Synopsis: Undercover lawman Gastón (Gastón Santos) comes to the García ranch wanting to know about an odd carved idol. The ranch and the nearby town have been deteriorating for a year, ever since the death of the lady matriarch. Young heir María Elena García (María Duval) is troubled by the morbid atmosphere. Her superstitious Aunt Clotilde (Carolina Barret), is convinced that the dead woman is La Lorona, or "weeping ghost" escaped from the crypt. Gastón and his sleepy sidekick Coyote Loco (Pedro D'Aguillón) accompany a doctor back to the ranch and slowly uncover the truth. Is a conspiracy afoot, or is La Llorona really rising from the dead to strangle unlucky victims?

A bloody victim collapses in the swamp (which looks rather parched to us) next to a scary skeletal corpse, as a screaming female voice howls, "My children!" The Living Coffin then devolves into a Mexican version of a Lone Ranger episode. Gastón Santos' buckskin garbed, white hatted 'amateur archeologist' wanders into a haunted house situation. After a number of ho-hum spooky events, he turns out to be (surprise!) a federal agent rooting out a murderous conspiracy. The García household is paralyzed by missing corpses, unexplainable killings and a haunted clock with a dagger stabbed into its dial. The beautiful, available young heiress frets, the ranch manager wishes that the old lady in charge would stop being so superstitious and our noble Gastón relies on a comic-relief pal in a coonskin cap to hold his horse. When the lawman is stuck in quicksand or needs help rousting the local bad guys, that trusty horse comes to his aid like Rin-Tin-Tin. In the film's silliest scene, the white stallion fires a gun by pulling a string, thus fooling the bumbling baddies into thinking that they're surrounded. I don't know of any 30s series westerns that were this infantile: Gastón returns from a soaking in the mud with a spotless leather outfit, and hurriedly explains that he 'spent all day washing his clothes in a brook.'

The Living Coffin's 10% horror content is interesting because the movie is in color, and is fairly careful with its lighting. A few setups use color accents that, if they were a bit more creative, might remind one of Mario Bava's work. Typical is the shot where a large wooden beam blots out the upper reaches of the frame, conveniently blocking our view of the top of the set and the lights peeking over it. La Llorona's initial appearances are actually quite effective, using spooky close-ups of a woman with a weird, dusty-looking facial texture.

The mystery of The Living Coffin resolves into a typical fake ghost gambit to cheat a family of its fortune, in this case, a gold mine. The movie has laughable shoot-outs and a risible saloon fistfight sequence, the kind where the stuntman reels backward from the hero's mighty blow, looks where he's going and then exerts himself to tumble 'out of control' over the bar. The film may not be scary, but it is occasionally funny.

According to David Wilt, star Gastón Santos was the playboy son of the governor of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. He was first a bullfighter and then seems to have gravitated to films as a lark. As an actor Santos is a complete wash. He exhibits only two facial choices (calm, distress) and approaches most scenes with an utter lack of expression. The energetic supporting cast can't do much, although Carolina Barret is effective as the frightened, superstitious Aunt. Pedro D'Aguillón's mildly likeable clown isn't going to attract any new fans; the music score makes room for 'wah-wah' type comedy stings when he pulls his 'zany' antics. That aspect of the picture is pretty painful.

The movie is too clinical to be a commercial thriller and too expressive to be an objective case history. Ken Ogata plays Iwao Enokizu, whose almost random murder spree begins with the brutal stabbing of a truck driver. But the police investigation format drops away when Imamura suddenly jumps to scenes from the past. A wild, troublemaking son, Enokizu is pressured into one marriage so he'll 'calm down,' but instead brings home and marries a pregnant girlfriend, Kayo (Chocho Miyako). Flashbacks show the Enokizu family, part of Japan's Christian minority, being abused by a navy officer in WW2. Iwao's father (Rentaro Mikuni) is forced to sell his fishing boats and opens an inn. He rails against Iwao's irresponsibility, but eventually forms a relationship with Kayo when Iwao is in prison.

Life on the run requires Iwao to adopt disguises and think on his feet. He endears himself to the owners of another inn by cultivating an ingratiating personality and posing as a benign science professor. Haru Asano, the unhappy innkeeper's wife (Mayumi Ogawa) falls hopelessly in love with Iwao and refuses to turn him in, even when she finds out his true identity. Her aged mother Hisano (Niijiko Kiyokawa) forms an odd bond with Iwao as well, for she once served a long prison sentence for murder.

But grandma is definitely not in Iwao's league when it comes to killing. Enokizu stabs some victims and strangles others, all to get a little more money to keep going. We see him mercilessly swindle a woman trying to get a loved one out of jail, by posing as a lawyer who bribes judges. Iwao has barely taken her money when he links up with another lawyer on a train. He murders the man, stuffs his body in a closet and squats in his house while spending his money.

Vengeance Is Mine was adapted by Masaru Baba from a novel by Ryuzo Saki. Director Imamura uses Iwao Enokizu's murder spree to show a morally corrupted Japan, where twisted sexual situations seem to be the norm. Iwao's devout father gives into Kayo's sexual needs but refuses to marry her, as he is too old for her. When Haru's faithless husband has no girlfriend available, he rapes his wife. Hisano enjoys a vicarious sex life by peeping at other couples at the inn. The film's frequent sex scenes indicate a close relationship between sex and killing: Iwao seems content only when he's in control of other people.

The film gives no specific answer as to why Enokizu has become filled with so much hate for the world. The childhood memories of his father's persecution don't on their own provide a handy rationale. Iwao is alienated and contemptuous of everything he sees, especially his father's Christian teachings. Abusive and selfish young men like Iwao are mostly tolerated, while women seem trapped in confining roles. The inn where Iwao hides out regularly hires prostitutes to entertain the guests. One of them recognizes Enokizu when his pictures flash on the television, but balks at turning him in because of her shady profession. Iwao takes Haru to see a violent Russian war movie, and a public service announcement in the theater shows his face to the entire crowd. From then on it's only a matter of time before the cops track him down.

Vengeance Is Mine avoids the grandiose pseudo-psychology and mysticism that clog much of today's serial killer subgenre. In the clinical wrap-around story, Iwao's captors discover little about his motivation for killing. Iwao behaves as if he never really needed a reason to kill. Director Imamura aims at a wider social statement about Japan's changing values. The many scenes set in cluttered modern inns contrast with the calm, classical cinema of masters like Yasujiro Ozu, and in themselves seem a comment on the moral corruption of Japan.

Martial arts movie history was made in 1973 when Robert Clouse's Enter The Dragon, the first martial arts film produced in America, made Bruce Lee a household named throughout the world and at least partially started the martial arts craze of the seventies.

Bruce Lee plays Lee, a member of the Shaolin Temple and master of the martial arts who is to attend a tournament being held by a mysterious man named Han who lives on a remote island. Han is a former Shaolin Monk who left the temple and went out on his own. He now has a massive army of martial artists at his disposal who live on the island with him.

Han is supposedly involved in an illegal opium trade and also appears to be dabbling in white slavery. Lee is sent there so that he can and try to find get some substantial evidence against Han, needed to bring him to justice. When Lee finds out that Han is responsible for an attempted abduction on his sister from three years ago (which resulted in her suicide), that clinches the deal for him and he's off.

Along the way, Lee teams up with a man named Roper (b-movie favorite John Saxon of Black Christmas and Cannibal Apocalypse) who has a financial problem with a few gangsters who intend to get their money from him by whatever means necessary. Roper has hopes of winning the tournament to get the prize money and take care of his problem. A third man, Williams (played with maximum cool by the Black Samurai himself, Jim Kelly) is also on the scene with hopes of taking home the prize.

From the beginning scene with Lee practicing to the grand finale in Han's house of mirrors, Enter The Dragon is an ultra-slick blending of the kind of stylish action movies that the American film industry was pumping out in the seventies with a very Asian sensibility to it. The fight scenes are tighter than a knot and performed with both grace and brutality. Lee is the consummate hero with the noblest of intentions and the skills to get the job done, while Roper and Williams provide some interesting contrasts with ‘human' characters who are prone to making some mistakes of their own along the way.

With a blink and you'll miss it cameo from a young Jackie Chan, and an equally small cameo from a young Sammo Hung, it's interesting to see this, Lee's most famous film, as a starting ground in a sense for those who would take up his mantle in the martial arts film world. There are a few goof ups (you can see Lee working his mojo choreographing one of the final fights if you look carefully, and there's a cobra that rattles like a rattlesnake) but for the most part, Enter The Dragon is an extremely well made, polished, slick, and highly entertaining film that wears its age proudly on its sleeve. It's a high point in the genre that has rarely been outdone and that most fight films, even now, more than thirty years later, can't hold a candle to.

There is a lot of material in this collection, and most of it is pretty funny. This two disc set starts out with one of Keaton's great silent shorts, The Playhouse (1921). In this amazing short, a technical tour de force, Keaton plays a nine piece orchestra all by himself and appears as all nine musicians on the screen at the same time. Not only is the film a technical masterpiece, but it's funny too. Buster plays a stage hand at a playhouse who gets into all sorts of trouble with a pair of twins, and a strongman who's beard catches on fire.

This version of the film is a little bit different than all the other versions that have been released on home video. In addition to having the original intertitle cards, this version has reputedly restored the scenes to their original order. It's a minor change, just two shots are switched, but it is nice to have this short as it was intended to be sene. I wish they would have given a little more information about how the producers became convinced that just about all of the other prints were incorrect. On the commentary track all they do is mention that the curator of the Raymond Rohauer film archive said that the print they had restored had the scenes switched. No more information was given.

Next up is Keaton's fourth taking film, made for MGM in 1931, Parlor, Bedroom, and Bath. Keaton's films went steadily down hill during his time at MGM, they just didn't know what kinds of scripts to give him. This film is a good illustration of this.

The plot is a very loose retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. Virginia (Sally Eilers) wants to marry her boyfriend Jeff (Reginald Denny) but refuses to until her older sister Angelica (Dorothy Christy) is wed. Jeff hits Reggie (Buster Keaton) with his car and takes him to Virginia's house to recuperate when he comes up with an idea: He'll get Reggie to marry Angelica. The only problem is that Reggie is a shy sap, and Reggie needs to convince everyone he's a great lover.

This film starts off dreadfully slow. The first 45 minutes are very bland and dull. Things start to move in the last act though, when Polly (Charlotte Greenwood who steals every scene that she's in) teaches Reggie how to woo a woman. The last section is very funny and worth watching, it's just not worth sitting through the first acts to get to it.

One interesting thing about this movie is that it the exterior shots were filmed at Keaton's Beverly Hills Mansion. It is a nice chance to see his "Italian Villa" in it's prime. Keaton would sell the house in 1933.

Character Studies is a short film, recently discovered, that was probably made for a party at Pickfair. It has cameo appearances by magician Carter DeHaven, Roscoe "Fatty"Arbuckle, Jackie Coogan, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Rudolph Valentino. (This also appears on The Forgotten Films of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.)

The second feature included in this set is An Old Spanish Custom (1935) (Original title: The Invader.) This is a fairly wretched film, but has some interesting moments. It was produced by Sam Spiegel who would later go on to produce such notable films as Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and On the Waterfront, and stared Lupita Tovar who played Eva in the Spanish language version of Dracula. The plot for this film is simple, too simple to carry a film that runs nearly an hour actually. A jealous man promises to kill the next person who flirts with his wife. As luck would have it, Keaton flirts and spends the rest of the film trying to stay alive.

Keaton was married to his second wife at the time, Mae, and he was drinking heavily and it shows. Though he looks better here than he does in some of his MGM features, he's not the clown that he was only a few years earlier. The film itself is padded horribly in order to attain feature length, and this padding, including a long dance scene, only serves to grind the comic action to a halt.

The rest of the first disc is taken up with a selection of promotional films that were produced over the years. These include; Seein' Stars (1922), The Voice of Hollywood #10 (1929), and Hollywood on Parade #A-6 (1933). These are a lot of fun to watch. They feature both staged and candid footage of several notables including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Thomas Ince, among others. The final film has a look at Keaton's 'land yatch' that he bought while working at MGM.

Disc Two:

The second disc was the more entertaining of the two. It starts off with several live TV appearances that Keaton made in the early days of the medium back when shows were aired live. Keaton often recreated scenes from his silent films, and the one that was done most often was the "Can of Molasses Sketch" from his very first film, The Butcher Boy (1917). This section starts off with an excerpt from the original film, followed by three recreations of Keaton's first film scene.

