Posts Tagged ‘Corey Yuen’
Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
WU DANG is not only an alternate spelling of “Wu Tang” and an excellent new exclamation to use, but also a nice period martial arts picture that just came to the region 1 DVD. The director is Patrick Leung (THE TWINS EFFECT II), the action choreographer is the great Corey Yuen.
Vincent Zhao, star of TRUE LEGEND, plays Dr. Tang Yunlong, a sort of more buttoned down Indiana Jones type of treasure hunter. In the opening he goes to appraise a legendary ancient sword, like Steven Seagal does on the weekends. He identifies it as a fraud, but the carrying case is apparently real because he breaks it open and pulls out a map to 7 treasures on the Wu Dang Mountain. Then it’s “well, gotta be going now fellas” as he tries to walk away with the map, which means he has to fight his way out. This is great because he’s wearing a pinstrip suit, a bow tie, round glasses and white gloves and he’s leaping through the air, punching through walls, crushing guys’ legs in doors. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Corey Yuen, Fan Siu-Wong, Hong Kong action, Vincent Zhao
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, November 20th, 2012
DOA: DEAD OR ALIVE is the name of a tournament where the best fighters from around the world are invited to come stay on a remote island where they are pitted against each other in un-refereed fights with few rules. It’s like Mortal Kombat except not interdimensional, no monsters, during daylight, and not to the death. So they probly could’ve picked a better name. Maybe just “A.”
They’re wedded to this DOA title, though. They got the logo on parachutes, computers, signs, even a volleyball. That’s the kind of island we’re dealing with here, it has custom made non-tournament related sporting gear. These are professionals. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian J. White, Collin Chou, Corey Yuen, Devon Aoki, fighting tournament, Holly Valance, J.F. Lawton, Jaime Pressly, Kane Kosugi, Kevin Nash, Matthew Marsden, ninjas, Sarah Carter
Posted in Action, Reviews, Videogame | 59 Comments »
Saturday, November 3rd, 2012
THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS is the new kung fu movie directed, co-written and starring RZA, leader of the Wu-Tang Clan. The rap group, not the clan, although he has actually been a guest at the Shaolin Temple and trained under a 34th generation Shaolin monk, no bullshit. If you’re not a Shaolin monk and not into hip hop either you might still be familiar with RZA from his all time classic score to GHOST DOG: WAY OF THE SAMURAI or you might’ve seen him show up as an actor occasionally, like in AMERICAN GANGSTER or FUNNY PEOPLE.
Directing a kung fu movie, though, is something he’s been trying to do since at least the ’90s, when he started filming a super hero martial arts thing called BOBBY DIGITAL. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Byron Mann, Chen Kuan-tai, Corey Yuen, Cung Le, Dave Bautista, Gordon Liu, Jamie Chung, Lucy Liu, Rick Yune, Russell Crowe, RZA
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 75 Comments »
Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
ABOVE THE LAW (1986) (a.k.a. RIGHTING WRONGS) really is about the law. It begins with Yuen Biao after graduating from law school. A group of conspirators, including one with a gun tucked behind an accordion, try to assassinate his professor. The shit goes down just as he’s saying his goodbyes and the prof is giving him a law book as a gift. In the chaos the book goes flying in the air, is shot through with holes, and then is stepped on by panicking witnesses. I don’t know why but I almost feel like that could symbolize something. Probly not. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Corey Yuen, Cynthia Rothrock, Dragon Dynasty, movies with the same title as a Seagal movie, Yuen Biao
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012
There’s alot of big movie anniversaries this summer. Everybody’s celebrating 30 years since the Summer of ’82 shit like E.T., THE THING, BLADE RUNNER, CONAN THE BARBARIAN. And I’ve been trying to commemorate the important summer of ’87 ones like PREDATOR and ROBOCOP. Little did I know that there was another movie, originally released July 9th, 1987, worthy of that kind of respect, but that I never saw before.
Geez, man. What have I been doing these last 25 years that was so god damn important I couldn’t be bothered to watch EASTERN CONDORS? Nothin, that’s what. Why did nobody convince me to watch this one before? This is my new favorite movie until further notice. The only legitimate reason to not watch it is if you’re worried that it will be hard to find another action movie to watch after that, because not many hold up to the EASTERN CONDORS standard of fun. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Corey Yuen, Hong Kong action, Joyce Godenzi, Sammo Hung, Vietnam, Yuen Biao, Yuen Woo-Ping
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, War | 59 Comments »
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
As successful as they may be in their own countries, global superstars always seem to have their eye on the juicy, low-hanging grape of Hollywood. It doesn’t matter how many soldiers have fallen before them, stumbling on a new language, style and approach to filmmaking and bleeding away everything that made them great in the first place. It’s still hard to resist the temptation. They’re still gonna jump and try to bite it.
