Point is, I don't know a lot about video games. It's just not a medium that I have ever gotten into. So I can't comment very authoritatively on anything that was made after, say, Crazy Climber, but I have never the less seen a lot of video game related movies. In fact, I've seen just about all of them. And while some video games really do have a rich enough mythology or back story to serve as a decent foundation for a movie (Resident Evil, Silent Hill -- even if you don't think the movies were good, the games at least provided enough meat for the framework), many others do not. Of course, that doesn't stop them from being made into movies anyway.

Such is the case with DOA. As best I can gather, DOA started life as a beach volleyball video game, with the hook that all the characters were hot cartoon chicks with tiny bikinis and huge tits, and you could somehow set the jiggle rate on their boobs. Then somehow the DOA games became fighting games, with the attraction being the same. The approach was twofold in its success. First, it was simple, sleazy titillation. I mean, hot chicks with bouncy boobs in tiny bikinis, engaging in lots of activities that require their jiggly parts to jiggle? What's not to like? Secondly, the games tap into the fundamental desire of just about all guys to, at least for a while, be a really hot chick. I'm pretty firm in my belief that most men harbor this fantasy, and I think nowhere is it more obvious than in the tendency of men to always play the hot chick character in a video game. Chun Li is nothing if not a symbol of ten million wanna-be gender-benders.

You can support or detract from my theory all you want, but what's most notable about DOA is that "hot chicks play volleyball and fight" as a plot is pretty much the single greatest plot ever invented and the sole reason the technology of cinema and video games was invented. Thousands of years of intellectual evolution and technological innovation has finally resulted in my ability to watch a movie with the plot, "hot chicks play volleyball and fight."

DOA the movie was directed by Hong Kong action director Cory Yuen, who has a track record that boasts more high points than low and who specializes in turning attractive women into on-screen kungfu bad-asses. Under his tutelage, Cynthia Rothrock, Joyce Godenzi, Michelle Yeoh, and Shannon Lee were all transformed into believable martial arts powerhouses (OK, Rothrock was already a kungfu powerhouse; he just figured out how best to choreograph her). And while Hsu Chi, Karen Mok, and Vicky Zhao may not have been 100% believable as ass-kicking superwomen, that doesn't change the fact that Yuen's So Close was completely awesome. Yuen is also one of the few Hong Kong directors to have a big hit as a director in the United States, that hit being the Luc Besson-produced The Transporter starring Jason Statham.

When news that there was going to be a DOA movie produced first hit cult film fandom, there was a lot of eye-rolling and "yeah, whatever, man" reaction. But when it was further revealed that Cory Yuen would be director, ears (among other things) pricked up and a lot of action film fans were suddenly a lot more willing to give the film a try, even if the inevitable PG-13 rating meant it would be all tease. If anyone was going to be able to direct a dumb fun "hot chicks play volleyball and fight" movie, it would be Cory Yuen.

So people waited. Trailers played, and the reaction was tentatively positive after the initial negative reaction. Sure, the movie looked colossally goofy, but it also looked like it would sport high energy and be a lot of fun. And then the release date came and went, and there was no movie. DOA vanished, bumped from the release schedule and shelved for any number of reasons, the most likely of which was probably, "Wow, this movie is awful." Which is a shame. I mean, how bad could the film possibly be? They released Norbit, for crying out loud, and Epic Movie. And those had to be worse than DOA which, if nothing else, at least would feature hot chicks playing volleyball and fighting.

DOA eventually began to trickle out to theaters in other countries, though it still remained absent from American theaters, and fans of Cory Yuen, action movies, video games, and hot chicks in bikinis started looking to foreign DVD releases to see the movie.

Was it worth the wait? Or the trouble to see it? Yes and no. DOA is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be from the elements listed above. It is dumb. Extremely dumb. It is full of cheap titillation and gratuitous bikini ass shots, which always gets the Teleport City seal of approval. The script is paper thin, and what little story there is makes no sense anyway. Most of the cast doesn't even seem to realize they are supposed to be acting in a movie. The fight choreography, involving almost no trained martial artists, is heavy on editing, camera trickery, and computer manipulation.

And yeah, it's all a whole lot of gloriously stupid fun.

The plot revolves around a group of women invited to compete in a semi-secret martial arts tournament where, of course, shady shenanigans are being engaged in behind the scenes. Enter the Dragon's plot has proved useful so many times, the writers of this film decided there was no reason not to dust it off one more time. We first meet Katsumi, head of a ninja clan with a massive temple complex you would think someone in modern-day Japan would notice. Katsumi's brother disappeared during the last tournament, presumed dead, and she is determined to uncover the truth behind his disappearance, even if it means violating the laws of her clan. She leaves for the tournament with two more ninjas in hot pursuit: the noble Hayabusa, who has a thing for Katsumi, and the vengeful Ayane, herself the former lover of Katsumi's brother.

Katsumi is played by the indescribable Devon Aoki, whose continued presence in the world of cinema is one of the great mysteries of the entertainment world. She's a horrible, horrible actress, completely incapable of anything beyond a single blank expression and a single, monotone style of dialog delivery. On top of that, she's pretty weird looking. How she ever got a part in a movie is beyond me, but how she continues to get parts, however small they may be and however bad the movies they are in may be, I simply can't explain. And despite all that, I kind of like her. Not in a way where I'd go, "Oh, hey! Devon Aoki is in DEBS. I guess I'll watch that!" But more in the way of, "This movie has Devon Aoki in it. I won't not watch it just because of that."

Accompanying her, Hayabusa is played by none other than Kane Kosugi, son of the legendary (to me, anyway) Sho Kosugi, who starred in many of the best ninja exploitation films of the 1980s and then went on to host Ninja Theater and release a ninja exercise video in which he was accompanied by the scantily clad Ninjettes. One gets the feeling that Sho probably appreciates DOA. Kane started his acting career alongside his dad, always playing the son of whatever ninja guy Sho was playing at the time. Kane never developed much in the way of an American acting career, but he clicked in Japan and managed to forge a pretty consistent string of jobs, including a role in a Japanese sentai television series (those superhero shows that get turned into the Power Rangers in the United states), a role in one of those crappy new Ultraman shows, and most recently one of the leads in Godzilla: Final Wars (even though the lead role should have gone to Godzilla). He isn't really that great of an actor, but he's no worse than his dad (although his dad also wasn't a native English speaker), and he does handle action scenes well, which is generally all he's expected to do. As he gets older, he is looking a lot like his father, so much so that I'm beginning to wonder if Kane isn't Sho Kosugi, his revitalized youth the result of some esoteric ninja ritual or something. Oh sure, you say, but what about all those times Sho and Kane appeared alongside one another? Well, yeah. Maybe -- or maybe they just told us that was Kane Kosugi. Honestly, they could have hired any kid.

Anyway, Hayabusa is along for the ride, trying to convince Katsumi that she should return home while also helping her out with her investigation. Ayane is a little more hostile. Despite her love for Katsumi's missing brother, Ayane holds clan law more important, and clan law dictates that when Katsumi abandoned her post as leader, she was marked for death. Ayane is played by Natassia Malthe, who has a string of cult film credits to her name but is probably most recognizable, to people who might recognize such an actress, for her role as Typhoid in Elektra or for her upcoming title role in the sequel to video game based movie Bloodrayne. I may be one of the few people in the world who would think, "Elektra and Bloodrayne II? Sounds good to me!"

Second on the list of DOA combatants is Tina Armstrong, played by Jamie Pressly of My Name is Earl fame. Pressly is pretty much the only person who showed up to this film with the intention of acting, and she steals the movie as a pro wrestler looking for the opportunity to prove she's a genuine fighter. The film introduces us to her as she reclines aboard her yacht while wearing an American flag motif bikini, stirred out of her sunbathing just long enough to beat the snot out of a bunch of pirates (lead by none other than Robin Shou, former star of such movies as Mortal Kombat, and, umm, well, just that and Mortal Kombat II, really). When our founding fathers first set forth the basic premise of this great land of ours, I'm sure that they could conjure up no greater symbol of American awesomeness than a hot chick in an American flag motif bikini beating up pirates. OK, maybe Thomas Jefferson would disagree. But whatever. Fuckin' Jefferson. Ask Ben Franklin. He'd be on board.

Tina's pro-wrestling dad is also in the tournament, play by real-life pro wrestler (there's something...ironic? about the phrase "real-life pro wrestler") Kevin "Big Daddy Cool Diesel" Nash, who is dressed up more or less like Hulk Hogan in a somewhat lame gag I'm sure Nash found amusing. Since Kevin Nash's job in this movie is to drink beer and go, "That's my little girl!" he turns in the second best acting job after Pressly.

Finally there's Holly Valance as Christie Allen, a posh thief who shows up to the tournament while on the run from the Hong Kong police. Or someone like that. Valance is definitely no actress. I think she was some sort of mid-level Aussie pop star before this movie, and it's unlikely much will change after this movie. She's hot, though, and just bad enough an actress to still be somewhat acceptable in a movie of this nature. And she does the thing where she throws a gun and a bra up into the air, then sticks her arm up so that her bra goes magically on just as she catches the gun and whups the butt of the world's most incompetent bunch of cops. I mean, really, when a kungfu chick, however hot she may be, asks you to hand her a bra, do you really offer it to her as it dangles from the barrel of your gun? And I don't mean that figurative gun. I mean the actual gun, the one she can now kick out of your hands.

Along with a bunch of other fighters you will never care about (and most of whom just disappear at random throughout the movie with no explanation presented anywhere other than deleted scenes), the three ladies head to the island fortress lorded over by brilliant mastermind and DOA tournament manager Eric Roberts. Yes, folks, Eric Roberts, looking like a dude who would hang around the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame a lot, telling young kids about what a genius Jimmy Page was. In a feat of casting not rivaled since the days when Black Belt Jones cast Scatman Crothers as a karate master, crummy movie mainstay Eric Roberts is the lord of DOA, and with the help of his nerdy assistant Weatherby, Roberts aims to use the DOA tournament as a way to inject the world's best fighters with nanotech robots that will harvest their genetic information and make it downloadable to a pair of sunglasses which will then instill the wearer with nigh invincible kungfu prowess.

Seriously, man, that's the plot. All Eric Roberts needs to do for his nefarious scheme to work is, 1) capture each of the best fighters in the DOA tournament, 2) strap them into his gigantic info downloading machine, and 3) manage to keep a clunky pair of sunglasses on his face while fighting. And the end result is that you will be a slightly better fighter than most other people. On the grand scale of nefarious schemes, this one ranks pretty close to the "moronic" end of the bell curve. I mean, how is being a marginally better kungfu guy than most other kungfu guys going prove profitable to anyone other than, say, a guy in the Ultimate Fighting Championship? And then, you have to get the ref to allow you to wear sunglasses while you're fighting. And it's not like Eric Roberts put a sports band or anything on those glasses, so they will eventually just fall off. But it doesn't matter, because were centuries away from the era when being good at kungfu guaranteed global supremacy.

Complicating Roberts' already goofy plan is the fact that the original DOA founder's daughter, Helena, is an aspiring DOA combatant herself and is beginning to suspect Roberts is up to something her father wouldn't have approved of. Oh, and there's Katsumi's missing brother. In between that nonsense and all the awful dialog are a whole bunch of choppy fights of varying quality, a game of volleyball, and well, that's pretty much it. DOA has absolutely no surprises to offer even the most easily surprised viewer. But does that mean this movie is as awful as it sounds? Of course. And does that mean that it's as great as it is awful? You betcha.

The script, such as it is, comes to us courtesy of a trio of writers who actually have, if not a respectable track record writing good action films, then at least a modest record writing halfways decent action films. J.F. Lawton scripted two of the better Steven Seagal films (as odd as that statement may seem to some), Under Seige and Under Seige II, as well as the cult film spoof Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. His big gig, however (besides writing Pretty Woman, but what does that have to do with us?), was as a regular writer for the goofy television series VIP, in which a group of hot chicks run a private investigation service. And when you realize that was one of Lawton's former jobs, the entire look and feel of DOA makes perfect, predictable sense. with a few tweaks here and there, this really could pass as a VIP movie, right down to the three-letter title. Lawton worked on more serious action films like The Hunted starring Joan Chen and Christopher Lambert fighting ninjas, and he worked on goofier action movies, like the Damon Wayans superhero spoof misfire Blankman. So you can pretty much see where the script for DOA came from.

Script contributors Seth and Adam Gross were writers for Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I guess they came up with Eric Roberts' crazy science scheme, although i think the sheer goofiness of it all makes it more of a Beakman thing, really.

Cory Yuen's direction is a little uninspired compared to other efforts, though he puts his craft to good use in filming the ladies (Yuen has previous experience with cheesecake kungfu thanks to his turn in the director's seat of Women on the Run, which features some rather interesting, um, kung-nude). DOA lacks the slick polish of So Close, though Yuen is still adept at making cheap films look flashy. But even though the cinematography may be lacking, he misses no opportunity to randomly cut to a shot of someone's ass or cleavage, so he's not totally off his game here. And while Yuen is used to making non martial artists look like martial artists, he really has his work cut out for him in this movie. Aoki and Valance seem to possess almost no athletic ability whatsoever, and so to pass them off as fighters, Yuen relies on gravity-defying wirework and jumpy editing, as well as a dollop of CGI. He does the most he can with what little he has, but no one is going to be mistaking these gals for legitimate fighters. Even Hsu Chi was more believable. Jamie Pressly fares better largely because she has a pretty awesomely athletic build and looks like she really could deliver some punches and kicks and make you feel them. There's a reason why she's the one out of all these women who went on to have the biggest career. She's adept at both the job of acting and the job of looking good in the fight scenes. Sho Kosugi, errr, Kane Kosugi gets to have one fight scene all to himself, which ends up being the only fight scene that looks anything like vintage Cory Yuen, since this is a guy who knows martial arts fighting a bunch of stuntmen. But even though this fight is pretty good, the award for best fight scene has to go to the one between Valance and Sarah Carter, who plays Helena. And that's because that fight is between two sexy chicks in bikinis. On the beach. In the rain. In slow motion.

Yuen manages to wring a few other choice action sequences from a game but largely incapable cast. His skill alone is what elevates this film above the level of, say, an Andy Sidaris action film. Aoki and purple-wig wearing Malthe have a decent wirefu match-up in a bamboo forest, which many people have pegged as a cheap knock-off of the bamboo forest fight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, even though it has more in common with the same type of scene as presented in Andrew Lau's Stormriders. The finale against a super-powered Eric Roberts (who's acting suggests that if you asked him today, he might not even be aware of the fact that he ever even appeared in this film) isn't exactly solid fight choreography, but it's still funny and exciting because, well hell, it's Eric Roberts. What the hell is even going on? And by this point, Yuen has resorted to his trademark jettisoning of any and all semblances of logic or reality, and believe me when I say that semblances of logic and reality are the last thing a movie like this needs.

Leave it to Liu Chia-liang to make such a sweeping film and draw such meaning from a fighting form. Few directors would be able to do that, despite the fact that kungfu is obviously a fighting philosophy. Sure, you can throw out some quotes, the old "Be like water" saying and all that, but really plumbing the depths of all that is good and bad about the philosophy of kungfu is something few directors have attempted, and as far as I know, only Liu Chia-liang has succeeded at.

The movie begins with a cult of pugilists, men who believe that by practicing a sacred form of kungfu, their bodies will become impervious to the guns of the foreign countries threatening China. The historical link to this is the Boxer Rebellion in China, in which martial artists believed exactly what the characters in this film believe. The results were, predictably enough, tragic, though not as tragic s the results of benevolent Mao Tse-tung's "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution." China just never has an easy time, does it?

One of the elders of the society denounces the ridiculous and deadly belief in pugilism. Rather than order his students to their deaths under the pretense that they have become invincible, he openly criticizes and leaves the society. This draws their ire, and they spend their days setting him up as a traitor who wants to see China controlled by foreign powers. The elder, who is played by the film's director, Liu Chia-liang, goes into hiding.

But a kungfu man can only hide for so long, especially when so many people are looking for him. A Shaolin monk played by Liu Chia-hui wants to fight him because he believes Chia-liang to be a traitor. Hsiao Ho plays a young up-and-coming fighter looking to make a name for himself with the Boxers. And Liu chia-yung plays another elder member of the society who wants to kill Chia-liang in order to cover up his own shame.

Chia-liang's only friend is Kara Hui Ying-hung, but she's a pretty good friend to have. In case y'all haven't picked up, along with Angela Mao, Lina Romay, and Jeanine Garafolo, Hui Ying-hung completes the quartet of World's Greatest Female Stars. But Hui Ying-hung will always be my favorite out of them all, because, well, she's just that cool.

She hangs out with Chia-liang, who is living a humble life as a wood cutter. At least for a little while. Eventually, he must face off with each of the men searching for him. The result is a series of incredible kungfu fights that culminate in the superb showdown with his brother, both in the film and in real life, Liu Chia-yung. These two face off using the legendary 18 weapons of kungfu, thus the title.

Liu Chia-liang fights are the best Shaw Brothers films have to offer, but for all their intricacies, they are rarely "to the death." More often, his characters fight "to the understanding," and the violence ends when one character has understood something important. Such is the case with the spectacular fights in Legendary Weapons of China. It's just one more example of Liu putting the philosophy of Buddhism and kungfu before the sensationalistic violence.

The pugilist theme is not an uncommon one in martial arts films, though it's also not as common as some people might think, probably because making any honest comment about it is criticizing the Chinese culture of the past. Once Upon a Time in China II dealt with a similar society but was hardly successful at conveying any real meaning. Legendary Weapons of China on the other hand, is very powerful in the message it conveys. Liu holds up to the light the Chinese stubbornness and unwillingness to acknowledge modern times, their unwillingness to let go of notions of the past in order to move forward. Similar themes ran through other Liu Chia-liang films, such as My Young Auntie and Lady is the Boss.

Liu also takes a quick jab at martial arts fakery via the cameo appearance by Alexander Fu Sheng. Alexander, who was recovering from a devastating accident that left him with two broken legs, plays a charlatan who fakes all his martial arts abilities in order to impress those around him and garner prestige. His scene is the only real comic relief this otherwise serious film possesses.

The film's only weakness is in the characterization. So much time is spent on philosophy and fighting that the characterization suffers a little. While I understood the commentary and the situations, it was difficult to really empathize with any of the characters, as they were all a bit on the bland side. It may simply be because previous experiences with Liu Chia-liang films showed just how well he could create a character, and in here, that human touch is lost amid the messages.

Not that the characterization is non-existent. These people still have a lot more depth to them than the characters in most kungfu films. Liu's curse is that the standards are always so high for his films; even a small glitch seems more obvious in his work since it's usually so perfectly executed.

Legendary Weapons of China is a classic, not just of the genre, but of film in general. It peels away layer after layer, examining Chinese attitudes, martial philosophy, and the martial arts movie genre itself. Liu always has a lot going on in his films, but this one exceeds them all. I don't think it's his most entertaining film. It's not his most action-packed film. But it's certainly one that will provoke thought, and on a more superficial level, it's still grade-A kungfu action.

Bruce Li doesn't look like Bruce Lee. He doesn't have the muscles Bruce had, and sure as hell doesn't have the talent. They could have cast former Monkee Mickey Dolenz as Bruce and had a more believable imitator on their hands.

The basic plot of this film revolves around Bruce's desire to leave Hollywood and his white woman behind, return to Hong Kong, get a nice Chinese girl, and settle down to a traditional Chinese life. Somehow, I don't think so. Betty Ting Pei is portrayed as a sweet and loving woman whom only wanted what was best for Bruce. And all this time we thought she was a sluttish gangster-groupie drug addict who only had a career because of her harpyish addiction to famous men. Oh well, to her credit, in many of the films she would later make, she got naked.

This film is filled with nail-biting boredom, horrible fights scenes, and factual inaccuracies so utterly absurd that the whole thing crosses over from purely tasteless, boring drivel and becomes an insult.

This film relishes everything that was sordid and seedy about Lee's life, making it the mirror opposite of the similarly named Hollywood version of Bruce's life. Someday, someone will tell his story accurately, and you'll have a moving, powerful portrait of a flawed but ultimately heroic human being.

Until then, we have utter garbage like this three-day old trash. Bruce Li is at his worst here. We know he can be a decent actor and martial artist when he tried, but this movie is just plain awful. If this was how Bruce Li paid tribute to "his master," then Lee's ghost must be out gunning for revenge.

That in itself would be an interesting movie. Bruce Lee's ghost comes back to beat the shit out of Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Brute Lee, and all the other lame-ass wannabes who cashed in on his name, life, and death. And maybe, if we're lucky, he'll beat the shit out of David Carradine as well ... just for good measure, of course.

So it was only fitting that Hong Kong's greatest sword hero be among the first stars to make the transition to kungfu hero. Jimmy's first foray into unarmed martial arts was Chinese Boxer, a decent enough film, especially by early standards, but it was clear that Jimmy would not rule the kungfu world the way he had rules the sword hero world.

