There are moments caught on film that truly inspire movie goers for generations to come. My three favorites are when 1)Rocky runs up the steps pumping his arms in the air. 2)When William Shatner yells "KAAAAAAAAHN!" and of course the sequence in Live By The Fist which finds kickboxer Jerry Trimble defending his cherry from brutish Fillipino prison thugs, while completely in his underwear! This scene inspired me in the most unusual way, in that I realized that fighting in a shower in your underwear is almost as gay as George Takei after 5 beers.

Speaking of the Takeisenhour, he's in this classic boys behind bars, epic. (Just the sound of Takei in a prison somehow makes the movie seem far more homoerotic, I mean we're not even going to imply what "Live by the fist" means. I'm guessing they were asked to drop the ing from the title) Things are of course off to a high flying start when Jerry Trimble defends an asian woman from various asian thugs, and it's here he gets knocked out and when he awakes he has a bloody knife in his hand and because there are no lawyers(Since he has no blood on him), he gets sent up the river. (In which he fights in his underwear!) I forgot to also mention that Jerry Trimble also killed a man while saving the woman, so immediately he's marked for murder by the leader of one of the gangs. Many fight sequences occur with Trimble fighting with a plastic pickaxe (I worked a labor job when I was 19 and a pickaxe is very heavy so watching these guys fling it around as if it were nothing was humorous)

Around this time we learn of Ted Markland and he runs the white group in the prison. Of course the thing I was wondering is how exactly a racist redneck could end up in a Filipino prison, let alone start a group of white supremists. Anyway he wants Jerry Trimble to join and because Trimble doesn't, he also marks Trimble for demise. Of course Trimble eventually joins Takei's gang for reasons that are definitely not homoerotic. After all, any guy who can fight in his underwear in a shower is a guy that's right up Takei's alley. Okay, okay i'll stop making jokes of the overall gayness of this movie, but keep in mind it has George Takei and features a blonde stud fight in his underwear while getting wet and all this, couldn't have been on accident.

Anyway the various gangs are actually under the thumb of the prison warden, who wants Takei dead, and wants to silence the only woman in the film, she's a human rights activist, who sees nothing wrong with wearing sexy clothing in a fully male prison, where security is really quite lax. Not that it matters our resident babe ends up being rescued by Trimble who after pounding the pavements with his opponents he escapes on a boat and rides off into the sunset with the human rights activist. Of course we all know what happens next, since any man who has escaped from prison with a human rights activist in skimpy clothes would end up happening in real life. Although the half assed ending cuts right to the credits, we do get to see Trimble eye that sweet piece of human activist ass and it's here Trimble expresses heterosexuality, it took only 90 some minutes to do so.

As it stands though Jerry Trimble would go on to star in such, uh, classics as Breathing Fire, One Man Army and Stranglehold. Meanwhile the audience is left to flounder in the gayness and ineptiude of Live By The Fist. So I say Fuck Brokeback Mountain, this is the movie that ushered in a new era of thinking, without this movie, a movie like Brokeback Mountain could not have been made. Period.

6 Hamlins

Ryan