The 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 少林寺十八銅人

His grandmother gives Tang Siu-Lung (Tien Peng) into the care of the Shaolin temple when is just a little boy, so they can train him for vengeance on whoever is responsible for the death of his parents. Though nobody bothers to tell the kid, apparently.

Twenty years or so later, Siu-Lung has grown up beside the abrasive, rude, but also protective, Brother Wan (Carter Wong/Carter Huang Chia-Ta) and the rather less strict Ta Chi (Chiang Nan) as brothers who share a somewhat sadomasochistically coded training regime. Little does Siu-Lung know that the man he is supposed to take vengeance on later for murdering his father is already making plans to assassinate him right in the monastery. But then, Siu-Lung has no clue who his father was or that he was murdered in any case. Before any of that becomes important (or, depending on the cut of the film you watch, before any of that is even mentioned), our hero and his friends must get through the final test of accomplishment for Shaolin kung fu students, an often deadly gauntlet that features some of the best robot armour ancient China has on offer as well as a lot of monks painted bronze and some rather remarkable tests of fortitude.

Afterwards, vengeance on an evil general (Yi Yuan) and a surprise fiancée with considerable fighting skills (house favourite Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) and a tendency for crossdressing and wearing capes await, as well as betrayal and dramatic revelations concerning all three of the Shaolin students.

I’ve never really delved into the body of work of Taiwanese martial arts and wuxia director Joseph Kuo Nan-Hong, and what I’ve seen didn’t exactly impress me much. His films – like most Taiwanese martial arts cinema of the era I’ve seen – tend to the rough around the edges and the scrappy, and while I usually like that sort of thing, I don’t seem to appreciate it as much in martial arts cinema for some reason.

However, a film like The 18 Bronzemen does make a boy rethink some of his prejudices, and there’s certainly going to be more Kuo in my near future. Ironically enough, the versions of The 18 Bronzemen made available by Eureka, doesn’t actually feel all that rough around the edges and scrappy. In fact, particularly in the reconstructed original version of the film, Kuo shows a decidedly great hand at providing his film with a proper flow – there are some simple yet wonderfully effective transition shots (half of which are missing in the the prettier cut of the movie based on a Japanese recut) that make clear passages of time and space easily enough. Even though the film does show its (much lower than Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest) budget from time to time, there’s an energy and visual inventiveness to the direction that always puts itself in service of making the martial arts look cooler than the excellent choreography already is.

Kuo’s sense for flow also helps along the film’s curious structure of half shaolin training film – with that wonderful version of the 36 Chambers that predates the Shaw Brothers interpretation – and half martial arts vengeance movie whose feel borders on wuxia. Of course, you can see where Kuo got his ideas for some (or even most of it) but his execution is excellent and energetic, with neither drama – there’s some great melodrama here as well – nor action letting the side down or slowing the film down.

Being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course particularly fond of the film’s weirder elements, like our main villain’s final defence consisting not just of stolen Shaolin skills he trained with the help of useful little statuettes of bronze as a memory help the movie flashes to when appropriate but also of dressing random fighters up as himself (even doubling up on his transport for it), or male, heterosexual men not being able to identify a cross-dressing Polly Shang-Kuan as a woman (still one of my favourite classic martial arts movie tropes after all these years). I’m also particularly happy how much ass Shang-Kuan is allowed to to kick once her character is finally introduced halfway through, not always a matter of course in films on the martial arts side of the martial arts/wuxia divide. As always, what she lacks in precision during the fights, she makes up for by so fully applying herself to the action one can’t help but be convinced by her fierceness.

Hell, I even like Carter Wong in this one.

Invitation to a Murder (2023)

A group of strangers – among them florist and mystery fan Miranda Green (Mischa Barton) – are invited to the isolated island mansion of an eccentric rich man for reasons nobody involved is clear about. During the proceeding weekend, somebody starts killing people. of course including said rich man.

Miranda just might be the only one able to figure out what’s going on, trained as she is on mystery novels of all shapes and sizes. Plus, the other characters permanently tell her and us how clever she is. They wouldn’t lie to us, right?

Stephen Shimek’s low budget attempt at doing a traditional murder mystery seems heavily inspired by the first two Poirot films of Kenneth Branagh, but doesn’t have the budget or the visual imagination to play on the same field. Which isn’t a problem as such – a country house mystery doesn’t necessarily need much more than a couple of country house sets, an interesting cast, a good script and a director who can get out of the way of what they and the story are doing. Unfortunately, this is not that film.

While the cast of mid-level actors is perfectly alright, as professionals on that level usually are – and Barton makes a more convincing amateur detective than I would have expected – the writing is simply not up to snuff, and Shimek here appears not to be the kind of director able to distract from that sort of thing with visual pizazz.

