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Monday, November 07, 2005Bang Rajan
2000, Thailand. Starring Jaran Ngamdee, Winai Kraibutr, Theerayut Pratyabamrung, Bin Bunluerit, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Chumphorn Thepphithak, Suntharee Maila-or, Phisate Sangsuwan, Theeranit Damrongwinijchai. Directed by Tanit Jitnukul. Written by Tanit Jitnukul, Kongkiat Khomsiri, Patikarn Phejmunee, Buinthin Thuaykaew. Purchase from Amazon.com
After concentrating October on reviewing Spanish horror films -- which was actually more fun than the poor reviews for many of the films may suggest -- I've found myself with a big stack of other stuff I'd watched throughout the month that needs mention. So forgive me if some of these comments are shorter than usual. It had been my intention to catch the Thai epic Bang Rajan when it was playing in extremely limited (as in, one theater) release in New York, but as with most things I plan, it didn't pan out that way. I was getting worried that no DVD release seemed forthcoming, which I thought was strange. So I rented the UK edition from Niche Flix, only to get it and discover that it was cracked and unplayable. I was just destined not to see this movie it seemed. Then all of a sudden, there it was on Netflix -- and only Netflix, in some sort of exclusive distribution deal with Oliver North's production company or something, which was in charge of bringing it to the United States, presumably to make up for how awful Alexander turned out to be. So at last, I was able to sit down for a night and watch hot Thai guys with big walrus moustaches beat the crap out of each other. Thai movies have been getting a lot of exposure in the past couple years. While not nearly as popular as Hong Kong, Japanese, Korea, or Bollywood films, Thai cinema has eeked out a substantial cult following in the West, thanks primarily to the sort of low-fi approach many of the films have. As films from most of Asia attempt to out-tech and out-glitz Hollywood (though to date, only the Koreans have really succeeded at this), Thai films are throwbacks to an era of cruder but more interesting special effects, CGI-free fight scenes, and a more down-to-earth approach to making films that, while often rough around the edges, are refreshing precisely because they are rough around the edges. They feel like movies actual people made, instead of being mass market researched products that seem to have been assembled by a machine. Hot on the heels of the international success of Ong Bak, which reminded people of how much fun it was to watch Jackie Chan and others during the 1980s before they got all old and broken down and reliant upon computers and gimmicks, Bang Rajan hit some screens around the United States. Like many recent Thai films, it concentrates on the period of war between the disparate fiefdoms of Thailand and the Burmese empire to the north -- a conflict which eventually led to the formation of the Siamese nation, and the last time Thailand was ever controlled or occupied by a foreign power (unless you count Japanese businessmen drunk on Heineken and looking for a cheap handjob). While some films have concentrated ont he complex political maneuvering that took place during the war, and others on the personality of the great Thai queen who eventually lent part of her name to the nation, Bang Rajan chooses to concentrate on lean, muscular guys in loin cloths beating the shit out of each other. The story of the village of Bang Rajan is one of the most famous in Thai history, and while it's easy to say the film Bang Rajan was inspired by films like The Seven Samurai, it's also easy to guess that The Seven Samurai might have found some kernel of inspiration in the true story of Bang Rajan. It was a tiny rural village which, despite being grossly outmatched by Burmese forces possessed of far superior technology, numbers, and training, managed to hold out against onslaught after onslaught, costing the Burmese dearly, not to mention delivering a major blow to Burmese morale before the town finally fell. Bang Rajan the movie takes this story and treats it with an epic feel, though there's very little truly original in the film and every hoary old chestnut of this type of war movie is served up. What makes Bang Rajan fun, however, is how gung-ho it is with its elements. I'd compare it to Shiri -- a completely by-the-numbers police thriller from Korea which, despite conforming to every single genre expectation, does it so well that it becomes tremendously fun to watch the old formula again. Bang Rajan has everything you'd expect in a movie where sassy villagers repel superior forces: the cool and calculating leader, the young hot shot, the drunken lout who will rise Toshiro Mifune style to the heights of glory and honor in battle -- nothing you haven't seen dozens of times before. But that familiarity didn't much matter to me, because Bang Rajan is full of energy and zest, not to mention solid acting, incredible cinematography, and some truly monumental moustaches. The battles are gory, informed obviously by Braveheart, but very effective, and for much of their running time, the director (Tanit Jitnukul, who helmed the similar historical battle epics Khunsuk and Khun Pan: Legend of the Warlord) manages to refrain from employing "in the thick of it" shaky cam, which I loathe so much these days. The leading cast of men continue the modern Thai tradition of loading their films with hot guys who can actually act. Jaran Ngamdee sports a moustache that would make Rollie Fingers fall down and weep at his feet. I guess it was a fake, but the fact that Thai men ever sported moustaches this fabulous is just one example of the undying flame that enabled them to defy the Burmese army for nearly half a year. Like the other characters, he is exactly what you expect of his character, but all of them are likeable, which is more than you can say in many other Seven Samurai-inspired movies. As the drunken, axe-wielding Nai Thongmen, Bin Bunluerit became the crowd favorite and took home a best acting award for that year. He proves that the Toshiro Mifune model can still be fun, exciting, and poignant even if you already know what to expect. The fact that the film invests real time in developing characters and familiarizing you with them, even within he confines of their cliches, makes the finale clash, when you know pretty much everyone has to die, all the more effective. And the scene of Jaran Ngamdee slashing his way across a lush green field littered with corpses, his majestic moustache flowing around him -- man, it's straight out of "dramatic war cinema 101," but it's still extremely effective. The film also sports some fine female supporting stars, but I'm just not familiar enough with hem to have much to say except that I really dig the Thai dress and hairstyle from the 1760s. I also enjoy comparing this to similar battles from generally the same time -- say, oh, I don't know, the American Revolution. Though I'd studied plenty about that in school, I never once had any idea what might have been happening in Thailand at the same time. I wouldn't exactly call Bang Rajan a solid historical lesson, but history and folk tales underline everything that goes into the story -- and in fact, that it is so similar to Seven Samurai and countless other war and siege films is a testament to how certain folk tales permeate all cultures, and certain traits and scenarios affect populations across varied cultures and geographies. My only real gripe about Bang Rajan are a few ill-advised forays into CGI explosions. Placed as they are amid actual actors and sword fighting and stampeding elephants, these clumsily-executed computer effects stick out like a sore thumb. But there are only a couple of them, and that's easy to overlook in the greater scheme of thing. Bang Rajan end sup being one of my favorite things: well-executed, energetic genre formula. You know what you're going to get, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still taste delicious. Labels: Country: Thailand, Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 4:57 PM | 2 Comments Tuesday, July 06, 2004Gladiator
United States, 2000. Starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi, Djimon Hounsou, David Schofield, John Shrapnel, Tomas Arana, Ralf Moeller, Spencer Treat Clark, David Hemmings, Tommy Flanagan, Sven-Ole Thorsen. Directed by Ridley Scott. Available on DVD from Amazon.)
I'm still tinkering with the format for these viewing journals, trying to determine which way best suits my needs, and I think what I'm deciding on is that I'm not really going to worry about a set format. Whatever works best on any particular day is how things will be. Sometimes that means just a series of separate reviews, and other days it will mean something where a couple films all get mixed I together - or some combination of those two, and whatever else pops up along the way. It is, after all, a journal and not a dissertation. But enough of that uninteresting and largely unrelated stuff. We're here to watch some movies, right? So let's move on down, move on down, move on down the road to the next little pile of films coming to us through the miracle of the modern postal system. As I said just a few days ago when talking about King of Kings, and as I've no doubt said several times before in some place or other, I love big historical epics. For that matter, I love little historical epics. And big and little films that might not necessarily be considered epics. A good epic - and mind you, despite the budget and cast of CGI thousands, there have been precious few good epics in the past twenty years - has more to it than just a lot of money and eye candy thrown up on screen to dazzle. There has to be a thread of intelligence weaving its way through the grand proceedings, something emotional and human and philosophical. If you slap a bunch of people fighting each other and blowing stuff up on screen and forget to add some element of humanity, of intellectual discourse, then you've done nothing but make a big, dumb movie. The best epics have famous action sequences - the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, the chariot race in Ben Hur, the battles in the desert with the Turks from Lawrence of Arabia - but these action scenes are relatively few and far between and are remembered partly because they were so grand and sweeping in design, but also because surrounding them is a story worth remembering. At the heart of any good epic, no matter how vast the scope of its setting, is often the story of one or two human beings. A romance, a crisis of faith, a quest for redemption - these small, human elements are what make the grand epics worth rewatching decades later. Because these movies make an effort to engage you emotionally, they carry more weight than their fluffier counterparts. This is not to say they need be oppressively talky and weighed down by their own sense of importance. No, a good, rousing epic must figure a way to balance itself between emotion and plot and breathtaking action. They must, in every traditional sense of the word, be romantic. In our modern era of filmmaking, the trend has been toward bigger, louder action sequences and less and less characterization or thought. Thus we have the $200 million action blockbuster, but without any vestige of humanity these films are nothing more than a light confectionary, perhaps nice to look at for a hundred or so minutes but hardly warranting a second viewing in the future, and certainly they are not demanding of any manner of discussion beyond the very basics to match their simplistic approach to telling a story. We are not without hope, however. In the first half of the new millennium, there seems to be renewed interest in the art of epic filmmaking. There have been many failures and many more still will come, but there have also been a satisfying number of successes, films that have managed to do more than parade a lot of money and technical wizardry across the screen, that have remembered that at the heart of every quality epic there must be just that: a heart. Peter Jackson's monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy is without a doubt the most obvious example. They are films that feature immense battle scenes and countless special effects, but they also never forget to take time out for a quiet scene of two main characters lying back in a field for a smoke. And the film's most memorable special effect - Gollum - is memorable only in part because he is realized with such a high degree of photo realism in so many scenes; he is memorable more because there is an engrossing human performance and conflict behind his façade. And there have been others lately, and despite some missteps (Troy being the biggest and most disappointing) there seem to be a lot of potentially wonderful films on the horizon. We may not yet be matching the golden age of the epic that came during the 1960s, but all things considered and in light of how little most people seem to demand from their films, that we have anything at all worth celebrating is itself worth celebrating. The modern epics more or less got their start in 1995 with Mel Gibson's Braveheart, but the ball really got rolling in 2000 when visionary director Ridley Scott gave the world... Although out of fashion for decades, Scott decided it was high time that someone dusted off all those old tunics and golden helmets and gave the world a gusto-filled ancient world epic again, and God bless 'im for it. Ancient world epics are probably my favorites, and I'll gleefully sit through even the most threadbare of old Italian productions so long as it has some guys in togas and armor throwing each other around. Gladiator, for all its visual flare and state-of-the-art special effects is, at its heart, nothing more than a rousing resurrection of the old sword and sandal actioners that thrilled audiences throughout the 1960s. In this sense and as a gladiator film, it does pretty much everything right. It gives you everything you demand from such a film and manages to make them seem fresh and reinvented without turning them into something unrecognizable or mocking. Russell Crowe, looking the best he's ever looked and probably the best he ever will look, plays Maximus, legendary general of the Roman legions campaigning against the Germanic hordes in 108 AD. As befits a gladiator epic, he is betrayed by a deceitful man of power (in this case the dying emperor's son Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix), finds his family murdered, his home destroyed, and his freedom taken from him when he escapes death only to find himself a slave forced to participate in brutal gladiatorial games in the less developed reaches of the empire. He is the archetypal wronged hero who must lead the oppressed masses against men who have been corrupted by power, lust, and greed. Crowe's performance is exactly what it should be. On the surface, his character is simple enough for anyone to understand and relate to, but inside he is a much more complexly drawn figure. A farmer by birth, he discovers a knack for becoming one of the greatest generals the Roman army has ever seen, a fearless fighter who, unlike some generals, leads his men into battle and risks death alongside them. But his dream is not of glory or fame. He simply wants to one day return to his wife and child and harvest his wheat. Crowe strikes the perfect balance between swaggering, sexy manliness and simple emotion and depth. Maximus is not a philosopher or a poet or a man prone to eloquent speeches and poetic waxing. But he is no dumb, violent slab of meat, either. He is an everyman who, as is often the case in epics, finds himself caught up in sweeping social upheaval and political machination. His opposite number, the Emperor Commodus, is an equally complex character. Simple cartoon villains are easy, as are people who are evil simply for the sake of being evil. Joaquin Phoenix lends Commodus a tortured a soul, a powerful portrayal that is equal parts despicable and pitiable as we watch his most earnest of efforts rejected by his father until it drives Commodus to patricide and an illegitimate ascension to the throne. He is, at his core, desperate to be loved by someone, anyone, and his desperation has twisted him into a creature both monstrous and tragic. The supporting cast rounds the film out wonderfully and is buoyed by three of the great legendary British actors - Richard Harris, David Hemmings, and Oliver Reed. Reed as the sympathetic slavemaster and gladiator owner Proximo gives one of the best and most moving performances of his career. Connie Nielson is wonderful as Lucilla, the sister of Commodus who is torn between loyalty to her brother, disgust for what she knows he has done, greed for the power that comes with her position, and love for the disgraced Maxiums. As with all the characters in the film, Gladiator takes a simple archetype and invests it with depth and emotion. Historically, of course, this is a movie. If you want to learn about the actualities of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and the path of the Roman empire, you really should be reading books. Gladiator is, after all, entertainment and not a documentary about the Roman Empire. True, Emperor Commodus wasn't slain in the gladiatorial arena by a disgraced general, thus opening the door to the reestablishment of the Roman Republic. But you know what? It makes for good cinema. At this point, anyone who goes into a big Hollywood epic and is disappointed by the fact that it plays fast and loose with history is probably the same person that is flabbergasted by the fact that there's a movie in which Hercules fights monsters from the moon. I'm a history buff myself, which is part of the reason I love these epics, but I would never be so foolish as to regard them as history themselves. That's what, as I said, books are for. They should, instead, be regarded as modern-day legends. A hearty helping of credit should go to the terrific score by Hans Zimmer, easily one of the best movie composers in the business. His score, like the movie, strikes that perfect balance between thundering bombast and introspection. Parterning with former Dead Can Dance songstress Lisa Gerrard (with whom he also worked on the soundtrack for Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down), Zimmer conjures up the perfect gladiator score. An adventure film soundtrack this rousing has not been heard since the great scores for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Conan the Barbarian -- and funny enough, the theme song from Conan was used in the trailer for Gladiator. Actionwise, the film is remarkable for taking very small scenes and making them seem vast. The opening battle between Maximus and his legions against the Germanic armies is as grand and giant as any battle scene in an epic, and a wonderful way to kick things off. But it is also the only large-scale action scene. Subsequent clashes are between no more than a few men in the Coliseum, and it is the combination of Ridley Scott's visual prowess and the script's emotional impact that make them huge. Although Ben Hur's chariot race remains, I believe, the greatest of all gladiator film action pieces (and simply one of the best scenes of any type, period), the fights in Gladiator are absolutely stunning. Gory, brutal, and bone crunching. Where as large-scale battle scenes wow you with their scope, the fights here are personal. You could call them small if they weren't so pumped full of macho energy and gusto. But never zeal, if you know what I mean. The violence is there, yes, as a spectacle, as it was thousands of years ago, but also as a way to illustrate the point that good men and great men are often forced to kill one another for the most trivial of matters. There is no doubt that Maximus feeds off the crowd, that their cheers give him a glimmer in the eye, but he is never enthralled by the violence. Early in his career as a gladiator, he reacts with disgust as the bloodlust of those around him even as he dispatches his foes with relentless precision. On the grand stage of Rome's Coliseum, the crowd is less an inspiration that it is a means to an end, a weapon for him to use against Commodus when all other weapons would fail. But never does he embrace the violence, and always does he dream simply of personal peace and a return to his simple life. And once again, it's these emotional flourishes that make Gladiator such a rousing experience. It is what big moviemaking should be. There is plenty of grim machismo and sex appeal on parade, but it's not the sort of big dumb machismo one would get from, say, a generic action flick where everyone is just obnoxious and loud and blustering. It is manliness tempered with philosophy and compassion, honor and heart, as it should be. I know Oscar award-winning films are hardly our forte here, and that many of our readers are predisposed to dislike or avoid a film that garners such accolades. But Gladiator is the rare film that is worthy of its hype. Any fan of epics, of war films, of old sword and sandal movies, of good old-fashioned movie making, should give it a try. Personally, I love it. I love it for exactly what it is - a big, gigantic gladiator film. Nothing unexpected happens, and yeah, everything is predictable, but no more so than in any other film and especially in any other gladiator film. Did it deserve to win Best Picture of the year? Who really cares? The Oscars only have any real credibility these days when compared to, say, the MTV Movie Awards or The Grammies. I don't think a movie getting such an award is a reason to see it or not to see it. Gladiator appeals to me, though, and neither in spite of or because of the pomp and circumstance surrounding it. Is it the best picture of that year? One of the best of all time? Let me just say this: I really liked it. That's pretty much all that matters to me. And speaking of manliness tempered with philosophy, the next film in our line up is another of my favorite big epics, and once again it stars Russell Crowe. Labels: Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 6:02 PM | 0 Comments Tuesday, May 11, 2004Wild Zero
2000, Japan. Starring Masashi Endo, Kwancharu Shitichai, Makoto Inamiya, Masao Sato, Shiro Namiki, Naruka Nakajo, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Guitar Wolf, Drum Wolf, Bass Wolf. Directed by Tetsuro Takeuchi. Available on DVD (Amazon).
