FanTasia Film Fest 2009: “Hells” (2009)

"Hells Angels" was renamed to "Hells" for Western audiences.

Director: Yoshiki Yamakawa

Cast: Daisuke Kishio, Fumihiko Tachiki, Misato Fukuen

Country: Japan

At 25 years of age, and seeing roughly 800+ films during my lifetime, I have never ever fallen asleep during a movie in a public theater ever. I have friends tell and have read reviews of movie-goers snoring their ways through movies like “Pearl Harbor” and the ilk, but never once have I been so disinterested in a movie or as comfortable in a theater seat to have passed out during a movie’s screening. Today, I’m sad to announce that Madhouse’s much anticipated animation, “Hells” (renamed from “Hells Angels” for North American audiences), the third film I saw play at FanTasia Film festival this year, broke that streak in a big way.

The anime production group Madhouse’s resume consists of classics like the “Patlabor” movies, “Ninja Scroll” and “Metropolis”, as well as all four of the legendary Satoshi Kon’s films, “Perfect Blue”, “Millenium Actress”, “Paprika”, and “Tokyo Godfathers”. The movie trailer gave off an aura similar to the zaniness and style of, one of my personal favorites, “Dead Leaves”, but with heavy religious undertones a la “Neon Genesis Evangelion”, another anime classic. The staff behind “Hells” also have impressive histories, including Yoshiki Yamakawa, who wrote the “Star Wars” manga, Kazita Nakagawa, who helped animate the hip-hop samurai epic “Samurai Champloo”, and Yasushi Nirazawa, who designed the monsters in the “Hellboy” movies.. So how did Madhouse get it so unbearably wrong to drive this filmophile to Z’s?

At first glance, “Hells” has an interesting enough plot. Linne, the film’s protagonist, is hit by a car on her way to school and is sent to hell. This would sound awful, but as it turns out hell is basically a high school similar to the one Linne goes to on Earth, but is instead attended by buxomy demons instead of obedient school children. Furthermore, the school is run by Helvis, who is basically Satan as an Elvis impersonator. Insanity ensues, just as you would expect, as the sadistic Helvis, among other hilarious things, makes the school demons play in deadly games of volleyball for the prize of having any one wish granted.

The first twenty minutes of this movie was an absolute joy to watch. The animation had a style of it’s own and the character designs were phenomenal. It had enough genuinely funny parts that I would call “Hells” a comedy way before I would ever qualify it as an action animation. However, with such little plot to run on, how much longer could the movie go on for? Answer? TWO MORE HOURS.

“Hells” drags on for over two hours in length, and after about the twenty or thirty minute mark, things take a turn for the worst and the movie starts trying to make an introspective philosophical masterpiece out of a cartoon that stars a character like Helvis (who, by the way, also has a back-up band whenever he appears). This did not bode well. The plot starts taking on a religious context that is way over it’s head when they reveal to us that Helvis is actually Cain reborn, and the most popular demon-boy at school is a reincarnated Abel. A pathetic portrayal of God, who here is a pint-sized lawn gnome, also shows up just to confuse even more with a shit ton of existential banter.

The last thing I remember about “Hells” was something about how Linne was actually Cain and Abel’s mother reincarnated, and a random male demon schoolmate, who is never introduced to us up until this point, admits that he is the father reincarnated. I started seeing a few people getting up from their seats and leaving, but with this being my first time at a film festival before, I didn’t want to be rude and instead laid back in my seat and fell asleep beside my girlfriend. By the time I woke up, it was about 45 minutes later and the story didn’t look like it progressed any farther than from when I left off. Somehow Linne realizes that the concepts of heaven and hell is in one’s mind and this life on Earth is just another creation of man’s will. Or something. Just as the dwellers of Hell seem to be happily returning to Earth, Abel (the film’s antagonist) pops up again and they do battle.

Knowing that “Hells” wasn’t going to get any better, my girlfriend and I left. So there you have it; the first time I’ve fallen asleep in a theater, and only the second time I’ve ever walked out on a movie (“Elizabeth: The Golden Age” would be the other). It’s by far the most boring anime I have yet to see, which is really upsetting when it could have been so much better if they had quickened up the pace and cut the movie’s duration in half. The movie tickles the optic nerves with it’s flashy colors and slick character designs, but the story continuously beats the brain with a baseball bat. Worst movie at FanTasia and perhaps worst movie of 2009 in general for me.

FanTasia Film Fest 2009: “The Warlords” (2008)

Jet Li and Andy Mau star in "The Warlords"

Director: Peter Chan

Cast: Jet Li, Andy Lau, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Xu Jinglei

Country: Hong Kong/China

The second screening I went to at the festival was the much talked about Canadian premiere of “The Warlords”. I went into this knowing very little of it’s premise other than the fact that it casts two massive Asian stars, Jet Li and Andy Lau, and it was based on actual Chinese historical events during the Taiping rebellion of the Qing dynasty (mid-1860′s China). The trailer let on that what we were going to see was an epic battle movie, as did members of Montreal’s Hong Kong Exchange who, before the movie began, gave away FanTasia prize packs to anybody in the audience who could demonstrate some kung fu.

