Out for Blood (1992)

Tagline:

Lawyer by day... Vigilante by night.

Movie Review:

DTVC reviewed this the other day and Comeuppance Reviews in late 2010, and it reminded me that I have had this PM entertainment movie on a double-disc with Lorenzo Lamas Final Impact for months now. So, I decided to give it a spin today and see if my thoughts on the movie were in line with Matt's and Ty's.

Don "The Dragon" Wilson plays John Decker the attorney, which is hilarious in itself as the few scenes we see of him in his office surrounded by books, wearing big glasses and ordering an unseen secretary to bring him files, is about as far removed from Don the kickboxer as you could get. Don is seeing a psychologist for the recurring dreams he is having from his past where on a night out with with wife and son he is brutally beaten and his family killed by drug runners. Some doctors say he has 'selective amnesia' as he only remembers brief glimpses of the night. On a late night run Don disturbs a cocaine transaction, and that's when Don "The Vigilante" Wilson takes matters into his own hands to clean up the drug runners in the town. The media gets behind him and he is dubbed "Karateman", the vigilante cleaning up the town where the cops have failed.

This is a pretty sweet PM action flick. Don is definitely at the top of his game here, sporting his martial arts prowess and his famous grimmeses when attacking foes. In fact, his facial expressions are so awesome I have dedicated the screenshot gallery in this review purely to Don's face. There are at least half a dozen real fights in the Out for Blood, spred out pretty evenly so that when the movie does get a little bogged down in plot exposition it isn't long before someone's jaw is broken or groin displaced. This is also a benefit as Don, let's face it, is no Academy award winner. He is at his best when applying foot to face or clinging to the hood of a moving vehicle. Don also gives a few not-so-classic quips ("What are you looking at?", "Dirt!") when he dispatches bad guys so be sure to pay attention to those.

Don's love interest in the movie Joanna is played by Shari Shattuck, who has previously been in Seagal's On Deadly Ground, little-known horror movie Death Spa and 1986 Canon produced 'Women in Prison' movie The Naked Cage. I don't know what she is like in those movies (I haven't even seen On Deadly Ground yet at the time of this review) but in this she sports a terrible British accent, like Angelina Jolie as the Tomb Raider. IMDB says she was born in Atlanta, USA, and I don't see why the producers felt the need to give her the accent. Perhaps because she is an art dealer, therefore needed to sound upper-class? Also, Michael Delano from one of my favourite early reviews, Peter Weller's Top of the World, is back at a Lieutenant again, which is nice to see.

The movie has most of the ingredients from the action movie checklist to make it a near classic. Plenty of brutal hand to hand combat? A machine gun shootout at a train yard? A drug runner with a mullet haircut and cowboy boots who kills his own men when they fail him? Crashing vans through the door of a warehouse? Stuntmen falling off eight story buildings onto a car? A sensei who dispatches helpful advice on Chi? Running from an exploding drug lab full of cardboard boxes? Beautiful girlfriend being held hostage? The hero a lone warrior with a dark past? All boxes checked.

Out for Blood could have only been better if Don was actually a grizzled ex-military and visited a strip club at least once, after his partner of eight years was killed during a raid - then it would have ticked all the boxes. However it makes up for this with the awesome ending that has the bad guy explain Don's past to him in full detail before attempting to flee in a biplane in the middle of a shootout! It's even better when Don chases after the biplane on a Jeep!

There's not much more I can really say on the movie as the plot is wafer thin and the fights speak for themselves. This should be easy and cheap to pick up so make sure you do if you want a night of solid bad-action entertainment, curtesy of Don, The Karateman.

The Video:

Simply put, this was bad. Australia's Payless Entertainment do a great range of RRP $2 double-feature action DVDs however they jam two movies onto one single layer disc. This results in serious encoding artefacts that spring up when there is any motion. The source video was soft enough to begin with being a cheap DTV PM movie, but the quick NTSC to PAL conversion makes it even harder to deal with. Still, it's watchable but if you see the VHS around I'd suggest picking that up instead or importing the R1 or R2, but for $2 with Final Impact on it as well you really can't complain. Runtime (of Out for Blood) 90 minutes.

Sourced From:

$2 bargain bins.

Trailer:

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