DVD

Sun - October 15, 2006

For Your Height Only/Challenge of the Tiger

I've been sick for for the last week, but I did get to take in this double feature DVD from Mondo Macabro.

I've been meaning to see For Your Height Only (1979) for a while, just because the movie has quite the reputation. In case you haven't heard of it, it's a Filipino James Bond parody starring a midget. Now that I've seen it, I can say I've seen it. And that's about it. For Your Height Only is a totally bland collection of James Bond-ish scenes, with the only difference being that Agent 00 (Weng Weng) is short. Agent 00 talks to women, and is short. Agent 00 beats people up, and is short. Agent 00 is in a gunfight, and is short. Just about the only real joke in the movie is that Agent 00 is looking for the evil Mr. Giant, and you can probably figure out the punchline there.

Challenge of the Tiger (1980), on the other hand, I had never heard of, but it was far more entertaining. This Bruce Le film (he stars and directs) is also broadly an espionage thriller, centering on the search for a secret formula. Now that I think about it, I think the formula was for some sort male sterility drug. Le and American actor Richard Harrison are CIA agents, and together they track the formula from Spain to Hong Kong and finally to Macau.

Challenge of the Tiger is an odd film. On one hand it's pretty cheap looking, with at least some scenes that look like they were shot in hotel rooms to save money. Oh, and there's scene at a horse race where all the CIA agents and terrorists are wearing nametags, suggesting they just filmed at some event that was going on at the track. On the other hand, the movie does have copious location work in Spain and China, and the cast includes martial arts heavy hitters like Yang Sze and Wang Jang Lee.

Presumably Richard Harrison was included to give the movie some selling power in English speaking countries, but I wonder what his contract read like. I suspect that there was a clause about how he wanted to share minimal screen time with Bruce Le, or maximum screen time with naked breasts, or both. Harrison doesn't have much to do in the film, especially towards the end, but he is around for almost all the scenes of gratuitous female nudity, and there are a lot of those. Seriously, Challenge of the Tiger may set some sort of new record for nudity in an otherwise serious martial arts film. An early scene has two topless women playing tennis – in slow motion! That's setting the bar exceedingly high (or low) right there.

Posted at 09:08 PM

Tue - August 8, 2006

King of the Lost World

When the 1976 remake of King Kong hit screens it was accompanied by small flock of crappy rip-offs, films like A*P*E (1976) and Mighty Peking Man (1977). I'm a little sad that there wasn't a similar outburst of exploitive photocopying when Peter Jackson's King Kong came out last year. In fact, I can only think of one Kong rip-off last year, and I just saw it and it wasn't what I thought it was.

Special effects cost less if you don't ask for any color.

That movie is King of the Lost World (2005), and while I was think it would be KING (Kong) of the Lost World, it's really King of the LOST World. Supposedly based on Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, though the resemblance is so tenuous that the same reasoning would have Top Gun based on Sense and Sensibility, King of the Lost World begins with a number of young attractive people (and Bruce Boxleitner) mysteriously surviving a passenger plane crash in the Amazon. From there the plot flails about, almost as if the screenwriters were trying to guess what direction a certain popular ABC show was going based on the first seven or so episodes. Other planes have crashed in this same area, and Boxleitner (as a character named Challenger) is toting around a mysterious briefcase. Soon the castaways are attacked by giant spiders and scorpions, captured by natives ruled by the flabbiest white guy who's ruled a native tribe since Abe Vigoda, and of course run away from a giant gorilla the natives keep in check with sacrifices to flying dragons. Steve Railsback is thrown in the mix as a crazy survivor of a previous plane crash, though his role is so small and inconsequential I wondered if it wasn't from a earlier draft of the script, until I realized the script wasn't nearly good enough to have had any drafts. Oh, and it ends with a nuclear explosion.

"Bring me a bacon sandwich this big!"

