Qualifying To Be One Of The BEST OF THE BEST!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR ‘FOXX’ SIR - THIS ONE IS FOR YOU!
“… You’ve worked very hard. All of you. You’ve grown, as athletes and individuals. You’ve learnt a lot. We’ve ALL learned a lot. As Miss Wade would say; a teacher also learns from his students. Today, you have the chance to be the greatest martial artists in the world. It’s up to you. If you give everything you’ve got, EVERYTHING, you’ll be winners. That I promise you. You can be the best of the best!”
- Coach, Best of the Best
When I was a child of maybe 11 or 12 I got hit by a car and ended up with a crushed right leg, requiring me to be in hospital for months with my legs in traction. I was placed in a side room of a children’s ward within the hospital that had a tiny portable TV, a VHS player and 3 films - Sydney Pollack’s vintage masterpiece, Tootsie (which I think I was too young for at that age because I couldn’t compute the idea of man pretending to be a woman without feeling nauseous - I adore the movie now!), the Disney flick Pete’s Dragon and the 1989 karate movie, Best of the Best.
Day in day out I watched Best of the Best up to like three times a day or something. Sad I know but there really was nothing else to do in between visits from the family and homework assignments sent from school. I knew dialogue off by heart, I knew the lyrics to all the dodgy songs in the film, like this one. I can only empathise with the young lads who watch a movie like Never Back Down these days and think it’s “the best movie ever made” because, for me - stuck in that hospital - all those years ago, Best of the Best was the “mutt’s proverbial nutts”.
A very good friend of mine (’Foxx’ - you may remember him from The Saturday Night 3-Way!) had a birthday recently, and knowing his love of all things B-movie related, I thought I would kill two birds with one stone: indulge his love of B-movies with a purchase of the Best of the Best boxset (there’s a friggin’ boxset?!?) AND catch up with the “franchise” myself in one, long, drink-fuelled, ”Lessons In Carpentery” style night. The results do indeed follow:
Now I knew going in that there was little to NO chance of the first film standing up to the standard it did back when I last watched it through a bored, hospitalised, child’s glazed eyes. I also knew that, just from reading the back of the DVD boxset [we're following a second tier character from the first movie as he essentially does straight-to-DVD variations on Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon (Part 2), John Rambo (Part 3) and John McClane (Part 4)], even with the influx of copious amounts of alchol, this could be a ‘long slog’ to say the least. Rose-tinted spectacles and mutterings of “easy guilty pleasures” were certainly not up front and centre.
BEST OF THE BEST (1989)
I could bang on about the plot of this US Karate Team versus Korean Karate Team B-flick starring Eric Roberts, Phillip Rhee, Chris Penn, James Earl Jones and Sally Kirkland but, well, why bother when it is covered so savagely and wittily in Roger Ebert’s one-star review of the film:
“… Roberts plays one of five members of the U.S. karate team, which has been hand-picked for a showdown with the Koreans. He is sensitive and vulnerable, with a shoulder held together by plastic and pins. The other members include a mean-tempered Texan, a thoughtful metaphysician, a scrappy Italian-American, and an Asian whose brother was killed in a karate match with - guess who? You got it: the same Korean that this guy is gonna have to fight.
So, OK, we have the team. Now what do we need? Students of the CLIDVIC ["Climb From Despair to Victory"] will know we need a coach who demands ruthless obedience to his inhuman and spartan training regime, but nevertheless turns out to have a heart of gold. James Earl Jones fills the role nicely, but then “Best of the Best” gives him two inexplicable assistants: a computer guru who taps statistics into his portable laptop model, even during saloon brawls, and a meditation guru (Sally Kirkland) who wears short skirts and teaches the guys to focus themselves.”
BEST OF THE BEST 2 (1993)
Possibly THE greatest so-bad-that-it’s-great B-movies ever made! Seriously! Okay, well, I exaggerate a little perhaps! Ha Ha. But… I defy anyone not to watch this movie, especially drunk (as I am by the time I come to watch this), and just get a massive grin on their faces. It’s just ridiculously SO machismo-soaked it is unbelievable. In fact with the amount of oiled male flesh on show, I could thoroughly understand if this was a film played in Gay Nightclubs as background visuals to the Barbara Streisand CDs. Hell, I’m as straight as they come but even by the midway mark I found myself audibly commenting (to myself?!?) that Ralph Moeller and Philip Rhee had “wonderful pecs”.
