Anna (Emille Davazac) has been voicing concerns over her boyfriend's behaviour recently, as Paul, also known as Stingray (Don Niam) has thrown himself into his competitive sport of kickboxing, so much so that he does not feel satisfied unless his opponent is battered, bleeding and seriously injured by the end of the bout. But his savagery does not stay in the ring, he takes it home with him as well and Anna is thinking she has had enough. Though just how unbalanced Stingray can be is something nobody could have anticipated...
This was not just the story of that particular nutter, for he was, as you will have probably guessed, the baddie in Undefeatable, and our heroine was martial arts champion and dedicated movie star in the vein Cynthia Rothrock, here playing waitress and streetfighter Kristi. She had been cracking heads of ne'erdowells on the silver screen for about ten years when this was made, although this example went straight to video outside the Chinese markets as Hong Kong auteur Godfrey Ho was pulling his usual trick of making separate versions of his works depending on where they were being put out.
So if Cynth's oeuvre was less seeing the inside of a cinema by this stage and more seeing the inside of a living room on a Friday night, accompanied by beer and pizza most likely, it may have looked to be neglected as action movies of her variety were capitalised on by blockbusters which took the idea of a kick-ass female and translated it to actresses far less adept in combat than she was. However, the arrival of the internet managed to give her profile a boost when the final fight from Undefeatable was uploaded to certain video sharing sites and became one of those most precious of things, the internet meme.
Not that the grand finale of this was any more ridiculous than what happened during the rest of it, but in isolation it provided the kind of WTF? entertainment that was only a bonus to the information superhighway surfers seeking giggles. One of the keys to this absurdity was that no matter how ludicrous it became, everyone involved appeared to be taking it uncommonly seriously, even the comic relief, so the theme about rape being a bad thing, something all reasonable people would agree with, was untertaken with utmost sincerity yet the surroundings simply rendered any such moralising understandable, but misguided in this context.
Especially if they wanted to be making a statement: this might have been better off without that kind of business. Nevertheless, you wouldn't be narrowing your eyes and stroking your chin too much during the watching of this as you'd be laughing too much. Our be-mulleted killer has a strange modus operandi as typical of serial murderers in efforts like this, being that every woman he sees with shoulder length hair and a flower print dress he mistakes for Anna, who has since departed (we never find out where), whereupon he breaks out the kung fu moves and abducts them, often with a gratuitous Bruce Lee reference (er, wasn't he always the good guy?). Soon the victims are discovered killed with a special punch and with their eyes torn out.
And when you find out what Stingray does with the eyes, well, let's say it makes a change from little plastic divers or treasure chests with bubbles emanating from them. This cannot go on, so when Kristi's sister falls prey to him she teams up with local detective Nick DiMarco (John Miller) in spite of having no formal police training and they set about tracking down the psycho. With Rothrock still throwing herself into the action sequences, and at times flexing her thespian muscles histrionically, you could not say she was not giving this her all, and Ho offered her many opportunities to beat up large men with some truly bizarre tough girl dialogue (listen out for the Tupperware reference). Its cheapness both financially and as far as how sensible it was meant that should you have a high tolerance for so bad it's good cinema, even of the straight to video strain, then you would have a good time with this. Bad taste, idiotic, overambitious, it was all those things, so laugh it up. Music by Todd M. Hahn.
