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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's 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

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