Virtual Combat (1995)

PLOT: In the future, a scientific breakthrough leads to a breakdown in the barrier between virtual reality and the physical world, where computer programs are equipped with human bodies and run amok. What science has wrought, only kicks, guns, and double-stomps to the chest can destroy.

Director: Andrew Stevens
Writer: William C. Martell
Cast: Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Athena Massey, Michael Bernardo, Dawn Ann Billings, Michael Dorn, Loren Avedon, Ken McLeod, Ron Barker

PLOT THICKENER

When direct-to-video martial arts filmmakers started experimenting with science fiction elements during the late 1980s and early 90s, more often than not, the results were, as the French say, “le merde crachin.” With Jean-Claude Van Damme finding success in movies like Universal Soldier and Timecop, the blueprint for the DTV crowd was set, and the smaller studios played mix-and-match with elements from big-budget futuristic productions in which they could let their various martial artist stars run wild. When the dust settled, there were a number of cinematic ambassadors for the sub-subgenre: Olivier Gruner (Nemesis, Automatic); Richard Norton (Hyper Space, Equalizer 2000); and Don “The Dragon” Wilson (Future Kick, Cyber Tracker). I almost feel like I’ve written this exact paragraph before -- is this current Brezdin returning from the past with old copy? Or is it old Brezdin traveling from the past and writing a post while current Brezdin is away on vacation? And why am I suddenly getting a nosebleed? Trying to make your fiction all sciencey just screws things up, and Don the Dragon knows from experience.

In the future, credits have replaced currency. Los Angeles crime has been supplanted by Los Angeles pacifism. And fighting and screwing has largely been replaced by strapping yourself into a giant gyroscope (i.e., aerotrim) and experiencing it inside a virtual reality (VR) program under the supervision of some keyboard jockey. David Quarry (Wilson) and his partner John (McLeod) are members of the grid runners, a security force tasked with defending the “grid” between Los Angeles and Las Vegas from threats both virtual and physical. When a scientist has a major breakthrough in cyberplastic theory, a local evil corporation stands to profit. What they didn’t count on, however, is that the same computer process that can create physical manifestations from cybersex characters, can also be used to bring virtual killers from the “Lethal Combat” fight simulator into the physical world. When a glitch in the system does exactly that, and an elite but egomaniacal fighter named Dante (Bernardo) is set loose in the physical world, the line between virtual and tangible may be forever erased.

Just like the cyberplastic goo in which the virtual reality characters come to life, this film was a warm and slippery mess that’s toxic to pets and small children. A lot of the plot elements and visual gags are straight rips from better science-fiction films like Demolition Man, Virtuosity, and T2: Judgment Day. However, I loved how shameless the filmmakers were about this pilfering and the  world-building that resulted from it. The movie portends the proliferation of the voice-commanded, personalized mobile assistant that retrieves any information you could want (here, it’s called “Mary”). It has programmable sex cyborgs, cyberterrorism, and virtual reality gaming. Looking around now at the emergence of technologies like Oculus, Siri, and Echo, I’m shocked at how much our world is beginning to resemble the one depicted in a friggin’ Don the Dragon Wilson movie. Will buzz cuts and pomade be outlawed in the future? Because for reasons unknown, the hair in this movie is huge and unkempt. Bernardo has always rocked the long locks, but Wilson, McLeod, and Avedon are all rocking some shaggy cuts in a production that had plenty of humidity but clearly lacked an on-set barber or even a single brush or comb.

This film came at an odd point in Loren Avedon’s filmography, one that we might objectively call a downturn in activity. Virtual Combat was sandwiched between 1994’s Operation Golden Phoenix, where he played bad guy Ivan Jones, and 1996’s Safety Zone, an obscure Canadian film that appears to have been released in Greece but nowhere else. While we might point to his role in Operation… as igniting a trend towards playing villains, a closer examination reveals that his turn as Michael Branson, the dickish kickboxer in the 1993’s Baywatch episode, “Kicks,” was the starting point. Avedon has spoken of his fondness for playing villains because they can act without rules, but his character of Parness is more of a corporate underling who lacks any real autonomy. It was also tough to see Avedon’s personality shine through here; he has a natural cockiness that I’ve always found enjoyable in his heroic roles, so it’d make sense to turn that trait up to 11 as a villain. Yet, Parness lacks any clear personality traits or motivations beyond those instilled by his employers. Overall, I felt let down with how he was used in this film, but thankfully, Avedon has a couple of scenes with Wilson and we get a solid fight between the two towards the climax.

