(October 9)

——Masters of Horror: Imprint (2005)——

Takashi Miike has the distinct honor of not only being the only Asian director hired to represent Asian horror for the Masters of Horror series and being the only one to film his episode outside of Vancouver, but he is also the only director to have his episode banned from being shown on American TV. Honestly, is anyone surprised? This is the guy who made Ichi the Killer, Audition and Visitor Q, three of the most disturbing movies that I have ever seen. If Miike (one of my all-time favorite directors) DIDN’T get banned from American TV I’d be very disappointed in him.

From a completely objective perspective, there really isn’t any more nudity or gore in this episode than in any of the other episodes that I have seen. Looking at it from that angle you would have to ask yourself, Why was this banned, exactly? Well, there might not be any more gore than any of the other episodes, but Imprint is about 20 times more disturbing than all of them combined. Seriously, in true Miike fashion, this movie is fucked up. Did you see Audition? Did that pin sequence make you a little queasy? Then you might not want to watch this episode. Also, depending on your opinion of abortion, this might not be the movie for you. For the rest of us this is fucked up movie heaven.

In 19th century Japan an American writer goes looking for a Japanese woman he lost on a mysterious island populated by whores and said to be possessed by demons. There he meets a prostitute with a scarred face who says she knew the women he is looking for. She tells her story, but all is not as it seems. What really happens tears his mind apart in ways he never expected.

Takashi Miike has a style all to his own, and no matter what kind of movie he makes (he notes in his interview that he’s not actually really a “horror” director, even though he’s made horror films) you can tell that he made it. What is his style though? It’s a sort of anything goes style. In a Miike movie anything is possible and anything could (and probably will) happen. The plot structure reminded me a little bit of Hero, where someone tells a story but doesn’t really tell the whole story, and only after repeatedly tearing away the layers do we really find out what happened. And boy, what happened was freaky.

(MUST SEE)

(October 10)

——Black Emanuelle (1975)——

This is a shit movie. It’s got some things going for it. The title, for one. I think it’s pretty funny. Because she’s called Emanuelle, and, you know, she’s BLACK. And then there is the theme song. Probably the best part of the movie, the theme song. Very funky fresh. I wish I could put it on my iPod. And then there is the rampant nudity. Who doesn’t like excessive nudity?

Of course, that’s about it. The plot sucks. This is basically softcore porn in Africa. Emanuelle (eh hem! BLACK Emanuelle) is a photographer sent to Africa on assignment who decides to sleep with, well, everyone. At first she seems a little picky and prudish, but once she realizes that everyone thinks she’s hot she sleeps with everyone. And I do mean everyone. This is basically porn without all the naughty X-rated bits. The movie isn’t really much to write home about.

That is until the very end. All of the sudden, out of frakin’ nowhere, the writer comes up with this brilliant theme for the movie. I’m serious. My jaw dropped at how profound and meaningful it was. Where the hell did that come from? I thought this was a shit, thoughtless movie! Who inserted a thought? It has something to do with how Emanuelle feels used and spit out by society because she is so attractive and she sleeps with everyone out of a depressed submission or something. Seriously, it’s good stuff. If someone had taken this idea and actually run with it for the entire film I’d be raving about Black Emanuelle right now. Instead, I’m going to tell you that this is a

(MISS)

——Duck Season (2004)——

Duck Season is a fun little homegrown Mexican movie about being a kid on a lazy Sunday. That’s it. It’s a pretty simple premise. But sometimes a simple premise is more than enough to make for a great film.

Flama and Moko are 14-year old best friends who hang out every Sunday, drink Cokes, eat pizza and play Halo. It’s just the two of them. Mom’s not home. But then the power goes out! What to do? They do, of course, what any male friends would do, which is sit and stare at the wall in silence. Yes, women, it’s true. Instead of, say, talking to each other, we’ll just wait. I think this is why men traditionally have one-tracked minds while women are great at multitasking. If we wanted to talk, we’d talk. But we want to play Halo and shit, we can’t do that until the power comes back on!

