Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Bullet Ballet/ Drama
Director: John Woo
Year: 1989

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars


NOT WORTH YOUR TIME

Just Heroes plays like a dress rehearsal for John Woo’s bullet ballet melodramas like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled. The elegant camera movements, slow motion, balletic gun-fu, heroic bloodshed, and male bonding are certainly all in evidence. Too bad it sucks balls.

I’m not sure what went wrong. The story had potential if it had been told in a lean way, but Woo drowns it in flashbacks within flashbacks. The story frequently makes no sense. Individual images and sequences are stunning, but the film doesn’t cut together worth a damn. Just Heroes is only 1:37 minutes long, but thanks to the lethargic pacing, it seems like an eternity. Despite all the killer action scenes, I was so bored, I was glancing at my watch every five minutes or so.

That’s why it’s such a surprise that Just Heroes isn’t early John Woo. It actually comes right between two of his masterpieces, The Killer and Bullet In The Head.

I really don’t understand. By this time, John Woo had shown over and over again that he was a competent storyteller, but you couldn’t prove it from Just Heroes.

Seriously, how hard could it be? Someone murders the dai lo. Suspicion falls on several people. Who is the betrayer? Woo should have been able to direct this in his sleep. Then again, maybe he did.

Unbelievably, even the Foley work is botched. Let me tell you what I mean. In some early scenes, it’s pouring rain, but behind the dialog in the scene, it’s just dead air. It’s crazy. Just Heroes is stuffed with stars: David Chiang, Danny Lee, Wu Ma, Ti Lung, Shing Fui-On, Chen Kuan-Tai, Stephen Chow, and Ku Feng all make appearances, but Woo didn’t have enough time or money to do the Foley work properly?

Woo has gotten charismatic performances out of his stars time and again, but this time out, his actors are stranded by poor pacing and editing. If you’re going to do a homoerotic, ultra-stylized action movie, you shouldn’t give your audience time to analyze what you’re doing. During Just Heroes, I had time to write grocery lists in my head between scenes. I actually laughed out loud during one scene in which Danny Lee and David Chiang blew beer foam in each others faces. It would be impossible to be more gay than that.

If you’re a casual fan of Hong Kong action movies, avoid Just Heroes like the plague. The only people who should see this are serious fans of hyperkinetic action sequences. The gun battles, choreographed by Yuen Bun and Lau Kar-Wing, and lovingly lensed by John Woo, kick some serious ass. Just make sure to keep your remote control handy. You’ll get carpal tunnel syndrome from pushing the fast forward button so often.

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Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Martial Arts/ Fantasy/ Girls With Guns/ Bullet Ballet
Director: Chi Li Tang
Year: 1991

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars


TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Bury Me High is nothing if not ambitious. What else do you call an adventure story about Feng Shui that incorporates a cast of thousands, military ordinance, voluminous explosions, kickass martial arts, and nutty stunts?

The plot resists easy summarization, but I’ll try. In the prologue, explorers Nguen (Paul Chun) and Wei Tien-Hsien (Corey Yuen) discover a location in the mountains with legendary feng shui attributes. Depending on where your ancestors are buried there, you will have limitless wisdom, wealth or power. Once Wei Tien-Hsien realizes that Nguen wants to create a political dynasty for his blood line by misusing the mountain’s powerful feng shui, he tries to stop him.

To counter Nguen, Wei Tien-Hsien arranges for himself to be buried in a location which will make his son Wisely (Chin Kar Lok), ahem, wise. The orphans of the man who helped Wei Tien-Hsien bury their father in a location that will make them wealthy. One of the orphans grows up to be Anna (Moon Lee). She owns a successful computer company. Wisely is a computer hacker.

But there’s a problem. If Anna and Wisely’s ancestors aren’t dug up within 24 years, the Fung Shui powers will turn inward and destroy them. Sure enough, Anna’s computer company is in trouble and Wisely has developed a brain tumor.

They make a journey to the magic mountain to fix things, but power mad general General Nguen (Yuen Wah) – you guessed it, the descendant of Nguen, the explorer – will do anything to stop them.

You may think that I’ve told you everything, but that’s an illusion. There’s enough plot in Bury Me High for half a dozen movies.

