Kill and Kill Again Recap

Okay. Here's what's going on here. I mentioned last month that I really liked this terrible karate movie from 1981 called Kill and Kill Again. And even though I hadn't seen it in years, I did a recap from memory, which is a lot like just describing a movie really vaguely.

But now I found it on DVD! Oh yeah! Look out! I am all over that. Seriously, you could use the most powerful scientific tools available, and they'd tell you the same thing: Kill and Kill Again on DVD is a thing all over which I am. Is that grammatical?

So now that I have it, I feel kind of bad that I didn't do it full justice last time. It's not my fault; it's just that there's so much good stuff in there, I naturally forgot some. So I decided to recap the whole darn movie and be done with it. This way, I hope to lure other people into seeing it and that way I can talk about it with them. If you live in Seattle, I'll loan you the DVD. Anyway, on with the carnage.

Kill And Kill Again

The credits have kind of a James Bond feel, with a silhouette of a man doing various karate-related things, including that interlacing-finger deal that ninjas are into. The credits appear as red wavy letters on the black silhouette.

Gorilla will be played by Ken Gampu.

The first scene is at the International Martial Arts Confederation awards ceremony, which is held in Sun City for some reason. The "greatest and most knowledgeable exponent of the arts" (which includes a white guy with a Hercule Poirot mustache) are going to be giving an award to someone.

Cut to Our Hero, Steve Chase, fighting guys in a casino. Everyone's dressed in snazzy leisure suits, but I'm pretty sure some of them are ninjas, because they make high-pitched noises like Bruce Lee. Steve knocks one guy into a slot machine, which naturally pays off its jackpot. In a weird mirrored atrium, Steve beats up two guys while a blonde woman follows him.

Steve's mighty flipping ability

In a cutaway, the guy giving out the award (who looks like he might be James Coburn) rambles on about how Martial Arts is "The highest of all the arts". That seems unlikely, but who am I to argue, considering how nobly Steve Chase does cartwheels and kicks to subdue bad guys. I assume they're bad guys, anyway. For all I know, he just likes beating people up whenever he walks through a casino. To finish off the last guy (who's facing him about six feet away), Steve grabs an ashtray and does a forward flip over the guy, bashing him on the back of the head. That's quite a vertical leap he's got there.

My mistake; that wasn't the last guy. The real last guy gets knocked into a pool with a bunch of well-dressed guests. Then Steve says "I really hate these affairs." The trophy girl (who's handing him a trophy) says "What kind of affairs do you like?" in what I think was supposed to be a southern accent. Steve's witty riposte: "The kind you're most amply suited for." That's not smooth, in my opinion. For one thing, he just went with the line she gave him. For another, he seems to be calling her a slut. Can't a girl get a job giving out trophies at martial arts conventions in Sun City without taking this kind of abuse?

The blonde who was following Steve wants to talk to him. Apparently, he was saving her from assault by the eleven or twelve guys. Steve knows that she set it up, and also knows that her name is "Kandy Kane with a K". Now I suppose he's going to assume she's a slut, just because of her name. And that's just not fair. She could easily be a stripper instead.

Steve invites himself up to Kandy's suite after delivering a heartfelt acceptance speech ("Thank you very much"). He praises Kandy's imported champagne, solely on the basis of it being imported. Since I happen to know that true champagne only comes from that one valley in France, I'm not very impressed with Steve's somellier act. Plus, his tuxedo looks silly. As they trade crude banter ("Call me Kandy." "Sounds delicious") and even cruder exposition ("Related to the missing Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dr. Horatio Kane." "He's my father."), Steve slides his hands along all the furniture. He's either looking for bugs or he is one kinky Martial Arts Master.

Kandy's father has been missing two months ("Not just missing. Kidnapped, in fact." clarifies Kandy, who's clearly in a hurry to get the party started). There's a bug in the piano, under the E above middle C. Dr. Kane has been working several years to extract fuel from potatoes. Kandy claims that "One years crop could provide enough gasoline to drive every car in the world to the moon." Sure, but where would they park?

