ANITA (1973)

I’m not usually suckered into checking out a DVD by provocative packaging, but there are always exceptions and this film is a distinct case in point. I mean, look at this image, weathered to look like a dirty novel, ferfucksake!!!

I purchased this one out of porn curiosity and what did I get? A sensitive sexploitation flick about an insatiable nymphomaniac, that’s what. Who’da thunk it?

I’ve only seen two of her films — THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE and SEX & FURY, both from 1973 — but I’m a huge fan of Swedish sex goddess Christina Lindberg’s work for the simple facts of her honest to the gods acting talent and her normal-person beauty. Well that and the fact that she was very kindly not afraid to drop her clothes like they were a bad habit. I normally hate soft-core stuff, but for Lindberg it was wholly appropriate since she was too adorable and pixie-ish for the “butcher’s shop window” visuals found in the more explicit world of actual pornography and it was also nice to see her in a film where her character was not a victim of off-putting sexual violence. Sure, her character in this one gives it away like flavorless soup at the local homeless shelter, but that’s beside the point.

Lindberg plays young Anita, a girl whose loveless home situation sends her down a path of compulsive promiscuity, a situation that alarms her parents, but not enough for them to actually get off of their self-centered asses and try to give their daughter the help she so obviously needs. Anita’s sexual adventuring is totally joyless — an interesting aspect to the film since this kind of stuff usually features women who enjoy being endlessly and mindlessly used by the sleazy, conscience-free guys in the story — and her encounters with complete strangers occupy much of the film’s running time, getting the first three trysts out of the way within the first ten minutes.

As her compulsion rages out of control, Anita becomes notorious in her hometown for sucking off, jerking off, or fucking any guy who’s willing to go into a broom closet with her, and the locals of her age become hostile and violent toward her — the girls are threatened by her crazed sexuality and the guys who haven’t fucked her tend to be outraged — so she leaves town and moves in with a house full of college students, most of whom are musicians. The notable exception among the schoolies is a psychology major named Erik (played by a very young Stellan Skarsgard) — who meets Anita after stumbling over her as she emerges from a makeshift tent after fucking some scumbag at the side of a construction site — and when she moves into the house he shares with the musicians, he puts his psychiatric chops to the test.

The story unfolds as a series of flashbacks related to Erik by Anita, and over the course of the film it becomes apparent that Erik has fallen in love with his patient. The problem with that is that Anita feels she’s a worthless person, so her intimate encounters with junkies, illegal immigrants, strangers and other users are all she can handle, and she won’t entertain the idea of a man actually loving her for who she is. Erik convinces Anita that all she needs to do is have an orgasm — something she never experienced during her countless encounters or masturbation — so how does she accomplish this? She finds a lesbian character that just shows up from out of nowhere and they have the first truly tender sex in the whole film, that's how! Then Anita runs away from the university house and becomes a performer in a nudie club, where she realizes that she’s now ready to have a healthy relationship after seeing her co-workers degrade themselves for a living. She hooks up with the truly nice Erik and it’s alluded to that they’ll get married; after all the miserable shit, they made it through and they’re finally happy. THE END.

During all of this there’s plenty of skin to satisfy the trench coat brigade but once you suss out the semi-artsy structure of the flick, you may find that you have compassion for this poor girl who just can't stop her drive for intimacy sans a human connection. I certainly did, and while I will never tire of Lindberg’s nudity — particularly her absolutely perfect, PERFECT breasts — about halfway through the film I no longer wanted to see her nude within the story’s sad context and if the grindhouse regulars who saw ANITA during its original run had any kind of human feeling, they likely didn’t either.

ANITA is very interesting but since it’s still a sexploitation flick, I can’t recommend it for a casual audience unless the individual viewer keeps an open mind when approaching it. Yes, there’s wall-to-wall nudity and prurient content, but it’s all within a legitimate narrative context. So, what the hell? Give it a chance.

Again, gaw-DAMN!!!

