Manhattan Chase (2000)

This had three names and three names only that I needed to see. First, DTVC Hall of Famer Cynthia Rothrock. That alone will get a movie to the top of my radar. Then there's DTVC favorite Loren Avedon. Always up to see him in something. And finally, this was directed by Godfrey Ho (credited as Godfrey Hall). That should be enough to at least see what this is all about, right?

Manhattan Chase follows Loren Avedon, a drug cartel hitman who is arrested by Cynthia Rothrock and put away for six years. When he gets out all he wants is to get his son and get his life on the straight and narrow. Problem is, even with the best of intentions, one can't plan for a girl running from the same dealers he used to work for because she stole their heroin, and landing on the hood of his car. But she does, so he takes her in and tries to protect her. Is it a moment of redemption, or a mess that'll only prove to derail his chance to go straight?



Though this has its moments, with some especially sweet martial arts scenes, overall it's bogged down by an overloaded and convoluted story that takes away from any great action we could've had. To put it best, this is like an MST3K quality flick, and I don't mean that in a "fire this one up for you and your buddies to enjoy on a bad movie night", I mean it like "if you have a TV show about a guy who's shot into space and forced by an evil scientist to watch bad movies with two robots and make fun of them, you might find this appealing." Some of the dialog was so bad that common words were mispronounced. "Hairo-on" instead of "heroin", or "homo-cide" instead of "homicide". Seriously, "homo-cide"? What, did you park your car in the "gay-rage"? Yes, the star power is good, and when the names can flex their muscles, it's really great, but compared to what you want from a Godfrey Ho directed flick with Rothrock and Avedon in it, this is more a missed opportunity than it is the awesomefest it should've been.

Rothrock is not the star in this, Avedon is, even though she's top billed. That means we don't get much of her, and even less of her fighting. She does have one of my favorites fights of hers ever, when she takes a dude out with a combination of a Reverse Rothrock, a Rothrock, and a Frankensteiner. Another thing I want to point out that we don't often talk about with regard to her is her acting ability. In 2000 (or 1998 when this was filmed), she had been in her share of movies, and many of them not of the highest quality, but you could tell here that she knew her way around a poorly written script, and knew how to make it look like natural dialog. She said in a featurette that came on the Sworn to Justice DVD that she did a scene with Brad Dourif, and he told her she was great, and I can see here in this why he'd think so.



Avedon, unfortunately, didn't have it so easy, but like Rothrock, he was trying. Part of it I think was he had more he had to deal with, his character being the one the story is based around and all. Is this what I want to see from my Avedon though? Less ass kicking and high octane martial arts, and more talking to a child actor about their future as father and son? Of course not, and every high octane ass kicking martial arts scene in this is a reminder of all the ones we could've had and didn't get. The thing is, of all the martial arts leads you could cast, Avedon is one of the ones that'll give you the highest work rate and will be willing to do what it takes to get the scene right, no matter how much it might hurt him at the time. When you have a guy like that, you can't waste him on a sub-par drama with a few action scenes in it, you need to hit this out of the park.

One really fascinating thing about this was the juxtaposition between the late 80s/early 90s quality film stock, and the post-Juliani New York City, because the movie looked like that grittier New York of the past, but we're seeing things in the background like MTV in Times Square and other newer late 90s/new millennium hallmarks of Manhattan. It was an odd thing, where I had to remind myself that this wasn't 1988 or 1991.



Finally, I want to end with the movie's ending, which I'll try not to give away too much, but if you don't want to know, just in case, you may want to skip this. The ending was the kind of thing that can barely be pulled of when a movie has built up mass amounts of goodwill, let alone here when the film wasn't that good and had no goodwill whatsoever. On some levels I'd call it lazy screenwriting, but more than that, it was just mean-spirited and kind of a punch in the gut to us who actually did spend our time watching the film. All film makers should on some levels understand that the movies they make are a contract with us the viewer. Sure, you can say you're making a movie for yourself and if people like it great, but I'm not sure that's what's going on here, this was not some self-indulgent French New Wave flick. In that sense, all film makers should take a step back when they write and film their endings, and ask themselves "will our audience think the movie was worth it after this?"