So, how good is Bury Me High? Well, you’ve got to give the writers kudos for imagination and audacity. Another strong point is the cinematography by Peter Pau, which is frequently quite poetic. The scenery is fantastic. The action is nonstop, and the fight choreography and stunts by Siu Ming Tsui are up to the Golden Age of Hong Kong (1985-1995) bone-breaking standard.

But unfortunately, director Chi Li Tang doesn’t have the craft to weave all of the elements into a coherent whole. The dialog and plot has only a tangential logic. That might partly be the fault of the subtitles, but not all. The scriptwriters have a bad habit of dumping truckloads of exposition every few minutes. The pacing of the film lurches instead of flowing smoothly.

Clearly, Bury Me High is a fantasy adventure – director Chi Li Tang wasn’t striving for emotional realism here, so I don’t fault it for that. But even fantasies require internal consistency to work. Bury Me High doesn’t draw you in and take over your reality the way a picture like Raiders of the Lost Ark does. Then again, Chi Li Tan is no Steven Spielberg.

So, is Bury Me High worth seeing? For fans of the Golden Age of Hong Kong, yes. Bury Me High is unique. It could have only been made in Hong Kong during the Golden Age. For fans of martial arts and stunt work, hell yes. You’ve got inventive martial arts choreography out the kazoo, executed by such talents as Moon Lee, Yuen Wah, Kar Lok Chin, and Sibelle Hu. Some of the less famous kickers, like Wing Cho and Siu Ming Tsui, also do fine work.

But for general fans of trash cinema, or newcomers to Hong Kong flicks, there’s plenty of classic films you should see first, like Operation Scorpio, Pedicab Driver, and Iron Monkey.

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Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Martial Arts
Director: James Glickenhaus
Year: 1985

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars


WORTH A LOOK

For those who don’t know, there are two versions of The Protector. The Protector started out as a project written and directed by James Glickenhaus, the American B-movie auteur behind The Exterminator.

The original movie is a mess. The pacing is sluggish, the story boring, the action underwhelming. The only fun aspects of The Protector are the gratuitous nudity, generous blood squibs, and mean-spirited graphic violence. At least Glickenhaus had the wit to let Jackie bring in some good character actors from Hong Kong, like Peter Yang and Shum Wai. Whenever they’re on screen, the movie lurches to life. It also has to be said that even the B-movie actors Glickenhaus hired are better than the hapless gweilos (white ghosts) that populate the typical Hong Kong flick. Interestingly, Danny Aiello, normally a fine actor, is terrible here. My guess is that he didn’t take the project seriously.

Jackie Chan apparently didn’t get along with Glickenhaus and decided to create his own cut of the movie, editing out the gratuitous nudity and graphic violence, and shooting new footage.

It’s an article of faith among Jackie Chan’s fans that his version is better than Glickenhaus’. Is that really true? Well, yes and no.

The final battle between Chan and Bill Wallace, as originally shot by Glickenhaus, is listless and lacks any rhythm. Jackie shot some new footage and reedited, and the result is kind of miraculous. Of course Chan has done much better elsewhere, but the reedited sequence generates some real excitement.

On the other hand, I missed the gratuitous nudity and mean-spirited violence that Chan snipped out.

In either version of the film, the music score is awfully cheesy, almost as bad as the typical Hong Kong film score from the period. Also, as much as I make fun of how Hong Kong movies depict American organized crime and gangsters, the street hoods in The Protector are just as unrealistic. Maybe this is the model Chan used for the street hoods in Rumble In the Bronx.

So, what’s the verdict? I pick the Chan version by a nose, which I’m pinching shut to keep out the stink. The Protector would only be of interest to huge Jackie Chan fans, and even then, you would be well advised to fast forward to the fights.

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Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Comedy/ Martial Arts/ Action
Director: Lau Kar-Wing
Year: 1990

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars


TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

What can I say about Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon? Unless you added in a plethora of crazy Hong Kong style stuntwork, it’s about as good as it could be, given the premise and style of the piece.

Baldy Mak (Karl Maka) and Fatty Dragon (Sammo Hung) are two Hong Kong cops who play fast and loose with the rules trying to bust criminals. They are a trial to their superior (Wu Fung) who constantly bemoans the fact that he’s the lowest ranking superintendent in the department thanks to their wacky antics.

