College Kickboxers (1992)

PLOT: A college freshman named James finds friendship and romance after arriving at school. He also finds a racist gang which takes offense at his friendship with Mark, his African-American roommate and fellow martial artist. Can he convince the cook at the local Chinese restaurant to teach him kung-fu, assuming the cook actually knows kung-fu and James isn’t just projecting racial stereotypes?

Director: Eric Sherman
Writers: Roxanne Reaver, Theresa Woo
Cast: Ken McLeod, Mark Williams, Tang Tak Wing, Matthew Ray Cohen, Harry Mok, Kendra Tucker, James Langton

PLOT THICKENER:
For a lot of people, college is a non-stop party where the sex is casual, the beer pours down like cheap flavorless rain, and the weed practically grows on trees. Yet, for some, college can be one of the most challenging life experiences they’ll ever have. Cultures clash. Beliefs are shaken. Hearts and minds can be changed as often as bad jam band concert t-shirts. In 1992’s College Kickboxers, a group of young minds is engaged in a conflict that can only be resolved in one of two ways: punches or kicks.

James, played by Ken McLeod (credited here as Ken Rendall Johnson), is starting his first semester at Millbrook State University, a fictional college which rejected my fictional application about a decade ago. Ever so cocky about his martial-arts prowess, James is surprised to find that his roommate, Mark (Williams), is an equally decorated martial-arts instructor. This is initially a minor point of competitive conflict, but is quickly set aside when a faction called the White Tigers interjects during the roommates’ friendly sparring session on the campus green one morning. Sadly, Sherman manages to botch the authenticity of this scene; there were no hacky sack circles whatsoever within view.

Led by obnoxious leather fashion-plate Craig Tanner (Cohen), the Tigers are sort of like a racist Cobra Kai without a John Kreese. Neither Tanner nor his gang really articulate the philosophical underpinnings of their bigoted worldview, but they’re pretty adamant that races shouldn’t mix. (I’m pretty sure one of their members is either Asian or Hispanic, though). More offensive than their reliance on racial slurs in casual conversation is their collective dependence on using cheap tactics and weapons during fights. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their beat-down of James following his night-shift busing tables at the local Chinese restaurant.

Outmanned and overpowered, James is unable to gain an upper hand despite his obvious advantage in actual fighting skills (in a previous confrontation, he easily handled Tanner one-on-one). He gets hammered with bats and pipes and only escapes serious injury thanks to the assistance of the restaurant’s cook, Mr. Wing (Tang Tak Wing). In an impressive show of speed and technique, he sends the wounded Tigers scurrying before pressure-pointing the fuck out of James’s various injuries. The student is astounded at Wing’s healing abilities and fighting skill and repeatedly asks him for training. Citing the huge cash prize in the upcoming Millbrook martial arts tournament, James is hoping that either he or Mark can win and open a karate school for disadvantaged children. Despite the good intentions, Wing insists that “money makes people crazy” before driving off in his expensive sportscar.

After James assures Wing he’ll abstain from the tournament, the cook eventually caves and soon enough, his new student is learning techniques through a combination of pain and perseverance. When he’s not translating these lessons for Mark and his karate class, James is trying to put his romantic moves on Kimberly (Tucker), the earthy activist from his ecology class. While the typical health-conscious environmental nutjob might reek of patchouli and have braidable armpit hair, it’s important to note that College Kickboxers is all about smashing negative stereotypes; Kimberly is a cute blond with the kind of huge 80s hair we all know and love. While initially disgusted at what she perceives as James’s meatheaded jockdom, she softens her stance upon learning of his interest in acupuncture. After an amazing first date montage consisting of petting zoo footage and beach frolicking, they bone in a hot tub and become inseparable.

The good vibes don’t last for long though; members of the White Tigers continue to make life miserable for James, Mark, and now Kimberly, and the douchebags declare their intentions to enter the fight tournament too. Things obviously don’t go as planned -- they never do -- but more important is the bond James and Mark forge despite the turmoil. Their dynamic reminded me a bit of the Jason Stillwell-RJ Madison pairing in No Retreat, No Surrender, but with reasonably good fighters and actors 10 years older than the characters they're portraying, instead of crappy fighters only five years older.

Generally speaking, the fight sequences are nicely choreographed and one would be right to attribute this to the involvement of a seasoned Hong Kong film veteran and martial artist like Wing. With credits including Supercop and Drunken Master 2 in his portfolio, he’s an obvious craftsman and it shows in the way strikes are both thrown and sold. His work is occasionally let down by clunky editing but the proficiency and fluidity of the fighters and stunt men on-screen overcome these technical missteps more often than not.

