{"id":5899,"date":"2024-10-14T23:37:55","date_gmt":"2024-10-15T03:37:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=5899"},"modified":"2024-10-14T23:37:55","modified_gmt":"2024-10-15T03:37:55","slug":"death-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/14\/death-force\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Force"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Death Force <\/strong>(1978)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Caprican 3\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 110 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Cirio H. Santiago\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Howard R. Cohen\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jaime Mendoza-Nava and Eddie Villanueva\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Ricardo Remies\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 15, 1978 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: James Iglehart, Carmen Argenziano, Leon Isaac (Kennedy), Jayne Kennedy, Jose Mari Avellana, Joonie Gamboa, Leo Martinez, Armando Federico, Irene Waters, James Monroe Iglehart, Allen Arkus, Tony Carrion, Roberto Gonzales.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: N\/A<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0For accuracy\u2019s sake, I should have put \u201caka Fighting Mad, Vengeance Is Mine and Black Samourai\u201d after the title Death Force<\/strong>, a Filipino-US exploitation movie from the guys that gave the world Vampire Hookers, Cirio H. Santiago (director) and Howard R. Cohen (writer). I recall watching it years ago under the title Fighting Mad. It had a running time of 96 minutes. That\u2019s the version that was theatrically re-released in \u201982 by 21st<\/sup> Century Film Corporation and subsequently on video by Continental Video. I\u2019m reviewing the original 110-minute version of Death Force<\/strong>, basically a cheap knock-off of Point Blank with plenty of martial arts sword action thrown in.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Returning Vietnam vets and partners-in-crime Doug (Iglehart, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), Morelli (Argenziano, When a Stranger Calls) and McGee (Isaac, Penitentiary) make a stopover in Manila to sell a shipment of stolen gold to a Chinese gangster for big money. Morelli and McGee have big plans while Doug just wants to quietly settle down with his wife Maria (Kennedy, Body and Soul) and young son (Iglehart\u2019s real-life son James). Before he realizes what\u2019s going down, Doug has his throat slit by his two partners before being dumped into the Pacific and left for dead. Instead of dying, he washes ashore of a remote island occupied by two Japanese soldiers (Avellana and Gamboa) since WWII. After nursing him back to health, they train him in the ways of the samurai. If he should ever make it back to the States, Doug intends to take bloody revenge on his betrayers.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Doug\u2019s time on the island is intercut with Morelli and McGee\u2019s rise to power in L.A. Now that they have money, they want it all. They set about taking over the city\u2019s criminal underworld employing the usual hostile takeover methods- e.g. murder, arson, intimidation, etc. Several bodies later, they\u2019re the new crime bosses. Little do they know their day of reckoning is upon them.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Long story short, Doug gets off the island and returns to L.A. with swords in hand. His plan is to reunite with his family before hunting down his sworn enemies. Things have changed a lot since he left to fight in \u2018Nam. He needs help navigating the city\u2019s underbelly. Enter the helpful cab driver played by Filipino exploitation mainstay Leo Martinez more or less playing the same role he did in Vampire Hookers. He has a knack for gathering information and finding out where people are. It\u2019s he who finds Maria who relocated with their boy after McGee\u2019s advances became violently aggressive. He\u2019s in for a serious cutting down and doesn\u2019t even know it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0At its most fundamental level, Death Force<\/strong> is a solid revenge actioner with a basically good man seeking justice against two greedy bad guys. Most filmmakers would be content with leaving it at that with the villains. Santiago and Cohen get surprisingly ambitious by providing them with additional motivations for their criminal actions- i.e. Morelli\u2019s inferiority complex, McGee\u2019s desire for Maria. Morelli needs to prove again and again he\u2019s not small-time. McGee, who lost Maria to Doug, derails her career as a nightclub singer and blocks her from getting ANY job in order to compel her to be with him. When that fails, he gets really nasty. Sure, these reasons are fairly perfunctory but the very fact that the makers made even a small effort in this area shows they actually care about what they\u2019re doing with Death Force<\/strong>. They largely succeed in their endeavor to make more than a routine revenge picture.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Please don\u2019t mistake my praise for Death Force<\/strong> as a declaration of perfection. It is definitely NOT perfect. It has serious pacing issues. It lags a bit in the island scenes. It\u2019s choppily edited and some of the fight choreography is sloppy. It has a few jarring sound cuts mainly pertaining to score. It\u2019s cheap-looking, but not amateurish. The acting is about what you\u2019d expect. That is to say, it\u2019s not great. Like many an action hero before and after, Iglehart is mainly brawn and bad assery. He does try though in scenes with his family. Argenziano is quite good as the new crime boss, a personable sort who schmoozes with customers at his Italian restaurant as easily as he dispatches anybody who dares stand against him. Leon takes it to the limit as the increasingly crazed McGee who goes completely bye-bye by the climax at a Mexican villa. This is the first time I\u2019ve seen Leon as a bad guy; he\u2019s a real scenery consumer. I always liked him as an actor. His then-wife Jayne is FREAKING HOT! She\u2019s a good singer with her sultry voice.<\/p>\n

\u00a0There is action and violence aplenty in Death Force<\/strong> including a few bloody dismemberments and decapitations. The real fun begins when the hero comes home and starts slicing his way through L.A.\u2019s dirtbag population. Who doesn\u2019t like that, right? At the same time, Death Force<\/strong> strives to be a crime drama in the vein of The Godfather and Scarface with all the side characters and side stories like the bad romance between Morelli\u2019s right-hand man Rico (Federico) amd Maria\u2019s waitress friend Marina (Waters). Santiago also throws clumsy but sincere melodrama into the mix the Doug-Maria-son plot thread. He even gives us a hazy montage of Doug romping and playing with his family before getting back to business. It\u2019s not completely successful, but it\u2019s fine.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Under any title, I like Death Force<\/strong>. It\u2019s a solid action flick that delivers a sweet balance of Filipino action and blaxploitation. It\u2019s better written than most exploitation flicks. It\u2019s flawed in some areas but Santiago mostly delivers. It\u2019s definitely grindhouse material. More sophisticated viewers will turn their noses up at it but this Movie Guy digs it!\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Death Force (1978)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Caprican 3\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 110 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Cirio H. Santiago\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Howard R. Cohen\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jaime Mendoza-Nava and Eddie Villanueva\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Ricardo Remies\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 15, 1978 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: James Iglehart, Carmen Argenziano, Leon Isaac (Kennedy), Jayne Kennedy, Jose Mari Avellana, Joonie Gamboa, Leo Martinez, Armando Federico, Irene […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Death-Force-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5899"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6123,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5899\/revisions\/6123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}