Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Showdown in Little Tokyo!

 

WE
WERE IN FACT
SHOGUNS N SHEEIT

At a lean 75 minutes, Showdown in Little Tokyo shows just how little plot and characterisation you can get away with in favour of action and banter and still produce something more entertaining than anything your normoid friends bug you to watch on Net Flix Plus Prime. Dolph Lundgren is the weeaboo cop out to avenge his parents' death at the hands of a yakuza thug. Brandon Lee is his bemused half-Azn partner who has no idea who Asuka and Rei are, or why it matters which is best. Tia Carrere is the hottie in the white tank top who falls for Lundgren's BWC.

Actual dialogue.

And Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is the villain, who is such an asshole he lets an underling dismember himself and present his severed finger to him in penance for failure, before killing him anyway.

In another scene he films himself decapitating a crack ho and then plays it back to Carrere while he rapes her. That's not a joke: he's just hilariously cuntish at every opportunity.

Lundgren and Lee team up to investigate Tagawa's nefarious plan to sell meth or whatever, which leads them through such cinematic vistas as this sushi bar where mobsters eat lunch off of naked chicks. I'm not aware that such places really exist but since knowing anything about Japanese culture has been rendered low-status by the weeb-shaming endemic in the neurotypical west, I'm going to feign ignorance and assume this is a ubiquitous Japanese custom.

Censored for icky female nipples.

Although it's nominally a buddy cop flick, there's a notable lack of any sort of chief or commissioner character dressing down our heroes for their reckless and flagrantly illegal antics, and the writers are well aware that they're not even trying to sell these guys as cops, as in one scene they emerge from a battle with the yakuza to see a cop car and high-tail it themselves.

The genius of lines like this is like a forgotten technology.

In fact, it's one of the few films I've seen that could stand to have a little more of that fillery background stuff, as you can easily imagine early drafts featuring more scenes of Lee listening incredulously as Lundgren waxes otaku about Godzilla movies and the power levels of Dragon Ball Z characters. The movie was cut heavily as a result of studio meddling and received a limited release to join the vast majority of movies that have generally been forgotten. On the other hand, there's nothing in the final cut that would suggest the plot ever involved much actual police work.

Lundgren demonstrates the sophisticated techniques familiar from JCS interrogation videos.

It's moreso just a movie about a couple of affable Chads becoming bros and killing an asshole in spectacular fashion. Lundgren and Lee are so likable you don't even really mind the movie skipping over the traditional tensions-between-the-unalike cops-gradually-giving-way-to-mutual-respect routine, because in real life any two guys with jaws like these two would just bond and excel effortlessly anyway. Were Hollywood not driven by the seething resentment of the dweebs, this type of Chadcore would prevail over the box office year round.

Somewhere Elliott Rodger is throwing another bitchfit.

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 18. The Fell Civil War (Part 2)!

 Previously...

Theme: Snake (Slip On) - Elektradrive

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tango & Cash!

May we all have as much fun at our respective trials.

Few genres are as uniformly mediocre as the 80s buddy cop flick, in which an odd couple of cops (or one cop and one crook, etc.) team up and bicker over differences until they learn a valuable lesson and defeat the villains of the day. Most iterations had a black guy and a white guy, and ranged from benign pleas for us to all-just-get-along to, well, Lethal Weapon 2.

This movie is why South Africa now has 70 murders a day and a government that proudly declares it doesn't have to provide its people electricity if it doesn't want to.

Others made the difference in backgrounds something else, like Red Heat (American cop meets strongman late-stage Soviet cop) or overlooked 90s variant Showdown in Little Tokyo (ethnically Japanese cop meets ripped weeaboo cop). Finally the genre mutated into prestige HBO drama with True Detective (good ol' boy chudjak meets fedora nihilist), with strangely kino results.

Spoilers: this show trolled atheoids so hard by making their Shadow the Hedgehog stand-in the coolest guy ever and the nominally Christian hypocrite a weak-willed slob only to have the fedora find Christ in the last scene. Neckbeards still jiggle with rage-filled sobs about it to this day.

But it is 1989's forgotten populist masterstroke, Tango & Cash, that most classically hearkens back to the original odd-couple formula, with the snob-meets-slob dynamic at its core. Sylvester Stallone gamely sends himself up as an erudite, fashion-conscious cop who plays the stock market and calls his own Rambo character a pussy, while Kurt Russell is his rough-around-the-edges foil, who spends most of the movie hitting on Stallone's sister (Teri Hatcher, Tomorrow Never Dies). 

Mid female lead of 1989 (colourised).

The plot is simple: supercops Ray Tango (Stallone) and Gabe Cash (Russell) get framed by arch-villain Jack Palance after interfering once too often with his drug empire. They're sent to live in general population in a maximum security prison full of scumbags they've previously busted.

Soap-dropping jokes are made.

Our heroes receive a warm welcome to the big house.

This shot says a lot about the duality of man.

Never mind that we've clearly seen that they're guilty of violations both technical and egregious, including brutality that would make Dirty Harry raise an eyebrow, which Palance could easily have leveraged against them. The movie breezily skips over that little detail, perhaps because the script was being constantly rewritten on the fly during a troubled production presided over by giant-spider-in-Superman-demanding Hollywood folktale Jon Peters.

The end credits freeze-frame literally telling you to disregard objections to the nonsensical plot would be a red flag if the movie weren't so much fun.

