From The Journal of Rex Saigon

RED TO KILL (Hong Kong; 1994)

2011-09-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a review of Red To Kill that won't make your eyes glaze over . . .

RED TO KILL (Hong Kong; 1994)
D: Billy Tang Hin-shing

Lest anyone think his RUN AND KILL licked the bottom of the exploitation barrel, director Tang soon after excreted this astonishingly tasteless Category III endurance test that makes the earlier work look like I HAVE A DATE WITH SPRING! After her father dies, mentally-challenged young Lily Chung is moved into an apartment complex where one floor is a government-subsidized rehab center for like-minded cases. Bad enough she and her new friends must endure the accusatory remarks of the “normal” residents (reflecting prevailing attitudes toward Hong Kong’s disabled as second-class citizens), but also the depraved advances of workshop co-ordinator Ben Ng, who’s also a ripped ‘n ragin’ serial rapist and necrophile of the wackiest sort. When he brutally rapes her after her pretty red dress and undies drive him nuts (the after-effect of a childhood trauma, don’tcha know), then walks free at the subsequent trial because she’s declared an unfit witness (!), social worker Money Lo decides it time to punch this bad boy’s tickets, but gets more than she bargained for when her deliberately slutty come-ons rocket him right off the deep end. Perhaps that tablesaw might ease the negotiations! Excessive to say the least, and balanced with a strange sentimentalism, but those who expect no subtlety (or deep characterizations) will probably find much bad taste to savour. Most of the cast assay retardation by tilting their heads, jutting out their lower jaws and rolling their eyeballs, while Ben Ng, thespian extraordinaire of Category III psychos, never misses an opportunity to stick his bare ass front and center before going beaters on a mannequin or pouring ice down the front of his thong. And while Chung does little to further the plight of the developmentally disabled in Asian societies, she does spend much of this jawdropper in the altogether. Waaaahhh!

A PUBLIC CEMETERY OF WOL-HA (Korea; 1967)

2010-04-27T00:29:00.000-07:00

NOW UPDATED WITH CLIPPAGE!

This review was previously published on this blog in 2008.

Adultery. Suicide. Murder. Insanity. Drug addiction. Severed arms. Severed Heads. Impaled eye sockets. Acid facials. Attempted infanticide. To name a few.

Sure, it all sounds like the grocery list for some lurid Category III thriller from Hong Kong, or a par-for-the-course exercise in J-horror.

But it's not.

Welcome to Korea, 1967.

The film is A PUBLIC CEMETERY OF WOL-HA, a contemporary-set chiller about a conniving housemaid who keeps her wealthy matron in perpetual sickness in the hopes that her eventual death will free up a little space in her husband's love life...and bank account. While the victim takes the eternal yawn by her own hand, and in abject sorrow and humiliation as befits only the most beautiful Korean tragediennes, payback begins in earnest for her tormentors (and yes, there's more than one!) when her ghost returns home to settle up the bill.

There's some remarkably effective imagery here on what appears to be a modest budget (jazzed up with enough cheap-scare violin shrieks to make then-WKU student John Carpenter proud). One might easily draw visual links to similar Japanese films of the period, but on the basis of this, my first foray into old-school K-horror, I'm tempted to think the Korean shock film industry was vogueing to it's own gruesome beat, one that still reverberates in many of the country's unique modern shockers.

Regardless, Michael Carreras would most definitely have been impressed.

Click through to YouTube via any of the above videos for more clips from this and other amazing (and often rare!) Asian Cinema!

Available at many fine retailers near your keyboard

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: The Age of Video (1988)

2009-12-30T19:41:00.000-08:00

Another journey back in time, to the halcyon days of 1988 with this 10th Anniversary of Home Video feature from the pages of the now-defunct home tech magazine VIDEO. What was hot, what was not, and what (they thought) was to come . . .

(turn pages included at the end)

I got your NINJA ASSASSIN right here.

2009-11-27T21:43:00.000-08:00

Really, now, does this look like the kind of fellow who could turn your extremities into sashimi while carving a watermelon wedge out of your throat? I didn't think so. I mean, come on, he's making a little heart shape with his hands. Just for you. Awwwww.

Korean pop sensation—and sometime archenemy to Stephen Colbert—Rain is hawking some tasty little chocolate covered, orange-goo streaked goodies here called Fei Cakes, produced by the Fuma Group Food Company of China, which has in recent years invested heavily in the Industrial Bank, China Everbright Bank and Bank of Communications as part of their plan to become the "China Cake Kingdom." You will eat their cake some day. Oh yes, you will.

Fuma's marketing spiel for the cakes might sound a little . . . suggestive to western ears, and seems to be trying to encourage you to put something besides cake in your mouth:

Rain between your lips, rain in your mouth and in your heart
Fall in love with the Fei cake, with Rain and with the smelling of Rain!

Rain's Coming, indeed.

Now, if that doesn't make you want to run out and buy a box to munch on while Rain slices and dices his way through the ranks of his former ninja clan, I don't know what will.

Well, how about the image from the side of the box, then?

Nah, didn't work for me either. They had me at Sho Kosugi. But the Fei Cakes are mighty good.

As always, my eternal gratitude to Canada's most awesomest Asian mega-grocery chain, T&T, for stocking some of the coolest little nibblies this side of Hong Kong.

Fresh goes better . . . with Jeeja!

2009-11-20T13:32:00.000-08:00

INVITATION ONLY (Taiwan; 2009)

2009-11-19T22:51:00.000-08:00

D: Kevin Ko Mang-Yung
W: Carolyn Lin Chia-hua, Sung In
Taiwan's first slasher movie brings little innovation to the global form, but replicates the cadence and ultra-gory mechanics of American and European forebears like HOSTEL, SAW, MARTYRS and their kin with such a ruthless efficiency that it's almost forgivable to overlook a comparative lack of indigenous flavor, as well as talking points that might seem profound to the average 18-year-old. Gorehounds will surely be satisfied, at least on the level of technical artistry: this is extremely gooey stuff, well-crafted and glazed in warm, golden-grimy hues by DP James Yuan, about five working class strangers lured—under false pretenses—to an executive networking party for "second generation people" at a secluded, abandoned factory warehouse. They're swiftly "exposed" as unwashed social climbers and subjected to prolonged, torturous executions in front of an appreciative audience of the privileged class, who are sickened by the envy of those beneath them, but not so much so that they can't watch the poor saps have their faces and throats carved open. In short order, the quintet is gruesomely reduced to the resilient "Final Boy" (Bryant Chang) and the resourceful "Final Girl" (Julianne), who navigate a punishing gauntlet of narrow escapes, invasive instruments, corpses and body parts (generally not their own) in order to turn tables and open doors to a sequel. Stunt casting of Japanese hardcore starlet Maria Ozawa will no doubt appeal to her onanistic fanbase, and she photographs beautifully in clothes or out of them, but her acting skills aren't likely to push her further into the mainstream as much as her willingness to disrobe as thoroughly as she does here. Make-up effects by Fei Wen-pin and Huang Ming-chu are every bit the equal of their western counterparts. Director Ko makes his feature-length debut here, after buzzing local film festivals and the internet in 2004 with his impressive horror short THE PRINT.

HAEUNDAE (Korea; 2009)

2009-11-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

D/W: Yun Je-gyun

Toronto was fortunate to have had this year's Korean Blockbuster® playing a screen at one of its biggest downtown multiplexes for a few weeks. It's a rarity to view any Korean cinema on the big screen in this town outside of the annual film festival, although TYPHOON did play one week on a screen near the north-end Koreatown a couple of years back.

Though it has much to recommend it, to more jaded eyes (and possibly damaged ears), HAEUNDAE isn't quite the "experience" it's been cracked up to be by various media (particularly the Korean media), despite a clearly and earnestly herculean effort on the part of everyone involved, as well as the suitably epic scope of the "super tsunami" (and the near Hollywood-grade special effects utilized to pull it off) when it finally lays waste to virtually all of Busan.

The only real problem with HAEUNDAE is balance (God knows the film's A-list budget is all up on the screen), which is tipped uncomfortably in favour of that very distinctly Korean brand of loud, slap-happily violent interpersonal relationship for virtually the entire first 70 minutes of the picture, weaving an assortment of romantic, bellicose misfits—a scheming tyrant (repped by vet Song Jae-ho, whose planned mega-mall will oust many local business people), a quartet of love-struck twenty-/thirty-somethings (fisherman Sol Kyung-gu and restaurant proprietess Ha Ji Won, united by her father's death in the 2004 Tsunami; and hunky, nice-guy lifeguard Lee Min-gi and perky college student Kang Ye-weon), cute moppets and even a salt-of-the-earth granny—into position for the rilly big shoo.

Nationalistic Koreans (of which there are many) would argue that these hyperbolic dynamics between family, friends and colleagues are indicative of passion for melodrama and their "earthiness" as a culture, but when it's pitched as loudly, as gracelessly, and as unceasingly (not to mention as drunkenly) as it is here, it's could leave the uninitiated with a splitting headache. It's disconcerting to see such chronic familial dysfunction in almost every film from a culture that prides itself on its outwardly strong family values. Koreans, however, may need a tissue or two by the last reel, since this is exactly the kind of melodramatic rollercoaster they've been conditioned to expect from virtually any film in any genre.

Science? Forget it. Veteran thesp Park Joon-hoong is on hand as a marine geologist (with his own dysfunctional family problems!) whose thoroughly researched predictions of impending doom are, in typical disaster-movie fashion, scoffed at by those around him, particularly his aggressively stupid boss, who's played as such a dim bulb you can't help but wonder how he achieved such high office (this idiot even requires Park to illustrate the super-tsunami principle in the office fish tank!). When he's not dealing with the return of his estranged wife (Eom Jeong-hwa) and the daughter he never knew she bore him, Park's stares ominously at computer screens, pours over ominous maps, receives ominous readouts from colleagues, and generally gets brushed off by the brass.

Fine enough, but the audience is given little sense of what's so ominous "out there" about until well over an hour into the picture. We're given brief shots of an underwater landscape near a Japanese island, the imminent collapse of which, Park suspects, will touch off the killer wave. But these shots show little activity beyond a slightly increasing rumble or shifting of sand. If you're going to follow the American disaster movie model—and import American special effects masters to punch up the realism—you've GOT to have a tease of what's to come to keep people baited; perhaps a sequence showing the destruction of a small portion of the island that doesn't quite register back on the mainland. In HAEUNDAE, the filmmakers seem to think the posters and trailers were all the tease they needed to get patriotic Koreans out to support this year's mega-budget blockbuster: "Face it, folks: you know what's coming; so sit back and watch this hearty stew of soap opera characters drink, scream, cry, fall in love and slap each other for a while!" We do get a few Michael Bay style high- and low-angle slow camera dollies around groups of people in multiple locations transfixing their gazes on television news broadcasts. Surely there must be better ways to film these kinds of gatherings?

Then the wave hits (prefaced by a minor earthquake, no less). And it's hum-dinger! A good 50 meters of briny CGI doom wipes out much of the popular tourist beach of the title, topples the hotels and skyscrapers lining it into each other, props a gargantuan container ship up against the Gwangan Bridge (it's cargo providing a ludicrously exciting falling obstacle course for one hapless schmoe trying to get off the bridge), and washes all of the characters in one direction or another, during which they crank their emotions to eleven, if they hadn't already done so.

And then it hits again, and we accept this because it's what we paid to see, but it stretches logic in ways the Americans stopped doing a couple of decades ago, to say the least (repeat "events" make sense in something like DANTE'S PEAK; they don't really make sense here, but it's still a lot of fun to see). Then, as the waters recede, and two of our beleaguered principals stand on top of a decimated skyscraper with other survivors as the last rescue helicopters roar away with seniors and children in baskets, the camera pans out to the sea and—blammo—another, hundred-metre wall of water comes barreling ashore. At this point, logic has headed for the mountains, and not just to stay dry. But just when we've prepared for this last dose of spectacle, just before it smooches land, the film fades to black, then picks up the story a few days later so the writers can really go for the emotional jugular with scenes of mourning and redemption. Jip!

Despite criticism, this is still very much a film worth seeing. Heck, my own standards were modest enough to pay $13 (+ subway fare) to see it on the big screen at Yonge-Dundas, despite my skepticism that a Korean movie this big would require Korean emotions every bit as outsized! The spectacle is definitely there, although many of the disaster sequences were "shot" from a considerable distance away. Ostensibly this is to give a sense of their scope, but it also suggests that the budget, as big as it was by Korean standards, only allowed for so much personal interraction between the cast and the rushing water, thus we get three main set pieces once the disaster hits: Park Joong-hoon rescuing his daughter from her room on the upper floor of a fast-draining hotel; Song Jae-ho, Sol Kyung-gu and Ha Ji Won joining hundreds in fleeing a massive wave as it barrels down a CG-extended street scape, and clinging to telephone poles where they can indulge some more melodrama; and the secondary character mentioned above trying to get off the bridge impacted by the upright freighter ship. That's more than enough to expect from any country's first disaster movie, but a monied Hollywood take on the tale would allow for several additional (possibly fleeting) sequences involving tertiary and bit players facing the disaster on a more intimate level.

HAEUNDAE is, regardless of its inevitable (though comparably minor) flaws to jaded western eyes, the most convincing disaster film to ever come out of Asia, and the very Korean-ness I'm bemoaning is what makes it stand out from other attempts in other countries. The Japanese did a pretty slick job with JAPAN SINKS in 2006, but the Korean film easily supplants it on many technical levels, and part of that is because it isn't afraid to dumb things down a bit for the domestic audience in order to give them a fun time at the movies. But there's a line drawn, more than half way through, where the dysfunctional-family drama-comedy suddenly becomes an epic scale disaster movie, whereas there needed to be a more seamless integration of the two halves.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (Canada; 1981)

2009-10-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

D: J. Lee Thompson
W: John Saxton

There's a reason Anchor Bay's new release of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME has turned up for as little as five dollars in certain big box retailers in the U.S.: it's an awful movie.

The infamous tagline "Six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see!" is of course part and parcel of the old-school hucksterism used to peddle these "event-related" slasher movies back in the 70's and 80's, but here it's more of a blatant case of false advertising than was usually the case back in those days. Sure, in concept, some of the murders are a little off-the-wall (kebab-skewer through the mouth; weights across the nuts 'n neck, motorcycle spokes to the face, etc.), but they all happen so quickly there's little time to find them anything but frustrating (and upon rewinding, you discover how little you actually see). This movie more likely earned its R-rating for its now-quaint profanity than it's gore (of which there is little) or it's nudity (of which there is none).

By 1980, when this was shot, veteran director J Lee Thompson still had some craft left in him, if barely, but he was clearly painting by numbers on this outing, and sloppily so, as in two key scenes involving cars. Early on (and early enough to be an omen) one character's snazzy Trans Am jumps a rising river bridge, firmly planting (and utterly destroying) it's nose end on the other side, but a moment later, the car's in pristine condition. A little later, the car occupied by our possibly deranged heroine (Melissa Sue Anderson) and her crazy mother becomes lodged between the rising panels of the same bridge, eventually falling into the water below on it's roof, a plunge captured from three different camera angles, all of which are shown in sequence. Then, a fourth shot of the plunge completes the sequence, only this time, the car lands on it's wheels! How stupid did the filmmakers think audiences were in those days, anyways?

And poor Glenn Ford. He took a lot of flack at the time for appearing as Dr. Faraday in this, and his name value is really all he brings to it (as well as the opportunity for the filmmakers to insert another blatantly obvious red herring ("I'll never let anyone hurt you" he reassures Anderson in a disquietingly creepy fashion). One surmises that he took the role because it brought him back to Quebec, the land of his birth. He certainly wouldn't be the first actor to wrangle a free vacation out of a film role (Paging Michael Caine!).

The whole picture is sloppily made and poorly thought out. The red herring count is high, but it's also egregiously stupid, with virtually every character required to do bizarre things or exhibit strange behviour that no human being would ever do or exhibit (especially among a group of friends) in order to supposedly keep us guessing. It's insulting, as is the "rip off that rubber mask" finale straight out of the old Scooby Doo mysteries.

This would be a one star review were it not for the fact that Anchor Bay offers a very nice transfer on this edition, with the original music restored, thus the second star. The film itself barely merits one star. The only extra on the disc is the trailer.

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: State of the Art (1989)

2009-09-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

An article from the dead magazine Video Review, comparing then-cutting edge television sets to their predecessors.

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: RPM Weekly cover story - THE BLACK HOLE (1979)

2009-09-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

Digging real deep today for a musty old copy of RPM Weekly Magazine (Vol. 32, No. 12, Dec. 15, 1979), a trade-only rag for the Canadian radio and recording industries that followed the trends, interviewed the movers and shakers, posted weekly charts in the top music categories, handed out the RPM Gold Leaf Awards (which evolved into Canada's prestigious Juno Awards) and, once in a while, pimped a movie they believed was destined to be the Next Big Thing, in this case Walt Disney Pictures' THE BLACK HOLE (a guilty pleasure of Rex's from way back), which opened worldwide just six days after the publication of the magazine, then promptly became one of those movies that contributed to the studio's lean years in the early 80's. Sure, it's basically a puff piece, written mostly from the press kit, just as such "features" are today, but it provides a sizeable preamble chronicling the history of the studio, and an interview with then VP and GM of Walt Disney Music of Canada Jim Rayburn, who was convinced the various record products would take off concurrently with the success of the film.

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: Lost In Video Limbo (1990)

2009-09-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

From the 1990 "Tape & Disc Annual" edition of Video Review's Movie Guide comes Bruce Eder's special report about popular movies that were still unavailable on VHS or laserdisc. DVD has become home to most of the titles Eder investigates, but there may yet be holdouts. Read on:

REX TAKES TIFF PIX

2009-09-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

Took a few photographs at this year's Toronto International Film Fest, mostly of directors at the Q&As, but I'm no stargazer, so for the most part these were snapped from right where I sat, in one or two attempts, in darkened theaters. What you see is what you get. Or what I got. Or something.

Above, Soi Cheang discusses his brilliant new Hong Kong thriller ACCIDENT. He spoke in Cantonese but rarely needed the questions translated, and yakked with a few locals in the lobby for several minutes afterward. ACCIDENT is produced by Johnnie To, and it's actually superior to VENGEANCE, To's own entry in the festival. Cheang is flanked by an unidentified translator.

John Hillcoat (second from left) fields questions about his bleak end-of-the-world drama THE ROAD, possibly nervous that Bob Weinstein was sitting in the audience shooting uncomfortable stares at him. To the right of him are Kodi Smit-McPhee and Viggo Mortensen (turns out he's quite the long-winded one). Robert Duvall appeared at the outset, but couldn't stick around.

Michael Moore sits with Fest programmer Thom Powers (I think!) for a very engaging Q&A session for his new documentary CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY at the prestigious Elgin Theatre. Also in attendance were Moore's father, several striking miner's from Northern Ontario, and a coterie of hired "protesters" who marched down Yonge Street decrying the evils of Wall Street. Moore's new doc digs up the deep-seated and tangled roots of the current economic crisis in America (and by extension the world), with his typically leftist sense of humour. The film also showcases recently-unearthed footage of Roosevelt giving a speech that, had he lived to implement the plans he puts forth in it, might have altered the course of American history away from the current disaster.

Johnnie To joins fest programmer Colin Geddes and a translator on stage at the Ryerson to perform a little autopsy on VENGEANCE, his slick thriller starring French pop king Johnny Halliday, who also appeared at the beginning of the film, but couldn't stick around. An expectedly sumptuous visual experience even if it isn't top-tier To, with lots of little touches (beyond the casting of Hallyday) that will remind you of French cinema of the 60s and 70s, as well as an epic gun battle on a field full of cubes of discarded newspaper and cardboard that serves as To's homage to Akira Kurosawa.

Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza take the stage with Colin Geddes after scaring the shit out of the Midnight Madness with their pumped-up sequel [REC]2. They don't build up to the good stuff in this. They don't have to because the first film was the backstory. This starts with the good stuff and never slows down.

Hot Chicks In Black & White Flicks

2009-09-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised someone didn't think of this sooner. Frankly, I wish I'd thought of this sooner. There's five of these on YouTube so far, posted just this month by SecretSauceTV.

12 ANGRY MEN

ON THE WATERFRONT

RAGING BULL

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: Buy Now Play Later - Warner Laserdisc (1990)

2009-09-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

Found this in an old Video Review Magazine from 1990, back when you could build a library of your favourite movies on disc from only $24.98. SUPERMAN IV? Sign me up!

TIFF 2009: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968); George Romero at Yonge-Dundas Square

2009-09-12T18:42:00.000-07:00

To Toronto's famed Yonge-Dundas Square, where director George A. Romero, in town to pimp the latest entry in his deathless zombie franchise, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (of course I've got tickets!), expresses his somewhat puzzled gratitude to the throngs of walking dead Canadians (is there any other kind?) who got all dolled up in their nearly departed finery and participated in this afternoon's Zombie Walk, subtitled the "Special Director's Cut Edition" because it shuffled its rotten feet for a good three hours from Alexandra Park to the square. The Master was pleased, if a little incredulous at the whole affair.

Romero was joined by TIFF Midnight Madness honcho Colin Geddes, who further invited a sincere if somewhat clueless city councilor up on the YD Stage to present the director with a "very special award" that recognized both his contribution to the horror pantheon as well as his relatively new status as an authentic Canadian citizen. The trophy, natch, was a model of the CN Tower clutched by a severed hand.

The evidence (click each photo for a larger, downloadable version):

It stands to reason than an evening such as this wouldn't be complete without a free public screening of the movie that started it all . . .

That image on the bottom makes it look like they were presenting some worn-out old public domain VHS tape, but rest assured the film was spun from the excellent Elite DVD. Rex never said he was a night photographer, just an espionage master.

