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This week, we’ve got a sort of strange one. American Rickshaw, also known as American Tiger, was released in 1989 as an Italian/American co-production filmed in Miami. The film was directed and co-written by Sergio Martino. Martino was a major figure in Italian giallo films of the 70s. His films All the Colors of the Dark and Torso are A+ stuff in the genre. While he continued to make gialli and other styles of horror films throughout his career, he also dabbled quite a bit in comedies and crime thrillers, known as poliziottesco films.

Despite his mastery on display in All the Colors of the Dark and Torso, Martino faded somewhat quickly. He still had a few 80s films that I’ve heard of. Most notably, he directed 1982’s The Scorpion with Two Tails, 1983’s 2019: After the Fall of New York, and 1986’s Hands of Steel. But each of the latter two films really come off as fairly cheap dystopian/post-apocalyptic types of movies. By the end of the decade, when American Rickshaw was released, Martino seemed to be making mostly cheap content for home video rentals.

Yet, American Rickshaw does have something pretty interesting to catch your attention – the cast. Martino may have been best known for making Italian exploitation films of various dramas, but he could occasionally get a cast that could really sink their teeth into this movie. And, in 1989, if you’re writtin’ checks for actors to appear in your movie, Donald Pleasence would gladly take a piece. We’ll be talking more about him in a bit because woo boy does this movie get weird when it comes to his character.

Obviously, Pleasence is the most recognizable face in this movie. After all, this is 1989, one year after he returned to the Dr. Loomis role for Halloween 4 (which he is about to reprise once again in the fifth installment that same year), but two years before this movie, he appeared in the very creepy John Carpenter horror film Prince of Darkness and had a role as Gunn in Django 2, the only official sequel to the original masterpiece of spaghetti western. Pleasence was in fairly high demand. Apparently, he was in such high demand that he would be playing Django’s sidearm. I bet that was hard for Franco Nero to lift.

Uh… Anyway, the two younger hunks in the movie were played by Daniel Greene and Mitch Gaylord. Gaylord was an Olympian and, at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, won three medals in individual competitions and the gold medal as part of the Team All-Around with Team U.S.A. He quickly turned to acting and appeared in the 1986 film American Anthem playing, what else, a gymnast. He also acted as a stunt double for Chris O’Donnell in 1995’s Batman Forever as well as doing stunts for Mortal Kombat the same year. On the other hand, Daniel Greene has been in many things. The year before this, he appeared in Arthur 2: On the Rocks and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Later, he teamed up with the Farrelly Brothers to appear in several of their movies beginning with 1996’s Kingpin, followed by There’s Something About Mary, Me, Myself, and Irene, Shallow Hal, Stuck on You, Hall Pass, and Dumb and Dumber To. He even appeared in Peter Farrelly’s Oscar-winning film Green Book. Leading up to the release of this movie, he had been on all sorts of fairly popular TV shows in the early to mid-80s. His most popular role on TV was in 24 episodes of the primetime soap opera Falcon Crest.

Alright, after a very boring credit sequence that is literally just white letters over a pitch-black screen while Chinese restaurant muzak plays, we enter into the movie proper with a man placing a statue into a locker. It’s like one of those lockers you see at airports. It’s a temporary locker. The little statue is a jade pig monster. The man who put it into the locker is missing a thumb on one of his hands… Possibly both hands? When the locker is closed, the jade pig monster begins glowing ominously.

Next, we get some shots of Miami Beach with buff guys and bikini babes doing normal buff guy and bikini babe beach things. Soon, rain takes over the city. In a bit of a jolting hard cut, we then see a little old Chinese lady sitting on a bench with her Siamese cat in the rain. In slow-motion, we see Mitch Gaylord approach her to help her into his rickshaw. He takes her to a highrise building downtown.

