Post by Harkovast on Mar 16, 2016 23:03:16 GMT
Showdown in Little Tokyo.
I love this film.
I mean I legit love this film.
Its absolutely, perfectly, wonderfully dreadful.
Everything about this film is terrible in some way.
Not one scene goes by that isn't amazingly hilarious in some way.
Its like a movie that gets almost nothing right, but gets it all wrong in the best ways imaginable.
The film is a very stereotypical buddy cop movie, that ticks off every cliché for an early 90's movie of that genre.
The film is meant to have wise cracking one liners, but everything that happens is so deranged and exaggerate it turns into some kind of amazing comedy marvel.
You might have heard that films like Troll 2 or The Room are the "best bad movie".
Well I humbly submit, for your consideration, Show Down in Little Tokyo.
The film opens with a load of Japanese criminal types, betting on a kick boxing fight.
I guess this is the Thailand area of little Tokyo.
They are interrupted by super cop, Dolph Lundgren.
If you've seen Rocky 4, you know that Dolph is a big guy and when put next to a relatively short person (like Stallone) he can easily be made to look absolutely enormous.
Against the generally fairly short Asian bad guys he fights in this film, Dolph appears to be about 8 feet tall.
Now when I said super cop, I don't know if you fully appreciate how literally I mean that.
He enters the boxing ring by swinging in on a rope and knocking the fighters out of the way.
The guy running the place then orders the fighters to attack him.
Dolph then catches the leg of one of the kick boxers, and uses it to hit the other kick boxer. Yes, he kicks a man with the other mans leg.
One of the kick boxers then punches him across the face. The kick boxer (and lets remember, this is a man who fights people in illegal pit fights for money) then looks horrified at his injured hand and Dolph is unhurt. Dolph then retaliates by punching the guy so he flies right out of the ring.
At this point, a Yakuza can in hilarious zoot suits storm in and machine gun everyone (wiping out their criminal rivals.) Dolph chases them and they try to hit him with a car.
So what does Dolph do?
He jumps.
The car passes under him as he leaps clean over it and lands on his feet.
Maybe super cop isn't strong enough for this guy.
Dolph is basically earths greatest human in this film.
Later Dolph is hanging out in a tea shop in Little Tokyo, showing he has good relations with the Japanese American community in L.A. and also flirting with the old lady who owns the place. Dolph you playa.
Unfortunately the Yakuza show up again and Dolph has to cheerfully beat them all senseless.
Another cop shows up, played by Brandon Lee and in a mix up the two start fighting each other, allowing most of the Yakuza to escape.
Lee is a laid back, wise cracking cop, who (despite his Asian heritage) is very westernised, unlike enormous Aryan titan Dolph, who was actually raised in Japan and so lives by the code of the samurai.
I assumed the film was going to make reference to the fact that Brandon Lee is half Chinese, not Japanese, but no, in this film all Asians, no matter how patently not Japanese they look or how famously not Japanese they are, get lumped together to make up the Japanese numbers.
The racism in this film is wonderful.
Its never mean spirited. You get the impression the people who make this film think Japan is awesome. They know almost nothing about Japan, but what they have seen they think is kick ass! There are good Japanese people, and Japanese culture is presented as noble but perverted by the bad guys for their evil purposes. There's nothing hateful. Its just INCREDIBLY stupid. How stupid? The films casts Tia Carrere as Japanese, a woman born in Hawaii, to Filipino parents.
Sure, why not?
Dolph and Lee manage to capture one of the goons from the tea shop fight and interrogate him. Interesting, the tea shop has been completely destroyed in all the fighting, with the furniture smashes, window broken, bullet holes everywhere etc. Maybe the woman should have just paid the protection money. I'm pretty sure that would have been less expensive than paying to repair the ridiculous damage our heroes caused. Dolph could have at least waited till everyone was outside! Still she seems okay with this afterwards and no one offers to pay for the repairs and she's not in the movie again. Probably safe to assume the Yakuza came back and machine gunned her later.