I'm realistic. I am fully aware of the fact that I have seen quite a few "best films I have ever seen." They number in the dozens, if not more, and each and every one of them makes me happy. I live in fear of the day that I can say with any degree of certainty what my favorite movie is, because that means I will have gotten to the point where there is only one movie I can enjoy that much. Not very interesting, if you ask me. So it goes, then, that I have just seen the best film I have ever seen -- one of several, as I mentioned. The sort of film that makes you yell. The sort of film that makes you kick things over and want to set stuff on fire -- or is that just me? I have seen the sort of film that gives you, or at least me, everything I always want from a film: sexy gals, sexy guys, bucketloads of cool, guns, zombies, explosions, UFOs, and rock 'n' roll. Come on -- if your life had more of each of those things, wouldn't you be having a little bit more fun? The bast couple years have seen a number of Asian zombie films hit the scene, which has been refreshing since no one else, not even the Italians, seemed all that interesting in reviving the undead genre despite the popularity of games like Resident Evil. I thought for sure that was going to cause a minor resurgence in the number of shambling flesh-eaters we saw shuffling across the screen, but instead we just got more teen slasher films, a genre that impresses me with the fact that just when you think you have seen it reach its most annoying, insipid, and idiotic low, along comes the next movie and is even worse. Hong Kong's Bio-Zombie was a promising start, and things got better when Japan unleashed Junk, but both of those films had one major weakness: characters you either couldn't stand or simply did not care about. They must have picked that one up from the Italians. What was missing in Asia's slowly growing number of George Romero-inspired zombie funfests was any sense of caring or humanity in the characters. While a zombie still can and often does succeed on a purely visceral level even with characters you'd just as soon see eaten, there's something more engaging about a cast with charisma, a cast that includes people you actually don't grow to hate before the end of their first scene. In short, what they were missing was a film like Wild Zero, one of the greatest films ever made. Wild Zero is a shining example of everything Japan has that Hong Kong has lost. As I've said time and time again, Hong Kong desperately needs an underground in order to stay interesting, at least to me and the people out there who don't enjoy Coco Lee albums. They need a music underground and they need a film underground. They currently have very little of either. They also need pro wrestling and Mexican food, but that's a discussion for another time. Japan, on the other hand, not only has Mexican food and pro wrestling, they have one of the greatest underground and fringe scenes in the world. Chalk it up to how repressed the mainstream society is, then throw in a little something about the law of physics stating that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every uptight, by-the-books salaryman and stodgy old parent who looks at someone's financial reports before they look at the actual person in order to judge their worth as a potential date for their daughter, for every high-strung, addicted to protocol cog you have in mainstream society, there is a glorious opposite. Someone who doesn't bow down to the incredible pressures Japanese society puts on its citizens to conform and consume, someone who eschews the everyday and looks for something different. This has given Japan one of the most diverse and wild undergrounds anywhere. From noise music to heavy metal, punk rock to surf guitar, Japan isn't missing a beat. The face of the mainstream may be syrupy mass-market J-pop crap, but lurking not too far beneath the surface are a rowdy bunch of punks, rockers, and freaks who continue to shake things up. We salute them. It's a shame America can't rediscover a bit of that rebel attitude. I guess as we become a more "crazed consumer" society, as we continue to stop being people and continue to become commodities and resources, it'll rekindle a little of what the Japanese underground has been keeping watch over while we've all been too busy wallowing in self-indulgence. Underground film and music collide in Wild Zero as they only could in Japan. The movie stars, among others, now legendary lo-fi garage punk/rockabilly icons Guitar Wolf as themselves in roles that are not completely unlike what we saw KISS doing in KISS Meets the Phantom. The big difference is that while KISS seemed completely goofy in that movie, Guitar Wolf can't help but seem like the baddest ass bunch of guys on the planet. Rockabilly pompadours, black leather jackets, and "don't give a fuck" attitudes go a long way, and this movie uses them all perfectly. The story opens with Ace, a young rockabilly from some nowhere town in the Japanese countryside. Ace is on the verge of being cool but still has a ways to go before he'll be in the big leagues. He's got the hair and the jacket and the Link Wray albums, but there's still something naive and goofy about him. He'll quickly develop into one of the most likeable characters in any zombie movie. Ace is heading out on his none-too-cool motorbike to catch Guitar Wolf playing in a nearby equally no-name town. He also has plans to get himself known as a force to be reckoned with on the rockabilly/garage punk scene by confronting the manager of the club, who must be seen to be believed. He has Little Lord Fontleroy hair, a tennis sweater, and the absolute tightest, shortest shorts ever worn by man. I mean, these things are short and tight even by Japanese standards, and they are the people who gave us all those little kids in Godzilla and Gamera movies. This guy is wearing those same shorts, but he is an adult. All is not going well for Guitar Wolf, however. Despite the fact that they just put on a successful show featuring microphones that shoot jets of flame out the back, and despite the fact that the club owner grew up with Guitar Wolf, he doesn't want to give them anymore shows. He'd rather focus on sugary bubblegum pop, leaving behind Guitar Wolf's brand of retro rock and roll. "Rock and roll is dead!" the manager shouts. Ace, who happens to be lingering outside, hears this proclamation and is outraged. He busts into the office, assumes a cool rock and roll stance and yells, "Rock and roll will never die!" He's right, of course. You can have your hip hop and your metal hip hop and your trance and your techno and your electronica. Nothing can take the place of a loud, distorted guitar as far as I'm concerned. Ace's intrusion causes a shootout between the pistol-packing club owner and the members of Guitar Wolf. Wolf manages to get the better of the club owner, costing him a couple of fingers for his treachery. Ace is decked by a security guard, but after Guitar Wolf emerges victorious from the scuffle, lead guitarist and vocalist Guitar Wolf (the other guys in the band are Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf) slices open his own hand, slices open Ace's hand, and makes them "rock 'n' roll blood brothers." He then gives Ace a whistle and tells him to blow it should he ever find himself in a heap of danger, which of course, he soon will. The members of Guitar Wolf then ride off into the night in a muscle car and on a motorcycle that shoots jets of flame out the back. So already this is the coolest movie ever made. Obviously it's not taking itself seriously, but even with the wink and the nudge, it's still unbelievably cool. Maybe it's just me. I've always wanted to live in a rock and roll world where you could make things happen just by playing the guitar and snapping your fingers. I think part of what attracted me to punk rock in the first place was that, at least until it's corruption in the latter half of the 1990s, it believed in the rock 'n' roll myth, that rock 'n' roll could change the world, or that it could at least change your life. I know it changed mine. I still can't make things happen just by snapping my fingers, but I'm working on it. The next day, the story continues with a young cutie named Tobio getting dumped along the side of the road by some freaked out guy who is calling her a pervert. Why? Who knows? She's deadly cute and is keeping the faith by wearing a pair of Converse. She walks to a nearby gas station but can't seem to find anyone who works there. Likewise, a couple tow truck drivers stop by and are similarly baffled by the unlocked doors, fully operational pumps, and complete lack of employees. They all sort of mill about wondering what to do until a crazy-haired young punk busts in to rob the joint. He and his two friends -- a bickering boyfriend and girlfriend -- have driven out to the countryside to see a meteor that recently landed nearby, and this was the best thing they could think of to get traveling money. It doesn't go so well since no one who works at the gas station is around. The whole attempted robbery is foiled when Ace happens by on his way to a show in another town, opens the door, and bloodies the robber's nose by accident, sending him running and crying back to his car. Meanwhile, a couple yakuza types are driving out to a deserted area to meet with a crazy female arms dealer who is going to sell them some serious firepower for a coming gangland feud. They are stopped on their way by a bunch of people wandering around in the middle of the road. Seemingly not noticing that all these people are gray and covered with gory wounds, one of the yakuza gets out of the car to berate and threaten them, resulting in the first zombie attack of the movie. The zombies are decent, certainly better make-up than we saw in Bio-Zombie though still not quite up to the high standards established by guys like Tom Savini and Gianetto De Rossi. Back at the gas station, Ace and Tobio have become fast friends and developed immediate crushes on one another. Hey, they are two good lookin' young kids. Why the hell not? The movie reminds you not to take anything very seriously by shooting the whole "shy smile" exchange between the two through a pink heart-shaped cut-out. Awwww! Seriously, Ace and Tobio are easy to like, and it just goes to show you that it's not hard to make characters people will like. I don't know why so many other horror film creators can't get it right. All you have to do is not make them assholes. If they are decent people who are basically nice, there you go. People will like them. If they are selfish dickweeds who shout all the time, then obviously no one will like them. I guess horror writers want you to hate the human characters so you will root for the gore effects. That's fine the first few times you see a gore effect, but after years of them, you start to appreciate a few likeable characters in the mix. Tobio and Ace part ways at the gas station, with Ace, ever the cool cat, saying, "It would be nice to run into you again sometime." He then sets out on his dippy little motorcycle for the next town and the next rock 'n' roll show. Catching up with our sorry bunch of would-be gas station robbers, they've parked their van near a lake and are cooling off after their little foray into attempted crimes. No sooner do the boyfriend and girlfriend go off into the woods to argue some more than they are all set upon by a horde of zombies. At the same time, Ace stumbles upon the yakuza types serving as a bloody meal for some zombies while the crazy arms dealer woman finds her own home beseiged by the living dead. Suddenly these guys are everywhere, and as usual they are hungry for the flesh of the living. To make matters just that much more complicated, the vengeful club owner has discovered the whereabouts of Guitar Wolf and is heading off to even the score. Ace fights his way through the zombies in order to get back to Tobio, who is the first person he thinks of. The two of them hole up in what looks to be an abandoned school building or theater or something. Difficult to tell. As they spend time together, Ace is aware of the fact that he's falling in love fast and hard with Tobio, and she seems to feel the same way about him. Being attacked by zombies is just the sort of thing that will bring two people together, after all. After an awkward kiss, Ace bemoans the fact that he is a total uncool wannabe who only dreams of being as slick as Guitar Wolf. Tobio doesn't mind -- she likes Ace the way he is -- but when she reveals her big secret, the one that got her thrown out of that guy's car when we first met her -- it freaks Ace out so much that he scrambles for another room to get away from her. While Ace wrestles with his emotions, the apparition of Guitar Wolf appears before him, strikes a super-cool rock 'n' roll pose, and tells him that love has no boundaries or rules. Ace nods in understanding and goes in search of Tobio only to discover that zombies have overrun the building, and she is nowhere to be found. As Ace fights desperately against the zombies, he remembers the whistle. He blows on it, and like Goldar from the Space Giants, Guitar Wolf immediately senses that Ace in in danger. They mount up their flame-spewing vehicles and head off into the night to help their rock 'n' roll blood brother. And it's around this time that the UFOs start to show up. Did I forget to mention them? Along the way, Guitar Wolf picks up the boyfriend and girlfriend being chased by zombies. They arrive at the gas station and find it empty -- almost. Guitar Wolf bends down and finds Ace's comb. He shakes his head, realizing that Ace needs their help more than ever since he has such an uncool comb. No sooner does he make this decision than the crazy arms dealing woman pulls up in her armored vehicle with dozens upon dozens of flesh-hungry zombies hot on her trail. Guitar Wolf -- who, by the way, still has his guitar slung over his shoulder -- steps outside and dispatches the zombies in the best way possible: through the use of glowing magic guitar picks that whiz through the air like ninja shurikens and cause zombie heads to start exploding left and right! Oh yes, you heard me correctly. Don't worry though, because it gets even better! The group eventually finds Ace just in the nick of time, but Ace is just as happy to die for having betrayed Tobio and let her down. Guitar Wolf assumes another cool rock 'n' roll pose and yells at Ace to "Believe in yourself, Ace! Believe in rock 'n' roll!" Ace nods in comprehension and, using some guns supplied by the crazy arms dealing woman, sets out to find Tobio or die trying. Meanwhile, Guitar Wolf and their hangers-on are set upon by zombies attacking the crazy arms dealing woman's storage warehouse, where they've all holed up. As if enough wasn't going on, the club owner -- completely oblivious to the fact that zombies are everywhere and the sky is filled with UFOs -- finally corners Guitar Wolf for their big showdown, which includes grenades, pistols, and glowing magic powers of rock 'n' roll electricity. In just one of the film's seemingly endless parade of "greatest moments ever," The Captain shoots a grenade into the room where Guitar Wolf is hiding. Guitar Wolf leaps out of the window with bellowing fire around him, shouts "Rock 'n' roll!!!!" as he falls, then lands in a crouched position and immediately tunes his guitar. Drum Wolf and Bass Wolf finally settle matters with the application of a bazooka to the problem. After firing the bazooka and blowing a whole bunch of shit all to hell, they immediately return to drinking whiskey and combing their hair. Ace fights his way across town and ends up back at the gas station where he and Tobio first met. As fate would have it, she has returned there as well. He runs up to her and gives her a big hug and a kiss, proclaiming his love for her and promising to never leave her side -- he even swears on his leather jacket and rock 'n' roll that he will always be with her. They finally embrace while Guitar Wolf decides to deal with the UFOs once and for all. In one of the greatest scenes in movie history, he stands atop a building while a massive mothership flies overhead. Drawing a glowing samurai sword out of the neck of his guitar, he shouts, "Rock 'n' roll!!!"and proceeds to slice UFOs in half! By this point I didn't even know how to react. I was just sitting there with a huge smile on my face, perhaps with a bit of drool dripping from the corner of my mouth. Wild Zero had succeeded where so many other films failed: it had blown my mind. I was, in the greatest sense of the phrase, completely and utterly dumbfounded. The movie ends with Guitar Wolf parting ways with their rock and roll blood brother and his newfound true love. "You don't need this anymore," Guitar Wolf had said earlier, taking back the whistle when Ace found the courage to fight for Tobio. As they stand on the nighttime road, Guitar Wolf gives Ace the last gift he will need: a cooler comb. "After that night, I never saw Guitar Wolf again," Ace says in voice-over narration. "Courage and rock 'n' roll: that's what he taught me that night." And as Tobio and Ace ride off into the night, so ends the coolest fucking movie I've seen since the last Japanese biker/rockabilly movie I watched, Crazy Thunder Road. Man alive, I'd kill for a big-screen double feature with these two films. What can I really say about Wild Zero other than it's the greatest movie ever? I mean, it has Japanese rockabillies fighting zombies and UFOs while shouting "rock and roll!!!" It's nonstop energy, and even the slower scenes are fun. Ace and Tobio are two of the most likeable characters in any horror film, and that makes the whole thing much more engaging. The characters you don't like are killed quickly, and even some of them you don't like become more sympathetic as they grow through the course of the film's completely wild, over-the-top zombie action. And hell, you have leather-clad Guitar Wolf throwing magic glowing guitar picks and blowing zombie heads off with the greatest of ease as they tool around a plague-infested countryside on fire-spraying motorcycles. It goes without saying that if you want deadly seriousness, this is not the film for you. This is not the website for you, either. You know serious people make me want to dance naked on the lawn whilst playing the Pan flute. Well, they would if I had a lawn. And a Pan flute. So let's just say they make me want to dance naked in front of the window whilst playing the harmonica. So anyway, no seriousness, but you do get some actual social commentary that avoids being at all contrived or heavy-handed. It comes across as rock 'n' roll wisdom, and I for one will always take advice from mystical Japanese garage punk rockabilly guys. This movie has it all. Monsters, aliens, romance, and coolness! The acting is great. Ace and Tobio are engaging and charismatic, and of Guitar Wolf is there to ooze cool, which they do. Ace will have the ladies saying "awww" and Tobio is such a mind-blowing cutie that her big secret will freak out all sorts of the less open-minded people in the audience, which is reason alone to love this film. Everyone else is pretty good as well. And then there's the music. Incredible. Obviously you get a healthy dose of Guitar Wolf's growing ultra-distorted garage punk madness, but filling out the soundtrack are some of the greatest lo-fi garage acts Japan has to offer. Teengenerate, Charlie and the Hot Wheels, Bikini Kill, The Ramblin' Rose, Mad 3, The Vikings, Devil Dogs, Greg Oblivion and the Tip-Tops, and plenty more. With the plot, the characters, and the music, this movie is rock and roll, plain and simple. It's good to see (or hear) a movie where the soundtrack is more than a series of incidental songs with no real point within the context of the film. Wild Zero makes wonderful use of the music at hand in order to augment the movie, not just to augment record sales as is commonplace in the United States (and maybe elsewhere -- I don't really know). Guitar Wolf's music is obvious in its inclusion, but it's use well in both concert performance scenes and at key points int he action. Something seems that much wilder and cooler when it is accompanied by the sudden scream of "Invader Ace." Most effective after that are the handful of slower songs by Greg Oblivian that increase the power of certain moments tenfold. Tobio and Ace are cute with their shy first encounter at the gas station, but it's made even sweeter with Greg's "Twice As Deep" playing in the background. Using music effectively is something a lot of movies have forgotten. They either throw out completely disconnected pop songs in hopes of selling records rather than meaning anything within the film, or they just pipe in completely bland and predictable John Williams wannabe orchestration. Using music effectively seems to be a dying art, and I was happy to hear it used so amazingly well in Wild Zero. But then, what should I expect from a movie full of rockers? This isn't the goriest movie int he world, but it has plenty o' grue to keep the bloodhounds happy. Heads explode right and left, and there's the requisite number of throat rippings and intestine gobblings as are required by zombie films. But the gore is not front and center here as it is in weaker zombie films. The characters are the center of the story. Well, the characters and rock 'n' roll. They propel the action instead of the other way around, as it all too often is. See if it isn't more fun to sit through a movie where you actually hope the characters don't die. It makes everything a lot more tense and exciting. And you know that ultimately, I'm a sap, so the struggling romance between Tobio and Ace really serves as the icing on the cake. After all, it ain't rock 'n' roll if it doesn't have some romance, and it couldn't happen between two nicer people. The love story is what makes me really smile about this film, same way I did with Dead Alive. The scene where Greg Oblivian's strange but endearing "Bad Man on a Toy Piano" is playing while Ace fights zombies after realizing the error in spurning Tobio and Tobio wanders the desolate streets dejected and saddened, all done in slow motion, is one of the most effective and touching romantic moments in any film. And then you have Greg Oblivian again with the song "Twice as Deep" playing when the two finally find one another and Ace swears "on my leather jacket and on rock 'n' roll that I will always love you." I tell ya, not a dry rockabilly eye will be in the room. After all, rockers may be bad boys and girls, but there's an undeniable romanticism behind it all. Funny that my three favorite romantic films are now Wild Zero, Dead Alive, and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. You figure that one out. I really can't say enough good things about Wild Zero. It's an Ed "Big Daddy" Roth drawing come true. Monsters and zombies, rockabillies and romance. It's the most fun I've had at the movies in a long time. It represents everything I love about film and about life. Well, I don't love being chased by zombies, but I guess even that would be more fun if I had a glowing guitar samurai sword and ninja star guitar picks. If you are a fan of zombies, bikers, rock and roll music, action, or just damn good films, then this is the movie for you. After watching it, I wondered what it was I'd liked about other zombie movies so much. With the exception of Dawn of the Dead -- which incidentally was also highlighted by a strong cast of basically likeable characters -- they seem such distant trailers of a movie like this that just does everything right and remains a wild ride from beginning to end. I don't want to use the phrase "If you see only one movie," because as I said at the beginning of this review, I wouldn't want to watch just one film. So watch a lot of films, but make sure this is one of the first ones you grab. It's absolutely fantastic, and that's about as good as things can get. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Zombies, Rock and Roll, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 5:11 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, August 15, 2002Sakuya, Slayer of Demons
