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never watched a martial arts film ever

Started by madhair60, October 31, 2020, 12:40:03 AM

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Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Spiteface on October 31, 2020, 06:12:33 PM
Yeah, just to clarify, I was taking the piss regarding Godfrey Ho. Ninja Terminator is good for a laugh, though.
The most recent one of his I watched was "Ninja, The Violent Sorceror", which only works as a title if you read it as a ninja being introduced to a violent sorceror (they aren't the same person). Ho did make "Undefeatable", the most confusing of all the Cynthia Rothrock movies, so I must doff my cap to him for that fine work.

Talking of Rothrock, anything where she stars with Richard Norton is going to be at least entertaining. He's one of the few actors who seemed comfortable losing a fight to her - so many of her movies have a doughy, underwhelming male take over the final fight, where she gets to fight the main female villain.

And like lazarou said upthread, big recommendation for Scott Adkins. He's a decent actor, and a fantastic on-screen fighter. Drifting away from the topic of the thread a little, but he did a video for GQ Sports a few months ago where he breaks down some fight scenes from movies, and his insights are really interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BzGTiJ0k3k .

lazarou

Undefeatable is a personal fave of mine. Utterly insane early-'90s martial arts cheese, it certainly isn't the most technically amazing fighting film you'll ever see but it's hugely entertaining. One of those where I might have audibly cheered when I saw it come up on Best Of The Worst knowing what they were in for.

Loved that Adkins clip, and any martial arts or b-action fans are strongly recommended to check out Adkins' own YouTube channel where he's been spending his lockdown time interviewing every notable action star he can get his hands on, from Tony Jaa to Dolph Lundgren through to Rothrock herself, with plenty of deeper cuts for the Benny Urquidez or Gary Daniels fans out there. He's a likeable sort and clearly knows his onions, being a fan of the genre his whole life (the Rothrock interview has some pretty incredible and strangely heartwarming evidence on that front).

QDRPHNC

Was Undefeatable the Cynthia Rothrock one? I watched the hell out of Chinas O'Brien 1 and 2 when I was a kid.


lazarou

Quote from: QDRPHNC on November 02, 2020, 03:45:26 AM
Was Undefeatable the Cynthia Rothrock one? I watched the hell out of Chinas O'Brien 1 and 2 when I was a kid.

Yeah that's the one. It's every bit as unhinged as it looks in the clips. It's been a while since I saw it but the main things that stuck in my mind were the main villain somehow managing to overplay the part of "karate rapist" and random characters knowing karate to "fight to the death" level. And of course that showdown at the end which has to be seen in its entirety to be believed. But you don't have to take my word for it, as someone's put a nice upscale of the whole film on YouTube.

I wasn't as big on the second one but the first China O'Brien's a classic.

phantom_power

Drive (not that one) starring Mark Dacascos is a decent American martial arts film

QDRPHNC

Quote from: lazarou on November 02, 2020, 04:59:11 AM
Yeah that's the one. It's every bit as unhinged as it looks in the clips. It's been a while since I saw it but the main things that stuck in my mind were the main villain somehow managing to overplay the part of "karate rapist" and random characters knowing karate to "fight to the death" level. And of course that showdown at the end which has to be seen in its entirety to be believed. But you don't have to take my word for it, as someone's put a nice upscale of the whole film on YouTube.

I wasn't as big on the second one but the first China O'Brien's a classic.

Cheers for the link, I'll give it a brief scan and if it would suitable to watch with the boy. I probably saw China O'Brien when I was his age. Just looking the cover brings back memories of our local, hippy-run video show. The smell of the big plastic VHS boxes. Lovely.


Famous Mortimer

This is the calmest the villain of "Undefeatable" gets:


Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Richard Lewis: The Cocaine Years.

I watched The Man With the Iron Fists yesterday. A Tarantinoesque pastiche job ("Presented" by the man himself, no less) from the Wu Tang Clan's RZA. I didn't really follow the plot, but it was enjoyable tripe nonetheless. The cast dials their performances up to 11 and it's bursting with similarly OTT gore effects. Probably the funniest part is the sight of a rotund Russell Crowe winning fights against opponents way more athletic than him.

Is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon too obvious to mention? It was mega at the time, but it feels like it's faded from the public consciousness in the years since.