These are all a lot of fun, and it's interesting to see how the scene changes over the years and the gags that Keaton adds to it. A very nice selection. This section includes clips from the following shows:

REVIEW:
All of the Blind Dead films move at a slower, deliberate pace, but Night of the Seagulls (or The Night of the Sea Gulls, as the title card reads) is the only one in the series I found to be outright boring. The villagers are the villains for most of the movie rather than the Templars, but they're better described as impolite than evil. Sure, they do drag young girls to their doom, and they don't treat the mentally disabled with kid gloves (although I'd throw rocks at someone who continually referred to himself in the third person too), but that's awfully tame in something passing itself off as a horror movie. The undead knights aren't given much of anything to do for the bulk of the movie. The ritualistic sacrifices are repetitive (as ritualistic things tend to be, by definition), and it's only in the last twenty minutes of the movie that they get around to attacking a moving target. Even then, it's the same barricading, torch waving, and undead horse theft seen throughout the series. There's nothing new or original to be found in this fourth and final installment, and the pacing of the movie is typified in its fascination with crabs that slooooooooooooowly surround the corpses of the young girls for no apparent reason or purpose other than to remind the viewer that the movie's set near the sea. By far the worst of the four movies, Night of the Seagulls ends the Blind Dead series on a sour note.

REVIEW:
The Ghost Galleon gets points for an original plot, at least. As strange as that synopsis might sound, it could halfway-pass as a remake of Tombs of the Blind Dead, exchanging an abandoned village for a Spanish galleon. The core of the story is the same, revolving around a search for a friend whose bad call pitted her against a small army of murderous mummies, and there's a rape, a woman's shoe that gets caught in a wooden plank while escaping the Templars, an almost-lesbian-tinged flashback about girls rooming together at school, and a bleak finale that closes on a still shot.

There are a lot of surface similarities, but The Ghost Galleon is quite a bit tamer than the Blind Dead movies before it. There's even less blood and gore -- the Templars only kill one person on-screen, although to their credit, they do dismember her and gnaw on her severed limbs -- and the sexuality is largely tossed out. There are three lengthy attacks by the knights, the first of which comes a little after half an hour in. None of them are nearly as tense as anything in Tombs..., and the in-between moments are even duller and more repetitive than this review. The Ghost Galleon is a very nicely shot film, and the sequences on the ship are a nice fit with Amando de Ossorio's taste for the eerie and atmospheric. The Templars themselves look great, although the miniature effects are ridiculous, looking almost as if the ship had been yanked out of a box of Fruity Pebbles and dropped in a bathtub. For the second time in a row, there's nothing linking this movie with any of the others in the series; the Templars don't even get their trademark sacrificial flashback, and the sightless aspect really doesn't come into play. The Ghost Galleon is still a drastic improvement over The Return of the Evil Dead, and deeply flawed though it may be, the movie holds some sort of bizarre, inexplicable charm. I really dig the ending too. Hesitantly recommended, although it's not much of a horror movie.

REVIEW:
Sitting through The Return of the Evil Dead is like wading through one of the later Jaws sequels; yes, the body count is exponentially higher, the Knights Templar are in virtually every scene, there's an attempt to keep the pacing amped up...and in the process, pretty much everything worthwhile about the original is discarded. The Templars in Tombs of the Blind Dead were hunters, and the actual kill wasn't what added to that pervasive sense of dread...it was the hunt...the stalking. The sequel doesn't bother with this at all. Many of the deaths are largely off-screen -- someone will take a sword to the face, or a blade will plunge into an unconvincing mock-chest. Fast and unexpected can be effective, and so can slow and tensely anticipated. But just sword swipe after sword swipe after sword swipe...? Not really, no, and the movie doesn't improve when the survivors of the assault on the village barricade themselves in a church.

The Return of the Evil Dead seems like a deliberate attempt to copy Night of the Living Dead, again missing the point of why that film is as effective as it is. Night of the Living Dead has two things in particular going for it, the first being the conflicts of the characters grudgingly holed up in the farmhouse. Not that Tombs of the Blind Dead was rife with deep characterization, but at least I knew who the characters were and how they related to one another. Return... has a much larger cast and does little to distinguish some of them. I could tell that hardly anyone could tolerate anyone else, but I never had a firm grasp on why, exactly, and there were several times where I'd confuse who was who. Their motivation for doing the illogical things they do is even more baffling. The other distinguishing factor of Night of the Living Dead -- perhaps even the primary reason it's as tense a film as it is -- is that that it was just a matter of time until the zombies stormed the house. Once everyone piles into the church, the threat of the Templars is largely gone. Yes, they have the church surrounded, but they don't do anything. There are worse plans than gradually picking off everyone as they try to escape, but from a dramatic standpoint, it's not nearly as interesting to watch.

All of this culminates in a disappointing, anticlimatic cheat of an ending. The Return of the Evil Dead isn't agonizingly, unwatchably bad, but it pales in comparison to Tombs of the Blind Dead, and if it weren't part of this box set, it's not a movie I'd buy on its own.

REVIEW:
The atmospheric Tombs of the Blind Dead reminded me of another Spanish zombie film, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, in some respects. Both movies place a large part of their emphasis on a couple's investigation of a murder; its characters aren't continually pursued by the undead for the entire length of the movie, and the Knights Templar aren't the sort of cinematic creatures who lurch on-screen like clockwork every eight minutes. That restraint makes the scenes where the Templars do appear far more effective than they would've been otherwise, and although the Templars are only in a handful of scenes, when they are on-screen, they usually linger for quite a long time. The knights don't jump out of the shadows -- they slowly envelop their prey, and the combination of their slow stalking and the beautiful photography builds several extremely tense setpieces.

Although Tombs of the Blind Dead isn't a particularly gory film, several of its sequences are deeply unsettling, particularly a prolonged torture flashback and a brutal rape. The skeletal look of the Templars with their long, rake-like fingers and dusty, tattered cloaks remains unique, and there's something almost hypnotic about the use of slow-motion when the knights are on horseback. Horror movies often make more effective use of sound than any other genre, and in a film where its blood-starved villains are reliant on aural cues to locate their victims, it's the lack of sound that contributes so greatly to the sense of dread. Although the storytelling has its shares of flaws, lazily tossing in scores of plot contrivances and inconsistencies purely for dramatic effect, the simplicity of the story works to its benefit. Ignoring the still frames that close out the movie, the dark, nihilistic ending is fantastic. Very highly recommended.

The real saving grace in this package, the one film that can be enjoyed on a serious level and not for it's camp and/or schlock value alone, is Dario Argento's 1971 Giallo, Cat O' Nine Tails.

Someone, for some reason, has broken into a research facility where experiments were being conducted on human chromosomes in hopes of finding out what triggers reactionary and violent behavior in human beings. The cops don't know who did this and there's no obvious motive for the crime, as nothing so far as they can tell, has been stolen. While the suggestion of industrial espionage is raised, it's quickly dismissed and the police are at a standstill – the only one who was there, the night watchman, got whacked on the head and remembers nothing of importance.

Across the street from the research facility lives a retired, and blind, newspaper man named Franco Arno (Karl Malden) along with his young niece, Laurie (Cinzia De Carolis). Franco heard something that night, but being blind, he was only able to imagine what had happened in his head and not really see it. He heads across the street the next day to check out the scene and it's here that he meets a reporter named Carlo (James Franciscus) who is writing a story on the events that took place there the night before.

What the cops and the reporters don't know is that there is one sole man who is able to piece it all together for them – Dr. Calabresi (Carlo Aligherio). He knows the motive and he knows what's missing but, as he explains to his lady friend, it's better for his career if he keeps his mouth shut. Of course, that proves to be his undoing and he soon finds himself the first victim of a murderer on the loose. Franco and Carlo team up to try and stop him from killing again with some help from the police, but this murderer seems to know more than they do about many things, even themselves!

While a little slow in some spots, Cat O' Nine Tails is a slick and extremely well photographed Hitchcockian styled thriller in the grand Argento tradition. Plenty of wild and fluid camera work and expertly photographed murder set pieces make the film an excellent feast for the eyes and a few fun twists in the storyline keep you guessing through to the end. Performance wise, this one is above average for an Italian Giallo, Malden and Franciscus holding their own quite nicely, but nothing really shines here in that department. Ennio Morricone's score is perfectly suited to the film and while some of his later collaborations with Goblin might be more recognizable, with their pounding rhythms and strange keyboards, this lower key and more toned down music plays nicely against the determined pacing. Not as gory or over the top as some of the film that Argento made before or after it, Cat O' Nine Tails is still a top tier thriller from a man who, at one point, was the best in the business.

Set in the all too close future of the twenty second century, a few years after the atom bomb has laid waste to the world as we know it, Rats tells the story of a gang of Mad Max style road warrior/biker trash barbarian guys who hang out at a bar and drink a lot. Their world is turned upside down when giant rats, mutated by the nuclear radiation, move in on their turf and start chowing down on them. That's about it as far as the plot goes – there are a few moments where tensions arise between gang members and a love scene or two but they really don't matter much. This one is all about the radioactive rats (which are, in reality, guinea pigs dyed black and with bad ass glowing red eyeballs and not rats at all).

Rats is a terrible, terrible, terrible film. That's right, I used three terrible's to describe it but I'll be dyed black and called a rat if it isn't an endlessly entertaining exercise in wanton stupidity, and it works in much the same way that Slugs does except on an even more insane level. To give the movie that authentic post nuclear holocaust feel, Mattei has named his characters with titles such as Video and Lilleth. It doesn't work. The sets are as cheap as they come and look like leftovers from other, better films. The acting is terrible, the dialogue even worse and the effects are, well, not very effective.

That being said, the film is so completely manic and has such an enthusiasm for what it is that you can't help but love it. Unlike the overly long Hell Of The Living Dead or some of his recent shot on video fare like Snuff Trap, this one is just plain fun, made even more so by the goofy but way too cute little guinea pigs that are supposed to instill mortal fear in the viewers. For the more intense stunts where guinea pigs might be harmed, Mattei wisely chose to substitute large lumps of black fur to threaten our band of heroic biker trash. You can imagine how well that turns out…

Our story begins with a health commissioner named Mike Brady (Michael Garfield) who works out of a small backwoods town – normally a sleepy area where not a whole lot goes on. He wakes up one morning to find that the local Sheriff (John Battaglia) needs him to help get a drunk named Ron Bell out of a home he's being evicted from. When they arrive, the find the home empty save for Ron's corpse, which appears to have been eaten by some sort of animal. When Mike returns back to his office he's asked to come out and check out a problem with a backed up sewer. He and Don Palmer (Philip McHale) head out to the scene to make sure nothing is awry and Don decides to head on down into the sewers to see what's up. He starts cleaning out some debris when suddenly something grabs his tools out of his hands while he's working, sending him screaming to the surface.

Calling it a day, Mike decides to head home to his wife (Kim Terry). When he gets there, she shows him a strange discovery – their garden is full of abnormally large slugs! When Mike gets his hand in close to take a look at one of the weird little critters, it bites him and draws blood. He brings one of the slugs to a scientist he knows on the other side of town who does some testing on the subject, where it breaks loose and makes a snack out of a nearby hamster. The scientist ascertains that the slugs have mutated into flesh eaters and Mike starts to put it all together – they've been breeding in the sewers and are now showing up all over town, eating everyone that they come into contact with.

Amazingly ridiculous, Slugs starts off fast and keeps up the pace right until the end. Filled with some of the most retarded set pieces in horror movie history and plenty of completely gratuitous gore scenes, this is one for the books. Yeah, okay, slugs themselves aren't scary which kind of makes this one hard to get into if you take things seriously but just give it a chance. Simon's slimy slugs will win you over easily enough once you start getting into it. Characters show up only to serve as slug fodder, there's a fantastic bedroom scene, and for some reason no one seems to be able to run away from or simply stomp on the slugs but it all just comes together into one wonderfully bizarre and completely stupid movie that is about as enjoyable as they come. I love Slugs and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

One day a pretty photographer named Jill Trevers (played by Mimsy Farmer) takes a job working in conjunction with the local police (headed up by two notable Eurocult leading men, David Warbeck and Al Cliver). It seems that there have been quite a few murders in the area as of late and as she goes around taking her pictures of the victims for the police records, she notices that many of them bare some obvious scratch marks on them – scratch marks that could have come from… a large cat! Trevers heads over to Miles' humble abode to question him, police in tow, but things of course do not go easily or even remotely as planned and the cat is still prowling around, up to no good.

