He's a Cop, AND a Samurai?

It's TheDenizen again.

OK, enough of the lists. The Year's Best Milkshakes, Top 10 Diseases of the Decade, Greatest Celebrity Haircuts, etc. etc. I've seen a zillion of them in the past month, and I'm sick to death of them. They're usually stupid (in that they list shit I don't care about) and wrong (in that they don't agree with my opinions). I don't need to know the Top 5 Ways to Shave a yak, just tell me the best one. I'm probably only gonna need that kind of information once. So today in the interest of brevity, I'm just going to talk about one movie, but it is unquestionably the best of it's kind.

I like shitty movies, and I've seen a lot of really bad ones. Knowing my unusual cinematic tastes, people often ask me "What is the best 'bad movie' out there"? It's important to state that when I talk about shitty movies, I don't mean overwritten big budget Hollywood star driven ego-projects that tanked, like Ishtar or Gigli...I mean Z-grade schlock filmed for next to nothing that tries really hard to rise above it's limitations and fails spectacularly.

There are lots of great bad movies. 80's slashers produced for short drive-in runs, amateurish Italian and Turkish knockoffs of popular American films, exploitation sleaze churned out for the 70's grindhouses, etc, but one film rises above the creme de la crap. That film is Samurai Cop.

Samurai Cop is about a white cop named Joe who comes to LA to fight the evil Japanese gangs taking over the streets. Despite the fact that we're told several times that Joe has "trained with the Japanese masters", he talks about the code of "Bushida" and cannot pronounce the name of the main bad guy Fujiyama (played by a Latino). The Katana gang (which appears to only have one actual Japanese member) doesn't take kindly to Joe's intrusion into their racket peddling smack to grade school kids, so they send wave after wave of goons to die by Joe's hand.

Samurai Cop is truly wretched in every way. Filmed in the mid 80's and starring Sly Stallone's bodyguard, it never actually played anywhere, only getting a direct to DVD release in the 90's after being discovered in a vault somewhere. Everything is completely amateur hour, from the clunky writing, to the awkward direction, to the wince-inducing acting (Samurai Cop is the only acting credit on imdb for several of the principal actors). This movie wants to be a knockoff of Lethal Weapon so badly, it even has Joe exchanging painful chummy racial banter with a black partner.

Joe dodges bullets during a car chase by ducking and bobbing his head in the driver's seat. The main girl has a giant crocheted lion head on her office wall for no apparent reason. A villain uses a katana to slowly SAW the head off an unconscious guy. One of the female gang memebers only has one line: "The boss is coming", but she gets to use it in about five different scenes. The climactic katana duel was obviously filmed in slow motion and sped WAY up. It's got glaring continuity errors, poorly choreographed fight scenes, ridiculous plot devices, laughable editing, cheesy 80's synth music throughout, and three of the most painfully uncomfortable-to-watch love scenes I've ever witnessed.

It's a fucking classic.