Posts Tagged ‘Action’


Darna! Ang Pagbabalik

May 4th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Darna: The Return
directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes
1994 / Viva Films / 104‘
written by Floy Quintos, from characters by Mars Ravelo
cinematography by Marissa Floirendo
music by Archie Castillo
starring Anjanette Abayari, Edu Manzano, Cherie Gil, Pility Corrales, Rustom Padilla, Bong Alvarez, and Lester Llansang

If you want to know more about Mars Ravelo’s Wonder Woman inspired yet supremely Filipino superheroine Darna and her different on-screen incarnations, head on over to my buddy and fellow agent of M.O.S.S. Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill, who has spent a lot more time watching and thinking about Darna movies than I have.

The home province of everyone’s favourite rural superheroine Darna (Anjanette Abayari) is flooded in a villain-caused (yet not exactly explained by the film) catastrophe. Worse, a large woman clad in green and wearing a turban accosts our heroine in her non-superheroic form as country girl Narda while she’s distracted by a snake and clobbers her from behind. The villainess then proceeds to steal the stone Narda needs to swallow to transform into Darna, leaving our heroine for dead and in the rather undignified position of having to be rescued from the rising flood by her Grandma and her little brother Ding (Lester Llansang).

Either the clobbering, the loss of the stone, or the trauma of the natural catastrophe leaves Nards rather addled in the brain, and she spends the following escape of her family to Manila – as well as her first days there – as a happy, mute, loon, though somewhat threatened by various unpleasant males who find her mental state all too inviting. Still, it’s like a super hero vacation.

Once arrived in Manila, the family takes shelter in the hovel of Pol (Rustom Padilla), who may or may not be a distant relative, but who in any case once left their country home for the big city.

 
 
 

After various adventures – among them a meeting with local gangster chief Magnum (Bong Alvarez) – a sort of plot develops. It turns out that Darna’s arch nemesis, the snake-haired Valentina (Pilita Corrales), is responsible for the loss of Darna’s stone. She needs it to keep herself from turning into an – probably ill smelling – heap of goo, it seems.

Apart from that Valentina has bigger plans too. Her – also snake-haired – daughter Valentine aka Dr. Aden (Cherie Gil) has founded a millennial cult playing on the fears of the poor parts of society, promising her followers that Manila will rise into the skies to save them all from the coming destruction of the Philippines by floods, if they just pray hard enough. Valentine’s crazy preacher TV programme (she has interpretative background dancers) puts the mind-whammy on Grandma, who soon spends all her time praying and furnishing Pol’s hovel with plants. Which is actually an improvement, but hey – evil!

Anyway, while he’s out and about sniffing around the cult’s lair (why? you got me there), Ding manages to steal Darna’s stone back, and soon enough, our heroine is fighting evil-doers again, getting into a romantic triangle with Pol and a cop named Max (Edu Manzano), and saving the Philippines from the snake family’s evil plans.

Well, say what you will against the at times plodding pace of this outing of the ever-popular Filipino heroine Darna, but it’s still packed full of stuff, some of it interesting, some puzzling, some just plain weird. My plot synopsis has left out various side plots, “comic” distractions and characters – like Ding’s female friend Pia (Jemanine Campanilla) – the movie decides to forget halfway through, but really, this is not the kind of film that’s interested in a finely crafted dramatic arc. The film’s structure is – like in most other films meant for a more rural Filipino audience I’ve seen – episodic and distractible, and often reminded me of the way 70s Bollywood tried and succeeded to be everything to every viewer. Despite the absence of musical numbers, Darna! Ang Pagbabaliktruly squeezes everything and the kitchen sink into its 100 minutes of running time: cute children, low-brow humour, superheroic throw-downs, romance, a bit of horror, some excellent South-East Asian weirdness like freaky snake person transformation effects and an exploding villainess, a bit of social melodrama, and even a bit of religion (not surprising in a Filipino movie, really).

 
 
 

This kind of approach does of course threaten a film’s coherence and always risks to annoy a given viewer by spending too much time on the elements she isn’t interested in. As a German viewer, I’m certainly not part of the film’s core audience, seeing as it is clearly produced with a Filipino audience of the early 90s in mind, playing with and against the anxieties – poverty, religious mania, natural catastrophes – of its time and place. If you look at a film like this as an outsider, you need to bring a bit of patience and a willingness to accept a slightly different view of the world than you’re used to; in this regard, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik is just like a Ramsay Brothers movie or the body of work of Sompote Sands, though certainly more good-natured than the works of the former, and far less painful than those of the latter.

Fortunately, the film – co-directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes – does have more than a few elements that make getting into it quite easy for somebody of my tastes, and, I suspect, the discerning tastes of the typical reader of this column. If there’s one thing that speaks a true international language, after all, then it’s scenes of a statuesque and likeable beauty in a skimpy yet curiously not sleazy outfit flying around punching evil-doers and monsters. Abayari may not be the greatest of actresses (especially when playing trauma clown Narda), but she’s likeable (you seldom see a US superhero grin this much, as if it were an actual joy being a hero, flying and saving people, instead of a pain in the ass), has the right physique for her role and manages to wear a skimpy costume with a degree of dignity that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

But even when it isn’t clobbering time, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik has more than enough enjoyable, or at least interesting moments. Some of the scenes surrounding the snake women’s cult are actually somewhat disturbing in their portrayal of religious mania – those that aren’t pretty goofy, that is – and the whole plot line of Grandma turning into one of the cult members is not exactly realistically handled, but quite effective as a play on the fear of losing a lost one to malevolent influences without having the power to do anything about it.

These scenes are pretty dark for what is at its core a family movie, and would be quite unthinkable in a Hollywood family movie (just as the semi-realistic portrayal of poverty and desperation), which is, of course something I do approve of.

And even though Darna! (you gotta love that exclamation mark there) Ang Pagbabalik isn’t meant for me, it still made me glad to have watched it.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


With Death on Your Back

April 13th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Alfonso Balcázar
1967 / Bengala Film / 86′
a.k.a. Con la Muerte a la Espalda
 written by Alfonso Balcázar, José Antonio de la Loma and Giovanni Simonelli
cinematography by Victor Monreal
music by Claude Bolling
starring George Martin, Vivi Bach, Rosalba Neri, Daniele Vargas, Klausjürgen Wussow, and Michel Montfort

A gang of international evil-doers has invented a drug that can be used to provoke completely innocent members of the military into pushing the Big Red Button that would loose the Big One. Does it show I’m so old I even remember the Cold War?

Anyway, that drug may not sound all that useful to you or me (for what good is destroying the world, really, unless you’re an insane cultist of some eldritch god?), but “the third power” we will certainly not call China (oops) is very interested in acquiring it.

Fortunately, our international evil-doers make a very public test run of their drug, giving one of those professors of every discipline you can imagine called Professor you often find in these films enough data to develop an antidote against it. For once, the Americans and the Russians (as represented by agents called – I kid you not – Bill and Ivan) are of one mind, and are even willing to share the antidote with each other, if with gnashing teeth.

For some reason, the good guys ship the Professor and his assistant Monica (Vivi Bach) off to Hamburg, where he is supposed to give a suitcase containing the antidote and/or the formula for the antidote to the proper authorities during some rich woman’s party. Of course, the international evil-doers get wind of that particularly useless plan, and gun down the Professor. If not for the intervention of suave/smarmy thief Gary (George Martin) who just happens to be a sucker for beautiful women and suitcases containing valuables, they’d be able to kill Monica and steal the suitcase too.

Having acquired Monica and the suitcase, Gary isn’t quite sure what to do with them – sell them on to the Chinese? The Russians? The Americans? Be a gentleman thief and protect Monica? It would be nice if our hero (or not) had some time for further deliberation, but each and every faction who knows about Monica and the suitcase wants to capture, kill or buy him, leaving the poor jerk hardly a second to breathe or put the (horrible) moves on women. What’s a thief to do?

 
 
 

It has always been one of the pleasures of the Eurospy genre for me to encounter unexpectedly fun films like With Death On Your Back. Its director Alfonso Balcázar is one of those workhorses who spent much of their career during the 60s and 70s churning out films in the popular genres of the day, trying their best to craft fun movies out of clichés, pieces taken from other movies, and actual talent. In Balcázar’s case, a lot of his work took place in the Spaghetti (or is it Paella in this case?) Western, but I have to admit I don’t remember having seen a single one of them, which may either speak against their quality, my memory, or my knowledge of European genre films of the 60s and 70s.

Be that as it may, With Death On Your Back seems to be the director’s only Eurospy film, which is a bit of a disappointment given how entertaining the film is. Sure, much of what happens on screen is the usual mixture of a suave/jerk-y (why do these words seem to be synonymous to me by now?) hero charming the ladies in improbable ways, punching goons in the face (or whatever other body parts look most punchable), and going through various chase sequences to acquire and keep a McGuffin, but Balcázar just as surely knows how to make the generic just pretty darn fun.

For me, the light variant of the Eurospy movie to which With Death certainly belongs has a lot in common with the comedy genre. Both don’t thrive as much on originality as on an ability to make the well-known and expected feel new and exciting, and both genres often survive problematic plotting through the timing of their delivery. Balcázar’s movie is nothing if not good at timing and pacing, letting hardly a second go by that doesn’t have something exciting happen in it, never stopping for longer than a joke or a kiss until its hero stumbles into the next punch-up or the next chase, keeping the audience hooked through breathlessness and – always an important factor in a genre movie – a willingness to entertain that makes it easy to just overlook minor flaws like the fact that the scriptwriters don’t always seem to realize Hamburg is situated in Northern Germany and not in Bavaria or the silliness of most everything going on.

Balcázar is helped in his endeavour of keeping the audience away from thinking about plots, plot holes and other dumb stuff like that by an ultra-generic – or archetypal – soundtrack by Claude Bolling that’s just bound to swing things along, a cast – also featuring Rosalba Neri and a very unexpected Klausjürgen Wussow as mid-level baddies – that has no problems at all to go with the silliness instead of against it (there is, as you probably know, not much worse than an actor trying to be all thespian-like in what is basically an adventurous romp), and some very decent stunt work.

Plus, there’s a scene documenting the eternal struggle between earthbound human and small plane (hello, Mister Hitchcock), guest starring machine pistols, so what’s not to like?

