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.

Check out the big red boots on Chavez (left). The two guys on the right look bored… I can’t blame them.

The plot is paint-by-numbers all the way. When we first meet John Merill (Trimble), he is a recently discharged Navy SEAL interviewing for a seaman job in the far east. He gets the gig, but as he’s walking to his ship, he hears a woman screaming for help. Merill stands around like a big dope for a while, giving the bad guys time to corner the woman and tear her blouse providing a bit of gratuitous nudity. Finally though he intervenes and orders her five attackers to let her go. Well, since this is a kickboxing movie, you know what happens next. Merill mixes it up with the bad guys. We get lot of spinning kicks, flying kicks, and none-too-convincing punches. The bad guys have an amazing tendency to get thrown through the air and land on fragile pieces of furniture that seem to appear out of nowhere… but it does make for an impressive sight when these pieces of painted plywood shatter explosively as a bad guy lands on them. The fight goes on and on, and in the process we get introduced to Live by the Fist physiology. The short version is that the ability of these guys to inflict pain is well below their ability to withstand it. So Merill will execute a gorgeous spinning kick and drive his boot into the side of the bad guy’s head, and the bad guy will just take a step back and be ready to throw a punch. Not only will the guy not be knocked down, he won’t even have a cut or even be dazed really. It sort of reminds me of 10 year old boys, who as you probably know, fight with each other all day long without hurting each other. This sort of fun and games usually ends around 13 when suddenly the boys get strong enough to really hurt each other…. except in movies like Live by the Fist where a spinning kick to the ol’ noggin has virtually no noticeable effect.

Um, can you knock a blockhead unconscious that way?

While Merill is beating up on various henchmen (and getting pounded in return), the leader of the bad guys (Chavez played by Chris Aguilar) tracks down the woman whose assault began the whole brouhaha to begin with. Although Merill is fighting with his men, Chavez decides that now would be a good time to resume his attempted rape by tearing off the rest of her clothes. Luckily, Merill finishes off the others just in time. He approaches Chavez and the girl, only to have Chavez spin her around and hold a knife to her throat. This, of course, allows for more gratuitous nudity… and also some gratuitous violence as Chavez cuts her throat (although we don’t see it on screen. Too gory for Santiago?). Wow, is he a bad guy or what? You can’t argue with that kind of compelling characterization. Okay, so Merill and Chavez mix it up, until suddenly Chavez ends up dead. The climactic moment is so ineptly blocked and filmed that it wasn’t until Merill explained what happened later that I realized Chavez had fallen on his knife during the struggle. As Merill surveys the scene, he suddenly gets clocked on the back of the head with a metal bar…

…when he comes to, he’s surrounded by cops and he has the bloody knife in his hand (which seems like shoddy police work to me; aren’t they supposed to disarm suspects?). Needless to say, Chavez’s men accuse him of murdering both their boss and the girl, and on the basis of this credible testimony, Merill gets send to the pokey.

This guy was also an extra in Jaws 5: Shark in Prison (1989).

The prison is, surprise, surprise, set on an island where escape is impossible because of the shark-infested waters blah blah blah. Although, this seems like a small, barren island when we first see it, the prisoners are hard at work making gravel, and for some reason they have a large fleet of trucks to maintain, so I’m not really sure what the deal is. The warden is played by Vic Diaz, who reprised the role in Caged Heat II. Here he just sort of mumbles vague threats. We know he’s a bad guy because he’s always scheming to set the prisoners against each other and he’s also stealing from the prison accounts, but really his heart isn’t in it. Merill tries to protest his innocence to the warden, but that only gets him a blow to the ribs from the head guard for talking back. Merill starts to mention his government, but the warden cuts him off, “there are no extradition treaties….” And, um, even if there were, what difference would it make? I mean, it isn’t like he’s on the lam from the U.S. justice system. Which doesn’t stop Merill from interjection, “I’m an American citizen.” This earns him a deserved blow to the head for being cluelessness.

