This is the industry that gave us such genre classics as Untold Story, AKA Human Pork Buns, and the intense graphic, hard to stomach atrocity exhibition Men Behind the Sun. It's also the industry that gave us horror-fantasy wonders like Chinese Ghost Story, kungfu cannibal films like We Are Going to Eat You, and more hopping vampire films than you can shake a lucky Buddhist charm at. The sheer diversity of Hong Kong horror makes it a somewhat overwhelming, but endlessly exciting world to explore.

It's not horror like we've come to know in the West. Though a foppish looking Dracula may swoop down from time to time in old kungfu horror films, Hong Kong tends to rely much more on an indigenous cast of ghouls. Hopping vampires are sort of the banner carriers of the genre, and no creature is more uniquely identified with Chinese horror than these bouncing demons. Comprising the rest of the parade are a curious cast of witches, devils, sexy ghosts, fetus eating freaks, and countless possessed people with eerie green lights shining on them.

Conventional Western monsters are few and far between. Werewolves and Frankenstein monsters may have defined the genre in the 1930s, but you'd be hard pressed to find them in Hong Kong. And when you have the rich folk horror tradition of China and surrounding countries like Thailand from which to draw, why would you waste time ripping off wolfmen and vampires who wear frilly Renaissance garb even though it's 1999?

The composition of Hong Kong horror is also unique. The films are almost always bizarre, often uneven blends of horror and gore, slapstick comedy, and much of the time, kungfu or sleazy softcore sex. All good stuff, obviously, but the Hong Kong films that actually make all the elements work together are rare. Your average Hong Kong horror film has a lot of "roll your eyes in boredom" sequences of people just sort of shouting and falling down. That's fine and all, but I can get it for free on Galavision. Of course, most American horror films are the same way. The real short-coming of Hong Kong's prolific but not entirely impressive horror industry is that horror simply works best outside the mainstream. Hong Kong has no independent cinema or music scene, so getting anything but big studio crap is more or less impossible. The films may be influenced by Evil Dead, but it will never make a movie like Evil Dead.

Which is too bad, because the whacked creativity and willingness to skip happily down even the most tasteless of paths is present in spades. If someone in Hong Kong actually had the ability to work outside the studio system, the potential for an insanely great, totally wild horror film is staggering. Unfortunately, that's not happening any time soon. But then again, it's probably having to dance around studio censors and government madmen that has resulted in Hong Kong horror making up for outright gore with totally mind blowing weirdness. In the end, I eat my own words and go, "Why should Hong Kong horror be anything like Western horror? Western horror is already like Western horror." Thus, Hong Kong has a whole new batch of stuff ready to offer up people who have already seen all the Fulci and Deodato there is.

I can count the number of Night of the Living Dead type zombie films from Hong Kong on, well, one finger. The United States, Japan, and especially Italy embraced the shuffling flesh-eaters, but even in Hong Kong films that make use of the term "zombie," one rarely encounters anything resembling the ghouls that have been more or less defined by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

Bio-Zombie is the one of the only Romero-style zombie flicks to come from Hong Kong. The result is curious, to say the least. For the most part, it's uneven but definitely enjoyable. Although, predictably enough, it fails to effectively blend its horror with its slapstick comedy, the overall result is an energetic, bloody zombie romp that should satisfy fans of the genre.

The goofy, charismatic Jordan Chan, who made a name for himself in the popular Young And Dangerous movies I love to make fun of (mainly because they were the catalyst for the whole annoying "young triad guy" movie trend), stars as a wannabe street tough named Woody Invincible, which is also a pretty good porno name. My friend Stacey tells me you can derive your porno name by taking the name of your last pet and the name of the street you grew up on. Her name was "Galaxy Green," which pretty much rocks. Mine, on the other hand, was "Stumpy Meadows." No one but me would ever rent a porno movie starring Stumpy Meadows. I wish my name had been Woody Invincible instead.

Woody Invincible and his pal, Bee, work at a video game store in a mall that looks exactly like this mall down in Chinatown, only bigger. They spend their days goofing off, crossing the security guard, and flirting with a duo of mind blowingly cute flirty girls. Sometimes, they take time off from this busy schedule to bug the older wannabe gangster guy and his attractive wife. And there's also a nerdy guy who works in a sushi restaurant and lusts after one of the girls, which you can't blame him for.

A botched underworld transfer results in an experimental virus leaking out and turning people into gooey, flesh-craving zombies. The zombie make-up is simple but effective. It's higher class than painting people blue a la Dawn of the Dead but is nowhere close to the master zombie make-up of films like Zombie and Day of the Dead. Still, it's not bad stuff for their first time out. In a turn of events that reflects a definite Dawn of the Dead influence without any of the harsh social commentary, the zombies start wandering around the mall looking for victims. Woody Invincible and his small band of cohorts are the only ones who can combat the growing legions of the living dead. Why? Because they are the main characters.

When the zombies show up the action is fast and bloody, with all the requisite flesh eating you expect from a zombie movie. We're not talking Lucio Fulci buckets of blood here, but heads do roll and necks are chomped. Woody Invincible and a girl named Ruby face off with the living dead in the parking garage as they attempt to escape, only to discover that things are a lot worse than they thought.

The final scene of the two battered youths pulling into a deserted gas station and seeing emergency bulletins on the television is superbly apocalyptic, and a fitting end to any type of zombie movie. We can't win, after all. Have the humans ever won in a zombie movie? And who would want them to?

Bio-Zombie has youth, good looks, fast pacing, and inventive direction on its side. It's slick looking and technically well made, playing itself out like a Resident Evil video game. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect. The movie's first forty minutes lag as we are subjected to a long string of shouting and slapstick that isn't very engaging. Still, it's a lot less boring than Fulci's boring moments. At least something is going on.

That's really the only major drawback. More zombie action sooner would have made this good movie great, but as it is, I'm hard pressed to complain about what I got. Ultimately, the weird humor of the film makes the bleak ending that much more effective. And some of the moments are pretty interesting, if not out of place. When Woody Invincible braves the hordes of zombies to try and reach a telephone, the movie goes into full Resident Evil mode, with little flashing icons and "Reload!" messages popping up on the screen. Like I said, sort of out of place, but interesting. John Woo did the same thing in his one foray into horror-comedy, To Hell with the Devil, in which a battle between heroes and demons takes on the scoreboard of an Atari game.

And that video game was probably the biggest influence on this film. Once the zombies start showing up, it really gets to be a lot of fun. No heavy political messages or anything a la George Romero, but plenty of quality zombie action. Jordan Chan would seem an unlikely lead character, but once the shit hits the fan, he starts looking cooler and cooler.

As an aside, this is probably the only zombie movie where you'll see a group of soccer playing zombies demand human sushi from a zombie suchi chef.

So Hong Kong's first real attempt at "classic" zombie films is not perfect, but it's still quite a bit of fun. I hope they give it another shot sometime soon, as a sequel to this movie could be really cool. Jordan Chan and sexy sidekick wandering through a degenerating Hong Kong that is filling up with mindless zombies.

Hmmm. Seems like there might be more to the social commentary side of this movie than I first thought.

Any number of things about his work annoy me, but first and foremost is his ability to make even the most dynamic stars completely uninteresting and dull. I mean, this is the guy who had Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Lo, and Yuen Wah together in the same film (Police Story III: Supercop) and made them all incredibly disappointing. Oh sure, Michelle did the stunt where she jumped the motorcycle onto the moving train, and that was cool and all, but ten seconds out of a ninety minute film hardly justifies the tedium. What kind of fool puts Jackie Chan and Yuen Wah in the same film and doesn't think to stage a fight scene? Or Jackie Chan and Ken Lo? Or Jackie Chan and anybody? He might as well not have even been in that movie.

Tong went on to make Rumble in the Bronx, one of the most ludicrous of all Jackie's films, and redeemed himself slightly with the above-average Police Story IV: First Strike. But then he made Mr. Magoo, and it was all over.

China Strike Force was supposed to be his big comeback film, his grand return to Hong Kong, and at least financially, he was successful. The movie made a lot of cash at a time when Hong Kong films are still recovering from an industry collapse that sent everyone reeling for a couple years. China Strike Force had a lot going for it. First, there was Aaron Kwok. For years, Kwok was plagued by his pretty-boy teen idol image. It held him back and kept him from ever being taken seriously as a legitimate action star. Now he's a few years older, the wrinkles are starting to show here and there, and while he may still be a handsome young lad, he starting to get the age and character that will enable him to finally break through. A few more pounds and a few more scars and he'll be set to join the Hong Kong action set without looking out of place among the traditionally grizzled veterans.

And then there's Norika Fujiwara. You'd have to try real hard to find more of a knock-out than this woman. She is something else, to be sure. She was a model and a television actress in Japan before getting her big break in this film, and in getting her break, we've all received a break as well because she's drop dead gorgeous and not nearly as untalented as most other models-turned-actress.

Throw in direct-to-video American action star Mark Dacascos, and you have one of the best-looking casts around. I've always thought Dacascos deserved to be a bigger star than he was. Why is a guy who moves this well, who can act at least halfway decent, and who is a striking guy to boot, going direct to video while guys like Seagal still plague our nation's theaters? It's unlikely at this point he'll ever catch his break. Instead he'll be doomed to a life not unlike Don "The Dragon" Wilson, which is at least a good doom. I wish I could be doomed to be pretty damn rich after making an endless string of low-budget action films. Maybe Dacascos will catch on overseas, but it seems unlikely.

The movie itself has a pretty typical plot. Dacascos plays your run-of-the-mill young gangster guy who is intent on taking over the business, does not care for the tradition of honor, etc etc etc. These guys have been in about every gangster movie ever made in any country, but some old fart always trusts them, only to get shot in the back when the time is right.

Aaron Kwok plays Darren, a hotshot cop who is always annoying his superiors. He has a partner who barely does enough memorable stuff to result in anyone remembering his name. He's only there to die, as in one of the most contrived scenes ever, even for an action film, the movie takes a break from all sorts of shooting and jumping about to feature a scene where Darren and his partner go out for dinner, and Darren asks his partner "So your wedding is soon?" They might as well flash up a big red "This guy is going to die!!!" subtitle. Everyone should know by now that in a cop film, the cop who is retiring, getting married, about to have a baby, or just bought a boat is always going to get wasted. It's a time-honored tradition. Handled properly, it can be kind of funny. Handled without any finesse whatsoever, as it is here, it's just plain annoying. As if that wasn't predictable enough, he's also marrying the chief's daughter.

While the cops pal around, we learn that Dacascos plans to increase his underworld power by selling drugs. As is par for the course in this type of movie, the aging gangster who took Dacascos under his wing hates drugs and vows that his organization will never be a party to the selling of such foul goods. Extortion, murder, prostitution, slavery, gun smuggling -- these are all noble ventures, but drug peddling is right out.

This news irks Dacascos' partner in America, played by hip hop star Coolio, who is apparently not a fan of Weird Al Yankovich. Coolio plays your very stereotypical jive-talkin', cigar-smokin' hustler who's only task in this movie is to say "Holy shit!" and "Cuz" or however you spell the slang for "cousin." He's pretty good at doing that, and luckily nothing else is demanded of him. To no one's surprise but the old guy, Dacascos plots with Coolio, who's character is actually named Coolio, to off the old man and take the business over.

Also thrown into the mix is Norika, who is an undercover Interpol agent trying to get info on the old man's operation. Of course, no one knows she works for Interpol, as that is the general idea behind being undercover, but even someone who is still surprised by the plot twists in a Girls Gone Wild video can tell from her first scene that she's an undercover cop. One thing I like about a film like China Strike Force is that I don't have to worry about spoiling it for anyone. It's all so plodding and obvious that it's impossible to ruin any surprises.

An underworld assassination at a big fashion show gives the film an excuse for two important things: a lot of sexy women parading about in skimpy panties, and the film's first action sequence, in which Aaron Kwok chases the assassin through the streets of Hong Kong using a variety of vehicles. At one point, Stanley Tong even has the gall to completely rip off the "moving motorcycle" stunt from Supercop, though he manages to screw it up more this time around by using a lot of wires to make the whole think look goofy instead of cool.

The first action scene sets the stage for what you can expect from the rest of the movie: something just isn't right about it. Sure, there is a lot going on, but it just doesn't click. The wires are employed so they can go "over the top," but it winds up looking silly. In a fantasy film I don't mind wires and flying. In a reality-based action film, I think they look out of place but can still be used with great effect. In this, however, they are used very clumsily, and they detract greatly from the potential impact of what could have been cool fights and action sequences.

Actually, now that I rewatch it, the first action sequence is the best one in the movie. It almost, but not quite, achieves a flow and, if nothing else is kind of cool because the assassin guy gets run over, hit by cars, punched, kicked, thrown off moving trucks, and even jumps off a giant bridge -- yet he still shows up later in the movie only to get killed in the most boring, mundane ways. Way to give us a potentially cool character then treat him like an afterthought. Thanks, Stanley.

But far more than wires and missed character opportunities is the glaring problem that has plagued Stanley Tong's films since he first stepped behind the camera. He has no sense of pacing or rhythm. Tong started his career as a stuntman, and while we all know he can dream up and even perform some cool stunts, being able to properly film them is something else entirely. Tong's action sequences never find a groove. They always feel disjointed and, as a result, awkward and sloppy. Part of the problem here is that he's trying to make a kungfu action film with a cast that doesn't have much kungfu skill, but even that can't wash away Tong's own lack of directorial skill since he brought the same plodding sense of confusion to action scenes involving Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, both proven commodities.

What it boils down to, then, is that Stanley Tong just isn't a very good director. Or rather, he's an astoundingly mediocre director who makes astoundingly mediocre movies.

Anyway, lots of action film cliches follow. Rather than pay the assassin, who seems damn near indestructible and would seem to be a worthwhile investment, Coolio just kills the guy. Mark Dacascos does indeed kill the old guy and start selling drugs. Aaron Kwok's partner does indeed die tragically. Aaron falls for Norika and, in an attempt to give us more T&A, has a pointless, out-of-place daydream about massaging her thigh. I'm all for T&A, male and female, but come on. Put a little effort into working it into the film. I mean, they had the T&A scene where Norika infiltrates Dacascos' and Coolio's gang by showing up in a tiny string bikini then stripping down to nothing to prove she isn't wearing any wires or anything. That was an okay excuse for some T&A.

Eventually, Aaron and Norika close in on Coolio and Dacascos so they can have the big action blow-out. Just as Stanley Tong can't direct an action scene, so too does he always blow the finale of his films. Supercop has both Yuen Wah and Ken Lo for Jackie and/or Michelle to fight, so they knock off both those guys in about one second in very offhand manners, and leave Jackie to face... an old guy. Police Story IV gives us an underwater fight scene -- funny but fairly disappointing - before having Jackie slip around with a fake shark. Then of course Rumble in the Bronx completely forgot to even have a finale, so we just get Jackie Chan driving a hovercraft to a final showdown with... another old guy. This is worse than when the big final scene in Game of Death ended up being Bruce Lee versus... Gig Young. At least Gig Young was middle aged.

This time around, Tong tries to deliver an action-packed finale, but once again his own lack of skill as a director trips him and everyone else up. Mark Dacascos is a genuine martial arts bad-ass, or at least he can pull it off wonderfully on screen. So God forbid we include him in the final fight scene. No, let's kill him off in the usual goofy, offhand manner. Let's crush him with a purple pimp car dangling from a helicopter. Then let's have a huge kungfu fight between the three people with the least amount of kungfu skill. Aaron Kwok versus Mark Dacascos could have been pulled off, and with a different director, it might have even looked good. Coolio versus Aaron Kwok is about the stupidest damn fight scene I've seen in a long time, and that includes the fight scene in The Matrix where that woman jumps up in the air and strikes the most absurd looking "pouncing chicken" stance I've ever seen while she hovers and the camera pans around her.

Since Coolio and Norika are no martial artists, and Aaron Kwok is a passable on-screen kungfu star at best, that means we have to have a big gimmick to make up for the lack of interesting fight choreography. Tong's answer? Have the whole fight scene take place on a teetering pane of glass dangling from a crane hundreds of feet up in the air.

It might sound exciting at first, but think about it, and let me use this pro wrestling analogy. Many years ago, WCW had a pay-per-view match between the dull Dustin Rhodes and the even duller Blacktop Bully. The gimmick of the match was that the whole thing was going to take place on the trailer of a moving truck. It might have sounded cool at first, but the end result was two guys moving very, very slowly while trying to keep their balance as the truck barrelled down various lonely highways at speeds in excess of ten miles an hour.

This finale is that wrestling match. Norika, Coolio, and Aaron all scoot about very gingerly while trying not to fall off the glass. From time to time, one person or another will dangle off the edge or try to kick someone. And then Coolio finally falls, but only after one false change of heart. You know, where the villain is about to die, begs the hero to save him, and once being saved, immediately reverts back to his dastardly ways. Heroes always fall for that shit. I mean, before you flew around with the purple pimpmobile dangling from a helicopter, he was selling crack to nine-year-old kids. Now all of a sudden he's maybe not that bad a guy? They only do this so the hero can kill the villain without looking like a murderer.

How many action movies end with the hero refusing to kill the villain, only to have the villain suddenly produce some weapon, thus justifying the hero turning around and offing the guy? It's a weak-ass cop-out. People want their bloodlust satisfied, but you also can't just have a hero who hauls off and shoots people after beating their ass. In the end, Coolio falls off the thing and Norika and Aaron fall in love for no real reason. They were only together about two days, and most of that time was spent being hoisted around on wires and pretending Coolio knew kungfu.

The big problem with China Strike Force is how amazingly average it is. It's impossible to completely blast it and say it's awful, because it's not. At the same time, it sure as hell ain't a good movie. It's just... bland. Poorly directed. Awkwardly paced. Horribly choreographed. Completely cliche. In the hands of Gordon Chan or Teddy Chan, this could have been a good movie. In the hands of someone as over-rated and incompetent as Stanley Tong, the movie never manages to rise above a mundane level. It takes a talented director to elevate poorly written action film nonsense into something memorable, and Tong does not have the tools for the task. As such, China Strike Force remains an unsatisfying, though not completely unentertaining, failure.

Given the uninspired direction, the film's sundry flaws become impossible to ignore. The English language dialogue, of which there is quite a lot, is completely ludicrous. Who wrote this crap? I mean, it's English. I recognize the words, but it doesn't make any sense. It sounds like English that was spit out of one of those online translation things, that can get the vocabulary but fails utterly to comprehend nuances and grammatical rules. It also doesn't help that the dialogue was recorded at a level barely audible to dogs and mice, let alone humans. Whenever a piece of shit hip hop song plays -- and they play often -- suddenly it's like you have the volume on eleven, but when they go back to speaking, everything is silent again. Thus watching this movie is a constant battle with the volume control. I feel bad for people who don't have a remote control, because they're going to be running over to the television every ten seconds to readjust. I guess they mixed the dialogue so low because they knew what crap it was.

Speaking of English, what the hell is up with Mark Dacascos' character? How are you going to become the lord of a vast Chinese criminal underworld if you don't speak a lick of Chinese? Even people of Chinese ancestry I know who grew up in America know at least a few words in their grandparents' tongue, but this guy doesn't know a single phrase. Surely the Chinese triads would not be overly accommodating of a new boss who murders other bosses, can't speak any Chinese, and brings Coolio along for the ride.

The film's other big short-coming is, of course, the pacing. Stanley Tong can do no right when it comes to figuring out how to pace and stage an action sequence. He cuts when he should stay still, he shoots in close all the time so we can't see anything. He never finds a rhythm or a flow for the action. He loves to go over the top, but only in ways that are ludicrous rather than breathtaking. The many action scenes in this film range from pedestrian to lumbering. You spend the whole scene waiting for something to be done well, then all of a sudden it's over, leaving you with an empty feeling and no sense of satisfaction.

And then sometimes it's all too ludicrous, even for a Hong Kong action film. When Dacascos and Coolio are down at the docks watching the boys unpack a Ferarri or one of them other fancy-ass sports cars, Aaron shows up and spoils the fun, leading to a completely unbelievable scene where Dacascos takes off in the sportscar and Aaron luckily happens upon a passing truck full of forumla one racecars which, despite the highly explosive nature, apparently ship fully gassed and ready to go. Of course, this all happens after the part in that first fight/chase scene where he rides a motorcycle up the flat vertical surface of a delivery truck's rear door. I think he repeats that nifty trick at the end of the movie as well.

The finale, which is by and large a ripoff of the helicopter finale from Tong's earlier Supercop, is hardly the pay-off I was hoping for. It's not cool or original. It's just, well, stupid. From the whole "car dangling from the helicopter" bit, to Mark Dacascos being killed without ever facing off against the heroes, to the completely disjointed and uninteresting "fight" between Norika, Aaron, and Coolio, Tong certainly tries a lot of stuff, but none of it works. To add insult to injury, Tong's reliance on the most obvious and awkward of wire stunts makes it impossible to enjoy even on a visceral level. On the plus side, however, Norika looks great in her leathery fightin' outfit.

The acting is passable, but the roles aren't very demanding. Aaron Kwok is coming along, and as I said before, in a few more years I think he'll be ready to shine, but right now he's not quite there physically or in his acting skill. Norika is basically there to look good and kick some ass, and she is great at both. When she has to act, it's only the shallowest of deals. Even a paperdoll could pull it off, so no complaints. Dacascos is alright, but if he's going to be a Chinese gangster, even one from America, he should have learned to fake his way through some Cantonese. Coolio is playing a stereotype, and you have to be really untalented not to pull that off. Everyone else is pretty forgettable. Aaron's partner is so bland that when he dies, you hardly notice. His fiance is every bit his match in blandness, so that even though she loses her future husband and her father, it really doesn't matter all that much. The movie punctuates this by completely blowing her off at the end in exchange for a kissing scene between Norika and Aaron, which of course comes out of nowhere.

The only thing memorable about this film is how good it might have been if someone else had directed. As has always been the case, Stanley Tong was given all the pieces for a great film and just couldn't make them fit together. I should have come away beaming and saying "That was great!!!" Instead, I walked away slowly thinking, "Well, that was alright... I guess." Awkward drama, awkward comedy, and awkward action sequences are tenuously strung together in what proves to be a very average film. Sure, it's better than watching a Mario Van Peebles film, but with guys like Teddy Chan and Johnny To raising the bar and giving us enjoyable, well-made action films, Stanley Tong's lack of skill becomes even more glaring. He has no style, and he has no substance. In the end, China Strike Force, like most of his movies, is a bland and somewhat tedious exercise in paint-by-numbers film-making on the level of some of your better direct-to-video action films. I don't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever feel the need to watch it again.

The group of men got that nickname from their first film together, The Five Deadly Venoms ("A film as brutal as nature itself!"). The Venoms were played by Kuo Chui, Lo Meng, Lu Feng, Sun Chien, and Wei Pei, with Chiang Sheng playing the sixth Venom. For whatever reason, Wei Pei, who portrayed the Snake Venom, would not go on to be one of the Venoms. Instead, he went over to Golden Harvest to work with John Woo in films like Last Hurrah for Chivalry.

Crippled Avengers is one of my all-time favorite kungfu flicks. It is brutal, action-packed, and totally over-the-top -- basically, it's everything we've come to expect from a Chang Cheh film, and then some. The Venoms were easily the most energetic and talented group of guys the Shaw Studios ever got a hold of. With but a couple exceptions, almost everything they touched turned gold. This one, however, is pure platinum, like Ric Flair's hair.

The film opens with a group of thugs searching for a guy named Tu Tin-to. They visit his estate and, upon discovering he is away, make one of those leaps of logic that only happen in kungfu films. "He's not here? Well, then let's cut off his wife's legs and his son's arms!"

When Tu (Chen Kuan-tai) returns, he is furious. His wife dies from loss of blood, but his son survives, and Tu gets him a pair of iron arms that can smash through anything and shoot darts! He grows up to become Lu Feng, the Venom who was almost always stuck being the rotten one.

I don't know how he was before the incident, but after it, Tu is a ruthless killer. He rounds up the sons of all the people responsible for his wife's murder and son's crippling, and lets his son smash them up with his new iron arms. Before too long, Tu and Son have the town in an iron grip of fear.

Enter the other Venoms. Kuo Chui plays a wanderer who is blinded by Tu's son. Lo Meng is an uppity blacksmith who doesn't like them bullying people. For that, he is made deaf and dumb. Sun Chien is some guy or other. I don't know what the hell he was hanging around for, but they tear his legs off. Finally, Chiang Sheng, known to fans as "Cutey Pie," plays a wandering kungfu hero who tries to stand up for the others and, as a result, has a metal band tightened around his head until he goes insane.

Wouldn't it be easier just to kill your enemies? Well sure, but a movie called Dead Avengers would be a whole different genre. Anyway, the crippled guys hobble off together in defeat, hoping that they can find Chiang Sheng's old kungfu master and get some advice. The shot of the four of them limping and rolling out of town is both moving and ludicrous.

Chiang Sheng's teacher is located and trains each man in a form of kungfu that makes the most of his remaining appendages or senses. Sun Chien, who has always been a spectacular kicker, gets some iron legs that work as good as real ones. Lo Meng learns, I don't know, deaf guy kungfu. Kuo Chui learns blind boxing. Chiang Sheng giggles and flips around a lot. As always, he's the comic relief, or as comically relieving as you can be in a movie about men seeking vengeance against those who ripped their limbs off.

Armed with their new skills and iron legs, they go off to kill Tu and his evil son. You should be thankful that I have made it this far without any jokes pertaining to Lu Feng being unarmed in most of his fights.

Naturally, they take time out to kill Shaw Studio's busiest villain, Wang Lung-wei. This guy has died more times than I can count. He's been killed by the best in the business, time and time again.

The fighting is absolutely brilliant throughout, and they turn it up several more notches for the totally breath-taking finale. The Venoms hold nothing back, and Chen Kuan-tai proves every bit their equal. Once again the kungfu films teach us that if villains gang up on someone, it's evil, but if heroes do it, well, that's what the other guy gets for being evil. Sun Chien gets to kick through people's chest, and everyone turns in absolutely stellar performances. I was out of breath and totally exhausted by the time the final punch and kick was thrown.

Don't get this film confused with Two Crippled Heroes ("No fighting on my monkey's grave!") or Crippled Masters. Entirely different things there. Those films are okay, and the guys in them really are armless and legless, but as far as films go, no one can deliver entertainment like the Venoms, and this is one of their best.

Has any other genre stood up for the rights of the handicapped to be ass-kickers the way kungfu films have? I don't think so. They are brimming with one-armed, no-legged, blind bad-asses. You don't get that shit in a romantic comedy. Kungfu stands up for the rights of the everyday person, and teaches us all that someday, someone is going to step off that "short bus" you dickheads made fun of in high school and kick your ass!

Still, I've always dreamed of that daring life, though I've also dreamed of being a fireman, an astronaut, and a guy with the power to decide who lives and who dies. If I can't be a spy, then I'll do the next best thing, which is sit around in my underwear eating Bagel Bites and watching spy movies.

It's probably no shock to anyone that I consider the spy films of the 1960s to be vastly superior to the big budget special effects blockbusters that litter the genre these days. Though often quite absurd, the spy films of the 1960s placed a great deal of value on cool characters, even if they were one-dimensional, and cool situations. There was an obvious swankness about everything that could never be recaptured these days, especially since the focus is on computer generated special effects far more than it is on characters and sassiness. I try and try to get excited, but nothing about Tom Cruise goofing off in front a blue screen interests me. I like my spy films to look real despite their more fantastic elements, and I also like them to have at least one assassin who wears a fez and sunglasses.

It's the attitude, I suppose, that really sets the films apart. The spy films of the 1960s wanted to be action packed, but they also wanted to be fun. There were very few spy films that took themselves too seriously. Even the big-budget Bond films always maintained a sense of humor. As the spy film moved into the nineties and now the naughties, not only did the focus shift from cool characters and situations to big computer effects, but the sense of fun fell by the wayside. You watch those Mission: Impossible movies, and they are so grim. Everyone takes themselves so seriously as if they are creating some earth-shattering work of art or a cure for cancer. Those guys from the 1960s may have been one-dimensional, but at least they had that one dimension and it was somewhat engaging. The guys now are so dull and frowny. Even James Bond has become little more than a dry prop wandering from one special effects scene to the next. Where's the warmth? Where's the soul?

When Hong Kong decided to get in on the neo spy bandwagon, I figured if nothing else they would return some of the over-the-top fun and action to the genre since they wouldn't be able to afford to rely on expensive and uninteresting computer effects like most of their American counterparts. And hell, Downtown Torpedoes also had a good director in Teddy Chan (Purple Storm, Accidental Spy), and a great ensemble cast featuring three of my favorites -- Jordan Chan (Biozombie), Takeshi Kaneshiro (Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and Fallen Angels), and the always enchanting Charlie Yeung (Fallen Angels and Tsui Hark's The Lovers). After all was said and done, I was left with a big ol' satisfied smile on my face.

Cash (Jordan Chan), Jackal (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Ken Wong (Titan) are three members of a slick industrial espionage team specializing in breaking into high-security complexes to swipe important plans, documents, and sensitive information. The opening scene will fulfill your expectations for such a set-up: they go about everything in a really slick and needlessly complex fashion. It makes for good cinema if nothing else. Since real industrial espionage is mostly guys with fake IDs scamming their way into dingy little rooms crammed with wires and computers or rooting through the dumpster outside AT&T in hopes of stumbling across some secret document that was accidentally tossed into the trash, I suppose I'll go for watching sexy young lads repel down glass buildings and make by the seat of the pants escapes involving tethers and crossbows and things like that.

The team is commanded by the enigmatic Sam, who they have never met. After pulling off a wild heist to open the film, the three filed operatives are approached by Stanley (Alex Fong of the Angel films starring Moon Lee and Lifeline directed by Johnny To), a member of Hong Kong's secret service. He's not only uncovered proof of their various crimes, he's also uncovered the identity of Sam (Charlie Yeung) and unites them all while making a proposition. Seems a rogue British MI5 agent plans to steal some perfect counterfeiting plates and use them to either flood the market with phoney British currency or simply sell them off to the highest bidder. The big problem is that while the Hong Kong police know everything, they can prove nothing, and no one in the British government seems to be taking them very seriously.

Stanley wants the crew to break into MI5's headquarters in Hong Kong, steal the plates, and turn them over to the Hong Kong government before the rogue agent can smuggle them out of the building himself. Since no one else believes the story, it's likely the full force of MI5 (for the record, that's the British secret service, of which James Bond was, of course, a member) will come down on them during their attempt. Obviously, no one is very interested in taking such a seemingly hopeless job, but Stanley offers them further encouragement by freezing all their assets and assuring them poverty and homelessness awaits them even if a life sentence in prison is somehow avoided. Having no other choice, they take the job.

Cash reckons they'll need extra help if they are going to break into MI5's headquarters, so he contacts his closest friend, deaf and deft young computer hacker Phoenix (Theresa Lee). The computer hacking is pretty silly, though no worse than what passes for computer hacking in most movies. I mean, it's hard to write a good hacking scene, because hacking consists of some out-of-shape computer nerd sitting in their attic downing Mountain Dew and Doritos. Not exactly scintillating to watch unless you are some weird fetishist. So movies usually go way over the top and throw in all sorts of whirling computer animation and techno music to fool us into thinking it's all very exciting.

At least there are no 3D animated mazes and flaming skulls and stuff like that in this movie. It's not the presentation of the hacking that is the problem, it's just the way they go about it. For instance, Phoenix sets her computer up to "hack into MI5," and then just leaves it running. After a while they've hacked into MI5. The hell? Is that a function on that Microsoft Office I've been hearing so much about? The scheme the concoct is suitably ludicrous and involves repelling, hang-gliding, jet skis, mini-subs, and boats. Probably motorcycles too at some point. It's so wildly over-the-top that I lost track of things.

They manage to pull the heist off, but not without paying a high price. After exchanging the plates for all the evidence against them, Cash, Jackal, and crew find themselves the victims of a double cross. Turns out Stanley was crooked all along, and what they just did was rob perfectly loyal, straight-laced MI5 agents. Oopsie! To make matters worse, The suitcase that supposedly contained the evidence actually contained a bomb. Cash catches on just in the nick of time, and they all manage to leap to safety -- almost. Phoenix catches the full concussion of the blast. To make matters even more complicated, since when it rains it pours, they find out that Sam is not even actually Sam. She's an undercover agent who was working with Stanley because she thought what he said about the rogue MI5 agent was true. And finally, Cash blames Titan for the whole thing since Titan has a drinking problem that causes him to screw up from time to time.

So there you have it -- everyone who is still alive distrusts everyone else. Stanley has the plates AND managed to turn all the evidence against the crew over to MI5. So now they have MI5 and the occasional Stanley-hired hitmen after them. Not a good day. Maybe they should have stuck to rifling through dumpsters and figuring out how to hack the security on the demo version of Adobe Premiere.

Cash and Jackal agree to work with Sam in order to track down Stanley and recover the plates before he has a chance to sell them. They discover he intends to head to Budapest to meet the buyer, but before they can catch him, they are caught themselves by MI5. Needless to say, MI5 doesn't exactly believe their wild stories. With Titan's help, they manage an escape and then pull what I like to call a "Human Tornado."

See, MI5 completely shuts down all avenues out of the country. Every airport, every seaport, every train, every highway. In one scene we have Sam, Cash, and Titan trying to figure out how they're going to get to Budapest and find Stanley. Then in the next scene, there they are in Budapest with no explanation whatsoever.

It's called a Human Tornado because Rudy Ray Moore pioneered the amazing feat in his film Dolemite II: The Human Tornado. In that film, Dolemite and his men have a little shoot-out with some racist small-town sheriff and his boys, then run off into a field making ass jokes and saying, "How we gonna get to LA?" Then the next scene is them getting out of a car and going, "Well, here we are in LA." In some prints of the film, there is actually a scene where they get a ride from some stereotypical gay guy, but that's missing from just about every print in circulation now, so for all intents and purposes Dolemite and his men either teleport or run all the way from North Carolina to Los Angeles.

Likewise, Downtown Torpedoes establishes that there is no way our heroes will escape the country, only to cut to a scene where not only have they gotten out of the country, they've also managed to get all the way to Hungary despite their frozen bank accounts and total lack of money. And not only that, they've also managed with relative ease to locate Stanley. Ultimately, it's no worse than the gaping holes that pepper most any spy films, and at least there aren't twenty minutes of people peeling off various false faces and crap like that. Still, it's a pretty major hole in the plot, and even the casual viewer will find it rather annoying and sloppy.

Of course, I like to say they were simply picked up by the hand of Zeus. In classical Greek theater, on more than one occasion, the playwrite would write himself into a corner and end up with the hero in a predicament from which there is no escape whatsoever. In these instances, they would simply hoist the actor up on some wires and claim that Zeus had intervened and lifted the hero to safety. So don't think of Downtown Torpedoes plot hole as crummy writing; think of it as an homage to classical Greek drama.

There's also the little problem with the fact that during their escape from MI5 headquarters, they have to take the chief hostage. When they discover Stanley is in Budapest, they proclaim it loudly right in front of him. There is absolutely no way he didn't know Stanley and Jackal's crew were all heading toward Budapest. Yet not a single MI5 agent, not a single Interpol agent, not a single cop bothers to follow up on this. Instead, for the sake of the movie, they leave the whole thing up to Jackal, Cash, and Sam. It obviously makes no sense whatsoever.

In the end, Downtown Torpedoes is energetic and engaging enough to make it easy to overlook laziness in the writing department. In many ways, it's reminiscent of early 1980s Hong Kong action films. They were very often full of lame characters and mile-wide plot holes, but they were kinetic and action-packed and fun enough to make you not care. They also managed to refrain from insulting the viewer's intelligence, probably because, as I said earlier, they treasured the sense of fun rather than trying to come across as something overly important or serious. Downtown Torpedoes is less fun and more serious than wacky films like the Aces Go Places series, but it manages to conjure up the same exhilaration and thrill. Yeah, the movie is flawed, but what the hell? It's still one heck of a ride.

Downtown Torpedoes came out in 1997, a year when Hong Kong films really started to hit rock bottom. It was an historical year politically, of course, with the handover to China. Kind of funny and not unintentional that this movie, then, is about a treasure being stolen from England and handed over to a crooked Chinese official. Read into that what you will. Anxiety, preoccupation with other affairs, increased Triad exploitation behind the scenes -- there were dozens of reasons the Hong Kong film industry fell apart. While Downtown Torpedoes may not be one of the best movies to ever come out of Hong Kong, it's certainly a good, fun film, and far better than the vast majority of films that came out during the "dark years" between 1995 and 2000, a period from which we're only just now seeming to emerge.

The direction is tight, but I've come to expect that from Teddy Chan. He manages to maintain a tense, fast pace and balance drama, comedy, and action very well, certainly better than they are balanced in the bulk of Hong Kong films. Movies from that city nation traditionally love to mix and match moods and genres, and it's rarely done with much precision or smoothness. Instead, you have fifteen minutes of comedy, fifteen minutes of drama, and fifteen minutes of action in a formula that is repeated until the movie is over. Downtown Torpedoes is a much more even film that integrates all the feeling swell into a fast-paced if somewhat absurd and flawed narrative.