SEX & FURY (1973)

In recent years I've often asked myself whether or not the bona fide exploitation film, as we once knew it, is an extinct breed. I look at the output of the majority of moviemakers of the past two decades or so and am pretty much forced to admit that such appears to be the case. The grindhouses that once inhabited the seamier parts of the nation's cities are nearly all gone and Hollywood certainly no longer has the balls to provide us with anything even remotely like the over-the-top violent, gory, and nudity-saturated fun that so many of us grew up on and still hold dear —GRINDHOUSE and the most recent RAMBO being rare exceptions — so I'm thankful that DVD is there to make up for the loss. Watching sleazy crap in one's home is nowhere near as fun as sharing the experience with an audience reminiscent of the rampaging Zulu nation on amphetamines while worrying about the borderline-condemned theater collapsing on top of you, but I guess it'll have to do. It's a state that saddens me, though, because SEX & FURY is exactly the kind of movie that would have gone over quite well at the late, lamented Norwalk Theater.

SEX & FURY comes from the glorious period in the early 1970's when it appeared that many Japanese filmmakers had either completely lost their minds or imbibed a two-liter helping of Tennessee sippin '-whiskey, and the exploitation flicks resulting from that crazed state of mind were marvelous examples of sex and violence that often put our own homegrown efforts to shame. There are many who laud SEX & FURY with such descriptions as "the best exploitation movie ever made" and suchlike, and I'm the first to admit it's entertaining as a motherfucker, but it is by no means perfect...

Reiko Ike as Inoshika Ocho, one of the best of Japanese cinema's legion of badassed chicks.

Starring the cooler-than-cool Reiko Ike as the wandering gambler/pickpocket Inoshika Ocho, this flick takes place in 1905 and follows her adventures through Japan's Meiji period's underbelly as she searches for those responsible for the murder of her detective father some twenty years previous. During the course of her wanderings, Ocho calls "bullshit" on the cheating of a dealer in a yakuza-run card game, something a veteran gambler like herself would notice, and watches in shocked horror as the dealer is immediately killed in order to preserve his boss' reputation (although the boss secretly ordered the dealer to cheat). As the man dies in her arms, he tasks Ocho with giving his sister a sum of cash that will buy her out of prostitution, but the evil yakuza boss decides to have Ocho killed before that can happen and sends his men to murder her as she luxuriates in a hot tub. What follows is a spectacular fusion of sex and violence as Ocho leaps from the tub, stark naked, grabs a short sword and proceeds to kill every man in sight. This takes place about eleven minutes into the movie and is one of the few fight sequences in any film where the slow motion employed throughout in no way hurts the flow of the action, plus it allows us to see how a naked woman's bits are affected by gravity and motion as she swordfights like some demon straight out of Hell. Both awesome and educational!

Ocho's hot tub massacre: the scene that made this movie a classic.

By the time the sequence is over, Ocho's covered from head to toe with blood and has made her way outside into the gambling house's snowy courtyard, a location that will look familiar to anyone who's seen QuentinTarantino's KILL BILL VOL. 1 (or 1973's LADY SNOWBLOOD, for that matter).

Anyway, Ocho goes off in search of the dead guy's sister, and her search coincidentally brings her into contact with two of the three tattooed miscreants responsible for her father's assassination, and those two scumbags used information obtained from Ocho's dad to build political careers for themselves, positions from which they got up to all kinds of corrupt doings. Ocho's path also brings her into contact with Christina (the awesome Swedish cutie Christina Lindberg of THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE and ANITA fame), a former celebrated dancer who now works as a professional gambler and spy for the British government; the sad-eyed Christina accepted the spy gig as a way to get to travel to Japan to once more see her lover, Shunosuke (Masataka Naruse ), who is himself in direct conflict with the corrupt government officials as a radical leftist. Poor Christina finds herself a pawn in the machinations of her superior, Guinness (the atrociously bad actor Mark Darling), who seeks to set up an opium operation, and to facilitate that he gives Christina to one of the corrupt officials, which of course leads to a lesbian scene that swiftly evolves into a three-way that leads to the revelation of...

