A man trips over box of crabs and dies.
“He looks hungry.”
“He is hungry… for drugs.”

An everyday scene in any suburban town centre and one that we know, deep down, can only be wiped out by a Lebanese man playing a Canadian-Lebanese man.

Fearless Tiger may be the most overlooked film in cinema’s history.  Of course there’s a fairly good reason for this but the reason of “sanity” soon passes when you realise that Jalal Mehri is the most captivating screen presence you will ever see. 

But who is Jalal Merhi?

 "Jalal Merhi is recognized worldwide as a premiere action-film producer Director after successfully delivering over 20 films worldwide within a decade, and numerous short film projects."

"Jalal's commitment to high production values is evident on the screen but his commercial savvy and organizational skills are what make him one of Canada's most prolific and successful producers."

"That is when he was approached by a producer for a movie role.
The movie never started…"

Now you know.  That was cut and pasted from his IMDB biography and you can trust that information.  This is because he filled it in himself in a rare lull between bouts of being “prolific”.  While “delivering over 20 films” may sound only mildly impressive, you must be aware some of those houses had both small letterboxes and dogs.  Jalal was later fired by Amazon for tearing the heads from people who refused to sign for things.

But you obviously need to know more before you can grasp how awe-inspiring this man is:

"An expert martial artist. An acomplished (sic) jeweler.

Is known to his admirers as Beiruit's (sic) Steven Segal.

Is a huge fan of fast cars and drives a 911 Porsche turbo convertible."

So, now you know.

He also has weird toes and I’m taller than him, which is always nice.

Fearless Tiger was made in 1994 and appears to have been shot on stock lying about in the sun since it was dropped from the pocket of a tourist several decades before finally being found in a rock-pool, under a crab, by Jalal Merhi.  The poor quality of the film stock in no way distracts from the quality of the film.  What I can only hope to be an awful DVD transfer does not harm it either.  Without exception the cast are so breathtakingly ugly and have such puffy moustaches and hair that the unspeakably awful picture quality only adds to the vague suspicion you might be watching gay porn.  Jalal missed a trick by not calling it Fearless Bear.

The movie begins by giving us the usual insights into an evil karate school… or at least we think so… until you realise the man running it, the one with the skin that makes Keith Richards look like the Gillette guy, is called Lazar Rockward.  I assume it’s pronounced “La-zaaaar Rockward” but if I were him, and I wish I was, I would snap the neck of any man who didn’t call me “Laser Rockhard”.

Lazar is peddling a new drug called Nirvana, which he transports inside little Buddha statues.  Being a cunning businessman he then distributes them by selling them as souvenirs off a trestle table in a Canadian leisure centre holding a karate contest.  To encourage business he stands in front of the table wearing a cape and doing a surprising job of looking menacing despite the wooden floor beneath him being criss-crossed by colourful lines designating the boundaries for netball, badminton and other, more arcane games.  They tape a little sign saying “souvenirs” on the table to make complete the subterfuge.

 Attempting to defeat the mighty crime lord are two Hong Kong detectives.  One is a… uh… Hong Kongian?... er… well, now Chinaman, and the other is someone who looks exactly like your standard British child molesting maths teacher who goes trainspotting for kicks when he’s not touching Little Jimmy.  The former has awkward English; the latter has English from 1940’s music hall.  The film gained its 18 rating either from his constant use of the word “bloody” or the company that made the DVD wanted to save money on packaging design for the boxset. 

Our hero, whose name I have entirely failed to catch up to this point due to the sound be recorded through a kazoo, is introduced to us as he ineffectually kicks some people at the karate contest.  He buys one of the charming souvenirs because… well… who can resist a Buddha statue that costs fifty quid a gram.  He then rushes to his graduation.  He appears to have been a mature student. 

Oh, his name’s Miles apparently.  I’m watching a kung fu movie where the hero’s name is Miles.  Christ.

We meet his fiancée.  Ashley looks like a cross between a transsexual and a librarian who has just had one of those thirty-five quid make over photoshoots.  I can’t really knock her awful acting much as it must be tough having to take your glasses off before every scene and then blindly grope from one piece of scenery to the next.  In a way, it becomes quite a profound performance, bringing to mind both The Miracle Worker and Scent Of A Woman.

Aboot Haa.

