Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
Round 1, Bout 3, Team Video Games vs. The Men From Hong Kong
Fung Shang Wu Chi is the Darth Vader of the Man Chu Ching Dynasty. He’s a blind man who lives on a mountain disguised as a Buddhist lama, but he works for the Emperor, seeking out the last remaining rebels who support the former Ming Dynasty and decapitating them with the flying guillotine, a scientifically questionable but cinematically unparalleled weapon that’s basically a ring on a chain. When he tosses it over someone’s head it unfolds into a basket with a circle of blades inside, then he yanks it and it’s off with their head. And it’s ingeniously designed because the whole thing can fold up into small cylinder about the size of a pocket umbrella. If these things were easier to master then women could keep them in their purses instead of pepper spray, that would be pretty cool. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fighting tournament, Jimmy Wang Yu, The Super-Kumite
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 30 Comments »
Tuesday, June 4th, 2013
Round 1, Bout 3: TEAM VIDEO GAMES vs. THE MEN FROM HONG KONG
MORTAL KOMBAT: THE ANIMATED VIDEO, aka MORTAL KOMBAT: THE JOURNEY BEGINS was a straight-to-VHS-and-Laserdisc release made as a tie-in with Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 live action theatrical MORTAL KOMBAT movie. The cover boasts that it allows you to “GO ONE STEP BEYOND VIRTUAL REALITY WITH 3D ANIMATION LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE!”
It is true that I’ve never seen animation like this before, but only because most people who would make it would know it was not good enough to release on a video. This video alternates between substandard Saturday morning cartoon type drawn animation and extremely crude animatic type computer animation. More on that in a minute. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: The Super-Kumite
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Reviews, Videogame | 9 Comments »
Monday, June 3rd, 2013
ROUND 1, BOUT 2, AMERICAN KICKBOXERS VS. THE WOMEN
“They’re gonna be punchin where you’re at. Don’t be there.”
I wasn’t familiar with Mimi Lesseos until I was trying to find more tournament movies and I discovered this one. Actually, her wrestling name “The Magnificent Mimi” sounds kind of familiar, maybe I heard of her back in the late ’80s when she was a contender for the AWA World Women’s Championship belt (which she never got, except in a 1989 Playboy spread). After appearing as The Magnificent Mimi, chief rival to the heroine of AMERICAN ANGELS: BAPTISM OF BLOOD (1989), Lesseos decided to pull a Tom Laughlin and make her own independent action vehicles. She started by writing, producing and starring in PUSHED TO THE LIMIT (1992). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fighting tournament, Mimi Lesseos, The Super-Kumite, Verrel Lester Reed Jr., wrestling
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Thursday, May 30th, 2013
SUPER-KUMITE, ROUND 1, SECOND BOUT: AMERICAN KICKBOXERS VS. THE WOMEN
IMDb may list this Cannon production as AMERICAN KICKBOXER, but the DVD cover and more importantly the title screen call it AMERICAN KICKBOXER 1. So going by the DIE HARD 2 precedent that is the official title as far as I’m concerned. Part 1 is the story of B.J. Quinn (John Barett, GYMKATA), middleweight kickboxing
champ with a 35-1 record. In the opening fight he takes on the young up and comer Chad Hunter (Keith Vitali, REVENGE OF THE NINJA) and wins with an allegedly accidental elbow. Because of B.J.’s arrogant talk on the way to the ring and the dishonorable means of victory I honestly thought this was the introduction of the bad guy. But I guess he’s supposed to be one of those lovable asshole characters, or possibly just a guy at a low point who needs redemption or whatever. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brad Morris, Cannon Films, John Barrett, Keith Vitali, Terry Norton, The Super-Kumite
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, May 29th, 2013
ROUND 1, FIRST BOUT, BLOODSPORT SEQUELS VS. TEAM BOLO
“You’re a true warrior, Alex.”
The hero of the original BLOODSPORT, Frank Dux (played by the icon of tournament fighting movies, Jean-Claude Van Damme) trained in ninjitsu as a kid after stealing a valuable katana and then impressing its owner by having second thoughts and returning it. As an adult he’s in the Army, but goes AWOL to enter the dangerous underground Kumite tournament.
