No Exit aka Fatal Combat

Kumite! Kumite!

Fight to the death round robin tournaments have been action film fodder for decades.

And what’s odd, is that these spectacles always attract huge crowds, but never the authorities. And they’re also lucrative, even though as we’ve seen with certain MMA organizations nowadays, the purses aren’t exactly enough so that combatants can quit their daytime jobs loading trucks.

What Kumite flicks have in common is a brooding antihero who is compelled to participate through some fakakta plot device. These scenarios can be very weird (Gymkata, where there are geopolitical implications to who enters/wins the tourney – the establishment of a missile base), straight-ahead revenge plots, or the best kind: a media mogul or criminal mastermind who forces men to fight for the masses.

No Exit / Fatal Combat, combines the latter two, and carries on the fine dystopian fight-to-the-death cinematic tradition we’ve seen from Rollerball and Battle Royale, up to today’s The Hunger Games and The Condemned. Some of these flicks are undoubtedly finer than others.

Capable Canadian martial artist Jeff Wincott (The Perfect Weapon) portrays Professor Stoneman, one tough hombre and hardly a tweedy elbow patch publish-or-perish egghead. Rather, he’s a bona fide butt whupper, despite being a pacifist.

When a bunch of lead pipe-swinging thugs attack Stoneman’s wife in a parking garage, killing the baby she’d been carrying, Stoneman tries to intervene. (In the 90s it was a requirement that every action movie had a fight scene in a parking garage, and the Foley work sounds never exactly matched when the pipes clanged clanged off the asphalt)

However, the goons eventually get the better of him, and shove him into a limo, and preventing this film from basically being Death Wish.

Suddenly Stoneman finds himself on No Exit, a proto-UFC show, beamed out over the airwaves from some studio in the high Arctic.

As an unwitting participant, his philosophy toward nonviolence is put to the test. Suffice it to say, Stoneman fails miserably, and he doles out a plethora of highly entertaining beatings.

No Exit is Canadian, which makes it an intriguing watch as the Great White North is better known as the source for some of the finest horror films ever made: The Changeling, The Fly, Rabid, Possessor, Rituals, etc. etc.

*** (out of 5)

If you’re an action fan, pick up a copy of the book, Mine’s Bigger than Yours! The 100 Wackiest Action Movies (foreword, Aussie genre legend Brian Trenchard-Smith).