One of three films that paired kickboxing star Jerry “Golden Boy” Trimble and Filipino exploitation directing legend Cirio H. Santiago, Live by the Fist lives up to its scuzzy action promise by delivering all the garishly dubbed violence we were hoping for in their previous effort Stranglehold! While Cirio seemed out of sorts trying to make a Die Hard type movie set in a chemical plant with Stranglehold, he re-affirms his status here as a master of the low budget action film set in prisons, warehouses, and quarries!
Golden Boy is set up for a murder he didn’t commit and sent to a tough Filipino prison island. While there, everyone tries to kill him every seven minutes or so! The locations and the actors for such an epic tale have to look as cheap, filthy and degenerate as possible! Damn if that doesn’t totally describe Cirio’s trademark style! In fact, the only thing that feels the least bit out of place is the entirely too classy presence of Star Trek‘s George Takei as the old prisoner (Uncle) who is working with a human rights group to end the abusive warden’s regime!
Human rights group? Is there anyone out there who thinks that Golden Boy is going to be prevail over the evil warden, evil head guard, evil white gang and evil Asian gang by having Amnesty International lodge a complaint about his conditions with some prison oversight committee? Let’s get real, the sexy lady from the human rights group who comes to periodically threaten the warden with exposure is only meant to give Golden Boy someone he can rescue and escape with at the end of the movie. I mean, I like a prison movie as much as the next guy, but I don’t want to see Golden Boy going over the wall and stealing the warden’s personal boat and sailing off to freedom with some sweaty jailbird!
Golden Boy is just an ex-Navy SEAL looking for a job on board a ship. Along the way, he happens by a warehouse where a group of guys are trying to rape a girl. Cirio telegraphs within the first two minutes of the movie that Live by the Fist is going to be wonderfully tacky trash as the victim has her top ripped off! And just to make sure there are no doubts about what Golden Boy is up against, the rapist is still trying to rip this gal’s panties off even as Golden Boy beats the stink off the rest of the gang!
Golden Boy though gets conked on the head, the girl is killed, and when Golden Boy wakes up, he is somehow holding the murder weapon! Next stop is the prison island where Golden Boy is already a marked man since he killed the Asian gang’s friend during the attempted rape! Golden Boy immediately suspects that this prison island isn’t all that awesome when a dead, shark chewed prisoner floating in the water is pointed out as an example of what can happen to problem prisoners!
But Golden Boy is going to be a model prisoner, right? He’s going to work with jailhouse lawyer Uncle on his appeal and have the unjust sentence overturned! Maybe, but he’s got to get out of the shower alive first! In the time it takes Golden Boy to walk from the dock to the showers, he’s already brawling for his life against a gang of Asian prison thugs! Lucikly though, a group of white prisoners is more than happy to have Golden Boy on their side!
You know that really sweet gig working on the motor pool with the whites that the warden gave Golden Boy in an effort to keep him from getting killed by the Asian gang since the warden can’t afford any “accidental” deaths while the human rights people are snooping around? Golden Boy went and screwed the pooch on that because he stood up against the whites who were picking on a little Asian dude! We all know how these prison movies work so it’s not spoiling anything by mentioning that Golden Boy’s little buddy later ends up buried beneath a dump truck’s load of rocks. Come on! It’s like the white gangleader Sacker said, the load shifted!
The warden (who is stealing money from the prison) gets fed up with Golden Boy and with Uncle sending anonymous letters to the human rights people and cuts a deal with Sacker and the leader of the Asian gang to get rid of the trouble makers. The wisdom of putting this plan into action at exactly the same time as the human rights people are at the prison is suspect, but then again this is a prison lit by flaming torches and with plenty of gasoline lying around nearby.
Golden Boy and his blue bandana (the hideous rat tail of Stranglehold is nowhere to be seen) get a hell of a workout in this movie. He’s energetically brawling with five or six guys everywhere on the prison island whether it be in the shower or out in the quarry where he’s supposed to be breaking rocks instead of heads. His one on one battle with the head guard is epic and highlighted by the seqeuence where he is sent crashing through bunk beds in glorious slow motion.
Takei acts like he’s in an entirely different movie giving populist speeches about how they need to work together to beat the system that unjustly put them there. But it works! Because he gets stabbed in the stomach! And Cirio even remembers that when you live by the fist, you have to also blow up a helicopter! Jerry Trimble proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he is the Golden Boy of Filipino prison cinema with Live by the Fist!
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