I want to talk about something that bothers me. Here it is, the closing months of 2009 (say it "two-thousand nine") and I've put up with it for nearly ten years. But now, it's time to stop. I now refer to the year as "twenty-oh-nine" and if no one wants to follow me, that's okay. But so help me, if people keep calling the year "two-thousand ten" in two and a half months then I am going to pitch a fit. Is it really that hard to call it by two-sets of sub-centennial numbers? Or are we still, somehow, afraid that the ghosts of COBOL (no, that's NOT supposed to be "Kobol," and frak you for suggesting it, mother-frakker...) haven't been competely pushed out of our machines? Are we concerned that in the year 9999 (and yes, I will call it "nintey-nine ninety-nine") all our computers or similar technology will take us back to year 0? I don't know. That certainly seems unreasonable, sure, but why are we hanging to desperatlely to "two-thousand"? I've heard many people refer to the coming year as "two-thousand ten" many, many times, and I guess what bothers me the most about it is that I'm going to get weird looks when I say things like "twenty eleven" and "twenty thirteen." Jerks...
I also want to talk about something else, something that doesn't bother me at all. Something that brings me great joy, as a matter of fact. Bad movies. Bad movies are stupendous! When my friend and I had the Bad Movie Review, I got every bit as much entertainment out of talking about them as I did out of watching them. Some of them were too bad for us to finish watching, and some of them weren't bad enough (they were just kinda bad, but "stupid movie" bad, like Timecop. Not of the pure B-movie...ness? that makes the movies on Mystery Science Theater so entertaining).
The other night, I watched a movie that really did have enough of the B-movieness to make it awesome. It was called Breathing Fire and it Suh-uh-ucked! It stars Zach Morris (well, Eddie Saavedra, but it's more fun to think of him as a Zach Morris lookalike) and Short Round as martial-artist brothers, sons of a martial-artist bank robber. The movie opens with Bad Dad dropping his kids off at the state martial arts championships (attended by dozens!) while he goes and steals $X million dollars in gold bars from the local Bank of Gold Bars in Our Vault. Oh, and one of the members of his team is Bolo Yeung, who you'll recognize if you've ever watched a martial arts movie in the eighties or nineties. If you haven't, he kind of looks like a 'roided version of Ernie Reyes Jr, the pre-pubescent pizza delivery man/boy from Ninja Turtles 2.
While Bad Dad's busy stealing what has to be nearly 100 tons of gold bars (do no directors ever think about how heavy one gold bar is, let alone hundreds?!) Zach and Short Round become...co-winners? of the "karate" tournament. I say "karate" because I am somewhat of a martial arts snob, and instantly realized that they were all highly skilled practitioners of Tae Kwon Do. This normally wouldn't bother me (*snort* yeah, okay), but the only people who are really going to be seeing this movie are martial artists, so they're going to realize pretty quick that the director/writers/actors don't care about them. That something you should realize before watching the movie, and applies to you no matter your background in martial arts, so heads up.
Most of the plot of the movie was a blur to me as a viewer, but I expect it was quite a blur to the director, who I can only assume was completely coked out of his gourd. There was a lot of bad writing (Bad Dad actually killed Short Round's mother in the Vietnam War), bad directing (Short Round bounced off a mini-trampoline to climb in through a second story window? C'mon, give me something I can swallow), and bad acting (90 minutes of it...) but the basic idea was the bank robbers locked the gold in a safe somewhere, then made a porcelin cast of the two keys and destroyed the keys. I suppose the purpose was to keep the gold in a central location until the buyer arrived, but wouldn't it have been easier to split the gold six ways, and everyone sells their cuts at their own discretion? Cash4Gold.com came to late, I guess. They split the cast six ways, but one of the troupe began to have second thoughts, so they showed up to his house and killed him and his wife, but his daughter was outside the house at the time, and ran to one of her father's friends for help.
TWIST! The friend is Bad Dad's brother! Guess where he takes Little Girl so she'll be safe? That's right! He takes her to his brother's, where no one can find her. Brilliant! And to top it off, Bad Dad gets the piece of porcelin-key mold to add to his collection. Looks like things are coming together for the bank robbers, eh? Well, you may think that, but you'd be wrong. You see, Bad Dad's Good Brother is also a martial artist, and he, Zach and Short Round stand in between Little Girl and the rest of the bank robbers when they show up to...take her? Wait, I thought Bad Dad had the piece for the key? So why is he still after the little girl? She looked right in his eye, and didn't recognize him as the man who killed her father, so what's the point? Oh, yeah. Bad writing. I remember.
Eventually, Zach and Short Round beg Good Brother (now known as Good Uncle) to teach them his kung fu (again, they call it "karate" because they're stupid, I suppose), and he does. They use it to terrorize midgets. Well, they actually start looking for the people who are trying to kidnap Little Girl, and that leads them to a bar guarded by two little people, and to be fair, they absolutely rock the two brothers at first. Then they bust out Good Uncle's kung fu, and take the fight back.
Not much happens between...well, the beginning and the end. Really, not much at all. You could watch the movie at double speed, and the only difference would be you waste forty-five minutes rather than ninety. But at the end of the movie, Bad Dad and Short Round start fighting. Good Uncle was injured, and could only fight Bad Dad so much before revealing that he had killed Short Round's mom in Vietnam for no reason other than "they're all dangerous" or some crap like that. He saw baby Short Round, though, and felt so guilty that he had to raise him as his own. That guilt only lasts about sixteen years, though, because one Short Round stands between him and his gold, he goes all out at him. Short Round fights back, and gains enough of an upper-hand that he's able to keep him from escaping until the police show up.
Seeing his dad marched away in handcuffs, though, is more than Zach can bear. He blames Short Round for his dad being such a terrible, terrible role model, and in the coming National Karate Championships (again, attended by one to two hundred people. Maybe) does everything he can do to beat Short Round. I suppose they only have co-champions in the state finals? I don't know. But after delivering a viscious attack to Short Round's short-round face and seeing him fall to the ground, he suddenly rushes forward and cradles Short Round's head in his lap, crying. When Short Round regains consciousness, they embrace, and have interracial homoerotic incest love. At least, I assume they do. It's while the credits run, so anything could be happening, but that scenario would really fit with how bad the rest of the movie was. So gay! No one ever even breathed fire!
So, in conclusion, I'd definitely never watch it again. I probably wouldn't even watch it the first time, if I could go back in time (like in Timecop!) and change it. You may or may not enjoy watching it, too. It's right on the line. It's better than Surf Ninjas (soooooo dumb!!) but not quite as good as Dracula 3000. THAT'S a great bad movie!