But that doesn't mean he didn't turn in some great films. Of all his unarmed fighting films, it is in One-Armed Boxer II that he is most unarmed, as he only has one of them. Jimmy first got into the armless guy swing of things in One-Armed Swordsman and a sequel. Then he lost his arm for One-Armed Boxer and this film, and then lost his hand in Iron Man. This one, which is also known as Master of the Flying Guillotine is the second best of all the armless guy martial arts films--of which there are shockingly many. The best is still One-Armed Swordsman.

This is also a weird one. Not exactly a sequel to the first one but working in the same territory, the film opens with a creepy Throbbing Gristle like soundtrack. A blind kungfu master learns that a one-armed Ming revolutionary has killed the two pupils he sent to apprehend the rebel. so he does what any good blind kungfu master would do; he flies through the roof and vows revenge.

The blind man fights using the dreaded flying guillotine, a decapitating weapon that even has it's own movie. It's a metal box with retractable blades connected to a long chain. All you have to do is throw it on your enemy's head, and pop! Off comes the noggin!

Meanwhile, our one-armed hero, played by Jimmy Wang Yu, is busy showing off for his students by walking up walls and doing other stuff that kungfu masters do. They decide to attend a kungfu tournament where the combatants do all sorts of crazy stuff.

A fighter from India has arms that extend out like 20 feet--a trick that would later be used in the Street Fighter video game. There's also a Thai Boxer, some regular kungfu guys, a kungfu woman, and a mysterious Japanese guy in a big hat. The blind master shows up and recruits many of the fighters in his quest to kill every one-armed man in the area until he gets the right one. Luckily, there seem to be a lot of one-armed guys in this town.

The movie is great. Wang Yu looks good against all the weird martial artists, and there is a supernatural feel to much of the film. It's brutal and bleak, with the spooky soundtrack and some intense fighting. I think it's great. One of the best kungfu films out there, just for the sheer weirdness of it all. And the fightin' ain't bad, either.

The Hong Kong New Wave sort of kicked itself off in the beginning of the 1980s with two big events. The first was the teaming up of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao in the film Project A, which pretty much forever changed the way martial arts in particular and action in general would be staged. The second event was the release of Tsui Hark's special effects blow-out Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. Zu was the first film to make use of "Star Wars like" special effects, and with its completion, Tsui Hark had forever changed the fantasy film in the same way Jackie, Sammo, and Biao changed more conventional action films.

In 1986, marginal director John Woo, who was best known for a series of rather unfunny comedy films during the 1970s, completed the revolution when he tried his hand at gangster films in the form of A Better Tomorrow. Although Woo's highly stylized, melodramatic gangster epics were the last innovation of the New Wave, the tsunami carried Hong Kong through most of the 1980s and well into the 1990s. It finally sputtered and died around 1996 or so, when with the exception of Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle films, everything seemed to become as awful as they had previously been great. The Golden Era was over, and fans were forced to settle for a nauseating stream of erotic thrillers and copycat "young triad guy" movies. Fans of martial arts films were basically left watching Donnie Yen speed himself up to about 1000 miles an hour in some of the worst films of all time.

Things seem to be turning around, albeit very slowly, with the release of entertaining and inventive films like Storm Riders and Chine Ghost Story: The Animation. But for the most part, fans of Hong Kong cinema who aren't interested in the latest Wong Jing film with a title like Rape Squad or Rapist Union, or Rape Rape Rape Rape Rape and Tits have to look to the past to find quality work.

One of the overlooked films of the good ol' days is this live-action adaptation of the violent Japanese comic book, Crying Freeman. Director Clarence Ford opts to remove most, but not all, of the sex and nudity that populated the comic book, and replace it with more action and kungfu. Ford also worked closely with Film Workshop masters Dean Shek and Tsui Hark, and Hark's stylistic touch is all over the film like incriminating fingerprints. But hey, that's okay with me, because I generally like Hark's work.

Sam Hui, best known as a member of the successful comedy troupe that included his two brothers, Michael and Ricky, became a big-time film star via the action-packed slapstick spy caper series, Aces Go Places. Hui is a likable guy who some people mistake for Jackie Chan, probably because they have the same nose. Not literally the same nose of course, but similar looking noses. Hui was also popular as a pop star during the 1970s, and from what I've heard of his stuff, he specialized in sappy ballads and acoustic songs. For some reason, his star seemed to falter after this movie, which is too bad because he really shines.

Hui plays a man visiting Russia with his girlfriend, former action/comedy star turned respectable arthouse name, Maggie Cheung. Aside from witnessing a brutal fight between two guys in a subway, the trip seems to go quite well until Hui becomes the target of a mysterious man with a fucked-up croaky voice. The man is the trainer for the 800 Dragons, a secret society of assassins. Hmm, I guess all assassin societies have to be secret. You wouldn't get very far in the field if you were a very open and obvious society of assassins. It would be like being a ninja, but wearing a headband that says "Ninja" on it in big red letters.

Hui is captured and has his memory erased. During his training, be is befriended by the master's assistant, a cute and wily young woman named Pearl who has the ability to fly, more or less, or at least jump in really cool ways. And she is really good with her feet, to say the least. Hui doesn't really take any of it seriously, opting instead to be the archetypal "naughty kungfu student" despite his obvious potential. It's only when his pal, Pearl, is killed during a fight with rival assassins that Hui starts to take things more seriously. He gets the back tattoo, the mask, and the attitude that makes him the Crying Freeman, so named because he sheds a tear after each assassination.

His career as a secret super assassin is filled with cool fight sequences. Purists will be put off by some of the wire work, but it's integrated well and doesn't look goofy, at least not to me. The fights are fast paced, full of acrobatics, and just plain slick. During a mission in Hong Kong, however, his old flame Maggie catches a glimpse of him, and although he is wearing the mask, she thinks she recognizes him. He pays her a visit and recreates one of the most famous scenes from the comic book, in which he assumes the framed pose of a painting his girlfriend was making. The reunion is quickly broken up when vengeful thugs crash in on them. Maggie is shot by Freeman's own assistant, who wants to protect the secret of his identity and eliminate any chance of him regaining his memory. Either that, or he had to sit through Irma Vep.

One of the movies best scenes, and it has several, is when Freeman and his associates seek revenge on the renegade assassins who killed Pearl. The fight takes place in a church, and as if the sight of Nina Li Chih, who plays Freeman's partner, dressed as a gun-toting nun isn't enough reason to justify the movie, then I don't know what is. Anyway, you have to see the thing for full effect, but the shots of masked assassins perched atop cathedral steeples and crosses are a fantastic visual.

The movie follows it up with another short but cool scene in which Freeman battles Nina Li Chih in a shower. She is not happy with Maggie still being alive and posing a threat to Freeman's identity. Thus, Freeman himself becomes a rogue. For Maggie Cheung, I'm sure any man, and probably most women, would gladly suffer the ire of an ancient secret society of assassins and be happy about it - as long as she promised to never make a movie like Irma Vep again.

While Nina and the assistant decide to help Freeman out, the rest of the society, including the old master, are not as forgiving. The finale sees Freeman face off with his teacher in a truly spectacular fight sequence that still wows me nearly nine years after I first saw it.

I absolutely love this movie. It has a good story, and perhaps best of all, is jam-packed with creativity and wild action. I know some Crying Freeman fans were put off by the amount of comedy in the film's first half, but I think it helps make everyone more human and believable, even when they are flying over churches and engaging in insane kungfu fights. It also helps the film's finale pack more of an impact.

The best thing about this movie is the visual style. The masks and set-pieces are very nice, and the action sequences are stylish and unique. It's too bad they don't make them like this one anymore. But at least they made it once.

Clouse, who incidentally hated Bruce Lee, chose to work with Jim Kelly. John Saxon went on to appear in Cannibal Apocalypse. Kelly and Clouse made Black Belt Jones, a film that straddles two worlds, being both a martial arts film and a black action film. Not a bad move considering that the biggest audience in America was (and probably still is) black.

Kelly, a fellow Kentuckian who, unlike me, sported a perfectly spherical afro I consider one of the very best of the 1970s, plays Jones, a secret agent who has gone into semi-retirement, concentrating instead on teaching the martial arts to inner city youths. The karate school is run by a kindly old coot named Pops (Scatman Crothers). I don't know exactly how Scatman Crothers got involved in the martial arts, but there he is. His gambling debts, however, bring the local thug, Pinky, down on him. I don't know. Scatman Crothers, master of kungfu -- something about it just doesn't seem to click.

To make matters worse, Pinky is then hired by some white thugs who want to get a hold of the property Pops' school occupies so they can build a shopping mall. When things get heavy, Black Belt Jones leaps into action. Only he's not alone. Pops daughter, Sidney, shows up to lend a hand, proving herself every bit as agile and powerful a martial artist as Jones.

Sidney is played by Gloria Hendry, whose biggest role was in the James Bond film Live and Let Die, which also starred Yaphet Kotto. And some other guy. Some British guy. Who cares? Anyway, in that film, Gloria wasn't given much of a chance to show what a bad-ass she was. She just got killed by one of those novelty coconut head things you can buy along the road in Florida and other states with palm trees. Yaphet and Mr. Saturday were pretty much the owners of cool in that film. But here, Hendry gets to kick ass in a major way, even in her panties (to be fair, Jim Kelly is in his little boxer shorts as well). She kicks ass, and looks good doing it. Not as good as Jada Pinkett-Smith, though, but few people look that good.

Okay, enough youthful lusting. Black Belt Jones is a pretty good movie. It's not great, but it's a lot of fun. With the exception of Enter the Dragon, it's better than any of the other crap the Fred Weintraub/Robert Clouse duo cranked out.

Not that being a better movie than China O'Brien is a major feather in the cap. Plenty of action, Gloria Hendry and Jim Kelly fighting in their skivvies, and a healthy dose of comedy make for a fun ride. And hell, the movie has a scene where Gloria's panties blow out the window of the car and land on Pinky's windshield, to which Pinky angrily exclaims, "Is that fool throwing panties at me?!?!"

Jones himself is an interesting character, very much like John Shaft in the film Shaft ("Shaft's his name, Shaft's his game"). He more or less works for The Man, the Establishment. But at the same time, is hip enough to toy with them and remain with one foot outside of their system. A more recent version of the same character is Eddie Murphey in the original Beverly Hills Cop. All three characters are part of mainstream society while at the same time being outsiders who frequently show up and confound their white counterparts.

Unlike most American martial arts stars, Jim Kelly looks good in action. His build is not unlike Bruce Lee, only topped with a big round afro, and although he's not as quick as Lee, his action scenes are still crisp, exciting and better than anything anyone else from America has pulled off. I like watching Jim Kelly films, not just because he is from Kentucky, and Black Belt Jones is my favorite.

Jim gets to do plenty of ass-kicking, including a wild final fight in an auto body shop. Black Belt Jones and Sydney get to frolick around in panties and boxers while kicking ass on the thugs amid a seemingly endless flood of frothy soap bubbles. It's pretty silly stuff, but plenty of fun. The only bad part of the confrontation is the obvious Jim Kelley stunt double, whose skin is much darker than Kelley's, sort of like the "nude scene" Tia Careere had in Showdown in Little Tokyo, where when she took her clothes off, her face was magically obscured by her hair and her breasts seem to grow three sizes. Not that I'm sitting around by myself in my apartment staring at Tia's boobs. No. It was all in the name of research, you see. I did it for you.

Have you ever noticed that during the late '70s, it seemed like the Mafia was spending a lot of time trying to shut down martial arts schools or community centers that had martial artists involved with them in some way. What was up with that? You'd think the Mafia would have more to do than hassle karate guys. I must admit however, it would have been cool if, in Godfather II, Michael Corlionne said something like, "We have to take care of our Vegas operation. Now what's this I hear about Pops and his kungfu school?"

For the record, the Mafia guys in this movie, which was made in a time before racial or personal sensitivty prohibited such lines as, "Well, you want me, don't you? Or are you some kind of faggot?" spend most of their time sitting around, eating spaghetti, and talking in wildly exaggerated Italian accents, yelling things like, "Mama mia! This is a-good-a spaghetti!"

This film is so good that it actually hurts to think about it. I am pretty sure this is another Mainland Chinese film, though I could be wrong. If not, these guys simply rule the martial world, and I wish we got to see more of their films. Zhang Yi-who?

The film follows the exploits of a acrobat and acting troupe called the Red Dragons. En route to a gig, they are cornered by a vile lackey who insists they come perform for his even more vile master. The Dragons politely refuse, as they already have a commitment, but offer to catch him next time around.

Well obviously, this causes the evil-doers to do what the do best, which is evil. They attack and pursue the troupe mercilessly, until the actors hook up with some testy Shaolin monks who teach them to fight better. Then they all go out into a field to delight us.

And delight they do. This is some of the best pure martial arts choreography you'll find outside of a late 1970s Sammo Hung film. It's absolutely breath-taking. The entire film is packed with nonstop action and martial arts, all of it good. This another of the great martial arts films that people seem to ignore. Their loss, because it is one of the best ever.

Seven Grandmasters is a simple tale about a kungfu master who wants to retire knowing he is the best fighter in China. So he sets out on a journey with his daughter and some students to challenge the seven best fighters in the land. Along the way, they pick up a bumbling bumpkin who dreams of being a kungfu master (and of course, becomes one) so he can avenge his father's murder.

Not an earth-shattering plot, but what this film is about is wall-to-wall kungfu, all of it absolutely breath-taking. There are so many styles, the fights are so long and well choreographed -- it's basically a textbook on how to make a kungfu film. And it's all the more inspiring considering that it was made for fewer peanuts than you'd casually throw to a greedily grasping howler monkey in the zoo. With very few dollars, no major backing, and his usual cast of overlooked stars, Joseph Kuo has given us one of the seminal kungfu films.

If you haven't seen this one, you need to hustle your ass down to the video store and pick it up. It's every bit what a kungfu movie should be about: kungfu. Kuo never delivers frills, but he knows how important the core is, and that's what he concentrates his energies on.

Not to say that he doesn't know how to do anything but film fights and action scenes. His characters are interesting, and he gets in enough human emotion and comedy to carry the film during the non-kungfu scenes, not that there are many of those. Even though it's pretty obvious that the bumbling student will eventually be convinced that his master is, in fact, the same man who killed his father, it's a satisfying finale to see them face off and the truth emerge.Everytime I watch a Kuo film, I want to thank him for having made it, and this is probably his best, most pure film.

Two friends with very Chinese names (Joey and Gary) survive the slaughter of their family by greedy land barons. Gary, however, is captured, and Joey falls through a mystic portal, where he meets the King of Hell! He cuts a deal with the Prince o' Darkness, gaining supernatural powers and control of nine blood-guzzling demons in exchange for his eternal loyalty to the King of Hell.

He manages to save Gary after Gary's head is chopped off, and sets out to reclaim Gary's fortune for him, as well as deal out hellish justice to those who conspired against them. The nine demons he control remain dormant as a necklace of skulls until he summons them up, at which time they become eight giggling fanged children and one sexy woman. They then jump around, flip about, and suck the blood of Joey's enemies.

Gary reclaims his estate, but soon other greedy people are out to get him, and Joey has gotten a reputation as an evil spawn of hell, being that he is now an evil spawn of hell and all. It's interesting to hear people refer, in all seriousness, to "The demon Joey!"

Gary gets murdered a second time. Joey befriends a woman forced into prostitution and one of the murderers' righteous son to fight the second group of killers. Along the way, the woman and the righteous son (he also has a traditional Chinese name -- Roland) try to save Joey's soul from the devil. The finale sees Joey take on the traitors while they all skate around on a river! This absolutely must be seen to be believed. It's every bit as wild as the stilt fight in Ninja in the Dragon's Den, though not quite as exciting since there is a lot of wire work. But I mean, people are skating all over the damn place, flying, and doing kungfu while shooting magic rays.

All sorts of weird magic and voodoo abounds, as well as loads and loads of great kungfu. Chiang Sheng, long the babyface of all the Venoms, loves casting himself in the evil roles in these later films. This is one of those films that you really have to see to believe. All kinds of strangeness gets tossed at you. I absolutely loved it, although I'm still trying to figure out what the drawbacks are to being a minion of the King of Hell.

This movie is like one of those matches. You can't say a whole lot about the plot. The direction is good, but it's not inventive or earth-shattering. But the performance of the two combatants in the ring -- or in this case, on the screen -- is so astounding, so superb, that the movie is elevated to the ranks of near godhood by "workrate freaks" like me, people who appreciate the athletic skill and martial arts talent of the people involved.

Though he doesn't ever get the credit he deserves and seems to have been forced into the shadow of his two brothers, Liu Chia-yung proves in this film that he is a solid kungfu director and actor. Liu's brother, Liu (Chia-hui) plays a Shaolin monk (of course) who is battling it out with a Tibetan Lama (Lo Lieh) over some lost sacred treasure.

The simple plot lends itself to tons of exciting confrontations between the two respectful rivals, including a classic fight in which they must both remain completely silent while fighting, going through insanely amazing spots to avoid smashing furniture and decorations in a fancy, cluttered room. There is quite a bit of comedy thrown in to make the moments between fights enjoyable, and the whole thing is just simply one of the best kungfu movies around.

Of course, those "moments between the fights" don't come very often. If he does nothign else, Liu Chia-yung crams more kungfu into each of his films than any ten other films, yet he has the wisdom to temper it with good acting and plenty of wit and charm. Ninety minutes of nonstop kungfu sounds fun, but it would get pretty boring after a while. Liu makes his characters interesting enough to carry the film from one breath-taking action sequence to the next.

It helps that the man is working with two of the great legends of martial arts films. His little brother, Liu Chia-hui has a name synonymous with stellar kungfu films. Working as part of the team that included Liu Chia-yung and his other brother, Liu Chia-liang, Liu Chia-hui starred in many of the most respected, excited kungfu classics ever made. His foil and foe (in wrestling terms, it's a classic face versus face match here, two good guys going at it), is played by Lo Lieh, one of the true veterans of kungfu films. Lo cut his teeth in the Shaw Brothers swordsman films of the 1960s usually alongside Jimmy Wang Yu. They were two men who would later go on to be known as "being sorta ugly." Lo also starred in the classic pioneering kungfu film Five Fingers of Death.

It's a damn shame that, like many others, this film gets almost completely ignored by the new generation of fans. They are definitely missing out. If you like your kungfu fast and plentiful, pure and exciting, then this is the film for you. It gets our highest old school recommendation.

There are a few things, few key things, that embody the bad-ass cinema Teleport City likes to call it stomping ground. Maurizio Merli's mustache is one. Pam Grier pulling guns and knives out of her afro is another. Rudy Ray Moore's butt naked dive down the steep hillside while wearing only his floppy blue pimp hat. And of course, there's Tomas Milian and his little red bikini underwear.

But there is one man above all others, above even Maurizio Merli himself, who truly encompasses everything in this world that is bad-ass. One man whose every action, every look, every sound exudes cool toughness. One man, above all others, who has transcended all cultural barriers and become far more than a movie superstar; one man who has become a cultural icon, a piece of modern mythology.

That man is Bruce Lee.

You can't overstate the impact Bruce has had on modern pop culture. Stars have come and gone, names like Jackie Chan, Clint Eastwood, and Jet Li are all familiar marquee names, but Bruce exists above all of them. Take a walk down any street in New York and you will see half a dozen shops with some sort of Bruce Lee merchandise. T-shirts, posters, scrolls, black velvet paintings, statues, action figures, movies -- pretty much anything. I even saw one of those blacklight posters featuring the "holy trinity" of Bruce Lee, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Marley.

And these aren't just kungfu film specialty stores or Chinatown curiosity shops. Blacks, Puerto Ricans, whites, Dominicans, Chinese, Vietnamese, you name it and their culture has embraced The Dragon. No other action film star occupies the spot Bruce has obtained in our society. He is a modern day Greek hero, a Jason or Perseus, a man whose legend has grown to epic proportions.

So, the obvious question from many people is "Why Bruce Lee?" What was it about this brash, good-looking young guy that made him such a phenomenon? Why Lee and not Ti Lung? Why Lee and not anyone else in the world? The answer is equal parts timing, skill, charm, and mystery.

Bruce hit the scene at a time when a lot of people in both Hong Kong and the United States were desperate for an underdog hero, especially one who wasn't white. The world was gorged on James Bond rip-offs and sanitized Westerns full of chiseled white guy good looks. The Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, the Native American awareness movements that became things like the Wounded Knee siege -- all these cultural elements were combining in an explosive wave of disillusionment with the way things used to be. The urban communities in America, who were hit especially hard by both the Vietnam War (since so many soldiers were minorities) and the frustration faced by the Civil Rights movement. With real-life heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. being gunned down, people were looking for heroes somewhere. Up until then Hollywood hadn't been providing them with anything.

Then came Bruce Lee. It's no coincidence that Lee hit the scene around the same time that black action stars like Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree, and Pam Grier were starting to make a big impact on the scene. People were fed up with Bond and John Wayne. They wanted someone more modern, more bad-ass, and most importantly, they wanted someone to whom they could relate. Bruce wasn't white. He wasn't big. His characters were not rich or influential or successful. He was an everyman for all other men who could not see themselves in the previous set of American heroes. He was different, and he was the underdog.