Aw, who cares? By this point in the story any attempt at a plot recap is kind of pointless since the plots all converge in kind of a narrative train wreck, but it all ends in an ever-escalating cavalcade of depravity, debauchery, gory violence, nudity, switchblade-wielding nuns who show up from out of nowhere,

and the indelible image of Christina Lindberg clad in anachronistic hippie/Injun fringy buckskins, applying a bullwhip to a trussed-up Ocho in an underground dungeon decorated with huge stained glass images of Christ and a psychedelic light show.

SEX & FURY doesn't always make a whole lot of sense, but it is undeniably fun and entertaining. However, it does get bogged down by how convoluted the plot gets about two thirds of the way in, to say nothing of the mostly uninvolving romantic subplot about Christina and Shunosuke. Yeah, it's great to have Lindberg around, but her delivery of English is stilted at best, and although she's supposed to be playing a Brit she nonetheless speaks with a thick Swedish accent (the guy playing her superior's far worse and has none of her soulfulness, so I'll happily cut her some slack). And when she and Shunosuke are briefly reunited, what's supposed to be a tender sequence instead becomes an embarrassing display of two actors who don't speak English being asked to do just that, and it's truly agonizing to watch.

On the plus side, we have some truly vile villains who are in sore need of slaying, and the terrific presence of Reiko Ike as Ocho, who just plain exudes tough-gal confidence and single-mindedness throughout. She's a joy to watch and deserves all the kudos she receives for this performance, especially during the butt-nekkid fight sequence. She's totally comfortable with running around nude and slashing deserving rat-bastards, something not many exploitation movie actresses would have been, maybe not even Pam Grier during her prime, and she's amazing to watch. The scene's nudity is not exactly what I'd call gratuitous or sexy, instead being a matter-of-fact look at what would most likely happen if some badassed woman were attacked as she was bathing and then took the fight to her utterly surprised assailants. The one question I have about the scene is just how they were able to shoot a four-minute slow motion sequence where the protagonist is both head-to-toe nude and in constant motion, but at no point do we see a trace of her bush. It's a masterpiece of camera placement, the actress hitting her marks, choreography, and, above all, some of the tightest film editing I've ever seen.

So I say definitely check out the many sleazy charms on display in SEX & FURY. It may not be all it's been hyped up as, but it's a damned fun way to spend an hour and a half.

Reiko Ike and Christina Lindberg: what more could you ask for?

THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE (1973)

Pixieish Christina Lindberg as Frigga, perhaps the ultimate put-upon exploitation movie heroine.

When Sweden's 1973 THRILLER - EN GRYM FILM found its way to these shores in 1974, it was known by several different titles, including HOOKER'S REVENGE and THEY CALL HER ONE EYE, and was exhibited with some twenty-five minutes of footage excised. It's been out on DVD in the United States for the past few years in two restored versions — the "vengeance" edition, and the more explicit limited edition — and having spent much time pondering its merits since seeing it when unleashed in its fully uncut form, I have to say that it's almost the letter-perfect example of a seventies-era exploitation flick. You'll note that I say "almost," so allow me to elucidate.

Poster from the shorn-of-twenty-five-minutes U.S. release.

THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE falls squarely into the tried and true exploitation category of the revenge film, and its all-too-human and horrifying scenarios are absolutely not recommended for the squeamish or the easily-offended. The protagonist is Frigga, a young woman whose sexual assault at age eight rendered her mute, played with agonized melancholy by the innocent-looking yet totally hot Christina Lindberg, one of the few actresses who's so cute that I willingly sit through any Euro-trash softcore movie that she's in, most notably 1973's ANITA . 

One day during her teen years, Frigga makes the grave error of accepting a lift from Tony (Heinz Hopf), who promptly kidnaps her, addicts her to heroin, and forces her into prostitution.

