Let me answer that question with one of my own: Who cares? So long as I having my teeth rattled by the thunderous crash of a cop car flying end over end all over some Los Angeles freeway, watching a limousine get ripped in half by a semi, or enjoying a Suburban full of Gary Daniels’ movie family tumbling down a cliff to a horribly painful death, the movie could be endorsed, funded, and co-starring Satan himself, and I’d be happy as a pig in a steaming mountain of feces!

What PM Entertainment achieves in Recoil is something akin to economical action movie Nirvana. The first third of the movie is merely the set up for the story driving the remaining hour which may seem like things are pretty slow to develop. Which it would be. If this wasn’t a PM Entertainment/Gary Daniels confection of carnage!

Remember that bank robbery shootout in North Hollywood in 1997 where the criminals wore body armor and had the police outgunned? The shootout lasted something like a hour before those guys got wasted. Now, imagine that same incident, but with like, 15 bad guys decked out in body armor, automatic weapons, and hand grenades! That would surely turn L.A. into hell on Earth, right? Yeah, it would. If Gary Daniels didn’t exist!

The armored-up scumbags are pretty much having their way with L.A.’s finest until Gary rolls onto the scene. Gary turns out to be the equivalent of about 50 invincible guys with nerves of steel and a heart as big as his Owen Wilson-esque nose!

Gary just starts walking up to these guys and begins dropping them with head shots! Gary picks up some grenades from the robbers and starts lobbing them at trouble spots! Gary’s mentor cop buddy dies in his arms and Gary kisses his crucifix and crosses himself! Gary rolls over cars and pulls a little girl to safety and kisses her on her little mop top head! He’s like some kind of Catholic Boys and Girls Club Terminator!

And then one robber attempts to make his escape on a motorbike! What follows is a nonstop parade of jumping and wrecked cop cars with Gary in hot pursuit! Even better, much of the chase sees everyone driving through a fifty mile long warehouse full of crates, barrels, palates, and ramps!

A great movie would be satisfied ending with all that action once the robber is cornered at the end of the warehouse. Bank robber caught, all’s well that ends well, right? Not for Recoil!

The guy on the cycle just turns around and drives over top of a car and goes back the other direction! By the time Gary and four other cops shoot the kid after mistakenly believing that he had a gun, we all needed a breather!

But guess what? Internal affairs has barely even had a chance to get on down to HQ to harass Gary about wasting punks when it turns out the dead kid was the son of a mob boss! And the mob boss (Sloan) wants revenge! And his surviving sons are more than willing to do whatever it takes to exact their vengeance on the officers involved! Whether it involves gunning them down during yet another car chase, during a bust of a hooker or even just walking into the police station and wasting poor Chang, it’s makes no difference to them!

Gary is understandably upset when he finds out all his friends have been killed (“I played soccer with Chang!” he exclaims in anguish.) while he was partying it up in Santa Barbara with his and his partner’s families.

It’s decided that Gary should lay low for awhile and the next thing you know, Gary is recuperating in a monastery and being told that his wife and kids were killed when their Suburban rolled down the side of a mountain.

There’s a leak in the police department which is why Gary is hiding out in the monastery. It also allows for a nice montage of stained glass windows and for some talk about forgiveness and all sorts of stuff that’s heresy in a good action film.

The several months Gary has spent recuperating have also allowed him the time to develop a cunning plan to get revenge on the guys who are trying to get revenge on him. He simply goes to Sloan’s house during a party and starts killing everyone!

For reasons that are lost in the haze of the collateral damage Gary inflicted at the party, Gary leaves before killing everyone. This allows Sloan to send his remaining sons here and there to get Gary. That in turn allows Gary to shoot the piss out of everyone, jump from a moving car to a limo and fight a guy in the sunroof before jumping off just before the limo’s fateful encounter with a semi! Gary either jumps or is blasted about four miles in the air and it’s so awesometacular you don’t even care that you can see the cable attached to Gary that’s yanking him through the air!

Gary surely isn’t going to provide you with any memorable lines and he exudes too much of a nice, laid-back guy vibe to really ever convince you that he’s gone over the edge, but that’s what us Gary Daniels fans like about him. He’s not about to his ego get in the way of wall-to-wall action.

Yes, his family are a bunch of annoying boobs – his kids fight over an Etch-A-Sketch and play Risk with his partner, but their deaths serve more than one purpose. Watching them die both thrills the audience and galvanizes Gary into a rage-fueled rampage! That’s just another example of how Recoil is the perfectly structured brainless action film starring no one you will ever remember, but whose car crashes you will never forget!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Gary is a British kickboxer who has appeared in a string of straight-to-video action movies including Rage and Riot. What his films lack in budget, originality, and entertainment value is generally made up for with excessive use of stunts and action scenes.

Gary himself comes across as relatively non-threatening, but is always more than willing to show some intensity with his fight scenes, so I usually zone out until I start to hear the dubbed smacking of his feet and hands landing on some grubby-looking thug. You also don’t want to look to hard at some the action scenes where guys get knocked through the air because it’s a crap shoot whether you’ll see the cable yanking them to and fro.

Those of you whose stomachs are churning at the thought of one of these action movies where the star plays twins (think every other Van Damme movie) and the distractingly stupid tricks the films inevitably use to show the “twins” at the same time (can you say “bad wig?”) will be relieved to know that Gary’s wuss twin, Oliver, is shot in the head early on in the film, thus limiting the interaction Gary has with himself to a scene where the surviving twin carries the dead twin to a dune buggy so he can be taken home and buried. And how can you not appreciate a film with a dune buggy hearse?