On the whole, the action in the film is that solid brand of chopsocky one would expect in a film where Art Camacho is listed as the fight choreographer. That said, I’m not sure he got the most out of the talent here -- the fight between Wilson and Avedon is good, but given their styles I would have expected something with better pace and more wide angles -- the filmmakers relied way too much on close shots and it robs the audience of any sense of movement. Bernardo is a talented guy but I didn’t really see the Dante character as head-and-shoulders above everyone else in terms of skill -- he wields some limb-regeneration trickery straight from the T-1000 toolkit -- but if we’re to believe that he’s a VR program capable of learning the tendencies of its opponents, he needed to seem more invincible and adaptable. (And how David throws a glitch in the Dante matrix is head-scratching). All that said, this film gave me Loren Avedon firing laser beams and a good amount of kicking, so I can’t complain much about the action.

Now for my biggest issue with the film. Virtual Combat employs that weird trope of having Actor A (strong voice) perform all of the dialgoue for Actor B (weak voice) but instead of having Actor A move his mouth and then dubbing him in post-production, the filmmaker uses Michael Dorn’s disembodied voice-of-God dialogue over shots of Bernardo contorting his face to look like he’s thinking out loud. We love Dorn -- he has a great voice, he played Worf, he flies jets. And if you remember Shootfighter: Fight to the Death -- and let’s be honest, who doesn’t? -- Bernardo wasn’t exactly Isaac Hayes in the vocal talent department. On the contrary, he falls into that camp of screen fighters who unfortunately lack the ability to project effectively, doomed to “nice guy” supporting parts because they still sound like teenagers when they open their mouths. Teenagers who haven’t tasted whiskey or smoked a cigarette. Has Jeff Wincott ever been dubbed? Nope, and there's a reason for that. (Wincott Chainsmoking Method wins again). Anyways, this Dorn cover-up makes practical sense and the technique works on paper because it’s a futuristic science-fiction film where we can buy the idea of Dante’s telepathic outbursts. In execution, though, it comes off as overly goofy because the other “dimensionalized” VR clones talk with their own mouths and their own voices, and for some strange reason, the filmmakers included Bernardo’s natural grunts and groans during the fight scenes. The inconsistency undermines the approach, but I look forward to creating a series of supercuts where I dub Dante with dialogue from Skeletor, Zod from Superman II, and Ursula from The Little Mermaid. I might not be joking.

VERDICT

The VR fight simulation angle is interesting, if overly coincidental, given that Expect No Mercy came out the same year, but the intermingling of the tangible and the virtual is what makes Virtual Combat the slightly more novel of the two. This may be the closest that DTV chopsocky ever got to touching upon David Cronenberg’s recurring theme of technology merging with the human body, and it certainly reinforced the notion that he executes that theme better than almost any other filmmaker. I would have liked to see a better use of the supporting cast, but I always get a kick out of seeing what 90s films thought the technological world might look like in only a few decades’ time.

AVAILABILITY

A bit hard to find. VHS is your best bet.

3.5 / 7

Tiger Claws (1992)

PLOT: A trail of murder victims with distinct scratch marks left on their faces has New York City on edge. Two cops reluctantly team up to search for the elusive killer.

Director: Kelly Makin
Writer: J. Stephen Maunder
Cast: Jalal Merhi, Cynthia Rothrock, Bolo Yeung, Nick Dibley, Bill Pickells, Robert Nolan, Kedar Brown, Michael Bernardo


 

 

PLOT THICKENER:
Training one’s body to be a killing machine can be a tiresome process, both physically and mentally. One of the better cinematic depictions of this concept is in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, where the fragile Leonard Lawrence goes off the rails after verbal abuse and hazing during military training. Not to be outdone by some lame-o 1970s Vietnam war classic, Canadian filmmaker Kelly Makin -- perhaps best known for the Kids in the Hall feature-length film -- brought the martial arts thriller Tiger Claws into the fold in 1992. This story about the consequences of extreme training and the failure to keep one’s nails clipped raises many important questions, none of which will be answered by this review.

The thankless hours of spending her shifts dressed like a sex worker to catch johns isn’t cutting it for Linda Masterson (Rothrock). She wants serious police work. Fortune smiles upon her as a series of victims pile up with no visible trauma aside from peculiar claw marks left on their faces. Since the stiffs were all martial-artists and they died from internal injuries, Masterson suspects a highly-trained fighter. Despite the solid hunch, her department chief wants to pair her with someone to work on the case, dubbed internally as the “Death Dealer” murders.

While he’s hostile to working with a partner, vice cop Tarek Richards (Merhi) doesn’t have a choice. Right after demanding a $25,000 increase in his undercover budget, he botches a sting operation and get suspended. This, combined with his ponytail, houseboat, and his wife leaving him, apparently makes him some sort of loose cannon. (Most would conclude he’s just a screw-up on a major tailspin). After looking at Masterson’s evidence, Richards believes the killer is using a rare version of Tiger style kung-fu.

