Devil's Three (1979)

Bobby A. Suarez was, for those of you who have no idea, the best action director in the Philippines ever. Sure, we also had Cirio Santiago, who got some international fame with the help of Roger Corman's distribution. But Bobby was by far the most personal and eccentric of them both, with a healthy amount of violence and action and - maybe even more unhealthy - some very broad comedy tossed in for good measure.

They Call Her Cleopatra Wong and The One Armed Executioner might be his most famous films, and both of them got a nice DVD release a few years back. The lead in the first one was Marrie Lee and in other one Franco Guerrero, both created iconic characters in these productions. Bobby was wise enough to pair them together in Devil's Three, where Cleo Wong is back and with her she has a very fat fortune teller, Rotunda (Florence Carvajal) and the sissiest of sissies, Tony Del Rio (Franco Guerrero). They're hired by Devlin (Johnny Wilson) to save his daughters from a gang of evil kidnappers. Armed with their special physical abilities (in Rotunda's case, being fat and sit on people!) the go after the baddies with brutal force!

Devil's Three is more of a comedy than a straight-forward action flick, even if it's packed with fights and chases and stunts. But the focus is on the personalities of our three heroes. Cleo is the "normal", but who kicks ass like no one else. Rotunda and Tony Del Rio is very broad comic reliefs, but they work good because they are allowed to be heroes even if they're sickly obese or the silliest gay stereotype ever. They're funny and smart and can fight baddies almost as good as Cleo, but are allowed to be themselves. It's like Tony Del Rio mentions in one of the scenes, finally he can be the one he is without pretending to be someone else in his village. Its a rare, strong statement from a gay character in what's basically a exploitation movie. I easily can see Devil's Three as a both a cheap action-comedy and something with a message: the freaks shall inherit the earth.

While not as spectacular as They Call Her... and The One-Armed... Devil's Three still delivers a lot of fine action, some that even looks a bit dangerous. The fights are hard and look realistic because it's rarely you see padding or mattresses protecting the stuntmen and slow-mo is used where it fits perfectly, to enhance a few shots here and there. I don't know of Marrie Lee has a formal education in martial arts or if she's just acting (like many of our most beloved Hong Kong stars). Whatever she's trained in, she's doing it well and I still say she's one of the best and coolest action stars ever.

I have a hard time seeing something bad with movies like this. They're meant to be entertainment and this one succeeds with it without problems. I'm sure more than a few will have problem buying the comedy parts, but if you try to look beyond what you think is funny and open your eyes for some local form of slapstick (and we all know how special the Asian comedy can be) you might find something fun even here. And if not, there's enough raw, gritty b-action for everyone to love.

And... Happy New Year boys and gals. Cya in 2013!

/Ninja Dixon

Alex Bakshaev's Videohunter (2012)

My favorite indie-filmmaker is Alex Bakshaev and I've earlier reviewed Naked Trip and Zärtlichtkeit. Now Videohunter is out. Bakshaev works with very small means and his movies are often built around silence, but has that important edge that so many serious independent filmmakers misses. They think it's important to be  pretentious without having nothing to say when it's always about the opposite. Being arty doesn't mean you need to be empty, and Bakshaev is one of the few that realizes this. Videohunter is close to nine minutes long and I watched it in bed this morning, while trying to figure out if I should wake up or not. I'm happy I watched it during those conditions. It's a very Europan, dreamlike story - as usual with nods to the geniuses of European cinema: Fassbinder, Franco, Rollin - but here I see more of Bakshaev himself than just inspiration from the masters. I sincerely hope that he one day, once again, makes a feature length movie. 

Here's a link directly to YouTube. I'm afraid my settings on this blog cuts almost haft the picture down below, and you can't miss a thing of this pearl. Or do what we all should do, buy the DVD from Carnie Films.

Märstageddon 2012: Battle of the Bloggers!

Look out, a bat!

A couple of times every year I meet up with Jason from Cinezilla and Jocke from Rubbermonsterfetishism to drink and eat a lot of sugar and fat and watch whatever movies we feel for at the moment. The last one of this meetings happen today, a very icy and slippery day - which mean I had to let them go to the store for some additional candy alone - because it was so icy and I have a tendency to slip and hurt myself, just like two years in a row during Weekend of Horrors in Germany. That's me. Totally incompetent at walking and the delicate art of keeping the balance. We had some very vague plan to watch something dark and nasty, but as usual our plans hardly works out in the end and we ended with up four pieces of mega-cheese instead of the grittiness we aimed for.

