BY TODD GARBARINI

One of the most frustrating things that I find true of lackluster movies is that following the passage of time, usually several decades, a film that was initially, and often rightfully, considered a stinker is then later touted as “the original classic!” Generally, these accolades are tied-in with advertising to promote and ultimately sell product and give the uninitiated and the curious a reason to buy the film sight-unseen. Efren C. Piñon’s Blind Rage (1976) isn’t necessarily a bad film, it just isn’t a particularly good one. Despite its 82-minute running time, the film feels twice as long and that’s never a good sign.

Blind Rage is a good example of an interesting premise executed in a fashion that can best be described as pedestrian. A product of 1970’s “chopsocky” cinema, the opening credits play over the vocals of Helen Gamboa singing the title track, “The System”, the film’s original title when it was released in the Philippines in October 1976. The song sounds like a cross between the instrumental strains of The Bermuda Depths’s (1978) title song “Jennie” and the vocals of Shirley Bassey’s tune for the James Bond film Moonraker (1979). Johnny Duran (Charlie Davao, a Philippine actor with just over 250 titles to his credit) of the Oriental Bank makes his way over the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, CA and meets with several officials representing the U.S. Treasury Department and chairman of the project Southeast Asia, the Dept. of Foreign Affairs, the Secret Service, and a member of the CIA who looks like the "Dodgson! Dodgson! We've got Dodgson here!" guy in Jurassic Park (1993) with his tourist hat. They discuss the transfer of $15M earmarked by the federal government to prevent countries surrounding Vietnam from falling the way that South Vietnam did to the North. Unfortunately for them, some bad guys are looking to get their hands on the loot and before you can say “The International House of Pancakes”, Duran is followed and approached by Lew Simpson (B.T. Anderson in his only screen credit if you believe the IMDB) with $250K in cash in a briefcase. It’s Simpson’s hope that Duran will agree to help him commandeer the $15M for he and his bosses. It isn’t long before Duran phones Simpson the next day to accept the offer. They meet at the foot of 62nd Street in front of the Bay Yacht Club which is less than five miles from the Palace Theatre in Long Beach, CA where this film opened on Wednesday, March 7, 1979 for a brief engagement under its alternate and better known American title.

Duran senses a catch and his intuition proves right: he must recruit and train four blind men to pull off the bank heist! These men have all suffered a terrible fate that has led to their lack of sight, which the viewers get to see in all its glory: Willie Black (D'Urville Martin), a former mobster blinded by the Syndicate after foolishly cheating them out of money; Lin Wang (Leo Fong), a “liquidator” for a gang and double-crossed hoodlums on an opium deal; Hector Lopez (Darnell Garcia), a matador who was gored in the eyes by a bull (I kid you not); and Amazing Anderson (Dick Adair), a magician who was born blind (I cannot even fathom how that works). A fifth blind man (Ben Guevara) is included to disable the bank’s alarm system. Sally (Leila Hermosa, whose last name in Spanish means “beautiful,” a fitting adjective) is recruited to train the blind men and takes them through a mock robbery, putting them through the right number of paces and utilizing their acute hearing to guide them through the whole affair in a makeshift “bank” complete with the exact layout of the real one with “dummies” to sit in for tellers. Their sense of smell is heightened as well. Sally’s perfume is noticed by one of the men who tries to have his way with her one night while another comes to her rescue, calling the brute a “sex-hungry bastard.” It’s this sort of ludicrous dialog and bad dubbing that usually makes such films a riot to watch. When the bank robbery goes down for real, it’s quite something to see until the action goes south and a walking stick is left behind, behooving the police to catch them. With ten minutes left in the film, Fred Williamson finally shows up to snarl the bad guys!