For those of you are fortunate enough not to know who the hell William Hung is and why he is the anti-Christ of HK movies, he's a guy who got famous in the States by singing really badly during an audition for the inane TV show American Idol. Even though he looks like he rode the short bus to school, Hung's been smart enough to fully milk out his fifteen minutes of fame with CDs and appearances on other TV shows. For reasons unfathomable to anyone with an ounce of logic in their brain, producers in Hong Kong reportedly offered Hung HK$1 million to appear in this production, which was the first released to theaters in 2005 and thankfully bombed. At least someone in Hong Kong has some sense -- but the fact that there were some people willing to pay to see this in a theatre is mind-boggling.

Where is Mama's Boy? is supposedly a musical/comedy. Trouble is that the comedy isn't any sort of funny and the musical numbers are akin to fingernails on a blackboard. The movie tries really hard to be a Stephen Chow-esque "nonsense" comedy, with lots of movie parodies and toliet humor. Yes, there's yet another "hilarious" take off of Kill Bill, which was pretty original in the five other HK films that used it last year. As for the music? Well, we get a horrific Chinese takeoff on the "She Bangs" song that made Hung the pathetic shell of a man he is today -- twice! And one of them is with a talking horse! Yes, a talking horse. Apparently, William can also talk to animals. I just kept wishing one of the dogs on the set would bite him in the testicles. Someone had to pay for this atrocity I was watching.

Nothing, and I mean, nothing is done well in Where is Mama's Boy?. The movie is edited horribly -- shots often failed to match up with each other. At the times when the VCD's craptacular subtitles would disappear into light-colored backgrounds, I was thankful that I could not truly know how banal the banter was on-screen. One has to wonder if anyone, from the director to the janitor, involved on this movie took it seriously. I really hope not, because if this is something that could pass for any sort of "legitimate" film-making these days in Hong Kong, then their film industry is truly in trouble. As a long-time fan, I'm willing to hold out hope -- but if I ever see William Hung in a movie again, I think we can all just give up and call it a day.

The movie kicks off with a ridiculous sequence where "Bruce Lee" (whose gravestone was apparently bought at the same 99 cent store where you can get this DVD) being brought back to life via a lightning strike -- displayed, of course, via grainy stock footage. Apparently, zombie Bruce goes off to play pai gow poker, since we never see him again. The star here is Bruce K.L. Lea (real name Jun Chong) playing a guy named Wong, who heads to Los Angeles to meet up with one of the guys he used to run a school with. His former partner turns out to be dead, and Wong now has a series of racial stereotypes after him. Dragging a semi-cute and ditzy sidekick along for the ride, Wong sets out to find the "shocking" truth about who killed his friend.

The sidekick is played Debby Tebora, credited here as Deborah Chaplin -- I guess no one involved with this crud wanted their names attached. In fact, it was actually rumored at one point that the film was helmed by Italian horror director Umberto Lenzi. Nope, it's actually Doo-Yong Lee, a Korean director who surprisingly had a fairly respectable career in Asia before and since this cinematic turd. The same cannot be said for the rest of the cast and crew, many of which have this as their sole credit on IMDB. Maybe they were all buddies of Doo-Yong's who got drunk on soju, wrote the script on cocktail napkins, borrowed someone's super-8 camera, and set about to make the worst Brucepolitation flick ever. At least that's what the end results make it seem like.

Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave is the sort of movie that's fun for about the first ten minutes while you quaff a beer and make fun of its' shortcomings. But then, after the first terrible attempt at putting a fight scene on-screen hits your eyeballs like an acid wash, the stark realization hits you that you have eighty more minutes of this garbage to sit through, and no amount of liquor will be able to numb the pain. Even the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 troupe, who have made a career out of making trash like Manos: The Hands of Fate at least somewhat enjoyable, would be hard-pressed to wring any sort of enjoyment out of this failed production. From start to finish, Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave is simply one of the worst movies this reviewer has ever had the displeasure of sitting through. Do your brain (and sanity) a favor and don't waste your time or money with this cinematic turd.

Anyhow, the thin shred of a plot revolves around a dude named Yong, who just happens to be wandering by a car where a woman is getting raped by several vatos. Yong saves the lady and then asks her out on a date -- what a smooth operator. It turns out the woman is the sister of Yong's Triad boss, who doesn't like his sister dating the help. So Yong and his lady take off, and seem to have shaken the Triads. But of course, they don't, the woman gets kidnapped, and then it's up to Yong to dispense some street justice.

There is nothing, and I mean, nothing of value in here to offer the viewer. Everything is done so incompentently, one has to wonder if the creators of this dreck were actually trying. I've seen YouTube videos that look and sound better than this. The whole production has the feel that it was done in single takes using a camcorder that one of the guys on the crew borrowed from his mom -- which probably isn't too far from the truth. This is truly low-budget film-making at its' absolute worst.

And if you're thinking the action scenes might save the day, don't hold your breath. A few of the people involved seem to have some decent moves, but the fight scenes are shot and edited so ineptly, you could have put Bruce Lee in here and he still would have ended up looking like Bruce Leroy.

If you haven't gotten the point by now, do yourself and your brain cells a favor and stay far away from this trash. Even die-hard fans of bad movies aren't going to find anything worth their time here.

Despite Chan's top billing on many versions of the film, he only has a small role onscreen. Sporting butterfly collars, bell-bottoms, and a huge fake hairy mole on his face, Chan plays a henchman to a drug runner (Chiang Nan) who is being pursued by a female police officer named Ho (Yuen Qiu). But, actually, most of the movie centers on Chin Chen (played by Taiwanese "weepie" favorite Charlie Chin), a cab driver who is pulled into the fold when Ho's sister leaves a mysterious purse in his taxi before dying. Yes, it's all very compelling stuff, and with the leaden weight of the dubbing, the story is delivered with all the subtlety of a kick to the groin.

There is really nothing of value to the potential viewer here. Die-hard Jackie Chan completists might think it might be worth checking this out to see one of his rare villainous roles. Really, though, Chan's screen time is so slim that his factor in the movie's plot development becomes almost null. This was one of Chan's first cracks at being an action director, but, it's not really worth sitting through the dreck that are the exposition scenes in this movie to see a few minutes worth of semi-decent fighting.

