The Lady Assassin (1983)

Original title: 清宮啟示錄

The Qing emperor (Ching Miao) has come to his final years and is beginning to think about his successor. His favourite for the role is the 14th Prince (Max Mok Siu-Keung). Fourteen is young, he’s inexperienced and, as events will show, more than just a bit of a shallow idiot, whose more interested in looking righteous than the difficult business of actually being it. But least, he appears to not be actively malevolent. This can’t be said about the 4th Prince (Lau Wing) – he’s a man deeply in love with himself, palace intrigue and more often than not being evil for evil’s sake. Four has gotten wind of who his father plans to make his successor, and is not at all against murdering his own brother (well, half-brother, one hopes for the women involved).

The 4th Prince’s problem when it comes to assassinating his rival is that his brother has a very capable bodyguard and advisor in form of virtuous and highly efficient martial arts expert Tsang Jing (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung) – coming pre-packaged with his two female servants/martial arts students/probably lovers Jade (Yeung Ching-Ching) and Pearl (Daisy Cheung King-Yu) – and Tsang Jing isn’t just making the 14th Prince look like a better man than he actually is, he’s also easily thwarting most assassination attempts.

Eventually, the 4th Prince will acquire his very own martial arts expert in form of the ambitious Min Gen Yiu (Jason Pai Piao), but even then, a successful assassination seems doubtful and risky. So much so, the 4th Prince seeks out the help of Han revolutionary leader Lui Liu Liang (Ku Feng), promising him to get rid of the laws that suborn the Han Chinese under their Manchu conquerors. If, that is, Lui Liu Liang, or rather, his redoubtable martial artist niece Lui Si Niang (the incredible Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) help him access the decree in which is father has set down his designated successor.

Of course, helping out a man like the 4th Prince might not turn out as happily as one would want.

And that’s only about half of the plot of Tony Lou Chun-Ku’s breathless Shaw Brothers palace intrigue/wuxia mix The Lady Assassin, a film that somehow manages to run breathlessly through an amount of narrative that would provide for three or four seasons of a modern streaming TV show, features about a thousand different fights, yet still has room for rather a lot of complicated characterisation.

In most wuxia films, Lau Wing’s villain would be a one-note moustache twirler, but here, the guy’s abhorrent but also much more nuanced than you’d expect. As an example, the scene in which he convinces Lui Liu Lang and his family to throw their lot in with him by perfectly emulating a man of honour and conscience is a perfect portrayal of the kind of narcissist who always appears to believe in his own lies and empty promises a little (if you’ve never seen such a thing in real life, I can’t recommend the experience), and always finds a bad excuse for not acting on them he also appears to believe, however untrue it may be. Still, enjoying his own ability to pretend to be an honourable man, he will even try to implement his promises, until he gets the tiniest pushback. Then, he folds like the utterly weak man he is at his power-grubbing core.

As a whole, this is one of those wuxia where the most honourable characters – Tsang Jing and Lui Si Niang are genuinely good people – find themselves tied to the will and plans of characters whose nature is abhorrent to them once revealed, and can only break free from obligations, rules, and lies through acts of insane violence. Being in any contact with power can apparently only be cleansed through blood and vengeance.

Speaking of acts of violence, the martial arts choreography by Poon Kin-Kwan is absolutely insane – fast, vicious and only occasionally totally fantastical, this is all about speed and movement. Director Lou stages the fights – like everything else in the film – exclusively in angles and shot compositions of maximalist dramatic impact. There’s not subtlety to the direction, but as Lou uses his hammer here, everything doesn’t just look like a nail but indeed is one. It’s pretty incredible, as is how powerful much of the acting is – Lau Wing is a particular standout, but the burning fierceness of Leanne Lau’s gaze, or the dignity only slightly marred by the cynicism of permanent defeat of Ku Feng’s performance, are just as impressive.

To my eyes, The Lady Assassin is an absolute classic of the late period Shaw output, a film as perfect as its final freeze frame.

The Bells of Death (1968)

Original title: 奪魂鈴

Some travelling martial world evil doers murder the family of young woodcutter Chang Wei Fu (Chang Yi) just for the heck of it, and kidnap his sister. The distraught young man soon stumbles upon an experienced swordsman who eventually – after some running and shouting by our hero – teaches Chang Wei Fu martial arts so he can avenge his family.

Some time later, Chang Wei Fu begins hounding his psychopathic – other wuxia villains at least have motives for their misdeeds - enemies with his newly developed skills and the tinkling of an anklet with bells his mother used to wear. He will also acquire something of a love interest – it’s complicated – in one Hsiang Hsiang (Chin Ping) and have a reunion with his sister (Chiu Sam-Yin). None of this will get into the way of vengeance, of course.

The other wuxia directed by Griffin Yueh Feng I’ve seen tend to a certain stodginess and aesthetic conservatism (or perhaps a conscious classicism pointing at earlier style of wuxia, in whose production Yueh was also involved in?). So colour me surprised by The Bells of Death, a grim tale of vengeance that looks and feels like an Italian western, and not just because the tinkling of bells stands in for a harmonica. There’s a lot of dynamic editing, close-ups, and hand-held camera here, not just copied like the newest aesthetic fad but used with deliberation and intelligence, always in service of making the fights feel more brutal, the melodrama more intense, and the mood more doom-laden.

From time to time, Yueh Feng adds some of the more fantastical flourishes of wuxia martial arts – Chang Wei Fu’s mastery is so large, he can even use leaves as weapons - but never lets them get in the way of the grimness of proceedings. There’s impressive tonal coherence to the work, not always a strength of the genre.

The Bells of Death keeps to its grimness throughout – there’s never any doubt this will end with the kind of vengeance that leaves nobody standing at all; what the film thinks about this is difficult to say, for this has none of the love for philosophical discourse of a Chor Yuen/Ni Kuang joint nor even just the more thoughtful moments in Cheng Cheh’s filmography, when even he paused and thought about the prize of slaughter.

If that’s a virtue or a flaw will very much depend on a viewer’s mood.

Three Films Make A Post: Family over everything.

Shadow Force (2025): Joe Carnahan always has been a bit of a hit or miss filmmaker for me, though when he hits, he does tend to find the bullseye.

This piece of action cinema, though, does feel like the product of someone who can’t even be bothered to look in the direction of the target. Everything here, from the bland direct to DVD actioner look (this is not actually a direct to whatever movie), the lifeless script without character or style, the blandly generic action choreography to a script that can’t even be bothered to be interesting enough to be called clichéd, and finally the deeply dull performances by a cast that could do so much better, lacks so completely in personality and life, it’s difficult to even call this a movie. Hell, even “content” might be too friendly a description for something this lacking in soul.

Invader (2024): Certainly not lacking in personality is this brutal serial killer movie by Mickey Keating. This time around, the stylistically very varied director goes all out on jittery, nervous energy, often shaking, handheld camera that perfectly puts into picture the sense of looming threat and paranoia its main character (Vero Maynez) suffers as a foreigner in the USA. Particularly this USA, at this point in time. And though this is mostly a highly efficient, condensed, and often quite nasty, horror movie about a woman threatened by a killer, it works all too well as a mirror of how its time and place feels.

The Executioner (1974): One can’t help but hope the Japan of 1974 did feel like this Teruo Ishii action movie starring beloved Sonny Chiba as the youngest descendent of the Koga ninja clan, gone down in the world to steal a bunch of drugs from the Japanese franchise of the Mafia with a former policeman and a sex pest. For its combination of bizarre violence and the violently bizarre is pretty delightful.

Sure, Ishii has directed weirder things – he’s mostly doing Man’s Adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek here – and Chiba has been in weirder and/or better movies, but if I’d start judging their movies, or any movies, on that bar, there’d be a very limited amount of joy to be found in my movie watching world.

As far as the world of silly, violent Toei exploitation movies go, this is doing its job of entertaining me more than just fine.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (1991)

Original title: 女囚さそり 殺人予告

Warning: spoilers for one of the core points of the plot are inevitable!

A young woman (Natsuki Okamoto) is working as a very capable assassin for hire. She’s not exactly a posterchild for feminist self-realization, though, for she is controlled – mentally and sexually – by her handler, who turned a traumatized girl into his own private kill and fuck device.

Her newest mission is rather peculiar: she is to go undercover in a woman’s prison to murder Nami Matsushima, known as Scorpion, a woman whose influence and unbreakable spirit are so large, she has been held in a cave below the prison for years, so she can’t infect the other prisoners with her indomitable spirit. The powers that be of the prison are just that afraid of her.

And no wonder, because as it turns out, for at least half of the prison population has turned Nami into a near mythical figure who will some day get everyone out of the hellhole, and might even threaten the structures of violence and oppression outside.

But there’s something hinky about our assassin’s mission beside the plain weirdness of the situation, a hidden truth, as well as the realization that she, like any other woman, is only a thing to be dropped and destroyed at a man’s convenience.

There have been intermittent attempts to revive the Female Prisoner Scorpion films over the years. I believe this one, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who lived at the wondrous place where exploitation and arthouse met, is the most ambitious attempt of them all.

