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9 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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One night last week Shapiro Keats came home late to find me curled up on the couch, the living room lights blazing, clutching the cat like a feline shield. “Did you watch a scary movie?” He sighed.
Yes, yes I did. And I fully admit that Filipino horror movie The Maid probably wouldn’t have been half as scary if I had watched it, say, in the day time, when there was someone else in the house.
Rosa is a cute 18-year-old Filipino girl who arrives in Singapore to work as a maid for a Chinese family living there. Her employers are a retired Peking opera star and his wife. They seem like pretty cool people, except- oops!- they forgot to mention they have a mentally challenged adult son. But Ah Soon is a good guy, a grown man who acts like a toddler (a lot like my son, actually). Rosa doesn’t actually seem to do much work; she spends most of her time peeking into dark closets and opening and closing creaky doors. She finds a mysterious bag of clothes stuck under her bed, and does the only logical thing; she starts wearing them.
Rosa has had the bad luck to start work during the Chinese seventh month, when the gate to the afterlife is supposedly open. Her employers spend lots of time placating the ancestors by burning money and leaving food in front of the house. Her mistress even flips her shit when Rosa goes to the mailbox by herself; the ‘hungry ghost man’ is everywhere, just looking for some cute girl to terrorize. But Rosa doesn’t know all the superstitions: at an opera performance she sits in a seat reserved for the ancestors, and she nearly sweeps up a pile of ash from a burned offering. This pisses off the ancestors to no end, apparently, because immediately she starts seeing ghosts, all the usual Asian kinds- little kids, long-haired women, dead peeps in various stages of decomposition. But it’s cool, her mistress assures her. Once the seventh month is over, the ghosts will split and leave Rosa alone.
Then Ah Soon eats some of the food left out for the ancestors, and he starts seeing ghosts too. Rosa gets more and more freaked out, until it doesn’t look like she can wait until the end of the month to get rid of the dead people. Of course there’s a reason why Rosa’s employers are so hell-bent on keeping the ghosts at bay. Rosa’s not their first maid, after all. Esther ran off with some guy…or maybe she didn’t.
The plot of The Maid is pretty straightforward, and, in the end, predictable, except for one nice little twist that took me by surprise (but I tend to be rather dense about these things, too; Shapiro Keats would have figured it out in five minutes).
Most of the scares in The Maid are shock effects; quick cuts that flash a ghostly face at you, accompanied by a sudden burst of background music. None of the ghosts seems particularly menacing, besides being, well, ghosts; a dead child deliberately scares Rosa, but the ones who occupy the empty row at the opera house just wave cheerfully at her. There are hands popping out of laundry piles, ghosts showing up in the reflection in a cabinet door, translucent figures floating past doorways. There are nicely creepy dream/vision sequences, as when Rosa follows a trail of blood through a deserted apartment complex. In another, a Filipino girl Rosa has befriended is struck instantly mad when she is hit by the shadow of a coffin as a hearse passes by.
The dialogue is conducted in Cantonese and English. Alessandra de Rossi , who plays Rosa, speaks perfectly fine English, but the Asian actors are harder to understand, and there are no subtitles. I had to go back a couple times and listen to a couple conversations twice to figure it all out. The acting is decent; Benny Soh as Ah Soon is endearing if occasionally annoying. de Rossi is a little wooden, but it may simply be because English isn’t her first language.
One of the irritating things about The Maid is that the sound levels are uneven. I had to turn it up several times to hear the dialogue, and down when the music was overwhelming. Since I watched it on the Netflix Instant Stream and not a DVD, this is a problem with the sound mixing.
The Verdict: Watch it alone, and it will freak your shit out. Even if you watch it during the day, it’s interesting to learn the various superstitions associated with the Chinese seventh month.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: horror, Movie, phlippines, review, the maid |
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8 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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I know what you guys have been thinking. “She’s already on Day 8, but she hasn’t reviewed a single kung fu movie? WTF?”. Well, here it is, in all its spoiler-ific glory.
8 Masters opens with a fight, as all good kung fu movies do. As credits fill the screen, two men meet for a duel. One of them asks for a temporary reprieve of three months, as he is sick. The other refuses and they fight. The sick guy, unsurprisingly, kicks the bucket just as the credits end.
