The best parts of director Ko Young-nam's and star Lieh Lo's martial-arts pulp-pic Deadly Kick are definitely when it gets strange: the scenes in which the anti-hero channels/hallucinates animals during battle; the plucking out of eyeballs or intestines; the blind woman's fight-training sequence replete with superhero uniform and a girl with directional sleigh-bells. In the long stretches between those bits of weirdness, the movie leaves us with little: a pair of overactive eyebrows and absurd moments like when one guy holds a pair of panties to his nose then comments "smells better than whiskey."
Outside of that, the action — which ranges from convoluted syndicate machinations to drunken nipple-nibbling — is infrequently amusing, frequently preposterous. What should make for drama, does not. Take the film's airborne assassins who can't quite hit the one moving car with their machine gun or their hand grenades. Not even when the car runs out of gas. Not even when its passengers are on foot. Because then helicopter runs out of gas, too. And if the movie itself isn't quite a gas, what it does have is one delicious fake mustache (on Bobby Kim, once known as the "Oriental Charles Bronson") and a couple of "school project" torture devices. At least, it's set in the '70s so there are aviator sunglasses for everyone!
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