There's bad and then there's enjoyably bad, which accounts for the lonely one-star rating accorded BREATHING FIRE, a decidedly unenjoyable martial arts saga.

Stuffed with action, empty of sense, the semi-coherent plot commences with a gold heist by a criminal quintet masterminded by hawk-faced businessman Michael Moore (Jerry Trimble), with the compliance of cringing bank exec Peter Stern (Drake Diamond). In a possible tribute to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the robbers lock up the loot and make key impressions in a plastic pizza that they then divide among themselves to ensure honor among thieves. Stern wants out of the deal, however. Michael has the wimp and his wife both killed, but their busty teenage daughter Annie (Laura Hamilton) escapes with the precious pizza slice. She seeks sanctuary with her father's old Vietnam buddy, David Moore (Ed Neil), a grease-stained outcast who improbably snaps into form as an invincible kung fu fighting machine when the bad guys attack. He also happens to be Michael's brother, and unknowingly brings Annie to the archvillain's mansion for protection.

Here Annie encounters two kung fu kids who are the real stars of the story: Michael's biological son Tony (Eddie Saavedra) and his adopted son Charlie (Jonathan Ke Quan), a Vietnamese orphan. The latter tells anyone who'll listen that he's searching for his mysterious origins; it won't take viewers long to deduce that Charlie's peasant mom was mistaken for Viet Cong and gunned down by Michael back in the rice paddies. That bald fact takes Charlie the whole movie to uncover, as he and Eddie engage in fight after fight against Dad's evil cohorts.

With two official directors listed, and a third--Rick Mitchell--acknowledged in the closing credits for "additional scenes," BREATHING FIRE doesn't stay on a single tack for very long, alternating cold-blooded murder with comic slapstick, sometimes quite inexplicably as Charlie and Eddie tussle with a trio of chopsocky midgets and re-enact the famous fence-painting incident from Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The centerpiece of the picture has David Moore crippled by Michael in one brawl (Michael first pastes on a little mustache that effectively prevents his brother from recognizing him!). While David sulks, Charlie and Eddie beg that he tutor them in his brand of 'Nam-vet-fu, and soon David is putting the boys through the torturous training regimen that these movies love to chronicle.

There's an incredibly racist portrayal of gold-robber Tank (Wendell C. Whitaker), a big, blubbering Black goon who turns informer on the other criminals and, of course, gets killed as a reward--a typical fate for African-American characters in genre films like this. The karate tournament epilogue finds Eddie, upset that Charlie got Dad sent to jail, pummeling his half-brother nearly to death and then reconciling, a heartfelt message of Better Living Through Violence. The acting is often terrible, and hardly enhanced by badly post-synced dialogue, but otherwise production values are better than one would expect for such a jerry-built effort. Appropriately, the closing credits contain numerous spelling errors... oh, and by the way, Bolo is in it.