2000s

Stephen reviews: Kai Doh Maru (2001)

Kai Doh Maru [怪童丸, Kaidōmaru] (2001)

Starring Mitsuki Saiga, Shotaro Morikubo, Yurika Hino

Directed by Kanji Wakabayashi

I was drawn to this movie because of its visual style. And the promise of some samurai action. Samurai action is nothing new; making an anime inspired by ancient Japanese artwork, however, is something very unusual. Unfortunately, what I got was not as impressive as I wanted. The influence is limited to just the color schemes rather than the character designs or environments. Most of the scenery is muted and pale to give the impression of an old scroll, while vivid pastels color the characters and important objects. The contrast gives it a unique and interesting appearance, but that’s as far as it goes. In all other aspects, it looks like any other anime.

The opening scene tries to capture a scruffier look to the artwork, but it doesn’t help. I wanted it to look like a moving tapestry with all the characters looking like they had been painted centuries ago. I know that would be impossible to animate as well as I want, but they could have tried harder than they did. It doesn’t help any that most of the backgrounds are done in CG either. At least they took the time and effort to give the CG black lines so it doesn’t look totally out of place next to the standard animation, but it’s still disappointing.

Stephen reviews: Redline (2009)

Redline [レドライン, Redorain] (2009)

Starring Takuya Kimura, Yuu Aoi, Tadanobu Asano, Takeshi Aono, Kousei Hirota, Kenyuu Horiuchi, Kouji Ishii

Directed by Takeshi Koike

Redline tries as hard as it can to be cool. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize that trying to be cool is the fastest way to fail at it. That’s not to say that Redline is a terrible film, but it feels like it spends more time trying to prove how amazingly super awesome it is than actually being good. It feels a little like Kill Bill crossed with something out of MTV’s Liquid Television. Maybe Aeon Flux, except without the crap animation and horrifically ugly character designs. I almost want to call it melodramatic, but that implies a sappy sort of sentimentality. Redline is more about being as intense as it can. I may just have to coin a new term for it. Megadramatic or superdramatic or something. I’ll figure it out later.

I have seen other anime use this style of over-the-top excitement where every scene is filled with dramatic sharp camera angles and close up zoom-ins, and others have reached higher levels of intensity, so the novelty has worn off for me. This style needs to be all or nothing. If you can’t match up with the craziest of them, then you might as well not even bother, and Redline just doesn’t manage the same absurdity of something like Dead Leaves or FLCL. Maybe someone less accustomed to anime insanity would get more out of it than I did.

Doggy Poo (2003)

Doggy Poo [강아지 똥] (2003)

Starring Fiona Stuart, Josh Smith, Anna Desmarais, Kate Yoon, Tony Ruse

Directed by Kwon Oh-sung

Expectations: High. Watch the trailer first and you’ll know what I mean. Well, if you share my sense of humor.

Stephen brought this one to my attention. Its trailer was on one of the anime DVDs he was reviewing and thankfully he sent me a YouTube link post-haste. Before the video even ended, I had it added to my Netflix queue and quickly escorted directly to the top of the list. There are some films you just can’t wait on. Before I continue, I’d just like to say my apologies now to the creators of this film. I truly respect the work that went into this, and I think you have crafted a good film, but I simply cannot write a review of a movie that has a piece of dog shit for its main character and not make fun of it.

Doggy Poo is a movie about just that. The film opens with a simulated helicopter shot flying through mountains and valleys before finally coming to rest in a small, rural village. A Jack Russell terrier scampers into frame, squats his little butt down and drops our main character onto the dirt road, complete with oh-so-cute little shit hands. A bird flies down and pecks at it, hoping for a tasty morsel. Instead she quickly realizes that Doggy Poo is a doggy poo and flies away in disgust. If only Ms. Bird had noticed that Doggy Poo’s eyes were little seeds!

Killjoy 2: Deliverance from Evil (2002)

Starring Charles Austin, Wayland Geremy Boyd, Bobby Marsden, Aaron Brown, Logan Alexander, Debbie Rochon, Nicole Pulliam, Choice Skinner, Olimpia Fernandez

Directed by Tammi Sutton

Expectations: Moderate. I loved the first one, but I have a bad feeling about this one.

On the general scale:

On the B-Movie scale:

I loved the original Killjoy, and even though I had heard some horrid things about this sequel, I held out hope. With an intro featuring a badass foot chase through an office building with low-rent funk blasting out of the soundtrack and white cops calling black perps motherfuckers, I thought I was about to find another modern blaxploitation horror gem. It was all a ruse, though, and quickly my excitement waned as the actual movie set in. Killjoy 2 concerns a group of young criminals being transported in a van to another facility… somewhere. At night, their van breaks down in the middle of nowhere and without any cell service, they venture out in search of a house with a phone they can use. That’s about half the movie so I should probably stop there.

