Raw Force

• Also known as Kung Fu Cannibals
• Written and Directed by Edward D. Murphy
• July 9, 1982 (US)

Martial arts students coincidentally shipwreck on a Japanese island where dishonored fighters are buried and a Hitler lookalike drops female slaves off to the monks that reside there so they can bring the dead fighters back to life.

There was a time when if the biggest star in your film was Cameron Mitchell you were probably not making a very good film. If your second biggest star was a red shirt from Star Trek TOS, you were definitely not making a very good film. Into that very era came Raw Force which was an actioner with a bonkers idea and all the fine quality that one would expect of an extremely low budget wannabe martial arts action film.

Action scenes are poorly staged with little effort done to hide the staging. For example we have a truck crash where there is no effort to obscure that they never actually crashed the truck. It looked kinda like they began rolling when the vehicle came to a stop. Anywho…

Since the story is not very good Raw Force is heavy on nudity. Ridiculously so. Sometimes the nudity involves sexual assault and sometimes it’s done as part of bad comedy. And I’m not sure what this movie was exactly aiming for. Is it supposed to be an action film with some comedy or a comedy with plenty of action?

Rooms in buildings were used as rooms on boats. I’m not sure what type of boat they used when unavoidable, but they did their best to hide the area beyond the immediate actors. As characters the women barely exist. The men outside of this scenario might actually be sexual predators based on how they are here. I’m not calling them sexist. I’m calling them predators. And when it gets right down to it, considering that people aren’t allowed on the island and that’s well-known and the woman behind the cruise thinks she can get a boat on the island the plot itself makes no sense. Imagine a poorly executed episode of The Love Boat with nudity.

It takes about an hour before anything actually happens in Raw Force. We get a looooooong set up of everything that is going on from why the people wind up on the island to repeated mentions of it being avoided by everybody other than this tourist cruise to why these monks take in loads of young women and why the Hitler doppelganger is involved. Excruciatingly so.

What exactly does the villain get out of taking these women to the island? Free jade. Not sure if the fuel costs would be covered by selling jade at bargain prices. Why sell the jade they get from the monks at a cut-rate anyway? Why not at market value and make even MORE money? Extremely cheap jade alone would eventually draw attention. I am really stuck on that. That makes less sense than zombie warriors needing female flesh to rise from the dead which is the purpose of taking the women there.

The only competent action performer here is Rey King as Go Chin. Either there was no fight choreography or a choreographer and the cast was asked to basically wing it or nobody was really that good. This becomes laughably bad. Things that are funny are not and things that are supposed to be taken seriously are kind of funny. The exciting stuff only lasts for about 20 minutes. 

With the acting and a ridiculous plot and a villain that looks like Hitler, Raw Force easily falls into guilty pleasure. The characters are barely two dimensional. I would call them one dimensional if such a thing exists. This is the schlockiest of the schlocky. The B-ist of B-movies. It’s 100% junk food. It is entertainingly bad and that’s what gets you through it. There is not an ounce of quality. It locks you into watching with how much worse it can all get. And it does get quite bad.

If you can get through the excessive set up to the bonkers final 20 minutes or so Raw Force will be worth it for connoisseurs of bad movies. And that’s only if you’re willing to sit through bad 80s comedy with the bulk of the characters not mattering.