Baldy Mak and Fatty Dragon make special enemies of Prince Tak, a drug dealer. Even after they decide to quit the police force and open a karaoke bar in Singapore, Prince Tak (Lung Ming-Yan) still tries to have them eliminated.

The comedy in Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon, although an acquired taste, is actually pretty good for a Hong Kong flick from the early 90s. Karl Maka and Sammo Hung have good comic chemistry. Maka’s manic delivery is countered by Sammo’s sad clown. Sammo’s imitation of Bruce Lee is sort of amusing. And Director Lau Kar-Wing’s screwball pacing keeps the proceedings moving along fairly painlessly. I also enjoyed the Thai ladyboy assassins.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of reasonably good martial arts action and pratfalls choreographed by Ridley Tsui and Xiong Xin-Xin to help smooth over the bumps. In fact, the action has the feel of director Lau Kar-Wing’s work, so I’m sure he contributed a lot of ideas, too.

There really isn’t a whole lot more to say about Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon. If you’re in the mood for a comic kung fu caper, you could do a lot worse.

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Country: United States
Genre: Science Fiction/ Action
Director: Christopher Nolan
Year: 2010

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars


TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Give credit to writer/director Christopher Nolan for one thing: he’s got balls like an elephant. Inception is the most demanding piece of speculative fiction written for the screen in the history of movies.

Now, what do I mean by that? After all, we’ve already had Blade Runner, Minority Report, and The Matrix, three films with intelligent prognostications about the future, each mindblowing in it’s own way. But there is a difference. In Blade Runner and Minority Report, the futurism was in the background. The stories were really about the meaning of being human and the inevitability of fate, respectively. Even The Matrix, with it’s awesome vision of a world taken over by machines, was playing off our paranoia about the ever increasing predominance of computers in everyday life.

What is the context in Inception that’s designed to engender an emotional response in the viewer? There is none, really. Oh, I know that Christopher Nolan tried to inject “heart” with the love story of Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mal (Marion Cotillard), who only lives as a projection of his subconscious in dreams, but how is the audience supposed to identify with these lovers? What corollary exists in the real world to mistaking fantasy for reality? Okay, there is gaming, I suppose. Geeks who spend half their lives playing Grand Theft Auto and the other half on the Internet. But that doesn’t have a whole lot of resonance.

What Inception is really about is the details of a new type of corporate espionage — invading the dreams of others in order to steal their secrets. The technology and strategy of this line of work is laid out in logical, detailed and mind boggling ways. Writer/director Christopher Nolan doesn’t coddle the audience. He moves fast, giving explanations on the fly. You’ve barely wrapped your mind around one entirely new way of thinking when Nolan throws another freaky idea at you.

That brings up a puzzle. If Inception is so intellectually challenging, then how come it has been so successful? Inception made $60 million dollars during it’s opening weekend. Did the broad public actually succeed in following Christopher Nolan’s logic? I doubt it. My guess is that what the audience is responding to is the spectacle of Nolan’s epic vision. The story may be intimate, but the visuals are as majestic as you would expect from the director of Batman Returns.

Paradoxically, given that most of the movie takes place in dreams, the images have a high degree of believability. As much as possible, Christopher Nolan and his production designer, Guy Dyas, have shied away from CGI. As often as possible, Nolan uses physical sets and tricks like mounting a set on a gimbal, so that actors can run on the ceilings of hotel rooms and so forth. When Nolan does use CGI, it comes tantalizingly close to photographic realism. What little difference there is, we can put down to the dream state itself. Christopher Nolan, along with James Cameron, are the only two directors I can think of that use large scale CGI effects responsibility.

Nolan does less well with the music score, by Hans Zimmer. Nothing wrong with the music itself, but it’s pushed way too far upfront in the mix. It’s often almost impossible to follow the dialog at times. Nolan used this same strategy in Batman Returns to greater effect. In both movies, you’re forced to concentrate more fully, but in Batman Returns, we were in a recognizable world, in which the rules were well established. There were fewer unknowns. In Inception, the rules of the world are being established on the fly, so clarity is of the utter importance.

Inception also fails as a work of suspense. Because the real world relevance of Inception is so vague, there can only be one outcome to the story. we pretty much know that Cobb and his team of dream invaders will succeed in their quest because the consequences of failure would have no resonance. Nolan attempts to compensate for this deficiency with an architectural approach to suspense. There are three layers to the dream state, at which time flows at different rates. For example, in the time that a van takes to plunge from a bridge into the water in the top layer, an hour transpires in the bottom layer. In order to successfully exit the dream, the team must precisely coordinate conditions in the three layers of the dream.