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Demetrius and the Gladiators

March 27th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Delmer Daves
1954 / 20th Century Fox / 102′
written by Philip Dunne
director of photography Milton R. Krasner
origianl music by Franz Waxman
starring Victor Mature, Susan Hayward, Michael Rennie, Debra Paget, Anne Bancroft, Jay Robinson, Barry Jones, and William Marshall
reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight Time
Demetrius and the Gladiators is available on Blu-ray from Twilight Time in a limited edition of 3000, and is offered exclusively through Screen Archives Entertainment and their Amazon storefront.

Pushed into production before The Robe had even wrapped by producers content with the likelihood of that film’s success but not with the thought of wasting its expensive dressings, the 1954 sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators is understandably a bit smaller and less refined than its epic progenitor, but that doesn’t keep it from being gobs more fun. Ostensibly a religious drama about the ebb and flow of one (very) early Christian’s faith in Caligula’s Rome, Demetrius punctuates its piety with hearty helpings of good old-fashioned violent spectacle – ‘gladiators’ isn’t in the title for nothing.

Demetrius and the Gladiators finds The Robe‘s eponymous artifact – the robe worn by Christ to Calvary - in the protective custody of that titular Demetrius (Victor Mature reprising his role from the previous film) while its chief protector, the apostle Peter (Michael Rennie in another carry-over role), is away on urgent church business. Unfortunately for Demetrius the increasingly mad Roman emperor Caligula (returning player Jay Robinson in a delightfully outrageous turn) wants the robe for himself, convinced that it possesses a power that will render him literally divine. It isn’t long before the Praetorian guard are knocking at Demetrius’ door, and when a scuffle with them turns violent the devout ex-slave finds himself involuntarily inducted into Strabo’s (Ernest Borgnine!) gladiatorial academy and destined for combat in the Emperor’s private arena. There he captures the fertile imagination of Messalina (Susan Hayward as a Code-friendly variation on the nymphomaniacal third wife of future Roman emperor Claudius), who finds perverse gratification in forcing the good Christian to fight against man and beast.

Demetrius’ devotion to peace and good will doesn’t last long, however. The presumed death of his potter girlfriend Lucia (Debra Paget, The Ten Commandments) at the hand of a fellow gladiator soon has the pectoral hunk renouncing his faith and slaughtering his co-combatants wholesale, much to the delight of Caligula and his Praetorian guard, who appoint him to their ranks as a tribune, as well as Messalina, with whom Demetrius begins an affair. Meanwhile Caligula goes madder, hallucinating that the gods are walking his palace’s halls and becoming increasingly paranoid of plots (both real and imagined) against him…

Limited to just a handful of admittedly gargantuan sets and over and done with in a sight less than two hours Demetrius and the Gladiators really can’t help but feel on the small side compared to its mega-produced big brother The Robe, but it’s a distinction that ultimately works in the film’s favor. Focusing on just a few of that previous film’s surviving players and adding but a handful more, Philip Dunne’s capable screenplay works perfectly well as entertainment even as its ramshackle contrivance becomes increasingly obvious. The obligatory religious dramatics are more a means to an end than anything else, and leave poor Demetrius to seem more than a little the flake – one moment he’s ready to die for his beliefs, the next he’s tearing through Caligula’s private arena with a sword in each hand. The degree of Demetrius’ faith seems wholly dependent on the fate of his girlfriend here – an odd turn to be sure for a character whose Christianity was previously affirmed by no less than witnessing the crucifixion first hand, but it does get the action moving towards the arena, an essential development for a film whose credits spell out THE GLADIATORS at a scale considerably larger than that granted its eponymous hero.

The Hays Code may have put the kibosh on any possibility of overt blood and gore, but Demetrius and the Gladiators still offers audiences plenty of lavish arena-bound action. The show-stopper, despite the obviousness of its artifice, may be Demetrius’ first go in the arena when, after surviving a round with the King of Cartoons (a young William Marshall as Glycon), Caligula orders that the tigers be loosed upon him. A skillful blend of composite effects and stunts with trained animals make the sequence a real thrill, even when the tigers inevitably end up appearing more friendly than threatening. With skilled stuntmen and fencing instructor Jean Heramans (Scaramouche) at his disposal, all-purpose director Delmer Daves (Dark Passage, 3:10 to Yuma) proves himself more than adept in delivering Demetrius‘ big-screen action set pieces. Though essentially bloodless (Demetrius typically finishes off his opponents by bopping them on the helmet, complete with a sanitized, meatless sound effect) the choreography and set-ups are quite good, particularly when Demetrius is in his revenge-fueled dual-bladed frenzy.

Demetrius and the Gladiators is rarely great film making, but it is never less than good enough. The wonderfully erratic work of Jay Robinson, whose Caligula slithers about his palace with cool, reptilian menace, and the bosom-heaving performance of Susan Hayward, tempting enough despite being but a shadow of the notorious historical Messalina, help to elevate the show beyond the cash-in ambitions of its producers, while the much maligned Wtf-Film favorite Victor Mature seems well at home in yet another religious epic (following his turns in Samson and Delilah, Androcles and the Lion, and The Robe). This is good stuff, provided you don’t take it too seriously, and essential viewing for sword and sandal buffs.

Whether due to deficiencies in the available source materials, the age of the HD transfer, or both, Demetrius and the Gladiators looks substantially weaker in its Blu-ray debut than either its predecessor The Robe or the impossibly vibrant The Egyptian - Fox’s other lavish CinemaScope religious epic from 1954. The presence of a variety of damage, ranging from minor dust and debris to larger blemishes and even a few nasty vertical scratches, indicates that at the very least Demetrius hasn’t been treated to the same level of restoration Fox has bestowed upon those other films. As such Demetrius offers perhaps the weakest HD video presentation yet for niche label Twilight Time, but I still found it an imminently watchable disc and easily the superior of past editions.

Presented at the appropriate extra-wide 2.55:1 aspect ratio, the 1080p transfer has a lower level of detail than even the limitations of early CinemaScope lenses can explain – a factor compounded by an especially course, unrefined grain structure (just compare the grain in the screenshots here to that of the DeLuxe CinemaScope The Egyptian or the Technicolor CinemaScope Picnic). While contrast is strong color saturation rarely follows suit, falling short of the sort of lushness Demetrius‘ original Technicolor prints would have exported and often lending the film a dusty, subdued appearance – the image also appears unnaturally dark and overly red to these eyes. Even with all that in mind the presentation still thoroughly trounces that of the older DVD edition (released a decade ago), and the imperfect image is free of any undue digital manipulations. Twilight Time provide their typically strong technical backing as well. The video is Mpeg-4 AVC-encoded at a healthy average bitrate of 33.2 Mbps, and the relatively short feature (at least by epic standards) stretches comfortably into dual layer territory.

Blu-ray screenshots were captured as full resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Far less troublesome is the audio, which presents Demetrius and the Gladiators‘ original 4-track surround mix in lossless DTS-HD MA. The separation here is notable, and obviously intended for BIG theatrical projection – even the dialogue makes full use of the track’s right, left, and center channels. While the dialogue and sound effect sound as strong as can be expected from the vintage mix it’s Franz Waxman’s exhilarating score (which also incorporates themes adapted from Alfred Newman’s score for The Robe) that really wows. Waxman’s compositions are as essential Demetrius‘s epic style as its enormous sets and color CinemaScope photography, and I found his heroic opening melody bouncing about in my brain long after the imagery had faded. The only drawback on the audio front is, again, a lack of optional English subtitles. Fox’s own editions always come with a mix of them, and that they aren’t even providing Twilight Time with an SDH track is a crying shame.

Supplements are light, as expected (and advertised), with an original trailer (in SD) providing the only video extra. The only other supplement is of excellent stuff, however – Franz Waxman’s score, included as an isolated DTS-HD MA 2.0 track. The Film Score Monthly CD issue of the same is long out of print, and the importance of its addition here should not be understated. Twilight Time’s typically excellent packaging (which amusingly reverses the trend of giving the word “GLADIATORS” dominance over the name of the film’s hero) is again highlighted by a liner essay from the esteemed Julie Kirgo, who clearly has a ball discussing the film even screenwriter Philip Dunne labelled a “harebrained adventure”.

Demetrius and the Gladiators may be a harebrained adventure, but it wouldn’t have retained a quarter of its substantial appeal if it were anything else. Though loaded with compulsory attempts at evoking the pious gravitas of its predecessor Demetrius is ultimately all about seeing its eponymous hero break as many commandments as his test-of-faith (and the Code) will allow, and while the final product may never reach the dizzying heights of vintage DeMille-ian excess (Sign of the Cross this isn’t) it still offers plenty of that indelible old-Hollywood spectacle. For their part Twilight Time have offered another solid Blu-ray treatment, even if the HD materials leave something to be desired. Recommended, if for the keen lossless audio options alone.


The Devil-Ship Pirates

March 23rd, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Don Sharp
1964 / Hammer Film / 86′
 written by Jimmy Sangster
cinematography by Michael Reed
music by Gary Hughes
starring Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, John Cairney, Barry Warren, Suzan Farmer, Duncan Lamont, Natasha Pyne, Michael Ripper
The Devil-Ship Pirates is available as part of the Icons of Adventure DVD Collection. 

It’s 1588, and the Spanish Armada has just taken its deadly thrashing. The Diablo, the small ship of Spanish privateer Captain Robeles (Christopher Lee) has taken flight as soon as the tides of battle turned against the Spanish. With his ship in a bad state, Robeles decides to pilot it into the English marshes in the hopes of finding a place to make repairs in peace before he and his crew can take up pirating again.

Their luck leads the pirates into the vicinity of a small English town whose younger male population has nearly completely gone to war, leaving the place in the hands of women a cowardly country squire (Ernest Clark), some middle aged and elderly men of the lower classes, and Harry (John Cairney), a young man who lost the use of his left arm in Spanish captivity, and who romances Angela (Suzan Farmer), the daughter of the squire, quite against the man’s wishes. Harry’s father Tom (Andrew Keir) is something of a spokesman of the villages working classes. (There are, of course, also the women of the village, but the film isn’t progressive enough to do much with them).

Robeles hopes to win the help of the village in the repair of his ship – and later get an opportunity to loot it – by applying a trick that plays on the place’s relative remoteness. He’ll march his men into town and pretend that Spain won over the British fleet and is now occupying the British Isles.

The squire and the local vicar only seem all too glad to oblige the new master in town, but the working classes – especially Harry and his father – are burning to make contact with any British resistance against their supposed occupiers. Ah, class war.