2000, Japan. Starring Nozomi Ando, Shuichi Yamauchi, Kyusaku Shimada. Directed by Tomoo Haraguchi. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
You know what really ticks me off? I mean, maybe even more than when a film is just plain boring? It's when a movie could have been amazingly cool, or at least pretty neat, except for one single feature which completely torpedoes the whole film and brings everything crashing down into a smoldering pile of mediocrity. It's probably the most frustrating experience of watching a movie, to find something I want to like so much yet can't because of one little thing that, singular though it may be, is so overwhelmingly irksome that it drowns out everything else. Such was the case with Sakuya, a movie that draws from elements of science fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural "schoolgirl" horror thrillers that have been so popular in Japan since the release of films like The Ring and Birth of the Wizard and manga like Uzumaki, then ruins it all by including quite possibly the most grating, annoying, hideously unenjoyable little kid in the history of Japanese cinema. That right there is a strong statement, mind you. After all, this is the country that gave us Ichiro and the endless parade of Kenny's from the many old Gamera movies. This is a country who's cinema has pushed the envelope in exploring just how irritating a single pre-teen character can be. There is a well-documented history of these precocious brats in Japanese film, and even in the face of all that history and tradition, I still have to rank the snot-nosed little whiner from Sakuya as the worst ever. Ichiro may have been a twerp, but at least we could relate to his daydreams about Monster Island. The kid in this film, however, has no redeeming qualities yet he will not stay out of damn near every scene. Since we now use our supercomputers for important things like digitally inserting the face of Bruce Lee into new films and completely reinventing the depths to which people will sink to exploit the famous dead, I'd like to see them use the power to one day remove this kid from the film, thus leaving us with a fairly enjoyable supernatural fantasy romp full of cool monsters and a totally bad-ass female lead. Instead, we'll probably just use our computers to figure out how to add more Jar Jar Binks into Empire Strikes Back so that those films retroactively have more to do with the Phantom Menace series of films. We start off with the eruption of Mt. Fuji, accomplished through some of the best CGI work to appear in a Japanese movie. You really can't go wrong by opening or closing your movie with the eruption of a volcano. Heck, you could do both, even if your movie was about two people discovering love and their passion for dinner theater in the heart of New York City's Soho district. Is there any one Nora Ephram film that would not benefit greatly from a finale in which, after Meg Ryan discovers true happiness, something somewhere gets obliterated by a volcano? So much the better if said erupting volcano unleashes Rodan or, as in the case of this film, dozens upon dozens of hellish demons and monsters. This is bad news for 18th century Japan, and for any country of any era I suppose. Few and far between are the historical epochs that would have been better off with hundreds of ghouls and goblins running to and fro, I suppose, though in a predictable twist, I can think of very few films that wouldn't benefit from a few more ghouls and goblins, especially those obnoxious Metropolitan type movies in which vacuous young debutantes and society teens get together to discuss their drab, soulless existence as if any of us really give a shit about debutantes and their male hangers-on. I was shocked to discover these sorts of people even still exist, but with that knowledge now in my head thanks to that Whit Stillman asshole, I can firmly say that any movie about them would be much better if it featured goblins. Hell, why not throw the volcano in to boot? Then why not throw Whit Stillman into the volcano? That's for Last Days of Disco, you jackass. Where was I? Oh yes. Medieval Japan is in a real pickle with all these demons loose. Luckily, there is a family of demon slayers waiting to pick up the magic sword and send the demons packing. The big problem for the slayers is that the magic sword they use to do all their slaying draws its energy from the life force of whoever wields it. I'm sure they just love whatever ancient holy man half-assed his way through the fashioning of that magic weapon. The only way you can recharge the sword and retain your own lifeforce is by killing a fellow human - a crime no self-respecting slayer will commit. Thus, the job of slaying is handed down from generation to generation, and the slayers just keep getting younger. We first meet Sakuya, the teenage daughter of the current slayer, as her dad is busy facing off against a kappa, the turtle-like goblins of ancient Japanese folklore. Unfortunately for the slayer, he's at the end of his life force and dies before getting the job done. Sakuya, then, takes the sword up herself and makes short work of the beastie and officially becoming the next generation of demon slayer. If you are seeing similarities between this and another story about a cute teenage girl who becomes a slayer of supernatural rakehells and ne'r-do-wells, then that's probably not accidental. Horror aimed at teenage girls is big business in Japan, and Buffy fits the formula perfectly. It's no big surprise, then, that the same basic formula would be adapted to a more distinctly Japanese setting, but while Sakuya definitely owes a tip o' the hat to Buffy, it's not an outright copy, retaining a unique identity thanks to the wealth of Japanese monsters and folklore upon which it can draw. The entire opening battle is very stylish and dreamlike, full of surreal landscapes and glowing orange skies. All in all, very cool to behold, and a sure sign that, if nothing else, the movie has some pretty tremendous cinematography and art design. Where the movie begins to falter, however, is at the tail-end of this otherwise excellent little opening scene. As Sakuya finishes off the kappa, she hears a baby crying and soon discovers a baby kappa, recently orphaned by the aforementioned slaying. Against all better judgment and the wise council of her elders, Sakuya refrains from killing the baby, adopting as her baby brother and thus opening the door to the introduction of the most intensely annoying character you could possibly imagine. Months later, the baby has grown up looking more or less human save for the peculiar green dome jutting out of the top of his head - the only real remnant of the fact that he's not human. Well, there's that and the fact that he looks sort of like Kane Kosugi from Pray for Death. While his adopted older sister is a super-cute, sword-wielding bad-ass, little brother Taro seems proficient primarily at pouting and whining. I know this is more or less a movie for kids, despite the fact that crotchety old farts like myself will devour it as well, and that's why they have a little kid in the movie. But even other little kids watching this movie must find Taro grating. When he gets older, the only friends he'll have are the ones who are hoping to use him to scam on his older sister. Sakuya is preparing for the final push to rid the world of all those demons who escaped from the eruption, a quest that will eventually lead her and her two ninja sidekicks across Japan to a showdown with the Spider Queen, the demon who is in control of all the other demons. Unfortunately, this quest will also involve Taro tagging along, blubbering, whining, and generally behaving like a spoiled brat. Each scene in which he appears - and that includes just about all of them - is dragged down by his very presence. When he is confronted by the Spider Queen, who treats him as she would her own child as she tries to convince him that humans hate him (well, this human sure hated him) and he should join the demons in fighting his own sister, I guess we're supposed to feel for the inner turmoil, the sense of alienation he feels. But since Sakuya has been a kind if slightly stern mentor, and the two ninjas have tolerated his constantly screwing up every situation and complicating matters endlessly, it's hard to sympathize with his "dramatic" momentary change of heart. Instead, he just seems like even more of a little dickweed than before, and that's not a term I use often. It's really a damn shame, too, because without him, this movie would be pretty damn good. It draws from the same energy and spirit as Keita Amamiya's films, feeling like the little brother of something along the lines of Renegade Robot Ninja and Princess Saki or Moon Over Tao, both of which feature a similar stylistic flair and willingness to gleefully blur the lines between medieval fantasy and science fiction by giving the samurai and ninjas an array of seemingly futuristic weapons like guns and armored vehicles. It's not as good as either of those movies, but it still could have been a solid piece had Taro not stunk up damn near every scene he could get his dirty little kappa hands on. Director Tomoo Haraguchi certainly shows a flair for directing, having done 1991's peculiar Mikadroid as well as working on the special effects for such stylish hits has Uzumaki, Misa The Dark Angel, and even Takeshi Kitano's Brother. His background in make-up and visual effects is obvious, as the hyper-stylized look of the film is astounding. He maintains a brisk pace, leaping from one action scene to the next and making sure everything stays exciting. The special effects, pulled off by the same team who collaborated to give us the effects from the three recent Gamera films, range from traditionally average to utterly astonishing. These guys really raised the bar for special effects in Japan with the Gamera, and they do their best to keep up with their reputations here despite working on an obviously smaller budget. At their worst, they are the cat demon, which looks like something out of one of those hour-long Kamen Rider movies. Not bad, but obviously the traditional "actor in a big costume" sort of special effect that only works for kids and us forgiving fans of Japanese science fiction. That's just about the only low part, however, as the rest of the monsters look fantastic. The kappa from the opening scene is top notch, boasting a make-up job that would make even masters like Rick Baker and Steven Wang proud. Groups of decaying zombie samurai look even better as they gallop through the foggy streets at night. And topping it all off is the Spider Queen, who transforms into a gigantic half woman, half spider creature for the big finale. Usually, giant monster effects falter at least a little here and there, but the Spider Queen is pulled off with remarkable results thanks to a combination of CGI, forced perspective, and good ol' fashioned trickery. The level of realism is unbelievable, or should I say, very believable, as she plows through a medieval village during her climactic battle with Sakuya. Not a once does it look like she is demolishing little models or computer effects. Speaking of computer effects, y'all know I'm not a big fan of them most of the time for anything other than augmenting scenery or generating cool energy blasts, but I have to say they all look pretty damn good here and mesh well with the actual live action shots. Part of the reason they work is because they don't go overboard. While there are tons of computer effects, most of them are the aforementioned details rather than major focal points. While special effects obviously overshadow the actors in a movie of this nature, they don't treat the special effects as if they are the characters (learn a lesson here, George Lucas). The Spider Queen may be realized through the use of some clever CGI and scene matting, but that's still a human acting it all out. Even at their most outlandish, the computer effects never cross the line and become too much. The opening eruption of Mt. Fuji starts out looking a tad cartoonish, but the subsequent destruction of a forested valley and temple is fantastic, as are most of the scenes that follow. There is one scene in which a number of rather fake and archaic monsters fill the screen, which will, I imagine, look like nothing more than a cheap bunch of monster costumes and puppets to most people, very much out of place amid the far more successful and modern looking effects that are highlighted in this film. What one would be missing, however, is that these are all the monsters from the classic 1960s Daei films 100 Monsters and Big Ghost War. Those two films were absolutely wonderful mythology/fantasy films filled to the rim with countless creatures from the annals of Japanese folklore, and as a fan of those old movies, I was completely delighted and tickled to see them pop up in a pointless but welcome cameo in this film. They're all here - the big headed thing, the weird tongue waggling umbrella with one eye, two arms, and one leg, the woman with the beautiful face on the front of her head and the hideous demon face on the back, and countless others. That scene alone made it worth suffering the thousands insults of Taro. The action is plentiful and choreographed pretty well. We're not talking high-flying Hong Kong acrobatics here, but Japan has really been improving their action choreography in the past few years - basically, since Keita Amamiya kicked things into high gear. Back in the day, Japanese action choreography was as bad as - if not worse than - American action choreography. I guess everyone learned a thing or two from Hong Kong during the past decade or two, but while American films are happy to simply provide us with watered-down mimicry of John Woo's greatest choreography hits, Japan lifted the kinetic energy and spirit but adapted it to their own style. Sakuya blends the martial action seamlessly with the flashy special effects and more outrageous action. On the acting front, everyone is passable, at worst. Taro may be the most insipid character I've ever endured, but based on the script, I have to guess that's how he was written, and the young actor playing him pulls off "annoying whiner" with devastating proficiency. Newcomer Nozomi Ando performs admirably as Sakuya, kicking demon ass and looking cute while doing it. She looks like she stepped right out of one of those "Samurai Shodown" games. It's not exactly a deep character she's playing, but as far as generic sword-swinging action gals go, you could do worse. In only an hour and a half, she can't really develop the depth of character Buffy enjoys. The two ninjas are there to grumble, shout, and blow a lot of stuff up, and they do just that, while the Spider Queen is so good in her few scenes involving dialogue other than proclamations about destroying humanity that you'll almost feel sympathetic for the demons - an emotional manipulation that Taro couldn't pull off, even though that was supposed to be his job. Had she spent more time with the little bastard, I'm sure even the Spider Queen would have reconsidered her bid to win him over to the demon way. Sakuya's big problem is that it's a good film. Not a great film, but a good film. It would have been a kick-ass television series, but it's not high enough up there in the world of film to survive its own weakest link, Taro. In a better film, the good would have outweighed the bad, but in a movie on the level Sakuya achieves, he's enough to drag it down from "good" to "average" and transform it into a movie that, rather than looking forward to seeing, you should probably check out if you get the easy opportunity. Sakuya herself is all killer, no filler, and the special effects are aces, but the movie itself is pretty "business as usual" for this particular genre. When Amamiya has movies out there like Moon Over Tao, Renegade Robot Ninja, and Zeiram II, there's no need to subject yourself to Taro. Even without him, those movies outclass this one, which is ultimately nothing more than a popcorn flick, but boy howdy does it deliver in all the right places. A more solid plot would have helped it weather the Taro storm a bit better. As is, his blustering whining mucks up the front yard and leaves things less enjoyable than they could have been, should have been. As I stated earlier, this would have been a great television series, because then we would have been allowed time to get to know the characters better. Sakuya has a lot of potential - a young girl who is destined to fight a war using the Vortex Sword, thus causing her own young life to grow ever shorter lest she quench the blade with human blood. That's fuel for a great character and some good action-adventure drama. Confined to a mere ninety minutes or so, Sakuya's development is eschewed and we instead concentrate on Taro - himself a character that might not have been so painful if he'd been given more emotional depth. Unfortunately, the only characterization the movie has time for is "whiner," and the heroics he predictably performs at the end are less a natural outgrowth of his character and more just a simple function of plot conventions. With Taro firmly in place, and with the story being what it is, my recommendation becomes shakier and less certain. Sure, this movie has an ultra-cool heroine, some great action, slick monsters, surreal cinematography and art design, and generally cool special effects. but it also has Taro, a pesky insect buzzing in your ear that simply will not go away no matter how many times you swat at him. The end result is a movie that is watchable, even fun, but definitely flawed and frustrating since you'll keep thinking of how much better it could have been with just a few less scenes of that screeching little kappa sumbitch. Labels: Country: Japan, Fantasy, Horror: Yokai, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 3:59 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, July 03, 2002Godzilla vs. Megaguiras
2000, Japan. Starring Misato Tanaka, Shosuke Tanihara, Masato Ibu, Yuriko Hoshi, Toshiyuki Nagashima, Tsutomu Kitagawa, Minoru Watanabe. Directed by Masaki Tezuka. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