The movie makes a token attempt to deliver the sex and violence that Peter Jackson's ape movie, but the movie is SO cheap! The monster are all bad CGI, and they never interact with the actors at all, making it nearly impossible to get any sense of scale. I'm still not sure how big the giant ape or the dragons were. I'd guess that the movie was largely shot in a botanical garden, and some of the female cast members are brainwashed into joining the evil tribe to cut down on the need for extras.

Posted at 11:08 PM

Tue - August 1, 2006

Ultraman on DVD

After a very long wait the first legitimate, comprehensive release of the original 1966 Ultraman TV show in the U.S. came out on DVD a couple of weeks back. As a giant monster fan, it's tough not to be excited by the prospect. Unfortunately, my feelings on the release are mixed, in just about every way possible.

The only reason the American company BCI was able to attain the home video rights to Ultraman was because of a terrible mistake Noboru Tsuburaya (son of Eiji) made 30 years ago. In 1974 Tsuburaya Productions co-produced a feature film with a Thai company called Chaiyo. Hanuman Meets the 6 Ultramen featured a giant hero based on the local monkey/trickster god Hanuman and just about all the Ultraman characters up to that point plus some of the more popular Ultraman monsters. It's pretty awful, though the movie does occasionally push the gore in the monster battles to amusing "Itchy and Scratchy" extremes. I suppose it was intended to kick start a Hanuman TV or movie series, but as far as I know nothing came of it.

Years later, in the late 1990's, Chaiyo announced that they were going to produce their own Ultraman series independent of Tsuburaya Poductions, which came as quite a surprise to Tsuburaya Productions. (Imagine if the BBC suddenly announced they were going to start producing episodes of Lost.) It turns out that back in 1974, unbeknownst to nearly anyone else, Noboru Tsuburaya had signed over the worldwide rights (minus Japan) to all the Ultraman characters to Chaiyo, apparently in return for a loan. Tsuburaya Productions sued, but in the end the case went all the way to Japanese Supreme Court and Chaiyo won. Chaiyo owns the all the characters from the original Ultraman (1966) through Ultraman Taro (1974), and can presumably market those shows to whatever countries they want. Somewhat ironically Ultraman Millennium was never produced, beyond a trailer and a set of figures that I own. A new trailer showed up just this year under the title Project Ultraman, so maybe that's a go again.

It sucks that Tsuburaya Productions has essentially lost control of the characters they created for no good reason and that they won't profit at all from BCI's DVD release if it's successful. It's also true that Tsuburaya has a reputation for being difficult for American companies to work with (I still remember the horror stories from Expressions in Animation, who tried to release Ultraman on VHS years ago), so if it weren't for Chaiyo we probably wouldn't have gotten DVDs at all, but that doesn't make the situation any more fair.

"What are you?" "I'm Batchman!"

BCI's DVDs are packaged in an excellent shiny box with terrific art on all the disk and cases. There's also an informative booklet. So far so good, right? The 3-disc box set, optimistically labeled "Ultraman Series One, Volume One," features the first twenty episodes. All of the episodes appear to be the original Japanese versions and are presented in Japanese with English subtitles. The "Speed Racer" dubbing is also included as an option for the nostalgic, though the soundtrack will revert back to Japanese for scenes that weren't included in the original American TV airings.

My first impression watching the DVDs was that the episodes looked bright and colorful. However, as watched more I began to realize that in scenes with lots of movement, like a quick pan through a crowd or a shot with lots of splashing water, there was honest to goodness artifacting. Artifacting! I haven't seen major artifacting in a U.S. release in years. There's also a kind of minor stuttering in what should be smooth tracking shots or pans, as if there's some sort of frame rate issue. If I had to guess (and being anal about these things, I do have to) I'd say that these DVDs were made from Video CDs. Nice Video CDs, but Video CDs nonetheless. Considering the whole Chaiyo/Tsuburaya situation it's entirely possible that BCI didn't have anything better to work with. While Chaiyo has the rights to the characters and the series, the master prints are still owned by Tsubaraya, and Tsuburaya doesn't have a whole lot of incentive to hand the masters over to anybody. ("Hi. I stole this TV from your house last night. Would you please give me the remote that goes along with it? It's not doing you any good, right?")