Overall, Police Woman is just simply the sort of movie that gives old-school kung fu flicks a bad name. It looks cheap, the acting is poor, the fights really aren't anything special, and, most damningly, the film is just boring as hell to slog through. Even with Chan's name attached to this project, being able to actually sit through this picture in one sitting -- much less actually enjoying it and thinking you just made good use of your time by dedicating eighty minutes of your life to watching this -- is a bit of a Herculean task that only the more masochistic viewers out there will be able to pull off.

If you don't get the above reference, then you should consider yourself lucky -- it means you haven't been subjected to Ko's "movies" (and I use that term for his schlock very loosely). He's known for shooting films on the cheap and getting even cheaper results.

Case in point here: not only was Killing Skill obviously shot back-to-back with another Phillip Ko effort, Final Edge (since it re-uses much of the same cast and locations), but the plot itself is shamlessly ripped off from Robert Rodriguez's Desperado.

And by "shamelessly", I mean "totally", even down to cribbing certain scenes word for word. The film-makers must have balls the size of watermelons, because not only do they try to claim that this is an original script by crediting a screenwriter, but they have a huge copyright warning at the end of the movie.

Despite this, Killing Skill just might have been a decent girls-with-guns revenge flick if Ko actually knew how to put a movie together. Even though it only runs at a scant seventy-nine minutes, it feels much longer than that because every other scene is of Lily Chung walking in slow motion, driving in slow motion, boating in slow motion, or simply looking off in the distance... in slow motion.

Normally, the action scenes in Phillip Ko's movies save them from being total-bottom dwellers, but the ones here fall flat to say the least. Not only could this production not afford squibs (so the bullet hits produce no blood), they couldn't even afford blanks, so the actors just pantomime that they're shooting guns while the exact same looped foley effects play.

At a site that has reviewed some of the worst of the worst the Hong Kong film industry has produced, Killing Skill stands out. It's not quite as bad as the William Hung stinker Where is Mama's Boy?, but it's pretty damn close. It's an obvious ripoff that looks terrible while doing it. Worst of all, it's just boring. And this reviewer can take an awful lot of things, but boring is most definitely not one of them.

On the surface, things looked good. The movie was being backed by the Warner Bros. studio and would have a budget bigger than any of Chan's Hong Kong movies, and was going to be directed by Robert Clouse, who had helmed the most popular kung fu film of all time, Enter the Dragon. Thematically, it was to have contained many elements from the Hollywood Golden Age (films from the 1930's and 40's) that Chan admired so much. In fact, the film was pitched to Chan as an "Eastern Western" -- something that was a dream idea of Chan's. However, one thing lurked beneath the surface -- something that would make Chan miserable and turn this film into the horrible mish-mash that it is. Everyone involved -- the producers, the director, the studio -- wanted Chan to become the thing he had run away from in Hong Kong. They wanted him to become the next Bruce Lee.

The film's shadow of a plot revolves around Chan inadvertently putting the proverbial monkey wrench into gangster Jose Ferrer's plans. Eventually, Ferrer puts the squeeze on Chan's family and Chan finds himself competing in a bare-knuckle fighting tournament to save the family business (which is, of course, a laundry). Really, the particulars don't matter. This movie's horrible from beginning to end. The script, the cinematography, the acting -- they're all bad. Probably the biggest disappointment are the fight sequences. No one on the set allowed Chan any input at all, and as such, well, they're just pathetic. One of the movie's major sequences has Chan battling the gangsters during a roller-skating race. Now, this could actually be good; anyone who's seen Rollerball could attest to that. But in this movie, it comes off as what it is -- a bunch of people who can barely skate attempting to create a fight scene under the supervison of a director who has no idea of what his star can do.

This may (and I stress may) be worth a look for major Chan fans who want to see his US debut. But, honestly, this kind of movie is better left forgotten.

And to wrap up the long-winded story I've set up in this review, Chan was able to go back to Hong Kong via some help from old-school star Jimmy Wang Yu, who had his own Triad connections. He was eventually able to make his Eastern Western (albeit twenty years later) with Shanghai Noon. After the dismal failure of the film, Robert Clouse found himself regulated to doing B-list martial arts movies... and, in perhaps one of the most pathetic attempts to cover ones' tracks, later stated in the documentary The Deadliest Art that Chan was "one of the best people he had ever worked with."

Yawn... oh, I'm sorry, I must have dozed off while watching this clunker. I'm beginning to think that the one Brandon Lee movie I like (Rapid Fire) is a fluke. Simply put, they don't come much worse than this. The plot is stale with a horrible, by-the-numbers script. Both Lee and Wong are (or, in Lee's case, were) not native Cantonese speakers and it shows. I think if you look up "mook jung" (a Chinese phrase meaning "dead wood" used to call someone stupid) in a dictionary, you would see a picture of the two "actors" in this movie. Watching Lee and Wong (long known as one of the worst actors in HK cinema) try to interact with each other is literally painful. Did I mention that Lee and Wong use their real first names in the movie so they would know when they are being spoken to? Agh. The filmmakers should have saved us a whole lot of trouble and just let them speak in English so we wouldn't have to sit through this slow torture. Then again, neither Lee nor Wong are/were that great in English-speaking roles either.

You might ask why am I spending so much time bitching about the acting in an action film. Well, for a supposed action film, there's very little of it. Most of the movie meanders around, at times trying to be a serious crime/prison drama in the vein of Ringo Lam's On Fire series. Which might have worked if Lee could act, but... anyway, the fights (supposedly because of Lee's lack of talent in that area as well) are so short they're barely noticeable. In one scene, Lee beats up Triad enforcer Bolo Yeung in about 10 seconds. I don't think any of the "fights" last longer than that. Mostly it's just Lee giving a tough look, two or three blows and that's it. Back to another ten or fifteen minutes of boring exposition, another mini-fight, and so on. There is a fairly vibrant shootout near the end, but by that point, it's too little, too late.

Unless you're really (and I mean really) curious to see Brandon Lee in a HK movie, avoid this one. It makes most of Cynthia Rothrock's cheesy US B-movies look like Shakespeare by comparison.

Now, I'm sure some of of you will want me to give some justification for the above rant. I just really bring up any specific examples, because the production as a whole is just extremely flawed. From the god-awful soundtrack to the incredibly bad CGI, no feature -- big or small -- is done with any sort of professionalism or panache here. Worse yet, the director (Wa Kai-Fai) seemed to see the picture's shortcomings beforehand and thusly instructed everyone to try and cover up the faults using the fabulous acting method of screaming, waving their arms around and using embarassing facial tics. It's really amazing that a lot of the same cast and crew worked on Wa Kai-Fai's last movie Fantasia, which was one of my favorites from 2004. Lau Ching-Wan, in particular, seems to be almost a former shell of his super-cool self. It's sad seeing one of the most talented actors in Hong Kong basically reduced to imitating Rowan Atkinson's horribly annoying "Mr. Bean" character.

