My God, It’s Full of Nerds!

Kong Island, which does not feature King Kong nor takes place on an island, has been the Mt. Everest of movies to me. Three times before I have tired to watch it, and I always fell asleep. For good reason, the movie is slow and the dubbed in that soporific way Italian movies usually are.

Basically, there’s a mad scientist named Albert, and he is planning to take over the world by electronically controlling gorillas in Africa. To get the money to fund his experiments he robbed a mining company payroll with the help of a mercenary named Burt (Brad Harris), but ultimately Albert shot Burt rather than share the money. Burt survived, and sometime later he visits a friend of his named Robert, and Robert’s family, which includes people whose names don’t end with “bert.’ There’s Theodore, the patriarch, Ursula, his wife and perhaps Burt’s old flame, and Diana, Robert’s sister. Robert and Diana go hunting for the “sacred monkey” in the nearby forbidden jungle and Diana is kidnapped by Albert’s gorillas.

Here’s the thing about Kong Island. Burt is clearly supposed to be the hero of the piece, but he is one of the least likable character’s I’ve ever seen on film. For example, when Robert and Theodore appeal to him to help them get Diana back, Burt outright refuses. Theodore offers him money, but Burt still refuses. Then, Robert mentions that he saw one of Albert’s henchmen at the site of the gorilla attack, and Burt agrees to go, because he wants revenge, not to help his friends. But then, get this, he asks for the money he just refused! And incredibly, after this, Robert et al keep saying what a good friend Burt is to help!

In the jungle Burt ditches Robert and hooks up with a CIA agent. The agent wants Burt’s help, and promises to start a war Burt can fight in if Burt leads him to Albert. What a peach this Burt is! Then the two get captured by an angry tribe. They’re allowed to run away while the tribe throws spears, and Burt leaves an apparently lightly wounded agent to die the first chance he gets. Then Burt meets Eva, a jungle woman who can finally show Burt where Albert’s lair is and the movie can mercifully end.

There’s not much you can say about Kong Island, other than it is totally incompetent. The action scenes, such as they are, are staged so badly it’s tough to tell what’s going on, and even by the standards of mad scientist movies Albert’s plan seems dumb. Eva the jungle girl comes out of nowhere and doesn’t have much to do with anything, Apparently we’re supposed to assume she had control over the gorillas before Albert experimented on them, though this is never established. The European version of the movie had more nudity, most of it of the peek-a-boo variety when Eve’s breasts show from underneath her long hair, but it’s not enough to make this the exploitation movie it’s sometimes billed as.

When did this become a porn movie?

When did the become a gay porn movie?

“This is the nerve center of my operations… Ha! A little mad scientist humor there.”

And now for something completely different. Unless you’re me. I watch a lot of strange movies.

Jigoku is about Shiro, a student. He’s engaged to Yukiko, the daughter of one of his professors. One night Shiro is riding in a car with his friend Tamura, and Tamura runs over a drunk man in the street. Tamura convinces Shiro not to tell anyone, on the grounds that Shiro will be just as guilty if the story gets out. (Huh?) Later, Shiro and Yukiko take a taxi and it wraps itself around a lamp post. Yukiko dies, and Shiro blames himself. Shiro then leaves town to visit his parents in an old folks home out in the countryside. Mom is dying, Dad has taken up with another woman. Tamura shows up out of nowhere and accuses everyone in town of being a murderer. Then it turn out the neighbor’s daughter looks exactly like Yukiko. The drunken hit-and-run victim turns out to have been a Yakuza, and his girlfriend and mother show up in town too, though when the girlfriend tries kill Shiro she falls off a bridge. Tamura sees this and confronts Shiro, they argue, and Shiro drops Tamura off the bridge.

Look, long story short: By the end of the first hour of Jigoku literally every character that appeared in the movie ends up dead, including Shiro. This is the transition into the justly famous part of the movie, where Shiro and everyone else gets a tour of Buddhist Hell. There are lakes of blood and pus, fields of spikes, and even some stuff you won’t find in New Jersey. Demons knock repeatedly people’s teeth out, people are sawn in half, and flayed alive, including what must have been really shocking gore in 1960. Okay, still sounds like Jersey. Shiro finds out his unborn daughter is in Hell (Yukiko was pregnant when she died), so he runs around the abstract landscape following her crying while other people from the movie are forwarded to the Department of Ironic Punishments. The movie may not make a lick of sense, but the Hell parts are unforgettable.

For extra bonus entertainment, be sure to watch the making of documentary on the Criterion release. Watching colleagues of director Nobuo Nakagawa struggle to say something about him other than that he was an enormous lush is amusing.

GTA IV traveled back in time and inspired a hit-and-run! Is there no end to that game’s evil?

That guy driving is so not evil.

Negotiations aren’t going well.

Never ask them to spike your drink in Hell.

“I knew I shouldn’t wear clothes with buttons or eat shellfish!”

Hey, suddenly this Hell place doesn’t look too bad…

Watching this season of American Idol is Hell!!!

Violent City is about a hitman, Jeff Heston (Charles Bronson, looking quite good for a man in his early 120s), who survives an assassination attempt in the Virgin Islands and spends years in jail there. When he returns to his home in New Orleans he has two priorities: Kill the man who tried to kill him, and get back together with Vanessa (Jill Ireland), his girlfriend. Jeff does the first quite easily, but finds himself being blackmailed by “the organization,” a crime syndicate headed by Weber (a shaved Dave Atell Telly Savalas). Then he hooks back up with Vanessa, only to find out now she’s married to Weber. Not Jeff’s best day. Maybe a killing a bunch of people will cheer him up!

This grotty little film isn’t anything special. The plot is simple and the acting is all terrible, except for Telly Savalas, of course. There is nothing in the movie that begins explain what the mutual attraction between Jeff and Vanessa might be, especially since his first reaction when he sees her after being away for years is to rape her in dirty warehouse. (Classy!) At the end there is the almost obligatory reveal that Vanessa planned every event in the movie as part of some conspiracy to take over “the organization,” but if all she needed was Jeff to kill people, why not just pay him to kill those people? The sleeping with Charles Bronson (eww!!!), waiting through his jail time, the marriage to Tell Savalas (EWWW!!!!), it all seems like an awful lot of work just to get a discount on Jeff’s professional rates.

