Ninja Assassin is pure unadulterated Ninja porn.  Plain and simple.  There is a plot but it is completely unnecessary.  With a good porno, you can fast forward through all the plot stuff just to get to the action and it would still have the same effect.  Ninja Assassin is the same way.  Except instead of boobies and buttholes, there are Ninja stars and swords.  That is to say, it’s awesome.

Let’s talk action.  Let’s talk Ninjas.  This movie has so many damn scenes of Ninjas slashing the shit out of each other that it will make you just grin ear to ear.  The Good Ninja is played by Rain, who has to be the best actor named after a meteorological phenomenon.  He fucks everybody up but good.  The Bad Ninjas don’t stand a chance.  They even have the benefit of CGI to aid them in their Ninja-ing.  (No smoke bombs are necessary when you have computer effects to blend you seamlessly into the background.)  This Rain guy doesn’t care.  He slices and/or dices and/or cuts off every major appendage the bad Ninjas have.  There are more severed limbs in the opening sequence of this movie than you can shake a stick at.  The standout is the scene where Rain chops off PART of a guy’s head (otherwise known as a “half-decap”).

The director James (V for Vendetta) McTeigue films all of this with unabashed glee.  Although he goes a bit overboard on the Shaky-Cam stuff in the middle section; the rest of the film contains some of the best Ninja action these eyes have ever seen.  Who knew that an Irish guy named McTeigue could direct a movie about Japanese Ninjas?

Ninja Assassin isn’t the best Ninja movie ever made but it’s arguably the goriest.  It’s basically like a big budget Golan-Globus movie.  I can’t think of higher praise.  I mean Sho Kosugi came out of retirement to star in this movie.  If that isn’t a reason to rush out and see Ninja Assassin, I don’t know what is.

Ninja Assassin slashes it’s way onto The Video Vacuum Top Ten for 2009 at the Number 3 spot; putting it in between Chocolate and Crank:  High Voltage.

A gruff cop gets assigned a new partner and he grudgingly shows him the ropes of being an undercover policeman.  The wet-behind-the-ears rookie is shocked to see the slightly shady cop shaking down a bunch of criminals in order to pay for his wife’s increasing gambling debts, but they still become friends.  When the town kingpin tries to have the rookie cop killed, he barely escapes with his life.  After getting healed up, he goes out for revenge. 

The opening scenes kinda play out like an Old School Kung Fu version of Training Day.  This part of the film is pretty funny, but things begin to unravel once the plot takes a serious turn.  After that, the film focuses less on the interplay between the crooked cop and the green rookie and becomes just your basic run of the mill Kung Fu flick. 

The final bloody brawl between the two cops and the killer in white pajamas is appropriately intense and there is a handful of decent fight scenes sprinkled in here and there throughout the film.  I especially dug the scene where the rookie got stabbed in the heart and BOTH calves and still kept fighting.  As good as the action is; a lot of the goofy humor is ill-fitting.  All the stuff involving the gambling wife is pretty excruciating and the less said about the henchman with an unbelievable set of buck teeth the better. 

If Shadow Ninja was either a tough as nails revenge picture or a tongue in cheek buddy cop movie; it would’ve worked.  Since it tries to be a bit of both, it fails in both departments.  Still, it’s not the worst movie with the word “Ninja” in the title I’ve ever seen.

AKA:  The Killer in White.  AKA:  The Killer Wears White.

Take one part Karate Kid. Add a dash of Rocky 4. Throw in a splash of Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave. Toss in an insane amount of Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugaloo. Add the ingredients in a blender and puree at Ludicrous Speed. And what you get is No Retreat, No Surrender; which happens to be one of…

THE GREATEST MOVIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE

Jason (Kurt McKinney) is a hotheaded karate student whose dad (Timothy D. Baker) gets hassled by the Mob who wants him to hand over his dojo. When he says no way Jose, the gangsters get “Ivan, the Russian” (Jean Claude Van Damme) to break his leg. Daddy turns into mental Jell-O and packs up and heads to Seattle to become a wimpy bartender. While Jason gets accustomed to his new surroundings, he befriends a rapping, breakdancing Jheri Curled guy named R.J. (J.W. Fails) who gets bullied by a big fat dude who likes to stand in the middle of the street eating cake. One day Jason tries to join a Seattle dojo but Fat Kid cockblocks him. Later, at Jason’s girlfriend’s birthday party, Fat Kid and his cronies beat him up and make him look like a complete wuss in front of his gal. Jason finally reaches his breaking point when his dad has a meltdown and rips up his Bruce Lee poster. Distraught, Jason goes to Bruce’s grave and asks for his help. Much to Jason’s surprise, Bruce Lee’s ghost (Kim Tai Chong) appears and whips him into fighting shape. In the end, the gangsters try to move in on the Seattle dojo and hold a karate tournament where Ivan kicks everyone’s ass in the ring. Finally Jason hops in the ring and shows the Russian what’s what.

No Retreat, No Surrender is one of The Greatest Movies in the History of the Human Race mostly because it’s a bad movie. I make no bones about it. Much of this movie reeks of useless clichés and idiotic dance sequences. What makes it all work is that the film is a rainbow of awfulness. It runs the gamut of So Bad It’s Good (like the overacting gangster villain who seemingly channels Snidely Whiplash during the final fight), to So Bad It’s Awesome (like the lame banter between R.J. and Jason), to So Bad It’s Genius (the breakdancing scenes), to Hey, You Know What Folks, This Movie Kinda Rocks (the Bruce Lee training sequences), to Wait a Goddamn Minute, This Movie is Da Bomb (the excellent final showdown between Jason and the Russian).

Let’s talk about the bad first. Let’s talk about acting; or lack thereof. Never before has a movie featured performances so wooden and dialogue so stilted that it ends up being kickass in spite of itself. (Although Attack of the Clones comes close.) Kurt McKinney is a bland lead but he is at least proficient enough with his karate skills to make up for that. As the dumbass dad, Timothy D. Baker displays some of the worst acting by an alleged parent on the silver screen. The scenes between him and McKinney play out like a shitty After School Special and all of their dialogue seems phony and forced. But nothing and I mean nothing can prepare you for the hilarious ineptitude of J.W. Fails as R.J. Good God man, this guy says all of his lines in the same upbeat fake jive manner that will drive you bat shit insane. I don’t know what is funnier, seeing him desperately try to breakdance (his stunt dancer is haphazardly edited in) or the scenes where he “raps”. I dare you not to crack up whenever he overenthusiastically says the title. At least Van Damme exudes a sense of menace and essays his villainous role with a lot of authority.

Speaking of Van Damme, his final brawl is quite exciting and is the only legitimate thing that is intentionally good about the whole deal. He kickboxes the Hell out of three competitors before taking on McKinney one on one. The choreography is excellent in this scene (despite a couple of obvious jump cuts) and is a great showcase for JCVD’s skills.

Looking at this scene, I can’t help but note that Van Damme got a raw deal in this flick. I know we’re supposed to root for Kurt and everything but Jean Claude was fighting with a severe disadvantage. I mean he fought not one but THREE guys in the ring, gets bitten on the leg by a fat dude, and is almost hit with a chair by a girl all before going toe to toe with the hero. Also, Kurt was receiving supernatural tutelage from beyond the grave by the greatest martial artist of all time, which ain’t exactly fair if you ask me.

And let’s face it, this Kurt guy is a straight-up wimp. Despite the title, he actually retreats AND surrenders at least FOUR times by my count. Once during his initial run-in with JCVD, then when he squares off against the fat guy and his gang in front of the burger stand, then against the same guys at his girlfriend’s birthday party, and finally when his dad tears up his Bruce Lee posters. Granted, he doesn’t retreat or surrender by the end of the film, so I have to give him a little credit.

Corey (The Transporter) Yuen directs the action solidly enough. He films the dance sequences in a tongue in cheek manner and really gets to strut his stuff during the end match. He also displays a softer side in the scene when the two breakdancers help to reunite Jason and his girlfriend.

In 1986, the year No Retreat, No Surrender was released; Crocodile Dundee was the highest grossing comedy. This flick is a hundred times funnier and should’ve been just as big. Sure, the laughs are all unintended, but to me, an unintended laugh is just as good as an intended one. You know, it’s kinda a shame that No Retreat, No Surrender never won any Oscars. It’s sad to know that this flick will make it’s way on the AFI 100 Best Films List. Heck, I think I’m the only reviewer who has ever given it a positive review (let alone Four Stars). Hopefully, it’s inclusion into The Greatest Movies in the History of the Human Race will inspire readers to seek out this unadulterated camp classic. Do not retreat or surrender an opportunity to check it out.