I do have some questions. I’m not going to deny that a guy like Mitch Gaylord, who plays Scott Edwards, would live in Miami and do shit. I don’t doubt that a Chinese lady, probably many of them, would live in Miami and need transportation and shit. But, and I bet you already know where I’m going with this, were rickshaws a major option in Miami in 1989 for transportation? I’ve seen all sorts of movies. Many of them rather racist too. So, yeah, I’ve seen lots of movies in China or Japan or in a Chinatown somewhere out west where people get around in rickshaws. But why would Miami have that? It would make much more sense for Miami to have something uniquely Cuban or Hispanic in nature. But that would just mean taxis or lowriders or something… Well, at least if we are going to lean heavily into stereotypes.

I’m just saying that I’m not too sure that rickshaws make the most sense for people in Miami to use to get around town.

Anyway, fuck all that, we got titties on screen! After Scott drops the little old Asian lady off at the highrise office building, and tells her that he wears a shirt with a tiger on it because he was born in the Year of the Tiger, we go straight to where most Floridians spend their time instead of looking for jobs, the titty bar. Why are we at the titty bar? Well, there are two reasons. First, it’s an 80s action movie. Second, we meet our fiery redheaded leading lady, Joanna Simpson. She’s a dancer at this club, and, if I do say so myself, a great reason to go to this particular club instead of looking for a job. We’ll come back around to her in a bit.

Meanwhile, Scott is coming home from classes. He finds a mysterious package waiting for him in the mail. In the package is a box and a note. Inside the box is a bauble of some kind. It looks leathery and kind of like something you’d use for kinky weirdo sex. But the note is from the old Asian lady from the beginning of the movie. Unbeknownst to us, it’s six months later. It took her that long to track him down to send him this thing in appreciation. Seriously, how many rickshaw taxi companies are there in Miami that it would take this long to find Scott? Anyway, just as Scott is getting to the meaty shit in the letter about why she sent this weirdo, leathery sex toy to him, a girl in the building that has a crush on him rushes him and causes him to drop the letter into the trash. He bothers not to try to retrieve it.

If you’re curious if a MAJOR piece of the plot would be resolved if he just retrieves that letter and finishes reading it, you would be right on the money.

We shift to now see Donald Pleasence on the television. He’s a good old-fashioned televangelist preaching about saving souls and asking for money and stuff. He gets a call from someone who says the package has arrived and I guess that means some sort of plan is now in motion. So, let’s circle back around to our sexy, fiery redhead, Joanna. Joanna is played by Victoria Prouty. She appeared in only two things – this movie and an episode of a TV show called Men. That’s a shame because I think I’d pretty much watch her do whatever she got cast to do.

Her return to this movie’s plot is kind of hilarious. Remember when I was asking about rickshaws being used for taxis in Miami? Well, apparently, all the guys who do the rickshaws hang out in one place and basically hassle people on the street to ask them if they would like a ride on the “American Rickshaw”. Well, Joanna arrives IN A FUCKING TAXI where these rickshaws hang out to find a rickshaw to take to somewhere else. I mean, yes I know… She’s there to find Scott specifically because she makes a B-line straight to him to hire him for a ride, but I do find it hilarious that she takes a taxi to the rickshaws only to hire a rickshaw to take her somewhere else.

Alright, so Joanna is in a really sexy red dress. She goes right up to Scott, puts her hand on his rippling abs (I assume he has rippling abs because we can’t see them for his tiger shirt), and says, “Hey, tiger… Gimme a ride.” (in so many words). She tells him she wants to go to Biscayne Harbor. She asks him to come inside her boat to catch his breath. He initially declines saying he needs to get back to work, but she’s really hot and it would be an absolute shame to miss out on spending time with a sexy redhead.

And you know what? He really does not miss out! She instantly takes off her dress and says she will pay him for the rickshaw ride as well as do the sexy stuff with him. While the two of them have sex, the man with the missing thumb from earlier, whom we saw put the jade pig monster thing in the locker and then go visit the strip club Joanna worked at, is videotaping them doing the act. When Scott realizes what’s going on, he hauls off and slaps Joanna so hard she falls back onto a bench and then he pushes the thumbless guy across the room. He then trashes the camera by tossing that across the room and bodyslams the thumbless guy a couple more times while Joanna decides to beat cheeks.

