FIST OF THE CONDOR (El Puño del Cóndor), available now on the Hi-YAH! streaming network,* is the long-awaited (by me at least) reunion of Chilean martial arts star Marko Zaror (UNDISPUTED III, SAVAGE DOG, JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4) and writer/director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. They came up together making KILTRO, MIRAGEMAN and MANDRILL, but this is their first together since REDEEMER in 2014. From the looks of it they spent that time training, meditating, and learning powerful secret techniques.
I loved this movie, and I think it follows the established Zaror/Diaz Espinoza pattern of being even better than the last one, but I have exactly one (1) caveat: I wish I’d remembered that the first trailer called it FIST OF THE CONDOR: PART ONE. It felt kinda like if I’d watched KILL BILL VOLUME 1 thinking it was the whole thing and expecting her to cross all the names off her list. When it ended I had to do a double take, rewind and watch the last scene again to get my bearings. But I understand it now. (read the rest of this shit…)
“All right, you want some real action, tough guys? Let’s do it.”
While the summer was dominated by the expensive studio action spectacles 
BLOOD RAGE, aka NIGHTMARE AT SHADOW WOODS, wants to be the identical twin brother of HALLOWEEN. Same genetics, separate souls. It kinda seems like somebody wrote down a summary of HALLOWEEN, then went through line-by-line crossing out each part and writing something else next to it.
Well I thought this would be funny because Jean-Claude Van Damme plays twins but it is not one of his better pictures in my opinion. It is not nearly as boring as Cyborg, but it is pretty generic and dull and shows few signs of the iconoclastic action pioneer that Van Damme would later become.
