Category Archives: film

Hong Kong Action Movies

Film Review: Mr. Vampire (1980)

Jackie Chan, as a performer, is frequently compared with Buster Keaton and, as I’ve mentioned in my own review of Police Story at Letterboxd, Charlie Chaplin.

Well, Mr. Vampire, a martial arts horror-comedy film produced by Jackie Chan’s friend and fellow member of the Five Little Fortunes, is what I’d probably describe as the Hong Kong equivalent of the Abbott and Costello Meet… movies. Continue reading →

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Film Review: Blood and Lace (1971)

There’s a bit in an episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip where the characters on the series serial-numbers-filed-off version of Saturday Night Live are working on a sketch for Thanksgiving where the turkey spurts absurd, Army of Darkness levels of blood when carved. The bit is not shown, only talked about – with one of the characters commenting about the Prop guy thinking the level of blood is unrealistic with the comment”If it’s just a realistic amount of blood, then it’s… extremely disturbing…”

That is, perhaps, Blood and Lace‘s greatest strength, and its weakness. Continue reading →

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film, Hong Kong Action Movies

Film Review: The Mission (1999)

Johnny To, as a director, has two extremes. On one end is gritty crime thrillers like the Election duology – which may have an action scene or two, but which otherwise are generally grounded in the real world. On the other end is Exiled, a film which has a fight scene early in the film where several characters in a firefight cause a table to flip and spin end over end with their bullet hits, but ultimately both come out of the fight uninjured. In the middle lies The Mission. Continue reading →

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Film Review: Barbarian Queen II – The Empress Strikes Back

Barbarian Queen II is, basically, a somewhat nihilistic gender-swapped version of the Robin Hood story – princess is heir to throne, king has gone off to war and is presumed killed in the field, with the King’s evil brother planning to usurp the throne, princess flees to forest and builds a band of bandits to fight back against Not-Prince-John. Continue reading →

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film

Movie Review: Deathstalker II

Deathstalker II is a fun dumb movie. It’s the kind of film where there is a title-drop in the film that incorporates the number (sort of – the line being: “I’ll have my revenge, and Deathstalker too!”). It’s got a soundtrack by Casio, exterior sets from a Renaissance faire, pants made out of pleather because they ran out of their leather budget, and female characters who wear as little as possible in the hopes that the audience won’t pay attention to any of the rest of the film’s shortcomings. Continue reading →

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film

Film Review: Star Crash

There are some genres of cinema that have been lost to technological developments and rise of global interconnectivity. One of these genres is the “Italian knockoff of an successful American film.” One of the more impressive parts of this cinematic sub-genre is the science fiction film Starcrash, directed by Luigi Cozzi under an American pseudonym to conceal the film’s true nature. Continue reading →

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Film Review: Solaris (1972)

When it comes to the “science and technology” part of Science Fiction, there tend to be three axis of thought, that end up forming into a sort of spectrum-ish thing – like those charts used in some video games where your character’s stats are portrayed in context of a geometric shape, with portions sticking out in different directions based on how you’ve chosen to weight things. There’s a technical term for this, but I don’t know what its. Continue reading →

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Anime

Anime Review – Record of Lodoss War (1990)

Video

This time I’m reviewing the fantasy anime series “Record of Lodoss War” from 1990.

Footage:

Music:

“Little Lily Swing” – Tri-Tachyon
Used under a Creative Commons License.

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Notes: Matt Walton suggested that I cover some of the material I’ve previously covered in my fanzine on the show – this is meant to be a part of that – I did an article on Western Fantasy in Anime that covered Lodoss and several other shows that I’ll get to in future episodes.

film

Film Review – Fury (2014)

“$NAME_OF_FILM” on/in a “$LOCATION_OR_VEHICLE” is a pretty good reductive way to describe some films. Under Siege is Die Hard on a Battleship. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Starship Mine” was pitched as Die Hard on the Enterprise. The Magnificent Seven is The Seven Samurai in the old west. While it’s reductive, it’s not necessarily bad, nor is it necessarily a derogatory way to describe a film. Thus, don’t take it as a minus when I say that Fury is Das Boot (which I’ve previously reviewed) in a Sherman Tank. Continue reading →

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Film Review: Interstellar

Sometimes, science and scientific concepts make for great story hooks. Time Dilation – the idea that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down for you while moving normally for everyone else – is one of those concepts. One of the few high points of Flight of the Navigator was how it used time dilation to create pathos with the main character’s family having out-aged him. Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star did it with a couple being separated by not only distance, but time (a theme that would carry over to much of Shinkai’s other work). Interstellar does this with a parent and child. Continue reading →

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Movie Review: X-Men – Days of Future Past (Rogue Cut)

When it comes to comic book films, and adaptations of comic books to the screen, there are questions about how you adapt certain comic book concepts to the screen, and as cinematic universes get more involved, there is no question that has lingered in the background more than “How do you clean up a cluttered universe?” How do you not only pull a retcon, but a big universe altering one?

Days of Future Past not only attempts to pull such a retcon, but succeeds, by creating a situation where the X-Men films can change course to a new path different from the first 3 films, while still giving credit to where the earlier films worked. Continue reading →

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