This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Sorry, this movie sucks

Awesome Movie

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

A rogue arm of the intelligence community creates a false terrorist group (Red Five) who do acts of destruction via a deadly orbiting satellite in order to get the government to increase military and security spending. They try to use a presidential candidate and an ex- soldier deemed insane as fall guys but things don't go to plan. Cue lots of stock situations, stock footage and stock music. One spent most of the movie thinking, where have I seen that bit of film or heard that bit of music before? Jeff Speakman is a bland leading man who is supported by an uninteresting cast apart from Bruce Weitz who makes a fine villain. Not much excitement here.

To fans of the cult 1990s television series Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Worth Keeter is the director of many of that show's episodes. But when it comes to film, Keeter is one of the genre's most mediocre directors – virtually all of his works are poor & some are laugh riots due to their badly-written stories. But in the case of Memorial Day, a 1998 effort mounted by the decade's cheap action studio Royal Oaks, there will be no laughing here.Written by later Wynorski affiliate Steve Latshaw, Memorial Day is the tale of a secret group of US intelligence agents within the CIA who feel threatened by budget cuts & so decide to save their paycheques by inventing a new terrorist enemy. Using a top-secret weapons satellite codenamed the Eagle, they commit attacks against their own countrymen, blaming the fictional terrorists for it. Using a hawkish & paranoid senator as a mouthpiece, the agents decide to kill him & make him a martyr for their cause. To this end they rescue an assassin who has been thoroughly brainwashed for years, sending him to assassinate the senator. But he regains his memory & refuses to carry out the hit. With the aid of a crusading reporter, he attempts to bring down the conspiracy.The script is a collection of conspiracy clichés that will offend those who have lost loved ones during 9/11 & other real-life terrorist attacks. Despite being made only three years before Al Qaeda launched its war against the West, the film has dated badly due to its plot. Latshaw writes with an abandon of any sense of decency, making his scripts full of bad writing choices & flatly-staged action scenes. Keeter also is to blame here, making something that has no purpose other than to entertain those idiots out there who perpetually believe that the USA's government is in league with its enemies (although Frederick Coffin's senator is a carbon copy of George W. Bush with his incessant ranting which will bring back unpleasant memories of Bush's false preaching about Iraq's non-existent WMD stockpile as an excuse to invade the country).Avoid this one like the plague.

The previous user comment about this being an OK movie is quite bizarre... it's quite clearly a low budget, c-grade, made-for-TV quality movie -- if it was made for TV in the early 80's. The fight scenes are awful, and I can't imagine anyone, not even someone who knows Speakman's martial art of choice would really care about what kind of punch he is throwing at any stage. Maybe his comments were actually about a different movie... the back cover of the DVD that I picked up for $3 reads:"Chicago SWAT TEAM leader Jimmy Fain (Jeff Speakman) is committed to a mental facility, blaming himself after he fails to diffuse a terrorist bombing threat. There he meets a mysterious inmate who insists that Fain is the man destined to save the world from nuclear disaster. Going against all sane logic, Fain breaks out of the asylum, racing against time to save the human race from self-destruction.In desolate Siberia, mercenary saboteurs armed with a HI-TECH STEALTH HELICOPTER steal the control codes for Russia's orbiting LASER SATELLITE called TALON. Within hours, ruthless industrialist Gerald Lancaster launches a series of space-based laser attacks on American NUCLEAR SUBMARINE and a Russian ORBITING SPACE STATION. Soon, Russia's capitalist government falls victim to a hard line communist coup and the West prepares for the return of the cold war.Crossing the Canadian border, Jimmy Fain rescues a defecting Russian scientist who holds the key to destroying the TALON satellite. Pursued by Lancaster's hit squads, Fain battles to destroy the TALON satellite, before Lancaster plunges the world into NUCLEAR Armageddon."Now THAT's a movie worth $3! However, in the movie I actually saw:1) There is no character called Jimmy Fain. 2) The character Speakman plays is not a SWAT TEAM leader. 3) His character doesn't have a breakdown, he is forced into an insane asylum, but doesn't meet anyone there. 4) Siberia is never mentioned or seen. 5) There are no HI-TECH STEALTH HELICOPTERS. 6) Russia is never mentioned or seen. 7) Canada is never mentioned or seen. 8) There are no defecting or any other kind of scientists (technicians, maybe). 9) There is no-one called Lancaster. 10) There is no nuclear threat at any stage. 11) There is a LASER SATELLITE, but it's called EAGLE, not TALON.Apart from that, it's a perfectly accurate description of the movie. What's odd is the IMDb Plot Outline for this movie reads: "An embittered satellite expert gets the opportunity for revenge against the USA by aiding terrorists in a plan to destroy the country's military base."This is also completely inaccurate. There is no embittered satellite expert, there are no terrorists, and there is no plan to destroy any military base. The movie DOES have a satellite in it though, I'll give it that. And 2 out of 10.

Memorial Day is a decent film starring martial arts expert Jeff Speakman who happened to study the same type of karate (kempo) as I did. The movie basically details a former intelligence agent who had information about a special satelite that is being used to harm innocent americans. Speakman plays the agent who is deemed insane and confined to a mental hospital. He is released with the idea of him being ordered to kill a presidential candidate who is little more than a puppet in the eyes of the people who put him there. The film moves pretty well and the acting is decent.