Silent Assassins (1988)

PLOT: A scientist who holds the secret to a biochemical weapon is kidnapped by an ex-CIA agent and rogue criminal. Humanity's only hope to avoid germ warfare is a clumsy cop who eats raw hot dogs with peanut butter, a dude in red sweatpants, and the guy from L.A. Streetfighters who was clearly too old for high school.

Director: Doo-yong Lee, Scott Thomas
Writers: Lin Ada, Will Gates
Cast: Sam Jones, Jun Chong, Phillip Rhee, Mako, Bill Erwin, Linda Blair, Gustav Vintas, Rebecca Ferratti, Bill Wallace, Ken Nagayama
  
PLOT THICKENER
Sometime after the release of the iPhone, David Lynch sat down to record some bonus content for the special edition release of his film, Inland Empire. During that session, Lynch made a remark that people who watch films on mobile devices like their “fucking telephone” are cheating themselves out of the cinematic experience and need to “get real.” Some clever soul set this clip to music and uploaded it to YouTube as an iPhone commercial parody, and the rest is viral video history. I’m proud to say that I’ve never tried watching a full-length movie on my fucking telephone, and didn’t even purchase a smartphone until 2011. I have, however, watched a grainy VHS rip of 1988’s Silent Assassins on the 2.2-inch screen of a 5th-generation iPod Nano while enduring a five-hour bus ride somewhere on I-95. Sorry, David -- I was desperate.

DTV action films of the 1980s that dared to combine scientific elements with espionage often involved stolen microfilm, black market nuclear material, or secret formulas for dangerous but ambiguous weaponry. This film falls into the latter camp, where an elderly biochemist, Dr. London (Erwin), is kidnapped for his knowledge of a secret chemical formula that could be exploited for germ warfare. The abductors include a sultry killing machine, Miss Amy (Ferratti) and an ex-CIA agent named Kendrick (Vintas) along with an army of masked foot soldiers who may or may not be Iga ninja clan members. This lethal group gives no fucks, as evidenced by their snatching of not only London, but the small, Asian, and completely unrelated girl who he happens to be holding at the time of the abduction in a parking garage elevator. Let this be a lesson to all of you in the scientific community: if you’re working on anything remotely interesting to our nation’s enemies, they will not be deterred by your use of children as human shields. And don’t ask to hold people’s kids if they’re old enough to walk, it’s friggin creepy.

In hot pursuit of Kendrick is Sam Kettle (Jones), a wisecracking everyman cop who very nearly busted him just days before, during a sting operation. How did Kendrick get away? He ran to a warehouse pier and threw a baby in the water before boarding a speedboat. Why was a baby hanging out on a dock in the middle of the night, you ask? Who knows, but like any other good cop, Kettle dove in after it for the save. Upon discovering the baby was a doll, our hero actually yelled, “IT’S A DOLL!” Kendrick responded by cackling and firing his gun into the air as his boat sped away, because he’s the villain in a 1988 DTV action movie. Predictable.

The flipside to Kettle’s cocky can-do attitude is occasional meatheaded incompetence, so he obviously can’t be trusted to do things alone. He’s joined by Jun Kim (Chong) the distressed uncle of the kidnapped little girl, and he wants nothing more than to rescue her. This leads to some strange moments between the two men: Kim hides out in Kettle’s jeep, shows up randomly at police HQ for progress reports, and at one point finds himself sitting between Kettle and his wife, Sara (Blair) as Kettle eats a dinner of raw hot dogs and peanut butter while arguing about his increasing involvement in the case. When Sam and Sara get up from the couch to giggle and play grab-ass (they’re childless, so still having fun!) Kim discovers the majesty of heavily processed meat product combined with peanut butter. The heroes are eventually joined by Bernard (Rhee), the wise-ass son of a reformed Yakuza gangster and art collector (Mako). Bernard is also a Kendo instructor who is consistently flanked by at least one pretty, bleach-blonde California girl at any time.