In each of Lee's characters, there was plenty for the disillusioned to identify with. The condescension and racism hurled at him in Fist of Fury, having to take shit from a corrupt boss in Big Boss -- there were things people recognized, and things people loved seeing Lee overcome. His biggest film in the United States, Enter the Dragon was a wild James Bond type action-adventure film where the Asian was the hero rather than a silly sidekick or devious villain. It was also a movie where the black character (Jim Kelly) is a noble and heroic man of principle, while the white guy (John Saxon) is a sleaze. A lovable sleaze, but a sleaze never the less.

Bruce Lee gave people hope, goofy as that might sound, that they too could overcome the odds facing them in everyday life. They could rise above the poverty and hopelessness of their situation. When Lee died under mysterious circumstances, it cemented his place not just as a star, but as a legend. His mark on society, from his face on a t-shirt to the popularity of martial arts training as a way to cope with growing up in the inner city, will remain in place long after the names of hundreds of other stars have been forgotten.

So which of these films should be the first Bruce Lee film we review? His biggest, Enter the Dragon? How about his first, Big Boss? Or the one most everybody considers his best, Fist of Fury (aka Chinese Connection). I think we've explained the whole Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Chinese Connection thing, but just in case you forgot, here's the deal: when Bruce Lee's Hong Kong films were brought over to the US to capitalize on the success of Enter the Dragon, someone screwed up and got the titles confused. Big Boss, Lee's first film, was mislabeled Fist of Fury. Realizing the blunder too late to fix it, distributors took the actual Fist of Fury (Lee's second, and many say best) and retitled it Chinese Connection, probably to capitalize on the success of French Connection as well as Lee.

Since they were on a roll, they decided to also retitle Way of the Dragon, calling it Return of the Dragon and marketing it as a sequel to Enter the Dragon despite the fact that it was made before that film.

But that brings us to where we want to be, which is the movie we've chosen to be the first Bruce Lee film we review. We chose it because it seems to slip through the cracks a lot, and because it's the only complete film that was written, directed, and choreographed by Lee himself. It's an excellent movie that allows Lee to showcase not just his incredible martial arts skill, but also his ability as an actor. Most people like to write Lee off as a one-trick pony, perhaps the best martial artist to ever live but a pretty rigid actor. Those people obviously go along with hearsay rather than actually investigating the matter themselves. People who claim Lee could only act enraged and couldn't handle comedy should pay closer attention to this film, in which Lee gets to shine as a comedian as well as an all-around kungfu bad-ass. Bruce even gets to do stuff that results in that "wah wah waaaahhhh" comedy music!

We begin at an airport in beautiful Roma -- that's Rome to you non-cosmopolitan types out there. Bruce, playing Tang Long, is something of a country bumpkin from the rural land outside Hong Kong. Right away, Lee is great at invoking a sense of sympathy for his character. I mean, we all know Lee is the baddest man to ever walk the planet, but he plays his scenes here so realistically awkward and embarrassed that you feel bad yet amused for his fish-out-of-water character. He goes to an airport lounge and, not being able to read the menu, end sup ordering about six bowls of soup. Of course, he is still Bruce Lee, so he saves face by finishing them all, which allows him to launch a series of "must go to the toilet" jokes that will be a sure-fire comedy hit with the kids for years to come. Face it, you can be some Ivy League blue-blood in a long raccoon coat, carrying a pennant that says "Rah, Harvard!" or whatever, but you will think farts are funny. Go on. Admit it. You'll feel better.

I don't really know why farts are funny. I mean, we've been doing it for thousands upon thousands of years. You'd think we'd be over it by now. Sad as this sounds, I have spent many an hour late at night amusing myself by imagining a bunch of homo robustus types gathered around the campfire and bursting out into prehistoric prehysterics when one of them lets it rip. I think there were a lot of jokes in Caveman featuring Ringo Starr, so you know where I'm coming from with this one.

I know they are base and disgusting, low-brow joke material fit for a Chris Farley movie. But think about it. Fart humor transcends race and culture. Everyone the world over thinks farts are funny. Even high brow films like Scent of Green Papaya had fart jokes in it. Maybe it's because they are a great equalizer. Everyone has to do it sometime. Maybe it just feels good to do something that primal and animalistic. That's why we laugh, even at our own farts, and even harder when we see other animals do it. Nothing's funnier than a farting dog or howler monkey. When my parents' dog farts, it gets all freaked out, jumps up, and starts hunting furiously for the fart. I'm going to start doing the same thing, I think.

I know it's gross, but come on -- if Bruce Lee thinks farts are funny, then you can, too!

Lee also mines comedy gold in the "goofy effeminate guy with bad toupee" department. Bruce was, in fact, a huge fan of the Dean Martin - Jerry Lewis comedy team and the many films they did together. While Bruce's sense of humor is not quite as slapstick (and far less annoying) than Jerry Lewis, you can still see the influence it had on him. The main difference here is that Bruce is both the goofy, out-of-place Jerry Lewis and the suave, competent Dean Martin, depending on what the situation called for. Bruce definitely had a lot more depth than people gave him credit for.

After the soup skit, Bruce meets up with his cousin, played by the lovely Nora Mao (Fist of Fury, Big Boss), his frequent co-star. Nora had written her uncle back in Hong Kong to explain that they were having a lot of trouble with thugs at the restaurant in Rome. She expected him to send a lawyer, and instead he sent Tang Long, which Nora isn't exactly happy about as Tang is ignorant of big city culture, especially in the West. Tang Long explains that, while he may be a bit dim, he can help out in other ways.

He gets to show everyone his "other ways" when the thugs show up at the restaurant to smash things up and convince the Chinese to sell their land. It's always something like that, isn't it? The Man and The Mob are always trying to build malls on land owned by kungfu schools, community centers, and restaurants. It's a tried and true film formula, but it's also a comment on gentrification. In my old neighborhood, you could make a movie about The Gap trying to buy up land belonging to community gardens and outreach centers. Same shit, different era. I think The Gap stuck mostly to financial strong-arming, though, rather than sending thugs to beat up a guy named Pops.

Realizing that the thugs, one of whom I swear is Oliver Platt, won't listen to words, Bruce decides to speak with kungfu. He thrashes them soundly in a great sequence. Great not just because Lee is so fast and crisp with his art, but also because Lee's character undergoes a wonderful transformation. When dealing with the restaurant and the city of Rome, Tang Long is lost and vulnerable. But when he steps into the back alley to beat the shit out of the no-goodniks, he immediately becomes confident and in control. Ass kicking is a universal language, after all.

In between visits by the thugs, who keep arming themselves heavier and heavier only to still get the shit kicked out of them by Bruce, the film takes full advantage of its Rome locations. Hong Kong movies that filmed outside of Hong Kong were still very rare in the 1970s, so Lee takes in as much of Rome as can be crammed into a few "travelin' all around" montages. Then it's back to the alley behind the restaurant to kick ass on some more thugs. This is a pretty weak-ass mafia, I must say. But I guess they're not the big-time guys we see in films like The Godfather. After all, those guys are controlling international drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and resort casinos. These guys are trying to muscle out a restaurant. It's sort of like how most leprechauns get to guard gold and countless treasures, but Lucky the Leprechaun has to guard a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal.

In a theme that is present in all of Lee's Hong Kong films, he teaches other Chinese -- other minorities -- not to be ashamed of themselves or their heritage. When he arrives in Rome, the staff at the restaurant is practicing Japanese karate because they feel Chinese martial arts are weak and embarrassing. Once they see Lee in action, however, it fills them with pride and reinvigorates their interest in their own culture. This was an important theme for a film in 1972, and it's a large part of why Bruce Lee became so popular. He fights for the right not to be ashamed of the color of your skin, and he shows that minorities can survive the pressures put on them by the established white majority. They can rise above racism by learning, relying upon, and believing in themselves.

Once the boss finally catches on that his thugs are a bunch of fat-ass losers, he hires some karateka bad-asses in the form of Bob Wall and Ing Sik-wang (Stoner, When Tae Kwan Do Strikes, Young Master). Wall is best known for his role as the right evil O'Hara in Enter the Dragon.

After a while, Bruce gets sick of beating up the thugs, who just never seem to learn their lesson. So he goes to their headquarters, beats them up there, then does a very impressive kick in which he leaps up into the air and smashes an overhead lamp, completely without the use of tricks or wires. To accomplish the same simple but impressive kick these days would require Yeun Wo-ping to use ten miles of wires, pulleys, and CGI effects.

Pissed off about their light, the thugs hire their own kungfu bad-ass in the form of Chuck Norris. I know, I know. You guys here Chuck's name and it makes you grimace and roll your eyes. Great. Now we gotta watch Lone Wolf McQuade. But take heart, li'l buckaroos. There is a vast difference between Chuck Norris the Bruce Lee opponent and Chuck Norris the Texas Ranger. For one, bash him all you want, but Chuck Norris was an amazing martial artist at his peak (which is when this movie was made, and why Bruce chose Norris). Legit martial artists and kungfu fighters all recognized Norris as possessing one of the fastest, deadliest spinning back kicks in the world. Judging Chuck's abilities based on his American films is like, well, judging Cynthia Rothrock by her American films or Sammo Hung by his work on Martial Law.

The finale sees Lee face off against Norris in the maze-like arches of the Roman Coliseum, invoking the not-so-subtle image of modern-day gladiators. The ensuing battle is one of the best kungfu one-on-ones ever filmed, with the Benny Urquidez - Jackie Chan fight in Wheels On Meals being a distant second. Part of why the fight between Norris and Lee is so great is because it hurts. In 1972, kungfu film choreography was still pretty basic outside of Lee's films, and a lot of the over-choreographed fights, while looking spectacular, lacked any sense of injury or power, especially when the guys would hit each other over and over with no real sign of damage.

When Lee and Norris hit each other, you can feel it. Their blows carry weight, and the weight shows. It's obviously a result of two legitimate martial arts bad-asses being involved rather than two guys trained in Peking Opera, dance, or stage fighting. Of course, despite all the flesh-pounding-flesh action, the most painful scene comes when Lee uses Norris' thick, Piltdown Man-esque coating of body hair (it's possible he was one of the cavemen laughing at farts I talked about earlier) as a weapon, ripping out a big chunk of chest hair (he could have used a little off the back as well). Of course, ripping out a man's chest hair makes you bad, but then proceeding to blow it into the man's face makes you bad-ass. It's the little things, you see.

There's some end-of-the film shenanigans after the fight before Lee wraps everything up and heads back to Hong Kong. The film is absolutely superb. Lee shines as both an actor and a fighter, and his skill and charm should be more than enough to win over pretty much anyone. Watching this movie, you'll have little question left in your mind why Lee has become to celebrated by so many different types of people. One could even take the Civil rights slogan "We Shall Overcome," and apply it to the work of Bruce Lee.

Bruce's direction is good. Nothing overly inventive or unique, but more than competent for a first-time director. It's a bit raw at times, though he really shines at filming the fight scenes, which probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Sammo Hung, in many ways a student and master of Bruce Lee's, would be the one director more than any of the others who would realize Lee's ambitions in filming and directing kungfu films. What Lee began in Way of the Dragon and never finished in Game of Death, Sammo would carry to fruition in films like Knockabouts, Prodigal Son, and Project A. Makes you wonder what the "Three Brothers" of Sammo, Yuen Biao, and Jackie Chan would have been like if it had been four brothers, and one of them was Bruce Lee.

Way of the Dragon, aside from being some of Lee's finest stuff, is notable for launching the film career of Chick Norris as well. I don't actually know if this is a good thing, but I guess it was good for Chuck. He went on after this film to play a bigger role in another Hong Kong actioner, Slaughter in San Francisco, aka Yellow-Faced Tiger. That movie gave him ample opportunity to throw back his head and laugh in an evil fashion while he stood with arms akimbo. He also got to kick people. From there, it was the big-time, as he went on to play heroes in one crappy film after another, thus endearing him to the American public. If you have to watch any Chuck Norris film besides Way of the Dragon, make sure it's The Octagon, because that at least has some ninjas in it.

Chuck Norris and Bob Wall would reunite many years later to make the film Hero and the Terror, and even later to appear as themselves in Sidekicks, a film best left undiscussed.

Bruce, of course, went on to make Enter the Dragon, the film that would become his ladder to the realm of modern-day legend and launch the kungfu craze in America. Lee's contributions to the genre are sundry. He gave it it's banner star. He gave it the refinement of fight choreography, which up until Lee had been stiff and stage-like. He gave it comedy and heart. He gave it international appeal.

He gave it Bruce Lee. A man full of anxieties, flaws, genius, ambition, fear, and fearlessness. A man whose name and face would become ubiquitous.

So if you want to see Lee's biggest film, see Enter the Dragon. If you want to see his first film, see The Big Boss. If you want to see his best film, see Fist of Fury. But if you want to see the one film out of all of them that shows Bruce Lee at his finest in all ways, the one film that has the most Bruce Lee in its heart, the one film that, more than any of the others and despite its rough edges, defines where Bruce wanted to take the genre, then you have to see Way of the Dragon.

Set during World War II, Liu's character is given a secret map by a dying rebel fighting the occupying forces from Japan. The monk is pestered by a couple petty criminals who think he is carrying a treasure map instead of a strategic one, and to make things even more of a pain as he tries to reach the rebel headquarters to deliver the map, the Japanese have all sorts of gun-toting toadies running after him.

It's a variation on a theme, of course. There are plenty of movies in which Shaolin Monks help rebels fight the Ch'ing soldiers of the final dynasty, but it's rare that you see Shaolin monks fighting during World War II. I would guess it's mainly because World War II isn't very funny, especially for China. If you need evidence of the fact that World War II wasn't funny, just watch Hogan's Heroes.

To be honest, there really isn't a whole lot to this film. It's simple and straight-forward, with very few diversions along the way, which is more than can be said for Liu Chia-hui's trek in the film. However, don't let the simplicity fool you. Sometimes, kungfu works best in it's most simple form, free of frills and posturing. Warrior from Shaolin is plenty good, though it's not the best work by director Liu Chia-yung or his adopted little brother, Liu Chia-hui. Considering the filmography of each man, however, even on a bad day they do good work. And Warrior from Shaolin has plenty of good stuff going on in it, not least of which is Liu Chia-hui's goofy straw hair and floppy brown hat disguise. But he has to wear it so no one will think he's a monk. Instead they will think he's just some deranged hillbilly.

Great martial arts and acting highlight this fine kungfu fare. Liu Chia-hui may look silly in his floppy brown hat and straw hair, but that doesn't stop him from kicking some serious evil boo-tay. As usual, Liu Chia-yung himself shows up to give everyone who acts heroic a hard time.

This one recently got an el cheapo re-release here in the states and part of one on ten million "Shaolin Collections" to come out in the past year. It's worth picking up, though the old Ocean Shores tape looks much better if you can find it.

REVIEW:
Where most films about Shaolin characters are more about Shaolin than people, Liu has put a lot of work into characters. Still, I personally find the movie a bit dull, and the final fight ends ridiculously, with Hung's son punching the hermit, then a freeze-frame, and a narrator going, "And eventually, he was victorious."

But while we're stuck enduring the likes of Valentine and Urban Legend: Final Cut, Japan has been quietly - and sometimes not so quietly - taking over the helm as the premiere home for horror. Whether it's by just doing the age-old traditions correctly or by creating something brand new, Japan has become a haven for people who want more from their horror films than carbon copy scripts, a hot new soundtrack of industrial/hip-hop/metal, and twenty-year-old clones all formed from strands of James Van Der Beek's and Jennifer Love Hewitt's DNA.

Among the many aspects of horror of which the Japanese have become the caretakers is the zombie film. As we've lamented elsewhere, no one save the occasional deranged fan seems all that interested in making zombie movies anymore. There is something apparently unmarketable about the entire concept, even though all horror films these days seem to have a soundtrack containing at least one track by Rob Zombie. His last name and popularity has not, unfortunately, translated into similar success for the zombie film. On one hand, I suppose I should be thankful that I don't have to see my most beloved of horror subgenres done up as a film starring Denise Richards and any number of indistinguishable male leads from popular shows on the WB. On the other hand, it'd be nice if a few underground film makers remembered the genre, or at least some grumpy Italians.

But if Japan has become the sole guardian of the zombie film, then at least they are in very good hands. With films like Junk, Wild Zero, and most recently Versus, Japan has been not just keeping the zombie film alive (or at least undead), it's been reinventing the whole concept without disrespecting the traditions we've come to know and love. The Japanese approach, influenced by everything from Resident Evil video games to Evil Dead, and of course George Romero's "Dead" trilogy, has been to approach the zombie subgenre as much as an action film as a horror film. While still maintaining the Romero style look and behavior of most zombies, they've also thrown in kungfu-powered super-zombies and Guitar Wolf flinging glowing guitar picks into the skulls of undead legions. The movies have proven that, while Japanese filmmakers know their material, they also know that they have to put a new twist on it to keep it fresh.

Versus, a zombie masterpiece directed by first-timer Ryuhei Kitamura, will invariably be compared to Wild Zero, also made by a first time film director, Tetsuro Takeuchi. Both are completely over the top in ways no one else ever dreamed of going over the top. Both are possessed of a hyperactive insanity and relentless pace. Both are full of zombies, and both ooze with cool. But where Wild Zero draws its charm and energy from likeable characters, sweet romances, and rock and roll cool, Versus relies entirely on high style and complete bad-assness, making it an altogether different kind of movie in that sense, though no less successful and certainly no less enjoyable.

The movie opens in feudal Japan with a battered samurai facing off against a gang of shambling, sword-wielding zombies. Immediately establishing a kinetic, Hong Kong style approach to the action, the samurai butchers his way through the undead only to come face to face with their apparent master, a wicked human priest. The samurai charges valiantly only to find himself sliced in two. If that's not a good way to start a film off, I don't know what is.

Skip ahead a couple hundred years to the present. Two convicts are running through the woods after being sprung from prison. They soon meet up with their benefactors -- a gang of stylish young yakuza so utterly and completely cool that they punctuate most of their actions with frequent "cool yakuza" poses. Sometimes, movies are cool. Sometimes, movies try so hard to be cool that they look ludicrous. And sometimes, movies push their ludicrous cool so far over the edge that they become cool again. Mere words can't express just how bad-ass everything in this film ends up being.

One of the cons is happy to see the young yakuza, who look like spoofs of the various characters from the Hong Kong Young and Dangerous films. The other con, prisoner KSC2-303, is more suspicious of their motivations. After all, he doesn't even know them. Why would they bust him out of prison? When he discovers that they also have a kidnapped girl in their car, he promptly breaks out in some amazingly cool kung-fury, resulting in him ending up with a gun, the girl, and a yakuza hostage. The choreography for the fights is pure Hong Kong madness. Anyone who has followed Japanese cinema knows that they have traditionally been fairly lackluster in their action choreography, never having become masters of it quite the way the folks in Hong Kong were. Well, all that's changing, and Versus is a perfect example of where it's being taken. Ultra-fast, acrobatic, brutal, and simply stunning to behold.

As is wont to happen when people are pointing guns at one another out in the woods, two people end up dead: one yakuza and the other convict. Unfortunately for everyone else, they don't stay dead. Mere minutes after finding themselves with brand new bullets in their brains, they're back up and ready to do more damage to whoever is most convenient. Everyone is fairly startled, but no startled that they can't continue to pump the recently reanimated zombies full of lead while KSC2-303 and the girl make their escape into the forest. One yakuza, their resident kungfu bad-ass, pursues while the others mill about, make plans, and try to figure out what the hell just happened. No one has any names in this, so we'll just refer to them as the leader (ultracool guy in ugly lime shirt), the weasel (little guy who whimpers and panics a lot), and the smart guy. He may not actually be smart, but he has long hair and wears spectacles and a sweater.

The first plan is to simply haul ass out of any forest where corpses suddenly spring back to life. The leader puts a damper on that plan by insisting that they must wait for the big leader, the guy who told them to free KSC2-303 and kidnap the girl in the first place. As the yakuza stand around hoping nothing more will happen, the weasel has the realization that they have just wandered into the forest meadow where they like to bury all their murder victims. Before you can say "uh-oh," dozens of zombie yakuza are bursting forth from their shallow graves. Like your traditional zombies, they are slow, decayed, and tend to moan and stagger a lot. Unlike your traditional zombies, these guys haven't forgotten how to use their guns! Why they would be buried with fully loaded weapons, and why those weapons would still work after being buried in the dirt for months, possibly even years, is a stupid question to ask in the context of this film. I mean, they're zombies! Rising from the grave with fully loaded, fully operational pistols should be the least of your reality concerns.

The yakuza take to an ultra-gory battle with the zombies while KSC2-303 and the kungfu yakuza bash one another senseless not too far away. Their fight leads them back to the meadow, and everyone stops fighting each other long enough to fight the zombies. Then, of course, it's back to fighting each other.

