And into this nightmarish way life rides one man astride his chopper, ready to brawl with evildoers and romance native gals with access to a potassium mine! Yeah, it’s an apocalypse pretty much like you were hoping for!

Raiders Of The Sun was made by Cirio H. Santiago for Roger Corman. Cirio was pretty much the one man Philippine equivalent of the entire Italian trash movie industry. The titles of his films are a mouthwatering collection of junk that will instantly convert the uninitiated into Cirio fanatics!

Equalizer 2000, Dune Warriors, Future Hunters, and Wheels Of Fire are just a few of the more prestigious of his post-apocalyptic oeuvre alone! That he also shot a film called Bloodfist 2050 but somehow without Don “The Dragon” Wilson only cements his status as “Favorite Director Who Was Not Italian But Should’ve Been.”

At the beginning of Raiders Of The Sun there is some narration explaining how the world ended, but that’s just strictly boiler plate stuff, legally required to get us to the point where nameless groups of poorly dressed extras run around shooting and blowing each other up!

The Alpha League are the good guys and they’re fighting another group of losers for control of this really awesome quarry. You can tell everyone apart because the Alpha League wear yellow vests and one of the leaders of the bad guys commands his troops while wearing a hoghead, as if he was on his way to an Arkansas Razorback football game when Armageddon broke out.

The film follows the wasteland adventures of Talbot and Brodie. Talbot is a pretty generic guy who thinks the war is finally over and he can go home to his wife. Before he can get there though, his wife is kidnapped by the bad guys thus sending him on a search for her deep into the heart of enemy territory.

Brodie (Deathfight and Not Another Mistake’s Richard Norton) is mega cool with his blonde hair, dark beard, black leather pants, and open black leather jacket with no shirt. He rocks some mean kung fu when he has to and always seems to be hauling a giant gun, squeezing off rounds into whatever freak wanders by. He also gets hooked up with a bunch of midgets!

Cirio is obviously going for an epic feel with his almost 80 minute thriller by splitting the story between Talbot’s attempts to rescue his wife, Brodie’s quest for the hidden potassium mine, and the bad guys’ scheming to destroy the Alpha League once and for all.

There is a concern that perhaps Cirio is trying to cram too much into such a limited amount of time and that the movie might suffer from a lack of focus. Do not panic! The movie is excellent at maintaining its focus on stuff exploding!

Besides, you’ll be wrapped up in Brodie’s and Talbot’s situations in no time. With Talbot undercover in the evil gang, you’ll get to go on raids with him where he gets to see his buddies die, you’ll see him in a deadly rite of initiation that involves swinging on ropes while trying to club another to death, and you’ll see the big jail break where he and his old lady make their dash for freedom!

And don’t think that his old lady is just some piece of white trash arm candy (though she is that, too!) because she gives as good as she gets and manages to run over the guy in the hog helmet with his own car! Let me tell you something, brother – the end times is COLD!

But whither Brodie? After rescuing a native girl and getting shot for his troubles (thankfully not in the leather pants!), she takes him back to her secret village which just happens to be the very same village he was looking for that worships a potassium mine.

Their leader doesn’t want any outsiders because outsiders bring trouble, but Brodie is wise and says that trouble will find them anyway and trains the men in the village in stick fighting. He also has time to bang his new girlfriend and again demonstrates the wisdom of a guy who is getting banged regularly by saying that for the first time he knows what it is to be at peace.

Nothing is forever though! Especially in this new world where guys in leather pants are our wisest people! The bad guys roll in, steal gunpowder, kill Brodie’s girlfriend, and trap them all in a cave in!

The friendly midgets that Brodie saved earlier from being burned alive appear and dig Brodie and the villagers out of the cave in. Brodie heads back to the Alpha League to assist the final battle with the bad guys and when he gets out of a station wagon followed by about five or six midgets carrying buckets of gunpowder, the power of that scene is self-explanatory.

The best moments of the movie though occur when Brodie goes one on one with the leader of the bad guys. Karate fighting is the order of the day as kicks, punches, kneeings, head bashing, and assorting grapplings are delivered without mercy. That it was done to the chunky beats of the bad ass background music only made Brodie and his leather pants that much more awe-inspiring!

Raiders Of The Sun keeps getting better even as it ends when there’s a little victory parade where Brodie hugs Talbot and is taken through the assembled crowd of about ten people by his midget pals. It was kind of like the end of Star Wars when Han Solo and Luke and the rest were recognized by the Rebellion for their bravery. But with tight leather pants. To state the obvious, I, like Brodie, now know what it is to be at peace.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The Dude plays Dr. Rick Harding who is the best dang chemical weapons Delta Force guy that kicked all kinds of butt in the first Gulf War. He spends his days now in the lab, wearing his lab coat and his “I’m a doctor” eyeglasses.

While this may seem a bit ridiculous to the amateur viewer who only knows the Dude from his American Ninja days, those of us who have seen Steven Seagal as a world famous Yale archeologist in Out For A Kill aren’t about to think twice when the Dude starts talking about sulfuric acid and adrenaline. Besides, you can’t be an American Ninja when you’re 50, can you?

