Raw Force

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.

Yup, it played on the big screen with on a double bill with "Cannibal Ferox". There were some special guests who worked on this obscure film and they did not have much good to say about it. I guess the director was a big time sleaze and was also inexperienced. There is lots of nudity in this one. All the elements of exploitation are covered, including female slavery. It's actually a really hilarious movie which is probably partly intentional. The crowd loved it.

"Raw Force" is like an ultra-sleazy and perverted version of Love Boat, with additional Kung Fu fights, demented cannibalistic monks, white slaves trade, energetic zombies and a whole lot of lousy acting performances. No wonder this movie was included in the recently released "Grindhouse Experience 20 movie box-set". It's got everything exploitation fanatics are looking for, blend in a totally incoherent and seemingly improvised script! The production values are extremely poor and the technical aspects are pathetic, but the amounts of gratuitous violence & sex can hardly be described. The film opens at a tropically sunny location called Warriors Island, where a troop of sneering monks raise the dead for no apparent reason other than to turn them into Kung Fu fighters. The monks also buy sexy slaves from a sleazy Hitler look-alike businessman, supposedly because the women's flesh supplies them with the required powers to increase their zombie army. Tourists on a passing cruise ship, among them three martial arts fighters, a female LA cop and a whole bunch of ravishing but dim-witted ladies, are attacked by the Hitler guy's goons because they were planning an excursion to Warriors Island. Their lifeboat washes ashore the island anyway, and the monks challenge the survivors to a fighting test with their zombies. Okay, how does that sound for a crazy midnight horror movie mess? It's not over yet, because "Raw Force" also has piranhas, wild boat orgies, Cameron Mitchell in yet another embarrassing lead role and 70's exploitation duchess Camille Keaton ("I spit on your Grave") in an utterly insignificant cameo appearance. There's loads of badly realized gore, including axe massacres and decapitations, hammy jokes and bad taste romance. The trash-value of this movie will literally leave you speechless. The evil monks' background remains, naturally, unexplained and they don't even become punished for their questionable hobbies. Maybe that's why the movie stops with "To Be Continued", instead of with "The End". The sequel never came, unless it's so obscure IMDb doesn't even list it.

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.

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.