em : embalming (by shinji aoyama, 1999) - so, after only having seen ‘eli, eli’ to this point, a little rewinding to see what else the man can do. there’s traces of both kurosawa and miike to be seen, to some extent (perhaps) in a genre movie that’s also a little smarter with his own ideas whilst making those compromises to get into the audiences head. given the resoution of the story, huge swathes of the plot could be sliced out, though that’s also a good pointer to how aoyama is exploring his ideas - in a more complete, abstract fashion that uses redherrings to hide some interesting aspects of the plot away which would otherwise leave it all too bare and actually leads us into far more interesting stuff as a result. yes, it’s kind of gorey, it’s kind of bold and easy to watch, but some of the behavioural characteristics of those in the film are certainly very odd, creating a kind of abstraction within a popular film framework that makes for something harder to work out and worth digging away at…
Any film that plays ‘Eye of the Tiger’ as the credit ‘Gary Busey in…’ appears HAS to have something!
When you add the fact it co-stars Yaphet Kotto and William Smith (as a nasty biker no less!) it seems like there is nothing that can go wrong!
Sadly this is not the case.
All looks good in the build-up, bad guys do bad things to Busey…Busey gets a load of arms and a super truck bristling with weapons to take vengeance!!!!!
YOWZA!! Rock ‘n’ Roll…
It’s still looking good when Busey decapitates a biker in slow motion via a wire stretched across the road.
But now it all goes wrong!!
Busey now relaxes and hangs around a bit.
He carries out another attack on the bikers (not as much fun as the first) and then…HANGS AROUND A BIT MORE!
The Bikers then go and do something in retaliation that Busey was already worried about anyway…but was sitting on a porch chugging a beer with a bird when it happened!!
This is like prodding hornet’s nest and then sitting by it to eat lunch and acting surprised when the hornets sting your ass!
Get with the plan Busey!!!
So after much wasted time and some needlessly dead friends and helpers Busey finally goes all out and actually uses his weapons and super truck to damn well do what he should have done ages ago!!
Aside form a ‘well, no matter how much of a corrupt tosser the Sheriff was Busey’s not actually going to get away with that surely’ moment, the rest of the film plays out okay as Busey, armed with his famous scary grin and his rocket/machine gun firing truck (with the help of Yaphet with his plane and dynamite bombs) blow the hell out of the drug dealing (but rather stupid in how they act and bring attention to themselves) bikers.
A truly CLASSIC scene (which just makes the slack, silly, annoying, frustrating scripting that much worse as you ache for what could have been) has Busey ram a pipe bomb up the arse of one of the bikers, stuck in a hospital bed, to get information from him!
he outcome of whcih is delightfully ironic.
Some good moments, a top cast, a good set-up, some tasty cheese…but the STUPID scripting and plotting scupper what should have been a real classic.
“Nowhere to Run” -
Underrated van Damme actioner with some slower character moments (OH! THE HORROR!) that more often than not work, some very nice nudity by Rosanna Arquette, Van Damme’s arse, the always welcome Ted Levine enjoying playing a villain, some at least average action set-pieces, the odd snippet of ultra-violence, a surprisingly sombre ending and a nice motorbike.
Could have been better, but could have been a whole hell of a lot worse (“Derailed” anyone?!!).
Finally got in my first film by Shaw Brothers director John Lo Mar with Boxer From The Temple. For the most part there are many things with the story and characters throughout that feel forced and under developed. Luckily the third and mostly insane final act salvages the film IMO. Lo Mar employs some pretty interesting techniques in supplying character motivation and redemption from inner demons. The action up through most of the film while a bit too comical for my taste turns serious at the end with some terrific fights.
