Hot Potato (1976)

Hot Potato (1976)

 

Starring: Jim Kelly, George Memmoli, Geoffrey Binney, Irene Tsu, Sam Hiona, Judith Brown, Ron Prince, Hardy Stockmann, Metta Rungrat, Supakorn Songermvorakul
Director: Oscar Williams
Action Director: Jim Kelly, Pat E. Johnson

 

Hot Potato represents producer Fred Weintraub’s third attempt to cash in on the success of Enter the Dragon. He’d been fairly successful with Black Belt Jones, but his next attempt at an Oriental-flavored action movie, Golden Needles, failed big time. Back to the drawing board, Weintraub and company, including blaxploitation director Oscar Williams, decided to bring back Black Belt Jones. Unfortunately, the filmmakers supposed that if Black Belt Jones was successful as an R-rated movie, it might reach even more people as a PG-rated film. To that end, the profanity and violence was replaced with some of the dumbest slapstick comedy ever committed to film.

We open in the fictitious country of Chang-Lon (played by Thailand), where the Oriental supervillain Carter Rangoon (Sam Hiona, of Armed Response and Shoot to Kill) has kidnapped a senator’s daughter, played by A Queen’s Ransom’s Judith Brown. Rangoon intends to use her as leverage to keep the senator from passing any sort of legislation that might affect his drug business. He even goes so far as to procure a double for the daughter (also played by Ms. Brown) to influence her father to pass legislation that might actually be beneficial to his work.

The government sends Agent Jones (Kelly) to Chang-Lon to rescue to the daughter. Helping him is his karate-kicking gambler friend, Johnny Chicago (Raw Force’s Geoffrey Binney, filling in for John Saxon), and a local detective Pam Varaje (Irene Tsu, who played one of the topless torturers in Three the Hard Way). They pick up a fourth member of the troupe, an obese white guy named White Rhino (George Memmoli, of I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now). He will be our comic relief who’ll sink this film to the depths of awfulness as quickly as you’d expect a man of his carriage to do.

So much of the film involves our heroes wandering around the backwoods of Thailand, getting into fights and other hijinks. “Wandering around the hinterlands of Southeast Asia and getting into fights” is a fairly common trope in the martial arts genre. We can see examples of this throughout the decades in movies like Cheetah on Fire (1992), Angel Warriors (2013) and Hard Target 2 (2016). Besides the presence of Jim Kelly, we also have a “powerful” Asian villain whose base serves as a giant martial arts school to remind us that yes, Fred Weintraub produced Enter the Dragon and that film was popular. Appropriately enough, the students at Carter Rangoon’s school are all practicing muay thai instead of karate or kung fu.

The action is just okay. Jim Kelly gets most of the interesting fights. His kempo skills allow him some lightning-fast handwork, especially at the beginning the final fight. His kicks are less impressive, but part of that is because all of his Thai opponents are about two heads shorter than he is. He gets more fighting here than in Golden Needles, which is probably the most positive thing I can say about this movie. Irene Tsu does some generic movie-fu, probably choreographed by Pat E. Johnson. It’s about on the level as a female role in an early 1970s “basher” movie from Hong Kong—think Wang Ping in Heroine Susan. Her introductory fight has her beating up people elliptically, in which the camera focuses on objects as the stuntment get thrown or kicked through them, as opposed to Tsu actually performing the moves. The biggest gyp is the final fight between Jim Kellly and Sam Hiona. There is about 10 seconds of complex kempo handwork, followed by the two men locking hands in mortal combat, and then Jim Kelly kicks the man into a tiger pit and its over.

But even the disappointment on the action front would be easier to stomach if not for the excess of unfunny comedy. Most of it comes courtesy of George Memmoli, whose main claim to fame was that he worked at the ice rink in the original Rocky. The man is a comic vacuum, filling the film with pointless bickering, fat white guys thrusting their hips at the camera, one-liners that would have to raise their IQ by 50 points to reach “asinine” and a really dumb running gag involving a wind-up car. The fact that the guy is not only one of the heroes, but that he a) doesn’t die and b) gets a hot Thai wife (Metta Rungrat, of Red Dragon aka Mission to Hong Kong) over the course of the film. Without him, the movie would be shallow and silly, but fun on a no-brainer level. But Mr. Memmoli’s komic insanity drags this film to the lowest depths of martial arts movie hell inhabited only the likes of Snake Fist Dynamo and Sunland Heat.