Take care not to be misguided by the other comments on this movie! The action in this movie does not amount to "good" and it hardly even qualifies as mediocre. With a bad plot and too much bad storytelling instead of action, there is very little to entertain an experienced and/or demanding observer.Kane Kosugi is good in his movie-display of martial arts, but worthwhile action is presented only in 2 and a half minutes of the entire movie.The other fights have choreography, the quality of a bad Van Damme movie. ("I will block your kicks with my face until your feet start bleeding!") The showdown disappoints the most. It made me wonder if the action choreographer had left the crew, by that time. Cut-scenes, in no particular order, and devoid of any tension, are supposed to excite the audience. You may be familiar with that if you have seen the showdown of "Naked Weapon".

I have to say that despite having one of the worst titles ever, I really enjoyed this action film. Watching Kane Kosugi with his dad in the 80's, it is clear that he not only improved but action wise, he is better than what I used to see from him in the 80's. The plot is a typical B-movie by standards, but man was the action awesome. Seeing Kane spin in the air to do a split kick knocking two guys down is just astonishing...oh and look for Jackie Chan for literally 1 second in the opening before Shinya Hashimoto fights Ken Lo. Awesome film...Kane Kosugi is back!!!

MUSCLE HEAT was dead on arrival. The film offers up one of those cheap tournament fighting storylines popular in the late '80s and '90s, but really does nothing for the moviegoing public nowadays. The film's biggest draw is its star, Kane Shosugi, who is quite a good martial artist. His action scenes outside the ring are impressive, but once he enters the tournament, all the fighting becomes tedious and repetitive. More action sequences in the real world would have been a better way to go.As it stands, MUSCLE HEAT isn't a complete failure. I'd like to see more from Shosugi, preferably in a better environment, with a better story. Action films are fine, but there's something to be said for falling back on tiresome genres like the whole tournament thing.5 out of 10(go to www.nixflix.com for a more detailed review of this movie and reviews of other foreign films)

PLOT: An American soldier, locked up for disobeying orders, gets sprung from prison by a Japanese detective looking for help to fight a new drug. They go to Japan, where the detective is subsequently killed, leaving the American to battle the druglord himself."Muscle Heat" is an awful title, but the movie itself isn't so bad. There's a lot of awful stuff in-between the action scenes, but it's the action scenes that sell the movie. Kane Kosugi, whose father I consider something of a perseonal God, does all right as the Japanese-American lost in Japan. Although Kane seems more comfortable punching and kicking someone in the face then doing dramatic scenes, he's still a much more natural actor than his fellow action brethrens like, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean Claude Van Damme-I-Can't-Act.So go in "Muscle Heat" for the action, because nothing else is fleshed out enough to really care about. And although the drug is supposed to be this big bad drug, how is it possible that it's such a plague if the Japanese cops don't even bother to crack down on it? I mean, there's this big industrial place where the drugload hangs out, sends people to their death in his Muscle Dome on a nightly basis, and the cops don't seem to give a hoot. ANd yet we see all this poster and news reporters about how bad the drug, Blood Heat, is, but the only people I ever see taking it are the people who fight in the Muscle Dome!Anyways. Good action, and Kane Kosugi is something to look out for. He just needs a better script and to, from now on, avoid this whole Tournament Fighting thing. Tournament Fighting movies are just so...Van Damme-ish.