A 16-year old (female) neighbor comes over to use their stove to bake a cake, as her own oven isn’t working. They really don’t want to let her in, but she cons her way in anyway. And because the power is off, she’ll have to stay longer than she planned. Later the power comes back on and they order a pizza. The delivery guy is five seconds late (according to them) so they shouldn’t have to pay. He disagrees. They agree to play Fifa soccer on the X-Box to decide who is right. Of course the power cuts out before they have a winner, so he stays, waiting to get paid.

The four of them spend the rest of the afternoon together, learning a little bit more about the others. No one is who they appear to be on the outside. You really get to love these characters by the time the movie is done. I bought the movie after I heard it compared to a John Hughes movie, and that’s a pretty accurate comparison. If you liked movies like the Breakfast Club, you’ll probably really enjoy this too.

(MUST SEE)

——Sister Street Fighter (1974)——

Sister Street Fighter was a movie that I originally reviewed waaay back in December of 2003, just when I started up the Monday Movie Review and was really stuck on kung fu movies. Sister Street Fighter made a big impact on me then, so much so that when I saw that a newly restored boxset of all four Sister Street Fighter movies (wait, there are four of them?!) was coming to DVD I had to pick it up. Here is my original rave for Sister Street Fighter:

——Sister Street Fighter——

(A)

This is like camp movie heaven. It’s as if the director watched a whole bunch of Bruce Lee and James Bond movies on drugs, and then decided to make a movie out of the combination. The whole thing is just crazy and hilarious. Finally a Sonny Chiba movie I can call a favorite.

A few things to clear up first though. Although there is a sister in the movie, and she is a street fighter, she’s not the sister to THE Street Fighter, Sonny Chiba. Also if that wasn’t confusing enough, although Chiba is listed in the credits as The Street Fighter, he’s not actually the character from the Street Fighter movies. In fact he doesn’t really have much of a character at all, and instead is just a cool cameo guest star who appears occasionally (and usually randomly) to kick some ass. The real star is the sister (who I think is the same actress that was the “dragon princess”).

The plot: The sister is called to Hong Kong when her brother, operating undercover in a drug ring, disappears. The sister tracks him back to a drug czar in Japan who acts like a crazed Japanese Bond villain. Also, he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of trained killers who are absolutely HILARIOUS. There is this guy who wears a red jump suit and has two nunchuks and screams like a girl whenever he attacks. There is Hammerhead, who dresses like a traditional samurai and has a gang that travels with him that wear black leather masks that look like giant Buggles. There is a group of woman Thai boxers who call themselves the Amazons and wear those 1930’s Flintstone’s-esq leopard print caveman dresses and weird paper mache masks. And there are SO many more. It’s fantastic.

Thankfully with so many villains the movie is chockfull of fights and ass kicking, in the most extreme Bruce Lee HIIIIYAAAA! fashion. It’s excellent. The acting is camp-tastic and the villains secret underground lair has plenty of extreme fashion sense and bizarre traps (a pit full of spikes; a trap door say, oh, in the middle of nowhere). Add to that more cheesy cliches than you can handle and the fact that the villain’s master plot is to soak wigs in heroin in order to get them through customs (making this probably the only movie where the line “Quick, put out the fire! You must save the wigs!” has been uttered) and you have the makings of one of the best movies EVER!

——

I’m a little sad to admit that rewatching Sister Street Fighter wasn’t QUITE as awesome as I remembered it. It dragged a little bit from time to time. It wasn’t as crazy psychedelic as I remembered. Still, it’s a really fun movie. I think the main problem was that I watched it this time in the original Japanese instead of the American overdub. The English overdub is WAY funnier. I don’t even think the line “Quick, put out the fire! You must save the wigs!” was uttered in the Japanese language version. Too bad. Also, this version might be a little longer than the other one I saw. I read in the notes section that America got a chopped version for theaters, cut for violence. I can believe that. The credits are different (Chiba isn’t credited as THE STREET FIGHTER for one). It did seem a little gorier. And the transfer is beautiful. Crisp anamorphic widescreen. Nice. I just should have watched it with the crappy English dubbing. I really can’t wait to see what part two has in store for me.

