DVD review: Untouchable Glory (1988)

Southeast Asia has become a staging ground for a major powerplay between the Superpowers. When the Soviets decide to establish a secret missile base, the Americans counter with a clandestine operation to stop them. There is only one man for the job: Brian O'Riley (Pierre Kirby), who like his partner, White Tiger, is a member of the elite "American Force", a small group of highly skilled freelance commandos who stand ready to use their specialized talents in the cause of freedom wherever and whenever they are needed by their country. Their mission: to liquidate the Soviet espionage team headed by General Karpov, and give assistance and advice to the "Untouchables", the local civilian counter-insurgency group led by ex-cop Domingo. As civilians, the Untouchables must unfortunately operate outside the law. They are feared by the communitst rebels due to their effective hit-and-run strikes, and hunted by the military that they elude. Their skill in fighting and hiding has inspired their name, the Untouchables. Untouchable Glory is written by Godfrey Ho and the AAV Creative Unit and is directed by Philip Ko Fei (as Philip Ko). The acting is bad, the camerawork and editing is pretty decent but as this is a cut release (edited by german censors) there are some instances where it noticeable that a cut has been made. This flick is the usual Joseph Lai/Godfrey Ho product where they shot about 15 - 20 minutes of new footage featuring caucasian, use around 70 minutes from an older unknown asian movie, use inventive editing and redubb it. As anyone can imagine, the end result is a bit confusing. In Untouchable Glory we get a lot of action, mostly shootouts but also some fightscenes. The fightchoreography is pretty decent, Pierre Kirby actually seems to know martial arts which certainly helps as he doesn´t need to wear a mask when fighting (as Richard Harrison does in every Godfrey Ho movie I´ve seen so far) to hide the fact that it´s a stuntman doing the kicking and punching. The badly staged shootouts are plentiful and they are often in slow motion. As might be expected there are noticeable differences between the odler asian footage and the newer footage featuring Pierre Kirby and company. Actually I think that the asian movie might have had a bigger budget, bigger resources as it features a much bigger cast and so on but in my opinion it is the new scenes that are better. Better made and better action. There is, as can be expected, quite a bit of unintentional comedy in this. There is no gore in this except some squibs. There´s no T & A in this.
Untouchable Glory is also known as American Eagle, Ninja Untouchables, Aerolite Force 2 - The Untouchable Glory and American Force 2: The Untouchable Glory.
This review is based upon the german region 2 DVD release from VZM, it´s cut and german language only.
Rating: 1 out of 7. I found Untouchable Glory to be much more entertaining than it actually ought to be, there´s plenty of action and of course Pierre Kirby is Pierre Kirby. I would have prefered to see more martial arts as the frequent shootouts are for the most part pretty boring and badly staged.

/JL