Library of Classics: UNDEFEATABLE (1993)

It's been more than a year since I checked anything out of the "Library of Classics," so a fresh explanation is probably in order. In the early days of this blog, my main source for exotic movies, apart from my own collection, was the Albany Public Library. My local library has an eclectic selection of popular, classic and foreign films. Sometimes it's selection is very eclectic. The Library of Classics, then, gives recognition to some of the cultural center's more unexpected holdings. Just recently, Albany Public acquired a bunch of martial arts and blaxploitation films (Black Mama, White Mama was one of these that didn't quite, er, merit, the L of C distinction), so we'll probably have more occasions to dip into the stacks. But we'll start the revival with Godfrey Hall's legendary martial arts film from 1993, a film I felt dubious about as soon as I saw the director's name.

Godfrey ... Hall? Directing a cheap, bad martial arts film? Could it be?....

IMDB and Wikipedia confirmed my suspicions. "Godfrey Hall" is a minimal pseudonym concealing the identity of the notorious Godfrey Ho, who lives in infamy for patching together dozens of incoherent Ninja movies during the Eighties and Nineties from stock footage, newly shot cheapo fight scenes with guys in Ninja costumes, and clips of erstwhile Euro star Richard Harrison sitting at a desk. By the standard set by such stuff, Undefeatable is probably Godfrey's magnum opus. That's not saying much for Godfrey.

Undefeatable is set in the martial world of the United States, where the ancient traditions are upheld not by schools, but by street gangs. These gangs wander the mean streets, their leaders challenging one another to single combat. These combats are brokered by men in business suits; their financial interest in the fights is unclear. They seem to do no more than handle the money wagered by the respective gangs, and make no money from spectators. The only people watching these battles -- staged in such venues as alleys and warehouses -- are the gang members themselves or the family and friends of fighters. The rules are simple: if your hand touches the ground, you lose. That makes for quick fights.

Perhaps the most feared of these gang fighters is Kristi Jones (Cynthia Rothrock). After her apparent violent takeover of Erich von Zipper's gang, she fights for money to supplement her income as a waitress and put her sister through college. Undefeatable sets Kristi on a collision course with a higher-echelon fighter, a professional kickboxer nicknamed "Stingray" (Don Niam). Stingray takes his work home with him, regularly beating up his wife until she can't stands no more. Her flight, encouraged by her sexy psychologist, sends the already unstable Stingray over the edge. Already obsessed with the mother who abandoned him in childhood, he now fastens upon any woman who even remotely resembles his wife. He takes them home, chains them, whips them and kills them. Then he collects their eyeballs to decorate his fish tank. As the psychologist attempts to explain later, "It could be part of a ritual."

Arrested for illegal fighting, Kristi is befriended by a cop (John Miller) who knows some martial arts himself, though he makes no money from it. She resumes her fight career, defeating "Bear," a football player who fights while wearing his shoulder pads. If the current NFL lockout continues, expect to see more of this sort of thing. Soon after losing, Bear is killed by Stingray, the madman having taken a fancy to Bear's woman.

The degrees of separation fall away as Stingray decides that Kristi's sister is his wife and kills her. Now Kristi is dedicated to revenge, seeking out any of the master fighters in town who might know the techniques that killed her sister. Meanwhile, the friendly cop pieces together more clues, finally making contact with the psychologist who was Kristi's sister's teacher and the therapist for Stingray's wife. She tips our heroes off to where the killer might be found, and even though she never gives the address in the conversation we hear, the cops manage to get there anyway. Pursuing the investigation on her own, the psychologist falls into Stingray's clutches. With the almost evil cunning of the psychologist, she fights back with her mind against the madman. If he thinks she's his wife, she'll play the role, belittling his suspicions of her cheating. When that doesn't work, knowing his mother fixation, she becomes his mother, ordering him to behave. Miraculously, Stingray meekly complies, but the shrink overplays her hand when she offers to go to the grocery store to buy him dinner. The killer's abandonment anxiety kicks in, so he offers to go to the store instead, chaining "Mommy" up in the meantime. Fortunately, he's left her cell phone in her handbag near her feet. When the phone rings, she's able to reach the bag with her foot, step on it and tell Kristi where she is.

That sets up the first climactic fight scene, a brawl with fists, kicks and swords that pauses for a sublime moment when Stingray accidentally tosses a box full of packing peanuts into the air. He and Kristi strike poses as the peanuts rain down like confetti before they resume their combat. The cop arrives to save the day after Kristi injures her arm, but Stingray escapes. The second climactic fight scene takes place in the hospital, where Stingray disguises himself as a doctor in order to finish off the psychologist. He's intercepted by the cop, setting up the moment seen by millions on YouTube and acclaimed by many as "the worst martial arts fight ever filmed."

