Several years ago, Brad Jones, That guy with glasses, webmaster of Cinema Snob among other popular sites about pop cinema offered some special entries about Pierre Kirby and his movies. He studied them so deeply that he became Pierre Kirby into a well-known action hero of IFD so popular as Richard Harrison or Mike Abbott.
Pierre Kirby became so popular among fans of Z-grade IFD films that even a website dedicated to him and his career was done. If you want to learn more about who Pierre Kirby was you may visit Pierre Kirby Lost Action Hero website right now. I have to confess I didn't know this site but I am very happy to see the pics I shared with the webmaster have been published mentioning the original source. So I must thank them for their kindness and of course my gratitude will continue to Edowan Bersma who is still being punished by my questions and demands about his film career in Hong Kong.
This time, here we have an IFD movie that despite has been difficult to track down, was widely distributed in the States, South American countries such as Argentina or Mexico and in European countries such as as Greece, Turkey and as usual in a special way in Spain...Of course every place where it was distributed gave a different title to this film.
American Commando 4 Dressed to Fire was the title on its release in Usa, while in the UK the title was simply Dressed to Fired. Later when IFD re-organizated its catalog the film was retitled Advent Commando 3: Dressed to Fire as we can see in the pics above.
The Spanish release was similar to the UK one and we knew it as Dressed to Fire but there is a BIG difference among the USA or UK release and the spanish version. While in the States and UK the movie was another cut and paste movie with gweiloh actors, the spanish video edition was the original taiwanese movie that IFD had bought for its international distribution. So, we spanish, never enjoyed the adventures of Pierre Kirby & Edowan Bersma but we had the chance to see the original film that was the base for Dressed to Fire.
The Spanish VHS cover showed some pics of the real movie in the back cover while the front cover showed a ninja woman ( a pic of the ninja girl from the end of Ninja Thunderbolt!!!) to make the audience believe the movie was another ninja film from IFD instead of a gangster drama from Taiwan.
Dressed to Fire was the international title IFD gave to a Taiwanese movie directed by Chui Yuk Lung in 1983 and originally titled The Boy from the Dark Street. Jopseph Lai & Tomas Tang bought many of the movies Chui Yuk Lung directed in the late 70's and early 80's and, of course, all of them were released internationally under different titles and as we have seen, those movies were released on their original cut in places such as Spain or with new fotage shot in Hong Kong in many other countries.
If you are interested in learning more about the original movie that "inspired" Dressed to fire, don't forget to visit HKMDB clicking HERE
