Tag: 1986

Book of Heroes

  By

★★★
“Double-you Tee Eff?”

bookifheroesThe ranking here would probably be at least half a star higher, if I had the slightest freakin’ clue what’s going on here. For this has truly the worst subtitling I’ve seen in a quarter century of watching Hong Kong action films, with text that is entirely illegible more often than not. You’re left trying to piece together the plot, based on fragments of sentences and on-screen action, which significantly subtracts from the entertainment value. Good thing we have the Internet, and can turn to that for a coherent synopsis of proceedings, that will shine some light on who was doing what to whom, and why.

Having learned that the underworld society smuggled a batch of gold, the police authority sent Hu Pai and so on to watch and arrest. But unexpectedly it’s robbed by the 5th Rat of another gang. Therefore, Hu Pai was demoted as a traffic policeman. Hu Pai’s girl friend Little Wild Cat intended to join Royal Police but didn’t know how to get in, and so handled cases often in the name of Hu Pai. One day, when she met the youngest of Five Rats and was ready to arrest him, but was stopped by Risking San Niang. The second boss of Five Rats and Lawyer contrarily accused Little Wild Cat for pretending to be police. The 5th Rat wanted to sell the robbed gold to the 1st boss, but the latter took possession of it and sent Black Baboon to kill the 5th Rat. Before dying, the 5th Rat said “gold drawing, elder sister, fire” Little Wild Cat and Hu Pai started to investigate the 5th Rat’s sister Ever Changing Fox. Fox and her partner Smiling Tiger held the picture of hiding gold. The 1st boss, for the gold, started a chasing fight with Fox, Smiling Tiger and Stupid Rat. They used tricks one another with being extremely ridiculous.

bookofheroes2Well, crap. I was following that, right up to “batch of gold”.

Let me translate and summarize the summary of this Taiwanese action-comedy. What matters, is really that a shipment of smuggled gold has gone missing: the bad guys  led by Yamashita (Kurata) and his top enforcer (Oshima) want it, the police want to stop them, led by the plucky but largely incompetent Hu Pai (Gua Hu) and his cop wannabe girlfriend, Little Wild Cat (Hsin-chuen Lan). There’s also a couple of confidence tricksters – Ever Changing Fox (Yeung) and Smiling Tiger (Tao), if you’re keeping score – who end up collaborating with the cops to that end, though they have their own agenda in mind. Wacky hi-jinks ensue. Fortunately, so does a lot of action. Yeung has been seen here before, in Challenge of the Lady Ninja, Golden Queens Commando and Pink Force Commando, while Oshima’s credentials shouldn’t even need mentioning. Suffice it to say, asses are kicked in some volume, though the undercranking used to speed up the fight scenes is sometimes painfully obvious, and hardly necessary.

But there’s enough good here to balance out the negative aspects. Just don’t make the mistake of bothering to care about the storyline or the characters; in fact, you might as well save yourself a lot of time and just watch the fight compilation embedded below. All of the violence, none of the goofy (and largely unamusing) attempts at comedy, and a good hour saved for you to do something more worthwhile instead. You’re welcome!

Dir: Chu Yen Ping
Star: David Tao, Elsa Yeung, Yasuaki Kurata, Yukari Oshima

Sexy Battle Girls

  By

★½
“Neither sexy nor battle-y. They are, however, girls. So, one out of three then.”

sexybattlegirlsIt takes real effort for a film that’s barely an hour long, significantly to overstay its welcome, but SBG manages to do exactly that, thanks to its woeful combination of shoddy action and tedious sex scenes. The heroine is teenager Mirai Asamiya (Hashimoto, about as much an actual teenager as I am), who has been transferred to a new school at the behest of her father. Little does she know, at least initially, that she is simply a tool for his revenge, headmaster Bush (Hotaru) having seduced Mirai’s mother away from her husband, and run off with her. To this end, Mirai has been brought up with what we should call, a very particular set of skills: we’ll spare you the details of exactly what the “Venus Crush” involves, but it does lead to the classic line, “He doesn’t know how dangerous your vagina is!” Before she can reach her target, she has to get close by dethroning and replacing his current enforcer of discipline, Susan (Taguchi), and also get past Bush’s lesbian daughter (Kiyokawa).

It’s clearly intended as a spoof of the Sukeban Deka genre, with the heroine wielding another Japanese toy, a kendama, rather than a yo-yo – in this case, her weapon also has a little phallus, and no prizes for guessing where it’s aimed. The resulting moaning and thrashing around, only slows the pace of this down even further. There are also subplots involving schoolgirls being prostituted off to Japanese politicians, and a truancy officer who looks the other way in exchange for sex. Maybe the former was of particular cultural significance in its native land at the time this was released in 1986; here, it’s just a dangling cinematic preposition, hard to put up with. The film does occasionally show some berserk invention: let’s just say, you don’t need to worry about slicing apples when Mirai around. However, I’d estimate a good half of its running time is tedious soft-core sex scenes of one form or another, and the action, when it appears, makes the original Sukeban Deka fights look like Bruce Lee at the peak of his career.

