Martial Arts Movies

Here's a review i wrote recently. Please enjoy.

Jackie Chan presents his own take on the Indiana Jones franchise in this adventure across Europe.

How about a "Bloodsport" remake, with some elements of "Kickboxer", but we do it with women fighters instead? We can even use a stuntwoman as the lead to cut down on costs!

When Jane Jones, a beautiful but troubled American backpacking her way through Hong Kong, successfully fends off three thugs trying to rob her, it draws the attention of Shu, a female fighting champion. Shu recruits and trains Jane to fight in the vicious, all-female underground martial arts tournament known as The Kumite. After months of rigorous training, Jane is ready to face off against her killer rivals, including the apprentice of Shu’s nemesis, a Shaolin master. As other nefarious forces emerge from the shadows, Jane’s journey through The Kumite turns deadly as she risks everything to become the best female fighter in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Bloodfight

Trivia: Originally was titled "Lady Bloodsport".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4327752/

movie links:

• tubi (us, canada, england, australia, nz?): https://tubitv.com/movies/671826/lady-bloodfight
• youtube, indonesian subs, low volume: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0bcWFcx5AA
• youtube, arabic subs, low volume: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=792Fbp5_iSo
• youtube, no subs, sound cuts out at times (bc of copyright?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmZ7F5beSMU
• for all these links, uBlock Origin will help you avoid ads (at least on Firefox)

COME PREPARED FOR THE THRILL OF A LIFETIME!

As two martial arts schools prepare for an important tournament, one school's corrupt headmaster hires three Japanese samurai to target the rival school's best fighter.

GRINDHOUSE TRAILER

IMDb.com || letterboxd.com

On the edge of honor...lies revenge. The Old West collides with the swordplay of the Samurai in the first trailer for your new favorite martial action movie, Tornado. Set in 1790, Tornado follows the journey of a young woman who must confront the merciless thieves who are chasing her, with newly released footage teasing a gripping and gloriously violent tale of survival and revenge. You can check out the new trailer for Tornado below.

...

“Set in the rugged landscape of 1790s Britain, Tornado (Kōki) is a young and determined Japanese woman who finds herself caught in a perilous situation when she and her father's travelling puppet Samurai show crosses paths with a gang of ruthless criminals led by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and his ambitious son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden). In an attempt to create a new life for herself, Tornado seizes the opportunity to take matters into her own hands and steal the gold from their most recent heist. With her father murdered by the gang and her life in grave danger, what follows is a thrilling tale of adrenaline-fueled action, as Tornado races against time to escape a violent demise and avenge her father's death. Armed with her father's Samurai training, Tornado leaves a trail of devastation and bloody revenge in her wake.”

Trailer

Looks like a really interesting story.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/24261462

Set in the rugged landscape of 1790s Britain, Tornado, a young and determined Japanese woman, finds herself caught in a perilous situation when she and her father’s traveling puppet samurai show crosses paths with a gang of ruthless criminals led by Sugarman and his ambitious son Little Sugar. In an attempt to create a new life for herself, Tornado seizes the opportunity to take matters into her own hands and steal the gold from their most recent heist.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1126915-tornado

It's the 70s, and these three vets just got out of Vietnam after doing some crooked business there, and are on a boat headed home. But then two of them screw over the third guy, and throw him in the ocean! Luckily he survives, and gets washed up on an island where these Japanese World War 2 soldiers are holed up unaware that the war is over! And one of them teaches him "the art of the samurai"... The rest of the movie is the neo-samurai guy getting revenge on his former buddies.

It's a pretty entertaining movie if your expectations are low and you're in the mood for a campy but heartfelt action movie with a 70s feel. The ending is kinda sad tho.

• original trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mU3-sgKLS8
• I watched it on Tubi, which is free in I think the US Canada England and Australia/NZ: https://tubitv.com/movies/515830/death-force
• free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZh6phbL_zM
• free on youtube? you have to log in which I didn't do; the movie length is 9 minutes longer, and comments suggest uploader might have replaced some of the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM3FcIyg3qQ
• ADBLOCK NOTE: uBlock Origin on Firefox should work on the links above
• if you want to pay and/or watch ads, look here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/fighting-mad

Apparently it was originally released as "Death Force" but the opening title says "Vengeance is Mine" for some reason; looks like it was released on home video as "Fighting Mad". From IMDB images I see it was "El Samurai Negro" in Spanish and "Deathforce" in Swedish!

