As befitting the situation, Bruce hams it up greatly as Windham, creating a wonderfully caricatured image of criminality. We are introduced to him as he is being imprisoned within a high-security jail, lamenting to the warden that he is a misunderstood artist whose work of galactic terror goes unappreciated, undervalued by those minds too small to fathom his grandeur. He’s later featured quoting Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, mixing a lofty, aristocratic mentality with torture and bloodshed. Windham harbours the messianic vision of acquiring his own planet, one populated by less evolved humanoids who would worship him as a god. By doing this he’d escape the bland, artless hordes of Earth, creating like a good aesthetician a world of blossoming artistic culture. Bruce has rarely played such an ostentatious fellow and it’s a joy watching him orate in such highfalutin tones.

Beyond the ambit of Bruce Campbell lies an array of other familiar film faces. The mosaic consists of Jack Nance (Pete from Twin Peaks), Brion James (Swayze’s Steel Dawn, Fahey’s The Underground) and Mark Bringleson (a man who has had the good fortune to be marked by the scent of both Lou Diamond Phillips and Jeff Fahey, the former by appearing in The First Power, the latter by playing the villain in the classic Lawnmower Man). It’s a picture tessellated by Bruce, he is the star around which everyone else orbits – even those not too familiar faces are inclined to follow suit. Joseph Culp’s hero Chase Moran is thankfully an unfamiliar visage, his tired action sequences and abundance of chinless posturing driving the film to pits of quality. His wife, too, is nothing more than a object to be paraded in front of the camera in a series of short skirts and fodder for Bruce to act sleazily. She’s the inverse image of Chase Masterson in Terminal Invasion, for at least ol’ Chase exhibited some heroic virtue and wasn’t mere adornment.

The Die Hard rip-off is an enterprise doomed to failure. Lethal Tender couldn’t transpose Die Hard’s awesome dynamic to a water purification plant, despite the presence of Jeff Fahey. Assault on Dome 4, with its slowed down action shots and vapid protagonist, also fails to emulate the tale of John McClane. But that we know. Obviously this TV Movie is going to be no masterpiece. Where it does get points, morphing into something watchable, is with the inclusion of Bruce Campbell. Again his soaring charisma and endearing spirit turn a film no one would have cared to waste five words on into a film worth a thousand. And maybe, by dint of a sharp imagination, you can watch the film and imagine Bruce had actually played Hans Gruber and was involved in some wondrous concoction known simply as The Battling Bruces.