The quality issues are a bit distracting, but they in no way make the episodes unwatchable. For $20.00, the set is still a good deal, but it isn't the home run release I was hoping for.

Posted at 11:07 PM

Tue - July 18, 2006

Sapphire and Steel

I tried. I really tried. I tried to watch some episodes of the British sci-fi series Sapphire and Steel recently. Dear lord, they're boring. It's sort of like Doctor Who of the same period, with one cheap set and good acting, but there's no humor. None. Three episodes in, the exact nature of the conflict hadn't been established, so I gave up.

Posted at 11:08 PM

Mon - July 17, 2006

The Descent

It's really a simple little horror film. A group of 30-something British women who do "extreme" things together go spelunking in a cave system in the mountains of North Carolina. It's supposed to be a fairly easy excursion, mainly because this is the first time the group has gotten together in a year due to Susan (Shauna MacDonald) losing her husband and daughter in a car accident, but the gung-ho Juno (Natalie Mendoza) has secretly led the group to an unexplored cave. After getting a fair way into the cave system a crucial passage collapses, trapping the women. Even worse, they find out that the biggest threat in the cave isn't the possibility of death by accident or exposure, but a sort of humanoid predator that has lived in the caves for thousands of years.

Am I the only one sick of Katie Couric colonoscopy footage?

The Descent (2005) is another film from writer/director Neil Marshall, who made Dog Soldiers (2002), and much like that earlier film The Descent succeeds largely because it doesn't suck as much as it should. In this case we can directly compare The Descent to the similar film The Cave (2005), just in case we've forgotten how bad these kinds of films can be. The Descent is nicely atmospheric, the acting isn't bad, and the creatures, called "Crawlers" in the end credits, are genuinely scary.

But (and there's always a "but" with me) I had a tough time ignoring that most of the scares in The Descent are completely cliché. In one scene the camera pans between two passages, one on the left, one on the right. The camera moves to show two climbers enter from the right, one climber checks the passage to the left, declares it safe, the camera pans back to right as the other woman moves past the first… and you know that when the camera pans back to the left a monster is going to jump into frame. Lo and behold, one does. After a certain point I began to try to guess which stock scare would show up next. I was surprised when a scene where two of the women examine a dead crawler didn't result in the crawler suddenly lunging at them; not to worry, the "dead" creature suddenly awaking with a start was trotted out for a later underwater scene.

C.H.U.D. III - The Appalachians

I also have issues with the scientific implications of the crawlers. The problem is that they appear to evolved from some human ancestor, but no human ancestors, or apes of any kind, lived in the Americas before the very late addition homo sapiens. Even if I grant that a small group of apes lived in North Carolina millions of years ago, it's difficult to imagine why they would be adapted to be living in deep caves. Most blind/albino creatures have to be cut off from the rest of the world to develop in that direction, but apes can't live without a lot more food than would available in that sort of ecosystem. The Descent tries to paper over that by suggesting that the crawlers are like bats and hunt on the surface at night, but that doesn't really sell me. Most bats are adapted, physically and behaviorally, to hunt insects and avoid predators. The crawlers would need to hunt game, which is easier during the day, and wouldn't have much in the way of natural predators. What really confounded me is that Britain has the legend of Sawney Bean's cannibal clan, which could have easily been pressed into service for the movie if the cave had been in Scotland.

I hear the American cut will somewhat different that the one I saw. I wonder what they'll change. The movie does have a somewhat unnecessary fake ending/real ending structure that's supposed to create ambiguity. If the "real" ending were cut (and I use the term "real" in quotes because it could be argued that it doesn't really happen and the "fake" ending does) the same ambiguity would be present, and the movie would end on a much better sting. The other possibility is that they will end the movie at an earlier point to make a "happy" ending (and the place to do that is obvious, probably because like most horror film several endings were shot), but even that would still be ambiguous.

