PLOT: When the daughter of a Japanese diplomat is kidnapped by a gang of American mercenaries in Arizona, there’s only one man up to the task of infiltrating their compound to rescue her. Unfortunately, he’s busy filming Black Eagle with Jean-Claude Van Damme, so another ninja will have to do.

Director: Emmett Alston
Writers: Douglas Ivan, Dan Ivan
Cast: Douglas Ivan, Patricia Ball, Robert Williams, John Hobson, Lee Thomas, Chester Salisbury, Brook Lynne, Osamu Ozawa

PLOT THICKENER

To begin, let’s get our facts straight about 1988’s Force of the Ninja. It was a low-budget movie that failed to gain American distribution in a saturated direct-to-video landscape in the 1980s. It stars a guy who did stunt work in American Ninja, and he appears in the drinking scene at the beginning of Enter the Ninja. It was directed by the guy who made Demonwarp, one of the craziest WTF low-budget movies I’ve ever seen. It was filmed in Tonto National Forest, a state park in Arizona. It was also filmed in Japan. It features Japanese dialogue without any English subtitles. These are the facts I know about Force of the Ninja, a movie that has some ninjas in it.

Kenji (Ivan) is a practicing ninja at an elite martial arts academy in Japan. As a Japanese-American living in the country as a security agent of the U.S. government, he is afforded the unique opportunity to straddle both cultures. While he’s dedicated to the ancient traditions of his Japanese roots, he also enjoys the bar brawls and lax weapon control laws of America. After Kazuko (Ball), the daughter of a high-ranking Japanese diplomat is kidnapped while hiking Stateside in Arizona, his master (Ozawa) decides that the time has come for Kenji’s training to end. Only a ninja of his caliber is capable of the dangerous search-and-rescue mission that lies ahead.


The kidnappers are a cruel group of mercenary scum, led by the opportunistic Karl Ryan (Williams). They kill Kazuko’s friends when they stumble upon the gang’s arms deal with some Mexican crime lords, and nearly kill her before one-eyed Wells (Salisbury) figures out the significance of her passport. As a relative to political royalty, she’ll fetch a handsome ransom from her parents back home. The gang keeps her hostage at their desert compound, and Karl sends Wells to Japan to meet with their associate, Pretty Boy Wilson (Hunt), to set up a deal.

Kenji arrives in Arizona and immediately pounds the pavement to find Kazuko, befriending a national park guide named Wendy (Lynne) who just so happens to be her college friend and feels terrible guilt for convincing her to come to the wilds of Arizona. She connects him to local sheriff Scott Parker (Thomas) and mere hours later that night, they cross paths with some of Karl’s thugs at the local watering hole during a bar brawl. As we all know, sloppy drunks are terrible at covering their tracks in anything except vomit and Funyuns, and Kenji is able to track them back to camp. Will he complete his mission or will the intense Arizona heat force him to the air conditioned lobby of the nearest Hampton Inn & Suites?


If you ever need evidence that the American film production dollar was better spent in the Philippines than domestically in the 1980s, you need only compare the production values between Alston’s third film, 1985’s Nine Deaths of the Ninja, and this one. The former film takes advantage of the lush natural beauty of Southeast Asia, and features a bigger cast with a more experienced crew. On the other hand, Force of the Ninja is a more minimalist effort with economical production choices as a consequence of a slim budget. This isn’t a deal-breaker, but it gives you a sense of what Alston was up against in trying to translate this script for the screen.

Filmmaker Godfrey Ho was known for dressing his actors in every flavor of ninja garb under the sun, from banana yellow to Paisley Park purple to camouflage or simple white. Given his appreciation for the full spectrum of color possibilities and his extensive ninja filmography, it’s a little strange that this American indie film delivers the first Taupe Ninja in cinema history. It’s the only suitable costuming for doing ninja stuff in the arid desert landscape, but it can also be treated as a visual metaphor of how I felt about this film: it’s the cinematic equivalent of biting into a raw, unscrubbed potato.

It’s not offensively bad by any means, and I have genuine appreciation for Alston’s attempt at situating a ninja film in a totally incongruent setting, but it’s not an especially satisfying watch. One of the bigger problems is that while he’s a fine martial artist with a manly moustache, Douglas Ivan lacks the screen presence to carry the film. Say what you will about Sho Kosugi’s acting chops or his command of the English language, but between his martial arts skills, facial expressions, and physical intensity, he had charisma to burn. No one else in this particular cast -- a collection of first-timers and Alston associates -- is able to elevate the material. None of the villains are chewing scenery, and what could have been a decent buddy dynamic between Kenji and Parker is dull and unchanging.


The film earns some points back in the presentation of the action scenes. The climax is well-paced with short bursts of intense, hand-to-hand combat and Kenji stalking the mercenaries and killing them off from long distance, all while trying to blend into the surroundings. Our heroes’ final push towards the compound comprises a pretty sizeable chunk of the third act (15+ minutes) and this allows for the full gamut of ninja weaponry to get some play: shurikens, arrows, smoke bombs, and katanas are deployed to slice and stab enemies to pieces. Added to this mix is the odd choice to stage part of this climax on what looks like a dilapidated film set from a 1960s Western -- complete with saloon doors and breakaway roofing and pillars -- which was a unique and welcomed touch that was probably the result of some happy accident during location scounting. I would also be remiss if I failed to mention the “in town” bar fight that gets initiated by Karl’s merry men and thoroughly squashed by Kenji and Parker. In what has to be a cinematic first, the violent offenders are forced to pay cash to the bar owner for property damages in a protracted on-screen shaming. There’s even a collection hat!

VERDICT

While Force of the Ninja is unlikely to blow your hair back or provide additional proof of Alston’s neglected cinematic genius (e.g., Demonwarp!), damn -- have you looked around the low-budget ninja movie landscape? This ain’t prime Sho-time, but it doesn’t have to be amazing either. It’s a suitable ninja film in a totally weird and unexpected location with fighting, gunfire, and ninja gadgets. Maybe I’ve gone soft in my old age, but this is fine.

AVAILABILITY

PLOT: A righteous martial artist comes to the aid of his master when his karate school is being targeted for hostile takeover by a local crime boss beholden to the Italian Mafia. They probably want to turn it into a Whole Foods.

Director: Robert Clouse
Writers: Fred Weintraub, Alexandra Rose, Oscar Williams
Cast: Jim Kelly, Gloria Hendry, Alan Weeks, Malik Carter, Eric Laneuville, Scatman Crothers, Mel Novak, Andre Philippe

PLOT THICKENER

If you ever find yourself at some rich jerk’s house and he takes you into his climate-controlled wine closet and offers up a vintage 1974 merlot from Del Orso Vineyards, you would be wise to pay attention to the following notes. See that brick red color? The viscosity of the liquid as it coats the glass while you swirl it about? Maybe you taste the faint presence of tobacco, iron, or even meat? The reason for this is because this wine was fermented in a vat with a dead body in it. You are drinking dead people. Spit that wine the fuck outta here and welcome to the 1974 Jim Kelly classic, Black Belt Jones.