Ah, Sulu, Sulu… investments go bad?

As often happens in these movies, the warden’s schemes backfire. Here, the warden decides to put Merill in the same cell as Uncle (George Takei… I guess things have been tough since the original crew got put out to pasture). Uncle is a prison lawyer and troublemaker, and the warden is hopeful that the ostensibly homicidal Merill will take care of Uncle, if you know what I mean. Merill, of course, isn’t a bad guy, so this scheme is flawed to begin with. Worse, some of Chavez’s buddies are on the inside, and looking for revenge against Merill for Chavez’s death, so Merill is just looking to survive and doesn’t really have time to kill Uncle, even if he were so inclined.

Um, Sacker, dude, I’d get that mole checked out. It doesn’t look good.

The prison is divided into gangs. The whites are led by the execrable Sacker (Ted Markland) who reminded me of nothing more than one of those ageing bikers you see on the road on weekends… complete with the long, thinning hair. All he needed was a fat chick on a Harley to complete the picture. Though racist, Sacker and his gang are more interested in lazing around and getting doped up than waging a race war. The Asian prisoners are led by Alvarez (Romy Diaz), whose performance brings to mind a Mexican bandito more than anything else. Although Sacker and Alvarez preach racial hatred to keep their men in line, both men work with the warden and each other (as usual in movies, hypocrisy is depicted as somehow worse than honest racism). Also in the mix is a human rights group, and its comely hands-on investigator Helen Ferris (Laura Albert). Ferris is a tall, attractive brunette; when we first saw her, some of the people watching the movie with me speculated about when she’d get naked… surprisingly she doesn’t. Her task is to investigate the numerous deaths among the prisoners as well as allegations of fraud made in anonymous letters she’s received. Ferris has access to the prison because of connections to the regional governor, who was close to one of the murdered inmate’s family (not close enough to get the kid out, however). She arrives and threatens the warden. Speaking of the inmates, he tells her, “force is the only language they understand.” She replies, “And how much force is it going to take for you to understand I don’t take no for an answer?” Wow, tough talk from the human rights lady. What is she doing to do? Issue a white paper? Hold a press conference? Print up some bumper stickers for activists to put on their beat up Volvos? Organize campus protests? The warden is surprisingly cowed by her empty threat.

Her roles include: “Blond Stripper” in The Jigsaw Murders (1988), “Nude Dancer” in Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988), and “Strip Joint Girl” in Road House (1989). Here Laura Albert stays conspicuously fully clad… can you say rip off?

Before leaving says she will return in a week to conclude her investigation. The logic for all of this remains unclear throughout the movie. Considering how Merill was railroaded into prison, it is hard to imagine that the regional governor would want to go through the trouble of allowing a human rights group access to the prison simply to get the warden. I mean, couldn’t he just remove, kill, or imprison the warden on a whim? And anyway, my guess is that the corrupt warden would be quite careful to give the governor a stake in the continuation of the enterprise.

The human rights group’s scheduled return drives the plot, because in the week before they come back the warden tries to discover the mystery letter writer while Uncle tries to recover a lost ledger that will prove the warden’s corruptness once and for all. The mysterious ledger is, of course, one of the most hackneyed plot devices possible. I mean, why would the warden want to detail his theft in a single slim, easily lost or stolen, volume? Is he concerned about being audited by some IRS for criminals?

It turns out Jerry Trimble is reigning World Underwear Kickboxing Champ.

I won’t go into all the other plot points. I mean, does anyone really care that Merill is asked to join the racist white group and refuses; or that he has to fight off numerous assaults from both the whites and Asians as a result; or that he befriends a slight prisoner who brings water to the inmates while they work… a prisoner whose sole purpose is to be murdered later? Yawn. The fights get repetitive after a while, what with their time-eating function, and the inability of the participants to actually harm each other. Plus, Merill has this annoying tendency to throw away whatever weapon he’s holding… I guess he doesn’t want to have an unfair advantage as he fights for his life.

Merill heads for the box.

