White Fire

source: White Fire

WARNING SPOILERS CONTAINED HEREIN. White Fire is a mish mash of ludicrous mayhem. Trying to explain the plot is as pointless as this movie. Don't get me wrong, I love this movie! It has gratuitous nudity, senseless violence, a bizarre incest thing going on, bar room brawls, Russian Roulette, awful rock and roll songs, an all-women cult of (lesbian?) plastic surgeons, and Fred Williamson shows up as a macho pimp trying to get one of his ho's back. Great scenes: Robert Ginty with a chainsaw vs. thugs with meat hooks; ridiculous looking Battlestar Galactica-like uniforms; unrealistic, yet brutal gore scenes and oh-so-much more! Did I mention bad acting? This is what makes low budget b-movies fun to watch. Although the plot gets more illogical as the movie goes on, you just never know what's going to happen next. Questions such as "What?!" "Huh...?" and "Why?" will pop into your head. "And what exactly is white fire?" you ask. Well, it's a giant radioactive diamond, of course! All who touch it get burned. The moral of the story, I guess, is that greed will burn you in the end. This wonderful spectacle is available in the U.S., so hunt it down.

Now here's a weird one. Imagine if someone threw a bunch of film reels from different drive-in movies in the air, and used Robert Ginty's chainsaw you see above to wildly slice them at random. Then they spliced them all together and stuffed the result in a projector. The result would undoubtedly be...WHITE FIRE! In this highly entertaining monument to nonsensicality, Robert Ginty and Belinda Mayne play brother and sister Boris "Bo" Donnelly and Ingrid Donnelly. When they were children, their parents were killed by soldiers. The man who saved them, Sam (Jess Hahn) is now their friend in adulthood, and they live in Turkey. He has a sleazy associate named Peyton (at least we think that's what his name is). What are they up to? Apparently, Bo and Ingrid stole some diamonds and some bad guys want them back. Gordon Mitchell plays Olaf, a man who works in a futuristic diamond mine where they wear crazy outfits and torture and kill people. A gigantic diamond called "White Fire" is in the mine, but if anyone touches it, they melt. Then it gets really crazy. Many bad guys are after the Donnellys, including the Italians Sophia (Banti), who has a hilarious accent, and Barbarossa (Benito Stefanelli), not to mention an army of mustachioed Turks. During a brawl, Ingrid is "killed". Bo is crushed because they had such a close relationship (a little too close...more on that later) so he goes to drown his sorrows at the local watering hole. After the prerequisite barfight, a woman named Olga (Diana Goodman) comes home with him. She has blonde hair like Ingrid did, so, naturally, Sam suggests, "She could be Ingrid. We could replace her", or something to that effect. Of course, Olga goes along with the plan and goes to a bizarre castle populated only by women in diaphanous scarves and gets plastic surgery. Now she looks like/is Ingrid. Now Bo can fall in love with her without technically committing incest. But there's yet another wrinkle. Noah (Williamson) is after Olga because he is a pimp and she is a prostitute that escaped without paying him some money (that's the best we could make out of that unfollowable jumble of a subplot). SO! Will Bo and Olga/Ingrid ride off into the sunset with the White Fire? Or will Olaf and Noah get their way? And one other thing...what the HELL is going on? I'm sorry if any of the above came off in a negative way. Despite the fact that the "plot" is as jumbled, silly and nonsensical as any Godfrey Ho epic, White Fire is actually a lot of entertaining fun. You just have to be the type of person that can accept the fact that the plot is, let's just say, "non-traditional". White Fire is a cinematic oddity consisting of crazily choppy editing, nutty sound effects, loud, laughable dubbing, and riddled with bizarre jump cuts. And that's just the technical side. The plot is just a bunch of loose strands that make no sense. Add to that the Jon Lord-related soundtrack (two songs, the fast, title song and a sensitive ballad they repeat over and over, presumably by the band Limelight). It has all the exploitation goodies, over-the-top nudity and violence, and of course the "bad" acting...but what really sets this apart is the relationship between Bo and Ingrid...and Bo and Ingrid/Olga. It's just so weird all the way around. Fred Williamson is here in a rare bad guy role, and Ginty and the others wear some pretty amazing fashions. For fans of true cinema weirdness, if you haven't already discovered it, there's a rich mine of greatness to be found in White Fire.

