Blackbelt (1992)

Blackbelt (1992)

 

Starring: Don Wilson, Deirdre Haj, Matthias Hues, Richard Beymer, Alan Blumenfeld, Jack Forcinito, Bob McFarland, Barbara A. Graham
Director: Charles Philip Moore
Action Director: Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Paul Maslak

 

Low-budget schlockmeister Roger Corman—who currently has 515 Producer credits on the IMDB and shows no sign of stopping despite being four years shy of 100--has never been one to pass up an opportunity to exploit some fad and make a quick dime off of whatever’s popular. Alien rip-offs, Poe movies (to cash in on the growing popularity of Hammer’s horror films), dinosaur films, barbarian flicks, sexy nurse movies, CGI-shark-a-thingie films…you name it, Corman has most likely produced a film about it. So, when martial arts movies really took off in the States during the late 80s and early 90s, thanks to the popularity of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, it was only fitting that Corman would try to make some money off of that genre. While he worked with a number of actors, it would seem that his major martial man muse was Don “The Dragon” Wilson.

Blackbelt is one of the 14 movies that the two have collaborated on and...well…it was my first real Don “The Dragon” Wilson movie. Yes, you read that right. He was one of the Kings of the DTV Martial Arts films during the 1990s, and I’m only now watching something with his name on it (his cameo in Batman Forever doesn’t count). Actually, I once caught part of Bloodfist at my neighbor’s house many, many years ago. All I remember was Billy Blanks eating a fly and Don Wilson suddenly having to fight his master at the end, whom he kills in a rather brutal manner. I’ll have to revisit that movie one day.

The story is simple: Don plays a former cop turned martial arts instructor, Jack Dillon. The movie never explains to us why he left the Force, although he seemed to do it on good terms, because nobody actually cares about him doing cop business without a badge. Jack gets back in the game in order to protect an up-and-coming pop singer, Shanna (Dierdre Haj of Scanner Cop and Anna Nicole Smith’s Skyscraper) from a fanatical fan.

That fan is comparable to Maniac’s Frank Zitto, had he grown up to become a long-haired Aryan superman (Matthias Hues of I Come in Peace) instead of Joe Spinell or Elijah Wood. Johnny Sweet, as he’s called, is also a former Special Forces Op. who hangs out in a bar for other ex-operatives. In that case, he’s basically Frank Zitto by way of Gunner Hansen from The Expendables. In any case, this nutcase thinks that Shanna is the reincarnation of his mother, a lounge singer who had an incestuous relationship with Johnny during his formative years. I guess that will certainly turn a man into a hulking hooker killer.

Shanna’s problems aren’t limited to the giant Teutonic Oedipus, either. The outfit she’s currently signed to is a front for the mob, run by a sleazy character named Eddie D’Angelo (The Stripper’s Eddie Beymer) who’s getting more and more nervous at the pending expiration of Shanna’s contract. He thinks she’ll ditch him for greener pastures, and it’s never a good thing for a mobster to lose a cash cow…even in a legitimate business. Shanna also has an abusive d*ck of a boyfriend, Bobby (Demon Wind’s Jack Forcinito) that Dillon immediately takes a disliking to. In other words, Jack Dillon will have plenty of people to fight until the film is over.

Don Wilson was a born athlete. The son of an American man and a Japanese mother, he was a talented basketball and football player in high school, but also excelled at freestyle wrestling. While studying for his engineering degree, he trained in Goju-Ryu karate, later moving to a Chinese style known as Jim in Pai Lum, which is apparently a descendant of Shaolin boxing. He then entered the kickboxing circuit and won himself 11 titles over the course of 25 years, including one IFK title at age 45. Heck, Wilson was so confident in his abilities that he openly challenged Thai boxers, winning matches against three of them. As of today, Wilson has won 72 of the 82 matches he has fought in.

For this particularly production, Roger Corman pulled out all the stops—so to speak, it’s still a cheap production—and hired a bunch of a real-life martial arts champions to play Matthias Hues’s mercenary buddies. The opening credits even inform us what their tournament credentials are:

 

·        “Bad” Brad Hefton – ISKA Super Heavyweight World Kickboxing Champion

·        Mitch Borrow – Open Karate U.S. National Champion

·        Gerry Blank – WKA Super Heavyweight World Kickboxing Champion

·        Ian Jacklin – WKA Cruiserweight North American Kickboxing Champion

·        Ernest Simmons – K.I.C.K. Super Heavyweight World Kickboxing Champion

·        Tim Backer – IKA Shotokan Karate World Champion

·        Jim Graden – PKO Heavyweight World Kickboxing Champion

·        John Graden – WAKO World Championship Kickboxing Team

 

It is therefore a shame that Don Wilson is not a very good fight choreographer, nor are the people at Concorde Studios good cinematographers or editors. The fight scenes are extremely pedestrian: slow and ponderous in their staging, sloppy in their execution. The fights often feel like a demo video for self-defense techniques, as opposed to the choreographed-but-intense mayhem that you’ll see in most Asian films. The punches feel pulled and weak in spite of the sound effects. Some of the kicks are pretty good, but the “punching bag” choreography here feels even worse than that of a contemporary Van Damme film, which at least had decent editing. Heck, watch when Don Wilson unleashes his multiple-side-kicks-without-lowering-his-leg near the end, it’s shot in a way that almost looks like a parody of itself.

It’s a nice gimmick for Corman to get The Real Deal for a film like this, but to waste them all in lackluster fights is just…well, that: a waste. He should have foot the bill for a C-List Hong Kong (or Taiwanese) fight choreographer to stage and direct the action sequences. Yeah, Golden Harvest got Brandy Yuen and Lau Kar-Leung for the Ninja Turtles movies. Seasonal Films had Corey Yuen and Tony Leung Siu-Hung for their productions. I can’t imagine any of those guys’ going rates were all that high, and, even if they were, I’m sure that Filipino co-producer Cirio Santiago could have found some way to get Philip Ko Fei involved. Or somebody must have known somebody who knew Robin Shou. He could have given us something better than what we got.

There’s no way for me to sum up this review but to do so in the crudest way possible: when you cast nine or ten martial arts champs in your film and the best thing about the production is Dierdre Haj’s boobies, you have failed at making a martial arts film.

 

Trivia: Two years after this, director Charles Philip Moore (also of Demon Wind infamy) wrote and directed a remake of this movie called Angel of Destruction. It stars erotic thriller veteran/scream queen Maria Ford in the Don “The Dragon” Wilson role and is even sleazier than this movie was. In fact, the opening scene of that film is a shot-for-shot recreation of Blackbelt’s opening scene.