American Samurai (1992)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

So much average

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I remember watching this movie when it first came out many years ago on video and loved it, basically elimination tournament with weapons. Bloodsport essentially. You have the Samurai character badly and uncomfortably played by David Bradley. I say badly because he is so uptight the entire movie. Maybe he was worried about Mark Dacascos upstaging him, should be he does. Anyways this is more a message about the region 2 DVD, please don't buy it. It is cut to the point of being a PG. Sincerely this movie is poleaxed by the censors. If you want to watch Mark Dacascos in his element acting superbly please watch this otherwise find the uncut version.

Although I guess David Bradley is a highly skilled martial artist, I don't think he was that good in the three "American Ninja"-movies he took part in. "American Ninja 3" was OK, but the 4th and 5th installment of the series were just terrible. This movie is much better. It's an arena-fighting movie, and it's well performed. They managed to throw in a lot of different fighting styles from many places, and it was really interesting. Several of the styles were new to me. Another great thing is the introduction of Marc Dacascos into the world of martial arts movies. He's a great fighter, and here he made a convincing and extremely evil villain. The fight scenes in this movie are good, and they're also extremely brutal (even more brutal than "Shootfighter"). If you like martial arts action, you'll definitely like this movie.

David Bradley must retrieve a sword which was stolen from him, and is forced to enter an illegal tournament to fight to the death. there he meaes up with his step-brother. Some of the scenes are laughable. fight scenes were ok i guess but not much flair really. But hey, at least Dacascos is good!

The first time I saw this movie, I was much younger than I am today and I thought that it was a decent movie with awesome fight scenes. But when I watched it a few years later I realized something...it's crap. As I watched I came under the realization that the editors had no idea what they were doing. Scenes conflicted with each other. For example, at one time you see this blond fighter get his leg hacked to pieces only to see him with a perfect leg, no scratches or bruises, just a few minutes later (24 hours according to the movie). What was the worst of all was the final fight scene. It is totally obvious that all the makers of this movie did was just take previous scenes and meshed them all together. It wouldn't have been that obvious if it wasn't for the fact that the main character kept changing uniforms every 5 seconds, the guy he kept fighting changed as well, and for the horrible dubbing they did to make the previous scenes fit.Avoid this movie at all cost. I have seen some bad martial arts movies in my time, but they were always enjoyable. This one is just plain bad and should probably only be seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000 to be heckled at.