No Surrender Cinema: China O’Brien II
China O’Brien’s trip back home turned deadly, but after avenging her father’s murder, she remained in her hometown to protect and serve as an ass-kicking sheriff who kept the people safe. Now, a new criminal element is putting her town under siege, and it’s up to China and her allies to eliminate the threat with their feet and fists! The first China O’Brien film helped put Cynthia Rothrock on the map when it came to American martial arts films, and this No Surrender Cinema is heading into sequel territory for a look at the follow-up to Rothrock’s breakout feature, the simple-yet-effectively named China O’Brien II!
Things have been quiet in ol’ Beaver Creek ever since China O’Brien (Rothrock) took on the role of sheriff after her father, the previous sheriff, was killed via car bomb in the first film. China’s been enjoying the simplicity of small town life with nothing more than a drunken redneck or a couple of creeps bothering a woman at the local park to help her and her deputy/boyfriend Matt (Richard Norton) and deputy/friend Dakota (Keith Cooke) earn their taxpayer funded paycheck. Unfortunately for these Three Best Friends That Anyone Could Have, shit’s going to hit the fan real soon courtesy of an escaped con named Charlie Baskin. You see, Charlie’s not happy about being sent to the slammer, so he has the people who put him there, like the detective and judge, murdered in rather convoluted fashion, I guess to prove that Charlie’s going to be our bad man with a plan this go-round.
The next step of Baskin’s scheme is to get his missing money back, money which was no doubt ill gotten gains, but was taken from him by his Vietnam war buddy Frank Atkins, who has been placed in the Witness Protection Program and just so happens to be leaving the quiet life in Beaver Creek along with his wife and daughter. Since Frank’s wife Annie is old friends with China (even though we never saw her in the first film…you’d think she would have shown up for China’s dad’s funeral!) and his daughter Jill is dating Dakota (which is a bit awkward when Jill is portrayed as a high school student and Dakota is old enough that he’s active law enforcement; if we go by Cooke’s actual age, he was 30 at the time, so we’re pushing a lot of boundaries here). Frank tries to be a hard ass but comes off as a sniveling coward when confronted by China about his role in this situation, after she, Matt, and Dakota save his family from being kidnapped from the town’s fireworks spectacular.
Undaunted by the interference of our heroes, Baskin sends more of his goons over to Frank’s place, just in time for Dakota to arrive home with Jill. Dakota kicks some ass but falls victim to the numbers game and gets taken hostage with the Atkins women. Frank’s response? Pack up and leave town! Ol’ Frank is looking like as much of a sad sack as Jason Stillwell’s father (No Retreat, No Surrender for those of you who missed that reference), so thankfully China shows up to once again put Frank in his place and tell him to cut the shit. When she realizes that Baskin has placed someone on lookout outside of Frank’s house, she devises a plan to get to the old mill where Dakota and the girls are being held without tipping Baskin off.
After a whole lot of ass-kicking and a close call where deputy Russell (who is not only the only other deputy, but the only one not trained in the martial arts) nearly gets himself killed, the rescue mission is successful. Everybody is back at the sheriff’s department safe and sound when all of a sudden the phone line goes dead! The problem is not exclusive to that one building either, as the lines around town are dead and the radios aren’t working right. That’s because Baskin and his boys are cutting off communication to and from the town by snipping wires, putting out radio jammers, and setting up barricades. Beaver Creek is about to come under fire from a group of greedy, sadistic commandos, and it’s going to take every ounce of fighting spirit that China and co. have in them to overcome the assault and bring tranquility back to the town.
China O’Brien II went into production immediately after the first film, and because of that, there’s a lot of recycling going on here. The storyline is a bit derivative, pitting China against a non-fighting criminal mastermind surrounded by a bunch of cannon fodder as opposed to an imposing physical threat. The criminal element is seeking to overrun the town, and the three main stars only have each other to rely (for the most part…they did extend some goodwill towards the dispatcher Lucille, deputy Russel, and the Atkins family). We even get a fight at a town function, just like the brawl at China’s rally in the original film. Watching it with older eyes, you could make the case that it’s not really a sequel as it is an extension of the first film, focusing on China’s first “case” by having Baskin be the big bad that she’s got to take down. There’s also another corruption angle here, though it’s not as overt as having the town being completely in the bad guys’ pocket. Here it’s an almost throwaway piece of information when Baskin gets on the line with his inside man in the FBI, who just so happens to be the agent that China was in contact with.
