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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 March 30, 2012, 5:20 am  The Invincible Fist [鐵手無情] (1969)
Starring Lo Lieh, Li Ching, David Chiang, Fang Mian, Ku Feng, Chan Sing, Cheung Pooi-Saan, Wu Ma, Cheng Lui, Cliff Lok Kam Tung, Wang Kuang-Yu, Lau Gong, Chui Chung-Hok
Directed by Chang Cheh
Expectations: Moderate. Chang Cheh is always fun.
In Chang Cheh’s memoir he talks a lot about the period of creative soul-searching that was 1969. As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, he became fed up with straight wuxia films after Golden Swallow and wanted to find himself a new niche that would excite creatively. He had tried a contemporary picture, The Singing Thief, which I enjoyed immensely but is generally looked down upon by most reviewers and even Chang himself. He tried to subvert the wuxia genre by focusing on an anti-hero in The Flying Dagger. Again, I thoroughly enjoyed that film, but Chang felt it to be a disaster. He tried an over-the-top action sequel in Return of the One-Armed Swordsman, which was incredibly successful, but Chang writes it off as a mere variation on a theme in his memoir. The Invincible Fist, though, he expressed a love for, and a sadness that the box office didn’t reflect the quality of the film he produced. Looking back at the many Chang Cheh films released in 1969, The Invincible Fist is by far the best made of the bunch, and definitely worthy of your time and praise. I’d never even heard of this movie until I embarked on this review series, and that’s a crying shame for a film this good.
Again Chang Cheh seeks to do something different within the wuxia swordplay genre with The Invincible Fist, but it’s not the hand-to-hand fighting you might expect from a title such as The Invincible Fist. Instead, the figurative invincible fist refers to our main character, a bounty hunter played by Lo Lieh, on the trail of a skilled team of bandits. Lo commands a small group of his own (with his brother played by none other than David Chiang in his first major role), but it’s really all about Lo Lieh and his incredible skills as both a martial performer and an actor. He plays the hard-nosed, detective-like character with a badass calm that’s both impressive and chilling. He’s no one to fuck around with, striking fear and admiration in the hearts of all that pass his way.
Continue reading The Invincible Fist (1969) →
By Will, on February 10, 2012, 5:20 am  Killers Five [豪俠傳] (1969)
Starring Tang Ching, Li Ching, Ku Feng, Cheng Miu, Wang Kuang-Yu, Tong Dik, Yeung Chi Hing, Carrie Ku Mei, Ou-Yang Sha-Fei, Tien Feng, Lau Leung-Wa, Wong Ching-Wan, Poon Oi-Lun
Directed by Cheng Kang
Expectations: High. Cheng Kang usually delivers.
The Duke’s daughter has been kidnapped by bandits! Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the duke’s daughter? That’s the question asked of our heroes in Killers Five and the answer is a resounding yes. Killers Five is debatably the best martial arts/action film to be produced by the Shaw Brothers up to this point. It includes everything I could want in a movie, providing entertainment at every turn. I went in expecting fights and intrigue, but I also got fun & charismatic characters, wonderful performances, awesome traps, suspenseful thrills, shocking double-crosses, over-the-top gore and absolute sophistication behind the camera. This movie is just flat-out awesome.
Unlike so many 60s Shaw Brothers martial arts films, Killers Five doesn’t fuck around with lengthy plot exposition and slow-moving narrative. The duke’s daughter is kidnapped and within a minute or so, our main hero played by Tang Ching is on a quest to create a martial team badass enough to take on the evil bandit lord Jin Tianlong (Tong Dik) who’s taken the duke daughter to his fortress on Mt. Jinlong. The film takes on something of a Western vibe, or even The Seven Samurai, during this section as the hero travels around the countryside collecting the best people for the job.