Elsewhere, two completely insane cops are hot on the trail of the escaped convicts. One of the cops, Officer, apparently lost his hand during the escape. The other, Fighter, is simply crazy as a shithouse bat and keeps ranting about his invincible kungfu while all the while seeming very much like Jeffery Combs at his most gloriously manic. Must be the hair. The cops aren't above indiscriminately murdering innocent bystanders, either, if it gets them a new car.

As the madness continues, the leader yakuza finally finds the second group of yakuza, this one mostly ultra-sexy females predisposed to the same habit of striking super-slick poses for no particular reason other than looking incredibly cool. With them is the main leader, who we quickly recognize as the same guy playing the wizard from the beginning of the film. When he learns that KSC2-303 and the girl are both at large somewhere in the woods, he decides his first course of action will be to slaughter every single yakuza he brought with him, thus turning them into a legion of super-powered undead gangsters. Only one woman, an ultra bad-ass kungfu fighter, escapes his murderous frenzy.

It is through him that we learn the woods are known in ancient legend as the Resurrection Forest for obvious reasons already illustrated. We also learn that he is indeed the self-same wizard from the opening of the film, a long-lived demon who has waited five-hundred years for his ancient samurai rival and his ancient princess to reincarnate at overlapping times. He needs the blood from both of them to open a portal to hell that will grant him some unspeakable power. KSC2-303, of course, is the reincarnation of the samurai hero, while the girl is the princess. They have no intention of going down without one of the goriest, most insane fights you'll ever see on film. Meanwhile, those nutty cops and the female kungfu bad-ass are still running wild as well.

And that, my friends, is it. The plot is simple despite a few supernatural embellishments. The entire film is basically one very well-done, highly stylized action sequence after another, with a heavy peppering of spoofing throughout. KSC2-303 is the ultimate bad-ass anti-hero. In one of the film's best moments, he offs a gangster zombie, bends down, picks up a pair of sunglasses, then slides them on as bad-ass music plays. The girl then gives him a "what the hell are you doing?" look, and he promptly takes the glasses off. The film is full of clever touches like that, managing to provide ultra-slick action while lampooning it as well. Versus delights in poking fun at the stylish absurdities of every action film that was written as a rip-off of John Woo, but does so with such gusto and reckless abandon that it also manages to outdo them all in sheer style and suaveness.

There was hardly any budget for this film, and what little there was went primarily to the special effects, which range from very good to mind-blowing (sometimes literally). A mixture of old-fashioned squibs, fake blood, and make-up effects combine with expertly done fight choreography and wire effects to cook up an endless parade of exploding heads and guts, buckets upon buckets of blood, and even homages to gore classics like the hole in the head from The Beyond and the shotgun hole through the gut from Cannibal Apocalypse.

To free up as much money for effects as they could, the entire film is shot using relative unknowns and a single inexpensive location: the forest. The technical mastery and slickness of the film prevent it from looking cheap, however, and while it may be confined to a single primary location, it's a big location that provides for a fair amount of variation in scenery. Occasional flashbacks to the back story involving the wizard, the princess, and the samurai further allow the director to make the most of his one location so that by the end, you hardly even notice. Not that I would care much, anyway. Many of my favorite horror films -- Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead -- restrict themselves to no more than a few locations. Some truly gorgeous cinematography further allows the director to make the most the situation and avoid ending up with a movie that looks cheap.

The acting really shines. No one has a name, as I said, which in itself is a wonderful spoof of horror films where characters are often completely forgettable and only have names as a matter of formality. The weakest link is the girl who plays the reincarnation of the princess, but she's still quite capable. Tak Sakaguchi as KSC2-303 plays a subtle, grim-faced cool that we haven't seen the likes of since Clint Eastwood hung up his six-shooter and started making movies for fans of the Lifetime network. The director claims he found Tak Sakaguchi on the streets in the middle of a real-life fist-fight with rival youth gangsters and realized he'd be perfect for the part! Wielding samurai swords, shotguns, and even a massive artillery cannon, he is so completely bad-ass that he's off the scale. The evil wizard exudes quiet cool as well. The cop Fighter is absolutely hilarious. Everyone else is there to get turned into zombies.

Musically, the movies sounds like a video game. Lots of techno and instrumental drum-n-bass stuff, or whatever. I guess there are lots of different subgenres for that stuff, but I don't know any of them. While I wouldn't rush out and buy the soundtrack, it works amazingly well within the context of the movie, sort of like all the techno that was in Run Lola Run. It lends an even more surreal feel to the film, removing it that much further from any reality with which you or I might be familiar.

Versus is a perfect example of "reinventing the legend." Too often, that term is used incorrectly by people who aren't reinventing anything. They are completely throwing out the old and making up their own nonsense. Versus, on the other hand, showcases a great knowledge of the zombie and action film lore that came before it and constantly tweaks it and pumps it full of adrenaline without ever showing disrespect. And it's nice to finally see a zombie film that doesn't involve people rushing to the nearest building and boarding themselves in.

Clocking in at very near a full two hours with very little plot, many have said the film could use some editing, which it may well get when it finally sees full release. I don't agree with those who feel the movie needs trimming. Maybe I'm just more patient, but there wasn't a single time when I felt bored or wanted to move things along. The movie maintains a breakneck pace from start to finish, and at least in my opinion, it does not falter. There is a lot more crammed into the story and the action than is evident perhaps on the first viewing. A simple plot should not be mistaken for no plot or for a bad a plot. And the visual jokes are so plentiful that you have to keep going back again and again, not that I mind doing that. Versus is among the very few films I watched, then immediately watched again.

As if all this complete and utter insanity wasn't enough, Versus also manages to be the first film in I can't remember how long that has a shock ending that is actually shocking as opposed to idiotic, that actually serves as a wonderfully appropriate and unexpected punctuation mark rather than seeming like some lame-brained after-thought tacked on to open the door for a potential sequel. The shock ending, of course, is a time-honored, or at least heavily abused, tradition of the horror film. Almost none of them make it work. Halloween pulled it off, but those since then have been few and far between. The Ring, though I don't know if I consider the end of that film to be a "shock" ending so much as it is just a creepy one.

Most shock endings have no basis in reality at all, and are simply slapped on without complete disregard for logic and total contempt for the intelligence of the audience. Friday the 13th films provide us the most numerous examples (gee, is Jason gonna jump out of the lake for no reason again?), but my favorite recent example was Tim Burton's disastrous Planet of the Apes, which posses a shocking twist ending so mind-numbingly stupid that it'll almost make you look favorably on censorship so long as it is applied to Planet of the Apes. When asked about it, Tim Burton obviously had no explanation, which makes sense, as there is no explanation for it. It was a moronic ending. Being the director though, he couldn't say, "Yeah, it was stupid." So instead he got all pissy and complained that not everything could be explained, that some things are there to "make you think." Of course, what it does is make you think the director and the scriptwriters were complete dolts. But I digress.

Versus comes up with the most ingenious way to spoof the shocking twist ending cliché: by making it work. As if the movie hadn't already given us so much, it ends things on an amazing note with one of the best twist endings in the last twenty years. It's really the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the melted fudge on top of the delicious clown sundae.

I can't say I like Versus quite as much as Wild Zero. I prefer Wild Zero's developed and lovable characters and rock-n-roll lessons. Junk, another Japanese yakuza versus zombies film, was fun on its own terms, but it's really been outclassed by Wild Zero and Versus. But as I said, Versus is a very different type of movie despite being possessed of the same wild energy and anarchic spirit. It's really not fair to compare it to anything else, because frankly, nothing else compares, and no other movie quite like it has ever been made. Or rather, lots of movies like it have been made, but never crammed all together into one movie with this much total insanity running rampant. Fans of action and zombies will be delighted. Fans of low-budget filmmaking will marvel at how much this film delivers with so little money with which to work.

And fans of spirited, no-holds-barred fun films will be overjoyed beyond the capacity for words.

The primary cause for the shock and outrage directed toward the movie from us Yanks is simple enough: violence. To sum it up in a nutshell, this is a movie about recent middle school graduates who are rounded up and transported to a remote island where they are forced to hunt one another down for the amusement of adults. The film pulls no punches in depicting the brutality of adults toward children as well as from one child to another. This simply will not fly in the United States. The recent glut of tragic school shootings has left America somewhat shell-shocked and hesitant when it comes to dealing with the topic of teen violence.

We're happy to simply gloss over it -- perhaps the biggest tragedy of all to come from these horrible events. We blame the media, blame video games, blame extreme music. Basically, we blame everything except poor parenting, a complete lack of discipline practices, and a social set-up that encourages the alienation and persecution of any student who is different, smart, or in any way quirky and deviant from the rigid status quo. While we went on and on about violence video games and movies, we completely failed to address the obvious roots of the problem because it required us to point the finger squarely at ourselves. That's something we've never been very good at doing.

I would not sit here and try to tell anyone that violent entertainment does not trigger violent behavior in certain people. It's obvious that it does, just as The Holy Bible has triggered extreme violence in masses of people throughout the centuries. The question we should be asking is not why we have these violent movies or video games. The question is simply why are people today so monumentally stupid that they can't grasp something as basic as the difference between real and make-believe?

I grew up watching screwy movies, stuff far more twisted and violent than these kids ever saw. Horror, kungfu, crime, by the age of twelve I'd seen more shockingly violent fare than most people do their entire lives. I watched pro wrestling, listened to heavy metal and angry punk rock. And you know what? Not once did I ever entertain the thought of walking into a classroom and offing the kids who fucked with me in school -- and believe me, as a punk rocker growing up in a rural Kentucky town during the mid 1980s, I got fucked with plenty. Not once did I ever think it was okay to piledrive my younger sister or try to fly by jumping out of a tree. Not once did I ever think anything I sw in a movie wa anything other than just what it was: an image in a movie. Not real life. Not how you are supposed to behave.

I'm not particularly smart, but I'm also not a complete idiot. Even a simpleton should be able to comprehend the simple concept of what you see in a movie not being an example of what you do in real life. So what is it then, what is it we're doing differently, that is causing kids and adults both to behave like brainless twits who cannot conceive of the fact that you should not drop a flying elbow off the couch onto a two year old child?

A big part of the problem is what I think of as new-age parenting. We live in a society that is so terrified of punishing a kid for being a rotten, spoiled asshole than we've ended up with a whole population of rotten, spiled assholes. Parents who attempt to discipline their children are chastised and live in constant fear of some bleeding heart guidance counselor from school turning them in for child abuse. Likewise, teachers are shackled, forced to operate with bound hands and attempt to instruct children who have basically been allowed to run wild and develop not the faintest sense of responsibility or consideration for others. To make matters worse, teachers who dare to flunk a student who deserves to be flunked are punished either for making the child feel bad about themselves or for making the school lose face by having failing students. As a result, we have a population that is now not only meaner and completely devoid of any sense of responsibility regarding their own actions, we also have a population that is just plain dumb as toast.

Unable to understand that their actions have consequences, and too stupid to realize that what they see in movies and video games is not real, we end up with students who lack any sort of coping skills, who freak out and can't think of anything to do other than respond with violence and screaming. And as adults, rather than analyze our failure as elders, we simply blame the movies, even though countless other people saw the same movie and didn't interpret it as an okay to gun down classmates or co-workers.

In this environment, it's no wonder people would be gun-shy about a film like Battle Royale. It requires an audience to understand the difference between reality and fantasy. It requires the audience to think about why the violence on screen is occuring, to analyze the actions of the people on screen, to think about why they have been driven to do what they are doing. It requires a basic understanding of satire and social commentary. None of these are things the average American youth has been taught how to do by either parents or school. Given our stunted emotional state in America, I have no doubt that a movie like Battle Royale would indeed result in violent behavior among some of the more astoundingly moronic kids who managed to see it. Given this admission, although I'm not a fan of censorship, I'm ultimately happy that the film may not see the light of day in the United States. The fewer idiots who have it as an excuse for their own misanthropic hatred, the better off the rets of us will be. besides, it's not like it's been banned -- it simply hasn't found a domestic distributors. Even with that limitation, it's not as if the movie is difficult to find.

Anyway, it's impossible to discuss the film without discussing, at least in some cursory manner, the plague of youth violence. I'm not equipped for a full-on debate over the topic, but it had to be mentioned. It's also worth mentioning the difference between school violence in America and school violence in Japan. Although not nearly as violent as America, nor as well armed, Japan still has its fair share of youth trouble, and they are the impetus for much of the action in this graphic but well-made film.

While American schools seem set up to reward mediocrity and encourage the dim-witted to beat down and prey upon the smart and unusual, Japanese schools are dog-eat-dog in the opposite direction. The pressure to get high marks, be an ace student, and get into a top college is intense, and much of the violence that occurs doe so as a result of this pressure. AT no point is this more absurdly obvious in Battle Royale than in a scene where a bloodied student, crazed by the situation in which he and his classmates have found themselves, charges toward his friends with guns blazing, screaming, "I will win this game and get into a good college!"

Things begin on a troubling note, with a frantic newscaster scrambling to get shots of the "winner" of some game, a smiling, blood-covered young girl. The movie continues innocently enough, as a senior class prepares for their final day of middle school. Everyone's thinking about their future, and the happiness is only slightly marred by the attempted stabbing of one of the senior teachers, played with biting wit by Takeshi Kitano.

While on a bus ride, the graduating class is gassed. When they wake up, they are in a dingy classroom on some remote island. Takeshi Kitano is present, along with a group of trigger-happy guards, to fill them in on what's happening. They have been chosen at random to compete in a game. The goal of the game is simple: kill all your classmates and avoid being killed yourself. The last one standing is the winner. If more than two students are left at the end of the game, everyone dies. If you refuse to play or attempt to escape, a lock around your neck will detonate and blow your jugular all to hell.

The students find this impossible to believe, but a switchblade to the head of a protesting young girl quickly convinces them that this is serious. A couple more students mowed down by machine gun fire, and one demonstration of the blood-spraying effectiveness of the exploding necklaces later, and everyone falls into line.

What struck me immediately about this film is that none of the deaths are lightweight. Even though the students who are killed straight away have had no more than a minute or so of screen time, their deaths affect the viewer. Part of it is the simple shock of what you're seeing. Outside of fetish porn, you don't expect to see a teacher fling a knife into a young girl's head. These aren't especially bad kids as far as we know; they're simply paying the price. The result is that each death, despite being sensationally gory, is also amazingly important and somewhat depressing. At the same time, each death is totally senseless. There is no reason, within the plot of the film, for the killing. No purpose is served, and that senselessness is the primary source of power, ironically enough.

The students are forced to watch a cheery orientation video in which the basic rules of the game are relayed to them by a perky spokeswoman. They're then released into the wild. Some immediately form coalitions, while others immediately become paranoid. A few simply go insane with fear. The killing starts the minute they get out the door, although a number of the students are more interested in finding a way to beat the game than they are in killing one another. There must be a way to disarm or remove the collars. There must be a way to survive the game without playing it.

But it's hard to think rationally when other students are lunging at you with a variety of weapons. Each student is given a weapon at random. Some turn out to be crossbows, stun guns, rifles, or machetes. Others are pot lids, binoculars, and similar completely useless items. As the bodies pile up and students form bonds and establish plans and strongholds, the adults provide play-by-play body counts and updates. Once again, the movie succeeds in making not a single death gratuitous. Each one is slightly heart-wrenching, and as the action progresses, you get sucked into rooting louder and louder for them to find a solution to this deadly puzzle. At no point did any of the violence and killing strike me as cool or slick. It's bloody, and it's upsetting, just as it should be.

That's the true triumph of the movie, and the big element that your average dolt would miss. The violence in the movie is certainly not glorious, and the call for an end to violence, for people to learn to cope with life without resorting to bloodshed, rings clear in every frame of the film. Of course, no matter how loud the message may be, plenty of people simply aren't interested in listening and would instead rather just look at all the cool blood.

The action focuses primarily on a young couple, Noriko and Nanahara, and a guy named Kawada who vows to help them get off the island and stay alive. It's no easy task, of course, what with the the students who have embraced the violence all too quickly and the constant threat of betrayal. When Nanahara is separated from the group and wind sup recovering from wounds in a lighthouse occupied by a force of girls, he's witness to all hell breaking lose when suspicion gets the better of them.

Meanwhile, another group of students set up a headquarters, complete with a generator and laptop computer one of them had in his backpack. Their hope is to get help from outside or find a way to disarm the necklaces. One of them, the son of a 1960s activist, figures the best way to really play the game is by taking the fight directly to the adults who are controlling things.

The movie keeps you off-balance by proving to you that anyone could die at any moment, even the people who seem like they're set up to make it. Additionally, it messes with expectations by doing things like staging an encounter in the woods between Norika and Nanahara and Takeshi Kitano during which he treats them with warm-hearted kindness. It's obvious at that point that there's even more to the game than we first suspected, and that it may be more than a simple case of adults being fed up with their self-centered offspring.

Meanwhile, the guy with the computer successfully link sup with a hacker group and downloads a virus into the control room's computers. Before they can take advantage of the collapse of defenses however, they are set upon by one of the few students. In the end, it comes down to only three, the same three who have been working together since the beginning: Nanahara, Noriko, and Kawada. With time running out before the collars self-detonate, the tension mounts. Will they stick together, find a last-ditch solution, die together, or turn on each other?

Despite the sensationalism surrounding the film, there's no denying it's power. It's a stunner, that's for sure, and not just because you'll sit there amazed at just how far the movie is willing to go in order to get its point across. While he may not be the director, it's obvious that the peculiar humanist twist Takeshi Kitano brings to his films was brought here as well. Amid the non-stop carnage and mayhem, there is an overwhelming sense of sadness and hope. The final stinger -- I don't know if you can call it a joke -- punctuates the proceedings in the most classic of Kitano ways.

There is no one in the world as adept at using violence to create such striking anti-violence messages as Takeshi Kitano. As far as I'm concerned, he's the most gifted film maker working today. And as I said, even though he's not sitting in the director's chair here, his influence is certainly prevalent. A film about school kids forced to hunt one another down is ripe for the tendency toward exploitation, but while it certainly isn't afraid to get its hand's dirty, it never sinks to the level of lesser films. It never undermines its own message, something that marred films like Men Behind The Sun, who undercut their own power by revelling and wallowing in the depravity they depicted. That movie, while effective, also felt too exploitive, too interested in depicting grotesque deaths while not interested enough in creating any sense of character.

Battle Royale does wonders in establishing personalities for the characters in a very short amount of time, and that adds strength to the story. While undeniably gory, the death in the film takes a back seat to the struggle, and there is no point in the film that the violence ever seems fun, sensible, or in any way appealing. A lesser film, once again, would have simply relished each murder while forgetting that each death needs a meaning, needs to pack a punch that will further turn off the viewer to violence and make them hope, against all odds, that the kids who rely on peaceful cooperation will pull off the seemingly impossible.

That said, it's a movie that would be totally misunderstood by the vast majority of American film goers (I'm not well acquainted with the movie goers of other countries, so I can't comment on them), adult and juvenile. Dismissed as poorly wrought melodramatic exploitation, tasteless insanity, or a really cool movie about kids killing each other, I really don't see a lot of people appreciating the effectiveness of the film. Chalk it up to culture gap, a lack of desire to see movies as anything beyond what exists on the very surface, what have you. Ultimately, it's not my job to give you your opinion, and we all have our own reasons for liking and not liking a particular movie.

Personally, I find the melodrama touching in much the same way it was pulled off in John Woo films like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Bullet in the Head. All three are frightfully melodramatic, but it's composed so well that you can't help but be sucked into it if you give it half a chance. But just like John Woo films, a lot of people will simply not be interested by the melodrama (or realize the fact that we are, as a species, way more melodramatic than even the most overblown of movies) or will walk away from it snickering. So be it. I have no vested interested in getting people to like a movie.

Unlike a John Woo film, however, the violence on display here is never poetic or beautiful. It's just gory and mean and depressing. It's a movie that makes you hate violence, that makes you want to just see the insanity end. Or at least, that's what it did to me. Admittedly, I went into the movie already abhorring guns and real-life violence, so I didn't take much convincing. It's not that I'm a pacifist -- I'll freely agree with the notion that there's are times when physical and violent confrontation are the corners we've painted ourselves into. It's simply that I think we've devolved to the point where violence is our first and only solution for even the most petty events. People killing each other because they got angry at a bad umpire call during a tee-ball game? This is not the behavior of a rational species. Violence should always, in my opinion, be the final resort, not the initial response. See? I grew up watching violent films, even watched Battle Royale, and I have yet to want to go out and murder people.

Director Kinji Fukasaku spent most of his career making some of the better yakuza films, with some sci-fi and ninja fare thrown in for good measure. At somewhere right around seventy years old, he's a rather shocking figure to have made such a shocking film. But then, Takeshi Kitano ain't no teenager, either. Together, the two of them, along with writer Kenta Fukasaku have done an admirable job in adapting the best-selling but highly controversial original novel by Koushun Takami into film. While some changes had to made (obviously the book is able to get into the heads of the characters in much greater detail) or simply were made (the movie is set merely in the near future, while the book is set in an alternate timeline when Japan did not lose World War Two and never had to repent for its brutal imperialist advances), they still manage to catch the essence of what is a very complex subject wrapped in what appears at first to be a very simple film. The screenplay is actually as much a better-armed reworking of Golding's Lord of the Flies as it is an adaptation of the Battle Royale novel, with a little MOst Dangerous Game thrown in for good measure.

