Bad Movie Club: Raw Force

1982 action movie

Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (J.D.: 5/5; Fred: 4/5; Lisa: 4/5; Josh: 5/5)

Rating: 6/20

Plot: Some people trying to enjoy a martial-arts/sex cruise have their fun interrupted by some bad guys who trade women for jade on a zombie-filled island inhabited by shady monks.

This movie is also called Kung-fu Cannibals, and it's exactly as good as you'd think a movie called both Raw Force and Kung-Fu Cannibals would be. It's also as sleazy, borderline exploitative, the producers assuming they could make an easy buck by mixing the exposed breasts of every single female character with kung-fu, zombies, and explosions. It's a movie with 8 credited "hoods," 8 credited corpses, and 10 credited hookers which, for me at least, is a perfect proportion.

The film begins by showing the hijinks of he villains, a merry band of jade smugglers lead by a guy who is a combination of Panama Jack and Hitler. That villain is played by Ralph Lombardi who, despite stellar work with a wonky eye and a solid German accent here, wasn't in any other movies. Maybe he's just waiting for the right role. The rest of the bad guys are brutish but inept, the kinds of guys who cower behind tombstones as they fire machine guns at unarmed people. They're indistinguishable from one another except one of them has a bitching ponytail.

The good guys are also indistinguishable from each other. Most of the characters are part of a martial arts club, and they're enjoying their time on what appears to be a martial-arts/sex cruise. They try to hit each other with sticks, they flirt with the frequently-nude women on board, and they drink a whole lot. The boat is owned by a loud woman but captained by a seemingly drunk Cameron Mitchell. Apparently, he took his payment for this "starring" role in booze.

My favorite character is the bartender on the ship. Here's a picture:

If I looked like that guy, I'd never leave the house. He's Michael P. Stone, a stuntman in five movies, a bartender in this movie, and a "thug" in another.

Josh said "the entire bad movie kitchen sink" was in this movie. He might be right. You've got the ludicrous plot, zombies with bad zombie make-up, kung-fu, piranhas, terrible acting, an even worse script, sketchy fire effects, gratuitous breasts, cannibalism, weird pacing. The pacing of this story really is a major issue. It starts with the whores and monks and jade and guy with the Hitler Stache on the island, introduces us to the unlikable characters who are supposed to be the good guys, and then gives us a wild action sequence in a bar. Then, for about twenty or so minutes, it turns into a raunchy comedy when they're back on the ship. If you turned to this movie during that chunk of time, you'd have no idea this was an action movie with criminal activity and zombies. Well, you might think the movie itself is some sort of crime, but you wouldn't know there are any characters up to no good. You might even mistake it for slowly-developing porn.

Although this ends with a promise that it will be continued, I'm not sure what would even need to be continued here. Unless it's the parallel story of how that bartender survived the attack on that ship and then ran off to have an adventure on his own. It's been over 35 years, however, so we should assume a sequel isn't going to happen.