In terms of production value, technical competence, and overall narrative coherence, this was a major step up for co-stars Philip Rhee and Jun Chong from their previous collaboration, L.A. Streetfighters. Multiple directors is usually an indicator of a glorious mess (see: Breathing Fire) but directors Scott Thomas and Doo-Yong Lee do a solid job. I’ll dock them a few points for some bad lighting choices in the climax, but they otherwise keep the action moving at a good clip and utilize varied settings. I was surprised to see legitimate character development in Bernard, turning from an obnoxious and flippant California ladies man to a vengeful whirlwind through metered motivating incidents.  It should also be mentioned that while the onscreen chemistry between Chong and Jones isn’t great, the character dynamic was well-formed -- Kettle’s cocky, rapid-fire chatter plays well with Kim’s more downbeat demeanor. You could just as easily see a guy like Roddy Piper sliding into the Kettle role, but perhaps the world was not ready for a Piper-Chong collaboration. Humanity is so backwards, at times.

The action, for the most part, is well-executed and everyone gets an opportunity to shine. There are shoot-outs, foot chases, vehicle chases, smashed windows, rooftop jumps, 'splosions, and plenty of hand to hand combat. Chong and Rhee, as fight choreographers, make great use of the production’s willing stuntmen and unlimited inventory of breakaway furniture. No book case or end table was safe! Rhee, in particular, has a memorable scene in a public bathroom against two goons that leaves no stall divider untouched. Thankfully, no one was taking a shit at the time, so this saved everyone from that unique brand of action movie embarrassment.

Oddly, this is the last cinematic appearance from Chong we’ll cover, and he goes out on a high note with his best (dramatic) performance. (Amazing titles aside, 2006’s Maximum Cage Fighting and 1976’s Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave are decidedly non-canon in our theme of Western martial arts b-movies of the 1980s and 1990s). Despite less than a half-dozen acting roles, Master Chong’s contributions to cinema as a martial artist can’t be overstated: his pupils have included action genre mainstays such as Phillip and Simon Rhee, Loren Avedon, Thomas Ian Griffith, Lorenzo Lamas, and even Sam Jones himself. Regardless of how you feel about them as dramatic actors, that’s an impressive crop of on-screen fighters to have helped to elevate to lead star status. His crowning cinematic achievement is probably the amazing gangland shit-show L.A. Streetfighters, truly one of our pantheon films. So we bid adieu to Jun Chong, a man who was so much more than jump kicks and an awesome moustache, but also a teacher, learner, and master of the fighting arts.

VERDICT
On a second watch at a more reasonable resolution, I really enjoyed Silent Assassins. The plot and reliance upon exposition is a little hamfisted at times, but it’s a breezy 90 minutes of enjoyable action and it features one of those b-movie casts that was only possible during the golden age of direct-to-video. While it’s not quite a hidden gem, Rhee, Jones, and Chong completists will definitely want to bump this up in their respective queues.

AVAILABILITY
Used VHS and non-R1 DVD copies are available on Amazon, but it’s also on YouTube in full. Not to be confused with Godfrey Ho’s Ninja: Silent Assassin.

4 / 7 

L.A. Streetfighters (1985)

PLOT: Rival teenage gangs of martial arts street toughs rumble over territory and bragging rights. When one gang tries to go legitimate as a private security team, and one gang member starts dating the sister of a rival gang member, and someone steals drug money, and another guy comes from a broken home, things get really convoluted. And awesome.

Director: Woo-sang Park
Writer: Ji-Woon Hong, Jaime Mendoza-Nava
Cast: Jun Chong, Phillip Rhee, James Lew, Bill Wallace, Loren Avedon
 
PLOT THICKENER:
Bear Republic Brewery’s Racer 5 might be my favorite IPA of all time. You sudsy connoisseurs are probably chuckling at my naivety on the subject, but I had it for the first time recently and gave it immediate and favorable judgement. Taste is like that, so is smell: in analyzing the respective properties, you usually know immediately whether you like something or not. Movies are more slippery. The 1985 Woo-sang Park film L.A. Streetfighters is one that often popped up when researching the filmographies of Loren Avedon, James Lew, and Phillip Rhee. Digging deeper into some random reviews, I found a lot of “so bad it’s good!” reactions and added it to my Netflix queue. I watched it. I probably shrugged. I moved on.