The film also contains some of the more interesting training sequences you’ll find in an American-made martial-arts film. The highlight finds Wing showing James how practicing forms while barefoot in the middle of an ice skating rink at 6 a.m. can help with balance. We do get a parade of ever-conventional beach jogging scenes but thankfully there’s no manual labor posing as practical fighting wisdom or flimsy philosophy about the inner self (well, not too much).

Played by Hong Kong stunt performer Tang Tak Wing, the character of Sifu Wing joins a cinematic laundry list of older, wiser, Asian fighting mentors. However, Wing also injects his character with light touches of humor, referring to James almost exclusively as “macho man,” and he has an engaging screen presence both dramatically and in action. Aside from his crisp fight scenes, he walks James through an interesting pressure point lesson and later does an impromptu form demonstration that leaves a massive Yin-Yang symbol carved into the dirt; it made for a genuinely cool visual.

While the mentor and lead characters are indeed likable, I found the film’s most memorable character to be Craig Tanner, who cements his spot in the pantheon of weirdly great American martial-arts villains. Despite a serious lack of fighting skills, Cohen owns the screen and proves that you don’t need to be a dumb skinhead to be a racist prick. His long, flowing mullet is among the most intense we’ve ever seen on film and were it not for his incredible overacting, it would easily be his best trait. While the White Tigers logo on his coat flaunts his gang affiliation, his fingerless leather gloves and leather pants with dangling chains scream “I just robbed the wardrobe rack on the set of Deadbeat at Dawn.” Pairing such a unique look with an unforgettable performance is a huge factor for why this film ultimately works.

VERDICT:
Overall, I really dug College Kickboxers but I’ll be the first to admit that tonally, it has a bit of an identity crisis. At times, it attempts to be a fairly serious student-mentor martial-arts film with good fights, akin to The Karate Kid. During other stretches, it’s classic DTV American martial-arts cheese with timely (and regrettable) wardrobe attire, a despicable but hilarious lead villain, and enough bad acting and editing to kill a small pachyderm. All of that adds up to a very enjoyable romp of a martial-arts b-movie.

AVAILABILITY:
Amazon or EBay. Only available as a standalone copy on VHS, which may be hard to track down. You may be better off going with the very affordable ($3!) Lethal Vengeance 4-disc set put out by BCI.

5.5 / 7

Cyborg Cop (1993)

PLOT: A former DEA agent receives an urgent message from his former DEA agent brother and travels to an island in the Caribbean to find him. Once there, he must battle Gimli from Lord of the Rings and his army of cyborgs, doodads, zoozanks, and thingamajigs.

Director: Sam Firstenberg
Writer: Greg Latter
Cast: David Bradley, John Rhys-Davies, Alonna Shaw, Todd Jensen, Ron Smerczak, Rufus Swart


PLOT THICKENER:
Genre hybrids in cinema are as old as the medium itself, but one in particular gained traction during the 1990s despite no real box-office success to justify it: the sci-fi-martial-arts movie. Following the smash success of Robocop and Terminator 2 and the mild profitability of Universal Soldier, filmmakers were falling over themselves to figure out ways to integrate cyborgs and lasers with their tired martial-arts cops-and-robbers plots. The trend was so pervasive that few if any prominent martial arts actors working in the 1990s went without a science-fiction chopsocky film on their resume. Today we take a look at Sam Firstenberg’s 1993 film, Cyborg Cop, or its working title: I’m a Cyborg in a Direct to Video David Bradley Movie, But That’s OK.

Jack and Phillip Ryan, played by David Bradley and Todd Jensen, respectively, are hotshot DEA agents. They also happen to be brothers, and not the cold, distant, borrowing-money-but-never-paying-it-back type of brothers, but the warm and friendly type with a sweet nickname: the “Double Trouble Psycho Cops.” Yeah...really creative, guys. During a hostage negotiation, Jack takes out the captor -- the son of a newspaper publisher -- with lethal force. For obvious reasons, the news media has a field day with the botched operation. Following a wrongful death trial, they both resign.