AKA: Karate Tiger.

Okay, so I know you’ve all been wondering where the heck I’ve been for the past week or so.  Truth is I’ve been spending lots of quality time with my brand spanking new baby daughter and kinda forgot about reviewing movies for a bit.  To me, just watching the little faces she makes is like a hundred times cooler than any movie.  (Yes, even Star Wars.)  The other night while she was particularly fussy, I decided to pop on Dolph Lundgren’s new movie, Command Performance.  This thing can be summed up in six words:  Die Hard at a Rock Concert.  For most people out there, Command Performance will be pretty forgettable, but me; I’ll always remember it as the first movie I ever watched as a proud papa. 

Let me start off by saying that I admire Lundgren.  You can tell he really likes making movies.  It doesn’t matter to him that the studios don’t give him much of a budget and he has to shoot his films overseas on a tight schedule.  This guy just keeps his head down and continues to make better-than-mediocre low budget Direct-to-DVD action movies for his loyal fans. 

Command Performance is not quite what I would call “good”, but it’s got a high watchability factor going for it.  While there are better Direct-to-DVD Die Hard rip-offs out there (in fact, Dolph also made the superior Detention, which was Die Hard in a School), Command Performance is exactly what you would expect from the subgenre.  Nothing more, nothing less.  In addition, the film hits all it’s marks competently and moves along at a steady clip. 

Dolph does a great job in front of the camera.  His usual charisma shines through and keeps you watching; even when shit gets extremely derivative and predictable.  I do have a major criticism of his directing style though.  He goes hog wild for the Law and Order type shaky-cam shit and it gets rather annoying after awhile.

If anything, Command Performance delivers on the gore.  First off, there is plenty of arterial spray whenever someone gets their throat slashed.  We also get a gnarly scene where Dolph impales someone on a broken guitar neck.  The piece de resistance though comes when Lundgren shoves a drumstick into a guy’s head and it goes through his chin and comes out of his eyeball.  Great stuff.  Dolph also gave himself a bunch of cheesy/dumb/hey-it-made-me-laugh-because-I’m-seriously-sleep-deprived-from-being-up-all-night-with-a-crying-baby lines like “Dying is easy, Rock n’ Roll is hard!”

After a lengthy Ninja training sequence, the plot begins.  A Good Ninja gets hired to be the bodyguard for an industrialist who has been getting death threats from an evil clan of Ninjas.  Meanwhile a spunky teenage girl hounds our hero into teaching her the Ninja ropes.  It all ends with a big ass Ninja duel between the Good Ninja and the Bad Ninja.

If my plot description seems a little sparse, it’s because this movie really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  There are plot twists that negate other plot twists, flashbacks that seem like they came from other films, and the “surprise” ending is rather convoluted.  We also get some bizarre little asides (like the fight with the wrestler in a parking garage) that don’t add much to the overall film.  The fight scenes are frenetically filmed but it all gets a bit numbing after awhile.

There is however some good stuff here that makes A Life of Ninja sorta fun.  Like the opening training sequence.  It features all the usual Ninja jazz (like snuffing out candle flames with a bow and arrow) but it also contains an extremely random female mud wrestling match.  I’ve seen a lot of Ninja Movies in my time, so I’m a bit of an expert when it comes to Ninja training, but I had no idea that mud wrestling was on the Ninja Final Exam. 

There’s also a cool death in a shower where a Ninja sneaks in and stabs a chick with a poisoned icicle then leaves it in the tub to melt.  I also enjoyed the female assassin who killed men while fucking them and the Bad Ninja that used a prostitute as a human bullet shield too.  A Life of Ninja also gives you all the requisite scenes of Ninjas flying through the air and tossing Ninja Stars in people’s foreheads you’d expect from this sort of thing.

All of this is fun for awhile until it devolves into the standard issue Good Clan vs. Bad Clan clichés.  The finale also suffers from way too much slow motion.  Still, I had fun listening to the score, which steals memorable themes from Rocky 2 and countless other movies.

AKA:  The Deadly Life of a Ninja.

After reviewing director John Sturges’ weak Ice Station Zebra yesterday, I decided to watch Sturges’ The Great Escape; one of the greatest fucking movies of all time.  The Great Escape has one of the best casts ever assembled.  Steve Muthafuckin’ McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Donald Pleasence, the list goes on and on. 

All these guys are prisoners in a Nazi POW camp.  After digging tunnels and acting cool as Hell for about two hours, they escape.  What did the kraut-eating sons-a-bitches expect when they put all those badasses together under one roof?

You know, I always go back and forth over which star-studded WWII Men on a Mission movie featuring Charles Bronson is better, this one or The Dirty Dozen.  I think I have to give The Dirty Dozen the edge because it’s a bit more action-centric.  Still, The Great Escape is one Hell of a good time.

Sturges directs the film with an invisible style.  He doesn’t do anything flashy; he just presents the material and has enough confidence in his actors to let them do their own thing.  Besides, with a cast this great, who needs to worry about shit like “motivation”?  Sturges’ only direction must’ve been, “OK, act like a badass annnnnd… ACTION!”

And what a cast of badasses we have.  McQueen simply gives the best performance of his career.  He’s never been as cool as he is here.  The motorcycle finale is all kinds of awesome and what makes it so great is the fact that McQueen did nearly all of his own stunt diving.  Garner is also outstanding as the smooth-talking “Scrounger”.  I particularly liked the scene where he vouches for the blind Pleasence and vows to keep an eye on him throughout the escape.  Pleasence’s inevitable fate is tragic and both he and Garner are terrific in their final scene together.  Bronson does a marvelous job as the tunnel digger who has severe bouts of claustrophobia.  Many critics wrote him off as being a “Stone Face”, but he gives a fully three-dimensional performance in this movie.  The scene where the lights get turned out on him while he’s in the tunnel is unforgettable. 

On top of the impeccable cast, Elmer Bernstein delivers one of his finest scores.  It’s definitely among the best in film history.  You’ll be whistling that shit days after you watch the flick. 

McQueen, Bronson and Coburn were also in Sturges’ excellent The Magnificent Seven.

The Great Escape is Numero Uno on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year 1963.

After an opening sequence showing the bloodthirsty hitman Holmes (Roger E. Mosley from Magnum P.I.) killing people in a variety of ways (pushing their car into a speeding Semi, electrified gate, burning them to a crisp, etc.), the plot begins.  Holmes gets sent by his kingpin boss (the always great William Smith) to pose as a preacher in a poor black community to snuff out the competition.  He also puts a greasy Senator (Michael Pataki) in the pocket of the Mob after convincing his flock to vote for him.  When the phony baloney preacher gets a bit too big for his britches though, the Mob comes after Holmes.

I got a kick out of the initial premise of a tough guy assassin pretending to be a saintly preacher.  I mean here is a man of the cloth who grabs his secretary’s ass and holds a staple gun up to someone’s eye when they call him a “jig”.  This premise could’ve been awesome.  Alas, the filmmakers felt a need to put a message at the end of the movie.  They also threw in one too many subplots (like the cops who kill a young boy and cover it up) that get in the way of the fun. 

A few bar fights and shootouts aside, Sweet Jesus, Preacherman was considerably low on action.  That means you more or less have to enjoy the acting.  Luckily, everyone brings their A-Game to the table.  Mosley does a good job playing both sides of his character and carries the film with style and charisma.  I also dug seeing Marla Gibbs from The Jeffersons in a serious role too.  For me, the movie really belonged to Smith and Pataki.  They play sleazy white guys like it’s nobody’s business.  The duo was also in the minor classic Grave of the Vampire the next year.

A Russian spy satellite goes down in the Artic and submarine captain Rock Hudson gets the job of intercepting it before the Commies do.  He hops in his sub with British spy Patrick McGoohan and they high-tail it north to retrieve that sumbitch.  However there is a traitor in their midst who makes their mission even more difficult.

Director John Sturges is used to these all-star Men on a Mission movies having previously helmed The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape.  Like those films, Ice Station Zebra features a great ensemble cast; featuring everyone from Jim Brown to Ernest Borgnine.  It’s just a shame that it isn’t in the same league as those two classics.

I didn’t care very much for Ice Station Zebra but I must admit straightaway that submarine movies just aren’t my forte.  Because a big chunk of the movie takes place in a sub, that means there are lots of scenes where guys stare at blips on a radar screen and holler out things like “80 feet!” and “Thin ice!” over and over again.  I hate shit like that.  Sturges does get a lot of mileage out of the claustrophobic submarine setting and uses a lot of tilted camera angles to convey an adequate sense of motion-sickness though.

