31 DAYS OF HORROR 2018-DAY 23: BLIND WOMAN'S CURSE (1970)

The inciting — and unsighting —  incident.

In the wake of a bloody yakuza clan feud during which she accidentally blinds the innocent sister of the Godan gang's leader, Akemi Tachibana (Meiko Kaji), de facto leader  of the Tachibana clan following the death of her father, finds herself in a women's prison and plagued with nightmares involving a black cat that tasted the blood flowing from her victim's eye wounds. Once there, she bares her elaborate back tattoo of a dragon and formally introduces herself to her fellow female prisoners, accepting them as partners and members of her crime family for when they all get released. When her five-year sentence is served, Akemi and her girls are out and when she returns to her family's territory, she finds the area being usurped by the vile Dobashi clan, a pack of assholes who will stoop to the lowest of deeds in order to destroy Akemi's gang and officially take over the town, including pitting the Tachibana against the rival Aozora group in hope that they might wipe each other out. The situation steadily escalates but Akemi, realizing there's more going on than is immediately apparent, refuses to be goaded into retaliatory action, biding her time for the perfect moment in which to exact retribution. As a sign of respect and sisterly solidarity, Akemi's girls all get back tattoos that form a long dragon when they stand side by side, and the dragon tattoo also serves as the identifying "colors" of the Tachibana clan. Into all of this strides Aiko (Hoki Tokuda), a theatrical performer/professional knife-thrower and swordswoman who was the innocent girl blinded by Akemi. She has spent the five years after her blinding "training in the art of killing" and is now more than ready to exact her vengeance for both her brother and herself upon Akemi, so she joins forces with the Dobashi clan and immediately sets to work killing Akemi's girls and flaying them of their dragon tats. It all builds to a head that culminates in a sword-slashing bloodbath that puts paid to all wrongs, with Akemi and Aiko squaring off against one another in single combat, with surprising results, punctuated with the presence of the aforementioned black cat of Akemi's recurring nightmares.

The one and only Meiko Kaji as the cursed Akemi Tachibana.

Director Teruo Ishii, perhaps best known to U.S. audiences for bringing us the black & white Super Giant/Starman superhero films of the 1950's (which ran on American television throughout the 1960's and 1970's), turns in a fun and gorgeous-looking fusion of a female gambler/yakuza genre, Zatoichi-style blind swordsmanship tropes, old school Japanese "pinky" exploitation flavor, and traditional kaidan (ghost/horror story) tropes, and though billed as a horror yarn, the horror elements here turn out to more or less be beside the point. Sure, the spooky lighting and imagery and the black cat that may or may not be the symbolic embodiment of Aiko's "curse" of vengeance upon Akemi in ominous spirit form are intriguing, but don't let those elements fool you into believing this is a straight-up shocker. I've seen a legion of chambara/female gambler movies over the years and BLIND WOMAN'S CURSE falls squarely into that category, mild traditional horror flavors notwithstanding. 

Creepy imagery, yes. Straight-up horror film, not so much.

Akemi and Aiko square off.

It's a very entertaining film, don't get me wrong, but those who try to sell it as a "horror classic," as the DVD back cover copy would have you believe, are either barking up the wrong tree or simply lying their asses off. But I won't grouse too loudly, as its star is the always-welcome Meiko Kaji, who would later go on to screen immortality as the titular LADY SNOWBLOOD (1973) and LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE (1974).

Interesting side note: the actress playing Aiko, Hoki Tokuda, was a singer who was married to TROPIC OF CANCER scribe Henry Miller. The details of their relationship are interesting and more than a tad bizarre, so go here to read up on it.

Poster from the Japanese theatrical release.

A TRAILER THAT BLEW MY MIND

When I first saw this trailer back in 1988, it spurred me on a six-year quest to find the movie in question, which I finally managed to do when it turned up among VHS tapes relegated to the for-sale bin in a porno store that fell victim to the cleaning up/complete and utter ruination of NYC's legendarily sleazy Times Square area. Watch this and tell me that you would not have been intrigued. I was not disappointed when I finally got to watch this movie on home video,  but I deeply regret not having the opportunity to see in that 42nd Street theater that ran nothing but worn-out prints of martial arts movies 24/7.

THE BODYGUARD (1976)

After years of being available in a crappy pan-and-scan print, the Americanized version of 1973's Sonny Chiba opus KARATE KIBA is available in a nice widescreen edition, proving once and for all that a gilded turd is still a turd.

This grindhouse mainstay opens with the following narrated text crawl:

"The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper, and the father of lost children.

"And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger, who poison and destroy my brothers; and they shall know that I am CHIBA the BODYGUARD when I lay my vengeance upon them.

"Ezekiel 25:17"

Sound familiar? It should if you've seen PULP FICTION, since Quentin Tarantino, a notorious Sonny Chiba groupie, lifted it (Surprise!) for duty as Sam Jackson's thoroughly badassed signature line in that film.

Anyway, THE BODYGUARD is a dull waste of time that has pretty much the least amount of martial arts I've ever seen in a film allegedly of the martial arts genre. As a matter of fact, the flick's more of a routine crime flick that features Chiba — whose character's name, "Kiba," is re-dubbed "Chiba" so we're supposed to think the movie's a document of Sonny's day-to-day adventures — as an international crimefighter/bodyguard/badass-for-hire who announces on live TV that he's out to take down the mob and other such drug-dealing punks after he singlehandedly thwarts an airplane hijacking by Mafia goons, which is odd since every single supposed Mafioso in evidence is played by a Japanese guy).

Chiba's live TV demonstration of his badassery.

