AWESOME LOTUS (1983)

 

AWESOME LOTUS looks to be the equivalent of a standup comic trying to hone his talents in dunghole comedy-clubs where, as the saying goes, "no one sees you being bad." I assume most of the participants were amateurs, given that hardly any of them did anything beyond this movie. However, though the director David O'Malley didn't score with this attempt to execute the anarchic comedy of 1980's AIRPLANE, he did end up working as writer and/or director from the eighties to the 2010s. In fact, he wrote and directed (probably with some input from Sam Raimi) the underrated biker-comedy EASY WHEELS.                                                                                               

 The scattershot script is just one problem, co-written by one of the main actors, Peter Schuyler. But none of the actors do anything more than speak their lines correctly. Lorraine Masterson starts out the film as simple farm-girl Emily Anne. She gets torqued at her three older brothers, takes a kung-fu correspondence course (complete with instructional record), beats up her siblings, and leaves the farm. (Silly as it is, this is the strongest scene in the form.) When the viewer next sees her, apparently several years later, she's wearing a Chinese robe and a matching hairdo, and is calling herself "Awesome Lotus." Somehow she's become a master assassin, as well as a trainer of assassins, and her whole philosophy seems to be about confronting death, which would be fine if the script got any humor out of the subject. (She does have one decent line: "There's nothing like death to start your day.") The representative of a silk company (whose company name is the anagram SISSI) claims that his models are under attack by an evil organization, FART. There's some talk of it being a conspiracy to advance the fortunes of rayon in the fashion industry, but later the truth comes out: the evil mastermind Basset (made up to slightly resemble Hitler) resents the silk industry because vicious silkworms killed his beloved basset hound. Yeah, there's a lot of jokes like that one.                                                           

Aside from the opening scene, the script just barely finds energy in the film's middle to have Lotus lead her two allies-- her blind mentor Tofu Caca (Schuyler) and a blonde guy who hits his foes with a tennis racket-- against Bassett's compound, where they have comic fights with ninja guards. This looks like something that should have happened as the movie's climax, because the one they filmed really blows, even in comparison to all the other bad scenes. But to pursue my comedy-club analogy to the bitter end, since arguably at least one graduate of this "club" got better, I guess AWESOME LOTUS served a purpose.