PASSAGE
OF THE DRAGON (Twins [?]/Twins of Kung-Fu [?], 1981). Well, its not worth
anything, but the Hong Kong movie database has an entry for this, so I’ll
take their word for it. None-the-less its an absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel
offering from the closing days of the kung-fu movie sweepstakes. In fact,
it looks distinctly like it was pieced together from two different movie
(wait, Godfrey Ho’s name isn’t in the credits, is it?). Basically some sort
of kung-fu fighting “demon” is attacking villagers, and some seriously unfunny
stuff by some Three Stooges wannabes. If watching a guy under a waterfall
having his shoulders rubbed, flexing muscles that are made to sound like
Styrofoam being twisted and an unending and terrible final fight are your
idea of a good time go for it.
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PHENOMENA (1985). What
the hell was Dario Argento thinking? At least it's not as bad as Trauma,
but wow, it still reeks. Maybe Argento thought he had to doctor his style
to fit Cro-Magnon American tastes, which is a mistake many directors (i.e.
John Woo) have made, and of course they all fail miserably. Then again,
you can't have too much faith in a film that's about a girl who shares a
psychic bond with INSECTS, can you? It starts out like Suspiria (to
the effect that they both have opening credits and music) as American imperialist
Jennifer Connelly comes to the Richard Wagner Girls' School (what the hell?)
but instead of a coven of witches she finds a more banal psycho slasher
on the loose. Connelly, as previously mentioned, shares a psychic bond with
insects (even the lowly dung beetle? let's hope!) and she becomes friends
with crippled entomologist Donald Pleasance who possesses, in this film,
the worst Scottish accent possible, and no, Donald can't hide behind somebody
else dubbing in his voice, it's 100% pure Pleasance. Connelly gets bullied
'cause she's a freak, and the kraut Valkyre headmistress (with a special
emphasis on mistress) tries to have her committed. People are killed by
our slasher hero in scenes so uninspired you'd think Dario was years ahead
of whoever directed I Know What You Did Last Summer. Connelly has
high contrast dreams complete with a soundtrack by Motorhead (Lemmy, no!)
and Sex Gang Children . The ending dregs up a mutant child and is so ugly
and wretched that I think Dario had a Downs Syndrome attack while making
this movie. Especially ugly is the way Daria Niccolodi is killed off. Is
it any surprise she and Argento aren't together anymore? I liked the Anchor
Bay video release that gives us the complete version in all its shit glory,
but best of all includes a typically awkward and uninformative Joe Franklin
show interview. How did that joker manage to stay on TV for so long? New
Yorkers are dumbasses! Fortunately Argento wasn't screwing around with his
next film, Terror at the Opera, or for that matter, his next English
language film, The Black Cat.
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PHOENIX THE NINJA (1984).
Actress Pearl Cheung had appeared in a series of martial arts/fantasy films,
but his apparently isn’t a part of it, it’s a Godfrey Ho production, which
should tell you something. Typically for Ho, it’s a stitched together movie,
with scenes from an unfinished Cheung movie as well as a couple of others.
The usual you killed my family and I’m here to avenge you plot, the last
half hour is inspired, but before that is tedium upon tedium. Lots of wire
stunts and some what-the-hell-was-that cinematics, but Cheung does don a
cool outfit at the end.
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PIECES [Mil Gritos
Tiene la Noche] (1981). It's hard to believe that this movie was even made.
It's an incoherent gore movie and is so unbelievably fucking stupid that
a week or two after you've seen it you'll swear you were high when you watched
it. A psycho killer is loose on a college campus cutting up women and superhumanly
dumb cop Christopher George investigates. George sends in tennis player
Linda Day to go undercover and has a goofy college student look after her.
Huh? Nobody in this movie seems to realize that there's a sadistic killer
on the loose, and at one point the cops aren't too sure if a bloody chainsaw
next to a dismembered victim was the murder weapon. It turns out dastardly
Edmund Perdom is behind the whole thing, carving up women because his mommy
wouldn't let him put together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman, so he axed
her in the head. Thank you Juan Piquer Simon, you retarded son of a bitch,
for making this movie.
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PLEASE
DON'T EAT MY MOTHER! (Glump!, Sexpot Swingers, Hungry Pets, 1971). Forget
the stupid musical remake of Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors,
this is where its at, a crude semi-porno version of the perennial B-movie.
