Cinematic Damnation

Quitting Film Criticism

2009-03-10T22:00:00.003-04:00

Just to let everybody know that this blog's future postings will be paired down severely.

I'm sick of writing about movies, if this changes, I will start updating again.

I've never really even enjoyed film criticism and have always only really done it for accolades and money, both of which I haven't gotten much of through this. It's a boring, masochistic process that I hate and I get little support from people for it. I feel like it's just regurgitating facts and posting your opinions that nobody cares about on films that nobody has seen. Is that really worth it?

Writing about films makes me stressed out and is like squeezing water out of a rock for me. Making films, on the other, is something I adore and have passion for like nothing else. It's like Tawny Kitaen in a Whitesnake video: I just want to have sex with the filmmaking process 24 hours a day.

So, at least for now, I'm done writing about films. I'm going to write screenplays instead and make movies. I'm finished the new cuts of Little Red Riding Hood and Dream House and starting my own videograper business for local bands soon as well.

I also want to apologize to MST3K's entire fanbase for making that dumb post. It's still not my cup of tea but I recently dug up my old Amazing Colossal Episode Guide and didn't find it all that mean spirited after all. I was very angry and depressed about a myriad of other things and I channeled some of that anger toward a 20 year old comedy show. I'm sorry!

A few things.

2009-02-26T21:19:00.003-05:00

I'm probably winding down this blog for the time being. No more videos of the week (though a video a day will continue to be posted on Cinematic Damnation's channel for some time) and Ephemeral Film Friday is off for a while (may come back soon though). There will still be updates, just less in number.

Also, as a note, from Monday, March 2nd to Monday, March 9th, there will be no videos posted. I'm putting my desktop computer, which contains all the .avi files I upload to YouTube, in the shop for a while because of viruses. There's a weird, memory-sapping bug on this thing which all the software I have can't clean.

The Oscars were...

2009-02-23T00:11:00.002-05:00

Pretty good this year. They started off boring but ended up less boring than usual by the end.

It was good to see some Japanese filmmakers getting some love.

Heath Ledger deserved that honorary Oscar and it was touching to see his family accept it for him. It was strange that Nolan wasn't nominated, though.

Kate Winslet gave a nice speech. I still need to see The Reader (I loved Revolutionary Road though more than most).

I think Mickey Rourke should have won Best Actor.

I figured Slumdog Millionaire would win. I like the movie. A little too over-sentimental in bits, the cinematography and editing is a little "MTV" but the film's message is a beautiful one.

Evil Dead Trap (1988)

2009-02-21T15:27:00.005-05:00

Evil Dead Trap, Japan (Joy Pack/Japan Home Video, 1988), directed by Toshiharu Ikeda
Evil Dead Trap (1988), is a fairly brilliant, thrilling and extremely nasty little Japanese horror flick directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who also directed the somber art film Mermaid Legend (1984) and written by manga artist and soon-to-be-director Takashi Ishii. If there’s one thing that can be said about Evil Dead Trap it’s that the film is a very interesting stylistic work. Though its title brings Sam Raimi’s early work to mind, a viewing of it is far more likely to give one flashbacks of the works of many Italian horror legends, particularly Dario Argento (Suspiria, Tenebre) as well as the likes of Lucio Fulci (Zombie, The Beyond) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, House on the Edge of the Park). It’s got the stylistic flair and striking visuals of an Argento thriller, the wince-inducing viciously brutal violence and gore of Fulci at his finest and the vile rape and nastiness of a Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi exploiter. To top it off, it also throws a lot of elements from American horror films like Halloween, Alien and Friday the 13th as well as the films of David Cronenberg into the mix. What results is a highly suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that truly never lets up! It’s a very cruel, mean-spirited and nihilistic film, but that hardly detracts from its charm. Nami (Miyuki Ono) is a late night variety TV show host. One day she receives a video in the mail. The tape turns out to be a vicious and nasty snuff film. Nami, against everyone’s advice, decides to take a group of her friends to investigate the location in which in the snuff video was shot: a former American military base. However, someone or something starts murdering her friends in various grotesque ways. Later, she is saved by a man (Yuji Homna) who turns to have a bit of a dark family history. The man is actually the host to something truly evil, a creature beyond his control known as Hideki.
Evil Dead Trap is one of those wonderful films that gets you from frame one. The opening scene, of someone sitting a weird room, watching a recorded tape of Nami as someone else, apparently a child, tells him what to do, sets the film up perfectly. Then at the five minute mark, we see one of the nastiest simulated snuff films ever shot, in my opinion even nastier than the disturbing but pointless, badly shot and ritualistic Guinea Pig films, in which a girl is mutilated and her eyeball is cut Un Chien Andalou-style. It’s certainly the nastiest, most wince-inducing example of eyeball violence since Fulci’s Zombie. Later, the nastiness continues. A young woman gets skewered by metal rods and then a girl gets raped in a scene that rivals anything Deodato ever shot in terms of viewer discomfort and later gets strangled with a noose like in Suspiria. After that, there’s an absolutely vicious sequence in which a girl is tied to a wall with her face painted white and killed with a motion detonated crossbow. Ikeda’s direction of all of this is quite crisp and stylish, he keeps the first 45 minutes of the film running at a breakneck pace and the film is well shot by veteran cinematographer Masaki Tamura. It’s been said that Ikeda doesn’t actually like gory films, but this simply couldn’t be possible given the amount of horror references present in the film. Evil Dead Trap’s (often very blue) lighting heavily invokes Argento. The film’s score as well, by Tomohiko Kira, even sounds an awful lot like it was composed by Simonetti, Pignatelli and Morante of the Italian rock group Goblin, who did the music for many an Argento film and numerous others.
My complaint with Evil Dead Trap is that, while its pacing for its first act is steller, it kind of loses steam once Nami's friends are all dead and the film's subject becomes the mysterious man and Hideki. There's nothing wrong with its pacing, but next to the absolutely ferocious first 45 minutes it seems rather humdrum and doesn't really pick up again until the last 20 minutes. What’s interesting about Evil Dead Trap is that it doesn’t actually feel very “Japanese” at all. Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend had a very Japanese sensibility to it, but for Evil Dead Trap he creates something which feels extremely Western. If you were to keep the film exactly the same but simply change its actors to Caucasians and its setting to the West, it would be completely indistinguishable from any Western horror film. The film not only borrows heavily from Italian horror, it also pilfers Hollywood’s then fairly recent horror blockbusters as well. The whole conservative and deeply sexist American “promiscuous young women die first” plot device popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th is utilized early on in Evil Dead Trap. The film’s misogynistic rape and murder scenes are also nicely offset by a strong female protagonist in the form of Nami, played nicely by Miyuki Ono. The character is very reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley of Alien fame in her actions and actress Miyuki Ono even bares just a passing resemblance to Weaver.
Though Ono was a professional actress (having appeared in Toho’s Sayonara Jupiter a few years prior), some of the other actresses, most notably Hitomi Kobayashi, were “AV idols”, the sanitized Japanese term for “porno star”. Interestingly enough, Kobayashi is the one actress who does a fully naked sex scene, perhaps a joking little nod to her far better known roles. The film is at times rather clichéd and can sometimes feel like little more than a collection of slasher movie conventions, but Evil Dead Trap is so mean spirited in its nasty violence that it really rises above that. Best of all, the film features a fairy amazing and unexpected plot twist involving a demonic unborn fetus that must be seen to be believed. As some have said, it feels very Cronenbergian and even brings a few Hong Kong horror films to mind such as Devil Fetus and The Rape After. The gore and special effects by FX, gore and creature master Shinichi Wakasa (essentially the Japanese equivalent to Tom Savini) are excellent, particularly the puppetry and manipulation of the fetal hellbeast.
Evil Dead Trap was popular enough to be followed by not one, but two sequels, both of which were more or less in name only with no connection to the events of the original film. The first sequel, Evil Dead Trap 2 (1991) is directed by Izo Hashimoto, a very strange character in his own right, primarily a screenwriter who branched out into direction for a while. He’s the only filmmaker and writer in Japan who’s worked in the genres of horror, anime, exploitation and Hong Kong cinema all at the same time. He’s written things as varied as the seminal anime masterwork Akira, the Hong Kong co-productions Kujako-O (1988) and Shamo (2005) and the sleazy Sukeban Deka (1987) while at the same time directing such films as the very strange Guinea Pig series clone Lucky Star Diamond (1989). Sadly Evil Dead Trap 2 has little of the power of its predecessor and as usual for much of Hashimoto’s body of work, is just a little too weird for its own good. Then there came Evil Dead Trap 3: Broken Love Killer (1993), a film that was likely given the Evil Dead Trap name just to make a few more yen. Broken Love Killer was another collaboration between director Toshiharu Ikeda and screenwriter Takashi Ishii and features another character named Nami (Ishii tries to work a protagonist named Nami into every film he writes or directs) tracking a serial killer across Japan.

Videos of the Week(s) (2/19/09)

2009-02-19T22:24:00.005-05:00

I was kinda busy and missed the last "Videos of the Week" collection. Therefore, here are two weeks worth of YouTubey goodness.

The Strange Ones is a shot for shot, line for line 70s remake of a Sid Davis production from a decade prior. This film is best described as a pedophile hysteria movie, designed to terrify children into submission. Here we see the film's over the top presentation, which implies that there is a child loving pevert waiting to stick his dick up your butt in every alleyway, park, theater, street side and so forth.

Could being fed films and propaganda like this be the reason that the Baby Boomer generation over pampered their children to the point that some are spoiled brats unable to do anything with their lives?

Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972) is a fine example of a wuxia (Chinese swordplay film) produced by Shaw Brothers. It was directed by Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen) who later directed a large handful of incoherently plotted but lushly filmed martial arts flicks based on popular books by Ku Lung such as Killer Clans, The Magic Blade and Clans of Intrigue. This is likely his finest film, a stunning, bloody revenge flick of a girl, Ai Nu (Lily Ho) kidnapped and forced into prostitution by the icy Madame Chun (Betty Pei Tei). It contains some fine swordplay, lots of condom-dispersed Chinese stage blood, a subtle by today's standards but scandalous by 70s Hong Kong's lesbian love subplot and some very striking images. This scene, where a grude-holding young man tries to help Ainu escape, contains one of my favorite shots in any Hong Kong film: a haunting image of a smirking Pei Tei licking blood of her fingers.

Here's a very disturbing bit from Nobuo Nakagawa's 1959 kaidan eiga masterpiece Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Ghost of Yotsuya), a Shintoho production and no doubt one of the best regarded adaptations of Japan's most famous horror fable: Yotsuya Kaidan, which has also been adapted into such films as Illusion of Blood (1966) by Shiro Toyoda and 1994's Crest of Betrayal by Kinji Fukasaku. Whereas Toyoda's film runs three hours and treats the proceedings as a historical drama and Fukasaku's fuses it with the equally famous Chushingura Gaiden from the same time period as well as his typical socio-political elements, Nakagawa's version runs a taut 75 minutes and focuses on pure horror! In terms of atmosphere and scare factor, this is easily the finest depiction of the haunting of cruel, unfaithful samurai Iuemon by the ghost of his horrendously victimized wife Oiwa.

This scene shows Oiwa's death and is one of the most disturbing sequences in Japanese horror cinema, all the more incredible since it was made 50 years ago. The genre maverick Nakagawa, who later did the absolutely phantasmagorical freak show Jigoku (1960) and whose work was quite equivalent to that of Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava and Terence Fisher, sadly has little of the appreciation. Interestingly enough, his use of graphic violence predated H.G. Lewis' for several years and his use of atmospheric cinematography and ingenuitive camera tricks also slightly predated Bava's.

Addio Zio Tom or Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) was Italian mondo maverick duo Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperis next foray into the fertile world of human depravity after the shockingly educational Mondo Cane (1962) and the incredibly controversial Africa Addio (1966). This film, rather than an actual documentary, is a staged recreation of the American slave trade or as famed British author William Makepeace Thackeray would say that "most peculiar institution". For the filming, Jacopetti and Prosperi struck a deal with the notorious despot Papa Doc to lens their little epic in Haiti, which gave them an infinite supply of naked black thespians to play the tortured slaves.

Sometimes its hard to tell what Goodbye Uncle Tom's political purpose really is. Its either the most obscenely racist film ever made and a appalling piece of skinhead masturbation material or is the most militantly anti-white, pro-Black power film ever conceived, the kind of film even Spike Lee wouldn't dare make. Often it goes back and forth between these two sentiments. For example, the film shows a very iconic image of a little white girl, complete with a very Aryan blonde-haired and blue-eyed appearance, pulling a naked black boy, her pet, along her with a chain. Its an image that visually tries to demonstrate the superiority, or at least the dominance, of the white race over the black race. The black slaves in this film are depicted as very unintelligent and almost ape-like at times, mostly too stupid and too complacent to rise up and take on their white oppressors. . At the same time, the film goes to extraordinarily graphic lengths to show the extreme cruelty inflicted on black by white. We see slaves tortured and abused in every way imaginable and raped numerous times.

Here we have the film's flamboyant finale, showing an irate early 70s black man, afro in all, sitting on a beach reading the seminal Confessions of Nat Turner by visionary author William Styron, visualizes himself butchering the whites around him just like Nat did as revenge for their cruel treatment toward his ancestors. With his scene, which will make those with staunch racial nationalist views of both skin colors want to punch their fists through a wall just as hard for different reasons, Jacopetti and Prosperi's true intentions become obvious. They were not trying to calm the then current racial tensions in America by making a politically correct feel good piece of trash, no, they were trying to throw a gigantic Molotov cocktail into the middle of it and split the ground wide open. When making films, they didn't care about political correctness or tastefulness. What they did care about is compelling imagery and food for thought and I for one think that makes them incredibly fascinating men, even if their filmmaking practices were often morally reprehensible.

The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (Denchu Kozo no Boken) is a neat low budget short film from Shinya Tsukamoto. The film has a difficult length, at around 45 minutes, as it's too long to be a conventional short but not long enough to be a feature film, but is nonetheless very rewarding and quite wonderfully bizarre, shot on 8mm and color a year before Shinya Tsukamoto would make his seminal feature length break out hit Tetsuo.

It features a lot of the wonderful kinetic and crazy visual techniques Tsukamoto would employ (albeit to better effect) in Tetsuo. The plot involves a young man with an electric pole sticking out of his back (Senba Naruaki) who is considered a freak by his classmates, save for his kindly female friend Momoko (Shin Kanoka). He then time warps decades into the future, where he helps a grown up Momoko battle a trio of vampires and a genetically engineered mutant woman (Kei Fujiwara) who can blot out the sun so the vampires can reign supreme. For a 45 minute amateur film made on Super 8, this is a fine piece of cinema.

One of the funnier scenes in the 1975, criminally obscure classic Criminally Insane (also known as Crazy Fat Ethel). This film is simultaneously one of the best "bad movies" ever made along side such gems as Robot Monster and H.G. Lewis' and Ed Wood's collective bodies of work. It also, alongside such films as Troma's notable later productions and Peter Jackson's later Dead Alive, is one of the funniest low budget horror comedies ever made. Its subject: morbidly obese mental patient Ethel Janowsky (Priscilla Alden), recently released from the state loony bin to the care of her grandmother. The film follows Ethel's murderous exploits as she kills everybody who stands between her and the thing she loves most: large quantities of hearty food. Directed by former porn director Nick Phillips, despite having rock bottom production values, the film only really is heavily marred by its length: even at its short, barely feature length hour runtime, it still feels overlong, like a 30 minute short film stretched out to twice its needed duration. Still, if your looking for a a night filled with hysterical, belly rupturing laughter, make a date with Crazy Fat Ethel! She truly puts the "laughter" back in "manslaughter".

Here Ethel wants a midnight snack but finds her grandmother has locked up all the food. Her grandmother explains that she will eat normal amounts of food like a normal human being from now on so she can become healthier. Ethel, unfortunately, doesn't take this very well.

Here's a great scene from one of Godzilla director Ishiro Honda's first horror-themed films at Toho, The H-Man (1958). The film is known in Japanese as Bijo to Ekitiningen (Beautiful Woman and Hydrogen Men), a hilariously hyperbolic title that rather falsely advertises the film as being far more exploitative than it is. This is ironic, as usually, particularly in the case of AIP's releases of Toho's films, the US titles always played up the films' exploitation elements (see Matango/Attack of the Mushroom People) whereas the Japanese titles were often more serious.

While in The H-Man there are some pretty girls dressed a little scantily at times, the real focus is a creepy atmosphere and some well done special effects by the always iconoclastic Eiji Tsuburaya, both of which look forward to their aforementioned Matango (1963). The film's mix of yakuza hjinks and genre elements also anticipates Honda's future, and far less serious Dogora, the Space Monster (1964). Here's one of the big highlights of The H-Man, a sequence eerily reminiscent of the infamous Dai-go Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) incident in which a fishing vessel steers way too close to an atomic test causing some horrific repercussions.

Another scene from Mondo Cane co-author Franco E. Prosperi's often unintentionally comedic but always morally repulsive when-animals-attack epic Wild Beasts (1983). Have you ever seen an elephant squash a lady's head with its foot? Now you have!

A special, Valentine's Day themed clip. Here's a spectacularly silly sequence from Kinji Fukasaku's Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983). This is actually Fukasaku's second go at the material, as the director previously used the same basis for his space opera Message From Space (1978). For years only available in washed out public domain prints, Legend of the Eight Samurai is actually quite beautifully filmed and lavishly made and compares well with such Western films of the same type and period as Conan the Barbarian, Krull and Ladyhawke.

Its all the more amazing to see something like this from Kinji Fukasaku, who was simply the most versatile Japanese filmmaker to ever live. His crime dramas like Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) and Graveyard of Honor (1975) are notoriously grim and boast an almost documentary-like grit and realism akin to Western filmmakers such as William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann. Legend of the Eight Samurai, on the other hand, is silly, opulent and very over the top, all the more obvious in this borderline unintentionally hilarious sequence, a scene in which Shinbee (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Shizuhime (Hiroko Yakushimaru) fornicate in a saccharine PG fashion under a bunch of Buddha statues in misty, blue lit atmosphere is punctuated by American vocalist John O'Banion's love theme.

Meet Florrie Fisher: she's a narcissistic, drug addicted beast who sadly plays into "Nasally-voiced New York Jew" stereotype all too well. This is her story, the apparent point of it being "don't do drugs", which she drills into an obviously uncomfortable crowd of high school kids with the charm of a chronic Staph infection, often singling out the black kids as "you Negros", something that would get you instantly ejected from the premises of any respectable high school today.

While watching this footage, you will feel a strange mix of emotions: mainly disgust, fear and amusement. Within a few years Florrie Fisher was back on the streets doing drugs and later died in complete obscurity, as in nobody knows what happened to her. Amy Sidaris later based her character off Fisher in Strangers With Candy.

Here's a nasty bit from T.F. Mou's Lost Souls (1980). Mou was the man later responsible for Men Behind the Sun (1988) but some years before he was causing people to throw up, faint and even get heart attacks in China, he was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable at Shaw Brothers studios in Hong Kong. Mou hated working for the Shaw Brothers because they were pretty much a movie factory that did little in the way of encouraging artistic integrity. For Lost Souls, Mou convinced Run Run Shaw to greenlight this film with no script and pretty much made the film up as he went along. What results is a wildly uneven but definitely worthwhile film that very much foreshadows his later work on Men Behind the Sun and Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995).

Like Men Behind the Sun, Lost Souls takes its plot from reality, in this case the cruel exploitation of mainland China refugees in Hong Kong by HK-based Triads, a frequent headline news-grabber in the tiny island nation in the late 70s-early 80s. Lost Souls is one of those kinds of films that switches gears at any particular moment and if there's one major problem with the film, its that Mou seems like he wasn't sure what kind of film he wanted to make (and the fact that the film was shot without a script probably exacerbated this). At times it seems like hes trying to make an exploitation film as degrading and tasteless as anything Japanese filmmakers such as Teruo Ishii or Yasuharu Hasebe or Europeans like Jess Franco and Ruggero Deodato could come up with. Other times it seems like hes trying to make a serious political piece about the plight of these poor immigrants or even an artsy fartsy film like Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo and the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). This makes the film rather bipolar at times. One thing rampant in this film that definitely foreshadows Mou's later work is the use of extreme, graphic imagery. Throughout the film, we see women tied up like animals to chairs having hot wax dripped on their naked bodies, we see rows upon rows of naked female asses with prices sharpied onto them, we see naked children murdered and we even see homosexual sodomy so graphic it makes Deliverance look like an Ernest film! Some of this is staged in a solemn fashion, some of it is staged in an almost comedic manner and some of it is like a weird mix between both. If theres one major problem with the film, its that Mou seems like he wasnt sure what kind of film he wanted to make (and the fact that the film was shot without a script probably exacerbated this). Still, Lost Souls is a pretty incredible film. It goes as far as any Category III film did in the early 90s yet was made years before the rating (which T.F. Mou actually indirectly helped create with the controversy surrounding Men Behind the Sun) even existed and yet is a studio production from the Shaw era. This sequence is a good example of how far the film goes in its level of depravity.

Here's an absolutely kickass sequence from Kinji Fukasaku's Samurai Reincarnation (1981), also known as Makai Tensho (which translates from the Nihongo as Demonic Resurrection). Samurai Reincarnation is Kinji Fukasaku's return to the jidai-geki genre after taking his audiences to a post-germ warfare holocaust world in his megabucks sci-fi epic Virus (1980) which he made for Haruki Kadokawa, the Nippon Jerry Bruckheimer. With this film, Fukasaku pays another visit to the Yagyu clan, everyone's favorite dysfunctional Tokugawa-era martial arts family which he previous explored in his first period piece, The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy (1978). Here, however, working from a lurid novel by Futaro Yamada, Fukasaku crafts a far more bizarre world, throwing in other events and historical figures in the same time period as the Yagyus and the early Tokugawa bakufu as Amakusa Shiro Tokisada and the Christian rebels, Musashi Miyamoto and the Koga and Iga ninja clans. It was with this film that Kinji Fukasaku began to craft a more fantasy-based type of jidai-geki film that actually owed more the Western fantasy epics being produced at the same time than it did to Akira Kurosawa which come full circle in Fukasaku's Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983).

With an all-star cast headlined by such lords of Nippon badass as Sonny Chiba, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ken Ogata and Tetsuro Tamba, the film has several particularly spectacular action sequences courtesy of the always frantically kinetic Fukasaku's direction and karate master Chiba's intensely physical choreography. This is one of them; a beautifully staged and filmed duel on a beach featuring Chiba's Yagyu Jubei and Ogata's Musashi Miyamoto.

Badass as all get out bit from The Deadly Angels (1977), a Shaw Brothers cop/spy flick. If Mighty Peking Man was the zany, Sinoized version of King Kong, Deadly Angels is most certainly the wacky Hong Kong version of Charlie's Angels. The film is directed by hired hack/former cinematographer and Chang Cheh assistant Pao Hsueh-Li and revolves around a gaggle of international female cops lead by Peking Man's Evelyn Kraft and the cute Nancy Yen, who track a vicious diamond smuggling ring.

Despite being one of the biggest box office hits when released in HK and one of the more notable Shaw flicks before Celestial's restorations, Celestial Pictures decided not to bother releasing it, along with a great many other films. While The Deadly Angels is by no means a "good" film, being very sloppily made and disjointed, it is a lot of fun and does pack some always lively action sequences.

