Challenge of Five Gauntlets

After finding Len through RLM and his unlikely friendship with them, I've been keeping up with his movies. While many are ripe for ridicule and are genuinely funny-bad, this is a genuine attempt at a legit film.

This movie is competently shot, acted, and paced to an extent I never expected from Len. It's not funny bad at all. It's genuinely entertaining and it's wonderful to see this guy grow as an artist.

It's time to give Len a Star Wars film...

This isn't the type of movie you will ever watch by yourself. It is the type you turn on when hanging with the boys. THC and alcohol are a must but if you are watching a Len Kabasinski movie you know that already.

This is one of Len's pure action/martial arts movies without any horror elements. There is sort of a supernatural element with the magic flower but that mainly just serves to give the main character an altruistic reason to go on this quest and fight these people.

The movie starts with a family looking for a cure for their sick child. They have tried everything. The only thing left is a magical flower that can cure any illness. However, in order to get it, you have to defeat a series of five martial artists. You might call it a challenge of five gauntlets. The flower is really just a McGuffin. It's a reason for Len to do all of this.

The movie centers around a series of five fights. There are only a few fights so each one is fairly long and involved. He varies up the enemies and style of the fights fairly well to keep it from being too repetitive. The fights themselves are pretty well done which is good since they carry almost the entire movie. Leo Fong only has one fight scene which doesn't impact the main plot but it somehow looks better than most of the fight scenes he had 30 or so years earlier when he was starring in movies. He actually looks like the skilled martial artist he was. I'm not entirely sure that I buy Len as a historian but it doesn't really matter past the setup anyway.

This is a movie for fans of martial arts cheese. It has a McGuffin plot that serves as a loose excuse for why the fights are happening. I really enjoyed the movie but it is what it is.

The reason I gave this two stars is because I thought the story had potential. Perhaps a different writer, and director, with more money, and a better production could have done it justice. With this production I found many things to disappoint me. The acting was wooden, and contrived, the dialogue seemed uninspired, and uninteresting. In general I found the direction ie: the story progression was too quick without barely any setup of the story plot, and the actors weren't really directed in a way to convince the audience of their feelings, and emotions. Unfortunately I was unable to bring myself to watch more than ten minutes of the film, and that is unfortunate because in general I like this kind of story.

There are some issues here but the good far outweighs the bad as Len did a tremendous job making the most of what he had access to in order to make it seem like he was doing a globe trotting adventure story. Sure there's plenty of places to improve but I've seen WAY worse stuff. Len deserves more attention!