The film crawls from obvious plot point to obvious plot point at a snail’s pace – even when you’re prepared for the more sedate qualities this kind of mystery can have – and there’s little on screen to keep a viewer’s interest. Certainly not the rote mystery at Invitation’s core; it certainly doesn’t improve the film’s dramatic qualities that Barton’s detective doesn’t actually solve the mystery in the end but gets most of its solution presented to her by a side character. This is not exactly a great way to start a projected series about her adventures, and certainly does not bode well for sequels that may or may not get off the ground.

Three Films Make A Post: The tide is turning.

Aquaman – Lost Kingdom (2023): Even though I’m not writing about the current crop of superhero movies all that often, I haven’t jumped on the superhero hate train, and “superhero fatigue” just fatigues me.

However, most everything bad you’ve read about this second Aquaman movie is unfortunately true. For much of its running time, this doesn’t feel like a proper, finished movie from a big studio at all, but the rough cut of something that doesn’t appear to even have had a finished script, with characters just dropping in and out of the plot for no good reason, no dramatic arc, and an absolute inability to sell the film’s tonal shifts; actually, I don’t even see attempts at selling them, for James Wan has apparently not just decided to direct this as if it were a TV movie, but given up on doing his job completely.

Making matters worse are special effects that often appear to simply not be finished, with many a scene that takes place in what looks like raw sets you’d find in 80’s Doctor Who serial instead of intricate greenscreen work. It’s just a complete train wreck of a movie, and not even an entertaining one.

The Marvels (2023): Also much maligned is this second Captain Marvel movie directed by Nia DaCosta. Here, I really can’t see the problems I’m supposed to notice. Sure, the film can get silly as all get-out, but most of the time, its jokes are actually funny and imaginative, and the script has no trouble shifting from this to the more serious stuff.

Unlike certain parts of the internet, I also enjoy watching a superhero movie carried by a trio of women where the male characters simply aren’t terribly important without the film making much of a thing of it one way or the other (call it the Claremont approach). But then, I am a simple man.

Detective vs Sleuths aka 神探大戰 (2022): If you’re like me, you’re missing classic Hong Kong cinema rather badly. As this extremely energetic mix of action movie and twisty thriller suggests, classic Hong Kong filmmakers do so as well, so long time Johnnie To cohort Wai Ka Fai’s film isn’t just a big damn action movie that follows many of the rules of modern blockbuster cinema to perfection and with considerable verve, but that also contains more winks and nods towards the tradition of post-80s Hong Kong cinema than you can shake a stick at, some of them very subtle, others very obvious indeed. Lau Ching-Wan playing another Mad Detective really is only the beginning there, and before the film is through, we’ll even have gone through a moment of baby juggling.

That all of this works as an absurd but absolutely riveting action film of the highest order instead of sinking into some kind of retro mire is a particularly wonderful achievement.

Special Silencers (1982)

Original title: Serbuan Halilintar

This is based on the original Indonesian cut of the movie.

Criminal mastermind – the subtitles say so, so it must be true – Gundar (Dicky Zulkarnaen) and his evil nephew are attempting to take control of a village in the Indonesian countryside. To achieve this goal, the village mayor as well as the mayor’s brother, a cop en route from the city, need to die. Because nobody here is into regular assassinations, the villains poison their victims with a red pill that makes a mass of roots burst from their bodies.

Mayor and brother are easily despatched thusly, but the cop’s daughter Julia (Eva Arnaz) escapes this fate by chance and through some pretty nifty martial arts skills. Directly before her father dies, Julia also meet-cutes strapping young Hendra (Barry Prima), who quickly puts his considerable fighting prowess into the service of punching villains with and for her.

In most regards, Special Silencers, directed by Arizal, is pretty typical for an Indonesian martial arts movie starring Barry Prima: the fights are vigorous, well choreographed – if typically not on the level of comparable Hongkong films – and decidedly on the bloody side; there’s a romance element that feels somewhat more serious than in many another martial arts film; the villains are truly hissable.

Also there and accounted for is a pretty incredible synth soundtrack (I believe only partially needle-dropped) that helps make even the most normal fight feel a bit weird, and a certain sense of strangeness.

Despite that inspired and inspiring roots-based murder method – so good the film repeats the effect again and again – the strangeness level is a bit low for an Indonesian movie, for while there are some nods to black magic, and a bit of dubious but fun poison animal action, most of the fighting here lacks the bigger gimmicks you’d find in something like a Jaka Sembung film. That’s a complaint in so far as this lack of the more extreme bits of exploitation movie value robs Special Silencers of the chance of becoming  mind-blowing instead of just being a well-made and highly entertaining example of Indonesian martial arts cinema of its era.

