1990 action movie
Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Josh: 4/5; Johnny: 4/5)
Rating: 9/20
Plot: A freewheeling undercover cop, one who would surely never tell anybody that he's working undercover, gets a chance to avenge the death of his older brother when he's sent to Thailand on an assignment. He also gets laid and meets a new friend who owns a monkey.
I'm not shitting you when I tell you that the monkey was the best actor in the film. It's a film inhabited by a lot of bad actors. The lead is played by Loren Avedon. He can kick and punch and hang upside-down from trees and sport a mean mullet, but he can't act much at all. The writer of this thing didn't help him out a lot, giving him a lot of lines that make him into this unlikable idiot who you really don't want to root for. Even worse is the main villain--the "boss" if this was a video game--played by Billy Blanks. He spends most of his scenes grunting, and when he does get lines, he delivers them slowly, like very deliberate speech is the kind of thing that can make a person sound extra tough. I'm not sure he needed to say anything at all since we get to see him kill the protagonist's brother very early and a few minutes later get to watch him kill a guy with a crowbar to the neck. Blanks can trade kicks and punches, too, and the scenes with him beating people up aren't bad little action scenes. The final scene with Blanks and Avedon is something that you could even say is thrilling. It's impossibly fast-paced, filled with dangerous stunts and never really looking like it's choreographed. Who knows? Maybe they were really just going at it. And this is the second time we Bad Movie Clubbers have seen Keith Cooke, the guy who played the reclusive kickboxing master who reluctantly decides to train Avedon by fracturing his skull with gigantic swinging logs like he's protecting Endor from the Empire or something or by suspending him upside from tree branches or by making him bust up gourds with his knees. Cooke was also in Mortal Kombat: Annihiliation, and I assume he wasn't very good at acting in that either.
Though this wouldn't be bad to throw on if you're just looking for a dumb action movie, nobody will accuse it of originality. You've got cliched characters (a cocky protagonist who's got a lot to learn, a gruff police chief, a love interest, a Yoda/Miyagi hybrid looking for some redemption) and a tired revenge-heavy plot that you've seen before. I mean, I'm not sure if "You killed my brother!" is actually spoken in the movie or not, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. It really feels like it's a remake of another movie from the action-packed 80s or like the director took an outline of another movie written out on a napkin at a strip joint and made his own movie from it.
Our observations:
--An efficient use of one K for two on the title screen
--Not much actual kickboxing, so if you're going into this because you love the sport, you should probably find something else.
--How the hell can a guy's facial bones or skull exist when getting Ewokked between two swinging logs like that?
--It's easy to root for the logs in this movie.
--The director's friend had a flamboyant collection of shirts that made me a little envious.
--The main character seems to think everybody else is named Jackson. Ok, we exaggerated that a bit.
--Every time a knife came out, we knew we were getting some ridiculous swishing sound effects.
--A guy gets a space heater to the face, and that other guy got the crowbar to the neck. Most of the other violence involved kicking.
--The hero rocks a fanny pack when he first gets to Thailand. It doesn't matter how well you kick. That might disqualify you as an action superstar.
--"I must wash for you." If you're planning on having sex with somebody against their will while in Thailand, don't fall for that one.
--You never do get to find out what the sound of one hand clapping is from this movie. You're going to have to meditate on that one on your own.
--The lovely sound of the pan flute (or a synthesized version of one) finds its way into the end credits. So if that's something that might potentially bother you, you might want to shut this off right after the gigantic explosion.
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