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10 Best Movie Fights

by admin at 5:07 pm on Tue, Jan 13th, 2009

So you think you’re a fight-movie buff, eh? We here at WHF know your type. It probably started before you can remember—videos your parents put on when you were a baby because it was all they had lying around. Most likely you were weaned on Enter the Dragon and bottle-fed Chuck Norris. Then they noticed that they were the only types of movies you’d actually sit through without getting bored and hassling them. Eventually your folks came to a conclusion that could be summed up thusly: “F*%k it. Who cares if they’re rated R and filled with grotesque violence. It keeps him entertained and out of our goddamn bedroom.”

On the next trip to the video store, they strolled your five-year-old ass straight past the “Kids Korner” and let you graze among the martial arts and action aisles. Their sex life got a lot better (we know, sorry, but it’s true), and in return you got a first-class education in the most savage brutality ever committed to celluloid. Every year since, valuable cerebral real estate previously reserved for memorizing calculus theorems and friends’ birthdays has slowly but surely been supplanted by photographic memories of picture-perfect beat-downs. Hell, you might have even taken a few martial arts classes before you decided sweating wasn’t for you and went back to the Way of the Joystick. Chances are you only recently admitted to having a problem when your girlfriend of two years left because of your insistence on renting a new translation of a Shaw Brothers movie instead of Great Expectations.

Anyway, his one’s for you. We’ve rounded up the best (or at least extremely memorable) fight scenes you may not have seen. They are mini-masterpieces of the skuzzy, low-budget bowels of the B-movie and bootleg underground. Enjoy.

This may be the most ubiquitous selection on our list, so we’ll get it out of the way. But, the thing is, it never gets old. God only knows where the casting agents working on The Code of the Dragon (aka The Ghost) found a half-man in a wheelchair who is capable of inflicting so much punishment. Where is this guy now? And why isn’t he making still making movies? Oh, his name is Henry Smalls, and he’s a real-life samurai warrior who is more than capable of cutting you down to his size.

Oh, behold this Nigerian wonder. It’s from a movie called O Le Ku that was made in 1997 but looks like it was shot closer to 1967. It’s one of those so-incredibly-awful-it’s-good scenarios, but when you film two drunk African guys in smocks try to clobber each other it pretty much creates a force field that is impervious to criticism. Also, the sound effects are an amazing atrocity.

OK. So we’ve got Billy Blanks (of Tae Bo fame) and a little guy in a Jester’s outfit from the Halloween aisle at K-mart duking it out in some sort of glorified, giant varmint cage. It’s from 1990’s The King of Kickboxers, and we really can’t stress how important it is that you steal this film if you ever happen upon it at a 99-cent store. Really, it is capable of changing your life and perspective of the world in general.

This clip is from the flick Brave Girls and wins the award for Best Fight Featuring a Lady in a Coordinated Pink Number That Even Your Dead Grandmother Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead In. In all seriousness though, Ms. Yukari Oshima dishes out some wicked beatings in this 1990 monstrosity and you should track it down if at all possible.

Hahahaha. We just found this randomly. It’s from Knights, a movie about a post-apocalyptic cyborg named Job who needs the blood of 10,000 humans for whatever robot-people do with that much red stuff. Motherfucking Kris Kristofferson is cast as the cyborg hero, Gabriel, and… do we really have to say anything more? It’s a plotless smorgasbord of piss-your-pants-with-laughter fight scenes. The director is B-movie auteur Albert Pyun, who is probably best remembered for the Jean-Claude Van Damme abomination Cyborg.

We don’t know if this is real or not, nor do we know what movie it’s from, but the porno-combat genre has the potential to become bigger than both the sources that spawned it. There doesn’t even have to be sex; guys would gladly shell out $20 to watch women in their underwear beat the living shit out of each other. Why isn’t anyone cashing in on this? Obama, are you listening? You’ve got an FDR-sized public works program right here.

One of the key scenes from the Japanese masterpiece Yo-Yo Girl Cop, this is a good example of what the film is all about: A policewoman who fights people with a spinning disc tied to a string. We don’t think Donald Duncan had this in mind when he mass-produced the yo-yo, but we bet he would be down.

We’d be remiss not to include an example from the horror genre in our little list here, and it’s kind of impossible to do much better than Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV. In this little stinky nugget he treats some mutant cowman thing and a Phantom-of-the-Opera-looking chucklehead to the business end of his mop handle like a master of the bō staff. Who knew Toxie had it in him?

This is another one you may have seen that never gets old. The beginning of the clip—when the Bruce Lee-look-alike has some sort of blinding-powder thrown in his eyes—is funny enough, but things get much more interesting when he pops his opponent’s eye out by smacking him on the back of the head and birds immediately swarm down to eat it. Then things go way past the WTF zone when the newly eyeless guy commits seppuku and tries to strangle duder with his intestines. If you know the film please let us know in the comments so we can promptly order it on the internet.

Ze Germans really know how to capitalize on ze mindless gore, and this trailer for Violent Shit 3: Infantry of Doom is the epitome of the country’s splatter-core offerings. We’re not really sure there is a plot other than “shoot and punch and stab and blow up and kill stuff,” but then again is there a better combination to have beamed into your eyeballs? No, there isn’t.