DEATH PROMISE

d. Robert Warmflash (1977) 

When I was at junior school, about a thousand years ago, once a week our teacher Mr. Crockett would let us perform a play of our own devising on a rotational basis. In my group - boys only, of course, because girls were horrible  - we never really put much effort in, either blatantly ripping off something we’d seen on telly or coming up with some nonsense about robot teachers or someone setting fire to the school. When inspiration ran completely dry, we often just improvised, returning again and again to the twin preoccupations of pre-pubescent boys: fighting and friendship. These 'plays' involved kung fu, sword fights, stabbings, stranglings, shootings, wrestling, boxing and a huge amount of male bonding: hand shaking, back patting, affectionate arm punching. The high five hadn't caught on in the UK at the time, and the fist bump was still under development. It was an amateurish, childish vision of what it meant to be a grown up man: violence, camaraderie, heroism, cuddling, no women. And that, dear reader, is what Death Promise reminded me of.  

Two tough New York guys, one white, one black, one short, one tall, neither in any kind of employment, spend their days jogging in matching track suits and training – hard – at the martial arts club. To show that they are friends, they touch each other constantly. When ruthless developers try to evict them from their apartment building, using a variety of nefarious means (turning off the utilities, starting a fire, infesting the building with rats) the guys find any number of arses to kick, somewhatr exacerbating the problem and culminating in the murder of the short white guy’s father. Eaten up by grief, hungry for revenge, he flies off to an exotic dojo where he becomes so disciplined that he can catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks. Shit hot and invincible, he returns to the Big Apple to kill those dirty scumbag landlords one by one: by bow and arrow, by poison, by putting a bag of angry, hungry rats on someone’s head.

Each time he crosses a name off the list he and his tall, black friend nod sagely, clasp hands and look into each other’s eyes for just a beat too long. It's very funny, not because it’s homoerotic but because it absolutely isn't.   

Somewhat stilted in terms of drama, the film only really comes to life during the fight sequences,  although luckily these take up about 75% of the films running time. The last half hour is literally just one big battle, eventually descending into hysterical madness as angry men scream wildly and uncontrollably at each other, tearing off their tight shirts to kick and punch the shit out of each other really slowly. It ends with a dummy representing the main villain being thrown off a roof, and it’s not a good dummy either - which is great. Highly recommended!  

BREAKER! BREAKER!

d. Don Hulette (1977)

I like Chuck Norris. Not in an ironic, post-modern way, I mean I genuinely and sincerely like him. He was 37 (although he looks younger) when he made Breaker! Breaker!, a huge hit that was the start of almost two decades as a leading man in American films. He's a nice, all American hero: blond, quiet, capable, likable, he's respectful to the ladies and nice to the Village Idiot. He's slow to rouse, but dangerous to cross. It even takes him twenty minutes and a huge amount of provocation before he unleashes his first roundhouse kick.

Chuck plays a trucker whose little brother goes missing while driving a delivery of TV meals across the country. The kid has been tricked into driving through a corrupt one horse town, arrested on trumped up charges and given a choice: a $250 fine, or 250 days in jail. When he tries to escape by crashing through a window (he's Chuck's brother, alright), he is badly beaten, tied hand and foot and chucked into a barn. Big mistake.

The town is a Kritarchy, presided over by an erudite but alcoholic judge called Trimming, who is not only the Law and the Religion there, but also the store keeper, bar keep and everyone's Boss, like a Hillbilly Roy of Wroxham. He and his toothless serfs make a living crushing impounded vehicles and selling them for scrap, as well as making moonshine that they distribute by helicopter.

When Chuck eventually comes to town, driving a Ford van with an American Eagle airbrushed on its side, the whole dirty enterprise comes tumbling down. The Judge's men keep Chuck pretty busy, and there's a wonderful sequence where he walks along the unmade street being attacked by every guy in town, each of whom he beats up and throws to the ground. He's so assured in his mission he even has time to fall in love. Finally, fed up with the hassle, he finds his brother and a CB and calls in his truck driving pals, who trash the place and leave it in smouldering ruins. 

