Back in the late 90's, when I had unlimited access to cable's movie channels, I entered into a relationship with Don "The Dragon" Wilson. It was a pairing where he'd kick ass and I'd spend ninety minutes of my day cheering him, and his minimal acting skills, on. It's during this time I saw things like Night Hunter, Out For Blood, and the seemingly endless Bloodfist movies. When the nearby rental place had a deal to get five movies for five nights for five bucks, you better believe that one of his movies was in that batch if I could find them.

And that brings me to Bloodfist III: Forced To Fight. When I first saw it way back when, it was my favourite of Wilson's movies and certainly the best of the series. So, colour me shocked, when upon viewing all these years later, it still holds the series championship, even though I probably like Cyber-Tracker best of Wilson's efforts. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for martial arts movies set in prison (I hold the behind bars action of Death Warrant up as one of Van Damme's best movies - even if it's ridiculous as Hell) or the movie's mild attempts at a message about racism but this third entry is definitely the one to see if you have an interest at all in seeing a Bloodfist movie.

Welcome to Wingate State Penitentiary. According to our warden it's an awesome place to contain criminals as he apparently runs quite a tight ship. Of course, while he's giving this speech it's mixed with a man-rape shanking turned ass-kicking as Jimmy (Wilson) shows-up a bit late to save his friend but not late enough to beat the Hell out of those responsible. He also ends-up killing the jail kingpin in the process.

Pretty soon Jimmy finds himself in the middle of a race war as certain racial groups take his actions different ways. Some respect him while others, like the white supremacists, give him unwanted attention. This leads to Jimmy having to fend off various attacks by numerous factions within the prison, being brought under the wing of his older cell mate Samuel (Richard Roundtree) and getting befriended by a few of the convicts who've taken to gardening, eating pasta, and watching game shows in their special fenced off area - apparently it's their "work detail" - which beats the Hell out of doing car mechanics with the white power loving Wheelhead (Rick Dean) and his lackeys.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the first two movies as Wilson doesn't even play the same character but, in the end, do we really care? These movies are mostly about the seemingly random fights our hero gets into at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, most of them are fairly standard in execution and there's less of them than usual (in fact, you could say this is light on martial arts moments) but the movie gets by on a generally decent script by Allison Burnett and Charles Mattera, that may not bring much new to the table and trots out a basic and simple plot, and a few good performances. Roundtree brings some class to the proceedings and Dean is pitch perfect, if stereotypical, in his role. Hell, even Wilson isn't as bad here as he tends to be and certainly shows more charisma than he did in the first two Bloodfist movies.

As the high point of the series until the sixth entry, Bloodfist III: Forced To Fight isn't a bad little low-budgeter from Roger Corman's New Concorde b-movie factory - in fact a similar plot would show up a year later in the companies much worse Live By The Fist. Director Oley Sassone helmed a bunch more flicks for the company (including the now infamous, and never released, comic book adaptation Fantastic Four) as well as a couple more b-movie sequels (Fast Getaway II and Relentless 4) before slipping comfortably into a career directing episodes of syndicated shows such as Xena and Mutant X. Co-writer Burnett has, quite surprisingly, gone on to write such Hollywood fare as Resurrecting The Champ, Untraceable and the upcoming Fame redux. (Chris Hartley, 5/6/08)

Directed By: Oley Sassone.
Written By: Allison Burnett, Charles Mattera.

Starring: Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Richard Roundtree, Gregory McKinney, Rick Dean.