Fantasy Mission Force

Except for about 1,000 boring spots, this film is one of the most bemusingly funny "bad movie night" attractions I've ever seen. An absolute trainwreck of a production, Fantasy Mission Force (as its title translates, or so I'm told) is so profoundly and utterly stupid that it deserves a place of honor in the pantheon of cinematic ineptitude.

Still, it's funny!

There's a musical number in the first act which, although it fails to tie in with the subsequent story in any fashion, has got to be seen to be believed. Taking place at a what appears to be a huge honorary banquet for white male law students...oh, never mind.

If you love bad film as much as I do - "Plan 9 From Outer Space," "Glen Or Glenda," "Song Of Norway," "On Deadly Ground," "Boxing Helena," "An Alan Smithee Film," "Battlefield Earth" and the like - you will want to fashion a religion around this masterpiece of the inane.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, in this film makes even the slightest bit of sense. It makes "Godzilla Vs. Megalon" seem like an algebraic equation by comparison.

I watched this movie with two of my friends, and it is hands-down the funniest movie I've ever seen. It's so horrible. And it's so random. An island of cannibal women. Superheroes with KKK hoods who fly and throw streamers. A haunted house with jumping zombies. For God's sake, Japanese Nazis in Canada whose base is in a barn. And if you watch at the end, one of the junk cars the Nazis have has a Star of David on it. I very, very strongly recommend you watch this.

What the hell? This movie has everything! Hopping undead corpses. Crazed Amazons. Ghosts who cheat at cards. Japanese Nazis who attack riding atop 1970s clunker cars. Stupid musical numbers. Abraham Lincoln as a World War II general. Throw in loads of gratuitous violence, Chinese guys dressed in kilts and Elvis jumpsuits, and, er, Jacky Chan (and his chicken) and you have quite possibly the stupidest movie ever made. You won't know what to make of it either, but if you have the proper amount of beer on hand, and a few fellow appreciators of c**p, it won't matter in the slightest.

It isn't the greatest film of all time, of course, but it is certainly one of the oddest. No matter how many times I see this film (and I've seen it quite a bit) I never get tired of the relentless, manic energy this film spews from the screen.

The plot is so inane that I'm tempted to ignore it. It may or may not take place during the Second World War- in any case, the Japanese invade Canada, and, in the process, capture Abraham Lincoln and a handful of other dignitaries. This situation is of course intolerable to our Chinese allies, who immediately hire a crack team of mercenaries to rescue the captives. Wackiness ensues.

At various points we encounter a village full of leopard skin-clad amazons led by some guy in a tuxedo, a haunted house full of hopping zombies, a ridiculous song & dance number in a restaurant, and an army of Japanese Road Warrior-style Nazis who surf on top of old American muscle cars. The movie is hilarious, and, as far as I'm concerned, a must watch.

A hectic martial arts farce, it's a hard movie for casual fans to accept. Drinking helps. By our collective second beer, we stopped caring about glaring anachronisms and Benny Hill-like comedic sequences and just started whooping like baboons at the film's many hilariously bad "high points."

Apparently this is the "Good, Bad and the Ugly" of chop-saki flicks, inasmuch as every character gets his or her own ten-minute introduction to the audience. Yes, there is minimal Jackie, but he makes up for it with a well-choreographed fight scene against a dozen amazon warriors (played by women in the closeups, by men during the stunt sequences) all the while holding a chicken.

Other highlights include a houseful of decapitated, blood-sucking ghosts which falls somewhere between Disneyland's Haunted Mansion and Roger Corman's Death Race 2000; Plus, a young Kate Bush kicking butt in her vinyl thigh-high red booties; Also, Fans of the "Sharp Object Injury to the Butt" school of comedy won't be disappointed.

As for the undubbed musical number at the beginning of the film, what can I say that hasn't been said before? It was at once both mind-bendingly horrible and unspeakably fantastic.

Well worth the $2.99 I paid for it. As long as you approach it as a novelty film rather than expecting a "Drunken Master" out of it, you'll be cheerfully repeating "But first you must call me 'papa.'" with glee and fond memories for days following.