AUTHOR’S NOTE: This review was originally posted on our site on April 13, 2019, back when we were discussing teen sex comedies. A year later and not much has changed.
Any movie that starts with a plane crashing into downtown LA that’s played as a total farce is one I’m going to remember. Philo (Brett Cullen, who was on Falcon Crest and played Johnny Blaze’s dad in 2007’s Ghost RIder) has always wanted to be a pilot, but that crash — in a simulator — is because his contact lenses got knocked out by his friend and fellow pilot George (Donny Most, here booked as Don).
They decide that they want to stay on planes, so they enroll at Weidermeyer Academy, a stewardess school. Imagine Police Academy throughout this movie, with the teachers like Miss “Ironpants” Grummet as the older cops and the students as the cadets. Mary Cadorette — who played Vicky, the girl who finally got Jack Tripper to settle down and go from Three’s Company to Three’s a Crowd — is Kelly Johnson, an extremely clumsy girl. There’s a stereotypical gay guy. A frumpy overweight girl played by Wendie Jo Sperber, as Wendie played this role in nearly every film. There’s Wanda Polanski, a pro wrestler who just lost her latest boyfriend played by Conan the Barbarian‘s Sandahl Bergman. Julia Montgomery — yes, Betty Childs herself — plays an overly nice version of that role. Corinne Bohrer plays a punk rock girl in love with a biker (she’s a vet of these movies, appearing in Zapped!, Joysticks, Surf II, Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love and the fourth Police Academy movie). And oh yeah — Judy Landers as Sugar Dubois, a hooker with a heart of gold that’s on work release.
After going through hell, everyone graduates and gets a job at the struggling Stromboli Air. Their first flight has a blind person’s convention and a man with a bomb who doses people with LSD. Of course, our heroes have to land the plane and fix things. But don’t worry — everything works out just fine.
Voiceover artist Rob Paulsen (Pinky of Pinky and the Brain amongst 250 different animated characters and over 1000 commercials) shows up in a rare live-action role. Sherman Helmsley appears briefly as Mr. Buttersworth. And the owner of the school is played by William Bogert, who hosted the Frontline segments on Chapelle’s Show.
If you had Comedy Central in the 1990’s, there’s a good chance you saw this movie. Trust me. You did.
George Lollar (Grodin) takes his family on vacation to Club Sand, where everyone else is having sex while he has his kids in tow. There’s also a revolution happening, a staff that could care less about hospitality and Charles Grodin being, well, Charles Grodin.
It’s also the only woke movie I’ve seen in these 80’s comedies where the other f word gets someone in trouble. About time — I knew things were intolerant back then, but it’s nice to see that some people were also willing to tell people to back off.
Man, not to pile on the Grodin downers, but this movie is the kind of film that posits the question, “Can Charles Grodin be the Chevy Chase that people love or the Chevy Chase that people hate?” Remember that Casio keyboard that Chevy would randomly play on his abortive talk show? I’m shocked Grodin wasn’t lugging it around. There’s your answer.
Charles Sidney Grodin April 21, 1935 – May 18, 2021
“I started in movies in 1963,
and the first big one was Rosemary’s Baby in 1967.
While you don’t notice it right away, it finally dawns on you that 80% of the time, you’re doing nothing.”
A PG rated Police Academy? Well, it still made plenty of money and cost next to nothing to make, being shot in Toronto.
Lt. Proctor (Lance Kinsey) and Commandant Mauser (Art Metrano) meet up with former Sergeants Chad Copeland (Scott Thomson) and Kyle Blanks (Brant van Hoffman). Because there are two police academies — how does that happen? — one must be closed. Mauser wants Commandant Lassard (George Gaynes) to fail. Lassard wants to hang out with his fish Birdie. Such are the stories that Police Academy sequels are created to tell.
Lassard gets an idea on how to win: along with Sgt. Jones (Michael Winslow) and Lt. Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), he calls back Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), Hooks (Marion Ramsey), Hightower (Bubba Smith) and Tackleberry (David Graf) to help train the new recruits.
The new officers are Sgt. Fackler’s (Bruce Mahler) wife, Violet (Debralee Scott), Karen Adams (Shawn Weatherly, Amityville: It’s About Time), Tackleberry’s brother-in-law Bud (Andrew Paris) and Nagata (Brian Tochi), who of course falls for Callahan.