The man refuses to speak, so Dolph walks over and rips the guys shirt open...as you do....revealing he has the tattoos of the Iron Claw Yakuza.
This causes Dolph to have weird flash backs to his parents dying and so he grabs the guy around he throat.
I assume this is the way American cops normally behave. There is probably a line about it being okay to throttle people you arrest if you remember you dead parents in the Bill of Rights.
Brandon stop him from killing the guy, but while they are discussing what to do next, the captured baddie breaks his own neck.
With his hands.
You know that move in films where they turn someone head slightly and their neck breaks? He does that to himself.
How do you practice that? Wouldn't it be terrible if you fucked it up and just crippled yourself?
The police chief comes in and our heroes explain what happened and he accepts this....which is pretty terrifying when you think about it....the excuse "He broke his own neck" is acceptable in this place when a suspect dies. Would "He stabbed himself accidentally multiple times in the back" or "he threw himself down four flight of stairs, got up, dragged himself to the top and had another go." also get the same mildly irritated reaction? I like to hope so. I bet Dolph bringing people back alive happens so rarely that this has never come up before. For the rest of the film our heroes never successful arrest anyone else and I think only make one attempt to do so. A few times Brandon Lee talks about wanting to do things the right way, like cops, but they still seem to end up beating, shooting and stabbing pretty much every bad guy they come across, slaughtering dozens 'em!
To be fair, the bad guys are total assholes and deserve it. Aside from shooting up kick boxing matches and roughing up tea houses, they throw sleazy parties.
This movie came out before the dreaded PG-13 rating made all action movie hand in their balls, so in this one we get loads of swearing and random nudity.
At the sleazy party there are topless chicks taking drugs around a pool. These women are sporting some of the wonkiest early 90's fake tits money could buy. This movie literally cant even get naked women right.
One of the women turns out to have been working for the Yakuza bosses competitors, but she offers to give him a blow job in exchange for not being killed. He turns her around to have sex with her in front of his men, while also filming it.
They gives her some drugs to smoke from a pipe, he cuts some of her clothes off and then chops her head off. Not completely sure what that was all about, but some people have some really, really specific fetishes.
When the body is found it turns out the drugs were some sort of super crack or something that make you die so even if he hadn't cut her head off she would have totally died anyway. I swear this really happens.
The bad guys then capture Tia Carrere and the main bad guy beats her up and is implied to have raped her. This is completely unnecessary and gratuitous, though its later implied the bad guy is impotent, so maybe he didn't rape her? I don't know. The point is that the bad guy is bad and we don't like him.
The main bad guy is played by the guy who played Shang-Tsung in the Mortal Kombat movie. This is a guy who was born to play villains. He just looks evil. He's not ugly, he's a good looking guy and he's in good shape here...he just does the best evil looks out there. His sneer is of Alan Rickman level quality.
Backing him up are more evil Asians you might recognise. His right hand mook played Shredders second in command in the original two ninja turtles films.
If you remember the evil Asian guy from Die Hard, he's one of the gang too (though he patently doesn't look Japanese, but in this movie? Close enough.)
This is a dream team of evil Asian actors of the era, so Dolph is really going to have his work cut out.
They also have this one big fat guy who fights Dolph while wearing a thong like a sumo wrestler, flailing his arms around like a lunatic and then laying on top of Dolph to try and kill him by squashing him. Dolph triumphs in this battle when he falls into a hot tub with this would be yokozuna at a bath house and rams a water house into the mans mouth so it gets stuck there and the guy drowns. You know, the logical way to deal with that type of situation.
That's later on in the movie though, lets get back to the action.
Dolph and Lee are spying on the bad guys mansion and realise that Tia is going to commit ritual suicide (the bad guys left her with a bladed weapon for some reason. I guess Japanese people just leave that shit all over the place.)
Dolph decides to single headedly storm the compound, dispatching loads of bad guys who foolishly keep attacking him one at a time.
The worst fate is for one guy who goes to listen to a door to hear if Dolph is coming.
