Night of the Kickfighters (1988)
Do you love movies starring former kickboxing champions? But when you watch the movies you love starring former kickboxing champions are you also a bit put off by their God-like physiques and their infallible way of handling any situation thrust at them? You know what I'm talking about. While watching a Gary Daniels, Olivier Gruner, or Richard Norton coolly dispatching armies of thugs with a perfectly timed flurry of kicks, punches, and elbows, even as you are in awe, you are also a bit resentful. Why couldn't that be you with those black belts, perfectly ripped stomach, and Sugar Ray Leonard as a best friend? Don't you deserve it as much as those guys do? Um, no. They've busted their asses all their lives to get where they are, you're a lazy loser whose only aspiration is to kick, punch and elbow his way through a bag of Fritos.
How cool would it be though if there was a kickboxing-champ-turned-action-hero that us mere mortals could emulate? What if there was a guy taking on impossible missions to save chicks and the world that wouldn't be a threat to our fragile masculine egos? Wouldn't such a fellow be in for a long and successful career with his regular Joe qualities? No. Not really. In fact, the same things about such a guy that would cause him not to threaten us normal dudes would be exactly the same things that would makes laugh uncomfortably whenever this regular kickboxing guy foolishly attempted to strut his lame stuff.
Do you really think you want to see an out of shape, balding, middle-aged loser huff and puff his way through a series of fight scenes so badly staged that a professional wrestler in his first match would cringe at their amateurishness? Is there any possible entertainment value in watching a couple of kicks delivered with deadly slowness to guys who are even worse fighters than our hero? Guys who are seven feet tall, about one hundred pounds and don't look like they've fought anything more serious in their life than a trying to find a pair of pants to fit their bizarre frame? Guys so slow that our hero has to practically stand around so long that he has time to read Kickboxing For Dummies while waiting for them to muster a half hearted punch or kick in retaliation? Can any of that be truly the stuff of kickboxing movie legend? You damn right it can!
The video box declares that Andy Bauman is something called the "World Karate Kickboxing Champion" and has starred in such classic films as Ninja 2, Ninja 3, and Night Kill! The fact that I could not verify any of these credentials didn't bother me in the least. After all, just because the government has no record of my three tours of duty in Vietnam with the Navy Seals, doesn't mean it didn't happen. The stuff I did for them was "off the books" and you can't really expect our government to acknowledge every black op I get involved with. There's international diplomacy to consider after all.
So just because none of us has ever heard of Andy Bauman and his accomplishments doesn't mean they didn't happen. And just because he looks like a crabby middle management guy at a bank doesn't mean that he didn't kick a lot of ass about twenty before he made this movie. Besides, movies starring awesome kickboxing guys are a dime a dozen. Yes, you can brag all about how cool Gary Daniels was when he crashed that tanker truck into that school bus or how Richard Norton fought a guy with his shirt or how Jeff Speakman was just Jeff Speakman, but you'd be hard pressed to name which of their mega-wow movies these scenes came from. That time when Andy Bauman got thrown out of a second story window by the guy that played Lurch in those Addams Family movies? Night of the Kickfighters all the way, baby!
Night Of The Kickfighters proves to be memorably horrible on all levels. From the nonexistent fighting abilities of all the actors to the nonexistent filmmaking abilities of everyone behind the camera, Night Of The Kickfighters is a veritable symphony of bad editing, worse special effects, and a story so woefully wrong, you'd think they were trying to be campy on purpose! How else to explain the presence of Adam West as the father of the kidnapped girl who also happens to be the guy that's developed a smart laser than can target people on the battlefield based on scanning their eye, even with their back to the laser! Except that Adam West is the best performer in the whole movie!
When Adam West is the guy providing the dramatic heft to your kickboxing action picture, you know there are problems! The movie was clearly a stinkheap from the beginning, but it wasn't until Andy began to assemble his team that would assist him in rescuing the girl that I realized we were in for something a little more special than the usual five day, $50,000 film. Socrates is a guy who owns a strip bar and I suppose he's called Socrates because he's smart. At least he was reading a book at his strip club - I never did notice anything else about him that made me think he was smart. The fact that he was buddies with Andy kind of told me he was the opposite. And his strip club was really just a regular bar with one gal in a swimsuit dancing on an a stage that was about four foot long and two feet wide, just set up off to the side of the bar! Then there's the worst bar fight in the history of bar fights that happens for no reason! A couple of guys start brawling and Socrates and Andy embarrass themselves by wading into with their inept skills!
As hideous as that was, nothing could prepare you for another member of Andy's team. I am talking about Aldo the magician of course. Aldo demonstrates some of his magic skills on Andy including the self-inflating decoy designed to screw with the kidnappers' henchmen when they invade the fortress to rescue the girl. One of the greatest moments of home video I've ever been a part of has to be when Aldo whips this thing out, it inflates and turns out to be blow up doll dressed up as a ninja! How did Andy not fall over laughing, his flabby sides cramping up, when he saw that? And I'm not sure whether this is better or worse, but during the actual mission, Aldo uses inflatable dinosaurs dispatched throughout the fortress to confuse the guards! And one of the guards even delivers a roundhouse kick to one of the T. Rexs! You probably won't see that in a Van Damme movie!
The whole movie is filled with startlingly awful moments like this. The lady villain of the piece sneers and snarls while prancing around in a blue jumpsuit straight out of some late 1960s superspy movie. A guy driving a limo declares that he's going to lose a couple of people tailing him and we're treated to scenes of a limo trying to outrun a Dodge Charger and a couple of vans. A girl dresses up as a ninja and surprises her sister in the bathtub because she's upset that her sister is getting married! Andy even has his own version of James Bond's Q named Bomber who presents him with a heatseeking arrow to use with his mini-crossbow and the classic throwing star hidden in the shoe gadget!
And no one ever lets on that they're in on the joke! In fact, it's all taken so deadly seriously that one of Andy's team is killed in some microwave gizmo and Andy spends the last moments of the film contemplating his loss on a rock as the sunsets and the nauseating ballad of a theme song plays before the credits roll. On the one hand, it's a shame that we can't confirm whether Andy actually made any other films since it would be interesting to see where he'd go from here. On the other hand, I can't imagine where he could possibly go from here. If your video library was a travelling carnival, Night Of The Kickfighters is one of those strangely deformed freaks that would be exhibited in an area separate from the rest of your kickboxing flicks. Please note: in consideration of their delicate sensibilities, under no circumstances will women and children be admitted to this attraction without being accompanied by a paying adult male! Or an inflatable ninja!