It was added as a “midnight movie” selection to last year’s edition of the New York Asian Film Festival and due to time restrictions, I failed to attend. With fresh eyes, I just revisited the film last week and have concluded this: in terms of cinematic gut reactions, 2009 Karl Brezdin’s guts don’t know shit. This movie is incredible.

Phillip Rhee stars as Tony, a charismatic and likeable high school student. The only problem? He’s the new guy in town and doesn’t look quite tough enough to not be fucked with. Part of it is his affable demeanor but most of it is that he wears the same gray argyle sweater to school every day. (Unless it’s a Members Only jacket, wearing the same clothes on consecutive days is not a cool thing to do.) As a result, the school’s bully, Chan (Lew) and his gang of thugs target Tony for a beatdown, unless he can pay the fee: five dollars. Luckily, the rebellious Young (Chong) sticks up for Tony and challenges Chan to a duel under the cover of night. While his ample mustache might suggest he stayed back a few years, Young is a tough customer and has the leather jacket, black fingerless gloves, and occasional flowy scarf to prove it.

The bo staff is the weapon of choice for the rumble between Chan and Young, and it’s a legitimately well-choreographed fight scene that puts over Young’s skills very effectively. He dominates the contest and Chan’s gang goes scurrying. A casual observer to the proceedings notices that Young is a formidable physical specimen capable of quickly disarming his opponent and immediately offers him a wad of cash to work as private security. We then get the first of several WTF moments, as Young grips the cash in hand, turns his head toward the camera, and begins laughing maniacally before it abruptly cuts to the next scene. Incredible.

Like Chan, Young has a gang of super-tough friends, and also like Chan, he comes from a single-parent household. During a rotating cascade of poorly-lit, ineptly performed, and terribly dubbed scenes of melodrama, Young laments his place in America and his mother’s rampant alcoholism. Will she ever accept him or be a real mother to him? The dilemma frustrates him to no end and he constantly vents to Tony, but his friend seems to think that he should simply concentrate on school, the one thing he can control. Like Bill Gates before him, Young is all “fuck school, I gots to get PAID” and continues to bust heads during the gang’s adventures in private security and random parking garage rumbles.

As Young and friends rush fist-first into the alluring world of working the door at Mexican restaurants and dance clubs, Tony catches the eye of the adoring Lily (King) and they begin to date. Despite their innocent puppy love, this is a highly combustible situation because Lily is Chan’s sister. She attempts to explain away her brother’s dickheaded behavior as the result of their mother abandoning the family. The honesty between them and their mutual love for ice cream only fortifies their romantic bonds, and it seems as if Young is growing resentful. As the gang’s caretaker who took Tony in as a friend, it troubles him to see his friend happy with the sister of his arch-rival. This manifests itself in an awkward scene where Young drives around looking for sex workers for Tony, and mistakes non-sex workers for actual sex workers as Tony shifts nervously in his seat all the while.

There are so many more scenes just like this, none of which can be adequately described in the written word as a means of capturing the same random and off-beat spirit that an actual viewing could. By the time Young steals a drug dealer’s money and the gang is stalked by Bill “Superfoot” Wallace and a samurai-hitman fights a gang member in what looks like an expressionistic art gallery, your head will be spinning with the pure fun of it all. Though, for all the goofiness and technical gaffes, the ending to this movie is bleak as all-fuck which made me love it all that much more.