In no time Chiba finds himself bodyguarding a mysterious woman (Judy Lee) who gives him not one shred of information as to who she is or why she needs protection from the armed killers who dog her every step, and the resulting plot is so turgid that even us die-hard Sonny Chiba fans just will not care. The characters jump from one scene of standing around and gabbing about deceptions and double-crosses to another, filling the screen with endless talking heads while it should rightfully be filled with images of Chiba beating the motherfucking piss out of all comers while gouging out their eyeballs and tearing off their nuts with his bare hands every three minutes. The camerawork is often amateurishly hand-held, the bane of seventies Japanese action flicks, and the whole thing comes off as less lively than any given episode of a routine cop show. By the time we find out that Chiba's client was the mistress of a slain Mafia capo and is doing her damnedest to get her hands on a cool million's-worth of heroin so she make a final big score, most audience members will have turned off the DVD or fallen asleep.

The one almost-decent action scene features Chiba on the other side of a closed door, a barrier he punches through to grab the arm of a guman; once the gunman's limb is secure in his grasp, Chiba gives the guy a nasty, bone-protruding compound fracture and then rips off said limb for later use as a throwing weapon. That sequence takes up maybe two minutes out of a total of nearly ninety, and from that bit of business to the next set-to it's a long, dry haul.

So basically THE BODYGUARD sucks ass. I've tried about five times over the years to sit through it in its entirety while sober, having made it all the way through once in the early nineties while drunk out of my mind after coming home from eight hours of hard drinking at Bar X (a favorite hangout of the Marvel Bullpen in those days), and I was only able to make it through last night because of the widescreen format allowing me to see shots and compostions that were cut off and thereby rendered incomprehensible by the pan-and-scan VHS version. Needless to say, I'd missed absolutely nothing.

'70's-era martial artists Aaron Banks and Bill Louie: Unintentionally the most entertaining aspect of the American version of this film.

The only thing keeping this sleep aid in my collection is a mind-boggling bit of nonsense tacked onto the early moments of the film by the American distributor: a hand-held camera's point-of-view wanders the then-sleazy streets of Manhattan's Times Square, eventually staggering up the stairs of a martial arts studio. In this dojo with walls papered with 42nd Street grindhouse karate movie posters stands Bill Louie, an apparently Hispanic martial artist in a stylish sweatsuit — he's a dead ringer for Freddie Prinze, the guy from TV's CHICO & THE MAN, not his son who starred in SCOOBY-DOUCHE and other like crap — who hands out ass-whuppings on what I presume are his students, all while doing his best impression of Bruce Lee's moves and cat-in-a-vise screeches. Observing this is Aaron Banks, a Semitic/Italian-looking dude in a karate gi, who notes upon Louie's completion of his fit of Bruce-ism, in a John Wayne/Brooklyn accent no less, "Thats pretty good. But here's how Sonny Chiba woulda done it." Banks then launches into full-on post-THE STREET FIGHTER Chiba histrionics, savagely assaulting a couple of students, one of whom he suspends off the mat by a good grip on the guy's clockweights, after which he puts his fist to the face of the other poor bastard with a jump-cut that makes it look like the dude's being hit by a flesh-and-bone sledge hammer. Composing himself, Banks stands up and Louie comments, "Yeah, but Bruce had more speed and science. He'd probably have done something like this..." Louie stoops and picks up a pair of matched nunchaku — or "chucks," if you prefer — then launches into a totally gratuitous display with them while shrieking like a madman, culminating in him catching the flails under his arms and uttering a triumphant and Flip Wilson-esque "WHOOOO!" Banks looks thoughtful and says, "Yeah...I can see your point." (I can't.) "By the way, where is Sonny Chiba?" He and Louie contemplate that question for a moment, chins in hands and practically saying, "Hmmm..." at which point the actual movie lurches to a start. I've seen this sequence many times and, much moreso than the arm-removal, it's the only genuinely entertaining moment in the entire film. Avoid THE BODYGUARD like you'd avoid having one of those handheld apple-corers shoved up your anus. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

"I'm gonna kick my own ass for starring in this piece of shit!"

RICA (1972)

Probably nobody on the planet makes movies that are as crazy and sleazy as those of the Japanese, and this exploitation nugget — originally entitled KONKETSUJI RIKA, or "Rika the Mixed-Blood Girl" — definitely fits those descriptions.

Sixteen-year-old Rica (Rika Aoki) is the unwanted and unloved result of her mother's rape by two AWOL G.I.'s during the Korean war — her mother tried to bury her alive immediately after giving birth, but was stopped by a kindly old woman — and heads a group of like-minded juvenile delinquent girls in a seedy section of Tokyo; they're the usual assortment of tough-girl stereotypes found in the "Pinky Violence" genre, talking tough and getting into fights and so on, but they don't seem to have much of a purpose. Anyway, Rica's mom takes up with an unscrupulous banker who keeps her around for whenever he wants a convenient poke, and one day while the mother is out he beats young Rica into unconsciousness and has his way with her on her own mother's bed. When mom comes home and finds her still-unconscious daughter splayed out and bloody, she awakens the girl who immediately gets dressed to go after her assailant, but that date with vengeance must wait while Rica has a hand-to-hand duel with a Yakuza boss who seeks to muscle in on her territory. Rica kicks the living shit out of the guy, gouging out his eyes with that patented Three Stooges move, at which point he flails about blindly and falls back-first onto a foot-long nail that kills him. From out of nowhere the cops finally show up and haul Rica in for murder, after which the dead Yakuza's men show up, rape the hell out of Rica's gang and sell them into prostitution in Viet Nam immediately thereafter.

Now, in any other country you'd think all of that mayhem took place over the course of the entire feature, but as this is a Japanese exploitation flick — from Toho Studios no less, the people who made SEVEN SAMURAI and the GODZILLA series — all the stuff I just described takes place during the first ten minutes, before the fucking credits even roll!

Rica ends up in a Catholic reform school where she gains an instant arch-enemy by the name of "Dragon God" Reiko — who happens to sport one of those bitchin' full-torso Yakuza tattoos, in this case an appropriate dragon — and their enmity becomes one of the film's several running plot threads.

