Capital Punishment

In an interview, Gary Daniels referenced "Capital Punishment" and claimed that director David Huey ( Legendary Muay Thai ) was contractually obligated to limit the amount of dialogue in the feature to 15 minutes - meaning that this is a karate exploitation film if ever there was one but it's not something you can blame the stars or filmmakers for. Daniels also claimed that 43 fight scenes were filmed, and while my count is significantly lower than that, there is nevertheless a quantifiable ton of fighting here. Nevertheless, even kickboxing nuts like myself will find plenty to dislike about the feature.The story: Simultaneously framed for murder and drugged with an experimental compound by a shadowy syndicate, kickboxer James Thayer (Daniels,  Rage ) must both clear his name and find a way to cure himself of the drug's deadly effects.David Huey is a maker of pretty bad movies, and though I'll blame a lot of it on outside influences - limited budgets, poor equipment, etc. - this film is no better than his usual output. The film quality is pretty muddy, and much of the audio is either poor or features obviously dubbed voices. The opening titles literally look as though they were re-recorded by filming a TV monitor with a video camera. I won't be surprised if the budget for this one lay under $500,000.The trailer for this film billed it as a supergroup gathering of martial arts personalities, and it wasn't kidding. There's Gary, but also David Carradine as a corrupt police official, Mel Novak ( Game of Death ) as a DEA agent, Tadashi Yamashita ( American Ninja ) as a drug lord, and Ian Jacklin ( Death Match ) as a seemingly doomed boxer. The supporting cast also includes Richard Rabago as a benevolent master, Scott Shaw as a drug dealer, and Mark Russo and Butch Togisala as nameless fighters. I can't complain about the ensemble itself as much as the utilization of two of its bigger names: (SPOILER) Novak dies within the opening 10 minutes without fighting, and the late Carradine - who so rarely engaged in fight scenes outside of his  TV show  - spends almost all of his scenes sitting behind a desk.My tally of fight scenes is 26 full-length ones, so I challenge you to find at least one that you like. I enjoyed a couple, including a bar brawl between Daniels and Mark Russo, but largely, the encounters aren't great. Many of them seemed to have been filmed in single takes, resulting in very athletic but awkward brawls. Occasional dark lighting and troublesome camera angles don't help. There's some redemption in the occasionally inventive choreography that you don't see Daniels doing much anymore, so I can only imagine how great some of these would have looked if the production had been helmed by different producers.They would have needed to devote a good deal of work to the screenplay, too. Some of it's clearly due to the aforementioned stipulations - the fact that Gary can't enter a scene without being accosted by an attacker, the uncomfortable vagueness of the drug plot - but the dialogue needs considerable reworking and some of the more illogical character motivations could be better explained (e.g. why do the villains return Gary to his home after they knock him out?).Permissive fans of Daniels may enjoy this film more than me, but I can't recommend it to anyone else. Know yourself well before considering a purchase.

i received the item in very good condition and it plays very good.

Sorry folks. Haven't watched it yet so how can I?I'm just being honest...ok?I'm also looking to watching it

If you've read my other reviews of Gary Daniels' movies, you'll know I'm about one thing: Gary Daniels himself. He's one of the prettiest, most watchable men on film. So I bought this DVD just to see him in it.Sorry, but this movie is a turkey that wouldn't fly even if Frank Perdue were running after it with an axe. It is so low-budget that it appears the producer could not afford to buy a plot. It consists mostly of very darkly lit martial arts fight scenes interspersed with snippets of pointlessly meandering dialogue whose only purpose seems to get some "unknowns" their Screen Actor's Guild union cards. It's like watching Wrestlemania from the 100th row of some dark stadium, but without the benefit of dry ice smoke and shooting fireworks to alert you to the end of one fight, and start of the next.The "acting" and "script" is so turgidly bad that it sounds like the director woke the cast up at 4 AM after all had an evening of intense alcohol consumption, shoved a camera in front of their yawning faces, and made them improvise their lines with ear muffs on so that they couldn't hear what their fellow "actors" were saying. David Carradine is listed in the credits, but he appears sporadically and randomly, and spends the majority of his time yelling into a phone at some subordinate. (I think that the director may have been filming David cursing at his agent for making him take this role).The DVD video quality is poor -- dark, murky, and grainy as if it was a copy from a VHS tape forceably inserted into, and "played" upon, a Sony Betamax machine. It has no special features, no closed captioning, no languages other than english. It does have scene selection, but this movie is so bad that the only scene you'd want to select is the ending credits.Ok, one good thing about it: It has Gary Daniels in it. Unfortunately, it has Gary with a pony tail and bad split ends. I guess that the producer couldn't have afforded to spend $5 sending Gary to the mall for a haircut, because that would have consumed the entire music budget which sounds like it consisted of purchasing a 1970's vintage Kraftwerk 33 1/3 vinyl LP recording and playing it on a turntable that has 16 RPM. Gary is a whole lot prettier in his other movies (and his looks have improved with age -- he's more muscular and his facial features are more handsome now than in this early movie), so skip this one unless you like pain and your dentist's drill doesn't do it for you any more.

Dear Gary Daniels, please never stop making movies! The wolrd would no doubt be a sader place without your epic films.So, Capitol Punishment, never mind the cover this isn't "Gary goes to prison" I'm pretty sure the graphics guys didn't watch the movie and just assumed because the film was called "Capitol Punishment" it was a prison flick, well, it isn't. What it is almost defys explanation, Gary is some sort of fighter, ok. Gary gets taken in by DEA agents to do a mission, ok. Gary fights some guy who he's supposed to "kill" so this guy can get into witness protection with no qwestions asked....ummm...ok. After that Gary gets chased and double and then triple crossed by DEA guys, assulted by drug dealers, rouge cops, bikers, people hanging out in amusement parks, bums, and whatever extras the producers manged to give 10 bucks to to have Gary beat them into pulps. And in the end he has to face his former master turned drug lord as well as David Carradine as ...some guy with a phone. I think that was the story anyway, I would have given it just 2 stars but there are some pretty cool deaths that made me "ohh" and "ahh" Other then that if it raining out, and hailing and your xbox breaks, and all your books burn, and your phone is unhooked and you just need something to do, you might pop this baby in and try to uncover the mysteries of the universe as Gary beats down thug number 59.

I always find it interesting to continue my trivial pursuit of great under-the-radar action heroes/films, and alas, I have struck oil again today. This one is up there with Army of One and Silent Trigger With Adolph Lundgren, Drive with Mark Dacascos and True Vengeance with Daniel Bernhardt. Anyway, Gary is the main geezer of course trying to stop a steroid being spread across the states which is given to animals and he does plenty of fighting along the way. I mean a very lot, and it's very well done with short breaks to stop it being tedious. It's also nice to see Gary doesn't appear to favour one leg for kickzing too. If you're relating to this and you're like me you'll like this one. I've liked a few of his films in the past, but not a really good one he did. Now I have. Thank you for reading what I have to say. Peace. Say no to drugs, they are pointless.