(SEE)

(October 11)

——The Departed (2006)——

The Departed is a Hollywood remake of an Asian cop movie called Infernal Affairs. I know. Groan. Another remake of a great Asian film? Give me a break. There is one key difference here, though. Martin Scorsese is directing. And lucky for us, he’s made one of his best films in years.

If you’ve already seen Infernal Affairs (which you should) then you aren’t really in for any big surprises plot-wise here (that is, unless you are like my friend Josh and you forgot what happens in the end). Beat for beat The Departed follows Infernal Affairs to a T. What’s different is that the brilliant script to this movie has been fleshed out quite a bit beyond what they did in Infernal Affairs. The characters have been fleshed out so much more and every second of added footage is worth it. The Departed keeps everything I liked about Infernal Affairs and fixes everything I didn’t. Not only are the two main characters fleshed out a bit more, but more minor characters in the Hong Kong version like the crime boss and the girlfriend are given much bigger, juicier parts.

And luckily, we’ve got plenty of amazing actors to go around in this movie. Jack Nicholson is thankfully more restrained than he usually is; newcomer Vera Farmiga makes you believe that her small part actually has a reason for being in this movie; Mark Wahlberg actually reminded me of why we’re supposed to think of him as an actor, with a top notch performance as the most pain in the ass cop ever to be in film; and of course there are the two leads, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, who are the two cops forced to play roles they never wanted. A cop playing a criminal and a criminal playing a cop. Both actors show us what’s going on inside non-verbally, with vastly different but equally amazing results.

Did I mention that the script kicks ass? I think I did, but it bears repeating. There was really no reason to remake Infernal Affairs, that is until you see this script from William Monahan. Scorsese exploits it with fantastic results. His longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, shows us why she’s one of the best. All and all, you can’t go wrong with this movie. If you’d like to see a great thriller and have complained lately that there is never anything good to see in the theater, well, sit your ass down with this film.

(MUST SEE!)

(October 13)

——Cross of Iron (1977)——

Wow. This movie is something else. You hear “Sam Peckinpah” and “war film” and you think it’s going to be great, but you don’t get too excited because you’ve never heard of this movie before and it’s being released by a no-name company (Hen’s Tooth Video, anyone?). So it can’t be that great, right? One of Peckinpah’s lesser films? Wrong! This movie is crazy, in true Peckinpah fashion.

This is a unique war film in that it is actually about the Germans in World War II on the Russian front as they are starting to really lose the war. As you’ve already probably guessed, this is an anti-war film. James Coburn is Corporal Steiner, a war weathered veteran who doesn’t give a shit for authority and only cares about seeing his men make it out of the next battle alive. He leads his own commando unit behind enemy lines and is overall pretty badass.

Unfortunately he’s come under the command of a weasely Prussian aristocrat who volunteered to leave the cushy job he had on the Western front in order to get an Iron Cross. You see, everyone on the Russian front has Iron Crosses falling out of their asses, but then again no one cares because it is just as likely you will be dead tomorrow. Captain Stransky really wants an Iron Cross to take home with him though, so he invents the story that he lead the successful counterattack against the Russian advance even though he was running around like a chicken with its head cut off while the real hero died doing his duty. Steiner was only one of two officers who saw what really happened. The other is a coward too, afraid that Stransky will turn him over to the Gestapo for being a homosexual (the scene where that is revealed is handled brilliantly in the script).

So what does the anti-authority Steiner do? He tells the Captain to shove his story, of course. And, of course, rather predictably Stransky forgets to tell Steiner’s unit to withdraw from an oncoming Russian advance with the rest of the German army. Don’t feel too bad for Steiner just yet, though. We’re only at about the halfway point of the film.

