Macho Man (1985)

PLOT: A boxer and a karate champion join forces to destroy a gang of heroin dealers in Nuremberg. Fortunately for the local tourism board, they fight only in bars and streets and away from the Schöner Brunnen and the Frauenkirche.

Director: Alexander Titus Benda
Writer: Alexander Titus Benda
Cast: Rene Weller, Peter Althof, Bea Fiedler, Jacqueline Elber, Michael Messing

PLOT THICKENER

At least a decade before organized mixed martial arts provided a platform to answer questions such as “who would win in a fight between a kickboxer and a really overweight sumo wrestler?” a somewhat obscure 1985 film from West Germany sought to provide clarity to a similar proposition, with a slight sartorial spin. (“Who would win in a fight: a guy with moustache in a fur-collar leather jacket, or a tall dude with a mullet in leather pants and a white scarf?”) Macho Man puts real-life boxer, Rene Weller, and karate expert, Peter Althof, in a tiny wardrobe closet and shakes it vigorously to see if they’ll fight. They do, but not in the way you’d expect and not necessarily against each other! This is one of Germany’s only contributions to the golden age of action b-movies; we’re in "tiefschnitt" territory, you might say. Or is it schwacher hintern territory? I always mix those up.

I’ll begin by answering two questions right off the bat that I know most of you are asking. No -- this movie has nothing to do with legendary pro wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage or the Village People song of the same name. And no -- this boxing actor is of no relation to the dude who played RoboCop. Sorry to be so negative, but facts are facts (unless they’re alternative facts)!

The streets of Nuremberg, Germany are being flooded with heroin by a dangerous drug gang headed up by a dude who looks like a sleazy, coked out version of John Ritter. One of his main dealers, Tony, is after a young woman named Sandra (Fiedler) because she had the audacity to help one of her best friends (e.g., Tony’s customer) to get clean and sober. One night, as Tony and his thugs assault Sandra and try to forcibly inject her with heroin on a poorly lit street, a local boxer named Dany Wagner (Weller) just happens to be driving home from practice and sees the fracas. He pummels the thugs and makes the save, but he also makes a mortal enemy in Tony and the other dealers. During the drive to her home, Dany invites Sandra on a date.

Shortly thereafter, Dany goes to a local bank and his path crosses with Andreas (Althof), a local karate school instructor making a routine deposit of dojo funds. The two fighters jointly thwart an attempted bank robbery by two goons (the getaway driver is beaten and captured by Andreas’s karate comrade, Markus, played by Michael Messing). And wouldn’t you know it: Sanda just so happens to work at the office of a medical doctor who treats a number of area athletes, including Andreas himself!

The blonde karate master initially sets his romantic sights on Sandra -- they attend a boxing card together where Dany is the headliner, unbeknownst to them -- and the story teases a love triangle. That is, until first-dan karate student, Lisa (Elber) flies into town on her private jet in search of private lessons, and begins to steal Andreas’s gaze and heart. The destiny of all four characters converge on a fateful night at the local disco, where Dany and Sandra are grinding out a glittery, denim-laden dance of seduction. Lisa and Andreas arrive with his karate posse in tow, and sparks of jealousy fly between the two men who are macho. (Is it jealousy over Sandra? Or jealousy over Dany’s amazing denim jump-suit? Inquiring minds gotta know). Recognizing the possibilities, Lisa goads Andreas into challenging Dany to the ultimate style vs. style match.

Will the two random fighters make good on following through with the fight of the decade? Or will the looming threat of the heroin gang derail those plans and get everyone hooked on China white? And what is Benda trying to say about the “macho man” archetype as a manifestation of toxic masculinity and the male gender as it relates to violence and sex? Ha, just kidding. Nothing much.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, plenty of b-movie production houses formalized the practice of bringing seasoned competitive fighters into the filmmaking game as leading actors; this extended overseas as well. When this film was released, Weller was an accomplished professional boxer on the European scene but would only do one more film after this during his initial foray into movies (more on that in a minute). As a former heating engineer, jeweler, and goldsmith (and wow! … cocaine dealer?) we’ll have to assume his many varied interests were simply too consuming for a full-time career in acting.

In 1991, a half-decade after Macho Man was released, a German court forced the filmmakers to remove all of Weller’s sex scenes with Bea Fiedler from the film, per his request. (Surprising to see a professional boxer get beat to the punch by such a significant margin, but I digress). We’ll never know the extent to which this experience may have soured him on movies, but apparently not so much that he could resist the urge to come back for Macho Man 2, which is a real, actual thing being crowdfunded and made in 2017 for reasons I can’t understand (the website is in German and I literally can’t read it). On my big list of analogies I never expected to make, “Macho Man is to Germany as Samurai Cop is to America” was very close to the top.

