The Goddess and the Genius

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 »

Cirio Santiago’s Filmography

Cirio’s Masterpieces