I am so grateful for my mom. Okay, this is a statement that should go without saying - as Mister T expounds you should "Treat your momma right" - but in this particular instance, I have to directly credit her with my love of exploitation flicks. For the majority of my childhood, she took me to the local drive-in for all manner of schlock and exploitation movies: The Nude Bomb, Death Ship, Galaxy of Terror, Jaws 3D, Battle Beyond the Stars, CHUD, Yor: Hunter from the Future, Halloween II - the list of B-Movies I was directly exposed to every weekend is endless.
Bad parenting? Probably - but I love her just the same for it.
Where am I going with this? While I'm about as far away from the sleezy grindhouse theaters of 42nd street in New York and you can possibly get and still be in the United States, while I never actually set foot in one of those all-night exhibitions in Times Square (back before Mayor Ed Koch cleaned up the area and gentrified the hell out of it), I still appreciate schlock in all forms. Fortunately Synapse films is there to feed my habit with their outstanding series of wonderfully wild and trashy and twisted trailers: the 42nd Street Forever series.
Volume Five, by the way, comes to us with the help of the folks at Austin, Texas' legendary Alamo Drafthouse Cinema - which if you haven’t heard of (and/or been too yet), you need to check out. Opened in the late nineties, the Alamo Drafthouse is a movie theater/restaurant, with food and drink service while you watch the movies. The Drafthouse is famous for showing old exploitation flicks and obscure kids movies and cheap action flicks, and has grown in popularity to host all kinds of special events (like the annual film festival hosted by Quentin Tarantino). In short, The Alamo has become the center of the schlock and exploitation movie scene in America.
We start off with a solid gold nugget of reto cheese: Charlton Heston on a tennis court. Chuck is taking time out his busy day to explain the then newly implemented MPAA ratings system. Despite the potential for camp, Chuck actually plays it straight, delivering some pretty solid advice to the parents: be responsible for what your children see, use the guidelines and don’t let other people decide for you. Now if only Hollywood would follow that advice today. . . .
With the preamble over, it's off to the races! And what a curtain puller: A Life of Ninja! I've never heard of this before, but the trailer makes me want it more that air and food and water and sex itself. There's glowing eyes, dismemberment in alleyways, over the top dubbing, and gratuitous shower scenes. This thing looks like Kung Fu gold! Then there's 1973's Sting of the Dragon Masters, a flick I dimly remember watching in my youth on Kung Fu Theater on my local UHF station. And yet again since Asia really doesn’t care about copyrights, we get the North by Northwest score in the soundtrack! And then there's the trailer for Sonny Chiba's The Bodyguard - not very rare (it's on BCI's Sonny Chiba double feature disc), it's still a blast, with the chant of "Viva! Chiba! Viva! Chiba!" bringing things to an orgasmic crescendo. Finally rounding out the Kung Fu opening, we get a sample of Shaw Brothers and the trailer to Mad Monkey Kung Fu, probably one of their better known projects - at least in America. It's a good flick and the trailer does it justice!
Shifting gears, we head into the Wild Animals on a Rampage genre, leading off with Enzo G. Castellari's The Shark Hunter. Enzo is one of my favorite Italian exploitation directors, and him teaming up with Franco Nero and a giant shark promises to be one hell of a flick. And then we get Wild Animal Porn in a flick called Birds Do It, Bees Do It, a Mondo documentary about animals mating.
Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
From Animal Porn to Human Porn, we jump into soft core territory with an entry from Mister B.I.G himself, Bert I. Gordon, a flick called Let's Do It! I've never seen it, but the trailer seems harmless enough. More outrageous is Chatterbox, a story about Rip Taylor and a singing Vagina. Yup, only in the seventies, people, only in the seventies. Then there's a whole bunch of skin with Danish Love Acts, with plenty of slow motion sex over a bed of smooth jazz. Rounding out the Soft Core Sexploitation section is a flick called Group Marriage, which apparently is a bunch of youngsters shacking up together in a house and swapping bodily fluids.
Sonny Chiba makes a return appearance as a sci-fi samurai in a Japanese flick called Message From Space (with Vic Morrow?!?), there's the amazingly awesome entry MindWarp (A classic from Roger Corman) and quite possibly the best trailer of the disc - Hal Needham's career-ending Megaforce. The movie itself is so brilliantly bad, it's the gem of my Horrible Movie Collection. The trailer manages to distill all that gloriously bad movie-ness into 120 seconds. Fantastic! Then we get mobsters versus solders in a movie I simply have to track down: Zebra Force, which looks like it delivers tons of car chases, explosions, gunfights killings - and a one-armed man with a machine gun. Oh, and it promises to have a chase equal to The French Connection or Bullitt.
We'll see about that one.
There's an entry from Indonesia called Blazing Battle, set in the south seas of World War II with all manner of fighting, punji stick impaling and brutality against the enemy, And then Sonny Chiba shows up as a Three Time Offender in International Secret Police: The Diamond Trap, sporting some of the worst English translations since "All Your Base Are Belong To Us!
In need of some wilderness adventure? How about the shameless Tarzan rip-off Karzan: Master of the Jungle, staring Johnny Kissmuller, Jr. Did I mention Lee "I'm Banging Farrah Fawcett and you aren’t" Majors in a Viking epic called The Norseman? How about Roger Corman's Sorceress, featuring two buxom blondes with Kung Fu and Supernatural powers? Well, it is Roger Corman – the buxom part goes without saying.
Now keep in mind, I'm just hitting the highlights here. There's simply way too much to get into any sort of detail. I'm skipping Slaughterhouse Rock, the Rock and Roll horror flick starring Toni Basil, the Charles Manson mondo documentary The Manson Massacre, the Bill Cosbey produced remake of The House of Wax or the shameless Rosemary's Baby rip off The Devil Within Her.
For completion sake, here is the full list of everything included:
* A Life of Ninja
* Sting of the Dragon Masters
* The Bodyguard
* Mad Monkey Kung Fu
* Wonder Women
* Lucky Seven
* a vintage concession stand advertisement (our stand is state of the art cool!)
* The Shark Hunter
* Birds Do It, Bees Do It
* Let’s Do It!
* Chatterbox
* Danish Love Acts
* Group Marriage
* Violated
* Caged Virgins
* another concession stand spot (racist BBQ sauce? YUM!)
* Message From Space
* The Terrornauts
* Mind Warp
* Megaforce
* Zebra Force,
* Blazing Battle,
* James Tont: Operation One,
* International Secret Police
* Machine Gun McCain
* Stacey,
* Lightning Bolt,
* 3 Supermen In The West,
* Pretty Maids All in a Row,
* Putney Swope,
* Norman, Is That You?,
* Redneck County
* Moonrunners
* A commercial for really nasty looking shrimp rolls at the consession stand
* The Fabulous World of Jules Verne
* Magic Christmas Tree
* Pinnochio’s Birthday Party
* The Magic Kite
* The Secret of Magic Island
* The Norseman
* Sorceress
* Terror in the Wax Museum,
* The Manson Massacre,
* The Devil Within Her
* Slaughterhouse Rock.
