The Purifiers

I don't normally DO action or martial arts films. I'm a girly girl. But every so often you have to relent and let the boyfriend watch something HE wants.

The Purifiers was it. He followed the production of this in magazines in the UK like Impact and Combat along with another UK action feature. We had a double bill of this and Richard Jobson's 'Purifiers'.

Comparing the two is like chalk and cheese (although they both share similar actors and stunt men and where made around the same time). One is interesting. Enjoyable. Fun. And exciting. The other is The Purifiers.

If you have the choice of watching one or the other Left For Dead is the one to go with.

This film is just dull, pointless and badly acted toss. Alexander should be shot for crimes against acting. Oh well could be worse... at least I had the momory of Left For Dead to erase this!

Got this film along with a couple of other direct to DVD martial arts films.

This film showed great promise but, alas, it sucked. The cast were good but most of the most talented guys seemed under used and McKidd and the hobbit were seriously miscast (come on guys cast fighters as fighters not actors as fighters and fighters as actors).

The biggest flaw about this was it's use of slow motion... god if they'd taken all that out the film would have been 5 mins long!!! Everything about this film is wrong... the direction, casting, shots, production... it just feels cheap and fake.

Strangely I ordered another UK action film at the same time that shared cast members like Gordon Alexander, Brendan Carr, Chirs Jones, Ashley Beck, Oliver Hollis and others called 'Left For Dead'. Whilst that has a seriously reduced budget in comparison, for all it's faults, it was head and shouters above this piece of tosh! 'Left For Dead' used the action stars to the best of their abilities and whilst the Purifiers attempted to rip of the Warriors (and looked cheap doing it) 'Left For Dead' ripped off everything from payback, Fist Of Fury and others and whilst it does occasionally look cheap at least the story, action and way it embraced its budget far exceeded this film.

I rated 'Left For Dead' as a 8 whilst this gets a 2. What does this mean? Occasionally all you need is talent, invention and excitement rather than budget, names and sloooooooooooow moooootiiiiioooon! In brief : if your gunna watch one Uk martial arts film this year don't get this. get 'Left For Dead'.

This movie is so horrible, it makes Rollerball with Dean Cain look like a masterpiece. In an over-stylized and underacted martial arts debacle, Richard Jobson manages to torture the audience for an hour and twenty minutes with slow motion fight sequences nobody cares about but him. I won't get into the plot since it speaks for itself. Not a lot of thought went into it and can be summarized as follows: in some city run by rival karate gangs, only one gang has the guts and morality to stand up to the evil Moses, the gang boss bent on uniting the gangs for evil purposes. I don't exaggerate when I say that's as deep movie went into it as well.

With some of the worst martial sequences ever defecate onto film, this movie is sure to leave you kicking the DVD out of your player long before the final credits. The fight sequences are at times shown on a split a screen, with so much cutting and slow motion, you can't tell who's fighting who. Luckily, you don't really care. There is actually narratives by the main character, an inside look into his philosophical musings, that are actually so cheezy and out of place, it's sadly comical. I think SOMEBODY takes themselves too serious. Definitely not worth using a free rental for.

I would advise AGAINST watching this...there's better things to do with your time and/or money. If, for some reason, you ARE gonna be subjected to this, don't expect ANY elements of many sci-fi/action films - no realistic martial arts; no gore; no sex, no logic - virtually no attempts to string together something that is a passable movie. So, it's a no-no, all the way. Rigid acting; illogical continuity (a girl goes off to find a phone box to make an emergency call, telling the guy who see has just seen using his mobile phone), inexplicable jump cuts are common (why did one guy just teleport on to the middle of an ice rink, in another example a girl surrounded by a biker gang suddenly appears on the outside of their ring?). The plot is simple: Copy 'The Warriors', just add a bid of poor martial arts (i.e. four glow sticks are thrashed around in a otherwise black screen to represent a fight, absolute childish crap!) and no one will know the difference, nah! The films title doesn't seem to make any real sense until after watching this movie you'd wish your mind could be purified of the memory of it! I WILLED it to end... from the 90 mins of the Purifiers, you easily have 30 mins of characters running around the place with annoying bad music, including the director singing with his almost forgotten pop band the Skids. That leaves, say, 60 mins of attempting to clone 'The Warriors', but done so badly your jaw will remain hanging throughout this sorry affair. This is not a movie. This is not an essay about a movie. This does not bear any resemblance with entertainment or cheesy fun or anything connected with the movie business. There are some movies which are so bad you can find them amusing, fun, easy to follow because of their badness... well, fascinating stuff. The only fascinating thing here is the will of the director to show us how badly he can try to rip off a classic which he wrongly believes people have forgotten, total boredom is the honest result. This is probably one of the only movies in all movie history where a blank screen can be a better spectacle...Yes it really is that bad!

I had a urge to watch this film since I saw the awful trailer for it online. I know, I know, I am a glutton for punishment but I have always enjoyed the laughable badness of B-movies so decided to give it a go, especially since "Lost" actor Dominic Monaghan is in it.

How can I describe my experience watching it? I was bored, I laughed quite a bit, I got confused when action jumped to strange places, and I thought, "What the hell was this director thinking?" as the film's end titles rolled with the awful music accompanying them.

I won't even want to mention Monaghan's performance in this film because I am sure this is a film he hopes disappears off his resume, especially now he is on "Lost". I will just say that he seemed to do the best he could in this bad movie and leave it at that.

This film was a big old mess. It dragged in the action which is bad for a martial arts film. The fight scenes were awful, the dialog was awful, the John character spouting poetic at the beginning and end of the film was awful, and even the clothing was awful. It was a bad rip-off of the movie "The Warriors" simple as that....and a bad attempt to copy the film.

I did think that the film had beautiful lighting and the colours were very beautiful as well. High definition digital can be beautiful to look at. Too bad the movie wasn't good itself.

I tortured myself twice because after I watched the film through, I thought "What the hell was the director thinking?" so watched the film with his commentary. It seems he is fully aware he is making a bad B movie and that is what he set out to do. He was so earnest about it that I found myself liking bits of the movie after he talking about the "Whys" of them. This is why I gave the movie a "3" in rating. The director did do his very best to make a bad movie with the limited budget he had.

But, it is a bad movie so if you don't want to be bored, and don't find amusement in awful films, give this film a pass and rent something better.