Hombres de acero

When their boat hits Hong Kong harbor, two sailors go on shoreleave. One of them is on a courier mission for some far east heavies and goes missing. The other befriends some natives and goes on a kung fu- quest to uncover the secrets behind his friends disappearance.

This one is a fairly entertaining turkey containing lots of bad kung fu, bad acting and bad screenwriting. What makes it entertaining is its particularly disarming innocent silliness. One example: the lead character is a Dutchman named Dutch... Reasonably fast paced and coherent storywise.

Highly recommended for fans of second rate (or lower) kung fu.

Released on video in Finland in the eighties.

A Dutch sailor named Dutch and his American shipmate Jim take shore-leave in Hong Kong, where Jim has some business to attend to (something to do with a missing document sought by business executive Charles Winter, who plans to become tai-pan). When Jim goes missing, Dutch joins up with private detective Horatio Lim to try and find his friend. Jim eventually turns up-dead!-and Dutch and Horatio try to find out who is responsible and make them pay.

I wasn't expecting great storytelling and I wasn't expecting stellar performances, and in that respect, I wasn't disappointed. I did, however, hope for some half-decent martial arts, but sadly this isn't the 'classic beat-em-up' that the blurb claimed it to be: the action is dull, repetitive and poorly choreographed, making this film dreadful on almost all counts.

I would, under most circumstances, reward such inept movie-making with IMDb's lowest possible rating of 1/10, but there were a few things that made me laugh, so it narrowly avoids that honour: the scene in which someone is tortured by having milk poured on their face is hilarious (those baddies... does their cruelty know no bounds?); Horatio Lim's high-tech office is a cornucopia of horribly dated machinery, including a crap arcade machine, even cruddier computers, and a reel-to-reel answering machine; Mrs Winter looks like a man in drag (no wonder her husband is cheating on her); and best of all, hero Dutch's casual clothing includes a Donald Duck sweater that hardly says 'I mean business' to the bad guys.