My favorite recruits are Sweetchuck (Tim Kazurinsky) and Zed (Bobcat Goldthwait), who have come back into the story as enemies who soon become friends.
This movie brings back many of the jokes from the first, like an appearance by Georgina Spelvin and the Blue Oyster. But I didn’t mind at all. Honestly, these movies are like drinking cheap beer. It’s not the best beer, but you know, it’s beer.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This review originally ran on April 8, 2019. Let me tell you, this is a movie that I will never tie of. Where is the blu ray release with all the extras of this, I ask you?
My wife asked me, “Why would anyone watch this movie?” She doesn’t get it. She wasn’t around in the 1980’s, when we had no internet. She wasn’t going through puberty. She’ll never understand staying up until 3:15 AM to catch a movie about a Hamburger University and the joy that it can bring.
Russell Proco (Leigh McCloskey, who improbably is also in Argento’s Inferno) has been kicked out of multiple schools because he can’t stop hooking up. There’s a trust fund waiting for him if he can get a diploma. So he picks the one school he knows he can graduate — Buster Burger University.
You know why the 1980’s were great? Because Dick Butkus could be in a movie and we all knew exactly who his character was. Here, his job is to beat the hell out of the students so they don’t screw up Buster Burger. Everyone has to follow the rules:
Outside consumption of food is prohibited.
All candidates are to stay on the grounds of Buster Burger University until graduation.
Since sex and success make lousy partners, all candidates are not to engage in sex while students.
This is a movie that follows the best formula: just get a bunch of crazy characters together, get them into some insane situations and let the hijinks ensue. Along the way, Russell makes a friend who is obsessed with the CEO’s sexy wife (the pneumatic Randi Brooks, who also is in TerrorVision), a nun who for some reason is going to burger school, a sex-crazed guerilla fighter, a soul singer who was arrested and is at the school on work release and so much more.
Where else other than Buster Burger University can you learn to yell things like “Put those cookies back, motherfucker,” get stuck inside a giant pickle and then have to battle against bikers and cops on your first day of work?
Most amazingly, director Mike Marvin would go on to make a movie that is even less connected to reality, The Wraith.
Also known as Loose Ends, this is an attempt to use the name of the Screwballs franchise — such as it is — while using Coleen Camp from Police Academy and Police Academy 4 to somehow try and make a new series, because this movie has nothing to do with Screwballs other than the knowledge that both movies are Canadian exploitation tax shelter films.
Camp plays Liberty Jean, who has moved to Wagatno Beach — really Canadian sex movie location Wasaga Beach — to make a movie called Say Cheese all about the way women are treated in the world. Of course, it’s also the kind of movie I’d watch, so the local religious group the Church of the Divine Light and their leader Bishop Wally (Damian Lee, the director of Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe) decides to start a holy war.
Directing this whole mess is John Blanchard, who was the director of many episodes of SCTV and The Kids In the Hall, so he should know funny.
That said, it is on YouTube, so if you want to endure it like I did.
Paul Weiland, who directed City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold was, of course, the perfect person to make a James Bond spoof starring Bill Cosby. This is also supposed to be the sixth movie in a series of films where they never made any other ones. People never like that — ask Buckaroo Banzai.
Weiland would one day tell The Guardian, “It was a terrible mistake. … When anyone gets into that position (Bill Cosby’s position of power in the 1980s), they are surrounded by sycophants and no one tells them the truth. But Cosby just wasn’t funny. I couldn’t tell him directly. I’d say it feels slow, and he’d say, “You worry about construction, let me worry about funny.””
Leonard Parker (America’s dad at one point, Bill Cosby) is out of retirement and battling Medusa Johnson and her army of vegetarians. Joe Don Baker plays his boss, a similar role that he would play in the Bond films.
When the film was released, Cosby himself said that he was so disappointed with it that he publicly advised people not to waste their money on it. The dude wrote and produced it. He should know better. The Coke product placement is also near-constant, which upset so many people.
Cosby accepted his three Razzies — worst actor, worst screenplay and worst picture — on Fox’s The Late Show. I love that he had the ego to demand that the three Razzies he earned be specifically made out of 24 karat (99.99%) gold and Italian marble, which Fox paid for. Maybe he could have used the sizable money he made as an advance on this movie instead of taking more for so very little.
At least one person moved on from this to do something better. Cinematographer Jan de Bont would go on to direct Speed, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,Twister and The Haunting. We won’t discuss Speed 2.
