rawforce

A friend of mine loaned me this movie , and told me "You've gotta review this for your site....it's the everything movie!". And it certainly is. Somehow Raw Force manages to be part Kung Fu, part screwball comedy, part slasher flick, part cannibal movie , and part zombie movie. If I've forgotten any genres, you can bet they're lurking somewhere in this movie.

Raw Force is about one of those really cheesy, no frills singles cruiseships. It's about to depart for the mysterious Warrior Island , a place where disgraced warriors were executed which is now inhabited by cannibal monks. Human flesh can't be too nutricious, because the monks are all about three feet tall, and look like reject jawas. Legend has it that they can raise the dead warriors by eating human flesh. Why they would want to do this is never made clear.

The monks get a steady supply of tasty young women from the evil Dr. Speer , a Hitler lookalike who trades kidnapped hookers to the monks for the jade that they mine on the island. It sounds like a bad place for the cruise to be headed..... but never fear , it's captained by Cameron Mitchell, and a bunch of the passengers are from the Burbank Karate school.

About the first half of the movie takes the guise of a screwball comedy. There's copious amounts of inane jokes and nudity , and of course some guy ends up wearing a birthday cake. All the Meatballs style hijynx don't last long though , because Dr. Speer has found out about the cruise to Warriors Island , and sends his cronies onboard to make sure nobody lives to tell about his little operation. Now we're treated to some real action , as passengers are axed to death , shot with crossbows , and killed in a variety of ingenious and impractical ways.

The Burbank Karate school , a foxy LAPD cop called Cookie , and the Chinese first mate (hey this is a movie, and he's asian....of course he's a kung fu expert) fight off the hordes of hoods as they retreat to their speedboat. Before leaving , the hoods set fire to the ship, and the survivors take to a life raft. With no food or water , they fortunately ( or maybe unfortunately) wash up on Warriors Island before they have to drink their own urine.

Now we enter the zombie / cannibal stage. The vertically challenged monks chow down on some BBQ hooker , and raise about a hundred dead kung fu, samurai, and ninja warriors. Not only do our heroes have to deal with these rotting martial artists who move in Tombs of the Blind Dead style slow motion , but Dr. Speer has returned with some heavy artillery to finish them off. From here on it's action and laughs a plenty, with lots of laboured kung fu , guns , explosions , decapitations , and even a piranha attack.

This was a pretty entertaining mixed bag of a movie. The screwball comedy section on the cruise ship was pretty much as inane as they get , but I found myself laughing at the ridiculous turn this movie had taken nonetheless. The funniest scene was probably when a woman asks the funny looking bald bartender for a whisky on the rocks, and he headbutts a huge block of ice to get the icecubes. The slo-mo scenes of the undead warriors also added genuine moments of atmosphere and suspense to this otherwise cornball movie. Raw Force is a pretty good choice for a slow night, and is worth seeing if only to count how many genres it transcends.