In the next scene, a man shows up to his sister-in-law’s house with the news that her husband is dead, poisoned by the 8 Masters, a group of fighters who are pissed about being defeated by him. The uncle takes his dead brother’s son to a Shaolin monastery where he will be safe from the 8 Masters, but dies as soon as they get there. He makes young Chu Sao Chieh promise that after he grows up, he will leave the monastery and find his mother and his uncle’s daughter and take care of them.
Of course, it’s a Shaolin monastery, so next we’re treated to a bunch of scenes of the kid learning kung fu from the monks, including a scene that is apparently not related to anything, where a bunch of ninjas attack the monastery and get their asses kicked. After a while the kid wanders off screen, and when he comes back into camera range he has turned into a fully-grown, perpetually pissed-off looking Carter Wong.
Chieh wants to hang in the monastery and become a monk, but the abbot kicks him out with a long speech about repaying debts and remembering three principles: keep the peace, have patience, and forgive offense. Then he throws Chieh into a kung fu test that everyone has to pass in order to leave the monastery. Chieh has to fight his way through some Indiana Jones shit, like bridges swaying over huge wooden spikes, and then he has to fight a bunch of dudes painted gold and silver (this is apparently a reference to another film collaboration between Kuo and Wong), and then he has to move a really hot, heavy pot of fire. After that he is finally permitted to leave the monastery (which he didn’t actually want to leave in the first place) to find his mom and cousin.
As soon as he stops for lunch, he gets involved in a fight in a restaurant. A gang of ruffians is trying to make off with a woman, despite the protests of her husband, and Chieh steps in to keep the peace by kicking some ass (the proliferation of items like giant buckets of alcohol and bags of flour make for an incongruously comedic fight). Chieh continues on to his old home, where he finds his now-blind mother and his cousin, Ming Chu. It’s a happy family reunion until the 8 Masters show up. Even 18 years (or 10 years- there’s some disagreement on the time) after they killed his dad, the 8 Masters are still nursing a grudge. They want Chieh to fight them, but he refuses, remembering the last principle the abbot gave him. But the 8 Masters won’t take no for an answer, so Chieh ends up fleeing to the country with his mom and cousin to avoid them. When they hunt him down there, he takes his family to a cave. The 8 Masters and their minions continually beat him silly, but he won’t fight back. The 8 Masters are still intent on fighting him, so they eventually wise up and do what they should have done in the first place: kidnap his old blind mother and hold her hostage until he accepts the challenge.
Meanwhile, Ming Chu is meeting with some old guy in a conical hat that hides his face, who tells her she has to kill Chieh. When Chieh stumbles on a meeting, she confesses she’s not really his cousin, but some orphan that was passed off as the real Ming Chu 18 (or 10) years ago. The real Ming Chu is missing. The fake one was ordered by the mysterious hat guy to watch Chieh and kill him when she was told. But she can’t kill Chieh because he’s too hot and she’s fallen in love with him.
Chieh concocts a plan to sneak into the 8 Masters’ hangout (apparently they all live together) and rescue his mother. But it doesn’t go as planned, the 8 Masters catch them, and Chieh receives yet another ass-whooping courtesy of the 8 Masters. His hysterical mother decides to kill herself because she thinks that will somehow save her son. Conveniently, her suicide is the thing Chieh needs to get pissed enough to fight the 8 Masters.
Despite the fact that all the 8 Masters live in the same house, they somehow manage to teleport or something all over the damn place, so Chieh has to hop on a horse and fight each one in a different area, like by a rushing waterfall or in a field or a courtyard. Master Fight # 5 is where things start to get really fucking weird. Master # 5 has a weapon with an aluminum fist on one end and a nunchuck on the other. Chieh starts out fighting Master #6 in his courtyard, but then they leap out of the shot and suddenly they’re fighting in a forest, unless Master #6’s garden just seriously needed some attention. Master #7 is a woman who tells Chieh that his dad killed her dad, even though her dad was sick…bazinga! Chieh’s dad is the douchebag from the first scene! No wonder people wanted to poison him, if he was such a dick. Chieh feels bad about it, but I guess after you hand out 7 kung fu beatings you might as well go for #8 while you’re at it.