Godzilla has been through a rough couple years. After dying in Godzilla vs. Destroyer, the Big G was then shanghaied and brought over to America for a starring role in one of the most abysmal movies of the 1990s, Tri-Star's horrendous Godzilla. At the same time, the monster's popularity in Japan plummeted. Where there had once been oceans of Godzilla merchandise there was now only a tiny puddle of left-overs. Undeterred, and determined to rehabilitate Godzilla's image after the Tri-Star debacle, Toho seized up the reigns once more of their most successful franchise and delivered Godzilla 2000. Unfortunately, Godzilla's triumphant return to its Japanese roots was a middling affair hampered by bland human characters, an even blander monster foe, and a dwindling budget. While not necessarily a bad film (I actually think it's pretty darn good), it was not the type of thing that could compete with the likes of the recent Gamera series, which set the bar exceptionally high for special effects, story, and characters - and did it for less money. Toho, it seemed, was becoming a cranky old man, at times downright hostile to those who would otherwise be supporting them. While Daei Studios rushed to release all the Gamera films both new and old onto DVD, Toho played the stubborn Luddite and refused to put much faith in the new medium, allowing scarcely a trickle of Godzilla's back catalog to get the digital treatment. Fans both in Japan and overseas - a population Toho has never given a damn about in the first place - were even further alienated from the proprietors of their beloved atomic powered behemoth. When 2001 rolled around, Toho rolled out another Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Megaguiras. The budget was still small, and Toho still seemed to regard their once-mighty franchise with more contempt than support, but even a bad Japanese Godzilla film is still a better time at the movies than a good Meg Ryan romantic comedy or any of those movies where a sincere outsider teaches us the beauty of the human soul while lots of people "smile through their tears" as that emotional "revelation" type orchestration plays. You know the movies I'm talking about. Godzilla vs. Megaguiras is, in many ways, a return to the wacky spirit of the 1970s Godzilla films. After the relatively dark and somber-colored Godzilla 2000, Godzilla vs. Megaguiras goes for a more vibrant and rich approach, resulting in the revitalization of that comic book feel that permeated so many of Godzilla's adventures a couple decades ago. While certain key aspects are lacking - specifically the cool human characters and the funky action music - it's still another step back in the direction of entertaining audiences. But it ain't all wine and roses. Toho has become addicted to stories that immediately establish that none of the other movies ever happened, and this is an entirely new timeline. That's okay once, but they're pressing the reset button after every film now, and that smacks of desperation. For you wrestling fans out there, think of how many times WCW did the exact same thing, ushered in "a brand new era," in the year leading up to them just going belly up. It betrays the lack of faith Toho has in their own films, not to mention the ability of their script writers to pay attention to continuity - at least as much as Godzilla films have ever worried about such things. It's like saying all the previous films were so lackluster, or that the current writers are so unimaginative, that the best thing to do is ignore history completely. Why even bother then? It's not like Godzilla fans are Star Trek fans, people who will boycott an entire series because a character says an alien race came from Delos VII when it was stated twenty-two years earlier in some Trek novel that these aliens came from Delos V. As long as there are some tenuous links, we're happy. In the timeline of this Godzilla series, which is apparently going to last one movie and probably be reset again, Godzilla has attacked only a handful of times. There was the first time back in the 1950s - depicted in black and white recreations of scenes from the original movie, but featuring the new monster design. Then there were a couple other attacks that resulted in the capitol of Japan being moved from Tokyo to Osaka. It might be a good idea to move your capitol inland, especially when said capitols have a tendency to get soundly trounced by a giant monster who lives just off the coast of your nation. At least make him hike a little rather than simply being ale to swim right up and blast things with no real effort. Godzilla's history is recounted through us via one of those newsreel type things that went out of fashion round about the end of World War II, but apparently in this alternate reality, Japan still loves them. There is some cool recreation of a couple famous scenes from the original Godzilla so that we can see familiar destruction with the new monster design. Each of Godzilla's attacks have come at key moments in the development of the Japanese energy policy. He shows up to smash nuclear power plants, so those are banned in favor of plasma generators. When those too attract Godzilla's attention, they are banned as well, so I guess Japan then converts entirely to a power system based on hamsters running on treadmills. The movie proper opens during Godzilla's final attack on some plasma generators before they are banned, and we meet a group of very stupid special-forces operatives who attempt to combat Godzilla with the use of bazookas. Missiles and tanks leave nary a scratch on the beast, but these guys are going after him with handheld rocket launchers. What's next? Pistols at twenty paces? Stepping into his path and doing that thing where you flip open and shut your butterfly knife to show what a bad-ass you are? Well, the team calls themselves the "G-Graspers," so we have to assume their initial plan was to simply walk out and grasp Godzilla as a way of defeating him. You know, grab it by the shoulder and sternly admonish the monster with a "Look what you did!" Could be worse, I suppose. At least they're not the G-Gropers or the G-Goosers. Not especially amused with the antics of the ground forces, Godzilla simply squashes most of them, leaving only one survivor, a young woman named Kiriko. Naturally, she swears revenge on Godzilla for killing all her comrades, but stops short of shaking her fist at the monster. At least it gives Kiriko some sense of motivation. Godzilla 2000 had that businessman looking scientist determined to kill Godzilla, but he had no real back story, no motivation to give some sense of depth to his character. Kiriko's story may be cliché, but at least it's there. Skip ahead a few years, and just when Japan thinks they have everything solved and are on a clean energy source that Godzilla won't feel the need to come push over, their old nemesis shows up yet again. After enlisting the aid of the standard-issue scruffy young computer genius, the G-Grasper team devises a plan that is as idiotic as just about every other plan devised to kill Godzilla. They have developed a weapon that actually shoots man-made black holes! Hit Godzilla with one of those suckers, and even it won't be able to escape the gravitational pull. Once Godzilla is sucked in, the black hole will dissipate, leaving only a very large portion of land completely charred and ruined. The black hole idea sounds pretty daft at first, but weirdly enough there are scientists (up at MIT I believe) working on this very idea. Well, on manmade black holes; not necessarily a gun to shoot them at large monsters. The team tests their new weapon -- one that could potentially rupture the entire fabric of space-time and send the whole solar system plunging into oblivion - about a hundred yards from a heavily populated area. Frankly, as an inhabitant of Earth, I'm not so wild about the Japanese shooting black holes around just to kill Godzilla. I'm not wild about a bunch of crackpots up at MIT doing it either. It seems the sort of thing that could go horribly wrong and destroy the entire world. It would be nice if they consulted with other countries first, or maybe thought up a different plan, like using bigger missiles than those piddly little things they usually lob at Godzilla. You know, something smaller than an atom bomb but larger than those skinny little frog stickers launched by two F-14 fighters. Why not try, I don't know, fifty fighters and a few bombers dropping those 5,000 pound bunker busters? I mean, I don't go out and attempt to solve every little problem I have by creating black holes and jeopardizing the very structure of existence. I'm just saying maybe they should try something a little more conventional before they go shooting black holes at everything. With the potential to destroy the entire solar system in their hands, I guess it really doesn't matter that the G-Graspers decide to test the weapon scant yards from a suburb, with little more than a unkempt hedge as a security perimeter. On top of that, they apparently decide the best target is a school building, which it seems is still in use since we soon meet a young lad walking to the school to return a bug collection he borrowed. You'd think they would do this sort of thing on an island or something away from the people. Everyone's probably going to be pissed that not only did the G-Graspers test a potentially catastrophic weapon in the middle of a heavily populated area, they also sucked the local school into the nether regions of reality. As is par for the course in most Japanese monster films, the little kid manages to breach the tight security of the test site, foiling the whole two or three guards scattered throughout what must be several miles of woods. After they shoot off their little gun and he sees it, Kiriko catches him and makes him promise not to tell anyone he's just seen the government shooting black holes into the local school. Man alive, I thought American security at our nuclear research centers was bad! The kid witnesses one of the most top-secret super-ultra tests ever to be performed a hundred yards from a heavily populated suburb, and when he's caught they make him promise not to tell? Boy howdy, did Wen-ho Lee ever get the shaft! The test goes remarkably well despite having been infiltrated by a pre-teen, up until the distortions in space-time start happening. Even that isn't of great concern to them, but when a small dragonfly darts into the field of distortion, things start to get complicated. The bug begins to mutate and multiply. Why? Because it's a Godzilla film. It also starts to get really big. Meanwhile, a shady scientist has secretly been storing some plasma energy, you know, just in case. Just in case what? Just in case Godzilla detects it? That better be the case, because that's exactly what happens. You can't hide Scooby Snacks from Shaggy, and you can't hide volatile sources of energy from Godzilla. You might not be able to hide Scooby Snacks from Godzilla, either, but I've never seen anything on screen to confirm or deny it, so let's just leave it in the realm of potential fan fiction ideas. While the G-Graspers rush to get their weapon launched into space so it can target Godzilla, Tokyo finds itself under attack from the swarm of mutant bugs, who are laying eggs in the sewer system and causing the vibrant youth-oriented neighborhood of Shibuya to flood. They're also sucking precious bodily fluids out of people, but that's hardly as big a problem as ruining the Tower Records and chasing away all those looney club kids making the scene. Upset by the flooding of the vibrant entertainment and consumer district, yet no doubt happy about all the soaking wet kogals running into their waiting arms, the Japanese military immediately deploys a crack team of uniformed operatives to tool about in little rubber dinghies. No one seems all that surprised to find out that it's that damn kid's fault for bringing an egg with him from the countryside when he and his mom moved to Tokyo, then just going and dumping it in the sewer. Despite the fact that this kid has actually caused as much damage to Tokyo as Godzilla, everyone seems happy to just pat him on the head and go, "Get on outta here, ya little scamp!" as if flooding Tokyo and causing billions of dollars of damage was about as serious as the time Spanky was trying to scare Buckwheat and accidentally freed a gorilla from the local zoo. This kid really needs to be chased by those monkey-faced space agents from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. The first chance to use the black hole gun, or Dimension Tide as they call it, comes when Godzilla wanders up onto the beach of a sparsely populated island. Unfortunately, the bugs show up as well, fouling up the targeting computer and generally annoying the hell out of Godzilla as they poke him with their stinger and suck energy out of his body. Dimension Tide fails to hit its mark, and eventually Godzilla just heads back into the water. Luckily, they can track him since, in one of the movie's cooler scenes, Kiriko actually scales his back while they are in the ocean and plants a tracking device on him. Unfortunately, Godzilla decides a more populated area would be fun to visit, and you don't really need a tracking device to tell you when Godzilla has entered Tokyo. As you would expect, a big bug shows up, the Megaguiras, and has to fight with Godzilla. Godzilla wants that plasma energy, and Megaguiras wants that Godzilla energy. Well, whatever, so long as it gets our pals together for a couple big battles while the G-Graspers ho and hum and try to target their little black hole gun. You should pretty much know the drill from here on out. All in all, Godzilla vs. Megaguiras is a fun film, certainly a more interesting adventure than the previous Godzilla 2000. I compared it to the films of the 1970s, which of course would make some people groan. I, on the other hand, always loved how full of action, hijinks, and color they were. This movie is a return to that sort of action-adventure spirit. Godzilla is still a menace, but at the same time it's given more of a character than it has shown in most of the more recent films. It even breaks out the classic "Godzilla move that makes you groan with laughter" tradition when Godzilla delivers a flying body press to Megaguiras. There's a lot of monster wrestling in here, just like the good ol' days. The 1990s "heisei" series relied far too much on "beam weapon" warfare, resulting in Godzilla and his foe standing at opposite ends of the screen shooting pretty lights at each other. This time around, we get down and dirty with some solid, old school grappling, and that's a big plus in my book. Also a big plus is the latest Godzilla design. He looks boss, not to mention bad-ass. Very ferocious-looking. Now if we can just avoid the seemingly inevitable urge on Toho's part to inject a cutesy super-deformed baby Godzilla into later films. While Godzilla may look sharper than ever, the same can't be said for Megaguiras. On the surface, there's nothing overly wrong with the monster design. It's okay looking, based loosely on the Megaguiron from the original Rodan. But it lacks any real character, as all big monsters tend to. Megaguiras is an improvement over Orga from Godzilla 2000, but there's still no real depth to the monster that makes it memorable. I keep hoping for a new Ghidrah (instead of them just always falling back on Ghidrah when all else fails - he's the Borg of the Godzilla universe), or even a new Gigan, but all I get is a bunch of Gimantises and Spigas. Adding to Megaguiras' lack of any real appeal is the fact that after all these years, Toho is no better in 2001 than they were in the 1960s at making a believable flying monster. Sure, they're okay when they are gliding or just lounging about, but the minute those huge wings start shakily flapping at a rate of about one flap every thirty seconds, things start to look silly, even for a Godzilla film. Megaguiras is actually a couple steps back in this regard, and there are several times when he just seems to be hanging there, motionless in the air, not moving his wings even a lick. It's just lazy looking. I know it's a giant dragonfly, and dragonflies can hover like the dickens, but in doing so they flap their wings about a hundred thousand times a second (don't quote me on that). Megaguiras goes for the more laid back "a couple times every few minutes" approach to hovering. Confounding this is the fact that from time to time, they throw in some computer animation to give Megaguiras super-fast and realistically beating wings. This is his special attack, allowing him to dart to and fro just like a tinier dragonfly, but it looks great, reflects nature, and should have been the rule rather than the exception. I guess a taste of an advance in Toho flying technology is better than nothing at all, but a boy can dream, can't he? The worst part is how Megaguiras can somehow fly right and left without moving his wings at all, topped only by the scene where Godzilla catches Megaguiras' tail, thus causing the big bug to completely freeze in mid-air. Maybe shooting all those black holes around did more damage to the local gravity than people thought. Speaking of computer animation, like Godzilla 2000, this movie relies on it heavily, at least relative to Godzilla films. The CGI in Godzilla 2000 was pretty bad, especially in the case of the UFO and a few other key parts. Toho may not be ILM yet, but they certainly learned something between films. For the most part, the CGI on display avoids being embarrassing. There are a few weak moments, specifically some very slow-moving and video game looking fighter jets. One of the great mysteries of the world is why people would develop multi-processor supercomputers and $10,000 a user software packages, then devote days upon days of time for some computer programmer to painstakingly render in CGI a series of effects that are nearly as believable as what Eiji Tsubaraya did with models back in the 1960s. There's also a weird slo-mo effect that looks like that "step by step" sort of slo-mo you get on consumer VCRs rather than actual slow motion. Other than a few weak spots, though, the CGI is pulled off well, which is fitting for a movie that, other than a few weak spots, is itself pulled off pretty well. Sure there is an annoying kid, but he's not that annoying - unless you happen to work in the Akihabara district, that is. The other characters are bland but inoffensive. Kiriko at least has some character, but everyone else is pretty much there to fulfill a stereotype. The sloppy young computer genius. The dastardly old scientist. The benevolent old scientist. The nameless military guy who barks orders into a walkie-talkie for the entire film - you know the cast. I really hope that future Godzilla films continue to rediscover the influences of the previous films and give us some cool characters. Not since the 1970s have we had any human characters worth talking about. There have been no Nick Adamses or Akira Takarada's. There hasn't even been anyone to match the ambiguously gay suaveness of those two guys from Godzilla vs. Megalon or the hippy, karate girl,a nd cartoonish from Godzilla vs. Gigan. There certainly haven't been any Robert Dunhams or Kumi Mizunos. We've had a fairly bland parade of pretty but uninteresting human characters who neither add nor detract from the film around them, which is a shame. Sure, there was Miki the psychic girl in all the "heisei" films, but she wasn't really interesting. She was just driven into our memory through repetition. I'd like to see subsequent films give us a cool cast again. Okay, so we did have that M-11 android in Godzilla vs. King Ghidrah. Plotwise, it's business as usual and slightly less so. Toho definitely has the scriptwriters on cruise control here. Characters are, as I said, flat, and there's no real underlying message here other than the usual Godzilla fare of "don't ruin the planet," which is a given. At least the characters this time around are given some sort of motivation, lifting them beyond the characters from the last film, but there's still not a whole lot going on in the plot department -- not that this is a bad thing. Not every movie can be as multi-layered as Citizen Kane or as complex and plot-heavy as, say, Girls Gone Wild: Sexy Sorority Sweethearts, and while Godzilla vs. Megaguiras takes a very straight-forward approach to its somewhat idiotic plot, it is at least well-paced. The final scorecard sees Godzilla vs. Megaguiras skewed ever so slightly toward the positive side, however. It's not a work of art, but it's a monster fest that delivers with gusto and spirit that help elevate it above the obvious and voluminous short-comings in budget, plot, and acting. Labels: Country: Japan, Science Fiction: Kaiju, Series: Godzilla, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 4:49 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, April 20, 2002Foul King
2000, South Korea. Starring Song Kang-ho, Chang Jin-young Park, Sang-myeon, Cheong Wung-in, Song Young-chang, Chang Hang-seon, Lee Won-jong, Kim Su-ro. Directed by Kim Ji-wun.
