D.I. Why?

Scott_Mercer

Analytically speaking, this film sucks hard. But I can't kick at it. I can't hate it. I cannot do anything but love it. Like the the best outsider artist filmmakers of history, like Ed Wood or Tommy Wiseau, what we have here is someone with very little talent, but a love of movies and plenty of passion. I'm not talking about some kind of careless hack like Jerry Warren or K. Gordon Murray, grinding out product to make money.

Y.K. Kim needed to have passion to complete a movie against all odds (even this movie, as low budget as it is, I'm sure cost several hundred thousand dollars to complete, something you could use in 1987 to buy two or three decent houses or about two dozen new cars), especially when you have so little going for you: no actors that anyone has ever heard of, crappy talent on all levels, and a dung ball of a script.

What Y.K. Kim DID have, beyond enthusiasm for Tae Kwan Do, for the USA and for the awesome asskickingness of anonymous action/martial arts films that played on Cinemax at 3:00 in the morning, was an absurdly fantastic idea: Our Heroes, Dragon Sound: five college students and roommates by day, lousy Rock/Pop club band by night, badass Tae Kwan Do warriors later at night.

How'd that all turn out? Let's take a look.

1) Script: As I said, the idea is an impressively weak but awesomely gimmicky story used as an excuse for an ongoing series of fight scenes, ranging in tone from bar/nightclub/greasy spoon fight, to street brawl, to crime thriller full-tilt ambush mixing knives and guns, to finally a climactic Ninja battle with giant swords, spurting blood and heads being sliced off. Great idea, but too bad the plot is ridiculous, the motivations for the bad guys are really petty and stupid ("they got my band fired, I need them dead"), and the dialog contains exactly nothing ever said by a human being.

2) Directing: Let's be generous and call it competent. Occasionally. Too bad it is undermined by the:

3) Editing: Fricking awful. Tons of jump cuts, mismatched shots, and incidents where the editing actually makes the story more confusing, not more clear.

4) Music: The incidental music is all done on 80's synthesizer, trapping the film in that particular decade. To my ears, having lived through that time period, this stuff is beyond awful. It might be fun cheese for other people though, so whatever. The songs "performed" by Dragon Sound on camera are slightly less awful to me: at least I can laugh at the cheesy lyrics and the girl singer, who, in another Eighties touchstone, looks like Pat Benatar and even sounds like her a little (she wishes).

5) Acting: Uniformly bad. Y.K. Kim being the worst offender, having a less than solid grasp on the language, but the supposed native American English speakers don't hold up much better, especially hairy Tom, the lead guitarist who looks like Baba Booey from the Howard Stern Show (or really more like John Oates, but hey, same thing). I would be surprised if ANY of the cast were professional, or even semi-professional actors. Which brings me to the one semi bright spot:

6) Choreography: At least passable. Some of the fight scenes are put together marginally well. The rest of the movie has set such a low bar that this part of the proceedings cannot help but impress on a relative scale. And of course, in a martial arts film you have to have at least one training montage, and this film has several. These are fun and do get the point across.

There it is. I found this film through the Everything Is... Festival, and those folks have once again dug up a worthy obscurity from the trash heap of history. If you go into this film in the right frame of mind, you will have fun. Remember, the reason that this is fun is that Y.K. Kim thought he was making a straight-ahead low budget martial arts action film, the likes of which came out Cannon Films or the Andy Sidaris filmography at that time. The fact that this ended up being a trainload of fail is what gives you the enjoyment.

By the way, did ANY part of this movie take place in Miami? I think most of it took place in Orlando and Daytona Beach. Did I miss that?

score 9/10

Scott_Mercer 4 May 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2792372/