Following the previous year’s Black Samurai, a post-Enter the Dragon Jim Kelly re-teamed with schlock director Al Adamson to go all 007 with Death Dimension. They were off by at least six points.
Kelly’s police detective lives by the credo, “The name of the game is Save Your Ass.” His captain (George Lazenby, the one-and-done James Bond from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) assigns him the case of The Pig (Harold Sakata, aka Goldfinger’s Odd Job), a crime lord looking to sell a “freeze bomb” to any country willing to shell out $30 million. The scientific weapon turns anything within an immediate radius to absolute zero; under an Adamson budget, this is depicted by throwing fake snow within the frame.
Although Adamson was behind the camera, he was not responsible for the screenplay. That batch of incoherence can be blamed on Death Dimension’s own producer, Harry Hope, the man who unleashed a real weapon in 1972: the unwatchable Doomsday Machine. While Death Dimension shares that sci-fi turkey’s whiff of inadequacy, it emerges superior — comparatively speaking, of course — thanks to The Pig keeping a pet turtle, a pet madam (Terry Moore, 1949’s Mighty Joe Young) and a pet giant horny toad, which he threatens will “bite your tit.”
Lest we forget, Death Dimension also boasts star power in Kelly, a real-deal martial artist whose smile radiates actual charm. Yet having charm does not equal exercising good judgment in choosing scripts. In the end, Kelly takes down an airplane with a couple of shots from a hand pistol. Then, to celebrate, he performs a flying kick toward the camera, and Adamson, in his finest visual flourish not involving his wife Regina Carrol’s bosom, freezes the image. Absolute zero, indeed! —Rod Lott