Despite the fact these terrorists all wear matching black tactical outfits, use hand signals, and have little earpieces to communicate with each other, they seem to be a bit snakebit right from the beginning. First, what should be a routine theft of the most deadliest element ever conceived by anyone, including God himself, turns into a cluster when some idiot drops some of it and gets the crap poisoned out of him! Then they also decide to hit the Dude’s facility when the Dude is there! You just know that’s going to result in an elevator fight!

Following the theft of the Bromex, the terrorists hijack the vice president’s plane with the help of a crooked Secret Service agent.

Mrs. Dude is a news reporter who is there to interview the VP and the head terrorist gets aboard the plane by disguising himself as her cameraman. (If you are travelling exclusively with the vice president and you notice that your regular cameraman has been mysteriously replaced with a new guy wearing the worst fake mustache ever seen in the movies, you should probably be a little suspicious. That’s the first thing I learned in broadcasting school.)

The Dude learns his wife is on board the plane and convinces his superior to put him on the commando team that’s going to raid the aircraft while it’s in flight despite the personal involvement he has in the mission. It would have been a better movie if his boss simply refused and forced the Dude to hijack his own plane to do it anyway, but it’s still a great movie because the Dude attacks the head terrorist with a coffee pot in one scene!

So, who are these terrorists and what do they want from us this time? The leader is identified as Carlos Gruber. Carlos (Richard Norton of Deathfight and Not Another Mistake legend) is a guy who never seeks publicity or takes responsibility for his acts of terror. He also doesn’t have any political or religious affiliations.

But all that’s changed! Why? Who knows? He just wants some chemical weapon guy the U.S. is holding released and $100 million. And really, do we need to know any more than that?

Guess what though? The Dude only needs to know his old lady is flying the unfriendly skies, that they’ve started killing hostages and Mrs. Dude has the next bullseye tattooed on her pretty little reporter’s head!

Thus begins what the government calls Operation Intercept but I what I called Operation Executive Decision! You know what that means: mid-air plane-to-plane transfer of commando team from an SR-71 Blackbird to the hijacked 747! It also means the commando teams spends way too much time hanging around under the floor drilling holes to snake their little peeper cameras through.

The Dude manages to see his wife slapped around which causes him to insist to the other guy with him (their “team” turned out to be three guys and one of them was a fat ass who spent the whole movie defusing a bomb!) that they get started whupping ass!

The terrorists for their part are the standard issue pre-9/11 group of Eurotrash slugs with ugly accents that we loved to battle so much for some reason in the 1990s. I would imagine that was because there weren’t any special interest groups devoted to white Europeans that would complain like Arabs, blacks, women, and gays if any of them were depicted as terrorists.

The Dude is much better than this movie deserves and pretty much carries everything by himself, especially since the movie doesn’t always make much in the way of any sense. For instance, after the attack on the lab, the Dude gets a tip that something’s happening down at the docks. He gets involved in a big shootout and the next thing you know he’s at HQ begging to save the hijacked plane. I guess someone at the docks gave him the tip, but what was the point since Gruber called in the threat anyway?

Then, there’s all this time spent babbling and sweating over this bomb on the plane and finally at the very end of things, the guy just yanks the guts of the bomb out defusing it! I also would hope that the Vice President travels with more than three wimpy Secret Service agents and that strange cargo isn’t allowed to be loaded in the plane’s baggage area.

Still, the Dude does snap a guy’s neck in a bathroom and Mrs. Dude even pitches in by spiking the terrorists’ drinks with her co-anchor’s near-lethal hair tonic. Vitalis + Bromex 365 + The Dude Family = Dead Terrorists & Satisfied Viewer!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

That’s right! Don The Dragon Wilson graduates into the world of real movies with his version of Extreme Make Over: Crooked Ex-Cop Edition! The Dragon knows that it’s time to put away the cyborg assassins, the vampire hunter outfits, and the crazy CIA psychic powers to tackle storylines that almost resemble real life issues!

Sure, most of our real lives aren’t spent worrying about our drug-addicted hooker friend or the fact that our SWAT buddies lied to get us kicked off the force, but The Dragon comes from a world where guys run around using the Death Touch on people and villains are called The Hydra.

The Dragon is even loaded down with more ordinary problems including a burgeoning workplace romance and dealing with his ex-wife shacking up with a professional baseball player which causes the Dragon to worry that his connection with his son is going to be lost since his new dad can teach him how to throw a split-fingered fork ball.

Then this guy goes and gets traded to Florida and The Dragon’s old lady starts talking about taking The Dragon’s kid with them!

I didn’t have any problem buying everything else in the movie, but the whole child custody thing was bogus. Really, if you were a 12 year old boy, would you rather hang around some sissy who wears cleats and a cup, or around your kickboxing SWAT team dad?

