Fantasia 2025.05: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

Unusually short day, but a long post because it started with a shorts package. Well, didn't exactly start with it; I spent the first slot back in the apartment, finishing a post covering Friday, because the two things on offer were Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, which would run again the next day, and Bullet in the Head, which I've watched a couple times in the last couple years and believe has already been announced as the group of Hong Kong classics from the Golden Princess collection that Shout! Factory will be touring soon. You're welcome!

Between being the last one in and sitting where I can escape in a hurry if need be, it wasn't a great spot for pictures, especially if you use the phone's panorama setting:

Let's split that up a bit.

So off at the very far left, we have the event's host, then "Filther" filmmaker Simen Nyland, from Norway; "Lola" director Grace Hanna & executive producer Derek Manansala, from the US; "Weird to be Human" director Jan Grabowski, art director Agnieszka Adamska, and production designer Juliusz Dabrowski, from Poland; and "Disappeared" director Jeong Eun-uk, from South Korea.

Jeong's interpreter was next, then finally representing "Fingerprints of the Gods" were writer/director Wei Zhenfeng, producer Zhong Yu, and one more member of the crew, with their interpreter hiding behind.

I believe my favorite bit of the Q&A was Grabowski being asked about creating the look for their synthezoid character and handing the mike to Adamska after saying a few words, where she said she had about $2,000 for the whole thing and then they had to use most of it on a skullcap because the actress wouldn't shave her head and so that made things harder than they needed to be.

After that, it was a decision between a restored Shaw Brothers film at 5:40 and something maybe sci-fi-ish at 6:30, and I chose the former even though I knew I'd probably be getting it on disc soon enough; the description of the other seemed a bit inside-baseball. It gave me a bit of time for the annual burger at Mr. Steer before heading across the street for Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark, which was one of the things I've had circled on the schedule since it was announced, having dug the original when it played the Brattle in its American release, kind of amazed there was a follow-up.

Then back to the apartment, with Cielo, Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, and Dog of God on tap for Monday. It's Saturday now, and I'm planning on Hold the Fort, The Girl Who Stole Time, Influencers, and Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, with Funky Forest highly recommended.


"Moon & Back"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Writer/director Pony Nicole Herauf knows that the science-fictional aspects of her short film don't make a lot of sense, and bakes it into the beginning, when Branch (Bren Eastcott) and Mattie (Mattie Driscoll) phone a radio call-in show and are yelled at on-air for saying that the issue in their relationship is that their close friendship struggled when Branch was away at college, and now her new job is going to take her to the moon. It's going to be a big thing soon, they say.

Is it? Well, there's not exactly a lot else in the story to suggest it, but also only the most occasional slip to suggest that Branch is sick and may either be dying soon or undergoing experimental treatment far away, and this is a last weekend where that euphemism will be strictly enforced. It's not a thing one sees in the very funny performances from Eastcott & Driscoll at first - Branch & Mattie are the sort of delightfully ordinary folks who are funny in large part because of how they come off as mainly being funny to each other, even with Herauf giving them a lot of good lines - but they're good enough to give a lot of heft to scenes played against somewhat lo-fi visual effects toward the end.


"Lola"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I'm inclined to believe that "Lola" depicts what's actually going on, with teenage prodigy Tessie (Jovie Leigh) making yet another attempt to cure or at least arrest her grandmother's fast-moving dementia. It's got the feeling of someone who has always been superlatively bright running hard into her limitations and kind of doesn't work unless Tessie can actually get in there and receive one last bit of good advice from the part of Lola's brain that hasn't been scrambled.

Of course, what's fun is that the apparent limitations of a student film lead to director Grace Hanna making a lot of choices that emphasize that this is from the point of view of a precocious child, from the animation to the props made of everyday objects to a mindscape that's got the same general form of one where filmmakers spend millions of dollars to create a mental library but is all the more poignant for its relative simplicity. The costume Leigh is given to wear as Tessie is also adorable whether it's the characters existing in a heightened world, her sort of playing dress-up, or somewhere in between.


"First Sight"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"First Sight" looks like it's going to be a "don't fall in love with an AI construct" thing, but writer/director Andew McGee has some more interesting things to do, as widow Luna (Ellise Chappell) is matched for a first-date with handsome, likable Antony (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As a writer who reviews new consumer technology, she's got top-of-the-line Bluetooth contact lenses with a powerful AI in her phone offering useful advice on the heads-up display, but taking its recommendations doesn't make for an exciting date, and that's before the ransomware attacks.

I've been wondering when we were going to start to get more stories of artificial intelligence being kind of useless in situations where human expression is concerned, as features continue to come out with androids who are more human that human or AIs that can outwit even the most clever protagonist, and that's pretty far from the experience of anyone who has desperately tried to shut Copilot off. McGee is smart about this without it coming off as a lecture, and the ransomware bit is clever (although I'm almost more frightened of a hack where my reading glasses replace the fine print on a contract), although it kind of stretches the blind date out in a way that seems untenable.

Ellise Chappell is pretty darn good through that, at least, and all-around; she captures the bits of McGee's script that require her to be sad in a big way, even if it's not always on her face, and the sort of generally nervous that makes these sort of shortcuts so tempting. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd hits the right tone as well, disappointed enough that Luna is taking outside cues enough for it to show without seeming mean or sanctimonious enough to be unappealing.


"Disappeared"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"Disappeared" kind of feels a little more like The Matrix with the serial numbers scraped off than one would maybe like, although with interesting ways to go should Eunuk Jeong get a chance to expand it. There are times when I wondered a bit if it were written and selected with the intent of showing off the studio in which it was shot in a sort of symbiotic way, a chance for both the business and the filmmaker to have a polished calling card, and that determined a lot of its emphasis.

I do kind of like the central performance by Tan Woo-seok, whose character seems to be the sort of screw-up where both he and those who know him get frustrated at how his limitations get in the way of his being generally likable - one sort of feels bad for noting how annoying it must be - and he's got a bit more range than that when need be.


"No Nation"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Between this and 40 Acres, I'm liking the greater Native/First Nations representation showing up in some recent post-apocalyptic tales. Not necessarily a whole lot, but enough to make one consider how some things would shake out. "No Nation" carves out a nifty little niche where it feels grounded and gritty while hinging on silly genre nonsense, and director/co-writer Jeffrey Elmont seems to know it, having characters ask why they're doing the elaborate rugby ritual rather than something more sensible.

The reason, of course, is that the rugby ritual is cool, which is both why we watch these movies and how the guy in charge exerts control. The audience feels the excitement of it even if they don't necessarily have a rooting interest; Elmont and company reveal details as the combatants play rather than do an explanation ahead of time, throwing a monkey wrench into it just as the viewers understand. At that point, there's no satisfaction in anyone being hoisted by their own petard, and part of what makes the finale feel honest is that there's a lesson there but one maybe can't be sure people will take the right one to heart.

"Weird to Be Human"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Sometimes, watching science fiction, I'll groan at "back in the bad old days of the Twentieth Century, we did this, and though we say we've outgrown it…" dialogue, even if delivered with intense earnestness by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart, but I feel like I'd kind of welcome it in "Weird to Be Human". Part of that is that we're in "AI is more human than human" territory, a bit strained as AI makes things in everyday life dumber, and part is because many folks in the present who could do with a fable about how the government chooses who is eligible for citizenship and makes them jump through tortuous hoops to obtain it are isolated from the process and could maybe use the linkages.

All that is in "Weird to Be Human", but you may have to know it's there to see it. Happily, it's got a nicely unsettling "one dystopian room to decorate in budget Cronenberg fashion" aesthetic, the sort of performances where a viewer can settle in and change their impression of who is supposed to be the audience surrogate and who is supposed to be the monster over the film's running time, and just enough memory of being behind the Iron Curtain and having resurgent right-wing movements for everyone involved to know of what they speak. The small cast handles their parts quite nicely, willing to sound alien and odd but let their inner humanity come through, for better or worse.


"Fingerprints of the Gods"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I wonder, a bit, to what extent a character named "Monkey" was intended to make one think of some sort of trickster deity at first, even though we're probably more in "at a typewriter" territory in this short, as a reporter is given a story that makes him question the foundations of the universe.

"Fingerprints" is nice-looking - I particularly liked the precise layout of Monkey's apartment inside a run-down building - but it kind of falls prey to what hobbles a lot of simulation-theory stories, where there's not exactly much the folks discovering that they live inside a simulation that may be shut down can do about it, and for all that director Wei Zhenfeng talks about being inspired by the Mandelbrot Set, he never quite finds a way to blow audience minds with some sort of fractal revelation of simulations within simulations. It's a nicely-mounted short, but probably the one where specifics have faded most over the time it takes to write things up.


"Filther"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Appearing at this moment, with its faceless protagonist, steampunk imagery and compositing where the elements don't quite seem to match, this probably draws "is this made with generative AI?" more than the "nice ambition, but maybe you're stretching a little thin" it would have gotten a couple years ago. Unfair, perhaps - nothing in the credits indicates that's the case - but it's got the feel: Some nifty ideas, a focus on aesthetics, and a story that's relatively thin, trying to be capital-E Emotional while connecting the big visuals.

I found it kind of pretty but distancing, and there's something really odd about the love story seeming to favor the match-making service over the nice girl at the shop nearby who at least seems to like him. Nothing' is really happening other than the protagonist fixing things, and for as much as the clockwork construction is kind of a soothing respite from folks being mean to him and the general tumult among the normies, the movie isn't doing much more than showing pretty pictures to earn a happy ending.