The cast is also solid. Jordan Chan is great as always, and pretty-boy Takeshi Kaneshiro is engaging and charismatic. He's sort of like an Ekin Cheng with actual acting talent. Charlie Yeung is also good, as is Theresa Lee. All of them are basically one-dimensional characters, but since I'm not overly demanding of action films as long as they keep things moving along, I didn't mind the predictability of the characters.

Ken Wong as Titan, on the other hands, stands out from the rest. Granted his character is no less stereotypical -- the lost hero who falls from grace and must redeem himself with heroics and self-sacrifice to save the others -- but he plays it wonderfully, and it's hard not to feel sympathy for his wrongly shunned tragic hero character. Stanley is a properly evil backstabber whose motivations seem to be about as deep as "he is evil and greedy." We're not talking Shiri here, but we are talking lots of action and a movie that is just plain ol' harmless fun.

So it ain't perfect, but then neither am I. If you like to nitpick a film, then Downtown Torpedoes will probably annoy you. It has shallow characters and huge plot holes. But it also has likeable characters and lots of fast-paced, well-handled action. As with the Hong Kong action films of the 1980s and the Eurospy films of the 1960s, it's best not to get caught up in the particulars and simply sit back, check your brain, and enjoy the spectacle. Even on a bad day, Hong Kong action films deliver tons worth going nuts over, and Downtown Torpedoes, while certainly a flawed film, is far from a bad movie. I enjoyed the movie immensely. Part Mission: Impossible, part Aces Go Places, all with a kinetic over-the-top pile of action that concentrates on physicality rather than special effects, making it much more fun. If you are like me, then you are probably not slick enough to shoot crossbows or go fight villains in exotic locales. You can, however, sit back and watch Downtown Torpedoes, which is a damn fine way to spend ninety minutes of your life.

In the years leading up to the reunification of Hong Kong with the mainland, the quality of films deteriorated severely. The Hong Kong new wave really hit it's peak in the early 1990s, and John Woo's insanely action-packed shoot-em-up Hard Boiled was sort of the orgasm for the whole movement. After that, the good movies were few and far between. Hong Kong retreated into a dismal era of slapped-together no-budget crap, lame romantic comedies, and weird, often brutal softcore action/horror/porn.

I've been a fan of Hong Kong films ever since seeing my first kungfu film way back when in the 1970s. And no matter how embarrassing and abysmal the films may have become, I felt I owed it to the industry that had given me so much joy over the years to see if there was anything worth digging up. So let's see. I can't stand romantic comedies. Whether they star Anita Yuen or Meg Ryan makes no difference to me. I just don't like them. Maybe you do, and that's cool. They are there for you, and you don't have to worry about me snaking that last copy of You've Got Mail you were hoping to get.

So I can chose between no-budget slapped together crap or sleazy softcore sex and gore. Okay, I'm cool with both of those types of film. So let's see what the no-budget crap is all about. Apparently, it's all about Donnie Yen undercranking his fight scenes to where he looks like one of those old newsreels of Babe Ruth. Man, this shit reeks in ways that aren't even funny. It's just awful. It's Richard Kern awful. Who would have thought guns and kungfu could be so insanely, mind numbingly boring?

Well, that leaves me with sleazy softcore sex and gore. Ahh, it's like an old glove that always fits. I can always count on sleaze to delight me and make the neighbors wonder what the hell it is I'm watching. Are those naked three-headed green midgets with five dicks that I saw on his television screen? You're goddamned right, they are!

Luckily, communism hasn't quelled Hong Kong's tastelessness, and while every other genre may have become worthless, the boys and girls in what was once called "the biggest Chinatown in the world" have latched on to horror, gore, and sleaze as the only defense against the increasing popularity of foreign films and the defection of most of the big name talent to Hollywood. It's not a new strategy. When the bottom fell out of the market for Shaw Brothers films in the late 1970s, Runrun was quick to churn out a fistful of cheap exploitation films featuring ample amounts of naked female flesh and spurting blood, thus keeping his company afloat a while longer. Some things just never go out of style.

Most of the new school of Hong Kong exploitation, or Cat III films as they are known (because the Cat III rating is Hong Kong's equivalent of either an R, and X, or an NC-17, depending on the film) seem to revolve around vengeful spirits and a visit to Thailand, probably because spirits are easy to make (they look like people, but with green lighting) and Thailand is a cool looking country.

Eternal Evil of Asia is indeed about vengeful spirits and a trip to Thailand, but it's so much more than that. Of the gallons of cheap Cat III sex and gore films to come out of Hong Kong in the past five years, few are weirder than Eternal Evil of Asia, and absolutely none have a lead woman as fabulously sexy as Ellen Chan.

The movie centers around a nice enough fellow whose buddies seem to be dying, while he himself can't seem to get it up even when Ellen Chan, who plays his girlfriend, does a sexy striptease for him. Most people have the opposite problem, so we immediately know he's either gay or has drawn the ire of a vengeful wizard from Thailand. Well, as fate would have it, it's the wizard thing. That's bad news, because if you are gay, you have plenty of options. If you are on the shitlist of a vengeful wizard from Thailand, well you're pretty much screwed, aren't you?

Ellen thinks he's been cheating on her, and in order to save his relationship with her (believe me, you'd go to any lengths to save a relationship with Ellen Chan), he recounts to her the entire sordid story of his trip to Thailand with his buddies.

They'd gone seeking hookers, although our hero is too smitten with Ellen to even think of fooling around with hos. After doing such "funny" (by callous Hong Kong standards) things as going to an AIDS bar, where all the hookers are HIV positive, they end up getting chased by some local thugs and lost in the jungle. Luckily, a reclusive, buff wizard helps them out. When one of the guys insults the wizard by calling him a dickhead, the wizard gets an impish grin and turns the guy's head into a giant penis. Yep. Needless to say, the film only gets more highbrow from here. You know, if Woody Allen used the same joke, it would be bold and witty. When they do it here, it's just considered trashy. Well, I can't stand Woody Allen, so there.

Then, all of a sudden, a wizard war breaks out as the buff wizard is attacked by some sexy witch her buddy. They derive magic power from flying and spinning through the air while gettin' it on. Sure. Why not. It beats having to prance around to lame disco music like American magicians have to do. Our hero and his buddies help out the buff wizard, while the guy with a dickhead strokes his own neck vigorously.

The wizard is grateful. He turns the dickhead back to normal and introduces everyone to his cute sister, who instantly takes a shine to our hero. He resists her advances, though, so she cooks up a magic love potion. Unfortunately, everyone but him gets dosed with it, and they all have a wild orgy with the girl. When she realizes what has happened, she freaks out and, in an attempt to keep her from going nuts, the buddies accidentally kill her.

That done, they decide the vacation is over and return to Hong Kong, where they each start dying in strange ways. One guy keeps showing up as a walking corpse impaled on a flickering fluorescent lighting tube.

The wizard, seeking revenge for the death of his sister, has gone insane and is out for blood. He also takes time out to astrally project himself into the bathroom to watch Ellen Chan shower. Now that's a pretty good wizard power. Ellen, on the other hand, seeks the advice of a local sorceress and ends up in a showdown with the wizard's apparition, in which she gives a blow job to an invisible man. You'd never think that just watching a woman waggle her tongue and pretend to give an insane Thai wizard a blow job would be so sexy. Or then again, maybe you would. I think Ellen Chan could scratch her ass and make people weak in the knees.

But the fun has only just begun, as all sorts of magical mid-air sexual acrobatics ensue. This movie is every bit as high in tastefulness as your average cannibal film or Satanic lesbian nun flick. It's guaranteed to offend most people, but since the readers of this website generally aren't most people, I have no reservations about recommending it whole-heartedly. After all, offensiveness is one of our banner awards to any film. It's completely twisted, unrepentingly tasteless, and of course, immensely enjoyable. Like most Hong Kong horror films, it veers wildly between sex, gore, and slapstick comedy, but unlike most of them, manages to pull off the schizophrenia while only seeming like somewhat of a mess.

Of all the Cat III horror sleaze I've seen, and I'd be an obvious liar if I didn't say I'd seen ... well, more than my fair share ... Eternal Evil of Asia remains my favorite. It's the wildest, the weirdest, the only one with a giant penis-headed man, and perhaps above all that, it's the one that has Ellen Chan Ah Lun.

I think we're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The past few years have seen a number of fresh new faces finally emerging from the ashes, and it looks like things in Hong Kong are starting to finally get interesting again after we've endured years of cut-rate Wong Jing stinkers and wire-laden "kungfu" films that didn't seem to ever have any actual kungfu. Pieces are finally in place for Hong Kong to reclaim the action cinema throne it toppled off of (and subsequently left vacant since everyone else was sucking just as bad) sometime in the mid 1990s, and after years of hibernating in my little "golden age of kungfu" shell, I'm finally poking my head out and seeing what all this rumbling is about -- not to mention finally seeing the few good films from the latter half of the 1990s that I missed during my Hong Kong action film sabbatical.

Some of the people making folks stand up and take notice again are familiar faces who have finally paid their dues or are coming into their own, ready to shine now that the old guard is more or less retired or relocated. I'm thinking specifically here of guys like director Johnny To and stars Aaron Kwok, Jordan Chan, and Lau Ching-wan. Lau's already achieved a degree of fan and critical acclaim, and he seems to have all the right stuff to become the big dog in action cinema. He's got the look that is scruffy yet dignified, he's got emotional depth, and he's got a lot of great films under his belt. Jordan Chan, of all the new batch of Hong Kong young-bloods, is my favorite. He's engaging, and unlike Ekin Cheng, he can actually act. Aaron Kwok has been around for a long time now, and he's finally getting old enough to shake the "pretty boy" image that held him back throughout most of the 1990s. A few more years and a few more pounds, and he should be set to shine.

On the directorial front, guys like Johnny To, Benny Chan, Teddy Chan, Dante Lam, and Wilson Yip may not be the John Woo, Tsui Hark, or Sammo Hung of the new millennium, but then none of those guys got famous by being the next Chang Cheh or Liu Chia-liang either. They blazed new paths, took chances, and recreated the game with a new set of rules. After several years in the abyss, with people wallowing in the styles and retreaded visuals of the past, we finally have a new crop of directors who are once again challenging convention, shaking things up, and quite possibly lying the foundation for the next Hong Kong new wave. It's an uncertain but exciting time, and I feel myself finally getting back that sense of anticipation and excitement I had in the early 1980s when I watched Aces Go Places for the first time. After so long with nothing to get anxious over, Hong Kong is finally a place I want to start paying attention to again.

The real trick to revitalizing a movie industry is in finding new talent and new directions that appeal to both past and future fans. You have to find young actors who don't seem absurd in their roles (Ben Affleck as an ex FBI agent? Denise Richards as a brilliant nuclear physicist? Who the hell is casting people in Hollywood???) but still appeal to kids. And you have to find young actors who aren't so insipid and annoying that they turn away older viewers in droves.

Director Benny Chan (Who Am I, Big Bullet) seems to have hit the right combination of youth and tradition with Gen-X Cops. It's not that big of a surprise, I suppose. Benny Chan has already given us one of the most even and consistent Jackie Chan films in years (Who Am I), as well as 1996's Big Bullet, easily one of the best action films around and a real gem in the Hong Kong action film crown. Throw Jackie Chan and Eric Tsang in as the behind-the-scenes mentor and producer, and you have what should be a recipe for success.

Gen-X Cops begins on the right foot -- by bothering to explain why we will be seeing such brash youngsters in important investigative positions. Hollywood, of course, worships youth, but when they cast a 22-year-old as a veteran cop or something, they just expect you to roll with it and not question how the hell this kid got where he was. Gen-X Cops, however, shows us a little more consideration by providing a simple but adequate explanation for why everyone is so young: the criminals are young, too. Hong Kong street gangs. The new generation of criminals finally coming out of high school and into the big leagues. You can't infiltrate a violent youth gang with a fifty year old cop. They tend to stand out. Eric Tsang, as the pariah police inspector Chan, figures that to combat this new generation of criminals, you're going to need a new generation of cops.

The primarily stumbling block for Inspector Chan is that everyone thinks he is a moron because he had mental problems in the past and still has a pronounced nervous twitch when he gets upset. Rival inspector To (Moses Chan), who looks eerily like Nick Cave (as if there is an un-eerie way to look like Nick Cave), constantly berates Chan in front of the rest of the force, and no one seems all that interested in standing up for the little guy. When a gangland execution results in the death of an undercover cop, the police assign Chan to assemble "an elite unit" to take care of things, hoping that recruiting will keep him out of the way so Inspector To can work on the case without interruption.

Chan is determined to prove his worth, however, not to mention prove his intuition is correct when he thinks the younger brother (Daniel Wu as, umm, Daniel) of one of the murdered gangsters may be the very one who pulled the trigger, and may be the one who can lead them to big-time crime boss Akatora. Chan heads out to the police academy looking to recruit some fresh faces who will able to infiltrate Daniel's gang of obnoxious young killers. Unfortunately, everyone Chan sees is a total square, my favorite being the guy who tries out for the special unit by simply standing in the room and flexing his massive muscles. Things seem hopeless until Chan stumbles across three recruits who are in the process of being expelled for a variety of reasons, all of which boil down to "being uppity" and "exposing the idiocy of your elders." Needless to say, these three misfits are exactly what Chan has been looking for.

Nicholas Tse, Sam Lee, and Stephen Fung star as Jack, Alien, and Match respectively. All three are decent enough actors, though the roles they play here are about as thick as a page out of a comic book. Since this movie never aspires to be anything more than stupid fun, I can live with one-dimensional characters -- which describes just about everyone in this film with the possible exception of Inspector Chan, and that may only be because Eric Tsang is such a veteran at bringing life to absurd characters. Besides him you've got the three cops -- the goofball, the slick guy, and the moody guy. You've got the obnoxious police inspector who wears the same coat as those creepy bald guys from Dark City. You've got the honorable old gangster and the scumbag selfish young gangster. You've got the computer hacker girl and the sassy club girl with a British accent. No one is winning any awards for innovation, but as long as the movie keeps everyone moving around enough not to notice, that's fine by me. And the movie does achieve that very thing.

Jack, Alien, and Match are given new, hipper identities after indulging in a little gratuitous skydiving, which had to be done for two main reasons. First, you can't have a Gen-X movie without some extreme sport, and second, you have to establish that they know how to skydive so that can be used later in the film. They go undercover to follow Chan's hunch that Daniel is the trigger man behind the recent murders, and that he is in league with Japanese yakuza who is pulling the strings. Daniel is played by American-born Daniel Wu, who went to Hong Kong on a holiday after graduating from college and ended up making movies there. Just goes to show you kids -- if you put off real life and goof off a little more, you just might make it.

Wu is a decent enough actor, but like everyone else, he plays pretty much a one-note character. His job is to primarily walk around making "angry man" faces while wearing a jacket with no shirt on. You can always recognize a slick up and coming gangster by the fact that he'll be wearing a jacket with no shirt. Be glad those guys in The Sopranos don't do the same. Why is it that all those Hong Kong gangsters are always walking around in million dollar designer clothes, while Mafia guys walk around in cheap track suits? Well, I guess comfort is a big consideration for them. And who the hell is going to walk up to Paulie Walnuts and tell him he should dress a little hipper?

Match gets on Daniel's good side by hitting on his girl, Jayme, who it turns out was also Match's girlfriend back in Canada. That whole thing was pretty damn stupid and pointless, but whatever. As is usually the case, Daniel is going to kill our three heroes but is eventually impressed by their bickering and in-fighting, which is what we call "pluckiness" when we are being polite. He gives them a job -- go kill rival crime boss Lok, played wonderfully by Francis Ng. Of course, the job go haywire. For one, the boys realize that Lok is actually a pretty cool and honorable guy, and no one wants to kill him. When Daniel and his thugs show up, however, all hell breaks loose, and it gets even looser when some of Daniel's men defect and try to turn him over to Lok. Because duty calls for it, Match, Jack, and Alien end up rescuing Daniel instead of siding with Lok or the firestorm of cops who descend upon the place once all the shooting and exploding starts.

When one of the nameless, faceless cops is killed, Inspector To blames Chan and his band of misfits. Indeed, the entire police force seems indifferent-to-annoyed by Chan's inability to get the message that no one wants him actually working on the case. Chan has a breakdown and since they are not officially cops anymore, To succeeds in having Match, Jack, and Alien declared fugitives and suspected murderers. So now they got Japanese gangsters, Hong kong gangsters, and their own police force after them.

To make matters worse, Match and Jack get in an argument over Match's continued flirtiness with Jayme, causing Match, Jayme, and Alien to split ways with Daniel and Jack. It's all a ruse of course, so that Alien and Match can secretly back Jack up as he and Daniel meet with the dreaded Akatora. It culminates in a big display of exploding stuff and shooting at the quaint villa belonging to Akatora. The Gen-X cops discover that he's planning to blow up a convention center in order to kill some famous visiting Japanese politician who used to be a criminal and betrayed Akatora's dad. Convoluted? No doubt, but at this point you really can't care too much.

They attempt to stop Akatora from getting hold of the super-duper explosives he intends to use, which leads to a big fight in a mall where there happens to be a store in the very tall building that sells skydiving equipment. You figure out if this is where we learn the value of their skydiving skills. All things considered, it's far less groan-inducing than when that girl in Jurassic Park II had to use her amazing gymnastic skills as established earlier in the film to evade some raptors.

It all boils down to our lads and lass (computer hacker Y2K) facing off with Akatora in the bowels of the convention center while Inspector To's men run around and get shot. You know, one day I'm going to make a movie where the maverick cop fucks things up royally and the straight-laced, by the book partner ends up saving the day by sticking to regulations. Anyway, there is a cool part where Akatora taunts them with the detonator and says "If you can take this from me, you can stop the explosion." After a prolonged fight, the detonator gets dropped and everyone freaks out until Akatora says, "That's okay, I started it before I even told you you could stop me by taking it." That alone makes Akatora among the smarter criminals out there. Now if only he'd thought of just shooting his target instead of orchestrating a massively complex plan to blow up the entire building.

Will the young cops stop the crazy criminal? Will they manage to keep from getting shot by Inspector To and his men? Will they redeem the lost honor of Inspector Chan by proving him right? Will there be a big-ass fight and explosion at the end of the film? Well, what do you think?

In every sense of the phrase, this movie is "stupid fun," and it's easy to pick apart. There's an attempt to add an element of hipness to the events by mixing in English, but the English lines are so pitifully goofy and delivered with such awkwardness that they would have been much more effective had they simply not been used. It's really awful, and this is coming from someone who counts among his favorite film lines of all time the white guy from Once Upon a Time in China snarling "Who is this Wong Fei-hong? The Devil???" The story is needlessly roundabout.

What was the point of Match and Jayme having known each other in Canada? Just to explain why they fall in love so suddenly after he gives one of those "How could I take care of you when I couldn't even take care of myself?" speeches? It would have been more believable to just not worry about it and have them be two sexy young things who dig each other.

The film also spends all this time on Daniel's character only to have the actual villain be some other guy entirely. That's like writing a mystery novel where you get everyone to wonder "whodunit," then make the culprit someone who is only introduced in the final five pages -- or like making an entire slasher film then having the killer be someone's mom who isn't introduced until the final scene. It's cheap at worst, and in the case of Gen-X Cops, it's just pointless.

Need I even mention the disturbingly high number of "hold my gun sideways" moments there are. What the hell is with this? Who holds their gun like that? Some dumb-ass who has never fired a real weapon before and learned all his stuff from Mario Van Peebles, that's who! Still, I grit my teeth and just accept that for some bizarre reason, film makers continue to think this is cool. At least it's less ridiculous than the "cross my arms and shoot the guys on the left with my right hand, and vice versa." I guess if you are looking to be unable to aim your weapon and are hoping that it will jam up after squeezing off a few rounds, holding your gun sideways is a good thing.

With all that going wrong, and with the fact that the cast is basically the Hong Kong equivalent of a teenie bopper boy band (with Nick Cave lurking on the fringes scaring everyone), I fully expected to hate this movie. I was surprised when, not only did I not hate it, I actually had a lot of fun watching it. Dumb? You betcha. Style over substance? Completely superficial? Yesiree. Wouldn't argue with that. Sexy young cast? Sure, but at least the movie gave them a reason for being sexy and young instead of making us accept their youth at face value. With all those things wrong with the movie, it still managed to be thoroughly entertaining for a couple reasons.

For one, Benny Chan is a talented director, and he's an ace at finding the right pace for a movie and keeping things energetic even when nothing much is happening. he did it well in Who Am I, and he proved in Big Bullet that he has the skills to be a major force in the history of Hong Kong action cinema. He's got enough talent to elevate the film above the hackneyed, contrived, and completely predictable plot and turn it into something that is still exciting and energetic despite its massive number of short-comings.

The action is plentiful and is a decent mix of guns, explosions, hijinks, and fighting. No one is going to think these kungfu fights are going to revolutionize the industry, but they are fun and manage to compensate for the lack of real fighting skill in the cast without looking obvious.

The cast itself ranges from good to harmless. Moses Chan, Eric Tsang, and Francis Ng may all be playing one-note characters, but they still lend some sense of depth to them. It's no coincidence that these are also the most experienced actors in the film. Moses Chan as Inspector To is so thoroughly a complete and utter asshole that you can't help but like him. Eric Tsang manages to play slightly over the top without going to far, and Francis Ng is at his subtle best within the confines of his "honorable thief" character.

The young guys -- the cops, the girls, and Daniel Wu, are harmless. Sam Lee as Alien tends to be annoying, as all comic relief characters tend to be. Why is it that the comic relief guy is always the least funny of the bunch? But he's easy to discount since his character really does nothing other than stand to the side and shout in fear. Nick Tse and Stephen Fung are grade-A pretty boys -- the Aaron Kwoks of a new generation. I have not seen that many movies starring these two, but at least here they have the good sense to remain within whatever the limits of their skills may be by playing very familiar caricatures, which is not always a bad thing. It allows you to get to know an actor without immediately starting to hate them. Remember, we all though Keaneu Reeves was hilarious and talented until he tried to play characters outside his "Bill and Ted" range.

Daniel Wu is the most promising of the bunch. He's good looking and managed to bring a fair amount of intensity to his character. Granted, that probably wasn't that difficult but there's something to be said for knowing your role and shutting the hell up, as they say. I don't like any of these guys as much as slightly more seasoned young actors like Jordan Chan and Takeshi Kaneshiro, but none of these guys have been in the caliber of films that those two have been in. Gen-X Cops is, after all, no Fallen Angels or Downtown Torpedoes. But I also remember how much I hated Jordan Chan when all I'd seen him in were those annoying Young and Dangerous movies. I don't suspect I'll ever grow to like Sam Lee very much, though I can see myself referring to him as the "Jerry Lewis of Hong Kong youth" in the near future.

I don't think any of these guys will become the man around whom to rebuild the industry -- I think that's something I reserve for Lau Ching-wan and, to a lesser extend, Jordan Chan -- but you have all the makings for a decent bunch of b-team stars once they get a little older and a little better. Despite the pretty boy appeal that no doubt went into their casting, if you look hard enough, there is some actual talent on display. Granted most of it belongs to the director and the old guys, but Daniel Wu, Nick Tse, and Stephen Fung are still easier to watch than Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, or any of the smarmy young Hollywood stars of today. Maybe that's just because I don't have to hear about them all the time.

As far as the gals go, there's no denying that both Jayme Ong (as Match's girl) and Grace Yip (as computer hacker Y2K) are knock-outs. Grace Yip has a couple more films under her belt than Jayme (who I think makes her debut here), and it shows. Jayme's lines, all of which are in English, are often flat and awkward. I don't know how much of this is her lack of acting talent and now mush of it is simply the fact that the English language dialogue sounds like it was written by middle schoolers lacking a firm grasp of grammar and other finer points. Lucky for her the bulk of her lines are delivered during nightclub scenes where the blaring music obscures the fact that she's not a very good actress. Grace is much more engaging, but her character also has more to do than stand around being pretty.

And then there's the cranky fisherman who makes a cameo at the end of the film and dispenses some, "In my day, I was twice as lethal" wisdom. I'll just leave it at the fact that this guy has made cameo appearances before, but this is by far his funniest.

Gen-X Cops is the sort of movie you watch and are fully aware of the fact that it's completely ludicrous and not all that great, but at the same time it keeps you smiling and laughing. The action is decent, the cast operates within their boundaries, and the direction is great. Like I said, I went in fully expecting to hate this movie and pump out a scathing review about how much I hate snotty fashion-conscious kids these days -- and I do hate snotty, fashion-conscious kids there days -- but instead I found it was very easy to overlook the youth market "Gen-X" approach and just enjoy this as a brain dead but amusing action extravaganza.

Godzilla films often have a subplot involving man's disregard for nature. In fact, Japanese sci-fi in general is all about upsetting the balance of the planet. Funny stuff coming from the one nation that refused to stop slaughtering endangered whales and still likes to buy mass quantities of powdered endangered species for use as aphrodisiacs. DID THEY LEARN NOTHING FROM SPECTREMAN!?!!?

Godzilla Versus Hedorah is the most overtly political of all the Godzilla films, with the possible exception of Godzilla's Revenge. Some movies chose to serve you the ideology in small, subtle ways. Godzilla Versus Hedorah serves it to you as a giant monster kicking over buildings and spewing acid onto hippies. Normally, this would be a good thing, but this must have been some of that brown acid everyone was warned about. I guess a light, subtle touch has never been a staple of the Godzilla franchise.

So what we have here is a monster born of sludge and industrial waste. Hedorah actually looks a lot like that disastrous food item some Japanese company tried to market a few years ago. It was made of reconstituted sewage and was supposed to be full of nutrients. The only problem was that they didn't disguise the origin, and no one wanted to eat a black-green fruit roll-up that was once in someone's ass. Anyway, Hedorah looks liked that.

Hedorah can also transform into three states -- flying Hedorah, stomping Hedorah, and swimming Hedorah. The flying Hedorah spreads deadly acid clouds as it flies. This doesn't sit well with Godzilla, now firmly planted in his superheroic "defender of humanity" personae. So one night he strolls into town to take on the gooey gob of evil.

No one seems to notice the two monsters. I mean, there's no evacuation, no mass hysteria, no sirens or jets or anything. Did they sneak into the city? How can you not notice Godzilla fighting a sludge monster in the middle of town?

In fact, this film dispenses with a number of traditional Godzilla elements -- there is no evacuation scene. No Akira Ifukube soundtrack. No aliens or fairies. Most of the monster action takes place at night. It's a weird feeling Godzilla movie, very different and strange. But you still got the little kid in micro-shorts, though this one isn't so bad. On the Ichiro scale, he only rates a 5, at best.

But Godzilla isn't strong enough! Is it possible that man's carelessness and irresponsibility have created an environmental monstrosity even Godzilla can't handle?

Hedorah splits and takes to eating factory pollution, since pollution is what gives Hedorah it's nourishment. This actually seems like a benefit of having a Hedorah around. But it keeps squirting acid on people, and you just can't do that, not even in the 1970s. Some go-go dancers, Bohemians, and hippy kids decide to have a big dance on Mount Fuji to summon good vibes and make Hedorah disappear. Of course, Hedorah comes by and squirts acidic sludge on everyone. Important lesson there -- you can't combat environmental destruction with good intentions or pointless songs. You've got to take an active role. Art is not enough to make the world right. It takes physical work.

Luckily, Godzilla is there to be the Earth First to their hippy peace circle. He's ready to kick pollution's ass, and this time he has some back-up in the form of the Japanese military and the scientist who discovered the origins of Hedorah. Now, if you've learned one thing from a Godzilla film, it's that he can magically have bestowed upon him powers that help him beat his enemy, like in Godzilla Versus MechaGodzilla when out of nowhere he has the power to magnetize his body.

Well, that's nothing. In this one, he uses his atomic breath to actually propel himself backwards through the sky. Yes, using his breath as a jet engine, he can fly! This is the one and only movie where Godzilla goes airborne in any fashion beyond Rodan picking him up and dropping him on stuff. When you see it, you will know why.

I don't care what the critics say! I love Godzilla Versus Hedorah in all its puzzling, heavy-handed glory. It has tons of monster action, a weird "drunken super Godzilla" theme song, weird animated bits, more monster action, cute beatnik girls in go-go boots and body stockings, and a flying Godzilla! It has that "Save the Earth" theme song. It certainly doesn't have the same tone or look of other Godzilla films. The color is more muted (and Godzilla films would become garish in their use of color as the 1970s progressed). It has funky music. It has a message about taking care of the Earth, and about man's responsibility for cleaning up his own mess. If you expect someone else to do it for you (Godzilla) or just write songs about it and dance, you'll be set upon by a monster. Only when mankind rolls up it's collective sleeves and plunges their hands into the heart of the mess can progress be made.

Nerd note: the Hedorah monster is played by Kenpachiro Satsuma in his first "role." He would go on to be the man in the evil monster suit for many other Godzilla films. He moved on to play Godzilla itself in all the new films, and has even invented a style of karate based on the movements and exercises he must do to properly function in the bulky monster suit. He calls it "Godzilla kempo."

You can catch a letterboxed version of the film on the Sci-Fi Channel from time to time, with different dubbing than the old VHS version and the Japanese language version of the "Save the Earth" song. Watch for it and enjoy!

Well, nothing in the world of film pisses me off more than a serious fan, someone who wrings out every ounce of enjoyment from a movie and looks at it with most bitter of critical eyes. They turn their noses up at the "kiddie" films of the 1970s, forgetting all the while that the reason they seem so childish is because, well, they were made for kids, you nerd! They weren't made for some college drop-out film geek to analyze frame by frame on his DVD player while counting down the minutes until he once again has to jack off to the La Blue Girl cartoons.

Here at Teleport City, we stand in firm and unwavering defense of the Godzilla of the 1970s. Sure the films were cheap. The special effects were not up to the high standard set by the 1960s productions. The plots were often ludicrous at best. But more important to me is the fact that the films are a tremendously fun time. They are full of vibrant colors, outlandish aliens, monster wrestling, and plenty of good old fashioned destruction. As a lad, I grew up on the Godzilla films of the 1970s, and perhaps that, more than any other reason, is why I love them so dearly and totally do not relate to the contempt with which they are viewed by many people.

There are three films that often battle for the title "worst Godzilla film of all time," and predictably enough, I unconditionally love all three of them. Far and away the most hated film in the series is Godzilla's Revenge, but we will get to that film in due time. The other two films vying for the position are Godzilla Versus Megalon and Godzilla Versus Gigan, both of which feature Gigan, a cool cyborg monster with a buzzsaw in his belly!

Godzilla Versus Gigan begins with the wacky exploits of a frustrated comic book artist who is offered a job by a strange corporation. Their plan is to build replicas of all the monsters on Earth, then kill the real ones off. That way, people can come see the monsters and ride roller coasters out of their mouths, but there will be no real danger to humanity, and as a result, we will enter a golden age of peace and harmony or something. I love me a good roller coaster, and though I don't know if amusement parks are the key to global harmony, I'm certainly willing to give it a try. And although I would hate to see all the Earth's monsters killed, those plans for a giant monster themed fun park sure sounded like a good idea.

Sure enough, though, the corporate guys aren't totally friendly. Nor are they totally human. Yes, once again, we are the target of marauding invaders from space. These guys were all over the place during the 1970s. But just because they are here to conquer us and set up a peaceful Eden doesn't mean they can't take time out to build a giant replica of Godzilla. You know that thing is getting smashed by the Big G before the credits roll.

There are certain things in these sorts of films that are givens. For example, the bad guys will always tie up the hero and explain the whole plan for world domination -- making certain to highlight all the possible pitfalls and weak links in the plan. Then, while they are watching one of those rounded-corner TV screens, the hero will somehow manage to loosen his bonds. We accept this. It's a time-honored convention. But these are the only villains who not only explain their plan in detail, but actually present charts, graphs, and a short documentary on the subject. In that sense, their disguise as corporate cogs and middle managers is perfect. If you made this film today, they would come armed with a lengthy PowerPoint presentation.

The dashing comic artist and his cute karate-trained girlfriend team up with a chubby hippie guy and a disgruntled woman who used to work for the sinister corporation. Together, they intend to stick it to the aliens. Okay, so maybe it's not the elite team we'd hope would combat marauding aliens if ever they came to Earth. I mean, A cartoonist, his checkerboard-dress wearing karate girlfriend, the corn-lovin' hippie, and the marketing woman team up to fight the aliens disguised as amusement park owners. All they need is a dog and a van covered with flowers, and you have a whole different series.

Anyway, I'll take a cartoonist and his karate girl, a hippie, and a disgruntled woman any day over a squeaky kid in micro-shorts.

The aliens decide to raze the Earth because, well, why the hell not? Foolish ETs. Don't they know we humans have a guardian? That guardian is Godzilla. And to a lesser extend, Angilas.

The aliens send Gigan out to smash things up. Gigan looks cool, but you have to question the hand design there. The hook looks tough and all, but you'd think at some point some fingers would come in handy. Maybe one hand and one big hook or something. Anyway, Gigan gets a little help from everybody's favorite three-headed dragon thing, the mighty King Ghidrah, who has certainly looked mightier in previous days. In this film, it looks like they found the costume out in the alley and were like, "Remember this old dude? Let's use him one last time!" Ghidrah has certainly seen better days. It was like watching Andre the Giant during the end of his wrestling career when he was having really bad health problems. Or watching Ric Flair now.

Anyway, the big advantage for the heroes is that neither evil monster has any damn hands.

So you have your teams: Godzilla and Angilas versus Gigan and Ghidrah, and on the mid-card, hip Japanese heroes versus the square corporate aliens. Look at it as a counter-culture sort of thing. The fringe fighting back against a massive corporation that wants to impose global homogeneity, "peace" corporate style and at the expense of free thought. Godzilla, the living breathing creature versus a heartless cyborg. For some reason, I don't know if I would bet the farm on the writers of this script wanting to make a "Freaks versus The Man" movie, but what the hell? The glory of film studies is I can make any damn shit up I want. And the leader of the aliens does have a Bill Gates haircut.

This film has lots of other little gems. Like the fact that Godzilla talks. Yes indeed. He and Angilas gab to one another before swimming to Japan to beat alien ass. I think this only happens in the dubbed version. But get this: in the original Japanese version, I hear they actually spoke in comic book word bubbles! I have never seen the original Japanese version, but that sounds pretty amazing.

All in all, this movie is not the best written film in the world. It doesn't have the best special effects I've ever seen. That honor goes to Plan 9 from Outer Space. And sure, a lot of scenes may be stock footage from superior films like Rodan and Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster. And yes, I see the point of the many people who look at this film as if it was a piece of doggy poo. I just don't agree with them. You got lots of monster action. You got aliens. You got a beautiful karate kicking lady. You got hippies and comic book nerds saving the planet. And you have no annoying little kids in micro-shorts. When I was little, I was utterly enthralled by the Technicolor madness that is Godzilla Versus Gigan. Twenty years after I first saw it, I'm just as happy. Never mind the bullocks. Embrace Godzilla Versus Gigan.

This film was also released under the title Godzilla on Monster Island, which only makes sense, seeing how al the action takes place nowhere near Monster Island. Still, you catch a glimpse of the place for about ten seconds, so there you go. Also, nerd point: Kenpachiro Satsuma plays Gigan the monster. He also played Hedorah in Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster, but is best known as the ultra-cool man beneath the Godzilla suit in every film since Godzilla 1985. Now take that tidbit with you to the next convention, and hardcore fans will go, "Tell me something I don't know, Chappy. Hey look! A girl in a Sailor Moon outfit!" which is better than what I saw. Imagine a two-hundred fifty pound hairy comic geek in a Japanese school girl outfit. *Shudder*

I can genuinely say that, without exception, I love each and every Godzilla film Toho has ever made. Even the stupid stuff. Hell, the number of Japanese sci-fi and monster movies I don't like can easily be counted on one hand with fingers left over for flipping people off who run them down for being "fake" or cheesy. It was the goddamned 1960s, you dumb-ass! American special effects were ten times worse than their Japanese counterparts, and I still like a big ol' rubber-suited monster kicking scale models around than I do watching some computer generated shit.

But of all the Godzilla films of my youth, one stood out among all the others as my absolute favorite. And though these days my favorite tends to be Godzilla Versus Mothra, I still have a warm and open spot in my heart for the most bad-ass of all Godzilla films, Godzilla Versus MechaGodzilla.

And I mean bad-ass. From the opening scene of Godzilla's buddy, Angilas, getting his mouth ripped open, you know this is some serious ass-kicking shit. When, later in the film, Godzilla is wounded (son of a bitch!) and blood goes spurting like a geyser or a Lone Wolf and Cub film, you know this isn't a straight-up kiddie film. You're not going to get kindergarten students in micro-shorts dancing a jig with a pot-bellied baby monster. Everything about this movie is bad-ass. The music is bad-ass. The women are bad-ass. Godzilla is even more bad-ass than usual. And MechaGodzilla -- don't get me started! Ghidrah may be Godzilla's most frequent foe, but MechaGodzilla is the only baddie bad enough to go the full twelve rounds with our favorite thunder lizard.

