This is an early “hit” film by the renewed author, martial artist and actor Scott Shaw (with co- director Donald G. Jackson) and as much as I like the idea of Scott Shaw’s Zen film-making (no script, pure improvisation) the results are less then stellar (and that’s an overstatement). Without an actual aim or direction the film quickly dissolves into a mess of crazy psychedelic scenery, random badly choreographed violence and bunch of nonsensical overacted monologues by famous guest stars (in fact the cousins of famous people like Frank Stallone or Joe Estevez).
Black Knight played by Frank Stallone, slightly less popular brother
Crosshatched with music vide0- like vignettes and so many stop- starts that you forget what your watching. New characters are constantly introduced (see Fukasai Ninja) just to be squandered on useless cameos that doesn’t drive the story forward by one inch.The story (as far as we can figure) fallow deadly warrior Hawk who is sent on a mission by the mysterious Father Donaldo to rescue (their?) Sister Sparrow from the clutches of the evil overlord Pharaoh and his knight Frank Stallone. The whole film takes place in a deadly region known as The Wheelzone where the only way to travel is (for some reason) by means of roller skate. Except for Hawk who uses a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
Now even if we all ignored aforementioned things, every director knows that a movie is in fact mostly made in editing room. And that’s where the REAL problems start. Editing here is just extremely sloppy and the the insisting on repeating scenes 2-3 times (sometimes even 8 times) ends up being just damn tiring . And then they add the icing on the cake by using repetitive synth score that drowns out all the natural sound of the movie and upgrades incoherent and messy moments to the plain unwatchable level (yet we soldiered on like we always do).
“Brilliant! I have absolutely no idea what’s going on”
Lesson: If you want something done right what you need is PLANING! Dedication and a good plan, and enough time to realize the said plan.that is more important than all the money can buy, Now I’m not knocking down improvisation- you should always be free to let happy accidents happen but if you don’t have an aim-there’s no way you can hit it, and this ,movie is a perfect example of that Now If you decide (against your better judgement) to watch this movie try countering it with some psychedelics- maybe that will balance things out and it somehow all make sense, ’cause it sure doesn’t this way.
Worsemovies 