Posted at 04:26 PM

Mon - June 26, 2006

Superman Returns – The Prequels

To prepare for seeing Superman Returns tomorrow night I watched the original Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) over the last week. I still love those two films, but seeing them again I noticed some things that annoy me a lot more now more than when I saw them as a kid.

In Superman, there’s a bit where Supes has been neutralized by Kryptonite, and Miss Tessmacher offers to free him, but he has to stop the missile heading for New Jersey first. Superman’s first reaction is to say “But, Lois… Jimmy…” Crack job on the secret identity there, CLARK. But even more than that, why does he want to go stop the California missile first? Assuming he’s starting out in New York City (and let’s face it, the Metropolis of the movies is New York City) and the missiles were fired from someplace near the Mississippi, Superman would have to pass the missile heading towards New Jersey on his way to California anyway. And perhaps more to the point, since when does Superman turn down any chance to help people?

Superman II is great, but the denouement is terrible. The worst bit is where Superman kisses Lois and she forgets all about his secret identity. Does she have a reset button at the back of her throat? Were the screenwriters that terrified of having to include some actual character development in the next movie? I’m also not a big fan of the scene where Superman goes back to Alaska and beats up the bully in the diner. That kind of flagrant abuse of super powers is more appropriate to the Silver Age Superman, who was a jerk that way.

Posted at 10:17 PM

Sun - June 11, 2006

Murder Rock

I am coming to believe that it my destiny to see every crappy movie Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento ever made. I don't particularly like them, yet I keep seeing them. Sometimes it's because I read something interesting about a particular film. Most recently I was looking for a movie of a very specific attributes for reasons I don't want divulge at the moment (look for an announcement later, fingers crossed), and I just happened to come across Murder Rock (1984). Murder Rock fit the criteria I needed perfectly, so here I am, having watched a another crappy Lucio Fulci film.

And now... the Dying to be on Broadway dancers!

Remember The New York Ripper (1982)? I wish I didn't. It was quite possibly one of the most repulsive, misogynistic movies I've ever seen. Imagine my delight when I start up Murder Rock and the opening scenes are almost exact copy of Ripper. The same shabby shots of New York harbor, the same dubbed Iltalian actors desperately trying to pass as Americans. This time there's a killer stalking students at a dance academy, and Fulci gets to show us just how many times he's seen Fame (1980) and Flashdance (1983). The Flashdance rip-off scene is a particular joy, with one of the students dancing at a dinner club under the obligatory shower, and Fulci making sure he gets every conceivable angle on her crotch.

The next Fulci film had a murderer who killed women with watch fobs.

For the record, the murderer's method is to chloroform women (hopefully naked) and then stab them through the breast with an ornate hatpin. Hatpin? Who the hell has hatpins in this day and age? As with all Italian giallo, the police response is less than urgent. Upon being shown the first victim, sprawled naked on a shower floor, the investigating detective observes, "Pleasant death." He's not being ironic, he actually thinks her death was pleasant because she was drugged.

The main character is Candice (Olga Karlatos), the instructor at the academy. She has dreams about about a male model (Ray Lovelock) killing her in a dream, so of course she seeks the model out and asks him to help her solve the murders. Of course.

"Do you have to start every one of these presentations with a naked picture of your wife?"

My favorite scene was probably the one where one of the students is baby-sitting a little girl in a wheelchair. The two are so bizarrely hostile to each other it could almost be some sort of psychological test. Adding additional fun to the scene is that the little girl photographs the killer, but the resulting photograph is from an angle that would entirely impossible for her to get.