This attempt at suspense doesn’t work because Nolan fails to convince us that Cobb and his team can avoid the dozens of heavily armed soldiers generated by the target’s subconscious. In the most problematic sequence, the team is in a van being shot at by dozens of soldiers equipped with automatic rifles. No one is hit. That’s just not believable. Actually, that problem could have been solved. Most of the team could have been lying down in the rear seats. The driver, on the other hand, should have been shot to pieces while desperately maintaining his struggle to evade the soldiers. That would have increased suspense.

Despite these flaws, do I recommend that you see Inception? Well, that depends on your orientation. Do you want to have a stake in the failure or success of the characters, to be moved emotionally? If so, you should probably give Inception a miss. For me, this is the greatest drawback of the film. I go to the movies largely for emotional catharsis.

But there are number of good reasons to see Inception. If you care about the state of the art in Hollywood filmmaking, Inception is a must. Same goes if you’re a fan of speculative fiction.

Apart from my personal reaction to Inception, I have to applaud Christopher Nolan for having the nerve to create such a large scale film around such an original, intellectually demanding concept. Hollywood films are generally geared toward the lowest common denominator. How refreshing to find a summer blockbuster that challenges the audience to keep up with it!

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Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Bullet Ballet/ Suspense/ Drama
Director: Michael Mak
Year: 1992

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars


TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Underground Express AKA Long Arm of the Law IV isn’t quite as great as it’s predecessors, but you shouldn’t hold that against it.

One advantage the film has is a rich premise. In the aftermath of the Tienanmen Square massacre, Chinese pro-democracy students are marked for death. One of the leaders of the movement, a professor from Hong Kong, arranges for Hong Kong gangsters to smuggle a few student leaders out of China into Hong Kong, for a price of course.

The gang members were all members of the Chinese army until their leader, Wong Bing (Elvis Tsui), brought them to Hong Kong in pursuit of money and a life of crime. The gang members repeatedly stress that they are smuggling the students only for money, but their core idealism slowly betrays itself.

The mission is almost immediately in jeopardy, as their adversary, a higher up in the Mainland Chinese defense bureau, tortures anyone who might have information in pursuit of his quarry. I couldn’t find out the name of the actor who plays this role, but he’s spectacularly hateful, like a rabid pit bull.

The actors who play the gangsters, Elvis Tsui, Chan Ging, Ronny Ching, and Frankie Chan, all do tasty character work. In fact, the acting is excellent across the board.

Screenwriters Johnny Mak and Stephen Shiu keep our heroes in constant jeopardy. They manage a number of very suspenseful sequences.

Probably the most intriguing aspect of Underground Express is the politics. Everyone has different and conflicting motives. The Hong Kong politicians don’t want to hand over the political dissidents to the Chinese because it would cause an uproar among the pro-democracy public, but they are not averse to helping the Chinese arrest them on the high seas if it would strengthen relations with Beijing. The Chinese customs police feel duty bound to hand over the dissidents…unless the price is right. At one point, when the leader of the pro-democracy movement is late in paying off the gangsters, the gangsters kidnap him and attempt to ransom him for their pay. And so it goes.

So why is Underground Express the weakest of the Long Arm of the Law quartet? One aspect, oddly enough, is the action. For most of the film, when folks are shot, they pretty much fall down. Director Michael Mak is downright stingy with the bullet squibs, at least until the third act. Another problem is that Mak hasn’t figured out a way to stage the gunfights between the gangsters and what seems like the entire Chinese army in such a way that we can suspend our disbelief. If 100 soldiers armed with AK-47s were firing at you at the same time, I don’t care how many acrobatic moves you perform, you’re going to look like an alcoholic’s liver in about five seconds. There’s an explosion in which the use of a dummy is glaringly obvious. This kind of thing was handled much better in the previous three installments, although, to be fair, the action improves drastically in the final reels.

