Greetings everyone! My name is Matt and I have been writing for The 80’s Blog, but now I will be spending my late nights pumping out articles for Filmjunk. ‘Must See DVD’ is going to be a recurring article here; this first one has already been posted on The 80s Blog (lazy I know, but the movie is worth ‘re-mentioning’). Basically, I have been hunting down great movies that are relatively unknown. I use the term ‘great’ loosely as the reason for their unpopularity is due to their cheesiness, poor scripts, poor acting and poor quality. I assure you that they are cheesy, corny and campy enough to be good.

I purchased a copy of Gymkata after reading a review by Roger Ebert in his book “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie”. The tagline, “The skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate”, had me excited. This disc proved to be worth its weight in gold. Not just any gold, I’m talking about hard-earned, 1st place in world championship gymnastics gold!

There’s not much to the plot. The main character Jonathan Cabot (played by a champion gymnast named Kurt Thomas) has to get into a village for the government. The problem, no one has gotten into the city for 900 years or something because they have to go through the ‘game’. What is the ‘game’? Well, Jonathan has to fight a whole bunch of people in order to win. I won’t spoil the ending…

What makes this film so great are the fight scenes. As someone who has been a martial artist for 11 years and was a member of the high school gymnastics team, I found them utterly ridiculous. First, Jonathan does not really ‘fight’ anyone. He makes use of his gymnastics and flops/crashes into people. Imagine doing cartwheels and flips into crazy ninjas with all types of weapons. The most excellent feature of any given fight scene is the random placement of some gymnastic apparatus. For example, Jonathan is running through some alleys from the ninjas and out of nowhere a pummel-horse appears and he makes quick work of his assailants. A high-bar used in a different scene is a little more believable, in its placement that is. Jonathan does some rotations before giving a nice boot to his obviously expectant victim.

Jackie Chan has been most successful popularizing his style of martial arts, using his surroundings to fight more efficiently. Recently Tony Jaa has brought Muay Thai into the spotlight. It’s too bad Kurt Thomas couldn’t do the same with gymnastics. His martial art skills aren’t the only thing he lacks, Thomas’ acting was so bad he was nominated for a Razzie in 1986.

I don’t want these posts to become too Youtube, or video-heavy. However I can’t resist posting the trailer for this movie. I know it will persuade you to see Gymkata. “The combustion becomes an explosion!”

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