Blind Fury

Nick Parker, blinded in Vietnam, comes home after village women teach him to use a sword. Years later in the United States he goes looking for an old army friend, finds the man has been abducted and his son left alone. Trying to get the boy to his father puts Nick against a crime syndicate. Phillip Noyce directed, in his first American film. Rutger Hauer plays Nick, with Terry O'Quinn, Lisa Blount, Randall Cobb and Noble Willingham. It is an Americanised remake of Zatoichi Challenged, the seventeenth entry in the Japanese Zatoichi series. The person who kept the project alive was the actor Tim Matheson, a fan of the Zatoichi films, making his debut as a producer. Matheson and the producer Daniel Grodnik spent seven years looking for a distributor and only landed a deal with Tri-Star in 1986. Hauer counted the part among the hardest jobs of his career, having to carry swordsmanship and blindness at the same time. He prepared by working for a month with Lynn Manning, a blind Paralympian judoka, whose first words to him were that he does not get confused about what he sees. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties genre films and Rutger Hauer. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a serious martial arts film. The tone moves between comedy and violence and the film never takes itself seriously.