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Martial arts B-movie stars like Matthias Hues, Loren Avedon, and Richard Norton have gained notoriety through their roles in low-budget films. These underground heavy hitters have appeared in iconic martial arts movies like The King of Kickboxers, Cage, and City Hunter. While some stars, like Billy Blanks and Jeff Speakman, have had success outside of the genre, their careers as B-movie stars still deliver exhilarating action.

There are many martial arts B-movie stars whose work should not go unnoticed by those action films. In the long history of martial arts movies, many of the biggest stars of the genre have become household names, including Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. However, in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s, many other martial artists have also cultivated sizable followings without making it quite as big as the genre's most well-known stars.

Some...

Stars: Simon Rhee, Arlene Montano, Phillip Rhee, Howard Jackson, Loren Avedon, Jon Dane, Mika Elkan, Peter Malota, John Potter, Joyce Tilley | Written and Directed by Tim Everitt, Tom Sartori

‘Famously incomprehensible’ are among the first words which come up when one Googles 1984′s martial arts picture Furious. ‘Famously incomprehensible’ is about right too, from the awful picture quality to the bizarre story, which is best described as martial artists vs aliens (after a fashion) battling for control of the universe. I had to Google that bit too, so incomprehensible is the story that I couldn’t quite tell what was going on most of the time.

Lovers of purposefully bad movies like The Room and Plan 9 From Outer Space should find much to celebrate in Furious, in which a pensive young fighter named Simon (Simon Rhee) attempts to fend off the forces of evil by repeatedly kicking them in the face.

In the mid-eighties Ng See Yuen’s ‘Seasonal Films’ company decided it might be a good idea to try their hand at making films with more international appeal, initially inspired by the success of a certain Hollywood martial arts movie.

But unlike previous attempts at international productions by the likes of Golden Harvest and other studios, where the main goal was to introduce a home grown star to the west, Seasonal’s aim was to make movies with a combination of American actors in front of the camera, with a mostly Asian crew working behind the scenes, putting together the kind of action that Hong Kong does so well.

Their first attempt, ‘No Retreat, No Surrender‘ was released in 1986...A film which would eventually spawn two sequels.

“Tonight, he either fights for his life, or he’ll be running for the rest of it.”

The original ‘No Retreat, No Surrender...