Florida man and rickshaw champ restores immortal Chinese witch
By: Lucas Hardwick
Tags: Movies, Film, Movie Review, Film Reviews, Italian

You’ve probably been so wrapped up in your own personal hell for so long, you never knew what kind of living hell existed for the vaguely homoerotic contemporary rickshaw driver subculture. Oh, you think you got problems, but you’ve never been suckered into sex tape voyeurism by a stripper who’s loosely connected to a preacher who happens to be secretly forming a Satanic cult and has a bloodlust for an immortal Chinese witch. And you probably never had the burden of pulling rickshaws while you work your way through engineering school with the looming existential pressure of not only being born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, but specifically on the “day of maximum power” in the Year of the Tiger. And to top it off, you’ve probably never had to deal with all of this while also living in Florida.

Title card for “American Rickshaw.”

Of course, I’m talking about the 1989 Sergio Martino film (credited under his American pseudonym Martin Dolman) American Rickshaw, a.k.a. American Tiger, a.k.a. American risciò. One sweaty Miami night, rickshaw driver Scott Edwards (Olympic Gold Medalist Mitch Gaylord), carts home red-headed stripper-cum-prostitute Joanne (Victoria Prouty) to her houseboat after she’s arranged for a weirdo strip club patron to get his voyeuristic sex tape fix by secretly taping her sexual escapades with her hapless rickshaw driver — because as we find out later, contract voyeurs “pay better.”

And after quite a bit of plot getting in the way of an already complicated story, we discover that the camcorder creep, whose thumbless right hand we see at the beginning of the film locking up a creepy ancient Chinese boar statue, is Jason Mortom (Gregg Todd Davis), the son of the superchurch reverend Sam Mortom (Donald Pleasance). And not only was Jason also born on the same day as Scott, also making him a Year of the Tiger baby, but missing a digit and having the burden of getting his kicks from voyeurism is the least of his problems because he’s also being hunted by his own father’s henchman and Jonestown survivor — yes, that Jonestown — Francis (Daniel Greene), and of course winds up dead on Joanne’s houseboat which of course frames Scott for murder in the process.

There’s literally no concise way to describe the plot of this movie. I haven’t even gotten to the Chinese witch, Madame Luna (Michi Kobi), Scott rickshawed around town six months prior who noted his Year of the Tiger lineage from his silk-screened tiger tank top, and who sent him a weird Chinese talisman in the mail thanking him for his existential mystic Chinese trouble . . . we think. Scott’s pretty sloppy with his mail, and right away loses the letter Madame Luna sent with the talisman, and we never get more than the first sentence of it in voice-over. And as for voyeurs, Madame Luna is the Mitch Gaylord of it since she can manifest her vision through the eyes of a Siamese cat that follows Scott around and shows up, like you know, when he’s having sex with Joanne later in the film.

By the late 1980s, the famed genre Italian filmmakers of the 60s and 70s were running out of work, and American Rickshaw, co-written by Roberto Leoni and director Martino, was one of the last weird-beard Italian movies to come out of the giallo / horror / genre streak that had been going for the past two decades.

Sergio Martino got his start working for his writer / producer brother, Luciano, and eventually found his calling directing some of the best giallo films of the 70s collaborating with prolific writer Ernesto Castaldi on The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key, and the trippy, nightmarish All the Colors of the Dark, each starring the alluring yet frightening Edwige Fenech.

A lot folks online like to parallel the mystic Chinese angle of this film with John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China which premiered only three years prior and was not considered a hit, which makes me believe that the connotation is a bit unfounded. And Donald Pleasance wrestling with a cobra and a Siamese cat is about as kung fu as this move gets.

And I hesitate to consider this thing a giallo flick, but with Scott pulling a little bit of amateur detective duty along with the voyeuristic sex angle, plus the mechanics of a videotape switcheroo that’ll flip your rickshaw, it certainly has giallo tendencies.