Whew. Seriously, that's just about two hours of grindhouse goodness all in one spot. And the great thing is, often an exploitation trailer is way better than the actual movie, where you have to sit through boring exposition and character development to get to the good stuff. Here we just have a nonstop parade of bare titties, blood splatter, explosions, freaky monsters, gun fights and car chases for two solid hours. For a Bad Movie Junkie like me, these discs make Crack seem like a Popsicle.
THE DVD -
As one can imagine, the video is all over the map here. Some of the trailers look awesome and some show some serious print damage. They've all been presented in a anamorphic widescreen, though - and that's a giant step in the right direction for DVD quality. The Dolby Digital mono soundtrack is pretty much is the same quality - gets the job done, but not outstanding.
THE EXTRAS -
A couple of them this time, a half hour documentary on the Alamo Drafthouse (which should be more than enough to make anyone want to visit the Lone Star State) and a commentary with Tim League (the owner of the Alamo Drafthouse) and Lars Nilsen and Zack Carlson (programmers at the Alamo Drafthouse). Commentary for trailers? I hear you say. Don’t knock it - these guys really know their shit. It's a fun, entertaining, informative chat track stuffed with trivia and insight. Also, the DVD comes with an eight page booklet of liner notes, detailing the history of the Alamo Drafthouse, plus some lobby art reproductions.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
If sitting through two hours of bad movies sounds as much fun as pulling teeth, then this DVD is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're like me and cant get enough bloods and tits and Kung Fu, then 42nd Street Forever 5 is right up your sleezy alley. The disc is chocked full of vintage goodness and will provide hours of entertainment for the fan of exploitation flicks.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
CITY HUNTER 3 - Get wild and tough
While I've been an anime fan all my life (more or less), I was mostly unaware of City Hunter until fairly recently. Oh sure I've heard the name and I found a couple of undubbed, unsubtitled pirated episodes at my local Chinatown video store, but beyond that, I was largely unaware of the franchise. But when ADV gave the series a proper release, I decided to give it a spin as a blind buy.
Boy was I lucky! 300 bucks for this DVD set on Amazon? You gotta be kidding me! Anyway, I digress. . . .
Ladies and gentlemen (especially the ladies), meet Ryo Seaba - troubleshooter, investigator, gun-for-hire and ladies man. If you need help, if the police cant help you, if you have no where else to turn, leave "XYZ" on the message board at Shinjuku train station and City Hunter will respond to your plea.
His skill with his Desert Eagle is unparalleled - he can place a shot on a target, in the same hole, six times in a row. He can shoot the gun out of the hand of a thug holding a lady hostage through the gaps of a moving subway train at rush hour. His skill with the ladies. . . not so much. He's lecherous, he spends his free time hunting panties, his favorite word is mokkori - which is roughly the American equivalent of "Schwing!". He's about as subtle as a three hundred pound hammer to the head.
Which - funny you should mention that - is where his assistant Kaori Makimura comes in. She is primarily responsible for screening clients, helping investigations and other managerial tasks. She is also charged with keeping Ryo's libido in check, often by striking him about the head with a three hundred pound hammer.
As one might tell, the series is kind of goofy, bordering on the Loony Tunes at times. Kaori keeps her impossibly large hammers in the same place that the Highlander keeps his sword. Ryo's hunt for mokkori is ludicrous at best, ridiculous at worst. It is, at the easiest descriptor, a comedy.
Ah, but wait a moment - when Ryo needs to get his game face on, the trickster and the fool melt away, revealing a total badass who gets the job done. Despite the comedy and letch, the show is also full of Drama and Crowning Moments Of Heartwarming - like the time that Ryo was hired by a doctor who was dying of cancer. She intended to pay Ryo's fee from her life-insurance, hiring him to kill the sadistic boxer who murdered her lover. After finishing the job, rather than taking her life-insurance and letting her go back to drowning in alcohol, Ryo . . . well, cue the Manly Tears from the audience.
City Hunter started as manga by Tsukasa Hojo, running from 1985 to 1991. It spawned a four-season Anime series, several Direct-To-Video specials and a live-action movie starring Jackie Chan. This would be the third of the four seasons - hence City Hunter 3. Season three is only 13 episodes long, which I think why it's a weaker entry into the franchise. Unlike previous seasons, where each story was a two parter, most of the episodes here are stand-alone. We get some double length episodes towards the end, but the majority of the stores are wrapped up in 25 minuets. This doesn’t really let the series build momentum like it used to.
Don't get me wrong, City Hunter 3 sticks to the formula, so it's not bad - it's just not quite as badassed as it used to be.
Being an older series - produced in the late eighties and early nineties - the animation for City Hunter is a bit rough and primitive. It's not exactly Speed Racer or Star Blazers level of animation, but don't go in expecting slick CGI. That said, it's still very serviceable and looks smooth for the era. The voice acting is, well it's Akira Kamiya - the very voice of Manliness itself. He's done Ken from Fist of the North Star, Roy Focker from Macross. He's probably the Ur Example when it comes to Hot Blooded characters, and fits the roll perfectly.
THE DVD -
The video quality holds up well considering the age of the series. There's some print damage here and there, but overall it looks pretty good. The colors have not faded, there's not much over saturation, and everything seems clean. As far as soundtrack goes - since AVD films was not anticipating moving a great many units, plus the HUGE number of episodes to dub (65 in just the first season alone) we only get a Japanese audio track with optional subtitles.
THE EXTRAS -
Not surprisingly, we get very meager handful of extras - mainly trailers. There's a handful of City Hunter trailers - City Hunter the Motion Picture a.k.a. Goodbye, My Sweetheart), . 357 Magnum, The Million Dollar Conspiracy, Bay City Wars, and Secret Service. Then there's an assortment of ADV trailers for then current releases: Eden's Bowy, Princess Blade, Pretear, Orphen 2: Revenge, City Hunter: Secret Service (again), Cosplay Complex - and that's all.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
It's a damn shame that these things are out of print. While City Hunter Series 3 isn't bad, it's pretty short and certainly not worth the three hundred bucks that you get it for on Amazon. So on that basis alone, I'd say skip this set, unless you can find a copy at a used store for cheap. That said, you can get the second half of season two for less than twenty bucks from www.rightstuf.com - and THAT is well worth getting at least.
Boy was I lucky! 300 bucks for this DVD set on Amazon? You gotta be kidding me! Anyway, I digress. . . .
Ladies and gentlemen (especially the ladies), meet Ryo Seaba - troubleshooter, investigator, gun-for-hire and ladies man. If you need help, if the police cant help you, if you have no where else to turn, leave "XYZ" on the message board at Shinjuku train station and City Hunter will respond to your plea.
His skill with his Desert Eagle is unparalleled - he can place a shot on a target, in the same hole, six times in a row. He can shoot the gun out of the hand of a thug holding a lady hostage through the gaps of a moving subway train at rush hour. His skill with the ladies. . . not so much. He's lecherous, he spends his free time hunting panties, his favorite word is mokkori - which is roughly the American equivalent of "Schwing!". He's about as subtle as a three hundred pound hammer to the head.
Which - funny you should mention that - is where his assistant Kaori Makimura comes in. She is primarily responsible for screening clients, helping investigations and other managerial tasks. She is also charged with keeping Ryo's libido in check, often by striking him about the head with a three hundred pound hammer.
