Best of the Best (1989)

PLOT: The five members of the U.S. karate team must work together in order to compete against their highly skilled counterparts from Korea. Will the stress of intense training combined with their personal demons threaten their chances, especially if they’re not allowed to drink, have sex, or smoke the devil’s lettuce during training?

Director: Robert Radler
Writer: Paul Levine
Cast: Phillip Rhee, Eric Roberts, James Earl Jones, Sally Kirkland, Chris Penn, David Agresta, Simon Rhee, James Lew, Ken Nagayama, John Ryan, John Dye, Tom Everett, Hee Il Cho, John P. Ryan

PLOT THICKENER

The Rhee brothers, Simon and Phillip, are established quantities in the world of action cinema. The elder sibling, Simon, has done stunt work on everything from The Dark Knight Rises and Anchorman 2 to the 2011 Muppets reboot. While fight and stunt choreography is clearly his bread and butter, his acting appearances are frequent but mostly minor, with credits such as “Asian villain #1” and “Bruno’s henchman” in his filmography. Younger brother, Phillip, has had a much less prolific career in front of the camera, but four of his gigs were starring roles in the film franchise he co-produced starting in 1989, Best of the Best. He has since become more heavily involved with the business side of media production. The moral of the story: for the best of the best possible outcomes in the entertainment business, enroll yourself or your children in taekwondo classes around the age of four.

When it comes to competitive martial arts team competitions, no one is better than the Korean team. Practicing for 12 months out of the year -- even under the harshest conditions (snow jogging!) -- has resulted in countless international championships and Olympic medals. The team is also led by the reigning world's champion, the fierce Dae Han (Simon Rhee). With only three months to train the American team before a major competition, Frank Couzo (Jones) is facing an uphill battle. The team’s financial benefactor, Jennings (Ryan) has mandated that Couzo make room for an assistant coach specializing in meditation and mental skills, named Catherine Wade (Kirkland). With the merry band of fighters Couzo has chosen for the squad, he’ll need all the help he can get to make them laser focused.

The team is five men strong. Alex Grady (Roberts) is a widowed single parent and auto factory worker from Portland, Oregon with a bum shoulder. Travis Brickley (Penn) is a hotheaded and overtly racist Floridian cowboy from Miami. The team’s resident oddball is Virgil Keller (Dye), an aspiring Buddhist from Rhode Island. Hailing from the mean streets of Detroit is proud and totally generic Italian guy, Sonny Grasso (Agresta). Rounding out the team is the talented, Tommy Lee (Rhee), a taekwondo instructor who teaches kids in California and harbors a past trauma that could harm his ability to fight at a high level. To keep the team on task, Couzo’s two rules are simple: don’t be late, and function as a team. Other than racist infighting, car accidents, and a macho inability to deal with one’s emotions, what could possibly go wrong?

The action in the film is sparse but well executed. There’s a bar fight in the early going after the team has been assembled that serves to not only bond the new teammates, but also demonstrate how big of a prick Travis can be (his gyrating and groping of a woman starts shit with her jealous boyfriend and his crew of drunks). This melee (quite fun!) features broken tables, wrecked doors, a smashed pinball machine, and a shattered glass pane before all is said and done. Up until the actual competition, though, there’s a dearth of choreographed fight scenes, as the story focuses instead on preparation and training montages. Thankfully, the final showdown between the teams doesn’t disappoint, as each fight balances good choreography with relevant character drama. The filmmakers were wise to save the best martial artists in its cast for the most meaningful fight, when Tommy Lee takes on Dae Han in the final match with the highest stakes. The brothers Rhee tear the house down, showing off the skills that made them household names in the 1980s and 90s, assuming those households were comprised of action movie fanatics.

Maybe this is the sting of untimely 2016 celebrity deaths talking, but it’s rather odd to watch the team of young American fighters in a 1989 movie with the knowledge that two of the five actors are no longer with us. Stranger yet, both John Dye and Chris Penn passed away from non-specific heart ailments in their 40s. While both actors enjoyed roles in other action films, this movie afforded them an opportunity to demonstrate their martial arts skills for the camera for the first time (unless you count Penn’s fight scene in Footloose). Penn, as some readers might know, was also a student and close friend of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, but also trained in the early 1980s under Benny “The Jet” Urquidez. At least for a time, martial arts was a very legitimate facet of his life.