The thing to bear in mind is that that may have been the best fight scene in the movie. For an alleged martial-arts specialist, Godfrey is actually quite inept at staging fights. In one scene, Rothrock throws a kick and clearly misses her target by a country mile. But in the next shot, the opponent sells the kick and takes a wicked bump. The idiotic fight format doesn't help things, since the street fights can't help but be short. Kristi presumably knows the format by heart, but in the opening bout, when she's momentarily in peril, one of her minions has to warn her not to touch the ground (since no one else will explain the rules for us), yelling "No! No! You lose! You lose!") as if Kristi had never fought this way before. Every fight in the film is full of awkward moments; Undefeatbale is one of the least graceful martial arts movies you'll ever see. The acting is just as awkward. Rothrock is not without personality, but she's completely implausible as a street fighter.

Don Niam has become a legendary figure in some quarters for his performance as Stingray, but I found him overrated. He doesn't give enough for his to be counted among the great bad performances. He really does little but bug his eyes, flare his nostrils, flex and yell. His ultimate fight with John Miller is pretty hilarious, but that's as much to Miller's "credit" as Niam's. It wouldn't be the same if only one of them were ripping his shirt and yelling, after all. It takes two to tangle, and there's something practically musical to the way they go at one another with echoing ejaculations of rage. That they upstage Rothrock, who has to settle for a late run-in (though she does get the better of two lame one-liners) as a final indignity of many in this project.

Cynthia Rothrock became a star in Hong Kong in the 1980s and tried to cross over in the tried and true manner, under the directorial tutelage of Robert (Enter the Dragon) Clouse in China O'Brien. She never graduated from the straight-to-video ranks, her highlights including two films with Corey Haim, to give an idea of the level she attained. She may have been a decade or so ahead of her time, or she may never have had the charisma needed to turn her talents into real stardom. It's probably unfair to her that Undefeatable threatens to become her best-known film, but them's the breaks. At least she was never in a Godfrey Ho movie that I know of. This one is bad enough -- yet not bad enough to truly memorable. The Niam-Miller fight is not my cup of bad, but if it's yours, Undefeatable is a thermosful for you.

Library of Classics: FUTURE-KILL (1985)

Note: the Library of Classics is an occasional feature of Mondo 70 dedicated to the more idiosyncratic DVD holdings of the Albany Public Library. For previous Library selections, click on the "Library of Classics" label below.

Two of the most popular exploitation genres of the 1980s were post-apocalyptic fantasies and frat-boy comedies. Robert W. Moore's ingenious notion was to combine the two. It couldn't be a perfect fit, of course, since the idea of fraternities persisting past any imaginable apocalypse is a bit of a tough sell, but the key to exploitation is to retain the trappings of a genre, and as far as that goes Moore, in collaboration with co-writer/star Edwin Neal, sets quite the trap. The collision of genres might be messy, but isn't that how we discover how two great tastes can taste great together?

We open with what at first seems deceptively normal shots of a modern city skyline, but after the credits we find ourselves privy to a tense confrontation between Eddie, the non-violent leader of the anti-nuclear protest movement, and his non-non-violent colleague, known only as Splatter. He is the movement's only expert on nuclear technology, which entitles him to some indulgences. Eddie wants to draw the line at murdering fellow movement-people, however, but Splatter explains that his latest victim had talked to a reporter. While this did apparently violate some regulation of the anti-nuke movement, Eddie feels that the girl's need to speak out didn't merit a fistful of cybernetic claws in the throat. Splatter is skating on thin ice now, and doesn't like being lectured to. There's clearly trouble ahead in our future world.

So cut to a frat party. It looks like the present day, or at least the present of approximately 25 years ago. But isn't this the future? Isn't it supposed to be post-1985? The title of the film is "Future-Kill," isn't it? But if you think about it, it is the future. After all, when the director films the scene several months prior to release, he imagines it to be the present of the time the film is released. On the other hand, maybe they weren't making Deep Throat pinball games in 1985 and Moore had one custom-built as part of his future tapestry. If so, the point nevertheless seems to be that the more things change, the more they remain the same, since the frat boys and their lingerie-clad girlfriends behave pretty much as in any bad 1985 sex comedy. The hijinks culminate in the hilarious spectacle of a man being tarred and feathered.

Offered an (*ahem*) wiener, the lady replies, "No thanks, I'm trying to quit."

We never see how the Deep Throat game actually plays, but aren't you curious? I hear that it was easier to win free games on Behind the Green Door, however.

Come up with your own caption for this one.

The heroes of our story are in mid-pledge, and it's the job of their balding, overaged minder to find them useful work to do. His idea is to send them into the dangerous part of the city where the mutants dwell, so they can kidnap one of the local freaks. This requires our lads to undergo some camouflage, the better to pass for freaks. In the past, to become a mutant one had to be exposed to radiation of some kind, rather like our troubled Splatter. To pass for one in the purported future of the frat, however, requires only extensive exposure to eye-shadow.

These pledges majored in speculative anthropology at Future State U, with a minor in Theater Arts.

So the freak hunt is on. Could it not end badly? For who should be aimlessly strolling the dark sidewalks of the mutant quarter than Splatter when the faux-mutants attempt to make off with a native. For Splatter, extremism in the defense of mutants is no vice. When the pledges' minder tries to break up the trouble, he gets cybernetic claws to the throat. Eddie happens to witness this scene, but he shows no gratitude to Splatter for fending off the kidnappers. Can you blame the man for killing the ingrate on the spot? Maybe not, but you can blame him for framing the frat boys for the deed to justify hunting them down and killing them.