Tian long ba bu (The Battle Wizard)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Where to stream it(Prime link), or order the 2009 DVD at Amazon

The Battle Wizard may not be one of those Shaw Brothers flicks with a surprising seed of greatness in it, but it's awesome beyond its campiness, diving into one weird thing after another, barely considering the possibility of slowing down.

Twenty years ago, Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau) informed her lover Tuan Chengchun (Si Wai) that she was two months pregnant and telling her husband that it was his wasn't really an option, since he'd been away for six months, That husband (Shih Chung-Tien) chose an inopportune moment to return and attack Chengchun, only to discover that the latter's kung fu is so powerful he can shoot energy blasts from his fingers. Oh, and Chengchun is a prince who already has a fiancée (Hung Ling-Ling) who dismisses Hongmian in the bitchiest fashion possible. So it's no wonder that Hongmian spends her daughter's entire childhood teaching her kung fu so that Mu Wangqing ("Tanny" Tien Ni) can seek revenge on her father, his wife, and any offspring they may have produced. The trouble is, Chengchun's sun Tuan Yu (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) is a pacifistic scholar who has no desire to learn martial arts, which means he'd be in big trouble after stepping out to prove to his father that one just needs words if he didn't meet pretty snake handler Cheng Ling'er (Lin Chen-Chi), as Hongmian's husband has been hiding out, biding his time and training a disciple to assassinate Yu as well.

It's a lot happening and it's about an inch deep, sure, but like the best Shaw Brothers martial arts films, there is just enough earnestness in that inch to occasionally surprise, whether it's the look of shock as Hongmian realizes she's been abandoned or how enough friendship develops between Wangqing and Yu that the filmmakers aren't just teasing incest (amusingly and coincidentally, this special-effects-heavy film was made in part as a response to Star Wars, anticipating this twist by five and a half years). No matter how frantic and silly things get, the cast gets to make their roles more than ciphers notable for their fighting styles.

They're fighting a lot, of course, but there's a good balance to the violence that alternates between splatstick and good wire fu. The filmmakers go to town with all the visual effects and fantasy that mid-1970s Shaw Brothers can muster, complete with finger guns, rubber monsters, and a guy in a thoroughly unconvincing gorilla suit. The action choreographed by Tong Kai mixes up swordplay, punching and kicking, and what is effectively gunfighting fairly well, so that combatants aren't just posing at each other, and things get enjoyably gross as limbs get blasted off (leading to characters running around on iron chicken legs) or Lee Sau-Yin seems to have a good time playing Tuan Yu as surprised by the martial-arts moves he gets by drinking magic snake's blood.

It's got a nice pace to it, too, introducing a new absurdity just often enough to get audiences saying sure, why not, rather than feeling overloaded. It's maybe a bit too much by the end - there are points when I was thinking it's been too long since we checked in on the cute snake girl, and I suspect a subplot about where her family fits into all this was cut until the film needed more bodies for the ending battles - but it goes down smooth and never stops amusing for its whole 77 minutes.

And, honestly, what else do you want? The Battle Wizard is determined to entertain from start to finish, and it's a gas all the way through.


Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Tamala 2010 (Prime link), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

Sometime asked if seeing the first movie made this 23-year-later sequel better and I had to say, maybe, although it's been 20 years and I really should have bought and watched the new disc as soon as this was announced a part of the festival, the way I often do when sequels drop after this sort of wait. This could go up or down, depending on how that plays for me when I see it again.

(You're already talking to the distributor, right, Ned?)

As it opens, one-year-old kitten Tamala is just hanging around the run-down, graffiti-covered Cat Tokyo, popping in to visit her boyfriend Michaelangelo, a private detective and handyman who has just been hired to find someone who vanished a couple weeks ago, on 7 July, and while it seems like Tamala wouldn't be much help, she knows people, and they soon find video footage of him vanishing into thin air - and not only that, the same thing happened to six other cats that same night, forming a pattern across Cat Japan that matches a constellation. Meanwhile, a one-eyed mercenary named Blur is tracking occult occurrences around Cat Earth, many of which seem to lead back to Tamala herself.

I don't know that vaguely remembered details of Tamala 2010 really helped - they basically had me expecting this to be kind of unnervingly sexy, which didn't seem to be much of a factor after the start - and I kind of think loose continuity is kind of explicit here. Tamala is described as a 1-year-old kitten despite this movie taking place 20 years later than the first. It is, perhaps, a sort of meta-commentary on the state of media, with corporate entities behind the scenes managing cycles of destruction and rebirth, with the Real End lurking. The punk, anti-capitalist characters of the first film reappear somewhat jarringly toward the end, though their message is somewhat muted.

There's a lot of movie to get through before that material really takes center stage, though, and the long middle is seldom nearly as fun as the apocalyptic finale or watching literal sex kitten Tamala (seemingly what you'd get if you gene-spliced Betty Boop and Hello Kitty) tags along on Michaelangelo's missing person case. Tamala herself is in short supply for a while, and none of the other characters who get more involved with the plot are as memorable or fun, with the story itself more atmosphere than developments that pull an audience closer.

Like the last one, though, it looks and sounds amazing, a run-down retro future with great character designs, touching camera, and nifty music and sound the baseline . The mostly B&W look hits the direct spot where manga, film noir, and the Fleischer Brothers overlap. Tamala's cheerful dancing and bouncy walk (accompanied by squeaky boings to make one wonder if she's wearing leather all the time) give way to unsettling violence, and while I suspect that much of the film was realized digitally, writer/director/composers "T.O.L." really lean into that in the final act with a robotic cat god whose obvious CGI nature makes her incursion into Cat Earth almost Lovecraftian.

So, yes, going to see this again, and looking forward to it. It's crazy stuff, probably about 40% nonsense even if you've recently caught up on all previous Tamala material, but fun and energetic nonsense.

Fantasia 2025.04: Anime no Bento, "The Story of the Three Sisters", The Devil's Bride, "Check Please", Blazing Fists, "Look Closer", and Good Boy

Busy Day!

Programmer Rupert Bottenberg was justly proud of having the anime shorts program all independent works by up-and-comers, which probably makes getting four of the six to Montreal - Yasuteru Ohno ("Mamiko's Poop"), Shuzuku ("Dreaming of a Whale"), Ryusei "Vab.png" Hasegawa ("Beyond the Trail"), and Kim Sung-jae ("Redman") - even more remarkable. It was a fun introduction, although one that kind of underlined for me just how odd doing an event like this in a foreign land must be: You stand there kind of stoically while folks are going on in another language, and then become very animated when given a chance to speak about your film. Must be a crazy thing to do so young. Still, they had fun with it, including Ohno challenging the whole auditorium to rock-paper-scissors for a copy of a compilation DVD containing all the final film projects for his school (which you may not be able to play in North American players because it's Region 2, although at least it's NTSC).

After that it was across the street for The Devil's Bide, which I'm going to need another run-through to really appreciate; hopefully it hits the Brattle in the fall ahead of its Blu-ray release.

Then back across the street for the rest of the night, with programmer Steven Lee (man, seems like he was just an intern yesterday!) introducing "Check Please" writer/director Shane Chung and director of photography Tristan Baumeister. It's one he pushed for, because apparently picking up the check is a Big Deal for a lot of Asian and Asian-American folks, especially Korean[-American]s, which I've seen referenced occasionally. They got a nice slot ahead of the new Takashi Miike film, Blazing Fists, which was cool.

Although, about Blazing Fists... So, I heard programmer King-Wei Chu mention that there was a miscommunication and a movie they believed to be an hour and twenty minutes (1:20), was actually two hours (2:00), and it was this one, which was going to have a domino effect on the rest of the evening's schedule. Not a really big deal - the next film would be the rest of the day, but it meant that by the time I got out of Blazing Fists, the press line for Good Boy was good and long, and I was in the last group of six to get in, meaning this was my view:

Not really complaining - I try to just be grateful the festival thinks this blog is worth a pass in these situations - although I was glad that this was a really quick short and feature because I didn't have a chance to prioritize an easy exit from my seat should my bladder act up.

Crazy the zoom the camera in one's phone has, huh? Here we've got actor Thompson Sewell, producer Mackie Jackson, and writer/director/DP Tyson Edwards of "Look Closer" (and programmer Mitch Davis on the side) talking about their nifty little short; I gather Jackson created the painting in the center, which they built the short around.

And here, Mitch welcomes director (and co-star) Ben Leonberg, who left the titular good boy Indy at home because this situation would probably freak a dog out and it's not like his dog knew he was starring in a movie anyway. As he put it, there's a good reason why most folks make movies with humans; this was apparently 400 shooting days over three years, with a mind-blowingly ratio of usable footage to what was shot. The set-up often took longer than shooting time because dogs don't actually have a great attention span.

It was, though an interesting shoot to describe, with Leonberg acting in the film just because he's Indy's human and the one he'll respond to, although his face was often out of frame or occulted so that a real actor could dub his lines. The sound guys, he said, were heroes, because almost every shot had Leonberg and his wife talking over it to coax Indy around, so the whole thing had to be re-recorded. And while there wasn't any digital work done on Indy, they created a shattering window when he jumped through an empty frame, composited a shot where Indy follows a ghost dog up some stairs together because Indy and the other dog were buddies and would have just played together if they weren't shot separately, and used a fake dog (mostly used for lighting setups) to jump off a roof with Indy coming out from behind the bush.