Our action begins with the aforementioned mauling of poor Angilas. What's even more shocking than the buckets of blood gushing from his flapping jaws is the fact that his buddy Godzilla is doing the damage. Or so it would seem. A small wound to Godzilla reveals a shiny interior, and we, like Angilas, figure something weird is up.

But that doesn't stop Godzilla from immediately setting out to wreak havoc across Japan. No sir, this film wastes no time in delivering the giant monster mayhem. When Godzilla sets to smashing up a petrol plant, he gets a surprise visit from ... Godzilla! This freaks everyone out as the two Godzillas face off amid the fiery wreckage. This is easily one of the coolest looking Godzilla fights ever, with smoke and flame surrounding the battling lizards.

Before too long, the impostor Godzilla is stripped of his skin, revealing a sharp looking robotic body. MechaGodzilla! Turns out a race of green space monkeys intend to conquer the planet, and they are using MechaGodzilla to do it. I never understood why, if these space guys are so smart they don't just hit us with a big neutron bomb or something. Instead they always build robots and send monsters. Oh well. It's more fun for us that way, so I suppose it's more fun for them as well. Anyway, these haggard space monkeys aren't nearly as sexy as the space ladies who try to conquer us in Destroy All Monsters, so this time around I have no issue with Earth trying to prevent the take-over.

But rest assured, marauding sexy space ladies in metallic clothes, when you come for the Earth, I will be first in line to sell my race out and do your bidding.

MechaGodzilla is a tough son-of-a-bitch, and the humans feel Godzilla could use a little help. Thus, they summon King Caesar, the ancient mythical guardian of Okinawa. King Caesar won't wake from his slumber until a cute island girl runs down to the beach and sings a jazzy go-go tune to him. Can't say I blame him. When he does awake, he is supposed to be one of those Foo Lions you see dancing in Chinese parades and stuff.

King Caesar isn't really much help. He mostly snarls and shoots rainbow beams out of his eyes before just settling down for his inevitable ass whuppin' at the hands of a superior foe. This means, of course, that Godzilla has to get the job done on its own. To do this, he whips out a super power no one knew he ever had before.

The effects in this film are top-notch, especially after everyone seemed to be just sort of slumming around in the last couple of films. MechaGodzilla is nearly as cool and tough as his own theme song, which is one of the best monster songs ever. King Caesar's song is okay because a cute island girl sings it. And as for Godzilla? Well, what do you think? As always, he's accompanied by his traditional Akira Ifukube originated tune, a song that will dominate monster music forever, in much the same way Godzilla dominates the monster movies.

One of my most vivid memories is of watching this film with my friends from down the street, Roman and Mandy. When Godzilla gets jabbed by MechaGodzilla's finger missiles and spurts blood and falls down, we were all devastated. "Godzilla's down!!!" I remember us yelling in horror. And when the Big G gets back up to kick some cyborg ass, we were cheering wildly. This movie still makes me feel like that.

It was followed up with the inferior Terror of MechaGodzilla, which we will get to soon enough. That movie wasn't much, as far as I am concerned. But it does have Godzilla running in slow-motion, so it's not a total loss. In the 1990s, MechaGodzilla was dusted off one more time, with a new, curvier look that isn't as menacing as the old, spiky model. He was also controlled by mankind instead of marauding aliens. The movie was pretty fucking good, the best of all the new Godzilla films, but the old Godzilla and MechaGodzilla still rule the day in my mind.

Unfortunately, Godzilla's triumphant return to its Japanese roots was a middling affair hampered by a lackluster script, bland human characters, an even blander monster foe, and a dwindling budget. While not necessarily a bad film, it was not the type of thing that could compete with the likes of the recent Gamera series, which set the bar exceptionally high for special effects, story, and characters - and did it for less money. Toho, it seemed, was becoming a cranky old man out of touch with modern fans, unwilling to try anything different, and at times downright hostile to those who would otherwise be supporting them. While Daei Studios rushed to release all the Gamera films both new and old onto DVD, Toho played the stubborn Luddite and refused to put much faith in the new medium, allowing scarcely a trickle of Godzilla's back catalog to get the digital treatment. Fans both in Japan and overseas - a population Toho has never given a damn about in the first place - were even further alienated from the proprietors of their beloved atomic powered behemoth.

When 2001 rolled around, Toho rolled out another Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Megaguiras. The budget was still small, and Toho still seemed to regard their once-mighty franchise with more contempt than support, but even a bad Japanese Godzilla film is still a better time at the movies than a good Meg Ryan romantic comedy or any of those movies where a sincere outsider teaches us the beauty of the human soul while lots of people "smile through their tears" as that emotional "revelation" type orchestration plays. You know the movies I'm talking about.

Godzilla vs. Megaguiras is, in many ways, a return to the wacky spirit of the 1970s Godzilla films. After the relatively dark and somber-colored Godzilla 2000, Godzilla vs. Megaguiras goes for a more vibrant and rich approach, resulting in the revitalization of that comic book feel that permeated so many of Godzilla's adventures a couple decades ago. While certain key aspects are lacking - specifically the cool human characters and the funky action music - it's still a step back in the direction of entertaining audiences after the relatively drab outing that was Godzilla 2000.

But it ain't all wine and roses. Toho has become addicted to stories that immediately establish that none of the other movies ever happened, and this is an entirely new timeline. That's okay once, but they're pressing the reset button after every film now, and that smacks of desperation. For you wrestling fans out there, think of how many times WCW did the exact same thing, ushered in "a brand new era," in the year leading up to them just going belly up. It betrays the lack of faith Toho has in their own films, not to mention the ability of their script writers to pay attention to continuity - at least as much as Godzilla films have ever worried about such things. It's like saying all the previous films were so lackluster, or that the current writers are so unimaginative, that the best thing to do is ignore history completely. Why even bother then? It's not like Godzilla fans are Star Trek fans, people who will boycott an entire series because a character says an alien race came from Delos VII when it was stated twenty-two years earlier in some Trek novel that these aliens came from Delos V. As long as there are some tenuous links, we're happy.

In the timeline of this Godzilla series, which is apparently going to last one movie and probably be reset again, Godzilla has attacked only a handful of times. There was the first time back in the 1950s - depicted in black and white recreations of scenes from the original movie, but featuring the new monster design. Then there were a couple other attacks that resulted in the capitol of Japan being moved from Tokyo to Osaka. It might be a good idea to move your capitol inland, especially when said capitols have a tendency to get soundly trounced by a giant monster who lives just off the coast of your nation. At least make him hike a little rather than simply being ale to swim right up and blast things with no real effort.

Godzilla's history is recounted through us via one of those newsreel type things that went out of fashion round about the end of World War II, but apparently in this alternate reality, Japan still loves them. There is some cool recreation of a couple famous scenes from the original Godzilla so that we can see familiar destruction with the new monster design.

Each of Godzilla's attacks have come at key moments in the development of the Japanese energy policy. He shows up to smash nuclear power plants, so those are banned in favor of plasma generators. When those too attract Godzilla's attention, they are banned as well, so I guess Japan then converts entirely to a power system based on hamsters running on treadmills. The movie proper opens during Godzilla's final attack on some plasma generators before they are banned, and we meet a group of very stupid special-forces operatives who attempt to combat Godzilla with the use of bazookas. Missiles and tanks leave nary a scratch on the beast, but these guys are going after him with handheld rocket launchers. What's next? Pistols at twenty paces? Stepping into his path and doing that thing where you flip open and shut your butterfly knife to show what a bad-ass you are? Well, the team calls themselves the "G-Graspers," so we have to assume their initial plan was to simply walk out and grasp Godzilla as a way of defeating him. You know, grab it by the shoulder and sternly admonish the monster with a "Look what you did!" Could be worse, I suppose. At least they're not the G-Gropers or the G-Goosers.

Not especially amused with the antics of the ground forces, Godzilla simply squashes most of them, leaving only one survivor, a young woman named Kiriko. Naturally, she swears revenge on Godzilla for killing all her comrades, but stops short of shaking her fist at the monster. At least it gives Kiriko some sense of motivation. Godzilla 2000 had that businessman looking scientist determined to kill Godzilla, but he had no real back story, no motivation to give some sense of depth to his character. Kiriko's story may be cliché, but at least it's there.

Skip ahead a few years, and just when Japan thinks they have everything solved and are on a clean energy source that Godzilla won't feel the need to come push over, their old nemesis shows up yet again. After enlisting the aid of the standard-issue scruffy young computer genius, the G-Grasper team devises a plan that is as idiotic as just about every other plan devised to kill Godzilla. They have developed a weapon that actually shoots man-made black holes! Hit Godzilla with one of those suckers, and even it won't be able to escape the gravitational pull. Once Godzilla is sucked in, the black hole will dissipate, leaving only a very large portion of land completely charred and ruined. The black hole idea sounds pretty daft at first, but weirdly enough there are scientists (up at MIT I believe) working on this very idea. Well, on manmade black holes; not necessarily a gun to shoot them at large monsters.

The team tests their new weapon -- one that could potentially rupture the entire fabric of space-time and send the whole solar system plunging into oblivion - about a hundred yards from a heavily populated area. Frankly, as an inhabitant of Earth, I'm not so wild about the Japanese shooting black holes around just to kill Godzilla. I'm not wild about a bunch of crackpots up at MIT doing it either. It seems the sort of thing that could go horribly wrong and destroy the entire world. It would be nice if they consulted with other countries first, or maybe thought up a different plan, like using bigger missiles than those piddly little things they usually lob at Godzilla. You know, something smaller than an atom bomb but larger than those skinny little frog stickers launched by two F-14 fighters. Why not try, I don't know, fifty fighters and a few bombers dropping those 5,000 pound bunker busters? I mean, I don't go out and attempt to solve every little problem I have by creating black holes and jeopardizing the very structure of existence. I'm just saying maybe they should try something a little more conventional before they go shooting black holes at everything.

With the potential to destroy the entire solar system in their hands, I guess it really doesn't matter that the G-Graspers decide to test the weapon scant yards from a suburb, with little more than a unkempt hedge as a security perimeter. On top of that, they apparently decide the best target is a school building, which it seems is still in use since we soon meet a young lad walking to the school to return a bug collection he borrowed. You'd think they would do this sort of thing on an island or something away from the people. Everyone's probably going to be pissed that not only did the G-Graspers test a potentially catastrophic weapon in the middle of a heavily populated area, they also sucked the local school into the nether regions of reality.

As is par for the course in most Japanese monster films, the little kid manages to breach the tight security of the test site, foiling the whole two or three guards scattered throughout what must be several miles of woods. After they shoot off their little gun and he sees it, Kiriko catches him and makes him promise not to tell anyone he's just seen the government shooting black holes into the local school. Man alive, I thought American security at our nuclear research centers was bad! The kid witnesses one of the most top-secret super-ultra tests ever to be performed a hundred yards from a heavily populated suburb, and when he's caught they make him promise not to tell? Boy howdy, did Wen-ho Lee ever get the shaft!

The test goes remarkably well despite having been infiltrated by a pre-teen, up until the distortions in space-time start happening. Even that isn't of great concern to them, but when a small dragonfly darts into the field of distortion, things start to get complicated. The bug begins to mutate and multiply. Why? Because it's a Godzilla film. It also starts to get really big. Meanwhile, a shady scientist has secretly been storing some plasma energy, you know, just in case. Just in case what? Just in case Godzilla detects it? That better be the case, because that's exactly what happens. You can't hide Scooby Snacks from Shaggy, and you can't hide volatile sources of energy from Godzilla. You might not be able to hide Scooby Snacks from Godzilla, either, but I've never seen anything on screen to confirm or deny it, so let's just leave it in the realm of potential fan fiction ideas.

While the G-Graspers rush to get their weapon launched into space so it can target Godzilla, Tokyo finds itself under attack from the swarm of mutant bugs, who are laying eggs in the sewer system and causing the vibrant youth-oriented neighborhood of Shibuya to flood. They're also sucking precious bodily fluids out of people, but that's hardly as big a problem as ruining the Tower Records and chasing away all those looney club kids making the scene. Upset by the flooding of the vibrant entertainment and consumer district, yet no doubt happy about all the soaking wet kogals running into their waiting arms, the Japanese military immediately deploys a crack team of uniformed operatives to tool about in little rubber dinghies.

No one seems all that surprised to find out that it's that damn kid's fault for bringing an egg with him from the countryside when he and his mom moved to Tokyo, then just going and dumping it in the sewer. Despite the fact that this kid has actually caused as much damage to Tokyo as Godzilla, everyone seems happy to just pat him on the head and go, "Get on outta here, ya little scamp!" as if flooding Tokyo and causing billions of dollars of damage was about as serious as the time Spanky was trying to scare Buckwheat and accidentally freed a gorilla from the local zoo. This kid really needs to be chased by those monkey-faced space agents from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.

The first chance to use the black hole gun, or Dimension Tide as they call it, comes when Godzilla wanders up onto the beach of a sparsely populated island. Unfortunately, the bugs show up as well, fouling up the targeting computer and generally annoying the hell out of Godzilla as they poke him with their stinger and suck energy out of his body. Dimension Tide fails to hit its mark, and eventually Godzilla just heads back into the water. Luckily, they can track him since, in one of the movie's cooler scenes, Kiriko actually scales his back while they are in the ocean and plants a tracking device on him. Unfortunately, Godzilla decides a more populated area would be fun to visit, and you don't really need a tracking device to tell you when Godzilla has entered Tokyo.

As you would expect, a big bug shows up, the Megaguiras, and has to fight with Godzilla. Godzilla wants that plasma energy, and Megaguiras wants that Godzilla energy. Well, whatever, so long as it gets our pals together for a couple big battles while the G-Graspers ho and hum and try to target their little black hole gun. You should pretty much know the drill from here on out.

All in all, Godzilla vs. Megaguiras is a fun film, certainly a more interesting adventure than the previous Godzilla 2000. I compared it to the films of the 1970s, which of course would make some people groan. I, on the other hand, always loved how full of action, hijinks, and color they were. This movie is a return to that sort of action-adventure spirit. Godzilla is still a menace, but at the same time it's given more of a character than it has shown in most of the more recent films. It even breaks out the classic "Godzilla move that makes you groan with laughter" tradition when Godzilla delivers a flying body press to Megaguiras. There's a lot of monster wrestling in here, just like the good ol' days. The 1990s "heisei" series relied far too much on "beam weapon" warfare, resulting in Godzilla and his foe standing at opposite ends of the screen shooting pretty lights at each other. This time around, we get down and dirty with some solid, old school grappling, and that's a big plus in my book.

Also a big plus is the latest Godzilla design. He looks boss, not to mention bad-ass. Very ferocious-looking. Now if we can just avoid the seemingly inevitable urge on Toho's part to inject a cutesy super-deformed baby Godzilla into later films. While Godzilla may look sharper than ever, the same can't be said for Megaguiras. On the surface, there's nothing overly wrong with the monster design. It's okay looking, based loosely on the Megaguiron from the original Rodan. But it lacks any real character, as all big monsters tend to. Megaguiras is an improvement over Orga from Godzilla 2000, but there's still no real depth to the monster that makes it memorable. I keep hoping for a new Ghidrah (instead of them just always falling back on Ghidrah when all else fails - he's the Borg of the Godzilla universe), or even a new Gigan, but all I get is a bunch of Gimantises and Spigas.

Adding to Megaguiras' lack of any real appeal is the fact that after all these years, Toho is no better in 2001 than they were in the 1960s at making a believable flying monster. Sure, they're okay when they are gliding or just lounging about, but the minute those huge wings start shakily flapping at a rate of about one flap every thirty seconds, things start to look silly, even for a Godzilla film. Megaguiras is actually a couple steps back in this regard, and there are several times when he just seems to be hanging there, motionless in the air, not moving his wings even a lick. It's just lazy looking. I know it's a giant dragonfly, and dragonflies can hover like the dickens, but in doing so they flap their wings about a hundred thousand times a second (don't quote me on that). Megaguiras goes for the more laid back "a couple times every few minutes" approach to hovering.

Confounding this is the fact that from time to time, they throw in some computer animation to give Megaguiras super-fast and realistically beating wings. This is his special attack, allowing him to dart to and fro just like a tinier dragonfly, but it looks great, reflects nature, and should have been the rule rather than the exception. I guess a taste of an advance in Toho flying technology is better than nothing at all, but a boy can dream, can't he? The worst part is how Megaguiras can somehow fly right and left without moving his wings at all, topped only by the scene where Godzilla catches Megaguiras' tail, thus causing the big bug to completely freeze in mid-air. Maybe shooting all those black holes around did more damage to the local gravity than people thought.

Speaking of computer animation, like Godzilla 2000, this movie relies on it heavily, at least relative to Godzilla films. The CGI in Godzilla 2000 was pretty bad, especially in the case of the UFO and a few other key parts. Toho may not be ILM yet, but they certainly learned something between films. For the most part, the CGI on display avoids being embarrassing. There are a few weak moments, specifically some very slow-moving and video game looking fighter jets. One of the great mysteries of the world is why people would develop multi-processor supercomputers and $10,000 a user software packages, then devote days upon days of time for some computer programmer to painstakingly render in CGI a series of effects that are nearly as believable as what Eiji Tsubaraya did with models back in the 1960s.

There's also a weird slo-mo effect that looks like that "step by step" sort of slo-mo you get on consumer VCRs rather than actual slow motion. Other than a few weak spots, though, the CGI is pulled off well, which is fitting for a movie that, other than a few weak spots, is itself pulled off pretty well. Sure there is an annoying kid, but he's not that annoying - unless you happen to work in the Akihabara district, that is. The other characters are bland but inoffensive. Kiriko at least has some character, but everyone else is pretty much there to fulfill a stereotype. The sloppy young computer genius. The dastardly old scientist. The benevolent old scientist. The nameless military guy who barks orders into a walkie-talkie for the entire film - you know the cast. I really hope that future Godzilla films continue to rediscover the influences of the previous films and give us some cool characters. Not since the 1970s have we had any human characters worth talking about. There have been no Nick Adamses or Akira Takarada's. There hasn't even been anyone to match the ambiguously gay suaveness of those two guys from Godzilla vs. Megalon or the hippy, karate girl,a nd cartoonish from Godzilla vs. Gigan. There certainly haven't been any Robert Dunhams or Kumi Mizunos. We've had a fairly bland parade of pretty but uninteresting human characters who neither add nor detract from the film around them, which is a shame. Sure, there was Miki the psychic girl in all the "heisei" films, but she wasn't really interesting. She was just driven into our memory through repetition. I'd like to see subsequent films give us a cool cast again.

Okay, so we did have that M-11 android in Godzilla vs. King Ghidrah.

Plotwise, it's business as usual. Toho definitely has the scriptwriters on cruise control here. Characters are, as I said, flat, and there's no real underlying message here other than the usual Godzilla fare of "don't ruin the planet," which is a given. At least the characters this time around are given some sort of motivation, lifting them beyond the characters from the last film, but there's still not a whole lot going on int he plot department -- not that this is a bad thing. Not every movie can be as multi-layered as Citizen Kane or as complex and plot-heavy as, say, Girls Gone Wild: Sexy Sorority Sweethearts, and while Godzilla vs. Megaguiras takes a very straight-forward approach to the plot, it is at least well-paced and exciting, lacking any of the dull, dragging spots that marred Godzilla 2000.

The final scorecard sees Godzilla vs. Megaguiras skewed heavily toward the positive side, however. It's not a work of art, but it's a solid, action-packed monster fest that delivers with gusto and spirit that help elevate it above the obvious short-comings in budget and script. Godzilla 2000 wasn't exactly a misstep, but this film is certainly a step in a slightly different, and in my opinion, more enjoyable direction.

Godzilla 1985 in it's original Japanese version was a moderately entertaining film, but certainly nothing to get excited about, and certainly not worth the five year wait. It's sort of like if you were a Star Trek fan really excited about this huge, expensive, new state-of-the-art return for your beloved show, then you go see Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and well, it sucks. Or it doesn't so much suck as it simply lets you down in a monumental way. The one thing that puts Star Trek: The Motion Picture a notch above Godzilla 1985 is the fact that Trek had that sexy bald girl in the little toga. Say what you will about Star Trek, but they use the little toga and mini-skirt a lot, so that makes them cool in my book.

Of course, then along came Star Trek: The Next Generation, which had a decent mini-skirt and skimpy toga count for the first season, but then got really PC after that and had everyone parading around in goddamn burlap sacks and shit. I don't know what your vision of a utopian society is, but mine is most definitely not an agrarian society where we all plant rhubarb and wear burlap sacks. And I don't think I'm alone in this. But every time Picard and his minions go to one of them "peaceful utopian planets of absolute joy," everyone's all fucking excited about planting some goddamn potatoes and wearing smocks. The fuck? Look, if I want to find Paradise, it's going to be old series Paradise. Remember when Spock found Paradise? He had a sexy lady in a little mini-skirt, and they spent the whole day swinging upside down in trees and frolicking in fields while Spock bellowed, "I'm in love, Jim!" That is some Paradise, brother. Not once did you see Spock stop and go, "Wait, if we stop all this traipsing and fucking, then we can go hoe a field!" No, Spock was all like, "Fuck that farm work shit! I'm gonna go skinny dipping with my woman!"

And that's the way it should be. No one wants to plow for all eternity, yet those assholes in the Next Generation were always out in the fields, smiling, planting, and wearing sacks. Well let me tell you something: farm work is hard. It's not Paradise. And neither is wearing burlap sacks or pantsuits. So look, get out of your brown smock, throw down your hoe, put on something sexy, and run through the fields with me and Spock. You'll be much happier than if you were planting tomatoes.

Of course, if we all throw down our plow and quit farming, then we'll eventually starve. So we'll probably have to oppress some of you and make you toil in the fields to feed our new leisure class, but hey that's no problem, because we'll just get those field-plowin' assholes from Next Generation! Problem solved. Now let's all go off and be Eloi!

Anyway, where was I? Sorry, but that just really pisses me off. Okay, so Godzilla 1985 in Japan was a bland film. Godzilla 1985 in America was one of the most laughably atrocious debacles I've ever witnessed. Gone was nearly half the original movie, and in it's place we got Dr. Pepper drinking generals and, of course, Raymond Burr doing exactly what he did when he was spliced into the original Godzilla film buy the Americans of the previous generation: he looks on in awe and terror. And of course, he gives the requisite "You don't know what you're up against" speech that was mastered by Richard Crenna when he played Rambo's commanding officer in First Blood. You know the speech. Some cocky bad-ass will be bragging about how they have Rambo cornered and he's in a cave eating rats, and it'll be simple to catch him, so then the commanding officer type has to do the whole bit about "Rambo is a specially trained killing machine who used to kill Viet Cong generals using just a toothpick from a mile away blah blah blah I hope you bring a lot of body bags."

It's always a sign of bad writing when the movie has to take time out to have someone assure us that the main character is indeed the baddest mother fucker ever to walk the earth. If you make a good movie, then we'll know the guy is a bad-ass. It's like how every Steven Seagal movie has to explain to us how bad-ass his character is, or how WCW keeps telling us they're great and their wrestlers are really cool when we all know they are old washed-up farts (especially Kevin Nash -- whoever thought of marketign this guy as the hip, edgy one is about eight years out of touch with the rest of society). Don't tell us someone is cool or tough; show us, baby. Lesson number one in high school creative writing class.

Well, Raymond Burr is to Godzilla what Richard Crenna was to Rambo. And I'm still thinking about Spock swinging upside down in a tree and laughing his ass off.

As is always the case, these new American scenes were put in so we white folk could better relate to the film, because we would never understand a movie starring nothing but those crazy Asian people. You know, I grew up watching Ultraman and Godzilla, and not once did it occur to me that I shouldn't relate to them because they were Japanese. Not once. Hell, I didn't even know there was supposed to be a difference between me and them. That whole "children won't relate" thing is such utter bullshit that I can't even believe people still try to pull it. Kids don't fucking care, and even better, they simply don't know. They don't know that they are supposed to hate someone because of their ethnicity. They don't know that we are supposed to isolate ourselves from other cultures. They don't know Japanese from American from Laplander. What they know is that they are watching cool monsters and robots kick each other around and smash things up, and that my friends, is a universal that transcends any sense of national identity, like farts and old people who cuss and guys who get kicked in the balls.

Adults cling like hungry monkeys to this idea that "children won't relate" in an attempt to displace their own racism, their own inability to see people as people and not as curiosities or "others." Adults are the ones who can't handle a Japanese show full of Japanese people, and they blame it on children, who really don't give a fuck about who is what. You know, that's why I can't stand most adults, and why I hate this whole trend of trying to take kiddie entertainment and sell it as "not just for kids." You know what? I watch Godzilla movies. I watch cartoons. I buy toys, and I fucking play with them. I don't keep them in a box hermetically sealed up inside a safe deposit box. I get them out and I play with them. Fuck you. It's stupid and childish and I really don't care. I'm not trying to convince myself that it's something serious and adult, because you know what? Adult stuff sucks. Taxes are adult. Buying fucking silverware is adult. Paying your rent or utility bill is adult. Being a bitter racist asshole is adult. That shit sucks.

Playing with toys and watching giant monsters fight each other is simple, childish, and pure. I wouldn't have it any other way. So next time you sit down to read a comic or watch a silly movie, don't try to tell yourself it's an adult thing. Try instead to think about what it's like to be a kid again, to not be strapped down by the discrimination and hate and narrow-mindedness that creeps in as we get older. Try to remember what it was like to not know or care if there was a difference between black, white, Asian, or whatever. Try to remember what it was like to be creative and imaginative and free from the stress and fear and loathing of society. Try to remember what it was like to be a child. Enjoy yourself. Enjoy those around you. And for Christ sake, afterwards, go outside and play.

So anyway, America chopped up Godzilla 1985 and added a lot of Dr. Pepper product placement. Godzilla movies are not free from obvious product placement, of course. Whoever gave the film the most money usually has their building and brand name featured prominently in the film as Godzilla knocks it over. But at least that's integrated. It fits. I don't think five-star generals sit around NORAD downing cans of Dr. Pepper as they tensely wait to see if one nuclear missile will intercept another.

With the dismal failure of Godzilla 1985 it would be fifteen years before America would get another Godzilla film on the big screen (unless you count that 1998 Matthew Broderick romantic comedy that had some giant monster scenes in it). This could be because it stung so bad, or it could be because in America, we only release Godzilla movies with a date in the title. Either way, by all accounts Godzilla 2000 is another thoroughly average film, but I'll wait until I see it to actually make that judgment.

Anyway, that's all in the future, and who cares about the future when you can live in the past? I went through this whole goddamn thing about Godzilla and racism and the death of childhood innocence (as exemplified by Spock in the episode I mentioned earlier where he swings in the tree and shouts "I'm in love, Jim!") just so I could tell you that the last movie before the Godzilla 1985 to get released to American theaters was Godzilla Versus Megalon, generally considered one of the all-time worst Godzilla films ever made, assuming a powerful position alongside the equally despised Godzilla's Revenge and Godzilla Versus Gigan. Now it's not going to surprise anyone, I don't think, to learn that just like those other movies, Godzilla Versus Megalon is one of my personal favorite Godzilla films.

Try to set the mental stage, and once again, remember that you used to be a kid before you grew up to be a bitter nerd like me. Think about watching this movie as a sprout. I remember it clearly. When I was young, I absolutely loved this film. I remember my friends and I getting together with friends to play Godzilla, and someone always wanted to be Jet Jaguar. The Godzilla films of the 1970s were colorful, full of action (except for Terror of MechaGodzilla), and had lots of weird gadgets and other stuff to make little kids fall in love with them. Because I am childish and immature, I can watch Godzilla Versus Megalon through those same eyes, forgetting for a moment that I have sat through the collected works of Bergman and Godard. I drop the pretense, the snideness, and I can enjoy watching monsters slap each other around while a robot flies in circles and a hard-bodied little bachelor guy in hip-hugger slacks jumps in and out of his sports car.

Jun Fukuda is the director here, the man responsible for a good many of the Godzilla films people love to hate, starting with Son of Godzilla. He was the one who helped bring Godzilla into the "superhero" years, when Godzilla was an earth-defending good guy instead of a building-kicking bad-ass.

So here you go. The film begins with portents of doom in the form of one of those little whiny kids in micro-shorts. This one has a lame-ass paddleboat sort of ... thing, and is out for a fun day at the rock quarry pond or something (well, it sure as hell ain't a nice beach) with his two gay parents. Well, I assume the part about the gay parents, but you gotta look at the evidence. No women anywhere in the film, two young good-looking guys in chest-revealing discoware out for a quaint picnic together at the lake. Like it or not, Godzilla Versus Megalon is an early crusading film teaching us that gay parenting is really no different or less healthy than hetero parenting, so lighten up. The children of gay couples will be just as fucked up and trigger-happy as the rest of the country's teenagers.

If you are the kind of person who memorizes the look of little kids in microshorts, then you may recognize the little kid. He also played "the little kid" in Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster and Time of the Apes. And weirdly enough, he was also in an Akira Kurosawa film, Dodes'ka-den. Seems weird at first until you remember that Akira Kurosawa was buddies with a lot of the Godzilla people. One of his good friends and frequent collaborators was Godzilla creator Inishiro Honda, and one of his favorite composers was Godzilla music creator Akira Ifukube. Despite these ties, Akira Kurosawa did not put the kid in little micro shorts, best I can remember.

The professor type guy, played by Katsuhiko Sasaki, also had a long career, or at least a career, in the genre. Aside from his fine work in this film, he appeared in 1991's Godzilla Versus King Ghidorah, Terror of MechaGodzilla, and one of our personal favorites of bad cinema, Last Days of Planet Earth.

I don't know if Yutaka Hayashi, the guy who plays Hiroshi, the firm little buddy of Professor Ibuki, had much of a career after this film, but he is named Hayata, which was also the name of the character who turne dinto Ultraman in the original series. So there you go. A little something for everyone.

An earthquake suddenly hits, cracking the ground open. It turns out that an underwater race of people led by Robert Dunham, one of the better American actors to pop up in Japanese films. Dunham wears a skimpy little toga (see Spock argument from earlier on) and a tiara sort of thing, giving us further proof that this indeed a gay rights film. You know, no one wants to see Robert Dunham's hairy self in a toga and tiara, but I support his right to dress however he wants as long as it makes him feel good. Maybe later he can swing upside down in a tree and throw fruit at William Shatner. Wouldn't we all like to do that?

Dunham's people are the Seatopians, an ancient race predating man. They are sick of humanity's atom bombs destroying their undersea kingdom, where women also wear skimpy togas and engage in big dance numbers. So there you go. Utopia, mother fucker. No one plowing fields and wearing sacks. These people know how to have a good time, but of course The Man has to harsh on their fun with atomic bomb tests. Seatopia announces basically to themselves (it's just Robert Dunham yelling in a big cavern) that they are declaring war on us surface dwellers. You kinda have to look at them as the good guys. I mean, we're nuking their home for fun and profit.

Being an ancient, vastly advanced superior race in a Japanese movie, they spend all their time doing dance rituals and chanting and their master plan is not a super cool bomb or giant army of dolled-up toga-and-tiara wearing warriors. Their big plan is to unleash a monster on the surface. I mean, it only makes sense. The Seatopians are too suave and laid-back to wage a war themselves. They'd rather get naked and sip tropical drinks out of a hollowed out coconut shell down on the beach. Man, Seatopians kick ass, even if I don't understand how Robert Dunham got to be their leader.

Once again, we encounter my main problem with a lot of Godzilla films. The invaders are a lot cooler than we are. I mean, the Earth is always being invaded by sexy women or those Planet X guys with the Devo suits and little curly-toed elf boots. Now it's being invaded by a bunch of beach bums. Why on earth would we go against them and fight for our right to be stressed out and led around on a string by a bunch of uptight old men when we could be ruled by sexy space girls or gay surfers? I mean, it's not like the old men who run the world have done a good job. Maybe we should give some of these other people a turn at the wheel.

So anyway, Seatopia. As is de rigeur for these movies, they have to awaken their ancient guardian by engaging in song and dance numbers, though judging by their outfits, the Seatopians are pretty down with this. It would have been good to see Robert Dunham in a fairy outfit being pulled about on a wire and harness rig, but you can't have everything in one production. See, this is what I'm talking about. The Seatopians put on a show and it's full of sexy people in little togas doing tribal dances and gyrations. We surface dwellers put on a show, and it's mother fucking Cats. Fuck you landlubbers. I'm signing up with Seatopia!

It takes a lot of shouting and dancing to wake the monster up. A lot. Not as much as it took to wake up Mothra in Godzilla Versus the Sea Monster, where they had to dance and chant for almost the entire film, but it's still a lot of work. I guess the big pay-off is a giant monster to do your bidding, so it's worth it I suppose. Megalon looks like a big stag beetle and has some of those useless arms that turn into what I guess are razor-sharp jabbing objects, but I always feel some fingers make life easier. I don't know why undersea people would own a giant beetle instead of a giant sea serpent or something, but whatever.

The two guys and their annoying kid counterpart return to "the inventor's lair," which looks a lot like "the tinkerer's lair" from Godzilla's Revenge. This is place is -- I mean -- it's ... geez. Think mad scientist meets Matt Helm. It's a space age bachelor pad royale. One of the guys has built a robotic copy of Jack Nicholson in a turtleneck sweater and named him Jet Jaguar. Now that's a chick-getter. "Come on up to my space age pad. We can spin some Arthur Lyman on the hi-fi, and I'll show you my robotic man. By the way, this is my hard-bodied little friend, Hiroshi."

Man, the two gay bachelors and Jet Jaguar. I'm all for free love and threesomes and pretty much anything else, but I don't know if I would want to swing with these cats. All things considered, you'd think they would side with Robert Dunham and his army of sparkly toga wearers.

The Seatopians feel they need Jet Jaguar for their war. So they steal and reprogram him. Now they have two weapons with which to take on the world. Somehow, I don't like Seatopia's chances in this war, but what do you expect from a bunch of underwater cross-dressing hippies?

They use Jet Jaguar to control Megalon, who makes his debut by smashing a dam. This is all it takes to rile up Godzilla, who makes a hasty advance from wherever to Japan, ready to kick a little beetle ass. But a-ha! The Seatopians have a trick up their sleeve, and it's name is Gigan. Yes, they summon up Gigan, another giant monster with no hands or fingers. The two on one odds don't look to good, but luckily our heroic trio of two lounge lizards and their scantily clad young boy are able to free Jet Jaguar from Seatopian control. Jet Jaguar suddenly gets the ability to grow giant like Zone Fighter (another robotic friend of Godzilla and a tv show that was directed by none other than Jun Fukada -- the Big G shows up in several episodes, as do Gigan and and Ghidrah), but frankly, he get sin the way far more than he helps. Jet Jaguar, Angilas, King Caesar -- Godzilla always gets saddled with some B-team chump who gets his ass kicked like Pony Boy at that big rumble in The Outsiders. Yes, truly Jet Jaguar is the Pony Boy to Godzilla's Patrick Swayze.

So the stage is set, Godzilla and Jet Jaguar versus Gigan and Megalon, two monsters who have no hands. And as a sideshow, you got the hard-body bachelors versus the tiara-and-toga wearing spies of Seatopia! Man, what a show! How can people not like this movie? Everyone wrestles and jumps and throws things. The little muscular guy gets to drive fast, and Megalon gets to toss rocks. Yeah, they may not have hands, but Gigan does have a saw in his belly, and Megalon vomits flaming rocks. That's pretty cool, but if lives underwater, it's probably not very handy. And having a buzzsaw in your stomach is cool and all, but really the most practical spot for it. In order to even use it, you have to be in a position to rub your belly against your oppoenent. Now if Gigan had buzzsaws for hands, that would be pretty useful.

Jet Jaguar, on the other hand, is pretty useless all the way around. I mean, he magically reprograms himself to grow big (the hell?), but other than that, he's nothing but a load Godzilla has to carry. Well, he does have a really cool 1970s jazzy theme song with the guy shouting "Jetu Jaguar punchu punchu punch! Kicku kicku kick!"

Godzilla does one of his all-time most famous moves, the never-ending tail-slide, in which he actually makes Jet Jaguar stand at one end of the battle field holding up the evil monster while Godzilla runs to the other end (yes, he runs), gets a lumbering start, then slides like two-hundred yards in a position perfectly parallel to the ground. He does this a couple times, and it's definitely right up there next to the "flying backwards using his atomic breath as a jet engine" trick he pulled in Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster.

