YOG THE SPACE AMOEBA

1970/Director: Ishirô Honda/Writer: Ei Ogawa

Cast: Akira Kubo, Atsuko Takahashi, Kenji Sahara, Yukiko Kobayashi, Kenji Sahara, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Yû Fujiki, Noritake Saito

I sometimes notice how I neglect topics I am very interested in here. For one example I have yet to review a single Vincent Price film here though I have dozens here waiting to be praised. Another area of ‘film criticism’ I am remiss in maintaining is the Japanese kaiju (strange monster) films, and in particular the excellent films of Ishiro Honda. I had to search my own site to find that I have in fact a couple Honda film here already and that was King Kong Escapes and Frankenstein Conquers the World and I have Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People) available for viewing at the Uranium Café Matinee, unless Google Video has yanked it since the last time I checked. While I have seen plenty if kaiju eiga (monster films) I am a bit lost in the genre outside the films of Ishiro Honda and his TOHO works. There are other memorable kaiju eiga director such as Jun Fukuda but overall I just never get tired of Honda’s vision. Honda worked with special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya create some of the most memorable ‘men in rubber suit’ monster ever to stomp an urban area to rubble. And while I am on that, lest I forget, I actually read a couple reviews online of Yog: The Space Amoeba that said things like “you can tell it is just a guy in a monster costume” and then the review would go on to criticize the acting and other special effects. Even sarcastically mocking the miniatures of cities and villages. Now while I myself may poke a little fun and there I want it to be clear that I love these films and any jabs I give are directed at the film with zero malice on my part. Anyone who brutalizes an Ishiro Honda film because it has guys running around in rubber suits is missing the entire point. I may not know that that point is myself come to think of it but I just like these films and I need to do more posts on them here.

MORE YOG THE SPACE AMOEBA RIGHT HERE >>

BLACK TIGHT KILLERS

1966/Director: Yasuharu Hasebe/Writers: Ryuzo Nakanishi, Michio Tsuzuki

Cast: Akira Kobayashi, Akemi Kita, Mieko Nishio, Bokuzen Hidari, Eiji Go, Toshizô Kudô, Chieko Matsubara, Hiroshi Nihon’yanagi, Kaku Takashina

AKA: Don’t Touch Me I’m Dangerous, Ore Ni Sawaru To Abunaize

Recently got in two films by Japanese director Yasuharu Hasebe. I watched Black Tight Killers first and later skimmed over Assault! Jack the Ripper! to just check the quality -if it is bad then I have to find another rip somewhere- and was fairly stunned at how different the two films were. Not only in style but content matter as well. Surely Black Tight Killers falls more into the category of films I prefer more and that is not to say the more graphic content matter of Assault! offended me in some way. It did not. But I am talking here of film style and presentation. A review of Assault! Jack the Ripper! will be made after I have watched all of the film but just from the few moments I watched I can tell it is more in the syle of the Pinky Violence films of the seventies -which along with the softcore Roman Porno films is what Nikkatsu wound up making almsot exclusively by the end of the 70′s- while Black Tight Killers is a stylized Nikkatsu Studios Yakuza type film which is paying homage in many scenes to the James Bond films of the time. Some of the scenes are similar to what Seijun Suzuki –for whom Hasebe worked as assistant director for eight years- was doing at the time though Suzuki seemed to prefer luscious  b/w for his noir/gangster films. I do have some earlier Seijun Suzuki films that are in color but, to be honest, have not got around to watching them though what I have seen of them look marvelous. Anyway for Black Tight Killer Yasharu Hasebe chose not only to work in color but in a bright and lurid style of color that is reminiscent of some of Mario Bava’s work during the 60’s. Black Tight Killers has been compared to Bava’s 1968 Danger Diabolik and not without good reason though Black Tight Killer’s predates Danger Diabolik by a couple years so it could hardly have been influenced by Bava’s film. Both films have a comic book feel to the look and feel. Both films are lit rather garishly to say the least and both seem to be inspired by the Sean Connery James Bond films as far as the use of life saving secrets gadgets go. Of course Danger Diabolik was actually based a comic book character. I have actually read a couple reviews that said the lighting and photography of Black Tight Killers is horrible and I am at a complete lose as to what the hell these folks are talking about. And before moving on another element of the film that reminds me of Bava’s superb work of the 60’s is Hasebe’s use of how to stage and frame a shot. The technical word is mise-en-scène and there is some dispute over what the term actually refers to. I tend to keep things simple and define at as the total visual aspects of a scene. This includes the lighting and all props and placements of the objects in the scene. Bava –as an art director and cinematographer himself- understood this in his early films. I have only seen one complete Hasebe film –but have other lined up for downloading soon- and am not qualified to comment on those films at the moment but I can say I love the visual style of Black Tight Killers.

