The book is called THE 100 DEADLIEST KARATE MOVES, and it’s barely more than your lowest expectations. There are no tips on how to set these moves up, how to do them most effectively, or which states consider them “not murder.” It’s a list of common karate attacks and locations on a human body it would make sense to hit with them. For instance, punch in the face, punch in the neck, punch in the dick, punch in the dick, punch in the dick, end of chapter. Each move is accompanied by a picture of DR. TED GAMBORDELLA 5TH DAN using it on his mostly nude friends along with a list of injuries it causes in a best(?) case scenario. It is, by any standard of judgement, a terrible book. But it would make an awesome set of trading cards. So here is THE 100 DEADLIEST KARATE MOVES by DR. TED GAMBORDELLA 5TH DAN adapted into trading cards by ME.
… This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Micah Phillips: who joins together with four other pure-hearted warriors to form Zorklon, Protector of the Cosmos! He pilots the left leg — the invaluable left leg!
Hi, 1-900-Hotdoggers! Let’s open this fire safety book called “Children Are No Match For Fire” and see how ridicu– oh no. No, no, no, no, this can’t be right.
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Lyman: a magnificent youth who brandishes the magical broadsword, Lycheaper!
Most survival guides are written by the insane or people so much more awesome than the reader their expectations are insane. For instance, I have two books that swear the best way to jump out of a 5th floor window is to do half a front flip and aim for a dumpster. I have 700 books that swear poking tiny pressure points is the best way to defeat an attacking madman. And I have one book explaining how to use a sock to squeeze drinkable water out of animal poop. The point is, survival books are a fun way to fantasize about yourself kicking total ass if something terrible happens to you. I’m not saying you’re wrong, unlikely Rambo; I only brought it up because it’s unusually not so with this book. The Alien Abduction Survival Guide is exclusively for pussies looking for ways to make things easier on their space kidnappers.
First off, this book isn’t a joke. Or if it is, it’s a conspiracy to commit an unfunny prank lasting decades. Michelle LaVigne spends most of her nights in space, yanked there against her will by her best friends who have also tortured her for years. It’s easy to dismiss Michelle as a lunatic or a grifter, but it’s more accurate to say she has every possible emotional and sleep disorder and her only treatment has been blaming space. If you look at this book as a work of fiction, and come the fuck on if you don’t, she has the world building skills of a child saying, “The couch is a racecar and I’m Batman, and you’re Batman. We’re cats.”
It starts off simple enough. Michelle has been abducted since childhood by gray aliens. Hey, maybe you know her gray alien mentor? Hetar? Thin? From outer space? She drew a picture of him if you’re having trouble placing the name.
“You may know him; you may not.” That’s the closest thing Michelle has to keeping a foot planted in reality– being open to the possibility you DON’T know her childhood alien kidnapper. It’s the last almost sane line of the book, and we’re on page 4.
Maybe the most important thing to mention about The Alien Abduction Survival Guide, is there’s not a goddamn thing to “survive.” The worst thing Michelle ever saw in space was someone getting burned during a starship rampage, and the aliens immediately healed him with mind rays. From everything she says, these grays are kind creatures she just baaaarely doesn’t call “dad,” and they put you back right where they found you after some harmless nude experiments. You know what? Maybe the most important thing to mention about The Alien Abduction Survival Guide is how everyone is naked.
Aliens sometimes place prisoners, nudely, into rooms with other humans while they wait to be experiments. Michelle was given a job as an “empath” where she uses her emotion super powers to replace fear and anger in the other prisoners with warm, safe feelings. She thinks this reflects well on her, but this is like telling the rest of the slave ship to relax and enjoy the shade. Michelle is a human Judas cow.
I don’t know if Michelle’s artist is a 6-year-old she met in the stars or if she did the illustrations herself, but they don’t exactly lend credibility to her stories. There are any number of ways she could have recorded proof of her abductions and all she has to back up her story is a child’s drawing of these two, I don’t know, sea monkeys? Filming a porno on a stick of butter with The Unabomber?
