Dog Bite Dog

Sometimes a guy gets off a hard day's work and just wants to get home without running into every damn delay and distraction the world can throw at him. Such is the case in this film, with the guy being a Cambodian assassin raised in a feral child-fighting pit, his work the assassination of a judge's wife, and the delays and distractions are members of the Hong Kong PD. After working his way through a fair number of these obstacles, the hit man earns the ire of one distraction in particular, who then tracks him down for revenge.

Featuring gritty urban landscapes, a highly stylized knife-fight, and the sort of found-object fu that you would expect from a gladiator-turned-hired killer.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Dog Bite Dog (IMDB)

Wince : [**___]
Flinch : [****_]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [*____]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [****_]

What I would do different: Having the true bad guy appear at the closing scene would have been a nice touch.

Things you probably won't see anywhere else:
* A Datsun! A DATSUN!!!
* "You got your cop blood in my hit-man blood!" "You got your hit-man blood in my cop blood!"
* A 24-hour dentist

City of Violence

The Region 1 DVD of this came out over the weekend; in celebration, I re-watched it. The film definitely holds up to multiple viewings; the strength is in the choreography and the editing, rather than in any details of the plot. And it still earns that 5-flinch rating, even when you know what is coming.

The story itself is straightforward: big-city cop returns to his hometown for a friend's funeral, finds the circumstances of death suspicious, begins an investigation, ends up beating the hell out of a bunch of people. Fantastic action film for those who like tae-kwon-do, buddy cop films, sashimi knives, or 70s action movies.


* * * R A T I N G * * *
City of Violence (IMDB)

Wince : [*____]
Flinch : [*****]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [*____]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [*____]
Explicability : [*****]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: Fighting the gangs of kids. Definitely.

Natural City

Blade Runner welded to a buddy cop movie. Replicants, er cyborgs, have a 3-year lifespan. Even the pleasure models. Someone is activating the combat cyborgs, which the police seem woefully incompetent at containing. One of the cops is in love with an expiring pleasure model, and introduces some conflict when he starts looking for a black market hack to fix her.

Visually, this movie is quite appealing. Many ideas and details from the Ridley Scott film are used, and this film could easily be set in the same world (perhaps a few years later). As the encounters with the combat cyborgs get more frequent, the movie becomes more of a Korean action film, leading up to a typical big explosion at the end. Nowhere near as psychologically or philosophically interesting as Blade Runner, but an enjoyable sci-fi action film.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Natural City (IMDB)

Wince : [*____]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [****_]

Reality Check: The police tactics when hunting the combat cyborgs are pretty awful.

The Specials

Inevitably to be compared to Mystery Men, though without the annoying performances of Stiller and Garofalo. The humor here is more subtle, less absurd; the dialog is not as quotable, but has more depth.

The film covers a day (specifically, a day off) in the life of a team of second-string super heroes. Being more a satire than a spoof, the film's characters often have useful powers, with their superhuman status being used to contrast with their human failings (pride, lust, greed, etc).

Pretty much a must-see for any comic book fans.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
The Specials (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [*____]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [***__]
Explicability : [****_]

Breeders

Wow, this one is pretty bad. A man in a gimp suit is raping every virgin in Manhattan (hence the film's short running time), impregnating them with black slime and leaving a post-hypnotic suggestion for them to attend his midnight basement jacuzzi party. A young doctor and a cop use every stilted line and cliche at their disposal in a futile attempt to prove the existence of a scriptwriter, ultimately leaving the audience to make that leap of faith on their own.

Everything bad about 80s movies is in this one. Bad acting. Big hair. Awful clothes. Synth soundtrack. Questionable sets. Implausible events. On the plus side, the virgins share a rare allergy to underwear, and shuck their clothes at every scene change.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Breeders (IMDB)

Wince : [*****]
Flinch : [*____]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [****_]
Pornability : [***__]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [***__]

What I would do different: Spend the ten bucks to have someone write a script.

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: Breeder chicks in an alien hot-tub filled with milky-white fluid.

Memories I want to erase: Those tan lines!

Them

A French couple staying in a fairly creepy house in Romania are terrorized by flashlight-wielding hoodlums. Really, that's all there is to it.

Discovering who the eponymous 'THEY' are is supposed to be a big part of the suspense in this film (judging from the vagueness of the film summary, the equally vague trailer, and the fact that THEY are out of shot or in darkness for so much of the film), but it is pretty obvious from the start of the film if one assumes human rather than supernatural agents. Me being a skeptic, and no inexplicable events occurring, this is what I did.