Master #8 is…surprise! The mysterious old dude in the conical hat, who is revealed to also be the same man whose wife was getting harassed in the restaurant. They fight a bit, then the mysterious hat man disappears into his house. Chieh follows and finds himself in some kind of screwed-up Chinese haunted house walkthrough. First he is attacked by four hopping Chinese vampires with knives for hands. Then has to fight four more vampires who have hands, but are holding knives in them. Then he has to fight mysterious hat man while darts and spears fly out of the walls at them. Finally he wins, but since he doesn’t want to kill hat man, hat man kills himself with his own kung fu. But not before revealing that Chieh’s real cousin, Ming Chu, is actually Master #7, who was told that Chieh’s dad killed her dad for some reason. So Chieh goes back to inform her of their kinship, but oh no! He’s been hit by one of the poison-tipped darts that were flying out of the walls. The real Ming Chu goes into the forest to find some random old healer woman, who explains everything we already know about the real and fake Ming Chus, and gives her medicine for Chieh.
Then it cuts to the next scene, and in the space of that split-second edit, Chieh apparently got better and went back to the monastery to become a monk, to the dismay of the fake Ming Chu. The last scene shows her wailing on the steps of the monastery as Chieh turns his back on her and goes inside.
It’s a feel-good movie.
Yeah, I just ruined the plot for you, but seriously: the plot is the least-important part of a kung fu movie.
I was excited to see 8 Masters after I realized it was directed by Joseph Kuo, who directed what is probably my favorite kung fu film of all time, 7 Grand Masters. But 8 Masters, despite the addition of an extra master, isn’t quite as good. The story is ridiculous and chock-full of holes, which usuall wouldn’t matter, but where 7 Grand Masters’ story was engineered to create 90 minutes of wall-to-wall combat, 8 Masters crams in a forced romance and a bunch of histrionics concerning Chieh’s mother. It’s tedious to get through all the yapping before you can see some fighting (which is what we’re really here for, after all). Besides, Chieh spends a good portion of the movie refusing to fight.
The fighting itself is excellent, at least on Carter Wong’s part. He has an intense style that is accentuated by his perpetual scowl, and he’s smooth and incredibly fast. His opponents aren’t quite as good, a couple of the so-called ‘masters’ don’t even present much of a challenge. Overall, though, the action is well-done, if not as pervasive as one could hope.
The acting is…well, who gives a shit? The English sub is actually pretty good; the mouths don’t match up to the voices, of course, but at least the actors don’t sound bored or attempt preposterous accents. They even sound like they care sometimes.
Is it worth an evening of your time (or an afternoon, if you are among the unemployed)? Well, yeah. Carter Wong alone makes this movie worth watching, and the crazy story is entertaining as Hell.
The Verdict: Watch it as a double feature with 7 Grand Masters, and it will be a perfect evening. Don’t forget the vodka and a friend who can MST3K it with you.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: 8 masters, carter wong, kung fu movie, review |
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28 Jul
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Posted by Mazinga
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Project A-ko is one of the most unusual anime offerings of all time. Originally conceived as an episode of the hentai series Cream Lemon, it changed direction during production into a comedy that riffs on any number of anime conventions in general – giant robots, questing aliens, and schoolgirl heroines – and lampoons a number of specific titles to boot.
This classic 1986 anime movie is now available on a special Collector’s Edition DVD from Central Park Media that’s positively laden with extra features sure to please the most discerning otaku.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: Anime |
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27 Jul
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Posted by Mazinga
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We don’t often get an opportunity to compare the US and Asian releases of a Hong Kong flick, but fortunately, we were able to snag an import copy of the all-region Tai Seng DVD of Johnny To’s 1993 The Heroic Trio before it went out of print (and before Miramax acquired the US rights to the film, rendering import purchases taboo). This female superhero tale has long been a favorite Hong Kong flick. Recently, we sized it up against a copy of the DVD Miramax released in the United States.
