A fellow named Terry Woo (Steven Vincent Leigh) prepares for a fight by doing that heavy breathing these guys always do in martial arts movies. He comes out to the ring for an underground fighting contest. You know its underground because there are no chairs for the audience and, er, I bet that’s not a proper black and white striped shirt the referee has. Terry wins his match and is congratulated by his friend, who then enters the ring to fight, hell yeah, Gary Daniels! Terry’s friend does okay to start with, but Gary (named Bud in the film, really) quickly takes control and a swift knee to the head ends things. Terry rushes his friend to the hospital where we meet his cousin – Doctor Johnny Woo (Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson). Take a minute to ponder this, Don Wilson playing a doctor. If you can’t tell this film is in trouble already you’re not paying enough attention. Johnny admonishes Terry for taking part in the fighting, but when they are approached by a fat, stupid police detective who wants to know what’s going down, neither Terry nor Johnny will tell him anything. In fact Johnny insists that “They’re not out using drugs, they’re not shooting people, why can’t you just leave them alone?” Got to agree with him, they’re only kicking each other in the head until one of them loses consciousness, where’s the harm? Meanwhile at the same super-tough underground fighting place, a dopey blonde named Julie (Maria Ford) calls in to see her boyfriend Chuck (Vince Murdocco) who is on his way to growing a mighty fine mullet. His friend Brad (Dale Jacoby), also Julie’s brother, has even more stupid hair though and a rather loose-looking woman draped over him. Julie isn’t happy about Chuck fighting, but he’s very heavily influenced by Brad and won’t hear any of it. Julie leaves and Chuck goes to fight while Brad gets naked with his woman. Chuck is beaten by a short drunken Asian man called Kwong who is also the film’s odious comic relief. Brad fares better however in his match against some fat old guy who’s already grown a mullet, and after winning Brad screams that he wants Terry Woo.

Meanwhile Julie goes to a Chinese restaurant which just happens to be owned by Johnny’s Aunt Mei, who is totally insane. Johnny to walk through and Julie mistakes him for an idiot waiter who can’t speak English, which of course causes Johnny to instantly fall in love with her. He serves her and sees that she’s going to a masquerade ball and lets her make a bigger ass of herself for a while before showing her that he can speak English. Things are broken up by Brad, Chuck, Bud and others however, and its firmly establish what a bunch of assholes they all are. Later, Terry tries to convince Johnny to come to the fights with him but of course he won’t, and they just hint at Johnny’s superior martial arts skill, but he’s unwilling to show it. Tensions between Brad and Terry’s camps grows when Kwong urinates on Bud and some of his friends and then runs away but don’t worry, for once the comic relief actually gets what he deserves and is on the receiving end of a savage beating. Brad and company are at the Masquerade Ball that night, and Chuck is ignoring Julie in favour of her brother but everything changes when Johnny arrives dressed as the Phantom of the Opera (think a high school performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical with just a hint of Zorro) and Chuck reacts badly to him dancing with his girl. She’s bewitched by him before she even realises it’s the guy whose intelligence she insulted at the restaurant, but Chuck and Brad break things up just as Terry and his gang arrive wanting revenge for what happened to Kwong, must have been angry that somebody else put him in the hospital before they could. Johnny gets Terry and the rest to leave, but things are tense as Brad HATES all Asians because his dad died in Vietnam or Korea or something. Johnny does what any other poorly developed character would do and goes to express his feelings for Julie, and eventually he asks her out on a date after some painfully cheesy flirting between the two of them. Cue some cringe-worthy footage of them playing arcade games together before Julie suddenly turns around and says that she’s engaged and they’ll just have to be friends. Wha? Terry beats up Bud as revenge for Kwong and after a gang battle erupts in Chinatown Terry agrees to fight Brad in a month’s time. As tensions rise, with the police trying to bust the underground fighting ring, will Johnny be forced to fight when this melting pot of racism, hate, love and violence comes to the boil?