I did love how the movie seems to be a travelogue of all these places in the North America where an Italian film crew can get a cheap permit to film. (The Virgin Islands, New Orleans, and Michigan.) Also, how Weber keeps going on about how Jeff is a young guy, even though the respective actors are the same age. And Bronson wasn’t aging well, even in 1970.

Survivor: Death Wish Island

He got that gun in a box of Cracker Jacks.

Another entry in my continuing series of stupid glasses from the 1970s.

Set during the Boxer Rebellion, Lau Kar Leung’s Legendary Weapons of China is about the Yi Ho Society, one of the kung fu cults that thought they could use magic to make themselves invulnerable to Western guns. One branch of the society was shut down by the local leader, Lei Kung. This doesn’t sit well with the central leader, Master Yi, who declares Lei Kung a traitor and orders his execution. Lei Kung is believed to be in Guangdong, and can be identified by his need to show off his kung fu skills.

I must admit to be a little fuzzy on why what happens next happens. Four members of Yi Ho show up in Guangdong, all intent on finding Lei Kung, but they don’t work together. In fact they refuse to identify themselves to each other, and often throw darts at each for no reason. Dart throwing is a big hobby with these people, and I wouldn’t suggest taking them on as customers if you run a paper route or delivery service, because the only tip you’ll get when you show up at their door is a face full of dart.

The Yi Ho people include Ti Hau, the earnest fighter; Ti Tan (Gordon Liu), the hardcore monk; Lei Ying (Lau Kar Wing) the older master; and Fang Shao Ching, the woman dressed as a man that no one seems to realize is really a woman even though her disguise wouldn’t fool Mr. Magoo. The main suspects who may be Lei Kung are the woodcutter Yu (Lau Kar Leung) and a con man (Alexander Fu Sheng) claiming to be renegade master. No big prize for figuring out who Lei Kung really is, you can pretty much figure it out from the casting.

Like most Lau Kar Leung movies, this one has a lighter touch, with long comedy sequences, mostly centered on Alexander Fu Sheng. In one very bizarre sequence, Lei Ying uses a voodoo dummy to animate the unconscious con man in a fight with Ti Hau. This brings me to another very strange aspect of the film. The good guys, being Lei Kung and the Yi Ho people who eventually ally with him, want the Yi Ho society to give up on magic, the stated reason being because magic is trickery and will never work against bullets. Yet there are many examples of people in the movie using magic which quite easily bends the laws of physics.

The title of the movie comes from the last two fights where the revealed Lei Kung takes on first Master Yi and later another more personal opponent in combat that involves all 18 of the “legendary weapons” of kung fu, each weapon helpfully identified onscreen.

I assume he’s talking about that mustache.

Now do it while drinking a glass of water!

Do you think Gordon Liu ever gets tired of staring into the camera and scowling like this?

Legendary weapons #2, #7, #8, and #15.

A little update to what I said about Marvel producing their own films in my Iron Man review yesterday.

Marvel Entertainment today, as part of releasing their financial results for the quarter, announced the movies they’re planning for 2010 and 2011. Iron Man 2 will be out in April of 2010, followed by a Thor movie in June of 2010. The latter will be directed by Matthew Vaughn (Stardust), and it sounds like the two movies may even be linked story-wise. Not a bad idea, considering Thor is probably going to be a tougher sell than the average Marvel hero. Then in May of 2011 there will be a Captain America movie, which will directly lead into an Avengers movie in July.

Okay, my first thought here is, what about 2009? I guess the only Marvel movie next year will be the previously announced X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and that is being made by Fox, not Marvel proper. Secondly, it’s interesting to have all these movies linked to each other like this. Of course, the risk is that if one of them is a flop, it could throw the whole plan into chaos. It’s interesting that the people at Marvel are so sure of themselves at this early stage.

Yay! Iron Man! Yay! Techno-Porn!

I guess I should confess that I’m a big Iron Man fan. In the day I had a completely collection of the comics from issue #100 on, and a smattering going back to #50. (Before that, you start getting into real money for stories that I don’t enjoy that much.) In these days of trade collections I don’t feel that much of a need to hold on to the original issues, but I’ve really been enjoying Charles and Daniel Knauf’s current espionage-themed stories, with Tony Stark as the head of SHIELD.

Jon Favreau’s movie, of course, has to include the origin of the character, because he’s not exactly a household figure. This is probably also the biggest weakness of the film, because no matter how you cut it, the idea that terrorists would kidnap a weapons designer (instead of just stealing the weapons themselves) and then let him build a mech suit while they watched stretches credulity. Hell, the fact that Tony Stark could come up with something as revolutionary as a working mech suit while working with scraps in a cave is pretty unbelievable. (The recent animated The Invincible Iron Man got around this last point in a clever fashion, revealing that Tony had already built Iron Man armors before being captured, and he just built a primitive version of his refined design.) The movie adds on top of this Tony building a whole new kind of power source to keep himself alive while he was at it, but I’ll let this go because it did make for a clever “change of heart” metaphor. The movie moves the location of Tony’s imprisonment from southeast Asia to Afghanistan, as did the recent “Extremis” comic book story.

Once Tony Stark has finished his proof of concept armor and returned to the U.S., the plot loosely follows a story line the comics did back in the mid-1980s where, to greatly simplify it, Stark’s company was taken over by another industrialist named Obidiah Stane. This climaxed in issue #200, when Stane built a giant armor suit of his own, called the Iron Monger, based on incomplete designs he found in Stark’s computers. In the movie Stark and Stane are friends, though of course it turns out Stane has all sorts of ulterior motives.

In a modern comic book movie we expect the effects to be good, and they certainly are in Iron Man. What makes Iron Man a cut above is the terrific acting, from a cast that includes people who you wouldn’t expect to see in this kind of movie. Robert Downey Jr.’s personal life managed to all but kill his career, but now he’s back, creating a Tony Stark that is compelling watchable and believable. Gwenyth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, Ton’y s personal assistant, as both quietly sexy and very smart. Jeff Bridges, who I think is one of our finest actors, hasn’t headlined a movie for years, but he’s perfect as Stane, a man who’s just to smooth to be really smarmy. I also noticed that Jon Favreau himself played Happy Hogan, thereby continuing his domination in the field of playing overweight Marvel characters with stupid first names.

