Lack of good storyline.

Absolutely Fantastic

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Here's a cheap Japanese knock-off of the Van Damme "classic" BLOODSPORT, except made with only a fraction of the budget and skill. This boring, muddled film actually only contains about fifteen minutes of footage in the ring, as it were. The rest is taken up with a modern, realist drama charting the life and times of tough fight promoter Yasuaki Kurate as Kai, a middled-aged Japanese karate warrior who enjoys training new warriors to fight against the champ of the ring, Chang Lee.We get to watch Kai train, fight with his wife and lose her, become a hopeless drunk, and then finally enter the ring himself to take on Chang Lee. It's not as interesting as it sounds, and contains hardly any action – certainly not enough for a film with the promising title BLOODFIGHT. The on-the-street camera approach quickly becomes tiring, especially as there are no sympathetic actors to engage with along the way. Kurate does seem to be a halfway decent performer but his sullen, monosyllabic lead doesn't give him much opportunity to shine.The first half of the film is a pointless time-wasting exercise dealing with a moronic gang of street thugs, led by the insolent Stuart Smith (hilariously misspelt as Stuart Smita in the credits). You may remember Smith from the likes of NINJA HUNT and other ultra-cheap cut-and-paste ninja epics of the '80s; BLOODFIGHT appears to be his genre swansong but the film isn't any better than his earlier work. A young Simon Lam, possibly the most famous of the cast, doesn't fare any better with his heavy emoting. Lam later made a name for himself with gangster films and the heroic bloodshed genre but he's as bad here as the rest. Bolo Yeung is the only one to come out of it with some dignity, although he's just as much laughable here as he is scary.The film is poorly made throughout, shot in English (and in Hong Kong) with a script that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The fight sequences are typically poorly shot, aside from a few choice battles in the last half hour of the film. The only good thing in the whole movie is the last match between Kurate and Yeung, an impossibly long slug-fest to the death, which is, as the title suggests, pretty bloody. It's just a shame that the rest of the movie doesn't carry on in the same mould, instead alternating between mindless bizarre moments and stultifying boredom. Give this one a miss and check out the Van Damme film instead.

While this movie is obviously an attempt to cash in on "Blood Sport" (and shamelessly borrows the Stallone vs Lundgren training montage from "Rocky IV"), it still manages to have some charm on its own merits. I think what I really like about it is that the limited budget and unknowns in the cast keep the levels of bombast down to a minimum, and the director and actors keep sneaking in small touches and quiet moments that actually inject some human emotion into what could be nothing but another empty spectacle. Also, having the actors talk in their heavily accented English dialects (instead of HK style overdubbing) adds a nice flavor to the movie. They have to work so hard at expressing themselves in their second language that somehow a lot of the artifice and "attitude" that clots the typical Golan-Globus sausage factory gets left out, and the movie is better for it. I would actually prefer to watch a movie like this to most of the early Canon film/Golan Globus Chuck Norris stuff. Although FF can't hold a candle to "Code Of Silence". It's also sort of funny where it means to be (not "haw haw" funny, but mildly humorous), and some of the actual fights and most of training sequences have an authentic flavor; I practiced those footwork patterns and katas and candle exercises in my early martial arts days, and it was nice to see them done right. And of course, Bolo Yeung is always fun to watch - he always plays the same kind of character, but it's a role he was born to play. An obscure gem of sorts, worth taking the time to watch if you happen to come across it in a collection (like I did).

"Blood Fight" is an unexpectedly serious action flick that has some good, at times artistic camera work. Unlike most Chinese martial arts films, this one does not have the awful English overdubs that make these films so bad. The Chinese actors are actually speaking English, albeit with heavy accents, and it lends an extra level of quality to the production. The story is good, if not very original. A martial arts master becomes emotionally destroyed when his young protégé loses his life to a brutal opponent in the ring. Kung Fu cult icon, Bolo Yeung is his usual demonic self as the fighter who takes the kid's life. Basically a revenge flick, but with some decent character development and higher production values. Featuring some great shots of Hong Kong, both in daylight, and the neon-saturated nights. The fight technique is mainly kick-boxing, and at times things get quite bloody. Worth a look, especially for fans of Yeung Bolo.

Nothing particularly notable about this one. Plot is almost identical to VanDamme's Bloodsport which came out a year earlier, even down to Bolo Yueng as the bad guy and the retrieval of a belt/headband. I see the cityscape training runs as very reminiscent of "Rocky." Actually, the acting was probably better than most of the genre and there are some great thugs being beat up on about three occassions. I would have liked it better if they had resolved that issue before the end of the movie.The one thing I did find interesting was the complete Naihanchi Shodan Kata (Japanese version is Tekki Shodan) done by the main character on the top of a hillside looking out over the city. And the contrast between the bad guy's wonderful training facilities and the good guy's traditional tools is a good message, showing how hard work overcomes good facilities.My biggest gripe is the amount of devastation absorbed by the characters in the final fight without dying!