If there's one word that can be aptly used to describe this very, very, very loose Edgar Allen Poe adaptation from the proclaimed Italian master of splatter Lucio Fulci, it's goofy. Patrick Magee overacts with such wreckless, scenery chewing abandon that at times his performance also seems to be intentionally comedic. The fact that he's surrounded by numerous Italian actors trying to pretend they are English, with middling results, and the sole American in the film (Farmer) to make it more marketable to North American audiences simply adds to the rampant confusion that so dominates this film.

Those expecting injury to the eye motifs, gut munching zombies or shotgun blasts to the head (the type of material that is more often than not associated with the late, great Lucio) would do well to check out Zombie, Contraband or The Beyond instead as The Black Cat is an almost completely gore-less affair. However, if you're into films with lots of atmosphere (which this one has) and don't mind logic jumps that could fill the Grand Canyon (which this one also has) and you can appreciate the antics of Mr. Magee the psychic professor, there's a lot to enjoy in this uniquely Fulci-esque psuedo-gothic mess of a film.

Controlled by Veidt, Zoltan converts some dogs in the camp area to vampires, and mauls a few random campers, as they hunt down Drake.

Luckily for Drake, Inspector Branco (played by Jose Ferrer of The Swarm and The Evil That Men Do) has been following Veidt and Zoltan from the start and, with the help of friendly neighbors and the clownish local authorities, is able to track down the Drake family just as they're getting ready to head out of the woods after strange things start happening in and around their mobile home. Drake and Branco take it upon themselves to stop Veidt and Zoltan from converting Michael into a vampire and spreading the curse across the world.

Albert Band's (director of I Bury The Living) Zoltan – The Hound Of Dracula is one of the most unusual takes on the ever-popular Dracula mythos, and also one of the worst. The movie has so many plot holes that it's actually pretty funny. Despite the presence of some interesting second-string actors, the performances are unremarkable.

Then there are the so-called special effects – both visual and audio. When Zoltan, and his small army of vampire dogs get agitated, their eyes start to glow in the dark, and while probably intended to be scary, it comes across as ridiculous. When the dogs attack, obviously fake 'doggie paws' tear through car roofs, shacks, and anything else that gets in their way, making the spider attack scene in Fulci's The Beyond look pretty good by comparison. And not only does Veidt seem to sound like a monkey whenever he's in pain, but whenever one of the dogs attacks, the same tape loop of barking and howling is played over and over again to the point where it too becomes absurd.

The only reason that this movie scores the way it does is because it's so bad that it becomes quite entertaining in it's own right. Zoltan – The Hound of Dracula is a definitive example of 'so bad it's good filmmaking.'

When a gang of local thugs breaks into his van and steals his research material and equipment hoping to find some narcotics inside, the only other parasite (besides the one living inside Dean) is let loose on an unsuspecting town.

With the help of Patricia (played by a very young Demi Moore) and some of the other locals, Dean is off to get rid of the loose parasite before the Merchants can get it, and somehow figure out how to get rid of the one living in his stomach, all the while trying to keep the body count to a minimum.

While the film does have some really fun spots and a couple of creepy moments, there are definitely a few drawbacks to it. First of all, it was originally composed and shot for a 3-D presentation. While I'm sure it would have been great in the theater when all sorts of stuff starts flying at the screen for no real reason other than to pop out at the viewer, here, where it's presented in 2-D, it comes across as pretty silly.

In addition to this, Band seems to have decided that he should end every scene with a fade to black, which almost gives the film a made for TV look, as every time it happens, you expect there to be a cut to a commercial.

Add some thoroughly bad performances from pretty much everyone involved in the film and some low budget and unconvincing effects, and you're left with a goofy rehash of Alien set in a Road Warrior-like environment. In the films defense, it moved along at a decent pace and somehow managed to hold my attention throughout its entirety

You can tell a lot about a movie that declares itself The Brain that Wouldn't Die up front and The Head That Wouldn't Die over its end title. This is one of the loopiest and most endearing of the Z-budget independent cheapies. Released by AIP in abridged form, copies of the uncut sleazefest version have been around on video for awhile, but not looking this good. Synapse Films' DVD is a very satisfying rendering of this campiest of mad doctor movies.

SYNOPSIS:
Dr. Bill Cortner (familiar character actor Jason Evers, here billed as Herb) is obsessed by unconventional surgical ideas, even though openly discouraged by his father. But not even his fiancee Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) knows that Bill has installed his own Frankenstein-style mad lab in the family country house, complete with a crippled assistant, and an unseen 'Thing', the result of his failed earlier research, locked away in the dark.

A teeny tiny accident happens on the way to the lab ... Jan is decapitated in an auto mishap. But faster than you can say, 'Suture self!', Bill has her head propped upright in a plate of blood, and connected to various life-sustaining support systems. Although Jan's ghostly voice begs to be allowed to die, Bill makes plans to graft her head onto the body of another ... and immediately goes out on the town to choose his future wife's body from the available babes & strippers. But back in the lab, Jan discovers that her disembodied state has given her extrasensory powers - and starts transmitting telepathic orders to the horrid Thing in the Closet.

REVIEW:
Under-funded, under-directed, and dripping with some of the earliest outright gore scenes, The Brain that Wouldn't Die is a wonderful mess. It has perhaps the worst-filmed accident ever in a movie, and is padded with trashy strip acts and catfights that apparently were retained in the general release for the kiddie matinee market. But artistic poverty is totally beside the point. The film is very enjoyable for its utter lack of taste, and features three great - no, awful - no, great camp performances.

As the assistant with a mangled hand, Leslie Daniel matches the immortal Jay Robinson for exuberant delivery of his grossly overwritten dialogue - you want to clap for him. 'Herb' Evers should be concerned that he's throwing his career away by being trapped in the wrong role, but instead aquits himself well under the impossibly primitive direction. That the movie works at all is due to the very impressive Virginia Leith, who weirdly is never humbled by the risible situation of playing a head on a dish. Her voice is the first and last thing heard in the film, saying creepy things like, "Please let me die." If the IMDB is to be believed, she was the only woman in the cast of Stanley Kubrick's first movie, Fear and Desire, years earlier.

The film is so patently 'unreal' that petty details like how a severed head can possibly talk, are irrelevant. The Brain that Wouldn't Die is one of the best of the Z-pictures, the kind of irrational creepshow that once aired on local television stations at 2 AM. You'd see it half-asleep, and then spend the next day wondering if it was really that strange, or if you had just dreamed it up. It's as if the show had beamed in from another dimension - absurdly ridiculous, but hard to forget.

Surgical horror made a comeback in the late fifties with George Franju's Eyes Without a Face, which seems to have inspired sick surgery pictures like Die Nackte und der Satan (The Head) and the ever-popular They Saved Hitler's Brain. But Virginia Leith's head has the most personality by far - there's a giddy tension wondering what will become of her, and what she'll say next: "There is an ultimate in horror - and it is I." You can't hate a picture with lines like that.

The box claims 20 minutes of reinstated footage, but that must refer to some grossly edited television cut. Some of the sleazy female wrestling may have been restored as well, but the big shock are the famous deleted shots of gore at the end, when the Thing in the Closet breaks out and finally gets its hands on someone to mangle. Couple that with a prolonged dismemberment scene earlier on, and the show comes to a gory, abrupt, and frankly disturbing finish. There's a bizarrely haunting final dialogue line, that I won't spoil by repeating here.

TECH NOTES:
Synapse Films' DVD of The Brain that Wouldn't Die presents this cult favorite in the best possible light. The transfer is fine - the source appears to be 35mm in good shape (a few blemishes here and there) and the sound is exceptionally clear. The movie actually looks, well, like a real movie, instead of the blurry 16mm prints we're used to. The quality holds up when cropped to a theatrical 1:78 on a widescreen television; the tighter compositions help focus the dreamlike atmosphere. Synapse's slightly windowboxed transfer displays the full width of the image, too. Some packaging says 'widescreen edition' - but the picture is neither letterboxed nor enhanced. Savant's review copy reads 'Special Edition.'

Bryan Senn's liner notes are adequate, but don't get around to expressing its basic appeal. The lurid cover art is right from the original posters, and is included in a gallery of stills, along with an odd shot of the monster with a nude model. The original trailer is also on board.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Brain That Wouldn't Die Special Edition rates:
Movie: Just Fair - but hilarious camp fun
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Supplements: Trailer, still selection.
Packaging: Amaray case
Reviewed: May 4, 2002

Lee's third feature film also marked his directorial debut (he wrote and directed this one single handedly). In it, he plays Tang Lung, a man of Chinese heritage who moves to Rome to help out some family members with their restaurant. When Tang arrives, he finds that they are on the receiving end of some harassment from a local crime group who want them to sell the restaurant. These hoodlums aren't afraid to get rough with Tang's family if they don't get what they want, and they prove to make life difficult for them.

Thankfully for his relatives, Tang proves to be quite the martial arts master and he gives the mobsters a taste of their own medicine. The mob leader sends out word that he wants the best of the best from the martial arts world to help him take down Tang, but again, these fighters are no match for Tang and his skills. Eventually an American martial arts master named Colt (a young Chuck Norris of Invasion U.S.A.) is brought on board to take Tang down once and for all, and they square off in the now famous battle in the middle of the Roman Coliseum (Way Of The Dragon would be the last film ever shot there).

There are a few great fights in this one, but the two stand outs are the Lee versus Norris showdown in the end (anyone who doubts Norris' legitimacy as a martial artist would do well to watch these scene where he really is great) and a fight in which Tang takes a pair of nunchuk's in each hand and beats the crap out of some mobsters without missing a beat. Bruce's comedic timing was never stronger than it was in this film and he plays his character with the perfect amount of cockiness, hostility and naiveté at the same time.

Including Game Of Death II in this set and labeling it as a legitimate Bruce Lee film rather than a ‘Bruceploitation' film is stretching things a little bit, as all of the footage in this film that contains Bruce Lee in it is taken from bits not used in Enter The Dragon and Game Of Death. A lot of this film was shot in and takes place in Japan, and it was completed after Lee had died. With this in mind, it shouldn't surprise anyone to find that this film is all over the place, and has plenty of continuity errors and slips ups.

Basically what happens in a nutshell is that a famous martial artist named Billy Lo (Bruce Lee) is killed when he starts looking into the strange death of his good friend Chin Ku (Hwang Jang Lee of Drunken Master and Secret Rivals fame).

With Billy gone, his brother Bobby (Kim Tai Chung) decides to pick up where he left off and figure out who's responsible for both of the recent deaths. He finds himself en route to Japan where he hooks up with a man named Lewis (Roy Horan). As seems to be the norm for Bobby's pals, Lewis winds up dead pretty soon after meeting him, and Bobby traces it all to the strange Fan Yu temple where he must face a strange cast of skilled fighters and solve the mystery once and for all.

While not much of a ‘Bruce Lee' film despite his top billing Game Of Death II does deliver in the fight scenes department. With Yuen Biao, Hwang Jang Lee and Cassanova Wong in front of the camera and Yuen Woo Ping handling some of the fight choreography, even if Lee only appears in recycled footage the film still has enough going for it in the fight scene department to make it worthwhile. Just don't expect it to make much sense, because it doesn't.

Game Of Death could have been Lee's greatest moment. Really. Had he not died before it was finished, it's very possible that Game Of Death could have very well been his best film. The idea is great, the fight scenes are fantastic, it's just unfortunately marred by a ‘Bruce-Lee-A-Like' and some obviously botched up work to hide the fact that it isn't always Lee we're watching up there on screen.

The story follows Billy Lo (at any given time played by Bruce Lee or Yuen Biao or Tai Chung Kim), a movie star who fakes his own death in a manner all too similar to the way that Bruce Lee's son Brandon (star of The Crow would die years later on set. The reason he goes to all this trouble? So that he can fight a crime syndicate who want Billy and his lady-friend Ann (Colleen Camp from Cirio Santiago's Ebony, Ivory And Jade), a popular singer, to join their ranks.

Billy starts to track down the syndicate big wigs and eventually dons the now famous yellow jumpsuit (later rejuvenated by Uma Thurman's character in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill) to enter a pagoda where he fights his opponents one at a time, each on a different floor of the building. The most famous moment of the film, and rightfully so, is when Lee squares off against Kareem Abdul Jabar (it's wild to see the height differences between these two as they pummel one another in front of the camera). There's also a fantastic nunchuk sequence where Lee squares off against Danny Inasanto (who played Hatchetman in Big Trouble In Little China!).

