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.

One of the more curious aspects of this movie is that Kay here is listed in the credits as Ray Dunning played by Bobby Greenwood.

In any case, the movie opens up in Hawaii. We know it is Hawaii because the movie tells us so, but I sorta suspect the scene we’re seeing was actually shot in the Philippines. I don’t know why. Let’s call it intuition. We go to a hotel room. A 40-something woman, Kay Dunning, picks up the phone. The voice on the other end says, “The apples are dying.” The woman stiffens up, her face blank. Moments later there is a knock on her door. She opens it, and a bellhop hands her a package, which she dutifully opens to reveal a vest. Mechanically, she slips on the vest, and over it a nasty looking pantsuit that really could pass for a pair of PJs. Dressed in this awful attire, she goes down to the lobby of the hotel. Despite her blank stare, no one notices anything amiss as she makes her way into a ballroom where she is apparently scheduled to give a speech or a press conference or something. In any case, none of this comes to fruition because instead of proceeding to the podium, she reaches into her top, and pulls a pin, which sets off the explosives in her vest, killing herself and everyone in the room.

Now, it really may not seem fair to deconstruct this sequence. Shooting fish in a barrel, right? But, that said, I have to admit I found it amusing to contemplate everything that went into this bomb blast. The bad guys (whomever they might be) would have had to kidnap this woman and brainwash her. But they’d have to do it in a way such that she had no memory of it and was able to function normally otherwise. This isn’t quite as easy as brainwashing someone to make a declaration in front of a TV camera under controlled circumstances. Anyway, they’d then have to have a way to track her, or even direct her to a specific location where they wanted an explosion. Then, they’d have to find a way to call her and get her a bomb-vest when the time was right. Doesn’t this seem like a lot of work? Instead of doing all that why couldn’t the bellhop just plant the bomb and detonated it by remote? Why go through the whole kidnap/brainwash scenario? Yeah, sure, it adds to the “terror” factor, but hell, once the bomb exploded, it would have been just as easy to claim it was detonated by a brainwashed newswoman as to actually brainwash a newswoman. Plus, you know, it seems to me that if you are going to go through the trouble of creating brainwashed suicide bombers you wouldn’t want to throw away such a valuable asset blowing up a ballroom in a cheap hotel. There have to be more valuable targets, no?

Location, schmocation, a little paint and cardboard is all you need to set a movie anywhere in the world.

No matter. The movie now shifts to Vietnam. We “know” it is Vietnam because there are a few handwritten signs in Vietnamese (or at least some approximation of it), and an occasional drawing of Ho Chi Minh. An attractive blond woman is tossed into the back of a jeep along with an Asian women. The blond is Denise (Bernadette Williams in her only film as per IMDb), and although she’s the star of movie we don’t learn her name for another 19 minutes of screen time. The Asian woman is Nguyet (Gina Alajar)… we don’t learn her name for another 38 minutes. One thing I find both amusing and frustrating about b-movies is how often they leave characters’ names up to the viewer’s imagination, so one is often forced to think of the characters as First Blond or Kung-Fu Chick or Mustache Guy. Is it really so hard to run the Expositron™ for a few moments when you introduce a new character in order to orient everyone?

Denise asks Nguyet what she’s in for. Nguyet replies that her crime was to marry an American and try to escape from a labor camp. She also claims to be only 16… which really doesn’t seem plausible from her appearance, much less the history she provides. The movie was made in the early 1980s, and nothing in it suggests that it is set earlier, so this whole thing about marrying an American seems odd. Were there really many Americans in Vietnam in the early 1980s? And if so, wouldn’t they be by definition tolerated by the regime? It isn’t as if she fell in love with a random American businessman or tourist since obviously U.S.-Vietnam relations were pretty chilly back then. Nguyet also adds in that she’s been horribly mistreated by her captors… beaten, and, and… tears. You get the picture. Hyuget is obviously the fragile one.

They arrive at a camp set deep in the jungle. The girls meet Col. Van Duc (Jose Mari Alvellana) who runs the camp. He speaks with a British accent, which is sort of an odd touch since Vietnam was never a British colony. He’d have probably learned his English from Yanks. According to the Colonel, the girls are “here to learn.” “This is not a resort,” he adds helpfully in case Denise thought she’d won a trip to Club Med. He then warns them against escaping. They are “quite isolated’ and “surrounded by uncharted jungle.” Blah blah blah. He tells them that they are basically free to roam around the camp, and that there is only one rule (although this turns out to be a lie), “Obey. Do what you are told.”

