The story will be nothing new to anyone familiar with Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours (1955) or, closer to home, Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972 - itself based on Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film, The Virgin Spring). Good people are brutalized by bad people. In Fight for Your Life the twist is that a middle-class black family (headed by a black minister who talks of "turning the other cheek," with Robert Judd starring as Ted Turner, no relation to the media mogul) is held hostage by three escaped bloodthirsty felons; a racist, red-neck felon (William Sanderson, from The Bob Newhart Show), a Mexican (Peter Yoshida) with bad table-manners, and a Chinese guy (Dan Faraldo) who can just as easily kill women as children. It all starts out with some badly dubbed lines and a cartoonish pimp getting carjacked, but then the film shifts from cliches to push at other boundaries where babies are threatened and Turner's family is terrorized and racially insulted in a relentless fashion. As with Craven's The Last House on the Left, where liberals resort to bloody vengeance, the once pacifist Turner takes justice into his own hands. It's interesting to contemplate how both of these exploitation films debase any higher moral order by having their previously upright citizens, when push comes to shove, show that they are just as capable of lowering themselves to the violent level of the thugs that attacked them. Craven, however, rationalized his The Last House on the Left as an antidote to mainstream violent films where people are mowed down like extras in a Sam Peckinpah film who illicit little sympathy from the viewer. Craven liked to think that he created a realistic and tragic setting wherein you cringed and felt pity for every victim. (In Brian J. Robb's Screams & Nightmares, Craven says "I walked out of a screening of Reservoir Dogs (1992) because I felt at a certain point that the film-maker was just getting off on the violence and that it was being treated as something amusing, which it isn't to me.") It's not clear what Robert A. Endelson's rationale for Fight for Your Life is, and he is conspicuously absent from the audio commentary, leaving writer Straw Weisman and director of photography Lloyd Freidus to discuss the film.
Although directed by Endelson, whose only other credit is an X-rated job called The Filthiest Show in Town (1973), the real barker behind the film was its producer, William Mishkin (1908 ¿ 1997), a veteran nudie distributor who might be remembered by some shoe-string film fans for his work with Andrew Milligan (1929-1991), probably the only director to have distinguished himself as being below Ed Wood's caliber. (Milligan is also the source of a biography by Jimmy McDonough and his work was given a special tribute in Video Watchdog issue #52 and #53). The Psychotronic Video Guide lists Mishkin as having released Fight for Your Life "many times under various titles" and having it "double-billed with Snuff (1976) or a kung-fu movie," or even advertising it to "look more like a horror movie."
Presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, the Blue Underground DVD of Fight for Your Life Special Features include a poster and still gallery plus "White" Version and "Black" Version trailers and TV spots. It's interesting to note the "Black" trailer differentiates itself with an alternative title (Stayin' Alive), gives more screen time to Turner's family, and also has a different narrative pitch that tries to position the film as an expression of empowerment. ("You are about to see a few moments from an extraordinary gut-crunching movie that will make you get down and shout "I am proud to be a black man!'" Cut to scene of grandma at the dinner table waving her fist and saying; "I'll tell you where it's at: Black Power!")
For more information about Fight For Your Life, visit Blue Underground. To order Fight For Your Life, go to TCM Shopping.
by Pablo Kjolseth