Now Dolph has a gun and has already shot multiple people in the building and will shoot more after. But for this bad guy, Dolph doesn't let him off that easy. Dolph punches through the door...but not at head height. He punches at BALL HEIGHT! And after his fist goes through the door he grabs this poor guy, who really hasn't done anything worse then the other gangsters that I can tell, and pulls him right through the door by his balls.
When Dolph breaks the guys neck after that, it comes across as merciful.
Dolph stops Tia from offing herself and flees carrying her.
There is a particularly good but where he turns around while carrying her with both arms and fires off a shot without putting her down which shoots a chasing bad guy. Its such a wonderfully casual way to kill someone.
The guy from die hard and a load of other guys start shooting at Dolph as he reaches ground level so he uses his super strength to flip a car on its side to stop their bullets. You know, like we all would in that situation.
Brandon drives up and they all jump into his car and drive away, with Dolph firing a shot back which (because this is an early 90's action film) causes the car on its side to blow up, killing the guy from Die Hard. If I had one criticism of this film, its that the die hard guy doesn't get a bigger part, because he's a really great stuntman and martial artist. But I'm glad that he's at least here, it wouldn't be a complete band of evil 90's Asians without him.
The guy who was in charge of having the house guarded (who I guess was in the toilet while all that happens?) apologises to Shang-Tsung and does the Yakuza chopping off the pinkie ritual.
When offered the pinkie Shang-Tsung says "is that all?"
The guy looks shocked (he just cut off his own fucking finger!) and says something like "You want more?"
So then Shang just ups and stabs him.
What I love is that Shang clearly planned to just kill the guy, but he let the guy mutilate himself a bit first, just to be a dick. Also killing your minions for failure, another classic cliché. This isn't actually one of the worst examples of this as the bad guys appear to have Armies of badly dressed Japanese gangsters to call on when ever they need them. They seem to lose about a dozen of them every battle but no one seems to care, or even bother to pick up the bodies. Yakuza don't give a fuck.
Will evil triumph?
Can you get Asian bad guys to do what you want by challenging their honour?
Can Dolph's penis be as amazing as the rest of him?
Find out in Part two of my review, coming soon.
I love this film.
I mean I legit love this film.
Its absolutely, perfectly, wonderfully dreadful.
Everything about this film is terrible in some way.
Not one scene goes by that isn't amazingly hilarious in some way.
Its like a movie that gets almost nothing right, but gets it all wrong in the best ways imaginable.
The film is a very stereotypical buddy cop movie, that ticks off every cliché for an early 90's movie of that genre.
The film is meant to have wise cracking one liners, but everything that happens is so deranged and exaggerate it turns into some kind of amazing comedy marvel.
You might have heard that films like Troll 2 or The Room are the "best bad movie".
Well I humbly submit, for your consideration, Show Down in Little Tokyo.
The film opens with a load of Japanese criminal types, betting on a kick boxing fight.
I guess this is the Thailand area of little Tokyo.
They are interrupted by super cop, Dolph Lundgren.
If you've seen Rocky 4, you know that Dolph is a big guy and when put next to a relatively short person (like Stallone) he can easily be made to look absolutely enormous.
Against the generally fairly short Asian bad guys he fights in this film, Dolph appears to be about 8 feet tall.
Now when I said super cop, I don't know if you fully appreciate how literally I mean that.
He enters the boxing ring by swinging in on a rope and knocking the fighters out of the way.
The guy running the place then orders the fighters to attack him.
Dolph then catches the leg of one of the kick boxers, and uses it to hit the other kick boxer. Yes, he kicks a man with the other mans leg.
One of the kick boxers then punches him across the face. The kick boxer (and lets remember, this is a man who fights people in illegal pit fights for money) then looks horrified at his injured hand and Dolph is unhurt. Dolph then retaliates by punching the guy so he flies right out of the ring.
At this point, a Yakuza can in hilarious zoot suits storm in and machine gun everyone (wiping out their criminal rivals.) Dolph chases them and they try to hit him with a car.
So what does Dolph do?
He jumps.
The car passes under him as he leaps clean over it and lands on his feet.
