Badass Showdown

Oh my god! Cynthia Rothrock is finally back in the movies again. Yay!!! Hang on, the movie is so shocking she ought to stay away from being in future movies if they will continue to be as bad as this one.

Like other previous reviewers stated...Badass Showdown has gay boys pretending to be martial artists and you can tell that they don't know martial arts. Badass Showdown is choreographed/directed and produced by people who don't know martial arts at all.

I just don't understand how someone can show such bad acting or why Cynthia would return to movies and appear in a total flop of a film. I am very disappointed. The only time I will write a review is when the movie is extremely good or extremely poor. I would rarely say how bad a movie is. I just want everyone to know that I am telling the truth to save others money or time. I am a major movie buff and can watch almost any movie from beginning to end. I didn't even finish watching Badass Showdown although I consider myself a loyal Cynthia Rothrock fan. Watching the gay boys pose in shower and in bedroom made me expect some soft gay porn to begin but it never did...thank god. My wife after ten minutes of the movie was telling me to change to another. If you are gay, then you might like Badass Showdown.

Well how do I put it, one of my favorite female martial artists brought down to this level, what were they thinking, soft porn for gay men or just a flesh fest for the ladies, acting, well there wasn't any. For a martial arts movie the fight scenes and action were at the best lacking. I was expecting a film that was worth watching, however I found myself fast forwarding to avoid the shower of bad acting and semi-nudity. I find it insulting that the martial artists showed little if any talent in both acting and martial arts, adding insult to injury they have the leading lady as a minimal, non-fighting entity, this from a lady who has been five-time World Karate Champion in forms and weapons between 1981 and 1985.

This is NOT a film. It's just 55 minutes of guys showering and working out with 15-minutes of talking to pass off an excuse for a story.

I'm not even joking. This isn't a troll review, it's serious.

I've posted a breakdown of the film on the 'film's discussion boards entitled "No Badasses, NO Showdown" The DVD cover is to sucker MMA fans into buying it.

Thank God for DVD rip-s and sites like put-locker.

How this guy continues to produce these things is beyond me.

He used to make decent films. Now he just does soft-core gay-porn and puts a 'mainstream feature film' cover on the DVD too sell more copies.

I will try to write this without trying to insult anyone involved with this movie. Sorry if I do, but I have to say Badass Showdown is an insult to the viewers too.

All is filmed mostly in one location, except for the nice beaches we can see sometimes.

After watching a while, I just had to find out who the female director was. To my shock it was a man named David DeCoteau. There are a lot of scenes with all the guys showering, often a couple minutes of watching them. And quite a lot of scenes with half-naked boys doing exercise (not even doing it right).

The plot is thin, if any at all.

The actors are so bad you think they lost a bet and had to be in this movie. Yes, they are that bad.

Then there is the music/sounds. What did the sound department think of? Action movies usually have some crappy sounds, but this has a huge amount of it. The music doesn't fit in, it sounds more like from a sci-fi thriller.

The hand-held cameras does nothing good if you ask me. It made me dizzy and it looks like its filmed by kids.

I could not give 0 out of 10, so I had to give it 1. I'll watch Night of the Lepus 100 times before I watch this again. If they used $1.000.000 on this movie, a better choice would be to give it to charity or homeless people.

I beg any viewer stumbling upon my words to read them in full, and immediately push from your mind any slightest notion of watching this. You'll be very sorry if you don't.

The existence of 'Badass showdown' may be scientific proof that we live in the darkest timeline. It's utterly pointless. I do have a few conjectures as to why this rubbish was ever put out into the world: The first is that, a few years after having initially mostly quit acting, Cynthia Rothrock was hard-up for cash, and called in a favor with a producer so she could earn the easiest paycheck of her life. The second is that the film is actually a cruel joke, an experiment by filmmaker David DeCoteau to see just how far fan culture will go - if a single beloved name is attached to a feature, no matter how putrid, will viewers still seek it out? (With great shame I admit the answer is apparently "yes.") My third conjecture is that DeCoteau genuinely enjoys being raked over the coals, and makes terrible movies just so he can get his kicks from bad reviews. Whatever the case may be, please allow me to be very clear: there is no hole in hell too deep for this to reside in.

Rothrock is the only person on hand of any note whatsoever, and it's clear she's not remotely invested in the film; she may as well be reciting a grocery list instead of written dialogue. That dialogue is abhorrent, unreal, and completely unbelievable, just as the male characters are empty-headed and unlikable dudebros. Or - is it that the roles are horrid goons, or that the actors portraying them are? It's impossible to tell, not least of all because their presence is almost entirely bereft of anything that's recognizable as acting. "Threadbare" is too kind a word to describe the plot; imagine a throw rug reduced to a single thread, itself both hopelessly knotted and falling apart in multiple places, and you have a clearer picture of what 'Badass showdown' involves. It gets worse though, because music that would theoretically be subpar accompaniment for an action film is the soundtrack over scenes that mostly showcase unattractive shirtless men standing around, or lifting weights, or - I can't believe I'm about to say this - showering. A bewildering, infuriating, substantial portion of the length consists of footage of men showering. Never before have I felt so strong an urge to wash my eyes with bleach.

If the camerawork, cinematography, direction, and editing is in any way genuinely representative of DeCoteau's work, and skills, I can only surmise that he is, in fact, the single worst living filmmaker. I'd rather need to pay to watch 20 more no-budget features from Harold P. Warren than to suffer through another abomination helmed by DeCoteau. To glance at his credits, one can see that he has previously been associated with other people or production companies known for low-budget flicks, but even Roger Corman or Charles Band are cinematic masters by comparison. In those short, poorly made instances where we do see "fighting," it is the laziest and most uninteresting "action" I can recall. Imagine if the several minutes of Roddy Piper and Keith David going at it in John Carpenter's 'They live' weren't played up for laughs, but were an earnest effort at fight choreography. Are you getting the picture yet?

I'm embarrassed to say I watched this. I have never watched a single other movie that's as awful as this. Had you asked me only days ago I would have said that 'The 13th Friday' or 'A karate Christmas miracle' were the top contenders to be the worst film ever made, but that's no longer true. 'Badass showdown' is, beyond any doubt, the most excruciating, rotten, foul, malodorous, putrescent, wretched, appalling dreck that has ever been conjured. The outrageous "twist" that comes within the last several minutes makes me reevaluate my conjectures - maybe this really was just one big joke, and it was Rothrock who was forced out of retirement because she owed a favor to someone. 'Badass showdown' is proof that a divine power exists, and it actively despises humans. If I were granted one wish, I'm pretty sure it would be to erase this from the universe.

Now excuse me while I question every decision I've ever made in my life.