Bloodfist 3: Forced to Fight (1992)

Someone done woke The Dragon

Those hoping to see the continuing adventures of Jake Raye may be disappointed to discover that Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight has absolutely nothing to do with the first two movies apart from Don "The Dragon" Wilson (World Kickboxing Assocation World Light Heavyweight Champion). It was originally intended to be released under the title Forced to Fight but the first two movies did well enough at the box office that this movie was shoehorned into the series.

Given it's origin, it's not surprising that this movie is a bit of an anomaly in the Bloodfist series. For instance, I believe it's the first and only film in the series that begins with a prison rape. The perpetrator is cell block kingpin Luther and, unfortunately for him, the victim is friends with Jimmy Boland (Wilson). Jimmy interrupts Luther's crazy rape face by dramatically throwing open the door while some squealing guitars let you know it's ass-kicking time. Luther stabs Jimmy's friend right in front of him (who is not enough of a friend to get a name) so Jimmy does some punching and Luther catches a shiv to the kidneys.

Unfortunately this incident is captured on closed circuit camera just as the warden is giving a guided tour to the press. As punishment, Jimmy is sent to Cell Block C, which is apparently even worse. From here I expected this film to turn into an underground prison fighting movie, like the Undisputed series, but it's a little more serious minded than that. In fact there's only two other names in the credits with martial arts bonafides, Stan Longinidis (K.I.C.K. World Heavyweight Kickboxing Champion) and Pete "Sugarfoot" Cunningham (World Kickboxing Association World Super Lightweight Champion) and both have fairly minor henchmen roles despite their top billing. It actually has actors and seems like it took longer to write than it did to watch. Like I said, it's an anomaly.

Apparently killing Luther cut off drug supplies for the cell block, so Jimmy doesn't exactly get a warm welcome. A friend of Luther named Blue (Gregory McKinney) is out for revenge and Jimmy earns the ire of a white power gang when he rejects an offer of friendship from their leader Wheelhead (Rick Dean). The only person who gives Jimmy the time of day is a creepy sex-offender called Diddler, whom Jimmy casually calls by his nickname as if he has no idea what it means. Under the protection of the warden, Luther and Blue join forces against Jimmy. Consequently Jimmy is coerced to skirmish and we all learn a few lessons about race. For instance, I learned that black people think that white people "smell like dogs after they get out of the shower". And also that dogs shower.

What I liked about this film is that the bad guys are little more nuanced out than usual. I liked the part where Wheelhead relates a childhood story of his mother making him grilled-cheese sandwiches, and even though Diddler is an unabashed pedophile (there's even a scene where he ogles a little girl in the visiting room while creepy music plays) he's treated with an unusual amount of sympathy and even allowed a little redemption arc. How often does that happen in a genre film, let alone in a Bloodfist film?

Jimmy kinda lucks out in that his cellmate is Stark, a Malcom-X-loving, self-taught lawyer who is greatly respected by the other prisoners. He's played by Richard Roundtree, which is awesome, and he gives what is maybe the best performance in the whole Bloodfist series. Stark introduces Jimmy to a multi-racial group of peaceful prisoners who hang out in a rooftop garden utopia. Somehow they have access to gardening equipment, deckchairs, televisions and enough cooking materials for the goofy Italian stereotype to make them baked ziti every day. It makes prison life look pretty cool. They even get to watch Corman's own TNT Jackson on movie night.

I don't think this movie is a particularly realistic depiction of prison life, to be honest. It seems to be some sort of "Free Range" prison, where inmates are free to roam anywhere they please. They have unfettered access to gasoline and sharpened tools and they are even allowed to start small fires in their cells. Everyone seems to be armed with a shiv, sometimes two. There's maybe two prison guards in the whole complex and although the warden claims that the place is automated to the point that "one man does the job of a dozen" it all seems pretty low tech and more like two men doing the job of nobody.

Like all protagonists of prison movies, Jimmy is innocent of his crime. Apparently he was involved in a bar-room brawl that got out of hand, and the police blamed him because of his mixed-race heritage. You know those half-Japanese guys, always stirring up trouble. When Jimmy complains to Stark about being a victim of racial prejudice I think Stark displays surprising restraint in not telling Jimmy to go cry him a fucking river.

Even though it's full of prison movie cliches (is there a riot at the end? Maybe. Okay, yes) I kind of liked this one. The fighting is infrequent and not particularly well choreographed, but it didn't bother me too much since that clearly wasn't the priority. That makes it pretty unusual as a Bloodfist film, and so unfortunately Roger Corman's cunning ruse to slip this film in under the Bloodfist banner backfired. The film did poorly and Don "The Dragon" Wilson was sentenced to Direct-to-Video prison for a minimum of five Bloodfist sequels. A harsh sentence, but fair. The Bloodfist movies never really belonged in the cinema.

Bloodfist II (1990)

No shotguns allowed, Don! You're destroying
the sanctity of this brutal deathmatch!

Apparently after winning the Red Fist tournament Jake (Don "The Dragon" Wilson, World Kickboxing Association Light Heavyweight World Champion) returned to America and became a professional kickboxer. I guess he got over that whole missing kidney thing. During his championship bout he accidentally kills his opponent so he vows to never fight again, complete with a cry of "NEVER!" and the ceremonial tossing of his championship belt into the crowd. Two years later he's living in a crappy apartment and sleeping with convincing-looking skeezy prostitutes. He gets a phone call from his old friend Vinny Petrello (Maurice Smith, World Kickboxing Association World Heavyweight Champion) who has gotten himself into a few money problems in the Phillipines. Naturally it's up to Jake to pack his bags and head off to Manila. Again.

In typical Don "The Dragon" Wilson fashion, Jake heads straight from the airport to an attempted mugging. I do like that the thugs attempt a surprise attack by kicking a soccer ball at his head. That's some weak-ass shit, muggers. Jake shows them up in the next scene, at the gym where Vinny was last spotted. One of the guys there says to Jake that he "only talks with fighters, you dig?", so Jake kicks the punching ball so hard that it breaks off it's chain and hits a guy in the boxing ring in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious. He was wearing headgear too. That's a move both baller and off the chain.

