Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Thursday, July 6th, 2006
This is Sonny Chiba’s most famous movie, the one that made him an international star, and the one that Christian-Slater-as-Tarantino-stand-in went on about in TRUE ROMANCE. And as a vehicle to show how awesome Sonny Chiba is, it’s great. As a movie though I would argue that it’s not necessarily his best.
Maybe it wasn’t the greatest idea in the world to re-watch it right after enjoying the KARATE BULL FIGHTER trilogy. This one has alot of the same elements. Fights in dojos, dirty fighting on the streets, war time flashbacks, the tragic death of a goofy sidekick. But I don’t think the story is quite as good. It starts out very promising with Sonny’s character Terry Tsugura going into a prison disguised as a priest to bust a guy out. I mean, you know that’s gonna get good. But after that it’s pretty meandering and confusing for a while as he discusses things with various factions and people try to hire him and what not. (I should point out that I haven’t found it in a subtitled version, only dubbed, and that probaly doesn’t help.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Sonny Chiba
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Saturday, July 1st, 2006
According to this movie Superman has been in outer space for five years doing some research and now he’s returned. The concept is supposed to be that everything has changed, because Lois Lane is now engaged to the guy who plays Cyclops from X-Men and has a kid. The problem is though, nothing much else has changed. Sure, this is a whole new set of actors, a new director, and modern special effects. It’s been exactly (something) years since Superman part whatever the last one was, and its two lead actors, Richard Pryor and Christopher Reeve, have both passed away. Still, director Brian Singer goes out of his way to NOT reinvent the series. He wants this to be a sequel to the old ones so he got a guy who looks like Christopher Reeve, he uses the same theme song, he puts some goofy ’80s retro comedy in there and even did retro style opening credits. In the last Star Wars I heard an audience cheer for a hallway, in this one I heard an audience cheer for a font. Strange times we’re living in. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brandon Routh, Bryan Singer, Kevin Spacey, Parker Posey
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 138 Comments »
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
This third picture in the FAST AND THE FURIOUS trilogy saga is pretty different and at first doesn’t even seem to be connected to the other ones. I never saw Academy Award nominee for best director John Singleton’s 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, but I know Paul Walker returned and Vin Diesel didn’t. And I believe Tyrese showed up. This time around we lose everybody and start over with a new character played by Lucas Black (the kid from SLING BLADE who I last saw in a small role in JARHEAD).
The first section of the movie, which is also the best section, is all about Lucas Black getting into macho confrontations with dudes and then having a race. In the opening he’s leaving school, getting into his junker car when he exchanges words with a rich asshole jock dickhead (HOME IMPROVEMENT’s Zachary Ty Bryan, still wearing a letterman’s jacket at 24). You can already tell this is gonna be a worthwhile movie when it starts playing western style music and showing closeups of their faces as they stare each other down. They’re about to get in a wrench fight when the jock’s girlfriend suggests a peaceful solution: a fast and/or furious race. Lucas Black says, “I only race for pink slips,” (he doesn’t mention whether or not he lives life a quarter mile at a time) but since the HOME IMPROVEMENT guy’s Viper is worth $80,000, the bet is not agreed upon. So the girlfriend suggests herself as the prize. So you know the western music was not lying about this movie being awesome. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Justin Lin, Lucas Black, Sonny Chiba
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews, Sport | 18 Comments »
Monday, June 26th, 2006
The second in Sonny Chiba’s Oyama trilogy is even better than the first one. First of all, no rape scene. Second of all, he becomes more of a classical badass who gets to show off different facets of his badass powers. There’s alot of scenes where he’s in a situation that would make most people nervous – like when a powerful gangster tries to hire him – and he just gives off a Just Don’t Give A Fuck vibe, sometimes even munching on food instead of paying attention to people (always a favorite of mine since Dirty Harry foiled a robbery while eating a hot dog).
Oyama takes the job with the gangster, which is a great chance for him to wear shades, a white suit and a long white coat over his shoulder, and scare everybody without saying a word. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: karate, Sonny Chiba
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | No Comments »
Monday, June 26th, 2006
The third and final entry in the Oyama trilogy starts out in pretty much the most badass way possible. A narrator explains that at this point in his life, Oyama liked to go around to different dojos and make challenges to prove the power of his karate.
So he struts into this dojo wearing his karate clothes, but also with his white gangster coat draped over his shoulders for extra style points. When the students ask who the hell he is he explains that he’s come to challenge their sensei.
I think this sensei is the same guy he’s been feuding with all throughout the series. At any rate, the guy pretty much tells Oyama that he’s an asshole for going around picking fights, because that’s against the whole idea of karate. And it’s a good point. Still, the sensei agrees to a fight, sort of. He’ll fight Oyama, but first Oyama will have to fight 100 of his students. Ha ha ha. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: karate, Sonny Chiba
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
When a guy like me finds out there’s an ’80s action movie called HARDCASE AND FIST there’s pretty much only one choice: watch it immediately. The box says that Hardcase and Fist are cops who are framed so they have to bust out of Folsom to prove they’re innocent. That’s a classic arc, the 1980s version of the hero’s journey. I was hoping of course that the characters would be named Detective Jack Hardcase and Lieutenant John Fist, but unfortunately there is nobody in the movie who is named, nicknamed or even referred to as Hardcase or Fist.