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076024/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Force

Meng Li was betrayed by his brother. After being injured, he ran into obstacles and his life was unsustainable. Li decided to get back on his feet for the sake of his family and returned to the corner with the help of Shopkeeper Zhou.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32262824/

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOhSu3cSIvA - english and chinese subtitles, chinese dub. the sound cuts out twice for a minute or two, dunno why (copyright?) but it's not too bad bc nothings happening when it cuts out and the movie has subtitles anyway. available free everywhere except Vietnam, Xin lỗi!
• https://tubitv.com/movies/100034573/the-ancient-wrestler - Hindi dub, english subtitles

Bryant befriends a troubled teen and introduces him to martial arts. As Bryant's mysterious and dangerous past catches up to him, he is forced into a life and death struggle to clear his name, save the boy and get back all he left behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Good_as_Dead_(2022_film)

"My brother inspired me to write this," said White. "He had a great love for the Latino community. He drove his motorcycle from Florida into Mexico, and then fell in love with Playa del Carmen, a beautiful area there, and he then started a family. So when I moved to Los Angeles and got very connected with Mexico and the Latino community, I just always had a love for the family values that they've had, and the fact that they're just the hardest working people I've ever seen. So it was in my soul to kind of tell this movie, and I wanted to bring this martial arts action genre, like in a very Karate Kid type of way, but with a Latino child, and with this is kind of fusing of genres together. I wanted to tell this story about people, and how sometimes our heroes are wrapped in different packaging."

https://movieweb.com/michael-jai-white-good-as-dead-interview/

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah_P7b3WIYI - full movie available free in Canada, UK, Ireland, USA, blocked elsewhere
• https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/as-good-as-dead-2022 - to pay/watch ads

You really can’t talk about anticipated action films without Scott Adkins and Marko Zaror and the two have teamed up once again in the new martial arts barn burner Diablo. I personally interviewed Adkins last year for his most recent release Take Cover and he mentioned that this one had the goods to satisfy fans looking for a little ass whipping on an epic scale.

A new image has dropped, from Adkins himself via social media, which highlight the two action stars squaring off. Take note as Zaror looks like he came straight out of a James Bond movie looking like an old school and diabolical super villain and missing some hair. He’s even got only one glove on insinuating that he is indeed nefarious.

...

Adkins was quoted on the post saying, “Are you ready for the best martial arts action film of 2025?!!” further establishing that this one is looking to curb your appetite for insane and gravity defying action design.

If you don't know Chinese, you might not know that right now, the biggest movie in the world is Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants. This blockbuster adaptation of Jin Yong's classic wuxia epic novel, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, is one of the defining works of the wuxia genre. It stars Xiao Zhan as hero Guo Jing and is being hyped as director Tsui Hark's biggest comeback in decades. It opened this week for Chinese New Year, the biggest Chinese holiday and movie season of the year, and has already racked up 300 million ticket sales. You wouldn't know any of this because until Deadline reported on the Chinese New Year opening day box office earnings, no Western media had written about it at all.

The original novel of The Legend of the Condor Heroes has an official English translation from a UK and US publisher, all four volumes of it, and is bigger than Lord of the Rings – virtually every Chinese person knows it, and not just in China. Tsui Hark is one of the most influential action directors in the world next to John Woo, who has helped shape action movies in Hollywood and the rest of the world since the 1980s and 1990s, not counting his two forgettable Hollywood-funded Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in the 1990s. Yet there's not a single article written about this movie in English language or Western media, not even the Hollywood trades beyond a report on the box office charts.

Trailer

IMDb:

The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, went west to destroy the Jin Dynasty, wanted to go south to destroy the Song Dynasty. Martial Arts Masters from several Schools in the Central Plains of China fought gathering strength to defend Xiangyang

In his first live-action film appearance since winning an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, comeback kid Ke Huy Quan has chosen a movie that recycles the earlier one’s hit formula. Martial arts action plays out incongruously in quotidian locations; life lessons are combined with close-quarter combat. One difference is Love Hurts’s gloating reliance on gore: a hand is impaled with a knife, a pen is buried in a man’s eyeball, teeth stick to the duct tape ripped from a hostage’s mouth. It all rather puts the “ick” in karate kick.

...

In general though, the film is indebted, as Everything Everywhere was before it, to Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World. A visual gag showing Marvin leaping over a series of garden fences suggests that Eusebio also admires Wright’s Hot Fuzz. As Valentine’s Day treats go, however, Love Hurts is the cinematic equivalent of a wilted bouquet from a petrol station forecourt.

Love Hurts is out on 6 February in Australia, and on 7 February in the US and UK.