Anyway, if you have a dick and there’s testosterone pumping through your veins then this is a movie you cannot help but dig, regardless of the atrocious acting and script: Underground fight clubs? Ralph Moeller? Surprisingly good martial arts sequences? Stick fights? Sonny Landham turning up as a crazy-native-American guerilla who has to show the heroes “the way”? Wayne Newton (Yes, Wayne Newton!)? Training montages involving running up mountains and make-shift gyms with chains hanging from the ceiling? And… and… dialogue like “They kill their own mothers! Mean as catshit! Run over nuns!” and (after a bad guy dies in an exploding house) “I always told Gus smoking would kill him.” Come on: Join the fun:
In an underground fight club, blackbelt Travis Brickley (Chris Penn) is killed after losing to the evil martial arts master Brakus (Ralph Moeller). Travis’ death is witnessed by Walter Grady, the son of his best friend Alex Grady (Eric Roberts). Alex and his partner, Tommy Lee (Phillip Rhee), vow to avenge their friend’s death by defeating Brakus and shutting down the fight club.
Seriously, the alcohol level was heavily increased by the time I put this one on but I had a blast with it. You’re sat there thinking “This is the most bizarrely OTT testosterone-soaked movie ever. How can they possibly keep this up?” And then… and then… then… get this right… OH. MY. GOD. I can barely contain my excitement here but… seriously… then, for the climax, the friggin’ Korean Olympic Karate Team (the villains from the first movie!) turn up to work alongside the good guys in infilterating the underground karate club and laying waste to EVERYONE who gets in their way.
This is better then ANY movie Steven Segal has ever made. Seriously. Even Under Siege. And that one where he’s a fat bloke in prison with that midget rapper and the title is nonsensical shit about being only ‘half past dead’ or something!
I’ve never seen the next two movies at this point BUT they could be the worst movies in the world but if you’re a fan of crazy-ass B-movies then it’d be worth picking up the boxset JUST for this movie!
BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK (1995)
In between Best of the Best 2 and this year’s phenomenally excellent The Dark Knight (which he is also very good in!) Eric Roberts has made *deep breath* Two Shades of Blue, Cecil B. DeMented, Facade, The Alternate Luck of the Draw, No Alibi, Sanctimony, The Beat Nicks, Race Against Time, Dirk and Betty, Hitman’s Run, Spawn 3: Ultimate Battle, Heaven’s Fire, Wildflowers, Restraining Order, Lansky, BitterSweet, Purgatory, Making Sandwiches, T.N.T., Past Perfect, La Cucaracha, The Shadow Men, The Prophecy II, Dead End, Most Wanted, The Odyssey, American Strays, The Glass Cage, Dark Angel, Power 98, Heaven’s Prisoners, It’s My Party, The Grave, Saved by the Light, Sensation, The Immortals, The Nature of the Beast, The Specialist, Freefall, Babyfever, The Hard Truth, Voyage, Love, Honor & Obey: The Last Mafia Marriage … Okay, I’m losing the will to live here and I’m only 25% of my way through his filmography (I shit you not!) but you get the point right? Pay Eric Roberts enough money (I think it’s like $2.49) and the dude will shake your cock for you after you’ve pissed and thank you for the honour as long as there is a camera rolling. So if you can’t get him back for the new Best of the Best sequel then it doesn’t bode particularly fucking well does it? Be honest? Initially, when you look at the cast listing, you think “Eric Roberts? Fuck him! We’ve got the Ocean’s Eleven of straight-to-DVD subpar sequel casts here coz there’s Gina Gershon and Dee Wallace Stone and Christopher MacDonald and R. Lee Emery!” Don’t get too excited. Even with the entire cast thinking they’re making Shakespeare, they don’t pull together a single moment so god-awful-that-it’s-almost Brando-esque like what Roberts did in Best of the Best or its sequel. This time out:
Tommy Lee (Philip Rhee) is now living out a quiet existance as a martial arts instructor but, whilst visiting relatives in small town rural American, he comes to the defense of a schoolteacher (Gina Gershon - yes, Gina Gershon!) who has taken a stand against a local white supremacist organisation and ends up having to wage a one-man-war in defence of the town.
And when I say “one-man-war”, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking full on Rambo shit - but on roughly the same budget that a tramp has to buy his weekly supply of lager. Which in straight-to-DVD action flicks is often no bad thing is it? But this is Best of the Best 3. So fuckin ’rock hard’ is this sequel it gets a “sub-heading”. Best of the Best 2 was the ‘dog’s hairy bits’ of straight-to-DVD kickee-facee post-pub films and THAT didn’t get a sub-heading so that must mean Best of the Best 3 is far better right?
Wrong! We’re following karate instructor/US Olympic Karate champ, Tommy Rhee, not Rambo. So when Tommy starts getting clad in all black combos, chucking hand-grenades, handling assault rifles like a Navy SEAL etc. you’re just like “Where the fuck did this come from?” I thought he was a karate champion? Where did the special forces shit come from?” Go with me on this but imagine, if you will, that you sat down to watch - say - Driving Miss Daisy 2 and all of a sudden, fifteen minutes in, a group of teens speed passed Morgan Freeman’s character in his car, so Miss Daisy suddenly pulls on a set of black combos, starts loading her weapons and urges Freeman to give chase before she jumps out of one car, onto the roof of the other and then shoots the shit out of the speeding vehicle. You’d be like “What? What the hell is this?”
