I gotta be honest with you when I tell you that ‘Twin Daggers’ is a pretty damn bad movie. But it is kind of bad in a fun way. You know, how a lot of the martial arts movies of the late seventies and early eighties couldn’t honestly be considered ‘good’ movies, but yet we still watched them with wonderment in our eyes. Now this isn’t to say that ‘Twin Daggers’ had any wonderment in it like those films, unless you happen to be eight or nine years old like I was back then, but I did manage to find some entertainment value amidst it’s universal awfulness.

Our film opens in Los Angeles somewhere in the mid 1930’s where we meet the first of our four assassins of note in Captain Scholar (Rhett Giles), a sort of a poor mans Indiana Jones, who is doing some abacus accounting in a public library where he is suddenly attacked by a group of large Asian dudes. So much for those Asian dudes as they expire via death by Kung Fu. Next we see a woman who humbly calls herself ‘ The Body’ (Veronica Bero) who deep sixes some cat with her James Bond style knife boots. Then there’s some wacky Black dude named Lex (Joee Covington) who eschews weapons and is in the process of using his supreme tumbling skills in stealing some priceless pottery from some unknown man and finally we have The Mime (Vasilios Elovalis) who is the most insidious of all the killers since he forces you to watch him do his f**king mime shite before he kills you. Brutality has a new first name.

Turns out these four killers used to be part of a government kill drill team before something went wrong on a particular mission forcing them to go there separate ways and kill freelance style. One day our four killers are brought together by one Kay Moi (Coco Su) who has offered our crew a couple hundred grand to kill her super wealthy twin sister Sue, also play by Ms. Su, who she says murdered her parents. At first our crew was going to work as a team but The Body doesn’t to care to share the loot and suggest they work separately to kill Sue with the lone successful assassin getting all the cheddar.

So our murdering quartet descend upon Hong Kong to take out the lovely Sue, who looks like she stands around 5’2" and might weigh about 90 pounds and doesn’t seem all that hard to take out, but since Kay has made the conditions of her sisters murder being no collateral damage and no witnesses, it becomes just a bit more of a challenge. Also complicating matters is that Captain Scholar has become rather close to the lovely Sue calling into question her sisters claims that this small, cute, harmless looking woman could actually hurt anybody. This of course doesn’t mean that the Captain doesn’t want his loot, for as his colleagues have chosen to attempt to one up each other to kill Sue and get the money, the Captain has decided to take out the competition instead.

Now should the Captain find his opportunity to finally kill Sue and collect his bounty we question whether or not he’ll have what it takes to pull this off because a little thing called ‘love’ has stepped in the way. No sooner than you can say ‘twist’, the script has been flipped leaving our Captain in a bit of a quandary.

So what exactly is bad about ‘Twin Daggers’? Well… just about everything. Coco Su playing the twins is plenty cute, but equally badly acts both sisters. Rhett Giles on the other hand is well on his way to the B-movie hall of fame if you ask me as I’ve seen dude in some pretty bad movies, though he’s rarely bad in any of them. One has to wonder though who thought it was a good idea to make a guy with an Australian accent that heavy and have him allegedly hail from ‘Massachusetts’. And while we here at the FCU love to see Black dudes with jobs, one has to question the legitimacy of this particular Black dude being a secret government operative in 1930’s America. If this were in some way accurate it would have tricked a whole bunch of people back in the day because the being next to invisible the Black Dude would be able to take out a bunch gub-ment targets. However I’m thinking this is something J. Edgar, in between wearing dresses, would never have gone for. And don’t get us started on the Mime.

‘Twin Daggers’ also suffers from an overly complicated story line and a set of twists so outlandish that they almost have to be seen to be believed, and for an action movie it did move way too slowly at times and there sure was a helluva a lot of unnecessary dialog in it’s bloated two hour running time.

The fight scenes however were pretty rousing though it was painfully obvious that the actors doing the fighting had almost little or no resemblance to the actors they were stunting for. Especially the scenes that were supposed to be Coco Su since the Stunt Man, with emphasis on the word ‘Man’ was so masculine you could almost see his junk jumping around in his pants. I don’t know how movies work but surely there was some acrobatic woman somewhere in China they could have tracked down to do Ms. Su’s fight scenes.

It is the complete ridiculousness of things like this that almost save ‘Twin Daggers’ and make it almost entertaining to watch just to see what it does wrong. Yes, the pacing, acting, narrative and stunt manning were poor… if ‘stunt manning’ is actually a term, but it did have a lot of energy, the over acting was sky high and it had a Kung Fu Mime. When was the last time you saw a Kung Fu Mime?