When Pop Byrd (Crothers) and his karate school come under attack from a neighborhood crime boss named Pinky (Carter), the sparks, fur, and polyester will surely fly. Pinky is under the thumb of Italian mafioso and wine magnate, Don Steffano (Philippe), and he has orders to secure the location of the school for future real estate development. If the combined efforts of the karate school’s teacher, Toppy (Weeks) and his understudy, Quincy (Laneuville), aren’t enough muscle to hold off the goon squad, where else can they turn?


Enter Black Belt Jones (Kelly), a martial arts expert, unabashed trampoline enthusiast, and righteous dude with the unwavering respect of his community. As a one-time student of Byrd and a school loyalist, he’s more than willing to lead the fight against Pinky’s hostile advances. In parallel, the local police force is trying to recruit Jones to infiltrate the Don’s vineyard gang, with everyone apparently unaware of the links between the mafia and Pinky. When Byrd’s long-lost daughter, Sydney (Hendry) unexpectedly arrives in town to defend the honor of her pop and his school, the battle lines are drawn. Can Jones and Sydney get along well enough to fend off the aggressors? Will the alliance of Pinky’s gang and the mafia -- including a handsome menace known only as Blue Eyes (Novak) -- prove too strong a force? And is this the film which shows the very first 360-degree roundhouse kick in cinema history, courtesy of Scatman Crothers?

This follows Jim Kelly's scene-stealing role as Williams in Enter the Dragon, released just a year beforehand, and it's really a showcase for Kelly as a leading man. The action is choreographed to his strengths: kicking ass and looking good while doing it. If there’s a problem with this one-note approach, it’s that the outcomes of the fight scenes become predictable. The stunt guys sell out really well to make Kelly’s character look like a total superhero, but Jones lacks a logical, physical equal in the story (other than his ally, Sydney). The salve for this effect is a lot of visual creativity in the presentation. One scene has Jones working with Toppy during a night-time raid of the dojo by Pinky’s gang to use the indoor lighting strategically as he repeatedly busts heads and disappears in the darkness, only to re-emerge in the light and do it all over again. Another sees him fighting off Pinky’s men inside of an abandoned train car, and in one confrontation after another, the bruised henchmen fly through the train car windows to the outside, to almost comical effect.


In the infamous climax, Jones battles the remnants of the various gangs at a truck wash lot in a sudsy sea of knee-high soap. He makes easy work of his enemies using a variety of moves, though none more flashy than a chain of butterfly kicks that takes out four consecutive unlucky henchmen. In modern terms, a lot of this is going to look silly because there’s plenty of dreaded “stunt guys standing around and waiting to get hit” on the screen. I’m not sure it’s fair to nitpick the fight choreography, though, since American filmmakers were still figuring out how to stage martial arts for film audiences. Regardless, the scenes are creative and humorous on the whole and you’re not watching this for the fight scenes alone.

What I will nitpick, however, is some dated and regrettable language that, while not unique to this particular film, is certainly endemic to exploitation cinema as a whole. Prior to a physical confrontation with some of Pinky’s gang members, Sydney drops a gay slur in the middle of some trash-talking dialogue that will land with an awkward thud with most modern viewers. Why was this level of homophobia ever a thing in this genre? Do we blame Clouse for including it? The screenwriters for hatching the line? I would hate to think that Hendry ad-libbed it. And by the by, I can’t justifiably knock the film for a throwaway line like this without acknowledging the casual misogyny of BBJ telling Sydney to “do those dishes or something” before she shoots all of them with a loaded revolver and quips, “they’re done.” The humor there is in her assertive push-back against his misguided misogyny. That’s the joke!


Despite not being a technical marvel of filmmaking, this is quite possibly the most unadulterated *fun* that an American martial arts film has delivered, and it’s a historically important film to boot. I won’t lecture readers on the cultural significance of Kelly as the first black martial arts superstar -- I wasn’t alive when this was released, and frankly, as just another privileged white dude blogging on the web about cult movies, I don’t wield that authority -- but Black Belt Jones helped to kick off an incredible run of films through the end of the 1970s that melded martial arts and blaxploitation film elements. This Reddit thread does a good job of unpacking the context for how this type of film became so popular, and this tribute written by Michael over at Kiai Kick provides a good perspective for why Jim Kelly was so important to black moviegoers and other people of color who loved martial arts and action film. Jim Kelly really was a trailblazer, and will be remembered as a legend.

VERDICT

For many, Black Belt Jones is one of the great American martial arts films of all time, and I count myself among those ranks. The action scenes are ton of fun, it features an incredibly charismatic lead coming into his own as an action star, and the relationship between the two main characters is enjoyable and engaging. Such cool, very recommend!

AVAILABILITY

Streaming on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, iTunes. DVD is widely available on Netflix or the 4 Film Favorites: Urban Action collection from Warner Bros.

PLOT: Two unemployed friends join a martial arts school to meet girls, but must first contend with a fierce trio of enemies determined to confront them: discipline, maturity, and self-respect.

Director: Paul Kyriazi
Writers: Sid Campbell, William C. Martell
Cast: Eric Lee, Sid Campbell, Gerald Okamura, Carlos Navarro, Dalia Gutierrez, Nancy Lee, Frank Navarro, Juan Morales, Fumiko Takahashi, Harry Mok

PLOT THICKENER

It’s a rare thing in film or television to see a full-grown adult suddenly decide to start training in martial arts as a plot point (Seinfeld’s Kramer is an obvious exception). In most films, any portrayal finds a professional fighter training in the run-up to a big match or a hero who is depicted as a bad-ass from the very beginning. In both of these cases, his or her first entrance into the dojo (or dojang, for the taekwondo-inclined) occurred years beforehand. In Paul Kyriazi’s 1984 action-comedy Ninja Busters, two adult friends join a karate class after making a joint New Year’s resolution to make positive changes in their physical well-being. Just kidding. They join a class to meet women.

Bernie (Lee) and Chic (Campbell) are two pals who work together at a San Francisco warehouse owned by a purported crime boss. They’re fired (and beaten up) after snooping around some crates marked with a cryptic dragon symbol, and then beaten up again during lunch when they argue with some local bikers. After licking their battle wounds on a long walk, they observe a lesson through the window of a local karate school. Not only are the students great fighters, but most of them are women. In short order, the two friends join the school for all of the wrong reasons.


