Intent to Kill (1992 Video) User Reviews (12)

Intent to Kill is reasonably entertaining, but not a premier PM.

[tarbosh22000 · 5/10 · 4 July 2012]

Vickie Stewart (Lords) is a beautiful female cop on the edge in this PM outing. When a drug deal goes wrong (you mean they can go wrong?), Colombian thug Salvador (Tiffe) must get millions of dollars worth of drugs to his ruthless boss, The Mooch (Curto), or Salvador will meet a gruesome end. So Salvador is going all over the seedy sides of L.A. trying to collect all he can. The only thing stopping him is Vickie, who is determined to bring down the Colombian drug empire. To do this, she must go pretty rogue, but not all the way rogue. Meanwhile, she must deal with her philandering boyfriend Al (Patterson), a fellow cop, as well as her boss Captain Jackson (Kotto)., who is always on her case.

It was nice to see Traci Lords as a tough cop on the edge. She even teaches classes to other women in street self-defense. The sleaze factor comes in with some of the seamier sides of Hollywood with hookers and such (Vickie must go undercover as a hooker at one point). Vickie is a cool character and it would have been nice to see that developed more, maybe in a follow-up movie, or a movie that doesn't fluctuate so much...

What we mean by that is, Intent to Kill goes back and forth between decent and very dumb, and there seems to be a lot of padding and plot elements that aren't related and/or make no sense. But luckily there are car chases with rockin' guitar solos behind them, blow-ups, shooting, funny moments and lots of clichés. And of course Traci Lords getting into all sorts of dangerous situations (keep in mind it must have been in her post-porn industry contract that she do no nudity or sex scenes to try to distance herself from her past...just a theory)...and Yaphet Kotto pops up as the BYC with, and we quote, "one month left 'til retirement" ! It is a shame that he's retiring, as every day, generic newspaper headlines appear such as "Drugs Rule Streets".

And as far as her love interest is concerned, Officer Tom Martin, he's a kickboxing man that's some sort of cross between Gary Daniels and Richard Norton, but not anywhere near as likable or interesting as those two. This Gary Norton (or Richard Daniels) guy is Michael Foley, and he was actually in Karate Cop, so there you go.

Intent to Kill was released on the budget-priced EP speed tape released by Video Treasures/MNTEX, and the quality is not good. We're guessing this was a posthumous release because it's not included in some reference guides. Why this didn't come out on PM's own label, we do not know. It even has a shot from another movie on the cover (we believe it was taken from a Gary Daniels film). The director of this movie, Charles Kanganis, should have complained. After all, the previous year he directed Traci in A Time To Die (1991), and the packaging was much better, it even had a red plastic VHS.

Featuring the inspirational tune "Stand Tall" by Lost Art, Intent to Kill is reasonably entertaining, but not a premier PM.

For more action insanity, please visit: www.comeuppancereviews.com

Uzis in the night

[jotix100 · 4/10 · 20 April 2006]

For lack of better things to watch, we stumbled on this movie the other night on cable. Wow! If action is your thing, this film will be for you. There must be killings every five minutes. In fact, we are worried when there are no shootings in the background!

Charles T. Kanganis wrote and directed this movie that has a woman detective at the center of the story. Vickie, is a tough cookie (no pun intended). She might look blonde and vulnerable, but just don't mess around with her. The fact that Vickie is basically standing up as the film ends is a testament to Tracy Lords' masochism.

The bad guys come and go, yet, Vickie is able to avoid being shot, or have her hair messed during the worst of the action. The action is too intense at times as the Latin gangsters show to be ruthless in the way they settle disputes.

Watch this film for the pure fun of watching the action. Otherwise, don't bother.

Disappointing - "Ice" was better

[gridoon2024 · 4/10 · 26 May 2009]

Traci Lords fits pretty well into the action genre - her pouting expression shows believable contempt for her enemies - but she is better suited to "bad girl" rather than heroine parts, IMO. In two mid-90s PM Entertainment productions, she played a cop in "Intent To Kill" and a professional thief in "Ice", and "Ice" was the better vehicle for her. But not only because of her role - she also got to kick much more ass in that one, while the script of "Intent To Kill" is poorly written. It has all sorts of separate threads that never really come together, and although the film opens with a bang (car chase, shootout, multiple explosions), then it slows to a crawl as we spent too much time with Traci's relationship problems with her unfaithful long-time (also cop) boyfriend. The result is a film that doesn't seem sure of itself and of the story it wants to tell. Another problem is the mediocre supporting cast, with the obvious exception of Yaphet Kotto as Traci's boss. *1/2 out of 4.