More and more, it's looking like Korea is where the action is. While the United States continues to pump out wildly overblown, obnoxious blockbusters that are hardly worth mentioning (and don't even bother with telling me how they are "visually stunning"), and Hong Kong continues to counter every good film with a dozen nightmarishly awful ones, Korea has been quietly building a steadily growing international cult following by giving us intense horror and action films that boast the polish of a big budget film but don't skimp on plots, characters, writing, and other things deemed completely unimportant in this day and age of the never ending parade of shallow, slapdash crap that gets by on being "a feast for the eyes." In Korea, they seem to realize that you can kick some serious stylistic ass while not forgoing quality writing and dramatic punch. Movies like Shiri, Nowhere to Hide, and Joint Security Area have blown all other recent action films out of the water while twisted Korean horror films like Memento Mori and Tell Me Something do as much to revitalize the anemic horror film market (unless Valentine was your idea of quality horror) as the aforementioned action films did for their own genres. And then you have action-comedies like Attack the Gas Station that strike a perfect balance between thrills and laughs. Throughout the world, Korean films are making waves, and the attention is very much deserved. Korea has one of the only domestic film markets that isn't completely dominated by American movies, where the domestic fare can actually nab the number one spot. When I was in Japan recently, there were only two Asian films playing amid an onslaught of big budget American crap -- the Japanese anime feature Metropolis and the Korean blockbuster Joint Security Area. Throughout Europe, Korean films are consistently garnering critical praise and awards. And America, as usual, completely missed the boat. Just as this country caught on to Jackie Chan after every single country in the world already considered him old news, just as we started digging the Hong Kong new wave years after the tide went out, so too are we dragging our feet on catching onto the fact that the Koreans are kicking some serious cinematic ass right now. I guess the lack of attention to plots and logic in deference to advancing the technology of film presentation has paid off. Our Dolby 5.1 DSS home theaters cranked to eleven insure than we'll hear nothing but the mindless blather of the latest Michael Bay abomination. There's a reason that you can find more people reviewing the quality of a DVD than the quality of the film on the DVD. Well, ya get what you deserve, and frankly, I'm never one to mourn the ignorance of the masses. It's their loss, and as long as countries like Hong Kong continue to bring cheap Korean film DVDs to me, I don't really need my own country getting involved. After all, we'd only edit out half the material, dub it, and replace the original score with a compilation of P. Diddy and Linkin Park songs. The less said about how we treat most Hong Kong films, the better. The Foul King was box-office champ in Korea, and it's a great example of what's making these films so popular with everyone except the people who thought American Pie II was funniest shit they'd ever seen. Song Kang-ho stars as Dae-ho, a stressed-out loan officer who is plagued by two problems at work. First, he's one of the two worst employees in the whole bank. Second, his boss is an abusive, overbearing ass who likes to prove his points about the cutthroat nature of life by sneaking up on Dae-ho and slapping on a vicious headlock. But our beleaguered hero's woes don't end there. The teenage thugs who hang out on his route back home enjoy beating him up and chasing him. His father constantly harasses him about being such a twit, and the co-worker upon whom he has a crush doesn't even realize he's alive, despite the fact he sits only a chair or two down from her. His only solace from the many trials of life comes in the form of watching professional wrestling. Hoping to find a way of breaking his boss' headlock, Dae-ho seeks the advice of a tae kwan do expert, but the best the guy can do is brag about how a true master of tae kwan do would never get in such a predicament, but if he did, he'd just deliver a series of sweeping or over-the-head kicks to free himself. Dae-ho, of course, finds this advice of little help, especially since the master himself is incapable of actually performing any of these kicks. When Dae-ho is thrown out of a meeting for trying to sneak in late, he wanders the streets and ends up outside a run-down gymnasium advertising that it will train professional wrestlers. Dae-ho is interested but too chicken to go in at first. Eventually, he works up the courage, or is at least overwhelming frustrated by his boss' headlocks, and he enters. The gym isn't much to look at, and neither are the only two students, both out of shape and about as graceful as two stoned orangutans attempting to perform an interpretational dance that captures the spirit of an exploding building. Only slightly more impressive is the gym's owner and primary coach, a down on his luck, out of shape has-been who, in his day, had been one of the most popular cheating heel wrestlers of all time, Ultra Tiger Mask. Age and bad financial decisions have not been kind to him, however, and he spends his days now slurping instant ramen and drinking cheap beer in the back of the gym. Dae-ho, however, is undaunted by the ghetto nature of the gym, and begs the coach to take him on as a student, or at least teach him how to get out of a headlock. If he can just learn that, then he'll be able to best his boss, and surely things will turn around for him. The coach, however, is less than impressed with the clumsy, somewhat doughy young man and tells him to get lost. Dae-ho is heart-broken, but he's also undeterred. When the coach gets a visit from a big-time promoter on the Korean pro wrestling circuit, things change. The big-time guy represents the hottest young prospect in Korea, Yubiho, who is looking to make a name for himself by breaking into the international big leagues via the Japanese pro wrestling scene. What Yubiho needs for an upcoming match is a good heel to play off of, a dastardly wrestler who specializes in cheating. The promoter gives the coach the script for the match and tell shim he better come up with someone. Knowing that his two current students, Taebaik and Odai are about as useful as a couple sacks of potatoes in the ring, he decided to give Dae-ho a try. Unfortunately, Dae-ho isn't exactly an in-ring wonder, and they have little time to give him any formal training. The coach's drop-dead cute daughter, Min-young, is his principal teacher, which Dae-ho is skeptical of until she throws him to the ground and slaps an excruciating armbar on him. She does the best she can with him, and slowly but surely everyone realizes that Dae-ho's not half bad once he gets the hang of things, especially since his primary function will be to stumble around, cower, and cheat. He makes his in-ring debut at a lo-fi indy event against one of the other students, and things go well up until the point Dae-ho, who is given the ring persona of The Foul King, accidentally grabs a real fork instead of the painted wooden prop fork he's supposed to use. He plunges the fork into his opponent's forehead, which promptly erupts in a shockingly gory spray of blood. The film shows that it was written by someone who was a wrestling fan, or at least knew enough about wrestling to site Abdullah the Butcher as the undisputed master of using forks in the ring. All this is well and good, but Dae-ho is still unable to escape his boss' headlock, and he's still unable to attract the attention of his co-worker. He's also too much of a dolt to recognize the fact that his dream girl is Min-young. And yeah, his dad still picks on him. When Dae-ho discovers the coach's old Ultra Tiger Mask mask, he decides to adopt it as his own. Hoping that it will help him find the same courage outside the ring that he has inside, he dons the mask and hits the streets. His first stop is to soundly kick the asses of the young punks who picked on him earlier. Subsequent efforts to talk to his father while wearing the mask and to his co-worker Miss Jin don't go as well, as both people think he's crazy or drunk. Complicating things is the fact that Dae-ho realizes that he's actually talented enough in the ring to be more than a cheating comedy wrestler. If he was given the chance to prove himself, he could really shine. His chance comes the night of his match against Yubiho, a lean, muscular high flyer. It's The Foul King's first match beyond the county fair indy circuit, and even though Yubiho wants to stick to a well-plotted script for the match, Dae-ho is determined to turn it into something more than a showcase for his opponent. What's most striking about this film is that it is very conventional while at the same time being very subversive in how it handles the conventions. There are plenty of cliches here -- the young hero who is so blinded by his crush on an unobtainable and ultimately shallow woman that he fails to see the dream girl right under his nose, the washed up coach with one last shot at training someone for glory, the big final match. A brief description of The Foul King makes it sound very conventional indeed. But it's how it handles the conventions that really sets it apart. The film never really gives you the convenience of a nicely wrapped up closure of events. In the end, Dae-ho and Min-young still have not hooked up. His final match, while spectacular, goes the way of Rocky for him. And his final confrontation with his boss, while hilarious, is not exactly what Dae-ho was hoping for. In this way, the film manages to rise above conventions and deliver something fresh and consistently funny. You know what is supposed to happen in this sort of film, but you never know if what is supposed to happen is what will actually happen. The characters are wonderful, as are the actors who play them. Song Kang-ho is impossible not to like and root for as the goofball loser Dae-ho, especially since he rarely gets what he wants. The supporting characters are well developed, with the abusive boss being the best. He's just over-the-top enough so that you really despise him, but he's not so cartoonish that he becomes simply laughable. He's just a dick, plain and simple, and a very believable one at that, which makes you cheer for Dae-ho all the harder. Min-young and the rest of the down-and-out indy wrestlers are great as well. The movie is a perfect blend of romance, action, and comedy, with all three ingredients well prepared. This is one of the only slapstick films I've seen where slapstick comic violence results in very lifelike bloodshed. It's like watching an episode of the Three Stooges where Shemp would get stuck in the head with a fork, and instead of just yelling "Oww!" a splattering of blood would gush from the wound as he passed out and had to be hauled to the back. It's just another way the film manages to shock you by giving you something very run-of-the-mill but presenting it in a way that catches you completely off-guard. Most of the action is, of course, in the ring. For the most part,t he wrestling is humorously bad, just as it is supposed to be. Odai and Taebaik look like every out of shape wrestler on the indy circuit who can't even be has-beens because there never were nor will be in the first place. Unlike American movies that focus on the world of professional wrestling, The Foul King is very accurate in its portrayal of the seedy, harsh, and often destitute lives most wrestlers endure. While certainly focusing on the comedic aspects of such a life, it never fails to treat the dedication of wrestlers and the wrestling business with anything but respect, which is a breath of fresh air. Wrestling in Korea is more like it is in Japan -- ie, far less antics and skits and far more technical wrestling -- but certain aspects of the indy circuit are the same no matter where you go. The movie also treats the wrestling (and cinema) fans with respect. Despite the fact that even the lowliest country yokel (who I think might be me, actually) recognizes that wrestling is a scripted event (which is something different that being "fake," but I'm not really in the mood for that debate at the moment), the few American movies made regarding the subject still maintain kayfabe -- the illusion that pro wrestling is real, that the outcomes of matches are not predetermined. The Foul King acknowledges the fact that we're not complete dolts, and that exposing the fact that wrestling is scripted is hardly a shocking revelation. At the same time, it deftly deals with the fact that being scripted and being trained doesn't mean the matches don't abuse the wrestlers. As pretty much anyone who has looked even slightly beyond the mainstream media condescension can tell you, wrestlers -- especially indy wrestlers -- bust their asses, and no matter how well you know how to take a bump, coming off the top rope onto a concrete floor hurts. It hurts a lot. We go into the match between The Foul King and Yubiho knowing it's scripted, like most any wrestling match is, but we also see, in a very accurate way, that the match still involves two dedicated workers getting the unholy hell beaten out of them. It's gritty, bloody, and very true to what lo-fi wrestling is like in real life. You don't have to know a lot about the Korean independent wrestling circuit to enjoy this movie. In fact, a few bones are thrown the way of American wrestling fans. There's the aforementioned tribute to Abdullah the Butcher as well as a scene in which Dae-ho studies backdropping techniques by watching a match between Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker. In fact, not only do you not have to be well-versed with the ins and outs of small time wrestling promotions in Korea; you don't need to be a wrestling fan at all, though it helps. At the heart of the wrestling action are characters and situations to which anyone can relate. The final match between Dae-ho as The Foul King and Yubiho is actually quite spectacular. Dae-ho pulls out all the stops and, while technically sticking to the general outline of the script, really forces himself and Yubiho to turn it up several notches. They deliver a veritable match of the year to everyone's surprise, going from comedy antics to high flying to brutal brawling and hardcore death match style abuse. In the end, The Foul King does his job, so to speak, but there's no doubt he's turned a few heads in doing so. I know my head was turned by The Foul King. It's funny, touching, well-crafted, and even brutal at times. Song Kang-ho also refused to use stunt doubles for the wrestling matches, even though it would have been easy to do so since he wore a mask. Instead, he got a serious taste of method acting by going through wrestling training himself and learning to do some pretty high-risk style moves. That's the icing on the cake, really, as this movie, like a slew of other recent Korean hits, delivers everything I want in a movie that I'm not getting from anywhere else. It has warmth, charm, a bunch of wrestling, and most importantly, a well-written story populated by believable, sympathetic, well-constructed characters. It's a dynamite film that will please anyone looking for a fun time at the movies, and wrestling fans should be doubly impressed since the movie handles their often insulted and laughed at business with an understanding, respect, and energy that I don't think even wrestling promotions can muster these days. Labels: Action: Luchadores, Country: Korea, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 1:11 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, January 20, 2002Versus
2000, Japan. Starring Tak Sakaguchi, Kenji Matsuda, Hideo Sakaki. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
It's no big secret that horror films, while enjoying something of a mainstream revival, are looking pretty abysmal. Everything that gets made, at least here in the good ol' US of A, baby, consists of disturbingly similar looking young stars acting like utter buffoons while some seemingly indestructible slasher stalks and dispatches them in ludicrous and surprisingly bloodless fashion. Stop me if this sounds familiar. The big difference between the current slasher film trend and the original that started with films like Halloween and Friday the 13th is that the first batch at least contained a couple of the originators of the genre. The current bunch of yahoos are ripping off the rip-offs, and that's never a good sign. But while we're stuck enduring the likes of Valentine and Urban Legend: Final Cut, Japan has been quietly - and sometimes not so quietly - taking over the helm as the premiere home for horror. Whether it's by just doing the age-old traditions correctly or by creating something brand new, Japan has become a haven for people who want more from their horror films than carbon copy scripts, a hot new soundtrack of industrial/hip-hop/metal, and twenty-year-old clones all formed from strands of James Van Der Beek's and Jennifer Love Hewitt's DNA. Among the many aspects of horror of which the Japanese have become the caretakers is the zombie film. As we've lamented elsewhere, no one save the occasional deranged fan seems all that interested in making zombie movies anymore. There is something apparently unmarketable about the entire concept, even though all horror films these days seem to have a soundtrack containing at least one track by Rob Zombie. His last name and popularity has not, unfortunately, translated into similar success for the zombie film. On one hand, I suppose I should be thankful that I don't have to see my most beloved of horror subgenres done up as a film starring Denise Richards and any number of indistinguishable male leads from popular shows on the WB. On the other hand, it'd be nice if a few underground film makers remembered the genre, or at least some grumpy Italians. But if Japan has become the sole guardian of the zombie film, then at least they are in very good hands. With films like Junk, Wild Zero, and most recently Versus, Japan has been not just keeping the zombie film alive (or at least undead), it's been reinventing the whole concept without disrespecting the traditions we've come to know and love. The Japanese approach, influenced by everything from Resident Evil video games to Evil Dead, and of course George Romero's "Dead" trilogy, has been to approach the zombie subgenre as much as an action film as a horror film. While still maintaining the Romero style look and behavior of most zombies, they've also thrown in kungfu-powered super-zombies and Guitar Wolf flinging glowing guitar picks into the skulls of undead legions. The movies have proven that, while Japanese filmmakers know their material, they also know that they have to put a new twist on it to keep it