The opening sequence of Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, one of the coolest Japanese exploitation films ever made. Directed by maverick Shunya Ito and starring the always stunning Meiko Kaji (later of Lady Snowblood fame) the first three Female Convict Scorpion films feature a strange mixture of sleazy, exploitative violence and degradation with a level of visual beautiful and surreal aesthetic that will please the arthouse crowd. Despite the films' violent content, they are fierce feminist statements in many ways.

Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 is the finest of the films, however, something of a ero-guro Empire Strikes Back to the first film's A New Hope. Most of the film features protagonist Nami, along with a gaggle of other and far nastier female convicts, on the run from the cruel prison warden Goda (Fumio Watanabe). Meiko Kaji's persona shines brightest here: she is an unblinking, tough as a stone female revolutionary who never gives, no matter how much heinous abuse is piled upon her. She is, as the director himself said, the one female voice who dared to stand up and say "no" to patriarchal society. Ito's surrealist direction is also at its finest here and the film has a lot of freak out "wow" moments.

Cinema and Morality

2009-02-17T18:24:00.005-05:00

This is a question that has been wracking my brain for quite some time: does morality and the moral code of society have any true bearing on quality cinema?

For example, Roman Polanski is, by all means, a master of cinematic technique: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist are excellent films all. He also statutorily raped a 13 year old girl. The question here is: do 10 excellent films make Roman Polanski a highly talented, masterful director or does his one rape overshadow all that and automatically make him a rapist? Sam Peckinpah is alleged to have physically abused some women but that doesn't make The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs any less awesome as movies! Should he be primarily known as a domestic abuser or a masterful director? Klaus Kinski was a monstrous person to deal with, but his performances, particularly in Herzog's films, the person whom he clashed with the most, were all brilliant.

One person who really makes me think about this is Roger Ebert. He's reviewed a great many films I loved and it's clear he's very intelligent, loves cinema at its core and knows a great many things about cinematic technique. But he's also given many films that are quite objectively fine works of art poor ratings such as A Clockwork Orange and Blue Velvet because they morally overstepped in his mind. One film I feel heavily this way about is The Exorcist (which Ebert, ironically, loves). By all accounts William Friedkin directed the film in a monstrous way, most of the fear on behalf of the actors was quite genuine and the film uses masterful, documentary-like cinematic technique to make a Christian fantasy world very believable and palatable in a way almost akin to Triumph of the Will and Nazism. Yet I adore the film because it's simply a fine film and a good piece of storytelling.

With exploitation-type films, this dilemma gets much worse. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi's films are, objectively, very well made and powerful affairs, but the majority of them do feature authentic violence and abuse toward animals and sometimes even people. Even if the filmmakers didn't actually stage it themselves like some accused, they still sat by and rolled their cameras as people were executed and animals were butchered. They succeeded as filmmakers, bringing back amazing works of art like Africa Addio, but failed as human beings. Then there's Cannibal Holocaust, a great film, objectively, but its similar animal violence (which Deodato himself lived to regret) makes it hard for many to take. Despite the fact that Deodato clearly shouldn't have harmed those animals, can his film still be called a "good" film? And what of T.F. Mou and his work on Men Behind the Sun? Was his use of actual human cadvaers justified, even if it does lend a horrendous level of authenticity to his film?

This, to me, is truly the biggest dilemma facing all filmmakers and film lovers alike: what is more important, moral integrety or artistic integrity? Should a filmmaker focus only on making the greatest piece of art he can or should he focus on doing the right thing as a human being? Or perhaps should the modern filmmaker try to balance them both?

Tokyo Gore Police capsule review

2009-02-16T19:15:00.004-05:00

I must say that I found the recent Tokyo Gore Police better than I thought it would be. I think few can disagree that Japanese cinema in the last decade has gotten increasingly boring, bland and tailor made for the careers of TV and pop idols overall. This may sound pathetic, but I was very depressed last year that Japanese cinema was just so boring, a far cry away from the many daring, brilliant films made in the 60s-80s. I was so put off by movies like Sinking of Japan that I didn't even want to watch any other recent Japanese films they now lacked the soul of the classic cinematic art form Nihon film was once. However, then I saw Tokyo Gore Police and my faith has begun to return. I realized, having disdain toward recent Japanese cinema because of Sinking of Japan and Dororo is like hating all American cinema automatically because of Michael Bay and Zach Snyder.

Though mainstream Japanese horror is in a rut as the boom started by Ring over a decade ago and brought to America is one dead horse indeed, independent horror films appear to be in somewhat of a rennaisance, look at such gory delights as Meatball Machine, The Machine Girl and now Tokyo Gore Police for more evidence. Tokyo Gore Police is a rather underrated mix of South Park-like political satire with extreme, excessive “splatstick” gore very akin to the legendary Hong Kong production The Story of Ricky and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. Though Tokyo Gore Police is sometimes sloppily lensed on bland digital video, it’s nonetheless a highly funny and perversely fetishistic film that delivers bucket-loads of gore, laughs and arterial spray. I can safely say that Tokyo Gore Police is thoroughly welcome addition to the fabled league of "so excessively gory they're hilarious" films like Dead Alive, H.G. Lewis' mangled body of work and Criminally Insane (aka Crazy Fat Ethel). If you’re a gorehound and its gore you want, Tokyo Gore Police will give you that in literal torrents. In terms of onscreen grue and fake blood usage (in liters here since the Japanese use the Metric system) it rivals Dead Alive. Director Yoshihiro Nishimura exhibits a very similar humor style to Jackson before he started making three hour movies about magic rings and giant gorillas, but of course more Japanese, which means it's way more sexual and can involve teenage girls in school uniforms. The FX are not exactly realistic, but they aren’t meant to be and the film’s gruesome fleshy prosthetics brings Rob Bottin’s work to mind, which is a woefully absent quality in today’s age of CGI work over all else. Tokyo Gore Police utilizes some CG work, but as it should be, it’s used only when normal FX wouldn’t work or to enhance and not replace.

My favorite aspect of Tokyo Gore Police, however, is not the gore but the political satire, which is every bit over the top and very reminiscent of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s brutal, “no-one-is-innocent” humor style. Everything politically unpleasant about the country of Japan is mocked here: from right wing nationalism to enjo-kosei (the polite word for schoolgirl prostitution) to the capriciousness and shallow obsessions of Japanese teenagers to Japan’s relationship with China. Every once in a while the film pauses to show you absolutely hysterical faux commercials, the funniest being a bit where a group of schoolgirls tote trendy knives to self mutilate cute designs into one’s wrists. A Westerner may not get everything, but Tokyo Gore Police’s political satire is every bit as biting and take no prisoners as its gore FX, which is really saying a lot. Tokyo Gore Police is sadly bogged down a bit by a slightly overdrawn out runtime that could have some tightening up and a rather runny, shot on digital video look which is unfortunately very distracting. While the set ups, exposures and shot framings are decent, the film looks to have been shot on high range DV to mid range HD and as a result looks more amateurish simply because of its format than it deserves to. This, in the end, is the main fatal flaw in an otherwise delightful political J-horror splatter comedy which pulls no stops, shows zero restraint and is one hysterical night of chest heaving laughter for those who can laugh at the truly absurd.

I don't want this Valentine's Day to end.

2009-02-14T20:45:00.002-05:00

Music by John O'Banion.

The Lost Continent (1968)

2009-02-10T16:32:00.006-05:00

I have a large archive of unreleased writing material of mine. What better place to publish it all than this blog? So here it begins!

The Lost Continent, UK (Hammer, 1968), directed by Michael Carreras

I have a story to tell regarding The Lost Continent (1968). At the tender age of 7, I looked in the TV Guide and saw that something called The Lost Continent was going to be on the station TNT. Back then, in the early 1990s, before TV completely became a completely corporate dominated soulless entity filled with slick commercials, mindnumblingly banal TV shows and shameless reality television, we had something called MonsterVision. MonsterVision, easily the Gen-Xers’ Creature Double Feature, was an evening program that ran until the wee hours of the morning on TNT and showed ye olde monster films that nobody in my Ritalin and MTV addled generation cares about anymore. You could catch American schlock like Night of the Lepus (1972), Hammer horror movies, Ray Harryhausen films, 50s sci-fi movies like The Blob (1958), classic Toho kaiju films and so much more. Being then a dinosaur obsessed kid who loved to thumb through now softcore porno director Don Glut's The Dinosaur Scrapbook, I thought that the film being referred to was Lost Continent (1951), a film I still have yet to see. I then tuned into MonsterVision and was more than a little dismayed by what I saw. There were no stop motion dinosaurs or Caesar Romero to found. Instead what I got was bloodthirsty sea weed, giant octopi dragging dudes over the sides of ships and a bunch of smarmy British people. I kept waiting for the dinosaurs to show up, but they never did. That night, let's just say I had a fair share of nightmares to mull over.

However, The Lost Continent grew to be a favorite of mine by the age of 12 when I rediscovered it on VHS thanks to Anchor Bay’s Hammer collection releases. I was captivated by how exceedingly strange the film was. I mean it’s got bloody mutiny, killer crustaceans, man eating seaweed, explosive chemicals, fanatical Spanish inquisitors who look like Klansmen and music that sounds like it’s right out of an early 70s porno. Did I mention that one of its supporting actresses, singer Dana Gillespie, has a figure and bust that redefines the term “Rubinesqe”? Sure, The Lost Continent is gigantic mess, but it’s an incredibly fun mess. It’s not a good, working film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s just so much fun, like the Anglo-equivalent to Toho's Sayonara Jupiter (1984). It’s one of my favorite Hammer guilty pleasure movies along with Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972). From its opening credit sequence which features a psychedelic title theme by "The Peddlers" to its explosive finale, it never stops in its endless quest to entertain by barraging the viewer with lunacy after lunacy, chucked at you with all the subtlety of a fabled automobile-sized hailstone.

The smarmy Captain Lansen (Eric Porter) has just done the smarmiest thing imaginable: he’s smuggling explosives on his ship, the rickety tramp steamer Corrita from South Africa to Venezuela to make a few pounds. This wouldn’t be such a stupid idea if it wasn’t for the fact that his explosive is a weird compound that combusts as soon as water touches it. Why anyone would take hundreds of canisters of that particular kind of explosive on a long sea voyage is beyond any sane person’s logical comprehension. Lansen’s passengers are equally smarmy. Eva Peters (Hildegard Knef) has just made off with the last of her ex-husband’s money, him being a former Dominican despot. Dr. Webster (Nigel Stock) is a corrupt physician on the run from the police after having committed some hardcore medical malpractice. His daughter, Unity (Suzanna Leigh), is a nymphomaniac who has already screwed half the crewmembers of the ship by boarding time. Harry Tyler (Tony Beckley) is a man with such a severe case of alcoholism that he spends every moment of every day at some degree of inebriation. Last but by no means least is Ricaldi (Benito Carruthers), the indescribably skuzzy pedophile-mustachioed resident onboard weirdo who is actually some kind of secret agent out to hunt down Eva and get her husband’s money back. The ship’s crew isn’t that much better than the passengers. They are a gaggle of mutinous scumbags who you wouldn’t trust your worst enemy’s life to. Practically the only person on board who even begins to approach the level of decent human being is Patrick (Jimmy Hanley), the ship’s happy-go-lucky bartender.

Things start to get just a little strained when the crew finds the room filled to the brim with explosives and Lansen gets all dodgy about it when confronted. Later, the good Captain receives a hurricane warning and tears it up. Lansen’s lack of compassion for his passengers and crewmembers starts to get on Officer Hemmings’ (Neil McCallum)’s nerves and finally he leads a violent mutiny of the crew. The crew members literally jump ship and soon after, Lansen decides to abandon ship with the passengers and remaining crew as well. Naturally, with about a dozen smarmy people confined to a ten foot by five foot life boat, things get very Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Finally, Tyler gets drunk one night and pushes Dr. Webster off the boat, whereupon he’s eaten by a shark. Soon afterward, the castaways encounter living seaweed with a taste for human flesh, which proceeds to devour the token wounded cook. Soon, in a most contrived fashion, the castaways soon bump into the Corrita again, which mysteriously managed to not explode during the hurricane. Soon, the killer seaweed jams up the ship’s propeller and drags the ship through the Sargasso Sea. Unity is then attacked by a giant cyclopsian octopus thingamajig that ends up dragging Ricaldi off the boat.

Finally, the Corrita finds itself in the harbor of an usual island engulfed completely in the very voracious seaweed and littered with the wreckages of dozens of ships from about six centuries. One day, a large breasted girl named Sarah (Dana Gillespie) who lives on the island walks over to the ship with snowshoes and a pair of giant balloons (separate but only slightly larger than the pair on her chest) and is soon followed by the Spanish Inquisition itself (cue the inevitable Monty Python reference) who skirmish with the castaways. The Inquisitors are descended from Spaniards who were trapped there centuries ago, still haven’t made an ounce of social progress and worship El Supremo (Darryl Read), a young boy who is fed poisonous nonsense by the Grand Inquisitor (Eddie Powell), whose costume more suggests Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard than Spanish Inquisition. Can the castaways prevail over the Inquisition and can they escape the terrible titular lost continent?

The Lost Continent is actually based on Uncharted Seas, a 1938 novel by Dennis Wheatley, a very strange individual by all accounts. He wrote a large assortment of novels on the subjects of the occult, lost worlds and even aberrant sexuality. His books are nowadays fairly difficult to find since they are considered to be highly politically incorrect due to their flagrant racism. This film was made produced more or less simultaneously with Hammer’s other Dennis Wheatley adaptation that year, The Devil Rides Out (also 1968). The Lost Continent, however, was the much larger of the two productions, it being Hammer’s highest budgeted (at nearly a million dollars) film at that time. Unfortunately, screenwriter Michael Carreras (under the pseudonym Michael Nash) decided to use about as much of Wheatley’s original novel as the earlier adaptation of The Day of the Triffids (1962) used from John Wyndham’s novel of the same name. The original novel had a heavy plot element involving the Nazis, this was cut completely from the film and numerous other elements were altered as well. To add insult to injury, the production went way over budget and original director Leslie Norman (who previously directed X: The Unknown for Hammer over ten years prior) was fired after only filming a few days worth of footage. In the end, producer-writer Michael Carreras decided to direct the film himself and ended up creating a spectacularly uneven film.

However, as uneven and just plain weird and illogical The Lost Continent is, it’s a cinematic experience like few others. The film actually looks quite beautiful, thanks to Paul Beeson’s lushly atmospheric cinematography and Arthur Lawson’s sterling art direction. The sequences set around the lost continent are actually a wonder to behold visually, with a spooky layer of mist and a beautiful orangey hue to everything. The critters, which unlike Hammer’s earlier One Million Years B.C. (1966) are not Harryhausen stop motion beasts but mechanical mock ups, are sadly less than convincing. Robert A. Mattey, the man who previously was responsible for the giant squid in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and later created the infamously technical difficulty-riddled shark in Jaws (1975), handled the creatures here. Sadly they, with the exception of a pretty cool giant hermit crab which strangles Patrick the bartender, are definitely a large step down from Mattey’s future and former work. They look like what they are: foam rubber monsters moved around by a motor.

The music by Gerard Schurmann who previously scored such classics as Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Konga (1961), is uniquely bizarre. Most of the time, it’s a pretty standard orchestral score. Once in a while, however, usually whenever Hildegard Knef starts to talk about her checkered past, the film suddenly uses a music cue that sounds like a different person entirely wrote it. It’s a sleazy organ piece that sounds like it belongs in some kind of 70s porno film. The film’s strangest element is its acting. For some odd reason, the entire cast of fine British thespians keeps completely straight faces throughout. The Lost Continent is by no means a good film, but its best described as an indescribably surreal experience. By all means, it shouldn’t be so entertaining, the characters are deeply unlikable, the film is insanely messy in its plotting and the special effects are not so special, but it is! Did I mention Dana Gillespie already? I think I did…

Videos of the Week (2/6/09)

2009-02-06T11:21:00.000-05:00

A day late posting the videos this week. I still uploaded them, but yeah, I'm still busy right now putting together the new perfected cuts of my films. I also have Otaku USA business I have to finish up too.

Here we have the opening credits from the classic, old school dubbed version of Toho's Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971), once better known as Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster in brighter times. It was released on an infamous double bill to American drive-ins by American International Pictures in 1972 with Frogs, an equally eco-themed horror film in what must of have been one hell of a night to remember for any suburban Baby Boomer. This version redubs the film's song: Kai ei Sei (Give Us Back Our Sun) into an English ditty entitled Save the Earth sung by Adryan Russ.

This is one of the best dubbed versions of a movie ever made, equal to the Japanese version in almost every single way, but sadly, for some reason, most likely owing to the dubious rights entanglements of the Save the Earth song, Toho has chosen to pretty much disown this dub in favor of the much inferior international version, which is closer to the Japanese version but lacks all the charm of AIP's cut, which features one of the later dubs done by Titan Studios and Speed Racer dubber Peter Fernandez.

Carnival of Souls (1962) is one of my favorite films of all time. It's also one of the thriftiest productions ever made. It was shot on 16mm in Kansas for about 30 grand, a microscopic sum even back then. However, the film manages to be about a thousand times better than many massive Hollywood productions that its budget would buy a catered lunch for and that's about it. Its ghouls, all of which likely cost about a dollar to put each actor into rudimentary makeup are far more frightening than any CGI monster of today that costs $10 million to even get on the screen. The atmosphere and aesthetic of Carnival of Souls is equally incredible, like a mix between the serene visual beauty of filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Hiroshi Teshigahara with the meat and potatoes of a Mid Western American educational short. This was the director's, Herk Harvey's, only feature film he ever worked on, all his other films were ephemeral shorts made for the Kansas-based company Centron, most notably the expressionistic Cheating, which would foreshadow much of the eerie, moody aesthetic he would bring to this film. Carnival of Souls is true, eternal proof that we don't need Hollywood. Anyone with enough talent and tenacity and access to a bit of equipment can make a fantastic film in their own backyard for little money at all. If only more amateur filmmakers today, in this age of easy to come by digital cinema, would follow Harvey's example and produce films of this caliber.

Here we see terror on an epic scale on a shoestring budget. Mary (Candace Hilligoss), who mysteriously survived a terrible car accident that should have sent her to a watery grave, begins to see strange visions and see the line between reality and dreams blurred. What is really going on here?

Here's a rather perverted sequence from the Shaw Brothers horror film Haunted Tales (1980), the film is a Hong Kong horror anthology with two segments, one slow, methodical and very Mario Bava-like segment directed by the artsy Chu Yuan (Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, Killer Clans) and the other, a sleazy mini-film with a vibe very akin to a pinku eiga helmed by director Mou Tun-fei (better known as T.F. Mou), the mad genius later responsible for such works of spectacular brutality as Lost Souls and Men Behind the Sun. Haunted Tales is an experience not unlike Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse, with two films for the price of one that almost play ying and yang to each other, one subtle with a gradual build up and a more melancholy sense of horror with the other over the top, sexy, gory and filled to the brim with sleazy nastiness.

This is a bit from T.F. Mou's segment The Prize Winner, in which Ah Cheng (Chan Shen), a lonely, dirt poor tenement occupant wins the lottery using a Chinese charactered equivalent to a Ouija board. He soon abuses his money though which leads him to a rather unfortunate karmic payback. This is a bit from toward the end which shows you just show sleazy the film is. T.F. Mou seldom hesitates to throw in an uncomfortable scene in each of his films involving a child or adolescent and here a nasty father (Shen Lao), wagers his daughter (Liu Lai-Ling) to get Ah Cheng to gamble away his money. The outcome is decided via a game of strip poker with cigarettes and coins instead of cards and the girl doing the honors of stripping. When I met T.F. Mou, though, sadly he couldn't remember this one

Here is an infamously wacked little bit from Gamera vs. Guiron, no doubt the strangest of the 60s-70s kiddie Gamera films. The Japanese have a very different perspective on what's appropriate children's film material as us Westerners and it shows no better than here. Here, as space stranded kids Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima) and Tom (Christopher Murphy) gleefully watch, the blade-headed beastie Guiron, who guards the base of two brain-eating alien women, slices a silver spray-painted version of Gyaos, the monster from 1967's Gamera vs. Gyaos, limb to limb Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight style as nonchalantly as Takashi Kaga would slice an asparagus head.

Though Toho's staff of Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya generally shied away from kaiju bloodshed, especially for their star kaiju Godzilla, at Daiei in the Gamera series director Noriaki Yuasa was very gleeful to spill torrents of weird-colored kaiju blood, which is ironic, since the Gamera films are even more geared at children than the vast majority of Honda and Tsuburaya's output. Though Toho is reluctant to admit it, the kiddie factor and excessive kaiju gore of the Gamera series would significantly influence the Godzilla series, as in the 70s that series got sillier and more child-geared and Teruyoshi Nakano's monster fights far gorier after he took over in the wake of Tsuburaya's death.

The Drug Connection (1976) is an unauthorized Shaw Brothers remake of Jack Hill's celebrated AIP blacksploitation flick Coffy (1973) with pretty much the exact same plot, except substituting Hong Kong for Harlem, Chinese for brothahs and sistahs and vampy, voluptuous cutie Chen Ping (who previously starred in the equally sleazy The Kiss of Death) for Pam Grier. The film is directed by Sun Chung, who later made better known period works like Avenging Eagle and Human Lanterns and was one of the few directors at Shaw Brothers to utilize significant visual flair in his work despite Run Run Shaw's dedication at his studio to business over art.

The Drug Connection (now rechristened The Sexy Killer for alleged odd censorship reasons), is nearly to every bit as good a film as Coffy, in fact often feeling more cohesive and bringing a far more over the top hallowed Hong Kong quality to the iconic, heavily influential on Tarantino's Kill Bill tale of the vengeance and fury of a woman scorned. Here's a scene where the Coffy character, Wan-fei (Chen Ping), raids the glitzy but tasteless home of the film's evil drug lord, which even has a torture chamber where the guy chains up and whips hapless females. Only in Hong Kong cinema did films go this gleefully over the top.

House by the Cemetery (1981) is hardly Italian gore guru Lucio Fulci's finest film. Like Chinese director Chang Cheh, he's a rather sloppy filmmaker, but people hardly go see his films for their riveting mise-en-scene. House by the Cemetery is easily Fulci's sister film to City of the Living Dead (1980) and both films are quite similar: both have dreary New England settings, star English rose Katriona MacColl, are heavily influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and are quite unintelligibly and incoherently plotted.

If City of the Living Dead is confusing, House by the Cemetery is downright baffling in its plot-line. However, the film still is recommended for its bloody, always flamboyantly brutal killings and very strange atmosphere and aesthetic. As a native of New England, I can safely say that it captures the dreary, lifeless vibe of Massachusetts in the winter better than most films.

A wonderfully out there scene from the fantastic Japanese horror/sci-fi hybrid Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968). Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is one of my personal favorite Japanese genre films of the 1960s, sitting alongside such films as Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960) and Ishiro Honda's Matango (1963). There's really something quite amazing about this film. It's got the Cold War paranoia-fuelled plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers mixed with outlandish visuals of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. This film has been getting more press in the last five years because, when creating the scenes in which Uma Thurman flies to Tokyo in an airplane in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino turned to this movie for visual inspiration. Goke is directed by Hajime Sato, a very interesting and tragically underexposed Japanese genre filmmaker who also made the atmospheric Ghost of the Hunchback (1965) and the pulpy Terror Beneath the Sea and Golden Bat (both 1966). Sadly Goke, produced by Shochiku, was Sato's last feature film, but what a fine note to end his career it was!