Afterwards Jake confronts the owner of the gym, a weasely German nerd named Dieter. It's pretty clear where this movie's sympathies lie on the jocks vs nerds continuum, because everybody, including the other bad guys, treat Dieter with open contempt. At one point Jake even shouts "Fuck you, geek!" with the same venom you'd reserve for child molesting racists. Dieter calls in his goons and Jake fights and runs and fights and runs, but eventually finds himself drugged and put on a boat with the rest of the gym rats to compete in a high-stakes baking competition where only the most skilled with a piping bag will survive. Nah, just kidding. It's a secret underground fighting tournament.

While the first film was a Bloodsport rip-off, the second does a low-budget riff on Enter the Dragon. The tournament takes place on a secret island which is ironically named Paradise, although thanks to Black Dynamite I can't think think of it as anything other than Kung Fu Island. Joe Mari Avellana returns as the main villain, although he's playing a different character, a Bond-like villain named Su. Cris Aguilar also returns as one of Su's henchmen. If Jake notices all these villainous doppelgangers running around he doesn't say anything.

The other competitors are mostly real-life martial artists, including Timothy Baker (International Karate Champion World Karate Champ), James Warring (World Kickboxing Association World Cruiserweight Champion) and Richard Hill (International Sport Karate Association World Welterweight Champion). I really liked these guys. They aren't actors or pretty-boys but they're likable and there's a cheerful, ramshackle charm to their performances.

Jake manages to escape pretty early on, busting his way out of the most pathetic shackles ever, and spends a good chunk of the movie Die Harding his way around Su's mansion. He's helped out by a hot girl named Mariella (Rina Reyes), who is in league with Su at first but eventually falls for Jake's wooden charms. When he first meets her she is demonstrating her flexibility in a shiny leotard, just like his love interest in the first film. He's got a type, I guess. She turns out to be Su's daughter, which dumps all sorts of subtext onto an earlier whipping scene that I don't want to think about.

There are some pretty funny cartoonish touches to this film. Jake is able to get the drop on the guards over and over again, usually by tiptoeing a couple of steps behind them like Wile E. Coyote. My favourite part is where Vinny, who is working for Su as it turns out, comes up with an ingenious "plan" to stop Jake. He lures Jake down a hallway and around a blind corner and then, hidden off-screen, swings out with a plank of wood and knocks Jake unconscious. Ah, the old plank-to-the-face trick.

It turns out that Su and Dieter have developed a super-steroid which turns his fighters into grunting, indestructable death machines. Su intends to force the fighters into death matches with his 'roid-monkeys, providing entertainment for the standard assortment of rich fucks as well as giving a demonstration of the super-steroid to his investors. Su is very traditional about his deathmatches, with uniformed, spear-wielding guards and the whole thumbs-up, thumbs-down death signal. Of course it's the black guy who gets the thumbs down.

I always like watching the crowd in these death arena fight movies. It's mostly businessmen in suits, as you'd expect, but there's always a few old women and middle aged tourists mixed in among them. It's always funny watching some middle-aged accountant-looking dude screaming insanely as a muscleman dispatches his opponent with a Bolo-style neck stomp. I'd like to think it's a commentary on exploitative tourist culture, but really I think it comes down to whatever extras they could rustle up on the day.

Jake's final showdown with Vinny seems to mirror the kickboxing match that opens the film, with Vinny ultimately badly beaten and barely on his feet. You might assume that the residual guilt would make Jake pull his punch or otherwise hesitate in killing his friend, but instead he executes a lethal flying kick that snaps Vinny's neck. It's pretty weird. I suppose he assumed that Vinny was going to do that whole "you showed me mercy and now I shall reward you by stabbing you in the back" thing.

Afterwards Jake has a fight with Su that goes through his laboratory, right through his house and onto the balcony. There's a pretty funny part where Jake goes apeshit and tosses aside a table that is clearly made of rubber. Su actually does do the whole "you showed me mercy and now I shall reward you by stabbing you in the back" thing, so Jake kicks him over the balcony ledge. If only he had some rubber lawn furniture down there he might have survived. I did like how all the good guys silently stand over Su's dead body for about three seconds before leaving. These Bloodfist films are less than 85 minutes long, so there's no time for dénouement.

Actually there's barely time for anything in this film except for fighting. From start to finish I don't think the film goes more than ten minutes without a fight. I like the way they separate Jake and the other fighters so they can cut to one of the deathmatches after each chunk of exposition or embarrassing romance scene. Usually in these films they have one long string of fights at the end, which gets dull quickly. The choreography is much improved over the first film too, with some cool techniques and a nice sense of rhythm.

I liked this movie better than the first, mostly because it had a similar setup but ditched everything non-fight related. No more boring crime-solving where Jake tries to solve a mystery that we already know the answer to. No more boring training montages where we watch Jake spend five minutes running up a hill in high-waisted pants. Just more of what we came to see 1) blood and 2) fists. If you like both of these things and you've got a high-tolerance for direct-to-video crappiness, then check out Bloodfist II.

Bloodfist (1989)

Blood? Check. Fists? Check.

Roger Corman isn't one to sit idly by while a popular cinematic fad runs it's course, and Bloodfist was his attempt to cash-in on the recent success of kickboxing movies, Van Damme's Bloodsport being the most obvious influence. I would have liked to be in on the meeting where they decided on the title. "Blood... fist?" "Sure, why not? Let's go get hammered." Bloodsport, Kickboxer and even Shootfighter make some semblence of sense in context, but Bloodfist just hastily throws together two fight-related words and calls it a day. This half-assed approach extends to most aspects of the film.

During the opening credits, each of the principal actors are listed by name and martial arts credentials, a trend that would continue throughout most of the series. I like it. The filmmakers are letting you know up-front where their priorities are. Don "The Dragon" Wilson (World Kickboxing Association Light Heavyweight World Champion) plays Jake Raye, part-owner of a small boxing gym. He is a boxing coach, having retired from professional fighting after donating a kidney to his half-brother. He says that fighting with one kidney is suicide, but that hasn't stopped his brother from competing in underground fighting tournaments. I can only assume that Jake's brother had two perfectly healthy kidneys and Jake donated a third to make him an unstoppable fighting machine. Then again, this whole kidney thing is never mentioned again, so who knows?

