Heavenly Sword - The Movie

There are times a project comes together that is made up of individual pieces that simply scream to me "this is going to be absolutely wonderful."  It's destined to wind up my "best of the year" list and all I need to do is simply sit back and partake in its splendor.  A writer I love and an artist I love will come together to draw a comic book featuring characters I love to read about, and I wind up with Matt Fraction's run on Hawkeye.  A stellar cast comes together with amazing directors and producers and you can wind up with, well, any of the movies that found their way onto my best of the year list.  Writers finally hit their strides and I get amazing novels.

So let's look at the puzzle pieces here:

We have an animated movie.
Anna Torv (Fringe) voices the heroine, a sexy red-haired acrobatic woman wielding a powerful sword.

Alfred Molina (you know, the guy I just talked about being amazing) playing the villainous king.

Other voices by Thomas Jane (y'know, the Punisher), Nolan North (everything), Ashleigh Ball (Black Lagoon, Applejack AND Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony), and Barry Dennen (so much stuff on Broadway).

A story line involving revenge via massive battles against swarms of enemies, requiring a deft director's eye to choreograph complex fight sequences since this is based on a fighting game that essentially looked at God of War and went "yes, everything from that, just make the lead a woman."

Written by Todd Farmer, a guy whose extensive career includes... hold on, I don't actually know this guy.  Let's see what else he wrote.... okay, he wrote... Drive Angry, The Messengers, My Bloody Valentine 3-D...and Jason X.  As in "the one where Jason goes into space."

You know what?  I'm going to save all of you some time if you want to bail from this article.  This movie's terrible.  It's just awful.  The rest of this post is going to just be me ripping it apart and bemoaning the fact that I wasted an hour and a half of my life when I could have been doing anything else and it would have amounted to more, including "licking random mosses growing outside to see if they're toxic."

Suburban Commando

Why don't Hulk Hogan movies work?

Maybe there's just some types of acting that don't translate over to film.  Maybe it's that, aside from a few exceptions, wrestlers can't really act.  Maybe the Hulkster just isn't that good.

But I think there's more to it than that.

It only took me two days, but I got through Suburban Commando.  Here's the breakdown.

That's right, somebody got paid to think that this movie was "E.T. meets High Noon."

Mr. Nanny

Mr. Nanny is one hour and twenty-four minutes long.

That's the most important part of this review to keep in mind, because it took me four days to get through watching it.  I'd watch some, boggle at how terrible it is, and then have to stop because my brain was trying to invent new layers of ADD so I'd look at something, anything else.

Originally I planned on doing a scene by scene breakdown of it, like I did movies like Dead or Alive, Barb Wire, or Bangkok Adrenaline, but... I can't.  Those movies were at least ridiculous enough to be entertaining, while this one just feels like a group of "actors" got together and decided to do the minimal amount of work required to earn a paycheck.

When you manage to make a movie where I feel like even the cameras are bored, you know you've made a terrible movie.

Normally I'd just toss the DVD into my computer, rip some screenshots, and then post those, but I DON'T WANT IT PLAYING AGAIN.

Review: Bangkok Adrenaline - Part Two

Okay, so try to follow along with me as I describe the plot so far.

We start with four friends.  One of whom is a world-class martial artist, one of whom is the brains of the group and a high-quality marital artist, one of whom is a mountain of a man portrayed as being dumb as a post and always hungry, and one who I swear is the cause of everything wrong in this world, somehow, and has less character sympathy than your standard Nazi in an Indiana Jones movie.

At least the Nazi might have a family out there somewhere that cares about him.

After falling in debt to a local small time crime boss (a guy who breaks fingers over $90 American money), these four losers decide their best plan of action is to kidnap the daughter of a local millionaire/billionaire/somethingaire.  However, between their own incompetence and the fact that Irene's father (she's the girl in this situation) is apparently a "one man mob boss," things are even worse than before.

Irene's two bodyguards manage to attach a tracking device to the, quote-unquote "good guys" of the film, the extremely skilled martial artist (Dan) and Irene have a brief "meet cute" where angelic voices sing, and we left off after the group's leader (Mike) just learned something from a bondage fan at a leather club about Irene's father, leading Mike to provoke the father into admitting he'd rather have Irene dead than rescued because of...reasons, I guess.

Now, with a hit squad on the way, Irene's bodyguards closing in, and our four male leads having no idea what to do next, you might be thinking "wow, Erik, this sounds like an even dumber version of the Mark Wahlberg/Lou Diamond Phillips/Christina Applegate movie The Big Hit" to which I say "yes, I realized that as well."

