There have come various points in my life where I think nothing media related can find away to hurt me because the stuff I've watched has killed little parts of me in the most excruciating ways possible. I mean, I've sat through Manos the Hands of Fate (MSTK 3000 once touched on this gem, I believe), Troll 2, Halloween 3 and all four Leprechaun movies for Christ's sake. Unfortunately, whenever that thought crosses my mind something from across the Pacific decides to flying kick its way into my brain and injure me in an entirely new fashion.

This leads me into the three films I'm going to talk about today: Yo-Yo Girl Cop, Tokyo Gore Police and Silver Hawk. Silver Hawk straddles the line of things I probably shouldn't talk about on MMA because it's self-aware enough to considerably mitigate the retardedness factor, so it's mostly up here for comparison with the other two. Yo-Yo Girl Cop received a review earlier on my own blog, but I felt the need to bring it up again, because it shares a lot of the same problems as Tokyo Gore Police.

So let's get to the summaries of the film plots and the reasons why they injure me. I'll start with Yo-Yo Girl Cop, since it's already received a full review elsewhere.

Yo-Yo Girl Cop is a film about a girl whose mother was a former special agent in a unit that only uses combat yo-yos (I'm not making that up, I swear). She gets called in to investigate a series of suicides following methods posted on this website called the Enola Gay, run by some bitchy chick at this high school (who also fights with yo-yos for no adequately explained reason) and some guy who is either posing as the school janitor or is the school janitor. I'm not really sure because things get convoluted as hell and there really isn't a whole lot of cohesion as far as plot goes. Basically nothing happens until the last 20-30 minutes of the movie, where there's a yo-yo fight between Bitchy Girl (who has a name, but I'll be damned if I remember it) and the protagonist and a "showdown" between the protagonist and the janitor. I say "showdown" with ironic quotes because all he does is show her he's got a bomb strapped to him and rants. I really had stopped caring and paying attention at that point, so the guy could have been explaining a possible theory that would link gravity, electro-magnetism and nuclear weak/strong forces together for all I know.

The main problem with Yo-Yo Girl Cop is the lack of ANYTHING going on for a good part of the movie. The first ten minutes brings up some rather intriguing questions. Why is this chick tied up with a bomb on her? Is it a suicide? Is she some convoluted murder victim? Someone using her as "an example"? Why is she carrying a yo-yo? The movie only answers the last question and the answer is incurably retarded. It's mostly a bunch of dramatic, yet pointless and horribly boring, dialog and characters doing mundane things until the last half hour. Making a majority of your movie a sufferance means that when you get to the stuff we rented the movie for (the hot, hot violence in the form of yo-yo kung fu) we no longer care.

This lack of interesting shit going on is sort of the same problem Tokyo Gore Police has. The latter's a bit better because it feels like the writers didn't forget that they were making an Asian Grindhouse film and kept throwing mildly interesting stuff into the morass of boring "exposition" at random. The whole movie seems to be built around the question of "What the Hell?" though, so the mildly interesting stuff ranges from "Am I looking at what I think I'm looking at?" to "Holy shit, I think this movie just gave me an aneurysm."

To understand what I mean with that last bit, let me give you a play-by-play of the first ten minutes of the movie. We open up with a bunch of Japanese cops wearing what looks like what happens when someone decided to run through the costuming department for Ran while in SWAT gear. There's also this mopey chick sitting in a cop car and looking at a box cutter. Then we cut to an open area in the half-finished building all the cops have been looking at, where some hobo is hunched over a makeshift table.

We cut back to the cops looking worried/constipated and mopey girl glaring at her box cutter. Then, out of nowhere, this voiceover starts and I swear the chick doing it is on some combination of sugar, caffeine and crack because she is the peppiest human who has ever lived. She basically starts reading the dossier of this cannibalistic serial killer, who apparently was the hobo we saw earlier. The shot cuts up there with the voice over still going on and we see the guy is grungier up close. Oh, he's also eating chunks of a blatantly rubber woman whose coated in Kensington Gore except for one boob and...well, her hoo-ha, to put it rather juvenilely, but hey, I'm not above being juvenile when required. Like when movies just make blood dribble out my ears and nose.

We then cut back to the cops and the camera stops on mopey girl as super-happy-voice-over-chick finishes up the dossier and gives some orders. We then cut to what looks like the room of a tween girl who likes police themed décor, and a short, attractive Japanese woman with bleached blonde hair dressed in a sequined costume police uniform. Apparently she was the one doing the voiceover because she points and the screen and says in the same voice she just finished delivering this guy's criminal record in, "Okay, boys. Go get em!"

