As Karate Warrior embarked on his sixth, final and most majestically numbskull quest ever, I found myself overwhelmed with the enormity of it all. After six films, I had spent more time with Karate Warrior than I had with my own father!
Wrestling with the sense of loss now that this journey was finally ending, I found a semblance of peace as I recalled the words of one of the great philosophers of our time who said “here at last, on the shores of the sea… comes the end of our Fellowship. I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.”
And Gandalf the White was right! It was totally ok to shed some tears over Karate Warrior’s last adventure! Tears of laughter!
It all starts at the local watering hole where Karate Warrior and his girlfriend are reminiscing fondly about what happened in Karate Warrior 5. He’s tells her that it seems like only yesterday that she was kidnapped and then asks her what’s happening with the court case against the Penguin! Obviously Karate Warrior has been kicked in the head too many times since he has mistaken their latest adventure with a Batman comic he read.
Karate Warrior can be excused for mixing reality with fantasy though considering what happens next. One of his friends (a fat guy affectionately called Tubby) rides his bike into the limo of an foreign king. Though he is not hurt (blubber doesn’t bruise – it only jiggles) he gets $10,000 from the king.
Tubby announces to his friends that he is going to take them on a vacation to Greece with the money, but first they’re all going on a shopping spree to get really tricked out wardrobes. The viewer is advised at this point to put down his or her beverage and swallow so that no spitting up is involved when we cut to the shopping spree at… JCPenney’s!
After spending about $135 on matching shorts and caps at Penney’s, the boys fly off to Greece where Tubby gets involved in something that makes the Penney’s shopping spree look like the Manhattan Project. Late at night along the shoreline, Tubby encounters a guy with a violin who uses it to summon a mermaid from the depths!
The guy wants a bunch of money to allow Tubby to have access to the mermaid and Tubby manages to convince one of his friends to go along with this plan. In Karate Warrior’s defense, he was not involved in this scheme. Yes, he’s been whacked in the head hundreds of times over the course of six movies, but it’s not like he’s had his brain surgically removed.
Guess what happens next? The guy steals the money and runs away! And the mermaid turns out to be fake! And a man! While I’m no expert in cinema, I think I can safely say that a tranny mermaid is a first in an Italian karate movie.
Writer/director Fabrizio De Angelis knows what made previous hits such as The Karate Kid, Splash, and The Crying Game work and smartly combines them into a story that somehow forces Karate Warrior to not only compete in a karate match, but also a motocross race!
A motocross race? See how Fabrizio brings everything full circle in this movie? Way back in the original Karate Warrior, it was established that before Karate Warrior became the kung fu superhero with the sissiest costume of all time, he was an expert dirt bike racer!
And now, in his final explosive adventure, thousands of miles from home, with everything at stake, he has to lay his Golden Kimono aside and strap on the motorcycle leathers and helmet one last time in a race for glory! And for $2000 for plane tickets back home since Tubby got their tickets stolen in that mermaid debacle.
But what about his karate way of life? Don’t tell me that Fabrizio sent his most prolific hero into the sunset without a last karate battle of the bands! Okay, I won’t! Because it would be a frigging lie! The guy that Karate Warrior beats in the motorcycle race is none other than local karate champ Mustapha!
And guess who it was that helped Karate Warrior win the race by providing him a bike to ride? Mustapha’s disgruntled fiancee! And now, Karate Warrior feels obligated to fight Mustapha in a no holds barred karate dance of death in three days in order to free Mustapha’s fiancee from her engagement!
Three days isn’t much, but it’s more than enough for an extensive training montage to show how out of shape Karate Warrior is. It’s also more than enough time for Karate Warrior’s girlfriend, dad (poor David Warbeck again), and mentor to fly over to Greece and train his out of shape ass back into fighting trim so that he can absorb Mustapha’s beat down for about the last ten minutes of the movie before he gets the go ahead to use the Dragon Punch!
Star Ron Williams who has been Karate Warrior since Karate Warrior 3 demonstrates the karate ability of a goat, but Fabrizio sends everyone home happy by tacking on a epilogue back in the United States where Tubby tries to fake another accident to get more money from the foreign king. The king’s bodyguards respond by slapping him in the face repeatedly while Tubby’s friends watch and laugh! Without question, a satisfyingly abominable and nonsensical send off to the wimpiest and blandest of all big screen karate heroes.
© 2015 MonsterHunter
Yeessssss! You did it! No small task, going through these six (!) horrid little flicks! Amazing how they managed to churn so many sequels, though, considering they never had any central running plot, and nearly all the movies have the same structure. And also amazing was your discovery of Ron Jeremy, of all people, making a cameo in a movie essentially made for kids.
Still, it’s a pity the time where flicks like this one could be released (even on theaters!) is long gone. There was an aura of innocence and fun -and cheapness and lack of talent- that is difficult to find even in the current aspirers for the throne, like Asylum, where everything feels and look manufactured. I guess they were just simpler times.
Is there any other “saga” of the 80’s you may be thinking about reviewing? Perhaps Missing in Action, another staple of the time? (though not bad as KW by any chance)
Totally agree that there’s nothing like this stuff coming out today. Movies like the ones the Asylum releases embrace being cheap and not so great which takes a lot of the fun out of watching them. Karate Warrior and its ilk always seemed oblivious about how terrible they were which of course made them all the more enjoyable.
Other sagas of the era? Missing in Action, Kickboxer or Don the Dragon Wilson’s Bloodfist series are possibilities down the line. Got a lot more Steven Seagal, Gary Daniels and Jeff Wincott to do, too. Also, maybe some stuff from Full Moon. The one series that will likely be reviewed soonest is the Ator series of four films from Joe D’Amato and Alfonso Brescia. How can you go wrong with Italian barbarians?
LOL! Very true! The Ator movies were really, really terrible. Miles O’Keefe, though, always looked like a great, innocent guy. But the movies, oh my! The good thing, they got “better” (funnier) with each further installment! The first had a more or less creative twist at the end. The second, despite being made infamous by MST3000, had MUCH more material. In fact, there is a scene in that movie where one guy accidentally grabs his sword FROM THE BLADE. Though he immediately realizes so and turns the sword around, is tremendously obvious and funny as hell!
The third didn’t star O’keefe! The “star” was a chubby guy in his thirties, who everyone in the flick referred to as being “about to turn 18” (!). He was one of the oldest teenagers I’ve ever seen. And the fourth was quite weird, with O’Keefe back but barely speaking (not much of a loss) and without the “Ator” brand at the title.
You are right! How can you go wrong with italian barbarians? Conan, Rambo and Mad Max were the top italian ripoffs of the 80`s. What a great time!
By the way, if you want to see a modern movie where the filmmaker was totally oblivious to the horridness of his work, watch “Birdemic”. It’s truly terrible in every level, and somehow the guy behind it thought it was good enough to be comercially released, even without finished effects or anything resembling a budget or competent actors.
It became a cult classic, but when he released the sequel, he had lost his charming “innocence” and made an intentional, outright “bad” movie, which took all the fun out of it.
“Missing in Action” gets my vote!
Braddock has finally invaded MonsterHunter! Missing in Action (1984)