Ultimately, the thing that sinks Ice Station Zebra is that it’s too long for it’s own good.  The flick lumbers on for almost two and a half hours and it’s a pretty long slog.  It certainly doesn’t help when most of the action is weighted towards the end of the film either.

The performances almost (but not quite) save the flick.  McGoohan looks to be having fun as the wily James Bond-ian secret agent and Borgnine gets a few laughs playing a rascally Russian who talks like Boris Badenov.  It’s Hudson though who gives the best performance of the flick.  Rock also gets the funniest line of the movie when he says, “We operate on a first name basis here.  My first name is Captain!”

A karate chopping chick stands to inherit her father’s fortune but there is a bunch of no-good bad guys that want it for themselves.  That means they try to jump her repeatedly and she has to kick the snot out of them at regular intervals.  In the end, our heroine discovers that her inheritance is a humongous amount of heroin.  That gets her so mad that she sets out to kick the bad guys’ collective asses once and for all.

Before I go any further, I have to get something off my chest here about Black Rose (a film that IMDB has ZERO information on by the way).  I got this movie in a pack of 70’s blaxploitation films but it is actually a Chinese Kung Fu movie from the 80’s.  To top it off, the main character isn’t black and her name isn’t Rose either.  Talk about disappointing.

Disreputable titles aside, this is an OK Kung Fu flick.  The acting is horrible, the dubbing is atrocious, and the fight choreography leaves something to be desired.  However, what Black Rose lacks in quality, it makes up for in quantity as there is a major Kung Fu battle at just about every reel change.   

What entertained me most about Black Rose was that it ripped off so many musical scores from other films.  During a love scene, they actually play “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me.  Even better is the fact that they use Jimmy Page’s score from Death Wish 2 and 3 for several fight scenes.  The thing of it is; it’s actually pretty effective.  More composers should rip off the Death Wish theme for their movies!

AKA:  Hong Kong Tigress.

Director Cirio H. Santiago will probably never get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but I still dig the man’s work.  In his lifetime, Santiago directed some of the best low budget shot-in-the-Philippines action movies ever made.  Santiago’s The Muthers isn’t quite as good as his Angelfist or She-Devils in Chains, but it serves as an OK reminder of what he was capable of.

Jeannie Bell (who also starred in Santiago’s immortal TNT Jackson) stars as a sexy pirate who learns that her sister has been captured and taken to a remote island prison.  She gets herself arrested and goes to the prison to look for her.  After the lecherous warden murders her little sister; Bell escapes into the jungle along with some foxy companions.  In the end, Jeannie and her friends get into a machine gun battle with not only the guards, but a rival gang of pirates as well.

The Muthers is a mixture of several reliable exploitation genres (women in prison, blaxploitation, Kung Fu, etc.) yet it never really gels.  Most of the action is weighted towards the end of the film and while the shootouts, karate chops, and explosions are plentiful, they really lack the panache of Santiago’s best work.  The film also suffers from some awfully muddy cinematography which hampers a lot of the night time scenes.

Bell’s fun performance is what makes the film watchable.  (I especially enjoyed her topless shower scene.)  She has a genuine charisma about her that I enjoy and she handles herself well during the fight scenes (although her gymnast double is poorly edited in on several occasions).

It’s Bell’s best friend who gets the funniest line of the film when she gets bitten on the breast by a poisonous snake:  “Just like every other snake I’ve ever met… can’t leave my tits alone!”

Negaal (James Ryan) is a disgraced South African kickboxer who goes around killing kickboxing champions and stealing their belts.  When he murders David Sloan (off screen naturally, keeping in touch with the series’ roots) his good buddy Matt (Mark Dacascos) goes out for revenge.  Negaal sends another kickboxer (Geoff Mead) to kill Matt but since he has a grudge against our villain as well, they decide to team up to take Negaal down.

Kickboxer 5 had me thinking early on that it was going to be the best sequel in the series.  For starters, there is a hilarious scene where Dacascos throws a henchman off a tall building and he lands on top of a limo that his gay lover happens to be in.  Ryan quickly orders the driver to take off while the body is still on top of the car.  As the car is flying down the highway, the guy realizes his lover is on top of the roof and he rolls the window down, grabs the dead guy’s wrist, and frantically checks his pulse.

Another scene that had me in stitches was when Dacascos arrived at the South African airport and fought a couple of guys in the luggage bay, Die Hard 2 style.  Then they chase him onto the conveyor belt where he promptly kicks their asses.  The scene closes on a great note as the unconscious bodies of the bad guys revolve around the luggage carousel lying on top of the passengers’ bags.

It was here where the film stopped being goofy and fun and started being your typical by-the-numbers kickboxing movie.  I have nothing against by-the-numbers kickboxing movies as long as the people involved can do the math.  Unfortunately, director Kristine (Critters 3) Peterson needs to work on her arithmetic.  The fights scenes are all choreographed competently yet they lack the oomph of the previous entries.  Peterson also allows the flick to get bogged down during the pointless montages of Dacascos sightseeing in South Africa.

Dacascos does what he can with the material, which admittedly isn’t much.  He does have just enough charisma to make you sorta root for him though.  Ryan’s character is far too cartoony to be a legitimate threat and the idea of stealing championship belts is kinda hokey. 

Overall, Kickboxer 5 is better than Part 3 but not quite up to snuff with the Albert Pyun directed sequels.  That is to say that it should probably be avoided unless you really dig kickboxing sequels that hardly have anything to do with the original film in the franchise.  Be glad someone wisely pulled the plug on this series when they did. 

When an undercover agent gets killed trying to bring down a big time opium ring, Roc Tien is called in to investigate.  He goes around beating the tar out of people and acting cool for about 80 minutes until he comes face to face with the big boss man.  It goes without saying that Roc kills him since he has Hands of Death.

I am totally unfamiliar with Roc Tien but he seems like a pretty cool guy to me.  He’s proficient during his fight scenes and has a generous amount of charisma.  Roc also directed this bad boy and he stages the action rather well, although some of the bad guys are kinda shoddy at Kung Fu.

What really knocks the movie down a notch is that it never quite knows what it wants to be.  It starts out as more or less a spy picture (it even reuses some music cues from Diamonds Are Forever) then it turns into a Kung Fu flick, then it goes back to more spy stuff.  I think if old Roc could’ve made the plot transitions a bit smoother, Hands of Death could’ve been pretty tight.  I’m still giving him the benefit of the doubt though because he’s cool in front of the camera.  I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to see another Roc flick, that’s for sure.

What I dug about the film most was the whole Hands of Death angle.  Roc kills people with one punch to the chest (or back, like in the scene where he disguises himself as a masseur and kills the guy in a steam room) but nothing is ever really made of it.  He never says, “Beware my Hands of Death!”, which I thought showed a lot of composure on his part.  This guy didn’t have to brag about his lethalness, and that was refreshing.  Having said that; I would’ve enjoyed seeing him in a flashback scene at his job interview to be a spy.  I can see it now:

Employer:  “Roc, what makes you think I should hire you over all the other applicants?”

Roc:  “Well boss, I’ve got good people skills; I can type 45 words a minute, plus I got that whole Hands of Death thing going for me…”

AKA:  The Notorious Bandit.  AKA:  The Tongfather. 

After a pretty cool opening credits sequence, we get to see Bruce Lee in a couple of candid scenes signing autographs while a narrator tells us how great he was and stuff.  Next we see him in four sepia tone vignettes from movies he appeared in as a child.  Then footage of his funeral is shown.  It’s here where we stop seeing anything remotely resembling the “Real” Bruce Lee.

When the brief summary of Bruce’s life is over, the narrator tells us that Bruce Lee imitators started popping up because “Imitation is the highest form of flattery”.  We see Bruce Li in a couple poorly pasted together scenes from various films (one of which is the pathetic Bruce Lee Against Supermen) and then Dragon Lee does some Kung Fu.  From then on, the whole movie is just a random Dragon Lee film.

I have to admit that I did enjoy seeing Bruce Lee’s legend crassly exploited during the opening segments, even if the scenes of Young Bruce ran on a bit long.  I would’ve loved it if the film had explored the Bruce Lee imitator phenomenon a bit further, but alas the flick switches over to another Kung Fu movie before that can happen.  It’s as if the producers had short Bruce Lee documentary and no idea how to market it so they just slapped it on the front of an unreleased Kung Fu flick.  The audience would note that the running time was 100 minutes and figure that they were in for a really thorough documentary.  Actually, the documentary portion of the film is only thirty minutes and Dragon Lee movie runs about seventy. 

