The ‘Bad’ of Anime [Psychic Wars (1991)]

From http://cdn-2.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/050402072239_l.jpg

Dir. Tetsuo Imazawa

Japan

Film #8 of the ‘Worst’ of Cinema

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3jl8pKScr7jePAvveE61NffrB103CZmAECrZHqQRUyQGKnUjGOW3S85ZUymyvqh5yav-8jAy-W9fj4fB2GhyUXUeoLGBdsS3GgtHviGw07yPY_Qqu_gH-0shCN76UM4H1TjEh8OFIfdGG/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-07-15-22h36m20s8.png

[Note= The version of Psychic Wars I viewed was an English dub only copy. I inform you of this because anime has a very complex history with its English dubbing. Older dubs could change the script to the point of changing the entirety of the plot, and/or be incredibly awful even for great anime. Even now English dubbing tends to divide anime fans despite the fact that great ones do exist. Part of a mini-collection by Manga Entertainment called The Collection, the out-of-print British DVD of Psychic Wars is the only one I know of that exists except for a US disc that, frankly, would probably be not worth trying to get hold of. Bare this in mind with this review.]

From http://www.anime-planet.com/images/anime/screenshots/psychicwars6.jpg

Psychic Wars is awful. I chose it because it was on my list of the worst works I have seen over the years, the truly worst, the 1/10s which is a very selective list that not any film or anime can get on. On the rewatch, it is not justifiable to have it on that list still, because it’s merely a waste of time, not abominable, not one of the worst viewing experiences I’ve ever had. It is a testament to a time that, with rare exceptions now, Japanese anime in the West was an abstract entity, not because of the content, but because it could exist in a variety of viewing forms. The Original Video Animations, the OVAs, straight-to-video animation which had (usually) higher budgets and freedom for creativity than television, are the main reason for this when they were still being made in large amounts before the 2000s. Their variety of lengths, not just their stories, altered the material they contained; they could be six episodes long, or just thirty or so minutes long, with most I’ve seen being around forty to sixty minutes in length. By themselves, separate from their original source material, or if they were original stories and concepts, they were small bursts of images and narrative that either left you wanting more, or if they were convoluted or had no closed endings, left you baffled by what you had seen. I was too young to grow up with this sort of short length anime being released in the West for the first time, and while I can find many of them on DVD or on YouTube (or even on videotape despite the lack of access to a working VHS player), I wish we still lived with this type of anime being made one after another, both because it allowed for creativity, and trained younger anime directors and let them experiment, but because as well I find delight, perverse and sincere, in the idea that a random forty minute animation could suddenly materialise on a videotape shelf or in a rental store and dumbfound the person who viewed it. That said...I am not going to defend Psychic Wars even if it conjured up these thoughts for me viewing it again. I would defend other ‘bad’ short form anime like it, but not Psychic Wars itself.

From http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l115/Skellor/BT/psychicw3.png

Adapted from a sci-fi novel by Yasuaki Kadota, a surgeon finds himself pulled into a war for mankind’s survival when he treats an old woman, becoming imbued with supernatural powers and pulled towards prehistoric Japan to protect human kind from being wiped out of existence by a species of demons. Its short length makes Psychic Wars far more breakneck than the plot needs to work; while I only know of the novel from this anime, to attempt to cram any elaborate work in such a short running time, a common occurrence in anime, is never going to faithfully translate the original story. The results can be compelling – as with the feature length adaptation of X (1996) for me – but for Psychic Wars it’s not. Its pacing for such a short anime is problematic, sputtering from moments of exposition to an action scene in the first half without any sense of where it should be going, and ping-ponging back and forth through the narrative’s time period without a gracefulness to make such a fragmented structure work. It is cheaply made on a low budget too, which is a further problem. There are attempts to make it interesting – artistic looking sequences and a CGI vortex effect that amused my obsession with dated computer effects from the early nineties – but this crippling flaw is worsened by the really generic plot that undermines the anime’s chances of being entertaining. What could be a stylistic flourish, such as the protagonist taking on a group of horseback riding demons in prehistoric Japan that is done in sepia, could have been because of budget constraints, and while I am just as fascinated by bad animation if it looks interesting, Psychic Wars hasn’t really got a lot of moments to make it worth watching again. This is pretty much the same with the plot too as mentioned. There are moments of unintentional humour, seemingly about to promise a better anime when the surgeon first becomes Super Saiyan and fights a demonic tumour by punching it repeatedly with his fists, but there’s little to really attach myself to in this in terms of kitsch or quality. As much as I like that there was a period where anime like this snuck onto Western store shelves frequently before my time, there are plenty of other OVAs and short length non-sequiturs that far more better or jaw dropping in their content.

From http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l115/Skellor/BT/psychicw1.png

Normally when I watch anime that I can only view with the English dub, I try to judge them separate from the dubbing, but the one for Psychic Wars is awful, which I admit to having produced a laugh from me once or twice throughout the viewing. If the end credits are right, it was recorded in a studio in Cardiff, Wales, which does mean that there’s a scene where a demon general not only has to try and go forward with the plan to exterminate mankind but also hide his unexpected English accent, trying to speak in an American one like almost all British made dubs attempted to, which, while could be seen as cruel mocking by myself, is still amusing and does not let the hook the poor dubbing job. The whole anime, alongside the out-of-print series The Collection that Manga Entertainment released on DVD (and I own a few of), reminds me of a concept that the British company had, before it failed and they became a legitimately great company now, of releasing material that could be ‘beer and curry anime’, titles that anyone would watch on a Friday night with the foodstuffs mentioned, with friends, like they would with an action film. It does happen, but the concept of making anime fully mainstream, not just at the edge of it as it is now, has yet to be obtained. Manga Entertainment once thought that releasing violent and sexually explicit works, to separate anime from children’s animation, a paradox as anime is both for children and adults depending on the material, would work but it ended up making anime look like violent cartoon porn to British tabloids. Anime like Psychic Wars, released before I was old enough to become interested in Japanese animation, is no longer released in vast quantities here as a younger fanbase of teenagers make up most of the market. Only Studio Ghibli, in its own bubble, has really succeeded in breaking into the mainstream because of the quality of the work. Manga Entertainment could still reach their goal, picking up one-off and feature length animation that would be a lot more assessable for a non-anime fan to get into instead of a TV series, but even the concept of ‘beer and curry anime’ needs quality works to be released, and to be promoted greatly, to make the idea work. A bad action film is a bad action film, even with korma in your stomach, and if a good one is lost in the shuffle of new releases, nothing will succeed. As much as I got a masochistic kick revisiting Psychic Wars, you need good anime with English dubs of merit to succeed in reaching the mainstream. Great, accessible anime still exists but it gets lost in the crowd, and is not helped by the anime industry’s increasing pandering to the questionable tastes of die-hard Japanese, and Western, anime otaku. What sane person would watch some of the anime made now, especially those with gratuitous panty shots of animated, underage schoolgirls, with a chicken ṭikka masālā in one hand, a Carlsberg in the other and a smile on their face?