While Robeles has to use all his cunning and cruelty to play his ruse and keep the villagers under control, he is also threatened by philosophical differences with his first officer. That young man, Don Manuel Rodriguez de Savilla (Barry Warren), is a true Spanish patriot, and disagrees quite resolutely with Robeles plans for returning to the pirate business. Perhaps he will even disagree with them enough to partner with a bunch of English villagers?

 
 
 

While everybody (of taste) loves Hammer Film’s horror output, people – me too often included – tend to ignore most of what the studio put out in other genres. In some cases, like the studio’s small yet insipid comedy output, that’s pure self-defence, but in other cases, like its land-locked pirate movies, ignoring these films means missing out on some very fine genre filmmaking.

Case in point is The Devil-Ship Pirates, as directed by the generally dependable Don Sharp (who must have had a very good year in 1964, creatively, for it’s also the year that saw him direct the very fine little horror movie Witchcraft). It’s a film as clearly done on a budget as anything Hammer did at the time, but it’s also a film that knows how to use what it has (one ship, some fine looking sets and a highly dependable cast) in often inventive, always professional ways, and very entertaining ways.

Sharp’s direction isn’t as endowed with an eye for the pretty as it was in Witchcraft, but it provides the film with a sense of pace and tension that works well with the film’s script. Sharp also manages to handle the film’s more melodramatic parts in a rather off-handed way that provides them with a stronger feeling of veracity than you’d usually expect from scenes like them. There may be nothing flashy about Sharp, but he sure does all the right things to tell a clever story in an appropriately clever way.

Clever is a good way to describe Jimmy Sangster’s script for the film. The pirates’ plan does at once provide for a simple yet exciting set-up and keeps the film’s action constrained to a comparatively small number of locations without letting the production feel impoverished in any way; and once that plan is set up, it’s only a question of letting the various characters act appropriately, put in a few opportunities for mild swashbuckling (an English countryman is no Errol Flynn), and just let the plot roll out in a logical yet entertaining manner.

 
 
 

Of course, Sangster also finds time to add in some of Hammer’s usual political interests: the upper classes (especially the middle-aged men of the upper classes; there’s often still hope for the younger men and women in the production house’s films, at least if they’re willing to fall for lower class guys and girls) are not to be trusted, the working middle class is awesome, priests mean well but often don’t really know what they’re doing. It could be quite annoying, if it were not a) obviously true and b) made more complicated by characters who are allowed to transcend their class characteristics to act like actual human beings, or at least the adventure movie version of such.

On the acting side, The Devil-Ship Pirates provides ample opportunity to watch various Hammer stalwarts do their usual thoroughly convincing stuff. Standouts are Andrew Keir – who brings surprising intensity to a rather small roll, and Michael Ripper who portrays a pirate as if his usual innkeeper character had gone nasty with a relish that can’t help but delight.

Even the film’s romantic leads in form of John Cairney and Barry Warren are perfectly okay. That may be caused by the script providing them opportunities to play somewhat more complex characters than usual for romantic leads, but I’m surely not going to complain about added complexity in my adventure movies.

For once, I’m also not going to complain about my least favourite iconic horror actor, Christopher Lee. Sure, he plays more than half of his scenes on auto-pilot, doing his usual menacing shtick with little obvious interest in his role, but he has two really great moments. The first one – in his first violent confrontation with Don Manuel – is one of these (getting rarer the longer the actor’s career went) moments when the actor stops letting his Christopher Lee-ness stand in for acting and really puts some energy into projecting the smouldering menace he always was able to bring into its roles, but often seemed too disinterested to actually bring to use, turning his villain suddenly into someone not just bad in a perfunctory way as afforded by the script, but Evil in a much more total sense. Staying with the capital E Evil, his second great scene here sees Lee delighting in doing the most evil thing imaginable in a movie villain: outwitting a little boy.

Clearly, The Devil-Ship Pirates has everything you could ask of an adventure movie.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Mission Thunderbolt

March 20th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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directed by Godfrey Ho
1983 / IFD Films and Arts Ltd. / ~90′
 written by Godfrey Ho
 director of photography Tony Fan
starring Jonathan Stierwald, Chan Wai Man, Steve Daw, Chan Kun Tai, Summer Dora, Tina Matchett, Philip Ko, John Ladalski, Melisa Tayor, Phoenix Chu, Shih Chung Tin, Johnny Shen, Rosie Lee, Tommy Lewis, Jack Yeung, and Martin Cook
Unavailable for purchase – see the trailer on Youtube 

As was elucidated in the recent postscript update to my review of Robo Vampire, trying to pin down just which films from the low-budget Hong Kong pastiche eruption of the ’80s and ’90s (itself a reaction to the emergence of a vast foreign video rental market) were actually directed by Godfrey Ho can be a daunting task to say the least. The obscure corners of the internet are alive with rumors and speculation on the subject, and the desire to attribute all such films to a single entity has led to no end of misinformed articles (including some of my own) and erroneous IMDB listings. It’s bizarre to think that such wide ranging confusion has sprung up from what may well be the least important cinema movement in the medium’s history, but it’s a strange world, eh?

Still, those schlock-obsessed truth seekers among us are occasionally rewarded, and though the film in question today is of the dubious cut-paste-dub variety blindly attributed to him so often there is, for once, no question as to whether or not Godfrey Ho is responsible for it. Not only is his name there in the credits in big, bold letters (as writer and “chief director”), he makes a rare and uncredited appearance before the camera as well! Produced in 1983 strictly for the export market (it actually played theatrically in some territories), Ho’s Mission Thunderbolt is one of the earliest, if not the first outright, of IFD Films and Arts infamous pastiche productions, and while the gweilo ninjas so often associated with them are sorely absent it still makes for a hell of a brain-off time waster.

The plot, such as it is, concerns three Western assassins – a gunman, a brute (John Ladalski!), and a beauty – who arrive in Hong Kong to start trouble between the rival Serpent and Scorpion gangs. Interpol is having none of it, however, and put their Best Agent (Jonathan Stierwald in his only credited film appearance) to work hunting down both the assassins and their territory-hungry Boss (martial arts choreographer and sometimes producer / actor / director Philip Ko). Along the way Interpol’s Best Agent takes time to charm Cherry, who rewards him with a montage of steamy sauna lovin’ after he rescues her from a Halloween-masked madman. But all good things must come to an end, and after his beloved suffers a mysteriously fatal basket-bound water-dunking and beach-dragging Interpol’s Best Agent sets out not only to finish his assignment, but to avenge her death as well.

Meanwhile young shoe-shiner Allison (Lu I-Chan, here under an unknown pseudonym) is having gang troubles of her own. When her best friend Rosie is murdered by mobsters Allison swears revenge, and sets herself on a troubled path into the criminal underworld. She finds an unlikely friend in Phoenix (Chu Mei-Yam, as “Phoenix Chu”), matriarch of the Scorpion gang, who sees a kindred spirit in the young woman wronged. Soon Allison is doing dirty work for the Scorpions, putting pressure on the rival Serpent gang and their leader Hercules (the prolific Michael Chan Wai-Man, as “Chan Wai Man”) until Phoenix’s trusted subordinate Panther (Shut Chung-Tin, as “Shih Chun Tin”) turns double-crosser, revealing a conspiracy to overthrow the Scorpion empire and shining light on the identity of Rosie’s killer as well.

  
  
  

Perhaps two thirds or more of Mission Thunderbolt is devoted to the latter half of the synopsis above, courtesy of import source feature Don’t Trust a Stranger - a Taiwanese crime drama directed by Dung Gam-Woo (A Massacre Survivor) and released the year prior. Though some have speculated that IFD producer Joseph Lai utilized some treasure trove of unfinished film properties to generate his mountain of cut-and-paste efforts, the truth of the matter is less outlandish. IFD merely purchased the distribution rights to cheap foreign films that had already been produced (typically Taiwanese, Thai, or Korean efforts), and around the time of Mission Thunderbolt hit upon the idea of adding Caucasian material so as to make the properties more desirable to Western buyers. It was an idea that served Lai well through the rest of the decade, putting the IFD Films and Arts name on the shelves of video stores throughout Europe and America and earning him a mint in the process. It’s no surprise that producer Tomas Tang, a partner of Lai’s who started his own company after a falling out between them, took to aping the format. At the time Western audiences were rabid for taped entertainment, and with so much money to be made Tang was happy to give it to them. But I digress…

Though punctuated with some perfectly capable action set pieces, notably an early motorcycle chase and later night club brawl, Don’t Trust a Stranger is pretty rudimentary entertainment otherwise. While it would be a stretch to claim that the new footage contrived by writer / director Godfrey Ho is better, it is possessed of a certain hysterical edge that exponentially raises its entertainment potential. The juxtaposition of new and old is enough to delight in its own right, with Ho’s mustachioed avengers and hyper-kinetic action invading Gam-Woo’s comparatively sensible crime drama at every turn. The Don’t Trust a Stranger footage is ultimately just filler to keep audiences busy until Ho throws another crazy bastard development at the screen, and the the cursory attempts at connecting the two (like manufactured phone calls between the Taiwanese police and Interpol) aren’t enough to convince anyone otherwise.

As for said crazy bastard developments, Mission Thunderbolt offers more than its fair share of them. Ho treats his viewers to a seductress who kills with a mouthful of razor blades, a balding assassin on roller skates, and a tractor trailer ambush before the opening credits even roll, and things only get stranger from there (including a bizarre sequence in which a stray cat and rat are used as implements of interrogation). Even the casting is weird. Star John Stierwald looks more like a 7th grade science teacher than Interpol’s Best Agent, but Ho clearly believes in him - Mission Thunderbolt is chock full of glistening montages of his under-dressed adventures in exercising, never mind those escapades in the sauna. Things pan out in the inevitable combat sequences though, when Stierwald proves, against expectation, to be a bona fide badass. Leaping through the air with manic fury, gleefully performing his own stunts and showing a knack for martial arts choreography in the process, the man almost makes dressing like a Certified Public Accountant cool. Though former sword-and-sandal star Richard Harrison would replace Stierwald for future entries in the dubious Thunderbolt series (yes, there are more), the latter left an indelible impression – it’s a pity he’s never shown up in anything else.

Otherwise Mission Thunderbolt is full of that stuff that keeps borderline crazies like myself coming back for more – gaggles of post-dub atrocities, questionable editing choices, and an unlicensed musical score of epic proportions (including samplings of David Bowie’s Cat People, Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey, and Pink Floyd’s Run Like Hell). Like the other pastiche pictures reviewed here, it’s a hell of a thing. Mission Thunderbolt rates as must-see Wtf-Film material, provided you can lay your hands on it.