The Kung Fu flick that’s tacked onto the end is extremely slow to start but once it gets going, it’s not bad.  It’s all about a Good Karate School (ran by Dragon) that gets picked on by a Bad Karate School (ran by a dude with a Hitler moustache).  Meanwhile a guy runs around in white pajamas and gives the dude with the Hitler moustache a bunch of shit.  When the bad guys kill Dragon’s master, he goes out for revenge.

The Dragon Lee portion of the flick offers little variation on the whole warring karate schools clichés.  Despite a tedious beginning (which is actually the middle of the “movie”), the action is more or less non-stop in the third act.  The villains have some pretty cool gadgets too.  One guy has a sword that extends out five feet from the hilt and another dude uses a pair of deadly hubcaps.  Other than that, the flick is little more than your standard issue chopsocky bullhonkey.  There is a good (albeit slightly censored) gut-ripping scene at the end though.

If the Dragon Lee movie was all there was to watch, I don’t think I would’ve minded.  If the Bruce Lee documentary was all there was to watch, I don’t think I would’ve minded.  The fact that they’re both Frankensteined together so haphazardly definitely costs the film major points.  Otherwise, it’s a marginal recommendation; just Buyer Beware there's very little of the "Real" Bruce Lee to be found.

AKA:  Bruce Lee:  The Little Dragon.  AKA:  The Young Bruce Lee.

We all know that Tony Jaa is the new Bruce Lee.  We all know that the man can do enough crazy gymnastical feats of ass-kickery to make your head spin.  With Ong Bak 2, we also know he’s a pretty decent director as well.  Not quite in the same league as Prachya Pinkaew, the guy who did The Protector and the first Ong Bak, but he’s better than most action hacks.

As a kid, Tien (Jaa) sees his parents slaughtered by some ruthless bastard.  He gets sold into slavery by some Richard Kiel looking asshole who makes him wrestle a crocodile.  Tien wins and is taken in by a spiritual geezer who teaches him Kung Fu.  Tien quickly shows everyone what a badass he his and is chosen to lead the tribe.  Before he accepts the position, he opts to run out and avenge his parents’ death.  From then on, the movie is a bunch of swordfights and ass kickings.

Ong Bak 2 is sloppily paced and features ill-fitting flashbacks that run on way too long.  I’m giving Jaa a Mulligan on that though because it was his first time in the director’s chair.  He also kinda forgot to give us an ending too.  My main criticism of the film though is more of a case of personal preference than anything.  It has to do with the fight scenes.  Most of them center around swords and spears rather than fists and feet.  They are still well choreographed, but Jaa barely gets any use out of his lethal knees.  When Jaa does drop the weapons and fights Muay Thai, shit does get cranked up to 11 though.  The last twenty minutes of the film is more or less non-stop fighting and there is one drunken boxing scene in this movie that is the best of it’s kind since Drunken Master 2. 

Overall, I think I said “DAMN!” out loud about six times while Jaa was showing off his Kung Fu wizardry.  That’s about half as many “DAMN’s!” as I said throughout The Protector.  That film was the pinnacle of the Tony Jaa Fighting Alongside Elephants Movies.  Ong Bak 2, nitpicks aside is still a worthy entry into the subgenre.

David Sloan (Sasha Mitchell) gets set-up and sent to prison by his arch nemesis Tong Po (Kamel Krifa).  While David is in jail, Tong Po kidnaps his wife and keeps her captive in his fortress.  With a little help from the DEA, David gets out of the slammer and sneaks into Po’s secret martial arts tournament so he can rescue his wife and get some revenge.

Albert Pyun (who recently stopped by The Vacuum to say a few kind words… Al, if you’re reading this, welcome back) was back behind the camera for this puppy.  He took a break from the franchise, opting not to direct Part 3 (smart move).  If you ask me, Pyun should be made to direct all even-numbered Kickboxer movies because they are fairly enjoyable for the most part.  (This one is a lot better than 3, I’ll tell you that.)  It’s no Sword and the Sorcerer or anything, but it’ll do for action fans looking for a quick fix who will watch anything with the number 4 in it.

The plot is more or less just like every other Kung Fu movie ever made; Enter the Dragon in particular.  (Even right down to the part where Sasha sneaks around at night dressed like a ninja and beats up guards.)   I’ll let that slide though because the tournament is more or less just an excuse to pad the running time with endless scenes of inconsequential characters kicking each other.  Along with the five minute flashback filled opening, there’s probably only about 45 minutes of actual “movie” here.  I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing.

But if we are going to discuss BAD, let’s broach the subject of Tong Po’s make-up.  Apparently, they couldn’t get the original Tong Po back, so they slapped the most unconvincing Oriental make-up since Peter Lorre was Mr. Moto on Krifa.  In some scenes, it just looks like a bad Halloween mask.  Seriously, I saw in the paper that Rite Aid had 75% off of all their Halloween supplies.  I am absolutely sure this is how the make-up department found the mask used in this movie.

The most bizarre thing about Po in this movie though is that while he doesn’t look a thing like the original Tong Po, he sounds EXACTLY like Jean Claude Van Damme.  (If you don’t believe me, just close your eyes during some of his line readings.)  It’s a bit disconcerting to say the least. 

Another thing that puzzled me was Mitchell’s performance.  I mean the dude has starred in three Kickboxer movies in a row playing the same character, yet he’s played him in three completely different ways.  In Part 2, he was an easygoing guy trying to do right by some inner city kids.  In Part 3, he basically just replayed his role from Step by Step.  Here, he apes Clint Eastwood and pretty much growls all of his lines.  He isn’t imposing or anything and resembles a sullen teenager as he spends most of the movie walking around glowering.  Still, it’s a big improvement over his awful performance from the last film.  (Must’ve been Pyun’s instinctive tutelage.)

And here’s something I didn’t get about the movie:  Why the subtitle, “The Aggressor”?  I mean who exactly is the “aggressor” in this situation?  Is it David for crashing the tournament or is it Tong Po for instigating David’s involvement by kidnapping his wife in the first place?  That part was never really spelled out.  Maybe if Albert stops by again he can clarify that part for me.

I’m not going out on a limb and calling Kickboxer 4:  The Aggressor “good” but it had it’s share of head-scratching moments of pure “HUH!?!?”  Like the final round of “To the Death” matches.  In previous scenes, the guards dragged the dead fighters away.  During the last portion of the flick though, the bodies start piling up on the outside of the ring like cordwood.  The guards musta been on a smoke break or something.  Maybe it was just me but I thought that was funny.

Even funnier was the final showdown between Tong Po and David, which takes place on a long banquet table.  The two continuously pound on each other while breaking plates, glasses, and centerpieces.  This probably set Tong Po back a pretty penny because I bet it cost a fortune to cater that thing.  I’m sure Tong Po wouldn’t get his deposit back on that either.

While we are on the subject of fighting here, I have to say that for all the shit people give Pyun, he did direct one of the greatest barroom brawls ever captured on celluloid in this movie.  It’s not quite Road House, but it comes close.  This scene is (intentionally) very funny and features some kind of record for broken glass.  Simply put, the barroom brawl in Kickboxer 4 is to low budget straight to video kickboxing sequels what the boot eating scene in The Gold Rush was to silent comedy.  It’s that good.  If Pyun had put the same style, energy, and fun from this scene into the entire movie, we would’ve been talking Video Vacuum Awards out the wazoo.  Still, it’s good enough for a solid Two Star rating.

Special Note:  Thom Mathews has always been a favorite of mine from his stellar work in the Return of the Living Dead films (speaking of which, I just reviewed Part 2 earlier today) and Jason Lives.  Did you know that Mathews has starred in no less than ELEVEN Albert Pyun movies?  De Niro and Scorsese haven’t even pulled that off!

Sasha Mitchell returns as kickboxer David Sloan.  This time, he goes to Rio de Janeiro for a kickboxing exhibition and befriends a young homeless runaway.  When a greedy manager tries to sell the kid’s sister into a life of prostitution, David intervenes and tries to put a stop to the villain’s operation.

Kickboxer 3:  The Art of War features very little kickboxing.  It also contains no art or war either.  Because of this it should’ve been called Kickboxer 3:  The Fart of Bore.  It still doesn’t have much kickboxing, but at least you can tell from the title that it stinks and it’s boring.

