 The Perfect Weapon, released in 1991 and starring Jeff Speigman, is perhaps a staple movie in most martial arts movie collection. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a Kempo today who does not have this movie in their collection, or has at least seen it or known about it. And at face value, it might just seem like your standard 90s action film, but if you look closer we can clearly see that this is the ultimate Kempo movie. So The Perfect Weapon is definitely a film I grew up with. You know I discovered it in 1992, which maybe I found on cable, which is about a year before I started American Kempo. And the funny thing is I started American Kempo without really knowing what it was, and I didn't make the connection right away until Jeff Speigman came down for a seminar. And that's when I realized, oh wait, that's the guy from Perfect Weapon. It made me fall in love with the art even more. So I want to talk about that today, but before we get into the details of the movie, let's talk very, very briefly about the background of the film. Now we've covered the history of American Kempo before, and I'm going to put those links in the description below. But just a very quick recap, the art American Kempo Karate was formulated by Edmund Parker. And having grown up on the streets of Honolulu, Ed Parker spent his life training in multiple martial arts, and he began to fuse ideas together. And to form his system, he kept what worked for him when he found Six Festival, and he discarded what he felt was unnecessary. In adding a study of anatomy and human motion, Ed Parker put all these concepts together and he devised a system for self-defense American Kempo, which he called the science of motion. Now Kempo honestly is a heavily debated art. There are many people who are for and against it, but that's not what I want to talk about here. And despite how you might feel about Ed Parker and American Kempo as a system in terms of its effectiveness, there's one skill that he undoubtedly had that cannot be denied. And that was publicizing the art and bringing the martial arts into the forefront spotlight of the public eye. His influence spanned decades of growing interest in American martial arts, all the way through the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and his influence and mark is still felt in the martial arts today. Now he had a hand in bringing more sophisticated martial arts into American television, such as getting Bruce Lee the role of Cato and the Green Hornet, as all the way up to having Elvis Presley be an ambassador for the system. Ed Parker knew media and he knew publicity and he was highly effective at spreading Kempo's influence across the country. Now the Perfect Weapon was no exception and I personally fully believe that this movie did a lot to drive public interest towards the art. Unfortunately, Mr. Parker passed away in 1990 before the film's release and I do feel that this would have been the first of many joint ventures with Justin Beekman he would have had to help bring American Kempo to the forefront of American cinema. Now while Justin Beekman did go on to produce a dozen plus other action movies each featuring his Kempo techniques, the Perfect Weapon stands alone and having Ed Parker's Kempo at its core and actually embedded in the story. Now Justin Beekman is a household name in most Kempo circles. Even as a youth he was very athletic in high school he was part of the springboard diving team and he also admits that growing up he watched the show Kung Fu with David Carranine and he loved how the flashback showed him in his training and how it made him grow as a person so that movie inspired him to take up an interest in the martial arts. He began his training in Okinawan Gojiru under master Lou Angel. Pursuing for the studies in the martial arts, Lou Angel recommended to Justin Beekman that he seek out the teaching of Ed Parker and in doing so he became one of Parker's highest profile students definitely earning the place as ambassador of the art. Now I had the honor of meeting Justin Beekman early on in my training at the seminar when I was just yelling about and in a few subsequent times as our school was for a while part of the Justin Beekman Kempo system. Now it is my personal belief that Ed Parker was priming Justin Beekman to carry the art forward as an ambassador for the art and you can see that today in Mr. Beekman's actions. He has gone on to carry forward American Kempo. He's made a lot of evolutionary modifications to the art. He's changed tactics and techniques to focus more on today's fighting trends and he's definitely addressed the popularity of BJJ and he's implemented a heavy ground fighting curriculum into his art of Kempo 5.0. If you want to learn more about Kempo 5.0 please check out our episode The Evolution of American Kempo. Once again it's a link in the description below. So with all of that established, what makes the perfect weapon the definitive Kempo film? Now as a disclaimer I will say that this movie is first and foremost entertainment. Kempo draws a lot of criticism for you know having preconceived and pre-choreographed self-defense techniques that people often criticize as unrealistic saying that no one's just going to stand there as you hit them 20 times. Once again, this is going to be a debate for another time. However, those Kempo techniques are not really meant to be memorized and performed on the street. They're teaching tools, they teach concepts that you take out and you apply to freestyle techniques and freestyle fighting and the thing is most people just see the techniques performed as they are because they're great for demonstration and they look flashing, they look impressive but it takes training in the art to go below that surface and see what they're actually