RAW FORCE (Philippines/USA, 1982)
Directed by: Edward D. Murphy
Starring: Cameron Mitchell, Hope Holiday, Li Lin-lin, Chanda Romero, Jillian Kesner, John Dresden, Vic Diaz

A lot of cheap American exploitation movies got co-produced and shot in the Philippines back in the 80’s, but none of them achieve the delirious heights of nonstop nonsense as RAW FORCE. Featuring one of the world’s longest bar fights, stunts so unsafe you hope they paid compensation to the families of the dead and a topless cameo by Buster Keaton’s grand-niece, Camille Keaton (star of I Spit On Your Grave), RAW FORCE is everything good about the 80’s rolled up into 86 minutes and set on fire.

Open on: peaceful Warrior Island, where all disgraced martial artists go to die. It is a perfect tropical ecosystem. Here, we have an order of Buddhist monks who eat the flesh of sexy young ladies to achieve immortality. Providing them with said ladies is a gang of white slavers led by Hitler’s cousin. As long as there are white ladies for dinner, all is in balance. But then a passing cruise ship stops so that the passengers can see fabled Warrior Island for themselves and, as we all know, tourism exacts a heavy toll on the environment. Realizing that their way of life is threatened, the white slavers know they must take action. So they decide to kill everyone on the ship. Unfortunately, everyone on the ship is a badass martial artist. But every problem has a solution and in this case the solution is for the immortal monks to revive the zombified corpses of the island’s dead martial artists to feast on the flesh of the living. But the delicate balance of nature, once upset, is almost impossible to restore.

Filmed for $1.99 with costumes bought at a Halloween warehouse Going Out of Business sale, RAW FORCE is undistilled, unrefined, exploitation mayhem where nothing makes sense and everyone is dubbed. And then, at the end of the movie, after 86 minutes of zombie-punching, flesh-eating, undead-ninja-smashing, lady-enslaving, devil-worshiping, gut-busting, rib-tickling insanity, there comes a title card that reads: To Be Continued. 30 years later there is  a third Transformers, a fourth Terminator and a fifth Fast and Furious but the world can still only handle one RAW FORCE.