Just an absolutely crazy project, and it's kind of amazing how good it came out. I don't know if it will get a wide release - it's genuinely eccentric - but given that the audience was giving it the same reaction as a I remember a preview audience giving Flow, I suspect there's a lot of folks out there who will go for it.

Anyway, long Saturday ; Sunday was more spread out with the sci-fi shorts, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark. Since I'm up to posts running two days behind, my plans for Tuesday are Stinker, Sweetness, the "Perilous Ports" program, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens, with Fucktoys (seen at BUFF) a good time.


"Loca!"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Maybe not the single most cheerful post-apocalyptic movie you've ever seen, "Loca!" nevertheless has its two little kids who may be the last people on earth full of energy as they explore rural Japan, where the plant life has started to overrun the cities, although there's apparently enough pre-packaged food to eat and there's somehow still power where there needs to be. They're surprised when the train they find starts to move after they press the Big Red Button, but writer Takeru Kojima and directors Ion Miyamoto & Yuta Uchiya do not show any particular worry about the future or burdens of loss for them; the closest they come is mentioning that the people from before must have been really clever.

Which is sometimes disconcerting, maybe making this a brightly-colored horror story for the adults in the audience. But there's also something kind of joyous about it as one watches these two explore, learn, help each other out and start to build. The style is made to sort of evoke crayon drawings even though the actual ones that the kids are making in a notebooks are a different thing, a bright and colorful world that hasn't been specifically nailed down and is full of adventure, with the voice acting bouncing back to excited shouting quickly after every time it starts to get a little down.


"Dreaming of a Whale"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Seeing the two in sequence, one almost wonders if the girl wandering an empty Japan in "Dreaming of a Whale" with her dog Joanne is one of the kids from "Loca!" five years later or so, but it's a different vibe, as she is seeking something out and less protected from danger as she falls into a derelict (but unusable) train car of her own. She's frustrated by cryptic messages coming through on her radio, but still hoping to find another human being.

It's a more traditional anime style than the previous short, but director Shuzuku makes a nice-looking film and the voice acting from Myu as the girl and Sumito Owara as the voice at the other end of the radio are very nice. Shuzuku uses enough of the eight-minute running time to give her journey heft and suggest something larger, but also builds up to a climactic revelation that is simultaneously horrible and also something one appreciates for its cleverness, and which gives her a new path forward.


"Mamiko's Poop"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Ten out of ten, no notes. "Mamiko's Poop" - the end result of a schoolgirl eating her feelings after seeing her crush with another girl - packs as many outright guffaws into its two-minute runtime as movies fifty times longer. It feels like a manga where the art style suggests someone drawing in a caffeinated fever for its crazy designs and accelerating pace, and somehow has time to ramp up from sadness to binging to "ewww" to hilarious violence.

Director Yaasuteru Ohno did this for school, and who knows what he'll learn in professional apprenticeship by the time he gets a chance to make something bigger, but it should be a ton of fun.


"Dungeons & Television"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

I don't know if I'd necessarily watch a "Dungeons & Television" anime series or read it as a manga - I can actually see myself chuckling at the high concept but not wanting to commit to a long-term series the way I do when I come upon Delicious in Dungeon in previews, but as someone whose idea of stringing telegraph lines across a kingdom always got shot down when playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I appreciate the idea. This could be fun.

How fun? That's kind of tough to tell. Writer/director Junchukan Bonta seems to have the basics down for his six-minute short, in that the designs are just nifty enough to make one believe in the possible invention of television five hundred years or so ago, the adventuring party looks decent, and there are a few very solid gags in there, it's also moving way too fast for a viewer to really get attached and involved, seemingly just showing the highlights and almost having no time to tease effectively.

Heck of a calling card to show producers as a pitch, though.


"Redman"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

This is definitely a case where I feel like I might like it a lot more if I was a bit more familiar with the context. I kind of get the idea of a tokusatsu hero trying to live a normal life (though is he depicted with his helmet because he's wearing it and everyone thinks it's normal or because this is his self-image?), wanting to stay away or get involved as something mysterious is going on with his old teammates, and I dig the noirish style of it. But I do wonder if greater knowledge of the sort of story it's either sending up or grittifying (to coin a word) would allow me to see general patterns or fill in the blanks because I knew what references it was built out of.

As it is, it's tantalizing and the craftsmanship is darn good, but I'm not up on the shorthand.


"Beyond the Trail"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

A nifty little anime that could probably handle expansion to a feature, with two junior members of a team that is helping to clear away biological weapons left behind after a devastating war admiring a legend in their unit, although she holds some dark secrets. It's a mash-up of familiar sci-fi anime bits - people transforming into monsters, cool vehicles, the source of power being related to the monsters and slowly killing the heroine, mysterious foes whose interests are actually aligned - but they're familiar because they often work. The designs that the filmmakers have come up with are pretty cool, and there's a potentially pretty nice emotional core with the hero-worship Leichte has for Esus maybe not an entirely healthy complement to Esus having lost a daughter.

There is some difficulty balancing all this at 30 minutes, though - Leichte & Esus is probably the thing you want to focus on, but it leaves all the lore they're supposed to clean up feeling more like Macguffins rather than something that shaped them, and getting cut off because the story can only go so far in any direction. It also means Leichte's partner Gros winds up disappearing for a bit when their pairing is a lot of what's fun about the movie in its early portion. Just no room to work and I don't fault the filmmakers for prioritizing pretty aggressively on an independent, crowd-funded production like this, and I hope they get to do more.


"The Story of Three Sisters (or How the World Came to Have Four Seasons Instead of One)"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

A charming little storybook feature that has seven directors for its seven minutes, but doesn't necessarily impose a strict separation on them, even as one sees the style of its mythic tale of how three goddesses of the sky, time, and life found their static world collapsing into constant change as one found her curiosity getting the better of her. The rapidly changing style feels like the origin of a myth, taking new shapes in the telling.

The thing I kind of dig after thinking about it, though, is how well these three concepts map to certain human family dynamics: Ida, the sky, is the responsible elder sibling, very fixed in her ways and seeing safeguarding her sisters as her responsibility; Tia, the tiny youngest sibling, is the baby who is more or less allowed to run amok and get into trouble; May, the middle child, is dissatisfied, chafing at her older sister's authority and envying Tia's freedom even as she loves her. This strict alignment must eventually fall, scary as that is, for the three to not resent each other and work together, because a family is not strict assignment of roles.

Neat.


Velnio nuotaka (The Devil's Bride)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Pre-order the disc at Amazon

I am very much hoping this one comes around to the Boston area at some point, because to be completely honest, I think that I zonked out for about ten minutes in the middle or missed a subtitle indicating a time jump and just absolutely, completely lost the plot. It was like I was suddenly watching a different movie with most of the same cast and locations, also an opera, but I had no idea how the start and end were connected.

I do want to see it again, though, because where it's great, it's really great. The manic, probably sacreligious opening scene is reason enough to catch a pretty short movie, there's plenty of wit to be found around afterward, and the music - have we mentioned that this story of an angel who falls to earth and is immediately enslaved by a miller and caught up in various strange romances is a rock opera - is pretty darn good. I suspect that my biggest issue might be that the style of the music doesn't vary much from start to finish, which is how you get into a sort of reverie and eventually look up to wonder what's going on.


"Check Please"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Pretty dang simple when it comes down to it, as two co-workers out for dinner in New York - one a Korean ex-pat, one a Korean-American born and raised in the city - both try to pick up the check, only for things to escalate quickly into slapstick martial arts.

The action is pretty darn good - it's smartly staged so that one admires the athleticism and choreography, and winces occasionally at how that would hurt, but kind of stops short of feeling violent or dangerous; we're kind of having fun here and sort of representing things as larger-than-life so one can see the intensity of the feeling more clearly. I like that, ultimately, it ends on a sort of feeling of desperation to cling to this as part of their identity as a Korean man, with Jay (Richard Yan) lamenting that his (presumably non-Korean) wife knows more K-pop lyrics than him and he has to use a dictionary when he calls his grandfather, while Su-bin (Jeong Sukwon) notes he had to uproot himself from his home to provide for his family. It's maybe a sneaky second layer that the cashier is a woman, staring at her phone while guys go at this again.

Mostly, though, it's good jokes and physical comedy with appealing participants.


Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors (aka Blazing Fists)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Has it actually been a while since Takashi Miike delivered a movie about a bunch of juvenile delinquent fighting, or does it just seem that way? This one is maybe not quite a masterpiece of the genre; it feels a bit like the genre as seen through the eyes of comfortable, older filmmakers rather than something bursting with rebellion, anger, and energy. That happens to us all, I guess, and who knows, maybe Miike and company are acknowledging that with the 18-year-old in juvie clearly played by someone twice that age.

He's around when a new resident of a juvenile detention facility, Ryoma Akai (Kaname Yoshizawa) meets Ikuto Yagura (Danhi Kinoshita), who has been there for a year. They become fast friends and are inspired to take up mixed martial arts during a visit by a fighter and internet celebrity whose webseries "Breaking Down" combines confessional and fighting elements. It's not long before they are paroled, join a gym, and find work in a factory, though they've also got marks on their backs from a local gang consolidating their power and a crush on an influencer Ryoma knew from high school (whose ex is teetering on the brink of winding up a thug himself). Oh, and Ikuto was in juvie after being fingered for a crime he didn't commit (this time) and has vowed to take revenge on the person who did, not knowing it's Ryoma.

