Rage and Honor (1992)

Rage and Honor (1992)

Starring: Richard Norton, Cynthia Rothrock, Terri Treas, Brian Thompson, Catherine Bach, Stephen Davies, Alex Datcher, Patrick Y. Malone, Toshishiro Obata, Tim DeZarn

Director: Terence H. Winkless

Action Director: Bernie Pock

Richard Norton and Cynthia Rothrock. They are like the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of the martial arts movie world. Or maybe Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland…if Olivia had trained in Chinese wushu, Japanese karate, and several other martial arts systems. The thing is, these two have done lots of great things for the action movie world, but most people are likely to remember their collaborations, especially once both of them stopped working actively in Hong Kong and focused on making movies in the States.

Their first collaboration was in Sammo Hung’s Millionaire’s Express, a film that followed their respective Hong Kong intros: Yes, Madam! (for Rothrock) and Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars (for Norton). That film put them on the same team as bandits working under Dick Wei and Paul Chang. They quickly teamed up a second time in The Magic Crystal, this time as opponents: Rothrock as a the plucky Interpol agent and Norton as the kung fu-clawing KGB villain. Although it appeared they went their separate ways, with Rothrock working mainly in Hong Kong while Norton did projects in the Philippines, the two did join forces for a pair of programmers from low-budget legend Leo Fong: Fight to Win and Jungle Heat. 

But in 1990, Golden Harvest found itself trying to break into the American market once more and financed China O’Brien, which reunited the two. They joined forces the following year for its sequel, followed by this film and Lady Dragon in 1992. They teamed yet again for Rage and Honor II: Hostile Takeover. Norton choreographed Rothrock in Guardian Angel the next year. They both had supporting roles in the Don “The Dragon” Wilson film Redemption (2004), although by that point, I think most people figured that we would never get something like they did in their heyday. Most of their collaborations afterward appeared to be documentaries, until last year when they did the Western film Black Creek. 

Rage and Honor was their seventh (or eighth) collaboration and it is a conventional martial arts movie: the one where characters regularly break out into martial arts stances, even the policemen. Very seldom does anyone think to use a gun. But then again, that’s what gives these films their char.

Richard Norton plays Preston Michaels, an Australian policeman working in some urban hellhole American city for…reasons. He is currently working undercover in hopes of ferreting out a big drug dealer known as Conrad Drago (Brian Thompson, of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Lionheart). However, he is constantly getting in trouble with his superior, Captain Murdoch (Catherine Bach, best known for “The Dukes of Hazzard”), for playing the karate vigilante. Murdoch is always threatening to send him back to Melbourne, which begs the question: Just how did he get the job of working in the States in the first place. There is talk of his partner getting killed in the line of duty, but the film never makes it clear if it had anything to do with Conrad Drago. Or maybe he was on a police exchange program or something? I dunno.

Anyway, Cynthia Rothrock is also in this film. She plays Kris Fairfield, a history teacher at the local high school who also runs a dojo in the evenings. She is constantly followed by one of her students, a wannabe freelance reporter named Paris (Patrick Y. Malone, of “A Different World”). Anyway, some of the local policemen show up at Fairfield’s dojo to watch her give a demonstration in practical self-defense, including a pair of cops of whom Michaels is suspicious. 

He follows them after the class and catches them selling drugs out the trunk of their car and confronts them. They are interrupted by the arrival of Rita (Terri Treas, of Death Stalker III and various “Alien Nation” TV movies), who runs a pharmaceutical company and is Conrad Drago’s main squeeze. She kills one of the cops, but the whole confrontation is filmed from afar by Paris. Paris manages to hide the tape, but is nearly beaten to death by the other corrupt cop. The blame for the cop’s murder falls on Preston and he enlists the help of Kris to help him find the tape and clear his name. While that is going on, we learn that Kris has her own history with Conrad…

What would normally be a standard, predictable film is rendered a little less so by a supporting cast of weirdos. We learn that Paris was able to give the tape to a junkie (and former stock broker) named Baby (Stephen Davies, of Bloodfist VII—there were seven of those damn films?), who is quite the character. He then hocked the tape to a career criminal named Fast Eddie (Tim DeZarn, of Spider-Man and Cabin in the Woods), who speaks mainly in top-heavy dialog. Then there’s a female gang of hookers and butch lesbian bruisers, led by an attractive black woman named “Hannah the Hun” (Alex Datcher, of Passenger 57 and The Expert). She is interesting because she speaks entirely in third person. And Brian Thompson is…well…it’s Brian Thompson. He gives a standard Brian Thompson performance, although Brian Thompson doesn’t chew scenery to the degree Brian Thompson did in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. 

