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Devil’s Express, The

Friday, March 5th, 2010

a.k.a. Gang Wars
company: Mahler Films
year: 1976
runtime: 82′
country: United States
director: Barry Rosen
cast: Warhawk Tanzania, Wilfredo Roldan,
Larry Fleishman
writers: Niki Patton, CeOtis Robinson
and Barry Rosen
cinematography: Paul Glickman
not on home video in the USA

Luke (awesomely named Warhawk Tanzania) leads a successful martial arts dojo in New York. Among his pupils are as diverse people as the white cop Sam as well as Rodan (probably not related to the kaiju, played by Wilfredo Roldan), the drug-dealing thug leader of a street gang called the Black Spades.

Luke seems to have become quite successful in the growth of his own martial arts as well, at least he has earned the honor to travel to China to attain a new rank by getting his ass kicked by an elderly master. Luke seems to have some hope for instilling a bit of spiritual growth in Rodan, so he takes him on his Chinese adventure.

After a bit of fighting and losing, the New Yorker only needs to do some meditation in the woods to level up to level nine. He chooses Rodan to protect his body while he’s doing the silent soul-searching stuff. Unfortunately, Rodan is easily bored, and instead of protecting his friend, he’s all too soon roaming through the woods until he finds a cave full of century old corpses. Unknown to the freshly awakened Luke, he also steals an amulet one of the dead wears around his neck.

Both men don’t realize that their indiscretion has awakened the amulet’s owner, who is annoyed enough to possess some poor random Chinese guy and stow away on the same ship to New York the martial artists take, obviously with bad intentions in mind.

Back in New York, Rodan steers his gang into a war with a Chinese gang called the Red Dragons, while the demon, although seemingly pining for the return of his amulet, moves into the subway system and starts to kill people.

At first, the police think the gang war and the subway murders are somehow connected, but Sam – who is quite bright for a cop in a blaxploitation movie – soon realizes that there must be more to the latter than meets the eye. He also tries to get Luke’s help in containing the gang situation, but the martial artist is of course too much in love with his own machismo and the evils of The Man to be of any help.

Luke is only getting active when the demon finally kills Rodan. At first, he tries to avenge his friend on the Red Dragons, but when a random wise old man explains to him who really killed his friend, he decides to catch himself a demon.

There’s not much that could be sounding more grindhouse than a combination of blaxploitation, American martial arts and horror flick, promising a very special sort of dubious movie nirvana. Of course, “sounding good” was often as far as films made for the grindhouse circuit came to the word “good” at all, so I went into watching The Devil’s Express with some reservations regarding its quality. I was positively surprised.

Sure, Barry Rosen’s film isn’t exactly what one would call a good film, but it takes the elements of the three (four, if you add the surprise visits in cop movie territory) genres it plunders with enough enthusiasm and earnestness to win my heart.

It’s certainly a film with its share of problems. The acting – with the exception of the guy (possibly Larry Fleishman) who plays the Italian-American cop with excellent clichéd gusto and a schizophrenic bag lady – is rather wooden, but carries with it the sort of authenticity you get by casting semi-professional actors and amateurs. And I can hardly blame Warhawk Tanzania for not being as awesome as his name.

Compared to even the most mediocre martial arts movies from Hong Kong or Taiwan, the fighting (I wouldn’t really speak of fightchoreography in this case) isn’t much good either, but are there any US martial arts films with good, or even just competent, fights? At least the fights aren’t lackluster, because everybody on screen is really trying to get into it like Bruce Lee, just without the required training.

The movie’s plotting isn’t much to gush about either. The script doesn’t even seem to be able to decide who its protagonist is – Luke? Sam? both? – and therefore jumps merrily back and forth without developing much momentum.

Additionally, the film’s running time is padded out by random inserts of not exactly important scenes. However, in this film the padding is where the fun lies, since here “padding” doesn’t mean the usual travelogue footage or scenes and scenes of people explaining the plot to each other, but wondrous moments of exploitative art. Sudden bouts of grindhouse social realism (the things that just happen to land on camera when you film outside in a big city without a permit), an utterly random love montage between Luke and a nameless woman, a kung fu fighting waitress, or the rambly monologueing of a bag lady unite to become something quite special.