I also watched the Dragon Missle with Lo Lieh where he has a sort of boomerang version of the Flying Guillotine. Really I felt the film ran out of ideas halfway into it and the setup for the third act just makes you want to smack your head. Still though Lo Lieh and the fun the director has in realizing this weapon certainly make it entertaining for more die hard Shaw Brothers fans. For people that haven’t seen any Shaw Brothers films that featured the Flying Guillotine I would recommend seeing Flying Guillotine Part 2 first. I should also mention I finally saw Lo Lieh in Kidnap recently and to me it was best performance ever. Really gripping crime drama with a really nice psychic soul healing ending.
female punishment of the tokugawa (aka ‘the joy of torture’ by teruo ishii, 1968) - a 90 minute film split into thirds, starts with a woman split into thirds… no kidding - hung from a tree, tied behind hands, beheaded then quickly sliced in half at the stomach. it’s all a little OTT compared to the actual films overall tone, where three stories cover incest, jealousy, hot nun-on-nun action, and torture. far from just depicting torture, it’s narratives are drawn together by a man studying documents on legal cases that resulted in torture and execution as punishment, in a way that allows ishii to show how the situations that led to peoples downfall rarely, as you might expect but could possibly forget, result from many people’s involvement in each others lives - unfortunate circumstances, manipulation, deviosness all lie beneath the punishment and torture, but ishii reveals all those elements so as to grey the argument out into something not so clear cut as simply good versus bad. it’s relatively interesting, not entirely convincing as it might have once appeared, and the oddness of the visuals isn’t entirely there as it often as it can be in his work, but nobody quite did odd like teruo ishii did. worth seeing.
The Pathfinder. Looks fantastic but the film itself is lame, poor acting, script and directing. I doubt it bothered anyone else but since they got Clancy Brown and Ralph Moeller to speak Icelandic it totally ruined the atmosphere since I was laughing at how terrible they sounded. Karl Urban’s Icelandic was OK but most of the time you couldn’t understand what the hell they were saying. They did however get some Icelanders to talk for the background characters but that so different from how the lead actors sounded. I’m sure no Icelander could take this film seriously but I think this didn’t bother anyone else who didn’t speak the language.
As I said the film looks great, fantastic design in both the surroundings and costume and it’s the first time Vikings actually looked cool on film, even though they didn’t look anything like the real thing. But the overall look of it made it clear that we were watching anything authentic.
“The Stone Merchant” -
Not very well made, badly plotted, not very well acted (and that includes Harvey Keitel) drama/thriller about a plot by Islamists to explode a dirty bomb.
Has a few good moments and a tense opening and a veru effective score as well…but it’s sadly too flawed to really work as well as it could have.
But in a world where The West feasts upon (mainly) American movies packed with farcical self-blame for 9/11 (like “Syriana”) and self-loathing in general for simply BEING Western, it is refreshing to see a film that screams out the fact that the greatest terrorist and cultural threat facing the world today, from Africa to the UK, is political Islam…explicitly the Saudi based (but spreading) truly beyond any sort of defense ‘wahhabi’ brand of Islam.
Is it screamingly one-sided and preachy and as such does damage to any kind of real thriller plot? Yes.
But in a world that is slowly commiting suicide and where the only voice heard to any sort of degree in films is ‘America stinks, The West stinks and you should be ashamed for even existing’ perhaps the makers thought this was the only way to even have a small chance of being heard.
A failed movie as, well, a movie and we certainly need better…but the sad thing is this is all we’ve got.
And given the limbo hell and almost invisible distribution the film lives with (it was an Italian/UK production that has never even reached the UK whereas utterly one-sided, highly selective with the facts, vomitous liberal hand-wringing like “Road to Guantanamo” gets a wide release) even this highly flawed effort is lost in the gloom.
It has perhaps the most unusual ‘chase’ you will ever see though!
I was actually expecting some feminist, liberal, sob story, victim fest here that excuses her actions…
But actually this was an honest portrayal of how a genuine act of self-defense turned into a more cold-blooded, selfish, murder spree that utterly took control of someone’s life.