You call this a resort? The shower is nothing more than a glorifed garden hose… oh wait, the colonel explicit warned that it wasn’t a resort. That explains it.

Following this rousing introduction we get one of the most desultory shower scene in movie history as Nguyet and Denise stand naked under thin streams of water. Though Nguyet has already demonstrated her fragility, Denise is surprisingly stoic considering how vague everything has been so far. Talk about going with the flow, Denise in these early scenes is not angry or scared or really even anxious. In any case, following the shower, Denise and Nguyet are brought to a barracks. On the way, Nguyet panics and makes a break for it, but the guards grab her and slap her around. Nguyet is as skittish as Denise is passive, but even that doesn’t quite explain her sudden and obviously fruitless attempt to bolt.

I was expected the usual “meet the cellmates” scene once they got to the barracks, but only one character bothers to introduce herself, a tall brunette named Linda Baker (Jennifer Lane). Actually, to tell the truth, the scene is so ineptly blocked that I thought Denise was introducing herself, but I later deduced that Linda was the brunette. The girls ask Denise what she’s in for, and she replies vaguely that she “trusted an American.” Denise, it turns out, is Canadian… although this issue does not really come up again. The girls explain that this isn’t a prison, but rather a brainwashing camp. Denise doesn’t believe it, basically dismissing it as a UL. Although why she would is not clear considering that the Colonel told them it was, in fact, a re-education camp. The other girls support their contention by pointing out that the girls in the other barracks who have been there longer walk around with blank expressions on their faces… although around this point, I was wondering if maybe they’d just had the misfortune of being forced to watch Caged Fury themselves.

Actual footage of an attempted Reagan-era detente with Vietnam.

At this point, director Santiago cuts away from the gals. We meet Mr. Hartman (Ken Metcalf), who is presumably a spook of some sort. He’s meeting with an Asian woman (Chinh, played by Elizabeth Oropesa) who is a Vietnamese foreign ministry official. She has a deal for him. If he’ll turn over General Dang, a Ho Chi Minh protégé who has since defected to the United States, she’ll free the 20-odd girls they have in captivity. If he doesn’t agree, she threatens to send him the girls one at a time… as human bombs. Dum dum dum. He promises to consider her offer. This all seems almost plausible until you think about it. I mean, would the United States really even consider giving in to such naked blackmail? Well, maybe. I mean, around this time, Reagan was agreeing to trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon, so anything is possible.

An early Vietnamese music video

Back in the camp, we see a woman getting brainwashed. Apparently brainwashing is as easy as repeating “pull the pin” while flashing a picture of a middle-aged man on a screen and occasionally administering an electric shock. While this is going on, Linda is snooping around. She peers in at the brainwashing session, but is quickly discovered. She flashes some decent kung fu skills, downing a couple of guards quickly before being overwhelmed by the others.

How come that damn Alan Alda gets all the good gigs?

Back in the barracks one of the women prisoners is making eyes at one of the guards. As far as I can tell, we never actually learn her name, but I deduce from the credits that her name is Honey (Taffe O’Connell). She looks alarmingly like a pasty, flabby version of Loretta Swit… okay, a pastier, flabbier version of Loretta Swit. She does get topless a couple of times, so this movie might be useful to anyone with a “Hot Lips” fetish. The guard sneaks into the barracks and the two start fooling around. Apparently she trades sexual favors for provisions of various sorts (sort of a weird spin on the William Holden role in Stalag 17). Whether she was a ho before arriving at the camp is never quite established, but she is quite unapologetic for fraternizing with the enemy. The other guards are surprisingly tolerant of her paramour as well. While this is going on, Nguyet comes back to the barracks, having been beaten for her previous attempt to run.

Van Duc preps Linda for questioning.

We now turn our attention to Linda. She gets brought before the camp commandant. He asks her if she’s a spy. She denies it. (We later find out she is, although whether her imprisonment in the camp is a deliberate infiltration is never established.) “We cannot converse like this,” he decides, tearing open her blouse. He shoves her back into a chair, and his henchmen bind her arms and hands. Col. Van Duc, then attaches two electrodes to her breasts and a third… well, use your imagination. Interestingly, the Colonel eschews the traditional placement of the electrodes on the nipples in favor of the more original placement on the upper slope of her breasts. I focus on this for two reasons. First, of course, because I’m a pervert. But second, and more importantly, because I sort of wondered why they did it that way. I have two guesses: (a) because that way we could get a torture scene and still have visible nipples, or (b) because the actress objected for some reason. Either way, it is a little glimpse behind the scenes of this sort of movie. Just think how many decisions of this sort go into every movie, not matter how awful. Anyway, now fully wired, the questioning resumes. Linda proves to be a tough cookie, and refuses to break.