Despite having such a title like “Warlords”, and starring two mega-famous men are more known for their high-octane action films, the movie is actually pretty tame on the violence front. The movie is, at it’s core, a character driven drama about the casualties of strategic warfare and political corruption, that is thankfully (and surprisingly) well acted by all three of it’s protagonist — particularly from Jet Li, who one-third of the film’s 40-million dollar budget was spent on casting. The few battle scenes it does have do little more than provide eye candy.

The film is about an ex-Imperial General, Ma Xin Yi (Jet Li), who is the lone survivor of a bloody battle that took the lives of his entire army. He is taken in and sworn to a blood oath by two bandits, Zhao Er-hu and Zhang Wen-Xiang (Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro) and the three start up an army of their own so that warlords will provide their families with food and money. Now, having three people whose opinions and lifestyles greatly differ commanding an entire army makes their trek to the top tough (phew!), but when Ma starts sleeping with Er-hu’s wife, things start to take a turn for the worse. “The Warlords” is essentially a loose retelling of the mysterious, real-life assasination of Ma Xin Yi whose real cause of death has even now yet to be confirmed.

Of course, Jet Li and Andy Lau are great in this, considering both failed horribly in the English speaking film market. If only more English speaking people would dare watch Chinese speaking movies. But having been expecting a full-blown martial arts film, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. “The Warlords” runs for over 2 hours, most of it’s time spent on battle strategy than the actual battles. It also has it’s fair share of cheesy moments, such as a scene where Ma Xin Yi decapitates a General and holds his cut off head in the air as his brothers hug and dance giddley like school girls in the middle of a war. Western audiences don’t really buy the whole “blood oath” as a plot device like the Asians do, either, which makes a lot of the movie hard to swallow; we see three strangers who barely know each other but are willing to do incredible things for one another. But hey, apparently a lot of this shit really happened!

It’s little surprise that the director, Peter Chan, works mostly with romances and romantic comedies. The blood brothers are really big softies for killing machines, and the affair between Ma and his brother’s lover is the more prominent part of the story. Still, everything else in terms of wardrobe, make-up, locations, and cinematography is top-notch and helps keep the attention of those who find a lot of the story boring and romanticized (which, to be honest, a lot of it is).

It’s pretty hard to make a battle movie after “300″ and “Lord of the Rings”, even though this was never the director’s intention, but the movie was marketed as an action epic, which was a bad decision after overhearing some things that were said by those seated around me after the movie. I think if “The Warlords” was given proper marketting treatment here and exposed for what it really was I think Western audiences would have received with much wider arms.

FanTasia Film Fest 2009 wrap-up!

My girlfriend and I just got back from a week’s stay in Montreal for the 2009 FanTasia Film Festival; a film fest largely dedicated to horror, sci-fi, and foreign film. The trip was great but the films we manage to catch during our visit were not so great. To be quite honest, there were only 2 stand out films among the 7 we had seen, one of which I had already seen before.

Blame this on the organizers of FanTasia, who announced what films they would be playing almost a month in advance, but failed to have a day-by-day schedule written up until 4 days before opening night. As we both have jobs, we were forced to just pick a random week for vacation at the last minute, and almost none of the films we had hoped to see (particularly “Thirst”, “Grace”, and “Trick R Treat”) were playing during the time we had been there.

However, the festival itself was still a lot of fun. If there weren’t prizes being given away at the beginning of the screening, there were directors, actors, and others giving quick speeches about their work. A highlight was meeting the director of “Tokyo Gore Police”, Yoshihiro Nishimura, who signed my flyer for his new movie “Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl”. The audiences I saw movies with were also a lot of fun and would often cheer and applaud during the screenings.

I will be sure to go to FanTasia 2010 and be sure to schedule my time there a lot better, as long as the men and women behind the festival announce the itineraries much sooner so people travelling from out of town can plan ahead.

Reviews for the following will be up soon:

“Mutants” from France (see last post)

“The Warlords” from Hong Kong

“Hells” from Japan

“Les Lascars” from France

“Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl” from Japan

“Crush and Blush” from Korea

“Evangelion 1.0″ from Japan

FanTasia Film Fest 2009: “Mutants” (2009)

For those who can't read French, it says "A cross between 28 DAYS LATER and THE FLY".

Director: David Morlet

Cast: Hélène de Fougerolles, Francis Renaud, Dida Diafat

Country: France

“Mutants” is the latest edition to the increasingly popular new wave of French horror but instead of the knife-weilding psychos from “Haute Tension”, “L’interieur” or “Frontier(s)”, this film would normally fall under the zombie category if it’s “infected” weren’t being turned into hyper-evolved, man-eating mutants.

It is about a paramedic and her husband on the wintery countryside of France looking for survivors of a pandemic that turned half the world’s inhabitants into cannibalistic creatures.. After a run-in with someone infected, whom they thought was just mentally ill (number 1 in a series of stupid decisions), the husband starts to show signs of infection when they hide out at a seemingly abandoned hospital (stupid decision number 2). The wife, who shares with the audience way late into the film that she is immune to the outbreak, refuses to kill him or let him end his life and decides to wait it out at the hospital while she tries to find a cure on her own (number 3) as he slowly morphs into a twisted beast. The poster’s comparison to “28 Days Later” and “The Fly” is pretty spot on.