All the while, we find out that the old Asian lady is kind of aware of things going on. When Donald Pleasence was on TV earlier, a cobra she keeps in an aquarium began hissing and freaking out. When everything begins going down on the boat, her Siamese cat started freaking out and even bites her. Something else of note, the thumbless guy wears a necklace with a key on it. Scott ripped it off him and tossed it out the window. That key is for the locker where the jade pig monster is. Scott believed he got the right tape from him, but when he gets home to review it, he finds it’s a tape with the guy explaining what the key is, but the sound was all messed up. Scott tries going back to the boat to get the right tape, but he only finds the body of the thumbless guy. The boat catches fire and Scott escapes before the cops can find him. Meanwhile, there is a guy in a car, with a front seat full of videotapes, watching Scott return and the boat catch fire. He too drove off before the cops got there.

Scott comes home and is freaking out. Daniel, being an awesome roommate, says that they have nothing to really connect him with the guy who was killed. Scott still thinks that his fingerprints are all over the place. Daniel says the only thing that can possibly connect him to the dead guy is the videotape they have, so they have to get rid of that. Daniel tosses the tape into the oven and the thing goes up in flames.

Later, when the cops investigate the wreckage of the burnt-out boat, we learn the boat belonged to the son of Reverend Mortom (Donald Pleasence). By the way, it’s great that Donald Pleasence, one of the types of actors who could play both intense and very serious, is playing a Southern televangelist. That’s great. I mean, instantly, just reading a synopsis and his name is connected to the movie as a televangelist, you know he’s the fuckin’ bad guy. Then, to name him Reverend Mortom is fantastic. Mortom just sounds like a bad guy’s name. It certainly makes me think of stuff like post-mortem… I digress.

The guy who was watching the night before from his car while Scott tried to return to get the tape of him and Joanna is at home watching the tape. He makes a call saying that someone got there before him and he knows who it is. Later, Daniel tells Scott that the paper reported that the dead guy was Reverend Mortom’s son. He was pretty crispy, but they could identify him through the missing thumb. That dead guy and Scott have something more than that boat in common – they were both born on 6/6/66.

The guy with the tapes, Francis, finds out where Scott lives and breaks in and tosses the place looking for something. When Daniel comes home, Francis holds a gun to him and asks him what they saw on the tape. Daniel says he saw Jason Mortom on the tape talking about a key. The sound was no good and he didn’t know anything else. Francis destroys the tape he says has Scott and Joanna on it. He then says he believes Scott knows where the key is and shoots Daniel. When Francis tries moving Daniel’s body, the old Asian lady convulses, and suddenly Scott’s apartment lights on fire. When the cops investigate the murder and fire, Scott’s dresser where he stashed the weird thing that the old Asian lady sent him is completely untouched by fire.

The next stop on the Francis violence tour is Joanna’s house. He tells Joanna that he wants her to tell the cops that Scott killed Jason Mortom. Francis hopes that will draw Scott out of hiding because he is convinced he knows where that locker key is. Scared for her life, she agrees to make a statement. When she makes her statement, she doesn’t want to double-check what the cops typed up. She just wants to sign it and leave. This makes the lead detective, Lt. Morgan very suspicious of her claims. Regardless, Scott’s name and picture are all over the news.

Scott is trying to stay on the move, but he decides to sneak into the backseat of Joanna’s car where he’s hiding when she gets off work. Things aren’t exactly easy for Joanna currently either. Francis is now a regular at the strip club and watches Joanna very closely. Not only that but the cops are tailing her too.

She wants to know what Scott wants with her. He tells her he has questions for her. If she doesn’t answer them, he’s going to stick her with a hypodermic needle. This is when he says the greatest line in film history.

Scott has Joanna drive to a parking garage. He wants her to go to the very top floor where they will switch out cars so they can move about without being followed by the police. When they get to the top floor, instead of just getting into the other car like Scott wants, they argue. He tells her she got him in a bunch of trouble because she lied to the police. She tries to defend herself by saying that he had to have beaten Jason Mortom to death because she saw him beating the shit out of him. But… wait. So she believes the scary guy who forced his way into her house, throttled her, and then creepily watched her at the strip club is not the real bad guy? She seemed pretty unsure about what she was doing at the police station. It seemed as though she was not happy about being forced to make a statement. Is she an asshole too? I mean, she’s a pretty asshole, but she might be a mean asshole too.