Shit Good Nose

#39
Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on November 02, 2020, 02:51:04 PM
Is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon too obvious to mention? It was mega at the time, but it feels like it's faded from the public consciousness in the years since.

Having watched it recently (for the first time since it originally came out) I can confirm that it still holds up as a decent film, however compared with even c-grade straight-to-Netflix stuff that has come out in more recent years it will seem VERY pedestrian and cliched to someone watching it for the first time now, in the same way that Hoosiers/Best Shot watched now seems like the most cliche ridden sports film ever made.

It also leans more heavily towards the King Hu school, i.e. a bit art-house-y (also cf. all those that came out since like Hero and The House of Flying Daggers).

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I remember my best mate decrying it as artsy fartsy at the time. He was familiar with the classic Hong Kong stuff and complained about Crouching Tiger's fight scenes lacking impact.
I imagine it was many Westerner's first experience of that sort of thing (at least since Enter the Dragon, anyway), which would have helped its reputation upon release.


Famous Mortimer

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on November 02, 2020, 04:15:09 PM
Go on, treat yourself


I once owned that set, and they're both surprisingly awful! (also, they aren't really martial arts movies)

El Unicornio, mang

Oh.. never seen them, assumed they'd be some Seagal aikido nonsense!

Shit Good Nose

Seagal is actually a bona fide martial arts master (and was one long before a lot of the others), but they all - ALL - absolutely hate him and think he's a massive bellend.  The fact he's never been invited to join an Expendables film is very telling.  He routinely says it's because he's not interested and thinks it's all very silly (irony completely lost), but there's been enough said about him over the years by plenty of people that point to him being the problem.  I seem to remember even Justin Lee Collins (pre infamy) remarked on what a chore Seagal was.

Blumf

What are his best movies? There's so much crap he's done.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I always assumed the way Seagal goes out at the end of Machete was an ego driven rewrite he insisted upon.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Blumf on November 02, 2020, 09:40:54 PM
What are his best movies? There's so much crap he's done.

I don't think any of them are any good, but his late 80s to early 90s ones (Nico/Above The Law, Marked For Death, Out For Justice, Hard To Kill etc) are generally considered as his best, with the consensus being Under Siege at the top.  My favourite is On Deadly Ground, but for all the wrong reasons.

Trivia note - he was the fight choreographer on Frankenheimer's rather odd The Challenge, and Never Say Never Again.

lazarou

The best thing about Seagal is once you know The Story it's impossible not to think of it any time his name comes up. The story in question being that during filming on Out For Justice he claimed that due to his Aikido training it was impossible to choke him out, only for genuine hard nut "Judo" Gene LeBell to promptly step up and choke him out so hard he shit himself. He swears blind this never happened of course.

The most entertaining Seagal movie for my money is probably Marked For Death, aka the other '90s actioner to heavily feature Jamaican voodoo drug lords that isn't Predator 2. I haven't seen it since the '90s so it probably feels bracingly racist by now, but it's definitely got a villain called Screwface and some absolutely fucking appalling low-effort one-liners so swings and roundabouts and all that.

zomgmouse


dissolute ocelot

Quote from: lazarou on November 02, 2020, 11:37:07 PM
The best thing about Seagal is once you know The Story it's impossible not to think of it any time his name comes up. The story in question being that during filming on Out For Justice he claimed that due to his Aikido training it was impossible to choke him out, only for genuine hard nut "Judo" Gene LeBell to promptly step up and choke him out so hard he shit himself. He swears blind this never happened of course.

The most entertaining Seagal movie for my money is probably Marked For Death, aka the other '90s actioner to heavily feature Jamaican voodoo drug lords that isn't Predator 2. I haven't seen it since the '90s so it probably feels bracingly racist by now, but it's definitely got a villain called Screwface and some absolutely fucking appalling low-effort one-liners so swings and roundabouts and all that.

The best Seagal is Executive Decision where he dies in the first 15 minutes Under Siege, but that's an American-style action action movie without much martial arts. Seagal generally seemed to do cop or crime movies rather than pure martial arts movies, and bad cop movies at that. JCVD despite a reputation for self-parody has a much better filmography. (Van Damme made an entertaining movie with John Woo, Hard Target, in which he plays a cajun or something, and in later years, he seems to enjoy teaming up with Scott Adkins, as in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, which some film critics will tell you is the Vertigo of cyborg movies.)

