Karate Tiger 5 - König der Kickboxer

During the video revolution in the 1980s, small Hong Kong production companies started churning out a bunch of English-language fight films with second-rate Western actors, shot for a few bucks in two or three weeks in cheap locations like Thailand. Most of these were movies with fairly similar titles or, conversely, movies distributed to different parts of the world under many different names, so it's not exactly easy to navigate through them. However, Karate Tiger IV (which has nothing to do with the previous installments of the series) has not been forgotten by the fans. This is mainly thanks to the over-the-top final fight in a large bamboo dome (reminiscent of the Thunderdome from the third Mad Max), where kickboxers fight on platforms built over a moat full of sharp poles. Khan, the main villain, is unforgettable, crushing everything in his path, and Billy Blanks plays him with the utmost verve. He roars incessantly, menacingly rolls his bulging eyes and swollen veins, and knocks his opponents down with an unforgettable combo of extremely absurd kicks. Blanks's Khan is such a visually distinctive character that he was the inspiration for the wrestler Dee Jay in the Street Fighter video games, which are far more famous than this film. The film takes itself terribly seriously on the one hand, but also surprises with unexpected self-irony at times. Loren Avedon, for example, watches Karate Tiger III, in which he also played the lead role, and in the process says that it’s like a Bruce Lee movie, only without Bruce Lee. Sometimes it even turns into unintentional self-parody, when Avedon reacts to being offered the lead role in the film by saying he’s not an actor but a fighter, an apt assessment of his own performance. The film, which was in every video store in its day but is now a hard-to-find rarity, could be briefly described as a cross between Kickboxer and 8MM. While it rips off Kickboxer, it also outdoes it with better and tougher fight scenes. Like the John Holmes porn movies, it's all about the action and everything in between is unintentionally comic filler. Avedon here plays Jake Donahue, an undercover cop who consistently sends the SWAT team to the wrong places during arrests so he can kick the criminals' ass himself. Because he's the best cop far and wide, Interpol sends him to Thailand to stop mobsters producing kickboxing snuff films starring the feared kickboxer Khan, who once accidentally killed his brother. Donahue's overconfidence takes a beating on his first day in Thailand when he gets his ass kicked by a local rank-and-file kickboxer. In order to beat Khan, he has to work harder and undergo one of the most bizarre trainings in cinema history, which involves his teacher hanging him upside down from a tree and dropping giant logs on his head. The whole film is extremely far-fetched. Everyone here is kickboxing and crime scenes are blown up with rocket launchers (probably to keep the police from doing lengthy paperwork), in comparison Bloodsport and Kickboxer keep their feet firmly in the ground. While Avedon's career as an action star went downhill after Lorenzo Lamas broke his nose while filming a self-defense video course, Blanks' career sadly ended the moment he went soft and preferred this. Shame about the wasted talent. (21.08.2016) (weniger) (mehr)