Okay, enough about the normal movie stuff. Let’s talk nerdy. There are references to other parts of Iron Man lore. James Rhodes is in the movie, played by Terrence Howard, and he looks longingly at Stark’s extra armor, foreshadowing War Machine. The terrorists are part of a group called the Ten Rings, which implies that the Mandarin is behind them. (Portraying the Mandarin onscreen and avoiding making him a total “yellow peril” character is going to take some doing.) And then there’s a the post-credit cookie, where Nick Fury (played by the only actor cool enough to be Nick Fury — no, not David Hasselhoff) tells Stark that he’s part of a larger universe and he’s forming the Avengers. This little bit is perhaps telling us that now that Marvel is producing it’s own movies (Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk are the first), they’re going to start letting the movies crossover more. Tony Stark will have a cameo in the new Hulk movie, and if the Avengers movie happens I guess we can count on it also starring Captain America and Ant-Man, both of whom have Marvel produced movies coming up.

Wii controllers are getting ridiculous.

“This is just the primer layer, I’m going to have Jesse James do some bitchin’ flames on it once it’s dry!”

“Let’s see how tough the Batmobile really is!”

Remember kids: Bald people are evil!

“Rarr! Iron Monger SMASH!!!”

The Sign of the Cross is an historical epic set during Nero’s time, and focusing on the persecution of early Christians. There’s isn’t much plot for a movie two hours long (apparently unusual enough at the time it was made that there is an intermission). Marcus (Frederic March), the prefect of Rome, falls in love with Mercia (Elissa Landi), even though she is a Christian. Erm, that’s about it. The Christians are captured, Marcus tries to save Mercia, and then there are some scenes about the care and feeding of lions. The End.

One source of modern amusement while watching the film is how much of this movie is parodied in Life of Brian (1979). Whole scenes and characters were lifted from The Sign of the Cross, in particular the mute gaoler.

Quite frankly, I found the Christians as portrayed in this movie so annoying and dumb that probably deserved to be persecuted. As with most movies about this time period, the Christians are portrayed as Amish, completely pacifistic and helpless. Historically or biblically, there’s very little evidence for this portrayal, and I always wonder how the people who wrote these stories integrated this idea of Christianity with the fact that it was the militaristic Emperor Constantine who really established the religion as a major force. As to these movie Christians being dumb, the most obvious example is the titular sign. One guy draws an “L” shape in the dirt in front of a stranger, and to prove he’s a Christian the other guy draws another “L” to make a Christian cross. (Anachronistic to be sure, as the cross wasn’t a symbol of Christianity until the 7th century. I’ve also heard this same story falsely used as the origin of the modern “Jesus Fish” symbol.) But think about that. Wouldn’t drawing the “L” in the dirt be just as much of a giveaway to the authorities, if you did it in front of the wrong person?

Even worse for a movie that is trying, rather heavily handedly, to promote Christianity, the most memorable thing about the movie are the two chief pagans. Charles Laughton camps is up as Nero, and Claudette Colbert vamps it up Poppaea. This is a pre-Code movie, and Colbert’s milk bath scene was fondly remembered for decades after it was excised from most prints of the movie.

“Crap, why aren’t there any good Latin pick-up lines?”

Milk does do a body good!

“I’ll do whatever you want if you’ll just put some pants on.”

I could be mistaken, but I think this same naked woman is sacrificed to three different animals during the Circus scenes.

I’ve become a lot more familiar with who Johnnie To is recently. He was the director of PTU (2003), and I now see that he directed The Heroic Trio (1993) back in the day. I guess his thing is making surrealistic movies in genres usually know for being gritty. Exiled is almost an old school heroic bloodshed movie, about a group of childhood friends who drift apart but end up working for or being beholden to the Macau underworld, but who come together again when they all decide to cross one particularly bad ganglord played by Simon Yam. Things happen in the movie that don’t really make sense, and there are huge coincidences used to keep the plot going (again making me wonder whether Johnnie To improvises his movies or what), but it’s a stylish film and I generally enjoyed it.

The biggest star in the movie is Anthony Wong, who just cracks me up. He wins all sorts of acting awards in Asia, constantly. For good reason, by the way, he is a wonderful actor. When it comes to being a prize magnet, though, he’s like Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day Lewis all rolled together. The difference though, between Wong and any of those actors is that Wong is incredibly prolific as well. Seriously. In 1993, he made 15 movies. Not little movies either. His movies that year included The Heroic Trio (admittedly, as a minor baddie), The Untold Story, Taxi Hunter, Full Contact, and the sequel to The Heroic Trio (where he played the main baddie). I’d like to sing his praises some more, but I’m trying to watch the two movies he completed since I started writing this entry.

When you’re acting as much as Anthony Wong is, you can’t always take the time to get a good haircut.

I just realized I forgot to mention the oddest visual tic of the movie. When people get shot they don’t bleed, but rather emit puffs of red dust.

This barely feature length Babylon 5 project was released straight to video last year. It’s basically an anthology of two stories set in the Bab5 universe, about 10 years after the fifth season of the TV series.

The menu for this disc is one of the most confusing I’ve seen in a while, not counting Chinese ones. There are three main choices: “Voice in the Dark,” “Over Here,” and “Over There.” I guess the first is the whole feature, and the other two are the two halves individully, but those names are completely random.

The first story is about Colonel Lochley (Tracy Scoggins) asking a Catholic priest to come to Babylon 5 because a crew member appears to be possessed by a demon. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one, because it’s not really a Babylon 5 story. It appears that there really is something supernatural going on, and it’s tied directly to the demons of Christian theology having a literal existence as described in the Bible. That’s kinda contrary to the whole “Volrlons and Shadows inspired stories of angels and demons on all inhabited planets” idea that was so central to the TV series. In fact, the whole story, with it’s discussion of the logic of theology, reminded me of JMS’s comic book series Midnight Nation, and I wonder if this piece wasn’t left over from that.

The second story is much better. John Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) is traveling back to Babylon 5 on a Minbari cruiser to celebrate 10 years of the Alliance. On the way the technomage Galen (Peter Woodward) appears in his dreams and tells him that the teenaged Centauri prince they were planning on picking up will grow to be a horrible tyrant who will destroy Earth. Galen will arrange for an accident that will kill the young prince if Sheridan will cooperate. It’s a neat little morality tale, clever and touching in the way that the best Babylon 5 was.