Probably one of the less expected ways to fight cancer.
(From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8QRl3m6_inIo_blNbuqWjzMu41U2GVryRI7Wf0vTJjWSiabPbnHnbiZyz364nQECq1i6JLH41Klk8Drc5_dbA0111EXhuaLEkAgpFWNaAkB2nQR5TtX7yUvErsXcFCPVruGnF9pQCH_IV/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-07-13-21h03m11s254.png)

The ‘Underrated’ of Cinema [Halloween II (2009)]

From http://www.film1.nl/images/portrait/original/56435.jpg

Dir. Rob Zombie

USA

Film #7 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

From http://www.gorestruly.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/halloween2.jpg

At what point do I veer towards being a mere contrarian or are critically lambasted films like Halloween II far more subjective in your reaction to them than what a critical consensus says overall? A single phrase – ‘personal opinion’ – colours any judgement of a film, and the only reason it wouldn’t, even if you agree with the generally held opinion of most film critics on it, is because you’ve yet to see the film. I had no interest in Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) – having not liked House of 1000 Corpses (2003) or The Devil’s Rejects (2003) at all – but Halloween II sounded like something much more interesting. Stuck with a sequel he did not want to do, Zombie rebelled and also, despite his love for John Carpenter’s original film, purposely made a sequel that did not stick to the conventions of the series and slasher films, thus enraging horror fans. My love and admiration for Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) has been documented in a review on this blog – [HERE] – but I find the slasher sub-genre that grew out of its influence to be one of the most tedious. I will watch ones I have not seen in hope of finding good films, but my hostility is not a unwillingness to see them but disappointment in how almost most of them are vapid even as genre films. Good ones exist, and even the repetition of plot structures and characters could be used to the sub-genre’s advantage, but most of the time they are the worst offenders of reducing a film into bland dialogue and scenes that merely pulls you along arbitrarily, with only gore and maybe a naked breast or two as a reward rather than anything else, to an ending you (ie. I) don’t care about. They are the colouring book to the blank page of an Italian giallo; the latter, because they are usually murder mysteries, are allow to go in any direction they desire, depending on the quality of each film itself, while slashers, unless they break the conventions or are very well made, are suffocated by the plot structures and rules of the sub-genre, like lines in a colouring book you are forced to stay in. Rob Zombie’s Halloween II while flawed changes this, by being everything that is the opposite of what is loved about slasher films, managing to escape from the sub-genre and making itself something worthwhile.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeySSyjX1w7HLEchkoscNTABjy_lb9QaF8Zaz9tMxb5kY_UirFyBZS9RXNiAXt01zDknqSUwYPIPu-7FIWa7SUz_NheuzUirro5858RKgiO9GsONxIDtSR2UaORuuuZUKOO2rxx_7jM3h1/s1600/Halloween+II+2009+9.jpg

Viewing it without seeing Zombie’s first Halloween film, it can be seen as an alternative reality of Carpenter’s original, drastically changed by time period and Americana used but,  within a film series which became convoluted and has the awful Halloween 4 (1988), Halloween 5 (1989) and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) within it, almost comes off as an attempt to bury it all and convey a far more interesting portrait of the characters. Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) in Halloween II is far from the version Jamie Lee Curtis played, but could be seen as a logical conclusion of the potential psychological damage caused by Michael Myers’ attempt to kill her, leaving her a psychologically damage person suffering from constant nightmares and on medication. It surprises me – having grown up with girls who acted like this even if they weren’t this extreme – that many critics and viewers find this Laurie Strode obnoxious and completely unlikable. Despite her continuous swearing and hostile persona, there are plenty of times, especially around the characters Annie Brackett (Danielle Harris) and Sheriff Lee Brackett (Brad Dourif) where she is clearly a lovable, kind person whose outgoing attitude and persona – the swearing, the Alice Cooper posters etc. – are both the combination of how any of us as young adults sometimes rebel against authority figures through this kind of behaviour, and Zombie, sparing us another slasher sequel, bravely tackling post trauma damage on a person’s mind in a genre film’s tone. The only time where Laurie becomes obnoxious in how I perceive that attitude to be is after a major plot twist that leaves her in even more despair and believing that only drinking herself mindless at a Halloween party is the way to drown the pain away. It is probably a generational gap issue, as a much younger person, but I wonder, even if there is no sexism or misogyny involved, whether male fans are afraid of women, through this female character, who have human flaws and act in ways unexpected and confrontation to them. Fans are accepting of a virginal, mousy girl like Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie, whose portrayal is a great one nonetheless, but are taken aback by one who is angry, is psychologically troubled and dressed and acts as she does in Halloween II. Even if a male viewer does not like the final girl stereotype of slasher films, there is a potential danger for any of us men to still have a biased portrait of these types of young women – that they are only obnoxious and have no further levels in personality to them, that they are only empty headed and are not merely naive, or that, to use a horrible word I apologise for writing, they are merely sluts with piercings and ‘tramp stamp’ tattoos. Laurie and her friends, at moments in this film, come off as misguided, unbearable, annoying and childish, but not only are they young adults that, like all of us at some time, have still a lot to learn about the worlds and ourselves, but that, even in a genre film like this, Rob Zombie is willing to write characters, of any gender, who are as complicated and as flawed as people are in real life.

