Mister Trash Presents...

Our own Mister Trash lurks the fetid corners of ILV anonymously, like a vice cop covering the waterfront, or a gin-sop collecting used swizzle sticks stuck to cocktail napkins in the tavern dumpster. This week's theme is exercise, which not a one of us gets enough of -- rippling male buttocks, stylish leg-warmers, Aerobithons in the Rejuvenarium, mullet flexing & murderous jazz hands! Join Mister Trash as he gives that chicken fat back to the chicken...

Iron Thunder (Anthony Elmore, 1989)

     "An electrifying black Rocky!" screams the back of the VHS slip.  Anthony "Amp" Elmore screams viciously, sweat covering his face on the front.  ("Amp" also wrote, produced and directed this gem.)  How could I pass this up?  Iron Thunder opens in an all-black karate dojo in Memphis, where afro-ed warriors learn to throw mad punches and gain spiritual benefits from screaming during cold showers (I presume the true karate master must avoid horniness?).  Amp, sporting the mightiest afro of all, joins his family in welcoming his brother home from Vietnam only to start a family argument at the dinner table about whether or not pork is the “number one killer of black people in America” which involves his dad using the dreaded N-word about a hundred times.  Soon, Amp cuts his ridiculous hair, wins a karate championship, and delivers his five-foot trophy to his sensei.  But, of course, “real trophies are found within oneself.”  Why can’t you understand this, Amp?!  S’okay – his sensei beats the hell out of him for making the mistake.  How else is he gonna learn? 

Curtly informed that if he ever returns to the dojo his sensei will literally murder him (no trophies, goddamnit!), Amp is now a lone warrior in a big, lonely world.  So he naturally resolves to become a kickboxing champion.  But just when you might expect a massive Rocky-esque spectacle of a Friday Night Fight, you get a quarter-sized ring rounded by a couple dozen white teenagers instead.  And despite the fact that Amp is supposedly a real kickboxing ace, the fight plays out like a couple of dudes trying to mimic what they think kickboxing might look like just from the name alone.  A montage of montages follows, involving a series of fights and a succession of mullet-domed honkies who just don’t get the appeal of kickboxing and refuse to sponsor The Electrifying Anthony “Amp” Elmore.  Fools!

In no time, Coors gets on board to sponsor Amp, and now kickboxing is the biggest thing in sports since monster trucks!  In Amp’s own words, he is now in possession of ample quantities of “jazz, pizzazz, and arrazzamatazz!”  (Seriously.)  None of which, it seems, helps him win his next big fight when he gets the living shit knocked out of him in the most boring fight scene ever committed to celluloid.  Oh, he doesn’t lose – just when he’s about to, his old sensei (you remember, the guy who promised to fucking murder him over a trophy?) leaps into the ring and bitch slaps Amp across the face.  This is apparently enough to galvanize our intrepid hero toward victory.  Wow. 

Amp never made another movie (despite the warning at the end of the credits – Coming Soon: Iron Thunder II), but he does run Elmore African Imports now, and he is also a proud black Buddhist who deems himself “more Buddhist than black” even though he chose to be born black.  No, I don’t get it either.  Nonetheless, Iron Thunder is most assuredly worth a viewing, if only for its mind-bogglingly inept acting, preposterous plot, and bafflingly unfunny jokes.  Rarely has a movie this absolutely incompetent been seen by mine eyes (although The Happening comes to mind).  Still, this is the sort of dusty old VHS cinematic compost that makes indie video stores so much fun and my life just that much sadder.  I do it for you!! 

Pulsebeat (Maurice Tobias, 1984)

A Spanish fitness club romp from 1984, Maurice Tobias' Pulsaciones is guaranteed to make you feel sort of filthy for having seen it. The astonishing opening credits feature close-ups of rippling buttocks, straining thigh muscles, bare breasts, and more leg-warmers than I could count - all to the tune of a face-melting 80s pop tune "Heartbeat." Very much to my surprise, a shadow of a plot is introduced almost immediately - will Roger, the manager of the fitness club, enter them in the Aerobithon this year? God Almighty, I sure hope so. But first, a long montage of aerobics, dancing, and assorted 80s merrymaking! Naturally, Roger’s fitness club is in danger, however – he’s not really making any money and his best trainer ditched him for the superior competition, The Rejuvenarium (!!). If only there was something to boost morale and public support....like an Aerobithon, perchance?!

Meanwhile, Roger’s dorky accountant Alvin provides what I think is supposed to be comedy by clumsily working out at the club, and Roger’s fiercely closeted trainer Adrian conspires with the evil Marlene, Roger’s chief rival. Unaware of his employee’s wicked machinations, Roger bones his new trainer on the exercise equipment, and does not bother to wipe that shit down afterwards, which luckily provides me with yet another reason never to set foot in a gym. Now peeps is just hooking up left and right – even Alvin proves that stalking is an effective way to meet women, at least women who look like men in drag. Then comes a huge shocker: Marlene, who was eerily flirting with Roger and blowing him provocative kisses earlier in the film, reveals that she is his mother. Ew. (She does this by calling him a son of a bitch and then clarifying that “I am the bitch that he is the son of.” A bad grammar bitch, if you ask me.)

Next comes the most homoerotic scene in motion picture history, wherein Roger works out half-naked with his idol – Greg Adonis! – who proclaims that it’s better than sex in almost the same breath as he exclaims how relieved he is to not be married anymore. As if to convince himself that this wasn’t as extraordinarily gay as it really was, Roger then rushes back to the fitness club to bone his trainer on the weight bench again. Come on, man. It’s not working. Another long workout montage skirts the very edge of killing the viewer with tedium before we finally get to the Aerobithon (live at the Sports Arena!). Amazing events like competitive stationary bicycling thrill as it intercuts with more working out and some chicks running. I mean, this shit is intense. It all wraps up with a ridiculous sequence of dancing and running in place and push-up contests, the crowd going wild all the while, that of course concludes with the Pulsebeat team declared the winner. Huzzah.

Of course everyone in this atrocity walks around in shorty shorts that would put Magnum P.I. to shame and make even the most jaded survivor of the 1980s puke a little in his mouth. But then, almost everything about Pulsaciones makes me want to upchuck – the awful music, the offensive hairstyles, the implied incest and the fluids gradually coagulating on the weight bench. I am a sucker for legwarmers, though. Why the hell did that go out of style? At any rate, I’ve got nothing against aerobics movies of the 80s – Death Spa wasn’t really all that bad, and I really can’t resist the craptacular charms of Heavenly Bodies – but this one really is just painful. I can see evil military dictatorships forcing prisoners of war to watch this over and over again until they crack. I would – I’d tell ‘em anything. I’d sooner eat a bowl of Larry the Cable Guy’s excrement than sit through Pulsaciones again.

Highlight of the Film: The closing credits.