Movie Reviews : Lurid, Sadistic ‘No Retreat’ Shows No Mercy

They’re fierce. They’re blond. They’re macho. They kick like crazy. They’re the “good” guys of “No Retreat, No Surrender II” (citywide), a wild dive into lurid sadism, infantile humor and crazed karate.

It’s a bad movie, but not a boring one. The style is Hong Kong choppy-socky. Director Corey Yuen goes in for wild angles and hysterically overemphatic acting. Villains posture and scream, something explodes in your face every five minutes or so, and the heroes (heroes?) wind up committing acts of heinous torture, hideous brutality and rank histrionics while killing several hundred bad guys apiece.

Where the first “No Retreat” was a “Karate Kid” copy, this one tries to knock off “The Searchers” in “Rambo II” territory.

Deep in the Cambodian jungles, a preppie karate champ, a cigar-chomping mercenary and a foul-mouthed lady helicopter pilot--search obsessively for the preppie’s imprisoned Vietnamese girlfriend. Arrayed against them are the scurviest villains this side of “The Perils of Pauline”: the Viet Cong, and assorted ninjas and hooligans, masterminded by a Soviet commander (Matthias Hues), who talks like an Austrian hairdresser and keeps stripping off his shirt and cackling maniacally. (In “No Retreat’s” strange perspective, Cambodia’s bloody Khmer Rouge become the equivalent of the loyal sidekicks or “Good Indians.”)

How bad can a movie get? Director Yuen seems determined to break new records, kick the competition, and audience, into insensibility. Every sound is amplified. Two men booby-trap an entire village in one night. Phony orange-robed Buddhist monks run amok, killing and garroting all non-vegetarians. For the last half of the film, every building in sight explodes at least once. The heroines are dangled over mud pits swarming with famished crocodiles, while the Austro-Soviet commander cackles and his black-clad ninjas race around, scowling.

Here is the movie’s notion of witty badinage: The helicopter lady, dangled once again over the crocodile pit, screeches to the Soviet commander, “You belong in the circus! You’re a cross between a snake and a jackass!” Visual irony: Commander Hues is bopped over the head with a portrait of Lenin and strangled with the Red Flag. Tender emotionalism: The mercenary staggers up with the dead helicopter lady in his arms, moans “She’s gone!” and his buddy replies, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Good advice. Any intelligent audience should do just that, five minutes before “No Retreat, No Surrender II” (MPAA rated R for violence, sex, language) gets off its first kick.