Seriously though, where was I?  Oh, the flick falls into the unfortunate Karate Kid 2 trap of being mostly a travelogue for the first half of the film, instead of getting down to the business at hand.  You get to see a lot of the beaches of Rio this way, but precious little action.

Sasha Mitchell was pretty good in Kickboxer 2 but here he basically just plays his character from Step by Step.  I don’t know what happened to Sasha in between Part 2 and this one but I have a feeling that it starts with a “C”, ends with an “E”, and has “OCAIN” in the middle.  Seriously, the dude never blinks once throughout the entire movie and he has a nose as red as Rudolph.  It could’ve just been the tint on my TV though.  Still, the tint issue doesn’t hide the fact that he looks like he lost about 20 pounds throughout the course of the movie.

Kickboxer 3 is mostly the same old song and dance (or punch and kick) you get from many low budget action sequels but there was one thing about the film that I thought was truly original and that was the villain’s plan.  You see, he has a lot of money riding on the match between his fighter and David.  Most villains in this position would force David to throw the fight.  This guy is a real sport though.  He actually helps David train.  And by “train” I mean his underlings force him at gunpoint to jog with a backpack filled with rocks, drop him miles off the coast and make him swim back, and take him water skiing without the skis. 

Most movies have the obligatory training montage before the big fight.  Others have the obligatory scene where the villain tortures the hero.  This portion of the film is neat because it cleverly combines the two.  It also helps when the villain (Richard Comar) is slimy as fuck.  (He looks like the love child between Joe Isuzu and Chuck Woolery.)  After this brief interlude of inventiveness, the movie goes right back to sucking.  

Special Note:  This movie was written by Dennis Pratt, which is really weird since he also wrote another movie I watched earlier today, Leprechaun 4 and little else.  No, I didn’t plan it (like my Clint Eastwood double feature).  Shit like that just happens here in The Vacuum.

Fred Williamson starred in many low budget Italian made action flicks throughout the 80’s.  This one is on the higher end of the totem pole.  It’s sorta like a cross between Delta Force and Death Wish, although that’s probably giving it too much credit.

Brett Clark retires from Delta Force so he can spend more time with his pregnant wife.  Predictably, she gets gunned down by Nicaraguan terrorists about five minutes into the flick.  They also steal a nuclear weapon and fly back to Nicaragua and threaten the US with it.  Clark re-opts with Delta Force, but not to stop the terrorists from blowing shit up; he just wants revenge.  When his superior (Bo Svenson) gives orders not to pursue the terrorists; Clark decides to hijack Fred Williamson’s plane and forces him to go on an unpaid vacation to Nicaragua.  Williamson says OK because if he didn’t then we wouldn’t have a movie.  Once in Nicaragua, the duo blow away lots and lots of terrorists and eventually save the day.

Delta Force Commando is a competent no-frills action flick that manages to hold your attention throughout most of it’s running time.  The flick contains plenty of scenes where Williamson and Clark gun down tons of bad guys and say funny shit afterwards.  (“Excuse me while I throw up!”)  It also happens to be just mean-spirited enough to make you go, “Damn!”  In addition to the gratuitous death of the pregnant wife, we also get a gnarly scene in which the villains put electrodes on Williamson’s gonads.  (“They hot wired my nuts!”)  We also get some rather hilarious 80’s fashions too.  (The main terrorist wears an acid-washed blazer with the sleeves rolled up and all the women sport humongous shoulder pads.)

What kinda sinks the film is the interchangeability of all the action scenes.  Clark busts down a door, shoots a bunch of dudes, and rescues Williamson.  Repeat.  Clark and Williamson get inside a car/bus/jet and chase the bad guys until one of them shoots a rocket launcher at our heroes and they have to jump out of the vehicle seconds before it explodes.  Repeat.  Plus, the ending is mostly a letdown.

Clark (“Nick the Dick” from Bachelor Party) makes for a bland lead but at least Williamson gets to do one or two little cool things.  I especially liked the scene where the screaming guy with a machete ran at Fred and he just nonchalantly shot him.  If The Hammer wasn’t reduced to playing second fiddle, we may have had a classic on our hands.  

Williamson and Svenson also starred in Inglorious Bastards together.

David Sloan (Sasha Mitchell) doesn’t compete in kickboxing tournaments because both of his brothers died fighting the dreaded (in more ways than one) kickboxing champion Tong Po (Michael Qissi).  Instead, David opts to teach inner city kids kickboxing in his rundown gym.  To keep the gym open, he has to accept a big payday to fight for the kickboxing title.  He easily wins and after the match, calls out the promoters for being drug dealers and scumbags.  They get P.O.’ed PDQ and torch his gym, resulting in the death of one of the kids.  If that wasn’t enough, Tong Po also shows up and murders David’s prize student in the ring, Ivan Drago style.  You know what that means:  David’s got to dip his fists in Krazy Glue and broken glass and give Tong Po a beat down.    

You know, I hate it when sequels unceremoniously kill off one of the main characters off screen.  The most notorious instance of this is in Alien 3 when David Fincher killed off Newt and Hicks without giving them benefit of a meaningful death.  I think the only time that this device actually worked was in Rocky Balboa because Adrian’s death gave the story some depth.  What Kickboxer 2 does though is akin to killing off Rocky and substituting his brother, Stony.  If there is no Rocky in a Rocky movie, then what’s the point?

Yes, Kickboxer 2:  The Road Back features absolutely no Jean Claude Van Damme whatsoever.  Instead, we get… Sasha Mitchell, the idiot from Step by Step.  This is not an acceptable trade-off from where I’m sitting.  I will say this for Mitchell though; he is a halfway passable martial artist and has a sliver of charisma.  He’s not great, but he’s better than say, David Bradley, who replaced Michael Dudikoff in the American Ninja movies. 

I didn’t know this until I popped the DVD into the player, but this flick was directed by none other than Albert Pyun.  This guy kinda gets unfairly criticized as being one of the worst directors in film history.  I say that any man who directed Sword and the Sorcerer is OK in my book.  Still, Pyun has directed some unmitigated turds in his time.  I mean have you SEEN Alien from LA?  Pyun is also the dude who directed Jean Claude Van Damme’s worst film, Cyborg, so I guess you really can’t blame old JCVD for turning down the opportunity to reprise his role.    

Pyun’s style is straightforward and befits the material.  He does go more than a little overboard with the slow motion in the final two fights.  So much so that when Tong Po breathes, he sounds like a damn tiger.  The fights themselves are not bad per se; they’re just sorta bland and unmemorable.  You can easily say the same thing about the film.

The flick was written by David S. Goyer, screenwriter of Blade and Batman Begins.  Goyer also wrote Van Damme’s Death Warrant.  (I just like the way that sentence sounds.)  He also gave villain Cary-Hiroyuki (Showdown in Little Tokyo) Tagawa all the best lines like:  “Some things money can’t buy.  Fortunately for me, you’re not one of those things!”

Mitchell returned for more in Kickboxer 3 and 4.

David Bradley returns in this totally unrelated sequel in the American Ninja franchise.  He plays an American who happens to be a Ninja; other than that he’s a completely different character.  You can tell because he doesn’t have a mullet in this one.

Bradley is stuck babysitting a little punk (Lee Reyes) at the behest of his sensei (Mr. Miyagi himself, Pat Morita).  When his girlfriend gets kidnapped and is carted off to Venezuela, Bradley and the kid follow in hot pursuit.  Turns out, a nefarious villain wants the chick’s scientist papa to make a chemical weapon for an irate dictator and he’ll kill the dame if the doctor doesn’t cooperate.  Bradley and the little pipsqueak have to team up to Kung Fu a lot of color-coordinated Ninjas in order to save the day.

American Ninja 5 isn’t a bad movie per se, it’s just kinda flat and uninspired; especially when compared to the other films in the series.  The biggest problem I had is with the Ninja kid.  He gets annoying pretty quickly and the constant cutesy comic relief (Sample line of dialogue:  “All right dude… I mean… Master!”) makes this the Cop and a Half of Ninja movies.

The action sequences are slightly better than average and make up for a lot of the juvenile shenanigans.  Even though this flick isn’t really part of the American Ninja series (it was originally filmed under the title American Dragons), it still has all the arrow-catching, Ninja starring, nunchucking, and smoke bombing you’d come to expect from the franchise.  Bradley gives a competent performance and it’s always fun seeing Morita. 

AKA:  American Dragons.

