My God, It’s Full of Nerds!

I got this statuette in the art auction at this year’s Necronomicon. I’m quite enamored of it.

Talk about a movie that hasn’t aged well. Johnny Mnemonic is a movie that sci-fi nerds were waiting for. It might not have been Neuromancer, but finally someone was making a movie based on a William Gibson story, and the script was by Gibson himself! It was going to be awesome.

First of all, the movie play like it’s from the 1980s. Instead of cyberpunk we get plain old punk, with transgender bodyguards and Henry Rollins running over Dolph Lundgren with a delivery van. Moreover, the “high” tech in this movie looks clunky even for the mid-1990s, as if this if the steampunk version of the story.

And of course the tech is all laughably out of date. I bet the 80 GB Johnny’s onboard memory is supposed to hold sounded big then, but now there are iPods larger than that. And while we’re on the subject, how the hell is moving data in Johnny’s brain implant more secure than just keeping it on the disc and moving that way? In the movie the draw seems to be the encryption, but why not just encrypt the disc the same way? The one prophetic moment? Johnny asks for an iPhone. (Okay, it was probably something called an “Eye-phone.”)

Johnny Mnemonic is crippled by budget issues. A large part of the plot has to do with the fact that most of the population is in danger of succumbing to a disease caused by the constant exposure to electronic pop culture, but other than the “nostalgia” cable channel Johnny watches in one scene, we see none of it. From what we see in the movie, everyone lives in refrigerator cartons or under abandoned bridges.

The ultimate irony is that Keanu Reeves would go from this to making the definitive cyberpunk movie just 4 years later with The Matrix.

If It! was an example of a simple monster movie with too much going on, this British flick from the same time period is a simple monster with too little going on.

The Shuttered Room claims to be based on a story written in collaboration between August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft, where “collaboration” means “Lovecraft was too dead to object to Derleth fleshing out story ideas Lovecraft had abandoned years earlier and slapping both their names on it.” The only hint of Lovecraft I see in this movie, besides throwaway references like “Dunwich Island” and a bunch of people named “Whateley,” is a general distrust of anybody who doesn’t live in a major urban center.

Susannah (Carol Lynley) grew up on the rustic Dunwich Island, but was sent to live in New York City when she was very young. She remembers very little of the island, but on her 25th birthday she inherits the keys to her old family property, a disused mill on the island. She and her new husband, Michael (Gig Young), travel to the island to visit it, and are treated with great disdain by the locals and even Susannah’s relatives, who seem in equal parts to be afraid of Susannah because of some sort of family curse and envious of the New Yorker’s material wealth. Susannah and Michael make an attempt to clean up the mill and make it into a summer home, but the locals, and especially a gang of young men led by Ethan (Oliver Reed, playing the role like Marlon Brando if he’d starred in Rebel Without a Cause), turn downright violent. Oh, and there’s someone chained to a rusty bed in the attic of the old mill who occasionally escapes and claws people to death.

No prizes for figuring out what’s in the attic. The mill is a great location, and the town where the movie was shot is great for interesting locations, even if the occasional vista of rolling fields off into the distance reveal it isn’t a small island. I also really enjoyed the avant-garde jazz score. What I didn’t like about the movie is the way these islanders seems to all be borderline psychopaths just because they’re not city dwellers. It’s not like there’s actually anything supernatural going on; in fact, the curse was created by one character specifically because she knew the other islanders would be stupid enough to fall for it. Because the part about the actual shuttered room is so incidental, the entire message of the movie is that rural people are basically children, unable to grow up and deal with their baser urges.

It! is a very odd movie. I realize that may be an strange statement from me, who watches an odd movie before breakfast most days, but even so, It! is a very odd movie.

It would be very easy to give a completely accurate summary of It! that makes It! sound like standard monster movie. Arthur Pimm (Roddy McDowall) is an assistant curator at a museum of art in London. There’s a fire at one of the museum’s warehouses, and Pimm and the head curator go to see what can be salvaged. The only object that survived the fire is a creepy medieval statue of a man in simple robes. As the curator examines it and Pimm leaves for a second, and when he comes back the curator is dead and Pimm thinks the statue is in a slightly different position. Pimm has the statue moved to the museum as an example of “medieval primitivism,” where it inexplicably falls off its pedestal and kills an electrician. The museum’s board is dead set on getting rid of the thing, so they the contact an American museum which sends a representative to negotiate a sale. This inspires Pimm examine the statue a little closer, and he soon discovers it is the actual Golem of legend, and he also discovers the secret to make it follow his commands! Now the timid and downtrodden Pimm has the power of the unstoppable Golem at his command; will anyone be safe?

See, pretty straightforward. Here’s what I didn’t mention: Pimm lives in an apartment with the desiccated corpse of his mother, and he has Norman Bates-ish conversations with her. This has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but there you have it. It really undercuts the apparent theme of the film that “power drives men mad” when the guy getting the power is already loony to start with.

Towards the end the movie completely jumps the rails and falls into Wacky Gorge. After Pimm has the Golem tear down a bridge for no real reason, killing a busload of people, he drunkenly confesses, sort of, to the American agent. The police overhear this and confront Pimm, and then the scene fades to Pimm in a asylum for the criminally insane. I guess he was put there because the police found Mother, but this is never stated. The Golem appears and breaks Pimm out, and the next time we see Pimm, he’s in hearse with his mother and the Golem in the back and the beautiful daughter of his original boss (shagalicious Jill Haworth) tied up in the seat next to him. Pimm holes up in a country mansion with the Golem set to “kill!” outside the front gates. The British army tries to destroy the statue up with artillery, and when that doesn’t work they decide to take the next logical step, which is to detonate a nuclear weapon in the middle of the English countryside! Really, that’s the only plan they could come up with? Not “pick the slow-moving statue up with a crane,” but “reduce part of our own country to a radioactive crater”?