So how exactly do all these soap opera threads come together to give us The Dragon at his most angst-ridden? Like a lot of us, The Dragon is having problems at work. Tom Sasso is another guy on the SWAT team and feels like he should be the leader.

Sasso complains that the Dragon keeps making all kinds of wrong decisions that put cops’ lives in danger. Sure, The Dragon gets one cop stabbed and his girlfriend blown up, but come on Tom! Everybody has a few bad days at work!

Even though I was dreading watching this movie due to its hideous DVD cover which just screamed “turgid drama about a cop in too deep”, Redemption acted quickly to reassure me that not only was it going to be okay, it was going to set a new standard in Don The Dragon cinema!

You know surly Tom Sasso? Played by Richard Norton! As in Deathfight‘s Richard Norton! And Raiders Of The Sun‘s Richard Norton! And the very same Richard Norton who already fought Don The Dragon at the end of CyberTracker!

So Sasso and The Dragon get it on in a climatic battle that tears apart all of southern California in the last five minutes of the movie, right? Sure. In a movie that sucked!

In a movie that managed to be an awesome Don The Dragon effort while transcending all previous awesome Don The Dragon efforts, Redemption gives you a bare knuckled brawl right at the beginning of the movie in the SWAT team locker room!

The only thing that prevented a lot of guys having their lockers dented in the shape of Sasso’s head was the intervention of fellow martial arts legend Cynthia Rothrock! First Potsdam, now this!

After getting Cynthia blown up, The Dragon’s team turns on him and lies on a report that blames him for her death. The Dragon is forced to resign and into a life of crime. Because he needs cash for a down payment on a house. Because he wants to have a house for when his son visits him in the summer. Because I guess his apartment isn’t cool enough. Seemed to be a bit thin on the motivation front, but it brought the late great Chris Penn to the forefront of the picture, so who frigging cares!

Chris and The Dragon had already worked together in Future Kick and this time around Chris appears as the crime kingpin that The Dragon turns to for a job in an effort to make some quick cash.

While Chris isn’t in the movie much, he owns every scene he is in! His intensity whenever he’s on screen will have you hanging on every cuss word and racial epithet he spews out! During one of his rants, he even manages to name check Cloris Leachman!

One of the great things about Redemption (besides everything!) is that many of the characters don’t follow the expected trajectory. Chris Penn? He and The Dragon never have any big showdown! In fact, they’re pretty much buddy buddy throughout and never have a falling out!

The drug pushing pimp who beats The Dragon’s hooker pal? He and The Dragon never settle up with each other!

And evil Tom Sasso? He has his life saved by The Dragon during the big bank robbery that closes out the film! And acknowledges that maybe The Dragon is okay after all!

Redemption manages to juggle its various plot elements efficiently and if most of them never quite add up to anything (there are no consequences for The Dragon’s life of crime, nothing is resolved as to his child, and the SWAT team’s lies about The Dragon’s conduct is never revealed), well, we can overlook it because we love seeing Chris Penn swear, we love seeing The Dragon doing whatever it takes to get paid, and there’s a nice amount of kicking and killing going on.

Director Art Camacho (Recoil) does manage to irritate with his headache-inducing jerky camera work during some action scenes, but it’s not as awful as the Parkinson’s Cam used in Night Hunter. Besides, I’ll take a little bit of that in an actual movie over the less annoying slow motion used in abysmal juvenile kickbox junk like Red Sun Rising. Consider The Dragon redeemed with this one!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Ironheart is Britton Lee’s only movie as far as we know, thus lending credence to the popular theory that Britton Lee was actually just a cardboard cut out with a mechanical voice. As LAPD Lt. John Keem, Britton gives a performance so non-existent the viewer cannot but help to appreciate the natural stiffness of a Sho Kosugi. Whatever you want to say about Sho, at least we know that somewhere under that veneer of can’t act is a human being. You know, because he had to two kids who also inherited their dad’s twin abilities to get movie roles and to not be any good in them.

I will say this though for Britton Lee, his cardboard self is pushed through an equally flimsy movie. At first glance, it sounds like another one of those perfect Americanized kung fu movies that are blessedly a dime a dozen. A tough cop finds out his partner is killed and it’s up to our tough cop to bust heads, snap necks, stab people, and blow stuff up until everyone who ever coughed on his dead best friend is having Satan ream them with the rusty end of a hot tailpipe. Once you dig down though, especially to all the night club scenes, it turns out that we’re the ones that will be tasting hellish exhaust when we belch!

On the very same day that John Keem is promoted to Lieutenant, he also finds out his ex-partner has been killed up in Portland! We learn in a 10 second flashback all about how Keem and this dead guy were buddies. The flashback is of his partner telling Keem while they’re outside a 7-11 that he’s gone and taken a job up in Portland. It’ll be good for the guy’s family you see. It’s is based on this single exchange that we were supposed to care about the petrified-faced Keem and his quest to solve this guy’s murder.

