Dark Angel AKA I Come in Peace (1990)

What's It About?

Jack Caine (Dolph Lundgren) is a loose-cannon cop on the edge.  When a vice job goes bad, Caine is forced into a partnership with a by-the-books FBI Agent (Brian Benben) to solve a case invovling some dead mobsters and some missing heroin.  They stumble on the plot of an evil alien who is using the heroin to extract a natural drug consisting of the endorphins released by someone overdosing on heroin.

Is It Any Good?

Dolph Lundgren is four tiers down on the hierarchy of '80s action movie stars.  It goes Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, and then Dolph Lundgren.  As the fourth in line for the action movie throne, Lundgren starred in far-and-away the highest ratio of trash to treasure of the bunch.

Dark Angel is one of the rare diamonds in the rough of the Dolph Lundgren library.  The concept is patently silly: an alien drug lord steals some heroin and then injects it into random victims, causing them to overdose so that he can remove the raw endorphins from their brains.  This all takes place on the fringes of a fairly run-of-the-mill late '80s/early '90s buddy cop movie.  Lundgren actually manages to be halfway naturalistic in spite of the fact that he's not a natural English speaker and Brian Benben (who mainly serves these days as a direct-to-video Kevin Costner) plays a nice twitchy, uptight, by the books government agent.

This movie exists in a weird limbo between horror and not-horor so I'm not surprised that it turned up in the Scream Factory collection.  It's certainly not as egregious as movies like Robot Jox, The Garbage Pail Kids, and Teen Wolf turning up there.

Dark Angel is well-made, entertaining, and actually has some decent action to go along with the writing and acting.  It's not quite holiday appropriate but it's certainly a weird, wonderful film.

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

If you're an action movie fan then this is a definite buy.