The way the film handles the cultural representation of the Korean team is rather strange, yet almost typically 80s in its fumbling approach. The most glaring trait is that the non-English lines of dialogue among its team -- primarily delivered by the team’s coach, played by TKD legend, Hee Il Cho -- aren’t given the benefit of subtitles. The subtext that results is that these people aren’t meant to be understood, but rather only identified as foreign through their use of a non-English language. The team is shown practicing outdoors and/or in temple courtyards, bereft of the sleek and high-tech settings one might typically associate with South Korea today (a country often cited as the most innovative in the world). The team is said to practice 12 months out of the year and according to competition commentator Ahmad Rashad, taekwondo is basically the national pastime, akin to American baseball. (Assuming you ignore the data showing that football and baseball are the most popular sports there.)

Unlike a lot of films from this era, the main villain is not some cartoonish brute with a bad haircut or some wealthy, nefarious puppetmaster attempting to destroy everything around him. Sure, the Korean opposition is appropriately fearsome but far from evil. Instead, the tension for the heroes is almost entirely internal. Can Travis regulate his hot-headed bullying long enough to focus on the objective at hand? Will the distractions of Alex’s family obligations undermine his goals and get him booted from the team? Can Tommy overcome the torment of his past and find the killer instinct within himself that he’ll need to win? As someone who is deeply neurotic with a lot of unresolved emotions and a trail of failed relationships, this really appealed to me.

VERDICT

Critics were not kind to the film upon its release -- and neither were audiences -- but Best of the Best found a loyal fan base through home video and cable TV. It’s that rare breed of chopsocky film that complements its martial artists with seasoned performers and loads of dramatic heft to help carry the story. Admittedly, it can be formulaic at times and it may rely on training montages too often. Some action fans may be disappointed with the low amount of creative fight scenes. To those people I say: quit whining...and thanks for reading. At its core, it’s a well-acted and satisfying underdog story that should appeal to pure martial arts fans.

AVAILABILITY

On DVD through Amazon, Netflix, and eBay. Streaming on Crackle.

5 / 7

Furious (1984)

PLOT: A grieving martial artist does battle with a group of wizards and new-wave music enthusiasts for control of the universe. All participants are paid in delicious fried chicken for their efforts.

Directors: Tim Everitt, Tom Sartori

Writers: Tim Everitt, Tom Sartori

Cast: Simon Rhee, Philip Rhee, Arlene Montano, Howard Jackson, Mika Elkan, Loren Avedon, Peter Malota

PLOT THICKENER

Jodorowsky. Buñuel. Lynch. “All psychomagical hypnotist meditators and coffee drinkers?” you ask. Close, but no! They’re filmmakers responsible for some of the most transgressive surrealist works in cinema history. Based on his work in 1984’s Furious, Tim Everitt may have had an eye on adding his name to this list. His debut feature film lacks the epistemological heft of Holy Mountain or the fever-dream duality of Mulholland Drive, but make no mistake: Everitt was not afraid to feed your head with the weirdly random thunder. He’ll give you five straight minutes of old women eating chicken while a man in a kabuki mask performs magic tricks for a baby and a shirtless man twirls swords around in the back of a dimly-lit restaurant. And you’ll like it.

After a warrior named Kim (Montano) is chased into the mountains by white dudes in Mongol warrior garb making melodic nature calls lifted from Doug McKenzie, a brief skirmish leads to tragedy. The hooligans seek a powerful navigational tusk (think of a saber-tooth with GPS) that may or may not point the way to the so-called Astral Plane, and Kim was simply caught holding it at the wrong time. To her credit, Kim doesn’t make the theft easy for them, fighting off one fighter with a staff and hitting another in the lower-lumbar / upper-ass area with his own throwing star. Pretty demoralizing, though not as bad as actually dying.