teaching. The perfect weapon definitely uses Kempo in a demonstration fashion but those who train in the art can see a lot of the system mechanics embedded. So the first question that people usually ask me is what kata is just speakman performing in the opening sequence? Everyone remembers this scene he's in his living room and he's performing a very complicated sequence to the upbeat I've got the power song by snap but what kata is he performing? Well the answer is he's not performing one single kata he's actually putting a blend of forms together. Primarily there seem to be big chunks of Kempo forms 4 and 6 mixed together with some freestyle techniques possibly from his gojiro training and even elements from other forms and sets such as finger set. He makes it looking exciting and easy but as far as the story goes his character is either doing a mashup kata or perhaps reviewing a montage of him performing the different forms. Now Kempo form 4 is probably the most definitive Kempo kata there is and it's the most common one performed at tournaments. Kempo form 6 is a higher end form usually for further dan levels and I personally had to learn it in order to achieve my third degree black belt. Kempo principles are also at the root and backbone of the story. Jeff plays a young angry boy grieving the death of his mother and under the constant judgment of his strict father. He acts out and gets in the trouble at school until a family friend Kim played by the legendary Mako suggests enrolling him into a Kempo school. His father asked if this is some sort of hippie school and Kim laughs and informs them that Kempo was a school for self-defense and it would give Jeff an outlet for his anger while building self-confidence and self-discipline. We see a training montage and while there are some subtle differences and variations in the dojo in training it respects and demonstrates some of the traditions in many formal Kempo schools. For example the partner drills and technique flow demonstrations the symbols used in the dojo including the ikka Kempo patch the universal symbol and the tiger and dragon imagery the end of class pass it down tradition used in conditioning and being connected and passing the energy back and forth throughout all the students the formal way to wear belts in the Kempo dojo knots on the left side for males and knots on the right side for females. Now there are two stories going around for this reason and it Parker has been known to say that he wanted to respect the Chinese tradition of energy flow being strong on the left for males and strong on the right for females. There's also a story and he's also been noted for saying that it was the 70s and a lot of people grew their hair out and sometimes you know when he walked around the room he had a hard time telling from the back who was men and who was a woman so that the belts helped him identify it and he could have been joking but again it was the 70s so maybe not both reasons sound viable to me. Also the belt promotion ceremony is very similar in which the student forms the letter L with their old and new belts. The L stands for several things we seek to achieve in the martial arts. Loyalty and love for our friends and family. Longevity you know we want to live longer we want to be stronger and we try to get our strength and health by training in the martial arts. It also stands for a lie that if you do not feel you've earned this belt it would be a lie to put it on and finally and most importantly it stands for lots and lots and lots because regardless of what rank you're at there's always a lot to learn no matter how much you've already achieved. The forehead is then placed on the belts to transfer knowledge from the old belt to the new belt going forward. Now the presentation of the black uniform is also in traditional Kemple schools. In the film he has presented the uniform upon achieving his black belt but in most traditional schools you get your black uniform at the brown belt rank which is now your advanced rank and we kind of start teaching and becoming more of a instructional role in your classes. Although you know in a lot of modern times in a lot of informal schools they just use black as a traditional uniform all around. Now many people have asked me if that tiger dragon ring that Jeff wears is actually real and it's really presented at Kemple ceremonies. As far as I know the ring shown in the movie is not traditional and it was used as a plot device to demonstrate the concept of the dragon and the tiger. Now the dragon and the tiger are very heavy at the root of Kemple in which the tiger is the symbol of physical strength raw energy earthly power. The beginning students learn that you learn power to get stronger but as you go through your training you seek to achieve the dragon. The dragon represents strength mental strength and wisdom and controls the tiger and always has a choice to make and that duality is kind of what we seek to achieve as Kemple was you know we all start off as a tiger but we want to learn how to send to the dragon. In the film Jeff is conflicted he's angry he's emotional he has a hard time controlling himself at even one point he says the tiger is what I know and as a structures trying to teach him that you can't learn the dragon in the dojo you have to figure that out for yourself so as a sort of coming of age that symbolism is embedded in the root of the story you know the perfect weapon Jeff speakman is the tiger trying to learn how to become the dragon. Now talking about some actual fighting scenes there's a few interesting things to look at now one of the first things to point out is that during the time this movie came out you know 1991 we were coming off a period of american martial arts films from the 70s and 80s in which for the most part the