Several of my friends were shocked to learn that I had never seen this movie all the way through. It’s one of those I’d watched in pieces but never sat down and viewed from beginning to end. Why didn’t I make it a point to check it out earlier than this previous week, when I finally experienced it in its totality? Maybe because it wasn’t a Horror movie, and I expected straight Horror from John Carpenter. I don’t know. But I have now rectified that misstep and I’m oh so glad I did. Such a silly delight, this movie is.
Kurt Russell plays Jack Burton, perhaps the coolest yet most ineffective macho hero ever. To collect on a gambling debt, and then to retrieve his stolen truck, Burton helps his friend Wang rescue Wang’s girlfriend from the clutches of the evil, cursed, immortal necromancer Lo Pan, who needs the blood of the green-eyed woman to sacrifice to appease the demon from whom he obtains his powers and his longevity. There’s an apelike, werewolf-y monster that is in its own right as ineffective at being a monster as Burton is at being a hero. It looks scary but is kind of a pushover.