In these moments, The Devil’s Express isn’t so much a cheap shot at making money by haphazardly throwing a movie together, but a near-magical evocation of a particular place at a particular time. This is something you couldn’t get in a more carefully constructed picture that (understandably enough) would need to keep out all the randomness Rosen’s film (probably unconsciously) embraces. Of course, not too many low budget films of this type manage to incorporate as many of these moments of magic/unconscious art as this one does.

I also have to stress that some scenes belonging to the film’s main plot line are pretty great, too. The scenes in “China” are very creatively realized, and while you’d never believe them to take place in China, Rosen gives them a very different feel from the city scenes. I think it is the quality of the light that’s mainly accountable for that effect.

First and foremost, The Devil’s Express is an extremely fun movie. I can take a lot of delight in a film that goes out of its way to keep the promises of fun it makes, even if it is a little sloppy, a bit cheap and very silly, so I felt right at home with it.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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Crazies, The (original)

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

companies: Pittsburgh Films,
Latent Image and Cambist Films
year: 1973
runtime: 103′
country: United States
director: George A. Romero
cast: Lane Carroll, Will MacMillan,
Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar,
Lynn Lowry, Richard Liberty,
Richard Francis, Harry Spillman,
Will Disney, Edith Bell,
Bill Thunhurst, Leland Stames
writers: Paul McCullough (original
script) and George A. Romero
cinematographer: Bill Hinzman
music: Bruce Roberts
special effects: Tony Pantanella
and Regis Survinski
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VHS | SD DVD | Blu-ray

Things get a little crazy in Evans City, Pennsylvania after a germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the town water supply in this early thriller from director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Martin).  Recently remade as a slick horror piece by Breck Eisner with an executive production assist from Romero himself (read our coverage of that film here), the original The Crazies plays less for chills than one might expect.

The story is relatively simple: The Army descends upon the quiet community of Evans City in full HAZMAT getup in an effort to contain an accidental outbreak of the experimental Trixie virus.  Epic miscommunication between the Army, civilians, and the scientists on the hunt for a vaccine causes no end of trouble, with the unprepared military suddenly finding themselves up against both the crazed infected and the understandably defensive citizens of the town.  Meanwhile a small group tries to escape the insanity, dodging military patrols while dealing with the crazies among their own . . .

There are horrific elements to Romero’s The Crazies to be sure.  The opening plays as a repeat of that from Night of the Living Dead, with a young boy trying to scare his sister through ghoulish behavior.  Things soon take a turn for the serious, as the boy’s father loses his mind and sets fire to the property.  Later displays of insanity, a priest’s self-immolation in front of his church, an elderly woman treating a soldier as so much knitting, and a father lusting after his teenage daughter, make for indelible images as powerful as anything from the earlier Night . . . but are few and far between.

The step down in horror means a step up in action, the uneasy balance between the two marking The Crazies‘ place as a bridge between the better-known horror classics that bookend it.  Scenes of the Army bursting into homes unannounced and the gun battles that ensue are highly evocative of the tenement scene early on in Dawn of the Dead, with one major difference:  The tenement residents in Dawn know that they’ve been breaking the law in keeping their dead in the basement of their building – no one bothers to tell the citizens of The Crazies why they’re suddenly finding themselves under martial law.  It’s no surprise when factions of the town, crazed and sane, take up arms against what they see as an anonymous invasionary force.

Made as the war in Vietnam was in its death throws and opposition to it was at its height, the image of the US military in The Crazies is not a terribly kind one.  Soldiers are seen stealing from invaded homes as well as from the corpses of dead, for instance.  The commentary here seems to be more about individual indiscretion under extreme circumstances (a big part of the later Dawn of the Dead) than a condemnation of the military as a whole, here presented as an organization of working men who are every bit as confused about what they’re doing in Evans City as the citizens are about their being there.  Hogtied by bureaucracy and a lack of both supplies and manpower, it’s no small wonder that the containment operation devolves into madness so quickly.

