BLIND RAGE (1978): "It's going down right now in the International House of Pancakes!"

In the wake of the fall of South Vietnam, the United States government creates "Project E.S.A." to prevent the domino theory from being proven a reality. The Americans will invest $15,000,000 to finance counterinsurgency efforts and other initiatives to shore up the governments of the region. The money will be deposited in the Oriental Bank in Manila, where Johnny Duran is the liaison with the E.S.A. Duran's involvement in the scheme is known to elements of American organized crime, represented by a mystery man who corners Duran in an International House of Pancakes.

"My name is Lew Simpson," he explains, "Most of my friends call me...Wilbur." This is a fittingly strange introduction to one of the most inept performers I've ever seen. In his only performance known to the IMDB, B. T. Anderson has clear difficulty remembering his lines. Unfortunately, director Efrem C. Pinon has placed the idiot cards behind Anderson, so that he has to look over his shoulder every few moments to finish his sentences. "You've been used to money," his character tells Duran, "You've been surrounded by it eight hours........a day." Later, on board his office yacht, "Wilbur" tells Duran about Rocky, "my main man [who] has in his file, and in his head, more than five hundred names. He knows the size of their bank accounts, the time of day when they take a........take a crap." He may actually have meant that pause for emphasis, or that may be the way it was written in the script co-written by multitalented Asian-Arkansan Leo Fong. However you slice it, you know you're in the hands of masters the rest of the way.

Rocky tries to figure out Johnny Duran's bank account, crap habits or fashion sense in Blind Rage.

"Wilbur" has persuaded Duran to act as the inside man in a daring "foolproof" scheme to take the $15,000,000 from the Oriental Bank. The foolproof part of the plan, he tells his new partner, is that the robbers are blind men. There's Willie Black (D'Urville Martin), who got his eyes gouged out by gangsters, as we see in a flashback. There's Len Wang (Fong), a Hong Kong enforcer who crossed the triads and got acid in his face, as we see in a flashback. There's Hector Lopez, a matador who had his eyes gored out by a bull. No flashback for that one. Finally, there's the naturally blind magician, Amazing Anderson. They make ideal bank robbers because A. they're used to working without sight, and B. No one expects blind guys to rob a bank. That's what makes it foolproof!

The gang that could shoot straight, but couldn't see what they were shooting: from left, D'Urville Martin, Leo Fong, Darnell Garcia and Dick Adair.

Intensive training also helps. Duran puts together a full-scale replica of the bank so the bandits can learn their way around it in carefully timed and measured movements. They receive martial arts training so they can manhandle anyone who manhandles them. They become crack shooters trained to fire instantly (and accurately) at any unfamiliar sound -- and they have metal taps installed in their shoes so they'll know their own footfalls. Duran has recruited Sally, an educator at a school for the handicapped, to whip the men into shape, but only late in the game does he realize that he needs a blind electronics expert to deactivate the bank alarms. Sally knows just the man: Ben Gavara, who "needs money so he can get even with the world" for getting blinded by fellow gangsters, as we see in another flashback. He feels protective toward Sally, especially when Willie Black attempts to become a blind rapist. "Lay off her, sex-hungry bastard!" Ben warns him.

Against all odds, the robbery works, though thanks less to Ben's electronics expertise than to his knocking a guard's head into an electrical circuit to deactivate the alarm. Our trigger-happy blind men bump off several bank employees, one for merely leaning to one side, for which Len Wang apologizes. Ben goes his own way while the foreigners are packed into a leaky gas truck for shipment out of the country, and is promptly caught in a dragnet of known blind criminals. Under pressure to rat out his partners, he does so instantly. But Sally and the rest of the gang seem destined for a fiery reckoning at the airport no matter what Ben does, while Johnny Duran boards another plane for California with the loot.

Enter Fred Williamson. More specifically, enter Jesse Crowder, a character Williamson created for the movie Death Journey in 1975 and reprised in 1976's No Way Back. Crowder was apparently very popular in the Philippines, or else Blind Rage's Philippine producers thought including Williamson as Crowder would give their film a better shot at U.S. distribution. Whatever the reason, it's an odd shift in tone for the film to become a Fred Williamson movie in its last reel. For some reason the U.S. government needs a super-operative like Crowder to figure out how to tail a man they already know about until he makes contact with Lew "Wilbur" Simpson at another IHoP to bring the picture full circle. But maybe they needed a badass like Crowder to take the dangerous Duran down. Recall that he was just some schlub who worked for the bank and wore loud clothes before "Wilbur" set him up as a criminal. But now, at the movie's climax on a rooftop outside the IHop, he gets all Emperor of the North on Crowder.