A desultory chase ensues that consumes the rest of the picture. There's a good deal of running around, but there always seems to be time for quieter moments like a mutant rock concert or a hooker's attempt to humanize Splatter. This particular scene climaxes in the movie's most creative death scene. The hooker, curious about what's under Splatter's armor, offers the cyborg a life-changing bit of fellatio. Upon opening his trousers, however, she recoils.

Splatter learns that the whole walling-in-a-person thing really works better with bricks and mortar.

"What's the matter, bitch?" Splatter asks reprovingly, "Don't you like what modern man can do for his brothers with a little misplaced nuclear energy? If you can find enough to put your mouth on, get started! I haven't had much luck with it." And nor does she, and for her trouble Splatter wraps her up in corrugated metal and pounds on her until blood squirts. He then stalks off to resume his chase. But while he's the boss villain, two of his underlings actually outdo him in the atrocity department by machine-gunning a cat. The film shows you the damage, but I have to draw a line somewhere.

Stick a fork in Splatter, lady, and let's get this picture over with.

Along the way there are gestures toward human-mutant reconciliation and a partly-armored, partly-painted heroine emerges as Splatter's nemesis, but the crass humor of the early frat scenes gets lost somewhere as the boys become men, displaying unanticipated fighting prowess at key moments. Future-Kill might have been a more memorable project had Moore and Neal (who plays Splatter) attempted to maintain the frat-comedy tone throughout the future-esque mayhem. Had they done so, the film might have justified the Animal House meets Streets of Fire sort of labeling it usually receives. Instead, except for some bits in a nightclub, the movie takes itself all too seriously once Splatter takes the offensive, and to be asked to take Splatter seriously is offensive, to an extent. He seems as menacing as someone you might meet at a comic-book convention costume party, and unintentionally carries the comedic load for the remainder of the film. Edwin Neal was promoted in the ballyhoo for Future-Kill as a star of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but his later work in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers seems more characteristic. As for Ronald W. Moore, this was apparently his only writing and directing credit. That may be history's ultimate verdict on Future-Kill, but people who dig Eighties trash and genre mash-ups with occasional splashes of gore may draw a different conclusion.

Library of Classics: THE HITCHER IN THE DARK (1989)

For those just joining us, the Library of Classics consists of selections from the more unexpected or inexplicable holdings of the Albany Public Library, my main source for free movies. One that I've had my eye on for a while is Umberto Lenzi's Paura nel Buio, retitled in the U.S. and other markets to exploit the success of The Hitcher. Shriek Show released it on DVD as part of a Giallo Collection, but that label creates a false expectation that the film doesn't meet. On the other hand, you could come up with any expectation you want, and this film still wouldn't meet it.

A young man driving a Winnebago camper picks up a young woman hitchhiking on the road. She's annoyed that so many trucks, vans, etc. have gone by and only one son of a bitch, as she puts it, bothered to stop for her. The young man promptly hits the brakes, making the girl knock her head on the dashboard. "So I'm a son of a bitch?" he asks, but she strives to calm the situation. Cut to a long shot of the camper at night. Cue a woman's screams. Cut to the young woman's naked, dead body. The young man leans over her with bloody scissors in his hands, but he doesn't seem to realize what he's done. He seems genuinely confused. The only thing to do in such a situation, he decides, is to start shooting polaroids of the body. Then he feeds it to the local alligators.

It hasn't taken long for Lenzi (here directing as "Humphrey Humbert") to not just defy but spit on our genre expectations. He spent much of the 1980s making brutal horror films in the cannibal and zombie genres. You'd think he'd want to build up the driver's menace, get us scared before killing the girl -- or you'd think he'd show the driver killing the girl in gory fashion, since that's what he tended to do this decade. Instead, he does neither. So we can assume one of two things. On one hand, maybe he thinks it's enough to establish the menace of the driver by showing that he has killed somebody and might kill others later. On the other, Lenzi may just not give a crap this time.

Without ruling option two entirely, I think we have to go with our first choice. Lenzi isn't making a giallo here, but a psychological thriller or a woman-in-peril movie. The woman to be imperiled makes her appearance as the Winnebago of Evil pulls into a Virginia Beach amusement ground. A crowd has gathered around a young lady performing a desultory sort of dance to some dreadful synthesizer track playing on her boyfriend's boombox. Carlo M. Cordio bravely takes credit for this Eighties concoction, though it can't do his reputation as a composer any good. You can imagine why a crowd has formed. Is the girl drunk? Is she high? Is she going to take her top off? The answer to question three is no, but I'm not quite sure about the rest.

In a restaurant, the shades-sporting Winnebago driver bumps into Kevin, the girl's lunkish boyfriend, and is sullenly unresponsive when Kevin apologizes. He remains sullenly unresponsive behind his shades when two girls ask him if he wants to join them at the Madonna concert at the beach. Put off by his sullen unresponsiveness, one asks, "Who do you think you are, Mickey Rourke?" while the other concludes that he looks like a fag, anyway. Meanwhile, our driver observes that Kevin and his girlfriend are having a spat. She slaps him and storms out. Bingo.

