Fight for Your Life

REVIEW
Oh, my. Well, this scalding hot potato of a film was bound to come out on DVD eventually, and now that the brave souls at Blue Underground have actually granted it a special edition, we might as well come to terms with it. Alright, everybody take a deep breath. Fight For Your Life is a notorious and outrageous 1977 exploitation thriller that never fails to floor anyone (un)lucky enough to witness its noxious charms. A low-budget retread of the old Bogart “family held hostage” noir Desperate Hours, Fight ups the ante of that already intense plotline by reveling in issues of race. Three escaped convicts—a Chinese-American, a Puerto Rican, and a white guy (the latter portrayed by a pre-Newhart, pre-Blade Runner William Sanderson)—burst into the middle-class home of an African-American deacon and his family, and the cons proceed to torment the clan with violence and racial epithets until the tables are turned. The bigoted insults don’t begin and end with the standard “nigger” and “honky” name-calling, however; Fight pushes the envelope of racism in continually appalling ways, the majority of which we wouldn’t feel comfortable disclosing here. But the racial element is only one of many genuinely shocking exploitation components that appear throughout the running time, as a child’s face is beaten in with a rock, there are two brutal rapes, a crying infant has a gun placed to its head…and that’s not the worst of it. Correctly labeled “the least politically correct film ever seen in American theatres” by the All Movie Guide, Fight For Your Life is also effectively summarized by the book Sleazoid Express: “the racism exploitation movie to end them all…continually punctuated by wild outbursts of sex and violence, Fight For Your Life grabs the audience by the collar…(we have) never witnessed an audience so enraged and unified against what was going on on the screen.” Fight is bound to offend virtually everyone who comes across it, but it also represents the apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of 1970’s American exploitation cinema, and if you are interested in the most extreme example of that most extreme filmmaking climate, then Fight is, God help us, recommended viewing—for the very brave.