fresh. Versus, a zombie masterpiece directed by first-timer Ryuhei Kitamura, will invariably be compared to Wild Zero, also made by a first time film director, Tetsuro Takeuchi. Both are completely over the top in ways no one else ever dreamed of going over the top. Both are possessed of a hyperactive insanity and relentless pace. Both are full of zombies, and both ooze with cool. But where Wild Zero draws its charm and energy from likeable characters, sweet romances, and rock and roll cool, Versus relies entirely on high style and complete bad-assness, making it an altogether different kind of movie in that sense, though no less successful and certainly no less enjoyable. The movie opens in feudal Japan with a battered samurai facing off against a gang of shambling, sword-wielding zombies. Immediately establishing a kinetic, Hong Kong style approach to the action, the samurai butchers his way through the undead only to come face to face with their apparent master, a wicked human priest. The samurai charges valiantly only to find himself sliced in two. If that's not a good way to start a film off, I don't know what is. Skip ahead a couple hundred years to the present. Two convicts are running through the woods after being sprung from prison. They soon meet up with their benefactors -- a gang of stylish young yakuza so utterly and completely cool that they punctuate most of their actions with frequent "cool yakuza" poses. Sometimes, movies are cool. Sometimes, movies try so hard to be cool that they look ludicrous. And sometimes, movies push their ludicrous cool so far over the edge that they become cool again. Mere words can't express just how bad-ass everything in this film ends up being. One of the cons is happy to see the young yakuza, who look like spoofs of the various characters from the Hong Kong Young and Dangerous films. The other con, prisoner KSC2-303, is more suspicious of their motivations. After all, he doesn't even know them. Why would they bust him out of prison? When he discovers that they also have a kidnapped girl in their car, he promptly breaks out in some amazingly cool kung-fury, resulting in him ending up with a gun, the girl, and a yakuza hostage. The choreography for the fights is pure Hong Kong madness. Anyone who has followed Japanese cinema knows that they have traditionally been fairly lackluster in their action choreography, never having become masters of it quite the way the folks in Hong Kong were. Well, all that's changing, and Versus is a perfect example of where it's being taken. Ultra-fast, acrobatic, brutal, and simply stunning to behold. As is wont to happen when people are pointing guns at one another out in the woods, two people end up dead: one yakuza and the other convict. Unfortunately for everyone else, they don't stay dead. Mere minutes after finding themselves with brand new bullets in their brains, they're back up and ready to do more damage to whoever is most convenient. Everyone is fairly startled, but no startled that they can't continue to pump the recently reanimated zombies full of lead while KSC2-303 and the girl make their escape into the forest. One yakuza, their resident kungfu bad-ass, pursues while the others mill about, make plans, and try to figure out what the hell just happened. No one has any names in this, so we'll just refer to them as the leader (ultracool guy in ugly lime shirt), the weasel (little guy who whimpers and panics a lot), and the smart guy. He may not actually be smart, but he has long hair and wears spectacles and a sweater. The first plan is to simply haul ass out of any forest where corpses suddenly spring back to life. The leader puts a damper on that plan by insisting that they must wait for the big leader, the guy who told them to free KSC2-303 and kidnap the girl in the first place. As the yakuza stand around hoping nothing more will happen, the weasel has the realization that they have just wandered into the forest meadow where they like to bury all their murder victims. Before you can say "uh-oh," dozens of zombie yakuza are bursting forth from their shallow graves. Like your traditional zombies, they are slow, decayed, and tend to moan and stagger a lot. Unlike your traditional zombies, these guys haven't forgotten how to use their guns! Why they would be buried with fully loaded weapons, and why those weapons would still work after being buried in the dirt for months, possibly even years, is a stupid question to ask in the context of this film. I mean, they're zombies! Rising from the grave with fully loaded, fully operational pistols should be the least of your reality concerns. The yakuza take to an ultra-gory battle with the zombies while KSC2-303 and the kungfu yakuza bash one another senseless not too far away. Their fight leads them back to the meadow, and everyone stops fighting each other long enough to fight the zombies. Then, of course, it's back to fighting each other. Elsewhere, two completely insane cops are hot on the trail of the escaped convicts. One of the cops, Officer, apparently lost his hand during the escape. The other, Fighter, is simply crazy as a shithouse bat and keeps ranting about his invincible kungfu while all the while seeming very much like Jeffery Combs at his most gloriously manic. Must be the hair. The cops aren't above indiscriminately murdering innocent bystanders, either, if it gets them a new car. As the madness continues, the leader yakuza finally finds the second group of yakuza, this one mostly ultra-sexy females predisposed to the same habit of striking super-slick poses for no particular reason other than looking incredibly cool. With them is the main leader, who we quickly recognize as the same guy playing the wizard from the beginning of the film. When he learns that KSC2-303 and the girl are both at large somewhere in the woods, he decides his first course of action will be to slaughter every single yakuza he brought with him, thus turning them into a legion of super-powered undead gangsters. Only one woman, an ultra bad-ass kungfu fighter, escapes his murderous frenzy. It is through him that we learn the woods are known in ancient legend as the Resurrection Forest for obvious reasons already illustrated. We also learn that he is indeed the self-same wizard from the opening of the film, a long-lived demon who has waited five-hundred years for his ancient samurai rival and his ancient princess to reincarnate at overlapping times. He needs the blood from both of them to open a portal to hell that will grant him some unspeakable power. KSC2-303, of course, is the reincarnation of the samurai hero, while the girl is the princess. They have no intention of going down without one of the goriest, most insane fights you'll ever see on film. Meanwhile, those nutty cops and the female kungfu bad-ass are still running wild as well. And that, my friends, is it. The plot is simple despite a few supernatural embellishments. The entire film is basically one very well-done, highly stylized action sequence after another, with a heavy peppering of spoofing throughout. KSC2-303 is the ultimate bad-ass anti-hero. In one of the film's best moments, he offs a gangster zombie, bends down, picks up a pair of sunglasses, then slides them on as bad-ass music plays. The girl then gives him a "what the hell are you doing?" look, and he promptly takes the glasses off. The film is full of clever touches like that, managing to provide ultra-slick action while lampooning it as well. Versus delights in poking fun at the stylish absurdities of every action film that was written as a rip-off of John Woo, but does so with such gusto and reckless abandon that it also manages to outdo them all in sheer style and suaveness. There was hardly any budget for this film, and what little there was went primarily to the special effects, which range from very good to mind-blowing (sometimes literally). A mixture of old-fashioned squibs, fake blood, and make-up effects combine with expertly done fight choreography and wire effects to cook up an endless parade of exploding heads and guts, buckets upon buckets of blood, and even homages to gore classics like the hole in the head from The Beyond and the shotgun hole through the gut from Cannibal Apocalypse. To free up as much money for effects as they could, the entire film is shot using relative unknowns and a single inexpensive location: the forest. The technical mastery and slickness of the film prevent it from looking cheap, however, and while it may be confined to a single primary location, it's a big location that provides for a fair amount of variation in scenery. Occasional flashbacks to the back story involving the wizard, the princess, and the samurai further allow the director to make the most of his one location so that by the end, you hardly even notice. Not that I would care much, anyway. Many of my favorite horror films -- Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead -- restrict themselves to no more than a few locations. Some truly gorgeous cinematography further allows the director to make the most the situation and avoid ending up with a movie that looks cheap. The acting really shines. No one has a name, as I said, which in itself is a wonderful spoof of horror films where characters are often completely forgettable and only have names as a matter of formality. The weakest link is the girl who plays the reincarnation of the princess, but she's still quite capable. Tak Sakaguchi as KSC2-303 plays a subtle, grim-faced cool that we haven't seen the likes of since Clint Eastwood hung up his six-shooter and started making movies for fans of the Lifetime network. The director claims he found Tak Sakaguchi on the streets in the middle of a real-life fist-fight with rival youth gangsters and realized he'd be perfect for the part! Wielding samurai swords, shotguns, and even a massive artillery cannon, he is so completely bad-ass that he's off the scale. The evil wizard exudes quiet cool as well. The cop Fighter is absolutely hilarious. Everyone else is there to get turned into zombies. Musically, the movies sounds like a video game. Lots of techno and instrumental drum-n-bass stuff, or whatever. I guess there are lots of different subgenres for that stuff, but I don't know any of them. While I wouldn't rush out and buy the soundtrack, it works amazingly well within the context of the movie, sort of like all the techno that was in Run Lola Run. It lends an even more surreal feel to the film, removing it that much further from any reality with which you or I might be familiar. Versus is a perfect example of "reinventing the legend." Too often, that term is used incorrectly by people who aren't reinventing anything. They are completely throwing out the old and making up their own nonsense. Versus, on the other hand, showcases a great knowledge of the zombie and action film lore that came before it and constantly tweaks it and pumps it full of adrenaline without ever showing disrespect. And it's nice to finally see a zombie film that doesn't involve people rushing to the nearest building and boarding themselves in. Clocking in at very near a full two hours with very little plot, many have said the film could use some editing, which it may well get when it finally sees full release. I don't agree with those who feel the movie needs trimming. Maybe I'm just more patient, but there wasn't a single time when I felt bored or wanted to move things along. The movie maintains a breakneck pace from start to finish, and at least in my opinion, it does not falter. There is a lot more crammed into the story and the action than is evident perhaps on the first viewing. A simple plot should not be mistaken for no plot or for a bad a plot. And the visual jokes are so plentiful that you have to keep going back again and again, not that I mind doing that. Versus is among the very few films I watched, then immediately watched again. As if all this complete and utter insanity wasn't enough, Versus also manages to be the first film in I can't remember how long that has a shock ending that is actually shocking as opposed to idiotic, that actually serves as a wonderfully appropriate and unexpected punctuation mark rather than seeming like some lame-brained after-thought tacked on to open the door for a potential sequel. The shock ending, of course, is a time-honored, or at least heavily abused, tradition of the horror film. Almost none of them make it work. Halloween pulled it off, but those since then have been few and far between. The Ring, though I don't know if I consider the end of that film to be a "shock" ending so much as it is just a creepy one. Most shock endings have no basis in reality at all, and are simply slapped on without complete disregard for logic and total contempt for the intelligence of the audience. Friday the 13th films provide us the most numerous examples (gee, is Jason gonna jump out of the lake for no reason again?), but my favorite recent example was Tim Burton's disastrous Planet of the Apes, which posses a shocking twist ending so mind-numbingly stupid that it'll almost make you look favorably on censorship so long as it is applied to Planet of the Apes. When asked about it, Tim Burton obviously had no explanation, which makes sense, as there is no explanation for it. It was a moronic ending. Being the director though, he couldn't say, "Yeah, it was stupid." So instead he got all pissy and complained that not everything could be explained, that some things are there to "make you think." Of course, what it does is make you think the director and the scriptwriters were complete dolts. But I digress. Versus comes up with the most ingenious way to spoof the shocking twist ending cliché: by making it work. As if the movie hadn't already given us so much, it ends things on an amazing note with one of the best twist endings in the last twenty years. It's really the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the melted fudge on top of the delicious clown sundae. I can't say I like Versus quite as much as Wild Zero. I prefer Wild Zero's developed and lovable characters and rock-n-roll lessons. Junk, another Japanese yakuza versus zombies film, was fun on its own terms, but it's really been outclassed by Wild Zero and Versus. But as I said, Versus is a very different type of movie despite being possessed of the same wild energy and anarchic spirit. It's really not fair to compare it to anything else, because frankly, nothing else compares, and no other movie quite like it has ever been made. Or rather, lots of movies like it have been made, but never crammed all together into one movie with this much total insanity running rampant. Fans of action and zombies will be delighted. Fans of low-budget filmmaking will marvel at how much this film delivers with so little money with which to work. And fans of spirited, no-holds-barred fun films will be overjoyed beyond the capacity for words. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 3:09 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, November 18, 2001China Strike Force
2000, Hong Kong. Starring Aaron Kwok, Norika Fujiwara, Mark Dacascos, Lee-Hom Wang, Coolio, Ruby Lin, Ken Lo Directed by Stanley Tong. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
Stanley Tong sucks. I don't make such sophisticated statements without some degree of deliberation and thought, and after years of giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm left with no alternative than to pass judgement on this Hong Kong director, and my judgement is that I could never see another Stanley Tong film in my life, and I wouldn't be all that upset. Any number of things about his work annoy me, but first and foremost is his ability to make even the most dynamic stars completely uninteresting and dull. I mean, this is the guy who had Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Lo, and Yuen Wah together in the same film (Police Story III: Supercop) and made them all incredibly disappointing. Oh sure, Michelle did the stunt where she jumped the motorcycle onto the moving train, and that was cool and all, but ten seconds out of a ninety minute film hardly justifies the tedium. What kind of fool puts Jackie Chan and Yuen Wah in the same film and doesn't think to stage a fight scene? Or Jackie Chan and Ken Lo? Or Jackie Chan and anybody? He might as well not have even been in that movie. Tong went on to make Rumble in the Bronx, one of the most ludicrous of all Jackie's films, and redeemed himself slightly with the above-average Police Story IV: First Strike. But then he made Mr. Magoo, and it was all over. China Strike Force was supposed to be his big comeback film, his grand return to Hong Kong, and at least financially, he was successful. The movie made a lot of cash at a time when Hong Kong films are still recovering from an industry collapse that sent everyone reeling for a couple years. China Strike Force had a lot going for it. First, there was Aaron Kwok. For years, Kwok was plagued by his pretty-boy teen idol image. It held him back and kept him from ever being taken seriously as a legitimate action star. Now he's a few years older, the wrinkles are starting to show here and there, and while he may still be a handsome young lad, he starting to get the age and character that will enable him to finally break through. A few more pounds and a few more scars and he'll be set to join the Hong Kong action set without looking out of place among the traditionally grizzled veterans. And then there's Norika Fujiwara. You'd have to try real hard to find more of a knock-out than this woman. She is something else, to be sure. She was a model and a television actress in Japan before getting her big break in this film, and in getting her break, we've all received a break as well because she's drop dead gorgeous and not nearly as untalented as most other models-turned-actress. Throw in direct-to-video American action star Mark Dacascos, and you have one of the best-looking casts around. I've always thought Dacascos deserved to be a bigger star than he was. Why is a guy who moves this well, who can act at least halfway decent, and who is a striking guy to boot, going direct to video while guys like Seagal still plague our nation's theaters? It's unlikely at this point he'll ever catch his break. Instead he'll be doomed to a life not unlike Don "The Dragon" Wilson, which is at least a good doom. I wish I could be doomed to be pretty damn rich after making an endless string of low-budget action films. Maybe Dacascos will catch on overseas, but it seems unlikely. The movie itself has a pretty typical plot. Dacascos plays your run-of-the-mill young gangster guy who is intent on taking over the business, does not care for the tradition of honor, etc etc etc. These guys have been in about every gangster movie ever made in any country, but some old fart always trusts them, only to get shot in the back when the time is right. Aaron Kwok plays Darren, a hotshot cop who is always annoying his superiors. He has a partner who barely