Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter K

Kickboxer (1989) features Jean Claud van Damme, a.k.a. the Muscles from Brussels, as Kurt, the kid brother of Eric The Eliminator, a kick boxing 'world champion' who thinks he's the bee's knees. But when he goes to Bangkok to fight Tiger Ton Po, he run into a guy who's strong enough to demolish buildings unaided. Ton cynically breaks Eric's spine, the promoter's stooges dump him in the street on a stretcher and he ends up in a wheelchair.
   So Kurt goes in search of a Mu Tai master, who takes him on as a pupil after Kurt roughs up the local protection racketeers when they arrive to extort cash from the master's niece. Lots of tough training, some of it under water, and Kurt proves himself by kicking the fu*k out of a small palm tree.
   The master tests him via a drunken brawl in a local club then he has his first proper match. Eric gets cold feet but Kurt insists he's taking on the Tiger. Bad guys kidnap the niece, who is raped by Ton. Then Ton's manager borrows $1M from the local warlord to bet on his man, and had Eric kidnapped.
   The master's dog is knifed but survives. Kurt and Ton do battle in the traditional style, with broken glass stuck to their hand-wrappings, while the master retrieves Eric. Ton is then vanquished and his manager gets a boot in the chops.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) is Quentin Tarantino's 4th film and a self-indulgent assemblage of the same sort of material as its contemporary, Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The central character was left for dead at a massacre at her wedding. Her unborn daughter was killed but she survived somehow, waking up in hospital after a 4-year coma. Then she set off on a quest for revenge against the squad of assassins.
She had a list of 5 names, the last of which was the mysterious Bill, who doesn't appear in the first part. The film is divided into chapters dealing with background, plot and revenge killings, and the grand finale is a long campaign to take out a Yakuza queen, who has a vast army of toy boys with Samurai swords, all of whom need slaying before the bad gal can be taken out. The rest of the list, including Bill presumably, follows in Vol. 2.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) is a daft horror spoof. It's Friday night in an American backwater and a shooting star lands. The farmer who owns the field rushes to the landing site, finds a circus tent and falls foul of a Klown with a zap gun. Two college kids, Debbie & Mike, arrive next and find that the tent is huge inside. They escape the Klowns but the local cops won't believe their story.
The Klowns are putting the townsfolk in cocoons. Officer Dave, who was dumped by Debbie, checks out their story and finds a lot of empty cars in Lovers' Lane. He finds out that the threat is real but Officer Mooney, back at the police station, doesn't want to know. But a Klown visits the jailhouse. Dave finds that shooting a Klown's red nose makes it explode.
Debbie is beset by mini-monsters in her bathroom and captured. The aliens take over the amusement park. Dave, Mike and his 2 daft pals go after Debbie. Lots of fun inside the alien spaceship, and they all get out alive after Dave pops the nose of the giant boss Klown. But all the cocooned townsfolk stored in the spaceship are written off when it explodes.

The Killer Elite (1975) James Caan plays an undercover agent called Mike Locken. He works for a private company used by the CIA. While Locken and his partner, George Hanson (Robert Duval), are looking after a defector, Hanson shoots the guy in the head and cripples Locken by elbow- and knee-capping him. Lots of rehabilitation & fooling around with his nurse for Mike, but his old boss, Cal Collis, says there's no way the Agency will employ him again.
   Then there's a shoot-out at San Francisco airport and the CIA wants a Chinese politician kept alive until he leaves the country. Both Japanese ninjas & Hanson have been hired to take out Mr. Chung. Collis gives Mike the job of sorting out Hanson and he recruits 2 helpers. Collis is also in cahoots with Hanson.
   Locken & Co. go to pick up Chung and his party in a taxi with a bomb under it! There's a shoot-out, a chase by the cops then Mack, the driver finds the bomb. A motorcycle cop pokes his nose in and he is given the job of getting rid of the bomb. Chung's stupid daughter goes walkabout at the dockside hideout and Hanson grabs her. Hanson tells Mike that Collis is bent just before he is shot.
   The ninjas arrive and Collis tries to bribe Mike, so he gives his ex-boss the elbow- and knee-cap treatment. Chung insists on picking up a sword and fighting the bloke who wants him dead. The head of the agency tries to give Collis's job to Mike, but he takes the bribe money out of Collis's jacket and says he's quitting.