And I certainly didn't. If you're a completist, especially of Rothrock, Ho, or Avedon, and you see this, if it's cheap I'd pick it up. If you're considering actively seeking it out, I'd bury it down your must list, because this definitely isn't a must. And if you run a show where a guy and two robots make fun of movies from a satellite orbiting the planet, this might be the kind of thing you want for an episode.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199748/

No Retreat, No Surrender 3: Blood Brothers (1990)

It's taken me a little while to get my hands on this one and complete the No Retreat, No Surrender series, but we've got it, so let's do it. Our friend Karl at Fist of the B-List has also done this one, so you should check that out too.

No Retreat, No Surrender 3 doesn't have anything to do with part 2, it just has Loren Avedon. Avedon plays a rebellious younger brother who runs a dojo and wears a CCCP jacket, while his brother, Keith Vitali, and his father run a private spy company. After his dad's birthday, his dad is killed by a terrorist baddie named Franco that looks like a poor man's Roland Gift with bleached hair cut in the Billy Ray Cyrus style. Now the question is, can the feuding brothers, Avedon and Vitali, get along long enough to avenge their father's death?



This is a bit of a tough one, but I really enjoyed it. The action, when it's there, is extremely high octane. We're talking Hong Kong cinema level martial arts and stunts, which is really exciting to watch. Then you have the bad acting, worse dialogue, and amateur level direction-- seriously, were all those boom mics showing up on purpose?-- all of which was funnier than it was annoying when set against the too sweet action. The problem for me was that there were gaps in the action that at first were funny, but as the film went on, the bad acting, dialogue, and story wasn't as funny anymore, making those gaps tedious. Still, it does recover, and really brings it with a finale worthy of the solid scenes we'd seen leading up to it. I'm giving this a recommendation strictly to bad action fans and no one else-- again, if you overuse the word "cheesy" when describing a late 80s/early 90s DTV actioner, this is probably too much for you; but if you're into great action and are willing to have fun with the bad spots, you'll be rewarded.

Really liked Loren Avedon here. I think we've brought this up before, and other sites have discussed it as well, but it's a shame Avedon hasn't been in more stuff, based on how sick his skills are. Mr. Kenner at Movies in the Attic told us he spoke to the man himself, and one of the things he said was Avedon had a falling out with Lorenzo Lamas, and Lamas made it hard for him to get work after that. If that's true that's too bad, because Avedon is almost 50 years old, so we may have missed his best years-- though at 50 he'll still be over ten years younger than Steven Seagal, so maybe we'll see him again.



What was up with all the boom mic-age? I lost track of how many there were. And you had multiple kinds too, from the fuzzy outdoor variety, to the standard one you see here. Once or twice is a novelty that we love when watching a low-budget film, but after awhile it becomes ridiculous. Is it that hard to keep the thing from floating into the shot? I guess it is, and that's why we love you.

We've done some other Keith Vitali flicks on here, American Kickboxer 1, Bloodmoon, and Revenge of the Ninja. Don't know if I remember him in any of them. His acting is pretty rough-- which is hilarious-- but his fight skills are right there with Avedon's. According to imdb though, Avedon worked 4-6 hours a day to train, while Vitali came into the role out of shape. He also busted his arm for real before shooting, so it was written into the film that his arm was shot, and then the rest of the movie people made cracks about his cast. Keith Vitali, exactly what No Retreat, No Surrender 3 needed.



Most movies cast a veteran character actor as the President. We've seen Roy Scheider, Rutger Hauer (I know, he's not a native born American-- Birthers!), even Jerry Springer (I know, he was born in London-- Birthers!). This movie took a different tact. They used file footage of Bush 41, and acted like the villains were targeting him with a rocket launcher by drawing some green sights over it. Hey, it saves money, right? That's all public domain footage right there, you can do whatever the hell you want with it. So bad it's ingenious!

As far as I know, this is only available on VHS here in the States, but overseas you can get it on DVD-- in fact, Amazon offers a Region 2 DVD set of all three No Retreat, No Surrender films. I think it's really a matter of where you are in the bad action movie world. Do you love these things with absolutely no irony whatsoever? In that case, you should look for a copy of this. If you just kind of do this thing for some goofy fun to laugh at "cheesy" movies, this might be too much. To give you an idea, it wasn't too much for me, but I've had a blog for over four years where I review stuff like this on a regular basis.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100266/

Virtual Combat aka Grid Runners (1995)

This is one of seven acting credits Don "The Dragon" Wilson had in 1995, one of which was a bit part in Batman Forever, but the rest of which were all starring roles, including two Bloodfist films, VI and VII, the the third Ring of Fire film, Cyber-Tracker 2, and Terminal Rush-- co-starring fellow Hall of Famer "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. That's a lot of premiers to go to. I wonder if he had to buy a second tux. You probably rock the Canadian Tux to premiers like that.

