Double Impact

It’s no secret that the neck snapping, nut crushing, roundhouse-to-the-face action flicks of the late 1980’s and early 90’s are low hanging fruit for us/me here at VHS of the Week. Having actually lived through the golden era of this genre, it’s still kind of hard to believe that millions of people once took these films seriously. They’re the Hair Metal of the cinema world! I have duly covered films by all of the great high kickers: Seagal, Van Damme, Norris…even Jeff Speakman, who was poised to be the breakout kung fu star of the summer of 1991 and who never opened another film again (as of this writing, anyway. I guess he’s still only 66). I’ve always gone easy on Jean-Claude Van Damme because he always seemed like a broken but decent dude who pitched his career into the shitter because he couldn’t keep his nose clean. At the height of his popularity the Muscles from Brussels was doing 10 grams of cocaine…A DAY!!!! Shit man…I did one gram of the booger sug with 10 dudes over a bachelor party weekend and had to sleep for a week! When I wrote about the film Timecop, in which JCVD looks visibly hungover, back in 2018 I noted that, unlike Aikido master and world’s shittiest human person Steven Seagal, Van Damme never got into trouble for being a sex pest, renounced his US citizenship to peddle propaganda for Vladamir Putin, or made some bizarre, porny-looking infomercial about drinking wine. As I sit here typing this in the spring of 2025, ALL of those things I just wrote about Seagal are now also true about Van Damme (well..not the wine video. Belgium isn’t exactly known for its vino, right?). Van Damme was recently charged with trafficking Romanian sex workers…so that ain’t good. The political stuff is a little fuzzy but he was apparently maybe paid by the Trump administration to help decimate USAID abroad. Just LAST WEEK he posted a video asking Putin to “become an ambassador for peace based on love and sport, recalling their first meetings”...whatever the fuck that means (maybe that he’s still sniffing gak?). But wait! According to his Wikipedia page he’s really into the preservation of local flora and fauna. SEE! Not all bad! Anyway, at the outset of the 1990’s Van Damme’s amphetamine-induced fever dreams were so intense he started to believe that the only way to quench the moviegoing public’s insatiable thirst for all things JCVD was to make a film where he plays not one but TWO characters! Not some Nutty Professor shit either–a film where Van Damme would play both leads. Apparently he was inspired by Jeremy Irons pulling double duty in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and decided he would write and produce a film where he would play two diametrically different characters that would allow him to flex his acting chops. Let’s put aside the fact that Irons is an academy award winning titan of the craft who would go on to play Hans Gruber’ssssssses brother Simon Peter Gruber and Van Damme can't act his way out of a french fry. Someone at Columbia Pictures heard this double the Van Damme double the fun pitch and said “yes ok here is 16 million dollars,” sounded the air horn, and started blasting I Got The Power by Snap.

The film we are here to talk about today is called Double Impact and it goes a little something like this: We open at a Hong Kong tunnel dedication ceremony in the 1960’s. This is back when HK was still under British rule, right (note: I thought Hong Kong was in China until I was like 38) so there’s a bunch of posh talkin’ colonizers talkin’ about how they just dropped $200 mil on said tunnel. I see here in my notes I wrote “find out if true” but I never bothered. I’m sure it isn’t…right? Or there’s a tunnel but it is not owned by fictional British characters. The tunnel was built by these white cats Paul Wagner and Nigel Griffiths in conjunction with a Triad gangster named Zhang, which is the Cantonese word for “awesome.” Nigel congratulates Paul on a job well done and sends him home with his wife and baby twins, Chad and Alex. We also meet Paul’s loyal valet/security guard Frank, who is played by a dude named Geoffrey Lewis who starred in a bunch of Clint Eastwood movies but only the ones with chimpanzees in them. Frank is a mustachioed American southerner who won’t shut the fuck up about his experiences in ‘Nam. (Raises Hand) If this movie takes place in 1967 then shouldn’t Frank be, you know, in Vietnam?? I guess he’s got some time.

