'Kung Fu Killer': Carradine Inflicts Pain on Viewers

"Kung Fu Killer" doesn't even live up to its cheerfully tawdry title. The film's gaudy, gratuitous violence -- ax-in-face here, chopped-off-arm there -- lacks the ugly energy of genuine grind-house exploitation, and the film never seems quite bad enough to be knowingly funny.

It's easy to see why this laborious clunker was scheduled in a suicide slot opposite NBC's thrilling, gorgeous Beijing Olympics, although ironically enough, "Killer" was shot in China, too. Perhaps that's why the script is rather vague on the nature of the troops that plunder a humble village in the opening sequence. They appear to be commies -- one carries a red flag -- but you can't be 100 percent sure. The whole ordeal appears to be taking place in ancient feudal times anyway, but it's supposed to be the 1920s.

One key factor in the prevailing aura of logy listlessness is the film's star, old Mr. Fun Fu himself, David Carradine. Ages have indeed passed since he was being schooled in martial arts in a TV series that, we were later told (in the movie "Dragon," among other places) should have starred Bruce Lee.

Carradine, playing a character alternately called White Crane and the White Crane, brings new meaning to the word "disheveled." He looks like the bed got up on the wrong side of him. Scraggly, heavy-lidded and exuding ennui, he drags himself through both halves of the two-part film (airing tomorrow night at 11 and Monday at 10 p.m. on Spike TV) with even less enthusiasm than it deserves. In narration, he speaks of "the burden of revenge I carried, the darkness I was capable of," but he seems more like a guy who justifiably just wants some peace and quiet.

Executive producers Robert Halmi Sr. and Jr., who used to make windy historical pageants for the broadcast networks back in everybody's palmier days, utterly defy viewers to "stay tuned" for Part 2 by ratcheting the stakes and the drama way, way down, softening and mitigating the violence as if under orders from some peeved parental protest group. The effect is roughly comparable to a cheap version of "Spartacus" in which, following intermission, all the embittered slaves decide not to revolt after all and the Roman legions elect to beat their swords into plowshares literally.

While peace is wonderful in real life, it's not really all that compelling in an action movie, especially one with words like "Kung Fu" and "Killer" in the title.

Daryl Hannah brightens things up, in her own heavily muted way, as a nightclub singer whose first performances are bound to delight music-haters everywhere.

The obvious inspiration is the "Anything Goes" number with which Steven Spielberg opened "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom."

When the singing (mercifully) stops, Hannah hunkers down with Carradine for a philosophical colloquy or two. "What to do?" she asks him during one of these, prompting the reply "What not to do? Life follows its path; we follow life's path."

Some of his dialogue sounds like the goofy gibberish solemnly intoned by Maria Ouspenskaya in the Universal "Wolfman" movies of the 1940s. Maybe it's intentional homage, but somehow that seems unlikely.

"Some men turn away from the shadows," Carradine says early in Part 2. "Others embrace it." It? What "it"? To be fair, he had mentioned "darkness" in a previous sentence, but it's still sloppy syntax for such a wise and thoughtful old wit. "You really do have ice water in your veins," an admirer says earlier, prompting the witty reply, "Yes."

The most likable actor, and character, in the film is Osric Chau as young Lang, an apprentice martial artist who does the kind of spry and showy stunts that Carradine could never do. Chau deserves considerably more screen time and Carradine considerably less.

We're not kidding about the violence, by the way. Be warned that it's R-rated and not just PG-13 -- as when a decapitated head is rolled down a long, blood-soaked staircase, or when a hole made by an arrow in Carradine's chest is cauterized in close-up, or when somebody gets a large knife in the gut and the director cuts to a shot of the victim's messy entrails hitting the ground.

In early scenes, the filmmakers hold out the prospect that they're going to play it all for laughs, but the explicit bloodletting and turgid dialogue shoots that idea down in short order. Still, many viewers will get the giggles from an early shot of Carradine about to bring his hand down in a karate chop on a poor helpless tomato. Good heavens, he looks for all the world like the guy who sells slicers and dicers in those handy-dandy kitchen-helper commercials that air around 4 or 5 a.m.

Don't bother hoping that Carradine will end with a handful of squished tomato, however -- though a face full of egg is definitely within the realm of possibility. In fact, it's a sure thing.

Kung Fu Killer: Part 1 (two hours) of the two-part miniseries airs tonight at 11 on Spike TV.