The official Toronto Zombie Walk will be held October 24th.

MIA on DVD: TWICE DEAD (1988)

2009-09-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

D: Bert L. Dragin
W: Bert L. Dragin, Robert McConnell

Found this advertisement for the video release of the direct-to-video horror flick TWICE DEAD while skimming a small stash of bound-for-the-recycling bin home entertainment magazines for the various technology articles I've been posting in the past few days. I haven't seen this little B horror, actually, nor am I likely to, but I thought the packaging looked appropriately garish enough to share.

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: Home Entertainment Technology: The Next 50 Years (1989)

2009-09-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

A look at the future of home entertainment technology, based on then-current trends and predicted by futurist Gary Arlen, in the April 1989 edition of the now-defunct Video Review magazine.

His ETAs may not have been precise, but much of what he predicted has come to pass. Take a look:

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: Double Your Discs (1993)

2009-09-10T19:52:00.001-07:00

From the March-May 1993 edition of Britain's Home Entertainment magazine: disc-maker Nimbus demonstrates feature-length, full motion video from a double-density compact disc at the ever popular MIDEM music industry booze 'n schmooze at Cannes in January, 1993. But could something like this ever catch on? The magazine, much like every Home Theatre/Video magazine of the day, assumes that laserdisc can't be dethroned.

THE NEWZ (USA; 1994)

2009-09-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

THE NEWS (1994) was a one-season sketch-comedy wonder somewhat fondly remembered as the first to attempt to bring the flavour of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, MAD TV and IN LIVING COLOR to late night syndication, but since it varied little in its structure from those shows, and almost never pushed the envelope in new, innovative directions despite being afforded a later, more permissible time slot, it never really caught on. But it had its moments, and it proved fertile training ground for at least one future comedy star, Brad Sherwood, seen in the first clip as his recurring Tom Slack character:

The Happiest Place On Earth!

2009-09-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

No, not Disneyland, stupid. Pacific Mall in Markham, Ontario, Canada, just north of Toronto. If you die without having visited Pacific Mall, you will very likely burn in hell.

Here's a couple of articles culled from a local rag fancied by the hoi polloi, the first from 2006, the second from 2008, when promises of even bigger Asian malls started being made (if not necessarily kept):

From The Archives of Rex Saigon: Gump goes video CD (1994)

2009-09-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

Few among today's digital cognoscenti may remember that the Video CD format—still popular today in Hong Kong and parts of Asia, where few households circa 1993 had VCRs when this low-priced, climate-friendly format made its debut—almost became the successor to VHS. Almost. This ad from Philips appeared in the November 1994 issue of Premiere Magazine, touting the "CD-quality audio" and "digital picture quality" of the then-nascent format. Notice they don't say "VHS-quality" or "laserdisc-quality", since the VCD generally landed somewhere in between those formats—or, just as often, beneath both of them—on the home theatre presentation scale. It may have died a quick and quiet death in North America, but the format's resilience in Hong Kong, in particular, means any fan of the city's cinema who truly wants to wear the badge must indulge the format on a regular basis or risk leaving a considerable segment of Hong Kong's diverse film offerings undiscovered due to its lack of availability on DVD or any other format.

From the Archives of Rex Saigon: LASER DAZE (1991)

2009-09-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

From an issue of Entertainment Weekly, dated 1991, an era when optical home entertainment discs were incredibly large, not unlike the egos of people who owned and collected them.

SINGLES (2003; Korea)

2009-09-02T23:08:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Jang Jin-young
1974-2009

D: Kwon Chil-in
W: No Hye-yeong, Park Hun-Su

Uhm Jeong-hwa, Jang Jin-young

SINGLES is an incisive, progressive Korean comedy-drama that leaves many films in its overworked genre looking exactly like the disguised condoning of tradition they really are, but it's nothing like the U.S. television program, SEX AND THE CITY the U.S. DVD distributor has chosen to compare it to, despite the refreshingly liberal attitude taken by the filmmakers towards the sex lives of single people in a culture that pushes way too hard for traditional, culturally-protective dating and marriage.

One can only begin to imagine how entrenched thinkers in Korean society would react to this honest, observant, level-headed look at four late-twenty-somethings for whom life provides obstacles in both career and love that neither regressive-collective cultural thinking nor parents - who barely figure into the plot - can solve. Nan (Jang Jin-young), is a wide-eyed fashion industry drone busted down to Chili's manager by her sexist middle manager. The shift stings, but also points out realities she's not entirely uncomfortable with. Into her world comes Seo-hoon (Kim Ju-hyeok) a decent-fella securities trader who clearly wants to pursue a relationship despite her reservations.

Meanwhile, her best friend Dong Mi (Uhm Jeong-hwa), a web company employee out of work thanks to her own sexist superior, shares a flat with old pal Joon (Lee Beom-soo, in a 180 degree turn from his creepy role in OH! BROTHERS), who's as unsuccessful at removing himself from bad relationships as she is successful at bringing home a long string of bad boyfriends.

That both of these couples should end up together is a given. That the film provides no easy resolutions yet plenty of optimism for these truly modern Korean women is 2003's most pleasant K-cinema surprise: it allows the protagonists an honesty and resolve in deciding their own fates that many recent K-romances seem hell-bent on denying similar characters. Here, marriage to a handsome man and financial success - long the expectations of many young Korean women - are not depicted as an absolute guarantee of security and/or happiness, and turning 30 without being defined is hardly the end of the world, particularly for those who remain adaptable to the changes happening around them, rather than being pressured to fit a mold as their ancestors were. It should hardly surprise, then, that the film resonated so strongly with many young, independent Korean women who viewed it, some reportedly to the point of adopting Jang's distinctive and spunky bobbed hairstyle, as well as elements of her wardrobe!

Jang Jin-young

Fine acting across the board, anchored by Jang's captivating, authentic performance, raises this far above the low-brow antics too often seen in these kinds of films (CRAZY FIRST LOVE immediately comes to mind). Almost needless to say, the production design and cinematography are sterling, with warm and inviting environments (including an absolutely gorgeous Seoul) serving as extensions of the optimism with which these characters face an uncertain, hopeful future. Must-see contemporary Korean cinema, and easily one against which all similar Korean romantic films should be measured.

INTERNET DISASTER (China; 2003)

2009-08-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

INTERNET DISASTER (China; 2003)
D: Lee Tso-nam

Newly installed in a gleaming Shanghai suburb by her frequently absentee businessman husband (Yu Rong-guang), 18-year-old newlywed Vivian Chan (who’s far from 18 years old) continues her email relationship with an “online husband” who apparently understands her better than the real thing. She also strikes up a platonic, real-world entanglement with a ski bum (Alex To) she meets in her computer class. And then there’s her shamelessly nosy new friend from next door, who looks after that house with her shiftless boyfriend. When Viv’s internet paramour starts exhibiting stalker tendencies, the list of suspects is, obviously, a short one! Though it reflects an increasingly affluent and techno-savvy mainland Chinese audience, the film nonetheless toes the communist party line that maintains the internet can’t be trusted in the hands of mere citizens, a message ultimately delivered by a reformed Viv to her class of rosy-cheeked primary-school pun’kins (who are presumably rosy-cheeked because their classroom evidently has no heat!), one of whom counters that “surfing the web” would be OK because she knows how to swim! Awww. In revealing Yu’s character plays no role whatsoever in Viv’s predicament, the filmmakers flatly suggest that bored wives of wealthy Chinese businessmen would be a lot better off if they weren’t so darned uppity, and yet at the same time, scenes between Alex and Viv—as they frolic through sparkly shopping malls, restaurants and tourist attractions—look like something out of a Korean soap opera, a reminder to wealthy Chinese businessmen, one supposes, to keep an eye on their assets.

"Angel's, I want you to go undercover..."

2009-07-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

"Once upon a time, there were three little girls who went to the police academy. And they were each assigned very hazardous duty. But I took them away from all that, and now they work for me."

"My name is Bond. Just Bond"

And these are Bond's Angels.

Chung Wing, Annabelle Lee Hiu-tung, Wong Kit-ying confront a bad man in CRIMINALS

While many fans of the glory days of Hong Kong cinema were, by 1999, bemoaning its dwindling post-handover output and all but writing it off in favour of the latest fads from Korea or Mainland China, someone was making sure the gap between the golden age and the modest resurgence we've been enjoying these past few years was being filled.

Mind you, he filled it with shit, but he still filled it.

His name was Jacky Wong (or as he was more popularly known in the credits of his movies, Jacky Wong), and it was no doubt due in large part to his money, as well as his company, Winners' Workshop, that the HKMDB lists over 40 productions (including plenty of Category III goodies) on which he served as presenter. ALL OF THEM IN 1999! And the HKMDB is still missing several titles from his resume. I know. I see scores of them whilst fumbling through the dump bins.

I suppose this is where I come in. An inveterate and unrepentant bottom feeder when it comes to Hong Kong cinema (or any cinema for that matter, as this blog has likely proven to the three people who read it), I'm all too content to rifle through boxes of two dollar VCDs in Toronto's many Chinese media shops while most normal online Hong Kong cinema buffs are heartily debating the aspect ratios and audio restorations done on the 32nd DVD release of Jackie Chan's POLICE STORY.

Well, I found a different kind of police story. Eight of them, in fact. Which brings us to Jacky Wong's BOND'S ANGELS series. A series most people probably never knew was an actual series, if they even knew about it at all.

Simon Loui, one of the most reliable character actors in Hong Kong cinema for many years, proves himself ever the trooper when flanked by his inexperienced co-stars in WHO'S THE ASSASSIN. It's thanks in large part to the then-ongoing efforts of Loui and his hard-working compatriots that the Hong Kong industry survived the lean years from 1999 to 2004, wherein bottom-of-the-barrel productions like these kept a lot of people gainfully employed. These movies are generally dreadful, it's true, but their importance should not be overlooked.

I've had the first entry, SWORD OF DAMOCLES since its VCD debut back in late '99 (from whence springs the first review below). It's not a very good film, and was hardly worth the eight bucks I paid for it. In the years 'twixt then and now, I'd seen the same cast on a handful of very similarly-designed VCD sleeves, but the thought of spending another $56 to complete this possible series was a handy deterrent. But thanks to the good folks at the Wa Yi Trading Co. stores (one downtown, two up north), and their continuing divestiture of old VCD's at rock bottom prices, I've managed to complete the set for the grand total of about $16.

Anyone who's seen even one of these pictures would probably tell me that I paid about $15 too much. I don't know; the series kinda grew on me after awhile, I actually started to care about these girls—especially when spunky Kaka got her leg caught in a bear trap, poor thing—and while I'd rate none of 'em higher than a 3 out of 10 (see below) there's a certain wistful feeling that were it not for the heroic efforts of people like Jacky Wong and his brethren who pumped out shot-on-video product like there was no tomorrow for a good three or four years while Hong Kong cinema was on the verge of extinction, we might not have Hong Kong cinema at all today.

Alright, perhaps that's a bit too wistful—and deluded—but since no website I can find (including the venerable HKMDB or the Hong Kong Film Archive!) has bothered to attach a chronology to all the pieces of the Jacky Wong filmography, I decided to do at least some of the dirty work myself.

And while this series may not have generated a best-selling Farrah Fawcett style nipple poster, or changed the way girls feather their hair, it's not without some merit. Some, I said.

Let's start with...

A SWORD OF DAMOCLES (1999) First of far too many Bond’s Angels video features, a largely interminable collection of straight detective stories from Winners’ Workshop, a prolific outfit better known for an seemingly endless stream of shamelessly padded Category III sex flicks that appear to exist for few reasons beyond providing employment to washed-up 80’s directors and uninhibited starlets of dubious talent, and steady product for a recently-re-opened chain of former porn houses in Hong Kong. In shifting gears for an audience that doesn’t wear trenchcoats, however, the company has divested itself of the only thing worth watching in most of its movies to date: gratuitous female skin, thus making their trademark padding all the more unbearable, even as the production methods have taken a turn for the (slightly) better. When the prized Holy Spirit Sword is nicked from a Hong Kong auction house by thieves working for power-hungry businessman Wong Tin-dok, the security chief assigns its retrieval to Simon Loui’s newly opened private detection agency, consisting of himself and three “Angels,” sporty and sassy Kei-kei (Chung Wing), brainy and sensible Ley-kwan (Annabelle Lee) and bouncy and ditzy Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying), who soon uncover a plot—through a laughable amount of intuition and following people around—by the businessman’s aide (Ng Shui-ting) to copy the sword for fun and profit. But the sword has a habit of empowering the worst in those who possess it, causing the audience to view them through green and red filters as they thrust their arms skyward, mad with power. The real saving grace here, (as in the myriad sequels) is the sense of immediacy (not to mention history unaffected by artifice) afforded by shooting virtually without a budget on the real-time streets of Hong Kong in plain view of hundreds of passers-by! Written by the director. Followed by BLOODY LIE. 2.

BLOODY LIE (1999) When his cousin is charged with the murder of a PR girl, Bond (Simon Loui) entrusts his detective Angels (Chung Wing, Annabelle Lee and Wong Kit-ying) to hound a pair of likely suspects—a wealthy playboy (Raymond Cho) and a dirty cop—using their uncanny powers of conjecture, post-hoc reasoning and following suspects around in a conspicuous manner for very long stretches of time. To justify the title, there’s a lie detector scene in this film that runs over twenty-two minutes and extablishes virtually nothing, broken only by a brief sequence of the girls eating lunch and frolicking. By the time the girls are allowed to administer yet another lie detector test to a suspect, and Kiki (Chung Wing) whips out a gun to extract the truth—in a police station!—you’ll be hoping this might be the last Bond’s Angel’s film. But you’d be wrong. Followed by BEWARE OF THE STRIPTEASE. 1.

BEWARE OF THE STRIPTEASE (1999) Evidentally sensing that we needed them after trudging through BLOODY LIE, the Bond’s Angels are back! Resigning from the agency after boss Bond (Simon Loui) notes her gullability in a performance appraisal, private dickette Kiki (Chung Wing) takes a freelance gig searching for the runaway daughter of a successful clothier who bears an uncanny resemblance to the ex-boyfriend who ate a slug from then-rookie-cop Kiki’s pistol after he kicked her around and caused her to miscarry their baby when the then she wouldn’t hush-hush his daddy’s weapons dealing. Surprisingly, it turns out he’s not the same guy—not by a long shot—but it takes the diligent efforts of old pals Ley-kwan (Annabelle Liu) and Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) to convince her that this case goes far beyond a missing teenager. OK entry in the series is typically high on needless exposition and scenes of people walking around, and low on action until the kung-fu finale, but maintains just enough momentum to sustain interest for fans of this kind of video junk. Climactic character twist involving one of the villains is a silly surprise. Incidentally, the “striptease” of the title is largely justified by an unconvincing mash-up of footage with which the director tries to convince us that Kiki is getting loaded in a striptease joing while a caucasian peeler works it onstage. Followed by CRIMINALS. 2.

CRIMINALS (1999) Tasked with finding a politician’s stolen car, Bond’s Angels face a dramatic conflict of interest when boychaser Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) unknowingly falls in love with a key player in the auto theft ring, a suave hood (Teddy Lin) with Ekin Cheng hair on a desperate, murderous climb to the top. Perhaps sensing a dwindling interest in this generally plodding series, production company Winners’ Workshop have paid more attention to the details in this passably suspenseful installment (though they still skimp on the action). The screenplay, for once, holds up reasonably well to scrutiny and thankfully doesn’t require two thirds of the movie to be needless padding, while Wong’s flaky Yuk-yee gets the most shading of any character in the series to date. The cliffhanger ending is also an inspired touch. Followed by WHO’S THE ASSASSIN. 3.

In this scene from WHO'S THE ASSASSIN, the new Bond's Angels extract information from really-super-nice-guy Mr. Ting, played by one of Hong Kong's most venerable players of hissable villainy Karel Wong, whose very presence playing a nice guy in any film should qualify as a spoiler. Notice the deft handling of Wong's lengthy, complicated expository dialogue in this scene.

WHO’S THE ASSASSIN (1999) With one of Bond’s Angels shockingly blown to pieces at the end of CRIMINALS, and Lei-kwan (Annabelle Lee) packed off to the U.S. for cervical cancer treatment in the first few minutes of this followup, ace detective Bond (Simon Loui) pairs insolent, hot-headed Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) with Lei-kwan’s newly-arrived sister Tse-kwan (Miu Yin-wai) to solve the murder that climaxed the previous episode, while new hire Kaka (Cheng Chi-hung), Bond’s niece, gets tangled up with adulterous college flame Marco (Karel Wong), who may very well be the playboy psycho behind the recent murders of two women. Think these two plots will cross? Replacing two main characters in any series is no easy feat, even in no-budget dreck like the Bond’s Angels franchise, but if nothing else, the producers took pains to equalize the range of acting talent across the lead roles—they all suck about the same now, but each deserves at least a few points for trying their best under such catchpenny circumstances. Modest creative gains made in the previous film, and the potential for clever twists, are squandered: in the end, the killer is exactly who you figure it will be despite hoping that the filmmakers have been toying with red herrings along the way. Followed by CRUEL ZONE. 1.

CRUEL ZONE (1999) After countless entries, the Bond’s Angels series finally puts its heroines through the wringer in this followup to WHO’S THE ASSASSIN, the next entry after NUCLEAR WEAPON. Mind you, it’s still a dull slog, but it’s a marginal improvement over many previous installments. Ace detective Bond (Simon Loui), who’s done virtually no detecting of any kind in the series so far, sends the new Angels (Wong Kit-ying, Miu Yin-wai, Cheng Chi-hung) to look after a buddy’s flat on Lantau Island by convincing them it’s a resort vacation (!). Right around the time that Kaka (Cheng) gets her leg caught in a bear trap, it becomes apparent that not only are the locals a wee bit strange, but a psychopath has targeted the Angels because a) Tse-kwan’s sister Lei-kwan put his sister behind bars in BLOODY LIE and b) his wife ran off with a private detective, so he’s just got this thing against private detectives, and he’s selected Tse-kwan as the subject of several days’ torture around the island! Like all of its predecessors, CRUEL ZONE is half-baked with four parts padding to one part plot, and the villain’s plan relies almost entirely on dumb luck, though considering the sleuthing abilities of these gals, that arguably makes it a very clever plan. Followed by CYBER WAR. 2.

In their seventh film, CYBER WAR, Bond's Angels are finally given the opportunity to kick around a few bad guys. With choreography even!

CYBER WAR (1999) Still dazed from her experience in CRUEL ZONE, Angel detective Tse-kwan (Miu Yin-wai) decides its time to head back to the states for some rest. With little work and one less friend in her dayplanner, man-bait Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying), suddenly cognizant of how coddled she was by her former colleagues, decides to get involved with computers, ultimately joining a handsome techie (Edward Mok) on a visit to a Beijing computer expo, where the momentary loss of her passport puts her on the FBI’s most-wanted list back in Hong Kong! Now Kaka (Cheng Chi-hung), and Tse-kwan, who just couldn’t stay away for long, must help clear Yuk-yee’s name, which, since the Bond’s Angels series is as cheap in its seventh installment as it was in its first, means plenty of soundless scenes of the girls asking actual strangers for directions (or the time!) in the hopes we’ll be convinced this is anything like an actual investigation! Ranks with CRIMINALS and CRUEL ZONE as one of the better entries in this generally ridiculous series, but that’s not saying much. 2.

NUCLEAR WEAPON (1999) Somebody’s blowin’ up stuff all over the city, and that puts Bond’s Angels on the trail—to love! In this followup to CYBER WAR, Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) swoons for the bumpkin-ish pal of her mainland cousin, while Ka-ka (Cheng Chi-hung) romances an athletic stranger who bumps into her on the street, and Tse-kwan (Miu Yin-wai), ever the sensitive one since her misadventure in CRUEL ZONE, becomes infatuated with . . . the bomber! But it’s cool; he’s a repentent type who’s really being menaced by the man who taught him bomb-making to take revenge on the police for jailing his father years earlier on a trumped-up explosives charge. The Bond’s Angels series goes out on a comparitive high note in this modestly suspenseful (if typically contrived) installment, and finds an ideal Special Guest Star in Chan Kwok-bong as the bomber with a conscious (and a few surprises for the girls). He’s easily the most fully-realized character the series has ever produced, and his presence has a noticeable effect on all three leading ladies. Still, this is probably best enjoyed if you’ve somehow managed to survive the first seven features. 3.

DANCE DANCE (Korea; 1999)

2009-07-19T22:26:00.000-07:00

D: Moon Seong-wook

Korea's film industry was by the autumn of 1999 taking toddler steps toward the Great Renaissance, but domestic audiences still had to contend with the kind of bland, clichéd, low-calorie snack films that Chungmuro had been cranking out for years, movies which all but dared viewers to spend their entertainment money on flashier import fare. DANCE DANCE is just such a film, a warmly-photographed, "feel-good" underdog dance musical fronted by two attractive leads (Whang In-yeong, Yang Dong-kun) who unfortunately don't dance very well, or act very well. Whang's an almost-pro dancer uncertain of her desire to attend school overseas; Yang's a hunky med student who simply must dance after witnessing one of her solo workouts. Her motley crew of dance schoolmates want to make a name for themselves. And, uhh, that's about it. There's no tension here because there's virtually no spark between these two pretty people from different worlds, and neither of them does anything--alone or together--that helps or hinders the fortunes of the collective, except for Whang's brief run-in with a lecherous out-of-town concert promoter that costs them a gig, a subplot which lasts all of 25 seconds. By Korean standards, this is remarkably free of melodrama, which is not a good thing in any film about people with a burning passion.