(above) Josie Bissett storms out on Jason Saucier while Joe Balogh (see also below) looks on.

Before you can say, "Get the movie going, already!" the driver, one Mark Glazer, is offering the woman, Daniela Foster, a lift. He thinks Daniela's a nice name. It reminds him of a woman he knows, Danyetska. Daniela kind of looks like her, too, so he claims. He gets defensive when Daniela asks if Danyetska's a ballerina or spy. Don't make fun of her, he insists. She's about to quit this gig when she sees Kevin coming in his car in the rear view mirror. She crouches in the passenger seat so her pursuer won't notice her. With him safely past, she can try to be friends again with Mark. He wants to be friendly, after all. He offers her some Coke -- the fizzy soda in a thermos, that is, but not quite that innocuous. In fact, it isn't Coca-Cola at all. So always remember, children: when you're hitchhiking, never drink anything from Mr. Driver's thermos. The rest of Hitcher in the Dark will illustrate the importance of this point.

The situation is this: while we know that Mark will kill women on general principles, he has a special obsession over Daniela because of her purported resemblance to Danyetska -- his mother, who ran off with another man when poor Mark was young and fragile. During Daniela's captivity, he'll do a Vertigo on her, cutting and coloring her hair to make her better resemble his holy photograph of Mom. He also wants to screw her, but the confusing thing about this guy is, while he wants to screw her and wants to call her Danyetska, he doesn't actually seem to want to screw his mother. He doesn't call his victim "Mom," after all. But he blames the perversity of the situation for his failure to perform -- that and Daniela's innate whorishness. Still, he's determined to have her stay, and though he'd really like her to love him, he'll use the cuffs if he has to.

So the pattern is set for about 90 minutes of mental cat-and-mouse games as Mark tries to dominate Daniela and she tries to manipulate him into giving her chances to escape, all while Kevin tries to figure out what became of his girl. He eventually catches up with the Winnebago, only to be caught and tortured by Mark. In a scene Lenzi says was inspired by the Manson murders, Mark carves the word PIG into Kevin's hairy chest as if this will prove the man's unworthiness to "Danyetska." This comes the closest, I suppose, to being a gore highlight of a largely nonviolent film in the physical or effects sense of the word. Lenzi, who wrote the screenplay, is more interested in emotional violence here. He clearly had a portrait of modern evil in mind, though he complains in an interview that his producers forced him to change his desired "evil wins" finish to a revenge finale more typical of the Eighties.

I can credit Lenzi for trying, but he doesn't have the cast of actors to carry out his plan. The main name in the cast is Josie Bissett as Daniela. She went on to be a regular on Melrose Place, which may give you an idea of what to expect here. As for our villain, Lenzi says that actor Joe Balogh is better here than in the director's later Black Demons -- which may be reason to steer well clear of that film. Balogh is just too ordinary looking for his psycho role, and conveys no menace whatsoever. But maybe Lenzi wanted to depict the banality of evil. If so, Balogh was his man. Even if the acting had been better, I don't know if I'm really interested in a Lenzi film pitched, a few bloody moments aside, at the level of a Lifetime Original Movie. Hitcher in the Dark fails almost completely as an exploitation film. Whatever Lenzi's ambitions, he seems to have realized this himself. So he offers us extended footage of a wet T-shirt contest in mid-film as if it were a square-up reel. I've liked some Lenzi movies (Eaten Alive!, Rome Armed to the Teeth) and I know that some are bad, but I didn't expect any to be as lame as this one. The best I can say about it is that it was free -- for me, at least.

The trailer for Hitcher in the Dark is currently unavailable for embedding, but you can see it here. Truckertron has uploaded the introductory Virginia Beach scene, including Carlo Cordio's so-called music and Josie Bissett's so-called dancing as appreciated by a crowd of echt Eighties dorks.

Library of Classics: RAIN OF FIRE (Holocaust 2000, 1977)

It didn't take long for me to recognize what Lionsgate was peddling in their recent DVD of a Kirk Douglas film the title of which I had never heard of before. All I had to see was Simon Ward's name and I realized they were repackaging Alberto De Martino's Omen-ripoff Holocaust 2000, perhaps to be rid of the obsolete dating, perhaps also to hide a bad reputation for the movie. I'd never seen the film before, so when the Albany Public Library made it one of their more improbable recent acquisitions, I decided to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did.

Because of his current standing as a living legend of the screen, it may be hard to recognize that Kirk Douglas's career was on the skids in the 1970s. When you compare his output from the great decade with his peers (Lancaster, Mitchum, Holden, Peck) it's not that impressive. Even Peck was skidding a bit, but Kirk had to notice what The Omen did for Greg. But to get similar results, at the time, Douglas had to go to Europe (where he'd done The Master Touch a few years earlier) for this Anglo-Italo production was set up for the director of Blazing Magnum. I've watched that recently without reviewing it here, but its two great highlights -- the stunt-happy car chase scene and Stuart Whitman's bruising brawl with a gang of transvestites -- further encouraged me to try Holo--I mean Rain of Fire.

