Teen Boxer

I never would have guessed that a film would exist that fit quite nicely into the fabricated genre of “pseudo- kickboxing martial arts action comedy,” but here it is: Teen Boxer, a delightful mess of a film that now you too can own on DVD and revel in its sheer awfulness.

Teen Boxer, or Kickboxing Academy as it was titled when it was originally released in 1997, is a film about kickboxing that contains absolutely no kickboxing whatsoever. Director Richard Gabai apparently thought that multiple martial arts fight sequences could pass for kickboxing, and so it was. The questionable nature of the kickboxing is about as questionable as the film’s plot. Two rival kickboxing academies fight each other head-on in a competition that will leave only one of them standing, and that’s honestly about all there is to it.

There are other vague inklings of plot points scattered throughout the film, such as a burgeoning love story between two kick-boxers (one being Chyler Leigh, who would later go on to be on Grey’s Anatomy) and various training montages, but other than that, the majority of the film is essentially pointless and most of the scenes are simply there to extend the film’s runtime to make it feature-length. The love story aspect is particularly unusual, not because there is essentially no development or progression in the relationship whatsoever, but more so because the actor and the actress were apparently step-siblings in real life. Questionable? I’d certainly say so.

Not much can be found about this film on IMDB or other sources, but I’d like to assume that the majority of the actors used in this film were pulled off of the street and thrown onto a movie set with no prior experience. The child actors, in particular, are especially awful, as they tend to either deliver their lines via mumbling or exasperated screaming and spastic emotion. The adults aren’t too much better, as they are neither mumblers nor screamers; they tend to favor no emotion whatsoever in their performances.

[*SPOILER ALERT*]

The finale of Teen Boxer exhibits the absurdity of the entire film quite nicely. What ends up being a kickboxing tournament eventually turns into someone whipping out a machine gun and opening fire on the crowd of extras that were clearly assembled to watch this disaster take place. This comes pretty much out of nowhere and makes no sense, but then again, not much in this movie does to begin with! It fits quite nicely in with the unabashedly bizarre nature of this trainwreck. After it was all over, my friend whom I viewed it with turned to me and expressed that there was “no way in hell that this was meant to be taken seriously.” Sadly, I had to disagree with him. What was meant to be a humorous and oddly incestual kickboxing action comedy has somehow devolved into one of the biggest turkeys that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Fans of bad movies rejoice — you may have found your new favorite guilty pleasure.