Jake gets a phone call from Manila stating that his brother has been found beaten to death in an alley and could he please come and collect the body because it's stinking up the joint. Within a few minutes of arrival, Jake (looking completely inconspicuous in his Hard Rock Cafe LA t-shirt) is witness to several acts of street crime, including an attempted theft of own his suitcase which he foils by kicking. When he gets to the police station the police chief nonchalantly hands him an urn of his brother's ashes and tells him to be on his way. Seems a little premature for cremation, but at least Jake can take him back as carry-on luggage. The police seem spectacularly uninterested in solving the murder, so Jake does some investigating and finds out his brother was involved with the Red Fist Fighting Club, a organisation that stages one of those high-stakes underground fighting tournaments for the super rich.

Jake meets a wise martial arts master named Kwong (Joe Mari Avellana) who offers to train him for the tournament so he can find his brother's killer. Jake also meets another American fighter named Baby (Michael Shaner), who is ostensibly comic relief but mainly an annoying asshole. Baby is followed around by this mute Filipino girl who sleeps with him and makes him breakfast before leaping out the window, so I guess she's pretty much the perfect woman. Jake also finds a love interest, Baby's sister Nancy (Riley Bowman). She's a dancer (read: stripper) and when he first meets her she's dancing on the roof in a purple leotard to a terribly synthesised Asian pan flute. She's trying to get a job as a translator and she's always listening to language tapes on a walkman, even when they are on dates and during Jake's death matches, which strikes me as pretty rude.

All of the cliches are present and accounted for. Kwong puts Jake through several gruelling training montages while the competition is whittled down to a few final contenders. Rob Kaman (World Kickboxing Association Junior Light Heavyweight World Champion) plays Raton, a self-obsessed Dutch fighter who "uses music as inspiration". Billy Blanks (Professional Karate League World Champion) is great as a fighter named Black Rose. I've always liked Billy Blanks so it's a shame his scenes are pretty short.

Like in Bloodsport there's also an indestructable Asian muscleman who communicates solely in grunts, a genre trope that's always struck me as pretty racist. Here it's fulfilled by Kris Aguilar (Southeast Asia Kickboxing Champion) playing Chin Woo. He's so hardcore that he eats cockroaches instead of squashing them and routinely kills his opponents, which doesn't seem to bother anyone, least of all the police. By the end of the film he has murdered most of the other opponents and beaten Baby into a coma, making him a prime target for Jake's bloodfist.

There's actually a pretty decent twist at the end. Turns out that Kwong has a bizarre scam going where he trains up world-class fighters and then sabotages the final match and bets against them. Seems to me that there would be a lot more money to be made by actually training up world champion fighters, but who am I to question a wise Asian master? There's a really funny part where Jake is suffering the effects of a poisoned mango in his final match with Chin Woo, and Jake's partner tips him off to Kwong's treachery with a hilarious slow motion cookie monster voice. Jake's final fight with Kwong isn't particularly good since Avanella is clearly not a fighter, but that's cool because the rest of the cast are clearly not actors. Acting skills and ass-kicking skills tend to be inversely proportional, so in a movie like this you need to seed the cast with a few actual actors.

Of course a movie like this comes down to the fight scenes and unfortunately they are not that great. The choreography is mediocre and the frequent slow motion only highlights how much the punches and kicks miss their mark. Many of the fights are badly paced, with the two competitors simply trading blows without any sense of momentum. It's a pity, because in several of the fights it's clear that the competitors have the skills to pay the proverbial bills (Wilson vs Blanks is a particular highlight). I guess Bloodfist is a fairly average secret-underground-fighting-tournament movie, but it's watchable and at just a shade over 80 minutes it doesn't waste too much of your time.

Cybertracker 2 (1995)

Hopefully he won't have to open a door or something

Cybertracker 2, or as I call it, C2: Adjudication Day, takes place several years after the events of Cybertracker, long enough for Eric Phillips (Don "The Dragon" Wilson) to grow a luxurious mane of hair. He is still working for the Secret Service, but now he's working undercover for some reason, and as the film opens he's in the middle of a drug sting operation at an abandoned factory. Naturally everything turns to shit and the place erupts into a massive firefight that goes on for nearly ten minutes. Bullets fly everywhere, tonnes of explosives are detonated and, of course, lots of cars flip over and burst into flames. This is a PM Entertainment film, after all.

With weapons and vehicles that look pretty outdated even for 1995, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that this is supposed to take place in the near future, regardless of how many laser blasts are randomly dubbed into the sound mix. Well, the Near Future makes an explosive entrance in the form of Tracker 9, a low-budget Robocop with a minigun for one arm and a shotgun for another. Tracker 9 helps out when Eric finds himself on the wrong end of an uzi. He's a big improvement over the standard issue Core Tracker, and after the battle he and Eric have good chuckle together. I guess Wilson has gotten over his robophobia.

The Trackers aren't the only ones who have been improved since the last film. Even Agnes 3000, the computer AI that controls Eric's house has had an upgrade. No longer a disembodied voice who nags him incessantly, she is now a tiny holographic woman in a sexy sequined dress who makes creepy comments about going into "Privacy Mode" while he makes out with his hot ex-terrorist reporter wife Connie (Stacy Foster). The next morning they are visited by a young girl for one pointless scene where she does some Virtual Reality martial arts training. It's the mid 90s, so you've got to have some Virtual Reality in there somewhere. Otherwise how will people know it's the future?

The bad guys are an evil corporation that has developed the technology to create exact robot duplicates of people, which they hire out as assassins. They've been hired by the Vice-Governor to kill the Governor (pretty much the only way to get a promotion in the public service) and their overly-complicated plan involves creating an exact robot duplicate of Connie, then using it to take her place and assassinate Governor Quincy while he is making a speech at a press conference. Meanwhile they take the real Connie to an isolated barn to kill her in an explosion, making it look like she has returned to her terrorist ways and accidentally blew herself up while making bombs. Of course they balls this up, so Connie escapes and she and Eric go on the run, teaming up with Connie's camera man and fellow ex-terrorist Jared (Steve Burton) who died in the first film but I guess he got better.

Come to think of it, I'm not really sure why their terrorist organisation, the Union of Human Rights (UHR), has been disbanded. The friendly police captain Swain (Tony Burton aka Rocky's corner man) claims that the UHR was absolved of any wrongdoing after the first film and that the Computerised Justice System was dismantled, however in this film it looks like the Core Trackers are still around and are still executing criminals without trial. Can't fight Robo City Hall, I guess. One guy who is still fighting the good fight is "Trip" Tripwire, a nerdy ex-UHR explosives expert who likes to make Mr. Potato Heads out of plastic explosives and regularly refers to Cybertrackers as "Cyberfuckers". He lets Connie, Eric and Jared hole up in his hideout in an abandoned church while they figure out what to do.

