Martial arts movie is DOA

For his latest feat, action director/fight choreographer Corey Yuen turns Sarah Carter, Jaime Pressly, Holly Valance and Devon Aoki into killer-diller martial artists.

DOA: Dead or Alive is as dumb as a bag of rocks. But Yuen (The Transporter) choreographed, shot and edited the living daylights out of this video-game-turned-movie so that at least we get to blurt out the occasional, "Holy crab apple!"

The plot? Exactly the same as every junk actioner from Mortal Kombat to The Condemned. Great fighters, "warriors," from all over the globe gather on an island to fight it out.

But they don't any more fight to the death than the acronym DOA means "dead or alive." These brawlers fight for a $10 million prize.

The novelty here is that the people we follow all look really good in bikinis. Which they wear . . . often . . . when they're playing volleyball, flirting in the hot tub or thrashing assorted pirates, steroided hulks and thugs.

A jewel thief (Valance), a drawling ex-wrestler (a very buff Pressly), a Japanese princess who sounds as if she's from the Valley (Devon Aoki from Sin City) and the daughter of the guy who set up this DOA challenge (Carter) have got to be the favorites in this winner-take-all tournament, laws of physics be darned.

Natassia Malthe, in purple hair that makes her look even less Japanese than Aoki, is a sexy assassin sent to kill the princess for leaving her clan. She does the seen-it-before swordfight in the bamboo grove.

And Eric Roberts presides over this dairy farm as if he hadn't starred in just this sort of cheesy role and in just this sort of movie 34 times before.

Kane Kosugi and Collin Chou, passable movie martial artists, are here to make the stuntwork and editing that turned the actresses in the cast into champs look easy.

One funny scene - a father-daughter wrestlemania on bamboo rafts (real-wrestler Kevin Nash plays the dad opposite Pressly) and a few spectacular fights do not a movie make.

After 41 brawls showcasing wire-work martial arts (climbing bamboo stalks, etc.) and the occasional groaner-of-fake-set by Cheap Digital Effects R'Us, you've got a movie that still needed 10 minutes of filler at the end to cross the 80 minute mark.

DOA was the right title for this, acronym-bending or not. They can say "dead or alive" in all the TV ads they want to. It still means what it always did, in police and emergency room parlance or in describing idiotic martial arts movies based on video games - "dead on arrival."

* (out of four stars)

Directed by Corey Yuen.

Running time: 1 hour, 20 mins.

Tina . . . Jaime Pressly

Kasumi. . . Devon Aoki

Christie . . . Holly Valance

Helen..................................Sarah Carter

Parent's guide: PG-13(pervasive martial arts and action violence, some sexuality and nudity)

Playing at: AMC Loews Cherry Hill 24