A special mention has to go to the music by Keith Emerson. The big breakout song goes like this:

The street's to blame
You plead insane
Paranoia is coming your way
Nothing you can do
When take control
Paranoia is coming your way
Don't let your wubber rest
Wex wub less lex
There are some choice the golls that roll noaw
The street's to blame

I don't think they ever did a complete sound mix on the music because about the half the lyrics are unintelligible. It's almost enough to make the music Emerson composed for Godzilla: Final Wars look good. Except the ending theme, which makes me want stick hatpins in my ears.

Posted at 11:02 PM

Sun - June 4, 2006

Bamboo House of Dolls

Shaw Brothers was certainly not shy about jumping on any cult movie bandwagon that came along. Bamboo House of Dolls (1974) is an early-yet-derivative entry into the women in prison genre, even using a name that’s a garbled variation on Jack Hill’s The Big Dollhouse (1971). Being a Hong Kong film there’s a bit of kung fu and the villains are Japanese, but beyond that it’s about as bland as a women in prison film can be.

Prisoner of war camp or a new reality show?

As near as I can tell Bamboo House of Dolls may be the very first women in prison film set in a WWII concentration camp, albeit one in China, not Germany. A few years later Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975) would kick off the entire subgenre of women in Nazi concentration camp movies, but Bamboo House of Dolls may be the pioneer. Bamboo House of Dolls even has a female camp commandant (a lesbian, of course). I found myself a little surprised that the commandant even wore the uniform of the Japanese Imperial Army, though I guess that’s silly considering that I accept plenty of equally anachronistic female Nazis in various exploitation movies.

Probably the best indication that this was the first women in prison movie is that the filmmakers didn’t seem to have thought through the concept very well. The women are at each other throats pretty much from minute one, leading to the inevitable food fights, wrestling matches, and betrayals. That doesn’t make much sense, though, because these aren’t hardened criminals. These women have all been unjustly imprisoned by the Japanese, so if anything they have a pretty good motive to stick together.

The episode of Charlie's Angels they never aired.

As to the more… exploitable material, there are plenty of torture scenes, but I skip those. I realize that such scenes are the main draw for a certain audience, but not me. There's also a scenes where some of the women of the camp are called upon to act as "comfort women" to some Japanese soldiers, and all the stereotypical reactions for that kind of scene are already in place. One soldier torments a blind girl, one woman tries to kill her would-be rapist, another woman submits but shows no emotion, and of course one woman is so voracious for sex that she scares off two soldiers.

There is a minimal plot. One of the women in the camp knows the location (by sight) of some gold the Japanese looted, and the Chinese resistance wants to get her out to find it. Oddly, she isn’t the main character. The real main character is Red Cross nurse Jennifer, played by German actress Birte Tove. I guess casting a statuesque blonde woman was an attempt to add international appeal. She was rounded up after giving succor to the resistance, and she is the one who interacts with the various resistance fighters who have infiltrated the Japanese operation. The women in the movie don’t do much besides be tortured and lose their clothes. Whenever anything heroic needs to be done, like plan escapes or fight the Japanese, the men do it. That’s definitely a weakness in this kind of movie, which I’m really only interested in watching to see women kick ass.

Posted at 10:19 PM

Mon - May 22, 2006

One Armed Swordsman vs. 9 Killers

"Where's Uma Thurman?"

The character Jimmy Wang Yu plays in this 1976 Taiwanese production is not the one-armed swordsman he played in two Shaw Brothers films. Nor, despite the original title being One Armed against Nine Killers, is he playing the one-armed boxer Yu played in earlier films, though 9 Killers does have a little of the agreeable goofiness of Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976).

Liu Yee Su (Yu) is a one armed kung fu master searching for Chu, the man who slaughtered Liu’s entire family some time before. Chu is in hiding (even in his compound he only communicates with his underlings via a primitive intercom system), so Liu goes about finding and killing all of the nine men who helped Chu do the dirty deed.

"Now Angels, you're probably wondering what bikini factory I need you to go undercover in this week..."