There is plenty of dancing in the film—14 sequences by my count (training, rehearsals and performances), with at least six of those blended into maudlin montage sequences. Whang's a beautiful woman, a weak actress and a game, if ungraceful, dancer; in the larger group dance sequences, she's often positioned off to one side in the foreground, shot from the chest up, or stationed rather obviously in the back row, the better to disguise her shortcomings. The climactic, multi-group dance performance is primo stuff because the supporting players and extras get to strut their very real stuff, but it's capped with a spectacular and well-choreographed full-group hip-hop roof-raiser for which gruelling rehearsal is implied by its intricate and effortless nature but never seen throughout the film. At the same time, the sequence is gestational evidence of the Korean B-Boy movement that would erupt only a few years later. Worth seeing for this sequence alone, but otherwise, an utterly forgettable film from the year that Korean cinema issued its primal cinematic shout-out to the world.

YELLOW: AMERICAN DREAM, CHINESE AMBITION (USA; to be released)

2009-06-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

D: Troy Antonio
W: Tony Murphy

This comes via the film's producer-writer Tony Murphy, who's also a member of the Hong Kong Movie Database.

Sez he:

What you see doesn't fully convey what we really want to do which is create a Chinese Sopranos meets The Wire as a one hour dramatic cable series. Here's a bit about a few of the characters.

We have a female Prada wearing "snakehead" who was a former prostitute that took over the very business which enslaved her. She constantly berates her poor husband because of his low sperm count. There's the Liu Brothers, loyal, Lexapro poppin hitmen who love videogames and argue about the merits of hip hop and pop culture and combat their depression by killing. We have the weed-smokin' underage girl loving Ming the Credit Card King, the 2nd in command because of his ability to generate revenue via credit card fraud, counterfeiting, hacking, etc. yet covets Genghis' position as the dragonhead; however he's more Pineapple Express than gangster. And finally, Genghis who must fight to hold his unruly bunch of gangsters together, come to terms with having a gay brother, and appease the uncles while maintaining a semblance of peace as he plots to become the next Uncle 7 of Chinatown.

The gangsters are the nexus into the world of Chinatown and how the rest of its inhabitants live and struggle to assimilate into American culture. This is just a little taste of some of the characters but not everyone will be bad. I don't want to give it all away just yet.

35mm. Nice. Looks solid. But that name's gotta change. It says too much, with too many words; kills the mystery before anyone parks their ass in a theatre seat. I'm thinking "Yellow" would be perfect on it's own. Any poster for this film is bound to have Asian faces on it, so an automatic connection would be made, meaning at least a couple of different things to different people (a perfect hook!), with a likewise automatic allusion to the film's "race" issues.

Or maybe something like this:

YELLOW

The American Dream

Just with better fonts than Blogger allows, of course.

CATCH THE HEAT (USA; 1987)

2009-06-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

D: Joel Silberg
W: Stirling Silliphant
(aka: Feel The Heat)

This pedestrian actioner from the director of 1984's BREAKIN' and 1985's RAPPIN' has four aces up its sleeve (well, two down it's shirt, actually): Oscar-winning screenwriter/executive producer Stirling Silliphant (long past his prime); his alleged** wife, leading lady Tiana Alexandra, and her fantastic breasts, which debuted to the world in a very impressive wet t-shirt sequence, and later in a brief shower scene. The movie also stars Rod Steiger, but he doesn't count as an ace up the sleeve because it really feels like he did this as a favour to the prolific screenwriter who helped him score an Oscar for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT.

Produced in association with a rather haughty sounding outfit called M'amsel Tea Entertainment that one presumes was fronted by the Vietnamese-American actress herself, CATCH THE HEAT casts the overeager-to-be-a-star Alexander as Checkers, a hot shot U.S. cop recruited by tough guy partner David Dukes (very wrong for this kind of role) to infiltrate Rod Steiger's Buenos Aires drug operation via his nightclub by posing as an import dancer from Hong Kong.

Steiger's master plan for flooding the U.S. with drugs involves ripping off and killing his Malaysian suppliers, then encouraging his dancers to undergo boob jobs, whereupon their bazooms are stuffed with bags of heroin before the gals are shipped back to the U.S. for unstuffing. (!) Yeah, that's a speedy plan! Alexander's "clever" disguise consists almost entirely of a high-slit cheongsam, a few Suzy Wong wigs, and one of the phoniest Chinese "accents" ever. In fact, Alexander doesn't so much effect an accent as an "oriental" cadence that would fool no one because every word she speaks utilizing this facade sounds like fluent English in its own right, with only the rhythm of the sentences making it all sound "foreign". But she's beautiful, "feisty", and she fills out unitards and Danskins quite nicely while delivering high kicks to the faces of Steiger's goons.

Production values rival an average TV cop show of the day: flat compositions, hasty framing, harsh lighting, but with a couple of larger explosions than you might see on the tube.

Weirdest gag in the movie: when henchman Ike (John Hancock) discovers the undercover Alexander's real name, Checkers Goldberg, and calls her "that fuckin' Chinese Jew, half heeb, half chink" which makes no sense as it implies that the character is of mixed heritage, which by all accounts she's not, or that she adopted the religion, which still wouldn't make her half-Jewish. I'm guessing Silliphant thought it sounded funny, but didn't think about it beyond that.

**I say "alleged wife" because IMDB's entry for Tiana Alexandra lists her year of birth as 1961 and claims she was married to Stirling Silliphant until his death but give no year for their marriage. The Silliphant entry, however lists the year of his marriage to one Tiana Du Long as 1974. If these two are the same woman, which seems highly likely, that means either a) he married her when she was 13 or b) she lied about her age somewhere along the line. Wish the IMDB could be straight about this.

WHISPERS AND MOANS (Hong Kong; 2007)

2009-05-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

D: Herman Yau Lai-to.
W: Herman Yau Lai-to, Yang Yee-shan.

Ten days in the lives of a cross-section of Mongkok sex workers, led by weary "mamasans" Candice Yu and Athena Chu, in an industry on the wane, as they contend with the nightly rituals of club life—petty rivalries, pathologically abusive customers, gangsters, drug abuse—and the the daily rituals of survival: dysfunctional relationships, deadbeat sugardaddies, syphillis, AIDS and (the worst threat of all) mainland Chinese girls who'll offer steep discounts and fresher faces just to keep sending money back home.

Director Herman Yau reteams with liberal feminist social anthropologist and author Yang Yee-shan (his co-writer on this and the excellent FROM THE QUEEN TO THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE), working from her 2006 bestseller of the same name (previously published in 2002; and yes, it sits on my shelf!), a collection of mostly hard-luck stories mined during a year spent shadowing the denizens of Hong Kong's sex trade and learning, for the most part, that a lack of common sense is often the working girl's (or guy's) most vicious enemy. That theme is successfully carried over to the film, but unfortunately, so is the author, in the form of alter-ego Yan Ng, a pie-eyed social worker whose increasingly didactic refrains about unionization as the key to basic human rights and protection for prostitutes is met with a fairly predictable volley of sad-sack stories (both past and present) from the workers themselves, even though Yau's softballing of their often difficult, directionless lives ultimately supports the social worker's contention.

The slice-of-life concept would make this an appealing ensemble piece for nearly any performer, although some of those here are a little too green to put across the devastating emotional complexities required by the script. Signature moment is probably a lengthy, late-film diatribe belted out by a hard-working, righteous mainland hooker (newcomer Misia Chan) when she's informed that her sterling reputation may have just been jeopardized when jealous co-worker Chu released a syphillis-infected cloud of urine on her in a hotel swimming pool.

The biggest career leap, such as it is, is handled by Patrick Tang, as a popular gigolo who smoothly services housewives and mistresses, verbally vents his frustrations on his female colleagues, and saves for a sex change operation for his transsexual lover (Don Li). Tang, Li, and most of their young castmates do alright (if not exactly stellar) by the sexual frankness of the words they're fed, but there's a conservatism in the sexual imagery (which is almost always depicted under the covers, behind closed doors, or from the shoulders up) that actually undermines the filmmakers' drive to depict the unpleasant realities of the trade. Where 80's and 90's Hong Kong films about gigolos and whores often used nudity and sex for sheer exploitation value, to not see it used for political value in an issues-driven film such as this is somewhat of a copout, no doubt to keep the cast from having to dig too deep. Yau and his team compensate by composing an authentic milieu of night clubs, karaoke rooms, micro-brothels and a medical clinic in which the cast can function in an almost improvisatory way, one that echoes Michael Radford's DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA (2000) to such a degree that there's little doubt Yau used it as an inspiration.

JAILBIRD ROCK (USA-Argentina-Panama; 1988)

2009-05-15T23:25:00.000-07:00

D: Phillip Schuman
W: Edward Kovach and Carole Stanley (story by Eduard Sarlui)

In the frightening decade of the 1980’s there was an American television series called SOLID GOLD. This was a music program in which the top ten hit singles of the week were counted down between lipsync performances by actual best-selling artists.

As America had yet to want their MTV, the countdown segments on SOLID GOLD were boosted by sex-drenched interpretive dance routines performed by the Solid Gold Dancers, a collection of mascara-blasted, feather-haired showgirls in minimalist costumes, high heels and, when appropriate, leg warmers (say, while “performing” their interpretation of Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” for example). There were also a couple of guys in the troupe, but enough about them.

In fact, the Solid Gold ladies were the only reason for any red-blooded, just-pubescent boy to even bother tuning in to SOLID GOLD, and probably the only reason the show lasted as long as it did. When I think back to the revolving door of hosts that included Dionne Warwick, Marilyn McCoo, Rex Smith (who?), Rick “Disco Duck” Dees and Wayland Flowers & Madam, for heaven’s sake, I’m absolutely convinced the dancers were the reason the show lasted so long. God knows they were the only reason I watched. You only needed to watch about ten minutes of SOLID GOLD to say you actually watched SOLID GOLD, and none of those ten minutes required a host. If you catch my drift…

Anyway, if the Solid Gold Dancers had made a movie, that movie would be from 1988. At least, if I had my way, it would have been. Because then it might have attracted some actual talent behind the camera, and the “all-tease” format of the released product would have at least been justified.

JAILBIRD ROCK is a piece of shit set to a grating synth-pop score. A Women-In-Prison movie with all the Women-In-Prison movie cliches—an incompetent warden, a lesbian head guard, pretty girls using dirty words, knife fights in the yard, catfights in the showers, fights with hot irons in the laundry room, homemade ’shine, toilet duty, solitary confinement and all-out interpretive dance competitions—yet not so much as a single exposed bottom or bared breast to place it in the pantheon of babes-behind-bars masterpieces. It comes so close though. Actually, on reflection, I did see a couple of bums, but that’s about it. And they’re the bums of extras, which is hardly the reason anyone watches Women-In-Prison movies.

But wait a minute, did I just say “all-out interpretive dance competitions”?

Yessir, I did.

You see, JAILBIRD ROCK, as the title might have already implied, is a musical. Well more of a dance-ical and quite frankly, when push comes to shove, the girls in this prison could give the Solid Gold Dancers a run in their nylons, once they sort out their differences, stop assaulting each other with hot irons, and learn to distinguish a chasse from a ciseaux. This last bit of education seems to occur mostly off-camera; despite countless "rehearsal" sequences, we're given nothing that anticipates the film's tightly-choreographed dance show climax.

But first things first.

After killing her raging alcoholic stepfather to spare her mother another beating, dance prodigy Jesse (Robin Antin) is sent to the Mierda Hoyo Prison For Wayward Girls in a part of America where the automobiles all look strangely South American and the cell doors are drapes, not bars. Once there, she immediately bunches up the panties of block leader Max (Rhonda Aldrich) and her second-in-command squeeze toy Echo (Robin Cleaver). Playing on Jesse’s team are mousy crybaby Peggy (Valerie Jean Richards) who’s also an easy target for Max, and brash Samantha (Jacqueline Houston), a black girl from the ‘hood who don’t take no crap from nobody, as illustrated by the scene in which she tells Max to “get your dick outta my face before you gotta pull it outta your ass, bitch!” Max, a lesbian, is holding a knife, so Samantha is speaking metaphorically, of course.

Political gamesmanship ensues, shivs are pulled, and everyone ends up in solitary, but Jesse’s lifelong desire to kick it on Broadway is a flame that won’t be extinguished just because Max makes her clean a clogged up toilet with a toothbrush, and so she organizes an all-singing, all-dancing Prison Girl Variety Show. The inept administration sees a wonderful PR opportunity, Max sees a chance to mount an escape (a plan that remains unsuspected by everyone in spite of the fact that she shows up for but never participates in the rehearsals!), and Jesse spends the next six weeks whipping society’s rejects into the best damned tushy-shakers this side of, well, SOLID GOLD. On the big night, the girls tie up their prison shirts, hike up their cut-off short-shorts and leg warmers and dance, baby, dance!

In fact, the final number, illustrated here and set to a screechy tune called “Gotta Move,” is the high point of the movie. All of these girls are phenomenal dancers, but director Phillip Schuman has no idea how to film and cut a musical number, let alone a movie, so we’re left to sort of extract the energy from his unimaginative camera angles and awkward cutting. Mind you, Schulman’s biggest credit before this was the X-rated (and somewhat famous, thanks to a screenplay by DR. STRANGELOVE scribe Terry Southern) RANDY, THE ELECTRIC LADY (1980), which actually makes the general sterility of JAILBIRD ROCK doubly frustrating: this guy worked in PORN and the one thing he leaves out of his Women-In-Prison movie is gratuitous nudity?

If anyone learned anything from this movie (and it certainly wasn’t Schulman, who never made another), it was leading lady Robin Antin, who would go on to found the popular Pussycat Dolls burlesque group, as well as find some success choreographing music videos, television shows and movies (which is exactly what her character Jesse ends up doing when she gets out of prison in JAILBIRD ROCK). Unfortunately her choice of projects (CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE) sometimes seems as dire as her choice of boyfriends (McG, the director of CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE)

So, if you crave a prison picture with all of the workup and little of the release, JAILBIRD ROCK might be worth a peek for schlock aficionados. I found mine rummaging through a box of two dollar VCDs in a Chinatown shop, so I consider it money well spent.

LOVE @ FIRST NOTE (Hong Kong; 2007)

2009-05-04T01:22:00.000-07:00

D/W: Dennis Law Sau-Yiu

Official music video for Kary's song 座右銘 from LOVE @ FIRST NOTE

Product placement reaches staggering new heights—by all known international standards of the practice—in Dennis Law's LOVE @ FIRST NOTE, an electronic-press-kit-with-a-plot masterminded by Hong Kong music impresario Paco Wong, the head of Gold Label Records. The cast is a virtual catalogue of top-shelf Gold Label talent, and no effort is spared slowing a barely-there narrative for music-video-worthy performances of their top hits throughout the film.

Cantopop lovers will obviously find much to savor here—and the music is excellent of its kind—but even those disinclined to one of Hong Kong's biggest exports should give this a spin; it's bound to be dissected by future marketing professors for its sheer media-savvy chutzpah. This isn't just about someone holding a can of Coca-Cola in their hands, though it does happen here. It's about the person holding the product actually being a product themselves!

The biggest beneficiary of this super-slick infomercial is undoubtedly relative newcomer Justin Lo, an American-born singer-songwriter with a powerhouse delivery not often heard from the ranks of Hong Kong's superficial pop dispensary. Lo plays a slacker composer living with his seamstress mom who fears he might be losing his life-long best friend Kary Ng, a pseudo-goth record shop clerk who lives with her guilt-ridden alcholic father (Lam Suet), to wealthy shop customer Alex Fong, a shy, friendless singer who bemoans all the "money whores" in his life (including his parents!) while charging rare Barry Manilow and Fleetwood Mac LPs to his Visa Black Platinum card and driving around in his vintage Porsche 911. "Boarding school was my orphanage," he boo-hoos in order to make us think that maybe, just maybe, real-life pop stars aren't about the money after all.

The reverence for Cantonese pop music and the oh-so-genuinely-sensitive souls who perform it runs deep in this: nearly every time someone sings—and it happens often, in trendy nightclubs, cramped apartments, community centers and pay-as-you-go recording studios—there's inevitably a cut (or two, or three) to a listener on the verge of tears from the overwhelming wonderfulness of it all.

In keeping with the branding theme, Ng's former groupmates from Cookies make gratuitous appearances here as well: Stephy Tang and Theresa Fu play ditzy rivals who switch sides when nominal villain and rival singer Keith Lee treats Ng like dirt after she snubs his advances, and Miki Yeung quite literally hovers speechless around the margins of countless scenes because...well, they just had to get her in there somewhere!

In addition to the six songs performed by Justin Lo, three by Kary Ng, and one each by Alex Fong, Elisa Lim and Ping Pung (Kary's other pop band, consisting of Wong Tin-ho, Jerry Lee and Jan Lee, the latter pair younger brothers to the film's composer Mark Lui), those synergistic pixies at Gold Label made damned sure to include cuts by house titans Edmund Leung and Ronald Cheng (both of whom share hosting duties with Alex Fong on the hit starlet-bait TV show "Beautiful Cooking," and then cast Leo Koo, whose own career was revived by the company in 2003, in a key cameo role.

And the nine girls who pop up in those throwaway "bathroom" scenes? I smell another pre-fab idol group on the horizon...

Music Video for Justin Lo's song 決戰二世祖, heard during the opening of the film (video does not contain footage from the movie; it's just catchy, that's all)

One can only assume that music veteran George Lam, who is not on the Gold Label roster, was brought in for a cinematic passing of the torch to this new generation of candy-coated superstars.

Written, as such, by the director, who manages to slip in a shameless plug for his upcoming thriller FATAL CONTACT. Producer Herman Yau also served as the film's cinematographer, and it benefits immensely from his work.

SUKEBAN BOY (Japan; 2006)

2009-04-27T20:05:00.000-07:00

D:Noboru Iguchi
W: Noboru Iguchi, from the Manga by Go Nagai

WARNING: contains brief nudiness

Took a brief break from the wonderful world of Hong Kong Cinema today to watch the Hong Kong DVD of a shameless little gem from Japan called SUKEBAN BOY (2006).

Wow.

Gleefully twisted and but with tongue so firmly planted in cheek it's pushing through teeth and tendons and grue, Noboru Iguchi's adaptation of Go Nagai's Oira Sukeban manga, is a delightfully speedy, gloriously naked parody of schoolgirl fetish films so often found in Japanese erotic entertainment and, of course, a fetish film in its own right, I suppose.

The story is simple. Frequently beaten at a string of boys' schools because of his girlish features, gruff punk Sukeban (who's actually played by a girl, hardcore starlet Asami) is dressed in the traditional schoolgirl outfit and sent to a all-girls' school by his incestuous father.

There "she" encounters all sorts of villainy afoot, as well as Mochiko (fellow A/V porn starlet Emiru Momose) a new found friend with sapphic leanings who first takes her to the school's female embarrassent dojo, "The Club of Humiliation," which is actually a cover for the "Pan-Suto League" the in-house girl-gang that fights its battles in candy-coloured nylons over black thongs! From there, Sukeban must battle the "No-Bra League," whose leader Annie The Good spits bullets from a guerilla belt she wears across her enormous breasts; the "Hoichi League," three bald girls in fundoshi with kanji painted on their heads (in a nod to "Hoichi The Earless" from KWAIDAN); and the mysterious masked avenger of the naked Zen-su league, who doesn't take kindly to those who get too close to Sukeban. Peek-a-boo martial arts battles fought in varying stages of undress and increasing levels of TETSUO-style body-mutation gore ensue.

(In what I think must be a nod to the early work of Robert Rodriguez and his legendary EL MARIACHI "guacamole gun," clumps of bloody business are actually thrown at the actresses, some of whom are actually giggling. Mere seconds earlier, Sukeban's three male protectors hysterically slather handfuls of grue on each other when they're shot by organic weapons that have grown out of a woman's breasts!).

While Asami seems to be the only "actress" in the bunch with any even approaching reasonable thesping ability, the pouty, dead-eyed line-readings and awkward gestures of the rest of the female cast actually enhance to the dry wit present throughout. I haven't seen the two lead actresses at work in their rather sticky day jobs (no, really, I mean it!), and while there are no sex scenes in this piece, I suppose if you're going to film a comic book adaptation nonetheless brimming with gratuitous nudity, you won't be getting picking A-list stars.

Apprarently, this drew a good response when it screened at the 2006 Fantasia film festival in Montreal, but at 61 minutes and shot on video (and beautifully so, with faux letterboxing), this wasn't exactly bound for widespread distribution, so it's nice to see the HK DVD includes English subtitles, plus the original Japanese audio in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS. As a guaranteed cult item along the lines of the live-action WEATHER GIRL, though much less pretentious and made by people who are very much in on the joke and willing to splash as much nudity across the screen as is humanly possible, SUKEBAN BOY is cheeky fun.

Buy it At DDDHouse, if you dare!

"Can I quote you on that?"