This movie could have done with a rewrite. The whole Mother thing is too obviously thrown in just to try to capture some of the notoriety of Psycho (1960), and the rules for how the statue works are never consistent. No one even advances a theory as to why the statue killed two people before Pimm discovers how to animate it.

It’s going to be who knows how many months before I get to see how Red Cliff ends, so in he meantime I decided to watch Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon, another movie from this year that depicts some of the same events and characters.

The movie is narrated by Pingan (Sammo Hung), a lowly soldier in the army of Liu Bei. In a battle orchestrated by the military strategist Zhuge Liang to rout some of Cao Cao’s advance forces, Pingan an impressive fellow soldier named Zilong (Andy Lau). They become friends because of a shared hometown and a shared ambition to bring peace to their land. Later Zilong singlehandedly rescues Liu Bei’s infant son from a town surrounded by Cao Cao’s army. (This event is portrayed briefly in Red Cliff, because John Woo loves tough guys carrying around little babies.) Zilong is made a general.

Three Kingdoms then jumps forward 20 years. Though he is not shown on screen or referenced in the movie in any way, I feel that it’s important background to know that Cao Cao has a son named Pi. Cao Pi. Cao Pi, in fact, declared himself the emperor of the kingdom of Wei, ending the Han Dynasty. So that was Cao Pi.

Zilong has persisted as a general even as all the other elite generals that made up Liu Bei’s fell in battle during the many campaigns of the previous two decades, some of them undoubtedly against Cao Pi. Zhuge is planning another “northern expedition” (probably against Cao Pi), and Zilong is upset to find he’s been left off the org chart. He begs to have a chance to fall in battle, so Zhuge creates a place for him and gives him a small force. Pingan also begs to go along, even though in the preceding 20 years he hasn’t advanced in rank at all.

Zilong sets out, and his forces are ambushed by a large force led by Cao Pi’s daughter, Cao Ying (Maggie Q). She wants to avenge the humiliation her grandfather Cao Cao suffered when Zilong rescued the infant from under his nose. Outnumbered and outflanked, Zilong and his forces retreat to the fort where Zilong and Pingan first met, and try to hold off the enemy forces long enough to be useful to the rest of Liu Bei’s army.

Three Kingdoms: Completely Meaningless Subtitle is probably going to get lost in the shuffle thanks to the far more expensive Red Cliff. On the whole, Three Kingdoms has beautiful cinematography, but where Red Cliff shows huge navies and enormous formations of troops, most of the battles in Three Kingdoms look like they were shot with about 20 extras. Only occasional shots of larger armies marching remind us that these are supposed to be epic battles. The battle scenes are exciting, sometimes not as clear as I’d like, but fun. It’s sometimes a little too obvious that Andy Lau isn’t a martial artist, so his spear-fighting scenes include lots of quick cuts, but nothing too distracting.

The acting is excellent, with the exception of Sammo Hung in some scenes, because his histrionics are a little too old school for such a modern movie. The story is excellent, though there is a discussion of philosophy at the end that I think got lost in translation (”In the end I believe all men can prevail over destiny. We’re all bound to Fate.” The hell?). I hope this movie gets picked up for the U.S. so we’ll get better subtitles.

It may be just me, but I think whoever composed the movie flat out stole some the score from Ennio Morricone’s score to Once Upon a Time in the West. I’m serious, there are even whip-cracks. I haven’t heard swipes like that in a HK film since the early 1990s.

On Monday night I do movie night with friends, and the current theme is sci-fi comedies, and the sub-theme is movies that used to be on HBO every three hours when I was 12.

So, The Goonies. Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. Pirates are chased by the British navy into a cave on the Oregon coast in the 1600s. The pirates can’t figure out a way to escape, but they do spend the effort to build water slides and complicated, pipe organ-based booby traps. Okay.

For extra special fun, grab someone under the age of 20 and show them the two-part epic music video for “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” that’s on the DVD. Then try to explain to them how a campy no-budget clip starring Cyndi Lauper and bunch of wrestlers was used to promote a big budget kids’ movie, without using the term “cocaine binge.”

To summarize this movie: Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee, who is soooo Chinese) wants a CB set that can disintegrate cities. To get one, he kidnaps the hot daughters of various scientists, and occasionally feeds them to a pit of very laid-back looking boa constrictors. Somehow this inspires unbridled creativity from the scientists, and soon Brit secret agent Nayland Smith (Douglas Wilmer) has to find Fu’s radio sets of death before a peace conference is destroyed.

My favorite part of the movie is towards the beginning, when some of Fu Manchu’s thugs attack a scientist and his daughter walking on lonely stretch of the riverside London. The scientist manages to beat off the attackers, even leaving one unconscious a few feet from where his daughter fell. As he attends to her a bobby ambles up, and asks him what’s going on. The scientist explains that he was just attacked, and the bobby seems skeptical that anything at all happened. Even when shown the unconscious thug, he seems only mildly interested. If you’re that oblivious, you deserve to be reduced to your component atoms by Fu Manchu’s sinister shortwave.

It’s time for another installment of Slashers Flicks From Around the World! It’s like Wild On…, but with a lower survival rate. This week, Norway, land of snow and… Ikea? No that’s Sweden? Aquaman? That’s Finland. I’m sure Norway has something else it’s world famous for, I’ll think of it.