The film is well-done and quite suspenseful. It seems to be telling a true-crime story in the manner of a horror film, keeping the audience, like the victims, in the dark to play on their fear of the unknown. There were moments where, much like in The Blair Witch Project, you say to yourself "That's just not that scary. Why are they panicking?", but the actors are convincing enough and the camera work is jumpy enough that you get sucked into it regardless.

Enjoyable suspense film. Arguably more enjoyable if you know the premise, as that might drive the it-can-happen-to-anyone aspect of it home.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Them (IMDB)

Wince : [**___]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [*____]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [*****]

Carny

How many times have you said to yourself, "Boy how I wish that Jodie Foster ran away from her folks at the end of Taxi Driver to join a circus and become a burlesque dancer" ? I know, I know, it's the same with me: lots.

Well, here's your chance. A young Jodie foster runs away from her invisible mother and gruesome boyfriend to live the carnival life with Gary Busey. She becomes part of the carnival crowd, taking different jobs until she finds one she likes, and expands her relationship with Busey to include his friend, Patch. At about this point the movie picks up the pace as the local mob decides that the carnival's payoff wasn't big enough.

While aimless, and leading to no great insight for any of the characters (except possibly Jodie Foster), this is a decent film with some very solid performances by Gary Busey (seriously!) and Robbie Robertson. There is an authentic feel to the hustles pulled in the carnival, and to the community built up in the carnival itself.


* * * R A T I N G * * *
Carny (IMDB)

Wince : [**___]
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [**___]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [****_]

Demon Seed

There are a lot of valuable life lessons in this film. Never design an artificial intelligence that is smart enough to find a cure for leukemia in four days. If you do, never piss on its dreams. Failing those, you should never create a direct link from that AI to your fully robo-automated house. Where your wife is staying. Alone. Hell, back up a bit: never robo-automate your house. That's not gonna end well.

This film takes the mischevious HAL from 2001 and dumps him into Rosemary's Baby; his designer, a scientist at a government lab, learns all of the above lessons and more. The wife, trapped in the state-of-the-(70s)-art house, is tormented and measured (noooo!) until she submits to bearing the rogue computer's love child. Although any woman who can be seduced by a screensaver couldn't have put up too much of a fight.

The action takes place almost entirely in the house, and while the pace is a bit slow and the events a bit predictable (until the end, oddly enough), there are enough good scenes to keep watching. The top "Oh crap!" moment comes when the wife, after receiving an unexpected electrical shock and collapsing, wakes up on a table in the windowless (basement) lab with a robotic arm tying the last of her four limbs in place. What do you do now, MacGyver?

Worth seeing for the awkward dialogue ("You find me boring, my dear, but I find myself ... rather interesting") and disembodied voice of Robert Vaughn. Speaking as someone inured to tentacle hentai, though, I have to say the insemination scene was quite disappointing.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Demon Seed (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [**___]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [****_]

Technology you probably forgot:
* gull-wing doors
* binocular surveillance cameras
* 5 1/4" floppies
* computer dust-covers
* Television tuning dials

What I would do different: Proteus would have had a child that would emerge from the womb to enslave all mankind, crushing all opposition to his golden tentacled genius.

Electroma

Well. Everything I'd read about this film said the cinematography was fantastic. There were very vague, in retrospect suspiciously elusive summaries of the plot: two robots journeying through a wasteland, ostensibly in a quest to become human.

The cinematography is great: the film is wonderful to look at at. And the beginning of the film is quite entertaining, with two robots joyriding through the desert in an odd Ferrari (you can tell by the tail-lights), stopping off at an FX studio to be given human appearances, then nonchalantly strolling through an all-robot town, drawing stares and eventually a lynch mob.

About thirty minutes into the film, the two robots begin a journey into the desert with a long, slow take of them walking away from the camera. No problem, I tell myself, I've seen a few Tarkovsky films, I can handle long takes.

They walk in the desert for the next forty minutes.

Eventually one of the robots tires of this and gets the other to kill him. This is a metaphor for the dreams we must abandon in our quest for self-realization. Ten or twenty minutes later, the other robot wants out as well, but cannot kill himself because his self-destruct button is right between his shoulder blades. This is a metaphor for the audience.