Now, I only compare “Mutants” with it’s gory French peers because it was also marketed as such. To be honest, it was very tame in terms of gore and shock value in comparison. There are a number of fairly disturbing scenes when the man is starting to get rather sickly; his molars start to fall out on their own accord and his urine turns blood red, but these scenes are few and far between. The movie is hindered further by being infested with obvious zombie cliches and unimportant and moronic characters (see stupid decisions 1 through 3) who only complicate an otherwise simple story. I think it’s a bad sign when the audience of your North American premiere is laughing and rooting for your protagonists to fail.

Fortunately, “Mutants” still stays fresh in a film scene where “zombie” is hardly the buzz word it once was. As with all of our zombie faves, it comes with an underlying message that becomes more important than the movie itself. My girlfriend (whom I went to FanTasia with) has a father constantly in and out of the hospital with lung and brain cancer, and we both found many interesting parallels between her situation and the plight of the film’s protagonists. The paramedic keeps pressing her near-dead husband into staying alive despite the fact that the pain of his transformation is unbearable. She inadvertently gets him addicted to medicine and pain killers, and helps him comb out his hair that is falling out in the handfuls. This theme stirs questions about our treatment of terminally ill loved ones and the selfishness and hypocrisy behind our resentment towards euthanasia. At what point does medical treatment become crueler than death itself?

With that said, “Mutants” should’ve been called “28 Months Later”; the mood, the camera work, the atmosphere, the music. The whole “on the run from monsters while seeking out a rumoured military fortress” aspect is there too. Still, the plot is intriguing enough to sit all the way through, and some of the kills are really well filmed. Besides a close-to-home sub-plot, however, “Mutants” brings nothing new to the game of running zombies. Not great, but far from being the worst movie I saw during my time at the festival.

Review: “Aachi & Ssipak” (2006)

The thinking man's poop humour.

Director: Jo Beom-jin

Cast: Ryoo Seung-beom, Lim Chang-jung, Hyeon Yeong

Country: Korea

Not since Japan’s colorfully twisted “Dead Leaves” have I seen a movie, animated or otherwise, as fucked up as “Aachi & Ssipak” from South Korea, and I say that with all due respect.

How is this for a premise?: Aachi and Ssipak are two hoodlums earning a dishonest living in an energy depleted future dystopia; they hold up bathroom stalls where people are trying to have “sincere” bowel movements, as the energy source of tomorrow is human excrement. All citizens are implanted with anal identity tracking chips at birth, and when they defecate in public stalls they receive an addictive, hallucinogenic popsicle called a “juicybar” as a reward, which also functions as a laxative.

An addiction to juicybars can sometimes, of course, cause people to birth small, blue, and simple-minded mutant children. These mutants have been organized by a totalitarian charismatic leader into a revolutionary cell called “The Diaper Gang” (an ironic name, since they have lost total ability to shit) and they are constantly hounded by police forces, aided by an unstoppable government cyborg named Geko. Everyone wants to control the juicybar supply, including the two aforementioned anti-heroes, who always manage to be in the right place at the wrong time despite their general ineptitude (or perhaps because of it).

Now enter Jimmy the Freak, a drug-addled porn director who stumbles onto a means of tricking the system into over-dispensing juicybars and he hands this information to the leader of the Diapers. They then recruit anti-heroine and wannabe-pornstar Beauty (a woman imbued with the power to crap several times a day) to be the vessel for a “blessed” anal chip and soon accidentally lose her to Aachi and Ssipak (the latter of whom has fallen in love with her from afar). The three share the wealth amongst themselves and become outrageously rich from selling juicybars in the black market, while the police and Diaper Gang are hunting them down.

Phew.

If you can stomach a movie that takes place in a future where power is money and money is shit, then you’re in for a treat. “Aachi & Ssipak” took 8 years to complete and cost millions in production, so it’s more than just some cheap dirty ‘toon. It’s actually a very fast-paced and intense action animation chock full of gorgeous CGI, high-octane gun battles, and really vibrant colors. Think John Woo meets “South Park”, and you’d be pretty close. And as goofy as the plot is, which is tantamount, you would think, to that of a cheap B-movie, “Aachi & Ssipak” takes itself just seriously enough for it to be ranked up with some of the best of Asian animations, like “Dead Leaves” or “Afro Samurai”; other anime features considered politically incorrect but with enough balls to pull it off gracefully.

But the reason “Aachi & Ssipak” does pull it off so well is because it’s indeed a cartoon. If this had been live-action, it probably would have been too much; poop is only funny in theory. Same rule goes for the aforementioned movies, as animation gives it’s creators much more freedom when it comes to perverted and/or offensive humour and action and their audience greatly benefits.  But above all, “Aachi & Ssipak” has a very strong political message despite it’s obsessions with fecal matter, T & A, and gore. Much like the Cambodian government of 1975 (or any number of contemporary African governments), the political authorities of the world portrayed in this film are facing an insurgency of fanatical children soldiers (The Diaper Gang) led by a cult-like totalitarian leader who compares himself to Jesus Christ (a la Kim Jong-Il of North Korea). The world in which they live is very Orwell-esque, as the government makes addicts of it’s citizens, pushing them to poo more and more everyday, and even keeping a close eye on the number of times they defecate a day; one can go to prison if they don’t meet their monthly quota!