I'm sure most of you regular readers (all two of you) out there know that I am not a film "snob" at all. I enjoy Wong Jing's movies just as much as Wong Kar-Wai's. And I know Lunar New Year movies aren't exactly known for their deep plots or moving performances. It takes a lot for me to really hate a movie -- but Himalaya Singh "delivers" most everything that can possibly go wrong with a film in spades. Between this and the mind-numbingly inane Where is Mama's Boy?, 2005 is not shaping up to be a very solid year for Hong Kong movies. Let's hope they can pick things up before things totally bottom out -- those Segal and Van Damme straight-to-DVD "gems" sitting on the new release shelf at Blockbuster are almost starting to look good.

If you can't guess how this movie ends, then please promptly smack yourself in the head. Really, the only reason to even consider watching this dreck is to see how Simon Yam fares with acting in English and doing kung fu. Sadly, as good of an actor as Simon is, his work here makes some of Steven Segal's look Shakespearenan by comparision. The final fight between Kurata and Bolo is admittedly pretty decent, but it's too little, too late. Don't waste your time with this stinker.

The "plot" has something to do with Kelly Chan being wanted by the FBI, CIA, Japanese secret service, the Yakuza and (of course) some interested parties in Hong Kong since she was engaged to a Yakuza who was planning to smuggle in counterfeit Yen. Ekin Cheng plays some sort of interior designer who also happens to be a kung-fu expert (wah?!), who tags along with Chan on her way to Japan, where they meet up with private eye Tony Leung. I don't want to ruin anything for you, but it turns out that everyone isn't what they claim to be (what, you mean your average interior designer can't do kung-fu?). In fact, there are so many convoluted twists and turns that by the end of the film, I didn't care who was what or where they were or what they were doing.

The fact that most of the actors stink didn't help matters out at all. Here's a word to Hong Kong filmmakers who want to get more of an international audience -- don't put Ekin Cheng in any more movies! I swear to God, there should be a Surgeon General's warning on any movie featuring Ekin saying that it'll induce nausea. Both Ekin and fellow non-actor Kelly Chan should just go back to making crappy Cantopop records instead of stinking up any film that they're in with their dismal performances. On a lighter note, Tony Leung -- who must be really hard up for the money -- does give a decent performance. It was pretty sad seeing him slumming in a film like this, but it also highlighted the fact that good looks and talent are things that are often not apart in actors. There are plenty of talented young actors who could have easily filled Ekin and Kelly's shoes. Maybe they had the good sense to pass on the movie once they saw the script.

And don't think the action scenes save Tokyo Raiders at all. If you think Ekin Cheng can look convincing as a kung-fu expert, then more power to you -- and I've got some nice swampland in Florida I'd like to sell you. The scenes are shot and edited in such a choppy way that it makes The Replacement Killers look like The Killer by comparison. Overuse of slow motion and other camera tricks don't make your action scenes cooler, they only tend to give the viewer headaches, especially when they're accompanied by a score that sounds more appropriate for a cheesy porno film or MTV promo than an action film.

If you couldn't guess, Tokyo Raiders not only ranks as the worst of the latest wave of HK action movies, it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen, period.

The movie centers on two schoolmates, Young (Jun Chong) and Tony (Phillip Rhee), who in order to pay for college, start running a security-for-hire business. Actually, it's not clear where the guys are attending school, since it clearly looks like a high school, but all of the actors involved would look too old even in a grad school program. Anyway, Young and Tony are good at their job, which eventually lands them a high-paying job for someone that turns out to be a drug dealer. Seizing an opportunity, Young takes the dealer's stash, and a group of tough hitmen (which includes martial arts champion Bill "Superfoot" Wallace) are soon on their trail.

During the whole running time, L.A. Street Fighters feels like it could have been an enjoyable slice of 1980's straight-to-video cheese. But the fact that this production apparently had $19.73 to work with ends up crippling it. You that's hyperbole? Well, it looks like they couldn't even afford a lighting rig, which might have not been a huge issue, except for the fact that most of the scenes are filmed at night. It got to the point where I was questioning the brightness setting on my TV, since for a good amount of the movie, you can literally not see what the hell's going on.

That's a shame, since L.A. Street Fighters has quite a packed cast, at least if you're a fan of 1980's cable and/or VHS action movie releases. Besides the aforementioned cast members, canny viewers will be able to spot other B-movie icons like James Lew and Loren Avendon. When you can actually see the fights, they're actually good stuff, with some solid and bloody action. However, unless you're a total cinematic masochist, it's really not worth it at all to sit through the absurdly bad exposition scenes to check out a few minutes of decent action. Sure, you can probably obtain a copy of L.A. Street Fighters for about 99 cents, but even that small amount can't counteract just how terrible the majority of this release is.

Normally, picking up possible movies to review for this site via bargain bins is an exercise in futility. Once in a great while, you might stumble upon a gem, but more often than not, you're getting what you paid for. And in this case, the $1.50 your friendly neighborhood webmaster plunked down for this disc might have been more than a bit generous considering the amount of entertainment it generated. That same amount of cash could have bought a cheap beer during happy hour, and even if you've ingested more than your fair share of hoppy beverages, you'd be hard-pressed to eke out an iota of true enjoyment from a screening of this clunker.

From the start, you know you're in for a rough ride, as we're "treated" to some hammy narration, where some guy (apparently hiding in a public toilet somewhere due to the amount of slapback and echo) gives some half-ass "facts" about Chinese history that are going to end up making you even more confused. Basically, the emperor is bad, and his top general (Lo Lieh) is even worse, going so far as to slaughter the family of one of the emperor's main advisors. A rebel (Pai Ying) saves one of the advisor's kids, who, of course, is an annoying brat, but also happens to have a secret message for the leader of the rebels. Grabbing a baby cart from his brother, Pai heads off to find the rebel leader, fighting a motley crew of villains along the way.

The plot, while simple, would be serviceable enough if the film-makers didn't feel the need to adopt a very confusing style that depends way too much on flashbacks. There's also too many characters thrown into the mix, which makes the story feel that much more muddled. The action holds some glimmers of hope at points, mostly due to the various unique weapons featured, but most of the fights are over far too fast to create any real stimulation or interest. Ultimately, Thousand Mile Escort is just yet another poorly-made and forgettable old-school flick that deserves to stay in the bargain bin.