King Kobra (1998) is a 2-star sciffy creature-feature. A mad scientist makes a cross between a king cobra and a rattlesnake by genetic engineering, and an even madder assistant blows up the lab and releases the snake. Then we are into the Jaws plot with the snake menacing a small town and the mayor refusing to call off a lager festival. The snake is about 30 feet long and really fat for its length. It rampages around, zapping good old boys and the sheriff and his deputy. Then it comes up against a mad Jap, who won't let the mad scientist shoot the snake.
The mad Jap believes that he can catch the giant snake using scaled up snake-handling tongs. But he forgets that he needs to scale himself up, too, to have the strength to operate the tongs. So the snake gets him. Then the town's doctor dives into a tube and goes scuttling through it and the snake follows. This is a 20-foot tube which seemed to be about 200 feet long inside as far as the 30-foot snake is concerned. The snake is locked in the tube, gassed and exterminated. Hooray!

King Kong versus Godzilla (1962) starts with a fiendish Japanese pharmaceutical company kidnapping King Kong from his island to boost their TV ratings and Godzilla emerging from a disintegrating iceberg and heading for Japan, where its species lived 90-120 million years ago. Kong's Pacific island is at the mercy of a giant octopus but he soon sees the creature off when it tries to get at his supply of tranquillizing berry juice.
The Japanese navy tries to stop the pharmaceutical company from landing Kong but he wakes up and escapes from his raft, even after it is blown up. The 'experts' reckon Kong and Godzilla will be natural enemies and they do set about each other eventually. In the end, they fall into the sea, locked in mortal combat. Kong reappears and swims back to his island. No sign of Godzilla, though.

King of the Lost World (2005) is a Z-movie, in which Bruce Boxleitner of Babylon 5 fame plays a Dr. Challenger. A plane crashes in the wilds of the Amazon basin and the survivors split into 2 groups. One group goes in search of the cockpit and a radio. They meet a giant spider and find another wreck; the first of many. Then they encounter a killer plant and a dead dragon in a man-made trap.
There's a giant-footprint moment and Portuguese-speaking cavepeople grab the survivors to sacrifice them to the flying dragons. Dr. Challenger announces that he was sent to disarm a nuclear weapon on an earlier crashed plane.
There's a son of King Kong floating around, looking more like a huge chimp or a man-ape than a gorilla, and some jet fighters arrived, fly round 'Kong' a bit and crash. Kong chases a bunch of escapers, Dr. Challenger is fatally injured by a demented cavewoman at his plane crash but he gives the detonator to another guy and exploding the nuke takes out all the monsters. A truly dreadful film!

Kiss of Death (1995) Ex-con Jimmy takes a dodgy driving job, and he is shot in the hand by a bullet which hits a cop (Samuel L. Jackson). He goes to gaol, his wife turns to drink, she has to work for a cousin of Jimmy's who's cheating her, and she drives under a truck while drunk. So Jimmy does a deal with the DA and makes his cousin look like a snitch. So Little Junior Brown whacks him.
3 years later, the DA sends Jimmy after Little Jr. under the control of Calvin, the cop who was shot earlier. Junior whack Omar, who turns out to be a Federal agent. Junior is arrested with violence, he proves to Jimmy that he can grab Jimmy's young daughter whenever he wants, and his lawyer outwits the Feds.
Calvin stops Jimmy when he goes after Junior with a gun. The DA is getting a Federal judgeship out of the deal over Junior, which involved destroying evidence which Jimmy had collected. Calvin turns up late when Jimmy confronts Junior in his club but Jimmy is wearing a wire and Junior admitted again that he had killed Omar. So Jimmy uses the tape to blackmail the DA into prosecuting Junior under the threat of exposure in the news media.