The last fifteen to twenty minutes of Game Of Death are on par with any of the other fight scenes in any of Lee's other films. They're fantastic. They're vicious. They're brutal. They're elegant. In short, it's prime Lee material . Sadly, due to the circumstances under which the film was finished, getting there is an exercise in goofiness and a lot of the film consists of guys trying really hard to look like Lee by wearing big dark sunglasses and trying to sort of cover their faces.

Regardless, the film has undeniable historical significance and an amazing finale, which combined make Game Of Death very much worth watching for the martial arts film fan despite its very obvious shortcomings.

Better known in North America as The Chinese Connection, Fists Of Fury (not to be confused with The Big Boss, which is better known in North America as Fists Of Fury …confusing, I know) is in my opinion Bruce Lee's finest moment. Yes, it's a very traditional martial arts film and yes, he got a lot more creative in his later movies, but Lee in this film is the very embodiment of vengeance and he delivers such an amazing amount of anger into his performance that even if he had never made another movie he'd still truly deserve all of the accolades bestowed upon him for this film alone.

Chen Zhen (Bruce Lee) is an aspiring martial artist in training who returns to his dojo one day to find that his teacher has been killed. Chen quickly runs to his teacher's grave and digs up the body, overpower by grief and rage. When a competing Japanese school begins to tease Chen's school over their loss during the ensuing funeral, Chen loses it and once the funeral is over he pays a little visit to the Japanese school to teach them a thing or two. The result? Chen versus the entire school, and you know who's coming out on top, no contest. Chen is going to make the Japanese pay for what they did, in a big, big way.

No one, and I literally mean no one, has ever given such a genuinely pissed off performance as Lee gives in this film. Sonny Chiba has come close in a few of his movies, but not even Sonny can top Lee's anger here as he yelps, screams, kicks, punches an busts his way through as many men as the Japanese want to throw at him. The inevitable show down is a high point not only in Lee's career but in martial arts films in general and Lee unleashes his full fury on his opponents, sparing no one and doling out his vengeance in as cold and brutal a manner as he can muster.

While the storyline may be pretty basic (man avenges teachers death, lots of ass kicking, the end) Lee is just so unbelievably fantastic in this film that it really doesn't matter. He's definitely the main reason to watch this one, and this is the film that proves as an on screen fighter he truly had no equal.

In Bruce Lee's first starring role, we find him playing a young man named Cheng who moves from the city to a small town where his cousins live so that he can work with them at the local ice factory. Cheng, before he leaves the city he grew up in, makes a solemn oath to his family to never fight again, no matter what.

Cheng is forced to break this promise though, when a few members of his family start to mysteriously disappear once the y have a run in with the management of the factory. It turns out that the men in charge of the plant are in fact drug dealers, and after the ill effects that this has on his family, Chegn decides to take it upon himself to break his promise and take down the slime balls who are causing so many problems for his family at the factory.

This one takes a little while to pick up steam, but once it does, boy howdy, watch out. Lee shows the world in his feature film debut why he is the baddest of the bad and the Big Boss himself is really no contest to this little man here, a man who is pissed off enough to take matters into his own hands and solve them once and for all. In short, here Lee is an instrument of vengeance sticking up for his family and for those who have been wronged by organized crime, something that would prove to be a recurring theme throughout his short career.

Last House is very frightening. Its first two-thirds, before we get to the Collingwood house, is very well made. The acting is excellent, and extremely believable, especially David Hess and his ferocious partners. Although it began as an 'adult' movie made by adult filmmakers (Cunningham again sidesteps when he claims his previous softcore and borderline hardcore work as being 'documentary'), Wes Craven's conception of the worst possible horror scenario has a legitimate artistic basis. A growing number of recent mainstream films, like The Wild Bunch, had expressed the boiling violence of the times; I believe Craven when he says his cinematic atrocities were his reaction to the turmoil of Vietnam, Charles Manson, the '60s assassinations, and Richard Nixon's America. In 1971, the country was a pressure cooker that some radicals believed would actually spiral into revolution. Many Americans were terrorized by the thought of a rising tide of violence.

Charlie Manson laughed at the establishment, predicting that its own children would 'come at them with knives', in retribution for society's hypocrisy. An extension of Manson anxiety, Krug and Co. are America's worst nightmare, an alternate family of sex killers and dope addicts, a fusion of sick personalities who encourage the worst in one other. They have free sex. They sell drugs. They're completely out of control. Mari and Phyllis' very innocence triggers Krug's lust to defile and destroy, to outrage even himself.

Most everyone's been intimidated, maybe even threatened, by the kind of bullies or toughs who turn their own fears and powerlessness into aggression. Krug and Co. express their rage by wielding power over helpless victims. We get the feeling that their desire to give Mari and Phyllis 'the works' is an explosion of hatred that's built up over months of simmering hostility. It's premeditated only in that the killers know that they're going to have themselves a party. Everyone knows that to have fun at a party, one needs to let go and express oneself.

Last House is different from previous terror sieges like Lady in a Cage in that it tears up the assumed 'contract of politeness' with the audience. It pulls out all the stops, and unleashes an orgy of violence. Critics often made facile observations about violence in movies, saying that every new cinematic wrinkle in cruelty or sadism desensitized audiences, requiring the next film out to be stronger. Last House is totally outside this idea. The basic brutality here goes beyond any such theory, and anyone so desensitized as to enjoy it for its own sake, is already a borderline sociopath.

Craven knew that terror is in the details, and that's why he adds the disturbing incident where Phyllis is made to urinate on herself. A familiar captivity fantasy is the standard situation where the reader or viewer measures his or her inner strength against how the characters of a drama stand up to torture. When Phyllis pees herself on demand, Krug and his fiends are teaching her a lesson in power - whatever they want her to do, she'll have to do. Breaking the mild taboo of public urination is in itself a relatively tame humiliation, but there's a line that's been crossed. Ever have a boss, or a 'friend', insist you do something just for the principle of demonstrating who's in charge? Phyllis and Mari are undergoing that, but the horror shared by all is that both victim and tormentor know the stakes will soon escalate.

(spoilers)
The torments in Last House are direct and pitiless, and covered with a documentary eye so passive, that it all could be real. Nothing is stylized, not even to the extent that the atrocities in something like Salo are 'aestheticized.' Phyllis and Mari are breathing, shivering, pleading girls one minute, and after an extended agony, dead meat. See what I can make you do? See what I can do to you?, they seem to be saying, but when their mutilated victims are dead, the killers collapse into sullen silence. They are beyond the pale, yet there remains a pitiful humanity in their nervous, self-disgusted 'regrouping' after their crime.

Nothing's perfect, certainly not an overreaching shocker like The Last House on the Left. Craven's plan of bringing the horror full circle with the borrowed structure of The Virgin Spring is sound, but, unlike the later Tobe Hooper and Sam Raimi gorefests, his production doesn't have the basic technical sophistication for the third act at the Collingwood house. It's all interiors, which require experience to light. The cramped spaces force the footage to be broken up into more conventional angles, which don't have the docu veracity of the exteriors. Compared to the earlier section, big pieces of Last House's final reels are distractingly amateurish.

The violence in the house is also less impressive because it's not as honest as the horror in the woods. The Collingwoods use the best tricks they can come up with, but this is more plotted and hyped - with one of the first manic uses of a chainsaw. There's an obvious obscene bit where Estelle Collingwood (Cynthia Carr) bites off a piece of Weasel's anatomy. It comes from the Herschel Gordon Lewis school of exploitative shock, and the pandering instincts of the filmmakers is what makes it cheap. In general, the whole third act is an artistic letdown from the honest terror in the woods. "Just remember", the advertising should say of this section, "It's only degrading exploitation."

The 'Crime and Retribution' angle doesn't work too well. The random, senseless slaughter of the two girls is the kind of thing that happens too often to be ignored, and therefore has validity. But when the killers are delivered unto the Collingwoods for a payback slaughter, the show becomes a fantasy that teaches the wrong lesson, even if what happens is what we want to happen. The Collingwoods aren't Max Von Sydow and they don't pull heirloom swords from the attic and reforge them as weapons for a ritual slaughter. They're an average couple, who presumably haven't had survivalist & terror scenarios running through their heads for years (as many people do now, admittedly). When they respond with such cool killer instincts, it's a horror-comic gore fantasy entirely different than the raw realism in the woods. The show really stumbles when the Collingwoods retrieve their daughter's body. They just sit over her a moment, then it's back to Killing 101. There's no pause for them to recover from their emotions. When they go into battle with such cool heads, the believability connection is lost.

True, a consistent finale would definitely not have been as thrilling for the audience. Krug and his fiends might believably escape direct punishment, even if convicted of other crimes. If they were caught, legalities would probably mandate a protracted, agonizing trial, as in The Onion Field. But The Last House on the Left is first and foremost an exploitation film - even the viewers sobered by the horror in the woods, respond like a vigilante mob in cheering the slaughter at the house. I wouldn't be surprised if Craven and Cunningham originally planned a more naturalistic variation on a Herschel Gordon Lewis film, and their superior cast inspired them to overachieve in the first section of the movie.

The controversial Triumph des Willens has been notorious for ages; discussion of it cannot be limited to just to the aspect of brilliant filmmaking. Lenin may have declared the motion picture as the most powerful propaganda tool of the state, but it was Leni Riefenstahl who created the masterpiece of the genre, and this is it. Every film technique known in 1935 was used at its highest level, but for a supremely negative purpose. There's a lengthy documentary called, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, and even the Wonderful aspect of this show is Horrible in its cold-blooded calculation.

SYNOPSIS
This is a cinematically- augmented representation of the Nuremburg National Socialist rally of 1934, a week-long gathering of Germans under their brand new Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. Starting with Hitler descending Godlike from the clouds, the film is two hours of parades, adoring crowds, torchlit serenades, and massed reviews of what look like hundreds of thousands of regimented workers, Hitler youth, and party members. Hitler makes several bombastic speeches, along with pieces of speeches and testimonials by other top party members.

REVIEW:
Savant was shown this film several times in film school, and remembers a course taught by Stephen Mamber where we studied the distinction between documentary filmmaking and propaganda. I think we concluded that a film record of almost any subject so selects and chooses how to represent it, that objective documentation is an almost unattainable ideal. We are bombarded with calculated, insidious media messages today, all pretending to present 'the truth', whether about a consumer item or a political candidate for sale. There are those who claim that the culture as a mass, has lost the ability to discern for itself simple values of right and wrong, truth and lies.

Creating a controlled 'truth' seemed to be exactly the aim of Riefenstahl and her Nazi producers, who created and ran the giant rally as much to make this propaganda tool, than for its own purpose. The giant stadiums were designed to accomodate special cameras (you can see little elevators for camera buckets going up and down the colossal bannered columns) and many shots were obviously accomplished by repeatedly restaging ostensibly 'candid' scenes. Because of camera placement and sound recording, it's more than probable that key 'dialogue' scenes were actually shot totally separately, including whole speeches by Hitler himself. The staggering job of assistant- directoring dwarfed the dimensions of anything Hollywood ever made: there are literally tens of thousands of people following 'direction' and 'hitting their marks' far more perfectly than in any epic. When the pomp and circumstance becomes more complicated, the spectacle turns in a Busby Berkeley vision of Hell.

And it is staggering. The camera tracks along endless lines of people whose life's fulfillment seems to be the honor of massing to adore Hitler. The huge rally of workers, with Hitler and two cronies walking calmly down a wide causeway between vast regiments of men standing to attention, is the most potent image of 20th century totalitarianism in memory.

Synapse's DVD adds a dynamic to the movie that makes this disc more 'useful' than seeing Triumph of the Will projected on a screen. Watching the the show with only its own few titles as a guide, it's easy to get lost; you wish you had a college professor sitting next to you to identify all the historical villains onscreen, and the significance of whole rallies, as well as details like insignia (Who are those guys carrying shovels instead of guns? Are there any girls in the Hitler youth?). The DVD provides this extra dimension through the pleasant-sounding Dr. Anthony R. Santoro, whose running commentary is priceless. His explanations of basic facts are clear and well-timed: So that's what the infamous Streicher looks like. 'Swastika' isn't a German word - they call it a 'hooked cross.' What happened to all those Nazis making ecstatic speeches, and who were the nastiest of them? Santoro also notes for us the not-so-obvious indications of directorial influence : the restagings, the moments 'designed' for the camera. Without making weighted judgements, he points out the sources and the ironies of Hitler's power, remarking that everything in the rallies was chosen to bolster weaknesses in the party's rule (Hitler had just assumed full control of the state; a major party leader had just been purged). Finally, he makes the vital distinction between autocratic power, which wants to control your actions, and totalitarian power, which wants control over your actions and your thoughts. Thought control of masses of people wasn't possible until the 20th century and modern communications; this film pretty much proves the theory that the most powerful tool of thought control is the Cinema.

