This actioner could easily sink into the compost heap of cheesy, martial arts fist-fests glutting the video market, but in its open lack of pretension and no-holds-barred looniness, 24 HOURS TO MIDNIGHT rises to the top of the heap.
The festivities begin when local gangster "White Powder" Chan (Stack Pierce), in an effort to deter two government witnesses from testifying against him and exposing his organized crime operation, has his gang members mow them down. Unfortunately for Chan, the wife of one of the deceased witnesses
happens to be Devon Grady (Cynthia Rothrock), a martial arts expert, who vows vengeance upon Chan's gang for the murder of her husband. Donning black ninja garb, Devon skulks around in the wee hours, enlisting her ninja paraphernalia to off Chan's gang members.
As Devon wreaks her revenge, two very busy cops, Lee Ann Jackson (Myra) and Lester McQueen (Bernie Pock), who are apparently the only two cops in town, attempt to track down the mysterious killer while juggling sundry robberies and teenage gang wars that constantly intrude to sidetrack their
investigation. Finally, Chan meets with Mr. Big (Leo T. Fong) in an abandoned warehouse to cement a drug deal, but Devon was there first, planting a bomb that blows all the bad guys to smithereens. She escapes scot free to cool it down Mexico way and Jackson and McQueen are reassigned by the
police department to crowd control duty.
24 HOURS TO MIDNIGHT unreels like a bargain-basement THE BRIDE WORE BLACK grafted onto a live-action "Streetfighter." Its low budget smacks you in the face like a karate chop. All the exterior action appears to have been shot on a pre-dawn stretch of Wilshire Boulevard; the dialogue is post-synced
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT-style; the performances are glaringly amateurish; and the narrative construction is repetitive and cliche-ridden. But the film's mantra-like revenge plot and dreary production values are more than compensated for by Leo T. Fong's relentlessly screwy dialogue, which makes the
ears bleed in an Edward Wood, Jr. bleat. (Where else can you hear cops say lines like "You know what they say ... kill them all and let God sort them out" or "Are you the guy they call ... Spunky?")
Fong's crackpot dialogue is supplemented by his teasing disregard of his own hoary plot. Fong assumes that the audience is hip to the plot and could care less about whether the narrative makes sense or not. He also has no compunction about tweaking the nose of the audience and the genre. (For
example, when Jackson bemoans the latest unsolved murder and tells McQueen that she longs for a good, old-fashioned robbery, no sooner does she mouth her wish than a police dispatcher tells the two hapless cops to proceed to a robbery at a convenience store.) For a genre so often overwhelmed by
"serious artist" pretensions and raging egos, Fong's take is like a blast of cold air during a heat wave.
Although it suffers from a few gratuitous skin shots and flash-point exploitation, 24 HOURS TO MIDNIGHT has enough engagingly off-kilter moments to give the undiscriminating viewer a mental rest cure from the latest Oliver Stone or Spike Lee extravaganza and refuel his critical faculties for
another whack at David Lynch. (Excessive violence, nudity.) leave a comment
