New blog: Ninja Dixon is now... Ex-Ninja!

Hey,

I'm leaving this museum of reviews to start all over again at Ex-Ninja. It's bascially the same kind of movies, but I will try to write more free, expand my texts to articles and columns. And most of all, all the stress I felt with Ninja Dixon is now gone. I can start all over, I can get a little peace of mind.

The first review out is the forgotten, but good, anthology movie Trapped Ashes - directed by Joe Dante, Sean S. Cunningham, Monte Hellman and Ken Russell!

This blog will still be here, so if you need to come back to check out older reviews it won't be any problems. I have no plans to export them to the Ex-Ninja.

So if you feel for it, welcome over to my new place :)

/Fred

FIN

It's just not fun anymore. The visitors is getting less and less, everything has been written. There's nothing new to add to genre cinema writing.

I know I've said it before, but always come back. This time I must go on and quit Ninja Dixon while I still have some interest in this once so magical artform.

Might start over someday, under a different name. It's just not important.

Take care.

Fred

Toolbox Murders (2004)

My plan yesterday was to watch and review Toolbox Murders, but I ended up with Mortuary - also directed by Tobe Hooper. Today I searched the apartment again and found it! It was right in front of my eyes all the time, of course. I watched this first when it came and then forgot about it, bought the DVD some years ago and forgot about it again and now I understand why. This is by far one of Hooper's weakest moments, but it's still better than a lot of other generic, crappy DTV horror films. I'm not gonna make any comparison to the original 1978 movie, mostly because they're totally different films and I just don't believe in comparing everything new to stuff produced during the over-hyped the golden years of cinema. 

The original is actually damn boring and completely lacks talent (except the always awesome Cameron Mitchell of course!). But 'nuff about that!

Toolbox Murders suffers from the same problem as Mortuary: great ideas, a fun concept - but none of the ideas is fully developed and we're left with a boring slasher-esque thriller who hardly even tries to be scary. I know Hooper can do better and I'm afraid I think this was just another paycheck for him. It glimmers here and there, but the characters and the dialogue is the best - the horror is just something we've seen before a thousand times.

Hooper tries to provoke and produce disturbing images, but to receive R rather than the dreaded NC-17 the filmmakers was forced to cut the kills down and left is a (almost) bloodless mess. I'm pretty sure the horror would have been better with more gore, more violence. If this had been produced today it would probably never have suffered the same form of tasteless mutilation, but what can we do about it today? Nothing it seems.

I've heard the uncut kills is included as a bonus on the R1 DVD, but hey... there's no point in watching them outside the movie. I want them in the movie, where they belong.

On the good side, the cast is excellent. From the always enjoyable Angela Bettis in the lead to reliable character actors like Rance Howard, Juliet Landau and Greg Travis supporting the thrills it's a nice way to spend an evening. It's the same style of quirky, slightly disturbed Tobe Hopper-characters we're used to see - and that's a good thing, because it's part of his style. I need to see people like that in his movies, it's the last thing he has left from a far more successful career.

The idea used in the film is good, but it's surprising they never used it to something more. The occult and the old Hollywood always creates magic. Mysterious apartments, old actors remembering the past, long corridors, hidden symbols and weird noises. It's good stuff, it's great stuff. But everything is thrown away just to making something more simpler, something more... cowardly.

Until there's an official director's cut out I just can't recommend it. Sorry. 

Mortuary (2005)

Tobe Hooper is a curious fellow. I've always admired his worked and always tried to look beyond that first movie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that since then has become a curse for Hooper. He's far from a one-trick pony, with excellent stuff like The Funhouse, Poltergeist (yeah, I know some people claim Spielberg did all the directing, but you'll find many who claim Hooper did the job also), Lifeforce, TCM2, Eaten Alive and of course Salem's Lot. His TV-work and some of his less famous stuff from the eighties and nineties is good also. Seriously. Stop comparing, please. He's worth a more serious approach.

It took me four times to actually watch Mortuary. This time I managed to watch more than the first twenty minutes. It's my own fault, because I've been listening too much to the fancy schmancy bullshitters out there, people who prefer to look back into the past than analyzing the work of directors who doesn't want to repeat themselves. That's also Hoopers curse. He will be the director of TCM for his whole career and I think it's no coincidence that Mortuary has a weird, off-beat and macabre dinner-scene and odd redneck-esque characters acting strange. That's his burden and I guess it pays the bills.

While Mortuary has some serious flaws - including sloppy editing, some really awful physical and digital effects and sometimes a lack of energy from the director himself - it also have a lot of good stuff going on. The story, from writers Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch, isn't half-bad. Just a bit unfocused. It's an original twist on the boring zombie-theme with some truly original and bizarre ideas. It has a lot of black comedy - my favorite being the scene where the mother is sorting out her embalming equipment from the kitchen equipment! The dialogue is witty and mostly very fun in that quirky, strange way only characters talk in films by Hooper. The actors feels a bit awkward in the beginning, but they're soon in peace with their characters and the dialogue and in the end I would say this film has some of the more interesting people I've seen in a low budget, direct-to-video horror film that everyone hates.