As one might tell, the series is kind of goofy, bordering on the Loony Tunes at times. Kaori keeps her impossibly large hammers in the same place that the Highlander keeps his sword. Ryo's hunt for mokkori is ludicrous at best, ridiculous at worst. It is, at the easiest descriptor, a comedy.
Ah, but wait a moment - when Ryo needs to get his game face on, the trickster and the fool melt away, revealing a total badass who gets the job done. Despite the comedy and letch, the show is also full of Drama and Crowning Moments Of Heartwarming - like the time that Ryo was hired by a doctor who was dying of cancer. She intended to pay Ryo's fee from her life-insurance, hiring him to kill the sadistic boxer who murdered her lover. After finishing the job, rather than taking her life-insurance and letting her go back to drowning in alcohol, Ryo . . . well, cue the Manly Tears from the audience.
City Hunter started as manga by Tsukasa Hojo, running from 1985 to 1991. It spawned a four-season Anime series, several Direct-To-Video specials and a live-action movie starring Jackie Chan. This would be the third of the four seasons - hence City Hunter 3. Season three is only 13 episodes long, which I think why it's a weaker entry into the franchise. Unlike previous seasons, where each story was a two parter, most of the episodes here are stand-alone. We get some double length episodes towards the end, but the majority of the stores are wrapped up in 25 minuets. This doesn’t really let the series build momentum like it used to.
Don't get me wrong, City Hunter 3 sticks to the formula, so it's not bad - it's just not quite as badassed as it used to be.
Being an older series - produced in the late eighties and early nineties - the animation for City Hunter is a bit rough and primitive. It's not exactly Speed Racer or Star Blazers level of animation, but don't go in expecting slick CGI. That said, it's still very serviceable and looks smooth for the era. The voice acting is, well it's Akira Kamiya - the very voice of Manliness itself. He's done Ken from Fist of the North Star, Roy Focker from Macross. He's probably the Ur Example when it comes to Hot Blooded characters, and fits the roll perfectly.
THE DVD -
The video quality holds up well considering the age of the series. There's some print damage here and there, but overall it looks pretty good. The colors have not faded, there's not much over saturation, and everything seems clean. As far as soundtrack goes - since AVD films was not anticipating moving a great many units, plus the HUGE number of episodes to dub (65 in just the first season alone) we only get a Japanese audio track with optional subtitles.
THE EXTRAS -
Not surprisingly, we get very meager handful of extras - mainly trailers. There's a handful of City Hunter trailers - City Hunter the Motion Picture a.k.a. Goodbye, My Sweetheart), . 357 Magnum, The Million Dollar Conspiracy, Bay City Wars, and Secret Service. Then there's an assortment of ADV trailers for then current releases: Eden's Bowy, Princess Blade, Pretear, Orphen 2: Revenge, City Hunter: Secret Service (again), Cosplay Complex - and that's all.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
It's a damn shame that these things are out of print. While City Hunter Series 3 isn't bad, it's pretty short and certainly not worth the three hundred bucks that you get it for on Amazon. So on that basis alone, I'd say skip this set, unless you can find a copy at a used store for cheap. That said, you can get the second half of season two for less than twenty bucks from www.rightstuf.com - and THAT is well worth getting at least.
JACKSON COUNTY JAIL - exploitation this good should be criminal!
I love Roger Corman and his unending parade of schlock, shameless rip-offs of other movies and exploitation drive-in fair. Movies that is utterly suitable for two hours of pure escapism and necking in the back seat. Then there's the occasional one-off that's actually a kind of serious and dramatic, like 1976's Jackson County Jail.
Yvette Mimieux (from the criminally underrated The Black Hole) is Dinah Hunter, producer at a Los Angeles advertising agency. After a spectacularly sexist client totally blows up at her and she comes home to her boyfriend (played by Doctor Johnny Fever!) dipping his wick in another ladies candle, she throws in the towel and goes back to her old job in New York.
But instead of spending the six hours on a plane, she decides to see the country and drive from coast to coast. And so she packs her lemon yellow AMC Pacer (!) and sets off up what I'm guessing to be route 66. One unfortunate carjacking later, she finds herself in Texas in the middle of the night sans possessions, money, or her wallet - which leads to her getting locked up in the local jail on vagrancy charges before getting the shit raped out of her by the Night Duty Policeman.
Bet she's regretting that whole "Get to know America" thing now.
Anyway, after attacking back against her cop rapist and accidentally killing him, next thing she knows, Hunter and a very young (and still really good looking) Tommy Lee Jones are on the run from the long arm of the law. Plenty of car chases, gun fights and daring escapes ensue. . . .
While being in jail is certainly an important plot point, Jackson County Jail isn’t really a Women In Prison flick. There are no gratuitous shower scenes, there's not a lot of nudity, and shockingly, there's actually a plot and reasonably complex characters. Sure it’s a brutal flick, but it's not quite to the level shameless exploitation of flicks like The Big Dollhouse or Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS.
The acting is, for an exploitation flick, top notch stuff. Showcasing Roger Corman uncanny talent for finding untapped talent and bringing it to the screen, we get Tommy Lee Jones first big flick. Jones is just terrific as inmate-on-the-run, Coley Blake, really showing off that, yeah - he is totally star material. Yvette Mimieux hasn’t exactly been burning up the Hollywood charts (her only notable appearances are the old George Pal Time Machine and The Black Hole, plus a couple of made-for-television movies and appearances on the Love Boat) and that's a damn shame, because she is excellent here. Her post rape shell-shock state is emotional with a real sense of her just holding it together.
THE DVD -
There is an older edition of Jackson County Jail that's cropped pan and scan and a newer edition from Shout! Factory presented in 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen, and it looks pretty good. There is the odd instance of minor print damage here and there, mostly near the reel changes, but it's never intolerable or off-putting. As far as the soundtrack goes, we get a Dolby Digital Mono track that is clean and sharp - not bad considering the low budget nature of this 35 year old flick,
THE EXTRAS -
Shout Factory delivers the good again, with a boatload of trailers (The Big Dollhouse, Big Mama, Piranha and The Great Texas Dynamite Chase - plus a trailer for his new Sci-Fi Channel flick: Sharktopus, which I will now go on record right now as proclaiming the greatest achievement in the history of film EVER!) an interview with Roger Corman conducted by Leonard "Laserblast is better than Blade Runner" Maltin from the mid nineties and an audio commentary with director Michael Miller, cinematographer Bruce Logon and producer Jeff Begun. It takes a little bit to get really going, but once the three loosen up, they have loads of trivia and production tidbits to lay out.
Plus there's the Grindhouse Double-feature feature, where trailers play before each film, recreating the 42nd Street experience without all those pesky junkies and perverts in the theater with you.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
It's unfair to call Jackson County Jail a B-Flick. Sure it comes from Roger Corman, sure it's salacious and titillating and brutal - but it's also well acted and well shot. The story is strong, and there are some great performances from Tommy Lee Jones and Yvette Mimieux.
Yvette Mimieux (from the criminally underrated The Black Hole) is Dinah Hunter, producer at a Los Angeles advertising agency. After a spectacularly sexist client totally blows up at her and she comes home to her boyfriend (played by Doctor Johnny Fever!) dipping his wick in another ladies candle, she throws in the towel and goes back to her old job in New York.