SEE MORE OF THE BLACK TIGHT KILLERS RIGHT HEWRE >>

At times the nation of China, where I have lived now for five years, seems to be nothing but a nation of impassioned bystanders. People who just do not want to be involved in other people’s matters. If it does not affect you or your family directly it is something to ignore or gaze upon, hands folded behind your back, in remote curiosity. There can be a sense of helplessness on the part of a person who in dire straits here. They can be not only over looked by their fellow citizens but by the police, community leaders, doctors and most certainly by strangers who seem to see others only as opportunities. If you serve no purpose for them such as some quick money) they will not waste any time on you. This not a statement about 100% of the population of course. But in Li Yangs second film, Blind Mountain, one of the recurring themes is the indifference of just about everybody involved in the plight of college girl Bai Xue Mei who is kidnapped then illegally sold as a wife and baby machine to a villager and his family living in the remote mountains of Sha’anxi Province. Many people in the story could have rescued her if they simply did something.

Li Yang is like Ye Che’s Diao Yinan and is one of the new 6th Generation of Chinese film directors. Their films are less polished and extravagant than the directors before them like Zhang Yimou. Working with smaller budgets and often funded from outside China their films push the strict censor boards and sometimes do not even play on the mainland. Blind Mountain was released the same year as Night Train (Ye Che) and played along side at certain foreign film festivals such as the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. While visually the country sides of Blind Mountain are more beautiful to behold than the gray, industrial skylines of Ye Che the story itself is as, or more, bleak and painful to experience than Ye Che. In rural villages in China preference is given to male children for all the reasons one would expect in a farming based culture. Female babies are commonly murdered after birth (with legal impunity for the most part). People here usually do not have recourse to such things as sonograms and if they did the daughters would no doubt be aborted before birth. As it is they are discarded, as the film depicts, like garbage later and the couple gets back to work on trying to bare a boy immediately. A disproportionate number of males therefore exist in rural communities where education is none existent and thinking is backwards. The idea of buying a wife, like people have done for centuries, seems the most natural thing to the families in these isolated communities. Now this is not always a legal issue and some rural women are sold by their parents longing to get rid of the burden of a daughter to families to want to get their sons to breeding a new generation of boys. Some rural women see this as what a woman has done to her in life. There are no other options. And while buying wives is illegal in China it is another matter to try and enforce these laws as the film makes clear.

MORE OF LI YANG’S BLIND MOUNTAIN HERE >>

Ye Che (Night Train)

2007/Director: Yi Nan Diao/Writer: Yi Nan Diao
Cast: Rongcai Fu, Chao Ji, Dan Liu, Shudi Liu

In case you stumbled onto this site for the first or are a visitor who may not know it I live and work in China. I want to make that little information clear from the start since the film I am writing about in this post, 2007’s Ye Che (Night Train), is one of the more brutally accurate glimpses into life in modern China I have seen in a Chinese film since coming here. Most of the films being produced here are these atrociously boring historical epics that I cannot sit through. Those films seem to be trying to follow the path set by Li Ang’s great heroic epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon that won the 2003 best foreign film Oscar award. Almost everything coming out of the mainland now is some sort of epic set in the Tang or Qin dynasties and have a feel of the old Hong Kong ‘wu xi pian’ (basically kung fu films) that are not only safe as far as the Chinese censors go but might just, all the directors hope, win another Oscar. There are other films that come out of the mainland but I never really see any of them. Stupid comedies and propaganda films that show how evil the Japanese were and still are or how glorious was the founding of modern communist China back in the days of Mao Zi Dong and his little gang. Most of the new films from the mainland are lackluster and vapid. But that is not to say that there are not original and gifted film makers on the mainland whose visions run contrary to the efficient propaganda machine here. It just means their films are often financed and shown outside of the country and the versions shown here are censored and edited to death. As was the case with the Blind Mountain (Mang Shan), released the same year as Night Train. Blind Mountain tell the anguished story of a college girl in modern China who is drugged and kidnapped and held prisoner in a remote mountain village and forced to bear a child for a village man and his family. She is assaulted and beaten by the family and villagers routinely. It is a reality that this happens in modern 21^st century China still but that is not the type of film the government here want to promote. A review of Blind Mountain may be around the corner.

