Bloodfist Redux

A recent slide-show on Salon.com, entitled “The Best Remakes of All-Time,” chronicles movies that got better when their plots were re-imagined by later filmmakers. Like David Cronenberg’s chilling 1986 update of the old Vincent Price shocker, The Fly. Or the poignant Judy Garland musical version of A Star is Born. Or Howard Hawks’ transformation of that boys-will-be-boys newspaperman story, The Front Page, into a sparkling battle of the sexes, His Girl Friday.

I’m here to tell you: when it comes to remakes, Roger Corman has no shame. He views a remake as a cheap way to get extra value out of an existing script. Even his own best work as a director is fair game. In 1989, he gave upcoming director Larry Brand carte blanche to re-think The Masque of the Red Death, the Corman-directed Poe adaptation from 1964 that most critics consider his finest artistic achievement. And he was all set to green-light a television series based on his classic black comedy, Little Shop of Horrors, until the bureaucracy of TV production did him in.

I myself got involved with remakes, Corman-style, in late 1992. As the winter holidays approached, Roger realized there was no production booked into his Venice studio. Keeping the studio staff idling was anathema to someone of Roger’s frugal temperament. So he needed a quickie production to allow them to earn their keep. That’s when I was approached by veteran Corman production chief Mike Elliott, and told to grind out a fast adaptation of the 1989 Concorde martial arts hit, Bloodfist. The original script by Robert King (with heavy borrowings from Jean-Claude Van Damme’s KickBoxer) had featured Don “The Dragon” Wilson as an earnest young man who enters a Manila tournament in order to flush out his brother’s killer. My job was to transform the exotic overseas competition into the down-and-dirty L.A. under-the-freeway games, and to change the inscrutable Chinese mentor who turns out to be the villain of the piece into a mysterious African-American street bum. (Oops – did I just give away the twist ending?)

To metamorphose Bloodfist into Full Contact, I was allotted about a week. When it was shot (with kickboxer Jerry Trimble in the Don “The Dragon” role), I scored a cameo as a nurse who supplies some key plot information. Full Contact was released through Twentieth Century-Fox, and Roger was clearly pleased with the results, because four months later I was helping move the same story into outer space. This time we called it Dragon Fire. And soon there was a female version, Angel Fist. Briefly we also considered a sword-and-sorcery variation, but that seems a little much.

The kicker (so to speak) came in 2005, when I opened an American Film Market issue of the Hollywood Reporter and found a Concorde ad for Bloodfist 2050. Here’s the ad copy: “To avenge his brother’s death, Alex Danko must enter the erotic and deadly criminal underground of the near future, where he finds the fight of his life!” Yup, same movie. It’s heartening to know that some things never change.

Enter "The Dragon"

Living in Hollywood (or, rather, in that hazy geographic region that considers itself Hollywood adjacent), I am accustomed to seeing movie folk in ordinary surroundings: Elijah Wood at my local Starbuck’s; Dustin Hoffman strolling on the Santa Monica Promenade; Ahnold the Governator practically everywhere. As for the children of the famous—or at least the near-famous—they’re almost impossible to avoid.

The other day, I went to work out at a branch of my favorite gym, and discovered Billy Blanks Jr. teaching a highly aerobic dance class. I made the obvious connection: this dynamic young man was the son of Billy Blanks, a martial arts champion who in the 1990s starred in action films with names like Showdown, Back in Action, and Talons of the Eagle.

So of course I thought back to my own years as a maker of martial arts epics. In 1989, Roger Corman realized that kickboxing movies were the Next Big Thing. The films of rising stars like Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme were cleaning up at the box office, and so Roger decided to add a kickboxer to his payroll. His discovery was Don “The Dragon” Wilson. Don, an amiable fellow with an exotic look (his mother was Japanese) happened to be a legitimate world kickboxing champion, but his acting experience was nil. Roger sent him to acting classes, in preparation for a starring role in Bloodfist (in which, by the way, the senior Billy Blanks played a featured role).

The script for Bloodfist was whipped out in a hurry by a young writer named Robert King. King had become a go-to writer for Corman following his success with a rather good killer cockroach movie, The Nest. In later years, he moved up in the world, crafting bigger budget films like Vertical Limit before hitting the jackpot as the co-creator (with his wife Michelle) of TV’s award-winning The Good Wife. But I suspect that at the time of Bloodfist Robert was somewhat lacking in inspiration. It took me years to realize that his story—about a young martial artist who returns to the ring to sleuth out the identity of his brother’s killer—was a near-total rip-off of a recent Van Damme vehicle, KickBoxer.

No matter. Don the Dragon went on to star in seven more Bloodfist films. In all of them he played earnest and tight-lipped young men, who spoke mostly with their fists (and their feet). In real life Don was animated and chatty. But his limited acting chops made it essential to cast him as the strong, silent type.