But instead of spending the six hours on a plane, she decides to see the country and drive from coast to coast. And so she packs her lemon yellow AMC Pacer (!) and sets off up what I'm guessing to be route 66. One unfortunate carjacking later, she finds herself in Texas in the middle of the night sans possessions, money, or her wallet - which leads to her getting locked up in the local jail on vagrancy charges before getting the shit raped out of her by the Night Duty Policeman.
Bet she's regretting that whole "Get to know America" thing now.
Anyway, after attacking back against her cop rapist and accidentally killing him, next thing she knows, Hunter and a very young (and still really good looking) Tommy Lee Jones are on the run from the long arm of the law. Plenty of car chases, gun fights and daring escapes ensue. . . .
While being in jail is certainly an important plot point, Jackson County Jail isn’t really a Women In Prison flick. There are no gratuitous shower scenes, there's not a lot of nudity, and shockingly, there's actually a plot and reasonably complex characters. Sure it’s a brutal flick, but it's not quite to the level shameless exploitation of flicks like The Big Dollhouse or Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS.
The acting is, for an exploitation flick, top notch stuff. Showcasing Roger Corman uncanny talent for finding untapped talent and bringing it to the screen, we get Tommy Lee Jones first big flick. Jones is just terrific as inmate-on-the-run, Coley Blake, really showing off that, yeah - he is totally star material. Yvette Mimieux hasn’t exactly been burning up the Hollywood charts (her only notable appearances are the old George Pal Time Machine and The Black Hole, plus a couple of made-for-television movies and appearances on the Love Boat) and that's a damn shame, because she is excellent here. Her post rape shell-shock state is emotional with a real sense of her just holding it together.
THE DVD -
There is an older edition of Jackson County Jail that's cropped pan and scan and a newer edition from Shout! Factory presented in 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen, and it looks pretty good. There is the odd instance of minor print damage here and there, mostly near the reel changes, but it's never intolerable or off-putting. As far as the soundtrack goes, we get a Dolby Digital Mono track that is clean and sharp - not bad considering the low budget nature of this 35 year old flick,
THE EXTRAS -
Shout Factory delivers the good again, with a boatload of trailers (The Big Dollhouse, Big Mama, Piranha and The Great Texas Dynamite Chase - plus a trailer for his new Sci-Fi Channel flick: Sharktopus, which I will now go on record right now as proclaiming the greatest achievement in the history of film EVER!) an interview with Roger Corman conducted by Leonard "Laserblast is better than Blade Runner" Maltin from the mid nineties and an audio commentary with director Michael Miller, cinematographer Bruce Logon and producer Jeff Begun. It takes a little bit to get really going, but once the three loosen up, they have loads of trivia and production tidbits to lay out.
Plus there's the Grindhouse Double-feature feature, where trailers play before each film, recreating the 42nd Street experience without all those pesky junkies and perverts in the theater with you.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
It's unfair to call Jackson County Jail a B-Flick. Sure it comes from Roger Corman, sure it's salacious and titillating and brutal - but it's also well acted and well shot. The story is strong, and there are some great performances from Tommy Lee Jones and Yvette Mimieux.
Monday, April 4, 2011
THE WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL - fantastic and upsetting at the same time
Before I get into the review, please let me get one thing absolutely, positively crystal clear. In no way am I excusing or condoning anything the Nazis did in World War II. Now I know this may sounds like a no-brainer of a disclaimer, but as I go through this review, I will make some positive statements about Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi sympathizer and propagandist to Hitler and I don't want anyone confusing praise for Leni Riefenstahl the Artist as condoning Adolf, his actions or Nazism in general. Adolf Hitler was, is, and always shall be a mass murdering fuckhead, and I can only hope that he is burning in the deepest, darkest pits of hell.
Now, with the preface out of the way, let us turn our attention to Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl, otherwise known as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.
I have to hand it to her; Leni Riefenstahl is a pretty amazing woman: scuba diving at the age of 90, Greenpeace activist, spending years of her life living in Africa with the Nubia tribe, avid mountain climber back in the day when women didn’t do that sort of thing. If not for an eight year period of her life, you'd say she's lived a full active existence that most of us would love to live. Of course the downside - the pink elephant in the room, if you will - was that she had Adolf Hitler on speed dial. No, seriously, she could call up The 'Dolf any time she wanted and chat.
Oh dear.
While it was Joseph Goebbels who ran the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Hitler saw one of Riefenstahl's early movies and became a huge fan (and, depending on if you believe the rumors - lover - but there's no evidence to support that claim). And so Hitler commissioned Riefenstahl to document the upcoming Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, an event that was largely staged for the benefit of her cameras. The end result - The Triumph of the Will. Her next project was Olympia, a documentary on the 1939 Berlin Olympiad, mainly celebrating the power and majesty of the human body. Together, those two (plus a couple more short films here and there) are considered to be the best documentaries* ever put to film. Gorgeously shot with lavish sets and staging, innovated camera techniques well ahead of their time, and deeply influential in the world of film. Hollywood still uses many of the techniques laid down by Riefenstahl to this day.
* The term documentary may not necessarily apply here. While all documentaries are constructed in a way to lead the viewer to the filmmakers way of thinking - and Triumph of the Will certainly fits that bill to a tee - the movie was also constructed from the ground up, with retakes and staged shots and with a level of behind-the-scenes clean up that a normal documentary wouldn’t get. Propaganda? Sure. Documentary? Not so much.
But no matter how you slice it, the subject matter is repugnant and she was best buds with The Most Evil Man Ever for 10 years - and that casts a long, long shadow. And so it falls to Ray Muller and his documentary to deconstruct the occasionally unwilling Leni Riefenstahl, unravel her history, hear her own words, dig deep into her pre and post Nazi career and - most importantly - pose the question can one make art without making a political statement? Is there a line that one can straddle of art versus morality? Can art exist in a vacuum separate from its context?
Despite Riefenstahl obviously well rehearsed answers (she's had 60+ years to practice, after all), Muller and his crew don't mess about. Muller remains objective and neutral, but he does throw the hard fast pitches from time to time. Riefenstahl maintains to this day (well, the 1993 'to this day') that she was never a member of the Nazi Party, that she was an artist first and foremost, that she didn’t infuse her films with a political agenda, thus proving that denial is more than just a river.
We do get a sense from the interviews that Riefenstahl does indeed have a genuine passion for filmmaking - there are some scenes that Muller filmed on the sly showing Riefenstahl bossing around the camera crew to make a specific shot better - and when Muller takes Riefenstahl and some of her old camera crew to some of the locations where she shot Olympia, she comes alive. She goes on about some of the creative ideas, things that didn’t work (attaching cameras to balloons and sending them aloft) and things that worked famously (digging a pit near some of the events to shoot athletes from very low angles).
Frustratingly, Muller doesn’t ask some really basic key questions, like "how did you feel about your fellow Jewish filmmakers being branded, blacklisted - and worse" or asking what *exactly* was her relationship with Hitler? Perhaps these are in the longer, 3 hour cut of the film, but here - man, to have been on Muller's crew at the time.
