Gobsmacking Cinema: KILLPOINT (1984)

FONGSPLOITATION LIVES!

I'd like to take this opportunity to offer a little heads-up for any of you in the UK with access to the digital TV channels Movies4men and Movies4men2. They show a lot of forgotten movies (some criminally so, but most justifiably so) and more often than not the late night schedules are filled with the kind of tosh that Channel 5 used to fill up their weekend late night schedules with before they suddenly tried to become respectable. The upshot however is that there are some real gems of cult cinema lurking in the schedules during the wee hours. From spaghetti westerns such as DJANGO, CALIFORNIA and VENGEANCE to classic Jess Franco Eurosleaze (VENUS IN FURS, 99 WOMEN) there's some real treasure there.

Obviously, being me, I want to talk about one of the trashiest of the trash though - a film so bad that the sole reason for it featuring in my semi-regular Gobsmacking Cinema series is its sheer lovable crapness. It's an 80s action flick which could loosely be described as a martial arts cop thriller. However, it could more accurately be described as a jaw-droppingly bad cauldron of insanity and violence. And poodles.

The film in question is the classic - okay, I lied, it's not classic at all, at least not in the sense of the word that normal people use - KILLPOINT.

Where does one begin to describe a vision of brilliance such as KILLPOINT? How about the cast...

KILLPOINT features Cameron Mitchell, star of many a dreadful-but-lovable exploitation movie, not least of which was the original version of THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (the old video nasty, not the awful Tobe Hooper remake), who portrays a crimeboss who is violently insane, mistreats women constantly and... has a pet poodle.

He's joined by heroic cop Richard Roundtree, who of course is famous for being a guest star in the TV series THE FRESH PRINCE OF... nah, just kidding, he was of course SHAFT. I mean the original SHAFT, not the pointless remake one. That one was some Jedi guy who talks about what French people call burgers, or something.

The star of the film however, and God alone knows why, is Leo Fong, a cop who never seems to crack a smile. This could be a result of the rape and murder of his wife (an ultimately irrelevant plot point that is delivered in a hilariously bad piece of dialogue between two non-actors also playing cops), or it might just be because he's such a terrible actor.

Fong can't act; he's got a really bad hairstyle; he just seems to mumble all the time; he's clearly too old to be the martial arts star that the movie needs, and in fact his only qualification for indulging in martial arts is the fact that he appears to be from the right ethnic background. Seriously, when he starts kicking ass, it's with all the balletic grace of your grandad dancing to Carl Douglas records after one two many glasses of port.

Fong and Roundtree are paired up to solve the problem of a group of criminals (working for Mitchell, of course) who are committing robberies but with a new twist. They don't want any witnesses but rather than wear masks, they choose the more interesting approach of shooting everyone in the building, leading to some wacky action sequences in which they shoot up the entire clientele of a Chinese restaurant and then repeat the stunt in a supermarket.

Actually, Fong and Roundtree may very well be partners in theory, but in truth they appear on screen together very rarely. Once, if I remember correctly. Still, that doesn't matter so much because you have other wonderful partnerships anyway, such as Mitchell's teaming up with Stack Pierce as the psychotic criminal Nighthawk, who seems hellbent on shooting pretty much anyone he meets. You've also got the two cops I mentioned earlier who spend most of the film talking to each other on the phone. Clearly not professional actors, one of them looks like he's never seen a movie camera before ("rabbit in headlights" springs to mind) while the other talks in a strangley muffled way that suggests he's had his jaw wired shut.

But there's so much more to enjoy than just bad acting. There's badly executed martial arts; mindnumbingly unconvincing stunts; the finest array of moustaches outside of the pantheons of 70s soft rock; there's the wonderful habit people have of flying up in the air in spectacular fashion when they get shot; there's the dancing of the least erotic strippers ever; there's the synthesiser score that sounds cheap even for the 80s; there's even, when Fong readies himself to make his final stand against the bad guys, a cop-in-training montage! Yep, that's right, TEAM AMERICA fans, a proper, honest-to-goodness, 80s-action-movie-cliche training montage!

It's difficult to emphasise how simultaneously terrible and magnificent this film is. It should be required viewing for anyone who ever wants to study film, if for no other reason than to provide a checklist of everything you shouldn't do, and yet it's just so much damn fun!

The best news of all? Fong and Mitchell also starred together in another 80s film (which I'm sure is just as much of a turkey as this one) entitled LOW BLOW. Joy of joys, it's also been aired on TV thanks to those good M4M folks so expect an appraisal of that one at some time in the near future too.

In the meantime, I believe this film turned up on a budget DVD somewhere so either pick it up or else keep checking the M4M listing for the next showing (it seems to be on every week). You will/won't regret it.

P.S. I should point out that I didn't come up with the name "fongsploitation". It was the work of Marty McKee, who writes the rather good Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot blog, which I urge you to check out, particularly as he's currently working his way through the wonderful FRIDAY THE 13TH series of films. I've always wanted to do a FRIDAY 13TH marathon here, but I'm too lazy.