As the Wagners make their way to their compound, Paul stays in touch with Frank via walkie talkie to make sure there are no gangs of kung fu fighting, shotgun wielding bad guys following them. How they are able to converse on walkie talkies from long distances in the late 60’s we do not know. Paul tells Frank he can knock off and go chow some chow aaaaand that’s when the bad guys start to give chase. He tries to cancel Frank’s night off but dude is already 10 Tsingtao’s deep. Paul simply pulls into his driveway and hops out of the car like a sitting duck. He’s outnumbered like 35 to 1 (the babies don’t count…yet). Paul fires off a few rounds with his snub nose but ends up taking about 12 rounds to the chest. He dies. Mrs Wagner falls out of the car and pleads for her life but nah–they blow her brains all over the driveway like warm oatmeal. They’re totally gonna 86 the babies and their nanny too but Frank shows up and starts blowing dudes away right, left, and center. The meanest looking bad guy Moon, who is totally Chong Li from Bloodsport, tries to fire into the backseat but Frank shoots him in the eye, which has gotta hurt like a sonafabitch. The nanny high tails it into the brush while Frank splits with the other babe. It’s a shit poor ambush, you ask me. How hard can it be for a Triad gang rolling deep to massacre one pesky family?? The bad guys retreat and OH SHIT…it was Nigel behind all this dirty work. A doublecross!! I wonder if those babies are gonna grow up and have something to say about it! The nanny tosses her baby on the steps of a French nunnery like the world's most unwelcome Amazon package. Frank brings his stinky bundler to the states which is where we’ll pick things up in the next paragraph.

We flash forward to Los Angeles, CA in the year 1991. Chad has grown into the body of a fucking addonis, y’all. Cut from marble with an ass you can bounce a quarter off of (note: this is something that my buddy Matt always said when we were growing up…not about Jean-Claude Van Damme, of course. I would assume you could bounce a quarter off of most asses. Maybe I’ll call him and ask what he meant by that). Anyway, dude has ass for days….fuckin’ thighs like oak tree trunks. He’s wearing the tightest bulging lycra pants on the market with a women’s tank top. He’s quite a sight. When we met Chad he’s demonstrating how he can do a split with ease to a room of horny housewives in his hybrid massage parlor/dojo. The spot is owned by “Uncle” Frank, who has just received word that the Hong Kong bad guys are still out there bad guy-ing it up. He tells Chad that he needs to grab his passport and pack for HK t-t-t-t-today, junior! Chad is like “bro, I have like 50 ladies to sex…I’m not going to no Hong Kong” but Frank says they’re gonna go over and franchise their dojo and open those motherfuckeres all up and down the island. Because if there’s one thing the good people of Hong Kong want it’s karate centers run by a white dude with a French accent and some shitkicker from Tuscaloosa. They board the plane together.

When they arrive, they take an Uber straight to the nearest MahJong parlor. My man Chad is STYLIN’--white high tops with white socks…nut hugging salmon colored shorts. Dude looks like he fell out of a Virginia Slims ad. They aren’t on the scene but two minutes before a comely blonde approaches and asks Chad to follow her to the back room. There, she unbuttons his shorts and grabs his junk. He tells her he has a BIG surprise for her. What’s that–more dick? Just as she’s starting to compliment him on his silk underwear, Chad feels a tap on his shoulder. It’s…HIMSELF!! And the other him headbutts himself into unconsciousness. Right…so obviously this is Alex, the other twin…also played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. Except instead of being a hella chill Angeleano, this Alex is an aggro drug smuggler with slicked back hair and a leather jacket and a perma cigar and shit. I think he’s also trying to sound like he doesn’t have an accent? Or has a different accent?? Whatever he’s trying to do…it does not work. When Chad comes to, Frank is like “obviously you guys are brothers and also the same actor” but Alex is not having it. He calls Chad the F-word…and I don’t mean “French-speaking person.” I’m going make an unresearched claim that they weren’t able to put two of the same actor on screen at the same time until the 1988 Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin comedy Big Business came along. Really pionering, that film. It’s like Memento but not really entertaining in any way. This DOES mean that I will spend the rest of the movie wishing that Chad/Alex was being played by either Bette Midler or Lily Tomlin instead. Can you imagine old Bette all “HIYA!!!!”...signing tunes and shit. I waited on her once, Bette Midler. She was nice enough.