But even with those unasked questions and other flaws of the film, we still come away with a really good sense of a woman who hasn't quite come to grips with what she did. She's brilliant with this incredible gift for knowing how to edit a film, how to light a shot and where to place the camera for maximum effect, but astounding dumb (or perhaps just willfully blind) to everything going on around her.
THE DVD -
The DVD, released by Kino International, appears to be a straight transfer from their old VHS release. While the A/V quality is clear, it's kind of soft and fuzzy, understandable, considering the documentary was probably shot on 16mm film stock. It gets the job done, and really, we don't need a super sexy, crystal clear picture. The soundtrack is the original German with optional subtitles.
THE EXTRAS -
Nothing - not even a trailer. But then, honestly I can't think of anything else they could include that the documentary didn’t cover?
THE BOTTOM LINE -
Nobody would debate the fact that Leni Riefenstahl is a brilliant filmmaker and has a wonderful eye for editing - however, with great power (or ability) comes great reasonability. But I have to remember that I'm reviewing the documentary about her, not the filmmaker herself. To that end, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is a brilliant, frank, insightful look into a Wonderful, Horrible artist.
Now, with the preface out of the way, let us turn our attention to Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl, otherwise known as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.
I have to hand it to her; Leni Riefenstahl is a pretty amazing woman: scuba diving at the age of 90, Greenpeace activist, spending years of her life living in Africa with the Nubia tribe, avid mountain climber back in the day when women didn’t do that sort of thing. If not for an eight year period of her life, you'd say she's lived a full active existence that most of us would love to live. Of course the downside - the pink elephant in the room, if you will - was that she had Adolf Hitler on speed dial. No, seriously, she could call up The 'Dolf any time she wanted and chat.
Oh dear.
While it was Joseph Goebbels who ran the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Hitler saw one of Riefenstahl's early movies and became a huge fan (and, depending on if you believe the rumors - lover - but there's no evidence to support that claim). And so Hitler commissioned Riefenstahl to document the upcoming Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, an event that was largely staged for the benefit of her cameras. The end result - The Triumph of the Will. Her next project was Olympia, a documentary on the 1939 Berlin Olympiad, mainly celebrating the power and majesty of the human body. Together, those two (plus a couple more short films here and there) are considered to be the best documentaries* ever put to film. Gorgeously shot with lavish sets and staging, innovated camera techniques well ahead of their time, and deeply influential in the world of film. Hollywood still uses many of the techniques laid down by Riefenstahl to this day.
* The term documentary may not necessarily apply here. While all documentaries are constructed in a way to lead the viewer to the filmmakers way of thinking - and Triumph of the Will certainly fits that bill to a tee - the movie was also constructed from the ground up, with retakes and staged shots and with a level of behind-the-scenes clean up that a normal documentary wouldn’t get. Propaganda? Sure. Documentary? Not so much.
But no matter how you slice it, the subject matter is repugnant and she was best buds with The Most Evil Man Ever for 10 years - and that casts a long, long shadow. And so it falls to Ray Muller and his documentary to deconstruct the occasionally unwilling Leni Riefenstahl, unravel her history, hear her own words, dig deep into her pre and post Nazi career and - most importantly - pose the question can one make art without making a political statement? Is there a line that one can straddle of art versus morality? Can art exist in a vacuum separate from its context?
Despite Riefenstahl obviously well rehearsed answers (she's had 60+ years to practice, after all), Muller and his crew don't mess about. Muller remains objective and neutral, but he does throw the hard fast pitches from time to time. Riefenstahl maintains to this day (well, the 1993 'to this day') that she was never a member of the Nazi Party, that she was an artist first and foremost, that she didn’t infuse her films with a political agenda, thus proving that denial is more than just a river.
We do get a sense from the interviews that Riefenstahl does indeed have a genuine passion for filmmaking - there are some scenes that Muller filmed on the sly showing Riefenstahl bossing around the camera crew to make a specific shot better - and when Muller takes Riefenstahl and some of her old camera crew to some of the locations where she shot Olympia, she comes alive. She goes on about some of the creative ideas, things that didn’t work (attaching cameras to balloons and sending them aloft) and things that worked famously (digging a pit near some of the events to shoot athletes from very low angles).
Frustratingly, Muller doesn’t ask some really basic key questions, like "how did you feel about your fellow Jewish filmmakers being branded, blacklisted - and worse" or asking what *exactly* was her relationship with Hitler? Perhaps these are in the longer, 3 hour cut of the film, but here - man, to have been on Muller's crew at the time.
But even with those unasked questions and other flaws of the film, we still come away with a really good sense of a woman who hasn't quite come to grips with what she did. She's brilliant with this incredible gift for knowing how to edit a film, how to light a shot and where to place the camera for maximum effect, but astounding dumb (or perhaps just willfully blind) to everything going on around her.
THE DVD -
The DVD, released by Kino International, appears to be a straight transfer from their old VHS release. While the A/V quality is clear, it's kind of soft and fuzzy, understandable, considering the documentary was probably shot on 16mm film stock. It gets the job done, and really, we don't need a super sexy, crystal clear picture. The soundtrack is the original German with optional subtitles.
THE EXTRAS -
Nothing - not even a trailer. But then, honestly I can't think of anything else they could include that the documentary didn’t cover?
THE BOTTOM LINE -
Nobody would debate the fact that Leni Riefenstahl is a brilliant filmmaker and has a wonderful eye for editing - however, with great power (or ability) comes great reasonability. But I have to remember that I'm reviewing the documentary about her, not the filmmaker herself. To that end, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is a brilliant, frank, insightful look into a Wonderful, Horrible artist.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
PIRANHA - A remake with plenty of bite
Oh, what a dilemma I had. I love Roger Corman flicks, I love horrible B-Movies, but I hate remakes - Hollywood seems unable to leave anything alone, recycling and regurgitating the past after totally sucking the soul out of it. But last summer, I found myself at Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theater, which was running the remake Piranha - how could I pass up a chance to watch schlock at one of the most famous movie houses in the world?
So me and my 75 year old mother (who loves these movies as much as I do, god bless her totally awesome heart) I ponyed up my 18 bucks, grabbed my popcorn and checked my brain at the door. While I still got the headache from that damned 3D effect, I was pleasantly surprised by the actual quality of the film. So when I found the DVD at my local mom-n-pop video store for 5 bucks, I could hardly pass it up!
Right off the bat, you know that Piranha respects its roots. We open with an old man in a rowboat, all alone in the vast wilderness and fishing on an isolated lake. Since this is the Curtain Puller Monster Attack, you know that this cant end well - but the kicker? It's Richard Dreyfuss, singing "Show me the way to go home" and drinking Amity Beer. Now THATS class! Anyway, there's underwater earthquake, the lakebed splits wide open, and thousands and thousands of tiny eating machines swarm out of the yawning abyss. Poor ol' Matt Hooper is devoured within seconds and the prehistoric piranha swarm throughout the lake.
Meanwhile, at the other end of Lake Victoria, Spring Break has descended upon the sleepy little town. Thousands of randy teens swarm the streets, the beaches and the waterways in a giant orgy of wet t-shirt contests and loud rock music. Town Sherriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue, still looking hawt 25 years later) and Deputy Fallon (Ving Rhames, fulfilling our Doomed Black Man roll quota for the movie) are the overworked authority figures who have to keep a handle on this wild party. Meanwhile, teenage youngster and social outcast Jake Forester (decendant of Steven McQueen - who isn’t nearly as talented as his Grandpappy) has been shanghaied by Sherriff Mom to keep an eye on his younger siblings (who are charmingly played by Sage Ryan and Brooklyn Proulx).
