EDITOR’S NOTE: Eye of the Tiger was on the CBS Late Movie on May 5, 1989.

Imagine Con Air where instead of Cameron Poe finally getting home on a plane filled with killers, he served out his prison sentence and came back home to killers.

Instead of Nicholas Cage, Gary Busey is the hero, Buck Matthews, newly home to his wife Christie (Denise Galik) and daughter Jennifer (Judith Barsi, who was Thea Brody in Jaws: The Revenge and sadly was killed by her father at a way too young age).

His hometown is being ruled by that gang of killers I mentioned, a post-apocalyptic gang of motorcyclists led by Blade (William Smith). On his first night back at work on a construction site, Buck stops the bikers from assaulting a nurse named Dawn (Kimberlin Brown). To pay him back for his good deed, Blade and his gang follow him home, beat him into oblivion, kill his wife and send his daughter into a near-catatonic state.

Would the cops help? Not the sheriff (Seymour Cassel), who probably set Buck up for his first prison bid and threatens another. His friend Deputy J.B. Deveraux (Yaphet Kotto) wants to help, but the police department is corrupt. Buck calls in a favor from a Miami drug dealer he saved in prison, Jamie (Jorge Gil) and gets an armored truck that shoots missiles.

This movie was in the same script package as Rolling Vengeance, so once you know that, you’ll get it.

As you can imagine, Buck kills every single member of the gang that he can, as well as force feeding Blade a mountain full of cocaine, which is a wild death for a final boss. As for the sheriff, he blows up real good in Buck’s truck. The rest of the cops come through and J.B. drops bombs on the bikers from his biplane while blasting James Brown’s “Gravity.”

That’s because this movie may seem like a Cannon film but it was produced by Scotti Brothers.

Yes, the record label that released albums by Leif Garrett, David Hallyday, Felony, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Survivor.

Now it’s starting to make sense, right?

Right?

They may want you to think that Eye of the Tiger was based on the song by Survivor, but that was just a gimmick. Yes, that song was also in Rocky III and was used by Hulk Hogan before he took “Real American” from Barry Windham and Mike Rotundo.

This film actually started as a spec script called Midnight Vengeance, written by Michael Thomas Montgomery as part of an “Action Package” with the aforementioned Rolling Vengeance and a third unproduced script. He didn’t have an agent but instead sent posters and cold-called a hundred companies to make these movies. As the owners of Survivor’s record label, the Scotti Brothers owned “Eye of the Tiger” and thought that would make a good title for an action movie.

This is the kind of movie where bikers kill a woman and then come and ride their bikes around her funeral, which causes Busey to decapitate one of them with a wire across the road, then goes to the hospital and lubricates a stick of TNT, shoves it up a biker’s ass and lights the fuse while interrogating him. The bikers respond — well, Buck did cut the head off Blade’s brother — by digging up his wife and dragging her coffin all over the front yard like Big Bossman at the funeral of Al Snow’s dad.

If you like the song that this takes its name from, good news. You’re going to hear it a lot.

This movie is pretty good. It’s no Stone Cold, but what movie is? But for a late 80s non-Cannon revenge movie made by a record company — they also released Eddie and the Cruisers II, Lady Beware, In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro, He’s My Girl, The Iron Triangle, The Resurrected, Stealing Heaven and Death of a Soldier — it’s pretty solid. I mean, Gary Busey flips out on an entire town while they’re trying to play bingo.

Oh man! How can I forget? This was directed by Richard C. Sarafian. Yes, the same guy who made Vanishing Point!

You can watch this on Tubi.