The Imperial Swordsman

February 10th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Lam Fook-Dei
1972 / Shaw Brothers / 87′
written by Lam Fook-Dei and Ku Hsi
cinematography by Ho Lan-Shan
action director Leung Siu-Chung
starring Shu Pei-Pei,  Chuen Yuen, Yue Wai, Cheng Miu and Tung Li

As always, the Chinese Emperor is in trouble. The high-ranking official Fu Bing-Zhong (Cheng Miu), who is supposed to guard the Empire’s eastern borders, is planning to attack the capital with the help of a bandit army and his Mongol allies. When the Emperor finds out about Fu’s treasonous ways, he relieves him of his posts, and orders him to return to the capital. Fu pretends to go along with the Imperial edict, and begins his way in the direction of the capital on foot and only accompanied by a lone servant. In truth, he’s carrying his attack plan on the capital and a list of names of generals in his pack to bring that information to the heavily fortified mountain base of his army of bandits.

Lord Sun (Lee Pang-Fei), whoever he might be, somehow knows what Fu’s plans are and sends out four imperial bodyguards – the sisters Shi Xue-Lan (Shu Pei-Pei) and Shi Xue-Mei (Yue Wai), and the rather dubious looking couple of Zhi Yu (Lee Wan-Chung) and Gu Wan (Liu Wai) – to kill the traitor and get a hold of his plans and if need be to infiltrate the mountain base of their enemy and break all resistance there. If possible, they are to team up with imperial swordsman Yin Shu-Tang (Chuen Yuen), who walks around the countryside being rude to people while dressing a lot like a certain character out of Yojimbo, and a small group of men lead by Jin Zhi-Ping (Tung Li) who have infiltrated parts of the bandit organization. At least I think that’s what the plan is – the film sure isn’t making that point very clear, and in the beginning, the characters tend to act in a way that doesn’t fit too well with what they are out to achieve. The Shi sisters, for example, pretend to be a pair of sisters on the run from a marriage, and hunted by Zhi and Gu, which certainly makes a degree (but only a degree) of sense as long as they are interacting with Fu and trying to look harmless but doesn’t make a lick of sense when they do it towards Yin too.

Be that as it may, before long, everybody knows more or less on which side he or she stands, and a desperate battle can begin.

 
 
 

For the first forty minutes of its running time, Lam Fook-Dei’s The Imperial Swordsman seems like a rather minor Shaw Brothers wuxia that features some promising fight scenes but more often than not shoots itself in the foot with a lack of narrative clarity that is remarkable even for a film in a genre not exactly known for such a clarity. The longer it goes, though, the less interested the film seems in being needlessly confusing (not to be confused with the needed confusion of a Chor Yuen film), and the more interested it becomes in being awesome.

Once the protagonists start their attack on Fu’s base, the whole film turns into a long (about thirty to forty minutes), and incredibly intense series of fights and pitched battles that is as good as anything of its type I’ve seen. Lam (with whose body of work apart from The Imperial SwordsmanI am disappointingly unfamiliar) shows a fantastic ability to not only increase the action’s intensity from moment to moment, even when he’s juggling three or four fights happening parallel to each other in different parts of the base, but to show it in ever changing imaginative ways that at times seem heavily influenced by the way Japanese chambara films used to frame their action. The Imperial Swordsman‘s fights are often as much about the parts of the fights Lam’s camera doesn’t show as about those it shows, trading a bit of clarity of choreography (which was by the way created by Leung Siu-Chung) for the ability to surprise from shot to shot.

Lam again and again does things like going from standard wuxia camera set-ups to thirty sudden seconds of a static shot looking from outside into a corridor into and out of which the fighters move, so that we only ever see parts of the battle surrounding the camera’s point of view, which again is replaced by a more close and more dynamic set-up for a short interlude with a more individual (and therefore more personal) fight. Somehow, Lam’s creative style never gives the impression of belonging to a director just wanting to show off, and never breaks the all-important rhythm – wuxias of course having a lot in common with music – of the film. It’s a fantastic and altogether unexpected thing to witness in a film that began merely being solidly done.

 
 

Lam also shows a fine eye for shooting some well-known Shaw Brothers cave sets in ways I haven’t seen before, making the very familiar look new and exciting again. I also approve of a bit of obvious but beautiful miniature work that stands in for locations nobody working for the Shaws could ever have afforded to shoot at; there are some of the standard outside locations every regular viewer of these films know by heart, but the artifice of model work is in many cases better – at least moodier – than nature in any.

The Imperial Swordsman‘s mood is somewhat gritty, with an emphasis on decorative blood spatters and some pretty gruesome – yet great – ideas for action set pieces, like the fight where one of the Shi sisters has to avoid being run through with her own sword that’s sticking in the belly of her opponent. As that example should make clear, Lam’s film may be on the more bloody and gritty side of the Shaw Brothers’ output, but it sure is preferring fun gritty violence to the more realistic type. It is, of course, a directorial decision that’s right up my alley, especially when the film’s idea of fun leads to moments like the one when Xue-Mei gets rid of a whole corridor (there are a lot of corridors in this movie) of guards with the help of her trusty throwing darts, as demonstrated by some fast cuts, a few swishing noises and a lot of falling bodies. And really, that’s the thing about The Imperial Swordsman‘s second half: it’s so full of exciting little moments like this, of outrageous ideas and imagination I could go on for another thousand words or so just listing every single one of them.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


The Roots of Heaven

January 23rd, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. John Huston
1958 / 20th Century Fox / 126′
written by Romain Gary and Patrick Leigh-Fremor
from the novel “Les Racines du ciel” by Romain Gary
director of photography Oswald Morris
music by Malcolm Arnold
starring Trevor Howard, Juliette Greco, Errol Flynn, Friedrich Ledeber, Edric Conner, Herbert Lom and Orson Welles
The Roots of Heaven is reviewed here from a screener provided by Twilight Time, and is available on Blu-ray exclusively through ScreenArchives (and ScreenArchives by way of Amazon)

“My duty is to protect all the species, all the living roots that heaven planted into the earth. I’ve been fighting all my life for their preservation. [...] The oceans, forests, the races of animal, mankind are the roots of heaven. Poison heaven at its roots and the tree will wither and die, the stars will go out, and heaven will be destroyed…”

Playing as a sort of thematically-reversed companion piece to Huston’s earlier epic Moby Dick 1958′s The Roots of Heaven is a film perfectly in keeping with the director’s usual disposition towards eccentric characters and the obsessions that drive them. Based upon the bestselling Prix du Goncourt-winning novel by Romain Gary, Roots counters Melville’s Ahab with a man consumed by a passion not to destroy the great things of the Earth, but to save them. While the film’s focus on the issue of environmental conservation puts it in league with cinematic brethren more than a decade yet to come, films like Silent Running, the bizarre No Blade of Grass and so on, an A-list cast of players and a penchant for sprawling CinemaScope adventure elevate it to another class entirely. What’s that, Mr. Flynn – you say the elephants need saving? Where do I sign!?

Roots follows the Sisyphean efforts of expat Englishman Morel (a terrific Trevor Howard), whose imaginings of the free-roaming herds of Africa helped to see him through his stint in a Nazi POW camp, to abolish the wholesale slaughter of elephants by the ivory trade as well as their trapping by the callous providers of zoo specimens and circus attractions. When his early attempts at beating up freelance hunters and pushing petitions across all French Equatorial Africa fall on deaf ears Morel abruptly changes tact, becoming one of film’s first ever eco-terrorists (albeit of a strictly non-lethal variety – “You can never teach a man anything by killing him,” he quite logically notes).

When a bit of violent activism against a boisterous American television personality (Orson Welles) unexpectedly lands Morel the respect of the same his hopeless task is given wings, and oddball sorts looking to lend their support for their own ideological reasons join the fold. Most dangerous among them is wannabe revolutionary leader Waitari, who seeks to use Morel’s elephants as a rallying point for a popular uprising. Others, like a Dutch naturalist looking to save the “roots of heaven” and a learned Baron who refuses to speak until mankind has civilized its violent tendencies, are merely devoted, if a bit strange, while the cheerfully alcoholic Forsythe (Errol Flynn!), who turned informant after being captured during the war, is just looking to do a good deed to ease his conscience. Together they distribute printed materials and crash the party of an aristocratic huntress, achieving popular success among those reading of their exploits abroad while the French colonial government tries, in vain, to derail their operations.

Throughout The Roots of Heaven peripheral players attach various personal justifications to Morel’s impassioned quest for pachyderm rights, a trend that leads to some of the film’s most thought-provoking elements. Forsythe lends the narrative a Cold War timeliness, casting Morel as a man out to better his fellow man, rather than just trying to save elephants, at a time when the threat of “Sputniks” and atomic obliteration are dangling overhead. It’s a thought reverberated frequently in the screenplay (penned by Patrick Leigh-Fremor and later revised by Romain Gary1 himself) as well as in one particularly obvious visual flourish, a close-up of a magazine page declaring “Nuclear scientists predict ‘End of Mankind’ unless Atomic Race Halted”. Then there’s Waitari, who sees parallels between Morel’s quest to free elephants and his fellow Africans’ desire to free themselves from colonial rule.

For his part Morel’s motivations seem quite simple, but wonderfully personal. After the elephants helped him to maintain an internal freedom while imprisoned during the war he simply wishes to return the favor, though on a scale tremendously greater. He finds a kindred spirit in Minna (Juliette Greco), a bar hostess with a past – she found herself forced into prostitution by the Nazis only to later be “liberated” again and again by the Allied forces at war’s end. Minna seems to understand Morel’s humanity more so than his quest, and supports him all the more for that reason, trekking deep into no-man’s land (with Forsythe along for the ride) to deliver much-needed supplies and medicine to his rag-tag gang of activists. She also offers the most concise, and perhaps accurate, variation on his motivations. When berated by reporters as to just why Morel is doing what he’s doing, she glibly responds,  “Did it ever occur to you that he just might be fond of elephants?”

Shot largely on location in Chad (as well as at Studios de Boulogne in France), The Roots of Heaven was, by all accounts, a nightmare to film, with the production constantly hampered by debilitating heat and illness. In retrospect it may be a minor miracle that it was accomplished at all, and as such I find its occasional weaknesses easier to forgive than I might otherwise. Much maligned by critics at the time of release was the film’s chaotic third act, and not without justification. The final half hour or so sees Morel and his company astray in the African wilderness, battling a literal army of ivory hunters and playing the willing subjects to the neurotic advances of an American news photographer (a wonderfully absurd Eddie Albert, who literally crashes into the picture). A climactic elephant stampede featuring some legitimately impressive second unit footage of hundreds of the creatures in the wild provides some nice grounding action (and some of Trevor Howard’s finest moments), but is overshadowed by a couple of grim narrative developments that just feel nasty rather than necessary.

