White Fire Blu-ray

Esteemed French soft-core impresario Jean-Marie Pallardy wends his wickedly insidious way into the cheap thrill-strewn annals of sinuous exploitation excellence with his 24 carat, Bona Fide, B-Movie Bobby Dazzler, the multi-faceted freak-show, 'White Fire'. Clearly a canny celluloid alchemist of some considerable filmic fluency, as in lesser, more prosaically nuanced hands, this roughly hewn, uncut grindhouse gem would in all likelihood have remained an ill-remembered, trash movie misfire. And yet, perhaps, by sheer cinematic serendipity, White Fire's exotically enticing Turkish environs, plus some additionally fortuitous casting choices, namely having the stoical presences of enigmatic, no-nonsense actors like Fred 'Vigilante' Williamson, Robert 'Exterminator' Ginty and rock-rugged Roman, Gordon Mitchell adding their much-needed idiosyncratic ballast to the 'blah-blah' piecemeal plot of violently opposing smugglers covetous need to claim the outsized, brightly glistering, no longer mythic 'White Fire Diamond' for their own doubtlessly nefarious needs! This singularly unusual celluloid curiosity has the additionally funky frisson of Robert Ginty's bravura, dock-side chainsaw massacre and the sinful suggestion of a not-so latent incestuous desire betwixt brawny, tousle-haired Bo (Robert Ginty) and his maddeningly nubile sister Inga (Belinda Mayne), while remaining unconsummated, merely increases the risqué piquancy of an already outré, pleasingly paradoxical B-Movie melange! And it is White Fire's frequently awkward, bafflingly bizarre treatment of what might have been such stultifyingly ordinary material that gives this high-powered, diamond-detonating, chainsaw-battling, boredom-dynamiting dose of morally mutable sibling-on-sibling action its most transfixing allure! Trash aficionados of Cirio H. Santiago, Brian Trenchard-Smith, and Jess Franco's hastily mounted, no less saucy Spy escapades might well glean the most guiltless pleasure from Monsieur Pallardy's extraordinarily lustrous, recklessly lurid 'White Fire', an injudiciously juicy, genre-mashing, morality-baiting, multi-cultured jewel from the golden age of independently financed, iconoclastic genre cinema!