Director: Richard Park, Y.K. Kim
Cast: Y.K. Kim, Vincent Hirsch, William Ergle, Siyung Jo
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Honestly, I don’t think I had even heard of the film before it was announced for this year’s Slumber Party.
Did I Like It: There’s probably a reason for that.
Look, I enjoyed (and occasionally still enjoy) episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it may have a few things to answer for the resurgence of films that maybe ought to have disappeared the instant they first appeared. This never featured on that show, but this, along with The Room (2003) and any number of other films, shouldn’t be part of our cultural knowledge, but here it is leading off a late-night movie fest.
I enjoyed the film because the unintentional laughs and the audience's vibe overshadowed its shortcomings. We were laughing every time Jim (Maurice Smith) mentioned his father, and laughed even harder when his father finally showed up, mostly out of nowhere. We laughed at languid editing so in love with the very notion of martial arts that you spend most of the film forgetting that there were motorcycle ninjas in the film, until they suddenly reappear (sans motorcycles) in the film’s final minutes. When the film offers a final title card that enjoins us to embrace world peace through martial arts, I imagine that every single person in that theater, now so breathless from laughter, may have thought the filmmakers had a point.
But would anyone ever want to watch this again? I tend to think not. The gonzo laughs will never be recreated again. Would anyone—namely me—ever want to watch this without the benefit of a crowd? Not on your life. In that hypothetical future, I’m left with an incompetently crafted piece of nonsense from a guy who appears to be nice and lethal, and who made the classic mistake of assuming that making a film would be easy.