Most of Michelle’s book is made up of the kind of vague stories told by frequent liars…. lazy descriptions of how “all abductees” do things or how she’s “even seen some abductees” do other things. She has a deliberate lack of specifics like someone who had sex outside once and “could tell some pretty wild stories” or a guy who got punched in fourth grade and “grew up fighting.” Or maybe like Bill Cosby’s cellmate saying “I have Hollywood connections,” except with Michelle, there’s no scrap of truth from which to exaggerate. I’m not saying she’s lying because space monsters don’t exist. I’m saying she’s lying because she talks like a liar and isn’t smart enough to keep her stories straight. Even if Michelle has been taken into space, she’s still absolutely full of shit.
And while most of her anecdotes are hazy, there is one with actual details. She was sent in to comfort a hostile abductee, which she illustrated with what a chimpanzee might draw if their Pictionary clue was “nude American Idol.” (See Figure 4.) This means in her wildest imagination, Michelle is an Earth quisling working for the aliens to keep her fellow humans in line.
She told him the comforting fact, “You won’t even remember this when you wake up,” and “They’ll take you straight home after.” She doesn’t explain after what, but let’s not play games– creatures don’t steal you from your bed and erase your memory if they’re asking you to taste test potato chips. Michelle fails to calm him down because in her wildest imagination she is an unsuccessful volunteer kidnapper assistant.
The man goes nuts and the aliens stun ray him. He keeps fighting, and they have to stun him again, eventually dragging him only partially stunned into a mysterious room while he curses right at Michelle’s face. She explains to the reader how she felt bad because she promised him he’d be going home. Which means, in her wildest imagination, she met a brave hero immune to the alien stun rays and immediately betrayed him to gain favor with her captors. This is like lying that you were at 9/11, only to say you called the first responders gay and dropped an ice cream cone then selling it as HOW TO SURVIVE 9/11 EVERY TIME.
In the same book where men are dragged against their will to torture chambers, this lonely dingbat talks about how magical and loving the aliens are. “Come dance with me,” Hetar says to the children in Figure 6. And if the kids listen closely they can hear the man from Figure 4 shrieking, “I’ll fucking! AIIIEEE! Kill you for this, you traitorous bitch!” as his anus is harvested.
Not all of Michelle’s survival guide is devoted to pleasing your captors. She also has some tips for staying safe online from cyberbullies and fraudulent UFO researchers. For instance, one issue that has “effected” her is how people go online and pretend to be alien researchers but they’re only joking. You’d think it would be obvious, but some people are so ignorant they can’t tell the difference between dumb fucking idiots making up alien stories for attention and dumb fucking idiots making alien stories up for attention.
Michelle doesn’t just suggest pacifism and Uncle Tommery for abductees trapped in space. She thinks you should let the aliens have their way with you while you’re still in your home. She tells a story about her husband, who used to keep a wooden board by the bed to bash aliens until he almost used it to cave in the head of their four-year-old. Of all the anecdotes in her book, this one where no aliens showed up and her daughter almost got killed by her and her husband’s shared paranoia seems the truest.
If I’m being honest, I think hitting an alien intruder in the head with a stick is a pretty good idea and making sure the alien is not your daughter first requires a pretty basic level of stick expertise. More to the point I’m trying to make, fuck you, alien sympathizer. Step zero in surviving an alien abduction is at least trying to cave in their bitch ass moon heads while they’re beaming into your bedroom. What’s your other advice, Michelle? Establishing a relationship with the creatures and saying “Not tonight, please,” on occasion?
Holy shit, she really did suggest establishing a relationship with the creatures and saying, “Not tonight, please,” on occasion. Michelle claims this assertiveness and intelligence(?) will earn their respect! She thinks she’s very smart and tough for requesting a night off from her job as a naked space coward! Well, if Hetar is impressed by some collaborator sheepishly asking permission to not be abducted, he’s going to really think it’s something when I blast his grinning head off with a stick.