Another thing I love about Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is how deeply political and psychological a horror film it actually is. The film contains a number of references and jabs at Vietnam and World War II. The film's misanthropic and nihilistic vision of a group of castaways behaving badly is quite reminiscent of the aforementioned Matango in many ways; the two plots parallel: both revolve around a stranded bunch of castaways getting at each other's throats due to lack of supplies and being isolated together in a Jean Paul Sartre kind of of way before falling prey to the supernatural. The ending of Goke is probably the grimmest, most outrageously nihilistic punch in the stomach kind of finale I've ever seen in a Japanese film. Here we have a nice little scene in which the film's aliens ooze their way into assassin Hideo Ko's skull and possess his body, turning him into a vampire-like zombie.

Obviously, no Ephemeral Film Friday this week either. Maybe next week if I'm less busy.

Videos of the Week (1/29/09)

2009-01-29T22:04:00.003-05:00

More video goodness this week!

This is a great bit from Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), the legendary American International Pictures movie produced by the equally legendary Roger Corman and directed by Bernard Kowalski. The film features a hicked-out town of trailer trash in rural Florida being terrorized by bunch of giant leeches.

The film has two things to highly recommend it: its over-the-top depiction of the Deep South and lowbrow Americana and these sequences here, in which the titular giant leeches drag their prey into their mucky cavern homes and drain them dry slowly. These scenes are pretty shockingly gruesome compared to the relatively tame rest of the feature and were most likely responsible for many a Baby Boomer nightmare when screened at the Drive-In and on TV years later. It's truly bizarre moments like these that set exploitation and B-movies apart from mainstream cinema in a positive way.

The absolutely unbelievable final 10 minutes of the Shaw Brothers horror nasty Seeding of a Ghost (1983). Seeding of a Ghost plays a bit like Takashi Miike's Audition: it has a very slow start and build up but the final pay off is beyond anything you could ever have imagined. The first hour is surprisingly dull for a Shaw Brothers horror flick, particularly one in the "wacko Eastern black magic" family, a class of film known for being completely and utterly "out there". However, the best is truly saved for last: the final 10 minutes of the film are one of the most outrageously excessive, completely out of left field things I've seen aside from the lawnmower scene in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. I'm not even going to spoil it, you simply have you see it for yourself. It's like something from an H.P. Lovecraft story via Rob Bottin's effects for The Thing with the "splatstick" outlandishness of early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson. It's so outlandishly over the top that it's hard to believe that its even unfolding before your eyes on a TV or movie screen. Seeding of a Ghost owes at least 90% of its notoriety to this final sequence.

Scene from the US version of Toho's 1984 Godzilla franchise reboot The Return of Godzilla, here called Godzilla 1985. When it came to America, the film was tightened up, which actually improved it slightly as the original Japanese version is rather monotonous. However, the newly shot US scenes (by R.J. Kizer of Hell Comes to Frogtown infamy) which bring back Raymond Burr don't work as they fail to take material seriously and Godzilla 1985 needlessly demonizes the film's Russian characters by changing a major plot twist.

Here's an example of why Godzilla 1985 doesn't work. Godzilla's causing untold amounts of devastation while Major Jackass (Travis Swords) can't resist making an MST3K-style quip at the immense amounts of death and destruction he sees. Raymond Burr resists the urge to punch the guy out knowing that he might lose his paycheck if he does.

Meet the Feebles (1989) is a film by Peter Jackson, but those familiar with his recent work wouldn't know it until the credits rolled and even when they did see his name would probably think it was a different "Peter Jackson". Despite what you may think, this film was directed by the same man who made The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. I know it seems impossible, but it's true! Before he made megabucks films like those, he made films like Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles: outrageously excessive low budget Kiwi comedies with an always ghoulish sense of humor and copious bloodshed abounding.

Meet the Feebles is Peter Jackson's only puppet film and his second feature film after his guerrilla debut BAD TASTE. The film shows you the seedy "behind the scenes" of a Muppet Show-like variety show which ends in a bloody massacre few could ever have expected. Jackson showed a tenacity equaled by few that would foreshadow his over half decade of blood, sweat and tears on Lord of the Rings: he hated working with puppets and the film's shoot ran way over schedule. Undaunted, he broke into the studio for several nights with his crew and finished kind of illegally. Many of the people he hired to make the puppets and miniatures, most notably technician Richard Taylor, would, a decade later, make the Oscar winning sets, miniatures, makeups and effects for Lord of the Rings. In this scene, Robert the Hedgehog visits Wynyard the Frog, a helpless junkie who served in Vietnam. He recounts his experiences in combat in a sequence that hilariously pays homage to The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and just about every other Vietnam film ever made.

A scene from a Jacopetti and Prosperi's Women of the World (1964). Women of the World, made on the heels of Mondo Cane, partially from the massive amounts of footage the two obtained during their global sojourns, shows us the role of the female in various cultures around the world. This scene shows us a training camp for female recruits in Israel, one of the few countries in which military service is compulsory for both sexes.

Awesome scene from House (1977), a neat J-horror flick from director Nobuhiko Obayashi. Obayashi was a very popular director, later responsible for such films as School in the Crosshairs (1981), the very famous Transfer Student (1982) and The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983) as well the uniquely strange Drifting Classroom (1987). The interesting thing about House is that it's one of Obayashi's first outbursts of madness and that it comes from Toho, the Japanese studio best known for Godzilla who were and still are notoriously conservative in what they would make, with exec Tomoyuki Tanaka destroying director Yoshimitsu Banno's career for getting a little too "out there" with 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedorah.

The making of House is all the more of a miracle then, as the film is so visually eccentric it makes Godzilla vs. Hedorah look downright tepid. House's plot is a simple coming of age story mixed with haunted house flick, but Obayashi directs with an insane amount of visual flair: the film's color scheme is downright eyepopping, looking like a mix between Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan and Dario Argento's Suspiria. The film also throws every visual and cinematic technique into the mix: animation, double exposures, slow motion, fast motion, every scene has some sort of optical manipulation done to it. This scene here, involving a grand piano hungry for virgin blood, is a perfect example.

Master of the Flying Guillotine (1975) could well be my favorite Chinese martial arts film ever made. The film is directed by Jimmy Wang Yu, a director-writer-actor who began his career as the One Armed Swordsman in Chang Cheh's 1967 Shaw Brothers production of the same name. Jimmy Wang Yu is the Orson Welles of kung fu movies and I believe Master of the Flying Guillotine could be its Citizen Kane. While Wang Yu's The Chinese Boxer (1970) and Beach of the War Gods (1973) were made with Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, respectively, Master of the Flying Guillotine was made as an independent film, which meant a smaller budget but more artistic freedom for Jimmy.

The film takes its basic concept from the then very recent (if still in production) Shaw Brothers Qing dynasty epic The Flying Guillotine (1974), in which the paranoid Manchu emperor invents the titular device to decapitate his dissidents. This film has a titular Flying Guillotine assassin (Kam Kong), a blind monk who wields the thing for the Manchu government and comes after the One Armed Boxer (Jimmy Wang Yu), who runs a martial arts school which stands against the opressive Qing regime. The production values may be below the average Shaw Brothers movie here, but the action is some of the finest in any 70s Hong Kong film, with more "this is so awesome" moments than you can shake a stick at. The film's most exciting scene is its martial arts tournament scene, a stunning sequence that takes up a good quarter of the film and features a rousing display of numerous martial arts styles, all choreographed by the great Lau Kar Leung and Lau Kar Wing, who were on loan from Shaw Brothers and do some of their finest work here. In this clip, the Master of the Flying Guillotine rains on the parade of the festival and heads roll.

Sorry guys, but there's not going to be ephemeral film reviewed tomorrow. Too deeply into making the new cuts of my films. Next week, I'll do two if I feel like it!

Ephemeral Film Friday: The Trip Back

2009-01-23T10:09:00.000-05:00

Today's ephemeral film is:

The Trip Back (1970)

The Trip Back is the perfect example of a hilariously over the top educational short if there ever was one. This is some funny, funny but often very disturbing and disconcerting stuff. Viewing it seriously makes one feel an alteration between laughter and disgust, often at the same time. After watching this recently, I did a bit of research and found that for an anti-drug educational short that wasn't mocked on MST3K it had a sizable cult following. I found out that Amy Sidaris, for her portrayal of the main character in the TV show Strangers with Candy, based her performance on the subject of this film: Florrie Fisher. Even if Florrie Fisher was a fictional character, she would still disgust me, but she really is/was a grotesque human being. She's a horrifying, shriveled piece of work with an obnoxious voice that sadly plays into the "nasally Jew voice" stereotype all too well. She's as arrogant a fool as Sarah Palin could ever hope to be and racist as well, as she frequently calls the black girls in the audience "Negroes". With how she behaves and the narcissistic show she puts on in front of these kids, one feels absolutely zero sympathy for her plight.
The film's point is "Don't do drugs", but Miss Fisher verbally drills this message into these kids with all the charm of a chronic Staph infection. She tells everyone, with an obvious extreme right wing black and white worldview behind it, that smoking pot WILL get you arrested and WILL lead to you shooting smack and selling yourself on the streets of Harlem five years down the road. She pressures the kids to snitch on their friends who are smoking pot, accuses everybody in the rooms of being hippies and makes fun of black people. She goes on and on and on in a hideously narcissistic manner while chain smoking cigarettes as the kids roll their eyes, look annoyed at her and many seem a bit too frightened to run out of the school auditorium screaming. I can only imagine how these kids must have felt. She most likely droned on for hours and even watching this edited down to 30 minutes becomes like watching holocaust footage.
The most hilarious part about this is that fate apparently agreed with me, as Florrie Fisher was back on the streets a few years later doing drugs and getting arrested all over again. Then she just disappeared off the face of the planet. Nobody knows what happened to her when all is said and done and those that claim to know have different stories: some say she and a new husband ran an illegal enterprise and she then settled down in the 'burbs before dying in the late 80s but others say she died in the gutter in the 70s. Others say that she is still alive today and is in a cave on the Afghan/Pakistani border smoking cigars with Whitey Bulger and Osama Bin Laden. I'm not gonna say something evil like "by disappearing, she did the world a favor", but her legacy wasn't exactly great and this short film unintentionally speaks louder in that regard than any memoir.

Videos of the Week (1/22/09)

2009-01-22T12:40:00.000-05:00

Here's more juicy, cult film video goodness for this week.

An iconic scene from The Manster (1959), a US/Japanese co-production directed by Kenneth Crane (also responsible for Monster From Green Hell) and George Breakston. The Manster is definitely one of the better lurid 50s B-movie/horror/exploitation flicks with some genuinely freaky for its time imagery and a neat, Jekyll and Hyde-like concept of a man's animalistic ego-self becoming manifest as its own being, albeit in a slightly different form here.

The Manster tells the story of Larry Stanford (Peter Dyneley), an American reporter who pays a visit to mad Japanese scientist Dr. Suzuki (Tetsu Nakamura, who was in a fair few of Ishiro Honda's films). Suzuki shoots Larry up with an experimental serum, which has some rather unpleasant side effects, including but not limited to: anger, irritability, infidelity, the desire to commit murder, hairy palms, an eyeball appearing on the shoulder, growth of a second head and finally, your own bestial, egoic self splitting off from you. This scene is one of the more memorable scenes in the film, in which Larry loses his temper at a few colleagues and then finds something odd on his shoulder.

The Living Skeleton (1968) is one of the most tragically underexposed and just plain great Japanese cult/horror films on God's green Earth. Its atmosphere is stunning and its moody black and white cinematography has a very Carnival of Souls feel. The film's sumptuous visuals, of fog shrouded ships ala John Carpenter, the so distinctly Japanese image of ghostly young women with flowing long black hair, Hitchcockian bloody shower murders, emaciated cannibalistic doctors and of skeletons bobbing up in the ocean are all so lushly filmed and eerily beautiful.

This scene is a great example of how gorgeous the film is in its monochromatic visuals. In this scene, Suetsugu (Nobuo Kaneko), a smuggler, descends into the bowels of a ship he hijacked and massacred the passengers of and finds a man he thought he killed (Ko Nishimura) still quite alive down there.

Bay of Blood (1971) is such a neat little movie by Mario Bava, the father of Italian horror films. Bava's early films had a very gothic, fantasy-based horror style and aesthetic akin to what Hammer and Terence Fisher were doing at the time. However, later on in Bava's career, particularly here in Bay of Blood and his later Rabid Dogs (1974), his work took a rather nihilistic turn. Bay of Blood, however, is no less visually stunning than Bava's classic gothic work. Bava, a master of cinematography and simple camera trickery, creates an absorbing, atmospheric mood using what was apparently just a tiny stretch of woodland. Bay of Blood is perhaps my favorite of Bava's entire filmography, a thrilling and always visually inventive body count epic.

This scene is one of my very favorites. In it, a group of college kids staying near the film's titular bay are slaughtered because they are getting a little too close to the mystery for comfort. This scene really invokes the later Friday the 13th series (particularly Part II, which one set piece here was an obvious influence on).

The Rape After (1984) is a truly bizarrely wonderful Hong Kong shocker. The title itself is rather misleading as those looking for a sexually aberrant Category III type sexploiter will be disappointed. Its plot is similar to that of Seeding of a Ghost (1983), but The Rape After was not produced by Shaw Brothers and thus lacks the patented Shaw Brothers aesthetic. The Rape After is like a Hong Kong weird Black Magic movie mixed with the creepy, nightmarish, "something's just not right" atmosphere of Eraserhead. Its feel is truly unique. From one surreal, bizarre horror to next, it never ceases to repulse and fascinate.

The Rape After is the only directorial work of cinematographer Tom Lau and it's disappointing that he made nothing else, as this film is so promising indeed. Here's a spectacularly grisly sequence in which the pregnant main female protagonist's charred corpse has an autopsy done on it and something very strange happens. The squeamish and easily prone to nausea are recommended to keep a motion sickness bag or bucket by them at all times while viewing this clip.

A cool little scene from the first episode of Ambassador Magma (Magma Taishi), a Japanese sci-fi television far better known on Western shores as The Space Giants. It's a show about a boy named Mamoru (Mikko in the US version) and his alien robot/spaceship friend Ambassador Magma (Goldar). Together they defend the Earth from Goa (Rodak) and his legions of giant monsters. In this scene, Mamoru meets Magma for the first time. Magma wants Mamoru's camera. Mamoru doesn't want to give it up.

The show's basic premise and set up is relatively similar to that of the slightly later Giant Robo (1967, also known as Johnny Sokko and His Giant Robot), but unlike Johnny Sokko, which is a completely absurdest kiddie fantasy show, Ambassador Magma takes itself a little more seriously. Based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka, better known as the father of manga and anime and the creator of Kimba and Speed Racer, the show, like Giant Robo and Tsuburaya's Ultraman, has a wondrous, colorful quality very exclusive to Japanese science fiction at the time.

Funny clip from the 1970s anti-smoking ephemeral health film Smoking: It's Your Choice. The short is actually quite good and effective as far as these "school health scare films" tend to go. It doesn't try to force the viewer's hand, it simply shows you the negative effects of smoking for what they are and allows the viewer to make up their own damn mind.

The presentation is pretty strange by today's standards, though. This scene shows us, with the help of a creepy mannequin who looks like a relative of the Fuccon family of Oh! Mikey fame with cotton filled glass bottles inside meant to stand in as lungs, just how filthy cigarette smoke really is. Some animated diagrams also come in handy.

Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974) is an interesting creature indeed, it's one of Toho Studios' suppressed films, unavailable on legit DVD thanks to a self imposed ban by the studio itself. It's also a highly underrated film. Most often seen in its mutilated US TV cut entitled The Last Days of Planet Earth, the close to two hour long original Japanese version is actually quite a wonder to behold. The film, made on the successful heels of Submersion of Japan (1973), doesnt just target the continent of Japan for the destructive festivities, oh no. In something quite uncommon for a Toho production, the whole world is involved in this fracas. Directed by Toshio Masuda, one of the few directors to go back and forth between Japanese anime and live action films; it also boasts some of SFX director Teruyoshi Nakano's finest work. The film is also the partial brainchild of another mad genius: Yoshimitsu Banno, who would pen the script and act as second unit director for Prophecies of Nostradamus. Banno previously directed Godzilla vs. Hedorah in 1971: the notoriously unconventional and highly surreal entry in the Godzilla series which infuriated producer Tomoyuki Tanaka to the point that Banno never directed another film at Toho. The film bears several of the fine hallmarks of Banno's style, most notably a similar ecological theme. While perhaps not deserving of the title objectively, Prophecies of Nostradamus is nonetheless my all time favorite 70s Toho production and indeed, one of my favorite Japanese sci-fi films in general.

This is the infamous climax of the film, where Dr. Ryogen Nishiyama (Tetsuro Tamba) prophesizes in front of the Japanese Parliment what will happen if people and nations continue to behave idiotically on the stage of world politics. The end of this scene is incredibly creepy with some of the best creature makeup ever devised by Japanese FX technicians since 1963's Matango and it, along with an earlier sequence set in New Guinea, was what got a hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) activist organization riled up to the point at which Toho had to suppress the film to shut them up, not unlike what happened several years prior with Tsuburaya and an episode of Ultra 7. Toho tried to release the film domestically on VHS and laserdisc in 1986 but were met with more protests, since then they have taken a very hands-off policy with both this film and 1955's Abominable Snowman.

Barack Obama

2009-01-20T13:20:00.004-05:00

I'm happy Barack Obama is in the White House now.

In the eight years of the Bush Administration, society truly lost its way and its moral compass. The Bush Administration allowed the rich and powerful to blindly profiteer at the expense of everything else. They used a tragic attack on our nation as an excuse to manipulate us through fear. They started a horrific war on lies which they themselves made up.

In the last year, I saw a world and country completely drained of its hope and vitality. Everyone, particularly us young people, was afraid and feeling hopeless after eight years of Bush. The America of 2008 I saw was not far removed from Kinji Fukasaku's depiction of Japan in Battle Royale: a hysterically terrified, hopeless society. So we didn't throw kids on islands and watch them kill each other, but most of our reality TV shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians weren't too much better.

On the internet this was even more profound than in real life. People rotted away on their computers watching sensalistic videos on YouTube, viciously arguing about pointless shit and mocking everything instead of appreciating it.

With Barack Obama here, leading America, the country which should be making a good example to rest of the world instead of running torture chambers, the time for shallow silliness is over, now is the time for hard work on changing our world for the better. I realized this, if all the computer hackers who make viruses and the ex-computer hackers who make anti-virus software put their efforts toward something productive, like curing diseases: we'd probably have no sicknesses or cancer in this world anymore.

Hope is what can inspire change. It's the seed from which positive change springs. Barack Obama will give us that and get this country and world back on its feet once more.

Louisville Free Face

2009-01-17T04:38:00.002-05:00

I simply must wave the referential wand toward this website. As much as I'm not a fan of Something Awful or its style of humor (not gonna slander SA since I don't want 10,000 ruthless SA goons on this blog), I do like their Awful Link of the Day thing they do. One of my favorite kinds of humor is the kind that's totally unintentional and was made with serious intent.

Which is just what Louisville Free Face is. It's the funniest goddamn thing I've seen in weeks. What does a skinny, pasty Satanist who seems to have just gotten out of prison do? Why, he starts a website offering free oral sex to the hot chicks of Louisville, Kentucky and actually thinks he doesn't seem boundlessly creepy! The website's incredibly disturbingly hilarious in every way possible, from its uncomfortable descriptions of how this man wants to pleasure women for the goddesses they are to its amateurish, very late 90s Geocities site design. The thing that pushes me over the edge, though, are its equally quaint animated gifs of tongues! Good God.

The funniest (and most disturbing) part of this site though is how there's an application form and toward the bottom there's a list of things saying "Would you like any of these other things used on you while you are recieving oral". Some these things include pop rocks, ice cubes and get ready, ELECTRICITY! If he's not joking, he could be headed back to jail very soon.

However, if this guy really is so passionate about giving the ladies "free face", he should strongly consider a career in the porn industry, especially considering that half of the industry's male stars are sociopathic ex-felons anyways and nobody obsessed with naughty videos really watches them to see the men in them.

Ephemeral Film Friday: Weed

2009-01-16T12:44:00.004-05:00

Our ephemeral film for this week will be:

Weed (1971)

Weed is a neat early 70s documentary short, distributed by Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a surprisingly good little film because it completely lacks of the anti-drug hysteria of most of these drug themed educational shorts but doesn't endorse marijuana usage either. It simply tells you about it in as unbiased a manner as it can about a controversial substance, a substance which, while hardly the "weed with its roots in Hell", is not great for one's physical or mental health either.

The film has a nicely gritty, very slice-of-life feel and shows us Charlie, a young man who got caught with weed and is spending the night in a very uninviting looking prison cell block. The narrator nicely explains the history of marijuana, how the law in America sees and handles it and gives a very accurate picture of the effects of it. There's some neat time lapse shots of growing marijuana plants and the film even shows some clips of Reefer Madness, which by now was becoming a popular unintentional comedy for art students to watch stoned, in explaining the drug hysteria of the 30s and 40s.

Overall, Weed is actually a shockingly good short subject documentary on a controversial issue that must be commended and would perhaps even be effective in high schools today. This film is not be confused with another documentary film entitled Weed which was made a year later (1972) and directed by hardcore porn director Alex de Renzy (this film is credited to Brian Kellman). Both can be acquired via Something Weird Video's library.

Videos of the Week (1/15/09)

2009-01-15T08:21:00.005-05:00

Well, got more videos to share today. Been posting one a day, every day, go to my channel and subscribe if you wanna keep up with them.

The Lost Continent is a 1968 film adaptation of Dennis Wheatley's novel Uncharted Seas, not to be confused with 1951 B-movie with Cesar Romero. It was Hammer's most expensive film to date but is also no doubt the weirdest, most off the wall feature ever to come out of Hammer Studios (along with the ridiculous Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, of course). It's got bloody mutiny, killer crustaceans, man eating seaweed, explosive chemicals, fanatical Spanish inquisitors who look like Klansmen and music that sounds like its right out of an early 70s porno. From its opening credit sequence which must be seen to be believed to its explosive finale, it never stops in its endless quest to entertain by barraging the viewer with lunacy after lunacy, chucked at you with all the subtlety of a fabled automobile-sized hailstone.

This sequence is a good example. Here a giant cylopsian cephalopod thingamajig arrives to punish Unity (Suzanna Leigh) for being a naughty whore.

A sequence from the sleazy as all get out Hong Kong exploitation flick Bamboo House of Dolls (1973), directed by Gwai Zhi-hong, who later was responsible for more truly tasteless works such as The Killer Snakes (1974) and A Teenager's Nightmare (1977). Gwai was easily Hong Kong's equivalent to such Japanese filmmakers as Teruo Ishii and Norifumi Suzuki: his body of work is rough, sleazy and fetishistic as all get out.

Bamboo House of Dolls is a World War II women-in-prison flick set in a Japanese-run prison camp. It's depiction of the Japanese is blatantly offensive and so very Chinese but it's style is actually not far removed from Teruo Ishii's Joys of Torture series. The film's aesthetic and production values are quite sloppy and the film's tortures are staged in such an over the top fashion most of time as to be more funny than disturbing. Bamboo House of Dolls is also particularly similar to such Western "Nazisploitation" films as Love Camp 7 and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and its style also brings director T.F. Mou's later work on such films as Lost Souls and Men Behind the Sun to mind as well. This scene is one of better examples of how whimsically tasteless the film is most of the time.

