Burl reviews Enter the Dragon! (1973)

 

Kaa-chop, it’s Burl, with a little of the classic martial arts for you! Now, I’m not talking about Bruce Le, star of Infra-Man and Enter the Game of Death; nor Bruce Li, who toplined Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger and Blind Fist of Bruce; nor Bruce Lei from Enter the Deadly Dragon; nor Bruce K. L. Lea from Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave and Silent Assassins! No, today we have none other than the real-deal Bruce Lee in his final proper film appearance: that great favourite Enter the Dragon!

If you’re looking for a complex and unpredictable narrative, this is not the film for you! The story is simplicity itself: a martial arts expert is recruited by a toffee-nosed Hong Kong Brit to take part in a fight competition held on the private island of suspected drugs lord Han! He’s especially game for this because Han’s men were responsible for the death of Bruce’s beloved sister! Other participants in the competition are charismatic soul brother Jim Kelly, and, of all people, John Saxon, the iron-nosed cop from, your choice, Black Christmas, Blood Beach, or A Nightmare on Elm Street! He’s not a cop here, just a playa who does kung fu!

All the James Bond-y things you’d expect, like the skulking around and the fighting with henchmen, and the murder of the most likeable character, come to pass, and there are regular infusions of mano-a-mano, some of which are over unexpectedly quickly, others which are quite epic, and one of which doesn’t happen at all: on the boat trip to the island, where the old Purple Noon trick is pulled on an objectionable Kiwi! At one point we get to witness Bruce's impressive skill at twirling the nun-chuck-as, and that's a sight to behold! Ultimate vengeance comes in the hall of mirrors as Bruce battles the savage wolf claws of Han! Ha ha!

Of course director Robert Clouse tried this same story again a dozen years later in Gymkata, and the results were not stellar! In fact the results were downright Gymkata! But with Enter the Dragon, of course, he has such advantages as Bruce Lee, a good supporting cast, a decent budget, and again, Bruce Lee! And that means a world of difference, because Lee had style to burn and skills all day long, ha ha! What a genuinely terrible  shame that a cerebral edema got such a vital man at such a young age!

I guess there’s not a lot more to say about this iconic picture! The Lalo Schifrin score is not one of his more memorable, but it serves the purpose! Clouse’s direction is similarly nothing special, but he keeps it all moving and lets the fighters do their thing! It’s nice to see such familiar faces as Bolo Yeung, Sammo Hung and even, they say, Jackie Chan operating in the margins of this important movie! (Although Bolo is featured fairly heavily, and how could it be otherwise with a guy like Bolo!) Taking everything into perfect consideration, the proper thing to do is to give Enter the Dragon two and a half souvenir handbones!

Burl reviews Gymkata! (1985)

 

Hi-ya and yakmalla, it’s Burl, here to review a well-loved classic of le bad cinema! I’ve owned a big-box MGM/UA VHS tape of this entry for a long time, but until the other night had never bothered to sit down and watch the thing! (I’ve also never watched Ninja III: The Domination, another legendarily enjoyable bad movie released by MGM/UA, but then again I don’t own a copy of that one! One day I’ll catch up to it, though!) And, though you may already have guessed it, the picture I’d like to talk about today is Gymkata!

Yes, ha ha, Gymkata! I think we all know this movie! Evidently, in the wake of the 1984 Olympics, someone, somewhere, decided that gymnast Kurt Thomas should become an action hero, and developed a story in which he becomes the master of a gymnastic martial art called gymkata! (I don’t recall them ever saying the word “gymkata” aloud in the movie, but that’s neither here nor there, I suppose!) And the big secret of gymkata is to be sure there’s a bar or a pole or a pommel horse close by so that you can swing around it and kick people in the head! And if there happens to be no athletic equipment close at hand, you can do a bunch of flips, somersaults, and cartwheels! Ha ha, economy of movement is evidently not a central precept of this particular defensive art!

The plot is, quite simply, a crazy nonsense! The little nation of Parmistan, famed for its citizens' love of hard cheese and their constant cries of “Yakmalla,” is also known for its harsh immigration policy: every newcomer must undertake the inevitably fatal “Game,” which consists of being chased across the countryside by commandos and negotiating such obstacles as a steep gorge, a sheer cliff, a confusing forest, and a town populated exclusively by maniacs who keep a carved-stone pommel horse in their square! The US wants to put a secret Star Wars radar base in the country, but diplomacy has failed to achieve this end, and straight force is out of the question!