For most of the book, Michelle paints a picture of benevolent creatures who are super cool once you surrender to them completely. She wants you to know how lucky and special she is for Hetar choosing her. But like most attention whore liars, she’d like more attention and different kinds of it, so sometimes the aliens are very bad and you see how brave she is for enduring such hardship. Aliens who dance with children gave this woman a job telling nude men to calm down, and her best friend is a being named Hetar, who you may have met, but here she is complaining about how no one understands the sleepless fear she feels when reliving her abductions. Michelle may not have heard this phrase since she spends most of her time off planet, but pick a lane, you bottomless dumbshit.
You’re probably thinking, “These are balls-naked, easily tricked people surrounded by creatures who do not understand the difference between compassion and involuntary butthole research. There’s some weird sex stuff going on, isn’t there?” I’m happy to answer “Yes.” Very much so, “yes.”
Michelle lists several models of mind wands that give you “fantasies of pleasure or even an orgasm.” So they’re star dildos, but she goes on to explain how they’re also phaser weapons, which has got to be the single most common cause of space death. Even the most incomprehensible civilization would look at death and squirting and think, “Let’s make these two separate beams.”
Michelle talks about a “discovery room” which teaches you things about who you are. Things that would be “shameful” if done in front of others. Things you can’t be judged for because anything goes in the discovery room. And I wouldn’t consider this judgement, but I’m troubled by what sex kinks a woman finds shameful when she’s not embarrassed by putting her name on an alien survival book that’s nothing more than instructions on opening your asshole and saying “thank you, space.”
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Armando Nava: whose name is an anagram of how they were conceived: a rad van moan.
I’m going to tell you the same thing I should tell you at the start of every article: you are about to have a huge penis. That’s the whole intro, let’s read EXERCISING THE PENIS.
The book opens with a dedication to VENESSA, who helped the author “every step of the way, big or small.” I thought this might be a clever way of thanking her for staying with him through the small penis days, but the next sentence kept going on about steps to suggest there was no hidden metaphor. So don’t expect secret genius or tongue-in-cheek comedy from this penis enlargement book. He’s an idiot, and you can tell because the first thing he does in his book is name the one person who knows with certainty it’s make-believe. I’m glad poor VENESSA at least got a dedication because her boyfriend typed 272 pages of cock stretches and perineum kegels and she had the much harder job of pretending they worked.
You might already have an idea of how possible penis enlargement is based on your own independent research. Aaron Kemmer opens his book acknowledging your skepticism by debunking science, or as he calls it “penis myths.” You may have heard, for instance, the penis is not a muscle. Not true, sort of. According to one unexplained bullet point, it is approximately 50% smooth muscle and those are his italics, not mine.
This is more wordplay than biology. It’s like saying penises do not conduct electricity, but they can sure add an unexpected jolt to a rain storm. Renaming the very-much-not-muscles in a penis to something with the word “muscle” does not mean you can start pumping iron with it. Still, I’m going to say the same thing every owner of this book said: “What could it hurt to try pumping some iron with it? I know it’s fake, I’m not stupid, but I’m not willing to bet this tin- already huge dong on it?” This is fucking America, where the dumbest ideas are as valid as your pussy expert ones. What I’m saying is, let’s all pull it out and let’s get started.
There are several pages dedicated to measuring which include multiple methods and starting points. Aaron acknowledges dongs change size all day, so he suggests measuring at full boner from some of your favorite spots, and also taking three flaccid measurements and averaging them. By the end of this section, you’re going to have a lot of contradictory cock data, but only the most skeptical reader would suspect this was designed to make it very, very hard to tell whether or not your penis is increasing in size. If you ask me, the only true way to measure an erection is to pace out how much running start you need to penetrate a fiberglass door. I never saw the point of measuring a flaccid penis since I haven’t had one of those since they announced Chrisitan Slater would join Emilio Estevez and Lou Diamond Phillips in the cast of Young Guns II. “The West just got wilder!”
I don’t want to make this about me and my massive dong success. I’ve read enough penis enlargement books to be squared away, ladies. So let’s get back to talking about Aaron’s system. Before he gets into the hardcore stretching exercises, he gives 8 tips on how to make your penis bigger right now. And good news: almost all of you are doing numbers three through seven at this very moment.
