Teleport City’s Man in Australia weighs in:
STONE
The thing with Stone that makes it so important is if you pull apart the elements that make up this film, you can see it’s cinematic progeny throughout the next twenty years (or more) of Australian film production. If you look at the bikie and road element, you can see the direct influence in films such as Mad Max, The Road Warrior and The Chain Reaction (AKA: Nuclear Run). Which in turn spun off into films like Turkey Shoot (AKA: Blood Camp Thatcher / Escape 2000), Deadend Drive-In (AKA: Dead End), and Salute of The Jugger (Blood of Heroes). If you look at the crime element, which granted, isn’t really expanded upon in Stone, but it’s the beginning of a trend in Australian cinema, you can see the offshoots in films such as Ghosts of the Civil Dead, Stir, Fortress, and even Chopper. And I don’t think it is such a huge leap to compare Stone with Nick Cave / John Hillcoat’s Kangaroo Western, The Proposition – the primary difference being (apart from The Proposition being a historical piece) is that in Stone the central unit is a motorcycle club, whereas in The Proposition it is about family. But both feature main characters that have to go in ‘undercover’ into a disenfranchised community and solve a problem. And that’s just the influence in Australia. This is not the time for a discussion about violent post-apocalyptic Italian barbarian films!!!
The titular character in 
The movie jumps right into the action, assuming that if you don’t already know who the characters are, you probably aren’t watching anyway. After an opening montage that affords the Joes an opportunity to pose majestically on the top of the Statue of Liberty (and represents the coolest part of the whole movie), the action proper picks up with Cobra Commander (voiced by the legendary Chris Latta, who also lent his trademark shriek to The Transformers‘ Starscream) and a guy named Serpentor screaming at each other. As was established in the comic and the show, Cobra Commander is constantly vying for control of his own organization against a guy named Serpentor, who was engineered from the DNA of history’s greatest conquerors to be the ultimate warrior. Cobra Commander should have known better than to trust the work of a genetic researcher who walks around shirtless and wearing a billowing purple cape, though, because it turns out that the guy (Dr. Mindbender) didn’t take into account how many of history’s greatest conquerors were insane. Thus, Serpentor emerged as something of a mixed bag, and everyone should have been clued in to his instability as soon as he started insisting on wearing an hilarious snake costume 24 hours a day.
In 
If you want vintage Sho Kosugi, you are better off watching Revenge of the Ninja. If you want James Bond with a splash of 80s casualness, you are probably better off just watching The Living Daylights. But if you don’t mind somewhat slack and flawed, cheap action films, Black Eagle isn’t completely shabby, though I seem to be a lonely voice in saying this movie wasn’t all that bad (The Soldier was much worse, for example, even though it had Klaus Kinski in it). The Malta location allows it to have an air of the jet set about it, even if it’s not really trotting the globe all that much. It doesn’t look cheap. The plot never quite seems to know what it’s up to, but ultimately, it becomes inconsequential anyway. As Kosugi’s swan song (his next movie was a schizophrenic action-comedy remake of Zatoichi, the Blind Sowrdsman, but Rutger Hauer was the star), it encompasses all the strengths and flaws that defined Kosugi’s career and completes the man’s journey from shadowy ninja assassin to cut-rate James Bond with some throwing stars. Like a lot of other low-budget action stuff from the era, it manages to be just good enough without actually being all that good.
I must be an excessively moral person. I’m trying desperately not to “give it all away” in my description of