George Lucas went to USC with Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who later co-wrote American Graffiti with the Star Wars director. Readers of this site will recognize the two more for Messiah of Evil, a classic of 1970’s horror that is sadly underappreciated.
After finishing American Grafitti, Lucas told Huyck and Katz about Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck comic book. It took until 1984 to start the process rolling, however.
The film was optioned by Universal Studios after a partnership with Marvel Comics. Universal was excited, as they’d passed on previous Lucas projects and lost out on some major profits. Huyck and Katz felt that the film should be animated, but because Universal needed a summer blockbuster, Lucas suggested that ILM could create a live action movie.
The hard part of the whole movie is that in the comics, Howard is abrasive and rude. That’s not the way a main character should be in a Hollywood movie. The storyline is also straightforward while every adventure of Howard had a major streak of surrealism. After all, he was “trapped in a world he never made.”
Gerber often referred to his writing of the comic book as an existential joke: “This is no joke! There it is. The cosmic giggle. The funniest gag in the universe. That life’s most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view. Anyone who doesn’t believe this probably cannot enjoy reading Howard the Duck.”
That said, he helped with the script, was there on the shoot and felt that the movie was true to the spirit of Howard and Beverly.
Howard the Duck — played by Ed Gale, but also voiced by Chip Zien and acted by numerous puppeteers — is pulled from Duckworld to Cleveland, Ohio, where he meets Beverly (Lea Thompson), who will become his one true love.
Soon, the duck comes into conflict with the Dark Overlord of the Universe, a villain beyond the wall of sleep that possesses Dr. Walter Jenning (Jeffrey Jones) and menaces all reality. There’s also a subplot about Beverly’s band Cherry Bomb, which features Katey Sagal’s twin sister Liz, Dominique Davalos from the band Dominatrix and Holly Robinson from 21 Jump Street.
Paula Abdul, Kim Basinger, Belinda Carlisle, Jodi Benson, Tori Amos, Sarah Jessica Parker and Lori Singer all tried out for the role of Beverly, but Thompson does a great job. She even sang all of the songs in the film.
The film was considered a box-office bomb, as it made only a million more than its overall production budget. Universal production heads Frank Price and Sidney Sheinberg supposedly got in a fistfight over the results, with Price eventually leaving the studio. Seriously, movies have flopped much harder than this, so I’ve never understood the stink that is on this movie. Perhaps — before the prequels — people expected more out of Lucas.
Huyck never directed again — he had also made the Eddie Murphy movie Best Defense — but he did write Radioland Murders with Lucas and Katz.
I loved that Howard showed up at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy. It felt like Marvel’s first theatrical star finally got his moment, after being considered a failure for so long.
A postscript: Lucas had just built Skywalker Ranch complex and was counting on Howard the Duck to pay it off. He had to sell off assets to stay in business. Steve Jobs offered to help by buying Lucasfilm’s newly-launched CGI animation division for a better than market price. It turns out that he got a great deal, because that division is what we now know as Pixar.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This review originally ran on November 13, 2017. As part of our month of all things James Bond, I brought it back, did some editing and included some links so that you can stream it for free. It has George Lazenby pretty much playing Bond (Drew Stargrove) and while uneven, is still a fun watch. Enjoy!
I grew up on James Bond. More than that, at a young age, I was obsessed with Bond. One magical Christmas, the only gifts I got were the James Bond role-playing game from Victory Games and all of the expansions. I saw every single one of the movies, even the original Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again, the bootleg Sean Connery film that came out of Kevin McClory’s legal battles with Eon Productions, the Fleming estate and United Artists. I’ve seen every Bond ripoff, from Flint to Matt Helm to Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs(it helps that Mario Bava directed that one). Post Timothy Dalton, I grew bored with the more realistic Bond and never came back. I grew up with the ridiculous world of Roger Moore.
I get the feeling that plenty of other folks have had similar experiences, thanks to comics like Jimmy’s Bastards and Kingsmen (also a series of movies). And this movie — Never Too Young to Die guest stars the Bond from my favorite of the series, the only appearance of George Lazenby, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Drew Stargrove, but we can just pretend he’s James Bond.