Little known fact: Vietnamese “re-education” camps often featured harmonious outdoor spaces for the inmates and guards to socialize.

The scene ends and we return to the barracks. The gals are planning an escape. Apparently, the treatment they’ve received pushes them over the edge. The planning comes to a screeching halt when one of the girls notes that, after all, they are quite isolates and in the middle of uncharted jungle to coin a phrase. Well, d’uh. All of this cogitating and plotting gives Denise a hankering for a breath of fresh air. She steps outside and walks to a gazebo (!). She’s joined by guard Pram (Efren Reyes, Jr.) who tries to shoo her back to the barracks because it is almost lights out. They sort of make goo-goo eyes at each other, and it almost seems like the movie is trying to introduce a romantic subplot here. But before anything can happen, she has to return to the barracks, just in time to listen to Linda tediously recounting her recent nightmare.

Back in Hanoi, or wherever, some foreign ministry types are discussing the American response to the trade offer, which apparently was positive, although all of this is left quite vague. One of the Vietnamese argues against it, claiming the girls are too great an asset to give up. Then comes the devastating O’Henryesque twist… it turns out the brainwashing isn’t working. They got lucky with the first gal, but haven’t been able to duplicate the results since. As they make plans to trade the girls, they also order the camp commandant to redouble his efforts to brainwash the girls before the trade occurs. Back at the camp, Col. Van Duc breaks up a volleyball game. He throws the ball in the air and a guard shoots it — which reduces the entire stock of volleyballs in Vietnam at the time by 13%. The commandant announces that he has been too lenient, and that he won’t tolerate any spying or escape attempts, a reference to the escape plots the girls have been discussing. It turns out that there is an informer among the girls, but who?

We seem to find out in the next scene when Honey goes to visit the warden. She prances around apparently trying to seduce him in much the same way she seduced the other guard. She asks for preferential treatment. The warden looks at her disdainfully, “You have no brains to wash.” Still, she seems willing to trade info, or anything else, for a softer life in the camp. When she gets back to the mess hall, Denise confronts her. The two of them give us the beginning of a catfight, although it doesn’t get far.

Linda kicks a little ass.

The fight gets broken up without any broken bones. Denise storms out and runs into Pram. They go for a walk. They talk. It turns out, he never wanted to be a soldier; instead he wanted to be a writer. Denise is a writer. Wow! What a coincidence. The weird part about this scene is that I think the filmmakers really expect us to believe that these two are falling in love on the basis of a couple of 1-2 minute conversations. It would be much more believable if Denise were obviously trying to manipulate him and he was merely trying to get in her pants, but instead these two are soon looking at each other like long lost lovers… which, for that matter, would also have been more interesting in a Casablanca sort of way.

Well, for reasons that are never made clear, soon after this latest interlude with Pram, Denise gets dragged off to see the camp commandant. Like Linda, she gets the three electrode treatment. Is this in response to her dalliance with Pram? Her fight with Honey? Just a belated welcome? As with most other things in this movie, that is left unclear. One good things comes out of this torture for Denise, however, in that when the guards finally bring her back to the barracks, Pram feels sorry for her and agrees to help her escape. Denise, despite her suspicions that there might be a spy in their midst proceeds to spill the beans to the other girls.

Nguyet snaps at a voyeuristic guard.

Before the escape can begin, we get another shower scene. Again Denise and Nguyet stand sullenly under low-flow showerheads. I have to say that “sullen” is indeed the right word to describe Denise, who throughout the movie seems to be going through the motions. You can almost see the wheels turning in her head as she wonders why she gave up low-paying but respectable summer stock to try her hand at movies. The shower scene is broken up when Nguyet notices a guard peeping at them. She screams and tries to shut the window, which merely prompts the guards to rush in and drag her off. Denise is luckier. When she returns to the barracks, Pram is waiting to take her away.

Denise and Pram blast through the camp gates… real stealthy.