The screenwriters and director of Terminator 3:  Rise of the Machines have re-teamed to give us another underrated Sci-Fi robot action movie.  Surrogates isn’t doing so hot at the box office but I caught it this afternoon in a nearly empty theater and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Do yourself a favor and check it out on the big screen before it disappears completely.  It’s a lot better than Terminator:  Salvation that’s for damn sure.

“Surrogates” are lifelike robots that humans control via a computer hook-up (it looks like a cross between Neo’s Matrix portal and the virtual reality set-up from Lawnmower Man).  The Surrogates go to work, get groceries, and go out dancing while the human just sits at home in the chair doing nothing.  After a prominent scientist’s son is murdered, Agent Greer (Bruce Willis) is called in to investigate.  He quickly uncovers a plot by “The Prophet” (Ving Rhames), a stanch anti-Surrogate agitator to kill every person hooked into a Surrogate computer.  When Greer’s Surrogate gets blown to shit by The Prophet’s men, Greer has to go out into society for the first time in years to get his man.

Like most good science fiction, Surrogates gives us some subtle political commentary (The Prophet’s “Live” posters are almost exactly like Obama’s “Hope” posters) and makes an important statement on the times we live in (the people in the movie that are constantly plugged into their Surrogate are clearly meant to represent those idiots who sit around on their ass all day playing World of Warcraft).  It also delivers on the action side of things.  There are only two or three big action sequences, but they work extremely well because of your emotional investment in Willis’ character.

Bruce does a great job in this flick; both at playing his plasticy faced Surrogate (with a full head of hair) as well as the world-weary cop.  He is particularly awesome in the scenes where he has to get acclimated to walking around the city for the first time without a Surrogate.  Bruce also gets to do a neat little Snake Plissken thing there at the end that I liked (no I won’t spoil it for you).

Surrogates does suffer from a tad bit of déjà vu though.  It’s almost as if someone put Terminator, I Robot, and The Matrix in a blender and hit Puree.  That’s fine by me though because it was never boring and it made all of its points without being overly obvious.  Surrogates also happens to be a great Bruce Willis action flick and the world always needs more of those.

Surrogates lands on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year list for 2009 at the Number 10 spot; placing it just below X-Men Origins:  Wolverine.

The Doctor (Joseph Maher) is this stuffy British dude who goes around South America teaching Torture 101 to classes of prospective dictators.  In one such class, he puts electrodes on a reporter’s gonads and tortures him to death.  This was a big mistake because the reporter’s best friend was Charles Bronson.  

If Death Wish 1-5 have taught us anything, it’s that you don’t senselessly kill any of Chuck’s nearest and dearest unless you want The Moustache breathing down your neck with a big gun.

The Evil That Men Do isn’t a great Bronson vehicle but it contained enough moments of badassery from the man that kept this die hard Chuck fan entertained.  The baddest of the badass moves Bronson did in this one came when some jackass tried to hit on his girl.  What did Chuck do?  He grabs onto the guy’s dick and twists on it WITH BOTH HANDS for a good minute or so.  From the looks of things, I bet old Chuck could get a job at Auntie Anne’s twisting pretzels.

This movie also has a sort of Kinjite vibe to it too.  Consider the one scene where Bronson poses as a bisexual swinger to lure The Doctor’s bodyguard into his hotel room where he sticks a knife in the guy’s neck.  You don’t see Chuck flirting with another man very often and when you do, it kinda makes you sick.  You know the guy was going to get killed something fierce if Chuck had to pretend to be a switch hitter in order to get to him.

There’s also a pretty funny scene when Bronson goes to kidnap The Doctor’s sister and hides under the bed to wait for her.  Little does he know that she’s about to get down and dirty with a lesbian (who has a giant bush) and he has to wait until they’re done fucking to make his move.  Chuck’s double take after he crawls out from under the bed was priceless.  I haven't laughed that hard since Obama won the Nobel Prize.

The thing that prevents The Evil That Men Do from breaking out and venturing into classic mode is Chuck’s awful supporting lady.  He dumbly takes her down to South America with him as part as his cover.  He should have dumped her once he got over the border.  This chick is just there to tell Chuck that killing is wrong, bitch and moan, and occasionally translate for him.  Had the screenwriters just wrote her out of the script, The Evil That Men Do could’ve been another Ten to Midnight.

What The Evil That Men Do does have is a killer ending.  Those who don’t want it spoiled, skip down to the next paragraph.  Chuck actually doesn’t get his hands on the killer, which may infuriate some people, but I dug it.  The ending is reminiscent of Freaks as The Doctor’s misshapen and disfigured former patients do a little surgery of their own on him with some rusty pick axes.  This makes sense to let The Doctor’s victims get their revenge because after all, Chuck was just avenging the death of a friend.  Now if Chuck was avenging the death of his wife or something; that would be a different story.

The Evil That Men Do was the fifth of nine collaborations between Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson.  Oddly enough, it was one of the few of their films that weren’t produced by Golan and Globus’ Cannon Films.  The film is a solid Three Star Bronson flick, but one can only imagine how much more sleazier things could’ve been had it been released by those guys.

An imprisoned soldier doing hard time gets pardoned so he can single-handedly take down a Hong Kong crime organization.  He also happens to be a Ninja and possesses the power to teleport himself at will.  The crime family has problems of its own and pretty much succeed in killing each other off by the time the Ninja finally shows up.

My suspicion is that Ninja Empire is really two unfinished movies edited into one.  You can tell because the Ninja never interacts with anyone in the crime family and is only featured in the beginning and end of the film.  Speaking of endings, Ninja Empire has one of the worse endings I’ve ever seen.  The Ninja shows up, rescues a girl, kicks a few guys, and then runs off.  The flick ends right then and there, mid-scene; almost as if they ran out of film or something.  I’m not complaining though because I don’t know how much more of the movie I could’ve watched without falling asleep.

Ninja Empire has little to recommend about it; save for the silly scenes where the Ninja disappears and reappears wearing camouflage Ninja pajamas.  Other than that, Ninja Empire is a complete turd.  Director Godfrey (Undefeatable) Ho directs the interchangeable “action sequences” stiffly; the lone exception being the fairly decent motorcycle chase.  The dialogue scenes are boring as fuck.  Imagine watching a complete stranger’s poorly filmed Bar Mitzvah video, and that should give you some idea of a how much fun the bulk of Ninja Empire is.  

AKA:  Ninja Phantom Heroes.

I was kinda excited to see American Ninja 4:  The Annihilation (or as excited as one can be to see a movie called American Ninja 4:  The Annihilation) because it promised the on screen pairing of the original American Ninja, Michael Dudikoff and his replacement from Part 3, David Bradley.  The problem is; it takes 45 minutes for Dudikoff to show up.  What’s worse is that he and Bradley don’t appear on screen together until about the 80 minute mark.

The plot has a bunch of Red Ninjas kidnapping a team of Delta Forcers on an island owned by an evil British colonel and a demented sheik.  American Ninja Sean (Bradley) gets sent in to rescue them but he too gets captured.  Then it’s up to American Ninja Joe (Dudikoff) to get off his ass (he’s been spending his days in the Peace Corps) and rescue the guys who were sent in to rescue the guys. 

American Ninja 4 has all the obligatory fight scenes you’d come to expect from the series, just on a smaller scale and budget.  There is plenty of Ninja-starring, karate chopping, and the ever popular arrow catching.  (A one point, Dudikoff even catches one with his teeth!)  This one also incorporates some new stuff like bullet dodging (long before Neo made it chic), but it doesn’t stray too far from the beaten path.  We also get to see such sights as commandos in combat fatigues going up against an army of Ninjas and a pretty good bar fight in which a tubby guy gets kicked onto a pool table that collapses.  My favorite part had to be the funny Ninja training sequence in which a Ninja falls gonads first onto a beam lined with broken glass.

I’m proud to say that Dudikoff has come a long way from the first American Ninja movie.  In that film, he was totally unconvincing in his fight scenes, but here he is quite good.  His roadside Ninja swordfight is done relatively stuntman free and he actually looks like he knows how to use a katana for once.  He also gets a good fight scene where he battles several Road Warrior rejects in a gravel pit.  Dudikoff even manages to play a never-before-seen humorous side to his character during the part where he disguises himself as a priest to gain entrance into the villain’s secret lair.  I also dug the end scene where he casually tossed a grenade on his fallen enemy, effectively turning him into yesterday’s lasagna.