Virtual Combat takes place at an undefined point in the future. In it, virtual reality is the name of the game, until a scientist figures out how to take the computer generated characters, and make them into real people. He first creates a sex slave and a dominatrix, but somehow, unintended, Dante, the level ten fighter in the martial arts simulator, is made real too. Now it's a big old mess, because the virtual reality company wants to sell their new inventions, Dante wants to make a bunch of his friends, and then Dante also kills Wilson's partner-- I forgot to mention Wilson was a special cop, called a Grid Runner-- and Wilson wants revenge.



This one is hilarious. I don't know where to start. The helicopter hovering well above Wilson that he blows up with revolver fire? Yeah, that was great. What about the total devolution of the story at the end, where we just had no idea what the hell was happening? Even better. What about the cloned virtual reality people that turn into a pile of spilled Alka Seltzer after they die? Your guess is as good as mine. By the time you get to Wilson's end battle with Dante, played by Michael Bernardo, and Bernardo is able to make swords appear out of nowhere in his hands, it really doesn't matter. This is good for the pure silliness factor-- round up your buddies and see who can make the best jokes.

Film number 21 for Mr. Wilson is quite a doozey, and it makes me wonder what he thought while making it. I mean, a helicopter is above him, shooting laser beams at him and his girl, and he picks up a revolver, points, fires off a few rounds, and then we see an explosion. What is he thinking when he sees that in the script? The point is, no matter he's thinking, he completely sells it to us, which is all that counts. He does have some solid fights, choreographed by Art Camacho, but he also has a lot of "let's see how many roundhouse kick we can trade off on each other's faces" kind of fights. You know: wait, roundhouse, now your turn, wait, roundhouse, now my turn, uh oh, you ducked it! Between his fights with Bernardo and DTVC favorite Loren Avedon, I'd say the latter was the better-- is it any surprise? Also, we have 8 more Wilson movies after this one. Almost complete.



Bernardo never actually speaks his lines, Michael Dorn does it for him. Yes, that Michael Dorn. No offense to Michael Bernardo, but why didn't they just cast Dorn as the baddie anyway? Maybe he was busy doing Star Trek: The Next Generation. The voice is kind of distorted, so it's not as awesome as you'd want from seeing his name pop up in the opening credits, but it does in a pinch. As an aside, my nephew had this bear that recites The Night Before Christmas, and the voice is very Dorn-esque. Can you imagine if it was actually him? Like in his PJs and slippers, sitting in a rocking chair, maybe with a pair of spectacles, reading us The Night Before Christmas? How awesome would that be?

As I mentioned above, DTVC favorite Loren Avedon is in this. He plays the virtual reality corporation's hachetman, making him another baddie, but one that was also at odds with Bernardo. One thing you can tell right away is that his style of martial arts translates much better on-screen. I think Wilson could have managed with him, but they never really gave him that scene, it was more just Avedon going for it , and Wilson dodging and waiting and punching or kicking-- which looked clunky when combined with Avedon's quick style. I'm not that mad about it, because any Avedon is great Avedon, just don't go into this, seeing Avedon's name in the credits, and expecting The King of the Kickboxers.



I was trying to figure out where to go with this seventh paragraph. You have the Rip Taylor cameo, where a faint image of his head appears above some tourists in Las Vegas, which is pretty funny. It made me think of a line from a Bloodhound Gang song: "Rip Taylor, Rip Taylor, your girlfriend, we nailed her!" There's also Las Vegas itself, which is supposed to be futuristic, but looks suspiciously like Vegas circa 1995. Then there's the smartphone technology, which was good on some things, and notsomuch on some others. They don't look as stylish-- think cross between Tri-corder and Zack Morris Phone-- and they don't have great GPS; but they have tons of sweet apps, including a talking woman home screen, the ability to scramble neck-shocking collars, something that mimics FBI announcements, something that can replicate someone else's hand to get by security scans, and best of all, a self-destruct app. I have to think someone's working on that one right now for the iPhone.