Even funnier though is that Keem is told that the guy must have put up a hell of a fight before he died. Sure, if you mean that he caused Bolo to break a sweat beating the guy senseless and then shooting him about ten times while the guy emitted a high-pitched womanly scream. Yeah, his dignity put up a hell of a fight. And lost.

Once in Portland (after warming up by stopping a gang rape taking place down at the river), Keem finds that his partner’s death may be connected to a bunch of missing girls. The most recent one disappeared from a night club. This immediately sinks the movie since it portends lots of shots of bad dancing to even worse dance songs. And just to make sure that Ironheart isn’t your usual cruddy dance-padded movie, it throws in a dance instructor from a dance school!

She’s a great foil for Keem because while he is so vacantly anonymous in his screen presence (I spent most of the movie wondering why he insisted in dressing in oversized sport coats that were always some color of cat barf) she is so freaking annoying that you get genuinely excited when she decides to go undercover as a “girl at the club who wants to get kidnapped.”

If she isn’t making you gag blathering that for her, it’s all about the dancing and not taking the easy way out and using your dancing abilities at the club to land a rich guy, then she’s telling you her life story about how the father of her kid ran out on her after he landed a spot in a chorus line after making sweet dancer monkey love to you! I’ll bet old John Keem was glad he was just a cardboard cut out when he was lying in bed listening to that drivel!

The movie becomes pretty much a diary of the inept bad guys trying to kill Keem while Keem is zeroing in on them through his awesome investigating skills. For instance, he pretends to be a drunk in order to gain access to the bad guy’s office tower. This leads to one of my favorite tricks these sorts of movies use where kung fu guys solve crimes. It’s the old “the incriminating documents giving you all the information you need to know to take down the bad guys is all right here in this handy dandy file” gag!

I’ve worked in a couple of offices in my time. Some with only one filing cabinet. With just stuff I’ve filed myself. And I still couldn’t find half the crap I was looking for! Yet, John Keem can enter a 50 story office building in the middle of the night he’s never been in before and not only locate the correct office, but go right to the filing cabinet with the goodies in it and pull it out immediately, glancing at it for three seconds, and know everything there is to know about the evil scheme he’s battling? That is some rowdy kung fu, my friend!

Bolo Yeung is apparently the only real selling point of Ironheart which doesn’t make any sense to me. Bolo is barely in it and the fight he has with Britton Lee is something that looks pretty bad even when you fast forward through it. I guess there’s some Bolo fans due to his work in numerous “real” kung fu movies, but I got tricked into picking up Ironheart because of Richard Norton!

Norton is the double barreled threat of post-apocalyptic fare like Raiders of the Sun and Future Hunters and action movies like Nautilus and Not Another Mistake. He’s totally wasted as the bad guy here though because the only action scene he has is when he’s running away from Keem who is chasing him with a sword! How humiliating! It’s like renting Secretariat out to give pony rides to fat rich kids at a birthday party!

When it finally concludes with a silly voice over from the dance instructor telling us how everything turned out, you’ll understand why this was the movie that ended the careers of both the star and director. Ironheart is an apt title since that’s what you’ll need to get through it.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Shithouse rats aside, Nautilus is pretty much a floater even by the relative non-standards of the time-traveling submarine movie genre. You can’t help but compare Nautilus unfavorably to the granddaddy of all submarine time machine movies, Beneath The Bermuda Triangle.

That one had non-stop action, cyborgs, Jeff Fahey in two roles (including one that necessitated a ratty wig and eyepatch), and a super old half-frozen bad guy. Nautilus had non-stop talking about whether some explosive charge was going to be set off in the earth’s core by a drill bit, chicks with giant wax clown lips, and Richard Norton in a role that put him in the background in favor of chattering old farts way too often.

Nautilus did feature a really nice action sequence involving a van ramming stuff, blowing up a bus, and a bunch of cop cars flying through the air. Oh wait, that scene was lifted from Beneath The Bermuda Triangle! Never mind.

Norton (Not Another Mistake, Kick Fighter) plays John Harris, a mercenary with all the right credentials. You know the credentials I’m talking about – Medal of Honor winner and court-martialed for playing by his own rules!

After wrapping up some soldier of fortune business in Columbia involving a miniature crossbow, Norton starts his new job as the head of security on the oil rig, Prometheus. But this isn’t just any old oil rig. It’s going to produce all the energy the world could ever want once the Earth’s core is tapped.

But just like any great scientific advance that keeps America strong, a bunch of moronic eco-jerks from the terror group Equinox are determined to stop the Prometheus at all costs! Which means they send four guys to plant bombs and storm the rig!

I would’ve have felt sorry for these overmatched enviro-pansies tussling with Richard Norton, but I was enjoying watching Norton thump these guys too much to give a shithouse rat’s ass! Especially when these guys were already captured and restrained and Norton was still beating the crap out of them trying to get more information! Hey, it’s international waters, so anything goes, right?

But the Prometheus has even bigger problems! Problems from the year 2099 to be exact! That’s the crappy year that the future-sub Nautilus and her crew come from to bitch and moan about what we’re doing in 1999!