I guess it’s kind of churlish to complain about a pinku movie containing sex. But there are ways and means by which it can be used, and combined with the other plot elements in a manner that enhances them. The makers of this are apparently unaware of all such techniques, and prefer an approach which feels like a crap action movie crashed headlong into a crap soft-porn film, with the floor sweepings used to assemble the finished product. Never mind “uncut” and “unrated,” the finished product here is damn near unwatchable.

Dir: Mototsugu Watanabe
Star: Kyôko Hashimoto, Yukijirô Hotaru, Ayumi Taguchi, Ayu Kiyokawa
a.k.a. Target Campus: Attack the Uniform

Royal Warriors

  By

★★★½
“Royal pains.”

royalwarriorsIt’s really the finale which makes this stand out – not necessarily for its qualities (though it’s far from bad), more for the batshit insanity. It sees ex-cop Michelle Yip (Yeoh) storm a construction site in an armoured car, to rescue the coffin containing the body of a colleague, which has been suspended from a crane by the bad guy. How the hell did we get here? Good question. It all starts on a plane back from Japan, where among the passengers are Yip, Interpol agent Peter Yamamoto (Sanada, recently seen creating doomsday diseases in Helix) and security guard Michael Wong (Wong – a lot of thought clearly went into that character). On the flight, there’s a hijack, in an attempt to free a killer being extradited to Hong Kong; our heroic trio foil it, killing the hijackers. But that just brings down the wrath of the rest of the gang, who vow to take their revenge on the people who killed their colleagues. And they really don’t care who gets in their way, as a mass gun-battle at a night-club shows – it also gets Yip taken off the case.

Does the finale make sense now? The correct answer would be “kinda,” and the plot here is certainly the weakest element, forming more of a shaky bridge between the action scenes. Wong is particularly unimpressive, his romantic pursuit of Yip coming over as more in need of a restraining order than portraying him as endearingly romantic. In some ways, it also plays as 80’s Action Clichés, Volume 1, There’s a massive civilian body-count, the fate of Yamamoto’s family is painfully obvious, and we get things like Yip’s boss yelling at her, before she throws her badge in his face, and storms off to solve the case on her own. None of this takes away from the action, which is copious and hard-hitting (if, admittedly, sometimes frankly implausible, as noted). There could perhaps be some more Yeoh – you can never have too much – but watching her go up against the final villain (Ying) and his running chainsaw is a thoroughly adequate payoff.

Wong would show up in the fourth entry, again playing a character called Michael Wong, though by that time, Michelle Yeoh had been replaced as the series heroine by Cynthia Khan. Yeoh and Sanada would be paired again, but it would take a couple of decades and a lot of filmographic miles for each, before they worked together on Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. Chung would also direct Yeoh in her final action movie before “retiring” to marriage for a decade, Magnificent Warriors.

Dir: David Chung
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Wong, Ying Bai

L’Exécutrice

  By

executrice★★½
“Bon flic, mauvais flic”

They say, write about what you know – and writer-director Caputo certainly appears to have done that here. What better topic for the director of Pénétrations humides to choose for a police thriller, than the sleazy world of porn? Especially, when you can get adult legend Lahaie as your lead. She plays police detective Martine who finally manages to ensnare noted smut-monger Madame Wenders (Erlanger), only to find her gang retaliating by kidnapping Martine’s little sister and demanding the release of their boss. Making things even murkier, her boss (Modo) has a stalkery crush on Wenders, and her colleague, Valmont (Oudrey), carries a picture of the perp who shot his partner around with him. He is inclined to shoot first and ask questions later, and teases her about her reluctance to carry a gun. As the pictures here suggest, that reluctance doesn’t survive until the end of the film.

executrice2It’s all pretty implausible, and doesn’t exactly paint a kind picture of the French police, who are portrayed, almost without exception, as mad, incompetent or both – if it wasn’t for Martine’s informant, she would literally be clueless. However, Lahaie is always worth watching, showing much the same solid screen presence which I’ve previously enjoyed in Fascination. This isn’t as impressive, trading in the ethereal, other-wordly quality for a grubby and gritty urban approach that is never particularly convincing in its depiction. Still, there are some good moments, in particular an extended sequence where Wenders is released from jail, knowing full well the police will be tailing her. The cat-and-mouse game between them, leads to an explosive climax that was genuinely surprising, but the film doesn’t seem to know quite where to go from there.