Stargrove has a son, Lance. He has a theme song. And he has a mission, to stop psychopathic hermaphroditic gang leader Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons, sure he’s in KISS, but let’s celebrate his ridiculous IMDB page, where he’s either played himself or been in some amazingly insane films, like Trick or Treatand Runaway). But his luck has finally run out. He’s dead and his somewhat estranged son must leave behind his gymnastic days at college to take over his role as the best secret agent in the world.
Lance is played by John Stamos, mostly known for TV’s Full House. This is his star turn, all fresh-faced and ready to break hearts. He’s joined on his mission by Vanity, who may have had a short and sweet film career, but got to be in some incredible stuff, like The Last Dragon, Action Jackson, Tanya’s Island, 52 Pick-Up and Terror Train.
Your ability to enjoy this film depends completely on your ability to enjoy ridiculousness. And facts like this — the nightclub outfit that costume Gene Simmons wears in the nightclub scene is the same one that Lynda Carter wore for her 1980 ENCORE! special, where she sang KISS’ “I Was Made for Loving You.”
Writer Steven Paul also created the Baby Geniuses series and had uncredited help from Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (TV’s Batman, Flash Gordon), which shows. Paul also wrote 1992’s The Double 0 Kid, where Corey Haim dreams of being a secret agent.
Director Gil Bettman produced and directed tons of 80’s TV, like The Fall Guy, Knight Rider and Automan, a one-season wonder that combined police drama with Tron. I may be the only human being to have watched the entire season. His other major movie in 1986 was Crystal Heart, where Tawny Kitaen plays a rock star who falls in love with a boy who lives inside a crystal room because he has an auto-immune deficiency.
This film has an incredibly uneven tone. At times, it’s a family movie. Other scenes, Road Warrior clones are tearing off Vanity’s clothes and threatening to rape her. Sometimes, everything is treated with wacky humor. And then, you see people fall to their deaths and smack into the ground. It’s also a much better movie the more mind-enhancing substances you consume, I figure, as I watched it cold sober and it kind of dragged (no pun intended).
Oh yeah — Lance’s roommate, Cliff, is played by Peter Kwong, who was Rain in Big Trouble in Little China. And because this movie was made in the 1980’s, Robert Englund contractually has to be in it.
Okay, so Sam, B&S About Movies illustrious proprietor, swings by Eide’s Entertainment, a cool vintage music, comics, magazines, and videos joint in Pittsburgh and picks up a copy of Mill Creek’s “Explosive Cinema” 12-film pack—for the sole purpose of getting a copy of Brent Huff kicking ass in 1985’s Nine Deaths of the Ninja (and it really is the BEST movie in the set!). So, Sam and I get to talking about the other films on the set—1986’s Scorpion, in particular.
Directed by Columbia Pictures’ behind-the-scenes-of-movies documentary purveyor William Riead, Scorpion—the only starring role of karate champ Tony Tulleners, the one guy the “invincible” Chuck Norris could never beat—chronicles the adventures of super-agent Steve “Code Name: Scorpion” Woods. After Scorpion thwarts a Los Angeles airline skyjacking, he uncovers an international scheme involving the assassination of an imprisoned drug-kingpin turned government informant. And when the bad guys murder his partner—he lets loose his “sting” to avenge the death.
Now if this low-budget romp sounds familiar, like Steve McQueen’s Bullitt* familiar, that’s because it’s practically a shot-for-shot rip-off of McQueen’s iconic action film—right down to Don Murray (!) (Governor Breck from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes?) in the corrupt lawyer/politician role played by Robert Vaughn (watch this Vaughn scene from Bullitt to see what I mean). In fact, there’s touches of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry”-era films in the mix (watch this scene from Magnum Force and you’ll see what I mean).
What got us into this mess in the first place!
But as with those low-budget romps from Crown and American International Pictures, the cast is the thing: it’s why we suffer through them—and enjoy them. So, in line behind the always-a-pleasure-to-see Don Murray, we also get Robert Logan from the hit ‘60s TV series 77 Sunset Strip and Daniel Boone, Bart Braverman, who’s been in everything, from 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) as a kid actor to the hit ‘80s TV series Vegas, Ross Elliot, who’s been in everything as well, from the early Clint Eastwood war movie Kelly’s Heroes (1970) and TV’s The Virginian, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke, Robert Colbert from Irwin Allen’s TV series The Time Tunnel and Hunter in the ’80s, and John Anderson, who’s been in everything, from ’60s TV’s The Rat Patrol and MacGyver in the ’80s.
