No Surrender Cinema: Cage II
It’s time for February’s first installment of No Surrender Cinema, and since it’s February that also means it’s REBRUARY! You see, Valentine’s Day isn’t the only day we show love in the second month of the year. Among the thousands of B movie fans out there (many of whom are reading this right now), February has become the time of year where many pay tribute to cult film stalwart Reb Brown. Some of you may remember him from the trademark screaming he does in most of his film appearances, some may recall that he portrayed Captain America on CBS in the 70’s, and a whole lot of you most likely know him from the movie Space Mutiny that was famously lambasted on Mystery Science Theater 3000. For this edition of NSC, it’s a follow-up to a column I wrote just over five years ago. I reviewed the movie Cage, featuring Brown and Lou Ferrigno as Vietnam veterans who got sucked into the shadowy world of underground fighting. Almost a half-decade after the first film, the pair reunited for a sequel, and that’s the film that we’re going to have for our Rebruary review. It’s time to go back to the underground for Cage II: The Arena of Death!
Previously on Cage, our heroes took down kingpin Tim Lum Yin’s illegal fighting empire, with gentle giant Billy (Ferrigno) putting an exclamation point on it by crushing Yin’s spine in a bearhug, killing him. Cage II starts off with Billy and Scott (Brown) enjoying the ordinary task of grocery shopping. Mere minutes into their visit to the supermarket, a gang of goons (the leader of which is portrayed by the great James Lew) opens fire, killing everyone inside! Scott goes down just as he was sealing the deal on a double date for he and Billy, but Billy gets off slightly easier as he’s only shot with tranquilizers and kidnapped by the gang instead of massacred like all of the other poor souls who just needed bread and milk.
It turns out that the reason Billy was kept alive is because he’s being forced into cage fights again by his old nemesis Yin, who survived the spine-crushing but it now confined to a back brace and walks with a cane. Under Yin’s watch, the fights are raking in millions of dollars via a pirate feed that he has coined the “Cage Cable Network”, which to me sounds more like a Pluto TV channel for lesser known MMA promotions. Remembering how Billy brawled his way through some of the best fighters in their previous encounter, Yin is manipulating him into fighting by telling him that Scott is dead and Yin is the one who has his best interests at heart. As you might suspect, Yin most definitely does not have Billy’s best interests at heart, because what’s unfolding before our eyes is a rather complex revenge scheme where Yin has Billy frequently injected with steroids that make him more aggressive in the cage, but are turning his body into a ticking time bomb where his heart could give out at any minute. Billy goes from lovable big lug to snapping about the lack of competition and knocking a woman out cold, then five minutes later starts clutching his chest like a musclebound Fred Sanford. For Yin, he’s just using Billy to maximize profits while he can, but the endgame is to watch Billy die as retribution for crippling him at the end of Cage.
While the injections have Billy knocking on death’s door, Scott has avoided a visit from the grim reaper and sets out to rescue Billy. It’s pretty much a retread of the first film, except Scott’s got a little extra help from Interpol agent Tanaka and his pal Master Ohgami, who has a perpetual childish grin and enjoys kicking ass when the moment calls for it. The trio end up battling an assortment of goons and gangbangers, eventually succeeding in getting Scott into the cage fights via one of the most ridiculous disguises this side of the cop’s fake mustache at the end of Sleepaway Camp. Since the film doesn’t want to give the plot away too early, nobody pays attention to the new fighter with the ponytail wig and soul patch until he ends up unmasking himself when he and Billy are pit against each other in the cage.
Scott had to reveal himself so that 1) Billy would know he was alive, and 2) so that Billy didn’t take him for a random opponent and maul him, but the reunion of the two pals creates pure havoc in the underground. Billy, Scott, Tanaka, and Ohgami split off and fight their way through Yin’s guys, with Billy wanting to save Mi Lo (Shannon Lee, Bruce’s daughter), the hooker with a heart of gold that he’s fallen for. When Mi Lo winds up getting shot, it puts Billy on the fast track for a final confrontation with Yin. The big galoot confronts the criminal that he crippled at the end of the last film, and…Billy gets shot! Not only that, but he gets shot MULTIPLE TIMES. Then, when Scott, Tanaka, and Ohgami see Yin’s helicopter, Ohgami reveals that the duffel bag that he’s been carrying around contains A ROCKET LAUNCHER and blows the helicopter out of the sky! Then, as if things weren’t crazy enough, we get a horror movie ending complete with ominous music, as we see Yin limping in the shadows, and a presumed dead Billy begins to rise up from the ground…and we fade to black? THAT’S how they left it? It took them nearly 5 years to give us Cage II and it was essentially a copy/past of the original film, and the big cliffhanger is that Yin is getting away with murder, Billy is rising from certain death, and the rest of our heroes are completely oblivious to all of this.
Cage II: The Arena of Death didn’t break any new ground, nor did it seem like it was trying to. It did have a few decent ideas, like making Yin more menacing by giving him the brace and cane, and the plot point of drugging Billy to make him into a killing machine felt like it should have gone on longer, but it was dropped halfway through the film to focus on his relationship with Mi Lo. As for Our Man Reb, he got to do the same thing he did in the first film, which was fight a bunch of cronies around town with the help of his two new buddies. We do get a very brief instance of Scott training with Tanaka and Ohgami, and Reb throws a few kicks in several fights, but most of the fights here are slobberknockers as opposed to polished martial arts battles. The most notable cage fight comes when Ferrigno’s character is matched up against another musclehead that viewers will recognize as Malibu from American Gladiators (and coincidentally enough, Deron McBee aka Malibu appeared in two other films that I talked about in No Surrender Cinema, Skyscraper and Immortal Combat). It’s rather serendipitous that as someone who was given the nickname “Malibu” in my teen years that I seem to always end up covering films featuring the guy who is best known by that same nickname.
Cage II: The Arena of Death isn’t available on any streaming platforms at this time (the only full version on YouTube is a foreign copy), but the DVD is under $20 on Amazon. Considering the going rate for the first Cage film on DVD, that’s a steal, but I can’t in good conscience call this one a must-have for anybody unless you really love B movies. The premise was done much better in Cage, and the few new ideas inserted into this film don’t really go anywhere. Aside from a couple of fun fights and the insanity of the film’s ending, everything else is pretty cookie cutter. If you’ve got $20 to spare for the DVD or it shows up on Tubi there are worse ways to spend your time, but Cage II: The Arena of Death doesn’t come close to being as fun as the first film was.
