I remember seeing the video box for a film called B.O.R.N. at a local video store and imagining how atrocious the film contained probably was.  Well, when I got a review copy of Merchants of Death, which is the same film under a different title, I soon learned just how bad it was.  At first I thought, "Hey, Clint Howard and PJ Soles... this might be pretty fun after all", but I sorely mistaken.

In Los Angeles, a conspiracy of black market organ thieves called B.O.R.N. (Body Organ Replacement Network) run by PJ Soles, some surgeon, and a guy who looks remarkably like Robert Goulet that handles the dirty work, ends up kidnapping the daughters of Buck Cassidy, a rancher who is driving a Winnebago in Los Angeles with his daughters for some reason.  Well, he's the only surviving witness of any of their capers, so they send the Robert Goulet looking guy out after him and the remaining members of his family.  He enlists the help of a detective whose office is at the local bar and they eventually find the source of the scheme and take care of business.  Oh yeah, Clint Howard plays a weirdo-orderly at the operation who does nothing at all to further the film.

While the concept could have been interesting b-movie, director Ross Hagen (who also stars as Buck, our "man-I-wish-I-was-as-talented-as-Chuck-Norris" leading man) instead takes the film serious and we end up with something that's more like a movie-of-the-week than a horror film.  In fact, it's incredible to see so little action in a suspense movie and the attempts to bring action into the film are desperate and fail almost every time.  It does get slightly more interesting around 53 minutes in, but at that point, you really don't care anymore.

What's worst of all is that the cast is wasted.  PJ Soles basically just wears a terrible wig and tries her hardest to seem evil and Clint Howard's segments are so useless that you question what the point of including them was in the first place.  He usually adds a demented energy to b-horror movies, but here, he plays it straight as a sicko employee of B.O.R.N.  The rest of the actors are about as good as the atrocious music cues that are used to try insight some kind of emotion.

Avoid this one.  You're money can be spent on much better Troma releases.