The ideas behind the film are simple and universal: the idealist/artist striking out to make their mark on the world, indulging in pure freedom of expression, and being rejected, vilified, or otherwise outcast. And the film itself starts off well, before dragging the audience along on its own Exodus.

The final word: more people walked out of the theater while this was playing that any other film I've seen. Which certainly says something.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Electorama (IMDB)

Wince : [_____] (No dialog)
Flinch : [_____] (No violence)
Retch : [_____] (No gore)
Gape : [_____] (No anything!)

Beerequisite : [****_]
Pornability : [_____]
Obscurity : [***__]
Explicability : [**___]

What I would do different: Right before the credits, I would have had Daft Punk come onscreen, face the audience, and say "Are you still here? What the f*ck is wrong with you?!?"

Meatball Machine

A splatterfest in the vein of Iron Man. If you haven't heard of this movie by now, you probably shouldn't try to see it.

The film begins with the worst fighter in the history of anger using his skills to win over the girl of his dreams by repeatedly throwing his face and kidneys at the fists and toes of her date. Surprisingly enough, this works, and she is smitten long enough to be taken over by a parasitic alien that uses humans as a vessel for bloodsport.

Our hero allows himself to be taken over as well, and puts his well-honed martial skills to work saving/killing his girlfriend by bleeding profusely over her weapons in a rarely-seen display of Rust-Fu.

They live happily ever after... fighting each other.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Meatball Machine (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [****_]
Retch : [***__]
Gape : [****_]

Beerequisite : [****_]
Pornability : [**___]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [**___]

I/O

I picked up Simon Logan's I/O a few months back along with a bunch of other independent and self-published fiction (from Mellick, et. al.), back before I learned the true value of an editor. Being a collection of short stories, the omission isn't as painful here, though a decent copy editor would certainly have caught the grammatical errors.

This is a thin volume of 8 very similar stories: various loners in industrial settings (junkyards, factories, wastelands) striving after women who wound them. The final story, of course, proving the exception to this rule and revolving around a group of women who seduce and kill celebrities.

The writing is young and self-indulgent: every verb has its adverb, every noun its adjectives, every sentence its string of clauses that enhance, support, or belabor a simple subject-verb-object combination. Unpolished prose.

Some of the ideas are interesting enough, "Ignition" being the most fun to read, "Foetal Chambers" and "Irong Lung" having good rough concepts (if sparse treatment), and "Method of Pulse" visualized well enough to make a decent animated short. So there is promise.

Taken as a whole, though, the work is too amateurish to be worth reading. The ideas, the writing, even the setting of these "industrial fiction" stories have a from-the-hip feel: not considered, not thought out, not crafted. All in all, a slow, rough read.

The Bothersome Man

In the afterlife, everyone has a good job with a decent boss and any woman they want, and everyone is happy -- except for that one malcontent who wants things to be just as they were before, pain and ugliness included.

Andreas is this malcontent: a man wondering why food has no taste, liquor doesn't get him drunk, and everyone around him is shallow and emotionless. At first he thinks it's his fault, and he has made the wrong choices in the afterlife; then he finds that this is the way things are supposed to be, and he tries to find a way out. Andreas is not rebellious or spiteful or driven by revenge; he's just a quiet, friendly little cog being a quiet, friendly little pain in the ass.

A decent film that makes you question what it would take to keep you happy for eternity, and that makes damn sure you'll never throw yourself in front of a subway train.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
The Bothersome Man (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [*____]
Explicability : [***__]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: Jumping in front of the subway train.

Memories I want to erase: The joyless sex with his wife(?).

What I would do different: There were a couple of brief scenes, such as the kitchen or the very end, that could have been extended by three or four minutes. These scenes can be understood as filmed, but they lack any weight, and give the impression that the director did not want to commit to what the scene depicted, or how the protagonist was affected. Also, for fun, I might have made the bus break down.

Possession

This one is definitely going to require a second viewing. Perhaps a third and fourth. The ambiguity of the title (is it about a woman being possessed, or about a man possessing a woman?) carries over into the narrative. In spades, as it were.

The film is about a disintegrating marriage: Mark, a guy working for shadowy people doing unexplained work (though hints are dropped towards assassination, implausible as it seems), is away from home a lot, and unable to please his wife. Anna, his wife, has had a lover for a long time. The two fight a lot, sullenly refuse to communicate a lot, get weak and weepy a lot, and use their kid as weapon against each other. Typical light-hearted family fare.