The replacement hero for the Van-Damme-less part 2, Alex Cardos (Daniel Bernhardt, the Swiss martial artist and model who had been in a Versace commercial with Van Damme) is also a dirty sword-stealer, but this guy does it as a grown man, has no regrets and doesn’t try to give it back. He goes to a party at Pat Morita’s house, steals the sword from upstairs and makes a lunch date with a lady he was flirting with named Janine (Lori Lynn Dickson) as he flees. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Daniel Bernhardt, Donald Gibb, James Hong, Nick Hill, Ong Soo Han, Pat Morita, Philip Tan, Ron Hall, The Super-Kumite
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, May 28th, 2013
ROUND 1, FIRST BOUT, BLOODSPORT SEQUELS VS. TEAM BOLO
aka FINAL FIGHT
“Stop him! You mustn’t let him keep practicing martial arts! Please! Please! Ryu is not a fighter. He’s a warm and caring person!”
BLOODFIGHT is from Japanese director Shuji Goto (FIGHTING BLACK KINGS) and star Yasuaki Kurata (HEROES OF THE EAST, EASTERN CONDORS, FIST OF LEGEND) but it’s a Hong Kong production featuring Bolo Yeung and Simon Yam. I rented it on a triple feature called Great Martial Arts Movies, and it had a warning about the picture quality not being up to modern standards, so I expected the worst. But other than being cropped it looked fine.
I also thought it might be dubbed, and there’s not any dialogue for the first ten minutes or more, so I was in suspense. Turns out it’s one of the rare Hong Kong movies that was actually filmed in English. Some of the actors sound like they’re just repeating it phonetically, so it’s hard to understand some of it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bolo Yeung, Shuji Goto, Simon Yam, The Super-Kumite, Yasuaki Kurata
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 11 Comments »
Monday, May 27th, 2013
THE ISLAND I guess was Michael Bay’s big failure. He held his head high during his public shaming as the asshole who directed PEARL HARBOR, but this time he hit the type of bump that means more to him: he made a movie that didn’t make very much money. In the U.S. I guess it only made $36 million, which would be enough for his monthly Lamborghini allowance but doesn’t even cover a third of the shooting budget. For comparison, PEARL HARBOR made $75 million on its opening weekend.
Of course I’m coming to it eight years and three TRANSFORMERSes later having heard of its growing reputation as Michael Bay’s Not As Bad Movie. So when I was looking for a dumb summer blockbuster to get me in a summer movie mood it leapt off the video store shelf into my cold, reluctant embrace. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: clones, Djimon Hounsou, Ewan McGregor, Michael Bay, Michael Clarke Duncan, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 88 Comments »
Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
Ladies and gentlemen, the title is FURIOUS 6. They’ve been advertising it as FAST & FURIOUS 6, and every time I see that I think “if the last one was FAST FIVE then why can’t this be FURIOUS SIX?” Well, the actual movie says FURIOUS 6. And this is not the first time that the THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS series has come through for me. We’re family.
Director Justin Lin returns for his fourth and final installment, and I hope they gave him a hell of a gold watch. When he came along there was this one really enjoyable POINT BREAK ripoff and one ridiculous sequel and he had to follow up without the original cast or characters. The series was left for dead. But he did a great job with TOKYO DRIFT, then reunited Vin Diesel and Paul Walker for FAST AND FURIOUS, then brought back almost the entire team and added The Rock for FAST FIVE. With FURIOUS SIX he takes everything he learned from those movies and supercharges the engine and adds spoilers and shit. Having the whole team (minus Don Omar and Tego Calderon, plus Michelle Rodriguez) together isn’t a novelty the second time around, so to make up for that he kicks the action sequences into ridiculous new extremes. Which is saying alot in a FAST AND FURIOUS – have you seen these movies? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Morgan, Gina Carano, good part 6s, Joe Taslim, Jordana Brewster, Justin Lin, Luke Evans, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Walker, Screen Actor's Guild Award Winner Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Sung Kang, The Rock, Tyrese, Vin Diesel
Posted in Action, Reviews | 190 Comments »
Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
This week in my Daily Grindhouse column I check out STRANGLEHOLD, another Cirio H. Santiago picture. This one is from 1994 and stars Jerry Trimble, who you may know as the guy who fights Dolph in front of the welders in THE PACKAGE. It’s an UNDER SIEGE type scenario where delighted-with-himself terrorist Vernon Wells has taken over a chemical plant while Trimble was doing security for a visiting congresswoman.
Take a look.
Tags: Cirio H. Santiago, Jerry Trimble, Vernon Wells
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Speaking of weird animated martial arts videos, this week for my column on Daily Grindhouse I investigated a weird VHS tape I found of a 1976 animated movie purported to have Bruce Lee in it. Or a cartoon of him. It’s called CHINESE GODS, aka THE STORY OF THE CHINESE GODS. Bruce has a third eye and he fights a nine-tailed fox lady and that sort of thing. You know how it is.
