“OK! Let’s call Max.”

Drake’s rating: His sister’s name is Minnie.

Drake’s review: So Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon was going to be a launching point for Guam to get in on some of that Hollywood action. After a variety of other shooting locations fell through, including Hawaii, Miami, and Indonesia, the island was chosen as a scenic spot for the title character to wreak some martial arts mayhem. Better yet, the film’s producer convinced the government of Guam to put up $800,000 so that he could secure a $2 million loan for the film’s production.

Unfortunately, the loan was defaulted on and the investment from Guam was lost, leading to accusations and lawsuits and pretty much an unhappy ending for everyone involved. Honestly, the behind-the-scenes drama would likely have made for a better movie than anything that made it onto the screen. Sometimes I wonder if that’s par for the course with an Albert Pyun film.

Now I’m certain that any regular reader of Mutant Reviews has at least a passing knowledge of the films of Albert Pyun. After all, Pyun’s filmic resume is a veritable cornucopia of all things Mutant. Swordmen & sorcerers, cyberpunks & cyborgs, and superheroes & supermodels all inhabited the strange worlds brought to life by the prolific director during his lengthy career. Although many of his films were low-budget affairs, Pyun’s enthusiasm for filmmaking was always evident.

Granted, his films were a mixed bag at best, but it seems obvious that Pyun honestly just loved making movies.

What also seems obvious, looking back at his films, is that the director must have had a Rolodex of European kickboxers to flip through whenever he needed a star for his latest martial arts flick. This could well explain how he ended up shooting Cyborg with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Nemesis with Olivier Gruner. And a random Rolodex flip would also explain the casting of Switzerland’s own Mickey Hardt in Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon.

That doesn’t necessarily excuse the casting, but it would explain it.

Hardt is the titular Max Havoc, a kickboxer-turned-sports photographer who ends up getting embroiled in a plot about a stolen jade dragon that is cursed to summon David Carradine every few scenes so that the veteran actor can follow in his father’s footsteps and churn out a seemingly endless number of Z-movie cameos. The stolen dragon ends up in the hands of an oft bikini-clad art dealer named Jane Goody (Joanna Krupa) who is on vacation in Guam.

Jane wants to sell the dragon to pay for her sister Tawney’s medical school tuition, because they’re evidently broke, even though the art dealer owns a gallery in San Francisco and the sisters are renting a hotel suite in Guam that looks to be anything but a budget rental.

But since the dragon is stolen, the original owner (Carradine) sends his goon squads to get it back, and since this is a martial arts flick, everyone gets to kung-fu fighting at the drop of a hat. Which is kind of hilarious since Max Havoc runs around in board shorts and sandals for most of this flick. Sandals are a laughably bad choice for combat footwear.

Of course, you can’t have a hero without some sort of backstory to flesh him out, so it turns out that Max left the world of kickboxing after killing an opponent in the ring. And because everything needs to be tightly connected for some dubious reason, David Carradine was at that last fight. Probably to scope out more highly-trained yet seemingly expendable goons. Cue a martial arts showdown on a dark set that probably took a whole fifteen minutes to build.

Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon isn’t the worst of Albert Pyun’s films (Alien from L.A. exists, after all) but it’s far from the best. Ralph Coon, a lighting technician who worked on the film, told the Los Angeles Times, “This thing was really destined to wind up in the cutout bin of some truck stop on the way to Barstow.”

And far be it for me to argue with Mr. Coon.

Intermission!

• Pyun regular Vincent Klyn (of Cyborg and Nemesis fame, as well as the non-Pyun Point Break) is in this one as well. At one point he asks Max if he needs help, but Max tells him no. Bummer! More Vincent Klyn is always a good thing!
• The Guam locations are beautiful, quite honestly, and make this one look better than it might have otherwise.
• Pickup footage was shot in Los Angeles, by a different director, and those were the parts featuring David Carradine and Richard (Shaft) Roundtree. That’s why those sections of the film look to be on dark, tiny sets without the gorgeous island backdrops.
• The acting was pretty bad across the board in this one, but I have to give a shout out to Johnny Trí Nguyễn. As Quicksilver, the Vietnamese-American actor showed some real screen presence as well as impressive cinematic martial arts skills, and he’s probably the one bright spot in this flick.