Anyway, all this gives Francis time to get to the roof of the garage and find them. She then says, “Scott, be careful. That guy’s been looking for you.” Well, that’s a hell of a thing to say now. THEN! While Francis is beating the shit out of Scott, she takes off in the car that Scott wanted them to get into. Thankfully, when Francis pulls a gun on Scott, an alarm in the garage goes off when Joanna hauls ass out of the garage and runs into a bunch of cars and that allows him to knock the gun out of Francis’ hand and take off with it. Scott then has to catch her driving off and commandeer a ride from her thanks to that gun he picked up from Francis. They dump the car and hop onto a long-distance bus to get out of town.

They check into a shitty roadside motel. There, Scott and Joanna fight some more. This whole part of the movie has been pretty stupid and frustrating. Joanna is forced by Francis to tell the cops that Scott killed Jason Mortom. I mean, based on what she saw, it wouldn’t be that hard of a pill for her to swallow, but she knows more than that. Instead of just telling him she was forced into doing that waaaay back when they were in the car together, hours pass before they get to a shitty roadside motel where Scott has a gun, he’s running on some pretty tense feelings about everything that’s happened the last few days, and she accuses him of murdering Jason Mortom AND his best friend Daniel. Only then does she say that she was forced by Francis to tell the cops that he was the murderer because he wanted to get to Scott.

Why would we need to do all of that for them to eventually get to a point where they fuck in the shitty roadside motel’s shower and become friends so they can try to figure out everything for themselves? Why did she have to be so viciously anti-Scott to the point that she risked getting either (or both) of them killed by Francis? Does she just have a bad attitude? Did she just need to get to that shitty roadside motel to have dirty, dirty sex with Scott to then have a heel-face turn where they can then carry on with the rest of the movie? I mean Victoria Prouty can get naked all she wants in this movie. I’m not going to complain, but I do think I can complain about how this movie is structured and written. We still haven’t figured out exactly how Old Madame Luna ties into all this.

By the way, from this angle, Mitch Gaylord looks like Robert Hayes from Airplane.

Also, by the way, if you look at that picture above, it’s very clear that Joanna is wearing the green top she was wearing previously. However, when Scott suddenly flashes back to when he ripped the chain that had that key off of Jason’s neck during their fight, he sits up. when he does, we see that Joanna is topless. I feel like that’s less a real continuity error and Sergio Martino saying, “Yeah, we need more tits.”

Anyway, the cops figure out that Francis is also mixed up in all this. They are beginning to question stuff around the fires and the murders. For one, why would Scott shoot one guy on the boat, then return to his apartment only to shoot his friend with the exact same gun? In addition to that, the fires seem to have no obvious origin. Things just don’t burst into flames with no obvious flashpoint. Anyone and everyone who knows Scott knows he’s a hard worker and a good guy.

Later, Joanna calls home where her roommate is being held against her will by Francis. When Scott and Joanna go back to where Jason’s boat was, Old Madame Luna’s Siamese cat guides them where jump into the water to find the key that Francis has been looking for. In maybe the most unlikely moment of this entire movie (and yes there is a moment in this movie that seems exceptionally unlikely but more likely than this), Scott finds the key in the underwater sand stack.

When he comes back up, Joanna is running away from him. He follows her into the dry dock. There, a car reveals itself and Joanna’s young son runs out to embrace her. Francis shows up and starts beating the hell out of Scott demanding the key. Joanna, her son, and her roommate drive off. Francis knocks Scott out and gets the key from his pocket. He’s about to shoot Scott when a vision of Madame Luna’s cobra forces him to flee.

