Kung Fu: Year of the Tiger by Lee Chang

Kung Fu
Year of the Tiger
by Lee Chang (Joseph Rosenberger)

Eurasian martial artist Mace is visiting from Hong Kong to find his uncle is being forced to pilot his boat for mafia drug runners. Mace and his cousin decimate the gangsters with their Kung Fu skills and recruit the Coast Guard to make a rescue, leading to a Rosenberger trademark of a fight on a large boat.

Mace's style is to use exotically named moves that maim or kill in one strike. At one point Mace kills his enemy by screaming at the right pitch, which hits a vibration that melts his enemy's brains, which begs the question of why he doesn't just do that all the time.

From Amazon

Ninja The Violent Sorcerer

Ninja The Violent Sorcerer

Sometimes it looks like Godfrey Ho/Tomas Tang is inching towards making an actual movie instead of editing in ninja fights to a crime drama.  Here, most of the footage is original, consisting of battles between ninjas and hopping vampires.

For once it looks like he edited in a decent movie, a gambling-fu comedy The Stunning Gambling, which I'll need to track down.

Bangkok Revenge (2012)

Bangkok Revenge (2012)


Boy's parents are killed, boy grows up being trained in the martial arts, boy seeks revenge.  There might have been an interesting angle in the lead being a compassionless sociopath, but I just couldn't, it's so badly put together.  Bad performances, bad direction, bad editing.  The real shame is that the action choreography looks like it was probably really good, and John Foo has some moves, but they're completely lost in poor camera angles and incompetent editing.

On Amazon video.

Wasted Opportunity - Dream Faceoffs Too Little Too Late

The last few years have given us, and by that I mean me, lots of dream matches that have made me thrilled, then pleased, then nonplussed, then depressed and very, very old.

Jet Li vs Dolph Lundgren
Jeff Hardy vs Rob Van Dam
Stallone vs Jean Claude Van Damme

All twenty years too late, or ten years for wrestlers, who age twice as fast.

So here's Donnie Yen and Ken Lo, the fastest kickers in Hong Kong, both in their fifties and looking much older with the clothes, haircuts, and tattoos.  Having said that, they still move better than me.  But not as good as 1994's Donnie Yen and Ken Lo.

Wasted Opportunity - Vincent Zhao

Vincent Zhao replaced Jet Li in the Once Upon a Time In China series, but failed to take his place in general when Li came to make mediocre films in America.

This is one of Ken Lo's two good fight scenes, the other being the amazingly kicky Drunken Master II, but frankly I think Lo probably got more of a career out of that than could have been expected.

When Wasted Opportunities Face Off

Chin Ka-Lok!

Yu Rong Guang!

Green Hornet!



It stinks!

Could have been a good fight, but this was a criminally cheap production shot almost entirely in a field.

Wasted Opportunity - Yu Rong-Guang

Yu Rong-Guang started out strong co-starring in Iron Monkey, possibly the best wire-fu movie ever.  The same year he was the villain against Michelle Yeoh in Project S, but aside from his excellent role as the baddie in Jet Li's My Father is a Hero, he was criminally underused.  Pretty soon he was playing dads in period pieces, but at least he seems to be finding steady work in non-fighting roles.  I seem to remember from reports at the time that audiences didn't care for his red Chinese origins or Mandarin accent.

Wasted Opportunity - Chin Ka-Lok

Leading up to the Chinese handover of Hong Kong in 1997 there was a huge drain of star power from the Hong Kong film industry.  Asian stars were becoming popular in the west, and seeking bigger opportunities (and fleeing an uncertain political future) most of the big names moved to America or Canada.

During this time I looked forward to several lower tiered actors getting their opportunity to shine.  It didn't happen.  The middle dropped out of the film industry, and we were left with Andy Lau blockbusters and Z level gambling or triad dramas.

Chin Ka-Lok could have, and should have, been the Bruce Li to Jackie Chan's Bruce Lee.  He didn't have the same level of charisma, but he could move and had a face for comedy.  Instead, he languished in Young and Dangerous knock-offs and ghost comedies.  Even when he was in Kung Fu movies, he rarely had a fighting role.

He got one starring role in a big budget Kung Fu action film, 1991's Bury Me High.  Here's a look at what we should have seen more of, presented in copyright filter baffling Vietnamese

Bangkok Knockout

Give a Thai stunt team an empty warehouse, some cameras, and just enough of a story that it's not just an exhibition, and you've got Bangkok Knockout.  The challenge with having a movie that is just a series of fights is one of pacing.  You either need a break between them, or gradually ramp up the intensity, otherwise you burn out your audience.  Bangkok Knockout tried the latter approach, and it almost worked, but by the end there was just too much.  This kind of movie probably works better in small pieces.  Here's the best cage fight you'll ever see