1993, United States. Starring Frances Lee, Charles Pelligrino, Soomi Kim, Madoka Raine, Louise Millman, Jon Sanborne, Clark Donnelly. Directed by Pat Bishow.

When asked by a hairy guy what was good in life, the solemn Conan replied with a short list that would become one of the most famous lines in genre movie history. Well, crushing enemies and hearing lamentations may be okay if you are a big, long-haired barbarian, but I am a little, short-haired barbarian and I can think of things much better in life than crushing and lamentations. If asked the same question, I would come up with a slightly different list, which would not include the lamentations of the women but would include women in superhero outfits. It would not include seeing my enemies driven before me and crushed, but it would include masked Mexican wrestlers who crush their opponents with piledrivers. If this makes me a wuss and draws the ire of Vikings and barbarians, so be it. I'll have a masked Mexican wrestler and cute female superhero as friends, so bring it on, Kull.

Luckily for Conan, there seem to be a lot of people who delight in crushing enemies and causing people to cry. Luckily for me, there's at least one bunch of people out there who share my more relaxed, entertaining vision of what is good. And best of all, they brought video cameras!

We've dipped our toes into the shot on video home production before, possibly even jumped in off the high dive. While many of these films fall short of achieving adjectives with a positive slant, we've always appreciated the effort and done our best to communicate to people how much energy and work go into these labors of love, even stinkers like Redneck Revenge. That we've been involved and continue to be involved in the production of no-budget independent films makes us, I feel, not only more sympathetic to the cause and eventual outcome, but also makes it possible for us to provide a little more insight into the process of making and critiquing these films beyond the feeble scope of, "Dude, this movie sucks. It was nothing like The Matrix." While the reviews may not always be good, I feel we are at least fair, and even people involved in movies we've completely trashed (most notably Redneck Revenge), seem to agree. Not that I'm tooting my own horn or anything, but the way we handle other's film and video babies is far more delicate than the way we'd probably handle their actual babies if they have them.

So it is all that much more of a treat when a shot on video production comes our way that manages to be good enough to get a positive review without me having to throw in lots of, "but let me tell you how hard these movies are to make" justifications to soften my negative comments. Drawing influences it seems from the old Batman series starring Adam West, Pat Bishow's Adventures of El Frenetico and Go-Girl is a perfect example of how much fun a shot on video film can be not just for the makers and their friends, but for other people as well. It is a perfect example of what happens when a little effort is put into a movie rather than it being the product of one of those drunken nights full of "You know what would be a really funny movie? If we stole that chicken nugget outfit from work and made a movie about a vengeful chicken nugget!" proceeded immediately by you doing just that without any planning, script, actors, or anything other than your inebriated visions of how funny a chicken nugget is. Not that there's anything wrong with those types of movies - they can certainly be amusing - but it's also fun to see a movie that has a lot of love and effort put into it.

It also helps that the movie is about a drunken past-his-prime masked Mexican wrestler-superhero and his cute kungfu bad-ass of a female sidekick who, in true sidekick form, actually does most of the work.

There are three episodes to this feature, and each one improves upon the last. Part one pits the duo against the villainous snack cake king Heinrich Syphon, who wants to inject a chemical into his popular food items that will turn people into wax dummies! Unfortunately for him, his zombified henchman, and his stern assistant Hilda (a precursor to that uptight screaming lady from the Austin Powers movies), the ever-spunky Go Girl catches wind of his dastardly scheme and enlists the aid of her old partner and former idol, El Frenetico.

El Frenetico, however, has fallen on hard times and is more likely to be chugging liquor than fighting crime. El Frenetico is also dubbed in the same style as the classics of Mexican wrestling science fiction. He's El Santo on hard times, which probably would have been more interesting to see than all those later Santo movies where they ran out of outlandish villains for him to fight and so had movies full of filler scenes like, "Santo investigates CD rates at the local bank" or "Santo peruses the newspaper for a good restaurant." If nothing else, those movies gave us a lot of the scenes I love of Santo in a three-piece-suit while still adorned in hi trademark silver wrestling mask, but even I can stomach only so many scenes of Santo taking care of daily chores before I'm screaming out for some vampire women or ninjas to jump him while he's in line at the ATM machine.

