Greetings dear reader(s)!
Been a busy month
here at Arena Towers what with dodging angry cosplayers, actually doing
some work and helping operation Yewtree with their enquiries (you're
marked Ball) so I've been a wee bit worried that there wouldn't be any
updates till at least 2023.
How great is it then that a loyal follower has come forward and offered to pen a review himself?
And it's written in English and everything.
Not like the normal shite I get sent.
Anyway, here's what he wrote:
Dear Dr. Lamont,
I
like your writings on the films, you funny guy. I like writing on films
too. You publish my writings on films and we both get along fine. You
not and you be deader than Heath Ledger. When he died I said to my
friend "Heath Ledger is died. Let us drink to him and his nights tail".
I say the same to you.
Love
Jonathan.
So ladies and gentlemen please welcome this months guest reviewer Master Jonathan Butcher, aged 16 from sunny Korea.
Not too sure if it's the good bit or bad bit he's from but hey, beggars can't be choosers.
Fearless Tiger (1991).
Dir: Ron Hulme.
Cast: Jalal Merhi, Bolo Yeung, Monika Schnarre, Jamie Farr and Lazar Rockwood.
Fearless
Tiger is Z-grade movie alchemy - it should be steaming great dollop
of celluloid turd, but it’s actually a block of screen gold. It's
a kung-fu
action flick that is astoundingly, perhaps cosmically flawed in every
way, but somehow it always manages to keep me coming back, like a
scab that won't heal.
The
“star” (ahem) of the show is high-kicking short-arse Jalal Merhi,
"Beirut's answer to Steven Segal" according to his
self-scrawled imdb biography. Mr Merhi owns "Film One Films",
and had until 2008 been writing, directing, producing and starring in
ultra low-budget stinkers in a quest to keep the world’s bargain
buckets filled to the brim.
Fearless Tiger was one of his first
movies, and its extreme amateurishness combined with the enthusiasm
of its cast, including Jamie Farr of Mash fame doing his best
“indefinable Middle Eastern” accent, are what make it such a
cracking watch.
|
Lyle,
daddy and wife-to-be. Platform shoes, perspective and a big hat help
to make Lyle appear marginally less tiny.
|
The
story follows protagonist Lyle as he struggles with both ruthless
drug lords and the English language.
To explain the entire
pothole-ridden plot would take too long, but suffice to say it
involves tacky-looking opium-filled Buddha statues being sold as
cheap souvenirs (?), police corruption, brutal underground martial
arts contests attended by kids and their cardigan-clad mothers,
monks, kidnapping, backstabbing prostitutes and sensei masters with
ballet dancing sidekicks.
Lyle's
opium-peddling nemesis is Salamar, who resembles a crack-smoking
Asian hair-metaller and states repeatedly that his kung-fu monk drug
gang “The Black Pearls” don’t use guns.
He demonstrates this
by showing how mercilessly he deals with employees who steal from
him, when he and his chunky monk assistant Boh do the only thing that
ruthless drug lords do to traitors: they push a thief into some
shallow water.
|
The
many hideous faces of Salamar, the rumoured offspring of Axl Rose and
a bulimic cockroach.
|
When
Salamar and Boh fly to Canada for a martial arts contest,
the lives of Lyle and his even tinier Ronnie Corbett-sized chum
Detective Peng are changed forever.
After getting mashed by Boh,
Lyle buys a crappy Buddha statuette from Salamar which inexplicably
turns out to be filled with Opium,
thus setting him on the path towards chop-socky glory.
However,
because at this point Lyle is completely devoid of kung fu mastery,
Peng invites him to Hong Kong to sharpen his piss-weak fighting
skills.
It's
not long before an absolute legend pops into the picture: Mr Stan
Channing.
The Chan-man plays Bailey, a straight-talking, no
nonsense, badass police chief who is giving Peng a hard time about
the opium-smuggling case he's been working on.
The only trouble is,
Mr Channing looks less like a psycho and more like a frail,
60-year-old maths teacher whose pupils pelt him with spitballs and
lock him in cupboards.
