Badmovies.org Forum

I orignally posted this on a martial arts message board in a thread about "Best Of The Best", but considered it worth posting here
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Then there is the film I watched this week called Black Belt Angels (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109280/) starring a lot of people who were never in anything else.

The general plot is that a local developer, Mr Lucero, wants to get the building that is owned by a Mr. Lee (or Grand Master Lee) which houses his dojang and supposedly has room for ther businesses, which have left (other than a local rock band renting space to practice) First he tries to buy the place from Lee, which doesn't work. So he hires some thugs to trash the place and rough up Lee and his main instructor, Matt. The thugs get tossed out on their butts, but did manage to break a lot of windows. This doesn't work either so Lucero hires a coupe of Ninjas, and then later more Ninjas. In all of this are the named "Black Belt Angels" of the title, four female students of the school (two of them are Matt's daughters) and they spend much of the movie kicking up on various bad guys (a purse snatcher in the opening, and a lot of ninjas, too). The movie moves through various cliches such as the girls (and the rock band, one of whom likes one of the girls) holding a party to raise money and recruit students to pay off Lee's bills on the building), Lee, and Matt are kidnapped, the girls come to the rescue, Matt is being investigated by a cute blonde social worker questioning his ability as a single dad..and later falls for him and gets mixed up in everything else going on, the final showdown between Lee and the leader of the ninjas, and a few others along the way..., oh and the ninja teen ager who is a secret agent inside the dojang who has a showdown fight with one of the girls and based on her conversation, has a change of concious and comes to the rescue of the good guys at one point.

There are some pretty silly scenes, such as a drunk Lee being attacked by 5 ninjas and beating them all in the course of stumbling around and throwing pretty good kicks for a guy with that much JD in his system, complete with looney-tunes sound effects. Also using remote control toy police cars to play sirens around where the kidnappers are to make them think there are really cops outside.

My favorite scene was the oppening scene of the four girls doing form movements on a rocky beach with some opening music that I actually liked. (Unfortunately it went downhill from there)

This was a pretty bad movie. The director/co-writer has never done anything before and since and it shows. The acting is pretty bad, especially by the four girls, the dialog is terrible so I guess it's hard to be too hard on the actors if that's what they have to work with,. The plot, where it was not cliched, was, frankly, pretty stupid. Not a movie I recommend unless, like me, you really enjoy bad movies.


What was good about the movie was that the four main female characters, the Black Belt Angles (as they are called in word and song in the movie) were actually martial artists; a TKD 2nd Dan, 2 TKD 1st Dans, and a 1st degree BB from a Karate variant that I couldn't read. Also, the actors playing Lee, Matt, and the head of he ninjas also seem like legit martial artists. The choroegraphy of the fight scenes was actually pretty well done and is probably the best part of the movie. They wre not fancy, but what they seemed to be to me was real people who knew Taekwondo fighting it out, and that was very nice to see.

The movie centers around Taekwondo as it's main art and is pretty good at portraying Taekwondo both honestly and in a very good light. If you are a fan of Ninjistu, however, you will not like it as the ninjas are treated pretty badly (or portrayed as anywhare from compentent but overmatched by the good guys, to complete idiots)

So, if youlike Taekwondo and want to see it portrayed well and done well in a movie, this is a good example. If you actually want a good movie with decent plot, dialog, and acting...no

(NetFlix has it)
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I remember renting this one and rewinded the tape after 10 minutes and returned it Fearless Freep. It was bad in a bad way. : )

As I mentioned, this was originally posted to the Taekwondo forum of a martial arts bulleting board and , as a movie, it's pretty bad, but the fights are fun to watch in tha they look at least like real martial artist, and some other tidbits of interest to Taekwondo practitioners

The actors seemed to be real practitioners of Tae Kwon Do. Probably from a California Tae Kwon Do school that may have produced this movie BLACK BELT ANGELS. Fundimentally it may have been interesting, but the acting made it almost unwatchable. Depending on what you where looking for I suppose.

Well, I'll grant the acting was pretty bad.  But not much worse than many I've seen