I wasn’t very impressed with Aaron’s advice to increase my size by “pulling on it” or using my imagination to conjure most of a boner. In fact, if a being appeared before me and said, “I took the form of your people fifteen of your Earth minutes ago,” I would say, “Fifteen minutes? Then you’ve definitely tried pulling on your dick to make it bigger. Have you tried basketball? Or Emilio Estevez? Let’s see… what else, what else…” Aaron had some expert level advice on #5, though. I don’t think I would have considered holding in my pee so the guys in the locker room would see my penis at its best. That’s the kind of insecurity you don’t expect even from someone who wrote a book about pointlessly squishing your dick and hoping wishes are real. A lot of this stupid fucking nonsense I blame on VENESSA.
Another thing we need to do before our exercises, besides taking inventory of our girth, pulling on it, holding in our pee, quitting smoking, and thinking positive thoughts is a penis exercise warm up. A penis exercise warm up is exactly what it sounds like– you microwave a sock full of rice and put your dick in it.
In the first #1 bullet point, Aaron says any sock that fits around your penis will do. And if you own a sock that doesn’t fit around your penis, I don’t like that the only things I know about you are (1) you have a medically dangerous dong, and (2) you collect tiny doll socks. I also don’t like in his first #2 bullet point that this science is so imprecise you can use any kind of rice. If it’s important for my rice cooker to know the type of rice I’m using, it’s vital my dick also knows. The last thing I especially don’t like is in his second #3 bullet point: “microwave and heat for approximately 30 to 90 seconds or until you reach desired temperature.” What the fuck is “desired temperature” when I’m sous vide cooking rice-crusted dick? And do you have any idea the vast difference between 30 and 90 seconds in a microwave? The skin on a human penis does! All I’m saying is if you want me to perform untested boiling rice surgery on my genitals, I wish it was a more exact procedure than shrugging and hitting the SENSOR POTATO button.
Besides getting your cock nice and scalded, it’s important to prepare your “inner penis” for stretching by heating up your taint. Get all sectors of your penis as well including the hard-to-reach top, bottom, and sides. I was skeptical before, but anyone whose dick is big enough to have three different climates knows a thing or two about enlarging a penis.
I know you haven’t had time to get to the top or sides of your penis yet, but you’re ready enough. Let’s jelq.
Jelqing is either a 30-year-old dick squeezing technique, ordinary masturbation, or an ancient Arabic exercise. The author of this book based almost entirely on it doesn’t know. But you can’t argue with the science– pushing blood into the penis adds nutrients and stress causing it to grow. This sentence is left intentionally humorless to demonstrate how already ridiculous I find the idea of mashing vitamin blood into a human penis; joking about something so nakedly absurd is a waste of both of our times. Speaking of wasting time, here’s how you jelq:
Lather up your shaft and stroke yourself with as little romantic intent as possible. Congratulations. You have jelqed one complete jelq, because jelq is a verb and a noun. You can also consider it a carpet cleaner and a Batman because it is nothing. It is jerking off without purpose. It’s masturbating not to the idea of sex, but to the idea of blood vitamins and microwaved rice rewriting your groin DNA. Jelqing is how you would move milk out of a goat if the goat was a gullible idiot with a sad dick. This is a fun book, but if getting your penis warm and pulling on it made it bigger, wouldn’t everyone know? Does the author think we spent our teen years with our hands tied to the side of an igloo? If this worked, every 8th grader would have come back from summer break with 70 pounds of coiled, tender penis meat in a wheelbarrow instead of just me. Ladies.
If you’re still reading this book after discovering jelqing is playing with yourself and nothing else, you’re on board for anything. The author knew he could add more and more supernatural properties to jelqing. One of them is dick straightening. So while you’re making your penis bigger and stronger, go ahead and uncurve it by jelqing the other direction. If you mini jelq at the right angle you can reduce your heating costs and advance civil rights. Some jelqers jelq into their penis curve and ride the rotation into the swirls of time. This is how jelqing appeared both in “ancient Arabic” tablets and “roughly 30 years” ago. There are nights I see glimpses of my future self jelqing on a penis measurements have no numbers for. “Tell them NOT TO–” his, my voice will scream each time before being interrupted by the violent pull of the jelqstream. I have memories of jelqing from a world that never was. Has my penis always been this large and straight? So jelq and jelq? So jelq? Jelq? Jelq.