From http://www.doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/hallo2ween14433.jpg

The desire to preserve the original Carpenter film from this ‘imitation’ or ‘betrayal’ is pointless; the immortality of Halloween (1978) is cemented as is its great influence, while this film should be allowed to break from the rules and do what it desires with the material if it works. The portrayal of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) in this should not be viewed as blasphemous and it would show shallowness in a person if they said this for not being able to distance themselves from an reinterpretation they don’t like; in fact the Loomis shown in this could be seen as an alternative version of him if the events of the first Halloween night had destroyed the morals that were strengthened in Donald Pleasance’s interpretation. It is arguable that the character isn’t given a lot to do, part of the film’s issue of needing to have been a lot longer and fleshed out, but the drastic change in him adds a new perspective that would be a godsend in any slasher than the usual dirge. The same applies with the interpretation of Michael Myers; I find the original ‘shape’, which appears from the shadows, to be a frightening creation, but to repeat it with the mentality of a photocopy of a photocopy, until the quality becomes less and less good, is destructive to the original material. Why should this version wear the mask all the time? Why can’t he talk? Why does he have to use the same knife all the time? Why do these differences not make him a version of Michael Myers? This pedantic tone, while sometimes justifiable, feels childish against a film which is purposely breaking the series’ conventions on purpose rather than as a result of bad executive decisions.  Quite frankly this pedantic nature of horror fan culture is also probably why most of the films made now are unbearable or tedious for me, the colouring book mentality causing mistakes and bad ideas to slip into films and ruing their virtues. Something like Halloween II, while immensely flawed, is far more interesting and better for relinquishing itself from this mentality.

From http://lookpic.com/i/284/mqCBn0RV.png

The film is erratic in structure, needing the added time to pace itself I mentioned earlier. Only the dream sequences don’t work within the film as a specific flaw; some are striking, but they feel like the ‘prettified’ nightmares usually depicted in mainstream cinema and feel disconnected from the rest of the film and its subject. The violence also veers dangerously close to being sadism for the sake of sadism, like I felt with The Devil’s Rejects, but it thankfully avoids this, as horrifying and appropriately upsetting for a film with this dark of tone. The only concern I have is that, while it was clearly on purpose by Zombie and succeeds, the film is violently depressing by its ending, making it unadvisable to view as a visceral horror film but something you need to be in the mood for. It does give hope however that Rob Zombie could be on the way to being a great director and reminded me that good horror films of worth are still being made. That this one was merely dismissed in some circles is disappointing, yet may prove to be a virtue in its favour. The most memorable films in horror are usually hated on their release – and Halloween II has its supporters – and for the genre, the films should confuse, upset and anger people. Horror cinema should not be a mass act of self congratulation for a fan community, but to make films that are divisive and undermine the conventions from before even if enrages someone. It should not be safe, something a ‘subversive’ slasher film like Scream (1996) is actually not, its smugness worsened by it still perpetrating the same clichés it is mocking. Halloween II, an uncomfortable, messy creation feels far more honest and alive in its divisive nature and is something I can keep closer to heart than an ironic horror film.

From http://justinsmithonmovies.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/halloween-2-2009.jpg

The ‘Cheap Target’ of Cinema [Jack & Jill (2011)]

From http://www.heyuguys.co.uk/images/2012/02/Jack-and-Jill-2011.jpg

Dir. Dennis Dugan

USA

Film #6 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

During the next two months I am trying to catch up with films released in 2012 in my country as well as work on this project. Ironically, my first film in this plan, my first Whit Stillman film Damsels In Distress, has a scene within it that throws over this review a fitting metaphor for the issues surrounding what is another Adam Sandler film, the first I have seen since I was an adolescent but a film that has ended up with a cloud around it of some significance. Even though the issues of both are radically different, the structure and central concern of Stillman’s scene are suitable for the conundrum. In the scene in that film, the editor of a student newspaper on a university campus Rick DeWolfe (Zach Woods) is decrying the fraternity houses in front of a group of people as the worst of culture; he is the stereotypical liberal, as I should aspire to be as one myself, believing his words are the only truth. Put in his place the (usually) liberal, (usually) middle class or geek culture film critic – especially those who write for online sites and have podcasts – who decries Jack & Jill not only a cinematic abortion, but goes as far as saying Sandler is a conman and a bully. In Damsels In Distress, a main character Violet (Greta Gerwig) criticises DeWolfe’s cruelty, only for him to show himself as an obnoxious egotist who merely dismisses her with insults rather than a judged argument. This opposition, the Violets, can be in danger of being contrarians and behaving in the same ways, but they have also shown themselves to be the more level headed individuals regardless of whether they praise or criticise Jack & Jill. Some of the criticisms are worth bringing up against the film, but most of it, to borrow a term used in a negative video review by Red Letter Media, is the words of ‘snarky nitpicking assholes’, words full of cheap metaphors, hyperbole and belligerent swearing that drowns out a judged critique.

From http://www.filmofilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/jack_and_jill.jpg

The film is not a great one, just an entertaining ninety or so minutes and nothing more, but I have to wonder if some critics are using this as a distraction from daring to write a similar critique of films allowed to escape scrutiny, with critical praised flowered on them, without actually considering their content. About a family man (Adam Sandler) with a divided relationship with his twin sister (Adam Sandler), as well trying to convince Al Pacino (Al Pacino) to do a Dunkin’ Doughnuts advert for his failing company, the film is as plot-by-numbers as you expect with fart jokes, physical injury jokes and such things seen in a lot of American comedy now. But, to immediately go into the criticisms levelled at the film, it amazes me how critically destroyed this film was when I have encountered far worse in cinema. The repetition of the plot is one such criticism but bear in mind that the repetition of story narratives in all genres of cinema has been an issue for a long time now – even in arthouse dramas – and that it depends on how you gage with everything around the repeated narrative like the humour. For the most part here, the film is charming and amusing. The only real problem is the saccharine tone of the ending. It is not the dialogue however, or the tone, which could still work and has a funny gag involving Al Pacino and a ceiling fan, but a problem of the music, music that creeps into many Hollywood films and ruins the sweet moments, the over precious songs and string scores that forcibly try to wrench emotions out of you but feels bullying and irritating. That single music style is more aborrant than any repetition of wacky scenario or joke within Jack & Jill and should probably be blamed more on the practices of certain film composers than someone like Sandler.

