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Aug 13, 2018 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Every now and then, a film will be unearthed with the capability to blow the mind of the most hardened, seen-it-all genre movie fan; a movie so unapologetically nutty you’ll be wondering afterwards whether what you saw could possibly have been real. Lady Street Fighter (1981) is just such a movie.

Linda Allen (Frozen Scream’s Renee Harmon), a middle-aged secret agent of unspecified Eastern European origin, returns to the U.S. to find her twin sister murdered by mobsters. And that’s about all of Lady Street Fighter’s plot which makes sense. It seems that both the FBI and a shady underworld organization known as Assassins, Inc. are both after a tape containing a list of sleeper agents’ identities; Linda has said tape (maybe?) which is why her sister was mistakenly killed by the bad guys. Meanwhile, the FBI sends their own hunky hitman (Joel McCrea of AIP’s many Beach Party-style movies) after her, and the two fall instantly in love.

Very little about Lady Street Fighter’s storyline makes sense, and it’s hard to know whether that’s more the fault of the head-scratching screenplay or bonkers editing style; plot suddenly emerge or disappear entirely, scenes that are irrelevant to the story seem to occupy most of the movie’s 72-minute runtime, or characters that are good in one scene are often trying to kill Linda in the next. You’ll only click with the movie if you give up trying to make sense of it and approach the thing as a sleazy, action-packed fever dream. Lady Street Fighter is deliriously weird.

We have a scene where Linda performs mock fellatio on a piece of celery for no specified reason. At another point, she lights a thug on fire – and his final act as he burns alive is to flash her the middle finger. There’s an overlong sex party hosted by a mysterious Mr. Diamond, featuring casual BDSM and multiple close-ups of a hand unsubtly masturbating the neck of a champagne bottle. (Mr. Diamond has a mentally handicapped adult daughter whom our super-spy befriends.) Characters are naked left and right; Linda’s wardrobe flies through a new, garish, disco-era fashion choice with each scene change. The action is far from Chiba-esque, but it’s endearing in its failed ambitions. (A rooftop chase scene looks more like children playing hide-and-seek than a matter of life and death, but later a guy does get run through with a katana, so there’s that!) When Linda speaks, it’s often in a cheesy one-liner (said in a very thick German accent.) Adding an additional layer of strangeness to the proceedings is the movie’s crazy, inappropriate-feeling synthesizer soundtrack – made up mostly by two recurring musical cues – borrowed, it turns out, from a friend’s low-budget science fiction feature.

Lady Street Fighter goes beyond “so bad it’s good.” It’s “so bad it’s brilliant.” Bless the folks at AGFA for resurrecting it, and for doing their part in maintaining the legacies of filmmaker James Bryan and producer-writer-star Renee Harmon.

Renee Harmon was a German actor and dancer who married an American G.I. and followed him back to the United States. By her 40s, she was working as an acting instructor and had a brilliant idea: for a fee, she’d ensure her students their first on-screen credits by giving them a part in her next movie. (Essentially, Harmon raised money for her independent productions with paid appearances by her students, which explains the widely varying levels of acting quality from Lady Street Fighter’s minor cast members.) Her best-known work is the bizarre horror flick Frozen Scream, while she also appeared in schlock fare such as The Executioner Part II and Night of Terror.

Lady Street Fighter was shot in early ’75 but sat on the shelf for a few years. Noting the popularity of kung fu movies, director James Bryan changed the title from Deadly Games and re-edited a trailer to emphasize the minimal martial arts it featured; he also invented a new member of the Carradine acting dynasty, “Trace Carradine,” and gave him top billing so that the movie would have a little star power. Somehow all of that worked, and the film – starring a Carradine brother who was not only not in the movie, but didn’t exist – played the genre circuit in the late ‘70s. It would eventually arrive on VHS early in the rentals boom with some of the best Unicorn Video cover art you’ll ever lay eyes upon.

The Lady Street Fighter Blu-ray was restored by AGFA from the last surviving theatrical print of the movie. It’s no showpiece in terms of theatrical presentation, but this Blu-ray is undoubtedly better than Lady Street Fighter ever deserved to look. The primary piece of bonus material is Revenge of Lady Street Fighter, the long-unreleased sequel made in 1990. It’s a feature-length movie only in the loosest definition of the concept, made of about 15 minutes of new footage and the rest being recycled clips from the first film. A fun curiosity, but not something you’ll necessarily be re-watching as the inserted scenes only disrupt the original movie’s wonky flow.

The best extra feature on the disc is a full-length commentary with director James Bryan, who was also responsible for such VHS-era gems as Don’t Go in the Woods and Hell Riders. Moderated by two representatives of the AFGA, Bryan is incredibly laid-back and congenial, happy to share many wild behind-the-scenes stories from Lady Street Fighter’s production and his decades working in the exploitation arena. Bryan directed Lady Street Fighter almost by happenstance, having been employed in an L.A. editing room when Harmon wandered in looking for a director. He reminisces on those times with refreshingly zero pretense, having entered filmmaking as a big fan of AIP’s schlock output and learning from it that “a movie can be bad, and that can be good.” The stories he shares about making Lady Street Fighter are as incredible as the movie itself – among them tidbits about Harmon “borrowing” her husband’s car to roll it down a cliff, and a grown actor so strung out that his mother had to remain within arm’s reach on-set to smack drugs out of his hand if he tried to use them between takes. This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever had to avoid spoiling an audio commentary – but this one is just that good.

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