Unemployment often leads to odd career choices, and the universe of Cyborg Cop is no different. Phillip tells his brother that he’s going to the third-world island of St. Keith to bust up a heroin distribution outfit. (An especially odd choice since St. Keith isn’t a real place.) The target? A gadget-obsessed British drug kingpin named Kessel, played by John Rhys-Davies in a ridiculously over the top check-cashing performance. He stands around yelling about science, he flies remote-controlled airplanes rigged with explosives into trespassers, and he even has dozens of randomly topless women working in his heroin facility. In a master stroke of entrepreneurship, Kessel is using his dope money to fund a cyborg manufacturing project and has plans to sell the product line as elite assassins. In his infinite shit luck and general clumsiness, Phillip gets captured and transformed into the latest model.

Fortunately, Jack packs his bags and heads to the island to investigate after receiving a mysterious package from his brother containing a toy truck and some heroin. Perhaps appropriate during the holiday season but a bit suspicious for a random Thursday. Since he only has a random vial of air-mailed heroin as evidence but no dealer’s name to stick to it, Jack has to do some sleuthing to determine the drug’s origins.

In order to blend in with the locals and take advantage of the tropical weather, Jack wears jeans and a leather jacket for the majority of his Caribbean getaway. As Matt of Direct to Video Connoisseur dutifully pointed out in his review, Jack also has an unusual dependence on the fannypack. As compared to Zubaz pants or aviator glasses, this is a fashion accessory that doesn’t get nearly enough attention within the 80s and 90s action movie set. The only reason you don’t see them more often is pure quantum physics. If a fannypack, Zubaz pants, a denim jacket, and aviators occupy the same space, the fucking universe explodes.

Early in the trip he also encounters Kate, an irritable journalist played by Alonna Shaw, perhaps most famous for playing the meek British girlfriend who gets groped by Cory Everson in the 1991 Jean Claude Van-Damme flick Double Impact. She and Jack almost instantly hate each other and this inevitably leads to romance. Their love scene is abnormally thrusty for this type of movie and it represents something of an odd fall from grace for Shaw. In about two years’ time, she went from a love interest opposite JCVD in a major studio release shown in over 1700 theaters to the love interest of David Bradley in a straight-to-video action movie. (We should assume his character was wearing a fannypack for protection during the proceedings).

While the film lacks the requisite power ballad, composer Paul Fishman constructs a mix of tunes that are … interesting. The song played during the opening title sequence would have Bruce Dickinson bobbing his head along to the voluminous amounts of cowbell. Virtually any scene that shows Jack driving his rented pick-up truck along the St. Keith roads is accompanied by a bizarre disco beat with electric guitar. That is, unless he’s being pursued during a chase scene, then it’s banjo and fiddle. There’s even a bar scene featuring some genuine island rhythms. Fishman clearly set the score to “randomize” before hitting the self-destruct button.

This is probably somewhat of a given since this movie was filmed in South Africa and directed by a Polish guy, but authentic representations of islanders are nowhere to be found and the lack of political correctness here is enough to make a grad student’s head spin. Virtually everyone is happy to take bribes and there’s even one guy with dreadlocks working in a morgue who smokes a massive doobie while playing steel drums before he takes a bribe. The only awful stereotype they left out was the practice of voodoo. 

Despite a dearth of actual martial-arts, the film’s action still manages to come out on the plus side. There’s an amusing shoot-out in a morgue and a few scenes with Bradley kicking cyborgs and impoverished drunkards, but Cyborg Cop succeeds here in large part due to Firstenberg’s emphasis on camp. During an early cyborg demonstration, there’s a decent bit of gore as Kessel’s original model punches through the head of a volunteer victim. We also get hot cyborg-on-cyborg action in which one actually suplexes the other through a metal staircase in a smashing set-piece that might elicit chants of “ECW! ECW!” if it took place in a Philadelphia bingo hall, but since it happens in a cyborg laboratory in a drug kingpin’s lair, everyone just sort of stands around watching.

VERDICT:
There’s no such thing as essential viewing when it comes to the science-fiction-martial-arts genre and Cyborg Cop does little to change this. Access to lasers and random bleeps and bloops jacked from the Star Trek Sound Library does not a sci-fi film make. Beyond a couple of short fights between Bradley and various islanders, there’s little here to even qualify this as a martial-arts film. What are we left with? Bradley’s fannypack, some decent shoot-outs, a clunky love scene, cyborg fights, and John Rhys-Davies screaming about science in regular intervals.

AVAILABILITY:
If you have any intention of watching this, it's currently available on Netflix Instant. If you go the purchase route, cross your fingers for an out-of-region DVD or a cheap used VHS via Amazon or EBay.

3 / 7