{"id":35151,"date":"2026-04-29T10:33:27","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T15:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35151"},"modified":"2026-04-29T09:33:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:33:53","slug":"movie-report-fantasy-mission-force-1983","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/29\/movie-report-fantasy-mission-force-1983\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Report: <i>Fantasy Mission Force<\/i> (1983)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/fantasymissionforcedvd.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">I got this film <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/04\/good-uh-dvd-hunting-saturday-february-25-2023-relics-antique-mall-i-have-this-gift-card\/\" target=\"_new\">three years ago<\/a>, and since I have been watching films with and\/or about Bruce Lee, I popped this film in and&#8230;. what did I just watch?<\/p>\n<p>This is a direct-to-video or direct-to-cable kind of movie, something that might have appeared on USA Network&#8217;s <em>Up All Night<\/em> program where they played outlandish films like <em>Hell Comes to Frogtown<\/em> or <em>Surf Nazis Must Die<\/em>.  Heck, maybe they <em>did<\/em> play it at some point.<\/p>\n<p>So, the plot:  In World War <strike>11<\/strike> II, four allied generals are captured by the Japanese.  A, erm, Chinese military man puts together a band of misfits to attempt a rescue, including a varmint, a con man, a guy who is dressed like Elvis, a couple of gay-coded, kilt-wearing members of the British Indian forces (I presume), a woman whom I thought was actually the hero, and a couple other interchangeable pieces, none of whom is Jackie (or Jacky) Chan.  The first part of this film is the assembly of this group, <em>after<\/em> nixing James Bond, Snake Plissken, Rocky (I guess <em>Rambo: First Blood Part <strike>11<\/strike> II<\/em> was not yet the phenomenon)&#8211;no fooling, they&#8217;re offered as possible rescuers but are rejected&#8211;the first part, then is the, what, Allied authorities capturing these brigands to carry out the raid.  Jackie Chan and a partner appear as grifters as well, but they&#8217;re not part of the main group&#8211;they just want to recoup the money they lost in a grift-within-a-grift, so they&#8217;re following the group.  After assembly, the group travels toward the place where they think the generals are being held, and they visit&#8211;and destroy&#8211;a village of cannibalistic martial arts women and then a haunted house, where each individual is tempted in his or her own way by undead creatures, and then they get to the final destination to find a bunch of dead Japanese, and then they&#8217;re attacked by Japanese Nazis in 70s muscle cars festooned with Nazi swastikas, and then they&#8217;re all slaughtered except for Jackie Chan and his partner, who learn that it was all a double-cross from the beginning.<\/p>\n<p>The film was dubbed from the original Chinese, and I do so wonder what might have changed in the translation.  Perhaps not much, as outlandish as it was in English.<\/p>\n<p>I invited my boys to watch the film because, hey, Jacky Chan, but I&#8217;m glad they demurred (as they always do, now).  Because they were not steeped in the direct-to-cable schlock in the 1980s and they would not have been acutely amused to watch something like it.  Will I watch it again?  Probably not, but one never knows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got this film three years ago, and since I have been watching films with and\/or about Bruce Lee, I popped this film in and&#8230;. what did I just watch? This is a direct-to-video or direct-to-cable kind of movie, something that might have appeared on USA Network&#8217;s Up All Night program where they played outlandish [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35152,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35151\/revisions\/35152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}