It makes me wonder how people react to a book like Lord of the Flies these days, which is one of the original and most powerful explorations of children turning savage on one another. I've always felt that Lord of the Flies and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness are two of the absolute best novels for teaching young people to analyze and understand literature. Both books have a ton of messages in them, and very few of them are that hard for the average student, or even a sharp middle schooler, to grasp. But then, I don't even know if they teach literary criticism in schools anymore. From what I've seen, they barely even teach the kids how to read, let alone understand what it is the words are attempting to say to them. I think Battle Royale is bloodier but no less savage or intense than Lord of the Flies, but because it's using guns instead of pointy sticks, and because it's a movie instead of a book, it's going to get a lot more attention. I'm willing to bet if you relayed to the sensation-hungry mass media the story of Lord of the Flies without telling them what it was you were actually telling them, they would vomit out all sorts of indignant reports about this vile and violent story corrupting our children and forcing them to kill one another and break each other's glasses, how this twisted sick tale has children of no older than eleven or twelve marching around spewing vulgarities like "Sucks to your ass-mar."

There are plenty of other reasons to go bonkers over this movie. The acting is fine. Granted, the young cast mostly has to scream, cry, and die, but each one is believable and no one falls flat. They seem like actual school kids. Takeshi Kitano is, of course, gold. He plays pretty much the same deadpan but emotionally deep character he's known for in his own films, and he brings a twisted sense of very black humor to the violent proceedings. Scenes of him and a guard fighting over cookies in the control room as they continuously update the body count are a treat.

Aside from the acting and message, the film boasts a ton of action, all of it bloody and well-paced. An action film with a message would still be a crummy movie if it was boring and poorly executed, but Battle Royale injects the events with a sense of tense hyper-activity. There is no moment in the film when anyone is safe, when anyone can rest and relax. There is no point, even during the melodramatics, when you can let down your guard and take a breath, because there's always a very good chance that someone with a machete is about to pop up over the hill. While the action is not "well choreographed" in the same sense that action in Hong Kong is staged (after all, these are just kids, not hitmen well-trained in various gymnastic maneuvers to make their action flashier), it is brutal, bloody, and pulled off with a tremendous amount of energy.

But no movie is perfect. Battle Royale possesses a few problems that, while easy to ignore in my opinion, are still worth mentioning. For one, it's not clear exactly why the battle is allowed to take place. There is mention of an act passed by the Diet (Japanese congress), but it seems that such an act would not be passed even in extreme times without lots of controversy and constant protest, especially since it seems the battle itself actually does very little to curb teen violence. Since the kids are chosen at random, good ones get lumped in with the bad, and so there is no sense of it being a punishment or type of retribution for aggressive behavior. Why, after all, would you not be rotten if being good had just as much chance of landing you in the game? The news report at the beginning serves to further confuse the matter a little,as it would make it seem like the battle was a nationally televised event, yet once there, none of the kids seem to know what it is.

Another weakness of the script is that at times it becomes unclear exactly what it wants from the future. Obviously, a country that is willing to sacrifice its young in the name of stability, is roundly criticized (shades of the intense pressure put on young people to succeed in business and academics). Likewise, a world where children are simply allowed to run rampant with no discipline and no sense of responsibility is equally dangerous. It seems, ultimately, that movie simply calls for a little bit of common sense and understanding. In a way,it may seem like a slightly anti-climatic wish, but it's certainly sane. What we see in the film is what we seem unwilling to see in society: that we're destroying ourselves.

I know every generation thinks theirs is the worst, that they are the ones living in the end times and witnessing the fall of the empire, so on and so forth. I'm not naive enough to be that self-centered in the face of so much suffering throughout the history of humanity. But as far as things today go, you gotta admit, regardless of how hard those who lived through the Dark Ages had it, we could use a lot of improving. It seems amazingly simple. I mean, if we all just stopped being such assholes all the time, that would go a long way, but people seem to cling to their hatred of their fellow man (especially while driving) with dogged tenacity. And as long as we're insulating ourselves from and denying the causes of so many of our woes, as long as we're unwilling at every turn to accept any of the blame for the state of things, there's not much hope that the world is going to improve.

So perhaps the final message of Battle Royale is this: as adults, we've shouldered the younger generation with a hideous burden. We've completely failed to prepare them for life. We've completely failed to teach them responsibility, respect for others, or respect for themselves. We've failed to steer them away from self-indulgence and self-destruction. We've shouldered them with our guilt, our incompetence we remain unwilling to accept. We've decided the world is too much trouble for us, and we've left it to them to solve all the problems, while at the same time leaving them emotionally and mentally stunted.

And then we blame them. We blame them for being assholes when all they're doing is what they've been taught. We blame them for being out of control when we never made any attempt to teach them restraint. We blame them for our own bitterness, hatred, and buried sense of failure. We've stopped having children as a way of "feeling immortal" or simply because we want to love them, and we've started having children so we can have scapegoats and victims readily available.

In the end, a movie is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out. You take out of Battle Royale what you bring into it, and no one can be forced to find meaning in something that has no meaning to them. To be honest, I didn't expect to find the movie as powerful as I did. I expected to react to it no differently than I did to other noble but flawed attempts at using violence to criticize violence. Instead of drawing from the Cannibal Holocaust well, however, the film has much more in common with the work of Sam Peckinpah or even A Clockwork Orange, though I would not put it on the same level as that film. It took me off-guard, and maybe that augmented my reaction somewhat. It was certainly a pleasing revelation. Maybe I'm simply hungry for a movie that addresses what I feel is one of the fundamental great denials destabilizing our society; the self-same problem which probably makes it best that this movie isn't going to be gobbled up by teens across America.

The slower Jackie Chan gets in his old age, the more he surrounds himself with gorgeous women. Hell, Gorgeous was a rotten film, but it starred former nudie pin-up superstar Hsu Chi, who has been making a name for herself with her clothes on as a decent action actress in recent years. Jackie's latest, The Accidental Spy, pairs him up with another former nude model and video naughty star, Vivian Hsu. The point I'm really trying to make is this:

Damn, it's good to be Jackie Chan.

I mean, can you blame the guy? He's given everything for his art, everything to his fans. He's broken down, beat up, and will be lucky if he can remember his own name or walk in another ten years. Chan has sacrificed himself, his now former family, and just about everything else. You can play armchair psychologist if you'd like, analyzing how the fact that he was abandoned by his parents (who sold him to a Peking Opera school, where he met Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, and Yuen Kwai, among others) has driven this insatiable need on his part to be loved and accepted by fans while crippling him when it comes to close personal relationships (his marriage was a total sham and his flings with sexy female starlets have become constant fodder for worthless Hong Kong gossip rags). He's somewhat cocky and egotistical (though honestly, wouldn't you be the same way if you were him), but he's also very nervous and humble around certain reporters and throngs of fans. Jackie's a complex guy, one full of personal problems and accomplishments, failures and successes. In short, he's a human, and that's why I like him so much and defend him, especially now that's he's probably in his twilight years.

Jackie's list of injuries is both frightening and amusing, but it should never be forgotten that he got each and every one of them trying to make us happy. There are very few, if any, film stars who have given as much to their fans as Jackie has. For that, we should be forever grateful. Hell, if he decided tomorrow that from now on he was only doing Merchant Ivory movies about snotty people in riding coats or big frilly dresses sitting in the garden drinking tea saying "pray tell," we should still never forget how much he's given to us. The man is, without a doubt, one of a kind, and there will never be another like him.

So as far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see Jackie going in the direction he's heading. As a fan of his since his old kungfu films from the 1970s, I'm satisfied to see him taking it easy, slowing things down a bit, and not mercilessly abusing himself the way he did in the 1980s. Sure, I miss mind-blowing sequences like the shopping mall finale from Police Story, but that was a long time ago. In 1985, I could run five miles without losing my breath. I could play a hard-fought ninety minute soccer game without a break. Nowadays, I can run from the front of my apartment to the curb with maybe nothing more serious than a severe cramp in my calf muscle. Hell, if I can hardly get up the four flights of stairs to my home without having to set aside an hour for recuperation, then I shouldn't expect Jackie -- as he approaches fifty -- to still be falling head first off clock towers.

A lot of people have been up in arms about Jackie's films during the 1990s. I agree that some of them were pretty bad. City Hunter was awful, Rumble in the Bronx was just plain stupid (a multi ethnic neon dune buggy gang from the Bronx? Someone watched too much Warriors) Police Story III was dull as dishwater thanks to a shoddy direction job by Stanley Tong, who for some reason could never figure out the proper way to film Jackie. Gorgeous despite featuring the unspeakably sexy Hsu Chi (and for you ladies, the unspeakably sexy Tony Leung Chi-wai) and a couple good fight scenes, was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. It was far and away the worst Jackie Chan film ever, and that includes his role as the evil melting king in Killer Meteors. It was insipid, annoying, and the people in it were so monumentally grating and stupid that I literally wanted to reach into the television and throttle them. Not having strange videodrome powers, however, I did the next best thing and just stopped watching.

But other than that, I think Jackie's films have been amusing at the worst, and at their best (i.e. Drunken Master II) they've been astounding. People were pretty hard on films like First Strike, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Same with Mr. Nice Guy. Yeah, they had their weaknesses, but I still had a good time. So Jackie wasn't delivering the next Project A -- big deal. I thought Rush Hour was okay, and would have been a lot of fun if I didn't find Chris Tucker so overbearing. Shanghai Noon was tremendous fun. In this day and age where everyone tries to be edgy, it was great to simply sit back and enjoy an old fashion action-comedy where the stars actually seemed to have some chemistry together. Who Am I was also a great deal of fun for me, and it was pleasing to see Jackie return to the final fight scene climax after shying away from it for so long.

In short, cut the guy some slack. For all intents and purposes, he should be dead. If you're a fan of Jackie, then you shouldn't be pulling for him to kill himself trying to pull off some stunt. He did that. Hell, he actually did kill himself when he cracked his skull open during a botched seemingly simple stunt in Armor of God. It's time to adjust your perception of Jackie. He's not the machine he once was. If you keep that in mind and you still can't stand his more recent movies, well there you go. Nothing wrong with that. There's this stuff called taste, and everyone's is slightly different. If, however, you do adjust your thinking, you might find that his newer films are still worthwhile, even if they are not the classics he was making in the 1980s.

So in short, if Jackie wants to relax and pal around with ultra-sexy women half his age, that's his right. I, for one, thank him for that almost as much as I thank him for Drunken Master II and Dragons Forever. A man who parades Hsu Chi, Vivian Hsu, and Michelle Ferre across the screen is still doing us all a great service even if he can't deliver the kungfu and stunts like he used to.

I should point out that in this movie, Jackie Chan attempts to outdo is formerly frequently nude female co-star by featuring prolonged exposure of his own bare ass. Longtime fans of Jackie Chan films are, of course, already acquainted with his bare ass, which if I recall correctly made its film debut in Police Story. I think this might be its longest appearance yet, and also its first action scene. For some of you, extended scenes featuring Jackie Chan's bare bottom may be enough to scare you away. For others, it may get you even more fired up about seeing the film. For me, as a seasoned veteran of movies that feature Jackie Chan and movies that feature naked rumps, I simply nodded at Jackie's naked butt and said, "Hey man, long time no see."

I always look forward to a new Jackie Chan film regardless of bare ass content, unless it's Gorgeous. It's always something fun and exciting, which is cool since very few movies get me fired up these days. What makes me sad is that I really miss seeing them debut on the big screen. I'm not talking about dubbed, edited, and re-scored bastardizations from Dimension, the people who brought you gangsta rap in Police Story III and everything in Spy Kids (in answer to your unasked question, yes, someone is going to hell for that movie). We used to always time trips to New York City to coincide with Chinese New Year, which in turn meant the debut at the Music Palace of a new Jackie Chan film. Rumble in the Bronx didn't seem nearly as stupid sitting in the balcony of the theater alongside hundreds of cheering, shouting, rowdy Chan fans. Seeing the premiere of Drunken Master II was positively electric. The theater was a complete nuthouse. People went insane. It was far and away the most fun I've had attending a film that was not at a drive-in movie theater.

I moved to New York when the Music Palace was in its decline. The collapse of the Hong Kong film market hit the theater hard. No one wanted to go see Wong Jing's latest piece of shit, which would no doubt have a title like Naked Killer VIII: All Whore Bitch Slut Women Rape Rape Rape yet would still manage to feature very little nekkidness while, at the same time, being non-stop hateful, misogynistic, and god-awful boring. Annual Jackie Chan films became a thing of the past as American studios nabbed the rights to his films. The Music Palace countered this downturn in business by trotting out classic Hong Kong films, which again is something I was incredibly fond of. For a couple years, I could amuse myself on a Saturday afternoon with a six dollar double feature on the big screen of films like Zu, Dragons Forever, and Swordsman. The theater wasn't nearly as packed, but there was always a decent sized crew there. As I did for every movie I ever saw at that run-down, wonderful place, I sat in the front row of the balcony. No matter when I went, no matter what movie I went to see, I seemed to always sit in front of the eight-hundred year old guy who would chain smoke and erupt into nerve-shattering fits of phlegm-choked coughing.

The beauty of the Music Palace was also its ugliness. As long as you didn't bring a forty-ouncer of Colt 45 in with you, you could do pretty much anything you wanted. You want to bring in snacks? Hell, the Music Palace would let you walk across the street and bring back a whole roast pig if you weren't enticed by their concession stand selection of M&M's, gummies, and dried cuttle fish niblets (not all mixed together). If you wanted to stay all day and watch the same two movies over and over, they were cool so long as it wasn't overly crowded. Thus, it became a refuge for homeless guys who needed a couple hours out of the cold or old Chinese dudes with nothing better to do than sit back, smoke, and watch some kungfu.

The audiences were always fun as well. This was no hush-hush affair. People were loud and vociferous. They cheered, clapped, hooted, hollered, and if the movie stank, they booed and heckled the images on the screen with a smattering of barbs and jabs in English, Cantonese, Vietnamese, or Spanish. It was always a mixed ethnic crowd. The movies may have been from Hong Kong and the theater may have been in Chinatown, but the people who came did so simply because they loved the films. Everyone left with smiles on their faces, either because they'd enjoyed the film and the experience, or because they'd enjoyed ripping on the film or groping their date when the lights went down.

I admit that I'm lowbrow. It doesn't bug me. For me, movie theaters are at their finest when you're seeing a wild film with an equally wild audience. You want to annoy me? Put me in an arthouse theater full of wannabe film students who nod constantly in "comprehension" and feel the need to laugh quietly at strange points just to prove they get something you totally missed. No, I did my time in the arthouse world. I read the books, studied the techniques, learned the theories. I tried to fool myself into thinking I was part of that world, but in the end, when it came down to French existentialism or Foxy Brown, the choice was clear.

Likewise, I like my movie-going experience suitably rowdy. If I was seeing a serious film with lots of drama, then sure, the gab would be out of place and downright annoying. But hell, when I'm watching shit blow up or fly around in space or jump off a building and kick someone in the head, cheering, booing, eating, and back row sex are all essential parts of the overall experience.

Unfortunately, the Music Palace could only sustain itself so long on the memories and nostalgia. In 2000, it finally shut its doors for good while all around it new DVD stores sprung up. It was a great loss. New York has very few offbeat theaters full of that much character and energy left. Where we were once unique, now we're just another collection of AMC and Lowes' cineplexes. The old Chinatown movie theater on the corner of Bowery and Canal is now a big Buddhist hall, and the Music Palace sits a little ways down the block, vacant and still echoing with boisterous laughter and yelling.

New Jackie Chan movies are still fun, but man alive do I miss the experience of seeing them on the big screen with hundreds of other rabid fans on opening night. Going to Lai Ying Music on the Bowery and finding the movie on DVD is cool, but it can't hold a candle to the days when I could see it on the giant screen at the movie theater right next door.

So, in the most roundabout way ever, it all finally brings us to the movie at hand, Jackie Chan's big Hong Kong film for 2001 (probably not his biggest film of the year, since Rush Hour II will be opening later in the summer). Like I said, I enjoyed most of his recent films even if they were flawed, and I really enjoyed Who Am I, which this film is very similar to.

One thing's for certain: as much as Jackie exploits his ability to hire cute female co-stars, so too does he still flex his considerable muscle to score all sorts of exotic location work no other Hong Kong film maker could ever dream of getting. Accidental Spy bounces from Hong Kong to Turkey, giving the film a real international, James Bond type feel, which is fine by me. Most of his films since Armour of God have featured a fair amount of globe hopping, and while some people have complained about the "international spy" feel of the films, I dig it, what with me being a fan of old spy films and all.

The action begins in Turkey with a bunch of villagers and tourists getting mowed down by masked men wielding machine guns. Nothing like a little mass slaughter to get things going. Obviously, that'll all come into play later, but the film quickly jumps to Jackie, who for the first time since I can't remember when, does not play a guy named Jackie. This time, he's Buck Yuen, acclaimed salesman of all things gymnasium related. The bit with an over-zealous Jackie trying to sell a rich couple on fancy exercise equipment is pretty funny. He resorts to doing flips on the trampoline and bouncing around on the exercise ball (the one piece of equipment he has ever been able to actually sell). This being a Jackie Chan film, none of this has much to do with anything, and of course Jackie is still an ex-cop. Jackie's been a cop or an ex-cop in pretty much 98% of the films he's made in the last twenty years.

While on his lunch break in the mall, Jackie foils a bank robbery. Of course, where some people would just punch someone or trip someone up, Jackie's attempts to foil the robbery result in a giant crane smashing through a glass building while Jackie dangles from the arm. And you thought you were daring on your lunch break because you took an extra fifteen minutes. Jackie becomes a big celebrity as a result of costing ten times as much in damages as he probably saved by foiling the robbery, sort of like when the Powerpuff Girls destroyed an entire neighborhood and historic bridge to stop a man who stole a hundred dollars.

His fifteen minutes of fame bring him into contact with a disheveled private eye played by the always delightful Eric Tsang (is every private eye in the world named Manny). You might know him as Blockhead from the old Lucky Stars movies, or you might know him as the host of a long-running Hong Kong variety television show. Or maybe you know this silly little guy as what he actually turned out to be: one of the most influential and powerful men in the Hong Kong entertainment world. Go figure. Eric Tsang is a powerful producer and his fellow Lucky Star and goofball slapstick comedian actor friend John Shum is one of the most important pro-democracy activists in China. What a weird world. Together they are the equivalent of Bud Abbot and Larry Fine. I suppose you really can't judge a book by its cover. Any day now, someone will discover that in America Don Knotts has been calling the shots all along.

Tsang is seeking out male orphans born in 1958, which Jackie, err Buck, happens to be. I guess since he took the time not to call himself Jackie in this movie, I shouldn't call him Jackie in this review. I guess his reasoning for always naming himself Jackie makes perfect sense. When you look up at the screen, you don't see Buck Yuen or anyone else. You just see Jackie Chan, playing essentially the same everyman (albeit an everyman with incredible kungfu skills) Jackie Chan character he's always been.

Tsang has been hired by a dying Korean man who is seeking his long lost son, who ended up in an orphanage in Hong Kong. With the promise of an all expenses paid trip to Korea, Buck agrees to at least go meet the guy.

No sooner does Buck get to Korea than he is confronted by an American-Korean reporter named Carmen (Min Jeong Kim in what looks to be a debut). She is working on a story about the man who might be Buck's father, Mr. Park. Turns out he was once an infamous North Korean spy who defected to the South while in Turkey. Jackie seems mildly interested in all this, but since he doesn't even know if the guy is actually his father, he doesn't have much to say. Park meets with Buck and challenges him to a little game of hide and seek. He has something of great value hidden, and Buck needs to find it. Unfortunately, the guy won't say what, though it soon becomes apparent that others want it, whatever it might be. When Buck goes to visit Park one evening, he finds a load of hitmen in the room. Jackie deals with them through creative use of kungfu and those defibrillator things they use to shock people's hearts back into operation.

Something to note right away: one of the things people complained about most in regards to Who Am I (and I do not share their outlook) was that there wasn't enough action, or at least not enough kungfu action. Who Am I basically had three extended fight scenes, but Accidental Spy opts instead to deliver a lot of shorter but more frequent action sequences. It's a similar formula to Jackie's 1980s films, and I think it works brilliantly. It keeps the film from ever slowing down. It's also worth noting that for the first time in forever, some of the action scenes are not based around Jackie running away from people. Jackie's run away from more adversaries than I can remember. Some of his best fight scenes came as a result of trying to get the hell out of town. Accidental Spy finally strikes a balance between "I'm going to run away and hit you with random things" and "I'm going to just stand here and hit you with random things."