But Jake gets a better offer from sleazy video producer Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell, who apparently managed to slide into Bad Movie World), who is shooting the most recent installment of the “Wild, Wild, Girls” video series. Derrick needs a local to take him to all the best hot-spots on the lake. So Jake and his not-exactly girlfriend Kelly (Played by the blindingly hawt Jessica Szohr) hop aboard the Love Boat for some up close and person water sports. Lil Bother and Sister get stranded on an island, the Love Boat gets stuck in the middle of the lake, Sherriff Mom does her best to close the beaches and ten thousand little eating machines are heading right for the most happening hot-spots on Lake Victoria for a little dining out. . . .
Let me be completely upfront here. Piranha does EXACTLY what is says on the tin: a retro horror movie throwback with plenty of young and nubile tits, bad acting, cheesy writing, and sprays of kayo syrup and red food coloring. If you are one of those movie snobs that demands a solid scripting or intelligent dialogue, you might as well move onto another review - there are no such things for you here.
That said, Piranha is actually a pretty fun movie - note that I didn’t say GOOD movie, but fun. It's respectful of the original Joe Dante flick yet manages to make its own stamp on the proceedings. Director Alexandre Aja (the man behind High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes) clearly has a love of the old movie - while he mostly used CGI fish instead of puppets like they did in 1978, Aja opted to use as much practical effects work as he possibly could. CGI is sexy, but using amputees for stuntmen and having a well rounded make-up team makes the film much stronger. The beach party massacre where several hundred nubile and hunk teens are swiftly nibbled to death is one of the best, most visceral, batshit frantic scenes I've witnessed in a very, very long time.
I said the acting was crap - that's not entirely true. Aside from the Dreyfuss cameo, we get a bit part from Christopher Lloyd doing is best Doc Brown as the town resident fish expert. The best part (kids and cameos aside) has to be Jerry O'Connell. His hedonistic, womanizing, drug-using scumbag gets all the best lines ("My . . . penis! They ate my penis!"), totally hams it up and generally has a great time with a completely sleazy roll. Brilliant! Now granted, the script isn’t exactly a very demanding mistress, but the film would have suffered if the Old Guard thespians didn’t play it to the hilt.
Despite Roger Corman apparently not having anything to do with the remake (aside, probably, from receiving a huge check for the rights), Aja embraces the Corman ethic - interspersed with the lovely flow of red, we get plenty, and I mean PLEANTY of tits and ass to go around. Seriously, we get some full frontal swimming bits that I swear would have sent the MPAA censors into a tizzy.
It's not a perfect movie, mind you. After the amazingly frantic Beach Carnage scene, the movie moves on to its climax - but the energy to carry the action isn’t there. With Kelly trapped inside a sinking Love Boat, Sherriff Mom and the oceanography expert on site to investigate the earthquake throw a rope over to the doomed vessel, before crawling over, talking about the dilemma WAAAAY too much and then sending everyone back to the speedboat all at once. While there's plenty of Piranha Chomping to go around (Including O'Connell's last hilarious words), there's no sense of tension like at the end of Jaws and the "Smile you sunuvabitch" moment. Its okay I guess - but based on what had come before, it should have really grabbed my balls and twisted!
And a couple of minor points both good and bad. I'm kind of shocked that they didn’t play the Authority Figure Insisting on Keeping the Beaches Open Because The Regatta is The Life Blood of the Town card. There's one token mention on how the spring break dollars keep the town alive during the off season, but there's no Mayor Vaughn to hammer the point home. Bravo for not following the Jaws connect-the-dots to the letter! On the other side of the coin- where the hell did Local Jerk Rival Love Interest go? The script seemed to be setting him up as a supreme jerk that gets his comeuppance at the feeding frenzy, but he just falls off the map 3/4th into the movie. It can be safely assumed he was eaten by the piranha but it's weird we never see his fate, considering all the other victims on that same boat get very graphic and obvious deaths.
At the end of the day, what you take away from Piranha will depend on how much you like these type of movies. If dark comedic horror isn’t your bag, Piranha won't convince you. However if you grock the drive-in B-Movie vibe, Piranha will rock. It's pure schlock, completely camp, and utterly trashy. It's a flick that knows it's cheesy, ridiculous, and pretty much there so we can see scantily clad teenagers get killed in horrible and bloody ways - and revels in that fact. It doesn't pretend to be something that it's not, focusing on doing what it does in as fun a way as possible.
Roger Corman would have loved it.
THE DVD -
Right out of the gate, Piranha is a vast improvement from the theatrical experience. They ditched that crappy, horrible headache inducing 3D effect - a huge plus - and pumped up the color palate. The underwater shots are murky, but that's probably on purpose. Otherwise, the skin tones (and there is a LOT of skin) are amazing, the sky is nice and blue, the blood is a solid red that doesn’t bleed (color, I mean) and the blacks are solid - this thing really looks good. Meanwhile the dolby digital 5.1 surround sound has a good balance. The music and effects don't overpower the dialogue.
THE EXTRAS -
Shockingly, we get a five part documentary, with each section running about 20 minuets, give or take. Yes, the behind-the-scenes documentary runs longer than the actual movie that it's documenting! It covers the cast and the story, the location, putting together the spring break sequences, the blood and gore effects and the CGI special effects. While it drags a bit here and there, this thing is really amazingly comprehensive!
Following that behemoth, we get an audio commentary from writer/director/producer
Alexandre Aja along with producers Gregory Lavasseur Alix Taylor. It's a tough commentary at first, since the accents can get thick at times, but once you get used to their way of talking, it's actually really informative. They, like me, were shocked that the full-on nudity of the underwater scenes made it past the MPAA without any cuts. They were also pissed at how the trailer totally spoiled the end of the movie - true.
Oh, speaking of trailers - where the hell is the Piranha trailer? We get a passel of the latest shit to come out of Hollywood: the crappy 4th Resident Evil flick, Game of Death (not the really awesome Bruce Lee one, but a really crappy generic Hollywood action flick), Sniper: Reloaded (another generic looking action flick. When Billy Zane is your biggest named star, your movie is in trouble!), Ticking Clock, and some lame flick about a guy named Matt losing his virginity on youtube (Christ, take me now!) that I couldn’t be bothered to sit all the way through. So we get ALL that, but no Piranha trailer? Where is the justice in the world?
THE BOTTOM LINE -
Let us be absolutely, perfectly clear on this matter: Piranha is a horrible, dreadful, movie. However it is, hands down, the BEST horrible, dreadful, movie to come along in a very long while.
So me and my 75 year old mother (who loves these movies as much as I do, god bless her totally awesome heart) I ponyed up my 18 bucks, grabbed my popcorn and checked my brain at the door. While I still got the headache from that damned 3D effect, I was pleasantly surprised by the actual quality of the film. So when I found the DVD at my local mom-n-pop video store for 5 bucks, I could hardly pass it up!
