So you know how I’ve sometimes referred to movies as “not very good”? In almost all cases, you can translate that as “not very good, but it is a professionally made movie that knows how to be a movie competently, and just forgets to have any reason to exist.” Which I mention because this is the other kind of “not very good” movie — the one made by people who don’t really know how to make movies, and who end up just throwing a bunch of stuff onto the screen.

Objectively, that means it’s terrible. And it really is terrible! Clint Howard is creepy, sure, but that’s just because he’s Clint Howard; his character doesn’t really make sense, and is written inconsistently. Everyone else’s characters are even worse, and yet somehow, this is a movie whose characters are its strength, relative to its plotting and visuals. It’s just a literally amateur effort, made by people who didn’t know how to do what they were trying to do.

And yet… precisely because it’s such a failure, it’s arguably more interesting than a bland pile of smooth nothing like Hard Target. Nobody will like this movie, nobody will think it’s good. But to paraphrase Mark Twain and/or Winston Churchill, every mediocre movie is alike; each terrible movie is terrible in its own way. Five years from now, I will literally have to look back at my records to see if I watched Hard Target, but I am never going to forget that I watched this movie about a weird and murderous ice cream man, and Jan-Michael Vincent sleepwalking through a role as a cop.