From a technical standpoint, or from the vantage point of a grisled adult, this movie is awful. The special effects are weak, proving that even though Godzilla movies started out as effects innovators, they lagged way behind during the 1970s. Miniscule budgets shine through in all their cheap lack of glory. The kid is annoying and he has those disturbing shorts on. But I don't watch this movie as an adult. I watch it as a little kid sitting around on a Saturday afternoon with my friends. I watch it as someone who simply wants to laugh and enjoy a film. And in that regard, Godzilla Versus Megalon can be considered nothing but a success. Lots of monster action, lots of human action, robots, destruction, garish colors, explosions -- it ain't art, but that doesn't mean you can't come off your "these films should be treated as serious art" high horse and enjoy them for just one minute of your obsessed litle life for what they are: silly, fun bubblegum pop.

So take your serious comics, your "Batman isn't just for children," your mylar sacks and condescending attitude that berates anything not packed to the rim with state of the art computer graphics or smoking French guys talking about death. Keep your bland, soulless Matrix, your cgi, and your inability to remember what it was like to actually enjoy yourself. Keep it all, wrap yourself up in a little ball, and scoff at my low-brow stupidity while I hoot and holler and watch Godzilla Versus Megalon with nothing but the pure, unadulterated glee of a little kid.

A few brave souls remained to weather the storm, or at least did double duty in Hong Kong and the United States. Director and producer Tsui Hark was perhaps the man most responsible for what we call the Hong Kong New Wave. Films like Zu revolutionized movie making in the small island nation, and Tsui's knack for discovering new talent remains unparalleled to this day. As we've gone over before, his list of contributions to the world of film making are staggering. John Woo was laboring away in sub-par comedies and ultra-cheap action films before Tsui Hark fronted him the cash to make a little film called A Better Tomorrow. Tsui Hark's filmography as director and producer is more or less the same thing as a list of the most important, influential films in Hong Kong history. Chinese Ghost Story, Once Upon a Time in China, The Killer, Swordsman, Peking Opera Blues -- this is the man who basically made big-time action stars out of Chow Yun-fat, Brigette Lin, Jet Li, and countless others.

While you can't overstate Tsui Hark's contribution to the history of film, not everyone was happy about it. A lot of kungfu film purists disliked Tsui's reliance on slick editing and wires to augment his performer's talents, or in some cases cover up their lack of talent. Additionally, Tsui was notoriously difficult to work with in many instances. He would often bully his way out of the role of producer and into the role of director. You have to admire his conviction and passion, but if you're a director trying to work with him, it becomes frustrating to say the least. As many people as Tsui Hark "made" he alienated. John Woo and Ching Siu-tung are two among many who eventually had their fill of Tsui Hark's overbearing artistic passion.

However, most great directors shared these traits. It was Akira Kurosawa who demanded the entire lavish set for Seven Samurai be destroyed and rebuilt because a close inspection of the construction revealed nail holes in buildings that would not have been built using nails in the time Seven Samurai was set. Kurosawa also freaked out on the set of Tora Tora Tora because the paint on the battleships was a shade off the authentic historical color of paint used on Japanese ships during World War II. Obsession runs deep in people that committed to their craft, and it can definitely try the patience of those around them.

When Tsui Hark felt Hong Kong films had become too much about making money and not enough about artistry and innovation, he and a few friends started their own production company, Cinema Workshop, to cultivate film-makers who wanted to break out and try something different. When few Hong Kong film-makers would dare make films with overt political or social commentary in them, Tsui Hark made the fiercely political and downbeat Don't Play With Fire. Love him or hate him, there's no denying that Tsui Hark is one of the most important figures in Hong Kong film-making history.

But nothing gold can last, Pony Boy. As the industry fell apart, Tsui Hark was among the many directors who decided to try their luck in America. It was no surprise, really. Hark and friends like John Shum (the frizzy haired comedic actor was also a major figure in the freedom demonstrations that lead to the dramatic and tragic events at Tienamen Square) were outspoken opponents of Communism, and it seemed only logical that they would bid farewell to their home before China took over. Unfortunately, Hark's career in America was short-lived. Like John Woo and Ringo Lam before him, Hark was saddled with directorial duties on a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, only it was much worse because the movie also starred annoying basketball marketing scam Dennis Rodman. As if that wasn't bad enough, Hark immediately got stuck with another Van Damme clunker, this time bearing the burden of the Belgian bumbler and some intensely irksome comedian named Rob Schneider, who was nothing like the handyman Schneider from One Day At a Time.

After those two films, Communism suddenly didn't seem so bad. I think anyone who sat through either of those films would agree that maybe a little totalitarian censorship can be a good thing when it comes to Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman.

Hark's career leading up to his departure from Hong Kong was faltering. The comedy Chinese Feast and the romantic tragedy The Lovers both scored big with critics and fans alike, but from there Hark hit a series of stumbling blocks. His stylish and darkly violent retelling of the One-Armed Swordsman, entitled The Blade came and went with nary a peep. Likewise, his cynical, downbeat fantasy film Green Snake attracted little attention upon its initial release. People simply weren't that interested in depressing, angry films at the time. Since their initial failure, however, both films have acquired fairly large fanbases among aficionados of the genres. Certainly both films deserved far more attention and praise than they actually received, but at the time folks in Hong Kong just didn't want to hear the lunatic ravings of Tsui Hark.

Green Snake is set in a world between myth and reality. Zhao Wen-zhou stars as a young monk who spends his days hunting down demons and spirits who have crossed over from their own realm into the realm of mortals. Some of them come with malicious intent, but many of them seem only to want to run wild and free in the physical world for a brief time. The monk operates under the notion that the two worlds simply cannot cross paths, harmless intentions or not. The opening scene of the monk chasing an old wiseman who is actually a spider demon through a field as they both run through mid-air sets a beautiful but disturbing tone for the film. It's incredibly lush and over-saturated with dreamlike color. The hallucinatory beauty seems eerie, however, not at all peaceful, sort of like those old fairy tales where things are actually creepy and sinister instead of all bright and Disneyfied.

Monk Fahai is also immediately established as a complex character who is unsure of his Buddhist vows. He is determined to fight against the world of demons (keep in mind that in Chinese mythology, a demon is not necessarily an evil being), yet he also seems to find something fascinating about their realm. Likewise, he wrestles with physical temptations from his own world. On a rainy night, he witnesses a peasant woman giving birth to a child in the woods and finds it difficult to avert his eyes from the spectacle. He also notices that the woman is being protected from the rain, and quickly spies to giant snakes in the trees, serving as umbrellas. His initial response is to dispatch them quickly to the nether-realm, but he soon has second thoughts and decides that since they were helping the woman out, he'll let them slide by this time.

The two snakes are played in human form by the devastatingly beautiful Joey Wong and Maggie Cheung. They are two sister snake spirits who have decided they prefer the human world to their own, and so are doing their best to maintain human form and pass as mortals. Causing them untold amounts of grief is a blind Taoist ghost hunter and his assistants. Unlike Fahai, the priest has no doubts about his holy crusade to rid the world of demons and spirits. He goes about his quest with an unfaltering, blind conviction. Luckily for the sisters, he's about as good at his vocation as the Three Stooges were at their jobs as exterminaotrs or movers or guys who carried around those big blocks of ice. He's a minor annoyance to them, but not a real threat.

Hmm, two snake spirit sisters just trying to make it in this crazy world -- how come Lifetime can't play movies like that instead of those "woman is stalked by her crazy ex-husband while trying to get back the baby she gave up for adoption years ago" movies?

Rounding out the bizarre cast of characters is a young scholar named Hsui Xien who would much rather be drinking wine and writing love poetry than learning the ins and outs of Confucian philosophy. He's the classic "dreamer" character. You admire his idealism, but sometimes you just want him to shut up with his "my heart's so full of dreams" nonsense. And could someone tell me what the hell is the deal with the head rolling? As the scholars regurgitate the Confucian wisdom, they all roll their heads back and forth. I've seen monks and other assorted wisemen doing the same thing in various movies. Now I'm no Confucian gentleman. I've always been more along the lines of one of those drunken Taoists who lives in a cave and gets in arguments with the moon. So I guess the rule was you had to loll your head about while reciting your lessons, but you know if I tried that in school the teachers would tell me to quit nodding off, not unlike how they made me quit reading in "the robot voice" when I was in second grade.

Seriously though, if someone can tell me exactly why they made scholars roll their heads around like that, I'd appreciate it. I'm not above learning some new bit of history.

On a warm summer night, the two sisters sneak into town. Maggie Cheung breaks hearts by dropping in, nude and covered in rain, on a lavish party being thrown by some vaguely Indian guy. She proceeds to stomp mercilessly on said broken hearts with her suggestive semi-lesbian dance involving one of the female Indian dancers. I don't know of anyone, male or female, who's forgotten that scene. Joey, in the meantime, slips into the river and catches a glimpse of the young scholar. She's instantly taken with him.

Did I mention Maggie's suggestive dance?

Things get complicated quickly. Although Sou Ching (Joey Wong) and Hsui Xien hit it off well, there's this whole issue of her being a giant snake. Maggie also attracts the attention of Monk Fahai, who is torn between his sworn duty to combat the spirits and send them packing and his feeling that they are benevolent creatures doing far more to help their "fellow" humans than most of the actual humans are doing. Plus, he finds himself seized by a strong attraction to her, which shouldn't really surprise anyone. Fahai's confusion mounts as he witnesses people wallowing in filth and greed, far more destructive and nasty than any demon he ever vanquished. You could probably havea pretty good fire and brimstone movie featuring Monk Fahai and Robert Duvall's character from The Apostle, but you'd have an even better movie it was Monk Fahai and Robert Duvall's character from Apocalypse Now.

Monk Fahai considers the romance a blasphemy. Humans and spirits simply should not interact, plain and simple. He vows to put a stop to the relationship. Obviously, he's focusing his anger on the two lovers in an attempt to compensate for his own feelings of temptation and doubt. It's no surprise to anyone that the most wild-eyed, fire-and-brimstone preachers are often the ones with the most to hide. Nothing fuels a little righteous indignation quite like wishing you yourself could indulge once in a while. Fahai deals with his own guilt by projecting it on others and attempting to interfere in their lives despite the fact that they have no affect on him at all. Like most religious zealots, his divine call is pretty much what the rest of call "dickishness." Face it: it's pretty difficult to get behind a guy who's goal in life is to rid the world of Joey Wong and Maggie Cheung.

The blind priest, on the other hand, is a different type of corrupt religious leader. To him, battling "sin" is just a way to garner more attention and power for himself. It's not about righteousness; it's about career advancement. It's about the rush he gets by forcing his will onto others. Tsui's criticism of religion in these two characters is harsh but certainly not without sound foundation. Whether its nature is of a political or religious nature (if indeed there is any difference between the two), intolerance is, well, intolerable. It leads ultimately to destruction, alienation, and disaster.

Things get bad when Green (Maggie Cheung) starts getting jealous of her sister's romance. Green was already a bit jealous of the success her sister had in adopting human form. Sou Ching pretty much has it down, while Green still has trouble walking and maintaining her human form. She begins doing little things to sabotage the relationship, culminating in Hsiu Xien discovering Sou Ching is a snake spirit. The shock of the revelation sends him into a coma which only a magic herb can cure. Sou Ching is emotionally destroyed, vowing to do everything she can to shed her spirit self and become a real human. Green, in turn, realizes how her pettiness has potentially destroyed two people, and agrees to seek out the magic herb. Unfortunately for the two sister, Fahai is waiting to trap them and send them back to their own realm.

The whole ordeal is further complicated when the battle between Green and Fahai results in severe flooding. The entire village will be destroyed. Using their combined powers, Green and Monk Fahai could potentially stem the rising tide, but they are too caught up in their own vain battle with one another. By the time they realize the error of their ways, it's far too late, and their efforts to prevent the flood are a failure. The town has been destroyed. Hundreds have died in the flood waters, among them Hsiu Xien and Sou Ching. The final scene of Fahai and Green finally reaching a state of revelation as the world around them is washed away is powerful in the extreme. It's like a punch to the gut, and where most film makers would attempt to tie things up with some glimmer of hope, Tsui Hark just leaves it as it is. In a theme similar to Zu, the central characters discover their inability to compromise, work together, and put aside their own petty differences and jealousies has resulted in them losing everything they ever cherished.

Parallels to Hong Kong's situation going into 1997 are not difficult to make, of course. This movie seems like Tsui Hark attempting to come to terms with his own feelings toward Mainland China, a country to which he actually has very few ties (Tsui Hark is Vietnamese). His final resolution is bittersweet, to say the least. China has problems. The blind Taoist priest could easily be seen as the embodiment of China's contemptible past of intolerance and political persecution. If the reasonable people from both sides work together, however, perhaps progress can be made in healing China's ills. It's a message of hope, though Tsui's prognosis for whether or not it will actually happen seems doubtful, at best. He is, after all, a notorious pessimist when it comes to human character.

The acting ain't bad. Though Zhao tends to overdo stoic a bit, Maggie shines. And while she's outclassed by her "sister," Joey Wong manages to hold her own as the coy, innocent Sou Ching. It's a shame she disappeared fromt he scene soon after making this movie. Along with her role in Chinese Ghost Story, Joey Wong seems to be unmatched in making people wish they could just meet a nice ghost and settle down in some haunted temple or something.

The most subversive thing Tsui Hark pulls with this film is wrapping such a bitter pill in such a sumptuous package. Although a few of the wildly ambitious effects fall flat, Green Snake is a stylistic triumph. The beauty of every shot, the care that went into making every scene seem like a vibrant technicolor dream, is staggering. Few films are as overwhelmingly gorgeous as Green Snake. On that note, you'd be hard pressed to assemble a cast more entrancing and beautiful than Joey Wong, Zhao Wen-zhou, and Maggie Cheung. There's something unusual about all three of them. They're not just physically attractive. Something about each of the actors, even outside their roles here, is engrossing. Constant shots of flowing waters, billowing silks, mists, and swaying blossoms make the film unspeakably exquisite. Likewise, the scenes of magic and sorcery are breath-taking. There are no martial arts, but there's plenty of flying and summoning of natural elements.

As with most Tsui Hark films, it's possible to overlook the political and social commentary and simply let the grace and beauty flow over you, but you'd be missing out on what makes this far more than just a lovely little tragic fantasy film. If you go into it wanting tons of action and excitement, you're going to be disappointed. After providing us with some of the most wildly over-the-top fantasy action films in Zu and Swordsman, Tsui seems to be looking for a middle ground here between his early martial arts fantasy films and his later romantic tragedies like The Lovers. He hits the nail on the head. With the exception of a few weak visual effects, he creates the perfect fairytale mood: lush, haunting, dreamlike, and ultimately foreboding.

The failure of this film followed by the failure of The Blade was a good part of what lead Tsui Hark to seek success in America. Of course, that didn't work out either. He's been relatively quiet since returning to Hong Kong, though there are several projects in the works. Joey Wong went into semi-retirement, shifting her base of operations from Hong Kong to Japan. Zhao Wen-zhou should have been a huge star, but fantasy/martial arts films went out of style, and he found himself stuck is some astoundingly abysmal action cheapies that have done little to establish him as the future of Hong Kong action cinema, which is the title he seemed perfectly capable of inheriting. Maggie Cheung, of course, went on to become an international flavor of the month after some French guy got obsessed with her and developed an entire film called Irma Vep just so he could meet her. It worked. The film sucked (unless you really like watching French people talk about making movies as they chain smoke), but the director ended up marrying Maggie, so you can't fault the guy. He accomplished what he set out to do.

And Green Snake accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to pull people into its rapturous beauty then leave them confused and depressed at the tragedy of human stubbornness and greed. As a tragic love story, it operates well. As a indictment of political and religious intolerance and persecution, it works even better. Too bad it wasn't as successful at the box office as it should have been, but then, no one wants an unhappy ending. Tsui Hark was hoping that an unhappy ending in the film would make a real-life happy ending a little more feasible.

Whether or not that's the case remains to be seen, but no amount of politics can change the fact that Green Snake is a profoundly affecting, ambitious, heart-breaking story. Even a hardened old curmudgeon like myself has a soft spot for terribly tragic romance, especially if it's between snake demons and flying monks and lazy scholars. Taken as Hong Kong fantasy spectacle or political allegory, Green Snake is one hell of a film, and it's the perfect final note for the Hong Kong New Wave to end on. It's only fitting that the man who started it with Zu would also signal its closing with this film so similar in theme and (lack of) resolution.

Ironic that the entire New Wave cycle would end up so closely reflecting the events in Zu. There was lots of flash, lots of innovation. There was a noise that, for a spell, shook the world and attracted everyone's attention. But at the end of the day, everything closed on the same note of doubt on which it opened. We were right back where we'd always been. With any luck, the seeds of dissent and dissatisfaction continue to burn in Tsui Hark, and he'll surprise us yet again.

The Kikaider shows remain among the most popular of Japan's many 1970s superhero programs, but up here in the 1990s, it was Hakaider, not the goody-goody Kikaider, who was dusted off, revamped, and given his own feature film. I guess that's a comment on society. We're a lot more interested in anti-heroes and villains than we are in heroes. And the people we turn into heroes aren't like the heroes of yesterday. If Kikaider was the Hulk Hogan of Japanese superheroes, then Hakaider is definitely the Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Mechanical Violator Hakaider begins with a group of tomb robbers unearthing Hakaider, who has been lying dormant, locked in a massive underground vault, and then to add insult to injury, wrapped in layers and layers of heavy chains to keep him from wandering around. Obviously, he gets out, guns his motorcycle, and sets out across the landscape of tomorrow with one goal in mind: killing the man who imprisoned him.

His destination is a idyllic city where peace and prosperity reign supreme, partly because the benevolent leader is fond of lobotomizing free thinkers and anyone else who doesn't agree with his vision of paradise. A small band of rebels in black clothing (everyone in the city wears white) are trying to overthrow the leader, but they are a pretty pitiful, inept bunch.

Until Hakaider comes along, that is. He is a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of violence who lays waste to the city's lobotomized police squad as he makes his way toward the white tower housing the leader-- who is Hakaider's creator and imprisoner. Standing in his way, of course, is the new generation of mechanical superman, a silver-white android with the wings of an angel.

There are a lot of interesting things going on here. For starters, the film has subverted the archetypes and signifiers we've come to know and love. The black-clad motorcycle riding android is the protagonist, and the angelic, clean-looking android is the antagonist. Black is good, white is evil, or at least white is more evil than black. There are no clear-cut definitions here. Hakaider definitely isn't a "good guy," and the leader definitely isn't a "bad guy." He honestly believes what he does is in the best interest of the people and makes them happy. His vision has simply warped his view of the world.

You can almost look at it as a retelling of the age-old story set forth in Paradise Lost, in which Milton established the figure of Satan not as a ruthless embodiment of all that is evil, but as a proud rebel and non-conformist who was unwilling to bow down to the whims of God. Hakaider behaves in much the same way, an anti-hero whose crime is non-conformity in a realm where conformity is a way of life.

It may sound a bit far-fetched, but the film is not without ample religious iconography that makes it a much more feasible reading. The main rebel, an emaciated woman in punk rock garb, is haunted by a reoccurring dream where she is chained to a giant, gnarled tree. An angel approaches her, extends his hand, and is revealed as a hideous skeleton. It's only when the black knight bursts forth from the ground to defend her that she feels free.

Gothic tone, religious overtones, and politics aside, Hakaider is packed with tons of action, most of it consisting of Hakaider blowing away dozens and dozens of soldiers. Though not as stylized, there's easily as much carnage as John Woo delivers in his most frantic hour, and Hakaider kills even more people than Japan's other violent robotic hero, Janparson. The special effects are good, and the mood is eerie and dark while at the same time not subscribing to the Blade Runner paradigm that most people use when they ned to create a dark and moody film.

To top it all off, at least for you ladies and gay men, when Hakaider assumes human form (which, granted, is very rarely), he is probably the best looking super-anti-hero you'll find, sort of similar in appearance to Kyle McLaughlin but not as sickly looking. He's pretty cool and buys clothes from the same store as Mad Max.

Kikaider purists may dislike the reinventing of the myth (and the cameo by Kikaider's head near the end), but fans of well-executed, action-packed science fiction (not to mention people who like all that crazy goth imagery) should be more than pleased with this outing.

Now, let's see them bring back Kikaider as well!

Such was the case with Sakuya, a movie that draws from elements of science fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural "schoolgirl" horror thrillers that have been so popular in Japan since the release of films like The Ring and Birth of the Wizard and manga like Uzumaki, then ruins it all by including quite possibly the most grating, annoying, hideously unenjoyable little kid in the history of Japanese cinema. That right there is a strong statement, mind you. After all, this is the country that gave us Ichiro and the endless parade of Kenny's from the many old Gamera movies. This is a country who's cinema has pushed the envelope in exploring just how irritating a single pre-teen character can be. There is a well-documented history of these precocious brats in Japanese film, and even in the face of all that history and tradition, I still have to rank the snot-nosed little whiner from Sakuya as the worst ever. Ichiro may have been a twerp, but at least we could relate to his daydreams about Monster Island. The kid in this film, however, has no redeeming qualities yet he will not stay out of damn near every scene.

Since we now use our supercomputers for important things like digitally inserting the face of Bruce Lee into new films and completely reinventing the depths to which people will sink to exploit the famous dead, I'd like to see them use the power to one day remove this kid from the film, thus leaving us with a fairly enjoyable supernatural fantasy romp full of cool monsters and a totally bad-ass female lead. Instead, we'll probably just use our computers to figure out how to add more Jar Jar Binks into Empire Strikes Back so that those films retroactively have more to do with the Phantom Menace series of films.

We start off with the eruption of Mt. Fuji, accomplished through some of the best CGI work to appear in a Japanese movie. You really can't go wrong by opening or closing your movie with the eruption of a volcano. Heck, you could do both, even if your movie was about two people discovering love and their passion for dinner theater in the heart of New York City's Soho district. Is there any one Nora Ephram film that would not benefit greatly from a finale in which, after Meg Ryan discovers true happiness, something somewhere gets obliterated by a volcano?

So much the better if said erupting volcano unleashes Rodan or, as in the case of this film, dozens upon dozens of hellish demons and monsters. This is bad news for 18th century Japan, and for any country of any era I suppose. Few and far between are the historical epochs that would have been better off with hundreds of ghouls and goblins running to and fro, I suppose, though in a predictable twist, I can think of very few films that wouldn't benefit from a few more ghouls and goblins, especially those obnoxious Metropolitan type movies in which vacuous young debutantes and society teens get together to discuss their drab, soulless existence as if any of us really give a shit about debutantes and their male hangers-on. I was shocked to discover these sorts of people even still exist, but with that knowledge now in my head thanks to that Whit Stillman asshole, I can firmly say that any movie about them would be much better if it featured goblins. Hell, why not throw the volcano in to boot? Then why not throw Whit Stillman into the volcano? That's for Last Days of Disco, you jackass.

Where was I? Oh yes. Medieval Japan is in a real pickle with all these demons loose. Luckily, there is a family of demon slayers waiting to pick up the magic sword and send the demons packing. The big problem for the slayers is that the magic sword they use to do all their slaying draws its energy from the life force of whoever wields it. I'm sure they just love whatever ancient holy man half-assed his way through the fashioning of that magic weapon. The only way you can recharge the sword and retain your own lifeforce is by killing a fellow human - a crime no self-respecting slayer will commit. Thus, the job of slaying is handed down from generation to generation, and the slayers just keep getting younger.

We first meet Sakuya, the teenage daughter of the current slayer, as her dad is busy facing off against a kappa, the turtle-like goblins of ancient Japanese folklore. Unfortunately for the slayer, he's at the end of his life force and dies before getting the job done. Sakuya, then, takes the sword up herself and makes short work of the beastie and officially becoming the next generation of demon slayer. If you are seeing similarities between this and another story about a cute teenage girl who becomes a slayer of supernatural rakehells and ne'r-do-wells, then that's probably not accidental. Horror aimed at teenage girls is big business in Japan, and Buffy fits the formula perfectly. It's no big surprise, then, that the same basic formula would be adapted to a more distinctly Japanese setting, but while Sakuya definitely owes a tip o' the hat to Buffy, it's not an outright copy, retaining a unique identity thanks to the wealth of Japanese monsters and folklore upon which it can draw.

The entire opening battle is very stylish and dreamlike, full of surreal landscapes and glowing orange skies. All in all, very cool to behold, and a sure sign that, if nothing else, the movie has some pretty tremendous cinematography and art design. Where the movie begins to falter, however, is at the tail-end of this otherwise excellent little opening scene. As Sakuya finishes off the kappa, she hears a baby crying and soon discovers a baby kappa, recently orphaned by the aforementioned slaying. Against all better judgment and the wise council of her elders, Sakuya refrains from killing the baby, adopting as her baby brother and thus opening the door to the introduction of the most intensely annoying character you could possibly imagine.

Months later, the baby has grown up looking more or less human save for the peculiar green dome jutting out of the top of his head - the only real remnant of the fact that he's not human. Well, there's that and the fact that he looks sort of like Kane Kosugi from Pray for Death. While his adopted older sister is a super-cute, sword-wielding bad-ass, little brother Taro seems proficient primarily at pouting and whining. I know this is more or less a movie for kids, despite the fact that crotchety old farts like myself will devour it as well, and that's why they have a little kid in the movie. But even other little kids watching this movie must find Taro grating. When he gets older, the only friends he'll have are the ones who are hoping to use him to scam on his older sister.

Sakuya is preparing for the final push to rid the world of all those demons who escaped from the eruption, a quest that will eventually lead her and her two ninja sidekicks across Japan to a showdown with the Spider Queen, the demon who is in control of all the other demons. Unfortunately, this quest will also involve Taro tagging along, blubbering, whining, and generally behaving like a spoiled brat. Each scene in which he appears - and that includes just about all of them - is dragged down by his very presence. When he is confronted by the Spider Queen, who treats him as she would her own child as she tries to convince him that humans hate him (well, this human sure hated him) and he should join the demons in fighting his own sister, I guess we're supposed to feel for the inner turmoil, the sense of alienation he feels. But since Sakuya has been a kind if slightly stern mentor, and the two ninjas have tolerated his constantly screwing up every situation and complicating matters endlessly, it's hard to sympathize with his "dramatic" momentary change of heart. Instead, he just seems like even more of a little dickweed than before, and that's not a term I use often.

It's really a damn shame, too, because without him, this movie would be pretty damn good. It draws from the same energy and spirit as Keita Amamiya's films, feeling like the little brother of something along the lines of Renegade Robot Ninja and Princess Saki or Moon Over Tao, both of which feature a similar stylistic flair and willingness to gleefully blur the lines between medieval fantasy and science fiction by giving the samurai and ninjas an array of seemingly futuristic weapons like guns and armored vehicles. It's not as good as either of those movies, but it still could have been a solid piece had Taro not stunk up damn near every scene he could get his dirty little kappa hands on. Director Tomoo Haraguchi certainly shows a flair for directing, having done 1991's peculiar Mikadroid as well as working on the special effects for such stylish hits has Uzumaki, Misa The Dark Angel, and even Takeshi Kitano's Brother. His background in make-up and visual effects is obvious, as the hyper-stylized look of the film is astounding. He maintains a brisk pace, leaping from one action scene to the next and making sure everything stays exciting.

The special effects, pulled off by the same team who collaborated to give us the effects from the three recent Gamera films, range from traditionally average to utterly astonishing. These guys really raised the bar for special effects in Japan with the Gamera, and they do their best to keep up with their reputations here despite working on an obviously smaller budget. At their worst, they are the cat demon, which looks like something out of one of those hour-long Kamen Rider movies. Not bad, but obviously the traditional "actor in a big costume" sort of special effect that only works for kids and us forgiving fans of Japanese science fiction.

That's just about the only low part, however, as the rest of the monsters look fantastic. The kappa from the opening scene is top notch, boasting a make-up job that would make even masters like Rick Baker and Steven Wang proud. Groups of decaying zombie samurai look even better as they gallop through the foggy streets at night. And topping it all off is the Spider Queen, who transforms into a gigantic half woman, half spider creature for the big finale. Usually, giant monster effects falter at least a little here and there, but the Spider Queen is pulled off with remarkable results thanks to a combination of CGI, forced perspective, and good ol' fashioned trickery. The level of realism is unbelievable, or should I say, very believable, as she plows through a medieval village during her climactic battle with Sakuya. Not a once does it look like she is demolishing little models or computer effects.

Speaking of computer effects, y'all know I'm not a big fan of them most of the time for anything other than augmenting scenery or generating cool energy blasts, but I have to say they all look pretty damn good here and mesh well with the actual live action shots. Part of the reason they work is because they don't go overboard. While there are tons of computer effects, most of them are the aforementioned details rather than major focal points. While special effects obviously overshadow the actors in a movie of this nature, they don't treat the special effects as if they are the characters (learn a lesson here, George Lucas). The Spider Queen may be realized through the use of some clever CGI and scene matting, but that's still a human acting it all out. Even at their most outlandish, the computer effects never cross the line and become too much. The opening eruption of Mt. Fuji starts out looking a tad cartoonish, but the subsequent destruction of a forested valley and temple is fantastic, as are most of the scenes that follow.

There is one scene in which a number of rather fake and archaic monsters fill the screen, which will, I imagine, look like nothing more than a cheap bunch of monster costumes and puppets to most people, very much out of place amid the far more successful and modern looking effects that are highlighted in this film. What one would be missing, however, is that these are all the monsters from the classic 1960s Daei films 100 Monsters and Big Ghost War. Those two films were absolutely wonderful mythology/fantasy films filled to the rim with countless creatures from the annals of Japanese folklore, and as a fan of those old movies, I was completely delighted and tickled to see them pop up in a pointless but welcome cameo in this film. They're all here - the big headed thing, the weird tongue waggling umbrella with one eye, two arms, and one leg, the woman with the beautiful face on the front of her head and the hideous demon face on the back, and countless others. That scene alone made it worth suffering the thousands insults of Taro.

The action is plentiful and choreographed pretty well. We're not talking high-flying Hong Kong acrobatics here, but Japan has really been improving their action choreography in the past few years - basically, since Keita Amamiya kicked things into high gear. Back in the day, Japanese action choreography was as bad as - if not worse than - American action choreography. I guess everyone learned a thing or two from Hong Kong during the past decade or two, but while American films are happy to simply provide us with watered-down mimicry of John Woo's greatest choreography hits, Japan lifted the kinetic energy and spirit but adapted it to their own style. Sakuya blends the martial action seamlessly with the flashy special effects and more outrageous action.

On the acting front, everyone is passable, at worst. Taro may be the most insipid character I've ever endured, but based on the script, I have to guess that's how he was written, and the young actor playing him pulls off "annoying whiner" with devastating proficiency. Newcomer Nozomi Ando performs admirably as Sakuya, kicking demon ass and looking cute while doing it. She looks like she stepped right out of one of those "Samurai Shodown" games. It's not exactly a deep character she's playing, but as far as generic sword-swinging action gals go, you could do worse. In only an hour and a half, she can't really develop the depth of character Buffy enjoys.

The two ninjas are there to grumble, shout, and blow a lot of stuff up, and they do just that, while the Spider Queen is so good in her few scenes involving dialogue other than proclamations about destroying humanity that you'll almost feel sympathetic for the demons - an emotional manipulation that Taro couldn't pull off, even though that was supposed to be his job. Had she spent more time with the little bastard, I'm sure even the Spider Queen would have reconsidered her bid to win him over to the demon way.

Sakuya's big problem is that it's a good film. Not a great film, but a good film. It would have been a kick-ass television series, but it's not high enough up there in the world of film to survive its own weakest link, Taro. In a better film, the good would have outweighed the bad, but in a movie on the level Sakuya achieves, he's enough to drag it down from "good" to "average" and transform it into a movie that, rather than looking forward to seeing, you should probably check out if you get the easy opportunity. Sakuya herself is all killer, no filler, and the special effects are aces, but the movie itself is pretty "business as usual" for this particular genre. When Amamiya has movies out there like Moon Over Tao, Renegade Robot Ninja, and Zeiram II, there's no need to subject yourself to Taro. Even without him, those movies outclass this one, which is ultimately nothing more than a popcorn flick, but boy howdy does it deliver in all the right places.

A more solid plot would have helped it weather the Taro storm a bit better. As is, his blustering whining mucks up the front yard and leaves things less enjoyable than they could have been, should have been. As I stated earlier, this would have been a great television series, because then we would have been allowed time to get to know the characters better. Sakuya has a lot of potential - a young girl who is destined to fight a war using the Vortex Sword, thus causing her own young life to grow ever shorter lest she quench the blade with human blood. That's fuel for a great character and some good action-adventure drama. Confined to a mere ninety minutes or so, Sakuya's development is eschewed and we instead concentrate on Taro - himself a character that might not have been so painful if he'd been given more emotional depth. Unfortunately, the only characterization the movie has time for is "whiner," and the heroics he predictably performs at the end are less a natural outgrowth of his character and more just a simple function of plot conventions.

With Taro firmly in place, and with the story being what it is, my recommendation becomes shakier and less certain. Sure, this movie has an ultra-cool heroine, some great action, slick monsters, surreal cinematography and art design, and generally cool special effects... but it also has Taro, a pesky insect buzzing in your ear that simply will not go away no matter how many times you swat at him. The end result is a movie that is watchable, even fun, but definitely flawed and frustrating since you'll keep thinking of how much better it could have been with just a few less scenes of that screeching little kappa sumbitch.

On that simplistic, shallow level, this is a highly enjoyable film. The fights are long and the choreography is brilliant. In fact, on the surface, this film may appear to be nothing but one long fight after another. This is what happens when you don't dig.

After all, we're talking about Liu Chia-liang here. The man was one of the true and few ground-breakers and risk takers in the kungfu genre. When Mona Fong demanded that no women be portrayed as strong or heroic in Shaw Brothers films (she thought seeing a woman besides her who was strong would weaken her power base in the company), it was Liu Chia-liang who bucked the system and cast Kara Hui Ying-hung as a strong and heroic female in damn near every film he made. It was Liu Chia-liang who took the studio's films out of the simple, bloody Chang Cheh years and started infusing them with real plots and real characters.

Just below the surface, there is a ton going on in this film. Let's start with the biggest thing first. The Japanese are not the villains. Throughout the 1970s, kungfu films had lined up a seemingly endless parade of heartless Japanese villains for Chinese heroes to knock down. The bitter hatred of the Japanese reached as far back as incidents like the Sino-Russian War (in which Russia and Japan waged war against one another, but did it inside China), but were predominantly a result of the vicious occupation of China by Japan during World War II, an event that only in the past couple years has gotten any sort of global recognition.

So in Chinese films, the Japanese were as unquestionably the bad guys as the Nazis were in American films. There was nothing good about them. Until Shaolin Challenges Ninja. Liu Chia-liang stepped forward in this film with the message that it's time to put the wounds behind us and let the healing start. In this film, the Japanese are not inherently evil. In fact, they are basically pretty good people. The aggression between the two people is a result of misunderstanding, a lack of clear communication. The Japanese don't understand the letter Chia-hui writes, and in turn, he takes their gesture of respect (the offering of a samurai sword) as an attack.

Victory comes not when one side beats the the other, but when both realize that they are fighting for no reason, that it was all a mistake. Victory comes as a result of comprehension, not of physical superiority.

Liu Chia-liang also took a chance by making a kungfu film in which no one dies. This is, of course, almost unheard of, especially hot on the heels of the Chang Cheh era, in which people were slaughtered in droves. In fact, the violence usually took the place of other things, like plots and characters. I'm not getting all down on Chang Cheh films. Sometimes you want rampant bloodshed and heroic sacrifice -- at least I do. But Liu Chia-liang set out to prove that you could make an action-packed kungfu film in which there was no gore, in which the ultimate outcome is a state of peace. The ultimate goal is understanding, not revenge.

He also cast Japanese actors as the Japanese. This was no stretch in the case of the main Japanese guy, played by Yasuaki Kurata. Kurata built a career on playing evil Japanese guys in Hong Kong films. It's refreshing to see him in a more positive role. Yuko Mizuno is also good as Chia-hui's wife. Their parts in this film are indicative of something larger at work. One of the points of the film is that Japanese and Chinese culture grew from the same seed, that they are intertwined. Hating one is hating yourself. Yasuaki Kurata is an example of how Chinese people took pleasure from something Japanese, yet still harbored hatred toward the country. In fact, there is lots of trade-off between Japanese and Chinese pop culture.

Also on the chopping block is Chinese moral superiority. Previously, the Chinese heroes could do no wrong. Here, however, it's the Chinese hero's lack of respect for his wife's martial arts, his snobbery toward Japanese styles, and his ignorance of their ways of showing respect that leads to the fighting. The Chinese definitely and without ambiguity occupy the moral high ground when it comes to the incidents during World War II. But to imply that China is always without fault and has never committeded crimes against another country is preposterous (ask Tibet).

Each time I watch Shaolin Challenges Ninja, I find a new layer of the onion to peel away and examine. It's probably the most thematically rich and powerful film Liu Chia-liang has made. In 1996, it was paid homage to in the Jet Li film Fist of Legend, which was a partial remake of this and a partial remake of the Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury. Most fitting of all is the fact that Yasuaki Kurata appears in Fist of Legend as a benevolent Japanese karate master who is sick of politics and military machinations and simply wants to test skill against skill with a worthy opponent.