The DVD of this is out of print, meaning the VHS is the most affordable option. This is one of those it's so bad it's funny kind of deals, and I had a lot of fun with it. Definitely worth keeping your eye out for in bargain bins and whatnot, but I wouldn't go too far out of my way or spend too much money.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113220/

No Retreat, No Surrender 2 (1987)

The procurement of this film was a pretty tight one. I thought I had it coming from one source, but then that fell though, so I went somewhere else, and then it was a question of, do I get it on time for a Monday post? I got it on Saturday, meaning it all worked out. No Retreat, No Surrender 2, ready to go.

No Retreat, No Surrender 2 really had nothing to do with the first one, which was fine with me, because that movie was only okay, and this was pretty awesome. Our hero (Loren Avedon) is in Thailand to reunite with his bride-to-be and meet her parents. Only thing is, she's kidnapped, the fam is murdered, and the dad has to pay a ransom. That's when Avedon hooks up with an old buddy who's into all kinds of military shit. The two of them get a chopper ride into Cambodia from Cynthia Rothrock in an attempt to save the girl. Only possible snag? The girl is being held by Matthias Hues.



This movie was pretty sweet. Long by about 25 minutes, but pretty sweet. Corey Yuen is an awesome director and fight choreographer, he just needed to take the script and trim it down, because there is no bad action movie story that can't be told in under 88 minutes, let alone the whopping 104 this one came in at. The best way to enjoy this and get the full effect without getting bored? Do what I did, and work on a crossword puzzle. Then when I needed a break from it, I could get back to the film and see another great fight scene-- and I think I'm selling them short, because they were pretty first class. If someone just edited it down so it was only a montage of the fight scenes, you'd have a five-star film.

We'll start, as we always do, with the film's Hall of Famer. Don't let her presence on the cover fool you, she is not the star, or even the co-star, she's more like third, right after Avedon's buddy and above Matthias Hues. That means she does get some solid fight scenes, but not the bigger ones Avedon gets. That's okay, it worked out well for me, I just don't want anyone going in looking for a Cynthia Rothrock film to be disappointed, because this is really a Loren Avedon one.



And speak of the devil, our man is back, DTVC favorite Loren Avedon. One thing No Retreat, No Surrender 2 did even better than The King of the Kickboxers, was showcase how good Avedon can be. Great fight scenes, and he really goes for it in every one of them. If you thought Corey Yuen's The Transporter was great, this was even better, and a big part of that was Avedon. Right now we have about ten or eleven films left of his to do, it'll just be a matter of finding them all.

Matthias Hues is back again, this time as a Russian. I'm trying to think if we have a film where he plays a good guy. I'm trying to think if I've ever seen one even. When are Germans ever good guys? Uwe Boll employs Til Schweiger, and I guess he counts. Was it Klaus Kinski who started this trend of German baddies? I guess it was probably Hitler, right? If it sounds like I'm dumping on the Germans a bit too much, let me then say that they really got after against the English yesterday. I can't wait to see them play Argentina.



There was a lot of sex trade going on in this film. Avedon accidentally stays in a brothel, and then he meets his buddy at a strip club in the red light district. In 2000, at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, I went to see a presentation a woman gave on her study of the Thai sex trade, entitled Little Brown Fucking Machines Powered by Rice. I guess that's what the Western businessmen who go to Thailand call them. Her main issue was with how Western men have it in their minds that these girls love them and love doing sexual favors for them, as opposed to poor girls selling their bodies because they have no other option. This film doesn't really do much to dispel that myth.

This is a tough one for me, because it was long and drawn out, but it also had some really great action, so I'm giving it a solid recommendation. I would say watch it while you're doing a crossword or Sudoku, or maybe while you're cleaning the house. Maybe I should edit together an all fight version and see what that ends up like.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097991/

Tiger Claws III (1999)

This is the third and final installment in the Tiger Claws saga--and I use the term saga with all intended irony. We did Tiger Claws just to get part one out of the way so I could review Tiger Claws II, which featured blog favorite Evan Lurie. Now it was time to finish and do part three, and though I was in part reluctant because parts one and two weren't exactly awesome, the addition of Loren Avedon, who was great in King of the Kickboxers, made me more optimistic.