If this sort of movie is going to be comfort food now, Blazing Fists is at least enjoyable and amiable enough. The script is a bit on the wink-y side when it celebrates the power of friendship and happily walks through the genre tropes; though writer Shin Kibayashi is not adapting a fighting manga, he knows how the structure works but has the freedom to build it so that the expansive cast, regular fights, and sudden twists fit a movie rather than a serial. The cast is likable and each knows what they're there to do, not necessarily subtly (the scenes with the kids' mothers are fun, if kind of slight).

The movie also pleasantly recalls the V-cine aesthetic from when Miike started out with these films; things feel like they were shot quickly and allowed to be a bit flat or low-res (though today's low-res would have been top of the line thirty years ago). It's consciously not fancy, rather coming off of professionals getting the job done without a lot of fuss or pretension. It is, maybe, a love letter to the juvenile-delinquent movies that figured prominently in Miike's early career that doesn't treat them as more than they were.

Plus, the fighting is fun, eventually upgrading from earnest martial arts to the over the top brawls one expects from these movies. It's action that knows it's larger than life, where Miike and company enjoy throwing colorfully costume heroes against a horde, with as many jokes as battle cries thrown in. At the end, they're maybe looking to prove a point, both acknowledging the fakeness of these cinematic brawls but not giving a lot of credence to the stage-managed fights produced as mere web content either; even the main villain recognizes that the point of this is to fight like hell for the people you care about.

It's all right on the edge of self-parody, with the main characters' earnestness keeping it on the other side, but, then it's not like these movies are ever far from that, it's it?


"Look Closer"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

"Look Closer" is an impressively well-balanced horror comedy, making the audience feel just tingly enough to be uneasy but delivering solid dark laughs as an exhausted painter (Thompson Sewell) trying to power through to meet a deadline suddenly finds another work on his easel featuring a creepily distorted figure.

It's just on-the-nose enough to make one chuckle, as the painter seems to half-suspect that he's in some sort of nightmare, but niftily executed: Not only does one get the idea that the painting came first rather than just being a prop created to reflect the live-action make-up job, but there's a nifty effect of the painting seeming to throb with a heartbeat, alive in its own right. Filmmaker Tyson Edwards gives it all just enough time to breathe and make an impression and gets out before things have to make more than emotional dream-logic sense.


Good Boy

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Good Boy could easily be a movie that is remarkable for simply existing - getting even a very well-trained dog to do everything required to serve as a movie's protagonist is a daunting challenge - but this impressed beyond that. It walks a line between genre film and drama, getting viewers inside its canine hero Indy's head without necessarily anthropomorphizing him.

Something is wrong with Indy's human Todd (writer/direct Ben Leonberg dubbed by Shane Jensen), but he's not quite sure what; he's sleeping a lot and his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) seems very worried. Soon after Indy stays with Vera a few days, Todd decides to uproot them from their Brooklyn apartment to the house upstate that Todd inherited from his grandfather (Larry Fessenden), but that seems even more wrong, and not just because Grandpa had a lot of dogs that didn't necessarily have long lives: Todd doesn't feel quite right, there are things in the corners that the human can't see, and a strange threatening presence in the dark.

What's perhaps most surprising about Good Boy is just how stylish the movie is. Some of it is perhaps a matter of necessity, where keeping the camera near Indy's eye level is necessarily going to create a different framing that everything else in the film must respond to. But the lighting is terrific, often a hellish red to highlight the dog's emotional turmoil, or kept low to emphasize how he and his human are out of their familiar crowded city. Humans often appear in backlit silhouette, eerie for human viewers, but a reminder that dogs don't read faces so much as body language, so those are the emotional cues we get without seeming to cheat to limit information.

And it works as a horror movie. The filmmakers seldom go for jokes about dogs finding vacuums scary, but seed something vague about what might be haunting this house before presenting it in a way a dog might experience it. The shadow game is strong, and the score highlights what's unnerving to Indy nicely. Some of the effects work, when it comes to that, may seem like it doesn't match the live action footage, but I like that somewhat, having given it a little thought. There's a wrongness to what Indy detects in a way that's not quite equivalent to human senses, and this gets that across.

Plus, Indy? Such a good boy! The best boy! We've been seeing more CGI dogs in movies lately, which is fine - it's not like animals can agree to participate or emote on demand - but they often seem too blank or too human, while Indy is all dog, with an expressive face and the right sort of whine. He's not really giving a performance, of course, but the editing is convincing and the raw material is charming.

I suspect the film may seem too experimental or gimmicky to some - even at 72 minutes, it's probably roughly at its limits - but the material is pretty universal and both the human and canine emotion feels genuine.

Fantasia 2025.02: "Atom & Void", Reflet Dans un Diamant Mort, "Skulk", The Wailing '24, "Floor", and Noise

Are there very affordable flights between Montreal and Seoul right now? All the guests at my screenings have been from South Korea and that's a hike!

First up, producer Huh Youngjin and actors Park Tae-San & Lee Jong Eun from "Floor", an extraordinarily natural pairing with Noise and maybe a better riff on it for how its particular nuttiness spins out of something very relatable before escalating in crazy fashion. Very fun, since I didn't really know which direction it would be going from having only skimmed the description, and I like that Lee introduced himself as the "fighter", though maybe my messy French/nonexistent Korean messed this up.

Also here is Kim Soo-jin, director of Noise, a pretty darn fair first effort. One thing he mentioned is that he had the same sound crew as The Wailing (not the one from earlier in the evening, but the Korean horror masterpiece), and, yes, you can tell that those folks were at the top of their game.

With any luck, I've finished this by the time I'm off to Friday's films (The Bearded Girl, Nyaight of the Living Cat, and Find Your Friends) with enough time to spare for a late lunch because I had no time to eat between shows on Thursday and was hungry by the time I got back to the apartment. At least the front door was unlocked!


"Atom & Void"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

A downright terrific short film where the beginning - a spider emerging from its cave lair and exploring its spooky environment - does not quite prepare one for all the twists and turns it will make in the next ten minutes. As near as I can tell, it's mostly an actual spider poking around a meticulously crafted environment, highlighting that these arachnids are odd creatures, visually; a clever filmmaker can make them seem monstrous or adorable with the cinematography and editing. Writer/director Gonçalo Almeida and his team are very clever indeed, with André Carvalho's score helping him play with scale - it encourages you to think big even though you know spiders are small.

I don't want to say too much - it's a delight to discover - but I will say that just as I was writing "getting some Alien vibes here" in my notebook, it took a nifty turn and became even more my thing. This feels like the sort of short that a producer sees and immediately signs the director up for a feature, or at least I hope it is.


Reflet dans un diamant mort (Reflection in a Dead Diamond)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available

If you know the work of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, you know the general shape of what's coming here: An ultra-stylish riff on favorite genres, in this case James Bond and all the European spy-fi that came with him, deliriously diving into meta territory as the film goes on. It's not going to take a straight line, but the look will be impeccable, and they will take great pleasure in using a few words as possible when they can.

It opens with elderly John Diman (Fabio Testi) sitting on the beach behind an old fashioned hotel, watching the surf and not exactly objecting to having a pretty girl come into view. She reminds him of his younger days, when he was a secret agent (Yannick Renier) tasked with protecting and investigating oil magnate Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw). But if it was difficult to discern what is real in a world where a latex mask can transform deadly assassin Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen) into seemingly anyone, it's even more difficult when your memory is failing and that pretty girl in the next room goes missing. Is it old enemies returned, or just a strange coincidence?

There's a part of me that kind of wants this to be "retired secret agent getting lost in his past" and nothing more, or having one last adventure as his mind starts to fail him, but that's not all Cattet & Forzani have in store. Reflections is a catalog of the idea of the super-spy that likely never existed outside of fiction, where reboots, loose continuity, and trend-chasing rendered every aspect of a story as malleable even as some remains stubbornly, frustratingly fixed, and the moral underpinnings are even worse than one might think. They draw from Bond, Diabolik, and many others - fans of Euro-genre pictures will likely have great fun combing through the picture for influences - with great affection, but they're also mindful of the cruelty underpinning the genre: Ian Fleming's literary Bond could come off as a sadist or a psychopath, and the genre often reflected the desire to do monstrous violence justified by the other side being worse, although what they were fighting for was less freedom than oligarchy at times.

The acting is not usually a huge factor in this team's movies, aside from the ability to play it very straight or imitate vibe of 1960s Euro productions, but I do like the vibe that the two men playing John have: Yannick Renier gives the younger version this sort of sexy square-jawed righteousness that is so charmingly certain of itself that it can justify anything, and Fabio Testi often seems to be assuming the mantle of the man John imagine he'd be when retired, a silver fox with an air of sophistication and mystery, but you can see why none of the people around him actually seem to respect him much (aside from one woman who will soon discover it's a bad idea). The pair don't quite echo each other's performances as their worlds collapse, but they push the audience in the same direction, flailing in a way that makes them foolish and dangerous as they discover their world isn't what it seems.

The filmmakers cram a tremendous amount of deconstruction into 85 minutes; by the end one starts to wonder how they keep having another angle or example they want to play with. It's almost exhausting. You can't argue against wanting to see all of them, though; by the time they've fully levitated above their original story and jumped into every form of media that the genre thrived in, all captured in a way that calls lovingly back to the faded film look of memory, there's not really, and they're filmed to be just explicit enough in their violence to thrill but also strongly representing a broader concept. Cattet & Forzani (with cinematographer Manuel Dacosse, production designer Laurie Colson and everyone else in their meticulous crew) will make one gasp at how perfectly constructed and artistic every single shot is, throwbacks that seem like far more than mere quotations.