Frigga contemplates her one joy in life.

The poor mute girl endures untold numbers of sleazy customers of both genders — let's call it what it is: this is rape after rape after rape — but when she works up some gumption and refuses a client, her pimp graphically stabs her in the eye, from which point the tortured lass sports an eye patch. Frigga's is a hellish existence of getting shot up with horse and being used by vile creeps — in one shocking instance, we witness hardcore scenes of penetration as a body-double takes a plowing from an overweight, hairy John — and when she discovers that her pimp has sent her parents a vicious letter that they believe is from her, she is finally pushed over the edge upon finding that the letter broke her parents' hearts so badly that they committed suicide. Frigga then gets her shit together enough to take karate, offensive/defensive driving, and firearms lessons on her off-days (yes, she actually is left to her own devices on her days off, her captors knowing full well that she'll be back for more heroin), and once she has that skill set in place she goes after her tormentors like a pint-sized Fury straight out of the darkest tales of Greek mythology.

Now I don't know what you may think, but that sounds like it could have been the greatest exploitation movie ever made, loaded as it is with sex and violence from start to finish and a heroine any decent human being could not help but root for and want to see unleash righteous vengeance, but THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE has a couple of things going against it that hamper its potential classic ranking. First of all it's a Swedish film, and Swedish cinema is not known for lively pacing or even characters you can really find yourself emotionally connecting with. Like the country they hail from, Swedish films can be very cold and stark, and even their legendary pornography shares those traits, something that was largely overlooked back in the days when American porn wasn't yet allowed to be as "I am your gynecologist" explicit as its foreign contemporaries. Everyone in this film speaks in a lugubrious monotone and after a while I felt like I was dreaming all of it, or else I was under the influence of some particularly choice Mexican cough syrup, and that zombification of the proceedings is not in any way helped by the questionable choice of having Frigga's revenge scenes be rendered in snail-paced slow motion. Nothing kills a movie's action like slow motion, and here it buries the film and plants a fucking tombstone atop the fresh grave.

The lovely Christina Lindberg. I know it's all pretend, but she's the last person I'd want to see any of this stuff happen to.

But even with those obvious defects, one cannot deny the power of star Christina Lindberg's performance. Frigga's a character that life has chosen to shit upon since her childhood and her revolving door of graphic abuse is very hard to watch, endurable only because the tenets of the genre dictate that she will rally herself and savagely execute those who so severely wronged her by the time the final reel unspools. Secure in that knowledge, the viewer is nonetheless dragged along through her journey into a horribly personal hell, utterly unable to help her, offer her comfort, or rescue her thanks to being a filmgoing observer. Lindberg's childlike face is expressive to a painful degree, and her deep, sad eyes convey Frigga's misery far more effectively than any words could have hoped to. Everything she suffers only puts us that much more firmly on her side, and there is nothing even remotely titillating about her many nude scenes, although Lindberg's look captures a curious blend of childlike innocence and very much adult sexuality. I swear I wanted to reach into the film and throw a king-sized blanket over her to protect Frigga's dignity, and I would be shocked if you didn't find yourself sharing that sentiment. Not since Camille Keaton in the even more harsh I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) have I been so moved by a desire to stop the narrative and take the heroine away to a nice, comfy cottage somewhere, draw her a nice, hot bath, and hand her something very strong to drink.

So for me THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE is something of an odd duck. It's a theoretically perfect example of its breed, but I have a difficult time recommending it to anyone other than genre completists because of its flaws and the fact that it's simply one of the bleakest films I've ever seen. It's certainly not a date movie, and there's barely a sense of triumph when Frigga destroys her exploiters at the film's end. Frigga is a ruined and debased human being when all is said and done, still an addict and now, unfortunately, a murderess as well. This film comes from a place of utter blackness and misery and should probably be avoided by all but the hardiest of grindhouse-dwellers.