Tiger Claws III takes place some time after part 2. In it, Jalal Merhi and Cynthia Rothrock are police partners--and perhaps lovers as well--and they're on the case of someone who broke into a warehouse storing priceless Chinese artifacts. Turns out Avedon was the potential thief, and he wanted to steal three ancient assassin's suits, which he really didn't need to steal anyway, because he was able to do with them what he wanted at a party for their unveiling: cast an ancient spell and bring ancient assassins who filled the outfits back to life in the present. These supernatural Chinese assassins are wreaking havoc all over New York, they've killed Rothrock, and Merhi has no idea what to do, so he seeks help in Avedon's former master (the great Carter Wong in his final role to date), a teacher in the art of Black Tiger. Merhi, having already taken the prerequisites in regular Tiger, was able to jump right in and take the advanced Black Tiger classes, and he used that power to combat the baddies.

I guess, if you're going to go out, you might as well do it with a bang. Or rather, do it as ridiculously as possible. Supernatural ancient assassins brought back to life? Why not, just go for it. The thing is, that ridiculousness needs to pay off with solid action, and we didn't exactly get that. We had some great martial artists, and instead of them duking it out, we were treated to bad Street Fighter II rip-off effects with guys throwing blue balls of energy that looked like Ryu's Hadoken. That might not have been so bad, if we weren't tantalized by some great pockets of good fight scenes here and there. I guess the question is: does the silliness detract enough to make the film stupid, or make it fun?

This delivers a pretty solid Cynthia Rothrock bait-and-switch, as she dies early on. Considering she's the one Hall of Famer in the film, it was quite the disappointment. I'm debating which will be her next film we cover, either No Retreat, No Surrender 2 or Martial Law (with the idea being that immediately after we'd review Martial Law 2, which I think is the better of the two). I'm getting better at getting my hands on her older catalog, and that will allow us to look at more of the movies she's known for. I'm pretty excited about that. Also, according to IMDb, as of 2009 she and Richard Norton are shopping a new project around. Let's cross our fingers.

When last we saw Loren Avedon, he was tearing it up as the hero in King of the Kickboxers. Now he's playing a baddie in Tiger Claws III, and he did an even better job, in my opinion. It was almost like, with his goatee, he was Bizarro Avedon. What's great is, if you compare his bad guy to the one of Billy Blanks in King of the Kickboxers, you'll notice that he's much more like Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman, and he played it well. In fact, thinking about the late Dennis Hopper, you could almost say Avedon channeled that great actor as well. He hasn't made a film since the unreleased in this country Circuit III, which was produced in 2006. I'm not as familiar with his career as our friend Kenner at Movies in the Attic is, so maybe he can shed some light on why Avedon stopped working, and why he doesn't have that many credits in general.

I love Street Fighter II and all its sequels and whatnot. We used to play it for hours in high school. I went online to find out exactly how to spell Hadoken, and saw all kinds of screen shots and drawings people did. It brought it all back for me. I just want to go to the mall, buy a collection of all the games used for my PS2, and spend the next fives days living off Doritos and Mountain Dew while I play them all. Man, those were the days.

At UMaine I majored in anthropology, and as you can imagine, at a certain level, the class sizes got pretty small, as very few people wanted to take a class on Peoples of the South Pacific Islands or Systems of Family and Kinship. The way the department managed to subsidize these upper level classes was through the enormous 101/102 introductory classes, which a large percentage of students took at one time or other as a Gen Ed requirement. I was a TA for that class, and we had like 500 students in it. Anyway, in Tiger Claws III, Merhi takes a course in Black Tiger, and he's professor Carter Wong's only pupil. I have to assume the introductory Tiger courses must have many more students to allow for such personalized instruction. I think it was good, though, that Merhi, having the prerequisites from his early Tiger courses, decided to continue his studies. Maybe he'll apply for a minor in Tiger.

Somewhere this post took a left turn into Goofy-dom, so let's get it back on the main road and wrap it up. This had its moments, but overall was just too silly for words. You can get it on either DVD or VHS, but Netflix no longer carries it, so you'll have to dig if you want it. I'm not so sure you do. (Oh, and I tagged Bolo Yeung, but he's only in the film in a few flashback sequences from the first movie. Just wanted to let you know.)

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0197951/

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/

The King of the Kickboxers (1990)

My friend Kenner at Movies in the Attic has been on me about this one for a while, and when I did Tough and Deadly starring Billy Blanks a couple weeks ago, he put on a full-court press, hitting me with e-mails containing YouTube and Amazon links letting me know all the myriad ways I could experience this gem. I finally got a hold of it and made it happen on my own.