The trouble begins when Mark confronts Anna's long-time lover and finds that this isn't who she's been running off to spend time with. Well, who is it then? Her best friend Margie? Her appeared-out-of-nowhere twin, who is their son's schoolteacher? The man with the pink socks? A manifestation of her own desire gradually becoming flesh from the inside out?

The answer is fairly obvious, but less obvious is the nature of the Allsexthing and the role of the title: many characters act possessed, particularly in the proximity of the creature, but given the general craziness most of them display due to stress, emotion, or drugs, it is hard to be sure. Even more difficult is explaining why, after tightly wrapping things up and preparing to close the plot, Mark suddenly goes off the deep end in the last 15 or so minutes of the film.

I could probably spill forth pages of possible explanations with key points to watch in the film, all of which would be invalid. Find a copy of this (make sure it is the 127 minute version), sit back with a notebook, and prepare to spend 4 to 6 hours scrutinizing it.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Possession (IMDB)

Wince : [**___]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [*****]

Beerequisite : [*____]
Pornability : [***__]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [**___]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: "Almost... almost...".

What I would do different: The breakdown at the end looks like it is missing a couple of supporting scenes, perhaps to speed things up. On the second viewing, things became more clear, but there is still the matter of the police showing up outside of Margie's house, and who the pink-socked man turned out to be. Explaining these requires a bit of hand-waving, which means the extra four minute of film should have been spent justifying them, minor as they are.

Zebraman

Stripey!

One of the most twisted and innovative directors out there, Takashi Miike, serves up a variant of the generally detestable "if you believe in your dreams, they will come true" films that turns out to be damn entertaining.

The premise is straightforward: take a man who is a failure as an adult(he is unable to befriend or chastise the children he teaches) , a husband (his wife is cheating on him), and a father (his son is bullied at school, and his daughter is a teenage prostitute), give him a lifelong obsession with a superhero whose television show was scrapped after 7 episodes, mix in a wheelchair-bound kid who shares this same obsession, and pit these two against a horde of green-slime aliens bent on taking over the earth.

The failed teacher has made a Zebraman costume as homage to his childhood hero, and at night he dresses up in it and beats the stuffing out of... pillows. One night he ventures outdoors in costume, ostensibly to show his new wheeled friend his black-and-white finery, and encounters another nutcase wearing a crab-mask and wielding two pairs of scissors. Battle ensues. In the course of flailing about like a schoolgirl, the teacher is filled with the spirit of Zebraman, and thus begins his career as a costumed crimefighter.

Miike's rather jaded and unflinching humor crops up now and then, and the story takes a few odd and unexpected turns, making for an unconventional superhero-wannabe movie. It is well-worth the two-hour investment and, however predictable the rest of the film may be, no-one is going to be able to forsee the Zebraman finishing move.


* * * R A T I N G * * *
Zebraman (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [***__]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: "Zebranurse!"

Doubly-irreverant nickname I keep wanting to use: "Miike Mouse"

Blood & Donuts

A pleasant, some might even say tender, film about a vampire waking up (from sleeping off the effects of a moon-landing bender, apparently) in modern(ish) Toronto, and falling in with a (immigrant?) cabbie who hangs out at a late-night donut shop. Where the OPEN sign is on the inside, and they serve donuts on a plate. Quite odd donuts, too.

Boya the Undead is fun to watch as he stumbles stiffly around like a junkie, timidly making conversation and snacking on rats. It is Earl the cabbie, though, who soon steals the show with his outlandish accent and his easygoing delivery: "Is stress. My brain, is not pliable. It cracks!"

There's a plot of some sort involving some small-time gangsters (backed by the nefarious David Cronenberg), and another involving Boya's ex from the sixties, as well as a half-hearted love triangle between the vampire, the cabbie, and the donut shop gal (with Boya reaching for the part of hypotenuse when he plants a hand on Earl's thigh). But who cares? Great dialog and quirky acting combine to make a very memorable film.


* * * R A T I N G * * *
Blood & Donuts (IMDB)

Wince : [**___]
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [*____]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [***__]
Explicability : [***__]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: Earl coming to grips with Boya's vampirism. "Sorry! I only know this one day and already I try to kill you, eh?"

Memories I want to erase: The CGI golfballs over the opening credits.