Against that, there are too many scenes which make little or no sense, such as the one where Martine is attacked in a car-park, only to be rescued by a guy carrying a shotgun in his coat. Or her fondness for sitting in a luminescent hot-tub. While I’m not inclined to complain too much about either, there are times when you wonder if this is the policier version of Caligula, and there’s a three-hour version with hardcore inserts, lurking out there somewhere. I don’t think there is, but it has that kind of disjointed feel to it. Not the disaster I was expecting from some reviews, yet outside of Lahaie, there is little here to commend it to the view.

Dir: Michel Caputo
Star: Brigitte Lahaie, Dominique Erlanger, Pierre Oudrey, Michel Modo

The Yakuza Wives

  By

★★★½
“Could comfortably kick the asses of The Mob Wives.”

Perhaps a better title, however, would be Yakuza Sister, since this is a tale of two siblings. Tamaki (Iwashita) is an actual mid-level Yakuza wife, who is running their branch of the gang in the jailed absence of her husband, and doing quite well at it, enhancing its size and reputation. She is largely estranged from both her sister Makoto (Kitase) and their father – she’s a bartender, he works in his machine shop, but it’s clear from the get-go that his time is limited [this isn’t much of a spoiler when you see him coughing his lungs out while simultaneously chain-smoking]. Two things upset their semi-orderly lives. The overall head of Tamaki’s clan dies, opening up a power vacuum which sets off a struggle between rival factions, and Tamaki attempts to arrange a ‘suitable’ marriage for her sister. Makoto rebels, taking up instead with Kiyoshi Sugita (Sera) – which is unfortunate, because he’s a loyal member of the faction now battling Tamaki’s group for control.

The first in a long-running series of films, both direct sequels and knock-offs of the basic concept, this is somewhere between The Godfather and a soap-opera. Among the things I apparently learned from this were, that in Japan, organized crime syndicates have press-conferences to detail leadership changes, and that the best way to get a Japanese women to marry you, is to rape her. Who knew? [Legal note: GirlsWithGuns.org does not make any claims regarding the reliability of this information, and accepts no responsibility for any damages, prosecutions or severed digits resulting from acting on it.] It’s a bit of an uncomfortable mix, but the steely-gaze of Iwashita and her character’s single-minded dedication to the cause is impeccable: she’s a better female character than anyone in Coppola’s trilogy.

Things head towards their expected tragic outcome, but there are a few twists along the way, as well as an interesting cat-fight between the two sisters, when Makoto opts for her husband over her family. About five minutes in duration, there’s only about three cuts as they brawl their way around the apartment, in and out of the closet, before collapsing, exhausted. If not exactly a martial-arts epic, it’s an interesting stylistic choice, quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, and is presented for your viewing below. If a little low on the action quotient outside of this, it’s a solid piece of drama that should keep the spectator interested.

The player will show in this paragraph

Project A-ko

  By

★★★½

“Raises some interesting questions regarding the Japanese educational system.”

Project A-ko is one of those odd films that probably could only be done as anime, though as live-action goes, something like Kung Fu Hustle comes close. It centers on three schoolgirls, A-ko, B-ko and C-ko: the first two are rivals for the third’s attention…but despite the lesbian subtext, it’s really not that kind of story. [Though the film was originally intended to be part of the Cream Lemon series, which definitely are those kind of stories] No, it’s far more concerned with A-ko’s superpowers, to which she’s largely oblivious, the gadgetry cooked up by B-ko, thanks to her apparently limitless finances, and C-ko’s ancestry, which turns out to be not of this Earth – and that explains a lot, it has to be said.

This is as much parody as anything else, and what you get from it will, to some extend, depend on what you bring; for example, knowing that Mari, part of B-ko’s gang, is a pig-tailed dead-ringer for Ken from Fist of the North Star, with a squeaky voice. The rest is tongue-in-cheek SF, that revels in excess, particularly in the second-half. This is markedly less successful than the simple love-triangle, culminating in a marvellously destructive brawl between A-ko and B-ko, that starts off in school, then moves into the nearby city, where the pair end up facing an alien invasion. In the words of Monty Python, it’s just “too silly”, toppling over into ludicrous explosions for far too long, that proves rather less entertaining than the more understated irony from before.

The voice-acting (at least in the Japanese version; as usual, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the dub) is solid; B-ko is one of the most tremendously irritating characters you can imagine, but that’s entirely deliberate. Of particular note is the soundtrack, largely by American session musicians, Richie Zito and Joey Carbone, which thereby avoids the usual J-Pop cliches. Okay, largely by replacing them with American cliches, but the result is still pretty cool, in a Giorgio Moroder kinda way; hey, it was made in 1986. The result is solid, if entirely brainless, fun – and how can you not like a film which borrows its title from one of Jackie Chan’s best?

Dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima
Stars (voice): Miki Itoh, Michie Tomizawa, Emi Shinohara, Tessho Genada