While the story doesn’t break any new ground, the action is once again top notch. I was always a huge fan of Keith Cooke’s Dakota character as a kid, and he gets plenty of time to showcase his skills here. He’s got a quick fight in the park (a scene that younger me always marked out for as I tried to mimic Cooke’s jump kicks) which features Cooke’s future Mortal Kombat co-star Chris Casamassa as one of the local hoods who gets his ass kicked and who inexplicably ends up as part of Baskin’s crew for the finale, only to get his ass handed to him again. There’s also a great scene where Dakota, who in character has a disadvantage by being one handed (a trait written into the script of the original film when Cooke broke his hand prior to filming), fighting against Baskin’s right hand man while he has both arms tied behind his back. Cooke is always fun to watch, and he portrays Dakota with a brooding coolness, almost like an earlier version of Lorenzo Lamas’ Renegade character Reno Raines.
As awesome as Cooke is, Rothrock and Norton both have plenty of screen time to show what they’re made of, too. Rothrock’s speed and finesse are on full display as she move circles around Baskin’s flunkies, but I’ve grown to love Richard Norton’s rough around the edges brawling style in these films. In China O’Brien he was hitting dropkicks and body presses like he belonged on WWE television, and here in China O’Brien II he straight up body slammed one of the goons off of a catwalk! Forget about John Wick and all his guns, give me Richard Norton body slamming motherfuckers with no remorse for 90 minutes and I’ll be a happy man! The second best part about that scene is it comes right before China and Dakota engage in a brawl with more of the bad guys in the local restaurant. When one of the guys flips into attack and comes at China as if he’s going to claw her (it looks like an angry cheerleading routine), she takes the guy and HURLS HIM THROUGH THE WALL. Trust me kids, if you watch only 30 seconds of this film, let it be that scene. Once you see it, it will be burned into your brain forever.
The final few minutes of action do provide a few more familiar faces to tangle with our heroes; Toshishiro Obata, who many would recognize from his role as Tatsu in the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, would show up as a man with Freddy Krueger style gloves who tries to maim China, but would be done in by his own weapon of choice just a few moments later. After that, we’d get to see the biggest name in the film besides Rothrock, Norton, and Cooke, when Billy Blanks appeared as a nameless street fighter that Dakota took out. Blanks wasn’t yet the big star that he would become, and in fact wasn’t even planned for the original production, as his scene with Cooke was filmed after the fact so that director Robert Clouse could extend the runtime.
China O’Brien II is not a perfect film by any means, but sitting here writing this review 30-something years after I first watched it, I’m still proud to call it one of my favorite films. Rothrock is one of my all time favorite martial arts movie stars, and both Norton and Cooke hold up their end as supporting case. Everybody else is pretty unremarkable, save for Blanks, since Casamassa’s appearances didn’t give him a chance to show anything. Even the ending falls flat and feels like the producers didn’t know what to do once the fighting stopped, not to mention they took Baskin’s comeuppance and made one of the secondary characters responsible for it (again, a plot point seemingly xeroxed from the first film). Still, this was a Rothrock showcase, plain and simple, and a vehicle to get her over to the American market in the hopes that she would enjoy the same levels of popularity that she was while working on Hong Kong films like Righting Wrongs and Millionaire’s Express.
Typically when I wrap up my reviews, I like to let the readers know where they can find the film, but that’s no easy task this time around. Although the original China O’Brien got a US DVD release, this film did not, making the sequel a bit of a white whale when it comes to viewing. Yes, there are several foreign releases on DVD, but to this day no Region 1 or 0 discs have been made. Streaming is out of the question since I’ve never seen the China O’Brien films on any app, and the best that YouTube can do is provide the world with a glimpse at the majority of the fights. I’m fortunate enough that I still have my taped off HBO VHS copy of this film (which I also converted to a DVD years back), and while I can survive just fine with that, it would be nice to see Rothrock’s US breakthrough get some special treatment. Vinegar Syndrome has been doing God’s work for years now with releases like the entire Tiger Claws trilogy and Martial Law I & II, but they’ve cultivated a great relationship with Rothrock by getting her on board for extras for those releases and using her for a voiceover in New York Ninja. Word is that Golden Harvest’s rights can be a nightmare scenario depending on the film, so I’m hoping that China O’Brien II isn’t one of them, and that it will eventually be easy to get ahold of where others can enjoy it as much as I have for all these years.
