The Bloodfist series is rough for the uninitiated. Don "The Dragon" did 8 of them, all produced by Roger Corman, and there isn't much variation between them. You get some guy framed for something and he's got everyone against him, except usually a woman who gives him a hand. But paper-thin plots aside, the martial arts in these are usually way better than their pay-grade. You gotta respect Don, at the very least, for his expertise as a martial artist.
Bloodfist V, like it's predecessors, doesn't pick up where the previous installment left off. In this one, we see Donny with a mullet getting shot by people. He wakes up in a hospital with amnesia and a haircut. A woman shows up, saying she's his wife, and they escape the hospital and the Asian mafioso trying to kill them. Turns out the woman's a prostitute hired to pretend to be her hubby, and when they go back to her pimp, we find out the pimp, played by American Ninja's Steve James (the guy who played Jackson), is in on the set up. The next 45 minutes has D. "The D" Dubs trying to figure out who he is. He thinks he's a special agent. Then he thinks he's a criminal. We find out he was a criminal, but he's good, and the prostitute was working for the government to set him up, but she loves him now, so she saves him from Steve James, who it turns out isn't her pimp, but her boss in the NSA, who also wants to kill Donny. Who cares if it's convoluted, it's Bloodfist.
Don is pretty decent in this. It's not like 4, where he fights an equally solid fighter in Gary Daniels. That's kind of disappointing, in that I'd like to see Don flex his martial arts muscles, and we don't get as much as we'd want here. Still, he's ever the survivalist.
Denice Duff is Don's love interest, and she does all right. She's actually hotter later when she dresses in her NSA business suit attire. There's also a gross scene where she's being interrogated by the Asian baddie, and he sticks an acupuncture needle right under her eye. Many of you that are fans of bad horror and sci-fi are no doubt familiar with her other work. For me personally, I remember her vividly in a Matlock episode my mom was watching once where she played the girlfriend of an older guy married to Matlock's cousin.
This film also had the distinction being the last movie that wasn't a TV movie for bad action great Steve James, who unfortunately died of pancreatic cancer in 1993, before this film was released. He was probably best known as Jackson in American Ninja 1 and 2. He had a very prolific career, despite dying young. I'd have liked to see him as the star in a movie, but unfortunately that will never happen.
With the lack of great martial arts, we're left with very little here. The action is all right in the bad action film sense, but is that enough? We can get that re-watching a great Dolph Lundgren film. Also, since the Bloodfists don't have any kind of impact on the other films in the series, you can get away with skipping one or another. I'd say skip this one. At best, watch it at 2am if you're suffering from insomnia or writing a paper.
For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106434/
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