The twin that Gary spends most of the movie playing is Roland. Roland is a bounty hunter and when you see that he is dressed like some college kid going to a Halloween party as a gunslinger from a spaghetti western complete with stubble and cigar hanging out of his mouth, you’ll realize that modern civilization hasn’t been destroyed, but has just been replaced with a strange hybrid of “wild west meets standard post-apocalyptic motorcycle thugs” scenario complete with a disenfranchised group of outcasts known as Scavengers. The wild west aspect of things isn’t actually necessary beyond giving an excuse for Roland and his arch enemy Little Ray to dress like cowboys and twirl around six shooters and rifles.

Little Ray runs afoul of Roland when Roland learns that Little Ray has killed his brother. Oliver’s old lady escaped and is hiding out from Little Ray in Roland and Oliver’s family home. Little Ray is after her because she is pregnant with a child who has a gene that could help fight the plague that killed everyone.

Of course, if the plague already wiped out everyone that was susceptible to it, the value of that may be a little suspect. Besides, regardless of how serious that plague is, I think that if Earth wasn’t getting any sunlight, plague research would probably be taking a backseat to stuff like trying to stay alive.

In any case, Little Ray wants to ransom her off to the government while Roland is looking for revenge. Roland is also trying to atone for his haunted past since he got in a car wreck that killed his parents.

Oliver’s old lady hates him since she is reminded of Oliver whenever she sees Roland and also because of the pain he caused Oliver by killing their parents. I wouldn’t be losing a lot of sleep over what she thought about me though if I was Roland since she revealed that she and Oliver were saving all their money up to start a mushroom farm. You know, because mushrooms don’t need sunlight. And because when the world ends, the survivors are going to demand lots of mushrooms!

There isn’t really enough great action in this Gary Daniels movie like in Rage and some of that is because the movie feels like it’s been filmed on the same couple of sets with different angles and rearranged garbage masking the fact.

So you get motorcycles and dune buggies driving up and down alleys and streets that look pretty much the same and are mysteriously quite well lit for a world without sunshine. It doesn’t really do much for maintaining your interest and forces you to concentrate on the moronic story as well as Little Ray’s high maintenance facial hair.

You can’t really fault Gary since he gives it his all whenever he has the chance, kicking guys off motorcycles, spinning in the air, flipping over and shooting guns, but what am I supposed to think about your movie when Oliver’s old lady escapes in a helicopter and Little Ray has it shot down with the intent of capturing her alive by having it shot in the tail? And it works! I know this is supposed to be the wild west, but is Annie Oakely in his gang?

When Little Ray and Roland finally get down to business and fight it out, at least that gives us what we want. First, there’s the shoot out where they fire at each other through a wall separating them until they run out of bullets and have to dive clear of each other!

Then they agree to throw down their weapons and settle it like men! Lots of frenetic kick fighting and punching ensue and even an iron bar is used at some point.

Finally, they agree to finish it with this game where there’s one bullet for each gun and the first guy to load the bullet in the gun and shoot the other in the head wins!

This is definitely second-tier Gary Daniels and Gary isn’t helped with the idiotic setting and concept of the film. He also isn’t helped in scenes that require him to suggestively polish his rifle as he stares at his late brother’s wife giving herself a sponge bath. Ultimately, it is the audience that gets kicked in the face whenever Gary isn’t doing the same to someone on screen.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Director Anthony Hickox (Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth and couple of Dolph Lundgren movies you’ve never heard of) pulls every editing trick he can to keep things moving at a frenetic pace in spite of his star’s stunning immobility.

Lots of quick cuts and jittery action punctuated every now and again by a little slow motion (aside from Seagal’s perpetual slow motion) all combine to give the viewer the sense of being thrust into the confusing underworld of double agents and shifting alliances. Or it may just give you a headache.

Way down in Uruguay, a certain Dr. Lehder is creating an army of mind controlled soldiers in his secret lab underneath a dam. His subjects? The American commando team that was sent to take him out and were ultimately betrayed by the evil CIA agent Fletcher!

In all fairness to the CIA, I couldn’t swear that Fletcher was ever so identified, but in these kinds of films it’s de rigeur for the Company to get blamed for pretty much every little fart that happens in these banana republics.

The military is desperate to stop Lehder, but who can they get that could smash his evil schemes without the danger of his brain being compromised? Cue the slow motion, the electric guitars, and the scene of one Steven Seagal (dressed sensibly in black of course) being hauled onto a battleship in chains!

It doesn’t take long for Seagal to announce that he’s been in the stockade and it takes us just about the length of time to notice that this is a different Seagal than what we’ve all been raised on. No, I don’t mean the fact that he looks like death warmed over. That’s been the case for about ten years now. I mean the voice.

In an interesting turn of events that will leave the viewer with a flummoxed look on his face throughout the movie, Steve has chosen to endow his character of Chris Cody with an accent!

And not just any accent! I cannot with any certainty tell you what accent Steve is employing (and I suspect that Steve couldn’t either), but the closest thing I can think of is that it is some kind of Cajun accent. At least he talks about stuff like “alligatahs” and otherwise sort of sluggishly delivers his lines. It could also have been the result of some kind of side effect from prescription medication.

No matter though, because the government makes one of those once in a lifetime offers that’s always so popular with guys who are the best at doing Lady Liberty’s dirty business, but invariably get locked up because of the gutless politicians who don’t understand that freedom isn’t free.

We’re told that Seagal averted a 9/11 on the water near Hawaii when he blew up an explosive-laden tanker, but that the United Nations raised hell and got Seagal and his crew imprisoned! If Seagal and his team can take down Lehder, they will all get full pardons and $100,000 each! That’s a lot of endless buffets for big Steve!

