Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter K

K9 (1989, James Belushi) A cop chasing a drug lord has his car shot to pieces but his old buddy, who made lieutenant before him, won't give him another car unless he takes a partner. Officer Dooley of San Diego PD takes Freddy, who set him up for the hit, for a jog, handcuffed to an old wreck of a car, to get some info.
Dooley trashes a rental car to break up a siege and get the loan of Jerry Lee, a psycho drug dog. Round 1 with the drug lord is a flop but the dog is great for intimidating wiseguys. The drug lord tells Freddy to take out Dooley and do it right this time. The dog leads Dooley on a grand chase, which rips off Bullitt (q.v.) and the suspect takes a high dive off a building.
The dog finds that the drug stash Dooley is after is in a top-end car so his girlfriend is snatched. Dooley invades the drug lord's dinner party and makes a nuisance of himself. The lieutenant won't go along with Dooley's plan, so he has to improvise. The dog takes one for the team and Dooley blows the drug lord away. Then he rushes the dog to a hospital and makes the ER team remove the bullet. Then everyone gets a trip to Vegas.

The Keeper (2009, Steven Seagal) At a bust, there's $2M in cash floating around, so Roland's partner shoots him and decamps with the dosh. But Roland makes it to hospital and borrows a ladyfriend's gun to shoot his partner when the guy turns up to kill him. Then he battles back to fitness, only to get compulsory retirement.
Nikita Connor is almost kidnapped, so her dad, an ex-cop, flies Roland to Texas to be her bodyguard. He has a run-in with the local hoods right away. Connor has oil money and an enemy in his organization. Could it be Mason, Nikita's coke-snorting, cheating, boxer boyfriend? Croft, a bad guy, is intimidating Mason and he helps with a successful kidnapping. The dumb cops bust the bodyguard, of course.
Connor bought land from Croft, and found uranium on it when the oil ran out. Croft wants the land back plus $5M. A big battle at the ransom payment. The cops prevent Connor from killing Croft but Roland gets to wreck the boyfriend.

Kickboxer (1989) features Jean Claud van Damme, a.k.a. the Muscles from Brussels, as Kurt, the kid brother of Eric The Eliminator, a kick boxing 'world champion' who thinks he's the bee's knees. But when he goes to Bangkok to fight Tiger Ton Po, he run into a guy who's strong enough to demolish buildings unaided. Ton cynically breaks Eric's spine, the promoter's stooges dump him in the street on a stretcher and he ends up in a wheelchair.
   So Kurt goes in search of a Mu Tai master, who takes him on as a pupil after Kurt roughs up the local protection racketeers when they arrive to extort cash from the master's niece. Lots of tough training, some of it under water, and Kurt proves himself by kicking the fu*k out of a small palm tree.
   The master tests him via a drunken brawl in a local club then he has his first proper match. Eric gets cold feet but Kurt insists he's taking on the Tiger. Bad guys kidnap the niece, who is raped by Ton. Then Ton's manager borrows $1M from the local warlord to bet on his man, and had Eric kidnapped.
   The master's dog is knifed but survives. Kurt and Ton do battle in the traditional style, with broken glass stuck to their hand-wrappings, while the master retrieves Eric. Ton is then vanquished and his manager gets a boot in the chops.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) is Quentin Tarantino's 4th film and a self-indulgent assemblage of the same sort of material as its contemporary, Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The central character was left for dead at a massacre at her wedding. Her unborn daughter was killed but she survived somehow, waking up in hospital after a 4-year coma. Then she set off on a quest for revenge against the squad of assassins.
She had a list of 5 names, the last of which was the mysterious Bill, who doesn't appear in the first part. The film is divided into chapters dealing with background, plot and revenge killings, and the grand finale is a long campaign to take out a Yakuza queen, who has a vast army of toy boys with Samurai swords, all of whom need slaying before the bad gal can be taken out. The rest of the list, including Bill presumably, follows in Vol. 2.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) is a daft horror spoof. It's Friday night in an American backwater and a shooting star lands. The farmer who owns the field rushes to the landing site, finds a circus tent and falls foul of a Klown with a zap gun. Two college kids, Debbie & Mike, arrive next and find that the tent is huge inside. They escape the Klowns but the local cops won't believe their story.
The Klowns are putting the townsfolk in cocoons. Officer Dave, who was dumped by Debbie, checks out their story and finds a lot of empty cars in Lovers' Lane. He finds out that the threat is real but Officer Mooney, back at the police station, doesn't want to know. But a Klown visits the jailhouse. Dave finds that shooting a Klown's red nose makes it explode.
Debbie is beset by mini-monsters in her bathroom and captured. The aliens take over the amusement park. Dave, Mike and his 2 daft pals go after Debbie. Lots of fun inside the alien spaceship, and they all get out alive after Dave pops the nose of the giant boss Klown. But all the cocooned townsfolk stored in the spaceship are written off when it explodes.