From http://www.filmofilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/jack_and_jill_c06.jpg

The humour is that which gets rabidly criticised as well. It is strange however that the criticisms are about the type of humour – of bodily functions and people being hit in the head or genitals – rather than the quality of the writing and performances which it should be. We are a species that spends a great deal of our lives in the bathroom, and our relationship with our bodily fluids like faeces and vomit is usually messy and embarrassing, so why ostracise a type of humour that can allow us to laugh at our flawed bodies and feel more better about it, even if it ends in a diarrhoea joke? Pratfalls can be argued for in the same way too, and to dismiss this kind of humour as ‘below’ you, rather than argue that it doesn’t work and is not well done when it could have been better and funny, is elitist in attitude and shows a unwillingness to face one’s physical being in such a bluntly honest way. I also cannot help but think of the fact that Yasujirô Ozu, one of the most critically acclaimed film directors in existence, had farting as a running joke in his 1959 film Good Morning; it is done very well and is hilarious each time, but it is still a reoccurring fart joke in an Ozu film that I have yet to hear be dismissed as ‘low’ from the director, a fact that makes the dismissals of such humour in films like Jack & Jill even more questionable.

The humour in general in Jack & Jill is very absurdist and intentionally random at times. Some of it doesn’t work at all, a problem with the style itself if not strict in the construction and timing of a comedic line or act, but when it works, as with the adopted son’s obsession with tapping random objects and animals to his person, it is hilarious and even more so because it is so purposely abrupt and random. The jokes about race however is a more divisive area, made worse to discuss as, when one attempts to correlate one’s ideas on the subject, people have a terrible tendency to jump to words like ‘racist’ without stepping back for a brief moment to carefully dissect the issue at hand. Some of these jokes are cringe worthy, but it feels less like cruel, debasing humour, but a film that wants to poke at the viewer’s ideas on the subject, especially white politically correct audience members, but botches at times miserably in the writing and playing out of the jokes. Others, especially with the case of the gardener played by Eugenio Derbez, are purposely uncomfortable and succeed more because his character’s clear delight in making the white people around him feel that way is as much part of the joke; that can be seen as a cop-out, but Derbez, and the other Hispanic actors could have refused to make the film if they found the material offensive. There are few cases where someone is forced to make certain films that offend them to be able to feed themselves. Also this is a film with a reoccurring joke of Al Pacino’s attempting to communicate with his French staff in their tongue only to speak complete and utter gibberish, making the film as much a swipe at English speaking, white men and women as well. That this film has been called racist, to the point of Red Letter Media (again) calling it the most racist film since The Birth of a Nation (1915) is idiotic, completely hyperbolic and trivialising a serious issue where truly ‘racist’ attitudes are far more horrifying and insidious than the accusations levelled at this film.

It feels as if attacking Jack & Jill, unless I encounter a review which breaks down the author’s criticisms of the film with meditated thought and without irony, was just an excuse by some critics to be lazy, or far more seriously, to be cowards to avoid tackling far more controversial viewpoints on films that get a lot of critical praise. If any readers of this review hate Jack & Jill, I will understand completely, but the bile that has been used on it is totally worthless and time wasting. Some of the criticisms are justifiable, but many can be levelled at other films. The anger at the product placement is understandable, but so many American films now are as much commercial capital as well as cinema, such as with The Avengers (2012), and I find the idea of there being children’s costumes of Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker and Burger King tie-ins for a nihilistic, and intentionally dark and violent, film like The Dark Knight (2008) far more horrifying than Adam Sandler holding a bottle of Pepto-Bismol up in front of the camera. (Call me naive as well, but I hope my fellow man is intelligent enough to ignore such product placement in films too, only taking interest in one because the pre-existing desire within them was pushed forward by sight of a Coca-cola or something onscreen). The film is innocuous, not a one-movie plague on intelligent society that some critics seen to have viewed it as, a generally enjoyable film which, with documentary footage of real life twins talking about themselves at the beginning and end of the film, has a heart in its centre despite the attempts of the saccharine music to spoil it. To destroy a film like this when worse does indeed exist, as I am going to force myself through for this season, is lazy, and disappointing for someone like myself who, posting these amateur reviews online, desires to look up to professional film critics only to find that most of the writing is learning from, and is a waste of material and time. Like DeWolfe’s attitude in Damsels In Distress, I read the reviews of certain critics and find them narcissistically in love with their voice, something I fear a lot will happen to me with my writing, without anything of actual depth and meaning in the elaborate words used.  If I see more Adam Sandler films in the future, I hope that they attempt to be a little better; I would like his production company Happy Madison Productions to iron out some of the problems with the types of jokes they use and do something about the music, but Jack & Jill was good despite what it suffers from in terms of flaws. What is the point of throwing cheap punches at a film that merely desires to be funny and charming like this, and for the most part succeeds, when far more deserving failures in cinema are given a free pass?

