🎄 Adam L 🎄’s review published on Letterboxd:
This low-budget actioner receives my coveted Five Tubis out of 5 rating. No sane person could rate this more than three stars, but these aren't stars, these are Tubis, and they're reserved for rating films streaming on Tubi, the mom & pop video store of the internet.
Written (and seemingly ad libbed) by Wings Hauser, No Safe Haven stars Hauser as a CIA "listener" undercover as a member of the Peace Corps in Honduras. His female assistant does all the paperwork while he roasts her for not shaving her armpits or using deodorant. (She's played by Nancy Locke, Hauser's spouse at the time, and the co-writer of this film.)
His little brother back in the States is an NFL star who is in deep to cocaine traffickers. He breaks his own arm in the shower to get out of throwing a big game, but this doesn't pass muster with the cocaine traffickers, who drive to rural America to murder him, Wings Hauser's other little brother, and Wings Hauser's mom.
Uh oh! Now Wings Hauser is mad.
This is a low-budget, poorly directly, bizarrely written action film. I don't know if the framing was off on the version streaming on Tubi, but the boom mic makes many, many appearances in the first half of this film.
No Safe Haven is top-flight entertainment simply because of how off-kilter it is. Wings Hauser puts on a "gay voice" to go undercover as a bellhop in a hotel. (A tribute to Clint Eastwood's gay voice as a messenger in The Eiger Sanction?) When he has successfully put his target at ease, he sets down the tray of food, puts on his gruff "tough guy" voice, covers his target in lighter fluid, sets him on fire, pushes him onto the hotel balcony, closes the sliding door, and then snaps several photographs.
No Safe Haven also offers one of my favorite things: Wings Hauser the Lover. After a successful date with Marina Rice that ends in a parking-lot kiss and a promise to get together later, he shows up a couple days later in the middle of the night with a bag of groceries. She falls back asleep while he wears her bathrobe and makes breakfast. He serves her breakfast in bed, gives full tongue when they kiss, then off-handedly lets her know that he plans to use her toothbrush later before they spend the day together.
Wings Hauser and this movie are so crazy that the final helicopter assault (with Hauser's buddy played by Robert Tessier) almost feels like an anticlimax. Almost, that is, until Hauser hoists the bad guy with a hook and cable, and a dummy representing his body is attached to the side of the helicopter for the rest of the film.
Also, the closing credits end with an R&B track that sounds like the house mix of a J.M. Silk track. It was identified in the closing credits, however, as an Isaac Hayes record. Incredible! And it doesn't exist on Spotify or YouTube, but I found it here, uploaded as an mp3 to the Viva VHS blog. Thank you for your service, sir!