Poster from the original Swedish theatrical release.

THIS AIN'T STAR TREK XXX (2009)

Well! I checked out THIS AIN'T STAR TREK XXX and was quite pleasantly surprised for a number of reasons.

Porn parodies have been around since Day One and the majority of them expend little effort in doing anything with what they’re allegedly spoofing other than coming up with a title along the lines of HANNAH DOES HER SISTERS or SHINDLER’S FIST, and once the giggling over such titles has subsided, all viewers are left with is the uninspired uglies-to-uglies wrasslin’ that wouldn’t pass muster even during one’s teenage years. (Well, maybe during one’s more desperate teenage years, but you know what I mean.) Thankfully, THIS AIN’T STAR TREK XXX was made by a batch of pornsters who wear their love of old school STAR TREK on their sleeves (especially screenwriter “Roger Krypton”) and while it’s technically a parody, it’s played totally straight and is therefore quite funny when the humping isn’t in progress (and, if truth be told, sometimes even when it is). In fact, other than featuring different actors and some seriously hardcore sex, this DVD has the look and feel of old school STAR TREK down pat, with the sets, costumes and sound effects being as on the money as the budget would allow (it looks only slightly cheaper than TOS).

The plot — yes, there actually is one — is basically a re-do of “Space Seed,” the TV episode that introduced Ricardo Montalban’s arch villain Khan to the Trek canon, so if you’ve seen that story you know what you’re in for. Once more the Enterprise (which is never seen in an exterior shot) finds the “sleeper” ship Botany Bay and awakens the megalomaniacal Khan, thus setting in motion the conflict between the alpha male histrionics of Khan and Captain Kirk. Khan’s eugenics-derived super-human abilities are more or less forgotten here because, let’s face it, this is still a porno movie, and we’re here to see people in STAR TREK outfits get their hump on and not necessarily fully reenact a TV episode we’ve all seen a million times. The Trek-oriented sexual set-tos involve the following:

Spock (British pork swordsman Tony DeSergio) initiates “assimilation protocol” with one of two unfrozen female aliens aboard the Botany Bay. The first alien girl — also apparently her name — is played by the all-natural and very frisky Jenna Haze, Adult Video News’ 2009 Performer of the Year, and if her performance here is any indication of what’s she’s capable of, she certainly earned that accolade with flying colors. Her character states that she was "dipped in Venus juice at birth," which aids in her sole purpose for existing, namely to please men (thus making her, as she herself puts it, "the most popular female on the ship"). As a rule I usually hate blowjob sequences, but this fuck scene gets things rolling when Haze gives Spock the most impressive beejay I've ever witnessed, a virtuoso bit of fellatio intended to get the stoic Vulcan to break character and show some emotion. Seriously, it was truly a thing of beauty. Oh, and Haze’s costume is a different-colored semi-ringer for the one worn by Roger Korby’s android Andrea in the Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls made Of?”

Jenna Haze as "Alien Girl," the character who made this one an instant classic.

Next we get Nick Manning as Khan lording it ultra-macho-style over the delectable Aurora Snow as eventual turncoat Marla McGivers (a character also found in the original story, only now her deeply-dicked motivation for betraying the Enterprise being made explicit as opposed to implicit). How Manning kept up not only a straight face but also a completely insane grimace throughout is something to be pondered, and he’s a riot, while Snow is a delight to the eyes.

Khan (Nick Manning) plots, while Marla McGivers (Aurora Snow) finds herself wetter than Aquaman's Speedo.

When Kirk (an amusingly Shatneresque Evan Stone) gets the spotlight, he’s matched with Sasha Grey as a mouthwatering Vulcan in an outfit that would have been right at home on TOS.(R.I.P., Bill Theiss.) She's the other female from the Botany bay and she's there to warn Kirk of Khan's true intentions, but luckily for him (and us), before she can impart her info the Vulcan lady mentions that she is afflicted with Pon Farr, and if you know your Vulcan xenobiology, you know what that means… Being the selfless guy that he is, Kirk administers the cure for the “blood fever” right there on the transporter platform, an heroic act that made me wonder what happened to the transporter operator during the inter-species horizontal mambo. Next to T’Pol from ENTERPRISE, Grey is simply the hottest Vulcan ever seen, and I thank her for that bit of “fan service,” as the Japanese call it.