In the process of trying to discover this, Dr. Kane found a byproduct: "An incredible new mind control drug that enables whoever administers it to bend people to his will." That brings up some questions. First of all, am I to believe that potatoes contain both the fuel of the future and a super-powerful mind control drug? Second, how did he find this out? Was he testing potato squeezings ("Nope. This will only send half the cars in the world to the moon. Keep trying!") and then feeding the failures to his lab assistant? And if he's a Nobel-winning chemist on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough, won't everyone he meets already be doing his bidding?

Steve and Kandy.

Room service brings in some champagne. To my surprise, there is not a fight. Instead, the obviously-phony room service guy leaves the room before Steve throws the bottle out the window where it explodes. "Must have been domestic," quips Steve, before dragging the room service guy back into the room so they can destroy Kandy's suite while yelling "YAHHHH!" The guy escapes after kicking the piano over.

Steve opens a door and threatens the old whits guys in there by putting his foot to one of their throats and yelling. But they're here to help Kandy convince Steve to save her father. He's in a village in the mountains (they don't say which mountains). "It's for the good of the world!" gasps one guy, acutely aware that if they make a trailer for this movie, he'll get to be in it. Steve says it'll be expensive, but these are "men of considerable means". They offer two million plus expenses. Steve counters with five million and he picks up his own tab.

"I'll need help. Four good men I can rely on," says Steve, so that we can spend a bunch of the movie watching Steve go recruit his old buddies. It's like the plot of Baron Munchausen. Anyway, Kandy wants to come along, but Steve doesn't want any cooties. That gets a big dramatic music sting.

Cut to a big field with people doing karate movies while someone counts in Japanese. By the time he gets to "go", I feel like I should be doing push-ups. Everyone's laid out in regiments, through which Steve strolls, occasionally asking various sensei where The Fly is. Hey, they're on a rooftop all of a sudden!

The Fly, apparently, has found satori, and knows Steve is looking for him. Steve walks up to a door, but as he starts to knock, it opens by itself. When he walks in, the door closes behind him. I think it's supposed to represent The Fly's spiritual awakening or something, but it's an effect normally reserved for horror movies when the teenagers walk up to the creepy-looking inn.

The Fly's pad is weirdly lit, possibly to disguise the fact that there's no furniture. Steve walks up some stairs and sees feet come in the frame from the right. The feet take a long fireplace match, strike it, and light a candle. The music pretends we're watching something of great elegance and difficulty. I wonder if they got someone who was born without arms to do that.

The Fly's feet.

The Fly appears. He's sliding to his right, and we see a closeup of his feet, revealing that he's standing flat on the floor as he slides. The implication, I guess, is that he's using the teeny muscles on his soles to move. That, or he's mastered the art of sliding.

He slides to the center of the frams and stands passively watching Steve. Have I mentioned Steve's bronze tan? It's creepy. They bow to each other using just their heads, and The Fly starts to talk funny:

Steve: You won't come.
The Fly: Your outer eye sees clearly.
Steve: You must be tired of playing games.
The Fly: Your inner eye is equally aware.

Steve starts to walk away but instead decides to spar a little. He punches at The Fly a few times, but each punch is blocked. By The Fly's feet. So he's very feet-intensive, got it? After a few more exchanges, in which The Fly keeps gibbering ("This time the game is serious." "I know. It's a game between tigers and dragons. A game in which both sides bleed. Profusely.") The Fly runs off and starts climbing down the side of the building.

Gorilla and a rope.

Cut to a tug-of-war in a construction site. Seven men against one big bald black guy: Gorilla. If they remake this movie, this part will be played by either Ving Rhames or Michael Clarke Duncan. Various non-Gorilla people lose their footing and fall into a mud puddle. Because this movie is all about the sophisticated comedy. But then Steve takes the anchor position and holds off Gorilla, who looks up to see who's challenging him.

"Steve Chase, you son of a gun," he says in a possibly-Jamaican accent, before being pulled into the puddle. Gorilla is shirtless, by the way, and Steve's shirt is open to his navel. Gorilla doesn't want to go with Steve, because he's happy where he is. Also, he's been banned from pro wrestling. "Every time I beat a guy, I bite his ear off. I just couldn't help it." I think that's where the movie starts getting weird. That or The Fly's sliding-around deal. Anyway, that ear-biting line is not a Mike Tyson reference, because the movie's too old for that.

