I got this film three years ago, and since I have been watching films with and/or about Bruce Lee, I popped this film in and…. what did I just watch?
This is a direct-to-video or direct-to-cable kind of movie, something that might have appeared on USA Network’s Up All Night program where they played outlandish films like Hell Comes to Frogtown or Surf Nazis Must Die. Heck, maybe they did play it at some point.
So, the plot: In World War 11 II, four allied generals are captured by the Japanese. A, erm, Chinese military man puts together a band of misfits to attempt a rescue, including a varmint, a con man, a guy who is dressed like Elvis, a couple of gay-coded, kilt-wearing members of the British Indian forces (I presume), a woman whom I thought was actually the hero, and a couple other interchangeable pieces, none of whom is Jackie (or Jacky) Chan. The first part of this film is the assembly of this group, after nixing James Bond, Snake Plissken, Rocky (I guess Rambo: First Blood Part 11 II was not yet the phenomenon)–no fooling, they’re offered as possible rescuers but are rejected–the first part, then is the, what, Allied authorities capturing these brigands to carry out the raid. Jackie Chan and a partner appear as grifters as well, but they’re not part of the main group–they just want to recoup the money they lost in a grift-within-a-grift, so they’re following the group. After assembly, the group travels toward the place where they think the generals are being held, and they visit–and destroy–a village of cannibalistic martial arts women and then a haunted house, where each individual is tempted in his or her own way by undead creatures, and then they get to the final destination to find a bunch of dead Japanese, and then they’re attacked by Japanese Nazis in 70s muscle cars festooned with Nazi swastikas, and then they’re all slaughtered except for Jackie Chan and his partner, who learn that it was all a double-cross from the beginning.
The film was dubbed from the original Chinese, and I do so wonder what might have changed in the translation. Perhaps not much, as outlandish as it was in English.
I invited my boys to watch the film because, hey, Jacky Chan, but I’m glad they demurred (as they always do, now). Because they were not steeped in the direct-to-cable schlock in the 1980s and they would not have been acutely amused to watch something like it. Will I watch it again? Probably not, but one never knows.
