I Come in Peace

Part of the Channel 11 Saturday Afternoon Movies canon, I Come in Peace (released outside the U.S. as Dark Angel) is the third-best Al Leong Christmas movie (after Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, of course) and may have the most explosions of any Christmas movie ever.

Craig R. Baxley, a stunt performer and coordinator turned director, made his feature debut with 1988’s Action Jackson (another Channel 11 Saturday Afternoon Movie mainstay). His follow-up, I Come in Peace, follows maverick vice cop Jack Caine (Dolph Lundgren in one of his best roles), who is out to get revenge for his partner’s death at the hands of the White Boys, a Yuppie drug gang running heroin in Houston. The FBI gets involved when the White Boys steal heroin from a police lockup downtown and proceed to blow up the building, and Jack gets saddled with Larry Smith, a by-the-books agent played by Brian Benben.

While all of this is going on, an intergalactic drug dealer, Talec (German B-movie staple Matthias Hues), arrives and starts injecting people with heroin to harvest endorphins directly from their brains to formulate an alien drug known as Barsi. Naturally, Talec himself is being pursued, by space-cop Azeck (former Dallas Maverick player and current ESPN commentator Jay Bilas). The string of alien murders and Caine’s investigation into the White Boys merge and Caine and Smith are soon running around dealing with a who’s who of character actors (including Michael J. Pollard and the aforementioned Al Leong) as Houston explodes around them.

Co-written by David Koepp (as Leonard Maas Jr.) at the beginning of his career, I Come in Peace is a campy B-movie sci-fi/action classic that impresses despite its tiny budget. Baxley’s stunt background as a stunt coordinator makes for some terrific action set pieces, including one where Hues has to run across the hoods of parked cars as they explode behind him, which was apparently done in one take by the six-foot-five actor while wearing four-inch lifts. Lundgren and Benben have great chemistry as mismatched partners, and the effects mostly hold up, even the infamous flying CD of doom that Talec uses several times to clear a room full of goons (an idea that was reused later in Hellraiser III.)

The movie is better than the sum of its parts, following a by-the-numbers plot but also playing with tropes of its genre in fun ways: the loose-cannon cop has an upscale apartment filled with art and fine wine, the stick-in-the-mud FBI agent is actually a competent fighter, and membership in the White Boys apparently requires an MBA. A great synth soundtrack by Jan Hammer (of Miami Vice fame) rounds out the package. Definitely Baxley’s weirdest movie (and maybe Koepp’s, too), I Come in Peace might not be a violent Christmas perennial on the level of Die Hard, but it is better than most of the straight-to-streaming holiday dreck we’re getting these days. 🩸