The only downfall of this movie is it’s inability to engage the viewer after the first 60 minutes. By then, the viewing audience is ready for anything and the film’s twists and turns are everything but shocking. The toilet humor (pun intended) is dropped at that point in exchange for more bullets, bloodshed, and explosions, so there is almost no plot to focus on anymore. Still, “Aachi & Ssipak” is a fun-filled attack on the senses that’s worth a view if you have ever owned an Adam Sandler record. Further proof that Koreans can make action movies like no other, no matter how absurd the premise.

Review: “Kakuto” (2003)

Yusuke wants his credit, god dammit!

Director: Yusuke Iseya

Cast: Yusuke Iseya, Atsushi Ito, Hassei Takano

Country: Japan

2003′s “Kakuto” marks the directorial debut of famous young actor, Yusuke Iseya, who is better known for his modelling work with Prada and his leading roles in Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django” (alongside Quentin Tarentino) and the beautiful but boring sci-fi flick “Casshern”. However, “Kakuto” strays far away from the big-budget action movies that make up the better part of his successful career and gives us a peek into a world that is everything but glamorous.

The initial plot revolves around Ryo (also performed by Iseya), a 20-something drug peddler with connections to local Yakuza (Japanese mafia-type dudes, if you didn’t know) and dabbles in the pimping of young girls. Though his work is less than honorable, Ryo is generally an upstanding young man: on his birthday, a Yakuza friend sends him into a night club bathroom with a bag of coke and a prostitute but instead flushes the drugs and parts ways with the girl. One night, he is called in by his extremely coked-out boss who, thinking that the clean-cut Ryo may be leaking information to the police, forces him to snort a line of cocaine and drop some LSD before sending him out to deliver a cigarette pack full of ecstasy. Ryo goes for a joy ride with two high-school buddies before the delivery, but somehow manages to lose the ecstasy outside his boss’ apartment complex. High on coke and acid, Ryo cannot remember how to get to the building, and the three only have minutes before the boss realizes the shipment didn’t arrive to his customer and labels Ryo a traitor.

“Kakuto” is a look at Asian youth running wild, seemingly and equally inspired by director Harmony Korine (“Kids”) and movies like “Go”, “Human Traffic” and “Trainspotting”. To add an authentic, documentary-type feel, the movie is filmed completely in DV (think “Handi-cam”) much like other movies in the “teen agnst and aimlessness” genre. Unfortunately, it’s full to the brim with distractingly random and unimportant characters spouting even more unimportant banter who manage to intersect in the strangest and most unbelievable of ways, sometimes rather forceably.

An excess in cast is by far and wide “Kakuto’s” biggest problem. We are introduced to probably twenty unconnected, different characters in the first thirty minutes of the film and it drastically takes away from what is supposed to be the center of our attention. Actually, the whole “on the run from Yakuza while high on psychedelics” turn in the story doesn’t boot up until the 70 minute mark, which is pretty brutal considering “Kakuto” runs at almost two hours. What takes place before that is a series of what feels like eaves-dropping on some really bored Japanese youngsters who discuss everything from Valentine’s Day cards at a cafe to Charlie Brown cartoons at a bath house. It also stars a kleptomaniac obsessed with life on Mars, two overweight stoners who wander the streets smoking massive joints, a cowardly policeman who gets dissed by some 12-year-olds buying cigarettes, a mohawked gangster running around asking friends for help on his debt, and the list goes on. None of these characters or their relentless and unnecessary roles bring about any characterization nor pushes the story forward. With so much going on, I was still confused as to how the three main protagonists know each other.

Worse even is Iseya’a portayal of someone high on both a hard drug like cocaine and a mind-warping substance like LSD. Though the premise and the movie’s poster might make one thing they are in for a trippy ride, Ryo hardly at all seems messed up until the end of the movie, where he takes his clothes off to cool down and the adrenaline forces him to tears. There’s a scene that’s almost straight out of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” where the pattern of their car’s interior starts to move about, but it’s hardly satisfying or “trippy”.

Needless to say, “Kakuto” lost me not even thirty minutes in. It’s not so much a movie for the first half of it as much as it is a collage of irrelevant discussions involving some weird and over-the-top people. The big chase between Ryo, his samurai sword-wielding boss, and the weaponless (wtf?) police detectives, which was supposed to be the main focus of “Kakuto”, takes a lifetime to evolve and only lasts for mere minutes. Forget this one, folks. If you’re a fan of brutally honest portrayals of misguided Asian youngsters, check out “15″ from Singapore or “Tears” from South Korea; expert examples on how to make a truly gripping film about the dark side of growing up.

TRAILER: http://www.nipponcinema.com/trailers/kakuto/

This Just In: FanTasia 2009 line-up announced!