In more traditional style, both Raid films have amazing fights, although the second one seems to want to turn into War And Peace. Kill Zone (aka SPL) with Donnie Yen is an amazing cop/action movie with a mix of shooting, kicking, and knifing, and just the right amount of operatic emotion and small-kid sentimentalising.

Haywire and Atomic Blonde are neat if you like ladies killing people.


Jerzy Bondov

Quote from: dissolute ocelot on November 03, 2020, 10:01:27 AM
Haywire and Atomic Blonde are neat if you like ladies killing people.
The Night Comes For Us has some great lady action, particularly a very violent 2v1 lady fight, with the hammer girl from The Raid 2.

lazarou

Mentioned it earlier but neglected to mention Chocolate is basically a female take on Ong Bak but in place of Tony Jaa you've got  Jeeja Yanin as a little autistic girl kicking people off buildings. Also the recent Furie is good fun in that vein but more of a straight-up action movie with a lot less in the way of hyper-technical martial arts business. That last one should still be on Netflix in most regions too.

chveik

speaking of ladies in martial art films, Johnnie To's The Heroic Trio & Executioners are quite fun

Popping in to agree with dissolute ocelot

I like Haywire, rather different to how I thought it would be staged. Well worth a watch.

Going through a brief selection of DTV/D martial artists

Seagal - once you get to Under Siege 2 and Fire Down Below, its all over. Not seen Marked for Death for years, but its wonderfully brutal and Very Much Of Its Time.

JCVD - watch the two most recent Universal Soldiers. They're really rather good.

and that in turn takes us to

Adkins - well worth a late night film choice. Although I'm a bigger fan of his route to 'stardom' taking in Dangerfield, Doctors and a role as a barman in Eastenders.




Famous Mortimer

Quote from: chveik on November 04, 2020, 02:06:56 PM
speaking of ladies in martial art films, Johnnie To's The Heroic Trio & Executioners are quite fun

Ooh yes, I bloody love The Heroic Trio. I remember looking Anita Mui up and discovering that a surprising number of action / martial arts movie stars in that part of the world are also super-popular singers.

Blumf

Quote from: A Hat Like That on November 04, 2020, 02:50:38 PM
Adkins - well worth a late night film choice. Although I'm a bigger fan of his route to 'stardom' taking in Dangerfield, Doctors and a role as a barman in Eastenders.

The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud looks... interesting?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMchbW8WWQI

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on November 04, 2020, 02:52:49 PM
Ooh yes, I bloody love The Heroic Trio. I remember looking Anita Mui up and discovering that a surprising number of action / martial arts movie stars in that part of the world are also super-popular singers.

There's always been much less of a stigma over there with celebrities trying their hand at different things (except for actresses who marry and then get pregnant - even now it's still often the case that their acting career is over at that point and it's VERY rare for them to come back).  Singing to acting or acting to singing are the most regular ones - Leon Lai, Kenny Bee, Andy Lau, Alan Tam, Aaron Kwok, Jackie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Deanie Yip, Kelly Chen, Faye Wong, Carina Lau and a myriad of others that westerners know primarily as actors have absolutely massive music careers over there.  There are also lots of actors who have business dealings, and by that I don't mean like American actors who have investments handled on their behalf, I mean they're actually on the board of directors and have hands-on involvement.  There's also the odd unusual jump which, again, no one really bats an eyelid at - there's a (I think) Taiwanese actor whose name escapes me, but he's been in a few martial arts/action films that were big domestic hits.  Prior to those he was a breakfast TV presenter.

Obviously similar things happen in the west, but it's a much more regular thing over there and people just accept it, whereas here and in the States we're more likely to raise an eyebrow and take the piss.

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: lazarou on October 31, 2020, 03:11:54 AM
Ong-Bak

I remember listening to Adam and Joe one Saturday when they were giving away an Ong-Bak Backpack, and they found it hilarious to say that over and over again, and now annoyingly I can't refer to the film now without adding "Backpack" after it. I've no real reason for mentioning this either, I just want others to hopefully end up doing the same thing.