This early in Toei’s V-Cinema cycle, there appears to have been something of an anything goes approach to the types of films that could be made, if they contained a bit of action and nudity, at least. So making a film that’s a sequel to the first two films of an old 70s exploitation series – the rest of the films can’t have happened in this film’s world – that turns the originals darker by virtue of their heroine having been murdered, her dead body walled in must have sounded like a good idea to someone. While I generally don’t like that kind of set-up – let heroic achievements of earlier movies stand – I can’t help but admire what Ikeda does with the idea here.

This is very much a film about how a religion gets started, how a person’s life becomes mythical, how a poetical truth about someone becomes the only truth actually worth anything. Nami the Scorpion, the film argues rather obviously, is the patron goddess women need to survive what men do to them.

Ikeda doubles down on the mytho-religious aspects repeatedly – our protagonist is crucified, and later has a moment of bizarre revelation in which Nami’s dead body gives her the iconic sharpened spoon, literally turning her into an avatar of the Scorpion. All of this Ikeda stages without any irony, but as moments when borders between dream and reality grow thin and the mythical remakes reality in its image. It’s an incredible thing to do in a film that could be a lazy cash-in on a beloved series, but then, the space where the mythical, the real, and the commercial reality of the exploitation movie meet is something of a speciality of Ikeda. His probable masterpiece Mermaid Legend did something very similar some years earlier, perhaps even more successful than he is here.

Death Threat is also simply very satisfying as the kind of exploitation movie where all men, especially men in power, are bastards, but where those men are eventually punished by women who aren’t staying their victims. If that’s not invigorating, I don’t know what is.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Outlaw country musician Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is going nowhere. An aging alcoholic, he’s stopped writing songs and is mostly working the nostalgia and bowling alley circuit with his old hits, pick-up bands, whiskey and an air of bitterness. Bad’s former, much younger and sexier, sidekick Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) has hit the big time of country music stardom, but his intermittent attempts at helping out feel more like dominance plays and the kind of hand-outs that do not sit well with the rest of dignity Bad still possesses somewhere.

Bad comes to a crossroads when he meets younger journalist and single mom Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and falls for her – or perhaps the idea of falling for her and the different kind of life she stands for.

Sometimes, it’s okay for a director to step back and let their leads, their script and – particularly in this case – their musical experts do most of the work. There’s an admirable ability to shut off one’s director’s ego for a bit needed to do that properly, and Scott Cooper apparently possesses it, and can use it without making a film that looks and feels bland. Rather, this one’s simply focussed on performance and tone, centring Bridges and to a degree Gyllenhaal (whose story this isn’t it, but who always shows she possesses one outside of Bad’s life).

Bridges is in finest form, presenting a character as a relatable human being who might have become either a caricature or just unpleasant in the wrong hands, without attempting to make Bad better than he actually is. He’s also a really great old man outlaw country singer when provided with the right material.

There is a deep sense of compassion running through the film and its treatment of Bad that doesn’t make excuses, either. Yet Crazy Heart carries with it a not uncomplicated hopefulness that feels grown-up and deserved instead of perfunctory and calculated for its market.

It is also a joy to see a film that treats country music with an actual eye from the inside, with many small telling details about this particular intersection of showbiz and working class art that demonstrate how much the filmmakers get it. The involvement of T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton and Ryan Bingham on the musical side will certainly have provided some of the stuff of reality for the film – in any case, these guys do provide Crazy Heart with a tonally and sonically perfect soundtrack.

Three Indonesian Horror Films Make A Post: The thing with the flying coffin happens all the time here

Trinil: Kembalikan Tubuhku (2024): After a three month long honeymoon, a couple returns to the Javanese plantation Rara (Carmela van der Kruk) inherited from her Dad. The place is plagued by a curious series of worker suicides and disappearances, and a flying witch’s head – a kuyang – makes frequent appearances. Rara acts increasingly aggressive, while her hubby mostly cringes and cowers. All of it has something to do with dark secrets of the near past. Fortunately the cowardly male half of the couple has a friend who is a psychiatrist and an exorcist at the same time, so whatever could go wrong?

The very broad, sometimes hilariously so, acting, the just as broad direction, and the melodramatically twisting plot can give the impression that Hanung Bramantyo’s Trinil is some kind of crazily mutated plantation soap opera. If one can imagine a soap opera with kuyang (the beloved witch with a flying head figure), quite a few lobbed off heads, virtual bodies buried basically everywhere and a properly insane climax too fun to describe. None of this is exactly good, or exactly well made, but it has a crazed energy and a complete disregard for good taste that makes it a lot of fun to watch.

Kuyang: Sekutu Iblis yang Selalu Mengintai (2024): Speaking of kuyang, this Borneo-set tale of the misadventures of a young teacher and his pregnant wife taking on a position in a completely normal (see title of this post) isolated village and stumbling into a choice bit of folk/black magic horror features not one, but two of the creatures, who will even duel for a (alas only very short) bit.

This is shot with a bit more style and moodiness, the acting is a little better, and the plot makes more sense than that of Trinil, though the too long series of scenes where something utterly outrageous happens but everyone just kind of shrugs it off can strain one’s patience a bit. On the other hand, this film, too, climaxes wonderfully, with some beautifully macabre images and a lot of kuyang action.

Do You See What I See (2024): Of these three, Awi Suryadi’s movie is the classiest and most subtextually resonant, as well as the film whose director has the most control over his material. But then, Suryadi is one of the core directors of the decade’s Indonesian horror cycle, and knows how to set up lingering mood pieces, as well as short, sharp jump scares and is one of the directors who created the filmic language with its mix of very Western contemporary mainstream horror influences and old-school Indonesian horror the country’s horror directors speak in at the moment.

Apart from the obligatory – and often increasingly wonderful – horrors, this is a film about female friendship and empowerment, where the only actual male character is a pretty, vapid, and untrustworthy idiot, and love for a man is mostly treated as a threat to sanity and a young woman’s mental well-being – particularly when the lover turns out to be dead.

Apart from Suryadi’s obvious strengths, I particularly admired his willingness for keeping things off-screen here. We never get to see the ghost lover as poor Mawar sees him – in fact, for much of the film we see him only reflected in the changes he inflicts on her. There’s also quite a particular kind of daring to making a girl power film that still goes for a 70s downer ending.

The Silent Star (1960)

Original title: Der schweigende Stern

(There’s also a cut-down, re-cut, English dubbed version of the film called First Spaceship on Venus – I’m not talking about that one here)

The Near Future. Scientists discover a curious alien artefact in the area of the Tunguska meteor impact. Its origin is apparently Venus, and it contains what appears to be a message in a language linguists – first among them a Chinese (Hua-Ta Tang) and an Indian (Kurt Rackelmann, in brownface) expert – are trying and failing hard to decipher.

Still, the scientific community, gifted with the Soviet spaceship initially meant for a Mars expedition, decides to send a mission to Venus to find our intelligent neighbours. Apart from the gentlemen already mentioned, the crew is international in a way to give the current US president a heart attack while screeching about “DEI” or “wokeness”. Even an American scientist (Oldrich Lukes) takes part, though to the unhappiness of his bosses at “the Consortium”.

There’s some drama on the ship – cue a painful doomed romance between the traumatized astro-medico (Yoko Tani) and the German, hot shot pilot with the receding hairline (Günther Simon) – but eventually, once they arrive on Venus, the crew make exciting discoveries in what turn out to be the ruins of a civilization that took a wrong turn.

Science Fiction, called “Utopian” literature there (as often here in Western Germany as well), was a popular literary genre in the DDR (or German Democratic Republic, Eastern Germany). Whenever the political stars of censorship and propaganda aligned correctly, there were attempts to also make SF cinema happen.

This first SF film produced by the DEFA (the state’s very own film company) – in cooperation with Poland and an abortive attempt at working with French Pathé – was directed by Kurt Maetzig, a higher-up in the DEFA structure who apparently had the clout to get it made, if going through three different batches of writers on the way, in turns making it less, then more, then less propagandistic. This is based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, but I don’t know how it compares.

Technically and visually, this is quite the achievement, presenting a future visually not only inspired by western SF cinema on film but also by choice pulp SF cover art. There’s an orderliness and cleanliness to the designs that rubs this Alien-made viewer emotionally the wrong way a little, but objectively, the mix of grandiosity and sobriety is utterly beautiful.

Once we arrive on Venus, the film appears to prefigure Bava’s Planet of Vampires, presenting a planet full of objects the characters themselves often can’t categorize as artificial or natural. There’s an alienness to this part of the film that’s very Lem (in a specific mode), and still works to be somewhat disquieting.

On the level of narrative and characters, Silent Star is considerably weaker – its first half is a bit of a slog, full of the international cast speaking slowly in the emotionless German dub, and a de-emphasis on the more dramatic elements of what is happening on screen that sometimes feels nearly perverse.

Thematically, the Hiroshima and heroism-doomed romance fits the darker elements of the film  well, but its execution has an antiseptic quality that never suggests this may be about actual human emotion instead of fitting thematic material.