With all these advanced Tracker models running about, OG Core Trackers are about as attractive and popular as G1 iPhones, but they still make an appearance in this film. The police dispatch a Core Tracker Classic to hunt down Connie and Eric, which culminates in a very familiar-looking chase scene through a concrete LA river catchment. I guess since the first film shamelessly ripped off The Terminator and Robocop, it's only fitting that this one seeks inspiration from Terminator 2 and Robocop 2. This chase scene tallies up a pretty impressive amount of destruction, with Eric in a Jeep unloading a mounted grenade launcher on an armoured car driven by the Core Tracker, as well as a heap of old cars which are lying around in LA's flood channels for some reason.

After the Core Tracker fails miserably, the bad guys unleash their secret weapon: an exact robot duplicate of Eric. Their plan is to send Don "The Cyber-Dragon" Wilson on a Terminator-esque rampage through a police station, framing him for the attack, and given Wilson's acting abilities you could hardly blame anyone who confuses Eric for an emotionless cyborg. Eric's robot doppelganger also has a face off with a Core Tracker, easily showing it who's boss by tearing off it's arm and punching off it's head. Pow! Robo-Eric then attacks our heroes at their hideout, fatally wounding Trip who volunteers to stay behind and set off his bombs while the others escape through some sort of underground tunnel system. Somehow they miss the opportunity for a Wilson vs Wilson kickboxing battle.

A loose collection of plot holes sees our heroes making their final assault on the bad guys at their corporate headquarters, along with the help of Tracker 9. Lots of hapless security guards get kicked in the head and Robo-Connie gets frozen with liquid nitrogen and shattered into a million pieces. Hasta la vista, baby! By the end of the film the bad guys see fit to bring out their other secret weapon, the SuperTracker. It's never really made clear what exactly is so Super about it, except that it isn't played by Jim Maniaci like all the others. It manages to knock Ericaround for a bit before he blows it up with a big industrial laser. Eric also faces off with the evil corporate CEO, who is also a kickboxer for some reason. Hey, why not?

PM Entertainment are pretty skilled at cramming their films with action and making them look like bigger films than their budget would suggest. This one is particularly action packed, even by the standards of the original Cybertracker. Nearly all of it looks like new footage too, except for a helicopter explosion and a few short scenes from the Governor's assassination, which were taken from the original Cybertracker. This is the kind of film where nobody seems to care about wasting ammunition and everything explodes, usually for no reason. This particular brand of excess can get pretty monotonous at times, especially with choreography, camerawork and editing that is strictly perfunctory, but it works long enough to distract you from the fact that virtually everything in this film has been done better elsewhere.

Cybertracker (1994)

Cybertracker is a film that dares to ask the question:
What if the Terminator was Robocop?

In Cybertracker, Don "The Dragon" Wilson takes a break from pumping out Bloodfist films and teams up with Ring of Fire cinematographer Richard Pepin to dabble in a slightly different genre; one with lots of towering glass skyscrapers, hugely powerful corporations with generic names like Cybercore and lots of green computery fonts that roll out onto the screen with a series of electronic bleeps and blorps. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Not Too Distant Future. Wilson plays Special Agent Eric Philips, a bodyguard for the US Government, who has been assigned to protect the controversial Senator Dilly.

Dilly is the main proponent of the new Computerised Justice System, where a computer program determines the guilt of defendants and the frequently lethal sentences are carried out by low-budget Terminators called Core Trackers. It doesn't seem to be very popular, because when the first see Dilly at a press conference the attendees are greatly outnumbered by anti-Cybercore protestors. They are waving hilarious signs that say "Computers don't have hearts" and "Computers aren't machines... they're killers". The best part is where a guy angrily shouts "Computers killed my brother!" I want that on a t-shirt.

The speech is interrupted by an attack from an anti-Cybercore terrorist organisation called UHR, or the Union of Human Rights. Wilson foils the attack and saves the senator's life (scored by some ridiculously over-the-top choral music), much to the chagrin of Dilly's personal chief of security Ross, played by Richard Norton. Despite Ross' protests, Dilly decides to test Wilson's loyalty by making him a witness as they brutally execute a Cybercore scientist who they suspect of collaboration with UHR. Wilson balks and is consequently framed with her murder. With a Core Tracker chasing him down, he is kidnapped by UHR and forced to help them infiltrate Cybercore's headquarters and steal evidence of their illegal activities.

Although the Trackers are supposed to be virtually indestructible, Wilson takes out three of them over the course of the film, the first one 25 minutes in. Every time he destroys one the bad guys get another identical Tracker out of cold storage, which really deflates the tension. Taking a cue from Terminator 2, their bodies are made from some sort of rubbery protoplasmic goop, allowing them to store guns in their thighs with tearaway stripper-panels in their pants for easy access. Of course this feature also allows Wilson to shove a live grenade into it's abdominal cavity, so it's a pretty serious design flaw. The Trackers are played by Jim Maniaci, who makes for a pretty imposing/hilarious bad guy as he is fucking enormous. Unfortunately it makes it particularly unconvincing when he has to tuck a tree-trunk sized arm into his leather jacket and pretend like his arm has been blasted off.

Although the film is far too busy ripping off the Terminator to include an actual plot, they do manage to work in a love interest. At first Wilson is too hung up on his ex-wife, sitting in his apartment watching security camera footage of them fighting over his job, which I guess he recorded for some reason. This scene is pretty hilarious as it includes some terrible acting and head-scratching dialog like "I can't live my life waiting for you to walk through that door, dead or alive." Eventually though, Wilson meets Connie, a TV news reporter and the secret leader of UHR. Though for the leader of a terrorist organisation she's not very secretive about her political views, regularly including UHR-sympathetic , anti-Cybercore editorials in her news reports. She and Wilson exchange quips, bodily fluids etc.

It's easy to forget that this film is set in the future since the technology looks particularly dated, even for 1994. One weird touch is that Wilson's apartment is controlled by a voice-activated computer that is basically his robo-wife. It asks him annoying questions about his day and gets huffy when he's curt with it, and he even apologises to it like a chump. For some reason it's programmed it to simulate drunkenness, which sounds like a pretty bad idea. I think we've all drunkenly bought stupid crap off the internet, I wouldn't want my computer doing that shit too. It has all my credit card numbers. His computer also helps him sleep by blasting his head with lasers. Hopefully when he breaks news of his relationship with Connie it doesn't start jealously chasing him around the apartment with kitchen appliances like in Electric Dreams.