Those of you familiar with Godfrey Ho's work know that putting together any sort of coherent plot description for his movies is nigh-impossible, due to the fact that his films are almost always a mish-mash of two or more seperate productions. Ninja in the Killing Fields seems to actually be one of Ho's few movies that is made up of original footage, but that doesn't mean it makes any more sense. Bascially, there's a group of drug-dealing ninjas (led by Louis Roth) in Thailand, so a super-cop (Ho mainstay Stuart Smith) is sent over to take care of the problem.

But things aren't all that simple. Perhaps so he could get more footage for future releases, Ho introduces a plethora of subplots, each featuring a new set of actors, such as my personal favorite, one about a coke-bottle glasses wearing former ninja on the run from the clan. All this sort of stuff is mashed together with all the subtlety of Carrot Top after a bender into a headache-inducing mix guaranteed to make you reach for the fast-forward button quicker than you can say "ninja magic" -- which, in this movie's case, apparently includes the ability for dead ninjas to turn into toads.

Things might have been a little better if the movie was edited with any sense of continuity at all. For instance, in one scene, Stuart fights off a ninja that is hanging on his car. After the ninja is thrown off, he shoots an explosive arrow, blowing up the car. Literally seconds after the car is shown in flames, we see Stuart running around the jungle (his shirt seems to have been lost in the explosion) and then getting into a fight with an angry gardener. Those sorts of "what the hell?" moments will manage to generate a few chuckles, but it's not enough to warrant setting aside ninety minutes of your life to actually sit through this bottom of the barrel dreck.

Angry Tiger, at least in its' Spirits of Bruce Lee form, has been in the public domain realm for some time now, and is widely available for viewing on a number of streaming video websites. But even if you're not paying anything to watch this, getting any sort of enjoyment from this picture is an exercise in futility, except perhaps for a few chuckles with your buddies after having a few adult beverages. But even that might be a hopeless venture, as the movie's terrible pacing and lack of compelling action send Angry Tiger straight to the depths of B-movie hell.

If you're actually still interested in this film, and want to know more about it, basically, Michael Chan plays a man who heads to Thailand to investigate the disappearance of his brother. It turns out he was killed by a local crime lord who wanted to steal the large piece of jade he was carrying. Now out for revenge, Michael teams up with a Chinese family running a tea shop, each member fufilling a chop-socky stereotype: pops dispenses pearls of wisdom, the overweight (and possibly retarded) son provides the (extremely lame) comic relief, and the daughter comes on board to play out a very awkward romantic subplot. After picking up the mandatory sidekick in the form of an undercover cop, Michael heads to the crime boss' compound for the final confrontation.

Michael Chan is a favorite actor of mine, which is why this movie is getting a higher rating than it probably deserves, but he's totally under-used here. The fight scenes are, for the most part, simply awful, with most of Michael's opponents being generic slow-moving Thai guys who go down with one or two hits, ala the shemps peppering the initial level of any random beat-em-up video game like Double Dragon. The director does try to shake things up a bit during the finale, by adding in a dude with a whip and a pair of samurais, but by then it's clearly too little, too late to save Angry Tiger from being anything more than just yet another terribly nondescript and poorly-made old-school kung fu movie.

The movie centers around a family who moves from Chicago to North Dakota so they can begin farming and patching their life back together. The family's toddler begins acting strange because he can see the ghosts living in the house. Eventually, the teenage daughter (Kristen Stewart) begins seeing the ghosts as well, and pieces the story together of why the house is haunted.

When you discover why the hause is haunted, and see the events that come afterwards, it's most likely going to generate an annoyed groan rather than shocks. The Messengers subscribes to the whole overused "twist ending" gimmick, which became popularized with The Sixth Sense, and quickly got tired. If the movie managed to create any sort of tension during its' running time, then the lame ending might have been able to be forgiven, at least to an extent.

But that's not the case. The Messengers is bland, by-the-books, PG-13 "horror" all the way, full of stuff like cheap "scares" provded by animals jumping out at people, and, as is par for these types of movies, "ghosts" being actors with dyed black hair and white makeup. The lack of creativity in the script seems to have transferred on to the actors -- most of them look like they don't want to be there. And after finishing The Messengers, the viewer should be able to sympathize with them.

It can often be hard to pinpoint a statement like that, but in this case, it's exceedingly easy. The reason why? Two words: Chris fucking Klein, who personally delivers the cinematic equivalent of a Al Qaeda "dirty bomb" with his abysmal performance here. But, sadly, that's only the biggest reason to not watch this movie. There's so much wrong going on here that it baffles the mind to wonder why the hell this picture was ever made in the first place.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li chews up and craps out any and every thing Street Fighter fans have come to know and love about the games. Bison (played by Neal McDonough) is an Irish dude that spouts off crud from a Lucky Charms box. The "psycho power" that has come to make Bison known and feared in the game world is reduced to a CGI wack-off. And his "man-servant" Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan) doesn't fare all that much better. He spends a good amount of screen time shooting guns. What the hell? I thought he was supposed to be a tough boxer.

And Vega? Yeah, the masked one doesn't fare too well here. The much-anticipated match-up between him and Chun Li is literally over with in about thirty seconds. Actually, no one in this film fares all that well. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li sucks ass. I'm sorry for that uncouth description, but it is what it is. A huge layer of undenying suck. I threw my $5 at the screen and it felt wasted. I probably should have knew better when I saw that Kristin Kreuk was playing Chun Li. There's over a billion people in China -- couldn't the producers have found an actual Chinese girl to play Chun Li?

Of course, all this talk of story and acting would be all for naught in an action movie if the fisticuffs were up to snuff. Well, dear readers, don't worry. The fight scenes in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li also suck. Seriously, I've seen episodes of UMAC Masters that had better fight co-ordination. Action director Dion Lam needs to stick with Steven Seagal's pudgy ass. A couple of people look decent (not surprisingly, they're Hong Kong vets like Robin Shou and Josie Ho) but the rest of the cast is so hidden behind obvious wirework, CGI, and quick editing that it's not even really worth calling the fight sequences "action" scenes, since there's so little actual excitement generated during them.