Cold Prey is standard slasher flick. Five friends are on a snowboarding vacation. One of them (the nerdy guy, if you were wondering) falls and breaks his leg in a very bad way. The others (which of course include two couples, one conservative, the other more free-wheeling) manage to drag him to a nearby but completely isolated hotel, which turns out to have been abandoned in 1975, but still has a working power generator and is remarkably clean.

Vikings! Norway is famous for the Vikings, right? Or was that Minnesota?

Guess what? There’s a giant guy stalking living in the basement of the hotel, and he’s been killing people over the years. With only five possible victims, I knew this movie was going to have to draw things out. It’s all terribly predictable. The killer, despite being the size of a Honda Fit stood on end, still manages to sprint from place to place like Justin Gatlin, but as silently as a ninja. Towards the end Cold Prey does manage a couple of nice moments; the final two kids find a shotgun and one shell, but when they try to ambush the killer in a dark room he turns off his flashlight so they can’t see him to take the shot, and the final girl (a virgin, of course) does a good job of turning the tables. There’s a sequel coming, which either means this movie did really well in Norway, or the producers decided to take aping American slasher flicks to the next level. Or both.

Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004) seemed to be trying to repurpose the Starship Troopers franchise to be another Aliens rip-off (well, more than it was anyway), but Starship Troopers 3: Marauder brings back the satire, with a vengeance. I’ve got to figure that because satire is cheaper than bug battles.

In the first part of the movie Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) has been assigned to head a base on Roku San, a farming planet that isn’t very happy with the Federation presence. In the middle of a visit by Sky Marshall Anoke (head of the Federation) the bugs suddenly appear and overrun the Federation base. Anoke escapes on a ship commanded by Rico’s old friend Capt. Lola Blake (Jolene Blalock), but the ship is shot down over another planet. Rico is blamed for the Roku San tragedy and sentenced to death, but is secretly saved to lead the newly-formed “Marauder” squad to rescue Anoke.

Yes, this movie features powered suits, and they’re pretty neat looking. They only show up for the last few minutes of the movie, though. The movie also ups the satire, in particular when it comes to how the Federation initially rejects, then whole-heartedly embraces religion. There’s also quite a bit about war protestors, and I admit that I laughed when Anoke is introduced as the star of an American Idol-type show.

On the minus side, the movie is cheap, and the bugs tend to stay underground, where we can’t see them. There’s a new “scorpion” bug, and a surprise bug at the end, but neither of them are very impressive. And geez, the acting! I guess the terrible acting is supposed to be part of the milleu here, but even I have my limits. I used to think of Jolene Blalock mostly as the actress who taught us the surprising fact that Vulcans consider breast implants logical, but now I have to think of her as the actress who almost made Casper Van Dien look talented. Almost.

It’s John Agar again, this time as an archeologist who discovers a lost Sumerian civilization living underneath a mountain in Tibet. In keeping with the well known principles of anthropology, the men of this lost underground civilization are albino freaks, but the women are normally pigmented blonde hotties. The Sumerians support their civilization by enslaving “the beasts of the dark,” the deformed “mole people” of the title, though it does seem odd that the ratio of slave to slave master is 1:1.

The mole people are a pretty good costumes, but the set decoration seems to be the result of someone in the production department saying, “Ancient Egypt was near Sumeria, right?”

Is there any genre of movie more revered that the giant bug movie? When you look at a line-up like Them (1954), The Deadly Mantis (1957), Mothra (1961), Bug (1975), Blue Monkey (1987), Mimic (1997), and Bruce Almighty (2003), it’s undeniable that movies starring enormous insects are part of our heritage.

Tarantula is one of the earliest films in the genre, and as one might expect it’s rather simple. John Agar plays a doctor in the fly speck town of Desert Oasis. There scientists who live near town experimenting with some sort of “nutrient” that causes the test animals to grow uncontrollably, including a tarantula. Agar is called in when one of the scientists, apparently impatient to start human testing (Why???), doses himself and dies of a rare deforming disease. Yet another scientist also doses himself and starts a lab fire, freeing the tarantula and forcibly injecting the third scientist.

The tarantula ambles around the desert eating people and cattle, until the air force bombs it to death. This is one of the few giant monsters that is killed with a simple application of military power. No secret weapons, no poisons, no giant robots, just missiles and napalm.

Tarantula even manages to fit in some sweet 1950s style sexism in the form of a lady intern who works for the scientists. Also of interest is that the dialogue describing the cattle the tarantula killed matches almost exactly the kinds of things believers in cattle mutilation would say some 20 years later. (”No footprints. No blood. No sign of struggle. The bones stripped clean like peeling a banana.”)

I’ve heard from more than one person that Wake of Death is the best of the movies Jean Claude Van Damme has made recently. Of course, that’s not so much setting the bar low as digging underground until you hit a sewer line and dropping the bar in it. (You don’t know want to know where I keep the bar for recent Steven Seagal movies.) I suppose it’s true, Wake of Death is minimally competent in most respects and does feature Simon Yam in one of his few Hollywood roles, but I still can’t say I found the movie very good.

So here’s the set-up. Van Damme plays Ben, a bouncer who works at a mob-owned club doing horrible, unspecified things. His wife, naturally, is a bleeding-heart social worker. I guess that in the ten-plus years they’ve been married (and raised a son), she’s never thought to ask her husband, “How was work today?” Social workers aren’t known for being nosy, after all.

