Lady Street Fighter (1981)

Dir. James Bryan

James Bryan and Renee Harmon are dynamite. They’re magic. They're no slouches individually when it comes to low-budget exploitation, but paired together they are unstoppable. How else would you explain Lady Street Fighter? By all accounts it should be an unwatchable piece of crap. The plot makes no sense, the acting and dialogue are uniformly terrible, the action is clunky, and the eroticism is painfully awkward. But somehow Bryan and Harmon are instead able to turn these ingredients into a golden nugget of cinematic insanity that must be seen to be believed.

The film opens with a woman being tortured to death by men trying to extract from her the location of a stuffed dog containing sensitive materials. The woman’s twin sister, Linda Allen, arrives in L.A. with said dog, apparently unaware of its significance and is promptly attacked by two thugs in a parking garage. One of the thugs drives a car into the other’s face, but luckily this leaves him only with a bloody nose. Soon Linda learns of her sister’s murder and begins a revenge quest, only not really. She crosses paths with a host of seedy characters including a hitman(?), a pimp, and an FBI agent(?) who may or may not be a double agent for a sinister organization of assassins(?). From the beginning of the film, Linda’s role in everything is extremely unclear. The viewer is lead to believe that she was the intended target of the opening torture scene, that she is some sort of undercover agent investigating some sort of crime ring. But watching the film it seems that she shows up in L.A. unprompted and without purpose until she hears news of her unfortunate sister.  If none of this makes sense to you, don’t worry, I’m lost too. This is a movie that doesn’t show OR tell. But it’s ok; the plot isn’t important. 

What is important is that Linda gets involved in oddly staged shootouts, stiffly choreographed fistfights, and low speed car chases. There’s a scene in which Linda is at the corner of two hallways, firing shots back and forth at the men on either side of her. The motion is so repetitive and goes on for so long that it almost feels like a Tim and Eric sketch. Also Tim and Eric-esque are Linda’s bizarre attempts at eroticism including licking a telephone for the benefit of the man she’s calling, and on more than one occasion fellating a celery stalk. Many are quick to liken Renee Harmon to Tommy Wiseau, another thick-accented European auteur who tried to make an American-style classic, and while the comparison is obvious, scenes like the ones mentioned above prove that it is not wholly inaccurate. But while the thick accent of the lead, hammy acting from everyone, and some head scratching lines and physical quirks might remind some viewers of The Room (2003), what Harmon and James Bryan have over Wiseau are dynamic camera set ups and actual blocking. The actors move around. The camera moves around. It doesn’t just feel like someone camcorder-ing a community theater stage play. Harmon and Bryan also don’t have the inflated sense of self importance that Wiseau had making The Room. They know they’re making low budget action-trash and they revel in it.

Other highlights of the film include cars tumbling down hills, a sex party that cuts between Linda’s S&M shenanigans, nude dancing, a dude in a sleeveless Van Halen shirt, and group of people in togas chanting “Toga! Toga! Toga!” a la Animal House (1976), the inexplicably included character Ines, a young woman with the mind of a 5 year old, blue filtered day-for-night shots with heavily overlaid cricket chirping, a confusing and quickly dissipating romantic subplot between Linda and an FBI agent, a house exploding by way of miniature, and a sick Synth-Western theme tune. If I had to choose one moment to sum up this film, it’d be Linda smiling down on a car she’s just set ablaze. The man inside the car’s last act on this mortal coil is to raise his immolated hand and flip the bird. Awesome.