Clearly a secret agent-gymnast is the hero required for this mission, and the government, represented here by Edward Michael Bell from The Premonition, has one on standby! It’s Jonathan Cabot, a hoppy-jumpy dwarf unburdened by personality, who’s willing to master The Game by learning new techniques from a series of teachers! These techniques include flip-wrestling and walking up the stairs on his hands! He also receives counsel from the Princess of Parmistan herself, played by the comely Filipina Tetchie Agbayani, well known from The Money Pit!

Once he arrives in Parmistan and begins to play The Game, Cabot finds enemies around every corner! Richard Norton, who did about a million low-rent action pictures and also showed up in Mad Max: Fury Road, plays Commander Zamir, in charge of both maintaining The Game’s rules and subverting The Game’s rules! Bob Schott from Vamp and Head of the Family plays Thorg, a rival player determined to kill Cabot for his propensity to spring about like a leprechaun!

And then there’s The Khan, the country’s leading shouter of “Yakmalla!” and a personage unaccountably played by muscle-bound homunculus Buck Kartalian, from Please Don’t Eat My Mother and The Outlaw Josey Wales! Ha ha, he wears a big fur hat and plays The Khan like a conventioneer at a costume party, and seems never to stop shouting “Yakmalla!” He’s a good guy, as it turns out!

Robert Clouse, who directed The Pack, was in charge of all this lunacy, and indeed one must admit that the fights, as dumb as they are, contain some impressive athleticism from Kurt Thomas! I liked that there was some 80s action gore sprinkled here and there, which is something that always improves a picture; and of course the convenient, horselaugh-inducing presence of the pommel horse and other gymnastic necessities provides plenty of entertainment value! The performances stink, and there’s a backbreaking cape of stupidity draped across the whole thing, but that’s to be expected! I’m glad I watched it, I suppose, and I look forward to Ninja III! In the meantime I give Gymkata one and a half reverse faces! Yakmalla!

Burl reviews Black Mask! (1996)

Well chop my socks, it’s Burl, here to review up some all-new nonsense action! Now, I say nonsense action, but doesn’t Black Mask, the movie under review today, really fit into the Ridiculous Action category, I hear you ask? Shouldn’t it be mounted along the Via Appia with its fellows, among them the equally guilty Raw Force and Deadly Prey? Ha ha, no I say, and I say again no! While certainly ridiculous in parts, and not lacking in pep, Black Mask, for better or for worse, lacks that certain extra edge of Total Ridiculousness!

But enough of trying to categorize it! Black Mask is a Jet Li extravaganza featuring Jet as an extraordinarily bifurcated character: at once an inhumanly violent, chemically altered supersoldier unmade and re-created in a lab so as to be free of pain, empathy, and emotion of any kind, while capable of killing enemies by the dozen in a thousand different ways; and a soft-spoken, peace-loving, flower-sniffing librarian who only wants to be left alone! Ha ha! And the split between his dual natures seems to trouble him not a whit!

But his fellow supersoldiers are not so complacent! They feel the urge for revenge upon those who experimented on them, and for this they seem to blame just about everybody! So the drug lords, the cops, random doctors and nurses, and really just anyone who gets in the way are destined to become the victims of the special commando squad! Ha ha, and they come up with some pretty gruesome ways of dispatching their victims, like the heart-bomb, or the acid sprinklers!

There are also plenty of punchfights, of course, and very dynamically enacted and filmed they are too, with lots of funky moves! When I saw this picture in the theater with my friend Pellonpäa, we practically stood up and cheered: the action sequences were extremely effective, and they still hold up well today! They’re cartoonish, but not as extremely so as we find in some Hong Kong action pictures! And they get pretty gory too, which, I’ll admit, always brings an action picture up a notch or two in my esteem! Ha ha, I guess it’s the Fangoria kid in me! (I didn’t care for the gift the commandos send to the drug lord King Kao, however!)

The bulk of the story involves Jet’s character, Michael, trying to stop the evil plans of the supersoldiers and their long-haired, Lennon glasses-wearing leader! In this he’s helped by his friend, the cop with whom he plays chess, and also a lady from the library, a flibbertigibbet type who proves her mettle, but not without screeching a lot!

Well, if you like goofy high-octane action and Jet Li at his fastest and most charming, you’ll probably like this picture! I certainly feel an affection for it! You’ll forget the plot details immediately upon finishing with it, but you’ll have had a good time! I’m going to give Black Mask two and a half exploding drug lords!

Burl reviews Raw Force! (1981)

Hello hello hello, it’s Burl, back again with another review! This time I’ve got a picture that’s banana-monster from the word go: that famous and much-loved mulebender Raw Force! I like to think of it as the early-80s exploitation movie that aliens would make if they’d had early-80s exploitation movies described to them, but had never actually seen one themselves, ha ha!

Of course, having had goodies like Without Warning, Deadly Prey and Action U.S.A. described to them the aliens would hasten to hire Cameron Mitchell for their picture! They’d sprinkle in a few other familiar faces, like Jillian Kesner from Starhops and John Dresden from Final Mission and The Dark, and they’d certainly want Vic Diaz, from Beast of the Yellow Night and a thousand other Filipino extravaganzas, to play a cannibalistic monk who grins and claps to express his delight!

And what sort of plot did these extraterrestrial exploiteers cook up for their epic? Well, it seems there’s an island in the Far East where all the disgraced martial arts masters go to die, and a tribe of monks who exchange the big lumps of jade they mine in exchange for ladies of the evening, whom they barbeque to obtain the power to revive the kung-fu masters as zombies! They barter for these lovely comestibles with a gang led by a big greasy guy with a Hitler moustache and an ice cream suit, who kidnap them back in Manila or wherever and fly them in their float plane to Warriors’ Island!

Into this situation comes a little cruise ship whose passenger roster seems comprised largely of martial artists - ha ha, but it’s also a love boat, naturally! This ship is, of course, bound for Warriors’ Island, and once the Hitler simulacrum, Mr. Speer, gets wind of this, he decides he must kill everybody on the ship before his secret is discovered!

Our heroes aboard the kung-fu ship include a couple of dudes from the Burbank Karate Club; a lady police officer; the ship’s cook; and a mustacheman played by a guy whose last acting job for this had been Plan 9 From Outer Space! Ha ha! There’s also Captain Cameron Mitchell, of course, and the brassy lady who owns the ship and serves as cruise director! Some of the greatest scenes in the picture involve random passengers, like for instance one fellow, celebrating his 30^th birthday, who is apparently the result of Jeff Goldblum going through his teleporter and fusing with Richard Benjamin instead of a fly! Ha ha! There’s also Camille Keaton in a bathroom with a fellow trying to unzip her fly, and a most gnarly bartender who atomizes a huge block of ice with his fivehead!

 But much of the movie is made up of kung-fu battles! There are in addition lots of naked ladies, some moments of goofy gore, some disco dancing, a number of explosions, and a scene where the monks very thoroughly baste one young lady in preparation for the barbeque! There’s a happy ending though, and then, as in Buckaroo Banzai, a title card announces a sequel that has yet to materialize! All in all, though it certainly isn’t a good movie, it’s a pretty terrific picture! It’s hard to know what sort of a rating to give this one, which is why I’ve always given ratings against my better judgment; but on reflection I suppose I’ll give Raw Force three axe attacks! Ha ha, thanks, alien moviemakers!

Burl reviews Big Trouble in Little China! (1986)

Ha ha, this is ol’ Burl talking at you from the Pork Chop Express, here to tell whoever’s listening that John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, the picture he made right after Starman, is still one of the most enjoyable movies the 1980s ever produced! And, ha ha for a guy like Burl that’s saying a lot! Yes, I remember going to see this one in the theater with my good pal Carnee! We watched it, then, as the lights came up and the end credits scrolled, Carnee and I just looked at one another and without a word settled back in our seats to wait for the next screening! Ha ha!

And guess what! Just the other day I saw it in the theatre once again! Ha ha, that’s right, it was screened along with a bunch of other elderly movies (including The Dark Crystal), and I was there! It was legitimately fun to see the gosh darn thing with an audience – a far bigger audience, I might add, than I saw it with in its original flop release! Ha ha! 

Of course it’s the story of hapless tough-truckin’ hombré Jack Burton, played by Kurt Russell from The Mean Season, who gets mixed up in the subterranean craziness of San Francisco’s Chinatown! Along with pals played by Dennis Dun and Victor Wong from Prince of Darkness, and an overly spunky gal played by Kim Cattrall from Porky’s, Jack sets forth to rescue a comely maiden with green eyes from the ancient cursed wizard Lo Pan, essayed by James Hong from Blade Runner! Ha ha, that was a plot rundown for any poor fools who haven’t seen this picture! Let me assure you, it’s worth it!

Now, this is a king-fu fantasy picture, and while it didn’t break any new ground with the fight scenes, and I’ve always thought they could stand to be more kinetic, they’re fun and well-done! With the exception of Kim Cattrall, who seems to be trying on a spunky 1930s screwball heroine persona (the better, perhaps, to snag a role as Indiana Jones's next girlfriend), the performances are perfect for the job! Special mention must be made of Russell, who walks the perfect line between the Duke and a dunce! Victor Wong is also a pure-d delight in the role of Egg Shen, tour bus driver, San Francisco Chinatown! Ha ha!

It’s a shame this picture failed at the box office! But on the other hand, maybe it’s not! Perhaps this is part of a select coterie of pictures, among whose number I might include The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Lifeforce and other big-budget goofnugget-supremes, which are terrific on their own and could only be injured by the existence of some lame attempt to recreate their particular magic in a sequel! I used to want someone to make Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League, but now I’m not so sure! Anyway, John Carpenter doesn’t have a great record of sequelizing his own stuff anyway – just look at Escape From L.A.! Even Halloween II’s no great shakes!

Well, this picture has its faults, but while I’m watching it I hardly notice them! That’s because it’s just so gosh darn marvelous an experience! It’s got pretty 80s trick effects from the gang who provided Ghostbusters with the same; it’s got laffs, action, and monsters; and it spends plenty of time knocking out the props from under its putative hero, who doesn’t actually do very much that’s particularly heroic! Ha ha, during the climax he shoots his gun at the ceiling and is knocked out by the falling masonry that results; so really the picture is pointing and laughing and kicking sand at the whole concept of the tough-guy hero, which is a-okay by ol’ Burl! This is a perennial good-time picture and a personal favourite, and I give Big Trouble in Little China three and a half six demon bags!

Burl reviews Ninja Assassin! (2009)

Ding bong wao, it’s Burl, here to review a ninja assassin movie by the title of, ha ha, Ninja Assassin! It’s a title that fits this picture perfectly, as it accurately and completely reflects the subject, the carbon-copy plot and the stolid, fingerprintless low-ambition manner in which it goes about its business! For me, this movie fits into a category I like to call I Can’t Believe I Watched The Whole Thing, and quite honestly tight now, as I write this, one day after having seen it, I can barely recall a thing about it!

The great splashes of lame CGI blood: that’s one thing I do remember, ha ha! I guess it’s this picture’s signature element, because that element sure isn’t the star, a Korean pop warbler named Rain! Ha ha, the gambit of using a striking-looking non-actor to play a role in which he’s required not to emote – Rain’s ninja training requires him to feel nothing, you see – works on paper, and occasionally on screen also, with the go-to example being Arnold in The Terminator! But Rain defeats even this simple calculation with his special brand of reverse-charisma! It must be a function of the cultural and language barriers, because on some level, in some way, he must be a compelling personality, or he wouldn’t be a big pop star anywhere, no matter what he looks like or how he can sing!

But imagine for a moment that you’re making a movie with Rain playing the lead! What do you do? Well, one idea is to pack the picture with as many flashbacks as possible, so that Rain’s character, Raizo, while still unquestionably the lead, is frequently played by actors other than, and superior to, Rain! Ha ha! So that’s just what they did here!

Organized chronologically instead of in pointless parallel, the film is about a young orphan raised in the harshest boarding school ever, where the students frequently go to bed without food, and with great oozing wounds or simply extreme pain! He is taught pitilessness and how to move among the shadows and how to toss throwing stars like a baby flinging Tic Tacs! His particular specialty appears to be a knife on a long, barbed chain, such as has been seen in Kill Bill and other films! (This weapon may never have existed in prop form, so consistently is it rendered as a computer graphic!)

The school trains ninjas of course, and these enact high-priced assassinations all over the world! Ha ha! But Raizo becomes disillusioned with the ninja life when his brutal teacher, played by none other than Sho Kosugi from Rage of Honor, and a nasty fellow student, Rick Yune from Olympus Has Fallen, kill a few of his friends! As Raizo is breaking away, an agent of “Europol,” played by Naomie Harris of Skyfall, gets on the ninja case, and Raizo is forced to protect her from the shadowy ninjas, who are treated cinematically as if they were attacking monsters or ghosts!

Ha ha, I did like the use of trick effects to show the ninjas melting in and out of the shadows, but so did the filmmakers, and this device was too frequently deployed! The affectless CGI gore strove so mightily for “Whoa!” that barely five minutes in, the picture felt like a bar-boor pulling card tricks, all forced, desperate energy! It’s virtually bereft of intentional humour, but it does have a certain peculiar strain of stupidity that puts it in the same class as oddities like The Hunted, of which I was strongly reminded several times!

So it’s got that going for it, but little else! But, ha ha, it can’t be denied that I did in fact watch the whole thing, so to paraphrase Obi Wan, who is the more foolish? I’m glad at least that I wrote all this down while I still could, because I can feel the thing fading fast in my memory - it's little more than a vague smear of digital blood at this point! I give Ninja Assassin one bamboo cage, and it probably doesn't even deserve that!

Burl reviews Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai! (1999)

Ha ha, yo yo, it’s Burl here! Yeah, here to review a Jim Jarmusch picture from the late 1990s! Yeah, yeah! It’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai! And as you may recall from my review of his most recent effort, Only Lovers Left Alive, I have a history of seeing Jarmusch pictures in slightly extraordinary circumstances!

I saw Ghost Dog at a film festival, at what must have been one of the premiere screenings in North America! My man Jim was there, and he’d brought along none other than Henry Silva, whom we know from such pictures as Alligator and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold! Silva came on stage and mugged like crazy, ha ha! I think there were a couple of other actors there as well, and maybe The RZA, who did the score for the picture! Ha ha, I can’t quite remember! Anyway, it was a nice event, and Jarmusch and his actors were all clearly pretty excited to unveil the movie to an audience!

Forest “The Last Stand” Whitaker stars as Ghost Dog, a mysterious hit man who takes out hoods at the behest of other hoods, and follows a bushido code, and lives a monastic life on top of a tenement, and not incidentally keeps pigeons! He has an ice cream man friend with whom he chats daily despite the two not understanding one another’s language, and he also befriends and makes reading recommendations to a precocious young girl in the neighborhood!

Due to an escalating series of misunderstandings, this taciturn hoodrat also battles the mob! Ha ha, it’s pretty amusing to watch Ghost Dog take his vengeance using such techniques as shooting up through the drain of a bathroom sink! Then he invades their country home and does a real number on those goodfellas!

There’s a solid cast featuring a great gallery of gangster faces! This bunch of mutts includes Victor Argo of Mean Streets, Richard “Barton Fink” Portnow, Cliff “Angel” Gorman and John “Curse of the Jade Scorpion” Tomey! There are also appearances by Gary Farmer from Demon Knight and Isaach de Bankolé from The Skeleton Key (he plays the ice cream man), so that’s nice, ha ha!

I can’t say I thought as much of the movie this time around as I did after that initial festival screening! (That’s often the way with festivals!) It’s still an enjoyable picture, but not in the top echelon of Jarmusch pictures as far as ol’ Burl is concerned! I still much prefer Dead Man and Down By Law, for example! Outside the festival bubble and the 90s indie atmosphere which spawned it, Ghost Dog often seems too mannered and silly! But it is also frequently funny and consistently entertaining, and Jarmusch does provide the genre goods, so you can’t fault it overmuch! Plus it’s got some terrific cinematography from the reliable Robby “Repo Man” Müller!

Just about any Jarmusch picture will get a recommendation of some degree from me, and so it is with Ghost Dog! I’m pleased to offer this fine movie three rooftop boats!

Burl reviews SuperManChu! (1973)

Ah! it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I have another review of a kung-fu spectacular for you! This one is called SuperManChu, and it’s so similar to another picture I watched recently, Blind Fist of Bruce, that I’m already having trouble telling the two apart! I hope that doesn’t seem culturally insensitive, ha ha! Please recall that I’m in no way an expert on the kung-fu pictures, but I’m trying to educate myself by watching those films reputed by all to be the best! Thus, SuperManChu!

It’s got a pretty simple story! A criminal mob led by a pencil-moustache happens by a family-owned restaurant, orders some food and then molests and kills everyone! They leave just as the son, SuperManChu, is arriving home! Ha ha, he finds the corpses of his family and swears violence revenge!

SuperManChu, an expert knifesman, finds the gang just as a suave stranger arrives in town! The stranger fights the gang, then joins them, but it’s all a ruse because he’s an undercover cop sent to arrest the pencil-moustache! Ha ha, sorry for the spoiler! Anyway, it’s a situation very like those found in John Woo pictures, where two strangers, maybe not quite on the same side of the law, are forced, despite their oil-and-water personalities, to team up against a common enemy!

Of course there are fights and more fights, and nearly everyone comes to a sticky end, and because the version I watched was not letterboxed it was once again a case of watching limbs flailing in and out of an otherwise empty screen! Ha ha, this version wasn’t even pan-and-scan, because there was no panning and no scanning, and during the fight the characters would frequently move off one side of the screen or the other, creating a sort of Garfield-Minus-Garfield effect that was kind of neat!

Well, SuperManChu and the cop eventually team up, after a fashion, and it all ends up with a double fight at Whirlwind Beach! Ha ha, where else? And the tide was out at Whirlwind Beach that day, really out!

As for the kung-fu, there are a number of terrific little moves and a marvelous variation in the methods! The cop likes to throw coins at people, and he never seems to run out, though his slim-fit suits would hardly seem to have room for much pocket change! And he ends up using a swish-rope in novel fashion too! SuperManChu sticks mainly to his knives, though he’s handy with fists and feet too! He’s a pretty humourless guy, understandably enough, and is frequently dressed in black! The cop is a little more easy-going! Ha ha, they make an okay team!

It was a pretty enjoyable picture, not great, but engaging! The presentation was lacking, but that wasn’t the movie’s fault! Anyway, I tend to think of these VHS viewings as the closest we can get nowadays to a real grindhouse experience! It’s a question of reframing: the frustrations of the screening itself are no longer odd smells, lumpy seats and drugs-crazed maniacs, but poor transfers, stubby frames and muddy sound! Anyway, I’m going to give SuperManChu two stolen swords!

Burl reviews Blind Fist of Bruce! (1979)

Ha-ya ha-ya, it’s Bruce! I mean of course that it’s me, Burl, ha ha! Yes, I’m here to review a kung-fu picture for you! It’s Blind Fist of Bruce, one of the many examples of Bruceploitation, in which guys named Bruce (Bruce Li in this case) do some fights and jumps and battle grunts just like, but not as compellingly or personably as, the original Dragon!

I’m not an expert on the martial arts pictures, that’s for sure, so you’ll have to bear with me a bit here! I know enough to be familiar with this particular plot, though; namely that it begins with a wealthy, callow and, let’s be frank here, kind of dumb young man who runs a bank and fancies himself its great protector due to his stunning martial arts skills!

But his skills are illusory, as all his moves have been taught to him by a pair of obvious conmen who make up kung-fu styles on the spot based on whatever animals happen to be passing by! This young numbskull is silly enough to swallow it, and the conmen bolster his fantasy with the occasional staged robbery attempt, which the banker apparently foils!

Soon enough a genuine gang of toughs descend upon the town and the banker’s self-deception is obliterated! He gets repeatedly beaten, and all his worldly possessions are claimed by the gang! He finally sees the light with respect to the conmen, and they quickly join the gang themselves!

The devastated banker finds refuge with a local busker, an elderly blind man who would cause the Beatles great shame if they ever saw him, for he is the true mop-top! It does genuinely appear that he has taken the handle off a mop and simply placed the bushy part on his head, ha ha!

Eventually this crusty old blind man is revealed as a master kung-fu artist, and he teaches the banker enough that he is able to, ha ha, mop the floor with his enemies! But they call in a ringer: the giant bad-ass known as Tiger, who used to be a student of the old blind busker, and in fact is responsible for blinding him in the first place! So now it’s time for an epic battle and a sudden ending!

Ha ha, I’m not sure how this stacks up against others of its type, but I found the crude character arc and the balletic athleticism of the fight sequences fairly entertaining! The goofball humour of the early scenes was painless enough, I suppose, and the dubbing added some extra, more genuine laughs! Unfortunately the copy I watched was full-screen, so very often I was watching an area of empty space with fists and feet flying into it from the edges!

It’s not a standout effort, but it had a certain momentum, and of course you want to see the good guy learn his skills and see the bad guys pay for their misdeeds! It’s always nice to see their reactions when they realize this fellow can actually do some damage! Ha ha, I’m going to give The Blind Fist of Bruce two martial arts pushcarts!