About two days after landing in the joint, Rica escapes and returns to find her gang sold off to the Nam, so she confronts the flesh-peddler handling the girls' shipment and he agrees to return the girls if Rica can hand him three million yen by 6PM. Our heroine agrees to his terms and shows up at the office of the rapist-banker, extorting the cash from him under threat of revealing his crime to his wife and kids, but as she leaves with a briefcase full of cash the banker sends thugs to kill her and get the money back, but he doesn't count on Rica being the badass that she is, or the unexpected assist she receives from a renegade Yakuza enforcer who takes a shine to her. But all is for naught as the attack delays Rica, causing her to arrive about ten miutes after 6PM, by which point the boat has already set sail. Disgusted, Rica chucks the cash into the flesh-peddler's face and storms off.

The rest of the film details Rica's attempts to rout the gangsters who sold her friends, her brief employment as a headlining nightclub singer (?), her return to juvie and two subsequent escapes — does this place have no security, or what? — her ongoing war with Reiko, a pointless romantic subplot involving another escapee who's a half-Black girl in love with a Black G.I. who's getting shipped off to Viet Nam — his English-language acting is among the very worst I've ever seen, I shit you not — the revelation that Rica's mom ended up as a junkie who whores herself out to bums on the docks, the murder of the rapist-banker, a tender fling with the Yakuza enforcer after he rescues Rica from being drowned by thugs, and the thwarting of yet another attempt to sell girls into sexual slavery in Viet Nam that results in half the remaining characters getting killed. The film finally ends its breathless running time with Rica showing up at the wedding of the reform school's doctor (whom she may have had a crush on at one point, but that wasn't exactly made clear) and ruining the ceremony for no good reason by throwing a length of lit firecrackers at the happy couple and scaring the shit out of all in attendance, after which she hops on a motorcycle and drives off to nowhere in particular, or more accurately to the first of two sequels.

Very much in the same territory as SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975), RICA is definitely worth a look and is the perfect introduction to the Pinky Violence school of filmmaking. And unlike many films in the genre the rape scenes mostly occur off-camera, only going as far as getting the girls stripped down and leaving the worst of it to the imagination, so even the most squeamish are unlikely to get offended. As for the rest of the flick, it wears its manga origins like a dented badge of honor and makes little attempt to make any sort of sense or have its plot reflect anything resembling reality. Star Rika Aoki has bad girl charisma to burn, and I can't wait to see the next two chapters. RECOMMENDED.

THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN (1977)

"Her pussy's in this plot, too! She's using it to murder me!'
-the king of the Underworld, shortly after Bruce Lee saves him from being fucked to death by Emmanuelle. (Yes, you read that right.)

If you're a regular reader of this site, you know I love and cherish movies from many genres that could kindly be called "completely fucking ludicrous." With that in mind, please allow me to introduce you the what is hands down the most insane, ridiculous, stupid, and just plain downright shameless example of the deservedly maligned "Brucesploitation" genre. For those not aware of its dubious existence, the Brucesploitation sub-genre of martial arts films were cheapie cash-ins made in the wake of Bruce Lee's untimely demise, invariably starring dudes who bore a passing resemblance to the master at best, and none of whom were anywhere near being within the same galaxy of Lee's skills. The legion of those films are mostly boring and outright necrophiliac trash, but THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN is both wildly entertaining and an intentional comedy, and as such it deserves to be not only rediscovered but also restored and remastered. In fact, I'll even go so far as to say that this film is more entertaining than any actual Bruce Lee movie. How, you may ask, is that possible? Allow me to explain...

Bruce Lee's priapic corpse arrives in the Underworld.

It's 1973 and the great Bruce Lee is dead. His corpse, equipped with cool shades and what appears to be a raging hard-on — no, really — arrives in what is apparently an Asian variant of purgatory, and we are informed that when people die, their bodies and faces change so they no longer look like they did when alive and kicking (which is a convenient way of glossing over star Bruce Leung's utter non-resemblance to Bruce Lee). After arrogantly insulting the king of the Underworld and being given back his chucks (which were taken away when they were revealed not to be an impressive boner), Bruce wanders the local streets and encounters a number of majorly copyright-infringed characters in a noodle restaurant. We're talking Popeye (played by Chinese actor Eric Tsang) and Kwai Chang Caine from KUNG FU (played this time not by David Carradine, but by an actual Chinese guy), and the One-Armed Swordsman on the side of good, and Zatoichi, James Bond (!!!), the Exorcist and the Godfather (played by Chinese actors) and Clint Eastwood (played by a Chinese actor and dressed like the Man with No Name from the classic Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns). The Godfather and the Exorcist plot to overthrow the king of the Underworld and will stop at nothing to do it.

Kwai Chang Caine, Bruce Lee, and Popeye...Motherfucking Popeye?!!? What the fuck???

Meanwhile, the aged and exceedingly horny king of the Underworld is having problems with his wives because they've gotten wind of Bruce Lee's newly-arrived presence and they, like every other woman in the Underworld, are devoured by lust at the mere thought of him, even Emmanuelle (who's apparently the concubine of the Exorcist). Yes, that Emmanuelle, and she even describes herself as "a silly little pussy."

NOTE: For you readers who may have come along after the dire days when decent porn was not as readily available as it is now, the Emmanuelle character, initially portrayed by Sylvia Kristel, first showed up in a 1974 French softcore erotic film that went on to become a massive international hit, after which there followed a succession of sequels — around thirty-six at last count; no, seriously — the vast majority of which did not feature the original actress. From the dawn of home video and the ubiquity of cable TV, practically every kid I grew up with saw at least the first Emmanuelle movie and were mostly bored silly by it, its considerable amount of full-frontal nudity notwithstanding, so to those of us of a certain age the mere mention of that name is evocative of a key moment in our adolescent development. The point here being that in the world of cinema, the character of Emmanuelle was nearly as much of a household name as Bruce Lee, only reigning in the realm of tenderloin cinema rather than that of chopsocky, so her inclusion here as a usable pop culture icon makes a certain degree of sense. But I digress...

