Reason # 5,132 to not see movies in theaters: when I saw this film, every couple minutes it would skip forward in time a second so we’d miss a word or two of dialogue, followed a few seconds later by a second instantly repeating itself. That would be incredibly annoying under the best circumstances, let alone when seeing a movie that’s already a bit of a chore to get through.
I can appreciate a remake of an older film, particularly if the new version has something interesting to say, or at least retells the old story really well. However, we get neither here. Writer-director Rob Zombie’s stated goal with this film was to explore all the backstory that has never before been delved into in any of the other films, so there was certainly some potential in the basic idea. So what keen insight did we get for why young Michael Myers turned into a mass murderer? Well, apparently he was just always an evil little serial killer. Carpenter managed to explain this in less than ten minutes in his original film. Here it takes over an hour.
The film’s divided up into three parts: young Michael’s life right before his first murders, his time at the sanitarium, and his escape and subsequent killings that retell the first film. The second portion is the best of the three, I suppose, as it’s the least offensive and poorly made of them all. The film opens with a scene at the breakfast table that reads as though Zombie had just watched the scene in Little Miss Sunshine and wanted to do a Shocking and Edgy parody of it, filled with every character in the Myers family yelling, cursing, arguing, making sexual suggestions, and other tedious behavior that accomplishes nothing but to scream at the audience, “Oh, look at how bad Michael’s home life is! Do you see now why he becomes a killer???” It doesn’t improve from there, as each character we witness can easily be divided up between “This person is horrible and will be killed by Michael” and “This person is not so bad and will not be killed”. There is no tension to be had here, as we’re just sitting through ponderous unpleasantness while trying to determine how long it’s going to take before something actually happens. And before you ask, no, we have no way of knowing if his horrid home life actually is what led him down this path, as he had been murdering animals for a while before the film’s start, so the whole damn point of finding out what made Michael the way he is has been completely ignored.
As I said, the time spent at the sanitarium is probably the best portion of the film, with Malcolm McDowell reprising Donald Pleasance’s character of Dr. Loomis, who tries to break Michael out of his shell and begin the path to rehabilitation. He’s aided in this by Michael’s mother, played surprisingly well by Sherri Moon Zombie, until Michael kills someone at the sanitarium and his mother, feeling defeated, kills herself. The film quickly jumps ahead after that a good decade and change, as Zombie was evidently impatient to get on to the main course, and we just get Michael pretty much killing everyone at the sanitarium, including an old guard (Danny Trejo) who thought he had befriended him, though an off-handed mention of how he was just a few months from retirement boded poorly.
We then frantically rush ahead to the final (and longest) (and worst) part of the film, where he’s made his proud return to Haddonfield, Illinois (proudly played by Haddonfield, New Jersey in the original film) in search of his sister. At this point, a strong familiarity with the original movie is a must, because the whole section plays like Zombie just wanted to redo all his favorite scenes from the original without having to take the time to do unimportant things like, say, include any connecting scenes in between the Greatest Hits to create some sort of flow, or actually introduce any of the new characters or give us any kind of reason to care about them beyond that there were characters with the same names in the original film. To make it all even more muddled, Zombie directs these killings and the big climax with Laurie with all the finesse of 28 Weeks Later. For those lucky ones who missed that film, imagine a movie where every action scene is in near total darkness and has the camera shaking ridiculously violently to the point where you can’t even figure out what’s going on. This leads to a hide and seek bit in the old Myers house wherein Laurie hides somewhere while Michael tries to find her, but the camera’s shaking so violently and it’s so dimly lit and there’s so much fast cutting that we can’t even figure out the general layout of the house, let alone where exactly she’s hiding and where he’s looking.