This is a clip from the film Mondo Cane, the first noteworthy "shockumentary" made by the duo of Italian directors Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi (here accompanied by Paolo Cavara, who left the group because he found their filmmaking practices unethical). Mondo Cane was very popular when it first hit in Europe and America, spawned dozens of imitation "mondo" movies, won an Academy Award for "More", its theme song and most likely is indirectly responsible for the obsession today on TV and the internet alike for sensationalist entertainment.

Mondo Cane is actually a very good film: an immensely entertaining cosmopolitan romp around the world showing us various strange human behaviors and contrasting them with one another, making its audience all realize that, savage or civilized, we're all equally strange in many ways. This sequence here is one of my favorite examples, it contrasts the people's attitude toward dogs in America with that of Taiwan. In one country, they are revered and given funerals by their rich owners more elaborate than many human beings' whereas in the other, they're seen as a tasty delicacy.

Robot Monster (1953) is one of the most awesomely awful 50s sci-fi films ever made. It was made for pennies and after release, was critically panned so heavily that it drove director Phil Tucker to attempt suicide. This film is every bit as wonderfully inept as any Ed Wood movie, but is often even more fun and has a higher level of lunacy on hand. The dialogue is among the worst ever written but yet comes off as almost Shakespearean.

The only hour long film revolves around Ro-Man (George Barrows in gorilla suit and diving helmet), a very poverty row alien who takes over Earth and kills all human beings with stock footage from One Million B.C. and cheap optical effects. He, however, accidentally leaves only one family alive because they immunized themselves against his death ray. This sequence shows you Ro-Man's introduction and hopefully will give you a good sense of how wonderfully neurotic this B-movie (or Z-movie) truly is.

A scene from Evil Dead Trap (1988), a fine 80s Japanese horror film from director Toshiharu Ikeda, who also directed the somber art film Mermaid Legend (1984) and written by manga artist and soon-to-be-director Takashi Ishii. Though its title brings Sam Raimi's early work to mind, a viewing of it is far more likely to give one flashbacks of the works of many Italian horror legends, the lighting and cinematography invokes Dario Argento's body of work, the brutality of the violence brings Lucio Fulci to mind and the film also throws in a lot of elements from American horror films like Halloween, Alien and Friday the 13th as well as the films of David Cronenberg. What results is a highly suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that truly never lets up! Here's the film's first murder, where actress Hitomi Kobayashi, far more known for her roles in Japanese porn flicks, gets skewered to death.

A wonderful scene from This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967), the second entry in the absolutely batshit Coffin Joe (or Ze do Caixao) series by Jose Mojica Marins. Coffin Joe is a nihilistic psychopath (but he's our nihilistic psychopath) who wanders from Brazilian village to village harming people and looking for a virgin bride pure enough to bear his heir. This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse centers on Joe's said "virgin bride quest".

The Coffin Joe films, particularly This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, are such a strange mix: outrageously violent for their time and place, fetishistic as all get out, as nihilistic as Nietzsche mixed with Anton LaVey but often oddly hilarious. This scene is one of the very best, it's an elaborate dream sequence, which unlike the rest of the movie is in color, in which Coffin Joe plunges to the depths of Hell! Some have compared it to Nobuo Nakagawa's Japanese flick Jigoku (1960) and yes I feel that is an apt comparison, as both films' depictions of the Inferno, while not much alike, are very out there, highly phantasmagoric and photographed in vivid Eastman color.

A clip from the spectacular psychotronic Shaw Brothers production The Mighty Peking Man (1977, aka Goliathon), a Hong Kong King Kong kind of film. Though it came out around the same time as Dino DeLaurentiis' King Kong (1976), according to director Ho Meng-hua (The Kiss of Death, The Flying Guillotine, Black Magic), the Shaws were unaware that the film had commenced when they green-lit this one and it's more of coincidence than a ripoff. The film is great in a kitschy kind of way, unlike the '76 Kong, it doesn't take itself seriously in the least. The real true attraction on display is not the Japanese-made title beast (created by former Tsuburaya technician Teisho Arikawa), but Swiss blond star Evelyn Kraft, who spends the whole film in a skimpy fur bikini and her interracial relationship with a Chinese explorer dude played by future The Killer star Danny Lee.

This scene is likely my favorite scene in the film, it's a "love interude montage" sequence as over the top as anything found in an American comedy but staged with a more serious intent (or so I think). Evelyn and Danny have fallen in love. Evelyn's pet monkey is jealous.

Coming Soon

2009-01-12T13:17:00.002-05:00

I just realized, today marks the 6th anniversary of director Kinji Fukasaku's (1930-2003) death.

I was planning on writing a big, lengthy retrospective of Battles Without Honor and Humanity anyways, now I simply have more incentive.

Ephemeral Film Friday: Drop Out

2009-01-09T18:12:00.004-05:00

The ephemeral film of the week:

Drop Out (1950s)

From Sid Davis, everyone's favorite hyper-conservative kid-exploitation sleaze-meister comes Drop Out. Drop Out, which looks to have been lensed in the mid to late 50s, is one of the most relentlessly morose and depressing classroom scare films ever. Its story revolves around Alfred, a young man from an unfortunate lower class area of town who dropped out of high school years ago. Now he's simply a drifter who cries himself to sleep every night with no hope, no prospects and no life. All he can do is now is talk to local reporters about his mistakes on top of hills and creepily hang around schools and playgrounds living life as a pathetic loser. His mother and his teachers are all interviewed as well and talk about how good a student he was and wonder why he just decided to drop out all of the sudden.

Drop Out uses a truly unnerving documentary-style to get its point across. Sid Davis was truly a master of heavy-handed propaganda for classrooms and this is a good example. Every frame of the grainy 16mm black and white film feels drained of its hope and soul and the film, from aesthetic standpoint, has all the gaiety of In Cold Blood. Despite it's truly extreme level of heavy-handedness, it's a surprisingly social conscientious for a Sid Davis production, as Davis' films tend to be extremely conservative. The film doesn't really blame Alfred for his drop out, it more blames his defeatist ghetto-like environment he grew up in, but it offers absolutely no answers on how to solve this and paints all high school drop outs as lost souls who can't get employment and are pretty much better off dead. Drop Out is a bizarre, truly self defeatist, morose production and has a weirdly disconcerting, almost snuff film-like ambiance.

If you want to feel like you need a Prozac subscription, Drop Out can be aquired thanks at Something Weird.

Videos of the week

2009-01-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

Well, if you guys have been keeping up with my new YouTube channel, you'll know that I've been uploading a video every day. I'm trying to use this blog and my new YouTube channel to educate rather than for personal glory like in the old days. So, here we go.

The ending of Herbert J. Leder's British-made horror flick The Frozen Dead (1966). The film involves a Nazi scientist (Dana Andrews) trying revive his cryogenically frozen fellow party members. Like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the gag of a woman's head being kept alive separate from her body plays heavily into the plot, but unlike that film, where it's played for laughs, The Frozen Dead depicts it in a more disturbing, tragic kind of way.

Herbert J. Leder (who directed It! with Roddy McDowell not long afterward), directs in a rather pedestrian manner and the film's production values are sometimes amateurish, but overall the film succeeds in creating a deeply grim and foreboding atmosphere all around. It's hardly great cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a highly interesting nightmarish little movie.

Clip from Wild Beasts (1983), an absolutely relentlessly tasteless exploitation/horror hybrid and a weird, polemic, mondo-style take on the "when animals attack" sub-genre of films that were becoming increasingly popular in the 70s. Wild Beasts is directed by Franco Prosperi, certainly no stranger to the bizarre: having made such films as Mondo Cane, Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom with Gualteiro Jacopetti.

Wild Beasts involves a zoo full of animals in a German city going crazy thanks to PCP contaminating the metropolis' water supply. The film is such a strange, bipolar little movie. With a hefty amount of onscreen animal cruelty, it's often irredeemably repulsive but yet also manages to be cruelly hilarious in its excess at times as well in kind of an early Peter Jackson sort of way. This scene, featuring a girl in a Volkswagen being chased down the street by a cheetah (and punched with the line "She's not crazy, she's being chased by a cheetah!") is a perfect example of this.

Black Magic Part II (aka Revenge of the Zombies, 1976) is one of the Shaw Brothers' finest horror films, a follow up to the previous year's Black Magic, both directed by Ho Meng-hua. While Black Magic is on region 1 DVD, Black Magic Part II has yet to be even be released by Celestial, it's release was planned but then canceled twice. This is a shame, as Black Magic is actually kind of dull for a Hong Kong weirdo magic movie but Black Magic Part II is far superior. It amps up the insanity and nastiness level considerably and what results is a wild, wild ride that's even a lot of fun dubbed, cut and panned and scanned. The Black Magic films helped start a boom in what I like to call "gross out Hong Kong weirdo Eastern black magic movies" and Shaw itself made lots of similar productions in later years like Hex, The Boxer's Omen and Seeding of a Ghost.

This scene is a great example of how freaky this film is. The main character (Ti Lung)'s wife (Tanny Tien Ni) is possessed by the evil black magician (Lo Lieh). The only way to save her is for the good white magician (Yeung Chi-hung) to beat the evil out of her with a ferret. Hopefully we'll see this one widescreen and subtitled on region 1 soon, as it is licensed by Media Blasters.

Clip from the short ephemeral film (probably made in the early 1960s) entitled Read the Label and Live! Never before has using paint remover been so stiflingly dramatic and fearsomely dangerous!

This is a clip from Mondo Candido (1974). Mondo Candido is the final collaboration between the exploitation maverick duo Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Its also one of the most wonderfully weird and charming erratic films ever produced; a stunning barrage of mind bending imagery that never lets up. Unlike such see-em-and-puke works as Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom, its no documentary or historical recreation, no; its an adaptation of Voltaire's famous novel Candide and what an adaptation it is! It tosses in everything but the kitchen sink, throws all logic and narrative structure to the wind and the two directors put their own spin on Voltaires often gloomy, occasionally pessimistic but very rational story.

This scene is a great example early on in the film of its very strange aesthetic. Candide (Christopher Brown) lives in a posh castle in Westphalia but makes the mistake of falling in love with his uncle the Baron's luscious daughter Cunegonde (Michelle Miller). Ass kicking and exile ensues when they are caught in the act of naughty business.

Here's a clip from Toho's Jujin Yukiotoko (1955, Abominable Snowman), better known in the West as Half Human. It was director Ishiro Honda's second monster film after the original Godzilla, this time concerning a tragic yeti-like creature living in the Japan Alps who goes postal after its child is murdered by a greedy showman. This scene shows the snowman going on a rage-fueled rampage in the film's mountainous village.

One of director Honda's finest efforts, sadly the film is all but forgotten today thanks to a ban by Toho itself. The film is considered in today's day and age of political correctness to be in bad taste thanks to the film's villagers, whom some people think are too similar to racist caricatures of Japan's burakumin minority for comfort. The burakumin are a group of people in Japan who are something of a left over of Japan's centuries of feudal rule, they were considered the bottom of the social rung back then and even to this day are still discriminated against. Thus Abominable Snowman remains unreleased in Japan on any home video format to this day. It was released in America in a bastardized version with John Carradine added in and only about 30 minutes of the its Japanese footage remaining. Sadly the film was mostly seen in that version for decades, though bootlegs of the original Japanese version are becoming more common now.

The first five minutes of the late 60s drug propaganda film The People vs. Pot. Produced by the United States Marine Corp, the film is the most hilariously over the top piece of anti-drug propaganda this side of Reefer Madness. It was intended to stop troops in the Vietnam war from smoking dope, but given how many soldiers not only smoked pot in Vietnam but came back hooked on smack thanks in part to their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the effect it had seems to have left something to desired.

You know you've got a live one when the film opens with a catchy, folksy theme song about smoking pot. The film then shows us the moral dilemma of Eddie, an Aryan-looking GI boy who likes to smoke pot. He is confronted by three angels of light and reason who were once drug addicts themselves and proceed to tell him outrageously grim horror story after horror story. The People vs. Pot is so alarmist and so over the top concerning what amounts to a potent herb. Marijuana's effects are heavily over-dramatized and the drug is depicted as making you trip out harder than most acid. If marijuana is only hazardous to one's health with chronic, excessive usage, war, on the other hand, is often fatal for many, deeply devastating for the rest with only minuscule use. That The People vs. Pot was made by an organization that sells and deals in something far deadlier and more soul destroying than any drug is darkly hilarious and ironic in a Voltairian kind of way.

Stay tuned for more videos next week.

Seeding of a Ghost

2009-01-07T10:45:00.001-05:00

I finally got to see all of Seeding of a Ghost. I tried to watch the film once before about a year ago and I was very distracted. People kept going on and on about this film and from the 45 minutes of it I watched, I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. What extreme, outrageous, outlandish gore? Where is all this? I don't see much here. Sure, there's some nudity and some brutality, but that hardly makes it stand out against numerous other Hong Kong films, but then I actually watched it today all the way through.
The film plays a bit like Takashi Miike's Audition: very slow start and build up but the final pay off is beyond anything you could ever have imagined. The first hour is surprisingly dull for a Shaw Brothers horror flick, particularly one in the "wacko Eastern black magic" family, a class of film known for being completely and utterly "out there". Then the final 30 minutes gets underway and we're treated to a mind bending sequence of metaphysical living corpse sex. However, the best is truly saved for last: the final 10 minutes of the film are the most outrageously excessive, completely out of left field thing I've seen aside from the lawnmower scene in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. I'm not even going to spoil it, you simply have you see it for yourself. It's like something from an H.P. Lovecraft story via Rob Bottin's effects for The Thing with the "splatstick" outlandishness of early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson. It's so outlandishly over the top that it's hard to believe that its even unfolding before your eyes on a TV or movie screen. Seeding of a Ghost owes at least 90% of its notoriety to this final sequence. Simply see it for yourself, if you can make it past 60 minutes of relative monotony to get to the gooey, tentacled center.

GUILALA goes commercial.

2009-01-05T20:19:00.005-05:00

Here's a hilarious recently aired American commercial with none other than the CGI likeness(es) of The X From Outer Space's own monster Guilala.

There Will Be Seppuku

2009-01-03T10:29:00.001-05:00

The following article was written for but not printed in the newest Ota ku USA. Thus, here it is for your viewing pleasure.
After zipping into the distant future and shooting into the far reaches of outer space with the wild Message From Space (1978), genius director Kinji Fukasaku went back to the past for his next film: The Fall of Ako Castle (also 1978). This film would be another adaptation of the Chushingura (47 Ronin) story, which, along with Satomi Hakken Den and Yotsuya Kaidan (two stories Fukasaku also put his touch on), is one of the most adapted pieces of Japanese folklore in Nippon cinema, having been previously filmed by Kenji Mizoguchi in 1941 and Hiroshi Inagaki in 1962. Elements of the story, mainly the idea of a large group of samurai standing up and defying Japan’s authoritarian Tokugawa-era government, gel very well with Fukasaku’s own deeply anti-authority beliefs and themes. Others, however, such as the fact that the reason that the samurai stood up against the Tokugawa bakufu was simply due to allegiance to their own temperamental lord, don’t. When Fukasaku started work on this film, he originally had the intention of doing it in his typical way, with the titular 47 being a bunch of anti-Shogun rebels at war with the Tokugawa government. However, actor Kinosuke Yorozuya, whom Fukasaku had previous worked with on his previous jidai-geki epic The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy (also 1978), wanted the film done more traditionally, using his influence to muscle the Toei producers. Fukasaku lost out and was forced to make a more toned down, faithful adaptation. He still, however, manages to insert his own brand of politics into the mix, albeit in a more subtle way.
It is in the early 18th century in Tokugawa-era Japan. One day, while at the castle of the shogun, a young warlord named Asano (Teruhiko Saigo) loses his cool at the treacherous Lord Kira (Nobuo Kaneko, who previously played the equally nasty Yamamori in Battles Without Honor and Humanity), who insults his dignity and pride. Asano draws his sword inside the castle, a fatal offense and wounds Kira. Asano is then sentenced to death by harakiri by the Shogunate. After his death, his retainers are now out of employment and pushed into poverty. On top of this, Asano’s family name is abolished and Kira escapes punishment completely since he did not draw his sword in self defense. Asano’s second-in-command, Kuranosuke Oishi (Kinosuke Yorozuya) decides to, rather than accept this without question, to rebel! Over the next year, he organizes his retainers in a plot to storm Lord Kira’s castle, kill him and avenge their master’s death.
Most of The Fall of Ako Castle is lensed by veteran cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima. Miyajima was no doubt likely Japan’s greatest cinematographer, photographing such gorgeous films as Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) and Kwaidan (1964). However, his style of cinematography was always based on a kind of harmonious traditional Japanese symmetry. Kinji Fukasaku, on the hand, as a director, made films that even visually reflected his deep-seated hatred of conformity and authority. He refused to follow any set rules of cinematic language, often tilting the camera, holding it by hand wildly and sometimes even doing both. So in many ways, Miyajima’s obsession with symmetry and perfection and Fukasaku’s love of chaos were often at odds with each other, making for one messy visual style. Furthermore, the film, at a whopping over two and a half hour runtime, is actually often quite boring. The characters are poorly and messily portrayed, with only about five or six characters sticking in memory as to who they are. People often complain of having difficulty keeping track of the characters in Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, but it's a cake walk compared to keeping track of all 47 ronin in The Fall of Ako Castle. Fukasaku directs all the drama scenes like he’s quite bored, with little of the aesthetic flair he showed in every sequence in the likes of Graveyard of Honor (1975).
However, if one pays careful enough attention to the film, you can, in fact, see a surprising amount of Fukasaku’s trademark politics on display. It’s shown as outrageous that, rather than be punished over trying to kill a man, Lord Asano is simply sentenced for drawing his sword in the Shogun’s castle, itself a much deeper offense in Tokugawa Japan. Typically, Chushingura is seen as being something for the Japanese to be deeply proud of, a beautiful example of loyalty and honor. Indeed, Mizoguchi’s version of it was financed by the Japanese Imperial Army’s Propaganda department to boost soldier morale. Fukasaku’s vision of it, however, is that two wrongs should not, in fact, make a right, let alone a beloved Japanese folktale. While Kira is depicted as conniving, Asano is also depicted as being quite arrogant. The Shogunate is depicted as being extremely rigid and totalitarian. However, Asano’s 47 followers, are, in fact, subtly depicted as being very fanatical. Rather than simply go on with their own lives and accept what happened, they must get revenge for their master. It’s not a black and white story of good and evil like the other adaptations, no; it’s more like P.T. Anderson’s nihilistic masterwork There Will Be Blood (2007), with Kira and the Shogunate playing the part of Daniel Plainview and Asano and the 47 Ronin playing the part of Eli Sunday. It’s like how Fukasaku, as a young man, saw Japan’s cruel Imperial government defeated in 1945, but then found out to his disappointment that the Americans who occupied his country were actually not much of an improvement.
The real treat is the sequence in which the 47 ronin besiege Kira’s mansion and kill his entire family and finally, him. It’s a bloody spectacle that is likely the largest scale sequence of carnage that Fukasaku ever directed, like a samurai film equivalent to the legendary finale of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Fukasaku, certainly not bored when directing this sequence, does what he does best: anarchic carnage! This almost 20 minute visceral tour-de-force almost makes up for the film’s previous two hours of samurai sitting in castles and talking about things. Fukasaku even somehow was able to instead have Hanjiro Nakazawa, his cinematographer from his yakuza epics Street Mobster and Graveyard of Honor to lens the sequence. It really feels like it’s from a different film entirely. So while The Fall of Ako Castle is hardly Fukasaku at the top of his form, it still manages to interest enough with some subtle politics and a bloody, sword-wielding slaughter-fest for a climax. Fukasaku would also later revisit the Chushingura story in 1994’s Crest of Betrayal, a film that would brilliantly combine Chushingura with Japan’s famous ghost story from the same period: Yotsuya Kaidan, making Yotsuya Kaidan’s protagonist Iuemon Tamiya one of Lord Asano’s unemployed retainers. It shifts its focus away from the vengeance aspect and more toward Iuemon’s personal plunge into poverty, leading him to poison his wife Oiwa so he can marry the daughter of a wealthy lord. Crest of Betrayal is actually a much superior version of the same story as The Fall of Ako Castle, though it doesn't quite have the visceral punch of Nobuo Nakagawa's classic Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (1959).

Ephemeral Film Friday: Smoking: It's Your Choice

2009-01-02T11:16:00.010-05:00

Our ephemeral film this week is:
Smoking: It's Your Choice (1970s)
This short, seemingly made sometime in the early to mid 70s, is actually a pretty good one as far as an ephemeral film goes. While of course its presentation seems strange to our eyes today, it's not overly alarmist and quaintly outdated in it's factual information but it doesn't soften the facts and sweeten the truth either. As someone who, up until 6 months ago, used to smoke like a fiend, I can safely say that this little scare film is quite accurate in it's depiction of the effects of smoking and the topic is handled shockingly well.
The film shows us, with the help of some creepy mannequins who like relatives of the Fuccon family of OH! Mikey fame with cotton filled glass bottles inside meant to stand in as lungs, just how filthy cigarette smoke really is. We see a guy with a bad case of emphysema who can't even blow out a match without his air machine. We hear about how it causes cancer and see people who have succumbed to throat cancer and have to talk by swallowing air. We see that smoking has an immediate effect on blood pressure and the film even goes into how expensive a habit it is, which is interesting because a pack of cigarettes literally cost a quarter when this was made and costs 8 dollars now.Smoking: It's Your Choice, as the title implies, also has a lot less of an imperative tone than most of these films. It doesn't try to force the viewer's hand, it simply shows you the negative effects of smoking and allows the viewer to make up their own damn mind. If the mannequin-driven presentation wasn't so weird and the film's 70s fashion style wasn't so inherently dated in itself, it could possibly be useful in schools even today.

New YouTube Channel

2009-01-01T16:54:00.006-05:00

Happy New Year from Cinematic Damnation!

I have decided to start a new YouTube channel.

I'm gonna try to upload a movie clip a day. The middle of every week (probably Thursday), I'll post all of them on this blog for those that missed them.

This one here is the first. This is clip from the Japanese 1967 kaiju film The X From Outer Space (aka Uchu Daikaiju Girara), Shochiku's first (and up until recently, only) venture into the kaiju realm. The film is truly stunningly atrocious, easily the Plan 9 From Outer Space of Japanese monster cinema, with a hilariously ridiculous monster and a tone best described as truly bizarre.

This clip shows you just how strange the film is. It's depiction of space is so far from what we would see only a year later in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that it looks like it's from a different dimension and not only a different time. This was when space travel was fun, not bleak, dark and cold. This is the film's moonbase sequence, in which mankind's base on the moon is a fun little martini lounge with all the comforts of a luxury hotel!

Easier access.

2008-12-28T16:50:00.003-05:00

Cinematic Damnation: The Website was kind of a failure. I, in the end, didn't feel like managing a site of film criticism which I'm not paid a cent for. A blog's a lot more fun and satisfying to maintain.

The reviews from the site are all still up, but the main address will now direct to this blog!

So from now, you can type in cinematicdamnation.com to access this blog! It's way easier and quicker!

Ephemeral Film Friday: The People vs. Pot

2008-12-26T11:42:00.013-05:00

The week's ephemeral film is:
The People vs. Pot (late 1960s)
Produced by the United States Marine Corp during the late 1960s (no copyright date is given to trace the film's exact year of origin, sadly, but I'd place the film in '68 or '69 as a wild guess since it mentions the Tet Offensive), The People vs. Pot is the most hilariously over the top piece of anti-drug propaganda this side of Reefer Madness. It was intended to stop troops in the Vietnam war from smoking dope, but given how many soldiers not only smoked pot in Vietnam but came back hooked on smack thanks in part to their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the effect it had seems to have left something to desired.