Best of the Best 3 is the low-budget, barrel-scraping equivilent. We want karate moves, sub-par John Parr (sorry I couldn’t resist!) on the soundtrack, Chris Penn’s character being brought back from the dead so he can be killed again, Brakus’ revenge even though he got offed in the last movie too AND, most definitely, we want Eric Roberts going OTT with the theatrics. We don’t want this. Sub-par acting, an atrocious script, only a couple of decent kicks to the face (Nazi-loving faces as well!) and - because we’re in Region 2 land - cuts that take out ninja stars and Gina Gershon’s tits, allegedly.
There’s more explosions (or at least stock footage of explosions!) in the final third then in the combined running time of Independence Day, Die Hard 4.0 and Commando. However, this film will make you bored of explosions. And being bored of explosions is like looking at a pair of breasts and saying “M’eh, they’re just breasts!” How dare you Best of the Best 3? How dare you! The film is directed by Philip Rhee as a vanity-project (well, he wrote/produced/directed and quite possibly oiled his own skin for the climax) and it is one of the most incompetently put together affairs you will ever see - in one sequence we see Tommy riding a motorbike to the rescue of someone and then it cuts to inside the house and one of the bad guys pulls his mask of to reveal himself to be Tommy and it is so charring and unestablished that you can’t help but think there’’s about 5 minutes just accidentally lost from the film. It makes no sense. Did Philip Rhee catch sight of himself in the reflection of the screen in the editing bay whilst preparing to put that footage in then get distracted? It’s utterly moronic!
The film is barely, possibly just-about, enjoyable when heavily boozed-up as I am at this point. Imagine watching this sober? But this is so far removed from what you’ll have come to expect from these movies. It barely - in fact I don’t think it actually does - associates itself with the other movies (How come in Best of the Best 2 Tommy was out in the desert with his adopted Native American family and now he’s in small town American with his Oriental family? Did he just go around collecting stock ‘Ethnic Minorities’ to have in “exposition-reserve”? That would mean Best of the Best 4 sees him defending his long-lost Irish brothers and sisters right?)
If you thought the second movie was over the top in terms of its homoeroticism in comparison to the first movie’s uber-seriousness, then this will flick will kill you. It’s preaching to you in the most half-arsed, poorly shot manner. Imagine you hire a whore but she turns up and lectures you about the evils of casual sex instead of fucking you - THAT is what it is like to watch Best of the Best 3 and find they’d rather moralise in some really embarrassing immature manner then bring on brilliantly staged face-kicking a la Best of the Best 2.
BEST OF THE BEST 4: WITHOUT WARNING (1998)
Maybe it’s the heavy flow of alcohol at this point but I swear to god the minute Philip Rhee turned up on screen in this flick (and we’re talking a good twenty minutes or so by my drunken watch - or did it just feel like that long?!?) I couldn’t quite comprehend why he was speaking with this quasi-American-Asian accent, why he looked a little skinny and botoxed and where the hell he’d picked up a screen daughter from.
Yes, I know being a nitpicker in movies of this ilk (and by this point in the franchise we’re talking barrel scraping straight to “video” now!) is about as pointless as counting genital crabs on a Kings Cross hooker but where the hell did the character of Tommy Lee find time to pick up a dead wife and a token daughter (yes little child, letting a bunch of balloons go free so “mummy can catch them in heaven” will most definitely endear you to the audience! I mean you endeared yourself to me so much that I hoped you fell in front of a car before the first act was even over!) when he’s been representing his country in Karate at the Olympics, shutting down an illegal Las Vegas fight club one kick to the face at a time and going fist to fist with a bunch of backwater neo-nazis. I mean I struggle to shoot my load in a tissue whilst working a 37 hour week. When did he find the time to meet a woman, woo a woman, sleep with her, get her pregnant and patiently wait out the required 9 months and… Oh wait, the daughter is just a lazy piece of plot mechanics in an already lazy screenplay, you sya? Oh okay? So…
A group of Russian mobsters have stolen a huge supply of paper for printing U.S. currency, and are now flooding the market with conterfeit bills. When one of the mobsters decides to give herself in and hand over a data CD to the DA, she is shot and killed, but not before handing the disc to an unsuspecting Tommy Lee. Despite working with the police as a martial arts instructor, Lee doesn’t go to the cops with the disc, but instead goes on the run, giving the mafia time to kidnap his daughter and hold as a hostage in exchange for return of the disc. Will Tommy ever see his daughter again?