Why? For example, the adult characters behave good. They don't act like assholes. The mother, played by Denise Crosby, is a good mother. She understand her son isn't a saint and gives him some freedom, but still cares about him. When she sense smoke on him she's more worried that he's in to heavier drugs and when she discover he's been out in the graveyard two in the morning she just tells him to bring a baseball bat the next time, for protection. Every adult character behaves in the total opposite way than they usually do in similar films. This is also one of the few genre productions I've seen who has a normal gay character who's treated like everyone else and behaves like everyone else.

How's the horror then? Hooper works hard with the little horror he has, but most of the power of the scares is let down by terrible make-up, lousy set-dressings and one of the worst final scenes I've seen. I can see his idea here - a reference to the almost otherworldly, unrealistic style of Eaten Alive - but that belonged in the drive-in's during the 70's, here it just feels like a bad episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.  The lack of real gore and that final, nasty horror-punch he's usually so good at, makes a weak horror movie.

What makes it worth watching is the ideas, the acting, the dialogue. That's the Hooper I love.

Unlawful Killing (2011)

When I was seven years old me and my best friend Kristian were playing with a tape recorder at my mothers house, outside Sigtuna. Kristian brought some cassettes from home, belonging to his father. His father was, like almost everyone at this quiet community, an recovering alcoholic and a deeply religious man. We put one cassette into the recorded and pressed play.

What we heard was his father confessing a murder. He killed someone. He was in deep angst, I remember him sounding sad - almost crying. It was scary and we turned off the tape and I ran to my mother... Anyway. Nothing came out of this. It was forgotten and for many years I didn't think about it. Until my mother mentioned she heard that Kristian's dad nowadays had his own religious community, some kind of church. And it all came back to me. I think this imprinted my mind to look for mysteries, the unexplained.

Everyone loves a conspiracy, especially me after this episode of my life. But I'm also a sceptic. I'm an atheist, I don't believe in UFO's, Bigfoot and too absurd government cover-up's. What I do believe in is the eternal evil and greed of humans and I know, for a fact, that a person - or several - can do what ever is in their power to get what they want. Remember, it takes only two persons to create a conspiracy.

Like all decent human beings I pretty uninterested in royal families and crap like that. They're a left over of a very non-democratic way of reasoning and for me they're just spoiled brats who toys around with the peoples money for their own pleasure and luxury. And no, they're not good PR for the countries either - because that means every country who doesn't have a royal family sucks at tourism - and that's just not true. Even the smallest damn monkey understands that. They're a waste of money, energy and intelligence.

Actor, comedian and author Keith Allen, part conspiracy nut, part smart dude, has made the most interesting and wittiest documentary on the "murder of Princess Diana" so far, Unlawful Killing. Before I watched the movie I read what ever I could find on the case - on the net, I just don't have time to read books nowadays - and got myself a pretty clear view on the pro's and con's of the theory. Allen and his team has a clear anti-Royal stance in the movie (and no, there's hardly any objective documentaries made - ever, because all of them are made by a filmmaker who have decided to tell a story, whether he understands that or not) and that can be bad, but for an anti-royalist like me it's like heaven. He goes through everything around the accident, points out clear - and confirmed misses from the police and media - ask questions that never got answered, lets the people who didn't believe in the accident-theory and was heard by the police talk about what they know. It's not a sloppy production, it's well-made and rude in that wonderful British way we love so much. There's no ass-licking here towards the inbred family living a life in glamour behind those castle walls. Of course there's people who will refute the evidence presented here, but let them do that. They've done it since the accident and always had the media and cops behind them anyway.

There's a lot of chilling moments, of course - like all good docs - constructed to evoke more emotion for the victims, Diana, Dodi and Henri Paul, the driver. Dodi's father has his son buried in his garden and burns the former royal symbols from Harrods outside his house. It's a man who spends most of his time talking to his dead son and the story of Dodi is told in a more respectful and intelligent way than how he was portrayed by the world media. What I found most interesting his that there's never been any proof that the paparazzi's was near their car. Not even the verdict states this - it's just in the imagination of newspaper editors and us fools believing in them. There's a lot of stuff like this in Unlawful Killing.

I can't say this documentary is wrong. I can't say it's true. But it's a fine piece of conspiracy theory, far from the typical nutcase-films produced by home grown wackos in the US. It delivers suspense, satire and criticism in an elegant manner. But still, it's a documentary. And a documentary, like all kind of journalism, only delivers the opinion of the creator. Remember that the next time you're upset about something your read in the newspaper, on Facebook, Twitter or any other timewaster that blocks your mind.

Leviathan (1989)

The year of 2013 will go the history as the end of the life-long battle of which monster-in-underwater-base is the best. Jocke over at Rubbermonsterfetishism claims that Sean S. Cunningham’s Deep Star Six is superior to Leviathan (No Jocke, it’s not!), but in the end I think we both can agree that The Rift is the best and coolest film in this small sub-genre of monster films. Anyway, I decided to watch Leviathan for the tenth time (or something like that) and see if it still had the magic I’ve experienced before.


And you know… it still has.

