Fight For Your Life is probably one of the most controversial exploitation films ever produced, largely because of its endless stream of racial abuse and on-screen exploits including rape, the terrorizing of an innocent baby and the murder of a child. William Sanderson (of Blade Runner fame) plays Kane, a hate-fuelled redneck who absconds from jail with his sidekicks (an Asian and a Mexican, oddly enough) and - following some routine chaotic character-building sadism - hole up in the secluded house of a black Minister and his family, where the insults fly thick and fast before the Minister is forced to take revenge and tell the foul-mouthed cracker a few home truths in the process.

Although the idea of criminals terrorizing the inhabitants of an isolated house is nothing new in the field of exploitation cinema (see The Desperate Hours, Death Weekend, Last House On The Left and countless others), Fight For Your Life arguably trumps all of them with its staggering, exhausting use of jaw-droppingly offensive dialogue, most of it spewed by Sanderson. It's difficult to imagine the impact this film had when it played in black neighbourhoods on its original release, but at least one reviewer remarked that he couldn't have been paid enough to have been the only white man in the auditorium when the film played in Harlem. Fight For Your Life was denied a British theatrical release in 1981, but a video release the following year allowed the public brief access to this troubling slice of high-octane exploitation before it wound up on the video nasties list and was outlawed. It remains unavailable in the UK, in any form, but was recently awarded the fully-remastered DVD treatment in the United States, courtesy of Blue Underground. Video nasty was a term coined in the United Kingdom in the 1980s that originally applied to a number of films distributed on video that were held by some to be unfit for domestic viewing. ...