Speaking of themes, this is absolutely a film standing in the shadow of the H-bomb, seeing this use of nuclear power as a kind of (perfectly atheist) original sin, or rather the great crossroads of humanity: do we use this power responsibly and go off into a bright future, or do we vote for egotism and self-destruction like the Venusians? Not the sort of thing you’d get treated this earnestly in many American SF films of the era.

It is of course fascinating to see a film that works from very different ideological assumptions than much SF material on screen. The emphasis on international cooperation and serious and respectful co-existence between all kinds of people appears rather earlier than in western screen SF. It is presented a little demonstrative, of course (this is after all also a propaganda piece). Still, from the perspective of 2025, this kind of future feels like an impossible dream, and I found myself feeling melancholia and nostalgia for a future that never came to be. Hell, the Eastern parts of united Germany are one of the hot beds of racism and right-wing thought in my country these days, so there’s also some sad irony to be had.

Death Whisperer (2023) & Death Whisperer 2 (2024)

Warning: some spoilers included!

Death Whisperer takes place in Thailand in 1972. We’re mostly concerned with a farmer family whose many children all have names starting with Y – there’s Yard, Yam, Yos, Yod, Yee, Yen and Yak - which makes it somewhat difficult to keep them straight in dialogue until about the final act of the first movie. As if having a Dad who is badly trying to be a traditional patriarch and terrible at giving his kids names weren’t difficult enough, the family are beset by attacks of a supernatural entity that seems focussed on the youngest, Yee (Nutthatcha Padovan). For some time, it is not at all clear if the spirit wants to eat or possess her; what is clear is that it likes to put families through the emotional wringer, delighting in wreaking emotional as well as physical pain. The local shaman, Sarge (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul), is of some help, as is the return of Yak (Nadech Kugimiya), the son who didn’t want to become a farmer so much, he became a soldier instead, yet the spirit’s attacks become ever more disturbing.

And this willingness to get increasingly weird is one the two main strength of Taweewat Wantha’s Death Whisperer. It also stands in marked contrast to the aesthetically conservative streak of the film: this is very much a film that takes elements of the contemporary Southeast Asian horror mainstream (particularly Indonesian horror), some bits and bobs of the Conjuringverse and films like the South Korean The Wailing, and transplants them into the Thailand of the early 70s without doing much with the historical context. This mostly works out okay for the film because it is good at picking and choosing the pieces that work for it, and because Wantha manages to use them in a way that doesn’t let them feel like magpied bits of other films, but rather parts of the one at hand.

The film’s other main strength is its great hand when it comes to the kind of set piece that suddenly ramps up the tension or the ick-factor. These are nearly always well-placed and effectively realized – just look at the first teeth-stealing (it’s a whole thing in these movies) scene.

Death Whisperer 2 takes place three years after the tragic ending of the first one. Everyone in the family has tried to move on – Yad (Jelicha Kapaun) is even engaged to be married and move away – except for Yak, whose disgust for horror movie bullshit endings has caused him to team up with Sarge and become a rural exorcist and ghost puncher (no, really, he’s punching ghosts on the regular). The latter term, I’ve borrowed from a Letterboxd review from the great Gemma Files, because it’s the only, and perfect, term to describe Yak’s new occupation. Yak is specifically hunting the ghost who killed his sister, but leaves nothing else supernatural unexorcised and/or unpunched on the way.

Eventually, Yak punches his way to a haunted forest, where he, Sarge, and some macho assholes are getting a ghost history lesson while encountering a lot of disturbing, not always punchable, things that go bump.

At the same time, the remaining family members are threatened by the spirit as well, until things climax on the evening of Yad’s engagement do.

Where the first film does go for a somewhat generic, atmospheric ghost horror with incursions of weird vibes, the second one externalises most internal horror into a wild tale of Yak-centric ghost action and one of the best funhouse-style horror climaxes I’ve seen in quite some time. There’s macho posturing, one-liners like “You fucked with the wrong family, you godamn ghost!”, and a general sense of filmmakers who have been given a blank check after a very successful first film to do whatever the hell they want – which is apparently a tale of ghost punching and shotguns with magic bullets.

All of which could be dumb, and a bit of a disappointing tone shift, but actually feels like a perfect way to escalate things. Wantha’s still great at the more traditional spooky bits, but he also excels at the more action-heavy parts of the movie by absolutely, unironically, embracing the cheesiness and the silliness while keeping the creepy parts creepy. It’s the sort of thing young Sam Raimi would have been proud of, and one could imagine Don Coscarelli nod at approvingly, and makes Death Whisperer 2 the superior kind of sequel I always hope for in any horror movie sequel.

Three Films Make A Post: Every night a different nightmare.

Until Dawn (2025): There’s very little substance to David F. Sandberg’s horror videogame adaptation (which apparently isn’t any kind of close adaptation, people who actually played it tell me), but as an amusement park horror piece that sets off from a somewhat clever high concept to provide a series of ever-changing set pieces of suspense and gore, this is actually great stuff.

I’m not always the biggest fan of “fun horror” (it’s me, not the fun), but for me, this supernatural slasher variant simply hits all the right notes, is well paced and staged, and features a bunch of characters that isn’t too annoying to spend a hundred minutes with. Plus, once you’ve hit the spot where a series of messily exploding characters is just one of a dozen of good little gore gags you provide, you’re doing alright in my book.

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025): This Netflix thing directed by Matt Palmer, on the other hand, is as bad as slickly produced horror gets. It must have been difficult to follow up on Leigh Janiuk’s brilliant Fear Street trilogy with its mix of all horror genres, ever, and its treatment of race and class, and the feeling of doom teens of the underclasses carry around with them, but surely, the way to go there shouldn’t have been to not even try to reach the level of the previous movies.

As it stands, this is the epitome of laziness: boring 80s nostalgia, and over-reliance on plot twists, acting that suggests a complete absence of directorial guidance, perfunctory gore, and writing so disinserted and flat, the whole thing doesn’t actually feel as if anybody involved cared even so much to create a good product, let’s not even speak of a decent movie.

Demon City aka Oni Goroshi (2025): Speaking of films that don’t even feel like good product, this (again) Netflix outing by director Seiji Tanaka somehow manages to make a movie about a super assassin waking up from a coma to murder the corrupt real estate development cultists that killed his family (on the day of his retirement, of course) I can’t get behind.

Well, I say “somehow”, but really, simply by an inability to stage and choreograph a decent action scene, an unwillingness to really make its weird villains feel weird (or silly) instead of just faintly stupid, and a tendency to drown the soundtrack in the shittiest “rock” guitar thrashing I’ve had the displeasure to hear in a long time.

The Black Tavern (1972)

Original title: 黑店

Stopping off in a tavern, one of those singing beggar monks (Dean Shek Tin) that apparently roam the martial world sings a merry song about a corrupt official who has retired and is now transporting his ill-gotten gains via snowy backways to his future home. This really catches the imagination of a number of evildoers. First and foremost, this is Zheng Shoushan, the Whipmaster, (Ku Feng) and his minions, but also robber teams and individuals with delightful names and shticks like the Five Ghosts of Xiang Xi, the Three Headed Cobra, the Iron Arm, as well as the somewhat more respectable swordsman Zha Xiaoyu (Tung Li).

An increasing number of these guys and gals descend onto yet another tavern everyone is convinced the ex-official must come through on his way to Mar del Lago. It’s already the kind of place guests never leave, unless as mutton, so the influx of murderous martial artists doesn’t exactly make it less safe. As it goes with people like these, they do start killing each other rather quickly, for various reasons, mostly greed.

Sneaking around the tavern is a swordswoman who dresses like the Lady Hermit herself – as it will turn out, Shih Szu reprising her role as Zhang Caibing/Cui Ping from Meng Hua-Ho’s film of the year before.

Teddy Yip Wing-Cho’s The Black Tavern isn’t quite as great as that wuxia classic, but it is certainly a nice diversion from some of the standard tropes of the wuxia, telling its story a little differently. While Zhang Caibing does eventually make quite an impact – there is after all very little that’s better than a heroic swordswoman played by an actress specialized in that sort of thing – much of this plays out like a bottle episode of a TV show whose lead is only there for a third of the shooting schedule, which fires the producers up to make something out of a handful of sets and another handful of character actors.

Cool sets and character actors are things the Shaw Brothers had rather a lot of, and so this a film carried by newcomers and veterans like Ku Feng strutting their stuff, typically great (though not brilliant) fight choreography, and the special delight of some weird but rather nasty people making the world a better place by following their worst impulses and murdering each other gorily. There is a surprising number of decapitations on screen.

As is often the case, the combination of obvious budget constraints and talent leads to a highly entertaining film.

Danger Point: The Road to Hell (1991)

Original title: Danger Point: Jigokuhenomichi

A couple – and that description can very effectively be read literally, depending on how you read the film’s final scene – of hitmen (Jo Shishido and Sho Aikawa) get curious when their latest victim offers them more money than they could ever get their hands on through their usual work, while grabbing the photo of a hospital nurse (Nana Okada). Too curious for their handler, who drops them after a single, polite question about what the dead man might have been talking about.