That structure is typical of the film as a whole, really, as the whole movie is one grand mess. There are glaring continuity errors (one character is killed near the end by Michael digging his fingers into the guy’s eyes until blood starts pouring down his head, only to be dragged around later with no blood or noticeable injuries at all). There’s a villain who seems to be everywhere at once, not due to any supernatural powers (that angle is completely dropped in this remake), but because the editing is so slapdash that he just seems to jump from one house to the next with no rhyme or reason. There are a number of completely unnecessary characters (Dr. Loomis, for instance, has no reason for existing in this new film, and a scene at a truck stop after Myers’ escape is a failure, as there’s no indication that he hijacked any vehicles to make his way to Haddonfield as he did in the original. You know, unless Zombie thought it would take too long to include a mention of an abandoned car/truck/whatever) that serve no purpose but to provide an extra murder. It’s just one big mess, with no real redeeming qualities to be found. It doesn’t even have any of the humor that made the Devil’s Rejects so entertaining, preferring to remain at a dirge all the way through. It’s easily Zombie’s worst film, and the only thing that might keep it from being the worst Halloween film yet is because it didn’t have Busta Rhymes saying “Dangertainment” every five minutes. Avoid this at all costs.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Halloween (2007)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch
I had been interested in seeing Halloween 3 for a while now, as it’s pretty well known for being the odd man out of the Halloween franchise, as the series tried to break away from the slasher format and actually try something new. It’s generally pretty well hated among horror fans, I guess for having the nerve to actually try something different, and for not having Michael Myers in it (a quick cameo as they show the original movie on TV is all he gets here). I had never actually gotten around to seeing it before now, however, and I had always been curious as to how much of the hatred was actually warranted.
As it turns out, while there was certainly a good deal of room for improvement to be had, it really wasn’t bad at all, and was certainly better than the two Halloween movies I’ve seen that were made after this (H2O and Resurrection). One nice thing is how the plot, which has tended to lean towards the nonexistent side of things in pretty much all the other Halloween films, is so labyrinthine that it could easily have comprised two movies. Over an hour and a half, we are treated to a murder mystery, an evil children’s commercial, clockwork men, mind controlling Halloween masks, witchcraft, Stonehenge, a town under such strict curfew that even the pets need to be inside after 6, people being turned into insects, and warring between a toy manufacturer and his various clients. If all that seems like a bit much, then I probably also shouldn’t reveal that they found time to give the heroic doctor an estranged wife to have a fairly annoying subplot with, as well as managing to throw in a quick sex scene with him and a woman he had just met the day prior. Whatever your feelings on its overall quality, you cannot call this film boring.
While I will freely admit that this is not the best movie out there, it is at least a passable film, and were it not a part of the Halloween series I think people would view it much more fondly. It’s an interesting idea, at least, and if you’re doing a marathon of Halloween movies it’ll be nice to have one that is actually more than just “Guy in Shatner mask walks around stabbing people”. Give it a chance.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Halloween 2
I hadn’t seen Halloween 2 in about a decade, and had always had a vague intention to buy it, so when the opportunity came to get a double pack of not just this, but Halloween 3, I just didn’t see any way I could refuse. For those that haven’t seen it, it takes place later on in the same evening as the first movie (indeed, it opens with the climax of the previous film), with Michael Myers continuing on his quest to murder Jamie Lee Curtis.
It’s a rather curious thing, overall, trying to figure out his thought process for who should and should not be killed in this film. While in the first film he pretty much tried to kill everyone he encountered, here he makes the conscious decision not to kill on two separate occasions, for no discernible reason. We do indeed get a rather sketchy reason for why he’s so hell bent on Curtis above everyone else near the end of the film, and yes, it does indeed contradict the original film, though since they made massive contradictions in logic a bit of a running gag throughout the entire series I guess I can forgive this.
How does the film hold up overall, though? Well, it holds up like you’d expect a sequel to a hit horror film to hold up. The filmmakers knew going in that it wasn’t going to be as good, so they compensated by ratcheting up the blood and nudity (the former more than the latter). There are some deaths in this film that are more impressive than any in the previous film (particularly a scene in an overheated hot tub), and that definitely helps you get through this, but overall it simply doesn’t have any of the tension that made the first a classic. Part of the problem has to be John Carpenter’s score, which is a tad more elaborate than the music to the first film, but is also a good deal less creepy.
