Seriously, the funny thing about the Rifftrax movies in this entry is how kung-fu fighting can happen pretty much anywhere at anytime for any reason: on the road to the airport, in a suburban Virginia shopping plaza, or even at a fast food restaurant.
Miami Connection: The grandmaster of all these movies is this cheesy 1986 "classic." It features a group of young men at the University of Central Florida (in Orlando, not Miami) who play in a crappy synth rock band called Dragon Sound. Their leader is a Korean tae kwon do master named Mark who is barely intelligible. (It's hilarious when he says, "Listen to me" in heavily accented English and then you can barely understand what the hell he's saying.) The lone girl in the band has a brother who doesn't approve of her relationship to a member of the band so he and his gang hassle the band and finally kidnap one of the band members. When that guy is killed, his friend who's head of a gang of cocaine-stealing, motorcycle-riding ninjas in Miami, goes after the guys. This leads to three members of the band being stopped on the road to the airport by the gang of ninjas. To which one guy is like, "Ugh. Ninjas." Like this a totally normal thing that happens like geese crossing the road or something.
This movie is one of those that's so bat shit crazy that it's hilarious. And the gratuitous fight scenes are meticulously and yet still badly choreographed. Throw in the bad synth rock and it's a delight of 80s movie excess.
Samurai Cop: There's more gun play and sword play than kung-fu fighting but there's still some. Most of this is like a really bad ripoff of the Lethal Weapon movies that ends up even a worse parody than Loaded Weapon 1.
The eponymous "Samurai Cop" is a long-haired moron from San Diego who transfers to LA to help fight the Asian gangs in the area, though he's such an idiot he can't even pronounce the surname "Fujiyama." He's quite the "samurai" isn't he? The lead henchmen of the evil "katana gang" is the beefy, huge-faced Robert Z'Dar.
There's plenty of gratuitous violence in a restaurant parking lot, a hospital, a photographer's studio, a policewoman's kitchen, and finally at a cabin. Badly choreographed fights, lame car chases, and poor dubbing that causes actor's voices to periodically sound completely different are all hallmarks of this ridiculous action movie.
Maybe because of this infamous Rifftrax episode there was actually a straight-to-video sequel made in 2015 with Tommy Wiseau of The Room as the bad guy.
Honor and Glory: I consider this a spiritual sequel to Miami Connection in that while it's not the same actors or characters or locations it's made with the same corny excess of kung-fu. All it needs is some bad synth rock.
To get it started off running in Hong Kong (still under British control then) an agent is just going down the hallway when Cynthia Rothrock greets him with some kung-fu fighting. As one does, of course. Halfway across the world her sister is doing a news report in a parking lot when a black woman throws a Coke can at her and then tries to stab her to death because the reporter ran some negative stories about her father, a now-former senator. The reporter uses some self-defense moves to quickly disarm the woman and then...goes to the airport to pick up her sister. It's hilarious how chill her and her camera crew are about her almost being murdered. So does that happen a lot?
Meanwhile there's an evil bank president who's trying to buy the trigger for a nuclear weapon to sell to some Arabs for...reasons. The bank president is pretty buff and at one point kickboxes a guy to death. Because those are skills a bank president needs, right?
One hilarious fight scene the background alternates between a house and next to a highway as I guess they couldn't get a permit to reshoot the scene in front of the house, so just shoot it in some random spot nearby. Seamless! Later in a warehouse you see a Pepsi machine and sometimes the "Pepsi" part of the logo is visible and sometimes it's crossed out with tape. That attention to detail is what really makes it great.
Though it's the early 90s the reporter uses a broom to pick up her phone while meditating in her hammock instead of just getting a cordless phone. And then she insinuates a guy is blind just because he's wearing sunglasses--a guy who just casually walks into her backyard to surprise her while she's working out. Because that's what you do, right?
The whole thing is so utterly ludicrous that it's endearing in a way.
No Retreat, No Surrender: After his karate instructor father is run out of town by the mob taking over the lucrative karate studio industry, a boy is forced to move from Southern California to
There's not as much gratuitous violence as the previous movies in this entry, but still a bit of it like when the kid goes to a fast food restaurant and has to fight a fat bully and his minions with the help of his break-dancing black friend--because they needed to work in another crappy 80s fad along with the karate. And it's a pretty funny concept that the mob would kickbox someone almost to death to obtain his karate studio in a shopping plaza. I mean maybe they can use it to launder some money but it hardly seems worth the trouble.
