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The “impossible” 1974 movie from a “grade-Z filmmaker” that made Quentin Tarantino eat his words

Sun 3 May 2026 16:15, UK

Very rarely will you hear Quentin Tarantino admit he was wrong about anything, especially anything to do with cinema, but he once found himself being forced to devour a big fat slice of humble pie.

The outspoken auteur has his opinions, and more often than not, he’ll defend them to the death, which has a funny habit of pissing people off. Paul Dano is nowhere near being a bad actor, never mind the worst in the business, but take it with a pinch of salt, since it came from someone who’d suffocate if they were forced to emote their way out of a wet paper bag.

There are movies he’s grown to love after rejecting them on first viewing, there are actors he’s grown to adore after failing to be won over by the first performances of theirs that he’d seen, and then there are the exceedingly rare cases where he changes his mind completely, as he did with Fred MacMurray.

However, there was one thing that Tarantino was convinced was completely, utterly, and absolutely impossible, having seen enough to make up his mind. And yet, much to his surprise, and probably annoyance since he had to make a rare come-down, he was left with no other option but to hold his hands up and admit he was wrong, which hasn’t happened very often in the last three decades.

“In my film Kill Bill, during The Bride’s final confrontation with Bill, she makes a reference to an imaginary list of impossible things that could never happen. And she mistakenly puts (Bill) busting a cap in her crown right at the top of the list,” he prefaced. “Well, on that same list of impossible things that could never happen, right above that, would be grade-Z filmmaker Al Adamson making a watchable movie.”

Up until that point, Tarantino had viewed the notion that Adamson, the prolific director who churned out dozens of cheap exploitation flicks in the 1960s and 1970s, making a halfway decent picture was the most impossible thing that could ever happen. Until he saw 1974’s The Dynamite Brothers, that is.

“Lo and behold, it’s a damn good ‘seventies ’70s shoestring grade-Z little picture,” he acknowledged. “And believe it or not, it contains some of the best fights in a low-budget ’70s American-made martial arts movie.” The movie, which follows a Chinese martial arts expert who teams up with an ex-con to take on drug-dealing gangs, corrupt cops, and anyone who gets in their way, isn’t revelatory.

However, it was revelatory for Tarantino, who couldn’t believe that Adamson was actually capable of not only making something that wasn’t awful, but making something that he wished had a sequel. Two birds, one stone, and a two-time Academy Award winner who couldn’t believe that he’d watched the impossible become possible.

“On a list of impossible things that could never happen,” he noted. “Al Adamson, leaving you wanting more! That has to be right at the top of the list.” It happened, and having been so adamant that the filmmaker was nothing but a hack, he was eating his words by the time the credits rolled on The Dynamite Brothers.