Say the words “flamethrower” and “Robert Ginty,” and I’m excited to watch The Exterminator and/or Exterminator 2. But those words also apply to White Fire, a European action film that ultimately will extinguish your desire. For starters, Ginty isn’t the one who throws those flames, but he does get to rip into the flesh of his attackers with a Stihl chainsaw — a great element that, unfortunately, comes front-loaded with all the good stuff.
Ginty’s Bo is in the diamond-smuggling business, thanks to his loving sister, Ingrid (Belinda Mayne, Alien 2: On Earth), being employed by a mining company and using her assets to manipulate the CEO (Gordon Mitchell, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks). The siblings’ scheme is discovered by sleazy people who want in on it, just as a random miner lucks upon the fabled million-year-old White Fire diamond, a 2,000-carat rock so named because it’s radioactive, burning the hands of all who touch it.
What will burn your eyes, however, are the incestuous overtones between Bo and Ingrid, such as him freeing her towel from her nude body after she emerges from a swim, and voicing what a shame it is he’s her bro when she has a rockin’ bod like that. If you think that’s icky, just wait until he starts living with the prostitute Olga, who’s Ingrid’s spitting image — so much so that she’s also played by Mayne. Then again, White Fire comes written and directed by skin-flick filmmaker Jean-Marie Pallardy (Erotic Diary of a Lumberjack), for whom this kind of thing is NBD.
Shot in Istanbul (not Constantinople), White Fire introduces Fred Williamson (The New Gladiators) in the second half as a foil for Bo — a case to file under “Too Little, Too Late.” Ginty’s mealy-mouthed appeal is a peculiar one, with him forever in motion like a coke fiend. That he’s sold as some kind of sex symbol is hard to swallow; that’s he also sold as a guy who can karate-kick his way through a circle of heavily armed men is even harder. Nearly every backup goon looks like a Turkish Tom Savini, but only one gets bisected by a table jigsaw, testes first. —Rod Lott