Review

  • This movie doesn't hold anything of interest to the average viewer. Back in the early 80s it had the fairly rare oddity of featuring a western woman as a martial arts protagonist. Nowadays it'll just be worthwhile to people who are fascinated by the awkward B-movie productions that bloomed together with the video tape market. Like most low budget movies of that time, Firecracker lacks good writing, editing, acting, fight choreography, camera operation and a director who understands the genre. The laughable scenario might intrigue fans of bad movies.

    The uncut version has a few scenes of explicit gore and sexploitation. I wouldn't consider them noteworthy except for the odd tonal mismatch to the rest of the movie. Especially the nude scenes raise a lot of questions regarding the plot and internal logic.

    Jillian Kesner's character could have been an early example of a strong female lead in an action movie, except that the producers probably demanded to balance her tough moments with weak ones. The result is a protagonist who appears to suffer from multiple personality disorder, seemingly fearless in most scenes, but helpless and scared when the script is asking for moments of sexual humiliation.

    Jillian's martial arts performances are only barely watchable if you have hardly any experience in the field. She didn't know what she was doing and it shows in every single stance and move. That considered, she's at least doing better than most pretty women cast in action movies at the time, but the more competent scenes are performed by her double, whom you'll recognize by the wig. Rey Malonzo adds a few decent fight scenes that are at least on par with the most average western martial arts movies of that era. His Bruce Lee imitation certainly isn't the worst. Unfortunately, they seemingly decided not to keep his voice in the fight scenes when they added the sound effects for punches, kicks, etc. Thus, we can't tell whether he also tried to imitate Bruce's cat calls.

    Speaking of sound, the synthesizer based soundtrack might be the most worthwhile feature of Firecracker.