| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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JUDGE AND JURY
Rating: 
USA. 1996.
Director/Story – John Eyres, Screenplay – John Eyres, John Cianetti & Amanda I. Kirpaul, Producers – John Eyres & Gregory Vanger, Photography – Bob Paone, Music – Jonathan Flood, Computer Animation – C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, Miniatures – Glacier Entertainment, Special Effects – Larry Roberts, Production Design – Ron Mason. Production Company – Nu Image/EGM.
Cast:
Martin Kove (Michael Silvano), David Keith (Joseph Meeker), Paul Koslo (Lockhart), Thomas Ian Nichols (Alex Silvano), Kelly Peribe (Roland), Laura Johnson (Grace Silvano)
Plot: Wanted killer Joseph Meeker is caught by former cop Michael Silvano during a liquor store holdup and is sent to the electric chair. But Meeker returns from the dead and begins taunting and pursuing Silvano, determined to obtain revenge for Silvano’s accidental shooting of Meeker’s girlfriend during the holdup.
Judge and Jury is a variant on the killers-back-from-the-electric-chair mini-theme that was briefly the in-thing around 1989-90 with the likes of Shocker (1989), The Horror Show (1989) and The First Power (1990). All of these were forgettable. It was until the subsequent Fallen (1998) that this mini-genre gained its first respectable treatment. Judge and Jury is no different to any of these others. Its major difference over its predecessors is in treating the exercise as less of a horror film than as a sort of supernatural action film with villain David Keith pursuing hero Martin Kove amid car chases and lots of explosions, where Keith’s principal weapon is a shotgun as opposed to any ghostly arsenal of tricks.
Judge and Jury is made by John Eyres. John Eyres has previously made such direct-to-video efforts as Project: Shadowchaser (1992) and sequels and Monolith (1994). To say that Judge and Jury was John Eyres’ best film up to this point does not come as any great recommendation – certainly Judge and Jury is never a film that rises above the wholly average in any way. John Eyres pays even less lip service than most action directors to the nominal need for a plot to connect action sequences together. The Project: Shadowchaser films are astounding for the completely minimalistic motivation with which the proceedings are conducted. Judge and Jury is a marginal improvement, with Eyres at least paying some attention to character (or at least actor-driven scenes) at the beginning – there’s a nice scene with David Keith taunting a priest who reads him the last rites. Although the rest of Judge and Jury is like a single 90 minute chase sequence without any stops for plot, character development, or anything. Eyres has improved stylistically as a director to a certain extent, with some sequences being occasionally evocative rather than the mindless brutalizing action of earlier Eyres films like Project: Shadowchaser II (1995). (Although there is one very contrivedly silly sequence that requires hero Martin Kove to kick a goal with a flaming football).
On Eyres’ side is David Keith who has never appeared to be having more fun in a role than he is having here, playing wildly over the top while getting to dress as everything from an Elvis impersonator, a French chef (with an accent and mustache that both seem to be in competition to be the most outrageously false), a biker with a flaming orange hair dye job, in drag, a bespectacled academic in a tweed jacket, a clown and a stand-up comic.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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