Mastering the Curved Blade by Steve Tarani

The title is a bit misleading – I would have been more comfortable with “Introduction to the Curved Blade.”

The video is of similar structure, length and quality to the other Tarani videos from Em3 video. It’s about an hour long, beginning with some basic description of the “curved blade,” which is what he calls what most knife makers call their kerambit line. He covers the basic parts of the blade and the fundamentals of his defense philosophy. If you’ve seen any of the other Em3 videos, then you’ll recognize a lot of this material.

Tarani’s discussion of grips is the first real interesting information in the video. If you’ve seen kerambit videos before, then you’ve seen people spinning their knives around with the retention ring. Tarani explains the purpose of that spinning, and explains the advantages of the difference grips.

The next section of material covers the basic attacks and defenses that can be made with the keramibt. This is really the best part of the video. When Tarani is demoing technique, he’s really at his best. After the individual technique explanations, the video switches to a showing how the blade can be used in certain self-defense scenarios. These little snippets are very informative and interesting, but they don’t always convey the full detail and quality of the techniques being demonstrated.

This title is a bit of a miss for me. It has a bit of interesting information, but most of those bits can be found elsewhere. Overall, it’s just not worth the price.