Sasha Grey as perhaps the most visually enchanting Vulcan yet to hit the screen.

Meanwhile in sickbay, Dr. McCoy (Cheyne Collins) and Nurse Chapel (Codi Carmichael) must ward off the potentially fatal effects of an airborne pathogen released by Khan, and the only way to counter its effects is by unleashing certain endorphins… You do the math.

Evan Stone as Captain Kirk, afflicted and in need of a cure...

Following that bit of business, Kirk finds himself afflicted with the pathogen (allowing Evan Stone to really let loose with the outright Shatnerism) and takes the good doctor’s advice as to the cure, engaging in an on-the-bridge threesome with Spock and Lt. Uhura (Jada Fire, whose brief bits of dialogue were wisely dubbed, if the behind the scenes footage is any indication of her verbal delivery). And before you K/S freaks out there get too lathered up, Kirk and Spock do not do each other, but a shared-orifice DP is about as close as it gets to that. (I guess you’ll have to wait for the all-male parody to scratch that itch.) This scene is by far the least inspired and most perfunctory of the lot, and for those of you who hate “facials,” the two-man pecker snot bombardment seen at the end of this sequence is especially nasty thanks to the pearlescent aspect of the guys’ semen starkly contrasting with Uhura’s very dark complexion, really driving home how much taking a load directly in the face can make one look just like a seriously-melted candle. (BTW, neither Spock nor Uhura were affected by the pathogen, but how often does one get to make the beast with three backs on the bridge of the USS Enterprise?)

The semi-faithful low-budget remaking of “Space Seed” is utterly beside the point since there are virtually no other actors on hand other than the main cast — there’s no Chekov and both Sulu and Scotty have little more than walk-on parts — so Khan’s lack of a sizable force of supermen and the conspicuous absence of a visible Enterprise crew component would have rendered the plot moot anyway, so we just have to content ourselves with what amounts to a feature-length pornographic cosplay movie. And I, for one, have no problem with that.

THIS AIN’T STAR TREK XXX is very entertaining as contemporary porn flicks go, especially for Trek geeks, and the second disc even includes a sex-free version of the film should you for some reason choose to watch it. Also included on the second disc is an entertaining “Making of” documentary that takes us on a comprehensive tour behind the scenes, complete with cast interviews, a look at the costuming and makeup effects (most notably the Vulcanizing of Sasha Grey, who’s quite pixie-like and dainty when seen out of context of the feature), and plenty of amusing backstage buffoonery. Evan Stone’s David Lee Roth-ish words of warning to men who would enter the porn biz and thereby threaten his own work are hilarious, especially his statements that he and Tony DeSergio would tell the poor bastard in question to show up for a location shoot at some place that doesn’t exist, or that he’d make sure the guy was forced “to work with one of those girls who really, really hates guys, a serious lesbian who’s only in it for the money and will totally take it out on you. Why? Because you’re the new guy!”

The famous Vulcan salute: actually a secret shout-out to those of us who like to "get a taste?"

And while the behind the scenes documentary is fun enough, Jenna Haze gained my undying appreciation for the following quick-witted and funny observation, delivered from the captain's chair:

(Haze makes the Vulcan salute) "It's like a little pussy-eating thing, that's what it is. It's not the Vulcan salute; it's like (sticks tongue between splayed salute fingers) inter-galactic pussy-eating, right? That's what he really meant with that! He doesn't show emotion 'cause he's always buried between somebody's legs. Spock's really a secret pussy-eater, I bet..."