The King of the Kickboxers is about this undercover cop in New York who's always getting into trouble and living life by the seat of his tight acid wash jeans. Anyway, the chief wants to get rid of him for a little while, and sends him to Thailand to work on a snuff film case. It's not what you think: American fighters are being duped into acting in action films where they're really killed, and the killer is Billy Blanks. Our hero remembers Blanks, because Blanks killed his brother ten years before when they were in Thailand and the brother won a kickboxing tournament. Anyway, when our hero gets there, he finds out he's not ready yet, and luckily the Native American from China O'Brien is willing to give him a hand. Can our hero defy the odds and take down Blanks?



I don't know where to begin. First off, it's awesome. It starts with this title graphic that looks like an SNK Neo-Geo video game, then moves into some of the most poorly choreographed kickboxing in a ring you'll ever see. Just when you think this is a sack of asscrack, the kickboxer and his little brother (who grows up to be our hero) are attacked by Billy Blanks and his boys. Blanks then proceeds to blow up a golf cart with machine gun fire, letting us know that this is the official start of the film. It only gets more amazing from there. Jerry Trimble has (unfortunately) a small part as a two-sweet mulleted drug dealer, and our hero takes him and his goons down, just carrying over the energy from the Blanks scene before it. The action is stellar, the martial arts some of the best you'll see, and the acting and plot, though woeful, only enhance the experience, as opposed to detracting from it.

Billy Blanks as a baddie martial artist is great. I'm not exaggerating when I say he's up there with Michel Qissi as Tong Po or Bolo Yeung as anything. This is key to any great bad action film, as the baddie must make us detest him enough, yet at the same time respect his fighting skills and fear him. If our hero isn't facing an enormous challenge, or we aren't rooting for him either, the film isn't fun, and that's what we're in this for, to have fun. On top of all this, the end fight between he and our hero did a great job of paying us back for our investment, as it was worthy of Blanks's baddie and the work our hero put in in montage time to defeat him.



If I have one complaint though, it was how little Jerry Trimble there was. I know he was just getting started in the film industry, but still. The mullet was amazing, and the martial arts were tight. You know a movie is good when they can have a talent like Trimble in it for only one scene, and still be as awesome as The King of the Kickboxers was. Other people you may recognize were Ong Soo Han, who, like Billy Blanks, has starred in an action film with Rowdy Roddy Piper; Sherrie Rose as the love interest; and Don Stroud as our hero's contact in Thailand. Again, a great cast that just enhanced a great film.

Mr. Kenner remarked, and I agreed with him, that the late Richard Jaekel as the police captain was one of the best we've seen in a role like that. Whether you agree with us or not, what's interesting to note here is that we're remarking on an actor's job playing the police captain in a bad action movie versus other actors we've seen do the same part. We've seen that many bad action films that we're examining the art of the police chief. I'll have you know, though, that I passed up a used DVD copy of Guns and Lipstick at my local record store last night because they wanted $8 for it. I might be a self-professed connoisseur, but I'm not crazy.



I imagine the picture above has already told you where I'm going with this last paragraph. Loren Avedon, our hero, is shown here sporting... a Fanny Pack! Unlike David Bradley's similar fashion disaster in Cyborg Cop, though, King of the Kickboxers was a solid enough movie to transcend something so atrocious. Still, even if the point of the fanny pack was to have Avedon's undercover character come off as a naive dork looking for a fight, the tacky shirt and white pants were sufficient. The Fanny Pack is an abomination, and I can't let even a film as great as this one off the hook for such a felonious transgression.

To give you an idea of how awesome this movie is, I captured 12 images of it (which you can find on the image page), and that was me showing restraint. There might be another 20 to 30 other scenes that'll make you laugh, make you pump your fist, or just make you nod your head in understanding that what you got here is good. Find it on YouTube, buy it on Amazon, or scoop it a local used retailer. Whatever you gotta do, make it happen. You won't be disappointed.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102217/

Circuit 3: The Street Monk (2006)

I was trying to think back to the archives to see if there was another film like Circuit 3: Street Monk, where I reviewed it despite the fact it wasn't available on the retail market here in the States. Dolph's Retrograde comes to mind, but that was rectified last year, and now you can even get that on Watch Instantly on Netflix.