Touchingly, he spends most of the movie not wanting to marry her and being repeatedly advised by family and friends to not do so.  His father is played by Jamie Farr from M*A*S*H* and numerous other things.  While generally being willing to play almost anything for any amount of money greater than one small coin, this film may actually be beneath him.  To his credit he acts just as badly in this as everything else despite Jalal obviously beating him between takes.

The film itself is so action-packed it’s near impossible to bring myself to cover it all.  Also I lost track of the plot about twenty minutes ago, so that’s out of the window too.  The following rough guess at what I watched may or may not coincide with your own particular visual and auditory hallucinations suffered while watching.

Jalal’s brother is a drug addict… and apparently a rather open-minded one as we witness him consuming Nirvana, which has rapidly picked up the street name “fish food”.  As I only heard it kazooed out loud it could also have been “Phish Food” which would explain the strange willingness for people to pay a fiver for a tub of ice cream with random sweepings from the factory floor inside it.

Jalal’s reaction to seeing his brothers Cherry Garcia addiction is an interesting one.  His brother is consuming the drug in broad daylight, leaning on his car, outside the family business.  While most of us would have been inclined to question the sense of consuming a bag of Chunky Munky at lunchtime Jalal cuts straight to the chase and takes the small vial form his brother and drops it lightly to the ground with the full intention of leaving it for a small child to find.  He then sensually pats down his brother and finds a bag of brown flakes that, if they are actually “flaked opium” as claimed, would probably be worth a small house.  He dramatically tears this up but has a surprising amount of trouble with the polythene for a master of Tiger Claw.  He doesn’t suggest rehab because his brother’s addiction is obviously not too major if he’s only walking around with half a key of smack on him.  Instead he opts for a playful “you should really stop that” and wanders off.

But… dun dun dun… he later goes to visit his brother but gets no answer.  He uses his Tiger Claw to kick the door in and rushes into what I fervently hope and pray is Jalal’s real flat. 

My memories of 1994 are a little dim, I’ll admit, but I’m fairly sure most people’s flats didn’t look like they’d been decorated by the combined efforts of Jean Paul Gautier and Tony Montana.  Of particular note was the Y-shaped pink neon lightbulb which beautifully set off the full-cow rug. 

To everyone’s amusement, Jalal’s brother is dead in the bathroom from an overdose.  He overfed the fish.

Jalal swears revenge.  Or I’m pretty certain he did, I went and had a piss at that point.

Jalal heads to the nearest nightclub and rather limp-wristedly assaults a leather-jacketed thug and some other people.  I can’t identify who those people were because almost all of the fight scenes consisted of close-ups of Jalal’s thighs. Throughout the movie you see more thigh than most porn, although Jalal generally has the decency to wear a cheap white nylon suit when he’s doing so.  The fashions and fighting style began to evoke Saturday Night Fever at this point and I became oddly fascinated by the slight buzz in my headphones caused by electrical interference.

After being escorted from the nightclub he proceeds to lay another fearsome beat-down upon the leather jacketed guy and I tried to decide if I should have a baked potato.  The leather jacketed thug proceeds to shout “I’ll kill you” at various volumes and various speeds as dubbing is used to mask the fact he almost certainly yelled “Aboot time I gave you an abooting aboot the face you hockey-hating scallywag.”
 
Jalal ineffectually tortures the man until he gives up the Black Pearl gang as the source of the drug. 

In a confusing sequence Jalal travels to Hong Kong for thirty seconds of footage in front of various signs that clearly indicate he’s in Hong Kong.  Then he attends an underground martial arts contest in the neighbouring Canadian forest.  The battles take place on what appears to be a bouncy castle and I have no fucking clue who anybody was or where the giant blonde guy with the perm came from.  I couldn’t even recognise Jalal at this point, which is surprising considering he was dramatically shorter than everyone in this movie, including his girlfriend.

I have absolutely no idea what he gained from this.  I gained a slight erection but that could have just been from the constant exposure to Jalal’s girl-like thighs.   

Life increasingly blurred at this point and I found my head began drifting to the left in what I can only assume to be a subconscious attempt to avoid the film. 

The Hong Kong police pair get another chance to shine as they… uh… somehow they crack the case… I think… after a phone call from our confused Canadian ninja.  However, just after informing the Hong Kongian fuzz of the Black Pearls involvement, Jalal and his little friends receive a surprise visit from a bunch of violent foreign chaps who proceed to unleash the single least effective beating in history.  Jalal responds with a mixture of sadism and thigh shots until he is declared the winning in a controversial writing decision that had me booing the screen.

