Female Fight Club   Starring: Dolph Lundgren and Amy Johnston Distributor: Exploitation Films RRP: £15.99 EXP001D Certificate: 15 Release Date: 26 March 2018

I must admit to coming to Female Fight Club (2016. 1 hr 26 min 28 sec - directed by Miguel A. Ferrer) with low expectations, thinking that at best it would have some good fight sequences as it stars Amy Johnston who worked as a stunt performer on Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) doubling for Black Widow and Suicide Squad (2016). The film ups its fight credentials by including Dolph Lundgren.

Johnston plays Rebecca, a former fight champion who having retired works in an animal shelter, not that this stops her kicking the living daylights out of difficult customers. Rebecca is approached by her sister, Kate (Cortney Palm) who has gotten into debt with the wrong sort of people and needs a hundred grand to get her out of trouble. Although Rebecca does not have that sort of money it turns out that Kate owes the money to a guy who owns an illegal female fight ring... that’s handy.

You can kind of see where this will be going as Rebecca has to return to a world she thought she had left behind. The film has a B plot involving their father who is serving time for the murder of three men who assaulted Kate years before, but then is he guilty of the crime or is something else going on?

I’ve seen a lot of these straight to DVD releases and truth to tell most of the fight films are terrible, but not so, in this case. It is not the best movie made and a lot of the plot is clichéd and some of the dialogue is clunky, but Johnson is surprisingly effective in the role. The fight scenes are well shot and choreographed, staying within the realms of possible. Given that most of the cast are not professional actors they turned in a very watchable movie.

The disc only has the theatrical trailer as an extra. You get a choice of two audio mixes, a DD5.1 and a DD stereo, although this is not really a film which will over tax either option.

5

Charles Packer