Poster for the 2009 festival.

FanTasia Film Festival’s official website has just made public a press release that lists a large part of this year’s line-up. It is available as a PDF file here.

If you don’t feel like reading through all of that, I’ve made up a list of the films I am amped to check out myself, given they are screening during the week I am there (July 15th-21st).

The festival runs from July 9th to July 29th.

Trick’R'Treat
Grace
The Eclipse
Neighbor
The Children
8th Wonderland
Dead Snow (Trevor, if you’re reading this, you MUST check this out!)
Best Worst Movie
Breathless
Dream
Thirst
Yatterman
My Dear Enemy
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl
Rough Cut
Fireball
Crush And Blush
Paco And The Magic Book
Hells
Genius Party Beyond

Review: “Blood: The Last Vampire” (2009)

It's got enough blood but no guts.

Director: Chris Nohan

Cast: Gianna Jun, Koyuki

Country: USA

It’s been 9 years since Production IG’s “Blood: The Last Vampire” rocked anime fans’ world with it’s brilliant digital animation that was, back then, way ahead of it’s time. It’s popularity spawned not just this new live action movie, but an animated TV series in Japan, and a massively successful manga series. This is quite a feat for something only 50 minutes long and years in the making.

At the end of the original animated short, there is a “Making Of” featurette which explains that making “Blood” was migraine-inducing as they had put together over 100 minutes of footage and story to be used as a 3-episode mini-series, and later scrapped two-thirds of it and started anew. Besides funding issues and a tight deadline, they felt that there was too much filler and that the direction was wonky, thus ending up with a very short film that is high in production costs.

With the American live-action remake of 2009, “Blood” seems a lot like what Production IG would have ended up with if they hadn’t made the decision to cut the animation into a short film rather than a full-length or series. The live-action adaptation stays quite true to the anime, some of the action sequences transitioned identically almost frame-by-frame. However, one can only imagine what they could have done with only 50 minutes worth of material in making a 90 minute film.

Like the anime, “Blood” takes place during post-WW2 Japan and follows the story of a centuries-old vampire, Saya, who works for the CIA, tracking and killing “blood-suckers” (they are called “Chiropterrans” in the original story), bat-like shape-shifting demons who feast on human flesh. She goes undercover at a US air base and enrolls in the high school there to hunt out demons who may be there preying on children and faculty members. But unlike the animation, where there were a just a small number of Chiropterrans in hiding, live-action Saya finds out that her entire school and basically the city of Tokyo is infested with the monsters and teams-up with a general’s young daughter to destroy them.

And that’s where “Blood” loses juice. Writer Chris Chow and team try desperately to slow things down and elaborate on what the animated short taught us about Saya (which was not much) by greatly toning down the action, throwing in new supporting characters, more demons, and a thicker plot involving government corruption and Saya’s origin.

All of this complicates what was a relatively easy concept and it hinders the movie from being as exciting as the original. By bringing in more monsters, I’m sure the people behind this were out to create epic battle sequences to succeed the source material. But their “blood-suckers” (terrble name for something we’re supposed to be afraid of, and why they didn’t keep the name, Chiropterrans, is beyond me) are weak variations done with amateur CGI and the vampire-vs.-demon action involves a lot of cheap “wire-fu”.

It also raises the question — How do these “blood-sucker” murders take place without public knowledge when there are so many of them in a city like Tokyo? The big battle between Saya and about 50 “blood-suckers” in the middle of the movie takes place in the streets of one of the largest and most populated cities in the modern world, and yet, no bystander is seen for the entire fight, where Chiropterran blood is flying and lights are exploding. Saya leaves dozens of corpses lying around Tokyo and somehow the CIA is able it clean it up immediately and in time enough for no one to notice.

The girl who plays Saya, Gianna Jun, was also a poor cast choice. Not only is she a Korean playing a Japanese (asian’s asian, I guess), but her English is not so great either and her accent makes her sound goofy instead of mysterious. Her fighting choreography isn’t all that dazzling either, when it didn’t need much anyway. The animation was mostly hack-and-slash type violence while the US reincarnation tries to make it a kung-fu flick.

I do, however, appreciate the fact that this is the most loyal I’ve seen an American production stay to it’s Asian source. The opening 2 minutes is exactly the same as those of the anime, as well as some of the fantastic fights that made the original a classic. But in the end, as most of the influx of remakes, adaptations, and sequels, “Blood” is a highly unneccesary movie.

Review: “The Uninvited” (2009)

Not much to see here, folks.

Director: Charles & Thomas Guard

Cast: Emily Browning, Elizabeth banks

Country: USA

“The Uninvited” is an American remake of the grotesque 2003 Korean film “A Tale Of Two Sisters”, and if you have seen the original movie, you might have asked the same question I did when I heard about it’s inevitable American reinterpretation: Huh?

This is because “A Tale Of Two Sisters” was totally different from all of the creepy Asian girl-laden horror movies that have been adaptated over on this side of the planet since the success of “The Ring” (quite possibly the only decent remake, in my opinion). To me, “Sisters” really had nothing I could see American audiences finding any interest in as it was more of a complex psychological thriller than it was a ghost story. Sure, it had it’s share of ugly little kid ghosts but that’s not what made “Sisters” stand out amongst a flock of movies about haunted electronics.