After you’ve jelqed for a month, you are ready for the 🚫ADVANCED EXERCISE🚫.of draping a dry towel on your boner. As you advance or “jelq-up,” get the towel wet to increase the weight. Keep women informed of your jelqing progress. Say to them, “I stroke my dick so much I can hang a wet towel on it. Very wet.” Say “wet” as wetly as possible. Ask them if anything else is wet, again very wetly, and make very sure to get a clear answer. Penetrating a woman after 30 days of jelqing is more of a lubrication bench test than an act of love.
If you still seek advanced jelqing tips, try constricting your jelq-rod in the toothed claws of restraints to jelq handlessly during your travels. The pages of this jelq tome, upon which all future societies shall devote jelq and more, lists a number of dong crushing clamps and jelq-presses to keep the precious blood vitamins trapped inside your GIRTHED SHAFT. It is as jelqed by the prophecy my future self shrieks we must all one day heed: when a man mistaking masturbation for science suggests you place barbed clamps on your dick, only a great fool says, “Holy shit, what?” The jelq-minded man says, “Jelq me up to maximum and tourniquet this hog. I am no small penised coward.”
… This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, John McCammon: who left fighting behind him, at least until Baron Arena took his daughter.
As a tastemaking 1-900-HOTDOG reader, you already know most of our articles are about artifacts covered in the spectacular wrongness of some dark otherworld. Today is different. This Punching Day I’m talking about a single fight from the sequel to a knockoff movie that achieves spectacle through mediocrity alone. It’s a collection of uninspired cliches and lifeless performances as if all anyone cared about was smearing vaguely kung fu-like shapes on some film for the Yugoslavian VHS market. I’m, of course, talking about the finale of 1996’s Shootfighter II: THE ULTIMATE FIGHT TO THE DEATH: KILL OR BE KILLED.
Before we look at the stunning ordinariness of Shootfighter II‘s climax, we need to talk about how we got here. It took decades of training to create something this hauntingly generic. So let’s look at the long, weird, and almost exclusively mediocre journey of the film’s star, Bolo Yeung.
In 1973, Bolo Yeung was named Yang Sze and he starred in a movie called “Chinese Hercules.” I dare you to come up with a title more efficient at explaining the content of a movie. The films We Bought a Zoo and I Have Sex With Latina Babysitter (Facesitting Fetish) owe the elegance of their naming style to the legacy of Chinese Hercules. The only question you could possibly have when you hear “Chinese Hercules” is “Can he pick you up by your dick in the middle of a fight?”
The answer is yes! And there were no wire tricks or reasonable ways to safely perform it! That stuntman’s genitals were squashed into a wet rubber glove all for Chinese Hercules, a movie not worth such a sacrifice. This stuntman’s first four children were declared “bologna with fingernails” by the state. And even after doctors fused them together to form most of a boy, that boy received an unprecedented rating of “Get this thing the fuck out of my office,” in the April, 1977 issue of Hong Kong Son Review. All because the man who would one day be called Bolo Yeung couldn’t stop pumping weights even during handjobs.
To give you an idea of how good Chinese Hercules was, here’s a shot from the trailer. Which means this footage of him just missing the shit out of these guys was where they thought he looked the coolest. The trailer also prominently featured Bruce Lee who is not in the movie and a narrator screamed: “BONE CRACKER! HEAD CRUSHER! BACK SNAPPER! BODY BREAKER! MEN. WOMEN! OLD. YOUNG. HUNDREDS. OR ONE ALONE. EACH CHALLENGES, AND EACH BECOMES THE PULVERIZED PREY OF CHINESE HERCULES. THE FIRST AND ONLY MUSCLE MAD MONSTER OF THE MARTIAL ARTS. CHINESE HERCULES! HE’LL GET A CRUSH OUT OF YOU!!!“
Chinese Hercules was the 18th film by Yang Sze, who was also credited as Yang Szu, Szu Yang, Shih Yang, Yang Tze, Sy Young, Young Zee, Sze Yang, and Yeung See. One of the reasons he was so muscular was so bank tellers would be scared enough to cash checks made out to 70 different names. The point is, whatever the hell he was called, our English letters didn’t know how to recreate it. It’s sort of like how my name in hanzi can be the character for “explosion” in a cowboy hat or a drawing of Pac Man eating the letter 母乳. None of it mattered, though, because later the same year, the actor known as Something-like-Soo Something-like-Young would star in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon and everyone in the world would know him as “Bolo.” Or at the very least “that big guy who killed a dude by cradling him like a baby way too weirdly.”
