There’s a lot to unpack with this relatively unremarkable film. First up is that it’s directed by Aaron Norris, who is Chuck Norris’s younger brother. He’s better known for his stunt work, and while he made a good effort at directing ‘Hellbound’, I think it’s for the best that he seems to have gone back to working on just stunt choreography and setup. Second, it has Chuck Norris as a Chicago cop that gets wrapped up in a plot by a demonic entity to end the world, something that Norris’s character stumbled onto while investigating a body that fell out of a multistory building onto his car. This movie was released in 1994, but you’d think they were still in the hard boiled era of the 70s with all the hookers and pimps that were involved in this officer’s day to day life. Third, this was the final movie made by “Cannon Films” who Chuck Norris had a pretty extensive relationship with, they released all of the “Missing in Action” and “Delta Force” films. They seem to have mostly been interested in lower budget, incentive driven exploitation films of some form or another, with most of their catalog consisting of various horror or hooker films. Interestingly enough, I just watched “Hercules” recently and it was about the same quality as “Hellbound”, which is to say, it had a big name, some big ideas, and not enough money to properly realize them.
As fitting for this type of film, I watched in on Youtube in standard def with what looked like Jewish subtitles with English subtitles above those other subtitles.