It’s the classic revenge plot with absolutely none of those extraneous extras like character development or suspense building. Liu shows up some place looking for someone to kill, or else Liu is doing something else when someone tries to kill him. By the end of the movie literally every character with more than a couple of lines of dialogue has tried to kill Liu.

It might be easier just to buy an H3.

Most of the action is dismayingly routine, though there is a funny bit about a master of swords who tries to fight Liu with an oversized sword of the kind you sometimes seen anime these days. Apparently the prop was difficult to film because the guy basically gets to swing it twice before Liu breaks it. The final fight, such as it is, is buried under an avalanche of inconsequential plot twists, including one where the only thing Liu knew for sure about Chu is that he’s supposed to have nine fingers, but the revealed Chu chortles that he has all his fingers but only nine toes.

Posted at 11:14 PM

Tue - May 9, 2006

House of the Dead 2

You’d think there would be nowhere to go but up from Uwe Boll’s infamous House of the Dead (2003), and on a technical level you’d probably be right. House of the Dead 2 (2005) is more solidly acted, more coherently staged, and isn’t much worse when it comes to the acting. And yet, it’s really, really boring.

So that's why people say the library's dead on Saturday nights.

The movie goes to some pains to actually reference the original video game (all but ignored by Dr. Boll) by making the main characters two scientist/agents for a government organization that is seeking a cure for zombie-ism. It seems that Ellis (Ed Quinn) and Alex (Emmanuelle Vaugier) have been killing zombies for a while, though I’m little fuzzy on how that ties into character from the first film who is apparently responsible for the zombie outbreak at the college campus that is central to the movie. A scientist (played by Sid Haig) at the college captured Alicia (the survivor of the Isla del Muerte incident) and has been keeping her in vault, while experimenting with her blood to discover the secret of immortality (presumably to live forever). But the experiments get out of control and 29 days later (I guess that’s a reference to the Danny Boyle horror movie, or the Sandra Bullock rehab movie) the college campus is overrun by the living dead. For budget reasons it appears that no conventional authorities have noticed, so the only people we see responding to the crisis are Ellis and Alex, leading a small team of Colonial Marines… I mean special ops soldiers.

Wife Swap is just getting silly.

The rest of the movie is the expected clichés with the soldiers proving to be entirely ineffective against the zombies and getting killed off. Sorry, they're never called zombies, but "hypersapiens." That's latin for "Just call them freakin' zombies already!" Quite possibly the only original-to-the-movies idea in the whole film is blatantly stolen from the comic book The Walking Dead from Image comics. Beyond that the plot’s momentum is all about getting a sample of blood from the “Generation Zero” zombie. Our heroes manage that fairly easily, then lose the sample and have to go back to get it again. Nothing makes a movie drag like characters having to go back and do stuff again. Maybe they got confused and thought they were making a movie based on the Resident Evil games.

Catalina showers in her make-up?

Quick TV note: One of the special ops soldiers is played by Nadine Velazquez, who plays Catalina on My Name of Earl. She’s absolutely awful in this movie. She appears to be laughing during her death scene, though I can’t really blame her.

Posted at 10:33 PM

Thu - April 20, 2006

The Promise

I’m guessing Chen Kaige looked at all the big budget Chinese language martial arts films being made and thought, “I can get in on that action.” His entry into the genre is The Promise (2005), a glossy fantasy film that’s undeniably beautiful but incredibly shallow. The movie is not set during any real historical period in Chinese history, but takes place in a generic fantasy version of ancient imperial China. A great general (Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada) wins a stunning victory over a much larger force, partly due to the actions of a slave named Kunlun (Korean actor Dong-Kun Jang). Kunlun is from the “Land of Snow,” which for some reason means he has the ability to run really, really fast. Fast like the Flash, actually. The general is so impressed that he makes Kunlun his personal slave.