So let's jump back in and see if we can't stomach our way through it.

Review: Bangkok Adrenaline - Part One

Every now and again, somebody in Hollywood who has a job that isn't "screenwriter," "producer," or "director" gets the idea, "hey, I work in movies, I could probably make a movie!  How hard could it really be?"  It's because of ideas like this (and the fact that people aren't quick to stop those who have them) that we have movies like Swept Away, a movie so bad that Roger Ebert's review starts with the following sentence:

""Swept Away" is a deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one."

Fortunately, not everybody who has this idea is Guy Pierce.  Many actors have eventually made the successful leap into film production.  Action heroes, dramatic stars, even people who voiced cartoon characters have all moved on to create instead of simply act in a film.  Many of them have been quite successful and quite good.

Then there's Bangkok Adrenaline, a movie I can really only describe as "some really neat scenes of people being kicked in the face mixed in with people who wouldn't be cast as actors in any high school production of anything.  Anywhere."

I've had this movie sitting on the shelf for several years now, waiting for just the right time to watch it.

It turns out there is no right time.

That's right, we're doing a scene by scene synopsis, in the spirit of Dead or Alive, Barb Wire, and Iron Sky.  Because if I had to suffer through watching it, then you have to suffer through reading it.

Let's get started.

Helldriver

Zombies are a great resource for deep, philosophical discussions.  The original Dawn of the Dead is infamous now as a critique of mass consumerism.  They've been used to represent "dangerous" new ideas becoming popular to the masses to the dangers of increasingly alienating political structures that push away their base or attempt to hold on to outdated values and ideas.  They've represented a basic natural disaster, simply being background dressing for deep personal dramas, and they've represented an entire class of people separated by a wide chasm from the increasingly rich upper class.

However, not very often does a movie tackle the idea of death itself in a meaningful way.  Helldriver, a Japanese film by Yoshihiro Nishimura (creator of the infamous cult classic Tokyo Gore Police), takes time to examine the moral and ethical dilemmas of millions of people being "infected" with something that drives them to feast on the flesh of the living.  If they show signs of life, are they really "dead?"  If they show intelligence, organization, and understanding of concepts such as bartering and power structure, are they still "human?"  What if they show a knack for using tools or recognizing specific people?  Is attempting to wipe out beings referred to as "infected" a violation of human rights if they can instead be contained?  What if containment could lead to an entire nation's economy and social structure crumbling?  Does the needs of the "normal" override the needs of the "not normal?"

While not really providing many answers to these questions, Helldriver does go above and beyond your standard zombie film by actually being willing to address these issues.  A priest's soapbox movement calling for mercy for family, friends, and loved ones who are infected and a politician's refusal to pass a bill that would exterminate the infected, calling it "a murder bill" are balanced against cries from a populace already forced into cramped housing with limited food resources, struggling to stay alive when they're refugees in their own country.

Oh, and it's also the most insane movie I've ever seen in my life.

Oneechanbara: The Movie Vortex

So, it's day four of "Asian Women Wearing Inappropriate Clothing For Facing The Undead" week, and I've been saving some of the worst for last because I've heard terrible things about them.I don't have much hope for a movie that feels the need to show a trailer for the film I'm about to watch right before the movie itself.  Or one that feels the need to show a trailer for Psycho Gothic Lolita.

Now, I never played the video game Oneechanbara, so I'm going into this blind.  I'm going to sit back now and watch this and then do my review.

Let the film begin.

Oh, and just to try something new, I'm going to be documenting my reactions as the movie plays.

Zombie Stripper Apocalypse

I did not know what to expect when I tossed this DVD into my system to watch.

Actually, that's a terrible, filthy lie, borne of utter disregard for the truth in meaning, if not intent.

I knew exactly what to expect when I picked this DVD up at a Blockbuster store that was going out of business.  I mean, the cover pretty much explains it all.

There were going to be Japanese women.  There were going to be skimpy outfits.  There were going to be swords, chainsaws, and axes.  There were going to be zombies and strippers (or possibly zombie strippers).  There might even be an apocalypse.

I also, looking at the case, knew this movie was going to be awful.

How did I know?  

They misspelled the name of the movie on the side of the DVD case.

And yet, while it was all those things...I was also completely wrong.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter

I'm stuck at home today with a pretty bad cold (normally I get over these within a day or two), so I figured it was a good time to clean out a few things in the DVR.  Because I'm apparently also a masochist (or I hoped that the germs would be less tolerant than me and flee first), I decided the first thing I would watch is the horror classic Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.

You haven't heard of it?

Probably for the best.