An Elephant in the East.
When it comes to the notorious White Elephant Exchange Blogathon, I have been quite mean these past two years. To be fair, I got blind-sided by Bio-Dome in the inaugural edition, so I had some fury that needed venting. But still - there’s really no excuse for the two nuclear stinkbombs I tossed into the pot. People shouldn’t even know of the existence of King Kung Fu and Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, let alone find themselves forced to endure the likes of them. This year, I decided to go with something that, love or hate, is an odd and singular work, and I’m very anxious to see how the lucky recipient responds to it.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say with this needlessly long opening is that I was a nicer guy this year, and I guess you get what you give because fortune smiled upon me this time around. How else to explain my receiving the ridiculous, wonderful ball of ’80s-style goofiness that is…..
GYMKATA!!!
Gymkata! Oh, Gymkata! It’s so much goddamn fun to say Gymkata! Seriously, between that title and that poster, how could I not be excited for this? It’s awesome before I’ve ever popped in the DVD.
Gymkata, if you didn’t know, was the ill-advised attempt to turn gold-medal-winning gymnast Kurt Thomas into a fists-of-fury action-movie star. It was also part of the long karmic bitchslap administered to Robert Clouse in retaliation for his part in bringing the debacle that is Game of Death to fruition. Seriously, look at the guy’s resume. He makes one of the greatest martial-arts films ever in 1973 with Enter the Dragon and makes an enjoyable followup with Black Belt Jones. Even Golden Needles and The Pack have people who are willing to go to the mat for them. But post-Game, yeesh: A couple of telemovies for Disney, an unloved entry in Jackie Chan’s first attempt to break into the American market (The Big Brawl), a film with dachshunds dressed up as giant rats (Deadly Eyes), not one but two Cynthia Rothrock vehicles (the China O’Brien films)… and this inexplicable thing. It is an enormous, unbroken string of bad laughs, an entirely straight-faced rendition of an entirely ridiculous concept. To watch Gymkata is, among other things, to wonder if anyone involved in the production understood what a silly, silly film they were making.
But who the fuck am I to complain about a bad laugh? I much prefer misguided sincerity to the easy snark of the cult readymade - if you’re going to expend the resources to make a movie, it makes zero sense to waste all that on something to which you feel superior. So Gymkata takes itself very seriously even though it has (among other things) a scene where the hero finds a convenient pommel horse in the middle of a Asian mountain town populated entirely by psychotics, and I’m okay with that. Even as a retarded work of art, it still stands its ground as a era-specific cultural object.
Gymkata could only have been made in the Reagan ’80s - it’s a relic of the waning days of the Cold War, the days when a Star Wars military defense system sounded viable and thus would be a fine thing around which to construct your doofy action movie. Turns out the tiny East Asian nation of Parmistan (which, I assume, is bordered by Provolonistan and Asiagistan) is the perfect location to set up a ground base for such a defense system. Putting such a construction up would bring invaluable aid to whichever nation was allowed to build it there… but of course such a proposition is not as easy as it sounds. For 900 years, Parmistan has challenged all entering outsiders with “The Game,” a deathsport that’s a cross between The Most Dangerous Game and an Army training obstacle course. No outsider has won in all that time, which makes me wonder if even Genghis Khan got his ass whipped by the then-native Parmistanians or if he just intrinsically knew to leave those crazy bastards alone. Kurt Thomas, though, is determined to win for flag and family and all that patriotic jazz. (Also, his dad having disappeared in Parmistan while playing The Game probably added a motivational boost.) He’ll have to compete against his fellow players (a parade of ethnic stereotypes including a Hispanic guy, a Chinese guy and a big burly cheating-bastard Russian sumbitch) as well as the Parmistanian forces, comprised mostly of a couple low-rent ninjas and angry angry Richard Norton.
Just describing the basic concept of the film makes it sound shithouse-rat crazy. It’s to my great pleasure, then, that Gymkata lives up to that - The Game itself is properly daffy (the long sequence in the town of crazies is an indescribable highlight, not just of the film but of all Bad Cinema), but the film shows its willingness to jump the rails of logic and competence from the start. Because this is the ’80s, the film waits about four minutes to set up its premise and then kicks into a training montage, in order to explain how Thomas goes from Olympic hero to mad-kung-fu-skillz wizard. Thomas is taught how to fight, how to pay attention to his surroundings and generally how to be an ultimate-warrior type, and he also falls for the exiled princess of Parmistan who’s there for, I dunno, emotional support or something. (I kid: She’s there because she’s the only person who can get Thomas into the country, for obvious reasons. Interesting to note how the film sets her up as a sneaky ass-kicking bitch who can handle her own business only to conveniently forget that the minute the story shifts overseas.) One thing becomes very clear very quickly - Thomas is a fluid, agile gymnast, but he’s no martial artist. The grace he demonstrates on the parallel bars evaporates when he’s asked to kick people in the face; his attempts at karate are stiff and awkward, like he never quite got the choreography right because he was afraid to muss his mullet. Not that I blame him - his hair, so carefully maintained and precisely feathered, damn near deserves a supporting credit. Check it out:
You may think I’m being unnecessarily cruel and snarky. And maybe I am. But we live in a modern age, and instead of resorting to words to describe the Thomas-fight-scene problem to you, which is akin to using finger-paint to describe the taste of a Bordeaux, I can show you. To wit:
You see now, right? Thomas is a lot of things - an incredible athlete, a beacon of physical fitness, a potential second-place finisher at a Richard Dean Anderson lookalike contest, hopefully a good sport - but he is not a martial artist. Never was and likely could never be without a lot more intensive practice which wouldn’t have fit into the production schedule. You wonder how something like this basic conceptual failure could have happened. Why base a large-scale, high-budget kung-fu movie around a guy who cannot perform kung fu, cannot even reasonably fake kung-fu?
I ask this even though the answer is beautiful, obvious and very telling about its time: Kurt Thomas is in this kung-fu movie because he was a champion gymnast, a gold medalist in a number of international competitions. What’s more, he was denied a chance to go to the 1980 Olympics and win another gold medal on the home turf of those dirty rat-bastard Commies. He was, for a time, a national icon, a recognizable face… a god-damned hero. And why the hell wouldn’t you cast an athletic hero in a film that allows him to do a good many athletic things in the name of ass-kicking whilst simultaneously offering him a chance to symbolically enact the Commie beatdown he never got to do in real life? Easy peasy lemon motherfuckin’ squeezy. Gymkata may be dumb as dirt, may be a terrible action film, but it’s a true and sincere effort. A hero on the mat becomes a hero of flying fists for God and country, and America emerges victorious over the Eastern forces. USA! USA! USA! USA!
******************
Post-script: I couldn’t work this into the review proper, but I can sum up exactly how dumb this movie is in the space of one minute. This, I think, is an even more succinct explanation of this film’s wacky appeal than the above fight scene:
