The evil queen Queria returns to her kingdom and has a priest remind her what happened in the last El Santo movie, The Fist of Death. Once she and the audience are brought up to speed, she proclaims, “And now I wish to share my happiness with all of you!” and promptly does a sexy Vegas showgirl dance number by a giant bonfire. Since Queria is once again played by the buxom Grace Renat, her jiggly gyrations are an excellent way to kickstart any movie.
El Santo and his bumbling sidekick are invited to the Jungle Girl and the Karate Prince’s wedding, so they parachute their way to the palace for the occasion. Six minutes into the film and we have already seen an evil priestess doing a go-go number and a skydiving luchador. This is what I call entertainment.
Unfortunately, after a promising start, The Fury of the Karate Experts kind of gets bogged down once an elderly professor and his frumpy daughter show up. Luckily, Renat’s constant sexy dancing more than makes up for the sluggish passages (most of which revolve around characters boating through the Everglades). The plot is also pretty thin this time around. In fact, you’ll swear that the movie was comprised of outtakes and deleted scenes from The Fist of Death. (The Jungle Girl’s origin flashback is shown once again in its entirety.) We also get about a half a dozen subplots that are introduced in the last twenty minutes only to be immediately forgotten. The ending is completely nonsensical too, but at the very least it’s virtually impossible to predict.
Another issue: For a movie called The Fury of the Karate Experts, there are very few karate experts on hand, and none of them seem especially furious.
My favorite part was when Queria put El Santo under her spell and made him her slave. Of course, if it was me wearing the silver mask, you wouldn’t have to put me under a spell if you looked like this:
Many of El Santo’s movies feature sequences that fluctuate from night to day in successive shots. The Fury of the Karate Experts features what is probably the most egregious day-to-night-to-day scene of all time when a wild nighttime voodoo ceremony is intercut with scenes of people riding boats in broad daylight, with occasional cutaways to the moon to make things even more confusing. Still, I can’t be too tough on the film when nearly half of the movie is devoted to Grace Renat doing her thing.
AKA: The Fury of the Karate Killers. AKA: The Fury of the Karate Masters.
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