So yes, if you haven't guessed by now, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li is only "legendary" in the sense of how completely and utterly awful it is. In a movie like this, I'm not too picky. All I want is a good-looking woman kicking ass. This film couldn't even deliver that, plus it gives us Chris "go back to Amercian Pie" Klein assaulting the audience with his Keanu Reeves on qaaludes level of acting. This is not a good movie, it is not a "good" bad movie, it is just a flat-out bad movie that should never sully your eyeballs.

Lessons for an Assassin would be barely passable as late night insomniac/drunken random cable movie fare if it actually had some action in it. Instead, most of the film wastes time in boring training sequences where a random white guy named Gavin (Robert Vitelli, who is also the movie's executive producer) learns how to be a badass from "The Corporation", an assassin training facility run by the mysterious Quinn, who is played by Michael Dorn. I guess those The Next Generation residuals weren't paying the bills.

Anyway, after a bunch of scenes where Gavin tries to be a tough guy by showing off his cool barbed-wire tattoos and chain-smoking cigs, he teams up with one of his teachers, Fiona (Shannon Lee) after learning The Corporation is a front for drug companies to get revenge... or is The Corporation simply a killing simulation for bored rich guys? Whatever. Who the hell cares? It's all just a bad rip-off of La Femme Nikita and pulled off with none of the style or excitement of Luc Besson's cult classic.

All of the "action" featured here, what little of it there is, is co-ordinated so half-assedly that it fails to generate any sort of excitement. The gimmicks include nunchakus that can be seemingly pulled out of a pair of Doc Martens, and dual-fisted Uzi shooting from the comfort of a swiveling office chair. It might have been entertaining in a cheesy over-the-top way if it wasn't so obviously and stiffly staged. As hackey as Lo Wei's Bruce Lee movies were, at least the fight scenes were solid. You'll have no such luck here.

After recently watching the atrocious Catman in Lethal Track, Lessons for an Assassin came off as a little better -- but not by much. Where one of the highlights of a movie is seeing Dan Frischman (aka Arvid from Head of the Class and a mainstay of Nickelodeon's popular tween shows) being a sleazeball in a nudie bar, you know you're in trouble. Do yourself a favor and keep Bruce Lee's legacy afloat with some legitimacy by not wasting your time with this clunker.

The plot here's the standard revenge stuff found in several hundred other films, with Iron Umbrella going after a group of thugs who severely injured his sifu and killed his parents. Along the way, he picks up a plucky female sidekick, fights a couple of times, and walks for a really long time until he meets up with the nasty villain. Will Iron Umbrella get revenge? Should we even care after being bored to tears by seemingly endless shots of him walking through the countryside?

This reviewer certainly didn't. Granted, I am not the biggest fan of "old-school" kung fu movies, but I would be flabbergasted if anyone actually admitted to liking this movie. There aren't even any decent, much less, good fights.

None of the actors look to be particularly skilled in martial arts, and even the stuntmen are second-grade. During a mass fights, several of them can be seen moving on the gorund even though they're supposed to be dead. The horrible camerawork and editing don't help matters any, as things are either too stagnant or not focused at all.

The finale does try to liven things up, with things like blood (via noticeably placed squib packets), special effects (really awful stop-motion stuff), and strange choreography that I think might be the action director's attempt to create a "bullet time"-eqsue effect. Or maybe he just loaded the wrong film stock in the camera.

At any rate, even if you're armed with some adult beverages and are looking for a movie to mock MST3K-style, one should tread into Swordsman with an Umbrella lightly. The depths of cinematic inepitude don't get much deeper than this.

• Base your movie on an existing property (in this case, a manga called Slam Dunk) and then totally ignore everything that made the original source successful in the first place.

• Feature copious amounts of extremely obvious product placement. Here, we get Pepsi cola, Motorola phones, and Absolut vodka... in a movie where one of the main characters is an alcoholic. Smooth move there.

• Have a soundtrack that consists of stock music and the latest singles from the movie's stars, and present ample opportunity to use them via musical montages to pad out the running time. Bonus points here for the songs having insightful lyrics like "You're like tofu/TOFU!/I'll beat you with my kung fu/KUNG FU!"

• Mine half of your cast from veterans looking for a quick paycheck, with the other half being pop stars looking to promote their latest album. Make sure to do a half-ass job directing them so it looks like no one gives a shit about the production.

• Totally ignore the romance between the two young leads, and emphasize the creepy relationship between the male lead and his much older male co-star. Serious, Eric Tsang looking dreamily into Jay Chou's eyes whilst lil' Jay sheds a tear is one of the most unsettling images I've ever experienced in Hong Kong cinema.

• Make a movie about kung fu and basketball that doesn't really feature much of either, and when it is on-screen, totally ignore any rules or sense about it. Yet more bonus points are earned here by wasting the talents of one of the world's best action directors.

• When in doubt, use CGI. Lots of CGI.

Kung Fu Dunk is the kind of loud, annoying, and nonsensical film that give Hong Kong's output a bad name, and should be avoided by everybody other than aficinados of sub-par cinema.

The plot revolves around Wendy (played by the lovely Chingmy Yau), a girl whose psychokinetic powers have proven to be such a plague on her family that she's reduced to living with her aunt Big Beer (Deannie Yip), a PR host (aka hooker) who is on her last legs financially.

Along with her landlord's (Lawrence Cheng) money-grubbing girlfriend (Carol Cheng), Beer hatches a plan to use Wendy's abilities to make a lot of cash, via a popular TV show and the gullibility of rich women in Hong Kong.

Long-time readers of this site know the love I have of both Chingmy Yau and Wong Jing, but even with both their talents present, She Starts the Fire just ends up being a really lousy movie.

The acting present here is simply horrible; Deannie Yip in particular makes the viewer want to strangle her as she seems to want to yell and over-act every line she utters. Most of the other actors don't fare any better. Carol Cheng seems to be almost kicking herself in the head for doing jokes about the droopiness of her breasts.

"Comedy" like that thrown at the viewer doesn't help things move along in any shape or form. I'm not adverse to toilet humor -- in fact, I find it extremely hilarious if it's used the right way. But stuff like "humorous" attempts at making things like dog-cooking and urine-drinking funny just came across as insulting.

Yes, I will give She Starts the Fire a couple of points for the eye candy of Chingmy Yau, especially during the final reel, where she sports some hot pants that leave very little to the imagination. But, just like I'd imagine you'd to be, she seems at once totally bored and repulsed by the proceedings.