This new state of being out of a job to pay for suits and sunglasses does of course make the thought of a lot of money even more enticing, and so the killers turn detectives, though the sort of detectives that let Mike Hammer look like a nice guy. Soon, they are on the trail a group of gangsters and a corrupt cop, and indeed a whole lot of ill-gotten money.

If the new Arrow Blu-ray box with early Toei V-Cinema films teaches me anything, it is certainly that these early examples of the form were a meeting place of veteran talent making their way from TV or other low budget work, and the young guns that I’ve only known at the forefront of the conversation in western circles about it.

Here, it’s Jo Shishido – all sagging chipmunk cheeks and mild yet cold expression – starring alongside a young Sho Aikawa demonstrating a mixture of casual brutality and eager to please puppy dog charm very fitting to the relationship between these two, and Hideo Murota doing one of his patented villain – though our protagonists are obviously also villains – turns.

The film is directed by exploitation – and at this point TV – veteran Yasuharu Hasebe – not an unknown quantity to Shishido. Hasebe’s direction doesn’t have the energy of his early films, or the sheer nastiness and excitement of his 70s roman porn work, but there’s a moody, bright day neo noirish quality to his filmmaking that makes the simple, slow-moving plot genuinely engaging even in the many moments when there isn’t actually much going on on screen. Hasebe still uses some of his old stylistic flourishes whenever there’s action or violence to emphasise, but there’s a degree of calmness to his work here I don’t remember from his younger and wilder days. He’s rather more Shishido than Aikawa.

This provides the film with limited appeal as an action film, so Danger Point mostly lives off the interplay between its leads and its mood of doomed, brutal struggle, which does turn it into an unexpected joy.

Three Shaw Brothers Wuxia Make A Post

The Silver Fox aka 玉面飛狐 (1968): You can read many, if not most, wuxia as tales of family tragedy, and there’s little more tragic than a Dad who dresses up like a Chinese Phantom of the Opera while mourning your lost Mum and training you as his budding supervillain assistant. Despite this, our heroine Ching Ching aka Silver Fox (Lily Ho Li-Li) does appear to prefer roguish tricksterdom to more po-faced vengeance (until the climax, of course), which leads to a number of delightful scenes of Ho crossdressing as her own, imaginary brother, complex poison and antidote schemes, and many a moment of her and her romantic angle/theoretical enemy flirting by attempting to outwit one another. All of which does make a curious contrast to the more Gothic trappings of the film’s final act, but certainly doesn’t make those any less fun.

The only minor let-down is that director Hsu Tseng-Hung isn’t quite as fun a director as his material deserves.

Village of Tigers aka 惡虎村 (1971): Speaking of not quite as fun, for large parts of its running time this Yueh Hua (who is Elliott Ngok?)/Shu Pei-Pei vehicle about a bland attempt at framing an honourable martial artist for murder as directed by Griffin Yueh Feng and Wong Ping is about the most middle of the road wuxia film imaginable. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the movie: Yueh Hua is as always perfectly serviceable, Shu Pei-Pei convinces in a rare action role, and everybody involved is an experienced professional who was made this sort of film well for a decade or two. The choreography is fine, as well. Yet there’s also very little that’s actually interesting, or weird, or truly fun, or truly involving.

Until, that is, the climax arrives, and things turn into an actual battle between two opposing martial artist forces that’s so great, it seems to come from a totally different movie.

Dragon Swamp aka 毒龍潭 (1969): And with this Lo Wei movie, we’re with the wuxia at its most fantasy-adjacent, full of things like giant lizards, rubber masks that can literally make Cheng Pei-Pei look like Tung Li, green-glowing swords and the kind of complex worldbuilding that suggests you’ve somehow stumbled into the third novel of ten of a generation-spanning fantasy epic. Once the confusion settles, enjoyment can’t help but set in at the mix of increasingly imaginative fights, high emotional stakes and pure imagination. Further attractions are Cheng Pei-Pei in a double role at three different ages, Yueh Hua (him again) being very upright, and Lo Lieh in one of his not completely evil villain roles – which I always prefer to his total bastards, as much as I enjoy those.

Pursuit of Vengeance (1977)

Original title: 明月刀雪夜殲仇

Melancholy wandering swordsman Fu Hong-Xue (Ti Lung) meets wisecracking wandering swordsman Ye Kai (Lau Wing). The latter does his best to hit it off with the former with limited success.

Various other martial artists/assassins seem to be rather interested in killing one or the other, for reasons that’ll become clear eventually. For now, the odd couple are invited to the party of the local martial arts clan, the Mas. It’s a bit of a peculiar shindig, for the evening before, six empty coffins were delivered to the Ma Mansion – not before Fu Hong-Xue and Ye Kai had fought off a team of assassins who also arrived in coffins, but that’s par for the course in the martial world of a Chor Yuen film.

Can it be an accident that Ma clan leader Ma Kong-Qun (Paul Chang Chung) has invited six martial artists?

As it turns out, twenty years ago, Ma was involved in the killing of the hero Bai, and everybody believes that twenty years after the fact – which is to say now – Bai’s son is going to take vengeance on the group of martial artists who killed his father. Ma suspects this son is one of his six guests.

Things become rather more complicated from here on out and will also include a delightful anti-hero turn by Lo Lieh – dressed in what we have to assume is a bathrobe throughout travels, travails and fights –, an evil mastermind who produces life-like masks for others to add to the confusion, hordes of martial artists totally committed to their respective fighting gimmicks, and the most astonishing finishing freeze frame of any Shaw Brothers film, particularly if you’re a fan of Lo Lieh’s ass.

I’ve been loving the films of that great master of Shaw Brothers wuxia Chor Yuen for actual decades. And yet, the first proper – or what goes for “proper” around here these days – write-up I make of one of his films is for this, definitely one of the director’s minor wuxia, sharing a protagonist (and lead actor Ti Lung, of course) with the masterful Magic Blade, though very little of that film’s tone.

Well, it does share that part of its predecessor that’s wildly weird, often bordering on the goofy, the love for sarcastic dialogue wuxia on screen usually lacks, and of course Chor Yuen’s eye for the beauty of the artificial, the proper contrast between set and location work, and the artful framing of the beautifully improbable action. So let’s say it doesn’t share in its predecessor’s sense of melancholia and futility.

Pursuit features by far not the best action choreography Tong Kai did for a Chor Yuen wuxia, but there’s still enough magic for anyone who is even mildly into this sort of thing.

Just don’t expect the general weirdness of everything and everyone except our wonderful protagonist/straight man Ti Lung to be balanced with a sense of melancholia or even horror at the things these people do to one another. This case of mystery and vengeance, while having the body count to be expected of this sort of thing, is decidedly on the emotionally light side – often getting down to a downright comedy version of the martial world. Which does take particular getting used to in a film that follows the tonally very different Magic Blade but does give one a breather after all those Chor Yuen wuxia that end in doom and gloom.

It does help that the film’s jokes are generally pretty damn funny, the dialogue is joyfully absurd and dry. Lo Lieh and Lau Wing in particular seem to delight in this. But then, the curiously moral assassin Lu Xiao Jia introduces himself first by somehow dropping a gigantic bathtub into a street, getting naked, and mocking Fu and Ye from that bathtub, which is not something any actor will get to do very often during their career.

The Waves of Madness (2024)

Agent Legrasse (director, writer, editor and so on Jason Trost), a special ops style operative for a mysterious organization involved in paranormal research and defence is sent to a cruise ship that has sent out a somewhat peculiar distress call, intimating cult activity and things of the squamous type.

The ship is in fact infested by things eldritch and unpleasant that attempt to stretch their slimy tentacles right into Legrasse’s mind. Fortunately, a mysterious woman named Francis (Tallay Wickham), who has for some reason been locked up in a cell – all cruise ships have those, right? – turns out to be a helpful ally. She’s great with a knife and with exposition and may very well not be completely real – what more can any agent ask for?

This Australian – say the movie databases and half of the accents – or US – say the ending credits and the other half of the accents – very indie production will probably give its viewer the more joy the more they enjoy the its obvious influences. If pulpy black and white, side-scrolling videogames, survival horror video games of about the PS1 and PS2 eras, the pulpiest mode of Lovecraft’s Mythos, perhaps a smidgen of Delta Green or a Hellboy-less BPRD and home made special effects are your thing, you’ll probably find a lot to delight you here. In fact, the film isn’t just influenced by side-scrollers but actually shot as a green screen version of one, even including the loading screens, I mean elevator rides. Which is quite an aesthetic choice to make, and one Trost really, really doubles down on with admirable stubbornness.

I’ve never been much into sidescrollers on the gaming side, but otherwise, everything the film’s auteur Jason Trost is very clearly into, I’ve had or have room in my life for as well, so there was little chance of me resisting Waves’ cheap, homemade and enthusiastic charms, even if I would have been able to ignore the project’s ambitious indie creds. If this is what Trost makes in his living room with a handful of friends, he’d probably take over the world if you gave him a budget.