Their escape has to be one of the most ineptly planned breakouts in prison movie history. First of all, Pram shows up to pick her up at her barracks, despite the possible presence of an informer. Second, they try to escape in broad daylight. Pram tosses Denise into the back of a truck, behind a bunch of barrels. He climbs into the passenger seat up front, and one of his buddies agrees to drive. What is the buddy’s motivation? Pram, at least, is in love… or something. But this other poor schmuck is just along for the ride. Why? Third, when they get to the gate, they have no good reason for being in the truck, so the guards naturally get suspicious. As a result, they have to blast their way out. How’s that for a well planned escape? They are not even through the gates before they’ve alerted everyone within 50 miles. Personally, I think I would have planned it differently. Maybe Pram could have stashed a truck in the jungle beyond the perimeter. Then, he could have met Denise after dark and they could have snuck past the guards to the truck. At least then, they’d have a chance of getting out undetected.

Luckily for Pram and Denise, Caged Fury follows the laws of movie bullets. Even though a dozen guys with submachine guns open up on the truck, neither Denise nor Pram gets hit. Denise, remember, is sitting in the back of an open truck with wooden sides, and is only protected by a couple of barrels. Even more amusingly, Pram is actually hanging off the side of the truck returning fire. Still better, Pram seems to hit some of the guards every time he pulls the trigger, while their fire never touches him. It made me wonder what they teach in Vietnamese creative writing workshops, because for a would-be writer, Pram sure seems like a kick-ass soldier. I also wondered if Pram felt at all guilty about butchering his former compatriots in order to help some Canadian woman he just met escape.

“I regret that I have but one life to give to get my buddy laid.”

The escape continues…. The truck tears down a narrow jungle road and the camp guards chase after it. After more gunplay, the truck slows to a halt, the driver dead. Pram tosses him onto the road and climbs behind the wheel. Neither Pram nor Denise ever mourn this guy’s valiant sacrifice. I mean, is there anything more noble than a guy taking a bullet so his buddy can get a little tail? Ominously, the camera lingers on fuel pouring out of a bullet hole in the gas tank (at least the truck doesn’t explode). Sure, enough, a few more miles down the road, the truck comes to a sputtering halt… actually, it just stops, I guess they didn’t want to make the effort of foleying in sputtering noises. Pram and Denise disappear into the jungle by the side of the road. Soon the pursuing guards pull up and plunge into the jungle after them.

Pram and Linda take advantage of a lull to consummate their love.

Apparently, the camp guards aren’t very good trackers because our heroes soon elude their would-be captors. They stumble upon a house, and are invited to spend the night by an elderly peasant. On a mat in the old man’s house, Denise puts out. I hope it was good, because the next morning they wake up to find the house surrounded by guards alerted by the old man. Pram gives Denise a gun and goes out to confront the bad guys. Again, for a wannabe writer, he’s a heck of a warrior because he Rambos about half the guards. He tries to lead them away from the house, but no such luck. In the end he runs into one of his buddies, lowers his guard, and gets shot. Meanwhile, back in the house Denise pulls her gun, but doesn’t have the guts to pull the trigger… which is probably a good thing because outnumbered as she was, it would have been suicidal. They lead her outside, and show her Pram’s lifeless body, a development she almost immediately accepts with the same bored resignation as with everything else that has happened to her. The best part of the scene? The power lines and telephones poles clearly visible in the background in this supposedly empty jungle. When they return to the camp, the commandant punishes Denise by hanging her by her hair, which clearly demonstrates that the Colonel is a fan of women-in-prison movies in addition to being educated in England and a perpetrator of violence against sporting goods.

It wouldn’t be a women-in-prison movie without the heroine hanging at least once by her hair.

Meanwhile, half-way across the globe, Mr. Hartman is meeting with General Dang at a “Free Vietnam” rally. Hmmm. I’m thinking this probably isn’t the best place to discuss the possibility of Dang returning to Vietnam in return for a couple of dozen captive women, especially since Dang has to figure that if he goes back he’ll be killed. In any case, I’m not sure what the point of all this is, since I don’t think we ever see Dang again… which doesn’t stop Hartman from meeting up a little later with the foreign ministry woman to arrange a trade. They agree to fly Dang in by chopper and make the exchange at some sort of neutral site. None of this is well explained, but as best as I can figure, the Vietnamese don’t want to give away the location of the camp because otherwise why not just fly the choppers right to the camp? It also isn’t clear whether the Dang agrees to return, is kidnapped, is tricked, or even whether he’s even in the helicopters when they fly to the rendezvous point. It is possible that the plan is to trick the Vietnamese with a decoy, but as I say, this is all rampant speculation since the movie explains none of it.

