Blind Rage (1976)

A mysterious mastermind (B.T. Anderson) gets wind of an opportunity to steal a huge load of secret US government money meant to be pumped into South East Asia to buy away the domino effect. He has a brilliant plan: convince five blind men (Tony Ferrer, Leo Fong, D’Urville Martin, Dick Adair and Darnell Garcia) of various nationalities and backgrounds to commit the robbery. This way, they won’t ever see their boss and so can’t identify him. The blind gang will be protected, as well, for they are going to pretend to be able to see during the robbery. Obviously.

Before the heist can happen, our robbers will go through an embarrassing training regimen with Sally (Leila Hermosa), a teacher specialized in helping the blind.

There’s really no way around it, so, like everybody else writing or talking about Efren C. Piñon’s Blind Rage, I have to lead in with the obvious: this is indeed a riff on The Doberman Gang in which the dogs have been replaced by blind people. That’s obviously all kinds of problematic from today’s point of view, but it is also very, very funny, once you start thinking about how the development of this particular piece of exploitation must have happened. One can’t help but imagine a certain amount of alcohol being involved.

Unlike the Doberman movie, Blind Rage is actually fun. Sure, it carries some of the hallmarks of Filipino export exploitation cinema of its time, so expect some flat acting, a peculiar dub, and some dark side streets and beige walls standing in for Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila and parts of the USA. However, after a somewhat slow beginning, the whole affair develops a pleasant amount of energy, going by with a nice zip while hitting all of the heist movie tropes and nods to all kinds of exploitation sub-genres you’d expect, and doing this with conviction. Piñon may not be a terribly stylish director here – he’s really more on the functional side of things – but he does know how to stage cheap action, and how to shoot around ugly sets rather well, something that again helps keep spirits and pace of the film up.

Another likeable aspect about Blind Rage – and mostly what keeps the weird blindness fetish from becoming too offensive – is how seriously it treats its utterly goofy set-up. Keeping irony and self-consciousness to the minds of prospective viewers works wonders, and lets Blind Rage treat its blind criminals like this kind of movie would treat any seeing one. In other words, they are mostly violent shitheads, one of them’s rapey, and rolling over for the police as state’s witness happens in a manner of seconds for another one. All of which doesn’t exactly make for a likeable group of protagonists, but also staves off any potential mawkishness.

I’m not as happy with the decision to introduce the characters – about half with a short scene in which we learn of the violent way they lost their sight – as specialists in particular fields (one is a stage magician, and another a bull fighter!) only to then not make use of these talents in the heist itself, but I suspect these backgrounds are more the film’s attempts at characterisation than a doing Chekhov’s bull fighter kind of deal.

On the other hand, there are not many other films that feature a heist scene based on actors awkwardly playing blind people who are awkwardly pretending to see; nor many that would shoot a scene like that like your typical brutal crime movie heist, including quite the body count.

And if that’s not enough, Blind Rage decides to finish up on a short sequence of scenes in which good old Fred Williamson suddenly pops in for a cigar, some near shirtlessness and a good ass-kicking to reprise his role as Jesse Crowder and finish off the gang’s male, seeing, handler nobody cared about up until this point in a not terribly spectacular roof fight.

Structurally, that’s of course utter nonsense, but it does end things on an unexpected note while adding to the Williamson quota in a viewer’s life, which can only be a good thing.