Director Hickox knows that garbage like character development might get in the way of Seagal hijacking a Uruguayan sub, so in lieu of that, he introduces Steve’s crew dossier-style, showing us each person while their name and areas of expertise (dynamic entry, small arms, sniper, unidentifiable dialects) are flashed across the screen.

Once all this is established and the wily Seagal sniffs out Fletcher as a double agent and avoids the ambush Fletcher had set up, it’s pretty much non-stop mayhem, murder, and mumbling!

After hooking up with a sexy field operative who had been in a local watering hole arm-wrestling locals, the assault on the underground lab beneath the dam begins. They manage to rescue the prisoners and defeat the Uruguayan army (20 soldiers and one tank), but the crafty Lehder is already gone! Next stop is stealing a getaway sub!

This part of the operation allows Seagal to display his cool professionalism as he watches his expert sniper shoot and set guys on fire while uttering witticisms as these guys fall burning into the ocean. And that was only a warm up for his stint impersonating the U.S. ambassador at the opera!

I bet you didn’t see that plot twist coming! That’s what I like about this movie. I just assumed that most of it would be Seagal wandering around a sub, beads of sweat pooling in his chins as he pensively wondered how much further the sub could go down before she buckled under the pressure. But that sub got blown up after they were only it for about ten minutes! How did the stockade ever survive this guy?

To be completely honest, I never paid that much attention to the dealings of Fletcher and Lehder. I just used their scenes to catch my breath from the outbreaks of Seagal-instigated carnage. Seagal at the opera? Would you be shocked if it ended with one of his crew shooting the conductor?

But that was just the warm up for his drive through the city that saw him run over guards, ram a helicopter and drive right through an office building! But that was just a warm up for him to beat a guy senseless with his kung jitsu before blowing his brains out!

And guess what? That was just a warm up for him to kick Fletcher in the air about a half a city block and through a window where he landed on the mind control apparatus and impaled on Lehder’s fancy walking stick! All this plus an appearance by kickboxing movie legend Gary Daniels, too! As Steve himself might say, “another helping please!”

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Other than ex-special forces guys who know some off-brand kung fu, who knows the most about wanton violence and reckless cussing? Rappers! Those guys are always shooting each other, burning their houses down, stealing each other’s bling, and calling each other out in song with such a proficiency in profanity that it would make a pissed off drill sergeant envious! And for a company as bottom-line conscious as PM Entertainment, rappers are awesome because they provide their own weapons and wardrobe!

PM Entertainment was the company behind all manner of destruction during the 1990s including a billion Gary Daniels flicks (Rage, Riot), a little Jeff Speakman (Running Red, Hot Boyz) and the Jack Scalia sci-fi canon (Dark Breed, The Silencers) among many other thrillers.

It’s understandable then that they were the ones that had the vision to work with Master P behind and in front of the camera! They were also the ones that pretty much ceased to exist a few years later. I don’t have any inside information, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t have something to with not making any more Master P films!

It only takes about five seconds for Master P to show he has grasped the intricacies of the PM action movie when we find ourselves at a warehouse where some sort of arms shipment has come in. Zags is in charge, but somehow Master P has come to believe that he has been cut out of some lucrative deal so he and his posse roll in to cut themselves back in!

Before you have any time to even worry about whether Master P knows anything about making a movie, he’s using the flamethrower to set stunt men on fire and the rocket launcher to send them flying through the air before blowing them up!

Once Master P has melted everything down, the real movie gets underway and we find Jason (Gary Daniels) working at shipping company with Davis (Jeff Fahey). Since the only way an ass kicker like Gary Daniels would be working at a shipping company would be if he was in some deep cover for something or other, it isn’t shocking to learn that he’s an FBI agent who is trying to get close to the arms dealer that Master P thinks stiffed him earlier.

Davis is his connection and manages to simultaneously humiliate himself and make the audience cringe with his repeated references to being spanked by a hooker. Jason falls in love with this hooker which is the least believable part of the film as any normal person couldn’t even look at this woman without remembering that Davis liked to pretend that she was his third grade teacher Mrs. Brown!

Our focus though isn’t on Davis, but on Jason getting close with Busey’s arms dealer character, Noah. Busey, appearing almost normal here, is trying to broker a deal for plutonium blasting caps between some Chinese crime organization and another guy.

Despite Jason and Noah scheming and counter-scheming, Master P still periodically pops up in the movie, though only when it appears that Master P suddenly remembers he was supposed to be in the movie! So we’re treated to a totally pointless sequence at his recording studio where we watch some rapping before Noah’s men storm the place to kill Master P.

P pulls out his two gold-plated pieces and starts blasting everyone, resulting in an impressive amount of carnage where hundreds of guys manage to find their way through every single piece of glass in the building. Master P survives and the entire scene could have been cut out with zero impact on the story. On balance though, having Master P shoot tons of guys outweighs any pacing and plotting concerns.

Less forgivable as far as extraneous scenes go though are the two love scenes between Jason and the hooker you will have to fast forward through. They also have a rather lengthy conversation on a beach that is infinitely more deadly than any of Master P’s violent outbursts.

No Tomorrow comes to the sort of conclusion you hope for though when everyone converges for the big arms deal at a desert airfield.

Some questionable double-crosses occur, but it all leads up to Jason stealing a cargo plane that everyone else seems to manage to also sneak aboard resulting in an unfortunate and hilarious mid-flight incident where Master P. stabs Noah in the leg before Jason has to crash land the whole freaking thing! If you’re a No Limit Solider like I am, this is one flick that will “Make ‘Em Say Uhh!”

