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Lady Street Fighter (1980)
"Go back home, Linda. Take my advice: don't try to get to the bottom of this. Or you'll be killed. Get it?"
"What a kook."
The Executioner Part II (1984)
On April 12, 2019 Sister Street Fighter and Lady Street Fighter were screened as a double-feature on TCM Underground.
Don't Go in the Woods...Alone! (1981)
Movie Review | Lady Street Fighter (Bryan, 1981)
I've seen Renee Harmon, the star of Lady Street Fighter, likened to Tommy Wiseau, and there certainly similarities. Both have extremely distinct screen presences and accents (Harmon's is German, Wiseau's is...nobody knows) and obvious delusions about their acting abilities. Yet while Wiseau's The Room has a much larger cultural footprint than anything Harmon was involved in, I can't help but find her a much more likable presence. For one thing, from what I know about the production of The Room, Wiseau doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun to be around, and the movie contorts to his ego in a way that provides for obvious amusement but not a lot of warmth. From the films I've seen Harmon in, she seems like an integral part of their nutty, bad movie fabric but not necessarily the centre of gravity, and while I don't profess to be an expert on her career, I do know that her sometimes collaborator James Bryan spoke pretty well of her in Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA, which I'm currently going through. And as dumb as it is, the fact that Harmon's default expression is a kindly smile while Wiseau's is...something else, makes her a lot more approachable as a screen presence in my eyes. What biographical details I do know of Harmon help interpret her career as some kind of immigrant...well, success story might be a bit generous, but gumption is admirable and a little moving. Some of these things might seem irrelevant to their output, but when you're comparing bad movie weirdos, a logical rubric doesn't present itself so easily.
Of Harmon's work, I'd previously seen Frozen Scream, a masterpiece of incoherence, and The Executioner Part II, a vigilante actioner and fake sequel with probably the worst acted PTSD freakout I've seen in a movie. In both she played crucial supporting roles, but in Lady Street Fighter (not to be confused with Sister Street Fighter, the rock solid karate flick with Etsuko Shihomi and Sonny Chiba), she's the star, and the effect is less like Wiseau in The Room and more like Steven Seagal in On Deadly Ground, where the movie is ostensibly delivering genre thrills but has those subverted by an unabashedly weird lead performance. Like Seagal in his film, Harmon is given a number of extremely interesting outfits, like an excessively studded leather jacket, a shiny gold jumpsuit and a great big hat. And while Seagal has characters speak often of how fearsome and formidable he is (R. Lee Ermey says at one point that "He's the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire!"), in Harmon's movie, they keep talking about how hot she is and making objectifying comments, usually referring to her breasts. And like Wiseau subjects us to ample shots of his ass in his movie, Harmon spends an awful lot of time getting in and out of the shower, and attempts oral sex on a telephone and a piece of celery (the latter of which is a recurring theme in the movie). In another context I might find this off putting, but knowing she was a major creative force behind the movie, it's actually a little endearing.
Lady Street Fighter was directed by James Bryan, and like in his best known film, the regional slasher Don't Go in the Woods, the technical sloppiness lends itself to the unintentional avant garde, as when a shootout is staged awkwardly enough to feel like a montage of completely unrelated footage (as Harmon blows away her enemies, Bryan blasts through the 180-rule), or a torture scene keeps cutting to black to hide the fact that the torture is very obviously not making contact with the victim. The plot is...who's to say? Okay, it involves Harmon looking to avenge her sister (the torture victim, played by Harmon while writhing topless with her tongue sticking out), an evil organization called Assassins Inc. and a beardo who very obviously can't be trusted yet Harmon teams up with anyway. There's also a weirdo sex party full of sex weirdos (and a bunch of guys in togas) during which the host allows his daugher, who has the mind of a child, to attend, which seems extremely ill-advised. Most of these are standard action thriller elements (okay, maybe not the weirdo sex party full of sex weirdos), but Bryan's assembly plays like the screenplay was fed through the shredder and taped together with half of the pieces missing, distilling the movie's narrative to a crude abstraction of the real thing. The transfer I watched is of a grainy print where the colours have been desaturated, as if the movie was left out in the sun too long and faded like an ancient manuscript or eroded like a historical artifact, and the fact that the movie was shot in the '70s but only released in 1981 adds to this archaeological quality. (At one point someone wears a Van Halen shirt, so I assume that part was not shot before '78, when they released their debut.) And on the soundtrack hums a moron synth take on Morricone, giving the movie a nice, braindead ambience to solidify its distinct bad movie wavelength.