From http://movieboozer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Jack-and-Jill-Main-Review.jpg

The ‘Acquired Taste’ of Cinema [Strike of Thunderkick Tiger aka. My Name is 'Twin Legs' (1982)]

From http://pics.imcdb.org/0is146/strike1h.2843.jpg

Dir. Park Woo-Sang

South Korea

Film #5 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

Martial arts cinema is its own genre, not just a mere sub-genre it once was, with its own infrastructure to be divided into types of sub-genres, and marketable to a wider audience than many cult genres of film. Even the ordinary person on the street will find them in a supermarket’s new release section and buy it, something that The Raid (2011) will continue to a new stage for the genre.  It has its own section in the nationwide British store HMV, and its own shelf (or two) in the second hand store I frequent. The latter is a vast source of both obscure gems and truly the obscurest of this cinema, of scratched, English dub only DVDs from long vanished distribution labels of varying quality. I picked this up out of interest, but ended up (consciously or subconsciously) considering it for this season, not because it sounded awful, but because this sounded like one of those films that are usually viewed as bottom of the barrel in the genre but can turn out to entertaining viewing. Interestingly, it fitted the season as it is a South Korea film that has ended up with an entirely different person taking credit for its direction on the opening credits of the version I saw, and has the name Joseph Lai as one of the producers, the man who helped produce the films of Godfrey Ho such as Ninja Terminator (1985). This feels like the sort of films this man distributed, or at least cut from the same cloth of these low budget releases from the period, in terms of its recognisable and ridiculous English dub synonymous with films from Lai. In my experience with these films – where Godfrey Ho took credit for other people’s work, and Lai took credit for Ho’s, and where I have seen a cut-and-paste ninja film exactly like Ho’s infamous sub-genre of his own creation that didn’t have his name on it at all – this confusion with even the basic origins of this film and the disguise that it has had forced upon it is to be expected. It exists with a cheaper, more erratic or dimestore craziness than other more well regarded types of martial arts cinema, truly distinct even if it’s only written about in select films like Ninja Terminator.

From http://img.youtube.com/vi/A12Cv7bxN_Y/0.jpg

Three men steal a large amount of loot, only for one to betray the other two. When he is murdered, the other two swoop over his daughter, like hawks, to get information on where it has been hidden, only for an outsider with a dangerous skill in combat to intervene and stake his claim for the loot as well. Like the Lai/Ho films, and anything pre-existing they had their hands on, it starts as a simplistic one-dimensional film with absolutely no regard for boundaries in entertaining the viewer. As the hunt for the loot takes place – using a Rubik Cube as an important key of all things – you are bombarded by amusing digressions, dubbed voices and numerous fight sequences one after another.  From a period, decades long, where these films were being churned out, and the aesthetics of the 1990s onwards was a long way off, these low budget meat-and-potatoes martial arts films, especially those from South Korea (like this) or places like Taiwan, are fascinating. The fashion in this film – scarves, white gloves, denim jacket and jeans – alongside the hairstyles is a back catalogue of style far too concentrated in its nostalgia for most people that it would cause aesthetic diabetes of the texture cognition of the mind. The characters are one note but stand out for their looks and dubbing, including that reoccurring trend of Asian martial arts cinema of an effeminate (ie. gay) character as a joke who is as over the top in his behaviour as possible, one of the villains who wears a full body, blue stocking for part of the film and has a best boy pasted in lipstick and white blush besides him. Its eye rolling as always with this cliché, but like many of these films, at least he is a skilled martial artist who can handle himself. He’s also one of the few villains I have seen who, using an anatomy chart, goes out of his way to advise his minions about the combat prowess of their enemy to warn them of who they’re facing; it is such a poorly developed virtue in main villains that it shows so much in the incompetence of their henchmen, something this one can be grateful isn’t one of his faults. This film in the first half keeps throwing moment after moment that are charmingly goofy or insane; it stands out as eliciting one of the oddest thoughts I’ve had watching a film – “Wait, did the man bring a harpoon with him??” – only for it to become obvious, in a film that is 99% set inland, that the other main villain has indeed brought a harpoon with him to stab people to death with. When it disappears, thinking about it, the harpoon-shaped absence it leaves makes the choice of weapon even more peculiar.  This film even continues the trademark of Ninja Terminator in “borrowing” music from other sources, this time going one further and using Wendy Carlos' reinterpretation of Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, the theme for A Clockwork Orange (1971), for one sequence.

From http://pics.imcdb.org/0is4/strike5f.3897.jpg

Watching films like this however, unlike the more infamous Godfrey Ho works, is as much an act of patience, even masochism, too that not everyone has. The martial arts in this film is solid and well done, but outside of this or the wardrobe department, no one is bringing their best to the material; it starts to become the ponderous, disinteresting work it probably should have been since its beginning and the entertainment on from this fluctuates immensely. Its charm is still there – as when it suddenly becomes a Christmas film in a montage sequence, an instrumental rendition of Jingle Bells set over images of the daughter dressing up as the anti-hero in only his shirt, jacket and a drawn on moustache – but its sporadic. Also like a lot of films from this type of martial arts cinema, including Godfrey Ho’s own sadly, there is a bitter taste of sexism, especially with having its main female character beaten up continually, including by the anti-hero himself at one point. It’s a major issue with exploitation cinema – that is designed to exploit taboos regardless of moral judgement and good taste – but it’s very incongruous considering this genre is full of strong female protagonists, and actresses like Michelle Yeoh, who stand on their own two feet as incredibly skilled and talented martial artists.

It is a film for only the die-hard viewer or the person like me who dives into piles of films and DVDs for movies like this, as it is a film that gets it merits mostly from its ridiculousness, not necessarily for a cheap laugh, but to absorb the juxtapositions put onscreen and moments of goofy surprise. A large quota of the films on that second hand shelf I cross past continually is full of martial arts films like this, costing a mere pittance and probably only viewed by those film fans willing to give their time for lesser films that could either be mere hastily made bad cinema or great c-grade pulp. Strike of Thunderkick Tiger, like many of them, elicits mixed emotions that change from bad to entertaining continually throughout it, and because of this it’s an acquired taste if there ever was one. 