The real villains (the only villains, in fact) of the piece are the politicians and generals at the top of the food chain.  They’re first priority is to put a nuclear weapon in the skies over the quarantined city, a decision that has more to do with saving face (biological warfare experiments are obviously a no-no) than containing the infection.  Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain seems a likely inspiration for these sequences, with those in charge sitting in a room far from the center of action with far more concern for their personal careers than anyone who might be affected by their decisions.  Romero adds a nice touch here, showing several of the group having snacks (an orange, a sandwich) as they glibly discuss the mass-murder of a few thousand civilians.

Made for peanuts in his native Pennsylvania and on the streets of the real Evans City, The Crazies is an interesting if jumbled production from a Romero still trying to find his footing in the film world.  The biggest fault of the production is its kinetic editing sensibility, heavily influenced by Romero’s past as a commercial filmmaker.  What works well for scenes of action or horror leaves the drama tangled and, thanks to the low-budget audio recording, frequently unintelligible.  It’s not a bad film by any means, particularly given the considerable budgetary constraint, and there is still some prescience to the story (the corralling of displaced citizens into a high school gymnasium reminds of the Louisiana Superdome during and after hurricane Katrina).  It’s just not up to par with Romero’s better known works from the same time period, though the positives – strong performances and immediate, documentary-style photography – make up for the negatives.

The Crazies wasn’t a terrifically successful picture upon release in March of 1973 (it was even less successful when re-released as Code Name: Trixie a few years later) and hasn’t developed the same level of cult devotion Romero’s two contemporaneous zombie pictures.  Released twice previously on VHS by Vista Home Video and Anchor Bay respectively, Blue Underground has recently given the film the respect deserving of a lesser work from a horror icon.  Now available on both DVD and Blu-ray from the company, their editions come with excellent restored 1.66:1 framed anamorphic video as well as a nice array of supplements – including a commentary track with director Romero, a featurette on supporting actress Lynn Lowry (Shivers, I Drink Your Blood), the usual trailers and television spots and an extensive stills gallery.  Suffice it to say, the Blue Underground editions are the ones to own.

There are more than enough reasons for genre fans to see this one – the director, the supporting cast (Richard Liberty (Day of the Dead), Richard France (Dawn of the Dead) and the aforementioned Lynn Lowry), the memorable moments of craziness.  Though rife with imperfections Romero’s goal of creating a timely action / horror / thriller is achieved all the same, and The Crazies ‘73 is still a far more intriguing beast than its recent remake will ever be.  Recommended.

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Crazies, The (remake)

Monday, March 1st, 2010

companies: Overture Films, Participant
Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ,
Penn Station and Road Rebel
year: 2010
runtime: 101′
country: United States
director: Breck Eisner
cast: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell,
Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker,
Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby,
Preston Bailey, John Aylward,
Joe Reegan, Glenn Morshower
writers: Scott Kosar
and Ray Wright
cinematographer: Maxime Alexandre
music: Mark Isham
out in wide release

A germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the water supply for the sleepy community of Ogden Marsh in this modestly budgeted redux of George Romero’s sardonic 1973 thriller.  The new The Crazies wisely avoids rehashing the events of the original outright, though a few moments of slick horror aren’t enough to cover for the fact that the Scott Kosar and Ray Wright screenplay has precious little on its mind.

The story this go around focuses squarely on sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, Live Free or Die Hard) and his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell, Pitch Black, Surrogates), who are expecting their first child.  The intrusion of a shotgun-toting maniac into a high school baseball game announces the arrival of Trixie, a destructive virus engineered by those maniacal masterminds working for the big-G Government.  It isn’t long before other townspeople are showing signs of infection, glassy stares and questionable behavior (some reminiscent of the M. Night Shyamalan misfire The Happening).  Just as sheriff David and deputy Russell (Joe Anderson, Amelia, The Ruins) start to put the pieces of the Trixie puzzle together the town is cast into darkness, an all-encompassing communications blackout announcing the arrival of the film’s second villain: the big-M Military.