The Killer Elite (1975) James Caan plays an undercover agent called Mike Locken. He works for a private company used by the CIA. While Locken and his partner, George Hanson (Robert Duval), are looking after a defector, Hanson shoots the guy in the head and cripples Locken by elbow- and knee-capping him. Lots of rehabilitation & fooling around with his nurse for Mike, but his old boss, Cal Collis, says there's no way the Agency will employ him again.
   Then there's a shoot-out at San Francisco airport and the CIA wants a Chinese politician kept alive until he leaves the country. Both Japanese ninjas & Hanson have been hired to take out Mr. Chung. Collis gives Mike the job of sorting out Hanson and he recruits 2 helpers. Collis is also in cahoots with Hanson.
   Locken & Co. go to pick up Chung and his party in a taxi with a bomb under it! There's a shoot-out, a chase by the cops then Mack, the driver finds the bomb. A motorcycle cop pokes his nose in and he is given the job of getting rid of the bomb. Chung's stupid daughter goes walkabout at the dockside hideout and Hanson grabs her. Hanson tells Mike that Collis is bent just before he is shot.
   The ninjas arrive and Collis tries to bribe Mike, so he gives his ex-boss the elbow- and knee-cap treatment. Chung insists on picking up a sword and fighting the bloke who wants him dead. The head of the agency tries to give Collis's job to Mike, but he takes the bribe money out of Collis's jacket and says he's quitting.

Killer Elite (2012) Boom! Ambush, shooting, murder. One of the assassins, Danny, doesn't kill the kid in the car and quits the business. A year later, he has to go on a mission or his mate Hunter is a dead man. A rich Arab wants some SAS men killed for killing 3 of his sons in Oman. An attempt to break Hunter out of the desert prison flops.
Danny goes to Paris, then does some tunnel-lurking in Oman. An SAS guy is murdered after Danny chickens out. In London, he's spotted but gets away. Another murder on an SAS exercise. More mayhem and murder on the roads. Danny think's he's finished but he's told he murdered the wrong guy. There's another man to murder or his girlfriend gets it.
Danny is bagged after a failed murder attempt. Then he finds himself between an SAS guy (who is trying to protect his men) and a James Bond from SIS. Danny's Aussie contact is warned off with a bullet in the leg. The Sheikh gets a knife between his ribs. And Danny and the SAS guy reach a stand-off.

Killer Mountain (2011) 1954: climbers in trouble on a mountain in Nepal. Chomp! In the present day, the retired climber Donovan was recruited to do a rescue 24,000 feet up on a forbidden peak. He told the client to get Kate, the best active climber, but she said she was leading the expedition that needed the rescue.
   The Sherpas were reluctant and the rescue party had to have shots of dodgy blue stuff against altitude sickness. The client kept lying about the expedition. There was no one at the 20,000 feet base camp. Tyler, the client's son, was up to no good. There was a body dripping blood into one of the tent-huts! Ripped apart, said Nina, the lady doctor.
   The helicopter pilot ignored orders to return and crashed when he tried to rescue Kate. There was a huge bug and lots of little ones scuttling about on the mountain. The original expedition had blown a hole into the mountain and let the bugs out. Tyler told Donovan about the British explorer, who had found the bugs in 1954 at a Nepalese Shangri-La. Then the bugs attacked. Chomp! No Nina.
   Tyler's father had brain cancer and he was hoping to find the ultimate cure buried in the mountains. The soldiers were also after it. Donovan rescued Kate from the wreck of the helicopter. Tyler found that bug blood had amazing healing properties. Then he was eaten by little bugs. Donovan blew up a lot of big ones. He and Kate saw the Nepalese soldiers murder the client's staff. Then the monsters killed the soldiers and Donovan set fire to them.