But The Roots of Heaven shuffles right along, to a conclusion that’s concerned more with inspiring hope than really resolving anything. Huston musters some classic Hollywood-style movie magic for the build-up to the emotionally charged finale, the defeated Morel gradually realizing that all’s not lost for mankind as a few, then tens and eventually hundreds of locals gather just to catch a glimpse of the man who’s become a folk legend. However artificial it can feel in context it’s a moment that works as pure cinema, bolstered by Malcolm Arnold’s triumphant themes and beautifully captured by Oswald Morris’ (The Guns of Navarone, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) DeLuxe ‘Scope photography.

In a way it’s a moment evocative of the film as a whole. Despite its fair share (and more) of issues The Roots of Heaven still works, writ large, and has enough meat on its bones besides to inspire conversation about any number of issues still perfectly relevant today. It’s also a hell of a production, and may be worth seeking out for the cast alone, which is a still-impressive lot of name talent (even if many are relegated to minor roles). Where else might you find Herbert Lom stinking up a bar as a slimy aristocrat, Orson Welles livening up the airwaves, Errol Flynn talking to his pet jumping bean, and Friedrich Ledeber – Queequeg himself – waxing philosophical about creation, all in one film?

1 According to Hedda Hopper (writing Feb. 27, 1958 in the Los Angeles Times – Trevor Howard has Lead in ‘Roots’), Gary completed those revisions in just nine days. Huston would later lament that there hadn’t been more time to spend on the screenplay.

disc details:
released January 17, 2012 by Twilight Time
disc: dual layer BD-50
video: 1080p | 2.35:1
audio: DTS-HD MA 2.0 English
subtitles: none
supplements: isolated score track
retail price: $29.95
available exclusively through ScreenArchives.com (and ScreenArchives by way of Amazon)

If I’m not mistaken this Twilight Time Blu-ray edition marks the domestic home video debut (on any format) of The Roots of Heaven - a cause for minor celebration in and of itself. The latest restoration of the film provided by 20th Century Fox isn’t quite so pristine an affair as the simultaneously released Picnic, a product of Sony’s inimitable preservation department and one of the best classic film transfers I’ve ever seen, but I’m hard pressed to find anything demonstrably wrong with it. If there’s a quibble to be had it’s with the damage that crops up from time to time, mostly minor specs and blemishes but occasionally in the form of noticeable scratching and (very) infrequent negative damage. There’s nothing here that struck me as excessive for a film now fifty-four years old, and while Fox certainly could have put more time, money and effort into sprucing things up the results of their work are still pretty keen.

Twilight Time present The Roots of Heaven in an excellent 1080p transfer at the intended 2.35:1 CinemaScope ratio. Texture is again a key factor here, and a big part of the show’s appeal – this is another of those transfers that feels like film. The well-saturated DeLuxe color is dominated by the subdued hues of the scorching African shooting locations, with abundant shades of brown and tan, but can have some pop when given the chance (interiors, foliage, clothing and so on). Contrast and detail are at healthy, natural levels, and in motion the sum experience of it all is quite impressive. In terms of technical specifications this is nigh identical to Picnic - the two-hour feature is spread comfortably over a dual layer BD-50, with the video robustly encoded in AVC at an average bitrate of 33.2 Mbps. The grain in evidence throughout (heavier in some of the second unit photography and predictably coarser during the infrequent opticals – fades, credits, etc.) is deliciously rendered and free of artifacts, and the image is bereft of any undue digital manipulation.

The Roots of Heaven may not have quite the same wow factor as some of the other CinemaScope epics of its day, but it does have a rough-and-tumble grandeur all its own. Fox have captured the sense of it perfectly with their high definition transfer, and Twilight Time’s ace presentation supports it beautifully. Fans should be very pleased.

Screenshots were taken as full 1920×1080 resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Complementing the fine video presentation is a DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo track in the original English. It’s worth noting that The Roots of Heaven was originally a 4-track stereo presentation, something that no doubt benefited the climactic elephant stampede, and while it’s a shame that original mix hasn’t been restored here this track certainly gets the job done. Malcolm Arnold’s tremendous score is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the lossless encode, displaying some decent dynamic range and depth despite the lack of LFE oomph. Otherwise the vintage sound effects and dialogue come across perfectly clearly, and I’ve got no complaints. Less fortunate is the fact that Fox, again, seem to have snubbed viewers on the subtitle front, as no options have been made available in that regard.

Supplements are, again, light – the only on-disc extra is the isolated Malcolm Arnold score, presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. This is another fully functional Blu-ray disc complete with pop-up menu and non-generic chapter stops (sixteen of them). Twilight Time’s packaging is solid work once again, topped off by a booklet of liner notes from the ever-informative Julie Kirgo (here quoting quite a bit from Huston himself). I’ve found myself reaching for the booklets first with these Twilight Time releases as of late, rather than my usual knee-jerk habit of hurling discs towards players in a flurry of shredded cellophane. High praise, I assure you.

The Roots of Heaven is an undeniably peculiar film, an eccentric character drama by way of a sprawling conservation adventure, but it remains suprisingly timely. Indeed, that so many of the issues the film raises still plague us today, from endangered species to pollution to nuclear proliferation, makes it as relevant now as it ever was. Fans should be pleased that Twilight Time have served this Huston curio up right with their new Blu-ray edition, and it gets another easy recommendation from me.


Ninja Warriors

December 31st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. John Lloyd
1985 / Silver Star Film Company / ~90′
written by Ron Marchini, Romano Kristoff and Paul Vance
music by Pat Wales, director of photography Bob Aaron
starring Ron Marchini, Romano Kristoff, Paul Vance,
Ken Watanabe, Mike Cohen and Mike Monty
Ninja Warriors is available on VHS via Amazon.com, or in your nightmares

The holidays are winding down here in Wtf-Film-land, the jollity of days past reduced to little more than a slowly deteriorating refrigerated turkey and a few uncollected scraps of wrapping paper scattered about the floor. But much as I (and my waistline) would like to look forward to the year ahead there’s just one more bit of holiday business to attend to: the first annual M.O.S.S. Secret Santa assignment, my contribution to which has already been covered by the wonderful Fist of B-List. Thanks are due to Keith, of Teleport-City fame, for sending along this fetid slice of cinematic merriment, a US-Filipino martial arts fiasco from the bygone heyday of the under-produced action in-epic. It seems that, like myself, Keith had bad-white-actors-pretending-to-be-ninjas on the brain this holiday season, and the biggest surprise of his offering is that neither Joseph Lai, Thomas Tang, or even the inimitable Godfrey Ho are to be found in its credits. Don’t let that fool you, though, as 1985′s Ninja Warriors is at least as dreadful as anything that jolly band of schlock-shop entrepreneurs ever cobbled together.

Even though Ho and co. aren’t involved you’d never guess from the story line, which reads like those for any number of their efforts. Ninja Warriors concerns an evil band of ninja baddies (and one outrageously bearded goon) who are working feverishly to acquire a top secret and ambiguously described formula with which they hope to take over the world. Somehow. The police become involved after a bit of ninja espionage leaves a mountain of dead security guards in its wake. The bumbling lieutenant in charge of the case wastes no time in contacting his ninjutsu-expert pal Steve, who fights against the ninjas’ scheming with his two greatest weapons – bland, quizzical facial expressions and sweat pants.

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Heavy Metal

October 30th, 2011 | article by | 3 Comments »
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Year: 1981  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 90′
Director: Gerald Potterton   Writers: Daniel Goldberg, Len Blum, Dan O’Bannon,
Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Angus McKie, Jean Giraud
Music: Elmer Bernstein, Riggs, Blue Oyster Cult, Donald Fagen, Stevie Nicks, Journey,
Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Don Felder, Sammy Hagar, Trust, Black Sabbath, Devo
Cast: Rodger Bumpass, John Candy, Jackie Burroughs, Joe Flaherty, Don Francks, Martin Lavut,
Marilyn Lightstone, Eugene Levy, Alice Playten, Harold Ramis, Susan Roman, August Schellenberg,
Richard Romanus, John Vernon, Caroline Semple, Al Waxman, Harvey Atkin, Glenis Wootton Gross
Disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment   Video: 1080p 1.85:1
Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 English, DTS HD-MA 5.1 French   Subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish, French
Disc: BD50 (All Region)   Release Date: 06/14/2011   Available for purchase through Amazon.com

The Wtf-Film Guide to Essential Blu-ray is the record of one man’s eclectic journey to uncover the very best of the weird and wonderful that Blu-ray has to offer.  This edition is also our contribution to the Skeletons in the Closet roundtable, the inaugural group-think event of online pop culture consortium M.O.S.S.

A fleet of bombers slice through occupied airspace in the last Great War, ack-ack blooming about them and fighter fire riddling them, and their unfortunate crews, with holes.  The bomb bay doors open, the payload is dropped, and the bombers – crippled and leaden with the dead-weight of expended flesh – creep back towards the safety of Allied territory.  We focus in on one bomber in particular, in which all but the pilot and co-pilot have been killed.  As the co-pilot inspects the damage a strange, green-glowing sphere approaches and enters the plane, bathing the dead crewmen in its unnatural, unholy radiation.  We see one of the dead men’s hands in close-up – it boils and bursts, oozing fluids and dissolved flesh until only a menacing skeletal claw remains.  As the co-pilot makes his way back to the cockpit he realizes that the bodies of his comrades have vanished, leaving no trace of themselves behind.  Where could they possibly have gone, and how?