Roscoe the Raspy-Voiced Foreman comes over and fires Gorilla for taking too long a coffee break. Gorilla tosses Roscoe in the mud puddle and then gives Steve a big muddy hug. Gorilla's on the team.

Cut to either a junk yard with people living in it or a trailer park with a lot of abandoned cars. There's banjo music. Steve's shirt is now open well past his navel. He stops buy a guy with a newspaper on his head and a toothpick in his mouth. Steve's looking for Gypsy Billy, but the guy demands a couple of bucks before he says "Past that truck. First alley on the left." He says it in kind of an upper-class British accent, too, which is ruining the whole Deliverance vibe.

Steve goes up to a dove-infested school bus with "GYPSY EX-CHAMPION OF THE WORLD" written on it. After trying to convince Billy to come along (mostly by saying "C'mon, Gyp" over and over again), Steve moves onto the only thing he knows: violence.

So he pulls Billy out of the bus, Billy does a flip or two, Steve jumps after him, and Steve drags him away while Billy insists that he's in no shape for a mission, he'll be of no use, etc. When they get to Newspaper And Toothpick Guy, Billy stops and demands his security deposit back, but the guy only offers him Steve's two bucks. Steve wants to know if Billy's going to put up with that. Billy shrugs and answers "He's got the franchise," which is pretty funny even though I don't have any idea what it means.

Steve and Gypsy Billy

So Steve eggs Billy on, we learn that Newspaper And Toothpick Guy is named Vampire (I think), and a bunch of thugs come out of various trailers, trucks, and buses. Now fight! They circle him and attack one at a time, as ordained by law. One of them is armed with a crutch. I think they're supposed to be southern tough guys, but they're still doing the Bruce Lee "WAAAAA! IYYEEEEEEE! YAAAAAA!" high-pitched squealing.

Steve takes a seat and watches in bemusement as Billy does various flips and jumps, some of them assisted by running the film backwards. To the surprise of no one except Gypsy Billy, he soon dispatches the thugs. Billy's on the team.

Slide show. Satellite photos. This is clearly the Briefing. Apparently they rented a satellite from NASA or something. Time for more exposition:

Old Guy: "You've heard of Wellington Forsythe the Third, haven't you?" Steve: "A billionaire who dropped out of sight years ago." Same Old Guy: "Supposedly lost on an archaeological expedition. He calls himself Marduk now, after the Babylonian god."

So Marduk has a city full of mind-slaves and Kandy's father as his prisoner. Some of the pictures were clearly taken at ground level, not from satellites. That's because Marduk has a weakness for "pretty girls". Hey, who doesn't?

They plan to drop Steve and Crew off by helicopter and have them travel dirt roads the rest of the way. Because dirt roads make for cheap sets.

The evil Marduk and his extremely fake beard

Gorilla: "Steve. This is going to be a tough job. I think we should recruit Hotdog with his bag of tricks." The old guys also want Steve to bring Kandy, but he is adamant with his No Girls Allowed policy. If it was good enough for the treehouse, it's good enough for top-secret missions.

A pretty girl is taking pictures. This is their operative inside Marduk's encampment. Apparently, it hasn't occurred to Marduk to use the mind-control drug on the people closest to him. That shows pretty good morals for a supervillain, because I know plenty of people who, when presented with mind control drugs and pretty girls would not hesitate to combine the two. She joins four or five more of her kind around Marduk.

They're watching a sort of arena, in which a guy in white shorts and a '70s-style mustache is dispatching four stunt guys. Instead of attacking one at a time, the stunt guys attack two at a time in perfect synchronicity. Marduk rabbits on about his "loyal warrior", calling him "The Optimus" and generally establishing that this is the champion that someone's going to have to beat at some point in the movie.

This is Minerva. I wonder if watching this movie in my youth made me more likely to like the Rocky Horror Picture Show later on.

Whoo-hoo! I forgot there was a cool punk chick in this movie! It's "Minerva", and she's got extremely bright red hair. Also, she's very hot. She calls Marduk "honey child" and "angel face", prompting an "I wish you wouldn't call me those names. Not in front of the ladies." Heh. Honey, I'm working!

Minerva doesn't think that Marduk's harem qualifies as "ladies" and tells Marduk that Steve's coming. Marduk's thrilled that the Optimus will have a challenger. He's not thrilled that Dr. Kane is summoning him. Because as the mono-named supervillain, Marduk is supposed to do all the summoning.