American Ninja 4 is not great by any stretch of the imagination but it’s competently done and immensely watchable.  Although it loses major points for not having Dudikoff show up until the second half and giving Bradley very little to do (he’s tied up for most the movie) it’s much better than the previous installment.  Had the filmmakers chose to really make Dudikoff and Bradley a team instead of having them only say ten words to each other throughout the whole movie; American Ninja 4 could’ve easily been the best film of the series.  If you’re in desperate need of a 99 minute low budget Ninja fix, you can certainly do a lot worse.

The villain gets all the best lines of the movie.  Just before he executes somebody he says, “Tell my friend the Devil, I’m not ready to come home yet!”  His funniest line is when he gets in Bradley’s face and yells, “You American fuck!  I’ll teach you a lesson you won’t forget for the rest of your life; which I’m happy to say won’t be very long!”

As a boy, Jackie Chan’s father forbids him to fight so he has to take lessons from an old homeless man in the woods.  He grows up to be a waiter in his uncle’s tea house and keeps his martial arts skills a secret.  One day, he helps a lowly thief who is getting beaten up by his partners in crime by kicking the snot out of them.  Jackie’s dad finds out and gets pissed so he makes his son stick his fist in a bucket of broken glass.  When Jackie’s uncle gets targeted by the local crime boss, his father finally lets him go toe to toe with the no-good syndicate.

IMDB says this flick was cobbled together from two unfinished movies but it seemed pretty fluid to me.  It’s got Jackie playing a more serious role and partaking in some damn fine Kung Fuing.  He does some incredible flips and has some pretty wicked maneuvers in this one.  Chan lets his homeless master do most of the comic relief stuff and he does a fairly good job of it.  (At one point he farts in the face of his enemy!)

Ten Fingers of Death is a solid meat and potatoes Kung Fu flick; nothing more nothing less.  The way that Jackie was torn between his pacifist father and his short-tempered master is nicely done and gives the movie a dramatic center most of these things lack.  The short running time (78 minutes) certainly helps and the flick moves along at an acceptable pace.  The WTF quotient is pretty high too as there is an unbelievable scene in which a bad guy eats spinach to gain strength and the theme from Popeye plays on the soundtrack. 

There’s nothing spectacular or groundbreaking about Ten Fingers of Death; but there’s nothing really bad about it either.  It contains plenty of fight scenes, so any Chan fan should be pleasantly entertained.  Jackie gets the best line of the flick after he kicks a guy in the balls, he says:  “That’s called getting your kicks!”

AKA:  Last Tiger from Canton.  AKA:  Little Tiger from Canton.  AKA:  Master with Cracked Fingers.  AKA:  Snake Fist Fighter.  AKA:  Snake Fist Ninja.  AKA:  Stranger from Hong Kong.

Jotaro is a bad ass ninja who is in love with a hot chick.  When an old wizard makes a prophecy that whoever marries her will rule the world, a bunch of bad guys get together and make an aphrodisiac using the tears of her twin sister.  When the twin commits suicide by cutting her own head off, the villains swap out her head with that of a servant girl’s.  The newly put together woman is now known as Lady Hellfire who sends out the evil Five Devil Monks to kidnap the babe.  Jotaro doesn’t want those assholes messing with his woman so he sets out on a quest for vengeance.

Just coming up with a plot description for Death of a Ninja was kinda difficult.  This movie is all over the place and makes little sense.  The lack of coherency, erratic pacing and bloated running time took away from what could’ve been an enormously fun flick. 

I mean we have a ninja assassin who wears a big black wicker hat that tosses around a bad ass boomerang, a dude who shoots needles out of his eyes, and a monk whose fighting specialty is projectile vomiting.  The flick also has a number of quality decapitations followed by impressive geysers of blood spurting out of the neck hole.  Too bad most of the movie didn’t make a lick of sense.  On top of that, the dubbing is just plain awful.  (The villain’s evil laugh makes him sound like Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit.)  Oh and if you sneeze, you’ll miss Sonny Chiba.

AKA:  Black Magic Wars.  AKA:  Iga Magic Story.  AKA:  The Ninja Wars.

Sean (David Bradley) saw his dad killed at a martial arts tournament when he was a little boy.  After his father’s death, his manager takes Sean in and moves to Japan where he trains him to be a Ninja.  When his sensei gets kidnapped by a terrorist named Cobra (Mausoleum’s Marjoe Gortner); Sean teams up with his pal Jackson (series regular Steve James) to save him.  While infiltrating Cobra’s hideout, Sean gets injected with a deadly poison by his arch-nemesis.  He then must use his Ninja powers of mediation to purify his body of the toxin so he can Kung Fu the Hell out of Cobra.

You know, while I was writing this plot summary, something occurred to me:  Sean never rescues his sensei in the end!  He just roundhouses the villain to the face and then walks off into the sunset with Jackson.  I’ll just assume that he saved his sensei for the time being because what kind of American Ninja would he be if he didn’t.

American Ninja 3:  Blood Hunt doesn’t feel like a real American Ninja movie because of the conspicuous lack of Michael Dudikoff.  Steve James does return to remind you that it’s tenuously connected to the previous films.  That’s like making Indiana Jones 3 without Harrison Ford and calling it Short Round and the Last Crusade though. 

David Bradley is an OK substitute for Michael Dudikoff I suppose.  At all times he looks like he has an ice cream headache and doesn’t have much in the way of screen charisma.  He’s not bad in the fighting department though so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  In fact I actually kind of missed Bradley a little bit when he was knocked out of commission by the deadly toxin.  I mean he’s not great or anything but when a good chunk of the flick was just James, the dumbass blonde karate chopper, and the female Ninja trying to rescue him, the movie really falters and begins circling the drain.

On the action front, I will say there are a lot of Kung Fu fight scenes in this movie.  They aren’t really well choreographed or anything but there is a lot of them, so that’s good.  I mean there’s an underwater Ninja fight scene, which is something you don’t see everyday.

The action that doesn’t revolve around dudes in black pajamas is thoroughly inexcusable.  The inane motorized hang gliding scene has to be one of the sorriest action “sequences” ever devised.  The people flying the mechanized gliders are clearly stunt doubles and no attempt is made to make them look like the actors as they wear helmets and masks that cover their face.  Their dialogue is also horribly dubbed in, which is a further tip-off.  The editing in this scene is particularly atrocious.  The scene concludes when the glider lands in the back of the truck but we never see it actually land.  All we get is one lousy shot of its wheel landing on the bed and that’s it!  I hope the makers of those stupid hang gliders paid a pretty penny for their gratuitous product placement.

As dumb as much of American Ninja 3:  Blood Hunt is, I can’t bring myself to completely hate any movie in which it’s main character cures himself of a deadly disease solely through the power of meditation while being surrounded by a beam of white angelic light.  That shit had me in fucking stitches.  And wait until you hear the song, “The Cobra Strikes” that plays over the end credits.

Bradley returned the next year for American Ninja 4:  The Annihilation.

The original American Ninja movie had moments of WTF nuttiness sprinkled throughout your standard-issue Ninja flick.  Despite having flashes of cinematic craziness, it still desperately tried to pass itself off as a “real” movie and not a ridiculous Cannon action cheesefest.  American Ninja 2:  The Confrontation thankfully does away with any pretension and just gives us a balls-to-the-wall bat shit insane Ninja movie.

This time out, American Ninja Joe (Michael Dudikoff) and his buddy Jackson (Steve James) get a job guarding an Embassy on a remote tropical island.  It seems that a lot of guards have been mysteriously disappearing, so the duo investigates.  They learn that a drug dealer has blackmailed a scientist searching for a cure for cancer into using his genetic research to turn the missing soldiers into an army of biologically engineering super ninjas.

I’m all for utter zaniness and reckless abandon whenever you’re writing a Ninja movie but someone should’ve stopped screenwriter Gary Conway when he got to the “biologically engineered super ninjas” part.  Once they are introduced, the movie breaks the Goofy Meter and becomes so fucking mind-numbingly idiotic that I honestly think I lost some IQ points just from watching it.  I mean the doctor’s lab features cryogenically frozen Ninjas stuffed in oversized test tubes for Pete’s sakes!  You don’t even see that kind of wacky shit in Ninja Turtles cartoons!

Even though the movie gets increasingly sillier as it goes along, I still thoroughly enjoyed myself.  The opening scenes were particularly great with Dudikoff hanging around the oceanfront base with a bunch of highly effeminate beach bums/Marines.  The first fifteen minutes are mostly spent on Dudikoff fighting Ninjas on the beach; which made me think the movie should’ve been called American Ninja 2:  Ninjas in Paradise.  The plot eventually dropped the travelogue aspect of the story and concentrated on the more Sci-Fi-ish type stuff.

