User reviews

It's a familiar story: when her family is threatened by a martial arts expert and bully twice her size, Terry (Graciela Casillas) heads straight to the local kali (Philippine martial arts) master (does every American town have one?) who claims to know nothing about fighting, but has an endless supply of sage one-liners. And the rest is history.

This movie is full of worthwhile messages about women empowering themselves without losing their femininity, and it gives some interesting background on Philippine history and culture. The folk-dance scenes are particularly good. Ms. Casillas is a martial arts great, a multiple world champion and black belt, who has devoted much of her life to helping women and teaching martial arts and self-defence in an American University. Anything she does deserves respect and she is also expert in the fighting techniques used here - the scenes of her training sessions are also excellent.

Sadly though this is not a brilliant movie. Casillas was hired as martial arts trainer, then offered the lead role when the original actress was fired. She had never been trained to act and got little support from the novice director (no surprise he never directed again). The film plays like Karate Kid with a woman instead of a kid, supported by a bunch of wooden TV actors and bit players. Despite Casillas' obvious skills, even the fight scenes aren't great - short, scrappy and never competitive enough to be exciting. The plot is simple and obvious, the direction clumsy, there are plenty of sound booms in shot and the dialog is corny and predictable throughout.

Watch this, if you get the chance, for the beautiful, formidable and entirely admirable Ms Casillas alone. But it's a shame such worthwhile messages were presented so poorly.

My review was written in May 1986 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"Fire in the Night" (a pointless title) is an amateurish feature that unconvincingly tries to pull a gender switch on "The Karate Kid". Commercial prospects are poor.

Musclebound Graciela Casillas toplines as Terry Collins, a young college girl in a small California town dominated by the rich Swanson family. When not terrorizing people randomly, young Mike Swanson (Patrick St. Esprit) keeps hitting on virginal Terry to bed him and wed him. This culminates in a near-rape, when Terry is saved by a newly arrived old army (former) buddy Jason Williams (topbilled John Martin). Mike also is putting pressure (through his dad) on Terry's father, threatening to foreclose on the mortgage on his business.

Terry hits on the absurd idea of challenging Mike to a martial arts contest. Even less credible is the presence in town of a Filipino cement contractor and folk dance teacher Manolo (Muni Zano), who reluctantly agreed to teach Terry the secrets of Filipino martial arts in the six weeks before the coed contest. He also hiers her to work at cementing driveways to toughen her up (unfortunately, actress Casillas is an obvious weightlifter with shoulders like Lyle Alzado and thighs to match, destroying the plot premise of her vulnerability).

Of course Terry wins in a very poorly photographed fight finale, and Manolo even makes her a partner in his business.

Preposterous film is acted poorly to boot, with Casillas having trouble reading dialog. Looking like Wings Hauser, St. Espris is a hammy villain. It's hard to believe the filmmakers could keep a straight face cranking out this one.