★★½
Lady Snowblood
I’ll be honest: I was disappointed. I’d been looking forward to seeing this for a long while, but when we finally cranked it up on Monday, found it pretty dull. Truth be told, Chris was giving it loud Z’s by the end of the film, and I spent a few minutes closing my eyes and just listening to the dialogue. Which, since it was in Japanese, isn’t a good sign either. This was a surprise. A lot of people, whose views I generally respect, really like it, such as mandiapple.com, who called it “nothing short of a masterpiece.” Reading that, I had to check they were reviewing the same film. Because, personally, while its influence on Kill Bill is undeniable, that is a far more effective piece of work.
The plot in both is needlessly-convoluted, but it has much more of a negative impact here. Here is the story, in chronological order. In late 19th-century Japan, a mother sees her husband and young son slaughtered by a group of four con-artists; she is kidnapped and raped over a period of several days before being abandoned. She vows revenge, but is arrested after killing only one of the four, and sent to prison for life. There, she has a baby daughter, Yuki, spawned for the sole purpose of continuing the revenge. After the mother dies in jail, Yuki is released with another prisoner, and begins her training under a tough Buddhist priest (Nishimura). When she reaches her twentieth birthday, she leaves, to start her mission.
The problems here are multiple, not least that Yuki is just too cold. She might as well be an automaton, as she progresses on her vengeance, showing no emotion or feeling, and it’s hard to feel empathy for her. Yes, she is supposed to be a cold-hearted killing machine, but the performance here is devoid of all humanity. There’s nothing personal here either. Yuki is not the victim; the events in question occurred before she was even conceived, giving her no direct stake in proceedings – she is simply a tool, wielded from beyond the grave by a mother she never really knew. Contrast Kill Bill, where the Bride sees her husband-to-be slaughtered at the altar. As motivation, it’s far superior and resonates much more with the audience.
Then there’s the action, which is second-rate at best. It may have seemed cutting-edge when the film was released in 1973. Approaching forty years later… Not so much. There’s little sense that anyone – good or bad – has true sword skills, and the battles are largely brief and perfunctory. Admittedly, the arterial spray is enthusiastic – clearly the high blood-pressure epidemic affecting Japan is not a new phenomena – and looks very pretty on the snow backdrop which is frequently used. However, that can only go some way to overcoming the flaws in the characterization: one suspects the original manga, by Kazuo Koike (who also did Lone Wolf and Cub), perhaps had more room to be better developed in this area. And while we’re at it, what’s with the anachronistic jazz soundtrack, dating from a good half-century after this is set? Any sense of period atmosphere is completely destroyed, every time it cranks up.
What works is mostly the visual style, and it’s soundly put together from a technical aspect. Kaji, who plays the adult Yuki, is also solid enough, though was probably better – even if she said less! – in the Female Convict Scorpion series [I must get round to reviewing the excellent Jailhouse 41 here some time, though it won’t be till after we move house in October, and the DVD re-surfaces…]. I also liked the chaste purity here: Yuki doesn’t have any real relationships at all – she lives purely for revenge. However, I feel much the same way about this, that I did about the original Night of the Living Dead. While it certainly deserves to be respected for its influential place in the history of the genre, it feels as if the elements seen here have been revisited with greater success, by those who followed in its foot-steps.
Dir: Toshiya Fujita
Star: Meiko Kaji, Ko Nishimura, Toshio Kurosawa, Masaaki Daimon
★★
Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance
I was hoping that the second film would show me why this series has such a solid reputation, but was even more disappointed by the sequel than the original. There’s a striking opening, where Yuki basically walks out of an ambush, hardly bothering even to pay attention to the men circling her – except to slaughter them. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much downhill from there, with proceedings getting badly bogged down in even more of the political shenanigans that we saw in part one. Yuki is arrested and sentenced to death for her 37(!) murders, but is rescued by the chief of the secret police, Kikui Seishiro (Kishida), who sends her on a mission against nihilist Ransui Tokunaga (Itami), perceived as a threat to the order of things.