The other problem is harder to quantify. Somehow, director Michael Mak doesn’t get us to buy into the reality of the situation he’s presenting. This is a puzzle to me. The acting is fine and the situations are realistic (in the context of the piece). I’m just guessing here, but maybe the problem is that Mak is so intent on wowing us with nonstop action that he doesn’t pause long enough to allow us to invest in the emotional reality of the characters. It’s almost like they’re stick figures being moved around on a game board. The cartoon-like action in the early going doesn’t help, either.

It’s too bad I wasn’t able to get fully invested in the fate of the characters because screenwriters Stephen Shiu and Johnny Mak came up with a pretty gut wrenching scenario. The final image potentially would have had a lot of power if director Michael Mak had been able to make us care about his heroes.

Still, with all its flaws, Underground Express is definitely worth watching.

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Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Romance/ Action/ Suspense
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Year: 1972

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars


TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE

The Getaway is something a little different from Sam Peckinpah. There’s action in it, but it’s not really an action movie. It’s mostly about the stresses put on the relationship between Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) and Carol McCoy (Ali MacGraw).

The opening 20 minutes of the picture are a work of art, as director Peckinpah seamlessly blends imagery, subjective sounds and sparse dialog to create a vision of prison as a machine that grinds down and crushes the souls of it’s more sensitive inhabitants.

That’s Doc, who has been in prison for two years. When his parole comes up, it’s denied, even though he’s a model prisoner. Doc takes one look at the smug puss of Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson), sitting on the parole board, and he figures the fix is in. That’s when Doc sends his wife Carol to Beynon to make a deal.

It turns out that Beynon wants Doc to rob a bank in exchange for getting him paroled. You think Beynon might doublecross Doc?

But for all the machinations of the plot, writer Walter Hill and director Peckinpah are more interested in what’s going on between Doc and Carol. There is a temptation to write off Ali McGraw’s performance as Carol. It seems overly wide-eyed and disingenuous, but that’s the point. Carol has an inordinate amount of faith in Doc. She would feel safe with him in the middle of a war zone. That faith is challenged when Doc reveals a psychological weakness and immaturity she had no idea was there.

Doc and Carol’s travails are contrasted with the relationship of Fran (Sally Struthers) and Harold Clinton (Jack Dodson), who are recruited to drive Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri), one of the robbers working with Doc, to a rendezvous point. Fran is the type of woman who becomes pen pals with rapists in prison.

The violence, when it comes, is very personal, fueled by the passions of the characters. I’m thinking particularly of a scene in which Doc protects Carol towards the end of the movie.

Although The Getaway is rather slow-moving by modern standards, it keeps your interest through an investment in the characters. I was exasperated at Doc’s bullheadedness and yet I wanted him and Carol to ultimately make it as a couple. I was appropriately disgusted with Fran and Rudy. This is a tribute to thoughtful writing and sensitive direction (not something you ordinarily associate with Sam Peckinpah). Even the acting, although a tad dated, does it’s job.

The Getaway, with it’s emphasis on character, as opposed to empty and hyperbolic action sequences, is the sort of movie they just don’t make any more, and that’s a shame. Writer Walter Hill and director Sam Peckinpah show that it’s possible to make a character-driven movie without giving up action eye candy. But with the modern attention-deficit, gamer culture, I doubt that would fly today.

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Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Bullet Ballet/ Martial Arts
Director: Sammo Hung
Year: 1987

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars


WORTH A LOOK

In Eastern Condors, director Sammo Hung seems to have set out to make an American style war picture, along the lines of The Dirty Dozen. It’s not such a good fit for his talents.

The early sequences, which focus on the convicts who are recruited for a secret mission to destroy an abandoned American ammunitions dump in Vietnam, are overly broad. As a result, we don’t care enough about the characters to feel much of anything when they start dying off one by one.

Okay, so we don’t care about the characters or their situation. How’s the action? Not so hot. When it comes to war violence and action, Hollywood is pretty hard to beat. (Although Korea gave us the superb war picture Tae Guk Gi, which is the exception that proves the rule.)

Worst of all, there is no sustained martial arts action until the climax of the picture. Until then, we have to make do with an occasional roundhouse kick or two. And even then, director Sammo Hung uses way too much slo mo. What Hong Kong cinema does better than anybody else is full tilt foot to hand combat, choreographed, shot, and edited with brutal immediacy.

