Customer Reviews

The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

No other book has ever attempted to catalog the hundreds of martial arts movies on the market, or to seperate the good from the bad, like this one. You won't find every title here, but they come awfully close, and the authors obviously know and appreciate the subject. But a book this pricey should be nearly perfect, and this one isn't. My primary gripe is that the reviews often devote a coupleof paragraphs to the plot of each film, and even a die-hard chopsocky fan like me will admit that this is often redundant. On top of this, the portion of the review that describes the quality of the martial arts in the films is usually brief or simply missing. So a three-paragraph description of the standard "young man learns kung fu to avenge his teacher" plot finishes off with "the fighting here is only average, two stars." The format of the reviews is not consistent, and sometimes it consists of only, "Available on videotape." Not the most usefull piee of information. Not that this is a bad book, I have never regretted buying it and refer to it often. It just could have used some tightening up, rewriting, and refocusing. It's still the one book a martial arts film devotee really needs to have, though. Now that it's been a few years, and martial arts ovies are much more in vogue, how about a second, updated edition, with a little more editorial input?

I'll get right to the point: You will find no other book that researches so many martial arts films as this one. Most books on the market are about a quarter the size and usually just touch on the more popular films that we are allready so familiar with. Here find obscure American B Karate films among the even stranger Bruce Lee rip offs starring Dragon Lee or Bronson Lee! It is written in a very text-like manner which is better in my opinion as the point here is to find out as much as one can about a given film and not so much to be impressed by the writer's descriptive flare. If you can still get a copy (and afford the well worth it price tag) by all means grab it up.

Definitely the ultimate reference work on the martial arts movie genre. It's not perfect but it's still a must have for genre buffs.

This reference book has proved invaluable, however it does have it's limitations. For instance on many entries all there is is the name of the film with little or no other useful information such as year of production, cast or synopsis. He downgrades all
films that use wirework, which I happen to enjoy as a standard aspect of many martial arts movies, but which he uniformly dislikes.
I was able to use this book, however, to find out the true names of falsely titled bootleg versions of movies, which I greatly enjoyed.
Overall a very useful reference. How about an updated version?