That’s because Tokanaga and his wife are in possession of a document that could seriously embarrass the government, by proving their involvement in the deaths of Tokunaga’s partners. When Yuki discovers this, she switches sides, though Tokunaga is arrested, tortured and, when he fails to give up the document’s location, injected with bubonic plague [interestingly, this is a decade before the biological weapons work of Unit 731 during WW2 became public knowledge in Japan] and dumped in the slums as a warning to others. Yuki teams up with Tokunaga’s estranged brother, and sets out to take revenge on the government forces responsible for his death.
This is set just after the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, and I’ve a feeling is meant in some way to parallel the political situation of the 1970’s. However, all such sentiment is entirely wasted on Western viewers watching it almost forty years after it was made. If you’re looking at this as an action movie, it plays out in a manner best described as turgid, with very sporadic action, to such an extent that it hardly qualifies as such at all – if it weren’t for the original, I doubt I’d be covering it here. Even the arterial gushiness seems to be less unenthusiastic and sprayful than previously.
On the other hand, Kaji’s portrayal is more emotionally-disengaged this time, and it’s even harder to develop sympathy for a character engaged in some kind of obscure political activism, rather than personal revenge. It’s what perhaps makes this one’s closest cousin V For Vendetta, with samurai swords. And, in case you were wondering, that is not meant to be much of an endorsement. I’d say you are far better off watching the futuristic remake, The Princess Blade or even the better entries in the Crimson Bat series than either of these films, and given my high hopes coming into these, based on their reputation, that’s extremely disappointing.
Dir: Toshiya Fujita
Star: Meiko Kaji, Juzo Itami, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Shin Kishida
★★★★
Rob Zombie has had an interesting career, to say the least. From the early days as the front-man of heavy-metal band White Zombie, through his own solo work [heavily influenced by B-movies], and then on into his movies. That started with the fairly-crap House of 1000 Corpses, then the better Devil Rejects, and then his remakes of the first two Halloween movies, which were ok, as remakes of horror classics go. And then there’s The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, an animated feature which I stumbled across on cable. Well, actually, Chris did: “I Tivo’d a movie for you,” she said. And, surprisingly, she stayed for the entire thing, and appeared to enjoy this animated feature. Which is odd, because it has much the same gleeful, excessive insanity as Bitch Slap, which she walked out on.
Zombie was responsible for the Werewolf Women of the SS faux-trailer in Grindhouse, and brings much the same gleeful approach to proceedings here. Indeed, we first see Suzi-X kidnapping the head of Hitler, which is kept alive in a jar (as in They Saved Hitler’s Brain), and then has to escape by fighting her way through a massive pack of Nazi zombies (that’d be from Shock Waves). Carnage ensues, as it pretty much does, any time Suzi-X is on the screen, which is a lot – she gets far more of the action than El Superbeasto does. Proceedings culminate in a lengthy, slo-mo catfight, entirely necessary to the plot, between her and Von Black, while the soundtrack cheerily informs us that “It’s OK to jerk off to cartoons – the Japanese do it every day – so rub one out for the USA…”
“Oh, look,” I said to Chris. “Whiteout is just starting. It’s about a US marshal investigating a murder in Antarctica. Let’s take a look, shall we?” And, of course, the first thing we see is Kate Beckinsale bending over in her underwear, as she undresses to take a shower. I haven’t heard her eyes whirring as they rolled in her skull like that, probably since the first 20 minutes of Bitch Slap. I’ll have to sit through a few Ghost Whisperer episodes to make up for that. God forbid, maybe even stay awake for one. The sad news is, that was probably the most memorable moment in a film which, on balance, is marginally less interesting than the weather phenomena name-checked in the title.