One thing I did enjoy quite a bit was the big climax and ending, which I’m going to spoil here, so be warned. While most of the movie is only watchable, once it comes time for the big end fight at the hospital it does get really good (starting with a nice shot of Michael casually walking through a plate glass door). After being terrorized for two movies, Curtis finally gets to take him down, by shooting him in the eyes and blinding him, then running out so Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) can essentially blow up the entire wing and burn him to death. While he obviously survived to infest a number of sub-par sequels (though given that he wasn’t in Halloween 3, I have to assume they had intended for him to stay dead here), it would absolutely have made those sequels a whole lot better if they had built on this ending. Just imagine if Halloween 4, rather than being about whatever the hell happened in it, had just followed around a blind immortal killer that couldn't see its victims, but also couldn’t be killed or even arrested, since cops wouldn’t be able to get close enough to him to slap handcuffs on him. A whole movie of people just awkwardly moving around the blind guy with the knife? Brilliant, I say.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Man Bites Dog
Hot on the heels of Calvaire, here’s another French horror movie that I also really enjoyed. For those happy few of you that saw Behind the Mask, here’s another movie about a serial killer who’s got a documentary crew filming him, and it’s every bit as good as its spiritual successor.
A large part of what makes Man Bites Dog so entertaining is how it inverts a good deal of horror cliches. The idea of the sadistic killer as wise philosopher is something that predates film by quite a bit, for instance, and it’s nice that here, right when you think the film’s going to fall totally into that cliché, he begins undercutting himself mid-philosophizing by going off on mad racist rants or hinting at (though never confirming) a strong pedophilic streak within him.
Another nice bit is how the camera actually doesn’t catch everything. Much like in a real-life documentary, key bits of the plot aren’t caught on film, and we have to awkwardly find out about them in voice over after the fact. The film crew is not an all-seeing eye in this film. Indeed, the film crew gets a bit involved in the story here. While the crew in Behind the Mask mostly just follows him around filming (until the big climax, at least), here, after some initial fears around him, they begin to take to their subject well enough that they become active participants in his crimes, at one point even joining in and gang raping a woman with him. In a nice bit of editing, we jump directly from everyone laughing and cheering on Benoit (the killer’s name, in an interesting bit of foresight) as he rapes the woman to the aftermath, where the woman and her husband are lying there dead while Benoit and the crew sleep off their excitement.
Yes, this film is filled with fairly unlikable people, and they do not arrive at a happy ending, so if you’re looking for something a bit more lighthearted then Behind the Mask would probably work better for you. However, if you’re in the mood for something dark and grim, that’s not afraid to take its story to a pretty nasty extreme, then by all means check this one out.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Shaft
In my efforts to get as thorough a collection of movies as I possibly can, I’ve spent a good chunk of change this past summer on trying to get into blaxploitation films, as they were one of the last genres I hadn’t really made a dent into. I’ve met with some level of success in this venture, enjoying the bulk of the ones I’ve gotten, but I guess any proper blaxploitation collection wouldn’t be complete without a copy of Shaft, the single biggest, most famous one of all.
So how does it stack up? Well, I gotta say, for the biggest blaxploitation film of all time, a genre known for its wild excesses, this movie is pretty vanilla. It’s a pretty serious, straightforward detective story, with little time for anything really edgy, beyond the title character’s constant race baiting. The plot, tracking down the kidnapped daughter of a local gang boss, is pretty standard noir fare, and indeed this film plays a lot more like an old noir than it does its flashier 70s brethren. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty average affair all the way through. It’s pleasant enough, don’t get me wrong, and if you happen to be flipping through channels and it’s on, you could do a lot worse with your time.
I suppose the problem lies in my unwarranted high expectations, thinking that, in a genre known for its wildness, I was expecting the single most prominent film in that genre to be the most wild of them all, rather than the most sedate. I guess modern day audiences support it because it doesn’t frighten them as much as, say, Slaughter or Coffy would, I dunno. Has anyone else been disappointed like this recently?