Between the karate sparring, board (and rock!) breaking, boxing bouts, and the rumbles between our heroes and the various villains, the fighting scenes in this film are a mixed bag. The karate and boxing exhibitions, while broadly impressive on an athletic level and well integrated into the montages, aren’t likely to move the needle for most fight film fans. (How many close-up shots of boxing footwork are too many? This film doesn’t care!)

Where Macho Man really hits, however, is with its approach to street fights and bar brawls (one is preceded by a heroic watch synchronization scene). Consciously or not, Benda takes a few pages from the 1980s Filipino and Indonesia action movie playbook and made these fights dirty, smashy, and trashy. Breakaway furniture, strikes to the balls, and flailing strikes are just some of the tricks the filmmakers deploy to keep things chaotic. Throw in flowing scarves, crisp leather, and macho shit-talking in the German language, and the result is a unique and enjoyable blueprint that can be continually used without getting stale. Truly wunderbar!

VERDICT

If anyone ever doubts the pervasive influence of machismo-laden 1980s American action film at a global scale, one need look no further than Macho Man for evidence. The various fashions of the era -- the haircuts, the facial hair, the clothing -- mark it as an artifact of not just a particular time, but also a particular place. The Bavarian flavor here is extra funky, and almost entirely unique to the genre (the 1979 West German film Roots of Evil preceded it by a good six years). Recommended.

AVAILABILITY

For our pals in Europe, pick up the PAL DVD! For everybody else, dig in on YouTube.

4 / 7

Recoil (1998)

PLOT: After a bank robbery, cops kill one of the robbers. The robber turns out to be the son of a gangster. This makes his daddy awful unhappy and so he decides to kill all the cops involved. What he wasn't counting on, though, was that two of them would accidentally not get killed. These two men would set out to accidentally not get killed as long as possible. In the meantime, there is a not a single car or helicopter in the city that won't blow up.

Director: Art Camacho
Writer: Art Camacho, Gary Preston Jr.
Cast: Gary Daniels, Gregory McKinney, Thomas Kopache


PLOT THICKENER
I think this may very well be the best PM Entertainment film the company ever produced. At the very least, it is in the top five. This is one of the best films of its type that you'll ever see. Okay? Good. We're done here.

If you really must know more, you should know that this film works so well, I believe, for three reasons. First, it is directed by the great Art Camacho. Sure, a glance at Camacho's directorial efforts shows us that he is responsible for such fare as Little Bigfoot and Magic Kid. However, Camacho in the director's seat is great news because of the second point: action director Spiro Razatos.

Spiro Razatos as action director with stuntman Art Camacho in the director's chair means that the stunts and action sequences in this film are stellar. Really incredible stuff. There are a handful of really big scenes that must have been incredibly difficult to pull off. This is a film that knows what its audience wants and it does that thing better than just about anyone could, which brings me to the third point: Recoil is a very formulaic film.

That might sound contradictory. However, all PM Entertainment films are essentially formulaic. What sets Recoil apart is that it sticks to the formula for the entire running time. There is an opening bank robbery/car chase scene that lasts for about a third of the runtime. After that, we learn the very bare essentials about who the characters are and then there's another action set piece. The entire film is like that. It never strays from this formula and it never stops throwing cars and helicopters at you and blowing them to smithereens.

Probably the sole criticism of the film is that Gary Daniels does not get much of an opportunity to flex his martial arts skills until the final third but, when he does, it is very well choreographed and shot because, again, this is an Art Camacho film and he understands such things. Daniels very capably handles the action but, truly, the stars of this film are Spiro Razatos and Art Camacho.

VERDICT
If someone were to ask me why I watch these DTV action flicks, Recoil is one of the films I would show them. It gets almost everything right and almost nothing wrong and it is a window to a time in cinematic history that, sadly, just does not exist anymore. It sticks to the wild action set pieces and stunts that are the reason we watch these movies and it doesn't do anything else at all. Thank God.

-- Review by Craig McNeely

AVAILABILITY

Netflix, Amazon, YouTube.

7 / 7

Karate Cops (1988)

PLOT: Two Las Vegas cops -- one a straight-laced teetotaler, the other a rule-breaking redneck -- are assigned to solve a gang murder. Troy Donahue plays the mayor… Ronnie Lott makes a cameo... it was released in 1988. Um, I think that’s about it.

Director: George Chung
Writer: George Chung
Cast: George Chung, Chuck Jeffreys, Stan Wertlieb, Hidy Ochiai, Troy Donahue, Elizabeth Frieje







PLOT THICKENER
Take a good, long look at the VHS cover for Karate Cops, or as it was known in Spain, LAS VEGAS, 2 SUPERPOLICIAS (2 SUPERCOPS for you gringos). Not too long, though! The 1988 film’s original title of Hawkeye -- a titular nod to the character played by George Chung -- didn’t provide an adequate amount of deference to the character played by Chuck Jeffreys, so they went with something more encompassing and less likely to be confused for a member of Marvel’s Avengers. A lot of folks have noted that Chuck Jeffreys’s cadence and line delivery bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Eddie Murphy. No one would confuse the two in a visual comparison though. So who exactly did the Spanish distributors think they were fooling with this video cover? Perhaps the better question is: was the cover artist a racist prick who thought all black males in the 1980s all looked the same? Perhaps the best question is: was this movie any good and was there any nudity? In no particular order, maybe and perhaps.