When he hears a rustling in the bomber’s central ball turret his curiosity gets the better of him.  He opens the hatch, expecting one of his fellow men to emerge.  Instead he is grappled by a pair of monstrous arms, and his body splattered lifeless about the turret’s walls.  The pilot, suspecting too late that something is wrong, opens the cockpit door to see what has become of his fellow soldiers – on the other side he is greeted by a gang of inhuman things, piles of bones and organs stuffed into bomber jackets and creeping with grim determination towards his position.  The pilot slams the door to isolate himself from the horror and fires his side arm into the approaching horde, but it’s no use.  The creatures pummel the door to pieces, and as it falls from its hinges a mass of zombified flesh-hungry ghouls spill into the cockpit.  The pilot survives only barely, escaping the doomed bomber by parachute in the nick of time.  As the plane plummets into the Pacific he lands safely on the shores of a tropical atoll – but the safety is only illusory.  Awaiting him is a graveyard of aircraft of all generations, as well as the damnable creatures their passengers have become.  The pilot screams, but it’s too late.  The beasts surround him, leaving no possibility for escape…

These images, etched indelibly into my brain during my impressionable youth, were my first encounter with the alternative animated 1981 vignette-epic Heavy Metal - as they filtered out of my family’s seemingly monolithic tube set (a 32″ Sharp in an oversized black plastic box – huge to me at the time, but soon replaced with a 54″ monstrosity) into my unsuspecting, unprepared mind, I was horrified.  I’d never seen anything like it before, and nor had I expected to, particularly not from a cartoon.  As the scene’s nihilistic conclusion loomed I slammed my prepubescent fist into the power button, thus saving myself from what promised to be more such terror.  Even at that young age I knew I had seen something strange and different, and something I knew darn well I shouldn’t have.  One thing I could hardly have fathomed was that, had I only left the television running, I’d have likely seen a few other things that would have blown my growing male mind1…

It is only with the above experience related that one should judge the unflappable adoration the present I holds for Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel’s alternately crude, juvenile, prurient, and fantastic production – itself modeled on Mogel’s magazine of the same name, the domestic answer to the French publication Metal Hurlant.  Reitman and Mogel’s Heavy Metal was hardly the first alternative animation to burst forth into the American social consciousness (I can only imagine what things might have replaced the writings on these pages had I chanced first upon Ralph Bakshi’s Felix the Cat or Coonskin instead) but it remains one of the most accessible and popular, likely a result of its sidestepping of the sharp satire  and cultural observations of Bakshi’s work in favor of knock-down drag-out pulp madness.  More than once have I earned perplexed glares from Disney fans after they discover that my favorite of the studio’s work is the grim live action fantasy DragonSlayer - how much more disgusted those reactions might have been had those same people only known that my favorite animated film was Heavy Metal!


So beautiful and so dangerous. Who could ever say no to a face like that?

Comprised of a series of stand-alone vignettes, some original and some adapted from stories which had appeared in the magazine, Heavy Metal flirts with a variety of styles and genres – science fiction, film noir, western, fantasy, horror – with little but an overriding sense of adolescent glee holding it all together.  The individual segments – each farmed out to its own team of talented independent animators – are never quite in harmony with one another, even though a framing device in which an evil green orb relates the film’s six stories certainly tries, but the incongruousness of it all quickly becomes part of the film’s charm.  Heavy Metal shifts willfully and wildly in tone and style from one segment to the next, from the eroticized Burroughs-ian universe of Den to the futuristic scum-metropolis of Harry Canyon to the vast, inhospitable fantasy wastes of Taarna, and yet it works, both as an oddball assortment of self-contained narratives and as a jubilant celebration of genre excesses.  The sum experience is the cinematic equivalent of thumbing through the magazine from which the film takes its name – no more and no less than what Reitman and Mogel had always intended – and, much like the ancient Loc-Nar, the magnitude of its appeal and influence should not be underestimated.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the future-noir Harry Canyon.  Set in the rundown sprawl of New York, New York circa 2031, the story follows a world-weary street-smart cabbie who runs afoul of the Venusian mob after saving a red-headed show stopper from a shootout on the front steps of the Museum of Natural History.  The mobsters want the ancient Loc-Nar, the red-head wants to sell it, and Canyon just wants her.  The story by Daniel Goldberg (Cannibal Girls) and Len Blum (Stripes) is a 10-15 minute reduction of the narrative sensibilities of Taxi Driver and the MacGuffin-fueled drama of The Maltese Falcon with plenty of fantastic violence, raunchy cartoon sex and contemporary rock tracks thrown in for good measure.  If the story – a cab driver and a red-head on the run from unseemly elements on the hunt for an ancient artifact in future New York – sounds familiar, it should.  Whether credited or not, Harry Canyon plays like a step-by-step blueprint for much of Luc Besson’s later pop sci-fi epic The Fifth Element - a film which also prominently features a talking orb that is the embodiment evil.  Recently Heavy Metal ‘s influence has been glimpsed in other high-profile projects, notably in the bleak and over-contrived SuckerPunch (whose writer and director, among others, has been mentioned in association with a new Heavy Metal feature) and, more directly, in the 12th season South Park parody Major Boobage.

To that latter end, Heavy Metal is often negatively criticized for its decidedly adolescent sensibilities, including its grade school attention span and subject matter that seems culled straight from the doodlings of a 14 year old boy.  While I can hardly argue with the point – this is, after all, an exceedingly adolescent film - I’m similarly hard pressed to see it as a burden to the production.  Heavy Metal is a film in which cars drive home from outer space, cheeky alien robots have sexual affairs with Earth secretaries, and a pair of intergalactic hippies take a stoned-out trip around the Universe in a giant flying smiley face.  It’s an out and out celebration of whooshing rockets, spurting blood, and bouncing bare breasts – the very staples of the young male imagination brought to life in vivid, living color.  I certainly can’t fault anyone for not liking it, but to hold Heavy Metal‘s juvenile proclivities against it, when they are the very thing it exists to serve, seems more than a little silly2.

Every bit as senseless as you could possibly imagine but more intelligently conceived than you likely thought, this one makes about as good an argument as can be made for smart people making dumb entertainment.  The fun factor here is through the roof even twenty years on, and I’m sure that producers Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel are plenty pleased with their crass animated legacy.  The late Dan O’Bannon’s short horror segment B-17 still appeals to me most here, if only for the childhood memories it recalls, but there are more than enough fantastic developments along the way to appeal to genre fanatics of all kinds.  One could go on interminably about how Heavy Metal isn’t for all tastes, but that’s really the point of it all.  I say give it a try – the worst you can do is hate it.

1 Live and learn, I suppose, but the thin static haze separating family fun from outright pornography in old-school satellite programming would expose me to that other forbidden world soon enough…
2 Yes, I know. I’m sure I’ve made similar arguments against other films.  Then again, I never said I wasn’t silly.

Boo!

Heavy Metal was actually the first DVD I ever purchased, and to be perfectly honest that 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment edition has held up pretty well over the years with its decent anamorphic image, healthy encode, and substantial slate of supplemental content.  While I’ll be keeping that disc on the shelf for nostalgia’s sake it’s safe to say that it’s not going to be getting much play in the future – this Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Blu-ray blows it right out of the water.  Originally released as a Best Buy exclusive, the disc is now out in wide release and well worth picking up.

Given the highly variable nature of its animation, all of which was produced outside of any major film animation outlets, I had very grounded expectations going into Heavy Metal‘s Blu-ray debut, but I needn’t have worried.  Presented in 1080p at its original theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio, this new HD transfer is a modern marvel as far as I’m concerned.  Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the upgrade is the color reproduction, with both saturation and the depth of hues taking some huge steps forward – the 1999 DVD can look quite faded and yellow in comparison.  The colors here really have some pop (just look at the sky in the first comparison or Taarna’s lips in the final one below), and are backed by a richer, darker contrast and a substantial uptick in clarity and detail.  Each segment is a revelation, from the trash-noir Harry Canyon to the brilliantly bizarre Den to the all-too-brief B-17, and while the crudeness of some sequences is all the more obvious the more awesome moments shine all the brighter.

The overall quality of the film elements seems to have improved a bit as well, and while there is still some damage to contend with (mostly speckling and dust, much of it a product of the original animation and effects process, still more the result of age) the image here is considerably cleaner than on the DVD edition.  The delicious texture of the original photography is also maintained, much to my delight, with variable levels of legitimate film grain present throughout.  It’s refreshing to see that Sony haven’t skimped on the technical front, either.  The AVC-encoded image receives substantial bitrate support at an average of 34.2 Mbps, and the feature spreads comfortably into dual-layer territory.  I noted nothing in the way of artifacting or other encode troubles, and the image retains its lovely film-like aesthetic even under close examination.  The bottom line is that Heavy Metal looks better here than I’d have ever thought it could, and I doubt most theatrical screenings could touch it.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x.  DVD screenshots were captured in .png format in VLC from the 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Video edition (I don’t own the Superbit edition to compare), upconverted to 1920×1080 in GIMP and compressed to .jpg format at a quality setting of 95%.  In the five comparisons below DVD screen shots appear first, followed by the Blu-ray.  The rest should be self-explanatory.

More Blu-ray screenshots:

The all-important audio receives a healthy bump to DTS HD-MA 5.1 in the original English (a second DTS HD-MA 5.1 track in dubbed French is also included), and I’ve never heard Heavy Metal sound better.  The crude sound effects have a wonderful vintage about them, and sound very much of their time, as does the voice recording.  The HD track offers considerably more breathing room than on past editions, sounding neither so muffled as the Dolby Surround 2.0 stereo track or as frail as the Dolby Digital 5.1 included on the 1999 DVD, and feels considerably more substantial for the trouble.  The vintage rock tracks have great punch, with Felder’s Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride) and Hagar’s Heavy Metal both sounding hilariously awesome in their lossless iterations.  Benefiting even more so from the bump is Elmer Bernstein’s tremendous score, which offers some of the best genre work of its kind in segments Den and Taarna.  Heavy Metal finally sounds as big as it should on home video, and while I’d have loved a lossless track in the original stereo for posterity’s sake I’m hard-pressed to complain.  The disc comes with a decent array of subtitling options – English, English SDH, French and Spanish – and, according to the back of the case, should be playable in all Blu-ray regions.

The only area in which the disc seems to be lacking is in the supplemental department, and those who already own the Collector’s Series edition from 1999 won’t find anything new here.  Included is the original feature-length rough cut of Heavy Metal, which runs 90 minutes in 480p and is available both with or without commentary from Carl Macek, a small selection of deleted scenes – the unfinished Neverwhere Land sequence (3 minutes, 480p) and the alternate carousel framing story (2:38, 480p, and with or without Carl Macek commentary) – and the excellent documentary featurette Imagining Heavy Metal (36 minutes, 480p).  While all this is retained, a large selection of material was also left behind.  Lost, but available on the 1999 DVD, are a host of image galleries, including portfolios of pencil art, cell animation, production photos, and a massive gallery of Heavy Metal magazine covers spanning from 1977 to 1999, as well as an audio recording of Carl Macek reading from his book The Art of Heavy Metal: Animation for the Eighties that originally accompanied the feature presentation.

While Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have clearly skimped on the supplements, which is a real shame with regards to the art galleries (these would have looked fantastic bumped to HD), they have spared no expense with regards to the feature presentation, and given the low price this release currently commands that’s more than enough for me.  If I had my way this disc would be sitting on a shelf in every home in America, but finding myself in the absence of godly powers of influence I’ve added it to our shortlist of Blu-ray essentials instead.  So there you have it.  Heavy Metal on Blu-ray is an essential.  That means you have to buy it, right?

in conclusion
Film: Awesome  Video: Excellent  Audio: Excellent   Supplements: Good +
Harrumphs: Limited supplemental weight.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

Heroic Trio

October 21st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1993  Runtime: 84′  Director: Johnnie To
Writer: Sandy Shaw Lai-King   Cinematography: Tom Lau Moon-Tong, Poon Hang-Sang
Music: William Hu Wei-Li   Cast: Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, Damian Lau, Anthony Wong

An invisible villain is stealing babies from their cribs and out of hospitals! The evildoer even mocks the police by announcing jis or her victims beforehand. Not even the son of Hong Kong’s chief of police is safe, as hard as the policeman responsible for the case, Inspector Lau (Damian Lau), is trying. Eventually, the local superheroine (Anita Mui) – depending on the version of your subtitles either called the copyright-endangered “The Wonder Woman” or the incredibly boring “Super Heroine” – takes an interest in the case, which might or might not have something to do with her being Lau’s wife Tung when she’s not fighting evil while wearing a mask. But alone, not even she is able to catch the invisible fiend.

Said fiend is a woman named Ching (Michelle Yeoh), using an experimental invisibility that is still in development created by a scientist she’s shacking up with. Ching is in the service of someone only known as Evil Master or Old Bastard (Yen Shi-Kwan). Evil Master is a person of dubious gender (so probably supposed to be a eunuch) with a most excellent plan: make one of the stolen babies – all of whom are astrologically destined to greatness – the emperor of China and turn the rest of them into his cannibal assassins. It’s quite obvious that Ching is conflicted about the whole baby stealing business, but years of brainwashing are difficult to get rid of.

Once the police chief’s baby has been stolen, another costumed heroine appears. Chat aka The Thief Catcher aka Seventh Chan is more of a bounty hunter than Wonder Woman is, preferably – though not exclusively – working for money. Chat is also an escapee of the Old Bastard’s assassin program, and an old friend of Ching’s, who once let her friend live when Evil Master told her to kill Chat.

As a heroine, Chat is of the rather reckless sort, prepared to pull stupid stunts like kidnapping a baby herself to provoke the invisible baby stealer into action. That’s the sort of plan that in a Hong Kong movie has a good chance to end with a dead baby, which it does. However, this does at least bring Chat into contact with Tung and lets the bounty hunter realize who is stealing all the babies and why. Eventually – but not before it is revealed that Tung and Ching have a common past too – the three women will throw their lots in with each other and give the Old Bastard what he’s got coming.

  
  
  

Before Johnnie To had his own production house, he was working as a director for hire like just about anyone else in Hong Kong’s industry. Most of his films of this period don’t show as much of the hand of their auteur as we are accustomed from him now, and are instead realized in the directorial style of the minute in Hong Kong, making them decidedly professional and strangely impersonal affairs.

Nonetheless, some of To’s movies of that time period are pretty great movies, or are even, as is the case with Heroic Trio, minor classics of their kind. Heroic Trio might be an impersonal effort by the standards of its director, but it is also action directed by the great Ching Siu-Tung, and perfectly adapts nearly everything that is great about early 90s wire fu movies to the superhero genre that wasn’t exactly filled with great movies at a point in time when Tim Burton’s Batman movies seemed to be as good as superheroes could get on film.

The wire fu film’s combination of the insane, the bizarrely violent, the poesy of bodies in motion, the slapstick-y and the melodramatic always had clear parallels to what’s great about the superhero genre (one could even argue that wuxia heroes are old-timey superheroes with swords), so making a wire fu superhero movie seems like an obvious direction to take the genre in.

Of course, obvious directions don’t always lead to watchable films. In Heroic Trio‘s case, though, they do. Even though you can criticize To’s direction as being strictly inside the parameters of early 90s wire fu, with all the Dutch angles, wobbly zooms and dramatic slow motion shots that implies, one would have to be a soulless monster not to enjoy this style of filmmaking, especially when the action sequences between the scenes of melodramatic slo-mo crying are choreographed by someone like Ching who knows how to let non-martial artists like Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung look more or less convincing in a fight, or at least as convincing as is necessary in this sort of film. Michelle Yeoh for her part doesn’t need anyone to let her look good in an action scene.

It’s also a true joy to watch a movie featuring three female superheroes where the heroines’ competence is never questioned by anyone. “But you’re a girl” is just not a sentence that belongs in a film coming from the wuxia tradition that is so rich in female heroes, so nobody ever utters it. On a slightly more superficial level, and one slightly less feminism-compatible one, seeing our competent heroines played by Mui, Yeoh and Cheung is the sort of experience that can distract a guy from a movie’s flaws quite well.

Truth be told, I’m not even sure I should even call Heroic Trio‘s problems flaws at all. Perhaps, interpreting them as simple markers of their place and time would be much fairer, especially given how much more enjoyable they make the movie at hand. How, after all, can I resist a script that turns a decidedly simple basic plot into a more or less labyrinthine construction of flashbacks, side plots and contrived connections between characters? And how could I not approve of a superhero movie actually willing to kill a baby, even if it’s only to give Mui the opportunity to cry some very decorative tears? And how could I not enjoy Heroic Trio‘s sudden, generous, bursts of ridiculous, awesome nonsense like Anthony Wong (playing the original cannibal assassin) munching on his own cut off finger, or the great moment in the film’s finale when the Big Bad has been reduced to a skeleton and decides to ride Yeoh’s body like a bony puppeteer? How not to love a film morally dubious enough to throw in a scene of one of its heroines mercy-killing a bunch of cannibal toddlers for no good reason at all?

If Heroic Trio is one thing, it truly is the embodiment of the whole of Hong Kong wire fu filmmaking 1993.

 

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Miami Golem

October 14th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1985  Runtime: 85′  Director: Alberto De Martino
Writers: Gianfranco Clerici, Alberto De Martino, Vincenzo Mannino
Cinematography: Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Paolo D’Ottavi   Music: Detto Mariano
Cast: David Warbeck, Laura Trotter, John Ireland, Loris Loddi, Giorgio Favretto, Giorgio Bonora

War correspondent turned local TV reporter in Florida Craig Milford (David Warbeck) is sent to film the newest experiment of scientist Dr. Schweiker (Sergio Rossi), whom everyone calls – smiling as if it were the best of jokes – “that filthy Nazi”. Schweiker has cloned and somehow genetically manipulated cells that were found inside of a meteorite. Schweiker’s goal is to, um, you got me there.

A malfunction during Craig’s highly scientific looking attempt at filming the alien cells nearly ends the film early by killing the poor dears. Fortunately, the cells miraculously revive and Craig is distracted from that particular strangeness by vague looking projections swirling around the lab, talking to him in a language he doesn’t understand.

Our hero’s not too fazed by stuff like this, shrugs the David Warbeck shrug, and goes home. Shortly after he’s gone, Schweiker and his whole team are assassinated by the henchmen of evil rich guy Anderson (John Ireland), and the cells are stolen. Anderson has a fiendish and absolutely sensible plan: to grow the cells into a monstrous creature completely under his control he will then use to blackmail governments into doing whatever he wants them to do, like giving him contractual work. I think bribery would be an easier way to achieve that goal, but then I’m not an evil capitalist. For some reason, Anderson thinks Craig – and not sanity – is a threat to these plans and commands further henchmen to kill the reporter too.

But Craig, once he’s heard of the murders, gets himself a gun and demonstrates that shooting down helicopters with a revolver and being an all-around action hero are among the skills you learn as a war reporter.

When Craig’s not involved in chases and shoot-outs, he tries to find out what the strange swirling things were trying to tell him. Fortunately, he meets Joanna Fitzgerald (Laura Trotter), a very helpful woman who recognizes the message as being in the language of sunken Atlantis. Or aliens. Or both.

In fact, Joanna is secretly working for a group of benevolent aliens who give her fantastic psychic abilities (none of them protecting her from a gratuitous shower scene, alas). The aliens have decided that Craig is The Chosen One™, destined to destroy the cells which of course belong to the most horrible and destructive creature ever to live. It’s all in a day’s work for David Warbeck, I suppose.

  
  
  

Quite at the end of his career, Italian director Alberto De Martino had to work from confusing scripts bizarrely unfit for someone who was always at his best when directing straight action material. Miami Golem‘s confusing and generally random mix of Science Fiction, horror, action, and all kinds of 70s crackpottery (in the mid 80s to boot) isn’t as drugged up as that of De Martino’s Pumaman was – but what is? – yet it’s still pretty darn weird.

The film’s first fifty minutes or so consist of cheap and silly but also pleasantly tightly realized action scenes, which are regularly broken up by long sequences of characters talking reams of ridiculous poppycock at each other. There’s bad science, Atlantis, telepathy, telekinesis and people talking in that lovely Italian dub job manner that makes everyone sound as if they had learned cursing by watching Ed Wood movies. It’s enough to let anyone who has a heart and a brain cry tears of laughter and delight.

After those first fifty minutes are over, though, Miami Golem gets really weird. De Martino still shakes things up with decent action sequences, but most of the rest of the film is dedicated to melting its audience’s brains with as much dead-pan ridiculousness as it can possibly offer.

Among the film’s greatest moments belong a scene where an alien explains Craig’s role as The Chosen One™ by stopping time and drawing our hero into a mirror dimension (or something) where it can take on Craig’s appearance to talk to him, making the film’s main expository scene one of (an obviously pretty amused) David Warbeck discussing THE END OF ALL CREATION with himself. No no no, I’m sure he’s completely sane. Other high points of this phase of the film are many, many, many shots of actors and the embryo rubber doll in a jar that is the titular Miami Golem using mental powers at each other – leading to some lovely facial expressions and much VERY HARD STARING. And a blinking rubber embryo.

Even better are probably the scenes where the Golem/rubber embryo attacks Craig and Joanna with telekinesis, which is of course mostly demonstrated by the actors jumping around in the style of mildly excited St. Vitus’s dance sufferers and stunt doubles looking nothing like the actors catapulting themselves against walls. This, dear friends and readers, is exactly what movies were invented for.

