Forza bruta

Zombies, cannibalistic monks, kung fu, gore and tons of hilariously exploitative and entirely gratuitous nudity?! - Hell yes! - this has all the intrinsic ingredients to make it surely every blokes dream movie! And you know what? This heady mix of sleaze and action very almost lives up to the accolade to!

Marvel at such scenes as one of our hero's performing a daring flying kick through a moving trucks window (and breaking his foot in the process!), a seeming army of zombie samurai and a couple of still very agile zombie ninja(!!!), some decidedly creepy monks who spend most of their time laughing like imbeciles(!!!), an hilarious bar fight, an evil white suit wearing Nazi (complete with Hitler style comb over and moustache!) and enough leering, lingering close up shots of female breasts to fill an average porno! Yes indeed, this is great fun from beginning to end although it does have to be said that the main action featuring our heroes vs zombies sadly doesn't kick in until the final third of the flick which is a bit of a shame.

Nonetheless, if it's purely raw action and sleaze you're after then Raw Force certainly delivers!

Outrageously trashy karate/horror thriller with loads of graphically gory violence and gratuitous nudity, and a thoroughly preposterous and bizarre "plot". This is lowbrow and low-grade entertainment that will appeal only to viewers with particularly kinky tastes, but it's kind of cheerfully bad and I must admit that I wasn't actually bored while watching it.... (*1/2)

A group of martial arts students decides that they will visit the Asian island home of martial artists who have lost their honour. Well, not only will they have a nefarious jade dealer & white slave trader to deal with, but the resident mad monks as well.

"Raw Force" is short on sense and long on nonsense. If one is not partial to the charms of the silly side of B cinema, then stay away! Otherwise, this is great fun that writer / director Edward Murphy is wise to play tongue in cheek. You have to hand it to him for including so many exploitable elements in this wild and crazy flick: cannibalism, zombies, karate, etc. The dialogue and performances are often quite ridiculous, and while the actors stop short of winking at the camera, Murphy does keep that tone alive.

The special effects are lousy, the zombies are a rather sad lot sporting less than stellar grey makeup, the T & A quotient is high (at one point, a hero and villain have a fight in a room where a naked woman is tied up), and the gore is plentiful.

Ubiquitous Cameron Mitchell has the leading role of intrepid pleasure ship captain Harry Dodds. Co-starring are his real-life girlfriend Hope Holiday as Hazel, Geoffrey Binney ("Hot Potato") as Mike, Jillian Kesner ("Firecracker") as Cookie, John Dresden ("Not of This Earth" '88) as John, and Filipino icon Vic Diaz, rarely to be seen without a smile on his face, as one of the monks. Exploitation fanatics will dig the appearances by Camille Keaton ("I Spit on Your Grave" '78) and Jewel Shepard ("The Return of the Living Dead"). Ralph Lombardi hams it up, egregious accent and all, as the Hitler lookalike villain.

We even get a couple stock shots from the New World production "Piranha" '78 before this is over. "Raw Force" is unmistakably gutter trash, but is done with enough humour and spirit to make it engaging entertainment.

Eight out of 10.

"Raw Force" is like an ultra-sleazy and perverted version of Love Boat, with additional Kung Fu fights, demented cannibalistic monks, white slaves trade, energetic zombies and a whole lot of lousy acting performances. No wonder this movie was included in the recently released "Grindhouse Experience 20 movie box-set". It's got everything exploitation fanatics are looking for, blend in a totally incoherent and seemingly improvised script! The production values are extremely poor and the technical aspects are pathetic, but the amounts of gratuitous violence & sex can hardly be described. The film opens at a tropically sunny location called Warriors Island, where a troop of sneering monks raise the dead for no apparent reason other than to turn them into Kung Fu fighters. The monks also buy sexy slaves from a sleazy Hitler look-alike businessman, supposedly because the women's flesh supplies them with the required powers to increase their zombie army. Tourists on a passing cruise ship, among them three martial arts fighters, a female LA cop and a whole bunch of ravishing but dim-witted ladies, are attacked by the Hitler guy's goons because they were planning an excursion to Warriors Island. Their lifeboat washes ashore the island anyway, and the monks challenge the survivors to a fighting test with their zombies. Okay, how does that sound for a crazy midnight horror movie mess? It's not over yet, because "Raw Force" also has piranhas, wild boat orgies, Cameron Mitchell in yet another embarrassing lead role and 70's exploitation duchess Camille Keaton ("I spit on your Grave") in an utterly insignificant cameo appearance. There's loads of badly realized gore, including axe massacres and decapitations, hammy jokes and bad taste romance. The trash-value of this movie will literally leave you speechless. The evil monks' background remains, naturally, unexplained and they don't even become punished for their questionable hobbies. Maybe that's why the movie stops with "To Be Continued", instead of with "The End". The sequel never came, unless it's so obscure IMDb doesn't even list it.

All the ingredients of low-brow b-movie cult cinema. Topless (and bottomless) girls, kung-fu kicking chefs, slave traders, evil Germans with mustaches, Cameron Mitchell and sword-wielding zombies.

And, of course the breasts of Camille Keaton, who's best known display occurs in the feminist exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave. We also must mention the hooters of jewel Shepard, who play a hooker in the recent film The Cooler.

Lots of blood and action with knives and swords and martial arts among topless dancers in a bar, in a whorehouse, and on a boat load of martial artists heading to some zombie island where bad martial artists go to die or something like that.

Tops and bottoms come off easily and frequently as travelers are well lubricated thanks to the boat owner.

Then disaster strikes as their boat is destroyed and they land on the zombie island where mas monks sacrifice young girls to the dead martial artists to bring them back to life.

Just when you thought it had everything, there are piranhas in the water. Yum Yum A big fat German for dinner.

Just the thing for your next zombie fest.