The school’s Master (Okamura) and primary teacher, Romero (Carlos Navarro) are shocked by the behavior of their new students. Aside from being lazy and undisciplined, Chic and Bernie won’t stop hitting on the advanced students, Kathy (Gutierrez) and Tina (Lee). Romero is inclined to give these idiots the boot, but the Master sees value in their presence; the teachers have an opportunity to learn the virtue of patience through a dogged effort to reform them. Will the masters succeed and turn these slobs into fighting machines? Can bikers, ninjas, street gangs, karate students, Vietnam vets, and black separatists peacefully co-exist? And is it possible to have too many amazing turtleneck sweaters in the same movie?

The success of the 2012 Alamo Drafthouse re-release of Miami Connection established a demand for slick, modern presentations of lost action films of the 1970s and 80s. The market responded with subsequent releases of films like 1984’s Furious (once only available on VHS), 1982’s Raw Force, 1990’s Killing American Style (previously unreleased) and the 26-year action odyssey, Dangerous Men. While it shares an earnestness and the “lost” quality of the aforementioned titles, Ninja Busters otherwise bears little resemblance. For starters, it’s a comedy that aims to be intentionally funny; you won't get much ironic enjoyment here. Kyriazi was also on his third feature film, after having cut his teeth in the film departments at both San Francisco State University and the U.S. Air Force. He got good production value out of the filming locations, so the limitations of its budget aren’t as visible as in other, similar films.



The comedic tone of the film is not unlike a lot of comedies of the 1980s; sometimes the jokes work, and other times the try-hard humor is a poor fit by today’s standards. Campbell, in particular, had a tendency to overdo the physical comedy bits, and much of the horndog behavior -- from 30+ year-old adults, no less -- came off as forced. (That the ladies at the martial arts school put both schmucks in their place for their stupidity helps to dilute the awkwardness, somewhat). On balance, the frequent deadpan humor and occasional visual gag tended to work the best, e.g., when the guys leave the dojo for a long run only to return with pizza sauce and regret all over the faces. We've all been there, amirite?!


Despite the emphasis on comedic elements, this didn’t necessarily carry over into the action choreography and manifest itself as full-on slapstick. A good majority of it is straightforward, honest martial arts. One sequence set in a junkyard -- where gangsters, ninjas, black separatists, and our heroes fight it out in a free-for-all brawl -- makes clever use of tires and swinging doors in the choreography. The film has a proper climax set in Romero’s Latin night club, and the fight choreography has a nice, flowing pace on the whole. Kyriazi worked with Lee and Okamura previously for 1981's The Weapons of Death, and it certainly shows in the action sequences.

VERDICT

As a film that attempts to blend elements of a prototypical 1980s comedy with martial arts, Ninja Busters is in a category all its own. There’s no doubting the earnestness that went into the performances and the filmmaking, but one’s mileage may vary because the humor is emphasized over the action, and falls flat at times. Despite this, it’s an interesting curiosity of the genre and definitely worth a watch.

AVAILABILITY

The Bluray release from Garagehouse Pictures can be had at Amazon and your finest online retailers.

PLOT: The five members of the U.S. karate team must work together in order to compete against their highly skilled counterparts from Korea. Will the stress of intense training combined with their personal demons threaten their chances, especially if they’re not allowed to drink, have sex, or smoke the devil’s lettuce during training?

Director: Robert Radler
Writer: Paul Levine
Cast: Phillip Rhee, Eric Roberts, James Earl Jones, Sally Kirkland, Chris Penn, David Agresta, Simon Rhee, James Lew, Ken Nagayama, John Ryan, John Dye, Tom Everett, Hee Il Cho, John P. Ryan

PLOT THICKENER

The Rhee brothers, Simon and Phillip, are established quantities in the world of action cinema. The elder sibling, Simon, has done stunt work on everything from The Dark Knight Rises and Anchorman 2 to the 2011 Muppets reboot. While fight and stunt choreography is clearly his bread and butter, his acting appearances are frequent but mostly minor, with credits such as “Asian villain #1” and “Bruno’s henchman” in his filmography. Younger brother, Phillip, has had a much less prolific career in front of the camera, but four of his gigs were starring roles in the film franchise he co-produced starting in 1989, Best of the Best. He has since become more heavily involved with the business side of media production. The moral of the story: for the best of the best possible outcomes in the entertainment business, enroll yourself or your children in taekwondo classes around the age of four.


When it comes to competitive martial arts team competitions, no one is better than the Korean team. Practicing for 12 months out of the year -- even under the harshest conditions (snow jogging!) -- has resulted in countless international championships and Olympic medals. The team is also led by the reigning world's champion, the fierce Dae Han (Simon Rhee). With only three months to train the American team before a major competition, Frank Couzo (Jones) is facing an uphill battle. The team’s financial benefactor, Jennings (Ryan) has mandated that Couzo make room for an assistant coach specializing in meditation and mental skills, named Catherine Wade (Kirkland). With the merry band of fighters Couzo has chosen for the squad, he’ll need all the help he can get to make them laser focused.

The team is five men strong. Alex Grady (Roberts) is a widowed single parent and auto factory worker from Portland, Oregon with a bum shoulder. Travis Brickley (Penn) is a hotheaded and overtly racist Floridian cowboy from Miami. The team’s resident oddball is Virgil Keller (Dye), an aspiring Buddhist from Rhode Island. Hailing from the mean streets of Detroit is proud and totally generic Italian guy, Sonny Grasso (Agresta). Rounding out the team is the talented, Tommy Lee (Rhee), a taekwondo instructor who teaches kids in California and harbors a past trauma that could harm his ability to fight at a high level. To keep the team on task, Couzo’s two rules are simple: don’t be late, and function as a team. Other than racist infighting, car accidents, and a macho inability to deal with one’s emotions, what could possibly go wrong?


The action in the film is sparse but well executed. There’s a bar fight in the early going after the team has been assembled that serves to not only bond the new teammates, but also demonstrate how big of a prick Travis can be (his gyrating and groping of a woman starts shit with her jealous boyfriend and his crew of drunks). This melee (quite fun!) features broken tables, wrecked doors, a smashed pinball machine, and a shattered glass pane before all is said and done. Up until the actual competition, though, there’s a dearth of choreographed fight scenes, as the story focuses instead on preparation and training montages. Thankfully, the final showdown between the teams doesn’t disappoint, as each fight balances good choreography with relevant character drama. The filmmakers were wise to save the best martial artists in its cast for the most meaningful fight, when Tommy Lee takes on Dae Han in the final match with the highest stakes. The brothers Rhee tear the house down, showing off the skills that made them household names in the 1980s and 90s, assuming those households were comprised of action movie fanatics.


