Stalking Sammo Hung, Joyce Godenzi, and Simon Yam

Watching…

KUNGFU CHEFS (2009)

If you are looking for a sign that Hong Kong is lifting itself out of the abyss it’s film industry collapsed into in the early days of the new millennium, Kung Fu Chefs is not the sign for which you are questing. It’s cheap, shoddy, sloppy, and generally idiotic. But it’s not lazy, it’s not mean-spirited, and it’s not lethargic. This isn’t the kind of movie that will turn someone into a Hong Kong movie fan, but if you’ve been one for a long time, and you remember the old days of renting VHS tapes from the local Chinese grocery store and sifting through all sorts of goofy junk while boiling your bag of frozen potstickers, then you might, like me, find a movie worth enjoying amid all this nonsense.

When you’ve got a movie with a title like Malibu High, released with a poster showing a bikini-clad woman lying seductively, and being released by Crown International Pictures in the 1970s, you probably think you know what you are going to get – a teenage sex romp. And you’d be wrong. Instead, it is a movie that will show teenagers that the best way to better yourself is to engage in blackmail, prostitution, and eventually murder. To think I wasted all my high school years studying.

BLUE DEMON

Scientists create great white sharks that obey basic FORTRAN commands, such as GOTO, EAT, and NO EAT. Of course, the sharks escape and get stuck in EAT mode.

Review Snippet:
“A shark is our best defense against a terrorist with an atomic bomb? Won’t the nuke be in a boat? Are they expecting some radical Islamist to swim from Afghanistan to California with an atomic suicide vest?”

Lesson Learned:
A box truck can out-accelerate a Saab 900.

Got to work chipping my pile of unreviewed screeners down to more manageable proportions while I was at it:

The Alcove (1984), in which having someone literally give you Laura Gemser as a thank-you present turns out to suck a lot more than you’d think (and in which I never did see any alcoves)…

Flatliners (1990), in which Kiefer Sutherland and a team of fairly trepid med students take a tour of the afterlife, and all they get is this lousy haunting…

Masters of the Universe (1987), in which Golan and Globus come late to the party with their bid to cash in on the popular toy line, and even Dolph Lundgren understands how much the resulting movie stinks…

Penance (2009), in which being a stripper– or hell, just knowing a stripper– carries even more occupational hazards than you realized…

Roller Boogie (1979), which starts out being Saturday Night Fever on skates, then turns into Don’t Knock the Rock on skates, then finally decides that it wants to be Black Belt Jones on skates, too…

Sherlock Holmes (1922), in which the reality of John Barrymore playing Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous character comes up short in comparison to anything you might have pictured when you read that phrase…

and…

Supervan (1977), in which we see that literally nothing is too insignificant to attract the attention of movie producers hankering after a share of the youth market.
 
 
 

OPERATION WHITE SHARK

It quickly becomes clear that our visit to Curtain Guy’s office is for the purpose of a little pregame exposition, which is all pure 1960s spy movie boilerplate: A kidnapped scientist; a new kind of atomic device that could “destroy all human life” if it should fall into “the wrong hands”; a one week window to recover the device before those wrong hands that it’s fallen into start touching all over it; a clandestine atomic laboratory — perhaps located beneath the Mediterranean Sea — that needs to be located before it’s too late. The superior then outlines for the attendant anonymous functionary those attributes that the agent assigned to the job must possess: “Perfect understanding of Italian, French, and a complete understanding of nuclear science. And the man must also be an expert sailor.”

BLACK TIGHT KILLERS

Even though the cast and crew are making a lark of a movie, Hasebe never lets it collapse under the weight of its own self-awareness. He understands that the best spoof of the campy spy film of the 1960s also has to be a very enjoyable spy film, and Black Tight Killers doesn’t forget to entertain. Kobayashi, as usual, throws himself into the role’s physical aspects with gusto, and he and the girls who make up the black tight squad get to have frequent fights with fists, feet, guns, bamboo bazookas, and of course more mundane weapons like killer albums and ninja chewing gum. The whole thing is light, frothy, and totally ridiculous. Black Tight Killers looks like some scamp replaced the crew’s cameras with kaleidoscopes

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Hey, remember that house-keeping I kept going on about??

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I have now re-formatted and added screenshots to:

The Great Gabbo (1929)

The Mysterious Island (1929)

The Unholy Night (1929)

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There will be some viewers who will feel that Defense Play is seriously out of date. It takes place back in a time not only when floppy disks were being used, but when floppy disks were actually floppy. But I admit that all this low-tech stuff in the movie was pleasantly nostalgic for me. I grew up with that now-dated technology, and it was nice seeing this obsolete stuff once again. It’s too bad that the movie’s script didn’t please me as much as the technology it presented.

ZARDOZ

Where can you find Sean Connery dressed in a loincloth, a giant flying stone head that spouts NRA rhetoric from one side of its mouth, and denounces unprotected sex from the other, and a commune filled with people who are so bored with life that they have given up on enjoying anything at all? The Seventies baby, the Seventies.

Something to watch for:
50 mins – Between the perms and the half-tops, I cannot tell the difference between men and women. I haven’t been this confused since Thailand.