Movie Name: Bloodfist IV: Die Trying
Producer: New Concorde
Director: Paul Ziller
Actors: Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Cat Sassoon, Jon Agro, Kale Browne, Stephen James Carver, Lenny Citrano, and Gary Daniels
Release Date: November 18th, 1992
Introduction
So far we have looked at the following Bloodfist, Bloodfist II and Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight. The last movie looked like it was starting to come onto its own and the quality was slightly better than the first two movies. Will this movie build on that or fallback to the cheesy 90's martial arts movies that we grow and love.
Bloodfist IV: die Trying Trailer
Story
This time around Don "The Dragon" Wilson plays as Danny Holt. Danny is a struggling father who works for a repossession garage. One day he repossesses a car. Unbeknownst to him, the car was supposed to be a drop off point for something illegal. Until this point we do not know why.
Needless to say that the bad guys are not too happy about this and try to locate the car. They finally locate it and after they do not get what they want, they kill everyone at the garage. Danny was on an errand to get some food. When he comes back he sees that everyone is dead and takes the repossessed car.
He does not know who to trust anymore. All his friends are being killed one after another. After a while Danny realizes that the bad guys are after a box of chocolates. The chocolates contain a device that can trigger explosives.
When the bad guys have enough, they kidnap his daughter as leverage. Danny will do what he can to get back his daughter.
Bottomline
What can I say? This movie falls in line with the series. Where I felt that the last installment had glimpses of quality, this one dips a little. May be it is cause I have seen this storyline done many times, but I think it is more than that.
Like in Bloodfist III, they tried to get some more known actors to appear here. As you can see in the trailer, there is international model Catya Sassoon (credited as Cat Sassoon) and James Tolkan. However, I think it made little difference to the overall picture.
I did not notice it at the time, but read on the imdb website, the following:
The opening credits and the cover of the VHS release incorrectly list Women's National Tae Kwon Do champion Carolyn Raimondi as among the cast. Raimondi does not appear in this movie.
I can see the attention to detail that went into this movie. *Sarcasm*
Joking aside, the movie franchise was known for hiring and listing current and previous martial arts champions. I think that either the editors got confused about what movie they were editing or she was supposed to be in the movie and backed out last minute. This is only a hunch as I could not find any proof for this mistake.
Alright, so let us go back to the movie. As with most B martial arts movie, the story is not that great. I will say that the fight scenes are not that bad. I admit they may not be as polished as in 3, but you see a maturity in front of the camera for Don "The Dragon" Wilson. He did not have much to work with in terms of the dialogue.
I will be quite honest, all of the other characters in this movie are forgettable to say the least. Even James Tolkan who plays Agent Sterling, played a generic FBI hard butt.
The "Love Interest" Shannon played by Amanda Wynes was very generic as well. Although, looking at her acting career, it is quite impressive. Her biggest role that I can see until this point was playing in Nightmare on Elm Street. Again, not a bad actress but she was not given much to work with.
Having said all of that, it is a guilty pleasure. I do not know why, but I am drawn to these types of movies and I can watch them all day long. The story is not great, the action questionable and the acting is meh, but that is what makes these fun to watch. For some people it is bad horror movies but for me it is martial arts movies from the 80's and 90's. So I would recommend to anyone that is a martial arts movie fan. I do acknowledge that for the fringe fans, this will not be that enjoyable.
What do you think? Was I on the mark or did I miss it entirely? Let us know at the coordinates below.
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