The Killing Game (2011) Eve Duncan, a forensic sculptor freelancing for the police, goes to see a condemned killer to find out where he buried her daughter. He won't talk. 10 years later, the Feds find some bodies and someone phones Eve, pretending to be the dead killer. He threatens Jane, a 10-year-old girl in foster care, and kills her foster mother.
The nutter gives Eve 24 hours to take the girl into her custody. Mark, a reporter after Eve's story, helps her. She has to admit to the Atlanta PD detective on the case, Joe, what she has done. Joe catches up with Eve and the nutter continues to play mind games.
Joe nearly gets himself killed and that really upsets Eve. Gulp! Mark is the crazy killer; he met the dead serial killer in goal as a profiler. So he's zapped, and Eve ends up with Jane and Joe.

Kill Switch (2008) is a daft epic written by and starring Steven Seagal as tough Memphis homicide dick Jacob Stillwell. He beats the customers up to get confessions and tossed them out of a window when he's finished with them. He's on the trail of a serial killer and haunted by the memory of the murder of a friend when he was a kid.
   The killer beats a bloke to death then takes out a junkie hooker. Our hero gets into a serious bar fight and dishes out instant dentistry. It turns into a gun-fight outside as an Agent Miller of the FBI is put on the serial killer case. She gets to view a body in the morgue then beat up a stroppy guy with a knife.
   Stillwell breaks the mad killer's code but his messages make no sense. Stillwell kills a car but his suspect gets away on foot. No one man could carry the number of rounds of ammo blasted off by Stillwell before the suspect eventually eludes him. The lab confirms that the suspect is the mad killer.
   Jake catches up with the killer and wrecks a bar with him and hammers him to a pulp. Miller decides Jake killed one of the women and blamed it on the serial killer as the perfect crime! Meanwhile, Jake is off beating up the guy who killed his childhood pal. Then he splits to shag his Cajun girlfriend.

King Arthur (2004) takes the story back to its Roman roots. The Romans were getting out of Britain and the natives were making sure some of the loot stayed there. Arthur and his knights saved a Roman bishop from Merlin's Picts from North of the wall. Arthur just wanted to get back to Rome after 15 years in Britain. A round table, which had no head for him to sit at, gave the bishop the hump. So he gave the knights a suicide mission on the day of their discharge: save the Pope's favourite god-son from the Saxons, who were invading Scotland.
Arthur had to sort out a bolshy, arrogant bishop with a torture chamber, from which he rescued Guinevere. Merlin wanted Arthur to defeat the Saxons for him. A battle on the ice? How Alexandr Nevskiy! Back in England, the knights rejected their freedom scrolls. Then the Saxons turned jup at Arthur's fort on Hadrian's Wall, looking for a rumble.
Lots of smoke. Lots of arrows from the Picts and fire traps for gangs of Saxons yelling 'Zathros!', and catapults hurling Greek fire. Both sides took a hell of a licking but the Saxons were defeated and suddenly, it was King Arthur at Stonehenge.

The Kingdom (2007) Saudia Arabia has lots of oil and Wahabi terrorists. A group of them attack a US base. The Saudi police sergeant who shoots the ones who didn't explode is beaten up by the regime. The FBI sends a team to investigate, and the sergeant is assigned to them. The Yanks are stripped of their weapons and locked up in a steel box 'for their safety'. Welcome to Saudi, guys!
   The Feds can't look at the crime scene and the Saudis haven't bothered to interview witnesses. The ones the Feds talk to either saw nothing or they blame the Saudi police because the attackers were wearing police uniforms. The Saudis are also destroying all forensic at the crime scene.
   The Feds talk a prince into putting someone better in charge of the investigation. A small cluster of BGs is bagged; and that's turned into a major triumph and job done by the State Department. On the way to the airport, the Feds are ambushed and one of them is kidnapped. Cue a crazy car chase and a huge shoot-up.
   Abu Hamza al-Masri, the boss terrorist, and some of his family are exterminated. "I totally want to kill them all," said the captured Fed when his execution video was interrupted. Which is what Abu Hamza told his granddaughter just before he croaked.