This is probably one of the most insane war movies that I’ve ever seen. Peckinpah uses his trademark quick editing and slow motion camerawork to full effect here. Despite the fact that he’s obviously working with a low budget you never get that feeling from the camerawork. I was shocked at how big he make his action sequences seem. People blow up left and right from artillery and mortar fire. Instead of feeling like a Hollywood movie, this felt like a real war film. There is sort of a crazy glee to the film though, in that Peckinpah is saying that you’d have to be crazy to keep doing what the Germans were doing when you faced certain defeat every day. Coburn is superb in his role as Corporal Steiner. I believed he was a guy haunted by the fighting but still willing to go out and fight another day. And his laughter at the end of the movie…if that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what words could say it.

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)

(October 14)

——The Naked Spur (1954)——

The Naked Spur is basically a Western remake of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, except that the gold is now a man. Which is kind of more interesting. The gold never talked back, had a girlfriend, tried to escape or physically pitted one of the characters against the other. But you get all of that and more in this film.

James Stewart is a rancher turned bounty hunter out to find an outlaw with a $5,000 reward on his head. Before he finds that outlaw, though, he unwillingly acquires the assistance of two other men, an old prospector and a young soldier dishonorably discharged. The three of them capture Stewart’s outlaw and his tagalong lady friend (a feisty Janet Leigh), but when the other two discover how much he’s worth they both want to split things evenly three ways. Stewart wants the whole reward for himself, as he needs the money to buy back his ranch, but he’s also too nice of a guy to bump off the other two. That doesn’t stop Robert Ryan’s outlaw from trying to turn the other two. It’s all one big mind game. One of the best parts is how well Anthony Mann amps up the tension between the five of them. Everyone has choices to make, lines to discover and decisions to make to see if those lines will be crossed. And of course you have the great James Stewart, who pulls off tortured decisions like no one else out there. (See: It’s a Wonderful Life, anything he did with Hitchcock).

The ending to this is pretty good. Very angsty. Plus you’ve got to love a Western that makes use of somewhere other than Monument Valley (in this case we’re in the Rockies.) I liked this enough to pick up a bunch of other Anthony Mann Westerns.

(SEE)

——Emperor of the North (1973)——

On paper this doesn’t sound like a real attention getter. Hobos ride the rails in Depression Era Oregon! Oh my Gawd, this is going to be riveting! Sign me up! But then–surprise, surprise–it actually is really good. Who’d a thunk it? Robert Aldrich has created a funny, exciting thriller about an uber-bum called just A-No. 1 (Lee Marvin) who has taken the challenge to ride the train that cannot be ridden, Engine 19, because of its merciless uber-conductor, Shack (Ernest Borgnine).

No one rides Shack’s train. To ride it is to die. He has no problem at all with whipping a giant wrench at your head, knocking you underneath the wheels of the train. No one rides for free on Shack’s train. Reason number one why you should see this movie: Any movie where Ernest Borgnine plays a crazy maniac is worth seeing. And boy is he crazy in this movie. It’s an understated crazy though. His body and voice never go over the top. But his eyes! That man has some really good crazy eyes.

Anyway, A-No. 1 is famous among the bums for his skills at riding the rails. This guy wrote the handbook on being a hobo (or ‘bo’s, as they are affectionately referred to in this movie). But the first time he attempts to ride Shack’s train, some young punk (Keith Carradine) decides to jump the train with him. He’s just started being a hobo, knows nothing about being one, and is extremely obnoxious to boot. He thinks he’s just as good a hobo as A-No. 1 is, if not better, and when he’s confused with A-No. 1 after being caught riding Shack’s train, he takes all of the credit. A-No. 1 takes the challenge to ride all the way to Portland, but unfortunately for him the punk decides to join him. First he tries to ditch the kid, then he tries to teach him. A punk is just a punk though.

Which leads me to reason number two why you should see this movie: the fight between Shack and A-No. 1 at the end of the movie. What a kick-ass fight! It’s brutal and slightly amusing. Hobo fights don’t get any better. The whole movie is kind of like that. Except for the beginning of the movie. They play this extremely lame song at the beginning called “A Man and a Train” that offers up such nuggets of wisdom as: “A man is not a train and a train is not a man.” Wow, you’re blowing my mind, man! After that slight miscalculation though, the movie amps up the entertainment.

(MUST SEE)