Monday 22 April 2013

DVD review: Dragon Hunt uncut (1990)


Now this is a special occasion on Independent Flicks, for the first time I´m revisiting a flick I´ve already reviewed. The reason for this is that the german DVD release from Madison Home Video that my earlier review is based upon is very heavily cut and had german audio only but now I have managed to get my hands on an uncut release of Dragon Hunt. Mad man Jake and his People's Private Army set the captured twins Martin and Michael McNamara (Martin and Michael as themselves) loose on an island with vicious killers hot on their trail. Out-numbered and out-gunned, the twins are in trouble! Mick and Martin are the underdogs but they have a reputation to fight their last breath! The hunters become the hunted as the game takes a deadly turn! Dragon Hunt is written by Michael McNamara and is directed by Charlie Wiener. The acting is hilariously bad and there is a wealth of unintenional comedy in this. The main bad guy is laugh out loud funny, he´s like a cartoon character.The camerawork and editing is pretty okay. The plentiful actionscenes, both the shootouts and fightscenes, are pretty ridiculous and quite funny. I do know that the McNamara brothers are martial artists but it just doesn´t show on screen, this could be due to bad fight choreography or that the fights are badly shot. There is some slow motion in this but nothing compared to Twin Dragon Encounter (1986). It´s quite violent but there´s no gore in this besides a few squibs and someone being killed by punji sticks but that´s it. In contrast to the first flick about the McNamara brothers there are people getting killed in this and the bodycount is pretty decent. There´s no T & A in this.
Dragon Hunt is also known as Dragon Kickboxers in France.
This review is based upon a DVD-R released by Twin Dragon Kick-Boxing, you can buy your copy here http://www.twin-dragon.com/ .
Rating: 3½ out of 7. This and Twin Dragon Encounter needs to be seen by any serious fan of the action genre, they seem to be more or less forgotten. In my opinion they are at equal terms with classics such as Samurai Cop and Deadly Prey. This release has a running time of 91 minutes compared to the german release which is 77 minutes, i couldn´t pinpoint any obvious cuts but I imagine that it is the fight scenes that has been trimmed.

/JL

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