The wife is asked to work with a bunch of illegal Chinese immigrants who were being smuggled into our country under inhumane conditions. She decides to adopt one of the immigrants, a little girl apparently unrelated to any of the other immigrants. I’m a little fuzzy on how this could possibly be legal, but it doesn’t matter much because the girl’s father, a triad boss played by Yam, informs the authorities about his missing daughter and is given custody…

Just kidding! For reasons that I find even fuzzier than the adoption thing, the triad boss, who is in America anyway to make a heroin deal, sends goons to kill Ben’s wife and take the girl back. No warnings, no threats, he just starts slaughtering people. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the boss killed the girl’s mother and the daughter may know that, but still, the way U.S. immigration policy is these days, INS would be only too happy to turn any illegal immigrant over to any relative who would take them out of the country. Anyhoo, Ben’s wife is killed, and Ben retaliates by calling the authorities…

Just kidding! Ben starts hunting down all the triad businesses in L.A. and killing everyone he finds. The whole tone of the movie, with everyone being needlessly violent in every situation, reminded me greatly of the Sin City comics. There’s even a scene where Ben’s friends (the alleged good guys, keep in mind) saw a guy’s legs off to make him talk.

In the end, I’m not sure why this was a Jean Claude Van Damme movie. There aren’t any martial arts to speak of. I guess that Ben is supposed to look ragged and tired, and JCVD certainly looks both these days, but he’s still barely an actor.

This monday was a another movie night with the group, current theme “sci-fi comedies,” sub-theme “messing up The Watchening.” So tonight the movie selected was Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust, which I watched as part of the original 100 Movies, 100 Days. I’ll do another double feature some future day.

It’s amazing to think that as late as 1989 there were still Jaws rip-offs as bad as Killer Crocodile being made. It seems that a corrupt local official has been allowing a factory owner to dump radioactive waste into a swamp, resulting in a giant crocodile. I say “a swamp,” because I’m not really sure where the movie is supposed to be taking place. Most of the characters are American stereotypes, but if I had to guess where the movie was filmed, from the environment and the extras, I’d say the Dominican Republic. Anyway, a bunch of (Italian) (pretending to be American) ecologists investigate the swamp, and due to some sort of highly contagious inner ear infection, keep falling off their boat in front of the very hungry croc. In fact, everyone in this movie has a lot of trouble keeping their balance, and topple into the water if there’s a so much as a light breeze. I can’t blame the crocodile for eating them.

The crocodile is portrayed by a large, unconvincing puppet. It seems like they only had a front half to the croc, and one working paw, so there aren’t that many angles they can show the animal from. In the end one of the environmentalists, weaned from his treehugging ways by a crusty hunter, throws a running prop motor down the croc’s throat. This improvisation results in a lot of blood and eventually a fiery blast, because when crocodiles die they turn into explodium.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but I really don’t get why this is even a franchise. Is watching people die in ridiculously complicated accidents enough to hang a series of movies on? This third movie in the series doesn’t even have Tony Todd as the mortician, so there’s even less of a connection between this film and the other two as there was between the first two.

Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the cute actress from Death Proof) is the lead in this one, and she previsions a rollercoaster accident kill her and her surprisingly douchey friends. She manages to keep them from getting on the doomed rollercoaster, but then they all start dying in ways that may be foreshadowed in the photos that Wendy took that night. And yet again, I spend most of the movie wondering if I’m going to get an explanation for why Death (or Fate, or God, or Joss Whedon, or whatever) is pissed these particular people didn’t die in the accident Wendy saw. (Spoiler: No.) And if Wendy was thwarting Death’s design, why are the later accidents predicted in the photos Wendy took before the thwarting happened? Argh! This series is heading the same way as the Japanese Ring series, where after three movies they were still just hinting at where Sadako came from without committing to exactly what kind of origin she had.

Apparently the series is settling into the pattern of James Wong and Glen Morgan making the odd numbered films, and David Ellis and Eric Bress making the even numbered ones. (Final Destination 4, coming this summer!) I will say this for James Wong, he brings some visual panache to this movie, like juxtaposing the tanning beds that kill two girls with their coffins.

Daniel Myrick was one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project, and like the other director, Eduardo Sánchez, he hasn’t done much since. But here’s a movie he made that came out on video earlier this year, and surprise! It’s about people running around the woods, running from a supernatural force.

To be fair to Mr. Myrick, Solstice is a good low-key horror film. Megan (the super cute Elisabeth Harnois) and some of her college friends have a tradition where they visit her family’s remote Louisiana summer home every June to celebrate solstice. But this year is tinged with tragedy, because Megan’s twin sister Sofie committed suicide unexpectedly at a Christmas party. At the summer home (more of a mansion, really) Megan is haunted by visions of things that she doesn’t remember and she keeps finding a set of keys in places it can’t be, though she thinks they belonged to Sophie. Is her sister trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave? Are her friends having her on? Are the locals, including the handsome clerk at the local store or the scary rustic played by R. Lee Ermey, messing with her for some reason?

Credit where credit is due, Solstice plays fair. When we find out what’s going on it explains the otherwise inexplicable behavior of one character, and a careful reading of other characters’ lines will reveal them to be red herrings. There’s a lot of setup before the good stuff happens, so it’s a little boring, but I’ve seen worse horror movies this week.

Poor R. Lee Ermey. It’s supposed to be annoying to be typecast, and been typecast two times: as a drill sergeant, and as a hillbilly.

I finish up my little Thailand series here with this odd art film from a few years back. Tears of the Black Tiger is an old-fashioned movie made with new technology. The plot is pure melodrama, with a touch of Western. When they were kids Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan) and Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi) fell in love, but he’s from a rustic family and she’s upper class so it would never work out. Years later Dum is a gunman for infamous bandit Fai, and Rumpoey is engaged to local police captain Kumjorn at the behest of her father. With Dum and Kurnjorn headed for conflict, can Rumpoey avert tragedy?