One of the king's two wives is especially into Bruce because she's a fan of his movies — how she saw them in the Underworld is not made clear — and she desires nothing more than to have him beat her with his "powerful weapon" (his chucks) and make passionate love to her...

It's at this point that I think it's appropos to note that I'm neither drunk nor making any of this up. All of this lunacy is actually in the movie.

Anyway, Bruce rejects the advances of the king's wives, thus greatly insulting them and spurring them to send Count Dracula (pronounced here as "Draculer" in the dub) and his gang of zombies to kick Bruce's ass. That only pisses Bruce off, so he dons his famous Kato outfit from THE GREEN HORNET (where he got it from and why he does this is anyone's guess) and hands out ass-whuppings like they were Halloween candy. And just when things look really bad for Bruce, he reveals the secret "Third Leg of Bruce" technique, in which he magically produces an extra leg with which to kick Dracula square in the face.

Also, the bad guys, led by the Godfather and the Exorcist (who has an atrociously bad French accent for no explained reason), want to recruit Bruce to help them overthrow the king, but cocksure Bruce doesn't give a fuck about that (or much of anything else for that matter) and seeks nothing other than a way back to the world of the living. As the bad guys launch assassination attempts against the king, including the aforementioned and memorable attempted murder by insatiable French pussy, Bruce intervenes and is made captain of the king's personal guard (a plot point that goes absolutely nowhere). The remainder of the film is taken up by ridiculous fight after ridiculous fight after ridiculous fight, in which the bad guys are killed off one by one — how that works when they are all explicitly stated to be dead already is anyone's guess — finally culminating in Bruce forcing the reluctant king to send him back to the world of the living, which the king does by drop-kicking him and sending him flying off into the distance as the newly-liberated denizens of purgatory cheer their thanks.

Wow. Just...WOW.

THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN is balls-out insane from start to finish and this review doesn't even begin to communicate just how out of its mind the film actually is. It's low-budget to the nth degree, features one of the worst/best dubbed voice tracks on record, contains wall-to-wall fight scenes that look like they were choreographed by an eight-year-old, includes a surprising amount of nudity and sex for this kind of flick (which is what earned the film its R-rating), and is packed to the rafters with so much outright silliness and utter stupidity that I had a huge grin plastered across my face for most of its running time. Unlike many cheapjack kung fu films from its era, especially those found in the annals of Brucesploitation, the film is not dull for even two minutes and its loony, surreal cartoonishness moves along at a breakneck pace that suggests the filmmakers didn't want to allow viewers any time in which to actually contemplate just what kind of madness was unspooling upon the screen. No lie, THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN gets my HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION as a must-see masterpiece of bad cinema, but I recommend holding out for the UK-region DVD of it (provided you have an all-regions player) rather than spend money on the washed-out and blurry print included in the U.S.-released ULTIMATE DRAGON COLLECTION 10-film Brucesploitation set.

31 DAYS OF HORROR-DAY 29: THE SEVENTH CURSE (1986)

Betcha didn't expect to find a Chow Yun Fat movie on this list, didja? Believe it or not, this Category III cult fave was my first exposure to the excellence that is Chow Yun fat. Directed by Ngai Kai Lam, the same loon who gave the world the mind-bendingly gory and ultra-violent RIKI-OH (aka THE STORY OF RICKY), THE SEVENTH CURSE is an odd amalgam of its era's typical Hong Kong action flicks, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK-inspired death traps, martial arts mayhem, and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM with some broad comedic bits thrown in. At its heart, it's a straight-up horror movie, but one that had its primary flavor somewhat diluted and derailed by too many disparate elements in what I'm guessing was an attempt to have it appeal to too many audiences at once or else alleviate its considerable "darkness."

WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!!!

The vile sorcerer Aquala (Elvis Tsui).

While on an expedition in Thailand to find herbs with which to hopefully cure AIDS, a bespectacled police physician, Dr. Yeun (Chin Siu Ho, best known in the West for his roles in THE TAI CHI MASTER and FIST OF LEGEND), encounters "the worm tribe" and disrupts evil sorcerer Aquala's human sacrifice of a beautiful girl, "Betsy" (Sau-Lai Tsui), to the horrifying animate skeleton/shape-shifting monster "Old Ancestor."

"Old Ancestor" in its less-robust form.

Aquala (Elvis Tsui) is a black magician straight out of the Mola Ram school of heavies and he wields an assortment of baleful skills, chief among which is the "little ghost," a foul creature that he produces from inside his cape that flies through the air, viciously attacks its targets, and eagerly sucks their blood.

The ravenous wrath of "little ghost."

So, with that in mind, you can guess he's not at all pleased with Yuen fouling up his ritual, thus prompting him to hit the good doctor with a horrible "blood curse" that causes parts of his victim's body to agonizingly burst and spew thick red paint blood. (It's phony-looking but that only adds to the charming gross-out effect.) Though seriously injured, the doctor helps Betsy escape back to her tribe, so she kindly strips naked and cuts into one of her own breasts to supply the doctor with a cure that will hold his curse at bay for one year.

There's nothing like a little utterly gratuitous nudity.

