Clay Borris' Quiet Cool is basically a very simple and old-fashioned western movie, aside from the obvious differences:

1. It stars not John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, but James Remar.

2. It takes place not in the dusty and unsettled west, but in the lush and verdant hills of the Pacific Northwest. Like, Northern California / Oregon country.

3. The source of the conflict is neither gold nor land, but a huge and juicy field of (obviously illegal) marijuana. Yes, that's right: The villains of Quiet Cool are ice-blooded killer ... pot-growers.

The plot is simplicity itself: Remar, ever the gloweringly intense character actor, plays a plain-clothes NYC cop who heads up to the California mountains after getting a frantic phone call from and old flame. Seems the local pot-growers have turned ridiculously violent, and since they've got the local sheriff in their back pocket, these weed-merchants have the run of the town. (Too bad none of the townsfolk / heroes / eventual victims ever thought to call the State Police!)

So after the evil pot-growers viciously murder an entire family of sweet-natured suburbanites -- it's Remar Time, baby. Armed with a few guns, a ton of Ewok-style forest traps, and a teenaged sidekick who only narrowly escaped the nefarious ganja-men a few days earlier, it's some for some Pacific Northwest ass-kickin' -- 1986 style!

For all its woefully generic trappings, outlandishly ineffectual music, and cardboard-flavored dialogue, Quiet Cool does offer an appreciable amount of mayhem for your rental dollar. It's certainly not the freshest or flashiest action flick to have escaped the 1980s, but Remar's cool, the action is plentiful, and the talky bits fly by so fast you won't even notice 'em.

The DVD

Video: Image delivers the action-y obscurity in a fairly handsome anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1) transfer. Looked a lot better than I expected it to, at the very least.

Audio: Just a basic mono track. Certainly not dazzling, but it does the job.

Extras: Nada.

Final Thoughts

Call it a cable flick / guilty pleasure, but there's a small handful of fun to be found here. Quiet Cool doesn't have an original bone in its body, but it moves quick, offers gunfire and explosions, and rolls the credits just when it should.