The thing about Tears that demands to mentioned is the look of the film. To make it look like a movie made in the 1950s the whole thing was processed to look like faded two-strip Cinecolor, with reds popping and greens turning a sickly teal.

The music is all vintage, but the action scenes are frenetic, gory, and owe more than a little to Sam Raimi. It’s an odd melange to be sure, but somehow the presentation is earnest enough to make it work.

The only thing I would complain about is that Rumpoey is, to not mince words, kind of a bitch. She’s demanding and rude as a kid, and in the present day she pointedly ignores her fiancee to the point of not saying a word to him until more than an hour and a half into the film, even though he seems perfectly nice. He doesn’t seem to have done anything to earn her scorn, except towards the very end of the movie he comes down with a brief case of the rape-itis his kind of character tends to contract in these movies.

There should be a name for the genre of crazy kung fu films that aren’t quite outright fantasies, like Duel to the Death (1983), Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki (1991) or The Cat (1992). Weird Fu, maybe.

Dynamite Warrior is a Thai movie that would be one of those. At first it only seems a little weird. Siang (Dan Chupong) is a sort of Robin Hood of early 20th century Siam, stealing cattle from traders to give to the poor who need them produce rice. He does this using a potent combination of Muay Thai and rocketry. Yes, rocketry. He fires arrays of clubbing rockets into caravans, and even rides a particularly large rocket into battle. Besides the altruistic reasons, Siang is also looking for a man with a certain tattoo because that man killed his parents when he was a kid.

At the same time a local entrepreneur called Lord Waeng (Phutiphong Sriwat) is trying to disrupt the cattle business in order to sell tractors. (The character has a harelip and to my ears seems to be speaking with a bad speech impediment, but the subtitles don’t give any indication that what he’s saying is unclear to anyone else.) Waeng hires a local bandit to cattle rustle, but the biggest caravan is defended by powerful magician named Sing. As it happens, Sing has the tattoo Siang is looking for, so Waeng arranges for Siang to meet the one person who knows how to defeat Sing - the not-at-all ominously named Black Wizard. The one thing that will take away Sing’s powers is the menstrual blood of the Black Wizard’s daughter Sao. And if you don’t think this leads to a hilarious scene where Sing follows Sao around waiting for her Auntie Flo to visit, you haven’t seen many Asian films.

What happens next is tiresomely predictable, but the action scenes are so gonzo over-the-top that I still enjoyed the movie. Watching a guy with rockets fight someone who can magically punch you from across the room is fun, no matter what the rest of the film is like.

Mercury Man is a rip-off of Spider-Man (2002). What’s interesting is how gleeful this Thai film is about being a rip-off. Spider-man is referenced by shared dialogue, by name-checking, and even with numerous graffiti in the background.

Unlike Spider-Man, but like most of the Asian superhero movies I’ve seen, Mercury Man’s origin story is mystical, not scientific. Terrorists are seeking two magical amulets, the Amulet of the Moon, which they stole from a temple in Tibet, and the Amulet of the Sun, which I guess their leader found somewhere but lost when he got put in a Thai prison. That leader is Usama Bin Ali, and he’s supposed to be Afghan, but he looks Thai to me. I think all the terrorists are supposed to be Muslim and/or Arab, but they’re all played by Asian or Caucasian actors, and speak English.

Hot shot firefighter Charn (Wasan Khantaau) is at the prison when Usama stages a break, and ends up getting stabbed by the Sun amulet. The next day Charn discovers that if he gets excited he starts to burn. He tests this out by flipping through an issue of Penthouse until his clothes catch on fire. Way to take the subtext of those scenes from Spider-Man and turn them into text, Thailand.

Oddly, the whole burning thing is barely mentioned for the rest of the movie. Charn’s powers aren’t fire-based, but magnetic. His blood is now mercury because the amulet bonded with it. He can heal himself, he can manipulate metal objects at a distance, and he can swing from building to building on beams of magnetism. He also knows kung fu. A cute female monk (nun?) from the Tibetan temple shows up and ask for Charn’s help in finding the Moon amulet, so Charn has his sister make him superhero costume, complete with light-up eyes.

Incidentally, Charn’s sister is played by transexual Thai kickboxer Parinya Kiatbusaba. Finally, I get to use the term “transexual Thai kickboxer” in a blog post! And kudos to her surgeon. Other than the fact that she’s taller than every man in the movie, I probably wouldn’t have guessed she used to be a he. The only thing that really gave her away is that she stands out compared to almost all the other young female actors in Thai films, who tend to be tiny waifs who can’t act. At first I though she was going to be comic relief, but once she busted out some Muay Thai I remembered the movie Beautiful Boxer.

Back to the movie. Charn (he’s never called Mercury Man) does some of the basic superhero things, like foiling robberies and corralling elephants, before the terrorists kidnap his mother and sister. Luckily, the female monk has a magic compass that will point right to the Moon Amulet, even though she waited a half hour of screen time to tell us about it. The terrorists have a plan to destroy an American ship carrying chemical weapons, and they need to retrieve the Sun Amulet to do it.