MORE OF YE CHE (NIGHT TRAIN), INCLUDING VIDEO SAMPLES, HERE >>

TODAY’S SEXY ACTION PACKED ADVENTURES FROM NIPPON:

GIRL BOSS GUERILLA w/ CRIMINAL WOMAN-KILLING MELODY

MORE PINKY VIOLENCE RIGHT HERE >>

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MENK (Kyôfu Kikei Ningen)

1969/Director: Teruo Ishii/Writers: Teruo Ishii, Masahiro Kakefuda

Cast: Teruo Yoshida, Yukie Kagawa, Teruko Yumi, Mitsuko Aoi

I have been delving back into Japanese cinema of the 60’s and 70’s and focusing on the Pinky Violence variety as well as the b/w noir style films by people like Seijun Suzuki. I have a few films here by director Teru Iishi but had yet to get around to watching one all the way through. I mean I tend to skim over these things for quality assurance purposes before burning them a disk then deleting the files from my hard-drive. I think I have Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf, Female Yakuza Tale, Blind Woman’s curse and the focus of this review The Horrors of Malformed Men. I will have to confess something here. I often have no clue as to the history of many of these before I download or that the above films were even all by the same director until I began doing some research for this review. I may download a film simply because I like the title or the poster art and screen captures. I will skim over the review to get some idea of when it was made and what other work the director was involved with then decide whether to use up my bandwidth and hard-drive space with the download. Usually any Japanese film made from the late 50’t to mid 70’s has a better than 50/50 chance of getting downloaded in the first place. So when I saw the review snippets about the Horrors of Malformed Men and how it was banned in its own country for some forty years and never released on VHS I was thoroughly enticed.  My first thought was how freaky could the film be in order to be banned in Japan of all places. Well the lure of a film made in 1969 Japan being banned for so long is something I personally cannot resist but there is actually a slight catch to the banned aspect of this film.

MORE OF THE HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN HERE >>

THE GENE GENERATION

2007/Director: Pearry Reginald Teo/Writers: Keith Collea, Pearry Reginald Teo

Cast: Ling Bai, Alec Newman, Parry Shen, Faye Dunaway, Ethan Cohn

The Gene Generation with Chinese actress Bai Ling (or Ling Bai as it sometimes appears if you put the family name first) is one of those films that definitely falls into the category of it ‘could have been better’. The movie is not a waste of time and as the Café has evolved from its early posts I have taken a rather neutral position on most of the films I write about and I do not feel I actually recommend or pan films. I will leave that up to the reader to decide. While I cannot say I liked The Gene Generation all that much it seems to earn a post here not so much for the erratic storyline and touch and go production quality of the film itself but for the presence of lanky and luscious Bai Ling. Before talking about, and hopefully defending, the sometimes (actually usually) maligned Bai Ling I think I will say a word about my blogging process and why sometimes it is a drawback for me.

One problem I have is that I watch simply more movies than I can do decent posts on. I am not the type of person who wants to review every movie  right after I watch it, like better reviewers do I suppose. I started the Necrofiles category which is a way to skim over four or so movies at a time with comments of a brief paragraph or two at most. I work as an ESL teacher in China and the job, as well as life here at times, is draining. I may have the time to write but not the mental energy. I think over the last year I have begun to develop a writing style I like a little. I like to create a post that draws information from different sources on the net, as well as my own personal opinion, and brings them together in one place with images I either find online or make myself in the form of vidcaps, some that are pretty decent. The first thing I do when I decide to write about a film is find articles I like and make them into PDFs for future reference, get cast and crew info from IMDB or a similar site and then start collecting images and then they are all brought together in a rough form and stored as a nearly complete draft that I may save for months sometimes before I get around to writing the article. I must have over a dozen drafts now that have are laid out with images and cast/crew info but no written article. During that time of course I am watching more movies of a Uranium nature as well as mainstream films and sometimes doing posts as well on something I just watched.

MORE GENE GENERATION WITH BAI LING HERE >>