THE MASTER DEMON (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

"Measured choice" time again. MASTER DEMON is one of many undistinguished shot-on-video projects, starring a handful of familiar supporting-actors to give it marketability. But is it as bad as, say, SOUL OF THE AVENGER? And the answer is no, because SOUL burns up its run-time with dull sequences irrelevant to its hypothetical martial-arts content. DEMON's fights are almost all badly shot and arranged, but the movie doesn't make a pretense of being about anything BUT fights, which is a mild virtue.

So the demon of the title is an archaic Chinese being (Gerald Okamura) slain in some vague archaic time by a Chinese guy oddly named The White Warrior (Eric Lee). The actors, both of whom appeared in John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, then reappear in the 20th century. Lee becomes a martial-arts fighter named Tong Lee, who seems to know all about what transpired in antiquity and may be the White Warrior's reincarnation. Okamura's character Cheng though seems totally independent of the Master Demon, being a dealer of ancient artifacts. He accidentally summons a supernatural servant of the Master Demon, pumped prodigy Medusa (Kay Baxter Young), and she repays the dealer by killing him. Medusa goes looking for a mystic token in order to revive her Demon Master (whoops, got it backwards), and she finds the token in the possession of low-rent private eye Cameron (Steve Nave). She gets the token from Cameron and summons some kung-fu fighting servants to off the private dick, but Tong Lee shows up to thwart the assassins. But in jig time Medusa uses the token to revive the Master Demon in Cheng's dead body, and he summons a small army of bad kung-fu fighters from somewhere. Now the only people able to prevent the Demon from conquering the world are Tong, Cameron, Cameron's kung-fu secretary (Ava Cadell), and the secretary's cop boyfriend. And as stated, everything in the film is either a bad fight or a lead-in to a bad fight.

Writer/director Samuel Oldham doesn't ever come up with any worthy brain-fried dialogue for any of these goofballs, so don't expect DEMON to give competition to even the least of Ed Wood's offerings. DEMON does offer some of the worst makeup jobs ever seen in a cheapjack film, so that fills in some of the dull spots. Similarly, it's rare to see a martial arts movie with so many poorly choreographed fights. It looks like all the male performers had no idea how to deliver fake blows, so that all the punches and kicks look wildly misdirected. Oddly, only the two females look fairly authoritative when they're kicking ass, but Cadell only has three-four short fight-scenes, and Young doesn't get into fights per se, since she just slams opponents around with her massive muscles. Cadell and Nave are the only performers who seem moderately invested in their paper-thin characters, but this isn't much of a recommendation given that Lee, Okamura and the cop-actor get more scenes, and they're all bad ones.

If one isn't a fan of bad makeup jobs and bad fight-choreography, though, DEMON's sole virtue is that of being the only movie performance of Young, best known for promoting the popularity of  women's bodybuilding contests. DEMON was her only movie role before being killed in a car crash, so at least this cinematic sludge preserves a decent sampling of scenes spotlighting Young's impressive physique.