Fight Valley (2016)

Fight Valley (2016)

 

Starring: Susie Celek, Miesha Tate, Erin O'Brien, Kari J. Kramer, Cabrina Collesides, Chelsea Durkalec, Jefferson Sanders, Ivy Lashawn, Steve Downing, Cris Cyborg, Holly Holm
Director: Rob Hawk
Action Director: Erik Aude

 

It isn’t often that I get completely blindsided by how a bad a film is. In the early days of my movie reviewing, I often used Hot Potato as the gold standard for awful martial arts movies, with a rating based around how many times I would watch a film before considering watching that piece of crap again. My measuring sticks were adjusted by Sunland Heat, a made-in-Brazil low-budgeter with awful fight choreography and the total lack of an actual climax. These days, I occasionally come across a lesser martial arts film, especially while investigating lesser-known movies for my Almanac. But then there’s Fight Valley, which manages to be even worse than Hot Potato and Sunland Heat.

The first few scenes don’t have much to do with anything that comes after, so I get the feeling that writer-director Rob Hawk was retooling the script on set. The story proper—following a series of random scenes involving “Jabs,” played by UFC Bantamweight Champion Miesha Tate—begins with Tori Coro (Chelsea Durkalec), a young woman in Camden, New Jersey, fighting a girl in the park for fifty bucks. Following the fight, she joins up with her friends, Yanni (Suburban Coven’s Kari Kramer) and Jamie (Cabrina Collesides, of Called to Duty and Talons of the Phoenix), and her girlfriend, Duke (Erin O’Brien, of The Wrong Tenant and The Getback). The girls hang out and watch some MMA fight between the aforementioned Jabs and a blonde chick named Payton (Holly “I Beat Ronda Rousey” Holm).  And then go back to Tori’s father’s place for lesbian sex.

Tori wants to get Duke out of the ghetto and to someplace nicer, but like in a lot of these films, lacks the funds to do it. If she were in Detroit, she could try robbing a blind, former Special Forces operative. Instead, she hits her sister, Windsor (Susie Celek), up for money, but there’s some bad blood between them because of stuff that happened when their parents divorced. Tori receives word from some Random White Guy about the opportunity to make big bucks fighting in “The Yard.” Six weeks later, Tori’s dead body is found in a forest. Exit Tori. Stage left.

This is where the film becomes about Windsor. After her sister’s funeral, Windsor leaves her posh house in somewhere that isn’t Camden, NJ, and heads for the hood to find out what happened to her sister. Nobody can give her a straight answer about what happened or what might have happened, probably because Rob Hawk’s script can’t give us a straight answer about anything, either. There’s talk of “Fight Valley” and “fighting in the Valley,” as if those are two different things. I assume “The Valley” refers to a section of the Ghetto. “Fight Valley” is supposed to be some secret place for fighting that you don’t talk about, much like the “Fight Club.” And “The Yard” is a…sub-division of fight valley for high stakes fights. I guess. I didn’t write the script.

Anyway, Duke and the girls take Windsor to see Stakes (Jefferson Sanders, who’s due to appear in the movie’s sequel…God help us all), a rich gym owner who also moonlights as a fight organizer of sorts. Their meeting with Stakes ends up in a big cat fight with über-bitch Gracie (Ivy Lashawn) and a bunch of other hoodrats. Duke is beaten into a coma and taken to the hospital. Re-enter Jabs, who decides to take on Windsor as a student for no apparent reason. Jabs trains Windsor in the art of street fighting so she can survive on the mean streets of Camden, The Murder Capitol of the World, until she’s ready to face off with her sister’s killer: Church (Cris Cyborg, who was 31 when she made this film, but looks like she’s pushing 50).

If you can get past the questionable acting and dialog, the film’s major problem is that the script does not make a lick of sense. The film reeks of a script that was constantly being re-written on the go, possibly(?) because the filmmakers didn’t have their UFC talent on hand for very long. The first few scenes are completely removed from anything we see later: we see Jabs (Miesha Tate) beating an opponent to death during a street fight, a “one year later” intertitle, and then Jabs working at an ice factory. I guess that was the original story: the traumatized fighter who reluctantly gets back into the game. That is followed by Jabs quitting her job to rescue her sister, Kate (whom I also think is Chelsea Durkalec), who was jumped by Gracie and her hoodrat henchmen. But none of that gets mentioned again, so I’m guessing the story was re-written and director Hawk just kept that footage in.

The movie also brings up the shady white guy who gets Tori involved in “The Yard,” but he never shows up in the film again. The rest of the story makes it look like “The Yard” is managed solely by Stakes and his buddy, Gamble (Steve Downing, who also is set to appear in the film’s sequel…Why, God? Why?). What was the deal with the white guy? There is also a flashback where we see Tori going to see Stakes to set up a fight, picking a brawl at Stakes’s hideout, and being put in an arm-bar by Cris Cyborg and possibly choked to death. Another flashback at the end shows that Cris choked her to death in an arm-bar, but in another location. So, was that a plot inconsistency? Or was Tori such a dumb broad that she got her ass handed to her in side brawl with Cyborg, and then willingly accepted a challenge to get beat down by Cyborg again?

Speaking of beatdowns, the fighting in this movie is pretty awful. It feels like uncoordinated brawling. I mean, bar fights in old John Wayne movies were more satisfying than the scuffles in this, and this movie employed three UFC champions! People who want to complain about Donnie Yen’s Special I.D. and stuff like that really need to re-appraise that film as a modern-day classic compared to this dreck. Us fans occasionally talk about how good screen fighters not being able to beat people in real-life fights, but often the opposite can also be true: some good fighters in the ring simply don’t look good onscreen. Oh, Benny “the Jet” and Keith Vitali did, I’ll give you that. But for every one of them, you have your Don “the Dragon” Wilson’s and your Dale “Apollo” Cook’s…and now, your Miesha Tate’s, Holly Holm’s and Cris Cyborg’s. Yeesh. And crappy fighting is the just final nail in the coffin of this awful film, which, did I tell is getting a sequel? May God have mercy on us all!