2009-04-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

Some amusing movie quotes I found in an old notebook that I felt it was time to get rid of:

"Manny, it's not over until we get the broad"
—The Mayor (David O'Hara), WAR CAT (1988)

"I have this gun. Sometimes I think about using it. I have to go now."
—Kathy Bates, MISERY (1990)

"They're just more pellets in the gas chamber to me."
Ernie ( ), referring to his juvenile delinquent hostages, in NAKED YOUTH (1961)

"Let's aim for the knees next time"
—Charlie Sheen, THE ROOKIE (1990)

"I was aiming for the knees."
—Lara Flynn Boyle, THE ROOKIE (1990)

"I told you to fasten your seatbelt"
—Clint Eastwood to Charlie Sheen, after the pair crash a Cadillac Allante from one exploding building through the roof of another, in THE ROOKIE (1990)

"What's all this, then?"
—John Cleese, SILVERADO (1985)

"Today, my jurisdiction ends here. Pick up my hat."
—John Cleese, SILVERADO (1985)

"We'll be back!"
—Kevin Costner, SILVERADO (1985)

"Hey, are you guys OK? You're not dead or anything?"
—Brent Huff, THE PERILS OF GWENDOLINE IN THE LAND OF YIK YAK (1984)

"Got a light?"
—Clint Eastwood, after a massive truck and car calamity crushes his cigar, in THE ROOKIE (1990)

"The only man in the wasteland, and I broke him. There's nothing more useless than a man who doesn't work."
—Kathleen Kinmont (as Phoenix), PHOENIX THE WARRIOR (1987)

"He didn't get out of the cock-a-doody car!"
—Kathy Bates, MISERY (1990)

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm hungry."
—A surgeon, after sawing open a villain's skull and removing the brain, in ROBOCOP 2 (1990)

"Go fuck a refrigerator, peckerneck."
—A 10-year-old in ROBOCOP 2 (1990)

"He's fucked up."
—A little league baseball player, in ROBOCOP 2 (1990)

"I'm having . . . trouble."
—Robocop, explaining why he's reading rights to a corpse, in ROBOCOP 2 (1990)

"It'll take some getting use to . . . but it'll be great."
—Galyn Gorg, fondling Robocop 2, in ROBOCOP 2 (1990)

"You mouth off like that again, and it's no more Nuke for you, bitch."
—Gabriel Damon, 10-year old drug dealer, keeping his chick in line, in ROBOCOP 2 (1990)

"There's nothing like cold water when you're hot."
—Ginger (Val Kline), BEACH GIRLS (1982)

"What's a hussy?"
—Ducky (Jeana Tomasina), in response to being called one, in BEACH GIRLS (1982)

"They're tobacco-chewin', gut-chompin' cannibal kinfolk from hell."
—Video box copy for REDNECK ZOMBIES (1988)

"I think we've gotta set a few ground rules. Firstly, you've got to stop killing people."
—Tim Conlon, PROM NIGHT III (1990)

"I'm itchy to get my hands on some serious weapons."
—Darla (Liz Cayton), wearing a spacegirl G-string in SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY (1987)

"What to they want a picture of. We haven't got any dead bodies yet."
—Allan Murdock (Charlton Heston), lamenting media interference, in AIRPORT '75 (1975)

"Sometimes the public's right to know gives me a huge pain in the ass."
—Joe Petroni (George Kennedy), lamenting media interference, in AIRPORT '75 (1975)

"There's nobody left to fly the plane. Help us!"
—Nancy the Stewardess (Karen Black), lamenting the lack of people left to fly the plane, in AIRPORT '75 (1975)

"Ladies and gentleman. Thank you for flying Columbia Airlines."
—Allan Murdock (Charlton Heston), after landing the plane, in AIRPORT '75 (1975)

"Listen, I'm trying to make an ascent here. Why don't you go pester Dr. McCoy for a while."
—Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), in STAR TREK V (1990)

"If you want me, me and my ass are in the neighborhood."
—Gabriel Cash (Kurt Russell), responding to a prison proposition, in TANGO & CASH (1989)

"You've made me the happiest juvenile delinquent in Baltimore."
—Johnny Depp, thanking Iggy Pop for the motorcycle, in CRY-BABY (1990)

"If I'm not me, then who the hell am I?"
—Arnold Schwarzenegger, TOTAL RECALL (1990)

"Consider that a divorce."
—Arnold Schwarzenegger, after blasting wife Sharon Stone in the head, in TOTAL RECALL (1990)

"Thank you for not smoking."
—Robocop, helping a guy quit in six easy gunshots, in ROBOCOP 2 (1990)

"Anybody else want a limp?"
—Eddie Murphy, after shooting a redneck in the knee, in ANOTHER 48 HRS (1990)

"Listen, Dick Tracy, that think tried to kill us!"
—Eddie Newton (Wink Roberts) in THE DAY IT CAME TO EARTH (1977)

"I'm for a raid alright. Let's make it on panties."
—A jock in THE DAY IT CAME TO EARTH (1977)

"C'mon, take your shirt off."
—Eddie Newton (Wink Roberts) to Ron McGuire (Roger Manning), two seconds before they jump into a pond wearing their pants, socks and shoes, in THE DAY IT CAME TO EARTH (1977)

"No, don't, it could be Rudy's"
—Zara Kerova, stopping Larraine De Selle from eating a possibly-human spleen, in MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY (1980)

"They tied him to a stake, they castrated him and they . . . they . . . ate his genitals!"
—Mike Logan (Bryan Redford) in MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY (1980)

"We may even go under before we get up to the bottom to get ourselves out."
—Gene Hackman, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972)

"I don't know, Charlie, he bit his lip or somethin'."
—Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas), after elbowing a villain in the face, in BLACK RAIN (1989)

"I usually like to get kissed before I get fucked."
—Michael Douglas, critiquing Japanese law enforcement techniques, in BLACK RAIN (1989)

"Foreplay. He said he likes a little foreplay."
—Andy Garcia, translating for Michael Douglas, in BLACK RAIN (1989)

"The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed at the same time."
—Future victim in PIECES (1983)

"What if you gag me? I wouldn't make any noise then."
—Another future victim, PIECES (1983)

"Nobody likes a goody-goody."
—Kevin Dornwinkle (Noel Peters), about to kill a goody-goody, in THE INVISIBLE MANIAC (1990).

"Damn. No more serum."
—The Invisible Maniac (Noel Peters) in THE INVISIBLE MANIAC (1990)

"This country's goin' to the dogs. Used to be, when you bought a politician, the son of a bitch stayed bought."
—Roy L. Fuchs (Jack Warden), in USED CARS (1980)

"It can only be regarded as a hair loom."
—M's widow, observer her dead husband's toupee, in CASINO ROYALE (1967)

"Guess you found the fuckin' off switch, eh?"
—Gregory Hines, EVE OF DESTRUCTION (1991)

"Please don't say that. I'm very sensitive."
—Eve VIII (Renee Soutendijk), about to bite a man's penis off for calling her a bitch, in EVE OF DESTRUCTION (1991)

"If you weren't my daddy, I think I could fancy you."
—Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet), to her father James, in CASINO ROYALE (1967)

"That's the first john I've ever gone 'round with."
—Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet), on the revolving toilet, in CASINO ROYALE (1967)

"It was my mother's. She was buried in it."
—Flexi Jerkoff (Joseph Hudgins), FLESH GORDON (1974)

"Oh, Flesh, there's no place like home!"
—Dale Ardor (Suzanne Fields), FLESH GORDON (1974)

"I even pissed in the punchbowl!"
—Wayne Newton, THE ADVENTURES OF FORD FAIRLANE (1990)

"Look after Mr. Bond. See that some harm comes to him."
—Michel Lonsdale, MOONRAKER (1979)

"You get off on ecology? Eh? Twat?"
—Giovanni Radice as Mike Logan in MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY (1980)

"Life lesson number one: never believe anything you read in the newspapers. Life lesson number two: never threaten the Invisible Maniac.
—Noel Peters as the Invisible Maniac, THE INVISIBLE MANIAC (1990)

"You and that other dummy better start gettin' personally involved in your work or I'm gonna stab you through the heart with a fuckin' pencil."
—Dennis Farina, MIDNIGHT RUN (1988)

"I don't wanna get another phone call like this, 'cause if I do, I'm gonna get on a fuckin' plane and blowtorch the both of you."
—Dennis Farina, MIDNIGHT RUN (1988)

"Don't say a fuckin' word to me. I'll get up and bury this phone in your head."
—Dennis Farina, MIDNIGHT RUN (1988)

"Anal retentive. It's got a nice ring to it, but I like 'fuckin' putz' better.
—Gene Hackman, LOOSE CANNONS (1989)

"They're fucking with the wrong Jew this time!"
—Dom Deluise as Harry The Hippo in LOOSE CANNONS (1989)

"I'd rather set my head on fire and have it put out with a sledge hammer."
—Nancy Parsons, LOOSE CANNONS (1989)

"I'd rather drink turpentine and piss on a brushfire.
—Cowpoke, YOUNG GUNS 2 (1990)

"How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"
—Bruce WIllis, DIE HARD 2 (1991)

"Who gives a shit what you think? In 30 seconds you'll be dead and I'll blow this place up and be home in time for Corn Flakes."
—Ronny Cox, TOTAL RECALL (1990)

"You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt."
—Laura Dern as Lula in WILD AT HEART (1990)

"Find me a dead cat."
—Sean Connery, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (1978)

"So raise your hand if you think that was a Russian water tentacle."
—Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Lindsay Brigman in THE ABYSS (1989)

"It went straight for the warhead and they think it's cute."
—Michael Biehn as Lt. Coffee in THE ABYSS (1989)

"Hey, who died and made you Darth Vader."
—Cheech Marin, SHRIMP ON THE BARBIE (1991)

"I don't know about you, but next time I'm taking the bus."
—Jill Clayburgh, SILVER STREAK (1976)

"It ain't gonna be exciting, but we'll get you there on time."
—Scatman Crothers, SILVER STREAK (1976)

"All the have to play is eight bars of 'Melancholy Baby' and I turn to custard."
—Marilyn Monroe, SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

"I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl!"
—Jack Lemmon, SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

"Tyrell really did a job on Rachel. Right down to the mother she never had."
—Harrison Ford voiceover, BLADE RUNNER (1982)

"Don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars."
—NOW VOYAGER (1942)

"I had another dream about you last night, mom. I dreamt that a pack of mad dogs was chewing off your face but you still managed to tell me to clean my room."
—A loony in DISTURBED (1991)

"I know a missing body is a bit of a glitch, but we'll work that out."
—Geoffrey Lewis as MIchael in DISTURBED (1991)

"OK, but a way to cut a budget it to cut it."
—TEENAGE CONFIDENTIAL (1990)

"The first rule is: never go to bed with anyone crazier than you are."
—Kris Kristofferson, MILLENNIUM (1989)

"They're coming to get you Barbara."
—NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

"You guys think you're above the law. You're not above mine."
—Steven Seagal as Nico in ABOVE THE LAW (1987)

"There are several things in this world that you never mess with. One is another man's fries."
—Keith David, MEN AT WORK (1990)

"She's been around more in 20 years than the moon in its millions."
—BY LOVE POSSESSED (1961)

"Get than helmet off. We're talkin' to God."
—James Gammon, THE POM POM GIRLS (1976)

"This isn't the state of California. It's a state of madness."
—Robert Stack as Gen. Stilwell in 1941 (1979)

"That's my corn out there. You guys are guests in my corn."
—Kevin Costner, FIELD OF DREAMS (1989)

"One of them thought he was invincible. The other thought he could fly. They were both wrong."
—Steven Seagal, MARKED FOR DEATH (1990)

"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid."
—Lance Henriksen as Bishop in ALIENS (1986)

"As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster."
—Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in GOODFELLAS (1990)

"My mother just quietly and deliberately killed a man and ate him. That kinda blows all the old rules to hell, don'tcha think?
—Mark Thomas Miller, MOM (1991)

"Call her mad. Call her a monster. Just make sure you call her once a week"
—Video box copy for MOM (1991)

"Now that I see you in the light, you're plenty old enough to be Roy's mother."
—Annette Bening, THE GRIFTERS (1990)

"Ripley, if we ain't out of here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to ride through space."
—Yaphet Kotto, ALIEN (1986)

"Haven't I told you about death? It's nature's way of saying you're in the wrong job."
—Richard Harris, JUGGERNAUT (1974)

"You're terminated, fucker."
—Linda Hamilton, THE TERMINATOR (1984)

"It's like my English. Something gets lost in the translation."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, THE JAYNE MANSFIELD STORY (1980)

"Who do you think I am, Dirty Harry?"
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, RAW DEAL (1986)

"Grant me one request . . . revenge. And if you do not listen, to hell with you."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, CONAN (1982)

"I'll be back."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, THE TERMINATOR (1984)

"I'll be back, Bennett."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, COMMANDO (1985)

"I'll be back."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, THE RUNNING MAN (1987)

"If you're lying to me, I'll be back."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, TWINS (1988)

"Wait here. I'll be back."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, TERMINATOR 2 (1991)

"You're a funny guy, Sully. I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last."
—Arnold Schwarzenneggar, COMMANDO (1985)

"OK people, relax. Loosen your sphincters. We don't need any rush hour Rambos here."
—Bill Paxton, PREDATOR 2 (1990)

"This is how I spent Christmas last year."
—Bruce Willis, DIE HARD 2 (1990)

"It's OK, I've done this before."
—Bruce Willis, DIE HARD 2 (1990)

"It's an old Sicilian message. It means Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes."
—THE GODFATHER

"I'm sorry, mistress, that you were not able to properly confess, but there just wasn't enough time to torture you."
—Jeffrey Combs as The Scribe in THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1991)

"There's gotta be a hundred reasons why I don't blow you away, but right now, I can't think of one."
—Clint Eastwood, THE ROOKIE (1991)

"Sometimes I feel like you're the child and I'm the grownup. I can't ever imagine being inside you. I can't imagine being anywhere you'd let me hang around for nine months."
—Wynona Ryder, MERMAIDS (1991)

"I wish I had trouble conceiving. I could get pregnant by hanging my clothes next to a man's suit."
—Cher, MERMAIDS (1991)

"This whole drug thing. It's not a black thing. It's not a white thing. It doesn't give a shit about color."
—Judd Nelson, NEW JACK CITY (1991)

"If hate were people, I'd be China."
Daniel Stern, CITY SLICKERS (1991)

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking."
—Lloyd Bridges, AIRPLANE (1980)

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines."
—Lloyd Bridges, AIRPLANE (1980)

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffin' glue."
—Lloyd Bridges, AIRPLANE (1980)

'Don't cry. Tears will cause thy wheels to rust."
—Marshall Goodman, ROLLERBLADE (1986)

"That's it! Candel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings. And call off Christmas!"
—Alan Rickman, ROBIN HOOD, PRINCE OF THIEVES (1991)

"This is Sara Waters, 409 Treemont. Come quickly. I've just killed an intruder."
—Julia Roberts, SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY (1991)

"You're not too smart are you. I like that in a man."
—Kathleen Turner, BODY HEAT (1981)

"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."
—Kathleen Turner, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988)

"The good news is, your dates are here. The bad news is, they're dead."
—Tom Atkins, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (1986)

"If you expect me to arrest you for murdering a man in your dream, well, the arrest'll have to happen in the dream too, because I'm off duty when I'm dreamin'. "
—Paul Kelly, FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1947)

"Get away from her, you BITCH!"
—SIgourney Weaver, ALIENS (1986)

"Life's a bitch, and she's back in heat."
—Roddy Piper, THEY LIVE (1988)

"I used to be an alcoholic, but now I just drink like an Irish person."
—Shirley Maclaine, POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990)

"In this town, I'm the leper with the most fingers."
—Jack Nicholson, THE TWO JAKES (1990)

"That was more fun than eating cotton candy barefoot."
—Virginia Madsen, THE HOT SPOT (1990)

"Just the fax, ma'am."
—Bruce Willis, DIE HARD 2 (1990)

"I try not to get involved with women when the World Series is about to start, but for you I'll make an exception."
—Bob Hoskins, MERMAIDS (1991)

"I hate men. They're such jerks. They're so dumb. But I gotta find me one fast."
—Barbara Hershey, TUNE IN TOMORROW (1990)

"Listen, I appreciate this whole seduction scene you got going, but let me give you a tip: I'm a sure bet."
—Julia Roberts, PRETTY WOMAN (1990)

"If every man had his way, every woman would lie down a prostitute and wake up a virgin."
—Angelica Huston, ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY (1990)

"How do you thank a gorilla for saving your life?"
—Tony Eisley, THE MIGHTY GORGA (1969)

"I'll do anything if it'll help me get rid of this face."
—A model, in THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE (1960)

"You want to conduct peace negotiations with bugs?"
—Army staffer, in THE BEES (1978)

"You have to listen to what the bees have to say!"
—Angel Tompkins, THE BEES (1978)

"I'm going to be the first officer in U.S. history to get my butt kicked by a mess of bugs!"
—Richard Widmark, THE SWARM (1978)

"Because jobs for lady bacteriologists are not easy to find."
—Pamela Franklin, FOOD OF THE GODS (1976)

"You're too smart for me, baby. I like 'em stupid."
—CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)

"I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots, or only five. I've kinda lost track myself. But being that this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful gun in the world, and would blow you're head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?"
—Clint Eastwood, DIRTY HARRY (1971)

"I am sick and tired of you little mama's boys coming in here every time you have an abrasion of a hand growing outta your back, or whatever."
—James Caan, THE DARK BACKWARD (1991)

"You got a cleanup on aisle four."
—Brian Bosworth, STONE COLD (1991)

"It's Linda Blairsville!"
—HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT 2

"Imagine the future chains. 'Cause you're not in it."
—Brian Bosworth, STONE COLD (1991)

"You know at a moment like this I think of my father's last words, which were 'don't son, that gun is loaded!'"
—Lance Henriksen, STONE COLD (1991)

"Why do I wanna talk to some bloodsucking lawyer. He tied his sister buck naked to a lawnmower and sold tickets to watch him mow the lawn."
—William Petersen, HARD PROMISES (1991)

"I bet his ass was shakin' like a dog shittin' peach pits."
—Minor Mustain, SNAKEEATER III (1991)

"People have a nasty habit of getting dead around you."
—Police chief to Clint Eastwood, SUDDEN IMPACT (1983)

"Hurting people's not a good thing. Well, sometimes it is, but not when it's a bunch of people looking for something to eat."
—Sylvester Stallone, DEMOLITION MAN (1993)

"You're part of this. Whatever THIS is. You're part of it."
—Zoe Trilling, TOBE HOOPER'S NIGHT TERRORS

"Oooh, I do like a bit of gorgonzola!"
—Wallace, THE WRONG TROUSERS

"Funny, the world is so different in the daylight. But in the dark your fantasies get so out of hand. In the daylight, everything falls back into place again. Let's have no more nights."
—Candace Hilligoss, CARNIVAL OF SOULS

"I can't be left alone."
—Candace Hilligoss, CARNIVAL OF SOULS

"You happy now? No more anchovies."
—Terri Treas, after fighting a killer pizza, in HOUSE IV

"You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize."
—Harvey Keitel as Mr. White, RESERVOIR DOGS (1991)

"It's not the Russians. It's Rumblerama!"
—John Goodman, MATINEE (1993)

"I dont get this. It's just a big big. Guns? Cannons? Rockets? It's just a bug!"
—The Scientist in MANT, from MATINEE (1993)

"I'm gonna rip their guts so far outta their bodies they're gonna need a passport to take a shit."
—Vincent Pastore as Tony Scarboni, THE JERKY BOYS (1995)

SS HELL PACK TRIPLE FEATURE: Lest we forget the horrors of Nazi Germa -- hey, nice rack!

2008-12-30T20:57:00.000-08:00

Trailer for SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP

Three tedious Nazisploitation efforts, each largely indistinguishable from the vast majority of pictures in this genre.

SS GIRLS (1977), a SALON KITTY knockoff from the feeble mind of Bruno Mattei, is set in a secluded mansion wherein a crazy and debauched Nazi commander (Gabriele Carrara) employs prostitutes--each highly trained in ballet, weightlifting, fencing, gunplay and schtupping the spectrum of physically disgusting men--to lure unsuspecting Nazi traitors to their doom. The nudity quotient is high but the sex scenes, not unlike most of the male participants involved in them, are flabby, unrealistic and repetitive. And then there's some unpleasant business between a whore and a severely deformed man that, had this not been directed by one of the worst Italian directors of all time, would surely have engendered ill will. But with Mattei, it's tough not to have anything BUT ill will toward virtually everything he's ever done, so I suppose exploitation of the diseased should come as no surprise. The film is by design rather low on the torture and "cruelty" one associates with this genre, with even the mass suicide ending--which at last releases us from the company of these ridiculously smarmy actors--almost completely devoid of blood. In an interview included on the disc, Mattei reveals that he hates watching nearly all of his own films because he always sees many things he could have done better with more time and money. One would think that a director who worked extensively (and repeatedly) on low budgets and tight schedules would certainly not hurt for ingenuity, or style, as often as Mattei has, but such was not the case, if his long, depressing trail of visually ugly and sloppily plotted exploitationers is any indication.

Moving up a rung on the ladder of quality--arguably a lateral step, really, as the production value isn't much better--is Sergio Garrone's SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP (1976), a once-notorious "video nasty" in England which features more full frontal nudity and butcher-meat-laced cruelty than the Mattei picture, though the romantic couplings are again rather uninvolving despite their showcasing far more attractive performers of both sexes. In this camp, ladies not chosen to improve the German race through ridiculous sex experiments are instead deemed fit for ridiculous medical experiments. (Garrone was known to do research for his films, so in all likelihood his onscreen experiments also happened in real life, and were equally as pointless) The film's key plot device--and arguably it's wildest asset--involves the camp commandant's desire for a new pair of testicles with which he can get a proper leg over for Der Fuhrer's greater glory, items duly (and seemingly unwittingly) removed from one of his officers. When good guy Helmut discovers he's a nut-free by-product of the Nazi machine just before mounting his love camp lovely, he races naked throughout the compound until he finds the duplicitous Colonel von Kleiben (Giorgio Cerioni, who looks very much like one of the puppets on Gerry Anderson's THUNDERBIRDS), furiously demanding to know "what have you been doing with my balls!?!" before inciting an all-out riot. Still, it's decidedly a case of parts surpassing the whole, as it tends to be with Nazi pictures that don't star Dyanne Thorne in a lead role.

