…but I needed the following morning as well. This new update turned out more Christmasy than I intended when a seemingly simple idea spiraled out of my control:
Challenge of the Masters (1976), which is basically Drunken Master without the jokes…
Executioners from Shaolin (1977), in which Lau Kar Leung caps off Chang Cheh Shaolin Temple cycle before getting to work on his own…
Exposed to Danger (1982), about the closest thing you’ll ever find to a Chinese giallo…
Lake of Dracula (1971), another of the surprisingly numerous Dracula movies with no Dracula…
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972), in which you’ll have no more idea what an Ice Cream Bunny is after watching than you had to begin with…
Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), in which it makes sense for Jacob Marley to do all the work, since there are only six minutes of screen time in which to finish it…
Old Scrooge (1913), in which Marley has to do it all again, for reasons that aren’t nearly as obvious…
Scrooge (1935), in which Ebenezer Scrooge talks for the first time at feature length, and has to contend with the correct number of ghosts, too…
and…
Wolfen (1981), a werewolf movie with no werewolves.
#1 by supersonic on January 6, 2025 - 11:13 pm
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Re the linked Dragonwyck review:
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a film made roughly a year after the liberation of Auschwitz would have its socially and politically powerful villain express such sentiments, or that the same villain would also espouse a specifically Nietzschean form of atheism in which the nonexistence of God implies the unreality of morals.”
Actually the idea that libertines and cads and villains disbelieve in God and therefore in morality was a very standard trope centuries ago — it probably predates the invention of the novel, let alone cinema. In those days it was just understood (at least in written-down culture) that someone who didn’t believe the Bible would have no comprehension of how anything they wanted to do could be bad or wrong.
#2 by ronald on January 7, 2025 - 11:53 am
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I’ve been reading B-Masters Cabal reviews since, well, since I first got onto the internet about 26 years ago, and your reviews are consistently the most well-written with the least amount of time between posting one set of reviews and then posting the next one. Thank you. Just felt like saying that for some reason. Take care. 🙂
#3 by supersonic man on January 11, 2025 - 10:35 pm
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Wait… is Executioners from Shaolin the one where the dad’s old book of Martial Arts has been half-eaten by mice so the son has to fake it, thereby coming up with an unorthodox style of his own?
#4 by El Santo on January 11, 2025 - 11:57 pm
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It is indeed. Wen-Ding tries to bone up on the Tiger Style to add some raw power to his pre-existing finesse-based kung fu, but the manual is in bad shape by the time he gets his hands on it.