Two decades before Sean Connery played a flamboyant Scotsman out to control the weather in The Avengers, his fellow James Bond-movie veterans George Lazenby and Harold "Oddjob" Sakata joined forces to ransom off a weather-control device in 1978's The Kill Factor. (Also known as Black Eliminator, Death Dimensions, or Freeze Bomb, among other alternate titles.) As the film opens, Sakata and his henchmen are overseeing a demonstration of the device, which boasts the impressive ability to cover anonymous extras with pounds of fake snow. Perturbed by Sakata's non-utilitarian plans for the invention, the scientist who created it hides the secret behind its terrible power on the person of his fetching assistant, who promptly escapes Sakata's grasp. The scientist isn't quite so lucky, and he drops dead, so corrupt police captain Lazenby assigns detective and karate instructor Jim Kelly to the case. As Sakata's henchmen desperately try to locate the assistant, a pair of shaggy, bearded, jean-jacket-wearing Rick Rubin lookalikes are dispatched to take care of Kelly. But the Enter The Dragon star quickly puts them in their place, delivering a vicious beatdown before suspending one hoodlum over the top of a tall building, demanding, "Who sent you, sucka?" The terrified goon eventually cooperates, but Kelly leaves him dangling, after irreverently admonishing him to "Hang in there, baby." Undeterred by the attempt on his life, Kelly heads to Las Vegas. Unable to reunite with his legendary Dragon co-star Bruce Lee, he does the next best thing, recruiting ass-kicker Myron Bruce Lee, a top candidate for cinema's Geekiest Bruce Lee-Derived Name award. Lee and Kelly dispatch armies of Sakata's goons, many of whom choose to fight the pair in the rarely successful one-at-a-time method employed by cinematic henchmen the world over. While in Vegas, Kelly also embarks on a fact-finding mission at a whorehouse, allowing Sakata's goons to brutally murder Kelly's busty fiancée after an extended shower scene. Though betrayed by Lazenby, Kelly fights Sakata and his main goon in a climactic battle, then shoots down Sakata's plane. In celebration, he ends the film with a freeze-framed karate kick, secure in the knowledge that he's done his part to preserve the safety and security of the blaxploited masses.
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