Jack Gayer revisits the insane treasure that is Miami Connection…
Some films are such colossal pieces of shit that they can only be enjoyed sardonically. Until that limited charm wears off and you fall asleep. Cats (2019) is one of these misguided dumpster-fire films, and no amount of mind-altering substances known to man can make watching it a tolerable experience.
Other films, a certain type of cult film, are made so earnestly that they can be enjoyed less ironically and more gleefully. You’re still marveling at someone’s folly, but what they made is so unapologetically singular; the movie is downright delightful. These films seem to be made by aliens who haven’t the dimmest idea of how real humans talk or behave. The creators seem to lack even the most rudimentary understanding of story. It’s this bizarre perspective that makes them treasures. The Room (2003) is the classic example. Birdemic (2010)is also up there. A lesser-known treasure, but no less fantastic, absurd, and hilarious, is Miami Connection (1987).
What is Miami Connection? What isn’t Miami Connection, you ignorant simpleton? It’s a love story (two or three, really, if you count the brother’s unhealthy fixation with his sister and one of the main character’s unrequited love for another band member). It’s a crime drama. A musical. A martial arts flick. A meditation on violence? Sure. Buckaroo Banzai (1984) walked so Miami Connection could have ninjas running through a swamp, getting hacked to pieces. This ultra-violent climax, including a graphic decapitation, is followed by a message of anti-violence that’s as head-scratching/crazy-bananas as it is laugh-your-ass-off funny. The main characters of Miami Connection spend the whole movie going headlong into every fight, brutally, often fatally attacking their karate rivals. Often committing what some would call “murder.” This movie has been about as “anti-violence” as the Jackass franchise has been anti-nut shots. But somehow this film is even more homoerotic and funnier than the whole Jackass series.
The film starts off with a Miami Vice-pulpy-campy feel and takes an immediate turn when we see our first ninja about a minute and a half into the film. The movie only gets weirder and weirder from there. And you should be happy it does. Because what a treat. You’d be forgiven for thinking you’re about to watch a gritty crime drama—with ninjas. Then the opening credits roll in, and the first song spells out what you just saw for you, in case you have anterograde amnesia. The villains are “bikers by day, ninjas by night.” They “steal all your cocaine.” Got it? Good, cuz now it’s time to establish some characterization of the main characters through song as well.
Singing that characterization—followed by a song about being “friends forever”—is our heroes. Band name: Dragon Sound. Attire: karate gis. Some are shirtless. None of their instruments seems to be plugged in (they never seem to be plugged in). Their lyrics touch upon how “you got a friend in me.” If that’s too subtle, they continue, “When times get tough, you’ll see…you make me strong; I know I can depend on you…Friends for eternity, loyalty, honesty,” and so on and so forth. Is this a song about friendship, codependency, or one of the band members lusting after another band member? It’s all open to interpretation.
Also, didn’t we just see someone get their arm hacked off? What is this fun, upbeat ode to “friendship”? Turning up the weirdness is one of the gang leaders, who may be wearing a fake beard, getting more and more pissed off that his (adult) sister is dancing with the band. According to Jeff (William Ergle), his sister “isn’t supposed to be at the club.” Why isn’t she supposed to be at the club, and why does Jeff have such a toxic relationship with his sister? Who fucking knows. Not since Pin (1988) has there been such a possessive brother-sister dynamic.
Jeff is supposed to be intimidating, but he dresses like how Tobias Fünke would imagine a tough guy dresses (a sense of style that could easily apply to members of his gang and his ninja crime buddy as well). Ergle delivers his lines with a palpable and endearing anxiety as he struggles to get through his dialogue. You can’t help but think the actor was trying his best. This would be Ergle’s only acting role.
Jeff’s gang has a similar acting range, where it’s abundantly clear they don’t know what the hell they’re supposed to be doing at any given time. They often stand in the background making vaguely threatening hand gestures, like Jack Donaghy, trying his hand at acting and wondering what to do with his hands. It’s these little details that just keep giving you more to enjoy.
As you watch, you’ll be asking yourself again and again, “Why is this scene in the movie?” Certainly not to drive the plot forward or develop the characters, two of the main reasons to have a scene in a movie, that’s for sure. One can’t help but surmise that the “filmmakers” were just putting in whatever scenes occurred to them that day to pad out the runtime (despite the assertion by one of the co-writers that he read “eight books” about filmmaking to prepare for writing this film).
