A recommendation: Cinezilla!

I have a lot of favorite blogs, and each of them often have a special interest which also interest me. For example Rubbermonsterfetishism (monsters and... yeah, monsters!), Backyard Asia (weird Asian movies) and so on. I don't want to really leave anyone out, so check on the right side of this blog and you'll find links to a lot of awesome blogs from around the world!

One blog that I want to recommend extra much today is Cinezilla, which focuses mainly on European genre movies (but there's a lot of other countries too). What makes Cinezilla extra awesome is that Jason Meredith, the esteemed journalist (and that's not an overstatement) really goes that extra mile to analyze the movies, find references that no one else thought about before (his article about Tarkovsky vs Fulci is legendary for example, even if he seem to not take himself seriously there - but I think it's extremely interesting) and really takes our favorite trash-favorites seriously, like no one else. No ironic tongue-in-cheek here, at Cinezilla movies is art even if the director is Bruno Mattei.

So, give him a visit, follow his blog and add a link from your blog and homepage! NOW! ;)

Merantau (2009)

Merantau is a rite of passage in Indonesia, when a young man leaves his home to see the world and maybe learn something in the process. Here a young man leaves his home and kicks ass for most of the time. Not a bad way to spend his time, I guess? Merantau is directed by Welsh documentary filmmaker Gareth Evans, but it’s far from gritty and realistic. This is basically the typical Thai action film with Tony Jaa (country boy goes to town and gets in trouble), but with far more depth and drama. Nothing bad with that, but I guess most of us (including me) will watch it only for the action.

When Yuda (Iko Uwais) comes to Jakarta to teach Tiger Silet, a local martial arts, he finds himself out of a job and with no place to live. After running into a prostitute while chasing her little brother who just stole his wallet, he suddenly gets involved in the nasty, nasty Ratger (danish actor Mads Koudal), a baddie who deals with human slaves and likes to fuck as many prostitutes as possible. He’s also a brutal fighter. Anyway, Yuda decide to save this girl from her slavery and is suddenly the most chased man in Jakarta. Good for him that he’s a master in ass-kicking!

But don’t be fooled by the trailer (something you obviously can find on YouTube), Merantau takes it’s time introduce characters, set the mood and feels like a serious drama for quite a while, until Yuda can’t control himself and beats the shit out of a stripbar filled with henchmen. Then it’s bascially action until the last fifteen minutes of the movie when it turns to drama again, which works better than it sounds. The fighting is very spectacular and the style is very organic, very natural. It’s like watching something unreal, something animated. Uwais is obviously a very skilled fighter, and he’s quite a good actor too (this is his first part, he was a truckdriver before getting this part) and if he gets a good agent who can take care of his career he can be something big.

The endfight might be a letdown for you who expect something big in the style of a Tony Jaa-movie, this is just two baddies fighting with our hero on a flat area – but what a fight! This is poetry in fighting, a perfect example how to use fantastic choreography to create something stunning and beautiful. The stunts when people are falling are well-made, but often using wires – so the impact never looks as hard as in the HK-movies from the eighties, or the new wave of Thai action. But it’s not that stunts that’s important in this movie, it’s the fighting – and the fighting is top-notch.

... and if you want to see blood, this is the movie for you. Not in any extreme ways, but there's a squib-scene which literary covers the walls of an elevator with blood - and it's getting quite nasty int he end too. Just so you all know.

I also want to mention Mads Koudal, the actor playing the baddie. Often in Asian movies the western actors are quite bad, or at least they overact like hell or are there to fill out the story. The character of Ratger is one motherf**king nasty man, evil to the bone – and evil with a depth, something he shows to his brother in the movie. They have some kinda physical abusive relationship, and still love each other to the last drop of blood. Mads is a great bad guy, one of the best I’ve seen in the genre for quite a long while, and makes something special from a character that could have been just another meatbag in the history of foreign baddies in Asian movies.

Merantau is a great movie, with great locations and excellent directing. We’re impressed in the House of Ninja Dixon and hope to see more from Iko Uwais and Gareth Evans very soon in the future!

Escape from the Bronx vs Doomsday

When I first saw Neil Marshall's über-violent Doomsday there was one scene I reacted to directly, when one of the locals bashes a bat into the face of a masked soldier. This reminds me a lot about a scene in Enzo G. Castellari's masterpiece Escape from the Bronx, when Romano Puppo beats the shit out of some. I don't think it's a coincidence, but a deliberate tribute to Castellari's movie.