Trailer

The Fallout series has delighted gaming fans for decades and, thanks to Amazon's streaming series, it has found an even larger audience. The series' mix of dark humor, 1950s aesthetics, and fun action is a combination that has proved enduring and successful for nearly a generation. Of course, with the Fallout show currently between seasons and a new game likely a long way off, many fans are looking for something else to tide them over. These fans will likely enjoy the underrated cult classic, Six-String Samurai.

Released in 1998, this martial arts film didn't feature big starts and ultimately did poorly at the box office. Despite these challenges, however, Six-String Samurai still managed to earn a small but loyal following thanks to its action, music, and style. All of these elements echo aspects of the venerable video game and TV series. While it may not be as well known as Fallout, fans need to check this action movie set in its own post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Six-String Samurai is set in an alternate reality where, in 1957, the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union dropping nuclear bombs on the United States, turning it into a wasteland. Las Vegas, now dubbed "Lost Vegas," is one of the few surviving cities and bastions of civilization. Outside the city, roving gangs terrorize innocent people and war with one another. In addition to these gangs, all with unique, often themed outfits, the world is populated by all sorts of mutants, cannibals, and other colorful and dangerous characters.

Trailer

Full film

IMDb

Movies that have 100% approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are rare, given a movie has to appeal to every single critic who chooses to review it for such a score to be achieved. A movie with 100% does not necessarily ensure the movie is perfect, but that it was, at the very least, “good” in the eyes of all the critics who reviewed it. As such, the more popular and widely reviewed a movie is, the more impressive a score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes becomes.

Martial arts movies are already kind of underrated and underappreciated on a broad level, and some of the best of all time don’t have perfect scores on Rotten Tomatoes (see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Enter the Dragon, and Police Story, for starters). As such, searching for perfectly rated martial arts films on the site is easier said than done, but the following films can all broadly fit within the genre, and have 100% approval ratings… some, admittedly, because they’ve only been reviewed by a handful of enthusiastic critics, rather than dozens or even hundreds, the way a more mainstream movie might receive.

They are:

1. 'The Monkey King 2' (2016)
2. 'The Man from Nowhere' (2010)
3. 'Bad Black' (2016)
4. 'Yes, Madam!' (1985)
5. 'SPL 2: A Time for Consequences' (2015)
6. 'Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain' (1983)
7. 'The Prodigal Son' (1981)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20754647

Original title (ZH): 封神第二部：战火西岐 (Fēng shén dì èr bù: Zhànhuǒ xī qí, Conferred Gods Part II: War in Xiqi)

Taishi Wen Zhong led the army of Shang Dynasty including Deng Chanyu and four generals of the Mo Family to Xiqi. With the help of Kunlun immortals such as Jiang Ziya (Huang Bo), Ji Fa (Yu Shi) led the army and civilians of Xiqi to defend their homeland.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1155281

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22877972

Jackie Chan still has no rival when it comes to breakneck action and slapstick hijinks and the master of adrenaline cinema is ready to deliver a jolt of both with Panda Plan! Well Go USA is set to release the icon’s latest action infused comedy on Blu-Ray and DVD this February

Trailer

Fun though it is to see Jackie Chan good-naturedly busting out the classic moves – and very spry he is at 70 years old – this really is a by-the-numbers piece of work. It’s a Chinese action comedy in which Chan plays himself, the adored movie star, who is a little bored with the range of downtime activities on offer for an icon like him.

Then he jumps at the chance to adopt a rare baby panda at the zoo, and shows up just as a kidnap attempt is under way: a battalion of tough guys have been sent in to abduct the CGI creature at the behest of some Middle Eastern businessmen whose obvious stereotypical villainy is finally redeemed by some sentimental tearjerking — and of course Chan has to kick their butts in that unique slapstick way, helped by winsome zoo assistant Su Xiaozhu (Shi Ce). It’s a kids’ film in essence, although oddly the action violence means that it has a 15 certificate in the UK.

Trailer

Giant Pictures has acquired Lexi Alexander’s (Green Street Hooligan) martial arts action movie Absolute Dominion for international sales and U.S. release.

The movie’s cast includes newcomer Désiré Mia, Patton Oswalt, and Alex Winter, who also produced. Pic is slated for a spring 2025 release and it will be on sale at the upcoming EFM in Berlin.

Absolute Dominion takes place In the year 2063 AD, when the world faces catastrophe as zealots and extremists wage a global holy war in the name of spiritual superiority. In a desperate attempt to save humanity from itself, the world’s governing bodies vote to establish ‘The Battle of Absolute Dominion,’ a fierce martial-arts tournament that will determine a champion whose faith will govern humanity and restore peace for the future.

