After recycling his Richard Harrison footage across 25 ninja movies (see NINJA KILL), Chang Cheh assistant turned “Ed Wood of Hong Kong” Godfrey Ho made at least one movie that was shitty in an entertaining way. The proof is the English language, filmed in America UNDEFEATABLE (1994), sort of a poor man’s BLACKBELT, if such a thing is possible. Like that fun Roger Corman produced Don “The Dragon” Wilson vehicle, it combines martial arts with the slasher movie cliche of a deranged serial killer obsessed with his mommy. But this one has Cynthia Rothrock (NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER 2).
The movie itself seems to think the star is some guy named John Miller, who was also in the Ho-directed Rothrock vehicle HONOR AND GLORY the same year (hmmm…) and then was apparently on 20 episodes of Homicide: Life On the Street, but uncredited, so I think he’s just a background guy at the department. Here he’s a supercop introduced with the traditional off-duty interruption of a convenience store robbery, or “just a couple of punks giving me a warmup” as he calls it, before breaking up an organized street fight and confiscating the winnings. He’s actually kind of a stick in the mud hassling fighters. It wasn’t until 35 minutes in when they showed him practicing with a staff that I realized he was a martial artist too.
SHOWDOWN IN MANILA is the latest from Alexander Nevsky, the Russian bodybuilder turned b-movie actor who starred in and directed BLACK ROSE. This one is the directing debut of Mark Dacascos and it’s much more fun and ambitious than that last one, largely due to an EXPENDABLES-worthy cast of action icons.
Nevsky plays Nick Peyton, the leader of some sort of elite police strikeforce thing in Manila. In the prologue he leads a police raid and his whole team are wearing those giant helmets like in THE RAID – except for him, even though he’s 1-3 heads taller than all of them. Standing there ready to take it like a lightning rod. He doesn’t get shot in the head, but does get shot and fails to apprehend two ultimate b-action bad guys: Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (L.A. TAKEDOWN, KICKBOXER 2, SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, MORTAL KOMBAT, BRIDGE OF DRAGONS) and Matthias Hues (NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER 2, I COME IN PEACE, BLACKBELT, MISSION OF JUSTICE, TALONS OF THE EAGLE, TC 2000). C-HT in particular looks like he’s enjoying the hell out of just strutting around in tropical gangster clothes being arrogant.
THE MARTIAL ARTS KID is about a young man who gets in trouble too much so he gets sent far away to live with his aunt and uncle. He meets a nice girl he likes, but she has an asshole sports car driving bully boyfriend who threatens him just for talking to her. And the boyfriend is part of a bad crowd and they end up in competition over the girl and in sports. And he has an older mentor that trains him.
Remind you of any other movie? Me too. THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT. Or maybe you were thinking THE KARATE KID, but in that one he just moved because his mom moved, he wasn’t a troublemaker. Totally different. Also, that’s about a kid who specifically does karate. This is a kid who does martial arts in general. I don’t really see a comparison.
Okay, maybe I do. I just like to mention TOKYO DRIFT whenever I can. This is a weirdly transparent KARATE KID rehash, arguably closer to a straight up retelling than the official remake with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. There’s even a wax on/wax off reference like some remakes would want to do, and it plays with your expectations of him being given a nice car as a gift. Instead he gets a bike, which he rides around the suburbs, keeping him a Martial Arts Kid when he seems to be on the verge of Martial Arts Manhood. (read the rest of this shit…)
NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER 2, sometimes subtitled “Raging Thunder,” which is also the name of the opening credits song, picks up exactly where part 1 left off: with Corey Yuen directing movies. But it has no characters or story that have any relation at all. Like it would’ve been hard to throw the ghost of Bruce Lee into a scene or two.
Instead of being about a karate student in Seattle learning kung fu from the ghost of Bruce Lee to fight Russian Jean-Claude Van Damme in a karate tournament this is about Scott Wylde (Loren Avedon, KING OF THE KICKBOXERS), an American kickboxer, getting into some shit in Thailand. It seems like he’s a tourist, there to visit his old friend Mac Jarvis (Max Thayer, MARTIAL LAW II, ILSA, HAREM KEEPER OF THE OIL SHEIKS), but then we find out he has a fiance there, Sulin (Patra Wanthivanond). She’s from a rich family and she brings him to a restaurant for a huge feast of TEMPLE OF DOOM type food such as tiger balls and monkey brains. “Very funny, sweetheart!” he says.
But four guys break into his apartment with big knives and little guns and kidnap Sulin to the tune of inappropriately upbeat music. Two stay behind to fight Scott, and it’s immediately clear that the fights (action choreographer: Corey Yuen) are better in this than in part 1. It’s a very acrobatic fight inside the little dingy apartment, jumping off the bed, slamming against the flimsy walls, kicking a guy through the door and across the hall and through the neighbor’s door (where of course he surprises two people who are having sex). And there’s alot of banging heads against walls. And he kills them. (read the rest of this shit…)
In LADY DRAGON 2, Cynthia Rothrock de-prises her role as Kathy Galagher, ex-CIA underground fighter out to avenge the death of her also-a-CIA-agent husband. This time she plays Susan “The Golden Angel” Morgan, who in the opening scene defends her professional (i.e. not underground) competitive karate title in the presence of her very much not dead yet husband and famous soccer player Sonny (George Rudy). But then later her husband gets murdered and she has to avenge it.
