American Samurai (1992)

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.

I have seen MUCH worse Fu/ninja flicks then this but this one isn't very good either.Kind of a ripoff of American Ninja, white guy learns Japanese style blah blah blah. Unlike the characters in that series of movies, some of the people in this actually do seem to know martial arts. Kind of a cross between a genuine fu flick like a Jet Li movie and typical American crap.The rest of the plot is......ah who cares, its a samurai movie, doesn't matter. :PUnlike American Ninja this movie doesn't have 2 guys taking on dozens of "ninja masters" that can be knocked out with one punch, this has more of a realistic one on one style and it is a challenge for the combatants. Much like Blood Sport.What it does have going for it it the interesting fighters in the last 45 minutes of the movie, the first half of the movie is just filler to make an excuse for all of the fighting at the end so skip it.The fighters at the end look like they were pulled straight from an early 90's 2D arcade fighting game. That is the high point of this flick.The low point, and I mean VERY low point is the last fight scene. Both of the "samurai" are wearing the same black and white outfit, no other colors. If you look close during the last fight though you can clearly see red streamers coming from out of the frame, they reused footage from one of the earlier fight scenes to add length to the last fight and it looks SOOOOOOOO cheesy. Also the actors don't know a damn thing about sword fighting, they just clang them together for 5 minutes, that coupled with the reused footage makes it a non-climax.Since 45 minutes of this movie is solid fighting with fighters that actually do know how to use their weapons, the very last scene isn't as important.You can do worse then this, any American Ninja above 2 for example. Not really good or really terrible.5/10 when compared to other Fu/ninja movies, would score higher if the last fight scene was done well.

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.