Sword of Honor

Watching 'Bikini Summer II' yielded trailers to other PM Entertainment Group titles that looked equally cheap & cheesy, but I was most excited for 'Sword of Honor'. A standard 90's martial arts quest for revenge tale with likable dtv faces that thankfully delivered where it counts.

Cops Johnny Lee (Steven Vincent Leigh) and Alan (Jeff Pruitt) are the best of friends, butt kicking partners but the latter is killed just as he's set to retire. The bad guys work for Rudy (Jerry Tiffe) who wants the valuable sword they stole to sell. Leaving Johnny to go up against this criminal element, dodge crooked cops and get a hand from Alan's martial arts sister Vicky (Sophia Crawford).

Leigh (Deadly Bet, Ring of Fire) does the hero with ease and is no stranger to movies of the fisticuffs variety. Ditto Pruitt (Martial Law, Mission of Justice) and Crawford who cut her teeth on Hong Kong action flicks. I gotta give her credit for decent acting, fighting while being the obvious love interest. There's also a vanity element going on here. Director Robert Tiffe has a part and so do quite a few family members. Even writer Clay Ayers plays a featured cop.

'Sword of Honor' has a story that is predictable to the max, but doesn't mess around. Plenty of spots for people to get conveniently beat up / smacked down / shot. There's also bits of humor that work and always fun female nudity on display. Some typical low budget stops include a stripclub, casino and a bar here.

We shot this movie in Las Vegas on location except for 3 pickup days which were shot in LA , I mean I should know because I produced and wrote it and directed it so that's the right information. I'm not sure why people are saying it was made in Australia that's kind of funny I never been to Australia though I heard it's a nice place to go visit if you like kangaroos. We started production with only one gun and only one location that was locked and had no crew. The day before we got to Vegas our AD made a call to Michael Goi who made a call to a few people and we had a crew and we got a location every day after that for 16 days. The last day we shot half the shootout scene and after lunch it started raining so we wrapped and went back to LA and had three pickup days to finish the movie.

Zero points for originality or creativity here: within the first 10 minutes, two cops have stopped a convenience store robbery-in-progress, and a little later one of them, who is about to retire from the force, goes on "one last job"; no prizes for guessing what happens to him. "Sword of Honor" was obviously designed as a starring vehicle for Steven Vincent Leigh; he has some cool moves and his acting is OK, but most of the fight scenes are nothing special, despite the clear Hong Kong influences (people don't just fall down when they take a hit; they fly several feet away). There is barely enough story for 30 minutes, but the movie goes on for 90+, which makes it quite dull. Sophia Crawford has two exceptional fight scenes (her best trick: pulling a guy's jacket halfway down so that he can't move his arms and he becomes defenseless against her attacks), and shows her amazing body in lingerie, but she is wasted in the second half: she gets shot and falls into a coma. The most amusing scene is a nod to her Hong Kong film past, when she is shown understanding and even speaking Chinese. (*1/2)

Taking a good look at Sword Of Honor I wondered why everyone sounded so strange in a film set in Las Vegas. Answer, this was an Australian film set in America's sin capital and all you see of Vegas are establishing shots.

Steven Vincent Leigh and Jeff Pruitt are a pair of martial art skilled detectives who catch a case involving an Oriental artifact. It's a sword from the Ming period enabling the Mings to overthrow the Mongols who ran things in China for a few hundred years. It is endowed so the legend says with mystical powers kind of like Excalibur and always is with a winner.

Anyway it's stolen by some Las Vegas crooks and Leigh and Pruitt are assigned to the theft. But they run into some folks who have guns and Pruitt forgets to put on his bullet proof vest. Guess he didn't see Madigan and what happened to Richard Widmark.

Joined for a bit by the equally martial arts skilled Sophia Crawford for a bit, Leigh has his mission and even has to fight crooked cops to accomplish it. Along the way we see lots of martial arts action, almost like a Chuck Norris film.

Martial arts fans will love it, others, don't really bother.

Acting, plot, directing, editing, there is simply no beginning to this movie's good points. This hack takes all of the over-done, ridiculous cliché's that a comedy would be making fun of, and tries to make you think that they were serious when they filmed it. The only twists worse than the ones in the plot were the ones that were put in my bowels when I watched it. The fight scenes used what was probably supposed to be dramatic back lighting in otherwise dark areas, so the fact that the punches and kicks were pulled by what amounts to BUS lengths was completely obvious. What wasn't obvious to the hairdresser is the fact that the mullet was only popular for about 5 minutes, and that was years before production. The Russian Boss Hogg character has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't need to believe it, PLEASE don't bother seeing it. You could have a better time with a can of play-doh rather than watching this thing, and feel better about yourself as a person after the experience.