A plea to bring back movies like Gymkata

Cinema has become too self-aware, and it must stop.

The skill of gymnastics. The kill of karate.

One of the unexpected pleasures of co-hosting Kill by Kill is revisiting movies I would have once told you were unmitigated garbage, and discovering that they’re actually rather enjoyable. When I saw Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday in its theatrical release, I apologized afterward to the friend I talked into going to see it with me. Rewatching it many years later, however, I appreciated its eccentricities, particularly in a genre that at that point was playing it safe to the point of boring.

For being the ninth film in a slasher franchise (and the second that claimed to be the last in the series, though it wasn’t true then either), it’s extremely weird, a movie in which a coroner eats Jason Voorhees’ heart (which is the size of a Honeybaked ham) and gets his powers, and then later that same coroner straps a man to a table and shaves him with a straight razor for reasons I remain unclear on, and I’ve seen the damn thing at least four times. How can you not be stirred by that kind of commitment to oddness?

It happened again recently when I rewatched Gymkata, a movie I hadn’t seen in over thirty years, at the request of a Kill by Kill Patreon supporter. Gymkata has lived on mostly as a recurring gag on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I don’t know how many folks have watched it without any kind of commentary recently. It is as dumb as a bag of hammers. I’m not about to try to convince you that it’s actually good. I am about to make a case for why we need movies like Gymkata today, though.

Former Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas “stars” as Jonathan Cabot, and I put “stars” in quotes because when he’s asked to do anything but gymnastics he has all the energy of someone waiting for a crosstown bus. Unsurprisingly, Jonathan is also a champion gymnast, and he’s recruited by the “Special Intelligence Agency” (or S.I.A., like the lovably quirky musical artist) to represent the United States in a highly dangerous international “game” in Parmistan, a small country bordering Russia. Should Jonathan win the game, the U.S. will be able to build a satellite monitoring station there. Should he lose, he will be immediately killed.

Jonathan agrees without hesitation, and here’s what makes Gymkata so perfectly representative of a time we’ll never see again.

I wrote at length a while back about Cobra and how it was reflective of the conservative streak in 80s mainstream movies. So too is Gymkata, both in how here the United States are the good guys who play by the rules (whereas in real life we would have just invaded Parmistan to build the satellite monitoring station), and how Jonathan agrees to put his life on the line for his country without blinking an eye. Sure, he stands to gain nothing for himself after months of intense physical training for a competition that his father already supposedly died participating in (in fact, no foreigner has ever won it), and if he loses he’ll be literally executed, but when America needs you, you answer that call, no questions asked. 

In response to both the new and unimproved Cold War, and movies like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter that dared to suggest that the U.S.’s penchant for combat wasn’t actually a good thing, came a long line of mid-80s movies (nearly all of them written, directed by, and starring people who never spent a day in the military) that featured ordinary American citizens stepping up to protect their country. Sometimes they were single-handedly rescuing prisoners of war, or saving hijacking victims who are trapped on a plane. Occasionally they were literal children saving their tiny midwestern town from a Russian invasion, or former CIA agents stopping international terrorists from taking over the entire southeastern United States. In every case, they always stepped up regardless of the cost, because that’s what good Americans did. They didn’t have the audacity to question their government like some kind of filthy America-hating hippie, they just did their duty, even if that meant dying horribly.

Parmistan, the best fake foreign country name that wasn’t in a Marx Brothers movie, is described as being on the southern border of Russia, and populated entirely by white people in rags and turbans. Despite the king of Parmistan evidently being rich enough to grant wishes like a fairy tale genie, the country looks like a medieval peasantry, where everyone still gets around by horse. Also despite the king of Parmistan being a goofy white guy who comes off like he’s in a Mel Brooks movie, he inexplicably has an Asian daughter, who almost immediately falls in love with Jonathan, because who wouldn’t fall in love with a container of non-dairy dessert topping shaped into a man and given a Chess King turtleneck?

Given that the princess of Parmistan is supposedly an expert in how the game is played, and oversees Jonathan’s training, one would expect her to help him win it in some way. Alas, no, once it’s actually underway she’s sidelined for the rest of the movie, waiting for him to cross the finish line with a concerned frown on her face (either that, or the look of an actress desperately waiting for her agent to call and get her out of this picture). Speaking of the game, considering that it’s casually mentioned that in 900 years of playing it not a single person outside of Parmistan has ever won, it’s remotely possible that the whole thing is rigged. Nevertheless, that doesn’t keep anyone from trying it anyway, certainly not Jonathan, who shows up at the starting line in a sweater and Dockers, like he’s about to give a speech at a middle school graduation rather than engage in a deadly obstacle course.