Burl reviews The Hunted! (1995)

Hi, hi, it’s Burl! It’s another action picture review today, and the action picture in question is the slightly bizarre mid-90s oddbird The Hunted, which, believe it or not, ol’ Burl caught in the theatre way back when! Yes, this is the movie which features both Christopher Lambert and swords, but rarely in the same shot! Ha ha, there can be only one in-deed!

Being as it comes from the director of Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, it should be no surprise that the movie is weird! It’s weird in a different sort of way though! For instance, when you hire an actor years past his sell-by date, whose most renowned work is in a beloved sword movie – Highlander, for those not in the know – and then spend most of the picture having him simply cower in the corner while others do the swordfights, you’re being a little bit perverse!

Lambert plays Paul, a New York necktiesman with a heavy French accent doing computer chip business in a Tokyo that seems populated largely by Chinese people! He hooks up with beautiful Joan Chen for a night of love, but is surprised when suddenly some ninjas appear and chop off her head! They try to kill Paul too, but he survives, which makes head ninja John Lone, whom we know from King Kong, very, very angry! Paul becomes the Hunted of the title, and surely the ninjas would have got him too, if not for the sudden appearance of a crabby swordsman and his wife, who make it their mission to use Paul as bait so they can get that John Lone!

Any review of this picture will tell you that it peaks around the midpoint with a massacre on a bullet train! The ninjas slaughter everyone, car by car, on their way to get Lambert, but the frowny-face samurai gets in their way! Ha ha, it’s pretty great how he strolls insouciantly through the cars and puts a savage poking on all the ninjas, staining their sandy-coloured daytime outfits a spreading crimson! And there’s a nasty ladyninja who, after losing her battle against the grumpus, shaves her face off for honour! Yikes, ha ha!

The movie slumps a bit after that, though there’s certainly more swordplay to come! The cringing Lambert eventually takes a bit of desultory training from a drunk, and is able to hold his own against Lone once the latter has been so gravely wounded by others that he’s barely able to stand! The picture ends with a headchopping that would do Highlander proud!

As I’ve mentioned in a few different ways, this is a slightly strange movie! It’s got some action scenes, but still somehow doesn’t qualify as an action movie! I’d maybe call it a ninja drama! Lambert’s character is even less heroic and skilled in the martial arts than Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China, but unlike that fine picture, this isn’t a knowing satire on the very concept of heroism and its inversely proportionate relationship with attitude! I believe, in fact, that it’s meant as a serious look at the ninja-samurai rivalry Japan was still grappling with in 1995! Ha ha!

It’s enjoyably trashy while it’s on – and mark Burl, friends, there’s real value in that! – but totally forgettable when it’s not! Many of the plot points and character motivations are utterly inscrutable! It’s trying, I assume, to be an updated version of that terrific Mitchum picture The Yakuza, but it ends up being something else completely! It's got a few obvious matte paintings (which I always like to see, ha ha!) and a wonderfully horrible morphing effect! As you can see from the poster, it strives for a classy patina it simply doesn't earn! I recommend it, though! I’m going to give The Hunted two pink-handled samurai swords!

Burl reviews Silent Assassins! (1988)

Hi-i-i-i-ya, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a movie that has lots of the martial arts in it, the inaptly named Silent Assassins! Ha ha, have you seen this one? I’m excited to review it, because it feels like a new discovery: a healthy slice of Ridiculous Action that I discovered more or less on my own!

If you recall, Ridiculous Action is the (admittedly unimaginative) name I’ve given to that special microgenre of thrillers that are so gloriously, crazily over the top or just plain puzzling in their attempts to be action-packed that they cause you to guffaw and reach for another handful of chips at regular intervals! And though Silent Assassins doesn’t quite reach the giddy heights of Raw Force or Deadly Prey, it still does pretty well for itself!

It’s ostensibly a ninja picture, like so many Ridiculous Action movies are, and strangely, though I always enjoy Ridiculous Action, I’ve never much cared for the ninja genre! They’re so often repetitive in their action and unimaginative in their execution! But this one dilutes the whole ninja thing by having all sorts of other interesting stuff in it, and the ninjas themselves wear thick balaclavas and big coats rather than the usual tight ninja gear, so it’s got that going for it as well!

