"She makes the good guys happy...
"She makes the bad guys bleed!!!"
Tagline for Lady Street Fighter

You may never look at celery the same again after watching producer-writer-star Renee Harmon use the stalk as a seduction tool during the sex party scene in this unintentionally hilarious 1981 action film. The rarely seen exploitation classic is a tribute to the tenacity of Harmon, a pioneering action star who managed to produce and write a series of vehicles for herself starting in the late 1970s. The film has attracted a cult following for its sheer ineptitude and almost incomprehensible plot, filled with gratuitous scenes of sex and violence.

Lady Street Fighter is set in a world where police have a code for "man and woman leaving a residence," an FBI agent keeps a picture of actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. on his desk and guests at a sex party chant, "Toga! Toga! Toga!" at regular intervals. Harmon stars as a mob courier out for vengeance after her sister (also Harmon) is tortured and murdered by thugs who have the two mixed up. She flies to the West Coast in order to take out the killers, encountering an FBI agent (Joel McCrea Jr.) who may or may not be on her side, while also dispatching a batch of sleazy types with a few well-placed chops, kicks and swords. Her goal is to find a piece of microfilm revealing all the criminals involved in an assassins-for-hire business.

There are parts of this film that work. Director James Bryan does some effective visual storytelling in a few scenes. The opening sequence, for example, creates the impression of Harmon's torture without any of the stomach-churning sights of contemporary "torture porn" films like Hostel (2005) and Saw (2004). The editing of the party scene follows all the rules for creating a sense of mounting excitement, as Bryan cuts among Harmon's attempts to seduce a vice king connected to the assassination business (think celery and feet) and various revelers, including the men who keep shouting about togas.

Unfortunately, the script and low budget render even those rudimentary efforts useless. The dialogue borders on the nonsensical, with lines like "Shut up and talk", though they're a good match for the action. Major plot developments occur off-screen, with only the dialogue revealing that something important has happened. To set up a major fight scene, the script seems to forget the leading lady has been drugged...twice. By the film's conclusion, she even seems to have forgotten her main objective altogether.

To save money, Bryan had to shoot the film silent and post-dub the dialogue later, which gives the whole thing an air of dead sound void of atmospheric noise. The score consists mostly of a recycled theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) played repeatedly. But that's all part of the film's charm. Its sheer ineptitude and Harmon's clumsy efforts to position herself as a sex symbol and action icon are almost endearing.

Harmon was a cult star if ever there was one. She studied ballet in her native Germany before marrying an American G.I. and moving to the U.S. She created a theater group for servicemen's wives in Texas before moving to Los Angeles to start her own acting school. That led to work in independent films, starting with the low-budget horror picture Frozen Scream (1975), which she re-edited to create Night of Terror in 1986. Besides Lady Street Fighter, her most memorable screen role was as the wicked stepmother in Al Adamson's soft-core science fiction film Cinderella 2000 (1977).

At about the same time Harmon was making Frozen Scream, she wrote the script for a film originally called Deadly Games. She got Bryan, a former medical student who turned to directing (mainly working in adult films) to take the helm. He shot the picture in 1975 but could not get a release until 1981. It was then that they changed the title to Lady Street Fighter to cash in on the martial arts craze, particularly Sonny Chiba's Street Fighter trilogy.

Harmon recruited much of the cast from her acting classes. She and Bryan also cast Joel McCrea Jr. as the crooked FBI agent. McCrea had shown a flair for comedy playing Deadhead in Beach Party (1963) and its various follow-ups, which he made under the name Jody McCrea. By the time he filmed Lady Street Fighter, he seemed to have lost interest in acting. He actually retired from acting after producing and starring in Cry Blood, Apache (1970), and Lady Street Fighter would be his final film. He devoted the rest of his life to cattle ranching.

For a brief scene in a strip club, they quite appropriately cast Liz Renay, the gangster's moll turned stripper, who would achieve her greatest screen success in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977). Renay set out to become an actress, first gaining attention with her scene-stealing antics as an extra in The Sound of Fury (1950). Her involvement with gangster Mickey Cohen, which led to a two-year prison term for perjury, pretty much squashed those dreams, forcing her into a career in exploitation films and stripping.

The closing credits advise viewers to "Watch for The Return of Lady Street Fighter," but the film was never released. It finally resurfaced on DVD years later. The sequel was basically a recut version of the original, with additional scenes in which FBI agents question a woman. Extensive flashbacks consist of footage from the earlier film.

After making Lady Street Fighter, Bryan and Harmon teamed for five more films, including the police action flick The Executioner, Part II (1984), starring Christopher Mitchum and Aldo Ray. Harmon also wrote the film, which, despite its title, was not a sequel to anything. She also wrote the thriller Hell Riders (1984), starring Tina Louise and Adam West; the action film Run Coyote Run (1987), in which she starred; and the found-footage horror film Jungle Trap (2016), which was filmed in 1990 but sat unfinished for 26 years. By the time it was released, Harmon had passed on, a loss to lovers of weird cinema everywhere.

Director: James Bryan
Producer & Screenplay: Renee Harmon
Cinematography: Max Reed
Cast: Jody McCrea (Pollitt), Renee Harmon (Linda Allen), Liz Renay (Stripper), Trace Carradine, Tony Romano, Steve Sexton

By Frank Miller