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Beyond the fact that I didn’t have the faintest idea what anyone was talking about though I guess it sort of made sense that a star shouldn’t fight an entire constellation, every time either Gary or his mentor, the surely embarrassed Malcolm McDowell, earnestly uttered this cryptic bit of philosophy, I became more and more convinced that if North Star ever did throw down with Southern Cross that it would be a punch-apocalyptic mess of kicks, grunts, and broken stuff!

Well, it shouldn’t shake your fighting school belief system too badly to find out not only should North Star never fight Southern Cross, but that they actually beat the brown stuff out of one another twice!

Remember, this is after the collapse of civilization, so the old paradigms where the great fighting schools of earth co-exist in sweaty harmony are tossed aside like so many drenched leather vests.

It’s all laid out by Ryuken (McDowell) in a rather extensive voice over which would work really well to set the proper mood for a world without hope except for the fact that we already are feeling a bottomless pit of despair in our stomachs after watching the opening credits.

Costas Mandylor? Pro wrestler Leon “Vader” White? MTV VJ Downtown Julie Brown? The fact that Gary Daniels killed two of these three is sufficient that he will always be in my list of top five action heroes no matter what.

But just like there is the good North Star to balance out the evil Southern Cross, so too are there enough familiar faces kicking ass that the film easily overcomes some of its more idiosyncratic acting choices.

Malcolm McDowell worked with Stanley Kubrick after all. His big scenes in this film involve him floating in the air in red pajamas and taking the form of a reanimated corpse to lecture his son Kenshirô (Daniels) about his destiny. It’s pretty much A Clockwork Orange for a generation raised on Road Warrior rip offs!

And what can you say about Chris Penn as the witty and murderously psychotic Jackal except that he steals every scene he was in? And he manages to do this while wearing a leather harness on his horribly disfigured head? Is it any wonder that he worked with Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Quentin Tarantino is successive films?

Sure, it was awesome when Kenshirô’s old lady Julia caused his harness to get caught in some gears so that it was ripped off and thus allowed all the bumps on his head to finally explode, but deep down I was disappointed that he wouldn’t have a final opportunity to smart off to the over serious Kenshirô.

The story, based on the 1980s manga, is somehow at once ridiculous, familiar, and the perfect excuse to stage a bunch of kung fu fights featuring over-the-top injuries.

Following the destruction of civilization, the fighting discipline known as Southern Cross assumes control under the brutal dictatorship of Lord Shin (Mandylor). Kenshirô is the last survivor of the North Star and he must travel to the city controlled by Shin to stop him from enslaving a bunch of wimpy villagers.

Kenshirô sports seven round wounds on his chest which he suffered at the hands of Shin during their last encounter. Kenshirô somehow let his butt get kicked all over the wasteland by Shin while his girlfriend looked on, no doubt humiliated by Kenshirô’s rather pitiful showing.

Believing her dead, Kenshirô wanders around the crapped up countryside until he finally gets the psychic message from his dad (murdered by Shin) that he has to confront Shin.

Along the way, Kenshirô establishes his savior bona fides by healing a blind girl, saving a boy who idolizes him and comforting the boy once he lies dying in Kenshirô’s arms.

As everyone in the universe except for Kenshirô has probably guessed, Julia is still alive and living with Shin! She is still faithful to Kenshirô and clutches the magic beans that Kenshirô gave to her and claimed would save civilization.

Though we all laughed when the seeds were knocked to the floor during a confrontation with Shin, the joke is on Shin because dang it if one of those seeds didn’t end up in a crack in the floor of Shin’s stronghold and start to grow!

This proved to be critical because during the brawl he and Kenshirô had at the end of the movie, Shin had obviously won yet again, what with him using his special move of punching holes in Kenshirô’s chest and causing Kenshirô’s elbow joints to rip open, when Kenshirô sees this weed growing in Shin’s floor and you know what that means!

It’s like someone flicked a switch, as if Kenshirô thought “this guy can’t even keep the weeds out of his freaking house! How can he beat me?”

Once you get a look at Mandylor and Daniels kicking each other in the face, you understand why North Star should never fight Southern Cross! It’s because their mullets might get tangled up with each other!

Without a doubt, Daniels is an impossibly jacked up karate god in this movie, but his mullet proves to the one most hideously mutated by all the radiation in the air. It looks so bad on him that whatever actor’s union represents wigs surely filed a complaint against the filmmakers.

Add in the five o’clock shadow that sometimes looks so fake on him that you can’t help but think you’re watching a live action version of Sport & Shave Ken, and you realize that this is surely Gary Daniels’ most impressive work since he’s still able to come across like a perfectly sculpted bad ass. His leather pants don’t hurt either.

Mandylor’s caramel colored leather halter top is an entirely different story and when Kenshirô finally punches his head to death, it’s like a mercy killing. Mullets and manscaped stubble may be acceptable under certain circumstances in a world gone mad, but the light brown, wide strap leather tank top is always a fashion don’t, regardless of how many laws of man, God, and fighting schools you break.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

All of that makes it sound pretty bad for Gary’s character (for some reason named Xao), but that’s really not the worst of it. The guy he’s fighting both times is the 100% human champion named Chance O’Brien. As humiliating as it surely was to be dominated by a guy named like he was a boxer from a 1940s movie that probably featured mobsters, a crusty manager, crooked promoter, and platinum blonde femme fatale who drug’s poor Chance’s O.J. the night before the big fight, what’s even worse is that Chance was supposed to lose the fight to save his girlfriend/manager’s life!

Even more worse than that though is that the company behind Xao spends the entire movie having Chance beaten and injured to further help Xao out! So, you have Chance getting mugged on his way to the tournament. And it’s just not you ordinary run of the mill mugging either! He’s beaten, wrist broken, and worst of all (for the straight guys watching) stripped naked!