The game is overseen by the king of Parmistan’s right-hand man Zamir, who is, of course, the bad guy, and we know this because when we first see him he’s wearing a fur vest with no shirt underneath it, and what appears to be a clip-on rattail that’s in a different spot on his head in every scene. Much is made about the strict rules and fair play of the game, but it mostly seems to involve a bunch of dudes lumbering around rural Yugoslavia while Zamir and his henchmen (who are all dressed as ninjas, for some reason) indifferently shoot arrows at them. It gets repetitive pretty quickly, but on the other hand, it does result in not one, not two, but three separate obvious dummy shots, two of which use the same ADR scream.

Unsurprisingly, Jonathan turns out to be a scrappy competitor, using his gymnastics skills with conveniently placed bars and pommel horses. Though he is a talented gymnast, it helps that the various henchmen and/or angry peasants he encounters don’t so much attempt to fight him as politely wait in line to run into his feet as he swings from a bar over their heads. If you like seeing many people get kicked in the face, then you’re in luck, because Gymkata has more face kicking in ninety minutes than in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s entire filmography. There’s so much foot-to-face action that even if you cut out all the scenes that didn’t involve someone’s foot kicking someone else very hard in the face, you’d still have about 55 minutes worth of movie.

Even when Jonathan discovers that he’s being set up to lose (which the audience has already known for about 45 minutes, because such concepts as “suspense” are unfamiliar here), he keeps trying to make it to the finish line anyway, and ends up in the wrong side of town, which in this case is where Parmistan keeps all their freaks and lunatics. In the one scene in this entire movie that will make you think you fell asleep at some point and are having a weird nightmare, Jonathan is chased by said freaks and lunatics, including one guy who literally has two faces (one in front and one on the back), another guy who cuts his own hand off, and a third wearing a monk’s robe who beckons Jonathan to safety, only to turn around and reveal that he’s totally nude in the back.

As long as this scene goes on, as Jonathan is chased around by peasants bearing scythes like he’s Frankenstein’s Monster, it ultimately comes to nothing. He finds his thought-to-be-dead father, defeats Zamir, and wins the race. A closing title card assures the audience that the United States successfully built the satellite monitoring station, presumably establishing dominance and bringing about world peace.

To paraphrase my podcast co-host and dear friend Patrick Hamilton, Gymkata isn’t a good movie. But it might be a great movie.

It’s great for one very specific reason: all of the nonsense I’ve just described to you is played completely straight. Gymkata (a word that is never actually spoken out loud in the film) is meant to be a serious movie, with the only humor in it provided by the limp meant-to-be-flirty wisecracking between Jonathan and the princess, and the bumbling king of Parmistan. There’s no sense that anyone was treating the script, which appears to have been written inside a magazine cover while waiting for a dental appointment, with anything but the utmost respect. The ending is so triumphant one suspects the audience is meant to stand up and salute their televisions. 

Chuck Norris movies are entertaining in the same way: they’re invariably terrible, but their innate shittiness ends up being charming when you realize they were made with absolute sincerity. The same could be said for Charles Bronson, who gave no indication either in movies or in real life of even knowing what a joke was. When he kills a guy in Death Wish III by shooting a rocket launcher at him, you’re not supposed to howl with laughter, you’re supposed to gravely nod at the screen at another day of cleaning scum off the streets well done. Gymkata is the same: you’re not supposed to think the plot is as dumb as a shoe. You’re supposed to root for Jonathan, even though he consists of little more than a mullet and a smile, because he’s the hero. When he kicks a bunch of dudes in turbans and robes in the face, he’s demonstrating American strength against a foreign menace.

Somewhere in the early 90s (I blame Michael Bay), action movies suddenly became self-aware. Now there was a smug, ironic tone to them, and it began to feel as if the actors would stop in the middle of everything to turn to the audience and ask “Isn’t this the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen? I mean, come on!” I don’t want meta commentary on how stupid action movies are in an action movie, I already know that, that’s why they’re entertaining. I don’t need to be made to feel as if I’m above all that, because I know I definitely am not. I’ve watched Cobra at least a half-dozen times.

Now that SyFy and Asylum’s entire brands are deliberately low-budget, intentionally poorly written action and science fiction movies, the mid-budget action film is no longer fun. Now they’re just ninety minute smirks, where everything is deliberate and there are no hilarious accidents. The unexpected joy is sucked out of them. Rewatching Gymkata hit that sweet spot, where you’re not distracted by how much money was spent on a black hole of a plot. Here, it looks like most of the budget was spent on flying everyone to Yugoslavia, with the rest left over for scythes and torches. It’s a low budget, accidentally idiotic simple pleasure, and we’ll never see anything quite like it again.