Miami Golem‘s air of heart-warming wonder is further strengthened by an acting ensemble willing and able to say the most ridiculous things with the straightest of faces and what looks like real enthusiasm to me. His enthusiasm is of course what made David Warbeck such a likeable leading man in most films of the Italian phase of his career. He clearly realized that he was usually acting in ridiculous nonsense, but didn’t let that hinder him from putting as much energy into what he did on screen as possible, seemingly always having fun with his lot. If there’s an ability ideally suited to letting a grown man upstage a rubber embryo in a jar, as Warbeck does here so beautifully, it is the man’s gift of throwing himself into the job of having serious fun on screen.

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Garo: Red Requiem

September 2nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 2010   Runtime: 97′  Director: Keita Amemiya
Writers: Keita Amemiya, Itaru Era   Music: Shunji Inoue
Cast: Ryosei Konishi, Mary Matsuyama, Saori Hara, Yosuke Saito, Masahiro Kuranuki, Kanji Tsuda

Makai Knight Kouga (Ryosei Konishi) is still protecting his part of Japan from the incursions of extra-dimensional evil beings known as Horrors. This time around, our hero has left his home city for some other unnamed Japanese city to hunt the particularly loathsome “Lord” (who just happens to quite clearly be a Lady) Karma (Saori Hara voiced by Kouga’s TV show love interest Mika Hijii, for some reason). Karma resides inside of a mirror that can only be entered by others under very specific circumstances, and uses her victims’ hidden desires (and a couple of freakish henchpeople owning a goth club) to lure them in.

The city Kouga looks for Karma in has its own protectors already: the experienced Makai Priest Akaza (Yosuke Saito) and his assistant Shiguto (Masahiro Kuranuki). For once, both residents seem pretty okay with letting Kouga do his heroic loner thing. That’s not the reaction of another Makai Priest, Rekka (Mary Matsuyama), who arrives just when Kouga does, with a chip on her shoulder and obvious hatred towards Karma in her heart. Rekka wants to kill Karma herself, the fact that she isn’t bonded to a magical armour (it’s not allowed for girls, you know, I suspect because of girl cooties) notwithstanding, and really, given that we’ll later learn that Karma ate Rekka’s father, it’s a reasonable wish.

Obviously, Kouga and Rekka will come to blows, and it will take a series of cheesy speeches to convince the priestess that it’s the job of all female characters in tokusatsu to cast spells (or – as in this case – play magic flute) at the main baddie from the side-lines while a rude, arrogant man with a very large sword does the main fighting, even when she has been shown to be quite good – though not so good as to embarrass the main character – at kicking peoples’ asses.

Anyway, Karma is powerful enough for Kouga to actually need the magical help, so it is a good thing that he’s upgraded his interpersonal skills from “insufferable” to “just not a people person”.

  
  

Despite my problems with its use of its female lead character, the (3D, but who cares?) theatrical feature following the “mature” (and pretty damn great) tokusatsu show Garo is an at times very entertaining piece of work, at least if you’re willing to go with it.

Now, when you hear “theatrical feature”, don’t imagine the film’s budget to be visibly higher than that of the TV show. The rather humble number of locations, the shooting style and the quality of the special effects should make the low budget nature of the endeavour quite obvious.

Fortunately, Red Requiem is still as much Keita Amemiya’s baby as the original show was, and Amemiya is a director and creature designer with a great talent for milking low budgets for all the spectacle they are worth. After all, he’s the guy who once used re-jigged cuckoo clocks as gigantic war machines in a movie, and it kinda-sorta worked.

Whether you think the quality of the CG effects helps or hinders Amemiya in his creative efforts will depend on your tolerance for extremely cheap looking CG.

I have made my peace with unnatural looking CG effects by now, as long as I like the concepts and ideas that are being put on screen with their help. Given my predilections, it would be pretty difficult for me to dislike the aesthetic the digital tech is trying to bring to life in Red Requiem‘s case. It’s a strange, sometimes silly, sometimes cheesy, always very Japanese visual world, where classically Japanese style meets Western kitsch, mock-Gothic trappings, hack and slash videogame choreography and the free-form bizarre, until it becomes pretty difficult to decide on the appropriate reaction to it all. One could of course be an art snob and snort derisively, but it’s just as fair a reaction to be charmed by the combination of the childlike naive, the exploitative and the imaginative on display. (And yeah, there are some of Amemiya’s trademark mime-alike monsters and someone with white wings, too).

  
  

Most of the not-so-digital action and the wire fu is quite good too. Konishi and Matsuyama are convincing at striking the appropriate poses, and Amemiya is still a friend of staging action sequences so that the audience is actually able to see what’s going on. There are two or three moments of too obvious stuntman substitution, but I take a scene that’s so clearly staged I can identify someone as a stuntman over one where I don’t see what’s supposed to go on at all any time.

The acting’s about how you would expect from a project like this. Konishi still doesn’t move a facial muscle to do anything but scowl, but he ispretty fantastic at scowling, and everybody else plays his or her role a bit broader than contemporary Western tastes in acting styles would suggest. However, the characters the actors are playing are pretty broad archetypes too, so I can’t help but find these performances fitting. Certain characters are not meant to be portrayed naturalistically.

On the writing side, Red Requiem is clearly a step back from the comparative thematic richness of the show that spawned it, back into the safer territories of overlong speeches about heroics that take turns with emotional cheese. Still, I can’t say I found myself getting to annoyed by it all, because there’s nothing cynical about this aspect of the film, never a feeling that the film is going through the motions when it sprouts its not very clever philosophy. It’s all honest heart-on-its-sleeve goodliness that takes itself terribly seriously, and while it seems proper to giggle about that, I won’t blame it for being good-natured, silly and a bit dumb. See also, “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding”.

So, while I would have loved to watch a Garo movie that kept closer to the clever (or the exceedingly strange) parts of the show it came from, I had my fun with what Red Requiem has to offer, especially in its final third, when Amemiya seems to pull out all the stops and begins to bring anything on screen he could imagine and somehow squeeze in.

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Asesinos De Otros Mundos

August 5th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1971    Runtime: 87′  Director: Rubén Galindo
Writers: Rubén Galindo, Ramón Obón  Cinematography: Raúl Martínez Solares   Music: Chucho Zarzosa
Cast: El Santo, Juan Gallardo, Sasha Montenegro, Carlos Agosti, Marco Antonio Campos, Carlos Suárez

A horrible monstrosity that looks a lot like a bunch of people crawling around under a tarp kills important leaders of Mexico’s industry. It’s so very very sad. The tarpster serves a certain Malkosh (Carlos Agosti) who uses his awesome ability to appear on a television in police chief O’Connor’s (Marco Antonio Campos) meeting room to try and blackmail Mexico into paying him a lot of money, or else, more “important” people will die.

Fortunately, the police has a not-so-secret weapon: El Santo (El Santo!), the idol of the masses, greatest man on Earth, Blue Demon’s secret nemesis (etc.) is on the case before you can even cry out in excitement. One might doubt the great man’s technique – getting himself overrun by Malkosh’s car after he has already gotten rid of the bad guy’s henchmen, and then caught – but his results are great.

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Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame

June 30th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Di Renjie
Year: 2010    Runtime: 124′  Director: Tsui Hark
Writers: Chen Kuo-Fu, Chang Chia-Lu  Cinematography: Parkie Chan Chor-Keung, Chan Chi-Ying
Music: Peter Kam Pau-Tat   Cast: Andy Lau Tak-Wah, Li Bing-Bing, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Deng Chao,
Carina Lau Ka-Ling, Richard Ng Yiu-Hon, Teddy Robin Kwan

China in the 7th Century, during the Tang Dynasty. To commemorate her crowning as the first (and, unfortunately, last) Empress of China, Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) has commissioned the building of an unpleasantly gigantic statue of the Buddha pretty much next to her palace grounds. Her rather dictatorial policies have left the Empress with a lot of enemies, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when trouble hits her construction project.

Two of the people responsible for the building of the Godzilla-large statue are killed. More surprising than the fact of their death is the way the men die – spontaneous combustion. The deaths may very well have been caused by the victims’ moving of some magical pieces of script hanging inside of the statue, but the Empress is only prone to superstition when it suits her, and stays sceptical. After her chief chaplain (as the not exactly trustworthy subtitles call him) visits her in form of a talking deer and mutters an imprecise prophecy, the Empress decides that the stars ask her to put the mystery into the hands of Judge Dee (Andy Lau).

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The Omega Man

June 6th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Year: 1971   Company: Warner Brothers   Runtime: 98′
Director: Boris Sagal   Writers: John William Corringtom, Joyce Hooper Corringtom
Cinematography: Russell Metty   Music: Ron Grainer   Cast: Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash,
Paul Koslo, Eeric Laneuville, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Jill Giraldi, Brian Tochi, DeVeren Bookwalter, John Dierkes
Disc company: Warner Brothers   Video: 1080p 2.39:1    Audio: Dolby Digital 1.0 English, Dolby Digital 1.0 French, Dolby Digital 1.0 Spanish, Dolby Digital 1.0 German, Dolby Digital 1.0 Italian, Dolby Digital 1.0 Castellano
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, German, German SDH, Italian, Italian SDH, Castellano, Dutch, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norsk, Swedish   Disc: BD25 (All Region)
Release Date: 12/18/2007   Available for order this disc now through Amazon.com

There have been no small number of film adaptations, legitimate and otherwise, of Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction horror novel I Am Legend, from the stark Italian-American co-production The Last Man on Earth in 1964 to the dreadful Will Smith vehicle of a few years past, but this Walter Seltzer (Soylent Green) production from 1971 may be my favorite even as it takes considerable liberties with the source.  Charlton Heston is as big as ever as the requisite last man, the survivor of a modern plague that has decimated the world’s population and left civilization in ruin, but as the tagline is quick to point out, “The last man alive… is not alone!”

Set in the (then) near future of the late ’70s, The Omega Man follows doctor and colonel Robert Neville as he fights for survival in Los Angeles after biological warfare between the Soviet Union and China brings a swift conclusion to most human life.  Immune to the lethal biological agent thanks to the chance success of an experimental vaccine, Neville spends his evenings fending off the nightly sieges of the Family – a cult of plague survivors led by former news anchor Matthias (Anthony Zerbe, Papillon) who were forced into a life of darkness after their disease rendered them hypersensitive to light. Neville dedicates himself to exterminating The Family until he happens upon fellow survivor Lisa (Rosalind Cash, Cornbread, Earl and Me), and with her a hope for saving humankind…

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