It'll certainly be my pleasure, Mr. Nuff

Despite my supposed movie-buff status, I never really engaged in that staple of childhood movie fans everywhere, "watching all manner of absolute crap from the time period." So until very recently I was unfamiliar with a lot of the anti-classics of 80s cinema - the Breakin' films, Rad, Gymkata, and, of course, The Last Dragon (excuse me - Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon). One of the perks, if you'd call it that, of dating Alma is that she eats up all this crap (I suspect there is a small part of her that even enjoys it not just for how hilariously bad it is but actually as nostalgia), and so I have an excuse to watch it and laugh myself silly.

If this entry is going to mean anything to you, you probably have to have seen the film already, so I won't bother with any direct plot summary - besides, any attempt to describe this film by simply running down the plot could never do it justice. The Last Dragon is so insane it practically makes Breakin' 2 look like Raging Bull.

First of all, what's up with all the black guys thinking they're Asian and all the Asian guys thinking they're black? If I had a dollar for every ethnic stereotype in this movie, I could pay my rent for the next two months. The main character (Leroy)'s younger brother - by the way, one of the most obnoxious "wise-cracking kid" characters in a decade rife with them - refers to him using just about every "word or phrase associated with Chinese people" you can think of, including the classic line "chocolate-covered yellow peril," which could not make less sense if it was delivered by a talking unicorn.

On the other hand, what are we supposed to expect from a director who in his DVD commentary track (oh yes there is) brags about working on Krush Groove with its sizable minority cast, and then calls Ernie Reyes Jr. a Latino? (As Alma noted, there's an excellent chance he could not remember anything about Ernie Reyes Jr. and just guessed based on the last name, which is never a safe bet with Filipinos.) Maybe it's not a coincidence that in Taimak's first scene I was reminded slightly of C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man.

There is some intentional comedy, of course - "Mr. Nuff" alone cracks me up - but too much of the movie is too insane to be intentional, and Michael Schultz is far too sober in his commentary track. The Sho'Nuff character and his goons alone stalk around like rejects from The Warriors, and the villain Eddie Arcadian - because he owns video game arcades! - is preposterous. In one particularly memorable scene, his response to Leroy's kicking in his door is "We didn't order out!"

The musical numbers, or whatever you'd call them, are completely ridiculous - Vanity's clearly-talking-about-erections song, with attached crazy dance, is priceless. It's also funny because the movie supposedly had to be trimmed at one point because of a lack of money, and yet no one thought, "Hey, these musical sequences add literally nothing to the plot - maybe we could take them out!"

The movie is also notable for featuring the debut of Chazz Palminteri - as a hilarious goon wearing Keith Hernandez's mustache - and an early role for William H. Macy, here credited as W.H. Macy. (Me: "That looks like William H. Macy!" Alma: "It probably just looks like him." Me: "Well, it looks exactly like him and sounds exactly like him!" Except here he has blonde hair and a tremendously stupid jacket. Hard to believe he was already 34 years old when they made this.)

My other favorite part is how even though the movie takes place in New York, there's never more than about ten people anywhere. Somehow when Laura/Vanity gets kidnapped the first time, and Leroy/Taimak shows up to beat up the bad guys, there's no one within two blocks even though they're on a busy street. And even though no one is around during the climactic fight sequence in 7th Heaven or the abandoned warehouse next door, all of a sudden right after Leroy wins, the cops and the entire crew of Laura's show rush in. (And their first concern is, "Her hair will never be ready in time for tonight's show!" If the first show scene is anything to go by, she's only going to be on for five minutes - just fake it!)

Leroy seeks the enlightenment to light up with bad special effects, so that when he hits Sho'Nuff it can look like they're fighting in a steel mill or something. His master sends him to look up a fortune cookie maker which turns out to be a computer, and then it turns out that basically he just needed to look inside himself all along. A couple questions here: couldn't his master have just told him that in the first place, rather than sending him on a wild goose chase? And then why, even when his master specifically taps his head and tells him there is one place he has not looked, does it still take Leroy nearly being whipped by Sho'Nuff and then seeing a bunch of flashbacks in a water tank to realize, "Oh, he meant inside me!"

Perhaps the craziest part was that Alma - who had not seen the movie in nearly 15 years - remembered portions of the lyrics from the crappy, crappy songs, yet could not remember large chunks of the plot. Ah, the things the brain files away. Then again, I correctly foresaw pretty much every single plot detail before they happened, so why waste space remembering it? (The first time Leroy and Laura lock eyes, I said, "Let me guess - she gets kidnapped and he has to rescue her." Then it happened literally 30 seconds later! And of course it could not be any more obvious at the end that Leroy is going to catch Arcadian's bullet in his teeth, despite Schultz's description of that scene on the commentary as "a surprise.")

In other hilarious news, Taimak claimed in an online interview within the last couple years that he has been working on a script that he hopes to turn into a sequel for this film. Awesome though that would be, can you ever see it happening? This is one of those films that is just irrevocably stuck in the decade in which it was made - Vanity's huge teased-out hair, the awful outfits, the ridiculous dancing, the pervasive racist "humor." You couldn't get away with half this stuff today, and anyway I have to think that a lot of the humor comes from the fact that it was made more than 20 years ago - there's something about that 80s level of crazy that even the most unintentionally hilarious films of today could never truly provide, especially since so many mediocre filmmakers today are so self-aware. Gigli is one of the few real comparisons I would make - like The Last Dragon, it has a handful of moments that actually work as legit intentional comedy, but mostly it's a goldmine of insane, unintentionally hysterical shit. There are even clearly scenes in it - as here - where the actors seem to be trying so hard to be serious, but even at their best (and here that really isn't saying much) there's no way they can sell the material.

Simply put, The Last Dragon is a laugh riot from front to back. Alma always apologizes to me when we watch a movie like this, but I'm fairly sure I enjoy them as much as she does, if not always for exactly the same reasons.