Buck Yuen ponders the small number of clues left by Park, and eventually discovers a coded series of numbers that wind up being the telephone number for a bank in Istanbul. Some of Buck's detective work comes to him pretty easily, and Jackie communicates hard thinking by furrowing his brow. The narrative explains it all away by pointing out that he's very intuitive about a lot of things. Okay, sure. Hell, I've let worse things slide. With the $10,000 left to him by Park, Buck hops the next plane to Turkey, which is not unlike hopping on the last train to Clarkesville, except that it takes you to Turkey, where if you are lucky you can catch a revival showing of The Man Who Saved the World.

In Turkey, Buck finds a safe deposit box stuffed full of cash, which makes him mighty happy, at least up until the point where the same guys who attacked him back at the hospital in Korea show up again. More fighting and flying in and out of car windows ensues as Buck fights protect his life and his new suitcase full of wealth. Turns out the assailants weren't all that interested in the money, though. When the cops arrive, they split, leaving the whole pile of cash untouched.

Jackie checks into a posh hotel that was once a famous hang-out for spies, and he soon meets Yong (Vivian Hsu), the associate of a Japanese gangster named Mr. Zen (Wu Hsing-kuo of Green Snake fame). Jackie, being a sucker for a purty girl, arranges a dinner date with her, then promptly gets attacked by those guys again in a Turkish bath in one of the film's funnier sequences. Jackie and his opponents slip and slide all over the place before Jackie escapes the building, losing his towel in the process. What follows is the copious amount of bare Jackie butt I alluded to earlier. The fight scene is pretty funny, not to mention more than a bit remarkable. If you thought it was clever how Mike Meyers strategically covered his privates in Austin Powers, you should see it done while the guy is back-flipping and kicking and jumping over tables. I'm guessing there were some pretty good bloopers from this scene, although they were left out of the end credit blooper reel we've come to know and love.

Jackie makes it to his meeting only to get attacked again by those guys demanding "the thing." They might get farther in life if they were a bit more specific. The thing? What do they want? The guy from the Fantastic Four? Mothra's egg? That disembodied hand from The Addams Family? The head with spider legs from John Carpenter's The Thing? I mean, history is not short on things. Maybe these guys would be better off if they clued everyone in on exactly what thing they were looking for. I'm guessing they saw Jackie's thing during that last action sequence, but apparently that wasn't good enough for them.

Buck and Yong are captured and taken to a seaside village where they beat Jackie up more and demand the thing. To be honest, at this point it's beginning to all sound a bit silly. Maybe there is a cooler vague word in Chinese, but since all of this dialogue is in English, they go with the thing, which just starts to sound funny, like one of those old jokes that takes twenty minutes to tell and then ends with a really stupid punchline like, "and then he was hit by a car."

While getting beat up, Jackie manages to at least figure out that the thing is a new strain of Anthrax, which would be slightly less fatal than a new album by Anthrax. Turns out Park was supposed to sell the virus to Mr. Zen but decided against unleashing such death upon the world. Now Zen wants it because, you know, he's evil, and these angry Turkish guys want it because it was tested in their village -- thus that opening scene of mayhem! See, it's all coming together. The beating of Jackie is interrupted when the same masked men from the beginning of the film show up and start killing everyone. Buck and Yong make their escape after managing to destroy the entire town. This is Jackie Chan, after all. Or rather, it's Buck Yuen.

While afloat in a little makeshift boat, Jackie notices track marks on Yong's arm. Mr. Zen keeps her under his control by addicting her to heroin. It's a really weird and tragic little subplot that seems out of place in a Jackie Chan film, to be honest. There's really no point to it. It's not like we needed more reasons to hate a guy who slaughters whole villages and wants to terrorize the world with biological weapons. That he addicted a perfectly nice young girl to heroin is just sort of icing on the cake. Jackie, of course, wants to help her because he knows she is an innocent caught up in things bigger than herself, and she is an orphan like him.

As fate would have it, just as she is about to freak out, along comes Zen in his lush yacht. After plucking Buck and Yong out of the drink, he makes Jackie an offer: turn over the anthrax, and he'll let Jackie keep the money (which it turns out was payment from Zen to Park for the virus) and take Yong away. The one hitch is that Jackie still doesn't know where the virus is even hidden. Of course, he eventually figures it out, and in what has to be a cinematic first, the evil villain does not get the merchandise then try to kill the hero. In fact, he takes the virus then lets Jackie leave with Yong just as he promised. Hey, he may force cute women to shoot up, and he may want to control the world's supply of anthrax, but at least he is a man of his word.

Carmen eventually resurfaces and reveals she is actually a CIA agent, exactly like the girl from Who Am I. No one seems all that surprised, though they do consider the whole trading anthrax for a girl thing to have been rather stupid, especially when it turns out Yong was injected with the anthrax. Advice: don't do things that will result in Jackie Chan seeking revenge on you.

The finale is another in the long line of big stunt pieces that rely on smashing up vehicles more than smashing up people, as Buck, Zen, assorted thugs, and a truck driving family all find themselves speeding down the highway in a variety of vehicles, including posh sedans, goofy looking motorbikes, and a burning petrol tanker. You may think it's zany, but it's just another daily commute for a guy like Jackie Chan. The finale is pretty fun even if it isn't kungfu. I figured we'd gotten our fair share of kicks throughout the film, so a big exploding gas truck flying off a bridge was perfectly in order. Ever notice how all these out of control heavy vehicles always get out of control near highway construction and half finished bridges? Just once, I'd like to see someone have to drive a hundred miles before they are able to jump out and drive the truck off a half-finished bridge or something.

After that, the movie ends about five times in the course of a couple minutes. There's the epilogue involving Buck and Eric Tsang's character, who is of course revealed to be more than he initially let on. This also fulfills Jackie's requirement to end some of his films with a really tasteless disease joke. In Drunken Master II we had to endure the stupid "blind retard" ending to what was an otherwise amazing film. This time it's a joke about snorting the ashes of a man who died of cancer. Ha ha. Those Hong Kong people! What cards!

But the movie doesn't end there. Oh sure, the credits role, and we get the prerequisite bloopers, but then the movie starts back up again with Jackie getting offered a spy job, traveling to Italy, and riding around while wearing a fake "mama mia that's a spicy meatball!" mustache. So I guess he didn't take his old job at the fitness store back. Anyway, if this is his way of saying, "If this movie does well, I'll make a sequel," then that's cool with me. Like I said at some point way up there, a lot of people have been lukewarm or downright negative about this film, but I thought it was pretty good.

The film's only real drawback is the Sammo Hung-esque schizophrenia in its tone. I mean, for a good hour we're treated to very typical and enjoyable action-comedy, and then all of a sudden there's this whole depressing heroin subplot out of nowhere. The movie turns deadly grim for a while, then decides to get all slapstick again for the final scene. The hell? It reminded me of Pedicab Driver directed by and starring Sammo Hung (who was famous for changing the mood of his films in the blink of an eye). Like Accidental Spy, that movie starts out as a slapstick action comedy, then turns into a fairly devastating, dark, and angry tragedy. It's cool to keep people off balance, but it doesn't entirely work in Accidental Spy. Instead of raising the intensity, it just detracts from the overall enjoyment. It's almost like it was just some sort of an afterthought.

Other than that -- and I can live with it -- I thought the movie was fun. It's got plenty of action, and just about all of it is great. The script is harmless, which is about the best we can expect from a Jackie Chan film. It doesn't try to be too clever, and that's good. The location work is great, and the movie's budget is on the screen. It's almost like Jackie intentionally set out to reclaim his spot as Hong Kong's most expensive film maker -- a title he has held on and off ever since the globe-trotting shenanigans of Operation Condor. You didn't think Jackie was going to sit back and let Storm Riders keep that honor, did you?

The acting is passable to good, with Min Jeong Kim's Carmen being the one big exception. It looks like this was her first role, so I'll cut her some slack, but she was pretty bad. I know traditionally the English language acting in Hong Kong productions has not been very important, but when over half the movie is actually done in English, you need to pay closer attention to who is doing the talking. Min Jeong Kim sounds like she's reading her lines for the first time in several scenes. The other people who do their acting in English are okay, but that's because they are either Jackie Chan, angry young Turks, or the black CIA guy whose only job is to grimace and say, "You really screwed things up!"

Vivian Hsu does alright. I didn't expect much of her, but she actually made me care to some degree about her character, though she could use some work on conveying certain emotions. She accomplishes her withdrawal scenes by sniffling a lot. Maybe she should have watched Gene Hackman freak out and scream about the Lakers or whatever during his detox scenes in French Connection II. Hell, I'd pay good money to see cute, sad looking little Vivian Hsu screaming incoherently about basketball while she rolls around on the floor.

I will say this about both Min Jeong Kim and Vivian Hsu -- they manage to be a whole hell of a lot less annoying than those women from Mr. Nice Guy, who I was actually hoping might get killed at some point just so they'd shut the hell up. Min Jeong Kim is a bad actress, and Vivian Hsu is just sort of there, but at least neither of them grated and annoyed. When it comes to female sidekicks in a Jackie Chan film, about the best you can hope for is that they won't drive you insane, and neither of the gals here ever got that bad and whiny.

The director of the film, Teddy Chan, is someone I expect great things from. He's one of the big names behind what I hope will prove to be the rebirth of the Hong Kong film industry. With films like Purple Storm and Downtown Torpedoes under his belt -- both of which I thought were tremendous amounts of fun -- he seems heading down the right path. In Accidental Spy he shows the most skill at figuring out how to direct Jackie since Sammo Hung or Jackie himself. Stanley Tong was amazing at making Jackie seem dull and lackluster, which must take a lot of work. Benny Chan (another name I expect to deliver big things) did pretty good with Who Am I, which I've already pointed out is very similar to this film. Teddy Chan seems to click best out of any of the new guys working with Chan. The film has good pacing, and Teddy knows when to lay off the "directing" and just let Jackie do his stuff. He manages to use the camera to augment Jackie's skills while covering up the fact that the guy is slowing down and can't perform like he used to.

Also of no

Such behavior is still commonplace, and it is from this rich literary tradition that Cannibal Holocaust draws. This film is generally regarded as one of the grossest, sickest films ever produced, and I'm hard-pressed to argue. In fact, there was a time when the film earned itself a reputation as a genuine snuff film, which is only true if you count the naimals that were killed to make this movie. As I heard the story, Deodato even had to produce some of the actors before a court to prove they were not dead, and that their onscreen demise, however realistic and horrifying, was in fact nothing more than a very good special effect. Of special note was the woman who performed the now infamous "ass through mouth impaling," but we don't want to ruin things by getting ahead of ourselves.

As the title suggests, the film has something to do with cannibalism. We begin with a Franco Nero looking guy traveling to the Amazon to find out what happen to his film crew pals. The crew had gone into the jungle to make a documentary on cannibals. Common sense would tell me that if my friends go into the jungle to make a film about cannibals, and then we never hear from them again - -well, it just seems like a no-brainer. But this guy must find out for sure. So he bullies some local tribesman into guiding him and his gruff companions into the jungle.

The first tribe they encounter has been ravaged, their village burned, their food ruined. Damn cannibals! But wait -- soon our hero finds out it was not cannibals who did this -- it was the film crew. In their quest to capture the most shocking and grotesque images possible, the crew themselves instigated a massacre. In this revelation lies the enveloping, scathing message of Cannibal Holocaust. The primitives, even the cannibals, commit horrible acts in the name of ritual, in the name of warfare, and in the name of survival. Modern man, however, will initiate a brutal slaughter of innocents simply for the entertainment value of it all.

Eventually, our hero hooks up with the cannibal tribe that lives in the trees in the deep jungle. After gaining their trust, he finds the remains of his friends, and takes their film canisters back for development.

From this point, it becomes a film within a film, as we watch the crew fool around, goof off, and finally set off on their bloody mission. It is through these films that he realizes how horrific modern man can be, as he watches his "friends" butcher the innocent, torture animals, rape young girls, and burn villages to the ground.

Unfortunately for the film crew, after they are finished with the benevolent natives, they stumble acorss some less soft-boiled locals. You find yourself almost rooting for the cannibals as they fight back against the sadistic film crew. Well, you don't actually root, because it's pretty hard to root for rape and castration.

The film definitely walks the thin line between "cautionary tale" and outright exploitation. In many ways, Deodata creates a celluloid paradox, a film that angrily lashes out againts inflicting suffering on others simply to entertain, while at the same time augemnting his special effects with real-life scenes of animal mutilation and murder. Deodata gets tripped up in the seductive power of the one thing he most criticizes in this film.

Nevertheless, it's a powerful, if stomach-turning piece. Deodata parades a seemingly endless procession of horrific images across the screen, from scenes of the camera crew fucking like animals amid the charred remains of the village they torched to the aforementioned "poster" effect, the woman they find impaled with a sharpened stake running through her ass and out her mouth. That's one for the ages, my friends. And there's plenty more where that came from. Even among gorehounds, Cannibal Holocaust is regarded as something that can be difficult to get through.

It's probably because it's very much not your typical splatter film. It has a much more "documentary" feel to it, not entirely unlike another extremely grotesque and controvertial atrocity film, Men Behind the Sun, which also walks (and often stumbles across) the same line between criticism and exploitation of certain events. Deodata's direction departs from drawn-out gore shots and steady close-ups. The camerawork is often shaky and voyeuristic, as if we are hiding in the brush watching the horror unfold. Despite the sometimes outrageous events onscreen, the film maintains a serious and realistic tone.

Unfortunately for the film's rather lauditory message about the savagery of modern man, and how having been so far removed from nature for so long has, in its own way, driven many of us quite mad, the film loses itself in violent excess and can't help but cross over into the realm of exploitation. I'm no discontent of exploitation film-making, but it does seem that Deodata tends to shoot himself in the thematic foot when he can't help but linger over involved turtle skinnings. The film's social commentary would be much easier to accept if he hadn't been so into depicting real scenes of animal cruelty. I mean, if you can fake a castration or gutting of a human as well as Deodata can, surely you can pull off the goring of a fake turtle.

Despite it's flaws, Cannibal Holocaust remains a worthwhile mile marker in the history of cult film. It's not an easy film to recommend, and I know some people actually have a hard time dealing with the fact that they like the movie. I like it, and that doesn't bother me. I recognize some of its innate hypocrisy, but in the end I admire the boldness and ambition of the project far more than I am reviled by its horror. You can probably figure out whether or not you're the type of person who would understand this film, or be outraged by it, who would watch intently or who would be sickened, who would enjoy it (for lack of a better wor) or who would just fall asleep or wonder what's on Must See TV tonight. It's a call you have to make for yourself.

China has one big advantage over Hong Kong, and that's space. Lots of it. China may be the world's most populated country, but it's also pretty damn big, and once you get out of the cities, China contains some of the most diverse and breath-taking landscapes anywhere in the world. The location work here is great, as a result, though not nearly as compelling as Kids From Shaolin, which was a really beautiful film.

The kungfu is top-notch, and the acting is good. What more can you ask for in a kungfu film? Or any film, if you are like me. When someone told me to see the "charming You've Got Mail," my first question was "How is Meg Ryan's kungfu?" When I found out she didn't do any, well, you know how it is.

While this isn't quite as good as the Mainland's best known Shaolin film (Shaolin Temple starring Jet Li Lian-jie), it still ranks among the top kungfu films ever made. Young Hero of Shaolin chronicles Fong Sai-yuk's arrival at the Shaolin Temple (actual), where the monks kick ass, sleep on suspended ropes, cook using a Buick sized wok while hanging upside down from the ceiling and using a ten foot pole to stir with (much like I do myself), and other such things you do when you're part of the baddest religion on the planet. You don't catch Christian monks doing stuff this cool ... although they do make wine, so maybe somewhere there are some Christian monks doing drunken boxing.

After a while, Fong Sai-yuk leaves the temple to go out and spread peace and ass kickings to villains across China. That's the biggest advantage to being a Buddhist monk rather than a Catholic one. You can be into peace and harmony but are still allowed to dole out righteous beat-downs to the evil-doers of the world. Catholic monks and nuns aren't really afforded the same ability, though I know of a few Catholic Brothers over in Brooklyn that will take your ass in a boxing match. However, I don't know how the Pope feels about his sheep going out to beat up wrong-doers.

Fong duels with all sorts of crooked types before settling in to deal out some Shaolin justice during a crooked martial arts tournament. You know Fong has to jump up there and do some fighting on top of poles. Wonderful kungfu, a good story, great sets and costumes, and a good story make this an all-around quality production that any self-respecting kungfu fan needs to have in their arsenal.

Anyway, the plot? Hell if I can unravel it. It's too complex for my dumb hick mind. But there seems to be this city. A lot of people go there, maybe for a kungfu tournament. I don't remember, and I kept falling asleep. One guy has this jade dagger he keeps bragging about, so you'd think it would be central to the plot or something. Mostly, he just shows it off for a while like a high schooler who sneaks a switchblade into school and then gathers everyone around in the gym locker room to look at it. After that, he puts it away, and that's pretty much that.

There's also a lot of people in masks looking for revenge (thus the title I guess). In the end, everyone ends up related to everyone else, there is much treachery, and the old guy jumps out of the well some more.

If there is more to this film than what I recounted here, I missed it in between dozing off and making sandwiches. The kungfu sucks, the plot seemed to be comprised of several typical plot elements drawn at random out of a hat and then strung together with ten-day-long scenes of guys looking at a knife or old men jumping out of wells.

Actually, that makes it sound more amusing than it really was. I would rather gnaw my own foot off at the ankle than watch this film again. Well, not really, but I really don't ever want to watch this movie again.

To whittle things down to a more specific level, I don't think I've ever given up on a zombie film, not even on one of those abysmal shot on video homemade movies starring a bunch of stoned teenagers. Zombies are my favorite beasties in the world of horror cinema, and I can sit through pretty much anything as long as I know at some point, someone is going to mash some pig innards against their face in order to convey the eating of human entrails. I don't expect everything to be Dawn of the Dead. I don't even expect everything to be Zombi 3. When it comes to zombies, I don't demand much.

Which is why Stacy is such a frustrating experience for me. The fact that I was unable to get through this relatively short film in one -- or ever four -- sittings without getting bored and annoyed amazed me. That had never happened to me, not during a zombie film, not even during Hell of the Living Dead or Zombie Bloodbath.

On paper, Stacy should be one of the most goofily enjoyable zombie film ever made. It has so much going for it. For one, it's Japanese, and while being Japanese doesn't imply your inherently better at anything apart from being Japanese, Japan has boasted a pretty spectacular record when it comes to horror films in general the past few years, and zombie films in particular. With Italy and the United States laying off the ghouls despite the popularity of Resident Evil inspired zombie video games, Japan stepped forward to administer the property, giving us such wonders as Wild Zero and Versus, two films that respect the zombie genre while reinventing it (without destroying it) as a rock and roll fable and supernatural gangland fantasy respectively.

Outside of the zombie subgenre, Japan has given the world everything from Ring to Uzumaki to Kairo. Japan has become the new global capitol of horror, and it's proven itself more than worthy of the responsibility.

But Stacy, based on the novel of the same name by Ootsuki Keni, isn't just a zombie film. It's a cheap zombie film, and those are often the best kind. But wait! There's more. It's also a cheap zombie film about an ever-growing army of undead Japanese schoolgirls! First impressions, then, would make someone like me, someone with such poor taste and low expectations, that this might just be one of the best damn zombie films ever made, continuing in the vein of Wild Zero and Versus by delivering a film that isn't scary but sure is a hell of a lot of fun.

But it isn't even close. It's not even close to the enjoyable but over-rated and fairly idiotic Junk. In fact, Stacy is probably one of the worst zombie films I've ever failed to sit though, and this comes from someone who has seen the bulk of work from Bruno Mattei and Todd Sheets. How a film can start off with such an amusing premise and then go so terribly wrong is a bit baffling. This sort of movie isn't difficult to make, after all. And it starts off promisingly, with some great low-budget gore effects that will make this, if nothing else, one of the goriest of all Japanese zombie films. Even that isn't enough to save the sinking ship, though, and misguided attempts at incredibly unsuccessful drama drag it straight to the bottom of the barrel.

The plot is simple enough: a bizarre virus makes all teenage girls transform into flesh-hungry ghouls, dubbed Stacys after the first one to succumb, who flail and stumble about in the most ridiculously overblown, epileptic fashion. How they ever get anywhere is a miracle unto itself. The only people I can think of who would make slower progress on an average walk would be those ZZ Top girls who had to bounce and shake like Jell-O every step of the way, or maybe the gang from Fat Albert -- but at least they looked cool with their crazy walks. The government of Japan has mobilized specially trained "rekill" squads to deal with the girls who are not killed by their own family and loved ones. In true zombie film fashion, these specially trained squads are completely inept and look like they've had maybe three days worth of training, most of which was accomplished by playing video games based on Tom Clancy ideas. If I ever make a zombie movie, and lord knows I've been working on a particular idea long enough, I'm going to make the military somewhat harsh (as dictated by the bizarre circumstances) but otherwise effective in much of what they attempt. It's not like I'm some gung-ho type, but zombie film soldiers are really starting to bore me. Every director does the same thing -- just make them yell, curse, and shoot a lot. Most of them get away with having shaggy hair, too. I say give them boys a haircut and make them behave like soldiers!

