Zodiac America 2: Evil Destroyer (1988)

Shout out to the AAV Creative Unit. They came up with the story here, along with Bill Hu, and they gifted this to Godfrey Ho. Also buried inside it is a completely other movie, 1979’s Young Dragon, which was made by Joseph Velasco who is also Kong Hung and Joseph Kong. His movies were mainly Brucesploitation films with titles like, yes, Young Dragon, but also Bruce and the Shaolin BronzemenEnter the Game of DeathEnter the Game of Shaolin Bronzemen and The Clones of Bruce Lee.

We have entered a lawless land, a place where things like intellectual property and copyright no longer matter, where films can unseamlessly blend into one uncohesive narrative, where music from across genre can appear without warning, where characters and storylines float about you. These movies are the closest thing to capturing my dreams and my dreams are often horrifying vistas of being following, chased and taunted by aliens, so just imagine.

First off, this isn’t even a sequel. There is no Zodiac America that came before it. Supposedly, it’s part of a trilogy with Zombie vs. Ninja and Kickboxer from Hell, but this movie doesn’t just not make sense when compared to those films, it doesn’t make sense within the confines of itself.

But let’s try.

Mr. Wu and Blackstone are running opium into Hong Kong. Only the robotic Catholic priest Father Luke Daniels and the Young Dragon can stop them. Or maybe a group of the dorkiest white guys can. Also know that Father Luke and Young Dragon come from different films, different stories, different film stock and different years of creation, all spread across a chasm of storytelling madness.

For some reason — they wanted me to watch this and this is all part of a conspiracy to get me to write about it thirty years later so you watch it and it unlocks your third eye — hopping vampires and clown ninjas also make appearances.

I’m not going to make it seem like you’re going to learn the secrets of your existence watching these movis, but to be honest, you just might. They’re the height of exploitation, made simply to sell movies with strange phrases and keywords like ninja and hopping vampire to people like, well, me. And they all do that well, proving that movies can be made with what seems like no plan, no endgame and no narrative cohesion and I’ll become fascinated and start trying to watch every single movie by the people who made them.

It goes without saying that hardly anything on the poster for this movie happens.

You can watch this on Tubi.