Fight Back (2001)

As I've mentioned before, the explosion in streaming services, all desperate for content with which to pad out their schedules and libraries, all manner of obscure and forgotten productions have suddenly found a new lease of life.  Even micro-budgeted shot-on-video productions with no name casts that nobody ever saw when they were first released.  Like Fight Back (2001), for instance, a weird little geriatric vigilante movie that seemed designed to try and cash in on the tail end of the original direct-to-video boom, fuelled by the advent of VHS players.  By 2001, these were giving way to DVD players and higher audience expectations for direct-to video productions.  By any standards, Fight Back is crudely made, fuzzily shot with tinny sound and a cast apparently drawn from a local amateur dramatics group, (look, I'm not knocking amateur dramatic companies and their productions, but the key word here is 'amateur' - none of the performances on display here are remotely at the level of even the weakest professional actors).  It sits not just several steps, but several staircases, below the output of other pioneering British micro-budget direct-to-video film makers like Cliff Twemlow or Michael Murphy.  Despite running well under ninety minutes, the film is so slackly plotted and paced that it feels longer.  Indeed, its tale of mysterious pensioner Bill moving to a run down Devon coastal town and tangling with local juvenile delinquents and corrupt local officials, meanders all over the place at a leisurely pace before pretty much petering out, leaving all sorts of threads unresolved.  To be fair, on the way to its underwhelming conclusion, it does include quite a few amateurishly staged fights, a sort of car chase that ends before it ever gets properly started and other action 'highlights' including Bill avoiding falling slates and a speeding car.

Yet, despite all of its flaws - I say 'flaws', but the truth is that it is pretty crap in its entirety - Fight Back has exerted a certain fascination over me this past week or so. Part of this comes from the fact that I've seen it a few minutes at a time, as I've channel surfed.  It seems to show regularly every evening on one of those live streaming channels that seems to exist purely as a vehicle for the commercials it carries, with the films occasionally interrupting  them.  They only seem to have a handful of films, which show over and over on a looping schedule.  Fight Back has that curious property of simultaneously not being good enough to capture my viewing attention for more than a few minutes at a time, yet compelling enough that I keep going back each day to catch a few more minutes.  I think part of the compulsion comes from the fact that it is so utterly devoid of production resources, let alone artistic merit, it is hard to believe that it actually exists.  It isn't the worst film I've ever seen, but it is just so poorly realised that you are left wondering exactly what the intent and hopes of its makers were.  It does have some points of interest  the run-down Plymouth locations - all run down ex-council houses and industrial estates - make a refreshing change form the way Devon is usually portrayed as all sunny, affluent and tourist friendly, for instance.  The theme of seemingly ordinary people 'fighting back' against local thuggery and crime, while far from original, had potential, especially when placed in setting far from the usual urban jungles that feature in the genre, but here it is very poorly handled, with a script based upon a distinctly middle class, middle aged, not to mention patronising, view of young people.  

Fight Back's main sub-text falls into that ever popular middle England refrain of what the 'youth of today' really need is a 'kick up the arse', both literally and figuratively.  The young thugs of the film are first beaten up by Bill, then forced by him into learning new skills, (he effectively imprisons them in a workshop), which make them both better citizens and compliant and respectful of authority.  (Not all authority, of course, only the 'right' sort of authority).  Something those 'namby pamby' (or as the right would say today, 'woke'), lefty-liberal dominated things like the probation service, state education and social services are incapable of doing.  It's a depressing view of British youth, barely a stone's throw away from that old reactionary favourite of 'put 'em in the Army' or 'Bring back National Service' - coercion is the only way to deal with teenaged rebellion.  Because, after all, they are only rebellious because they are horrible little working class gits who don't know their place - to Hell with all that social and economic deprivation bollocks.  Getting back to the film itself, Fight Back is incredibly obscure - there's barely anything about it to be found on the web, for instance.  Checking on IMDB, it appears that most of the principal participants in the film never did anything else, industry wise.  The director had previously directed a couple of shorts but, after Fight Back, he seems to have disappeared from the scene.  But, for now, his only feature is probably being seen by its widest ever potential audience - this is undoubtedly the most anyone has ever written abut it.  (If you are interested, it is also currently available on Dailymotion).