According to Jalal Merhi, this endearingly
dithering codger is actually a black belt in real life, but sadly we
never get to see him whooping anyone.
|
The
mighty Stan Channing, masterfully chewing out Peng. Cower, mortals!
|
Lyle's
yuppy brother OD's on the same opium he found in his Poundland Buddha
statue, a new street drug known as "fish food", which is
apparently "more lethal than guns". This makes me question
its long-term selling power, but regardless, it's up to Lyle to
abandon his affluent job and towering, long-faced supermodel fiancé
to wreak revenge on the purveyors of fish food, by learning the
deadly Tiger Claws fighting style in Hong Kong.
Lyle's
first teacher is Do Man, who seems to read his script phonetically
and without any grasp of its meaning. After a stretch of thoroughly
dull training montages, during which Lyle throws a massive blob-strop
and tosses a load of paint over the floor, Lyle decides to compete in
the "Beh Moh".
This
totally irrelevant plot distraction is a dangerous underground
fighting contest with competitors that include a growling fat fucker
with a permed mullet, a scrawny giant with a wobble-head and a
balding, unhealthy looking American who looks like he’s
accidentally wandered on set while looking for an AA meeting.
Lyle
once again gets his Beirut butt pummelled by Boh, who is
coincidentally fighting here too.
After
the patience-testing and totally inconsequential Beh Moh segment,
Lyle, Peng, the shortass alcoholic and a cartoonishly tall black
fellow team up to take Salamar’s drug-peddling monks down to
cripple-town.
Lyle finally manages to achieve the Tiger Claws
technique after having a boogie on top of a mountain with mulleted
legend Bolo Yeung and a leotard-clad ballet dancer.
This sequence is
a whole other level of ill-advised drivel, descending into
interpretive dance before rising like a shit, inbred phoenix to a
sweepingly clichéd shot of Lyle trying to grab a ball out of Bolo’s
hand. This, apparently, concludes his training.
When
Lyle returns to Canada, his poor bemused fiancé is kidnapped by
Salamar’s giggling cronies, a crime seemingly cued by Salamar
unnecessarily leaping through a thick glass patio window.
They’re
desperate for a computer disk that Lyle found in his discount Buddha
which contains the recipe for Fish Food.
In one of the most baffling
film sequences I’ve ever seen, Lyle meets the drug dealers in an
art gallery to exchange his vast wife-to-be for the disk.
However,
the criminals and our would-be-hero are interrupted by an elderly
woman who just wants to look at the pretty pictures,
and the employees of the gallery who inform them that their dodgy
deal is taking place right at closing time.
Somewhere
amongst the mishmash of poor editing, pointless flashbacks,
over-acting, under-acting and not-at-all-acting there is the greatest
"fake limb" sequence in low-budget film history (closely
followed by the suicidal dummy in Zombie Holocaust/Dr Butcher MD,
whose arm pops off when it hits the ground, only to be miraculously
re-attached when we see the corpse in gory close-up).
|
Our guest reviewer Jonathan in all his Kung Fu glory! |
Not to spoil
the tension-free story (oh alright, I will), but Salamar and his
cronies are in a car chasing Lyle and his lady, who are balanced on
the back of a slowly-moving rubbish truck.
Salamar foolishly
clambers out of the sun roof to get a clear shot at them (using
firepower for the second time in the film, despite endlessly
wittering on about his gang not needing guns).
When the car swerves,
Salamar stumbles backwards, somehow managing to land head-first into
the car with his legs flailing out the top.
The car skids and flips
spectacularly with a preposterous-looking pair of dummy-double legs
poking out of the sun roof for what must be ten full seconds’
screen time.
After
the explosion, Salamar’s henchman Jerome and Lyle have the
clumsiest fight of a film consisting solely of clumsy fights, and
somehow Jerome ends up vanishing into a pile of garbage. Boh jumps
over, clobbers Lyle , grabs the disk and wobbles slowly away, ready
for the movie’s mind-blowingly anticlimactic climax during which
Lyle lobs a TV at Boh, fails to use any of his training and then
wanders gracelessly off into the sunset.
For
trash aficionados, Fearless Tiger simply has to be seen. It’s a
melting pot of directorial ineptitude, horrendous acting,
tension-free storytelling, ludicrous-looking cast-members, and a
script with more plotholes than plot. I would encourage any and all
to track it down, watch it and then never speak of it again.
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