The Movies That Moved Me: Ten Shimoyama’s BLOOD HEAT (a.k.a. MUSCLE HEAT)
I was 35 days into this year when I found out that this movie had its own Wikipedia page. Ha!
Anyway, I’ve blabbed on numerously over at my own social media about 2003 action thriller Blood Heat (a.k.a. Muscle Heat) on my Facebook profile but I might as well continue that trend here during this series. Yes, I found this movie on DVD at a Suncoast outlet in the Manhattan Mall back in the early two-thousandsies. I was maybe 22 or 23, and running an errand one morning on and saw this on the rack a few times in passing, until one day I went back, picked it up, looked at it, and said “why not.
For years I’d seen my fair share of VHS covers with suggestive artwork for films only to be let down. Alas, I was pretty picky about these films considering I already had a certain idea in mind about what “good action movies” were. That being said, as far as impulse buys go, this one was blind as fuck. I was also new to the Media Blasters brand and didn’t know what to expect, aside from already being a little familiar with Kane Kosugi’s heyday filmmography with his legendary father and brother.
That’s more than I can say about the TV show, “Sasuke,” which apparently Kosugi competed in at that time. That this resulted in Kosugi getting the lead role in what became Shimoyama’s directorial debut is, I think, fascinating, coupled with the involvement of several Hong Kong stunt stalwarts including action director Sam Wong.
Needless to say, Blood Heat was, is, and continues to be terrific. Co-star Masaya Kato plays the core villain in this one, something he does remarkably well in several of his films; I’m still pining to see a lot of his earlier work as well, which has me strongly craving some V-cinema content these days. The same goes for Sho Aikawa who appears alongside Kosugi in a supporting capacity, and who delivers an intense performance for the limited screentime he gets.
I commend Blood Heat for a handful of reasons – the most important of which is that it’s the film that got me started in collecting physical media. That habit led to shopping anywhere from Suncoast to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square before they closed, to a hole-in-the-wall Korean bookstore near Herald Square, but that’s another article for another time…
Whenever I wasn’t shopping in person, I became a perpetual window shopper of online stores. This was all during one of my heartbreak phases, so Asian films and genre cinema all became an outlet for me, something which even led to the earlier building blocks of my pursuit at writing at the time and joining the cadre of websites like KFC Cinema, Kung Fu Cinema, and Twitchfilm. Et cetera, et cetera…
Eh, you get it. Blood Heat is what started it all for me. I lost this DVD once in the course of moving (either that or it got stolen along with dozens of others), but I only recently managed to score another copy of it for my birthday back in January. I honestly don’t know if or when this film will pop up on Blu-ray, digital, or streaming – I did find it on Plex but it was a title-only page at the time.
If you can get this on DVD for now, I suggest getting it while you can. This way, we can jam to some F.O.H. as the credits roll, ya know, like real bros.
Lead image: Toho
“The Movies That Moved Me” is a series of articles in which I reflect on (or revisit) select films and various aspects of films that made me the fan I am today, and inspire me to write as I do.