Scott calls Lt. Morgan to say he’s a victim of a conspiracy. Meanwhile, Morgan’s partner, after learning about Scott and Jason’s shared birthday says that according to the Chinese horoscope, the day they were born on was the height of power for the Year of the Tiger. I guess that’s why Jason and Scott are kind of two parts of the same mystery. Scott has interest from Madame Luna and Jason had that key to the pig statue. Her cat leads him back to his apartment where he gets that weirdo talisman thing that Madame Luna sent to him a few days ago. The adoring neighbor called the cops and they eventually learn that he came back to get that talisman.

Scott and the Siamese cat go to the high-rise downtown to Madame Luna’s home. She reveals that she and her cat have been looking after Scott since the moment of his birth. The talisman was entrusted to Scott which has something to do with being a guardian to prevent some sort of evil from being released from that statue. It’s very much confusing gobbledygook, but whatever… Chinese mysticism and shit.

Later, Francis returns home to find Reverend Mortom waiting for him. Francis refers to Mortom as “Master” so I’m guessing they are also like Sith or something because Madame Luna is training Scott to be like a Jedi or something. She tells him about how she is basically a timeless spirit. She used to be eternally young and beautiful and she had experienced everything except for love. She was seduced by a man who would give her love. That man turned out to be Mortom. And, frankly, I don’t want to imagine Donald Pleasence seducing anyone, but here we are. Mortom stole the pig statue and she wanted Mortom’s son to steal the statue back for her. Instead of returning the statue to Luna, he tried to blackmail his father. That brought Francis into this whole scheme to rid Mortom of his son and get the statue back.

That means that, technically, Scott was never intended to be the hero, it was supposed to be Jason Mortom, but he turned out to be a greedy idiot. Our hero is just the backup plan. Hilarious.

Anyway, as Francis attempts to retrieve the statue from the locker at the station, the key burns through his hand and into the tiles in the floor. I guess this was Luna’s doing? I dunno. I do know that it was pretty rad watching the key burn through his hand. That was neat. Something else that seems like a really last-second addition to the story is that the talisman depicts a man and a woman who will retrieve the statue and save the day. That’s when Joanna comes in with her son and says she’s always been on his side. Sure… She was a dickhead to Scott the whole movie until they had dirty dirty sex in a shitty motel shower, but, fine, whatever. Luna says she was the one who “brought them together.” Whatever that could possibly mean.

Like, seriously… What the fuck and shit? Joanna has always been an agent of Madame Luna and was always working for her and Scott to get this thing back? Why? Was that something to do with Jason Mortom? Was that why he specifically took an interest in Joanna at the strip club? Does Madame Luna often seek out strippers to help in these apocalyptic mystic shenanigans? Are strippers magical? I suppose they can be.

Aw, fuck it.

Anyway, Scott and Joanna are off to do what it is that they are supposed to be doing to save the world and shit. Meanwhile, Reverend Mortom arrives to destroy Madame Luna. She says this time she has a way to defend herself. Her cat attacks and bites and claws at Donald Pleasence and that… that was pretty fun. Donald Pleasence does not do anything in a movie half-assed. So to hear him grunt and stuff while wrestling a stuffed cat is amazing. He tosses the cat away and then the cobra tries attacking him, but I think he might have killed the cobra with his bare-fucking-hands because he gains unfettered access to Madame Luna. He tries strangling her to death while she cries out for help. Her little shrine begins to smoke and it causes Mortom to escape and say the Stone of Evil is his.

Speaking of the Stone of Evil, Scott and Joanna arrive at the station to get the key and get the pig statue. They find Madame Luna’s cat lying over the key. Scott opens the locker and gets the statue. He is immediately attacked by Francis who apparently waited there all night knowing that Scott would be coming to get that key. This leads a big ol’ foot chase that eventually leads to Joanna guiding the cops their way. I am betting that Mitch Gaylord knew some Gymkata at this point because that would really help him against Francis.

But then again, a semi would also be helpful.

On top of that, Madame Luna’s cobra snakes up to the dead and mutilated Francis and crawls into his body and out of his eye socket! Scott returns the Stone of Evil which makes Madame Luna young, beautiful, and immortal again. Joanna tells the police that Scott is totally innocent. Scott asks Madame Luna about Reverend Mortom and what they should do about that. Madame Luna says that he is the final person that must be defeated, but he’s about to defeat himself.