The action overall is quite good when you can actually see what’s transpiring. While the terrible attention to lighting hurts at times, the choreography is mostly crisp, the movement is framed well, and the editing isn’t overdone. More than the technical components though, the roster of fighters helps these scenes succeed. Rhee, Chong, and Lew are all legitimate taekwondo masters and the inclusion of karate and kickboxing champion Bill Wallace was a cool way to bridge the 1970s and early 80s output of the Chuck Norris era, and the burgeoning talent and work of the 1980s Los Angeles taekwondo scene. I didn’t spot him fighting, but Loren Avedon -- a TKD practitioner -- makes a brief appearance as one of Lew’s buddies. Mark Hicks, who cries over a birthday cake here, has a long history of Hollywood stunt work, just appeared in the action blockbuster Fast Five, and achieved unfortunate Internet fame as Afro Ninja. Also deserving special mention is Danny Gibson, who appears as the leader of the Spikes gang and has one of the most unique looks in a film loaded with questionable fashion sense. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a mustachioed man in a belly shirt yelling “YOU'RE DEAD MEAT MOTHERFUCKER! DON'T FUCK WITH... THE SPIKES!”

VERDICT:
The terrible lighting. The dubbed dialogue. The fingerless black leather gloves. The VHS artwork that looks like it belongs on the cover of some obscure side-scrolling Data East beat-em-up for the NES. You get all of this and more in the highly enjoyable gang violence romp that is L.A. Streetfighters. While it will never win points on polish or artistic achievement, the film is legitimately historic for other reasons. It’s a cinematic flashpoint for some of the biggest figures in the American martial arts b-movie scene. Phillip Rhee went on to head up the infamous Best of the Best franchise. James Lew would become one of the most prolific stunt performers in Hollywood. Loren Avedon played prominent heroes and villains for the next 20 years. While Chong never achieved the same longevity cinematically, this is his most consistently entertaining piece of work and a legit midnight movie gem. Highly recommended.

AVAILABILITY:
Amazon, EBay, YouTube. Currently in Save Hell on Netflix.

6.5 / 7

Street Soldiers (1991)

PLOT: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is written mostly in iambic pentameter and includes puns, sermons, and sonnets. The writing in Street Soldiers includes the lines “I know about spitting snakes!” and “WHERE’S MY BITCH?!”

Director: Lee Harry
Writers: Jun Chong, Spencer Grendahl, Lee Harry
Cast: Jun Chong, Hwang Jang Lee, Joon Kim, Jeffrey Rector, David Homb, Johnathan Gorman, Katherine Armstrong, Jude Gerard Prest



PLOT THICKENER:
Just when you thought it was safe to stop combining a tired Shakespearean narrative with poor writing and unimaginative martial arts, along comes the 1991 film Street Soldiers. This is our first review of a film from Jun Chong, who penned the screenplay in addition to his acting duties. It’s also the second appearance on the site for Korean superkicker Hwang Jang Lee. We'll never know why he chose this movie as his real splash in the American market, but he shouldn’t feel too badly. Everyone is prone to taking bad career advice.

The unnamed American city in this story is but a canvas for the violent artistic expression of two competing gangs. The Tigers are a group of popular high school kids with good hair, steady jobs, girlfriends, and matching jackets. They play stickball and hang out at swap meets. While they don’t necessarily go looking for trouble, it seems to find them, most often in the form of the JPs. Unlike the Tigers, this crew consists of haggard misfits and cast-offs of various ages. Recently, a truce has held the tension between them to nothing more than a simmer. When the JPs’ de facto leader, Spider (Prest) stabs one of the Tigers to death during a skirmish, it doesn’t turn up the heat on the rivalry so much as it knocks the fucking pot off the stove.

When the group’s original leader, Priest (Rector), rejoins the fold after serving a prison sentence, he immediately reasserts his authority. Enraged by the broken truce, he dominates Spider during a knife-fight in front of the rest of the gang and forces him to beg for his life (“You’re gonna bleed like any other chicken!”). Jeffrey Rector is nothing short of a revelation in this role and he knows exactly what kind of movie this is. To call his performance hammy is inadequate; Rector decides to deliver all of his lines in a raspy whisper that falls somewhere between Demi Moore and an early Goldust promo.

