Dynamite Brothers (1974)

I agree with the other reviewer who wrote that there's a good movie buried here, but with Al Adamson at the helm, it was never going to appear on screen. His incompetency as a filmmaker is astounding. How can you make so many mistakes? For example, you have a good set of kung-fu actors who know how to stage a fight, but you'd never know it watching East Meets Watts or Dynamite Brothers or whatever you want to call it. The fight scenes are horribly shot. Add to that a plot that makes absolutely no sense, ridiculous dialogue, stilted delivery, and a lack of any technical acumen, and you've got one very poor movie. I think one of my favorite bits in the movie might have been the character named Stud Brown - how awesome is that!One of the things that amazed me as I watched East Meets Watts was how in God's name did Adamson convince Aldo Ray and James Hong to be in this pile of dung? Both are very accomplished actors who deserved way better than this.

Dynamite Brothers (1974) * 1/2 (out of 4)A Chinese man (Alan Tang) sneaks into America to locate his missing brother and ends up meeting a black man (Timothy Brown) who decides to help him. The two head to Los Angeles where they run into various drug dealers as well as a crooked cop (Aldo Ray) who is in with them.You know, I love watching bad movies and there's really no one worse than Al Adamson. With that said, I really do love Adamson as a filmmaker because no matter how awful his movies are you can at least spot them from a mile away. As with most of the director's films, this one here is pretty darn bad in regards to quality but at the same time you can't help but be mildly entertained just because of how much craziness one person can pack into a single movie.Adamson was certainly the type of director that would just throw everything on the screen and hope that it would work in the end. By doing this, movies such as this one are technically very poorly made and the storyline itself makes very little to no sense. However, you've got crazy stuff happening throughout the picture from car chases to bar fights to one of the dumbest scenes ever using a snake as a deadly weapon. The bad guys are downright silly to say the least and you're certainly never threatened by them.Then there's the cast. Brown is okay in his part of the duo but Tang is pretty boring and never brings any energy to the picture. Carol Speed, best remembered for her role in ABBY, is good as a deaf woman and Don Oliver is rather memorable as a character known as The Smiling Man. Ray, a good actor in his own right, is clearly just picking up a paycheck here as there are a few times where it's obvious he forgot his lines and is looking off screen for some help. We also have James Hong in a small role.DYNAMITE BROTHERS mixes elements of THE DEFIANT ONES with every other blaxploitation and martial arts film from this period. Heck, Ray even gets a brief scene in a mirror that appears to be mimicking the Marlon Brando "contender" speech from ON THE WATERFRONT. Still, this Adamson picture is very poorly made and gets boring after a while but as you can see, there's still a lot of crazy stuff going on.

I'm giving this turkey a one out of 10. It's supposed to be a mix of kung fu action with blaxploitation and it utterly fails to be either. The kung fu scenes are totally lame (there is a Lee Van Cleef look alike who dies at least three times) and the black action is shot in near total darkness and really weak anyhow. Add on that there are ZERO hot chicks in this, the ones in it are average off the street women, big deal! This film has zero going for it, which is probably why the Cinematic Titanic crew picked it to riff. I watched it on Hulu and it's a live audience version. As a riffed film I'm going to give it a 6 or 7'sh. It's not the funniest thing I've seen from this talent but it's not the worst, I laughed several times. Something about Kung Fu films and them getting riffed so far has not been the greatest, although my memory may be lacking I can only think of the Castle Of Fu Manchu and this was better then that early MST3K episode, oh yeah they also riffed the Lee Van Cleef The Master TV show and that was one of the very few things I couldn't finish from MST3K, so I guess this is the best Kung Fu riffed material I've seen but thats not saying much. Since it was probably heavily edited for Cinematic Titanic there may have been some decent nudity and bloody action scenes so maybe I'm being too harsh on it, if it had ANY nudity in it (the mute black chick), I'd give it a 3, but as for the version I watched it's a 1 film on it's own, and a 6 Cinematic Titanic film. I am thinking it's one of the worst things ever made in Hollywood stuff. Epic Fail.

Considering that this movie was made by the schlock-meister, Al Adamson, it's no surprise that the whole things comes off as cheap and unwatchable. Aside from lousy camera-work, an annoying soundtrack and cheesy stunts, this film suffers from horribly dull acting and dialog. To say that the main characters are dull and unappealing is an understatement--balls of lint have much more charisma than these two idiots.The film is about a Chinese guy who comes to America looking for his brother. He meets up with a black man and for a while they are handcuffed together like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in THE DEFIANT ONES, though there's no way you could mistake the two movies! A bit later, the two become separated and both have various dull adventures where there is a lot of bad martial arts and cars that explode for no particular reason. Frankly, the plot didn't seem that interesting, so I won't bother to elaborate further on it--you just won't care once the movie gets going.The only surprise, and it's a mild one, is the presence of a good actor (Aldo Ray) in the film. He isn't that bad but it's sad to see a decent actor like Ray in this and other crap productions in the twilight of his career. It must have been very hard on him taking on such rancid roles for hacks like Adamson.Overall, the film is an inept mess. Sadly, it's not even a film you can laugh at or enjoy on a camp level--it's just craptastic and dull from start to finish. The martial arts aren't even that good, as the cameraman, I suspect, was a lemur. Plus, many of the fighting scenes were just dumb--such as the guy with the nunchuks who swung them incessantly without even trying to connect or threaten the hero. I think in the end he was just so tired of swinging them that it was easy to beat him! By the way, for the sensitive viewers out there, there are a lot of politically incorrect racial slurs in this film. If you are easily offended, then try watching another film--this one WILL tick you off completely.