Wooooweeee! What the hell was this? A lot of gory and messy killings together with full frontal female nudity in a movie that is disguised as nothing more than a very bad B-action flick featuring a radioactive white diamond, but it's actually is a "moving" story about a brother's repressed sexual feelings towards his sister...????? A movie like this only comes around once every decade (unless we're talking about the 70's and the 80's). Fred Williamson was a hoot again! I love that man. Robert Ginty just showed us that he's actually not that good of an actor after all. There's images on a security monitor of mining workers that actually seem to be coming from an invisible camera operated by a ghostly, unseen cameraman? By this, I mean that the alleged surveillance camera images are shot from impossible angles. This movie also provides the one and only solution to having sex with your own sister without actually performing an act of incest. And the quickest way to get into a girl's pants and make her fall in love with you while at it is.... by giving her a survival training!?!? You'd think this movie is unbelievable? It is! Until you've seen it. One of the most nonsensical action drivel I've come across in a long time. Whatever you do, watch the uncut version, or don't watch it at all, because you'll be missing out on some good stuff, I'm sure.

Superbly trashy and wondrously unpretentious 80's exploitation, hooray! The pre-credits opening sequences somewhat give the false impression that we're dealing with a serious and harrowing drama, but you need not fear because barely ten minutes later we're up until our necks in nonsensical chainsaw battles, rough fist-fights, lurid dialogs and gratuitous nudity! Bo and Ingrid are two orphaned siblings with an unusually close and even slightly perverted relationship. Can you imagine playfully ripping off the towel that covers your sister's naked body and then stare at her unshaven genitals for several whole minutes? Well, Bo does that to his sister and, judging by her dubbed laughter, she doesn't mind at all. Sick, dude! Anyway, as kids they fled from Russia with their parents, but nasty soldiers brutally slaughtered mommy and daddy. A friendly smuggler took custody over them, however, and even raised and trained Bo and Ingrid into expert smugglers. When the actual plot lifts off, 20 years later, they're facing their ultimate quest as the mythical and incredibly valuable White Fire diamond is coincidentally found in a mine. Very few things in life ever made as little sense as the plot and narrative structure of "White Fire", but it sure is a lot of fun to watch. Most of the time you have no clue who's beating up who or for what cause (and I bet the actors understood even less) but whatever! The violence is magnificently grotesque and every single plot twist is pleasingly retarded. The script goes totally bonkers beyond repair when suddenly – and I won't reveal for what reason – Bo needs a replacement for Ingrid and Fred Williamson enters the scene with a big cigar in his mouth and his sleazy black fingers all over the local prostitutes. Bo's principal opponent is an Italian chick with big breasts but a hideous accent, the preposterous but catchy theme song plays at least a dozen times throughout the film, there's the obligatory "we're-falling-in-love" montage and loads of other attractions! My God, what a brilliant experience. The original French title translates itself as "Life to Survive", which is uniquely appropriate because it makes just as much sense as the rest of the movie: None!

White Fire has so much going for it. With Larry Bird look-alike Robert Ginty leading the charge blazing away with his fabulous hair and super macho mustache, the movie soars above other low-budget actioners. The charisma he has in this makes Tom Selleck look like a putz. With Ginty beating up everyone, the movie only rises in awesomeness when a story of diamond intrigue enters into play. Then add in Fred Williamson, some frontal bush, chainsaw attacks and some awesome incest themes....this flick ends up delivering on all cylinders. If you're looking for some awesome B-Action, this is where it's at. Now, if I can just get my hands on that soundtrack.