It's beautiful enough to suggest that rewatching to catch every reference, develop one's theories, or to just try to figure out what's going on will be a great pleasure indeed.


"Skulk"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Director Max Ward and co-writer Carmen Fortea offer up an initial warning in the titles, that foxes walk the streets and howl to warn of certain creatures getting close, and at the start of the film, one wonders if that lore has been lost or if the young woman alone in her house (Elina Gavare) feels it in her bones, not sure if the fox or something else should make her nervous. She gives a nice, nervy little performance as irritation becomes shivers, while Ward and his crew do neat things with how the dark transforms the city. After all, what's eerie in an urban environment is the closeness of other people and the accumulated/buried history of the space, but get it dark and quiet enough, and the primal fears start to reappear, but can urbanites recognize the warnings that nature has for us?


El Llanto (The Wailing '24)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The Wailing is one of those horror movies that I feel bad about shrugging off with "wasn't scary", but that's kind of where I wound up - there's a lot of things done well in it, and it doesn't take a lot of work to see what it's trying to do and even argue that all the pieces are in the right places, but ultimately, I wound up sitting through it mostly unshaken. All the good work and all the less-good but maybe unnervingly-incongruous material just didn't combine in such a way as to create a visceral reaction.

After a prologue, it introduces the audience to Andrea (Ester Expósito), a student in Madrid with a boyfriend (Àlex Monner) studying in Sydney who has recently learned that she was adopted, from a hospital in Buenos Aires. Except that when she receives her original birth certificate and adoption information, it says she was born in Spain, and that her birth mother recently died - after serving twenty years for murder, and right around the time shadowy figures started appearing in the background of Andrea's video calls. Perhaps the answers to her questions lie twenty-three years in the past, when film student Camila (Malena Villa) finds herself drawn to Marie Montand (Mathilde Ollivier), initially as a subject but soon as a friend and perhaps more, with the same mysterious old man appearing in Camila's Digicam footage.

You can see the pieces here, and what director Pedro Martin-Calero & co-writer Isabel Peña are maybe looking to have them add up to: Not just a family curse, but one visited upon the women of the family by an abusive and envious old man, something people dutifully ignore until they're looking at pictures and video and what's there can't be denied. It seems like rich thematic material, and I wouldn't be shocked if people closer to it than I am personally tell me it hits home. It's the stuff of horrors and Martin-Calero seems to have a nifty, underused angle from which to attack it.

I don't know that the story he built around it is ever more than an inch deep, or specific enough to really gel into a terrifying whole. Like, what's the deal with the sometime-empty, sometimes-not phallic building that appears in Madrid, La Plata, and maybe Buenos Aires? Why the adoption out of Argentina at all, especially since the reason given makes little sense with or without considering that geography is clearly not a limitation for this phantom? How far back can this be traced? Is the old man someone important enough to manifest this common evil supernaturally? Martin-Calero stages his jump scares all right - although there's some girls-lifted-by-an-invisible-assailant that looks wrong even if you don't expect the ghost to be as frail as he looks - but all the other good stuff about a horror movie, the pieces between the shocks and the underlying idea that let it all really sink in, just feels slapdash.

(It doesn't help that the filmmakers never quite figure out how to make present the idea that this old ghost is sexually molesting these women in a visually striking way beyond some clothing seeming to shift on its own as the women sleep; it maybe needs to be more lurid than something one squints at and says "I guess he's feeling her up, maybe?")

Kind of a shame, because Ester Expósito is impressive as Andrea, navigating this likable zoomer who spends a large chunk of her life online (and I like the bold, screen-filling letters past messages fading but not disappearing which highlight this text-speak as important and persistent to her rather than transitory like traditional subtitling) into anger, fear, and despair; she's also surrounded by a supporting cast that fleshes their characters out without a whole lot of exposition or distraction from Andrea. I'm a bit less enamored of Camila and Marie, especially since Malena Villa gives the more interesting performance as the former despite the story never really seeming to be enough about her before Mathilde Ollivier has a great run at the end.

Still, ultimately - The Wailing is just not scary for me, and no amount of breaking it down to its good pieces seems likely to make it so.


"Floor"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

"Floor" plays as a few odd ideas not exactly sewn together by arch, English-language narration (for a Korean film that doesn't seem to be any sort of co-production), but ultimately sort of held together by a frantic devotion to one idea and playing it out in as extreme a manner as possible: A married couple has just moved into a new place, which they mostly like despite it being kind of a dump, but the folks upstairs make too much noise, probably because they're violent gangsters. The husband (Park Tae-san) is sent upstairs three times by his wife (Jo Yura) - the first time he's ignored, the second time he's punched out, but the third…

Well, let's just say that there's something really delightful for action fans when a fight in a relatively low-budget short becomes a crazy freaking melee, smashing its way through multiple rooms featuring multiple combatants, shots held long enough for a whole exchange of blows and fewer chances to think they swapped a double in there, and just enough quick pauses for little jokes to keep the energy up as things escalate to absurd degrees. This movie is very silly, but it's very silly in a way that's consistent even while the action sometimes seems random.


Noijeu (Noise)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Noise feels like something that's right on the cusp of being a terrific little horror story if only its pieces fit together a little better. The filmmakers are building it out of bits that seem Lovecraftian on the one hand and Backrooms-inspired on the other, and that can work pretty well, but they often seem to be grasping at everything in such a way that the audience can feel like they're making obvious connections before them.

The film opens with Seo Ju-hee (Han Su-a) maniacally covering the ceiling of her apartment with sound-deadening foam to no avail, screaming that she's trying to find a way to make it stop. Some time later, after she's failed to show up to work for a week, her hearing-impaired sister Ju-young (Lee Sun-bin) is asked to check in, only to find Ju-hee has vanished without a trace, not even taking her phone. Ju-young move in to investigate - she and Ju-hee had meant to live there together, but the factory where Ju-young works has a dorm - but some of the building's other residents are at best unhelpful: The building supervisor (Baek Ju-hee) is worried that this talk of people going missing or dying in the building could imperil an upcoming reconstruction, while the man in the apartment below (Ryu Kyung-su) appears to be hearing the noise too, but assumes it is coming from the Seos' apartment and has started threatening violence. The single mom above on the 8th floor (Jeon Ik-ryung) seems nice, though, and Ki-hoon (Kim Min-suk), the boyfriend Ju-hee hadn't mentioned, is eager to help find her.

A day later, I can't say I recall what the noise in question was supposed to sound like - a rasp? my tinnitus? a low rumble? - but I can say that it's effective enough because I genuinely believe that it was driving Ju-hee and her downstairs neighbor to madness, although not just raging mania: Ryu Kyung-su gets to start an angry clenched fist and pull tighter as the film goes on, selling that he may once have been something like a reasonable person before he started hearing it, and for all that the main impression we get of Ju-hee is her wailing in torment, it's kind of fun that Ju-young keeps finding evidence that her sister was trying to attack the problem scientifically. It's probably the right choice - how do you make a film watchable with sound that will either drive a viewer to turn it off/walk out or not bad enough to be taken seriously - and he builds the reactions to it well enough to make it stand up.

There are a lot of other things that could maybe hold up better, though. There's not exactly a hole in the middle of the movie where the relationship between Ju-young and Ju-hee should be, but given what we see obliquely, it should be the beating heart of the movie. It seems so rich and fraught - we see that the car accident that orphaned them also disabled them in different ways, and that Ju-hee feels Ju-young abandoned her - but it seems to take forever to actually see the two actresses together, and the apartment never feels staged or shot like a place that is supposed to have two people in it instead of one. We also never see Ki-hoon and Ju-hee together, for that matter. It seemingly never occurs to the two people hearing the weird noise to say "hey, I'm hearing a weird noise too, let's figure this out", the audience waits too long for Chekhov's Basement Full of Garbage to come into play after the first mention that folks were not seen leaving the building, and after establishing Ju-young's hearing loss early, it seldom comes into play once she gets an upgraded hearing aid (though the sound design is excellent when it does).

(I also really want to know what the room full of weird equipment seen toward the end is about - it looks like fun lore!)

Director Kim Su-jin does decent work pushing through all this, though. It helps that he's got a star in Lee Sun-bin who has Ju-young come across as likably determined but also shows a fair amount of edge as she loses patience. He's good at cranking things up to the next notch several times as the movie goes on - you can feel the click as he moves the dial - and the script keeps the cast manageable rather than overstuffing so that they can drop bodies on the regular. Even if I'm not sure the whole thing adds up to something coherent, there's something really enjoyable about how Ju-young, Ki-hoon, and Ju-hee seem to take a smart approach to their problems rather than flailing or waiting for answers to fall into their laps.

It's just scary enough to work, especially since it doesn't have a lot of dead space to get a viewer annoyed at why they're not doing this smart thing instead of that dumb thing, but also just good enough to see that it could have been great.

Lunar New Year 2025.05: Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants

I take photos of the end credits just in case IMDB isn't particularly helpful on occasion, but it seldom looks this good.

