Guilty Pleasure No. 51: Rage and Honor (dir by Terence Winkless)

Posted on October 23, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1992 film, Rage and Honor, tells the story of two people from different worlds, who come together to kick ass and save a declining American city.

Preston Michaels (Richard Norton) is a cop from Australia who has come to America as a part of an exchange program. When he’s not working undercover, he’s supplementing his income by working as a bodyguard for what appears to be an 80s cover band.

Kris Fairfield (Cynthia Rothrock) is a teacher at the local high school who also moonlights as a karate instructor. She’s haunted by the death of her parents and the subsequent disappearance of her brother. She cares about her students, even though hardly any of them actually appear in the film. In fact, the whole high school teacher thing never really matters much in the grand scheme of things.

Preston and Kris are teaming up to take down spacey drug lord Conrad Drago (Brian Thompson). Conrad has a fierce mullet, a cocaine addiction, and a knowledge of all of the body’s pressure points. His girlfriend is Rita (Terri Treas) and the only thing that could possibly prevent Drago and Rita from taking over the city is a tape that reveals Rita and a bunch of crooked cops killing someone. Kris and Preston are trying to find the tape before Drago and Rita find it. Somehow, it all eventually leads to a homeless stock broker named Baby (Stephen Davies) and a weird fight club that’s run by Hannah the Hun (Alex Datcher).

It’s an incredibly silly film, to be honest. It’s the type of film where Preston gets shot once in the side and once in the leg and neither time does it slow him down. (He does mention that his leg hurts at one point but he never starts to limp or anything like that.) Kris, meanwhile, is given a tragic backstory that is explained to us in-between scenes of awkward comedic relief. Hannah goes from being a calculating villainous to a heroic ally, without the film attempting any explanation as to why. Meanwhile, despite Brian Thompson’s best efforts to be menacing, Conrad is written as being some sort of flakey, New Age drug dealer. He’s about as intimidating as the biggest guy in a drum circle. There’s really not much rage or honor to be found in Rage and Honor.

And yet, it was impossible for me to dislike the film. Every time Cynthia Rothrock did a flying kick and sent some jerk flying, the film won me back. Unfortunately, she didn’t really get to do as much fighting as she should have. She had to share the screen with Brian Thompson and Richard Norton, who both received fight scenes of their own. All three of them looked good fighting but Cynthia was the clear star. What she lacked in actual acting ability, she made up for with pure enthusiasm. Watching her, you realized that she was not only good at fighting but she enjoyed it as well. For all the film’s flaws, Cynthia kicked everyone’s ass and that’s really all that mattered. It was empowering and, even more importantly, it was a lot of fun to watch.

Go, Cynthia, go!

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Val’s Mini-Post: Why Undefeatable (1993, dir. Godfrey Ho) Is On My Gems List Of 2019

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Valerie Troutman

In 2019 I fell in love with Cynthia Rothrock. I started watching any of her movies that I could get my hands on. I also wound up exploring other martial artists that were in her orbit such as Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Richard Norton.

Rothrock did a couple of movies with notorious “cut-and-paste” director Godfrey Ho. I think the exact number is five movies, but she only did footage for three of them. In classic Godfrey Ho fashion, he reused the footage to make two more movies. I haven’t seen the one that repurposed the footage from Undefeatable.

The bad guy of the movie is named Stingray. There’s a final battle at the end of the film in which Stingray lands his face on a nail (???), causing him to lose one of his eyes. This doesn’t stop him though, and Stingray continues to fight. In the end, he ends up getting his other eye stuck on a hook. The hook lifts him up into the air. After he’s lifted up to the top, Cynthia Rothrock says, “Keep an eye out for ya, Stingray,” to which her partner adds, “Yeah, see ya!”

Those lines are what made this movie stand out from the 27 other Cynthia Rothrock movies I watched that year. You can watch the scene here.

It’s films like Undefeatable that are the reason the “Gems” exists.

Cinemax Friday: Sworn to Justice (1997, directed by Paul Maslak)

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Janna (Cynthia Rothrock) is a psychologist who is also a martial arts expert. One night, she comes home to discover that her sister and her nephew have been murdered and that the killers are still in the house! Though Janna manages to fight off the attackers, she also gets a nasty bump to the head. Weeks later, after she’s gotten out of the hospital and she’s ready to get back to work, she discovers that she now has ESP!

All Janna has to do is touch someone or hold something in her hand and she has visions of the past and sometimes the present. (She has those special ESP powers that do whatever needs to be done at the moment.) When she finds her sister’s brooch, she flashes back to the night of the attack and sees the faces of the men who attacked her sister. Using her newfound power, Janna sets out to get revenge.