Sadly this movie is only occasionally on Amazon Prime so I can't watch it as often as the others.
Fist of Fury: This Rifftrax is one of my least favorites because it's also one of the longest at about 2 hours long. It's an extremely dull 1972 Bruce Lee movie. It's something about the teacher of a martial arts school is killed and so Bruce Lee seeks revenge. The movie is supposed to be in the 1910s and yet the clothes, hair, and accessories are all current. I mean I'm pretty sure they didn't have plastic-framed glasses in the 1910s. They didn't have plastic, right? It's also badly dubbed and ends with Bruce Lee presumably being shot by a bunch of police. (And as the riffers say, all his friends behind him are probably also going to be shot too.) Hooray?
Kill & Kill Again: This is a South African movie from the early 80s about a cult of brainwashed people who kidnapped a scientist who invented some kind of fuel source that will somehow lead to them ruling the world. The only one who can stop them is some long-haired guy who constantly has his shirt open like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He recruits a team of idiots to kung-fu fight the bad guy and his main henchman, the Optimus.
I was disappointed in the lack of Optimus Prime references--too obvious?--but otherwise it's pretty funny. And the funniest part is at the end they find a parrot that crashes their car to potentially kill or maim everyone. Hilarious.
Kill or Be Killed: This was actually the precursor to Kill & Kill Again, but it doesn't matter that it was released on Rifftrax later than the second movie because other than the main character being in both, there's no connection between them.
So in this our "hero" is hired to be part of a karate team at a Nazi's extremely fake white castle. But he decides he wants out, not because his boss is a Nazi, but because his boss fired his girlfriend. They clumsily escape into the desert and when their VW Beetle dies, they tear it apart to the frame and rig up a sail to let the wind blow them to safety. But the girlfriend (who's sexy but has the unattractive name Olga) is almost immediately kidnapped back to the castle.
So our "hero" joins a rival karate team funded by some Japanese guy to fight the Nazi's team. And a lot of badly choreographed karate and lame car chases ensue. It ends by going to first-person shooter mode as the Nazi picks up a gun to shoot...himself? The good guy? His midget henchman? I guess it was probably himself since there was a sequel. Hooray.
Hey I found an MST3K episode for this entry! Master Ninja I: Imagine if Kung-Fu and the A-Team had a really, really stupid, cheaply made baby and that's what this "movie" is. I say "movie" because really it's a couple of episodes of a TV show mashed together. It starts off with something about an airport run by Claude Akins and his daughter (a young Demi Moore) who are hassled by a local businessman played by Clu Gulager until this B-team stops them. Then it shifts halfway to a club run by an old tap dance movie star and his disabled daughter (a young nobody) who are hassled by some Japanese gang. And in both episodes the ninja is hassled by another ninja who wants to kill him for leaving the ninja family to look for his daughter. In both cases one of Dick van Patten's kids and a ninja played by Lee van Cleef have to help them from some local thugs. The stunts especially are pretty funny as van Cleef was almost 60 so you know it's not him jumping around or walking on wires or any of that shit. As for Tim van Patten, he got his looks from his mother--and the talent too. Apparently this show had 13 episodes and was called The Master; four of the episodes were mashed into Master Ninja I and Master Ninja II. You know what's great though is you have two guys with "Van" in their names and they ride around in a van! That would have been a better show: Vans, starring Lee van Cleef and Tim van Patten as fictionalized versions of themselves riding around in a van to get work. Maybe the van could have talked like KITT and Tim van Patten could have worn Vans sneakers.
And the follow-up to Master Ninja I: Master Ninja II! It's pretty much the same thing: two episodes of The Master wedged together into a "movie." The first episode has the Vans helping a young Crystal Bernard of Wings fame start a union in a small town. The other teams the Master up with shortest-tenured James Bond, George Lazenby. He plays some kind of government agent trying to help some hostages. He even gets to drive the cool Aston-Martin from the Bond movies. I guess by 1984 that was how low the Bond franchise had fallen. Meanwhile Tim van Patten does...something. Ostensibly the series was about the Master finding his long-lost daughter, but neither of these episodes brings that any closer to fruition.
After about the second season MST3K would end every episode with a shot from the movie. In this case it was a shot of Lee van Cleef caressing Tim van Patten's gerbil with a super creepy look on his face.
1 comment:
My imagination is wrapping around a freeway of ninjas. Kinda like (in another culture) being surrounded by Hell's Angels.
Anyway happy Monday!
The Letter K
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