So, why is Scorpion the only movie Tony Tulleners ever did, you ask? He did, after all, kick Chuck Norris’s ass three times in the ring—and Norris ended up with the film and TV career? What happened?
Did Tulleners see the film, realized it sucked, and quit Hollywood? Or did Hollywood think Tulleners sucked—and gave him his walking papers? Truth be told: Scorpion really is awful: just a like an ’80s action direct-to-video flick should be. Like Crown International Pictures awful. Hey, wait a minute. Crown made this! Ah, no wonder it’s so bad. But again, what saves this blatant rip-off of Bullitt and Dirty Harry is the fact that Crown made it—and we know the barrel of crap we are getting into with that studio—and we want to get into the muck and mire with that studio. Why? Again, it’s the crazy “Where’s Waldo” who’s who casting of our beloved UHF-TV ’60s and ’70s television reruns cast in Crown’s oeuvre.
Here’s the thing with Scorpion, the feature film writing and directing debut by William Riead: No one would be talking about this film at all if it wasn’t for it being confused with the “specialty video” Scorpion (1986) shot by John Howard of Spine fame and starring Linnea Quigley (aka Jessie Dalton). So don’t be duped by the reviews on Riead’s Scorpion, in KY Jelly-anticipation for Linnea Quigley’s “hot tub kidnapping” and “extended bondage-torture scene.” Stow the pocket rockets, boys. Move along, now.
And god bless ‘em, Don Murray is still active in the business. He most recently starred in the 2017 limited-series reboot of Twin Peaks and is currently filming the low-budget direct-to-video western Promise. Most recently, Bart Braverman starred alongside Jeffrey Donovan of TV’s Burn Notice in the two season run of Hulu’s 2016 series, Shut Eye.
And writer-director William Riead is still at the keyboard and behind the camera. He made, what I think, is a pretty decent romantic-thriller that’s above the usual Lifetime damsel-in-distress flick-junk, 2001’s Island Prey (aka Broken Vows) with Don Murray, along with Ed Asner (TV’s Lou Grant), Tony Dennison (TV’s Prison Break, The Closer, and Major Crimes), and Olivia Hussey (Black Christmas, Ice Cream Man, Turkey Shoot).
From a karate-action flick to a Mother Teresa biopic. Everyone in Hollywood has has to start somewhere.
Riead’s most recent effort was his fourteen-years-in-development passion project: 2014’s The Letters, a biographical drama that explored the life of Mother Teresa and starred Max von Sydow (Flash Gordon, Judge Dredd) and Rutger Hauer (Nighthawks, Blood of Heroes). Sadly, Riead’s passion didn’t translate into box office gold: the $20 million film’s worldwide gross was less than $2 million (and does not deserve to be called-out in our “Box Office Failures Week”). The beautifully shot and acted film won the Audience Favorite “Best of the Fest” Award at Arizona’s Sedona Film Festival, while Riead won the Best Director and Juliet Stevenson (as Mother Teresa) as Best Actress at Rome’s International Catholic Film Festival.
You can watch a VHS rip of Scorpionalong with the trailers for Island Prey and The Letters, all courtesy of You Tube. There’s no PPV online streams or free rips of Island Prey available, but The Letters is widely available on all the usual streaming platforms—including You Tube. There’s no online rips of John Howard’s Scorpion but, if you absolutely must see the cover, you can, on Letterboxd (don’t worry; there’s no nudity and it’s safe to look at, provided ropes don’t offend you).
Phew! See what happens when you go shopping at Eide’s Entertainment? Again, watch out for more reviews from Mill Creek’s “Explosive Cinema” 12-pack all this week.
Speaking of Tony Tulleners . . . we blew out a week of martial arts flicks with Ron Marchini!
* Hey! Don’t forget that we blew out two weeks of rubber-burnin’ mayhem with our “Fast and Furious Weeks” one and two.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Frank Harris and Leo Fong! My head is swimming. Where do I begin with this review?
Well, first off, you can get both of these Crown International releases on Mill Creek’s “Explosive Cinema” 12-pack (along with Scorpion, Skydivers, and 9 Deaths of the Ninja). Second: You also get Troy Donahue (Omega Cop), Richard Roundtree (Q: The Winged Serpent), and, say what? Cameron Mitchell (Space Mutiny) appears in both?
Harris. Fong. Mitchell? Sign me up! I am going to loose my nut!