Since this is a Merhi/Peppin film it's really about the action, but unfortunately it's mostly rote and uninteresting gunfights. It's established quite early on that the Trackers are virtually immune to gunfire, so I'm not sure what anyone gains from three uninterrupted minutes of UHR freedom fighters cowering behind crates and firing clip after clip into it's torso. There are some decent stunts now again, though. I love seeing people flung across a room by gunfire or explosions, even when the wires are clearly visible as they are here. There's a good bit where the Tracker gets caught in a fiery explosion and stumbles around on fire for a while before getting blasted through a fence with a bazooka.

One thing they do love in this film is having cars ramp into the air, flip over and explode. I believe it happens three times, including once with a fire engine, regardless of whether it makes any sense. In one scene Wilson parks his car across the road to block the path of an incoming van, only to have it ramp up off his car, flip over and explode, leaving his sedan completely unharmed. And that one makes the most sense, other times there's a car just parked in the middle of the road for no reason except to obscure visibility of the stunt ramp, which is clearly visible anyway. I do appreciate their realism-shunning commitment to vehicular mayhem though.

They also work in a few excuses for people to be unarmed, so that Don Wilson can unleash "The Dragon". Consequently he does a lot of kicking of guns out of people's hands, a move I wouldn't think would be very effective in reality but here it's like the evil henchmen's kryponite. There's also a scene at a police station where they have an order to shoot him on sight yet they still attack him with billy clubs. None of it is as well choreographed as I would like. I was looking forward to the big Don "The Dragon" Wilson/Richard Norton fight at the end, but while it's the best fight in the film it still isn't that great. It's one of those fights where the combatants politely take turns wailing on eachother until one of them finally goes down. Wilson gets in a few cool spin kicks at the end, though.

If you showed a robot The Terminator and Robocop and told it to make a movie you'd get something like this, unless the robot refused to participate in the production of anti-robot propaganda on political grounds. It's like Terminator without the thrills and Robocop without the social commentary. As a delivery vehicle for car explosions it's okay, but it doesn't use the sci-fi setting to say much of anything, except that a judicial system controlled and operated by computers would be a bad thing, which isn't really blowing anyone's minds. Surprisingly the film ends with a quote from Ayn Rand, who I'm sure would have appreciated the film's anti-corporate message and the notion that emotion and compassion are vital components of the judicial system.

Ring of Fire 2: Blood and Steel (1993)

My diagnosis? Terminal homoeroticism.

My major complaint with the first Ring of Fire film is that it was a little light on the action, but you certainly can't make that claim about the sequel. The movie starts with a violent jewellery store robbery, a fistfight, multiple gunfights, a car chase and a big explosion, and that's just in the first five minutes! Dr Johnny Wu is in the store at the time of the robbery, picking out an engagement ring with his fiance Julie (Maria Ford, now a redhead) and when Johnny defenestrates a criminal dumb enough to try and steal their ring, another robber shoots Julie in the shoulder. Good thing her fiance is the world's best kickboxer/surgeon.

As Julie coalesces in the hospital and discusses honeymoon destinations with her fiance, she is visited by most of the major players from the first film; Brad (Dale Jacoby), Chuck (Vince Murdocco), Lee (Ron Yuan) and Kwong (Eric Lee). Kwong is still dressed like a teenage skate punk and is played for even more laughs as a creepy sex pervert. Actually it's pretty amazing how friendly everybody is with eachother considering that in the previous film they were engaged in a violent gang war, not to mention the fact that Chuck and Brad stabbed Julie and tried to kill Johnny. I guess Johnny isn't one to hold a grudge.

You know who does hold a grunge though? Kalin (Ian Jacklin), the curly-haired leader of an extremely homoerotic underground street gang and brother to one of the injured jewellery thieves. Him and his crew, dressed in matching leather daddy outfits, break into the hospital and try to bust him out, but when Johnny intervenes the robber is accidentally shot in the head with an uzi. Whoops. Kalin is captured by the police, but his second-in-command Predator (Evan Lurie) breaks him out of the prison bus by running it off the road so it explodes in a huge fireball. Kalin's fine though. In revenge they kidnap Julie from the hospital and ransom her for 250,000 dollars, but of course the only thing Johnny is going to give them is 250,000 kicks to the face.

I thought that the gang's post-apocalyptic meets gay-S&M-club outfits were a little weird, but it turns out that they are just one of the many themed street gangs that populate a network of subterranean tunnels under L.A. When Johnny enters an underground tunnel to try and find Kalin he's immediately attacked by a gang of thugs wearing hockey masks and twirling torches like nunchaku. He defeats them, but two of them tear off his shirt so he's got an excuse to spend the rest of the film half-naked. He then befriends Ernest (Sy Richardson), a crippled homeless veteran who lives in an underground commune of crazy homeless people, including the obligatory out-of-work Shakespearan actor. I don't know why but there's always one of those guys in every homeless community. Must be an L.A. thing. He explains that to find Kalin and rescue Julie, Johnny must run a maze of underground tunnels and face a gauntlet of themed gangs.

So yeah, the film is basically a rip-off of the The Warriors. There is even a DJ running an underground (literally!) radio station that broadcasts updates to all the gangs, except instead of a sexy woman it's a flaming homosexual. Like any Warriors rip-off it comes down to how fun and creative the gangs are, and - save for one gang who wear samurai armour made out of garbage and hide under styrofoam rubble to ambush intruders - they aren't that interesting. There's a gang who wear roller skates and neon netting. There's a gang who twirl neon nunchaku. It was the early 90s, you see, so there's a lot of neon around the place. So much so that there's another gang called the Shadow Warriors who blend into the background by wearing black outfits with with neon stripes all over them.

As Johnny works his way through the tunnels he is followed by his friends Chuck, Brad, Lee and Kwong, so typically each gang will be fought twice, once by Johnny and then again by his friends. Eventually Kwong gets separated from the main group, which is nice because his solo fights are some of the best in the film. He gets to use a three-section staff and fight a female bodybuilder while he gropes her and makes lavacious comments. Meanwhile Chuck, Brad and Lee stumble across a gang of sexy dominatrix prostitutes with their own subterranean strip club. This was one of my favourite scenes, for obvious reasons but also because of Chuck's hilarious delivery of the line "Let's get NA-KED!"