The implication seems to be that this will be the first in a series of DTV sequels to Babylon 5. While the CGI effects are very impressive, it’s obvious these stories were shot on the cheap. The physical sets used are spare to the point of almost being abstract (especially the interior of the Minbari cruiser, which is just two chairs lit by spots and no walls visible), and the cast is lean. It’s also a little disappointing to know that because of deaths and personal animus means there are at least three major characters who will never appear in any future stories.

If they do make more of these, I really hope they tell the story of how the Drakh Plague was ended. That’s been keeping me in suspense since 1999, even though several Bab5 spin-offs (and The Lost Tales) make it clear that Earth survived the crisis.

I’m glad to know that Pier One survives until 2271.

“Excuse me, my breasts are down here.”

This is my nightmare too, being caught in the middle of nowhere with a leather-clad SCA freak.

The Centauri get wussier and wussier every decade.

Another in the movie night with friends series. (Theme: Documentaries. Subtheme: Proof God hates Terry Gilliam.) This movie documents the disasters that befell the production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, an unfinished Terry Gilliam/Johnny Depp film. And by unfinished, I mean that they got nearly seven days into production before it became obvious that it wasn’t going to happen. The sad part is that the movie was doomed from the beginning, even before the flash floods and health problems and all the dramatic disasters. The financing was clearly a house of cards and it was never going to work.

It may make me a bad person, but I really want to see the documentary on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. That’s going to be another magnificent clusterfuck, even if it’s not Gilliam’s fault.

What would have really made this movie is if they could have had a heart monitor hooked up to Gilliam the entire time, so we could watch all the pretty spikes.

It an odd subgenre of the 1950s monster movie, the movie where the monster isn’t an animate object at all. There’s this one, where the monsters is just a chunks of meteorite that reproduce when they get wet, and The Magnetic Monster (1953), about a new element that regularly pulses exponentially stronger magnetic fields. If you really want to stretch the definition of inanimate you could include the The Blob (1958) and the featureless robot from Kronos (1957). If anybody else can think of any other inanimate monsters, I’d like to hear about them.

The thing about this kind of movie is that you just know that because there’s a substance (water) that magically makes the rocks grow, there’s going to be a substance that magically makes them stop growing. No points for guessing what that is, because it’s prominently mentioned a couple of times before the main characters even know there’s a threat.

Monument Valley II: The Revenge.

Albert Pyun, the greatest filmmaker of all time, is back! We haven’t seen much from since 2001, when he made a movie with the Graveyard of Bad Filmmakers (aka Steven Seagal). I’ve read with interest about the film projects he’s allegedly made in the last few years (Max Havok, Cool Air, Invasion), but none of them have made it to even a token video release. But his new supernatural Western Left For Dead is widely available, reminding everyone of why they fell in love with Pyun in the first place.

Left for Dead starts with a bunch of text screens designed to give us the backstory of the movie, because I guess the producers decided that the explanation of that backstory offered in the narrative itself is too confusing. Sadly, the text just makes things more confusing. Basically, there’s a town called Amnesty, and a whore (I’m not being judgemental, that’s the word the text uses… several times) has an affair with a priest. When he breaks the relationship off, the whore organizes all the other whores and kills everybody else in town, though the priest escapes death by renouncing God and pledging loyalty to Satan. He’s transformed into a zombie/ghost who haunts Amnesty’s graveyard, waiting for the whores to return.

The text is more than little confusing, because the “whores,” when we meet them, seem to be lesbian cult, and the “priest” appears to be more of a traditional gunfighter. But the real main characters are Clementine (Victoria Maurette) and her former (or maybe current) boyfriend Blake (Javier De la Vega). Clementine is looking for the missing Blake, who is in turn on the run from the lesbian cult because he knocked up the cult leader’s daughter. Bounty hunters find him in Amnesty, though the bounty hunters are promptly slaughtered by the priest/ghost/zombie/gunfighter Lockhardt. Meanwhile Clementine convinces the cult that Blake is probably in Amnesty, and they agree to go there despite the fact that they are well aware of fact that the town is cursed by Lockahrdt. There’s a lot of dull drama between actors who seem to be trying to move their faces as little as possible, and some torture scenes inspired by the Saw and the like. Eventually the whole backstory from the text is revealed, though with a couple of wrinkles that throw the whole chronology into doubt. And there are plenty of scenes of people shooting at the invulnerable Lockhardt, just for the heck of it.

How does Left for Dead compare to Pyun’s earlier films? Well, it features his favorite trademark, the macho female protagonist who can’t act. But beyond that, the movie appears to have been very badly constrained by either budget or location, because nearly the whole film consists of close-ups. I wondered that if the shot were allowed to go wider we’d see modern bustling city streets in the background, or something. Without even the minimal action Pyun was known for, we have to concentrate on the drama, and this movie just drifts from scene to scene instead of having any narrative drive. I guess it’s supposed to be building to the revelation that the lesbian cult killed Lockhardt in the first place, but again, from the opening text I already knew that.

The Albert Pyun type.

The Man With No Name meets the Man With No Eyes.

I have no idea what’s happening here.

I think some sort of line has been crossed here. Loch Ness Terror isn’t just a Loch Ness monster movie obviously not filmed in Scotland, it’s not even set in Scotland. After a prologue where a very dragon-like Nessie kills a bunch of scientists in the 1970s, the action moves to the lakeside town of Ashburn, USA, today. It’s in the same state where the Simpsons live, apparently.

Nessie shows up in the American lake, and kills the doctor from Battlestar Galactica and some other people. John Murphy (Brian Krause) shows up at the lake soon thereafter. See he’s a cryptozoologist, or so he tells us about twenty times, but rather than trying to prove Nessie exists (which he should be able to do easily) he wants to kill her! He was the son of one of the scientists killed in the Scottish portion of the film, and now he think thinks the exact same creature is killing people in Ashburn. How the creature in Scotland and the monster in America can be the same one is never explicitly explained, though there are references to tunnels in both lakes. (Really? All the way under the Atlantic ocean?) For her part the monster has infested an island in the lake with dozens of her spawn. On the plus side, the movie gives the monsters lot of screen time. On the minus side, the monsters are pretty goofy, and I couldn’t get over the fact that the local mother/son family unit that helps Murphy out are roughly the same age.