The version of this movie I watched had slightly sketchy subtitles, so exactly why the terrorists need both amulets was obscure to me. At one point the terrorists put a little piece of the Moon Amulet in a regular handgun bullet and fire it at a mountain, resulting in a shockwave big enough to blow over an SUV from miles away, so I’m not sure why they didn’t just do that and skip the Sun Amulet altogether. Their plan also involves putting some colored crystals in a rocket and firing it at the American ship, and to keep the Americans from seeing the missile coming they kidnap a little Cambodian kid with unexplained psychic powers and have him block the ship’s radar. I’m so confused.

Outside of the Usama’s insane and overly complicated plan, Mercury Man moves quickly and is fairly entertaining. There’s a one especially good fight scene in a nightclub, where the bad guys steal Charn’s powers (his Kryptonite is electricity), and force him to fight under various challenging conditions, including while on fire. The special effects are, as you’d expect, bargain basement, but only occasionally so bad as to be distracting.

I’m part of group that watches a movie every week, with every person choosing a single movie in a theme, until everyone has gone. Then we pick a new theme. The current theme is Sci-Fi Comedies, and this week’s sub-theme was “Movies that will mess up Scott’s web project.”

I’ll do a double feature on some upcoming day to keep my unique movie count above 100.

Remember John Woo? He was that director who made some great movies in Hong Kong, like The Killer and Hard Boiled, and then came to Hollywood an made a series of increasingly uninteresting films, culminating in Paycheck (2003), a movie any halfway competent action director could have made.

Guess what? John Woo is back, baby, and he just made a movie unlike anything he’s made before.

But yes, there are doves.

Red Cliff is based on the famous historical battle that ushered in China’s “Three Kingdoms” era. For us ignorant Americans, they might as well retitle this movie “Dynasty Warriors,” because that video game is about all most of know about the period. Still, the comparison is surprisingly apt. Like the video game, this movie is all about the generals, who seem to have borderline supernatural physical prowess that they use to mow down dozens and hundreds of unlucky grunts.

The short version of the plot: 208 AD. The Han Dynasty is facing rebellion from two of the southern parts of the empire, ruled by local lords Liu Bei and Sun Quan (Chang Chen). Lead by General Cao Cao, the imperial forces invade Liu Bei’s land and force his armies to retreat. The only thing that can save him is an alliance with Sun Quan, so Liu sends his top strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to Sun’s court. Zhuge doesn’t get the warmest reception, but he goes around Lord Sun and meets with Sun’s Viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), who is convinced that a military alliance is the only way to stop the ambitions of Cao Cao.

I found it quite helpful to have read about the Battle at Red Cliff before seeing the movie, because the movie does assume you know a fair amount about Chinese history. It can be confusing that the main characters are all proxies for more powerful people. For example, in theory the Han emperor starts the whole mess, but only appears briefly in the first scene. Other details, like a soldier yarfing for no apparent reason on one of Cao Cao’s ships, are references to certain traditions and stories about the historical battle.

This movie has been quite notorious, both because of the extreme expense ($80 million, unheard for a Chinese film) and revolving door casting. Originally Chow Yun Fat was cast as Zhou and Tony Leung as Zhuge. Both dropped out of the production as filming started, and Leung was later resigned to play what is essentially the lead role.

What John Woo has fashioned here is a huge-scale epic, comparable to Lord of the Rings, and much like that trilogy, broken up into parts. This first movie is all set-up, with there being no fighting at Red Cliffs, and it ends just as things start getting really interesting. Red Cliff, Part 2 will be opening in Asia early next year, and altogether it will be a four hour plus epic. Sadly, if we get this movie at all stateside (and I see no guarantee we will, the excellent film The Warlords still hasn’t been bought for distribution here), it will probably be in a 2 hour “international” version.

But is it any good? Yes, it’s really, really good. The two big action set-pieces are thrilling, the performances are good, the story is interesting and sometimes genuinely stirring, the movie looks gorgeous, and unusually for a Chinese movie, the special effects are really good. Except the CGI arrows, they look as bad here as in almost every other Chinese movie I’ve seen. But the ships look really good, and despite the complete lack of naval action in Part 1, Red Cliff is largely a naval battle. Woo also takes time for some nice little character scenes, but if you see the international version I guarantee they’ll all be cut out.

Have you been wondering whatever happened to the directors of The Blair Witch Project? Me neither. But it turns out that each of them has made a couple of films. Today I thought I’d watch Eduardo Sánchez’s most recent, Altered. Guess what? It’s about people being scared of stuff in the woods.

Okay, in fairness to Sánchez, it’s not a bad little thriller. Three Florida crackers capture an alien out in the wilderness somewhere. It seems that these three friends have been hunting together at for years looking for aliens, because 15 years before they were part of a group of five that were abducted and experimented on. One of the five didn’t make it back, and another, Wyatt (Adam Kaufman) became a recluse after he was returned. The other three bonded over their shared need for revenge.

Once the three have the alien in their possession they take it to Wyatt because they think he may know what to do with it. This thing isn’t some passive Grey. It’s reptilian, has huge claws, and can possess people by looking at them. More David Icke than Whitley Strieber. So the movie boils down to the four men (plus Wyatt’s wife) hiding in a shack with a hostile alien chained up in the garage, hoping that the aliens proper don’t decide on full-scale reprisals.

I was quite into the movie, but towards the end there’s some of the ridiculous gore I find so distracting in modern horror movies. It’s not that I don’t like gore — I mean, I cover my eyes, but I still watch a lot of gory movies and enjoy them. It’s what I do, darling. But one guy gets his intestines pulled out and unspooled like yarn, and not only lives, but continues to talk. No. That kills you. Blood loss. Shock. Scenes like that really pull me out of what was otherwise a pretty realistic movie. It’s like certain directors out there take Garth Ennis comics to be documentaries.