Kim’s martial artist brother, Simon (Simon Rhee), lives in an isolated woodland cabin, teaches martial arts to an eager group of adolescents, and even has a dog. All in all, life is good. When he learns of his sister’s demise, everything goes to hell. He immediately beats the shit out of an outdoor heavy bag in front of his confused students and then storms off to seek guidance from his master, Chan (Phillip Rhee). The older, wiser Chan lives and works in an office building and oversees a dojo, but spends most of his time meditating while floating three feet off the ground or learning new sleight-of-hand magic tricks from his right-hand dude, Mika (Elkan). Noting his protege’s grief, he gifts him with a mysterious pendant and some philosophical claptrap before sending him off on a wild goose chase for spiritual enlightenment. This is odd, because the office building is filled with chickens. You following so far?

Good, I’m glad that’s out of the way. Now, take everything I just told you about the plot of this film and throw it in the garbage along with the leftover macaroni-and-cheese you forgot to refrigerate overnight. Some of this stuff definitely happened, but it’s a patchwork story interspersed with fight scenes and in-camera effects. Watch, rinse, and repeat, because you’ll (arguably) benefit from a few viewings and come up with all sorts of theories. That said, anyone approaching this film and hoping for modern-day, inventive TKD action will come away disappointed. The fight scenes, while good for a 1984 American movie, seem a little loose and under-rehearsed, no doubt a consequence of a micro-budget and rushed shooting schedule. Where the fights succeed is in their energy, frequency, and pure silliness. Enemies throw cardboard boxes from rooftops, restaurant combatants throw bowls of rice at each other, and fireballs turn into chickens mid-flight. Who cares if you don’t get crisp choreography with intricate combinations and epic build-up? This has Simon Rhee fighting a goddamn papier-mâché dragon with a skeleton clenched in its teeth.

Last summer, I was a guest on the GGTMC podcast where we reviewed this film, and while we had a ball discussing the zany elements of Furious, we found it was a slippery movie to discuss given its disjointed story and lack of dialogue. For fans of the genre who are tired of needlessly talky movies filled with exposition, you’re in for a treat. The first line of dialogue -- “All right...” -- comes around the 12-minute mark. Now, the dialogue may not be as sparse as say, Castaway or All is Lost, but even for a 73-minute film, there’s not a whole lot of conversation here to move the plot forward. Everitt instead uses a lot of surreal visuals with uncomfortably long stretches of silence to build the story’s framework, and leaves the audience to fill in the rest. Somehow, for this type of film, it works more often than not.

Furious is significant for a lot of reasons -- chickens, talking pigs, a flaming skeleton -- but it also marked the film debut of Loren Avedon. As a student of Jun Chong and Phillip Rhee, he was one among many advanced students who made an appearance as a henchman -- Double Impact’s spur-heeled villain, Peter Malota, also appears -- but you’d be hard pressed to pick him out given the generic costumes and grainy look of the film. In my correspondence with Loren, he himself couldn’t recall the specific scene in which he appeared. (He would go on to have a similarly fleeting appearance in L.A. Streetfighters, but was at least identifiable). Here, I had no clue though. Devo henchman? Restaurant patron? Chicken handler? Who knows?

VERDICT
This was not a film where much footage was left on the cutting room floor and you get the feeling that the filmmakers needed to use or re-purpose everything they captured on camera. Filmed in less than a week’s time, Furious bears a very “kitchen-sink” feel informed by visual non-sequiturs, a limited inventory of ridiculous props, and a wonderfully absurd plot. There are some highly unconventional ideas at play here and this is likely to be the most original (if not the most technically adept) martial arts b-movie you’ll see this year. Highly recommended.

AVAILABILITY
Near-impossible to find in its distributed physical form (VHS). A previously available VHS rip was yanked from YouTube based on a copyright claim from the director himself. In isolation, this guarantees almost nothing, but I’m hopeful that this means Everitt was reasserting control over his intellectual property for a proper home video release.

AVAILABILITY UPDATE!
The fine folks at Leomark Studios released a Collector's Edition DVD on July 21, 2015. The release is now available for pre-order, so make sure you support this film!

6 / 7