Honor and Glory is about some kind of nuclear thing that has fallen into the hands of an evil banker, played by Undefeatable's John Miller. The only ones who can stop him are two sisters, Cynthia Rothrock and Donna Jason--until Miller's bodyguard, played by the great Chuck Jeffreys, defects over to their side, so now he's also one of the only ones who can stop miller. Are they successful?
This was a lot of fun. It's directed by Godfrey Ho (credited as "Godfrey Hall"), but it's more like Undefeatable than it is like his cobbled-together ninja flicks. When you don't have action, you have dialog that feels just unnatural enough to be fun enough to keep us from being bored; and then when we get the action, it delivers--plus we have fun moments, like when a Pepsi Machine in one scene has a visible logo, and in another there's black tape across it. When you see Cynthia Rothrock on the tin, and Godfrey Ho is directing, this is the movie you came for. In an age where we can never trust the cover to deliver what it purports to be selling, it's refreshing to be able to go back to 1993 and have some comfort food to remind you that things were once good. Bill Clinton as president, the Gin Blossoms on the radio, Arsenio Hall on late-night TV, and Cynthia Rothrock in a green leather jacket, blue cable-knit turtleneck sweater, and 49ers baseball cap kicking ass and taking names. God it was a wonderful time to be alive then.
Part of the reason why Rothrock's numbers stalled out in the upper 20s was I couldn't get my hands on movies like this for a good price. Now a lot of them (including this one) are on Prime, Tubi, or YouTube for streaming, which makes it a lot easier and allows me to get more of her films up. Getting her into the 30 Club was important, and something I probably should have made more of a priority when I first came back from hiatus, because she is the only woman in the DTVC Hall of Fame, and as such should have at least 30 movies reviewed, if not more. When we look at her CV, it's not just her as a DTV action star, it's a lot of films with her in the lead, and both Hong Kong films and US films; plus multiple DTV franchises of two or more movies that she's carrying. She's not just the greatest DTV woman action star of all time, she's one of the best DTV action stars of all time period, and one thing we're definitely going to do at the DTVC is take advantage of the fact that more of her films are available now and make getting more of those reviewed on this site a priority.
In their review of this, Ty and Brett call John Miller "a national treasure." I couldn't agree more. As great as he was as the hero in Undefeatable, he might be even better here as the baddie. Beyond the mean mugging you see above, he does all kinds of other great evil banker baddie stuff, like firing an older gentlemen that had worked for their bank for twenty-five years; or doing shirtless kung fu exercises to show off his muscles. Beyond this and Undefeatable, and a 20 episode run on Homicide, he didn't do much else in acting, which is too bad, because we could use more John Miller.
Rothrock's costar is played by Donna Jason, and she was great as well. Like John Miller, she hasn't done much beyond this film, and I think to some extent that shows how big Cynthia Rothrock's career has been, because we see a lot of women in action movies who are great but either only do a few movies like Donna Jason, or are like a Karen Shepherd or Cec Verrell where they have some memorable movies, but don't have the multiple franchises and prodigious CV that Rothrock has. And it's not just female costars. Look at names like Loren Avedon or Jeff Wincott that she's worked with. They're great as well, but have had nowhere near the career Rothrock's had. She's beyond just a DTVC Hall of Famer, she belongs in that further rarefied air of being now only the 6th actor/actress to have 30 or more movies reviewed. (The other five are Dolph, Daniels, Dudikoff, Wilson, and Lamas.)
This movie was also done by the guys at Rifftrax, and while they caught a lot of the good stuff in here that I had caught--like how Chuck Jeffreys above plays a famous bodyguard--I guess akin to a famous bouncer? One thing though that I didn't think as off that they caught was when Donna Jason's character is attacked by the knife-wielding daughter of a senator that Jason disgraced in a previous news article. I'm so mentally in the action movie mindset, that I also didn't see anything crazy about the senator's daughter attacking Jason with a knife, and then that being the end of it. As the Rifftrax guys rightly pointed out, this would have been the leading news story for weeks; and while crazy things like this happen and no longer matter in a Godfrey Ho (Hall) movie, I should be catching them as much as the Rifftrax guys are, but I've been so mentally affected by action movies that I was as fine with it as Ho was.
I think that was as good a moment to wrap this up on. This is available on Prime in both regular and Rifftrax versions. I suggest watching it first without the commentary, then see what they thought after. This is as fun as you'd expect a Godfrey Ho/Cynthia Rothrock movie to be.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105900
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