The set concludes with Sergio Garrone's SS CAMP: WOMEN'S HELL, actually known as (and ID'd onscreen as) SS CAMP 5: WOMEN'S HELL. Exploitation Digital's sleeve for this dates it to 1977, though it's obvious Garrone shot it at the same time as SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP using the same locations and most of the same cast in different roles. Garrone admits as much in the accompanying interview, and the comparatively stronger plotting, acting and action elements on offer suggest this was actually the first of the two pictures completed. Thanks to its meatier scenes of torture and medical experimentation, WOMEN'S HELL ventures closer to being a "video nasty" than LOVE CAMP, but then as now, it's tame stuff, notable mainly for introducing a Pam Grier blaxploitation vibe in the form of Rita Manna as the cunning Jamaican whore Alina, who takes advantage of besotted camp commandant Col. Strasser (Giorgio Cerioni, again sporting a THUNDERBIRDS coiffure and the plastic complexion to match) to plot the bullet-riddled liberation of her fellow prostitutes. Again, Garrone's superficial research informs the film's scenes of cruelty and degradation--including a cheap-but-effective optical that allows dead bodies to jerk and twitch in the camp's ovens (a trick used several times in LOVE CAMP as well)--but the vintage newsreel footage of actual Jews being stripped of their belongings and their lives sits uncomfortably amidst all the gratuitous boobs and beaver on display. But this was Italy in the 70's: "anything goes" was the cinematic order of the day, but cheap moralizing in a film such as this is offensive.

Thankfully, this thematically-challenged genre wasted away on the merits of films such as those included in this set. They're worth watching if you're new to the genre and want to see three average examples at a budget price rather than getting burned on the individual releases (which each cost nearly as much as this triple feature), but there are better examples out there, most notably ILSA: SHE WOLF OF THE SS. Extras on each disc include an interview with the respective director (running 10-15 minutes), meager still galleries, and selections of trailers, including some for other Nazisploitation titles.

THE MIDNIGHT MOVIES COLLECTION, VOL. 2: Steckler's dark period

2008-12-23T14:58:00.000-08:00

Once you watch this trailer for BLOOD SHACK, you won't need to watch the film. In fact, you'll be lucky if you make it through the trailer.

THE MIDNIGHT MOVIES COLLECTION VOL. 2
D: Ray Dennis Steckler
Exploitation Digital/Guilty Pleasures/Media Blasters

Four excretions from the bowels of Ray Dennis Steckler comprise this collection, and one wonders if Guilty Pleasures/Exploitation Digital was contractually obligated to release these in order to get their hands on the superior, better known Steckler opuses (comparatively speaking) in their first Midnight Movies Collection box set. These four films pretty much exemplify the dismal, indifferent remainder of Steckler's "career", at least that part of it during in which he wasn't cranking out pornography. Having viewed the four films in the first MIDNIGHT MOVIES collection, I was compelled to discover what came afterwards. It wasn't pretty.

The most famous "title" in this package is probably THE HOLLYWOOD STRANGLER MEETS THE SKID ROW SLASHER (1979), a wonderful moniker fronting a woeful production shot on the sly on seedy Hollywood locales. Steckler's real-ife housepainter (and a veteran of two dismal Charles Nizet efforts), Pierre Agostino, plays the Strangler, while his wife and regular leading lady, the alluringly paralytic Carolyn Brandt, plays the Slasher. Agostino poses as a photographer and slices up nudie models he picks up in the Hollywood sex papers. Brandt despises the winos who blight the porn-theatre infested neighbourhood in which she has oddly chosen to run a used bookshop and slashes their throats in her off hours. These lethargic "maniacs" never speak, either to each other or to anyone else in the cast, because Steckler was too cheap to rent sound equipment for the picture. When dialogue exchanges are required, he instead utilizes the time-honoured Wishman Method of having one character speak their dialogue while another character is onscreen. This, of course, allowed Steckler to loop in whatever dialogue he deemed appropriate, but since he evidently didn't have a script, the whole thing sounds ad libbed. Poorly. Often by Steckler himself! ("Diiiiieeeee Gaaaarrrrbage, Diiiieeeee") Eventually, these two will meet, but only after Steckler repeats their boring and predictable killing routines ad nauseam. On the plus side, there's plenty of breastage on display from a parade of what are presumably real-life prostitutes from the Hollywood sex papers, and Steckler's modest talents as a cinematographer ensure that his images actually registered on the film stock in a reasonably pleasing manner.

An older, paunchier, and rather sad-looking Agostino reprises his role as Hollywood Strangler Jonathan Klick in THE LAS VEGAS SERIAL KILLER (1986). Thanks to Steckler's ongoing resistance to recording actual sound (which, like the plot, was added in post), the brightest city on earth is also the quietest as Agostino, his character free on a technicality because they never found the bodies of his victims in HOLLYWOOD STRANGLER (!), mopes around Vegas with his camera, crashing creepy "celebrity" parties and looking for fresh meat when he's not working at a pizza joint decorated with posters from Steckler's movies (of course!) and banging the occasional panty-clad delivery customer who apparently can't resist a little pepperoni on the side. By this time, even Carolyn Brandt wouldn't appear in a Steckler film--and this was a woman who appeared in virtually nothing but Steckler films her entire career--so for balance Steckler has a couple of yahoos hit the strip for a little purse snatching and armed robbery, then has them cross paths with the killer Klick in the final moments of the film, in what Steckler presumably thought was a delicious twist of irony but which is actually just lame. As with any Steckler picture, the viewer is subjected copious amounts of padding, including strolls around tourist attractions, down city streets, and even a through a parade, sequences which have nothing to do with the story. As a time capsule of Vegas before the monoliths hit town, this stuff has value. As filmmaking, it's a last ditch effort by a seriously washed-up filmmaker to squeeze a few bucks out of both his own name and the poor souls who would spend their money on it. Like me.

Venturing further back in time, we come to 1971's BLOOD SHACK (aka THE CHOOPER), a gritty, ugly-looking "horror" effort shot in the middle of nowhere (with live sound!) and heavily padded with rodeo stock footage just so it can wheeze toward a one-hour running time. The story concerns a "famous" horror movie actress (Carolyn Brandt, playing herself, supposedly) who inherits a desolate, dilapidated ranch haunted by an evil Native American spirit known as the Chooper. The house and the stained mattress within represent the only real "production value" in the entire film outside of Carolyn Brandt's pants and a few half-customized jalopies driven by various cast members. It's not spoiling anything to reveal that the Chooper, which appears at regular intervals to scare and/or kill people, is not a real spirit at all, but someone with a grudge against the leading lady (so small is the principal cast, you'll figure it out in the first ten minutes). The get-up on this "creature"--plush brown PJs and a ridiculous mask) must truly be seen to be believed. This DVD also contains a "director's cut" of the movie that runs about ten minutes longer than the theatrical version: advisable only if you're a fan of Steckler's unique brand of padding.

Trailer for BODY FEVER.

Finally we have BODY FEVER, presented here under its alternate title SUPER COOL (I'm not sure why the packaging differs), a 1969 detective thriller that, owing to it's chronological proximity to the better films in Steckler's oeuvre (namely, the four films included in the other Midnight Movies box: RAT PHINK A BOO BOO, THE LEMON GROVE KIDS, THE THRILL KILLERS and THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES yadda yadda yadda), actually manages to be modestly entertaining on a typically Stecklerian budget. It even features live sound, to boot! Steckler plays a P.I. wading through an underworld of sleazeballs to track down a sexy thief who absconded with a bag full of mob heroin. Once he finds her, they fall in love, and run through a park tossing the bag of heroin between them like smitten schoolchildren before ultimately facing the drug kingpin himself. There's a charm in this film that would never be seen again in a Steckler feature, and it compensates for the fact that much of the film was shot in and around Steckler's house. The film may be best remembered for Steckler's charity to the seriously down-and-out director/actor Coleman Francis, a Hollywood fringe dweller (and cast member in Steckler's LEMON GROVE KIDS and narrator of his THRILL KILLERS) who was literally found drunk on the street by Steckler and offered a few bucks to clean up and play a rather touching scene in a bankrupt laundromat. Short of a bit part in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS the following year, Francis would never again work on or in film, and would be found dead in his car in 1973.

Each DVD in this set qualifies, more or less, as a special edition, with trailers, interviews with Steckler and Brandt, and commentaries from Steckler on all four features, though these are of questionable value as he provides perhaps 5% insight and 95% narration, and if you've seen a Steckler film, you know the last thing any of them need is narration. The best extras of all are the commentaries on HOLLYWOOD STRANGLER and BLOOD SHACK by drive-in movie scholar Joe Bob Briggs, who seems to know far more about the films than Steckler (!), and has a whale of a time trying to help us understand just how they ever got made, let alone released. Briggs' participation alone makes these two discs worth keeping, since they're much more tolerable in his company. Without it, the whole box would basically be a write-off to all but the most die-hard Steckler aficionados, despite the good-natured participation of Steckler and Brandt in the supplemental features. Of course, at this price, and even moreso when it turns up in various online discount sales, it's a far better value than buying any of these titles on their own.

MIA on DVD: HOT STUFF (USA; 1979)

2008-12-14T22:01:00.000-08:00

Great little movie with a fun cast and a script co-authored by the venerable Donald Westlake. Sadly, it's not on DVD, but I managed to dig up these credits of the inimitable Reed's theme song and post them on YouTube. Enjoy!

And, for your further viewing pleasure, Dom Deluise blasts off!

DOG BITE DOG (Hong Kong, 2006)

2008-12-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

A fight at the opera: the bits they really didn't need.

DOG BITE DOG (Hong Kong, 2006)
D: Soi Cheang Pou-soi

Bleak made chic, with hip nihilism taken to nearly laughable extremes, as grungy Cambodian assassin Edison Chen hits Hong Kong for a paid hit and is immediately pursued by tenacious cop Sam Lee across a dingy, trash-strewn city. The picture moves at a relentless clip, forgiving those moments where it slows down for Chen to "act," but the central message that men will revert to basic instinct in desperate times is nothing new, so the filmmakers make sure to blame bad daddies for good measure (or is it absentee mommies?). The metaphor is mercilessly pounded home by Silver Cheung's production design, which consists largely of spreading copious amounts of detritus and grime onto every location--as if having one major character live in a shanty on top of a garbage dump wasn't obvious enough--and cinematographer Edmund Fung, who bathes the festivities in a sickly yellow-green hue. Okay, we GET it! But just in case we don't get it, one setpiece fight between the grunting protagonists is augmented by dog growls. You see, they're all feral and stuff, so...ummm... But the worst is saved for last, a self-contained, thematically unneccessary and nigh-operatic blast of pretentious Cambodian slice 'n dice that could have saved all involved one hell of a lot of embarrassment had it been dropped entirely. Real life party boyz Lee and (especially) Chen look too young for these parts, and are surrounded by any number of actors who might have been better in their places. Of the two, Lee comes the closest to convincing, while Chen finally appears to have found the outer reaches of his limited talents, and it was a very short search.

THE TIRED CITY (Hong Kong, 2008)

2008-11-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

THE TIRED CITY (Hong Kong, 2005/2008)
D: John Chan and Pam Hung

An official selection of the 2008 Hong Kong Independent Short Film Awards, presented here via the YouTube Screening Room.

I.C. KILL (Hong Kong; 1999)

2008-11-21T21:07:00.000-08:00

I. C. KILL (1999)
D: Mihiel Wong Chung-ning.
Y2K jitters conjure up yet another ghost in the machine in this moderately (but surprisingly) witty, suspenseful videogramme that has slacker Michael Tse fearing for his life after roommate Jason Chu intercepts a date with his pretty new internet ICQ chatmate (Liz Kong) and turns up face down at the Ma Liu Shui pier in Sha Tin shortly thereafter. Tech-dumb detective Vincent Wan sizes up the clues, discovers a small chain of victims—including an embarrassed, defensive young female survivor in the hospital—and deduces that the perp is, in fact, a vengeful ghost with a firm deadline for Tse’s departure from the mortal coil. Taking their cue from last year’s phenomenally successful RING pictures from Japan—not for nothing is this film’s bogeywoman named Hiroko—director Mihiel Wong and writer Andrew Wu, who shared these duties between them last year on their debut project B. FOR BOYS, think cinematically on a home video budget and come up with a (very) rough gem distinguished by smart blocking in visually interesting locations—aided in no small part by cinematographers Ng Wing-sin and Lau Wai-kwan, and art director Ginnie Fung Suk-fun (the lamp in Tse’s apartment radiates golden-orange like something from a Wong Kar-wai movie)—and two lead characters that are generally more rounded, both in the writing and the performances, than one usually finds in this corner of the shot-on-video arena. The picture’s most notable asset might very well be it’s unvarnished depiction of computer user interface and online chat sessions (watch the video), something far too many filmmakers unnecessarily “enhance” with phony graphics and sound effects. It should be interesting to see what Wong and Wu are capable of should they return to shooting on film.

BLACK MAGIC 2 (Hong Kong; 1976)

2008-07-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

BLACK MAGIC 2 (Hong Kong; 1976)
D: Ho Meng-hua
Heeding what I can only assume was a public outcry for a followup after the success of the previous year’s wild dark arts exploitationer BLACK MAGIC, director Ho Meng-hua, writer Ni Kuang and their mischievous horror elves not only come up with a more intricate story that repurposes most of the earlier film’s leading players, they crank the freak-show dial way, WAY up.

Lam Wai-yiu, Ti Lung, Tanny Tien Ni

More gore! More nudity! More zombies! More lesions, skin ulcers and blood worms! More lactation! A miscarriage! Wait a minute...ewwww! The opening credits haven’t even rolled before a topless native girl is devoured by a fairly convincing crocodile, after which a frizzy-haired old wizard (Yeung Chi-hing) guts the beast to retreive a cherished bangle for her grieving family. Things get decidedly more outlandish from there as skeptical Hong Kong docs Ti Lung and Lam Wai-tiu take wives Tanny Tien Ni and Lily Li on vacation to what a title card informs us is “A Tropical City,” where they run into all sorts of gooey Southeast Asian mysticism at the hands of suave sorcerer Lo Lieh.

Lo Lieh

From his basement lair, Lo whips female pubic hairs and breast milk into powerful zombie potions, controls his creations via giant metal spikes pounded into their heads (the removal of which expedites the decomposition process in Hammer-style dissolve-o-vision), and doesn’t take kindly to city folk sniffin’ around the rotting corpses of his victims. Not only does he turn Li into an walking husk after luring her from the group, he casts a love spell on both Ti’s wife (Tien) and his colleague (Lam).

Lily Lee

Shaken free of Lo’s remote-controlled adultery by a rightfully perplexed Ti, Lam’s subsequent race to rescue his own wife from Lo’s clutches ends rather poorly for both of them, leaving Ti to seek out the services of wily old wizard Yeung, who helps him break Tien’s spell by extracting live worms from the oozing sores on her back. After he loses a subsequent battle of the hex dolls with an agitated Lo, Yeung bequeaths his own eyeballs to the young hero, who’s not a little nauseated that he has to eat them to gain the arcane powers needed to take on Lo and his battalion of druid-robed zombies.

The increased budget is not only evident in the quality and abundance of the movie’s visceral special effects, including some fairly effective process work during the fiery finale, but also in soft, atmospheric lensing by Cho Wai-kei and an eerie, detail-rich production design by Chan Ging-sam that works as hard as the actors to play up the popular Hong Kong perception of Southeast Asian countries as literally crawling with all manner of evil and exotic threats. Definitely one of the all time great Hong Kong horror pictures, with a few bits of Yuen Cheung-yan’s martial arts play thrown in for good measure—dig that kooky fight atop the gondola lift— and a flavorful music score by Frankie Chan Fan-kei.

I'm told you can pick this up on DVD in Region 1 from Media Blasters some time in the Fall, but when I want to see a movie—especially one as hyped as this one has been over the years—I don't like to wait. And like others in the know, I grabbed a membership at www.jaman.com—a LEGAL online distributor of a phenomenal selection of international cinema—and downloaded it myself, an act all the more necessary when IVL/Celestial apparently withdrew it from their release schedule for some godforsaken reason. And while I'm glad I didn't wait, I'll still pick up the Media Blasters edition when it streets or better yet, when it inevitably ends up in one of their price-reduced three packs that follow about a year or so after they release the titles individually.

THE PLOT (Hong Kong; 1991)

2008-06-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

THE PLOT (Hong Kong; 1991)
D: Chui Chik-lim (as Teddy Yu)
Greedy, traitorous Simon Yam usurps the throne of a weapons syndicate, only to contend with freshly-paroled rival Sun Chien and an abundance of undercover cops in the organization (dude needs to run better background checks!). Cheapo actioner strains plausibility at regular intervals, and lacks a strong leading character: puggish Sun Chien and Emily Chu, as one of the cops, vie for the honor but cancel each other out, leaving the impeccably-apparelled Yam to steal the show. Highlight action sequences, co-choreographed by Sun Chien, pit him against a Japanese hitbitch (To Gwai-fa) in a shanty-trashing deathmatch, and the entire cast against each other in a sprawling shipyard shootout that goes on for nearly 12 minutes straight!

BLACK DYNAMITE (2008; USA)

2008-06-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD (Korea; 2008)

2008-05-18T19:24:00.001-07:00

BRAVEFUL POLICE (Taiwan/Hong Kong; 1990)

2008-03-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

Nightclub wrestler To Gwai-fa meets with disapproval. Bet your local Amvets ain't got a show like this!

BRAVEFUL POLICE (Taiwan/Hong Kong; 1990)
D: Hon Bo-Cheung
This lesser-known Kara Hui vehicle should probably stay that way. It's a soapy thriller that looks like it was shot for free and sends the veteran martial artist to Tokyo where, with the help of a plucky prostitute (Yip Ka-ling) and a sexy lady wrestler (To Gwai-fa; don’t ask), she takes down the syndicate that’s squeezing her restauranteur uncle. Lotsa yap about displaced Taiwanese folk sticking together (all the girls hail from the island), but the only real highlight comes when Kara yanks the bikini top off a snooty roundeye peeler and tosses her into the audience at one of those only-in-a-Hong-Kong-movie nightclubs where well-dressed society couples gather to furiously applaud spastic stripteasing—and female wrestling—like it was a night at the friggin’ opera! Stay home. New wave band Berlin performs “Take My Breath Away,” though I’m fairly certain they’re not aware of it.

KILLING ME TENDERLY (Hong Kong; 1997)

2008-02-26T20:02:00.000-08:00

WARNING: Clip contains spoilers, but also many of the things that are cool about Hong Kong cinema (even if this isn't one of the great Hong Kong films), so view at your own risk.

KILLING ME TENDERLY (Hong Kong; 1997)
D: Lee Lik-chi

Craving a change of scenery and pace, rural village leader and police chief Leon Lai transfers to the big city, where he’s less than thrilled with his first assignment: babysitting low-ranking pop singer Sammi Cheng through a gauntlet of rehearsals, mini-concerts, press conferences, petty rivalries, radio interviews and photo ops, all the while pretending to be gay both to fit in with her all-gay “mistress house” of handlers and to keep her from suspecting he’s actually investigating an increasingly homicidal stalker.

Cute blandness very nearly defines bubblegum Hong Kong filmmaking, but the scenario might have sparkled more brightly had Lai dialed up the camp to something even half approaching the levels seen in his concerts, and had Cheng played something a little edgier than a trusting dove of innocence who just wants the world to hear her sing (essentially her own “public image” made manifest). Then again, this is the kind of movie in which the hero grudgingly allows his charge to carry on with her first big stage show and, despite the threat of a psycho killer on the loose in the auditorium, allows groups of tear-streaked young girls to deliver flowers to the singer ON STAGE! Because he loves her, you see, and she trusts him with her life, which she doesn’t fear losing in front of her adoring fans because they’re the most important people in the world, even when the man sworn to protect her is 30 rows back while more of them run up on stage to greet her and cry some more and . . . did I mention that a man-child whacko who kills cats is loose in the house?

Sammi Cheng and Leon Lai (the latter somewhat surprisingly) give warm, natural performances, although the contrivances that turn their working relationship into a romantic one are far less convincing (particularly Cheng’s reaction after discovering Lai’s undercover status and the fallout that ensues). Industry milieu and minutiae have a sanitized air of authenticity about them, which weighs nicely against the film’s ultra-conventional catch-that-stalker scenario.

BIZARRE (Canada/USA; 1980-85)

2008-02-17T19:20:00.000-08:00

Apropos of nothing, I thought I'd take a look back at one of the great viewing pleasures of my youth, one of the last great sketch comedy revues and one of the few things televisual that Canadians should rightfully be proud of, even if their American cousins got the version with all the boobies.

Bizarre has aged much more gracefully than one might expect, and a series of DVDs issued in recent years as THE BEST OF BIZARRE should attest to this fact. Sure, it dates from a time when names like Bella Abzug, Henry Kissinger, Tom Snyder were punchlines in and of themselves (though barely, and more often because they simply sounded funny as punchlines), and sure, host/cast leader John Byner was probably given too many opportunities to run through a surprisingly (for his talents) limited range of impersonations that had been serving him well since THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW in the 60's (Paul Lynde, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Marlon Brando, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Mathis, John Wayne to precise, and usually in the form of "audition reel" sketches for famous movie and TV characters like THE GODFATHER and FANTASY ISLAND's Herve Villechaize), but when I transferred several season's worth of old Betamax tapes to DVD-r for safe keeping not long before the DVD series started appearing (figures!), I can safely say I still found myself reeling with laughter despite knowing much of this material from heart. (this piece references some of the sketches contained within the DVD volumes, as well as many others)

The show's writers, directors and cast had a remarkable collective ability to spin old jokes into seemingly fresh full length sketches that would usually feature heavy padding via Byner's antics and asides. Distill just about any sketch down to it's raw elements - minus sets, cast, and the usual digressions for time - and you've got jokes that had been done on any number of variety shows in the decade before this one - BIZARRE reformulated the brew in large part by added healthy doses of cynicism, sexism and slapstick violence - and of course the naked women (keen eyes would be right in noticing a thankfully mute Ziggy Lorenc—later a vee-jay for Canada's MuchMusic channel—as a piece of furniture, clad in a bikini just like four other "pieces" placed in a slum apartment rented out by crotchety landlord Byner).

