June 5: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 90s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

How awesome is it that Ice T has played both the hero and the villain in movies that are remixed versions of The Most Dangerous Game? He started here as Jack Mason, the homeless man hunted by the rich and powerful and just three years later, he would be Vincent Moon, the crime overlord who has gathered a hundred of his best killers to, well, kill one another in Mean Guns. It’s as wild as the journey that took him from singing lyrics like “I got my twelve gauge sawed-off, I got my headlights turned off, I’m ’bout to bust some shots off, I’m ’bout to dust some cops off” to playing Detective Fin Tutuola for a quarter of a century on prime time cop TV.

Ernest Dickerson has made a cool path in his career, too. Starting as the cinematographer for several Spike Lee movies, as well as John Sayles’ Brother from Another Planet, Robert Townsend’s Eddie Murphy Raw and James Bond III’s Def by Temptation, he directed some really interesting films, including Juice, Demon Knight and Bones. He’s since directed episodes of The Wire and The Walking Dead. 

But back to the most dangerous game

In just a few days, Jack Mason has lost his dog and his only human friend, another unhoused man named Hank (Jeff Corey, who was blacklisted and became an acting coach before returning to acting and being in movies like Jennifer and The Premonition). Between that, being on the streets of Seattle and never dealing with the loss of his wife and daughter, he decides to kill himself. He’s saved by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton, a powerhouse of an actor who nearly spent his life in prison) who runs a soup kitchen and refers him to Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer), a man who runs hunting parties and needs someone who knows how to survive to guide a party that includes CIA psychologist and hunt leader Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey), Texas oil tycoon John Griffin (John C. McGinley) — who is also grieving over a lost daughter — and wealthy Wall Street trader Derek Wolfe Sr. (F. Murray Abraham) and his son Derek Wolfe Jr. (William McNamara)

Of course, the hunt is to kill human game. And his time on the street has taught him how to be more ruthless than any of these evil people or even the ones who have been led to be part of this group. You know, kind of like Hard Target without the splits.

Writer Eric Bernt also was behind Virtuosity, Romeo Must Die and then you see that he also wrote Highlander: Endgame and the remake of The Hitcher and you want to be nice but man, really?

That said, I kind of love this movie because the cast is pretty great and I’m all for Ice T snarling nearly every line of dialogue that he has.