Like that other 70s American action film reviewed around these parts, Devil’s Express (1976), Paul Kyriazi’s Death Machines is very much a film that can never make up its mind exactly what it wants to be. It starts out squarely in Bruce Lee cash-in territory with the evil Madame Lee (Mari Honjo) choosing a new subject to be injected with a new mind-control serum, one of the “three deadliest men in the world”, martial artists who are being turned into assassins by a shadowy, Blofeld-like mastermind who has developed the drug. The crime cartel that the fabulously coiffured Madame Lee works for sends the trio of racially harmonious zombified killers – one white (producer Ron Marchini), one black (Joshua Johnson), one Asian (Michael Chong) – to rub out rival mobsters in various often hilariously inventive ways – one is run over by a bulldozer while he’s making a phone call, another is thrown off a roof onto a cop car while a third is run down by a truck while eating spaghetti at his favourite restaurant. One particularly funny intervention has the “Death Machines” pull up in a car and blow away one assassin at close range with a rocket launcher.
There’s a lot of messing about with Lee issuing orders, wining and dining the head of a rival mob (Chuck Katsakian) and mangling every line of dialogue she utters. Honjo appears to have learned her lines phonetically and delivers them in a slurring voice that suggests that she’s been on the bottle for a few hours before filming began. In a film full of terrible performances she takes the proverbial biscuit. All this rumbles on for an hour or so with no discernible sign of an actual plot hoving into view. Eventually, it all settles down a bit and the Death Machines are dispatched to a martial arts dojo to kill everyone on sight but they mess up by leaving one survivor, Frank (John Lowe) whose hand they chop off, leaving him thirsty for revenge.
As the Death Machines go on the rampage, the film turns into one of those renegade cop films that turned up at least once a week in the 1970s, with Lt Forrester (Ron Ackerman) on the case aided and abetted by the aforementioned Frank. He’s hassled by his boss for not sticking to the rules, skimping on his paperwork and, bizarrely, for not attending HR Department-mandated awareness training sessions. When not squabbling among themselves, the cops manage to detain one of the Death Machines but he escapes after massacring most of those on duty at the station and settles into a diner for a quick burger, a lecture from the elderly owner about God and a scrap with a passing gang of bikers before finding his companions again.
When Kyriazi and co-writer Joe Walders get bored with the tough-talking cop shenanigans they go off another direction, treating us to Frank’s interminable love affair with one of his nurses. A romantic soul at heart, he takes her on a date to the sleazy strip bar he works in where, despite witnessing a drunken brawl and the strippers coming on to her date, she quickly jumps into bed with him. Unless I missed something (and I confess that’s a possibility), we never even find out what her name is… Eventually we get back to the Death Machines who, for reasons that you won’t really give two hoots about, have outlived their usefulness to Madame Lee and are themselves now targeted for elimination.
Whichever way you look at it, Death Machines is a terrible film. The martial arts scenes are crude and unconvincing, the love story tedious and the cop business so riddled with cliches that it’s more laughable than engaging. The Death Machines – who for some reason are impervious to bullets; we never find out why – never speak, are never named and have no discernible personalities so we never care about them or what they’re up to. The notional hero, Frank, is as much a personality vacuum as the trio of killers though he tends to gab rather more and you’ll quickly wish that the Death Machines had been more efficient and finished him off at the dojo, putting us all out of our misery.
There’s little point wasting any time in trying to work out what’s going on in Death Machines. The various plot threads don’t so much weave around each other as stop dead in their tracks and step aside to let another not-at-all-interesting idea lumber along its tedious course. Kyriazi and Walders seem to be pioneers of the Quentin Tarantino magpie approach to film-making, lifting little bits here and there from films that caught their interest but having no real idea what to do with them. It sometimes feels like the various scenes were thrown into the air in the editing suite and simply stitched together as they fell. There’s a lot going on in Death Machines but none of it seems to relate to anything else and it all just sort of happens with no rhyme nor reason.
Fans of the classic Moog synthesiser sound will get a kick from Don Hulette’s score which seems to consist of nothing but him noodling away on a Minimoog for hours on end. And lovers of low-rent action scenes might enjoy some of the film’s infrequent but frequently hilarious knock-about stuff, most of seemingly constructed around whatever resources the film-makers could lay their hands on. There’s no real need for that rocket launcher attack on a light aircraft for example but someone offered them an old Cessna they no longer wanted and a few pounds of explosives so in it goes.
The climax suggests that Kyriazi and producer Marchini had a sequel in mind but thankfully we were spared that horror. Kyriazi was just starting out with Death Machines and went on to make five more action films, the most recent, Forbidden Power, being released in 2018 after a career break of 28 years. Like its predecessor, Omega Cop (1990) it blended his unique take on action with science fiction. Marchini, usually billed as Ronald L. Marchini or Ronald Lee Marchini, also produced Omega Cop and a fistful of similar efforts, none of which will be remembered by any but the most completist of low-budget action fans.
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