AMC switched things up a bit for this particular week, opening the Indian films at Causeway Street while this opened at Boston Common, counter to what's become the norm of late; I kind of suspect they didn't necessarily want three Chinese films at the 13-screen Causeway Street location, and that appears to be where Detective Chinatown 1900 is lingering. Something interesting is that, despite being right next to Chinatown, it's the first opening night for a Chinese film in a while where I didn't feel like I was the only person who needed subtitles. A lot of English being spoken on top of ethnicity, and I kind of wonder if some of the young stars are known for other things.

I don't think it was only playing in 2D because there was only room for one screen - although that was probably why 3D shows for Ne Zha 2 were initially scarce before the chain realized showtimes were going to sell out - because Sony seems relatively less enthused about using it these days, and I don't know how much the hardware side no longer putting out 3D televisions and dedicated Blu-ray 3D players has to do with it (their 4K players do tend to have 3D as an unadvertised feature) or if it's just because they're not getting much return. Doesn't much matter, I guess, except that I'd like to see it that way, and you can't even count on regular Blu-rays out of Hong Kong for Chinese movies these days, let alone 3D. But maybe we'll get lucky!

She diao ying xiong zhuan: Xia zhi da zhe (Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2025 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

There's a certain flavor of Tsui Hark film that you don't see quite so much since he started working with the big Chinese studios, the sort where he's seemingly trying to cram all the good parts of a sprawling epic into 100 minutes and doesn't quite have the FX resources it demands. During his Hong Kong heyday, he'd often have a producer credit while someone else directed, but his fingers were all over those movies. Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants is the closest he's come to that in years, for better or worse (but mostly better).

The Gallants in question are Guo Jing (Xiao Zhan), a son of the Song Kingdom who grew up in the grasslands of Mongolia, raised by the Great Khan, but who joined Huang Rong (Zhuang Dafei)on Peach Blossom Island to learn magical martial arts, but rejecting her when it appeared it appeared her father murdered his teachers. The real culprit is likely Western Venom Ouyang Feng (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), who sells the Novem Scripture which Rong-er has hidden and Jing-ge has mastered - and he might well provoke a war between the Mongols and the Jin-dominated Song in order to get it.

That muddies the story up more than a bit; as is Hark's tendency in these pictures, he front-loads with a fair amount of background to get to the stretch of the novel that he figured would make the best movie, but also occasionally jumps into flashbacks like a storyteller who sees his audience getting confused and is like oh, right, that doesn't make sense without this. For a while, it's a bit overwhelming but not much of a problem; the pieces fit even if you have to keep reaching back into the box. Once that's in place, the more serious problems start, as Hark is seemingly trying to include all the cool action scenes and melodramatic heights that there's not a whole lot of room for what goes in between. The back half of the movie has the young lovers dramatically separated and reunited without much time to feel like they're actually apart, and bombastics professions of loyalty that may or may not be enough to get someone killed and are pretty quickly forgiven. The climax is a massive showdown between the Mongol and Song armies that doesn't seem strictly necessary even before considering that all the audience really wants is Jing and Rong facing off against Feng.

It flows well, at least, in large part because, even with tragic backstory and other events pulling at them, Xiao Zuan and Zhuang Dafei have upbeat youthful energy and the chemistry to play scenes so they're not explicitly romantic but establish enough of a connection that there doesn't need to be a lot of hand-wringing about how they really feel later. Tony Leung Ka-Fai is the right villain for them, monstrous and powerful but also kind of amusingly pompous. He's big and rugged but doesn't have the sort of dignity and gravitas Bayaertu brings to The Great Khan in contrast. Zhang Wenxin is good as her daughter, a princess you can watch growing up (although she really doesn't look like the sister of the ethnically-Mongolian actors playing the Khan's sons at all).

And the action, of course, is just as much fun as you might expect; Hark has been honing this sort of high-flying, mystical martial arts for roughly forty years (since Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain in 1983), and though the action here is less aerial than in some cases, it's still larger than life and has the right weight to it, even when it's effectively force fields and chi blasts. There's impact to the blows and some freewheeling creativity to the staging that mostly doesn't quite cross over into slapstick. Even with CGI tools he could probably barely imagine forty years ago, he sometimes seems to want a little more than he has, with the CGI armies and locations not quite being top of the line. The fights between Jing, Rong, and Feng tend to be great fun, though, not quite gravity-defying but big and satisfying.

(I'm guessing that they're even better in a 3D presentation; Tsui Hark clearly plans for the technology and enjoys throwing things at the audience!)

For all that this is a big Tsui Hark fantasy-action movie where his reach exceeds his grasp by a bit, it's also possibly the most grounded of the three films in the genre released for the 2025 Lunar New Year, which is an odd turn of events, when you think about it. The result is a bit messy at times but has personality and assurance; Tsui Hark continues to do Tsui Hark stuff well.

Lunar New Year 2025.01: Detective Chinatown 1900 & Hit N Fun

Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate, even if it's just heading to the movie theater to check out the big holiday blockbusters.

Although one is, frankly, busting more blocks than the other; when I purchased my tickets a few days ago, both were in Causeway #6, one of their large rooms. But while Detective Chinatown 1900 was ready to fill up for its 6:30pm showtime, it was basically just me and one other person for Hit N Fun at 9:30pm, so they moved that to a smaller room (#10) and put another show of DC1900 on. The funny thing is how they handled assigned seating: The app still had me in seat C11, although I'm pretty sure that this would have placed me in the handicapped seating, while the ticket I printed out had me in I20, or as far back and to the left, viewed from the back of the theater, as you can get. Which, considering how I tend to be front and center, and slightly to the right if I can't be on the centerline (left ear better than the right, so that kind of balances things), is not a great guess. Fortunately, I could check Fandango and see that the front was wide open and just grab my usual seat B10.

Anyway, it's a busy year for Lunar New Year movies, the busiest in some time: DC1900, Hit N Fun, and Creation of the Gods II this week, Ne Zha 2 on the 14th, Tsui Hark's Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants on the 21st (hopefully in 3D), and Dante Lam's Operation Hadal on the 28th. Hopefully it's a good one as well; both of these are decent but with room to be a bit better.


Tang Ren Jie Tan an 1900 (Detective Chinatown 1900)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Does the propaganda get laid on fairly thick toward the end of Detective Chinatown 1900? Yeah, absolutely, but it's not like the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't a real thing, and it's not like there aren't parts of the movie which are uncomfortably topical today. I'll give it to them, even if it might be a somewhat bitter pill for the potential Western audience pulled in by the promise of a fresh start and some familiar faces.

As it opens, there is upheaval on both sides of the Pacific, as the Western powers are looting Beijing and Empress Dowager Cixi (Xi Meijuan) dispatches investigator Fei Yanggu (Yue Yunpeng) to San Francisco to track down rebel Cheng Shialang (Ke Bai aka White-K). He is supposed to be met by some noted detectives and translator Fu Qin (Liu Haoran), but Fu is left on his own and taken in by the head of the Hip Sing Tong, "Louis" Bai Xuanling (Chow Yun-Fat), who is due to address the city council on a plan to greatly expand the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act which would have the city reclaim the land under Chinatown. It's being supported by ambitious politician Grant Jones (John Cusack), but everything is thrown into chaos when Grant's daughter Alice (Anastasia Shestakova) is found dead, stomach gutted in a manner reminiscent of Jack the Ripper, with witnesses placing Bai's son Zhenbang (Steven Zhang Xincheng) at the scene of the crime. Also found dead is Navajo chief Six-Hands, who often came to Chinatown to trade furs; and his son "Ghost" Gui (Wang Baoqiang), a Chinese orphan adopted after his parents died building the railroad, must team with Fu Qin to solve the mystery.

There's more going on - an Irish labor gang, a stage magician, more bodies eventually to come, all running at a breakneck pace that's nevertheless impressively coherent given that the credits show both series mastermind and Dai Mo as directors and a whole slew of people contributing to the screenpay. I would not be shocked if the studio were throwing everything they could at the movie to meet a Lunar New Year release date - Chen's previous film, Decoded, came out just six months ago and you wonder if he just asked Cusack to hang around because he had another movie that could use an American shooting the next day - and it's kind of shaggy in that way, as well as in all the other ways Chinese movies with American parts often are: Lots of guys who are clearly Twenty-First Century Russians and who clearly don't speak English as well as Chow Yun-Fat.

Mostly, though, it fits nicely into the series, delivering very broad comedy which often gives way to a surprisingly good murder mystery, maybe the series's best since its first entry. There'a a lot of activity going on, but it's seldom wasted or purely red herrings, and the characters dive in rather than wink at the audience. As usual, you can tell Chen Sicheng loves this stuff; the film comes alive when it's time to reveal all, and if he's hidden a conversation or two, it's not like it's material you can't figure out. There's a very nifty chase in the middle which is full of slapstick, western, and wuxia bits, and a somewhat sillier (but still fun) set piece ahead of it. Mixing things up and throwing other genre elements in at times seems to have revitalized the returning cast and crew.

If the chemistry between Liu Haoran and Wang Baoqing isn't quite what it was in the first film, their parts are a little more balanced than they were in the last couple movies, where the growing confidence of Liu Haoran's Qin pushed Wang's Tang back into a more purely comic relief role. Here they both get to play fishes out of water and bounce off each other in entertaining fashion, and they've got a nice brace of folks supporting them, with Yue Yunpeng and Wei Xiang particularly good at playing their parts as both comic and potentially more than they appear. As in Decoded, John Cusack is kind of an odd presence in the film, in that his comfort in English can make him seem like he's underplaying relative to the other "Americans", but he grounds the climax surprisingly well.