Since study of Triumph of the Will proves that it is an obvious promotional film, and in no way a documentary, Riefenstahl's defensive claim that she was an artist not concerned with politics cuts no ice with Savant. Aesop wrote a fable about a battle trumpeter who, when captured, pleaded that he was no soldier because he carried no weapon. The conquering general had him executed along with the rest of the soldiers, with the moral that he who enables hostilities is as much a combatant as the soldiers themselves. As Riefenstahl was not even a conscripted soldier, her participation in the deification of Hitler has to put her right up with the most heinous enablers of his crimes.

TECH NOTES:
Synapse's DVD gives a reasonably clear image of the show, with the best sound Savant's yet heard. Besides the great commentary, there are newly translated, removable English subtitles, reportedly more accurate than the old ones. An extra from David Shepard is a much shorter promotional film about the army from 1935's Nuremburg rally, called Day of Freedom. Apparently it was produced because the army felt slighted by the National Socialists hogging the spotlight in the previous film; here Riefenstahl turns her camera to artsy and dynamic views of crack troops demonstrating their skill with various military hardware in a mock battle staged before a huge crowd, Roman-Coliseum style.

When people want to suppress key films like this because they might inspire further adulation of Naziism or encourage hateful rhetoric, Savant becomes suspicious. The greatest value in seeing something like Triumph of the Will today is that it might inspire viewers to question the content of the avalanche of messages they have to fend off every day: not only what passes for 'news', but attitudes and judgemental bias in other kinds of entertainment. You don't have to be Philip K. Dick to see the Ubik-like hidden messages in our modern world, but education seems to be the only way to help bring anything like truth to light. This Synapse disc of Triumph of the Will is an eye-opener and a significant DVD release.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Triumph of the Will rates:
Movie: Excellent, and Horrible too.
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Supplements: Commentary, additional short subject
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: April 23, 2001

If you are, man oh man, "Shoot" is the perfect little film for you. If you've read the above paragraph and felt the all-too-familiar wave of bad movie nausea, than you're much like me. There's a time for ultra-hip, self-aware, over-the-top pretense, and then there's "Shoot 'Em Up:" a creatively bankrupt aria of stupid ideas stupidly assembled with a desire to register even more stupidly than human intelligence will comprehend. Get it? It's supposed to stupid. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

For the last year or so, director Michael Davis (the man behind such duds as "100 Girls," "Monster Man," and "Eight Days a Week") has been proclaiming his love for action movies, yet "Shoot" is almost a slap in the face of the genre. The film comes from the same cesspool that germinated several other adrenaline-milking features of the last few years, including the excretal "Crank" and the vile "Running Scared." These are snot-slicked creations intended to ride the audience hard with a smug orgy of violence, only to undercut the horror with creamy black comedy so nobody goes home with a grudge. Parody is the lazy man's game, and Davis plays "Shoot" like a guy cashing in his last favors in Hollywood.

Taking Wooesque gunplay theatrics to a "Looney Tunes" level (a reference Davis crudely underlines at every turn), the film is nothing short of an orgasm of banal brutality, with bullets flying, limbs torn off, and babies put in harm's way for cheap effect. Love him or hate him, at least Woo played his cards straight, brazenly walking towards absurdity with a straight face and more squinty conviction than a spelling bee champ. He believed in his mayhem and fought to sustain his funhouse of violence, even when, at times, it was all a little too much. Hell, even caloric escapism like "The Transporter" imagines a loose reality for itself.

Davis isn't nearly that brave, and turns "Shoot" into a reckless wild comedy that scraps even the faintest hint of realism and dignity to become a flashpoint of lunacy; an acidic cartoon for those with a more inebriated sense of humor and tolerance for nincompoop direction. If previous cinematic efforts didn't already covered this ground repeatedly, perhaps "Shoot" wouldn't seem like a death row meal of dry toast and warm water. It craves the Woo seal of approval with wickedly-mounted sequences of bullet-whizzing combat, but it's afraid of facing such bold style head-on, cowardly snickering at itself time and again with a kind of ghastly self-deprecation that would make Kevin Smith wince. The film literally begs the viewer to scoff at the preposterous nature of it all, leaving nothing to root for but a hollow exercise in masturbatory filmmaking. Yay?

Oh, there's a plot somewhere inside "Shoot," but one holds the feeling, as the film steamrolls over anything in its path, that the storyline was an afterthought following the years Davis spent choreographing the action beats. Somehow he tricked Monica Bellucci (Heaven's second greatest gift to the planet) into starring as Mr. Smith's lactating hooker/pal (don't ask), permitted Paul Giamatti to slip into his earsplitting overact zone (an era I thought was finally over with "Sideways"), and looks to sneak a mutated message on gun control inside the exhaustively winky, persistently-crinkled script. That is, when he's not spinelessly backpedaling on the cardboard characters, trying, in the film's only infinitesimal moments of sincerity, to embellish their haunted souls as if anyone is going to give a flying fig how these characters earned their "life stinks" badges. Either you put the time and effort into emotional resonance or you imagine berserk gunfights occurring mid-penetration. There's no room for both.

Of course I realize that by taking the dreadfulness of "Shoot" so personally, I'm playing directly into Davis's sweaty, calloused hands, potentially revealing my critic heart to be black and shriveled when it comes to exclusionary geek-treehouse entertainment such as this. I'll take the risk, since "Shoot" is one smothering, viciously unfunny spanking machine to sit through. Last spring's "Hot Fuzz" tangoed on a similar reverential terrain, mimicking action movies to create an action movie, but it had, gasp, genuine wit to support its homages and parodies. It used, gasp gasp, actual care, concentration, and thought when serving up a hot plate of havoc rooted in established genre entertainment.

The bottom line is: "Hot Fuzz" had skill. "Shoot" has noise and a debilitating reliance on the absurd to power it through scenes of gag repetition (yeah, we get it: Mr. Smith uses carrots as a weapon), high-school-dropout screenwriting, and numbing usage of ironic cock-rock music to stroke off Davis's less perceptive audience members. If there's a Hell, an honest-to-God place of eternal torment, "Shoot 'Em Up" would make the ideal introductory video, promising a lifetime of anguish to come.

For those of you who found The Transporter too subtle*, or if you've decided that The Boondock Saints is the Godfather of the millennial generation, then it's quite possible that you will see in Shoot 'Em Up what I so clearly did not. My thesaurus doesn't have enough synonyms for the word "bad" to adequately get me through this review. I was squirming in agony for just about every frame of this awful, awful movie, and having to relive it just to write this is causing me to shudder the way one normally shudders when imagining having a prostate exam or passing kidney stones.

Here's the skinny: Clive Owen is the hero. He's in the wrong place at the wrong time for living a quiet life, but the right place at the right time when it comes to saving a pregnant woman from thugs that multiply faster than Madrox the Multiple Man. These leather jacket-wearing dudes are lead by the maniacal genius Paul Giamatti, who likes cracking bad jokes in between showing off how smart he is. Clive delivers the woman's baby before she takes one in the head, and manages to get away with the wee bairn in a hail of bullets and impossible stunts.

I was actually ready to go with Shoot 'Em Up at that point, because I kept expecting the fourth wall to break. Surely, this wasn't really the movie I was watching. Clive Owen is playing a bad actor in a bad action movie, and the reveal is just around the corner. Someone's going to shout "Cut!" and like Bugs Bunny, whom he clearly emulates, Clive's going to turn to his audience and say, "Gee, ain't I a stinker?" Right?

Well, kind of. Clive Owen is performing badly in a bad action movie, but it really is Shoot 'Em Up and there is no breaking away from it. Strap in, because it's all downhill.

In order to save this little baby, Clive enlists a lactating hooker played by Monica Bellucci, and Giamatti chases them all over town, moving from one ludicrous situation to another. There is no point dissecting the plot, because it is intended to be ludicrous. I get that. Michael Davis, who directed as well as wrote this garbage fest, even wants us to think he's being clever by constructing multiple gags to let us know he's in on the joke. He's not just making a bad action movie, he's making fun of bad action movies. Shoot 'Em Up is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for people who huff paint, laced with left-over hipster irony that went out of style when those guys realized the elephant ears they stretched their lobes into weren't going to snap back into their original shapes.

The thing is, I'm just not buying what Davis is selling. In order to play at that kind of satire, your movie has to be smart, and Shoot 'Em Up is not smart. It has no class, nor does it have any real wit. It's dumb, dumb, and then dumb some more. What it has instead of brains is a solid rock of meanness. Shoot 'Em Up is a vicious movie, escalating its graphic violence and cruel jokes until the screams of sadism become a cacophony of torture, women debasing themselves (and being debased--how many dead pregnant women is too much?), and dislodged eyeballs. This film is a comedy in the way Hostel II and Captivity were movies about relationships. By the final bloodbath, Clive Owen isn't even trying for groaning one-liners anymore. There's no point. If the movie has done its job, we'll be drowning in our own drool, unable to laugh for all the gasping for air. Hours later, I'm still trying to wash the sickness off of me.

It's not that I'm offended by Shoot 'Em Up. One, I'm not namby pamby enough where I'm offended all that easy. Two, being offensive requires that you also be clever, something I've already noted this movie is not. If I'm anything, I'm insulted that the people involved in putting this atrocity together decided that we should all be so easy to please that they tried so little. Most of the work was done when they put the cast together, and all anyone had to do was deliver on the promise of the title. When it comes down to it, though, the action isn't even that good. Davis constructs several sequences that are like old Jackie Chan routines with a touch of Rube Goldberg, but rather than actually pulling them off with real stunts and complicated set designs, all of the running and jumping gunplay is done with computers and editing trickery. He's robbed us of the visceral thrill he promised us when he named his movie Shoot 'Em Up. I know a lot of people will likely compare this to a video game, but I don't want to blame the poor gamers for this waste of time. Besides, those guys at least know you have to actually be involved in what's happening for it to be fun.

I could go on and on ranting about how much I hated this movie, and probably take up more of your time than you would have to spend watching it for yourself (though, I'll at least not charge you for the dishonor). Instead, I'll leave you with a snippet of one of my favorite film reviews of all time. It's by Harlan Ellison, and I have it in front of me, contained in a book of his film criticism called Harlan Ellison's Watching. It's Harlan's take on Robocop**, and he gives that movie many thrusts of his dagger, but the one that has always stuck with me is his labeling it as "wetwork," which he then defines as, "the 'intelligence community's' currently fashionable doublespeak for the dirtiest of deeds, the act of assassination, termination with extreme unction, or whatever."

Such a label could also be applied to Shoot 'Em Up. "Or whatever" indeed. As Harlan told his readers in relation to Robocop, "Stay away from this one at all costs."

* And for the record, I actually enjoyed The Transporter quite a bit. Make of that what you will.

** Also for the record, I pretty much agree with Ellison's feelings on Robocop, though my reaction softened in the twenty years between viewing it at the theatre and on DVD. Maybe in 2027, I'll be okay with Shoot 'Em Up, too.

Stuck working overtime at her office, Angela (Rachael Nichols, "Alias") is in a rush to meet her family for Christmas. When her car won't start, she enlists the help of Thomas (Wes Bentley), the parking garage security officer. Seemingly affable and flirty, it turns out Thomas is a psychopath who's had his eye on Angela for some time. Kidnapping and locking her away in his office, Thomas plans a quaint holiday evening around forcing Angela to fall in love with him. When she resists, it sets off a chain of murder, torture, and revenge that ruins Christmas forever.

There's some hope offered in the opening credits of "P2" in the form of producer Alexandre Aja, the director of the magnificent "High Tension" and the "Hills Have Eyes" remake. Seeing his name attached to the screenplay immediately affirms that this throwaway horror film might not be so throwaway after all. Well...so much for the promise of screen credits.