Kiss of the Dragon (2001) stars Jet Li as a Chinese cop who is sent to Paris on a drug job and sees the Chinese suspect killed by a drug-crazed hooker run by by M. Richard, a bent senior French copper. The Chinese cop strolls off with a compromising recording. Richard frames him for the murder and gets the job of tracking him down.
The Chinese cop holes up with Burt Kwouk, who provides a base for visiting Chinese cops. The next battle wrecks the shop, and writes off poor old Burt. The bad guys seem to be able to get away with all sorts of mayhem killing any number of people in public. The Chinese cop hooks up with a hooker, who works for Richard because he has kidnapped her daughter.
The hooker was at the murder and she does a deal; rescue her daughter and she'll help clear the Chinese cop's name. He almost gets her killed, then he wreck Richard's police station and gives Richard the Kiss of the Dragon; Death by Acupuncture!

Komodo Vs Cobra (2005) A wimpish guy is eaten by a huge lizard, his 2 braver colleagues escape only for the man to be chomped by a giant cobra, which appears out of a river. But his daughter escapes. The US military sends in a recon team, which is taken out by the local wildlife.
   A couple of tree-huggers hire a deadleg called Stoddard and his boat to take them to an island controlled by the US military, along with a TV reporter, to seek the truth about Project Carnivore. They come across corn 2 storeys high then they try to confront the evil scientist. But as he's been eaten, his daughter greets them with a gun.
   The huggers meet the komodo then the cobra. Chomp! The daughter gives a pottest history of her father's attempts to feed the world, which were diverted by the military into animal experiments, producing the bullet-proof beasts. Which is more remarkable; bullets having no effect on the creatures or Stoddard being able to fire 40 or 50 shots from his handgun without reloading?
   The general in charge sees film of giant komodos and orders the destruction of the island if the recon team fails to check in. The huggers reach the beach in time to see their boat bombed. Then the cobra comes back for a snack. The whinger is attacked by giant leeches. Gulp! Jerry might be infected with the growth matrix!
   The general finds out who the intruders are but he's cool with bombing the crap out of them. The intruders find a chopper but the monsters arrive. Jerry sacrifices himself and the cobra attacks the komodo. We don't see a winner because the bombers arrive. But the story ends up on all the news channels and pisses off the general mightily.

Kull The Conqueror (1997) stars Kevin Sorbo, who's Hercules in the TV series. Kull takes the throne from a homicidal king, despite the objections of his brother, and starts freeing slaves and offering religious freedom and similar stuff. A priest uses the sacred flame to revive a demon, which takes female form and becomes the queen despite a warning from the soothsayer lady, who ends up framed for the king's murder. (How come she didn't see that coming?)
King Kull is chained to the wall in a dungeon but escapes to the L.A. Underground. A priest pal tells him his bride is 3,000 years old, not 19, and she wants to open the gates of Hell. They free the soothsayer and flee, and have to take over a slave ship from its crooked captain. The priest croaks after a battle at the North Pole, where the soothsayer is infused with the Breath of Volka, the god, and grabbed by Kull's brother.
Kull follows him back to the kingdom for another battle, he sees off the demon and his brother, and he lets the grand vizier know that he's going to continue to rule his way with his new queen, the soothsayer.

Kung Fu Killer (2007) Khan, a warlord, took out a monastery with artillery and machine guns, and killed the grand master. An ancient monk (David Carradine), whose life the grand master had saved, went to Shanghai seeking revenge and made a young trainee stay put. Crane took out some unruly sailors in a club and the owner gave him a job as a pro fighter.
Crane took out Khan's head bully boy then saved Khan, and the club owner, from an assassination attempt by the local Resistance. Khan recruited Crane and he had Pete, the night club singer's chemist brother, a prisoner and making poison gas for him. Crane was sent to kill the club owner because Khan wanted the singer. No, he only looked dead when Crane had finished with him.
The singer found Pete in a dungeon and found out what he was doing. Khan got ready to bombard a village rebelling against his opium farming but the villagers, including the young trainee, were ready for him. Khan lost his head during a big battle and the opium fields ended up in flames.