In a sad coincidence, we were preparing this review just as news reached us of the death of the film’s star, Anita Mui. Her untimely death from cervical cancer at the young age of 40 deprived fans in Hong Kong and around the world of a popular singer and talented actress.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews, Uncategorized | Tag: Anita Mui, film, Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung, martial arts, michelle yeoh |
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23 Jun
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Posted by Mazinga
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Editor’s Note: This entry completes our trio of retro reviews, but we hope to have a brand new one of The Host coming your way soon. – Mazinga
The way of the Yakuza is to wear red clothes or white.
Avant-garde Japanese director Seijun Suzuki has earned a reputation for injecting his trademark unconventional style into even the genre films he did for studios in his early career. One notable example is Kanto Wanderer (Kanto mushuku), a ninkyo eiga, or chivalry film, Seijin helmed for the Nikkatsu studio in 1963.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: film, japan, yakuza |
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23 Jun
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Posted by Musashi
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Few directors boast a resume as varied and long as the late Kinji Fukusaku. Known primarily in the U.S. for one of his last films, Battle Royale (2000), Fukusaku helmed over sixty films during his 42-year career. Among them are a fair amount of yakuza films; Fukusaku is remembered primarily as a staunch anti-authoritarian, and many of his films display a man clearly at odds with society.
Released in 1968 (the same year that Fukusaku helmed both the sci-fi cult classic The Green Slime and the Yukio Mishima-penned Black Lizard), Blackmail Is My Life is a very idiosyncratic piece showing Fukusaku at his most energetic, and most creative. While Blackmail Is My Life starts off in a very light-hearted manner (it reminds one of such Mod classics as Alfie, with the protagonists’ running inner dialogue) it soon reveals itself to be a tense, gripping crime flick that quickly escalates to a violent, satisfying conclusion.
| Category: Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: film, japan, yakuza |
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23 Jun
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Posted by Musashi
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Editor’s note: Since Musashi brought it up, we’re reposting reviews from our previous incarnation, Destroy All Monsters, of a couple of the flicks he mentioned. We’re kicking things off with Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower. — Mazinga
‘Nihilism’ is a word that comes up a lot with regards to Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower…fittingly so. The vast majority of yakuza film play to their audiences by providing their protagonists with relatively noble aspirations and motivations. Shinoda’s anti-hero Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) is disturbingly free of these notions. When, at the beginning of the film, Muraki describes the killing which sent him to prison for three years, he comments “What was so wrong about killing one of these stupid animals?” That’s a disdain for human life that’s rare in a Japanese protagonist. His motivations aren’t even fueled by any sort of righteous indignation; rather, he kills out of boredom.
So when, freshly out of prison, Muraki meets a young woman named Saeko (Mariko Kaga) whose thrill-junkie nature spurs her to greater and greater degrees of excess, it’s only natural that he sees a kindred spirit. Of course, when they begin feeding off each other’s nature, the real question is: who’s pushing who?
| Category: Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: film, japan, yakuza |
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19 May
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Posted by Mazinga
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Sometimes a movie is a lot like popcorn – light, fluffy, and not very filling, but tasty enough to be enjoyable. The 1999 Hong Kong action flick Gen-X Cops is one such film. While by no means a cinematic masterpiece, it provides plenty of attitude and action.
As might be expected from a film produced by Jackie Chan, Gen-X Cops combines action, thrills and comedy in a somewhat incoherent but still entertaining package. The film’s titular cops square off against a new breed of young Hong Kong gangsters in league with the Japanese mob, and a flurry of kung-fu and gunplay ensues.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: film, Hong Kong, martial arts, Triads |
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19 Mar
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Posted by Mazinga
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Long-time readers will remember (and given the appalling scarcity of my reviews recently, only long-time readers are likely to remember anything of mine) my appreciation for both exploitation flicks and cheapo DVDs – preferably together. Happily, I recently obtained a couple of DVDs for less than $4 each. One, which I plan to review presently, is the awesome 1980s Chuck Norris ninja movie The Octagon. The other is 2008’s Ninja Cheerleaders, likely the most high-concept movie since Snakes on a Plane. (But amazingly, the concept isn’t entirely original; Cheerleader Ninjas got there first in 2002.)