You know you've got a live one when the film opens with a catchy, folksy theme song about smoking pot. The film then shows us the moral dilemma of Eddie, an Aryan-looking GI boy who likes to smoke pot. He is confronted by three angels of light of reason who were once drug addicts themselves. They tell him outrageously grim horror story after horror story, first about how pot's driven soldiers crazy. Then they show how sealing a room in Bangkok caused a bunch of high GIs to suffocate and choke on their own vomit and force poor Eddie to relieve a bad memory about how he caused his buddy's death because he was high when the 'gooks attacked and didn't care. The film also shows us depressing drug rehab houses where all the smack addicts talk about how they all started with pot. Eddie is also sternly warned that he'll be discharged, sent to jail and lose his GI benefits if ever caught. One of the guys then is forced to confess that, thanks to his drug addiction, he still lives with his mom and is a loser and a baby. The film then climaxes in a very strange, jazzy picture montage of real life ghetto America. It then proceeds to warn us that "Marijuana is a hallucinogen and even use in moderation can be dangerous".

The film is funny and quaint enough, but knowing that the army made it makes it even more hilarious in a fucked up way. The People vs. Pot is so alarmist and so over the top concerning what amounts to a potent herb. Marijuana's effects are heavily over-dramatized and the drug is depicted as making you trip out harder than most acid. You see men becoming murderers after smoking weed on the battlefield. You see GIs in Thai hotels so tripped out that all they can do is look at a single noodle while saying "beautiful". No, you shouldn't smoke pot while your fighting on the battlefield, but what The People vs. Pot fails to mention is that you shouldn't even be fighting on the battlefield in the first place. If marijuana is only hazardous to one's health with chronic, excessive usage, war, on the other hand, is often fatal for many, deeply devastating for the rest with only minuscule use. That The People vs. Pot was made by an organization that sells and deals in something far deadlier and more soul destroying than any drug is darkly hilarious and ironic in a Voltairian kind of way.This film can, again, be procured through the wonders of Something Weird's video catalogue!

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T10:54:00.002-05:00

Gunther wishes you a Merry Christmas filled with fornication, champagne and shallow idiocy!

"Children's Land?! Is that some sort of fancy name for a lunatic asylum?!"

2008-12-21T19:58:00.007-05:00

These pictures should amuse you. When I go to Japan, I'll ask someone about where the "Gojira Bagina Suraido" is.

Ephemeral Film Friday: Habit Patterns

2008-12-19T03:30:00.001-05:00

This week's ephemeral film is:
Habit Patterns (1954)

Habit Patterns is one of the classics and was not made by Centron or Coronet (the two biggest producers of educational shorts in the 1950s), but a smaller company. It speaks of a quaint old time when children were given "tough love", expected to fix their own problems and were taught to never rely on anyone else for their happiness. While perhaps a bit excessive, it's really no worse than today's child-rearing style in which most children are treated with saccharine amounts of sympathy, caring and understanding and turned into complete and utter sissy losers who can't deal with the world's slightest obstacles. The stern 50s American household created a generation of rebellious hippies who in turn tried to "avoid their parents' mistakes" and created a generation of irresponsible, hedonistic imbeciles.
Habit Patterns concerns Barbara, a klutzy, scatterbrained young woman with either the guiltiest conscience ever or the meanest, sternest narrator (in 50s educational shorts they're quite indistinguishable). Her time management skills are nil, she's not very hygienic and she's socially awkward. These three traits get her in a lot of trouble at home, school and with friends and everybody ends up hating her. As she commits each mortal sin, her mean-spirited narrator voice-inside-of-her-head-that-just-won't-fucking-shut-up gives her grief. As she realizes that her entire social life is destroyed thanks to the giant stain on her dress and her less than steller social skills, the narrator callously remarks "It's too late for tears now, isn't it?". We are then shown Helen, the "perfect", "good" girl that everyone strives to be like and how wonderful, flawless and Christ-like she is. In the end, Barbara, unable to take it anyone, goes up to her father's gun cabinet, grabs a shotgun and empties the gun's double barrel into her mouth (okay, she doesn't, but it might as well end like that).

Habit Patterns is a strange film. Yes, all educational classroom scare films seem "strange" nowadays, but this one in particular. On the one hand, it's quite primeval in it's view of parenting and child psychology. Many of these films relied on "guilt-tripping" it's child audience to get them to do and not do certain things, but this one's the worst. The film's narrator, a bitchy, shrill, pompous voice (perhaps it's the future version of Barbara as a sexually unsatisfied middle aged woman) is one of the most condescending omnipotences in any one of these films; constantly giving Barbara grief and making her feel bad over the slightest slip ups. However, as I said earlier, the Baby Boomers' style of child rearing is no better. It's simply gone from one extreme to the next: now children are pampered, spoiled and bought $1000 worth of presents at Christmas time here in America. The "spare the rod, spoil the child" and "children are precious" crowds are both wrong.

Criminally Insane (aka Crazy Fat Ethel)

2008-12-18T13:37:00.001-05:00

Good god, by sheer chance I have discovered a film so absolutely, insanely awful that it could be one of the funniest goddamn things I've ever seen. This film is Criminally Insane (aka Crazy Fat Ethel). This film is the definition of the term "you have to see it to believe it". Think the hilarious ineptitude of an Ed Wood film mixed with the gritty slice-of-life quality of The Last House on the Left or an ephemeral film and capped off with the lack of subtlety and taste of a John Waters film. I cannot even begin to describe how screwy, strange and just plain hilarious this film is.

The plot concerns Ethel, an obese female mental patient who has but one love: food. After being released from the nuthouse and eating her grandmother out of house and home, her grandmother can't take it anymore and locks up all the food. Ethel goes apeshit and kills Grannie with a butcher knife. Later, she kills a delivery boy when she doesn't have the money for the 80 dollars of food she ordered and kills her doctor who start snooping around and wondering why she's been missing so many treatment sessions. Being too inept to properly dispose of the bodies, she simply leaves them rotting in her grandmother's room. Finally, her hooker sister and her sleazy, player boyfriend come to stay and first Ethel tolerates them. However, when they start to wonder what the horrendous smell coming from upstairs is, Ethel decides to do something about them too.

Criminally Insane is most like something Troma would have made in the 80s and released directly to video in sensibility, but still manages to pack that gritty and sleazy 70s 42nd street vibe. Everything in the film is so inept: the cinematography bites and shows a very minimal command of the cinematic art form, the murder scenes are hilariously badly filmed and executed with obviously zero cash spent on anything else but a stage blood recipe (an Argento flick this is not), the dialogue is as outrageously inane as anything Ed Wood ever punched on a typewriter (with my favorite being "All women need a good beatin' once in a while") but the film only gets boring toward the end, when it cuts to a bizarre dream sequence courtesy of Ethel. Most of the time, it is one of the funniest comedies I've ever seen, whether intentional or unintentional. Ethel's gluttonous eating and psychopathic mind-set make a weird and often funny combo and the film is excessive and over the top as any early Peter Jackson film. The true wonderful awfullness of Criminally Insane is hard to convey through the English language, just see it, it'll blow your mind. Ethel truly puts the "laughter" in "manslaughter". Avoid its sequel, Criminally Insane 2, however, at all costs. If the first Crazy Fat Ethel film is like an ephemeral film in terms of production values, the 1987 produced sequel, with horrendously ugly, shot on video photography, looks just like a porno (but no penetration). It's a lot more boring and dreary and less funny than the first.

Gamera vs. Barugon

2008-12-17T00:26:00.002-05:00

Gamera v. Barugon is a famous 1966 Japanese court case. Gamera, the plaintiff, sued Barugon, the defendant on the grounds of "stomping ground infringement" arguing that fellow monster Barugon was destroying Japanese cities designated for demolition by Gamera. Barugon vigorously retorted, saying that "stomping ground" laws are unconstitutional and constitute a violation of kaiju civil rights. The case went through several municipal Japanese courts (destroying each in the process, along with the cities they were housed in) before being settled in the Tokyo Supreme Court, who ruled in favor of Gamera.

Actually, Gamera vs. Barugon was the second Gamera film made in 1960s and I just rewatched it. It's the first Showa-era Gamera film I've seen in at least five years. For those who don't know, the Gamera series were Godzilla and Toho's biggest competition but Daiei decided to aim them at a much younger audience than the Godzilla films. The series was over by 1971 though, when Daiei went bankrupt. I'm gonna give all the Showa Gamera films a rewatch, since I'm not sure what to think about them from memory. They are mostly children's films, make no bones about it, but should a kid's film be just as entertaining to any age group or should a children's film cater solely to children? I found the Gamera films delightful and adored them as a kid (not as much as Godzilla, of course), but last I watched them they hardly held up.

Of all the old Gamera films, though, Gamera vs. Barugon is the most Toho-esque. Most of the Gamera films have obnoxious Japanese boy protagonists who wear short shorts (why did every Japanese boy wear those in the 60s and 70s), luckily, there is not a person under 18 or a single pair of Japanese boy pants to be found in Gamera vs. Barugon. The film is a completely serious kaiju film. The reason is obvious. All of the Showa Gamera films except for this one were directed by Noriaki Yuasa, a director who made his films with children in mind but had a weird fetish for kaiju bodily fluids (every monster in each Gamera film has its own blood color). He hated Kaneko's much superior 90s take on Gamera because the films "took themselves too seriously". The director of Gamera vs. Barugon, Shigeo Tanaka, takes a more Ishiro Honda-like approach to the proceedings. Everything's depicted in a tragic fashion and like a Honda film the film goes deeply into Japan's scientists and military collaborating on strategies to defeat the monsters which blow up in their faces all too often. For this reason, it's definitely my favorite of the old Gamera films and it keeps the childish silliness inherent in all the later films to an absolute minimum. The monster footage is quite satisfying and lengthy. Barugon, not to be confused with Toho's Baragon from Frankenstein Conquers the World, is pretty neat. He's has features of a dinosaur, lizard and dog all mixed together with a unicorn horn and freezes everything in his path.
Kaiju fans love to complain about Gamera vs. Barugon. A frequent complaint is that the film relies too much on a boring human plot and yes, that is quite true. The film, clocking in at a fairly whopping for a vintage kaiju film 101 minutes, definitely could have used some tighting up in the editing room. Speaking of editing, Gamera vs. Barugon was shot well, but seems to have been edited hastily (not surprising as the film was green-lit a few weeks after the first Gamera opened in November 1965 and released in April of 66). The film has the most jarring edit I've ever seen this side of Manos: The Hands of Fate. A wide dialogue shot simply cuts right in the middle of the shot to a different take at the same angle quite sloppily with no coverage inserted to mask it. Still, aside from all that, this film is the closest Daiei got with their Gamera series to a Honda/Tsuburaya feel and therefore deserves props. Also, the film is far better enjoyed in it's original aspect ratio and language than it's infamous MSTed Sandy Frank version. The Sandy Frank versions of the Gamera films are the strangest cinematic experience you could ever imagine: absolutely bizarre, mechanical Hong Kong dubbing coupled with a murky panned and scanned image that makes everything look more like an adult film from the 70s than a 60s Japanese monster film.

Lost Souls on DVD!

2008-12-16T12:26:00.000-05:00

That's right, in March and on Region 1 DVD, T.F. Mou's Lost Souls is hitting region one. I may or may not be buying this, since I already own the region 3 re-release and Image's product is often inferior. If you don't have the old disc, though, I'd recommend you buy the new one. Back in 2005, the film only got a very limited VCD-only release by Celestial. The VCD stopping being sold within six months at the most. All of the sudden it just couldn't be procured, anywhere. I had to get a bootleg to get my hands on it. Now, three years later, Celestial just decided to release it on DVD with a region one release following. The DVD transfer is definitely a big improvement over the VCD, not just in resolution and clarity, but the opening scenes, which were almost illegibly dark on the VCD, have been considerably brightened up.

This was a movie that, until three years ago, nobody knew about, even the majority of the fringe cult film fans. Of Mou's filmography, Men Behind the Sun was known, but not Lost Souls. The only way to procure the film was dubbed in German. Suddenly, with the Shaw Brothers library being rereleased, it became obvious, T.F. Mou was pushing the boundaries of taste for years prior! His sensibility is quite akin to that of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi: social commentary and politics mixed with shocking content! I've used clips of Lost Souls in my film Dream House during the climax (look closely on the TV set behind Dave) and even met T.F. Mou himself and talk to him about it and still Lost Souls preplexes me. It's an absolutely schizophrenic work that can switch gears at anytime. It can be a serious artsy fartsy film about the cruelty of society like Pasolini's Salo and the 120 Days of Sodom or an exploitation film as degrading and jaw droppingly tasteless as any entry in Teruo Ishii's The Joys of Torture series. Often, like Jacopetti and Prosperi's Goodbye Uncle Tom (a film Men Behind the Sun also reminds me a lot of), it can seem like both.

Like Men Behind the Sun, Lost Souls takes it’s plot from reality, in this case the cruel exploitation of mainland China refugees in Hong Kong by HK-based Triads, a frequent headline news-grabber in the tiny island nation in the late 70s-early 80s. Mou hated working for the Shaw Brothers because they were concerned with business and profit above all else and regards most of his output there as “junk”. He was not allowed to put much political commentary in his films. The only two films Mou got to have his way with were Bank Busters and Lost Souls and one had its dialogue censored upon release in Hong Kong, the other was flambéed by critics. For Lost Souls, Mou convinced Run Run Shaw to greenlight this film with no script and pretty much made the film up as he went along. What results is a wildly uneven but definitely worthwhile film that most definitely foreshadows his later work on Men Behind the Sun and Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre.
The film is often compared to Bamboo House of Dolls, directed by Gwai Zhi-hong, the madman responsible for The Killer Snakes and the other resident sleaze sultan at Shaw Studios. However, Lost Souls goes even further than Bamboo House of Dolls and is a little more serious, far more political and much better directed. One thing rampant in this film that brings Mou's later work to mind is the heavy use of extreme, graphic imagery. Throughout the film, we see women tied up like animals to chairs having hot wax dripped on their naked bodies, we see women graphically raped as they scream, we see young ladies doused with gasoline and dying in flaming agony, we see rows upon rows of naked female asses with prices sharpied onto them, we see naked children murdered and we even see a young man sodomized by an older man so graphically it makes Deliverance look like an Ernest film! Some of this is staged in a solemn fashion, some of it is staged in an almost comedic manner and some of it is like a weird mix between both. Lost Souls goes as far as any Category III film did in the early 90s yet was made years before the rating (which T.F. Mou actually indirectly helped create with the controversy surrounding Men Behind the Sun) even existed. It’s ending is even more amazing, in which the film’s protagonist finally gets to the fabled “Diamond Hill” in Hong Kong and finds that it’s just as much of a shithole, if not even more so, than his hometown in China. This is a daring, ballsy message for an early 80s Hong Kong film, let alone one from the most high profile studio in that country.

"She's not crazy! She's being chased by a CHEETAH!"

2008-12-14T16:39:00.001-05:00

The immortal line "She's not crazy, she's being chased by a CHEETAH!", perhaps the greatest line ever written in any B grade or exploitation movie, hails from the film Wild Beasts. Now Wild Beasts is a film directed by Franco Prosperi, yes, the same Prosperi of Jacopetti and Prosperi fame, but this was one of a handful of films he made after he split from his creative partnership with Gualtiero Jacopetti. It's an absolutely relentlessly tasteless exploitation/horror hybrid and a weird, polemic, mondo-style take on the "when animals attack" sub-genre of films that were becoming increasingly popular in the 70s. Some people are unsure if Franco Prosperi actually made this film and not a different Franco Prosperi, but I am 100% certain that it is the Franco Prosperi. No other filmmaker has the same sensibility as the one displayed in this film and it has all the hallmarks of Prosperi's early work with Jacopetti such as Mondo Cane, Africa Addio and Addio Zio Tom from naked children to grotesque violence and mutilation to mucho onscreen animal abuse.

This film defines the word "exploitation" perfectly: everything and everyone in it, human and animal alike, is exploited to the limit. Wild Beasts is heavy handed as all get out and features such pretty sights as a topless 12 year old girl lounging around in her underwear, a woman having her breasts chewed on by rats, who are later torched for real in a sequence that would by several years predate a similar and also all too real scene in Men Behind the Sun and lions and tigers being set loose, also for real, on pigs in a slaughterhouse. The film opens with a weird montage punctuated by the synthesizer-ridden tunes I love so much that just scream "this film was made in the 1980s and really wants you to know that". It shows us some "Northern European" (Frankfurt in Germany) cityscape, water running from a water treatment center and some used needles. And then there's some philosophical quote about how "Our madness engulfs everything and infects innocent victims such as children and animals". Yes, despite how much I perversely enjoy them, Italian exploitation movies of the Mondo Cane school are the most hypocritical genre ever. The filmmakers claim to denounce and condemn how the insanity and selfishness of human beings hurts kids and animals, yet while making these films, they slaughter, injure and endanger animals on camera and turn 12 year old girls into sex objects.

Wild Beasts is such a strange, bipolar movie. There's something actually funny about a lot of it. The film's very premise: zoo animals going nuts on PCP-tainted water, is silly enough, particularly since PCP has little effect on most animals (particularly elephants). The sight of elephants strolling down the streets of Frankfurt is way more funny than intimidating and some of the film's gags have a downright Monty Python/early Peter Jackson quality to them in terms of how goofy, silly and hilarious in their excess they are. Of particular note is a scene of a woman having her head crushed by an elephant and another of a woman in a Volkswagen driving as fast as she can to escape a pursuing cheetah (where the aforementioned line comes from). Lorraine DeSelle, who was in the equally weird and sleazy House on the Edge of the Park and Cannibal Ferox and looks like Eva Green to me for some reason and everybody else try their best to keep straight faces.

The film's morose ending is almost as inept as House on the Edge of the Park's. It would work in someone else's hands, but it's handled really badly here. With Wild Beasts, Franco Prosperi fails pretty miserably at making a serious ecological horror film: the movie is either irredeemably repulsive or unintentionally hilarious in an excessive, mean-spirited kind of way. However, as entertainment and an extreme guilty pleasure (with high emphasis on the word "guilty"), the film succeeds in a way but never even approaches the films that Prosperi made with Jacopetti, likely proof as to who was the real brains behind that duo!

Ephemeral Film Friday: V.D. Truths and Consequences!

2008-12-12T14:28:00.000-05:00

Every Friday, this blog is going to have a new routine: I will cover and review a different "ephemeral" film.

Ephemeral films are a genre of movie I really adore. They're essentially exploitation films made for classrooms: poorly, artlessly lensed with bad acting. However, they also have a quality and show you a gritty slice of life of 50s, 60s and 70s Americana that the vast of majority of Hollywood productions from that time don't. Watching one of these films is like stepping into a time machine to a bygone, past America that once upon a time didn't have a McDonalds, Walmart and Starbucks on every street corner.

Our first is:
V.D: Truths and Consequences (1976)

This is an educational short from the 70s about venereal diseases made years before the advent of AIDS. It probably was screened to junior high and high schoolers. The real title of this film should be V.D: Truth or Paranoia. STDS are indeed a dodgy subject. Some people believe it's going to kill and ruin us all and that 25% of women, who are all treacherous skank whores, carry herpes. Some on the other hand, like myself, believe that the paranoia is absolute bullshit. How do they have any way of accurately knowing who's infested and who's not? I know a lot of people and I only know one person who has confessed to having been infected (and not even personally).
STDs are like the sexual and medical equivalent of witches, communists and terrorists: they can cause a few problems, but Americans, as usual, blow it all (no pun intended) out of proportion a thousand fold. America may be the center of dreams and liberty, but it is also and always has been since the Salem Witch Trials, the center of fear and paranoia. Throwing Japanese Americans in internment camps, Senator Joe McCarthy's insanity and the current War on Terror were and are all driven by an insane level of witchhunt-like madness. The lost sleep over STDs is no different.

V.D: Truths and Consequences is actually shockingly liberal for once of these such productions, actually not demonizing, condemning or just plain not talking about premarital sex like the old films did, though I guess it's not too surprising as it was made in the 70s after the sexual revolution had taken off. It's one of the most hilarious educational films I've ever seen. The film is flatly narrated by a kid who looks like he's been stoned the whole time and features so many priceless little moments, like a middle aged-looking kid saying with about as much emotion as the average 4th grader at a school play "I got a strange discharge from my penis, do you think it could be VD?". There's a lot of boring scenes of "real" doctors droning on and on about STDs and some humorous diagrams of infected genitals. The film's most memorable bit features a look at an STD treatment clinic. At this fine clinic, the perverted weirdo doctor who runs it is shown conducting his examinations without the use of rubber gloves! We later get to hear from this guy and he blames the entire recent STD "epidemic" on the pill. Hilarious!

This film can be acquired via the wonders of Something Weird Video. You know what they say about laughter, right? It's infectious!

The Dark Knight: A Few Thoughts

2008-12-11T03:34:00.000-05:00

In case you've been hiding in a cave on the Afghani/Pakistan border, The Dark Knight came out on DVD as of Tuesday.

Yes, Everyone and their grandma has seen the film. I can say one thing, though, it's one of the first Hollywood Blockbusters in years that I haven't been able to get out of my mind for months on end. The last films to have this effect on me were The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Indeed, Peter Jackson and Christopher Nolan are two directors I highly admire. They simply make good films no matter which way you slice it. Their best known films may be big budgeted Hollywood-backed stuff, but it's all really good. They make their own kind of films and do what they want in the Hollywood mainstream and I can only commend that from the bottom of my heart.

The Dark Knight is such an interesting, thought provoking film really. Batman Begins I really loved but The Dark Knight, it just has a quality Begins doesn't. Begins doesn't feel as real to me, while a huge leap from every incarnation of Batman prior, it still feels just a bit anchored in the DC comic book universe, whereas The Dark Knight feels completely grounded in reality. All the characters are like real flesh and blood human beings and every building feels like it really is made out of enforced steel and concrete.

The film does seem to have its detractors. I've heard people say that it's "too depressing and too pessimistic". Depressing it is but I'm not sure if it's really pessimistic.

Batman Begins has Bruce Wayne making the decision to undergo his physical, spiritual and mental metamorphosis into Batman. He decides to stand up for what is right. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, is his dark night of the soul. Bruce Wayne's rage over his parents' murder drove him to become Batman and wage war against Gotham's criminals, but it is in The Dark Knight that he begins to feel the repercussions of that choice. The resistance begins. The criminals bite back even harder. Batman begins to realize that his job will be a much harder one than he originally planned and that it won't be all fun, games and the glorious thrill of sweet revenge. The film's hope lies in the fact that Batman decides to stand tall, continue on and stay strong no matter what happens and how difficult and painful it all becomes.

That's why I strongly feel that Chris Nolan needs to make a third film. We need to conclusion to this saga. Bruce Wayne and Batman need redemption at long last. The audience needs closure. I can understand why Nolan is hesitant to do a third one, what with Heath Ledger's death and all. Ledger's performance as the Joker, which, while on par with any Daniel Day Lewis or Robert DeNiro performance in terms of how genuine it feels, is almost horrific and painful to watch. Whenever Ledger shows up on screen, The Dark Knight becomes more frightening to me than most horror films. After seeing the performance, I think that, perhaps, he did let the role take his own life in some way. He became such an extreme form of human evil that perhaps he couldn't snap out of the performance once he was through playing it. I sometimes wonder if perhaps Nolan feels somewhat responsible for that, but I hope he decides to make the third film anyways, regardless of all that, just like Bruce Wayne/Batman decided to never give in no matter what happens.