First out was Retribution, the 1987 (and it look VERY eighties) horror film starring Dennis Lipscomb. The DVD from Code Red is very nice, even if it's the R-rated version. But it's stilly pretty gory and violent (and the unrated versions of the kills is included as an extra anyway). It's a bit on the slow side, but when it delivers it Delivers with a big D. It's colourful and bloody and has some fun retro-style visual effects. The acting is another thing with this movie - most of the time it's very, very bad - or lets say, a bit over the top. Lipscomb makes the best of it and is good in 99 percent of the scenes, except those where he has to cry. Not his cup of tea, we could see. Anyway, a fun eighties time capsule and a fine DVD.

Next on the list was Bloodbath at the House of Death, the 1984 horror comedy starring Kenny Everett. This is the essence of a lame comedy, but it's so funny because the jokes is so damn cheap, and the atmosphere is sillier than Sillierzilla! And watching it with two friends - including Joachim who might no be the biggest fan of this kind of very stupid comedies - made an even better film. Some of the jokes, especially "Look out, a bat!" is still one of the funniest gags I've seen in a movie - and yes I know, it's hardly original and was probably written by a eight year old schoolboy. But it works. The timing is perfect and the acting from Everett and Pamela Stephenson is hilarious. It's also a bit bloodier and more graphic than I remember it to be.

The last feature we saw was John Frankenheimer's greatest mutant bear-movie, The Prophecy. Still a very amusing nature-runs-amok film from the happy days when a movie with a PG rating both could be bloody and quite disturbing. Made during the height of Frankenheimer's alcoholism, this is one cheesy rubber-monster-packed movie with some clumsy but well-meaning scenes of message and Robert Foxworth singlehandedly defining the typical seventies semi-sensitive alpha-male with his beard, social consciousness and curly hair. Like an awake Hugo Stiglitz. The monsters is awesome and it truly looks like an expensive movie - except when they're sending out some poor guy in a rubber-suit to run after victims. Then it's more like something from Ultraman!

And what a transition, because at the end we watched three episodes of Ultra Seven - yes, from the recently released Shout! Factory box. It might have less city-stomping scenes and more focus on... yeah, "story", but it doesn't take away the fun of this cheap and exciting show. It's more gloomy and serious than Ultraman, with more location-shoots and even some deaths and blood. But it's still a harmless family-friendly show.

That's all folks!

The Inugami Family (1976)

I'm the first one to admit that I'm watching a lot of soulless crap. Most of what I'm watching never - NEVER - gets reviewed here, because it's too uninteresting. I think this is one of the reasons why I'm from time to time looses interest in writing reviews. These movies, the bad ones, works as (to quote Anton LaVey) "Psychic Vampires". They steal all my energy and points out how meaningless it is, this what I'm doing. The last couple of days, after a few weeks of writing nothing, I've been watching Japanese genre cinema and hey... this is very good for the soul! From Ultraseven (SO cool) to The H-Man and Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds. Original, fresh, fun, absurd and with a depth that a lot of other countries don't have in their art. So I decided to once again take down Kon Ichikawa's The Inugami Family from the shelf and give it a spin, and boy... this is freaking good stuff!

When it comes to the work of Kon Ichikawa I'm not an expert at all, but I would love some recommendations what to start with - preferably if it's out on a nice DVD or even nicer BD. What I understand this is not a typical Ichikawa film, but obviously he liked it enough to make a whole bunch of movies starring Kôji Ishizaka as the shy, maybe-maybe not incompetent, mumbling private detective Kindaichi (based on a hugely popular series of books written by Seishi Yokomizo). I would give my left arm to see the other Kindaichi films they made together. Anyway. The Inugami Family is the proud tradition of Agatha Christie and similar storytellers, and this time it's even more cliché: old man Inugami has died and seven months later his family, his three daughters with their three sons and the rest, gathers to open his will. The will is very complicated and it will work out the best for one of the family's branches if Inugami's new favorite girl, the young and innocent Tamayo Nonomiya - not belonging to the family bloodline - marries one of the sons. One of the sons is also hideously deformed after the war, but she has to choose what's best for her anyway...

