I’m on a new monthly injection to help keep my cancer from coming back around and biting me someplace soft and this one is making me dumber. Last night I could remember the supporting cast of the 1983 Hong Kong horror comedy The Dead and the Deadly, but not what a washing machine was called. I was telling my husband to put the thing in the thing, when I meant the Gain Fling in the washing machine.

Along with brain fog comes nightmares, but you realize they’re ridiculous when you wake up, like when I was going through chemo and I would dream that I was crawling across barbed wire to turn off the spaghetti sauce that was burning. Last night I dreamed that my son and I had a babysitter, and she was annoying because she kept having food from different restaurants delivered to the front and the back door at the same time, and I was trying to text or email my mom on every internet connected device to have the babysitter fired but the messages kept getting replaced with spam. The night before last I dreamed that cats were attacking my pet hamsters and I had charged $80 to my ex-husband’s debit card. The only hamsters I know are the three hamster villagers on my latest Animal Crossing island, and I haven’t received one thin bell of child support since 2017 so I’m pretty sure my ex owes me $80.

All that is to say, if you are still reading, it’s hard for me to concentrate, but when I caught Stickfighter the other night on B-Movie TV, I intently watched every minute of it, and for most of the wrong reasons.

There’s this guy, and I think his name is John, and he’s a DEA agent. He’s got about the mental capacity of, say, me on the day I have to have one of these shots, so he bungles his latest bust and his partner is killed AND the drugs disappear. He gets fired and he has to team up with his partner’s sister and their blazing sexual tension to catch the bad guys. The thing is, everything about the acting and dialogue is either forgettable or howlingly, unintentionally, funny, but the fighting in this movie is bad ass if you give it the caveat that it’s taking place in a 90s American martial arts movie that never made it to an official DVD. This guy does things I’ve never seen before. I hate to tell you too much of it so you can go to YouTube and watch for yourself, but I must reveal that John Stickfighter grabs a guy around the neck with his legs and teabags him while he rides him down a flight of stairs like a sled. And that near the end of the movie he’s about to hang the #3 villain and says, “Later, Dickwad,” right before he kills the guy. “Later, Dickwad” is naturally the new catchphrase around my house.

Unfortunately, for all the badassery, there’s a glaring lack of stickfighting going on, even though John’s the best stickfighter ON THE WORLD. Also, there’s a sex scene in the middle with performative moaning. Nobody wants to hear that shit. The best part about this movie moaning, though, is that it is so loud that it covers up the sounds of a massacre taking place in the strip club underneath where the rumpy pumpy is taking place, allowing the thin plot to be spread a little thinner. If it wasn’t for the I’ll have what she’s having noises, John could have caught the bad guys and saved a life. But then we wouldn’t have had the location for the final scene. And though the strip club is a bar with the obligatory pool tables, and some fighters have the bad luck to fall onto the pool tables, nobody picks up a pool cue and hits anyone with it as if they were fighting with a stick, I don’t think.

The final fight, as with all low budget movies made in Los Angeles, takes place in an empty warehouse. It’s mandated by the state film commission, if they have one of those and not just an anthropomorphic pig at a desk smoking a cigar while eating a diablo sandwich, I’m not sure. But back to the movie, we actually get to witness John rip the sleeves off his own button-down shirt during the final fight. Usually that just happens mysteriously to heroes in movies so it’s nice to finally learn the secret to that particular movie magic.

I don’t know how to end this post. Most would say I didn’t know how to begin it, either. But I wanted to post something. If you like martial arts movies and schlock, I highly recommend Stickfighter. It’s the b-movie of my dreams, this week.