In RIPPED-OFF, originally titled THE BOXER and also going by COUNTER PUNCH, MURDER IN THE RING, CHAMP CHEROKEE and TOUGH GUY, Robert Blake, after establishing himself as a great actor in IN COLD BLOOD, is a drifting Vietnam Vet boxer (the next year he'd be a vet cop in ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE) named Cherokee...
After a come-back and then being set-up to lose an important match, is accused of slaying his manager and, in the usual Noir fashion... which this is an extremely low budget version of... is desperate to find the real killer...
Most of the movie feels pasted together with dubbed dialogue and a myriad of awkward, often hilarious close-up/inserts, one in particular involving a brawling Blake blinded by a spiked rag: making his eyes blink like a frantic cartoon character...
Also includes an evil hippie (Tomas Milian); a stone-faced love-interest Catherine Spaak, an overly obvious surprise villain, wah-wah peddle music (which inserted breaks sounding very much like the instrumental noises in Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love) and, last but not least, Ernest Borgnine's sporadic "guest appearance" scenes as a growling cop out to nab our troubled bruiser...
Blake whose performance is more BARETTA than IN COLD BLOOD... makes this corny, campy, obscure import a thoroughly addictive guilty pleasure...
(PS In TAXI DRIVER you can see this movie's playing outside Robert DeNiro's cab, in the dirty New York streets... and it would be a real trip escaping from that hell and finding your way into this one.)