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GrHkbqssc10/0.jpg

The ‘Nostalgic Trauma Flashback’ of Cinema [Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)]

From http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/original/3KoZiWlgvmeDYiLk9oOMpEvZThb.jpg

Dir. Danny Leinen

USA

Film #4 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

From http://images.blu-ray.com/reviews/557_1.jpg

I was going to view this only out of fascination, remembering seeing pieces of the film, but watching it has gone beyond that to opening a vast segment of my mind that is rarely allowed to be opened, bringing a whole era of my adolescence out like a post-trauma flashback. About a pair of stoners (Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott) who have to deal with a night’s aftermath that they cannot even remember, this film of all things is the key to mapping out my early teenage years in terms of culture and film, even more so in that the film isn’t good and is the mediocre bridge between the late 1990s and the early 2000s where I went through puberty and early teenage hood. Born in 1989, my adolescence was from 1999 onwards to the middle of the 2000s, probably 2006 or 2007 when I was at college and I started getting more into various types of music and cinema gradually. I still remember the peculiar taste of the 1990s I grew up with, reconciling with it through my film watching, but the early 2000s is this vague beast that has been wrapped in cotton wool in my mind despite having many memories of it. Dude, Where’s My Car? has abruptly revealed the truth of the era, a bucket of cold water over my head and woke me up.  

From http://static1.fjcdn.com/comments/t
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After the post-modernism of the 1990s, the early 2000s for me is probably a lot more dated than any other period, especially since it has yet to gain the protective shield of nostalgia that the 1980s has. It was a period of the American Pie films and bands like The Offspring were popular. It is also a period which, despite having many aspects of it that still stand up today in quality, was a crumbling mess of pop culture, of the lingering taste of the nineties trying to interconnect with the new technology, the sanitisation of a lot of it, and the effect of being post-post-modern in mood, something we’re still trying to deal with in cinema in 2013 for myself regardless of the critical consensus of most people of the current film climate. It was a period that never considered pop punk to be a paradoxical concept, where everything was both cheerful and bright, or like the lyrics to Disturbed’s first album, but a lot of it feels lame and hollow in hindsight. It was acceptable to have white man rap against heavy metal guitars, and while I still listen to some songs by Linkin Park etc., for the most part it is cringe worthy, and a period of mass commercialisation of American skater, college campus and ‘alternative’ culture that was blatantly sold of marketable product despite the creators’ intentions. Now most of the albums from this period litter the second hand music stands, as I am baffled I had songs by bands like Zebrahead on my computer, heaven is no longer a halfpipe, and Sega no longer has a Dreamcast and is now in the pocket of their age old rival Nintendo. And like the early 1990s straight-to-video horror films I evoked in The Invisible Maniac (1990) review, comedy films like this one from the early 2000s are strange beasts with no place in cinematic history.

From http://www.uber-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tumblr_ma6gqr8eLs1rgonf4o1_1280.png

Why, when Dude, Where’s My Car? has sex jokes, pot references and such types of gags, does it have the look, tone and music cues of a family friendly wacky comedy? You know, the ones where a person acquires an animal, usually a dog, which they have to eventually fall in love with by the end and at some point demolishes their home, and drools everywhere, in the narrative? It comes more apparent that of a lot of early 2000s cinema, geared to rebellious teenagers, is actually awkward and awkwardly put together. It immediately invokes the infamous Freddy Got Fingered (2001), which I finally viewed last year, a film that was said to be offensive and abhorrent by film critics but turned out to be really ordinary, plastic looking cinema that Hollywood was making at the time, with the vast gallons of elephant semen being the only thing that separated it from the teen comedies. Dude, Where’s My Car?, a series of comedy vignettes about the most vague night of debauchery possible, has a few laughs, but it is mostly the worst aspects of the period put together, American comedy that should not be criticised for its type of humour by critics but for how stilted and lackadaisically put-together it all was, with their empty visual looks and ‘alternative’ pop punk soundtracks. That this film looks and sounds like Beethoven (1992), but is actually about pot smokers having to contend with disappointed girlfriends, amnesia and mystical alien technology instead of a lovable and rambunctious dog, is even more incomprehensible in its plainness. Greg Araki’s Kaboom (2010) this is not – Araki almost digging the graves for films from this period and kicking them into the holes from behind with Kaboom’s braver but more charming nature - a film that just reminds me of some of the utterly generic music and items of the period. That could be viewed as incredibly cruel on my half, but as someone who still loves quite a few things from the era, even if people now would turn their nose up to them, I can also cringe at the awful quality of some of this culture and see how airheaded it was.

If only these two had a film of their own completely separate from this one (From http://static.yify-torrents.com/attachments/dude_wheres_my_car_(2000)/imphGM_large.png)

The compromised Americana of Dude, Where’s My Car? – of pot smoking, white men ‘ghettoing’ in a music video fantasy sequence, fast food drive-ins etc. – is sorely lacking and flat onscreen, even more so as an Englishman with a continental difference between me and it. It is all distracting series of iconography on a screen, and probably is now for a lot of Americans my age or younger an embarrassment too. This could be viewed as trying to use the scorched earth policy on my adolescence out of shame, but its more the realisation that, for everything I still keep to heart, things like this film, which produced only a snicker or a laugh occasionally and is not creatively interesting in humour or look, sadly make up a large part of the era and has reminded me of it all like bathroom tap limescale in my mind which has forgotten about for years. It feels cheap, and it’s sad to see the outtakes in the end credits where everyone including the two main actors are enjoying themselves, as they all deserved better than this. What I was left with, thinking about the film, is just how many people will be willing to (re)watch Dude, Where’s My Car? and whether they’ll have the same nostalgic feelings of horror at what they see as I did.