On the topic of story, does the movie have a plot? Not a discernible one. There’s a loose narrative about the cocaine shipment having been stolen, but it’s all so tenuously held together by seemingly random scenes that we challenge you to figure out what the hell is going on at any given moment. Does it matter? Not really. You’ll be having such a good time with this bizarro world that you can enjoy it on an episodic level. To be fair, this is really the only way to enjoy it.
And if you want random, the music is a treat. Sometimes it comes out of nowhere and is far too loud, like the composer suddenly woke up from a nap and realized he was supposed to be putting music in the film and overcompensated by cranking up the score. A tactic that drowns out some of the dialogue. At other times, the music is fairly tense and effective, aided by the bone-crunching foley work. If the songs sound surprisingly well-crafted and catchy, it’s because two of the stars, Tom (Angelo Janotti) and Jane (Kathy Collier), are actually musicians. They wrote the songs and helped the production acquire the instruments. They also coached the other actors on how to look like musicians (which apparently didn’t include plugging them in). Unfortunately, Janotti and Collier were also dating at the time, so when Collier had a passionate kissing scene with John (Vincent Hirsh), Angelo was sent off to buy beer so as not to see his girlfriend kissing another guy. Did he not read the script?
If Tommy Wiseau couldn’t write dialogue to save his life, the writers of Miami Connection seem to have gone to the 50 Shades of Grey school of screenwriting. Here is a sampling of some of the more bonkers lines:
Mark: I didn’t know you had a father. I thought we are all orphans.
Jack: He’s in there every night with his damn… gang, selling that stupid cocaine.
Mark: You don’t scare me at all. AT ALL! GOODBYE!
But whereas Wiseau thought he was making the next A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), it’s unclear what movie the filmmakers were aspiring to make here. But somehow, it all works. Maybe because self-serious the film is not. How serious can a film be that features a man hand-feeding a roomful of men grapes? And bear in mind that several of the men are shirtless during this forced feeding. But who among us hasn’t been hand-fed a grape by a close friend? However, perhaps taking away some of the intimacy of this gesture is how the grapes are fed: they’re practically shoved into the friends’ mouths. Several of the actors visibly gag.
As far as friends go, John and Mark are the closest, and outside of the villains, they probably have the most screen time. But their acting ranges from intense fury during the fight scenes to a sort of blank-eyed incomprehension during other scenes. People have looked more expressive after undergoing complete lobotomies. Mark and Jim’s (Maurice Smith) relationship can best be described as “predatory.” More on that later.
Regarding friendship and the film as a whole, Y.K. Kim has spoken about how viewers looking for a film with music, “real action,” and the “true meaning of friendship…they will be crazy about the Miami Connection.” Which would seem to imply that real friendship includes force-feeding your male friends. Preferably shirtless. And not knowing the most basic details about your friends’ lives. Or the meaning of “orphan.”
If The Room had out-of-left-field subplots, say Denny’s drug debts and Claudette’s cancer, Miami Connection isn’t without its own where-the-hell-did-this-come-from twists. Like Jim finally being reunited with his father after “searching” for him the whole movie. Of course the dad would be played by an actor about the same age as Jim, but in laughably unconvincing old-person makeup. There are whole scenes of the cast doing nothing but practicing karate and having sparring matches, where Mark seems to be beating his students to a pulp. Is it part of a montage, like Rocky training? Nope. What information is conveyed? These martial artists practice karate, stupid. In a lesser film, this would feel indulgent. Here it’s charmingly bizarre.
This movie doesn’t just take the cake when it comes to the bizarre and the nonsensical; it obliterates the bakery. Take the beach scene: there are many shots of women in bikinis and men playing volleyball. There are close-ups of women’s asses and breasts, glistening male bodies, and shots of male dumpers too, all of this communicates, “Look at all this sexiness.” We even see the male characters openly leering and catcalling, in case the message wasn’t clear. And then we cut to several shots of children. The visual grammar would seem to suggest that the eroticism of the male gaze extends to kids. It’s also very possible/highly likely the editor just didn’t know what the hell they were doing. God knows the screenwriters, directors, and actors didn’t. Rather than detracting from the film, this just adds yet another fruit to the crazy salad.
At one point early in the film, a professor, possibly of computer science, says, “Hey Jane, good circle!” What does this mean? Your guess is as good as ours. But if we had to wager, we’d say this is what one of the screenwriters thinks happens in a computer science class. Not having taken a computer science class, we can neither confirm nor deny this. Truly, every couple of minutes, it’s worth pausing to confirm you just saw what you thought you saw (according to IMDb, this professor character is played by a real computer science professor).
