Shameless Self Expression

Dominique Vandenberg plays an amnesiac pit fighter, who is managed by mafia-connected Steven Bauer. Vandenberg keeps having flashes of a woman (Stana Katic) whose identity he can’t yet place, but slowly it all starts to come back to him. Scott Adkins has a non-fighting role as a man from Vandenbeg’s past, whilst Stephen Graham plays a character connected to Katic.   An early collaboration between writer-director Jesse V. Johnson and martial arts actor Scott Adkins, this dreadful 2005 film is a long way from “Savage Dog” , “Accident Man” , and “Avengement” . Adkins was still in the early stages of his career and thus is barely an extra here in what may be the worst film he’s been involved in. Yes, worse than “Max Cloud” , “Black Mask 2” , “Dead Reckoning” , and “The Legend of Hercules” . It’s been poorly edited, it’s needlessly confusing and dreadfully boring. I wonder how Johnson looks back on this one because his films are usually competent at the very least, whereas the narra...

Lung-Wei Wang plays a boxer who gets permanently disabled by the hulking, cheating Bu-bo (Bolo Yeung). His brother Chan Hung (Phillip Ko) a small-time crook, is having a bit of a tough time of it himself. Not only have the chieftains of his criminal gang been killed by rival gangsters, but Chan Hung himself gets kidnapped only to be saved by some kind of ghostly monk. More ghostly visions occur, so he goes to a Buddhist temple where he learns his arrival was foretold by the deceased chief abbot. This abbot tried to put an end to some black magic practitioners who eventually destroyed him, or at least part of him. His soul remains alive inside his decaying human body. Now Chan Hung has arrived to fulfill the prophecy, he is asked to become a monk and help the abbot take down the black magicians. But first, he takes on Bu-bo in revenge for his brother.   If you enjoyed 1986’s “The Seventh Curse” , director Chih-Hung Kuei and co-writer On Szeto (who wrote the enjoyable “The Magic ...