Dark_Lord_Mark
Lauren Avedon as Jake Donahue! Billy Blanks as Khan! Good vs Evil! WHO WINS!!!! How do you rate something so over the top so over exaggerated, so full of itself. The plot will not win Oscars, the lines are just insane and the acting oh boy the acting is so...so...incredibly over the top, it's so good.This movie is a gem, right up there with Superfights and No Retreat, No Surrender as some really fun so bad, it's good martial arts flicks we saw pop up in the mid 90's to early 90's. These movies were the pinnacle of guy-dem, in an era which we saw T2 and Turtles and the Ooze....this was a lost gem that ALL men and true guys who love movies should worship.It's the Troll 2 of action movies, so fun to watch and make fun of.Lauren Avedon, is the Nicolas Cage of action movies; so over the top, he over acts yet...he's so good at it you cannot stop watching. From his Star Wars Episode III Darth Vader like, "Noooooooooooooooooo...." to his egotistical fights and other quizzical one liners. It's so bad it's good?Avedon plays a cop who sees his antagonist in Billy Blanks after years of searching and his memory is jogged. Essentially Lauren Avedon is OUT FOR VENGEANCE and has to become the King of the Kickboxers if he has any chance of living.Could this be the BEST Worst Movie of All Time?
BrickNash
The makers of this film are certainly no strangers to films that are "Inspired" by mainstream others. The company's earlier effort "No retreat No Surrender" was meant to be a take on the Karate Kid and this film is no different. Let's just get this out of the way now.......it's a Kickboxer rip off! In fact it goes beyond rip off in places with some parts and locations being nearly identical to the Van Damme film, it really is shameless!Fortunately, Seasonal films are no slouches when it comes to fight scenes and here's where you start to forgive them for being such blatant pilferers. The Fights are truly spectacular, choreographed with such precise flow, speed and with such immense power. This film is a direct descendant of No Retreat No Surrender which was the first film to use western actors set in America with an Oriental production team and like it's ancestor it really is quite something. Gone are the traditional, slow movements of the 70's Kung-Fu films which were so akin to Shaw Brothers films at the time and in their place there is rip roaring torrents of brutal martial arts action.Billy Blanks as Khan is a great, nay tremendous and utterly terrifying bad guy and it's always great to see the amazingly talented Keith Cooke (who almost steals the show here) but Loren Avedon is as hammy as ever despite his great fighting skill. Of course that's half the charm of these films and that statement is meant fully as a compliment. It certainly has captured the feel of Van Damme's Kickboxer although it doesn't match up to it in terms of polish or drama, but the fights more than make up for it!Be like me, buy both and enjoy both!
kphurley-1
This film is so focused on the fighting they forget the name of the main character...we are introduced to a cop named "Jake", but then the woman he is trying to save at the end can't be bothered to remember what his name is; she calls him "Jack" NUMEROUS TIMES.There are so many other cheesy lines which have been mentioned in these reviews...how funny is it when Avedon, looking like he's going to burst into tears, sternly demands Blanks to LET THE GIRL GO!! Great stuff.BTW...I believe Blanks' finisher is U, U, D, D, L, R, L, R, B, A.
BBmanDawn
Ridiculously good martial arts choreography combined with laughably bad dialogue and an outlandish plot that borrows heavily from Kickboxer add up to a very enjoyable fighting movie. Seeing the film in Middle School when it was on cable I had trouble getting past the poor film stock, and substitution of water in the mouth as fake blood was probably too expensive to use. Coupled with lousy acting and poorly-lit sets, I just enjoyed the fighting scenes (probably on a day when I had my fill of Van Damme and Seagal). Looking back on it recently, the choreography is some of the best ever put on celluloid, and it holds up tremendously against just about all of the other fight scenes from the 90s. A combination of beautiful foreign locales, some pretty intense stunts, and a sense that the director was going for a "let's be satisfied with the first take of any non-action scene" attitude, the movie is a guilty, but VERY impressive martial arts film.