It's not such an Omen ripoff after all. Look: Douglas's character Robert Caine is a businessman, not a diplomat, and the Antichrist is practically grown up, not a toddler. Oh, all right, people have a funny way of dying when they could mess up the infernal plan, but wouldn't the Devil do that anyway even if there had never been an Omen? Anyway, the plan is different, too, though the makers of Holocaust 2000 didn't know going in what the long range plan was for the Omen franchise -- and they didn't know their film would be renamed Rain of Fire, either. But Omenologists will recall that Damien's plan is to pretty much make everyone miserable so that they'd renounce God, while Angel Caine (Simon Ward) simply wants to kill everyone in a nuclear holo--(sigh) --rain of fire.

I'm an atheist, but I'd still have this guy
pegged as an Antichrist just on appearances. Simon Ward in the film formerly
known as Holocaust 2000.

How does Robert Caine happen to raise an Antichrist? I cannot tell you, but it seems to have something to do with little Angel strangling a twin to death in Mommy's womb. Also, carrying the genes of an avatar of Kirk will give you a certain degree of cussedness even before other powers intervene. But it all does seem to be part of a plan, as our hero begins to discover strange numerological coincidences linking his big Middle Eastern nuclear power project with some of the symbolism of the Apocalypse. Some people don't like this idea simply because of the pollution it might cause. Protesters dog Caine's every step, chanting: What do our children want to be when they grow up? Alive! Them he won't believe, but all those coincidences get him having very strange dreams.

I don't think Kirk Douglas would know how to merely go slumming in exploitation cinema. He earned stardom in a series of apoplectic performances (Champion, Detective Story, Ace in the Hole) in which his characters drove themselves into early graves by force of pure will, it seemed, and at moments here he taps into that early fury. He throws himself into the show with Bela-like commitment, putting himself through more than Lugosi ever had to endure in a picture. Two scenes stand out: a feverish dream sequence that requires him to run naked through a desert and martyr himself (sort of) in a crowd of demonstrators; and a furious insane asylum visit that comes off less like Douglas's dream project of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and more like Shock Corridor, albeit with more color and violence.

Above, the dream; below, the nightmare.

Since I left out the bit where Douglas smashes an assailant's skull with that plank, I may as well show you the other gore highlight. A change in government in the Middle East has jeopardized Caine's power-plant project, so it's up to Satan to do something about it, helicopter style.

I don't mean to suggest that it was all hard knocks for poor Kirk in Europe. After all, he gets to go shoulders-&-sheets with the charming Agostina Belli, so charming a female that the innocent fawns of the forest are drawn to her.

Everybody loves Agostina Belli in (with apologies to Lionsgate) Holocaust 2000.

She becomes the object of some anxiety when Kirk confuses his prophecies and begins to believe that the child she's carrying by him will be the Antichrist rather than his grown boy. His suspicions are furthered in a manipulative scene in which Belli's character claims she's too tired to visit a church, leading Kirk to think she can't enter such a sanctuary. These suspicions lead our hero to force her into having an abortion -- with the endorsement of a Roman Catholic priest! I'll leave that particular plot point in suspense, as the whole film rather leaves you hanging. As if they, too, were planning a sequel, the filmmakers leave most of the major characters alive, though the balance of power has shifted a bit. What might Holocaust 2001 (or Rain of Fire 2, if you insist) have been like? The world will never know.

Whatever you choose to call the picture (your choices also include The Chosen and Hex Massacre), it wasn't your everyday Italo exploitation project. Getting Douglas and Anthony Quayle, among others, was just part of a budget that included some nice art direction and location work. Morricone did the music, by the way. Especially now on a widescreen DVD, this is a treat to look at, even if the plot doesn't endure much thought. For instance, the devil's style is to kill those who might interfere with his scheme. But at a certain point, the main obstacle becomes Robert Caine, yet at that point the best the evil one can do is to get him very temporarily confined to the nervous hospital. Why aren't buildings falling on him, for Satan's sake? On the other hand, there is no way you want Kirk Douglas taken off the screen prematurely on this occasion. He more than earns respect from genre buffs and exploitation fans with his all-out work here, though he may not necessarily have respected himself for a while afterward. It's his shamelessness on screen that makes the movie worthwhile.

* * *

Now dig this: an alternate ending to the movie that has been copied from a Greek tape and posted to YouTube. I'm guessing this was for countries that wanted a less ambivalent ending or where censorship boards required evil to lose. You can also find the whole film in installments, as well as clips of the helicopter death scene and Kirk's dream, if you look for them.

Library of Classics: POWER FORCE (1983)

Richard: You know what we Chinese say: Beware when trying to avoid stepping on the tail of the dragon, lest you trip on the claw of the phoenix and fall into a massage parlor that doesn't take American Express.

Princess: Oh, Richard, you're about as Chinese as a Big Mac!