The film's ties to this film were all but ignored by most people, even though they are quite obvious. It's certainly a remake of Fist of Fury, but the influence of Shaolin Challenges Ninja is not trivial. Fist of Legend has a softer, more enlightened view of Japan and China than the Bruce Lee film. Jet Li's clothing is almost identical to the clothes worn by Liu Chia-hui in Shaolin Challenges Ninja (the grey suit). He has a Japanese wife, just like Li Chia-hui. And the villains are neither the Japanese nor the Chinese, but the politicians who sacrifice innocent people in the mad quest for power and glory.

Shaolin Challenges Ninja is the better and more important of the two films, though both are worth seeing. It represents Liu Chia-liang doing everything right. A brilliant story with a brilliant message, incredible choreography, tons of action, and a reason behind it all. It's probably one of the most perfect kungfu films ever made.

But that was okay. While America force-fed itself a steady diet of Rambo and Steven Seagal, dedicated action fans needed only to turn to Hong Kong, where the whole concept of action films was being reinvented by guys like Tsui Hark, John Woo, Sammo Hung, and plenty of others. What America had lost -- that human quality, the thrill that comes from seeing people instead of special effects at the forefront of the action -- Hong Kong now offered up in spades. And much like Italian and American films of the decade before, Hong Kong films during the 1980s were unique and will probably never be matched again.

Enter the 1990s. For various reasons, the Hong Kong film industry started to collapse. As older stars found themselves unable to perform the wild stunts the fans demanded of them and newer stars refused to undergo the horrific training required to pull off the stunts of yesteryear, action films faltered. Like American films, they began to focus less on the human aspect of a stunt and more on the technical aspect, things like big explosions and jumpy editing. Where many of the films had once relied on the style of breakneck martial arts action pioneered by Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, and Jackie Chan, the new crop of stars didn't have the dedication or the backgrounds to pull it off. A lot of the older stars, like Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, suffered pretty harsh injuries as well, meaning that by the middle of the 1990s it was getting pretty hard to find a martial arts action film that didn't relying heavily on wires, camera tricks, and undercranking. Rather than covering up for the weaknesses of the stars, with few exceptions it only reminded people of how lame the new bunch was turning out.

Interest in Hong Kong action films waned, and action fans soon found themselves lost once again. Sure, over in Japan Takeshi Kitano was revolutionizing the genre and doing things unlike anyone had done before him (or, of course, would ever do again), but one man could hardly support the genre for the entire world. It seemed that the well, for the most part, had run dry. Oh yeah, some people were swearing up and down that the latest crop of Bollywood actioners from India were real ass-kickers in the spirit of early John Woo action films. This claim never really held up to inspection, though. Despite the desire to seem action-packed and dark, the bulk of Hindi action films just couldn't stop themselves from including the musical numbers, and nothing will kill the intensity of an action film quite like singin' and dancin' that ain't done in a seedy nightclub or strip bar. Perhaps it was simply time to go into hibernation, or spend time acquainting oneself with the impressive back catalog of worthy action films the world has to offer.

The along came Korea.

The Korean film industry has yet to get the attention that the cinema of China, Hong Kong, and Japan received overseas. An arthouse film would pop up every few years, but for the most part, even your above-average film fan in the United States knew little about Korean pop cinema. It just didn't have the trendy ring of other Asian countries. But a cursory look at where Korea stands right now will show that's in very much the same situation Italy, the United States, and Hong Kong were in when they were at the top of their game.

Both Italy and the US hit their action film stride in the early-mid 1970s. for the United States, it was a period when the Vietnam War was still raging, the country was trying to hold itself together, and everyone on either side of the fight just felt disillusioned and exhausted. In Italy, it was the Arab-Israeli war and the dramatic rise in terrorist activity and crime that tore the country to shreds. Out of these boiling cauldrons of chaos emerged some of the greatest, grittiest films of all time. Intense times breed intense films. In the 1980s, Hong Kong was really coming into its own as a force to be reckoned with, and at the same time realized that the 1997 hand-over date at which time they would rejoin the Communist mainland was no so far off as it once was. Mix that anxiety in with an explosion in the power of triad gangs, and all of a sudden you have an island full of nervous, uncertain people. That fear and uncertainty got channeled in many ways into energetic films and artistic expression. If nothing else, directors were betting they might not have has much freedom come 1997 so they better pull out all the stops before then. The results were, of course, amazing.

When 1997 rolled around and turned out to not be that big a deal, the industry found itself spent. Gangsters had bled it dry behind the scenes, VCD bootleggers had demolished the box office returns, and most of the old stars were retiring, seeking their fortunes elsewhere, or simply couldn't perform like they used to. Hong Kong settled back into a period of relative stability and complacency, and the raw intensity of the films from the 1980s was lost.

And now we have Korea. I'm going to assume that no one needs me to give them a lesson on the past and current state of Korea. The United States fought a little war over there we creatively call the Korean War. You can watch MASH for the low-down on that. The war was historic for many reasons, not the least of which being that America, still high off their big World War II win, was in for a rude awakening pertaining to our military might. The United States has never been successful with wars in Asia. The Japanese ran circles around us and just would not give up during World War II. The ground battles in the Pacific were some of the most intense and bloody American troops have ever fought -- my grandfather's ear will attest to that if you can find it. He left it back in Guadacanal somewhere. Eventually, we just had to drop a couple atom bombs on Japan to get them to surrender.

Korea didn't go much better (and I won't even bring up Vietnam and Cambodia). When the country went into civil war, the United States immediately jumped to the aide of the democratic South. What we didn't count on was the Chinese leaping to the defense of the communist North. The war raged for years and never amounted to anything more than a stalemate. Eventually, everyone just got tired and signed a cease fire agreement. The war was never actually declared over. Officially, it's still going on today.

Like just about every communist country started finding out in the 1990's, there are some basic problems with a government that is totalitarian and isolationist. Communist North Korea simply started running out of money, then they were not so simply hit with a number of bombshells. Crop failure and severe flooding resulted in mass starvation. Just about every communist country in Asia began moving toward an open market economy. Where North Korea could previously rely on China and Russia for aide, that aide was gone as those countries found themselves with their own load of problems. Both leaders in the communist world began making ovetures toward the formerly evil democracies of the West. Before North Korea knew it, Russia dropped Communism and China started to (but just couldn't let go of that whole torturing of political dissidents thing). Kampuchia changed its name back to Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Vietnam loosened the grip somewhat and started marketing itself as a great spot for vacations. Korea's communist allies were suddenly few and far between.

There was no way an impoverished, isolated country like North Korea could deal with the natural disasters that crippled its economy and crushed the people. They had to look for help, and the only places that were doing well were the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Maybe it was time to resume talks with their brothers and sisters from the South.

The notion of a reunification of the two countries has been kicked around a lot in recent years. It worked for Germany. But then, it's still a wildly complicated situation. Decades of separation require years and years of work before reunification can ever be a viable, lasting solution. The countries started down that road when North Korea simply stood up and said it needed help. Japan, South Korea, and the United States obliged. If the bitterest of enemies (there is no love loss between many Koreans and Japanese) could put aside differences to help people in need, then maybe healing the wounds wasn't such a crazy idea after all. Talks began, and just like in Italy, The United States, and Hong Kong, feelings of hope, fear, anxiety, and confusion emerged.

It's from these tense but hopeful times that Shiri draws its power. It draws its title from a fish that is native to the waters around the demilitarized zone between the two countries. The symbolism is not lost on the viewer, and in fact fish play a major role as symbols in this film.

Shiri opens with no holds barred, as a group of North Korean special operatives train under merciless conditions that include practicing your killing on (temporarily) live prisoners. The intro is alternately beautiful and grotesque. It holds nothing back when it comes to gore and bloodshed. In fact, as a whole Shiri is one of the goriest action films I've seen in quite a long time, right up there alongside War Dogs and the violent outbursts in a Takeshi Kitano film. At the same time, while people are being gored on bayonets and flayed alive, the entire thing is shot beautifully, set primarily at night in the rain with lighting and angles that remind me a lot of the rainy night fights from Tsui Hark's The Blade.

The star member of the team is a woman named Lee Bang-Hee. She kicks ass at everything, but shines as a marksman and sniper above all else. Choi Min-Sik stars as the leader of the group, a dedicated soldier named Park Mu-young. The grueling training sequence ends with the group seemingly hatching some sort of plot. Lee Bang-Hee then departs to carry out some mysterious task.

Skip ahead several years and a little further south, where we meet two star members of South Korea's special anti-terrorist police force, Ryu (Han Suk-Kyu) and Lee (Song Kang-Ho). The two of them have spent the bulk of the past couple years attempting to thwart the plots of the North Korean terrorists lead by Lee Bang-Hee and Park. Bang-Hee seems at least to have disappeared in the past year and stopped assassinating people. Well, that doesn't last long, as the story picks up as she comes out of retirement to play a major role in what is apparently going to be a major scheme. A film about an assassin who doesn't kill anyone wouldn't be very interesting.

Lee and Ryu realize that she's come out retirement when they attempt to meet with an arms dealer who wants to give them information about something she and her North Korean cohorts attempted to purchase from him. Unfortunately, he winds up dead before he can say much of anything. Lee and Ryu know now that Bang-Hee is back, she's trying to buy something serious, and that's about it. On top of all that, Ryu is struggling to build a life with his girlfriend Hee (Kim Yoon-Jin), a recovering alcoholic who runs a fish store. The fish symbol is played out again as she gives him a pair of kissing fish, explaining that if one dies, the other will die shortly thereafter of loneliness.

Ryu and Lee eventually figure out that the terrorists are going to try and steal a new type of liquid explosive that is far more powerful than plastique or any other sort of bomb. When they realize they are constantly being thwarted and outsmarted in ways that are impossible, it becomes evident that there's one more problem to deal with: someone in the office is a spy. Ryu and Lee suspect their own boss at first, and eventually turn their suspicions on each other. Meanwhile, Park leads the rest of the squadron over the border into South Korea and sets up the plot to steal the liquid explosive.

Despite all their careful planning, Ryu and the special forces are dealt a serious blow when the terrorists successfully hijack a convoy transporting the explosive. Ryu convinces himself that his partner and best friend Lee is indeed the spy, while Lee has come to the same conclusion about Ryu. Park begins threatening to blow up a variety of important spots throughout Seoul, promising that he will even tell the cops where the bombs are -- making sure to do so that no matter how fast they move, the cops won't be able to diffuse the bombs before they go off. The first explodes in a huge shopping mall -- a little strike against capitalism, there. Ryu knows that as long as someone is leaking information to Park's group, there's no chance the special ops unit will be able to capture them. He devises a plan that will trap, he hopes, both the rat and sniper Lee Bang-Hee.

It's necessary from here on out to be a bit vague about the particulars of the plot. I firmly believe that a great film cannot be ruined by knowing the end, and that you can't spoil something if it's effective, but I'll defer to common courtesy and keep a number of things secret. The trap almost works, but winds up leading to a huge shootout between the special forces and the terrorists. The action in Shiri is intense. Most of it is shot at a frantic pace with lots of movement, as if the camera was a member of the special ops team. And as we already said, the shootout are incredibly bloody. When people get ripped apart by automatic rifle fire at close range, they get ripped apart.

The best thing about the action isn't how much of it there is or how wild it is; it's how real most of it is. After years of watching John Woo and his many imitators send people sailing through the air in slow motion with two guns blazing while they cross their arms so they can, for some inexplicable reason, shoot left with their right hand and right with their left, it was good to see a film that handles most of its gunplay as if actual guns were being used. No sideways guns, no double-fisted guns. When they shoot, they hold the gun with one hand and steady it underneath with the other -- gee, the way guns are actually supposed to be fired so you can aim and shoot without shattering your wrist bones. Stylish, outlandish violence and gunplay is fine, but it's also nice to see a film that finally pays a little attention to detail and realism. In fact, among the many awards Shiri received in South Korea was one from the actual special forces unit. It was for realism in depicting the use of weapons and the way in which the team operates.

Ryu and Lee figure out that the bombings are little more than a red herring. The big target is a packed stadium during a soccer match. As part of the process of reunification, the leaders of North and South Korea decided to have their two teams play one another before uniting to play against teams from the rest of the world. It may seem like blowing up a soccer game isn't that great, but remember that the game is packed -- including the presidents of both countries -- and sports have actually played a major role in diplomacy in the past. I'm not a big organized sports fan, but only a fool would fail to see what an impact they've had on politics. The best example is the relations between China and The United States. Richard Nixon gets lots of credit for being the man who opened up dialogs with Communist China and began creating bridges between that country and the US, but the real pioneers were actually members of an American ping pong team.

Ping pong is serious business in China. If you've ever watched their Olympic ping pong team, you know this is an entirely different level of play then what you see in rec rooms across America. In 1971, the U.S. Table Tennis Team paid a diplomatic call to China for a friendly game of ping pong. The photo of a shabby, goofball looking hippy member of the American team surrounded by giggling Chinese kids is a famous picture. So famous and effective was the visit that the entire process of creating ties with China became known as "ping pong diplomacy."

A few years ago, a similar event happened when American Greco-Roman wrestlers traveled to Iran for a bout with the national team of our long-time enemy. Just as The US saw China's border dispute with the Soviet Union as a way to get in good with China, so too did we see Iran's constant battle with neighboring Iraq as a sort of "common enemy" way of establishing some sort of diplomacy with a country we'd hated previously. Once again, the first diplomats were athletes.

One of the most striking images from the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney came during the opening ceremonies when North and South Korea walked into the stadium under a unified flag and as a single team. They competed separately, but for that one night, there was no North or South; there was just Korea.

So sports can actually have a dramatic impact on things, and it's because they are something people have in common. A photo op of Mao and Nixon sipping mai-tai's is all fine and dandy for a history book, but how many everyday people relate to the staged posing of heads of state? How many relate to being enthralled by a good game? Sports speak to people on a common level that exists apart from ideology and politics. Sitting in the arena in 1971, there were no Communists and Capitalists. There were ping pong fans.

Ryu and Lee both know that if Park succeeds, it will be a crippling blow to the process of reunification, but the viewer may be confused by the fact that before every action, the terrorists say, "For the reunification." If they are in favor of reunification, why fight so hard against it? That's explained as part of one of the film's many strong points. The terrorists are not just terrorists. They are human characters. Their motivations, emotions, and beliefs are made very clear, and it becomes difficult to simply dismiss them as evil. They avoid the one-dimensionality that plagues most other bad guys in action films. Park in particular has a powerful moment when he confronts Ryu and talks about how SOuth Korean people have been lounging around in shopping malls and fancy stores while North Koreans have been left to starve and suffer and die. In his eyes, the biggest roadblock to reunification is the squabbling, petty, egomaniacal leaders of the political parties who leave people in misery while they sip cocktails and talk diplomacy in posh apartments.

It's hard not to sympathize with Park. He's a common type of character -- an everyman who sees people die in the name of political posturing. Choi Min-sik is superb in the role, as subtly powerful as Takeshi Kitano at his best or Chu Kong in The Killer as Sidney Fung and Kuo Chui as Mad Dog in Hard Boiled. While he's not the main character, he definitely emerges as the most interesting because he has so much depth. During one of their many bloody and intense shootouts with the police, there's a striking contrast between he and Ryu. While whole slews of cool looking anti-terrorist guys in their fancy uniforms get blown away, Ryu dashes past intent on catching Park. Conversely, when one of the terrorists is shot, Park's primary concern is for his team. He even puts himself in an inescapable situation because of his attempts to save his fallen comrade.

You may notice that I haven't said too much about assassin Bang-Hee despite her being central to everything that happens. Suffice it to say that when Ryu finally catches her, he's in for one hell of a revelation. You'll probably figure it out pretty easily, and to the film's credit that doesn't lessen the emotional impact. I firmly believe that I could detail every little plot point for you and it would still be a blast to watch.

After Ryu's trap backfires and Park is rescued from a nasty predicament by by Bang-Hee, Ryu manages to trail Bang-Hee as she retreats to her hideout to treat a wound. Ryu nearly loses it when he finds her hideout is his girlfriend's fish shop. At the same time, Lee finally figures out the mystery of the leak inside police headquarters. Months ago, Ryu's girlfriend Hee gave him a fish for his desk, and as a way to pretty up the place, the department bought several other fish from her. They had a problem with them dying, which they attributed to the fact that Lee thought they'd like to eat things like cookies and hamburgers. Lee has a revelation about this however, and when he cuts open a dead fish in his office aquarium he finds a tiny transmitter inside. He realizes then, just as Ryu realizes it as he watches Bang-Hee remove a wig and disguise: Hee and Bang-Hee are one and the same.

The year or so Bang-Hee was retired was spent in Japan receiving plastic surgery. Ryu is devastated to say the least. He has no idea what to do or how to feel. At the same time, Hee is tortured over the fact that she actually does love Ryu as much as she says, and her relationship with him goes far beyond a mere easy road into police headquarters. Lee is less indecisive, however, and immediately calls out the troops to capture her. It doesn't go as planned, of course.

In the end, it comes down to Ryu facing off against Park and his soldiers in the stadium while Hee waits as a back-up plan. If the bomb doesn't go off, she'll open fire on the two presidents. The final shootout is amazing, not that everything up to this point hasn't been equally amazing. It ends as we expect it will, with Ryu forced to confront Hee before she assassinates the presidents. The final scene between the two is silently powerful. They exchange no words, but the emotion conveyed is overpowering. And it only gets stronger in the following scene. When Hee refuses to relinquish her weapon and takes a potshot at the presidential limo as it passes, Ryu shoots her in the head.

The next scene sees Ryu returning to the fish shop. His mission was a success, but he's lost everything. On the answering machine he finds a message from Hee. In it, she details every aspect of the plan so Ryu can successfully foil it. Her only request in exchange for the information is that he not be the one to go after her. Send someone else, anyone else, but she couldn't face Ryu again. It's a staggering scene, one that perfectly illustrates the depth of Ryu's loss.

Even among the tough guys, nary a dry eye is to be found as the movie draws to a close.

After I finished this film, I sat in quiet, stupefied awe for a while, then immediately watched it again. The movie got a lot of hype at home, and I think it more than lives up to it. It's one of the most action-packed, exhilarating, emotional films I've seen in decades. It has the emotional impact of The Killer but avoids being as melodramatic. It's an incredible, draining experience. And the action is simply incredible. Shiri eschews the bullet ballet of heroic bloodshed while maintaining the emotion, and goes for a grittier, realistic approach while at the same time still remaining highly stylish. It's like a mix of 1980's John Woo with films like Heat. In fact, this movie reminds me of Heat in several ways, including the flawed cop and the well-developed criminals as well as several stylistic aspects.

Upon its release in South Korea, Shiri was a blockbuster. It knocked Titanic out of the number one spot and quickly became Korea's highest grossing film. With the collapse of the Hong Kong film industry and everything about Japan these days being lukewarm at best, South Korea has the only domestic film industry that regularly out-gross American imports. With this much hype surrounded it, I was sure there was no way Shiri could deliver, at least not at the level that was being claimed. I'm happy to say I was dead wrong. The film is fantastic, breathtakingly paced, and exquisitely structured.

I don't get wildly excited by movies that much anymore. I've seen just about everything at this point, and as I've said before it may not take much to please me but it does take a lot to wow me. Shiri is the type of movie that reminded me of why I developed such a passion for the cinema. It has everything and executes its game plan without flaw. Whether or not South Korea can keep it up remains to be seen, but other recent action films from that divided nation look promising. In the wasteland that is the modern action film genre, Shiri is the only movie that can go toe-to-toe with the films of the past or the films of Takeshi Kitano.

The lead cast is superb, and the supporting cast is great as well. Particularly cool is a young cop who is treated as sort of the office nerd throughout most of the film until he showcases his talents at the end and becomes one of the central players during the final confrontation between the Special Ops and the North Korean soldiers. I've already covered how amazing Choi Min-sik is in this film, but let's not leave out Kim Yoon-jin as Hee. She is remarkable, though she needs to brush up on pretending to take a drink from a bottle. She brings an emotional depth and spiritual/physical strength to her character that is almost never found in a female in an action film. Most of the time, the action film idea of a strong woman is just to have her beat people up same as the guys. Hee is a different type of character, though. Total and absolute bad-ass, no doubt, but it's the depth of her character and the sacrifices she forces herself to make that make her truly memorable as one of the most powerful female characters in action film history.

While the politics and symbolism are not exactly subtle, they also manage to avoid being heavy-handed. There is never any, "This is right, this is wrong" proclamation the way you see in American movies that attempt to have a message (Traffic being a notable exception). Instead, the politics serve to add extra electricity to the film, just as they did in the 1970s in films from the US and Italy. shiri reminds us that action films can still be good, and films can still be political without being preachy and condescending. Are you listening, Susan Sarandon?

The gore will no doubt turn some people off, just as I'm sure it will attract others. It's pretty graphic stuff, but I'm one to say it's actually positive to see the negative aspects of violence. When people get shot, they bleed. They bleed a lot. It's not something that is clean. American action films love to up the body count while lowering the actual amount of bloodshed, thus making the violence far more cartoonish and far more inviting. Watching some poor cop get his kneecaps blown off in Shiri will not make you want to pick up a gun.

Speaking of which, man alive do a lot of cops die in this film. The uniform with all the packs and the hood and the goggles and the neat guns may look ultra-slick, but you might as well be wearing one of those red shirts in the old Star Trek series. Like I said, in at least one part of the film it's used to great effect.

I really can't say enough great things about Shiri. It made me feel like I was discovering something for the first time. If this film doesn't obtain the same sort of lofty cult status that movies like The Killer and Hana Bi have obtained, then the world truly is obtuse. If you are in search of the best action films in a decade, then you need look no further than Shiri.

But despite my many criticisms of his work, and they are multitudinous to be sure, I also freely admit that I enjoy most of his films. They may not be masterpieces (unless you ask Fulci fanatics), but they are usually entertaining and pretty wild. That I don't take him too terribly seriously as a director should not be misconstrued as my not liking what the guy does.

From time to time, he got the bug to make something outside of the horror genre. A number of painful slapstick comedies bear Fulci's name, and they are up there on the funny scale with, say, the late 1970s/early 1980s comedy films of John Woo. Sometimes, you have a knack for a certain genre, and you should just accept that and excel in your field. I mean, you don't see accomplished neurosurgeons going, "Yes, but I want to break out of the neuro surgery genre, which is why I'm trying my hand at triple bypass heart surgery today."

The Smuggler is one of the few times Lucio Fulci left the confines of horror and was somewhat successful. It still plagued by Fulci's utter lack of fast pacing, something that can work fine in a horror film but falls flat in a crime drama. He never really creates any tension or suspense. He does build several lengthy scenes of guys sort of sitting around or driving. Still, it's certainly a better way to spend one's time than watching Donnie Brasco or Mafia Massacre.

Fabio Testi plays a young Mob hotshot who specializes in smuggling. When one of their runs leads to a boat chase with waiting police, Fabio becomes determined to discover who set them up. When his father is murdered, all-out war breaks loose between rival Mafia factions and the cops.

Despite working in the crime/action genre, Fulci doesn't shy away from the gore effects for which we know and love him. Exploding necks, sundry blood-gushing bullet wounds, and gut shots that blow massive, bloody holes in guys are all part of the fun.

The first hour or so of this film is godawful slow and unengaging. None of the characters are very interesting, and calling them one dimensional is putting it lightly. At no point did I feel any sort of sympathy or interest for any of the characters. Fulci should have studied the masters of the genre, guys like Umberto Lenzi and his spectacular film Violent Napoli. Lenzi manages to pack tons of action, plot, emotion, social commentary, and actual character development into his film. Fulci manages to pack in lots of scenes that seem like they just left the cameras on while everyone was taking a break. To be fair, it's nowhere near excruciating as the endless scenes of guys sitting around that we are served in Mafia Massacre. But the weakenesses of Fulci that are dismissed as "surrealism" in his horror films are all too obvious in this film, and this time around you can't pin the blame on the supernatural.

The writing is weak. The characters are stiff, but well-acted within the confines of the generic archetypes each person fulfills. Fabio Testi is certainly no Maurizio Merli or Tomas Milan, but he's competent enough. The problem here isn't with the talent of the actors, but with the shallow characters they are given to play.

Fulci finally hits his stride in the final half-hour of the film. The finale is more than satisfying enough to make up for the spott first hour. Once Fulci and his cast finally wake up and realize a movie is going on, they really kick it into high gear, and this becomes quite an enjoyable and bloody action film. Fulci goes all out with the special effects, resulting in a brutal series of acts. Stomachs are blown wide open. Faces are burned. Brains are splattered. It's fun stuff, but also an example of Fulci's weakness as a director. When he can't create anything real, he falls back on the visceral punch delivered by his gore. And give the man his props, nobody does it better.

It's too bad Fulci never clicked as a more proficient director. His taste for the outrageous in splatter effects coupled with some actual directing panache could have made for some masterpiece films. Instead, Fulci usually delivers fun but flawed stuff, films I certainly enjoy but for which I don't have a high degree of respect. There's nothing wrong with this, mind you. Not every film can hit on every level. At the end of the day, despite all my Fulci bashing, I can only think of a couple movies he directed that I didn't find fun.

Dying Mafiosos never looked better or bloodier than they do in this film. When the carnage was over, I was left with a satisfied smile on my face and a whimsical giggle in my throat about all those bursting chests. Those fuckers must have been firing hand-held cannons.

The Smuggler is certainly no Violent Napoli, but it's still an amusing film that has more good than bad. I recommend it. If nothing else, the finale will blow your mind. No one gets shot with a loaf of bread like in Mafia Massacre, but you also don't have to sit through endless scenes of Mafia family picnics.

You know you're in trouble when people are desperate enough to adopt Donnie Yen -- the Mario Van Peebles of the Hong Kong film industry -- as the most promising young talent. Look, Donnie Yen has "been showing a lot of potential to be good" for something like twenty years now. If he hasn't done anything yet, then maybe it's time to admit the guy is, in fact, a worthless hack.

Hong Kong is a polluted sea churning with slap-dash nonsense, undercranked and ridiculous looking wire-fu debacles, and films whose scripts seem to have been assembled at random by a small inbred family of chimps with wild Charles Manson hair. There was a time when Hong Kong filmmakers actually put some small degree of effort into the script, but round about the mid 1990s they realized they could squeeze out any incoherent piece of tripe and people would eat it up no matter how poorly made and vile it was. They were, of course, wrong, and the total disregard for quality that blossomed in the mid-90s helped destroy the once mighty Hong Kong film industry.

Even once-great directors like Tsui Hark seem incapable these days of making anything that might rank higher than, say, being stricken with a sudden and intense case of diarrhea when you are miles away from the nearest toilet. His latest big idea after cranking out some truly worthless Jean-Claude Van Damme films is to remake the John Woo classic A Better Tomorrow, only with an all-female main cast. This guy used to have great ideas, or at least managed to have two great ideas for every three bad ones (like that notion he had to make the musical live-action version of Mai, the Psychic Girl starring Winona Ryder. Probably just a rumor, but it still makes me laugh).

The entire situation is made all the more tragic by how great Hong Kong movies once were. Starting with the Shaw Brothers swordsman epics of the 1960s, continuing on through the golden age of kungfu films in the 1970s, the kungfu revolution of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung in the 1980s, and the invention of the Hong Kong new wave by guys like Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and John Woo, for three decades Hong Kong film making was a dynasty.

Then, in the 1990s, round about the time American fans started greedily devouring anything at all from Hong Kong and celebrating it as high art despite the "make a quick buck" mentality that dominated the industry, something started to go terribly wrong. The films were becoming increasingly cheap and haphazard looking, as if the men and women behind them were so high on their own success that they felt they could shit out a film and people would love it. Scripts looked like they were thrown together by mental patients, and due to injury, retirement, or immigration to other countries, much of the old talent disappeared and was replaced by the new school who lacked any real skill in anything at all, be it acting, directing, or doing kungfu.

Criminal triads bled the industry dry, milking it for every last penny they could steal and then leaving a shriveled, dried-up corpse not unlike that space vampire woman in Lifeforce, only unlike Mathilda May, these gangsters were not stunningly beautiful and naked throughout the entire film. And given that most gangsters, despite the glamorous images of themselves they helped put on screen, are out-of-shape thugs with dripping, oily jeury curl haircuts, you probably wouldn't want them strutting about in the nude anyway.

Persistent injuries to big-name stars like Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, and Jet Li meant they were relying increasingly on stunt doubles, camera tricks, and wires to do what they used to do on their own. Old age, frustration, the lure of Hollywood, and the desire to get out from under the thumbs of the gangsters who controlled the industry lead many actors and directors to America, Japan, and The Philippines. Uncertainty over what would happen after the 1997 hand-over of the island to Communist China chased away a lot of other people, or at least started them thinking about things other than movies.

Lump on top of all this the truly monumental pirate VCD market in Asia. Movies started coming out on VCD before they were in theaters, and people were much happier picking up these ultra-cheap discs than going to the theater, especially since the movies were starting to suck. It's a catch-22 there, or a chicken and egg conundrum trying to figure out whether people bought VCDs because they didn't want to pay to see a shitty movie, or whether the movies started getting shitty because so much money was being lost to the pirate market. Either way, it's one of the few markets where video piracy actually did help destroy the industry, though frankly, it had become so big and bloated that it was bound to pop at some point.

As if all this wasn't enough, the Asian economic recession of the 1990s put the final nail in the coffin of Hong Kong's domestic product. Where Hong Kong was once fiercely loyal to its own industry, the flood has slowed to a trickle, and people turn out to see big budget American films while eschewing the local stuff. Which is odd, because as bad as Hong Kong cinema may be, it's no worse than, say Battlefield Earth or Wild Wild West. Hong Kong is an easy target because of the trendiness, albeit waning, of the films, but you can't really help but notice that we're in a global recession when it comes to quality movies, and Hong Kong films are no worse than the crap coming out of America and Japan these days. Weirdly enough, India seems to have picked up the ball in terms of making amazing, complex, and elegant action films, but a lack of distribution and translations keep Hindi films, however great and action-packed they may be, relatively inaccessible to the greater American cult film audience. And the musical numbers simply scare a lot of people away.

But it's not like Hong Kong didn't earn the break from making good films. They've given us thirty years of great material to work with. And as bad as things may be these days, we can enjoy the past while we search the drech for a glimmer of hope in the future.

And in this environment, when a glimmer does appear, however faint, it is blinding in its brilliance, simply because that which surrounds it so dim. The most promising film to come out of Hong Kong in the past several years is Andrew Lau's (Lau Wai-keung, not the famous bad actor and worse singer Andy Lau Tak-wah) special effects fantasy extravaganza Storm Riders. Ahh, you were wondering if I was ever going to get to the movie review, weren't you?

Touted by many as sort of a next generation Zu, this film actually holds up pretty well to the comparison by being a rather inventive, action-packed, highly stylized spectacle of no-holds-barred film making. What makes it different from most all other Hong Kong films these days is that it's actually fun, and they put a ton of time, money, and effort into it. In fact, it became the most expensive Hong Kong film ever made, a title previously held by films like Jackie Chan's globe-hopping adventure film Armor of God II: Operation Condor. As a quick aside, since Armor of God II was released in America as Operation Condor before the first film, when they finally released the first film, they called it Operation Condor II: Armor of God. Not quite as silly as the infamous mistitling of Bruce Lee films, but still amusing.

Back to Storm Riders, since that's the film I'm reviewing and I generally like to stay on topic. Fading teen heart-throb Aaron Kwok, who has not aged a day in fifteen years, stars with current teen heart-throb Ekin Cheng, who rose to fame with his role in those annoying Young and Dangerous films. Aaron's film career always seemed to show promise, as he is good looking and physically talented. But every time it seemed to be getting on track, it would falter, probably because he's a pretty lame actor. Luckily that doesn't matter anymore, and what's important is that he has good hair and is willing to wear a cape. You know, I seem to recall an unusually high number of films in which Aaron dons a cape. Both he and Ekin Cheng have amazing hair talent that allows them to have the sort of hair usually only found on an anime cartoon character. As Storm Riders is an adaptation of a comic book, this ability to have flowing cartoon hair that is perpetually waving in the breeze is important, and let it never be said that the hairdos of Ekin and Aaron don't rise to the occasion.

Anyway, not to be undone in the wooden acting department, Ekin Cheng excels at bad acting and is every bit Aaron Kwok's equal in this department. Unlike a lot of Ekin bashers, and they are legion, I actually admit that there is quite a bit of talent somewhere inside Ekin that goes beyond his amazing hair. He has a glimmer of talent and charisma, and with the right director, he could probably become a decent actor. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is interested in good acting anymore, and unless he develops a massive "I'm an artist" ego like Tom Cruise, it's unlikely Ekin will feel driven to hone his craft. But there's some hope. After all, Leslie Cheung was a pretty worthless actor at first, but over the years has become better and better.

None of this really matters, though, as both guys are here to play one-dimensional comic book characters, and they certainly have the talent to pull that off. They star as orphans named Wind and Cloud who are being raised by a bad-ass warlord who happens to be the guy who orphaned them in the first place by killing their respective parents. The warlord, who doesn't fuck around and simply names himself Conqueror, is played by none other than the mainstay of 1970s action and sci-fi programming in Japan, Sonny "The Streetfighter" Chiba, who seems to be turning into Toshiro Mifune in his old age. That's not bad. You can do a lot worse than start to look like Toshiro Mifune, one of the grand masters of bad-assness. For instance, you could start looking like Don Rickels or Phyllis Diller, or even worse, like a combination of Don Rickels and Phyllis Diller. Then you'd have no friends, and you'd die a lonely, bitter old mutant.

Despite the fact that the greater portion of Sonny's work sucks, I love him. Or maybe I love him because of the fact that a lot of his films suck. But still, there's no denying the man's importance in action cinema. His Street Fighter movies revolutionized karate films by turning low budget into stylized art and teaching us that as violent and brutal as you thought films already were, he could make them meaner. Plus, the formation of Chiba's Japan Action Club helped train some of the best and brightest action, martial arts, and sci-fi stars of the 70s and 80s.

The movie begins with a sleepy monk throwing out your typical esoteric Yoda prophecies. The subtitles on my copy were flea-sized, so it looked at times like the guy was named either Mad Buddha or Mud Buddha. Whatever the case, his name wasn't Larry. The monk makes a prediction that Conqueror will rise to rule the martial world. Yep, it's the martial world again. This isn't really that great a prediction. I mean, the guy can fly and he's named Conqueror. If you are named Conqueror it pretty much guarantees that you will kick some serious ass, sort of like how if you are named Tiny you will be really huge. But a warlord named Tiny isn't very imposing, so he went with Lord Conqueror.

Unfortunately, the prophecy isn't all wine and roses. Mud Buddha also predicts that Lord Conqueror will be toppled "when wind and cloud combine." Down south, we used to call those tornadoes, and rest assured that they can indeed do some real property damage, even if you are named Lord Conqueror. Upset by this prophecy, Conqueror goes out to collect all the kids born under a certain star and named Cloud or Wind. One of them is the son of one of those dirty ol' beggar looking swordsmen who has a beef against Conqueror anyway. Seems Conqueror is a big fan of collecting rare and powerful swords, and this guy has one. See, this was back before eBay, so back then if you wanted some weird little antique, you had to search for it at flea markets or challenge people to duels. Years ago, the two dueled in one of the film's most beautiful sequences, a fight amid a lush green forest of bamboo. This entire sequence, though by no means a display of any real martial arts, is positively stunning.

The swordsman loses the duel, and Conqueror makes off with the guy's sexy wife, vowing that they will meet again to fight for ownership of the magic sword. It was cool because something like that happened to me a couple months ago. When the two warriors meet again, they duel on, above, and all around a giant cliff carved into the shape of a towering stone Buddha. This fight is pretty cool as well, with the guys zipping all over the sky much like the fighters in the superb old Ching Siu-tung fantasy film Duel to Death. Only this time, instead of wires, it's cgi. Normally, I'm not a huge fan of cgi and other computer animation effects, mainly because I think they look awful. Even supposedly good ones look awful to me, but then, who the hell am I to judge? I still think Ray Harryhausen stop-motion looks cool.

Storm Riders manages to use cgi the way it should be used, however, which is to create a very vivid fantasy world that is only slightly related to reality. It looks great, on par with and quite possibly better than anything done even in big budget American films. There are only a few instances where it looks awkward. For the most part, I thought it was pretty spectacular, and they actually seem to have put a lot of thought into making the effects lush and interesting. Plus, they don't have cgi characters, only backgrounds, landscapes, and of course flying stuff.

The second boy Conqueror goes after is the son of a swordsmith. The fight here isn't nearly as slick, but it's still good, and reminded a lot of the fights in Tsui Hark's last good film, The Blade, but that may only be because those guys were all shirtless swordsmiths as well.

Conqueror raises Cloud and Wind as his own sons, with the basic plan being keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I guess. Both of them grow up to be bad-ass super fighters in sexy leather outfits. Aaron, whose character Cloud is the angrier, brooding member of the duo, also adds some flare with the aforementioned cape and blue highlights to his anime hair. Both of them fall in love with Conqueror's daughter, and hey, you would too. She's cute, but there's nothing quite as unnerving as having your girlfriend say, "I want you to come home to meet my father, Lord Conqueror, ruler of the martial world."

