Machines à tuer

A friend of mine bought this film for 25 pence and always said it was the worst film ever made. I didn't think it could be that bad. It is. In England it's on video as The Ninja Murders. There's a Chinese woman with a small mouth who seems to be up to something. Lots of ninjas who don't seem to know kung fu from ballroom dancing go around "attacking" other people who seem to have no purpose in the plot. That is if there is a plot. I'm not convinced.

There's one bit where some ninjas attack a fisherman and he disables them by gently pushing them to one side. We see lots of stock footage of a propellor plane landing. I never knew who was on the plane or why. Or what film this footage came from as I'm sure the production team couldn't afford the hire charge on a plane. The last time we see the plane land there is a blond man hiding. At the end of the film he is revealed as Frank. Well, a woman calls him Frank. I assume he was the hero. I don't recall seeing him do anything during the film and I certainly had no idea he was called Frank.

The most interesting thing about the whole movie is the plot summary on the back of the video casing. It says that a new warlord is gaining power and the old warlord is struggling for survival. Apparently they must "fight to the death before the MAIN BATTLE!!". Well i don't recall any warlords, though I suspect the chinese small-mouthed woman may be the new warlord. And don't bother sitting in great gaping-jawed anticipation for any fight to the death or main battle. What fight to the death? What main battle? The film ends with two men at an airport and then the height of all camera tricks is used to show they are a group of three men not two!! Maybe a great twist ending but as these men were about as familiar to me as Frank I had no idea what it all meant. Actually I have no idea what any of it meant or what was going on. I'm still baffled.

The great thing about this film is that you couldn't possibly make a worse film. Even if you tried so hard to make a film on a shoestring budget that was so bad it was unwatchable it would be like The Godfather in comparison to this pile of pants. I would conclude my review with words representing such abominable appallingness that I won't even bother. Avoid at all costs

We live in a cruel world where DEATH MACHINES never got to live to its franchise potential. I can't be the only one who would love to see the continued karate-kicking adventures of the three unnamed, ethnically diverse zombified ninjas of writer/director Paul Kyriazi's 1976 action jewel. Of the dozens of B-movies (and worse) that I've subjected myself to recently, DEATH MACHINES is one of the best. Madame Lee (Mari Honjo), a minor boss in a vague Asian crime syndicate, has got a new weapon to make a splash on the world of organized crime: her three mind-controlled ninjas (Ronald Marchini, Michael Chong, and Joshua Johnson). When her shadowy boss orders her to eliminate rival hit-men and establish business dealings with mob boss Gioretti (Chuck Katzakian), the ninjas are more than effective. When they're assigned to eliminate a local karate teacher (for reasons unknown thanks to bad audio mixing), the "death machines" attract the attention of law enforcement, particularly hot-shot detective Lieutenant Forrester (Ron Ackerman), and earn the ire of overzealous karate student Frank (John Lowe). Frank is the sole survivor of the machines' vicious attack on the karate school and he's determined to seek vengeance for the murder of his teacher and fellow students and for the loss of his right arm. Will Frank rise to the challenge of Madame Lee's three unstoppable death machines? Will Lt. Forrester succeed in his mission to capture the mystery ninjas? More importantly, will he ever get around to that human resources class so his captain will get off his back?

DEATH MACHINES is a perfect blend of semi-competence, incompetence, and martial arts action with just a hint of insanity. The filmmakers set the tone from the very start. The movie opens on the ninjas' final test, where each of them battle another martial artist of the same ethnicity (out of….symmetry? fairness?). Just in case anyone was worried this would just be a bunch of sword-swinging and high kicks, the white ninja eliminates his competition with a pistol he pulls from an ankle holster. So right away, we're shown that rules are for suckers. When assigned to knock off the competition, we're treated to three separate murders in the first fifteen minutes; of those three, zero involve any sort of martial arts action. One involves a freakin' bazooka. Who needs subtlety when you're a seemingly invulnerable death machine? Man, this movie's a blast. Far from perfect, DEATH MACHINES suffers from its share of problems. For starters, the movie's obnoxious synth score and the audio mixing that frequently drowns out dialogue in favor of it. Most of Madame Lee's dialogue in the film is near unintelligible. But, it's just intelligible enough for us to hear that poor Mari Honjo isn't much of an actress. It's fine. I'm not here for the performances. The movie also has the unfortunate problem of being unsure how to tell a proper story, what with the protagonist and the story arc and whatnot. DEATH MACHINES, and the audience, isn't really sure whom we're rooting for to win.

Detective Forrester seems an obvious choice, being a police officer and all. And he's a pretty cool guy, standing up to his griping captain and putting his overly smug rival in his place. But Forrester doesn't show up for the first half hour and then disappears again until the end of the film for a little bit of deus ex machina. Then there's Frank, the newly one-armed karate student. But Frank disappears for large chunks of the movie and then proceeds to get his butt handed to him by an ornery old man in a barfight, so he's hard to get behind. At one point about halfway through the film, there's even a brief moment when it appears the white ninja might shift allegiances and become our hero when he stands up to a rowdy band of bikers that terrorize a Ma & Pa diner/fueling station. But nope, once he finds his ninja buddies again he's back to work as usual, making the previous twenty minutes or so where we followed his capture and escape from the police (and said diner brawl) completely pointless. Fortunately for this movie, I'm willing to forgive all these problems because it's all so much fun. It sets itself up perfectly at the end for a sequel but I guess it was never meant to be. DEATH MACHINES, while certainly not a "good movie", ranks high on the spectrum against its peers. Do yourself a favor; I know the movie is available online…find it and watch at least the first 15 minutes. You won't regret it and you just might be tempted to see it through to the end.

They don't really make films like Death Machines anymore and that's a bit of a shame. It seems to have a bit of a mixed reputation if the reviews on here are anything to go by but for me this is an unqualified success on account of just how entertaining it all is. Its story centres on three fighters – the death machines - who are directed by a female crime boss by way of a mind control drug. She then uses them to carry out a series of hit jobs on her enemies. For reasons that remain unexplained, the death machines are bullet proof.

From the outset, you have to give some credit to a film whose three central characters are named in the credits as White Death Machine, Black Death Machine and Asian Death Machine. And you also have to give plus points to a film whose master criminal is an East Asian lady with huge hair. She directs proceedings that amount to a series of scenes of the death machines taking out a variety of shady rival criminals. These set-pieces are connected together, often without much of an explanation. But sometimes sense can be over-rated and sheer nonsense can be so much more fun. I find it hard to understand how so many people can have found this movie boring. As far as I'm concerned, it moved along at a cracking pace and threw plenty of action and insanity at us from start to finish. There are lots of martial arts fights; heads and arms are chopped off; a truck is driven through restaurant window and a bulldozer flattens a man in a phone booth; an aeroplane is taken out by a bazooka; a banker is blown up by a time-bomb and a professional hit-man is thrown off a roof; an assault on a karate school is attempted with predictably action-packed results; there's a biker bar-room brawl; we have a shouting police captain and a 'hero' who is beaten up easily by an angry pensioner. I'm pretty sure there was a lot more than that as well. This is great fun basically.

I'm from Texas so I thought I knew big hair, but the female villain in this movie had humongous hair. Whenever she was on the screen I couldn't concentrate on anything but her hair. Take about stage presence! There seemed to be a lot of people with hearing problems in this movie also. There was a traffic warden writing out a parking ticket who somehow didn't notice the owner plunging toward the car screaming at the top of his lungs until he hit the car. Then there was a guy in a phone booth who couldn't hear a huge bulldozer coming at him until it was 5 feet away. All the hit men in this movie seemed a bit deaf, no one had to sneak up on them. The one handed 'hero' of this movie was so whiny and ineffective that it was funny. The bar-fight was pretty funny. There is a priceless scene where the hero and his girlfriend just had sex and judging from their expressions, it wasn't good for either one of them. It made me laugh out loud. This movie is on the 50 Movie Pack Martial Arts set if you want to see a lot of bad movies (with a few decent ones).

