On trial for murder and certain to be convicted, Bellavance (Ray Wise, TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME) is out on bail for forty-eight hours and needs to pack up his kid and escape to some country where he can't be extradited. When he discovers that $50,000 of his ill-gotten cash has disappeared, he puts Lloyd (Dana Ashbrook, WAXWORK) in charge of finding and killing anyone who might have taken the money (and he wants it "loud and messy" as a message to anyone who thinks they can mess with him. With the assistance of Chissolm (Derek Mears, Jason Vorhees in the FRIDAY THE 13TH remake), Freddie (Jacob Reynolds, GUMMO), and Wydofski (Joseph McKelheer, APRIL FOOL'S DAY), they shoot their way down the list towards Bill Rutledge (Boyd Kestner, CLEOPATRA'S SECOND HUSBAND) who has just moved out to the country with his new wife Maggie (Lisa Rotondi, THE MATING HABITS OF THE EARTHBOUND HUMAN), her moody daughter Lauren (Fabianne Therese, JOHN DIES AT THE END), and his seemingly autistic son Owen (Ryan Hartwig). While they would seem to be the easiest set of victims, the hitmen do not realize that Bill's son Owen has scored a 99.5 on The Aggression Scale - a psychological measurement for the potential of an individual's aggressive behavior to physically or psychologically injure others - and that he's incredibly adept at MacGuyver-ing household objects for deadly means (and he's got a special dislike of bullies of any kind).

Billed as "HOME ALONE meets FIRST BLOOD", THE AGGRESSION SCALE is very thin on plot and the performances are wildly uneven, but it moves at a fast clip and holds viewer attention even if things are rather predictable (even the sudden deaths of major characters that are supposed to surprise us). The villains are suitably repugnant enough for us to root for the two teenage characters and relish their gory comeuppances (although only one of them gets the full HOME ALONE mantrap treatment). There are some amusing action film homages (like one of the heroes having to painfully extract a bullet and cauterize a wound ala RAMBO complete and another character's self-treatment of their wounds lets out a scream that echoes throughout the forest) and parodies (like the released break on the moving truck that sends it not-exactly-careening down an incline while two characters struggle over a gun inside it), but they do not clash with the otherwise sober - if not exactly serious - tone of the rest of the film. Despite what we know of Owen's past as a victim of bullying, and his extreme reactions to it (including blinding one schoolmate and crippling another), don't go looking for any sort of message here. Director Steven Miller third film is a more polished and mainstream than his previous films, the zombie fest AUTOMATON TRANSFUSION and the SyFy Channel movie SCREAM OF THE BANSHEE, and it will be interesting to see if his recently released "suburban nightmare" UNDER THE BED and the recently completed "killer Santa" flick SILENT NIGHT are of a similar improved quality.