Crowder: All right, Duran. That's about as far as you go.
Duran: There is no way one man can take me alive.
Crowder: [points gun].
Duran: I said one man!
Crowder: [shrugs] Forgot to load it this morning anyway.

Crowder than tosses his gun aside to engage the rogue banker in hand-to-hand combat, and actually gets his trademark cigar knocked out of his mouth before setting things to rights. That may not be enough for Fred Williamson fans who get suckered into this film on the assumption that he's the star and fights the blind bandits. VideoAsia's Thug City Chronicles collection goes so far wrong as to claim that Fred leads the blind gang in this picture. Even more disappointed will be such fans as there are of eccentric auteur Leo Fong. Though the story is as goofy as you might expect from Fong, whatever his actual contribution was, he doesn't really have much to do in the picture and his distinctive voice is overdubbed by another actor. Those caveats aside, bad movie connoisseurs should have a blast with this blockheaded epic. If the story isn't enough for you, there are outrageous Seventies fashions and ponderous theme ballad, "The System," to take into consideration. I'll leave you with some lyrics from Tito Sotto's song:

We live in a world
Of heartaches and pain
And somehow you feel
Life's just but a game

So dare not say why.
You have to survive.
The moment you fall...
...Into the System!

And speaking of falsely advertising a Fred Williamson vehicle, here's the trailer as uploaded by HuffTheTalbot

LOW BLOW (1986): "I think you owe me a car!"

Somewhere in San Francisco, a deli robbery disturbs the repose of Joe Wong, private detective. Surveying the scene from his window, he glumly puts on his gun and heads out the door. Where are you going, his secretary asks. "Going to quiet things down," he answers. He strolls into the deli, demanding, "Hey, where's my ham sandwich?" A gunman helpfully conducts him to a table, then resumes demanding money from the cashier. "Okay, here's your money," Joe says. Actually, it's a gun. In moments, the robbers are dead. Joe heads back to his office. "Forget about the ham sandwich," he says.

Two years after Killpoint, we're back in the world of Leo Fong, Asian-Arkansan martial arts auteur. Fong is a man of many skills. For this occasion, he stars, acts, and wrote the script, leaving the direction to his Killpoint helmer, Frank Harris. Compared to that minor apocalypse of gangs and gunrunners running amok, Low Blow seems much less inspired, and definitely less well funded. It also hardly seems to merit an R rating; while it wallows in a certain impoverished scuzziness, it never delves to the depths of sleaze you'd want to reach with such a film. It's Fong's fourth film as a writer, but he's still a work in progress, playing with the building blocks of a script but never quite getting one to stand on top of another for long.

The bare description of Low Blow promises more than the film delivers. Joe Wong is recruited to rescue a millionaire's daughter from a cult run by Yarakunda -- played by Cameron Mitchell. The prospect of Mitchell in Jim Jones mode ("It's very much like Jonestown" a cult expert tells Wong) had me stoked for this film, especially since Fong and Harris got a great crazy turn from Cam as the head gunrunner in Killpoint. Two years later, Mitchell seems really out of it, unwell and uninspired. Whether this was because he was on or off the wagon, I just don't know. But it seems like Fong knew something was wrong, so he and Harris build up the role of Yarakunda's exploitative assistant, Karma. One year earlier, Akosua Busia was in The Color Purple. Working for Leo Fong, she camps and cackles away as a cynical con artist with a fetish for Brach's salt-water taffy. It's probably the closest thing to actual acting in the picture.

Yarakunda and Karma run Unity Village, where the acolytes till the fields daily and listen to Karma's harangues. Their latest recruit is Karen Templeton, daughter of John Templeton of the vaunted Templeton International. How did Templeton get so rich? We get a sample of his savvy in a scene that has him riding through a seedy street in his limousine. He has the driver stop when he witnesses two muggers snatching an old lady's purse. Joe Wong is enjoying a bowl of chicken feet soup nearby when he hears the woman's screams. Abandoning his repast, he rushes out, chases down the muggers (who'll become recurring comedy relief characters), dodges a vicious purse attack and saves the day, before Templeton's eyes. This man knows talent when he sees it. He braves Wong's slobbovian office to hire the man to rescue Karen, whom the cultists call Purity.

Purse fu is no match for Leo Fong -- and this guy swings like a girl, anyway.

