Prime Cuts: Strike of the Panther

 It came from a land down-under

So this is a soft reboot of a concept I had back in 2019 after I found the brilliant Enter the Ninja whilst browsing Netflix and decided to try and dig up as much dross as possible to review. I guess I just sort of forgot about it during the whole COVID-19 Nightmare that was last year, but I'm bringing it back after one evening of browsing Amazon Prime turned a whole treasure trove of glorious genre pictures, mock busters and vintage sci-fi. And now the pun name is even worse: Prime Cuts. So lets get this train-wreck rolling again shall we?

Strike of the Panther is an 1988 Australian Martial Arts crime thriller sequel to Day of the Panther directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite directors based purely on how hilarious and honest he is. If you haven't seen Day of the Panther don't worry, the recap it for you in the first 12 minutes in a sequence that made me wonder if the whole movie was going to be shot like one of those season recaps that you sometimes get when a show gets a second run after a long hiatus. You'd think that this would be the worst thing that happens, but we haven't even gotten to the brothel fight yet.

But what you need to know is that our hero, Jason Blade, is an expert martial artist who fights crime by kicking it in the face and randomly throwing off his shirt who really hates Jim Baxter, a Triad hitman with more body hair than a wookie. Baxter killed Blade's teammate in the last movie and is sitting in jail and the Australian police have asked Blade to train up a division of kung-fu super cops to bring law an order to the mean streets of Perth, where the gangs are all dressed in acid wash denim and mullets. Baxter breaks out of jail and kidnaps Blade's girlfriend (who is extremely fond of sexy aerobics/dancing) and hires an army of “Kung-Fu Freaks” to bait Blade into a one-on-one showdown. And how does that Brothel Fight I mention one paragraph ago tie into this? Very loosely is the answer, but the man in the chicken costume and the man dressed in a school boy outfit who begs to be kicked by Blade are now burned so deep into my psyche that I cannot separate them from movie without a hammer and an icepick.

This movie's quality fluctuates like a sine wave. For every poorly staged and executed fight scene, there's two stuntman clambering up the side of an apartment building without a single rope or harness in sight. I don't know how this $500,000 flick was able to have better, more dangerous, stunts than some blockbusters. I've seen people clamour up so many rocks in front of green screens so many times that watching some poor Aussie dangle 10 floors off the ground feels like the seeing a Monet painting after being locked in a room with nothing but Coke ads for a year. And then a man in a plastic Halloween mask with a sword squats menacingly on a catwalk and we're back into the low frequency portion of the wave.

Now I owe it to the people who worked on this movie to explain what actually happened during production. This film and its prequel were both funded privately and entered production under the Direction of Peter West, the film's stunt coordinator, who quickly realised he was out of his depth. And Trenchard-Smith stepped in on two days notice and managed to reshoot and redirect most of the movie in record time. He wanted to get these movies in theatres and blew up the 16mm reels to 35mm before having to shove it straight to video. When asked about it, Trenchard-Smith admitted that it was not a great movie, but he tried to make it entertaining and more importantly “The main thing is: from an economic standpoint - THE PATIENT LIVED!”

I have been wracking my brain trying to to figure out why I enjoyed this movie as much as I did because it is objectively such poor quality that I shouldn't. But dammit all I liked it! Its not so-bad-its-good because it isn't bad enough, but it also isn't good enough to be simply called “Okay-ish.” It lives in solitude in this weird little limbo that I can't really put a name to. To reuse a metaphor, its like a sine wave, fluctuating steadily up and down in quality at such high frequency its impossible to get a good read on it. So guess ill just have to say that I thought it was really entertaining whilst being objectively low quality. So check it out some time, I guess?