Less than what you'd expect from Traci

[tomlindh · 1/10 · 4 April 2001]

Story line - very poor

Acting - mediocre to poor

Character Development - very little

Violence - heavy

Sex & Nudity - NONE

Tough cop Traci takes on a very bad drug dude, and in the end, she's the last cop still standing, mostly because it's her arrogance and stupidity that got the others killed. The best comedy moment (not intended to be funny) is when she seriously wonders what it was that she did wrong.

I expected the overall quality of the flick to be poor, and so wasn't disappointed in that regard. However, I was expecting a certain amount of eye candy, and the best this movie provided was a girl on a bicycle wearing a thong bikini. Doesn't Traci realize that nudity is the only reason her fans put up with the other inadequacies?

Traci is actually not a bad actress, but if she really wants to go mainstream and keep her clothes on, she needs to start hanging out with a better class of writers and directors. Continuing to be in forgettable flicks like this is what she's doing wrong.

Traci wears the pants in this precinct

[actionfilm-2 · 3/10 · 11 November 2010]

Intent To Kill is another entertaining B action film from producers Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi of PM Entertainment. I'll simply describe a scene and let you decide if the film is worth viewing based on the following.

Hardboiled police detective Traci Lords has kicked her unfaithful dog of a boyfriend to the curb, and is immediately invited out by a macho detective in her department. They head for the restaurant, but not before Lords is dragged to the gym so as to witness her date strut his martial arts moves by pounding some poor white belt shmoe in the ring. She appears slightly impressed so he earns points there. He then gains her favor with witty conversation during dinner, and again gains points with the lovely lady detective. Unfortunately all of his romantic efforts go down the drain when 3 gun toting thugs enter the restaurant, pistol-whip the owners and shoot a customer. Lady Lords' smooth talking karate kicking date decides to use this moment to stay in his seat and do nothing. Lords is then targeted by the vicious trio. Holding out her purse which has a pistol concealed inside she pleads "Don't shoot me, here take all of my money", to which the thugs shout "we don't want your money, we want your life!". Tough cop Traci replies, get this, "It's not on the menu" and KA-BLAAMM!! fires a round into each of the three punks before her dumbfounded date can say another word. "Thanks for the help!" she screams at him with contempt, something she seems to have plenty of practice doing as every other male in the film seems to lack the spine and grit she has in spades. Of course the damsel detective is not above having a good cry, something she does after blasting bad guys, sobbing as she feels her feminine tenderness slowly eroding from all the violence.

If the above doesn't convince you this is a film worth seeing, thats fine, more cheesy entertainment for the rest of us B film fans.

Intent to bore

[haildevilman · 2/10 · 13 May 2007]

Despite the endless violence, I nearly fell asleep.

Traci does her best playing a feminist hero here. And to be fair, the whole cast gave their all. But the director REALLY goofed.

Piling car chase after fistfight after senseless killing on top of each other will not guarantee a thriller. It seemed that they just decided to kill several cops when they couldn't think of anything better to film.

Angelo Tiffe made a great villain here. You did want to see him die. But early, so you wouldn't have to watch this heap of celluloid.

And whose idea was it to put classical music on the sound track? It did not help.

Violent and boring. Bad combo people.

Intent to Kill

[BandSAboutMovies · 5/10 · 3 February 2024]

Wikipedia claims that this is the first movie given an NC-17 for violence instead of sexual content. By the look of things - you can see the rating on the MPAA site - it seems true but after all, sometimes hype is better than the actual real tale, right?

Police detective Vicki Stewart (Traci Lords) is undercover as a prostitute with her lover Al (Scott Patterson) as backup when she finds the crook she's been hunting, Salvador (Angelo Tiffe). As he starts making out with her, he finds her concealed handgun and everything goes wild with cars blowing up, machine guns firing on crowded streets and Lords even flying out of the limo.

Captain Jackson (Yaphet Kotto) takes her off the case after all of the property damage, even if she got $50 million worth of drugs off the streets. As for Salvador, his boss gives him a week to get the white powder back.

If Vicki isn't on the case, she's going to have some fun. She overhears a rape victim being discharged and tells her there's no way that the three men who destroyed her will ever see jail. Instead, she visits them at home and brutalizes them. She also goes to a factory where the boss sexually harasses women and slaps him into oblivion, all things that get her in even more trouble.