What’s that? Harris also did the post-apoc romp Aftershock and the cop actioner Lockdown (1990; trailer) with Richard Lynch from Deathsport and Ground Rules? What? No way! And Fong did Showdown (1993; full movie) with Lynch as well? Rock on! Richard Friggin’ Lynch. Rock on, Ankar Moor, you post-apoc bad ass.
Frank Harris
Writer, director, producer and cinematographer Frank Harris got his start as a reporter for a small California TV station. But his true love was film. He got his start in the movie business courtesy of the fifth film from Asian action star Leo Fong, 1976’s Ninja Assassins (aka Enforcer from Death Row), who hired Harris as a cinematographer. (I have wonderful memories of my older cousin, Bobby, who studied martial arts and was ready to go into the military, taking me to the Drive-In after seeing the film’s commercial on TV. Yes, I rented it when it came out on VHS.)
After putting one more cinematography gig under his belt with the 1984 actioner Goldrunner (trailer: race cars, motorcycles and kidnapping), Fong hired Harris to not only serve as the cinematographer, but as the producer, director and screenwriter for his eighth film as an actor: Killpoint.
Then there was Harris’s directing gig with 1996’s Skyscraper, an awful attempt to turn famous-for-being-famous ex-Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith into—not only into an “actress” and not only into a “leading lady”—an “action star.” Anna Nicole as a hot, corporate helicopter pilot who goes “Die Hard” when terrorists take over her employer’s office tower? Huh and W.T.F. It’s one of those movies where you simply can not turn away. And let me make this point perfectly clear: there’s a lot of people to blame for it, but Harris isn’t one of them; he was just a director-for-hire. (Watch the full movie at your own peril; the trailer might even be too much to bear.)
Killpoint (1984)
Cameron Mitchell returned from Ninja Assassins, this time as Joe Marks, an illegal arms dealer who robs a Californian National Guard Armory with plans to sell the weapons to L.A’s street gangs. Lt. James Long (Fong) a bitter, troubled L.A detective still dealing with the rape and murder of his wife a year earlier, gets his chance to go “Dirty Harry” —well, “Jackie Chan,” actually—when he discovers Mark’s sidekick, known as Nighthawk (professional ex-boxer Stack Pierce; worked on several of Fred Williamson’s Blaxploitation films), was responsible for her death. Teamed with FBI Agent Bill Bryant (Richard Roundtree), they bring them to justice.
Of course, while Fong was already a major star in the Eurasian marketplace, he was an unknown commodity in the States. So while Roundtree’s part in Killpoint is a minor one, as you can see from the below poster images, that didn’t stop the distributors from highlighting Roundtree’s contribution—and giving Leo Fong the short shift on the U.S Drive-In and video campaigns.
Where’s Leo?
Low Blow (1986)
Karen Templeton (Patti Bowling; her only film role) is a young, wayward Patty Hearst-type heiress brainwashed-kidnapped by the Church of Universal Enlightenment, a Jonestown-styled religious cult run by Cameron Mitchell’s Jim Jones-inspired Yarakunda.
After seeing Joe Wong (Leo Fong), a harried ex-San Francisco detective take down a couple of thugs who mugged an old lady, Karen’s tycoon-father (Troy Donahue) decides Wong is the man for the job to rescue his daughter. So Wong recruits a Vietnam vet and ex-pro-boxer (Stack Piece is back!) to get her out. Once inside, Wong fights the cult-camp’s ninjas and world-renowned martial artist and Tae Bo exercise program guru Billy Blanks (Tango & Cash, Lionheart) in his first film role.
Leo Fong
Leo Fong is still going strong at the incredible age of 91. He starred in three films in 2018: Hidden Peaks, Dragon to Dragon, and the most recent film: Challenge of the Five Gauntlets. And he has four more films in various stations of filming and pre/post production: Pact of Vengenance (with Jon-Mikl Thor!), Asian Cowboys, Runaway Killer, Hard Way Heroes, and Junkers. You catch up with Leo and his Sky Dragon Entertainment at LeoFong.com.
Other films in the Harris-Fong oeuvre include 24 Hours to Midnight with Cynthia Rothrock (1985; clip), Hawkeye (1988; full movie) (seen them on VHS), and the direct-to-DVD releases Brazilian Brawl (2003; trailer) and Transformed (2005; full movie) (honestly, never heard of them or seen them; I need to change that).
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