Part Dragonheart, part Kermit.

One thing that always seems to be true of martial arts films is that they’re looking for the best thing. Usually it’s an actor, like Wang Yu, Jackie Chan or Michelle Yeoh. Sometimes it’s a technique, like the Hung Gar in Heroes Two, the parkour in District B13 (2004), or in the case of Flash Point, mixed martial arts “Ultimate Fighting.” I’m not super-familiar witht he sport, but Flash Point features a lot more grappling than most kung fu films, reminding me of Maximum Risk (1996).

Donnie Yen and Louis Koo play brothers who happen to be cops, with Yen being a on-the-edge borderline vigilante, and Koo being undercover. Both are working on taking down a Vietnamese gang run by three brothers (including Colin Chou, the Jade Warlord in The Forbidden Kingdom). The plot isn’t really the draw here, and it’s largely based on Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), with the gang assassinating a truly epic number of police detectives to avoid successful prosecution. I’m not sure why, if the gang is able to plan so well as to untraceably kill dozens of cops they need to be in an illegal business in the first place. And you know what else? I’d like just once in this kind of movie, when the hero mouths off to the IA cops that, “You care more about prosecuting cops than criminals!” the IA guy would respond “You took an oath to enforce the law, and the law states everyone is equal before it, even cops. Man up and do your job or get out!” But that never happens.

The reason to see Flash Point is the final half hour, which is an action blow-out in two parts. First Yen takes on the gang in an extended gunfight which is probably just the thing for people who don’t think John Woo has made a real John Woo film since Hard Boiled (1992). Then Yen has an long fight scene with Colin Chou that will probably remind you of why you liked kung fu films in the first place.

Getting a table at a Chinese restaurant isn’t easy.

Heroes Two is a hardcore martial arts film from Chang Cheh, and it features all the trademarks of a great Chang Cheh film: intricate action scenes, bloody violence, a homosexual subtext that’s one manly tongue-kiss from becoming text, and fighters with strange weapons.

Here’s a fun thing to do while watching this movie. Count how many lines of dialogue are exchanged before the next fight breaks out. Towards the beginning of the movie, I doubt you’d get any higher than five.

The plot has something to to do with the Manchus burning down the Shaolin Temple, and the former student of the Temple named Fang (who I understand is supposed to be Fong Sai Yuk, played by Alexander Fu Sheng) is tricked by the Manchus into capturing Hung, a current hero of the Temple. When he realizes his mistake Fang devotes himself to freeing Hung, which eventually involves digging a tunnel from a nearby house to the dungeon where Hung is being kept. Finally the rebel Shaolins challenge the Manchu General Che to big fight, resulting in the usual Chang Cheh bloodbath.

This movie is totally awesome. Just see it.

Just kiss and get it over with, already!

A woman?! What’s she’s doing in this film? (Don’t worry, she mysteriously disappears towards the end of the movie, so the men can get on with the important business of killing each other.)

Someone needs a stress toy.

Tibetan death rings! China might take the Dali Lama more seriously if he’d bust those out more often.

When a man commits suicide in his sleep, the police notice that he had recently called a certain number on his cellphone… and that the same number showed up on the phone of another odd suicide. A somewhat emotionally-distant detective named Keiko (played by someone who goes by the single name hitomi) is assigned to chase down any possible supernatural angle on the deaths. Really. She contacts Kagenuma (Ryuhei Matsuda), a psychic who she’s heard can enter people’s dreams. He doesn’t want to help, particularly, but Keiko keeps insisting. Together they discover the existence of “0″ (Shinya Tsukamoto, the director), a killer who can enter the minds of people while they sleep.

I feel strongly ambivalent about Nightmare Detective. What I liked, I liked a lot, and what I didn’t like about the movie annoyed me a lot. The sequences where “0″ pursues people in the dreamscape are tremendously effective, and I give Tsukamoto full credit for being the rare director who can completely refrain from showing his monster. By the end of the movie we have a very good idea of what “0″ is in the dream world, but it’s far scarier for never getting a good look at it.

On the other hand, the plot is badly muddled. I understand how “0″ was involved with his first victim, but how did the second victim come into it? And then there’s the question of whether “0″’s victims were suicidal, as is stated several times. He mostly seems to be talking people into suicide with the usual “Everyone dies, the world sucks” kind of arguments that seem to drive people over the edge in the movies, but I strongly doubt you can actually talk someone into killing themselves like that. I realize suicide is a bigger problem in Japan than most countries, but it still seems a bit much.

“You only shop at Hot Topic, you say?”

Maybe Dali phones will catch on like iPhones.

I admit, when I popped The Land Unknown in my DVD player earlier in this project I thought I was going to be watching this movie.

Even odder, in my memory from seeing it as a kid, Unknown Island was in black and white, but the the DVD is in color (sort of). Was it shown on TV in black and white? The print Image used to make the DVD seems to have degraded so badly that all the colors have faded to rust brown or sickly turquoise, so it would have looked better with the color turned off.

Anyhoo, Unknown Island is a King Kong rip-off, with an engaged couple renting a seedy ship out of Singapore to find a dinosaur infested island. Along for the ride is a crazy guy who’s been to the island, though apparently his being shanghaied into the trip by the amoral captain of the ship makes his crazy get better. On the island the crew runs into Tyrannosaurs, Dimetrodons, Brontosauruses, and a very ape-like giant sloth, all portrayed with bad puppets or slightly better men-in-suits. The climax, such as it is, has a Tyranno fight the giant sloth, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the original inspiration.

Okay, there’s the museum diorama. Where’s the lost world with real dinosaurs?

“Make a wish!”

“These films will be on YouYube, as soon as they invent the internet!”

“Ha! I kill me!”

“I kill you too!”

This was the movie night movie this week. (Theme: documentaries. Sub-theme: people that make us feel macho by comparison.) It’s a movie about competitive crossword solving. Well worth it just for the part where Jon Stewart calls out Will Shortz.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that more than few people in that room are familiar with 20-sided dice.