There is another line of dialog that sticks in my mind. It's a minor quibble but I have to get it out of my system. When Ernest and Johnny are first attacked by a street gang and Ernest tells Johnny "let's see how many balls you got". This strikes me as a strange turn of phrase, since fortitude is usually (and erroneously) correlated with the size of one's testicles, not the number. You wouldn't say that a particularly courageous guy must have, like, fifteen balls. He'd have a scrotum that looked like a bunch of grapes in a sock. Surely the answer would be either zero or two, in which case you'd say "let's see if you've got any balls". Sure, Johnny might have a single testicle due to a medical issue, but if so then it's a particularly insensitive remark on Ernest's part.

Actually Ernest has the closest thing to a character arc in the movie. They try to work in a few Serious Moments about homelessness, but it's pretty silly and patronising. I found the ending particularly insulting; Johnny offers to help Ernest find some work and get back on his feet, but Ernest decides he prefers the simpler life of living in a sewer and self-medicating his mental illness with alcohol and drugs. Still, I think it's fair to say that social commentary isn't top priority when you list everyone's martial arts credentials before their acting credits. Back then you couldn't just train up a pretty-boy pop star for a few months and put him in an action film, you had to be "5 time World Karate Champion" or something.

After the somewhat realistic first film, number two in the Ring of Fire saga takes a pretty surreal turn. I didn't know that subterranean gang violence was such a problem in Los Angeles. It's also pretty much non-stop action sequences, strung together with the simplest of rescue-the-girl plots, like a videogame. There's even two fake endings, culminating in a car stunt and a big explosion. The fights are pretty good though, choreographed by Art Camacho as were all the Ring of Fire films. The only fight that doesn't work too well is the one with the hockey mask gang, since it's lit primarily by their twirling torches. I enjoyed Ring of Fire 2: Blood and Steel and I also like that you can swap around the words "Fire", "Blood", and "Steel" and still have a servicible action movie title.

Ring of Fire (1991)

I would totally watch a stage production of
Phantom of the Opera starring Don "The Dragon" Wilson

After watching Ring of Fire 3: Lion's Strike, I had a hankering to track down the previous two adventures of Don "The Dragon" Wilson as Dr. Johnny Wu. I like the idea of a hero who can both kick asses and heal them, something that crops up regularly in traditional Chinese kung fu films but only very rarely in Western action films. Unfortunately at this stage in the Ring of Fire trilogy Johnny is only in the business of healing asses as he is bound by a strict oath of non-violence. He refuses the pleas of his cousin Terry (Steven Vincent Leigh, Sword of Honor) to join his kickboxing team and take part in an underground fighting ring. As Johnny puts it "You beat them up, I patch them up".

Terry does his best to beat them up in the opening sequence, "them" being a rival kickboxing surf gang lead by Chuck (Vince Murdocco, who was apparently in Sworn to Justice although I don't remember who) and his friends Brad (Dale Jacoby from No Retreat, No Surrender) and Bud (Gary Daniels, Fist of the North Star). Terry gets his ass whupped at first, but his teammate Kwong (Eric Lee) saves the day with his drunken boxing. Chuck gets a thorough ass-kicking, much to the consternation of his fiance Julie (Maria Ford), who is sick of Chuck's constant fighting and the fact that he's a complete asshat.

It's actually quite a while before Johnny makes his debut appearance, but it's a pretty good one. It's one of those dramatic reveals where you only see him talking to his cousin with his back to camera and then it pans around to show his face and there's a musical sting and you go "Holy shit! It's Don 'The Dragon' Wilson!" Just in case you missed his name in the credits, on the DVD cover, plot summary etc. After dealing with his cousin he also gets harrassed by Sgt. Lopez (Michael Delano), a racist cop who is constantly accusing Johnny and his cousins of being thugs and drug dealers. I guess he must have worked through those race issues eventually because by the third film they are BFFs.

Actually, most of the film revolves around a blossoming relationship between Johnny and Julie. When they first meet at Johnny's grandmother's Chinese restaurant, Julie mistakes him for a waiter. Johnny plays along, making it the first time in human history where a doctor has pretended to be a waiter in order to hit on a girl. Johnny is smitten and begins to stalk her, showing up at a "Masquerade Ball" (more of a costume party really) dressed up like the Phantom of the Opera. Way more romantic than Chuck, who looks like some sort of post-apocalyptic Cirque de Soleil reject. The next day Johnny goes to the clothing store where she works and creepily professes his love to someone in the change room who he thinks is Julie but is actually a horny old woman. Wah-waaaah. Julie falls for him anyway, but she's still got to deal with asshole Chuck and his hatred of Asians. So you know, star-crossed lovers etc.

Although the two of them make a big deal about the reactions of their respective families, it all gets resolved fairly easily. When Julie shows her grandmother a picture of Johnny she solemnly intones "This is a problem," which may make her seem like a huge racist but it turns out she's fine with it and more worried about Chuck's reaction. Likewise with Johnny's grandma, who is horrified at first but after peppering Julie with questions she determines that Julie's an acceptable mate for her grandson. By which I mean she can cook and is of child-bearing age; granny isn't too hard to please. Soon they are indulging in a montage of romantic movie cliches, like eating ice cream on the boardwalk, kissing at sundown in sillhouette, doing tai chi on the beach etc.

Meanwhile Terry is having his own montage, only his consists of his intense poolside training regimen for the escalating race war between his Chinese bros and the surfers. It's sparked off for reals when Kwong, who is in his mid-40s but dressed like a 12 year old skate punk from the late 80s, invades the surfers' turf to hit on girls. Chuck's guys pants him in front of the girls and then Kwong sneaks onto the roof of a building and pisses on them in retaliation. That marks the end of the teen-sex-comedy type antics though, as the surfers' then corner Kwong in an alley and beat the shit out of him, putting him in the hospital. Tensions rise and eventually the conflict erupts into a stiffly choreographed street fight between the gangs. Luckily the police arrive and break things up before it gets out of hand.