A high-concept movie is one that can be summed up in a simple phrase, perhaps even in its title, and Ninja Cheerleaders fits the bill. Though far from a good movie, this action comedy, written and directed by David Presley, just manages to strike a pleasing chord with its unlikely assemblage of exploitation film elements, an appealing cast and gratuitous nudity. It’s sort of a low-rent version of the Charlie’s Angels movie.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Events, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: film, hollywood, martial arts, ninja |
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14 Dec
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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[rating:2]
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Every major city has its own collection of unique urban legends; often these myths involve the city’s rarely-seen nether regions. Alligators and giant rats inhabit New York’s sewers; cults meet in the catacombs of Rome and Paris. And in Tokyo’s labyrinthine subway system, ghosts cross the border between our world and the next. All the linked short stories in Dark Metro are focused around the Tokyo subway and its dead residents, and are connected by the presence of the mysterious character Seiya.
The first story involves a young actress who notices her co-star hasn’t come to work in days. A late-night rush to catch the last subway train reveals why: her fellow has killed herself by jumping in front of a train (a popular method of suicide in Japan) because she thinks the actress stole a lead role from her. Now she’s out for revenge in an eerily deserted subway station, and only quick intervention from Seiya saves her life.
The second tale explores a dark facet of teen life in Japan. A teen boy meets up with two acquaintances who invite him to an exclusive club. Unknown to him, his pals run a side ‘business’ where they introduce teenage girls to older men- in short, they’re pimps. And one of their ‘clients’ was murdered by the man to whom they introduced her. The club turns out to be located in a room beneath a subway station…and once again only a warning from Seiya saves the innocent boy’s life. Story three introduces a newbie subway driver who laughs at his co-workers’ tales of ghost haunting the tunnels, until, of course, an encounter convinces him drastically otherwise.
The final tale in volume one concerns a teen girl whose life was saved when a mysterious man rescued her from a burning subway car. When she thinks she glimpses him in a subway station, the hunt is on to find out who he is.
Volume two gets ever-so-slightly weirder. A maid café employee goes missing, and three of her regular customers go to find her…in a video game. After that comes a touching story with an unsettling ending. A young amusement park worker finds the mother of a lost child, and soon wishes she hadn’t. Only the power of love can calm the spirits of children killed in anger.
The volume’s final story is about the link between all the tales: Seiya, who saves the living again and again from the wrath of the dead. Volume two also contains a collection of goofy four-panel comics involving the characters.
Horror often works best in a short-story format, since it’s difficult to sustain an atmosphere of dread over a longer work. But this also presents horror writers with a unique challenge: in a relatively short period of time, they have to engage the reader and make them believe what is happening. This can be done with a unique storyline, or with extensive development that makes the reader actually care what happens to these people. While Dark Metro has an interesting concept, it’s hardly unique and the stories are so short there’s really no place to develop the characters. Most of the intended victims are shallow and stereotypical. Even Seiya, the only recurring character, is the usual sort of bishonen with a sad, sad past (and when his tragic past is revealed, it’s so overwrought as to be unintentionally funny).We’ve met all these people before, and they’re still no interesting, even in the subway.
Dark Metro has some nicely creepy moments. It tales a well-worn premise- ghosts seeking vengeance on the living- and lands it in an interesting setting that has plenty of shivery atmosphere on its own. Some of the stories are engaging: the train driver driven to madness by an apparition, the abused boy seeking a friend. But on the whole Dark Metro is neither creepy nor interesting.
The artwork of Dark Metro is likewise pretty average, though Yoshiken excels at drawing decaying corpses and some of them are truly gross.
Tokyopop gives Dark Metro the standard presentation; the cover of volume one shows the actress in a dark subway tunnel, while volume two shows the maid café employee, apparently in the exact same subway tunnel. Unusually, volume one features a short excerpt from another manga series, Doors of Chaos.