They say to let sleeping dogs lie, but one sleeping dog has lain down for a bit too long. Donnie Yen’s Sleeping Dogs adaptation is no more, the actor told Polygon this week.

Fans of the 2012 Hong Kong-set action game have been waiting for years for an update on a live-action film adaptation. First announced in 2017, the Sleeping Dogs movie was to star Yen, who rose to international fame in the Ip Man franchise and made a Hollywood splash in Rogue One, as game protagonist Wei Shen. In 2018, Yen said the movie was “in motion,” and at one point, Indonesian gore maestro Timo Tjahjanto (The Night Comes for Us, The Shadow Strays) was in talks to direct.

That would have been quite the appealing combination of talent for an adaptation of a beloved game, but as Yen shared on a Zoom call this week, the project is no longer in the works — at least as far as the Hong Kong legend is concerned.

“I spent a lot of time and did a lot of work with these producers, and I even invested some of my own money into obtaining the drafts and some of the rights,” Yen said. “I waited for years. Years. And I really want to do it. I have all these visions in my head, and unfortunately… I don’t know, you know how Hollywood goes, right? I spent many, many years on it. It was an unfortunate thing.

“Well, on to better things.”

Ninja is a 2009 American martial arts film directed by Isaac Florentine and starring Scott Adkins, Tsuyoshi Ihara and Mika Hijii. The film's plot revolves around an American martial artist named Casey Bowman, who is asked by his sensei to travel to New York City and protect the Yoroi Bitsu, an armored chest that contains the weapons of the last Kōga ninja.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_(film)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182921/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85UxL-AJdpQ - available in the USA only, blocked in the rest of the world, すみません!

Bloodfist is a 1989 American martial arts film directed by Terence H. Winkless, starring Don "The Dragon" Wilson (in his first feature starring role), Rob Kaman, Billy Blanks and Cris Aguilar. The plot sees an American former kickboxer travel to Manila, where he re-enters competition to avenge the murder of his brother and fellow fighter.[5]

The film takes the template established by previous tournament fighting films, especially the recent Bloodsport, and adds a whodunnit element to it.[6] While negatively received, it generated record profits for Concorde Pictures,[7] and kickstarted a long running franchise of increasingly unrelated sequels and spinoffs.[8] To bolster its credibility, Bloodfist listed the real-life martial arts credentials of its stars, not only on the poster but in the credits as well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodfist

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwryEdv8WUE - the link from above; for some reason the video is blocked in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, and Pakistan
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdHqzH-Wp4o - might be another copy of this movie? you have to sign in to see it, so I dunno

IN THE WORLD OF JUDO, FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION.

A former judo champion is given the chance to redeem himself after he befriends a competitor and an aspiring singer.

Trailer

IMDb.com || letterboxd.com

Martial arts have been a staple in movies and television since the 1970s. The majority of the early projects originated in Hong Kong and immediately became worldwide sensations. These films have periodically changed in numerous ways, leaving an influence on all types of genres, from science fiction to fantasy. Legends like Bruce Lee helped pioneer many of the wild fighting styles that are so popular today. Jackie Chan still has upcoming movies, and was a similar force of nature in the exhibition of on-screen combat.

When first entering the realm of cinematic martial arts, it's important to watch classic films. The early works were truly revolutionary and laid an impressive groundwork that has stood the test of time. To that extent, it's interesting to see the prominent influence that early movies hold over modern releases. For those looking to get into the genre for the first time, it's best to start with the source material.

1. Enter The Dragon (1973)
2. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
3. Drunken Master (1978)
4. Ip Man (2008)
5. Fist of Legend (1994)
6. Executioners From Shaolin (1977)
7. Five Deadly Venoms (1978)
8. Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior (2004)
9. Police Story (1985)
10. The Karate Kid (1984)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/20542450

While investigating the history of a newly discovered ancient artifact, a renowned archaeologist (Jackie Chan) unwittingly establishes a mystical connection with a heroic Han dynasty general, blurring the lines between past and present right as the general prepares to wage war against the brutal Hun army.

Featuring a de-aged Jackie Chan!

Old documentary about kung fu, displaying the various types of wushu forms. Doesn't have a plot, is only 480p, and I think it was meant to be some kind of national propaganda film. But it is fascinating to see the different styles by expert practitioners in natural settings. A young Jet Li shows up at 19:10.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l4mc4H0xIQ
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0201255/

After his students are killed by the One Armed Boxer, a vengeful and blind Kung Fu expert travels to a village where a martial arts contest is being held and vows to behead every one armed man he comes across.

IMDb