Soon David, his wife and his faithful deputy are on the road, doing their best (and failing) to avoid the likes of crazed gun-toting hillbillies and the anonymous forces of the gas-masked Military on their way to Cedar Rapids.  They meet others along the way of course – one of Judy’s patients, her boyfriend, and the less-than-friendly new management of a rural car wash – none of whom are terribly important.  The film wastes no time in dispensing with them by means of pitchfork-armed high school staff or squads of Army-issue goons.

Breck Eisner’s The Crazies hits upon several of the high points of the 1973 film, updating the house-fire opener of that picture to good effect, but eschews the military perspective entirely (a huge part of the original, which focused on the inefficacy of government bureaucracy at the time of the Vietnam War), a perspective that could have added some prescience to this by-the-books horror programmer in the wake of hurricane Katrina and in the midst of two wars in the Middle East.  Instead we get an anonymous Military machine that, in obvious allusion to the Nazis, rounds the towns population into cattle trucks and concentration camps in preparation for mass extermination.  Yikes.  A soldier momentarily captured by David and his cohorts even enlists the Nuremberg defense after helping to gun down a teen-aged boy and his mother: “We were just following orders.”  There can be little doubt as to who is supposed to be perceived as more dangerous – the Military or the crazies – with a fuel-air bomb hanging over our protagonists’ heads.

The “military = bad” trope has been repeated in films ad-nauseum for as long as this reviewer can remember, and while it probably still works for plenty of people it’s my biggest complaint against the picture.  One thing we can be thankful for, however, is the exclusion of a scheming uniformed baddie behind it all.  Whoever is behind the quarantine operation in Ogden Marsh is left graciously unexplored, and one irksome genre pratfall avoided.

The other villains of the piece, those poor souls unfortunate enough to have become infected with the Trixie bug, are utterly unremarkable in design, with Eisner choosing to take his cues from the overflowing cornucopia of blandness that is modern zombie cinema.  The crazies sprout sores, puffy veins and discolored eyes, an aesthetic far too familiar to be in the least big frightening on its own.  Crafty implementation could have solved that particular issue, but no dice.  Eisner telegraphs his scares far in advance and allows too many of the horrific setups to devolve into outright silliness, leaving The Crazies sorely lacking in real visceral thrills.  Gore is actually quite limited here, and those expecting buckets of exposed inner organs may be disheartened.  Here I find myself giving Eisner considerable credit, for depending on the horror of the situation over graphic visuals.  A pitchfork to the gut is no less terrible a prospect without the sight of intestines flailing about.

Eisner seems more adept at action than horror here, with the slow-motion tumbling of an SUV proving one of the highlights of the picture.  His handling of the dramatics is adept if not particularly brilliant, and it’s the believability of the small-town characters that ultimately lifts The Crazies above merely average.  The cast do well in their respective roles even if no one (as is the case with much of the picture) stands out.  The fictitious Ogden Marsh may be no substitute for the real Evans City of the original, but it’s Mayberry-esque main street appeal is not to be underestimated.  The intrusion of HAZMAT-suited military men upon Rockwellian America is still a vision both surreal and effective, though it is a pity more wasn’t done with it.

I feel it important to note that I did enjoy The Crazies by and large, even if I have no desire to see it again.  Neither memorable or really effective, it’s still better than most horror programmers these days.  The crowd I was with was certainly entertained (admittedly much more-so than myself), even with a baby cooing and giggling  throughout.  The best thing about the picture may be Romero’s place as its executive producer – he’ll undoubtedly see a decent payday for his troubles.  This new The Crazies may be entirely forgettable, but those on the lookout for a matinee’s worth of entertainment could certainly do worse.

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Trancers

Friday, January 29th, 2010

company: Empire Pictures,
Altar Productions and Lexyn Productions
year: 1985
runtime: 77′
country: USA
director: Charles Band
cast: Tim Thomerson, Helen Hunt,
Michael Stefani, Art LaFleur, Anne Seymour
writers: Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo
cinematographer: Mac Ahlberg
music: Phil Davies, Mark Ryder
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In what should be the 23rd Century (although the film also calls it the 25th, so who knows), the delightfully subtly named future cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) spends all his time mopping up the remnants of the mind-controlled zombie slave troops (so-called “Trancers”) of his dead arch-enemy Whistler (Michael Stefani). His obsession is quite understandable, because Whistler killed Deth’s wife, but still costs the cop his job.

