Moviecut—The Brawl Busters

source: The Brawl Busters

DRAGON FROM SHAOLIN is a wacky South Korean variant on the usual Hong Kong and Taiwanese kung fu staples. It's a film heavily influenced by the wuxia genre of film-making, with the basic laws of physics often broken for scenes of the actors performing larger-than-life leaps and jumps and generally flying around the screen during the many frenetic action sequences that the film contains. The plot is a fast-paced jumble of the usual themes and events: betrayals, allies and enemies, ambushes and refuges from the bad guys. The heroes are a nondescript bunch and the budget is pretty low, so don't go in expecting finesse or realism; instead this is a cheese fest throughout, with even an attack by a random squad of brightly-coloured ninjas at one point. My favourite moment is the bit where the hero gets mired in a pool of tar and attacked by a squad of guys using flying guillotines, which here look like circular saws, complete with sound effects. It's the hilarious highlight of an otherwise obscure and oddly entertaining little movie.

This Korean martial arts film is centred on a woman whose father was murdered when she was just a baby because he refused to use his martial arts skills to help a group oppressing the people. She is trained by a Shaolin master until she becomes an expert in kung fu then sets out for her revenge. In this she is assisted by an equally skilled stranger and a group of woman martial artists. It must be said that this is fairly low budget and the action is nowhere near as well choreographed as modern wuxia films... still it manages to be exciting with lots of fight scenes. This action sees a good variety of weapons as well as the standard kicking and punching. The acting looks decent although it is hard to really judge as the UK DVD release of the film I watched was rather poorly dubbed into English and for almost half the film the soundtrack was lagged the picture by about five seconds... so much for quality control! At least the story wasn't too complicated. Overall not a bad example of the genre; I just wish the version I watched was of a better quality.

Alright. So apparently Brawl Busters is South Korean movie that looks like a Chinese kung fu movie. Okay, I guess. Well, if you enjoy choppy editing, s#!++y effects, dreadful picture quality, incomprehensible if not incoherent plotline and horrid English dubbing then this, my home skillets, IS the movie for you. It certainly is for me because I like this sort of thing. Screw authenticity. Aside from the aforementioned "flaws", Brawl Busters also has a ton of action including a wide variety of melee weapon combat and Taekwondo crap but the choreography was silly as s#!+. A lot of the effects that accommodate the action is hilariously bad like some woman flinging toilet paper at someone's head and spinning him around and all that. Brawl Busters is entertaining even though it's poorly made.