On cue the cops rushing in and mopey girl starts cutting on a Kensington-Gore-filled, flesh-colored plastic balloon that's supposed to be her wrists. The cops rush in and hobo picks up a chainsaw, sending appendages and gore everywhere. Finally one cop gets it together and shoots the guy's hand off. Now this is where everything goes nuts, because the guy screams and he GROWS A CHAINSAW HAND before ripping the cops a new one.

He rampages around, yelling and generally chomping on the scenery until Mopey Girl, apparently bored of cutting on herself, shows up with a katana. They have a cheap wire-fu fight for a few minutes before Mopey Girl gets bored and CUTS HIM IN HALF, which turns him into a blood fountain.

That, ladies and gents, is the first TEN MINUTES of this thing. "What the Hell?" doesn't even cover my reaction to this. The friend I was watching this flick with and I had to pause the move because we were shouting variations on "WHAT?" over the dialogue. A lot of the WTF factor gets cleared out of the way off the bat....sort of. By which I mean that they clear up some stuff to make room for more insanity. The whole "growing weapon appendages" thing is unique to a group of criminals who call themselves Engineers. They get this power from....key shaped tumors (I wish I could make this shit up) somewhere in their body and the only way to stop them is to cut off where ever this tumor is. Hence the hack-and-slash happy mopey girl, who is the member of the now privatized Tokyo PD (who all wear the armor mishmash as a uniform. Except for Mopey Girl, but she's important, so she gets to avoid being dressed like an escapee from the set of the new post-apocalyptic Yojimbo) and apparently is the one who specifically hunts these guys. Also, she's our designated protagonist for the film, so get used to a lot of long mopey stares off into the distance and morosely flat dialogue deliveries.

As for random voiceover girl? She's the police dispatch. Basically the PD is batshit nutso and their intro is all sorts of awesome. The Police Chief is this jovial badass who adopted Mopey Girl and has a "dog" (and later when his character goes to shit, sex slave) in the form of a quadruple amputee girl who later gets Katanas for limbs. The other notable member aside from the dispatch is the coroner, who has a wicked dissection tool for a hand and is lovably eccentric. Basically this messed up force is our heroine's adopted family after her dad's head was shot open in a fashion that makes an exploding melon look conservative. Unfortunately, after their awesome opening bits they suffer some massive character derailment which leaves them all as irredeemable assholes, but I'll get to that later.

Another character worth mentioning is Mopey Girl's "normal" friend who runs a bar. She's sort of inconsequential until the last quarter of the movie, but she's probably the only actor in the flick trying to play a genuine human character. She does get awesome though, which is the one thing about this movie that is leagues ahead of Yo-Yo Girl Cop; every "relevant" character gets some form of Crowning Moment of Awesome. However, as the plot is irredeemably stupid, these moments of awesome do little to save the movie from ultimately being shit.

The long and short of the plot is that Mopey Girl is put on the tail of the guy who they think has been giving the Engineers tumors (and yes it makes about as much sense as you'd expect). After a lot of tangental crap that's irrelevant and/or weird (like a legless chick with a tooth-filled crotch and a dude with a giant shlong gun, but I like to pretend those things didn't happen), Mopey Chick gets a tumor herself and tracks the guy down. Given that in the scene where he gave her the tumor, he rips off the top of his head and ends up having a PVC pipe eyes attached to his head, that can't have been that hard, even if it takes fifteen damn minutes of movie time. Pipe-Face's story is as nonsensical as you'd expect. He was a medical genius studying the genes of serial killers when his poor farther was conned by Mopey Girl's adopted father into shooting her real father and was then killed himself. In grief, Pipe-Face jammed a syringe full of all those serial killer genes into his arm and....somehow this let him meet the devil, who is both A.) a midget and B.) the one who gave him the key tumors in the first place. Given how irritated Satan the Midget is, he probably gave the dude the tumors just to get him off his lawn.

After Mopey Girl hears all this nonsensical crap she does the logical thing: slashes his head in half and leaves. however, all the stuff about her adopted dad being a dick is true, as the once insane-but-lovable Tokyo PD falls completely off the tracks of awesome and crashes head first into Pricksville. They run around killing, torturing and mauling everything. Even the awesome normal chick dies, but not before killing three of the officers. Mopey Girl runs up in time to see the awesome normal chick die and somehow her hand mutates into a mouth, despite the fact that we never see an Engineer get their wacky mutated limb until they lose their conventional one, which she didn't. I know I shouldn't question the logic of a movie that has a plot built around magical satanic key tumors that give people chainsaw hands, but a little consistency would be nice.