Marduk exits his helicopter with majestic elegance

Marduk and Minerva get into a teeny little helicopter that looks like it was built from a kit. Minerva's piloting it, because she's cool. They're only doing this to get some aerial views of the compound. Troops are exercising and shouting. They all have sweat pants and T-shirts. When the copter lands, Marduk has to bend almost double when he walks out. It's not very awe-inspiring.

The lab has many beakers full of colored liquids bubbling around. Of course it does. Dr. Kane has found out from the news that he's not here of his own free will. If I were Marduk, I wouldn't let my mind-controlled slaves watch the news. It doesn't seem like a good idea.

Cut to a warehouse. "Okay, Round Number Six! Place your bets!" A guy in a red baseball cap has a pistol and laughs to himself as people put money underneath a bowl. One guy is sitting on top of a ladder, and other guys are sitting around. Baseball-cap guy throws the pistol against the wall. Pow! Pwing! Ka-pwing! The bullet ricochets for awhile, but no one's hit. The guy on the ladder says "I'm not ready to die yet" and gets out of there.

Steve, Billy, and Gorilla are looking through the door, which is ajar. "That's our Hotdog" says Steve. Apparently, last man alive gets the money. They move to Round Seven. Before Round 8, Hotdog takes a stub of cigar out of one of the guys' mouths, dips it in a glass of something dark and alcoholic, sucks off the juice, and puts it back in the guy's mouth, saying "Hotdog." It's weird. In Round 8, someone gets hit in the leg and ducks out.

Steve whistles, sort of, and Hotdog comes over to the door, telling the guys to keep playing without him. He's happy to see everyone, but he's crushed that The Fly's missing. He realizes Steve's "assembling" again, and says to count him out, because Steve is too dangerous. As he says "dangerous", a stray bullet goes through the beer bottle in his hand. "Hey, you guys," he yells. "I passed this one. You're only allowed to shoot each other! It is damn hard to keep these guys a new game." That Hotdog sure knows how to live.

Hotdog tries to stall, but Gorilla picks him up and threatens him, so he comes along. As the gang leaves, we hear a nasal carnival-barker voice continuing the game in the warehouse. "Chip in or ship out. You got nothin' to lose except your life!" Man, why isn't this movie a classic?

Fancy airplane. Hotdog's got a box of caltrops and a Budweiser baseball cap. Hotdog whines about not having The Fly along. Gorilla wants to use the bathroom, but it's occupied. So he breaks the door down. Take that, pilot!

Billy points out that Kandy's on the flight. Hotdog puts the moves on her with a bad Bogart impression. Kandy says that it's her plane and her money, so she's coming along. "Listen, Steve Chase. I'm here for a reason. I know where you can find The Fly. I can't make him come along, but I can take you to him." Steve's already talked to The Fly, and he got turned down.

Steve reluctantly acquiesces (because "reluctantly" is the only way anyone ever acquiesces) and calls her "Duchess" for some reason.

The Fly in his Fortress of Solitude or something

Cut to The Fly, who's apparently in a Sting video. He's kneeling, surrounded by candles. Steve begs him to come along ("Okay, come on, Fly. I need your feet." "For this mission, feet alone are insufficient."). Then The Fly starts levitating. Why are the enlightened ones always such show-offs?

Steve also levitates to show how great he is, and The Fly agrees to come along. Cue the music and cut to a truck on a dirt road. Almost immediately, they stop.

The Fly: "Question: Why is the soft lady traveling with warriors?" Kandy claims she can hold her own. Steve offers to teach Kandy some of the basics, "right after you cook breakfast."

Marduk's mind-controlled karate army is training on a hillside. They're the same guys that were outside The Fly's place earlier, but in different shirts. They include more overweight middle-aged guys and pigtailed girls than you'd expect from an army. Marduk strolls around pontificating to Minerva who looks bored. She also looks like she belongs in a different movie.

