You haven’t seen Miami Connection until you’ve seen it with a crowd. Like all Great Bad Movies, this can bring a house down.
It’s a martial arts flick in which everyone has a black belt in bad acting. It’s a music film that never gets in tune. Its a shoot-’em-up movie that backfires. Despite its failures though, it is the finest film ever made that addresses the problem of ninja drug dealers in Orlando, Florida and how one band of 80s neon-rockers with a positive message and kung fu stage outfits can make a difference.
Also like all Great Bad Movies, it’s earnest as can be and fascinating beyond mere laughter at its trips and slips. Writer, producer and star Y.K. Kim went for broke on this independently made film. His only previous media credit was a book on Tae Kwon Do. Miami Connection was to be his movie debut and it was so jammed with the ingredients of a hit—breakneck action, a catchy theme song, fun at the beach, danger in the streets, a few breasts and a little pathos—that Kim felt sure that he had the sensation of 1987 on his hands.
Didn’t happen. Instead, it barely got out to theaters, its few reviews were hatchet jobs and it quickly disappeared, doomed to be as lost in the 80s as the film’s neon and mullets. Miami Connection didn’t make a connection in Miami or anywhere else. It wasn’t even a cult film. That would happen about twenty years later when the genre mavens at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX discovered it after one of their programmers, Zack Carlson, bought a vintage print of it for $50 on Ebay. The first night that the Drafthouse put it up on the big screen, they knew they had a lost treasure. From there, they got it into festivals and midnight slots in theaters, with an eventual home video release, fully authorized by Y.K. Kim who was dumbfounded that any of this was happening. He’d swept the film under the rug decades ago. Deep-digging movie fans though know that’s where some great stuff lies. Here’s one of the latest finds from the dark corners. It’s a little dusty, a little faded, but intact and dying to be loved.