Godzilla vs. the Knights in the Service of Satan

2008-12-10T12:22:00.000-05:00

Scene from a lost Godzilla movie that Toho doesn't want you to know exists.

Let the Right One In!

2008-12-09T08:09:00.000-05:00

If you're not in an arthouse theater seeing Let the Right One In right now, you're missing out on what could be one of the best movies in decades. It seriously could the most original, most daring horror film since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the original Halloween. This is a fine, fine film. It's beautiful, touching, tender, grotesque, etc. Nowadays, horror in particular is dryer than the Sahara. Saw sequels are green-lit like an Uzi set to rapid fire. It's so bad that very marginal filmmakers like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth are hailed as genre gods and even the old masters like George Romero, Dario Argento and Brian DePalma all make movies that are marginal at best (Diary of the Dead), embarrassingly bad at worst (Mother of Tears). Let the Right One In is perhaps that film we've all been waiting for. It's a film that feels fresh and original, something not even the greatest horror films of today can boast of and guess what, it ain't American, it's from Sweden!

It's also the most realistic film I have ever seen. Never before had I got more of a "slice of life" quality and more of a sense of "being there" from a film. Everything just feels so real. The only crack in this that takes you out of the film briefly is some dubious CGI used very sparingly. Let the Right One In is actually apparently set in the early 1980s, but thankfully the filmmakers decided to not to make the movie scream "this is the 80s". For a good comparison with the latest dreck from America's multiplexes, Let the Right One In is essentially the anti-Twilight. Both films have the exact basic plot except gender reversed: a young person falls in love with a vampire who seems their own age. The big difference is that Twilight was made for emo girls who wear black eye shadow, cut pentacles onto themselves with exacto-knives and stick their fingers up their vaginas while envisioning themselves losing their virginity in a candlelit room to Robert Pattinson. Tomas Alfredson, the director of Let the Right One In, doesn't try to appeal to or appease anybody. He simply directs a poignant drama, a film so effective that one could completely remove the horror elements completely and still have a wonderful film on their hands. It is, first and foremost, a psychological drama and love story between an adolescent boy and girl. The "girl", Eli, just happens to a vampire and need to drink blood to survive. I really haven't seen anything so poignant, so unique and so original in years as Let the Right One In. Hollywood is already allegedly "jealous" of Sweden's filmmakers and cannot comprehend the idea that we Americans have been "on-upped", as Let the Right One In isn't even done with its theatrical run in the US and already a remake's been green-lit with the director of Cloverfield in the helm.

Shochiku Horror Retrospective

2008-12-08T14:49:00.000-05:00

Shochiku was one of Japan's biggest studios in the 60s along with Toho, Daiei, Toei and Nikkatsu. After the Japanese monster and special effects film took off with the Godzilla series at Toho, every other studio got in on the action and made their own kaiju and tokusatsu "genre" productions. First Daiei gave us the Gamera and Majin films. Toei made The Magic Serpent and Terror Beneath the Sea (both 1966) along with a mess of TV series and Nikkatsu made Gappa, the Triphibian Monster (1967, aka Monster From a Prehistoric Planet). Shochiku made but four sci-fi/horror/fantasy films in the span of two years. These films were an interesting bunch of movies ranging in theme from haunted ships to genocidal insects and nuclear war to giant reptilian space chickens to vampires from the stars. These were an interesting bunch of movies that very few talk about. Rather obscure up until now, even most of the Japanese cult film scholars have yet to do a complete essay on all four of them.

The first of these films and no doubt the most well known is 1967's The X From Outer Space, directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu. I have mixed feelings on this film. If it's possible to simultaneously adore and yet also despise a film at the same time, that's how I feel about The X From Outer Space. On the one hand's it's such a thoroughly awful, silly, illogical and inept movie that Ed Wood would be proud. Like Wood's body of work, however, the film has an incredible charm to it that's hard for a B-movie fanatic to resist. It's totally the Plan 9 from Outer Space or Robot Monster of kaiju films: awful yet so wonderfully kitsch as to be a highly entertaining experience. I was weirdly obsessed with this film as a child and tended to watch it way too much. I loved Guilala, the film's monster, for some weird reason. My Orion VHS from the 90s is all still around in my basement pad and all worn out (I'm gonna transfer it to DVD soon though to give that tape's now seldom heard dub digital immortality).

The film's faults (and simultaneous virtues) are so easy to fault. First off, the film depicts space travel as a joint venture between old pals Japan and Germany. Though it occur to me as a child, this film could be depicting a world ruled by Hitler and Tojo had the Axis won World War II. However, a black man does make a brief appearance in one scene, so perhaps not. Either way, it's nice to have Japan and Germany collaborating on something which doesn't involve the cremation of people en mass or Third Impact. Another very strange element of the film is it's depiction of space. Forget 2001: A Space Odyssey or Alien, this is not the dull "realistic" cold, dark and sterile space we're all used to, no it's happy, upbeat and portrayed by placing Christmas lights against a blue wall complete with a base on the moon where everybody sits around and drinks martinis as Taku Izumi's lighthearted "easy listening" score blares which sounds far more at home at a Bohemian cocktail lounge than in a kaiju space movie. It's hard to believe that this came out a year before 2001, as the two films look not only like they came from different time periods or cultures, but from different dimensions.

The film's monster, Guilala, is just about the silliest looking kaiju ever designed by the Japanese. It looks like a reptilian space chicken with horns and insectoid eyes and antennae. It's such a strange looking beast indeed and does not do much to intimidate. The film is filled with a cast that's about half professional Japanese actors and half gaijin who were plucked off the streets to star in Japanese films by Osman Yusef. Eiji Okada, best known for starring in Hiroshima Mon Amour for Alain Resnais and Woman in the Dunes for Hiroshi Teshigahara is very far from that here indeed and tries his best to keep a straight face as the amateur white people around him get their lines wrong and a giant space chicken destroys Tokyo. Toshiya Wazaki, who later was in a few Lone Wolf and Cubs in the 70s, plays the macho asshole Captain Sano.

Then there are the white people, who should be recognizable only to people who watch too many Japanese cult films like myself. Most notable is Peggy Neal, better known for playing a young Sonny Chiba's doting white squeeze in Terror Beneath the Sea, who plays the sympathetic lady scientist Lisa. Also on hand are Franz Gruber, who was in Terror as well and later played a member of the fateful New Guinea expedition in Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974) and Mike Daning (whose name has been misspelled in sloppy English credits sequences more times than the IMDb can handle) who plays the obnoxious, fat and whiny Dr. Stein. This is a bad movie, make no bones about it, but there's just something so wonderful about its ineptitude. It's definitely, at the very least, far more entertaining than the boring as fuck Gappa and the absolutely abominable Korean knockoff Yongary, Monster from the Deep (also 1967). Any movie where the monster doesn't undergo rectal bleeding at the film's finale definitely earns points in my book.

Shochiku's next stop would be Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968), which is also somewhat well known but generally only among genre aficionados. It's directed by Hajime Sato, an interesting but none too prolific Japanese genre filmmaker. His first notable film was the very Mario Bava-inspired Ghost of the Hunchback (1965) and he also made the aforementioned Terror Beneath the Sea and The Golden Bat (also 1966), both of which featured Sonny Chiba in early starring roles a little under a decade before he became The Street Fighter and began his skull smashing and testicle-ripping journey to glory. Goke would mark his Sato's first film with Shochiku and would be, sadly, his last feature film, but what a note to end on! Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is one of my favorite Japanese sci-fi and horror films of the 1960s, sitting alongside such films as Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960) and Ishiro Honda's Matango (1963) and War of the Gargantuas (1966). There's really something quite amazing about this film. It's got the Cold War paranoia-filled plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers mixed with outlandish visuals of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. This film has been getting more press in the last five years because, when creating the scenes in which Uma Thurman flies to Tokyo in an airplane in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino turned to this movie for visual inspiration. Indeed, Goke's strong visuals hit you from frame one, the opening scene of Goke being a foreboding plane flight across a burning crimson sky. The film involves a plane fight that crashes into a deserted wasteland and the arrival of a race of aliens who possess an assassin (Hideo Ko) and turn him into a vampire who starts to stalk and prey on the other crash survivors.

From the film's gorgeous color palette to the film's constant gloomy and creepy atmosphere, this film is really something else. I first got this film as an 11 year boy on some old tape set that now defunct video archive company Video Yesteryear sold of their Japanese genre films. I made it through all the other films on the two tapes, but when it got to Goke I chickened out as soon as the bird splattered against the plane window. It was almost a year before I could watch the film in its entirety and while it seriously creeped and grossed me out, I loved it. There are indeed a lot of wondrous screwy sequences in the film, the most notable being the alien possession sequences in which the Gokemidoro aliens, large blobs, oozes their way into Hideo Ko's skull via a vertical gash in his head (which, yes, as many have noticed looks a lot like a gaping vagina). The vampirism sequences are quite shocking graphic, particularly the attack on screaming gaijin actress Kathy Horan by Ko. Most vampire films I've seen don't show much of the vampires actually draining their victims dry, but this film shows it in a very drawn out and agonizing looking fashion. Another thing I love about Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is how deeply political and psychological a horror film it actually is. The film contains a number of references and jabs at Vietnam and World War II. The film's misanthropic and nihilistic vision of a group of castaways behaving badly is quite reminiscent of Matango in many ways; the two plots parelel in many ways: both revolve around a stranded bunch of castaways getting at each other's throats due to lack of supplies and being isolated together in a Jean Paul Sartre kind of of way before falling prey to the supernatural (Matango's mushrooms, Goke's alien vampires). The ending of Goke, while I won't spoil it, is probably the grimmest, most outrageously nihilistic punch in the stomach kind of finale I've ever seen in a Japanese film. It's some heavy shit.

The acting in Goke is mostly good and a lot of the actors are much better known to yakuza and ero-guro film aficionados than tokusatsu fans. Teruo Yoshida and Hideo Ko were both Teruo Ishii veterans who both appeared in his Yakuza's Law: Lynching and Horrors of Malformed Men (both 1969). Tomomi Sato was in Kinji Fukasaku's Blackmail is My Life (1968) and Nobuo Kaneko, who plays the mean-spirited arms dealer Tokiyasu, later became a favorite of Fukasaku as well and played the pivotal role of Boss Yamamori in his seminal five film Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. The film's weakest link is Cathy Horan, who cannot act her way out of a paper bag. Every line she says is so wooden that you could build an entire suburban cul-de-sac out of her performance. Most of the gaijin actors and actresses in Japanese cinema had zero acting skills and were just foreigners living in Japan looking to earn a few bucks, but at least Peggy Neal was really cute, Cathy Horan has none of the charisma. Another blight is the occasional silly special effects (stiff dummies thrown off cliffs), but aside from those flaws and particularly for Japanese cult/fantasy film lovers, Goke really delivers.

In the same vein and made only a few months later in 1968 is The Living Skeleton. This is probably one of the most underrated and just plain obscure and under-appreciated Japanese cult films ever made. Why more people don't know about this wonderful gem I'll never know. It's one of the coolest, most atmospheric and beautifully creepy Japanese genre films I've ever seen. Its feel reminds me of a mix between Mario Bava's early black and white work and the feel of movies like Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead. If Goke is a triumph in the use of color than The Living Skeleton surely is an equal triumph in the use of monochrome. The film's sumptuous visuals, of fog shrouded ships ala John Carpenter, the so distinctly Japanese image of ghostly young women with flowing long black hair, Hitchcockian bloody shower murders, emaciated cannibalistic doctors and of skeletons bobbing up in the ocean are so gorgeously filmed and eerie.

Though I've never seen the film subtitled so it can't make it all out, the film's plot involves a ship's crew rebelling and massacring a shipload of passengers, Sanae (Kikko Matsuoka, an obviously half white actress who starred in Fukasaku's Black Lizard around the same time), a girl who is the younger sister of one of the dead passengers haunted by visions of fog shrouded ship and a priest named Father Akashi (Masumi Okada, later to star in Latitude Zero) who turns out to be not the man he seems. Finally, the film climaxes with a trip to the ghost ship and the discovery of one of the thought-dead passengers, Dr. Nishizato (Ko Nishimura), the husband of Sanae's sister, still quite alive. The Living Skeleton is the most strange and misleading English title this side of The Rape After. I'm not sure what the title refers to. There are some skeletons that pop up underwater in a few scenes but the title could also be referring to Ko Nishimura's character for all I know: an emaciated, now crazy doctor who stayed alive apparently through cannibalism of the dead bodies of his fellow passengers. Nishimura was an interesting Japanese actor who frequently played creepy roles in Japanese films due to his gaunt appearance (he was the titular hunchback in Sato's Ghost of the Hunchback). The Japanese title, which translates as Bloodsucking Skull Ship, isn't much less misleading, however. This is not a vampire film, though there are gothic elements as well as skulls and a ship.

It's interesting to note that the director of The Living Skeleton, Hiroshi Matsuno, seemingly never made another film before or after. This is as unfortunate as Hajime Sato's retirement after Goke, as Matsuno's debut work is so promising. Absolutely zero is known about Matsuno, so it's unknown if he was not allowed to make anymore films for whatever reason or if he just didn't like the stress of filmmaking and quit. The Living Skeleton is an absolute triumph and it really deserves a lot more press than it gets, particularly here in the West. Matsuno is like the Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General) of Japanese genre films, both only made one notable film but both films were so great one can only imagine how far they'd have went had they kept making films.

Shochiku's next and last sci-fi/horror film was War of the Insects (aka Genocide, also 1968), with X From Outer Space director Kazui Nihonmatsu back in the director's chair. It's hard to believe that this is a film from the same director: X is goofy, silly, nonsensical and happy go lucky. War of the Insects, while also boasting an outlandish plot, is far more serious in tone, more akin to Goke and Living Skeleton. It's pretty relentlessly grim and at times rather mean spirited and sleazy. I guess Nihonmatsu was a just a studio hack who filmed whatever script and did whatever he was told, since Susumu Takahisa, who wrote Goke, penned the script this time around. If X had a giant alien chicken growing from spores attached to spaceships and Goke had alien blobs taking over the world by turning people into vampires, War of the Insects has killer bees being breed for revenge against Germany by a very irate Holocaust survivor.

Yes, the plot is kind of tasteless in that way. While I love the theme of "hate breeds hate", I dunno, I just find it heavy handed in this film. War of the Insects involves a ship carrying a nuclear bomb that goes down in Japan after being attacked by a swarm of bees. One of the ship's crew members, Charlie (played by Chico Roland, better known as the black guy in every Japanese cult film that calls for a character of African descent) goes crazy and starts whimpering about insects and genocide. Later, we found out that he was tortured by Anabelle (Goke's Cathy Horlan), a bitter concentration camp survivor watched her family die at the hands of the Nazis and has been breeding the bees to send to Germany and have them sting everybody there to death as revenge for the Holocaust.

Of all of the Shochiku horrors, War of the Insects is probably the least memorable to me. It's not as bad as X From Outer Space, but it's not particularly great either like Goke or Living Skeleton. In other words, it's not bad enough to be funny in a kitschy way and not good enough to be considered a genuinely good piece of cinema. It's simply average and mediocre. It works, but it doesn't work that well. It's kind of boring. The film touches upon two very Cold War-era fears and mixes them together: nuclear annihilation and threat of insects overtaking man, specifically killer bees. In the 60s and 70s, there were these mean "killer bees" that were allegedly coming up from South America and people were scared shitless, hence all the killer bee movies like the Amicus production The Deadly Bees and Irwin Allen's The Swarm. The killer bee concept is a hilarious outdated one. Not only did the killer bees never show up to sting everybody to death, but bees are dying at a record rate now and could take us with them if we sit around and do nothing since the beekeeping industry is closely tied to the food industry. War of the Insects doesn't totally succeed in it's attempt to mix two types of apocalypse scenarios into one. Kinji Fukasaku's Virus, made over a decade later, which mixed germ warfare and nuclear devastation together, is a far more effective fusion of Cold War paranoia.

The film, like X From Outer Space, features a roughly half Caucasian cast with one black guy thrown in for good measure. Cathy Horan from Goke, who is fortunately dubbed into Japanese this time, is on hand and Franz Gruber, Mike Daning and Harold Conway, an actor who played foreign ambassadors, military men and scientists in Ishiro Honda's space movies like The Mysterians and Battle in Outer Space quite often, plays a general. The real standout, though, is Chico Roland as the delirious Charlie. Roland is very noticable in any film he's in naturally, since in Japan and Japanese cinema, white people are rare enough, but black people are virtually nonexistent. He's the guy who lusted over Kaoru Yumi's strip tease in ESPY and had his tongue psychically ripped out. Sonny Chiba also enjoyed killing him on a regular basis, most notably with the forcible orchiectomy in The Street Fighter. In the Japanese end, War of the Insects most notably features Yusuke Kawazu, who made a return to genre cinema in his older age with his role in the later two 90s Gamera films for Shusuke Kaneko.

Sadly, after War of the Insects, Shochiku ceased production of their genre films. This is kind of a shame. Gappa vs. Guilala was in production for years in the 90s, but finally director Minoru Kawasaki (Everybody Sinks But Japan), himself a huge tokusatsu fan, directed a politicized spoof/sequel to X From Outer Space called Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008). I have yet to see it, but definitely will once the DVD hits in any region, though I am kind of burned out on contemporary Japanese cinema after the abomination that was Sinking of Japan. Also notable is that Janus Films (the famed film archive whose films usually are released by Criterion), apparently has the rights to all four Shochiku horror films (I know for a fact that X From Outer Space and Goke are owned by them). A Shochiku sci-fi/horror film boxed set from Criterion in the spirit of their Bergman and Teshigahara box sets would be the coolest fucking thing ever! Criterion, please, I'd not only buy something like that, I'd pre-order it four months ahead of time!

The funniest video on YouTube.

2008-12-07T15:11:00.001-05:00

Nigerian Titanic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaLcEKPeBhI

I first saw this video months ago. It's so weird but also hilarious. It's hard to believe that a human being could have made something like this in a completely serious fashion. Sadly the poster of this video on YouTube disabled embedding, probably so the white supremacist Stormfront.org types won't post it onto their blogs as proof of "the general ineptitude of coloreds".

Nigeria has a massive cheap film industry where people make movies with crappy video cameras and release them onto poorly authored DVDs. Hundreds of these movies are made every month. It's like Bollywood, but much cheaper, perhaps even more prolific and, well, black.

Not to sound racist or anything, but the thing that astounds me about Nigerian Titanic is that the director of this film actually thought he could make a black version of Titanic and people would take it seriously. He also thought that he could "borrow" James Cameron's special effects footage and inter splice his poorly Hi8 camera shot footage in and nobody would notice at all.

I would love to find a full length copy of this film. It just doesn't seem to be around anywhere. It's not even on IMDb.

This post, in the meantime, is dedicated to all the black people who died when the Titanic sank in 1928 (that's an alleged actual quote from the end of the movie)!

New Beginnings, Books and Herbert J. Leder.

2008-12-06T23:22:00.000-05:00

I'm starting this blog up again. From now on, there is no restriction as to what I'll post about. I'll post whatever I want about the art of cinema and sometimes even about politics, spirituality and other important things.

No more "just Asian movies" or just "cult movies". Of course I will talk about Asian movies and cult movies very often, but it will not be all I'll write about!

I am definitely going to write some books now. I kept being afraid to write books because I "wasn't enough of an expert on certain types of films". I don't care about that anymore. I'm just gonna do it. Go for it. I'm going to make good on my goal of writing a critical analysis on the Japanese special effects film genre but I'm also going to write a book called Cinema Obscura as well.

I've been thinking, lately. There are a lot of directors, films and even some sub-genres of films that are very seldom written about by anybody. Only the most hardcore fringe film historians and film collectors have seen these films or indulged themselves in the body of work of these men. T.F. Mou is one of these such directors and there are many others and numerous films which I have never seen a single film book publish a review of, or an in-depth analysis for that matter. That's the kind of book I want to write. A collection of dozens of oddball movies that people just don't care about and never mention from all around the world. This is what I will serve, but it's also about time to stop endlessly saying "I'm gunna right teh bookz sumdei" and actually get around to sitting down at a computer for a few months and work every day to make them happen.

In the meantime and speaking of obscure films and directors, I offer one of the most unknown of all. Compared to this guy T.F. Mou is as world famous as Peter Jackson. This dude is Herbert J. Leder.

As with many of these men, we know next to nothing about him. We don't know what he looked like and we don't know what life he lived aside from the fact he apparently became quite bitter about the film industry in general after years of non-success and became a film professor in New Jersey until his death in 1983. That said, a director's filmography frequently speaks a lot louder than his life and Leder did have one odd and varied filmography!One of his early works was a film called The Child Molester, an American ephemeral film made by Highway Safety Films. Here in good old America from right after World War II to the mid 70s, there was a whole "educational film" industry. There was almost a small Hollywood out in the Mid West that made these films. Hilariously outdated now, I nonetheless love these movies and like to collect them on occasion (archive.org has a lot for download and Something Weird Video has a lot in their catalog too). What I love about them is that they are frequently shot in the small towns that they are set in. Hollywood films rarely were shot on location and thus looked glamorized and filtered. The ephemeral films were not, they show the meat-and-potatoes Americana of the old days just as it was, before Walmart, McDonalds and Hollister bought out all the corner and hardware stores. On top of that, they were also total exploitation films, but made for children and young people. They were designed to frighten children in a heavy handed fashion into "doing" and "not doing" certain things. The Child Molester is perhaps the tipity top of these films.

The film, which opens in a nicely creepy fashion, shows a pair of young girls being charmed by a sunglasses wearing pedo who lures them into his car with jellybeans and then takes them to some nearby woods and murders them. The film then shows you their parents looking for the girls and then goes into typical quant ephermal film mode by giving kids advice on how to handle themselves. No sooner, however, does the film start to seem like Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder than does the film employ a shock tactic whose effect is the cinematic equivalent of hitting you in the nuts with a brass knuckle and then beating you over the head with an aluminum baseball bat. The film flashes the images of actual dead little girls. That's right, we see lifeless, soaking wet, bloody and battered little vessels that were once beloved children with hopes and dreams. It is one of the most heartbreaking and sickening things one could ever comprehend. The film ends with the haunting image of one of a little girl's slipper floating down a river.

Highway Safety Films, the company that made The Child Molester, was no stranger to shock tactics. They were the company that made all those driver's ed films with the shots of real, gory, mangled bodies that all the Baby Boomers were shown back in the day. The Child Molester, indeed, was actually shown to elementary school kids in the mid 60s and then apparenty withdrawn after so many children became terrified wrecks. The film is a strange mix: it's poorly acted, insanely alarmist and hyperbolic yet Leder's direction, as with his next, feature film The Frozen Dead, is simultaneously pedestrian and effective. It has one of the most interesting atmospheres of foreboding I've ever felt in a film before. Every frame of the movie seems burned with dread and child-like fear and the addition of the real crime scene footage only amps it up to 11. Could Leder be the man responsible for the fact that the entire Baby Boomer generation deeply overpampered their children and turned them into sissy emo kids? The film is available to watch on archive.org, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Leder's next film, filmed in England, would be a feature length horror opus called The Frozen Dead. The Frozen Dead involves Dr. Norberg (Dana Andrews), a former Nazi scientist who is trying to revive his cryogenically frozen comrades without much luck. Everyone who he's revived up to now, including his own brother, have gone completely nutzoid. He can revive the body functions of someone frozen but he always goes wrong with the brain. Things get complicated when Nazi leader General Lubeck (Karel Stepanek) shows up and starts breathing down his neck and his niece Jean (the cute Anna Palk) also shows up at his door with friend Elsa (Kathleen Breck). Norberg's demented assistant kills Elsa and blames it on Jean's father and he and Norberg decide to keep her head alive so they can experiment on it.

