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Death Force
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| Year: |
1978
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Director: |
Cirio H. Santiago
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| Stars: |
James Iglehart, Carmen Argenziano, Leon Isaac Kennedy, Jayne Kennedy, Joe Mari Avellana, Joonee Gamboa, Leo Martinez, Armando Federico, Cathy Sabino, James Monroe Iglehart, Allen Arkus, Tony Carreon, Ernie Carvajal, Vic Diaz, Ramon D'Salva
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| Genre: |
Action, Thriller, Trash, Adventure |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Three American soldiers are on their way to ditch their positions in the military, but unlike some who have very little to fall back on when they get back to civilian life, this trio have a parting gift to themselves they mean to take right before they go. All of them - Doug Russell (James Iglehart), Morelli (Carmen Argenziano) and McGee (Leon Isaac Kennedy) - make a deal with some gangsters in Manila to secure a small fortune in gold bars, hidden in a coffin that is supposed to hold the body of one of the fallen G.I.s, and after smuggling it out of the Army warehouse before it is shipped away, they plan to divide up the spoils. Unfortunately for Russell, Morelli and McGee only want to split it two ways...
Which is why before the film has barely begun that Russell has had his throat cut and his body thrown overboard on the trip to land, which would make for an arresting ending, never mind an arresting beginning. Ah, but he is not dead, and he is washed ashore on a remote Pacific island where in one of many eccentric developments he is discovered by the inhabitants. Only they're not exactly natives, they're a couple of ageing Japanese soldiers who were left behind during the Second World War and have no idea of what is happening in the outside world. As this progresses, the drama comes across like two separate movies edited together for we are also following what the two bad guys are getting up to back home.
This was directed by Cirio H. Santiago who during the nineteen-seventies was one of many filmmakers providing product for grindhouses and drive-ins, in this case out of the Philippines, but when the eighties arrived he began to distinguish himself, especially with the advent of home video's domination of the entertainment scene which would be the ideal venue for his work. Even further on than that, in the twenty-first century when grindhouse became a buzzword for trash cinema followers, his brand of action and thrills were an obvious destination, and though he made an awful lot of what could be charitably referred to as pulp, there were instances of his endeavours marking themselves out among the huge mass of similar enterprises, and Death Squad was one of those.
That was down to a few factors, one of them being that in comparison to the nostalgic trash imitators that would follow in its wake long after the fact, there was not one hint of self-awareness. You could observe there was a certain irony to the plotting, but otherwise it was played completely straightfaced, which could set the viewer laughing heartily or caught up in the action, as crude as it could become with its scrappy martial arts, swordplay and makeshift gore effects. With the sword being the principal instrument of death for the hero, the favoured form of execution was slitting open the antagonist's stomach, though restlessly Santiago wasn't content to end there and graduated to some amusingly fake beheadings before the end credits rolled.
But to those concurrent plotlines: they did meet up and merge in the latter half, yet you still had a choice of whether you preferred the tale of Russell's woe as he survives with his new Japanese friends, taught the ways of the sword as a primer to attaining his vengeance should anyone else show up in some transport to get him off the darned island, or whether you'd opt to be more bothered about Morelli and McGee's climbing the ladder of underworld success as they gunned down what seemed like a hundred mobsters. Seriously, the body count may not have been the equivalent of an atomic bomb going off that some movies might have leaned on to create their carnage, but those two were unbelievably bloodthirsty with an archaic-looking machine gun among their weapons of choice. That was even before Russell is indeed rescued, and Santiago appealed to the heartstrings in absurd scenes of the Japanese guys' fate and our now-maniacal hero's reunion with his singer wife (beauty queen Jayne Kennedy, Leon's spouse at the time). Yes, she does get a whole song to trill. Oddly diverting.
Aka: Vengeance is Mine, Fighting Mad (not to be confused with better known movies with those titles).
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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