"Billy Chow playing Tai is married to the endowed Mindy played by Diana Pang Dan. Mindy forces him to set up a kidnapping to make money. This puts him at odds with his former kung fu brother and policeman Li Tai-Chu played by Law Kar-Ying. There seems to be an obsession with tying bombs to people and letting the clock tick down. Li discovers his true love along the way the film makers apparently unaware and any Freudian significance in the fact she blatantly reminds him of his mother."

So, yeah, Another Chinese Cop is actually both boring and confusing at the same time. Even with Diana Pang Dan throttling her cleavage about (especially in a strip-tease scene totally ripped off from True Lies), this has nothing to offer the potential viewer. After this movie ended, I felt like I was just robbed of the last ninety minutes of my life, and I suspect you'll feel the same way if you'd ever be brave enough to subject your eyeballs to this twaddle.

The slim plot has David Sloan (Sasha Mitchell), who is now the world kickboxing champ, along with his trainer Xian (Dennis Chan), heading down to Brazil to compete in a championship bout against some generic tough guy named Martine (Ian Jacklin). David and Xian befriend a couple of homeless kids, and when one of them is kidnapped by the nasty Lane (Richard Comar) to be put into his underage prostitution ring, it's on like Donkey Kong.

You might think this would lead to some sort of cool Bloodsport-style underground tournament. Nope, it just leads to Kickboxer 3 becoming a really shitty "mismatched buddies" action flick. Fists and feet of fury are replaced with Woo-wannabe shootouts and shitty one-liners, and the end result is annoyance and boredom for the viewer. Seriously, you'll probably find more hard-hitting action at a kids' karate class than you will here.

The film-makers try to beef things up at the end with an actual kickboxing match between David and Martine, which is admittedly at least competent. But after eighty minutes of having Sasha Mitchell channeling Keanu Reeves with a head cold hopped up on NyQuil (with an annoying kid actor tagging along to boot), the limp attempt to inject some real action in at the end is your proverbial case of "too little, too late". Even if you're tanked on cheap beer some night and catch this on TBS, just do yourself a favor and switch over to the Total Gym infomercial instead.

The plot basically re-treads the first film. The Japanese, led by the insidious Miyamoto (Lo Lieh, who must have been hard up for beer money to be forced into taking a role in rubbish such as this) are trying to kill the spirit of the occupied Chinese by destroying their kung fu schools. Chen Shan (Bruce Li) heads to Shanghai to check out his brother's grave, sees what the "nasty Japs" are up to, and proceeds to kick their asses into submission.

I'm not a big fan of the first movie, and its' sequel does nothing to improve on it. In fact, as you might expect, given that the first entry's main draw (Bruce Lee, natch) isn't here, things become worse. Bruce Li is a decent actor and martial artist, but he's not given a chance to display either of those skills here.

The film-makers were obviously trying to make him into Bruce Lee v. 2, but it doesn't work. There's one scene where Li does his best Bruce Lee imitation of The Dragon's legendary nunchaku skills. Instead of exciting, it comes off as cheesy and hollow, and is a perfect example of why this should be left in the bargain bin and not put in your DVD player.

In the movie, Yuen plays a kung fu instructor who has attracted the attention of a young music teacher (Lee Bing-Bing), who wants him to teach martial arts to one of her pupils. The two begin a bit of a romance, but it has to be put on hold, as Yuen as still dealing with demons from his past, as his former best friend was the one that ended up marrying his childhood sweetheart (Yoyo Mung).

This doesn't sound like your usual action movie plot, and I'd be fine with that if anyone involved with this picture could act. Actually, they don't do too bad of a job, but one gets the sense that the actors were really doing this more for a paycheck than anything else. The same cannot be said for the kid actor in this movie. He made me want to jab needles into my eardrums every time he spoke, and soon had me wishing for the halycon days of that brat from Rumble in the Bronx.

The extremely poor script doesn't help matters any, either. This is the type of movie that uses a lot of musical montages to pad its' running time. It even goes so far as to use the stupid "flashback within a flashback" device -- of footage we just saw minutes ago. I know good screenwriters are getting hard to find in Hong Kong these days, but this was ridiculous.

There is a very little bit of action thrown in, and it's what saves Fight for Love from coming across even worse than it does. But frankly, given how crappily the dramatic scenes are done here, even action stuff on the level of Drunken Master II or Hard-Boiled couldn't rescue this from the foul depths of B-movie hell that it's firmly entrenched in from the get-go.

The movie (which is actually shot on video) centers on Chin Siu-Ho, who returns to Hong Kong from England to investigate the death of his brother. It turns out lil' bro was actually an undercover cop, and so Chin decides the best way to find out who killed him is to infiltrate the brother's gang. And that's about it, really.

Nothing much of any substance, much less of any interest, occurs during Big Job's thankfully short running time. There's lots of throwaway scenes that are supposedly trying to build up the characters, but the acting is so piss-poor, the viewer quickly loses any and all interest in the proceedings.

You might think that even on a shot-on-video cheapie, the action might be able to save the day, but that's not the case. Not only are the action scenes shot and edited that makes you think the film-makers just threw the whole thing together on the fly (which they very well might have) the sound effects are so bad that they sound like the director hired his little kid to sit on the set and make noises.

From beginning to end, Big Job has little, if anything, to offer viewers. With the wealth of Triad movie options out there, it should be the proverbial cold day in hell before you should even think about checking this out. It's not even so bad that it becomes funny -- it's just plain bad and should be avoided even by the more masochistic HK filmphiles out there.

That is, until Sussie finds out Sum's true personality and sets out to make Yee the winner. Oh, yeah, there's also a plot line about Sussie's childhood love Shui (Leo Koo), who still holds a torch for her. Believe me, this is all as truly compelling as it sounds.

Anyway, first off, can someone please, please, PLEASE, tell me how in the holy hell Sammy Leung (I refuse to call him just "Sammy") continues to get starring roles in movies? I used to think Ekin Cheng was bad, and Edison Chen was even worse. But compared to the vortex of suckitude that is Mr. Leung, those two come off as classically-trained thespians. It seems like any movie Leung is in is destined to fail, and Super Fans doesn't break that trend.

Now, seeing as how I am not a fan of either Cantopop or TV "talent" shows, perhaps I am not in this movie's target audience. On the other hand, if director Eric Kot and screenwriter Anselm Chan were actually smart about their process, we might have gotten an actual honest-to-God entertaining movie here -- even with Lil' Sammy stinking up the proceedings.