But I got a good idea that Hardcase is Bud McAll (the credits say McAll, not McCall) because he’s a cop so he has to make a hard case or something. And Fist would have to be Eddy, his heartsick, kung fu obsessed cellmate. Hardcase was a cop framed by his crooked partner and Fist was in a “Hey Joe” type situation where he killed the dude he caught his stripper girlfriend with. The movie opens on Fist, dramatically lit in his cell, going through all his badass kung fu routines as a low keyboard drones John Carpenterishly and the camera slowly pulls out. Meanwhile, we keep cutting to Hardcase as he approaches in the prison bus. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: '80s Cheese, Angelyne, Carter Wong, Ted Prior, Tony Zarindast
Posted in Action, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
aka CHAMPION OF DEATH or FIGHTING KARATE-ULTIMATE TRUTH FIST
KARATE BULLFIGHTER is the first in a trilogy starring the great Sonny Chiba as his real life mentor Masutatsu Oyama. Apparently it’s based on a comic book called The Fanatical Karate Generation. Despite all the crazy titles this movie is really sort of a fictionalized biography of a visionary karate instructor who causes an outrage by rejecting the notions of the time. He pisses everybody off by saying that modern karate is just “a dance” and lamenting that he wasted his time by training for 3 years. He does win a big trophy in a tournament that supposedly means he’s the best karate man in Japan, but when a guy compliments him he gets all pissed off and throws it down some stairs.
It’s a real interesting story but let’s be honest, you’re not gonna watch it for an interesting story. You’re gonna watch it because it’s called Karate Bullfighter. This is because in the first half of the movie Sonny is practicing karate on the beach when suddenly he hears that a mad bull is loose. He figures maybe he should help so he saves a little girl from being gored and then wrestles the bull. He literally grabs the bull by the horns, then figuratively goes for the jugular by literally karate chopping the bull in the head until a beautiful shower of samurai movie/Dawn of the Dead style bright red blood sprays out. This is actually kind of creepy because they have a real bull for alot of shots and it looks like they somehow forced his mouth shut so he couldn’t bite. (Some of it is also clearly a fake bull.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: karate, Sonny Chiba
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | No Comments »
Monday, June 19th, 2006
SHADOW MAN, I’m sorry to say, is the most boring movie Seagal has made so far. At least on my first viewing. To be fair, both THE FOREIGNER and THE PATRIOT seemed alot more fun the second time I watched them. In some ways maybe Seagal movies are like operas, you gotta understand the plot first before you can appreciate all the pageantry. But still, this is not one of my favorites.
(No, I’ve never seen an opera before, I’m just guessin.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, Seagalogy
Posted in Action, Reviews, Seagal, War | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
When the Criterion company puts out a DVD, and the title doesn’t rhyme with either THE SCHROCK or SCHMARMAGEDDON, you know it’s probaly a pretty good movie. And everybody loves a good samurai picture so I’ve had my eye on this THE SWORD OF DOOM for a while now. What finally inspired me to watch it though is the ballots for the revision of the Badass 100. It hasn’t been rated as many times as alot of the other movies, but so far every single person who’s rated it has given it a perfect 10. It seems like they like it.
Sure enough, this is a good one. It’s basically the story of a crazy fuckin bastard goin around killing people for no reason in samurai times. The guy’s name is Ryunosuke and he’s played by Tatsuya Nakadai, who I guess is in some of Kurosawa’s pictures. The Japanese title actually means “Dai-bosatsu Pass” which is the location of the opening scene where we first meet this psychotic fuck. And right away you get this feeling that something horrible is gonna happen because the opening title says something like “Spring 1860, the Dai-bosatsu Pass Incident.” Like what’s about to happen is some horrible notorious thing we’ve all heard about before. Gulp. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: samurai
Posted in Action, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

Some of you may be wondering why the Bruce icon would adorn a review for some corny movie about an ancient war between leather clad vampires and werewolves, especially since Bruce does not appear in the film and probaly hasn’t even seen it, unless maybe on a plane. But some of you know what I’m getting at. According to recent reports, Mr. Len Wiseman – whose sole accomplishments in Hollywood so far are directing the two Underworld pictures and marrying Kate Beckinsale – will be directing “Die Hard 4.0.”
Now, I got a history with this movie, sort of. A while back, an Ain’t It Cool talkbacker named IAmLegolas begged me to review Underworld Evolution. I said I couldn’t because I hadn’t seen the first one and considering how boring I’d heard that was it might be more research than I was willing to do. As soon as I read this Die Hard news though I realized that Legolas had been ahead of his time and that the research would have to be done. And he was sure to point this out to me too. Good job YouAreLegolas, hats off to you. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Len Wiseman, vampires, werewolves
Posted in Action, Bruce, Fantasy/Swords, Horror, Reviews | No Comments »