Okay, cut to the finale. By this time, Merill has found the lost ledger hidden under some slats in “the box” – literally a metal box in the main yard used as punishment for unruly inmates. How did the ledger get in the box, and how does it get out? Who knows? By this point, we also know that Uncle is the source of the anonymous letters to the outside (wow, who’d a thunk it?). Uncle keeps talking about what a hellhole the prison is… but you know what? It really isn’t. The cells are pretty roomy; the inmates get fed enough to keep any of them from looking malnourished. Yeah, the guards sometimes hit the prisoners when they talk back, but we don’t get even one scene of gratuitous beatings or torture. The prisoners are forced to work, but for the most part they aren’t under close supervision. At one point, Merill gets into a running fight with a half-dozen guys, and the guards don’t even show up for a good five minutes. In fact, as far as movie prisons go, this is one of the more benevolent and easy-going. The Turkish jail in Midnight Express (1979) makes this one look like Club Med by comparison.

Sulu gets a knife in the gut.

The human rights people return. The warden claims that this is all just a big misunderstanding, and promises to introduce them to the letter writer who he says will recant his accusations. The warden is still hopeful at this point that Uncle will accept his offer of parole in return for withdrawing his charges. Unfortunately, Uncle refuses to play ball, so the warden has him killed, with Alvarez putting a knife into his stomach, drawing a gusher of blood. The warden then tries to buy time. He sends the human rights folks over to the guest house to “freshen up,” although the very next scene has the warden leading the human rights investigators to lunch in the prison mess with all the prisoners (!). I am not sure what happened here. Bad scripting? Or did the scene at the guest house get cut? In any case, the meal with the prisoners is sort of surreal scene. The prisoners, of course, go wild at the sight of a women, and the warden is barely able to quiet them. He seats the whole group at a head table in front of the mass of prisoners. Is he trying to intimidate the human rights group? Maybe. But why bother? Since the human rights people don’t know who sent the letters, the warden could just dress up one of his guards in a prison uniform and have him recant. More likely this whole scene is just because the filmmakers needed a way to get all the main characters into a room together.

Alvarez wields a mighty torch.

Just as everyone is sitting down to this pleasant supper (which sort of reminded me of last Thanksgiving at the in-laws), Merill arrives with the news that Uncle has been killed, thus setting off a riot of sorts. It is hard to describe what happens next because the action is incredibly confused. The prisoners begin to riot. As they do, the human rights people try to make their escape. At the same time, Sacker and Alvarez decide to try to settle the score with Merill once and for all.

In the meantime, Merill is mixing it up with Sacker and Alvarez. They go round and round. At one point, Alvarez attacks Merill with a burning torch. Finally, Merill managed to knock them both down to the ground just as the warden, human rights people, and prisoners arrive. Merill pours gasoline all over the room and threatens to incinerate everyone. He finally manages to coerce a confession out of Sacker and Alvarez, although I am not sure why they were so worried since Merill would have killed himself if he had dropped the torch anyway. They might have called his bluff. Anyway, they confess, which sends the prisoners into a tizzy to avenge Uncle’s death. Still, there is no proof that the warden was involved in any wrong-doing until… you’re not going to believe this… until Uncle comes back from the dead, with a gaping stomach wound, and the ledger in his hand. That’s right, we’re asked to believe that after being stabbed and left for dead, Uncle managed to crawl out to the yard, get into the locked box, dig out the ledger, and then track down all the main players in a deserted part of the prison… all with a ragged stomach wound. Wow! That Sulu is one tough SOB. Well, not that tough. His mission complete, he conveniently dies.

Uncle comes back to life.

