Best of the worst: favorites from low budget, Western produced martial arts movies

[Bruce]

I recently watched a couple low (very low?) budget martial arts movies from the early eighties, Raw Force & Kill and Kill Again. Raw Force was kind of enjoyable in a nostalgic, so awful it's amusing (Cameron Mitchell looked like a shorter, fatter, drunker version of Dean Martin getting through each scene by taking a shot of whiskey just before someone called "action!") kind of way, but Kill and Kill Again was actually more entertaining than I remembered it being, in a politically incorrect, cheesy fun kind of way. It looked like it was ripping off Force Five's idea but, for my taste, it was more enjoyable, Force Five took itself too seriously & Joe Lewis had no onscreen charm (I don't know about onscreen charisma, but Joe's ego really comes across). Force Five probably  had more skilled martial artists in the leading rolls (Lewis, Urquidez, Norton, Bong Soo Han) but it was also more of a blatant ripoff of Enter The Dragon (Reverend Rhee had "an island fortress, really", and Robert Clouse actually had the class to sneak in a couple of Bruce Lee's quieter kiais from ETD here & there) & the choreography overall made me think Pat Johnson was a bit over-rated by Hollywood production companies.

Anyway, these movies got me thinking about which ones might be favorite guilty pleasure low budget (without the backing of a major Hollywood studio), Western produced martial arts movies for me. In no particular order, a few for me would include:

     The above mentioned Kill and Kill Again; it's fun despite itself, better than the sum of it's parts.

     Gymkata; I don't know if it can even be described as "so bad it's good", but, for me anyway, it's amusing/entertaining ... they actually thought they could just plop a pommel horse into the middle of a scene without anyone noticing! 

     L.A. Streetfighters (AKA Ninja Turf ... were there any ninja anywhere in the movie?); looked like everyone involved tried to do the best they could with what they had to work with. They tried to have a character driven plot, excellent martial artists worked hard to get their best action on screen, I think this might actually be my favorite movie from the Rhee brothers! Phillip Rhee deserved much better career-wise from Hollywood, his skills looked great on screen & he was a decent actor, too, it's a shame he never got the support he should've from any major studio.

     Enter The Ninja; cheesy, sure, but Mike Stone & Sho Kosugi did some good work with the choreography, and I appreciate that they weren't pretending they were making an A grade serious drama, the film makers seemed to embrace the over the top appeal of their script.

So, what are some of your favorite movies in this vein? What are some drive-in chop sockey classics I might've missed?

[One Armed Boxer]

14 hours ago, Bruce said:

So, what are some of your favorite movies in this vein? What are some drive-in chop sockey classics I might've missed?

Basically anything that the Koreans touched during the 1970's - 1990's! This is a pretty comprehensive list with about 90% of it being chop sockey related (which includes 'L.A. Streetfighters'!) - 

https://cityonfire.com/hallyu-in-hollywood-koreans-in-america-in-the-1970s-1990s/

[Killer Meteor]

 

[AlbertV]

These are my favorites of these low-budget American martial arts films. 

[Boards Fight Back]

I have saved most of the Variety charts. There is often no way of knowing a film's genre just from a film's title, so if I look for a film, it could even go by a different name. So I can use Wikipedia to determine if it charted rather well.

I do like most 80's action movies. Cannot say I ever felt let down by most of the ones I have seen, unless the budget or acting is really subpar.