And yes, sure and obviously, the acting isn’t always great, the effects are sometimes more charming than exactly good, and the script drags a little in the middle even with a seventy minute runtime, but there’s so much genuine enthusiasm, love, and raw ability on screen, these flaws feel beside the point for The Waves of Madness.

Three Films Make A Post: A Scream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

Screamboat (2025): In the realm of the PublicDomainsploitation slasher, something like Steven LaMorte’s murderous Mickey Mouse effort is basically a masterpiece. That’s not saying terribly much given a sub-genre that usually makes 90 SOV slashers look brilliant in comparison. So outside of its particular little pond, it’s a basically competent by the numbers slasher with pop culture jokes. Which is to say, it’s a little dull.

Unlike with many a film of its kind, those pop culture jokes are actually standing in dialogue with the thing it has been inspired by – the next step would be to make this dialogue actually interesting, or more of the jokes funny. But I’m optimistic that some day, one of these movies will actually do more than drop jokes and have children’s characters do the slasher thing. This one’s half way there, after all.

Rape of the Sword (1967): Even in 1967, Griffin Yueh Feng’s vengeance-based wuxia must have felt a bit old-fashioned. The film featuring two female heroines in form of Li Ching and Li Lihua as its lead right at the end of this cycle of the domination of female-led wuxia (despite what some writers say, swordswomen leading never went completely away before the next big revival) is the kind of old-fashioned I like, obviously. Yueh’s filmmaking as well as the choreography are a bit dusty as well, though never in a way that lacks in charm when seen from half a century away, while the narrative is very standard and trope-heavy. Again, not unpleasantly so, if one enjoys the genre – I certainly do again, these days.

Burning Dog (1991): This early V-cinema movie directed by Yoichi Sai doesn’t go as heavy on the sleaze and the insanity as one might expect when one has mostly seen more extreme examples of the form. Instead, this is basically a 70s heist movie, starring Seiji Matano trying to look like a badly aged Yusaku Matsuda, and other middle-aged guys of some experience.

The pacing is slow and careful, the action, once it comes, feels rather too methodically staged, but there’s also an unhurried calmness to Sai’s approach to the crime movie which makes it worth watching. Again, as with Rape of the Sword, there’s a lot of joy to be found in somewhat middling genre entries for me.

Havoc (2025)

Bent policeman Walker (Tom Hardy) is in more than one kind of trouble. Domestically, he’s not only divorced but a horrible father, the kind of dad who somehow manages to forget that old obscure tradition of buying one’s spawn decent presents for Christmas.

He’s also involved in decidedly shady business with a group of colleagues lead by a character played by Timothy Olyphant (still one of Tolkien’s finest) that may or may not have involved some amount of cop killing in the near past. Furthermore, because he’s flexible in all kinds of bad directions, Walker is also beholden to real estate mogul and mayoral candidate Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who has some sort of hold over him beyond just Walker being on the take.

The consequences of all of these different corruptions will come crashing down on what goes for our protagonist here when Beaumont’s son Wes (Jim Caesar) and Wes’s girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) are at the wrong place at the wrong time and become witnesses and suspects in the rather spectacular murder of a triad boss. Soon, the triads – the killed boss’s mom is a real piece of work -, the other corrupt cops, and the real cops are after the couple. Beaumont only wants his son to live, and if that means involving Walker, that’s going to happen. Apart from an ever-growing amount of violence, there will be betrayal and confused loyalties, as one should expect.

Gareth Evans, as much as I love his first three films, is a much better action director than is he one of complex narratives, so Havoc’s first forty or fifty minutes are somewhat heavy going, with a dozen or so characters whose relationships – and even names – are often much more confusingly presented than is necessary. It’s not that their relations or the budding plot are lacking interest, but the pacing of the introductory scenes feels off and the storytelling lacks in clarity without a need for it to do so.

Once the various groups of assholes and morally bankrupt shitbags begin murdering each other – at more than one point in three or for way fights – Evans finds ample opportunity to demonstrate his brilliance at staging action scenes that are frenetic, chaotic, spectacularly, sometime poetically, violent, and absolutely controlled. While he’s putting a heavy emphasis on fast cuts and jittery camera work, Evans doesn’t use these stylistic elements to obfuscate weaknesses in the stunt work – as a matter of fact, all the havoc (sorry) and chaos on display is also clear and wonderfully easy to parse. This is just a guy directing the hell out of these scenes because the stuntpeople aren’t the only ones allowed to have fun.

The film’s visual style goes for a version of the neo noir – the city is clothed in the colours of darkness and neon, beset by digital grain for neither rain nor snow are going to touch this particular Christmas – and everyone living in it seems to have taken on the moral qualities this suggests. This America, not unlike the real one, is dominated by two things – money and violence – and any kind of innocence or genuine human feeling is bound to get a character killed nastily rather sooner than later. Even redemption, of a kind, is found only under a mound of dead bodies.

There’s no place like America today, as the poet said.

Three Films Make A Post: So, what does Jirocho do, exactly?

The Kingdom of Jirocho 4 (1965): In this final of four Jirocho movies starring the great Koji Tsuruta and directed by Masahiro Makino, things change: about half of the characters are recast – generally not for the better – and something like focus appears, one might even say this one’s got a plot. Tonally, there’s still quite a bit of the funny business, but much of the film is taken over by Jirocho’s wife slowly and very dramatically dying of what I can only assume is consumption.

The production as a whole feels cheaper, and rather like a project everyone involved was trying to get over with as quickly as possible. However, there are still enough aesthetically or emotionally pleasing moments here to make this a somewhat satisfying viewing, at least if you’re into ninkyo eiga.

Magnificent Trio (1966): This isn’t exactly one of the more spectacular offerings from Chang Cheh’s early wuxia phase. Its actual emotional and moral core lies surprisingly enough with the female characters – particularly those played by Margaret Tu Chuan and Chin Ping – but this being a Chang Cheh joint, he puts emphasis on the much less interesting business of his male trio, of whom only Lo Lieh’s doubtful hero is actually interesting. There are bits and pieces in the background of Jimmy Wang Yu’s and Cheng Lei’s characters that could be thematically interesting but the film never really gets into those.

What’s left is a decent mid-60s Shaw Brothers wuxia – that’s still nothing to sneeze at.

Para Betina Pengikut Iblis: Part 2 aka The Female Followers of the Devil: Part 2 (2024): Rako Prijanto doubles down on the insanity of the first part of the story, and tries to squeeze even more melodramatic acting, trashy yet awesome gore, and general disreputable mayhem in, while also adding a bit of religion, fights between the now three Female Followers, a bit of a demonic zombie apocalypse and martial arts of doubtful quality.

If that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, dear imaginary reader, I don’t know what to say.

Para Betina Pengikut Iblis (2023)

aka The Female Followers of the Devil

There’s something going on in a small Indonesian village - I mean apart from all of the patriarchal repression you’d expect. A woman is murdered, her corpse is stolen and – spoiler – becomes the secret ingredient of a tasty curry. Secrets of the past loom, and quite a bit of female revenge is on the horizon.

That revenge is instigated by the Devil (Adipati Dolken) himself. When he’s not giggling like a loon or mewling like a sick kitten, he’s independently feeding information to two different girls – Sumi  (Mawar Eva de Jongh) and Sari (Hanggini) – that makes them very angry indeed, and thus perfectly willing to join into perhaps rather ill-advised pacts. Though said ill-advised pacts do lead to some tasty comeuppance for the kind of evildoer that hides away behind the mask of male respectability, so the Devil is doing something right, at least.

If this does make Rako Prijanto’s Female Followers sound like a tasty example of somewhat deconstructivist feminist horror, perish the thought any of that happened on purpose. Clearly, the filmmakers have not spent a single thought on questions like what it actually means that the only recourse that might allow its female protagonists a way to justice and perhaps freedom is a pact with the actual devil; nor that they only exchange one version of patriarchal servitude with another. They just wanted to show us a dude preening and giggling in one of the funnier devil performances outside of comedies – the noises Dolken makes are absolutely brilliant/hilariously stupid. Female Followers combines that with soap operatics so big, our lead actresses can’t stop eye-rolling, shouting, and contorting for even a single scenes some choice, and also features delightfully tasteless gore.

Obviously, since all horror movies have horrible secrets in the past, Female Followers has those as well, they’re just treated with an impressive degree of stupidity and carelessness and are completely divorced from the way actual people – hell, even fictional people – think or behave.

The script by Prijanto and Anggoro Saronto seems utterly uncaring of the way you’d traditionally construct a narrative. There’s no attempt to reconcile the double protagonists who basically only meet to set up a sequel with the necessities of structures, there’s barely a recognizable act structure – in a way it’s rather an impressive feat in an environment as professional as contemporary Indonesian horror filmmaking is.

So, technically, this isn’t what I’d call a “good” movie, but it is a terribly fun one, full of invention, ill-advised and badly aimed energy, ideas that make little sense, characters that simply aren’t and acting so intensely, badly melodramatic I find it impossible to imagine not being entertained by the whole shebang.