In honor of The Forbidden Kingdom, I decided to watch this earlier Monkey King movie from the Shaw Brothers studio. The Cave of Silken Web was the third of four films Shaw Bros. did based on the 16th century novel about the Chinese monk Xuanzang and his disciples traveling to India, and it assumes you know who these characters are already. There is no recap, or any explanation of where they are going or why.

While crossing a desert Xuanzang’s party is spotted by the female spider-demons who dwell in Cave of Silken Web. Eating the monk will grant the demons immortality, so they kidnap him and attempt to kill the other members of the party, those being Pig, Wu Jing, and the Monkey King. In order to rescue their master from behind the cave’s impenetrable magic web-door the disciples need the Seven Fires of Heaven, though the plot kind of does circles and everyone ends up in the cave anyway either by being captured or deception. The Monkey King uses his shape-changing abilities to turn the spiders against each other, and then Wu Jing gets the Seven Fires anyway. Oh, and there’s a weird male demon who is never named who may be from an earlier film, and the good guys have to fight him too.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started this film. It’s really a musical comedy, with occasional martial arts scenes with sloppy fight choreography. Not a bad time-waster, and the special effects are occasionally amusing, but every single possesses so many different, unexplained magical powers that there can hardly be any suspense or drama. No matter what, the Monkey King will pull out one if his hairs and poof! the problem is solved.

What amazing special effects!

Turns out there’s a Castle Anthrax in China too.

Shock the monkey!

Meatloaf gets so much tail.

I think The Asylum, fine maker of crappy rip-offs of current hit movies, wants to try to make a better class of movie, at least every now and then. Sure, the title of this upcoming release may sound familiar, but the movie itself is an original story.

A military team that specializes in rescues is assigned to a project headed by Dr. Reno (Michael Grossman). Reno worked on the “Philadelphia Experiment” back in the 1940s, and it turns out that it wasn’t about teleportation but time travel. After the initial accident with the ship, Reno refined the technology and sent some soldiers (and two women, for whatever reason) back to the Cretaceous period. He found that he couldn’t retrieve them, and now, sixty years later, he’s got the technology to the point where can send the modern soldiers (and himself) to the same time as the 1940s soldiers and bring them back.

Luckily for the filmmakers, southern Gondwana just happens to look like southern California. The current day soldiers are eaten by various cheap CGI and puppet dinosaurs before being saved by the 1940s soldiers, who are living the vida Land of the Lost-a. The rescue is attempted, and almost everyone gets back, plus the addition of Big Red, a particularly tenacious Carnotaurus.

It all wants to be epic, but the production let the story down. There are of course a minimum of shots that show the dinosaurs and the humans at the same time, and pretty much every sequence only seems to have half the shots it needs to communicate the action clearly. The droning, bargain basement score makes tedium set in every ten minutes, no matter how exciting the action onscreen should be. And the non-Grossman cast is unable to emote or look attractive on camera, which is unfortunate in a b-movie. In other words, this is just another Asylum production, but one that seems to want to put on airs.

The Asylum can even make running from a dinosaur feel as boring as working in a cubicle.

It’s Jackie Chan and Jet Li! in one movie! What more do I have to say?

Incidentally, I love the way the movie solves the problem of who gets top billed. On the poster, as in the movie’s credits, the names are arranged with “Jackie Chan” running across and “Jet Li” running down, sharing the “J”. The film’s website is even more egalitarian, switching whose name is across and whose is down every time you refresh.

Jason (Michael Angarano) is a martial arts movie nerd (though as the opening credits subliminally imply, he lives in a world with no Jackie Chan or Jet Li movies) who is transported to a fantastic version of medieval China by a magic staff. Quicker than you can say “Wizard of Oz,” Jason is joined by a collection of misfits, including Lu Yan the drunken scholar (Jackie Chan), the Silent Monk (Jet Li), and speech-impeded, vengeance-obsessed Sparrow (Yifei Liu). Their quest is to return the staff to the Monkey King (also ably played by Li, in a role usually reserved for a younger actor), who was turned to stone 500 years before by the evil Jade Warlord (Colin Chou).

The plot is certainly no great shakes, but I did like the details. I liked that the movie didn’t skimp in the Jackie Chan/Jet Li fight department. With a Hollywood director at the helm I was afraid the fights would be Hollywood short, but the movie lets fightmaster Yuen Woo Ping indulge himself when he puts these two icons toe-to-toe. I liked that Jackie and Jet’s characters were based on the roles that made them both famous, Jackie in Drunken Master (1978) as a student who learns how being inebriated makes you fight better, and Jet in Shaolin Temple (1982) as a young man who learns kung fu from the monks. I liked that movie tried to deal a bit with morality as usually seen in the movies. I also liked the fact that the movie is beautifully shot, by Peter Pau.

This is certainly the best movie Jackie Chan has made in a while, even if it’s in a genre he often says he doesn’t like. It would be an appropriate movie for him retire from action movies on, even if I don’t think he will. The Forbidden Kingdom does prove that he’s still an incredibly charismatic performer. It isn’t the best movie Jet Li has made recently (see The Warlords), but then he’s had a pretty good run recently.

“Don’t mess with us, or our egos will crush you!”

“Kid, in my day I had buckets on my arms and I was sitting on a spike.”

Somebody’s compensating…

Fructis?

New Frontier is a sort of a “What If?” story with all the DC superheroes sort of coming together and becoming beloved to the public in the mid-1950s. The big guys, like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are more supporting characters, and the superheroes who actually first appeared in the general time period (though usually a bit after the movie is set), like the Flash, Green Lantern, and Martian Manhunter, are given the most screen time. The somewhat amorphous big bad is The Centre, the exact identity of which is only barely hinted at in the movie. If you aren’t a comics continuity freak like me, I could imagine you missing it. (I assume this whole aspect of the story is fleshed out in the comic book story the movie is based on, but I haven’t seen it.

The movie has a strong visual style, and many good plot moments. I rented it from iTunes, and it was certainly worth seeing.

“See J’onn, right over there. The Dallas Cowgirl locker room.”

The Centre, or possibly the Zentradi.

Is it just me, or is Green Lantern the squarest superhero ever?

Prof. Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) transforms into the Mighty Thor orders a coelacanth corpse to enhance the prestige of his university. He discovers that the irradiated fish’s blood causes any creature exposed to regress to earlier stage in their own evolution. So a German Shepherd grows wolf-like fangs, a dragonfly becomes a Meganeura, and Blake himself becomes some sort of vicious hominid that kills during the night. It takes him forever to figure out he’s doing it, and only after he proves it to himself by exposing himself on purpose. What, he couldn’t have just used rats to see what would happen?

I think maybe this movie got my hopes up for some really great 1950s sexism with the first line of dialogue: “Ah there she is, the female in the perfect state. Defenseless and silent.” But after that, there isn’t any more condescension to the women than would be expected.

I was a bit surprised that the idea that the coelacanth was “immune to evolution” was formed as early as 1958. I thought that was a recent misunderstanding that entered pop culture through the efforts of Creationists and other people who deny the fact of evolution. In fact, the modern coelacanth, while a “living fossil” in the sense that the whole family was thought to have died off 65 million years ago, is quite different from any of its prehistoric brethren. It’s much larger for one thing, and lives in deep water, as opposed to shallow water of the prehistoric varieties. In short, when the K-T extinction hit, only the varieties of coelacanth that were able to evolve to exploit a different environmental niche survived.

Cutting edge anthropology isn’t this movie’s forte.

The 1950s scientist: Rugged, manly, with just a touch of George Clooney.

Mmmm. Unprocessed fish sticks.

“Rarr! Robin Williams smash paparazzi!”

Remember Konga? This is the exact same movie. British Dr. Moran (George Coulouris) brings a giant meat-eating plant back from South America and installs it in his basement laboratory. (Does England have a customs department? At all?) He believes the natives’ claims that the plant’s extracts will bring the dead back to life, but he has to feed it young women in a ceremony overseen by a Amazonian cultist he uses as a manservant. He keeps all this secret from his housekeeper, who he once had a relationship with, while lusting after a young dancer he recently employed. So there’s no giant ape, but we do get a Frankenstein moment where Moran tries his plant formula and finds out someone has been playing a years-long, continent-spanning practical joke on him.

Best Dialogue

Well, as a scientist I’m more interested in things with six legs than two.

You know, if Britain had worked on developing something other than underwire bras after WWII, their economy probably wouldn’t have been in the crapper.

Get eaten by plant, or hang out with this Michael Jackson-looking guy? Tough choice.

Now you’re just giving Doctor Who ideas.

I had heard that School of the Holy Beast was offensive. I had even heard why it was offensive, what kinds of things happen. And yet, I was still surprised by how offensive this particular Japanese nunsploitation movie really is.

And seeing the spellcheck highlight “nunsploitation,” I’m reminded that I travel in kind of specialized film circles, where the term “nunsploitation” is commonplace, but if I use that term around my meatspace friends they act like I’m a 5-year old who just asked a fat lady if she’s pregnant.

Okay, so the movie. There’s this woman named Maya, and she joins a convent because she wants to find out what happened to her mother, who while a nun at this particular convent years before. For the first half hour it’s basically a women in prison movie, with the “assistant” (or student) nuns as the prisoners and the “choir” (or teacher) nuns as the guards. (Typical lesson: All sex is bad, and people should rely on immaculate conceptions to procreate. Yep, that’s what Catholicism preaches.) There is the strip-search scene, the shower scene, one of the choir nuns is a lesbian who trades favors for sex, etc. This part of the movie climaxes when two nuns are caught stealing food, and are stripped to the waist and forced to fight with whips! I thought, “Wow. This can’t get any worse.” And then in the next 15 minutes Maya sneaks in two of her males friends in nun drag, and they rape a choir nun in her sleep. But it’s okay because she really wanted it, got it?

Maya is implicated in the whole rape thing, and the nuns torture her by stripping her naked and twisting her up in ropes made from rose vines, and beating her face with rose bouquets. That last bit is a bit of a mystery to me. Another nun takes the fall, though, and Maya stays on at the convent long enough to discover that her mother was impregnated by the local priest and tortured nearly to death by the current Abbess. Maya’s mother then hung herself on Christmas Day in the sanctuary, and Maya was born as she died. Armed with this knowledge Maya focuses on revenge, though at the same time the priest calls in a “witch hunter” nun from France to deal with clear breakdown in discipline at the convent. (During the course of the movie he’s impregnated another nun.) After a some wonderful witch hunting scenes (which would, I think, create more than a few false positives) Maya makes her move. She drops the Abbess into a vat of acid (!) in the convent basement (!!!), and kicks the witch hunter nun out a window over a spiky fence. And finally, she sneaks into the bed of the priest, who was expecting the witch hunter, and has sex with him. Then she — dum dum DUM — accuses him of incest! Maya, the guy knocked up two nuns and conspired to commit murder. Why do you think he’s going to be that broken up over a little incest?

I think I’ve hit most of the highlights. What’s almost more surprising than just how crass this movie is, is that it’s actually pretty well made. There was a sort of golden age of Japanese exploitation, from 1972-1974, where movies like this one and Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 were made with a lot more style and skill then the tawdry material deserved. Take for example the scene with the whip torture of the two nuns. Yes, it’s two naked women beating each other. But the filmmakers cared enough to use multiple camera set-up and dolly-shots to capture the action, which is really kind of amazing. Some of the movie is quite beautiful, in it’s low budget way.

Can we leave Bill Clinton out of this?

I’m calling FOX tomorrow, I’ve got a great idea for a reality show!

I’m sure someone out there finds this a turn on. I just don’t ever, ever want to meet you.

Tobacco, the weed with roots in Hell!

Yeah, what?

If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.

And the acid vat in the basement was for what, exactly?

This is the latest movie in the movie night I do with friends. (Theme: documentaries. Subtheme: Subjects who are probably dead by the time you see the film.) Been Rich All My Life is about a group of women who were chorus girls at the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater back in the 1930s and who still dance today as the Silver Belles (ages 84-96). You can listen to an NR story about the movie here.

Not being a movie about monsters or killers I’m not going to write much about it, but there is one scene worth mentioning. The filmmakers are out of the street with Cleo, and for some reason they give her a little camera to film something from her perspective, I’m not sure why because nothing else in the movie is shot that way. As soon as they give her the camera she falls down some subway stairs, breaking her arm and leg. I found it an odd moment, and one that probably should have been discussed a bit in the movie itself.

