The B-Masters Cabal

I dedicate this screencap, and my review of the movie it comes from, to Dr. Freex:

(Punchlines are a dish best served cold.)

Hannibal (1960)

Our second film from the New York Asian Film Festival (got to see a lot less than I wanted, but ain’t that always the case). Can Jackie make up for The Tuxedo, Robin B. Hood, and getting drunk and crashing the stage during some pop idol’s concert?

LITTLE BIG SOLDIER
In 2009, Chan made Shinjuku Incident. It was not the Jackie Chan movie people expected. This movie saw a much grimmer Chan, something more along the lines of the glimpse we got in Ringo Lam’s Crime Story. Here was a Jackie Chan who was no longer trying to deny his age. Here was a Jackie Can who was trying to make a good movie, with a good script and good acting. After years of poopy diaper jokes and Jennifer Love Hewitt striking Karate Kid poses, Shinjuku Incident seemed to be saying that it was time to start paying attention to Jackie Chan again. And then, in 2010, came Little Big Soldier, and Jackie Chan fans, covered in cobwebs and the dust of the wasteland, knew that our time in the wilderness was finally at an end.

Psst! I know a secret that I think you’d be interested in knowing. It has to do with the famous magician David Copperfield. Remember how years ago, he made The Statue Of Liberty disappear? I know how he did it. If you want to know how he did it, simply read my review of the magic-themed Ben Gazzara movie Quicker Than The Eye, and in the review you’ll find the answer. And if I get enough positive comments about this review, I will tell you guys the ingredients of the coating mix on Kentucky Fried Chicken (is it really eleven herbs and spices?)

My one-month sabbatical is over, and there’s really no better way for me to get back into the swing of things than with the material for which I’m so well known:

Killer dolls.

Demonic Toys 2 (2010)

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.”