AllMovie

Exploitation director Al Adamson forgoes his usual subjects (bikers and mad scientists) to consider a new realm of grind-house mayhem with this blaxploitation/martial arts hybrid. He turns his dusty, smudged lens on the biracial duo of Timothy Brown (former pro-footballer and "Spearchucker Jones" in the M*A*S*H TV series) and Alan Tang Kwong-Wing (hero of Hong Kong martial arts epics like The Bloody Fight and Blood Fingers), but the result is a fairly pedestrian collection of exploding cars and kung fu. They meet cute in the backseat of a squad car and spend the first act handcuffed together, fighting bigots and cops and leaping from various moving vehicles. A friendship established, the pair help each other pursue their own genre-specific conundrums; Kwong-Wing seeks a long-lost brother to avenge his wife's death, and Brown fights gangsters to keep heroin out of the ghetto. Familiar Asian-American character actors James Hong and Richard Lee-Sung appear as villains and Aldo Ray is his usual blustery self as a rogue cop caught in a gang war. Carol Speed is along for the ride as a mute prostitute who not only gets her face slashed by the bad guys but also endures an insipid serenade from Brown. Fight fans might find that Adamson's clumsy direction doesn't effectively capture the martial arts action and there isn't much "funky" ambiance for the blaxploitation lovers. Even admirers of the director's psychotic epics like Satan's Sadists and I Spit on Your Corpse will be disappointed in this inessential entry in the Al Adamson canon.