Johnny tries to get his cousin to stop the turf war, but while Terry doesn't want any more violence he doesn't know how to stop things without looking like a pussy. Johnny suggests that Terry challenge Chuck to fight "they way they used to in Thailand" (or more accurately in Kickboxer) in a literal ring of fire with broken glass on their hands. That way when Chuck inevitably backs down from the fight Terry won't lose face. It can't possibly fail! Unless Chuck accepts the challenge, which of course he does, and soon Terry, who I'm sure wishes he thought the plan through a little better, is bleeding out on the pavement. Julie commits a huge faux pas by showing up at his Chinese funeral wearing black, but she needn't have worried because that is by far her least egregious fashion mistake in the film. I know it was 1991, but Jesus; Mom jeans with thigh-high hooker boots, acid-washed denim jackets, even a long-sleeve denim onesie. Behold Julie, Queen of Denim.

Surprisingly Terry's death still isn't enough to force Johnny into breaking his vow of non-violence. It's only when Chuck and Brad bust into Julie's aerobics class (more 80s fashion) and slap her around that Johnny finally decides to fight them in the ring. I'm surprised he didn't start beating them up right there, but it dissolves straight from Johnny glowering in the aerobics class to Johnny glowering at the underground fighting ring, so maybe he teleported them all there through the sheer force of his anger. Naturally it's a pretty one-sided match between Chuck and Johnny, so Brad leaps into the ring and starts beating Johnny around with a chair. What is this, WWE Raw? Chuck, in a fit of desperation, grabs a samurai sword and tries to stab Johnny, but Julie intervenes and gets slashed. Strangely this does not cause Johnny to go batshit and beat them both to a bloody pulp, rather Chuck and Brad immediately surrender after realising what they've done while Johnny carries the injured Julie out of the ring and out of the movie.

It was a pretty interesting decision to focus this film on interracial romance rather than kicks to the face. I liked that it isn't handled with kid gloves (Julie and Johnny even have a sex scene!) and when the two gangs are trash-talking eachother the racial epithets flow quite freely. Also, it's kind of refreshing to see such strictly racially-divided gangs, rather than the multicultural street gangs that tend to show up in films like this. In this respect you're definitely more than you'd expect from a direct-to-video Don "The Dragon" Wilson film. On the other hand, it's pretty light on the action. Johnny's vow of non-violence may give the final battle a bit more dramatic impact, but nobody picks up a Don "The Dragon" Wilson film to watch him make googly eyes at some blonde in a belly shirt. Now that Johnny has broken his vow of non-violence and dealt with his race issues, hopefully in the sequel they can get down to the business of kicking ass.

Ring of Fire 3: Lion's Strike (1995)

Grandpa's got a gun!

What's up with the subtitle to this film? There aren't any lions, nor any super-powerful secret martial arts moves that go by that name. I feel cheated. Maybe it's explained in the first two Ring of Fire films, which according to my extensive research (five minutes on imdb) are a legitimate series with continuity and everything. This is a welcome change from Don "The Dragon" Wilson's Bloodfist films, which are united only by their inclusion of blood and fists.

In these films, Wilson plays Dr. Johnny Wu, medical practitioner/kickboxing champ. This seems like an unlikely combination, but it mustn't be that rare because when the film opens he's sparring on the roof of the hospital with a fellow kickboxer/doctor (Timothy D. Baker from No Retreat, No Surrender). They are interrupted by a bunch of mafia goons trying to break out their geriatric Don before he's transferred back to jail, and as the Don escapes in a helicopter he witnesses Wu shooting his grandson in self defence. You'd expect the rest of the film to be about the Don seeking vengeance, right? Wrong motherfucker, because Wu hangs off the side of the building and blows up the helicopter with a few shots from his magic pistol. Actually this sequence has fuck all to do with the rest of the movie; it's just an average day in the life of Dr. Johnny Wu, Ass-Kicker MD.

Things are pretty stressful for our resident doctor/martial artist. Not only does he have to deal with the mafia shooting up the hospital staff and street punks tearing through the wards on their motorcycles, but he's also raising his son Bobby (played by Wilson's real-life son) alone, his wife having died in a car accident sometime after Ring of Fire 2. The hospital is critically understaffed as well, (especially after Dr. Wu hospitalises a bunch of unruly street thugs in the emergency room) so naturally his boss decides it's the perfect time for Wu to take a holiday with his son. He even lends Wu his sweet mountain cabin, so remotely situated that his brick-sized cell phone has no reception. Gee, I wonder if that will come back to bite him.

Meanwhile, an international co-operation of organised crime bosses are branching out into the lucrative field of smuggling stolen nuclear weapons. This "worldwide mafia" includes some other Italian mafia guys, the Russian mob, the Chinese triads, the Bogota drug cartel and the Yakuza. Once again the black man is excluded by The Man, but a couple of enterprising young African Americans decide to break into the mafia's offices themselves, stealing, among other things, a floppy disk containing 1.44 Mb of hard evidence implicating the crime bosses in their smuggling operation. Some mafia goons kill one thief and chase the other down in a big explosion-y car chase, but when Dr. Wu stumbles across them and intervenes the fucking idiots run away and leave the bag of loot behind. Naturally the bag is identical to Wu's doctorin' bag, so in a mix-up that makes no sense whatsoever, Wu heads off to the remote cabin with the diskette.

Up at the cabin Wu and Bobby are busy inspecting a caged wildcat when they run across Kelly Scarborough (Bobbie Phillips), Army Ranger turned Park Ranger with a penchant for tight-fitting ribbed turtlenecks. "Pretty nice cougar, huh?" says Bobby. It sure is. Actually, early in the film Wu mentions that Bobby is desperate for a new mom, and he's not kidding. When Wu teams up with her to deliver a beat down to some poachers Bobby gets so excited he pounds the shit out of their groceries. Impressed by her fighting skills, Wu invites her to their cabin for a super awkward date and when they kiss Bobby pumps his fists and shouts "Yes!" I think Wu needs to have a word with him about the realities of dating. It could get pretty traumatic if she doesn't stick around for Ring of Fire 4.

Anyway, after their date is over the bad guys manage to track them down and surround the cabin. There's a pretty weird continuity error when one of the goons collapses from a blow-dart in the neck before Wu even knows they are there, but the long and short of it is that Wu manages to sneak up and take them out while they are blowing the shit out of the cabin and their car. The remainder of the bad guys somehow manage to escape back to the city, gather reinforcements (including a Russian psychopath who hates being called "Boris") and fly back to the mountain long before Kelly and Wu can stash Bobby at a nearby farm and hoof it back to civilisation.