After which she supplements that brilliant observation by confessing to being a geek, but not for Trek, instead preferring Star Wars, video games and werewolf and vampire novels. Gotta love her!

Bottom line, THIS AIN'T STAR TREK XXX is way more fun than it has any right to be, so if you're both a Trek goon and porn-friendly, you should definitely TRUST YER BUNCHE and check this out. I believe a parody this close to the source material is considered "fair use" but I would not be at all surprised if Hustler could only get away with this once, so enjoy this while you can.

STAR TREK (2009)

If ever there were a franchise that sorely needed a reboot, it was STAR TREK, and I'm glad to see that in enacting the reboot the filmmakers chose to start over at the beginning, with the original crew of characters and a slightly altered timeline. That's all I'll divulge about the overall plot, but I enjoyed it very much and would rank STAR TREK right next to THE WRATH OF KHAN as the best in the series. I say that as a person who grew up on the old school cast and prefers The Original Series (or TOS if you prefer) over all subsequent TREK entries, so make of that what you will. I can't guarantee that it will please the inflexible purists out there whom I know (I'm betting cash that both Scooter and Peter the Red will find endless fault with it), but take it from me that this is in every way the correct way to handle a TREK relaunch. As for the particulars:

• The actors do a damned good job of giving us the Enterprise crew we know and have taken to heart, and I'll eat my own buttocks on live television if Karl Urban isn't channeling the late De Forest Kelley.
• I thought I would hate Zoe Saldana as Uhura. I was wrong. I always loved the original for being an indelible part of the bridge crew (to say nothing of her being one of the hottest women in TV history, as well as the first hot black chick on the tube) but back in the days Uhura amounted to little more than an inter-galactic switchboard operator, so seeing her reinterpreted for an audience that comes forty-some-odd years after her creation was definitely something that had to be done and it is done quite well here, although I would have given her an African accent, but that's just me and it's a very minor quibble. (I know the original Uhura didn't rock an accent but she was supposed to be African and occasionally spoke Swahili, admittedly sans accent; now sounds like she just strolled in from a mall shopping spree somewhere in California and no mention is made of her place of origin, so for all we know she could be from Van Nuys.)
• I love the new Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Yes, I just admitted that in a worldwide public forum.
• I'm still not down with the Enterprise's new look, but then again I didn't care for its re-design in STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979) and that design not only eventually grew on me, but I now consider it a classic for many reasons. So who knows what the future will bring? (No pun intended.)
• Simon Pegg as Scotty. I wouldn't have thought to cast him, but he acquits himself quite well.
• For me the bit of casting I dreaded most was Chris Pine as James T. Kirk. Simply put, how the fuck do you even think of getting someone to step into the unique characterization William Shatner brought to the table? For all of Shatner's over-the-top acting, Kirk would not be remembered at all if not for Bill giving him a sense of lovable fratboyish assholism, and it would have been dangerously easy for an actor stepping into the role to turn it into inadvertent parody. Pine takes some of the Shatnerian traits that made Kirk legendary while reigning in the Shat's (in)famous thespic stylings, allowing Kirk to be seen as a somewhat realistically acted character. I think he did a great job and I look forward to seeing how his portrayal evolves.
• I was far less concerned about Zachary Quinto stepping into the Spock ears and bangs, but he was superb and the script addressed my favorite aspect of Spock's character, namely the seething rage within him that grew throughout his life as a mixed-race outsider on his homeworld. I can never get enough of the character and I can't wait to see more of Quinto's take on him.
• Giving away nothing, we even get a tasty and fleshy Orion woman, aka that epitome of the classic STAR TREK alien babe, "the green chick," so I was a very happy camper.

Rachel Nichols as the all-too-briefly-seen Gaila, proudly representing for green chicks throughout the galaxy.

Anyway, the bottom line is that it's fun, so TRUST YER BUNCHE and boldly haul your ass to STAR TREK this weekend. And if you don't feel like combating the opening-weekend hordes you'll miss nothing by waiting a few days; if you know old school TREK you know what this is all about, but it's a blast seeing the series get exactly the shot in the arm it's needed for well over a decade.

