Caged Heat II: Stripped of Freedom (1994)

Rating: (4 out of 5)

Starring: Jewel Shepard, Pamella D’Pella, Susan Harvey, Chanel Akiko Hirai, Ed Crick, Vic Diaz, Ramon D’Salva, Bon Vibar, and Totoy Torres.

Directed By: Cirio H. Santiago

Ah yes, a tale of two directors. While Jonathan Demme used Caged Heat to move into mainstream pictures, Cirio H. Santiago has spent his whole life making exploitation movies. Santiago is, in fact, one of the great men of exploitation films, having directed and produced movies in the women-in-prison, blaxploitation, rape-revenge, forced-to-fight, martial arts, and post-apocalyptic genres. Maybe the B-Masters Cabal should do a retrospective of his work at some point.

This is an absurd movie in many ways, but also quite entertaining. It begins at what seems to be a cultural show in an Asian country. The king is sitting on a dais, watching a group of native dancers. On his left sits his daughter, dressed in traditional garb, on his right, a redheaded American, who everyone assumes is his mistress. In the middle of the performance, a group of spectators suddenly produces anti-American banners and begins to riot. The king watches this anxiously, but his security forces seem to be containing the demonstration. Suddenly, one of the performers pulls a gun and shoots the king. In the ensuing pandemonium, the king is whisked off in an ambulance with his mistress, while his daughter (Princess Marga, played by Chanel Akiko Hirai) is eventually captured by an angry mob. The ambulance drives directly to an American Air Force base, where we learn that the whole thing was just a charade, and that the “mistress” is really CIA agent Amanda Kelly (Jewel Shepard). As we learn later, the king was about to be overthrown, and the CIA planned the whole fake assassination to exfiltrate the king more easily. Marga is the only flaw in the plan. She’s been captured by the mob, and the new government wants to try her for treason in her father’s place. She is sent to the Rock, an island prison. It is now Amanda’s job to infiltrate the prison, and with the help of friendly guards get Marga out.

Strip searched!

Getting into the prison is the easy part. Amanda books a flight out of the country. At the airport, a drug-sniffing dog singles out her luggage. Naturally, the authorities find the drugs she placed in her suitcase. Unfortunately, another American, Lucy (Susan Harvey) happens to be talking to Amanda when all this goes down, and she get swept up by the authorities as well. It turns out that Lucy is transporting illicit pornography. (Hey, Lucy, ever hear of the internet? You don’t need to carry that stuff with you on planes anymore.) Both Lucy and Amanda soon find themselves incarcerated at Rock Island Penitentiary. Their first experience is chilling; they witness the guards beating the daylights out of an attempted escapee. Their second experience is not much better, as Amanda (and presumably Lucy too, although that isn’t shown) is strip-searched by the Warden Chen (Vic Diaz) and his captain of the guards. Read the rest of this entry »

Live by the Fist (1993)

Rating: (2 out of 5)

Starring: Jerry Trimble, George Takei, Ted Markland, Laura Albert, Vic Diaz, Romy Diaz, Roland Dantes, Nick Nicholson, Steve Rogers, Bert Labra, John Crank, Ramon D’Salva, Zernan Manahan, Jim Moss, Ned Hourani, and Ron Asinas.

Directed by: Cirio H. Santiago

Uh, you mean I need to act too?

Is kickboxing a real sport? Don’t get me wrong, I admire its grace, and I respect the fighting skills of renown kickboxers, but does anyone really follow kickboxing? Are there kickboxing fans? Kickboxing groupies? How does one become a kickboxer anyway? What sorts of honors do kickboxers strive for? Olympic gold? Big-money endorsements? I ask mostly because it seems to me that kickboxing is mostly important as a recruitment channel for acting-challenged, lunkheads looking to break into low-budget action movies. The minor leagues for b-movies, so to speak. Amazingly, some of them, like Jean-Claude Van Damme actually manage to break out of the genre in a minor way. That said, video store shelves suffer under the weight of dozens of former kickboxers and their direct-to-video fare.

I have to admit, I had high hopes for this one. Not only is it set in the prison, but it was distributed by Roger Corman and directed and produced by Cirio H. Santiago, the tag-team champs of exploitation fare. Santiago is the director of a highly rated movie on this site, Cage Heat II: Stripped of Freedom (1994). Unfortunately, in this one Santiago has blond-haired dolt Jerry “Golden Boy” Trimble as his lead rather than the talented and foxy Jewel Shepard. The good news for “Golden Boy” is that if he ever decides to make a career move into gay porn, he’s got a perfectly serviceable nickname. The bad news is that he’s a terrible actor. As I watched him on screen, I was torn. Is he jawdroppingly bad? Laughably awful? Or migraine-inducingly painful to watch? I think it might be some combination of all three, and only your individual constitution will determine whether you find the experience amazing, funny, or agonizing. He’s incredibly wooden, and worse, talks like a whiny teenager, which is not exactly ideal for an action star. Read the rest of this entry »

Caged Fury (1984)

Rating: (2 out of 5)

Starring: Bernadette Williams, Jennifer Lane, Taffe O’Connell, Catherine March, Margaret Magick, Gina Alajar, Elizabeth Oropesa, Efren Reyes Jr., and Jose Mari Avellana.

Directed by: Cirio Santiago

Nguyet and Denise meet the warden in Caged Fury (1984).

This is the 1984 Cirio Santiago version of Caged Fury, not to be confused with the 1948 version which is apparently about a “Psycho lion tamer [who] uses the big cats to commit murders” in a circus. It also should not be confused with the 1993 porn flick Caged Fury which starred such adult film luminaries as Tiffany Minx and Peter North. Furthermore, this movie should not be confused with the 1989 women-in-prison movie of the same name that starred Erik Estrada (!) in addition to porn stars Janine Lindemulder, Ron Jeremy, and Julia Parton in minor roles. Okay, so just to recap, this is a review of the 1984 movie… the one without circus animals or porn stars (as far as I know).

Caged Fury is not strictly speaking a women-in-prison movie. There are women. They are captured and held against their wills, but they are in a brainwashing camp in Vietnam rather than in an actual prison. (I say this, of course, to head off the potential firestorm of protest from you WIP purists out there.) That said, the whole brainwashing thing is really sort of given short-shrift. It almost seems as if they started out planning to make a low-budget rip-off of the Charles Bronson thriller Telefon (1977), but got side-tracked into a WIP movie instead — and hey, I know how that can happen. You start up with a thriller, but before you know it, you’ve got captured women, shower scenes, torture sequences and escape attempts. Indeed, this movie definitely has the feel of something made up on the fly out of bits and pieces of better of movies with the captive women theme holding the whole mess together. Read the rest of this entry »