"So my armorer asked me to say 'when' when the helmut was big enough, but I nodded off."

On his way back to the Imperial City the general is ambushed and incapacitated, but only after meeting a trickster goddess that tells him the Emperor will die. The general gives his trademark “Crimson Armor” to Kunlun and instructs the slave to pretend to be him and save the Emperor. Kunlun rides to the city and finds it under siege by the forces of a Duke called Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse). The emperor’s chief concubine (Cecelia Cheung) is on the roof of Imperial Palace, seducing the entire enemy army by saying she’ll strip. See, when she was a child she met the same trickster goddess, and the goddess made her irresistible to all men though she could never find true love. The emperor sees what his concubine is doing and tries to kill her just as Kunlun rides by. Kunlun kills the emperor and escapes with the concubine, though when he’s cornered by loyalist forces he jumps to his apparent death. The concubine sees this and falls in love with the masked man she thinks is the general. But hey, the general is still alive! The general (now with his Crimson Armor back) engineers the rescue of the concubine, and they go off to live in idyllic exile. The End.

Nothing says 'bad-ass' like a crown and throne made of feathers.

Oops, that isn’t much of a movie. After a year the general and the concubine are captured by Wuhuan, and Kunlun visits his own childhood by running really, really fast. Everything is in place now for the final confrontation…

…Which, truth be told, is really kind of bland. The movie is terrific looking, but the drama is not terribly logical or logical. There’s a certain air of calculated populism about the cast, like they tried to get one actor from each major market in Asia, and the shaky chemistry between the actors makes it tough to forget they’re all from different countries. What little action there is in The Promise is also not terribly impressive. The movie also trips over that line that separates the fantastic from the just plain goofy, like an early scene where Kunlun crawls at superspeed to keep from being trampled by a herd of buffalo. I think The Promise is a good indication that the big budget Chinese drama genre is running out of steam.

Posted at 11:14 PM

Tue - April 4, 2006

Lessons of Darkness

Lessons of Darkness (1992) is made up of documentary footage Werner Herzog shot in Kuwait in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, yet it isn’t really a documentary. The movie doesn’t really explain what it is we’re looking up, but rather just presents it. All the footage is accompanied by a classical music score, and there is sparse narration by Herzog. However, Herzog is crazier than a bear in a tutu so that narration is split roughly between suggestions that what we’re seeing is an alien planet, quotes for the Book of Revelation, and factual declarations that are of dubious accuracy.

Which way is Barad-dur?

What can not be denied is that footage in Lesson of Darkness is spectacular. The size and scope of what we are seeing is often overwhelming. There appear to be entire lakes in the desert, which upon closer inspection turn out to be oil. Smoke that covers the sky for as far as the eye can see, even from a helicopter. Tiny firefighters framed by the infernos that rage behind them.

Digging for fire. I think they found some.

We also get to see what I assume are most of the processes used to put out the oils fires and then cap the well afterwards. It’s amazingly complicated, yet major parts of the capping mechanism are held on by simple nuts that have to be turned by hand. Stuff like that always fascinates me. We also see firemen lighting wells back on fire, though I don't have any idea why they would do that.

Wasn't this a John Wayne movie?

Posted at 09:21 PM

Sun - March 26, 2006

Creep

I watch a lot of horror films, but I still get annoyed by characters who don’t act like real people would in the same situation. My annoyance was even higher than usual with Creep (2005), I guess because the whole movie is shot in an overexposed, handheld style that is supposed to give you the impression of gritty reality.

Kate (Franke Potente) is some sort of Eurotrash party girl in London who has found out George Clooney will be at a certain party. For some reason she assumes that if she shows up there she will be able to get Clooney to sleep with her, but she misses her ride. She heads to a tube station, but while waiting for a train to come she takes some recreational drugs and passes out. Hours later she wakes up and the station is closed. For some reason she can’t find a door leading out, so she hops on a subway train that comes through. Here’s the first point where logic breaks down. The train is empty (and doesn’t leave the station), but it turns out a male coworker of Kate’s followed her and tries to put the moves on her… and when he’s spurned he gets violent. But why did he follow her in the first place, and why didn’t he make his move when she was just sitting on the platform? Certainly he couldn’t count on her still being there after the station closed.