Each of the boys is given a task. Wind (Ekin Cheng) is sent out with his other adopted brother, Frost, to capture the legendary Fire Monkey, which you have to find if you want to earn an audience with ol' Mud Buddha. Cloud, who as we said, is a lot more pissed off, is sent on a secret mission to slaughter the members of another powerful martial arts family. Lord Conqueror is on a real slaughter kick these days. But I guess if you are named Conqueror you really do have to get out and, you know, conquer and stuff. It's sort of in the name. You can't be named Lord Conqueror and work a desk job.

Conqueror wants to talk to Mud Buddha about a puzzle box he got many years ago that supposedly contains the last portion of Mud Buddha's prophecy. As he gets older and Wind and Cloud become stronger, Conqueror is starting to go a bit insane with paranoia and wants to make sure he can alter his own Destiny by either controlling or destroying his two star disciples. Plus he's got the survivors of the recently slaughtered clan out for revenge and enlisting the help of an ancient super sword hero played by Anthony Wong in a Gandalf outfit. Everyone figures if anyone can beat Conqueror, it's this guy. So you see, being ruler of the martial world isn't all fun and games. It's sort of like being the mayor of New York, and when you see how much you have to deal with, you kinda have to wonder why you'd want the job. In fact, now that I think about it, I'd like to see an American version of this movie, with Rudy Guiliani starring as Lord Conqueror.

As if all that wasn't enough, you have this whole thing where Wind and Conqueror's daughter, Charity, are engaged, which pisses off Cloud, who was all moody anyway and walking around like some weird blend of Henry Rollins and Morrissey. I guess you could say he has a dark cloud hanging over him, but if you did say that, I'd kick you in the shins. While Charity likes Wind well enough, she's just as attracted to the dark and mysterious Cloud. This whole love thing sort of drives Cloud batty, and during the wedding he causes a ruckus that eventually leads to Conqueror accidentally killing his own daughter. It's sort of like those America's Funniest Home Video things where the groom's pants fall down of the bride slips and lands on her ass, only this time it's the bride's well nigh all-powerful supernatural father accidentally exploding her with magic energy bolts shot from his hands.

All jokes aside, the emotion of this whole sequence is actually pretty moving, and Aaron rises above his usual limitations as an actor and creates a very memorable, sad scene. The woman's death drives both he and Conqueror even more insane than they already are. Wind goes to reclaim his dead father's magic sword and get some sacred fruit, which is hidden inside the giant stone Buddha cave and guarded by a cool fire monster thing. When both Wind and Cloud learn that Conqueror himself murdered their families, it's time to bring the prophecy to fruition in a jaw-dropping special effects battle that reminded me a lot of the final fight between the duo of Yuen Biao and Meng Hoi against the insanely evil Adam Cheng in Zu.

And much like Zu, I've managed to account for about 30% of the action that takes place in this wild madcap ride. The rest is left for you, yes you, to discover on your own, because action and adventure and seeking thrills is what this websit4e is all about. Those things, and Hot Pockets.

Storm Riders is not a kungfu film. It's a fantasy film, and as such, it works wonderfully. It is full of action, drama, and insanely wild, cool looking special effects. Most special effects movies tend to forget the human aspect of their story, but Storm Riders remembers to make the humans the central players amid the onslaught of slick special effects. The result is delirious, breathtaking, and the most fun film to come out of Hong Kong in a very long time. It's a shame that in the wake of the film's monumental success, rather than follow it up with an equally well-crafted film, the director chose to go for a series of quickie look-alike films of varying quality.

But none of that matters here, and what we're left with is the fact that Storm Riders is a tremendously enjoyable, energetic film with an amazing look to it. People who are fond of praising derivative junk like The Matrix for it's supposed visual style should check this film out to really have their tiny minds blown. It manages to be beautiful, colorful, alien, and sweeping while remaining recognizable. I guess it's what the martial world looks like. But the aspect of the film that really shines is Sonny Chiba, bellowing and laughing in all his evil glory in what is a truly epic comeback film. He looks better than he has in decades, but since he spent much of the last decade making direct-to-video films with Rowdy Roddy Piper, he doesn't have much competition from himself. I was overjoyed to see Sonny in action, even if it's all special effects, and kicking ass for a whole new generation.

I have never read the comic, so I can't comment on how it compares to that, but as a film, Storm Riders is totally satisfying to me. In the years to come, as it betters with age, Storm Riders will become one of my all time favorite fantasy/mythology films.

Anyway, this one blows the minds of many a person, even people familiar with Chang Cheh's bloody resume. Along with screenwriter I Kuang, the guy pretty much gave birth to the ultra-violent kungfu films of the 1970s that would shape the entire genre. His films were packed with heroic sacrifice, extreme torture, and spurting blood. Chang Cheh was a master of exploring the depths of human friendship, heroism, and loyalty, but he was also a master of exploring cruelty, deception, and the various ways in which the human body can be brutalized.

The film opens with treachery, as a bad kungfu school confronts the leader of a good kungfu school and poisons him with that poison that only exists in kungfu films -- the one where the good guy, "has been poisoned and won't be able to do kungfu for about three years." It's like those punches that can make people not be able to do kungfu. Powerful stuff.

In order to take advantage of the situation, the bad kungfu school hooks up with some crazy-ass ninjas who can fly and swim and burrow and set shit on fire. They infiltrate the good guys using the standard issue "sexy female ninja." She befriends the two best students of the school, one of whom falls for her; the other of whom suspects she is up to no good. She is indeed up to no good.

In a fight gory even by Chang Cheh's blood-drenched standards, the ninjas decimate the good kungfu school. One sequence even has a hero getting his belly sliced open and continuing to fight even as his intestines slop out of his stomach. It's only when he steps on his own small intestine that the hero hesitates and is killed. Chang Cheh further draws attention to the gore by making sure all the heroes wear clean white clothes, a little nugget Chang Cheh protoge John Woo would use even more in films like The Killer and Hard Boiled. It's just one of the many stylistic touches Woo picked up from his master.

Only one student survives the slaughter. He runs off into the woods to study with an old master and his students, who have knowledge of the secret ninja skills. I would have thought they would have called these guys before the slaughter, but hey -- what do I know? The last part of the movie is the heroes taking revenge on the treacherous ninja. People get ripped in half, beheaded, blood spurts all over the place, almost approaching the level of a Lone Wolf and Cub film.

A definite must-see, full of wild kungfu action, gore, a sexy female ninja, guys saying "But still," and everything you could possibly want, all rolled up into one, bloody little package full of mayhem. Solid!

Given our increasingly crass and cynical society, I would seem, at first, that this sort of twisted tale would be popular, but as they often require some degree of imagination and appreciation of both the subtle and the fantastic, most people would simply rather watch shit blow up or get the classic Disney ending. When someone does attempt to carry that sense of the macabre over into a modern day fairy tale, it can happen with mixed results. At their best, they come out looking like Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb or City of Lost Children. More often than not, however, they just come out looking Troll.

In our recent review of the classic Japanese horror film Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, we talked about how, despite being a world away, Japanese horror draws on very similar, almost universal, elements of horror to lay on the scare. In a similar vein, there creepy fairy tale elements that exist above and beyond culture and geography and become part of globally understood and shared heritage. While in college, I was reading a book simply called Japanese Tales, that was a collection of bizarre Japanese fairy tales, and it struck me that, despite the fact that many of these existed as oral legends at a time long before Japan was in regular contact with the nations of the West, the stories were very similar in tone. Everyone understands a witch luring innocent youths into the woods, or monsters who take the form of humans.

My favorite was about a woman who struggled much of her life with a tape worm. She managed to survive the parasite and eventually give birth to a young son who grew up to become a tremendously powerful general and leader of men. Great were his deeds, and he soon ruled the land. A neighboring warlord invited the great warrior to his court one day for a celebration of their new alliance. At the feast, the neighboring warlord offered up bushels of walnuts (or was it chestnuts?) for all to eat -- it was, after all, the commerce crop that kept his province prosperous. The great warrior, however, refused to eat the walnuts. When the host warlord grew angry and felt insulted, the great warrior threw off his helmet and exclaimed "I can't digest nuts! I'm my mother's tapeworm!" He then promptly turned into a tapeworm and slithered off.

The best part of the whole weird story, however, was the final line, which went something like "Back in his homeland, his family was devastated and his province plunged into chaos. Everyone else agreed it had all been a good laugh."

I bring this up because I feel the Japanese surrealist horror film Uzumaki draws heavily upon the tradition of the creepy fairy tale. There is something fantastic and mesmerizing about it all, and something unsettling and distressing lurking just under the surface. I forgot where I read it, perhaps in an interview with Clive Barker, but someone said that the most effective way of creating a sense of dread is to take something familiar and slowly transform it into something alien and threatening. The best example I can think of is the closet monster. How many times have you opened your closet to get something out? Your shoes, perhaps, or an elf you've been holding prisoner? If you have a closet, chances are you open it at least once a day, maybe more. It's a familiar place. But let it get dark out, let it be pitch black and three in the morning when you wearily gaze over from the comfort of your bed and realize the closet door is open.

Suddenly it's not so familiar. It's a gaping black maw, noticeably dark even in the dead of night. Suddenly what was once familiar to you begins to take on a sense of dread. What if something comes out of there? A monster, or a killer, or that damn elf? And what's that shadow? I think it's just my shirt thrown over the vacuum cleaner, but it sure looks like an ax wielding homicidal maniac.

I once spent an entire night scared witless as a youth, covers tight around my neck as I stared in horror at what was most definitely the shadow of Weird Harold from Fat Albert come to kill me.

Okay, so maybe not everyone gets freaked out in the middle of the night by shadows that bear a vague resemblance to Weird Harold, but you get my meaning. Nothing makes a person panic quite like suddenly finding yourself in a strange situation when you thought you had everything under control.

Uzumaki is set in a sleepy working class town somewhere in the Japanese countryside. There's nothing particularly weird about the place. Hell, even though it's in Japan it's not that much different than a small blue-collar town in America. It's downright idyllic, right up until the opening narration that tells us of the unspeakable nightmares the town contains. Director Higuchinsky has nothing on his resume before this film, but he proves right out of the gate that he is a master of subversion, taking a beautiful small town and immediately making you anxious about it.

We then meet cute high school student Kirie, our narrator. She's a pretty average schoolgirl -- a few friends, a few enemies, a nerdy goofball who keeps trying to make her fall in love with him by employing such tactics as jumping out and trying to scare her at every possible opportunity. Her dad is an accomplished pottery artisan, and her boyfriend is a moody teen who will one day join an emo band. The two of them are hassled by a Barney Fife-esque local cop who has nothing better to do than bluster at teens who ride two to a single bike.

En route to meet her beau, Shuichi, she spots his father crouching in an alley. Attempts to get his attention fail, as he is intently videotaping a snail slithering up the wall. Already things are weird. Shuichi is acting weird as well, though not so weird as to be taping hours worth of snail shenanigans in extreme close-up. But he seems afraid, and he talks of running away, fleeing the town, which he feels has a rotten core. Kirie is confused but also a bit excited by the idea of dropping everything and running off with her childhood sweetheart.

At this point, the film is shaping up to be just another schoolgirl horror film, the sort of watered down, one step above Goosebumps stuff that has been big business in Japan for the last couple years. You know, whenever anyone has the brains to make a movie for adolescent girls, it's always a huge hit (remember Titanic), and yet people only seem to remember to do it like once every ten years or so. You'd think by now they'd understand that the girls are bored shitless and want a little something thrown their direction.

Don't be fooled. Uzumaki is just getting started.

Kirie learns that Shuichi's father has become obsessed with spiral designs, surrounding himself with them, dedicating his life to staring at them and ranting about it all when he isn't bust videotaping the spiral design on snail shells. His madness has reached the point where it is starting to tear the household apart, and Shuichi suspects there is a force behind it all that threatens the whole town.

At school, in the meantime, things aren't much more normal. When Kirie isn't being accosted in the bathroom by the leader of the resident girl gang, who sings the praises of being the center of attention, of being the focus of the spiral, she's sitting in a science class attended by a kid who only shows up to school on rainy days and is covered by a thick, dripping goo. WHy they let him only come into school on rainy days is less puzzling then why they would let a kid covered in gallons of snotlike effluvia just take his seat. Hell, we didn't even tolerate the kid who always had the gooey, unnaturally green ball of mucous clinging to the very edge of his nostril. I know if I had showed up for chemistry glass all dripping with goo, there would have been a good chance they would have made me hit the showers, or at least that emergency eye wash fountain for the kids too clumsy to not get iodine in their eyes.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, though, as Shuichi's father is eventually overcome by his mania and commits suicide -- by cramming himself into a washing machine and twisting his body into a taffy-like spiral. This upsets Shuichi's mother, and the matter is made worse during the funeral when the clouds from the crematorium spiral up into a massive, misty whirlpool that also has a tendency to form a likeness of the deceased's anguished face. Shuichi's mother breaks down, and soon she too is obsessed with spirals, but with their elimination rather than their collection. She begins by slicing off her own fingertips, and then after a later midnight visit from a friendly neighborhood centipede, realizes there is a part of her inner ear that is also a spiral. The jagged shard of a broken vase can dig that out, though.

As Shuichi helplessly watches his parents self-destruct, Kirie begins to notice her father too is becoming a nutcase, and the girl gang leader at school has started styling her hair into massive swirls. A local Poindexter teams up with Kirie and Shuichi to crack the sinister mystery, but of course, just as he makes a huge discovery, he's killed in a grisly car wreck. If the overall freakish atmosphere of the movie thus far hasn't convinced you this is something more than schoolgirl horror, the graphic gore might bring you around. While we're not talking Dawn of the Dead here, the movie refuses to pull punches with the gore, and when someone dies, they die horribly.

The bizarre events in the town eventually attract the attention of the outside media, and a news van arrives to do a "can you believe this shit" type of story that is made even meatier by the fact that the gooey kid and his friendly neighborhood tormentor have just gone and transformed into giant half-slug half-human creatures and spend the day squirming up and down the side of the high school. The film crew meets with an equally unsavory fate as they attempt to leave town, resulting in some decapitation and a cute, perky newscaster left with her eyeballs dangling by the optic nerves.

Kirie and Shuichi want desperate to either fight against or escape from the growing hurricane of spiral-related madness, but they don't even know what to fight against or where to start. There is no creepy old wizard living at the edge of town, or secret government lab, or anything at all to give them the first clue as to what the hell is happening. As she struggles desperately to make some sense of the chaos, Kirie's life is completely shattered when Shuichi himself begins to exhibit rather strange spiral qualities.

The end is a disturbing jolt to the system, to say the least. At first, it will leave you sort of pissed off and thinking "what the hell?" kind of like Blair Witch Project. Unlike the end of that film, however, which gets stupider as time goes by, the final burst of gory insanity in Uzumaki grows increasingly unnerving the more it sits in your mind. Ultimately, the film ends with the same close-up and snippet of narration with which it began, turning the film itself into one giant spiral. It's a feeling not unlike the one you might get from a particularly good episode of Twin Peaks, like the one where they finally reveal Laura Palmer's murderer. It will confound and anger some, while others will simply sit back and think, "Holy cow!" to themselves as they realize the disturbing power of what they've just seen.

First and foremost, Uzumaki is a visual film, but unlike a lot of current films that rely on slick visuals as nothing more than eye candy, the surreal atmosphere of Uzumaki is a central tool with which to weave the tale. It's not just thrown on for the hell of it. There is an actual purpose, and Higuchinsky knows how to use the visual aspect of the film with the deftness of a scalpel-wielding surgeon, and I don't mean Dr. Giggles. Every shot, every set, every quirky pice of music, is perfectly exploited to create a sense of lurking dread. Like a seedy circus sideshow or run-down midway, Uzumaki is undeniably gorgeous and frighteningly grotesque and disorienting. It is, as I discussed earlier, a disorienting warping of the familiar, mundane world into something threatening and dangerous. For his first time out as a director, Higuchinsky is astoundingly successful. WHile Lucio Fulci always talked about creating the feel of a surreal nightmare in his films, he was only ever able to accomplish it in tiny bits and pieces. A moment here, a moment there, then back to the tedium of watching Ian McCulloch intone, "But that's crazy!" Higuchinsky manages to capture that same nightmarish mood, but he sustains it throughout the whole movie and never exhibits any of the slapdash qualities that undermined Fulci's own attempts at such a mood.

Some of the scenes don't even strike you as bizarre until they are over and you're going, "Wait, what the hell?" In a casual, offhand manner, the film will just randomly throw in background characters who are walking in reverse, or in a particular eerie scene that doesn't even hit you as eerie at first, Kirie and her friend are walking down a hallway having a typical schoolgirl conversation while, on either side of the hallway, students stand at attention, still as statues, gazing off into nothing. There is never any acknowledgement of these things, making them even more intriguing, sort of like that weird hippie you can catch sitting in the background of various episodes of The Young Ones. I didn't even notice him until years later, but now that I know that he's sometimes there, squatting in the corner, it's equally amusing and disturbing. Watch the very first episode, Demolition, and you'll see him during a scene around the television set. It's kinda creepy.

As far as the plot goes, it is simple but effective. The movie is based on a series of horror comics by writer Ito Junji, a proclaimed H.P. Lovecraft fan, and the influence of Lovecraft is obvious. Like his inspiration, Ito's stories are difficult to translate onto film. They are simply too far out there. This problem has plagued countless would-be screenwriters and directors who took on the unenviable task of turning brilliant H.P. Lovecraft stories into incredibly lame movies. Consider that a number of Lovecraft's stories revolve around creatures who are so intensely terrifying that merely glancing at one is enough to drive someone mad. If you make a movie about such a beast, you either have to show it -- which will inevitably be a big disappointment -- or not not show it -- which would also be a big disappointment. Lovecraft created a fear that simply could not be lifted off the page or out of your own mind.

Likewise, Ito's stories often defied easy adaptation. Despite the difficult source material, this is a damn effective film that manages to communicate an intangible yet overwhelming horror without ever having to show it. Lovecraft would have been proud, I think. Sure there are kids who turn into creepy slugs, people with weird eyes and hair that spirals up forty feet and continuously swirls around. Sure heads are crushed, people are gutted, and bodies rot before horrified onlookers, but these are all symptoms of what is happening. In the hands of a lesser storyteller or director, the fact that the film never reveals the nature of the seemingly supernatural madness would be a big let-down, but scriptwriter Nitta Takao, armed with Ito Junji's story and Higuchinsky's inspired direction, uses the ambiguity to augment the film's nightmarish tone. It's truly a stunning feat to have pulled off.

The movie also never tips us off as to what actually happens to our heroine, Kirie. When last we see her, she is in what is, at best, a dire situation, but the closing repetition of the opening narration would imply that she somehow cheated fate. If so, how? We never know, and while that would be a weakness in some films, it's the reverse here, like never finding out why the birds were attacking people in The Birds. Is it possible that Kirie, who was teased about never being the center of attention, was somehow the focal point of the spiral madness? Was she the eye of the hurricane? Or was she simply insane, dreaming up this whole bizarre scenario in her head? The film is constructed in such a way than any explanation would fail to be as effective as no explanation, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of chill and glorious discomfort.

Higuchinsky also uses music brilliantly. The soundtrack is a combination of sappy toy piano sounding "young kids in love" music and off-kilter horror/carnival music. It works further to subvert the feel of the film when you have this quaint and innocent scene of a young girl clinging to the boy she's loved her whole life while dippy lovey dovey music plays in the background as they ride the bike in slow motion. It's sweet tot he point of being goofy, but it becomes heart-breaking in a way since you know any second the creepy carnival music is going to start up and no one is going to be very happy.

The cast is up to the task of fleshing out this bizarre world. Hatsune Eriko is great and sympathetic as Kirie, while Fhi Fan as Shuichi is moody, dreary, and detached. At first it almost seems like it's bad acting, but then you start to think about how many of these self-absorbed mopey guys you knew in high school, and you suddenly realize the kid has nailed it. Unlike the mopey kids in high school, at least this guy lives in a town that is cursed with a madness involving lots of spirals and bloody deaths. Everyone else is basically there to die horribly and go insane, and they all do it well.

The effects are great as well. Actually, the effects are somewhat archaic looking in spots, but once again the director makes it work marvelously for him, turning what should be a drawback into another strength. Competently done but somewhat awkward computer effects serve to embellish an increasingly alien and surreal landscape. The gore effects are bang on, grisly and realistic, and the make-up effects to create the slug people is also great. Unlike those twits who made the updated version of The Haunting, Higuchinsky knows better than to make a movie where there are effects for effect's sake, and they are the central point to the movie being made. Higuchinsky wants to creep you out, and he is smart enough to know that special effects are just one of many means to that end and not the end themselves. Just like the stylish direction, the special effects are not there just as eye candy. They have a job to do, and they execute it wonderfully.

Uzumaki is a surprising film, and that makes me happy. Like a fairy tale of old, it seizes you from the outset and pulls you deeper and deeper into a world that is too weird to look at but too enticing to turn away from. Even during the quiet moments and build-up scenes, there is enough tension and uneasiness to keep the movie sailing along. When the end hits, it hits hard, and I guarantee the whole thing will stick in your mind a long time after you've finished watching. Of course, my guarantee means nothing. It's not like I'm going to give you an oven mitt if you find yourself dissatisfied. I only have two oven mitts, and I need them both because one is always dirty.

The most refreshing thing about this movie is that it's not quite like anything else I've ever seen. While you can place in the company or H.P. Lovecraft and Twin Peaks, it's still quite different in many ways. It's a movie that knows how to lull you into a sense of security, then spring untold amounts of indescribably freakiness 'pon you. I love a movie that keeps me guessing and thinking, and Uzumaki delivers on a cerebral level, at least for a dolt like me.

Still, I'm a realist, and I know this is the kind of movie that will just piss some people off. It's not that it's overly arty -- those movies even piss me off. It's just weird. Really weird. Weird people will dig it, but if your idea of clever horror was Scream or your idea of a well-constructed story was, well, Scream, then this sort of movie version of a Salvador Dali painting probably ain't gonna make you happy. That's not a judgement, just an expression of opinion. If everyone liked everything I like, I'd get pretty annoyed.

Uzumaki is a film for people who like to be fucked with, who like to be unnerved, who like to get depressed and disturbed by a film out of nowhere, days or weeks after they've seen it. You're sitting there, thinking happy thoughts, and all of a sudden you start thinking about the gruesome "slide show of death" that helps close the movie, and all of a sudden you just feel creeped out. It's the sort of movie that will be appreciated by people who also appreciate sinister carnival midways and those ringmasters who speak of black things and always seem to have midget henchmen dressed as Aladdin walking behind them playing the accordian. It's a movie for people who just simply delight in the torment of sheer weirdness and surrealistic horror.

It's my kind of movie.

The movie opens with our attractive red-clad ninja woman going through that official "ninja camp graduation" thing where you have to run through the woods and fight other ninjas. She beats them by using such clever tactics as flying and flinging off all her clothes and spinning around in her pink panties. That's some pretty good kungfu, right there. She graduates from ninja school, but just as in every other ninja movie ever made, one of the senior ninjas is pissed off about an outsider (in this case, a woman) becoming a ninja.

Of course, historically speaking, there were lots of female ninjas. Women tended to make the best ninjas because so few people expected them to be well-trained death-dealers. One minute they are walking toward you, demure and proper in their kimonos, and the next second, you're wondering why the hell your head is on the ground a few feet away from your body. Yes, this could also describe various love affairs, but I was thinking of it as an example of ninja sneakery.

But in the world of weird kungfu films, there are no women ninjas, and the ninjas who do exist blend in with society by wearing bright red ninja suits. The woman has been training in the martial arts in order to avenge her family's murder -- isn't that always the case? She has to train her own army of female ninjas to help her. Female ninja training, of course, consists of lots of back bends and splits while the camera is focused on your crotch. Also, female ninjas must always work out in short shorts or panties. It's tradition, you know.

This movie is supposed to be set during World War II, I think. The evil Japanese guards are all bald transvestites, everyone has a Cadillac, and the women wear mini-skirts and platform go-go boots, just like in World War II! A lot of kungfu films are set in a magical time that is an amalgamation of the past 400 years or so. Just check out Fantasy Mission Force, or if you want a Western example, watch the Dark Shadows television show, where all the men dress like 19th century gothic villains, but all the women wear tight sweaters and mini-skirts.

When the woman finally gets around to revenge, there is lots of cheesecake fighting in underwear. The lady ninja must fight the head evil lady ninja, so they strip down into their bikinis (the evil one has strategically placed handprints on it!) and roll around in the "water." I call it water, but it has this strange, gliseryne gel quality to it, sort of like it's actually baby oil instead of water.

The martial arts fight between these two consists of lots of slipping and rolling around in the baby oil. While it may not be fight choreography on par with early 1980s Sammo hung work, it still satisfies on this other level. Most of the martial arts are, well, worse than you probably think, and you are like me, you're thinking they are probably pretty bad. But y'know, you watch kungfu movies for kungfu. You watch sexy female ninja exploitation films for sexy female ninjas, and this film is a resounding success in that sense.

Anyway, we're not here to talk about tacos. We were talking about how you can count the number of Hong Kong cartoons on one hand, even if that hand was mauled in an industrial accident. In fact, I've only found two cartoon movies from Hong Kong, though I think they have some television series about a flying pig or something. My excuse for Hong Kong having pretty much nothing fun going for it has always been that the island is too small and concentrated. There's really no room for punk clubs and independent films and zines and whatever. So everyone is stuck with nothing but crappy, mass produced pop entertainment. But with animation, I just don't know. Can't they just send it all to Korea like we in the United States do?

Chinese Gods was the first Hong Kong cartoon I ever saw, and quite frankly, I've yet to fully recover. Someone took a lot of that brown acid they had at Woodstock, then dove too deep and got a nitrogen high, then sat down and made this utterly dumbfounding, totally amazing gem of a movie. I don't even know where to begin with this one, as the size of this film's weirdness makes it nearly impossible to get a hold of. Should I start with ancient Chinese gods and their motorcycle clouds? Or the frequent dismemberment, charring, and other acts of insane violence? How about the fact that, when all else fails, the ancient gods of China have to call on the ultimate supernatural guardian of China, Bruce Lee (sporting a cool third eye in the center of his forehead)?

Well, let's start with the technical aspects of this. The artwork is pretty good, a nice mix of traditional Chinese styles with 1970s style Japanese cartoon aesthetic. The animation, however, looks about on par with what kids doing an animation project in their middle school class would come up with. It's really bad and reminds me of those crappy Christian religious cartoons they sometimes play on cable. If you have ever seen one, you know what I'm talking about. The Lord may have filled his flock with righteous condescension but he left out little things like artistic ability. That includes artistic musical talent. What the hell is the deal with Christian rock? Is there a worse sounding abomination anywhere in the universe?

Okay, where were we? Let's move on to the plot of this cartoon. There is an evil warlord who is oppressing the people of his province. His wife is a fox spirit, and although they are sexy, fox spirits are always deceitful and naughty. Disgusted by the ruler's evil deeds, the gods, one of whom can make his eyes extend way far out of his head, send a wise demigod type fellow down to Earth to talk sense to the despot. In accordance with the behavior you would expect from a ruler who murders his most loyal advisors and burns lots of people alive for the hell of it, he doesn't really see the error of his ways. Angered and frustrated, the demigod whips up a tornado that carries many of the peasants to a neighboring province, where the ruler is benevolent and honest. Obviously, this is a fantasy film.

The evil ruler decides to declare war on the good leader, but when his assassins fail to carry out their job, the fox spirit suggests that the evil ruler enlist the aid of the dark forces, who are pretty good at such things. In turn, the wise demigod enlists the aid of his pals up in the heavens and all out supernatural war ensues. Evil Taoist priests, monsters and demons of every possible shape and size, and god riding around on clouds that make motorcycle noises are all part of the fun.

When the forces of evil send in the Three Kings of Hell as their coup de gras, the good gods summon up Bruce Lee. Yep. When God himself can't solve a problem, he calls on Bruce Lee. Wouldn't you? Bruce Lee, complete with his official silly fighting noises, materializes to kick some King of Hell ass. Bruce can do kungfu and shape shift, among other powers he never used in his other movies but we always suspected he had.

I've really only scratched the surface of how insane this cartoon gets. I mean, if you thought The Wall was weird, you ain't seen nothing yet. This movie has more craziness packed into each of it's poorly animated cels than most any other film around. Was this for kids? Surely not. It shows people being chopped in half and burned at the stake, flailing and shrieking as the melt. It has demons ripping people apart and eating their limbs. I mean, sure it's the kind of movie I watched as a kid, but these kids these days are goofier.

Oh well, who cares whether or not your kids can watch it, if you have kids. What I'm more interested in is my own personal enjoyment of the film, and I have to say it's really one of the most unbelievably fun and inexplicable things I've ever seen. It makes me feel a bit light-headed. It was another favorite of my stoner friend Ken Volkman, along with Young Taoism Fighter. And hey, if a stoner thinks it's weird, you know you can trust them. The animation is not great, as I said, and a lot of people will snub the film simply on that. But you have to overlook the cheap animation and enjoy the delirium of the story. And you can also admire the artwork, if not the outcome of trying to make it move. It's so cheesy to say that a film looks like someone's bad acid trip, but man alive does that ever fit the bill here.

I'm not sure exactly how accurate the mythology on display is. As best I can tell, the reason Bruce Lee is no longer with us is because he had to travel back in time to like the Han Dynasty or something in order to assume his role as the ultimate god of China. He brought with him his knowledge of motorcycles and applied to it some clouds for his buddies. Well, he's a better folk hero than Buffalo Bill, anyway.

Chinese Gods got a domestic video release and tends to turn up on video shelves from time to time, so keep your eyes open. When I am rich, which should happen any day now, I plan on re-releasing this film, unleashing unto this Earth some animated madness the likes of which God himself has never before witnessed. You think you know weird, but if you haven't seen this movie, your education is incomplete. Luckily, I'm here to teach you in your times of need.

Now before you fire off an angry email telling me how great Tony Leung is, keep in mind that I am not referring to the Tony Leung who starred in Ashes of Time. Nor am I referring to the Tony Leung who starred in Tom, Dick, and Hairy. No, feeling that the Hong Kong film industry wasn't complete with just two guys calling themselves Tony Leung, writer-director Leung Hung-wah decided that he too would become Tony Leung, joining an ever-growing cast of characters favoring that particular name combination.

Leung Hung-wah got his start in the early 1980s as an actor in a few films not many people remember. In 1986, he penned his first screenplay, Ghost Snatchers, which starred Michael Wong and Sammo Hung's knock-out (in more ways than one) wife Joyce Godenzi. When Leung crossed over into directing, his interest in low-budget horror films became apparent. Mystery Files was his first directorial effort, and in 1999 he followed it up with A Wicked Ghost, an obvious though entirely dismissible attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Japanese horror film The Ring.

As anyone who has tested the waters of the world of Hong Kong horror well knows, it's a strange place even in the world of horror. Action, kungfu, melodrama, slapstick comedy, and chills are often thrown together in a mish-mash of styles that rarely work well together, giving one the impression of watching several different movies at once, sort of like those Thomas Tang/Godfrey Ho ninja movies. Although there are several good Hong Kong horror films - most notably Chinese Ghost Story and Mr. Vampire -- even those are difficult to accept as pure "horror" within the boundaries set by Western expectations. Chinese Ghost Story is more a fantasy film, and Mr. Vampire is as much a kungfu comedy as it is any sort of horror film.

Part of this vast difference in approaches can simply be attributed to the fact that tastes around the world vary. Chinese audiences have different expectations of what a horror film should be like, and since they have a wealth of local mythology from which to draw, there's no real need to plumb the depths of Western genre traditions for ideas. Hopping vampires may not be scary to Western audiences, but how scary is some old count in an opera cape to your average cranky old Chinese guy? For every werewolf there is a Fox spirit; for every zombie there is, well, a kungfu zombie. For every Medusa there is a witch whose head comes off and flies around the room screaming at you.

On the opposite side of the coin is Japan, a country which embraced Western definitions of horror and ran with them so successfully that, in the view of many people, Japan has become the preeminent producer of the world's finer horror films now that the Americans and Italians have run out of ideas. Japan and the West have always had closer relations than China and the West (that whole World War II incident not withstanding). It hasn't always been a smooth relationship, but it's always been a relationship. Western film had a big influence on Japanese films, and Japanese films, in turn, ended up having just as big an influence on The West. Throw a rock in a video store, and there's a good chance you'll knock over two Don "The Dragon" Wilson movies and at least one film that steals plot points from an Akira Kurosawa film.

Japan's approach to horror was to take Western influences and put a decidedly Japanese spin on them. Nobuo Nakagawa revolutionized the genre with films like Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan and Jigoku, one of the world's first "splatter" films. They are distinctly Japanese, but they're also familiar to fans of classic horror films. Hell, a good ghost story is a good ghost story regardless of whether the people in it are wearing kimonos or overcoats. Japan continued to play with classical notions of horror, tweaking them enough so that they were unique and fresh while still not being completely alien to foreign viewers in the way many Hong Kong productions were.

In 1999, the film The Ring hit the screens and threw gasoline onto a smoldering fire that had been started by films like Wizard of Darkness, Birth of the Wizard, and by the horror comics of HP Lovecraft-influenced Junji Ito. Japanese film and manga makers discovered that Japanese girls have a voracious appetite for tales of horror, especially when the protagonists are people they can relate to - namely, other girls. That this whole batch of books, comics, and movies gets dubbed 'schoolgirl horror" is somewhat misleading, conjuring up as it does images of tales roughly on the level of an RL Stine book. On the contrary, many of the films are quite good, quite scary, and surprisingly gory. They are a natural progression from the fact that horror has often favored female protagonists. The big difference is that the gals in these films were less likely to do incredibly stupid things thanks to the fact that the writers creating them were far better than your average slasher script penman.

In the wake of The Ring's success, the whole genre acquired mainstream appeal, and "Ring" movies themselves became something of a cottage industry. A sequel to the original was put into production under the name Raisen or Spiral (not to be confused with another schoolgirl horror film, Uzumaki, which can be translated as meaning "Spiral"). Ring director Hideo Nakata, who was not involved in the sequel, didn't like the way it carried on the vision of his film, and so he set out to make his own official sequel, simply known as Ring 2. There was a television series, a third "prequel" called Ring 0: Birthday, and a Korean adaptation of the same original novel called Ring Virus.

Somewhere amid all the noise was Tony Leung with his Wicked Ghost film. Along with Bio-Zombie, it's one of the few Hong Kong horror films to bear a resemblance to the style preferred by the Japanese and Western horror films, though there's enough esoteric Chinese superstition in it for it to maintain its own cultural identity. While not exactly a rip-off of The Ring, A Wicked Ghost certainly steals willy-nilly from the superior Japanese film as it weaves its own mythology of an angry ghost lashing out from beyond the grave. The most obvious example is the appearance of the ghost itself, which manifests as a pale white woman with long, ragged black hair hanging in front of her face. Similarities to Sadako from Ring are unavoidable. She even has the same weird herky-jerky way of walking.

The plot steals the same basic structure as well, though to its credit, it does change it enough so as not to be a complete act of plagiarism. Trouble begins immediately when a group of friends are playing one of those "let's summon up some ghosts" type games at a party. The game requires them to each slit their finger, drip blood into a bowl of water then take turns drinking it. You know, I played my share of supernatural ghost-summoning games when I was younger, and I have to say that I draw the line at any game that involves slicing my finger and drinking the blood of my pals. Most people I know are hesitant to even drink from the same cup as one of their friends, let alone gleefully consume a mixture of their precious bodily fluids. When you add to it the fact that you have to mix in "some oil from a dead body," it really just becomes time to call it a night. It's not even that it has anything to do with being afraid of ghosts; there just have to be better games you can play with your friends than ones involving you drinking dead body oil and blood.

One of the friends, Ming, seems to agree with me, and he'll have none of this drinking of bloody water and corpse oil. His friends go ahead with the fun, and before too long, ghostly wind blows through the apartment and one of the friends, a guy named Rubbish, has died of extreme fright after seeing a ghost. His face is frozen in an expression meant to convey either "I am terrified beyond the comprehension of mortals" or "I'm hungry." Just as the impetus for the action - a group of friends who invoke an otherworldly force and are then mysteriously killed off - mimics the same basic plot from Ring about a group of friends summoning a similar force after watching a cursed videotape, so too is the horrified expression a somewhat less effective imitation of the look of fear all the victims in Ring take with them to the grave.

