A controversial, globe-hopping conspiracy theory that links the US government to the drug trade combines with a simplistic script, an almost non-existent budget and laughable execution to make WHEN THE BULLET HITS THE BONE a shambles of a straight-to-video action flick.
Physician Jack Davis (Jeff Wincott) sees daily horrors in the emergency room, the result of drugs saturating the streets. When he interrupts a situation between high-class hooker Lisa (Michelle Johnson) and pimp-pusher Trevor (Phillip Jarrett), Jack is gravely wounded. Reviving in his hospital
bed, Jack erases his whole identity by simply discarding his wallet, and strides forth as a relentless, vengeful vigilante.
But assassination squads are already hunting him. It seems Lisa and Trevor were no common skid-row slime: She's the abused, heroin-addicted wife of Nick Turner (Doug O'Keefe), the nation's biggest drug kingpin, with allies in Congress and the CIA; Trevor is a key player in pouring crack into the
American ghetto. Trevor is slain in a Company power struggle. Any witnesses must be eliminated, but through sheer force of will and a pistol that never seems to need reloading, Jack survives attacks by drug gangs, and sadistic torture by government goons.
He steals incriminating computer files that prove Washington controls the crack racket, saves Lisa and her little daughter, and puts an end to Turner by playing the rogue agents and mob thugs against each other. Jack drives off with Lisa after blackmailing CIA honchos into temporarily halting coke
shipments to give the suffering citizens some much-needed relief--for a short time, anyway.
In 1995-96, The San Jose Mercury-News newspaper ran a controversial series of articles tying America's cocaine epidemic to an alleged Reagan-era CIA policy of importing drugs to finance Nicaraguan Contra "freedom fighters." That conspiracy seems to the basis of this movie. Another conspiracy
theory could be that the CIA financed WHEN THE BULLET HITS THE BONE to make speculation on their involvement in narco-terrorism look laughable by association. Few sights are as embarrassing as a Grade-Z genre flick preaching Big Ideas. And prolific cheapjack Canadian producer-director Damian Lee,
whose wide-ranging output--DEATH WISH 5, SKI SCHOOL, BABY ON BOARD, FUN--aspires to camp at best, trips over his soapbox in trying to depict a United States rotten with violent crime, greed, political corruption, mongrel gangs, South American generals, loathsome liberals and a cabal of right-wing
Anglo masterminds who monitor the carnage approvingly. And all of them apparently operate within the same few slum districts and an adjoining suburb, to judge by the production's low-budget scope.
The nondescript Wincott, turbo-charged by his bullet wound from angst-ridden sawbones to angry white superman, is just a joke as he single-handedly exposes the evil CIA shadow-government network by bursting through a few doors and shooting. Whatever truth lay behind the Mercury-News allegations,
one word aptly sums this hysterical anti-drug flick: crackpot. (Violence, extreme profanity, substance abuse) leave a comment
