When push comes to shove, Charles Bronson shoves back hard — a dildo up a pedo’s hindquarters, a $25,000 watch down a pimp’s throat — in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, his wide-release swan song as a leading man. Bronson plays Los Angeles vice cop Lt. Crowe, out to bust an underage prostitution ring run by the greasy Duke (Juan Fernandez, 2009’s The Collector) any way he can; per Cannon Films’ 1980s house rules, that means wanton acts of violence and unchecked police brutality.
In other words, see it!
The plot thickens with the addition of an Asian ingredient, as corporate climber Hiroshi Hada (James Pax, Invasion U.S.A.) and his family are transferred from Japan to L.A., whereupon one of his little girls (Kumiko Hayakawa) is kidnapped and “hired” by Duke. Ironically, days earlier on a public bus, Hada molests Crowe’s teen daughter (Amy Hathaway, Last Exit to Earth), who screams and exclaims, “Some Oriental guy touched my holy of holies!”
Bronson fans eager to see Crowe dish out some serious daddy revenge on Hada will be deeply disappointed, as Kinjite inexplicably abandons the matter altogether. The omission of Death Wish-style payback is all the more startling given Hada is portrayed negatively from the start: a salaryman who prefers the company of bargirls to his wife (Marion Kodama Yue, Troop Beverly Hills) because, as he informs her with robotic matter-of-factness, “Your sexual gifts are few and bitter.”
From frequent Bronson collaborator J. Lee Thompson (The Evil That Men Do), the film more than earns its reputation of being aggressively sleazy and possibly racist. Collectively, the icky bits — such as a not-yet-legal Nicole Eggert (The Haunting of Morella) in black panties that appear to be cut 3 feet high — become the movie’s star, as Bronson barely seems invested enough to show up and flash a badge. While exhibiting that Cannon touch, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is not among his most memorable, beyond keeping cult favorite Manos: The Hands of Fate company in the small realm of movies whose titles inadvertently translate themselves into redundancy. After this, Chuck continued the aging-cop roles, but mostly in network originals — you know, the kind that don’t open with a sex worker’s jar of Vaseline. —Rod Lott