Maybe this is the sting of untimely 2016 celebrity deaths talking, but it’s rather odd to watch the team of young American fighters in a 1989 movie with the knowledge that two of the five actors are no longer with us. Stranger yet, both John Dye and Chris Penn passed away from non-specific heart ailments in their 40s. While both actors enjoyed roles in other action films, this movie afforded them an opportunity to demonstrate their martial arts skills for the camera for the first time (unless you count Penn’s fight scene in Footloose). Penn, as some readers might know, was also a student and close friend of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, but also trained in the early 1980s under Benny “The Jet” Urquidez. At least for a time, martial arts was a very legitimate facet of his life.

The way the film handles the cultural representation of the Korean team is rather strange, yet almost typically 80s in its fumbling approach. The most glaring trait is that the non-English lines of dialogue among its team -- primarily delivered by the team’s coach, played by TKD legend, Hee Il Cho -- aren’t given the benefit of subtitles. The subtext that results is that these people aren’t meant to be understood, but rather only identified as foreign through their use of a non-English language. The team is shown practicing outdoors and/or in temple courtyards, bereft of the sleek and high-tech settings one might typically associate with South Korea today (a country often cited as the most innovative in the world). The team is said to practice 12 months out of the year and according to competition commentator Ahmad Rashad, taekwondo is basically the national pastime, akin to American baseball. (Assuming you ignore the data showing that football and baseball are the most popular sports there.)


Unlike a lot of films from this era, the main villain is not some cartoonish brute with a bad haircut or some wealthy, nefarious puppetmaster attempting to destroy everything around him. Sure, the Korean opposition is appropriately fearsome but far from evil. Instead, the tension for the heroes is almost entirely internal. Can Travis regulate his hot-headed bullying long enough to focus on the objective at hand? Will the distractions of Alex’s family obligations undermine his goals and get him booted from the team? Can Tommy overcome the torment of his past and find the killer instinct within himself that he’ll need to win? As someone who is deeply neurotic with a lot of unresolved emotions and a trail of failed relationships, this really appealed to me.

VERDICT

Critics were not kind to the film upon its release -- and neither were audiences -- but Best of the Best found a loyal fan base through home video and cable TV. It’s that rare breed of chopsocky film that complements its martial artists with seasoned performers and loads of dramatic heft to help carry the story. Admittedly, it can be formulaic at times and it may rely on training montages too often. Some action fans may be disappointed with the low amount of creative fight scenes. To those people I say: quit whining...and thanks for reading. At its core, it’s a well-acted and satisfying underdog story that should appeal to pure martial arts fans.

AVAILABILITY

On DVD through Amazon, Netflix, and eBay. Streaming on Crackle.

PLOT: A teenage martial artist is thrown into a world of theft and risky behavior while investigating the death of his older brother. Will he find out the truth? And what sorts of cool swag will he accumulate in the process?

Director: Jerry P. Jacobs
Writer: Sean Dash
Cast: Ted Jan Roberts, Corey Feldman, Marshall Teague, William James Jones, Erin Gray, Mako, Dean Cochran, Jason Majik, Erin Gray

PLOT THICKENER

The 1984 film The Karate Kid had a lot going for it. Pat Morita was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as Mr. Miyagi. It featured a charming teenage protagonist with tangible, relatable problems. It set the blueprint for high school gangs of martial arts meatheads. But you know what The Karate Kid movie was missing? A murder subplot! That’s the dropped ball that director Jerry P. Jacobs tried to pick up with 1994’s A Dangerous Place. That ball is covered in blood and pomade from Corey Feldman’s pompador.

Ethan (Roberts) and Greg (Cochran) are two teenage brothers living with their single mom, Audrey (Gray). One might expect the younger Ethan to be the troublemaker when, in fact, it’s Greg who finds himself hanging out with the wrong crowd. As of late, he’s been skipping karate class at the Lions dojo to hang out with the Scorpions gang, a group of suburban karate street toughs led by Taylor (Feldman). The crew goes on joy rides during random weeknights, stealing cars, dirt bikes, electronics, and whatever else catches their eyes -- they run wild with impunity and look cool doing it. (“How come all the best looking girls in school hang out with the Scorpions?") Because they have dirt bikes and nice televisions. Duh!


While Greg hangs with them socially and has represented them in illicit sunset beach fights, he’s not quite a “made” member of the group. After coaxing him into a night-time domestic burglary, the Scorpions turn on Greg when he has a crisis of conscience mid-act. During a physical struggle, Greg gets maced, falls down a flight of stairs, and dies accidentally. How do Taylor and his impressionable friends with behavioral problems respond? If you answered, “they report the accident and serve their time,” you win a prize! The prize is immaculately wrapped and decorated with ribbons. You tear the wrapping paper off to reveal a gift box. The box contains a framed picture of Greg’s prone body hanging from the basketball net at the high school gymnasium. Yep -- these pricks staged his death to look like a suicide. Enjoy your prize, by the way.


Ethan refuses to believe the circumstances surrounding his brother’s death. What about his bike? Never recovered. What about the bruises on his body? Unexplained. Against the wishes of his Sensei (Mako) he wants to infiltrate the gang to find out the truth about that fateful night. He first brawls with a Scorpion member in the cafeteria during lunch to demonstrate his toughness. He slowly befriends the most sympathetic Scorpion member, Eddie (Jones). Finally, he shows up to the Scorpions’ dojo to spar, and later arranges a competitive fight between the Lions and Scorpions to win the approval of the wicked Sensei (and English teacher) Gavin Smith (Teague).


This was my first foray into the action film career of Ted Jan Roberts and while I’m nearly two decades beyond the targeted demographic for this film, I can say that 12-year-old me would think he was pretty cool shit. He’s sort of like Daniel Larusso with Cali mall swagger in place of New Jersey wisecracking. A Jonathan Taylor Thomas with karate skills, if you will. His on-screen fighting is solid and believable, and in a post-Ernie Reyes/Kane Kosugi world, that’s all you can ask out of an adolescent martial arts film star. In terms of screen presence, he’s perfectly fine for this material and the filmmakers wisely avoid the trappings of any sustained emotive drama. Ethan is angry and inquisitive, not depressed and weepy. It’s a bit unnatural since these family members barely react to the sudden death of a brother and son, but this is a movie about teenage karate vengeance, not therapy sessions and brooding introspection.


I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the contributions of Corey Feldman as the treacherous Taylor. It would have been simple to follow the blueprint of Billy Zabka as Johnny Lawrence in the Karate Kid and play him as a volatile, testesterone-fueled jerk. Instead, he portrays Taylor as sleazy and calculating. Feldman’s fighting technique doesn’t match the skills that his character’s black-belt rank might suggest -- do you really buy his lethal mastery of eagle claw? -- but fight choreographer Art Camacho makes it work regardless. His character’s cold unpredictability and absence of fear of consequences is what makes him tick. Throw in an out-of-time greasy pompador hair style and an everyday affection for black fingerless gloves, and he’s a weirdly memorable 1990s martial arts douchebag.