Anyway, Mopey Girl gets a scope eye to go with her toothy hand and stomps off to the PD HQ where crazy coroner awaits her with the goofiest weapon ever, the hand gun. It's a gun that shoots hands. I'm not kidding. It's so ridiculous that it's actually kind of awesome. He's choked by one of his own hands and Mopey Girl continues her march towards the final battle.

There she fights Quadruple Amputee Girl and, after a brief fight, Mopey Girl breaks all four of her katanas and dukes it out with her adopted father. After cutting his legs off and seemingly ending the fight, he injects himself with something and his legs become....blood jets. I can't believe I just typed that, but that is exactly what happens. He frigging flies around the room using the blood that shoots out of his legs. Anyway, she kicks his butt and the last shot we see is of Mopey Girl in all her goofiness and quadruple amputee girl with her katana limbs replaced with machine guns.

This movie is definitely as bad as Yo-Yo Girl Cop, but at least it's interesting. Interesting in a "Hey, did I just see a bear in a clown suit ride by on an ATV?" sort of way, but that's not enough to ultimately save the film. It's definitely more worth a look than Yo-Yo Girl Cop at least, but really, that's not saying much...

Unlike Yo-Yo Girl Cop and Tokyo Gore Police, Silver Hawk is good. It's very aware of what it is, a goofy Kung Fu film, and revels in it. Much like Zebraman, it embraces the clichés of its genre, but instead of becoming a very good satire on fan culture and the internet at large, Silver Hawk just wants you to come along for the ride.

Before I get into the plot of Silver Hawk, I have to point out that this is a Michelle Yeoh film. I'm a rather big fan of hers because she always seems to enjoy what she's doing. Even if the film is terrible, she will be awesome. In this case, however, she takes the film from being a pretty decent self-aware Kung Fu film to being a really good self-aware Kung Fu film, simply because she seems to enjoy the silliness of the movie as much as the audience.

The plot is...well, as ridiculous as the other plots of the movies in this review. Michelle Yeoh plays basically the female version of Batman: a wealthy business tycoon who likes to beat up bad guys in her spare time. However, unlike the broody Batman, Silver Hawk does superheroing just because. We're never given any motivation for why she does it, but given how much she grins like an idiot when breaking mook bones, I think she just does it because...well....why the hell not?

The first scene pretty much sums up what this movie is about: cool vehicles, explosions and Kung Fu. Some thugs have stolen some Panda cubs and Silver Hawk has come after them on her sweet motorcycle, which I shall henceforth call the Hawkcycle. A quick chase ensues, Silver Hawk shoots at them with her motorcycle missiles and then proceeds to jump onto the trailer. Kung Fu and righteous ass-kickings follow, culminating in Silver Hawk rescuing the panda cubs and calling it a day.

From there we jump to Silver Hawk (known as Lulu in civilian mode) on a plane. She sits next to a guy who recognizes her from magazine covers. She recognizes him too, and we get a flashback about how they trained at a martial arts academy as kids. Funnily enough, the dude doesn't recognize her name, immediately leading me to dub him Idiot Love Interest for the duration of the film. He brags to her about how he's being brought in to catch Silver Hawk, to which Lulu responds by smiling indulgently like he's a five year-old telling her he's going to be an astronaut, and asks for her number. She mucks around with his phone so she can track him, and tells him he gets a date with her if he can remember her.

Cut to Lulu's swank pad where she's cheerily telling her female Alfred about the bust we saw at the beginning. Cue comic relief relative who brings a professor with her as a blind date for Lulu. Things get awkward until Lulu gets word of a robbery and quickly weasels her way out of the date as fast as humanly possible. Another series of awesome Kung Fu fights follows, until Silver Hawk stops a mugging, only to find out it's a sting and Idiot Love Interest was cross-dressing as the victim so he could fight her. Silver Hawk basically makes him a laughing stock to his underlings and takes off on the Hawkcycle. She makes it back to her place and finds out that the professor has finally figured out that there will be no date and has left. However he stuck one of his poor grad students to wait around and let Lulu know he'd like her to come to his presentation tomorrow. The dumb shmuck of a grad student slinks off after this, clearly hoping that he'll get some sort of benefit out of doing something that could have been handled better through a voicemail.

The student shows up the next day to basically make sure Lulu goes to the damn exhibition. On the way to the presentation, poor dumb grad student (Kit) reveals he's a Silver Hawk fanboy, which Lulu is amused at. Idiot Love Interest interrupts Kit's gushings about Silver Hawk to let her know he does remember her. The presentation happens and we get the movie linchpin: an A.I. chip that's supposed to make recommendations on how to make your life better based on it's interactions with you. Professor is promptly kidnapped after the reveal of the MacGuffin by a black dude with bling brass knuckes and a raver chick whose hair will change color between appearances.