The Sweet East (2023)

High school senior Lillian (Talia Ryder) semi-accidentally goes on the run when the opportunity arises to while she’s on a class trip to Washington DC. From there, she goes on a long strange trip across the Eastern seaboard of the US, during which she falls in with leftist college activist, becomes  the live-in Lolita of pseudo-intellectual neo Nazi (Simon Rex) who likes to go off about Poe but really doesn’t seem to have made it to Nabokov, turns curiously (or not so curiously, really) great actress in a low budget movie for a bit, survives a massacre that’s somewhat her fault, and falls in with a member of an Islamic cult living in the woods. Among other things.

The first ten minutes or so of veteran indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s first feature as a director go for maximum lo-fi indie grain eyestrain, threatening the sort of misunderstood naturalism I still loathe known as mumblecore. But as soon as Lillian starts on her improbable trip across the Eastern seaboard of the United States by going through the modern version of a rabbit hole, things turn more interesting – and calmer – to look at.

They also turn increasingly surreal, Lillian drifting through an America that has gone off-kilter and ever so slightly grotesque. Like the proper protagonist of any good picaresque, Lillian herself is a bit of a trickster, able to project exactly the qualities the people – mostly men - she falls in with want to see in her, and thus uses this ability as a survival tool. Or, one can’t help but think, as a way to keep the world off her back, so she can drift, and look and just be in the world. Lillian always seems to sit right on the border between user and used, naïve and manipulating here, and the film never makes the mistake to replace this enigmatic quality – perfectly projected via Ryder’s exceptional performance – with something as boring as psychology or trauma porn.

While there’s violence and horror here as well – we are talking about contemporary America after all – The Sweet East never loses its dream-like quality, never playing as a coming-of-age movie in the traditional style, but rather one that portrays the strangeness of a self not fully formed colliding with the strangeness of the world. This quality of dream, of a fairy tale without a moral, is probably what draws me particularly to the movie. Even though I wouldn’t exactly call this a work of fantastic cinema, its feel is much closer to the realm of, for example, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural than US independent cinema of this style typically ventures these days.

Demon of the Island (1983)

Original title: Le démon dans l'île

Dr Gabrielle Martin (Anny Duperey) moves to a somewhat isolated island to become the new general practitioner there. The islanders haven’t told her, but her predecessor, Dr Marshall (Jean-Claude Brialy), is still there, dwelling in the 80s idea of a high-tech mansion, and giving off a decided mad scientist vibe. Consequently, and for other reasons that will only become clear to Gabrielle much later, nobody wants to have anything to do with the guy.

At least, Gabrielle won’t have to fear a case of duelling doctors this way. She’s going to have larger problems anyway, for the island is hit by a series of curious and improbable accidents all apparently caused by objects of daily life – from razor blades to household appliances – acting out aggressively with little rhyme, reason, or respect for the actual laws of physics as we know them from the real world.

The truth behind these occurrences will be quite surprising, for our heroine as much as for the audience.

Which is the sort of surprise that’s predominantly caused by a film that builds up its mystery in so pleasantly nonsensical yet also derivative a manner, I was surprised to encounter it in something made in France during the 80s instead of Italy in the 70s.

In the case of Francis Leroi’s Demon of the Island, that’s a compliment, and certainly not an impediment to enjoyment. For what’s not to enjoy about a film that has such a good time finding improbable ways in which household appliances can mutilate people, then realizes them through decidedly not realistic but very fun effects, and finally makes them part of a story that touches on as many clichés as it can grab. I particularly enjoyed the misguided attempts at making Gabrielle’s trauma of child loss part of her motivation.

All of this is filmed by Leroi in the slick and appealing style I associate with softcore filmmakers like him doing horror for a change (or a buck). He’s not great at building suspense, but he’s certainly applying himself to it anyway, often mistiming things in ways I found charming rather than annoying.

Leroi also gets fun performances from Duperey and Brialy, the former increasingly losing her considerable cool, while the latter rants, raves and looks sinister with the best of them.

Even better, Demon of the Island finishes on a moment of genuine greatness, Marshall’s final fate being as strange as anything I’ve seen on screen.

Somewhere in the Night (1946)

After throwing himself on a grenade, a soldier (John Hodiak) in World War II suffers from amnesia. He’s probably called George Taylor, or so the facts suggest. He’s not too keen on finding out more about himself, and even hides his condition from the Army, because he has found a letter among his belongings that suggests he might not be the nicest of guys.

Yet when the opportunity arises to be released to his apparently native Los Angeles, he still grasps it. Once there, the shell-shocked George even learns he might have had an actual friend by the name of Larry Cravat. Looking for something, anything to hold onto, George decides to find Larry. What follows is a series of encounters with the night people of LA, various attacks on his life, and even more questions concerning his own former habits and personality. Bar chanteuse Christy Smith (Nancy Guild) appears quite smitten by George, so things aren’t all bad, confusing and traumatic, even though our protagonist’s face has the sweaty Hollywood glow of stress on his face most of the time.