Circuit 3: Street Monk picks up where Dirk Longstreet (DTVC Hall of Famer Olivier Gruner if you didn't know) left off in part 2. It seems like his girlfriend didn't survive that coma she was put in by that film's baddie, and Dirk has given up, living a nomadic lifestyle completely off the grid out of his van, searching for the next great wave to ride. He supplements this lifestyle through illegal underground fighting, which we see at the beginning. Anyway, while surfing, a young girl who was sold by her step-dad to white slavers escapes to the beach, Gruner saves her, and a bond forms. When she's captured, Gruner must fight again to save her. Of course, what he doesn't know is his wife is actually alive, but his off-the-grid life means no one can tell him.



Maybe there's a reason why certain films aren't released here. This was made on what looked like a shoestring budget, and I can't imagine after that that there was much left to pay for distribution. Beyond Gruner, all you had was Jalal Mehri, who also wrote, directed, and produced, so I imagine he was cheap, and then the main baddie was Jason Carter, who's a Brit you might remember from Babylon 5 or 90210. The best they could do for a fighter for Gruner at the end was James Lew, a major That Guy who is seldom in any film for more than a few scenes and seldom for anything more than a member of Cary Tagawa's. I had trouble accepting this was made in 2006, because the film quality, dialog, and clothing, looked more like 1999.

And with that lack of talent, the action suffered. Gruner had a few moments, but he could only work with the scraps he was given. The first two were just more complete films. I have to feel like maybe Gruner and Mehri would prefer I didn't get my hands on this, because I'm sure they'd rather no one knew about it. If you go to imdb, Gruner's not even top billed. That being said, this could've been a little better. A lot of the ideas were just dipped in wrong sauce. Gruner fighting with a surf board may sound cool in the meeting room, but on screen it looks silly, and someone needed to fix that, ie cut it out. In another scene, Gruner is stomped by some surfers after the baddie's goons pay them. In response, Gruner runs out to the water where they're surfing, swims underneath them, and grabs them one at a time and brings them below the surface. Who knows what it accomplished, and who knows why the baddies paid the surfers to stomp him, because they didn't do anything after either. The movie was more moments like that than good ones.



Gruner's current imdb photo is for this film One Night, which is in post-production, and which marks Gruner's directorial debut. Of the five films between that and 2006's Crooked, only one, Brother's War, was available over here, including Circuit 3. That's not a good ratio. We know the Albert Pyun directed Tales of an Ancient Empire will be released here, but still... I guess in one case, Blizhniy Boy: The Ultimate Fighter, a promising film with a solid cast, the film went bankrupt and is now in limbo, probably never to see the light of day. How does that happen? The film lists, in addition to Gruner, Tagawa, Gary Busey, Eric Roberts, Martin Kove, and Bolo Yeung. You'd think a distributor like MGM would scoop that and make money on those names alone. Anyway, in Circuit 3, Gruner was pretty hilarious. He looked like teen poser rocking his Quicksilver beach visor. Again, someone should've stepped in and stopped that.

One reason why Circuit 3 wasn't released might have to do with the casting of James Lew in a major part. I don't know this for a fact, but it seems that using a That Guy like that might interfere with the time/space continuum. If too many people knew that James Lew was more than just That Guy from that movie where he played a guy in a gang, the consequences could be catastrophic, and perhaps... nah, that's crazy... okay, I was just thinking, it might mean Massachusetts might elect a tea bagger backed Republican into Ted Kennedy's senate seat, but that would never happen, would it...?



In one scene, Gruner and the girl break into a hotel to hide out from the baddies. To make up for a lack of blankets, Gruner uses a bathrobe. I only bring this up, because back when I was like 19 or 20, me and some buddies were drinking at one of their places while his folks were out of town. I was pretty plastered, and curled up on a recliner to call it a night. Draped over the top of it was what I thought was a throw blanket, which I covered myself in. Anyway, my buddy's sister comes home and says "um... do you need a blanket?" and I was like "Oh, no, this is fine." I had no idea why she gave me a funny look, until the next morning, when I found out I was sleeping in what looked to be their mom's bathrobe. I'd forgotten all about that until that scene.

So you can't get this over here, and that might be a good thing, I don't know. The cover picture I have up there is from an Australian set of all three movies on DVD. I don't know if that will make it's way over here, and I don't really care. Unlike Retrograde, where I'm glad it was finally released, I could do without seeing this one again.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498335/