Aja isn't the director for this exercise in parking garage havoc. That honor goes to Franck Khalfoun, a newcomer and associate of Aja's, getting his feet wet with a routine thriller that will more likely put the viewer to sleep than give them the scare of their life. Setting a thriller in a confined area isn't a bad idea, but you'd be surprised just how flavorless a parking garage can be. Khalfoun isn't accomplished enough as a filmmaker to jolt this story to life, and he lazily depends on boo scares and strange displays of fairly graphic gore to keep the crowds interested. It just isn't enough, especially when lady logic is furiously beating down the door (I never knew one could rip off a fingernail passively reaching for a cell phone on the ground) and the acting couldn't be worse if it tried.

The main offender is Wes Bentley who, after his display of cream puff badassery in this year's "Ghost Rider," should consider a career path in which he never plays a villain again. With a cheeseball Abercrombie model stare and internet-café-regular skin color, Bentley isn't the least bit menacing, and I swear to God there should be a law against actors with feminine voices taking roles that require a great deal of screaming. It's hilarious, which is most certainly not the intention of "P2."

The rest of the film is standard issue thriller "entertainment," only there's a curious lack of invention to the piece and not a drop of emotional investment. The experience is mostly watching bad talent interact interminably without ever achieving a plot point and counting how many times the movie wets down Nichols's ample cleavage. This is not horror. This is not much of a thriller either. It just stinks, and even worse, it's unbelievably boring.

Directed by Clifton Ko (credited here as Chi-Sum Ko), I Will Wait For You! is a romantic comedy short on both aspects of its genre. It neither tugs at the heart or strikes the funny bone. Both Leung and Yuen are likable enough, but the monkey wrenches that get thrown into their ongoing affair year after year get more and more tedious. There is the time a robber does pratfalls all over the apartment without the couple noticing, or when Wai-Sum shows up pregnant and, of course, goes into labor. Once Yau-Shing slips on some turkey guts and ends up with his head inside the dead bird, the audience is made fully aware that they too are in the dirty bowels of a turkey of a movie.

As a result of all this nonsense, by the time the relationship reaches its climax, I wasn't rooting for the pair to finally make their love official because I cared about them; rather, I wanted their union to happen so the movie would finally end. I Will Wait For You! should be kept waiting, passing into old age on the video shelf, untouched.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Definitely Skip It...I Will Wait For You! is devoid of the requisite laughter and romance that would make it worth watching once, let alone multiple times.

I was wrong.

The reason the box description of 49 Days makes no sense is because the movie makes no sense. In fact, I give whoever put the package together credit for getting as close to sorting it all out as they did.

Let's see if I can do better.

Lau Shing (Stephen Fung) is leaving his provincial village to go to the big city, where he will set up a business selling medicine made from traditional Chinese herbs. He is taking several of his fellow villagers with him, making it a sort of family affair. Women cry to see their men go, but spirits are light enough to take a group photo--only the picture never gets taken. A bumbling pal knocks over the camera, a bad omen for the trip to come. At this point, we're watching a family drama.

Jump ahead four years, and Lau Shing's business is flourishing. He hasn't been home the entire time, however, and his wife's letters are becoming increasingly strange. Though his brother in law, Pang Shi (Raymond Wong), urges him to stay, Lau decides to visit his family. On the eve of his departure, he goes to a night club, where he is coaxed into a romantic dinner with Susie (Debbie Goh), a dealer in Western medicine. She has a crush on Lau and doesn't want him to go. To ease the sting of his refusal, she goes to his warehouse to wander around for no real reason, running into Pang and his gas can. He's going to burn the building down, and he thinks he and Susie now have converging interests, as she wants Lau to stay and he wants money. How these two things connect is not explained to the audience, but given that we are now watching a mystery/thriller, presumably we will find out.

The warehouse catches fire, and the rest of Lau's cohorts are trapped inside, since apparently they all live there, too. They run around and start to burn to death in a couple of scenes of spectacularly excessive gore. Lau turns into an action hero, leaping across rooftops to get into the warehouse, something not even the firemen manage to do. Somehow, he gets back out. I don't remember exactly how that happened, but suffice to say, he's the only one who did. The firemen find the gas can, Pang fingers Lau, and then he's on trial for his life.

Still with me? Because we haven't even reached the half hour mark!

Lau Shing's guard in prison owes him for taking care of his mother, so he helps the herbalist by going to his friend, Lam Siu Chin (Gillian Chung), who just happens to be the cutest inexperienced attorney in town. The only thing is, Lam is starring in a screwball comedy, so she doesn't want to take this dreadfully serious murder case. Only when she urinates too close to where her father (Shaolin Soccer's Wong Yat Fei) is burying his own father and messes up the feng shui of the sacred site, unleashing a flock of ravens so dense they black out the sky, does she agree to take the case, figuring when she springs Lau it will prove she's not a screw-up. Little does she know, however, she has now stepped into Silence of the Lambs (dear editor, don't let me make a pun out of the lawyer's name here) and when she walks in the prison, some dude is going to grab her through the bars and lick her neck. Ewwwwww!

Naturally, she screws up the trial, as she seems to just sit around and wait for Susie--who we're now told has disappeared--to show up. She sees Susie once or twice, but it's clear to us that Susie is a ghost, so it's hard to tell why Lam keeps thinking Susie will answer the subpoena. When the disgruntled judge can gruntle no more, he convicts Lau, leaving Lam with only five days to make her appeal before Lau is sentenced to death. Too bad she falls in a giant plothole in the middle of the street, bumps her head, and enters a coma! Thankfully for all involved, Lam is due a break, so a phone call from Susie wakes her up on the day that Lau is going to have his head and body forcibly separated, leaving her with just enough time for her to somehow arrange for the executioner to make some incantation so that a hole of light opens up in the wall, and Lau runs through it into the forest outside his village. Lam is waiting for him there, and they are going to clear his name Scooby-Doo-style, going up against the evil Pang, who is actually hanging out in a yakuza picture where he owes a bunch of money for gambling debts. As if that weren't enough, we're soon going to find out that Lam's family is living a movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

By the way, did I mention this might be a period piece? The camera in the opening is one of those ancient kinds where the photographer hides under a sheet to take a picture, and I don't recall seeing any cars. Similarly, no phones or other means of speedily sending messages back and forth between town and the boondocks. Lam has some really nice business suits, however, so maybe she has a time machine that takes her to the dressing room at Contempo Casual.

If you've made it this far, don't worry, you only have half an hour left before the whole thing collides into one completely asinine climax. I've even saved a ton of surprises for you should you decide to wade into this genre swamp. 49 Days is the directorial debut of Kin-lun Lam, and hopefully the cinematic slaughter will stop here. To be fair, he's not completely without skill, as 49 Days has style to spare. Of course, just like everything else in this production, he doesn't actually apply it sparingly. Random bursts of slow-motion or sped-up stock are peppered throughout to no real effect, De Palma-esque split screen is used for when Lau walks the Green Mile, and occasionally the director even indulges in CG. This over-the-top showboating is really unnecessary, since all the average shots are actually pretty nice. The film is lit like the world is full of neon, which again makes zero sense if 49 Days is a period piece, but it shore is purty.

The subtitles are incredibly bad, perhaps in an attempt to allow English-speaking audiences to view this as a comedy. Just what exactly is Pang doing when he is "percolating public funds," for instance? It sounds pretty awful, whatever it is. Similarly, for a movie that relies so much on math, they could have sprung to buy the translator a calculator. The magic invoked to allow Lau Shing to keep going after his death sentence mentions he has "7 times 7 of 49 days," but I gathered from the later urgency of the situation that it actually is really only two weeks. Also, Chun Bo (Law Mon), the executioner (or, in this case, "executor," which I think means he will handle Lau's estate after chopping off his head), says that karmically he must retire before his death toll exceeds 100. Lau is his 99th straight kill--which doesn't stop Chun from sparing Pang's life at the climax so he doesn't go over his limit. 49 days is really two weeks, and 100 kills is really 99 in this crazy mixed-up world!

FINAL THOUGHTS: ...There aren't enough hours in your life for this kind of thing, so if you see 49 Days at your local video store, I hope for your sake a big hole of light opens up in the wall so that you can jump into it and escape this awful movie. Skip It.

To classify Immortal as a live-action production would be a misnomer. The movie is at least 95% animated. There are only 3 or 4 live actors, and everything else is sub-Playstation quality CGI (when I say Playstation, I'm not even talking PS2; I mean original Playstation). Some of the characters are strange-looking aliens that you could make a reasonable case needed to be digital, but even most of the normal human characters are animated for no particular reason. The movie was produced in English, but most of the European actors (both live and voiceover) are clearly sounding out their lines phonetically, which I suppose was a benefit for them; if they could understand the atrocious dialogue they were speaking, they'd probably be horrified.

The story set in New York City of the future. Specifically, it's set in New York City of the Fifth Element future. If the CGI wasn't so soft and blurry you could probably spot Bruce Willis driving one of those flying cabs. A giant floating pyramid is hovering over the city, which no one below seems to notice or care about. Inside, half-naked, animal-headed Egyptian gods play Monopoly and card games (I'm not kidding, this is really the plot!). One of the gods named Horus is sentenced to death for reasons that are never explained. He must have lost at gin rummy or something. Anyway, he's allowed seven days to cruise the city looking for chicks, which I guess is the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a last meal. He's desperate to impregnate one so that he can be reborn later or some stupid nonsense like that, but to do that he has to possess the body of a human man, because the Egyptian gods don't seem to have genitals of their own. Problem is, most of the time he tries to do this the human body explodes. Naturally, the police think he's a serial killer (Stop snickering! I'm really not kidding!). Eventually he finds one suitable body in a subversive existentialist poet/political revolutionary guy named Nikopol, and together they roofie a blue-haired goth chick and rape her, but hey the guy is kind of studly so of course she enjoys it and falls in love with her rapist.

It turns out the blue-haired hottie has an alien boyfriend who's totally into her "experimenting" with other men for reasons that are meant to be somehow philosophically profound. Then there's a bright red hammerhead shark-looking monster that slithers along walls and can shrink himself and swim through the plumbing system. I'm not really sure what the point of that was, but he gets zapped into goo by the laser eyes of the bird-headed Egyptian god. At the end, they all go to Central Park, which despite the rest of the city being in the middle of summer seems to be located in the arctic.

The movie is astoundingly stupid and boring and cheesy, with exceptionally poor animation quality and even worse dialogue. I pity poor Charlotte Rampling for getting trapped in this mess, even in such a minor supporting role. She's an actress of a caliber way beyond this tripe, and must have lost a bet to be showing up in it. The story doesn't make any sense, and it's so damn joyless and dull you don't want it to make any sense. You just want it to be over. Sadly, it takes 104 painful minutes to get there. Avoid at all costs.

Final Thoughts: I find it impossible to believe that anyone could enjoy or think that Immortal is a good movie. It's not even worth a rental. Pretend you never heard of it and consider yourself better off.

Leung Chun Chiu's 1996 film begins with the most typical cold-hearted journalist plot imaginable, and then somehow manages to make it infinitely ridiculous. The problem is one of tone. The first half of the movie is like a homoerotic Asian version of Romancing the Stone, reporter and criminal running through the wilderness and engaging in high-comedy hijinx--including falling down a waterfall. It's not mud, sure, but it could be. Of course, the men who once hated each other are now friends, and this corporate thief isn't such a terrible dude after all. It's not very funny, and it's strangely scatological. I actually enjoy toilet humor, but Chung-Shun having to go to the bathroom every five minutes was just tiresome. The two actually meet in a stall, and at one point, Chung-Shun even urinates on Sun.

The second half is a little better, as things get more serious. Lau is a likable actor, and he seems to honestly try to bring Sun's inner struggle to the surface. Lee's hooker with a heart of a gold, however, is pretty obnoxious. There is also another overbearing reporter who wants all the good dirt on Chung-Shun and the still lingering cops who have been transplanted from a more standard Hong Kong police drama. At one point, one of them does a flip and slide over his car hood...just to give Sun and Chu a ride.

Lau's character may learn his lesson in the end, but it's an obvious one, and his final gesture to Chu just earns a mild shrug. The end isn't as offensive to one's tastes as the beginning, but it's too little too late.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Despite some decent acting from Andy Lau, What a Wonderful World is a storytelling mess... Skip It.