And, of course, the inimitable Super Dave Osborne (played by series producer Bob Einstein, the brother of Albert Brooks).

Cast lists at places like IMDB fail to give credit to the contributions of many bit players who went on to greater things, most notably Canada's own Mike Myers (as Byner's nephew in a show closer in which Byner reacts to a review that claims he stuffs the audience with relatives, only to learn that all but one audience member is family!) and future CROW villain Michael Wincott (look closely at the Mexican Nephew seated beside Luba Goy in the legendary Bigot Family sketches). Donnelly Rhodes, another Canadian mainstay who had a memorable run on the U.S. sitcom SOAP, plays one of Super Dave Osborne's stunt coordinators in a second-season sketch involving a mechanical bull. There were others including early, popular appearances of a young Howie Mandel, though guest stand-ups were generally more along the lines of Willie Tyler and Lester. For whatever that's worth.

In the first and, to a lesser extent, the second seasons, BIZARRE would include sketches filmed outside of Toronto, including an amusing bit filmed in an L.A. cemetery in which "priest" Redd Foxx sends bad TV shows to their rightful resting places surrounded by a platoon of LET'S MAKE A DEAL contestants), and a peculiar filmed segment where a gorilla holds up a grocery store and speeds off in a stolen Mercedes.

When something clicked on BIZARRE, viewers could rest assured the idea would be tweaked and repeated on a future episode. Witness the ever-increasing insanity of the Super Dave Osborne stunts, or the "Byner Originals," in which the host would claim to be introducing some new comedy creation - Boy John, Johnny Jackson - that were blatant ripoffs of actual personalities of the day which would prompt producer Bob Einstein to interrupt the sketch, calmly berate Byner, and then suffer a litany of insults in return ("it's called the wandering Jew and it'll be here in about 5 seconds", went one memorable line from a similar sketch). Or better yet, it might involve yet another unsuspecting audience member and end with something like this:

The aforementioned Bigot Family proved popular enough to fill several repeat sketches with well-delivered ethnic humor (although 90's syndication episodes oddly removed what few Asian gags there were and cut several watermelon gags). Other popular returning characters included: the Reverend T.V. Seewell, who broadcast from the Enzlo Veal Animal Healing Pavilion (the location of which changed from bit to bit); a Yoga For Health instructor with fake stretchy legs who invariably closed his sketch to Devo's "Whip It"; and a perennially bottom-rated news team featuring a sportscaster who only favored black athletes, a drunken film reviewer (Saul Rubinek in some sketches) kept on a leash, a clueless weatherman (Don Lake) with an atrocious toupee and a lead anchor (Byner) who took exception to his female co-host's bitter digs by punching her out of her chair.

Another great repeat gag was often played on regular Tom Harvey (another Canuck), who would be whisked from a sketch to correct a "makeup problem", only to return to the re-shoot and discover doors nailed shut, breakaway furniture and real booze in the drinking glasses. Audience members were often used to supplant "underwhelming" actors, or to heap further indignity on Tom Harvey. And finally, long before Conan O'Brien thought he came up with the idea, the creators of Bizarre used the process of superimposing real lips over cardboard celebrity cutouts to often delirious effect (politicians of the time singing lite-FM love ballads, for example)

BIZARRE's peak seasons were probably 1982, 1983, 1984 and even most of 1985-86, after which other comedy shows on then burgeoning cable networks (and regular broadcast TV) started to steal their thunder, signaling and end to the sketch comedy format as many had known it throughout the 60's and 70's. Nonetheless, these shows represent one of the last bastions of political incorrectness in broadcast comedy, particularly for something shown on a major Canadian network during early prime time hours!

At long last available on DVD, BIZARRE might not provide the hearty laughs it once did to those of us who were there to witness it during its initial run, but there are still many fond memories to be savored in these volumes.

BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL (Japan; 2003)

2008-02-15T19:10:00.000-08:00

BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL (Japan; 2003
D: Yudai Yamaguchi

This low-budget baseball zombie comedy is arguably a mixed bag, but one likely to develop a sizable cult following if it hasn't by the time you read this. While it successfully pokes fun at the clichés inherent in most sports movies, particularly those emotional cheats where spectators spontaneously applaud the most mundane, often personal actions of the main characters, it doesn't deliver on the action and gore quotient promised by the concept. And yet, as a budget-conscious live-action adaptation of a Shonen Jump manga, it plants tongue hard in cheek and certainly feels faithful to the source material, never for a minute taking itself seriously and gleefully indulging in the most eye-rollingly obvious visual gags.

Desperate to make it to the big leagues, the Seido High School baseball team must face their much more successful rivals at Gedo High, a team made up entirely of well-armed zombies. Their ace in the hole may well be transfer student `Jubeh The Baseball' (Tak Sakaguchi), whose signature fastball killed his own father, a tragedy which prevents him from helping the team. Directed by the writer of VERSUS (Yudai Yamiguchi), produced by that film's director (Ryuhei Kitamura) and starring that film's lead (Tak Sakaguchi), BATTLEFIELD shares that film's low-budget ingenuity, but wisely knows when to take up stakes and call it a day around the 90 minute mark. Can't speak for the R1 release of this title, but the Japanese R2 DVD I picked up has English subs and includes a hilariously inventive short film called Ramen Baka Ichidai, about a kid who hunts down the perfect Ramen noodles for his dying grandfather. Primo stuff.

TUBE (Korea; 2003)

2008-02-08T18:46:00.000-08:00

TUBE (Korea; 2003)
D: Baek Woon-Hak

While I can't highly recommend it, TUBE is kind of fun, provided you don't think too much about the plot, which has a stereotypical loose-canon cop (Kim Seok-hoon) battling a terrorist (Pak Sang-min) onboard a hijacked subway train. The terrorist is a former government eraser that the government tried, but failed, to erase, and he's taken the train, and Seoul's mayor, hostage to uhh, well . . . to apparently have the plan be doomed from the start.

Equal parts SPEED and THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123, and lesser parts DIE HARD and MONEY TRAIN (the hero's boss does his best crazy Robert Blake impersonation), the film has few pretensions, which make it easy on the derriere, but overall it's a victim of ridiculous logic and a story that begs a few too many questions. Poor Bae Doo-na gets one of the stranger film roles in film history, as a pickpocket who apparently knows she must love the hero even before she knows the hero, and indulges all the necessary Korean histrionics along the way (as well as almost bearing more physical brutality than the hero!) while our glowering protagonist poses with a series of unlit cigarettes in his mouth (and which only one person will ever be allowed to light, care to guess who?).

Production wise, though, TUBE delivers the goods, with slick production values throughout, and some nicely handled chase and fight scenes. Turns out, if I read the docu-stuff on the Korean 2-disc set correctly, that the Korean subway trains don't even look as hi-tech as they do here, and the ones in the film were almost entirely CG apart from the sets for close-ups! Columbia Tri-Star's sleeve is highly reminiscent of the art for TRANSPORTER and, not entirely unexpectedly, substitutes a generic Asian face for that of star Kim Seok-hoon. Nice.

FATAL TERMINATION (Hong Kong; 1990)

2008-01-27T15:55:00.000-08:00

The only reason you'll probably get this movie in the first place!

FATAL TERMINATION (1990)
D: Andrew Kam Yeung-wah

Dark, serpentine action thriller, sharply written by Lee Man-choi and Pang Chi-ming, from one of the colony’s most unsung filmmakers. Andrew Kam, co-director with Johnnie To of the Heroic Bloodshed classic THE BIG HEAT (yeah yeah, I know. . .) and, later, the excellent HEART OF KILLER, shows his singular knack for taming an abundance of lead characters and converging plotlines into a lean piece of work.

To hide his middleman dealings with Arab terrorists and a vicious gun dealer (Phillip Ko, who also co-produced) from hound-dog Political Division investigator Simon Yam, dirty customs chief Robin Shou frames, then kills fellow customs officer Michael Miu. The dead man’s sister (Moon Lee, in a career highlight performance) and her husband (Ray Lui), both Special Forces operatives, begin their own investigation, but soon find their lives virtually destroyed by the bad guys.

The movie plays like a nicely stripped down version of some of the great American police corruption flicks of the 70’s, although the Yanks rarely contrived finales in which all the principals go at each other with cars, copters, grenades, machine guns and rocket launchers on an open battlefield! Of interest: FATAL TERMINATION contains one of the most frightening stunts I’ve ever seen in a Hong Kong movie, as a bug-eyed gwailo goon holds Moon’s little girl by her hair outside the window of a visibly speeding car with Moon on the hood desperately trying to punch through the windshield. The story goes that the kid was never in harm’s way and that the “arm” was actually a strong steel contraption, but it still makes for one of those jaw-dropping, “holy shit!” moments that separate the cinema of Hong Kong from any other.

NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE (Korea; 2006)

2008-01-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

Shin Ha-kyun

NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE (Korea; 2006)
D: Park Chul-hee

Superb production values aside--and really, what Korean movies aren't well made these days?--NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE has a lot of the elements that, when viewed in too many consecutive movies (which can happen in this country's films), tend to shift people away from Korean cinema for short periods of time, and help to explain the terrible financial slump that is plaguing the K-film industry right now. You'd think they could avoid it by mixing genres, but there's often a streak of emotional violence in many (but obviously not all) Korean movies --including comedies--that takes a toll after awhile, and this film has some of that, in addition to some rather cringe-inducing physical violence at odds with it's self-consciously quirky characters.

It's the story of a mute, loner assassin (Shin Ha-kyun, essaying yet another oddball like he did in SAVE THE GREEN PLANET) who lives by his own code of "cool" and dreams of becoming a bullfighter despite being a bit of a bumbler in his profession. His best friend is also an assassin and former ballet dancer who is saving up to buy a warehouse to make into his own studio. Isn't that just quirky and cool? He picks up and beds a sexy bar girl (Yoon Ji-hye) from a favourite post-kill gin joint, and she comes and goes from his life as she pleases, at least until a little street-urchin attaches himself to Shin, at which point a weirdly dysfunctional family is created. Oh, how inventive!

The killer's motto is summed up in the title, as he only kills those who deserve it (of course, the victims are so one-dimensionally sketched that we have to take the filmmakers' word for it that they're really deserving of the grisly deaths they receive). When a hit results in the death of the intended victim's twin brother, the usual volleyballs of revenge start getting served, leading this wannabe black comedy to a typically melodramatic and tragic ending that is almost a foregone conclusion in these kinds of films. Especially the ones from Korea.

Watching this as a double bill with CITY OF VIOLENCE (released the same year as this film; check the archives for a look at the love affair with J&B that it shares with this film) makes for an interesting contrast in styles of on screen physical carnage. Where CITY is cartoonish and winkingly overblown, MERCY marks each kill with the juicy pop of an exit wound or the nauseating (and repeated) "chukks" of knives thrusting into chests and stomachs--all lovingly and realistically recreated in crispity-crunchity DTS and effected as realistically as possible. A flashback scene involving a paid hit on an unsuspecting fisherman is a queasy highlight only because the filmmakers cleverly place the audience in the shoes of the first-time assassin, who (initially) has difficulty with the job because he knows nothing about his scared, misunderstanding victim, and neither do we, which makes it all the more difficult to watch. After that, blood flows with an abject realism but in the end there's no point to anything these self-consciously eccentric characters do, and their fates are made predictable by the very genre!

Some films in the "oddball assassins" genre will take at least modest pains to show the pointless and unrewarding nature of killing and its inevitable consequences, and I guess this one MIGHT be trying to get that across, but I find some of the more effective ones have at least a believable hero worth rooting for: MERCY's hero is practically a byproduct of his own imagination, but he's not even a remotely likable character once you see how viciously he can dispatch targets that usually don't get much opportunity to fight back. Nor is anyone he comes into contact with particularly likable beyond their wardrobes. By the time the festivities climaxed with the by-now de-rigeur Korean blend of melodrama and spitting blood, I found I couldn't have cared less.

Always remember, labels out! Yoon Ji-hye and Shin Ha-kyun

Just tell 'em Emily sent ya!

2008-01-02T16:34:00.000-08:00

Promo ad included in the VCD of QUEEN'S RANSOM a few months back. She might not be on every Hong Kong film producer's run-to list—and she damned well should be—but it's good to know the vastly under-appreciated Emily Kwan can still land nice promo gigs on the side!

SPICE COP (2002)

2008-01-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

SPICE COP (2002)
D: Amen Wu Ga-kan.
AKA: HOT & SPICY

"Kooky" cops Louis Fan and Patrick Keung (two names that don't exactly scream "hilarious!" playing characters named F-Bomb and Mojito) are hired by the estate of a millionaire to shield his prized daughter from her shifty relatives, who are soon murdered one by one in the tycoon's opulent mansion after arriving there for the execution of the will. Writer Michael Yeung and director Amen Wu play out their mystery with a winking, Dutch-angled cartoon sensibility, most shamelessly embodied by the hero detectives: every line of dialogue they speak, every movement they make, is accompanied by the broadest possible gestures, including funky little dance steps and outsized facial contortions like googly eyes or flicking tongues. In the end, this liberal coating of "wacky" fails to make us forget that this is a formulaic whodunnit. Thankfully, Fan participates in several well-choreographed and crisply edited martial arts fights, including a climactic style-versus-style doozy in a garage with henchman Sze Hung-bor, and these make the title worth at least one viewing.

THE BARREN VIRGIN (1985)

2007-12-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

Lam Yue-kit, Heung Chuen-chung and Kim Gee-mei.

THE BARREN VIRGIN (1985) D: Lee Tso-nam

. . . or, The Subject Was Hymenoplasty! A "social disease" film in the fine tradition of U.S. roadshow exploitationers like DAMAGED LIVES (1933) and SEX MADNESS (1938) and MOM AND DAD (1945). In other words, a conservative moral issue fueled by ripe dialogue and fronting an endless parade of "square-up reels" on the part of both the characters and the filmmakers. In other words, sex, son, and lots of it!

The title's misleading though: there are actually two barren virgins put through the wringer here, both of them misunderstood and driven to sins of desperation by the harsh expectations of an unjust society. One, Kwai-len (Kim Gee-mei) is a Hong Kong divorcee with an impenetrable hymen who flees an abusive husband in Hong Kong to live in Japan with the other barren virgin (Lam Yue-kit), a close friend not coincidentally named Mary whose leaking vagina has her terrified that her fiancee's archconservative (and apparently clueless) Singaporean parents—and maybe even her fiancee—will think she's used goods on her wedding night. Quelle horreur!

Repping offense in this gynecological soap opera is Mary's friend Ruby (Heung Chuen-cheung), a likewise appropriately-named scarlet woman who models naked or nearly-naked with snakes, motorcycles, spearguns, banana-yellow surfboards and other phallic metaphors, and snacks on a buffet of promiscuous boyfriends, including one (Chan Kai-jun) who discovers a surprise package on a Caucasian tourist but doesn't let it spoil the fun!

Heung Chuen-chung with accessories.

The barren-esses, meanwhile, turn to the nightclub scene to raise the exorbitant cost of Mary's outpatient hymenoplasty, with Kwai-len substituting her "iron bar" hymen for Mary's less protective barrier right at the brink of nookie with a sleazy old fart.

Despite a Category II rating and distinctive lensing against often dramatic Japanese locales, the abundant toplessness and full frontal nudity here tend to mitigate against any pretense of social responsibility, which was probably the point to begin with. Marbled with the kind of stale, hokey comic relief that one expects from a film of this genre, regardless of country of origin, and the characters ultimately reap their just rewards, as they always have in films like these: some enjoy postnuptial frottage with their abstinent manly men, while others face the direst of consequences (thanks in part to a gweilo "transvertile") in a throwaway bit that reeks of prevailing ignorance about the subject.

But hey, tits galore! as David Friedman might say. And the opening credits—all three minutes, fifteen seconds of 'em—unspool over footage of the Main Street Electrical Parade at Tokyo Disneyland, almost as if to prophecy the innocence that will be lost soon after, but more likely because somebody wanted to get their home movies up on the big screen. The last 90 seconds of this film truly must be seen to be believed.

And remember. It could happen to you. And you. And you!

EYE FOR AN EYE (1990; Hong Kong)

2007-12-19T18:08:00.000-08:00

EYE FOR AN EYE (1990)
D: O Sing-pui

When her cop boyfriend (Wilson Lam) puts her supposedly reformed triad father (Foo Wang-tat) behind bars, trading company exec Joey Wong aims to rid the organization of it's dirty ties, but chief goon Jimmy Lung Fong—in a deliciously over-the-top portrait of scumbaggery—has plans for a very hostile takeover. To ensure her cooperation, he rapes her, videotapes the deed, and sells copies to his pals when he's not whipping her, insulting her, killing her relatives, making her watch him have sex with hookers and reveling in her utter defenselessness (which actually lasts longer than logic would dictate).

Lam's conflicted detective is ultimately painted as an ineffectual, emotionally constipated hero-by-accident, which doesn't exactly win back his girl, but hotheaded partner Max Mok—whose unrequited love for Wong is sketched in montage while he sings karaoke to a soaring Dave Wong Kit power ballad (illustrated above and below—thanks YouTube!)—doesn't fare much better when he goes above the law to get things done.

In fact, the filmmakers strongly suggest that triad "troubles" take care of themselves, though to prove it, they go a little nuts in the second half, with catharses and plot twists and fight scenes—including a king sized gang-on-gang chopper battle that spills through a restaurant's windows and into the street, presumably so a fire hydrant can be broken open to make everyone look even cooler fighting in a downpour—piled on at such a ferocious clip that a viewer's emotional circuits might need rewiring after all the yanking around.

And your name is . . . ?

2007-12-10T21:28:00.001-08:00

Drew this gal in a hurry about four years ago and for the life of me, I can't remember what movie she's from. All I know is this: it was a Hong Kong movie, shot on video, real cheap. She was a cop, the kind where the actors just sorta show up in their own clothes, dangle a badge holder around their neck from a little chain, and run around the back alleys of Hong Kong with toy guns shooting each other. It must've been late, 'cause I liked this girl's get-up enough to whip out my pencil and start doodling, but a few short years later, I stumble across the sketchpad, and it's driving me nuts wondering who she is and where she was, and why I took little artistic licenses—not sure if she was wearing a belly shirt, definitely wasn't wearing dog tags, and the face is in no way a likeness—to make her and the movie that much harder to ID. But here she is, smudges and all. Click on her and she should sharpen up. Her big-ass North Face-style jacket, the camouflage cargos and the boots are about the only things that I know are in the ballpark. Maybe someday I'll be able to stick a shot from the movie up here so folks can see if I missed by a mile . . .

NARAKA 19 (2007)

2007-12-03T19:45:00.000-08:00

NARAKA 19 (2007; Hong Kong)
D: Carol Lau Miu-Suet

Slick but plodding terror tale for teens—based on the wildly popular novel 'The 19th Gate of Hell" by Choi Tsun—about a group of university freshwomen drawn into a "hell game" (in Buddhism, a "naraka" is one of 18 purgatories) via the Short Message Service feature (SMS) on their cell phones, which serve as ersatz user interfaces that help them find weapons, locate exits and earn bonus points. With two of her roommates dead and a third well on her way to insanity, mousy heroine Gillian Chung enters the game in search of answers but ultimately faces demons from her own past. Though told in a way that requires more thought than its intended audience of youngsters might be prepared to give it, the story is nonetheless intriguing if not particularly high on scares, and thanks to some impressive digital effects by Sinai Mountain, holds water for a good long time despite the villain being telegraphed far too early, and an egregious "guest star" dropped into the proceedings for sheer exploitation value.

Gillian Chung

SEOUL (2000; Korea)

2007-11-30T17:15:00.000-08:00

Choi Min Soo, Tomoyo Nagase

SEOUL (2000)
D: Masahiko Nagasawa

Japanese cop Tomoyo Nagase, on vacation in Seoul is held over for questioning after he foils an armored car robbery. Meanwhile, Dawn of Nation, a terrorist organization, plots to disrupt the upcoming Asian summit, kidnapping Japan's Foreign Minister to back up their demands. Tomoyo inserts himself into the investigation of hard-nosed Korean cop Choi Min-soo, an unwavering protocol-follower who teaches him the finer points of Korean etiquette along the way, most often at the receiving end of a punch in the face. Choi himself is saddled with obstructive KCIA guys who regularly overrule his authority. Meanwhile, Tomoyo, against the wishes of his handlers, begins to suspect a link between the terrorists, the robbers and the monolithic Korea Japan Union Bank that could spell a deadly threat to Pan-Asian relationships. Slick, solid thriller with crackling action sequences, and a worthy cousin to the seminal 1999 actioner SHIRI, though one rooted less in Tom Clancy-ish techno-fantasy than that film. Writer Yasuo Hasegawa lightly acknowledges Japan's shameful presence in Korea's history, largely through the character of a wizened Korean noodle-stand proprietor whose Japanese fluency surprises Tomoyo, but then in the film's climactic turning point, in which Tomoyo rescues hostages on a city bus in defiance of Choi's orders (and is ultimately joined by Choi in his efforts), this act of Japanese redemption on behalf of Korean innocents seems tantamount to the Japanese (historical revisionists with the best of them) telling the stuffy, face-saving South Koreans to remove the stick from up their collective ass and get over themselves. A minor quibble, considering the film's general intelligence and quality in the face of so many cop thriller genre clichés. Trimming a few of the film's multiple denouements might have helped, though.

