The Art Of Acting
Spurred, I think, by my recent review of THE OCTAGON, my friend Rob has lately been corresponding with actor Art Hindle, a very busy Canadian who appeared in that film as A.J., the best friend of Chuck Norris‘ character. Two things that distinguish Hindle in THE OCTAGON: 1) his fluffy mane of feathered hair that threatens to steal all of his scenes and 2) he plays a badass karate champion, yet not once do we see him do any karate. Even further, when he attempts to invade a secret terrorist training camp run by killer ninja, he is captured in about 0.46 seconds, leaving it up to Chuck to try to save his ass.

Hindle has actually had a pretty interesting career that dates at least as far back as 1971, when he began appearing in Canadian features and TV shows. One of his early films, FACE-OFF, was honored with its own SCTV parody with John Candy playing “Hindle”. Of course, anyone who grew up watching as much American television as I did in the 1970’s and early ‘80s knows Hindle’s face for sure, if not his name. He guest-starred in many popular TV series, like BARNABY JONES and STARSKY & HUTCH (in that first-season episode, now available on DVD, he played an “evil twin” of Starsky and Hutch’s old buddy), but my brother and I really remember him from the obscure THE POWER WITHIN, a TV-movie where he played a test pilot who was struck by lightning and gained superpowers. It was obviously meant to be a pilot, but the series didn’t sell, and Hindle continued bouncing back and forth between his native Canada (where he starred in David Cronenberg’s THE BROOD) and the U.S., working in both features and television.

He might not want to admit it, but his biggest success was probably PORKY’S, a notorious teen sex comedy that hit theaters in 1982 and went on to become one of the most profitable independent films ever made. Everybody of my age group saw PORKY’S--usually more than once--and Hindle had a nice role in this Canadian sleeper as a police officer. He had already worked for director Bob Clark in the fabulously chilly horror film BLACK CHRISTMAS (in which he steals almost every scene he’s in, thanks to the magnificent black fur coat he’s wearing that makes him look as though he’s being mauled by a grizzly bear) and was rewarded with an even larger part in Clark’s PORKY’S II: THE NEXT DAY, an interesting failure that bounces back and forth uncomfortably between raunchy sex hijinks and serious racial themes. To be fair, the first PORKY’S dealt with anti-Semitism, but the message is more pronounced in the sequel, which, to its credit, attempts to be a stupid sex comedy about Something.

Another Hindle picture that has stuck with me, due to seeing it on HBO 493 times, is RAW COURAGE, an effective little thriller written by its star, Ronny Cox (BEVERLY HILLS COP), in which he and Hindle are a couple of fitness freaks running across the desert who become targets for a white survivalist army led by M. Emmet Walsh (MISSING IN ACTION). Yeah, it’s basically THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, but Cox and Hindle do a fine job playing their roles as Everymen caught up in an extraordinary life-and-death scenario.

You should be happy to hear that Art is as busy as ever, mainly in Canada. I most recently saw him in BLACK HORIZON, a direct-to-video thriller directed by Fred Olen Ray (who loves working with older stars) and starring Michael Dudikoff. He had some juicy scenes as a sinister senator who could care less that his niece is one of a handful of astronauts and cosmonauts stranded on a space station.

And you know what? He still has damn good hair.