Top Fighter
1994
Director: Toby Russell
Documentary
This documentary takes a look at martial arts films, concentrating mostly on old-school stars and movies, with a variety of clips and interviews with notable people such as Sammo Hung, Jimmy Wang Yu and Gordon Liu. Like Russell's other films like Cinema of Vengeance (which re-uses some of the footage from this movie), Top Fighter suffers from a few problems, such as somewhat shoddy production values (some of the interviews are shot on home video and look cheap), a bad sound mix that sometimes muffles the narration, film clips -- which are not labeled at all -- that come from more obscure movies. While it's kind of cool to see scenes from lesser-known films, it really hard to do a complete documentary on the subject without clips from films like Enter the Dragon or 36th Chamber of Shaolin.
Despite the shortcomings, though, Top Fighter offers up a good amount of information as well as some decent action clips. While you won't become an expert on the subject after viewing this movie, it will give you a nice overview of the genre as well as some new titles to seek out to see.
RATING: 7