He’d be beaten up and injured later once he’s on the island for the tournament and then during the semi-final match, someone puts acid in his boxing gloves! And Xao is the one who ends up with all sorts of electronic gear hanging out of various body parts! When he finally gets shot, I felt like it was a Terminator meets Old Yeller situation and was just glad that the much put upon Xao was finally put out of his misery!

And that’s pretty much the whole movie. Director Albert Pyun (Cyborg, Captain America) understands that in a movie about a tournament of kickboxing cyborgs, scenes of anything other that kickboxing cyborgs battling each other in a tournament wouldn’t make any sense.

Yes, you do have the unfortunate scene where Chance and his manager Jo are groping one another on a romantic getaway in Rome. Luckily, Jo gets kidnapped not long after, sending Chance on a collision course with kung fu robots.

There was also the occasional scene where the evil Tung is having business meetings with the guys in charge of the Sianon Corporation, but you can’t really complain about those since you get to see genre legend Tim Thomerson sporting a cartoonish red wig and large eyebrows. It’s obvious that Albert knows how to keep us awake during scenes without sweaty dudes snapping each other’s arms.

That several fights end with cyborgs having their mechanical heads smashed open is reason enough to watch Heatseeker, but the fact that Chance O’Brien, Gary Daniels and frequent Albert Pyun movie character Brick Bardo (Bloodmatch, Dollman) are all present makes this a virtual all-star collection of mid-1990s kickboxing movie icons.

Chance is played by Keith Cooke, a real-life martial arts champ who also appeared in both Mortal Kombat movies and King of the Kickboxers. Brick Bardo is really Thom Matthews, a black belt who was in Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor and Nemesis. Gary Daniels is just some guy who made “The Three Rs of Whup Ass” action movies, Rage, Recoil, and Riot!

We know that Gary is the sunglass wearing meanie who is trying to put the make on Chance’s lady, but what is Brick Bardo up to in this one? Brick is a fellow competitor who is trying to win the tournament to save his company and get his father out of prison. Brick has befriended Chance, but what Chance doesn’t know is that Brick is secretly working with Tung to ensure that Chance fights Xao in the finals and loses!

Brick gets shot by his manager for his troubles and his manager gets hit in the head with a bowl by Chance for her troubles. I found it all quite ironic since I felt I had been both shot and hit in the head with bowl after watching Brick investigate his own murder in Bloodmatch.

Most of the film is dedicated to taking us through the tournament. The point of the tournament is to pit all the companies who make cybernetic implants against one another so that the best ones can be determined. The winning company will see their stock price increase and gain market domination. We watch as every company’s champion fights one another, with the winner advancing to the next round and the loser having his circuits smeared all over the mat and even worse, his company’s stock crashing!

The matches don’t last very long and we don’t care about any of the competitors because we don’t know anything about them other than what fighting style they use. We also don’t care about them because they’re no good robots trying to ruin the purity of America’s favorite straight-to-video pastime, kickboxing!

In defense of the tournament though, they did set a very strict 50% cybernetic limit. So really, at most it’s just half-man, half-cyborgs fighting each other. Besides, when they kill each other, it’s more like demolition derby then murder.

Fans of Gary Daniels will be disappointed at his poor showing during the big fights and the fact that his role is essentially a glorified cameo. Fans of Chance O’Brein running around the streets of some foreign country buck naked will be thrilled, while normal folks will be grossed out. I imagine that if there were any fans of Brick Bardo, they would appreciate his double-crossing efforts as well, though even his followers might have trouble with that horrible striped suit he wore late in the movie. But for those who just skip to the last line in a review, it’s pretty simple: cyborgs in a kickboxing tournament – it really recommends itself, doesn’t it?

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Never mind the team finished 0-11 last year and is called North Dingleberry A&T Tech. Then you have to listen to Coach cry about his team. Every guy on scholarship is hurt, the only guys left are a couple of gimpy sixth-year benchwarmers who can barely hold the clipboard during practice and some freshmen that are so young and green that the women’s basketball team has heavier beards than them! We probably ought to just forfeit, says Coach, to save our state the humiliation that will surely occur on Saturday. Then they play the game and we blow out the crappy nothing team just we knew all along!

Rage is a lot like Coach and his poor mouthing. Shucks, I’m just another dingy, low budget action movie with a guy who kicks people in the face, Rage whimpers to the audience. Another Gary Daniels/Joseph Merhi team up just like Riot, but not as awesome because we don’t have Sugar Ray Leonard this time! Shoot, in Riot, we had an entire city going bananas! Rage only has one guy going ballistic. There’s no way Rage can even get a whiff of Riot‘s jockstrap, let alone hold that stinky bastard!

Oh, Rage, you crafty devil! It manages to not only be as good as Riot, but to surpass it on every level, right down to the increase in screen time of Kenneth Tigar as the idiotic TV reporter!

Just how does it manage to kick it up a notch over a movie that had Sugar Ray falling several stories to his death? When Gary hijacks a fuel tanker truck, I knew instantly that it could only end with Gary diving out before the tanker crashed into something, causing an explosion the likes of which hasn’t been seen since that asteroid killed off the dinosaurs!

And it did! But only after about 20 minutes of total highway carnage that had Gary destroying countless cop cars, engage in a battle of the big rigs (that also saw a welcome cameo from some CB talk!), and ultimately playing chicken with a school bus driven by the evil sheriff that got Gary into this mess in the first place!

Even when we finally get to the expected crash up, Rage shows it’s here to devastate the competition! Lots of sissy films would’ve had the hero dive out of the cab of the tanker truck, rolling safely down an embankment. Rage has Gary tie the steering into position, lock the gas pedal in place and then climb out on top of the cab! Just as the vehicles collide head on, Gary jumps over all of it, flying and rolling through the inferno-like explosion before somehow landing unscathed on the highway ahead of the horrific wreck!