Go Girl manages to snap her old chum out his stupor in enough time for them to stick it to Syphon. The fights in this -- and subsequent -- episodes are handled primarily by Go Girl (Frances Lee), and she performs remarkably well. Trust me when I say I know more than a thing or two about just how profoundly awful kungfu in a shot on video homebrew movie can be. Sure, some people think Don "The Dragon" Wilson is bad, but there is stuff out there that will make you marvel at the Yuen Biao-like adroitness of Don Knotts in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, let alone a competent but unspectacular performer like Don. Frances, however, is several notches above the shot on video standard. She moves well, looks convincing, and obviously knows a thing or two about kicking some ass. It helps that she's not one of those rail-thin types who we're supposed to believe are powerhouses even though a light breeze could snap them in half. With a professional choreographer, Frances could easily make an impact (but thankfully not a Double Impact) as a martial arts star.

But even more important, at least in the realm of action cinema, is the fact that the director and cameraman know where to point the camera. Lots of low budget - and even quite a few big budget - films have this problem of not knowing that they should position a camera so that you can't see kicks and punches not landing. Unless you're part of the Sammo Hung philosophy of actually making hard contact then settling up the medical bills when the day's shooting wraps, you're not actually beating the living hell out of your actors. In the absence of George Lucas style special effects computers that can make people and punches appear closer to their target than they were in real life, this means you have to fake it by coming as close as you can without actually making contact, or that you know how to edit a blow so that you see contact that is actually faked after the blow has already been shot.

More times than not, this results in you and me watching Jim Kelly throw a punch that stops a foot from his foe's face yet still manages to knock them back ten feet through a window. A simple repositioning of the camera at a different angle would often alleviate this problem, but it seems few low and no budget filmmakers have thought of that because El Frenetico and Go Girl is one of the few movies that pulls it off, resulting in fight scenes that may not be straight out of Sammo Hung's Magnificent Butcher, but are heads better than most of the action committed to and on video, which is often more like committing a small crime.

The acting is also above what one expects from these sorts of productions. Most of the time, you just cast your friends, their friends, and who ever else you can convince to work for beer and nachos. If Pat did just draw from a pool of pals and acquaintances, then he at least knows some talented people. Frances is not just a solid action performer, she's also a solid actress and delivers her lines with just enough camp to be amusing and fitting for the subject matter, but not so much that she just sounds silly, or like the WWF's Hurricane Helms. El Frenetico is dubbed with intentionally flat sounding dialogue, so he doesn't count. Charles Pelligrino, the man behind the mask, does mimic the stilted movements and mannerisms of your finer Mexican wrestlers with amusing accuracy. He may not be Santo, but he's pretty close to Mil Mascaras or Blue Demon.

Jon Sandborne as Syphon performs with all the cartoonish glee of Caesar Romero, though to be honest, I'd be far more afraid of Caesar Romero kicking my ass (in or out of Joker make-up) than Jon. Not that I want to fight anyone. There's just a lot of people I'd rather have to fight than Caesar Romero, even if he's old or dead. Well, whatever, there are worse things than having said to you, "You remind me of Caesar Romero." Granted Sandborne gets to ham it up as the over-the-top snack cake mogul bent on world - or at least town - domination, and being hammy is always more fun than being serious, but even hams, and probably even Ham the chimp who was the first American in outer space, can deliver lines flatly. Sandborne doesn't. He mugs beautifully and even manages to deliver his straight lines well.

The supporting cast, including the angry Hilda and a panicky scientist, do well up until the point we meet the panicky scientist's father, who delivers his few lines with all the feeling and skill of your finer elementary school students doing the first read-through of the school play, or me and my friends Rob and Roman when we decided to annoy our third grade teacher by reading everything in class with a monotone robot voice. Granted finding older actors willing to play a part in a video production is difficult, which is why you see so many twenty year olds with long hair playing Nobel Award winning scientists from World War II. That they even bothered to find a guy who actually looks his age is a testament to dedication, and it's not like he's constantly onscreen or anything. Ultimately, he's more amusing than he is "bad." And who am I to judge? Brilliant scientists are a weird lot.