Maybe super cop isn't strong enough for this guy.
Dolph is basically earths greatest human in this film.
Later Dolph is hanging out in a tea shop in Little Tokyo, showing he has good relations with the Japanese American community in L.A. and also flirting with the old lady who owns the place. Dolph you playa.
Unfortunately the Yakuza show up again and Dolph has to cheerfully beat them all senseless.
Another cop shows up, played by Brandon Lee and in a mix up the two start fighting each other, allowing most of the Yakuza to escape.
Lee is a laid back, wise cracking cop, who (despite his Asian heritage) is very westernised, unlike enormous Aryan titan Dolph, who was actually raised in Japan and so lives by the code of the samurai.
I assumed the film was going to make reference to the fact that Brandon Lee is half Chinese, not Japanese, but no, in this film all Asians, no matter how patently not Japanese they look or how famously not Japanese they are, get lumped together to make up the Japanese numbers.
The racism in this film is wonderful.
Its never mean spirited. You get the impression the people who make this film think Japan is awesome. They know almost nothing about Japan, but what they have seen they think is kick ass! There are good Japanese people, and Japanese culture is presented as noble but perverted by the bad guys for their evil purposes. There's nothing hateful. Its just INCREDIBLY stupid. How stupid? The films casts Tia Carrere as Japanese, a woman born in Hawaii, to Filipino parents.
Sure, why not?
Dolph and Lee manage to capture one of the goons from the tea shop fight and interrogate him. Interesting, the tea shop has been completely destroyed in all the fighting, with the furniture smashes, window broken, bullet holes everywhere etc. Maybe the woman should have just paid the protection money. I'm pretty sure that would have been less expensive than paying to repair the ridiculous damage our heroes caused. Dolph could have at least waited till everyone was outside! Still she seems okay with this afterwards and no one offers to pay for the repairs and she's not in the movie again. Probably safe to assume the Yakuza came back and machine gunned her later.
The man refuses to speak, so Dolph walks over and rips the guys shirt open...as you do....revealing he has the tattoos of the Iron Claw Yakuza.
This causes Dolph to have weird flash backs to his parents dying and so he grabs the guy around he throat.
I assume this is the way American cops normally behave. There is probably a line about it being okay to throttle people you arrest if you remember you dead parents in the Bill of Rights.
Brandon stop him from killing the guy, but while they are discussing what to do next, the captured baddie breaks his own neck.
With his hands.
You know that move in films where they turn someone head slightly and their neck breaks? He does that to himself.
How do you practice that? Wouldn't it be terrible if you fucked it up and just crippled yourself?
The police chief comes in and our heroes explain what happened and he accepts this....which is pretty terrifying when you think about it....the excuse "He broke his own neck" is acceptable in this place when a suspect dies. Would "He stabbed himself accidentally multiple times in the back" or "he threw himself down four flight of stairs, got up, dragged himself to the top and had another go." also get the same mildly irritated reaction? I like to hope so. I bet Dolph bringing people back alive happens so rarely that this has never come up before. For the rest of the film our heroes never successful arrest anyone else and I think only make one attempt to do so. A few times Brandon Lee talks about wanting to do things the right way, like cops, but they still seem to end up beating, shooting and stabbing pretty much every bad guy they come across, slaughtering dozens 'em!
To be fair, the bad guys are total assholes and deserve it. Aside from shooting up kick boxing matches and roughing up tea houses, they throw sleazy parties.
This movie came out before the dreaded PG-13 rating made all action movie hand in their balls, so in this one we get loads of swearing and random nudity.
At the sleazy party there are topless chicks taking drugs around a pool. These women are sporting some of the wonkiest early 90's fake tits money could buy. This movie literally cant even get naked women right.
One of the women turns out to have been working for the Yakuza bosses competitors, but she offers to give him a blow job in exchange for not being killed. He turns her around to have sex with her in front of his men, while also filming it.
They gives her some drugs to smoke from a pipe, he cuts some of her clothes off and then chops her head off. Not completely sure what that was all about, but some people have some really, really specific fetishes.