So just how did Gary get himself into this particular mess since he’s the nicest second grade teacher ever? On his way back from dropping his daughter off at a slumber party, he gets carjacked by a guy attempting to elude local law enforcement who are trying to take him to a secret lab where experiments are being done to turn people into perfect killing machines! Naturally, when the cops get a gander at Gary’s buff bod, they kidnap him and give him a dose at the lab. The drug apparently works a little too well since Gary proceeds to destroy the place and kill scores of people before his escape!

The media picks up on the government version of the story that says Gary has gone nuts and killed a federal agent. Gary is the subject of an intensive manhunt and no place is safe! From Gary’s destructive powers that is!

A series of stunt and fight-laden scenes follow, all with that special Rage touch. Breaking into a house for some grub and to use the phone, Gary ends up fighting a couple of kinky, leather-clad freaks! Can’t Gary catch a break?

Some action at the top of a skyscraper follows with Gary periodically falling here and there before jumping onto the helicopter that keeps shooting at him. Gary somehow manages to survive falling off the helicopter and dropping about five miles by landing in a greenhouse! A trip to his sensai’s boat and a final shattered-glass intensive shootout at the local mall wrap things up nicely.

Rage‘s emphasis on lots of crazy action is just as much a survival instinct as it is for entertainment purposes since the movie turns into a giant roundhouse kick in the head whenever it’s time for the characters to spew out the dialogue that gives us the plot. The scenes at the TV station and with the governor are as bad as anything you will ever seen on your TV outside of public access. Between the horrible dialogue and the incompetent way it’s delivered, you’ll be wishing for an actor with the experience of a Sugar Ray Leonard!

Most of the story didn’t make any sense since the effect the rage drug had on Gary wasn’t very clear. It made him cramp up now and again, but wasn’t it just as likely that all the beat downs he gave people was because he was an expert kickboxer and not due to the drug’s effects? The movie never said he was, but he had a freaking sensai!

And how does the governor of a state have the authority to call off a manhunt? Especially if the manhunt is being conducted by some shadowy federal government/defense contractor consortium? And if you’re doing secret testing at a super secret lab, should you really be abducting second grade teachers in broad daylight right on a city street?

But you know what? I expected all that from Rage! Bad acting and garbage plots are the bread and butter of these types of movies that star guys who are really good at kicking stuff. What I didn’t expect was that Gary Daniels would be swinging through malls, busting up video stores full of posters for other movies from Rage‘s production company, and beating up 20 guys while in a strait jacket! I did expect him to slide under a table and come up kicking a guy in the nuts, but I still loved it when it happened! And it all ends with a hilariously heavy-handed monologue by the obnoxious reporter!

Rage is another great Gary Daniels super stunt spectacular that’s predictably sucky in the expected spots, but top-notch (in a low budget way) in the areas that movies like this need to excel at.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Several times while enduring another of its endless and pointless training montages, I tried to remember why I even bought it, let alone continued to watch it. Then Gary Daniels would appear for a few minutes the Pocket Ninjas’s sensei and I sadly recalled that I was trying to fill in a gap in my project of watching the entirety of Gary’s filmography. That this project wasn’t suspended following a viewing of his space turd Spoiler will not reflect positively on me if I ever undergo a court ordered psychological evaluation.

In its broadest terms, Pocket Ninjas is about three kids who train at Gary’s strip mall karate studio. Gary, being the completely irresponsible ninja master that he is, decides to put the children at risk of being killed by giving them some fancy masks and ninja suits and has them go out and fight a gang trying to take over the city.

In Gary’s defense, he threatens to suspend the Pocket Ninjas from superhero duty after they come back from a battle with some bumps and bruises. I got the impression though that Gary was more put out that these twerps couldn’t get the job done than he was worried about them getting pounded into horse meat by the Stingers.

The mere recitation of the basest elements of the story in Pocket Ninjas doesn’t begin to explain the almost ninja-like mystical powers of suck the movie puts on display for its entire duration.

At his absolute best, Gary Daniels (Bloodmoon, Cold Harvest) is borderline serviceable in the world of third tier straight-to-DVD kickfighting movies. He’s like the bland Olivier Gruner, but more bland and with an accent that you can actually understand.

In this movie though he is the acting anchor everything is built around. Virtually everyone else appears as if they were literally cornered at the strip mall and dragged in front of the camera for a day or two of stilted and halting line readings that would have been more convincing if they were all wearing those crazy ninja masks Gary hands out to all the students he’s trying to get killed.

It’s true that minor league cult figure Robert Z’Dar is also in the movie and that he sort of plays the villain, Cobra Khan. Robert’s main claim to fame though is possessing a cartoonishly huge jaw that will make some wonder if he isn’t a distant relative of horror legend Rondo Hatton. I said he sort of plays the villain because I was never sure if Cobra Khan was supposed to be real or not.

Pocket Ninjas for some reason periodically switches to scenes where the kids are imagining something happening that’s based on some stupid comic book they’re reading. This is where Z’Dar gets most of his screen time.

The kids imagine him battling the White Dragon (Daniels) in some sort of balloon factory. I suspect that it was played for laughs, but since I was never laughing I couldn’t quite be sure. There was a moment where they were jumping up and down on balloons that wouldn’t pop which may have supposed to been funny, but only resulted in me yearning for the normal-sized pain I endured during 3 Ninjas: High Noon At Mega Mountain.

Other less ostentatiously idiotic touches include having the Pocket Ninjas fighting while wearing Rollerblades. The first time they roll up on the gang and begin to fight, you can distinctly see the littlest Pocket Ninja have some trouble maintaining his balance. That’s just like a real ninja, right?