The script, written by Raymond Wong (who also stars), centers around one family, and takes them from the eldest son's wedding anniversary to the anniversary of his parents a couple of months later. Structured around three brothers, All's Well, End's Well has three concurrent story lines: Wong's marital woes, brought to a head by his cheating; Chow's womanizing and the strange, film-obsessed woman (Maggie Cheung) who turns her obsession on him; and Leslie Cheung's rivalry with a tomboy aunt. In the latter story line, both Cheung and the aunt (Teresa Mo) are clearly gay, though no one ever says. Cheung is actually pretty entertaining as the effeminate flower arranger, but given his tragic suicide in 2003, the fact that the film ends with the two "curing" each other by having sex left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

Not that the rest of the film was much of a treat. When it was watchable at all, it was thanks to the charismatic stars. Stephen Chow and Maggie Cheung have some very sweet moments together, though I think the regular use of the word "rape" was a mistranslation that hurt the romantic angle. They indulge in parodies of popular movies of the day--the funniest is seeing Cheung dressed as Madonna from Truth or Dare, conical breasts and all--making this by far the most successful of the stories, with Chow eventually feigning madness to get out of his romantic entanglement; yet, it's also indicative of what is wrong with All's Well, End's Well. While director Clifton Ko flirts with the sort of audacious spoofing that Chow has since become known for, he shies away from taking the comedy to its most audacious limit. So, the film merely skirts the edge of Naked Gun territory, landing somewhere along the lines of what you used to be able to find on the USA Network at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night.

Plus, a lot of All's Well, End's Well simply isn't funny. People with their heads stuck in the dryer and endless off-key karaoke performances just don't get the laughs. Wong gives himself the worst story line, and every time Ko cuts away from Chow and Cheung, I found myself wishing I could just hit fast forward.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Though All's Well, End's Well may have some gung-ho early performances by some of the bigger Chinese stars, their talent is wasted on a pretty dismal script. While die-hard fans of any of the actors may consider renting it, my general advice is that you Skip It.

As The Dark opens, a scrolling text informs us that just as many animal species found on Earth can camouflage themselves or use unusual methods to protect themselves. We are then told that it stands to reason that aliens may have similar powers. We then see a woman (Kathy Richards, Paris Hilton's mother) stalked and attacked by something or someone. This event brings in the three main characters in the film. The woman's father, horror novelist Roy Warner (William Devane), is informed of his daughter's death, and confronts the police detective working on the case, Mooney (Richard Jaeckel). These two men dislike each other, as Mooney aided in Warner doing time for manslaughter. Meanwhile, TV reporter Zoe Owens (Cathy Lee Crosby) smells a juicy story with the murder, and convinces her boss (Keenan Wynn) to let her pursuit it. As Warner leans on Mooney to investigate the case, Owens attempts to learn more about Warner. During this time, the murderer continues to kill a new victim every night. Our three main characters, Warner, Owens, and Mooney, begin to learn more about the murders, mostly from a psychic named DeRenzy (Jacquelyn Hyde), and they converge on the killer, who may be more than human.

You know that you're in trouble when the special features on a DVD are filled with comments from the director stating that the finished film bore little resemblance to the original script and that the film's focus was changed during production. According to director John "Bud" Cardos, who was brought onto the film after Tobe Hooper was fired, The Dark was originally going to concern a man who had been imprisoned by his parents, never seeing the outside world. Following a house-fire, the man escapes and goes on a killing spree. But, during production, producer Edward Montoro decided that the movie should be about an alien, as sci-fi was quite in vogue at the time. So, the killer became an alien and the physical attacks changed so that the creature killed by shooting lasers from its eyes.

Thus, it becomes apparent that The Dark is yet another film where the behind-the-scenes story is more interesting than the film itself, as The Dark is a very slow and boring movie. Given that Cardos inherited the film from another director, it's hard to place a great deal of blame on him, but someone is responsible for the incredibly slack pacing in the film. Scenes meander from beginning to end and, save for the opening scene, there is no suspense or tension in the movie. The actors seem to be coming from all different directions and there's one scene between Crosby and Devane where it felt as if I was watching two people in the same rooming carrying on completely different conversations.

There are also many problems with the script by Standord Whitmore. The movie has far too many characters and throughout the first half of the movie, new subplots are popping up constantly. Horror fans will most likely be disappointed by the movie, as it plays more like a police/crime movie than a horror film. Since the monster kills a different person every night. All of the victims are nameless/faceless (and eventually headless!) characters that we know nothing about, and thus, don't care about. If it weren't for the text at the film's opening, we would have no idea that the creature was meant to be an alien, as this is never mentioned in the movie. (Although Mooney does joke about it.)

So, the outcome is a movie where a lot of characters talk about murders and we occasionally see someone we don't know get killed. The finale does feature some nice shots (and it was the only thing that I remembered from the movie...and how it influenced my Halloween costume...), but it comes far, far too late. However, the most annoying thing about The Dark is the music. I can only imagine that composer Roger Kellaway had seen Suspiria and was taken with the whispering in that film. Thus, The Dark is filled with people whispering "The dark, the dark" over and over. Never before has the mute button looked so tempting.

Oh well, another fond childhood memory has been destroyed. When a movie contains a monster with laser-beam eyes, it's easy to see why a young boy would find it cool. But, when that same film is seen to be pointless and to have a plodding pace that would make a turtle nervous, one can see that not all old memories should be trusted.

ADV's latest release in their line of "rubbersuit" monster shows, while decidedly aimed at kids and those fans who are into the more obscure releases from Japan, is set in medieval Japan. Some grave robbers have disturbed the tomb of a nasty supernatural beast who drinks human blood and takes control of human hosts. In short, he's a vampire.

The creature is very powerful and disturbs the natural order of things. This includes the lives of the natural spirits and other imps, monsters and demons. The movie shows how the humans and monsters work towards the common goal of ending the threat posed by this creature.

Okay, I liked the cheesy effects and silly nature of the monsters. From the one who looked like a guy with a frog mask to the one with a crystal ball in it's head (not to mention the lady with the long neck), the low budget release made me howl with laughter. My laughter at the acting was also enough to make my sides ache (though in a good way). That the story was so bad, only reinforced my enjoyment of the release. The original director, Yoshiyuki Kuroda, didn't show a lot of originality but he sure played this one so straight forward that it yielded numerous unintended laughs. For that alone, I Recommend it as a treat for movie fans able to enjoy a silly guilty pleasure once in awhile.

Final Thoughts: Okay, the movie was lame but so much so that I really thought it was fun to watch. It tied in some Japanese traditions about spirits and demons with a mindset that differed from the superstitions that I was raised with and showed a different light on the concept of samurai of ancient Japan. If you like silly monster movies, but can't quite get into the ones focusing on 300+ foot tall super sized monsters, this one will likely appeal to you as much as it did to me. In short, how often does a terrible movie get better with each viewing? Recommended!

Although The Prisoner is billed on the cover as being “Jackie Chan is The Prisoner”; Chan only has a small role in this 2001 re-release of the 1990 film Island on Fire. In fact, he doesn’t come in until about twenty-five minutes into the film. He then has a couple of cool fights in a pool hall and in a prison, after killing someone in the pool hall, but the comic, martial arts wizard that we all know Jackie Chan to be never appears. Rather, this film is an action/drama about a police officer, played by Tony Leung, who puts himself in lockup in order to uncover a crime that he doesn’t know much about. The only thing he does know is that his friend was killed and his dying wish might have been for Leung to solve the mystery of the prison. Okay, so follow this closely; Sammo Hung, from Martial Law, is also a prisoner but he wants to get out to be with his son. But, there are two bad guys who go around bullying everybody and they want to kill Jackie Chan. The warden likes to see the inmates fight against each other and he’d like to kill a few people of his own. Meanwhile, no one knows Leung is in prison and he has no idea, nor does he take any steps to find out, who is behind the prison mystery. Confused? So was I and I was watching the film!

Once I approached the end of the film some ideas fell into place and I had a better idea of where the story was supposed to be going. But it takes a long time to make heads or tales out of the loosely wound plot and in-between the twines are a lot of dull moments punctuated by pretty good fight scenes. The production values are high in this movie with big sets, lots of explosions and a gratuitous scene with a pretty girl in a wet shirt. So one must assume that the Production Company spent so much money on the production that they had nothing left with which to pay a good writer. But that’s okay, someone’s child did a fine job for an 8th grader!

...All in all, The Prisoner is a ten-year-old, mediocre film that tries, and must, capitalize on Jackie Chan’s name in order to draw an audience. If you’re a die-hard Jackie Chan fan, give it a glance but if not, skip it!

Here is a case where you have an all star cast, including the likes of Andy Lau (God of Gamblers, Days of Being Wild, Savior of the Soul), Bridgette Lin (Swordsman 2, Chunking Express, Peking Opera Blues), and Elvis Tsui (Gunmen, Viva Erotica, Royal Tramp) hamming it up as the title characters. You get a director like Taylor Wong who previously handled big name stars in Rich and Famous and had a hand in directing two of the big forerunners to the new wave fantasy action movement with the early 80’s films Buddha’s Palm and (one of my nonsense, wacko faves) Return of the Deadly Blade. But it all fails because it has an uninvolving, nearly incomprehensible story. I cannot imagine they had more than a rough idea of a plot because they never stick to any idea, commit to any real story. Its like the done to death blurry, slow motion, wirework, sword swinging fight choreography and its roster of names should be enough to ensure healthy box office. Well, it isn’t. There are so may reasons I should love this movie. Great cast, and the genre is one of my favorites. Its a film where the lead character can decapitate his enemies, just with a flutter of his robe, but, like his foes, it all falls apart in every way.

The story is a complete mess. I mean, it is so bad, it is nearly impossible for me surmise. Between bad writing and bad sub translation, its a real chore. There is complicated backstory that is only spoken of, events offscreen, all told in such a mediocre, ill-translated way, you can tell its a disaster no matter what the language and even if it was translated perfectly. There are also entire conversations that are seemingly psychically communicated, two actors speaking, yet their mouths don’t move. The direction and editing is so dizzying, that too makes just the job of “Who is that flying in the air?” tough to decipher much less where people are standing and what exactly is the location. For Example... At one moment it looks like our hero, Sam Sui (Andy Lau) and Butterfly are escaping the soldiers pursuing them in a field. Then Butterfly falls off a cliff into a river. Sam Sui continues to fight on the field before suddenly disappearing into the ground. Dao (Elvis Tsui), the commander pursuing Sam Sui, informs his men to “Search the celler.” Butterfly, underwater and drowning, swims up to some rocks, movies them aside, and sees Sam Sui, trapped in ice. Thats right, trapped in ice. He then busts through the ice, grabs her, and leaps out of the river, landing in the field again. He puts her on a horse and this is, word for word, his instructions to her- “Here is dangerous. Listen to me. No matter what, just leave here first. You’ll go towards the West. Count the numbers from 1 to 7. Ride up the horse. Later you can see me.” She then rides away only to have him- for no apparent reason- tie a rope to the horse so he can fight and then bungee jump onto the horse after she rides a couple of feet away???

The basic plot, as best I can surmise through the headache I’m still suffering from (and was caused by the film)... Sam Sui is a master swordsman at some competition for master swordsmen, where he is framed for murdering a royal family member. Soon, he and Butterfly, a member of some rival sword school who has the hots for him, are running around being pursued by a ninjalike sword sect and the army commanded by a, guess what?, master swordsman Dao. Dao’s terminally ill daughter, Red Leaf, was a onetime love of Sam Sui. Anyway after a couple of battles where Sam Sui defeats all comers very easily, he and Butterfly go to Swords Villa to rescue her sister and meet up with Ming Jian Kim, yet another master swordsman. After Ming Jian and Sam Sui spend long minutes swiping the empty air, the ground, and flying around, some guy named Yun Dong Wong breaks out of the ground, is a leader of some sort, and was buried for 7 yrs. Something like that, by this point my temples were throbbing... Anyway, the armies all converge on this spot, wanting to arrest the wrongly accused Sam Sui, but he is injured, so they decide to let him rest and have a grand duel. Anyway there’s some kind of backstabbing... Butterfly is kidnapped... Someone wants Ming Jai to be the master swordsman... A Prince shows up to judge the duel... Everybody fights... Its awkwardly filmed making what’s going on hard to discern, and you don’t really care anyway... Its a mess and it made my head hurt...

Sent on an assignment to cover a night at the average Los Angeles firehouse, T.V. personality Angela (Jennifer Carpenter) is stuck reporting on the mundane details of fireman life. Becoming frustrated with her botched attempts to add some spice into this monotonous story, Angela's fortunes change when a call arrives requesting emergency assistance at an apartment complex. Tagging along with her newfound friends (including Jay Hernandez), Angela and her cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) head into the building, only to be quickly sealed in by faceless government officials. Now trapped with angry cops (Columbus Short), paranoid residents (Rade Serbedzija), and an anxious medical professional (Greg Germann), Angela and her roving camera discover the true reason for the quarantine...and it's hungry for flesh.