The star of the picture is Sam J. Jones, the guy who theoretically could have had a huge career after Flash Gordon if only they hadn’t dubbed over his voice! I’m assuming they’re using his real voice in this one, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, so I wonder why they dubbed it for the pulp space adventure! Who knows? Anyway, here Sam plays Sam Kettle, a cop whose methods are unorthodox, but are tolerated by his chief because after all, he’s The Best There Is! The whole movie is set in some pan-Asiatic netherworld, and a bald bad guy named Kendrick, with a heavy but unplaceable accent and a hysterical screechy voice, engineers the kidnapping of a elderly scientist and a little girl!

Why? Well, for The Formula, of course! The scientist is played by the old guy you hire when Wilford Brimley is busy, and Kendrick goes to work on him with bamboo splinters in a pretty horrific scene of torture! But even this harsh treatment isn’t enough to make the brave old duck give up The Formula! In the meantime Sam Kettle has been called onto the case over the objections of his goodly wife Linda Blair! Ha ha! He’s joined by the little girl’s uncle and red-trousered swordsman, and together they take on Kendrick and his legions of heavy-coated, hand-chopping ninjas!

Ha ha, the ridiculousness is strong in this one! Kendrick himself is completely nutso, with his high, shrieky delivery of such lines as “Take that, Dr. Wise Guy!” He pulls the old rubber baby trick on Sam Kettle early in the picture, laughs like a gooney bird whenever he runs, and does a lot of nefarious tortures; but after all that his quick demise in an exploding toy helicopter is a little disappointing! Mako shows up, of course, fresh from Armed Response, and has a few good battles with the ninjas before they pull a bookshelf over on him! Linda Blair showed she could kick buttocks in movies like Savage Streets and Nightforce, but here she’s nothing more than a concerned wife! She gets to shoot a guy at one point, but it’s still pretty disappointing that she’s not more involved in the action! Well, Sam Kettle’s two pals, one of whom reminded me very strongly of Eddie from Big Trouble in Little China, help take up the slack!

It’s got a lively climax, with some head-chopping and hand-chopping, a guy blowing up and Sam firing a rocket launcher at everything in sight without even once loading a shell into it! Given all of this, in the right circumstances, Silent Assassins is about as healthy a slice of second-tier Ridiculous Action as you could want; and having been pleasantly surprised to find this out, I feel kindly disposed to it! I’m going to give it two exploding scientists!

Burl reviews Fists of Blood! (1987)

Hullo, hullo, it’s Burl here to review some Australian action! Ha ha, in the land down under, is it true that roundhouse kicks are delivered counter-clockwise? Fists of Blood is the movie that might have the answer to that question for you!

Just as I did, you’ll probably figure out pretty quickly that this movie, the original title of which is Strike of the Panther, is in fact a sequel, because as with some other sequels, like Silent Night, Deadly Night part 2 for example, long reams of footage from the first installment (Day of the Panther in this case) is used to kick off the story and get untutored viewers such as myself up to speed! In fact we seem to see pretty much all of Day of the Panther compressed into fifteen minutes or so, and it leaves you feeling that you could pretty happily go the rest of your life never bothering with the full-length version!

Ha ha, Fists of Blood ought to come in a fifteen-minute version too, now that I think about it! Like Deadly Prey, it’s an example of Ridiculous Action, although at a few points it clearly knows it! A potato-faced muscleman plays the irresistible Jason Blade, who, his mentor’s incessant voiceover tells us, is all things good, and is trained in the mysterious martial arts! But the nefarious Baxter, Jason Blade’s archest enemy, busts out of the Australian prison he’s in and hatches a scheme involving an army of hockey-masked ninjas, Jason Blade’s girlfriend (whom he loves but can’t commit to, natch), a bundle of dynamite and the old abandoned power plant!

Ha ha, this is a real daffodil, this one is! The potato face (every woman's dream?) is pretty much free of anything so burdensome as a personality, and the action scenes are staged with only minimal excitement! There are a few laffs here and there – note spelling, please! – none of which, or perhaps one of which, are intentional, and there’s also a great deal of aerobic dancing! There’s a pretty good scene where Jason Blade’s mentor, despite his years of training in the mysterious martial arts, is door-hammered by someone in a passing car and has to help Jason out psychically from his hospital bed thereafter!

But it’s mainly just silly, and the silliness is not robust or full-bodied enough to satisfy the way something like Raw Force manages to! And there’s an unfortunate dearth of Cameron Mitchell in this picture too, it ought to be noted! I give Fists of Blood one chicken suit and an extra helping of potatoes!