Hot Potato

Year releasted: 1976

by Nathan Rabin
October 3rd, 2001

Reprising his role as the afro-sporting protagonist of 1973's Black Belt Jones, Jim Kelly stars in Hot Potato as a scowling mercenary sent to rescue an American ambassador's daughter kidnapped by warlord Sam Hiona, whose use of a tiger den as a holding pen for his enemies violates both the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Convention. After rounding up colorfully named sidekicks Johnny Chicago (Geoffrey Binney) and gargantuan White Rhino (George Memmoli), Kelly heads to Thailand, where he and his chums innocently mistake middle-aged, conservatively dressed Thai special agent Irene Tsu for a woman of ill repute. Tsu soon proves she's a formidable martial artist in her own right by making quick work of a roving gang of hooligans, sending them crashing into a fan stand, a poorly constructed birdcage, and several other easy-to-collapse structures. But Kelly and company fail to realize that Hiona has ingeniously replaced the ambassador's daughter with a shady lookalike, and, after an elephant-back raid on Hiona's compound, Kelly and his posse unknowingly leave with the imposter. Despite inadvertently playing into the villain's sinister plans, the brave adventurers are still confronted and challenged at every turn, most prominently by a band of black-and-white-clad face-paint enthusiasts whose makeup and costume suggests an unholy cross between a pack of killer mimes and a lost division of the KISS Army. Meanwhile, Memmoli endures a series of indignities, including an encounter with an obese native whose curiosity about Memmoli's unusual physique prompts the latter to offer a heartfelt plea for "no faggy stuff," which inevitably leads to a mock-sumo contest. All of the team's hard work appears to be for naught when Hiona's ruse is discovered; shortly thereafter, the imposter dies a speedy death at the hands of Hiona's goons. After an appropriate period of mourning, Kelly and company head back to rescue the real hostage from the villain's lair, where, in a not-unexpected bit of irony, Kelly climactically flings Hiona into his own tiger den.