As the warden stammers in anger and the prisoners kill Sacker and Alvarez, Ferris grabs the ledger and makes a run for it pursued by armed guards. The warden wants to keep the human rights people from escaping, so he orders his guards to shoot them down! Um, how’s he going to explain that one? And if he was willing to do that, then why was he so worried about them in the first place? He actually plugs a couple of them in the back. In the meantime, Merill is duking it out with prison guard Vargas (Roland Dantes). Merill finally gets the upper hand, and joins up with Ferris. In order to escape, they need to get over the prison’s ten foot walls. Conveniently, a random prisoner shows up just in time to give them a boost over the wall, although he gets conveniently shot before they can pull him over thus avoiding the awkward question of who the hell this mysterious prisoner was. The funny thing, of course, is that it is easy to picture what happened. With the cameras already set up and ready to shoot, they realized that Merill and Ferris couldn’t get over the wall by themselves, so they had a random extra enter the scene, help them over, and get shot for his troubles.

A speedboat pulls away on a darkened sea. Who says b-movies don’t have exciting endings?

On the other side of the wall, they make a run for her helicopter, which is conveniently parked with the engines still running. A couple of guards are still in pursuit including one armed with what I thought was a shotgun, but which turns out to be a grenade launcher considered how he incinerates the chopper with a single shot. Oddly, that’s the only grenade he fires. Anyway, with the copter in flames, Merill and Ferris head for the powerboat conveniently moored at the beach. This time, there are no grenades to stop their escape and they pull away unmolested.

The movie ends with some idiotic banter about how Ferris will vouch for Merill and get him a new trial… although considering the evidence against him — the bloody knife and eyewitness testimony — I wonder how he’ll fare even then. Ferris is surprisingly composed considering that the three other members of her team were gunned down in cold blood right in front on her. I doubt many Marines would be in such good shape, much less your average human rights activist.

More exciting kickboxing action… well, at least, pickaxe combat.

The problem with these kickboxing movies is that the kickboxing ends up being more important than the plot. That would be okay if the fight sequences were well executed, but they are really sort of desultory frankly. I’m sure Jerry “Golden Boy” Trimble is a terror in the ring, but that doesn’t come across on film. Combine the weak action sequences with a lack of sex or humor, and well, it isn’t a pretty sight. Still, the acting is just bad enough and the plot is just clichéd enough that this is almost in the “so bad it’s good” category. Almost.

Now, a love of bad movies requires three things: (1) A sense of humor; (2) an appreciation for the absurd; and (3) an eye for the little things. Live by the Fist is a great movie for would-be b-movie fans to cut their teeth on because it is obviously bad. In fact, it is so obvious in its badness that even the video cover is laughable. Let me quote from it at length and comment.

A barbaric bug strength test.

“World kickboxing champion Jerry ‘Golden Boy’ Trimble… is imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. Behind bars he discovers the world’s most barbaric prison.” Now, as I’ve mentioned before, it really isn’t that barbaric. “It is a world where men are judged by their ability to fight, riot, kick… and kill.” Actually it isn’t. The men are judged mostly by their ability to join a clique. But beyond that Uncle seems to do quite well just on brains.

“When Jerry befriends an elderly prisoner and refuses to join the prison’s bloody rituals of violence, he is marked for death by the brutal prison warlord ‘Khan.’” You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Khan in my review. Know why? Because there is no Khan in this movie… at least not among the major characters. And there are no “bloody rituals of violence.” The closest thing we get to a “bloody ritual of violence” is a scene where they glue two bugs together and bet on which one will right itself first. Sure, Merill gets attacked several times, but it isn’t like there is any organized form of violence in the prison. Now, the funny thing is that Jerry Trimble did have a bit part in a movie with a character named Khan, namely King of the Kickboxers (1991), but Trimble’s role in that one is pretty small.

Shower combat. That’s gonna hurt when he lands.

“Forced to abandon his Zen philosophy on non-violence, Jerry must live by savagery. Jerry must live by action. Jerry must… Live by the Fist!” Zen philosophy of non-violence?! He was a Navy SEAL! A professional warrior. And he never shows any evidence of non-violence.

How does this sort of thing happen? Was the box designed first and the movie filmed afterwards? Was someone just asleep at the switch? Anyway, I just thought it was pretty funny. An extra little gift from Roger and Cirio.