Michael Mak's film is one of the least appropriate films found in Videoasia's Dragon Immortal collection of Bruce Lee-inspired movies. It seems to be included only because Bruce Li is in it, and perhaps because the original (and more obvious) title was Dragon Force. It really has nothing whatsoever to do with Bruce Lee or his purported legacy. Instead, it occupies its own zone of zaniness that deserves its own spotlight. Like many an exploitation spectacular, it gets off to a wobbly start, but heads downhill with an inexorable snowball effect, bowling over all in its path with the sort of escalating audacity that sometimes redeems such projects.

You actually get two Bruces for the price of one in this picture. The first one we meet is Bruce Baron in the role of Jack Sargeant, secret agent for TROUBLE. Here's his opening scene, and I hope you see what I mean about the wobbliness. Jack Sargeant seems like a kick-ass fellow, but notice the way the dubbing just ends this scene with a thud.

After this exploit, all Jack wants is some R&R (or T&A). But his reverie is disrupted by an urgent summons from TROUBLE. One of Jack's girlfriends takes the call and tries to protect him. "I'm sorry," she says, "We don't have any sergeants here. We're only interested in privates." When this film tries to be funny, writers Terry Chalmers and Dennis Thompsett tend to fall on their face, but in a sort of charming way. The movie does a good job being funny without their ministrations.

To explain why Jack's been summoned, we need to backtrack a bit and detour to Hong Kong, where Princess Rawleen of Mongrovia recently arrived for a state visit, and to check in on old friends. While there, her father, the king, died in his bathtub, making her queen. This makes her a target for an ambitious subject, General Nikolai Maruschka, who hopes to become the power behind the throne and sell off the country's mineral resources to the Communists. The General is a great big fat person and as such is the source of some humor as well as menace, but there'll be more of that later.

For now, it's enough to know that he sent a team of ninjas to get past the Princess's security and kidnap her out of the hotel, despite the efforts of her Tony Sinclair-like security chief.

Overall, it's probably a good thing she's out of the hotel, since that means we're rid of Richard, the boorish hotel owner whose way of making small talk is to invite the Princess inside for some fresh lines of cocaine. Hid idea of wit is to say, "You can call me Rich. I am, you know." It will be up to Jack Sergeant to rescue the Princess, but he'll need the help of Dragon Force, a secretive organization whose headquarters are known to but a few, including the man called Ah Chu, whom Jack is sent to meet. If you think that name is funny, check out some more humor at the expense of Chinese names.

Ah Chu only reveals himself when Jack sneezes. "Did you call my name?" he asks. This guy turns out to be the "Q" of Dragon Force, or whatever the equivalent Chinese ideogram might be. He shows Jack some interesting weapons, none of which will be used in the film. More importantly, he tells him where to find Dragon Force, somewhere out in the woods. These woods are thick with martial artists: women who try to hit you with flutes; a samurai in a ceramic kabuki mask; a couple of kung fu-kicking lion dancers. These are the members of Dragon Force.

The flutist is the charming Su Lim. The head lion dancer is "the Monk." As for the samurai, "They call me Kamikaze. I'm from Japan!" Their leader is Tao Lung (Bruce Li), a pole fighting specialist who obliges Jack to perform a final test of spearwork before he receives his own personal Mao suit and becomes a member of Dragon Force.

Actually, I suppose it's a cross between a Mao suit and a Nehru jacket.

Nikolai's ninjas launch a second attack at the hotel, kill the Princess's security chief, and wound Jack with a poison dart. Ninja quality deteriorates rapidly from here, but for now we have Jack's health to worry about. Tao Lung, fortunately, knows that snakes can counteract ninja venom, leading us to pretty scenes of the snake nibbling at Jack's open wound.

Was Power Force meant to be in 3-D? Certain scenes look like they might have been filmed that way.

While Jack recuperates, Su Lim gets herself hired as a nightclub singer in an attempt to seduce Yang, Nikolai's boozy minion, and plant a tracer on him. This results in a comedy kung fu sequence in which her attacks have no effect on the sozzled villain until she applies the business end of a rickshaw to his privates and dumps him in the harbor. Mission accomplished: Dragon Force is able to trace him back to Nikolai's lair, where the princess is being put through an ancient ritual combining acupuncture and body painting that will render her a mindless thrall to the general. This is what we call an homage to Kwaidan, and you'd have seen something similar around the same time in Conan the Barbarian, except for the full frontal female nudity.

The procedure is in its final stages when Dragon Force storms the compound. Fortunately, Nikolai has both hot and cold running ninjas on his property. It's a positive infestation of the little buggers, as much a signature nuisance of the era as the Mediterranean fruit fly. But these aren't the high grade ninjas who successfully carried out the kidnapping. These fellows seem to exist for one reason: to die at the hands and feet of Dragon Force.

To be fair, I suppose they also exist to buy time for Nikolai and his main minions, including the chastised Yang, to escape with the Princess. Nikolai himself has some difficulties. He doesn't fit through one doorway until he's shoved through, and and he can't squeeze his way fully inside the escape helicopter until somebody whomps him on his fat ass with a nail-studded club. He endures it all with good grace, all things considered, and Dragon Force is left bloody-and-empty handed.