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Calvaire
The French aren’t exactly known for their horror movies. Eyes Without a Face and Jean Rollin aside, the nation as a whole really hasn’t stepped up to the plate when it comes to this much-maligned genre. That’s a large part of why it was a bit surprising to me that Calvaire wound up being so good.
It’s hard to find a way to describe this movie in a way that doesn’t make it sound fairly pedestrian. The film plays a bit like a blend of other horror movies, most notably Misery and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It stars a singer who, while venturing through the countryside, has his car break down in the worst possible area in the world, and is put through an incredible amount of hell for it. The bulk of the film is merely him being abused by the inhabitants of the town he breaks down near, and his attempt to escape from them. Like I said, just going by the story, there’s not that much that makes the film stand out.
Where it works its magic, though, is in the overall style of the film, in the incredibly unsettling and horrid nature of the town and the inn where he is trapped for the bulk of the movie. The innkeeper seems initially friendly, but ominous signs begin to pile up about him, and soon enough he mistakes the young singer for his unfaithful ex-wife, kidnaps him, and begins dressing him like her. The rest of the town isn’t going to come to the rescue, either. Their first appearance, while the singer is out on his walk, has him stumbling upon a group of them engaging in a friendly bit of gang bestiality, and things swiftly go downhill from there.
I have to say, for a movie that doesn’t really have that much blood in it (well, comparatively, at least), it’s really one of the more brutal horror movies I’ve seen. It’s uncomfortable in all the right ways, it never shies away from taking its tale to horrifying extremes, and its well acted and paced enough that you never get bored. It’s probably the best movie I’ve seen from France since 2001’s Amelie. Hunt it down, pronto.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Shallow Ground
I have to admit that it was a tad unfortunate that, when I made this blog for the primary purpose of critiquing the horror movies I watch, the first horror movie I actually watched to review ended up being terrible. Fortunately, that’s not the case here, so we can all go cheerily pretending that yesterday’s entry didn’t exist, or at least was written after this one, all right? All right.
So as you may have cleverly guessed from the above, I rather enjoyed Shallow Ground. For a low budget straight to DVD horror movie it was a whole lot better than it needed to be (and, along with Dead End and Boo, makes me rather optimistic about the straight to DVD horror movies I’ve ordered for this year, unlike the ones I got for last Halloween season, which were by and large pretty bland and dull). The acting was decent, if not spectacular, there was a good plot that actually hasn’t been done to death before, there was plenty of pretty realistic gore, there were some properly spooky locations, there was pretty much everything you could ask for in a film like this.
The plot in question concerns a small woodlands town that’s in the process of packing everything up and disappearing now that a nearby bridge has been completed, when a young man walks into the police station dressed only in a whole lot of blood and wielding a knife that swiftly disappears. Soon, the young man is fountaining blood out of himself, causing visions in whoever touches it, revealing himself to have the fingerprints of multiple missing persons, and causing a whole lot of grief for the local police force. I don’t think I’m ruining anything by mentioning that the head of the police force has a tragic past connected to the young man, or that he finds he now has to atone for his old mistake that resulted in the death of a girl, or that the serial killer is strongly hinted to be one person, only to shockingly turn out to be someone completely random, or…well, despite this list of cliches, it really is a fun movie, and you can get it on Amazon for only ten bucks. Go check it out.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Wicked Little Things
Yes, five reviews in and I’ve finally gotten to a horror movie. Anyway, for those unfamiliar with the After Dark horror collection, they were basically a group of eight horror movies that played for three marathon nights in a few select cities around the country last November (one of which was fairly close to me, though I didn’t go because I couldn’t find anyone free to join me). Shortly thereafter, of course, they all came to DVD, which is when I first began watching them. Prior to catching this one on FearNet, a channel I hope to never have to endure again, I had seen Penny Dreadful, Dark Ride, and The Hamiltons, all of which were decent films, but which were nothing particularly special. I had feared for a time that all eight films were going to fall into this quality range, but Wicked Little Things has just proven me wrong, by virtue of an hour and a half of unending dullness and tedium.