Chuck has a final face off with a fairly secondary figure who is elevated to chief villain at the last moment. They have a slo mo slug fest in a corral that is also home to an angry, tethered horse. When Chuck finally kicks the guy to whatever Valhalla hicks go to, the horse jumps over the fence, free at last. This is America, man, fuck with freedom, you'll get the flat sole of the wrathful boot of REAL justice.

Two additional features that particularly struck me about this homely but never hokey production: 

1. Chuck is no ordinary trucker, also being a Karate instructor who specialises in Third Eye Manifestation. He does this wearing a black open necked shirt with a gold sequined collar.

2. Secondly, the brilliant Jack Nance is featured in a supporting role. This film was made in 1977, the same year that Eraserhead was finally finished. Nance keep his cowboy hat on at all times, presumably to hide his Lynchian pompadour.  I miss that guy a lot.

A fun film, but then, hey, I like Chuck Norris. 

VELVET SMOOTH

d. Michael L. Fink (1976)

Blaxploitation essentially presents an Afrocentric world where super hip, super smart, super fly black people easily swat away Whitey's conventions and rewrite injustices for themselves. It's a macho, often unconscionably sexist place, but there is also room for distaff John Shafts: beautiful, intelligent, strong women who can kick arse just as well as their male counterparts. Sometimes, as with the Pam Grier characters Coffy and Foxy Brown, our heroines are driven to action by revenge or necessity; sometimes, like Cleopatra Jones and the wonderfully and even more improbably named Velvet Smooth they're just preternaturally cool and in charge from the get go. 

Velvet (Johnnie Hill, who gives a slightly stilted but appealing performance and only ever appeared on screen in this one film) is a sassy and switched on private eye investigating a hostile and violent takeover of her ex-boyfriends crime syndicate. That's the story, a fluid ounce in a quart pot. Velvet is calm and collected and sleeps with whoever she damn pleases. She has two girlfriends who help her out, and they're a formidable team, so much so that they solve the mystery in about fifteen minutes and then have to hang around for the rest of the movie.

The crime lord is a surprisingly nice guy, who spends his spare time having pillow fights and has a very distracting braided pig tail hanging out of the back of his afro. He's played by a gentleman called Owen Wat-Son, a surname I'm familiar with but have never seen spelled in quite that way before. Wat-Son was also a martial arts instructor, and was responsible for the interminable fight scenes here, where the same dozen guys get beaten up again and again, one after the other*, really, really slowly. Rather cheekily, Wat-Son has a featured fight of his own, which is notable for having most of the action sped up to make him look shit hot, but nevertheless remains more Benny Hill than Bruce Lee.

Clearly filmed on the fly on the streets and in hastily reconfigured and re-purposed borrowed rooms (you can see the light patches where pictures were recently hanging), Velvet Smooth fails to live up to the sophisticated promise of its title in almost every way but has an endearing earnestness about it, as well as a Kojak gag that must have been out of date by the time the film crept into selected cinemas.

* Why do villains never attack en masse? If you greatly outnumber your opponent, it's moronic to give them the advantage of being able to knock you off individually. Pile in!

KUNG FU KILLERS

d. Brian Trenchard-Smith (1974)

It’s difficult for today people to comprehend just how big Kung Fu was back in the 1970s. Previously seen as an ancient, esoteric, slightly shifty thing that foreigners did, the phenomenal success of Enter the Dragon turned the rabid consumers and novelty seekers of the West onto all arts martial, including karate style pyjamas which my brother and I plagued our parents for and then wore to chop and high kick the shit out of each other. 

I can remember being ill in 1974 with whooping cough, sat out on a blanket in the back garden (it was the Summer, not some extreme form of quarantine) and reading a big pile of Marvel comics, every single one of which featured either a black or Asian protagonist absolutely expert in martial arts. Later on, my Mum called me in to watch Hong Kong Phooey. Man, those were literally the days, being approximately twenty four hour periods of solar rotation that have now passed.

