1991 - SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, so be it.

 Junk is junk and it doesn't get much more junky than this film.  The director Mark L Lester had made the amusing B-movie Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger knocking heads, shooting people and cracking one liners like a Las Vegas comedian as he tried to save his daughter.  If it were possible to make a movie that was even dopier than Commando, it would probably turn out to be something like this thing.  Showdown in Little Tokyo has the poor man's Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren as the action star.

Dolph's your typical big city detective who doesn't follow the rules and doesn't want a partner.  Of course all the tropes are going to be carefully observed.  His boss sticks him with Brandon Lee, (son of Bruce) as a cop and Asian American who doesn't like Asian culture.  For some reason Swedish born Dolph does embrace the oriental world.  He has a collection of samurai swords and lives in a Dojo.  What they have in common is that they are both a couple of kick-ass martial arts guys who don't mind beating the stuffing out of any bad Asian gangster who gets in their way.

Let's go to the recap.  Dolph and Brandon are on the trail of a really bad Asian guy.  You know he is bad because when they capture one of his henchmen the guy breaks his own neck rather than inform on his boss. The big bad guy called Yoshida is so bad he kills the owner of a nightclub which he takes over and turns it into a perverted restaurant which probably doesn't even have takeout.  Naked women lay on tables while their bodies are used as nude placements. This is where his gang eats sushi off of the naked women placemats   Into this evilness comes Dolph and Brandon who rescue the lead singer played by Tia Carrera, 24 years old when she made this film.  She becomes Dolph's love interest and there's lots of nudity between the two of them, although close inspection reveals they are using a body double for Tia.  

 

It all comes down to a big duel with samurai swords between Dolph and the evil Yoshida, but there's really no question how this will all turn out.  I guess the best you can say about this film is that the action pieces are fairly well staged although I've seen them done better in other films.  Dolph has his shirt off a lot and he has sure been hitting the weight room at the YMCA.  Sadly Brandon Lee died young which was unfortunate.  He projects a winning personality and probably would have went far in the B-movie action genre.

 

The film was written by Stephen Glantz and Caliope Brattlestreet.  The running time is 79 minutes, apparently the studio took the film away from Mark L. Lester and significantly reedited it.