Before I get accused of being too negative with this review, let me pause here to mention what I liked about the movie. The woods, where the majority of the film is set, does indeed look quite creepy at night. Alright, now to the rest of the review.
The basic premise, that of a family inheriting a house from a newly-deceased husband that happens to be deep in the mountainous woods where an ever-larger group of children were killed in a mine explosion and who are now back as flesh-eating zombies, is pretty cookie-cutter, but more has been made from even more tired plots. However, when it comes time to flesh out those bare bones, to make it distinctive and different so that it really starts to shine, this film just falls to pieces. All the characters are pretty thoroughly unlikable – the mom and her two daughters are established from their first appearance, driving to their new home, as being incredibly bitchy, whiny, and catty, and the film never really gives us a reason to change that view of them. The zombies are also pretty impossible to side with, as the film’s sepia-hued prologue (to let us know it’s in the past, you see, because the message reading “1913” wasn’t enough of a hint) shows the cave-in caused by dynamiting, and showing one of the girls in particular deciding that rather than move away from the dynamite before it goes off, she’d rather just sit there and hide like a damned idiot and court death. Impossible to side with them. There is a creepy all-knowing neighbor that we’re presumably supposed to like as he’s helping the family survive, but even he spends the whole movie openly blaming the last living descendant of the old mine owner for the accident that happened decades before he was born.
So those are the characters. Now was there at least an interesting plot, or even some good violence to get us through this thing? Well, if you view the violence of the original Night of the Living Dead to be incredibly gory, then you’ll be suitably impressed with the violence in this film, but it really isn’t better than any number of late 60s films. The plot, beyond even the contrived nature of it all, is simply terrible. It moves along just painfully slowly, with pretty much nothing at all happening for the first half-hour or so, then fleshing things out with as many bad cliches as one could name. The youngest daughter disappears from the house on multiple occasions; people dart out in front of cars, almost causing crashes, not once, but twice; a car gets stuck in the mud when the people inside are desperate to escape the zombies, despite the complete lack of rain at any point in the film; a car won’t start at all, requiring the survivors to venture out on foot, etc. At no point was I able to actually get involved in the film, as the constant cliches and idiocy of the plot, coupled with the overwhelming dullness of it all, just made me annoyed to be watching it at all. Do not see this film unless you need something to fall asleep to.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Superbad
I finally got to see this yesterday with my friend Curtis, on a fun little playdate that involved us getting to the theater tragically early (two hours before the damn movie started) and having to find ways of keeping our interest up before we could actually enter the auditorium. What this eventually entailed, as per my own suggestion, was to explore the woods behind the theater a bit, during which stumbled upon a purse and a hairbrush scattered about on the ground in a most unsavory way.
Once we got into the theater, we got treated to a nice treat, as, while most of the previews were kind of ass (particularly the Walk the Line parody with John C. Reilly, which looked like another entry into the Anchorman/Talladega shitfest), we were surprised by the discovery of a sequel to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, which was one of the great comedic surprises of the decade. The only other trailer that really looked any good at all was the one with Will Arnett and his brother trying to get a child to show off to their dad before he dies. Beyond that, all the trailers were ass, and there were quite a lot of them.
Of course, I’m sure you’re reading this to find out what I thought of the movie itself, now that I’ve bored you for two paragraphs describing my entire day. Oh, I forgot to mention that before we went to the theater we had a fairly sub-par meal at P.J. Whelihan’s, in which I ate a burger while fighting off a surprising number of flies. There, my full day for you all.
So anyway, the movie itself was actually really good. Most of the humor involved actually sprung from the characters themselves rather than from stupid plot contrivances like in most present day comedies, and the characters themselves were actually (gasp and horror) fully realized, three dimensional people that you could easily believe existed in the real world. The plot hinges upon the three main characters and their desperate quest to procure booze for a high school graduation party so that girls there will be drunk enough to sleep with social outcasts like themselves. In this way, so reasons Jonah Hill, they’ll be able to have summer girlfriends to practice having sex with so that they won’t embarrass themselves when they get to college. It’s a surprisingly well thought out plan for a high school kid to think of, I have to admit.
