RED BLOODED 2
(CANADIAN - ACTION - COLOR)

An SC Entertainment pro-duction. (Intl. sales: SC Enter-tainment, Toronto.)
Produced by Nicolas Stiliadis.
Directed by David Blyth.
Screenplay, Stiliadis.
Camera (color), Edgar Egger;
editor, Nick Rotundo;
music, Paul J. Zaza;
production design, Michael Close;
co-producer, Paco Alvarez;
line producer, Steve Arroyave.
Reviewed in Cannes market, May 10, 1996.
Running time: 86 MIN.

With: Kari Salin, Kristoffer Ryan Winters, Burt Young, Nicholas Pasco, David Keith. Red Blooded 2, the sequel to “Red Blooded American Girl,” is a very hot-blooded action pie that features an over-the-top mix of violent shoot-’em-up fare and sexy thrills. This surprisingly entertaining effort will rev its way straight to its rightful place on video store shelves around the globe, but its titillating “The Hitchhiker”-meets-”Duel”-meets-”Thelma and Louise” approach, combined with oodles of erotically charged action, makes for some seri-ously lowbrow fun. But this low-budget offering will not make much of an impact outside the vid bin. Fast-paced pie opens with clean-cut college kid Trent Colbert (Kristoffer Ryan Winters) driving down the highway on his way home from college for a Thanksgiving get-together with his parents. But this all-American college fresh-man has his conservative world view turned upside-down cour-tesy of Miya Falk (Kari Salin), a man-hating, dirty-talking, sex-crazed hooker. She forces a reluctant Trent to rescue her from a bunch of demented truckers, including her father, who are trying to rape and kill her at a roadside truck-stop. The unlikely duo takes off, which starts an interstate chase that lasts for the rest of the pie. The angry truckers call in a hit-and-run report on Trent’s car, and soon Trent and Miya are being pursued by the state police and her psycho dad. But that doesn’t stop Miya from initiating Trent into the sort of steamy fun and games he’s clearly only dreamed about in the past. They stop off at a hotel run by a couple of close friends of Trent’s overprotective parents, and Miya introduces Trent to the pleasures of S&M, complete with cracking whips, handcuffs and hot wax. Back on the road the next day, Miya’s furious father catches up with the pair in his 18-wheeler, and he begins taking potshots at them with his shotgun. A few miles farther down the highway, he tries once again to rape Miya, but she manages to grab his shotgun and, appropriately enough, gives him a shotgun blast right smack in the midsection. Rather improbably, after Miya has murdered her father and with the cops on their tail, Trent decides it might be a good idea to bring Miya home to meet his folks. But before they do that, Miya insists that he adopt a cooler sartorial style. So she outfits him in leather from head to toe, takes him to the body-piercing clinic and throws in a couple of tattoos for good measure. Pie climaxes with a full-scale shoot-out with the SWAT team, which has staked out Trent’s parents’ suburban home. Salin is literally bursting at the seams with sex appeal, which is just about all her role demands, and she also manages to inject some perky humor into the piece. Winters has the requisite clean-cut look, but he’s not entirely convincing as he slips from goody-goody mode into hormone-fueled bad-boy behavior. Helmer David Blyth pops as much sex and violence into each scene as possible, and the pacing never flags for even a nanosecond. The story is far from memorable, but Salin’s steamy presence and the nonstop thrills ‘n’ spills will keep most from hitting the fastforward button. Composer Paul J. Zaza delivers his usually bouncy score, which is beefed up by numerous rock tracks, and other tech credits are fine. -Brenclan Kelly