Thankfully, we get some of that with the climax, with high energy face-offs involving such stellar talents as Yuen Wah, Dick Wei, Lam Ching-Ying, Sammo Hung, Joyce Godenzi, and Yuen Biao. I just learned from the Hong Kong Movie Database that the choreographers on Eastern Condors were Yuen Wah, Corey Yuen, Lam Ching-Ying, Yuen Biao, and Sammo Hung himself. Considering that embarrassment of talent, the results are awfully meager.

I wish Sammo Hung had integrated more sustained martial arts setpieces into the movie, instead of concentrating it all into the end fight. That’s probably unfair, given that Sammo set out to make a war movie, but there you are.

One more thing I should probably mention — Sammo (or a stunt double) performs one of the craziest stunts I’ve ever seen: a 60 foot jump off of a cliff into a moving jeep filled with people.

I know that Eastern Condors is considered a classic, but it didn’t impress me any more this time around than the first I saw it 20 years ago.

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Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Bullet Ballet/ Drama
Director: David Lam
Year: 1992

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars


TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE

All history lessons should be as fun as Powerful Four. It seems that, during the 50s and 60s, the Hong Kong Police Department was totally corrupt. Not only did cops take bribes to look the other way, they actively participated in illegal activities as partners. Powerful Four tells the tale of how four policemen rise through the ranks, end up working as a team, and end up taking on corruption at the highest levels, almost in spite of themselves.

It certainly doesn’t start out that way. No-Hand (Danny Lee), Master Hung (Waise Lee), Fatty B (Kent Cheng), and Laughing Tiger (Simon Yam) initially look out for themselves, taking bribes like everyone else and scheming to get promoted.

No-Hand is the most principled of the bunch, and early on, he runs afoul of Sam, an opium shop owner with higher aspirations, by making the biggest drug seizure in Hong Kong history. As No-Head is promoted, he diffuses resentment by recommending Laughing Tiger and the others for promotion, creating lifetime loyalty.

All four characters are quickly and competently sketched by screenwriter Wong Chi. The characterizations are filled out by the stars, who overflow with charisma.

Danny Lee does his usual righteous cop, but he makes the most of opportunities for comic embarrassment, as when a maid he has a crush on washes the dingy underwear he’s too cheap to throw out. Simon Yam is slick and suave as an immoral hustler. Kent Cheng brings comic grace notes to a comic loudmouth who occasionally experiences lapses of bravery. Waise Lee doesn’t have a lot to work with — his character is forthright and has an unrequited passion for No-Head’s wife, but he’s still vivid. Finally, Vincent Wan makes a spectacularly hateful villain as Sam. He comes off as a seething bungle of psychosis.

The story has plenty of twists and dramatic reversals to keep our interest. I have no way of knowing if the movie’s depiction of 50s and 60s era Hong Kong is accurate, but is sure feels authentic.

The action choreography of Yuen Tak is gratifying brutal, and it’s beautifully woven into the fabric of the film by director David Lam.

Unusually for a Hong Kong movie from the early 90s, the score by Lowell Lo isn’t laughably garish and tinny. Instead, it contributes to the overall atmosphere.

In summary, Powerful Four is a very good and consistent genre effort, although not quite fabulous enough to earn an Essential rating.

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Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Martial Arts
Director: Godfrey Ho
Year: 1993

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars


NOT WORTH YOUR TIME

Angel The Kickboxer is stultifyingly boring, to the point of being unwatchable. Reader, I confess that 40 minutes into this snooze fest, I skimmed through the rest of the DVD, only pausing for the fight sequences.

Don’t blaim the actors. Don’t even blaim the martial arts coordinators. There’s some halfway decent swordfighting, pole work and ground fighting to be had here.

No, what makes Angel The Kickboxer truly awful is the story. Rumor has it that auteur Godfrey Ho cobbled together Angel The Kickboxer from fragments of several films, with a little new footage to tie it all together. The result is truly moronic — I felt my brain cells dying as I watched.

The only time that Angel The Kickboxer shows any life is when Yukari Oshima is onscreen. She oozes charisma and personality, and she’s lovely to watch in action. Oshima is grace and power personified.

If you happen to be a huge Yukari Oshima fan like me, by all means watch Angel The Kickboxer with the fast forward button handy. Everyone one else would be well advised to shun Angel The Kickboxer like the toxic celluloid sludge it is.

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