I totally love this movie. Emilio Estevez is a disaffected young man who is sort of kidnapped into the life of a repo man by Harry Dean Stanton. The movie is definitely one of those 1980s cult movies that try to be strange for strangeness’ sake, with the setting being “Edge City” and the only tenuous plot thread having to do with a crazy scientist who has stashed some alien bodies from Roswell in his Chevy Malibu’s trunk. I love all the characters, from the repo men, to the crazy guy who works the yard (”I do my best thinking on the bus… The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.”), the rival repo men the Rodriguez Brothers, and the one-handed agent looking to retrieve the aliens. I suppose the movie does a lose a little charm in the third act when, this being the 1980s, there’s some unnecessary gunplay, but the ending is transcendent!

Leathery secret agent James Bond is back in Octopussy!

Really, “Octopussy“? Was there a double entendre shortage in 1983, and that was the only one left?

It’s tough to choose exactly when the Bond films reached their nadir. Was it when Pierce Brosnan went CGI windsurfing on a tidal wave? When Bond spent an entire film looking for a man with a third nipple and ended up fighting a midget? Was it Sean Connery in “yellow-face”? What about that bobsled “chase” with Bloefeld where Bloefeld essentially kills himself? Twice?

All those moments are bad, but I think they’re outshone by the moment in Octopussy when Bond swings on some vines, accompanied by a Tarzan yell sampled from the 1930s movies.

It takes a special movie to blow its only plot twist in the title. That’s what Policewomen manages to do.

Policewomen is the template for Charlie’s Angels, though it actually features the exploitation angle that series could only hint at on TV. Lacey (Sondra Currie) is a female police officer who feels that she only gets grunt work because the male officers don’t appreciate her. She’s a karate expert, a surgeon with an assault rifle, and an expert driver, but she has never been assigned to the field. That changes, though, when gang made up entirely of women is suspected of knocking over banks and smuggling gold into the country. This gang is led by the elderly Maud (Elizabeth Stuart) and her 30-year old paramour Doc, and seems to be amazingly diverse and competent for an organization made up exclusively of former prostitutes and junkies. With the police stymied by this gang, some of the brass recruits Lacey to go undercover…

But not in the gang. The movie is a little confused on this point. Lacey and the hunky Lt. Frank (Tony Young) go “undercover” by going to Catalina, which is where the gold is apparently coming in, and playing tennis, eating expensive food, and having sex. Lacey and Frank do run across five bikini-clad members of the gang and arrest them, but it doesn’t achieve much. So Lacey then decides to go undercover in the gang, but all the other cops protest because it would be too dangerous. Wait, why did they recruit her in the first place?

Lacey contrives a reason to meet Maude and is inducted in the gang, and by this point you’ve probably noticed that the plural title doesn’t really make sense unless there’s already another policewoman undercover in the gang.

There is a lot of female nudity, but the “karate” fights are really lame. With that being the extent of the exploitation elements most of the rest of the fun comes from the obvious Bronson Canyon locations, including one shot with the Batcave in the background. This movie may also be of some small interest to fans of Kill Bill, because some of Lacey’s attitude and speech patterns (if not anything she actually says) were probably an influence on The Bride.

Some sadist over at Something Weird must have thought it would be funny to include this barely-a-movie on the same DVD as the equally rotten Psyched by the 4D Witch. The movies have nothing in common other than occasionally superimposing photos of nebulas over the action as a way to seem “trippy.”

Monster A-Go-Go was started by Bill Rebane (the cheesehead director of The Giant Spider Invasion) as “Terror at Halfday,” but was abandoned. Future gore pioneer Hershel Gordon Lewis finished it some years later, with, as near as I can tell, only one of the original cast members returning. It’s a bit hard to tell where one man’s work begins and the other ends because Rebane and Lewis were pretty much equally incompetent. Neither man seems to have had the budget to finish any special effects shots, so we’re left with a monster movie with almost no monster.

The plot is rip-off of First Man into Space (1959), and by association, the original Quatermass serial. An astronaut crashes to Earth in his space capsule, apparently mutated by the radiation drugs he was given to protect him. He wanders around, strangles a couple people onscreen, a couple more offscreen, scares some sunbathers, is captured by the scientist who developed the drug and imprisoned for two months (though we never see him), and finally escapes to menace Chicago. Except he doesn’t, because then the monster disappears and narration tells us that the astronaut was discovered hundreds of miles away, unharmed.

I can’t imagine what an actual paying audience would have done after seeing this movie. Rioted, I’m guessing.

I do wonder what direction Rebane was going with all this. There is a one brief scene where a soldier appear to be surprised by the (offscreen, of course) monster and fires up into the sky, suggesting that perhaps the astronaut was supposed to grow to 50-foot woman size by the end of the film.

It’s probably easier to describe what Psyched by the 4D Witch is rather than what Psyched by the 4D Witch is about.

Psyched by the 4D Witch, at least in the form I saw, is a hardcore porn film inspired by Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan silliness, but with almost all the sex clumsily edited out. The print Something Weird presents on their DVD has a “Rated R” card before the feature, so this cut version was probably intended to play in theaters, but I don’t know if this is an edited version of a more explicit version, or if this version was an attempt to salvage something from a failed project and an explicit release version never existed.

Psyched has no dialogue spoken onscreen, but rather has a couple of actors doing conversational narration over the whole film.

