the challenger

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THE HIT LIST: February 27, 2017

My weekend was a little laid back…managed to catch up on a little anime and some Lady Snowblood for fun. Classic!… I also managed to finish a review for Franklin Correa’s newest indie thriller, Lyco which you can read here. In the meantime, The Hit List is back for another round of stunt reels and shorts to promote for the week and we begin with Michelle C. Smith, delightfully one of the most active and involved people I know on social media so you definitely want to follow her links at the end of her reel. We continue onward with the hard-hitting mo-cap stylings of actor and stuntman T.J. Storm, followed by reels from Frank Alfano, Steven Rummenie, William Bokan, Caitlin Huston, Rustic Bodomov, Spencer Thomas, Andrei Runtso, Max Laurin, Jessica Bennett, Ozzy Ramirez, Najmeddin Al Hadad, Mustafa Bulut and an explosive, kick-ass, dietary finish by action star Scott Adkins. Next up is […]

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CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: PART THREE – An Interview With Ken Quitugua

2004 was a pretty invigorating year for me. We got our first computer and I suffered like hell everyday with dial-up until we finally acquired DSL which evidently made it much more easier for me to venture into online martial arts fandom at the time. It was new to me and quite phenomenal, and thanks in large part to one such skit was titled Battle Of The Stunt Monkies, a product of a very talented and diverse group known only as the premiere team that started it all on the cusp of the new millenium, Zero Gravity. Incidentally, it just so happens that member Ken Quitugua was one of the first people I began noticing before getting addicted to the content Zero Gravity was putting out. This, on top of my newfound DVD craze through sites like the now defunct HKFlix.com and hkdvdstore.com, and the still-active YesAsia.com added to my […]

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CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: PART TWO – An Interview With Andy Le

Last month’s online shortfilm release, The Challenger, should serve as an exact reminder that there are people in the world – filmmakers who have an ardent love and respect for the craft to keep the martial arts genre alive. After all, it’s played a huge role in the lives of many people, and if that weren’t true, the genre wouldn’t have had the impact and global appeal it did in more than fifty years. Director Bao Tran knew this prior to working among the likes of Hong Kong film legend Corey Yuen Kwai and action stars like Johnny Tri Nguyen as of late. To that effect, I think it’s quite fortuitous that actor, martial artist and competitive tricker, stuntman, choreographer and master in the making, Martial Club’s own Andy Le, knew this too, and to see such like-minds collaborate to achieve something as solid and inspiring as a shortfilm preamble […]

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CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: PART ONE – An Interview With Bao Tran

Going into this article, I found myself at an advantage to finally be able to talk to quite a few people whose work I’ve admired over the years. Bao Tran (who I initially knew as Tran Quoc Bao) came under my radar many years ago around the same time as I came across actor and martial artist, Ken Quitugua when he was appearing in content put out during his time as a key member of the martial arts stunt team that started it all for the online kung fu cinema niche, Zero Gravity. The aforementioned stunt team would eventually go on to pair with Tran‘s Persistence Of Vision Films banner to produce and create one of the best, and incidentally one of the most awarded martial arts action shortfilms going into the new millenium, Bookie. I was a late bloomer myself having not had access to a computer for a […]

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Check Out These Stills And More From Upcoming Kung Fu Short, THE CHALLENGER

Director Tran Quoc Bao‘s latest short, The Challenger is arriving today in full kung fu fashion, and I’ll be sharing it tonight with a slew of other fantastic shorts in this evening’s Hit List. In the meantime, here are some great new stills accompanied by a handful of behind-the-scenes pictures of our cast and crew. View post on imgur.com Unlucky Stars co-star Ken Quitugua makes his appearance opposite Martial Club member Andy Le, in a story of a young martial artist who challenges his hero in an underground fight to make a name for himself. The project was filmed earlier this year before Le flew for tour with filmmaker Jacob Sebastian Malm and a team of other martial artists to perform for Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot at this year’s Bregenzer Festspiele in Europe. It’s also being billed as a prequel to an upcoming feature film, and after screening a copy just […]

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