Continue reading Killers Five (1969) →
By Will, on February 6, 2012, 5:20 am  My Name is Shanghai Joe [Il mio nome è Shanghai Joe] (1973)
AKA The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe, The Dragon Strikes Back, Knochenbrecher im wilden Westen (literally translates to: Bone Crusher in the Wild West), Shanghai Joe, To Kill or to Die
Starring Chen Lee, Klaus Kinski, Gordon Mitchell, Claudio Undari, Katsutoshi Mikuriya, Carla Romanelli, Carla Mancini, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, George Wang, Federico Boido, Piero Lulli
Directed by Mario Caiano
Expectations: High, this one looks great and I’ve heard good things.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
Usually in films where two distinct genres are mashed together, the end result is less than it could have been. In My Name is Shanghai Joe, I am happy to say that everything comes together in the best, most satisfying way possible. It is a western first, then a kung fu film, but it truly delivers on both levels. It is also nearly non-stop action, with Shanghai Joe moving briskly through the baddies in one great scene after another. I always go into mixed genre films with apprehension, especially ones that mix two of my favorite genres, but My Name is Shanghai Joe does it so well that I had an absolute blast watching it and will definitely be watching this one again.
There isn’t much of a plot to speak of. Shanghai Joe arrives off a presumably slow boat from China in San Francisco of 1882. He quickly buys a stagecoach ticket East to Texas. At every turn, Joe meets up with some of the most racist fuckers ever put onto celluloid, spouting shitty Chinaman jokes one after another. After working his way through tons of these bastards, Joe finally pisses off the wrong dude, who in turn hires four assassins to track down Joe and take him out. These assassins, with such names as Scalper Jack and Pedro the Cannibal, each go down in interesting and fun ways. My Name is Shanghai Joe is a revenge film, but not one to linger on the pain or the regret such killing might lead another hero to contemplate. Instead most of the scenes follow this general framework: Joe enters, the bad guys say some racist shit and attack, Joe fucking annihilates them. It’s truly gratifying to watch and literally never gets old.
Continue reading My Name is Shanghai Joe (1973) →
By Will, on January 23, 2012, 5:20 am 
AKA Mi amigo Mac, Mac – O Extraterrestre, Mac, a földönkívüli barát, Mick… mein Freund vom anderen Stern
Starring Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, Tina Caspary, Lauren Stanley, Jade Calegory, Vinnie Torrente, Martin West, Ivan J. Rado, Danny Cooksey, Laura Waterbury, Ronald McDonald
Directed by Stewart Raffill
Expectations: I have high hopes that this will deliver some B-Movie fun.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
OK, hear me out! If you’re a child of the 80s like myself, you most likely saw this movie when you were a kid and have some vague memories of how it did a horrible job of ripping off Steven Spielberg’s slightly more famous stranded alien film, E.T. The Extraterrestrial. Like fine wine, time has been very kind to our friend Mac and his zany adventures through the Los Angeles basin, resulting in one of the most unexpectedly fun re-watches in a long time.
The film opens on a distant planet in our solar system. Which planet is never revealed, but the foreboding presence of Saturn overhead suggests that it might be one of the ringed planet’s sixty-two moons. I guess now is a good time to state that it’s important that any sort of analytical or critical thinking must be turned off for the remainder of the film or used simply as comedy, as anything else will only result in sheer disappointment with this cinematic gem. OK, where was I? The planet is inhabited by weird creatures with eternally surprised looks on their faces, doing their best to survive. The dad (or Big Mac) busts into the soil and inserts a makeshift straw, sucking out the life-giving water inside. Due to their surprised facial structure, their mouths are always ready to go for straw-drinking, and with mouths like that I’d imagine the straw would’ve been one of the first tools this species invented… or maybe their world is populated with straw trees and in order to survive the creatures evolved and adapted to use the tools given them by the area they inhabited. It’s questions like this that we’ll never have a definitive answer for, as the promised sequel unfortunately never materialized.
Continue reading Mac and Me (1988) →
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