VERDICT

A Dangerous Place has Corey Feldman popping wheelies on a dirtbike across a baseball field during live game-play while wearing a red gi and black fingerless gloves. What more do you want? Run out and impulsively put some discretionary income down on this film, like the foolish, emotionally distraught teenager you never were.

AVAILABILITY

Amazon, eBay.

PLOT: A single dad with an engineering degree who works as an auto mechanic decides to pursue underground kickboxing after his friend is killed. Will his drunken has-been trainers teach him enough to avoid a similar fate?

Director: Richard W. Munchkin
Writers: Sean Dash
Cast: Michael Worth, Marshall Teague, Sam Jones, Eric Lee, Matthias Hues, Jenilee Harrison, Nicholas Hill, Lelagi Togisala, Michael DeLano, Art Camacho, Nick Koga

 

PLOT THICKENER 

Recent reports indicate that nearly half of college graduates got their first job outside their field of study. Taking a longer view, around one-third of college graduates will never work in the field in which they pursued their degree. I myself went to school for alternative medicine and now I work in the legal field. Hmm, or did I go to school and partake in self-medicating which wasn’t legal? It’s all a bit foggy (much like my dorm room at the time). The central character in 1995’s Fists of Iron may have wasted his college years by getting some newfangled engineering degree, but his job as an auto mechanic gives him enough money to live on the beach (in a mobile home), drink like a connoisseur (at a dive bar), and buy expensive clothes (baggy silk shirts and suspenders). Take that, higher education!

Dale (Worth) is the young and single father to an adolescent daughter. Things with his ex-lady didn’t work out, but Dale is a stand-up guy who made sacrifices to give his daughter a stable environment. He sold a business to help put his ex and his daughter in a proper home, while he lives the dream of residing in a mobile home on the beach like Riggs in Lethal Weapon. He makes his living as an ace mechanic during the day, and spends many of his evenings at a local watering hole with his best friend, Matt (Hill), getting into skirmishes with drunken riffraff. While attending a kickboxing event at the sprawling estate of a local fight promoter, the devious Peter Gallagher (Teague), Dale playfully reminds his pal of all the fighting he’s done on his behalf. Matt’s pride gets the better of him, and when a $2,000 open challenge to survive two minutes with Gallagher’s prized monster Victor Bragg (Hues) is announced, Matt is the first to throw his name in the hat. Surprisingly, he lasts the requisite 120 seconds and takes the cash prize home, but not without cuts, lumps, and internal bleeding to go along with it.


While recouping on the beach outside of Dale’s house, Matt succumbs to his injuries during a nap. Furious and filled with remorse over the death of his childhood friend, Dale does what anyone would do: he goes to the bar to get drunk. While there, he fends off a disgruntled customer from his car garage and then confronts two old-timers who were purportedly once fighters but now like to cut loose and observe instead of engage: Daniel (Lee) and Tyler (Jones). Dale asks them for their help so he can take on Gallagher and his fighters, but they rebuke this silly notion, and Tyler even stops Dale’s punch bare-handed when the young upstart gets frustrated. Because this is a 1990s kickboxing film, this resistance only lasts for about another 10 minutes. Before you know it, the pair of former fighters are instilling their wisdom in a fresh young fighter who’s gifted, as Tyler puts it, with “an iron fist.”


Due to this being such a cookie-cutter subgenre, I was prepared to hit the snooze button on this but was surprised at how much I enjoyed the film. The hero is sympathetic given his circumstances, Marshall Teague plays a terrific and dickish villain in Gallagher, and Sam Jones and Eric Lee have great chemistry with each other and with their trainee. This is one of those cases where a film becomes more than the sum of its parts because the performances are spot-on, and there's some humor peppered throughout to make these characters relatable. Sure, there are missteps. All of Gallagher’s fighters are dressed up in the most unintimidating K-Mart-level ring gear I’ve ever seen. It really undercuts the brutality of the monstrous Victor Bragg when he’s dressed in the same loose, star-print pants and matching cut-off sweatshirt that my mom used to wear to her aerobics class. The screenwriter went a bit too heavy on exposition-heavy dialogue at times, leading to some clunky, unnatural exchanges between characters. But when a movie features a line as unabashedly 1990s as “see the girls in the flowered vests to place your bets,” it’s hard not to jump on the bandwagon despite some flaws.



In an odd bit of serendipity, we’ve now covered consecutive films featuring actresses from the television show, Dallas. Jenilee Harrison -- who famously replaced Suzanne Somers on Three’s Company and played Jamie Ewing on Dallas -- appears here as a love interest to the story’s hero, much like her Dallas colleague Charlene Tilton did in Deadly Bet (see prior post). The tangled web doesn’t stop weaving there! The actress who replaced Harrison on Three’s Company, Priscilla Barnes, appeared in Talons of the Eagle as -- who would have guessed it? -- the hero’s love interest. Before he appeared in the Kickboxer sequels as David Sloane, Sasha Mitchell played the illegitimate son of J.R. Ewing on Dallas. Andrew Stevens -- who co-starred with Karen Sheperd in Blood Chase and directed Don Wilson in Virtual Combat -- played a hustler working for J.R. Ewing. Will the chopsocky film connections to Dallas ever end? More likely, it will puzzle and enthrall researchers for centuries.


Fight choreographer Art Camacho and director Richard Munchkin have worked together eight times, starting with 1991’s Ring of Fire and ending in 2004 in one of those hilarious chimpanzee action films. Either as a result of their cinematic chemistry or the efforts of a crafty second unit director, the fight scenes in Fists of Iron look quite good. Fighters' heads and the punches that hit them snap with intensity. Just about every fight is lively, with striking and countering combinations that make sense. Different fighters have distinctive styles and their abilities are showcased by camera angles that allow the choreography to breathe. Worth’s character tests his mettle against a variety of fighting mini-bosses, all the way up to his climactic fight with Hues’s heavy-hitting behemoth. Their match is fairly entertaining while still maintaining some semblance of believability -- the strategic advice dispensed by Dale’s teachers is actually deployed in the fight itself (and by extension, the choreography) and all too often, films fail to stick to this formula. Combine that with plenty of cutaway shots to people in the crowd dressed in the finest threads this era had to offer, and I’m a happy viewer.

VERDICT

Some will gloss over the plot of Fists of Iron and conclude, “another post, another kickboxing tournament film,” and they wouldn’t be wrong. The main difference between this film from many others with a similar story, is that this film has a lot of heart. It also has a bruised spleen, broken ribs, and cauliflower ear. The fight scenes are fun, the dynamic between the hero and his teachers is entertaining, and the film has some of the most amazingly weird underground fight tournament crowd shots I’ve ever seen. Dig it.

AVAILABILITY

Amazon, eBay.

