Inferno/Desert Heat (1999)

Today I had a couple of friends over, and when they didn't want to watch some old classic movie, I had to break into some of my stash of old DVDs I had borrowed from my parents. This includes about 6 Van Damme movies, including Inferno. Although, to be honest, the DVD I have says Desert Heat on the box, but that's not the title it seems to go by on IMDB and other places. As far as titles for movies go, this odd mix-up is one of the strangest I've seen. Even the IMDB page, while calling in Inferno, shows only half the box of Desert Heat, and then half of the box of The Order which is another Van Damme movie. I just don't understand. Hopefully the movie makes more sense than this. Hit the jump to find out!


The story here is about Eddie Lomax (Van Damme). For reasons the film never gets into, he wants to end his life, so he drives out to a little outpost in the desert to see an old friend before he kills himself. Before he can do this though, some thugs find him and shoot him, leaving him to die, and stealing his motorcycle. His friend, Johnny Six Toes (Danny Trejo), finds him and revives him, and now Eddie is off to save his beloved bike.

As my friend put it, it seems like almost every Van Damme movie is that same. Either his wife or his daughter is kidnapped, he gets pissed, and kicks ass until he gets them back. This time the formula at least gets mixed up a little when it's his motorcycle that gets kidnapped! But seriously, it's true, Van Damme movies tend to have the most recycled simplistic stories ever. This one is no different.

Eddie Lomax and his beloved bike

This really is one of the worst Van Damme movies I've ever seen. The action is rarely entertaining, and basic at best. The characters are all caricatures, and all played by C and D-list actors that you haven't seen in a long time. Faces like Vincent Schiavelli and Larry Drake pop up all over this movie. More recognizable actors like Danny Trejo, Pat Morita, and Jaime Pressly also show up in uninteresting side roles.

One of the weirder parts of this movie is that Eddie seems to regularly halucinate his friend Johnny. Mainly in the beginning when he's drunk and cooked in the desert sun. But this fake Johnny does pop up again later, but we were never sure when or if the Johnny we were seeing was real or not. At one point he shows up out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, and knows all about the girl in town that Eddie likes, even though he was never in that scene or even in town. But honestly the movie is filled with all kinds of strange holes like that. Also, why is Danny Trejo playing a Native American? God this movie is bad.

He's gotta be real this time, right?

This movie is just filled with confusing, stupid scenes. Scenes where characters spout lines and lines, upon more lines of exposition, simply telling us what another character somewhere else is doing and where they are. Or how about the totally random sex scene between Van Damme and 2 biker chicks (he just killed their boyfriends) while the old lady who runs the motel watches them through a window drinking whiskey through a straw? How about when other people suddenly can see Eddie's hallucination of Johnny too? How about when Mr. Miyagi Pat Morita shows up as an innocent old man, and decides to help Eddie out by disposing of all the bodies of the people he kills by wrapping them up in miles of saran-wrap, and dumping the bodies in the nearby rock quarry. Oh yeah, and the townsfolk blame the missing people on UFO abductions. Have I said enough?

This is just a goofy, crazy, uninspired piece of garbage. The writing, characters, dialog... everything is just so crappy. This isn't even "so bad it's good", it's just bad. We ended up spending way more time ripping the movie apart and laughing at how stupid or bad it was, instead of getting any kind of actual entertainment directly from the film. If you have a choice of Van Damme movies, never watch Inferno/Desert Heat. You'll regret it if you do.