When the body is found it turns out the drugs were some sort of super crack or something that make you die so even if he hadn't cut her head off she would have totally died anyway. I swear this really happens.
The bad guys then capture Tia Carrere and the main bad guy beats her up and is implied to have raped her. This is completely unnecessary and gratuitous, though its later implied the bad guy is impotent, so maybe he didn't rape her? I don't know. The point is that the bad guy is bad and we don't like him.
The main bad guy is played by the guy who played Shang-Tsung in the Mortal Kombat movie. This is a guy who was born to play villains. He just looks evil. He's not ugly, he's a good looking guy and he's in good shape here...he just does the best evil looks out there. His sneer is of Alan Rickman level quality.
Backing him up are more evil Asians you might recognise. His right hand mook played Shredders second in command in the original two ninja turtles films.
If you remember the evil Asian guy from Die Hard, he's one of the gang too (though he patently doesn't look Japanese, but in this movie? Close enough.)
This is a dream team of evil Asian actors of the era, so Dolph is really going to have his work cut out.
They also have this one big fat guy who fights Dolph while wearing a thong like a sumo wrestler, flailing his arms around like a lunatic and then laying on top of Dolph to try and kill him by squashing him. Dolph triumphs in this battle when he falls into a hot tub with this would be yokozuna at a bath house and rams a water house into the mans mouth so it gets stuck there and the guy drowns. You know, the logical way to deal with that type of situation.
That's later on in the movie though, lets get back to the action.
Dolph and Lee are spying on the bad guys mansion and realise that Tia is going to commit ritual suicide (the bad guys left her with a bladed weapon for some reason. I guess Japanese people just leave that shit all over the place.)
Dolph decides to single headedly storm the compound, dispatching loads of bad guys who foolishly keep attacking him one at a time.
The worst fate is for one guy who goes to listen to a door to hear if Dolph is coming.
Now Dolph has a gun and has already shot multiple people in the building and will shoot more after. But for this bad guy, Dolph doesn't let him off that easy. Dolph punches through the door...but not at head height. He punches at BALL HEIGHT! And after his fist goes through the door he grabs this poor guy, who really hasn't done anything worse then the other gangsters that I can tell, and pulls him right through the door by his balls.
When Dolph breaks the guys neck after that, it comes across as merciful.
Dolph stops Tia from offing herself and flees carrying her.
There is a particularly good but where he turns around while carrying her with both arms and fires off a shot without putting her down which shoots a chasing bad guy. Its such a wonderfully casual way to kill someone.
The guy from die hard and a load of other guys start shooting at Dolph as he reaches ground level so he uses his super strength to flip a car on its side to stop their bullets. You know, like we all would in that situation.
Brandon drives up and they all jump into his car and drive away, with Dolph firing a shot back which (because this is an early 90's action film) causes the car on its side to blow up, killing the guy from Die Hard. If I had one criticism of this film, its that the die hard guy doesn't get a bigger part, because he's a really great stuntman and martial artist. But I'm glad that he's at least here, it wouldn't be a complete band of evil 90's Asians without him.
The guy who was in charge of having the house guarded (who I guess was in the toilet while all that happens?) apologises to Shang-Tsung and does the Yakuza chopping off the pinkie ritual.
When offered the pinkie Shang-Tsung says "is that all?"
The guy looks shocked (he just cut off his own fucking finger!) and says something like "You want more?"
So then Shang just ups and stabs him.
What I love is that Shang clearly planned to just kill the guy, but he let the guy mutilate himself a bit first, just to be a dick. Also killing your minions for failure, another classic cliché. This isn't actually one of the worst examples of this as the bad guys appear to have Armies of badly dressed Japanese gangsters to call on when ever they need them. They seem to lose about a dozen of them every battle but no one seems to care, or even bother to pick up the bodies. Yakuza don't give a fuck.
Will evil triumph?
Can you get Asian bad guys to do what you want by challenging their honour?
Can Dolph's penis be as amazing as the rest of him?
Find out in Part two of my review, coming soon.