The Captain, Noah Brinn, claims that because the Prometheus drilled down and blew something up below the earth’s surface that massive earthquakes and fires occurred and that this somehow caused the world to be wrecked and for some evil government to spring up and harass the people in the future.

So instead of using all the brains that somehow constructed a massively powerful time traveling submarine to help themselves in their own time, they come trucking back here and expect us to clean up a mess we haven’t even gotten around to making yet!

After all a lot blather back and forth and some ships and planes getting blown up while the military and the Nautilus were squabbling with each other, Captain Brinn lays out his plan. In exchange for us abandoning the Prometheus project and not destroying the planet, he will give us all the secrets of the submarine, limitless power and probably also the recipes for the maggot-based food he bragged about serving on the Nautilus. (In the future, all the food is contaminated except for insects! Why not the insects? Because it’s the future you dummy!)

This sounds pretty good except that the guy who owns the Prometheus is a stubborn dolt and there’s also a traitor aboard the Prometheus who is secretly working for Equinox. There’s also a CIA guy sort of in cahoots with Equinox and everybody and their brother is still trying to blow the damn thing up!

Then Captain Brinn goes and gets his mega-sub hijacked by a woman! Acting alone! The Nautilus would have been in better hands with Captain Kangaroo at the helm!

The stupidity rapidly ramps up at this point as Brinn gets it into his head that it was Nautilus that caused the end of the world! It was never explained how that was going to happen, but it resulted in a lot of scenes of Brinn tearing out wires from his sub’s various control panels, so he must have been serious. What’s truly stupid though about this movie is the whole idiotic plan of Brinn’s.

If you can go back in time and you need to change the past so that a specific event does not occur, why in the world would you go back to ten minutes before the event takes place? Why didn’t Brinn go back to before the Prometheus was built and give the scientist who was going to work on it all his secrets for time travel and limitless energy instead of doing it at the last minute when half the world is trying to blow Prometheus up?

Or just go back in time and stay and work on getting all that stuff up and running in our present so there’s never any need to build the Prometheus in the first place! There’s no reason to go back when he did except that the movie demands it because without that nonsensical choice, there wouldn’t be any movie at all. It’s all shithouse rat crazy if you ask me.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

There’s a cake and Kick Fighter (KF) and his friend have purchased a dress as expensive as it is ugly with the winnings from KF’s first fight. His sister gets all huffy about how much it cost and that she doesn’t like KF (Richard Norton of Deathfight and Equalizer 2000 legend) gambling to get the money. Putting aside the fact that KF should’ve saved a little kick fighting from his match for his ingrate sister, what exactly is the point of that scene? No one watching a movie called Kick Fighter is wanting to see some queer-assed birthday party for a guy’s cry baby sister!

And what was the point of KF’s friend? KF didn’t really need him to help with his fighting career. KF manages to acquire a sleazy Australian fight manager that lines up all his crooked fights for him. He also doesn’t need this friend to train him because his manager lines KF up with a kung fu master that lives in a candle infested cave.

And in one of those strange twists of fate that only exist in films taking place in the kung-fu infested far east, the kung fu master turns out to be the supposedly blind beggar that KF ripped off earlier in the movie to help pay for his sister’s heart medicine! Okay, so maybe these guys did know how to fill time between fight sequences after all! How can you argue with the old kung-fu-master-as-beggar and sister-needing-open-heart-surgery gags?

Some of you out there that aren’t as well-versed in these sorts of films may also wonder why KF needed to periodically hang out at a strip club. For a lot of these movies, the strip club is where a lot of investigating goes on. This usually happens whenever the hero is being framed for killing a hooker or when his old lady has been kidnapped and sold into slavery or something like that.

In KF’s case, it’s primarily used as an excuse for getting into a bar fight. In short, it’s a training tool. He also likes to just hang out, drink beer, and drop the F bomb on his sleazy Australian manager, but that’s a sort of training, too. Training for real life!

There isn’t a story per se in Kick Fighter, but there are what you might call story elements. That is, there’s events that occur that seemed designed to tell a story, but don’t actually do so. Take the beginning of the film which tells the secret origin of KF. KF was just a little crapface running the streets of Bangkok, stealing and beating up guys who run crooked dice games before getting sent to prison for five years.

Apparently this young KF was also played by Richard Norton which practically merits a viewing of the film all by itself since he’s decked out in ill-fitting clothes and an even more ill-fitting hair cut. Thankfully, once he’s released from prison, he’s a pumped up super street fighter who favors the tasteful Norton mullet all his fans worship.

When KF’s parents aren’t failing to properly supervise KF, they’re running an import/export business and getting themselves blown up by some crooks. None of this has anything to with anything else in the movie other than feebly explain why KF has to live with his sister and not have enough money to buy her medicine.

There will not be any vengeance dished out for KF’s parents and if they same dude who had them killed is also the guy who gets arrested at the end of the movie for trying to blackmail KF into losing the big fight, it’s purely coincidental and KF and his sister don’t know anything about it. And I can’t really blame them since I wasn’t paying enough attention to know for sure either.

