In defense of the Blade movies

These were extremely low budget movies shot back to back for 500K each. giving drama production experience to a Perth crew, who worked very hard, and did the best they could with the resources they had. After 4 days of shooting, I was asked to fly in and replace the director. Shooting resumed on the sixth day and contued till both pictures were shot. I inherited 2 scripts and a series of casting and location choices fraught with problems. The project could well have been unsaleable if all these choices had been maintained. In my role as emergency surgeon, I chose to do as much repair work as time and money would allow, without stopping the daily need to produce scenes and finish on schedule. An hiatus longer than two days - and total recasting - would have been more effective, but not economically feasible. We re-wrote and recast and relocated what we could on the run.The films were designed to showcase the considerable martial arts skills of Edward John Stazak and Jim Richards. Their abilities as actors were considered irrelevant by the producers and financiers. "These are low end fight movies. Just give us lots of fights, and the films will sell. The audience for these movies are happy to hit the fast forward button between action scenes ." That was the brief. That's what I did, while adding what humor I could. ( I stand proudly behind the jokes I put into the brothel fight) And regardless of the quite justified criticisms of the films listed in the user reviews, the Panther pictures sold to Video and TV everywhere in the world, because there is an audience in every country that will settle for a vaguely coherent story, cliched situations,but regular albeit low budget punch ups. The Panthers were not movies I would have developed this way even on such a low budget, but they were movies I was prepared to rescue to a basic level, so the investors could get their money back. Inevitably I was criticized for decisions I inherited rather than created. And time tends not to be kind to your efforts on fundamentally flawed material anyway. But if you also work as a film doctor between your own productions, that goes with the territory. The main thing is: from an economic standpoint - THE PATIENT LIVED!
See the Panther pics with a sense of genre satire; switch on your inner 13 year old, and you might have a better time.