Matty admires the technical chops of Jim Wynorski’s attention-holding actioner.  

Saddled with ineffectual and actually kind of needless characters in previous Jim Wynorski assignments Hard Bounty (1995) and The Assault (1996), Matt McCoy delivers a robust performance in RANGERS (2000). Here the Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) star is the flat-topped Broughton: a tough and honourable army captain tangled in a web of chicanery following a botched black ops mission.

Syrian terrorists, government puppet masters, espionage, revenge, and Broughton’s quest to uncover the truth – it’s all going on, to the point where Rangers is tricky to keep up with. That said, Wynorski’s boisterous approach covers the narrative cracks, and Broughton and the villain, betrayed grunt Shannon (Glenn Plummer), are a shaded and compelling pair. Moreover, Rangers’ script – by Steve Latshaw, a regular of the film’s producers, Phoenician Entertainment – does exactly what it sets out to do:

Link the action together.

Utilising approximately fifteen minutes of material from Navy SEALS (1990), Red Heat (1985), Invasion USA (1986), and Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990), Rangers is part of the same military hardware, stock footage action dynasty as fellow Phoenician epics Active Stealth (1999) and Final Voyage (1999), which, in turn, are rooted in the formula established by company boss Andrew Stevens and his earlier film, Crash Dive (1996) (produced by Phoenician antecedent Royal Oaks Entertainment). As Wynorski explains in Rangers’ DVD commentary, “You have to work backwards with these shows… You get the footage and then write the script around what you’ve got.”

Of course, Wynorski – whose working relationship with Stevens can be traced back to their respective Corman days – is no stranger to bolstering his pictures with stock footage either. Repurposing carefully curated snippets of other peoples’ movies was a trademark long before the Chopping Mall (1986) maestro entered the Phoenician fold. Wynorski’s brilliant Not of this Earth (1988) swipes chunks from Hollywood Boulevard (1976) and Humanoids From the Deep (1980); his hilarious horror pastiche Transylvania Twist (1989) contains a clever Boris Karloff cameo twocked from The Terror (1963); the marvellous 976-EVIL II (1991) features the unforgettable ‘It’s a Wonderful Night of the Living Dead’ sequence; and fellow action/hardware capers The Pandora Project (1998), Desert Thunder (1998), and Stealth Fighter (1999) are essentially Wynorski’s CineTel versions of the Royal Oaks/Phoenician style. Prior to the aforementioned Final Voyage, Wynorski even provided Royal Oaks with The Escort 3 (1999); an amusing bit of erotica cobbled together with scenes pilfered from other Stevens-produced shag-a-thons (Over the Wire (1996) and Sexual Roulette (1997) among them).

Though Rangers is neither Phoenician nor Wynorski’s best film or pairing (it’s a mid-tier offering), you can make a strong case for it being their peaks on a technical, craft-based level. The trimmings from Navy SEALS et al are impeccably selected, and the way in which Wynorski and his team replicate their sets and props; match their tone and tempo; and augment the offcuts with additional stunts that perfectly slot into the half-inched carnage is sublime. Seamless doesn’t even begin to describe it. 

Rangers is also a vital piece of Wynorski lore, and an important film in the annals of DTV action.

Shot before Wynorski took the reins of Militia (2000) for CineTel and before he was recruited to salvage Phoenician’s doomed Dolph Lundgren vehicle, Agent Red (2000), Rangers wound up released after both. It debuted on VHS and DVD on 17th April 2001 via 20th Century Fox (a key Phoenician distributor) [1]. At the time, Wynorski and his pal/frequent collaborator, Fred Olen Ray, were busy belting out more stock footage fare for Phoenician, including but not limited to: Submerged (2000), Critical Mass (2001), Gale Force (2002), and the mode’s magnum opus, Ablaze (2001). However, three things quickly put paid to the entire stock footage action epoch: 

First, Phoenician themselves hit the skids when the FBI’s fraud squad began looking into the dodgy financial dealings of their parent company, Franchise Pictures, who’d basically shafted their German backers, Intertainment AG, out of a helluva lot of money with bogus stats and budgets. 

Second, the U.S. market’s appetite for action vanished in the wake of 9/11, ruling the genre a bust. 

And third, Rangers was seen by the wrong person. The exact details change depending on the teller of the story but, according to legend, Aaron Norris, helmer of Delta Force 2, caught Rangers on TV while channel hopping one night and was left reeling by how much his film had been ransacked [2]. Despite Wynorski and Phoenician acquiring the footage from Delta Force 2 and the other films legally, a vexed phone call from Norris to the Directors’ Guild of America was enough for the big studios to immediately pull the plug on licensing anymore footage to enterprising B-movie moguls, causing a noticeable decrease in spectacle and production value in DTV action henceforth.

[1] Militia premiered on HBO on 4th August 2000 and landed on tape and disc in October, and Agent Red schlepped onto video store shelves one week ahead of Rangers, on 10th April 2001, again via 20th Century Fox.
[2] Fred Olen Ray, meanwhile, remembers differently. Check out his take in the comments below.

Updated with additional information on 6/7/25