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By  Will, on April 30, 2012, 5:20 am  Starring Robert Z’Dar, Matt Hannon, Jannis Farley, Mark Frazer, Melissa Moore, Krista Lane, Gerald Okamura
Directed by Amir Shervan
Expectations: Oh I fully expect a golden, wonderful piece of shit.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
PURE. FUCKING. AWESOME. Can you tell I loved Samurai Cop? Oh man, where do I begin? This movie surpassed all expectations I had and promptly found a place beside shitty favorites such as Laserblast and Mac and Me. It’s always a joy to find a pure gem of cinematic trash like this, and Samurai Cop is like the Dom Perignon of trashy action flicks. Literally everything in this movie is done poorly and wrong, but it’s just this quality that means that literally everything is perfectly right. This is the kind of cult movie favorite that only a truly gifted individual could pull off. Like Lawrence of Arabia, or Troll 2, Samurai Cop is a movie so pure in its vision that it transcends the simple label of entertainment and becomes an art form. Samurai Cop is pure fucking awesome and you need it in your life.
I honestly didn’t keep track of the story as the film went along, as the film wasn’t too concerned with keeping track of it either. There’s a Japanese gangster who’s mad at some other gangsters and causing mayhem in the streets. The police force brings in their specialist, a man known as Joe Samurai to take on these katana-wielding fuckers. And that’s pretty much it. The cops chase the bad guys and shoot their guns. Next scene: the bad guys hunt down the cops and shoot their guns. Repeat. It’s fantastic. Samurai Cop is nothing but pure, unfiltered 80s, opening with a pair of undercover cops trailing a GMC van to a cocaine deal on the marina. I believe most everything of note in the 80s happened on the docks of a marina. Isn’t that where Reagan held the press conference to tell Gorbachev to tear the wall down?
Continue reading Samurai Cop (1989) →
By Will, on April 26, 2012, 5:20 am  Starring Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Steve Buscemi, Mike Judge, Matt O’Leary, Emily Osment, Ricardo Montalban, Holland Taylor, Taylor Momsen
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Expectations: Moderate. I expect to have fun. No more, no less.
I don’t review a lot of kids movies here at Silver Emulsion and that’s because most of them aren’t very good. OK, OK, the same could be said of many horror films, but the truth is: I’m not a kid, nor do I have kids, so I just don’t see a lot of them. They also don’t really appeal to me either, which is probably a good thing as I’m now in my thirties and it gets a little creepy to be saying “One for Agent Cody Banks, please” once you’re old enough to drive yourself around. There are always exceptions to the rule though, and Robert Rodriguez’s films for children always seem to fit into that category for me. As I mentioned in my lengthy and ridiculously wordy review of the original Spy Kids, it was a viewing of his Shorts that led me to revisit his kid-friendly work, and I’m glad that I did. I enjoyed the first film quite a bit, and I think the second one is even better.
Story isn’t really the strongpoint of this film, but here’s the gist: Our spy kid heroes are no longer the only game in town, as seemingly every agent this side of a Madagascar alleyway has inducted their own children into the program. Juni and Carmen’s main rivals are Gary and Gerti Giggles, spawn of Dr. Giggles Donnagon Giggles, the new head of the OSS. Anyway, the president’s daughter starts the ball rolling by stealing a device known as the Transmooker, and, of course, every one wants it. This leads our heroes and their devious enemies down a wonderful thrill ride of a spy picture, complete with more insane gadgets than you could ever hope to see in the entire James Bond series.
Continue reading Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams (2002) →
By Will, on April 19, 2012, 5:20 am  Flash Point [導火線] (2007)
AKA City With No Mercy, City Without Mercy, The Signal
Starring Donnie Yen, Louis Koo, Ngai Sing, Ray Lui, Xing Yu, Fan Bing-Bing, Kent Cheng, Xu Qing, Teresa Ha Ping, Helena Law Lan, Tony Ho Wah-Chiu, Irene Wong Yun-Yun
Directed by Wilson Yip
Expectations: High. I’ve been pumped to see some more of the Wilson Yip/Donnie Yen films since I saw Ip Man, which was quite a while ago at this point.
