Imperial Tomb Raiders (1973)

The late 19th Century. The bandit gang – small army, really – of Chin Da-Kui (Tso Yen-Yung), the owner of the biggest damn fur hat you’ve ever seen, is hanging around a village, making it impossible for Liu (Yuan Shen), the official in the next big town, to collect taxes (the subtitles speak of “collecting rent”, but I’m doubtful). Liu has hired famed bandit killer Luo Qi (Wang Yong) to get rid of the problem, but the gentleman appears to have not survived a fight with the bandit leaders.

Even worse, the bandits have bigger plans. Turns out the Liu family’s old Nanny Wang (Chang Ping-Yu) was once an Imperial maid, buried alive together with some of her colleagues to accompany the Emperor’s favourite concubine into death in the lavish, secret tomb hidden in the mountainous country where the village is situated. Apart from dead maids and a dead concubine, the tomb also holds an incredibly valuable pearl – and Nanny, who managed to escape from the tomb, is the only living soul who knows where exactly this tomb is hidden. Somehow, the bandits have gotten wind of her knowledge, and are willing to do rather a lot to get at the old woman carrying it.

While Liu has no clue what to do about the problem, his rather more proactive, if perhaps not terribly sensible, daughter Qiao-Er (Tso Yen-Yung) and her four maids – all excellent fighters with guns, bows and martial arts – grab Nanny Wang and go off to get rid of the bandits.

It’s good that they are capable fighters, for while Luo Qi turns out to be alive and of great help, there are fights, dirty tricks, betrayal and an instable tomb for them to cope with.

I have always assumed that media about Imperial tomb raiding were a Chinese pop-cultural obsession of this millennium (before the censors started complaining, of course). At least, I hadn’t encountered any Chinese or Hong Kong movies featuring tomb raiding action of this style before Taiwanese director Ting Shan-Hsi’s Shaw Brothers film Imperial Tomb Raiders. So apparently, I have been wrong again.

Though, to be fair, despite its title, the film isn’t as tomb-centric as one might expect – most of its short and sharp runtime is spent on a siege scenario, with Qiao-Er’s group and Luo Qi holed up in a farm, fighting the bandits and their dirty tricks. The tomb only really comes into play in a short flashback to Nanny Wang’s escape (including her surviving by eating snakes), and then for the film’s climax, and there’s little of the supernatural or the bizarre traps that would turn up in later tomb raiding films. The tomb, however, is a very nice set and makes a good backdrop for the climactic fight.

Speaking of fighting, even though the choreography is rougher than usual for a Shaw Brothers production, the mix of guns and martial arts does make for an interesting series of fights, fun by virtue of being atypical for the way the Shaws handled this sort of thing otherwise. But then, this was shot in Taiwan instead of Hongkong, so I suspect Ting (who also wrote script) had a bit more freedom here than directors working directly on the Shaw lot.

This film also features few of the usual Shaw stars and bit players – which is its biggest weakness, for while nobody here is unconvincing, nobody is excessively charismatic or puts much of a stamp on the very basic characters featured, either.

That doesn’t mean Imperial Tomb Raiders isn’t a fun film – it’s always interesting, atypical, and features elements – like the siege scenario, the tomb business – that weren’t typical for martial arts cinema of the time and place.

Red Sonja (2025)

Having directed the surprisingly good Solomon Kane adaptation, MJ Bassett has some form with Robert E. Howard adaptations, though this, of course, is based on what Roy Thomas unleashed when he brought the historical adventure character of Red Sonya of Rogatino into Conan’s Hyborian Age in the comics, where she soon acquired a chainmail bikini, and many, many more adventures than her historical counterpart experienced.

It is also, alas, yet another damn origin story, so if you hoped for watching a movie featuring the character you actually like, you’ll have to make do with Sonja – adequately if not wonderfully embodied by Matilda Lutz - as an occasionally ultra-violent eco terrorist orphan with a horse buddy until the epilogue that promises a sequel we’re never going to get anyway. Our main villain (Robert Sheehan) consequently plays like the fantasy version of a tech bro, at least half of the time. The other, actually more interesting, half of the time, he has a tragic backstory that will turn out to be closely connected to that of Sonja, because contemporary scriptwriters (the credited guilty party here is Tasha Huo, though I suspect diverse hands being involved in about a thousand versions of the script) just can’t help but overexplain and overconnect.

More interesting is the villain’s unhealthy co-dependent relation with his main henchwoman (Wallis Day) who has her own trauma to carry – something the script decides is so important, it starts to get weird about it in the climax. Or really, what one calls a climax, for the film decides to put its worst battle at the end of the movie and to then peter out with endless amounts of dialogue and character business, some of which is at least vaguely interesting, all of which goes on way too long and sits at the wrong damn place for the kind of movie this is. But then, sensible structure really isn’t the script’s strong suit. The narrative timeline is a total mess – just try to understand how long the film thinks Sonja is with the gladiators – and there’s little sense the film understands how dramatic arcs work.

