Movie review: Karate Cop (1991)
Before settling in to what I hoped would be an enjoyable — if mindless — action movie, I had no idea that Karate Cop (1991) was actually the sequel to Omega Cop (1989). There are no words to describe the feeling of pure joy I experienced when Ron Marchini entered his first scene wearing the same “Special Police” cap he spent five minutes of screen-time chasing during the earlier film.
Unfortunately, while the film does retain Ron Marchini’s John Travis character and John Travis’ hat, it does not retain Adam West, which is excusable given that he blew himself up with a grenade at the end of the last movie. This lack of camp value is something that would negatively impact the film.
When we last saw Travis, he was swimming in the clean waters of Montana with three post-apocalyptic babes. He had found an oasis of hope in a future gone mad. However, as this film opens, he has gone back to his old profession of beating up random derelicts and troublemakers in the name of enforcing a system of laws that have long since been ignored by the remaining members of society. His opening scene involves him and his dog rescuing a woman who very much resembles Rachel Lee Cook (fortunately for my brain, she is in fact named Rachel).
Rachel is played by a young actress named Carrie Chambers. The two most prominent credits in her IMDB profile are as “Chairwoman” in The Bikini Carwash Company II (yes, they made a sequel — a nation demanded it) and as Kelly Preston’s body double in Love is a Gun. I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate on which caused her to be cast in this film.
Rachel invites Travis back to her base and promises him a hot meal. At the good guys’ headquarters, Travis meets the “Freebies” — a bunch of strategically dirtied young orphans who fancy themselves as freedom fighters. Here, Rachel introduces the film’s very poorly executed McGuffin: a Star Trek-like teleporter.
The Freebies HQ contains a broken teleporter and all it requires for operation is a replacement crystal. This teleporter would allow the orphans to escape to greener pastures as long as those greener pastures also contain a functioning receiver teleporter. In what was presumably a neat cost-cutting move, the audience is never actually shown what is at the destination end, so we take it on faith that they would actually be in a better place. The most plausible thing about the teleporter is that it’s controlled via a battered and ink-stained Commodore Vic-20 (the movie was made in 1991, and the Vic-20 was obsolete even then).
Travis decides to help and — leaving his dog behind (the dog disappears until the end of the film) — sets off on a motorcycle to find and return the crystal.
Karate Cop is a hard movie to like; it’s an even harder movie to stay awake through. When I watch a bad movie at home, I’ll find my attention beginning to wander. I’ll wonder if perhaps there isn’t a more interesting 29 inches of space somewhere else in the living room I could be directing my eyes towards instead of the TV. In this case, my eyes felt that a more entertaining sight would be to look directly at the inside of my eye-lids. It’s an awful cliché to say that a film is a cure for insomnia, but in my two viewings I found it incredibly difficult to stay conscious both times.
Ron Marchini is a sort of poor man’s Chuck Norris. He spends most of his screen-time kickboxing a seemingly limitless number of masked or hooded bandits. The fight scenes drag on and on and on. It’s a relief to get to the end of one, even though you know that the end of such a sequence inevitably results in a humorless and banal would-be catch-phrase, delivered in a dull, flat monotone.
Like Omega Cop, this future is populated by roaming bands of dirty deviants with nothing better to do all day than stand around holding crowbars, planks of wood and metal bars, waiting for a stranger to pass by so they can chase him. Unlike the previous film, in this version of the future, no one has a nice coat, just wife-beaters, stained flannel shirts and dirty, collared shirts with parallel slashes in them.
The slave trade from the previous film has been replaced with an illegal drug trade (although no one in the movie is seen using, buying or selling drugs). The film’s main bad guy is called Supreme Commander Lincoln, a tubby guy with a handle-bar mustache and bleached blond hair. He spends most of his time in a gladiator-style fighting area watching extras covered in filth unsuccessfully attempt to defeat his champion.
SCL’s main henchman is an overactor named Snaker. He’s a gang leader with a strangely deformed face, long stringy hair and a noticeable bald spot. Snaker constantly refers to himself in the third person in a series of loud, oddly phrased shouts. It isn’t much, but his gang does contribute something new to film lore. While other movies have often shown individuals hurling Molotov Cocktails, this is my introduction to a Molotov Shopping Cart. Well played, Snaker.
One should also note that while David Carradine enjoys a prominent position on the DVD cover and on the cast list, he’s basically here in an extended cameo. His five minutes are as the manager of a greasy spoon diner called Jackass Junction… specializing in rabbit stew and clean water. Strangely enough given their mutual background, Carradine and Marchini do not have a kickboxing fight. Why bring David Carradine into a martial arts movie and not have him perform martial arts?
John Travis’ greatest talent is choosing enemies who scream at the top of their lungs when charging at him from behind and blow any element of surprise they might have had. If they didn’t do that, then they’d save themselves the trouble of many, many minutes of unendurable kickboxing sequences. The movie would be better paced, and it would be tremendously shorter.
This review was originally posted in March 2011.