Sets and locations are always another big problem when you have no money, which is probably why so many shot on video features are about people awakening ancient evils in their own home or in the nearby woods. A couple things you can almost always tell from one of these movies are where the director and their friends live and where they work. And where they go to school if they're still in. Curiously, every movie I was involved with from 1986-1990 revolved around my high school or my friend Dave's basement. From 1991-1995, everything suddenly revolved around the University of Florida campus and the parking garage across the street from where a bunch of my friends lived. Coincidence?

El Frenetico and Go Girl handles this limitation well. I don't know what the factory of a snack cake king would look like, but I do live a stone's throw away from a Domino Sugar plant along the East River, and it's not that nice, especially when striking workers rent the giant inflatable rat and sit it so that it's peering into the bosses third floor window. I don't know if this is the practice everywhere, but here in New York City the big inflatable rat (and his smaller brother) gets a lot of business. Whoever rents it out must be making a killing, because every picket line I see these days has the big inflatable rat.

Syphon's lair looks about what I imagine the layer of the Domino Sugar guy looks like, if he has a lair - and I'm sure the people on strike would say he does. At least Syphon doesn't have to deal with the big rat. The rest of the movie is sensibly set in a series of warehouses, crowded industrial offices, and little convention center type places, thus avoiding the need to pass off a card table set up in front of your video collection in your living room as the headquarters of the NSA.

There are only a few special effects, and while we ain't talking Ray Harryhausen or ILM, did you really expect that? In one scene, Go Girl is foiled by a big sticky trap, then menaced by a couple paper mache spider monsters. The whole thing is shot in an off-kilter fashion and set to weird music, and it ends up feeling like you've suddenly stumbled into a music video by The Residents or Renaldo and the Loaf. They also spit that neon goo you get out of coin machines at Toys-R-Us, which Frances dutifully has flung in her face. Bleah!

The second episode improves upon the first in that the supporting cast has no noticeable weak spots and the fight choreography is even better. This time around, Go Girl's best friend and her supermodel cousin Bonnie are kidnapped by a villain known as The Fop, who can best be described as Paul Reubens starring as Parry Farrell of Jane's Addiction fame, or I guess as Parry Farrell starring in the Paul Reubens story. One got caught stealin', and the other got caught feelin'! Thanks you. You've been a great audience. Try the clam dip, folks. I'm here all week.

Just feel lucky that you got that one and not my joke about how now that Buffy has gotten it on with Angel and Spike, they should change the series name to Buffy the Vampire Layer.

The Fop wants to force the town's models into a fashion show highlighting his entire line of crappy designs. Turns out that as a young, up and coming designer, he was snubbed by teachers and the fashion establishment, and now he's seeking revenge.or is he just trying to get them to give him a little respect. El Frenetico, meanwhile, squares off against The Fop's main henchman, a ghost from El Frenetico's past by the name of El Fuerte. Also packing a surprise is Bonnie, who proves that while she may be a model, she has all the ass-kicking kungfu power of her superhero cousin.

The big addition to the cast here is Soomi Kim as Bonnie, who later adopts the superhero persona of Runway. She's a good actress and a great martial artist, or at least very good. The scenes involving her and Go Girl kicking ass are great. They outshine even most of what you find in bigger budget (though still low budget) direct to video martial arts films starring way more experienced actresses like Cynthia Rothrock, and hell, they're even better than most of what passed for martial arts in most big budget films before Jackie Chan and Yuen Wo-ping made everyone realize Jean-Claude Van Damme wasn't actually as good as everyone thought.

Not that I'm saying Soomi or Frances could whup Cynthia's ass. We all know Rothrock is a legitimate bad-ass, and while both Soomi Kim and Frances Lee could probably kick my ass (but then, who couldn't?), I'd still have to put my money on the five time forms champion and star of Righting Wrongs. My point is that once Cynthia Rothrock left Hong Kong and stopped getting directed by Sammo Hung and Yuen Kwai, she started making some really crappy films with some really weak looking martial arts choreography. I'd much rather watch the work in El Frenetico and Go Girl than what I saw in China O'Brien II.

