Força Cruel

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.

In a conventional sense, there really is no redeeming value in the film Raw Force. However, if you are willing to let go of your need for logic for ninety minutes, you will find Raw Force to be fun.

The story, such as it is, deals with the sale of nublile woman to monks on a small island. The monks believe that consuming the flesh of the woman will allow them to have the power to raise the dead. You can tell the monks are evil because they are always shown in slow motion!

Throw in a guy that looks like Hitler in a leisure suit and the beautiful Jewell Shepard and some American Bruce Lee wannabees and you have the ingredients for the perfect drive-in movie.

Oh, did I mention that Cameron Mitchell was in this. Some may say that his appearance in The Toolbox Murders was his low point (others might say The Demon). I think this is it.

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.

This movie has everything a good exploitation movie should have: Zombies, cannibals, Nazis, naked chicks, blood, action, comedy, piranhas ...unfortunately this movie doesn't quite work as well as it should.

This is the story of a cruise ship that promises some people a trip to exotic locales one of which is Warrior Island where disgraced martial artists go to die. Also on the Island are a band of cannibalistic monks. Through a chain of events too complicated to explain the Nazi pilot who is trading kidnapped women to the monks for jade sinks the cruise ship so it can't go to the island and ruin his deal. The survivors end up on the island anyway and the monks let loose the zombified remains of all of the dead martial artists on the survivors.

At this point you're either intrigued or repelled by the nonsense you just read. If you're repelled move on to the next movie, if you're intrigued keep reading.

Lets be honest this isn't a good movie by any conventional standards. Its got bad acting, bad special effects and a dumb plot. But then again its got the spirit to go for it anyway and it almost manages to be one of the all time classics.

Unfortunately the film falls down in two key areas. First it doesn't know whether its serious or tongue in cheek. There are times when the cast seems to be playing it straight and times when they seem not. The unevenness of tone makes it hard to know how to take the movie so it ends up rubbing you the wrong way. The other problem is that the action sequences are filmed basically in a point and shoot style. There is no excitement generated from what we are seeing on screen because the camera man seems bored by it all. Its awful because this is often a really fun movie at times.

If you are an exploitation movie fan, or a fan of movies that are just out on another planet I'd give this movie a shot, because even with all of the bad in it there is just an incredible collection of wild and way out things going on that you're very likely to find something to love.

On the exploitation scale of 1 to 10- 6.5 rounded up to 7.

This is a movie that changes type and tone even ten minutes, is poorly shot, edited, acted, and staged, and makes no sense, BUT it's hilariously stupid, and so weird that you can't help but love it. Cameron Mitchell seemed drunk and/or confused the entire movie and the copious nudity doesn't hurt. Great midnight movie!