The film-makers could have seemingly fairly easily created a picture which pokes fun at the insane tabloid-driven world of stardom in Hong Kong -- something that might cross borders and been interesting to someone other than lonely 13-year-olds. But instead, we get a long, boring, and annoying commerical for the pop stars planted in here under the guise of making an actual movie.

Super Fans represents pretty much everything that is wrong with Hong Kong films nowadays. It's so obviously obsessed with making a buck by any way possible that it's hard to consider it anything but a blatant attempt to cash in on the stars' names, much less anything close to an actual work of art.

Whether it's through music videos disguised as plot exposition, or some of the most blatant product placement ever (for Hong Kong productions, that's saying an awful lot) the film-makers apparently forgot that people like to watch movies to be entertained, not to be hammered over the head with a cheeseball message delivered by horrible acting.

I have a really hard time believing that even the most dedicated teenybopper fan of the stars here would be willing to slog through this crud, but then again, I never thought I'd be talking about Sammy Leung as a lead actor. But, honestly, even if you're a glutton for punishment and/or the world's biggest Charlene Choi fan, your time and money would much better be served elsewhere. Life's too short to waste it sitting through trash like this.

In this installment (which has nothing to do with the previous entries), Andy Lau plays a fighter pilot who is shot down over a small village. Wu Chien-Lin finds him and -- of course -- instantly falls in love while nursing Andy back to health. Andy also has "special" feelings for Wu (who wouldn't?) but the village elders don't like the idea of an "outsider" marrying one of their own, so Andy heads back off to the war. Will the pair reunite and find true love? If you don't know the answer to that, then please do yourself a favor and get off the internet, because obviously you're in need of serious help.

Instead of Benny Chan, Johnnie To took the directorial duties this time out. But there's none of To's trademark style or wit to be had here. This is by-the-books Lifetime network movie of the week romantic crud all the way, complete with several retch-inducing slow-motion musical montages. One of these is puzzingly paired with footage of Wu and Andy beating the hell out of a cow. I guess there's nothing like the feeling of bonding over some animal cruelty to show what true love is all about.

A Moment of Romance III moves at such a glacial pace that even a few frosty ones couldn't help this reviewer from getting extremely bored during the proceedings. Andy Lau's acting didn't help matters any. He was still fully in his stone-faced mode here, and it was impossible to develop any sort of sympathy for his character, and thus any interest in the movie went quickly out of the window. Wu Chien-Lin tries her best, but given the dismal script, she can't really do much other than being the typical "jade vase" seen far too often in these kinds of Hong Kong movies.

Again, watching this sort of fluff isn't exactly my idea of fun, so if you're a huge Andy Lau fan or need something to smooth things over with your girlfirend, then A Moment of Romance III might be worth your time. Otherwise, go and seek out Johnnie To's excellent crime movies from this period for an actual satifying film experience. Probably the only positive thing I can think about this effort is that it was a minor hit (probably due to Andy's star power) and the profits allowed To to create "real" motion pictures instead of snore-inducing pop dreck like this.

After that sequence, the flimsy plot rolls into place, with Jade Leung and Karen Cheung playing a pair of private detectives assigned to protect a computer geek who has some sort of special program (what exactly it does is never fully explained). Of course, there's some bad guys after him -- we know they're bad because they dress in all black -- so the trio heads to a resort to hide away for forty-eight hours. Again, why exactly they must do this isn't explained, but it gives the film-makers the opportunity to use some really cheesy-looking split-screens ala 24.

Most of the film's running time is dominated by dopey comedy and sexless attempts at titillation. There's also lots of bickering between the girls, especially after Teresa Mak shows up to help out. The only reason seemingly for her arrival that the film-makers can rip off Charlie's Angels. With all of these "homages", director Manny Luk comes off as Wong Jing, except without his gentle touch. By the time Kung Fu Tea ended, I was grateful. Not because I had just seen a great movie, but the mere fact that it was over. Save your time and skip this one -- even fans of B-movie trash won't find much of interest here.

Dating a Vampire stars Alex Fong and the incredibly annoying Sammy Leung as a couple of medical students who go to an abandoned apartment building to study for final exams. The only other people in the building are a trio of cute women (Miki Yeung, Zuki Lee and Cynthia Ho) who strangely dress like they're still in the 1960's. Well, it turns out that they dress like that because they were vampires who were "turned" during that time.

Why exactly they haven't bought new clothes since then, even though their apartment has stuff like a flat-screen TV in it, is never explained. Also, the vampires have mirrors in their apartment. Why the hell would vampires need mirrors? Anyway, the trio has killed 999 "bad guys" and need the blood of just one "good guy" so they can achieve immortality. And guess who the good guy is? So, enlisting the aid of a TV Taoist ghostbuster (Yuen Wah, in a total "beer money" role) and his brother who is in the SDU (Andy On), Alex sets off to destroy the vampires.

I really don't know where to start with this. The acting is piss-poor, even by horror movie standards. Does Sammy Leung have some donkey show pictures of Charles Heung? I cannot fathom why this "actor" keeps on getting work. I wanted to jab him in the kidneys about five minutes into the film. The other actors don't fare much better. Yuen Wah tries his best, but it's almost embarrassing seeing a man who was in some of the greatest action movies ever created slumming in fare like this.

If you're expecting the horror bits to save the movie, don't hold your breath. The vampire makeup is laughable, consisting of white face paint and cheesy-looking fangs... which sometimes fall out of the mouths of the actors! Clarence Fok tries to create a spooky atomsphere with dim lighting and "fancy" camera techniques, but it totally fails. I've seen more compentent shooting and editing on amateur films on YouTube.

From beginning to end, Dating a Vampire does nothing but alternately bore and annoy the viewer, and frankly should not be viewed by anyone with a lick of sense. Even after a six-pack of Heineken, it was a chore getting through this one. The movie gets a couple of points for the eye candy from the actresses, but if you're looking for some T&A -- or just a decent horror movie -- there are far better alternatives to be found elsewhere.

The result of all this is a bunch of choppers being produced, some people getting killed, and just general boredom to be had by the viewer. Everything moves at too much of a slow pace, and when events do happen, there's no explanation given to them, so that the viewer is not only bored, they're confused -- not a good combonation. It doesn't help matters any that most of the actors give pretty poor performances. It's really not a good sign when Shing "Big Silly Head" Fui-On does a better job in a Triad movie than Chow Yun-Fat (who also hampers matters further by strangling a cat, er, "singing" some of the songs in the movie). Actually, it is a pretty good sign -- a sign to stay the hell away from this stinker, that is.