Chase/fight scenes follow and after a bit, Silver Hawk lets them go in order to save someone, but not before the black dude snaps a picture of her to send to his boss. Idiot Love Interest is off being non-productive in a way that leads him to cross paths with Silver Hawk again and the professor is dragged to meet the villain of the film, Alexander Wolfe, who wants the professor to make the chips work like mind control devices. The professor whines a bit before caving after Wolfe fixes him with an irritated glare.

Basically the next 20 minutes is Lulu actually doing detective work while idiot love interest is working damn hard at being a giant millstone around her neck. Every once in a while we'll cut back to Wolfe chewing scenery and basically being every Bond villain ever. Oh, and at one point Lulu rescues her uncle (whose some bigwig CEO for a phone company) and the black dude takes another picture of her, leading Wolfe to figure out who she is.

CEO is later duped into being whisked off by Wolfe, and all Lulu can do is snap a pic of him. Deciding to hit up the only semi-competent person she knows, she sends the picture to Kit as Silver Hawk, knowing her fanboy will immediately jump at the chance to help her out. Idiot Love Interest has started being less of an idiot at this point and is starting to figure out that Lulu and Silver Hawk are one in the same. He pops over to talk to her about it, only to find her getting ready to head out to a secret meeting with Wolfe. He ends up doing one of two sort of useful things he will do this movie, and puts a tracking device on her.

We then cut to possibly one of the most ridiculous fight scenes I've ever seen in my life: Michelle Yeoh versus bungee ninjas. She proceeds to kick the shit out of them until Wolfe gets bored and injures her with his weaponized prosthetic arm. Down, but not out, Silver Hawk knocks one of the bungee ninjas off his set up and uses his bungee chord to scale up the wall and out of the building.

Despite being injured, she manages to make it back to her apartment before passing out from the pain. Idiot Love Interest has still been tracking her and basically breaks in to question her about the whole Silver Hawk thing. Seeing she's pretty much unavailable for questioning at the moment, he starts to take care of the wound, but Kit busts in and, after a moment of shock, starts gushing about meeting his idol. Idiot Love Interest drags Kit out and starts pumping him for information, leading the two of them to put together what Wolfe's plan is.

Silver Hawk is cleaning her own wound when she recalls a Kung Fu lesson and gets an idea of how to beat Wolfe. The next day, Kit and Idiot Love Interest have a plan, they just don't know where Wolfe's hideout is. As they contemplate this very large, very obvious hole in their plan, they get an e-mail with an address from Silver Hawk, whose already speeding to the scene. There we get the second most ridiculous fight of the movie: Michelle Yeoh vs. Hockey Thugs.

It's epically silly, made worse by the SWAT team, Kit and Idiot Love Interest busting in and joining in the fight against the hockey thugs. Also, Raver Chick and the black dude show up and fight Silver Hawk until she drops Raver Chick. Idiot Love Interest decides this would be a brilliant time to charge the black dude, but Silver Hawk stops him and lets the black dude pick up Raver Chick and leave. Silver Hawk then stomps down to have an epic showdown with Wolfe. Cue another Kung Fu fight interspersed with Idiot Love Interest, Kit and the professor trying to stop the mind control signal from going out. Unfortunately, they can't because they need Wolfe's retinal scan.

Silver Hawk kicks Wolfe's ass and drags him over to the main control panel. Wolfe childishly keeps his eyes shut for a good minute before Kit tricks him into opening his eyes. The scan stops the brainwashing whatchamawhosit that was Wolfe's plan, but it sets the self-destruct off. Everyone escapes, except Wolfe who is crushed to death. Cut to a bit later, where Idiot Love Interest and Lulu are having dinner and talking about everything that just happened. Lulu asks him if he'd arrest her as Silver Hawk, but he's called away before he can answer. As Idiot Love Interest rushes to the scene, he's passed up by the Hawkcycle and the two exchange banter as the movie ends.

Silver Hawk epitomizes everything good about a silly martial arts flick. It's fun, fast-paced and well shot. The characters are a little silly and the plot's goofy as Hell, but that works in its favor rather than to its detriment, and honestly you can tell that the actors were having a blast shooting it. From Idiot Love Interest's goofy mugging, to Wolfe's gleeful scenery chomping, it's a really entertaining watch.

Unfortunately films like Yo-Yo Girl Cop and Tokyo Gore Police are more common imports, but hopefully this article has semi-educated you in what to look for in a Kung Fu film. If not, well, at least you know two films to avoid unless you like being bored and/or confused as hell.

Is very aware that this article is huge,

Jenna Darknight

NEXT TIME: Cutthroat Island. Be afraid.

All images belong to their respective owners and are only used for the purposes of review.