So what’s the deal with KF becoming a professional kick fighter? Sister needs an operation. He needs money, beer and whores. That’s pretty much it. It’s all very glamorous and romantic when you think about it. In fact, both of these motivations come into dramatic conflict during the movie’s funniest scene not involving KF getting bitten.

One night, sis is waiting up for KF wondering where her meal ticket, I mean brother, is and incredibly the movie goes to split screen and shows KF rolling around on a bed with a whore! Can you imagine how mad his sister would have been if she and KF were actually dating! Oh, and not to state the obvious or anything but the story of KF falling in love with this whore pretty much goes nowhere.

While we love the quirky lifestyles our kickfighting heroes inevitably lead, what matters in the end is the kickfighting! The movie is pretty slack on this during the first half of things, but once KF decides to start fighting, we get a nice violent dose of it.

There’s three really good fights. One against an ugly fat guy in a cage where the fat guy uses a type of fighting that involves standing on KF! KF also battles it out with a ugly guy in a mask (well, why else would he be wearing a mask?) inside a club. The victory sets up his title fight against a rat faced champ in Manilla. Say what you want about Rat Face, but when KF literally took the kid gloves off to fight with only taped fists, Rat Force was more than willing to do it that way, too!

Taped fists? Kick Fighter might have had a bit of a bumpy journey leading up to this final brawl, but when you finish your film by having Richard Norton fighting real-life undefeated kickboxing champ Benny “The Jet” Urquidez with taped fists, nothing else matters! All the crud I sat through to get to that point disappeared! I was transported to that dingy gym in Manilla! I could smell KF’s mullet sweat! And when KF’s gloves came off and he was pushing past the disbelieving referee to get at Rat Face, despite my euphoria, I cried a little because I knew I could only experience this scene for the first time once! But then I hit rewind and felt better!

© 2009 MonsterHunter

A lot of you wuss civilians out there would probably look upon a “no chance in hell, government will deny all responsibility if you’re caught” mission behind enemy lines as a pain in the ass.

I’ll tell you though, when you’re living the life and all you know is the Special Forces and it’s like the war never ended for you and every guy you ever loved as a brother is just a memory, getting one of these gigs that allows you to go back to doing what you know best (killing Commies) is kind of like winning the lottery. Especially for guys like Straker!

As the movie begins, Straker comes home one night just in time to see his family held hostage by armed intruders! Proving yet again that he’s a lot more adept at killing than protecting his loved ones, he manages to kill all the bad guys, but his poor non-Special Forces family gets their dumb asses slaughtered!

Even better than that is that during all of this, he’s flashing back to the Nam! You might think that this event will somehow haunt our hero and cause him to go Code Red on Charlie when he inevitably parachutes back into the world’s armpit for some vengeance that’s been 15 years in the making! But if you did, you were obviously never in the Special Forces! It’s just another day at the office for Straker!

It’s a measure of how spectacular Not Another Mistake (U.S. video title: Cross Fire) is that this prologue is basically just a love letter to those of us in the audience mindlessly addicted to scenes of wimpy wives and kids getting wasted right in front of our hero/killing machine’s eyes! Sure, these bonus kills have no real bearing on the plot, but it’s still a great way to kick off your crazy Vietnam Vet movie!

For the next year, Straker turns from being a successful businessman to drinking and spends his free time getting thrown out of crappy bars! We know this thanks to a rather stilted conversation a couple of military guys have while driving around looking in cheap bars for Straker.

They’re in search of Straker because remains have been found back in Nam or Cambodia or whatever country the Philippines is trying to trick us into believing it is, but none of the remains are old enough to be Colonel Harrison or any of the other guys from Straker’s old outfit.

Oh and Straker’s old outfit? Black Thunder. Yeah, I was ready to sign up to go back with Straker when I heard that, too! How can you be a real American and not get the itch to lace up the combat boots, throw on the camos, and strap on your Ka-Bar knife when you hear that the sole survivor of Black Thunder needs a team of grunts to lead back into the stinky mouth of Hell of itself?

This guy is going to need at least a half dirty dozen of inglorious bastards to have his back when these lepers start falling apart on him! And watching how Straker handled his business once he was back in Southeast Asia, I was ready to be all six of those guys!

His first night in Thailand, Starker begins looking for Colonel Harrison in the one place he probably isn’t – a strip club!

Oh crap, I smell a warm up bar fight/international incident a brewing! And that’s just what we get when a whore he’s getting friendly with runs afoul of three creeps!

Straker lets loose a whole duffel bag full of Black Thunder on these scum and proves he’s already in the Zone by carjacking a Taxi and racing back to his hotel room so he screw her brains out! Take that Charlie! That was for you Colonel Harrison! You will be avenged! And it only cost like twenty bucks!

The next morning Straker meets his squad. Straker and I immediately peg them as being so green that they don’t even probably have pubes yet, but they’re all going to die at various points in the mission anyway, so who cares!