The film was directed by Terence H. Winkless, who got his start in the industry by adapting the source novel The Howling into a workable screenplay. He went on to direct the killer cockroach film The Nest, followed by Kickboxer clone Bloodfist, which introduced the world (outside of kickboxing circles) to Don “the Dragon” World. Interestingly enough, after making this movie, he spent a lot of time in the realm of tokusatsu, directing numerous episodes of “The Mighting Morphin Power Rangers”, followed by smaller stints on “Power Rangers Zeo”; “BeetleBorgs” and “The Masked Rider.” He even joined the Big Killer Animal boom that followed the “success” of the first Shark Attack and wrote Scorpius Gigantus.

Winkless’s direction in this movie is a bit odd. It has a story I can follow, but it never feels like a cohesive whole. The Captain Murdoch character disappears from the narrative shortly after Michaels is framed. There is a bit about most of the police being on Conrad’s payroll, but nothing much is done with that subplot. The movie teases a huge fight between Michaels and Drago’s bodyguard, Chan (Toshihiro Obata, who played Tetsu in the Ninja Turtles films). That never happens. In fact, both Chan and Rita just sort of observe the final throwdown between Drago and our heroes and then do nothing when good prevails. It almost suggests that they will just walk away scot-free. It’s weird: stuff happens and I understand why it is happening—except for Michaels being in the States in the first place—but it frequently doesn’t feel like an actual movie. Maybe it’s that cheap Cassio keyboard score that makes it feel like a made-for-TV film instead.

Credited as the stunt coordinator is Bernhard Pock, who did stuntwork in lots of big Hollywood films before dying in 1996 at age 33. I do not know if Pock did the fight choreography, of it that just fell to Norton and Rothrock, who did their best within the constraints of the production. The fights suffer from the same issues that plague a lot of American martial arts movies of the period: bad camerawork (i.e., too many close ups and bad angles) and editing. While it isn’t edited with a chainsaw like many movies these days are, it often cuts to an unflattering angle just as a blow is about to hit. It’s pervasive enough to be annoying, but there are still a few decent moments in the action.

Norton comes across as a standard Hollywood brawler who can throw a few kicks when need be. Rothrock is served better and gets to perform flashier moves, including a scorpion kick at one point. Norton’s earlier fight with Toshihiro Obata shows some promise, especially as it establishes Obata as the superior fighter. I was hoping that the climax would be set up so Rothrock would take on Thompson and Norton would have a rematch with Obata-san. But that does not happen and I’m disappointed because of it. Norton was better served by the choreography of his Hong Kong films and the China O’Brien movies. Both of them were, to be honest.

Broken Path (2007)

Broken Path (2007) Aka: Broken Fist; Attack of the Yakuza

Starring: Johnny Yong Bosch, Dan Southworth, Pamela Walworth, Motoko Nagino, Sonny Sison, Panuvat Anthony Nanakornpanom, Tadahiro Nakamura, Lanie Taylor

Director: Koichi Sakamoto

Action Directors: Alpha Team, Dan Southworth

What do you get when put a Power Rangers (or more specifically, Super Sentai) fight choreographer and a former Power Rangers actor in the same room? More Power Rangers tomfoolery, you say? Hell no. You get a bone-crunching action thriller fight fest called Broken Path, proving to the world that if you take some of these Power Rangers actors out of Angel Grove and put them in a serious film, they can perform to the level of Jackie Chan or Scott Adkins. That is the case with Johnny Yong Bosch, better known as the Adam Park, the second Black Ranger from the Power Rangers (and the first Power Rangers movie).

Broken Path builds its action upon an exceedingly simple premise: computer analyst Jack Ellis (Bosch) has moved with his wife, Lisa (From the Dark’s Pamela Walworth), and his little daughter, Maddie (Lanie Taylor), to Texas. When we meet them, they are enjoying a nice summer barbecue with the locals on the eve of sending Maddie off to summer camp. Jack appears to be an affectionate dad and loving husband, but there is a constant look of discomfort on his face. After everyone leaves, Jack and Lisa are enjoying an intimate moment when she brings up how they have moved four times in the past four years for…reasons. The conversation makes Jack visibly disturbed, but he tries his best to reassure Lisa that they’ll stay put from here on out. But a nightmare about a masked man in military fatigues slitting Lisa’s throat suggests that he’s hiding something. 