Continuing to pull wildly from Ring the movie introduces Ming's reporter sister, Cissy (Gigi Lai), and her (seemingly) ex-boyfriend, Mo, a teacher who seems to possess psychic powers and an uncanny though very handy knowledge of all things supernatural. Similarities between them and female reporter Reiko and her ex-husband and resident psychic teacher and expert on the paranormal, Ryuji, is purely coincidental. Mo is played by one of the better actors to never really hit the big-time, Francis Ng. He's got talent enough to lend an air of credibility to an otherwise outlandish film, although his effectiveness here was somewhat undermined by the fact that the film did not shoot with synch sound (as was common in Hong Kong up until a year or so ago) and the original actors did not do their own dubbing in post-production. So instead of Francis Ng, you get someone doing a weird soft-spoken Francis Ng impersonation.

At one point, the film even shows a second-long clip of the disturbing Sadako video from Ring, though it has nothing to do with the actual plot. There's also the old man who is the key to figuring out much of the mystery, a body that needs to be properly laid to rest in order to end the curse, and the revelation at some point that what they thought was the answer was, in fact, wrong. For people who have seen Ring, the greater plot is very familiar indeed, and that hurts the film. It hurts mainly because this movie is no Ring, and having so many images and elements lifted from the superior film means you're going to sit there for much of the film thinking about how much better Ring was.

Ming and Mo figure out that the spirit-raising game has summoned an angry ghost who is tricking everyone into killing themselves. Efforts to figure out a way to stop the ghost are confused when people with no connection t the game start dying as well. And why is it that Ming, who didn't take part in the game, can see the ghost? As in Ring, it becomes a race against the clock to solve the mystery before it claims the lives of more people. Although built in pretty much the same fashion as the plot from Ring the writing here is not entirely derivative. There are some fairly unique twists and surprises that keep the movie from being a complete joke. Although undermined by the huge amount of cribbing of images and scenes the film does, somewhere beneath the Ring-exploitation was a halfway decent story that never got a fair chance.

Mo's weird little crackpot theories about the transference of emotion are actually somewhat interesting within the context of the film, though I always wonder why every professor in every horror or sci-fi film is always featured in a lecture scene during which they're espousing some half-baked pet hypothesis. I had my fair share of crackpot professors, but none of them spent the entire class period rambling on about the "the lost amulet of Nagath-nor" or anything like that. Yet film professors are always on about something similar. Mo's lecture is about how emotion can become a sort of energy that can be transferred from one source to another. That's why we feel sad when we watch a sad movie or feel angry when we watch Saving Silverman. As far as crackpot theories go, it's not a bad one, and it ties in well with the plot of the movie revolving around a murder victim (who was an actress, just to keep the theme going) who transfers her rage in the form of a ghost.

The most notable different between the films is in the female reporter. While Reiko was the driving force behind the action in The Ring, Cissy's role here is more or less disposable. She's there to shout at her brother for hanging out with people who summon demons, and she's there to be a convenient link between Ming and Mo. The love triangle between her, Mo, and her fiancée Jack attempts to give her character some reason for being in the film, but it's never really developed to the point that it matters much. When Mo accepts the ghost's curse alongside Cissy in the end so he can help her survive the attack, it could just have easily happened without the underdeveloped subplot involving Jack. The subplot doesn't hurt the film; it just doesn't add much to it.

With Cissy relegated to the ranks of screaming woman, her brother Ming, who works closely with Mo to unravel the mystery surrounding just what ghost it is they've awakened, picks up the action. Although he's on screen a lot, Ming fails to develop into an interesting character. When the plot throws us one it's many somewhat successful curveballs toward the end, the fact that it involves a character as bland as Ming saps it of some of the power. Additionally, the fact that almost no character other than Mo generates any sort of sympathy means that the movie fails to create any sense of urgency or tension. With Ring, a mounting sense of hysteria grew from the fact that we actually liked Ryuji and Reiko, and we even liked their weird little son. We didn't want to see them succumb to the curse. We wanted to see them succeed, and we wanted that because the film took time to establish positive character traits for them. With Wicked Ghost, we meet most of the cast during the séance, and their next scene is the one in which they die. In between, there is nothing to make us feel like we should care one way or the other.

Even with all his screen time, Ming doesn't fare much better. Part of the problem again is the dub job. Dubbing Hong Kong movies was pretty much the way things were done, and still are for most low-budget productions. It was a practical decision more than anything. Shooting synched sound is expensive, for one. Since Hong Kong films were seen by as many Mandarin speakers as they were Cantonese speakers, and since the differences between the two dialects make them more or less different languages, the films would be dubbed anyway for the Mandarin speakers. Not shooting with sound also meant that multiple productions could occupy the same limited real estate in Hong Kong for location work. Most of the time, the actors would come in and do their own voices, and the end effect was such that you could hardly tell. Sometimes, certain actors would even dub their own Mandarin tracks as well. And of course, Jet Li was almost always dubbed by someone else regardless of the language, because he has a chipmunk voice.

Why they went with entirely different actors to do the dubbing in Wicked Ghost is beyond me. How expensive can Gigi Lai and Gabriel Harrison (Ming) be? A good actor can survive a bad dub job, which is why Francis Ng emerges in fair condition, but Gabriel Harrison is pretty green, and his facial expressions and body language are not effective enough to compensate for the lackluster dubbing. In one scene, as he watches his girlfriend become possessed by the ghost and attempt to kill herself by eating a party mix of pills, the general idea is that he's too paralyzed by fear to simply rush over and stop her. The weak voice work combined with Gabriel's pouty expression make it come across as if he's simply too lazy or unconcerned to walk across the room and deal with the problem. The viewers have to keep reminding themselves that there's a ghost in the room, because the movie itself fails to communicate that.

Looking scared is harder than you might think. Your average terrified person doesn't stop to make a mental note of how their face contorts when they're seized by terror. The common manifestation is to simply scream and scrunch your nose up. If you've ever been really scared, and I mean really really scared, you know that screaming is one of the least likely reactions to the situation. It's actually a lot subtler, and Gabriel Harrison hasn't got it down yet. Hiroyuki Sanada has a wonderful look of terror at the end of Ring when he has his revelation about the ghost. It's a face twitch and a look of bewildered horror that is beautifully communicated. When you see it, you can nod and go, "Yep, that's the look of a terrified man." Although it's an unlikely source, another of film's greatest looks of terror comes in the beginning of Ghostbusters. When Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis are running out of the library after being frightened by a ghost, the "I'm about to puke" look of panic on Akroyd's face is priceless, and even though it's a comedy, it's a perfect glimpse of a genuinely scared person.

Harrison's best offering is to look vaguely confused. It doesn't do the trick, and especially in the scene where his possessed girlfriend is gobbling prescription drugs, it works against his character.

As Cissy's fiancée Jack, Mok Ga-yiu is somewhat successful. He plays one of those guys who is sort of a dick, but not in a way where you can really just hate him. He doesn't actually do anything bad; he just seems like he might. Gigi Lai is an experienced actress, but she's given so little to do here that it really doesn't matter one way or the other.

Technically the film is somewhat awkward. Hong Kong horror has always favored weird point-of-view zooms and Hitchcockian weird angles and camera tricks. There's nothing in Leung's direction that is so bad you could brand it an outright fault, but the movie does possess the look of what it is: someone's second film. There's an inexperience to the proceedings, and that results in tension lost. Leung hasn't really got down how to build anxiety or deliver a sufficient pay-off. Most of the films attempts at scares consist of something popping into view along with a blast of "fright" music. Unfortunately, it telegraphs just about all these instances, so you don't even get the cheap jump. Although the plot manages to rise above what you might expect, the actual composition of the film never escapes predictability. With a few exceptions, you know when the scare attempts are coming, and you know what they're going to look like. It's a marked difference between this movie and Ring, which I found to be one of the most successfully and genuinely scary horror films I'd seen in a long time.

A Wicked Ghost isn't totally without chills, though, and from time to time you can catch a glimpse of potential in Leung's work. The trappings of Chinese superstition always lend an air of eeriness to things, but Leung's most successful segments come when the investigation into the origins of the ghost lead Ming to an abandoned village that was the scene of a mass murder/suicide spree in which sixty-six people were killed in a span of three days. The setting itself is creepy by default, even in broad daylight, but when Ming wanders into a decrepit temple, Leung has one of his best moments. The camera pans around in point-of-view style, taking in all the decay, but when it comes back in the direction from which it came, we begin to catch glimpses of hunched over figures kneeling in the rubble. It's the film's most effective moment, although the shot in which Ming sees the ghost clinging to the back of one of his friend's is pretty good as well.

Likewise little images here and there, like the long-haired ghost sinking slowly into a pond or a scene in a washroom where the ghost of an old guy just wanders in to freak people out. There's also a decent scene in which a character morphs into the ghost. Sure, the movie fails more than it succeeds, but the successes are actually pretty creepy. Leung manages to subvert the familiar world by placing these otherworldly apparitions in very run-of-the-mill settings with nothing special about them. Traditionally in Hong Kong horror, supernatural shenanigans are accompanied by someone shining green spotlights all over the place, green being the color of all things ghostly in Chinese mythology. Leung avoids the obvious in this respect, opting instead (possibly because of budgetary constraints) to play the scenes straight. For me, seeing some creepy ghost limp around an otherwise normal apartment is scarier than if that apartment was suddenly bathed in a green glow. One of the most effective ways to unnerve people is to warp what they think they know.

And then there's the ghost, Mei. Yes indeed she's 100% a rip-off of Sadako from Ring. But you know what? Even in light of that, she's still a little spooky. Sadako had one of the most effective, creepy appearances of any creature in any horror film. Just imagine glancing out the window to see her standing on the corner of the street, slowly coming toward you. Sadako's look was a stroke of horror genius, and any movie that rips that look off is going to reap a little residual chill from it. Original? Not in the least, but it still works.

Flashes of good filmmaking are part of what make this movie frustrating. It's not without its merits. Although shamelessly distilled from The Ring, the story is not bad. Revelations about the fate of the woman who would become the vengeful ghost result in a sympathy for her that is, unfortunately, somewhat bungled in the finale. There are enough twists to keep the story interesting, and if more thought had been put into the characters, the movie might have survived being a Ring knock-off and acquired more of an audience. It's a fairly accessible mix of Chinese myth and good ol' fashioned ghost story that translates into any culture, but the slapdash nature of the characters is shallow even for a horror film.

The final scene is something of a flawed gem as well. There is no real resolution to the problem of Mei slinking around and killing people. Sure, Mo and Cissy manage to break the curse on them, but what about all the other people? In a nice bit of writing, the woman who had a husband who was willing to kill her in order to save himself is moved by Mo, who in contrast to Mei's husband is willing to sacrifice himself in order to save Cissy. It would seem at first that this act has quelled Mei's murderous rage, but then Jack goes and attracts her attention, and we see that it's really only Mo and Cissy who have been saved. What becomes of Mei and of the other innocent people who were unwittingly cursed remains unknown.

A Wicked Ghost is more ambitious than it is successful, but even ambition is an admirable trait in a movie that could have just been a rip-off with no attempt to do anything different. From his filmography as writer and director, one has to assume that Tony Leung loves horror films, and as I said in the beginning, I appreciate his attempts to keep horror in Hong Kong alive. As flawed as A Wicked Ghost is, there is effort put into it. Tony Leung isn't just some Wong Jing type who will dash any old crap off to make a fast buck off a trend. No, Leung may have been hoping to cash in on Ring's success, but he was also looking to make a good film. There's effort behind the direction, effort behind the writing, and there's effort behind the acting. That the effort is never fully realized or that it is undercut by bad dubbing doesn't change the fact that the attempt alone is worth at least one viewing.

Within the realm of Hong Kong horror, A Wicked Ghost looks better despite it's sundry flaws. It avoids entirely the tendency toward sophomoric slapstick comedy that so many other Hong Kong horror films can't help but indulge. It plays itself straight and with more respect for classical horror than you usually see from Hong Kong. It also manages to be more than just a series of shots in which five people scream and run from one room to another, which is a description that fits more than a few Hong Kong chillers. The fact that it steals fromRing means that it also attempts to be as good. It isn't, but it's better for having tried. Characters are bland, but they're not annoying. Well, Jack is sort of annoying, but we can forgive him. There is a lot that isn't good about this film, but there's a lot that is could, or could have been could with just a little more tweaking.

One thing that keeps the movie slightly alien to non-Chinese viewers would be the rather blasé and at times downright callous attitudes toward death some of the characters exhibit. Part of this can be attributed to the bad voice acting, but part of it just grows from a culture where the dead are dealt with in a different fashion, like constant companions hopping around the netherworld. My favorite example of this is in a scene where an older guy is on an elevator and is suddenly approached by the ghost of a dead loved one. Perhaps you would react with fright, or maybe you'd just go into shock. His reaction is simply to make a sort of annoyed face and go, "Leave me alone. You're already dead." Within the framework of Hong Kong horror films, people don't react especially strongly to death because the assumption is that ghosts exist, and that is that. There's very little skepticism presented. In light of that, it's not so difficult to understand why people aren't more upset by death. They know whoever has died is still lurking around somewhere; they're just in a different form.

To say A Wicked Ghost is one the better straight horror films in Hong Kong isn't saying much. For one, there just aren't that many films like it that play it straight with the horror instead of resorting to slapstick antics, softcore porn, or kungfu - or all of the above. Hong Kong has never been shy about mixing genres, after all. What does exist really isn't very good. Biozombie is a decent measuring stick since both are from around the same time, and both are more in line with American and Japanese horror films than is usual for Hong Kong fare. Biozombie is a better-looking movie, with a bigger budget and better acting. A Wicked Ghost is the more enjoyable film, in my opinion, because the characters aren't nearly as shrill and the plot endeavors to be more than just run-of-the-mill video game mentality nonsense. It tries to be somewhat intelligent, somewhat peculiar. I'd watch it again, where as I'm a lot less likely to ever want to endure all the shrieking and idiotic comedy of Biozombie.

It isn't entirely successful, but truth be told, I enjoyed A Wicked Ghost. It's an underdog of a film. Sort of sloppy. Not fully realized. Full of problems, not the least of which being the fact that it steals en masse from Ring, sometimes just for the hell of it. But by God, despite all that, the movie tries hard. Tony Leung puts his heart into writing a script that strives to be more than a collection of scenes in which people run around screaming. He summons up the spirit of a good horror film, and although it doesn't quite materialize, the end result is still interesting and, at least for me, fairly enjoyable once I got over the Ring rips. I appreciate that it sticks to horror convention and doesn't wander all over the place in an attempt to be all things to all audiences. No kungfu, no wacky hijinks, no lame comic relief characters. Just straight-up horror. It's still a rarity in Hong Kong, and that makes this film something special.

Far from a perfect film, but not a bad film, A Wicked Ghost deserves a look if for no other reason than it tried to be something a little more than the usual fare. If you're a fan of Ring and all the associated works that came with it, then you should check out this movie, even if it's just as a curiosity piece. If you're just looking for some interesting horror, you could do worse than A Wicked Ghost. If the future of horror in Hong Kong rests in the hands of Tony Leung, we won't be getting any high works of art, just like he won't be getting any big budgets. But we've got a guy over there who seems to genuinely likes horror and who seems to want to experiment with it a little. We've got a guy who might do something pretty good in the future, and who will at least be interesting to watch progress.

Although most plots can be similarly boiled down to their base element, few are the movies that actually outline the entire plot with the first two lines of dialogue. Fewer still are the movies where reducing the plot to a single sentence doesn't result in you missing out on at least something. But such is the case with Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion, a movie that lays out it's entire story when, in the first scene, an old kungfu master tells his young female student to go find the master's brother. That's it. What's truly astounding, however, is how a movie with such a simple plot can boast such convoluted storytelling. By the end of this whole martial arts mess, your head will be spinning with a whole lot of nothing, leaving you frustrated and more than just a bit disappointed.

A big part of what makes Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion so disappointing, besides the fact that it's more or less a study in never-ending tedium, is that it stars Angela Mao Ying, one of the all-time greats and one of the top five ass-kickingest female movie stars of all time (she sits atop the pile alongside Pam Grier, Claudia Jennings, Zeenat Anan, and Etsuko Shiomi). Along with women like Polly Shang Kuan, Mao was one of the first women to make a name for herself as a kungfu star after women like Cheng Pei-pei and Lily Li blazed the path in early swordsman films. Working frequently with Sammo Hung as a stunt and fight choreographer, Mao clawed her way tot eh top during the early 1970s with her combination of fists, feet, swords, and grace. She was none too hard on the eyes, either.

Angela Mao got her start in martial arts when she began training as a member of a Peking Opera troupe in 1958 after having already spent time training in ballet. That's a lot to do by the time you're eight. By the time I was eight, I think I could ride a bike and melt an army man with a magnifying glass, but none of that was going to help me become a kungfu star. Also in the troupe was a young actor named James Tien, who should be a recognizable name and face to any old school kungfu film fan. Tien starred in hundreds of martial arts films, including Bruce Lee's Big Boss and Fist of Fury.

Mao got her first role in 1967, when Huang Feng cast her in his upcoming film Angry River. Huang Feng is also the guy who would give Sammo Hung and Carter Wong their big breaks, and the same magic worked with Angela. After a few movies, most notably The Fate of Lee Kahn directed by Taiwan's legendary King Hu, Mao caught the eye of some guy named Bruce Lee, who got her a short but memorable part as his character's sister in Enter the Dragon. Although she doesn't last long in that movie, seeing a woman on screen kicking some ass kungfu style was more than enough to get people interested in her.

She made a series of films alongside Carter Wong, a kungfu workhorse who has never gotten he credit he deserves (even after puffing himself up all big in Big Trouble in Little China, the best of which was When Taekwando Strikes, which also starred Korean martial arts master Jhoon Rhee. While working on the film Hapkido, she also developed a partnership with Sammo Hung, who would go on to choreograph several more of Mao's best films. With movies like Enter the Dragon, When Taekwando Strikes, the British-Hong Kong co-production Stoner (with George Lazenby!), and the brutally violent Broken Oath under her black belt, Angela Mao carved a place for herself in the kungfu star hall of fame.

But it's safe to bet that Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion didn't do much for building her reputation. It's not a good film, especially compared to some her other work. It has all the right elements: cool and esoteric kungfu styles, old masters, intrigue and treachery, Angela Mao and Don Wong Dao. Nothing comes together though, and the end result is a tiresome train wreck of a film that stretches ten minutes of story into a feature length film.

Mao stars as a young swordswoman who, as we now know, has to go find her master's brother, who has mysteriously disappeared. What follows is a full film's worth of Angela wandering around aimlessly in a village looking for this guy, while various kungfu factions attack her for no real reason. Don Wong Dao shows up from time to time to fight, and later assist Mao in her bland quest. Characters and factions are introduced with absolutely no development whatsoever. A character whose identity is obscured throughout the whole film is eventually revealed to be exactly who you think he is. People who act nice but seem like they might be hiding evil sides are indeed hiding evil sides. This movie is full of shady characters and mysteries, yet not a single one of them is in the least bit interesting.

As someone who considers himself not without a small degree of expertise regarding old kungfu films, I'm used to convoluted plots and films that throw so many characters at you that you need a flow chart and an Oracle database to keep track of them. Traditional Chinese storytelling has always been fond of tossing characters at you left and right, often with little explanation of where they came from and little explanation of where they go. Heck, the classic martial arts epic Water Margin has what? Well over a hundred main characters? The fact that people come and go with suddenness mimics real life well, but it also makes for some confusing storytelling. You get used to it after a while though, and with a little work and concentration, keeping most of the players straight and sorting out the threads of plot is not that difficult.

A story has to at least make you want to sort everything out, though. The Shaw Brothers classic Brave Archer has tons of characters and a story resembling a bowl of spaghetti, but the movie is so good that it's worth the effort to get it all straight. Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion instills in its sundry characters not a single interesting trait, making the job of sorting them out unrewarding, and ultimately darn near impossible since most of the characters exhibit no characteristic that sets them apart from any other character. It's just an assortment of guys in wigs stroking their fake goatees as Angela Mao walks from building to building. Although character development has made good kungfu films great (witness just about any Liu Chia-liang film), it's never been a necessity for making a good kungfu film good. You can get by without it so long as your movie delivers something interesting. Even static, one-dimensional characters can be interesting. No one watches Kungfu Zombie to see the dynamic evolution of Billy Chong's character. But Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion really pushes things too far. Not only are the characters bland to the point of insulting the adjective "bland," but the film doesn't give you anything else to make up for it.

You know when someone is trying to tell you a very simple joke or a story, and they keep pausing, having to retell one part, stammering, messing up, and generally aggravating you to the point where you want to throttle them and just scream, "Spit it out, man!" - that's what this movie is like. What should be a minute-long anecdote becomes twenty minutes of mind-numbing boredom that almost makes you break down and cry. Likewise, what should be a short film with a simple plot becomes stretched past the breaking point. An endless procession of dull scenes involve Angela Mao walking into someone's compound and asking them if they know where her teacher's brother is. They all say no, and as she walks away, the camera zooms in on whoever she was talking to, who will then stroke his goatee in a devious manner. It's about as subtle as a moustache-twirling villain in a black coat and top hat tying maidens to the train tracks.

And why do we care anyway? All we know is that some guy is missing. We don't know anything about him. Why would someone kidnap him? Why should we even care? When Angela Mao finally finds the old coot, the revelations about who is evil and why he's been kidnapped are hardly worth the pain the rest of the film has caused. The reasons for the kidnapping are events that don't even have anything else to do with the entire film! Geez, by this point I would have taken a revelation like, "Evil Ma killed your father!" even if no character named Evil Ma had been in the film up to that point, and then Evil Ma shows up out of nowhere for the final duel. But we don't even get anything like that. The rescue of the old man is sort of like getting all worked up about one of those firecracker champagne bottles only to pull the string and, instead of a pop and shower of confetti, the cardboard bottom just tears off and a wad of paper falls to the ground.

From time to time, a fight scene interrupts Mao's random questioning of beard-stroking guys. Often times, the fight breaks out because Angela just waltzes into a courtyard unannounced and starts swinging her sword at people until someone asks her to explain, then everything is okay. Maybe if she would announce her intentions before barging in and sticking blades in people, these fights wouldn't break out. Normally, you would want a fight to break out in a kungfu film. After all, that's what makes them kungfu films. But when you see the fights here, you'll realize with no small amount of anger that they are about as interesting and energetic as the scenes in which Angela Mao walks down the street to her next destination.

And just when you think things can't drag any more, the movie takes a break for a five-minute long fan dance sequence that boasts all the energy of an old man pouring molasses on a cold Dakota morning. The intricacies of the dance seem to hit their zenith when a woman at one end of a row walks slowly to the other end of the row and the evil master, obscured behind a curtain for no good reason since it's not like we give a rat's ass who he is, gets to laugh and stroke his goatee. This entire sequence drags so bad that time will actually reverse while you are watching it. Normally, the ability to reverse time is a good thing, but unfortunately it will only reverse time to a point earlier in the film, and you'll have to watch it all over again.

Mao is not a bad martial artist, but she needs a good choreographer. With one in place, the girl can shine like the sun, but without one, you'll wonder why she became such a star. Let's just say there was no Sammo Hung working on this film. The kungfu fights are just painful to watch, and not in a good way. People seem to move at half speed. Everything consists of "flail arms, tumble forward" type of choreography -- the sort of stuff that makes a Jimmy Wang Yu fight look complex. When things threaten to get halfway interesting, such as when Mao faces off with a female fighter and her exploding lotus-wielding minions, the sluggish, clumsy nature of the fights more than negates to esoteric novelty of a bunch of guys who, for some reason, have their screams dubbed by women (they don't scream like women - women are actually doing the screaming) as they hurl exploding plastic lotus blossoms at our heroine. Whoa re these people? Well, they're allied with one of the beard-strokers, but if anyone bothered to write out exactly what the alliances are in this film, they forgot to actually shoot those scenes.

The movie flirts with being almost watchable in a scene where Mao must negotiate a house of traps type fortress that is full of hidden swordsmen, balls of fire, flying saw blades, and stone lion statues that spit acid. Even with all that cool stuff, Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion still manages to be dull. Even Treasure of the Four Crowns showed more energy. The final fight scene is just as awful as everything else that came before it. The combatants move as if they are in slow motion. What the hell? Is everyone doing tai chi in this movie?

There's really nothing worth watching here. Angela Mao fans, of which I am a big one, will only mourn her participation in such a dreadfully uninspired and uninteresting movie. Likewise, people who are wondering what Angela Mao is all about certainly aren't going to be convinced of her greatness by Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion. If you are a student of taking one simple plot and stretching it out seventy minutes past its breaking point while, at the same time, trying to recount even the simplest fact in the most convoluted fashion imaginable, then maybe this movie is worth your while. For everyone else, this thing is just a failure on every level you can think of, and maybe even a few new ones that didn't occur to you until you had to do something like sit through that fan dance sequence. If anyone can drum even the slightest interest in anything that happens in this film, they are certainly more determined and forgiving than I am. I hate to write bad reviews, or at least to write bad reviews without finding something of value amid the garbage, but this movie just leaves me speechless when I try to dream up any redeeming quality. Angela had a couple nice outfits. I'm afraid that's the best I can do.

In Enter the Dragon, Angela Mao guts herself with a jagged shard of glass rather than suffer the villainy of her attackers when they corner her in an old dockside warehouse. I felt like doing the same thing to myself in order to escape this movie.

It is indeed a film, and you shouldn't miss it. The world of kungfu movies is not hurting for movies about the Shaolin Temple protecting and fighting alongside Ch'ing dynasty rebels, but when you find a good one, and I mean a really good on, everything becomes that much more special.

A young soldier is wounded while trying to protect the Royal Seal, but is saved from death by a woman named Bai. They seek shelter at Shaolin Temple, but the abbot is hesitant to get involved, since Shaolin was on tenuous ground (at best) with the Ch'ing government (which later ordered the temple burned to the ground and declared open season on the monks). This hesitance moves Bai to angrily shout, "Let's get out of here! This temple is run by a bunch of wet willies!"

The soldier stays, however, wanting to learn the ways of Shaolin Temple -- or more precisely, learn the ways of Shaolin Temple kungfu He is a trouble-maker and all-around imp of a fellow, which means he is destined to be the Temple's greatest hero. The abbot of Shaolin must breathe a sigh of relief every time one of these impish, no good louts come strolling through the front gate, because it seems like they always go on to become China's greatest heroes. It's probably an interview question. "Are you an impish bum who will spend more time goofing off than studying, and spend more energy getting out of work than you wouldput in if you just did the work in the firts place?" If you answered yes to either question, you are going to be either a national hero or a computer programmer.

The soldier hears that the best kungfu teacher in the temple went insane a long time ago, and now lives in a cave where he drinks wine and practices kungfu all day.

Bai is kidnapped by the evil soldiers, and the soldier, now an apprentice monk, rescues her but is captured himself. This is one of those times when it is good to have twelve angry monks as your pals. They come to his rescue without the permission of the abbot.

On the outs with the abbot after the rescue, our hero goes into the cave inhabited by the insane monk who prays to his many jars of wine. The crazy drunk monk agrees to teach the hero that sort of kungfu you can only learn from crazy drunk monks.

And just in time, too, because the soldiers are coming to Shaolin Temple to kill, kill, kill!

Incredible kungfu action, especially from the crazy drunk monk and hero, highlight this energetic, action-packed, and quite funny kungfu film. It made me want to go out to a cave and find a drunk monk of my own. When I went to the cave, though, all I found was stoned metal heads making out and spray painting Ozzy's name on the wall. Still, they taught me a thing or two, but it was never very useful.

In fact, I quite like this film, though I may be the only one in the world. Seems like everyone else hates it, or at least most people I've talked to. True, the kungfu isn't all that great, and the production is cheaper than a desperate crack whore (did I just write that?), but I admire the film's ambition, if not it's actual execution.

The plot is something special: in a dirty dystopic future, a kungfu student named Killer (Wang Lung-wei in an ultra-rare non-villainous role) seeks revenge for the destruction of his school against a cut throat gang of body-building neo-Nazi Chinese skinheads who sell drugs and conduct strange genetic experiments inside their decadent Studio 54 discotheque!!!

No, I swear! Really!

How can you not love a film as brazenly weird as that? Forget Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate starring Chuck Conners. Forget Blade Runner. This films gives you best of both worlds. And to top it all off, you get freaky Tangerine Dreamish music that reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, some sexy drugged-out future women whose avant-garde stage show is stripping while killing fat people to the sounds of Velvet Underground, lots of cars with tubes and stuff taped to them (because it's the future), and a lot of other crazy future stuff. And lots of slightly below average martial arts.

What can we learn from these Blade Runner-inspired cautionary tales of the future? Well, the main thing we take away from them is that we will be hanging lots of wires and tubes in our cars and apartments. You know you are living int he future when you have big bundles or wire stuck to your wall. Also, it helps if you have several small computer or television monitors tuned to dead channels or that weird blue screen that just has the white line going up it over and over. Get some of those, scatter them around, and presto! Welcome to the future!

But the gestalt feel of this freakish little experiment is something I must admit I completely love. Today's art house film-makers and cyberpunk wannabes couldn't make a film this disjointed and messed up if they tried. And at it's heart is the basic kungfu plot of a student seeking revenge for the destruction of his school. There is a reason Wang Lung-wei usually played villains. He's really not that great a hero. I kept waiting for him to do something evil, and he never quite clicks as a good guy. Ko Hung as his teacher rules, though, but Ko Hung pretty much always rule. That guy is a definite underappreciated talent. And the ladies are not too bad, despite their Cyndi Lauper meets Devo wardrobe.

Amid all the mind-blowing silliness, you can actually see some moments of genuine talent and promise in Kirk Wong's direction, and recognize all the basic ingredients of a Kirk Wong film in extremely elementary and raw form. In a film that stars Ko Hung. Hmmm. And then you have Heroes Shed No Tears, an early action film by John Woo, in which you can see all his basic themes and stylistic tendencies in a very raw, undeveloped film. Who stars in that film as well? Ko Hung. And these two directors go on to become two of the biggest most influential men in action cinema. Coincidence? Or is Ko Hung the real power behind the Hong Kong New Wave?

On top of it all, be amazed at what the cast and crew pull off in a film that must have had a budget of $9.00. I love Flash Future Kungfu, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It's utterly absurd, mind-bendingly bizarre fare!

Anyway, Madame Kuo raises six children to be an acrobatic troupe. One of them grows up to be Chi Kuan-chun, best known for his many roles alongside Alexander Fu Sheng in many of the Shaw Brothers best films (5 Masters of Death, Invincible Kungfu Brothers, Death Chambers). Another grows up to be Phoenix Chin, a martial arts actress I know nothing about and have never heard of outside of this film. Too bad, because her flexible yoga style kungfu is a sight to behold.

They all work to sell a somewhat questionable health elixir in order to keep their school open, though I'm not certain how expensive it is to run a school that never accepts any new students, and the small group of current students all work for free at the place. The group gets on the wrong end of some corrupt officials, and soon Madame Kuo is murdered and her students are seeking revenge against the evil Dr. Chan, who is so friendly at first that you know immediately he is the bad guy. That's a lesson for you -- if a guy in one of those long white robes and a black fedora is really friendly to you and helps you out on countless selfless ways, there's a good chance he's going to try and kick you later on.

Phoenix is an interesting fighter to watch, as she contorts and twists in ways no human should. I'd like to know more about her, but if this film is the only testament, it's not a bad thing to go on. She is a mute in this film, and seems to communicate with the rest of the cast through a disembodied female narrator. That's a pretty good trick in and of itself, but you lump it in with the ability to tie herself into a pretzel while kicking goons in the head, she becomes even more impressive.

This film is full of weird comedy that few people will understand. A lot of people like to attribute this to cultural differences, and sometimes that may be true. Sometimes, though, I think these films are just insane. When it all comes down to the money, Dr. Chan, Phoenix, and her two useless male sidekicks face off in a fight to the death. But then, is there any other kind?

Overall, this movie manages to be just above average, which means I enjoyed it quite a bit, since a kungfu movie can be way below average and still please me. I like watching Phoenix fight because it's a weird, new style that makes all the fights more unique. Not an earth-shatteringly great film, but a solid, enjoyable little romp. Sometimes, that's just what I need.

It wasn't always like that, though. Most of the elements in these martial arts films that we take for granted - the cranky teacher, the sassy student, the goofy kungfu style - are all rooted in ancient literature and performance but are relatively new to film, or as new as anything born in the 1970s can be. The martial arts have a long tradition of comedic elements being woven into stories about them, and most of this stems from the popularity of the Monkey King, Sun Wu-kong, whose immortal hijinks and kungfu clowning have pleased audiences for generations. Born in the epic 16th century mythology novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng-en, the character of the Monkey King was a wise-cracking rebel with little regard for the politics and protocols of Heaven. Put him in charge of a sacred garden full of peaches of immortality, and all he's gonna do is get drunk, eat all the peaches, and stumble on over to Lao Tzu's place for more hijinks. Monkey was rude, disrespectful, and impish. For that, he became one of the most beloved literary figures of all time.

Peking Opera troupes frequently did performances revolving around some prank or other that Monkey was involved in and audiences ate it up with the same voracious appetite Monkey himself displayed when he took care of that holy peach garden. Stories about Monkey allowed the performers to incorporate a variety of acrobatic stunts and hijinks that, in turn, delighted audiences. Plus, it was a nice break from all the serious romantic tragedies people usually had to endure.

Inspired by the success of the Monkey King on page and stage, street performers also started working comedy into their routines. After all, watching some serious guy stand on the corner and twirl his sword might be interesting for a little bit, but after a while you're going to tire of the scowl and wander off to check out the guys who are shouting, doing flips, and generally turning their acrobatic martial arts displays into a block party. It simply made for better theater.

When motion picture creation rolled around in the early years of the 20th century, Hong Kong's first films were little more than stage plays on camera. Drama progressed, but martial arts films remained fairly theatrical in their presentation until men like Kwan Tak-hing revolutionized the way people thought about making kungfu films. When the modern era of martial arts filmmaking began in the 1960s with the Shaw Brothers wu xia (swordsman) films, whatever sense of humor the Monkey King had instilled in the martial arts was drained entirely. The Shaw Brothers films were blood-soaked tragedies full of feudal honor and revenge. Things rarely worked out well for the characters, and while many of the films were exceptional, no one is going to sit around and tell you that Trail of the Broken Blade is a raucous comedy.

When martial arts movies started making the transition from swordsmen films to kungfu films in the 1970s, the grim tone was carried over. Jimmy Wang Yu and Lo Lieh, two of the biggest star of the wu xia era, were also two of the first men to start making kungfu films. Jimmy Wang Yu made Chinese Boxer and Lo Lieh was hot on his heels with Five Fingers of Death. Although the focus shifted from knights in white tunics to gritty hand-to-hand combatants, the somber tone and tragic elements were still prevalent. It wasn't until Bruce Lee came on the scene that people started thinking about adding some laughs to the mix to lighten things up.

It's interesting that one of the criticisms of Lee by people who are generally unfamiliar with his work was that he had an imposing screen presence but was weak when it came to lightness and comedy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did Bruce Lee completely change the way kungfu films were choreographed by introducing technique when previously most films just had their combatants waving their arms at each other, but he also helped alter the overall tone of the kungfu film. He alerted people to the fact that even I a relatively serious film, you could still get some belly-laughs. Nowhere was this more evident than in the movie he wrote, directed, and starred in, Way of the Dragon.

The humor wasn't exactly high-brow. It was bathroom humor - literally. But respectable or not, it was something new. You wouldn't catch Jimmy Wang Yu putting squat toilet sight gags in one of his films. Unfortunately, Lee's career was cut tragically short, so we'll never know exactly where he might have taken the genre, but the seeds he planted forever changed things. After Lee's passing, a new generation of actors and directors were set to take over the scene, and they brought with them a sense of humor that was in sharp contrast to the brutal, romantic films of the first half of the 1970s.

Chief among the new stars was a rotund fella by the name of Sammo Hung. Hung had cut his teeth as a member of a Peking Opera troupe alongside other rising stars like Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, and some guy named Jackie Chan. Where as the previous generation of martial arts stars, those who came before Bruce Lee, had generally been classically trained actors with little prior knowledge regarding the martial arts, Sammo represented the new breed whose doors had been opened by Bruce. Sure, he was trained as an actor and acrobat, but like many members of the Peking Opera school, Sammo supplemented his theatrical training with hardcore martial arts training. By the time he left the school to pursue a film career, Sammo was an accomplished fighter, choreographer, stunt man, writer, and even director.

Perhaps even more than Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung possessed a natural understanding of what making a kungfu film meant. He understood the difference between what worked in a real fight and what looked good on screen. He understood how to make moves and styles that were too outrageous to work in real life seem completely believable in the context of a film. Given his background as a performer and martial artist, it's no surprise that he also brought with him a Monkey King like sense of warped humor. Although his early jobs as a stuntman and fight choreographer earned him a reputation as one of the best in the business, it wasn't until he wielded enough power to really shape a film in his image that the revolution began. 1977's Iron-Fisted Monk, the first film directed by Sammo, set a new standard for fight choreography, revealing to people that Sammo's talent as both a fighter and a choreographer had only been hinted at in his previous films.