Okay, right away the safe bet would be on this movie being written by someone who had a lot of trouble getting dates in high school. The treatment of young girls is pretty vicious on first impression. And on second impression, for that matter, but frankly, anyone who could be offended by (or even bother looking for) social commentary in a trash film like this probably isn't going to be watching in the first place. If Japanese films, especially horror films, have proven anything it's that they are definitely not for those with weak hearts or moral sensitivity to, well, anything. So what do we have here? A savage critique of the mindless Kogal trend that turns young Japanese girls into greed-driven, shallow zombies who will trade sexual favors to rich old men in exchange for fancy clothes and accessories? Perhaps, but frankly, at this point Kogals are old news (I'm mor einterested in those crazy-ass girls who wrap themselves up in gauze like they just wandered our of the ER), and social commentary about them is as fresh and shocking as someone in America making a movie that exposes the fact that under the seemingly happy veneer of small-town life, there are often hidden passions, desires, and evils waiting to erupt. What's the next news flash? Pro wrestling is scripted? Religious zealots can sometimes be hypocrites? When will the shattering of my illusions end?

The movie follows three different but equally uninteresting groups of people. There are the Romero kill squads (the in-jokes here come fast and frequent and are about as subtle as hitting a sack of wet mice with a sledge hammer) and a couple guys forced into service. There's a puppeteer and the seemingly crazy young schoolgirl who adopts him as her killer and spends the entire movie giggling in a most annoying fashion. And then there are the Drews, a group of young as-yet uninfected girls who dress up crazy, idolize Drew Barrymore, and earn money as vigilante zombie killers. I really wish describing these groups of people didn't make them sound in the least bit interesting. Pretty much all the Romeros and Drews do is yell at each other for no real reason. From time to time, someone will try to communicate the gravity of the situation by having a freak-out, collapsing on the floor and crying while screaming out about the horrible fate of the world and those poor girls. It's really bad. Worse than soap opera melodramatics. And if you're wondering if they trot out that hoariest of cheap horror film tricks to show fear and despair -- the head clutch -- rest assured that it is here in abundance.

Working with the Romeros is the standard issue mad scientist working out of what all cheap horror films use in place of a real laboratory: a basement dressed up with an old computer and an operating table. The doctor's job is to talk to himself a lot about finding the cause of the affliction, and once the truth is out there, it isn't really all that interesting.

Then there's the puppeteer and his crazy girl. They don't do anything at all but walk around while she squeaks and giggles in a fashion more shrill than even the most abrasive Melt Banana CD. I know some people consider this cute, but a real man like me (one who walks around in his underwear and eats Hot Pockets) prefers a deeper, sultrier voice. This guy seems to have attended the William Hurt school of acting, which urges you to show no emotion, speak in a single tone of voice, and always look vaguely stoned. Not to go off on a tangent, but how the hell does William Hurt continue to get jobs? I mean, Steven Seagal can't act, but at least he pretends to beat people up and can probably do pretty good at that thing where you put a giant top hat over your head and upper torso and draw a big whistling face on your fat belly. William Hurt doesn't even have that, and perhaps has even less acting talent than Seagal, yet people keep hiring him. It's safe to say that as bad as anything in Stacy might be, it's at least better than watching William Hurt.

Pacing is the movie's primary problem. I can overlook threadbare sets and a budget that might one day be as lavish as what you might get for a rural community playhouse revival of "Flowers for Algernon," but what I can't overlook is the excruciating way in which this eighty minute movie seems to last for days. I have never stopped watching a zombie movie, but this one finally got the better of me. I turned it off about five different times, and it took me multiple tries throughout a week to actually finish the dreary thing. It has no purpose and no direction, and it feels like they're just making crap up as they go along - and not very good crap, at that. What should be resolved in seconds takes minutes, and those minutes seem like hours. There were scenes where I was on the verge of tears, begging the movie to just end the scene and move on. But it never would. Just as I thought I'd reached my breaking point and could tolerate "man falls to his knees and screams in the street" no longer, the film would deliver a solid body blow by continuing the scene another several minutes, repeating the same one or two lines of dialogue as the video camera wanders around, apparently as mind-numbingly bored by the proceedings as I was.

On more than one occasion, it seems like cast members are just standing around doing nothing as if they've all forgotten what it is their supposed to be doing. It's the cinematic equivalent of that "What do you want for lunch?" "I don't know. What do you want?" ritual that grinds people down in the workplace every day. Playing fast and loose with a script, or a concept is one thing, and it works if all the other ingredients compensate for the slapdash nature of the plot, but here it's not even as if they're jumping from one goofy idea to the next. They're jumping from one lack of idea to the next. Hey, nothing's happening in this scene anymore, so let's stick with it for a few, then cut to the next scene, where there is also nothing happening. And I don't mean nothing as in it's just boring. I mean nothing. Actors stand around like they're waiting for cues that are never going to come. You're in big trouble when the most animated members of your cast are the living dead.

And let's talk about the living dead for a moment. What's the deal with these girls? I know all zombies have to do the zombie shuffle with outstretched arms, but this is just too much. These zombies don't shamble or stumble everywhere so much as they electric boogaloo to and fro. It's really quite silly, especially when it's combined with "crazy eye rolling" the likes of which I've not seen since the last System of a Down music video.

So no worthwhile characters. Okay, I can actually live with that. Italian zombie films have trained me well, and I can still enjoy on a visceral level a movie in which I give a damn about absolutely no one since everyone is so zero-dimensional. I mean, Junk had no likable characters, and Versus abandoned character development in favor of cool poses and punching holes through people's heads. I was able to overlook the lack of characters there since there was other stuff, primarily the pacing, that kept things hopping like a Chinese vampire.

Not here, though. The film crawls. Not because it's trying to build atmosphere or anything, but simply because all the action that does take place is so dull and uninspired. At Ultraman Land in Tokyo, I saw an Ultraman stage show where they called a little kid up on stage who did nothing but pick her nose and cry as Ultraman Taro tried to get her into the spirit of things, and that show had better action than Stacy. I won't even call the fights choreographed, because that would be an insult to anyone who ever orchestrated a very poorly choreographed fight scene. From fists to guns, it's honestly barely above the level of someone's homemade horror film from high school. Presumably this movie had at least some budget, and yet it managed to never exceed the lofty standards of a home movie in any category save special effects.

I expect bad writing from most movies, especially low budget, shot on video horror films. I suppose there are those out there who still think naming a character or organization after some famous horror film director is clever, or that dropping names like Bruce Campbell and George Romero is still witty. Personally, I find this self-referential style of humor exhausting. It's been done to death, but like a pesky zombie, simply will not retire. Year after year, a whole new crop of horror film makers name a character Romero or Dario and pat themselves on the back at what a slick in-joke they've written, unaware of the fact that a million before have done the same thing. It's the most obvious and tired of horror film cliches, even more so than a black character going to check what made that noise at the end of the long, dark corridor. I beg of all you future horror film writers: give the name game a rest.

So what's the score? Horrible pacing, and characters who generate all the interest of a lump of mud. What's next? The budget? I almost never fault a film for lack of budget. There are some people out there who don't seem to fathom the concept that not all movies are multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art eye candy. Some cost a buck fifty and make due with pie tins. I always accept a film within it's budgetary restraints. I know some guy making a single-camera first feature can't afford to hire ILM for special effects, so I grade his accomplishments based on spirit and ingenuity. What's the point of watching someone's shot on video no-budget film and complaining about the lack of cool special effects? It's like going to Disney World and complaining about the long lines.

As far as sets go, Stacy doesn't know when to reel itself in and live within its budget, and thus we get military installations that look like rec centers or high schools, and the aforementioned laboratory that looks like a laundry room. They didn't even spring for the Jacob's Ladder. What the hell kind of mad scientist doesn't own a Jacob's Ladder? Despite overreaching their means with locations, the movie acquits itself rather well in other departments. The gore effects are pretty phenomenal, and not just for a film of this budget. They pull off some great stuff, and they do it often. Too often, if fact. A film with this much gore, with this many exploding heads, severed limb, and gushing wounds, should be a lot more fun (well, for someone like me) than Stacy is, but that shouldn't take anything away from the fact that the effects crew pulls off some pretty dazzling tricks. It's too bad the other people involved in the film weren't as inspired to give it their all.

And therein lies the ultimate problem with the film: no one seems to give a damn. The writing is lazy at best, with the only funny joke being the commercial for a chainsaw called "Bruce Campbell's Right Hand II." The rest of the gags fall flatter that the worst performance on an open mic comedy night. The drama is even worse and should have been left out entirely. Sometimes, if you can't do it, you shouldn't try. The acting ranges from William Hurt-esque somnambulism to Shatnerific histrionics but without the camp value of either one of those performances. The direction is plodding but competent. Like pretty much all direct to video, shot on video cult fare from Japan, it's dull and unimaginative but gets the job done. Something about the cheapness of video seems to make people just not try very hard when they are working with it. Ten years ago, with analog editing suites, you would have had an excuse for this. Not today, though. You have digital editing systems for super-cheap. Learn to use them, and hone your editing skills before you make another movie. The only guys who showed up ready to play were the special effects crew, but even their constant flood of brains and blood can't make this movie interesting.

If I seem particularly spiteful in this review, it's only because I was really excited about the movie. It should have been a trashy, goofy blast. I read about it long before I saw it and thought the premise sounded promising. A Japanese schoolgirl zombie film, heavy on the gore and with lots of tongue in cheek references to other horror films? Seemed like a good idea, even if the whole "self referential" gag in horror films was played to death by the mid 1980s. I was expecting, well, not a lot, but at least something. Maybe something that was as poorly written but also as enjoyable as Dead Next Door. Maybe next time. I guess not every Japanese zombie movie can be a home run. They need their own Hell of the Living Dead.

That I really wanted to like this movie, and that it in turn made it so hard for me to even finish, has probably amplified my dislike of it. Ultimately, it's stupid and boring but has some nice special effects. It's not as good as Junk, which I didn't think was that good to begin with but is the closest in terms of budget to Stacy. Don't even bother comparing it to Wild Zero or Versus. Even if you don't care for those films, they still outclass this movie by a country mile. Stacy never becomes the madcap roller coaster ride it should be and needs to be to make the approach and concept work. In fact, it barely even manages to become one of those lame mine car kiddie roller coasters. It's worth a look, and it might even please you if all you want is gore. If you want anything more from a film, then Stacy will try your patience and leave you wishing it had been a different, better movie.

Lucky for you I spent my money on a copy of the latest Giant Robot instead.

Although if you think you will escape the wrath of a Don "The Dragon" Wilson kickboxing vampire film, you are sadly mistaken. You've merely been granted a temporary reprieve. If I am in an especially nasty mood, I may also post a review of Future Kick.

Hmmm, maybe Don "The Dragon" Wilson can team up with that Roman Catholic kungfu priest from Dead Alive ("I kick ass for The Lord!"), and the two of them can travel the countryside kungfu-ing the shit out of the living dead. Outside of the realm of Billy Chong films, there simply aren't enough kickboxing zombie movies.

Of course, the funny part about all this is that absolutely none of it is related to the film I'm reviewing in any way other than "I reviewed this film instead of the Don Wilson kickboxing vampire hunter film."

Unlike hundreds of other sites, I've pretty much shied away from the big names in Hong Kong film making, or at least away from their big films. Sure, we'll review a Jackie Chan film or two, but it'll be Fantasy Mission Force. And as you will see here, we'll review a John Woo film, but it sure as heck won't be The Killer or Face/Off.

Most folks cite the slick gangster film A Better Tomorrow as the breakout film for both director Woo and actor Chow Yun-fat. And that is, in part, true. It was the film that made them both household names (Chow far more than Woo), and it spawned hundreds of imitations. Where Jet Li's Shaolin Temple made mainland Chinese kids want to quit school and go join Shaolin Temple, A Better Tomorrow made Hong Kong kids wear Ray Bans and overcoats and quit school to join triad gangs. Woo must be really proud of that.

A Better Tomorrow didn't come from nowhere though, and a good film fan should be curious about how that film evolved from the muck that was John Woo's largely unsuccessful early career, which he spent making asinine slapstick comedies and other films worth forgetting or never experiencing in the first place. Woo's career as the high priest of "heroic bloodshed" began early on in his career with films like Countdown in Kungfu starring a young Jackie Chan and Delon Tam Tao-liang (and Sammo Hung wearing goofy Jerry Lewis novelty teeth in an otherwise very serious role). Things really started to develop in the fine film Last Hurrah for Chivalry, which again showed Woo's penchant for male bonding and gore. But this was nothing out of the ordinary for a kungfu film, and certainly nothing out of the ordinary for a disciple of legendary Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh. It wasn't until Woo was able to add guns into the mix that he really began his journey.

The oft-ignored, intensely violent Heroes Shed No Tears is the first film to really mark his break from the inane and stomach churning slapstick "comedies" of his early years and his move toward gun-oriented action films. Heroes Shed No Tears is his Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare's early drama about feuding families is soaked in gratuitous gore and violence. Tongues are ripped out. Heads are hacked from their bodies then catapulted back to their loved ones during dinner. It is a nonstop parade of brutality, gore, and tastelessness that most Shakespeare scholars like to pretend never happened. Obviously, it's my favorite play by the guy, and it's important historically not just because it's his first published play (as far as I remember), but because it also contains all the elements and themes that would become the crux of Shakespeare's work. They are rough, raw, and not all that well written, but they are most definitely there, taking form like amoebas in a great primordial soup of dramatics.

Heroes Shed No Tears is exactly the same thing for Woo. It's horrifically gory and violent -- this is not the stylish, over-the-top ballet of violence Woo would become known for, but it's still a look at the outrageous lengths to which Woo would take gun battles. All the basic ingredients that gel in A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head, and The Killer are present in Heroes Shed No Tears. They're raw and underdeveloped, but there they are. And just like Shakespeare fans ignore Titus Andronicus, most Woo fans have skipped over this mean-spirited little number in favor of his higher profile films. And you know, just like I love Titus Andronicus, I love this film.

This is, in many ways, a modern-day adaptation of the Lone Wolf and Cub story. The underrated Ko Hung stars as a soldier-of-fortune type leader of a ragtag band of mercenaries fighting the drug cartels in the Golden Triangle. For some reason, he also keeps his family nearby, which you wouldn't think he would do. I mean, if you are out with the boys killing drug smugglers, you have to expect at some point they're going to look for a way to get back at you. It's sort of the nature of the business, you know? And if, after a long day of shooting a bazooka at a warehouse full of heroin or opium, you hop in the jeep and drive down the street to the house where your family lives, well, you gotta sorta expect that the drug smugglers might go there as well.

But never mind that. Ko and the boys capture a bigtime general who is trafficking drugs, and no sooner do they have the cuffs on the guy than they are being pursued by vengeful lackeys. Fearing for their lives, Ko, his men, his son, and a couple other people who serve no real purpose other than to get in the way, all pile into the family jeep, which is really sort of comical. It's like a little clown car or possibly the antlers of the title character in Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, where the moose had like two dozens assorted animals hitching a ride on his antlers.

The nastiest thorn in Ko's side is a maniacal military man played by the one-eyebrowed priest himself, Lam Ching-ying. A lot of people site Lam Ching-ying as being the soldier-of-fortune in this film. Obviously, those people are insane or just don't know who Lam Ching-ying is. He is the crazy general, not the noble hero. Sort of like me. He engages in a series of very bloody gunfights with Ko's men, and even bullies some spooky but cool local trackers to badger, kill, and set booby traps for Ko. One of the most notably Lone Wolf and Cub inspired moments comes when Ko's son is trapped in a burning field and buries himself to escape the flames. If you are up on your Lone Wolf stories (an incredibly violent series of Japanese comic books and films about a lone samurai assassin who roams the bloody countryside with his little son in tow), one of the films features a scene where wee Daigoro is trapped in the middle of a burning field and does exactly the same thing. Or maybe that's just something they teach in Asia, the "stop, drop, and bury" method of fire prevention.

As Ko and his boys fight their way across the rural landscape of ... Thailand? Burma? Laos? I can't remember, but as they do it they meet a variety of other-worldly characters, including a pot-smoking American soldier and his wife. The entire journey is somewhat surreal, and it actually reminds me a lot of Apocalypse Now in that as the journey progresses, things get increasingly primitive, alien, and weird.

Woo takes the violence way over the top in a grueling scene in which Lam Ching-ying, who has one of his eyeballs shredded (when Ko shoots it out through the scope of the sniper rifle Lam was aiming through -- a scene that has been ripped off dozens of times since then, including Sniper and Saving Private Ryan), extracts horrifying revenge on a captured Ko by attempting to sew his eyelids open. This is shown from KO'S POINT OF VIEW as Lam giggles and we see the dangling, bloody thread drooping in and out of our point of view. This is actually even more disturbing and gross than I'm expressing. When Ko is rescued, his son has to chew the threads out of his dad's eyelids. I don't know why he had to chew them out, but hey -- who am I to argue?

Despite the obviously low budget, Heroes Shed No Tears (especially when you sew their eyes open) has a lot going for it. It's pretty much non-stop action from the opening scene, and it's easily Woo's most relentlessly downbeat, gory film. That's saying a lot when you remember the films Woo would go on to make. The film is fast-paced and exciting, and best of all, all bets are off on who is going to die. None of the characters are all that well developed, but Woo has never been a master at realistic characters. His people are always charicatures, symbols, and archetypes.

This actually aids the film, because you never really know who is going to buy it. In a Hollywood film, you know exactly who will die in a war movie. The noble leader will die. The jack-ass of the bunch will have a heroic change of heart at some crucial moment, and he will sacrifice himself. The guy with the girl back home who writes him to tell him she's in love with someone else will probably die. The nerdy pacifist guy with wire-rimmed glasses and a notebook full of writing will probably end up having to kill a lot of people in the end, but he'll probably live and be the film's narrator. He'll also be named "Scoop" or "Squirt" or "Specs" or something suitably nerdy. In another life, he would be a zine editor.

But in Heroes Shed No Tears pretty much anyone is fodder for the cannon. You half expect even the main guy to buy it halfway through, or even the little kid. You won't find too many films these days that beat the shit out of a little kid with as much glee as this film does. And he's not even that annoying, so you actually feel bad for the boy. Despite shallow characters, Woo successfully makes you feel for their plight and root for them on their utterly unreal odyssey through a mad landscape.

And of course, there is lots of friendship, bonding, exploding, and slow motion gun fights. Woo would become a much better technician in later films, but there is so much passion and energy in this film that you can't help but be taken in by it. It's uneven in places, but it's liking watching a surreal wartime flashback. Apocalypse Now meets Lone Wolf and Cub meets Southern Comfort (the movie, not the drink). It's not Woo's most talked about film, but it's one of my all-time favorites, and like I said, a boiling primordial soup in which all his signature themes and stylistic innovations can be seen in their embryonic, rudimentary stages.

Somewhere in this nihilistic, wrenching experiment is Bullet in the Head, and even though it's goofier than that later Woo masterpiece, it's still right up there in terms of sheer fierceness. The casual fan will probably be turned off by the tremendously grueling violence or the low-budget look. Those who stick around and endure the eyelid sewing scene get to witness what is still one of Woo's most brutal, surreal, and surprisingly poetic efforts.

Well, sooner or later we were going to have to address this, so it might as well be now. Arena Video, or maybe you know them as Xenon. Whatever the name may be, you certainly know their trailer for Black Spring Break. Since groups like the Wutang Clan revitalized the popularity of old school kungfu films among fans of hip hop, Xenon was quick to cash in on the trend. They grabbed every old kungfu film they could get their grubby mitts on, made ultra-shitty EP speed dupes of them, changed the names to something stupid, and dumped them on the market knowing suckers like me who knew better would still shell out a few bucks here and there for certain titles.

Xenon is a rotten company, make no doubt about it. Not as rotten as Tai Seng video, but still plenty sleazy. Just about every movie they got -- and I doubt they have the rights to most of them, since a good lot of their releases are nothing more than third or fourth generation dupes of the old Ocean Shores dubbed video cassettes -- they changed the title to have something to do with the Wutang Clan. Previously, they retitled everything to have something to do with Shaolin, and before that, I bet they were the ones going around adding "Ninja" to the title of every kungfu film back in the early 1980s. The implication is twofold: 1) black folks love kungfu movies, and 2) black folks are too stupid to realize this movie has nothing to do with hip hop music.