PLOT: A drunken, degenerate, kickboxing gambler must overcome his vices to regain his self-esteem, his money, and the woman he loves. But mostly, his money.

Director: Richard W. Munchkin
Writer: Joseph Merhi, Robert Tiffe
Cast: Jeff Wincott, Steven Vincent Leigh, Charlene Tilton, Michael Delano, Mike Toney, Ian Jacklin, Gerald Okamura, Ron Hall, Gary Daniels

PLOT THICKENER

I’ve only been there once, but I can say from experience that when Las Vegas puts its hooks in you, it can be hard to break free. One minute you’re walking around on the casino floor, slack-jawed and overstimulated, and the next minute you’re $2,000 in the red, wondering where it all went wrong and why you’re wearing mismatched sneakers. (Don’t ask). Director Richard Munchkin and PM Entertainment honcho Joseph Merhi originally met in the City of Lights, so it’s no wonder that Vegas was often featured as a setting in many PM films. In 1992’s Deadly Bet, it’s also the antagonist.


Angelo (Wincott) and Isabella (Tilton) are a young couple on the verge of a move, trading the neon of Las Vegas for the natural wild of Colorado. This particular night finds them exchanging a hearty goodbye with Isabella’s lounge-singer brother, Frank (real-life entertainer Jerry Tiffe) before Angelo announces that he needs to settle a debt of $1,000. The creditor in this situation is Rico (Leigh) a suave fight promoter and fighter who gives Angelo the chance to settle the debt by taking a new bet on two fighters currently in the ring. Angelo’s fighter wins! The couple celebrates over drinks! A steamed Rico finds them later in the evening and challenges Angelo to a fight for even more money. This time Angelo not only loses, but made the foolish mistake of putting Isabella up as collateral. She begrudgingly goes home with Rico, but not before slapping Angelo in the face for his dumb deeds and broken promises.

Broken, alone, and flat-broke, Angelo must decide between two paths. One: cease gambling, get sober, and win back everything that he’s lost. Two: get shit-faced, owe more people even more money that he doesn’t have, and act like a total asshole. As you can probably guess, he spends a lot of time in this story stumbling down path #2 before he reverses course to take the first one. Along the way, he bets on college basketball, drinks whisky, sniffs the clothing Isabella left behind, and is forced into working as muscle for a bookie named Greek (Delano), who oddly decides not to go by "The Greek," perhaps because he's not really Greek. Neither was The Greek though!


This wasn’t Wincott’s first time at the chopsocky rodeo -- see Martial Law II -- but it would mark his first time as the leading actor in your standard 1990s kickboxing tournament feature. It also marked his last time in this sort of movie, which might demonstrate that you can only go so far working in that sub-subgenre. Much to my surprise, this was also the first of only two films he did with PM Entertainment, the other being 1996’s Last Man Standing, which I maintain is one of their top three films ever. This is just further evidence that unlike a lot of chopsocky stars who stay in their lane, Jeff Wincott is full of surprises. He attended the prom in Prom Night. He did a romantic comedy with Adrien Brody. He even beat up Dave Matthews. Not surprisingly, Wincott is the best part about this movie, and I say this as someone who is perversely obsessed with Zubaz pants and poorly lit action scenes.

The action scenes are fine by PM Entertainment standards, which is to say, 'poor' by 1980s Hong Kong standards and 'borderline genius' by 1960s Star Trek episode standards. For me, there were two stand-out fights worth mentioning. The random alley confrontation between Angelo and a group of thugs led by stunt stalwart Art Camacho is punctuated by some humorous dialogue where Angelo details his losses from that day before fighting off his would-be muggers. It made sense in the context of the plot and added a light, self-aware touch to the hero’s circumstances. The other fight of significance is the climactic blow-off between Rico and Angelo. It has drama, some blood, and decent kicks that make both fighters look competent, but the fight is also preceded by one of the most blatantly homoerotic pre-match stare-downs I’ve ever seen. Apropos of nothing, Angelo decides to jump up on the top rope in his corner in a split-legged position while flexing, and Rico’s face lights up like he just got served a plate of filet mignon after two months of forced Tofurky dinners. While the tone is not exactly foreign to a genre where muscular dudes beat the shit out of each other, it was a weird moment.


We’ve seen some wacky tournament fighting before, but the tournament featured in Deadly Bet stretches the laws of time, fashion, and even spelling. Greek tells Angelo it’s a 50-man tournament. OK then. The tournament then unfolds over the course of a single night. I hate to drop math on you guys, but assuming it’s a single elimination tournament, 50 fighters means 49 matches. How the hell are you going to get through 49 matches in one night? The sartorial choices add further confusion to the proceedings. Some of the fighters, Angelo included, don the unfortunate combination of bike shorts with white cross-trainers, giving this tournament the appearance of uncool dads fighting each other to exhaustion. And last, one of the people keeping tabs on the brackets spells Rico’s name wrong on the whiteboard. Whoever organized this tournament (hint: it was Rico) performed no quality control whatsoever, and really should have hired an event planner.

Regardless of the significance of their roles, there are plenty of faces in the film that will be familiar to fans of action b-movies. Gary Daniels shows up for a brief, non-speaking role as the fighter who wins Angelo a bunch of Rico’s money to set the plot in motion. Ron Hall took a small part as a tournament fighter. Ian Jacklin shows up as a shaggy bartender who tangles with Angelo over unpaid debts to Greek. And even Gerald Okamura (listed in the credits as his Irish doppelgänger, Gerald O'Hamura) gets in the ring for an underground fight -- and wins!  Didn’t catch James Lew or Al Leong anywhere, but there *was* a scene where Isabella visits a hair salon. Maybe they were getting their hair did.

VERDICT

Deadly Bet is one of several love letters from PM Entertainment to the city of Las Vegas. But instead of affectionate words, the letter is actually just a 47-page storyboard of Jeff Wincott repeatedly kicking motherfuckers in the face. The boozy, sin-soaked Vegas kickboxing film seems to be an actual THING (recall To Be the Best) and I’m going to chase down more movies like this one.

AVAILABILITY 

Amazon, eBay.

PLOT: In the future, a scientific breakthrough leads to a breakdown in the barrier between virtual reality and the physical world, where computer programs are equipped with human bodies and run amok. What science has wrought, only kicks, guns, and double-stomps to the chest can destroy.