What saves this Red Sonja from being just an inconsistently and technically badly written movie and makes it one that’s actually still entertaining enough is mostly Bassett’s quality as an action director, if you can ignore that unfortunate final battle. In those scenes where they commit, there actually is the kind of thrill and excitement, perhaps even a bit of blood and thunder, I expect from a film about a Robert E. Howard, Rascally Roy character.

Three Films Make A Post: Run for your life before they devour you

Halabala (2025): This Thai production directed by Eakasit Thairaat about an killer cop and a handful of idiots hunting a crazy killer in a haunted forest is a bit of a frustrating mess. It never can decide on a tone, wavering between Thai gore, psychological horror, ill-advised post-Tarantino-isms, and whatever else you can come up with. Whenever it actually hits on something creepy or interesting in a scene, it’s going to undermine it completely in the next; the climax is a particular mess, and a waste of a perfectly good monster suit to boot.

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992): This is the first of three unconnected Kamen Rider V-cinema movies. It is also the longest and the least artistically successful one.

It is actually a great idea to double down on the body horror element inherent to Kamen Rider as a whole – crossing people with bugs and all that – but the film doesn’t really commit to the horror for too long, finds itself not clever enough to rip off the relationship bit from The Fly properly, and shoots a third of its action scenes via bug vision, so the audience can’t actually see what’s going on in them. Which is a bit of a shame, for the rest of the action sequences are full of the great joys of direct-to-video action and tokusatsu. Hell, they could even afford a helicopter for the climax.

The film isn’t without its charms – Geena Davis should have had a foetus shooting golden light from her abdomen as well – but it’s also not as fun as the film you’ll see in your mind when you hear “Kamen Rider body horror”.

The Great Chase (1975): To avenge her father, race car driver and karate ace Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has joined up with a secret government organisation. Her investigation, during which she also turns out to be a mistress of disguise (she does old ladies, dapper young men, and even older ladies from Cambodia) and a fashion icon (some of the costuming choices alone would be worth the price of admission), eventually leads her not only to the man who killed her father, but also the guy responsible for it: Bin Amatsu, who likes to rape women while wearing a furry suit (including a head), accompanied by loud classical music. Afterwards, he stuffs the traumatized victim in full plate mail, because why not.

So yes, this is indeed a Norifumi Suzuki movie, full of stuff that is as problematic as it is outrageously fun, as well as half a dozen cool fight showcases for the ever wonderful Shihomi, and a choice Toei funk soundtrack. It’s not his most extreme or outrageous Suzuki joint – Shihomi had certain standards – nor his most offensive but it is certainly still quite a bit of fun.

Honeydripper (2007)

The early 50s in the Deep South, Alabama. The Honeydripper Lounge, the juke joint of pianist Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) has seen better days – the music doesn’t excite, it probably doesn’t help that Tyrone doesn’t allow guitarists into his place, the audience doesn’t leave enough money, and most everybody appears to have lost patience with Tyrone’s attempts to save his place hustling. Not even to speak of his debts, particularly to a landlord who comes calling with a weekend ultimatum. Thus this weekend will be Tyrone’s last chance to save his place – for this he even breaks his “no guitarists” rule and has managed to invite famous New Orleans electric guitarist Guitar Sam. Obviously, things do not run as smoothly as Tyrone hopes.

Despite being set a couple of decades later, and being far less interested in plot or vampires, John Sayles’s Honeydripper would make an interesting double feature with Sinners, seeing as it centres around a dive bar in deep Alabama, music, and all aspects of the surrounding culture. Of course, this being a John Sayles film, it uses its plot as an incitement to begin exploring a community of people – what keeps them together, what keeps them apart, and in this particular case, how do you live when a racist system is always stacking the deck against you to lessen your triumphs and make all of your fuck-ups much worse. So the film spends just as much time on the disillusionment and potential religious conversion of Tyrone’s wife Delilah (LisaGay Hamilton), the dreams of his daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) for a very modest idea of a better life, the hopes of young guitarist Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) for a life in music, and so on and so forth as it does on Tyrone’s increasingly desperate and immoral attempts to keep his head above water. There’s a plain matter-of-factness to the film’s portrayal of day-to-day racism, the way the local Sheriff (Stacy Keach) takes his corruption as his simple due as a white man lording it over black people that’s perhaps more painful than if it were showing the extremes and deepest horrors of these injustices (knowing Sayles, he probably wouldn’t think it his place to do so).

