Fight Valley is about a young woman being found dead after getting involved in an underground fighting ring. Her sister, windsor, begins training under a respected ex-fighter as she searches for the killer.

2016's Fight Valley pulls off a convincing depiction of female fight culture by having active female UFC fighters playing off their personas rather than being made to play actor. Mugging, grimacing are the name of the game as it feels like every exchange of dialogue is going to end up in a massive ruck. So it's a ton of fun.

It's loud, it's aggressive, it's operatic, it's very Italian feeling. Which i like. I'll try to be balanced with my critique, but I do warn you, it didn't take long for this film to win me over. So I said that the UFC fighters do not play actor and instead play themselves. I guess a more measured way of describing this would be to say that the majority of the cast play it way OTT and therefore make it hard for you to ignore them.

What also helps Fight Valley is it's New Jersey regional feel, it's colourful locations and background artists, tattooed up like they just walked off the set of fury road. The atmosphere achieved is what gives this film the gravitas which it's cast do not provide.

How the hell this film got a $27,000,000 is beyond me, but upon learning of this absurd amount of money, I've become less forgiving of the film's rough edges such as it's poor sound mix and very bizarre cinematography. The moment I saw two directors of photography accredited, I knew I was in for a weird looking film. Fake cinema verite would be the most fitting umbrella to put it under as most interiors adhere to three point lighting, yet the camerawork for the most part is shaky and sloppily framed. When you think about it, it's a fitting look for MMA, a combination of glam and grit.

Fight Valley is probably the only 'Foxy Boxing' movie you will need to see. It has everything, fists, grapples, dixie jeans, lesbianism, thrash metal, New Jersey, geographically confusing montages and a lotta shouting. For a compelling story and good acting though, I'd look elsewhere.

I read the reviews before watching the movie so I knew it was gonna be bad, but because Miesha Tate was on it I had to watch it. I'm a big Miesha Tate fan and a huge MMA fan. It also stars Cris Cyborg and Holly Holm (I think, didn't see much of her in the movie...) so I watched it.

But it all went wrong. Nothing worked. I'll not go into every detail saying this was bad because and that didn't work because here, and strangely, the correct and polity thing is to say that it all failed.

The viewer struggles to watch the movie, the first half of the movie pushes the inner will of power of the viewer to its limits not to do the logical thing which is just stop watching that thing that is on the screen. It's so bad and illogical and so badly made and so totally nonsense that you almost match Miesha's will of power when the grabbed Holly Holm on that rear neck choke when she won the UFC title, holding on to it and not letting go no matter what. Yes, the viewer really must hold on to his will to watch this entire 'movie', he has to be like a pit bull on a bone. ;)

And the second half of it doesn't get better. At all.

People can say it's a low budget movie, but the budget was 27 million US dollars. That's not a low budget and could never be an excuse for this to be as badly made as it is and as bad as it is. Have you ever watched Elite Squad (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861739/)? It was made with 4 million US dollars! Seven times less than that!!!

I'll be honest, everyone involved in this thing (it's very hard to call it a movie) should not be a thousand miles near the movie business again, ever again. As for the actors, I know the script and the directing were, how should I say this politely, zero on the scale from 1 to 10, but still, the actors involved must work on their acting skills a lot.

So I gave it a 4 out of 10. I was very generous, I overrated it because Miesha Tate is on it.

On the mean streets of Camden, New Jersey ("the murder capital of America", as we're informed), there is an undisclosed location where girls go to fight. Naturally enough, it's called Fight Valley. It seems only the shady underground fight promoters and the fighters themselves know where it is. When one of the ladies, who is a bit more untrained than the other, more hardened fighters, enters Fight Valley, trouble follows. Tori Coro (Durkalec) finds Fight Valley...but never leaves. Soon thereafter, her sister Windsor (Celek) endeavors to find out what happened to her.

The problem: Windsor comes from an upper-middle class or possibly rich background, and she doesn't fit in at all with the dwellers of the ghettos of Camden. Despite their socioeconomic differences, Windsor ends up befriending the "Knockaround Girls" - Tori's friends Jabs (Tate), Duke (O'Brien), Yanni (Kramer), and Jamie (Collesides). When it becomes apparent that the evil, Tong Po or Ivan The Russian-style baddie is a frightening woman named Church (Cyborg), Windsor and all the others train their hearts out for a big, final showdown in Fight Valley. Who will emerge - if I may borrow a phrase from Tori Spelling (as I often do) - vicTORIous? You'll find out soon enough...

Yes, Fight Valley is a low-budget Punchfighter with non-professional actors. But it's got heart, and, dare we say, charm. We here at Comeuppance Reviews are incredibly impressed that this film was completed and released to the world. It's on Amazon Prime, DVD, cable, and presumably it will hit other formats such as Blu-Ray at some point in the future. It was clearly a labor of love and we respect that. To all the haters out there who are crying into their Tapout shirts and proclaiming this is "the worst movie ever!!!!!" we say: you try doing what the makers of Fight Valley did. How many movies have you made? Oh, zero? Okay. Come back when you've actually risked something, created something, and released something.

In the meantime, all of us non-haters can brush aside the negativity and see that the Fight Valley cast and crew were trying. That goes a long way with us. Sure, it's not perfect and it has its flaws, but we say that about big-budget Hollywood productions. We try to judge everything on a level playing field. Much like Fight Valley itself. Viewers should expect going in that you're not going to get Master Thespian-level acting, but is that why you're watching Fight Valley to begin with? Just about everyone in the cast speaks with what you might call a 'flat affect', which we found endearing, not irritating.

Compare that to Chokehold (2019), where the female fighters also had flat affects, but were also there to fight, primarily. Not win Oscars, Tonys, and Blockbuster Awards. Anyway, we wouldn't classify Fight Valley as a "Homie Movie", but it's THIS close. There are some strong Homie Movie influences on the production overall. Also, there's a good, old-fashioned training sequence towards the end that we enjoyed. Because it's 2016, the influence of Crossfit and moving tires around seems to have crept into the training montages. Call it a sign of the times.

The plot is your typical Punchfighting plot, and there's plenty of punching to go around. During the credits, in a little box on the side of the screen, we see behind-the-scenes stills that were taken during the production. It was endearing to see that. It's hard to beat the during-the-credits-and-in-a-box sequence of Attrition (2018), but, to be fair, no one could.

Fans of the real UFC fighters involved or anyone who enjoys female fight films will most likely be the target audience for Fight Valley.