Where the movie works is in how it treats its characters as real, and doesn’t try to caricature them in any way. It understands just how obsessive high schoolers are regarding things like sex and alcohol, but also understands just how lousy parties based around alcohol can often be, and doesn’t mind letting its characters learn of this. Even the side plot with Fogell palling around with the cops, which seems at first somewhat out of place given the borderline realism of the main plot, is eventually explained in a surprisingly intelligent and emotional manner.
While I still wouldn’t list it as my favorite comedy of the year (that honor is reserved for Hot Fuzz), it’s still a really great movie, and one that you should all be checking out (of course, by its box-office take, it seems probably that you didn’t really need this advice). Unless you’re someone that really hates the entire concept of the teen sex comedy, and are intent on hating anything in that vein, you should enjoy this quite a bit.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Way of the Dragon (a.k.a. Return of the Dragon)
This is going to be the last movie I review from the Bruce Lee Ultimate Collection, as, despite my great love of trash, even I really have no desire to see how they manage to shoehorn old footage of Lee into two additional movies made over half a decade after his death. Anyway, this sort of qualifies as the first Bruce Lee film I’ve ever seen part of, as I saw close to the first half of it in the break room at Borders, back in that glorious time when we had a working DVD player and ceased all work for a couple months.
Anyway, this is my favorite Bruce Lee movie, and I’ll take my hits from any odd readers now, because I’m fully aware of how poor my reasoning is for this. Let’s be honest, though; if you had to choose which was the best movie out of four options, all four of which featured Bruce Lee beating the piss out of everyone he sees, but only one of which features Nora Miao being incredibly attractive alongside him, which would you choose? Don’t worry, there really was only one right answer there, you did the right thing by siding with me.
On a somewhat similar note, I found that while watching these movies I had to keep reminding myself that back in the 70s Hong Kong was run by the British and not China, as I kept being happily surprised anew whenever a woman got naked in one of these (for those wondering, it happens in all three briefly, though in this one it’s a lustrous Italian woman trying to get with Lee). It may be brief, but it’s appreciated all the same.
The increased comedy in this film is also appreciated. While, yes, I was just yesterday raving about the darkness of Fist of Fury because I am an utter schizophrenic, I do enjoy the occasional goofiness, such as the randomly effeminate gangster that menaces Lee’s cousin’s restaurant, or the climactic showdown at the Coliseum between Lee and Walker: Texas Ranger that is inexplicably being viewed by dozens of cats. The jokes about his cultural clash in Rome were a bit odd, as I switched from the subtitles to dubbing early in the movie for my mother’s benefit, which led to him going from not knowing what half the cast was saying to everyone speaking the same language and him just being an asshole to everyone that’s not Asian. That Bruce Lee guy is such a dick.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Fist of Fury (a.k.a. The Chinese Connection)
Also from the Bruce Lee Ultimate Collection, this one seems to have been somewhat the odd man out of the collection, as it’s the only one that was set in the past (well, ignoring that, by virtue of having been made in the early 70s, they’re ALL now set in the past), and had a somewhat more traditional kung fu plot of dueling martial arts schools. It was also big on playing up racial tensions between China and Japan, and had probably the most grim story and ending of all of Bruce Lee’s films.
That said, I liked it more than The Big Boss or Enter the Dragon, in part because of its overall viciousness. Lee infuses the film with a bit of righteous anger over the way the Japanese have treated the Chinese over the years. In one part, he is denied entrance to a place – I am rather uncertain exactly what the place was – by a doorman who points to a sign reading “NO DOGS AND CHINESE ALLOWED”, offensive both for its racism and for its poor grammar. Lee, being a reasonable man, naturally beats the shit out of the doorman and those damned racist Japs that come along and make fun of him for being barred. It’s precisely that kind of instant gratification that we love about the movies. Or at least that I love from the movies, because, you know, I’m not a Commie.