And what do you know, the next morning, a masked man in military fatigues (Tadahiro Nakamura, of Karate Kill and several Power Rangers incarnations) does show up and start hacking at both Jack and Lisa with a knife. He is soon joined by a second masked killer in camo pants (Sonny Sison, who choreographed Maria). They both beat the hell out of an apparently defenseless Jack. That is, until one of them tries to rape Lisa. At that point, Jack completely snaps and reveals that he is just the martial arts dynamo that these two nutcases are. A pitched fight ensues and the two are beaten to a retreat. But when they show up again in the dining room downstairs, they are now joined by a third killer (Anthony Nanakornpanom, whose stuntwork résumé has exceeded 240 credits in Hollywood movies, TV, and video games). And when Lisa tries to escape, a fourth killer, this one female (Kunoichi: Deadly Mirage’s Motoko Nagino, who is also married to the director), takes a particular interest in killing her. As we find out, Jack has not been particularly forthcoming about his past, and now it has caught up to him.

Broken Path is something of a martial arts chamber piece, with the entire film being one big action sequence broken up into smaller individual fights, all set on the Ellis homestead. Most of the fights occurs within the house itself, although a couple occur in the driveway or in front of a storage shed or garage. With the exception of the first ten minutes and a brief interval when the main characters hide in an attic—giving them a chance for some exposition—the entire movie is just a single chain of increasingly brutal fight sequences. And when I say “brutal,” I mean brutal. The fighting has the feel of a more-intense-than-usual Jackie Chan movie, but when it comes time for someone to die, they get it good. Without fail. The film can get extremely gory, including one death that feels like the inverse of a memorable one from Sister Street Fighter.

So, what do we know about Jack Ellis? The film reveals that he was originally named Hiroko and worked for an organization of assassins known as…well, they don’t say the name. We just know that they bought children, often of Japanese descent, and then trained them to be cold-hearted kung fu killers. My head canon theory is that the organization was just the 701 Squad from Black Mask. I mean, the imperviousness to pain that the characters demonstrate over the course of 80 minutes of non-stop fighting is just unreal. One guy gets repeatedly kicked in the nuts and does not flinch. Another character gets whacked in the head with a shovel, has their face covered in blood, and in the next scene is none the worse for wear and still fighting. Some of these characters get beaten, stabbed, hacked, and slashed so badly that I cannot imagine how they make it to the next fight scene. But there they are: must be some of the surviving members of Jet Li’s team from Black Mask.

The film was directed by Koichi Sakamoto, who spent the 1990s choreographing tokusatsu shows in the Japan and did some work in Hollywood, too. Notably, he helped choreographed the fights in Martial Outlaw and Mission of Justice, both starring Jeff Wincott, and the martial arts western Savate, starring Olivier Gruner. He is most famously renowned for his work on Drive starring Mark Dacascos, considered by many to be the best martial arts film to come out of the US, at least until Scott Adkins showed up.  Drive is certainly one of the best Jackie Chan movies to not star Jackie Chan, if you catch my drift. These days, Sakamoto focuses more on directing tokusatsu, with a filmography of more than 100 films and series of Ultraman, Super Sentai, and Kamen Rider. He also did the “hawt lesbian” MMA film Girl’s Blood, which I’ve heard a lot of good about. He has new film called Shogun’s Ninja coming out…today I think, so glad he’s keeping busy.

The fight sequences were staged by his own team, Alpha Stunts, who have been around since at least the mid-1990s. The fights in this film are very similar to those in Drive, with a very obvious Hong Kong flavor to them. There are lots of flips, falls, and butterfly spins of the stuntmen and actors falling on top of furniture or landing in painful positions. And the exchanges are very much in the Hong Kong style that you would see in an 1980s Sammo Hung or Jackie Chan movie. Since the film was made on a cheap with a limited cast and one location, the fights may be repetitive to some. Johnny Yong fights two killers, and then three killers, and then three killers outside, and then he gets joined by an old friend (Dan Southworth, Blade of the 47 Ronin and Mortal Kombat: Legacy), and then they fight the same killers inside the house, and then outside the house, etc. etc. To the uninitiated, this may be boring and get old after the second fight. But for us fight fans, especially those of us who always lament how Hong Kong cinema hasn’t been the same since the mid/late 1990s, watching what amounts to be a single Jackie Chan fight expanded to feature length is a breath of fresh air.