George Chung plays Alex “Hawk” Hawkamoto, a renegade cop, former non-baseball Texas Ranger, and burgeoning black belt in Las Vegas. After a botched negotiation with a group of bank robbers in which Hawk punches a hostage in order to knock out the captor behind him and then leads a violent shoot-out, his superiors and the mayor (Donahue) are in an uproar. In order to put him back in line, they pair him with Charles Wilson (Jeffreys), who just happens to be the city’s most decorated cop. Eager to create a foundation for a lasting friendship, Hawk makes a horribly racist joke and the pair trades punches. INSTANT BUDS!

The reluctant partners have plenty in common: they have girlfriends, they’re cops, and they’re martial artists who enjoy jogging. The reluctant partners are so different: Wilson doesn’t drink, Hawk hates sushi, Wilson abstains from eating red meat. However, they’re united in the mission to solve the murder of a shady middle-man who fell into some bad company. Was he snuffed out by gang leader Sakura (Ochiai)? Was he set up by mob boss Tony (Wertlieb)? What happens to stolen drug money after the police take custody of it and take their requisite 20% skim?

This is probably the greatest film in the history of cinema that uses Comic Sans font during an opening credit sequence shot on VHS. The first 30 minutes of the film contains a botched drug deal, our hero taking a black belt test to honor his YMCA instructor, a bank heist by a femme fatale and incognito Ronnie Lott, expensive vase shooting, racist jokes that would make Don Rickles blush, and a random hostage punching (by the hero). Amazing stuff, but perhaps this pace was unsustainable. Maybe Chung ran out of ideas. Maybe my expectations for “lost” genre gems are unrealistic following the renaissance brought about by movies like Miami Connection. Whatever the reason, the film grinds to a halt as the reluctant partners then attempt to detangle the loose threads of a half-baked police procedural plot. I say “attempt” because I’m still not sure what happened or why characters were doing what they were doing. I do know, however, that the main characters didn’t do nearly enough of what they should have been doing: fighting.

Jeffreys and Chung get to show their action chops in a few isolated scenes, but they’re few and far between. A shoot-out on the Las Vegas strip feels like too little, too late. There’s not really any stand-out stunt work of which to speak, though some of the gun-play is marked by healthy squib usage. I came away feeling really underwhelmed by the action in this action movie, and part of the blame lies with Chung as a director, and Frank Harris as the director of photography. The over-emphasis on comedic and dramatic elements may have been the byproduct of Chung having too many production roles, a lack of willing stunt people, or even Chung using this film as a showcase for his acting skills instead of his action skills. However, what action is on the screen doesn’t flow that well and looks washed out, with poor composition from shot to shot. Some may recall that Harris collaborated with Leo Fong on at least two drab action films in the mid-1980s, and went on to squander a stacked cast for the post-apocalyptic Aftershock (1990). Lo and behold, Fong is an executive producer on this very feature! I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here other than Harris and Fong working together screams “bad juju!” like that creepy antique doll whose eyes follow you around the vintage store when you’re digging for Al Green vinyl.

There are very few actors featured on this site who are as decorated in the world of real-life as George Chung. He was a founding member of the vaunted West Coast Demo Team. He’s a five-time world karate champion. He earned a Super Bowl ring as a martial arts trainer for the 1994 San Francisco 49ers. Currently, he serves as Chief Content Officer for Crunchyroll and has served executive functions for several media companies. Any one of us would be lucky enough to have accomplished one of those things in our lifetimes, yet Chung has compiled all of those accolades and more. He has an easygoing charisma here and while he doesn’t carry the weight of the film, I can imagine he’d have an enjoyable wise-cracking presence in an ensemble cast. That said, he has his fair share of awkward emotional moments, so maybe we’ve discovered the one thing he isn’t good at. Take THAT, wildly successful George Chung!

VERDICT
It’s hard to do action and comedy really well. There are plenty of films and franchises that have made the combination seem easy as pie, but executing either genre element well individually is a feat in itself. The comedy in Karate Cops -- both intentional and unintentional varieties -- is given much more run than the action scenes, often to the detriment of the film. That Chung and Jeffreys were in their physical primes makes the low quotient of action scenes all the more puzzling. Add in a clunky plot and you have a recipe for meh, or maybe blah, depending on where you live. Karate Cops is a rare curiosity for those itching for deep cuts from this subgenre and these actors, but ultimately it can’t overcome its narrative shortcomings and low budget.

AVAILABILITY
To my knowledge, this only made it as far as VHS, and it's a pain in the ass to find. Happy hunting!

3 / 7