Born to Fight (1989)

• Year: 1989
• Released: 28 Sep 1990
• Country: Italy, Philippines
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096970/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/born_to_fight
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: Tagalog, Filipino, Italian, English
• Genre: Action, War
• Runtime: 90 min
• Writer: Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi
• Director: Bruno Mattei
• Cast: Brent Huff, Mary Stavin, Werner Pochath

5.0/10

Born to Fight Storyline

Super tough Vietnam War veteran Sam Wood is a survivor of a vicious prison camp where he was brutally and painfully tortured before finally managing to escape. When Wood returns to rescue his friends, he finds that they are already dead. Some time later a woman named Maryline Kane offers him a tremendous amount of money if he will accompany her back to the area where the prison camp was to do interviews for a documentary story. It all turns out to be a lie – her father is now a prisoner in the camp, and she knows that only a man like Wood can help set him free. Sam adopts a proposal, but the situation is much more complicated, because the camp is now run by his old nemesis Duan Loc.

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Born to Fight Movie Reviews

Sam Woods was born to fight!

The ever watchable Brent Huff headlines here as super tough Vietnam Veteran Sam Woods, a one man army ala Rambo, in this typically entertaining action flick from the one and only and very sadly missed, Bruno Mattei.

Yes, the result as expected is explosions galore (with the usual quota of ‘borrowed’ footage from various other Mattei flicks), gun fire aplenty (including some cool slow-mo shots of our main man firing off his M-60) and a plethora of one liners as mumbled by our hero whenever he takes out one of the enemy.

This also benefits immensely from its great assembled cast of recognisable faces including the ever creepy Werner Pochath (playing, yep you’ve guessed it, a villain again!), Romano Puppo and Massimo Vanni.

Well worth checking out for fellow Mattei fans. Note: The film goes under the title of Born To Fight here in the UK if you’re lucky enough to find a copy.

IT CAN BE DONE!

The third time Brent Huff would work with Bruno Mattei – there’s also Strike Commando 2 and Cop Game – this time finds the actor playing Sam Wood, a survivor of a vicious Vietnamese prison camp who is talked into going back into hell with reporter Maryline Kane (Mary Stavin, the 1977 Miss World who is also in Mattei’s Born to Fight, as well as Open House, House, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, Caddyshack II, Top Line and Howling V: The Rebirth, proving that I have seen many of her movies), who really just wants our hero to help her free her father from the prison camp.

Things get more complicated when Wood learns that Duan Loc (Werner Pochath, Colonel Magnum from Thunder 3) is still in charge. Yet instead of being a film that explores the root causes and treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, Mattei and writer Claudio Fragasso gives everyone watching what they really want: violence, glorious violence.

The beauty of this film is that Mattei references Casablanca while featuring a hero who is so bored with life that he mixes snake venom into the beer he drinks all day long to escape the pain of his past.

Made pretty much hours after pretty much the same crew finished Strike Commando 2, Born to FIght has everything I look for in a Mattei Philippines war movie, which is totally a genre, thank you for asking. There’s nothing quite like a slow-motion Brent Huff unloading millions of rounds of ammunition into bamboo huts while screaming and repeatedly saying his catchphrase, “It can be done.” Maybe he was a Bud Spencer fan?

As for Ms. Stavin, she also dated Manchester United football hero George Best, who was voted the sixth for the FIFA Player of the Century and one of GQ’s fifty most stylish men of the last fifty years in 2007. One of the first celebrity football players, he was nicknamed El Beatle and owned restaurants, fashion boutiques and a nightclub called Slack Alice. Of his life, he said, “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered.”

Between 1982 and 1984, the fitness craze swept the UK. Lifestyle Records released a series of celebrity albums in which different somewhat famous folks sang cover songs and discussed what working out meant to them. The first two albums, which featured Felicity Kendal and Angela Rippon, sold well. Later releases, well…not so much. Beyond Isla St. Clair, Suzanne Danielle, Christina Brookes, Jay Aston, Suzanna Dando and Patti Boulaye, Stavin and Best released their album, which even had their cover of “It Takes Two” cut as a single. They also covered The Eurythmics “Love Is a Stranger!”

God bless Bruno Mattei and all his hut-exploding ilk!

Sam Wood (Huff) is a Vietnam War vet who is still chillin’ in ‘Nam because he “feels more free there”. When a female reporter named Maryline (not a typo) Kane (Stavin) approaches him about being in a news package about returning to Vietnam, he reluctantly accepts. It soon transpires that the whole thing about being on TV was just a ruse to get Wood to go back behind enemy lines to rescue Maryline’s father, who is still a prisoner of war at the Lu Tan prison camp. She sought him out because he’s a one-man army with a surprisingly positive attitude. His motto of “It can be done!” is downright infectious. But rescuing dear old dad isn’t going to be a walk in the Philippine park. He has to contend with super-evil arch-baddie Duan Loc (Pochath), his toady Bross (Puppo), and a never-ending stream of tan-outfitted, triangular-hat-wearing troops…who bring new meaning to the term ‘cannon fodder’! Will Sam and Maryline be the new Sam and Diane? Or will he prove once and for all that he is BORN TO FIGHT? Man, Bruno Mattei was sure on a roll in the late ’80s. To think that this one man, in this one short span of time, turned loose on the world Strike Commando (1987), Double Target (1987), Cop Game (1988), Robowar (1988), Strike Commando 2 (1988), and the movie up for discussion today, is just insane. Sure, he may have recycled a bit of footage here and there, but who’s counting exploding huts? And this is just ONE guy! Never mind all the many others churning out video store-era gems at the time. Yeah, this never came out on VHS in the U.S., but you get our point.

Both Huff and Mary Stavin return from Strike Commando 2, and while there is some standard bickering between them, this is truly Huff at his best and coolest. As some sort of lost-in-translation-from-the-original-Italian cross between Indiana Jones and Sonny Crockett – when he’s not channeling Clint Eastwood with his low-slung cowboy hat and cigar stub – he drinks snake venom at a bar and massacres countless people with his machine guns and grenades. He has a lot of funny lines, mainly after he kills some baddies: “Shut up!”, “Shove it!”, “You started it!”, etc., though it could be forgiven if it seems like his dialogue was written by one of those push-button insult machines of the time. Still, this is the Huff you want, unlike The Bad Pack (1997), which was disappointing Huff.

Werner Pochath is notable as the evil baddie named Duan Loc, who has an ‘Evil German’ accent. Helpfully, he cries, “Sam Wood isn’t like other people. He thinks he’s inWINCEable! He was born to fight!” It’s also handy to know there are massive battalions of Viet Cong soldiers still on the attack in 1989. The hotel assault scene is a movie highlight, as is the climax, with a mega-kill count and exploding huts galore. It’s amazing the jungles of the Philippines were able to survive after all that was blown up there. But it’s all for our entertainment, and even with the repeated footage (both dialogue scenes and blow-up scenes), it all adds up to a golden age of filmmaking never to be repeated. We should really treasure the output of this time and place.

The soundtrack by Al Festa certainly won’t be confused for John Williams anytime soon, no matter how hard he tries. We certainly preferred the non-ripoff synthesizer themes. That’s what these movies are all about. Blow-ups, shooting, and the craziness in between. You gotta love it.

God bless Bruno Mattei and all his hut-exploding ilk. The reverberations from the explosions that they created are still being felt today.