Following some field research -- i.e. walking through Chinatown and going to a martial arts tournament -- Richards thinks he has a lead, but he’ll have to go undercover in order to chase it. This basically means that Cynthia Rothrock sits in a van doing surveillance while Jalal Merhi gets to have all the fun training in Tiger style. He’s done this once before, but this variation is so intense it can drive a man mad and it’s the real reason why his wife left him... not his ponytail. During his tenure, he befriends some trainees and meets a harmless interior painter named Chong, played by Bolo Yeung. Hmm, that’s weird. Why does the harmless 260-pound interior painter have a giant shrine with all these stolen martial arts weapons?

I’m not sure to what degree they should be held accountable for the way the fight scenes are shot, but as tandem fight choreographers, Steve Lucescu and Jalal Merhi do little to sway me with how they’re staged. The climactic fight involving the male principals lacks drama and is made watchable only by Bolo’s facial expressions and the fact that they crush more cardboard boxes than a trash compactor. Much of the combat is slow to develop and hurt by a lot of over-the-shoulder, first-person perspective shots. Since this was Makin’s first and only foray into the action genre, one could make the case that his team was favoring “feel” over “look” with this style of shooting, but they fail to achieve either effect.

There is some gold swimming in the garbage though. All of Chong’s kill scenes have decent build and execution, and the victims do a good job of selling Yeung’s strikes. Cynthia Rothrock creatively uses rope and a kayak paddle as weapons, and she has two fights with Yeung toward the back-end of the film which are paced a few beats quicker and incorporate their differences in size and speed. Most of the “Tiger” training portions are visually interesting and well-shot, and Bolo is made to look positively bad-ass in scenes where he displays his bastardized version of the training. One sequence has him dunking his hands in scalding water before splashing it on his face and drinking it, while another finds him making kung-fruit salad by squeezing apples to a pulpy mess.

In the area of performances, there’s not much to love. As Masterson, Rothrock is decent but her role is diminished, and Bolo is menacing as Chong but the character is underdeveloped. The best part of the movie is any scene involving real-life Canadian master Bill Pickells. I briefly participated in Tang Soo Do as a youngster in the early 1990s, and was thus exposed to a handful of martial-arts demos where middle-aged white guys with mullets and wonky facial hair would scream while breaking boards or waving swords. The insanely goofy Bill Pickells Karate Show featured in Tiger Claws brought all of those memories back. Even better is that Pickells plays an egotistical jerk who berates his production staff and complains that the set’s potted plants make him look short. We’ve covered several films with the martial-artist-as-serial-killer plot device and each of the antagonists was memorable for different reasons. As a counterpoint to that, Pickells earns the distinction of being the most memorable victim -- he’s hilarious in short minutes.

Despite attempts to paint his character as such, Merhi isn't especially adept at playing the dark, rough, and brooding type. I appreciate that screenwriter J. Stephen Maunder positioned the Tiger training as emotionally taxing and physically extreme; the case of a practitioner snapping and killing as a result of the grueling training is a believable and compelling dramatic device. The dialogue which describes the training process is another story, though. The total lack of emotive qualities in Merhi’s line delivery really makes him an unideal fit to play a “man on the edge.” A better dramatic actor like John Barrett or Jeff Wincott could probably pull this off more convincingly, but whether he’s striking down “NO SWIMMING” signs at the beach, or wearing his hair down and looking like a haggard version of Balki Bartokomous, Merhi isn’t quite that actor for the way this role is written. 

This was the first film released under Merhi’s Film One Productions banner, and it’s one of their better efforts. We often poke fun at Merhi around these parts but it’s all in good fun. He built a 15-year career on Torontoyork City martial arts movies teeming with big-name talent like Rothrock, Billy Blanks, and Loren Avedon, and for that longevity, he should be commended. That he seems to consistently elevate his own parts over those of his costars has always seemed curious to me, though. Maybe he’s just a really persuasive guy.

VERDICT:
I first caught this film as part of TNT’s action-oriented “Nitro” programming over a decade ago and at the time, I regarded it as nothing more than a barely-average fight film. The recent rewatch has done little to change my opinion but I did find some likable elements that 14 year-old Karl might've overlooked. The film is nicely paced and rarely drags. Bolo is convincing as the story’s monster and while not at the level of Chong Li in Bloodsport, he’s used more effectively here than in bit parts for other American films. I found Rothrock was underutilized but she did have some decent fight scenes and gets to show off her burgeoning fashionista side. Despite the occasional bright spots, the film is crippled by some awful dialogue and acting, and poorly-composed fight scenes. That said, it launched two sequels and is one of the better Jalal Merhi action vehicles.

AVAILABILITY:
VHS copies can be purchased on Amazon or EBay.

4 / 7