There's nothing broad to be found in "Quarantine" that directly separates it from "Rec." Director John Erick Dowdle (of the unreleasable "The Poughkeepsie Tapes") crafts a straightforward copy of the Spanish film, preserving the same plot and scare beats, but altering the corners of the writing to put his fat stamp on the picture. To Americanize "Rec," "Quarantine" introduces crude sexual tension between Angela and the firemen, and turns our camera-ready hostess from a frustrated lifestyle reporter to a veritable sorority pledge, with Dowdle encouraging Carpenter to play daft instead of confident, ultimately reducing Angela's role in the overall scheme of things.

The changes are minor, but they do add up, wandering away from "Rec" in all the wrong ways. The original film spent some time with the characters, "Quarantine" quickly sets up the humans as zombie food, with little development beyond differing puncture wounds. "Rec" was a multi-layered visual piece of broadcasting verisimilitude, resembling a chaotic news explosion; the remake retains an unacceptable glossy look, highlighting the already recognizable cast as humdrum actors, not frantic citizens trapped in Hell. Also, while "Rec" didn't win any awards for steady cinematography, director Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza composed carefully for maximum suspense and exposition. Dowdle just throws his camera around arbitrarily, with huge sections of the film lost to inane handheld blur and iffy technical believability. In other words, "Rec" invited the viewer to get lost in the terror. "Quarantine" can't stop reminding everyone that it's just a dopey movie.

Reviewing "Quarantine" on its own merits is a difficult challenge, since "Rec" is as close to perfection as fright films get these days. To the uninitiated, the remake will be easy enough to swallow, with plenty of cheap boo scares and hysterical Carpenter overacting to justify the price of admission. For "Rec" fans, there's no reason to return to this story, since Hollywood has drained the tension away, replacing Spanish innovation with American stupidity.

That's what you'll see if, for some ungodly reason, you happen to be holding the latest Charles Band DVD. If so, put it down. Immediately.

After spending much of the past two decades churning out colorful schlock like Dollman Meets the Demonic Toys' Puppet Master Robot Attack, Mr. Band has settled down with a new outfit called "Wizard Entertainment," and if you happened to read my reviews for the first two Wizard flicks (Decadent Evil & Doll Graveyard), then you already know two things:

1. As an old fan of Band's early work, I'm actively trying to like his new stuff. Honest.

-and-

2. These movies are just all sorts of terrible. Seriously.

I was half-expecting to have a royal hoot with The Gingerdead Man, but the thing never comes close to being colorful crap or affable camp. It's just ... dingy and tiresome and painfully plagiarized from Child's Play. Only this time instead of a doll we have a cookie, instead of Brad Dourif we got Gary Busey, and instead of actors, a screenplay, and an actual three-act story structure ... we have inept amateurs, a lot of aimless blather, and a formless movie that clocks in at about 55 minutes, not including the opening and closing credits. Put together one DVD, the triple feature of Decadent Evil, Doll Graveyard, and The Gingerdead Man might be worth maybe 9 American dollars.

Frankly I'm amazed that something this low-rent and borderline-unwatchable could come from a guy who has directed over 100 movies. True, they were always low-budget and cheesy, but at least they felt like real movies! The Gingerdead Man is a few limp kill scenes, a truly moronic concept, and a whole lotta brain-damaging "cookie" puns. Not even the gimmick casting of Gary Busey can bring any color to this crummy affair.

Final Thoughts: I wish I could offer the opinion that Charles Band is back and slingin' his trademark cheeseball goodness, but the guy's 0-for-3 with his new production company, and after watching all three flicks in order ... things don't seem to be improving.

Half-man, half-demon dude goes around offing demons and laying the smackdown on possessed people who simply don't respect the bible. He's been raised by priests to fight for good, but he's also struggling with his own inner demons. (Weak pun intended.) Paired up with a chaste (yet inevitably sexy) young nun, our kinda-hero tangles with a boss demon who sweats a lot and rambles on and on to whichever undead minion happens to be within earshot.

So the concept basically sounds like Constantine meets Hellboy meets the first five minutes of Scary Movie 3, only imagine that concoction stripped of all energy, excitement, creativity, style, intensity, thrills, chills, gore, and half-decent special effects.

That's Demon Hunter in a nutshell, one of the driest, dumbest, and most consistently derivative knock-offs since that E.T. rip-off about the alien who loved McDonalds. (You know the one I mean.) What could have been a mindlessly exciting b-level retread is instead a ponderously uneventful yawnfest laden with overwhelming amounts of lengthy exposition rants, circuitous backstories, and dialogue barrages that border on the unjustifiably painful. The action bits are fairly few and far between, but you'll know 'em when you see 'em, because you won't be able to help but notice that the main characters have somehow managed to stop yammering for 11 consecutive seconds.

Not only does Demon Hunter pilfer from four or five painfully obvious sources, but it doesn't even bother to take the borrowed foundations and build something semi-creative on top of it. It's all familiar themes, endless conversations, goofy FX work, oh, and a sweaty Billy Drago in a series of hotel room scenes in which he gropes a devil-woman with glue-on horns. If this flick were just a little more awful, it'd probably be hysterical.

Don't believe me?

Screenwriter/stunt coordinator Mitch Gould and DTV hack Scott Ziehl* may go on to much bigger and better things, and I'll be here to give 'em a second shot when that happens, but what they've put together here is equal parts boring, silly, and downright stolen.

(*To be fair, Ziehl also directed Earth vs. the Spider, which is a perfectly, stupidly enjoyable b-movie, just so everyone knows I'm not just gunning for the little guys. He also did Cruel Intentions 3, which I somehow missed, and he's presently working on something called Road House 2: Last Call, which stars Jake Busey, Will Patton, William Ragsdale, and Johnathon Schaech, and which (no lie) I cannot wait to see.)

Final Thoughts: A dreary and overly familiar DTV occult thriller is, of course, nothing new. But what's interesting here is that Demon Hunter was produced by Stephen J. Cannell, a name familiar to anyone who's seen The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, Hunter, Riptide, 21 Jump Street, Wise Guy, or The Commish. These days Mr. Cannell is producing movies called Demon Hunter, The Tooth Fairy, and It Waits, two of which I've seen, both of which are destined for the $1.99 bin by the end of 2006. Hollywood's a nutty place.

Regarding Demon Hunter -- stolen plots, stupid stories, and silly monsters I can take, but there's no damn reason a 75-minute movie should feel like 275.

Unfortunately, through the miracle of DVD technology, I'm able to see Virgin Witch in its entirety, completely uncut and commercial free. It's a pity. What might have titillated me at ten -- knowing for sure I was missing out on something good whenever there was an awkward jump cut - now becomes an unendurably rote and routine experience. Oh, there's nudity, all right. But that's about it -- and I'm not ten anymore. There's no scares, no gore, no tension, no horror - nothing. What promised to be a creepy exercise in English witchcraft seen through the exploitation lens, devolves into a third-rate Hammer knock-off, with precious little to recommend it.

Sisters Christine and Betty (Ann and Vicki Michelle) are running away from home, when they're picked up by sharpster Johnny (Keith Buckley), who takes them to stay with him in London. Christine, we learn, wants to be a model. We also learn that she has powers of ESP; this is how she picks out commercial modeling agent Sybil Waite (Patricia Haynes) from a magazine layout. Going to Waite's office, Christine is compelled by Waite to remove her clothes to "measure her for the records" (frankly, she doesn't seem that upset by the request). But Sybil has other plans for Christine that don't include modeling. Sybil fakes a phone call from a photographer, telling Christine that she's in a bind to find a model on short notice who will spend the weekend at a country estate, shooting a liquor ad. Christine readily accepts, and brings along her sister Betty for protection. But from the start of the weekend, it appears that Christine doesn't need any protection; she willingly removes her clothes for the photo shoot, and acts as if she doesn't have a care in the world. Meanwhile, Sybil keeps a sharp eye on Christine -- for personal reasons.

At the same time, sister Betty is exploring the estate, when she stumbles across a ceremony room for witches. Disturbed by this, she goes outside for some air, where she again becomes confused by the lustful stares of several men from the village. She wakes up in bed to find Dr. Amberly (Neil Hallett), the owner of the estate, comforting her while saying it's perfectly normal for a young virgin to have sexual frustrations (Mr. Smooth). After Betty confides in Christine what she has found, Christine states that all of the people at the estate are witches - and yet, she feels absolutely no fear concerning this situation. Later at dinner, Dr. Amberly freely admits that they're a coven of witches, but that they only practice white witchcraft - never Satanism. Eventually, Christine discovers her powers becoming more acute, and decides to become the next High Priestess, pushing Sybil out of the way. Will Johnny come to Betty's rescue before Christine totally loses it, and sacrifices Betty at the pagan orgy?

It's not difficult to interest me in one of those typical "there's something wrong at the English country estate this weekend" type of movie. It's such a common setting for British films and TV shows, and it can encompass many different types of film genres, from Agatha Christie-type mysteries, to horror films (Night Must Fall) to Hammer suspense films (Die! Die! My Darling!), to various Avengers and The Saint episodes. But for that type of film to work, there has to be something wrong at the estate, and after watching Virgin Witch, I couldn't figure out what the problem was. The film starts out with a montage of naked women, with one apparently being sacrificed during a pagan witch ceremony. But this is never referred to again in the film. Who's the victim? We never find out. Dr. Amberly assures Betty and Christine that his coven never practices the dark arts, and even argues about it with Sybil, demanding it stay that way. Did Sybil lose control, and sacrifice a virgin? One might think so, but the film never definitively answers that. As well, there never seems to be a credible threat to the young girls in the house; I kept waiting for someone to feel threatened, for someone to start getting that uneasy feeling that all was not right with their too-friendly and accomodating hosts. But it never happened. Christine seems to be at one with the house immediately upon her arrival, and there's no question (from either her or her hosts) that she will eventually become a witch -- and a powerful one, at that. The witches and warlocks in the house keep saying they don't want to harm anyone - and then they don't harm anyone. And Betty - poor, dim Betty - doesn't seem to comprehend anything that's going on in the house. And once she is clued in, she willing agrees to become a witch in the final ceremony, to bring back Johnny (with the help of Christine's powers). Again, no big threat is seen at the house. So...basically, we have a pallid little witchcraft movie with no internal strife, and no dramatic conflict.

And when you're left without dramatic tension or a provocative plot line, the only thing left to concentrate on is the acting. The actors are fine in Virgin Witch; Hallett and Haines do an adequate job with their "evil" witches parts, while the Michelle sisters are suitably desirable as the nubile victims. The only problem with all of these performances is that you've seen tham all a hundred times before, in better movies. There's nothing in the slightest way distinctive about Virgin Witch's story or screenplay, or its performances. The direction by TV veteran Ray Austin is, in a word, perfunctory. He seems incapable of building any kind of tension, and most of his scenes just lie there, inert. He isn't helped, either, by indifferent cinematography and editing. As for the musical score by Ted Dicks, it's derivative John Barry.

Final Thoughts: I know Halloween is coming up, and you're looking around for something new to watch - anything, anything other than Halloween or Friday the 13th for the upteenth time - but you can find something better than Virgin Witch, trust me. There's lots of Hammer collections out there that you can rent or buy on DVD. Or if you're lucky, something will come up, late at night on TV - just remember to keep the volume down or your Mom will hear. Skip it.

The plot centers on a latchkey kids and Elsa. She's befriended by an elderly neighbor (Michel Serrault) in her building. When he goes looking for a special butterfly in the mountains, she hides in his car without telling anyone.

Michel Serrault does an excellent job with the material as Julien, the eldery neighbor, but there's no saving this 80-minute film. The entire second act drags (tough to do in a film less than an hour and a half long), and the entire third act feels tacked on, as if writer/director Philippe Muyl had no way to end the film.

The one saving grace is the cinematography of Nicolas Herdt. The entire butterfly hunt looks beautiful, colorful and so peaceful. Herdt and Muyl do a great job of contrasting the free and open mountain hike with the cold and gray of the city.

Final Thoughts: The Butterfly tries to find a whimsical tone, a place where it can pull on the heartstrings. Instead, with its short running time and lack of character arc, the film comes closer to replicating an after-school special.