Alright, now back at the camp again, the guards untie Denise. When she’s brought back to the barracks, she moans, “They knew.” Presumably, the spy thing again. Although in this case, it seems to me that it hardly required an act of espionage to bust up her and Pram’s ill-conceived escape plan. In any case, before the girls can mount a full-blown mole hunt, they are herded into a couple of boxcars for the ride to the rendezvous point. We get a couple of obvious day-for-night shots here, all the more obvious for their lack of justification. I mean, why not just set the scene in the daytime?

Nguyet pays for her treachery

Although things seems like they are going well, there is trouble brewing. At a rest stop, one of the girls overhears some of the guard talking about how the girls are just bait, and that once they have Dang back in their possession, the women will go right back to the camp. Nguyet and Honey get sent off to try to figure out where they are in order to plan an escape. This quickly degenerates into an impromptu escape attempt as the women burst from the prison car and try to run. Disorganized and scattered, they are all quickly tracked down. The result is an orgy of drunken rape and assault as the guards abuse the would-be escapees. The scene is presented in slow motion, with several shots superimposed on one another. It is almost surreal actually. In the midst of all this, Honey spots Nguyet sharing a cigarette and a laugh with one of the guards, thus fingering her as the spy. Now you may be wondering why the Vietnamese government would bother infiltrating a spy into a bunch of miscellaneous women prisoners. The answer, of course, is that the Vietnamese are a bunch of evil commies, and that is what evil commies do.

Denise and Jackie surprise a couple of hung over guards.

When the train starts moving again, Honey tells her story. Nguyet tries to deny it, but the timing is too obvious. Before every disaster, Nguyet was conveniently absent, including before Linda’s snooping expedition, Denise’s attempted escape, and the final mass break out. Nguyet tries to back away from the vengeance-minded women, but they grab her and toss her from the moving train. Then, fortified with anger, the women decide to try to escape once again. Linda climbs out the open door and onto the roof of the moving train. Other women burst through a door into the guards’ room. One-by-one the women overpower the guards, who are hungover and exhausted from a night of rapine. This, by the way, is a staple of this sort of movie. The women always recover from being assaulted right away, while the assailants are usually left exhausted and vulnerable. One could easily write a book on the meaning of this cliché.

The climactic final chase

Before long, the women have control of the train, and suddenly a movie that started off as a riff on Telefon turns into a low-grade rip-off of Von Ryan’s Express (1965). The women blast through the meeting point and continue down the track. The Vietnamese pursue in APCs and jeeps, while the American choppers appear overhead. Though the footage is looped several times, the chase scene really isn’t half bad as the helicopters try to keep the Vietnamese away from the train, while the Vietnamese try to blast it off the tracks. The helicopters are armed with air-to-ground missiles… which is odd because you’d think the Vietnamese would have made sure to specify that they would only tolerate unarmed helicopters. Anyway, the Americans manage to chase away the APCs, without actually hitting any of them. Presumably, Santiago had enough budget or pull to borrow the military vehicles, but not enough to blow them up. Finally, once the Vietnamese have been forced back, the train slows and the women run to the chopper… all except Denise and Jackie (Catherine March) who have stayed behind at the train manning a machine gun to provide cover. With the helicopters on the ground picking up prisoners, the APCs now make another charge at the train. Believe it or not, there is actually some tension as they approach. At the last minute, the helicopter takes off. Dangling a rope ladder, it hovers over the train. Denise and Jackie grab hold and climb to safety, just in time to leave the Vietnamese looking up at the sky impotently as the ‘copters pull away. Cue credits.

The girls make a last minute escape.

You know, I really wanted to like this one. The whole Von Ryan’s Express bit was pretty good, and I liked the Stalag 17 (1953) “spy among them” aspect (although it could have been developed more effectively). But the brainwashing-Telefon business turns out to be just a red herring, and the prisoner trade plotline a distraction. The Denise-Pram romantic sub-plot is just awful. Ultimately, the movie has too many moving parts, and they just don’t hold together well. Also, the acting is stiff even compared to other entries in the genre.

Still, this isn’t a bad entry in the genre, but it isn’t very good either. That said, I should note two items I noticed in the closing credits. First, casting credit is given to Jim Wynorski, who, as you know, has made dozens of b-movies, although none in the WIP genre as far as I can tell. More importantly, for those of you interested in technical details, the movie was filmed in Imperious Color™.