Though his violent and unreasonable actions indicate otherwise, Priest is more than just a crazed convict. He has a thoughtful and sensitive side too. When a random prisoner named Tak (Lee) helped him during a jail fight and somehow lost his tongue, Priest invited him into the gang on their first day out of the joint and gave him the gift of a toy cobra that spits water. He also longs for his ex-girlfriend, Julie (Armstrong), the teenage love with whom he got a matching star tattoo on his hand. I mean, he doesn’t long for her so much that he’s unwilling to arrange and participate in the brutal gang rape of a hated rival’s girlfriend. But he does wear protection when going first … and last, according to the unfortunate victim.

The Tigers don’t appear to have a main leader, but the closest thing they have is Max, played by Johnathan Gorman. He was there to hold his dying friend in his arms when the truce was broken and understands more than anyone that the JPs must be shouted down in the only language they understand: violence. Max’s closest friend, Chuck (Kim) is slow to come around to this realization, but a brawl at a school dance expedites this change of heart. During the tussle, an associate of the Tigers named Troy (Homb) assists Chuck during the melee. Noting his unrefined but effective fighting skills, Chuck brings Troy to a martial arts dojo run by his uncle Han, played by Jun Chong.

As if the burning hatred between the gangs didn’t have quite enough kindling, Troy and Julie have the hots for each other. Priest flies off the handle and the violence escalates to cause additional deaths, drawing the attention of the police. Following the precedents set by equally violent gangs like the Bloods and Crips, Max refuses to involve the authorities. He instead wants to involve Master Han to teach the Tigers how to fight. Initially reluctant, Han eventually relents and the guys learn his special brand of asskicking, which consists mostly of montages where they break boards and get tossed to the floor.

Jun Chong has put together some decent fight scenes when paired with the right talent, as in previous efforts L.A. Streetfighters and Silent Assassins. On paper, there were no reasons why he and Hwang Jang Lee -- both taekwondo experts -- could not have had a terrific fight. As happens so often though, the direction and editing fail to live up to the skills of the performers. The shooting angles and choppy editing are bad enough, but Lee Harry also opts to interrupt the fight with shots of Troy looking around in the darkness of a warehouse and shots of Priest and Troy gazing at each other during a climactic stare-down.

The acting for the most part is quite poor, but Rector’s overacting and some competence from Joon Kim and Johnathan Gorman manage to carry the story to watchable heights. Not only does he bear more than a passing resemblance to a young Paul Rudd, but Gorman might also be the embodiment of what would have happened had Paul Rudd’s career gone horribly wrong.

If viewed with a critical eye -- please, don’t strain yourself -- this film represents Jun Chong coming full-circle in his acting career. In Street Soldiers, he’s a mentor to a group of young punks with misplaced aggression; in 1985’s L.A. Streetfighters, he was one of those young punks. In the latter, he was virtually the only “kid” in his high school capable of growing a moustache, which invited disbelief about the appropriateness of the actor’s age relative to his character. By the time Street Soldiers came around, Jun Chong was the perfect age to play a socially awkward uncle who teaches kids how to maim and kill people.

VERDICT:
There are many reasons to avoid Street Soldiers. The direction is inept, the acting is subpar, and the fight scenes have little creativity and even less focus. However, it’s the only film to combine Hwang Jang Lee’s only appearance in an American-made film with Hwang Jang Lee’s only appearance prancing around in designer clothes with a fake cobra hanging around his neck. If there’s such a thing as Jun Chong completists, it’s worth seeking out to see his only film of the 1990s and the only one he wrote. Thrown in for no additional cost, you get an epically hammy performance from Jeffrey Rector as Priest, who instantly makes a case for a spot in the Mesmerizing Martial Arts B-Movie Villains Hall of Fame (not a real place … yet). Be forewarned though: this is the weakest of Jun Chong’s output and not a good martial arts film by any stretch.

AVAILABILITY:
VHS or YouTube.

4.5 / 7