Always had a feeling I wasn't going to like this. Movies with a plot like "Raze" may have been tremendously popular during the exploitation-heydays of the 70s and early 80s, but it's just not done anymore these days. My love for underrated actress Rachel Nichols eventually persuaded me to give "Raze" a look, but when her beautiful face gets smashed to bloody pulp before the opening credits have even appeared on screen, I should have stopped watching and put the DVD safely away somewhere at the bottom of my collection. "Raze" is a movie about beautiful women in captivity that are forced to bare-knuckle fight each other until one of them is dead. As you can imagine, this leads to (far too) many deeply unpleasant sequences of respectable actresses - or, in case of Zoë Bell, stunt women turned actress - beating and kicking each other nonstop for several long minutes. I honestly didn't know there was still a market for this type of filth. All the other dreadful clichés of ancient Women-in-Prison movies are represented as well, like loathsome male guards and a vicious shrew at the head of the organization. Oh, Sherilyn Fenn... how low you sunk! The only thing surprisingly missing is gratuitous nudity, like shower sequences or breasts falling out of tank tops while fighting. What a relief to see that at least one tiny bit of good taste made it to the new Millennium.