What do you think? I haven't listen to any commentary with Marshall, so I have no idea what he says about this detail. But I hope I'm correct :)

UPDATE!
I got a tweet from the awesome Axelle Carolyn (Doomsday, Centurion and other movies) with this message: "Neil hasn't seen ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX (unless it's got a different name in the UK?) but the coincidence is pretty funny!" - so there's the answer, and I was wrong. But maybe he saw it when he was very young and that detail stayed with him subconsciously ;)

Manhattan Baby (1982)

A long time ago, during the ancient nineties, people actually hated Manhattan Baby. Said it was the beginning of all the bad movies Fulci made after his gore-soaked horror-career (that only included 4-5 movies, the “fans” had no idea about the movies before that). But now it’s a different time, and even some of his even later movies have got the blessing from the nasty nerds out there in the void. I saw Manhattan Baby on a VHS-bootleg the first time and was even then impressed by its visuals, but the sound was bad and it was hard to concentrate. Some years ago I bought the DVD and since then I’ve learned to fully appreciate the amazing little movie that Manhattan Baby is.

Christopher Connelly is Professor George Hacker, an archaeologist who brought his daughter and wife to Egypt for some work and vacation. During a mysterious event, his daughter gets a gift – an amulet with enormous powers. At the same time Hacker and his colleague is involved in a terrible accident inside an old pyramid and Hacker is left blind…
Back in New York the treatment for his eyes starts, and it’s looking good. But his daughter has shown the amulet to her little brother and together they start use it, for “journeys”… Soon people start to die around the family, is it possible to stop the curse?

Manhattan Baby isn’t as confusing as some people will say, the story is quite clear but they just left out a lot of details, a lot of explanations. I’m happy for that, I want to fill in the blanks myself. I guess the thought is something supernatural, something occult, but for me it always has been connected to ancient technology. The stories about the Egyptians and their unknown, lost, technology is famous and some even claim they was aliens (no, I don’t think so – I didn’t even believe in Santa or God as a kid). The amulet, according to me, is not so much a supernatural thing, but a technological thing. Maybe connected with radioactive power. A time machine, or a dimension portal, highly dangerous in the wrong hands. The occultist, Adrian Marcato (the always awesome Cosimo Cinieri), reacts like he’s been exposed to strong radioactivity (blood from nose and ears, spasms) after touching the amulet for example.

Manhattan Baby is also, as usual with Fulci, a beautiful movie with so much atmosphere that even James Whale deserves to be a bit jealous. The opening in Egypt, is among the best sequences in a horror movie Fulci ever directed! Everything is perfection, a flawless use of camera and lightning. Compared to his other horror flicks it’s quite low on gore, but the the little that is looks great, from the nice impalement in the beginning to the nasty and ultra-gory bird-scene in the end. In-between Fulci gives us a lot of nice set-pieces with cool effects and that special Italian movie-poetry that we learned to love from him.

Manhattan Baby is another proof that Lucio Fulci was a master storyteller, who could show stuff with only his camera that other directors only could dream of. Now when I come to think of it, he should have done a silent movie! That would have been very, very cool.

The Rift (1990)

Juan Piquer Simón has died in lung cancer, another fantastic artist who has left us during the last twelve months. Simón became a fan favourite because of his fantastic mix of commercial ideas, in almost a Hollywood-like style, but filled with gore, cool actors and just a lot of love and passion for the genre he was working in.

In The Rift, a slightly late competitor to the eighties trend of underwater-movies, we meet the one and only Jack Scalia (with an amazing haircut), the grumpy and cool Wick Hayes, designer of an super-advanced deep-sea submarine, When his last sub disappears and he looses a friend in the accident, he’s more or less forced to go down once again together with a new crew, among them his buddy Ray Wise and captain R. Lee Ermey, to solve the mystery. What they find down there is… something very monstrous!

I can proudly say that this is THE best movie in its genre, underwater-monster-missions. It has almost perfect pacing, more monsters than you can bargain for and even some nice graphic gore-shots which splatters the screen with plasma! Like every movie by Simón the monsters isn’t realistic in a way that some fancy schmancy critics might like, but right from some Kevin Connor-movie or one of his own earlier movies, for example the excellent Fabulous Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The Rift looks better than most of the other low budget incarnations in the genre, which nice sets and props, lots of cool actors and more action than to expect. Jack Scalia is as usual a perfect hero, and Ray Wise a great sidekick. R. Lee Ermey do what he does best, looking evil with a heart and even Edmund Purdom shows up in a quite pointless cameo (but I guess it paid his bills that month).