Flim Flam with Tim Tam: LEGEND ABOUT HUNTING GHOST: THE SERIES!

2007-11-27T19:24:00.000-08:00

At last! Long overdue confirmation that the people most qualified to investigate leg-tugging ghost children in haunted lakes and sobbing spectres in derelict housing estates are three beautiful women in short-shorts, tank tops and swimsuits! In the first episode of LEGEND ABOUT HUNTING GHOST: SPIRIT IN NIGHT (2002) After introducing hostess/models Eileen Chin, Ann Lau and Hui Wai-san in office Q&A sessions and then letting them introduce themselves wearing swimsuits by a stream, producer/host/flim-flam man Tin Tam takes them for an investigative swim in a resort lake supposedly haunted by the ghosts of drowned children, where a headless plastic doll conveniently placed in the water freaks them out in broad daylight.

Next up, they attempt to peel apples in front of a mirror in order to see the faces of their future husbands, but in each case they appear to be stuck with Tim Tam when he moves into the shot to tell them they’ve broken the peels. Finally, a visit to a condemned high-rise apartment building in Kuala Lumpur for a session of “plate spirit” (essentially a Quija game involving an overturned up on a sheet of Chinese characters) allows Tam to play the ace up his sleeve, video glitches subtly present throughout the videogramme suddenly pay off when a sobbing spirit—conveniently located in the room adjacent to the one where they decide to play the game—pounds on the connecting door and, wouldn’t ya know, blacks out the camera! In the right frame of mind, this is cheap fun, and one indeed wonders how Tam keeps a straight face in view of the flagrant con-artistry he and his crew are perpetrating, much of it unwittingly confirmed by a mystic “master” that Tam interviews at the end of the film. Reality-program production techniques are hindered by excessive waving of off-camera flashlights at the actresses for effect.

After the obligatory preface in which new hostesses Yu Lam-lam, Cheng Yan-yi and Lee Hak-lei postulate the existence of ghosts while modelling swimwear by the pool, LEGEND ABOUT HUNTING GHOST 2: HORROR NIGHT next entry in the earnest Malaysian “reality” series proceeds to offer scant evidence of the supernatural and plentiful implications of wishful thinking and off-camera crew tampering, as Tin Tam—who now actually seems to believe in the antediluvian myths he’s shoveling—drags his gullible cuties around to remote and/or witching hour spook sites (like a haunted lake, where they get to wear swimsuits again) in the wee hours of the morning when they’re way beyond tired, then yells something like “What was that?!?” at a bubble in the lake or a squeak in an old house, then presents the resulting stampede from the scene as evidence of the paranormal. Priceless!

Hostess Lee’s conviction that her cellphone was stolen by the graveyard ghost—all too readily encouraged by Tin Tam, who seems to know right where they’ll find it—and hostess Cheng’s “possession” by the estate ghost illustrate how easily reason can be ditched in favour of delirious group-think that favours urban legends for which there is clearly no evidence. But Tim Tam will have none of that . . .

Sporting a sleazy new porn-producer hairstyle and hopping into the director’s seat, Tam opens LEGEND ABOUT HUNTING GHOST 3: SPIRIT by reading viewer mail complaining that the show has yet to find an actual ghost and that the female hostesses are needlessly dressed in skimpy attire. His response? Smaller bathing suits and shorter shorts!

Like their predecessors, hostesses Christine, Cat and Chan Yi-yi (the only one with prior film experience, having appeared briefly in the 2000 Sammi Cheng vehicle SUMMER HOLIDAY) are introduced in their swimwear, then taken on Tam’s patented tour of the not-so-supernatural. Stop-offs this time include a delapitated colonial mansion—conveniently littered with “evidence” like joss sticks, yellow-paper talismen, ancestor tablets, and rotting papier-maché figures—where a couple of girls (but not the cameraman, of course) spot a figure at a window; a murky pond where the girls conduct an investigation by floating around on an inflatable alligator;

and finally back to the office where a “phone call to hell” pretty much flatlines, though Tam’s paranormal “expert” claims there’s plenty of evidence that they’re “getting close” to the spirit world. But just how close? Perhaps we'll find the answer in . . .

LEGEND ABOUT HUNTING GHOST 4: THE SPIRIT ON EARTH. The fourth installment in this Malaysian pseudo-reality series is just barely the most effective, though its predecessors score higher on the sex appeal scale. Tim Tam’s “adventure team” in this one is comprised of a more intriguing mix of faces (who understandably take billing by first name only), including a lovely Indian girl, Karen, who speaks fluent Cantonese and wears the most revealing swimsuit. On the whole, though, the outfits are on the conservative side for this outing (perhaps Tam got his wrist slapped for Chan Yi-yi’s skimpy bikini in Part 3?). Tam pushes Karen, Elvi and Shirley harder than he did the ladies in previous episodes, probably because he’s yet to prove anything outside of the attractiveness of young models in swimsuits. At a “mining pool,” he responds to their unwillingness to swim out near a yawning vertical mine shaft surrounded by twisted rebar—even after his bribes and threats—with a real gem: “Girls nowadays are harder to force.” The derelict building in this one is an old hospital, and as usual, they find nothing in it of a supernatural nature, but the place is genuinely creepy and the girls show more genuine fear than any of their predecessors. In fact, it’s a little uncomfortable to see them put through such an emotional wringer in pursuit of something that anyone with common sense knows does not exist, but it’s effective because of it. A shuffle here; a creaky water pipe there; a flashlight shining on a rafter: these are Tam’s evidence of the paranormal. Well, those and a few “invisible” crew members who can make noises or break things while “everyone” is seemingly in the same room.

Fifth and (to date) final entry in this ridiculous series—LEGEND ABOUT HUNTING GHOST 5: CATCH THE OIL GHOST—ditches the formula of the previous four. No more swimsuits, no more short-shorts, no more adventure teams. Instead, a single hostess (who opens the show wearing a lovely sheer black shirt) interviews a woman, seated behind obscured glass, who relates the story of her husband being possessed by a trio of “Blackmen,” oily, boxer-short-clad child-spirit-demon-thingies that disguise themselves as his mahjong buddies, and who are known to break into houses to steal things and rape women (funny how such distasteful, male-dominated activities in near-third-world shitholes are also conveniently attributable to ghosts). This tale is re-enacted with cut-rate actors (one of whom, Eileen Chin, was actually a hostess in the first episode). In the “reality” portion of the show, the hostess ventures out to the boonies, where the men in a remote village—most of whom look unemployed, drunk and all too willing to cater to the producer’s wishful thinking—gather at night to hunt a “Blackman” who has, according to the flimsiest yokel evidence, been giving them troubles with break-ins and raping (always blame the ghost. Yeah, that’s the ticket!). They arm themselves with with cell phones, guns and machetes and, in more evidence of Tim Tam’s out-dated flim-flammery, very nearly catch the little beasty before it disappears into the forest. Oddly, the deliberately gauzy glimpse of the thing reveals it to be nearly identical to the version shown in the dramatization! Coincidence! You decide.

GYPSY ANGELS (1980/1994)

2007-11-26T17:33:00.000-08:00

GYPSY ANGELS (1980/1994; United States)
D: Alan Smithee

Diggin' into the vault for this one. Ahhh, the memories. Brother, you just ain't seen bad acting until you've seen a pre-Wheel of Fortune Vanna White, playing the leather jumpsuit-clad squeeze toy of a macho barnstorming pilot (executive producer Gene Bicknell, who looks a lot like John Sayles but acts like Merle Haggard) defiantly proclaim: 'Well let me tell you one thing mister, I am one fine stripper. Real kinky, you know what I mean? Yeah, you betcha!' If the bellbottoms, aforementioned jumpsuits and Lyle Waggoner on display here are any indication, this is a movie the top-billed Vanna (at least Gene correctly surmised nobody would pay to see him) would likely have preferred to keep buried in the past, since most of it was shot in 1980 before she realized she was better suited to decorating game show sets. Not only can she not act, but she appears to be on the verge of puking during her big love scene with Gene (in which she innocently begs 'Love me. Please...love me.') To her credit, Vanna does reveal one of her vowels during that same romp in the hay. Otherwise, toss this one a Golden Turkey Award.

THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH (1976; United States)

2007-11-16T16:47:00.000-08:00

Hal Lindsay, false prophet

THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH (1976)
D: Robert Amram, Rolf Forsberg

"It's almost as if we had an unconscious desire to see the biblical prophesies fulfilled," frets narrator Orson Welles, ominously, in this classic piece of Christian fearmongering. Quietly insane evangelical minister Hal Lindsay attempts to marry revelation to then-current affairs in an effort to prepare us for the Armageddon that lies just around the corner. Obviously, with 30 years of hindsight, we now know he was wrong, and continues to be wrong, but had really swingin' fashion sense circa 1976.

Many actual scientists and deep thinkers appear on screen in LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH, and you'd be forgiven if you felt that some of them (who are clearly talking along evolutionary lines) were being taken out of context to support Lindsay's crackpot theories. Lindsay's apocalypse is scotch-taped together out of all the Bad News® that was available at the time of production. Thus, Lindsay's world was set to end as a result of any number of nasty afflictions. Recombinant DNA! Brazilian killer bees! Viruses from Hell! Atheists and witches run amok! And, as Orson says with deathly gravitas, "Nucular" Holocaust. It's Hal's nauseating belief that if you don't have hardcore Christian faith, then your ONLY possible options are witchcraft, astrology, transcendental meditation, Hare Krishnas or the Rev. Sun Myung-moon's wacky Reunification Church! In any case, Hal sez you haven't got a prayer.

The late, great Orson Welles

As always, Hal saves the best for last, enlightening us as to the coming of the antichrist, a figure he believes is alive today (at least as of 1976), and who would achieve omnipotence through seemingly good deeds and the establishment of world peace before enslaving everyone with microchip implants supplied by the then-fledgling computer industry. Or something. Apparently, only those who heed Hal's book and movie can avoid falling under the spell of this evil megalomaniac. He then proceeds to illustrate his argument with imagery designed to stoke the usual cold-war paranoia: before or around 1982, sez Hal, Russia and China will invade the middle east (didn't happen, at least not the way it's predicted here), the European market will grow to a prophesied ten member nations (25 and counting and still no Armageddon), and the "nucular" bombs will rain from the skies like the falling stars seen by the biblical John on his island retreat (well, we're still waiting!). Nonetheless, this allows the filmmakers to go mad with stock footage, a delirious and depressing exercise in escalating doom that runs a full six minutes, unnarrated. Oh, the humanity!

Just because radical fundamentalists love to fulfill prophesies, or see fulfillment where none rationally exists, doesn't mean the prophets were right. It just means that we'll always have to live with people like Hal, desperate to prove their "faith" has substance rather than just keeping it to themselves, and actually learning from it.

Viva VIVA!

2007-11-02T16:03:00.000-07:00

Could this be the next PSYCHO BEACH PARTY? I think so.

TIFF 2007: FLASH POINT

2007-09-15T20:16:00.001-07:00

FLASH POINT (Hong Kong/China; 2007)
D: Wilson Yip Wai-shun

Re-teaming of the director and star of SPL and DRAGON TIGER GATE is an extra lean, meaty police revenge thriller that treads familiar ground but builds to a protracted action climax that's sure to please fans of mixed martial arts, a school of increasing interest for producer and action director Donnie Yen, not to mention one of the most popular and profitable sports in the world at the time of the film's release. Story has venemous Vietnamese brothers (Ray Lui, Collin Chou and Xing Yu) hardballing their way into territory controlled by Hong Kong gang boss Ben Lam and his compatriots. The near-mortal wounding of Lam convinces the other three to seek justice from Organized Crime & Triad Bureau detective Donnie Yen, a one-man tornado to wants these guys disposed of in the worst way. Yen apparently finds his badge a little restrictive and his deep cover operative (Louis Koo) increasingly at risk of exposure. When gang honcho Ray Lui (in a solid comeback performance) is finally captured, the brothers start eliminating witnesses and eventually sniff out the mole in their midst. Koo survives their attack, but they kidnap his girlfriend to ensure that his memory fails at the trial, and when Lui walks free, Yen's snatches the guy up for delivery to the big showdown. In time, bodies are pushed beyond the limits of known human endurance, just as they have been in Hong Kong action cinema for decades, and Yip's camera swoops and glides to capture the elegant ferocity of these duels without a flurry of smash-cut editing constructing the fights for him. What Hong Kong cinema needs is more movies like this to balance the current lean toward romantic comedies and show that the former colony's film industry hasn't lost touch with the martial artistry and screen action design that have placed it on the international stage

Ray Lui

TIFF 2007: THE EXODUS

2007-09-14T14:09:00.001-07:00

THE EXODUS (Hong Kong/China 2007)
D: Edmond Pang Ho-cheung.

The opening shot, a slow, meticulous dolly backwards down a hallway, says it all. It begins with a tight closeup of a pair of alluring female eyes in a photograph. The subject of the portrait is revealed to be Queen Elizabeth II, and beneath it stand two men in swim trunks, goggles and flippers who light up smokes and casually redirect a Hong Kong police officer who has unwittingly entered the doorway at screen left. These must be cops, pre-1997, and as the frame continues to open up, we notice two, then three, then four of these "frogmen" beating a suspect with mallets and phone books as he struggles violently to flee.

"All the hatred of this world are caused by men," claims one of the film's female characters, but as evidenced by this gorgeous opening shot, much of it happens under the watchful eye of condoning women, and in pondering the question of why the female almost always outlives the male, as well as what they talk about when they go to the ladies' room together, writer-director Edmond Pang, along with co-writers Cheuk-Wan-chi and Jimmy Wan Chi-man, have crafted a sleek black comedy that, strangely, doesn't manifest most of its inherent dark whimsy until well into the final reel.

Nagged by a condescending mother-in-law who only sees value in a man who runs his own business, and long ago demoted to a desk job as a reward for interdepartmental whistle-blowing, bored and complacent Tai Po police sergeant Simon Yam—who we later learn was the redirected officer in the opening sequence—begrudges a favor to a fellow officer and agrees to take a statement from a peeping Tom (Nick Cheung), who foams profanely about a top-secret organization of women plotting the elimination of the male species, one unsuspecting rube at a time. Yam thinks little of it, until the report disappears from the evidence room and the suspect one-eighties his story after a visit from a prickly female senior officer (Maggie Shaw). Eager to learn why such a patently ludicrous story would need to be hushed up, he soon comes to the realization that Cheung was telling the truth!

Artfully directed and photographed (by Charlie Lam Chi-kin) with an emphasis on static, contemplative frame compositions the seem to grow organically from the modernist yoga-zen architecture that dominates the locations, but the concept begs for a playfulness that the filmmakers seem to avoid until the last ten minutes of the picture. The build-up is played with such a straight face that sequences which all but confirm the existence of the assassination club pass with nary a raised eyebrow. Perhaps that was the point, but the shift in tone is nonetheless jarring. Yam underplays nicely throughout, as if his character knows all too well how ridiculous his mission might seem to those looking in. Fine music score by Gabriele Roberto features exceptional piano solos by Aiko Takai.

TIFF 2007: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

2007-09-11T01:09:00.001-07:00

Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, T.V. Carpio

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007; USA)
D: Julie Taymor

Ever have a particularly strong memory play out in your head while you were listening to a cherished song on your mp3 player? You know the routine: the song isn't necessarily about you or your particular fragment of history, but nonetheless there's the movie unspooling in your mind with it's own soundtrack, if only for a few minutes.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, the latest film from renowned stage director turned film director Julie Taymor seems to be built almost entirely on the effortless ability of virtually any song in the back catalogue of The Beatles to evoke a certain time, a certain place, a certain frame of mind in virtually any listener. Taymor chooses these moments wisely, if rather obviously: they're pretty much the cultural touchstones that have all but replaced actual history in the minds of recent generations, in no small part becauce they've formed the backbone of nearly every Big American Movie about "the sixties" to come down the pike. As such, they're cliches, but set to the music of The Beatles, they're magic, and besides, cliches are what works best in any good musical. Like most of the recent crop of stage musicals based on pop repertoires (Abba, Rod Stewart, Queen, Billy Joel), the story here would be a dreadfully thin, left-of-center oversimplification without them.

The film's much-touted musical/fantasy sequences are fuel for daydreams, as one would expect from director of TITUS and director/designer of Broadway's LION KING refit, but many of the songs that frame them were never intended to forward a narrative, and they'd more than likely stop the plot cold if it weren't for Taymor's dazzling visuals completing the character arcs within these sequences more effectively than her unquestionably talented cast of singers, who look more 60s-as-we-remember-it than 60s-as-it-really-was, and often need only be present in a scene surrounded by the director's dreamy phantasmagoria and singing a typically evocative (but non-narrative) tune for us the audience to grasp their evolution.

Of course, without the music, there's about as much plot here as you'd find in any stage musical based on any pop act's back catalogue (paging Abba!), and the plot is this: idealistic early 60's goody-goodies become late-60's cynics, burnouts, protestors and veterans, full stop. That old chestnut has pretty much turned up in countless major movies about "the sixties" made in the last 20 years, but the timeless quality of the music keeps us from ever caring that Taymor and 69-year old writing duo Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (THE COMMITMENTS, STILL CRAZY, umm...NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN) are just running down a checklist of important signifiers of the decade, and coating each with a gorgeous new lacquer.

Taymor's cast of actor/singers (Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Martin Luther and Dana Fuchs, the latter two both debuting here as Joplin and Hendrix refurbs respectively) is impressive across the board—as are the numerous guest stars, including Bono, Joe Cocker and Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite, but as an avowed fan of Hong Kong cinema and Cantonese pop music, I'll give special props to T.V. Carpio as the bisexual Prudence (bad with men, yearns for the ladies). Carpio's mom is famous Hong Kong diva Teresa Carpio, and it's obvious T.V. has inherited her mother's pipes, particularly during her opening rendition of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" a yearning ode to lesbian love.

T.V. Carpio

This is a director's picture all the way, and one very much worthy of the big screen experience. The ground it covers may feel well worn, perhaps a bit pat, but Taymor and her team of designers and effects engineers dress it up in a such a beautiful new wardrobe, it'd be a pity to not see it writ large, while appreciating its artistic intensity rather than its philosphical/political underpinnings, because the latter are, naturally, better suited to the history books.

TIFF 2007: GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD

2007-09-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD (2007; USA/Canada)
D: George A. Romero

In an age where everyone's dying to tell a story, to make themselves known, and increasingly fitted eight ways to Sunday with the means to do it, it should come as no surprise that a reimagining of George Romero's DEAD franchise would be a timely affair, particularly now that it's been liberated from studio interference.

This time out—his 146th if I recall correctly, and I think I do—Romero's trademark unexplained zombie apocalypse rises up while the protagonists, a bunch of pretentious film school students and their besotted professor, are shooting a low budget monster movie deep in the woods outside Pittsburgh. The one in Ontario, Canada, that is. Armed with the videographic weapons of the digital age—cell phone cameras, DV cameras, Webcams, security cameras, Myspace and YouTube videos— and the knowledge that the end is nigh, the group sets out in their grimy Winnebago (with the "W" logo rather lazily taped over by Romero's set designers) to document the mayhem with an eye to uploading the results so that people can see the truth this bunch believes the world is being denied by the mainstream media, which has almost immediately attempted to put a positive spin on the plague.

Folks who like to piss all over Romero's last zombie flick, the narrative-driven LAND OF THE DEAD (which really wasn't that bad), will find much to savour here now that he's working to his own specs on a comparitively modest budget and freed of a standard narrative. There's a sense of urgency and nausea (and, of course, calculation) in the hand-held camerawork— much of it performed by cast members—that has been largely absent since Romero's original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

That to achieve any of this Romero's characters had to be pretentious film-school students (and their besotted professor) was a bit of a bother, but in this age of untrusted media conglomerates and ubiquitous, listen-to-ME "personal reporting," I suppose it is the most topical route to catch up to the zeitgeist. But the concept wears a bit thin over the course of 90+ minutes, though by then you've invested enough in these characters to at least see how, or if, they die. The whole cynical "are you gettin' all this on your stupid camera?" ethical-moral routine is present and accounted for as pretty much everyone takes a shot at their student "director" (Joshua Close) for his seemingly callous drive to capture every gruesome moment on video. A brief snippet of Close's character talking to the camera is about all we're given to suggest he's NOT motivated by a filmschoolian lust for fame, and it's barely enough to convince. Indeed, the entire film is set up as a patchwork documentary pieced together from various sources by the director's girlfriend after he's no longer capable of finishing the project. Indeed, the film's opening title isn't DIARY OF THE DEAD, it's THE DEATH OF DEATH. Clever, if not particularly inventive. Her switch from loathing his decisions to finishing the project in his honour—replete with a horror-film score because she feels she needs to "scare you"—is just a bit too tidy (and quite how she does it is never explained, even though we're supposed to be watching the final results)

As stated, a lower budget apparently couldn't deny Romero the services of the folks at KNB Effects Group, and their gore doesn't disappoint in the least! A few little bits of CG are evident in the head shots, but that's acceptable in this day and age. Overall, though, the zombies meet some very inventive demises this time out, via defibrillator paddles, acid, scythes, gunshots, you name it. An attempt to be all meaningful in the final scene rings a bit hollow, but the effect used to put it across is exceptionally well done.

The film's most memorable character is bound to be Samuel, the deaf-mute Amish man who proves rather handy with his little chalk-board, with which he communicates with the protagonists when they stop at his farm, and sticks of dynamite, with which he dispatches three undead ghouls before turning around his chalkboard, where's he written an introductory "Hello, I'm Samuel" that he punctuates with confident little nod of the head! Priceless.