Right so it turns out the blonde is Alex’s girlfriend Danielle, who naturally mistook Chad for Alex as he is literally the same person but without slicked back hair (“it’s not slicked back…it’s PULLED back”). Frank sits everyone down and lays out the plot line: the doublecross yada yada. He says that the brothers are the natural owners of the tunnel and should take back what belongs to them. That’s nice…fuck are they gonna do with a TUNNEL?? Also–do human people own tunnels? Here in Boston we have that Ted Williams tunnel but I’m pretty sure the dead baseball player wasn’t out front collecting tolls and shit. There’s a random reference to Donald Trump in the scene, who was a bankrupt casino owner at the time and not the 34 times convinced, pants shitting, golf cheating, narcoleptic, anus mouthed, adjudicated rapist and twice elected president of the United States. So it’s pretty obvious the brothers need to start making plans for Nigel (if you understand that reference please pay yourself $5). They’ll kill all of the bad guys leading up to some showdowns with the baddest baddies…who will die most gruesomely. It’s a tried and true formula. It would make for a real snappy 80 minute movie. Problem with this one is that there are 80 minutes plus 30 more, for a brain melting total of 110 minutes. That’s not exactly Killer of the Flower Moon…but it certainly feels like it. There’s just not much meat here. JCVD isn’t exactly Billy Goldman with the pen and paper. He neglected to include things like humor and suspense. This flick makes Out for Justice (a tidy 91 minutes!) look like Goodfellas. This film also came out in the summer of T2 and Point Break (and the aforementioned Jeff Speakman vehicle The Perfect Weapon). Y’all needed to do better, Van Damme(s)!

What else happens? Kind of a lot I guess. Alex takes Chad for a boat ride but it ain’t for catching bluegills and tommycocks. Alex is a big time smuggler of Mercedes Benzzzzes….with trunks full of hooch and smokes! He’s kind of working for Zhang…it’s not terribly clear. Some dudes show up on the boat and start some shit and the brothers get to show off their eerily similar karate moves for the first of approximately one grillion times. We also learn that Moon has recovered from his eye shooting and is still out there gangstering and has somehow not aged a single day in the last 25 years! They could've at least greyed the dude's temples or something! Alex still has doubts that Zhang had his parents murdered but then he has Chad kidnapped, Zhang does, thinking that he’s Alex. They try to kill him but Chad kicks 75 dudes in the balls and snaps a baker's dozen worth of necks. When one of the Triad gangsters fails to subdue Chad, Moon grabs him and strangled him to death. His own bad guy!! That eye bullet must’ve taken out part of his brain too cuz that shit is nutz! They eventually get the jump on Chad and smash his head into the side of a shipping container about 33 times, putting him in a coma for 6 months. Just kidding…he’s totally fine. Just a small bruise above his eye! When Alex finds out about this beating he decides his on team takedown and will immediately start participating in training montages ahead of the inevitable showdown with Zhang, Moon, and whomever else. Also–it’s revealed that Danielle works as an admin in Nigel’s office so Alex pressures her to dig up irrefutable proof of her bosses malfeasance. So there’s that.

Frank and the twins decamp for an abandoned hotel movie set on an island that looks like it's 3 miles from the mainland to do pushups and shore up their weaponry. “I’ve seen worse in ‘Nam,” Frank says. I’m sure you have, old buddy. My interest in this movie starts to wane precipitously. I start to think about how there aren’t a lot of actual twins who became action stars. I guess there were those Barbarian Brothers. What about that band Nelson with Ricky Nelson’s handsome blonde sons? I bet they could have crossed over into films. Anyway, there’s a super long piece where the brothers set out to blow up Zhang’s drug lab…so that’s what they do. They set off a bomb and suddenly there’s coke blowing through the air and straight up Jean-Claude Van Damme’s nose(s). Danielle tries to rifle through files from work but is intercepted by the sexually menacing, black leather-clad receptionist Kara, who is totally 5 time Ms Universe winner Cory Everson (I looked it up). She’s built like a brick shithouse, this lady!