And to be a successful Jackie Chan homage, you need an actor with a smorgasbord of different styles. A little bit of everything, y’know? Well, Johnny Yong Bosch has studied Shaolin Kung Fu, Muay Thai, Jeet Kune Do, Judo, Kick Boxing, Judo, Hapkido, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Kali and Atillo Balintawak. Dan Southworth is a 5th degree black belt in Taekwondo. Sonny Sison studied a number of Filipino styles, like Escrima, Kali and Arnis. And you can see a smattering of everything. There are a moments when the characters are going nuts on the arm locks and joint manipulations, which bring to mind both hapkido and aikido. There is some limited ground fighting. Knife fighting? Lots of it here. You can even see Bosch performing some kung fu—wing chun—during the final part of the climax. Mix that with some solid stuntwork, painful falls, and finishing moves worthy of Mortal Kombat, and you have an action classic of the post-HK Golden Age era.

Contour (2006)

Contour (2006)

Starring: Eric Jacobus, Ed Kahana, Andy Leung, Tyler Wang, Dennis Ruel, Ray Carbonel, Stephen Reedy

Director: Eric Jacobus

Action Director: Eric Jacobus

The Stunt People.

I discovered them around 2000 through their old website, mainly because I was always looking for places that reviewed martial arts movies/Hong Kong action. Back in those days, I was an ardent follower of Dragon’s Den UK (now Far East Films), The Martial Artist’s Guide to Hong Kong Films, and lived in hopes that Teleport City and Stomp Tokyo would review a Hong Kong film on their next update. The Stunt People reviews broke the films down on a fight-by-fight basis, complete with multiple screenshots of each individual fight, and were extremely critical of every aspect of a fight. 

Assuming that it was Eric Jacobus who was reviewing those films, he was very much a purist and came down hard on almost anything to come out of the USA, even when it had a HK choreographer (like Bloodmoon). He even was extremely harsh on Cynthia Rothrock’s performances in HK films back in the day. So, I liked his reviews and the occasional video clips he included with them, but I found myself disagreeing with him…A LOT. I was also aware that he and his crew were in the business of making martial arts shorts, some of which I downloaded and watched back in the day. I think I saw one of the “Teamwork” videos—it had something to do with a car stopping in a parking garage and the guys getting out of the car and starting to fight.

In the mid-2000s, the Stunt People started making their own feature films. The first one appears to be Immortal, followed quickly by Contour. They went on to make other movies: Bound by Blood (2007); Detective Story (2010); Dogs of Chinatown (2010); Death Grip (2012); and Rope a Dope (2013). Eric Jacobus himself has done some stuntwork in Hollywood (A Good Day to Die Hard), a lot of motion capture/action direction work in video games (including several incarnations of Mortal Kombat); and even some action directing in Asia. So, good for them.

Contour is a martial arts comedy that is very much an homage to the sort of films that Sammo Hung made in the 1980s—if you read Jacobus’s old reviews, he seemed to respect Hung’s work the most. The film is a comedy, but the action is mostly played straight. And even when there is humor in the action, it is a bit more situational (i.e., a guy in forced to dress in drag ripping off his wig and dress before fighting) than simply choreographed goofing off.

The plot (such as it is) goes like this: Lawrence “Law” Young is a cynical, hard-smoking tour guide in San Francisco who owes a lot of money to a rich Vietnamese guy named Thuoc (Stephen Reedy, who does a lot of behind-the-scenes work in Hollywood). Thuoc has gotten rich selling self-defense videos for his own style called “Tae Phở”—with the running joke being that Thuoc is almost never seen without a bowl of phở (the Vietnamese soup) in front of him. Law occasionally goes in for different jobs, usually stealing money from thieves and drug dealers, in order to accelerate the payment progress. But after a few bad jobs, Law goes back to his dead-end tour guide job.