Donnie Yen is a badass motherfucker. This should be a given, but some may not yet be familiar with his work. Flash Point isn’t a good starting point, but it will show you (eventually) just how badass Donnie Yen is. See the problem with this one, despite featuring the current reigning badass of Hong Kong cinema, is that it’s actually not much of a martial arts film until the final scene. There are flashes (and points), where bits of martial arts are sprinkled in but it never really lets loose until the final fight. This is a supreme disappointment to me, but regardless of this Flash Point remains entertaining and fast-paced throughout.
Yen plays a ruthless cop that has a nasty habit of beating the shit out of every criminal he takes down. He’s got a high rate of success at cracking cases, but the suits at the police force don’t like his brutal methods. In other movies this might be a vital plot point, or perhaps a wake-up call to Yen’s character, but in Flash Point it’s basically meaningless until the very end of the film when it all gets brought back around. Not that you need a point or a moral to the story. Anyway, he’s on the prowl for some asshole Triad dudes that are trying to make off with some money they fucked a bunch of Vietnamese gangsters out of. I recently wrote about the underdeveloped plot in Merantau, and how it wasn’t necessary to the film to have it be much more developed. In Flash Point we have the opposite, where the plot is too developed and becomes so convoluted at times that it’s hard to keep track of what exactly is going on. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Before you know it, you’ll catch back up and figure out what’s going on. This isn’t a Bergman film, so the real reason you’re here is for a fun thrill ride, and Flash Point delivers on that promise.
Continue reading Flash Point (2007) →
By  Uncle Jasper, on April 17, 2012, 5:20 am  Starring Jean Claude Van-Damme, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, Wilford Brimley, Kasi Lemmons, Arnold Vosloo, Willie C. Carpenter
Directed by John Woo
To the seasoned viewer of early 90s action films there are only two things wrong with Hard Target. One, there are like twenty dudes trying to kill Van Damme at any given moment and Al Leong is not one of them. Two, the painfully obvious musical selection “Born on the Bayou”, which could have made any scene in this film infinitely more awesome, is not played until the end credits. Despite these two obvious flaws, the movie was a pleasant experience to return to since I had last viewed it over 15 years ago.
Hard Target is forever cemented in history as the film that brought John Woo to Hollywood. Language barriers as well as unfamiliarity with the Hollywood system were obvious concerns. The brass over at Universal Pictures were apparently shitting themselves so badly over letting John Woo take the reins of this film that they hired producer Sam Raimi to babysit the production. Woo was working in horrendously stifling conditions, being given only two months to shoot the film, and was relentlessly hounded by studio execs to go easy on the violence, which ironically is the very reason he became such a desired Hollywood import in the first place.
Continue reading Uncle Jasper reviews: Hard Target (1993) →
By Will, on April 16, 2012, 5:20 am  The Raid [Serbuan maut] (2012)
AKA The Raid: Redemption
Starring Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Doni Alamsyah, Yayan Ruhian, Pierre Gruno, Ray Sahetapy, Tegar Satrya, Iang Darmawan
Directed by Gareth Evans
Expectations: Super high. So stoked for this movie.
Before I get into more specific feelings about The Raid, I want to say that I really enjoyed it overall. I liked Merantau a lot more, but I think The Raid is the better made film hands down. With that out of the way, let’s get down to business. Iko Uwais and Gareth Evans, hot off of the success of Merantau, are back to bring you a bone-crunching, kick-ass martial arts film. If you went into The Raid cold, you’d never guess this was the case from the opening half hour or so, as there is very little, if any, martial arts at all during this time. It’s all police squads and machine gun fire, and while automatic weapons are always pretty damn exciting and entertaining, I was there for the punchy-punch.
There’s not a whole lot of story being told in The Raid, but that’s to be expected. The basics of The Raid are this: There’s an evil fucker on the top floor of a fifteen-story building. He must be taken down, along with all the other evil fuckers that he has rented rooms to in the building, not to mention his two evil henchmen fuckers. As one of the cops says during the opening scene, “Let’s clean up this city.”
Continue reading The Raid (2012) →
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