With Italian genre film-makers always mustard keen to capitalize on financially successful film trends, the talented, opportunistic producer/director Fabrizio De Angelis formulated his very own blisteringly fight-packed, heroically headstrong hybrid of 'Kickboxer' and 'Karate Kid, setting his excitingly exotic, fleet-fisted, punch-fighting epic in picturesque manilla. Not long after sulky, estranged son Anthony Scott (Kim Rossi Stuart) arrives in the Philippines, the uneasy family reunion is further disturbed by fresh-faced Anthony's fateful barney with evil karate gangster Quino (Enrico Toralba),this grievous beating being the bloody catalyst which inexorably draws brave, unskilled fighter Anthony into the oracular orbit of sensei Kimura (Ken Watanabe),and before you can say 'Kumite', the white bread, piecemeal pugilist is thrillingly transformed into a steel-thewed, iron-fisted, majestically melon-mashing 'Karate Warrior' able to courageously meet the deadly Quino blow-for-blow in the climactic eye-of-the-tiger duel, wherein the once fey 'The Boy in The Golden Kimono' stoically fights not only for righteousness, but for his VERY life! Gifted exploitation impresario Fabrizio De Angelis's far-flung fight-flick is a bellicose, bloody-knuckled, blissfully 80s B-Movie classic!

I guess you could boil it down to that, though to be honest there are far more things that are "wrong" with this copycat. Karate Warrior - what you can say in a positive light, the movie is not just an exact copy of Karate Kid. It does have a bit of a different story. It also is way more violent than the movie this based it's idea and "success" on.

And yes while this can not be considered a good movie in any way of the imagination, it was successful enough to spawn a few sequels (which I have not watched ... yet). So not having seen them I can't say if they are as muddled, have the same history when it comes to dubbing or "original" audio (which kind of doesn't really exist, everyone talking in their native language I assume, even if Italian is named as main language here) or the pacing issues.

If you don't mind the countless flaws and relish in the b-movie nature of it all (with surprises along the way, whatever that may mean),you can be quite entertained by this

I used to love this movie when I was a child, I used to compare it to karate kid but now that I'm watching it again I noticed all the differences, bad acting, terrible story.