Check out those credentials on the door. And check out Troy Donahue as Mr. Templeton

Purity has given up her jewelry and signed a document of some kind, but even though the cultists know who she is, they make no great effort to exploit their asset. No matter how mercenary Karma is said to be ("She's not just from India, she just got out of prison," says the cult expert), there's no attempt to shake down Mr. Templeton or induce Purity to get more money. Yarakunda seems quite content to have his charges work the fields while he babbles about the river reaching the ocean. Mitchell talks so low so often that Busia has to repeat his words through a bullhorn so the faithful may hear. But I wonder if Fong and Harris had her do this because they knew that they'd be using an incredibly annoying wall-to-wall soundtrack of generic 80s instrumentals. In any event, I'm trying to tell you that there's no urgency to Purity's plight, nor is Joe Wong in a great hurry to save her after an initial foray into Unity Village. Pretending to be journalist "Jack Chan," he's taken on a tour of the minimalist compound. "Right around here I think we've got a nice setup," a guard doubling as a guide tells him, moments before another guard bops Wong on the head. A nice setup -- get it?

With the help of a disgruntled cultist sharing a cell with him, and after a session of ear biting and hair pulling courtesy of Karma, Joe sets a convenient wastebasket on fire to get a guard's attention. "Hey guard, fire in here," he says. Calling it yelling would give Fong too much credit, as he sounds about as exasperated as if the room were leaking rather than burning. He waves the pyre just under a barred window so the guard will get the idea. Suffice it to say that Joe fights his way out and into his dilapidated car, in which he must brave the dreaded barrier of empty cardboard boxes.

Somehow the cultists figure out "Jack Chan's" true identity and track him down to his house, somewhere in a junkyard. But the garbage and loose planks strewn about everywhere make Joe the master of his terrain, and that means it's "Home Alone" time for his attackers. The ensuing sequence is perplexingly non-violent. Yes, Joe hits people all over the place. But his strategy seems to consist of jumping someone, disarming them, and then leaving them behind and conscious so they can rejoin their buddies. One offender is even subjected to a puppy attack, such is the brutality of the moment. Finally tiring of the monotony, the perps pile into their car to flee, but Joe is just getting started. He rips out their wiring, smashes all the windows with a two-by-four, puts on a pair of goggles and grabs a circular saw. Before our eyes, and sometimes with clearly no one inside the car, he tears up the roof until he can peel it off like the lid of a tin can, at which point all the clowns now back inside the car spill out and run away up the road, presumably with Joe's best wishes.

Payback time should be coming, but Joe's approach to taking the offensive is rather like Colin Powell's. He is determined to have overwhelming force on his side. Toward this goal he's been scouting out likely allies like Duke, an overaged boxer, and Fuzzy, a fat guy with professional wrestling moves, and Chico, a stereotypical Hispanic knife fighter. They're still not enough to overcome Unity Village's formidable army of guards. They're led by future Tae-Bo tycoon Billy Blanks, after all. Also, Leo Fong has time to kill if he wants his film to get to the 80-minute mark. But I don't want to characterize what follows as a stalling tactic. Actually, it's at this point that Low Blow achieves genuinely inspired stupidity.

While John Templeton waits with dwindling patience for his daughter's freedom, Joe Wong tells his faithful secretary to call the press and announce a $20,000 toughman tournament. I assume the prize money is coming out of poor Templeton's pocket, since the gate isn't going to be much based on this crowd shot. We should note that the tournament is not a "Toughman" competition, strictly speaking. Those are boxing tournaments for people without professional skills. What Joe Wong stages is more like pit fighting. But what do I mean, "more like?" It literally is pit fighting. They've dug a hole in the earth and thrown people in it to fight each other.

At times, the tournament looks like a prototype of old-school mixed martial arts competitions, or early versions of those Kumite-style affairs that became their own movie genre in the late 80s. It's too bad more people didn't show, because there was something for everyone here.

Fat guys!

Ninjas!

Intergender!

Now Joe Wong has his private army of fighters for the dangerous assault on Unity Village. Strangely, though, considering the need for stealth, he didn't pick any ninjas. Stranger yet that he felt a need to judge their skills in unarmed combat, since they'll spend much of the climactic siege shooting down Yarakunda's guards like ducks in a gallery. The privilege of unarmed combat belongs to the master. He can use guns, too, but he also uses doors and other unorthodox attacks, including the emotionally challenging double handjob.

But the supreme moment comes when Joe fights the man whose car he destroyed back at the junkyard. "I got you now, Chinaman," this villain says in an instant of upper-handedness, "I think you owe me a car!" Joe promptly throws the car guy on his back, but the baddie is reaching for the gun in his shoulder holster.