Even more than for the overall rage featured, this film is probably Bruce Lee’s real shining glory, however more infinitely better known Enter the Dragon is, as he’s just about doing a perfect Superman role in this. He casually jumps from a crouch over a fence that’s taller than he is. He’s a perfect master of disguise, dressing up as a rickshaw driver, an old man hawking newspapers, and a telephone repairman, each time outright verbally interacting with people trying to hunt him down and kill him, without once being found out. He also shows superhuman strength, as when he lifts up the aforementioned rickshaw, with a man in it, and heaves it across an alley, before going on to hit a Russkie (yes, the film even panders to 70s American audiences by throwing in an evil Russian so we can join in on the racial tensions) so hard that he sees trails. If he had only turned time back a day by flying counterclockwise around the Earth, he would have completely outshone Christopher Reeve.
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Big Boss (a.k.a. Fists of Fury)
Yes, I am absolutely the kind of person to make an intro post saying that most of my critiques would be about horror movies, then make my first one on a martial arts film. This is the kind of change-up you’re going to have to expect around here, you know. Anyway, this is the first film in the Bruce Lee Ultimate Collection that I recently purchased. It’s worth noting that by ‘Ultimate’, they of course mean that it does not include Enter the Dragon, but does helpfully include not only Game of Death, but also Game of Death 2. The makers of this set clearly have their fingers firmly on the pulses of martial arts fans around the nation.
I should say that this is actually only the second Bruce Lee film I've ever seen (at least all the way through), so watching it today, I really had no expectations, other than perhaps an undercurrent of quiet snobbish hope that it would suck so I could feel quietly superior to all those fools that loudly trumpet his films. Unfortunately, I did end up liking it quite a bit, so that plan went right out the window. A large part of my enjoyment came not from the plot itself, but from the sheer style oozing out of the movie. The soundtrack, a bombastic and funky mix that sounds sort of like Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton teaming up to do a Bond score, works like a charm, and the hyper-kinetic directing, with lots of swooping camera movements and quick cuts that actually enhance the action rather than making it harder to follow, went a long way towards making the movie great. The odd dubbing was interesting as well; at one point, Lee’s cousin sneeringly taunts a gang that’s threatening to beat him up by going “Just you four lousy guys?” while facing down five of them. One may ask why I had it dubbed, and that’s because I vaguely, and mistakenly, thought I had read some customer reviews on Amazon complaining that this set only had the movies available dubbed, rather than offering the original Chinese soundtracks. I only thought to check during the end fight, and learned that Bruce Lee makes weird animal sounds when he’s not fighting in English.
I don’t have much to say about the story itself, but I did rather enjoy one aspect of it. I’ve been watching a lot of martial arts movies lately, and way too many of them have the protagonist deciding that just beating up the bad guys is going to stop them for good. It looked for a while like this film was going to follow in that pattern, up until there was about half an hour to go, when he grabs a knife off of one of his enemies while surrounded by a small army of thugs, and then proceeds to STAB THE LIVING FUCK OUT OF THEM like a madman. It was a beautiful thing.
Howdy
For those that already know me, hi, this is my attempt to do a semi-daily/at least occasional half-assed review site for some of the movies I see, since I do tend to watch and purchase way too many of them. For those that don't know me, I'm Zach Savage, and am an infrequent staff writer for http://www.thepopcult.com, which is a delightful pop culture review site that hasn't been updated in half a year because we're all waiting on a redesign that seems increasingly unlikely to ever arrive. The reviews here are mainly going to be of horror movies, because, well, I'm a sad addict (that's also why I went with a white text on black background design, because horror movies are just that spooky), though there will sometimes be other genres of film included here too. I'm that giving, what can I say? Hell, maybe if you're all very good little boys and girls, I might even finish that Lovecraft book I've not yet gotten through the first story of and review that for your pleasure. The possibilities are endless, they are.