The incident brought to mind a Silver Screen saying that dates back to the days of D.W. Griffith: “those who forget the lessons of previous awful Rollerblade karate movies are destined to repeat them and probably get the ankles of their actors twisted.” I mean, didn’t director David Eddy learn anything from the godfather of inline skating cinema, Donald G. Jackson? Actually, he probably did because Donald G. Jackson (Roller Blade) is listed as a director of the skating and some fight sequences!

Not surprisingly, much of the movie is quite simply padding. The frequent shots of both the good guys and bad guys working out will give your fast forward finger several reps as will the needless scene at a local parade. And when you aren’t being subjected to padding, you’ll wish you were.

Like when Gary meets one of the Pocket Ninja’s moms and it’s love at first sight. The movie suddenly adopts this dubbed voice-over technique so we can hear what he and the mom are thinking even as they are also talking out loud! Then it’s never used again. Well, there is also a Wonder Years-like voice over by a grown up Pocket Ninja at the beginning and end of the movie, but I didn’t have a clue what the hell he was jabbering on about.

I wasn’t even sure when the movie ended since they battled the bad guy kid using a virtual reality game that featured footage of Z’Dar fighting people in super fast motion, but when it was over, we never saw the bad guy kid again and things sort of just petered out.

You could easily author a ten volume encyclopedia on everything that stunk like the inside of those masks after an afternoon of skating and fighting, but the sooner we pass this nunchuk-sized kidney stone through our movie urethra, the better. Frankly, the only thing that appeared to be professional in this whole project was the DVD cover. It features three little kids (who were not in the movie) dressed as ninjas and for some reason they were wielding a household cleaner called Scat, a broom and a plunger – all items Pocket Ninjas was in desperate need of.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

But what is the point of blindly following a religious messiah if there isn’t a final battle between Good and Evil? How are we able to threaten non-believers with Gary’s righteous retribution if there isn’t some story about the end of the world and how all the Gary-haters will be sodomized with a radioactive cactus for all eternity for their blasphemy?

Gary’s True Revelation on the subject is contained in the movie Bloodmoon. Its power to inspire and renew faith in Gary is powerful and inspiring. Its deceptively simple story belies the depth of its message as Gary is able to take everything he has taught us to this point and gives us a roadmap for navigating the turbulent days of the end times.

The journey though will not be easy! For one thing, Bloodmoon is too frigging long! I mean, I’m a super, super strong Gary believer and all, but come on! This movie is 102 minutes! There’s no reason for Gary to kick stuff longer than about 90 minutes!

To be fair to Gary, he doesn’t actually appear until about 15 or 20 minutes into the film which makes the coming of Gary that much more of a jeans creaming moment for devotees, but dang it, don’t fill that time with the likes of a magic trick prone cop and a really old and crabby Frank Gorshin!

The opening segments though also serve to introduce us to the force that Gary will battle for the very soul of our universe! I give you…Bloodmoon!

Technically, he wasn’t really called Bloodmoon by name, but we can see through Bloodmoon’s many disguises, can’t we? Deceit is one of Bloodmoon’s greatest weapons! So also, are his steel-toe boots, superior kick fighting skills, and his two metal fingers he uses to punch holes in people!

Evil is also all about preening flamboyancy so Bloodmoon is sometimes decked out in a mask and black cape like some ass kicking amalgamation of the Phantom of the Opera and Zorro!

Like all prophecies involving the coming of the Final Evil, there are several signs that Bloodmoon has descended to our world for his final confrontation with arch-nemesis Gary. First of all, the moon is red! Second of all, a whole bunch of champion fighters are turning up murdered! Third of all, Bloodmoon keeps sending the NYPD taunting e-mails and at one point even manages to stream live video to them of a battle to the death he was having!

It’s a testament to his dark powers that he’s able to plug his video camera into his laptop and send crystal clear video to a police computer just by punching a few buttons!

Bloodmoon’s foul mastery of mid-1990s Internet technology though wasn’t limited to harassing the NYPD. He also took on Gary directly through the computer! While Gary is consulting with a hacker at the hacker’s house, Bloodmoon sends an e-mail to Gary through Gary’s e-mail account and it pops up on the hacker’s computer while Gary is standing there!

As awesome as that was, Bloodmoon pulls an even better stunt on Gary when Gary breaks into Bloodmoon’s house and Bloodmoon’s computer displays a picture of Gary with his wife and child, but the picture is suddenly replaced with the same picture but with Bloodmoon Photoshopped in instead of Gary! I think I would be stating the obvious if I mentioned that Bloodmoon also rigged the machine up to speak in an electronic voice during these various encounters.

Bloodmoon’s tech war though is just an evil hobby since he’s really all about killing off all the champs that trained under Gary’s old master. I don’t know that his motive was ever made really clear, though there was some mention of him being disqualified from the big tournament of champions for being too brutal.

The confrontation between Gary and Bloodmoon is everything you assumed, hoped, prayed, begged, pleaded, and sold your soul for! The venue? Large factory with big pipes, catwalks, ledges, and lots of stairs! The stakes? Gary’s wife and daughter are strapped to a pole with a wad of dynamite taped above their heads! The fight? To the freaking death, my friend!

Any doubts that this battle isn’t religious are shattered when Bloodmoon announces upon Gary’s arrival to the factory, “welcome to hell!” Bloodmoon also babbles about how the “endgame” has begun!

