The Action/Adventure Section — A regular column that will exclusively highlight and review action movies. The most likely suspects? Action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. But no era will be spurned. As the column grows, the intent will be to re-capture the whimsy of perusing the aisles of your local video store with only ragingly kick ass cover art to aide you in your quest for sweaty action glory. Here we will celebrate the beefy. This is a safe place where we still believe that one lone hero can save humanity by sheer force of will and generous steroid usage.
In the long and storied world of second class action movies, there are many bright lights. But there are just as many would-be action heroes who never quite made the grade. For every Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson or Michael Dudikoff, there’s an Ivan Rogers, a Peter O’Brian, or a Joe Lewis. And to this list of names, we now must add one more: Tiana Banana.
Granted, she doesn’t just go by Tiana Banana. She’s also known in some circles as Tiana Karate Princess. Or by her birth name Thi Thanh Nga. But for the purposes of this review, we’ll call her by her stage name, Tiana Alexandra.
A Vietnamese immigrant with an artistic bent, Alexandra has been an activist, a producer, a singer, a dancer, a filmmaker, a playwright, a game designer, and an archivist. The one nut she was never able to crack was that of the next big action star. Which is a shame, because based on what I’ve seen here, she had the goods.
Catch The Heat is exactly the kind of movie we like to cover here at the Action Adventure Section. It’s action packed, more than a little offbeat, and never takes itself too seriously. For those of us that are into this sort of thing, it’s a cult classic just ripe for discovery.
Alexandra plays Checkers Goldberg, a wisecracking FBI agent whom we first meet in the middle of a drug deal with B-Movie mainstay Brian Thompson. When his subsequent offer of two hundred dollars for ten minutes of sex doesn’t go over so well (despite his chivalrous insistence that “Even plumbers don’t make that”), Thompson tries to get a bit rape-y, uttering the deathless line “Ass on the grass, baby. I’m gonna mow your lawn!”, as bad guys in low rent action movies are unfortunately wont to do. Happily, Checkers immediately turns the tables on her assailant, aided by her partner Waldo Tarr, played by the late David Dukes, who has to advise his irate partner that “Federal agents don’t kick people in the head!”
The movie is full of lines like that. For the record, my personal favorite comes when Dukes interrogates Thompson by pointing a gun at his crotch and warning him “Give me a name, or I give you a vagina!”
As one might expect, Tarr gets the name, and the trail leads to Buenos Aires, and to Jason Hannibal, a talent agent who resides there, but previous to that spent a lot of time in Thailand.
Now if the movies have taught me anything, it’s that there’s only two reasons people ever go to Thailand. And in this case, it’s the other one.
(drugs).
It gets better, on account of the fact that Hannibal is played by none other than Rod Steiger, a.k.a. “The Hammiest Ham To Ever Ham In Hamville”. By my count, Steiger has made more than a hundred movies, and given good performances in roughly five of them. If you’re wondering what kind of person makes a movie like On The Waterfront and then spends almost the entire rest of his career trying to prove it was a fluke… well, there you have it.
Steiger is rarely ever good, but he’s almost always at least interesting to watch as he does his ‘Off-Brand Brando’ shtick. And though he’s mostly sleepwalking (one scene in particular blatantly plays like he told the director “Fuck it; just shoot the rehearsal”) he provides some nice moments of weirdness as the big bad boss man.
At any rate, Checkers goes undercover as Cinderella Pooh (These names!), posing as an aspiring dancer in order to get close to Hannibal and infiltrate his talent agency.
And here’s where we meet Reggie!
Reggie is the choreographer that teaches Checkers/Cinderella how to tango. He doesn’t really do anything in the film, but it’s so rare to see a gay character in an 80s action movie that isn’t the subject of scorn and ridicule that I had to make a note of it.
Once Checkers is ensconced in Hannibal’s troupe of dancing ladies, she works to get close to Hannibal, a task complicated by the fact that one of his henchmen seems to think he’s met her before under acrimonious circumstances, and is determined to prove she isn’t who she says she is.
Meanwhile, Tarr provides assistance from the sidelines, buddying up with a Buenos Aires cop named Ramon to keep her out of trouble.
They’re not particularly great at that part, which is a hassle for Checkers, but pretty entertaining for us as viewers.
This all leads to the reveal of Hannibals evil plot, which I will not reveal here. But here’s a hint: it is so absurd that it was recycled wholesale for a MadTV sketch and they didn’t have to change a thing.
With the truth out, all that’s left is an assault on the compound, where guns blaze, grenades fly, and justice is served. Weirdly, Checkers is kept mostly out of this action, which is handled by Waldo and Ramon. Instead, Checkers gets into a fight with Brian Libby as Brody, that ends with a finishing movie that, if I’m to judge by the way the scene is edited, appears to be anatomically impossible. She doesn’t even get to deliver the coup de grace to Hannibal, who is taken out in a weirdly perfunctory manner. Oh, well. A win is a win, I suppose.
It may seem like I’m being a bit sarcastic about all this, that this is one of those so bad it’s good movies. But that’s not the case at all. I genuinely enjoyed this movie. The delightfully tongue-in-cheek script is by Stirling Silliphant, a screenwriter whose works includes everything from episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason to Shaft In Africa and The Towering Inferno. It’s full of great lines and offbeat touches that make it stand out from the pack.
The action sequences, while not up to the standard of the bigger stars’ flicks, come at a rapid pace and are energetic enough to make up for their dearth of originality.
Alexandra (who actually studied under Bruce Lee) holds her own in the fight scenes. Her match up with Professor Toru Tanaka is a highlight, unexpectedly physical and brutal. Better still, she fills out the role of “wisecracking cop that doesn’t play by the rules” way better than you might expect.
Real talk: Where a lot of these lower tier action heroes fail is that while they might have the physical chops, they rarely have the onscreen charisma that separates the Jean Claude Van Dammes from the Olivier Gruners. They tend to be a little too stiff and posturing to be enjoyable. While I don’t know if I’d classify Tiana as “good” as such, she definitely brings vitality and charm to the proceedings. And really threads a potentially offensive needle with her undercover “performance” as Cinderella; she adopts a hilariously broad China Doll persona that would probably be pretty offensive if Tiana didn’t sell in with a knowing wink.
I always feel bad that I keep confusing David Dukes the actor with David Duke the exceedingly racist two-time Presidential candidate. And now that I’ve learned Dukes died in 2000, I feel even worse. But maybe I can make up for it by calling attention to his stellar work here. He forges a wonderful chemistry with Alexandra: their relentless banter feels uniquely lived in. I don’t buy the romantic aspect they kind of throw in there, but I definitely buy that these two have been partners and friends for a long time. But besides that, Dukes is good all around, even managing to sell some hoary language barrier gags with Ramon, who is amusingly befuddled by everything going on around him.
I’ve gone on for way too long at this point, so let’s close with this: I award this movie the Roadhouse Medal of Awesome, an award I just made up right this minute to honor action movies that are too weird to live, and too good to ignore.
And if you need any more recommendation than that, then you’re reading the wrong column in the first place.