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

Capital Punishment (1991)

PLOT: There’s a new and dangerous drug in town, and a secret group of government agents needs the help of a kickboxer to bring down the trafficking ring. See? The road towards a sound federal drug policy is not paved with large-scale crackdowns or even legalization, but with guys like Gary Daniels.

Director: David Huey
Writer: David Huey
Cast: Gary Daniels, David Carradine, Mel Novak, Tadashi Yamashita, Ian Jacklin, Mark Russo, Linda Lightfoot, Scott Shaw, Ava Fabian

PLOT THICKENER:
While drugs appear pretty regularly in action movies, it’s rare to see the drug experience itself mapped out on the screen. We’ve seen heroes get drugged before or during a big showdown and been treated to first-person blur-vision to share in the character’s perspective. However, it’s uncommon to the action genre to have the experience of the drugged character closely match the experience of watching the movie unfold. In only his third film, David Huey manages to accomplish this with 1991’s Capital Punishment. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that only someone on drugs could have made this movie.

James Thayer (Daniels) is leading a simple life as a fighter working the grueling restaurant-lounge circuit. After tossing his latest opponent through a table of two-for-one appetizers, he gets jumped in the locker room area by a pair of stooges and tazed into blackness. He awakens in an office run by a secretive branch of the DEA investigating the mastermind behind a new and popular street drug called “kick,” which causes heightened euphoria and temporary immunity to pain. The only ill effects are debilitating pain during withdrawal and genetic mutations in the offspring of users. No biggie. While watching an organized but extremely boring slideshow called “Project Kick,” Thayer is shocked to learn that the mastermind is his sensei, Kenji Nakata (Yamashita). The secretive unit, led by the creepy Mason Dover (Novak), wants to use Thayer to bring his old mentor and father-figure to justice, but they may have other motives as well.

Thayer must not only contend with Nakata’s thugs, covert double-crossers, and a kickboxing toolbag played by Ian Jacklin, but he’s also drugged at random throughout the movie with the very drug he’s grown to abhor. DEA agent Nikki Holt (Lightfoot) is disgusted by the corruption within her own ranks and wants to help Thayer, but his experience with the alternate worlds of undercover work and being high as a motherfucker may prevent her from showing him the way. A normally trusting human being, he has confidence in nothing, believes no one, and punches and kicks everyone in his path towards the truth. Can Holt and a doctor versed in Eastern medicine help Thayer to erase the druggy fog preventing him from dispensing justice? Or will everyone be content to just sit around eating Cool Ranch Doritos and laughing uncontrollably?

The combination of "slow and sloppy" can have positive connotations when you're referring to cooking pulled pork or having sex, but when it comes to film fights, it usually spells doom. Capital Punishment contains some of the most hastily put-together fight scenes I've ever seen (and I watched For Hire)! One fight featuring Daniels and Jacklin appears to have been secretly recorded without the actors' knowledge as they worked on blocking out the moves at half-speed. The stunt teams in Filipino productions tend to be reliably solid, but it looks like Huey required a history of faulty vestibular systems as well; these guys make the Shockmaster look coordinated.

The standout sequence would have to be a bar fight between Daniels and Floridian martial arts champ and veteran of No Retreat No Surrender 3, Mark Russo. His beard is just as epic but his part here is even smaller than his small henchman part in NRNS3. The two trade strikes and a long exchange of wrist-lock takedowns in a nod toward the future of film fights by incorporating grappling and MMA tactics. It ends rather memorably with a death-by-pool-cue, but the fight is still marred by crummy shooting angles and a lack of consistent sound effects. Still, you have to take what the film gives you and next to the climactic fight scene between Daniels and American Ninja's Tadashi Yamashita, this is probably the best of the offerings.

David Carradine appears as a behind-the-scenes order-barker and all of his scenes are filmed in a dimly lit office or a big-rig truck interior. He was almost completely wasted here and his character felt tacked-on to what was already a total mess of a plot. Along with Mel Novak, he’s the most actorly of this bunch but he’s rarely afforded the chance to guide this group of mostly inexperienced performers to more watchable dramatic scenes. You don’t necessarily need Carradine to fight either, but he and Daniels share no screen time whatsoever so I’d have to regard this as a wasted opportunity on all fronts.

Capital Punishment is a strange film because its anachronistic narrative both fails and works at the same time. In one sense, it's no different than the hundreds of films like it which ignored any semblance of logic and flauted the rules of escalating action and tension. In a vacuum, by these traditional measures, it falls short. But given the druggy experience of the film's protagonist, the disjointed and often surreal tones actually work pretty well to throw the viewer off-kilter as they try to navigate the film's events. Was this the intended effect by the filmmaker? Probably not, but since I regularly take tremendous satisfaction when receiving credit for unintentionally positive results, I imagine director David Huey would too.

VERDICT:
The story is convoluted and confusing, the characters who aren't assholes are uninteresting, and the fight scenes are mostly lackadasical and poorly shot. Yet, despite all of the elements that snowball to make Capital Punishment a forgettable film, there's something about it I still enjoyed. Part of it was Yamashita as a somewhat hilarious villain, but it's also an early Gary Daniels joint where you can see him honing his screen presence and learning how to carry a film in the face of so many other problems, technical and otherwise. There's something admirable about that and you can't really quantify it, but it's present here. However, I can't honestly recommend this to anyone but Daniels completists or action trash enthusiasts who've exhausted all other options.

AVAILABILITY:
AmaBayFlix.

3 / 7