I read in a review long ago that the best way to describe “Sisters” was to call it a “fright poem”. It didn’t follow conventional story-telling or time chronology and it’s intricate yet complex plot required multiple viewings in order to fully “get it”. It was a movie that forced it’s viewers to draw it’s own conclusions after a plethora of plot-twists and mind-fucks: that was the fun of it.

What the Guard brothers do with “The Uninvited”, however, is completely dumb it down to it’s bare bones for it’s English audience, fill it full of drunk and horny high school kids, and strip it of all it’s artistic integrity. It only appeals to the most vanilla of horror fans with it’s PG-13 rating and the plot twist is seen, even if you haven’t viewed the source material, coming a mile away.

Like “Sisters”. “The Uninvited” is about a girl, Anna, who returns home from her stay at a psycho ward, to the behest of the worst psychiatrist on film ever(!), to find that her father has married a significantly younger woman who helped nurse her mother who was gravely ill (with what, they don’t explain). While her mother was alive, the family kept her in a shed (I think this is new to the original story, and why they keep her there, I don’t know) in the front yard when it accidentally burns down with her mother inside. When Anna and her sister/best friend see that their new stepmother is acting quite peculiar, they suspect that their bitchy new house-guest (played perfectly by mega-babe Elizabeth Banks) is behind their mother’s death.

While the plot stays essentially the same if not more accessible for Western audience (lord knows we don’t like to be challenged), the acting and the script are cringe-inducing where the original was superb in both aspects, even for a non-Korean speaker. It’s full of cheap thrills and brutal teen-drama-type acting (which seems to be viral in these Asian horror remakes) and whole lot of dumb decisions made my protagonist Anna which had me yelling at the television (like “What the fuck are you thinking, you dumb bitch?!”).

Why I keep putting myself through hours upon hours of bad Asian-to-America adaptations, I’ll never know. Perhaps I’m waiting for another “The Ring” to come along and surpass my expectations and renew my faith in Hollywood (yeah right). I guess since I’ve seen “A Tale Of Two Sisters” long before I decided to torture myself with “The Uninvited” I’m slightly biased and it’s “shocking” conclusion never really shook me, so maybe if the “Sisters” concept is new to you, you might want to take a look if only to steer you into renting the source material and away from Asian horror rebuilds.

Anticipating: Apparently, there’s a “Blood: The Last Vampire” US remake coming out.

I had heard that there was an anime-to-live action adaptation of “Blood The Last Vampire” coming out soon, but little did I know it would be an American made film. I figured the Japanese were behind this as the source material is Japanese. Normally, I would ignore any American attempt at bringing a Japanese franchise to life (remember Dragonball and Street Fighter?), but this actually looks promising, and the reviews have been largely positive as it’s making it’s theater debut this month. It looks as if a lot of it is frame-by-frame the same as the animation (the jeep scene is a key moment in the original film) which is reassuring.

If you don’t know anything about the “Blood: The Last Vampire” 50-minute-long anime movie, check out this link, the 2000 trailer. The story revolves around Saya, a centuries-old vampire undercover as a school girl in an english language school on a US military base in post-WWII Japan. She hunts chiropterans, shape-shifting bat-like monsters who feed on human flesh. But what “Blood” became famous for what it’s unconventional (at the time) animation techniques. The animation for the film was completely digital. Rather than following the tradition of using animation cels, the entire film was inked, colored, and then animated with computers, making for some stunning 3-D action sequences. The movie also spawned off a comic book (manga) and video game series, as well as an anime television series called “Blood+”.

Looks promising...

This Just In: PS2 game “Shadow of the Colossus” being developed for big screen.

A still from the classic PS2 video game.

The good news: One of the best and most epic video games in the past 5 years, “Shadow Of The Colossus”, is being developed into a movie by Sony pictures. It is due out for next summer.

The bad news: It is being written by the same guys who wrote “Street Fighter: Legend Of Chun-Li”, a movie that single-handedly killed decades of video game history.

God help us all.

Review: “Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li” (2009)

Another terrible video game adaptation brought to you by the director of "Doom"!

Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak

Cast: Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein

Country: USA

By now you’re probably wondering why I keep finding myself watching terrible to mediocre movies. But I promise you my intentions with “The Legend Of Chun-Li” were good. Of course, I had heard that this latest adaptation of the “Street Fighter” video games was bad, but I had also heard that it was hilariously bad. To quote one friend of mine who actually paid to see it in theater, “It was the most fun I’ve had at the theater in a while”. I can’t say no to a “good bad movie”.

I also can’t say no to anything “Street Fighter” related. The original “Street Fighter II: The Animation” is one of my favorite animated films of all time (who can forget that brilliant Chun-Li vs. Vega battle with KMFDM booming in the background?!), and the “Alpha” anime movies that came out afterwards were above average and I enjoyed watching them. At one point in my life, I even owned the complete “Street Fighter II: V” anime TV series on video cassette. Above all, a childhood isn’t a childhood until you’ve played at least one of the “Street Fighter II” video games.