If you're wondering why almost all the action talk revolves around Go Girl, that's no accident. It's tradition that the sidekick ends up doing most of the work. Sherlock Holmes had Dr. Watson doing most the work. Birdman had Avenger, and now the hard-drinking El Frenetico has Go Girl to solve most of the mysteries, do most of the thinking, and even handle most of the fighting. When El Frenetico comes out of his drunken coma long enough to fight, he clobbers everyone in true wrestler fashion. His "rematch" with his old in-ring nemesis is the most action he ever sees. Considering just how good Frances and Soomi perform, that's not a bad thing.

The second big addition to the cast is Clark Donnelly as The Fop. Once again, both the plot and the villain seem to have stepped right out of the old Batman show. In such a setting, Donnelly is free to go way over the top without it seeming out of place, and he just that while, at the same time, playing a villain that actually isn't nearly as villainous as he initially seems to be. The script also avoids gay jokes and other lowbrow nonsense. The Fop probably isn't even gay. He's just a, you know, fop. Whatever he may be, Donnelly turns in a credible performance that is about as far from flat as you can get.

Part three sees the dramatic return of Syphon and Hilda, only all is not well in the land of the super villainous snack cake king. He and his assistant are sprung from jail, or from a factory, by the mysterious Shade, a beautiful but dangerous secret agent who in generally offended by the male dominated world that allows incompetent boobs like Syphon and El Frenetico to be criminal masterminds and superheroes while intelligent, competent women like Hilda and Go Girl do all the work. When Go Girl shows up to foil the jail break, we also learn that she and Shade already know each other. The ol' "We trained with each other" deal. Hey, just like Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow! Shade urges Go Girl to join her and drop that load named El Frenetico, but Go Girl refuses. A quick shot of sleeping gas later, and the trio of villains have escaped.

Shade's assertions are made all the more convincing by the fact that El Frenetico is too drunk to help Go Girl and, left on his own without the input of Hilda, the best plan Syphon can come up with is to randomly hire some ninjas for no real reason. In one of the funnier scenes, the ninjas arrive to unload some boxes for Syphon and one of the ninjas simply stands off to the side swinging his nunchuka around wildly and with no purpose.

When Shade and Go Girl meet up again, Go Girl agrees to join Shade and Hilda in the plot to ditch the men and kick some ass, girl style. When Go Girl's bluff is called, it all comes down to a rooftop fight between her and Shade. El Frenetico, meanwhile, gets up long enough to track down Syphon, who he finds tied up in the closet with no idea what the evil plan is since he never did much of the thinking in the first place.

The only disappointing thing about this chapter is the absence of Runway. She makes a cameo in the Tick-like superhero bar where all the super types hang out, but she's otherwise absent from the action, which is a shame given how good Soomi Kim is in action and how well it would have played into the plot about the women being so much better at their jobs than the men who are in charge. But I guess you can't have everything.

Making her debut here is Madoka Raine as Shade. She's cute and looks great in her evil 1960s villainess black costume with white go-go boots, as seems par for the course for the starring gals, but she's a weaker on-screen fighter than Frances Lee and Soomi Kim. Not bad, mind you, and certainly better still than most of the would-be martial arts stars flailing about in SOV productions. Once again, however, the folks behind the camera know where to point it in order to cover fighting and choreography shortcomings. The final fight between Go Girl and Shade reminded me of the similar rooftop fight between Sho Kosugi and his ninja opponent in Revenge of the Ninja, except that I think I enjoyed the showdown between Shade and Go Girl more. Maybe if Sho Kosugi had donned a red cape and tights -- and been Frances Lee.

Acting-wise, Raine is as solid as the rest of the main cast. A bit flat from time to time, but not bad all things considered. And since she plays a greater role this time around than she did in the first episode, it's worth mentioning Louise Millman as Hilda. While she doesn't speak much, she maintains that classic "stern German matron" type of sour scowl perfectly, right out of any of your finer Nazi exploitation films.