Like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the gag of a woman's head being kept alive separate from her body plays heavily into the plot, but unlike The Brain That Wouldn't Die, where it's played for laughs, The Frozen Dead depicts it in a horrible, tragic kind of way. Leder's direction is again rather pedestrian and the film's production values are sometimes amateurish, but the film succeeds in creating a deeply grim and foreboding atmosphere all around. It's hardly great cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a highly interesting nightmarish little movie. The film would probably work a lot better in it's original theatrical presentation in black and white, but the majority of available prints nowadays seem to be in color. Like with The Child Molester, The Frozen Dead and Leder's vision of dread seems to have been responsible for a lot of Baby Boomer nightmares when the film was shown on late night TV.

Made shortly after The Frozen Dead by Leder and virtually the same crew, again working in the UK, was It!. The film is a strange opus. While It! is far better made than The Frozen Dead, with cinematography that looks very glossy and Hammer-esque, It! is also a lot less interesting a film. It! involves Pimm (Roddy McDowell), a freakish young museum curator's assistant who finds himself in control of a creepy looking, indestructable Hebrew Golem. He begins to use it for selfish reasons: to murder people he doesn't like, to steal and to try to impress Ellen (Jill Haworth), the girl he has a crush on. Of course having this level of power doesn't help his already imbalanced mind and pretty soon he's holed up in a country house with Ellen, his mother's corpse (which he keeps around because he's so attached) and the Golem and pretty soon the British military decides to drop a nuclear bomb...

It's like Leder really learned something about filmmaking in the short period between The Frozen Dead and It! because the production values are infinitely superior. The film feels glossy and has a look and feel that Leder allegedly intended just like a Hammer film. The big problem is that, unlike The Frozen Dead, the movie's often kind of boring. The film throws in the completely unneeded, highly contrived and obviously Psycho-inspired touch of having Pimm be a complete Mama's boy who keeps the embalmed, almost skeletal corpse of his mother around. The film would have worked infinitely better had he just been a sexually frustrated young man without the Norman Batesy shit. Still, the sequences with the Golem and the concept of an angry young man possessing an indestructible power is a good one. The Golem's design is quite nice and has a very creepy, crude look to it. Actress Jill Haworth is also absolutely luscious in this film. It!, overall, is kind of a mixed bag of a film. It definitely has its moments but overall you have to wait around too long for those moments.

Coincidently, It! is hitting region 1 DVD on Tuesday (December 9th) in a double feature DVD from Warner Brothers with The Shuttered Room.

Leder also directed the druggie/psychedelic Mexican-shot film The Candy Man in 1969, but I have not seen that one yet.

Conversations With T.F. Mou

2008-08-23T10:19:00.002-04:00

Conversations with T.F. Mou is DONE!

I met T.F. Mou!

2008-06-26T17:11:00.001-04:00

Here's a trailer for my upcoming film Conversations with T.F. Mou.

Through a mysterious set of circumstances I ended up getting to meet Mr. Mou, face to face. One of the nicest people I've ever met!

He was kind enough to let me videotape the whole thing.

Conversations With T.F. Mou
by JLCarrozza

Newz

2007-05-15T16:07:00.000-04:00

I've decided I'm going to write two Asian cinema related books. I always wanted to write a book about something and I've decided now is a better time than ever. The first book will be entitled Oh No, There Goes Tokyo and will be about Japanese fantastic cinema, covering everything from 1954's Godzilla to 2006's Sinking of Japan. I figure it's been a while since anybody's published a good Godzilla book, the last good book about these movies was Stuart Galbraith's Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo in 1998 and sadly Guy Tucker died before he could write the book he really wanted to write and get it properly published (even Age of the Gods was just self published).

The second book which I want to publish is a book about the films made by the Shaw Brothers in the 20 year period from 1965-1985. Face it, before Come Drink With Me it was all goofy Huangmei operas and such. So yeah, it'll cover everything worthwhile from Come Drink With Me to Disciples of the 36th Chamber and will feature extensive bios and pretty everyone who was everyone at the Shaws. The book would take a decade to write and be thicker than New York City's yellow pages if I reviewed all 1000 movies, so yeah, there's going to be about 100 reviews in the book, It's not so much that I feel that I'm qualified to write a book like this, it's that I want to see someone publish a book like this so badly I've decided I'm gonna do it myself.

Keep America strong! Watch more Japanese monster films!

2007-03-20T18:55:00.000-04:00

June is going to be great month for kaiju eiga fans and fans of Ishiro Honda's body of work, with Ghidrah, the Three Headed Monster and Godzilla vs. Monster Zero (yes, I know the real international title that Toho prefers is Invasion of Astro Monster, but I refuse to call it that) coming from Classic Media. Not only that, but Frankenstein Conquers the World (or Frankenstein vs. Baragon) is coming from Media Blasters. All classic, great films by Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya made during Toho's golden age. If this doesn't excite you and you don't plan on buying copies of all three, you are a traitor to America! What do Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya films have to do with supporting America? I have no fucking idea.

Anyways, check out the cover art. The Ghidrah and Monster Zero discs look absolutely sexy, though I'm not as keen on the Frankenstein one. To quote a friend of mine, it looks kind of like an Alpha Video cover.

woo

2007-03-19T21:47:00.000-04:00

i saw hard boiled at the movies today. its by that guy who did that mission impossible and stupid time travel movie with ben asslick. its way better. mom didnt want me to go see it, but i put a fake moustache and lifts on and snuck in. there were lots of explosions. that chow mein guy who's in pirates of the caribean 3 was badass. he saves babies and shit and shots lots of evil men. it was kind of scary though, lots of blood and this one guy is really evil. but i loved it and plan to sneak the dvd in the house and watch it while mom is sleeping.

a review by Jules, grade 4.

My thoughts on the Oscars can best be summed up by this...

2007-02-26T12:05:00.001-05:00

Infernal Affairs is NOT a Japanese film! What the fuck?! You lose! Good day sir!

Ken Watanabe and Rinko Kikuchi must have been rolling their eyes as the announcer said that and Quentin Tarantino must have spat out his beer.

You Tube Finds IV

2007-02-21T14:40:00.000-05:00

Okay, guys, the next Shaw Brothers film I'm buying is gonna be THIS ONE.

Don't quite have time to watch all of this yet, but this is officially the coolest thing I've ever found on YouTube: the famous live action sequence that was cut from End of Evangelion for some bizarre reason and substituted with something more tranquil.

Thank you, Criterion!

2007-02-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

Shohei Imamura's masterpiece and one of my very favorite Japanese films of the 70s, Vengeance is Mine, is headed to Criterion in May. Great news!

Now if only Criterion would release the Hiroshi Teshigahara/Kobo Abe box set they've promised for a while.

Also, in the Hong Kong film front, Hard Boiled and Infernal Affairs are playing at the Brattle next month. I'm gonna be there and so should you.

YouTube Finds III

2007-02-12T22:42:00.000-05:00

Mona Fong, best known as Run Run Shaw's long time partner and a frequent associate producer and production manager at Shaw Brothers, SINGS!

Knowing that there is someone else on this planet as obsessed with these movies as I am and that he also makes movies makes me all warm inside, I swear.

Rare trailer for My Young Auntie.

Even rarer trailer for Fukasaku's Legend of the Eight Samurai.

Bullet Train Big Explosion!

Gunbuster!

2007-02-08T15:24:00.000-05:00

Just another heads that Gunbuster, one of the best but also most neglected anime OVA series of all time, is finally headed to DVD at long last on February 20th. Gunbuster is a great show and is Hideaki (Nadia, Neon Genesis Evangelion, His & Circumstances) Anno's directorial debut, it plays like a Japanese war film and feels like a dress rehearsal of Evangelion. I can finally throw my Chinese bootleg of the show with horrific subtitles that appear to have been translated from Japanese into Chinese and then to English in the garbage (or better yet, sell it on Ebay).

YouTube Finds II

2007-02-04T09:59:00.000-05:00

Commercial for Kinji Fukasaku's first and sadly last video game, Clock Tower 3, featuring the master reciting a poem.

Speaking of Fukasaku, I found this trailer for one of his rarer yakuza films, New Battles Without Honor or Humanity 2!

The opening to the US version of The Bodyguard, aka Bodyguard Kiba, with Sonny Chiba. If it sounds familiar, it should.

Angela Mao truly is Queen of the Deep Thrust...

If you don't think this is the greatest commercial ever, you suck.

Sinking of Japan

2007-02-04T09:21:00.000-05:00

Sinking of Japan is Shinji Higuchi's newest film. I confess, I was really looking forward to it. Knowing Higuchi's penchant for eye-popping visuals as well as his love of the original 1973 Submersion of Japan, I was expecting something to knock my socks off. What we got instead was a cloyingly saccharine, overly sentimental film with a bunch of cool (but underused) FX scenes. I confess, I'm not the biggest fan of the original Submersion. It's kind of boring, overly talky and Teruyoshi Nakano's superb FX sequences are again underused, but Sinking of Japan makes it look like a masterpiece in comparison.

As I said, my hopes for the film were extremely high. Like Peter Jackson and his love of the original King Kong, Shinji Higuchi himself is a life long fan of Submersion of Japan. In interviews he talked about how it was the first tokusatsu film he ever saw. I really thought he would do the film justice. Sadly, I was wrong. Higuchi is a highly talented FX director and has an excellent command of visuals when either doing FX for Shusuke Kaneko's Gamera trilogy or storyboards for Hideaki Anno's many opuses, but like George Lucas, when it comes to actually directing, he's much inferior. As I was watching it, I really wished that Kaneko was helming this film instead. Perhaps I was a little hard on Higuchi's previous film, Lorelei, which, despite having a bit of a right wing slant, was still highly entertaining and had a very compelling story. Sinking of Japan is a disappointment on so many more regards.

The thing that made the original interesting was the film’s socio political elements. It begged the question “What would really happen if Japan were to sink in the ocean? What would people do? How would the governments of the world respond when asked to take in hundreds of millions of immigrants?” Submersion of Japan also had a sad, melancholy vibe to it and a nicely downbeat ending. In Sinking of Japan, however, the socio-political elements are touched upon only lightly and the film is cloyingly saccharine, featuring almost laughable melodrama straight out of Michael Bay’s Armageddon and the love interludes between Tsuyoshi Kusanagi and Battle Royale and One Missed Call's Ko Shibasaki might as well have been from one of George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Unlike the original, which ended with Japan sinking into the ocean and hundreds of millions of Japanese refugees now displaced across the globe, this film actually ends with Japan being saved from total destruction. The film is not a socio-political disaster epic; it’s just a silly disaster/action flick that is really no better or worse than such trite American films as Deep Impact, Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow.

The film does have some saving grace, which lies solely in the film’s strong visuals. The cinematography is absolutely lush and gorgeous and the film’s camera work is very fluent and effective. The film’s special effects and visual effects work, by GMK’s Makoto Kamiya, are easily its best attribute. It’s simply eye-popping, easily rivaling most of Hollywood’s work and is quite an improvement over the obvious CGI of Lorelei. Unfortunately, in one problem it shares with the original, it’s simply not used often enough. The film’s most impressive shots are some satellite’s eye view shots of Japan sinking into the ocean as well as massive pans over the country of Japan, again from a kind of God's eye view. The film is simply a huge mess with great special effects work and beautiful cinematography but a story ruined by silly heroics and saccharine sentimentality that approaches comedic levels. Overall, I really wanted to love the film, I swear I did, but the film’s flaws are simply too glaring to ignore.

YouTube Finds

2007-02-03T20:55:00.000-05:00

From now on, every week, I'm going to scour YouTube for cool Asian cult film related shit and post five things. Here's what you all get for our trial run:

Macross: Do You Remember Love? is the coolest anime movie ever, aside from The End of Evangelion. Anime is shit now compared to how badass it was in the 80s.

I actually don't think Resurrection of Golden Wolf is all that well made a film, but it's better than the fun looking but kind of boring Sailor Suit and Machine Gun and does speak to bored Japanese salarymen everywhere who want to abandon their humdrum working gruelling hours and having sex with their wife only once a year lifestyles and start robbing banks and dealing heroin. That and Yusaku Matsuda is so badass he actually makes his co-star Sonny Chiba, at least in this film, seem like a sissy in comparison.

I used to have this on my Myspace. I've never actually seen Supermen Against the Orient, but I plan on buying it on the week of my first paycheck once I can attain employment. This is the first and last movie where you get to see the lovely as always Shih Szu, Lo Lieh and some Italian dudes dress up in superhero outfits and kick ass. I wish Hollywood producers today would think more like Run Run and Runme Shaw did!

Rare trailer for Chang Cheh's The Blood Brothers, a rare Chang Cheh film in which the bloodshed was caused not by just male hormones, but by the pretty Ching Li AND male hormones. Either this, Vengeance or The Boxer From Shantung are his masterpieces, it's really hard to choose.

May I present to you, the Holy Grail of trailers! The trailer Toho doesn't want you to ever see. Judging from the Chinese characters on the bottom of the screen, apparently it was floating around in Hong Kong. Kudos to whoever tracked it down.

Godzilla is a model Dad.

A nice scene from HK exploitation master Kuei Chih Hung's The Killer Snakes, the film that PACTV wasn't too happy that I aired on their station! I stopped doing Cinematic Damnation: The Show, by the way.

Warning: This trailer can cause uncontrollable orgasms at the sight of Lo Lieh and Lee Van Cleef together in one shot! If you are a fan of both Spaghetti Westerns and kung fu films, not watch in public places!

Your Shopping List Part II

2007-02-02T09:32:00.000-05:00

A lot of great DVDs are comin' out early 2007. Here's my personal shopping list for the next two months:Never seen this one, but it looks great from the preview I watched of it. Looks like kind of a Lo Mein Western by Chang Cheh with one of his first collaborations with David Chiang and Ti Lung. Already got this one coming to me.

Another Chang/Chiang film that I haven't seen but am definitely going to get. I'm planning on getting every Shaw film Image releases, anyways.

Ho Meng Hua, the guy who gave us The Lady Hermit, The Flying Guillotine, Oily Maniac, Mighty Peking Man and a whole bunch of other classics directed this one and though I haven't seen it yet, it looks really good and I'm definitely picking it up.

Now Sayonara Jupiter is for sure one of Toho's weirdest films, like Submersion of Japan and Virus it's based on a Sakyo Komatsu novel, but is not nearly as well executed as those two films. It's sort of like Godzilla: Final Wars in that you really don't want to like this movie but are kind of forced to due to it's immense charm. It now comes to Region 1 DVD for the first time ever and will surely make most Toho freaks scratch their heads.

Now Babel is not an Asian film but it does, however, feature the great Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance), is fucking great, has mute Japanese schoolgirls in it and presents one of the best portrayals of Japan I've seen in a Western film. If you missed it on the big screen, check it out on DVD! I really think the three Mexican directors and their films dominated cinema last year, namely Alfonso Cuaron with Children of Men, Guillermo Del Toro with Pan's Labyrinth and Alexandro Gonzalez Inarritu with Babel.

Now I already own these as I snagged them off Classic Media's website, but this is just a heads up that they are headed for general release in early April. I can assure you all, they are absolutely fucking superb DVDs. These are the DVDs I wanted when I was a teenager, with gorgeous prints, meticulous subtitles and lots of nice extras, the only thing missing being the US trailers for the movies. Anyone who has so much as even a passing interest in kaiju eiga should buy these in a heartbeat.

Yet More Shaw Brothers Madness! Part I

2006-12-09T20:02:00.000-05:00

The new Image Entertainment Region 1 DVD of The Water Margin arrived at my doorstep a few days ago. The Water Margin is perhaps one of Chang Cheh's very greatest period epics, with a sprawling, epic feel all around, a fairly compelling story and an absolutely superb cast. First, the cast. Rounding out the cast is none of than two veterans of my other favorite Asian movie company, Toho Studios: the sadly recently deceased Tetsuro Tanba (best known as Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice and that same year, 1972, would appear in Under the Flag of the Rising Sun for Asia's other master of cinematic bloodshed: Kinji Fukasaku) and Toshio Kurosawa, would would appear in everything from Samurai Assassin to Evil of Dracula. Two years later, Tanba and Kurosawa would reunite in one Toho production known as Prophecies of Nostradamus. The rest of the cast members are a veritable who's who of the Chinese 70s martial arts stars we know and love, including David Chiang and Ti Lung (Have Sword Will Travel, The Heroic Ones), frequent Chang actor Ku Feng, Yeuh Hua (Come Drink With Me), Lily Ho (14 Amazons, Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan), et all. I cannot tell you how wonderful and surreal it is to see Tetsuro Tanba, one of my all time favorite actors in Japanese 70s cult films, on screen with these numerous idols of 70s Chinese martial arts films that I've grown to adore. It's truly like getting the best of both worlds. Once one can get past the coolness factor of seeing Tanba in the same shot as David Chiang, there's a lot more to recommend about the film. The film truly has a sweeping scale to it, with lots of extras and the finest sets money could buy. The fight choreography, by Chang's usual team of Tong Gaai and Lau Kar Leung, is superb and quite dynamic as well. Another huge plus is the storyline in which you really feel for the characters, particularly Tetsuro Tanba's character, a martial arts master who trained Toshio Kurosawa and is betrayed by one of his servants and his unfaithful wife. All and all, The Water Margin could be Chang's finest attempts at a large scale, all star martial arts epic and is also now one of my very favorite Shaw Brothers productions.

A day later, hungry for more Chang Cheh epic filmmaking, I popped Boxer Rebellion into the DVD player. I've seen the film before and really liked it. Boxer Rebellion is another Chang Cheh martial arts epic and one of his very last films with Lau Kar Leung as fight choreographer. After this, Lau and Chang would part ways, with Lau starting to direct films of his own, which , unlike Chang's, focused more on martial arts than violence. The film is an excellent production with a superb cast and a sprawling scale. The film has just one fatal flaw, it's history accuracy is absolutely horrendous. I don't mind when filmmakers take some liberties with history to make things a bit more fun, but to create a work of complete fiction and then pass it off as some sort of historical drama is rather annoying. It has about as much in common with history as Chang's earlier Marco Polo, which in Marco Polo (played by Richard Harrison, who's also in Boxer Rebellion) is actually presented working for the Mongols. That's a little more acceptable, however, as it's really old history, the Boxer Rebellion happened a little over a century ago. I don't know much about the Boxer Rebellion, but I know for sure that the Japanese, Germans, Americans, French, et all, who occupied Peking after the Boxers went nuts didn't turn the city into a Nanking-like hell zone where they raped and pillaged like in this movie. That said, the movie's still a lot of fun with a superb cast, consisting of the great Alexander Fu Sheng, American cult actor Richard Harrison as a German officer, frequent Chang collaborator Chi Kuan Chun, Hu Chin (House of 72 Tenants, Kidnap), villain actor Wang Lung Wei (best known for his role in Chang's later Five Venoms) as the treacherous zealot leader of the Boxers, Shih Szu, Gordon Liu and Phillip Kwok in "blink and you'll miss 'em appearances" and many others. The film is also one of the (if not the) highest budgeted and largest scale films ever made by Chang Cheh, with as I said, a massive cast, thousands of extras, not-entirely-historically-accurate period costumes a plenty and a nice epic canvas and nearly two and a half hour runtime. It's a great movie, it just would have been nice if Chang Cheh and his frequent scribe Ni Kuang actually did some historical research before they wrote the script.

RIP Akio Jissoji (1937-2006)

2006-11-30T17:22:00.000-05:00

Looks like we've lost another great legend. I just got word that Akio Jissoji, the man who gave us numerous films and directed numerous TV episodes, mainly of Ultraman and it's spinoffs, has passed on. He was 69.

The first exposure I had to his unique style of cinema was Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, which is a very cool, somewhat underrated little movie with creatures designed by H.R. Giger, Kyusaku Shimada in one of his greatest roles, a chick vomiting out a gigantic fucking maggot and so much more. I also think one of the episodes he directed of Ultraman, My Home is Earth, featuring an astronaut turned enraged kaiju is one of the best and most bittersweet episodes in the series. He attempted to bring a lot of creativity to the episodes he directed at Tsuburaya by using expressionistic camera angles and lighting. He'll be missed, let me tell you that.

Mikadroid

2006-11-23T21:52:00.001-05:00

Tomoo Haraguchi is an interesting fellow. Like a Japanese Tom Savini, he's both a special effects master and a director, doing everything from creating the sickening gore in the abhorrent torture flick All Night Long to making the monster suits in Shusuke Kaneko's Gamera trilogy as well as directing a few films himself, including the fun Sakuya: Slayer of Demons. Mikadroid is his directorial debut, a highly entertaining and interesting, if flawed, low budget sci-fi/horror hybrid from Toho's direct to video line. The film was originally going to be about a dead Japanese soldier coming back from the dead as a zombie, but the sudden headline grabbing rampage of perverted child killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, one of whose obsessions was horror films, stopped that project in it's tracks. Haraguchi was forced to go back to the drawing board and invent a new, albeit similar project, this time involving a modified cyborg superman instead of a zombie.

The plot is a fun one, involving everything from Japan's WWII human experimentation to discoclubs and women with that 80s hair. The film is quite well made considering it's budget, with an ample amount of nice camerawork and some brutal murder scenes involving the film's titular cyborg, most notably one in which a girl is slashed up with the thing's katana and then spun around, that bring Dario Argento to mind. The special effects are by Shinji Higuchi, one of Haraguchi's colleagues and the genius who would give us the eye popping effects in Kaneko's Gamera trilogy. They aren't nearly as incredible as the SFX in those films, but are still quite serviceable with a nice use of pyrotechnics and a cool design for the Mikadroid, looking like a cross between a 50s sci-fi robot and Majin. If there's any problem with the film, it's that the film is too short. The characters could have been fleshed out more and I wish the film had more scenes of the cyborg going around killing people, as those sequences are easily the highlight of the movie. The origin of the titular Mikadroid could also have been explored a bit more throughly. The film's finale, in which the Mikadroid is defeated by another modified superman, also seems like something of a cop out. That said, Mikadroid is still an underrated and highly fun little film, definitely recommended.

A Rare Assortment of Shaw Brothers Treats

2006-11-13T19:09:00.000-05:00

I apologise for the lack of updates, between writing screenplays, writing reviews for Toho Kingdom and getting my Open Studios together, I've been busy for a man with no life. So I decided I'd compensate with extra long post. Anyways I watched a bunch of Shaw Brothers flicks in the past few weeks, some of which I've seen before, some of which I haven't. These films include Vengeance, Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, The Super Inframan, Clan of Amazons and the non-Shaw Brothers but still Chang Cheh-directed Shanghai 13.

Vengeance, for starters, is absolutely superb. It's a gritty, violent and highly entertaining flick from Chang Cheh, a Chinese director whose body of work is akin to that of Sam Peckinpah, in that his works are ultra-violent with a general feel of manliness and testosterone. Chang also reinvented the Chinese martial arts film in a similar way to Kinji Fukasaku's reinvention of the Japanese gangster flick and made many young actors famous, including Ti Lung, Chen Kuan Tai and of course, The Venoms. Vengeance is no exception and is one of his very best collaborations with an actor which to Chang Cheh was like Robert DeNiro to Martin Scorsese: David Chiang.