The general's party retreats to Maruschka Island, his own little kingdom where blond, barefoot karate champions "of some place or other" wait on the head table. This is one of those instances where the filmmakers can't keep track of what they're doing. Just like none of Ah Chu's inventions are put to use (probably a good thing when it comes to his atomic bomb), so these karate babes are built up as something formidable for Dragon Force to fight, but the battle never happens. They don't even get to punish Yang, apart from keeping him from running away when the real punisher appears.

Wouldn't you want to run? Believe me when I say the stills don't do justice to this guy. At first I thought he might be the missing link between man and Bolo Yueng, but in time I reconsidered. I now think Bolo's the missing link between man and whatever this guy's supposed to be. As the Princess watches baldly and impassively, Mr. Whatzit dispatches poor Yang, who had a certain joie de vivre that we'll miss hereafter.

Now determined to finish off Dragon Force, Nikolai boldly invites them onto his island. Their arrival has something of an Enter the Dragon meets Apocalypse Now in the Bermuda Triangle quality with a little high-school Fellini thrown in. It isn't long before the decisive battle breaks out, with The Monk defeating Mr Whatzit with disappointing ease as a general melee erupts around them.

Nikolai decides to take his leave, with the Princess in tow, along a predetermined path to a waiting motorboat. It'd have to be predetermined, wouldn't it, for the ninjas to have their routines rehearsed all along the route? This is really where the picture just rips the top flap right off the envelope of ninja silliness. Did the filmmakers really expect anyone to be intimidated by ninja cheerleader formations, for instance?

The viewer empathizes with Jack and Tao Lung's mounting impatience with each new wave of ninjas as they swoop down from the trees and burst out of the earth. Drastic measures are called for, so Jack starts cutting heads, extracting viscera, and lopping limbs. The ninjas respond in kind with their adorable little bombs -- but boys! You made the fuses too long! That means when you throw them, Jack or Tao Lung can bat them right back at you and...

Oh, forget it. This sort of thing happens about half a dozen time before the ninjas learn their lesson. And while there's still Nikolai to run down and the Princess to deprogram, Power Force has climaxed in a giddy paroxysm of destruction for its own sake that may well justify your patience during the early meandering part of the picture. I ended up admiring the movie for its joyous abandonment of restraint and its almost instinctive understanding that the answer to any plot problem is as simple as more. Bad exploitation films are exploitative because they make little or no effort to fulfill our expectations once they've conned us into the theater or the purchase. Power Force more than fulfilled my admittedly low expectations, and its imperturbable stupidity might win others over, too.

Library of Classics: BRUCE LEE AGAINST SUPERMEN

Former Hong Kong child star Bruce Lee achieved mature stardom in the role of Kato, masked chauffeur and all-around henchman of the Green Hornet in a 1966 TV version of the old-time radio program. It lasted only one season but was a big hit in Hong Kong, so the story goes, under the title The Kato Show. This enabled Lee to begin his starring career in feature films. Kato, therefore, was an iconic figure for Asian audiences. For that reason it was inevitable that the "Brucesploitation" genre that emerged following Lee's death would appropriate Kato's image. Now that we've established that fact, all bets are off.

The origins of the film presented in the Dragon Immortal box set as Bruce Lee Against Supermen are mysterious. The Internet Movie Database denies the existence of such a film. The closest thing to it in their filmography for star Bruce Li is a 1977 release called Superdragon vs. Superman. Other sources date the film under the title we know to 1975. That title is certainly one of the most misleading ever used. It's one thing to invoke Bruce Lee in your title; that's standard practice in Brucesploitation. It's another to suggest that Bruce Lee is either starring or a character in the movie. As for the other part of the equation, ... we'll get to that in due time.

C. C. Wu's production opens with a pre-credit car chase, during which criminals toss their swag practically into the laps of a tourist couple. They hardly have time to marvel at their luck before they are rebuked by a masked gentleman in the black livery known to millions. This as yet unnamed person confiscates them and their money and drives them to the police station. The opening credits roll.

Post-credits, the masked chauffeur deals with three antagonists. We then see him at ease in what must be Green Hornet headquarters. Here our hero (or assistant-hero, I suppose), can slip into something more comfortable: a red superhero costume with a green hornet logo. It's the club uniform apparently, and for some inexplicable reason the club has at least three members. I could swear I saw three guys when there are normally only two, Sith-style, and all in the same casual attire. Then the telex lurches to life, setting the plot proper into motion.

The two faces of Bruce Li in Bruce Lee Against Supermen

Professor Ting has discovered a way to synthesize food products from petroleum by-products. The resulting compound is reportedly "rich in vitt-a-minns." Unscrupulous elements want Ting's formula. They follow him to an Arab country where he inspects some likely resources under the approving eyes of Chinese actors who don't even try to look Semitic, apart from the clothes. The criminals do little at this time, however, apart from ogling the professor's daughter, Alice, as she skinny dips in a nearby pond.