His latest batch of clients include a “teenager” named Alfonso de la Rosario (Ed Kahana, American Brawler and Unlucky Stars), the crown-prince of the obscure island nation of Uruvia; his Chinese bodyguard, Lei Tak (Andy Leung, Immortal and Bound by Blood); and some right-wing Christian missionary named Renee Wilder (Tyler Wang, who was in the Stunt People’s short “Undercut”). Long story short: the Uruvian government is at war with the United States, who wants to undercut the small country’s cheese production. And there is a video cassette with compromising information that may destroy the country. The tape has fallen into the hands of a criminal named Esteban (Dennis Ruel, of American Brawler and The Man from Death). Since there is a reward by Alfonso’s parents for the retrieval of the tape, Lawrence sees this as a means of getting the money to pay off his debts.

Let me start off with the bad: the length. I don’t see any reason for a film like this to be 100 minutes long. And the overlength of the move can be summed up in most of the footage “set” in Uruvia and the final brawl, which has some nice choreography, but draws out the denouement more than it should have. I didn’t find any of the scenes in Uruvia to be funny—Alfonso’s mother is a male actor (Jesse Traugot) in drag, har! I also thought they could have done more with the Renee character, like explain why a (supposedly) straight-arrow Christian right-winger instinctively knows how to use a sub-machine gun…I guess I answered my own question right there. She gets to throw down a little at the end, but she seems more there to provide a little bit of “romantic” “tension” and keep the film from becoming a total sausage fest.

The action was staged by Eric Jacobus himself, with help from his co-stars. There are several major fight sequences. The film starts with a fight at a warehouse when Law tries to steal a blue bag from the bad guys. There is some stylized gunplay in addition to some solid 1980s-Hong Kong-style choreography. The next big fight is between Law and Lei Tak inside of a Taekwondo school, and this is where things really get good. The two put on a kicking clinic with the sort of aerial boots that would make Scott Adkins proud. There are flip kicks, all sorts of nutty jump kicks, and just your garden-variety roundhouse and spin kicks. The two put in their repertoire, broken up by nice stretches of punch-and-block exchanges that remind me of Fan Siu-Wong vs. Billy Chow in The Death Games (a film Jacobus was a huge fan of).

The next set piece pits villains Dennis Ruel and Ray Carbonel against a roomful of baseball bat-wielding men (presumably the other main actors in ski masks). There is some nice weapons choreography as Carbonel is able to get a hold of the weapons and use them like escrima sticks. Ruel is a bootmaster supreme and does all sorts of neat work in this sequence. There is even an homage to Dragons Forever when one of the nameless fighters—Jacobus himself, I think—gets kicked and performs a fall where he hits neck on a ledge, similar to how Yuen Biao dispatches Billy Chow in that film. That is followed by a fight involving Alfonso (Ed Kahana) while on a sugar high—the gag is that his character is hypoglycemic and if he eats junk food, he goes into super kung fu mode, similar to Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II. This fight plays like a dream sequence as he has to beat up a series of enemies in different locations, including a guy in a bunny mask on a rooftop. The second part of his shtick is that Alfonso is a big fan of the “Tae Phở” videos, so his fights look a mixture of 1980s Jackie Chan and more old school kung fu.

The final fight runs for a good 20 minutes and is set in the same warehouse as the opening set piece. The fight is broken up into four different mini-fights. One of them has Ed Kahana going into his crazy “sugar fu” routine, which has some nice falls and kicks, plus some wicked chain whip work. There is an extended fight between Andy Leung and Ray Carbonel, which is a mixture of strong bootwork with lots of complex handwork and chin na, presumably taken from kung fu (wing chun?). Leung is joined by Vlad Rimburg, who plays the former owner of the warehouse who is forced to take on custodial duties after Esteban takes over. He gets his revenge and uses what appears to be more conventional Taekwondo or Karate in this sequence. But the meat of this martial arts smorgasbord is the fight between Eric Jacobus and Dennis Ruel, which is like the final fight of No Retreat, No Surrender 3 or any fight from In the Line of Duty IV just cranked out to 11. The entire sequence is several minutes of uninterrupted punch, kick, and block exchanges performed with speed, height and crispness. If you can sit through the comedy and corniness, you’ll surely enjoy the fight action on display. Then again, that’s more or less how we talk about our favorite 80s HK films, too.