It’s an idea whose time has come. Actionfest, co-founded by movie producer Aaron Norris (brother of Chuck), is a brand new film festival based in Asheville, North Carolina that just had its inaugural run in mid-April and is expected to reoccur annually. As the name implies, it’s a festival devoted exclusively to that most critically neglected of genres: the straight-up action movie. While critics haven’t completely dismissed the action genre over the years, singling out the occasional masterpiece like Die Hardfor praise, they’ve undoubtedly tended to favor action that is wedded to science-fiction or other high-minded genres as opposed to action for its own sake. They also generally under-appreciate the complexity involved in pulling off traditional action elements like car chases, gun battles, explosions, and mano a mano combat, all of which can be exhilarating when done in high style by a talented filmmaker. Directors such as this year’s Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow toiled for decades in the action ghetto, making gems like Point Break and Blue Steel while going unrecognized by the critical community, and the chances of other action veterans like John Woo and John McTiernan being officially recognized by their peers anytime soon are slim at best. The need to support this genre, which requires its directors to have inherent choreography instincts, endless patience, a meticulous eye, and genuine visual flair, has never been greater. Hence, Actionfest.

Traveling down to Asheville for this year’s inaugural fest, I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of action films to expect. Would there be some ultra low-budget, do-it-yourself action films like Robert Rodriguez’s debut, El Mariachi? Answer: not really. The DIY phenomenon seems to have died out over the years. Would there perhaps be an action movie equivalent to Ti West’s recently praised mock-80s horror film The House of the Devil, with its actresses in big hair and 80s clothes? No such luck. Would there be genre crossovers, perhaps in the form of violent thrillers or sword and sandal films? And would there be a ton of imports from Asia and South America, where martial arts films have more currency of late than in North America? The answer to the last two questions was definitely yes: Actionfest proved to be nothing if not international in flavor, with the Chilean revenge film Mandrill and the Muay Thai martial arts film Raging Phoenix just two of the many international films premiering. It also marked the regional debuts of highly-anticipated genre offerings like Neil Marshall’s gore-soaked Romans-invade-Britain epic Centurion and the awards-caliber Australian noir film The Square, both of which deliver a heavy quotient of blood while telling fantastic, gritty stories. If you’ve ever wanted to see an angry Scottish banshee saw off a soldier’s head during a battle, don’t miss Centurion when it comes to theaters this summer.

One staple of the action genre is revenge, and an action festival wouldn’t have been complete without an old-fashioned man-against-the-fucked-system revenge drama, a la Death Wish. The Actionfest title that fit that bill was Harry Brown, a British import starring Michael Caine as an elderly widower and ex-Marine who decides he’s not going to sit still anymore as packs of mindless hooligans trash his East London neighborhood. Spoiler: Old Man 1, London, 0. Then there was Dirty Mind, a delicate Flemish comedy from director Pieter Van Hess about a film crew technician who undergoes a drastic personality change after an on-set accident permanently ups his adrenaline levels, and refashions himself as a fearless stuntman. Eventually, a surgery option is presented that will restore his old, cautious personality, but why be yourself when you can be a fearless man, loved and admired by all? An unpredictable, engrossing film, this was undoubtedly a festival highlight. As with all festivals, there were also the oddball films that you know you’ll never see again outside of the fest, and for me, the movie that most lived up to that description was Noboru Iguchi’s RoboGeisha. Part Japanese fetish film, part mechanized body horror, part Kill Bill-on-LSD, this nearly indescribable piece of craziness is like Takashi Miike meets Russ Meyer. See it at your own risk.

As is common with most film festivals, Actionfest was also brimming with activities beyond the scheduled screenings, and the two most prominent non-film events this year were an outdoor stunt show for the locals with a jetpack flyer as its centerpiece and a big panel discussion with legendary stuntmen on hand to swap stories and discuss their craft. (See footage from the stunt show here). The show was something to behold, featuring a highly-trained skydiver who jumped out of a plane many thousands of feet in the air and landed ten feet away from me as well as the aforementioned jetpack stuntman, who powered himself over the top of the movie theater like Iron Man and landed safely on his feet to thunderous applause. The show also included amazing demonstration of how stuntmen pull punches for fight scenes, set themselves on fire and take backwards falls off buildings, but the highlight of my Actionfest experience was by far the panel. It was a thrill just being in the room during the gathering of legendary stunt coordinators such as Paul Weston, known for doing the stunts on most of Roger Moore’s James Bond films, as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman, Return of the Jedi and countless others. Weston’s anecdotes ran the gamut from stories about his time hanging with the Beatles on the set of the film Help! to explaining why the catapult stunt in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the toughest of his career to telling tales out of school about Roger Moore’s extremely lax work ethic when it came to doing the simplest stunts like, say, climbing up a ladder.

Other highlights from the raucous stunt panel included Weston revealing how he made Christopher Reeve fly with piano wire, and a young stuntman in the audience delighting the crowd with the story of how he was asked to run face-first into a beam repeatedly on the set of the recent My Bloody Valentine 3D because the 3D cameras needed coverage from multiple angles. The stuntmen on the panel were also unafraid to name names when it came to directors who had put their safety in jeopardy, singling out Blade director Stephen Norrington and director Michael Winner as filmmakers who were known for caring more about getting the shot than stuntman safety. One stuntman gave as an example of when to say no to a director the story of the time he was asked to walk out onto a building’s ledge that was no more than two inches wide. Also on the panel was Aaron Norris, who told stories of his long association with brother Chuck’s movies, including how he associates the film Forced Vengeance with the honeymoon he took during its making and the tale of how he talked a studio into letting him direct his brother’s film Braddock: Missing in Action III after the original director began turning in footage so bad that Norris feared it would ruin his career. Although Norris’s filmography includes work with some other colorful directors like Joseph Zito and Andrew Davis -- the latter being a well-respected action director throughout the 80s and 90s -- they sadly couldn’t make it to Asheville to discuss their respective entries in the Norrisography.

If Actionfest had an alternate name, it would definitely be Norrisfest. Chuck Norris’s library of titles, consisting largely of mawkish Vietnam POW rescue fantasies from the early Reagan era and poorly executed cop dramas, and interspersed with the occasional corker like Andrew Davis’s Code of Silence, was front and center at the festival thanks to his brother’s heavy involvement; the man himself even agreed to show up and collect a lifetime achievement award on the festival’s closing day. Norris films were not only screened along with the regular lineup of features during Actionfest, they were also played continuously on a wall-mounted screen in the festival’s VIP lounge throughout the fest, a surreal touch if ever there was one; imagine sipping cocktails on a leather couch while zoning out to Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection. In fact, the first year of Actionfest was a bit surreal all-together, something that first struck me when I witnessed Chilean martial arts star Marko Zaror chatting up Asheville locals outside the main theater, and correcting them on the proper pronunciation of Chile. It wasn’t just witnessing the intermittent culture shock that the festival produced, however, it was the newness of action cinema being taken seriously at all. As action fans, we’re not used to seeing the genre we love most being considered as deeply as other genres, like horror, but a dedicated festival could change that. If Actionfest does more to draw widespread attention to the admirable work of the stuntmen, fight choreographers, cinematographers and visionary directors who’ve dedicated their careers to filming action and filming it well, then it will be well worth the twenty bucks I paid for a Code of Silence t-shirt at the gift shop.