Best of the Best 3: No Turning Back (1995)

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK steps even further away from the tournament set-up of the original movie to offer straightforward straight-to-video action thrills from leading man Phillip Rhee. Rhee is the sole returning cast member from the first two movies, although he steps up to direct here as well as star in what turns out to be a typically over the top, mildly entertaining slice of mid-'90s entertainment.This time around the setting is the small, ubiquitous town in one of the southern states. Rhee turns up and soon uncovers a hotbed of racism and murder, brought about by the antics of the cult-ish members of the local church, which bears more than a passing similarity to Westboro Baptist Church. Cue lots of violent fist fights, shoot-outs and explosives, achieved in the best low budget '90s way.BEST OF THE BEST 3 isn't as good as the previous film in this series - the action isn't as hard-hitting or as well staged - but it's not bad and could be a lot worse. Rhee is a dependable hero type, and the supporting cast is packed with familiar aces: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION's Mark Rolston as the baddie, R. Lee Ermey as a preacher, Gina Gershon as a potential love interest, Dee Wallace-Stone as a townswoman, and the hulking Michael Bailey Smith (THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake) as a thug.

You know how Tommy was raised by Native Americans? Well, his sister lives in the deep south, married to the local sheriff. Now, this area is in major trouble because we've got the old white supremacists out on the warpath, led by none other than R L Emery. There's this other guy who doesn't think Emery is white enough who, at the start of the film, bludgeons to death a black reverend while all his skinhead mates look on. And one of the skinheads is the teenage son of Dee Wallace Stone.Now that's a lot of story with no Tommy involved, right? It does take some time for him to show up but doesn't take much time for the old Nazis to get right on his case and also start hassling his sister. Didn't they watch Best of the Best 2? No one messes with Tommy's family! Eric Roberts isn't in this one by the way, and I think it was probably because his character took the rap for killing the bad guy in the last film. Otherwise I can't think of a reason how Tommy got away with breaking a guy's neck in front of a screaming crowd.Anyway, while a schoolteachers goes up against R Lee Emery (who doesn't get a credit here for some reason), Tommy goes up against the far more dangerous henchman, played by Drake from Aliens! Drake is all up for a bit of ethnic cleansing and gets his army of skinheads some hardware while Tommy breaks all their noses while dressed as a clown.Just when I thought this film was never going to get going Drake kidnaps Tommy's nephew and the fight is on! Tommy and the guy from Happy Gilmore head off to the Nazi compound and start wasting their way through a skinhead army in a whirlwind of machine gun fire, explosions, and even an M80 machine gun. Thank God for that.Tommy also directs this one (under the pseudonym Phillip Rhee) so you'll have to ask him how Tommy manages to kick three guys off three separate bikes using just two legs, or how we see the schoolteacher getting attacked in her home, then cut to Tommy on his bike, then cut back to the schoolteacher's house where Tommy suddenly appears.It's okay this one once it gets going. The big battle at the end kind of makes up for all the drama and such like so there's not much to worry about there.

Phillip Rhee goes it alone (After Roberts wisely stepped out) to face off against a band of white supremacists who hold the town in a grip of terror. Seems that nobody of color can even go out at night without being hassled, that is until Rhee arrives on the scene and makes them pay with his fist and foot. Think Billy Jack but with a much more mean spirited vibe. The beginning sequence makes this an ugly movie. In it a black man is beaten with a baseball bat while a choir sings. This is a mean spirited scene and also the movie labors to lay on a message so thick headed that one wonders why they bothered in the first place. The action sequences are okay but hardly save such a ugly film. Also the pacing is way off and the film includes an attempted rape scene, lots of racial insults and just a lot of badness. The acting is universally horrid and it's just a terrible movie. Offensive too.1/2* out of 4-(Awful)

Any 'message' this film might impart is totally lost in the goofiness of setting a martial arts film in the middle of a Mississippi race war. The writing and performances are so terrible that I found them weirdly entertaining. The cliches come so fast and furious that you may find yourself laughing out loud at things you would never ordinarily laugh at. Gina Gershon is hilarious as the choir conductor. The biggest joke about this movie is that it dislikes racism enough to support the plot about really stupid white supremacists, but not enough to allow Gina Gershon to fall in love with the Asian lead. They had to bring in a totally pointless white character for that... Dee Wallace-Stone is one of the greatest actresses who has ever lived and she is so sadly underrated and underused. She's the only thing in this film that isn't a really funny joke.