The main characters vacillate between committing acts of extreme violence and having playful boys’ time with the sort of unaffected good nature exhibited mainly by sociopaths or the exceptionally stupid. The homoerotic overtones are so strong they probably should have just pulled the trigger and featured some gay sex scenes. Yes, there’s the grape scene, but there are also the small touches, like the thug who wears shorts so small and tight you wonder why he bothered wearing anything at all. His penis is so clearly visible you could describe it to a sketch artist. In another scene, Mark caresses Jim’s face with his foot before guiding him around the stage, holding his nose pinched between his toes. If someone holding your nose with their foot sounds off-putting to you, Jim seems to love it. It should be noted that Kim seems fond of the toe-grabbing nose move in his own martial arts classes.
Frankly, Mark really can’t seem to keep his hands off Jim. At several points, you swear they’re about to kiss. Moreover, you have to wonder, when Tom—the band’s John Oates look-alike—is kidnapped, why do the bad guys take his shirt off? Why is Jeff’s gang working out in the dark? Why is Mark acting like he’s just another college student, living with his buds, when he’s clearly in his 40s and seems to be the group’s karate instructor? In a city where everyone seems to know Taekwondo, and those who don’t know it see no problem picking fights with their better-trained adversaries, anything could make sense.
The glory that is Miami Connection is rife with behind-the-scenes trivia that goes a long way toward explaining much of the film, although nothing will ever fully explain it, much like how Alejandro Jodorowsky could never adequately explain why he opened his film El Topo (1970) with a staggering number of shots clearly showing his underage son naked. John Lennon was a big fan. Of the movie, not the shots of the pantsless minor, that is. However, Lennon wasn’t without his own cinematic penis fixations, as he once made a short film of himself getting an erection. The film lasts 40 minutes. Didn’t write a song about that for the White Album. But less about men’s genitals and more behind-the-scenes info.
Supposedly, a motorcycle club was paid in beer to act in the movie. It shows. One of the motorcyclists clearly dumps his bike over as he tries to drive it in sand. Why leave a shot in that makes the fearsome biker gang look like buffoons? Probably because they didn’t have the budget or sense to reshoot it.
The co-director, writer, producer, and star Y.K. Kim was supposedly so popular in Orlando that he was allowed to film without permits. Kim’s resourcefulness didn’t end there. If it seems like the majority of the cast were first-time actors, it’s because they were. Apparently, many of them were Kim’s students from his Taekwondo studios. Other “actors” may have included real-life police officers playing police officers and a federal prosecutor playing the bearded band leader.
According to an interview with Kim, the filming was a nightmare, as he’d never “had time” to see a film before. He was also “shocked” that all the major studios rejected it (the cowards). So, Kim did the next logical thing and brought the film to Cannes. Nearly everyone there told Kim his film was “trash.” One person told him it needed some fine-tuning. Kim decided to write some more scenes and direct some reshoots himself. After all the improvements he made to the film, Kim was sure Miami Connection would be a “blockbuster.” It was shown on eight screens in Central Florida, and according to Kim, the audience totally rejected it. Despite his retrospective confidence in the movie, it’s also been reported that the ever-optimistic Kim became so depressed after he saw Miami Connection for the first time that he went home and slept for 48 hours straight.
Kim also promised that there would be an Academy Award-quality sequel suitable for the whole family coming out in three years. That was thirteen years ago (still no sequel, Academy Award-worthy or otherwise). Following the film, among other pursuits, Kim has been doing motivational speeches where his audience chants his name and claps their hands in a totally non-cultish fashion.
If Grease (1978) and The Warriors (1979) had a baby, you might get something close to Miami Connection. Provided they also drank paint thinner while pregnant. There are many terrible-yet-amazing films. Few “rise” to this level. Unlike films of a similar ilk, such as The Room, Miami Connection has a purity to it. The star had a vision and believed in himself to an admirable degree, but he didn’t have the ego (or the misanthropic personality) of Wiseau. Kim has said over and over again how his primary goal was making a movie that promoted martial arts. And that he did. Much like one can’t really describe a psychedelic trip, one has to experience it. So too does describing Miami Connection fall short. You just have to experience it. Possibly on a psychedelic.
Have you seen Miami Connection? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Jack Gayer
Originally published April 19, 2026. Updated April 20, 2026.