Well acted, well made and engaging I’m happily surprised to say.
flower and snake (by masaru konuma, 1974) - there’s huge amounts for room to argue over the extent to which konuma uses this as either an attempt to talk about general male/female relationships, and the role sex plays in it, and the discussion of the more isolated, dysfunctional aspects of the characters through which the story is told. truth be told, it probably flits between the two and blends them together, making for something that confusingly erotic and repelling at the same time - not an intentional playing of those two elements off one another, more a differing taste and understanding of the roles between frustrated men and frigid / proud women and the use of bondage in sex - so it’s a hard one to entirely pin down or get a first overall impression of.
naomi tani is superbly beautiful, no svelt teen but a womanly, rounded, truly beautiful woman who seems quiet and distant. her much older husband seeks a man to break her will, picks bondage fan katagiri and persuades him to help drug her, kidnap her and begin her breaking-in as an uber slut. i don’t entirely get the idea of women shying away from sex, not in general anyway, so it’s hard for me to understand to a great extent, but i appreciate the stories trying to tell of how sex becomes more important and more contentious when resisted than when it’s accepted, and konuma gives a good argument for acceptance, via torture and rape, unfortunately. in the mix are numerous questinable behavioural characteristics, potentially racist or dodgy, almost comedic attitudes and moments to how convincingly this is all done, so it has an air of amateurish knowledge of the techniques that are central to it’s story, and the potentially impotent katagiri is almost a comedy character of a downtrodden 30-something son living with his mother until things begin to unfold or wrap up towards the end.
superbly lensed it is though, very interesting and briefly told, nice and easy to watch if you can cope with the ideas of the imagery (which, as i say, aren’t entirely convincing, so it’s not like some odd pr)n VHS someones passing around that’s truly obscene) and the disc, given the information that runs at the end of the feature, seems a direct port of the nikkatsu remastered disc from a couple of years back - very nice.
How did director John “Twins of Evil” Hough sink to this dull, ponderous, by the numbers, 80’s American horror fluff? Oh dear!
The last 15 minutes picks up and opens up a suitably macabre world, but there is nothing here really.
Low gore, rushed deaths and ending, tired direction, overly slow build-up, annoying acting (Michael J. Pollard is only slightly less awful than he was in “Sleepaway Camp 3”), slumming thesps (Rod Steiger and Yvonne De Carlo, though at least Steiger has a better wig this time than he did in “The Kindred”).
All in all it’s just a passionless splodge of smelly blandness thrown at your TV screen, that was actually a good sighpost to the (mostly) awful decade to come as far as American horror films went.
I started up Texhnolyze last night with Inhumane and Beautiful. Sparse dialogue, subtext heavy and quite comfy in it’s choice to give you so very little in the way of answers to the many questions that enter your mind sharpish. If this is cyberpunk then it’s a quietly assumptive branch that you don’t see all that often…one which expects that you hold a certain familiarity with the facets of your classic Dystopian backdrop - not just robotic limbs either. Clearly this is gearing itself towards Yoshitoshi ABe’s sense of all that’s abstract, but what’s already evident is that knowing Lain and Haibane Renmei isn’t necessarily going to let you grasp Texhnolyze any easier. Looking forward to the rest
Working my way through the official Pod films. Finally caught up with Abel Ferrara’s “BODY SNATCHERS” from 1993, a film I hadn’t seen since the original VHS release. It’s techncially competent and has the highest “icky/slimy” factor of the bunch, but it’s not as lasting in the creep out factor as the 1956 or 1978 versions.
A twitchy performance from Forrest Whitaker and a few creepy/sexy moments from Meg (sister of Jen) Tilly set this apart. Its always nice to see R. Lee Ermy in stuff, but he isn’t given too much to do here. I love the closing shot of this film as well (boo to the soundtrack at almost ruining it though!) A worthwhile but lesser entry in the series of remakes.