At the same time, Sammo's classmate Jackie Chan was wandering down the same road toward kungfu hijinks. Chan starred in a series of go- nowhere kungfu films under the directorial lead of Lo Wei, but in 1976 the duo collaborated on a screwball kungfu film called Half a Loaf of Kungfu, and suddenly things were looking up. Instead of trying to pass Chan off as a serious presence, the movie allowed him to ham it up in a variety of silly situations. Chan was able to tap into his inner Monkey King, and the results, while not entirely classic, were certainly worth noting. 1977's Spiritual Kungfu followed the same basic formula.

In 1978, though, it all boiled over.

In that year, Jackie Chan starred in Drunken Master, directed by Yuen Wo-ping, and Sammo Hung directed and starred in Warriors Two. Kungfu films had been incorporating more and more comedic elements into their goings-on, but these two movies more than anything pushed the whole thing over the edge and gave official birth to the kungfu comedy as we know it today. Drunken Master laid out the formula that would become far and away the most used plot in the subgenre, that of the curmudgeonly old master, the lazy disrespectful student, and their eventual need to work together to defeat some seeming insurmountable evil.

While the plot of Drunken Master may serve as the basis for nearly every kungfu comedy that would follow, it was the mental state of Sammo Hung that would provide the genre with it's dominant tone. Sammo's films have always been possessed of a certain degree of schizophrenia. On more than one occasion, a scene that starts out as a study in slapstick physical comedy will suddenly turn deadly serious and tragic without any warning. I don't pretend to know what goes on in the mind of Sammo Hung, but at least a portion of it is prone to sudden turns of dark moodiness. This split personality approach to a film would become the prevailing mood of most kungfu comedies. In one scene, the madcap hijinks are flying left and right, and in the next scene, with no transition or warning, things become heavy.

In 1979, director Joe Cheung tried his hand at the kungfu comedy with the film Incredible Kungfu Master, starring a well-respected but not well-known martial arts actor by the name of Tung Wei. When last we saw Tung Wei, he was getting slapped on the head by Bruce Lee and lectured about not staring at the finger when you should be marveling at all the heavenly glory. The movie was a bug success, thanks in no small part to the fact that it starred Sammo Hung, who was one of the two hottest properties in the business at the time, possibly the hottest since he was the total package where Jackie Chan was still considered primarily just an actor. Hot on the heels of their success, the Tung Wei - Joe Cheung tried it again with 18 Fatal Strikes, a less successful but still enjoyable entry into the kungfu comedy genre which unfortunately got lost in the shuffle that year since there were roughly ninety-three thousand similar movies made at the same time. Still, the fact that it was a relatively low-key affair adds to its charms, and it stands up well as an example of everything that is good and bad about the genre as a whole.

The story is a study in the kungfu comedy formula. Tung Wei stars as Shou Tung, a lazy bumpkin who whiles away the hours on what appears to be a twig farm with his brother Tai Pei. Tai is played by none other than Shih Tien, whose name may not be familiar but whose face certainly is. The guy was a fixture in damn near every kungfu comedy that got made, usually as some sniveling conniver who taunts the hero endlessly. He is in a slightly different role here, but he still manages to whine a lot. One day while the brothers (or half-brothers, I guess - they have different mothers) are out collecting twigs, or rather while Tai Pei is collecting twigs and Shou Tung is sleeping, they happen across a badly wounded monk who, as we learn in the film's opening scene, is one of the great leaders of the rebellion against the Ch'ing dynasty.

The monk Wang apparently got on the wrong side of Ch'ing heavy Wong Wu Ti, whose utterly bizarre "Shaking Eagle" fist is well nigh invincible, not to mention incredibly annoying. Any time he busts out the style, Wong Wu Ti prefaces it by shaking around like a Bollywood dancer and making a sound not unlike what you hear if you dump a bag full of broken glass on a concrete floor. This in itself isn't so bad, but whoever did the dubbing for this movie makes Wong Wu Ti emit the most grating, ludicrous "whooo hoo wooo aahhh" noises I've ever heard. Kungfu film fans expect goofy noises from dubs, and heck, often from the originals, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a more ludicrous sounding cacophony that what Wong Wu Ti rattles off. I'm guessing that his style is so effective because, upon seeing some dude with long white hair bust out the "shaking my tits with arms wide open" move you expect from your more mundane strippers while he hoots like a total buffoon, even the best trained martial artist doubles over with laughter, thus leaving himself open to a fatal blow from the man acting like a chicken. His style makes the technique and gibberish of Rudy Ray Moore seem subtle and refined by comparison.

Shou Tung takes the monk home while Tai Pei delays searching soldiers. Back in their hovel, Shou Tung engages in a variety of hilarious exchanges in which he looks at the monk, and the monk grimaces and spits blood in his face. Oh, the wackiness! Nothing is funnier than having a dying monk spit blood in your face. What's really odd is that it never occurs to Shou Tung that wiping the blood off might be a good thing. Perhaps he knows that monk is just going to execute the gag again, so there's no real point. This does, however, illustrate one of the key elements in kungfu comedy - that being that the comedy is rarely all that funny. A monk spitting up blood isn't normally considered a source of amusement outside of a Gwar concert, and likewise, many of the situations played for comedic effect in kungfu comedies aren't especially funny. Some of them are downright serious. The comedy doesn't come from the situation, but rather it comes from the reaction. Okay, so a monk spits up blood on someone. Not a big deal. But when that someone reacts by making a silly face while "wah wah wahhhhh" music plays, we're clued in to the fact that this is all supposed to be a reason to chuckle, so chuckle we do.

Most kungfu comedies rely on the mugging of the star and generic comedy music to relay the fact that something funny is going on. Jackie Chan became a true master of mugging for the camera - to the point where it almost became the only thing he was able to do. Plentiful are the scene sin which something would be relatively straight-forward and serious if the star didn't follow it up by making the funny "it's a living!" face while someone dubs in a rim shot or something. 18 Fatal Strikes is no different. Almost all of the comedy is derived not from a funny instance, but from a funny face following an otherwise normal occurrence. Thus, a monk with severe internal bleeding becomes the source of much frivolity.

Another aspect of the comedy in kungfu comedies is that jokes often get driven into the ground. No sooner do we think the whole blood- spitting monk thing has been played out than Tai Pei comes home so he, too, can have blood spit in his face.

Shou Tung and Tai Pei also fulfill the requirements of a hero in a kungfu comedy. Both are interested in the martial arts, but neither is very good. They're too lazy to practice, and as a result, their kungfu is about on par with that of David Carradine. Few and far between are the kungfu comedies devoid of the bumpkin hero, and that's because people like bumpkin heroes. We can laugh at them, but we can also cheer for them. Heck, Shou Tung is basically a farm boy who dreams of fighting in the rebellion and one days meets a wise old master who serves as his teacher. Just call him Luke Skywalker, probably the most famous of all bumpkin heroes. Luke even whines like the bumpkin hero of a kungfu comedy. He wants to go to the Tashi Station to pick up some power converters; Shou Tung wants to go into town to buy some steam buns.

Shou Tung and Tai Pei also fulfill the "odd couple" relationship with their master. Where as the classic films of the 1960s and early 1970s relied on a feudal sense of honor and reverence toward the master on behalf of the student, the students in the comedies of the late 1970s were often far more Monkey King-esque in their relationship with their master. They lie, cheat, and try to scheme their way out of hard training. The master, in return, generally pronounces them as being "goddamned useless!" Heck, the Monkey King even ate his master once! Instead of the traditional code of loyalty, the kungfu comedy takes the hustling capitalist approach to martial arts training. The student will do anything it takes to get ahead.

Such a drastic change in attitude was brought about partly because of the change in the economic situation of real-life martial artists during the 1960s. At the end of the decade, as the wu xia genre waned and the kungfu film had yet to be fully born, a lot of professional martial artists suddenly found themselves falling upon hard times. Interest in the arts waned amongst the public, and what had once been a decent job as a teacher or as an actor suddenly fell apart. Kungfu masters had to adapt, and many of them did so by falling in with triads, by doing what it took for them to survive with the skills they had. It's one of the many factors that contributed to the rise of gangland involvement in the Hong Kong film industry.

When the brothers discover that their favorite lady at the local restaurant is also part of the rebellion, they themselves find their roles becoming increasingly entangled with the political players. This means they suffer some mighty beatings at the hands of Wong Wu Ti's henchmen. Abbot Wang aggress to teach the brothers the eighteen secret styles of the Lo Han fist, Shaolin's greatest fighting technique, although he himself only knows a few of them. I guess they'll just wing the others. Unfortunately, the use of the Lo Han form tips off the bad guys that Shou Tung and Tai Pei are hanging out with the monk. In order to convince them to turn over the rebel leader, Wong Wu Ti's cronies murder Tai Pei's one true love, and then fulfill the "Sammo schizophrenia" even further by murdering Tai Pei himself!

Quite a twist, but it wasn't entirely unexpected. After all, if we continue to look at 18 Fatal Strikes as an example of all the conventions of the kungfu comedy, Shou Tung has to experience a tragic loss that causes him to find the determination to become a great kungfu master in order to seek revenge. Kungfu comedy heroes generally find themselves caught up in situations where they have very little at stake personally. Before meeting the monk, the duo is simply living in their own carefree little world. Sure they know about the ongoing rebellion against the Ch'ing dynasty, but it's not exactly something that affects their lives any more than the Ch'ing dynasty itself affects their lives. Even after meeting Abbot Wang, their relation to the greater forces at work is tangential. It is only when a tragedy befalls one of the characters that resolve is discovered. At that point, however, it is still a personal matter far more than it is a political one. Shou Tung doesn't fight Wong Wu Ti in the name of revolution. He does so out of a desire for personal revenge.

The finale is also a perfect example of what makes the kungfu comedy tick. Up to this point, we've seen very little of Wong Wu Ti other than in the beginning and at a point here and there throughout the film, often doing nothing more than sitting in his fancy throne. Who sells these evil kungfu masters their thrones, anyway? They all seem to have one. In a kungfu comedy, the villain is usually outlandish and, after the student and the teacher, is the most important character despite the fact that he generally has very little screen time. This is done in order to preserve the mystique of the character, to avoid overexposing him to the audience. Wong Wu Ti is much cooler when there is an air of menace and mystery about him. When we do see him, he has a tendency to constantly leave his victims for dead when, in fact, they were just playing possum. How many times is this guy going to fall for that trick?

To draw another parallel to Star Wars, take a look at Boba Fett. That guy does next to nothing in the entire movie, until a blind guy bumps into him and he gets eaten by an immobile hole in the sand. The very fact that he has next to no screen time is what allows the character to maintain the air of being a total bad-ass. The only different is that in kungfu comedies, the villain eventually leaps up in the final scene to prove how tough he is. Boba Fett just screamed like a little girl and fell in a hole. The less we see of Boba Fett, the better off his character is.

Kungfu comedies also exist in a time vacuum. From the first time we meet Wong Wu Ti, to the final frame of the film, we're given no indication about how much time passes. Once the plot is established, everything remains static. The world does not change. By all accounts, the series of events in the film should take years, but it could just as easily take place in a matter of days or weeks. Time is irrelevant. Wong Wu Ti sits in the same garishly lit throne room until it's time for him to go out and die in the final fight scene.

This warp happens partly because of limited budgets. Kungfu comedies are largely character driven, even if those characters are broad clichés, because the limited time, money, and locations available to the average Hong Kong film production were severely limited. You can't track the progress of a countrywide revolution on the back lots of a studio. 18 Fatal Strikes was a decent enough production, thanks no doubt to the success of Incredible Kungfu Master, that they could afford some location shooting for some scenes, but for the most part it was limited in scope. In these circumstances, the characters drive the story, and all other considerations, including historical accuracy or the passage of time, become irrelevant. That's why you can have so many films set during the Ch'ing dynasty but completely devoid of the baldhead and pigtail haircut that was required by law. Some films at least paid lip service to the historical facts by pasting a pigtail onto the end of the star's regular hair, but simply figured that historical details like that were less important than having the actor available to shoot another film a week later that was set in modern times.

Timewise, all that is important to a kungfu comedy are the three stages of the plot. Those stages are the only real way in which the passage of time is handled. Stage one revolves around introducing and establishing the character of the carefree protagonist. Stage two contains a steady build-up of action that builds up the conflict between the hero and the villain. The third stage sees the conflict resolved as it should be: through kungfu fightin'. As long as the film progresses through these stages, the actual duration of events is inconsequential. This is why so many kungfu comedies, 18 Fatal Strikes among them, end almost the very second the hero lands the fatal blow on the villain. That blow was the goal of the entire film, and once it is over, the universe in which the film exists ceases to be.

18 Fatal Strikes is a good example of the kungfu comedy genre because it fulfills all the requirements, showcases the strengths of the formula, and also spotlights the weaknesses. The strengths come primarily from the characters and the action. Tung Wei and Shih Tien are both fabulous in their roles as wisecracking hillbillies thrust into a national political struggle. Although few people seem to talk about him nowadays, Tung Wei was a decent actor and a great martial artist. He's easy to identify with because he's not that big and not that handsome. He's a regular Joe, physically built sort of like me except that where he had six smaller, harder muscles in his abdominal region, I have one larger, softer pillow. He's also an accomplished choreographer, and the fights here are superb. While they may not be up to the lofty standards of Sammo Hung at his best in films like Warriors Two or Prodigal Son, Tung Wei and crew throw together some impressive, fast-paced, hard- hitting action. Except for the whole "Shaking Eagle" style, most of what we get is a fairly straightforward variation of authentic Shaolin forms. That in itself sets 18 Fatal Strikes apart from the larger pack of kungfu comedies, which are full of "Rubbish Fist" and "Happy Style."

Another thing that makes 18 Fatal Strikes a little different is the inclusion of Ms. Sheng, a virtuous and accomplished female fighter. Kungfu comedies are notoriously misogynistic, and women in the films are generally given nothing more than to do than shriek like harpies or be kind and demure up to the time when they get murdered. 18 Fatal Strikes does have the demure girl who gets murdered, but it also has a woman who can hold her own in a fight. While we get to see similar characters in movies like Half a Loaf of Kungfu and the films of Liu Chia- liang, it was still a rarity that a movie was made in the mold that didn't feature a shrew as the lead female.

Aside from that, though, 18 Fatal Strikes is formula kungfu comedy through and through. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. After all, something becomes a formula because it generally works well. And 18 Fatal Strikes may be flawed, but it's also satisfying and entertaining. It's biggest weakness is indicative of the biggest weakness in all kungfu comedies - the inability to make the comedy work with the seriousness. At his best, Sammo Hung was able to make the two work, even if their coexistence was an often jarring affair. Most directors, however, ended up with an awkward mix of slapstick hijinks and tragic seriousness. 18 Fatal Strikes certainly suffers from this, but not so much that it proves fatal to the film. It's still a problem, though, and in fact it's a problem that continues to plague Hong Kong films to this day. The humor of the film is undercut by the tragic deaths of Tai Pei and his girlfriend, and the emotional impact of such sad events is similarly subverted by all the mugging and hamming that's been going on. The end result simply doesn't mesh together.

Still, you come to expect that from most kungfu comedies, and you can overlook it so long as the movie delivers the goods on other levels. 18 Fatal Strikes does just that. A simple but effective story and top-notch kungfu choreography more than make up for the clumsy handling of humor and tragedy. It's not a classic of the genre, but it's a good workhorse example of what it has to offer. The Monkey King would probably enjoy it.

Movies like Shiri, Nowhere to Hide, and the recent Joint Security Area have blown all other recent action films out of the water while twisted Korean horror films like Memento Mori and Tell Me Something do as much to revitalize the anemic horror film market (unless Valentine was your idea of quality horror) as the aforementioned action films did for their own genres. And then you have action-comedies like Attack the Gas Station that strike a perfect balance between thrills and laughs.

Throughout the world, Korean films are making waves, and the attention is very much deserved. Korea has one of the only domestic film markets that isn't completely dominated by American movies, where the domestic fare can actually nab the number one spot. When I was in Japan recently, there were only two Asian films playing amid an onslaught of big budget American crap -- the Japanese anime feature Metropolis and the Korean blockbuster Joint Security Area. Throughout Europe, Korean films are consistently garnering critical praise and awards.

And America, as usual, completely missed the boat. Just as this country caught on to Jackie Chan after every single country in the world already considered him old news, just as we started digging the Hong Kong new wave years after the tide went out, so too are we dragging our feet on catching onto the fact that the Koreans are kicking some serious cinematic ass right now. I guess the lack of attention to plots and logic in deference to advancing the technology of film presentation has paid off. Our Dolby 5.1 DSS home theaters cranked to eleven insure than we'll hear nothing but the mindless blather of the latest Michael Bay abomination. There's a reason that you can find more people reviewing the quality of a DVD than the quality of the film on the DVD.

Well, ya get what you deserve, and frankly, I'm never one to mourn the ignorance of the masses. It's their loss, and as long as countries like Hong Kong continue to bring cheap Korean film DVDs to me, I don't really need my own country getting involved. After all, we'd only edit out half the material, dub it, and replace the original score with a compilation of P. Diddy and Linkin Park songs. The less said about how we treat most Hong Kong films, the better.

The Foul King was box-office champ in Korea, and it's a great example of what's making these films so popular with everyone except the people who thought American Pie II was funniest shit they'd ever seen. Song Kang-ho stars as Dae-ho, a stressed-out loan officer who is plagued by two problems at work. First, he's one of the two worst employees in the whole bank. Second, his boss is an abusive, overbearing ass who likes to prove his points about the cutthroat nature of life by sneaking up on Dae-ho and slapping on a vicious headlock.

But our beleaguered hero's woes don't end there. The teenage thugs who hang out on his route back home enjoy beating him up and chasing him. His father constantly harasses him about being such a twit, and the co-worker upon whom he has a crush doesn't even realize he's alive, despite the fact he sits only a chair or two down from her. His only solace from the many trials of life comes in the form of watching professional wrestling.

Hoping to find a way of breaking his boss' headlock, Dae-ho seeks the advice of a tae kwan do expert, but the best the guy can do is brag about how a true master of tae kwan do would never get in such a predicament, but if he did, he'd just deliver a series of sweeping or over-the-head kicks to free himself. Dae-ho, of course, finds this advice of little help, especially since the master himself is incapable of actually performing any of these kicks.

When Dae-ho is thrown out of a meeting for trying to sneak in late, he wanders the streets and ends up outside a run-down gymnasium advertising that it will train professional wrestlers. Dae-ho is interested but too chicken to go in at first. Eventually, he works up the courage, or is at least overwhelming frustrated by his boss' headlocks, and he enters. The gym isn't much to look at, and neither are the only two students, both out of shape and about as graceful as two stoned orangutans attempting to perform an interpretational dance that captures the spirit of an exploding building. Only slightly more impressive is the gym's owner and primary coach, a down on his luck, out of shape has-been who, in his day, had been one of the most popular cheating heel wrestlers of all time, Ultra Tiger Mask. Age and bad financial decisions have not been kind to him, however, and he spends his days now slurping instant ramen and drinking cheap beer in the back of the gym.

Dae-ho, however, is undaunted by the ghetto nature of the gym, and begs the coach to take him on as a student, or at least teach him how to get out of a headlock. If he can just learn that, then he'll be able to best his boss, and surely things will turn around for him. The coach, however, is less than impressed with the clumsy, somewhat doughy young man and tells him to get lost. Dae-ho is heart-broken, but he's also undeterred.

When the coach gets a visit from a big-time promoter on the Korean pro wrestling circuit, things change. The big-time guy represents the hottest young prospect in Korea, Yubiho, who is looking to make a name for himself by breaking into the international big leagues via the Japanese pro wrestling scene. What Yubiho needs for an upcoming match is a good heel to play off of, a dastardly wrestler who specializes in cheating. The promoter gives the coach the script for the match and tell shim he better come up with someone. Knowing that his two current students, Taebaik and Odai are about as useful as a couple sacks of potatoes in the ring, he decided to give Dae-ho a try.

Unfortunately, Dae-ho isn't exactly an in-ring wonder, and they have little time to give him any formal training. The coach's drop-dead cute daughter, Min-young, is his principal teacher, which Dae-ho is skeptical of until she throws him to the ground and slaps an excruciating armbar on him. She does the best she can with him, and slowly but surely everyone realizes that Dae-ho's not half bad once he gets the hang of things, especially since his primary function will be to stumble around, cower, and cheat.

He makes his in-ring debut at a lo-fi indy event against one of the other students, and things go well up until the point Dae-ho, who is given the ring persona of The Foul King, accidentally grabs a real fork instead of the painted wooden prop fork he's supposed to use. He plunges the fork into his opponent's forehead, which promptly erupts in a shockingly gory spray of blood. The film shows that it was written by someone who was a wrestling fan, or at least knew enough about wrestling to site Abdullah the Butcher as the undisputed master of using forks in the ring.

All this is well and good, but Dae-ho is still unable to escape his boss' headlock, and he's still unable to attract the attention of his co-worker. He's also too much of a dolt to recognize the fact that his dream girl is Min-young. And yeah, his dad still picks on him. When Dae-ho discovers the coach's old Ultra Tiger Mask mask, he decides to adopt it as his own. Hoping that it will help him find the same courage outside the ring that he has inside, he dons the mask and hits the streets. His first stop is to soundly kick the asses of the young punks who picked on him earlier. Subsequent efforts to talk to his father while wearing the mask and to his co-worker Miss Jin don't go as well, as both people think he's crazy or drunk.

Complicating things is the fact that Dae-ho realizes that he's actually talented enough in the ring to be more than a cheating comedy wrestler. If he was given the chance to prove himself, he could really shine. His chance comes the night of his match against Yubiho, a lean, muscular high flyer. It's The Foul King's first match beyond the county fair indy circuit, and even though Yubiho wants to stick to a well-plotted script for the match, Dae-ho is determined to turn it into something more than a showcase for his opponent.

What's most striking about this film is that it is very conventional while at the same time being very subversive in how it handles the conventions. There are plenty of cliches here -- the young hero who is so blinded by his crush on an unobtainable and ultimately shallow woman that he fails to see the dream girl right under his nose, the washed up coach with one last shot at training someone for glory, the big final match. A brief description of The Foul King makes it sound very conventional indeed. But it's how it handles the conventions that really sets it apart. The film never really gives you the convenience of a nicely wrapped up closure of events. In the end, Dae-ho and Min-young still have not hooked up. His final match, while spectacular, goes the way of Rocky for him. And his final confrontation with his boss, while hilarious, is not exactly what Dae-ho was hoping for. In this way, the film manages to rise above conventions and deliver something fresh and consistently funny. You know what is supposed to happen in this sort of film, but you never know if what is supposed to happen is what will actually happen.

The characters are wonderful, as are the actors who play them. Song Kang-ho is impossible not to like and root for as the goofball loser Dae-ho, especially since he rarely gets what he wants. The supporting characters are well developed, with the abusive boss being the best. He's just over-the-top enough so that you really despise him, but he's not so cartoonish that he becomes simply laughable. He's just a dick, plain and simple, and a very believable one at that, which makes you cheer for Dae-ho all the harder. Min-young and the rest of the down-and-out indy wrestlers are great as well.

The movie is a perfect blend of romance, action, and comedy, with all three ingredients well prepared. This is one of the only slapstick films I've seen where slapstick comic violence results in very lifelike bloodshed. It's like watching an episode of the Three Stooges where Shemp would get stuck in the head with a fork, and instead of just yelling "Oww!" a splattering of blood would gush from the wound as he passed out and had to be hauled to the back. It's just another way the film manages to shock you by giving you something very run-of-the-mill but presenting it in a way that catches you completely off-guard.

Most of the action is, of course, in the ring. For the most part,t he wrestling is humorously bad, just as it is supposed to be. Odai and Taebaik look like every out of shape wrestler on the indy circuit who can't even be has-beens because there never were nor will be in the first place. Unlike American movies that focus on the world of professional wrestling, The Foul King is very accurate in its portrayal of the seedy, harsh, and often destitute lives most wrestlers endure. While certainly focusing on the comedic aspects of such a life, it never fails to treat the dedication of wrestlers and the wrestling business with anything but respect, which is a breath of fresh air. Wrestling in Korea is more like it is in Japan -- ie, far less antics and skits and far more technical wrestling -- but certain aspects of the indy circuit are the same no matter where you go.

The movie also treats the wrestling (and cinema) fans with respect. Despite the fact that even the lowliest country yokel (who I think might be me, actually) recognizes that wrestling is a scripted event (which is something different that being "fake," but I'm not really in the mood for that debate at the moment), the few American movies made regarding the subject still maintain kayfabe -- the illusion that pro wrestling is real, that the outcomes of matches are not predetermined. The Foul King acknowledges the fact that we're not complete dolts, and that exposing the fact that wrestling is scripted is hardly a shocking revelation.

At the same time, it deftly deals with the fact that being scripted and being trained doesn't mean the matches don't abuse the wrestlers. As pretty much anyone who has looked even slightly beyond the mainstream media condescension can tell you, wrestlers -- especially indy wrestlers -- bust their asses, and no matter how well you know how to take a bump, coming off the top rope onto a concrete floor hurts. It hurts a lot. We go into the match between The Foul King and Yubiho knowing it's scripted, like most any wrestling match is, but we also see, in a very accurate way, that the match still involves two dedicated workers getting the unholy hell beaten out of them. It's gritty, bloody, and very true to what lo-fi wrestling is like in real life.

You don't have to know a lot about the Korean independent wrestling circuit to enjoy this movie. In fact, a few bones are thrown the way of American wrestling fans. There's the aforementioned tribute to Abdullah the Butcher as well as a scene in which Dae-ho studies backdropping techniques by watching a match between Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker. In fact, not only do you not have to be well-versed with the ins and outs of small time wrestling promotions in Korea; you don't need to be a wrestling fan at all, though it helps. At the heart of the wrestling action are characters and situations to which anyone can relate.

The final match between Dae-ho as The Foul King and Yubiho is actually quite spectacular. Dae-ho pulls out all the stops and, while technically sticking to the general outline of the script, really forces himself and Yubiho to turn it up several notches. They deliver a veritable match of the year to everyone's surprise, going from comedy antics to high flying to brutal brawling and hardcore death match style abuse. In the end, The Foul King does his job, so to speak, but there's no doubt he's turned a few heads in doing so.

I know my head was turned by The Foul King. It's funny, touching, well-crafted, and even brutal at times. Song Kang-ho also refused to use stunt doubles for the wrestling matches, even though it would have been easy to do so since he wore a mask. Instead, he got a serious taste of method acting by going through wrestling training himself and learning to do some pretty high-risk style moves. That's the icing on the cake, really, as this movie, like a slew of other recent Korean hits, delivers everything I want in a movie that I'm not getting from anywhere else. It has warmth, charm, a bunch of wrestling, and most importantly, a well-written story populated by believable, sympathetic, well-constructed characters. It's a dynamite film that will please anyone looking for a fun time at the movies, and wrestling fans should be doubly impressed since the movie handles their often insulted and laughed at business with an understanding, respect, and energy that I don't think even wrestling promotions can muster these days.

When I moved down to Florida, I met a guy named Pat who shared my love for all things kungfu, both old and new. It was he who took me to what was, at the time, the holy grail of kungfu movie stores, a place on the outskirts of Gainesville that stocked shelves upon shelves of old school kungfu films, not to mention weird horror and black action films. It was one of those moments where your eyes fill with tears, and you simply want to fall to your knees and mutter "Amitabah!" as you gaze upon the glory. A couple years later, I would meet a girl (coincidentally named Patty) who worked at this same store. I'd like to think that she was impressed by the ferocity with which I devoured their entire stock of kungfu films that first brought us together, but I can't be entirely certain. Ours would be a wild and fun romance culminating in a disastrous move to Charlotte, North Carolina, which in turn lead to my moving to New York to chase fortune and glory. Truly great is the power of kungfu.

In those first few carefree years in Florida, back before another particularly stormy relationship crushed much of my spirit for the bulk of a couple years, few things could bring a glow to my face quite like the nights Pat, myself, our friend Todd, and assorted others would gather around my massive 10-inch television, pop in the latest rental from the video store, and smile as we heard those familiar notes accompanying an animated seahorse flying through space while an announcer shouted "THIS is an Ocean Shores VIDEO presentation!"

Ahh, yes my brothers and sisters, those were, as we say in the old country, the good ol' days. I had a tiny apartment with a worthless air conditioner, good friends, a video store full of dollar rental kungfu films, and a crush on the girl at the counter. That entire period in my life was overflowing with good friends and plenty of fun. We'd stay up til the wee small hours, packed ten in a small room, laughing, drinking, eating, and watching kungfu films. It's hard to separate this film from the circumstances under which I first watched Kungfu Zombie, but that doesn't matter since any way you slice it, this is damn good filmmaking.

Kungfu Zombie was among our favorite rentals, along with War on Shaolin Temple, Young Taoism Fighter, and Jackie Chan's Police Story. Whenever it was our turn to entertain the troops, one of those movies would invariably find its way into the VCR, even if it had to chase away the copy of Black Devil Doll From Hell everyone wanted to see as well. Tons of top-notch kungfu action, comedy, ghosts and goblins, and pretty much everything in the world that I would want to see thrown together in one film is launched at me from the madness that is Kungfu Zombie. The only thing that could possibly make it better would have been if it was in 3D.

Not that it's a flawless film by any stretch of the imagination. The writing leaves a considerable amount to be desired, and none of the characters are very likable people. You certainly wouldn't want any of them for friends, except perhaps the wizard who can resurrect you if you need such services. At the same time, it's not like people are renting a movie called Kungfu Zombie in hopes of seeing rapier-sharp wit and clever writing. More than likely, they are renting such a movie in hopes of watching some living kungfu people fighting some non-living kungfu people, and the movie certainly delivers that in spades. In a way, the movie is perfect despite its flaws, perhaps even because of them.

The under-rated, should-have-been superstar, Billy Chong, stars as a snotty, rebellious kungfu student who constantly fights with his ailing dad. Well, he pretty much just constantly fights, period, and runs really fast. But those are things you can do when you learn kungfu. He's pretty much a jerk, which is something kungfu comedies love to do. They make the hero a total asshole. Sometimes, in the end, he has learned a valuable lesson about the value of humility and respect. More times than not, however, he would beat people up then fart, and that would be the end of the movie. While Billy doesn't do much farting in this, he does get to remain a jerk through the whole movie. Character-wise, there isn't much about the guy for which you can root. But he does kick a lot of ass, and he looks great doing it, so that makes him the hero.

A gang of cut-throats have taken a disliking to the lad and his sidekick, who is named Hamster (he would be good friends with Young Rudy from Wolf Devil Woman). They employ the services of a black magic priest to resurrect some corpses to fight Chong. Granted, it seems a rather complex plan. Employ a priest to resurrect zombies that will, once given the cue, fly through the air and push Chong into a pit filled with spikes. A spike-filled pit seems a rather conventional culmination for a plan that involves resurrecting the dead, but then I'm not really a martial arts bandit, so I guess it's not my place to question their machinations.

When your plan is so intricate that it requires a large number of flow charts, Vinn diagrams, and a priest who can summon the dead, things are bound to go awry. What the bad guys didn't figure on is that after making a rather impressive flying leap from a coffin, a moldy, crumbling corpse is a rather ineffective fighter. Chong dispatches them without much difficulty, not to mention the fact that he's rather unimpressed by the fact that he's being attacked by the living dead. I've watched a lot of zombie films, and a lot of things involving corpses, and despite the fact that I consider myself more or less desensitized to their appearance in movies, I'd probably still be taken aback a tad by the appearance of one in real life, especially if it was flying through the air and trying to punch me. For Chong, however, a gang of zombies is no different than any other gang.

The evil leader guy, who sports a pair of rather sloppy muttonchop burns, accidentally gets pushed into the pit of spikes during the ensuing melee, being justly undone by his own treachery. Satisfied that the night of being attacked by creatures of the night returned from the grave for bloody revenge has ended, Chong heads off for the local tavern to make merry.

Things don't go as well for the wizard, who is soon plagued by Muttonchop's ghost demanding resurrection services. Complications arise due to the fact that Muttonchop's body is badly mutilated after taking the tumble into the spike-filled pit. Let that be a lesson to you. If you are a treacherous villain bent on killing someone who tends to walk through the woods at night, don't employ a wizard to raise the dead in an attempt to push your mark into a spike-filled grave. Instead, just hide behind a bush and shoot him with an arrow or something as he saunters by. It's a lot less complicated, and you have a much slimmer chance of you yourself falling into the spikes. Just because you can summon the dead doesn't mean every plot you hatch has to involve the summoning of the dead.

While Billy Chong may not be an ugly ghost adorned with mangy muttonchops, his life still isn't perfect, either. His family-which consists only of his father and the mysterious Hamster - is dysfunctional, and when a family is dysfunctional in a kungfu film that means all hey do is yell and try to kick each other. Just about every interaction between Billy and his dad consists of the following exchange:

Father: "Ungrateful bastard!"
Billy: "Go to hell, old man!"

Which is then followed up by a few minutes of fighting that culminates in the father nearly dying of heart failure, muttering "You're killing me, you ungrateful son of a bitch!" which elicits a smirk from Billy, who will wave bye-bye and go out on the town with Hamster. As one may guess, there isn't a whole lot to like about either Billy or his father. They're both assholes. Even when the father isn't scolding Billy, he still talks to him in an angry, condescending manner. Billy responds by goading his father into having another heart attack, which is the source of much hilarity around their household. The mother probably died just to get some peace and quiet.

The father soon reveals to Billy that he has been yelling at him so much because they come from a family of constables, and even as they speak, a blood enemy of the family is coming to seek revenge. It doesn't matter if he kills the father or Billy, so long as he kills someone. Billy sees this as little more than his father using his own son as protection against a bad guy, and the father pretty much responds with, "Yeah, so what? And you're a no-good little bastard, too." Then I think they fight, the dad has a heart attack, and Billy goes out gambling with Hamster.

Meanwhile, Muttonchops is busy haunting the priest, and in his spare time, feeling up sexy ladies. Hey, if you were invisible, don't pretend like you wouldn't at least be tempted to cop a cheap feel off the local harlot. The priest eventually agrees, as the nightmarish haunting takes the form of things like the ghost pulling the priest's seat out from under him, constantly moving his wine out of reach, and other dastardly spooktacular shenanigans. Down at the local morgue, they find the freshly dead body of a powerful kungfu fighter who is obviously evil on account of his long hair and black cape. When the gang leader tries to inhabit the corpse of the super-baddie, they discover that the guy is, in fact, not quite dead. I guess he just likes sleeping in a coffin down at the local morgue. Awakened from his slumber, the villain makes a beeline toward Billy's home to extract a little revenge.

The two fight for hours, and Hamster whiles away the time by constantly dumping buckets of water on Billy for no real reason other than it makes Billy's muscle glisten a bit more. It's all the reason you need, I guess. I know if I had muscles in place of the puny sticks occupying the position of arms on my body, I'd always have a guy named Hamster around to dump water on me. I'd also probably do that thing where when someone asks you the time, you check your watch and flex your bicep at the same time. Then I'd go down to the beach and kick sand in my former self's face.

Chong is eventually victorious, killing the bad guy and collecting a sizable reward, which his father promptly takes for himself. Why does Billy even live with this guy? You know, filial piety only needs to goes so far. The wizard-priest and Muttonchops figure they can try to use the bad guy's body again for another resurrection attempt. Since they only get three tries before Muttonchops is condemned to roam the earth as an incorporeal spirit, 'Chops inspires confidence in the wizard by using the old encouragement tactic of slapping the wizard in the head and yelling, "You better get it right this time, you stupid bastard!" The wizard, who commands the all the vast powers of darkness, takes this abuse for some reason. I guess he and Billy are kindred spirits in a way, despite being on opposite sides of the law. But since the film isn't really interested in this as a plot device as much as it is interested in scenes of guys engaged in Moe-Larry type relationships, let's just drop the whole thing.

They mess up again, discovering this time that the bad guy is simply too evil to be killed by normal means such as breaking his neck. The failed possession attempt also transforms the baddie into a super-invincible mega-bad zombie. He's not one of those slow Night of the Living Dead zombies either. He hauls ass and has invincible kungfu. We Westerners think that when the zombies come (and they will come), they will be slow and rotten and easy to kill simply by shooting them in the head or hitting them with a pipe. We're not ready for the eventuality that they might all be a bunch of buff, invincible masters of the martial arts.

The zombie guy immediately sets out to kill Billy Chong. And meanwhile, the bumbling gang guy half-possesses Billy's dad, resulting in some weird behavior as the two fight for control of the body. Eventually, Chong has to face off against his possessed dad and the super invincible zombie guy. Luckily, a monk shows up out of nowhere to lend him some advice and holy relics just before the zombie's hands burst into fists of flame! Things just get wilder from there on out.

On the surface of things, this is a pretty straightforward movie. When you dig a level deeper, however, what you discover is that there isn't a deeper level, and you should have stayed up on the surface level instead of ruining the floor by digging around. But not every movie has to be a deep reflection on the dark heart of man. Sometimes, a movie can just be about a loudmouth braggart kicking a zombie's ass, and that's the road Kungfu Zombie chooses