And most importantly, there's Chow Yun-Fat in his first role in five years (One More Chance was delayed by Covid), and he's been missed. He goes from comedic mugging to fearsome authority as this film goes on, and his ability to switch between Mandarin and English lets him pull that off in all of his scenes - if he's dubbed, one wonders why nobody else is dubbed that well. He's giving a speech at the climax and seems earnestly at a loose end at the finale, the film's secret weapon except he's no secret.

(On the other hand, one cannot help but notice that nearly none of the women in the film get to actively do anything, and a lot of Navajo are played by Chinese actors for a movie that leans pretty hard on how racist Americans can be at points.)

Chow's maybe not quite enough to elevate this film where it gets rough, and you'll never really miss the rough spots, but DC1990 does just enough of the things I particularly like about the series fairly well, so that I wound up enjoying it quite a bit.


Lam Si Kyut Dau (Hit N Fun)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #10 (first-run, laser DCP)

Hit N Fun looks like it's going to be a broad, silly New Year's comedy as it introduces its characters and sets up their situations, but winds up going in another directions, like these goofballs haven't quite been made goofy enough and the filmmakers have grown too fond of them to really have fun at their expense. That's far from crippling, but it does mean that there comes a point where the movie is more pleasant than hilarious. Which is still a net positive, and I've got to admit, I don't really know where the zany version of this story would go.

It opens in a dingy muay thai gym in Macau; Bruce Chung Li (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) was once a legend with an unbeatable left fist but he and student Stallone Ko (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung), who has lost 37 straight matches, have been catering to senior citizens and children ever since word got out that he lost a fight to disciple Arnold Chan (German Cheung Man-Kit). Across the estuary in Hong Kong, advertising executive Elsa Lam (Louise Wong Tan-Ni) is bouncing between multiple appointments, including a voice over for "Meno-Peace" where the actress, Bruce's wife Carrie Mok (Gigi Leung Wing-Kei), has not been told what the material is and still isn't ready to be associated with that sort of work at 48; her agent Bridget (Yeung Sze-Man) is Elsa's aunt. That's when Elsa discovers that her boyfriend Daniel (Peter Chan Charm-Man), has another girlfriend, Surewin Suen (Chrissie Chau Sau-Na) - Macau's women's champion, Bruce's former student, and the face of Arnold's gym. Humiliated when their conference goes viral, Elsa shows up at Bruce's gym and offers 200,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $25,000 US) to teach her to fight.

Are there a bunch of nutty coincidences in that rundown? Yes! But that's kind of what makes it work, early on, where a sudden turn around the corner brings them back into familiar territory but from a cock-eyed view, and we get to wonder how the intense Elsa is going to play off the laid-back Stallone, or note that the bad blood that apparently festers between Bruce and Arnold doesn't keep Carrie and Surewin from being friends. There's comedy to be mined from Carrie's vanity or how this insecure artist has drawn the attention of two highly driven women. It should be an invitation to entertaining chaos, but never quite is. The initial friction between Carrie and Elsa vanishes so quickly that it's genuinely weird for the former to be describing the latter as a bitch by a half hour into the movie, for instance, and nothing really develops with Arnold being money-hungry.

At times, it's almost like the characters get too well-rounded. Gigi Leung, for instance, is given what should be a one-joke caricature and somehow makes this kind of shallow and vain woman who hasn't come to terms with her aging very funny and sympathetic without being maudlin, and there's an enjoyably understated opposites-attract thing going with Louis Koo's curmudgeonly Bruce; Koo's "uhh" when Carrie suggests Bruce train her for an action movie suggests he's known this would be a bad idea for twenty years. Louise Wong snaps out orders that make Elsa seem like she's abrasive and a lot but also not unsympathetic, and German Cheung briefly works as an entertainingly exaggerated take on everything one hates about the gym. At some point, though, they all seem to become too aware of their precarity and how the modern world can make comic characters tragic in a second, and there's not much of a back-up plan. There's really no reason for Elsa and Surewin to fight, let alone Bruce and Arnold; instead of the story leading everybody to weird places, it's easy to see them deciding to be mature about everything.

That said, when they are going for the big joke, it tends to land pretty well; Gigi Leung and Louise Wong are especially funny, as is Wong Wan-Ching as the daughter of Bruce & Carrie who is easily as smart as the two put together. Nobody really has a joke die on them so much as the jokes get smaller. It being Hong Kong, even a comedy knows what to do with a fight, from the slapstick chaos of Elsa's first confrontation with Surewin to a finale that is kind of unblinking in how, on a certain level, these two really want to beat the hell out of each other but are also very grateful for rules that tell them that this is enough. That one is intercut with the duel between Bruce and Arnold that is shot in a completely different way; they are expert fighters but their battle seems abstracted more than violent.

It's an enjoyable enough movie to see on a holiday, I suppose, although more a bonus-lazy-afternoon holiday than a big one where you're making a lot of noise. It's not quite tradition, but it's fairly nice.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 02: Chang Cheh x4 and Jackie Chan/Yuen Wo-Ping x2

I've got a pinned post on my Bluesky account saying I was going to go for one post in this series a week, and in retrospect it was kind of silly because (1) I've got a work trip next week and (2) sometimes it's not just a two-night thing.

So, here, Dale rolls an 11, which takes her to Arrow's Chang Cheh box set, featuring four movies - Five Shaolin Masters, Shaolin Temple, The Five Venoms, and Crippled Avengers - and since it turns out these are all new to me, that's a big chunk!

Then Centy rolls an 8, landing on an old Jackie Chan double feature disc of Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master. It turns out I've seen both before - Snake in 2012 and Master back in 2010 - but both were part of Films at the Gate weekends, and while I love those events, there are little kids running around and street noise, so these could be "first time seen and retained" viewings.

The disc's a bit of an oddity now, produced by the now-defunct Twilight Time Films in 2017, which didn't really specialize in this sort of movie - I don't recall them releasing any other Hong Kong action - but they had access to Sony/Columbia's library, which included Destination Films, which included these two movies in more or less the form they were released in America back in the 1970s and 1980s, with different opening credits in some cases (check out Jackie's mustache!) and a soundtrack on Drunken Master that is kind of maddening - it's like they have the complete English soundtrack, but only parts of the Cantonese and Mandarin ones, Apparently, that's just the way it's always been, and I wouldn't be surprised if between licensors like Twilight Time and whatever the successor company to "Seasonal Films" was, it was hard to get hands on better ones until recently. Both of these movies have recently been released on Blu-ray in the UK (via separate distributors!) all fixed up. Which means I could wind up buying them again and seeing them "new" for the first time again.

Anyway! How did our players do by all this?

Shao Lin wu zu (Five Shaolin Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the disc at Amazon

How many Shaolin Masters is too many Shaolin Masters? The answer isn't necessarily "five, possibly fewer", especially when people seldom complain about seven samurai being excessive, but it kind of feels like the filmmakers should do a bit more to earn that number toward the start, as it introduces five pretty nondescript masters with similar costumes and haircuts, in the middle of a lot of folks with similar looks getting slaughtered, and aside from Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing, who is more comedic than the rest, they feel kind of interchangeable, especially since they all immediately go their separate ways rather than stick together and explore the contrasts between them and their fighting styles.

Maybe that sort of character work isn't strictly necessary in this sort of movie; writer Ni Kuang and director Chang Cheh don't exactly create a slow burn that explodes into violence at the climax, but a stream of nearly non-stop action as the fugitives encounter resistance, focus on their training, and then draw their foes out for a rematch. Chang and the stunt team led by Liu Chia-Yung and Liu Chia-Liang spend the first half of the film delivering action in bulk, and while there may be a moment or two where you can see punches whiff as the other guy launches themselves in the air, but it's still a bunch going on that's almost all good.

But, as with most Shaw Brothers movies, technique is characterization, and once the characters start training with the goal of defeating specific foes, and then setting up a twenty-minute finale where we see it all put into place, well, that's the good stuff. Chang and the Lius build the action for maximum clarity in the one-on-ones, making the Masters nearly as distinctive as their various foes. It's a very specific sort of giving-the-audience-what-it-wants formula, and I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to learn that the action was designed first and then Ni backfilled a story, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if the thread in the middle where one starts to wonder what makes the Shaolin masters so special that they can be treated as less expendable than the various other Han fighting the Manchus came about by accident and that's why it never really became a theme.

It's a formula that delivers some fine, nifty-looking action, at least; it's no wonder Chang would return to the Shaolin Temple again and again.


Shao Lin si (Shaolin Temple)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

Because of the way I tend to see Shaw Brothers movies - randomly, every few months or so, as they show up at various midnight movie programs or when there's an archival print at a festival - it's easy to forget, or not even realize, that Chang Cheh had a sort of "Shaolin Temple Cinematic Universe" going, reusing characters and actors so that the stories would, at least roughly, line up and form a larger saga. Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that it was kind of neat when the stars of the previous night's movie, Five Shaoline Warriors, showed up and it became clear that this movie would end more or less where the previous one started.

It hijacks the movie in a way - the film starts out as one thing - three young men determined to prove that they are worthy of entering the temple and given menial tasks that initially seem like little more than hazing until it's revealed that the monks have seen their potential and assigned them the work that will strengthen them and develop the skills they will later need to fight - that is more or les sidelined when the soldiers show up and ask to hide, eventually merging in with that story on the one hand, as they join the fight against the attacking Manchu army on the one hand while two characters sneaks out and other adventures (presumably chronicled in other movies). As with Five Shaolin Masters, there are a fair amount of seemingly redundant characters, with Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing once again the standout because there's personality to his bluster and braggadocio, the character who can't easily be swapped out for another.

