Lady Dragon (1992)

I've seen some Cynthia Rothrock movies of questionable quality before, but this one was almost enough to put me off her. Almost everything that happens in Lady Dragon, and the way it happens, is ludicrously bad. No part of the plot even begins to be credible, never even rising to the level of cliché. To wit:

What we have is an ex-CIA agent, Kathy, played by Rothrock, who's on a personal vendetta to catch the guy who, for no discernible reason, had her husband killed on their wedding day. She begins by disguising herself as a hooker and going, unarmed and with no plan, into a nightclub to confront the guy - which only gets her raped, as the bad guys have guns.

They then drop her by the side of a jungle road (this is in Indonesia), where she is picked up by a kindly old grandfather and his 8-year-old grandson, who nurse her back to health over what is apparently months. The old man can kick handkerchiefs into the air. (And since he also has a ready-made and very handy martial arts training ground, you'd think that he would step into character at some point and get into some of the fighting, but you'd be wrong.)

In a lengthy sequence, Kathy then ingratiates herself with the bad guy's mistress by pretending to get hit by her car. This mistress, Susan, is smart, classy and preposterously altruistic, giving Kathy a job and clothes and letting her stay in her apartment! (All the while never revealing why the hell she's with the evil and idiotic bad guy.) When introduced to the bad guy, he doesn't remember Kathy at all. So she tears up the place, killing one of his henchmen, and then grinningly making a run for it, not seeming to mind that she didn't catch up with him. But meanwhile, Susan has gone to the village and taken the grandfather and grandson hostage, forcing Kathy into a climactic battle with the bad guy - his name is Ludwig, in case you're wondering. So Ludwig beats Kathy savagely in a quite sadistic fight, but eventually she wins. Of course. And the police drag the bad guy away (I'm pretty amazed that he wasn't killed, seeing as this movie seems to consider itself real edgy, bandying the f-word around a lot).

A decent martial arts actioner could have been made with this plot, perhaps, but in this case it certainly wasn't. The terrible dialog (in a couple of places bordering on the outrageous) served only to make almost every plot detail all the more unbelievable, and elements that seem to promise further developments were never delivered on. It was a monumentally bad script, resulting in an awful movie, the main virtue of which is to show how NOT to make an action movie.