Psyched includes random psychedelic shots every few seconds, which is what I assume the opening credits mean by “Transetheric Vision.” These shots are mostly double-exposure shots of space scenes with masks or eyes or even a little dragon puppet superimposed. Going along with these shots are various library cues of classical music, including “Night on Bald Mountain” and “Bolero.” The music jumps around and changes abruptly, though how much of his is because of the X-rated material being removed and how much is on purpose I can’t tell.

With all this in mind, now I’ll talk about what Psyched by the 4D Witch is about.

Cindy is a coed who decides to read everything she can about the occult. She tries some magic spells, which consist of her sitting around her dingy efficiency naked and waving candles around like a cheerleader. Incredibly, this works. Cindy is contacted by her ancestor Abigail, the Witch of Salem. Abigail promises Cindy as many orgasms as her pelvis can handle, but she’ll remain a virgin, “for her Daddy.” Once a week Cindy will be able to “Fantasy F***,” and this will open new vistas of experience for her. The first week she does something with her homosexual neighbor. The next week, ditto. The third week she apparently has sex with her own aunt. (To give an example of how much is cut out, not only do we not really see any of what happens with the aunt, but later dialogue suggests that the encounter included Cindy’s father as well.) Abigail reveals that Cindy’s best friend Jane is a Satanist and we see Jane performing a ceremony involving nudity, a cup, blood, urine, and a snake. Finally Abigail tries to make Cindy have sex with Jane’s corpse. Enraged, Cindy calls Abigail a “witch-bitch.” Abigail retaliates by targeting Cindy’s heretofore unmentioned brother. In footage probably from another abandoned movie, we watch the brother go to a Chinese restaurant (where absolutely nothing happens), go home, and turn into a vampire which chases a woman and bites her breast before getting shot. Finally, Cindy goes to Jane’s father, a psychiatrist, and they have sex to defeat Abigail. The End.

I quite enjoyed Kong Su-Chang’s R-Point, and his long-delayed follow-up G.P. 506 is similar in many ways. The main characters are all in the Korean military, it’s set in a wonderfully creepy building (Kong is, if nothing else, a master of atmosphere), and it plays it’s cards close to the chest when it comes to the exact nature of the threat.

Perhaps a little too close. Or actually it’s more that the nature of the threat is pretty simple, so the movie has to use a flashback structure and go through plot contortions, some of them extremely unlikely, to hold the revelation of what’s going on until the halfway point. Because G.P. 506 hasn’t been released in the U.S. yet I’ll avoid spoilers here, though it was inspired by certain American movie.

Set in the modern day, G.P. 506 tells the story of a what happened at a guard post on the DMZ. When contact at the post is lost, soldiers sent to investigate find 19 dismembered corpses and the only survivor covered in blood and wielding an axe. Soon after an Inspector Han arrives, to try to sort out what transpired. Being a sharp type, Han notices what no one else did, which is that there were 21 soldiers stationed at the post, so there is presumably another survivor. That survivor is found hiding in one of the creepy tunnels that run under the post, but he claims he doesn’t remember what happened. The axe-wielding guy isn’t talking either. Most perplexing to Han, it seems that the military brass is trying to cover up whatever happened. A storm traps Han, the rescue team, the survivors, and the corpses in the guard post overnight, and before long people start acting out in violent ways for no reason. Are people being possessed by ghosts? Are the North Koreans using some new weapon? Or is being trapped in one of these guard posts enough to drive people crazy?

While the style, like R-Point, is very effective, I found the movie’s flashback structure unnecessarily confusing, with very little to indicate when you’re watching one group of soldiers and when you’re watching the other group. I hate to sound like the stereotype of the ugly American, but all the Korean actors look the same to me, especially when they’re all wearing the same clothes and have the same haircut, and a couple of them appear in both timeframes. It isn’t until the movie is nearly over that anybody decides to actually deal with the threat, and I couldn’t help wishing someone had been proactive before that point, because there isn’t much meaningful conflict until then.

We must have been doing something right back in 2007 to get not one, but two giant crocodile movies, both based on true stories. But while I didn’t think Primeval was all that great, the Australian Rogue is a much sharper Animals Gone Wild movie.

Where Primeval insisted on adding a political subplot to the proceedings, Rogue is a straight up monster action. In a remote area of the Australian North Territory a river tour group, reponding to a distress flare, is trapped in a swampy lagoon where a very aggressive 25-foot-long crocodile lurks. There isn’t really much plot beyond that. At first our characters are trapped on on a small island with the tidal river slowly rising, so they have to come up with a plan to get to dry land. Then they have to get through a swamp with the croc still following them.

When you get down to it, the only thing that differentiates one movie in this genre from another is the animal chomping down on b-actors. Unless a movie trying to be deliberately iconoclastic, you can pretty much tell which characters will live and which will die simply by charting each of them on a continuum of attractive/ugly and not annoying/annoying. If they’re attractive and not annoying they’ll live, if they’re annoying and ugly they’ll die. If they’re half as annoying as they’re attractive they’re critter chow, and if it’s the other way around it’s a toss-up. With every movie following those rules, I guess the feel-good horror movies are the ones where the dog lives, and the hardcore ones are the ones where the dog dies. Just once, I’d like to see a horror movie where only the dog lives. I’d pay to go to that.

Rogue has a couple of attractive actors in the personages of Radha Mitchell as the tour boat operator and Michael Vartan as a travel writer who doesn’t seem to like traveling. Most of the giant croc scenes are quite effective, though the climax falls into the usual cliche about stumbling into the monster’s lair, and the what it’s killed wouldn’t really work. But while the movie ended on a low note, I still enjoyed it on the creepy suspense on the earlier parts. The score is also unusually good.

I don’t know if this is what the actual game will look like, but I love this trailer.