Like the rest of the movies in this ‘franchise’ the supporting cast is surprisingly “okay”; pre-Saw Tobin Bell, Ernie Hudson (well, he’s only ever been good in Ghostbusters and The Crow), the late great Paul Gleason, Jack Lemmon’s son Christopher (remember him from that shitty Hulk Hogan TV show about the Knight Rider style boat?!?) and Sven-Ole Thorsen (aka La Fours from Mallrats). Which means when you look at the cast listing for all four of these movies it’s a hell of a lot better then perhaps it deserves - James Earl Jones, Sally Kirkland, Eric Roberts, Chris Penn, Sonny Landham, Gina Gershon, Dee Wallace Stone, Christopher MacDonald, R. Lee Emery, Tobin Bell, Ernie Hudson, Paul Gleason, Christopher Lemmon and Sven-Ole Thorsen (aka La Fours from Mallrats). Hmmm… okay, so when you read it back it does scream “straight-to-DVD” but it also screams “classy cult straight-to-DVD” too don’t you think?
Best of the Best 4 has the worst script of all the movies. Yes, even worse then the third movie but only because the third movie doesn’t have a moment in it when a conversation like this happens:
TOMMY LEE: You shouldn’t hurt people!
BAD GUY: Why not?
TOMMY LEE: Because then they get to hurt you right back!
It’s also shoddily directed, acted and really just a thoroughly plodding and uninspiring piece of straight-to-DVD nonsense. It’s so run of the mill that you know from the get-go where it’s going and what it is going to try and do. Plot twists make no sense, explosion effects are of ‘Microsoft Paint’ standard and the whole thing is just kind of… well… boring. Movies like this show that straight-to-DVD B-movies can be fun, well executed and very close to being classy and worth shouting about. Best of the Best 4 works on the level that you can pass out drunk frequently throughout its running time and still keep up with it when you come round. It borders on giving straight-to-DVD fare a bad name but you’ll probably find it a lot less irritating and considerably more watchable as “trash” then the third movie! So, well, that makes it kind of better then that movie in a twisted sort of way.
***
In conclusion, Best of the Best is quite a good overly-serious so-bad-that-it’s good slice of 80s B-movie, in its own semi-retarded way. Best of the Best 2 borders on actually being great. It is an awful movie in pretty much every conventional sense but the martial arts sequences are so well staged and well shot [covered as they are by cracking permed-hair-torn-jeans-and-leather-jackets-with-a-barechest-underneath soft rock tunes like Mark Free's To Be (Best of the Best)] that you kinda become enthralled with the whole thing! From there, it’s pretty much a downward spiral into straight-to-DVD hell.
But if you love post-pub brainless B-movie fare then it’s worth putting up with the last two movies, just to acquire the boxset as the bargain that it is if only for the first two!
Repeated scientific studies were carried out following the marathon screening of all four (yes, FOUR!) Best of the Best movies. People were randomly polled, retrospective interviews were carried out, Best of the Best 2 was rewatched under supervised conditions to make sure that no erection did occur at any given moment and… with all said and done the above (Fig. 1 ) was discovered. As you can see our research reveals that the quality of the Best of the Best movies is directly proportional to the presence of severely shoddy action at the hands of Eric Roberts and NOT proportional to Philip Rhee turning the movie into a vanity project for himself. IN FACT research initially showed that the more Rhee’s chest is covered up and unoiled the better the viewing experience BUT we had to reread and recalculate this research, revealing it to be not necessarily correct, as that would have suggested Best of the Best 3 is better then Best of the Best 2 and, well, come on, let’s not enter into “crazy talk” or nothing eh?
Our final, patented intellectual theory has been established with the following multi-level standard equation:
The dramatic pause is over! The fact that I have studied this franchise in the depth that I have speaks only of my own inanity. You can go about your business. Thoughts? Questions? Quibbles? Queries? Hit the Talk-Backs…
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7 Responses to “Qualifying To Be One Of The BEST OF THE BEST!”
Nice graph Professor Gazz!
Thank you kind lady! Congratulations on being the first AND ONLY person to read this!
I beg your pardon?
Oh is this the bit where you say you were first Kris but that you just didn’t leave a comment. I hate it when you get like this when I start talking to other women. I’ve told you before there is ONLY you babe!
Was watching these last night Gazz lol
Sharon didn’t see the fascination with em but your graph is correct, the first two were always the best and I must of turned off the Best of the Best radar after that as I didn’t even know there was a part 3 and 4.
Probably better I didn’t know they existed to be honest as you have shown they are canny pap, but great on the B Movie front
As I said to you mate, how did they manage to not just make TWO sequels in the nineties but keep them completely under our radar for TEN YEARS? lol
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