Bad Movie Club: Undefeatable

1993 action flick

Rating: 6/20 (Libby: 5/20; Fred: 5/20; Josh: 7/20; Jeremy: no rating)

Plot: Following the death of her sister, a tough kung-fu broad seeks revenge on a guy who's named either Stingray or Death Matches. Regardless, he's killing women and ripping out their eyes, neither which is as much of a crime as his mullet.

Everybody--and I mean everybody--was kung-fu fightin', and some of these cats were fast as lightning. Seriously, the fight scenes in this weren't too bad. There were just too many of them, making this a practice in redundancy, and not nearly enough plot. And it is a little ridiculous that every single character in the movie knows kung-fu. I mean, I suppose it's that way with the genre, but when the psychologist in this starts kicking people, it just made this otherwise realistic and gritty crime drama a little too silly. It's still a lot of fun though. I'd been trying to get these Jockasses in the Bad Movie Club to watch a Godfrey Ho movie for a while, and it finally happened. The bad guy's menacing enough, and Don Niam is the type of actor who thinks he can do it all with nothing more than his eyes, maybe ironic since he ends up gouging out the eyes of his victims and keeping them in a fishbowl for reasons that are never fully explained. My guess would be that they needed a reason to have the exact climax that they did because the writers of this had some really good "eye" puns they wanted to use. An early rape scene--right before a scene where Niam eats some meat like he's a caveman and a few scenes before one where he hurls meat at a wall--was described by Libby as "the funniest rape scene ever." And that's saying a lot because there are a ton of funny rape scenes in cinema. But this character isn't all eyeball-gouging and brawn and mullet. Oh, no. This is a villain with depth. Well, if you can call a lot of mommy issues depth. Of course, you really have to assume that Stingray is hearing the same exact unchanging song that makes up the "score" of this movie, and maybe that's what has driven the poor guy crazy. Anyway, he meets his match in our heroine played by the nimble Cynthia Rothrock. I'm assuming she's the one who's "undefeatable" in this. Most of her fights are arranged by a triad of buffoons for money, and the first one has enough rhythmic clapping during it to embarrass the cast of West Side Story. Generously peppered with numerous fight scenes, general weirdness, and very poor acting, this turned out to be a very satisfying chunk of kung-fu cheese. Highly recommended, especially if you actually are high like Josh was for this one.