From http://www.wikinoticia.com/images/
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The Pointless of Cinema: The Invisible Maniac (1990)

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VXNWSr1UpT4/
TF0n3zWISpI/AAAAAAAAEc0/Wd7SFkPM8T0/s1600/Invisible+Maniac+poster.jpg

Dir. Adam Rifkin

USA

Film #2 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema Series

From http://img11.nnm.ru/3/a/2/3/a/4ed1077af2734e82ed200f36cad.jpg

I was born in 1989. Approaching this - just punting itself into the nineties with a soundtrack that evokes to me a Casio keyboard soundboard, but with traces of the eighties all over it - I am in alien territory. These early nineties lowest-of-the-low budget horror films, usually full of nudity, are strange also-rans in cult cinema for me, in a peculiar decade in terms of fashion, colour palette and entertainment, yet not fully part of it, an era where all culture, like an Ouroboros, ate its own tail, from Quentin Tarantino to Double Dragon (1994). There are many of these films still to see, but the ones I have seen, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, are too weird to live, and too boring to die. The Invisible Maniac is another of these prototypes that was never meant for mass consumption and fails miserably. Mentally distorted by his mother’s words into hating women, while lusting after them, Kevin Dornwinkle (Noel Peters) grows up to be a scientist but has a violent breakdown at a scientists’ convention when his invisibility formula fails to work. Escaping from a mental asylum, Dornwinkle hides himself as a replacement physics teacher at a summer school while improving on the mistakes of his formula. Unfortunately his libido and mental sanity is distorted, beyond a pervert to a lust obsessed fiend, and the students he teaches are pushing him over the edge, making his success with the modified invisibility serum even more useful to him than to merely become the greatest scientist in existence.

From http://www.imcdb.org/i415164.jpg

In a year I finally started viewing Troma films, it’s amazing this wasn’t released by that company, the bright coloured, sparse set located goofiness comparable to those films. Unfortunately, like most of Troma’s films I’ve seen, The Invisible Maniac is also lackadaisical. Immediately against the film’s favour, despite having female nudity in-between for the male (or female) viewer, is that its only after fifty minutes into its eight six minute running time that it starts its main concept proper after far too long a time. There is such thing as drawing out a film to add to the anticipation or dread of the events about to happen, which I will champion when it works perfectly, but it’s shocking to realise fifty minutes went past so quickly but that nothing of worth actually took place in that time. The film starts properly after that time – death after death taking place, people fighting invisible foes, nudity, goofy silliness – but even after it picks up the pace, the film is already damned by how toe curling it is. It is not helped that the students themselves, including one jock that looks like he should be in the teacher’s staff room rather than behind a classroom desk, are completely obnoxious and insufferable. They are callous, mean spirited idiots, and despite being a red hot blooded heterosexual, the titillation is worthless for me because of the film’s tackiness and that, in my personal taste, the actresses playing the students were not attractive to me at all. The female headmistress of the school Mrs. Cello (Stephanie Blake), who promises higher grades to male students, and to be a pig (or admirer of the female form) has lovely soft, big curvaceous breasts, is far more attractive and interesting than the bland Barbie doll, schoolgirl archetypes and looks portrayed in the female students, even if some of her line delivery is so wooden it causes the film’s reality to stop and break in half. Physical attractiveness depends on individual thought, but a common thread of these early nineties B-movies is a limited view on titillation, in the casting of the actresses willing to be naked and the showing of this unnecessary naked flesh, that is exceptionally bland for me looking back at this era, defeating the key enticement to see this film, or even make it, in the first place.

From http://www.also-known-as.net/films/the_invisible_maniac/the_invisible_maniac5.jpg

Pretty much the vast amount of the film is disinteresting. There is a brief moment when two of the students, realising that Kevin Dornwinkle and Mrs. Cello’s physical additions are upstaging them all completely, commit to an utterly ridiculous sex scene. It’s not just the dialogue ‘Without risk, there would be no love’, or a ballad that aspires to be Total Eclipse of the Heart but fails miserably, but that they have sex in the same room, the same proximity, of a freshly dead body, making the ballad’s vague romantic nature even more inappropriate. For the most part thought the titular maniac has to carry the whole film on his transparent shoulders. He cannot save the movies – the students are detestable, the attractive Stephanie Blake is only in the film briefly, the dialogue and look of the film is the usual scrags of z-movies, and the caretaker is made to be mentally disabled in a way that would make the disabled laugh at the film’s creators harshly – but he does his damndest anyway. From using a footlong sandwich in a way that would appal Subway to making awful puns, actor Noel Peters is the only real virtue of the film in terms of cheese. Even his intolerable cackling laugh eventually becomes amusing.

From http://www.also-known-as.net/films/the_invisible_maniac/the_invisible_maniac3.jpg

It is a pretty forgettable film, far too uninteresting for the most part, despite its shining moments, to be worth remembering or beating the drum for. Even then the choice sequences, like the sex scene, could merely be extracted and put up online as clips, defeating the purpose of viewing the rest of the film, stale and dull rather than good fun or a cacophony of ever increasing lunacy like the shining gems of low budget genre films. The good moments are worth seeing, allowing The Invisible Maniac to still cling on by its fingers away from complete damnation, but these small charms cannot stop the rest of the film to be exceptionally pointless to sit through.  

From http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111110014836/theflophouse/images/4/43/Vlcsnap-2011-11-09-21h46m12s123.png

The ‘Stitched-Together Gem’ of Cinema [Ninja Terminator (1985)]

From http://img.movieberry.com/static/photos/33733/poster.jpg

Dir. Godfrey Ho

Canada-Hong Kong-United Kingdom

Film #1 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema series

From http://imcdb.org/i194292.jpg

It seems a shame, although I hope there will be more films that I view this way throughout the season, that Ninja Terminator  has to be reviewed under a season that has the title The ‘Worst’ of Cinema. I liked the film before this review, and I love it even more without any shame; the point of the season however was to review films as well that, even if I disagree wholeheartedly with them, are dismissed as bad by other people. The film has a 4.4 rating on the Internet Movie Database as I post this on my blog – January 1^st 2012 - but usually Godfrey Ho films are around 2.0 on their scale. While I fell in love with Ninja Terminator on this second viewing, and think it’s a good film in its accidental way, I can understand the low rankings it gets from other film viewers.