Director: Andrew Stevens
Writer: William C. Martell
Cast: Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Athena Massey, Michael Bernardo, Dawn Ann Billings, Michael Dorn, Loren Avedon, Ken McLeod, Ron Barker

PLOT THICKENER

When direct-to-video martial arts filmmakers started experimenting with science fiction elements during the late 1980s and early 90s, more often than not, the results were, as the French say, “le merde crachin.” With Jean-Claude Van Damme finding success in movies like Universal Soldier and Timecop, the blueprint for the DTV crowd was set, and the smaller studios played mix-and-match with elements from big-budget futuristic productions in which they could let their various martial artist stars run wild. When the dust settled, there were a number of cinematic ambassadors for the sub-subgenre: Olivier Gruner (Nemesis, Automatic); Richard Norton (Hyper Space, Equalizer 2000); and Don “The Dragon” Wilson (Future Kick, Cyber Tracker). I almost feel like I’ve written this exact paragraph before -- is this current Brezdin returning from the past with old copy? Or is it old Brezdin traveling from the past and writing a post while current Brezdin is away on vacation? And why am I suddenly getting a nosebleed? Trying to make your fiction all sciencey just screws things up, and Don the Dragon knows from experience.


In the future, credits have replaced currency. Los Angeles crime has been supplanted by Los Angeles pacifism. And fighting and screwing has largely been replaced by strapping yourself into a giant gyroscope (i.e., aerotrim) and experiencing it inside a virtual reality (VR) program under the supervision of some keyboard jockey. David Quarry (Wilson) and his partner John (McLeod) are members of the grid runners, a security force tasked with defending the “grid” between Los Angeles and Las Vegas from threats both virtual and physical. When a scientist has a major breakthrough in cyberplastic theory, a local evil corporation stands to profit. What they didn’t count on, however, is that the same computer process that can create physical manifestations from cybersex characters, can also be used to bring virtual killers from the “Lethal Combat” fight simulator into the physical world. When a glitch in the system does exactly that, and an elite but egomaniacal fighter named Dante (Bernardo) is set loose in the physical world, the line between virtual and tangible may be forever erased.


Just like the cyberplastic goo in which the virtual reality characters come to life, this film was a warm and slippery mess that’s toxic to pets and small children. A lot of the plot elements and visual gags are straight rips from better science-fiction films like Demolition Man, Virtuosity, and T2: Judgment Day. However, I loved how shameless the filmmakers were about this pilfering and the  world-building that resulted from it. The movie portends the proliferation of the voice-commanded, personalized mobile assistant that retrieves any information you could want (here, it’s called “Mary”). It has programmable sex cyborgs, cyberterrorism, and virtual reality gaming. Looking around now at the emergence of technologies like Oculus, Siri, and Echo, I’m shocked at how much our world is beginning to resemble the one depicted in a friggin’ Don the Dragon Wilson movie. Will buzz cuts and pomade be outlawed in the future? Because for reasons unknown, the hair in this movie is huge and unkempt. Bernardo has always rocked the long locks, but Wilson, McLeod, and Avedon are all rocking some shaggy cuts in a production that had plenty of humidity but clearly lacked an on-set barber or even a single brush or comb.


This film came at an odd point in Loren Avedon’s filmography, one that we might objectively call a downturn in activity. Virtual Combat was sandwiched between 1994’s Operation Golden Phoenix, where he played bad guy Ivan Jones, and 1996’s Safety Zone, an obscure Canadian film that appears to have been released in Greece but nowhere else. While we might point to his role in Operation… as igniting a trend towards playing villains, a closer examination reveals that his turn as Michael Branson, the dickish kickboxer in the 1993’s Baywatch episode, “Kicks,” was the starting point. Avedon has spoken of his fondness for playing villains because they can act without rules, but his character of Parness is more of a corporate underling who lacks any real autonomy. It was also tough to see Avedon’s personality shine through here; he has a natural cockiness that I’ve always found enjoyable in his heroic roles, so it’d make sense to turn that trait up to 11 as a villain. Yet, Parness lacks any clear personality traits or motivations beyond those instilled by his employers. Overall, I felt let down with how he was used in this film, but thankfully, Avedon has a couple of scenes with Wilson and we get a solid fight between the two towards the climax.

On the whole, the action in the film is that solid brand of chopsocky one would expect in a film where Art Camacho is listed as the fight choreographer. That said, I’m not sure he got the most out of the talent here -- the fight between Wilson and Avedon is good, but given their styles I would have expected something with better pace and more wide angles -- the filmmakers relied way too much on close shots and it robs the audience of any sense of movement. Bernardo is a talented guy but I didn’t really see the Dante character as head-and-shoulders above everyone else in terms of skill -- he wields some limb-regeneration trickery straight from the T-1000 toolkit -- but if we’re to believe that he’s a VR program capable of learning the tendencies of its opponents, he needed to seem more invincible and adaptable. (And how David throws a glitch in the Dante matrix is head-scratching). All that said, this film gave me Loren Avedon firing laser beams and a good amount of kicking, so I can’t complain much about the action.


Now for my biggest issue with the film. Virtual Combat employs that weird trope of having Actor A (strong voice) perform all of the dialgoue for Actor B (weak voice) but instead of having Actor A move his mouth and then dubbing him in post-production, the filmmaker uses Michael Dorn’s disembodied voice-of-God dialogue over shots of Bernardo contorting his face to look like he’s thinking out loud. We love Dorn -- he has a great voice, he played Worf, he flies jets. And if you remember Shootfighter: Fight to the Death -- and let’s be honest, who doesn’t? -- Bernardo wasn’t exactly Isaac Hayes in the vocal talent department. On the contrary, he falls into that camp of screen fighters who unfortunately lack the ability to project effectively, doomed to “nice guy” supporting parts because they still sound like teenagers when they open their mouths. Teenagers who haven’t tasted whiskey or smoked a cigarette. Has Jeff Wincott ever been dubbed? Nope, and there's a reason for that. (Wincott Chainsmoking Method wins again). Anyways, this Dorn cover-up makes practical sense and the technique works on paper because it’s a futuristic science-fiction film where we can buy the idea of Dante’s telepathic outbursts. In execution, though, it comes off as overly goofy because the other “dimensionalized” VR clones talk with their own mouths and their own voices, and for some strange reason, the filmmakers included Bernardo’s natural grunts and groans during the fight scenes. The inconsistency undermines the approach, but I look forward to creating a series of supercuts where I dub Dante with dialogue from Skeletor, Zod from Superman II, and Ursula from The Little Mermaid. I might not be joking.

VERDICT

The VR fight simulation angle is interesting, if overly coincidental, given that Expect No Mercy came out the same year, but the intermingling of the tangible and the virtual is what makes Virtual Combat the slightly more novel of the two. This may be the closest that DTV chopsocky ever got to touching upon David Cronenberg’s recurring theme of technology merging with the human body, and it certainly reinforced the notion that he executes that theme better than almost any other filmmaker. I would have liked to see a better use of the supporting cast, but I always get a kick out of seeing what 90s films thought the technological world might look like in only a few decades’ time.

AVAILABILITY

A bit hard to find. VHS is your best bet.

PLOT: An American fighter in Manila is forced to put down the bottle and take up arms (and fists) against the evil fight promoters who killed his friend. Bad timing too, because he just signed up for a mail-order membership to a “Godawful Cheap Vodka of the Month” club.