Blood of Revenge (1965)

Original title: 明治侠客伝 三代目襲名

Osaka in the late Meiji period, quite literally the end of an era in Japan. Upright Asajiro (Koji Tsuruta) is the right-hand man of his yakuza clan boss. The boss really wants his clan operations turn away from criminality and become completely straight. To achieve this, he attempts to build up a fully legal construction business, hopefully eventually to be put under the leadership of his immature son, guided by Asajiro. Alas, the actually legal construction business that is their main rival goes in exactly the other direction and has financed their own yakuza clan.

These fully-owned criminals are of course not at all honourable, assassinate the clan boss and do their darndest to destroy Asajiro’s clan by means subtle and direct. As if trying to do legal business and straighten out a young fool weren’t enough of a job for a man.

Parallel to this, we witness the doomed – this is a ninkyo eiga, after all - romance between Asajiro and prostitute Hatsue (Junko Fuji, here in one of her final completely traditionally female coded roles of this part of her career) – it certainly doesn’t help the case of their love that the head of the evil yakuza clan wants to claim Hatsue as his own. Words of aggressive possession used deliberately.

Tai Kato was of course one of the masters of the ninkyo eiga form. In this particularly wonderful effort, the violence plays second fiddle to the melodrama of Asajiro attempting to drag his people into a new age that will make men like himself obsolete, and the riveting and moving love story between Hatsue and him. Both plot lines can only end in painful sacrifice and death, obviously. As always, we’ll never learn if the sacrifice does at least achieve what it’s meant to.

Usually, the Tsuruta/Fuji pairing isn’t terribly strong when it comes to Fuji and Toei’s main romantic male leads – it might be the age difference, or simply chemistry – but here, both actors project an intensity and eventually a quiet desperation that’s as exquisitely stylized as it paradoxically feels completely real and authentic. Kato appears to have had a rather great hand with his actors, getting their best and most subtle efforts, even if they’re shooting their fifth ninkyo of the year.

In general, Kato’s films don’t treat the romance plots as obligatory elements to include on the way to the climactic violence, but treats this aspect of the human heart with full seriousness, which does tend to make everything surrounding it more emotionally involving as well.

When the violence comes, it is stark and effective, chaotic yet precisely staged, shot with intensity as well as artsy angles, carrying weight – often the weight of real violence and that of satisfying genre violence at the same time, as if it were easy to do it that way.

Kato does of course include a quietly spectacular bit of action on a train (I believe I have yet to see a Kato movie without at least some prominent train tracks in an important scene), and quite a few of his famed low angle shots, but Blood of Revenge also amply demonstrates some of his other specialities as a director – the organisation of large groups of people in a frame, the economical yet dynamic editing – the first scene is a masterclass in both – and the ability to know when to choose movement and when to choose stillness in any given scene.

That last ability seems to be particularly important in the ninkyo eiga, with its insistence on a kind of stoicism that in the end always dissolves in quick and brutal violence.

Dangerous Seductress (1992)

After her shit-heel boyfriend tries to rape her, Model Susan (Tonya Offer) flees from Los Angeles to the home of her sister Linda (Kristin Ann) in Indonesia. While Linda’s off on a modelling job in Bali, Susan discovers an old book of spells and rituals some guy who will later turn out to be a shaman apparently randomly gifted Linda for her birthday.

Before you can say “Klaatu barada nikto”, Susan has conjured up The Evil Queen (Amy Weber). Said Queen, who had already been somewhat revived by the blood of some car-crashing robbers, promises Susan eternal life, beauty, and sexual dominance over men if she agrees to puke or otherwise spatter the blood of men she murders at the mirror the Queen appears in.

Susan is more than game, and begins to seduce and murder her way through the Indonesian nightclub scene. In a satisfying development, her evil ex-boyfriend comes to Indonesia to murder and/or fuck her – I don’t believe he sees much of a difference there – and gets a deadly example of Susan’s new, assertive manners.

At this point in his career, H. Tjut Djalil, the director/writer who brought us the glorious Mystics in Bali as well as the not quite as glorious Lady Terminator, was clearly making his movies for the international market. Thus, the Indonesian actors are mostly relegated to minor roles, and the leads are taken by a bunch of spectacularly bad American actors who look like Baywatch rejects.

Which isn’t a problem for a film quite as maniacally insane as this one is, starting with a car chase that produces quite a few flying body parts and going through so many set pieces of tasteless, sleazy beauty, it’s difficult to find words for all the glories included. So, I’ll do as the Marquis de Sade would do, and just list some of it: there’s a woman with skeletal parts who draws the flesh of dead bodies to her to finish her look, who is then held down by grabbing arms underground that won’t let her go on her evil ways this easily; she also has blue glowing nipples I always hoped would fire lightning bolts sometime during the course of the film yet never do; sexy sax and synth music that suddenly turns abstract; a sexy murder chase in a meat packing plant; blood play with fishhooks; a woman cutting her own throat to feed a mirror with blood; a sparkly glowing magic duel; an evil queen played with all the enthusiasm of a kid’s theatre performance; flame thrower candles; so much sleazy teasing with no climaxes but the big bloody death; and so much more.

All of this – and truly much more - is presented with great energy and joy, never stops to think – lest it die of stupidity – and often looks surprisingly good for what it is. I don’t exactly want to cart the old “psychotronic” out to describe this wondrous piece of cinema, but it is, and so I do.

Needless to say, this giant hunk of lingerie, blood and glowy magic made me inordinately happy while watching.

Three Films Make A Post: Human traffickers beware.

A Working Man (2025): Unlike quite a few other friends of Stathamsploitation, I already hated David Ayer’s last cooperation with the guy, The Beekeeper. Little did I know that their next cooperation would be this thing. With writing credits for Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Dixon (the former trying to jump on the MAGA train to make up for his ever decreasing talent, the latter once a writer whose right-wing bullshit accepted a certain degree of real-world complexity, but certainly isn’t that anymore) and consequently this contains more QAnon/MAGA dog whistles than whatever they call it when they cart Trump out to spew hateful nonsense.

It’s also a surprisingly bad action movie, full of fights without any physical impact, indifferent action direction and a lack of energy that makes it painfully dull. Even Statham deserves better.

Ash (2025): Flying Lotus has certainly seen Event Horizon, played the Dead Space games and is into a bit of gore from time to time. There’s not a single original idea in the whole of the film, and it could certainly have used another editing go by somebody who isn’t tripping all of the time, but in its undemanding low budget SF horror way, this is pretty good fun. If nothing else, this has a sense of aesthetics it is all too willing to show off.

Captain America: Brave New World (2025): I am by far not as angry at this stage of Marvel Studios’ output as a lot of other people appear to be, so I actually went into the fourth Captain America movie with hopes on being entertained by a perhaps mildly politicized superhero tale.

Which I actually was for two thirds of the film’s running time, until it broke down into two separate climaxes that really would have needed to be turned into one for the film to work and a series of four(?) epilogues that also could have been fruitfully turned into one by – gasp – having more than two characters at a time interact with each other. But hey, at least it’s the film where Captain America punches an orange president.

Bull (2021)

Warning: there really will be spoilers this time around!

A rather angry gentleman named Bull (Neil Maskell) kills his way through the underlings of gangster Norm (David Hayman) in a brutal and somewhat gratuitous manner, certainly not leaving their family business out of the business of dying. Before he kills he asks for the whereabouts of his son Aidan.

Flashbacks slowly reveal that ten years ago, Bull was working for Norm, but marrying your boss’s daughter can have dire repercussions when the marriage goes to shit. Custody battles can turn even uglier than those among civilised people and end even worse.

So much so that a trail of dead bodies years later can be their consequence.

I know very little about the surprising number of direct to streaming (and so on) action and gangster movies that are being churned out by various low budget filmmakers in the UK for at least a decade or so now. But I am well able to identify Paul Andrew Williams’s Bull as the kind of answer/climax movie that takes all of a genre’s tropes, joys and problems and turns them into something monolithic and forceful in what’s not so much a critique as the platonic ideal of its form.

So Williams’s film is nasty in its depiction of violence, often shockingly so, treating vengeance as the undignified and cruel business it is in a manner that goes from the grimly cruel to the disquieting by simply thinking the brutality through to its end. Bull – a guy with an action movie name if ever there was one – is not just the blunt object his name suggests but turns out to be something darker than just a man on a vengeance trip in a late turn towards the explicitly supernatural. And not in sweet baby Jesus Pale Rider way – this is High Plains Drifter territory, but nastier.

Williams’s direction is based on a kind of kitchen sink hyperrealism that regularly drifts in the direction of the feverish and the surreal, using the ugliest bits of the reality of Britain and turning them into thin places. There’s certainly a sense of flow and rhythm to the filmmaking here, but one that often takes stops and starts that very consciously break up the very satisfying structures of the vengeance movie, thereby mirroring and emphasising Bull’s brokenness.

Maskell’s performance is fantastic – the subtle differences he shows between the already horrible but also human Bull of the flashbacks and the horrifying machine of violence and resentment that borders on a more talkative slasher movie killer he turns into are as believable and effective as are his handful of emotional freak-out scenes in the Nic Cage manner. Thanks to this, the difference between what the character was and what he becomes carries an air of genuine sadness. Not because Bull ever was a good man, but because he was the kind of man who could have been good and now is something irredeemable.