Good God Almighty, what a monumental disaster of a cheap martial arts flick this is, with writing and acting so bad they make sure the audience cares not a jot for any character involved.. First off, the only way this film could possibly be called a success would be if its aim was to make Don Wilson’s character look like an incredibly huge loser. From his ridiculous appearance at the masquerade ball, to every painfully dire scene he shares with Julie, he just comes off as a weak-minded wimp who has never even talked to a girl before let alone seen one naked. This is our hero? The guy who doesn’t do anything interesting until the last fifteen minutes? His cousin is involved in more fights, we’re shown Brad romp with his naked girlfriend way too many times, and Johnny barely even cracks an emotion let alone do anything that would make his character in any way interesting. This spills over into my second complaint, where we know the film is building up to Johnny finally get in the ring and take on Brad, but the build-up here is appalling. I’ve watched enough marital arts movies to know how to set up the big grudge match for the end of the film – show some training sequences, show the hero and the villain beat a lesser opponent or two, then have them fight. However there is barely any attempt to actually build Johnny up as a fighter of any ability, nothing to make you think “oh wow, just wait until he does that to Brad”. He does not fight once until the end of the film, so why are we going to care about some guy who they haven’t even convinced us can fight well? Even worse is that Don’s big fight scene is ridiculously boring and flat, proving that just because he’s a former kickboxing champion does not automatically mean he’ll be good on camera. This is made all the more frustrating because stuck in a small role is Gary Daniels, an extremely talented martial artist who has a far more engaging on-screen style and certainly deserved a better shot rather than being stuck in a minor henchman role and Michael Jai White is somewhere in the film too. Admittedly the fights not involving Don aren’t too bad, Steven Leigh is okay amd the big fight that erupts in Chinatown between Terry and Brad’s gangs basically has every martial artist they brought in try and show they can do something for a few minutes, which proves to be an entertaining trainwreck.

That's a tiny grass island of hope in a sea of putrid, loathesome effluence, however. Continuing the theme of being thoroughly unconvincing, the relationship between Johnny and Julie which gets way too much time during the movie has no chemistry, no believability, and no point. We are given no reason why Johnny would fall for Julie to start with apart from “she’s blonde and has a beauty mark”. Unfortunately every single scene they share is so badly acted and written, complete with cheesy “this is meant to be a romantic scene” music, after a while they become simply unbearable. Clearly there is an attempt here to express the dilemma Julie feels, where on the one hand she’s falling for this, ahem, Chinese guy while she’s engaged to Chuck and her brother Brad is a racist f**khead. However the writing and acting is so poor there’s never any tension built in the situation and the viewer ends up bored out of their skull waiting for the fight scenes they thought they were going to get. Also smashing believability under foot is Johhny’s origins where he talks about being born in China and always wanting to come live in America, though they make no attempt to make him seem Chinese in any way at all except for calling him Woo. Clearly the writers, brothers Jake Jacobs (chortle) and Richard M. Munchkin (heh heh heh) were way in over their heads, as what could have been a simple martial arts flick has been overcomplicated by romantic relationships and racial tensions that they clearly did not know how to develop properly. Not that it would have mattered if they did get a handle on the themes in the films, nobody in any of the main roles could act more than one emotion anyway and even that was something of a push for them. To be fair this is the early days of Don’s career, but as he does very little fighting this actually shifts more emphasis onto his acting ability which is more or less non-existent and exposes him very badly. It really is as if the writers hated Don and wanted to make him look as bad as possible by portraying him as a big loser, forcing him to act, and not even letting him use his martial arts ability, the only reason he has a bloody film career to start with! Not to mention, did you see what the names of the main characters were? Julie, Johnny, Terry, Chuck and Brad? Puh-LEASE! Luckily Jacobs never wrote anything again and Munchkin who also directed this tripe has only dabbled since, so thank heaven for small mercies. Of course Don has found plenty of other hack filmmakers to work with since.

On one viewing, this is an extremely poor film that will provide some entertainment just from seeing Don Wilson make such an ass out of himself, and despite the crappy end fight there are some reasonable encounters in the earlier parts of the movie. However, repeat viewing is verging on a health risk, due to the sudden urge to pull out ones own eyes just to avoid having to see Johnny and Julie in one more painfully dreadful scene together. Just have a good laugh at the pictures in this review and avoid this deplorable excuse for a movie altogether, just to be safe.