When the year runs out, Yeun is confronted by a member of Betsy's tribe (Dick Wei) who summons him back to Thailand so he can try to effect a cure for both the doc and the girl, whose face has become disfigured in the wake of Aquala's curse. Following the advice of his occult-savvy pal, Wei Si Li, aka "Wisely" (Chow Yun Fat), Yeun returns to Thailand and accompanies the tribesman on the quest for the antidote, dogged along the way by the cute but incredibly annoying unnecessary comic relief reporter Tsai-Hung (the gorgeous Maggie Cheung). The trio encounters all kinds of nastiness, gore and sadistic violence and when the irritating reporter ends up in Aquala's clutches, the heroes aim to rescue her and the tribe's children, who have been taken so their blood can serve as the base for a magic potion, extracted from a stone crusher/juicer that squishes the kiddies into liquid goo (in a scene like something out of a child's nightmare). And after that there's still the matter of curing the doc and Betsy's curses, plus kicking Aquala's evil ass and wiping out the Old Ancestor once and for all, so you could say that the doc's dance card is pretty full.

THE SEVENTH CURSE is very lively from start to finish but it does suffer from the aforementioned elements that throw a bit of a monkey wrench into its proceedings.The comedy, mostly stemming from Maggie Cheung's reporter character, doesn't work and when it happens it transforms the film into a whole other movie entirely. The action and martial arts sequences are well done but they also seem to belong in another film, especially the RAIDERS-style death traps and the blatant swipe of RAIDERS' gigantic rolling stone ball, this time with the ball being swapped out for the huge dislodged head of an ancient idol. The schizophrenic tonal shifts are all the more unfortunate because the horror story at the film's core is quite strong and would have made for an instant classic had all the needless bullshit been excised entirely. It's dark stuff of a rather Lovecraftian order and as such should have been treated with the seriousness of a heart attack.

But all of that can be overlooked when a movie is as balls-out entertaining as this one is. The hero's a bit bland but everyone else in the cast more than makes up for his relative lack of character. As monsters go, Old Ancestor's kinda neat, what with starting out as a dirty-fighting skeleton and later morphing into a cross between the Alien and the winged form of Princess Dragon Mom from INFRA MAN and all, and the little ghost is one vicious little bastard whose malevolence far outweighs the in-your-face obviousness of it being a cheaply-made prop that looks like a dime store baby doll as altered with some liquid latex and a hot glue gun by an LSD-addled member of the Manson Family. And let us not forget the presence of thirty-year-old Chow Yun at as the appropriately-named Wisely. He's the kind of character who's mellow and urbane but knows all kinds of obscure shit about the black arts for no particular reason, so he's quite handy to have around when this kind of shit is going on. And does he fight the film's Big Bad with a crucifix, holy water, counter-spells or even exorcism? Fuck that shit; that stuff's for pussies. In this narrative, using that crap's like showing up to a knife fight armed with nothing but your flaccid dick in your hand. Wisely knows better, so he shows up at the last possible minute, armed with a motherfucking missile launcher and two loads that he uses to blast Old Ancestor into showering chunks that have not a hope in hell of re-animating. The first missile blows a huge hole clean through the monster, allowing it to observe its own beating heart before it's hit by the second shot, which scatters its remaining mass like a handful of thrown jacks. And when all is said and done, Wisely isn't even impressed with himself.

Chow Yun Fat, in an early moment of awesomeness, shows us how to properly sort out unholy creatures from the underworld.

I would have preferred a whole film about just Wisely and could have totally done without that bland-assed Dr. Yuen, but I guess a Wisely-versus-monsters flick would have been over two seconds after Wisely found out about the given threat and called a tactical thermo-nuclear strike to deal with it, after which he'd simply chill out in his study with a tumbler of Scotch as he waited for the radiation to die down. Oh, well...

DETROIT METAL CITY (2008)

Lord Johannes Krauser II: the bane of general decency everywhere.

Ever since falling in love with Kiminori Wakasugi's hilarious manga series DETROIT METAL CITY, I'd been jonesing to get my mitts on a subtitled copy of the DVD, and I finally obtained one at the 2009 Big Apple Convention. I remembered seeing some untranslated hype material for the live-action film version (it's also been animated) at the 2008 NY Comicon and at the time I dismissed it as the latest lame-assed Japanese filtering of Western stupidity, but now, having devoured the manga and almost pissing myself with laughter while doing it, I'm the first to admit my prejudicial error and happily proclaim DETROIT METAL CITY to be among the funniest of the post-THIS IS SPINAL TAP lampoons of the heavy metal genre (or in this case, the "death metal" sub-genre).

Cover of the first DETROIT METAL CITY manga collection.

DETROIT METAL CITY tells the story of Soichi Negishi (pop idol Kenichi Matsuyama, who's surprisingly good here), an acoustic guitar-playing complete pussy of a musician whose fondest desire is to create songs like the Swedish pop music he adores, treacly crap that would give many listeners diabetes.

Kenichi Matsuyama as uber-pussy Soichi Negishi.

But Soichi's true gift lies in writing songs and performing as Lord Johannes Krauser II, an over-the-top-offensive death metal singer/guitarist who fronts the series' titular band. When on stage, Soichi loses himself in his demonic stage persona — whose look is more than a little bit influenced by Gene Simmons of Kiss and Mercyful Fate frontman and solo artist King Diamond — and bellows out ultra-stupid songs of rape, bestiality, matricide, patricide and damned near every other "-icide" one can think of, all the while delighting his fans who totally buy into his satanic act as the inspirationally-transgressive real deal.

Detroit Metal City's demonic frontman, Lord Johannes Krauser II (Kenichi Matsuyama again), whose press releases state he raped and killed his parents.

As DMC's popularity flourishes, Soichi's discomfort with his lurid stage antics grows while his insane manager (Yasuko Mitsuyuki) — who determines whether a DMC song is worthwhile by just how wet it makes her —does everything in her power to warp Soichi into a lifestyle more in line with Krauser's purported forays into garden-variety murder, cop-killing, public molestation of the innocent and cannibalism (this corruption is considerably toned down from that sequence in the comics). But despite his success and growing fame/infamy, Soichi keeps his rock 'n' roll self hidden from his friends and family out of a deep sense of shame at what he's doing, to say nothing of how being Krauser brings out parts of his personality that he never knew existed (i.e. very public displays of disrespect for authority, verbal abusiveness toward women, and generally unbecoming behavior that makes the Japanese blanch).