CHOCOLATE (2008)

After hearing nothing but great buzz on this Thai ass-whuppin' opus from the makers of 2003's ONG-BAK, I checked out the DVD and was somewhat underwhelmed.

CHOCOLATE is best described as a "gimmick" martial arts film that's kind of a chopsocky RAIN MAN thanks to its protagonist being an austistic girl whose savant gift is in the field of martial arts rather than numbers and calculation. Young Zen (Yanin "Jeeja" Vismistananda) has the ability to observe, absorb and apply hardcore ass-whuppery techniques, a skill that comes in quite handy when she embarks on a quest to collect monies owed to her gangster mother who is dying from cancer and needs the cash to pay for her medical bills, and the flimsy narrative is nothing more than an excuse to show off the star's impressive handling of the clever and bone-crushing choreography. I gave up caring about the actual plot fairly early into the film and just wanted to witness Vismistananda's precise demolition of the list of deadbeats, but even though I stuck with the movie for the fights I soon felt wearied by the mechanical nature of the proceedings. The tear-jerker element of the narrative failed to draw me in and once the fights went from the repetitive to the ridiculous — particularly a finale that owes much to Jackie Chan's PROJECT A (1983) — I pretty much lost interest altogether. Vismistananda's work here cannot be faulted, however, and shines despite the lackluster script. She's apparently experienced in Tae Kwon Do (believe me, it shows) and trained for two solid years for this film before embarking on its two-year shoot, so we're talking four years of intensive effort on her part, but I just wish she'd had a script worthy of her awesomeness.

CHOCOLATE is definitely worth a look for the fights, but that's all. And, no, I have no idea how the film's title has anything to do with anything in the story. Maybe that's because the DVD I saw had cuts made to it that I know flesh out elements of the story in the original Thai version; there's supposed to be some business about Zen growing up next to a Muay Thai training school as well as learning to kick ass by watching kung fu movies and playing martial arts video games, but that was excised from the version I saw, so maybe a sequence explaining the title got lost as well.

OKATSU THE FUGITIVE (1969)

This third installment in the LEGENDS OF THE POISONOUS SEDUCTRESS series is a major disappointment after the excellence of its predecessor, QUICK-DRAW OKATSU . It's pretty much a remake of the previous film, even starring Junko Miyazono as a master swordswoman named Okatsu, but not the same character she played before (?); at the end of QUICK-DRAW OKATSU our heroine was a wanted fugitive, so wouldn't you expect a film entitled OKATSU THE FUGITIVE to be a direct sequel, especially since the film that came before it was a hit and the Japanese are not by any means sequel shy?

This new Okatsu is again the blade-proficient daughter of a swordsman, and when her father threatens to expose the vicious corruption of a local magistrate he's tortured in an attempt to get him to reveal the whereabouts of a written document of the magistrate's offenses. When he won't talk, his wife and daughter are hauled in by the bad guys and the wife is thrown to six hardened criminals for a bit of gang rape (which thankfully doesn't occur, but she does get alarmingly manhandled), and after that moment of extreme bad taste dad kills his wife and then himself. Unfortunately Okatsu then falls victim to the evil magistrate and is raped, then thrown into a basement dungeon. With the aid of her sleazy fiancee, she escapes — killing several swordsmen in the process — with the document hidden in her mother's elaborate (and very pointy) hairpin and sets out to avenge her parents, not realizing her fiancee is in league with the bad guys. After that the film becomes a lackluster and very much by the numbers samurai revenge flick that could have been written with little or no effort by anyone who's ever seen one of these things, and ends up a staggeringly generic item that will be forgotten about five minutes after the title that reads "The End." That's a real shame because the level of quality found in QUICK-DRAW OKATSU lead me to expect a hell of a lot more from all involved, and after this I can see why the series stalled out. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!