Enter the Dragon was the most famous movie by the most famous kung fu star, so you’re probably familiar with it. And Szu(ish) Yang(ish) would milk its popularity for 15 years. After Bruce Lee’s death, 750 Chinese actors changed their names to something very close to Bruce Lee, added kitty cat sounds to their kicks, and made unauthorized sequels to his movies. Bolo Yeung was in fucking all of them. He starred in Bruce’s Fingers, Soul of Bruce Lee, Image of Bruce Lee, Bruce Li Invincible Chinatown Connection, Amsterdam Connection, The Tattoo Connection, Enter the Game of Death, Dragon on Fire, Bruce and Shao-lin Kung Fu 2, Young Dragon, Enter the Game of Shaolin Bronzemen, Bruce the Superhero, Way of the Dragon 2, The Clones of Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee King of Kung Fu, The Big Boss 2, and Bruce Lee’s Dragons Fight Back (starring Jackie Chang).
Between 1973 and 1988, Szu Young acted alongside a Bruce Le, a Bruce Li, or a Bruce Lei 17 times, meaning he starred in 12 more Bruce Lee ripoff movies than there were actual Bruce Lee films. He has worked with hundreds of co-stars on dozens of movies, but he has never met anyone with a second name. To tell the Bruces apart, he had to use subtle vocalizations like a penguin, and even then he could never be sure he was on the right set or punching the right Bruce.
His characters rarely had names because why bother? It’d be like giving a backstory to the Before model on a tube of Teenage Mutant Karate Tortoise Penis Large-Up Cream. No one fucking cares who Henchman #3 is in Broose Lea Meets Cop-Robot 2000. Bad example, because that was Professor Shave Gravestone, who everyone loved. The fact is, you could have named Szu’s character “Titties Breakdance” or “Beijing Trevor” and everyone would have still called him “Bolo.”
In 1977, Sze tried to fix his name problem when he played a character named Bolo in a film he directed named Bolo. Strangely, it wasn’t about a man named Bolo murdering men by cradling them too tightly. It was a comedy aimed, apparently, at shitty toddlers dying of stupidity. It wouldn’t have exactly redefined his personal brand even if anyone had seen it. It was like Jaleel White writing “Urkel Vitamins!” on a bottle of benzodiazepine pills and leaving it in a parking lot. Still, it gave Tse the courage to finally, officially change his name to “Bolo.”
You already know this, but in 1988, the man now known as Bolo Yeung starred in a second Greatest Martial Arts Movie of All Time– Bloodsport. It’s the film my Netflix algorithm knows as “the only movie.”
Bolo was great in it. Just like in Enter the Dragon, he hardly talked, stole every scene he was in, and the moment the movie was over he spent ten years playing characters with the same name in third rate knockoffs of it. For instance, his first project after playing Chong Li in Bloodsport was playing Chang Lee in Bloodfight. That sounds like the winner of 1989’s Least Inspired Joke, but it’s what really happened.