The remainder of the movie demonstrates that when you slavishly follow a great genre of film, you can’t help but have good results!

Their trek through the jungle has everything! A slimy Australian who drives them part way in a school bus (see Warbus for an entire movie built around this), getting captured and tortured by enemy soldiers, a big break out scene with a pleasing amount of carnage, the stealing of a train, and of course the attempted double cross by the gutless CIA agent in charge of the operation!

Richard Norton and director Anthony Maharaj also teamed up to make the great Deathfight as well as Kick Fighter and Return of the Kick Fighter and if it feels like they’re just going through the motions of making a Rambo or Missing In Action rip-off, well their motions are pretty damn perfect!

Nonstop no nonsense nastiness from Norton is the order of the day and is exemplified in such moments as the final confrontation against the evil prison camp commander. Straker kicks him off the guard tower straight down into the commander’s hut right on top of his own chess set! Then Straker shoots him dead. Guess what he says? “Check. Mate.” No name action movies about nothing much new don’t come any better than this one!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

His attorney, the very best legal beagle in all of southeast Asia is none other than his wife! Can she put aside her irritation with Jack for screwing hookers on business trips while he’s too self-centered to agree to have children with her to get an acquittal?

But her life is about to get much worse! She turns out to be pregnant! And the only way out of this serpentine mess is through the most dreaded of all competitions! Deathfight!

Those of you fearing that Deathfight is that most dreaded of all film genres, the erotic legal thriller, can rest easy! The dead hookers, pregnancies, irate wives, and hostile business takeovers are only the set-up for Jack to kick his way through a variety of karate experts on the road to his showdown with his evil step-brother Chang!

Despite Jack’s wife being a great lawyer, he’s not about to let his fate hinge on arguments about circumstantial evidence, time of death, and alibis! Once Jack’s super rich step-father bails him out of the pokey, he and his new prison buddy Wiley begin an intensive (read: violent) search for the real killers!

The story of Jack and Chang goes back to when they were just kids practicing kung fu on each other. Their fathers were business partners, but when Jack’s parents were gunned down before his eyes, Chang’s father adopted him and raised him as his own.

After Jack’s father’s death, Chang’s father continued to build up the company and they all became very wealthy as a result. But wealth can’t change what’s inside of you! Chang is a criminal mastermind who is into drugs, selling arms, and prostitution while Jack is a good guy who has a penchant for cheating on his wife with nasty hookers!

Jack and Chang are put on a collision course when Jack is awarded the chairmanship of the company. Apparently the board of directors felt that a guy who patronizes prostitutes would better represent the company than a guy who pimps them out.

Being the kingpin of crime though is not enough for Chang and he feels slighted by being passed over for the chairmanship and thus arranges for Jack to discover the dead hooker. He also blackmails his old man into giving him control of the company with some information about the deaths of Jack’s parents which kind of makes the whole dead hooker scheme pointless, but could we really expect Jack to get as revved up about a little blackmail as being wrongfully accused of murder? Really, how many Deathfights are going to result from Chang’s little spiral bound report he uses against his dad?

Deathfight is great chiefly because of star Richard Norton. Norton has appeared in a ton of films with titles like Raiders of the Sun, Strategic Command, and Equalizer 2000. He’s a bit on the tall, goofy-looking side, but he’s pretty jacked up and displays an intensity and quickness in his fight scenes that are showcased really well in this movie.

This isn’t some 500 pound Steven Seagal standing around and waving his arms a couple of times like he’s trying to get a waiter’s attention to refill the all-you-can-eat buffet. This is kicking, punching, choking, kneeing, jumping, rolling, and elbowing like there’s no tomorrow! This is Deathfight!

What’s awesome about Norton in Deathfight is that he doesn’t have to be in a given location more than five minutes before he’s stripping his shirt off and kicking the crap out of some guy with information that will lead him to the identity of the guy that set him up. I probably would’ve been thinking evil step-brother the whole time, but that’s what so great about Norton’s character – he’s willing to be kind of thickheaded so that he can have several Deathfights before the ultimate showdown with Chang.

It’s a smart move on the movie’s part since I’m here to see Richard Norton dispense bone crunching vengeance! And there is no shortage of that! He beats up every convict in his jail while tearing apart the prison cafeteria and making friends with Wiley. But only after he finishes his lunch!

Then he and Wiley beat up every patron at the Body Machine strip club while tearing it apart! Jack also fights a couple of guys connected with Chang including a dreadlocked guy name I-Ron who lives in some sort of really cool fighting temple that has lots of candles, statues, and a variety of weapons.

Norton displays all sorts of skills as he fights a knife-wielding I-Ron with just his shirt! Almost as awesome is when I-Ron starts going after Norton with something that looks like a Klingon Bat’leth while Norton starts twirling around a spear with great authority!