After making an undeniable impact strapped to a car bonnet in the second-half of Grindhouse, Zo…Hang on, let me find the right key on the keyboard… Ah, there we are… Zoë gets to do some actual ‘acting’, rather than playing a stuntwoman called Zoë Bell [Way to go, Tarantino!] Thios started as a web-based series of ten episodes, but is now available on DVD, which is how we watched it. Bell plays Eve, an assassin whose personality radically changes after she is stabbed in the head. She starts to see one of her victims – a young girl – and as a result, decides to go after those who ordered the death. Needless to say, her manager and handler Graham (Poth) is not impressed by this sudden burst of morality, and neither are those who have now become her target, including up-and-coming gangster boss Jake Abel, who sends his minions out to take care of her before she takes care of him.
In the near(ish) future, Japan has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which only the strong survive. Initially, that does not include Milly (Mizuno), who is tortured by the Jack brothers and their gang: her baby is set on fire, while she has her breasts sliced off and is left for dead. However, she survives, albeit in a partially-mechanical form, and has now devoted her life to revenge on those responsible. Her artificial enhancements include a shotgun leg, a sword up her sleeve and a chest that… Well, that has to be seen to be believed, let’s just leave it at that, shall we? That’s Hard Revenge Milly, the first of the two films on the Western release DVD.
Ward (whom we’ll watch in anything, as payment for the enjoyment Tremors has given us) plays John McWhirter, a hard-bitten journalist with a fondness for the bottle, who is still trying to put behind him an incident when he was a young radical, that led to his friends being sent to jail for long terms, while John escaped doing time. He’s looking into the murder of an industrialist by Palestinian terrorists, when said friends show up, asking him to hide a woman (Ticotin) from the authorities for a few days, describing her as an activist in Shining Path, a Peruvian rebel group. Turns out she’s not who she seems, and it also turns out John had more to do with his friends’ arrests, thirty years ago, than it initially appeared. With enemies in the FBI, led by Robert Lecker (Plummer), an ally in the CIA, and a female assassin (Miller, right) out to tidy up all the loose ends, McWhirter has to decide whether to do what’s right, what’s easy, or what’s best for himself – and those might be three mutually exclusive options.
With B-movie entrepreneur Roger Corman getting honoured at the Oscars earlier this month, it seems appropriate to pop on one of his classic productions, starring Dickinson, who was just about to become a star in one of the first shows with a female law-enforcement lead, Police Woman. The truth is, however, that this doesn’t have much more to offer beyond Dickinson: while she holds the film together with her steely resolve, and proves that sexy doesn’t stop at 40, the rest of it offers nothing as substantial. It’s a basic enough plot: she plays Wilma McClatchie, a single mom bringing up her two teenage daughters in Depression-era rural America. They fall into a life of crime, in part because they happen to be trying to cash a fraudulent check in a bank when it gets robbed by Fred Diller (Skerritt). They also team up with gentleman con-artist William Baxter (Shatner), but things go awry when they pull of their last big heist, kidnapping the daughter of a millionaire.
This feels more like a mid-season episode of Alias than anything else, and not much more than a filler episode at that. I say this, because so little effort is put into developing the characters, it’s as if the makers reckon everything had already been established in the previous seven installments. And since there 
★½
I usually have no problem going on about GWG movies at some length. Hell, I even managed 750 words on DOA: Dead or Alive, and for that one, I had to re-read my review to remember what it was about. But when I got to the end of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, my first thought was, “What the hell am I going to write about this?” It seemed likely the only way I’d get to 750 words, would be by repeating the title one hundred and twenty-five times. For the film is ill-conceived, poorly cast, badly written and directed by the man who managed to make Jet Li look bad, not once but twice, in Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave.
And I believed Street Fighter II was a fighting game. Silly me. It’s far too talky: all mouth and no trousers, to borrow a good ol’ British phrase. The fights themselves, choreographed by Dion Lam, aren’t bad, though the welding of some of the Street Fighter moves into the game doesn’t work – Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick, for example, just looks silly. But otherwise, they aren’t awful; there’s a nice brawl in a bathroom between our heroine and Bison’s henchwomen. However, particularly in the first hour, there just aren’t enough of them, and what should be a fast-paced slugfest becomes bogged down as Chun-Li meanders her way, with a somewhat concerned expression, around the slums of Bangkok [which actually look surprisingly liveable. You want real slums, try Mumbai].