Deth spends his new-found free time diving in the submarine ruins of Lost Angeles, until the Future’s ruling council has need of him again. That point in time comes sooner than expected. For some reason the film is unwilling to explain, Whistler is still alive and has somehow managed to find his way into the Los Angeles of 1985 to do the Terminator thing. Obviously, Deth is the best man for the job to protect the council’s ancestors and bring Whistler back in.

It looks like (the film doesn’t bother to explain this point either) you can send dead matter back through time as you wish, but can only transfer the consciousness of people into the bodies of their ancestors. As luck will have it, Deth’s and Whistler’s respective ancestors both look exactly like they do, so Deth can go on a merry hunt through Los Angeles without having to look at a strange face in the mirror.

Jack ropes his ancestor’s one-night-stand Leena (future Academy Award winner Helen Hunt, not as completely annoying as she would soon become) into working as his native guide – and of course future love interest. To make life a bit more difficult for him, he is only a lowly reporter, while Whistler’s new body is a Police Detective without rank but with considerable influence.


Once, before his unhealthy obsession with living dolls overwhelmed Charles Band’s complete output as a producer and overrode even the small interest in making watchable movies he might have had, the producer/director/writer/etc was trying to be a small-time Roger Corman, just with less talent and imagination. At least, Band had enough clout to rope in promising talent (see Reanimator). Trancers was made in that still promising phase of Band’s career and is probably his best work as a director.

Of course, keeping in mind that I am talking about the future director of The Gingerdead Man and Dangerous Worry Dolls here, one has to keep one’s expectations at a realistic level, which is my long-winded way of saying that, while words like “style” or “intelligence” just don’t belong into the man’s vocabulary as a director or producer, Band’s work here at least doesn’t suck completely. He points, he shoots, he doesn’t embarass himself.

The movie’s script by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, the pair responsible for the rather delightful ”Tim Thomerson is Sergeant Rock and meets aliens” film Zone Troopers, has more logical flaws than my attempts at doing arithmetics. From the wildly inconsistent way time paradoxa work (people whose ancestors are killed and their own children disappear, but everyone still remembers them?) to the fact that the film really should have ended after about 30 minutes – a point where Deth has ample time and opportunity to get rid of Whistler – there is not much that stands up to even the mildest of scrutiny. Worse, the film never explains any of its concepts that need explaining. My remarks about the way time travel works are based only on conjecture, for example. Still, I can’t say that I cared much about logic or needed explanations while actually watching the film, because what the film lacks in artfulness, it makes up for in (sometimes consciously ironic) low budget film charm. Following Deth, we flit from one obvious and silly situation to the next.


This is the sort of film that doesn’t need to spare the killing of a department store Santa Claus for the grand finale, because it also has a (terrible, of course) punk rock club, little girls with the souls of gruff police chiefs and our hero riding a motor scooter instead of a motorcycle to throw at us. Among other things. But most importantly, Trancers not only shows us those things but does its best to let them be fun, by not taking itself serious. Not taking yourself serious in the good and entertaining way must be a lot more difficult to achieve than it looks like or most films that try for the effect wouldn’t be as bad. The difference between Trancers‘ version of this brand of fluffiness and the bad sort as incorporated in Troma films or Band’s later Full Moon Productions lies in the fact that it still takes its audience serious. Where a Troma film winks at itself in a mirror, this is a film still winking at us sitting in front of it.

While I usually just can’t stand Helen Hunt, I do approve of the fact that the film doesn’t make her character completely useless and only be there to be rescued by Thomerson and wear troubling fashion. She’s useful, she has moments of being sensible, she’s as much as you can hope for in a cheap SF actioner.

And she’s next to nothing compared to the film’s true trump card, the utterly awesome Tim Thomerson doing the perfect square-jawed cynical hero with delightfully silly one-liners (personal favorite: “Dry hair is for squids”) while having at least one toe in the territory of a parody of a perfect square-jawed cynical hero, which, let’s be honest, is the only way those guys can ever be made sympathetic. Somehow, Thomerson even makes Deth kinda cool.

A few years later, Band would go on to turn Trancers into a confused franchise of films that have nothing to do with each other beyond Thomerson, but none of the later films is even vaguely watchable, so this is the one to watch if one wants to see Thomerson doing what Thomerson does best.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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Knight Errant

Monday, January 11th, 2010

postera.k.a. Ying Xiong Ben Se
company: First Films
year: 1973
runtime: 89′
country: Taiwan
director: Ting Shan-Hsi
cast: Jimmy Wang Yu, Yasuaki Kurata,
Lung Fei, Shan Mao, Got Siu-Bo,
Eddy Ko Hung, Ngai So, Tse Gam-Guk,
Sit Hon, Blacky Ko Sau-Leung,
Cheung Yee-Kwai, Ng Tung-Kiu
writer: Ting Shan-Hsi
cinematographer: Chi Bun Lin
original music: Fu Liang Chou
disc company: Pathfinder Pictures
release date: May 3, 2005
retail price: $14.98
disc details: Region 1 / NTSC / single layer
video: interlaced / 2.35:1 / anamorphic
audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 (English, Mandarin)
subtitles: English
order this film from Amazon.com

Plot: Taxi driver Lin Huo-Shan (Jimmy Wang Yu) must defend his family after the three sons of a dead captain in the former Japanese Imperial Army arrive in Taiwan with revenge on their minds.

Everything I needed to know about this low budget brawler I learned from its German theatrical trailer.  Firstly, the ever inventive German film distributors opted to re-title the picture Wang Yu – Der Karatebomber (I’m not sure what the hell karatebombs are, but put them in the title of a movie and I’m there).  Secondly, the trailer prominently features hand to hand combat between star Jimmy Wang Yu and a short old Japanese woman, combat that appears to culminate with Wang Yu running the woman over with a car.

A film that promises both karatebombs and wanton vehicular violence against elderly people?  Needless to say this reviewer had to see it.

Out on domestic DVD from Pathfinder Pictures (stateside distributors of Wang Yu’s cult hit Master of the Flying Guillotine), the film’s English release title of Knight Errant isn’t nearly so exciting, but no matter.  This little exploitationer still packs plenty of well choreographed punch.  The promised battle between Wang Yu and an elderly Japanese woman is here to be relished and is, if anything, even more amusingly absurd than the trailer for the film might indicate, but more on that later.

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From a narrative standpoint, Knight Errant is pretty standard genre fare, though its contemporary setting is a bit unusual for the time (Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss and Enter the Dragon went a long way towards popularizing non-period action).  The script by frequent Wang Yu collaborator and director Tsing Shan-Hsi (Fast Fists, The Executioner) begins with a revenge plot similar to that of the later Master of the Flying Guillotine, showing a trio of brothers wronged training to assassinate their sworn enemy, Lin Ming Chung (Ngai So).  During the war Ming Chung had helped a Japanese prisoner to escape, leading to the humiliation and eventual suicide of the three brothers’ father and mother.  Training the brothers is the nameless Lady with the Iron Fist, a brutal elderly Japanese woman whose connection to the family is unclear.

Balancing the tables on the other side is Taiwanese cabbie Lin Huo-Shan (Wang Yu), the well meaning street fighting son of Lin Ming Chung.  Huo-Shan’s sister Yueh Feng is blind and in need of a corrective operation, but the young man’s preponderance for street brawls (noble though they may be) is sucking the family’s savings dry.  Complicating matters is the arrival of the three brothers in town.  They beat Huo-Shan’s father and cousin senseless, leaving Huo-Shan no option but to take the law into his own hands and put an end to both the trio and their master.

Knight Errant’s dramatics are of the sort parodied far and wide in the Western world.  Performances are full of hand gestures and intense facial expressions while the family dynamic at the center of the story is calculated to no so much tug as yank at the heart strings of the audience.  The lines between good and bad are clearly drawn, and any potentially questionable action on the part of the good guys (like running an old woman down with a car, for example) is rendered acceptable simply by virtue of their presumed goodness.

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Common for the time, the villains of Knight Errant are Japanese, a reflection of tension between that country and the Chinese (be they in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the mainland) resulting from the occupation and atrocities of the last World War.  Interestingly, the three brothers here are not so much beastly (the fanged Okinawan of The One Armed Boxer) or conniving (the knife-wielding Win Without a Knife Yakuma of Master of the Flying Guillotine) as they are completely and utterly incompetent.  The bulk of their training consists of repeated humiliation at the hands of the Lady with the Iron Fist, and their assassination mission in Taiwan goes spectacularly awry.  The Lin family escapes their efforts relatively unscathed, with Huo-Shan’s quadruple homicide passed off by the authorities as self defense.  Little sister Yueh Feng even gets her eye operation!

Of course Knight Errant’s drama is secondary to its action set pieces, which are every bit as plentiful as one can hope for.  The film certainly establishes Huo-Shan’s reputation as a street fighter, engaging him in half a dozen epic brawls before the bad guys even arrive.  Combat with the three brothers is surprisingly limited in comparison, totalling only two (albeit lengthy) sequences – both taking place in a lumber mill.  For sheer absurdity Huo-Shan’s impromptu car attack on the Lady with the Iron Fist takes the prize.  The old woman proves startlingly resilient, surviving being run over not one but three times, and goes so far as to hop into Huo-Shan’s trunk so that she can leap out later and fight him again!

Knight Errant offers up a host of faces that will be familiar to those who have seen other Wang Yu films.  Two of the three brothers are played by Lung Fei (perhaps best known stateside for playing the villainous Lu Ting Chu in Savage Killers, which was later re-edited into Kung Pow: Enter the Fist and his character renamed Master “Betty” Pain) and Shan Mao (Taek Won Do fighter Chin Chi Yung in The One Armed Boxer).  The other is played by Yasuaki Kurata, a rising martial arts star in his own right.  Even Sit Hon (the tournament announcer in Master of the Flying Guillotine) makes an appearance, here playing a would-be thief put in his place by Huo-Shan early on.  Lady with the Iron Fist is herbalist, martial artist, and sometimes actor Tse Gam-Guk, who would star in the hilariously named Kung Fu Mama the same year.

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The 2005 DVD from Pathfinder Pictures is generally excellent, especially after their two so-so (and never the less recommended) handlings of the much more popular Master of the Flying Guillotine.  The transfer is of an international print with English titles and is presented in 16:9 enhanced 2.35:1.  The image suffers a bit from its interlacing, but still presents with reasonable color, contrast, and detail.  The only real complaint to be had is with the unrestored image, which shows varying degrees of damage (none of which particularly bothered this reviewer) throughout.  Audio is offered up in two dubs (Mandarin or English) in 2.0 Dolby Digital stereo.  Both sound appropriately rough, replicating the low budget sound design of the production just fine.  Optional English subtitles are provided for the feature.

The disc sports a healthy little bunch of supplements, starting with a commentary track by Wade Major and Tim Cogshell of Boxoffice Magazine.  Next up is a brief interview (11′) with star Jimmy Wang Yu that appears to have been prepared for a Japanese release of the title.  A still image gallery, some text biographies / filmographies, and a faded English language theatrical trailer round out the disc.

I’m a long-time Jimmy Wang Yu fan, so it should come as no surprise that Knight Errant gets my approval.  The Pathfinder Pictures release is well produced and reasonably priced, making it an easy recommendation for those interested in the picture.  See it!

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Sexy Killer, The

Monday, December 14th, 2009

postera.k.a. Du hou mi shi / The Drug Connection
company: Shaw Brothers
year: 1976
runtime: 88′
country: Hong Kong
director: Sun Chung
cast: Chen Ping, Yueh Hua,
Tung Lam, Si Wai, Wang Hsieh,
Tin Ching, Chan Shen
writer: Ki Kuang
cinematographer: Lam Nai-Choi
limited availability
(IVL disc is OOP)

Plot: A nurse whose sister is destroyed by the illegal drug industry poses as a prostitute and infiltrates the upper echelons of a Hong Kong gang in order to get her bloody revenge.

While my taste in film has shifted more towards the serious as of late (not that my reviews here do much to evidence this), there are times when nothing hits the spot like a good, trashy exploitationer.  Shaw Brothers’ The Sexy Killer is just such a film, careening through such saucy subjects as drugs, prostitution, and sado-masochistic sex on its way to a shotgun-fueled finale that plays like a candy colored scope re-envisioning of Bo Arne Vibenius’ Thriller – A Cruel Picture.

The story concerns Wanfei, a nurse in Hong Kong who gets a nasty wake up call when her younger sister is tempted into the sordid world of heroine abuse and sex trafficking.  Wanfei involves herself with a shady celebrity, whose strong public posturing against the exploding drug industry makes her blind to the fact that he’s nothing but a paid cover for the cartels, while simultaneously seeking her own revenge against the gangsters who defiled her sister.  Her policeman friend Weipin is fighting his own losing battle against corruption in the department, realizing that a presumed friend is on the cartel’s payroll only after his reputation for drug busting almost gets him killed.

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It doesn’t take long for Wanfei to find out that drastic action is required if she’s to move up in the ranks of the mob, and she begins moonlighting as a prostitute for the higher ups.  She’s found out when an attempt on the life of the Boss of the operation (a sexual sadist with a dungeon in the back of his bedroom) goes wrong, and dragged off to the edge of the city for disposal.  But it’ll take more than a few moronic henchmen to stop this lady scorned and it isn’t long before she’s driving right through the front door of the Boss’ house, blasting holes the size of dinner plates into every gangster she can find.

The Sexy Killer is a prototypical Shaw Brothers exploitation vehicle, of which they produced a slew throughout the ’60s and ’70s along with their better known martial arts product.  One can expect to see lots of bare human flesh by the end of things, much of it belonging to lead Chen Ping.  The company obviously understood the dual functionality of the heroine, and the intended audience should have no trouble getting behind Ping’s lust for vengeance while oodling over her extensive physical charms.  The highlight of the picture is inarguably her delivery of deliciously violent final justice, and I can think of few actresses capable of handling a shotgun so deftly while donning a pink polka-dotted dress.

Keeping things interesting in the dry spells between senseless acts of depravity are a stable of unusual characters made all the more unusual by the audaciousness of the performances behind them.  Wang Hsieh (the Professor in The Super Inframan) steals the show as the depraved Boss, gleefully twirling his cane betwixt the legs of his favorite whore and whipping her while who-knows-what spools through a collection of film projectors in his bedroom.  Just as memorable is Tin Ching as the happy-go-lucky sex trafficker Ma-Yuan, who gets his just deserves when Wanfei convinces the Boss of his usurptuous intentions.

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Direction by Sun Chung is as adept as necessary for the material in question (scripted by Ki Kuang, Human Lanterns), and he keeps the material from becoming draggy even in the slower spots.  Cinematography by Lam Nai-Choi (director, The Story of Ricky) is questionable, and his overuse of wide angle lenses often gives the impression that we’re watching a film shot through a goldfish bowl – not that it does a thing to dampen The Sexy Killer’s potential to entertain.

There’s only one DVD release of The Sexy Killer I’m currently aware of, from IVL’s extensive line of Region 3 Shaw Brothers titles.  The disc presents the film in a decent, if slightly soft, anamorphic widescreen transfer in the original 2.35:1 Shaw Scope ratio.  Audio is Mandarin, augmented with optional English and Chinese subtitles.  Extras are typical – stills, production notes, and a collection of trailers for other IVL releases.  The disc is currently listed as being temporarily out of print by the company, though copies are still easy enough to come by on eBay.

I enjoyed the hell out of this one, though my mindset at the time undoubtedly had a lot to do with it.  This is trash, pure and simple, but of the brightly colored and irresistible variety only the Shaw Brothers can provide.  Keep your expectations in check and know what you’re in for – the screenshots here should be enough to convince of whether or not The Sexy Killer is for you.  As for me, this one comes recommended.

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