Meus Punhos São Minhas Armas

In San Francisco's Chinatown, Eric (Eric Lee) runs a martial arts school. His skills come in handy when a band of thugs kidnaps his half-sister for a large Chinese gang. The head thug took the job because he has a score to settle with the girl's father. The Chinese gang wants ransom money from the girl's mother, who, despite living modestly, has enough to pay it. Eric gathers a team of expert fighters from his school and goes off to get the girl back. But emotions run high when the team is joined by the father who had left his family years ago. Later, they'll be joined by a kidnapper with a conscience (Louis Bailey). In the hills, the girl escapes and gets recaptured several times. The hills are teeming not only with the members of the Chinese gang, but with female assassins and cruel bikers, too.

There's plenty in this low-grade action film to satisfy bad movie fans. Eric's mother speaks perfect English (though she often flubs her lines), but Eric himself seems to be reading his lines phonetically. All the performances are cardboard, except that of Bailey, who somehow manages to seem intelligent. Eric's band includes only one man with a gun: Paul (played by the writer and director, Paul Kyriazi), who seems a much more efficient killer than the rest of his team, especially since no one in the Chinese gang has a gun either.

The good guys always manage to win their fights, even though they're always ludicrously outnumbered. Late in the movie, the female assassins are given a big introduction in slow motion. Considering what happens in their very next appearance, it seems in retrospect much ado about nothing.

The fight scenes are violent and cartoonish, and show off the impressive skills of the martial artists. Even a bad martial arts movie needs good fighters.

When I watched this film, I had no idea at all that its director, Paul Kyriazi, also helmed the earlier Death Machines (1976). It seems that a lot of people don't have much good to say about that one but I, on the other hand, thought it was excellent fun. A proper crazy bit of action trash, and highly entertaining. It maybe explains why I found myself enjoying Weapons of Death really, because as I have seen more and more cheap martial arts flicks from the 70's and 80's I've sort of realised I can't really be bothered with most of them at all. I usually find them somewhat tedious with action scenes so relentless that they act as a sleep inducer. Well, for some reason Kyriazi's two action movies didn't bore me at all. I found Death Machines to be the better of the two on account of its sheer insanity levels but Weapons of Death certainly is coming from a similar overall general ball-park.

Set in the San Francisco area, a Chinese crime group hires a band of low level American thugs to kidnap a girl from a rich family from Chinatown, a family who have hitherto refused to pay the gangsters protection money. Instead of bowing to the criminals demands they gather together a crew of fighters to go and rescue the girl and sort the bad guys out.

This American movie sort of tries to come across like it might be an Asian effort, or at the very least a cross-cultural movie. To this end we have multi-ethnic characters all bringing their own individual fighting methods to the table. We have swords and bow-and-arrows mixed in with kung fu and brawling. One of the proponents of the latter is one of the bad guys, a black character called Carter who for me was the most memorable character in the movie. In one scene of inspired mayhem he takes out an entire gang of bikers (or sex offenders), he slashes and boots hell out of them resulting in exploding motorcycles and piles of dead bodies. Great stuff. There are also other notable characters such as a gang of Chinese female ninjas, although to say that they were underused would be putting it mildly. But this one scores in that it has a variety of characters of different types, and some unpredictable plot developments. The action is pretty full-on but it isn't as tedious as it can be in a lot of similar action nonsense. Overall, I found this one to be quite a bit of fun.

There is a surprisingly strong script here; sadly, it is buried by poor production values, generally amateurish performances, and a lack of any real direction that could turn these disadvantages into strengths (or at least nullify them).

However, the film is only comparatively bad - that is, if you size it up with better made American martial arts films, it will look pretty bad; if you rate it next to anything Hong Kong, it will look embarrassing when not laughable.

However, After this became obvious, I let decided I'd try to set these comparisons aside and just let the film be an cheap American action film of its era; and on its own terms, it proved watchable, and even entertaining.

The high point of the film is a sequence some reviewers complain about, that seems to drop a biker gang into the movie out of nowhere. The writing is crisp and the 'cinema verite' approach makes the violence seem brutal, despite lack of proper dramatic perspective. This actually emphasizes the almost Homeric theme of the scene, and I could help thinking that the writer had read a bit of Homer before writing the film, since similarly epic-influenced moments pop into the story throughout. It's too bad the script wasn't sold to someone or some group that could really put a package like this together.

Altyhough looking dumb at the surface, there are some interesting themes here expressed well in the dialog. And the pacing is pretty good for a cheap action movie.

One other remark - I suspect this sat on a shelf looking for a distributor for a number of years - the '80s release date is belied by the hokey '70s fashions and hairstyles.

Sh!tty acting combined with sh!tty choreography ruin this whole film. I couldn't stomach more than 30 minutess of this sh!t. The plot is BASIC, even by Kung-Fu standards. I agree with previous reviewers. Plus, why is it so hard for Kung-Fu movie producers to come up with more original title names? It makes it very hard to discern between films. I actually got this movie as one of 20 movies in a $5 20 movie Kung-Fu pack. The transfer is bad quality. Almost worse than a VHS tape. I WISH Kung-Fu movie producers would REMASTER their stuff with the original widescreen version of the film.

Point blank, this movie is a waste of time, even for hardcore Kung-Fu fans.

Cinematography is poor, choreography is weak. Some of the one-on-one fight scenes are good due mostly to the physical abilities of the individuals. Too many characters to get to know any of them. Character development is very weak and shallow. Those with deep 'secrets' spill them without much protest.

There is a very weak plot line that sort of ties it all together. Pretty much any time more than two people get together they start swinging at each other. Not a lot of contact is made, but they swing a lot! We have the Chinese crime syndicate hiring a bunch of American thugs to do a kidnapping. The expected evil heavy is bald and carries a bag full of weapons, only a couple which get used before being defeated by the good guy. There is the typical character that is on the side of the bad guys, but is good at heart. Throw in a hoard of women and a motorcycle gang and a couple of double crosses and you've got it! Weapons include pistols, clubs, bow and arrow, swords of all types, spear (the most interesting one in my opinion!), a mace and claws.