Oh yeah, WHITE TIGER was a 1995 production featuring former kick boxing champ and direct to video martial arts specialist Gary Daniels (from FIST OF THE NORTH STAR) battling Japanese American gangster Victor Chow (the always excellent Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa) and his designer drug gang after his brother (Matt Craven) is killed. Chow likes to brand people and kind of acts like Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET toward the end!
Eventually, Daniels gets help from the Japanese Yakuza! Julie Nickson plays an assassin who provides a topless sex scene. There's the usual explosions, car chases and hand to hand combat but the direction is well done and Tagawa makes a great villain and should be in better movies!
Director Richard Martin is the son of comedian Dick Martin and directed episodes of TV's HIGHLANDER as well as the big screen movie AIR BUD. It seems like it takes place on the West Coast but it was filmed in Vancouver, BC. B movie vet Lisa Longois has a small role.
And then there's BLUE TIGER from 1994. A single mother named Gina (Virginia Madsen) gets caught in the middle of a shootout between The Mob and The Yakuza. Her young son gets killed accidently by a Japanese assassin (Toru Nakamura). She goes nuts and is put away but eventually comes back to seek revenge. She gets a tattoo (from Harry Dean Stanton), a gun and learns Japanese. Through a strange series of events she and the assassin become lovers! She points a gun at him a lot but never has the nerve to shoot him. This is not a half bad action film featuring John Woo inspired shootouts and a surprise ending. The director, Norberto Barba later did a lot of TV programs.
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