White Fire (1984)

Robert 'The Exterminator' Ginty!   Fred 'The Hammer' Williamson!  Giant glowing diamonds! Chainsaws!  Nudity!  Guns! Explosions!  How could a film packing in all these elements possibly go wrong?  Well, quite easily, as it turns out.  To be honest, the trailer succeeds in melding together these elements far more coherently than the film itself does.  I once started watching White Fire on a streaming channel but gave up about a quarter of the way in, due to a combination of them running a very poor quality print and the fact that it seemed to be getting nowhere fast.  Then it turned up again on another streaming service, this time with a better quality print, so I decided to give it another chance.  It still felt disjointed with an overly convoluted plot that gets too confusing to follow long before the end.  The direction, by fashion model turned soft core porn director Jean-Marie Pallardy is, at best, serviceable, but the editing, especially in the action sequences, is choppy, with scenes ending abruptly as we move onto seemingly unrelated sequences.  This results in the plot developing poorly, with characters disappearing for long stretches before suddenly reappearing, denying the film any rhythm, frequently coming over as being a random assemblage of scenes.  (To be absolutely fair, it appeared that the channel I saw it on actually did run one scene out of sequence, confusing matters even more). 

Worst of all, the film completely wastes its most charismatic player, Fred Williamson, playing a character who, ultimately, is largely irrelevant to the main action.  Indeed, his entire sub-plot seems to exist solely to pad out the film's running time and his appearance part way through the movie serves only to slow things down even more.  The main plot involves a brother and sister, Bo and Ingrid, (Ginty and Belinda Mayne) working a diamond smuggling racket, in cahoots with the security chief of the diamond mine the sister works at.  Another gang led by an Italian villainess( who is saddled with an atrocious accent that simply adds to an already atrocious acting performance) that wants a cut of their action.  This results in the film's first big action sequence, which sees Ginty using a chainsaw to see off some of the Italian woman's cohorts.  This provides an excuse for some pretty tame gore effects.  The 'White Fire' of the title - a legendary radioactive diamond - is then discovered at the mine, at which point the film starts getting complicated. One development isn't unexpected: the security chief double crosses Bo and Ingrid by conspiring with the rival gang to steal the diamond.  The other, less so: it becomes apparent that Bo's feelings for Ingrid run beyond the brotherly.  After she takes a naked swim, he surprises her and whips away her towel, telling her 'you don't look like anybody's little sister now', adding 'pity you are my sister'.  As if this wasn't clear enough, the lascivious looks Bo gives Ingrid leaves the viewer in no doubt as to what he wants to do to his little sister. 

Things then get even more complicated as the rival gang kill Ingrid in an attempt to kidnap her in order to try and find out more about the 'White Fire', (cue a fight sequence with Ingrid, clad only in a towel, fighting off various gang members).  A grief stricken Bo, after wandering aimlessly along beaches and getting drunk, meets another girl, Olga (Diana Goodman), who bears more than a passing resemblance to Ingrid.  Naturally, he falls in love with her and persuades her to replace Ingrid in his plot to steal the 'White Fire', which is more than mildly creepy due to the incest-by-proxy, (not to mention necrophiliac) angle thanks to Olga's resemblance to his dead sister.  But it gets worse - he also persuades Olga to have plastic surgery so that she looks exactly like Ingrid, ostensibly so that she can impersonate her as part of the scheme, but really because he wants to bang his sister.  Which, in effect, he does, as, after the surgery, (a bizarre sequence involving an island of - possibly lesbian -women and some kind of feminist guru-cum-plastic-surgeon), Ingrid/Olga is being played by Belinda Mayne, the original Ingrid, (the plastic surgery having replicated not only Ingrid's face but, miraculously, also her knockers and arse that Bo had admired so much)..  At which point it turns out that Olga is either a high class hooker or the mistress (it is never really made entirely clear) of some villain, who has sent Fred Williamson's character to find her.  Oh, and the security chief at the mine decides to double cross the other gang by co-operating with Bo and faux-Ingrid to steal the diamond, before double crossing them and tipping the gang off.

At which point it all becomes barely coherent as to who is doing what to who, who is double crossing who or, indeed, who anyone actually is.  The latter problem is compounded by the fact that the film is full of large Turkish moustaches - every henchman, no matter who they are working for, sports one.  So prevalent are they that, obviously wanting to fit in, Ginty and Williamson sport their own extravagant facial hair.  A French-Italian-Turkish-US co-production, its international cast are severely hampered by the fact that many of them, including Brit Belinda Mayne, are clearly dubbed on the English language version, although many of the performances were weak, to say the least.  Gordon Mitchell, (a veteran of many an Italian exploitation flick), as the security chief, for instance, is particularly poor.  Even those more capable members of the cast are roundly defeated by a weak script that serves up some utterly nonsensical dialogue.  Only Williamson manages to rise above it and deliver a reasonable performance -  which makes it even more of a pity that his role is entirely superfluous to the plot.  On the plus side, the Turkish locations look good, the inane title song performed by Limelight and Vicky Browne and produced by Jon Lord is irritatingly catchy, despite some poor editing, most of the action scenes are reasonably entertaining and Belinda Mayne's nude scene is, it has to be said, very enjoyable.  Overall, White Fire would be a perfectly enjoyable piece of low-rent exploitation if it wasn't for the incest angle, which hangs heavily over the action.  It is just too prominent to ignore, (It drives one of the key plot twists) and left me feeling extremely uncomfortable, (just about everyone else I've spoken to about the film had the same reaction).  It just feels as if someone was trying to enact on screen a personal fetish/fantasy - which would be fine if it was one shared by a large proportion of the audience, but somehow I doubt that many viewers would ever have had incest on their minds.