Vicki has had what we call "a day" and it gets worse when she catches Al in bed with someone else. She sets his car on fire and then heads back to the police station, the very place where Salvador is coming to get his cocaine.

Directed and written by Charles T. Kanganis, this is the perfect use of Traci Lords in a movie. She's a near-unstoppable force of destruction who is the best cop on the force despite how much destruction happens around her. She's actually a very male-coded hero and yet, you know, looks like Traci Lords.

Bad movie?

[wsandberg-1 · 4/10 · 10 April 2005]

What I see is someone who is trying to buildup a reputation in the industry as legit, after coming from an industry where the mainstream population is going shun you. You have to start somewhere and I'm sure it's not going to be at the top, so for starters I'd expect to see some of the "low budget" type films. I'd say she is still young enough to make the jump to mainstream files but I'd also have to say give her 15 to 20 years to make that jump without the stigma of the past hanging on. Take a look at her biography and see the time frame where she was in the porn industry and when she got out, adding that 20 years to that date brings us pretty close to the current time. So I really think she's got a chance at this and if she makes it, it will indeed be a rarity. Who knows she could be in the next blockbuster, these days you never know. But then that's just me, I'm one of those kooks that hang around to read the credits.

Overdone 90's Fare.

[FiendishDramaturgy · 6/10 · 15 March 2007]

This is a 1993 straight-to-video stereotypical female-cop-has-to-show-her-stuff-to make-it-to-the-top movie. The action is written into the script AND it is executed...kind of. Traci Lords isn't my idea of an action star. Yes, she has done plenty of action parts, and even does a decent job as Anna in Len Wiseman's Underworld and also contributes a fair performance as Chameleon in Black Mask 2, but I never could wholly buy her as an action star. She doesn't fit the bill, and for me, her presence lessened what enjoyment there COULD be had in this endeavor. Not her performance; that is as good as she gets, but her presence.

But this is typical of the 90's. It is overdone, the performances are over the top dramatically, the dialog is trite and contrived, and the action is choreographed so that no one actually touches ANYone in the hand-to-hand scenes.

The mafia, gang, and cop stereotypical elements are too prolific to enumerate and really drag down the story, such as the story was.

There IS some enjoyment to be had, if you're into late 80's, early 90's M4TV or Str82Video Movies. Directed by Chameleon, whose last "real" movie was...wait. Oops. I can't say he has made anything worth mention. But if you like this, he also directed A Time To Die (1991), also starring Traci Lords, and not any better than this one.

This one rates a 5.6/10 on the TV/Video Scale from...

the Fiend :.

You get what you get

[miloradalempic · 8/10 · 27 September 2020]

I don't want to go into the plot at all because it's the generic "tough cop, but with feelings getting a hard time from the commissioner, shooting and driving like crazy with a lot of broken glass and explosions" kind of a movie. But I like the aesthetics. The saxophon/synthesizer music, especially during a nighttime LA, the looks of the cast, the not alltoo cheesy dialogue. Tracy Lords was a perfect cast for this direct-to-video flick. And sometimes you like something for no reason than the above mentioned. So no, I don't care that the plot is thin and the movie just ends somehow. Best watched on a CRT on VHS.

Cheap but workable

[Leofwine_draca · 6/10 · 2 May 2022]

A cheap but workable B-movie thriller with Traci Lords playing a renegade cop on the trail of a drug kingpin wreaking havoc in the city. This one is packed full of violent shoot-outs and assorted mayhem, so it breezes past, and if you don't mind your films low budget then you'll find yourself enjoying it a fair bit like I did. Watch out for Yaphet Kotto's cameo and a bad guy impersonating Tony Montana.

Incredibly hot

[samanthawelles · 10/10 · 6 February 2020]

Intent to Kill is one incredibly hot movie! Traci Lords does her best as a really tough female cop. She doesn't even waste time with any cheap stunts. The stunts are first rate and acting is very good. ITK is serious business in terms of action movies. The plot twists and turns are much better than most of the garden variety action films. This is a film about drug use and drug dealing! ITK has been rated NC-17 for multiple reasons. Yaphet Kotto does a great job as the captain of Los Angeles Police Department. This crime thriller kicks serious you know what! It's worth the 96 minutes. The only problem with ITK was Salvador could have been cast better; he performs good although as a drug dealer he should have performed better.