There's a good flow and sense of fun here, though, as the new students banter, with physical comedy in how they learn their lessons, and the intrigue ramps up as the film goes along and a number of plott threads develop. The action, whether it be sparring or training or, finally, fighting with real intent to kill, is good stuff. The filmmakers manage a good balance of the basically supernatural abilities that the students are learning and the more realistically violent action of the soldiers come to sack the temple, and where they overlap, there's a knowing cruelty that's a bit enhanced by the nature of this as a prequel, as we know this particular guy is not just what amounts to a schoolyard bully. Indeed, it handles its prequel nature fairly well, not waving away how much of the thrust of Five Shaolin Masters was that those characters decided they were inadequate fighters while still having an exciting climax.

And now, it will probably be another year before I see another Chang Cheh Shaolin Temple movie, and as such have no idea how it fits in.


Wu Du (The Five Venoms)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the disc at Amazon

Having only scratched the surface of Chang Cheh's work at Shaw Brothers, I'm in no position to say what might be his best or his masterpiece, but The Five Venoms is solid in ways that make it a real favorite. Its six fighters are just enough for fun mixing and matching without needing a scorecard, the fighting styles are distinct and evocative of their names, there's a story that mostly gives everyone something to do throughout without it just being "martial world" abstractions.

Indeed, it's a fun caper that keeps just enough hidden to have a little mystery while allowing most of the action to take place in plain sight. It almost requires Chang and co-writer Ni Kuang to skip the usual training sequences and master characters, mostly pushing them into a prologue. The images that went with the description of the various styles will be used in the final battle with the sort of flashbacks Chang usually uses training scenes for, and even with the secret identities, the characters are fun to watch bounce off each other. Lo Meng is great as the confident young Toad, puffed up on his invulnerability, with Wai Pak and Lu Feng knowing their parts of the villain pairing cold - Wai's Snake a consummate schemer, Lu's Centipede perfectly nasty as the muscle. Chiang Sheng's "sixth venom", who is sort of an audience surrogate, is a bunch of fun, eventually capable with the martial arts but kind of a dirtbag slacker in the middle of the grand archetypes.

Keeping things moving does kind of require sidelining Chiang and moving Philip Kwok Chun-Fung's Constable Ma off the board for a large part of the middle, as the bad guys start circling around each other - with enough auxiliary villainy that there are multiple suspects for the identity of the Scorpion - and Lo's poor lovable Toad is humbled. The fights are a blast, though, as the martial arts team makes each venom style instantly identifiable and larger than life but not quite silly, the big final five-way showdown a blast.

It's a wuxia with more going on than martial arts, broad enough to seem grandiose, but with earnest stakes. Even if it is basically a set-up for fights, you can describe it in terms that aren't just part of the genre, and maybe that makes it a great was to introduce the Shaw Brothers and Chang to those not looking for the Shaolin mythology.


Can que (Crippled Avengers)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Shaw Brothers was a factory of a studio; with Crippled Avengers coming out three months after The Five Venoms and reuniting much of the cast and crew for a movie that's closer to the Shaw formula but also an outright deranged version of it. If you told me that director Chang Cheh and co-writer Ni Kuang were just throwing everything out there to see what stuck under an insane schedule, I'd believe it; if you said that this was them doing a bit of self-parody, I'd believe that too.

As ridiculous as the movie is, it kind of works because the filmmakers and cast take it seriously where they need to; Lo Meng, Philip Kwok Chug-Fung, Sun Chien, and Chiang Sheng introduce their title characters with broad strokes and their disability representation is just maybe kind of questionable, but there's chemistry between them, a real camaraderie when it comes to helping each other out that makes them more than fighting gimmicks. Philip Kwok and Lo Meng, respectively, play the blinded merchant and deaf-mute blacksmith as keenly aware of just what they and the other are missing and how that can put them in danger. On the flip side, Chen Kuan-tai and Lu Feng are monstrous villains, but the sort that one believes might have once been heroes, if not consumed with rage and ready to see every little thing as a sleight that requires Vengeance.

On the way, the audience gets the humbling/training/rematch cycle, and it's some terrific action choreography, with Chiang Sheng especially showing off some amazing acrobatic ability and some downright absurd use of iron limbs elsewhere. There's a just-run-with it ethos to the whole thing, from the sadistic way the Daos pronounce how they will cripple the future heroes, to the earnest monks training them to be martial artists, to a finale where this massive structure has built and populated with henchmen for the express purpose of thwarting the avengers' remaining senses, which the others blithely dismantle. Chang never leaves a spare moment to wink at the camera, and as a result this whole thing is very silly but never in a way that grinds things to a halt.

Se ying diu sau (Snake in Eagle's Shadow)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Twilight Time Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the UK disc at Amazon

As mentioned, I've seen this before, but somehow I had forgotten the bit with the cat and the cobra, and the subsequent creation of cat's-claw kung fu, and it kind of feels like Chan and director Yuen Wo-Ping realizing that the funny stuff is their wheelhouse. Sure, there was plenty of comedy in this film before - Simon Yuen Siu-Tin, in particular, as a martial arts master who is squarely on the less cool side of the nomad/bum divide, and how fickle the students at the martial arts schools are - but it's a moment of pure, ridiculous slapstick that makes the movie what it is, the difference between Chan being an actor who is good at comedy versus a clown.

And the movie needs that clowning, because the Eagle clan hunting down the Snakes to eradicate their martial arts style is silly but not funny, and the competing martial arts schools storyline feels like the filmmakers trying to figure out what to do with the standing sets they've been allotted to make their movie with. It's the sort of movie where you wonder just what sort of order things were done in, because I could absolutely believe that they came up with a general outline, planned and choreographed the fights, and then tried to connect them with a story. It's kind of a mess.

But, it's a mess with Jackie Chan basically figuring out who he's going to be, this put-upon underdog whose martial-arts gifts come so naturally as to be almost unconscious, and I don't know to what extent Yuen Siu-Tin played comic characters in his long career, but it certainly feels like he's passing a torch to Chan, as the movie moves from his fights full of guile and the old guy being surprisingly spry to Chan doing a bit of comic exaggeration with his snake-style boxing before pulling out the comedy, and there's also something about his sad-sack face that lets one believe in him as the victim of bullying even though he's clearly almost comically fit.

Watching it after four Shaw Brothers movies, even funny ones like Crippled Avengers, one can almost feel this next generation figuring out a new way to make martial arts action, and also feeling like scrappy underdogs because they don't have the system the Shaws do, and the fights staged outside almost feel like guerilla filmmaking (when the Shaws did it, it often seemed like a specific place between others, not like they just needed room to move and had no set in mind). It's Jackie Chan becoming Jackie Chan.


Jui kuen (Drunken Master)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Twilight Time Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the UK disc at Amazon

Another case of "this group worked well, let's put 'em together again", this time with Jackie Chan playing another student, Simon Yuen Siu-Tin as a hobo mentor, and Yuen Wo-Ping orchestrating it. To a certain extent, this one has been kind of obliterated by Drunken Master II, which retreads the material as much as sequelizes it and is considered by many to be Jackie Chan at the absolute peak of his powers, staging his signature stunts on the one hand and recognizes that he comes across better as a goof than a dick, and is more likely to be compared to that film from 15 years later than Eagle's Shadow from six months before.

In some ways, what strikes me as especially funny, especially considering how much the previous film was struggling to build a story between its fights, is that in this one, Yuen Wo-Ping seems to have really internalized that what he is good at is fights, and so absolutely everything in the script is built to lead to a fight, to the point of absurdity. Flirting with a girl? Arguing with your father? Trying to buy a snack? Fight, fight, fight. There's a hitman using a house near where Yuen's Beggar So is training Chan's Wong Fei-hung ("Freddy Wong" in the goofy English dub) as a dead-drop, so you know that's going to lead to a fight, and in fact, we're going to jam a wealthy rival to father Wong Kei-ying just to make sure. It's not exactly a good script, but it's one that knows what it's there for.

And, obviously, what it's there for is to set up chances for Chan, Yuen, and Hwang Jeong-Ri (as the assassin "Thunderleg" Yen Tieh-hsin) to show off how they can move and trade punches until you eventually get Jackie doing drunken boxing, which is really just one of the all-time great physical comedy bits in for how he jerks around like a marionette controlled by someone who has never seen a puppet before but somehow unleashes devastating combos . I think what really makes it work, though, is that there is something underneath the fighting that resonates: That last fight is between Chang and Hwang, and Chan's take on Wong Fei-hung spent the start of the movie as a prick who thought he was cool, and to the extent he thought he was capable of improvement, he probably aspired to the kind of cool that Yen represents, dressed in a Nineteenth-Century version of what was natty in the 1970s, the best at what he does, dispensing violence but having a code, that sort of thing, and he eventually rises above it by being loose, letting himself look like a fool but doing the "be water" thing until he has wiped the floor with the killer.

He literally defeats grit with comedy, and he would spend the next 40 or fifty years doing so.


Early to hit a box set, but there are a couple dozen scattered throughout the board, so don't freak out too much.

Dale Evans: 14 ½ stars
Centipede: 8 ¾ stars

Big lead in stars, but they're right next to each other and Centy only needs two bonus pretty-good movies to close the gap.