The movie is pretty faithful to the manga, but it plays with the narrative's structure to make it more appealing to people other than metalheads and fans of offensive humor. That move excises the aforementioned hardcore corruption of Soichi and makes his interest in a cute journalist (Rosa Kato) more of a conventional and up-front love sub-plot. But at least the filmmakers wisely retained the sub-plot about DMC going up against the retiring American "god of death metal" Jack Ill Dark for the right to be recognized as the greatest, most evil band currently active in the genre. That sequence in the manga is laugh-out-loud hilarious and though considerably tamed for the film, it's still ridiculous enough to pass muster. In fact, when Jack Ill Dark is first seen in the movie during a TV entertainment news segment on his impending retirement, I said to myself, "Y'know, Gene Simmons would have been a no-brainer to play this character..." Then, upon closer examination of the actor playing Dark, I exclaimed, "Holy shit! That is Gene Simmons," so somebody at the casting office had more on the ball than just hiring the letter-perfect guy to play Soichi/Krauser.

The legendary Gene Simmons of Kiss looms over the cast.

The film ends in such a way that it allows both a finite done-in-one ending and the possibility of sequels, so I hope there's more to come, only with more of the manga's utterly anarchic spirit undiluted. If you find the real-life excesses of heavy metal music in general and death metal in particular to be goofy as hell and amusing enough as is, you'll more than likely get a kick out of DETROIT METAL CITY. The only problem is that as far as I know there are no plans to release the film in the States, either theatrically or on legitimate DVD (the copy I got my hands on looks professional and the subtitles are about a 9 out of 10, but it does not appear to be a legally sanctioned release), so your best bet is to see it like I did or keep an eye open for it to turn up in Japanese film festivals, provided you live in a town or city that regularly runs such fare.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

MATCHING ESCORT (1982)

I've been in a martial arts movie mood lately, especially of the occasionally outrageous 1980's wuxia variety, and this particularly crazed Taiwanese flick managed to more than fill that need.

For those not in the know, wuxia is perhaps the most venerable of the martial sub-genres, bearing a rich history spanning centuries of literature and other arts, with its best-known examples for western audiences being the elaborate CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000) and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (2004). Modern wuxia films are genuine spectacles, replete with high-flying wire-work meant to symbolically embellish the heroes' already considerable skills, romance and lavish sets and costumes, but the earlier examples of the form were often cheaply made and hastily shot, rife with over-the-top melodrama and much chewing of the scenery. But, if you ask me, that's what makes the old school examples a million times more fun than their modern descendants, and MATCHING ESCORT is a balls-out riot of superheroics and unintentional (?) hilarity.

First of all, as near as I can determine, the title MATCHING ESCORT has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the film's plot, so that's a win right out of the gate. And unless you're a regular watcher of films of this sort it's rather easy to lose track of what's going on in the story, but I assure you that it does have a linear narrative, albeit one that contains many elements that make not one lick of sense. The basic plot is once again the tried and true revenge saga, this time involving a very girly young woman named Pearl Fan (played by Cheung Ling of WOLF DEVIL WOMAN infamy), who, as a child, is forced to constantly wear heavy shoes of metal with no explanation from her dad.

Child abuse or training device: the metal shoes are locked to our young heroine's feet.

As the years pass, Pearl Fan gets used to the metal shoes and can move about as nimbly as a monkey while wearing them, and when she takes them off her agility and speed become downright superhuman.

Then comes the day when a pack of the evil sword-wielding assholes requisite for this kind of story show up at her dad's house and proceed to kill seventy-three family members and house staff, except for Pearl Fan, who is entrusted with a precious family heirloom — the Jade Lovebird pendant — and unwillingly spirited away by a loyal retainer. The retainer is swiftly killed and our heroine soon finds herself framed for her family's murder, so now she's on the run from both the legitimate authorities and the clan of mysteriously-motivated killers. Disguising herself as a boy (rather unconvincingly, but you just have to let that go) — one of the major tropes of the genre in stories featuring female heroes — Pearl Fan is chased to and dumped over a sheer cliff by the killers, who leave her for dead. But what they don't know is that she has fallen into a deep cave that resembles and even-lower-budget version of H.R. Pufnstuf's Living Island, where resides an hilariously kvetchy old crippled hermit named Uncle Strange. No, seriously.

Uncle Strange: Yoda he ain't.

Initially quite irritated at Pearl Fan for her unplanned landing in a vat of vaguely mystical potion that he'd been preparing for twenty years, a potion that would have somehow enabled him to exact revenge upon the villain who crippled his feet and cast him into the cave, Uncle Strange is moved by our heroine's desire for revenge of her own and so agrees to take her on as his pupil. (It soon turns out that Pearl Fan's quest for vengeance neatly/conveniently dovetails with that of Uncle Strange.) As this is a wuxia martial arts film, it has less to do with hand-to-hand styles than swordsmanship and more "romantic" action playing up the hero's grace and moral purity, so Pearl's training, such as it is, involves little more than a tad of hand techniques that will later allow her to catch and break sword blades with just two fingers (her later-displayed utter badassery with a sword is not explained but is accepted as a given for the genre's requirements).

A clearly not amused Pearl Fan demonstrates the bitchin' two-fingered sword-catching move.

She is also subjected to a regimen of assorted potions, strange fungi (Awright!) and unguents that grant her the necessary skills of a typical genre hero (the aforementioned 20-years-in-the-making potion presumably being some kind of Asian super-soldier serum), and she's ready to get down to the serious business of killing when Uncle Strange dies after physically transferring his energy to her (and hilariously freezing in position with his arm outstretched and a wild look on his face when he croaks). Once back in the outside world, Pearl Fan displays all the attributes one expects from a wuxia superhero, and her skills with a sword would make even the most adept of Jedi turn chartreuse with envy.

