Upfront, there is something you should know about Furious, lest you become just that in baffled frustration. For as little dialogue as this indie rarity holds, it contains even less of another critical storytelling element: sense. More than 16% of the movie passes before a single line is uttered; once they do emerge, the words confound with mystical hokum like, “You are now between anvil and hammer. The dove is a gentle creature, full of good. … Wisdom must come from within.”
You’re not (necessarily) high. Watching Furious just makes you feel that way.
In a showcase for his considerable martial-arts talents, Showdown in Little Tokyo supporting player Simon Rhee stars as — stretttttttttch — Simon. His sister (Arlene Montano, L.A. Streetfighters) seeks … well, something; I forget exactly what — such is a side effect of the Furious experience — but she uses a compass in which the needle has been swapped with some sort of tusk or tooth. Whatever it is, the damn thing still works … assuming she wanted to be pointed toward the astral plane of certain doom. Meanwhile, taking a break from teaching karate to half-pints, Simon embarks on a quest of his own and runs afoul of … well, everybody.
The first of Furious’ many all-feet-on-deck fight sequences erupts in the atrium of an office park — aka Bad Guy Headquarters — where a woman kicks nuts and rakes her nails across men’s eyes, and where one guy looks like the chef hero of the arcade classic BurgerTime. Another rock-’em-sock-’em altercation — this one fought with twirling swords — is waged inside a Chinese restaurant frequented by old ladies eating chicken ordered off menus the size of stone tablets on which God displayed his Ten Commandments.
The physical pièce de résistance, however, pits Simon agains the evil Master Chan (Rhee’s real-life brother Phillip, the common thread woven through all four installments of the Best of the Best franchise), who possesses the power to zap his opponents into poultry — and uses it unsparingly, because c’mon, like you wouldn’t? Simon reigns supreme by ducking underneath one of Chan’s power-finger bolts, which then bounces off a mirror and back onto the power-finger bolter himself, transforming him into a pig. One might say Chan gets a taste of his own medicine, and it sure ain’t kosher!
Sound strange? Just think, I skipped over the magic demonstration doubling as the opening credits, the whispering waterfall, the talking dog, the guy whose hands spurt flames, the giant dragon head that may have been made for a church carnival, the Devo-esque New Wave rock band or the alien invasion. Yes, the alien invasion. While that nugget of info should clear up any narrative questions, it instead succeeds only in stirring more confusion into the plot pot. The oddball flick is a kung-fu extravaganza as directed by Upstream Color wunderkind Shane Carruth (but actually comes from the team of Tim Everitt and Tom Sartori): nonstop action rendered as a semi-lucid, stream-of-consciousness mindfuck. Its bizarre operatic quality is something to behold … or beware, depending upon your ability to suspend disbelief of your disbelief. —Rod Lott
Man oh man, do I ever love a movie in which an olive-complected hospital attendant gets caught literally red-handed, because he’s chomping on a heart freshly plucked from an on-the-slab body! But man oh man, do I ever love more a movie that then has that shamed, swarthy man hurl himself through a plate-glass window and to his death several floors below, the impact of which pops one of his arms clean from his torso. No worries — it’s back attached for his close-up, Mr. DeMille. 
So in 
Things get more twisted as Mary-Kate and Ashley search for a pig to roast. This essentially being a short film, they quickly come across one, sleeping. “Is it alive?” asks Mary-Kate (or maybe it was Ashley). “I don’t know! Let’s see,” replies Ashley (or maybe Mary-Kate; it does not matter). A cartoon light bulb appears over her head and she spots — and then grabs — a nearby stick that conveniently ends in a pencil-sharp point, which she then jabs into the swine’s where-the-sun-don’t-shine hole. As the animal jolts awake and squeals in equal parts terror and pain, the girls again just laugh and laugh. 
Matching in ambition, Pete Schuermann’s 
A former juvenile delinquent who never quite grew up, the bisexual Savage (who died in 1975) hustles and schemes and cheats his way through life and into grandiose dreams of Hollywood fame. That he has no discernible talent outside of fleecing others and abusing his long-suffering wife (Jodi Lynn Thomas, TV’s 
Presumably without knowing, the sheer campiness of the beloved 
And yet, for how purposely and appropriately silly it all is, it left me cold. Wally Wingert may have Frank Gorshin’s Riddler laugh down pat (assuming it’s not sampled straight from the old show), but Return of the Caped Crusaders feels more like a fan film than a real-deal reunion, as if it exists purely to wring dollars from nostalgia rather than because there was a new story to be told. It’s not bad — it’s certainly not drawn that way — but I quickly grew tired of its unrelenting need to poke me in the ribs. To be reminded of the TV series this much, I’d rather just watch the TV series. —Rod Lott