Fans of explosions and the like are rewarded for their patience since Wiley is in charge of providing a diversion while Jack storms Chang’s hideout. Being an ex-marine means Wiley has a ready supply of assault weapons, grenades, rocket launcher, and truck packed with explosives! Obviously tremendous on every important level (violence, cussing, dead hookers), if this is your first Richard Norton film, it will not be your last!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Much like the Jeff Speakman flick Scorpio One which had the Perfect Weapon take on Brent Huff of Strike Commando 2 fame, Cyber Tracker creams the undiscerning action audience’s jeans with the mouth watering showdown between Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Richard “The Kick Fighter With A Mullet” Norton.

If it doesn’t stack up to the fight on the space station between Speakman and Huff where Speakman smacked Huff in the head with a fire extinguisher, that just goes to show that when you have such legends brawling, the edge often comes down the intangibles. Intangibles like space stations and fire extinguishers.

Just because Cyber Tracker doesn’t have the foresight to fire its stars into orbit where they can duke it out with fire extinguishers doesn’t mean that Cyber Tracker is all thumbs when it comes to the whole ass kicking/fire safety angle.

First of all, Cyber Tracker takes place in the future! The future is sort of like being in a space station, but on Earth! For instance, The Dragon’s apartment is outfitted with a computer that talks to him and can even simulate being drunk. Even better is that his pad is outfitted with video cameras that record everything that goes on inside!

Have you ever wanted to relive that moment when your old lady told you that you were a no good loser and that she’d rather be gang banged by a bus full of syphilitic retards on Viagra? Of course! That’s the sort of inspiration some of us need to get on with our lives! It also helps a Secret Service agent like The Dragon stay haunted!

The Dragon’s old lady isn’t nearly as colorful as our purely theoretical example, complaining instead about worrying if The Dragon is going to get killed on the job! Frankly, I think that’s a more humiliating complaint than our purely theoretical (no – really, I just made it up!) example since she’s basically saying, “I don’t think you’re bad ass enough!”

We all know that The Dragon was really just with her though because her line reading made us simultaneously think that she very well could be an undercover Cyber Tracker and that The Dragon wasn’t really the worst performer in the movie.

And really, to be fair to The Dragon, it’s not exactly like the rest of the cast were spending time between scenes of them standing around shooting at leather-clad androids polishing their award acceptance speeches. Well, except for Jared (Steven Burton). You could tell by the way he wore his wife beater and kept getting in The Dragon’s face that he would soon be winning Emmys and Soap Opera Digest Awards for his work on General Hospital.

So why exactly is an actor as obviously talented as Steve Burton mixing it up with The Dragon in the first place? I can only imagine that the opportunity to appear in a movie that combined the best parts of Robocop (robot cops killing scum) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (robots in leather) was too freaking good to pass up! Plus, what better opportunity to get Richard Norton to autograph your VHS copy of Deathfight?

But what exactly is all this Cyber Tracker business? And how does The Dragon and Norton figure into things? What place do a couple of old school kickboxers have in a future full of robots and award-winning soap opera actors?

The Dragon is working the security detail of a senator who is connected to a company that makes the Cyber Trackers. The Cyber Trackers are robots that run around killing suspected criminals. This cuts down on a lot of the paperwork the regular human cops have to falsify whenever they kill suspects. It also is a real money saver since police departments no longer have to budget for all those extra “throw down guns” they need to have on hand to keep the shootings of unarmed civilians righteous.

Norton is The Dragon’s boss and doesn’t like how The Dragon showed him up during an assassination attempt. He also doesn’t trust The Dragon. Can The Dragon be counted on to tow the company line when he finds out the lengths the company is willing to go to in an effort to cover up its super secret Echo project? Will the The Dragon be able to put aside how haunted he is by his ex to shack up with the sexy terrorist leader/star TV reporter/expert hacker? And most important of all, will The Dragon finish the movie before wandering off to do another Bloodfist film?

Okay, I know you’re saying “that’s sounds pretty stupid and/or non-interesting, but are there enough cars and helicopters exploding and guys getting shot to justify watching this more than five or six times? Let me answer you this way: Director Richard Pepin (Fire Power, Dark Breed, Hologram Man) is also the “P” in PM Entertainment. Did visions of cars flying through the air and blowing up just hurtle across your synapses?

There’s no point in cataloging all the damage that one butch android and The Dragon can do, but remember how we bemoaned the fact that Scorpio One had one up on this film because it had a great scene where Speakman clubbed Huff with a fire extinguisher? Cyber Tracker says, why bother with a fire extinguisher when you can use the whole fudging fire truck!

When The Dragon carjacked the fire truck in his bid to escape a Cyber Tracker, by the time I was thinking that no way do they blow up the fire truck, I see The Dragon bailing out and that big mother is flying through the air after hitting a car parked inexplicably in the middle of the road!

Whatever else is awesome about Cyber Tracker (Norton and The Dragon punching each other again and again, questionable design flaw in Cyber Tracker that allows The Dragon to shove a grenade inside of it, The Dragon’s girlfriend quoting Ayn Rand) I’ve already had the exploding fire truck added to the montage of straight-to-video action clips that I’m having played at my funeral!

© 2008 MonsterHunter