Lee B. Golden III

Sam Firstenberg’s 1992 action thriller, American Samurai was another one of those commercial TV finds for me growing up. The film stars David Bradley in the role of Drew, a journalist whose investigation into a drug-smuggling lands him in the crosshairs of a criminal organization, and its deadly fighting tournament where he’ll be forced to square off with long lost stepbrother-turned-yakuza, Kenjiro, played by Mark Dacascos. Firstenberg comes from a crop of filmmakers who laid the groundwork for a raft of hit titles out of the Cannon label in the 1980s and onward. American Samurai was no different, save for more persnickety critics who lambasted the film, and even the director who spent a year in recent history collaborating with filmmaker Lyle Goodwin to retouch and refurbish his tourno martial arts adventure into something more closer to his vision than that of what he deemed was studio interference. The new […]

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