Marduk, Minerva, and the army

Steve is also pontificating to Kandy. "Martial arts must first be graceful. Elegant. And only then can they be potent. The student begins to become one with the spirit of his art. Lending a new creativity to his every movement. No wasted motion. No wasted energy. Every flick of the finger must have meaning. Every step. Every breath. Even the slightest flick of the head." While he's saying all this, he's' doing kata and punching at her. Finally, Kandy gets tired of all this, grabs his arm, and throws him to the ground. Steve's posse starts laughing and she kicks them off their log. Steve says "I should have known" and the wacky music cuts in.

Remember that one phrase, though: No Wasted Motion.

Minerva enters Marduk's groovy pad, where he's got several girls and a parrot. She tells him that "Operation Intercept" has been activated, calls him "pumpkin pie" and "Chuckles", and leaves.

The trck pulls up to a bar (with a big sign that sys "BAR"). The Fly says "House of merriment usually breeds trouble." I think he's supposed to sound like a fortune cookie. The bar has an American flag, although the license plates were South African. Steve walks up to the bartender, who is smoking a cigar, and asks for directions. The barkeep takes offense at being called "friend", and tensions get high.

Hotdog, with his unerring sense of etiquette, walks up, takes the barkeeps cigar from his hands and does that same dip-it-in-alcohol, suck-off-the-juice, hand-it-back, say-"Hotdog" thing. That's really weird. I mean, I get that it's phallic to smoke off another man's cigar, but the rest of it really complicates things. The bartender is confused.

Steve offers to buy everyone in the bar a drink. A cowboy spits and puts out a candle. Is this whole scene going to take place in metaphor?

Steve puts out his hand and Hotdog hands him nunchaku. Because ever since Bruce Lee, it's important for a martial arts hero to do this scene with the whooshy sound effects. Steve puts out several candles with the nunchaku, which is nicely reminiscent of Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone. It also raises the question of just why a redneck bar had so many lit candles.

A colorful local pours a beer on The Fly

The Spittin' Cowboy says "I'd like to buy you a drink," and then pours his beer all over The Fly's head. He offers to buy another drink, and Steve kicks it out of his hand. A fight, unsurprisingly, ensues. Steve "No Wasted Motion" Chase uses forward flips any time he has to travel ten feet. Hotdog gets some mileage out of the Bruce Lee "AwwwwwwwwwwwWWWW" noise before breaking bottles over people's heads. Kandy kicks her share of butt. Carnage. Guess who wins. The barkeep gives Steve the directions.

Marduk's compound. Some officer stops a soldier off on his own and asks for his documentation. Marduk's not tattooing his mind-slaves? The officer is about to let the soldier off, but Marduk himself shows up. The soldier is put in solitary for losing his Class A Permit. The officer is hit sharply over the head with a baton.

Minerva drives up in a jeep. The bar fight was Plan A of Operation Intercept. It's a good thing for their plan that Steve stopped at the right bar. Marduk says to put Plan B into effect. It involves "ground troops", or what I like to refer to as "Infinite Ninjas". Operation Water Supply is going to effect soon. These are pretty lame Operation names. I mean, "Operation Go Eat a Baked Potato for Lunch" is too informative to be catchy, you know? Minerva calls him "Dimples" and leaves.

Steve and Kandy get close to each other until they realize that the boys are watching them from a tree branch.

After the fight, Hotdog steps on one of his own caltrops.

One scene later, they're lost. The map (which they got from people so rich they could rent satellites) is inaccurate. Steve flags down a truck, which turns out to be carrying several large gentlemen. About twenty, in fact. In the ensuing fight, Hotdog and Kandy do almost nothing, although Hotdog eventually uses his caltrops while being chased. Have I mentioned the whooshing noises every time anyone does anything in a fight? The sound effects are right out of terrible kung fu movies. Whereas this is a karate movie.

Marduk expostulates about his "elite ground corps" being destroyed, and is not mollified when Minerva calls him "popsicle" and refers to the next operation.

There is general meditation and training among Steve's boys. Gorilla and Steve meditate while The Fly and Billy do kata in unison. I assume Hotdog's drinking a beer somewhere.

The Fly: "Question. Why are eagles wearing umbrellas?" Hey, skydiving ninjas! Gorilla, Hotdog, and Billy are unconcerned and continue playing poker on the hood of the truck. The parachutes are all bright rainbow patterns; exactly what you'd never ever use to sneak up on someone. The Fly opines that it's "a beautiful sight but deadly." I think they just got some footage of a parachuting festival.