—
A Boy and his Dog - I’ve got a real soft for watching a pre-Miami Vice Don Johnson telepathically talk to his dog before being forced by the surviving society to act as the male sperm-donor because, well, he is the last non-sterile male. Not even nuclear war can stop Don Johnson’s little swimmers. A Boy and His Dog is the thinking mans Hell Comes to Frogtown with Jason Robards dressed up as a pasty-faced version of Colonel Sanders. And the film is damned good in spite of that fact. I seem to come back to this little forgotten gem every 5 years or so.
Working my way through the official Pod films. Finally caught up with Abel Ferrara’s “BODY SNATCHERS” from 1993, a film I hadn’t seen since the original VHS release. It’s techncially competent and has the highest “icky/slimy” factor of the bunch, but it’s not as lasting in the creep out factor as the 1956 or 1978 versions.
A worthwhile but lesser entry in the series of remakes.
I agree this is easily the slightest of the three big screen adaptations.
This is mainly due to two main faults, the first is that the movie is set almost entirely on the Army base and so loses the apocalyptic, widespread disaster aspect of the other films and the other is actually a strange one, and that is the film is too fast-moving for it’s own good.
There is very little build-up to the ‘invasion’ and instead we are given a limited (and obviously abnormal and far from everyday, due to the fact it’s an army base) setting, where things are strange and sinister from the very start, and where many characters have time for only one scene before being caught up in the Alien take-over.
Whereas the other versions gave us a build-up showing normal, everyday existence in everyday towns and cities and a group of fully formed characters interacting with each other as they go about their normal routines, Ferrara’s version gives us strangeness, regimented behaviour and sinister goings-on from the get go, thus losing that vital contrast aspect to the story that shows how horrifyingly changed things have become since the invasion compared to how they were before it
There is no character here to even slightly compare to Donald Sutherland’s wonderful lead in the 1978 version, or any of the relationships seen in either the ‘78 or ‘56 incarnations.
That is not to say the movie is all bad or all a failure. There are in fact some highly effective sequences and visual jolts.
The shots of translucent tendrils snaking into noses and mouths are suitably gross and unsettling and very well executed.
And if the film does not have a scene as jolting as the brutal destruction of Sutherland’s ‘double’ in the ‘78 movie it makes up for it with its own twist that sees any partly formed ‘clones’ (looking like skinned and boiled corpses) attacking those that have interrupted their ‘birth’ process.
Ferrara handles the horror/chase sequences pretty well, but it’s a shame to say that the dialogue/interaction scenes that are normally his strength are rather lifeless and lacklustre and there are only fleeting glimpses of his talent here.
An average film at best for Ferrara completists only.
Watched The Car yesterday. Clearly a reaction to Jaws, it’s about a bad-ass vintage car prowling the desert and harassing James Brolin and friends. There are some outstanding driving stunts and a few eerie moments; a surprising amount of development between Brolin and his on-screen beau Kathleen Lloyd; some incredibly-staged moments of a giant car actually sneaking up on people before it kills them. Good, good times.
It would pair nicely with Race with the Devil for a ‘70s horror / car chase hybrid double bill.
Finally saw Spike Lee’s “Inside Man”, and liked it a lot.
Very decent non-action actioner. Nice cat and mouse game between Clive Owen and Denzel Washington, very rewarding. I like smart criminals who aren’t too ruthless for their own good. Weird to see Jody Foster in there but she fits her role like a glove.
On a side note: I didn’t know Christopher Plummer was still alive and kicking!
Watched The Car yesterday. Clearly a reaction to Jaws, it’s about a bad-ass vintage car prowling the desert and harassing James Brolin and friends. There are some outstanding driving stunts and a few eerie moments; a surprising amount of development between Brolin and his on-screen beau Kathleen Lloyd; some incredibly-staged moments of a giant car actually sneaking up on people before it kills them. Good, good times.
Love it! Picked it up on the strength of the ZZ Top style cover for a fiver and took it in with a crowd…much fun.