There are a bundle of limitations to making a no budget, shot on video movie. Ask anyone who has made one, and they can spend days rattling off all the hassles they endure in the name of love, art, and mild (or raging) insanity. First and foremost there is the cheap equipment, and even cheap equipment can be hard to come by, especially when you discover that just because a piece of equipment may have been made cheaply and performs cheaply doesn't mean it can be rented or purchased cheaply. Then there's the fact that you can't afford to hire people most of the time, and thus are limited to the talent pool of people who will work for free or for some chips or to get into a convention for free later on down the road. Then there's the editing process, which is far more difficult and time-consuming than even dedicated people are often willing to endure, resulting in shoddy, poorly paced final cuts on account of a lack of patience or proper editing equipment. In previous reviews of shot on video films like Goblin and Twisted Issues, I've already gone on about what a pain in the ass analog editing systems are for VHS. You better like picture quality degradation and machines that go "ka-chunk" a lot.

The true test of one of these films and of the talent of the people behind them is in how they manage to work around their limitations. Are they smart enough to figure it out? To write scripts that don't demand more than production can deliver? To be aware ahead of time of the problems they'll face? Will they be clever enough to solve them in ways that don't require money and teamsters? The answer is almost always a resounding "no." Very few people realize how much is involved in making a movie that exists in a realm beyond those that can only be shown to close friends. Well, okay, amateur porn is easy, but even then you gotta know enough to do something with the camera, even if it's just shoving it in your partner's crotch. And sure, acting in amateur porn is easy once you get used to it (not necessarily speaking from experience here), but you still have to make yourself or your subject last more than five minutes, and that's something fewer guys than will admit to themselves can muster.

But we're not talking about amateur porn here. We're talking about an action film with a script, fight choreography, and people with lines more complex than, "Oh yeah, right there, baby! Make me yodel like that little cardboard hiker on The Price is Right!" I'm pretty sure that's an actual line from a porn film. If it isn't it will be as soon as I make my own porno film. Going beyond that is a trial, to say the least, and if more people knew how difficult it was, you'd have a lot less people making their own movies and a lot more critics understanding better how much effort went into the piece they are viewing. Not that it would make a bad movie any better, but it does give you a better perspective. Like I said once before somewhere else, you don't have to make a movie to be a valid critic, but you should try anyway.

The remarkable thing about The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl is how well it hides the short-comings inherent in the medium. Granted no one is going to mistake this for a million dollar movie, and granted it isn't perfect. The sound recording in particular could use some work, but that's also one of the most difficult things to get done properly when you have no money. The acting is good. The editing and pacing are shockingly tight for home video. My biggest complaint about most SOV films is that the directors don't know when to stop and they don't know what to cut out. This results in scenes that are overlong and dull, or those shots that begin with someone standing around in awkward silence for a few seconds before saying their line or doing what it is they're supposed to do. A little editing can eliminate that, and any good editor will tell you what you cut out of a movie has as much to do with making it good as what you leave in.

The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl violates the norm in that it is, for the most part, well edited and thus moves along quickly. I've already gone into the surprisingly high quality of the fight scenes, and that's thanks in part to the ability of the editor to know when to go to the next shot rather than to linger on someone waiting dumbly for their cue. It's not 100% polished, but it's definitely one of the most smartly edited amateur films I've seen, and I've seen a lot of them.

Writing is another typical pitfall of the no-budget film. Usually, people who can't write very well throw together dumbed down rip-offs of their favorite movies. There must be a million lame Evil Dead and Night of the Living Dead copies out there, each one as abysmal as the next. The scripts here, however, actually have some wit and intelligence behind them. We're not in James Joyce territory, but then, James Joyce never had enough sense to pepper his work with cute women in superhero outfits either, so it's a give and take. At least no one trots out the tired old "This is like a bad horror movie!" joke. The plots are straight-forward, but the writing has a charm to it that shows they actually bothered to put some thought, and some decently smart thought at that, into the words. They even write some decent sympathetic villains with more to them than just "they're evil." Making it better is that since they wrote passable and witty scripts, they don't have to rely on gore. Just about every shot on video movie I've seen relies on gore, primarily because the people making them wanted to make cheap gore effects, not an actual movie. Scripts and other considerations were simply a means to showcase gobs of red-dyed Karo syrup. El Frenetico and Go Girl is one of the few shot on video productions that doesn't have to (or want to) rely on cut-rate splatter effects. You could actually sit your whole family down for the show, if you wanted to. It's better than the Power Rangers, after all. While I don't demand that any movie be family entertainment, it's nice to see something that is, while remaining loads of fun no matter how depraved you might be in the darkest recesses of your evil little soul.

