Combate sangriento

well well well.....

How could this movie fail?

with benny the jet, and a host of other talented kickboxers, this film was sure to be great......right...

(Sarcasm kicks in here)

It was

It was truly excellent

The best part was the story, with characters who did nothing for the whole movie except kick each other. And the kicking was great too, simply because of the fight editing. An experienced editor would show one kick when the actor did one kick but this editor made the fighting 5 times better by replaying all the punches and kicks 5 times. Pure genius. This way, he has achieved his goal of completely confusing the viewer (how is that possible in a fight scene), because you dont know whether or not the punches are replayed or the real thing. So, you might as well fast forward throught the fight scenes because they are too mentally taxing (trying to figure out who hits each other). Then you can watch the story in all its glory.

In my ignorance, i couldn't really follow the twisted plot, but it seems that billy's dad was killed in the desert, so now he can gather together all these kickboxers at random and get them into a ring, where he can proceed to kill all of them, even thought he knows they were innocent. This way, there is a lot of killing which makes no sense at all. This also gives the director an opportunity to throw in a sex scene. Great movie.

(Sarcasm stops here)

Crap movie. Why the hell did he kill all the people when he knew they were innocent? I thought he was the good guy!

3rd worst movie ever

After bloodsucking freaks and bloodfight (Notice how all the crap movies start with blood)

1/10

Brick Bardo (Thom Mathews) kidnaps four world-class kickboxers who may have killed his brother and takes them to an abandoned arena in Las Vegas where he plans to fight them all to the death in front of each other, until either one of them kills him or one of them is revealed as his brother's murderer. It was written by K. Hannah and directed by Albert Pyun (The Sword & The Sorcerer / Cyborg), and co stars Benny "The Jet" Urquidez (who choreographed the fights), Hope Marie Carlton, Dale Jacoby and Thunderwolf. Marianne Taylor is Max who helps Brick out and appears naked in a sex scene. There's way too many filler scenes and lots of poor dialogue (that's hard to hear over the background music) in this movie that's just too talky and doesn't even deliver on the fight scenes.

Five years ago, one of the world's greatest kickboxers killed Thom Mathews' brother. Someone had been fixing matches and he had to die to cover up the secret. Now Mathews is tacking them down and beating them to death to figure it out, as one does.

All right, it's a dumb plot, and the lines are dumb. People who go to see this sort of movie don't go for the Shakespearean tragedies and wild language, any more than I look at Fred Astaire movies for the Edward Everett Horton soliloquies. So how's the fight choreography? Lousy: chopped up, moving camera, every kick is cut ..... and not while moving, but between, screaming that this is a patched-together cut. True, ex-Playboy Playmate Hope Marie Carlton is present. It's the only movie I've seen with her in which she does not take off her clothes. I guess at 24, she was showing her age.

Brick Bardo is on a revenge mission to take out the four fighters who set up his brother. The lead has no charisma or maybe he's not really the lead. The overall acting skill level is bad. There are plenty of fights but I couldn't tell you who's who. All I know is four forgettable names in the kill list. Everything else is a confused blur. This is a bad B-movie. It runs out of steam by the thirty minutes mark if not sooner. The movie should start with getting the four kidnapped and then Brick can give his exposition. The acting remains bad but the story gets a bit clearer if not more reasonable.

All through "Bloodmatch," I was like, that main actor looks so familiar. And then I looked him up after the movie and realized he's Tommy Jarvis from "Friday the 13th Part VI." When the most famous actor in a movie is most known for the sixth episode in a slasher film franchise, that tells you something right there about the quality of the movie you're watching.

"Bloodmatch" is so funereally paced and set to such an incongruous, droning score, that it unfortunately is more boring than bad movie good. I could summarize the plot, but....ha! Ha!.....why? It might be the most monotonously structured movie I've ever seen. There's a twist ending I think, but since the plot devolves into the incomprehensible, it might just be a normal ending to a plot that doesn't make any sense in the first place. I'm not really sure, and trust me, this movie is not worth the mental energy required to figure out what happens.

And this also has to be one of the darkest movies I've ever seen. I don't mean in tone or subject matter -- I mean it's literally so dark you can't see what's happening half the time. It's like the budget was so small that they couldn't afford enough lights. Tip to the filmmakers -- if you have to cut some things for budget reasons, start with a couple of the terrible actors before you start cutting things like lighting. Hey, it would have reduced the amount of plot and made your film shorter to boot. That's a win for everybody!

Grade: D-