King Kobra (1998) is a 2-star sciffy creature-feature. A mad scientist makes a cross between a king cobra and a rattlesnake by genetic engineering, and an even madder assistant blows up the lab and releases the snake. Then we are into the Jaws plot with the snake menacing a small town and the mayor refusing to call off a lager festival. The snake is about 30 feet long and really fat for its length. It rampages around, zapping good old boys and the sheriff and his deputy. Then it comes up against a mad Jap, who won't let the mad scientist shoot the snake.
The mad Jap believes that he can catch the giant snake using scaled up snake-handling tongs. But he forgets that he needs to scale himself up, too, to have the strength to operate the tongs. So the snake gets him. Then the town's doctor dives into a tube and goes scuttling through it and the snake follows. This is a 20-foot tube which seemed to be about 200 feet long inside as far as the 30-foot snake is concerned. The snake is locked in the tube, gassed and exterminated. Hooray!

King Kong versus Godzilla (1962) starts with a fiendish Japanese pharmaceutical company kidnapping King Kong from his island to boost their TV ratings and Godzilla emerging from a disintegrating iceberg and heading for Japan, where its species lived 90-120 million years ago. Kong's Pacific island is at the mercy of a giant octopus but he soon sees the creature off when it tries to get at his supply of tranquillizing berry juice.
The Japanese navy tries to stop the pharmaceutical company from landing Kong but he wakes up and escapes from his raft, even after it is blown up. The 'experts' reckon Kong and Godzilla will be natural enemies and they do set about each other eventually. In the end, they fall into the sea, locked in mortal combat. Kong reappears and swims back to his island. No sign of Godzilla, though.

King of the Lost World (2005) is a Z-movie, in which Bruce Boxleitner of Babylon 5 fame plays a Dr. Challenger. A plane crashes in the wilds of the Amazon basin and the survivors split into 2 groups. One group goes in search of the cockpit and a radio. They meet a giant spider and find another wreck; the first of many. Then they encounter a killer plant and a dead dragon in a man-made trap.
There's a giant-footprint moment and Portuguese-speaking cavepeople grab the survivors to sacrifice them to the flying dragons. Dr. Challenger announces that he was sent to disarm a nuclear weapon on an earlier crashed plane.
There's a son of King Kong floating around, looking more like a huge chimp or a man-ape than a gorilla, and some jet fighters arrived, fly round 'Kong' a bit and crash. Kong chases a bunch of escapers, Dr. Challenger is fatally injured by a demented cavewoman at his plane crash but he gives the detonator to another guy and exploding the nuke takes out all the monsters. A truly dreadful film!

King Solomon's Mines (1985, Richard Chamberlain, Herbert Lom) is H. Rider Haggard's story redone as an Indianabanana Jones rip-off. A murderous Turkish wog and an evil German officer are holding a professor prisoner to force him to do a translation. The professor's daughter, Jesse, has hired Alan Quarterpast to find him. Jesse has a talent for getting into trouble.
   Dad has a map to King Solomon's mines. Quarterpast causes havoc among the Germans. and everyone ends up on the same train. Jesse, of course, gets herself captured, so dad talks. Jesse does her best to screw up stealing a plane, and when it crashes, she and QP find themselves surrounded by hostile natives.
   Where did cannibals get a pot 20-feet high? The upside-downies help our heroes to escape from the cannibals and lions. Then they run into Gagoul and the crocodile pit. Their servant reveals himself as Twala, the tribe's rightful ruler. The Jairmans attack. Everyone into the mine.
   Our heroes find the diamonds. The head Jairman blows up Gagoul's death trap. She sets off the volcano and a monster gets the Jairman. Our heroes escape with 2 huge diamonds.

Kiss of Death (1995) Ex-con Jimmy takes a dodgy driving job, and he is shot in the hand by a bullet which hits a cop (Samuel L. Jackson). He goes to gaol, his wife turns to drink, she has to work for a cousin of Jimmy's who's cheating her, and she drives under a truck while drunk. So Jimmy does a deal with the DA and makes his cousin look like a snitch. So Little Junior Brown whacks him.
3 years later, the DA sends Jimmy after Little Jr. under the control of Calvin, the cop who was shot earlier. Junior whack Omar, who turns out to be a Federal agent. Junior is arrested with violence, he proves to Jimmy that he can grab Jimmy's young daughter whenever he wants, and his lawyer outwits the Feds.
Calvin stops Jimmy when he goes after Junior with a gun. The DA is getting a Federal judgeship out of the deal over Junior, which involved destroying evidence which Jimmy had collected. Calvin turns up late when Jimmy confronts Junior in his club but Jimmy is wearing a wire and Junior admitted again that he had killed Omar. So Jimmy uses the tape to blackmail the DA into prosecuting Junior under the threat of exposure in the news media.