Next the twins decide they’re gonna bomb the annual meeting of the gangsters at the Climax Club (note: ew). The whole crew…Moon, Zhang, Nigel McBritishington…are all in attendance to celebrate the purchase of a new freighter to help ship more fenty to the USA. Someone has even made a giant cake shaped like their new boat for the occasion. Boat cake. They manage to detonate the bombs but they don’t do squat. It’s like they put some firecrackers, jumping jacks, and bottle rockets in a box and hoped for the best. No one dies but there’s lots of hand and gunplay. At one point Alex comes across a glass of whiskey, chugs it, and squeezes the glass until it shattres in his bare fucking hand! That’s a boss move…not gonna lie. I’m not a man who takes shots very often..but next time I do I’m smashing the glass! Oh…and now the bad guys know that there are two Van Dammes in this movie…kind of like how there were two Screwfaces in Marked for Death except not at all. I had kind of forgotten myself as there really isn’t anything to distinguish these two performances (besides the hair). If JCVD thought this was the movie that would display his formidable acting chops for the world to see he, umm, did not succeed.

The next day Danielle is outed for spying on her bosses and narrowly escapes from the office. She calls Alex for help (they have phones??) but he’s out foraging for berries so she gets Chad on the line, who promises to rush to the mainland and secret her back to safety. He rescues her and they steal a boat back to Secret Training Island. Here’s where things go completely shithouse. When Alex finds out that Chad is off rescuing Danielle, his natural inclination is to nervously patrol the shoreline waiting for their return. Just kidding! He starts chugging Johnnie Walker Black straight from the bottle, getting completely cocked. He stumbles around punching out walls and screaming “motherfucker!!!” He thinks that Chad and Danielle are somehow having sex on their rescue boat…and starts to, I guess, fantasize about it. So there’s a SUPER GRAPHIC sex scene where you see all of the boobs in butts…that ISN’T ACTUALLY HAPPENING!!! Of all of the weird excuses to include a sex scene in a movie this one might be the weirdest. Chad and Danielle arrive back all chipper and chaste but Alex still thinks what he thinks so he punches Danielle in the phase (bro) and beats the shit out of his own brother. That’s right–there’s a scene where JCVD fights himself. They filmed it in the way way dark though so you can’t really tell which one is the stunt double I guess. Alex uses the F word again. Chad said he doesn’t need a tunnel anyway and is gonna fly back to LA to eat chicken chinois salads and ball exercise ladies.

Before Chad can split the secret island gets invaded and Frank and Danielle are kidnapped, setting up the inevitable climax we’ve been waiting for for the last 30 hours (I wrote TOO LONG in my notes at least 3 times). The whole cast assembles on the special new floating barge to hash it all out. Zhang has Danielle and Frank tied up in a boiler room. They keep torturing Frank by spraying hot steam into his face. Not necessarily worse than anything that happened to him in ‘Nam probably. The brothers invade. Alex has a one on one fight scene with a random bad guy that looks like it was filmed in the ether. I think the guy has a knife or something? I completely stopped watching during this scene. Sorry doodz. Chad pulls the short straw and has to take on one-eyed Moon, who promptly rips his shirt off and FLEXES! This one moment here is worth the price of admission! Or maybe just look up a 10 second clip on YouTube, Moon keeps deadlifting these giant barrels and throwing them at Chad…who at one point jumps about 10 feet into the air. They slap around a little but then Moon accidentally backs into an exposed fuse box and electrocutes himself to death. It’s a cheap win for Chad…but..gruesome death #1 is in the books. Alex does battle with Zhang, who promises him untold riches if he kills his brother and signs up with the Zhang Org. Alex puts Zhang’s hand into some grinding gears, turning it into roast beef. He pleads some more. Alex puts the rest of Zhang in the grinder and then throws him from a 10 story crane. 86 Zhang. So that leaves Nigel Griffiths, who gets crushed to death by a falling shipping container.

So now all of the bad guys are dead and Rank and Danielle have been rescued. I assume they’re gonna meet up and talk about tunnel ownership logistics and squash their brother beef but NOPE! Seconds after the final kill is registered one of the Van Dammes looks into the camera, flashes the A-OK symbol…freeze frame…the movie ENDS! After all sitting through all of that we don’t even get dessert?? Come ahhhn! Apparently they’ve been trying to make a sequel for the last 34 years but have not been able to because, according to director Sheldon Letich, the first film was “too successful.” I guess we’ll never know. Or…JCVD is only 66 right now. I guess if he doesn’t go to jail they could maybe work something out. The end

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