Blind Fury (1989)

I worked with a guy who was constantly confused about my incongruous opinions on things. Seemingly incongruous, I should say. This was about a decade ago. I told him I had seen the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Last Stand, and that I loved it.

He looked at me like I had three heads. He said it was completely hypocritical to everything I ever said about movies. I always railed against mainstream fare, and sang the praises of great filmmaking.

I guess it made me seem like an oxy-moron.

Real movie freaks get it. They understand how someone can love Bergman, Kurosawa, Leone, and Ashby, but still dig a good Chuck Norris actioner.

Art films and exploitation movies have at least one thing in common. They defy the mainstream. They are outsider movies, not necessarily intended for lame, boring audiences.

Exploitation/action/B-movies help us stay in touch with the violent impulses that lie within all of us. Drive-In fans, the best of us anyway, work out these feelings through these low budget features. That's why many of the fans of these sort of movies are among the most peaceful, kind, wonderful human beings I have ever known.

And sometimes the movies are just a whole lot of fun. That's where Blind Fury comes in.

Rutger Hauer stars as a former soldier who lost his vision in a Vietnam firefight and and is trained by monks in martial arts. Back in the States the man is a wandering nomad. Like Rambo, but not so stiff and humorless.

Hauer tries to visit an old combat buddy, played by the Stepfather himself, Terry O'Quinn, but finds himself in the midst of a scheme to inflict designer drugs into circulation. Hauer takes his buddy's young son on the run and has to fight to save all their lives. Of course he brings his trusty sword with him.

For a movie about violence and child abduction, Blind Fury is an uplifting experience. Hauer is great as the blind swordsman, deftly juggling a balance of humor, heart, and menace. There's a lot of goofy action, cheesy gore, lowbrow redneck shenanigans, and fun interplay with the boy. An epic sword-fighting climax with martial arts icon Sho Kosugi rounds out the fun.

Director Philip Noyce went on to bigger if not better things with The Saint, The Bone Collector, Salt, Patriot Games and other highblown horse fodder. Blind Fury is easily my favorite of his films.

The cast is filled with familiar faces: Noble Winningham, Meg Foster, Lisa Blount, Randall "Tex" Cobb, Nick Cassavettes, and Charles Cooper.

Blind Fury was kind of a turning point for Rutger Hauer. He was previously a known and highly reliable commodity in action pictures. The Hitcher, Flesh+Blood, A Breed Apart, The Osterman Weekend, Nighthawks, and of course Blade Runner are all excellent. After Blind Fury his validity fell and it wasn't long before he was working for Albert Pyun.

I'm a big fan of hundreds of action movies. Some are enjoyably rotten, and some are genuinely good pictures. I'm hard-pressed to think of any of them as enjoyable as Blind Fury. Released in 1989, it stands as a swan song for a glorious decade of great and not-so-great action extravaganzas. By the time the nineties rolled into gear our beloved exploitation genre was compromised by major studios and the guts were torn out of its soul.

Written by Mark Sieber