Fireback – A Gauntlet Exclusive!
Title: Fireback
Genre: Filipino Action Revenge Movie
Tag Line: “They thought he was dead- They thought they were safe..They were wrong…DEAD WRONG!”
Filmed In: The Philippines
Year of Release: 1978
Cast: Richard Harrison, Gwendolyn Hung, Ann Milhench and Ruel Vernal
Director: Teddy Page
Writer: Timothy Jorge
Running Time: 85 minutes
Plot: Jack Kaplan is a U.S. weapons expert in Vietnam who is rescued from a P.O.W. camp, only to return home to find that his wife has been kidnapped. It is up to Jack to take matters into his own weapon-constructing hands.
Breaking Point: At about 50 minutes in, I finally thought to myself that Fireback is losing it’s thunder. It was about 5 seconds later that things really started to pick up. I hate to say it, but the pacing of this film is quite good.
Similar Films: Rambo: First Blood Part 2, Born on the Fourth of July, MacGyver: Trail to Doomsday.
Review: Any film that opens up with a poorly dubbed American actor describing an advanced handheld weapon of ultimate destruction only to be followed by a scene involving multiple explosions and Filipino soldiers flying through the air to their deaths is screaming to get put in any upcoming gauntlets.
Fireback has to be one of my greatest Liquor Store video bin finds in a long time. Although I felt that the five dollar price tag was a bit steep, i soon realized that it was well worth every last penny. As mentioned in the plot, Jack Kaplan is captured by the “bad guys”. They never really say what country Jack is in so i will just say Vietnam. The first thing I noticed about Fireback is that the opening credits use music from Jerry Goldsmith’s score to the O.J Simpson, James Brolin classic Capricorn One. Thanks to this illegal choice of music, if the film ever starts to slow down, I could still listen to some great music by one of cinema’s greatest composers.
It isn’t until after Jack gets rescued and fully recovers in a U.S. hospital, that he decides to ask the authorities about his wife. You see, apparently he has been calling her since his return to the States, but the phone is continually giving him a busy signal. After being back for a while, he finally decides to head home from the hospital, only to find the phone off the hook and his wife missing. I guess nobody felt the need to try to get her to the hospital after her P.O.W. husband was rescued or even let her know that her husband was safe.
So of course Jack decides, instead of calling the police, to go to a bar. There, he has a drink, takes in a couple lap dances and leaves to kick some dude’s ass in an alley for no good reason. As it turns out, the man that Jack just kicked the shit out of is Digger, a small time thug and informant for Jack. Digger is a fantastic character who is dubbed exactly how you would expect a Filipino production company to dub a black man in the seventies. Thanks to information that Digger has to offer, Jack starts off on his mission to find his wife’s kidnappers.
At the twenty three minute mark Jack fights a man in a hotel room as a topless woman stands by. Did i mention that the man that Jack is fighting in the hotel room has a GOLDEN HAND!? That’s right, folks, a golden fucking hand. As i mentioned before, the pacing in this steaming pile actually keeps your interests going throughout. And random moments like this can only help. There is a fantastic scene in which Jack is taking a break from his busy schedule to clean his gun. As he cleans his gun there is a knock on the door from a toilet repair man. The toilet repair man leaves his tool bag in Jack’s bathroom, so the ever suspicious Jack Kaplan grabs the bag and tosses it at the fleeing villian. The bag explodes as the toilet repair man falls down. He dies, but not until he is able to give information of the next person on Jack’s hitlist. Jack must seek out a man with one eye, named Harry Johnson. That’s right, a one eyed man named Harry Johnson. The villains in this movie are all great. There is this phenomenal scene in which a female villain named Eve has a conversation with the big boss about Jack Kaplan which includes my favorite piece of dialogue from the film: “I’m really worried so far none of your men have been able to kill him what if he finds out that i am involved with his wife’s kidnapping he just might want to kill me that worries me.” I know that I left out some punctuation there, but that is exactly how Ms. Micro Machine’s Man talks.
After a fight with a bad guy with a retractable cane-sword (yup, this movie is officially incredible) we get to a really bizarre scene that shows Jack’s wife being “raped”. I am not a big fan of showing rape in movies. It is uncomfortable and in poor taste, especially if i am trying to watch a fun action movie. But this rape scene is a bit different. You see, the whole scene is in slow motion. I am talking about as soon as the big boss comes into the wife’s room. It is all slow motion. The big boss, known as Duffy Collins, chases Diane Kaplan around her room for a bit, up until the point where he pins her on a bed. This is the point where Duffy decides to continually rub his cheek on her stomach and that’s it. This is about where we hit the 50 minute mark. After an uncomfortable face to stomach “rape” scene, i started to get a bit bored, but just as I was about to give in to the pain, things got way interesting when Jack Kaplan finds his wife Diane in the middle of a sewer. Dead. Yep, she’s dead. In a fucking sewer. The goddam humanity.
Because you have to have a “I’m getting some payback now” montage, this is the point in the film where Jack gathers all of his weapons and after a couple of bad edits and a quick nap, infiltrates the enemy compound armed with a gadget car and a handful of things that go “boom”. But wait. The cops show up. Well, let’s be clear. There are two guys dressed as cops while the rest of the twenty or so men wear Starter jackets and pimp outfits. This culminates in a quick shootout and a seven minute long chase through a jungle where Jack murders everyone in sight with a fucking high powered harpoon gun. Once all of the Cops and their Pimps have been sent to Cops and Pimps hell, Jack puts on stolen Ninja assault gear and goes after Duffy Collins.
But the plot, already pushed to bursting, thickends yet again! As it turns out, before Jack was married to Diane, Duffy was in love with her. Whaaaaaat!?! After an hour and twenty minutes of non-stop gauntlet amazement, Jack comes face to face with his wife’s murderer and kills him within 5 seconds with five swipe of his sword. What the fuck. It’s a good thing that they show the shot in extreme slow motion, over and over and over again, because that was some bullshit. Cut to an obligitory freeze frame, then comes one of the best parts: the rest of Jack Kaplan’s life is told to us through text. That’s right. It’s not enough that he avenged his wife’s death, but now we get an epilogue that spans years of his life. I guess this means no “Fireback 2: There’s Plenty of Boom Left In Me”. Damn.
My only complaint with the film is that the super secret advanced handheld weapon of ultimate destruction that was described in the opening scene and painted on the VHS cover did not make it’s return in the film. What an F-ing blue ball that was. Other than that small gripe (we did get a retractable cane-sword after all), Fireback is one hundred percent Gauntlet for any action fans out there. To all of those pirating individuals involved in getting this film smuggled out of the Philippines and into my local Liquor Store, i salute you.