The original Killjoy was low-budget at around the $150,000 mark, but it made the best with what it had and crafted an interesting, fun film. Killjoy 2 was made for the smaller sum of $30,000, and while it tries to make that work, the quality of the writing and the situations are just so poor that it’s nearly impossible to be entertained by this film. It only runs seventy-two minutes but it is an absolute slog to get through… well, that’s not entirely true. The first half, while bad, is infinitely more enjoyable than the last half when Killjoy is around. I know that sounds odd, but Killjoy was so scaled back and different in this that he only made me sad. Perhaps his on-screen strength is directly proportionate to the quality of the reason why someone is summoning him. In the first film there was a lifetime of pain and bullying, but in this film it’s only a desperate attempt to heal their friend’s gunshot wound. What were they thinking? Killjoy isn’t named Healjoy, he’s a fucking killer clown! The bastards in Killjoy 3 better have a damn good reason to call up Killjoy from the depths!

Stephen reviews: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [時をかける少女, Toki o Kakeru Shōjo] (2006)

Starring Riisa Naka, Takuya Ishida, Mitsutaka Itakura, Sachie Hara, Mitsuki Tanimura

Directed by Mamoru Hosoda

If this were any other movie, discovering the power to time travel would start our protagonist on a great journey of superheroics. Maybe she would find some horrible crime that needed solving, or perhaps she would track down the X-Men and try to join the team, or if nothing else, she would become the villain of the piece. She would at least do something with her power. But when high school student Mokoto Konno finds out she can leap backwards in time, the first thing she does is head back to yesterday so she can eat her pudding before her sister steals it. This basically sums up much of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time as Mokoto uses her amazing new power for the most mundane circumstances.

The closest movie to compare this to might be Groundhog Day, but in that film reliving the same day over and over was a curse, while here Mokoto gleefully heads back to past moments to relive them or make them turn out better. She spends about ten hours straight at a karaoke bar leaping back whenever her time is up so she can start again. And when she comes home and finds that dinner isn’t the meal she was hoping for, it’s another quick hop to two nights before when they had her favorite.

Killjoy (2000)

Starring Angel Vargas, Vera Yell, Lee Marks, Dee Dee Austin, Jamal Grimes, Corey Hampton, Rani Goulant, Napiera Groves, Arthur Burghardt, William L. Johnson, Penny Ford, Carl Washington, Dionne Rochelle

Directed by Craig Ross Jr.

Expectations: Low, but if it’s a series, there has to be something good about it, right?

On the general scale:

On the B-Movie scale:

Going into Killjoy I knew nothing of the plot or what to expect. All I knew was that on every DVD cover I’d seen there was a scary clown with a wild look in his eyes. Full Moon’s modern series have been real hit or miss with me, so I expected the worst from Killjoy. Perhaps it was these tempered expectations, but Killjoy kept me entertained, made me laugh and horrified me at the same time; it was a resounding success. If you dig B-Movies and Blaxploitation films, then Killjoy is a low-budget entry you should definitely check out.

The film opens with the mild-mannered Michael asking Jada out to the prom. Jada and her friend Monique laugh him off, but when Jada’s boyfriend, the gang member Lorenzo, arrives with his homies, they beat the shit out of Michael for his transgression. Michael retreats home and resorts immediately to black magic, hoping to summon Killjoy from the depths to aid him in his revenge fantasy. While this is obviously not Pulitzer Prize material, Killjoy is well-written, if a bit clichéd, and its short runtime promises a film that never gets boring. In the world of low-budget horror, that counts for a lot.

SPL (2005)

SPL [殺破狼] (2005)
AKA Sha Po Lang, Kill Zone

Starring Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Simon Yam, Liu Kai-Chi, Jacky Wu Jing, Timmy Hung Tin-Ming, Ken Cheung Chi-Yiu, Austin Wai Tin-Chi, Uncle Ba Suk, Danny Summer

Directed by Wilson Yip

Expectations: High. I’m totally stoked to be wowed.

OK, right off the bat I just want to say that this is definitely not the revelation in martial arts cinema I was led to believe it was. In 2005, Hong Kong films had fallen into disrepair, cranking out ugly CG-aided fights with their greatest stars off to find their fortunes in Hollywood. Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen, tired of this bullshit and wishing to recapture the 80s/90s glory days, created SPL, a film that would feature fights as they were done in the past. This was a line in the sand to everyone else, to prove definitively that fantastic martial arts choreography and performers trump any and all CG bullshit. In that, they handily succeeded, but in the grand scheme of things, SPL isn’t worthy of the high praise.

The film opens with a car crash. A group of cops were transporting a witness, his wife and their daughter when an assassin rammed them with his car. It instantly killed everyone except for two of the cops and the little girl, and it was yet another crime added to the résumé of Wong Po (Sammo Hung). Because the witness was unable to testify, Wong Po was released, but Inspector Chan (Simon Yam) vows to nail his ass at some indeterminate time in the future. Donnie Yen gets roped into this struggle later in the film, and there’s some personal melodrama draped over the whole thing, but that’s it in a nutshell.