Assumption number one I can't contest. A healthy love of kungfu films is a requirement, in my opinion, so anyone displaying such a love gets points in my book. As for point number two, well that's obviously a load of nonsense. I doubt anyone but the dimmest kid, regardless of color, actually believes a movie was ever made with the title Wutang Hos, Thugs, and Scrillah, but they called a movie by that title anyway. This is to say nothing of the seemingly endless number of films they bought and called Rumble in Hong Kong or Chow Yun-fat's Hardboiled Killer. When it comes to insulting blacks and attempting to dupe people new to the world of Asian films, Xenon/Arena has absolutely no shame. Sammo Hung was never the Phat Dragon, and there was never a movie called Wutang Matrix. That last one is one of my favorites. I mean, what the hell? Did they honestly think someone was going to believe it was related in some way to the over-rated Keaneu Reeves sci-fi film? Geez, they have nothing but utter contempt for their target audience.

Frankly, I can live with insulting and stupid retitling if it means I'm able to get nice looking copies of movies I love. Despite the absurd titles, a lot of the films are actually top notch kungfu fare. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, most of the releases are nothing more than cheap-ass bootlegs. In fact, calling them bootlegs is an insult to bootleggers. A couple tapes are nice quality, but the fast majority of them are third generation dupes, often with chewed up pictures, constant tracking problems, EP speed, and other signs of quality and care. Just more evidence of how much Xenon hates you. I even got one where they neglected to even edit out the blue screen and "play" display when they started recording the tape. The artwork on the covers is often from entirely different movies as well. The only saving grace of these pieces of garbage is that the films are generally good even if the tape isn't, and you can pick them up for ultra cheap. It's worth the gamble in hopes that you score one of the rare decent prints or at least a movie that is so good you can live with the myriad technical glitches of the cassette.

Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver has always been one of my favorite kungfu films, if for no other reason than because it's so relentlessly depressing. Xenon has decided to retitle it Wutang Thugs, Hos, and Scrillah, which I guess is at least an accurate translation into "insulting street lingo," though I won't pretend to know what the hell "scrillah" is. I guess it's silver, but I've never heard anyone use the term. I may a dumb scrawny cracker, but I still live in New York. I can't even think of a situation in which some street thug would be talking about scrillah. Money, sure. Gold? You bet. But silver doesn't seem to be a high priority with today's up and coming street kids. Oh well, if there is ever an urban rush on the silver market, at least Xenon has the word ready for us. Scrillah aside, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with Wutang, which is par for the course in 99% of the Xenon tapes with "Wutang" in the title. I'm waiting for them to release Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as Wutang Matrix Killah and The Hardboiled Wutang Bitch.

One thing I can definitely say about this film is that it's aptly named. The movie is primarily about bandits, prostitutes, and silver. So right away you know what you are getting into. Fabulous fighter Don Wong Dao stars as a down on his luck cart driver whose one true love has been sold into prostitution to pay off her parents' debts. Wong dreams of the day he has enough money to buy her freedom, and they can forget all the nastiness in the world. Unfortunately, he seems to earn about ten silver pieces a year. With the going price for his lover's freedom being 180 silver pieces, he's not exactly making a lot of headway. Part of the problem could be his chosen profession. Cart driver? He proves early on he's a master of kungfu, so why not get a job as a bodyguard or an escort? Why not open a kungfu school? Geez, why not stand on the street and beg? You'd probably be doing better than what this chump is making.

He might also be doing better if he would quit paying to spend the night with his girl. I know he loves her and all, but shelling out your hard earned cash you're supposed to be saving to free her just seems counter-productive, especially when all they do is stand around and say, "I'm saving money to set you free." She knows that, asshole, and you just spent half of it to tell her.

As is required for a kungfu film, Wong crosses the local rich bastard, who then makes it his personal quest to humiliate Wong by sleeping with Wong's gal every chance he gets. He even goes so far as to threaten to buy her before Wong is able to do so, which at the rate Wong was going, would leave a cushy ten thousand year window of opportunity. Frustrated by his lack of progress, heart broken as he watches his girl service his arch-nemesis, and just generally pissed off at how the world seems constructed to keep the little guy down, Wong befriends a famous bandit named Sparrow. You may laugh at a guy named Sparrow, but then you'll have to explain to your friends how a guy named Sparrow kicked your ass and stole all your scrillah.

Sparrow offers Wong a chance to make more money in one afternoon than he would make in a lifetime, or once again, at the rate Wong was saving money, in ten million lifetimes. All Wong has to do is drive the cart in one of Sparrow's heists. Ahh yes, the getaway car driver. Is there any less fortunate character in all of action cinema? Set it in modern day American cities or ancient China, and the result is always the same. Getaway drivers have nothing but bad luck. Wong is hesitant. He's always been a straight arrow. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and the kungfu film thrives on the character of a good man gone bad or a peaceful man pushed to the brink of violence. Personally, I make it a rule in my life to never ever piss off a guy who struggles to maintain a peaceful nonviolent lifestyle despite being a whirlwind of kungfu power. It's just one of those things I figure I'm better off not doing, like heroin or robbing the Mafia.

Nothing is ever as simple as just stealing a huge shipment of scrillah, though. Lo Lieh runs an escort service hired to protect the silver. Unfortunately for the guy who hired him, Lo's true agenda is to work with the famed Three Scars Gang to steal the silver for himself. He'll dole out some to the gang, some for himself, and then triumphantly return the rest to its rightful owner, who will be thankful and give him a big reward. Personally, I'd kick the guy in the shins for letting my silver... err, scrillah... get stolen. Actually, no. Add to my list of things not to do "kick Lo Lieh in the shins."

Lo Lieh, of course, is a kungfu film institution. He was a staple of the wonderful 1960s Shaw Brothers swordsman films alongside Jimmy Wang Yu and Cheng Pei-pei. He usually played a good-hearted but somewhat dim-witted guy, and there was always a good chance for a romantic triangle involving he, Jimmy, and Pei-pei. If you only know Cheng Pei-pei as the leathery, truly frightening Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, then man alive are you in for a shock when you see how astoundingly beautiful she was in the 1960s. Lo Lieh's transition to kungfu films went much better than Jimmy's. While Jimmy faltered and never really hit a stride in kungfu films, Lo Lieh flourished, though not in the role we knew him for. After starring as a hero in the amazingly brutal kungfu classic Five Fingers of Death, Lo caught a bad case of the uglies. His mustache went from debonair to mangy, and he always seemed to be sweating a lot. It was only natural, then, to cast him as a bad guy, a role he played in scores of films. Whether or not he was evil more times than Wang Lung-wei is a counting job best left to today's fastest super-computers.

The Three Scars gang is lead by the delightful Angela Mao Ying, one of the true greats of kungfu films. I'm at a bit of a loss as to why you would cast Angela Mao in your film and then proceed to not have her fight, but whatever. She's cute, but cute is for wimpy girls who aren't powered by the fury of kungfu. Angela Mao should be cute and kick some serious ass. Anything else is just a waste of her talents. The Scars aren't all that happy with the deal, but like everyone else they have to make a living. They think it's unfair that they do all the work but Lo takes the lionshare of the loot. When they find out Sparrow is also after the silver, they're even less enthused, because he's damn good.

Wong agrees to drive the cart, and he and Sparrow are the first to get to the shipment of silver. When Sparrow demands that Wong kill the driver of the other cart, Wong refuses. He won't commit murder, and besides, that's a fellow cart driver there just trying to earn a living. Sparrow gets right pissed and attacks Wong, but after a rather great fight and a rather goofy "rolling shenanigans," Wong proves the better fighter. Sparrow is accidentally stabbed by his own knives and has to give the dying, "I knew I would die one day, but I never thought... it would be... like this!" after which one must spit up a lot of blood then fall over. The spitting up of blood is crucial. Any seasoned kungfu film fan will tell you that if you're gonna die, you have to spit up blood, preferably while making the "sour" face and reaching out with one arm while the other holds the knife in your belly.

Wong is terrified and takes off in the getaway cart, forgetting that the chests of silver are in the back. Meanwhile, the Three Scars gang is looking like a bunch of chumps hiding behind a tree a little ways up the road, wondering what the hell is taking so long. Wong stops to collect himself in the woods and realizes then that he has a shitload of scrillah with him. He does the "laugh and let the money fall through your fingertips into a big pile" thing, which I usually do, only with pennies. I don't know if there is a slang word for pennies that is comparable to scrillah. Let's call them nuchwaezchers. He starts daydreaming of proudly walking up to the whorehouse and demanding the release of his love. Then he falls asleep, which is generally a bad thing to do just a few minutes after killing a famous bandit and hightailing through the woods with a fortune in stolen silver.

When he wakes up, he's staring at the feet of a very annoyed Three Scars gang. There's a tussle in which Wong once again emerges victorious until Angela Mao steps up and shows us her secret weapon -- spinning razor blades hidden in her shoes! That can't be comfortable to walk on. She reveals that while she is indeed the leader of a ruthless gang of bandits, she's not totally devoid of compassion. She offers Wong a cut of the silver and a position in the gang, recounting to him how he reminds her of her husband when he was young and driven instead of laying on the ground after just getting his ass kicked by Don Wong Dao. Wong however maintains that despite the day's tragic turn of events, he'll only take enough money to free his girlfriend. He has no desire to enter a life of crime. Angela sighs and tells him it's too late; a life of crime has already entered him.

Back in town, word of Wong's sudden skill in the art of committing crimes spreads quickly. His girl can hardly believe that he'd do such a thing, while Lo Lieh is convinced that Wong's in cahoots with the Three Scars Gang to rip him off. When he confronts them using kungfu and a head-slicing steel whip, we finally get to see some ass-kicking action courtesy of Angela Mao. It's a great fight, like just about all the fights in this film. I only wish they'd done more with someone as capable as Angela in the film. Despite her secret weapon, neither she nor her husband are good enough to beat Lo. That task can only be completed by one man, and he's heading right into a trap at the brothel.

Wong knows they'll set a trap for him there, but he has no choice. What he doesn't expect, and frankly I don't know why he didn't, was that they'd have his girl tied up in the head slicing thing as a hostage. The good thing about a kungfu movie is that even with a predictable, run of the mill plot there is still a lot of tension generated because anyone could die at any moment. It doesn't matter who they are, how heroic or innocent they've been, or how important they've been to the story up until that point. Everyone is fair game. In an American film, there'd be no tension because you'd know the girl was not going to get decapitated. In an old school Hong Kong kungfu film, you don't have that promise. It's just as likely, perhaps even more likely, that heads will roll.

The final fight is fierce and suitably tragic. The hero doesn't get the girl, but he does get a noose around the neck. In one of the most powerful finales to a kungfu fight, Wong is tied to one end of a rope while Lo is on the other. Using an archway, he hangs himself in order to hang Lo. The final shot of Wong's limp feet hanging a foot above the ground while the stolen silver pours out of his torn pocket is a heavy-handed but effective visual, and it puts the entire moral point of the movie right there in front of you. It's that moral that lifts this movie above the usual "guy out for revenge" film.

Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver is simply a fabulous film. The acting is great, and the characters manage to avoid most of the cliches. Well, except for the villains. They laugh and stroke their beards and kill everyone they can. But the good guys are an interesting lot. Wong's character is great, noble without being overbearing. He's flawed. When he's faced with a chest full of silver, he becomes greedy. He gets confused. Frustrated. He struggles to be good, but he's also corruptible. In short, he's a fairly believable human character. Likewise, Angela Mao and her husband are interesting. They're not good guys. They're not even bad guys with hearts of gold. For the most part, they are pretty ruthless, but the back story of how they became bandits and why they show compassion for Wong makes them interesting.

Since this is a kungfu film, let's talk about the fights. Don Wong Dao is spectacular. His name may not be as familiar to people as Jackie Chan or any of the Shaw Brothers stars, but he's a tremendous fighter. Fast, powerful, and graceful. He carries the action scenes remarkably, and he's helped by a stellar supporting cast. Angela Mao and Lo Lieh are, of course, acclaimed veterans, but even the extras put up great fights. Quantity is one thing, quality another. Luckily, this movie features both, and that makes it one hell of a ride toward a thoroughly depressing ending. It's the sort of thing only a kungfu film, or possibly a spaghetti western, would ever dare to try.

Everyone is doomed and depressed. Mao and her husband miss their simple life. Wong has the whole girlfriend forced into prostitution thing as well as having to deal with the fact that once you take a step down the path of violence, it's very difficult to turn back. Greed and anger spawned from his frustration with seeing how goodness doesn't seem to accomplish anything in a world this evil eventually ruin his life despite how valiantly he struggles to avoid them. The depression adds an added degree of ferocity to the kungfu, which was already pretty fast-paced and impressive to begin with. Kungfu films are always great for morality plays because, and you'll have to excuse the pun, they pull no punches. The tragedy playing itself out in Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver is every bit as poignant -- and violent -- as a Shakespearean drama. I know ol' William's melodramatic works are on a pedestal these days, looked at as high art. But in their own day, they were seen as worthless, violent crap. Lowest common denominator trash full of greed, lust, and perversion. Maybe someday hundreds of years from now, people will regard kungfu films with the same degree of reverence. Ha, yeah sure. Pro wrestling, too.

The Xenon tape of this movie is awful, and not just because of the stupid new title they slapped on it. The tracking is off through the whole thing, so the picture is jittery. It's fuzzed out from being several generations down, and as if to cement it's place in the world of crappy bootlegs, they don't even bother to edit out the Ocean Shores copyright message at the end of the film. With that said, if you can't find the film anywhere else, you might as well fork over your eight bucks and deal with the shitty quality because the high quality of the film far outweighs the low quality of the transfer. I wish someone out there would spend a little more scrillah on these films and give fans a product worth buying. Movies as phenomenal as Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver deserve better treatment than this.

In this film, Chia-yung's first as a director, he packs in a ton of the best choreography you're likely to see. There is really not a bad thing that can be said about this completely incredible film. Liu Chia-hui plays a young hero who is attacked by some thugs and loses his memory of everything but one thing -- his ability to righteously kick some ass, kungfu style.

He teams up with a petty thief (Young Wang Yu, not to be confused with old Wang Yu, as in Jimmy Wang Yu) who plans on exploiting his amnesiac friend's kungfu prowess to make a quick buck.

Along the way, of course, pieces of the puzzle present themselves, and before the end credits, Liu Chia-hui is showing us why we loved him, and Young Wang Yu has become a reluctant hero himself. Stunning kungfu fights, great pacing, a good story, top notch production -- hell, what more could you want but to be able to make this kind of film yourself? A classic of the genre!

Whatever. No matter what you call it, this film kicks major kungfu ass. Joseph Kuo regular Li Yi-min plays his usual bumpkin character (not unlike early Jackie Chan roles), a guy who wants to learn kungfu to avenge his father's death at the hands of the dastardly Ghost Faced Killer.

At his kungfu school, Li is picked on and bullied by the other students, until the cook (Simon Yuen of Drunken Master fame) takes pity on him and teaches him "cooking," which is, of course, a thinly disguised way of teaching him kungfu. Those old masters can never just teach you kungfu. They always have to get some chores out of you in the process. Learning cooking and kungfu, of course, prepears our hero for a possible future as one of the Iron Chefs.

When the school's master finds the pendant of the Ghost Faced Killer in Li's possession, he mistakenly assumes Li is in cahoots with the villain and throws him out. Li seeks out the cook's brother, who, like the cook, says he can't teach kungfu; only chess playing. Again, the chess playing is how Li learns kungfu. I have tried to learn kungfu by doing lots of other stuff. Vacuuming my carpet. Watching television. Eating burritos. None of this has really made me any better at kungfu, though it always seems to work in the movies. I even tried to create my own style based on my old job at the bookstore, which consisted of lots of lifting and shelving. I think it would have been a pretty good style, but then I quit that job and started building web pages. It's more challenging to develop a kungfu based on sitting on your ass eleven hours a day, typing and clicking on the mouse. But I'm sure one of those old msaters will think of something.

Anyway, the chess master has a past with the Ghost Faced Killer, so you know everyone is going to square off in the end for some great kungfu fighting, which is the one thing Joseph Kuo films always deliver in overflowing abundance. He may not have the budgets or star power of the Shaw Brotehrs or Jackie Chan films, but he does have amazing kungfu fighters and breathtaking action scenes that come at you fast and frequent.

Brilliant fight and training scenes, a decent plot, and superb choreography highlight this grade-A kungfu feature. I like how every single opponent of the murderous Ghost Faced Killer watches him assume the Five Elements (that style again!) stance. They then yell out "Five Elements?!?!" in surprise. Considering that was the style he was famous for, I don't understand why everyone was so shocked. This is among the many older titles recently released by Arena to home video, so check it out. Even without any ninjas jumping around in it, you won't be disappointed.

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 for itself. The writing has just enough effort put into it to propel it from one supernatural fight scene to the next, and that's all it really needs.

The fight scenes come fast and furious, and though some undercranking is obvious in spots, it doesn't detract from the overall quality of the kungfu. Billy Chong is a superb looking fighter, carrying himself with a lethal combination of grace, speed, and power. It's a wonder he didn't become a bigger star than he did, but from what I hear, he's quite the attraction these days down on Malaysian television. You can't complain about steady work, I guess. I'd certainly trade in my job to be a big star on Malaysian television.

The final fight between Chong and his supernatural-powered nemesis is one of the top old-school fights out there, and while it doesn't come close to the pure frenetic genius of the Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao fight scenes contained in films like Prodigal Son, Magnificent Butcher, or Sammo's own supernatural kungfu farce Encounter of the Spooky Kind, it's still great stuff. The fights before that are all short but sweet as well, and while I would have preferred a few more minutes of kungfu in place of more malicious comedy, there's really no good reason to complain about a film with this much action in it.

The comedy is hit or miss, and while it misses more than it hits, it doesn't miss in a way that would turn you off to the film. I'm guessing the relationship between Billy and his dad is played mostly for laughs, but after a while, it's not funny so much as it is like one of those times when you were a little kid over at a friend's house while the friends was getting yelled at by his parents. You just sort of sit there sheepishly and awkward, trying to pretend you don't notice your friend is getting spanked right in front of you. Looking back, at least you can be thankful that your friend and their parents were not kungfu aces who settled all their arguments by yelling "Bastard!" and proceeding to kungfu the crap out of one another for the next five minutes.

On the plus side of the comedy is the guy who plays the wizard. He's superb as the not-entirely-evil priest who can't seem to catch a break, especially when he has to walk around town wearing a giant leaf hat in order to avoid the angry ghost whose resurrection he botched three times. A combination of wonderful facial expressions and perfect timing make him the standout performer in the film even up against Chong's impressive kungfu skill. The rest of the cast performs dutifully but without anything really spectacular to make them memorable. Muttonchops is just there to bellow and make the "angry surprised" face a lot. His accomplices fulfill the standard old school kungfu roles of "goofy fat guy" and "goofy skinny guy." If you are wondering about the inclusion of the giant fake wart with the single piece of super-thick hair coming out of it, don't worry. Hong Kong filmgoers seem to find that sight gag endlessly hilarious, and this movie isn't about to let them down.

The guy who plays the actual kungfu zombie is pretty damn good in his role as well. Though the white trousers and cape with no shirt look probably doesn't work for everyone (I've tried it several times), he manages to pull it off. I guess it helps that he is one of the living dead, well nigh indestructible, and can make his feet and fists burst into flames of fury. That's not the sort of guy you generally go up to and sneer, "Nice outfit, buddy."

Kungfu Zombie isn't an expensive film, and it does its best to cover the lack of funds by not aiming too high in the special effects department. Some eerie colored lighting, a few good and gross corpses, and a fog machine are all it needs to successfully create an inexpensive but interesting otherworldly feel. Since the movie is primarily about kungfu and secondarily about laughs, getting a good scare out of people isn't one of the top priorities. Still, the director manages some eerie shots, even if their eeriness is undercut by all the wacky goings-on. The movie is certainly put together a lot better than many of its contemporaries operating on a similar budget.

Kungfu Zombie is probably a better film for seasoned old school vets or people just looking for a severely twisted and delightful little mindwarp of a film. In the greater scheme of things, Encounter of the Spooky Kind is a better movie all the way around, and if you are looking for an introduction into the wild world of supernatural kungfu hijinks, you'll be better served by either Spooky Kind or Mr. Vampire, both of which are more successful in their comedy and chills, have better performances from actors and fighters, and simply had more money and talent behind them. Not that it's an insult to say something isn't as good as one of those two films. Spooky Kind was directed by and starred Sammo Hung, and Mr. Vampire had the benefit of Hung as a producer. In the late 1970s, early 1980s, no one -- and I mean no one -- was better than Sammo Hung. He completely revolutionized the kungfu film, delivering a level of energy and action that had never been seen and has never been matched since then.

So it's not so bad for Kungfu Zombie to be seen as sort of the plucky little brother of Sammo's better supernatural kungfu comedies. This movie was one of the defining elements of my journey toward being a kungfu film nutcase. It's crude and cheap, but it also has great energy behind it, not to mention some spectacular kungfu and a few creepy seconds scattered throughout the madcap zaniness. Although not the best example of the genre, Kungfu Zombie is a film I have a lot of fond memories of and still watch from time to time. Despite the loud performances and unlikable characters, the movie has charm and charisma. Watching it is like hanging out with old friends, even if you and your friends weren't the type to be resurrecting kungfu powered zombies to do your bidding.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 epoch