Well, we all know what this leads to: murder, murder and more murder - everything in a delicate mess of intrigue and gossip and the question is if even the famous Kindaichi can solve this mystery before it gets even bloodier!

The Inugami Family is part murder mystery but maybe most of all an interesting and very dark deconstruction of a typical rich (and greedy) Japanese family. I promise you, there's multiple solutions to the murders and after each one it gets even more and more complicated. The calm camera studies the reactions of everyone in the shot, like I never seen it before. A couple of time the visual style reminded me of John Carpenter's The Thing: the paranoia growing bigger, the unexpected kills, the subtle music. Ichikawa also has some fun with the murders - all of them off-screen, until the final revelation at the end when we gets a chance to see every kill again, but this time with blood and goo. It's not terribly graphic, but enough to spice up a brilliant story even more. The style of the movie also reminded me of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood, with it's setting close to a dark lake - perfect to dump bodies in - and greedy family members sneaking around every corner.

The story is very complex and convoluted, and it takes 100 % concentration to watch this film. Because if you look away you might miss a clue or a twist, and to fully enjoy this story you need to know everything.

The Inugami Family, with its black humour, ghastly murder mystery and scathing satire - and don't forget the discrete use of homoeroticism - is one of my favourite Japanese movies ever and a true masterpiece. For those interested, Ichikawa remade it himself in 2006. I need to see that version!

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (1977)

After Toho closed down the Godzilla-shop in 1975, after Ishiro Honda's masterpiece (and a movie that also failed to gain enough audience) The Terror of Mecha-Godzilla and Gamera took a nine year long break after Gamera vs. Zigra in 1971, the Kaiju died away in cinemas (but continued to wreck havoc in television with armies of Ultramen, Kamen Riders and everything in-between in tight pants and spectacular helmets) and seemed to be a lost cause... until 1977 when Tsuburaya Productions and Rankin/Bass Productions co-produced the entertaining The Last Dinosaur (starring a very visibly drunk Richard Boone) and Toei tried their hands on one of the oddest pieces of Kaiju cinema so far, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds.

Not technically a typical Kaiju movie with men in suits battling in miniature cities, instead it's another version of Jaws...or Grizzly, or Tentacles etc etc. A small tourist spot near a lake experiences odd disappearances and deaths and soon some scientists suspect there's a dinosaur swimming around there, hungry for human flesh. It starts of beautiful and quite scary with a woman falling down in a cave - after walking in a fairy tale forest, breaks a big egg in the fall and a huge slimy, yellow eye looks out at her. She screams and runs away and soon everyone wants to go to this little town to look for dinosaurs and monsters!

Already here the movie feels very off-kilter and has a very modern (for the time) look and characters who are more grown-up and cynical than everyone else who ever appeared in a Godzilla-movie - not to forget Gamera. There's not stupid kids or slapstick here, not talking monsters or colourful space aliens shooting rays of death against skyscrapers. The humour here is very adult and dark and that's also the feeling of the whole movie. This is not for kids and maybe it's goal to be aimed at a grown-up audience also made it less popular and confusing for the contemporary audience. Everyone expects most Japanese rubber monsters to be for kids, yeah? Not here. LODAMB is also quite gory with some torn off limbs, unexpected deaths and adults having problem with each other. No nudity though, which feels even odder when you look at the rest of the movie - because it belongs there.

The effects is all over the place, but as a fan of the Toho flicks I can't say they're less convincing here. They fit the genre and even if this is less "fun", the script is also dark enough to make the story work even with rubber and plastic filling the screen. Another fine detail I like is the inclusion of - I guess - the infamous suicide forest Aokigahara. I can't remember they're mentioning it in the movie, but it's located in the same era and fits both the look and the story. In LODAMB they walk through the forest and finds some human remains and the guide just laughs at it and explains that it's a common place for suicide. It's a macabre little twist and it's left like that without explanations. Check out the wiki page about Aokigahara, seems like a "nice" place.

When I first saw this film I wasn't that found of it, probably because I expected something more traditional - but I've seen it a couple of times since then and I like it more and more and now it's a Kaiju favorite. The dark themes, the blood and twists, the more mature characters, everything makes this a very fine example of Japanese genre cinema.