And yes, the religious undertones are certainly there on purpose, as the final reveal makes perhaps a bit too clear.

In the Lost Lands (2025)

In a post-apocalyptic future that has turned into something of a weird fiction style fantasy world. Ageless witch Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) plies her trade in what is apparently the only city left – a hellhole of slavery and inquisition-based religion ruled over by a by now very old Overlord. Alys is hunted by the inquisition, but manages to escape regularly from their clutches, and even the gallows, accidentally putting revolutionary ideas into the heads of the enslaved populace on the way.

For reasons never explained, Alys is bound to fulfil any wish somebody pays her for. The fulfilment of these wishes, as she warns as a matter of course, doesn’t usually work out as pleasantly as her customers hope.

Surprisingly even to Alys, the Overlord’s Queen (Amara Okereke) comes by with a very specific, and somewhat peculiar, wish – she wants to acquire the power of a shapeshifter. To find one to rob of his powers, Alys has to travel into the Lost Lands, the dangerous wastelands surrounding the city. She needs a guide through these places, and chooses the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), who just happens to be the secret lover of the Queen. On their travels, fighting their way through various dangers and hunted by a train carrying Alys’s arch enemy, the Inquisition’s main Enforcer (Arly Jover), they do of course fall in love.

In between, we pop in on the Queen and her palace intrigues.

Here I am again, enjoying a Paul W.S. Anderson movie. He’s not always making it easy – his insistence on casting his wife Jovovich who still can’t act her way out of a paper bag is certainly a particular stumbling block for me. But say what you want about the guy, he’s clearly doing the auteur thing where he puts all of his personal obsessions into his movies, and doesn’t give a crap if they are en vogue or not. He’s very much like Wes Anderson in that way, but with more monsters.

Visually, tonight’s Anderson has clearly become fascinated by the colours grey and brown, going for a wasteland so desaturated and woozily shot, the insane spotlight glint in Bautista’s eyes coming with its own lens flare tends to be the most colourful thing on screen. And yes, in Anderson’s world, eye glints have their own intense – and I mean intense - lens flare effect, as have torches, skulls and everything else the polishing-mad wasteland maid I assume roams the place just off-camera has polished to a sheen.

Ill-advised and ugly as it may be, this is certainly a conscious aesthetic decision, making the supposedly ugly post-apocalyptic wasteland indeed pretty damn ugly.

As ugly as his world looks, and as grimdark as things get, there’s a palpable sense of fun here that also made Monster Hunter rather enjoyable. The monsters, the incredible gothic train, the fucking werewolf, the mediaeval Mad Max costumes are all things Anderson clearly has a blast with getting on screen. Quite a bit of that enjoyment makes its way at least to this viewer. Plus, I always appreciate Bautista. See also, rule of cool.

Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

Original title: 獨臂刀

Because his father sacrifices himself to protect his master Qi Ru-Feng (Tien Feng), the master swordsman takes on Fang Kang (soon grown into Jimmy Wang Yu) as his pupil and takes care of him pretty much like a son. This doesn’t manage reduce the huge amounts of anger and guilt inside of Fang Kang much, and though he grows up to become Qi Ru-Feng’s best pupil – in the ways of the sword as well as those of honour and simple human decency – the young man simply feels inadequate.

It certainly doesn’t help his emotional well-being that Qi Ru-Feng’s other students use him as a verbal – and physical - punching bag based on him coming from the lower classes. Even Ru-Feng’s daughter Qi Pei-Er (Violet Pan Ying-Zi) is part of the bullying – in her case this is an attempt to deny her own attraction to him filtered through some rather spectacular self-centeredness.

Fang Kang decides to leave his master, but on a final encounter with Pei-Er and the upper-class twats, a mixture of bad luck on his side and horrible impulse control on hers lead to her cutting off one of his arms while she’s pretending to surrender in a fight he didn’t want.

The mutilated Fang Kang more or less stumbles into the arms of peasant girl Xiao Man (Lisa Chiao Chiao), where for some time he finds peace, physical and emotional healing, as well as love. As the wuxia gods will have it, Xiao Man is actually the daughter of a martial artist who got killed for the usual martial world reasons, and the owner of half of a martial arts manual meant to train the left arm. That’s the only arm Fang Kang has left, and he simply can’t stop himself from learning to fight with only one arm at the same time he’s professing to be finished with the martial world.

That’s going to come in useful when Fang Kang is drawn back into into it. His old master and all of his other students are under attack by a group of villains who have developed a rather cruel fighting technique that counters their golden sword arts, and these guys are not going to rest until all of Qi Ru-Feng’s people are dead. Being a honourable and responsible man who can’t stand by when he witnesses wholesale slaughter of a family he still feels bound to, Fang Kang will put himself into danger again.

As much as I love the later periods of Chang Cheh’s body of work, the films he made when he still had to play by some of the rules of wuxia are special to me. In them, like in this classic, some of Chang’s weaknesses simply didn’t apply. So we have actual female characters with personalities, motivations and even some depth, and a narrative that feels tight, focussed, and more than just a mood meant to stitch fantastic martial arts sequences together.

In fact, while the fights here are pretty damn spectacular and influential on anything that came after in the genre for good reason, One-Armed Swordsman is very serious about telling a complex tale of a man growing up, working through trauma and hurt to become someone who is not only loved but feels himself worthy of being loved, learning to give back what he receives emotionally, and working through his issues to become a whole person instead of one defined only through his losses. In a turn of events one really doesn’t expect of Chang, here, Fang Kang’s sadness when he looks at the bodies of people he has slain feels absolutely genuine – and part of the point of the film. This isn’t about vengeance and everybody bleeding to death in the film’s final shot, but actually about how to live – with pain, and hurt, injustice, and love.

Jimmy Wang Yu – who’d become a bit of a one note dispenser of anger after leaving the Shaw Brothers – here acts with surprising depth of feeling, admitting weaknesses and complexities into his performance I can’t remember finding in much of anything he’d go on to do during the 70s. There’s a fearlessness in admitting to the pain Fang Kang goes through that I find rather more impressive than reels of slaughtering fake Japanese.

There’s a reason this one is an absolute classic, or rather, the many reasons of a film that does everything it puts its mind to very well indeed.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A Spanish coastal town that harbours quite a number of British expats, between the wars. The local lush living is dominated by beautiful Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner). Every man wants to destroy himself for her, every woman hates her (secretly or loudly), yet Pandora is mostly bored and disenchanted. Even when she convinces a race car driver to push his self-built vehicle into the ocean to prove his love, or gets her very own love suicide going, this only provides her with some flickering excitement for a minute or two. She’s not only lacking in human compassion but also all deeper human connection.

Things change when Hendrick van der Zee (James Mason) arrives om town on his yacht, and a mythic pull develops between these two. The old tale of the Flying Dutchman might have more truth to it than most people would expect.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s director Albert Lewin was a very successful Hollywood producer, first for MGM, then for Paramount. From time to time, he directed a movie himself. These aren’t the films of a dabbler, but of a director and scriptwriter very consciously aiming for art in a deeply earnest and just as deeply bourgeois manner that should make them pretty much unwatchable in their serious, classics-quoting way. Yet somehow, this member of the educated classes showing off his education didn’t just strain for art but actually manage to reach it, perhaps in spite of himself.

Case in point, and Lewin’s best movie as far as I know, is this incredibly ambitious concoction of bohemian melodrama, ancient Greek myth and somewhat more modern European legend. Often, Pandora feels like Powell and Pressburger – this is nominally a British film - at their most melodramatic seen through the lens of Hollywood with arthouse aspirations.

There’s a sensually languid quality to the film’s look and feel that stands in stark – and pretty magical – contrast to its literary and (sometimes too) knowing dialogue, its allusions to culture and cultural detritus, and its palpable love for all manner of cultural production – be it music, Shakespeare, the poetry of Omar Khayyam or Ava Gardner’s face (though the last might be the point where culture and languidness meet). The film’s straining for the mythical qualities of Pandora (very much an embodiment of the old hat of the destructive force of female sexuality that makes quite a bit of European bourgeois culture rather awkward) and the Flying Dutchman is often a visible and palpable effort but it is that uncommon kind of strain that eventually reaches and envelops (is enveloped by?) what it wants to touch, until the overload of allusion and emotion becomes magical and hypnotic.

Part of this magic most certainly lies in Jack Cardiff’s lush photography and Lewin’s fearless – of ridicule, of too much emotion, of the wrong emotion, of overload – direction, but there’s also the brilliance of the performances that hit the unreal notes the material needs again and again, and the willingness of Lewin’s script to go to places scripts (certainly not one written by big shot Hollywood producers) in 1951 simply didn’t go – neither in theme, nor in eroticism, nor in frank honesty about the harshness of mythic love.

Elements here leave me uncomfortable: the film, like its male characters, seems unable to admit to the existence of a kind of love that isn’t based on destruction, death and sacrifice; Pandora’s commitment to being the belle dame sans merci is disquieting, particularly in a film that so clearly wants us to find her tragic. Yet, like with all capital-A art Lewin’s film is in dialogue with, feeling uncomfortable with it isn’t an argument against it.