But even as she tracks down the thugs who killed her sister, Janna still does not know the identity of the person who ordered the hit. She just knows that he’s known as “The Man.” Could he have something to do with the arrogant cop killer (Brad Dourif!) for whom Janna is serving as an expert defense witness? Or could The Man by the publisher (Kurt McKinny) with whom Janna is having a steamy affair? (This was a late night Cinemax film, after all.) Or could it be the detective (Tony Lo Bianco) who is supposed to be investigating her sister’s death?

As far as Cynthia Rothrock martial arts films are concerned, Sworn to Justice is pretty good. Rothrock was not only a force to be reckoned with in fight scenes but, as this film shows, she was a likable actress, too. For the most part, she’s able to hold her own even when acting opposite seasoned scene stealers like Brad Dourif, Tony Lo Bianco, Mako, and even Walter Koenig, who plays Janna’s mentor with an outrageous German accent. While the film’s fight scenes are just as good as you would expect from a Cynthia Rothrock fick, the ESP twist adds just the right amount of weirdness to keep Sworn to Justice from coming across as just another low-budget martial arts film. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously. Even while she’s getting revenge for their deaths, Janna never seems to be that broken up over the deaths of her sister and her nephew. At worse, she’s seems to be annoyed by the inconvenience of it all. It’s just something else that she has to find the time to deal with.

There are a few scenes that are so darkly lit that it’s almost impossible to see what’s happening but then there are other scenes, like the one where Janna shows off her favorite martial arts moves to her new boyfriend, that work surprisingly well. This is a 90s production all the way, which means a saxophone-scored sex scenes and synthesizer-scored action scenes. Sworn to Justice is a good Cynthia Rothrock film, even if most audiences will end up figuring out the identity of The Man long before she does.

Insomnia File #10: Eye For An Eye (dir by John Schlesinger)

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were awake at midnight and trying to get some sleep, you could have turned over to ThillerMax and watched the 1996 revenge thriller, Eye For An Eye. However, the film wouldn’t have helped you get to sleep. Eye For An Eye is not a film that you sleep through.

Eye For An Eye opens with Karen McCann (Sally Field) comforting her youngest daughter, Megan (Alexandra Kyle). Megan is terrified of a moth that has flown into her bedroom. “Kill it, mommy, kill it!” Megan shouts. Instead, Karen gently takes the moth in her hand and allows it to escape through an open window. In those first few minutes, the film tells us everything that it feels to be important about Karen. She’s a mother. She lives in a big house in the suburbs. And she wouldn’t kill a moth…

But — the name of the title is Eye For An Eye and that would seem to promise killing so we know that something terrible is going to happen to change Karen’s outlook on life.

And it does! The next afternoon, Karen is stuck in traffic and calls her oldest daughter, 17 year-old Julie (Olivia Burnette). In an extremely harrowing sequence that is pure nightmare fuel, Karen helplessly listens as Julie is raped and murdered.

A white trash deliveryman named Robert Doob is arrested for the crime and we immediately know that he’s guilty. First off, his name is Robert Doob and that’s a serial killer name if I’ve ever heard one. Secondly, he smirks at Karen and her husband (Ed Harris) and, in a particularly cruel moment that was especially upsetting to this former stutterer, he imitates Julie’s stammer. Third, Robert has tattoos and Satanic facial hair. And finally, Robert Doob is played by Keifer Sutherland. And usually, I find Keifer and his growl of a voice to be kinda sexy in a dangerous sorta way but in Eye For An Eye, he was so icky that he just made my skin crawl.

Robert Doob is obviously guilty but an evil liberal judge throws the case out on a technicality. After Karen gets over the shock of seeing justice perverted, she decides to take the law into her own hands. After meeting a professional vigilante (Philip Baker Hall, looking slightly amused no matter how grim he tries to act), Karen decides to learn how to use a gun so that she can get her revenge…

There’s not a single subtle moment in Eye For An Eye but that’s actually the main reason I enjoyed the film. Everything — from the performances to the script to the direction to the music to … well, everything — is completely and totally over-the-top. The symbolism is so heavy-handed and the film is so heavily stacked in favor of vigilante justice that the whole thing becomes oddly fascinating. It may not be a great film but it’s always watchable. It may not be subtle and it may even be borderline irresponsible in its portrayal of the American justice system but who cares? By the end of the movie, I was over whatever real world concerns I may have had about the film’s premise and I was totally cheering Karen on in her quest for vengeance. I imagine I’m not alone in that. Eye For An Eye is the type of film that elitist movie snobs tend to dismiss, even while secretly knowing that it’s actually kinda awesome.