Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray offers a pristine high-def presentation and a few good extra features.

The outrageous premise has crooked jade dealer and Hitler lookalike Thomas Speer (Ralph Lombardi) kidnapping planeloads of Filipino prostitutes and whisking them to Warriors Island, inhabited by wild-eyed cannibalistic monks. (The Filipino Peter Lorre, bug-eyed favorite Vic Diaz, plays their leader.) The monks trade raw jade for its weight in young, fleshy women, whom they barbeque and consume because eating their flesh gives them the power to raise the dead. As the island is a veritable graveyard for "disgraced Kung Fu fighters," these Kung Fu outcasts-turned-sword-wielding zombies come in quite handy when uninvited guests visit the island.

Meanwhile, a group of tourists, most Kung Fu enthusiasts themselves, board a dilapidated cruise ship hired by cheapskate tour organizer Hazel Buck (Hope Holiday) in Los Angeles, bound for the China Sea. The tour is dirt-cheap, six weeks for a mere thousand bucks, but the ship's captain, Harry Dodds (Cameron Mitchell), is none too happy with Hazel's lack of concern for the ship's maintenance.

Stopping in the Philippines, the passengers go shopping, while alcoholic Lloyd (Carl Anthony) talks Mike O'Malley (Geoffrey Binney) into "chaperoning" a little expedition, sneaking away from pretty wife Ann (Jennifer Holmes), whom Mike is attracted to, for a side trip to a brothel, the "Palace of 1001 Pleasures."

There, Mike finds a travel brochure for Warriors Island (!), though Speer, also at the brothel to round up more women and concerned the alluring pamphlet about mad monks and Kung Fu outcasts would bring unwanted attention to his criminal operation, orders his men to stop the misguided travelers at all costs. But, as it turns out, their clumsy attempts to kidnap Capt. Dodds, kill passengers, and sink the ship only lead the survivors straight to the cannibal and Kung Fu zombies-filled island.

Raw Force was an American-based production partly financed with Filipino funds, bringing the total budget to around $400,000. The movie looks cheap here and there; dynamite, figuring prominently during the climax, looks like unpainted sticks of wood. The film has its share of continuity problems; for instance, Speer always seems to be wearing a pilot's cap when inside his seaplane, but it's always off for exteriors shots. But, generally, Raw Force looks quite professional, with a lot of coverage and, by western world standards, lively choreography of all the fight scenes. When the cruise ship is set afire, obvious but clever mattes reasonably suggest a large-scale disaster.

Except for the deliberately obnoxious Lloyd, the castaways are all pretty likable and the script gives them just enough personality and individuality to maintain interest and to get the audience to root for their survival. Mitchell and Holiday, apparently dating (though she was married to Honeymooners supporting player Frank Marth at the time) are a lot of fun to watch.

There's an enormous amount of gratuitous but not unpleasant nudity*, and the film, though gory, is not nearly as graphically violent on the level of, say, Cannibal Holocaust or George Romero's "Dead" trilogy.

Video & Audio

In 1.78:1 widescreen, approximating its 1.85:1 original aspect ratio, Raw Force looks pretty great considering the picture's budgetary limitations. Colors are decent and detail, blacks, and contrast are all good. The 1.0 DTS-HD Master mono Audio is also fine, maximizing the film's surprisingly good score (by Walter Murphy) and bone-crunching action. The disc is all-region, and includes the same content on a standard-def DVD.

Extra Features

Supplements include a new featurette, "Destination: Warriors Island," that includes interviews with director Ed Murphy and cinematographer Frank Johnson; an audio interview with finishing editor Jim Wynorski; and an original trailer in HD.

Parting Thoughts

Not unlike Hammer-Shaw Bros.'s The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, Raw Force's absurd but sincere genre-fusing is hard to dislike. Indeed, it turns out to be much more enjoyable than many mainstream, bigger-budgeted horror films and martial arts spectaculars from the same period. The transfer is excellent and the extras are good. For exploitation fans, this comes Highly Recommended.

* Sometimes cheap movies have remarkably unattractive women, or attractive women photographed unattractively. Come to think of it, an awfully high percentage do, e.g., virtually all of Jess Franco's later films.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His new documentary and latest audio commentary, for the British Film Institute's Blu-ray of Rashomon, will be released this September.