I'll tell you now that Purity is rescued, Karma kills Yarakunda, and her own fate is left a mystery. I do this because the climax of the Joe vs the car guy fight is the real climax of Low Blow. You can tell it's an important moment because Fong and Harris prepared a special effect. The fact that there's a continuity problem between action and follow-through shouldn't affect our appreciation of their effort. Let's break it down shot by shot.

Joe has to act fast to beat car guy to the draw, so to speak. We see him desperately bearing down with his fist to subdue his antagonist.

The target: car guy's face. Kinda looks like Michael Medved, doesn't he?

IMPACT: But what's wrong with this picture?

Yes, you guessed it. Joe is destroying car guy's face with his foot rather than his fist. Harris has to take the blame for this one, because Fong was in his moment, getting into his Bruce Lee finishing move trance. Don't knock it: for him, this is acting.

For Low Blow Leo Fong had plenty of ideas that might have made a more effectively comical film in more skilled scripting hands, but he and Harris leave most of them laying on the screen. There are running gags like Joe's awful driving and his always getting a ticket, and the repeated appearances of the two purse-snatchers, who get beaten up by nearly everyone. There's politically incorrect repartee between Joe and Duke the boxer, the black man calling the Asian "Chinaman" and Joe calling Duke "boy." But our filmmakers are not really comedians by temperament, however comical their films turn out regardless. Fong has no sense of pacing, and his dialogue is rarely bad enough to be quotable.

The final third of the picture almost redeems the whole, but my knowledge that this team was capable of better (or "worse") work keeps me from really recommending the film. Low Blow is best appreciated by intensive students of 80s cheese and fans of Leo Fong, whose bland stoicism makes Chuck Norris look like a Method actor. Despite that, Fong's obvious dedication to making movies makes him a sympathetic figure in a period when the odds against getting on the big screen were growing ever longer. He has my respect.

Here's how they sold it back in the day.

KILLPOINT (1984)

Back in 1995 I crossed the continent to visit Riverside, California, to serve as best man at a friend's wedding. I took in such sights as there were, most notably the theater where Gone With The Wind had its first preview showing. It seemed an ordinary, past-its-prime town, but I had little inkling of its secret history. For according to Frank Harris's movie, about a decade earlier Riverside was the murder capital of the United States.

The trouble began when a man in soldier's fatigues robbed a military arsenal of its guns and ammo. The perpetrator was "Nighthawk," the right-hand man of local crimelord Joe Marx (Cameron Mitchell). Nighthawk then carried out a daring attack on rival arms dealer Leo DeJulio in a crowded Chinese restaurant, instructing his men, "There should be no witnesses, and everyone has to die. Have fun." His orders were carried out; 15 people died in the eatery.

The ATF soon learned from Snake the snitch that Marx and Nighthawk were behind the robbery and the massacre. Agent Bryant (Richard Roundtree) was assigned to supervise the Riverside investigation. Capt. Skidmore of the Riverside PD, noting the stakes involved ("We think we've got a real problem with this thing.") assigned Lt. James Long (Leo Fong) as Bryant's liaison, despite reservations from ATF higher-ups. Wasn't Long the officer whose wife was raped and killed recently? Is he all right? "No, he's not all right. Would you be?" Skidmore told the Bureau, "But I'll tell you one thing. He's going to get the job done."

Nighthawk was soon handing out guns as if they were free samples. Gangbangers were soon shooting up grocery stores, bumping off another 15 people in one robbery.

The film portrays Joe Marx watching news reports linking the two massacres and shooting his TV set. Marx had a love-hate relationship with his pet poodle, adoring the animal despite the fact that it "poos and pisses all over the living room." He fussed over the dog while arranging with his procuress, Anita, to have a new girl visit him.

Candy is shown telling Marx, "This really isn't me....I'm really a singer." To which Marx responds, "Girly, when you know Joe Marx long enough, when this old son of a bitch tells you to sing, you better sing before I get physical with you. Sing! Anything!" The filmmakers believe that Candy's voice failed her due to nerves, and that when she refused to strip on Marx's order, he murdered her and had her body dumped in a river.

Lt. Long took over the murder investigation when the police learned that a burn mark on Candy's left breast matched the m.o. in an unsolved New Jersey homicide in which Joe Marx was a suspect. The autopsy clearly depressed Long, who is shown in a montage working out furiously, recalling his own dead wife, and staring into space.

Having discovered Anita's address in Candy's home, Long interviewed her to no avail until he explained that Candy had been murdered. Anita then apparently went to Marx's home to denounce him as the gunrunner tried to feed his dog a cigarette. The song Cameron Mitchell sings is probably dramatic license.

Sparky is a friend of mine.
She will do it any time,
For a nickel or a dime.
Twenty cents for overtime.

