Starring: Ron Marchini, Michael Chong, Joshua Johnson,
Mari Honjo, Ron Ackerman, Edward Blair, Bob Cori, Philip DeAngelo, Mary Carole
Frederickson, Chuck Katzakian, Colleen Kinsley, John Lowe, Felix McGill, George
Neal, Eric Lee
Director: Paul Kyriazi
Action Director: (none credited)
One of the interesting oddities in the annals of American martial arts cinema is the career of Ronald Lee Marchini. Hailing from the author’s hometown of Stockton, California, Ron started training in a karate style known as Renbukai in 1964 at the age of 19. He ended up spending time in Japan to advance his training. Over the course of his tournament fighting career, he fought against Chuck Norris, won a number of championships and received various accolades for his work as instructor and referee. He has a dojo in Stockton—one that the author considered studying at karate at before ultimately choosing to study Goju-Ryu under Eugene Tibon.
What is especially fascinating about Marchini is that his career as a leading man in martial arts movies started as early as 1974, when his contemporary Chuck Norris was still cutting his teeth in supporting roles in movies like Slaughter in San Francisco. Nonetheless, Marchini’s career rarely rose above low-budget Filipino action films, or low-budget American action films made in the Phillipines. He ended his career in the mid-1990s, little more than a footnote in the history of the genre.
Death Machines is an odd duck to be sure. As a low-budget American film produced by Marchini himself, one might think that he would take extra care to make a movie that would serve as a showcase for both his talents and for the Renbukai style itself, much like what Bruce Lee wanted to do with jeet kune do or what Lau Kar-Leung did with hung gar. Instead, we get a rather bizarre action film that features a handful of fight scenes, but mainly serves as an object lesson in how not to write a screenplay.
The movie begins with a series of fights between different martial artists, overseen by “Oriental Dragon Lady” Madame Lee (Mari Honjo). There are three survivors: a white guy (Marchini), a black guy (Joshua Jackson, of Weapons of Death), and an Asian guy of undisclosed nationality (Michael Chong, of Kinjite: The Forbidden Subjects). All three men are subjected to brainwashing (offscreen) that transforms them into silent, obedient killers. Their first job is to eliminate a rival assassin broker and his employees. During these scenes, our assassins use discreet methods to off their victims, like shooting a would-be sniper from behind with a bazooka in the middle of a public park.
With the competition out of the way, the gangster (Chuck Katzakian, who lived in the San Joaquin Valley in California and thus was probably a friend of Marchini’s) who had previously hired the deceased hitmen turns to Madame Lee to get his dirty work done. The first job is to wipe out a karate instructor (Eric Lee, also of Weapons of Death), whose dojo is a front for unseen nefarious activities. Instead of waiting for the man’s class to be over and kill him when he’s alone, our three killers storm the place while class is in session and kill both the instructor and his entire class with katanas. Only one man, Mike (Bob Corri), survives, albeit with one less hand. So when Lee finds out that a witness is still alive, she sends the killers to the hospital to silence him. That’s where things get complicated...
The main problem with Death Machines is that it doesn’t know who its main characters are. As a result, it sort of jumps around from one character’s point of view to the next, without ever gaining any narrative momentum. One moment, we spend several scenes with a pair of detectives assigned to the case (played by Low Blow’s Ron Ackerman and Edward Blair) and you think the movie will be about them trying to discover the killers’ identities before taking down Madame Lee. But once Ron Marchini’s character is apprehended, the movie hints that he might regaining his humanity and you think that the film will revolve around him being forced to turn on his colleagues and boss. But that’s suddenly forgotten as we spend a number of scenes with Mike, who strikes up a romance with a nurse (Mary Carole Frederickson) while coming to terms with his new disability. Will the film be about him and his trying to stay alive after being marked for death? No. The script forgets about that as we go back to the three killers and their second target. Death Machines wants to be about a lot of things, and in the end is about nothing.
Compounding the messy writing is that the sympathetic characters are either jettisoned for most of the film—the detectives—or are just jerks (i.e. Mike). Mike spends a lot of time complaining about missing a hand, but at no point tries to adjust his martial arts ability to his new reality, like you’d see in a kung fu movie. In fact, if he’s the film’s hero, than he’s the most ineffectual one we’ve seen in a long time. Who wants a martial arts movie in which the nominal protagonist does nothing but berate his sympathetic nurse girlfriend and watch the villains from afar. The only contribution to the plot he makes is that helps the Law find the villains’ mansion at the end.
Any catharsis we might get by a hinted final fight at the villains’ hideout is lost in a series of bad decisions. The finale plays more like the end of a giallo film than a martial arts movie. There is no final fight to speak of. None. Zero. Nothing. And the subplot that suggests that Madame Lee answered to more powerful crime boss—and might have been thinking about a hostile takeover—goes completely ignored to the point that we never even find out who this person is. It’s completely ignored. Why bring it up if you’re never going to do anything about it.
And the three killers are some of the worst you’ll ever see in the profession. If these were characters in a Hitman game, they’d be “Deranged Slayers” or “Mad Butchers.” Thankfully, their martial arts are pretty good. The opening fight representes probably the first American film to feature a character wielding the three-section staff, which has to mean something. Ron Marchini gets a big fight scene in which he faces off with an entire police department and gets in some good kicks here. The dojo massacre scene is a neat idea on paper, although the low budget prevents them from using many make-up effects, effectively turning it into a bloodless affair. There is also a random fight at a restaurant run by a couple of Evangelical Christians between the three killers and a biker gang. These fights aren’t bad by 1970s standards—certainly they’re better than some of Jim Kelly’s efforts at the same time—but the lack of a good climax will no doubt leave a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth.
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