If you had a wife named Maggy and you introduced her to Bolo Yeung, he would go home, build five mannequins named Majo, Morga, Maggie, Majjy, and Cyber-Maggy vs. Moonwolf, then fuck the shit out of them for SAG minimum. After playing “Chang” in Bloodfight, he went on to play “Chong” in Tiger Claws. Then he mixed it up by playing a good guy in Shootfighter: Fight to the Death, a movie the producers definitely pitched as Bloodsport meets nothing else featuring the co-star of Bloodsport. It had both bad guys from Karate Kid, only enough plot to get everyone into an underground death tournament, and one of the fighters was a man-snake. Look at how sweet Shootfighter man-snake was:
Fucking snake dodge! Snake dodge! Snake headbutt! Man-snake’s existence implies there are lots more magical Mortal Kombat guys in this movie, so it will already never live up to your expectations, but it’s still pretty great. And it’s weird seeing Bolo as the good guy, not because he’d been a villain for 80 straight movies, but because of scenes like this:
Was this Bolo’s script note? To have the hero rip a man’s bones into gore and then, in front of cheering fans, feast on his agony? Silently? For a full minute? This would be like Rocky III ending with Sylvester Stallone running over Mr. T’s head with his car and screaming, “Adrian! My boner throbs with the forbidden power I’ve taken from the vanquished!!!” Bolo didn’t even try for a catch phrase. He could have said, “Thought you could use a break!” or “If this movie is a hit, I’m going to play this character again in six no budget reboots with you impersonators!” Anything would be better than demon-hissing at the crying man’s ruptured remains.
So that brings us to this, the fight scene I mentioned 9000 Bolo Yeung facts ago– the finale of Shootfighter II. It’s everything Bolo had trained for over the course of 100 lazy, knockoff movies. It opens with an avalanche of story elements. There is no need to watch the rest of Shootfighter II because everything you need to know is communicated with “Chinese Hercules” levels of efficiency. Stakes are explained by having actors walk right up to the camera to show the audience their gun. It is not ham-fisted. It is Shaquille O’Neal searching for his wrist watches inside two full pigs.
The cage fighters, Bolo Yeung and Joe Son, are both cranky Asian men wider than they are tall. The film wants us to know this is serious, but they look the same heading into a battle to the death as they would bowling or enjoying a glass of sun tea. These are actors who can perform “menacing” and “bored after a long day of menacing.” Asking them to act like this particular murder is important is like asking a Wendy’s employee to make a cheeseburger extra special. They wouldn’t know how or even consider trying.
A crowd of about 15 wealthy gamblers are there to watch, and they each specifically look like the last person you’d trust to keep your murder fighting pit a secret. They all take turns demonstrating how they’ve never seen a fight, a crowd, or a movie. For instance, one guy spends the whole match against the cage fist pumping and any time he starts to feel too silly he’ll throw an awkward high five to the nearest extra.
The extras are putting in five times more work than the fighters. If you’ve ever seen a kung fu movie, you recognize the move where one guy has a staff and chases his enemy with foot smacks. It never hurts anybody, but it’s more exciting than picking it up and walking over to them. At least it was before Bolo Yeung tried it. He looks like he called time out to sweep up dog hair. This is how an elderly couple learns hip hop dance on a cruise ship, not how you kill a man with a stick. It’s almost too terrible to explain away with “everyone involved sucks.” They might have had to patch this scene together with rehearsal footage after Bolo left to film Bloodpunch IV with Jake-Claude Von Doom and the original Hamburglar.
Bolo and Joe both have a tendency to look away when they attack or block as if they learned how to fight by watching Magic Johnson play. It takes away all urgency from this life-threatening situation as if they learned risk assessment by watching Magic Johnson fuck. Nobody in this cage gives a shit if they live, die, or look at all like two men fighting. Luckily, the subtle filmmakers remind the audience of the stakes by constantly cutting to a shot of the villain holding a gun against the neck of Bolo Yeung’s friend.
This is a pretty normal trope for a death tournament movie. Bloodsport is both the best known example of the genre and the only one where the hero enters the tournament for no reason other than kicking ass. Normally, they need to be blackmailed. What’s weird in Shootfighter II is that it’s happening in plain view of the main group of shootfighting fans. Assuming they’re okay with this very different tone of crime, it still seems a little distracting. This would be like watching an illegal horse race while Magic Johnson was in the center of the track hovering a nose bleed over a sleeping baby. It is not the drama you paid to see, but it will command a bit of your attention.
