Raw Force (1982)

Raw Force

USA/Philippines 1982 colour

aka Kung Fu Cannibals, Shogun Island

Director/Writer Edward D. Murphy

Cast Cameron Mitchell (Captain Harry Dodds), Geoffrey Binney (Mike O'Malley), Hope Holiday (Hazel Buck), Jillian “Kessner”/Kesner (Cookie Winchell), John Dresden (John Taylor), Jennifer Holmes (Ann Davis), Rey King (Go Chin), Carla Reynolds (Eilleen Fox), Carl Anthony (Lloyd Davis), John Locke (Gary Schwartz), Mark Tanous (Cooper), Ralph Lombardi (Thomas Speer), Chanda Romero (Mayloo), Vic Diaz (monk), Mike Cohen

When your writer AND director is the old boy who played the Captain in The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, you may take this as an SOS call.

But fear not – Raw Force is out of its mind. In a good way, of course, but is also foaming at the mouth and howling at the moon. Imagine a film shot by Americans in the Philippines exploiting every possible angle: cannibals, zombies, samurais, white kung fu (this WAS 1982, and Chuck Norris reigned supreme!), gumby comedy, and more flesh on display than a Friday night karaoke crawl in Manila.

Executive Producer Larry Woolner used to be a mover and shaker at Dimension Pictures, who handled a few Filipino features for the Seventies drive-in circuit; Raw Force was his last hurrah, and has that weird tension between old-fashioned entertainment and what he believes the kids want to see. As such, there’s old has-beens hobbling next to young never-wills. It’s Porky’s with Sidney Greenstreet and David Carradine, and none of it meshes. But with a mess this entertaining, thank god for senile dementia.

Aging name actor Cameron Mitchell stars as the skipper of a rusty tub bound for the South China Sea and Hope Holliday is Hazel Buck, the boat’s New York jewish owner. On board are the Burbank Karate Club (actually a few no-name TV actors), plus blonde black belt champion Jillian Kessner, who had already played the lead in Cirio H. Santiago’s Firecracker (1981). It’s a motley crew on a crusty Love Boat stocked with degenerates, schmiels, and the brown end of California’s swingers circles.

Onto the ship comes Speer, a nasty German with a Hitler mustache looking for white women to steal, and his karate-kicking cronies. The ship goes up in flames, and the remaining cast and crew are adrift in a life boat before washing up on Warrior’s Island. There they discover Speer has been trading jade for his plane load of tasty-looking nubiles - Warriors Island happens to be the home of a renegade group of grinning, clapping cannibal monks who can reanimate the corpses of disgraced martial artists to do their bidding. The girls… well, they happen to be the monks’ main course.

And that’s the set up for one of the strangest kung fu horror sex comedies you will ever witness. Keen-eyed Schlock viewers will recognize the chubby features of the ubiquitous Vic Diaz as one of the head monks, alongside Mike Cohen who Weng Weng fans will recognize as Dr Kohler in For Your Height Only. All I can say right now is slip the brain into neutral and enjoy, and if you ever needed proof that the Philippines exists in a parallel universe in which our laws of taste, logic and sanity are turned on their heads, it’s this: the 1982 Raw Force. (Andrew Leavold)

Primitves (1978)

Primitives

Indonesia 1978 colour

Fullscreen, dubbed into English

aka Primitif, Savage Terror

Director Sisworo Gautama Putra Writer Imam Tantowi

Cast Enny Haryono (Rita), “Berry”/Barry Prima (Robert), Johann Mardjono (Tommy), Rukman Herman (Bisma)

It’s hard to believe that a devoutly religious country such as Indonesia would have such a thriving film industry specializing in sex and horror. Well it does, and next to the Philippines, was one of the largest exporters of genre films. Rapi Films, still Indonesia’s largest film company, was founded in 1968 as an importer of American and European movies. In 1971 they branched into feature films and by the late 70s were successfully dubbing into English their more salacious fare – outrageous gore-soaked horrors, sexploitation and action films – and selling them all over the world. Rapi Films’ own bona fide superstar Barry Prima would feature in most of their exports, such as the 1978 feature Primitives… but more on that later.

Meanwhile the Italians were running around South East Asia creating their own Third World atrocities. The cannibal film, one of the most despicable of horror’s sub-genres, was in full swing, having emerged from the Italians’ own Mondo or Shockumentary genre, in which primitive rituals and nature’s inherent barbarism were packaged with snide narration and pompously ironic soundtracks for modern middle class audiences to be titillated by in the smug comfort of their multiplex. From the Mondo Cane films came Man From Deep River in 1972, a blatant reworking of A Man Called Horse, in which a white man becomes accepted into a cannibal tribe and experiences their savagery first hand. Italian director Ruggero Deodato subsequently delivered a pair of similarly-themed films which would define and dominate the relatively short-lived Cannibal Genre: The Last Cannibal World in 1976, and Cannibal Holocaust in 1979. For the next few years, natives chowing down on entrails would become a defining image for not only European but international horror.

The Indonesians decided to beat the Italians at their own game and rip THEIR ideas off for once. Rapi Films set to work to remake The Last Cannibal World on home turf and, for added measure, claimed the story was based on an actual incident (and seriously, from outside Indonesia, how could you ever prove it?). Four anthropology students bribe a guide against his better judgement to take them deep into cannibal territory to peer at the Pangayan tribe close up. Their boat crashes and they’re savaged by wild animals, only to find their hosts aren’t as welcoming as they’d hoped. And while sitting in bamboo cages waiting to be the tribal feast, altruistic thoughts of trying to civilize them turn a little sour…

Deodato’s plot is plundered mercilessly right down to identical scenes and you could almost swear certain shots. Without the director’s flair, however, the entire exercise is stripped back to its basest of elements, though shots of natives chewing the heads off lizards and a mother chewing through her own umbilical cord are made slightly less lurid by the film’s Third World context. Yes, the natives are revolting – and it’s this kind of cultural revolution that makes for some very jarring Schlock Treatment viewing, and not just because of the completely out of place Jarre-like soundscapes and robotic disco. We ask ourselves “who are the real savages” and – holy crap – it turns out to be us, as we chow down on the 1978 Indonesian cannibal flick Primitives. (Andrew Leavold)