Meanwhile, criminal maniac Diego (Billy Drago, DELTA FORCE 2, MARTIAL LAW II) and his two flunkies (Sam FLASH GORDON Jones and Greg Stuart [QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER]) are stealing diamonds from the mafia, and then staying in the same hotel as Susan and Sonny. Somehow sensing that Sonny’s fame as an international soccer star will get him brushed through customs without much more than a glance, they stash the stolen loot in his luggage and follow him to Jakarta. But when they go to reclaim the diamonds they’re gone.
Before we move on, let me just say that they call it soccer throughout the movie, they don’t say football, so I don’t have to say it either. Those are the rules. I also say shit instead of shite. It’s how I was raised. (read the rest of this shit…)
In MARTIAL LAW II: UNDERCOVER, our hero Sean “Martial Law” Thompson from the movie MARTIAL LAW has gone so far undercover that he doesn’t even look like Chad McQueen anymore, he looks like Jeff Wincott (MISSION OF JUSTICE). But he’s still with his cop girlfriend Billie Blake (Cynthia Rothrock) and he still opens the movie by stopping some bad guys while in disguise. Last time he was a pizza delivery guy stopping a hostage situation during a jewelry store robbery, this time he pretends to be a confused homeless guy and interrupts some bikers making an arms deal.
In case you forgot, he’s called Martial Law because he is a lawman who does martial arts. In fact he does so many martial arts that this time he gets a credits sequence where he’s silhouetted doing katas in front of flags while smooth jazz plays. He just made detective, but he gets transferred to another city to start a martial arts training program for the police there. He and Billie have the kind of relationship where that’s okay, you can just move away and it’ll be okay, no discussion necessary. (read the rest of this shit…)
I gotta admit, I didn’t know what Chad McQueen looked like, or that he starred in this, so I thought “Who the fuck is this?” when he showed up undercover as a pizza delivery man to defuse a hostage situation at Crown Diamonds. Those dumb fucks shoulda known the cops wouldn’t allow a real Domino’s dude to walk in there. Even in Seattle, where we’ll have a $15 minimum wage in a couple years, it wouldn’t be worth it, and this is Los Angeles circa 1990. (The 25th anniversary is on the 16th of next month, so get the balloons ready.) Also, fuck these guys for not insisting on giving him a huge tip when they believed he was a legit employee. Not cool at all, gunmen.
Anyway, he’s really a cop, so he karates them. He’s playing Detective Sean Thompson, nicknamed Martial Law. It took me a while to catch on that it’s because he’s a lawman who does martial arts. We learn that after his dad died in 1983 he took off to Hong Kong for a few years “to prove how tough I was.” He regrets it because he left his younger brother Michael (Andy McCutcheon) behind and now the kid wears a leather jacket, has two DUIs, crashed their mom’s car and steals sports cars. (read the rest of this shit…)
There are innumerable dreams to which humanity aspires: feeding the hungry, building racial harmony, inventing comfortable shoes that also look cool, ending war, etc. Of these goals, the one we’ve come closest to achieving is “a female EXPENDABLES.” But it takes small steps to make big ones.
This was a concept that guys like us were already discussing and backseat casting before the movie news told us it was really in the works. In fact there are two such movies still in development. There’s the one from the producers of the male EXPENDABLES. It was announced before Rowdy Ronda Rousey was in part 3, so I don’t know if they plan to spin off from her character or not. From the sound of it it might not be worthy of a woman that tough. They’re calling it “EXPENDABELLES” and it’s from the director and the writers of LEGALLY BLOND. It was reported that they were trying to get Naomi Watts, Kate Beckinsale, Marcia Gay Harden, Li Bingbing and Mila Kunis. Sigourney Weaver turned it down. I’m gonna go ahead and write this one off.
The other one is from Adi Shankar, the face-paint wearing producer of DREDD and those “bootleg universe” shorts like Joseph Kahn’s POWER/RANGERS. This one reportedly stars Gina Carano (HAYWIRE, FURIOUS 6), Katee Sackhoff (RIDDICK) and maybe Sharni Vinson (YOU’RE NEXT, STEP UP 3), which is a promising start.
