At my age you tend to look back on the 1990s with thoughts of, “pfft, that was only yesterday.” But in the harsh of day I am forced to concede that it was, in fact, 14 years ago. Back then I was a spotty teen with a curious addiction to crap direct-to-video flicks, and I can actually still remember the first time I saw a copy of China O’Brien at my local video rental outlet. The jacket designer seemed to have taken great pains to omit Cynthia Rothrock from the cover. The model on the front clearly wasn’t Rothrock, even if she weren’t holding her hands in front of her face. I’ve often wondered in the intervening years if the distributors didn’t think Rothrock was hot enough to elicit sufficient rentals, and substituted the nameless blonde model instead. If so, they missed a perfectly good opportunity to show her in a bikini. Anyway, the designer’s brief was clearly to make the tape look as much like another popular martial arts title as possible, that being the Jean-Claude Van Damme ‘classic’ Kickboxer.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t me who eventually rented the film – that bloody cover convinced me that it was a Kickboxer knock-off, and even back then I didn’t like Kickboxer very much. In fact the eventual renter was my step mum. Now my step mum was and is a pretty amazing lady, but a love of martial arts cinema is not one of her many attributes. I think she rented it because... nope, it’s no good. I have no idea. I don’t think she enjoyed it very much anyway. I, on the other hand, got quite a kick (pun most certainly intended) out of it. At the time I was blissfully unaware of the long tradition of Asian fighting babes, and so the sight of the magnificently female Cynthia beating the ever lovin’ shit out of foolish hick townsfolk appealed to me enormously. All these years later, I have matured into, um, a spotty adult with a curious addiction to crap direct-to-video flicks, and so I figured it was time to revisit the movie I saw in the video store on that distant, fateful day...

Lori ‘China’ O'Brien (Cynthia Rothrock) is a cop and karate teacher in the big city. A misadventure involving her student Termite (Doug Wright) leads to China finding herself in an alley, laying some martial arts vengeance on a bunch of street punks, ably assisted by her buddy Jonsey (fight choreographer Nijel, a.k.a. martial artist, author, stuntman and sculptor Nigel Binns). A figure in the shadows pulls a gun on Termite, and China quickly responds by shooting first – only to discover that the gunman was a young kid.

Vowing never to carry a gun again, China leaves the force over her Captain’s (Scott McMillan) protests and sets off for home: Hicksville USA, also known as Farwest County. Her Dad is none other than the local sheriff (David Blackwell), who is currently suffering at the hands of a local crime boss who runs all the local rackets, owns the town’s Judge (Will C. Hazlett) and even has one of O’Brien Sr.’s deputies in his pocket. When China arrives at the station house to look for her poppa, she overhears the crooked Deputy Lickner (Patrick Adamson) getting a call from the crime boss, Sommers (Steven Kerby). Lickner directs China to a bar where her father had gone to pick up one of Sommers’ men. Arriving at the Beaver Creek Inn (ha and indeed ha) China finds an unwelcoming committee of good ol’ boys with unhealthy designs on her person. Of course, what we watching all know is that they’re about 2 seconds away from a severe beating, which is duly doled out. The standard of the script is highlighted when the barman (also on the bad guy’s payroll) yells, “She’s one o’ them chop suey fighters!” How enlightened. China also gets a little assistance from a Native American kid named Dakota (Keith Cooke), who also has a nifty line in kicking people in the face. Sadly the barman doesn’t notice, so we’re spared any more “he’s one o’ them firewater n’ buffalo fighters!” political incorrectness.

China subsequently manages to hook up with her Dad and his decent deputy, Tyler (Chad Walker). She also gets reacquainted with an old flame named Matt Conroy (Richard Norton), a former Special Forces guy who is apparently supposed to be local but talks with a broad Australian accent. China decides to spend some time helping out her Dad, which mainly involves getting into more fights with Sommers’ trailer trash army. Dakota follows her around and is on hand to get in on the action, including one scene where he takes out Gerry Garcia – or at least a sniper who looks a lot like Gerry Garcia. Nothing ever comes of the busts though, since the cowardly judge lets all of the hoods go.

Deputy Lickner discovers that the sheriff is about to call in the feds, and so Sommers arranges a couple of car bombs for the sheriff and Tyler. I’m no expert on American law enforcement procedures, but wouldn’t the high-profile assassinations of two prominent cops automatically prompt the interest of the FBI? Apparently not, as once both men are dead the Feds are never mentioned again. China, though devastated by her father’s murder, is determined that Sommers won’t get away with it. She decides to run for sheriff in her father’s place, much to Sommers’ annoyance. He sends the inevitable gang of monster truck fans to bust up China’s election rally, but they fall foul of some intense violence handed out liberally by China, Matt and Dakota.

China and Matt finally manage to pin down the wily Dakota, who explains that Sommers turned his mum into a hooker and then murdered her. They also roughed him up and crippled his hand, which is now wrapped in black electrical tape for some reason. This is all illustrated in Flashback-o-Vision, and shows Dakota apparently unable to defend himself. We’re apparently expected to believe that Dakota learned some amazing acrobatic kung fu moves in the space of a couple of months – either that or he hired Keanu Reeves’ stunt double.

Election day comes and Sommers’ tractor pull green berets are on hand to try and rig the results. But schoolteacher Matt has posted his students at the polling stations to alert our heroes to trouble. Sure enough a call comes in and Matt & China mix it up with the bad guys at a gym, resulting in more black & blue rednecks and, more importantly, an intact ballot box.

China wins the election by a landslide and with the upstanding young teens of Farwest County sworn into service as deputies, she starts to clean up the town. Sommers’ drug lab, bordello and various other rackets are smashed – literally and figuratively – and soon the town is hailing China as a hero. But Sommers is far from licked and sends yet more goons to kill the new sheriff, all the prompting she needs to head to Beaver Creek Inn and take out the rest of the gang. But can she keep the vengeful Dakota from killing Sommers himself?

The company behind China O’Brien was the mighty Golden Harvest, the legendary Hong Kong studio that was home to both Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan for much of his career. Unfortunately the same was true for Golden Harvest as it was for other Hong Kong studios, for example Seasonal Films, that tried to break into the US market; your dollar goes doesn’t go nearly as far in America as it does in Hong Kong. Thus the film looks incredibly cheap for an American production. Of course many kung fu movies just have two guys in a field duking it out, and what’s cheaper than that? But then the good ones had spectacular, elaborate fight choreography to draw the eye away from the surroundings, while this movie... Well, we’ll get to that.

The old ‘small-town hero made good goes home to clean up the streets’ plot has been done so many times and in so many genres that it’s become an action movie standard – we’ve covered it at least three times before, in Bucktown, Road House and Sheba, Baby. Unfortunately this film is certainly among the most hackneyed examples of the sub-genre, almost touching on Sheba, Baby levels of script suckiness.

There’s nothing like a good director to rise above the limitations of a dull script, and sure enough Robert Clouse is nothing like a good director (I’m the first person to ever use this joke, honest). Clouse basically made his name by directing Enter The Dragon, which was of course a global smash hit and the most popular kung fu movie ever made. This tends to overshadow the fact that Clouse was a hack who hadn’t made a film for three years prior to Enter The Dragon, who got the gig because Warner Brothers weren’t about to pay for anyone decent to helm what at the time was a small-time movie starring a little known (in the West at least) Chinese guy. Then there’s the fact that much of Enter The Dragon (and all of the good bits) was directed by Bruce Lee himself.

Clouse went on to make Golden Needles, an attempt to fuse the martial arts genre with, um, Joe Don Baker, and then the minor classic Black Belt Jones with Enter The Dragon star Jim Kelly. He worked sporadically until 1978, when he made the hideous hack-job of a movie that was Game Of Death, using the unreleased footage of Bruce Lee fighting assorted villains in that famous yellow and black tracksuit so much admired by Quentin Tarantino. The finished film is far from a classic, but even then Clouse took credit where it wasn’t due; Lee’s friend Sammo Hung directed a large portion of the film including all of the new fight scenes. Clouse then helmed The Big Brawl, another brainchild of Enter The Dragon producers Raymond Chow & Fred Weintraub, and an attempt to break Jackie Chan into the US market as they previously had done with Bruce Lee. The movie found little love with American crowds and Chan’s hijinks were too watered down to please his diehard fans. The film bombed.

By the time Clouse directed China O’Brien he hadn’t worked for five years - probably because his previous project was the gymnastic-action disaster Gymkata. But once again Weintraub and Chow had visions of bringing the latest action sensation over from Hong Kong to rake in the US dollars, so their old collaborator Clouse got the job. Unfortunately without a mercurial talent like Lee, Hung or Chan to fall back on, the limitations of Clouse’s direction are all too apparent. Like The Big Brawl, the film failed to set the box office on fire. However, its low-budget charm was better suited to video, and it became a rental smash.

One thing in the film’s favour was the cast. Rothrock had of course had a successful career in Hong Kong action films, and must have seemed like a shoo-in for the filmmakers. She was a hot chick, could kick vast swathes of arse and best of all, there wasn’t that pesky Asian factor for conservative US audiences to deal with. Unfortunately – and as much as it pains me to say it – Rothrock didn’t have the acting chops of either Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan to back up the action. This wasn’t such a big deal in Cantonese movies where her dialogue was dubbed, but once she began to speak for herself it became instantly apparent that she was really quite wooden.

The same could be said for Richard Norton, the notoriously affable Australian karate master and former celebrity bodyguard. Norton had a few small roles in American films – he plays about four different bad guys in Chuck Norris’ early Ninja film The Octagon – before making it big as a Gweilo villain in Hong Kong. He’d also worked with Rothrock a couple of times, most notably in Sammo Hung’s Millionaire’s Express where both played karate-kicking bandits, and Wong Jing’s barking-mad Magic Crystal, where they got to spar in a couple of superb fights.

The third member of the film’s butt-kickin’ trio was Keith Cooke, a.k.a. Keith Cooke Hirabayashi. An expert in several martial arts styles, Cooke gave one of the movie’s better performances. Sadly he never really attained the cult status of the other two, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for him – he has a great fight against Robin Shou in Mortal Kombat.

Action-wise the film is underwhelming by Hong Kong standards. Almost all of the action is of the good-guy-vs.-gang-of-random- thugs variety. There are a few good moments; Cooke shows off some incredible kicking skills, while Norton gets to demonstrate more authentic ‘real-world’ karate moves than your typical fu flick. The best scene is the opening alley fight, which has a bit more Hong Kong style flash, allowing choreographer Nijel to show his kicking abilities. Overall it’s a step down from Cynthia’s Hong Kong work, but back in 1990 the World at large, including me, hadn’t seen anything like it before. Even so it was pretty clear that Cynthia had considerably more skill than the big-name action heroes of the time.

If this film had been more successful on the big screen, who knows what kind of career Rothrock could have had? Certainly it’s possible she might have had some major hits - hey, if Seagal and Van Damme could do it... As it is, Rothrock became a video rental star, with a hard core of loyal fans (like me) and a dedicated internet following. Plus she’s still recognised Worldwide as an extraordinary martial artist, so I doubt she’d complain.

Can’t help feeling a little sorry for all those rednecks, though...

Dave Thomas, 9^th February 2004