Fight Valley (2 Stars)

This is another film that I picked up from DM's bargain bin, at the same time as "Asylum". I don't buy Blu-rays just because they're cheap. Something has to attract me to them. In the case of "Asylum", it was Peter Cushing's photo on the box. In the case of "Fight Valley", it was tough looking women. That looks like a film I'd love. So why is my rating so low?

A young woman called Tori is found dead.  Her sister Windsor investigates and finds out that Tori was killed in an underground fighting match. There's a place called Fight Valley in which women fight brutally, no holds barred. Windsor decides to get revenge by challenging the woman who killed her sister. She's never been in a fight before, so she takes lessons from an MMA champion who owns a gym. After four weeks she's ready.

Huh? Four weeks of training is enough to prepare a woman for a bare knuckles fight? That's the smallest problem in the film.

I checked the biographies of the women in the film. They're not actresses, they're all professional fighters. Without knowing anything about the film's background, I can assume it was a work of love for them. They wanted to make a film with tough women. That's laudable. But they could have done it better.

The girls all talk at ghetto level. They sound primitive. I'm sure that not one of the women in the film talks like this in real life. They put on ghetto accents to make the fighters sound primitive. They succeeded. They sound primitive, and they sound obnoxious.

The film's biggest problem is the way Fight Valley is organised. It's run by a group of muscular black men who stand watching the white women fight. Something about this picture is wrong. Is it racist or misogynist or both? There is something deeply disturbing about black men watching white women batter one another to death.

I almost gave the film a one star rating, but two scenes with gratuitous nudity perked my interest. It's sad when that's the only thing I can praise about a film.

I bought the film on Blu-ray, but according to Amazon the Blu-ray is out of print, so the film can only be bought on DVD. I wonder how many months the film was on DM's shelves before it was moved into the bargain bin.

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