Fighting Mad

My first Cirio H Santiago film! This one has a brain-meltingly random premise, Afros, cool music, is choppy as hell and even throws in a bit of gore at the end there.

Russell is a Vietnam vet who's smuggled some gold with his mates Morrello and McGhee, who of course double cross him, slit his throat, throw him in the sea and head off to L.A to waste the mob there and become crime lords (as we see them blast their way through many gangs). McGhee also has the hots for Russell's wife, and periodically turns up to try and woo her (getting more aggressive with every visit).

Russell, however, washes up on a desert island, where he meets two Japanese soldiers who have never surrendered (and never will). After becoming friends and indulging in some funny banter ("You should see Japan now!"), the ranking officer (great character) teaches Russell how to slice things up good with a samurai sword, which as you know will lead Russell back to LA where he can chop his buddies, and their hired goons (Hired goons?) into little pieces.

Full of ridiculous situations, action scenes and funky music, Fighting Mad is a good bet for an exploitation fan. There's a good relationship between Russell and the Japanese officer, and just when I thought Russel would never get off that damn island, he does in a rather sad scene and the film picks up from there. Whenever the film bogs down in training sequences, Santiago just switches to L.A to show McGhee and Morrello taking on rival mobs.

Once Russell arrives in LA, he becomes an unstoppable killing machine to get to his enemies. It looked like some of the violence had been cut from the version I watched (a leg being severed), but as there were several graphic decapitations at the end, who knows? This is good for a watch if you're like me, and just switch your brain off before hitting 'play' and just go with the flow. It's cheap and cheerful and action packed – what else do you want?

With the belated rise in popularity of Asian exploitation, groovy Grindhouse icon, Cirio H. Santiago, has become somewhat of a bona fide underground cinematic hero; this is due in no small part to his electrifying series of low-budget, high-octane, Post-Apocalyptic actioners that proved so exceptionally popular during home video boom of the 80s. The doyen of Post-Holocaust automotive Armageddon, Santiago noisily perfected the machismo-soaked iconography of swarthy, leather-clad heroics, wherein dusty, embattled muscle cars, festooned with gaudy Motley Crue accoutrements blazed a furious trail of calamitous carnage across a noxiously corrupted landscape, whereby brutality and automotive prowess were the only viable remaining currency! Santiago directed these dystopian vistas with their crimson-hued skyline, mottled by the choking dust of deathly radioactivity with great gusto; so it came as no great surprise to discover that his earlier exploitation winner, the wildly entertaining revenger, 'Fighting Mad' (aka) 'Death Force' was by no means an impoverished backwoods cousin to his better known PA extravaganzas!

Brawny charismatic actor, James Iglehart, is part of a roguish trio of opportunistic thugs, and after completing a particularly frantic blag upon a yacht, things go rapidly pear shaped, as he is left to rot in the midst of the pitiless expanses briny sea. Being a pure bred Grindhouse classic, Death Force's unerring goal is unrelenting, blood-thirsty revenge; and after washing up upon a deserted island he is trained by two Japanese soldiers fortuitously stranded there since the end of WW2. Naturally, we have to endure a little ham-fisted cross-cultural observations, but Santiago ably constructs some tasty training vignettes, while certainly NOT on par with '36 Chambers of Shaolin', they prove to be an excellent aperitif before our vengeful black samurai, (fortunately not the far less dynamic, Al Adamson interpretation) armed with his trusty quicksilver Katana blade proceeds to bloodily exact a most furious and dreadful revenge! Ostensibly, 'Fighting Mad' is the timeless fists of fury fable of a hypertrophically muscular, gleefully gangster goring, powerhouse African American badass vengefully decapitating multitudinous dumbbell Mafiosi with a diamond edged katana blade! So, what's not to like?

Cirio H. Santiago seems to have been a bit of a legendary Filipino director from the period when many cheap and cheerful genre flicks were being knocked out in the Philippines. From the little that I have seen, his output seems to be a guarantee of a good time on at least some level. One thing I have noticed is that he is fond of throwing everything at the screen no matter how disparate, with Future Hunters (1986) for instance he combined a post-apocalypse, time-travel, religious artefacts, Shaolin monks, neo-Nazis, dwarfs and Amazonian women. With the earlier TNT Jackson (1974) he simply combined martial arts with Blaxploitation, which was a tactic he returned to with Fighting Mad, with the added bonus of a vigilante revenge story and Hell in the Pacific thrown into the mix as well. The story itself has a lot going on in it. Three Vietnam veterans steal a cache of gold and then two of them double-cross the third by killing him and throwing him in the sea. Trouble is he doesn't die and winds up on a tropical island inhabited by two Japanese soldiers who are still fighting World War II in the late 70's. They nurse him back to health and train him to be a martial arts expert and samurai sword master. He eventually ends up back home in L.A. and seeks out his ex-buddies - who are now crime lords - for a slice of violent revenge.

It would be churlish to complain too much against a movie which has a synopsis like the above. In true Santiago style its attempt to mash genres up does result in something a little bit different for sure. It's full to the brim with fighting, training montages, heads and ears being lopped off, soul singing, 70's hats and Afros. So while it's not always entirely engaging stuff it tries its best to deliver a bit of stupid fun and you really can't argue with that too much.

Death Force (1978) is a movie that I recently watched on Tubi. The storyline follows a man shot and left for dead by his drug lord partners. He wakes up stranded on an island with Japanese soldiers left there since World War II. They train him on the art of fighting and sword work. When he is rescued from the island the man sets out on a path for revenge against those that left him stranded to begin with.

This movie is directed by Cirio H. Santiago (Firecracker) and stars James Iglehart (Savage!), Leon Isaac Kennedy (Lone Wolf McQuade), Carmen Argenziano (Broken Arrow) and Jayne Kennedy (Chips).

This is one of those movies that's more fun than good. The cast is well selected and fit their characters perfectly. The action scenes are entertaining with some fun shootouts, sword fights and hand to hand action sequences. There is a decapitation scene in this that's awesome.

The training scenes on the island are fun too and had me laughing at times. The background music is very well selected and give the movie a classic feel from this era.

Overall, this movie is far from perfect, or from being one of the better blaxploitation movies, but it is worth a watch. I would score this a 5.5-6/10 and recommend seeing it once.

Classic cult martial arts movie i had this movie on vhs back in the day