TIFF 2007: VEXILLE

2007-09-10T00:02:00.001-07:00

VEXILLE (2007, Japan)
D: Sori (Fumihiko Sori)

2077. Ten years after Japan withdraws from the U.N. in opposition to legislation banning continued development of advanced robotics and biotechnology, the entire country has become an impenetrable fortress: no one gets in, no one gets out.

The discovery of a human limb made up of an unknown artificial biology—severed from his own body by a Japanese agent trying to shake off the film's exo-suited heroine clinging to it as the pair dangle from the wing of an airplane that has just torn through a towering chateau (!) on U.S. soil in the film's jaw-dropping opening sequence—forces the American government to greenlight a covert infiltration using members of S.W.O.R.D., a high-tech special forces unit clad in gadget laden battle armor.

The chosen super-soldiers have got a three minute window, and they're almost immediately hit by a violent welcoming party, but one of them makes it through. She's Vexille (voiced by Meisa Kuroki), and she soon discovers the entire country is a barren (and flat!) wasteland, with once-pulsing Tokyo nothing more than a vast, teeming, shantytown populated by the victims of a government biotechnology experiment gone horribly, morally south.

In a brilliant set-up for the climax, Vexille's commander and his minions are briefly able to run surveillance of the secretive country, but a biometric scan reveals only two actual human beings among the hundreds of thousands clearly populating the former metropolis, including those aiding Vexille in her mission, which suddenly takes on a much greater importance for the future of mankind.

Director Sori (billed this way on screen), the effects director on Shinji Aramaki's groundbreaking APPLESEED (2004), takes the helm for this gorgeously grim cyberpunk ethics lesson. The moral implications of man and machine reaches its apex here: this is a world in which science has gone far beyond the melding of man and machine into the realm of slowly evolving mankind into machines via a cyber-virus disguised a Heavy-Industry controlled government as a cure for another less-threatening malaise. In VEXILLE, the final vestiges of humanity are wiped out during a few moments of agonizing convulsions, and the newly-minted android is ready for conversion into just about any variety of domestic or military machinery. This ain't your afterschool anime, kiddies.

Character design here is more fully developed than technology allowed on APPLESEED; character faces in particular are much more naturalistic and, because the story demands it, ethnically correct. And where the earlier film dazzled with its gleaming mega-city and shiny robots, VEXILLE's animators have applied the same attention to detail to the crowded Tokyo slum, which resembles nothing so much as a bustling city-wide street market rich with telling details: rusted sheetmetal, weathered wood, a cobbled together existence for a people who are all to aware they're soon to lose the last remnants of their culture, their humanity.

Of course, like APPLESEED, VEXILLE also has exo-suits, albeit pared-down versions, and they're cool and shiny and loaded with options, but the film's undoubted standouts are the "jags," humoungous, screaming, burrowing wasteland worms made up almost entirely of scrap metal and failed "experiments," cast-off robots and machinery that, in assimilation, finally find a purpose: to assimilate more of the same, ultimately inside the massive barriers that surround Tokyo. The jags also figure heavily in VEXILLE's signature setpiece, in which Vexille and rebel leader Maria and her motley, dwindling crew undertake a hair-raising, theatre-rumbling mission to infiltrate the offshore headquarters of the company responsible for virtually ending the Japanese race. It's a sequence packed to exploding with rapid-fire action, incredible detail and an ever-escalating series of seemingly insurmountable threats, all set to a pounding techno score by APPLESEED maestro Paul Oakenfold. Indeed, the film pushes things a bit too far during the final moments of this sequence, with one limping character chasing another limping character who has just survived the inferno of a full-speed helicopter crash. But it's a minor offense, and that might be more easily overlooked on the small screen which, somewhat sadly, is probably where the majority of westerners will be able to experience it.

One thing's for certain: with animation technology now capable of creating such richly, minutely detailed environments and such subtle degrees of character realism, and also capable of emulating the language of live-action so convincingly that you nearly forget you're watching a cartoon, the dawn of a new anime age may be just around the corner.

Hong Kong: Outside In #4

2007-09-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

POWAQQATSI (Cannon/MGM, 1988)
Director: Godfrey Reggio
Cinematographer: Graham Berry, Leonidas Zourdoumis

Hong Kong: Outside In #3

2007-09-07T19:03:00.001-07:00

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (Paramount, 2003)
Director: Jan de Bont
Cinematographer: David Tattersall

My name is Grace Lee...

2007-08-25T23:54:00.000-07:00

Well, it's about damned time. THE GRACE LEE PROJECT finally hits DVD. Women Make Movies has finally put a price tag on this that puts it within reach of the home viewer. Definitely worth the 20 bucks.

You can order it here

In THE GRACE LEE PROJECT, filmmaker Grace Lee manages to cram a textbook worth of insight into a scant 70 minute running time, and, with a sense of humor akin to that shown by Morgan Spurlock in SUPER SIZE ME, presents a litany of telling observations about growing up female in a diasporic Asian (largely Korean) culture that, to hear the myriad Grace Lees on display tell it, almost unwittingly turns its young women into closed-minded do-gooders who, even when they do muster up the gumption to rebel, only do so out of fear of losing face for their parents and the greater community. In other words, girls who never seem to have any true sense of independence or freedom, and basically the polar opposite of the filmmaker herself - a self-professed (in the film) non-believer from a Christian Korean family who dated and married a Caucasian (also in the film) and decided on a career that all but guaranteed a hard-scrabble existence (although this film should change all that). Nonetheless, her own parents, a soft-spoken, humble couple, are featured in the films opening moments and if they harbor any feelings of embarrassment about their daughter's life choices, it's not evident on screen.

The film will probably resonate best with Korean women ages 25-35, as Lee genuinely seems unable to find a Korean Grace Lee that deviates far from familial and societal expectations ("quiet, soft spoken, Christian, petite, intelligent, really nice and with 3.5 years of piano lessons"), and those she does highlight are hard-pressed to define what makes them "different" from what their generic names imply. Nonetheless, all the subjects, while sharing essentially the same existential quandary, which itself is more a symptom of their upbringing than their parents' choice of name, still manage to betray little eccentricities and repressed desires to subvert the system, so to speak. Women of Chinese extraction, most notably Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs ("Grace X"), are also featured prominently and tend to come off as the most atypical of the bunch in one way or another, perhaps because of the culture's longer presence in the west, perhaps not. Another Chinese Grace Lee who came from an abusive adopted home and in turn took in an abused woman and her three daughters later in life, provides much of the emotion of the doc's final 20 minutes.

No film about young Korean women made by a young Korean woman could possibly sidestep the issue of religion, what with Christianity an ever-present force in the diasporic Korean community. Lee makes no bones about her thoughts on the subject in sequences involving a P.K. ("Pastor's Kid") who has her entire life planned out while still just a teenager, most likely unaware of the hidden machinations that conspire to keep her on the path she's "chosen." In voice-over, Lee says she envies the girl's unsullied and eager acceptance of her future ("marriage at 25, three kids each spaced five years apart), but the images presented on screen subtly suggest the director knows that life may throw up unexpected obstacles to challenge her glassy-eyed optimism. The girl's father is shown operating a modest but dedicated church out of his backyard and she dutifully quotes the requisite scripture to explain why this is acceptable, while the sharp-eyed viewer will no doubt see plain evidence of a split within this particular Korean community's church that has probably given this Grace Lee an even narrower world-view.

Continuing the theme, Lee meets a Pastor's wife and, in one of the film's more obviously calculated moments, shows her explaining how young girls can always get a "do-over," should they lose their virginity, during a discussion of the dreaded S-word at a Christian youth group meeting. Nice.

In the end, the audience is left with many excellent avenues for discussion. For as alike as these women are in both name and social conditioning, life will throw many of them in fascinating new directions - if only they'd have the encouragement of a community, and the courage of Grace X, to see where they lead.

THE GRACE LEE PROJECT, though it lacks the marketing power behind docs like THE CORPORATION, SUPER SIZE ME or the collected works of Michael Moore, easily joins their ranks as one of the most entertaining pop-docs of the year.

After a screening in Toronto in 2006, Grace Lee answered questions from the audience (four of whom were Grace Lees, including two from the film), including the inevitable query about a sequel. She claimed she was done with the subject, but I couldn't help but think of Michael Apted's 7-UP series. Obviously, a GRACE LEE PROJECT every seven years might be overkill, but at least one follow-up, say in ten years time, would be an ideal way to see how these women, many of whom are still at crucially undefined moments in their lives, have turned out in comparison to the expectations both they (and others) have for themselves in the film.

Rex says you gotta see this one, and here's the sneak peak to prove it:

Hong Kong: Outside In #2

2007-08-25T23:43:00.001-07:00

THAT MAN BOLT (Universal, 1973)
Director: Henry Levin/David Lowell Rich
Cinematographer: Gerald Perry Finnerman

Fred "The Hammer" Williamson (as Jefferson Bolt): "I'm gonna even it up for Sam. Tell 'em I'll be in Hong Kong. I want them to know where I am and what I'm doing, so they'll come looking for me. That way, I'll find them."

"I surrenduhrrr!!"

2007-08-17T23:25:00.000-07:00

Kudos to Colin Geddes over at Kung Fu Fridays for uncovering this little gem on Youtube. It's a segment of "Movie World" hosted by venerable Hong Kong film critic Paul Fonoroff, and it deals with the dubbing of English movies into Cantonese and Hong Kong movies into English back in the halcyon days of the late 80's. Best of all, those of use who first experienced John Woo's seminal THE KILLER in its English dubbed incarnation can finally put faces to the "voices" of Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee.

Hong Kong: Outside In #1

2007-08-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

FORCED VENGEANCE (1981)
Director: James Fargo
Cinematographer: Rexford L. Metz

Camilla Griggs, Chuck Norris, Lloyd Kino

The philosophy of Chuck Norris (as Josh Randall): "Hong Kong. A borrowed place on borrowed time. The British run it for now, but in 17 years, the lease runs out and the People's Republic is the landlord. But this is a city of survivors, and whatever happens, Hong Kong will always be THE place."

The other philosophy of Chuck Norris (as Josh Randall): "Never let your girl handle your piece."

Tuh-ran-su-fo-mah!

2007-07-14T12:18:00.001-07:00

Just came into possession of a small pile of Korean theatre flyers via the globetrotting Ms. Saigon, and thought this one from Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS was kinda cool. I'm no fan of Michael Bay, but I do love movie posters in languages not my own. In moviehouses in my neck of the woods, they give you these shitty little magazines filled with studio press-kit rewrites, "interviews" that are really just...blowjobs-in-disguise, upcoming DVD review-lets that largely parrot sleeve copy, and for whatever reason, horoscopes and celebrity birthdays. Basically, crap that can be read in thoses few moments you've got before the movie begins. Well, in Korea, you get these cool little 9' x 12' one-sheets with just the information you need. Sure, it's still studio fluff, but compared to some of the reading material I've seen in theaters, this is marketing minimalism. I'm sure Korean theatres have plenty of other tie-ins going on, but since I've only seen these little flyers, I can live in my bubble a little bit longer.

"God Forgives. The Brotherhood doesn't."

2007-07-04T23:38:00.000-07:00

Well, it took nearly a decade, but the powers that be, somewhere in the offices of MGM, have finally realized the Craig Baxley's 1991 magnum opus STONE COLD is worthy of release on DVD.

Bar none, this film, which launched the DTV career of ex-Seattle Seahawk Brian "Boz" Bosworth, is the most underrated action movie of the 1990's. Maybe even of all time. Seriously. American movies designed around sports or martial arts stars all too often make the fatal mistake of getting mired in "messages" or, worse, pandering to the pre-teen set. In a sense, both are what effectively killed Jeff Speakman's big-screen career around the same time STONE COLD was in wide release. Speakman, a real-life ken-po boogie master ("I got the pow-uhh"), had roughly the same acting ability as The Boz, but his debut film, THE PERFECT WEAPON (1991), was a dull slog through Buddhist-y believe-in-yourself-as-you-kick-ass righteousness, and his followup, STREET KNIGHT (1993), which Cannon ultimately sent straight to video despite high production values and a solid supporting cast, was really just another after-school special about the perils of street gangs. By the time Speakman tried to go "dark," with veteran stunt-coordinator Rick Avery's directorial debut, 1993's THE EXPERT, the damage was done, though Speakman has remained a quality also-ran of the DTV market ever since.

And so has The Boz.

But it wasn't the quality of Boz's debut film that sent him to the ranks of the Blockbuster shelf-fillers. Box-office performance probably had something to do with it, but that in no way implies a bad movie. Like Speakman, The Boz simply wasn't a household name, nor was he as well known as the producers probably thought he was, but if nothing else, his comparatively affordable salary simply meant more money for some of the goddamned coolest practical stunts ever to burn across the screen. Reportedly, the producers had only ever planned on making something that would be an easy sell to the big cable networks (thus the film's 1.33:1 aspect ration, matted on the new DVD), but when Baxley turned 74-year-old Walter Doniger's tight screenplay into a lean, mean motherfucker movie in which everyone and everything gets shot and blown up, they knew there's be at least some money to be found in a theatrical release. And so it went...

A few of the tightasses I worked with at a daily newspaper at the time were fish-eyed that I could give this silly-sounding movie such raves in an extended review, but when I passed around the screening cassette a few months later, most of them suddenly realized the greatness they'd missed on the big screen. Those who didn't lived sheltered lives...

I mean, not only do you get a pro-football novelty-athlete-du-jour in the lead role of a supercop who infiltrates a scuzzy gang of bikers with access to heavy artillery (including military choppers!) and plans to blast up the state senate, but you get not one but two of the greatest screen villains of the past 20 years, Lance Henriksen as gang leader Chains and William Forsythe as his vicious second-in-command Ice. And with veteran hollywood stunt coordinator Baxley at the helm after two above-average mid-budget actioners—ACTION JACKSON (1988) and I COME IN PEACE (1990)—it's a safe bet the action scenes won't just amaze, they'll friggin' cut your arms and legs off and weld you into a steel tank and drop you into the bah-yoo, son.

And now that we live in an age where heavily and obviously computer-augmented "practical" stunts in a film like LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD are considered welcome throwbacks to old-school 80's action pictures by critics who really oughtta have better memories, it's nice to put in an true old-school action movie and see what it was like when stunts were done entirely for real.

Dead Air

2007-06-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

Kinda like the FLIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD title better, but PLANE DEAD will have to do. Good zombie fun, with what appears to be something resembling an actual budget...

There'll be blood...on the floor...when Super Snooper opens the door...

2007-06-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

One of the best bits of news I received last year was news that an old favourite—Sergio Corbucci's SUPERFUZZ (1981) aka POLIZIOTTO SUPERPIU—was finally getting a legitimate Region 1 DVD release this February. A special edition no less, although what ultimately hit store shelves was not what many fans were expecting. The R1 DVD of Superfuzz turned out to be the U.K. cut of the film, which lists among its offenses: PAL speedup, additional and extended scenes which screw up the pacing a bit, music replacement, alternate voices from the U.S. version, missing narration, and more.

Also, the distributor didn't port over the interviews with Corbucci's wife and actor Sal Borgese from the Italian disc, opting instead for a bio of Terence Hill and clips from other films (but NOT Superfuzz, oddly enough).

Saigon says skip this baby and get the Italian DVD instead (see below).

While some folks may have fond memories of SUPERFUZZ from it's endless airings on HBO in the network's early years, I was one of the few, the proud, to have seen it first run in a theatre, geek that I was. And what would possess a small-city 12-year-old to place a fluffy, often puerile Italian comedy made by people he'd never heard of above all other fare—even RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK—playing the local multiplexes that summer?

Well, the theme song definitely had something to do with it, which is why I posted it over at Youtube, taken from the awesome Italian DVD of the film that came out a couple of years ago: :D

I'm sure there was more to it than just a groovy title track, though. But for my money, rarely has a theme song so infectiously encapsulated the personality of a film. After all, this is a film about a Miami cop (Terrence Hill) who gains superpowers when he accidentally shoots a Nasa rocket out of the sky after firing a warning shot to scare a freeloading alligator out of his police canoe on a routine call to collect on parking tickets at a swamp shack in the everglades! THE LEOPARD this ain't. By the end of the movie, Hill and Ernest Borgnine are floating on a giant chewing gum bubble over sunny Miami. In between is all manner of humour that perhaps only a 12-year-old could love.

When I discovered the uncut, anamorphic widescreen, 5.1 Italian DVD about two years ago, after years of fruitless wading through listings for bootlegs on eBay and shoddy "official" fullscreen releases from the U.K. and elsewhere, I was in a deep nostalgic haze for several hours, thanks in no small part to an ever-present all-region DVD player. Not having seen the film since that theatrical showing 24 years prior, I was pleasantly suprised to discover how little of this film I'd actually forgotten over the years. That said, I'd highly recommend sourcing out the Italian DVD while it's still in print. It contains the original U.S. English language track, a beautiful transfer, and the aforementioned interviews.

If you like Corbucci's sillier stuff, or just about anything with Terrence Hill in it, then POLIZIOTTO SUPERPIU will be money well spent.

From Giallo to Jjakpae

2007-06-20T20:17:00.001-07:00

I remember a couple of years back, a Korean movie called SPY GIRL took heat for essentially being a feature-length advertisement for the fast food chain Burger King, and while one of the chain's restaurants was featured prominently throughout the film, part of me couldn't help but appreciate the verisimilitude it brought to an otherwise dull picture. I mean, in real life people work at Burger King, and Harold and Kumar went to White Castle, so why bother "creating" a Burger Shack or a Burger Barn that people will know is fake when there's a chance the real deal might not mind being in your movie? And besides, it didn't feel as insidious as MAC & ME. At lest the makers of SPY GIRL were largely in control of their project, and the heroine didn't defeat the villains by throwing juicy, flame-broiled Whoppers® and succulent Tendercrisp® Chicken Sandwiches.

Sometimes, though, it's the little product placements that can get out of hand. Have a look at these stills from Ryoo Seung Wan's THE CITY OF VIOLENCE and see if you can guess what he probably has cases of in his garage.

(a word of warning: this first one's tricky, so you may have to stare at it for a long, long time to ~~feel thirsty~~ spot the placement)

Still not certain? Well, they do get a little more difficult from this point on:

And if you think this next shot is here just because I loved watching this beautiful girl kick both of our heroes' asses, you'd be half right. But look closer...

I'm not entirely convinced even Sergio Martino wouldn't consider this a bit much...

When the mercury dips below zero.

2007-06-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

Gave Bandit Thongdee's MERCURY MAN a spin tonight.

It was alright. Just.

At the time of its release, I believe this first foray into the Thai superhero genre was one of the more expensive movies ever made in the country, but it's dismal box office performance there didn't bode well for its producers' hopes that it would "go international" or have the box-office muscle of Sam Raimi's SPIDERMAN, a film it so obviously has been modelled on, right down to the lead character's sinewy-rubbery costume, which can be easily duplicated in a computer.

Mind you, it's flawed enough that it probably never stood a chance of cracking the international market anyways. Glossy production values aside—and they're often rare in Thai cinema—there's a weird sense that the whole thing is some kind of thinly-veiled propaganda. After having part of a mystical "Solar Mercury" amulet embedded in his chest, a hot-shot fireman (Vasan Kantha-u) must learn to control his temper (in a country known for silencing dissent, no less, not to mention alienating religious minorities) if he's to defeat not only various hooligans around the city, but also a small band of Muslim extremists led by a dude named "Usama" who unfortunately looks a lot like Richard Lynch in INVASION U.S.A. The terrorists need the amulet, paired with it's sister—the "Lunar Mercury"—to aid in their plans to attack the literal and symbolic American interests around the country (Hello, massive McDonald's & Hard Rock Cafe product placements!!). Interestingly, the film features a little boy with psychic powers who opens the film by demonstrating his ability to stop a stopwatch at will. Funny that they'd need a scene like that...

For the money the filmmakers spent (which still wasn't much by American standards), everything looks pretty good, but the computer effects are hobbled on occasion by a clear misunderstanding of the laws of physics (like the car that Mercury Man kicks into a billboard, where it becomes stuck rather than crashing through!). Yes, I know it's a fantasy, and I can indeed accept Mercury Man's metal-based powers allowing him to "fly" between metal objects without the aid of machinery or ropes or webs, but billboards can't stop cars!

The cast is generally quite dull, but I've come to expect that in Thai cinema. Pretty faces, but not much expression, not unlike the ones that Mercury Man must suppress for fear of catching on fire, as his crotch nearly does when he cops a few glances at a Penthouse magazine tucked away in his drawer.

The action choreography, by Prachya Pinkaew and his ONG BAK/TOM YUM GOONG team, are the main reasons this is watchable, but there's a certainly a recycled feeling about them now, with only the more expensive costuming and modern-looking locations differentiating them from those seen in the earlier Tony Jaa films. On top of that, there's one hell of a lot editing going on in these sequences. Every connected blow is followed by an immediate cut to a closeup or a long shot, which tends to make you wonder just how many stunt doubles are being disguised with every splice. Fans of BEAUTIFUL BOXER, the life story of transgender Muay Thai boxer Parinya Charoenphon, might enjoy watching her, largely undoubled it would seem, kick the snot out a batch of evildoers in white lab shirts.

And the final fight between Mercury Man and the villain's right hand babe, who's absorbed the power of the Lunar Mercury amulet, is worth watching for any number of reasons.

Though undoubtedly intended as an A-list picture in its homeland, and indeed, with its slick visuals and breezy pace, feeling and looking much more like one in comparison to a lot of the sloppily made crap that passes for populist cinema there, MERCURY MAN is nonetheless best viewed with lowered expectations, particularly if you aren't familiar with Thai cinema, otherwise you'll inevitably be tempted to actually compare it to the American superhero films it so brazenly wants you to.