Kiss of the Dragon (2001) stars Jet Li as a Liu, a Chinese cop, who is sent to Paris on a drug job and sees the Chinese suspect killed by a drug-crazed hooker run by by Inspector Richard, a bent but highly decorated French cop. Liu strolls off with a compromising surveillance tape when Richard tries to frames him for the murder. Richard and gets the job of tracking Liu down. He blows up most of Liu's hotel and his minions shoot up a fair bit of it.
Liu holes up with his contact (Burt Kwouk), who provides a base for visiting Chinese cops. The next battle wrecks the shop, and writes off poor old Burt. The bad guys seem to be able to get away with all sorts of mayhem and killing any number of people in public. There are massacres in a road tunnel and on a cruise ship on the Seine.
Liu hooks up with Jessica (Bridget Fonda), a hooker who works for Richard because he has kidnapped her daughter. The hooker was at the murder and she does a deal; rescue her daughter and she'll help Liu to clear his name. Liu almost gets her killed in an ambush when they go looking for the daughter. Liu wrecks Richard's headquarters, gives the inspector the Kiss of the Dragon – Death by Acupuncture – and Jessica wakes up in hospital to find her daughter there.

Knight & Day (2010, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz) Roy, the rogue spy, tries but fails to get June bumped off a nearly empty flight to Boston because everyone else wants to kill him. He kills everyone aboard (except June), including the pilots, and lands on a road then a field at night. CIA goons drag June away from preparations for her sister's wedding. Mayhem on the highway, then Roy joins in. June goes back to her fireman ex-boyfriend to get away from him. Doesn't work.
   Roy has a prototype of an AA-size battery which never runs out and can power a city. (Yeah, right!) He reckons he's been set up to look like a rogue to his CIA boss. Roy goes after Simon, the inventor. June is drugged again and ends up on a tropical island in the Azores. Next stop, after a drone shoots the island up, the Alps and mayhem on a train.
   The CIA boss tells June that Roy has been using her and he plans to sell the battery to an arms dealer. Roy goes off a building into a river at night with the battery. Is he dead? Of course not. The bad guys grab Simon. June bamboozles them. Roy rejoins her.
   Surprise! The battery is unstable and blows up the bad guy in his helicopter. Simon doesn't make it. Roy is shot up a bit so June takes her turn to drug him to get Roy out of the hospital before the CIA can kill him. Then off they go on a trip to Cape Horn overland in the car her dad rebuilt and she finished.

Knock Off (1998, Jean Claude van Damme) It's 1997, the British are about to hand Hong Kong back to China, the Russians have something explosive, the Muscles from Brussels is Mr. Ray of the Hong Kong rag trade, and someone has been putting cheap knock-offs in the shipments of jeans which Ray sends to the United States. He's caught between the cops and the KGB, and a woman from the US jeans company arrives to fix his wagon.
Tommy, Ray's partner, turns out to be a CIA agent. The cops try to bust the factory of Eddy Wang, knock-off merchant and Ray's mate, but it blows up. The CIA is after Russian microbombs the size of coin-cell batteries. Ray tries to rescue Eddy but the Russians have put an RPG in his safe, and Ray & Tommy have to fight their way past a zillion Chinese gangsters.
The jeans lady is also CIA. The local CIA HQ is blown up. Ray finds that the microbombs are built in to his jeans! Harry, the local CIA boss, turns out to be bent and planning to blackmail $100 million/month out of the US govt. using the minibombs. But Harry's freighter goes up in smoke, and so does he.