The newly-badassed Pearl Fan hands out free passes to the netherworld on a lonely beach.

The rest of the film is a series of genre trope-laden, dizzying and unrealistically bloody swordfights against her enemies and it's a hell of a lot of leave-your-brain-at-the-door fun getting to the inevitable outcome. The wild and utterly impossible acrobatics and swordplay are piled on quite generously, making the film a definite precursor to the kind of thing we so enjoyed in XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS, only cartoonishly gorier.

Bad guy "Simon Cloud" meets his deservedly gory demise.

Our heroine, mowing down bad guys like weeds.

You've gotta love the heroine's moments of balletic poise in the brief moments between whirling arms and clashing steel.

There's also a disguised traveling prince — accompanied by the by-then-stock annoying comic relief servant whose basic character is meant to invoke Jackie Chan, only much more broadly — who's on hand to provide a love interest that literally goes nowhere and serves virtually no purpose to the story, so the less said of him the better.

The superfluous prince and his annoying servant.

(Oh, alright...Regarding the whole prince sub-plot, the story's Big Bad is revealed to have his eye on ruling the country and aims to kill the prince as part of his plans, but that sub-plot is given very short shrift and really doesn't add anything to Pearl Fan's narrative since you know going in that she's going to win in the end, so the governmental overthrow angle is totally superfluous.)

The film's ultra-flamboyant-looking Big Bad, who is quite appropriately named — and I'm not making this up — Lord Rouge.

If all of this sounds only slightly goofy and not like anything all that special, that's because I have thus far neglected to mention the overall "fairytale on mushrooms" feel and approach of the piece. There's not one single frame's-worth of realism in it and its look fuses low-budget cheapness with garish colors and occasionally weird-assed sets (Uncle Strange's cave being something straight out of a kiddie show's idea of "scary"). And of course all of the aforementioned physical impossibilities, and the ever-popular running-on-water move all add up to a heady cornucopia of wuxia junk food of the highest order.

Wire-work fun at its most endearingly cheesy.

Though nowhere near as brain-wrenchingly out of its mind as actor/director Cheung Ling's legendary WOLF DEVIL WOMAN (which I will definitely get around to reviewing one of these days), MATCHING ESCORT is a stone hoot and should be shared with friends and family as soon as possible. And although there is spewing arterial spray (translation: pressurized gallons of bright red paint) and some dismemberments here and there, the gore on hand is not scary at all and would only be disturbing to the youngest of viewers. I would not hesitate to show it to kids if seven and older, so use that caveat as a guide. Me? I plan to show this to my nephew, Nate, as soon as possible, and I also think my niece, Cleo, would totally dig it because it's about a "lady hero" (as she would have put it when she a tad younger) and it has violence. This film could easily have run on the late, lamented Channel 5 Saturday afternoon DRIVE-IN MOVIE weekly kung fu showcase of the early-through-mid-1980's with no editing for content, but that was then and this is now, so if run today the film's split-second decapitation and hand-lopping would likely be cut. If I had to rate this, I'd give it a PG, but the wussified MPAA would likely insist on a PG-13 or a wholly undeserved "mild R." RECOMMENDED.

The excellence that was Cheung Ling.

KUNG FU FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1982)

I first heard of this one while watching the fight scene highlights videotape THIS IS KUNG FU with a bunch of equally-stoned friends back in 1989, and we simply could not fucking believe what we saw when the tape opened with the literally jaw-dropping trailer for this flick. Along with all manner of bizarro Chinese mythology-specific creatures and weirdness, the trailer featured tag lines that mangled the English language to an alarming degree (example:"Ghost seeking revenge evils are deadly scared!" and "Human heart annoying both spirits and human!), and my friends and I watched the trailer over and over in disbelief, vowing to someday find and watch this surefire classic of lysergic chopsocky madness.

Packaging art for the Ocean Shores VHS release from the '80's, a tape that took me four years to track down.

I finally found the movie about four years later in a cheesy hole-in-the-wall video store that was going out of business, a victim of the Disneyfication of Times Square and it cost me around ten bucks (about five bucks too much for a beat-up used copy), but I finally had the object of my relentless quest. The wait was worth it, because the martial arts were pretty good and the script is a ludicrous dialogue fan's wet dream.

Starring Indonesian martial arts cult figure Billy Chong — who starred in the rather similar, though way more coherent, KUNG FU ZOMBIE (also 1982) — the film chronicles the young hero's quest for vengeance against the rat bastard who murdered his father, a quest instigated by the pissed-off ghost of the hero's dad. The murderous rat bastard is played by none other than Lo Lieh, star of the film that kicked off the 1970's kung fu movie boom, the classic FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH (1971, released in the U.S. in 1972), but here he's playing one of his many, many outright villains and it's always a pleasure to see him be just plain unabashedly evil. Realizing that the son may come after him and hand him a well-earned ass-kicking, the bad guy hires an evil kung fu priest/sorcerer to handle things for him, and the evil sorcerer gets up to a shitload of black magic and suchlike over the course of the film, including one of the most memorable (to say nothing of ludicrous) moments in the entire history of cinema. The prize goes to a scene wherein the villainous sorcerer realizes he's about to get his ass kicked, so he throws some spells into the air and screams "Count Dracula! Come to my aid!" The second he says this, the sky turns to night, the full moon pops up, a wolf howls and then from out of nowhere fucking Count Dracula himself — the only white guy in the entire film — swoops from out of the sky screaming "I'M COMING!!! HAHAHAHAHAH!!!"

The justly infamous Count Dracula sequence.

