Curse of the IFD THUNDERBOLT series: MISSION THUNDERBOLT part 3

Joseph Lai & Tomas Tang tried the taste of success during the time Asso Asia provided many korean kung fu movies to the world during the first 80's when the video boom was reaching its peak. The markets were hungry of action movies & at least in many countries of Europe, hungry of kung fu movies. So, Mr Lai started his own way & continued offering dozens of asian movies as he did in Asso Asia but some of them had new elements such as westerner actors who gave international appeal to his products making his movies availiable for all kind of publics. Here, at this point, Mission Thunderbolt enters.

a wonderful widescreen IFD spanish video edition

After checking many IFD movies & studying their copyright dates and IFD distribution ways, I would bet Mission Thunderbolt may surely be the first CUT & PASTE movie ever came from IFD. According to the copyright date showed on screen, we must suppose the movie was produced in 1983, a year later if we compare it to the Asso Asia copyright date shown & the creation of Filmark International.

Jonathan Stierwald, a moustached actor was not a Richard Harrison clon at IFD, Stierwald arrived first!!

Mission Thunderbolt is the "mother" of all the subsequent "cut & paste"movies IFD offered us till middle 90's. As we stated above, before Mission Thunderbolt "was born" Joseph Lai just used to buy the rights of different asian movies & threw them into the international markets. Mission Thunderbolt was the very first one moviethat combined an asian source movie with new pasted shots directed ( or co-directed asshown in the credits by Godfrey Ho).

Original art Spanish art cover from a Betamax video edition

Mission Thunderbolt was just a taiwanese gangster movie originally directed in 1982 by Richard Tung Chin-Hu who had previously directed some kung fu classics such as Massacre Survivor, Snuff bottle connection or The budda Asasinator and starred by Chan Wai Man, Chen Kuan Tai & female action star Julie Luk Yat Shim ( aka Lu I Chan) who became a regular face in many Filmark cut & paste movie as well and was one of most popular faces in those taiwanese gangster movies known as Taiwan black movies shot between 1979-1983.

John Ladalsky was the main character showed in Conflicto, an aka title for Mission Thunderbolt in Spain

The new edited fotage in Mission Thunderbolt was starred by Jonathan Stierwald, an actor who dissapeared from screen after he starred this movie. Other actors were John Ladalsky, Philip Ko & a nameless chinese actress who would star Scorpion Thunderbolt as the witch just a year later.
As it happened to Inferno Thunderbolt, some shots from Mission Thunderbolt were used in later IFD ninja productions that already had Richard Harrison as main actor.

The wonders of the widescreen editions

Chan Wai Man was the main actor in the original taiwanese cut

Is this guy a premontion of the image Mike Abbott would bring to IFD few years later?

Can you scratch my back please?

Lu I Chan was the queen of the taiwanese gangster movies

Mission Thunderbolt was edited on tape twice in Spain under different two diferent titles: Mission Thunderbolt as the international title & Conflicto ( conflict). Both editions kept the original widescreen cut & dubbing was simply wonderful. Nothing to do with the following IFD video editions we got. The Spanish voice dubbers for Mission Thunderbolt were the same used in many important Hollywood productions; this fact plus the widescreen made Mission Thunderbolt a real pleasure to be watched.