The leader of the bad guys fights Steve with Sais. That's the fork-looking thing that Raphael, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle had. Engrossed in the poker game, Hotdog tosses Steve the nunchaku. Gorilla raises by ones and twos; Hotdog raises by fives and twenties. The helmets on the parachuters don't seem to be helping any.

Steve does a forward flip all the way over the hood of the car (because he's all about No Wasted Motion). A thug is thrown onto the hood, which sends money and cards everywhere. Gorilla claims to have lost his cards and tells Billy that since there were only twenty of them, he didn't figure he needed to help.

Gorilla says they'll have to replay the hand and that he had a pair of threes. What did Hotdog have? Hotdog: "A royal flush. The first one in my whole life. Without cheating!" Whaa-Whaaaaa.

They're outside Marduk's compound. Steve tries to come up with a plan. Team A is Gorilla and Hotdog. Team B is Gypsy Billy and The Fly. Steve works alone. Kandy is supposed to stay behind and watch the car. Steve thinks they should try to blend in, so he tells everyone to find someone their size and knock 'em out. That trick still worked in 1981.

Invasion music plays as the gang hops over walls and thugs out guards. Steve does a double-flip over an eight-foot wall. Hotdog walks up to the front gate and bangs on it, claiming that he has "new weapons" for Marduk. Gorilla comes up behind them and bonks their heads together. Diabolical!

Seriously, they're doing landscaping. Just because you're an evil genius with mind-controlled karate slaves is no excuse for sloppy shrubbery.

While Steve prowls Marduk's compound (where the mind-controlled karate troops are doing some landscaping), a gas station attendant regains his free will and runs for it. He gets almost ten feet before he's subdued and reinjected with the drug.

Gypsy Billy finds a construction site and follows a guy into a porta-john. Then, I guess, he subdues the guy and strips him naked before putting on the clothes himself. It's not a very big space to do all that in.

Steve is stopped by an officer who demands to see his documents. In the inevitable fight, Steve does that move where he runs up a wall and does a backflip, creating the impression that he's studied tap dancing at some point in his life. He's not even being chased when he does it; he just seems to like doing flips.

Hotdog and Gorilla creep around while trying to decide which mind-slave's uniform they should grab. Steve creeps into the lab and finds Kandy, who has shocked absolutely no one by coming along. They find Hotdog and Gorilla, the latter of whom is wearing clothes too small for him. Because Gorilla couldn't find Officer clothes, he's sent to join a work group. Kandy needs mindslave clothes, so Hotdog sneaks behind a building, sees a guy go around a corner, and throws . . . a boomerang. Naturally, he's able to aim it perfectly and knock the guy out with one shot, so he carries the unconscious body back to Kandy. We cut away as they're stripping him.

They run into Gypsy Billy and The Fly (also dressed like officers) and have an unwise discussion out in public about where the doctor might be. A high-level officer comes by and starts questioning them. Steve tries to talk his way out of it, but it doesn't go very well. They find out where Dr. Kane is, and then thug the guy. Gorilla rejoins the group for some reason, and they go up some stairs to where the Doctor is being held.

Their way is barred by guys with guns who say they have to see the Captain first. Luckily, the gun-toting guards find nothing suspicious about Steve saying "We'll have to do it the hard way; take the first chance you get."

The guy they just thugged out is there and calls for injections of mind drugs. But he's stopped by Marduk, who has "far greater plans for Mr. Chase." There's a bit of a fight scene, but guards with AK-47s come in, and that's that. Taken prisoner!

Marduk leads Steve through the hillside of training. He says that these soldiers are his elite of the elite. They include at least one woman who looks to be over sixty, and several balding fat guys. Cut to the drug vats, where Marduk says that freedom of choice is bad, and discipline is good. I think Minerva helped with some of that philosophy.

Anyway, The Optimus. Marduk's a crackpot, so he wants the Optimus to defeat Steve Chase in hand-to-hand combat.

Marduk shows Dr. Kane to Steve, who is horrified to learn that the doctor has been drugged. Minerva drags in the spy, who was caught taking pictures of the serum vats. She tries claiming that she wanted to record Marduk's victory or something. It doesn't work.

Minerva: "So you're Steve Chase. Mmm. Not bad." Steve's not impressed, and even insults her hair.

