Score

Score rips off Reservoir Dogs, Hard Target and other action movies and it does it so blatantly it makes me puke from my rectum. It's stupid as hell. It does deserve some credibility for the action as it is bloody and fun but urgh. It is so annoying. Recommended if you like movies that devoid original thought.

A cheap and cheerless heist movie with poor characterisation, lots of underbite style stoic emoting (think Chow Yun Fat in A Better Tomorrow) and some cheesy clichés thrown into an abandoned factory ready for a few poorly executed flying judo rolls a la John Woo. Even the squibs look awful. At no point in the proceedings does it look remotely like America. Three wonky old cars do not a country make.The Mustang even has a wobbly right front wheel. The plot, such as it is, is so derivative and predictable that the ending is like a mercy killing. It couldn't come soon enough. Even the jewellery from the robbery looks like the cheapest junk costume jewellery available. The awful dialogue and hopeless overacting by everyone who gets shot top off a real waste of space and time. Worth watching if you want to know how not to make a cliché-ridden low budget movie.

Score (1995) is a low budget gem from Japan. A film that aims for a certain crowd and it doesn't disappoint it's audience. A group of lowlife thugs are gathered together by a low level Yakuza boss so they can get their hands on some precious gems. This picture has more turns and twist than and old school crime novel.

Caution this movie is very violent. The director showcases some of the biggest blood squibs I have ever seen in a movie. It's tightly edited and moves at a nice pace. The only draw backs are the budget ( at least it was shot on film) and the locations (the movie was filmed in the Phillipines even though it's suppose to take place in the U.S.

I highly recommend this film (for the total carnage)

An extremely derivative gangster/heist movie, Score succeeds by being so deliriously OTT that one can forgive any obvious plagiarism. Stealing liberally from Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers and umpteen John Woo and Yakuza films, director Atsushi Muroga constructs a wild and bloody tale about a jewellery heist that goes seriously wrong when a couple of lowlife drifters attempt to relieve the robbers of their ill-gotten gains.

With wall-to-wall gun battles and some genuinely hyper-kinetic action scenes, this film certainly delivers the goods expected of the genre; everyone gets shot at least a few times and all 'hits' result in a gallon of blood spurting from the wound.

The story may not be anything new, and the acting nothing special, but Score still manages to be extremely entertaining. Hitoshi Ozawa, as lead crim 'Chance', is perfect as a hard-bitten con who is forced into committing one final crime. Sporting a prize-winning mullet, he throws himself whole-heartedly into his role and comes out all guns blazing.

If a slab of mindless violence is what you're after, this film is well worth checking out.

SCORE (1995) is a derivative Japanese crime film, borrowing liberally from, among others, HARD-BOILED, HARD TARGET, RESERVOIR DOGS, TRESPASS, NATURAL BORN KILLERS and THE GETAWAY. It's a fast-paced, violent, old-fashioned (in a good way) caper thriller that makes up for an extremely low budget by fast-cutting, imaginative staging of action, judicious casting, and lots of shootouts, fights, chases, greed, betrayal and frenzied, bloody agony.

SCORE is set in the U.S., but was largely shot in the Philippines (the police cars have `Manila's Finest' printed on them). The main character, Chance, looks like a Japanese Quentin Tarantino with his square face and bulldog features, and heads a team of jewel robbers waiting for their payoff in a massive abandoned factory. There is a psychotic highway robber and his crazy female accomplice (straight out of NATURAL BORN KILLERS) who dog the jewel robbers. The male psycho has a fixation on Doc Holliday and the O.K. Corral and insists on referring to the jewel thieves as the Clantons.

Despite its budget limitations and blatant rip-offs of so many better films, SCORE boasts the kind of speed, grit, color, and imaginative violent outbursts that used to grace so many of the grade-B crime films that Hollywood (and Hong Kong) used to produce on a regular basis.