The Kick Fighter (1989)

The Kick Fighter: Directed by Anthony Maharaj. With Richard Norton, Erica Van Wagener, Franco Guerrero, Glenn Ruehland. Ryan Travers (Richard Norton) has just been released from a prison in Bangkok, Thailand, after serving a five-year sentence for murder. His parents, running an antique shop in the area while waiting for their son to be released, are killed in an explosion perpetrated by the local mob after refusing to pay protection money. Ryan’s news go from bad to worse when he learns his sister Katie (Erica Van Wagener) is seriously ill and will need an operation. With only a dead end job at a construction site after his release, Ryan learns about a local underground fight ring and decides to enter to raise the money for his sister’s medical fees and search vengeance.

“Richard Norton stars as Ryan Travis, a street punk who becomes a street fighter to pay for the operation that will save his sister, however the mobsters want him to lose so they decide to try and kidnap her while he trains in whatever it is they call martial arts in this movie. Kick Fighter stars Richard Norton, who I know is a great martial artist but in this movie he isnu0026#39;t so great, in fact his action sequences are laboring and slow. Norton doesnu0026#39;t have enough charisma to make the role work and basically the movie is a yawner as we watch lackluster martial arts rain down on the screen with no skill or purpose. It can also be that we are indifferent to who wins being that we know so little about the characters but mainly it is because the movie is so boring. Itu0026#39;s not so bad itu0026#39;s good, it doesnu0026#39;t have good fight sequences, itu0026#39;s just awful and youu0026#39;re best off avoiding it like the plague.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003e1/2* out of 4-(Awful)”