I’m not entirely sure why I like it so much. It could be because of the awesome cast – from always reliable leading man Paul Weller to character acting legend Richard Crenna and excellent supporting actors like Daniel Stern and Ernie Hudson. Oh, and don’t forget Hector Elizondo (who I saw in the fantastic The Taking of Pelham 123 recently) and of course the lizard-eyed Meg Foster. Everyone is good and the dialogue is realistic and all of the characters, with the exception of Lisa Eilbacher, is written with depth and intelligence. I’m pretty sure screenwriters David Webb Peoples (who also wrote Blade Runner and Twelve Monkeys) and Jeb Stuart got the orders from the producers to try to copy the realistic style of Ridley Scott’s Alien, with the same fast and witty dialogue.

Alien isn’t the only inspiration – the atmosphere and characters is directly from that film, but much of the storyline and twists is taken almost directly from John Carpenter’s The Thing. With some slight changes of course. Personally I love this, because I could watch Alien and The Thing rip-off’s all day long, especially if they’re so ambitious and drenched with money as Leviathan. It never reaches the excellent paranoia of The Thing – and it’s not the focuseither, this is more the anxiety over the infection, people looking for signs of illness etc. It works, but in all honesty it could have ripped The Thing even more here.

Leviathan is foremost a monster film and the special effects, the action, is extremely well executed. It goes from the usual slime and gore to a fifties sci-fi film complete with a silly (but cool) looking fish monster, just bucket or two of slime from being black & white and starring opposite Richard Carlson! It looks quite cool, but I guess there’s a reason why it’s kept quite hidden most of the time with just a few wide shots which lasts less than a second. It’s a pity, because the man behind the monster effects is Stan Winston and he and his crew has done a fantastic job.

Leviathan is produced by the nephew of Dino De Laurentiis and like his uncle he knows who to spend the money on the production. It’s big and gory and has a sensational cast, which must have been a dream for talented director George P. Cosmatos. The rumor says he got fired from one production for spitting in the face of an employee at the production office! One of the last movies he was involved with was Tombstone, but he was just hired to pretend to be the director. He just sat around the sent, relaxed and watched Kurt Russell do the job. But he still did good work and Leviathan, while lacking a personal stamp of some kind, still is one of my favorites from his interesting filmography.

There’s just one question left regarding the film: what use did the crew have of big, futuristic flame-throwers down in the underwater base?

I guess we will never find out…

Undisputed III: Redemption (2010)

Me and G's mutual action favorite is Scott Adkins, a marvelous fighter and sometimes quite a good actor also. His magnum opus so far is the (masterpiece) Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, John Hyams sensational fifth (if counting the TV-movies) sequel to the 1992 semi-classic starring Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme. They're both elderly statesmen of action cinema now, and it's up to Adkins to save the day and take over the torch. The biggest difference between him and the older generation of fighters his how he (like JCVD nowadays) dares to show emotions, work more with the acting part and not be afraid to be a little bit weak from time to time. He gives the characters depth and intelligence, even if they're here just to kick someone in the head. In Undisputed III: Redemption he gives us more of Boyka, the earlier so shallow typical Russian bad guy, and everything becomes so much better.

Boyka is now a broken man after the nasty knee-injury Michael Jai White gave him in the last movie. But when he gets a chance to fight the new champion his former employer Gaga, a ruthless businessman and gambler, gives him a new chance. He's transferred to Georgia where there's a prison tournament and a lot of money is at stake. One of them is an American, Turbo (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) and they soon - after some ruckus - becomes close friends, but something is fucked up in the tournament and they both realize it's not an honest game... and now they need to fight extra hard to survive!

I know it's very easy to read in gay sub-text in very male-dominated action movies like this, but the thing is that I can swear it's not even a subtext. It's there on the screen. Boyka is the ultimate closeted macho-man, giving his time to god and praying when he's really only lusting for his new opponent Turbo. His refusal to talk about kids and women, his acceptance of Turbo's flowers to him and how terribly jealous he acts when Turbo is gonna meet his wife. Not to mention that they both are referred to boyfriends, lovers etc all the time from the other characters. It's interesting, because Boyka never reacts to this. He's quietly accepting it. Turbo becomes irritated at one point, but forgets it fast.

But gay subtext belongs in action movies, I think we all can agree on that. So how about the action? Scott Adkins is THE best fighter we have now (forget about those short, silly Indonesian fellas!). His physique is outstanding and even if he's bigger and bulkier than most expert fighters I've seen he's working the floor, the fists and feet like he was born Thai or Chinese. The fights are plenty and brutal, lots of blood and slow-mo. Most of it seem to be real contact, but from time to time it's easy to see how how far the feet and fists are to the other body. But it's a movie, dammit. It's not snuff!

Undisputed II, who we watched again a couple of days ago, is still a good movie, but it's very weak (except Adkins) compared to part III, a film packed with bloodshed and broken limbs. I especially like the small twists, the dialogue and the brave decision to give the characters some... character. It's a few surprises here and there and far above the average DTV action film. I loved it! Can't wait to see was Isaac Florentine and Adkins will do with Ninja 2, currently shooting in Thailand!