And so it was that in the late ’90s and early 2000s Jet Li left Hong Kong to make some Hollywood-produced, English language movies. Of course if you have a guy who’s a legendary martial arts champion and iconic star of many of his generation’s most popular movies (the SHAOLIN TEMPLE series, the ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA series, the FONG SAI YUK series, and FIST OF LEGEND) what you do in the U.S. is put him in a movie with DMX and Anthony Anderson that’s billed as “an urban Romeo and Juliet.” I mean, what else would you do with him? That’s just obvious.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bridget Fonda, Corey Yuen, Cyril Raffaelli, Jet Li, Luc Besson, Tcheky Karyo
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 74 Comments »
Saturday, December 4th, 2010
Some of you young kids might not know about The Curse of Van Damme. It was an early ’90s phenomenon named after (but not necessarily caused by) our favorite Belgian kickboxer/actor because of his track record for personally delivering talented Hong Kong directors to Hollywood. They’d come over, inject our action movies with a very small watered-down dose of what they had been doing back at home, then their bodies and minds would be completely drained by the studio beasts, leaving them hollow husks whose names on movies were no longer desirable. I mean you got John Woo – who used to wear his heart on the back of his director’s chair, who used special cameras powered by liquified male bonding and typed his scripts in inks made from tears of passion – directing a movie so obviously for a paycheck that, in my opinion, it was even titled PAYCHECK.
But the curse can be broken. Six years and no theatrical releases later John Woo returned home, filming a Chinese movie for the first time in 17 years, and what he came up with was a motherfucking masterpiece. The damn thing is so powerful somebody tried to chop it in half and it just grew into two complete movies. Whoever did it I bet they just ran away because they knew if they chopped those in half you’d have four RED CLIFFS and they would conquer the earth, guaranteed.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Corey Yuen, epic, John Woo, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung
Posted in Action, Reviews, War | 66 Comments »
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
Note: Nothing against this old review, but 14 years later I recorded a commentary track as a Patreon exclusive and that’s much better in my opinion
NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER is easily one of the best “bad” martial arts movies I know of. In the U.S. it’s only on VHS, and the import DVD cover shows a shirtless Jean-Claude Van Damme, like it’s KICKBOXER or BLOODSPORT. Actually, Van Damme only appears in the beginning and at the end as “Ivan the Russian,” the Ivan Drago of kickboxing, the villain who the hero has to beat. He doesn’t talk, but does a good robotic bad guy performance. He even wears a white suit, and if you wear a white suit you’re either a rapper, a Love Boat captain or a villain. In this case he’s mostly the latter.
The actual star of the movie is Kurt McKinney as Jason Stillwell, a dorky white guy but an actual martial artist at least. Something about his squareness kind of reminds me of Brandon Lee for some reason. His dad runs an L.A. karate school, but shuts it down and flees to Seattle after organized crime figures (with Van Damme as henchman) threaten him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Corey Yuen, JCVD
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 39 Comments »
Friday, November 21st, 2008
Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
Vern is the greatest writer about film writing about film anywhere that film is written about. If you disagree, I will pay a big guy to punch you in a soft place.
I haven’t seen TRANSPORTER 3 yet, but thanks to this review, I feel like I have. Every word’s a gem, Vern. Thanks for the huge Friday morning belly laugh.
Check it out. Tell me I’m wrong.
Here’s a test for you. How many times did you rewind the part in TRANSPORTER 2 where he sees in a reflection that there’s a bomb on the bottom of his car so he drives the car off a pile of junk, flips, successfully hooks the bomb onto a nearby crane and lands the car safely? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Besson productions, Corey Yuen, Jason Statham
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | 30 Comments »
Monday, March 27th, 2006
One day not too long ago I was sitting in a theater waiting to watch some movie, the identity of which has by now dissolved into the fountain of time. (that’s not a real saying, I just made it up. My audience deserves new sayings, not the same old shit they’ve heard before and understand.) And suddenly there was a trailer for a sequel that probaly nobody, and definitely not me, asked for. The movie of course was THE TRANSPORTER 2 in case you forgot which review you’re reading here. There was kicking, jumping, cars flipping, things exloding, a half naked lingerie wearing sexy nurse assassin with makeup smeared down her eyes Tammy Faye Baker style, that sort of thing. There was this ridiculous shot where The Transporter jumps his BMW from one parking garage into another and skids out right on the edge of the thing. All that flash and bang got me excited and I realized that somehow, even though I kind of hated THE TRANSPORTER, I wanted to see the sequel. I can’t remember ever being excited about a sequel to a movie I didn’t like. But like Jesus and the correctional system said, you gotta give a guy a second chance. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Besson productions, Corey Yuen, Jason Flemying, Jason Statham, Keith David, Louis Leterrier, Matthew Modine
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 5 Comments »
