Jim is a heavily-afro’d special agent with no respect for authority. He works for a private international anti-terrorist group called DRAGON, an acronym standing for Defense Reserve Agency Guardian Of Nations- no shit, I’m not making this up! DRAGON want him to rescue a diplomat’s daughter who has been kidnapped by a Voodoo priest and is being ransomed for a brand new super-weapon “The Freeze Bomb”. As if that wasn’t enough the Hong Kong-based kidnap victim is this Jim (a California resident)’s girlfriend. What are the chances of that, eh?
I’m going to bang on about title sequences again I’m afraid. I’m usually underwhelmed by them, even in big expensive popcorn movies, but these are great. They are utterly simple, a set of negative photos of Jim in various action poses set to a standard funky guitar theme, but really pretty effective. From there it’s straight in on the action with a carful of no-good hoodlums- you can spot them by their greasy hair, moustaches and denim- tracking the kidnap victim. They take her from her villa by beating up her guards and then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, shooting them anyway- the bursting blood bags under their shirts stick out like overfilled catheter bags, if they’d only turned and faced thirty degrees in a different direction it wouldn’t show but, ah, it’s too late now.
And so Jim- Robert Sand, the Black Samurai- is called in. His undercover contact Pines keeps giving him tip-offs which lead to dangerous situations, Jim isn’t daft he knows that they’re traps but he isn’t afraid either and goes in anyway. Variously fighting off shotgun-toting rednecks, weedy hit-men, jungle-dwelling Leopard men (the jungle looks a bit like a Florida garden), a muscular bodyguard who is set up as his black Superman rival, various dwarves, a vulture possessed by a demon (!), some rattlesnakes, several armies of bad Kung Fu dudes all in black and an axe-wielding Warlock he manages to save the day. What a bloke!
The production values are atrocious- the film is badly lit and filmed with indoor scenes being little more than guesswork, the editing (vital to the success of any Kung Fu film) is crap and with a little care could have rescued the project- do we need to see stuntmen standing waiting for their turn to get kicked in the face or the same kick from different angles during different fights? Something else that didn’t help, I’m getting hypercritical here but I don’t care when I’m on a roll, is that Jim is dressed in a red boiler suit (can they really have been fashionable) and then a red tracksuit and the ropey DVD transfer makes both a retina-burning pain to endure. While I’m on costume I learned from the closing titles that Marilyn Joi’s costume was provided by Marilyn Joi- does that reflect the budgetary constraints they were under? Perhaps I should reassess the film. Marilyn Joi, by the way, plays a High Priestess of Voodoo named Synne who tries and fails to seduce Jim despite looking like Diana Ross with a figure. He’s a one-woman man that guy!
The acting, of course, is dreadful throughout with one exception. Jim Kelly was a Karate champion turned actor and I actually prefer his acting to his Karate. Fine fighter he doubtless was but his moves always look a little clunky and unpolished- perhaps that’s a legacy of being a real fighter rather than a movie fighter. So, I prefer his non-combat scenes. I mean it’s not good acting, but his performance as a super-cool super-dude is convincing because the hokey dialogue deserves to be read with contempt. He carries off the suave badass thing to perfection and always looks the part- even when putting a helmet onto his immaculate afro to infiltrate the enemy hideout with his Thunderball-style jet pack! Yes, his jet-pack! And his delivery of the line “whitey faggot” as he grinds his heel into some dude’s balls is magnificent. So cool is Jim that even the post-mix dubbing of some Muhammad Ali-style dialogue during the (frankly disappointing) final fight with his big black nemesis can’t detract from him. Somehow he pulls off the shuffle, the “come on sucka! Hit me, is that all you got?” and the pretty boy with the unmarked face schtick through his sheer ballsy chutzpah. Well, fair fucks to him.