But leave it to Asylum, the studio that brought us SHARKNADO and I AM OMEGA, to have theirs already done and released before the other two even settle their casting. Admittedly this DTV female mercenary squad is light on marquee names, but it’s a good team. They have Zoë Bell (DEATH PROOF, THE BAYTOWN OUTLAWS, GAME OF DEATH), Kristanna Loken (TERMINATOR 3, S.W.A.T.: FIREFIGHT), Vivica A. Fox (KILL BILL, THE HARD CORPS, BLAST, SET IT OFF), and, uh, Nicole Bilderback (CLUELESS, BRING IT ON). (read the rest of this shit…)
In the opening of LADY DRAGON, Kathy Galagher (Cynthia Rothrock) arrives late to her underground fight. The crowd goes silent from cheering on her opponent when she enters in silhouette, a mysterious figure of intimidation in a pointy druid hood, carrying a gym bag, her footsteps echoing like Walker in POINT BLANK. She stands with her back to the camera as she pulls off the hood, then spins around to reveal her face.
It seems like we’re supposed to spit out our Pepsi when we see that it’s a girl. What, did they not know we knew we were renting a Cynthia Rothrock vehicle?
Director/story-provider David Worth (this was his followup to KICKBOXER) gives her lots of cool entrances like that and different outfits, sometimes masculine (a black leisure suit), sometimes the opposite (lots of glittery dresses). She’s trying to track the white arms dealer in Indonesia who killed her CIA agent husband. We learn all this only after special guest star Robert Ginty (THE EXTERMINATOR), who was watching her fight from behind shades and a cigarette, finds her at a bar and tries to bring her back into “the Company.” She says no and tells him to “have a nice day.” He says “Yeah, you too.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Well, looks like on August 8th (on VOD and in theaters most likely not near you) we will get the first of the long-promised “female Expendables” movies.
The good news: Zoe Bell, Cynthia Rothrock, Vivica A. Fox, Kristanna Loken, and Brigitte Nielsen as the villain (which I’ve been saying they should do for a while, though I guess I hadn’t thought of it when we first discussed this). The bad news: produced by The Asylum. Also, director Christopher Ray (MEGA SHARK VS. CROCOSAURUS, 2-HEADED SHARK ATTACK, ASTEROID VS. EARTH) also has one coming out called PRISON RAID with pretty much the exact same cast, so who knows how much thought and care they might’ve put into either one of them. Or one of them might be all outtakes.
I’ll give it a shot, though. It’s also worth noting that Asylum is about to work with a world class director known for transcending the limitations of his chosen formats. Z Nation is the name of their upcoming 13-episode zombie tv show for SyFy. Sounds like Asylum Walking Dead, which sounds like the worst thing ever, but the pilot is directed by John Hyams. I read somewhere that he was also the show-runner, but the SyFy websight lists some other guy, so maybe not. Anyway, I’m keeping my fingers crossed, which makes it hard to type but I’m doing it.
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
Ben on Abigail: “I always wonder about spoilers for things that are addaptations like Bloodshot, like yeah they ruin the twist, but also…” Apr 23, 19:07
JTS on Abigail: “Re: movies being ruined by trailers, the Vin Diesel movie BLOODSHOT is not worth watching if you’ve seen the trailer.…” Apr 23, 18:40
Ben on Abigail: “@muh Honestly I think T2 is a great example that spoilers don’t really make a movie worse. T2 rules and…” Apr 23, 18:16
Kaplan on Abigail: “I think the SPOILER BY INFERENCE SPOILER BY INFERENCE SPOILER BY INFERENCE From Dusk Til Dawn comparison is apt, but…” Apr 23, 18:00
Muh on Abigail: “Well in T2 where it would be a huge twist to have Arnold be the good guy…everyone knew it but…” Apr 23, 17:55
Ben on Abigail: “I wonder what movie got done the most dirty by being spoiled by a trailer? I’m still salty that the…” Apr 23, 17:13
VERN on Abigail: “Yes, I understand why the marketers would market the movie in such a way that people would want to see…” Apr 23, 17:05
Ben on Abigail: “@ Glaive Robber They didn’t focus test to find out people like spoilers, The university of callafornia did a study…” Apr 23, 16:40
Glaive Robber on Abigail: “SPOILERS Well, ok, first of all, muh, maybe they didn’t have a smaller ending, but I’ll bet they did a…” Apr 23, 16:29
Ben on Abigail: “The way you worded that end bit had be so fucking excited that the end cameo reveal was gonna be…” Apr 23, 15:13
Muh on Abigail: “Glaive, you never know but I’d be surprised if the movie had a lower key ending…it’s Radio Silence who always…” Apr 23, 13:32
Muh on Abigail: “Marketing was right to spoil this…first, most people don’t really care that much about general spoilers. They’ve focus tested that.…” Apr 23, 13:26
Glaive Robber on Abigail: “NO SPOILERS. I saw the trailer for this in front of several movies over the last few months, so I…” Apr 23, 11:34
MaggieMayPie on Abigail: “I agree with Vern that Newton and Durand were the best parts. I loved when SPOILER Abigail reveals herself as…” Apr 23, 11:24
Rodrigo Citon on Abigail: “Coincidentally, this is the third movie I’ve watched in the last week or so with cinematographer Aaron Morton (this, NO…” Apr 23, 08:38
VERN’S “I RECOMMEND THE SHIT OUT OF THIS PRODUCT” CORNER: