Spotlight on Fandor: “Miami Connection”

To reword Leo Tolstoy, sometimes it feels as if all good movies (at least as they are typically defined by the mainstream) are all alike. But bad films, truly bad, haphazard, baffling films, are bad in their own special way. A pall of irony hangs over the embrace of such movies, be it Netflix binges on no-budget horror or the full regalia of a screening of The Room, complete with tuxedo rentals and spoon tosses. But it’s also easy to genuinely love these terrible, self-absorbed works; if the increasing corporatization of American multiplex fare regularly strips filmmakers of their identities, the rank amateurism of these justly forgotten bombs can offer the mild thrill of a truly unique artist, however unworthy they may be to use that term.

One of the greatest bad movies, freshly unearthed a few years ago by Drafthouse, is Miami Connection. The film sets the bar for crap astronomically high from the outset: set not in Miami but Orlando, it concerns a cocaine-smuggling ring orchestrated and enforced by ninjas who must do battle with the good guys, a collective of taekwondo students who moonlight as a synth metal band with songs about friendship and martial arts. If you made it to the end of that sentence without wanting to see this movie as quickly as possible, what is wrong with you?

Richard Park came up with the idea for the movie watching a Korean talk-show interview with Y.K. Kim, who stars as the head of the ring of hard-rocking, hard-fighting martial artists. Dubiously named Mark, Kim occupies a nebulous age range somewhere between 25 and 60. Kim’s thick accent turns every line into mush, but at least he has an excuse; if anything, the natural-born Americans speak even more phonetically. Jim (Maurice Smith) can barely get through a sentence without raising his voice to an animated squeak, while Kathie Collier’s Jane talks about her parents dying when she was young as if still trying to parcel out what, exactly, “death” even means.

The dialogue itself is so full of non-sequiturs that writer Joseph Diamond could have passed himself off as an Andy Kaufman-level anti-genius on this script alone. Watch the scene of Jim receiving a letter from his long-lost father, to which an awestruck Mark exclaims, “I didn’t know you had a father. I thought we were all orphans!” A tearful Jim explains in halting cadence: “My mother was Korean, and my father was Black-American.” Physical acting is as strange. Watch John (Vincent Hirsch) flirt with Jane at the top of the film: the two gesture at each other like people in a corporate training video about appropriate office behavior, with John making absurdly broad, hackneyed “let’s get outta here” thumb jerks and Jane executing a textbook “Oh, you” swat of the wrist. Even the martial arts demonstrations have an alien quality to them as the actors’ training collides with their abject fear of the camera, leading to fights in which good guys and bad seem on the cusp of uniting against their common enemy, the camera.

There’s just so much to love, like how one member of the band looks like Hall and Oates, or Jack’s (Diamond) downright delightful lament of Orlando’s streets being flooded with “stupid cocaine.” But let’s be honest, Miami Connection is no dumber than even some top-tier action movies from the era, and at times its hypnotic rhythm lends the film a consistency of tone that some higher-profile blockbusters lack. Nothing in the movie contains even a trace element of verisimilitude, yet every single component fits together perfectly within its own internal logic. Sometimes, that logic just so happens to lead to some University of Central Florida undergrads killing a bunch of ninjas in a public park.

If you’re interesting in watching Miami Connection on Fandor, use your Movie Mezzanine coupon for an exclusive discount and access to a breathtaking library of cinema!