Australia, being a mere 3,500 miles from Hong Kong, was naturally very excited by the Kung Fu boom, and this documentary fronted by a hairy stuntman and climber called Grant Page profiles some of the stars of the genre, including inexplicably pleased with himself countryman George Lazenby and the indefatigable American star Stuart Whitman, already nearly 25 years into his career and looking smooth and in control, qualities he would use to sinister effect in his role as the Reverend Jim Jones in the 1979 film Guyana: Crime of the Century.   

Both men are obviously excited by the trend, not least, I suspect, because it pays them the sort of money that they can no longer command in Hollywood. When Lazenby, a self-proclaimed free soul and searcher of truth, is asked what he has learned so far he smirks and says 'beware of the Chinese'. And why not? As the arrogant occidental narrator states: 'they are not just a nation of waiters'.

Stuntman Page is not a particularly engaging or knowledgeable interviewer, but he does get into a fight – twice – with martial arts star Carter Wong, something that Michael Parkinson never did, unless you count his tussle with Emu (I don’t). Page spends some time showing off to semi-naked women in Bottoms Up, 'an upper class topless bar' if that isn't a moronic oxymoron. He also spends a lot of screen time equating martial arts to his own sport, climbing, pointing out that he uses a lot of the same muscles and has iron will power, etc. What do you expect from someone who wears a vest instead of a shirt?  

Ultimately, we don’t learn a massive amount about how to attain 'strength, peace of mind, and a love of life through the apparent study of violence' but it's an interesting period piece, full of frenetically action packed film clips of people being kicked in the face. We also see the bit from Game of Death where Bruce Lee tears out a fistful of Chuck Norris' chest hair, a spectacle I never, ever, ever tire of watching. 

STONER

d. Huang Feng (1974)
 
Originally planned as a $10m international blockbuster starring Bruce Lee, Sonny Chiba and George Lazenby, The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss was understandably compromised by Lee’s sudden death, which left a huge superstar shaped void (and no longer guaranteed box office success) and prompted the enigmatic Chiba to pack his samurai sword and go back to Japan. Rapidly regrouping, the supremely practical producer Raymond Chow slashed the budget by 9/10ths and had the ambitious script hastily rewritten to accommodate its remaining star, rangy Australian Lazenby, the man who walked out on the James Bond franchise claiming he didn’t need the degradation and could make more money elsewhere (his sole outing, 1969's On Her Majesty’s Secret Service once  underrated, is now vastly overrated. Objective reality: it’s not bad).

The end result, renamed Stoner in a number of territories to further emphasise the centrality of Lazenby’s character, is a shaggy but exhilarating mix of crime, espionage and crunching kung fu, centring around the invention, distribution and use of a new drug called Happy Pills, an opium based aphrodisiac and mind blower that has flooded the far east causing instant addiction and is now threatening places where white people live. After the drug related death of his sister, the moustachioed and slightly detestable Joshua Stoner decides to investigate, striding through the temples, night clubs and back alleys of Hong Kong in an incredibly conspicuous way, not least because he is at least a foot taller than everybody else.

Lazenby is as much tailors dummy as actor, but he does exhibit what he brought to his uneven interpretation of Bond, a sudden, brutal physicality that manifests itself in a number of fast, bruising and very convincing fight scenes. He’s no Bruce Lee, of course, but he hands out (and takes) a number of comprehensive beatings, and looks committed and convincing as he does so, aided and abetted by crunching and slapping noises dubbed loudly over the action.

He later teams up with a Taiwanese undercover cop played by the rather marvellous Angela Mao, part mouse, part lion, and the last half of the film plays out like a Bond film: they infiltrate the billionaire villain’s underground lair (he doesn’t have a white cat, instead, rather curiously, he has a spinning desk), then kill him in an interesting and grisly way and blow everything up. The End.

Additional highlights include the discordant electronics that play when anyone mentions drugs, Stoner’s taupe and caramel wardrobe and cloak clad Rupert, a deep voiced, statuesque black love guru who leads a flaky hippy sex cult made up of really scrawny white blokes and a number of dirty faced women who greedily and obscenely suck ice lollies when the Happy Pills start to kick in.