After editing, writing, and acting, the two biggest pitfalls for a film like this are lighting and sound, also two of the most difficult to master and hardest to understand elements of making a movie. In pro productions, entire teams of people are in charge of nothing but recording the sound or setting up the lights. Sound is a given, but you'd be amazed at just how important lighting is for a scene. It's part science, part art, and it's amazingly hard to do well. Most no-budget movies cannot afford to rent most of the proper lights for a movie, let alone afford some union type well-trained in what to do with them. And lighting video, which is by nature rather flat and cold compared to film, is even more of a hassle. About the best you can hope for is that the people making the movie had enough sense to at least light the set so that you could see everything you were supposed to. Once again, this being done properly is the exception more than it is the rule, and you are then stuck with one movie after another that defeats itself by having long stretches in which you cannot see a damn thing.

The crew behind The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl succeeds in making sure you can see the action, and they even through a little flare in now and then to show that, while they may not have an expert or expert equipment, they at least understand the basic concepts and can use them to alter and enhance the mood of a scene. It's not Dario Argento, mind you, but he maybe goes a bit overboard anyway.

The sound recording is the film's major technical flaw. It can be hard to hear what's being said sometimes, and once again that's probably more a reflection of the limitations of the equipment available than it is a reflection of the skills of the people making the movie. Given that they nailed the editing and acting, and at least didn't blow the lighting, I find it hard to believe they neglected the sound. The basic problem is that recording sound well is hard. Built-in mics on the camera are practically useless, and even cheap remote boom and directional mics pick up as much ambient noise and atmospheric hiss as they do whatever sound it is you are actually trying to capture. A decent sound engineer can fix this in post-production, but again, most no budget films hardly have the means to finance sound engineering or buy all the equipment one needs to do it. Added to the equation is the fact that VHS is a lame medium to begin with, and audio quality is one of the many elements that suffers every time you reproduce your work and move generations away from the original.

I've yet to encounter a single no-budget shot on video film (and even some low budget shot on film productions have the same problem), that didn't have at least some spotty audio trouble, and at least in this The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl has its one noticeable flaw. It doesn't happen nearly as much as it does in other similar films, though, and to their credit it's almost as if they knew certain scenes would sound bad and so limited the amount of dialogue in them. Actually, that probably just happened naturally since the bad audio comes primarily in the fight scenes shot in wide-open spaces, so there isn't much dialogue to begin with. Wide-open interiors and windy exteriors are the most problematic to shoot in. Cheap mics love echos.

But come one. If infrequent audio troubles are the biggest complaint about a shot on video film made with no money and no professionals, then that's quite an accomplishment. Shot on video movies, even the ones I enjoy, are often a chore, and I sit through them purely out of stubbornness or because I have to in order to write a proper review. So it is with no small degree of joy that I received this movie, one that actually made me want to keep watching because I was having fun, as were the people making it, no doubt. Their enjoyment and energy shines through, and that probably helps the film out quite a bit in ways mere competence cannot. You know, like those surfers who spout off all that stoned surfer Zen philosophy. Sure, they may not technically be as adept at the sport as their sponsored contemporaries, but then they don't see it as a sport - or a business - in the first place, and probably get a lot more out of it. Just look at Patrick Swayze in Point Break! He loved surfing, man!

I'm not going to say that director Pat Bishow is the Patrick Swayze from Point Break of shot-on-video movie directors, mainly because I'm not 100% certain that's a compliment, and given how much I enjoyed The Adventures of El Frenetico and Go Girl, I wouldn't want to insult the guy.

Labels: Action: Luchadores, Action: Superheroes, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Microbudget, Year: 1993