Fans of trashy, bad 1970s cinema gather 'round. I've found a real winner - Death Machines. Calling Death Machines "so bad it's good" doesn't begin to explain how deliriously enjoyable this movie truly is. Sure, it's bad - in fact you'd have a hard time finding anything quite so inept - but it's also an incredibly fun experience. What little plot the movie has concerns three assassins for hire - one white, one black, and one Asian (Think of the Death Machines as the Rainbow Coalition of killers - how politically correct!). These killers are all but indestructible - they're even impervious to bullets (the movie may have explained why or how, but I must have missed it). On a mission to take out a local karate studio, they inadvertently leave one man alive. They may have taken off one of his hands, but he's alive nonetheless. The police can't seem to find any leads into the karate studio killings, so it's up to our hero, Whining One Hand (as I like to call him), to bring down the gang of killers.

Oh where to start? This is one of those instances where I could easily write paragraph after paragraph about the ineptitude on display in Death Machines. But I'm not sure I can do the thing the justice it deserves. So instead, I'll summarize some of the highlights:

• The plot is little more than one set-piece after the next that only fit together because some of the characters are the same. The attack on the karate studio, the killing of the man in the phone booth, the bazooka shot at the airplane, the obligatory fight scene in the police station, and the bombing of the bank president - the only connection is that a familiar character or two appears in each scene. Otherwise, you might get the wrong idea and start to think the Death Machines actually had no real, coherent plot (wink, wink).

• The killers receive their marching orders from one of screendoms most bizarre master criminals. Madame Lee (and I only know her name by reading the credits on IMDb) is one weird cookie. To begin with, she seems incapable of opening her mouth and speaking as a normal person might. Between that, her thick accent, and the boom operator's inability to get close to her, it makes it just about impossible to understand what she's saying. And then there's that wig! Why in God's name did anyone think it would be a good look to have her wear a 12-inch high geisha wig? She looks ridiculous. Add to that her strange way of walking, her unusual choice of wardrobe, and her totally out of place facial expressions and Madame Lee is a sight that must be seen to be believed.

• The fight choreography is laughable. The opening fight scenes where Madame Lee is picking her three killers is beyond ridiculous. My 6 year-old son takes karate and I'm sure he and a few of his friends could have put together more believable fight set-pieces. And what's with the gun? Who told the white guy to bring a gun to a karate fight? And was it just me or were the opening fights rigged to ensure the racial diversity of Death Machines? White guy fighting white guy, black guy fighting black guy, Asian guy fighting Asian guy? It's too funny.

• Has there ever been a more ineffective hero than Whining One Hand? When not whining about his problems, getting beat-up by an old man in the bar he works at, or making love to the most unappealing nurse imaginable (I think I might have just thrown up a little in my mouth thinking about it), one of his lone contributions to the movie is to follow the bad guys, crawl through the tall grass, and watch as they blow up a plane and the unknown passengers therein. Does he do anything at all to try to stop the baddies? NO. He merely watches. By the time he shows up at the run-down house (that's obviously a stand-in for an opulent mansion- just use your imagination) the Death Machines have left, Madame Lee's right hand man is already dead, and yet he still manages to get attacked by the wobbly sword welding Madame Lee and her gigantic wig. What does our hero do? Again - nothing. Thank God the police were on hand to take out the dragon lady or Whining One Hand might have ended up being Whining No Hand.

On and on it goes (I haven't even gotten into the technical issues, the lack of any sort of ending, the inappropriate Casio keyboard music, or the old time gospel music played over the fight scene in the grocery store/bar). Death Machines is a real hoot of a movie that I implore all fans of bad 70s trash movies to seek out. You won't be disappointed. As for my rating, I'll be honest, rating movies like Death Machines is difficult. On one hand, it's a stinker of epic proportions. But, on the other hand, I've always said that I rate movies based on my enjoyment. And with that in mind, I have to give Death Machines at least a 7/10 even with its numerous and all too obvious problems. Be warned, if the notion of a bad, plot-less 70s movie with characters that have no motivation or acting ability and big bad wigs with speech impediments doesn't appeal to you, stay away. Otherwise, enjoy!