The H-Man (1958)

Ishiro Honda was, according me, one of the finest director to ever have lived and work in Japan. He began like everyone else, but after Gojira he became the leading special effects/monster/sci-fi guy - and he did it with the same flair, style and quality as his non-genre movies. In 1958 he directed one of the most interesting films in his career, The H-Man, who completely lacks a big rubber monsters who stomps Tokyo, but still contains one of the coolest creatures in his career: slime.

I'm not gonna go into the story that much, except it's a beautiful and original mix of gangsters, night clubs, cops and slime - yeah, more or less a monster-noir packed with jazz and tough guys wearing hats. Of course everything is triggered by nuclear bombs and it lead to two scenes - directly after each other - that's very similar to what Luigi Cozzi did in his wonderful Contamination. The same dark and gritty atmospheric search of the abandoned vessel, resulting in the spectacular death for some of the people aboard - and then back to the lab where they try out the liquid on an animal, with terrifying result. In this one it's a frog, in the Italian film it's a rat. Cozzi is a big fan of Japanese genre cinema and I'm pretty sure he included it into Contamination as one of many tributes.

Like with Honda's later family production Godzilla's Revenge, The H-Man also shows us what a fantastic storyteller he is with a film that puts the special effects and terror in second place. The H-Man is first of all a gangster/crime movie, but with an awesome slimy twist. Godzilla's Revenge is, as you might remember, a very cute and well-made kids movie with a few pointless inserts of the Kaiju monsters fighting on an island. 

Usually when fancy schmancy nobody's with a PHD in fine arts laugh at Godzilla I always reminds them of how Honda and Kurusawa was dear friends, they often worked together and how much they respected each others work - even if they worked on the total opposite of the movie scale in Japan.

But I'm sure you won't get disappointed at the slime-sequences in The H-Man. This is class, and of course superior to the same years (in my opinion very weak) The Blob. The special effects here is fantastic and produced with a lot of imaginative ideas. This piece of slime moves around and behaves like no slime up till then - sure, some effects is a bit cheesy, the dancer who gets covered by slime comes to mind, but it's very realistic compared to the American counterparts. The melting people looks awesome also, often covered in shadows and the result is like from a horror movie.

The H-Man is a masterpiece of fifties sci-fi and manages to be adult and intelligent all the way through. 

Panic Button (2011)

"I want to play a game", the ominous voice is familiar and with four characters locked up in a place they can't escape this can be considered slightly inspired by Saw, but Panic Button still stands on it's own two legs (or fly with it's own two wings, if you want to) and still feels quite fresh compared to some of the other Saw-rip offs flooding the markets since 2004. This is a British independent movie who quite cleverly tells a morality tale about social networking, especially Facebook - the story's version is called All2gethr, but is basically the same thing.

Here our heroes (or what to call them) wins a trip to New York through the site and during six hours they get a chance to win a lot of nice prices... if they're just honest. And guess what, this is social networking - no one is honest. I'm sure we can all agree on that. By answering very private question they can win cars, tickets, everything you can wish - but soon the honesty of the anonymous game leader creates some dangerous tension in the cabin...

I'm pretty sure some people can't stand this film, mostly because of some plot holes and the sheer absurdity of the set-up. But personally I find these twists good, because what I see is an escape-from-reality. I mean, I can accept Godzilla rampaging through cities without problems, so I have nothing against a film which kills Facebook-users on a private airplane over the sea. It's more or less the same thing. There's a story to be told and then there's no laws against improbable storylines. Thank Satan for that!

The best thing with Panic Button is the fine cast, which once again proves what brilliant actors the UK fosters. The four leading actors, Scarlett Alice Johnson, Jack Gordon, Michael Jibson and Elen Rhys are all excellent, very convincing. It's something about that tradition of realistic, toned-down acting in their traditions that still works so well (of course there's still sucky British actors, but you know what I mean). It's about them taking the job serious that makes it work. It might be a low-budget Saw-rip off, but they're still doing what they're paid to do.

How's the gore then? Not much actually. There's a blow-off head and an arm-chopping, but both of them is very fast and you can't see them properly either. It's more the ideas behind it all that makes it a bit eerie, especially what everything leads up to. Sometimes the budget shows itself with a set that looks a bit corny sometimes, a bit cheap - but if you ignore the details and enjoys the mental cat and mouse game I think you will enjoy Panic Button as much as I did.

Can't wait to see what director Chris Crow has up his sleeve with his upcoming The Darkest Day, also starring several of the actors from this film.