No Surrender Cinema: Cage (1989)
There’s an illegal underground fighting ring happening somewhere beneath Chinatown! Gangsters are in debt and looking for a way to get more money before they get killed! Lorenzo Lamas’ Native American friend is cosplaying as Wolfpac era Konnan! In a situation like this, some heroes have to be called upon, and it’s up to Captain American and The Incredible Hulk to bring the bad guys to justice… sort of. In this edition of No Surrender Cinema, prepare to marvel at Reb Brown, Lou Ferrigno, and a cast chock full of “hey, it’s that guy!” as we enter the underground and check out Cage!
Released in 1989, Cage teams up two actors best known for portraying Marvel heroes. Brown played the far from the source material, Evel Knievel looking version of Captain America in a pair of CBS TV movies, while Ferrigno’s breakout role came as the green skinned goliath, spending five seasons fighting evil as The Incredible Hulk on the classic CBS TV series. Here, they play Scott Monroe and Billy Thomas, respectively, two soldiers embroiled in conflict in the Vietnam War. When they come under fire during an evacuation, Billy refuses to leave Scott behind, and gets his captain to safety, but at a cost. Since Lou’s not playing the Hulk here, the bullets being fired at him don’t bounce off, and he takes a shot to the head (while clinging to Scott, who is hanging out of the helicopter). Through the opening credits, we find through various clips that both men survived, but Billy has suffered brain damage from the headshot. Cage does something that I can’t recall any other action movie doing, showcasing Scott and Billy’s bond through recovery while playing a love song that sounds like a knock off of Kenny Rogers’ “Through The Years”. I can’t be the only one caught off guard when a movie about the seedy world of cage fights kicked off with a low budget ballad, played over clips of its two male leads.
Cheesy songs aside, our movie takes us to present day Los Angeles, where Scott and Billy, now a childlike gentle giant, own a bar. Scott has assumed the role of Billy’s big brother/caretaker, and the two seem pretty happy go lucky, surrounded by fellow veterans and a motherly barmaid named Meme. So how do two decorated soldiers living a pretty mellow life get mixed up with the criminal underworld? Through a series of convoluted circumstances, that’s how! See if you can follow along here; mobster Tony Baccola (Michael Dante) and his right hand man Mario (Mike Moroff, who looks like the poor man’s Jon Favreau) owe a debt to Asian kingpin (and the man in charge of the cage fighting) Mr. Yin (Die Hard fans will recognize him as Mr. Takagi, real name James Shigeta). Tony also owes money to mob boss Costello (character actor Al Ruscio, who once starred as a gangster opposite Ferrigno in the “Final Round” episode of the Hulk TV series). Both crimelords want their money, and Tony feels that the best way he can climb out of his debt is to get a fighter of his own to enter the cage and earn it for him. The two goodfellas just happen to be at Scott and Billy’s bar reflecting on their troubles when a gang led by Diablo (Branscombe Richmond) come in to cause trouble. Scott tries to pacify the punks, but fists are soon flying, and the brutish Billy rushes to Scott’s aid just as fast as he did back in The ‘Nam. Tony and Mario are impressed by the way the soldiers took out the street trash, but Scott turns down their offer to fight for them, on both his and Billy’s behalf. This causes Tony to appeal to Diablo’s sense of revenge, as he asks him to torch the bar-in daylight when it’s closed, so that no one is killed-feeling that it will give him an opening to get Scott and Billy to fight for him. Diablo fails to do a clean sweep of the bar, and the arson winds up killing Meme, which devastates Scott and Billy. As Scott heads out to deal with their sad turn of events, Tony and Mario convince Billy into coming with them, posing as his new friends. The simple minded Billy welcomes these new friendships, unaware of the danger he’s about to be put in.
Sounds like a pretty complex plot for a low budget 80’s action flick, doesn’t it? Well hang on, because there’s more! The cage matches are infiltrated by reporter Morgan Garrett, who disguises herself as a man and snaps pictures of the bloodshed for an expose on Mr. Yin. She’s eventually found out by Yin’s henchman Tiger Joe (Al Leong, who you may also recognize from Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and his humorous take on Genghis Khan in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure), who we later find out is more than just one of Yin’s thugs. By the way, Marilyn Tokuda’s acting during the scene where Tiger Joe catches up to her is so wooden I’m surprised she didn’t splinter when he grabbed her arm. Almost immediately after this turn of events, Costello turns up in the underground, looking for Tony and Mario and also wanting in on the cage fighting “racket”. At this point there may have been more people in the underground than there have been at the last few WrestleManias.