Minerva and Marduk leave Steve and Dr. Kane alone with guards outside. Dr. Kane turns out to not really be drugged, because with him the drug wears off in two days instead of five. When Steve says he's been hired by Kane's daughter, Kane claims that his daughter is already one of Marduk's victims. Oooh, Kandy's a phony! Anyway, Dr. Kane has made an antidote. And not a moment too soon, because the mind control drug is already in the water supplies of various major cities.

There's just so much to like about this shot.

To the arena! Marduk makes a speech to his troops, half of whom are shirtless for some reason. Steve is brought to join the gang in a cell. He snipes at Kandy, apparently bitter about being lied to, before all the non-Steve people are brought out to fight locals for Marduk's amusement.

Gorilla fights a big white guy. He wins with an airplane spin. Gypsy Billy fights some guy. I think these are people they fought before, but it's really hard to tell. He wins with a kick to the back of the head. Kandy fights a woman and wins really quickly. Hotdog, who has shown no fighting skills at all so far, starts his fight off be getting repeatedly kicked in the face. But to everyone's surprise, he catches the other guy's kick and gets a few good punches in and soon wins. He swaggers off, saying "hotdog". The Fly has an extremely choreographed fight which he wins fairly quickly.

Marduk is 0 for 5 and the troops begin to murmur. It's not good when even your mind-controlled troops are murmuring. Minerva leans over to Marduk and says "They're making us look like idiots" in a tone of voice that I really, really enjoy.

The Optimus. Doesn't look that scary, does he?

Steve Chase faces The Optimus.For some reason, Steve's black belt, which is presumably part of the clothes Marduk handed him, is really worn. Many silly combat tactics ensue, including Steve jumping up to do a handstand on The Optimus's shoulders. In fact, that's what he does several times. The final sequence goes like this:

Steve flips up over The Optimus, clapping him on the ears while upside down.
Steve flips up over The Optimus again, punching him in the back of the head while upside down.
Steve does a round-off, a back handspring, and a twisting backflip for no reason at all.
Steve kicks The Optimus in the face, knocking him out.

The Fly, Hotdog, Gorilla, Gypsy Billy, and Kandy run up to congratulate Steve. Marduk throws a tantrum and orders the guards to bring the new orally-administered mind drug. Steve drinks it, which would be pretty manly if we didn't already know about the antidote. Marduk tests him by telling him to kill his friends.

"They're making us look like idiots."

Steve's gang pretends to hit him and then throws Steve up to Marduk. Steve grabs Marduk and makes him announce to his assembled troops that New Babylonia (which I think I forgot to mention is Marduk's name for his compound) no longer exists and that Marduk is their enemy. Pandemonium ensues and Minerva and Marduk run through a gate.

Steve's gang goes after them, barring the gate behind them (because of all those insane mind-controlled karate zombies now running amok). Steve does an absolutely gratuitous double backflip with several twists off a wall. No wasted motion!

Kandy and Gorilla chase Minerva and Marduk to the teeny helicopter. Gorilla grabs the blades to keep them from rotating. Because he's strong. Minerva runs out and Marduk screams "You dare to desert me!" in a way that sounds a lot like Chong in Yellowbeard. Minerva runs into Kandy who makes short work of her.

When shot by bullets, even the smallest helicopter will immediately explode. Well-known fact.

Gun-toting guards show up and tell Gorilla to let go of the helicopter or they'll shoot. He doesn't. They shoot. Naturally, the helicopter blows up with Marduk inside. So long, supervillain!

Meanwhile, Steve's climbing the outside of a building for some reason. The high-level guard from earlier is in a room full of beakers pointing a gun at Dr. Kane. He shoots at 1:36:10. The bullet comes out very slowly. Much slower than in The Matrix. Ten seconds of bullet-time later, Steve appears from behind Dr. Kane with, um, a metal ashtray or something. jumps in the way, and deflects the bullet.

A little more Hotdog.

So everything's fine now. Kandy was a government agent who was trying to get the mind control drug, but now that she's gotten a taste of Steve Chase, she doesn't want to be a spy anymore. Hotdog's got Marduk's parrot. Gorilla drives the truck around a corner and has an accident. The (somewhat confusing) End!