American Samurai (1992)

Too much of everything

Fantastic!

Absolutely the worst movie.

Absolutely Fantastic

I remember watching this movie when it first came out many years ago on video and loved it, basically elimination tournament with weapons. Bloodsport essentially. You have the Samurai character badly and uncomfortably played by David Bradley. I say badly because he is so uptight the entire movie. Maybe he was worried about Mark Dacascos upstaging him, should be he does. Anyways this is more a message about the region 2 DVD, please don't buy it. It is cut to the point of being a PG. Sincerely this movie is poleaxed by the censors. If you want to watch Mark Dacascos in his element acting superbly please watch this otherwise find the uncut version.

David Bradley stars as Drew Collins a raised Samurai who was given the family sacred sword which ticks off his younger step-brother (Dacascos) who joins the Yakuza and now is the favorite in a weapons circuit, when Dacascos swipes the sword from Bradley, Bradley travels to Turkey to get it back. American Samurai is an interestingly atmospheric attempt at starting a new franchise to which Bradley looked to capture when he couldn't upstage the original American Ninja, Michael Dudikoff. (Not exactly the world's hardest actor to upstage...) so he tried his hand at being an American Samurai and of all ironies this one is only noteworthy as his co-star Mark Dacascos' debut. Bradley would later find minor stardom in the moronic Cyborg Cop movies. American Samurai however suffers from terrible acting and not enough verve in the fight arena. The movie seems edited very poorly as we are missing initial kill shots, perhaps the movie was cut for release, even so the movie is just too stupid to work as even guilty pleasure. American Samurai is a thoroughly dull effort which doesn't have enough plot to back any of it up. The action sequences are lifeless and in the end it just never gels into anything of worth.*1/2 out of 4-(Poor)

Okay, so it was never going to get an Oscar, but consider this movie's merits for what it is ¡V a low budget film trying to ride out on the ¡§fame¡¨ of a B grade star with Ninja hype. Take that away and what you have is an innovative late 80s early 90s martial arts flick that managed to repackage the ¡§Blood Sports¡¨ idea using (some) extremely talented actors. I watched this video as part of my research on a new director, Tony Szeto. I was amazed by the fight scenes that involved Mark Dacascos (Kenjiro) and Tony Szeto (Phan-Xu). Even with the dismal fight between Dacascos and a hopeless Bradely (Drew), the close-ups reveal a telling red flag ¡V obviously the close-ups of the previous fight between Dacascos and Szeto. Realize that, barring the slow motion, all fighting was done in real time. That is, there was no motion speed-up as often used in Hong Kong kung-fu films. I don't know about the rumors that they used actual weapons (blunted of course), but I have an article from an Israeli newspaper that says one of the actors were injured by a weapon while shooting one of the fight scenes. With ¡§Brotherhood of the Wolf (2002)¡¨, it is surely only a matter of time before Dacascos hits the A-list in Hollywood. But with the knowledge that much of the martial arts choreography was done by Tony Szeto, I'm looking forward to seeing his directorial debut in ¡§DragonBlade (2003)¡¨, which apparently will be packed full of martial arts weaponry.

Simultaneously the best and worst film of all time. More cheesy, cliche-ridden martial-arts mayhem and a very gory film indeed. If you enjoy this kind of film, however, you'll love it for what it is - mindless entertainment, worthy to be ranked with the Van Damme films of the eighties. It also marks the debut of new "Crow" Mark Dacascos. Superb fun - but not to be taken too seriously...