If you’re really bored, the first couple volumes of Dark Metro aren’t a bad way to waste an hour. But true fans of horror manga won’t find anything here to impress
Details
Publisher: Tokyopop
Author: Tokyo Calen
Pages: 192
Format: manga
MSRP: $9.99
Date of Publication: 02/12/2008
| Category: Film Reviews, Print Reviews | Tag: dark metro, horror, japan, manga, subway, tokyopop |
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27 Oct
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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[rating:4]
On October 15th and 16th Viz released into theaters the second live-action Death Note movie, following up its May theatrical release of the first film. My review of the second live-action Death Note movie is going to be much like my review of the first. Death Note II: The Last Name is a direct continuation of the first movie, picking up the story almost exactly where it left off.
Everyone’s feeling sorry for Light Yagami since the tragic death of his girlfriend Shiori- everyone except Ryuk the shinigami, who knows Light engineered his girlfriend’s murder with the Death Note. Light fakes a thirst for vengeance as an excuse to join his father’s task force, where he can keep an eye on L, the detective who’s pursuing Light’s murderous alter ago Kira.
Light thinks he’s got his bases covered, until a new complication drops in: Misa Amano, a pop idol who also has a Death Note given to her by the shingami Rem. Kira killed the criminal who murdered Mias’s parents, and she idolizes him. She finds out Light is Kira, and it’s love at first sight, at least for her. At first Light is annoyed by her devotion and her clumsy handling of the Death Note. But then he sees an opportunity to use her to further deceive L. Misa becomes part of an elaborate scheme to kill off L so Kira can ruthlessly create an ideal world devoid of crime.
What follows is an almost madcap plot of Death Notes claimed and given away, memories lost and regained, some slight bondage shinigami revealed, people killed and (in L’s case) massive amounts of sugar consumed.
From the beginning the movies have diverged significantly from the plot of the original manga, and The Last Name takes a completely different tack. Death Note weaves such a complex web of events, plans, counterplans and surprises that adapting it into two 2-hour movies could have been a nightmare. However, Tetsuya Oishi, the screenwriter, does a skillful job at presenting a believable alternate version of events. Sticklers who want to see every detail of the manga recreated will be disappointed, but other fans will see these films as a fun alternate history. The end of The Last Name is clumsier than the end of the manga and feels more heavy-handed, but it still holds up well.
The complete cast of the first movie returns for the second. We didn’t see much of Erika Toda as Misa in the first film, but The Last Name shows she can pout with the best of them. She doesn’t show much emotional range, but Misa is a shallow character by nature, so it works. Tatsuya Fujiwara is still delightfully smarmy as Light, though his dramatic turn near the end of the film strays perilously near histrionics. Once again, Kenichi Matsuyama shambles to perfection as L. He turns uncharacteristically sentimental and lucid near the end, but that’s not so much his fault as the writer’s (and, judging from the reactions of the teenage girls in front of us, fans might like it). Takeshi Kaga (Iron chef’s own Chairman Kaga) turns into a surprisingly powerful performance as Chief Yagami, head of the Kira investigation and Light’s father.
The story is fast-paced and is filmed accordingly, with lots of quick, sharp edits. The music, by Kenji Kawai (who scored both Ghost in the Shell movies) is suitably dramatic but never intrusive; there are even long stretches of the movie that have no background music at all. The inclusion of The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Snow (Hey Oh)” over the ending credits was an odd one to say the least, and it feels entirely out of place in a film like this one.
One of fans’ major concerns about a live-action Death Note was the portrayal of the shinigami. The first film proved that CGI technology is equal to creating Ryuk; this movie gives animators an even better chance to show off their skills with Misa’s shinigami Rem. The shinigami are beautifully detailed and recreate the manga’s original designs in every bizarre detail. We even get a peek into the Shinigami Realm, a barren wasteland (I was slight disappointed, though- there’s a certain shinigami with a Native American feather headdress and huge face-devouring sunglasses I would have liked to see).
Viz has released both films into theaters with a dub track. I was rather upset about that, since I personally prefer subtitles, but I have to admit the dub is excellent and I quickly got used to it. Again, though, Viz has neglected to subtitles things like signs and newspapers, so those who can’t read Japanese are left in the dark by the various news headlines that the camera often zooms in on. One odd choice made by the dub director was to give Rem a very deep, masculine voice- when in both the manga and anime series Rem is identified as being female, and the anime’s seiyuu is female(as female as a shinigami can be, anyway).