Realising their days are numbered, the eponymous duo break out of prison and begin pursuing their revenge against Palance's minions, including Requin (Brion James), who shrugged off the shackles of a stock role as scripted to make his character speak solely in Bri'ish clichés.

Actual dialogue.

Finally, with help from a shameless ripoff of James Bond's Q, Cash and Tango storm Palance's hideout and defeat him, owing largely to Palance and Requin's classic bad-guy blunder of forgetting to announce they have a hostage until after their small army of faceless thugs are already dead.

In another blatant Bond nod, Palance has pet mice. However, while Blofeld just idly strokes his cat while dealing with his underlings, Palance really seems to adore his little pets.

Tango & Cash was the last movie released in the 1980s and feels like the perfect sendoff to an era. As uneven, derivative and poorly paced as it may be, it's completely satisfying entertainment. The whole movie is peppered with male bonding banter that could kill the tone like Marvel's jokes-per-minute mandate, but it never does because it is the tone and is completely unselfconscious about it. Watch this movie; you will grin like a tard from beginning to end.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Warriors of the Apocalypse!

This title font looks like something from a straight-to-DVD Barbie movie from the 90s.

Just as Albert Pyun used the marketability of the post-apocalyptic genre in the 80s as a springboard to explore his noir detective and Walter Hill fantasies, so Warriors of the Apocalypse, AKA Searchers of the Voodoo Mountain, quickly veers off in the direction of lost-civilisation discovery flicks like Siren of Atlantis, Hammer's She, or The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. This article contains spoilers, but since the movie makes no sense it would be more truthful to say this article contains non-sequiturs.

Inside this aesthetic are two wolves. One is Rob Halford. The other is the cop from the Village People. But I'm not sure which is which.

Our protagonists are a Mad Maxian rabble of post-nuke leatherbois who seem to tool around the desert wasteland aimlessly until, as luck would have it, they run into a mysterious immortal who intervenes in a fight with an enormous fatass and his parasol-bearer, apparently over the plight of two black guys he keeps as slaves and feeds on scraps. Like everything in movies, this was probably meant as brown-nosing progressive sociopolitical commentary but ended up hilariously raycist instead.

I have a dream that one day little black filmmakers and little white filmmakers alike will stop embarrassing themselves with this crap.

The mysterious immortal leads our heroes into a lush jungle that apparently exists right next door to the desert, where they are immediately attacked by a succession of tribal hunter-gatherer types ranging from Pygmies to Amazons to this guy:

Remember Star Wars Kid? This is him now. Feel old yet?

At first the Village People easily defeat their attackers, since they have firearms that appear to shoot explosive projectiles, while the hunter-gatherer bros have spears and aren't much good with them. They run into more trouble with the Pygmies, whose leader, this vaguely androgynous shaman type in spoopy makeup whom I shall call Marilyn Manlet, has the ability to heal them back from death with psychic powers.

*Eric Cartman voice* neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh, pewwwww

This leads to ROUND TWO, in which the Pygmies catch up to our heroes and proceed to beat on them with wildly improbable success.

It doesn't seem to occur to this guy that he can just pick up his assailant and throw him literally about twenty feet with no effort at all.

Finally the Village People reach the Land of the Yik-Yak, or to be more precise, the land of Sheila, whose name might be a sly reference to She, and her underappreciated high priest, Julian Assange.

Sheila has kind of a Brazilian drag queen thing going on. She more like >she amirite?

Much like the real Assange, this character does nothing wrong but gets destroyed for it anyway, making this B-joint oddly prescient.

The Village People find their new home is a paradise of plenty, with all the food and female attention they could want - only they can't leave. Since everywhere else in the world seems to be a post-nuke desert, I'm not even sure why this condition strikes them as a problem, but they have to pull the thread, and soon all manner of secrets about the Land of the Yik-Yak are revealed, such as that Assange has managed to make everyone eternally young and have psychic powers by harnessing an underground reactor, because at least one 80s screenwriter was still going by the 50s B-movie consensus that atomic energy is basically magic.

The aesthetic shifts from Mad Max ripoff to jungle adventure to Dr No lair hit like a Mr Bungle song.

The movie comes to a head when Sheila seduces the leader of the Village People and openly plots with him to team up to get rid of Assange right in front of Assange, prompting a showdown in which Sheila and Assange shoot lasers at each other from their eyes. During this confrontation, radioactive mutants show up and revolt, causing Sheila to go full Samson option and blow up her entire compound with a cannon hidden in her throne.

Boy, that escalated quickly. That really got out of hand.

Perhaps, as in greatest movie of all time Zardoz, the idea is that the phony utopia bred in its spoiled rulers a desire for self-destruction; that the essence of fulfilling life is found in struggle; that Howard's triumphalist normative barbarism trumps Lovecraft's neurotic death-grip on the guard rails of civilisation as the height of man's potential. Maybe this movie is actually profound and great. And wouldn't that be the most shocking twist of all?

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: 0.

SHOULDER PADS: they seem to be incorporated in most of the Village People's character designs.

CUSTOM CARS: not even one.

MUTANTS: some guys with radiation burns who limp around in the underground lair.

GOGGLES: we're counting gas masks so yes.

TOTAL: 3/5 - the most post-apocalyptic Henry Ryder Haggard pastiche ever filmed.