does enough memorable stuff to result in anyone remembering his name. He's only there to die, as in one of the most contrived scenes ever, even for an action film, the movie takes a break from all sorts of shooting and jumping about to feature a scene where Darren and his partner go out for dinner, and Darren asks his partner "So your wedding is soon?" They might as well flash up a big red "This guy is going to die!!!" subtitle. Everyone should know by now that in a cop film, the cop who is retiring, getting married, about to have a baby, or just bought a boat is always going to get wasted. It's a time-honored tradition. Handled properly, it can be kind of funny. Handled without any finesse whatsoever, as it is here, it's just plain annoying. As if that wasn't predictable enough, he's also marrying the chief's daughter. While the cops pal around, we learn that Dacascos plans to increase his underworld power by selling drugs. As is par for the course in this type of movie, the aging gangster who took Dacascos under his wing hates drugs and vows that his organization will never be a party to the selling of such foul goods. Extortion, murder, prostitution, slavery, gun smuggling -- these are all noble ventures, but drug peddling is right out. This news irks Dacascos' partner in America, played by hip hop star Coolio, who is apparently not a fan of Weird Al Yankovich. Coolio plays your very stereotypical jive-talkin', cigar-smokin' hustler who's only task in this movie is to say "Holy shit!" and "Cuz" or however you spell the slang for "cousin." He's pretty good at doing that, and luckily nothing else is demanded of him. To no one's surprise but the old guy, Dacascos plots with Coolio, who's character is actually named Coolio, to off the old man and take the business over. Also thrown into the mix is Norika, who is an undercover Interpol agent trying to get info on the old man's operation. Of course, no one knows she works for Interpol, as that is the general idea behind being undercover, but even someone who is still surprised by the plot twists in a Girls Gone Wild video can tell from her first scene that she's an undercover cop. One thing I like about a film like China Strike Force is that I don't have to worry about spoiling it for anyone. It's all so plodding and obvious that it's impossible to ruin any surprises. An underworld assassination at a big fashion show gives the film an excuse for two important things: a lot of sexy women parading about in skimpy panties, and the film's first action sequence, in which Aaron Kwok chases the assassin through the streets of Hong Kong using a variety of vehicles. At one point, Stanley Tong even has the gall to completely rip off the "moving motorcycle" stunt from Supercop, though he manages to screw it up more this time around by using a lot of wires to make the whole think look goofy instead of cool. The first action scene sets the stage for what you can expect from the rest of the movie: something just isn't right about it. Sure, there is a lot going on, but it just doesn't click. The wires are employed so they can go "over the top," but it winds up looking silly. In a fantasy film I don't mind wires and flying. In a reality-based action film, I think they look out of place but can still be used with great effect. In this, however, they are used very clumsily, and they detract greatly from the potential impact of what could have been cool fights and action sequences. Actually, now that I rewatch it, the first action sequence is the best one in the movie. It almost, but not quite, achieves a flow and, if nothing else is kind of cool because the assassin guy gets run over, hit by cars, punched, kicked, thrown off moving trucks, and even jumps off a giant bridge -- yet he still shows up later in the movie only to get killed in the most boring, mundane ways. Way to give us a potentially cool character then treat him like an afterthought. Thanks, Stanley. But far more than wires and missed character opportunities is the glaring problem that has plagued Stanley Tong's films since he first stepped behind the camera. He has no sense of pacing or rhythm. Tong started his career as a stuntman, and while we all know he can dream up and even perform some cool stunts, being able to properly film them is something else entirely. Tong's action sequences never find a groove. They always feel disjointed and, as a result, awkward and sloppy. Part of the problem here is that he's trying to make a kungfu action film with a cast that doesn't have much kungfu skill, but even that can't wash away Tong's own lack of directorial skill since he brought the same plodding sense of confusion to action scenes involving Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, both proven commodities. What it boils down to, then, is that Stanley Tong just isn't a very good director. Or rather, he's an astoundingly mediocre director who makes astoundingly mediocre movies. Anyway, lots of action film cliches follow. Rather than pay the assassin, who seems damn near indestructible and would seem to be a worthwhile investment, Coolio just kills the guy. Mark Dacascos does indeed kill the old guy and start selling drugs. Aaron Kwok's partner does indeed die tragically. Aaron falls for Norika and, in an attempt to give us more T&A, has a pointless, out-of-place daydream about massaging her thigh. I'm all for T&A, male and female, but come on. Put a little effort into working it into the film. I mean, they had the T&A scene where Norika infiltrates Dacascos' and Coolio's gang by showing up in a tiny string bikini then stripping down to nothing to prove she isn't wearing any wires or anything. That was an okay excuse for some T&A. Eventually, Aaron and Norika close in on Coolio and Dacascos so they can have the big action blow-out. Just as Stanley Tong can't direct an action scene, so too does he always blow the finale of his films. Supercop has both Yuen Wah and Ken Lo for Jackie and/or Michelle to fight, so they knock off both those guys in about one second in very offhand manners, and leave Jackie to face... an old guy. Police Story IV gives us an underwater fight scene -- funny but fairly disappointing - before having Jackie slip around with a fake shark. Then of course Rumble in the Bronx completely forgot to even have a finale, so we just get Jackie Chan driving a hovercraft to a final showdown with... another old guy. This is worse than when the big final scene in Game of Death ended up being Bruce Lee versus... Gig Young. At least Gig Young was middle aged. This time around, Tong tries to deliver an action-packed finale, but once again his own lack of skill as a director trips him and everyone else up. Mark Dacascos is a genuine martial arts bad-ass, or at least he can pull it off wonderfully on screen. So God forbid we include him in the final fight scene. No, let's kill him off in the usual goofy, offhand manner. Let's crush him with a purple pimp car dangling from a helicopter. Then let's have a huge kungfu fight between the three people with the least amount of kungfu skill. Aaron Kwok versus Mark Dacascos could have been pulled off, and with a different director, it might have even looked good. Coolio versus Aaron Kwok is about the stupidest damn fight scene I've seen in a long time, and that includes the fight scene in The Matrix where that woman jumps up in the air and strikes the most absurd looking "pouncing chicken" stance I've ever seen while she hovers and the camera pans around her. Since Coolio and Norika are no martial artists, and Aaron Kwok is a passable on-screen kungfu star at best, that means we have to have a big gimmick to make up for the lack of interesting fight choreography. Tong's answer? Have the whole fight scene take place on a teetering pane of glass dangling from a crane hundreds of feet up in the air. It might sound exciting at first, but think about it, and let me use this pro wrestling analogy. Many years ago, WCW had a pay-per-view match between the dull Dustin Rhodes and the even duller Blacktop Bully. The gimmick of the match was that the whole thing was going to take place on the trailer of a moving truck. It might have sounded cool at first, but the end result was two guys moving very, very slowly while trying to keep their balance as the truck barrelled down various lonely highways at speeds in excess of ten miles an hour. This finale is that wrestling match. Norika, Coolio, and Aaron all scoot about very gingerly while trying not to fall off the glass. From time to time, one person or another will dangle off the edge or try to kick someone. And then Coolio finally falls, but only after one false change of heart. You know, where the villain is about to die, begs the hero to save him, and once being saved, immediately reverts back to his dastardly ways. Heroes always fall for that shit. I mean, before you flew around with the purple pimpmobile dangling from a helicopter, he was selling crack to nine-year-old kids. Now all of a sudden he's maybe not that bad a guy? They only do this so the hero can kill the villain without looking like a murderer. How many action movies end with the hero refusing to kill the villain, only to have the villain suddenly produce some weapon, thus justifying the hero turning around and offing the guy? It's a weak-ass cop-out. People want their bloodlust satisfied, but you also can't just have a hero who hauls off and shoots people after beating their ass. In the end, Coolio falls off the thing and Norika and Aaron fall in love for no real reason. They were only together about two days, and most of that time was spent being hoisted around on wires and pretending Coolio knew kungfu. The big problem with China Strike Force is how amazingly average it is. It's impossible to completely blast it and say it's awful, because it's not. At the same time, it sure as hell ain't a good movie. It's just... bland. Poorly directed. Awkwardly paced. Horribly choreographed. Completely cliche. In the hands of Gordon Chan or Teddy Chan, this could have been a good movie. In the hands of someone as over-rated and incompetent as Stanley Tong, the movie never manages to rise above a mundane level. It takes a talented director to elevate poorly written action film nonsense into something memorable, and Tong does not have the tools for the task. As such, China Strike Force remains an unsatisfying, though not completely unentertaining, failure. Given the uninspired direction, the film's sundry flaws become impossible to ignore. The English language dialogue, of which there is quite a lot, is completely ludicrous. Who wrote this crap? I mean, it's English. I recognize the words, but it doesn't make any sense. It sounds like English that was spit out of one of those online translation things, that can get the vocabulary but fails utterly to comprehend nuances and grammatical rules. It also doesn't help that the dialogue was recorded at a level barely audible to dogs and mice, let alone humans. Whenever a piece of shit hip hop song plays -- and they play often -- suddenly it's like you have the volume on eleven, but when they go back to speaking, everything is silent again. Thus watching this movie is a constant battle with the volume control. I feel bad for people who don't have a remote control, because they're going to be running over to the television every ten seconds to readjust. I guess they mixed the dialogue so low because they knew what crap it was. Speaking of English, what the hell is up with Mark Dacascos' character? How are you going to become the lord of a vast Chinese criminal underworld if you don't speak a lick of Chinese? Even people of Chinese ancestry I know who grew up in America know at least a few words in their grandparents' tongue, but this guy doesn't know a single phrase. Surely the Chinese triads would not be overly accommodating of a new boss who murders other bosses, can't speak any Chinese, and brings Coolio along for the ride. The film's other big short-coming is, of course, the pacing. Stanley Tong can do no right when it comes to figuring out how to pace and stage an action sequence. He cuts when he should stay still, he shoots in close all the time so we can't see anything. He never finds a rhythm or a flow for the action. He loves to go over the top, but only in ways that are ludicrous rather than breathtaking. The many action scenes in this film range from pedestrian to lumbering. You spend the whole scene waiting for something to be done well, then all of a sudden it's over, leaving you with an empty feeling and no sense of satisfaction. And then sometimes it's all too ludicrous, even for a Hong Kong action film. When Dacascos and Coolio are down at the docks watching the boys unpack a Ferarri or one of them other fancy-ass sports cars, Aaron shows up and spoils the fun, leading to a completely unbelievable scene where Dacascos takes off in the sportscar and Aaron luckily happens upon a passing truck full of forumla one racecars which, despite the highly explosive nature, apparently ship fully gassed and ready to go. Of course, this all happens after the part in that first fight/chase scene where he rides a motorcycle up the flat vertical surface of a delivery truck's rear door. I think he repeats that nifty trick at the end of the movie as well. The finale, which is by and large a ripoff of the helicopter finale from Tong's earlier Supercop, is hardly the pay-off I was hoping for. It's not cool or original. It's just, well, stupid. From the whole "car dangling from the helicopter" bit, to Mark Dacascos being killed without ever facing off against the heroes, to the completely disjointed and uninteresting "fight" between Norika, Aaron, and Coolio, Tong certainly tries a lot of stuff, but none of it works. To add insult to injury, Tong's reliance on the most obvious and awkward of wire stunts makes it impossible to enjoy even on a visceral level. On the plus side, however, Norika looks great in her leathery fightin' outfit. The acting is passable, but the roles aren't very demanding. Aaron Kwok is coming along, and as I said before, in a few more years I think he'll be ready to shine, but right now he's not quite there physically or in his acting skill. Norika is basically there to look good and kick some ass, and she is great at both. When she has to act, it's only the shallowest of deals. Even a paperdoll could pull it off, so no complaints. Dacascos is alright, but if he's going to be a Chinese gangster, even one from America, he should have learned to fake his way through some Cantonese. Coolio is playing a stereotype, and you have to be really untalented not to pull that off. Everyone else is pretty forgettable. Aaron's partner is so bland that when he dies, you hardly notice. His fiance is every bit his match in blandness, so that even though she loses her future husband and her father, it really doesn't matter all that much. The movie punctuates this by completely blowing her off at the end in exchange for a kissing scene between Norika and Aaron, which of course comes out of nowhere. The only thing memorable about this film is how good it might have been if someone else had directed. As has always been the case, Stanley Tong was given all the pieces for a great film and just couldn't make them fit together. I should have come away beaming and saying "That was great!!!" Instead, I walked away slowly thinking, "Well, that was alright... I guess." Awkward drama, awkward comedy, and awkward action sequences are tenuously strung together in what proves to be a very average film. Sure, it's better than watching a Mario Van Peebles film, but with guys like Teddy Chan and Johnny To raising the bar and giving us enjoyable, well-made action films, Stanley Tong's lack of skill becomes even more glaring. He has no style, and he has no substance. In the end, China Strike Force, like most of his movies, is a bland and somewhat tedious exercise in paint-by-numbers film-making on the level of some of your better direct-to-video action films. I don't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever feel the need to watch it again. Labels: Action, Country: Hong Kong, Director: Stanley Tong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Aaron Kwok, Stars: Mark Dacascos, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 4:38 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, September 20, 2001Uzumaki
2000, Japan. Starring Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Ren Osugi, Hinako Saeki, Masami Horiuchi, Taro Suwa, Eun-Kyung Shin, Sadao Abe. Directed by Higuchinsky. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