If you read my prior review (here!), you probably noticed me bitching about the proliferation of squealing, shrieking, wailing fangirls in the theater. Fangirls at a theatrical release of a Death Note movie are pretty much a given, but it was nearly unbearable. Thankfully this time around there were far fewer fangirls in attendance, most likely because we now live in a larger city where multiple theaters were showing the film (where we lived before, only one theater in town was screening it).
All in all, Death Note II : The Last Name is a solid conclusion to the first live-action movie, and offers a fun alternate ending to the manga for fans. It will be interesting to see how Viz handles a U.S. DVD release; hopefully the theatrical release’s few failings (no subtitles for written text, the dub-only track) will be addressed then.
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11 Sep
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Posted by Mazinga
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About midway through Sebastian Gutierrez’ entertaining vampire flick Rise: Blood Hunter, the lead bloodsucker asserts something to the effect of “Sex and murder are the only real pleasures man has left.”
But in the world writer/director Gutierrez creates, those are actually the only pleasures left to vampires, much to their cost. They can’t eat food, hold no love for their fellow creatures, are cut off from their families (due to their being, you know, dead) and must hide their true natures from unsuspecting humanity. And, of course, there’s the little matter of an irresistible craving for human blood.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: film, horror |
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5 Sep
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Posted by Mazinga
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A supremely skilled fighter wanders the Earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, looking for the ultimate battle in Death Trance, a rip-snorting action film directed by Yuji Shimomura, action director for Versus, and featuring Versus lead Tak Sakaguchi as action director and leading man. The 2005 film is available on DVD in the United States courtesy Media Blasters.
Sakaguchi plays Grave, a mysterious man of few words who raids a hidden temple for a coffin the local monks had been guarding for a century. Rumor has it that the coffin will grant a person a wish. But when a Ryuen, young apprentice monk (Takamasa Suga), returns shortly after the raid, the head monk warns him that opening the coffin will release the Goddess of Destruction. He hands Ryuen a sword with an amazingly phallic handle and urges him to track down the thief with the sword. Unfortunately, many others are also after the coffin for the power it contains.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: film, martial arts, Tak Sakaguchi |
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9 Aug
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Posted by Mazinga
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One of the nice bonuses of 2007’s Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez tribute to low-rent cinema, Grindhouse, was a flurry of DVD releases of exploitation movies. One notable set was a batch of “Welcome to the Grindhouse” double feature DVDs by BCI / Eclipse, which offered similarly themed genre pictures along with a “grindhouse experience” of titles and trailers.
Along with horror and women-in-prison flicks, “Welcome to the Grindhouse” offers up some old chop socky films, and what better than the public-domain exploits of badass extraordinaire Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba and his Japan Action Club, featuring the lovely, talented and deadly Etsuko “Sue” Shiomi. One such title features the 1976 films Dragon Princess (Hissatsu onna kenshi) and Karate Warriors (Kozure satsujin ken) (Another release features Chiba and Shiomi in The Bodyguard and Sister Street Fighter.)
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: Etsuko Shiomi, exploitation films, film, japan, kung-fu, martial arts, Sonny Chiba |
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27 May
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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[rating:4]
On May 20th and 21st, Cinemark did America a favor and performed a two-night showing of the first live-action Death Note movie. The 2006 film has been floating around in bootleg, Hong Kong (and now official) releases, but this was the first and only time it was shown in an American theater.
I probably don’t need to explain the plot of Death Note, since everyone in the Japanese and English-speaking worlds seems to not only know about it, but also reads it, draws fanart, and writes naughty fanfiction for it. But just in case you’ve been living in a submarine, here’s a quick overview.
Light Yagami is a golden boy: smart, handsome, personable, and an all-around good guy. He’s a high school student with no doubt he’ll get into college and change the world. But the chance to change things comes a little earlier than he expected when he comes across a strange notebook marked “Death Note”, with a list of odd rules for the notebook’s use inside. It seems Light has stumbled upon the Death Note of a real live shinigami, or death god, and he now has the power to kill anyone he likes simply by writing their name in the book.
| Category: Anime, Film Reviews | Tag: Anime, death note, film, japan |