It’s been a while since I read Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, but I don’t remember it having as many roars ripped or buckles swashed as Matthew Vaughn’s movie. I also don’t remember a gay, cross-dressing sky pirate. Still, a cute movie with some great visuals and good acting.

After mentioning the Quentin Tarantino video label a couple days ago, I decided to find out what it was named after. Turns out be the movie Rolling Thunder, a revenge thriller starring William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones.

Maj. Rane (Devane) and Cpl. Vohden (Jones) are POWs released at the end of the Vietnam War after years of captivity. Rane find that while he is treated like a hero by the south texas community where he lives at, he can’t really have his old life back. His son was a baby when he left and doesn’t remember him, and his wife wants a divorce so she can marry the local sheriff. Rather than fight back, Rane just sits in the dark, as if he’s still in cell in Hanoi.

As bad as things are, they get worse. A gang breaks into Rane’s house one day, looking for a horde of silver dollars Rane received from the local community businesses. When Rane won’t tell him where the money is they mangle his hand in a garbage disposal, kill his wife and son, and leave him for dead. But he doesn’t die, so he plans an elaborate revenge for himself rather than giving the police any clue as to who attacked him. He sharpens the prothetic hook that replaced his hand, collects a horde of guns, picks up a local waitress (Linda Haynes) who is sweet on him, and heads into Mexico looking for the gang.

This is a movie that sounds like more fun in concept that in execution. There isn’t much action, and most of the violence is oddly muted. In particular the attack on Rane’s house, which is supposed to drive the plot, shows us almost nothing. We have to infer that the gang killed Rane’s wife and son, at least until dialogue a few minutes later tells us they did, and I actually had to go back and watch the scene again to figure out why Rane needed a prothetic hand. It’s odd because there are some impalements and messy gunshots later on, not to mention nudity, so it wasn’t like they were trying to duck under an R rating. Also, despite the horde of guns we see Rane has in his car, he seems oddly loathe to use them, and at least once walks into a hostile bar unarmed for no reason I could discern.

As an actor’s showcase, this movie is more of a success. William Devane is great as the emotionally damaged vet, and Tommy Lee Jones downright eerie as guy who can’t function without someone giving him orders.

“I swear, he wouldn’t shut up about carbon footprints!” Tommy Lee Jones recounts surviving being Al Gore’s roommate.

“Okay, okay, I admit, I didn’t actually roll a natural 20! Please let my Drow save against poison anyway!”

“So, you say you bought this car from Charleton Heston?”

What it takes to get good treatment at Walter Reed.

Am I the only one who thinks the Final Destination series seems unlikely, even in the world of multiple horror sequels? I mean, there isn’t even a villain for audiences to look forward to. People just die.

Final Destination 2 follows on the original Final Destination (2000), though it’s been so long since I saw that movie I can’t really say how they fit together. Kimberly (A.J. Cook) and her friends are driving from New York to Florida when she has a vision of a horrific wreck that kills them all, and probably a dozen other people as well. Kimberly stops traffic on an onramp, though the accident still happens she and some of the people behind her don’t die as she previsioned. (Her friends in her SUV end up dead anyway, though.) If you’ve seen the first movie you know the drill. The people who Kimberly saved start to die in Rube Goldberg-esque accidents, while Kimberly asks Clear (the only survivor of the first film, played by Ali Larter) for her help in foiling Death’s design.

We also get a return visit to Tony Todd as a creepy mortician, who is assumed to have some special knowledge of what is going on because he’s played by Tony Todd. He says “new life defeats death,” which our heroes take to mean they have to hope one of them has a child before Death is finished. Luckily one woman on the road that day was 9 months pregnant, and for a little bit this movie looked like it was going to be a stealth pro-choice film. After all, Death isn’t counting it as a life until the baby is born.

The whole concept here makes want to ask questions. Kimberly’s vision may have saved the people behind her, but didn’t additional people die in their stead? Why the complicated accidents? Why not just stop people’s hearts? What about some of the complicated accidents people avoid, only to killed by another? Is Death improvising as it goes along? How does the chaining of deaths concept introduced in the movie work? Wouldn’t it result in the death of everyone on earth after 10 or 11 permutations? And why did the filmmakers decide to end the movie on a note of black humor which is at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie and invalidates the plot?

“We need to exchange insurance information!”

The ironic part of this guy’s death? He dies in a bar fight with Justin Long.

“And this is the guy who wrote season two of Heroes!”

“Candyman, Candyman, Candyman.. Boo!!! Just kidding.”

Anybody remember Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder video imprint? That never went anywhere, did it? I remember that the first release was Chungking Express, and on that tape was a promo that promised such movies as Fist of Legend and The Psychic. When all was said and done, I think the the total of subsequent releases, on both VHS and DVD, were Switchblade Sisters, Detroit 9000, Mighty Peking Man, and a theatrical release of The Beyond.

What did Quentin Tarantino like about The Psychic? I’m guessing, the music. At a climatic point there is a pretty neat piece of scoring that Tarantino used to good effect in Kill Bill.

Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) is the new wife of Francesco Ducci, an Italian of some means. Virginia has had psychic flashes since she was a small child, and after seeing her husband off on a business trip she has a particularly intense episode where she sees many confusing images. The images lead her to believe that she’s witnessed a murder that happened years before. While her husband is away she intends to renovate a house of his that’s been abandoned for years, but when she looks around she recognizes one of the rooms from her vision. Following the clues, she’s takes a pick axe to a wall, and she finds the skeleton of a young woman bricked up inside. The police arrest Francesco at the first opportunity, but Virginia is convinced he’s innocent because he isn’t the man in her visions.

This movie is a giallo, and a Lucio Fulci giallo at that, so if you’re at all familiar with the genre you know what that means: This movie doesn’t make a lick of sense. The big twist here, that Virginia’s vision is of the future instead of the past, is blindingly obvious, yet the characters in the movie seem to have blinders, so they not only don’t think of the possibility of future premonition until the last possible moment, but they ignore clear pieces of evidence that point in that direction! And the sheer coincidence involved in Virginia’s visions of the future leading to the murdered body of someone from years before is mind numbing, not to mention the bunch of supporting coincidences needed to keep the investigation of the past murder stay in line with the images in the vision long enough for the “reveal.”

Some other random thoughts: