North Star : La Légende de Ken le survivant

I thought this film was pretty good. Although, I do agree that the anime is better. I think the actors really did well for their parts. It's a lot different though from the anime. I recommend picking it up when you've got the chance. Watch it at night, it sets the mood better.

In the future the world has become a waste land after the apocalypse. The populated territory is now under the rule of the martial arts clan of the Southern Cross, led by Lord Shin. When the Master of the North Star is murdered the baton is passed and the new master has very personal issues with Shin. When he passes through a small terrorised village he comes to their aid and sets up a confrontation with Shin.

Even though I had read bad reviews about this film, I still had reasonable hopes for it, using the logic that I was prepared for a dumb martial arts movie. However some bothered me about the film was that it didn't seem to live up to the potential that the story had. The film should have been a more majestic story about mysterious clans doing battle in the future, but instead it felt very small and restricted. The story doesn't seem to go anywhere and lots of avenues are left unexplored.

The sets etc don't help as they were clearly pretty cheap and only the opening shot of Malcolm McDowell sitting in his oriental house really had style or imagination – the images of apocalypse were too cheap to be impressive. The fight scenes are pretty average I'm sad to say. While Honk Kong cinema was on the edge of things, this film was back in the 1970's with its standard fights. In the anime the fights are much more impressive and the film should have tried to capture much more of a sense of wonder. The effects are a little too gory for my taste and don't fit with the story, because the film lacks a sense of mysticism it feels ordinary – hence the problem when it tries to do something that is different or weird.

The cast has some well known faces in small roles but the lead actors aren't up to the task of delivering good dialogue, they have awesome bodies and can move quite well but they can't act! This takes away from the film a great deal and stopped me getting into the characters. Daniels and Mandylor are two of the guiltiest ones but it is spread through the cast of villagers, including Melvin Van Peebles. McDowell looks like he might add class but is a temporary narrator and faces like Penn and Howard are only of interest rather than stealing the show.

Overall this is a pretty poor film. It lacks the majestic, epic sweep that it should have had and feels small and cheap. The effects are OK but the fights really lack flair or imagination – witness people queuing up to come one at a time and you'll understand what I mean. The poor acting, bad dialogue and basic average delivery of every part of the film really makes this feel bad – I was in the mood for an undemanding martial arts movie to waste 90 minutes and even I was disappointed by this!

I love the anime version. I knew this one would be a train wreck, but had to check it out. The fights bored me to tears. The guy playing Kenshiro looked too much like Kevin Nealon in a bad wig for me to take seriously. The fact that Downtown Julie Brown was the best actor in the mess should be enough to warn you away. Kenshiro's head-exploding move looked like something out of hot shots part deux. A for effort, but they just weren't up the task.

FIST OF THE NORTH STAR

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Ultra-Stereo

Low-budget Americanization of the Japanese manga 'Hokuto no Ken' - already the subject of an earlier anime feature and TV series - in which a mystical warrior (British-born martial arts expert Gary Daniels) defends the survivors of an unspecified global holocaust from an evil warlord (Costas Mandylor) who intends to rebuild the planet in his own image. Photographed by A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's Jacques Haitkin through layers of murk designed to conceal a multitude of budgetary deficiencies, and 'distinguished' by flashy editing and gymnastic camera-work designed to conceal the lack of a comprehensible plot, Tony Randel's unconvincing future noir trades the visionary outlook of the original graphic novel for the same lumbering, humorless approach which typified this particular subgenre before US producers *finally* learned how to imitate their Asian counterparts. Though brutal in places, particularly during the final confrontation between Daniels and Mandylor, the film actually *downplays* the gory carnage of its source material, which will disappoint those expecting a more faithful adaptation.

A popular figure in this kind of DTV potboiler, Daniels was clearly hired for his fighting skills rather than his acting, and he's upstaged throughout by many of his co-stars (including Chris Penn, Melvin Van Peebles and Malcolm McDowell). Thankfully, Randel makes a virtue of Daniels' handsome face and muscular torso, and there's an unmistakable whiff of homoerotic tension in the aggressive relationship between Daniels and his equally handsome nemesis.

I literally grew up reading Fist of the North Star as a kid and to tell the truth, I was upset that they even tried to make a real movie out of it. I would like to answer some of the quetions from previous messages. Someone mentioned there aren't many martial art moves in the movie. Well... In original manga, every fight ends in 1-2 moves since either Ken is WAY TOO strong or the opponent is stronger. And yes, characters have Japanese names, but in manga, they DO look like white people.

Overall, the movie itself is not something to watch and the ONLY reason why I even bothered to hunt down this rare movie was because I was the biggest Fist of North Star manga fan about 15 years ago.