The film stars Chiang as a young man in 1920s China, out to get bloody revenge on a vicious General and his men for the death of his brother (played by Chiang's frequent co-star in Chang Cheh's films: Ti Lung). After the spectacularly gruesome death of Ti Lung, the film builds up in intensity until the ending, in which Chiang, clad in a white suit, takes on the General and his men in an orgy of crimson. It's a supremely bloody 15 minutes that would only be outdone in kung fu bloodshed by the similar ending to Chang's martial arts/crime epic The Boxer From Shantung. Chang's direction is his typical work, lots of whip zooms, charmingly ragged camera motion and a generally gritty fell throughout. Aside from Ti Lung and David Chiang, the film also features frequent Chang Cheh villain actor Ku Feng and the cute Wong Ping as the love interest. In the end, next to The Boxer From Shantung, Vengeance is one of my all time favorite Chang Cheh films.

I've seen Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan and if you know me well, you'll know that it's my favorite Shaw Brothers production of all time and is pretty high up on my favorite films in general. A young named Ainu (played by the cute Lily Ho) is kidnapped and sold to a brothel, run by vicious lesbian Madame Chun (Betty Pei Ti). Though at first she rebels and tries to escape, eventually she gives in. Years later, she begins her spree of vengeance against the men who first deflowered her.

Chor Yuen is by far one of the most interesting directors to come out of the Shaw Brothers Studios. His wuxia films were far more female oriented than Chang Cheh's and have an almost lyrical quality to them. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan is absolutely no exception. The cinematography is some of the most gorgeous in a Shaw Brothers film, with the whole film taking place during winter and numerous highly memorable and haunting images, particularly a shot of Betty Pei Ti licking blood off her fingers. Freeze frames are also used to great effect, quite like in the films of Kinji Fukasaku. The film features a mix of sleazy erotica with classy, gorgeous cinematography and settings that highly reminds me of such Japanese cult films as Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41. The film's acting is excellent as well, with a great sense of chemistry between Lily Ho and Betty Pei Ti. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan is simply an amazing piece of cinema all around.

I then gave my long unwatched R1 of The Super Inframan (or Infra-Man) a viddy. The film is the first Shaw Brothers production I was ever exposed to. Watching it, at the tender age of nine, on a badly panned and scanned VHS of the infamous Peter Fernandez dub was like a religious experience. To this day, Infra-Man is still one of my all time favorite guilty pleasures (though I'm not terribly guilty about liking it). I feel about Infra-Man quite like how Patrick Macias feels about Kinji Fukasaku’s wild space opera Message From Space, in that if I was only allowed to take one film bearing the Shaw Brothers logo with me to a deserted island, you bet your behinds that it would be this film. No film is quite as insanely kinetic, as colorful or as all around fun as Inframan. The only film to come even close is Ryuhei Kitamura’s kaiju action orgy Godzilla: Final Wars, made some 30 years later.

Picture the martial arts action of a typical Lau Kar Leung film. Now combine that with the colorful insanity of such Japanese tokusatsu shows like Ultraman and Kamen Rider. That is the gist of Infra-Man. The film is full of colorful monster costumes that put most of the creatures in your average sentai show to shame and garish sets that bring Message From Space to mind, all lovingly lensed by veteran Japanese cinematographer Tadashi Nishimoto (billed here as Ho Lan Shan), best known for his work on Bruce Lee’s Return of the Dragon and who, back in his native Japan, DPed such films as Nobuo Nakagawa’s horror masterpiece Ghost of Yotsuya. The direction by the then 33 Hua Shan is also quite energetic as well and the film boasts a furious pace that never really lets up. It is simply one of the most insanely entertaining films produced in any country.

Next up was Clan of Amazons. Clan of Amazons is yet another example of the many adaptations that director Chor Yuen did of Ku Lung's martial arts novels. I think The Magic Blade is the finest of these films, but Clan of Amazons, while not nearly as entertaining as The Magic Blade, is still a decent piece of martial arts cinema sure to entertain.

The film's plot revolves around a martial artist's quest to catch a mysterious thief who robs his wealthy victims and then blinds them with embroidering needles. His trail leads to a mysterious clan of female martial artists known for their embroidery. As with nearly any film with a Ku Lung book as it's source material, the film can appear almost nonsensical to Westerners, with numerous difficult to keep track of characters, wild, eye catching sword play and a plot that twists and turns as much as a walking catfish.

Therein, however, lies what I believe is the charm of these movies and what makes them entertaining in the first place. Chor's direction is masterful and, as usual with one of his films, the cinematography is gorgeous and shows off the Shaw Brothers sets, then the finest in the whole Hong Kong film industry, very nicely. The cast is top notch too, with Anthony Lau playing the main character and quite a few other recognizable faces as well, including Ching Li (who is in almost all of Chor's Ku Lung adaptations), the lovely Shih Szu, the well known and prolific Yueh Hua, scumbag actor Chan Shen, the matronly Ha Ping, future Lau Kar Leung-collaborator (and girlfriend) Kara Hui and many others. As I've said before, if there's one thing that makes Chor Yuen's films very different from Chang Cheh's, aside from his films' more lyrical and lush quality vs. Chang's harder edged, grittier work, it's his use of female characters. In Chang's films, the females just stand and watch while the men fight whereas in Chor's films, the women play quite a large role in the plot of his films. Nowhere is it more evident than in Clan of Amazons.

Last and also least is Shanghai 13, which while fairly entertaining, is a real mess of a film, saved only by it's incredible cast, one of the finest assembled in any Hong Kong action film. The plot makes absolutely zero sense to me as I watched it on a crappy panned and scanned DVD with cut off subtitles, so onto to the technicals. The film is directed by Chang Cheh and for a film directed by the fellow who had redefined the Chinese martial arts film and given a new meaning to cinematic violence in the Hong Kong film industry, it's highly disappointing. The production values, especially when compared to Chang's sprawling Shaw Brothers epics like Marco Polo, Boxer Rebellion and 7 Man Army, are absolutely zero. It looks like a really cheap Taiwanese production (which it probably was), though it does have it's moments of Changian bloodshed, which, if not for the film's stellar cast, would be the film's only saving grace.

The film's real charm is in it's cast. The film, literally, stars almost everybody, a veritable who's who of 70s Hong Kong grindhouse cinema, including many of Chang's entourage and is one of the few, if not the only, films to see some of Chang's original actors on screen with members of the Venoms. The film features everybody from Jimmy Wang Yu (The One Armed Swordsman), David Chiang and Ti Lung (The Heroic Ones), Chen Kuan Tai (The Boxer From Shantung), Chiang Sheng and Lu Feng (The Five Venoms), Chi Kuan Chun (Boxer Rebellion) and Danny Lee. If Alexander Fu Sheng had been alive when this film was made, he'd likely have been in it too. The film also stars Andy Lau, who one day would appear in such films as Infernal Affairs and House of Flying Daggers. Most of the actors only appear briefly, though, but seeing all these actors in one film is quite an experience. It's really the only thing making this otherwise rather depressingly cheap film worth seeing.

For more Shaw Brothers related fun (or in the case of Lost Souls, agony), check out and Lost Souls and Haunted Tales on YouTube!

A YouTube Gift From Me To You

2006-10-31T11:48:00.000-05:00

I put all of the 114 minute Japanese version of Prophecies of Nostradamus up on YouTube. It's incredibly rare and now everybody can see it.

Look for T.F. Mou's Lost Souls on YouTube soon as well.

J-Horror Top 10

2006-10-21T10:53:00.001-04:00

In honor of the month of October, here are my top 10 horror films from Japan. Watching these 10 films is absolutely mandatory, not just for Asian horror fans but really horror fans in general. Also, yes, yes, I know, where the fuck is Ringu? Great, by far one of the better new wave J-horror films, but too overexposed. Juon? Not a big fan. Why doesn't this include horror films from other Asian countries? Haven't seen enough of those to make a top 10 list. So without further adeau, I present what I personally are the 10 greatest horror films to come out of Japan, not objectively, but more based on my personal taste.

10. Evil Dead Trap (1988)
Evil Dead Trap is an absolutely top notch 80s J-horror film. The film, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, is heavily influenced by such Italian masters as Argento and Fulci and really shows it in it's nicely slick style. The music even, as Michael Weldon of Psychotronic once noted, sounds like Goblin. From the absolutely wince inducing snuff film opening to the creepy shock ending, Evil Dead Trap is one of those kind of films that never lets up in it's intensity and insanity. The whole action ark takes place in an abandoned military base which makes for a nice, eerie backdrop for the gruesome killings and general weirdness that soon follows. Highly recommended for those with a strong stomach.

9. House (1977)
Where does one even begin when writing about Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 horror cult masterpiece? According to the wonderful source of information that is Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion, all Obayashi was asked to do was make a horror film that would sell well with youth. Obayashi did do that, but he did so much more, using every avant garde cinematic technique you could think of to create what resembles a horror themed music video 10 times better than Michael Jackson's Thriller. This is no doubt the strangest thing ever to greenlit by Tomoyuki Tanaka himself and boasts an insane, completely erratic feel and numerous absolutely arresting visuals.

8. Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)
Now, thanks to Quentin Tarantino, this is best known as "that movie where the blood red sky in Kill Bill came from" but is still sadly unreleased on R1 DVD and underappreciated in the West. I first saw this film when I was the tender age of 11 and it scared the ever living fuck out of me. Basically an apocalyptic sci-fi/horror hybrid and modern day vampire tale heavily influenced, stylistically, by the films of Mario Bava but also boasting a very unique "Japaneseness" with a heavy anti-war element and surprisingly gorgeous cinematography. It's a pretty depressing, unsettling movie in actuality. Particularly unsettling is the film's somewhat infamous "possession" sequence, in which a blue alien blob enters the skull of the film's main villian, a white suited terrorist, through a vagina shaped gash in his forehead. That, my friend, is cinema!

7. Wicked City (1987)
The only anime film on this list, this is no doubt one of the roughest, coolest horror-themed anime around and one of all time favorites in the genre. Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri from a novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi (Vampire Hunter D), Wicked City is a surpremely badass film with everything you could ever hope for, from spider women with snapping sharp tooth vaginas, grisly demonic transformations and loads of sex and violence, bringing the film up to easy NC-17 terrority. Fuck anybody who calls this a hentai, however, as the graphic sex in this film is hardly the main attraction. Kawajiri would later give us the almost equally good Ninja Scroll, another anime work that nicely mingles the worlds of sex, violence and the supernatural.

6. Jigoku (1960)
Jigoku (or Hell) is an absolutely fucking incredible film from Japanese horror master Nobuo Nakagawa, the man who, prior to this, gave us Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (or Ghost of Yotsuya) his own unique, Hitchcockian vision of the famous Japanese Yotsuya Kaidan legend. For this film, Nakagawa goes way further, taking us into, where else, but the depths of Hell itself. After an amazing intro, the film actually plays it pretty subtle for it's first half, with everything simply playing out as a drama. However, no sooner does it start to get boring than does, literally, all Hell break loose as the main characters are all mercilessly sent down into the infernal depths of Hades, where they, for the next thirty minutes, wander around eerily lit landscapes and breathtaking sets that would have made Mario Bava jealous and are subjected to various grisly tortures that predated H.G. Lewis' Blood Feast by three years.

5. Chushingura Gaiden Yotsuya Kaidan (1994)
Speaking of the Yotsuya Kaidan legend, here's our next selection, one of the later films of Kinji Fukasaku, one of the greatest directorial geniuses to come out of Japan. Fukasaku was no stranger to Japanese literature, having adapted the Chushingura (47 Ronin) legend in 1978 as The Fall of Ako Castle and the Satomi Hakkenden legend twice as Message From Space and Legend of the Eight Samurai. For this film, not only was he taking another shot at Chushingura, but he also combined it with the Yotsuya Kaidan story, an idea he had wanted to do back in 1978, making Iuemon, the main character of Yotsuya Kaidan, one of the loyal 47 retainers. From the film's almost Kubrick-like use of Wagner's O Fortuna to sharp editing and fine direction, the film is, as usual with Fukasaku, one of the finest, most entertaining examples of it's genre.

4. Audition (2000)
No doubt the best film the otherwise rather overrated Takashi Miike has made and likely ever will make. What starts out as a simple, almost dull drama gets creepier and creepier, until, in the last, grotesque, hyper disturbing, sadomasochistic reel, the film gives you what is the cinematic equvalent to a drop kick in the nuts. Whether it's more of a fucked up drama and less of a horror film I'm not sure, but that does not change the fact it is likely the scariest thing to come out of Japan, making Ringu and Juon look like The Adventures of Milo and Otis and it's easily twice as gnarly as Hostel.

3. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988)
Tetsuo is the breakout film of Japanese cyberpunk director Shinya Tsukamoto and is, to me, quite frankly a fucking incredible piece of experimental cinema, like Kafka's The Metamorphosis on crack. It's also far more a horror film than sci-fi, as there is no real scientific explanation for the goings on. The film's got loads of gnarly gore, nightmarish imagery a plenty, a superb use of pixelation animation, a thundering metal score by Chu Ishikawa and yes, the film's infamous "power drill penis" sequence which you really have to see to believe. The B&W 16mm cinematography, interestingly enough, is surprisingly beautiful and the whole film is quite insanely entertaining.

2. Matango (1963)
In terms of my favorite classic Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya film, I frequently go back and forth between Gojira (Godzilla) and this film, once best known as Attack of the Mushroom People, which I could best describe to anyone unfamiliar with it as a Japanese Gilligan's Island on shrooms. That said, it's a lot deeper than that, if Gojira was Honda's own warning against atomic weapons, this is Honda's own warning against the dehumanizing effects of narcotics and it's hell of a lot more scary and effective (not to mention far more entertaing) than say, Reefer Madness. It's got some of the best production design and cinematography around in a Toho flick and was as some of Tsuburaya's best, most subtle FX work and film's titular "mushroom people" are some of the creepiest monsters to come out of Toho's FX workshops. It also features some of the best performances of such veterans as Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno, Yoshio Tsuchiya and company.

1. Onibaba (1964)
Onibaba is an absolutely amazing piece of cinema, a genuinely fucking scary film with vague but very much present horror elements. It's a stunning work of art directed by the ingenius Kaneto Shindo with absolutely amazing B&W cinematography and is a gritty, stark, highly sexual film boasting with some of the eeriest, loveliest monochromatic images you will see in a film from the terrifying visage of the film's hanya mask to the corpse filled hole to the swaying reeds that look almost unreal. It's a truly arresting piece of cinema and totally deserves it's number one spot. Kaneto Shindo's next foray into period horror: Kuroneko, well not quite as powerful, would be nearly as good.

Show Airtimes

2006-10-11T23:59:00.002-04:00

Well, Cinematic Damnation: The Show finally made it's triumphant premiere tonight, a week later than I intended, but it still aired. The film it aired was Haunted Tales, the 1980 Shaw Brothers production featuring two short horror films spliced together into a feature length production, one a eerie haunted house piece by Chor Yuen (Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, Killer Clans), the other an exploitation flick by Mou Tun Fei (T.F. Mou), the director of such fine fare as Lost Souls and Men Behind the Sun.

In the meantime, here's the full list of episodes that will be airing for the rest of the year. The show airs at 10 PM every Wednesday night on PACTV channel 13.

October (Asian Horror Film Month)
10/11/2006- Haunted Tales (1980)
Directed by Chor Yuen and Mou Tun Fei. In Cantonese with English and Chinese subtitles.
10/18/2006- Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa. In Japanese with English subtitles.
10/25/2006- The Killer Snakes (1974)
Directed by Kuei Chih Hung. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
11/01/2006- House (1977)
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. In raw Japanese.

November (Shaw Martial Arts Movie Month Vol. 1)
11/08/2006- The Chinese Boxer (1970)
Directed by Jimmy Wang Yu. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
11/15/2006- The Magic Blade (1976)
Directed by Chor Yuen. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
11/22/2006- The Boxer From Shantung (1972) [Part One]
Directed by Chang Cheh. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
11/29/2006- The Boxer From Shantung (1972) [Part Two]
Directed by Chang Cheh. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

December (Kinji Fukasaku Month Vol. 1)
12/06/2006- Battle Royale (2000)
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. In Japanese with English subtitles.
12/13/2006- Black Lizard (1968)
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. In Japanese with English subtitles.
12/20/2006- Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983) [Part One]
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Dubbed in English.
12/27/2006- Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983) [Part Two]
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Dubbed in English.

With the exception of Legend of the Eight Samurai, which will be from a fullscreen and dubbed public domain print as I'm too much of a sissy to use Adness' DVD as a source video, everything will be letterboxed!

Black Magic

2006-10-05T16:48:00.000-04:00

Went to the theater to see Fearless the other day. No time for a full review, but it was a great movie. I find it hard to believe that Ronny Yu could give us filth like Freddy vs. Jason and then three years later make a beautiful, touching film like this one. I swear, between him and John Woo, Chinese filmmakers seem to just make much better films when in their more familiar surroundings. Jet Li was awesome (though okay, I confess I've only seen him in this and Hero, I spend too much time watching HK films from the "golden age" of the 70s and not enough time watching current ones) and the action was expertly coreographed. The scene where Li takes on the American boxer even gave me some Boxer From Shantung flashbacks. Definitely get your ass out and see this film before it leaves theaters.

In other news, I finally gave my Black Magic DVD from Image Entertainment that has been sitting around unwatched for almost a month now a viddy yesterday.

Black Magic is directed by Ho Meng Hua, who gave and would give us such masterpieces as The Lady Hermit, The Kiss of Death, The Flying Guillotine, Oily Maniac and The Mighty Peking Man. His films generally all have one thing in common: they are a load of fucking fun to watch. The Lady Hermit is one of the most fun Shaw Brothers wuxia films around. The Kiss of Death, while quite tasteless, is one of the most fun SB exploitation flicks and don't even get me started on how much fun The Mighty Peking Man is, especially compared to Dino DeLaurentiis' big bore that was the '76 King Kong. Black Magic is no expection, it's probably one of the most insane, tasteless, lurid and just plain fun horror flicks to come of the Shaw Brothers Studios, with a great cast, including Chang Cheh staple actor Ti Lung, the badass Ku Feng, the sexy Tanny Tien Ni, the cute as a button Lily Li, the late, great Lo Lieh and even cameos by Chen Ping and Yueh Hua. The plot revolves around a woman (Tanny Tien Ni) who is in love with a man (Ti Lung) who is already engaged to another girl (Lily Li). The jealous Tanny consults a black magician (Ku Feng) and gets him to cast a love spell for her and soon Ti Lung is head over heals for Tanny, but then Tanny decides to get Feng to cast a death spell on Lily.

The direction by Ho really has that nice Shaw Brothers feel we all know and love, with many ragged pans and whip zooms. The soundtrack is also one of the catchier ones in a Shaw Brothers flick and I really wish someone would make a CD of all the stock music used by the Shaw Brothers. The film is a fairly sleazy, with loads of T&A and lots of lurid gore, but it's all staged in a silly manner as to make it all quite fun. The ending of the film, in particular, is a hoot, in which Ku Feng's black magician and another white magician battle in a spectacular display of optical rays. Overall, is Black Magic a great piece of cinema? Likely not. Is it a fun movie worth watching when bored on a Sunday night? You betcha!

The DVD itself is pretty much the same product as the R3, except repackaged on Region 1. It has a few advantages, however. First off, the audio is remixed in 5.1, wheras on the R3 it's only in mono. Second, the subtitles are more accurate and are more devoid of gramatical errors. The video, however, looks very similar to that of the R3, in fact, it might have more compression on it, making it slightly inferior.

I'm gonna do a DVD Beaver thang and compare some shots of the R1 (top) with the R3 (bottom), to fully make up my mind.

All in all, they look very, very similar, though the R3 has a little more grain on it in spots and the R1 has had some of it removed and looks softer. The R1, however, has better contrast. All in all, Black Magic is definitely worth a buy.

Inframan on DVD!

2006-10-03T21:04:00.000-04:00

Just a friendly reminder to pick up Image's new release of The Super Inframan, perhaps one of the most wildly fun and just plain cool movies around, essentially the Godzilla: Final Wars of the 70s. It's so fucking fun even Leonard Maltin couldn't dismiss this one, but enough about the worst thing ever to happen to film reviewing and more about Inframan. Viewing the film on Prism's crappy VHS as a young lad was a religious experiance for me. I won't be holding this in my hand until, tragically, the beginning of next month as I preordered it with the new DVD of Cannibal Ferox, but I'm hoping it has Peter "Speed Racer" Fernandez's truly nostaligic dub on it and not a shitty Hong Kong recorded dub like most of the Shaw Brothers films have and most of the Godzilla films now unfortunately have. Does anybody have it and know?

Wicked City

2006-10-03T00:33:00.001-04:00

It's been a while since I've watched a good anime. I used to be a huge (quite literally), raging otaku, who spent hours on end watching Love Hina, eating ding dongs and watching my waistline grow. Recently I decided to take a walk down ol' memory lane and I ordered the Japanese R2 for Wicked City. I have a funny story to tell you about this one. When I was 13-15, while the other kids were experimenting with drugs and sex, I was tracking down many films (then on VHS) highly inappopriate for my age. Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Evil Dead Trap, Guinea Pig 2, The Street Fighter and Nakagawa's Jigoku all had something in common. They were all Japanese films in my collection that shouldn't have been. I also was starting to get into anime and tracked down a bunch of anime that I probably shouldn't have watched so young. Wicked City was one of them and just when the opening scene, in which Taki, the main character, fucks a demon women and almost gets castrated by her toothy, snapping vagina, was playing, Mum walked down stairs and saw it all. The tape, of course, was confiscated, though I snuck up and stole it back later.

Wicked City is directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, called the Michael Bay of anime by some. I disagree with that analogy, as while they both do favor style over substance, Bay's shit is just painful to watch, wheras Kawajiri's early work, from this to Demon City Shinjuku to Ninja Scroll is loads of insane fun. To me, he's more the Brian DePalma of anime, in that he made loads of stylish, highly entertaining works. Sadly, however, like DePalma, he sold out after Ninja Scroll with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, which, while looking easily 10 times better than it's 1985 prequel, isn't even close to as much fun as the original Vampire Hunter D. It also pales in comparison to Wicked City, which to me, is possibly Kawajiri's masterpiece.

People sometimes label Wicked City as a hentai. That just pisses me off, as, while it is likely NC-17 level, the sex, while still quite there and figuring heavily into the plot, does not dominate the film. Like Ninja Scroll, it's an action flick primarily, though yes, like Urotsukidoji and LA Blue Girl, it does mix eroticism and the supernatural, only it's about 10 times better than those awful films. The animation is pretty fucking cool, with lots of seizure-like flashing and really cool demonic morphing (often compared to the morphing scenes in John Carpenter's The Thing). I really dig Kawajiri's animation style, which tends to feature characters with much smaller eyes than most other anime, though sadly he dispensed with that with the X TV series and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. What really sets anime apart from US animation is how innovative it is. Wicked City is no exception. It features nearly as many camera movements as a live action film, which is amazing when you consider how difficult it is to animate that sort of thing. Wicked City, all in all, is not just an anime film, it's a really awesome piece of badass cinema. The film would be remade in live action in Hong Kong by Tsui Hark years later, plus sadly, like Akira, Evangelion and others, the film is also getting US live action remake status. Just as The End of Evangelion scene where Shinji violence jacks off over Asuka's catatonic body will likely be cut from Evangelion: The Live Action Movie provided they are even able to raise enough money to make it, I don't think the snapping-vagina-with-teeth sequence will be in Wicked City Live Action, either.