Way better than some people claim, and one of those amazing VHS-tapes that I watched too many times as a teenager. Juan Piquer Simón was a true master of unpretentious genre cinema, something he probably knew himself and this quote tells the truth: "I am an adamant fan of fantasy, thriller and horror films. They are a great purgative and one of the most visual or cinematographic of all the genres." – This is so damn visible when you watch his movies. Maybe the stories themselves lacked depth (not the characters), but he gave us everything we wanted to see in a horror movie: gore, monsters, nudity and more monsters!

Rest in Pieces, Juan Piquer Simón.

Corruption (1968)

An actor should be able to do whatever the director and script tells him to do. I have no idea why Peter Cushing accepted the part as the crazy Sir John Rowan in Robert Hartford-Davis Corruption, but it’s one of the most odd and extreme characters Cushing every played. I mean, dear old Peter has played evil characters whole his life, but they always had a logic, a heart, a passion. Sir Rowan is just plain motherf**king mad!

As a famous surgeon, Sir Rowan has it all: money, fame and a young hot wife. After visiting a wild party Sir Rowan gets into a fight with a sleazy fashion photographer (it can happen us all!) and in the chaos a big spotlight falls directly into the face of the wife – who get’s badly burned. In this situation both goes a bit mad, and without much explanation Sir Rowan starts to kill young women to get fresh skin to fix his wife’s burn wound! All goes well in the beginning, but when they discover that the skin dies after a while, he need to kill more women…

This is one sleazy, brutal and nasty little movie. I can understand those who can’t understand how Peter could sign up to do such a mean-spirited movie. I have no idea either, but I think he found that this character in a way was both very natural – like a modern London-surgeon and something very much edgier than he’s done before. From the beginning he’s the normal polite man that he played hundreds of times, but after his wife starts to manipulate him with her self-pity (she’s the real bad guy here, he’s just crazy) he transforms himself to a very cold, evil and sadistic person.

The murders are drawn out, very violent (and I’ve just seen the cut version, the unedited scenes is available on Youtube) and merciless. He goes after prostitutes first, but when he’s forced to take on a normal, decent girl, he does it. Everything for the perverted love of his loved one. I think Cushing makes a fantastic, excellent performance – among the most interesting stuff he’s ever done. The character itself was probably a lot more shallow before Cushing laid his hand on him, and when there’s a lack of depth the eerie realism in his performance easily wins us over.

Of course it borders to cheese when the laser in one scene breaks havoc in a room and cuts thru walls and people, and the silliness of some of the supporting parts takes away some of the seriousness. Over the whole movie we’re treated to an amazing jazz-score, often very inappropriate to nasty scenes of violence towards women and ruthless, but kinda hip, gangsters.

A movie that deserves an uncut DVD release (or rather Blu-Ray), but I doubt it will ever happen. It’s been released in Spain, cut, but in good quality. But it’s not enough. I want it all…

Krzysztof Kolberger RIP!

Not everyone knows who Krzysztof Kolberger was, but here in Sweden – and especially inside among the fans of cult cinema – he was Christopher Kohlberg, the actor playing Mason, the hero ninja in Mats Helge Olsson’s action classic. Not that he was a martial arts-expert or something, but he had that good look and was talented actor.

Everyone knows what a chaos the shooting of The Ninja Mission was, Bo F. Munthe once told me they called him late in the evening at his home in Stockholm, because they realized that they needed him that day. He jumped into the car, drove down where they shot the movie, arrived in the middle of the night and found out that they forgotten him. Another problem was the communication with Krzysztof Kolberger and Hanna Bieniuszewicz (who got the more English-friendly name “Hanna Pola”), to very serious actors ( who didn’t know English at all. In the end Bo F. Munthe demanded to be killed off so he could go on with his life and the legend says that Krzysztof and Hanna took one of the production cars, escaped back to Poland and sold it to get some money for their work.

The Ninja Mission wasn’t Krzysztof’s first movie, he already had 17 movies and TV-show behind him, and probably a lot of theatre. And his once-in-a-lifetime performance as a ninja didn’t end his career either. He made another forty or so movies back in Poland, a popular character actor. One of them is Katyn, who’s available on blu-ray in Sweden.

My favourite Krzysztof Kolberger-movie isn’t The Ninja Mission, instead I consider Curse of Snakes Valley my preferred choice when it comes to a good, cool Krzysztof Kolberger-o-rama. It’s a Polish Indiana Jones-style movie with a twist of Alien DNA! Shot in Thailand, or maybe Vietnam, with quite an impressive budget, this is a movie that needs a good English-friendly DVD-release.

About a year ago I tracked him down, and with the help of his very nice daughter Julia (also a filmmaker) I got the signed and dedicated photo that you can see above.

Today, 7th of January 2011, he died from cancer...

Rest in peace, Krzysztof – may the world never forget how cool you were!