Welcome to Ballie's Bad Movies page! Its the same page as before but with a young go-getter mascot to replace Socrates, who has now been put out to pasture. Theres a new movie review coming soon so keep checking this page for updates.

Do you enjoy action films where the hero is never in any real danger? Really? Well how about fight scenes executed with the same fluidity and grace as a first time ballroom dance class? Oh, and are you cool with only 3 pieces of music to accompany an entire screenplay? Finally, do you like films that are edited with the coherence of video taping a TV show and occasionally forgetting to turn off the pause button after the ad breaks? If you’ve said 'yes' to all of the above then Low Blow is for you.

Discovered in a cheap pharmaceutical store known as Priceline, the stunning artwork on the cover and the $3.95 price tag convinced me to max out my disposable income budget on this movie. Now let’s begin.

The DVD begins with an ad from the DVD’s distributor, Payless Entertainment Ltd
“Why pay more for your CDs and DVDs?” - The graphics pose the tricky question…hmmm yes. It’s an important question and I'm glad they asked. After all, I'm only 10 seconds into this disc and glad I didn’t spend an extra cent on it.

I'm completely caught off guard when the main menu loads up; what is that music? It seems my TV set has channeled a Commodore 64. And who the hell is that old man slinking along the wall of the chicken shed? Where’s the ass kicking muscle-bound giant from the cover that motivated my purchase in the first place? Wasn’t this going to be a Mad Max (The Road Warrior) spin-off? Apparently not. Just a flick about an old hunchback Chinese guy with chicken poo on his shoes.



While I was in my state of surprise about being shafted, the film had started automatically, which is a DVD authoring setting that most competent developers turn off.
Still, mistakes happen. For example, if you push “play movie” on the Australian release of Terminator 3, it defaults to an introduction of Arnie sitting in a room: “Haiyee. Dis is Arnol Schwarzenegger an welcome to the DeeFeeDee commentairly...”

I threw that in to completely throw you out of the moment and I think I have achieved that.

Just so you know we’re 300 words into this review and we haven’t really talked about the movie. But who cares! It's a cold shitty day in Nagoya, my kiddies bike has a flat tyre, Microsoft Word is insisting I spell tyre as in tire, someone armed with a hammer is smashing down the nearby love hotel at 9am on a Saturday morning, so let's just sit in front of the computer, read about a $3.95 movie and like it!

The plot involves some rich guy’s daughter who cuts class and joins an ‘extremely dangerous’ religious cult. The mind warping leader can “utter a few words to send his followers on a rampage of murder and destruction.” Enter Joe Wong (Leo Fong), an ex-cop who (“with the help of five special underground martial arts fighters”), is hired to rescue the girl and destroy the commune in the process.

Sounds great? Pity only 30% of the blurb is true. Allow me to describe the opening sequence:

The film begins with an armed robbery taking place in a sandwich shop. Oh, by the way, everyone has stretched heads because the film hasn’t been reformatted for television. The cowering hostages cooperate while the crooks maintain their insistence on waving shotguns and yelling random threats. It’s hard to make out what their saying as the wailing guitar soundtrack drowns out everything. Somehow, this yelling is audible to Joe Wong, who hears the disturbance three floors above the busy streets of San Francisco. Joe takes his revolver down to the store to “quiet things down” and showcases his versatile acting range by posing as a customer asking whether or not his “ham sandwich is ready?” After sitting down for a couple of seconds he casually offers an “OK here’s your money” and blasts the would-be thieves. To close out the scene, he throws back his head and says “hey…forget the sandwich”, a dry cool wit that can only rival the likes of Stallone in Cobra (I’ll get to that one later).

Immediately after this scene is the worn out ‘the chief is pissed off with the good guy who uses excessive force but gets results and saved a couple of lives’ cliché.

We jump to the location of the Yarakunda cult. Basically a farm with a dozen big haired, flannel wearing teenagers, supervised by an over the top woman who speaks every!...line!...as!...though!...it!...were!...her!...last! The leader of the cult is this mumbling guy dressed in a grim reaper outfit and has the lenses of his sunglasses painted black (ohhh!....he’s supposed to be blind!). The DVD blurb says he’s a dangerous killer with super mind powers, but all he does is mumble bible verses in a passive tone…BORING!!! Lets get to the stupid stuff!


Joe Wong makes a rescue attempt and quickly learns that he’s a little outgunned. The compound is guarded by guys with M-16s and ill fitting muscle shirts. So what do you do? Call in the military? Hell no! Put on a “TOUGH MAN CONTEST” with $20,000 prize money and rally a bunch of goons to your cause! If you’ve made it this far into the film, you really don’t care about the logistics of this.

So from here the winners are recruited to go and take on the cult. The catchphrase that accompanies this film “the best weapon is still your fist” is rendered useless by Joe and his merry band of martial arts bogans using machine guns to resolve the matter. So of course they kick ass and drive away in a van celebrating the fact that they’ve graduated from moronic bar fights and elevated themselves to killing people with firearms. I could really go on about this film, but you have to see it to realise how unforgivably bad yet entertaining this film is. Next!