Watch Tough to Kill For Free

Touches You

Strong and Moving!

Overrated and overhyped

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

With a threadbare jungle mercenary script, a touch of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", zero nudity, and zero blood, this is a tough watch. Character development is nil, and the film is mostly aimless walking around in the jungle, by men who we care nothing about. The highlights would include a game of chicken with grenades, and a surprise ending. The lowlights would include a bloodless decapitation, gratuitous explosions, a stock footage cheetah, and a plot that hinges on someone having a million dollar price on their head, who we know nothing about. "Tough to Kill" is tough to watch, for obvious reasons. Not recommended, even for admirers of low budget exploitation. - MERK

Story of a mercenary who infiltrates a mercenary army in order to kidnap one of the other soldiers and bring him back for a reward. the problem is that several other men find out whats going on and insist on being cut in. Once on the march the group begins to turn on each other. Slow to start action film is actually pretty good. If you have the patience to get through the first 25 minutes or so you'll find that the characters are all set up so that once things get into motion people are more than just cardboard cut outs. The print I saw is one of the ones supplied to the now defunct BCI by Crown International and its slightly choppy and seems to have been put together from a number of video sources. I mention this because I've read some reviews of this film that have mentioned poor video quality, which would be understandable since this is the type of film that probably wad a heavy renter in the VHS days and since many budget DVD companies sometimes use VHS copies as their sources you're going to get a warn picture. I like the movie and think that if you like B movie action films you'll want to give it a shot

D'Amato's war film meshes The Wild Geese with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, as a group of mercenaries on a mission in an unnamed African country are sidetracked by their scheme to deliver one of their number dead or alive to the shadowy organisation who have placed a bounty on his head. The film stets up its seeming hero, Martin, as a watchful and cool customer, infiltrating the mercenary unit and successfully winning a game of one-upmanship with the unit's martinet commander, Major Hagerty. The two men are forced to work in collusion when they discover that they are both planning to kidnap the wanted man and get the reward – Hagerty needs Martin as only Martin knows the delivery point, but Martin can't shake Hagerty nor the two other mercenaries that get involved. As with most gangs of desperate men, the gang is internally divided and constantly at each other's throats. Their only bond is collaboration to make money.Tough to Kill is a typically cynical 70s war exploitation picture, showing men who fight not for king or country or ideal, but simply for their own financial gain. D'Amato, with his customary flair for disparagement, reduced the war game to a petty scrabble to see who can deliver a body for booty – a body dead or alive, so the he-man warriors are reduced to a team of walking wounded and bickering ninnies squabbling over who carries a stinking corpse and finally a severed head. Despite encouraging us to see Martin as cool and collected for the first half of the film, D'Amato turns the tables on his hero and his audience at the end, by having Martin and the others played for fools by the seemingly innocent but actually scheming and inventive black helper who has been their lackey throughout – white culture is seen as not merely inherently greedy and corrupt and back-stabbing but also as a game which whites are no longer top dog at.The film is worth watching for its steely reductionism and for its moments of genuine sadism – the wanted mercenary is a nasty piece of work who tortures the black guy by immersing him in a turd-filled latrine tub, and who dies himself when fed a cyanide-laced rabbit whilst ravenous. The universe portrayed by Tough to Kill is by a fetid dog eat dog swamp, and although the ending portrays the black guy as managing to beat the white man at his own corrupt game, the victory feels unstable, as if at any moment what has been gained can be taken away; D'Amato was to explore this kind of pyrrhic black victory again in L'Alcova, showing explicitly in the later film how wobbly the triumph is.

1st watched 11/23/2002 - 5 out of 10(Dir-Joe D'Amato): Ok action-adventure film with unexpected twist at the end. This Italian film seems like it's trying to sell itself as a Rambo-type movie but it's less of a shoot-em-up and more of an adventure. A `white' mercenary is hired to be one of the guys in the troup but then return an enemy or the proof that this enemy is dead. As members of the troupe catch on to what's really happening they become an interested party to the mercenary's task but then they start dropping like flies and we're left with only a handful. This movie is more about the interaction of that handful, but the problem is that their actions are predictable and characteristic of their type of character in the film. So we basically know what's going to happen until the surprise ending. The ending is kind of a retaliation to how the movie treated the blacks in the story, and this part I liked. But overall, the whole movie is not quite worth the effort to get to the end.