Damn You, Ric Meyers -- A Review of Kidnapped Girls Agency

For those who really know the kung fu scene here in the USA, Ric Meyers is well known and polarizing figure. On the one side you have everybody, and on the other you have Ric. A lot has been said about the man, much of it conjecture, and of that, much of it obviously false. What is not conjecture is that Ric Meyers frequently spreads misinformation in his commentaries, articles, and liner notes, yet is still collecting paychecks as a "kung fu movie expert" from people who don't know any better (but should).

For example, Ric Meyers wrote the English language copy for at least some of the IVL DVD releases of Shaw Brothers movies. From the back of Full Moon Scimitar:

"No team of 'Martial Arts World' epic-makers ever matched that of director Chu Yuan and best-selling author Ku Lung. Screen idol Derek Yee is the ambitious, proud master of the 'Meteor' style, who becomes obsessed with sword supremacy and goes on a selfish rampage of violence and sex."

What movie is he describing? I don't recall a rampage of sex, or much of any sex at all in Full Moon Scimitar, and I watched it again only a few weeks ago.
But the weirdest rumor I'd ever read about Ric Meyers was his so called foray into the world of pornography. Supposedly, Meyers starred in and directed bondage porn. The tales of a mind flaying, erection breaking, bondage themed porno elicited a combination of furious laughter and wild expectations. If you don't know what Meyers looks like, hit up his myspace, and giggle with me at the thought of him in bondage gear getting his pimply ass whipped by a dominatrix, then puke in disgust.
Sadly, the film itself isn't anywhere nearly as funny as I'd hoped. The movie in question is KGA: Kidnapped Girls Agency, an hour long soft-core bondage tape released by "HOM Incorporated." In KGA, 80's scream queen/porn star Linnea Quigley plays a young woman kidnapped by a male-female pair of bondage-pervs after attending an audition. The same deviants also kidnap her room mate, and plan to sell them both to the white slave market. Never fear! The Kidnapped Girls Agency, an agency that specializes (one assumes) in the recovery of kidnapped girls, is on the case! Lead by a mighty, portly, bespectacled detective with a very ugly beard (Ric Meyers, lolz) the Agency finds the girls in time, saving them from forced prostitution, through means which I'm not quite sure I followed. The audio quality on the tape I watched is impossibly bad -- so bad I couldn't hear what they were saying in the scenes preceding the finale.

I have to say that I was quite disappointed with this one. It might have entertained me more if I liked bondage or actually cared about Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer. The only thing I wanted to see was Ric Meyers embarrassing himself. He does a good bit of that. He looks creepy as hell, for one. For another, he uses a very large dildo as a weapon in one scene, which I assume was intended as humor. It fell quite flat. Perhaps worse is his hand-to-hand fight scene at the end of the film, which provides great competition with the slow motion fight from Dragon Pearl for the "worst fight scene ever filmed" award. The finale to Godrey Ho's Undefeatable is beautiful by comparison. Did I mention Ric tries to brain somebody with a big dildo?

There is a certain question I would like answered: did Meyers direct Kidnapped Girls Agency? The video credits Geoffrey Merrick as writer and director, but IMDb and a bunch of obscure video web sites claim that Meyers auteured this all by his lonesome. It has the feel of a home movie: lapses in audio, lots of stationary camera work and interminably long takes of screaming, naked women and their abductors, and a total lack of composition or lighting design. If Ric made this, he doesn't know much about how to make a movie, and made this one solely to help other fetishists beat one out. If that's your proclivity, you might like this. You might like it if you appreciate the women who appear in this film, although it certainly isn't essential when they're naked in dozens of other movies, at least one of which has to be better than Kidnapped Girls Agency.

Did they think they were doing Cassavetes with bondage? I'd like that question answered too.

I originally finished this review with a really harsh paragraph that insulted Meyers personally. I don't want to do that, because my problems with him are not personal in nature. I simply want to point out how hilarious Meyers is as a person. I mean, if he actually consented to appear in this movie, he deserves a little bit of derision; If he actually directed and wrote it, he deserves it even more. So to that I say: Ric ought to be embarrassed, but I don't think there's anything I could say that would actually effect somebody so shameless.

Believe it or not, he's the savior, not the kidnapper.