Right off the bat, you know that Piranha respects its roots. We open with an old man in a rowboat, all alone in the vast wilderness and fishing on an isolated lake. Since this is the Curtain Puller Monster Attack, you know that this cant end well - but the kicker? It's Richard Dreyfuss, singing "Show me the way to go home" and drinking Amity Beer. Now THATS class! Anyway, there's underwater earthquake, the lakebed splits wide open, and thousands and thousands of tiny eating machines swarm out of the yawning abyss. Poor ol' Matt Hooper is devoured within seconds and the prehistoric piranha swarm throughout the lake.
Meanwhile, at the other end of Lake Victoria, Spring Break has descended upon the sleepy little town. Thousands of randy teens swarm the streets, the beaches and the waterways in a giant orgy of wet t-shirt contests and loud rock music. Town Sherriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue, still looking hawt 25 years later) and Deputy Fallon (Ving Rhames, fulfilling our Doomed Black Man roll quota for the movie) are the overworked authority figures who have to keep a handle on this wild party. Meanwhile, teenage youngster and social outcast Jake Forester (decendant of Steven McQueen - who isn’t nearly as talented as his Grandpappy) has been shanghaied by Sherriff Mom to keep an eye on his younger siblings (who are charmingly played by Sage Ryan and Brooklyn Proulx).
But Jake gets a better offer from sleazy video producer Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell, who apparently managed to slide into Bad Movie World), who is shooting the most recent installment of the “Wild, Wild, Girls” video series. Derrick needs a local to take him to all the best hot-spots on the lake. So Jake and his not-exactly girlfriend Kelly (Played by the blindingly hawt Jessica Szohr) hop aboard the Love Boat for some up close and person water sports. Lil Bother and Sister get stranded on an island, the Love Boat gets stuck in the middle of the lake, Sherriff Mom does her best to close the beaches and ten thousand little eating machines are heading right for the most happening hot-spots on Lake Victoria for a little dining out. . . .
Let me be completely upfront here. Piranha does EXACTLY what is says on the tin: a retro horror movie throwback with plenty of young and nubile tits, bad acting, cheesy writing, and sprays of kayo syrup and red food coloring. If you are one of those movie snobs that demands a solid scripting or intelligent dialogue, you might as well move onto another review - there are no such things for you here.
That said, Piranha is actually a pretty fun movie - note that I didn’t say GOOD movie, but fun. It's respectful of the original Joe Dante flick yet manages to make its own stamp on the proceedings. Director Alexandre Aja (the man behind High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes) clearly has a love of the old movie - while he mostly used CGI fish instead of puppets like they did in 1978, Aja opted to use as much practical effects work as he possibly could. CGI is sexy, but using amputees for stuntmen and having a well rounded make-up team makes the film much stronger. The beach party massacre where several hundred nubile and hunk teens are swiftly nibbled to death is one of the best, most visceral, batshit frantic scenes I've witnessed in a very, very long time.
I said the acting was crap - that's not entirely true. Aside from the Dreyfuss cameo, we get a bit part from Christopher Lloyd doing is best Doc Brown as the town resident fish expert. The best part (kids and cameos aside) has to be Jerry O'Connell. His hedonistic, womanizing, drug-using scumbag gets all the best lines ("My . . . penis! They ate my penis!"), totally hams it up and generally has a great time with a completely sleazy roll. Brilliant! Now granted, the script isn’t exactly a very demanding mistress, but the film would have suffered if the Old Guard thespians didn’t play it to the hilt.
Despite Roger Corman apparently not having anything to do with the remake (aside, probably, from receiving a huge check for the rights), Aja embraces the Corman ethic - interspersed with the lovely flow of red, we get plenty, and I mean PLEANTY of tits and ass to go around. Seriously, we get some full frontal swimming bits that I swear would have sent the MPAA censors into a tizzy.
It's not a perfect movie, mind you. After the amazingly frantic Beach Carnage scene, the movie moves on to its climax - but the energy to carry the action isn’t there. With Kelly trapped inside a sinking Love Boat, Sherriff Mom and the oceanography expert on site to investigate the earthquake throw a rope over to the doomed vessel, before crawling over, talking about the dilemma WAAAAY too much and then sending everyone back to the speedboat all at once. While there's plenty of Piranha Chomping to go around (Including O'Connell's last hilarious words), there's no sense of tension like at the end of Jaws and the "Smile you sunuvabitch" moment. Its okay I guess - but based on what had come before, it should have really grabbed my balls and twisted!
And a couple of minor points both good and bad. I'm kind of shocked that they didn’t play the Authority Figure Insisting on Keeping the Beaches Open Because The Regatta is The Life Blood of the Town card. There's one token mention on how the spring break dollars keep the town alive during the off season, but there's no Mayor Vaughn to hammer the point home. Bravo for not following the Jaws connect-the-dots to the letter! On the other side of the coin- where the hell did Local Jerk Rival Love Interest go? The script seemed to be setting him up as a supreme jerk that gets his comeuppance at the feeding frenzy, but he just falls off the map 3/4th into the movie. It can be safely assumed he was eaten by the piranha but it's weird we never see his fate, considering all the other victims on that same boat get very graphic and obvious deaths.
At the end of the day, what you take away from Piranha will depend on how much you like these type of movies. If dark comedic horror isn’t your bag, Piranha won't convince you. However if you grock the drive-in B-Movie vibe, Piranha will rock. It's pure schlock, completely camp, and utterly trashy. It's a flick that knows it's cheesy, ridiculous, and pretty much there so we can see scantily clad teenagers get killed in horrible and bloody ways - and revels in that fact. It doesn't pretend to be something that it's not, focusing on doing what it does in as fun a way as possible.
Roger Corman would have loved it.
THE DVD -
Right out of the gate, Piranha is a vast improvement from the theatrical experience. They ditched that crappy, horrible headache inducing 3D effect - a huge plus - and pumped up the color palate. The underwater shots are murky, but that's probably on purpose. Otherwise, the skin tones (and there is a LOT of skin) are amazing, the sky is nice and blue, the blood is a solid red that doesn’t bleed (color, I mean) and the blacks are solid - this thing really looks good. Meanwhile the dolby digital 5.1 surround sound has a good balance. The music and effects don't overpower the dialogue.
THE EXTRAS -
Shockingly, we get a five part documentary, with each section running about 20 minuets, give or take. Yes, the behind-the-scenes documentary runs longer than the actual movie that it's documenting! It covers the cast and the story, the location, putting together the spring break sequences, the blood and gore effects and the CGI special effects. While it drags a bit here and there, this thing is really amazingly comprehensive!
Following that behemoth, we get an audio commentary from writer/director/producer
Alexandre Aja along with producers Gregory Lavasseur Alix Taylor. It's a tough commentary at first, since the accents can get thick at times, but once you get used to their way of talking, it's actually really informative. They, like me, were shocked that the full-on nudity of the underwater scenes made it past the MPAA without any cuts. They were also pissed at how the trailer totally spoiled the end of the movie - true.
