18 Fingers of Death! (2006)

just watch it!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Now let me start out by saying this movie by no stretch of the imagination is a masterpiece, but it is much better than people seem to give it credit for. This is not a movie for the unobservant, if you need the joke to come up and smack you in the face you'll be bored. Some may wonder how anyone can say a movie with a ten minute fart joke could have subtle humor, but it does. The man that owns the Fortune Cookie company having a stereotypically Jewish name and later Ronald Mack(Maurice Patton) asking Mr. Lee(Pat Morita) if there's any Chinese Jews that bit was great and would have received huge laughs if it would have been slipped into an episode of Family Guy. But an example of the most subtle jokes and semi-racial(but they took shots at everyone so who cares) was placing Maurice Patton(who is African-American) directly in front of a Watermelon during the training scenes and makes you feel semi-guilty about laughing at it. Political correctness was very much the enemy of this film.James Lew did a great job poking fun at his career and the fact that despite being a huge cornerstone figure in martial arts cinema being practically unknown by fans of his work and the fact that a fair amount of his contributions have been uncredited. The jokes run the gambit from subtle to direct, a great movie for fans of Kung-Fu or for the highly observant who are not above laughing at a fart joke.

Going by the previous comment here I thought this movie would be comical exploration into the kung-fu world. What a mistake that was! The only laughs I got were at the expense of the acting and the script (if there even was a script, often it felt as though the entire movie was being ad-libbed by a first-year college movie class). Although there are numerous references to classic kung-fu movies, they don't come across as a tongue-in-cheek homage, but rather a pathetic attempt to legitimise the meaningless content. There are plenty of low brow jokes which only serve reinforce the weak script and poorly written characters, with nothing original or witty as a saving grace. A waste of time & money.

The idea of a mockumentary on creating a stereotypical low-budget martial arts movie is great. This movie definitely had some potential - some of Lew's lines on the aspects of these martial arts movies are great! But the whole thing is just too corny to be genuinely funny. Silly celebrity sound-alike names really take away from the celebrity impersonators ("Steven Seafood"? Why not just like, "Steven Seagull," or just use his real name? I think laws on parody would have had them covered). Add to that very poor editing, with lines obviously recorded afterwards and edited in (they even overlap what the on screen character is saying) and a "fart fight" scene, and the whole thing just goes down the chutes.It's really unfortunate that some of the best scenes are in the trailer! It opened promisingly enough ("I'm Deadly Thug #1!") but just couldn't keep up. Worth a rent maybe, but that's about it.

I really, really wanted to enjoy this movie but it just didn't seem to gel. A movie spoof is supposed to be funny, not make you sorry for the people appearing in it. Not to mention sorry for the people who financed it because you pray they can somehow make their money back and yet you know they probably won't. A movie lives and dies by it's script and for a comedy spoof this just wasn't very funny at all. And I agree with the 2 other people who said the "fart fight" featuring Lorenzo Lamas was the definite low point. Flatulence on film was funny when Mel Brooks did it in the classic "Blazing Saddles" but that was a long, long time ago. And how disappointing to see a film with the smoking hot Robin Shou and veteran Don "The Dragon" Wilson and neither one of them fights?? Just much too brief cameos for both, truly a shame. Might have helped things a bit here, at least there would have been some great fighting to make up for the lack of great comedy.