And even though the first hour and a half of this movie felt like I was simultaneously being crucified, burnt at the stake, drawn and quartered, electrocuted, skinned alive, and listening to fingernails scrape a chalkboard, I felt a sweet release and calm wash over me when Gary began to use a metal pole to beat the fudge out of Bloodmoon! Bloodmoon got his licks in as well, punching a hole in not only Gary’s stomach with his magic metal fingers, but also in Gary’s magician partner, too!

Bloodmoon also turns out to be about more than deranged kickboxers giving each other concussions and dislocated arms. It’s also about the importance of family!

Though we hated the cop who did magic tricks more than Bloodmoon himself, it was his two-headed quarter that tricked Gary into calling his wife and telling her that he wanted to work things out! And it was because of that two-headed quarter that we got to see Gary, his wife, and kid have a family outing at a carnival where Gary used his mega kick to ring the bell on that game where you usually have to use a sledge hammer! Toss in professional wrestling superstar Rob Van Dam in a minor role and it’s easy to see why millions of people continue to light candles to Bloodmoon and Gary each and every day!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Gary (White Tiger, Riot) is forced to call upon all his training in his quest to defeat the evil Garr, save the local Chinese population from being involuntary organ donors, screw the ice princess cop, and most importantly of all, overcome the lame Canadian-made film he somehow got tricked into appearing in!

We even get to watch him honing his talents as he spends his opening scene in the movie shooting a training video for his special forces crew! After busting in through a window, rolling around and shooting folks, he stops to give some tips on how to subdue a guy in such a way that your vision of the situation is not restricted and so that you could still use him as a human shield if need be! Why didn’t that get released on DVD instead of Hawk’s Vengeance?

News of his brother’s death cuts short Gary’s status as the British Jane Fonda of counterterrorism tactical workout videos and he ends up in whatever American city Montreal was filling in for.

About two seconds after the funeral Gary is in a local bar getting teased by a bunch of liquored up hilljacks. They’re saluting him, giving him the finger, and making lewd gestures to his lady. I could practically taste the vicious beatdown that was coming just as surely as Gary would be standing around without a shirt on for no reason at some point in the film! Taking out the trash from a local bar is just Gary’s way of stretching before the real workout begins!

The real battle lies ahead with the Death Skulls! That’s the area skinhead gang who have been kidnapping Chinese folks, including the brother of Gary’s new Chinese sidekick!

Gary figures where the Death Skulls’ hideout is (a nasty, falling down building with “The Crypt” spray painted over the front door), but how in the world is he ever going to infiltrate it? He can’t just go kickboxing his way inside, can he? Well, he probably could, but where’s the fun in that? So it’s off to the costume rental store!

I’ve always thought that these movies where special forces guys are running around on unofficial revenge missions were a little light on the whole “let’s put on a whacky disguise and trick the bad guys” angle. How many times have I sat there watching Olivier Gruner or Don The Dragon Wilson lighting up some dumb thug’s face with their feet while thinking how much better it would be if they were doing it while dressed as a circus acrobat or a nun?

Gary Daniels movies though are all about action movie fans living their dreams! And so we are treated to Gary knocking on the The Crypt’s door dressed as a fire safety inspector!

I thought two things when I saw it begin to go down. One was that no way in hell would a bunch of skinheads be crazy enough to let a fire safety inspector guy into their secret headquarters to check the smoke alarms.

It turns out that Gary’s special forces training also includes the ability to assess how crazy a bunch of skinheads are because they do in fact let him in and install a working smoke detector, despite the fact the entire building is almost ready to collapse!

Then they go ahead and accept a box of complimentary cigars from Gary before he leaves! Naturally, all their smoking triggers the smoke alarm which causes it spew out a bunch of knock out gas! Incredibly, when Gary comes back to search for clues, all he comes up with is a flyer promoting the skinhead band, Hatebeast! Even more incredibly, it’s just the clue he needs!

Oh, and the second thing I thought when this crazy plan unfolded? Surely, this will be the most ridiculous disguise Gary wears in the movie! Wrong! That would be the time he and his Chinese friend were disguised as Hasidic Jews for their plan to start a gang war between the Death Skulls and Garr’s crew! Oy vey!

It’s great that Gary’s in top form as usual, but he doesn’t even have to carry the whole load in this movie! A significant portion of the movie’s entertainment is provided by the hit man tag team made up of the old fat Don and the young, dapper Blade.

Don is looking forward to getting out of the business so that he can retire to Costa Rica. He even carries a pamphlet extolling the vacation virtues of Costa Rica in his coat pocket! For his part, Blade likes to dress well and spend time combing his hair!

There’s also a running gag throughout the movie that whenever Don and Blade get into a fight with Gary, Blade accidentally injures Don! First Blade accidentally chops Don’s fingers off. Then Blade accidentally slices part of his ear off. Finally, fed up with getting cut by Blade, Don takes Blade’s knife from him before they go confront Gary for the last time! And what happens? Blade accidentally shoots Don to death! Double oy vey!

Hawk’s Vengeance easily satisfies the government’s recommended daily dosage of senseless violence as it features Gary at his most sadistic! Gary interrogates a skin head by strapping him to a board smeared with home made napalm, gets his information, and let’s the guy blow up anyway! What’s great is that when his cop girlfriend finds out he torched the guy, she slaps him and calls him a lying piece of shit! That’s women for you, Gary!

Gary also fires a homemade bazooka at a guy and even carves a dude’s head with surgical saw. Heck, just to show she isn’t a priss, his girlfriend uses a pair of defibrillators on a woman doctor to electrocute her! But, Gary’s not about to be shown up! After failing to stomp the evil Garr’s hands so that Garr can fall off a high rise to his death, Gary just shoves Garr’s head into a big spinning fan on the roof instead! Man, how did these British guys lose the Revolutionary War?

© 2009 MonsterHunter