Before we can think about all this too clearly the coworker is grabbed by an unseen and very violent assailant. Kate runs back into the tube station and finds a well lit area where she can easily see if someone tries to approach her.

Pop quiz! In Kate’s position would you:

a) Stay where you were and wait for security to find you?

b) Head up stairs and look for a fire exit?

c) Find a dark, narrow passage through a hole in a wall and crawl into it even though the only illumination you have is a cigarette lighter?

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

Needless to say Kate chooses c). Kate hooks up with a homeless man who leads her to a security guard, but of course he’s the kind of security guard who refuses to investigate further just because there’s a blood-drenched woman in the subway after closing. I mean, c’mon, that’s not the kind of thing that should concern him!

This is what happens when you have socialized medicine.

The killer is Craig, who looks like a cross between a C.H.U.D. and Gollum. He was apparently raised and abandoned in an underground maternity ward and now plays at being a doctor, though judging from how he can sneak up on people he must also be trained in the ancient arts of the ninja. Wait, did I just write underground maternity ward? What? Creep proposes a weird view of the infrastructure of a city where the subways and the sewers are attached to each other, and I’m not quite sure how either of them are supposed to be related to a doctor having his offices down there. Creep has some nice production values, but the killer is just too silly to be believed. Are we that desperate for film bogeymen?

Posted at 10:42 PM

Wed - March 15, 2006

Godzilla (Region 2) and Space Amoeba DVDs

Rights issues appear to have delayed the release of the original Japanese version of Godzilla (1954) in U.S., so you may as well pick up BFI’s British release of Godzilla if you can play region 2 PAL DVDs. Classic Media will be doing region 1 release later this year, but that release probably won’t have the extras BFI’s disc features, including short photo-illustrated documentaries on the design and construction of the Godzilla suit and the development of the story as well as a commentary by Steve Ryfle, Keith Aiken andEd Godziszewski. It wouldn’t be hard for Classic Media to outdo those extras, though.

Space Amoeba (1970) is Tokyo Shock’s latest (and probably last) release of a classic era Toho film on DVD. This movie has been better known to us as Yog, The Monster from Space, but Space Amoeba better represents this relatively late Inshiro Honda entry into the kaiju genre. It is interesting that unlike nearly every other kaiju film the mutated animals that terrorize the island can be harmed and even killed with small arms and simple explosions. The monsters do look pretty silly (especially the cuttlefish Gezora) and it’s not all that surprising that even the Japanese trailer tries to sell this completely humorless movie as a campy comedy. Great looking disc, though.

Posted at 09:52 PM

Fri - March 10, 2006

Gatchaman Episode 6, “The Great Mini-Robot Operation!”

At its best TV shows should educate as well as entertain. As an example I present this episode of Gatchaman. I learned that the alien dictators of Galactor have a retirement plan so good it attracts characters from other cartoons, including the Great Gazoo.

"Toodle-loo, dum-dums!"

Additionally, the World Bank is an actual bank, with World Tellers and presumably the World Offer of a Toaster with Every New World Savings Account. Also, it’s apparently good robot design to have the self-destruct switches somewhere where you can access them quickly.

"We are the Judean's People Front!"

This episode ends with Ken and Joe arguing about the damn Bird Missiles again, which is by my count the eighth time in six episodes they’ve had this spat. Last episode Joe fired dozens of Bird Missiles (at the “Ghost Fleet from Hell!”) and nothing really happened, but I guess this episode taught me that Prof. Nambu is such a control freak he still wants the Science Ninja Team to ask him every time they need to use a moderately effective weapon.