The film features a nearly all-black cast of Sayles veterans, character actors, musicians, and young actors on early gigs, and everyone appears deeply engaged with their craft here, even if they are just in the film for a scene or two. Glover does give one of his career best performances, projecting a complex mix of desperation and sadness, but also a genuine hopefulness that feels lived and earned. Nobody else here falls below that sort of level of performance.

Visually, Sayles sometimes strains against his budget, with some shots and camera set-ups that feel more as if they belonged into a contemporary cable TV movie, and an all-around cheapish look to the photography. Fortunately, Sayles’s script, the great performances and, yes, the quality of the music are more than enough to keep Honeydripper engaging and emotionally involving.

Striking Rescue (2024)

Bai An (Tony Jaa), a man with a rather expert talent for inflicting physical punishment on dozens of goons at once, is going on a bit of a personal crusade through the underworld of a South East Asian (or the censors would never allow some of the elements of the plot if it took place in China) country. Turns out murdering his pregnant wife during the course of some corporate/criminal business wasn’t the villains’ greatest idea.

Because movies – supposedly - need a bit more of a plot, Bai An rescues the teenage daughter of the corporate overlord he takes to be the man behind the murder, and finds himself drawn into protecting her while still murdering his way through the underworld and what turns out to be a conspiracy.

This Chinese direct to streaming action movie by Siyu Cheng is positioned as something of a return to form of its leading man, troubled Thai action star Tony Jaa, and if you’re an old-fashioned lover of watching Jaa smash his elbow (and other parts of his anatomy) into bad guys’ heads like me, you’ll be quite happy with the fact that Jaa is indeed still a fantastic screen fighter up to all kinds of inspired physical shenanigans. One whose elbows you want to keep far away from your head.

The plot, such as it is, is decent enough to hold the action scenes together, though the film could have lost its final scene that’s built on a misguided believe we care one way or the other for a certain character, or feel the need to see them punished, as well as the Chinese morality police mandated text about how Jaa’s character is going to be punished for his violent acts off-camera, because order and virtue and blah blah blah.

Even the subplot about the teenager, the sort of thing that can get pretty annoying right quick, meant to humanize proceedings and our violent protagonist, works well enough, also thanks to a perfectly decent performance by Chen Duo-Yi (I believe) as said teenager.

The action itself is brutal and varied – as we like it around here. Cheng knows what he has in the screen fighters, martial artists and stuntpeople assembled here, and appears to see it as his job to make them look as good as possible doing their things. Which, obviously, should be a given when you direct an action movie centred on a beloved martial arts star, but I’ve seen too many directors obfuscating instead of enhancing what’s happening in action scenes to take this sort of approach for granted.

So, yes, Striking Rescue is indeed the comeback we were promised, possibly the one we deserved.

Three Films Make A Post: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Missing Child Videotape (2024)

Original title: ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ

Keita (Rairu Sugita) is somewhat obsessed with helping find kids who get lost in woods and mountains - and he’s rather good at it, as well. He doesn’t appear to let anyone get very close to him. His roommate Tsusaka (Amon Hirai), a part time teacher with the ability to see ghosts (being Japanese, the film is very matter of fact about this), is probably his closest friend, and even he doesn’t really know what drives Keita. He does know that Keita’s little brother disappeared somehow when they were both still children, but his friend has never really gone into any details.

This changes when one of the parcels of parental detritus Keita’s mother has begun to send him following the death of his father contains a videotape young Keita himself shot on the day of the disappearance. There’s something off about the thing apart from its inexplicable content, and slowly but surely, a supernatural dread begins to engulf the two friends, as if something other than human – and certainly not just a little kid’s ghost – were calling for them.

Eventually, they, as well as a journalist (Kokoro Morita) who has become interested in the case for reasons more complicated as they first appear, decide to travel to Keita’s childhood country home. There, things become increasingly disturbing.

In many aspects, Ryota Kondo’s Missing Child Videotape – despite the title not a POV horror film – harkens back to the height of J-horror. Its mythology – as vaguely explained as it is - is certainly steeped as much in Japanese supernatural folklore as it is in contemporary internet interpretations of the same. Unlike its obvious predecessors, it isn’t really interested in updating the technological elements of the haunting much further than the late analogue, early digital era they were situated in. This doesn’t appear so much as an attempt at being retro than a focus on a certain timelessness. These supernatural things don’t belong to any specific time and place, are indeed dissolving our concepts of time and place, so the film isn’t interested in being about technology that hasn’t settled into becoming a thing of a vague past (even for us who experienced it live) either.

Formally, this takes a lot from the approach of Kiyoshi Kurosawa in his J-horror phase, more so than from Takashi Shimizu (who produced the film), or Hideo Nakata. There’s a slowness and calmness to the film that feels very Kurosawa, shots that linger, as well as a build up of dread that does only very seldom end in anything traditionally shocking (though when it does, it hits). This is all about creating a mood of dread, of quiet but intense isolation, and the equally quiet pressure to open one’s old wounds again and again.