The film contends that Anita's first guess was mistaken, and that Nighthawk killed Candy. It shows Anita wounding Nighthawk before he killed her, after which Marx complains, "Now you're bleeding all over my carpet!" Sparky is the dog, by the way.

As the investigation intensified, Long and Bryant pumped informants for new leads on the gunrunners. One likely prospect was gunned down in a tavern men's room before Long could meet with him. Nighthawk subsequently shot the gunman. Meanwhile, the gun trade continued, Nighthawk delivering arms to the Sanchez gang (with his lady chauffeur on hand for "insurance"), who subsequently massacred members of the rival Ramirez gang.

The first major break in the case came after Long kung-fued the snot out of the Sanchez crew and arrested their leader. After breaking up a gas station robbery by a black gang, the Riverside police played the gang leaders against each other, locking them in a bare cell to kung-fu one another until one is willing to rat out the arms dealers -- as long as the other is blamed.

Using the fresh lead, Long arranged to meet Marx and Nighthawk, pretending to be an Asian gangster interested in rocket launchers. James Long's origins are unknown, but to account for Leo Fong's incongruous Southern accent, Long claims to come from Arkansas, where the China-born Fong was raised from the age of five. Long didn't realize when meeting with Nighthawk that the gunrunner had just killed Agent Bryant. It's an oddity of the film that Bryant dies without his liaison, Long, ever really taking notice of the fact. But there were more than enough ATF guys to go around in Riverside, even if Marx and Nighthawk wanted to start their own religion.

Marx suspected that Long might be a cop. He tested his theory by having four of his men beat Long up. He was satisfied of Long's good faith because "If you'd been a cop you'd have back-up all over the place." Paranoia, however, wasn't Marx's main problem. A breaking point came in his partnership with Nighthawk when Marx went berserk in a diner where the waitress kept a crying baby.

This apparently convinced Nighthawk that Marx was no longer a viable partner. He also had reason to think that Marx no longer trusted him, since the boss was wont to wander about talking to himself, saying such things as "From now on it's me alone, nuts or otherwise, against the whole world." Soon afterward, while picking Marx up in his limo, Nighthawk cut his mentor's throat. That left Nighthawk to consummate the big arms deal with Long, while the ATF surrounded the rendezvous point in an abandoned factory complex....

If Joe Marx didn't exist, Frank Harris and Cameron Mitchell would have to invent him. Mitchell gives one of his patented eccentric performances, fussing over the dog as much as he plots evil. But such is the quality of the man that Marx comes across as convincingly nutty, capable of completely unpredictable behavior. There's weird psychosexual tension between Marx and Nighthawk, whom Anita accuses of being gay. In turn, Nighthawk insults Marx while the boss wallows in a hot tub: "Look at you, wearing scarves, flowers in your hair, talking to a dog. Business going downhill and you're still turning into a raving faggot." Mitchell and Stack Pierce as Nighthawk make an effective team of misfits. Their interplay is the most entertaining thing about Killpoint apart from the sheer volume of gunplay that erupts every few minutes. This is a film that kills for the love of killing. Why does a criminal gang need to kill 15 random people in a grocery store? Because they're evil and the violence looks cool is my best guess.

Mitchell may steal the film, and Richard Roundtree may recede into the background for no good reason, but this is Leo Fong's show. The overaged (56 when this was filmed), mop-headed master of redneck style kung fu is a spectacle even if he couldn't act his way out a door. He spends a lot of time receiving very detailed orders from Capt. Skidmore, because taking the initiative might require him to open his mouth, and Director-Screenwriter Harris apparently wanted to delay the awful moment when Fong's accent revealed itself for as long as possible. Now, an Asian man has just as much right to a Southern accent as anyone else, but in Leo Fong's case it's just the icing on the cake that makes him an avatar of '80s bad taste. Only in that decade would anyone have thought of making him a star.

Harris is capable of creating dynamic moments, especially the grocery store attack, and he keeps things busy during the drawn-out climactic siege, crosscutting the ATF blasting thugs with Leo Fong going hand to hand with various foes until his showdown with Nighthawk. But there are also lots of flat moments of telephone conversations, pointless helicopter shots and instructions from the authentically dull Capt. Skidmore to pad out the picture. Throw in some convincing sleaze, some country music and a lot of bloody shirts and the end result is approximately 90 minutes of mindless action candy, Crown International Pictures style. You can find this one nicely letterboxed on BCI's Maximum Action set, which includes another Harris-Fong-Mitchell exploit, Low Blow. But if you want to see lots of people get shot, Killpoint should probably be your first stop in that collection.