Three Films Make A Post: Toei Triple Threat

Kingdom of Jirocho 2 (1963): For large swathes of its running time, this second of Masahiro Makino’s remakes of his own material leaves behind honourable yakuza Jirocho (still Koji Tsuruta) in favour of the misadventures of “comedic” stuttering yakuza Ishi, and really strained my patience there. Apart from how badly stuttering-based humour has aged – it’s about as funny as US 30s films’ “cowardly black people” humour, so very much not at all – there’s a meandering quality to these scenes, very much leaving one with the feeling that half of this film is filler. Which is particularly disappointing because the other half is perfectly entertaining light ninkyo eiga business with one hell of a cast.

Kingdom of Jirocho 3 (1964): That last bit is also what makes the entertaining part of this third film. While there’s decidedly less – but still too much - of Ishi going around the third film mostly suffers from a lack of focus. There are perfectly cromulent subplots and even a bit of actual dramatic tension in the main plot, but there’s also a lot of side business that mostly feels unimportant and typically not terribly interesting.

Consequently, instead of an actual climax – what would be the climax in less woozy movie comes about an hour into the ninety minute film – we get another to be continued ending. Sure, part of the reason for this is the TV show like format in which these movies were produced, but it often feels as if the scripts were written while shooting on the film was already on the way.

Case of Umon: Red Lizard (1962): The Umon films, with Ryutaro Otomo in the title role, were one of several shogunate era samurai detective series. I have more experience with the somewhat darker Bored Hatamoto films, but my first foray into the adventures of this less pretend-lazy detective – in a film directed by Sadatsugu Matsuda who directed his first feature in 1928 and his last one in 1969 – is certainly promising. There’s some of the moody, near-gothic staging you get in many a Japanese mystery on screen, pulpy ideas like Edgar Wallace on speed (a killer known as the Red Lizard who is accompanied by a raven is certainly keeping in the spirit), some decent swordplay, and an actually pretty interesting mystery. Even better, the final sequence during which our detective explains what has been going on takes place during a stage play he has had a playwright write for the occasion.

To Kill a Mastermind (1979)

One of those huge cults of martial arts assassins that tend to plague the martial world in wuxia films has grown to become a huge threat for peace and stability throughout the whole of China. The cult is controlled by a mastermind so secretive, none of his underlings have ever seen him. He only communicates with his the eight chiefs stationed in his headquarters via a curious mechanical contraption, commanding them to do the most important dirty deeds.

Things have grown so bad, the emperor has ordered a group of men to find and kill the mastermind at all costs. Apart from the villains’ secrecy, there’s the little problem that the cult’s leaders are not to be beaten through a simple frontal assault, so the emperor's men work with the tools of espionage, subterfuge, and suicide attacks – all in an attempt to turn the leaders against one another.

In fact, the good guys, such as they are, appear to have managed to place an agent inside of the highest ranks of the cult. Their identity, however, is so secret, even the audience will only learn it during the final battle, when hopefully the mastermind’s identity will be revealed as well.

Wuxia films, particularly once Chor Yuen got into the genre at the Shaw Brothers, often have a particular closeness to the mystery genre (unless Jimmy Wang Yu, stars, of course), and the search for a mysterious mastermind certainly was a pretty standard genre trope at least during the 70s.

However, the approach Sun Chung (working from a script by Ni Kuang, who wrote about a million wuxia scripts, and novels) takes here is markedly different from the more typical tale of Ti Lung walking around the martial world, asking questions and getting into fights until the final showdown, and seems to take many of its cues from procedural spy material, while subtracting charismatic figures like George Smiley or Harry Palmer from the equation.

Instead, this is a film that spends a third of its time with nameless, thankless officials giving their lives for a goal that seems perpetual out of reach, and two thirds with eight – and then increasingly fewer – paranoid killers losing patience with one another.

It’s an interesting and uncommon way to go about it, but also one that leaves the film at hand without any visible centre. There is no clear protagonist, and because the mastermind stays hidden throughout, there’s no central antagonist here either. The film emphasises this even more by eschewing any of the great – or even mid-level – Shaw stars. Everybody here is a somewhat nameless character actor – all very capable when asked, all great in the fight scenes – so there’s nobody for an audience member to project themselves onto.

This turns To Kill a Mastermind into a somewhat alienating experience, as if you’d watch a film from a place where a genre you know quite well worked under somewhat different rules you as a viewer can’t quite comprehend, and are not sure you want to.

If this is the film’s great success or its great flaw is probably more a question of personal taste than anything else. At the very least, it is certainly interesting to see so many standard tropes of the wuxia without the thing – people, it turns out! – that usually anchors them, floating in a strange sort of limbo of great fight sequences, its director’s sense for striking use of colour, and some of the prettier locations to be found in the Shaw corpus.

It’s certainly an interesting experience, and even if I more appreciate To Kill a Mastermind than love it, and am rather glad most wuxia have central characters, I am just as glad its peculiar kind of abstraction exists.

Three Films Make A Post: Where the cashiers have no name

Supermarkt aka Supermarket (1974): If you know German director Roland Klick mostly for his psychedelic noir western Deadlock or his Dennis Hopper coke freak-out White Star, you’ll be in a for a whole world of pain in the form of an hour of very earnest Hamburg-set naturalism pasted onto the beginning of a pretty great, naturalist, heist film. Needless to say, simple guy as I am, I don’t appreciate this approach much.

However, it’s not that Klick isn’t good at the earnest naturalism bit – one could imagine him going on to become a German Ken Loach figure in a more interesting German cinema – the problem is all mine. I just find earnest naturalism the least interesting mode for a fictional narrative possible and have never seen the point to it. Surely,if you want to go for straightforward representation of the world as it is, why not make a reportage or a documentary? Hell, I might even praise you for that one (if only with backhanded remarks that I prefer Herzog style documentaries all about poetic truth, of course). As it stands, this just isn’t a film for me.

Only the River Flows aka He bian de cuo wu (2023): Speaking of films that aren’t for me, this arthouse crime drama for the Cannes crowd by Wei Shujun suffers from what I see as a weakness of most of the minor wave of mainland Chinese arthouse noir cop films of this style: an attempt to make genre films so critical of their genre they go out of their way to extract all joy and excitement from it. No thrills in our serial killer thriller, sir! No excitement to finding the killer! Hell, not actually finding the killer clearly is the way to go.

This particular example of the form eventually descends into a vague kind of surrealism, akin to Lynch without a sense of humour or a heart (so not very much like Lynch at all), without the power to actually make its surrealism feel like anything of substance or with a point; indeed, things are so opaque in the end, I have no idea why the film exists at all.

Admittedly, it is very well shot, and decrepit 90s China is evoked just as well – I don’t have any idea why, though.

Fantomas (1947): This second attempt to drag Fantomas into the sound film era after one in 1932, as directed by Jean Sacha, certainly has no ambitions at being anything more than a potboiler.

As such, it has decent entertainment value eighty years later: there are a handful of nice, mad science-y sets, some of the action is staged on a more than decent level, and after pacing issues early on, things zip along nicely, and mindlessly. The whole affair suffers from a very flat Fantomas performance by Marcel Herrand, but kinda makes up for it with a very young Simone Signoret running circles around every other actor as the villain’s virtuous daughter Hélène.

In an uncommon move for 1947, Hélène is a rather competent heroine who even takes part in the physical parts of the plot, which obviously is the sort of thing I like in my pulpy nonsense films.

964 Pinocchio (1991)

Dragged out on the street by his owner for performance problems, an amnesiac, nearly mindless cyborg sex slave we’ll soon enough call Pinocchio (Haji Suzuki), crawls into the lap of also amnesiac homeless woman Himiko (played by a mysterious woman only known under the pseudonym of Onn-chan).

Himiko slowly teaches Pinocchio to speak, eventually causing a radical – and pretty icky - bodily and mental transformation in Pinocchio and herself. Also, madness in at least one of them.

At the same time, the company producing sex slaves like Pinocchio is looking to reacquire the weird freak, by any means.

This is as much clarity as the plot to Shozin Fukui’s classic piece of indie cyberpunk cinema offers. And even this is hard won, for after half an hour or so, this turns into an intense assault on senses and tastes, featuring extensive scenes of vomiting, amateur actors freaking out in ways that border on the physically difficult to watch while real-life passer-by gawk or make wide berths, wildly speeding dolly shots and hand-shaken camera, intense editing and noise, noise, noise. The film puts a heavy emphasis on the punk part of cyberpunk going for a confrontational assault on as many senses as it can touch. I’m glad smell-o-vision never took off.

This assault is leavened by a peculiar sense of humour, a nodding acknowledgement that this is all very intense, but also a bit silly – not in the way of filmmakers not taking their work seriously, but of someone recognizing there’s something fun and funny in being confrontational as well. So perhaps, this isn’t so much an assault on the audience as an invitation to allow oneself to be assaulted by it while also having a bit of fun.

It’s really a rather special movie – unless you’re trying to eat while watching.