The Last Dragon

What’s it about?
Bruce Leroy, Harlem’s most awesomest chop-socker, is harassed by evil asshat Sho’Nuff whilst questing for the ultimate kung-fu power-up known as The Glow. 

Any chicks in the movie?
Prince cast-off Vanity who, based on this movie, possesses a vocal style pitched somewhere between Grace Jones and Nina Hagen. She also looks about ten years older than Leroy, making her the Anne Bancroft of 80s kung-fu blacksploitation flicks. 

Awesomeness Factor?
Cultish. The final cinematic treasure of Berry Gordy’s short-lived Motown film department that unleashed such timeless classics as The Wiz and Can’t Stop The Music upon a bemused public, The Last Dragon is a head-scratching attempt to blackify the kung-fu genre for an 80s audience. Which isn’t a bad idea in and of itself, except that Motown had cluelessly failed to embrace the flowering rap scene in 1985 so instead The Last Dragon is crammed with that ultra-bland R&B crapola Gordy was desperately trying to shovel down our throats back then. Always the businessman, Gordy also has no problem stopping the movie dead in it’s tracks to show long video clips from then-current Motown hit “Rhythm Of The Night” by DeBarge, which is terrible but still shitloads better than Vanity’s Solid Gold-esque show-within-the-movie. Man, nothing kills momentum more than Vanity lip-syncing to “7th Heaven”, a song so monstrously godawful you could bottle it and use it to kill insects. Luckily, the third of the movie that is taken up with actual chop-fucking-socky is not too bad; Bruce Leroy is played by Taimak, a charmingly wooden martial-artist-turned-”actor”, so at least he moves well even if the subtleties of pretending to be attracted to Vanity elude him. But what kicks this movie from an affiably-campy time-waster into just short of genius is the mighty unstoppable clobberosity of Sho’Nuff, The Shogun Of Harlem, seemingly a cross between a gang leader, a samurai and a coked-out linebacker.* The climax involves Leroy and Sho’Nuff kicking eighteen kinds of shit out of each other with different color Glow powers, which is only slightly less gay than it sounds.

Mitigated By?
One day, the Wu Tang clan is going to look this retarded to your kids.

* Like any self-respecting Glow-addled kung-fu madman, Sho’Nuff comes complete with his own greek chorus posse. “Who is the Mastah?” posits Sho’Nuff. “SHO’NUFF!!!” screams the posse. And all is right with the world.