I'm not going to go into any real detail about the plot, because there really isn't any depth to it. Ronald Cheng plays a bumbling low-level Triad who is spotted by a trio of too young/too cute cops, who think he is really a undercover officer who has lost his memory. In order to get into their (as well as the local dai lo's girl's) pants, he agrees to become a mole. And that's about it. The writers (all three of them!) try to inject some subplots, but nothing gets seen to completion, and as such, everything falls flat as a result. The directors try to make up for this by having all of the actors scream their lines, or when things get really desperate, curse in English. It's stuff like this that gives Hong Kong comedies a bad name with many viewers. Undercover Hidden Dragon is loud, dumb, and just not funny.

There are a couple of bright spots, such as parodies of Masked Rider and Initial D. What there is of the too-brief action sequences is very well-done (though Cheng is quite obivously doubled for most of them). Plus, the females in the film add some nice eye candy. But it felt like a chore getting through Undercover Hidden Dragon, which watching a movie should never be under any circumstances. I know Hong Kong movies will probably never be up to the level of the "golden age" ever again, but surely HK film-makers can come up with something better than this half-ass effort.

Directed by Wong Ching Po (Jiang Hu), Ah Sou tells the story of a young woman (newcomer Annie Lau) who is promoted to the top of a Triad gang after her father (Eric Tsang), the former dai lo, is assassinated. Of course, the girl doesn't want to become a gangster (she's more interested in pursuing a romance with the local pizza delivery boy), and this leads to all sorts of double-crosses as the remaining leaders in the gang vie for power. As with most movies of this type, things come to a head in a series of bloody confrontations that lead to the crowning of the true leader of the gang.

Ah, where to begin? The plot is hardly nothing new, and the acting is sub-par. Annie Lau is wooden and uninspiring, and even veterans like Simon Yam and Anthony Wong seem to be phoning in their performances. Ah Sou is also poorly-paced; there's just way too much time dedicated to the pizza boy romantic bits, especially since the relationship never seems to go anywhere -- which is kind of a metaphor for the movie as a whole. Through the whole running time, Ah Sou accomplishes nothing. We never like the characters and don't care what happens to them. I spent a good portion of Ah Sou's running time wondering exactly when it would end, and I suspect most viewers -- even hard-core HK movie fans -- will end up feeling the same.

Probably the most damning part of Ah Sou is Wong Ching Po himself. He mistakes gimmickry (animated sequences, sideways shots, slow-motion, etc.) for story-telling. There are just way too many "look at me" moments which come off as film school-inspired cinematic mastrubation, rather than actual film-making. Disappointingly, this seems to be where Hong Kong movies have been headed nowadays, with directors just throwing everything in their palletes against the wall and seeing if anything sticks. In all honesty, if this is the sort of output Hong Kong studios are going to be churning out from now on, most viewers aren't going to stay faithful for that much longer -- even the most die-hard fanboys have their limits.

Now, before you call me an intellectual philistine, I know that movies don't need explosions or bare breasts to be good, but Flowers of Shanghai is so slow-moving and so talky, it bored me within the first fifteen minutes or so and it was a struggle to get to the end. Even if I was in the mood for a "thinking" movie, I sure as hell wouldn't pick this film. I didn't care at all about the characters. The mood created by the filmic techniques and script made them seem limp to me -- I kept saying to myself "what was that scene good for?" throughout the movie. Visually, the cinematography (all the scenes are done in a single take, followed by a fade in/out) and the film's lone set drove me nuts after a while. A lot of reviewers gushed about this movie's visual style -- I didn't see anything that interesting here. Some of the costumes are nice, but that's about it.

Flowers of Shanghai comes off as more as a stage play put on film than anything else. If I want to see something like that, I'll go to the theatre and see it live -- or perhaps not. This seems like the kind of movie that film critics say they love because they feel they have to, not because they want to (in fact, several US critics put the movie on their "ten best" list of 1998 just becuase it was ranked highly at film festivals). Quite honestly, this is probably just not my kind of movie. I've enjoyed "arty" films from all over the world, but my idea of entertainment (which films -- despite any "artistic" pretenses -- are) doesn't include watching two hours of static shots of people rambling on and on and on. As the saying goes, "your mileage may vary," so you might still want to check out this movie if you're into the real arty stuff (or just want to try and impress one of your film teachers). But don't blame me if you fall asleep halfway through.

I'm not going to even really bother getting into the plot details -- The King of Wrestlers doesn't even deserve that. Bascially, there's a scrappy young kickboxer who wants to take on a old vet, who has retired after throwing a fight. There's also some Triads who want to kill the guy and a pixie-esque love interest, and a wise old mom... you get the idea. This is by-the-numbers cheapie action movie stuff all the way.

The big problem here is that there really isn't any action. It's a shame, because some of the actors look to be talented in that department. Instead, we get a bunch of throwaway scenes that add nothing to the movie, except to prolong the viewer's boredom. There are glimmers of hope when the action does rear its' head, but the payoff comes off as too little and too late to save The King of Wrestlers from being anything other than a Z-list production that deserves to be gathering dust on the video shelf, rather than polluting your DVD player.

The plot is so banal that I'm not going to really go into much detail on it. Basically, Sammo left his wife and kid to travel to a remote village to learn Tai Chi. Some years later, his son (Huang Xiao Ming) finds him, so he can train to fight a karate champ (Richard Ng) to save his mom's business. Even though the plot is dead-simple, the movie takes forever to get anywhere, even going so far as to pad the thin running time with an extremely embarrassing dance number. There are a couple of decent fights near the end (including one where Sammo takes on "Beardy" Lau Kar Leung), but they're too short to make much of an impact. A screening of Legend of the Dragon steers the viewer between boredom and stupidty (Timmy Hung, as Huang's sidekick, provides some comic relief that does nothing but aggravate), bringing them to a destination that one hops Sammo never reaches again.

Really, nothing at all here is done compentently, much less actually done well. The characters are all cookie-cutter cliches (the tough kid, the nerdy guy, the suave one, etc.) and the script feels like it was wirtten by a couple of drunken monkeys; plot developments come and go on a whim, and even though the basic story is very simple, it still manages to make no sense. There are a couple of decent fights, but even if the ghost of Bruce Lee made an appearance here, it still couldn't save Vampire Settle on Police Camp from being a total dud.