Simian Buck Kartalian plays Henry Fudd, a middle-aged virgin bachelor (who
seems to wear the same sweater every day) that lives with his irritating,
gossip mother (who's roughly the same age as him). Henry spends most of
his time reading Playboy and spying on young couples having sex, until the
day he buys a “most unusual” plant from a gay florist (who operates out
of the seediest looking flower shop imaginable). The plant talks to him
in a “sexy” (as in poorly recorded and dubbed in) voice, at first demanding
flies, then toads, then dogs, and, inevitably people. The plant and its
pot grows very large, and looks progressively worse each time its seen (whenever
it talks the whole prop shakes violently), usually when it eats a person
there's a cheap jump cut to the plant flapping its jaws and making weird
slurping noises. Henry falls in love with the plant, but eventually has
to find a mate for it. Between this he spies on more couples having sex
(one couple, in a car, seemingly screw for about a week straight!), and
despite this being a cute “comedy”, the sex scenes go from inept licking
of various non-sexual body parts to obvious hard-core (another one of those
“in-between” pornos that can't make up their minds). Henry watches perennial
early porn couple Rene Bond and Ric Lutze have a lengthy sex scene, then
get into the most bizarre argument imaginable, as the dialog jumps from
corny “gee wiz” type witticisms to “shut up bitch!” (probably something
Bond heard quite a bit), and finally, “that's it, where's my gun!!” Priceless.
It took me a while to figure it out, but Kartalian looks exactly like Mel
Brooks, and according to the Psychotronic Encyclopedia, he was a performer
on a kids show, I wonder how parents would react seeing a nameless actress
putting her hand down Kartalian's pants, or Bond trying to sex him up. The
whole movie is pretty tame and inoffensive, not bad enough to really make
fun of, not good enough to love, but not terrible either, progress at your
own risk .
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THE
PRODIGAL SON (1983). An excellent and somewhat unique martial arts film
is one of Sammo Hung's best. Yuen Biao (in one of his better roles) plays
a spoiled rich kid who thinks he's a kung-fu expert, obviously since he
can beat all comers. It turns out that his father is paying off local fighters
to lose to Yuen, to keep him from getting hurt. One day though, after some
of his friends are beaten up, Yuen challenges a famous Opera star (Lam Ching-Ying,
who's superb) to a fight and is soundly thrashed. Appropriately humiliated
Yuen leaves home to travel with the Opera troupe in hopes that Lam will
teach him kung-fu. Lam refuses, and eventually Lam himself is challenged
by another prodigal son, a rich kid with a pair of bodyguards who goes around
challenging other fighters (Frankie Chan). Lam is in the process of beating
Chan when he has an asthma attack, and must retire. It turns out that, unbeknownst
to Chan, his bodyguards are, like Yuen's friends, to keep him from harm,
and, being typically evil government agents, set about making sure that
Lam cannot harm Chan, namely by slaughtering the entire opera troupe. Yuen
and Lam barely manage to escape, and they take off to stay with Lam's ex-classmate,
Sammo Hung. Up to this point the film has been amusing, with some surprisingly
grim violence, but when Sammo arrives it becomes priceless, as Sammo has
rarely been funnier than he has in this film, playing a slightly self-important
wing chun master with a likeable, portly daughter. Sammo's debut scene,
"mastering calligraphy" using outrageous flips and spins only to paint a
portrait of himself with the inscription, "I love daddy" is hilarious. From
then on Lam and Hung verbally spar (Lam getting a rare opportunity for comedy)
and Yuen is constantly getting in trouble with Hung's daughter. Eventually
Lam relents and begins to teach Yuen wing chun, eventually tricking Hung
into continuing Yuen's education. But, in the end, Chan returns, and his
men causes havoc, which leads to a very rough and tumble fight between Chan
and Yuen. The film's charm, like many of Hung's films, is in its mix of
high and low, the light comedy mixed with the at times rough violence. In
many ways Hung is being realistic to an extent, in so far as he is dealing
with fighters, and violent death is always a risk, yet, unlike, say the
Chang Cheh approach, he's able to poke fun at the self-important image many
marital artists have of themselves, so rather than making them dour killing
machines, he makes them into more well-rounded human beings. The fights
are, per a Sammo Hung movie, excellent, and based more on real martial arts
techniques rather than outlandish flying swordsman type action. One of the
best.
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PROJECT A, PART 2 (1987).
Though with the usual faults of a self-directed Jackie Chan film, this is
one of his best efforts, the ending especially is an impressive action blow-out.
Chan returns as “Dragon” Ma, and this time out he takes on gangsters, a
corrupt police superintendent, and pirates left over from the first film.
Loads of frenetic action, and not quite as much time taken out of the fighting
and stunts for Chan’s mugging. The scene with Chan and David Lam handcuffed
together and fighting off hatchet wielding pirates is one of the best sequences
from any of Chan’s films. Plus, how can you not like a movie that includes
the otherworldly beauty of Maggie Cheung and Rosamund Kwan.
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