From http://static.megashara.com/screenshots/489190__snapshot20090424173920.jpg

Three ninjas (including actor Richard Harrison) steal from their ‘Ninja Empire’ the pieces of the Golden Ninja Warrior, an artefact that can turn your body and arms into living shields able to deflect even sword blades. Yes it has its weaknesses, such as the fact one’s legs could still be lopped off from under you regardless by a sword, but it’s a powerful artefact nonetheless and the Ninja Empire is on the hunt for the individuals responsible for its theft. When one of the ninja thieves is killed, it divides the remaining conspirators, Harrison’s Ninja Master Harry fighting for good, while his conspirator within the two years that have past is leading a crime syndicate and wants to claim the remaining pieces. Through his second in command, who dresses in a white suit and a lovely blonde, curled wig, and his own set of minions, the syndicate goes after the surviving sister of the murdered ninja to claim her piece of the Golden Ninja Warrior. To protect her, Harry sends in his own man Jaguar Wong (Jack Lam), a suave and skilled fighter who intends to help her and generally undermine the actions of the syndicate with his fist. Godfrey Ho, alongside his producer Joseph Lai, is infamous for this run of ninja films which take pre-existing films and re-edit them, intercutting new scenes of ninja combat and Richard Harrison, to weave together  new narratives using the English dubbing script and some blatant editing techniques. It was done mainly to capitalise on the bludgeoning obsession with ninjas in American culture in the 1980s, so it can be viewed as a questionable practice as well as ramshackle to the extreme.

From http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4ftszf5E61qztwngo1_400.png

I view Ninja Terminator as an immensely enjoyable film though, but what makes it and a few other of Ho’s ninja films even better is that the attempt to combine two completely different sets of material into one single movie, through editing, inadvertently stumbles into the ‘Montage of Attractions’ theory that Sergei E. Eisenstein, the legendary director of Battleship Potemkin (1925), had developed. Like his fellow Soviet filmmakers who practiced experiments with editing and the concept of the montage, Eisenstein believed that by juxtaposing two single images together in a specific way would have a certain effect on the viewer, and that it could be used in different ways to have significant power to them. This is seen at it best with Lev Kuleshov’s experiment known as the Kuleshov Effect, where the same image of Tsarist actor Ivan Mosjoukine was spliced together alternately with an image of a plate of soup, a person in a coffin, and a young girl playing, each version having a drastic change in effect on the viewer in each combination. By utter accident, in an attempt by Ho and Joseph Lai to take unfinished and obscure films from South Korea, Taiwan etc. – not just martial arts films, but at least one softcore soap opera set in the fashion industry as well that was remade into Ninja The Protector (1986) – they ended up practicing the same methods Soviet filmmakers perfected to make numerous films over the eighties and early nineties. Some film studies students reading this may want to throttle me for comparing Ho to one of the most important directors in cinema’s history, or may be dismayed that someone used these techniques so that we can have Harrison communicating with the lead of the original film through a Garfield the cat telephone. The resulting creation turns out to be something special however.

From http://c.asset.soup.io/asset/3117/2460_5fc0.gif

With a plot that, because of two different sets of footage being spliced together, doesn’t really make sense, the film ends up being an abstracted version of these sorts of c-level movies. The tiers of each side face other but do not interact with members of their own side in other tiers, outside the moments when they are connected together by editing of course, and fights break out about almost every five minutes. Nothing is seen as ill-advised production decisions either. No one raised an issue about toy, motorised robots being the messengers of death for the Ninja Empire, walking into rooms under the veil of ominous smoke or getting stuck on the raised doorway, but its charming and hilarious to see especially when the robots boom with the voices foreboding doom on those who trespassed against them. Everything that transpires in the film either undermines conventions of plotting, such as having a henchman of the villains get his own prolonged sex scene, or what one expects in this sort of filmmaking, and would become bored by, making it almost avant-garde in its idiosyncratic savant mindset. Any moment it seems to slog through the minutes is undermined by the fact that something interesting, mindboggling or amusing is going to happen. Godfrey Ho and Joseph Lai, while they could be taken to task for their idea of generating as many films they could sell from existing materials, at least, when their creations succeeded, made movies that are entertaining, and used pre-existing materials that had something inherently watchable about them for any viewer even if they were trash. Even the ninja sequences, with stunt actors clearly doing the fighting in the cheap ninja suits for the likes of Richard Harrison, are competent and have skilled performers involved so that, despite most ninja fights in Ho’s films consisting of flips and repeated sword clash sounds, they never become poor, slapdash sequences found in martial arts films outside of Asia.

From http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17fq078m8os00jpg/medium.jpg

Since this is a review on this site, this cannot end without briefly talking about the music. Some of it is dated but appropriate for the material. Some of it however is legitimately great; it’s not up to the quality of the famous cut-and-paste film Shogun Assassin (1980), whose score is combined with the images to add to its ghostly, phantasmagorical tone, but Ninja Terminator’s music choices adds to it immensely. Researching, it appears that Ho had no issues with “borrowing” music from other sources and there is a possibility that some of the music in the film is by Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream. It’s an exceptionally dubious practice to take for a film that may have made money only for Ho and Lai, but decades later it is actually inspired and effective. How these films have not occurred the wrath of the original musicians, especially since they have been released on DVD unlike rip-off films that have borrowed music too, I have no idea. No one care, no one knows about their existence, or Roger Waters really adores cut-and-paste ninja films. We will never know.

From http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ninja-terminator03.jpg

There films of Godfrey Ho – not taking into account his self directed films, the ones he made with Cynthia Rothrock, or those made by other directors he merely put his name on and claimed for himself – can be hit-and-miss, as to be expected from a technique that can work immensely but also creates many unusable results even for artists who are using it for more than commerce. When they do succeed like Ninja Terminator, they do so greatly and its disappointing to merely dismiss them as guilty pleasures as, while it will be difficult to defend it to friends and loved ones, its Frankenstein form and tone is inspired and avoids the pitfalls of completely original material that falls into generic tropes. With this film generic tropes are cut to shred like an unfortunate watermelon Richard Harrison practices on with his katana and is repeated again later in the film to compensate for the lack of a second training montage.

From http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v218/Glupinickname/Blog%20gluparije/NINJA_Terminator_03.jpg