In many regards, Somewhere in the Night is a bit of a best of collection of the tropes later decades decided would make up the character of the noir as a genre. As many a noir, it isn’t an orderly constructed mystery, it hardly even is a laissez faire one, but rather a film that puts its audience very much into the same position as its protagonist has stepped into: utter confusion about his self and the world surrounding him, chasing shadows while encountering characters – all played by brilliant character actors – whose importance to his own questions or his life he can neither grasp nor understand for much of the film’s running time.

This sense of dislocation and confusion isn’t a weakness of writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film, however, but its point. If ever there was a film about existentialist angst and a world that has broken down so much, a person even has to doubt their own identity and character, this one is it. As a portrayal of this, Somewhere in the Night is flawless.

Even George’s encounters with people who will turn out to have very little to do with his problems have a point in this regard, as Somewhere in the Night shows most of these characters to be just as much in the dark about the world, the plot and their roles in it as he is. Even the film’s main villain knows only parts of what is actually going on, and about these, he isn’t exactly right. Confusion and doubt are just the natural state of the film’s world.

All of this gives Somewhere the quality of an anxiety driven dream even before Mankiewicz and DP Norbert Brodine drench much of it in shadows not so much of night but of our ideal of night.

The dialogue wavers between sharp, clever and sarcastic quips and bouts of depression and existentialist doubt – all of which is about as naturalistic as a Shakespeare monologue, and therefore perfectly fitting to the artificial depths of the noir.

Somehow – perhaps because Hodiak looks and feels like a guy who really deserves a break, and Guild projects a genuine kind of  goodness that makes one root for the guy she goes out of her way to protect – I’m not even annoyed about Somewhere in the Night’s happy end, usually  a small irritant in noirs for me. Nightmares do turn into more pleasant dreams from time to time, after all.

You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In (2024)

Kelsey (Diana Gardner) and professional Gay Best Friend Blake (Nathaniel Ansbach) travel to Italy for the surprisingly intimate bachelorette party of Kelsey’s former best friend Rochelle (Isabella Egizi). There’s some bad blood Kelsey has never actually talked through with Rochelle concerning the fact that Rochelle’s husband to be is also Kelsey’s ex; what seems to have caused a larger rift in the friendship, however, is Rochelle’s career as an influencer. This turns all of her private interactions public, and makes actual friendship as Kelsey understands it impossible.

Right now, that rift is certainly not bridged by Rochelle’s bridesmaid Jenny (Anastasiya Bogach), who acts like the director and producer of the five person – one of whom mysteriously never arrives - bachelorette outing as if it were an important event to be micromanaged to death.

On the plus side, Jenny did manage what looks like the greatest Air B’n’B coup ever: an actual centuries-old Italian villa.

As it turns out, this place usually belongs to a man named Victor (Fabián Castro). And Victor for is part is soon the be revealed as a vampire who sees Kelsey’s as the reincarnation of a former lover and wants to make her his bride, by any means necessary – so mostly sex, hypnotism, bloodsucking, and more hypnotism.

I enjoyed Dave Parker’s Tubi low budget original quite a bit more than I expected going in. In fact, encountering it felt a bit like stumbling onto one of the lesser Charles Band productions before he got all puppet-y on us: a film that embraces being cheap and cheesy without using this as an excuse for not putting any effort in.

So what if many of the American characters have suspiciously continental accents, if this means we can shoot on location in Italy? Sure, sexy vampires have been done to death, but what if we mix the well-worn tropes of 90s erotic (or “erotic”, if you prefer) vampire movies with some contemporary concerns? That’s the kind of thoughts I suspect to have gone through the filmmakers’ minds, and that’s the sort of thing I’m looking for in my low budget movies rather than total originality or the kind of production values you realistically shouldn’t expect anyway.

You Shouldn’t makes appreciating it rather easy as well – not only does it look pretty great for what it is – the 90s indoor fog and some clever, also 90s-style lighting tricks work wonders for nightclub scenes as well as for a bachelorette party turned hopeful orgy turned hallucinatory mini-hellscape – it’s also very well paced.

The script by Michael Lucid and Mary O’Neil is much cleverer than it strictly needs to be, and eventually turns many a trope of the sexy vampire movie on its head to use the space of wonderfully cheesy horror to think through toxic relationships and the vagaries of female friendship in a world full of toxic men and general assholes in a way that’s at once efficient and aggressively non-stupid. Again, that’s how many a great low budget movie has done it in the past, and clearly, it is a tradition these filmmakers understand and appreciate.

Among the other surprising joys of the script is character work that starts from the expected tropes but eventually turns them into characters that don’t always act like their initial nature suggests, but feel rather more complex and, dare I say it, human, thereby. The cast certainly seem to appreciate that as well, and transitions from bitchy one-note to person very effectively.

Plus, how many horror movies feature a gay occult shop owner and vampire hunter?