one of my absolute favorites!

disgusting, overrated, pointless

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

this one might be a little tricky because it only shows a run time of 94 minutes and no other version so I'm not sure if that is the uncut version or if there is a shorter or longer version, in any case I've personally seen 2 versions of this movie, one is a great underground hostel type battle to the death gory hack and slash movie and the other is so watered down that it becomes a cheesy Bloodsport clone with death battles in it but with barely any blood and no gore, this movie is a perfect example of what some good old fashioned latex gore effects can do to increase the overall value of the film, it's a movie that could very easily been done as a PG-13 and yet, they knew what they had was a sub product that was limited by it's budget from the opening bell so they invested well where it could distinguish itself from all those American Ninja Crap movies, don't even get me started on those, to this day I've never understood why there was so many sequels of American Ninja, those and the Madea (A Big Dude In Drag) movies are a real head scratch-er, they were all bad and just got keep getting worse, anyways back to American Samurai uncut, it had really good fight scenes, the acting was good enough for what this is, and the Gore was superb, it's not the kind of Gore that you wouldn't normally see in a rated R movie back then, it's more of the Hard R variety or Unrated equivalent back in 1992 so I can see why there is a cut version of the movie but that version royally sucks, the uncut is really good, you'll know right off the bat what version you are watching with the graphic extraction of a bullet near the beginning, do yourself a favor and watch this gory little gem, it's what Mortal Kombat should be gore wise

I watched this movie as I thought that this movie would be as good as "American Ninja". But this is one of the worst action movie I have ever seen. In the tournament scene, David Bradley is simply standing,walking,running and waiving the Katana against the opponent like a lame. He has not got the nice martial art moves like other pretty fighters in the movie.Acting of the entire cast is avoidable. Mellisa Hellman has nothing to do in the movie. The fight scenes of Mark Dacascos is impressive but he lacks acting. Also the story is as usual like this ..... the hero flawlessly defeats the opponents without a scratch on his body. Is David Bradley a really trained Samurai... eh ? I don't think so..Don't waste your time in watching this crap. Just watch "American Ninja" instead in which fighting scenes of Michael Dudikoff is quite impressive.

Although I guess David Bradley is a highly skilled martial artist, I don't think he was that good in the three "American Ninja"-movies he took part in. "American Ninja 3" was OK, but the 4th and 5th installment of the series were just terrible. This movie is much better. It's an arena-fighting movie, and it's well performed. They managed to throw in a lot of different fighting styles from many places, and it was really interesting. Several of the styles were new to me. Another great thing is the introduction of Marc Dacascos into the world of martial arts movies. He's a great fighter, and here he made a convincing and extremely evil villain. The fight scenes in this movie are good, and they're also extremely brutal (even more brutal than "Shootfighter"). If you like martial arts action, you'll definitely like this movie.

In the movie the best part of the movie was Mark Dacascos as Kenjiro. I found the movie's lead actor to be very stiff and boring. Mark Dacascos was the only young actor that was worth watching. I only watched when he was on the screen. I think that he was great.