And… boy howdy… He… Gosh. He sure does. In a way that I cannot even begin to explain. Thank god for the ability to clip this portion of the movie and show it to you from YouTube.

Reverend Mortom goes back to his flock and gives a sermon. In the middle of this sermon, he begins to squeal like a pig. As he begins to uncontrollably snort and squeal like a pig, Madame Luna takes over the monitors and the TV broadcast and reveals all about his actions that led to the murder of his own son. His wife, suffering his brutality throughout their marriage, shoots him and as he lay on the floor of his mega-church, his skin rips open and a pig monster comes out of his body. Fucking Christ!

Anyway, we can’t end the movie with that piece of practical effects magic. We end with Scott and Joanna going to visit Madame Luna one last time to thank her for everything. When they go inside her home in the high-rise building, it’s completely empty as if she was never there. The only thing left is a book about Confucious and her Siamese cat. The movie ends with Joanna simply saying that Madame Luna left something of herself behind. The shot freeze frames on the cat and then credits and I’m left making either of these same expressions.

This movie is fairly crazy. It’s crazy in an “Italian” sort of way. What I mean by that is that there are so many ideas and concepts in this movie that seem to fit so poorly together that only an Italian filmmaker could make it all work as well as it actually kind of does. Yet, it also feels like a late 80s American film through and through. But let’s try to break this down, shall we?

On one side, you have the action/suspense stuff that deals with the murder of the sex freak guy who likes to videotape strippers fucking random dudes. That is basically one whole movie as it is. A guy gets killed, the last guy to be videotaped wants to get the video of him to clear himself of the crime because he found the body, and he’s hunted by the real killer for whatever reason. Okay. So that’s one movie and that could fill up a whole 90 minutes by itself. You still have the stripper and all the tits and what have you.

But then, almost inexplicably, you have this Chinese mysticism thing woven into the movie too. That is so leftfield that you think it had to have been added in late in the scripting game. Either that or it was part of an earlier version of the story/script that wasn’t totally written out but heavily diminished. The whole thing with the televangelist also feels just kind of tacked on. Yet, it’s also woven into the whole Chinese mysticism part too! This is a crazy movie.

However, somehow, some way, it kind of works. Yes, there is about 15 or 20 minutes right in the middle that gets really frustrating because Joanna is kind of a dick to Scott and it kind of comes off as one of those things that a single real conversation between the two of them would clear up pretty goddamn fast. It was never like she couldn’t explain herself to Scott because Francis was right there or had her wired or something that could put her in immediate danger. No, she just accused him of murder and kept that up even when he had a hypodermic needle riddled with AIDS and a gun that he could threaten to use on her. Then, only to find out that she was on his side and working with Madame Luna the whole time? That was dumb.

However, all of the rest of it worked out as an interesting and engaging oddity from 1989. Mitch Gaylord is kind of a decent actor. I really liked Daniel Greene as the primary antagonist, Francis. He was threatening the whole way through. So much so, when it’s realized that he doesn’t just work for Donald Pleasence but he refers to him as “Master” it kind of also feels like it comes out of nowhere. In fact, I would even argue it takes a little bit of bite out of his menace. The cherry on top of all this is Donald Pleasence turning into a pig monster. What more do I need to say about that?

If you can get your hands on this movie (I think it is only available on physical media because I don’t think it’s streaming anywhere), I would actually recommend it for those who like weirdo late 80s movies that don’t really know exactly what genre they were going for.

That brings me to the end of this review. Next week, we need to hitch a ride on our rickshaws to a place that is… odd. We go from 1989 to 1998 to visit Dee Snider’s Strangeland! Come back here to read that next Friday. Before you do that, though, tomorrow, there’s another episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series! Check out the links to the right to find where you can get to the B-Movie Enema Roku app, the YouTube Channel, or the Vimeo page to watch me host the Italian Eurospy/superhero ripoff The Three Fantastic Supermen!

Until then, be suspicious of any stripper who suddenly climbs out of a taxi to request you give her a ride on a rickshaw so you can hang out on her fuck boat.