I can’t not talk about the actor playing Scott, Olympic Gold Medalist Mitch Gaylord. Mitch won a Gold, Silver and two Bronze medals for gymnastics in the 1984 Summer Olympics and was the first American gymnast to ever score a Perfect 10. Mitch was so great at gymnastics, he has two difficult signature moves named after him known internationally as the Gaylord Flip and the Gaylord Two, of which he does neither in American Rickshaw.

In the mid-eighties, Mitch began his acting career starring in the sports film American Anthem, and went on to do several commercials and stunt work including doubling for Chris O’Donnell in 1995’s Batman and Robin. He also served on the President’s Council for Physical Fitness for both Reagan and Bush, and did some soft core porn in the 90s — Animal Instincts and Sexual Outlaws. Being the Swiss Army knife of celebrity these days, Mitch makes his rounds doing motivational speaking for the low, low price of around $10,000 per appearance and makes no mention of American Rickshaw or his 90s film credits in his bio.

Indie home video upstart Cauldron Films recently released a pristine 2K scanned version of American Rickshaw on blu-ray after the film was lost to obscurity for years often only being found on VHS or a digitized VHS version that if you dug around, could find streaming out in the wild. The new high-def picture gives this film a new visual life it probably hasn’t had since it was shown in theaters, and where it wasn’t shown in theaters and was most likely direct-to-video, then it certainly looks better than ever. It’s kind of like giving that 91 Dodge Shadow that still runs but has been sitting in your driveway for 30 years a pretty intense wash, wax, and detail reminding you that yeah, it’s ugly and the oil pan’s busted, but it’s actually kind of fun and sporty.

In the final act, after Joanne helps frame Scott, she falls in love with him so they team up to track down and beat up Francis — which is no easy feat because he’s seen some shit — to get the key that goes to the locker where the ancient mystical Chinese boar statue is hidden. This restores the elderly Madame Luna to a more youthful state ensuring her immortality that had been ripped away from her by none other than a kabuki painted Reverend Mortom who stole the statue, giving life to its evil power in “a time not of this time.”

And at the end, with the boar statue back in Madame Luna’s possession, as the now powerless Reverend Mortom is spewing biblical hyperbole before his superchurch crowd, one of the most garish, rubbery, shocking endings to a film that never saw it coming occurs. Mortom begins making the rooting sounds of a hog before his crowd of followers as he loses control after Madame Luna hijacks the church’s closed-circuit feed outing the Reverend’s evil deeds. And it turns out, Mortom is indeed the devil incarnate — we don’t really have any way of knowing outside of his tormented wife screaming it to everyone in church, so we pretty much have to take her word for it. But we finally find out for sure after Mrs. Mortom puts a round in the Reverend, and as he dies, in a fine show of practical effects, takes on his true form as, you guessed it — and if you didn’t well, we certainly can’t blame you — a man-sized boar.

Then a few days later, after the smoke clears, Scott and Joanne head over to see Madame Luna to thank her, I guess? I don’t know. Anyway, when they reach the top of the high-rise building where she lived in what looked like a five-star Chinese buffet, in a swift, mystical Chinese denouement, they find the place gutted almost as if she was never there to begin with. And with this movie, who the hell knows.

So what does it all mean? It means everyone is dealing with something, even the rickshaw driver you paid $50 to haul your entitled ass 20 blocks for twice the time and quadruple the cost it would have taken in an Uber.

And while this movie is absolutely bonkers from the stylized slow-motion rickshaw trip Madame Luna takes at the beginning of the film, to the bloody rubber and latex addled metamorphic finale, it absolutely knows what it is and I can’t slight it for its honesty. There’s even a title card at the beginning of the film quoting Confucius that aptly admits this awareness and serves as a cautionary disclaimer for what you’re about to embark on: “The way that is the way is not the ordinary way,” and that’s the Sergio Martino way.

Three stars.

(Blu-ray release from Cauldron Films.)