Movie Details
| Title: | Fight for Your Life | |
| Director: | Robert A. Endelson | |
| Year: | 1977 | |
| Genre: | Desperate Hours | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.17.05 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.17.05 | Alamo Downtown | This Screening is part of event: QT6 Encore Night continued with a new film which Quentin described as one of his favorite exploitaiton movies ever. He was looking through Tim's list of prints last night and freaked out when he saw the title and when he called Tim up this afternoon and said he wanted to show it, Tim just started laughing. Qhen QT mentioned that it would make a great double feature with Hot Summer in the City, Tim got serious and said you couldn't do it. It would just be too wrong. Either the screen would ignite into flames or God would just have enough with us and push the "Smite" button on his keyboard. QT then goes into an impersonation of a foul-mouthed ghetto-slang God stomping his foot down on poor little Alamo Drafthouse Downtown... at the time i thought "God wouldn't really be that bad" but after seeing this movie and imagining seeing it together with Hot Summer in the City, I have changed my mind. I DO think God would get that upset and start swearing and mashing us down into hell with his white sneaker. What's funny about the movie is it stars William Sanderson, who has been in tons of stuff, usually as a dimwit thanks to his unique voice. He was in Blade Runner as the toymaker and the Bob Newhart show as Larry (with the brother Darryl and the other brother Darryl) and is now on Deadwood now as E.B. Farnham, the hotel owner. According to QT, anyone who knows this guy will forever now know him only as Jessie Lee Kane from this movie. His performance as a cracker southern hillbilly psycho nutcase will burn into your brain and make you forever associate him with this role. "You can make a movie as incendiary as Fight for Your Life," Quentin tells us all, "but you can never make a movie MORE incendiary than Fight For Your Life." Quentin also mentioned that this movie first had the title "The Fighting Family," but then it was "Fight for Your Life," but when he finally got to see it in NY it was "Staying Alive." Incidentally, IMDb has seven titles associated with this movie, including "I Hate Your Guts", "Getting Even", and "Blood Bath at 1313 Fury Road." The Isely Brothers-esque theme song that plays in the beginning and end of the flick has the words "fight for your life" in it though so... you know. The actual movie is about a black family (the patriarch being a deacon at his church, very soft-spoken and decent) being terrorized by a group of escaped convicts. Sanderson is the leader of said escaped group, taking great pains to include EVERY reacial slur in the KKK lexicon of "words that make black people angry." He doesn't limit himself to the family that he's terrifying though. See, he has a gun and his buddies only have knives so he gets to call his latino buddy a spic and his "oriental" buddy a chink an awful lot too. Both the spic and the chink are pretty funny though. one's like obsessed with his poor upbringing and the other is a total perv who they have to hide the family dog from for some reason. It's really Sanderson though who takes the cake. He points a gun at the back of a baby's head after killing its papa, beats the deacon out of conscioussness with his bible, yelling "turn the other cheek!" and he rapes the virgin daughter then lets the other two have goes while the dad's still knocked out. The pervy oriental also beats this little kid to death with a rock. It's really pretty brutal and totally uncalled for. I really think the FBI needs to investigate anyone who owns a copy of this movie. It's ultimately rewarding though when the family finally turns the tables on Sanderson and his crazy-ass buddies. The once peacable happy family becomes completely vicious and vindictive, shooting one guy in the crotch and really exacting some revenge on the other two. I think it might be wrong for me as a person to say i really liked this movie, but I have to say it's the kind of movie that you don't tend to forget. Surprisingly (to me at least) there were lots of people there who'd seen it before, many times before actually. It's just a reminder for me that i am a real lightweight when it comes to exploitation film. Oh, also. Quentin said that the last movie of the night would be Johnny Firecloud, which he hasn't seen so that would get to be his little festival, watching a movie he hasn't seen with us. |