With that many people already caught up in the cage chaos, it was just a matter of time before Scott finds his way down there. After deducing that Diablo was responsible for the fire (and thinking that he may have done something to Billy), Scott grabs a shotgun, jumps in his Jeep, and goes on a path of vengeance through East LA. Scott dispatches several members of Diablo’s gang (and even delivers a knockout punch to GLOW wrestler Matilda The Hun!) before finishing off the man himself. With that part of the problem taken care of, Scott seeks Billy out in the underground, but he’s soon captured and stuck in a cell with Morgan and Tiger Joe, who is actually an undercover cop that gets outed by Costello.
With all of our principal players accounted for, Billy is sent into the cage, first to take on Costello’s “Italian Champion”, who looks a lot like…waitaminute, that IS Matthias Hues! The Incredible Hulk vs. one of the greatest martial arts movie actors in history? Is this real life? It is, and it’s also real short, as this dream match ends pretty quickly for Hues’ character, who is no match for Billy’s brute strength. Billy’s win earns him the right to fight the current cage champion, Chang (say it three times fast), but he protest that he doesn’t want to fight anymore. Despite Mario softening up to Billy (there’s an honestly touching moment where Mario reveals his fears that Billy might be killed, to which an emotional Billy says “I died a long time ago”), Tony puts Billy back in the cage, and he’s bloodied and battered so bad that he starts flashing back to the beginning of the movie…uh, Vietnam. This causes Billy to HULK UP ™ and fight back against Chang, destroying him to Tony and Mario’s delight, but angering Yin. Billy overcoming the odds to become the unlikely cage champion leads to the climax of the movie, where Scott, Morgan, and Joe break out, a new fighter enters the cage, bullets and fists fly, and not everyone makes it out alive.
I can’t call Cage a bad movie, because I didn’t hate it, but I’m hard-pressed to call it a good movie either. For a movie about cage fighting the fights are simple and short, with nothing spectacular about them at all. It’s a far cry from the many other “illegal fighting” movies that were prevalent around this time. In fact, the best action sequence in the whole movie is when Scott is on his rampage against Diablo’s gang. There’s also a LOT of plot thrown in here, and at a runtime of just over 90 minutes, the pacing is pretty frantic. Precious Cargo was a movie that had more action, but I was never as bored with Cage as I was when I reviewed that film. The biggest draw, to me, is the curiosity factor that Cage presents us with. Cage has an amazing cast by BPA standards, but they’re not properly placed, if that makes sense. Matthias Hues as an Italian kickboxer? Danny Trejo as one of Costello’s mob hitmen? Renegade star Branscombe Richmond as an evil Mexican gangbanger? Al Leong, notable for his numerous roles as a villain/henchman/all around bad dude, as an undercover cop? It’s like the casting director hired everyone he felt could be perfect in Cage, then had them pick their roles out of a hat. At least former wrestler Tiger Chung Lee is fitting as the intimidating Chang, but for all the buildup of him being a killer, Billy is able to crush him quite easily, despite recovering from a beatdown that he got only a half hour before their epic encounter.
The fights are as simple as the Billy character, and the acting borders on MST3K levels (appropriate since Brown’s resurgence in recent years came after Mike and The ‘Bots mocked his 1988 sci-fi flick Space Mutiny), but Cage still has some charm. Ferrigno’s natural likability is magnified by playing the gentle giant here, and the cast is a well-assembled action movie ensemble. The DVD is out of print, but both Cage and its sequel (oh yes, it had one, with both Ferrigno and Brown returning), can be found on YouTube. Cage is the perfect example of a “weekend watch”, something to put on on a Saturday afternoon when you’ve got nothing to do. Check it out to see the early appearances of action stars like Hues and Trejo, or to chuckle at Brown’s uncanny ability to overact during his action scenes.