But what Hollywood has done to “Street Fighter” this time is unforgiveable.

Moongood in her work attire.

My friend mentioned above was semi-right: “The Legend Of Chun Li” is at times really fun to watch just for the sheer awfulness of the movie. I couldn’t say it was the most fun I’ve had watching a movie, but regardless, the first half of this mess is hysterical, while the second is total trash. It’s one of those bad flicks that’s still reasonably fun to watch while you’re drinking or smoking pot with some buddies. I just wish I could describe the plot to you but unfortunately there barely is one. It has something to do with Chun-Li wanting to avenge her father’s death by bringing down M. Bison (who, here, is the wimpiest incarnation of the mega-bad-ass villain ever) and his Shadowlow. Within this story, or lack thereof, lies some of the worst acting and dialogue caught on film.

The star of this disasterpiece (if you can call him that) is Chris Klein, the guy who ended the “American Pie” movie series by deciding he wanted to do more “serious roles”, who plays Charlie Nash, a cop who looks a little too much like Nicolas Cage. I couldn’t tell you how many times I burst out laughing during one of his lines. With lines like “Looks like you just inherited a big problem”, Klein really puts “Running Man” Arnold to shame. Props also go to a talentless actress named Moon Bloodgood (seriously) who plays Klein’s partner, whose unprofessional police attire will give you a few laughs and maybe a boner.

And if you’re a fan of the “Street Fighter” franchise whatsoever and you plan on giving this movie a shot, toss everything you know about the SF world out the window. God knows the people behind this movie did. For some reason, Chun-Li is the only character whose story coincides with that of the game at all and is the only one who has super power. Even Bison, the boss of the video games and therefore the most powerful SF fighter, is just some dick in a nice suit with an Irish accent (even though he was raised in Thailand… good grief!).

Taboo as Vega. Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

The biggest sin that “The Legend Of Chun-Li” commits is the fight between the masked Vega and Chun-Li. As I mentioned earlier, their fight in the first SF animated movie made it a classic, but here it’s like watching a pillow fight. I would say they probably used the same fight choreographer as the one they used in those lame daytime action TV shows like “Xena”, but “Xena” was better. Did I mention that the Spanish fighter Vega is played by Native American “Taboo” from the Black Eyed Peas? They couldn’t even get it racially consistent (hey, us fanboys take that shit seriously!)

I guess, if you’re curious enough, I’d say give “The Legend of Chun-Li” a shot just for the guilty pleasure of seeing Chris Klein’s career go down the toilet, for it’s his cheesy acting that is the one saving grace for this movie even if it wasn’t intentional.

But hey, don’t just take my word for it!

Review: “Deadgirl” (2009)

Rich idea, poor execution.

Director: Marcel Sarmiento

Cast: Shiloh Fernandez, Noah Segan

Country: USA

Just when you thought the new wave of American zombie movies was finally dead and buried, along comes Deadgirl, an interesting low-budget film that takes the zombie genre to a whole new, controversial level: zombie rape. But worry not: it is not the type of torture-porn (such as Martyrs, from France) your mind might conjure up when you think of such a disgusting concept. Instead, Deadgirl forces it’s viewers, especially young men, to ask themelves if love and sex can be one in the same, and where do we draw the line when it comes to feeding our sexual desires.

Two high school buddies, JT and Rickie (oh yeah, the movie is full of generic names), are sexually frustrated loners with a whole lot of teenage angst. They spent their free time getting high and drunk in abandoned buildings and venting about girl and school problems. One night after school they break in to an abandoned asylum to hang out and find a filthy, naked girl chained down in the basement. The two argue whether to call the police or not but soon find out that the girl cannot be killed and whatever wounds they inflict on her quickly heal on their own. While Rickie is a little more sympathetic to the situation of this undead girl, JT takes full advantage and starts to skip school to spend his days raping her, experimenting on her, and using her as his punching bag, even having some friends over to join in. If that’s not brutal enough, he even cuts new holes in to her stomach to penetrate when she “dries up”. It’s not long before JT figures out that anyone and anything bitten by the girl becomes just like her and so he hatches a plan to kidnap and create more “deadgirls”.

“Zombie rape” would seem like a dead give away that this is going to be heavy on the shock value, but other than the controversial subject matter itself, Deadgirl is pretty tame. I’m not asking for excess gratuity here, but every scene involving blood-letting has the camera cutting away from the action, even when the circumstances are downright perturbed anyway. An example of this is a scene where a young man shits out his own intenstinal tract, but the camera only allows us a half-second blink at what’s happening. The script calls for some heavy violence, sex and gore, but the viewer sees none of it, which may or may not be a question of funding.

The characters and the actors portraying them also cripple the movie quite a bit. As I had mentioned, the kids’ names are plain and typical (Rickie, JT, Johnny, Clint, Wheeler, to name a few) and 80% of the dialogue is teen-drama type trash (“I’m just trying to defend your honour, baby!”). Rickie and JT are supposed to be the freaky high school outcasts but look as though they stepped off the cover of a Sears catalogue.