And don't ask how the hero and the eerie aides he gathers finally defeat the sorcerer (hint: it involves the aid of a bunch of prostitutes who are experiencing "monthly women's concerns"). To say more would give away shit that you just won't believe, so I leave you to rent this and discover its ultra-bizarro wonders for yourself. Illegal smokables and alcoholic beverages are recommended for maximizing the fun, and it's a real crowd-pleaser/baffler when shown to a roomful of willing attendees. A unique cinematic experience, TRUST YER BUNCHE and snag this one as soon as possible.

Packaging art for the most recent DVD release. You'll note they got the title wrong.

AACHI & SSIPAK (2006)

Crazy. Just plain balls-out crazy. That's about the only way to describe the sheer insanity and wholesale carnage on display in Jo Beom-jin's AACHI & SSIPAK, a South Korean exercise in unbridled animated mayhem and humorous bad taste. I saw a free screening of it in Tribeca last night and I'm completely blown away.

At an unspecified point in the future, the only renewable energy resource is human excrement, so the government anally implants citizens with an identity ring that takes note of when they drop a deuce, and the citizen's contribution to the fuel supply is rewarded with a narcotic Juicy Bar, an addictive taste treat that looks like a popsicle made from Windex. Unfortunately, a side-effect of Juicy Bars is that they can turn those who eat them into borderline-retarded blue mutants who can now only metabolize Juicy Bars for nourishment, and when the government cuts off distribution of the bars to the mutants, they band together under the leadership of the Diaper King and ravage armed Juicy Bar shipments as the ultra-violent Diaper Gang. In the aptly-named Shit City, Juicy Bars are abundant, so the gang has plenty to plunder.

Highway robbery: the Diaper Gang hijacks a shipment of Juicy Bars.

But the government isn't having that, so their resident very mad scientist, Dr. Strange, creates Geko, an inhumanly agile, motorbike-riding super-cyborg who's equipped with enough ordnance to overthrow a small country. Geko regularly annihilates droves of the Diapers, but their numbers seem limitless so his fight goes on and on.

Geko, the cybernetic one-man army, in action.

Into this maelstrom of violence ride the diminutive Aachi and his bald, shirtless friend, Ssipak, two biker punks who make a living by hanging around public lavatories and ripping off Juicy Bars from citizens while they're still on the bowl and selling the bars on the lucrative black market. After getting beaten up by prison-based gangsters whose territory they've horned in on, the pair find Jimmy the Freak, a flamboyant pornographer who's making an "artistic" film about a girl whose anus saves the world (don't ask), and the two get him Carlos Castaneda-level fucked-up on Juicy Bars in order to remote control his body and wreak vengeance upon the the crime boss whose boys had earlier assaulted them and made off with their ill-gotten loot. As the Diaper Gang also zeroes in on the crime boss and his Juicy Bar ring, all hell breaks loose, landing Jimmy in the clutches of the Diaper King, while the boys meet Beautiful, an avaricious porn actress who sought the lead in Jimmy's new film (and turned up her nose at his anally-oriented film concept, instead suggesting he focus on her world-saving tits).

Beautiful makes her pitch.

During the Juicy Bar-spurred madness, Jimmy explains to the Diaper King that all he needs to do to get all the Juicy Bars he and his people need is to find someone who takes exceptional dumps and implant them with several of those anal identification rings. In theory that would cause a decent dump to yield vast amounts of the bars, so Jimmy points the Diaper Gang in the direction of the perfect subject, namely Beautiful. Once kidnapped by the gang, Beautiful is unwillingly stuffed with the identity rings, only to be rescued in the nick of time by our heroes (at the insistence of the smitten Ssipak).

Beautiful, getting anally stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey, just as our heroes arrive to literally save her ass.

With Beautiful now amounting to the goose that laid the golden eggs, the trio turn her defacatory yield into an avalanche of Juicy Bars ready for black market distribution and in no time the crew find themselves Tony Montana-level wealthy, which allows them to live out their dreams of tacky opulence.

Our newly rich heroes, stylin' and profilin'.

But such a state of affairs was not meant to last and the forces of the government, the Diaper Gang and the utterly mad Dr. Strange each converge to claim Beautiful (who has plans of her own for her cash cow ass) and shut down the crew's operation. While a cornucopia of mayhem and violence erupts from every conceivable direction, it's a race against time to save Beautiful from a horrid existence of rectal slavery as Aachi and Ssapik must simultaneously contend with the legion of Diaper Gang mutants, the guns-a-blazin' fury of Geko, evil government officials, and some special threats dreamed up by the psycho doctor.

The battle for Beautiful.

AACHI & SSIPAK is a delirious, beautifully-designed and colorful head-on collision of a NATIONAL LAMPOON sensibility, a HEAVY METAL-style anarchic and dystopian future, and the kind of wild sci-fi fun to be found in 2000 AD magazine during its classic period. It's also a real treat for film buffs because it references and pays homage to many of the films that it was influenced by, but, unlike a Quentin Tarantino crib-fest like KILL BILL VOL. 1, it never becomes a feature-length checklist of the filmmaker's sources.

Beautiful borrows a page from Uma Thurman during the film's "wealth" montage.

By far the best and most entertaining Asian animated movie I've seen in ages, I cannot recommend this highly enough for those of a mind to check it out. The only problem with doing so is that AACHI & SSIPAK is not yet legally available on DVD here in the States, obtainable only via "gray market" DVD if you know where to look, and on YouTube. At last night's screening, the show's host stated that the film is supposedly slated for legitimate release on DVD next year, so keep your eyes open. Until then, go here for the first fourteen minutes of the film. You will NOT be disappointed, so make sure to watch this as large as possible. (I would have embedded it, but embedding of this material was disabled by request.)

Aachi, shamelessly grooving on the profits garnered from Beautiful's bountiful turds.