Director: Teddy Page (as Irvin Johnson)
Writer: Ron Davies
Cast: Dale Cook, Don Nakaya Nielsen, Andrea Lamatsch, Ned Hourani, Jim Gaines, Nick Nicholson, Steve Tartalia, Cris Aguilar

PLOT THICKENER

As a huge fan of Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood, the 2008 documentary that blew the doors open on Australian exploitation film for the mainstream, I was really looking forward to his 2010 follow-up that focused on the Philippines, Machete Maidens Unleashed. You can imagine my surprise, then, when the film reached the end credits with nary a mention of the important part that the chopsocky subgenre and its many stars played in the Filipino film industry of the 1980s and early 90s. Everyone from Richard Norton and Jerry Trimble to Loren Avedon and Don Wilson went for at least one go-round in Manila, and in a sense, starring in a Filipino actioner as a Westerner meant that your star power had reach and cachet.


Or, more simply: you were an accomplished kickboxer. The Filipino film industry -- particularly filmmakers like Cirio Santiago and Teddy Page -- loved kickboxers of every stripe. Dale “Apollo” Cook, who started kickboxing professionally in the late 1970s and saw his fight career last nearly two decades, was one of the few American-born stars whose film work (nine movies in all) was almost entirely limited to the Philippines (save for one part as a jerkward foreign devil in the 1992 Hong Kong film, Deadend of Besiegers). Cook may have lacked the dramatic chops or swagger to make it as an action star Stateside, but he had an easygoing, American-as-apple-pie vibe that Filipino action films, for whatever reason, seemed to really dig. 1991's Blood Ring was just his second film and the first of four films in which he would star with Teddy Page in the director's seat. It was also the film title most often confused for a sausage product.

In the world of underground Manila kickboxing, tickets may be cheap but life is even cheaper. (The beer is still expensive). Promoters use up and discard their fighters as often as they change their t-shirts. Max Rivers (Cook) is your typical burnout drunk, fighting and throwing fights in exchange for booze money from his sleazy promoter, Dingo. When Max’s fighter pal, Philip (Tartalia), goes missing, his girlfriend, Susan (Lamatsch) brings the news to Max, hoping that he can help. Philip has been trying to get out from under the thumb of his own promoter, the evil Caruleo (Nielsen), by betting on himself to lose fights. In exchange for these efforts, Philip gets “released from his contract” which is a formal way of saying that Caruleo beats him to death. (Wouldn’t you know it? Caruleo is a kickboxer too).


The reach and cruelty of Caruleo’s gang spreads far and wide. His main hatchet man is Stevens (Gaines), a coke-addicted creep in molester glasses whose enjoyment of violence is matched only by his love for nose candy. While Caruleo oversees many expert fighters -- including a beefed-up weirdo in a mask called D’Executioner (Aguilar) -- his most prized subject is Madigan (Hourani), a kickboxer with bountiful chest hair who can’t be trusted with any dialogue whatsoever. As Max gears up to infiltrate and destroy the gang who killed his friend, he’ll not only need to defeat each of these mini-bosses on the way to Caruleo, but he’ll also have to fight his raging addiction to booze on the road to sobriety.

There is little to no production sheen to Teddy Page’s films, and Blood Ring is no different. You can’t go into Filipino action films from this era with any expectation of technical mastery because you’ll walk away more disappointed than Steven Seagal after the food court Cinnabon has closed for the day. (Not fatshaming here, BTW -- Seagal just really loves Cinnabons). The plot here is simple, if stale, but the bad blood between the hero and his enemies is sufficient to carry us through the film. If you’ve seen a few of these early 90s Filipino chopsocky films -- Fighting Spirit and Blood Hands in particular -- you’ll recognize not just the filming locations, but also the cast of faces. The Jim Moss-Nick Nicholson-Jim Gaines triumvirate is back and in full effect -- all three have supporting parts -- but it was interesting to see Gaines get the baton as the baddie with the most screen-time. As the drug-addled rapist flunky, Stevens, he’s pretty good at capturing his character’s cowardly and sleazy qualities.


If Billy Blanks is the “casual Friday” of chopsocky b-movie stars with his denim ensembles and button-up shirts, then Dale Cook and his plain-tank tops or polos with sweatpants is definitely the “working from home” model. It’s not something exclusive to his character in Blood Ring, either, because he was rocking similar threads in American Kickboxer 2. You might remember from our conversation with Loren Avedon that on the chopsocky film set -- when you’re kicking, punching, and stunting for up to 12 hours a day -- comfort is key. So, maybe there’s a method to Cook’s sartorial madness, as plain and borderline sloppy as it might appear. Or maybe he was decades ahead of his time, as evidenced by the uptick in high-end sweats worn to premiere events and basketball games by everyone from Drake to Bieber. Oscar Isaac spent pretty much all of his screen time in Ex Machina wearing sweatpants and getting shitfaced. If it’s good enough for a tech genius in a top 10 film of the year, why isn’t it good enough for a kickboxer running around Manila and beating the shit out of crooked gangsters and fight promoters?


The real question though: do the sweatpants make a difference in the quality of the fight scenes? Beats the hell out of me. Cook moves well, and you can definitely tell he’s a pro fighter. The training montage in the back-half of the film finds him doing full-extension kicks in waist-deep water -- athletically speaking, that’s insane. He looks best when paired with other legit fighters (e.g. Hourani) as opposed to the standard stunt players, and his climactic fight with Nielsen (himself a former pro kickboxer) is pretty solid. The choreography is simple and the camerawork is average, but the atmosphere -- dark arena, ropes wrapped in barbed wire, and cavernous echoes -- is a cut above your traditional “two dudes kickfighting in a boxing ring” showdown. There’s a lot of blood, a pretty gruesome ending, and even Susan gets in on the action by swinging through the air (she’s tied up per the “damsel in distress” trope) and delivering a timely double-kick to the bad guy. Again, none of it will necessarily blow you away but I appreciated that they put some custom touches on the formula.

VERDICT

It’s undoubtedly cheap and occasionally sleazy. It’s plenty of other excessive adverbs combined with adjectives typically associated with Filipino exploitation films -- take your pick, man. It’s got all the customary markers: subpar acting, doofy plot, poor lighting, crazy stunts, and a library music score. Does Blood Ring rise above it all and deliver the goods in spite of itself? It sort of depends on your threshold for technically unsound cinema and your appreciation for Oklahoman kickboxers. Fortunately, I have both in spades, so I thought it was a breezy 90 minutes. Solid pick for those Saturday afternoons when you don’t want to change out of your tank top and sweatpants.

AVAILABILITY

It never made the jump to DVD (R1 anyway), so used VHS copies on Amazon or eBay are probably your best bet.