Near Unwatchable

The other night, I finally got to watching one of the more intimidating VHS tapes I've bought so far. It's called "Black Force" (and also is known as "Force Four"). Writing this just moments after the conclusion of the film, I'm sure of few things outside of the fact that the man and woman brandishing guns on the box are not in the film and in fact must have posed for the pictures on it years later. That's not the film's biggest problem.

The film's plot is not incredibly difficult to unravel. It begins with a man being attacked and robbed of a little African fetish doll. It's hideous-looking, but everyone wants it. A team of four investigative martial artists are hired to locate it and subsequently recover it from a gangster called "Z". They do some quick detective work on the streets (which is to say that we hear them asking questions while watching b-roll footage of the streets), and then recover the fetish, the money that was meant to be traded for the fetish, and some heroin no one mentions until the end.

Most of the film's problems relate to very basic filmmaking. The director seems to hate close-ups. There are no more than a few in the entire movie, and those seem to come by accident. This is the one thing that more or less automatically separates bad movies from entirely unwatchable movies. The film also suffers from the apparent lack of any lighting apparatus or of any ability to record sound in sync with the video. I should also mention that out of the film's announced 82 minute running time, an exceptionally large percentage is lovingly devoted to the aforementioned b-roll footage.

I'll say one nice thing about the movie. Although it's not evident from the fighting action in the movie, I've heard of few movies which as extensive a pedigree in martial arts education. The film's credits assign a black belt to countless members of the cast, and virtually everyone who appears on screen is listed with some kind of belt, ranging from an 8th degree black belt all the way down to a white belt. Regrettably, that is not enough for me to recommend the film.