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Martial arts movie fans are a pretty forgiving bunch…probably second only to horror fans. The structure and predictability both genres are part of their charm. So audiences are often willing to praise second-rate material simply because there’s so darn much of it. Which makes it all the more shocking when a movie comes along that really brings its “A” game. Fifteen minutes into 1990’s She Shoots Straight and you realize this is what all those movies were trying to achieve in the first place! When Mina (Joyce Godenzi) marries into the Huang family, she butts heads with her husband’s four sisters, particularly Chia Ling (Carina Lau), who’s jealous of her new sister-in-law’s reputation in the police force. But a tragedy brings them together in pursuit of a vicious gang of Vietnamese thieves intent on covering the tracks of their most recent crime. That means taking out members of the Huang family one by one. Produced by Sammo Hung’s Bo Ho Film Company and utilizing his top-notch...

Your chances of dying from a 20-foot-tall ninja made up of 30 ninjas standing on top of each other are low, but as 1983’s Duel to the Death proves, not totally impossible. The directorial debut of action choreographer Tony Ching is a riotously inventive hodge-podge of wuxia, kung-fu, chanbara and the aforementioned army of mystical ninja warriors that never stops trying to top itself. Two warriors are chosen to compete in a once-a-decade contest that will determine the superiority of Chinese or Japanese martial arts. But subterfuge on both sides results in a series of assassination attempts that bring the combatants together to defend their mutual sense of honor and fair play. Meanwhile, the daughter of their host wages her own campaign to fulfill her clans’ destiny and break into this elitest boys’ club. Duel to the Deat h manages to be both ridiculous and thoughtful at the same time, offering up a respectful view of Japanese culture and combat that was all too rare in Hong Kon...

It took a long time for Bruce Lee to get “discovered” in the U.S. By the time Enter the Dragon turned him into a phenomenon, he was already gone, leaving behind opportunistic producers eager to wring out his legacy and a handful of celebrity students to carry on his techniques. Chuck Norris might be the most famous of the bunch, but Joe Lewis was arguably the most formidable. A karate champion and early evangelist of American kickboxing, Lewis clearly had his eye on replicating his mentor’s big screen success. Instead, his debut, Jaguar Lives! (1979) found more fame years later on MST3K than it did in theaters. It’s follow-up, Force: Five (1981) is still a clumsy martial-arts mishmash stitched together from TV-grade stunt work and flat performances…but it’s aged to the point where an audiences can laugh with it rather than at it. Recruited to rescue a senator’s daughter from a drug-smuggling cult leader, Jim Martin (Lewis) gathers his own team of superfriends (including karat...

When it comes to films that reveal the inner workings of mafia crime families, The Godfather (1972) was far from the first of its kind. As far back as New York Confidential (1955), screenwriters were laying the groundwork for power-hungry dons, resentful daughters, stoic hitmen and crooked politicians. So the Japanese Godfather Trilogy  (1977 – 1978) isn’t exactly breaking new ground, merely shifting the setting to a new locale and reinforcing the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. As head of the Nakajima group, Sakura (Shin Saburi) understands a brutal truth of the modern era: a business that isn’t growing is already dying. So he pushes his second in command, Tatsumi (Koji Tsuruta) to expand the yakuza empire into legitimate territory, crossing paths with political figures who all want a piece of the pie…but whose morals are even lower than the criminals they publicly condemn. In part two, Ambition , Matsugae (Hiroki Matsukata) carries on with the campaign, ope...

Actors are a bit…self-involved. That’s not exactly breaking news. So for a particular breed of thespian, playing opposite themselves is probably quite a kick. Which might explain why Jean-Claude Van Damme has arranged that very scenario three times in three different movies: Double Impact (1991), Maximum Risk (1996) and Replicant (2001). In retrospect, probably not the best idea for an actor who needs all the help he can get to emote convincingly. But it can still be awful fun to watch, especially his inaugural adventure as Chad and Alex, twins separated at birth who reunite to save their father’s legacy in the aforementioned Double Impact . Raised in L.A., Chad is a happy-go-lucky womanizer who discovers his parents were murdered by a triad in Hong Kong where his twin, Alex, has been slumming for the past 20-plus years. This odd couple is brought together by Frank (Geoffrey Lewis), the former family bodyguard, in search of hard evidence to implicate the murderers responsi...

If your knowledge of Greek history is limited to Ray Harryhausen films and some half-remembered high school Honors English, then Michael Cacoyannis’ Iphigenia (1977), based on the play by Euripides, might seem above your pay grade. But there’s a reason these mythological tales have such staying power; they’re often built around universal truths, political drama and emotional baggage that’s all too familiar even in the modern era. Minus the stop motion monsters, of course. Despite its resemblance to Clash of the Titans , there are no krakens unleashed in this story of King Agamemnon, ruler of Argos, who’s duped into sacrificing his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to appease the gods and raise the winds that will send his ships to Troy. Iphigenia’s mother, Queen Clytemnestra, rages for her doomed daughter’s plight, enlisting the help of Achilles to convince his fellow soldiers of the tragedy in the making. But in a world of weak, petty men beholden to their positions of power, women –...