This kicks off a Hard Target style style cat-and-mouse game as the Russian/Italian mobsters chase them through the snow and shoot everything in sight. Wu and Kelly use the poachers' bear traps to their advantage, but things get pretty weird when the bad guys stumble into trip mines and net traps. Are trip mines standard poaching equipment or were Wu and Kelly able to rustle them up with whatever they had on hand? Anyway, the dastardly Russian ends up heading back to farm and kidnapping Bobby, arranging an exchange for the disk at some factory somewhere (when deciding the setting for their action movie climax the filmmakers flip a coin that says "abandoned warehouse" on one side and "factory" on the other).

Wu seeks the help of a cop, a friend from the earlier films from what I can gather, who refuses to inform the rest of the force, adding that most of the force is in the mafia's pocket and that "they said no cops!" Wow, fantastic. The two of them head to the factory for the final showdown and when the Russians make a last-minute power grab from the Italians, Wu is given enough time to snatch his son and have his sweaty, shirtless, somewhat anti-climatic fight with the evil Russian.

This is a pretty terrible movie by any metric you care to name, but for Direct-to-Video it's pretty action packed, even if the action doesn't always make sense or have anything to do with the plot. Actually, this is one of the most enjoyable Don "The Dragon" Wilson film I've ever seen. I also like the idea of a doctor who beats people up in his spare time, so maybe I'll track down the other Ring of Fire films. I have to mention the hand-painted art they used for the DVD menu, though. I mean, I know I picked this up in a 12-pack of dodgy action films so I'm lucky there's any menu at all, but... Jesus, just look at it. Who did that, Rob Liefeld? Is that supposed to be Don "The Dragon" Wilson? Nice font for the title too. Holy shit.

Out for Blood (1992)

Behold the acting range of Don "The Dragon" Wilson!

The world of Direct-to-Video action films is getting pretty crowded these days, what with JCVD, Dolph Lundgren and, of course, Steven Seagal all throwing their hats into the ring. However, back in the late 80s and early 90s, there was one name that was synonymous with Direct-to-Video action: Don "The Dragon" Wilson. I don't who gave him the nickname "The Dragon", but that shit has stuck with him like herpes and now I believe you have to pay his lawyers ten cents every time you refer to him without it. "The Dragon" put his considerable kickboxing talent (and less considerable acting talent) to use in dozens of dodgy action films. He appeared in Albert-Pyun-esque low budget sci-fi flicks like Cybertracker and Futurekick and eight out of the nine Bloodfist films. In 1995 he made a whopping seven films! Truly, this was the age of "The Dragon".

In the very Seagalian-titled Out for Blood, Wilson plays John Decker, a criminal lawyer/martial artist whose life is destroyed when his family is murdered by drug dealers. The culprits are roaming free thanks to an incompetent police force and Decker's selective amnesia about the night in question. The police are skeptical about Decker's condition, but he is being treated by a psychiatrist named Dr McConnell (Ron Steelman). The two of them hang out a lot socially, which is weird and probably unethical, and McConnell takes a personal interest in restoring Decker's memory.

One night Decker is out jogging, haunted by memories of his family, when he is confronted by some stereotypical scumbag drug dealers (many uses of "holmes", "ese" etc). Simmering with rage, he beats them to a pulp and after realising that one of the men was there on the night his wife was murdered he tosses him off a rooftop. A homeless woman witnesses his act of vigilante justice and soon the media have branded him with the hilarious nickname "Karate Man". It's only later at the hospital, when he helps subdue a enormous, drug-fueled madman, that his synapses begin to fire and he gets a little piece of his memory back. He realises that his amnesia can only be cured by beating up as many drug-dealing scumbags as he can find. This is probably the best set-up for a martial arts vigilante film ever.

So by day Decker is a smartly dressed criminal lawyer and by night he stalks the streets of LA in his Adidas jogging suit looking for drug dealers to kick in the head. He doesn't have to look very far either; he can't even enjoy a quiet meal a noodle bar without being interrupted by an armed gunman. At one point he visits some drug dealers in an old train yard and even though there's just one dealer selling coke to a couple of dorky white guys there are at least a dozen guys armed with uzis. Seems excessive, but Decker manages to punch, kick and shoot his way through them anyway, getting those two buyers caught in the crossfire. Don't do drugs, kids, or you too could end up in a Don "The Dragon" Wilson film.

Decker also tries to conceal his vigilante alter-ego from his would-be girlfriend, a gallery owner named Joanna Montague (Sheri Shattuck doing her best Katherine Hepburn impression), but she manages to piece it together when she sees a report about "Karate Man" on the TV. This film probably sets a record for conveniently placed local news reports; everybody seems to have their TVs on and set to the local news 24 hours a day. Joanna is kind of annoying but she does introduce him to a Japanese artist named Hiroshi (Aki Aleong) who acts in the critical role of "wise master", inspiring him with folk wisdom and haikus.

Gradually Decker works his way up the food chain of the local drug distribution network, which is lead by a cowboy named Rick (Todd Curtis). His organisation seems to be a pretty varied lot, from bikers to hillbillies to surfer dudes, but they all seem to be united by their love of bandanas and long flowing hair. Unfortunately his gang cannot lay claim to having the best hair of all, that title belongs to a mafia bodyguard played by Deron McBee (aka Malibu from American Gladiators).

Naturally Rick kidnaps Joanna and Decker is forced compete in unarmed combat with a knife expert named Blade. There's a pretty funny moment when it focuses on Blade's fruity scorpion earring, and there's a musical sting that sounds like a rattlesnake. Eventually it turns out that the mastermind of the drug organisation (and the murder of Decker's family) is Dr McConnell. I'd put in a spoiler warning, but if that revelation comes as a surprise to you then... jeez. I don't know what to say. Maybe you should give up on narrative fiction altogether and take up scrap-booking. Turns out that McConnell spared his life for some reason and kept him under control using a combination of hypnosis and drugs.

This is probably one of the better Don "The Dragon" Wilson films. There's a lot of action and while the fights aren't fantastically choreographed or edited, they are extremely violent. There are several broken limbs, an eye gouging and a several stabbings. If a fight film isn't technically brilliant I'll take some tastelessly brutal violence as an acceptable trade-off. A less acceptable trade-off is compensating for a complete lack of boobs by having the portly Dr. McConnell lounging around in a skin-tight, nipple-accentuating sweater. I'll take no boobs over man-boobs.