action was fairly basic I mean we had bad asses like Van Damme and Chuck Norris but when you really break it down the it was pretty much basic kicks and punches and the 90s kind of started the tradition in american cinema of showing more complex sequences more kung fu films were being embedded into our our mainstream and we're starting to see a lot more sophisticated concepts and I think that the perfect weapon was one of those films that transcended the old action film and started showing newer faster more complex more visually entertaining techniques in the world in which we were used to seeing Van Damme just round kick someone inside of the head we now had Jeff speakman performing this rapid sequence of techniques almost too fast for the camera to see now for anyone who actually trains in campo it's really fun to watch the movie and pick out actual self-defense techniques that we learn and he performed several of them or at least parts of them and if you have a keen eye you can spot them this is a trend that continues in his other movies and even though they aren't specifically campo films you can find a lot of campo techniques in his choreography and in the behind the scenes interview with Ed Parker he said that he liked working with Jeff on this film because Jeff speakman had the control of his power and his techniques now when you make um action movies it's very common to have a lot of space between actors so that you know they don't actually hit each other and usually through camera placements and rapid editing and cutting techniques that you can make it look like shots land what Ed Parker was saying with Jeff speakman was he had such a high level of control that he could throw strikes and stop within one inch of the other person and in doing so it made it look like the strikes were much more solid in their landing it made it a little bit more convincing and he even addressed the the criticism that people say oh well why do you teach your students to pull punches and then Parker said I don't teach them punches I teach them to control punches because there's a belief that if you if you practice by pulling your punch or if you purposely miss your opponent while you're training that you're going to build some bad habits when you actually need it and then Parker was saying that you know when you learn to control a punch and you stop within the inch if you want to go that extra inch there's no problem in doing that and that's all that's the difference of being uh and that's the difference of being in control of your own techniques now Jeff speakman also wanted to highlight the concept of multiple attackers and show how American campo addresses that now of course we do have self defense techniques to teach multiple attackers but of course that is not something you can choreograph because there's just way too many variables but again as you learn the techniques you learn that they are teaching particular concepts specifically in concepts of flow rebounding and as mr speakman says you you move in a gaseous state so that you have this flow in and around your attacker so that you can move around and you can be reactive and not just be tied up with one person or be overwhelmed there's concepts there and you like to show them off in this movie now this movie highlights a few different variations of this scenario sometimes with multiple attackers he takes them on one on one or they're attacking at the same time or in one instance he reacts so fast that the attackers don't even know how to respond mr speakman said that one of his favorite scenes to shoot was utilizing multiple attacker combos under the strobe lights in the scene at the croc pit club additionally there's a few times in the movie where stick fighting comes into play now the colleagues sticks are favorite among campos and they're often embedded into different school curriculums and with mr speakman it's no different he's quite good with them and it's actually really fun seeing the damage he can do with those six in the film now i also want to bring to attention the sound editing especially for the time of its relief this movie's got some great foley and sound effects mixing work i mean the strikes sound deep and painful and the bone crunches are wincing now yes this is a motion picture and sound editing is part of the art but i will say this one of his favorite sequences that he does in the film this favorite combinations i have personally seen him do this in real life in a demonstration and i'll tell you right now he moved just as fast and the contact he made on the person he was demonstrating on it sounded exactly the same it blew me away the first time i saw it and when i saw him perform this this was like oh yeah i'm in the right art so yes it is movie mixing but i assure you it really looked and sounded like that in real life i can also attest to how powerful his strikes are you know we had him at some seminars when we were part of his network that dude can hit so all in all while the perfect weapon might not be a groundbreaking piece of cinema history it definitely has this place as a cult classic of sorts in the martial arts circles it's got a great cast with several actors that've got great martial arts film legacies it's cheesy but in all the fun ways and it definitely stands as a representative and a definitive movie for american compo on film and even just speaking himself said that he was very proud to make this movie and be able to portray compo on screen the way that ed parker himself would have liked to portrayed so i would love to hear about your favorite moments in the perfect weapon or any just speaking movie for that matter please comment below subscribe to the channel join us on patreon for some exclusive content and thank you so much for watching we'll see you all next week