It’s insane and ridiculous, but checking in to see which of these guys is smiling is the only way to know who’s winning. Joe and Bolo never change expressions and their punches and kicks miss by a wider margin than Magic Johnson AIDS jokes in a karate article. But you can always tell when one of Bolo’s nonchalant air swipes was supposed to hit because the hostage is having fun.
I didn’t edit that clip in any way. The sequence of events is this: Bolo claws at Joe’s titties with both hands and misses, neck hostage guy fucking loves it, then suddenly Bolo is holding a stick again while Joe patiently waits to die with his arms at his side. It should not be possible for any men to be this bad at pretending to fight, especially these two. At this point in his career, Bolo had been in over 200 professionally choreographed fights and Joe Son was a UFC veteran who would go on to be a convicted sex criminal and actual murderer. Joe Son could have shown a tape of his UFC fight to the producers and said, “In my exact experience, real cage fights look more like this:”
The filmmakers knew the action had to escalate, but weren’t sure how to do it since the gun-in-the-neck guys can only smile and frown so hard. One idea Joe had was to climb onto Bolo’s shoulders like he’s getting sleepy at DisneyLand. I guess It was about as good an idea as the one he had at UFC 4 when he clung to a useless headlock while getting punched directly in the dick. And it didn’t help the scene when veteran actor Bolo Yeung chose to sell the attack as “mildly to not annoying, this reminds me of the other time I held a guy up by his mangled dong.”
By this point, each fighter had drawn blood, but the makeup effects were limited to a few streaks of fake blood on two very wet men, so their wounds closed after one or two camera cuts. And with neither able to land a convincing shot, it seemed there was only one way this fight was going to end– have Bolo freeze in place for several seconds so Joe could pick up an emergency fuel can and douse him in gasoline.
Think about what this means. Someone built a cage for the purposes of locking two gladiators inside and thought, “We should be ready in case they drove here from the left side of the basement and ran out of gas.” This is a truly insane choice for the one single object to put in a fighting cage. Even assuming it was for one guy to light the other on fire with, what kind of maniac wants Bolo Yeung on fire in a crowded room with one exit? You think a burning alive Bolo Yeung is going to wait for the building to evacuate before he bursts through the cage and into a flammable stampede of sociopaths? All these people should be dead and this lair should be ashes. It’s pure dumb luck that Joe Son suddenly came down with a brain disorder that prevented him from swinging a torch any lower than seven feet in the air.
There is no more certain way to lose a kung fu fight than to use a lethal weapon against an unarmed opponent. If you’re the only one with a sword, drop it. That man is about to do something so cool and kill you. In this case, it would be almost too obvious for the blind, battered, gasoline-covered man to defeat the guy beating him with a flaming stick, but one thing Shootfighter II: THE ULTIMATE FIGHT TO THE DEATH: KILL OR BE KILLED never does is defy expectations. Sure enough, Bolo finishes Joe with dozens, maybe zeros of punches. With the bad editing and mistimed sound effects, it’s hard to tell which impacts happened and which ones were sarcastic. After it ends, Joe is helpless while the crowd chants for Bolo to execute him. But Bolo has done this enough times to know: if you’re the only one with a sword, drop it.
With the hero gladiator refusing to kill and walking away, there were no cliches left to film. “Not… so… fast,” said Joe Son as he picked up the discarded sword and drove it into his own guts. “You assholes… forgot about this one.” And with a look of disappointment from the bad guy of Karate Kid, Bolo Yeung had finished the perfect final fight of his long film career– an impossible combination of insane, cliche, terrible, and awesome. Long live Sze “Bolo” “Chong” “Chinese Hercules” Yeung.
… This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Ethan Rangel: half wolf, half cop, half cyborg, and all wolf again twice, for a total of 2.5 wolves.
In 1964, a boy was blinded by a radioactive truck! Twelve years later a boy was born who would change the words of comic books for humor jokes. I am that second boy and I hope you love to humor laugh, because this week’s Nerding Day features the adventures of Daredevil, only a worse, less sexually confident Daredevil. Oh, and out of respect for this wonderfully written character and his rich internal dialog, I left all of Daredevil’s original thought bubbles.
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Jeff Atwood: the star of the story choosing from 39 possible endings!
