An escaped prisoner is pushed to the POINT OF NO RETURN in this little-seen Australian action film on DVD from Umbrella Entertainment.

In prison for a money-laundering scheme with his sentence extended after murdering a fellow inmate, former mercenary Grady (Marcus Graham, DANGEROUS GAME) is allowed to attend the funeral of his brother Christian whose headless corpse washed up had been thrown in the river by persons unknown. Grady takes advantage of the funeral to make a daring escape that leaves the cops transporting him O'Rourke (BLUE HEELERS' Doug Bowles) and Kopinsky (Stephen Whittaker, HOUSEBOAT HORROR) humiliated and gunning for him. Grady reconnects with his former flame Kate (Nikki Coghill, THE TIME GUARDIAN) who took up with Christian when he went behind bars, and she reluctantly chauffeurs him to Christian's cabin in the mountains where they discover the brothers' ne'er-do-well cousin Frank (John Arnold, MAD MAX) ransacking the place in search of whatever Christian was selling on the black market that got him killed. Realizing Frank knows more than he is telling him, Grady allows his cousin to think he knows what Christian is hiding to draw him and his brother's murderers back under the guise of a new deal. With the cops gunning for him and Frank having made contact with the killers, Grady and Kate discover that Christian left answers in the form of a hidden camera that reveals his grisly fate and what someone will kill to obtain.

Easily overlooked in light of the previous year's like-titled John Badham film (an American remake of LA FEMME NIKITA), POINT OF NO RETURN is pretty generic all-around with Graham – who has become something of a character actor on both Australian and American episodic television – spending the entire movie in cuffs (he also plays his brother in a bad hairpiece that has one questioning Kate's taste in men), the hunt for a McGuffin, and a sufficiently exhilarating climax. Everything else is just going through the motions, but the film looks slick thanks to the photography of Louis Irving who had assisted cinematographer-turned-director Vincent Monton on some of his prominent Ozploitation credits like LONG WEEKEND, THIRST, and SNAPSHOT and also lensed Philippe Mora's HOWLING III and COMMUNION. Producer David Hannay was another Ozploitation pioneer with credits like STONE, several Brian Trenchard-Smith films including MAN FROM HONG KONG, as well as the lesser-seen horror films EARLY FROST and ALISON'S BIRTHDAY. Like fellow Ozploitation producer Anthony Ginnane (PATRICK), he moved to smaller theatrical and direct-to-video films in the in the eighties and nineties like KADAICHA (released here as STONES OF DEATH) and THE 13TH FLOOR.