The film’s very deliberate pacing and its unspectacular treatment of what would be its main set pieces will probably not work for some viewers – this is never leaving the border between slow and deliberate and just slow – and its unwillingness to explain itself in detail goes against much of the current taste. You can practically feel the irate YouTubers babbling about “plot holes” when they mean “crap we have to figure out for ourselves or might even have to accept as ambiguous, like much in actual life”.

Me, I felt utterly at home in Missing Child Videotape’s idea of dread, its pacing and its ambiguities. I am, indeed, a bit floored by it.

Out Come the Wolves (2024)

Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and her fiancée Nolan (Damon Runyan) have come to Sophie’s old cabin home in the sticks so Nolan can have an actual hunting experience he feels he needs for an article he’s writing. Sophie isn’t into hunting anymore and has even turned vegan, so she has asked her childhood friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) to take Nolan out hunting for a day while she stays at the cabin. Kyle comes complete with a never resolved and pretty damn unhealthy longing for Sophie and an alcohol problem you can practically smell through the screen.

Tensions mount between the three even the evening before the hunt, and it is this very human shittiness that’ll make the situation much worse when the hunters encounter a pack of very hungry wolves in the woods and things devolve from there in exactly the ways you’d fear them to.

Most people, me most certainly included, go into animal attack movies for the animal attacks, and expect the human business to be relegated to filler and other things you really want a movie to get over with to get to the meat of proceedings.

That’s not at all the case with Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves – here, it’s the naturalistic portrayal of a very human situation that might have ended in violence even without the wolves that drags you in and hold you. The actor trio clearly understand this, and so really get their teeth into their roles and the performances, treating the human business as a serious drama that’s just as important as all the wolf fighting later on. This creates an impressive amount of tension before the hunt starts, and leaves a viewer with the proper amount of dread, the more cosmicist sibling of suspense. It is not at all about the question that things will go wrong, it’s only how they will go wrong. If you want, you can even read the wolves more as a hungry metaphor bringing to life all the repressed feelings of the characters, nature, particularly the red in tooth and claw kind of the hunt, bringing out the worst in people.

MacDonald presents the action part of the film with an admirable relentlessness, a direct brutality that makes a wonderful contrast to the cold beauty of his nature photography. There’s a sense of desperation to the final act most films of this kind can’t hope to grasp – but then, most films of this kind don’t put this much effort into creating actual characters to confront nature (the outside one as well as their own).

Three Films Make A Post: Fear The Darkness

The Black Water Vampire (2014): This piece of POV horror directed and written by Evan Tramel is a bit of a strange one. At times, it is a clever bit of myth-building, and culminates in a surprisingly exciting climax with actual special effects. At other times, it mindlessly reproduces beats from The Blair Witch Project regardless if they actually fit into its plot and concept or not.

It’s a genuinely confusing mix of the inept, the effectively creepy and the clever, and one’s liking for it will most probably be based on how little that first bit turns one off.

Nightmare (2000): This South-Korean movie directed by Ahn Byeong-ki (who would soon go on to the much superior Phone) attempts to ride two of the horror waves of its time at once. There’s certainly a world where you could mix the Asian ghost movie revival following Hideo Nakata’s Ringu with the American teen slasher revival, and have a successful little movie.

Unfortunately, this drab concoction isn’t from that world and has little to offer beyond its dark, moody photography and an ensemble whose prettiness gives any US teen slasher cast a run for its money. The pacing is too slow and the supernatural elements and the I Saw What You Did Last Summer business don’t really do much for each other. Worse, the film’s narrative structure with flashbacks inside of flashbacks is way too much for the very basic plot to carry, and the only thing it does is hold back that our supposed protagonists are even more horrible people than they at first appear to be for an hour or so.

I was rooting for the ghost, and not just because she is played by Ha Ji-Won.

Coma (2022): In some scenes, Bertrand Bonello’s mix of essay film, science fiction and COVID induced coming of age fantasy is nearly brilliant, attempting to feel its way into the mind of an eighteen year old girl (Louise Labèque), suffering from a particularly bad case of teenage desperation at a world that’s clearly made to make us all desperate and what I’d describe as a parasocial infection. In others, it is that kind of nearly insufferable type of French art house movie which hides its intellectual simplicity by expressing its simple ideas in as complicated and obtuse a manner as possible.

And let’s not even start on the film’s start and finish, when Bonello explains exactly what his film is supposed to mean - which may lead the more cynical among us to the suggestion he may have tried to make a movie whose themes viewers can understand by watching it and thinking about it.