After looting the corpses in a spiteful fashion he locates another Buddha statue.  Having previously given his first smack-filled statue to his fiancée to use as a bookend he decides that it would be a lovely gesture to give her the blood-caked trophy to use as another bookend.  He doesn’t mention he killed the previous owner, presumably because he wanted her to think he’d paid money for it and top up his balance in the Bank Of Blow Job.  Our hero pops round to the gallery at which she works that in no way looks like the film company’s production office with a print from the pound shop on the wall.

 While Jalal is browsing the Monays, Pickassos and Van Gogh-Offs the Black Pearls’ chemist suffers a bit of a chemistry whoopsie involving a faceful of finest acid.  The highly concentrated acid causes some of his makeup to wash off and the poor man to clutch at his eyes before slowly revealing them to be remarkably healthy looking.

“Our chemist is the only one who knows the formula and now he’s blind.”

This bodes badly for both the Black Pearls and anyone who likes their movies’ scripts to have been read by an adult. 

Due to the chemist’s unusual inability to explain a scientific formula in any way beyond pretty pictures the Black Pearls now need to retrieve the disc containing the pretty picture of the formula.  This disc is, for some doubtless good reason, inside the Buddha statue that our hero pulled from amongst the entrails of his vanquished foe.  They have no choice but to drop a line to Jalal… presumably because he boasted about his recent acquisition on his Facebook.

Jalal reacts badly to the call, and the fact they’re threatening the woman he was going to reluctantly marry if he couldn’t get out of it.  In a moment that genuinely shocked me, the film’s budget extended to a 3.5” floppy disk rather the expected 5.25” or reel to reel.  The DVD transfer was not sharp enough to reveal whether the disk was double density or not but I have my doubts.  Jalal puts it into his super-computer and a crudely drawn picture of a molecule appears on his high-tech green and black monitor, strobing soothingly.

As a man of action Jalal knows that drugs are very bad but the millions who will die of addiction when he returns it to the gang are the price he must pay to get back the woman he doesn’t love and whose heart he intends to break.

They decide to have the hand over at the production off… uh… art gallery.  For a moment it looks like the gang are going to be thwarted by the knee-high metal detectors that, as we all know, are installed at all art galleries.  Opting not to put the guns in higher pockets they instead decide to rely on the fact there’s several of them and they all know how to kick people’s spines out.  

Jalal arrives and a petty squabble breaks out during which I looked at the lightswitch I was projecting the bottom-left corner of the movie onto.  I need to clean it.  When I looked back Jalal had, inexplicably, rescued the girl… but had handed over the disk…

How could you let the world down like that Jalal?  How could you do it?

But wait…

When the gang plug the disk into their own super-computer they are greeted by a crude picture of a man mooning them and then the words “The Black Pearls Suck”.  Oh Jalal… you genius… you… you genius who spent about half an hour drawing buttock wrinkles, spots and really strangely fat, clenched, buttocks…  He’s not only the Beirut Steven Seagal, he’s also the Beirut Rubens and slightly disturbed.

The last part of the film really did go by in a blur.  This was due to both the fast pace, building excitement and the gradual disintegration of the very fabric of my soul. In Jalal’s defence the last part of the film may well have made sense and been quite tightly scripted… I admit weakness… I admit crying tears of pain… right up until the frankly incredible moment where a car hit another car and pirouetted through the air.  Whilst this may sound run of the mill, especially as cars had been doing this sporadically throughout the movie with no good reason… this time it was different… this time it was wonderful… this time there were a pair of rubber legs sticking out the sunroof throughout.

The climax of the movie somehow occurred when I bent down to pick up my cigarettes.  I looked up and Jalal hugged the woman he didn’t want to marry and the credits suddenly appeared in a startling fashion.  I swear I was only down there for about fifteen seconds.  I tried to rewind to see what the hell had happened to Laser Rockhard but it caused my computer to crash.  This happened three more times and I gave up.

All in all, one of the finest movies I have ever seen. 

Jalal, if you ever read this, please feel free to quote me on the box.  Your movie touched my very heart, my lungs, my loins and, dare I say it, my thighs.  Also, please can you email me at tiredbadger@yahoo.co.uk to tell me how the fuck the movie ended because there’s no way I’m going to watch the whole thing again as it also made me cough up blood.