Knowing (2009, Nicolas Cage) Lexington, Mass, 1959. A school buries a time capsule and weird Lucinda's contribution is a numeric code. 50 years later, Prof. Kessler's kid, Caleb, is at the school when the capsule is opened and he gets the Lucy's message to open. His dad, an astronomer, breaks in down into dates of disasters and the number of dead. And there are 3 more disasters to come.
   The prof tries to contact Lucy but one of her teachers says she's dead. A plane crashes right in front of the prof! So there's disaster No. 1. He tries to talk to Lucy's daughter but Diana doesn't want to know. Then he tries to warn New York about a disaster but there's still a huge crash on the underground railway.
   He and Diana go back to where Lucy overdosed and there's a weirdo floating around. The prof decides that a solar flare will destroy the ozone layer and wipe out life on Earth. Both Caleb and Amy, Lucy's granddaughter, get the number-writing bug. Diana decides that the prof is nuts but a weirdo steals her car with the kids in it.
   Diana is killed in a crash after stealing a car to chase the weirdo. Aliens have kidnapped the kids and they're planning to transplant them to another planet. Just dumping them there, apparently, with no adults. Then the world goes to hell.
   Mr. Cage has made a few okay films and a number of proper turkeys. This one qualifies for a Golden Gobbler Award.

Komodo Vs Cobra (2005) A wimpish guy is eaten by a huge lizard, his 2 braver colleagues escape only for the man to be chomped by a giant cobra, which appears out of a river. But his daughter escapes. The US military sends in a recon team, which is taken out by the local wildlife.
   A couple of tree-huggers hire a deadleg called Stoddard and his boat to take them to an island controlled by the US military, along with a TV reporter, to seek the truth about Project Carnivore. They come across corn 2 storeys high then they try to confront the evil scientist. But as he's been eaten, his daughter greets them with a gun.
   The huggers meet the komodo then the cobra. Chomp! The daughter gives a pottest history of her father's attempts to feed the world, which were diverted by the military into animal experiments, producing the bullet-proof beasts. Which is more remarkable; bullets having no effect on the creatures or Stoddard being able to fire 40 or 50 shots from his handgun without reloading?
   The general in charge sees film of giant komodos and orders the destruction of the island if the recon team fails to check in. The huggers reach the beach in time to see their boat bombed. Then the cobra comes back for a snack. The whinger is attacked by giant leeches. Gulp! Jerry might be infected with the growth matrix!
   The general finds out who the intruders are but he's cool with bombing the crap out of them. The intruders find a chopper but the monsters arrive. Jerry sacrifices himself and the cobra attacks the komodo. We don't see a winner because the bombers arrive. But the story ends up on all the news channels and pisses off the general mightily.

Kull The Conqueror (1997) stars Kevin Sorbo, who's Hercules in the TV series. Kull takes the throne from a homicidal king, despite the objections of his brother, and starts freeing slaves and offering religious freedom and similar stuff. A priest uses the sacred flame to revive a demon, which takes female form and becomes the queen despite a warning from the soothsayer lady, who ends up framed for the king's murder. (How come she didn't see that coming?)
King Kull is chained to the wall in a dungeon but escapes to the L.A. Underground. A priest pal tells him his bride is 3,000 years old, not 19, and she wants to open the gates of Hell. They free the soothsayer and flee, and have to take over a slave ship from its crooked captain. The priest croaks after a battle at the North Pole, where the soothsayer is infused with the Breath of Volka, the god, and grabbed by Kull's brother.
Kull follows him back to the kingdom for another battle, he sees off the demon and his brother, and he lets the grand vizier know that he's going to continue to rule his way with his new queen, the soothsayer.

Kung Fu Killer (2007) Khan, a warlord, took out a monastery with artillery and machine guns, and killed the grand master. An ancient monk (David Carradine), whose life the grand master had saved, went to Shanghai seeking revenge and made a young trainee stay put. Crane took out some unruly sailors in a club and the owner gave him a job as a pro fighter.
Crane took out Khan's head bully boy then saved Khan, and the club owner, from an assassination attempt by the local Resistance. Khan recruited Crane and he had Pete, the night club singer's chemist brother, a prisoner and making poison gas for him. Crane was sent to kill the club owner because Khan wanted the singer. No, he only looked dead when Crane had finished with him.
The singer found Pete in a dungeon and found out what he was doing. Khan got ready to bombard a village rebelling against his opium farming but the villagers, including the young trainee, were ready for him. Khan lost his head during a big battle and the opium fields ended up in flames.