The flick starts getting pretty stupid pretty fast near the end.  I mean there is one completely moronic scene where the bad guy shows some potential investors how great his new biologically engineered super-ninjas (BESN’s) are by giving them a demonstration of their skills.  Afterwards, he sends his right-hand man into the arena and he promptly kills like a dozen of the BESN’s.  Wouldn’t the fact that your personal bodyguard can easily kill your multi-million dollar BESN’s make your investors a bit worried?

There are also way too many comic relief moments involving James.  I know he’s the sidekick and everything but he really shouldn’t have to have so many stupid one-liners while kicking somebody’s ass.  The part where he knocks down a bunch of people at the same time and you hear the sound of bowling pins on the soundtrack is the comedic low point of the film.

As many flaws as American Ninja 2 has; I can’t help but like it.  As in the first movie, this one features some head-scratching logic that made me laugh out loud on numerous occasions.  Like how all of Dudikoff’s Marine cronies dressed “undercover” as Hawaiian shirt-wearing surfer dudes.  They looked especially idiotic because they still sported their military buzz cuts and never bothered to cover up their blatantly obvious Special Forces tattoos.  And how about the opening scene in which a bunch of drunks roll some unsuspecting soldiers in a bar.  It’s kinda odd when you think about it because it’s usually the other way around.  There were lots of little moments of cinematic hilarity like this that made the flick so much fun. 

Most of these goofy scenes revolve around the villains.  For example, the main bad guy was called “The Lion” but his real name was “Leo”.  That was so dumb that I had to laugh.  I also liked the Bond movie scene where the hero disguised himself and took a tour of the villain’s secret multi-million dollar facility where he told him all about his operation too.  Then where was the bad guys’ great dialogue that conveniently allows them to say the title of the movie; like when the right-hand man says, “That damn American Ninja, he fights like a tiger!”  The funniest moment though is when The Lion meets Joe for the first time and says, “American Ninja… I presume.”

Director Sam Firstenberg does a much better job on the action side of things than in the previous film.  This was his fourth Ninja Movie (after Revenge of the Ninja, Ninja 3:  The Domination, and American Ninja), so he pretty much knew how to film all the spears shoved through the ribcages, face slashing, ninja stars to the forehead, blow-darts to the face, ninjas being set on fire, and knives to the neck this sort of thing requires.  The action sequences are a lot more competently staged this time around and are filmed with a lot more energy.  Really, it’s just one big Ninja free for all as it’s basically Michael Dudikoff beating the bejabbers out of dudes in black pajamas for 90 minutes.

Speaking of Dudikoff; he’s a lot more credible in his action scenes too, although he still relies on an obvious stunt double occasionally.  He seems to have gotten used to the whole “acting” thing as well and carries himself much better in this outing.  For whatever reason, he declined to return for 89’s American Ninja 3 but came back to the series for Part 4.

Thirty years earlier, screenwriter Gary Conway made his acting debut as the monster in the immortal I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.  Luckily, he writes as good as he acts.  I think my favorite line of dialogue had to be when Dudikoff’s superior got mad and yelled, “This is really beginning to get on my tits!”

A dumb blonde photographer (Ahna Capri from Enter the Dragon), her asshole brother, and her uptight boyfriend head on down to Venezuela to find some diamonds.  They hire a poacher (William Smith) to act as their jungle tour guide and he immediately gets the hots for the bubble-headed broad.  He slowly goes nuts and rapes her, feeds her brother to some piranhas, and sets fire to the village.  In the end, the photographer finally gets her shit together and blows him away with his own hunting rifle.

Piranha is one big snoozefest from start to finish.  There are numerous reasons for this.  First off, the trio of heroes are all irritating and will get on your nerves real fast.  Secondly, the lethargic pacing will put you to sleep PDQ.  Seriously, in one scene there is a long pointless shot of a sloth climbing a tree.  This shot only exists to prove that the sloth moves faster than the plot does. 

The big reason Piranha is such a waste of celluloid is that we don’t even see any piranhas (save for one brief close-up during the opening credits) until 75 minutes into the damn movie.  (It takes almost an hour for anyone to even say the word, “piranha”.)  What’s worse is that there is only ONE lousy piranha attack in the whole stupid film!  (It’s hard to tell whether or not the poacher got ate by piranhas or not because the last scene is so poorly edited.)  The movie really should’ve been called “The Poacher” because that’s who does all the raping and killing.

Although Piranha sucked hairy masculine balls for most of it’s running time, the excellent performance by William Smith made it somewhat tolerable.  Smith is just one of those actors that you enjoy seeing no matter how bad the movie is.  His considerable screen presence and erratic sleazy behavior was enough to keep me marginally interested in what was going on.  He also does his own motorcycle stunts during the film’s lone action sequence, which was easily the highlight of this shitty movie.

AKA:  Piranha, Piranha!

It took three directors of three different nationalities to film this huge-ass star-studded war movie.  The Longest Day recreates D-Day in intricate detail and focuses on several groups of soldiers on all of the major fighting fronts.  However, the undertaking itself is ultimately more is impressive than the actual results.

At almost three hours, it’s tempting to be a smartass and call The Longest Day The Longest Movie.  That would be too easy.  The Longest Day knows that it’s a sprawling big budget war movie.  The problem is that it’s just too sprawling for its own good.  The film features an international cast of hundreds; from John Wayne to Henry Fonda from Richard Burton to Robert Mitchum.  It even has Paul Anka and Fabian in it for Christ’s sakes!  The thing is that none of them ever really get enough screen time to make you care about their characters.

I understand the filmmakers’ crusade for authenticity but you have to draw the line somewhere.  I’m sure a lot of viewers will relish the film’s obsessive-compulsive attention to detail.  I’d rather say that it’s meticulous to a fault.  For example, I liked how all the major characters were introduced alongside of their name, rank, and serial numbers.  By (literally) the 40^th time a new character was introduced, it got pretty old and I gave up trying to remember who was who.  History buffs should eat that shit up though.

I also could’ve done without all the scenes where the Germans sit around and scheme.  Not because I had to read all those damn subtitles, but because they just slowed the movie down to a crawl.  If they had been excised from the final print, The Longest Day would’ve been a much tighter film.  I could have also done without Sean Connery’s turn as a blithering comic relief Scottish soldier too.

For a three hour movie, the film is kinda light on action, and when it does come, it’s usually in short bursts.  Most of the screen time is spent on generals barking orders and soldiers sitting around waiting to fight.  Thankfully, what action we do get is effective and tense.  Particularly suspenseful is a scene where a scared soldier anxiously waits to hear the “two clicks” signal from a comrade in arms.  There is also a great POV shot of an incoming paratrooper flying into a war zone too.  Of the major battle sequences, the Normandy invasion (led by Robert Mitchum) was probably the best and John Wayne’s portion of the film was a close second.  (The scene where he finds bodies of dead soldiers hanging from the trees is memorable.) 

The Longest Day isn’t entirely successful, but it certainly had moments of excitement, energy, and poignancy.  Still, it’s a long slog.  Your ass will be numb as Hell by the time it’s all over, that’s for damn sure.

A ninja steals a sacred book detailing the “7 Fists” style from a Shaolin temple.  Since Jackie Chan was on guard and let them steal the book, he gets punished.  Later, a bunch of ghosts show up and haunt the temple.  Jackie fights the ghosts and eventually earns their respect.  They teach him Kung Fu so he’ll be able to get back the book from the no-good thief and return honor to the temple.

Spiritual Kung Fu probably shouldn’t work as well as it does.  I mean the ghosts look like Kate Bush dressed like Raggedy Ann and the special effects are the same kind used by Cable Access shows.  What’s more, the ghosts seem shoehorned into the mix and only have about two scenes where they really do anything cool. 

I guess the filmmakers had to spice things up somehow.  The plot is strictly your standard Good Clan vs. Bad Clan stuff, so the goofy ass ghosts really make the movie stand out from the rest of the pack.  Chan gives a funny performance and the above average Kung Fu choreography helps whenever things start getting too silly.  (There is beyond-the-grave flatulence humor.)  Spiritual Kung Fu is no classic or anything, but those weirdo ginger-headed clown-faced karate-chopping ghosts are the kind of thing you don’t easily forget.

Director Lo Wei reused the scenes of Jackie catching frogs and worms in his pants for Fearless Hyena 2.

AKA:  Karate Ghostbuster.