I love fairy tales. Not the happily-ever-after Disney stuff that makes you feel good about yourself. Not the safe and sanitized nonsense that has come to represent the fairy tale in our more recent history. No, I'm talking the black stuff. dark and twisted, meant more to terrify children into sleepless nights than to lull them into a soothing night's slumber. Tales where the kids don't outsmart the witch, where they do end up in the oven, and no one lives happily ever after. Given our increasingly crass and cynical society, I would seem, at first, that this sort of twisted tale would be popular, but as they often require some degree of imagination and appreciation of both the subtle and the fantastic, most people would simply rather watch shit blow up or get the classic Disney ending. When someone does attempt to carry that sense of the macabre over into a modern day fairy tale, it can happen with mixed results. At their best, they come out looking like Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb or City of Lost Children. More often than not, however, they just come out looking Troll. In our recent review of the classic Japanese horror film Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, we talked about how, despite being a world away, Japanese horror draws on very similar, almost universal, elements of horror to lay on the scare. In a similar vein, there creepy fairy tale elements that exist above and beyond culture and geography and become part of globally understood and shared heritage. While in college, I was reading a book simply called Japanese Tales, that was a collection of bizarre Japanese fairy tales, and it struck me that, despite the fact that many of these existed as oral legends at a time long before Japan was in regular contact with the nations of the West, the stories were very similar in tone. Everyone understands a witch luring innocent youths into the woods, or monsters who take the form of humans. My favorite was about a woman who struggled much of her life with a tape worm. She managed to survive the parasite and eventually give birth to a young son who grew up to become a tremendously powerful general and leader of men. Great were his deeds, and he soon ruled the land. A neighboring warlord invited the great warrior to his court one day for a celebration of their new alliance. At the feast, the neighboring warlord offered up bushels of walnuts (or was it chestnuts?) for all to eat -- it was, after all, the commerce crop that kept his province prosperous. The great warrior, however, refused to eat the walnuts. When the host warlord grew angry and felt insulted, the great warrior threw off his helmet and exclaimed "I can't digest nuts! I'm my mother's tapeworm!" He then promptly turned into a tapeworm and slithered off. The best part of the whole weird story, however, was the final line, which went something like "Back in his homeland, his family was devastated and his province plunged into chaos. Everyone else agreed it had all been a good laugh." I bring this up because I feel the Japanese surrealist horror film Uzumaki draws heavily upon the tradition of the creepy fairy tale. There is something fantastic and mesmerizing about it all, and something unsettling and distressing lurking just under the surface. I forgot where I read it, perhaps in an interview with Clive Barker, but someone said that the most effective way of creating a sense of dread is to take something familiar and slowly transform it into something alien and threatening. The best example I can think of is the closet monster. How many times have you opened your closet to get something out? Your shoes, perhaps, or an elf you've been holding prisoner? If you have a closet, chances are you open it at least once a day, maybe more. It's a familiar place. But let it get dark out, let it be pitch black and three in the morning when you wearily gaze over from the comfort of your bed and realize the closet door is open. Suddenly it's not so familiar. It's a gaping black maw, noticeably dark even in the dead of night. Suddenly what was once familiar to you begins to take on a sense of dread. What if something comes out of there? A monster, or a killer, or that damn elf? And what's that shadow? I think it's just my shirt thrown over the vacuum cleaner, but it sure looks like an ax wielding homicidal maniac. I once spent an entire night scared witless as a youth, covers tight around my neck as I stared in horror at what was most definitely the shadow of Weird Harold from Fat Albert come to kill me. Okay, so maybe not everyone gets freaked out in the middle of the night by shadows that bear a vague resemblance to Weird Harold, but you get my meaning. Nothing makes a person panic quite like suddenly finding yourself in a strange situation when you thought you had everything under control. Uzumaki is set in a sleepy working class town somewhere in the Japanese countryside. There's nothing particularly weird about the place. Hell, even though it's in Japan it's not that much different than a small blue-collar town in America. It's downright idyllic, right up until the opening narration that tells us of the unspeakable nightmares the town contains. Director Higuchinsky has nothing on his resume before this film, but he proves right out of the gate that he is a master of subversion, taking a beautiful small town and immediately making you anxious about it. We then meet cute high school student Kirie, our narrator. She's a pretty average schoolgirl -- a few friends, a few enemies, a nerdy goofball who keeps trying to make her fall in love with him by employing such tactics as jumping out and trying to scare her at every possible opportunity. Her dad is an accomplished pottery artisan, and her boyfriend is a moody teen who will one day join an emo band. The two of them are hassled by a Barney Fife-esque local cop who has nothing better to do than bluster at teens who ride two to a single bike. En route to meet her beau, Shuichi, she spots his father crouching in an alley. Attempts to get his attention fail, as he is intently videotaping a snail slithering up the wall. Already things are weird. Shuichi is acting weird as well, though not so weird as to be taping hours worth of snail shenanigans in extreme close-up. But he seems afraid, and he talks of running away, fleeing the town, which he feels has a rotten core. Kirie is confused but also a bit excited by the idea of dropping everything and running off with her childhood sweetheart. At this point, the film is shaping up to be just another schoolgirl horror film, the sort of watered down, one step above Goosebumps stuff that has been big business in Japan for the last couple years. You know, whenever anyone has the brains to make a movie for adolescent girls, it's always a huge hit (remember Titanic), and yet people only seem to remember to do it like once every ten years or so. You'd think by now they'd understand that the girls are bored shitless and want a little something thrown their direction. Don't be fooled. Uzumaki is just getting started. Kirie learns that Shuichi's father has become obsessed with spiral designs, surrounding himself with them, dedicating his life to staring at them and ranting about it all when he isn't bust videotaping the spiral design on snail shells. His madness has reached the point where it is starting to tear the household apart, and Shuichi suspects there is a force behind it all that threatens the whole town. At school, in the meantime, things aren't much more normal. When Kirie isn't being accosted in the bathroom by the leader of the resident girl gang, who sings the praises of being the center of attention, of being the focus of the spiral, she's sitting in a science class attended by a kid who only shows up to school on rainy days and is covered by a thick, dripping goo. Why they let him only come into school on rainy days is less puzzling then why they would let a kid covered in gallons of effluvia just take his seat. Hell, we didn't even tolerate the kid who always had the gooey, unnaturally green ball of mucous clinging to the very edge of his nostril. I know if I had showed up for chemistry glass all dripping with goo, there would have been a good chance they would have made me hit the showers, or at least that emergency eye wash fountain for the kids too clumsy to not get iodine in their eyes. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though, as Shuichi's father is eventually overcome by his mania and commits suicide -- by cramming himself into a washing machine and twisting his body into a taffy-like spiral. This upsets Shuichi's mother, and the matter is made worse during the funeral when the clouds from the crematorium spiral up into a massive, misty whirlpool that also has a tendency to form a likeness of the deceased's anguished face. Shuichi's mother breaks down, and soon she too is obsessed with spirals, but with their elimination rather than their collection. She begins by slicing off her own fingertips, and then after a later midnight visit from a friendly neighborhood centipede, realizes there is a part of her inner ear that is also a spiral. The jagged shard of a broken vase can dig that out, though. As Shuichi helplessly watches his parents self-destruct, Kirie begins to notice her father too is becoming a nutcase, and the girl gang leader at school has started styling her hair into massive swirls. A local Poindexter teams up with Kirie and Shuichi to crack the sinister mystery, but of course, just as he makes a huge discovery, he's killed in a grisly car wreck. If the overall freakish atmosphere of the movie thus far hasn't convinced you this is something more than schoolgirl horror, the graphic gore might bring you around. While we're not talking Dawn of the Dead here, the movie refuses to pull punches with the gore, and when someone dies, they die horribly. The bizarre events in the town eventually attract the attention of the outside media, and a news van arrives to do a "can you believe this shit" type of story that is made even meatier by the fact that the gooey kid and his friendly neighborhood tormentor have just gone and transformed into giant half-slug half-human creatures and spend the day squirming up and down the side of the high school. The film crew meets with an equally unsavory fate as they attempt to leave town, resulting in some decapitation and a cute, perky newscaster left with her eyeballs dangling by the optic nerves. Kirie and Shuichi want desperate to either fight against or escape from the growing hurricane of spiral-related madness, but they don't even know what to fight against or where to start. There is no creepy old wizard living at the edge of town, or secret government lab, or anything at all to give them the first clue as to what the hell is happening. As she struggles desperately to make some sense of the chaos, Kirie's life is completely shattered when Shuichi himself begins to exhibit rather strange spiral qualities. The end is a disturbing jolt to the system, to say the least. At first, it will leave you sort of pissed off and thinking "what the hell?" kind of like Blair Witch Project. Unlike the end of that film, however, which gets stupider as time goes by, the final burst of gory insanity in Uzumaki grows increasingly unnerving the more it sits in your mind. Ultimately, the film ends with the same close-up and snippet of narration with which it began, turning the film itself into one giant spiral. It's a feeling not unlike the one you might get from a particularly good episode of Twin Peaks, like the one where they finally reveal Laura Palmer's murderer. It will confound and anger some, while others will simply sit back and think, "Holy cow!" to themselves as they realize the disturbing power of what they've just seen. First and foremost, Uzumaki is a visual film, but unlike a lot of current films that rely on slick visuals as nothing more than eye candy, the surreal atmosphere of Uzumaki is a central tool with which to weave the tale. It's not just thrown on for the hell of it. There is an actual purpose, and Higuchinsky knows how to use the visual aspect of the film with the deftness of a scalpel-wielding surgeon, and I don't mean Dr. Giggles. Every shot, every set, every quirky pice of music, is perfectly exploited to create a sense of lurking dread. Like a seedy circus sideshow or run-down midway, Uzumaki is undeniably gorgeous and frighteningly grotesque and disorienting. It is, as I discussed earlier, a disorienting warping of the familiar, mundane world into something threatening and dangerous. For his first time out as a director, Higuchinsky is astoundingly successful. WHile Lucio Fulci always talked about creating the feel of a surreal nightmare in his films, he was only ever able to accomplish it in tiny bits and pieces. A moment here, a moment there, then back to the tedium of watching Ian McCulloch intone, "But that's crazy!" Higuchinsky manages to capture that same nightmarish mood, but he sustains it throughout the whole movie and never exhibits any of the slapdash qualities that undermined Fulci's own attempts at such a mood. Some of the scenes don't even strike you as bizarre until they are over and you're going, "Wait, what the hell?" In a casual, offhand manner, the film will just randomly throw in background characters who are walking in reverse, or in a particular eerie scene that doesn't even hit you as eerie at first, Kirie and her friend are walking down a hallway having a typical schoolgirl conversation while, on either side of the hallway, students stand at attention, still as statues, gazing off into nothing. There is never any acknowledgment of these things, making them even more intriguing, sort of like that weird hippie you can catch sitting in the background of various episodes of The Young Ones. I didn't even notice him until years later, but now that I know that he's sometimes there, squatting in the corner, it's equally amusing and disturbing. Watch the very first episode, Demolition, and you'll see him during a scene around the television set. It's kinda creepy. As far as the plot goes, it is simple but effective. The movie is based on a series of horror comics by writer Ito Junji, a proclaimed H.P. Lovecraft fan, and the influence of Lovecraft is obvious. Like his inspiration, Ito's stories are difficult to translate onto film. They are simply too far out there. This problem has plagued countless would-be screenwriters and directors who took on the unenviable task of turning brilliant H.P. Lovecraft stories into incredibly lame movies. Consider that a number of Lovecraft's stories revolve around creatures who are so intensely terrifying that merely glancing at one is enough to drive someone mad. If you make a movie about such a beast, you either have to show it -- which will inevitably be a big disappointment -- or not not show it -- which would also be a big disappointment. Lovecraft created a fear that simply could not be lifted off the page or out of your own mind. Likewise, Ito's stories often defied easy adaptation. Despite the difficult source material, this is a damn effective film that manages to communicate an intangible yet overwhelming horror without ever having to show it. Lovecraft would have been proud, I think. Sure there are kids who turn into creepy slugs, people with weird eyes and hair that spirals up forty feet and continuously swirls around. Sure heads are crushed, people are gutted, and bodies rot before horrified onlookers, but these are all symptoms of what is happening. In the hands of a lesser storyteller or director, the fact that the film never reveals the nature of the seemingly supernatural madness would be a big let-down, but scriptwriter Nitta Takao, armed with Ito Junji's story and Higuchinsky's inspired direction, uses the ambiguity to augment the film's nightmarish tone. It's truly a stunning feat to have pulled off. The movie also never tips us off as to what actually happens to our heroine, Kirie. When last we see her, she is in what is, at best, a dire situation, but the closing repetition of the opening narration would imply that she somehow cheated fate. If so, how? We never know, and while that would be a weakness in some films, it's the reverse here, like never finding out why the birds were attacking people in The Birds. Is it possible that Kirie, who was teased about never being the center of attention, was somehow the focal point of the spiral madness? Was she the eye of the hurricane? Or was she simply insane, dreaming up this whole bizarre scenario in her head? The film is constructed in such a way than any explanation would fail to be as effective as no explanation, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of chill and glorious discomfort. Higuchinsky also uses music brilliantly. The soundtrack is a combination of sappy toy piano sounding "young kids in love" music and off-kilter horror/carnival music. It works further to subvert the feel of the film when you have this quaint and innocent scene of a young girl clinging to the boy she's loved her whole life while dippy lovey dovey music plays in the background as they ride the bike in slow motion. It's sweet tot he point of being goofy, but it becomes heart-breaking in a way since you know any second the creepy carnival music is going to start up and no one is going to be very happy. The cast is up to the task of fleshing out this bizarre world. Hatsune Eriko is great and sympathetic as Kirie, while Fhi Fan as Shuichi is moody, dreary, and detached. At first it almost seems like it's bad acting, but then you start to think about how many of these self-absorbed mopey guys you knew in high school, and you suddenly realize the kid has nailed it. Unlike the mopey kids in high school, at least this guy lives in a town that is cursed with a madness involving lots of spirals and bloody deaths. Everyone else is basically there to die horribly and go insane, and they all do it well. The effects are great as well. Actually, the effects are somewhat archaic looking in spots, but once again the director makes it work marvelously for him, turning what should be a drawback into another strength. Competently done but somewhat awkward computer effects serve to embellish an increasingly alien and surreal landscape. The gore effects are bang on, grisly and realistic, and the make-up effects to create the slug people is also great. Unlike those twits who made the updated version of The Haunting, Higuchinsky knows better than to make a movie where there are effects for effect's sake, and they are the central point to the movie being made. Higuchinsky wants to creep you out, and he is smart enough to know that special effects are just one of many means to that end and not the end themselves. Just like the stylish direction, the special effects are not there just as eye candy. They have a job to do, and they execute it wonderfully. Uzumaki is a surprising film, and that makes me happy. Like a fairy tale of old, it seizes you from the outset and pulls you deeper and deeper into a world that is too weird to look at but too enticing to turn away from. Even during the quiet moments and build-up scenes, there is enough tension and uneasiness to keep the movie sailing along. When the end hits, it hits hard, and I guarantee the whole thing will stick in your mind a long time after you've finished watching. Of course, my guarantee means nothing. It's not like I'm going to give you an oven mitt if you find yourself dissatisfied. I only have two oven mitts, and I need them both because one is always dirty. The most refreshing thing about this movie is that it's not quite like anything else I've ever seen. While you can place in the company or H.P. Lovecraft and Twin Peaks, it's still quite different in many ways. It's a movie that knows how to lull you into a sense of security, then spring untold amounts of indescribably freakiness 'pon you. I love a movie that keeps me guessing and thinking, and Uzumaki delivers on a cerebral level, at least for a dolt like me. Still, I'm a realist, and I know this is the kind of movie that will just piss some people off. It's not that it's overly arty -- those movies even piss me off. It's just weird. Really weird. Weird people will dig it, but if your idea of clever horror was Scream or your idea of a well-constructed story was, well, Scream, then this sort of movie version of a Salvador Dali painting probably ain't gonna make you happy. That's not a judgment, just an expression of opinion. If everyone liked everything I like, I'd get pretty annoyed. Uzumaki is a film for people who like to be fucked with, who like to be unnerved, who like to get depressed and disturbed by a film out of nowhere, days or weeks after they've seen it. You're sitting there, thinking happy thoughts, and all of a sudden you start thinking about the gruesome "slide show of death" that helps close the movie, and all of a sudden you just feel creeped out. It's the sort of movie that will be appreciated by people who also appreciate sinister carnival midways and those ringmasters who speak of black things and always seem to have midget henchmen dressed as Aladdin walking behind them playing the accordion. It's a movie for people who just simply delight in the torment of sheer weirdness and surrealistic horror. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 2:07 PM | 0 Comments |
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