There are also a lot of loose ends that the movie doesn’t tie up on it’s own. Plot holes, if you will. I won’t get into the lot of them as to not give away too much about the movie, but let’s just say that we really have no idea how JT figures out that this “zombie-ism” can be spread as you never once see it happen in action. The dead girl even takes a massive bite out of a dog not even halfway through, and we never see that dog again.

Despite having a really fresh take on the whole zombie fad, Deadgirl is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination. It’s full of innovative ideas and powerful messages about our compassion and sexuality, but it’s ruined by having too many loose ends and some very amateur-ish acting. Still, it’s worth at least one viewing for the sake of being the only movie of it’s kind in a stale market.

This Just In: Miike’s “Yatterman” and Park’s “Thirst” make North American debuts at FanTasia!

FanTasia Film Festival has just made it official: the Cannes Jury Prize winning “Thirst” by Park Chan-Wook, and the live-action remake of the classic anime “Yatterman” by infamous Japanese director Takashi Miike, will both be making their North American screening debuts during the 13th annual genre movie fest.

No particular dates and times have been announced for either one, but fans of Asian horror and, obviously, Miike’s cult following will take notice.

A still from "Thirst", Park Chan-Wook's latest vampire flick.

A still from Miike's "Yatterman", a live-action remake of a 70's anime favorite.

Review: “Tokyo Zombie” (2005)

I'm a massive Asano fan, and I'm afraid this happens to be one of the very few to add to his pile of stinkers.

Director: Sakichi Satô

Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Sho Aikawa

Country: Japan

When I first started to hook myself up with a blog and focus on film, my original intentions were to either make a movie blog tribute to either wacky Japanese director Takashi Miike (who has literally hundreds of directorial credits under his belt) or my favorite actor out of Asia, Japan’s Tadanobu Asano (also, hundreds of acting credits for a reasonably young actor). Though if I chose either one of those subjects, I would have plenty of material to work with, but I decided to not limit myself to their work alone.

When I came to discover that there was a zombie comedy movie called “Tokyo Zombie” out there that not only starred Tadanobu Asano, but was written by the same man who wrote Takashi Miike’s “Ichi The Killer” (in which, strangely enough, also starred Asano in a leading role that went on to inspire Heath Ledger’s Joker character), I had to get my hands on a copy and review the shit out of it.

You see, Tadanobu Asano is like the stranger and busier version of America’s Johnny Depp. Asano is young, handsome, and has won enough film awards to sink a small boat. Aside from being in some really big career-changing roles (such as “Ichi The Killer” which shares the same writer as this film, or the massively successful “Mongol”) he also finds himself in some more under-the-radar films that range from goofy (“Survive Style 5+”, “Party 7″) to dark and utterly twisted (“Rampo Noir”, “Vital”). Tadanobu Asano is my favorite actor because of his ability and interest in working in a very ecclectic mix of films and not limiting himself to the more accessible and higher end projects. Add all this up and throw in a bad-ass movie title like “Tokyo Zombie”, and you’ve got my attention by the balls.

Unfortunately, the movie seems to have very little of both Tokyo and zombies, and even less coherence in it’s plot. “Tokyo Zombie”, based off a REALLY badly drawn manga, is set in a post-apocalyptic Japan where in the middle of it’s capital is a giant garbage heap of a mountain entitled “Black Fuji”, where people dump everything from used dead refrigerators to the corpses of molested school boys. The protagonists are two friends, Fujio (Asano) and Mitsuo (Aikawa), who spend their lunch breaks at work practicing Jujitsu. After an altercation with their boss, they kill him and go to bury him in Black Fuji where, unbeknownst to them, reanimated corpses are already crawling out to feast upon the living (no explanation is really given as to why and how this is happening). They head back to work but find that it’s under attack by the Black Fuji zombies so they must use their Jujitsu skills to make it out alive. They decide to head to Russia in their van (since that’s where “real men should live”, apparently) and on the way they save a girl from a gas station (hmm… “Wild Zero” anyone?) which forces our heros to part ways.

After that, the movie completely shifts gears. The “buddy” movie aspect of it is completely dropped and void of all the comedic value the first half of the film had (which wasn’t much anyway). “Tokyo Zombie” has it’s moments, most of them involving the silly banter between Asano and Aikawa, who have Beavis and Butthead-like chemistry on film, but they’re too few and far between. The humour is very much Japanese. Most of it is mildly funny slapstick or, what the Japanese seem to love, off color perverted jokes. Hentai humour, if you will, which I always thought was in poor taste. If you’re the type to be into that, you’ll be happy to know that there’s lots of old men fondling school children (boys and girls) and zombie blow jobs.

This movie is very influenced by the likes of fellow Japanese zombie satires like “Versus” and the classic “Wild Zero”, but it has the audience scratching their heads more than doubling over in laughter. It’s a little too all over the place in terms of story, and the movie is hardly at all entertaining soon as Asano and Aikawa part ways mid-way through it leaving it’s star actor to carry the weight of a poor script for the remaining 40 minutes. I’m a massive Asano fan, and I’m afraid this happens to be one of the very few to add to his pile of stinkers.