My review was written in March 1985 after watching the movie on TWE video cassette. "White Fire" is a crudely-mad action picture, lensed in Turkey in the summer of 1983 and bowing domestically on video cassette. With more filmmaking care, it could have had some domestic theatrical playoff on the action circuit. Leads Robert Ginty and Belinda Mayne are cast as brother- and-sister diamond smugglers, in cahoots with crooked mines security officer Yilmaz (Gordon Mitchell). A pointless, 20-years-earlier prolog shows their parents killed by soldiers with the kids cared for by Sam (Jess Hahn), who is now a smuggling partner. The legendary White Fire diamond (2,000 caats and emitting deadly radioactivity) is the main prize, but French filmmaker Jean-Marie Pallardy detours into absurd territroy when Mayne is killed and Ginty picks up a girl in a bar, has plastic surgery convert her into a Mayne lookalike in order to continue the inside job at the mine, but then falls in love with her (incest psychological overtones stressed). Even guest star Fred Williamson, cast as a villain bjut predictably turning into Mr. Nice Guy in the final reel, fails to save this one. Dubbing is crude, and gore makeup is emphasize over local color.

What can you say about the film White Fire. Amazing? Fantastic? Disturbing? Hilarious? These words are not big enough to describe the event which is White Fire. From wobbly, garbled beginning to profound end, this movie will entertain throughout. Our movie begins in the woods of a country somewhere in the world. A family is hiding from unmarked soldiers in costume shop uniforms. When the father separates from the mother and their childen, you get a real sense of what kind of movie you're about to watch. Father makes sure to roll down hills in his all white outfit, and is polite as he gets people's attention before he shoots them, but alas, dad is burned alive in what looks like a very unsupervised, unsafe stunt. Meanwhile, mom and the kids are running down a beach with an armed soldier trailing about 5 feet behind them. He too gives a stern warning before action in the form of a bizarre "HALT!", and then promptly wastes the mother. This action sequence sets up the happy childhood of our heroes Bo and Ingred. So now we fast forward about 20 years (30 if you're honest about the hero's age) to beautiful Turkey, where Bo and Ingred have settled as professional thieves, or diamond prospectors, or something. Ingred works at a diamond mine where she helps herself to the goods, while Bo (masterfully played by the dynamic Robert Ginty) drives around the desert in his denim outfits. Bo and Ingrid have an interesting relationship. They don't seem to have any friends other than each other, and they spend all of their time together. That coupled with the fact that Bo has expressed his desire to sleep with his sister as evidenced in lines such as "you know its a shame you're my sister" he says to her while she's stark naked, make for a very dynamic duo. Bo is then crushed when Ingrid is killed, as he wanders the beaches of Turkey with his ceremonial pink grief scarf. A renewal of hope occurs when Bo finds a girl who looks like Ingrid, and gives her plastic surgery to make her look exactly like Ingrid. This opens the door for Bo to have sex with his sister without it being technically wrong. Bo is a real fan of ethical grey areas, and he is overjoyed with his new love. So anyway, there's a lot of fun action scenes, ridiculous violence, great acting, impossible to follow plot-lines, Fred "the hammer" Williamson (for some reason), and a big chunk of dirty ice which is supposed to be a giant diamond (which later explodes). All of these things are great, but the Bo and Ingrid relationship is what makes this movie special....really special. So I heartily encourage everyone to behold the majesty that is White Fire. You may be glad you did..or not.

(1984) White Diamond/ Vivre pour survivre DUBBED ADVENTURE / ACTION Written, produced and directed by Jean-Marie Pallardy opens with a young Bo and Ingrid losing both their parents as a result of some soldiers chasing them through the outskirts of Russia, they are then are taken under the wing of some rebels. The movie then jumps 20 years later in Istanbul, Turkey both are now adults, Robert Ginty as Bo' Donnelly and his sister, Belinda Mayne as Ingrid Donnelly where she works and steals diamonds from her boss, Olaf (Gordon Mitchell). A curious mine digger discovers it before he is killed by Olaf, and it was at this point both, Bo and his sister Ingrid plan to steal what is supposedly be the is supposedly legendary white fire diamond, which burns if someone were to touch it. Spoil The ridiculous happens is when Bo's sister gets killed by Sophia and her goons, it is not long before he cross paths with a woman who has some of the same features as Bo's sister while he was sulking at a bar, her name is Olga Smith, including a little plastic surgery. And it's like,with the short training she begins to know all the duties Bo's sister had performed for her diamond mine, boss Olaf. And it was at this point, is when Fred Williamson he plays Noah as he and his goons are looking for Olga. Both the fight scenes and the shootouts sequences looked super fake while the * scenes were real.

source: White Fire