While this goes on, the unmasked chauffeur, now in civilian garb, shows up at a martial arts school. He announces that, owing to an injury to the Green Hornet, he has been sent to protect Professor Ting. Here's where we finally hear his name: they call him "Carter."

This is one of those moments when you want to slap someone upside the head. Why in the blue hell did they change his name? Were they somehow afraid of copyright infringement after identifying "Carter" as the Green Hornet's assistant? Did they perhaps believe that the name "Kato" was a form of intellectual property in a way that the name "Bruce Lee" was not? Did they fear that audiences would confuse the character with Inspector Clouseau's servant?

Let it go, and let's move on. As you may have guessed once Carter declared his intent to protect the professor, Ting and his daughter are promptly kidnapped, fortunately in sight of Carter and one of his pals. An unusually orderly, sedate and protracted car chase follows. It is very time consuming, and only looks like a chase because understand that it's supposed to be. It finally ends when the good guys figure out a short cut, get ahead of the crime car, and lay themselves down in the road in front of it. The gangsters actually stop, thinking the men must be hurt. But it is they who are hurt as our heroes rescue the Tings.

"Hello, S.O.S. I need me a real good sharpshooter," the head criminal says on the phone. In short order, Carter finds himself the target of a sniper who is not really good. For the sake of variety, the film now gives us a leisurely, roundabout foot chase through the city that finally ends with the sniper falling off a building. Not knowing exactly whom he's dealing with (and I was sometimes uncertain myself), the head criminal realizes that "That Green Hornet's a real problem." Thinking aloud, he muses, "Superman? I'll get him! He can fix Green Hornet, I'm sure."

Far away, in a dark fortress of solitude, a weird caped figure practices his super calligraphy. With every leap and flip comes a new brushstroke, until a complete statement is visible. Written in Chinese characters, it is completely incomprehensible to me. The caped figure reads his own handiwork and laughs maniacally. This is Superman, rocketed to Earth from the planet Crip Tong and endowed with powers indiscernible to mortal men. That's my theory, at least, but the film itself makes no effort to explain why a man in black tights and flimsy white cape with a troupe of half-mimes, half-ninjas in tow should either see himself or be seen as a Superman, much less the licensed property of DC Comics, a Warner Communications company.

Superman (second from right) considers a rich offer to fight "Bruce Lee" later in the picture.

Still, Superman demands a high price for his time and trouble. The criminals offer "$400,000 cash, ten girls, and a truckload of booze," paid for by foreign backers. "That's not bad," Superman admits, "Foreigners are generous." His employer is less sanguine. "Foreigners are nothing, but very rich. Nothing upstairs but their big fat wallets." Yeah, but their money buys you Superman, ingrate! And isn't he kind of a foreigner himself, jerk?

You will believe a man can fly -- please?

But was that purchase really necessary? It seems like all the gangsters needed was a woman to seduce Carter while another band of miscreants re-kidnaps the Professor. It's only when Alice bursts in on the seduction and incites an ill-choreographed catfight that Carter realizes that he's made a tactical mistake. By the time that sinks in, Ting has been subjected to the dread torture
of hot lights and hair pulling. Screen distortion allows you, the audience, to share in the doctor's agony. Alice can only imagine it, but it can't possibly magnify her present disdain for Carter. "What can you do but kung fu?" she sulks.

When the criminals negotiate a deal so that Alice can bring her father the medicine he needs to keep alive, a chagrined Carter follows their car by pulling a rickshaw at something like super speed. This finally sets up some successive showdowns, first with a pack of gibbering minions who throw frisbees at one another and threaten to taunt him to death.

And then finally with Superman himself, who displays the powers of jumping, flipping, kung fu and knife fighting. The only special effect at his disposal is the ability to reverse film, enabling him to leap upright out of the water and onto a ledge several feet above. The entire climactic fight is pitched on this level of ordinary. No one walking into Bruce Lee Against Supermen, no matter what they might have expected, expected the big battle to come down to knife thrusts, but it does....

As I wrote a few days ago, I picked up Dragon Immortal collection from the Albany Public Library expecting Bruce Lee Against Supermen to be the highlight of the set. Instead, I was only amazed by how brazenly lame it was. This is the kind of effort that gives exploitation a bad name. Either the original producers or the American distributors, or both, seem simply out to put one over on the gullible public. It's the sort of show that almost needs a square-up reel, though the producers do make gestures in that direction with the skinny dipping, the catfight, and a near-rape scene involving Alice and a sweaty white guy.

Nor is Bruce Lee Against Supermen on the mesmeric level of ineptitude that makes something like Bruce's Fist of Vengeance fascinating and unpredictable. It's nearly the worst thing that any exploitation effort can be: utterly mediocre. It hasn't even the Turkish gall to show what it promises: a fight, let's say, between a dude in a yellow track suit and a guy in a genuine Superman costume, or guys with some sort of superhuman powers. The pure scandalous idea of the film as a great ripoff of U.S. pop culture is really more entertaining than the actual movie.

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Next in the Library of Classics series is the remaining film from the Dragon Immortal set, and the real highlight of it -- Power Force: Coming Soon to this blog.