Oh, speaking of trailers - where the hell is the Piranha trailer? We get a passel of the latest shit to come out of Hollywood: the crappy 4th Resident Evil flick, Game of Death (not the really awesome Bruce Lee one, but a really crappy generic Hollywood action flick), Sniper: Reloaded (another generic looking action flick. When Billy Zane is your biggest named star, your movie is in trouble!), Ticking Clock, and some lame flick about a guy named Matt losing his virginity on youtube (Christ, take me now!) that I couldn’t be bothered to sit all the way through. So we get ALL that, but no Piranha trailer? Where is the justice in the world?
THE BOTTOM LINE -
Let us be absolutely, perfectly clear on this matter: Piranha is a horrible, dreadful, movie. However it is, hands down, the BEST horrible, dreadful, movie to come along in a very long while.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
FIVE DEADLY VENOMS - I need no antidote!
While I remember Shaw Brothers kung fu flicks from my childhood on the local UHF station on Sunday afternoons, I was never really well versed in their flicks. Oh, sure - I know the name and I've seen some of the Big Name Flicks, but generally I couldn’t pick Run-Run or Rumie Shaw out of a lineup if my life depended on it. Fortunately Dragon Dynasty has my back, with a constant flow of Shaw flicks on DVD! This time, 1978's Wu du - otherwise known as the Five Deadly Venoms.
We open with a dying Kung Fu Master - who, shockingly was not assassinated by a rival clan - who tells Yang Tieh, his last remaining student, to seek out his five previous disciples, who are currently converging on a nearby city to find the clan's lost treasure. The Master fears that their Kung Fu - inspired by a different venomous animal - might be used for evil.
Unfortunately for Yang Tieh, there are two problems. 1) While he knows all five martial arts styles, he is master of none - each of these disciples are more than a match for him, and B) each of the venoms trained in masks, so he has no descriptions of the other disciples other than their fighting styles. And so much Kung Fu ensues as Yang Tieh uncovers that some of the students have indeed turned to evil. Can Yang Tieh combine the styles of all five Kung Fu disciplines to stop these thugs and to bring honor to his late master?
Lets be perfectly honest here - the story in a Kung Fu flick is much like a story in a porn flick, the most basic of frameworks to get from one Money Shot to another (or in this case, from one Kung Fu battle to another). We don't buy these things for the in-depth character development, the acting or the historically accurate settings. That said, Five Deadly Venoms must be praised for avoiding the whole "You killed my master, now I must take revenge on you after this training montage" chestnut. Sure the story is kind of goofy if you apply any thought to it, but at least its new territory!
The characters are pretty well done too - well, relatively speaking. They actually have personality beyond their designated Kung Fu styles. The villain of the piece, well he's not deep, but there's a bit more to him than just a mustache twirling heavy. The leads seem to have good chemistry and energy.
Yeah, yeah - who cares about all that? I'm just here for the Godzilla!
If all you care about are people kicking each other's ass, then good news! You're in luck - director Cheh Chang, mastermind behind a dozen of Kung Fu flicks like The Flag of Iron, Five Element Ninja, Invincible Shaolin, and Crippled Avengers - brings the goods in spades! There's blood a plenty, the setup for the individual styles pay off at the five-way battle at the end when it's a clusterfunk of arms and legs, the choreography doesn’t look staged at all and the fighters are silky smooth. While it's not Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, it's still very good, very entertaining stuff.
THE DVD -
While Hong Kong flicks are notoriously diabolical in their A/V quality, we get none of that here. It looks like Celestial Pictures either restored the heck out of the print or they found a pristine print in their basement - because this thing looks great. We get a widescreen anamorphic print where the colors are rich, the blacks are strong and there's little print damage that I could see. As far as audio goes, we get two mono tracks, the original Chinese (mandarin, I think) and the English dub that you'd remember from the UHF days. Cheesy? Sure - but nostalgically fun too.
THE EXTRAS -
All we get is a couple of trailers before the front end menus (you can't even access them from the main screen? What’s up with that!) and an audio commentary from long running martial arts movie expert Bey Logan. Bey’s commentary is up to his typically high standard - informative, entertaining and full of Kung Fu trivia. In short, he's always a pleasure to listen to.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
While the Shaw Brothers may not be the best Kung Fu studio in hong kong, their chopsockie is still some first rate stuff. While I think that Chinese Super Ninja is still their best work, Five Deadly Venoms is still some outstanding, first rate schlock!
We open with a dying Kung Fu Master - who, shockingly was not assassinated by a rival clan - who tells Yang Tieh, his last remaining student, to seek out his five previous disciples, who are currently converging on a nearby city to find the clan's lost treasure. The Master fears that their Kung Fu - inspired by a different venomous animal - might be used for evil.
Unfortunately for Yang Tieh, there are two problems. 1) While he knows all five martial arts styles, he is master of none - each of these disciples are more than a match for him, and B) each of the venoms trained in masks, so he has no descriptions of the other disciples other than their fighting styles. And so much Kung Fu ensues as Yang Tieh uncovers that some of the students have indeed turned to evil. Can Yang Tieh combine the styles of all five Kung Fu disciplines to stop these thugs and to bring honor to his late master?
Lets be perfectly honest here - the story in a Kung Fu flick is much like a story in a porn flick, the most basic of frameworks to get from one Money Shot to another (or in this case, from one Kung Fu battle to another). We don't buy these things for the in-depth character development, the acting or the historically accurate settings. That said, Five Deadly Venoms must be praised for avoiding the whole "You killed my master, now I must take revenge on you after this training montage" chestnut. Sure the story is kind of goofy if you apply any thought to it, but at least its new territory!
The characters are pretty well done too - well, relatively speaking. They actually have personality beyond their designated Kung Fu styles. The villain of the piece, well he's not deep, but there's a bit more to him than just a mustache twirling heavy. The leads seem to have good chemistry and energy.
Yeah, yeah - who cares about all that? I'm just here for the Godzilla!
If all you care about are people kicking each other's ass, then good news! You're in luck - director Cheh Chang, mastermind behind a dozen of Kung Fu flicks like The Flag of Iron, Five Element Ninja, Invincible Shaolin, and Crippled Avengers - brings the goods in spades! There's blood a plenty, the setup for the individual styles pay off at the five-way battle at the end when it's a clusterfunk of arms and legs, the choreography doesn’t look staged at all and the fighters are silky smooth. While it's not Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, it's still very good, very entertaining stuff.
THE DVD -
While Hong Kong flicks are notoriously diabolical in their A/V quality, we get none of that here. It looks like Celestial Pictures either restored the heck out of the print or they found a pristine print in their basement - because this thing looks great. We get a widescreen anamorphic print where the colors are rich, the blacks are strong and there's little print damage that I could see. As far as audio goes, we get two mono tracks, the original Chinese (mandarin, I think) and the English dub that you'd remember from the UHF days. Cheesy? Sure - but nostalgically fun too.
THE EXTRAS -
All we get is a couple of trailers before the front end menus (you can't even access them from the main screen? What’s up with that!) and an audio commentary from long running martial arts movie expert Bey Logan. Bey’s commentary is up to his typically high standard - informative, entertaining and full of Kung Fu trivia. In short, he's always a pleasure to listen to.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
While the Shaw Brothers may not be the best Kung Fu studio in hong kong, their chopsockie is still some first rate stuff. While I think that Chinese Super Ninja is still their best work, Five Deadly Venoms is still some outstanding, first rate schlock!
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