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 >>

TODAY’S FEATURE FROM JAPAN:

YUKE YUKE NIDOME NO SHOJO

GO, GO SECOND TIME VIRGIN

SEE GO,GO SECOND TIME VIRGIN 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 >>

REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES aka BLACK MAGIC II (Gou Hun Jiang Tou)

1976/ Director: Meng Hua Ho/Writer: Kuang Ni

Cast: Lo Lieh, Lung Ti, Ni Tien, Lily Li, Feng Lin, Wei Tu Lin, Terry Liu

AKA:
Bewitch Tame Head
Black Magic II
Ngau Wan Gong Tau

Shaw Brothers Studios leading horror/exploitation director Meng Hua Ho returns to the helm for this 1976 sequel to the previous year’s Black Magic. Also returning are veteran wuxia pian (‘heroic kung fu films’ usually with a wandering swordsman on a knight errant mission) actors Lo Lieh (sometimes Lieh Lo if you search using the Asian method of family names first) and Ti Lung with Lo Lieh serving this time as the black magician. While I have not yet been able to find of a copy the first Black Magic film I understand that Lo Lieh was not the black magician in that one and will reserve any comments on that film until I have actually seen it. While the two Black Magic films have the reputation as Shaw Brothers studio most famous horror films they were in no way the first as the studio had dabbled in non-Kung Fun genres as far back as the 50’s. The Hong Kong horror genres would evolve , after the 80’s, into the Category III variety (meaning sexually explicit but not quite hard core porn) and contain the sort of gory shock elements found in most modern Japanese horror. With Black Magic II (Revenge of the Zombies and Gou Hun Jiang Tou) there are more than enough elements visually and story wise to keep the film somewhat linked to the classic Shaw Brother’s films of the 60’s and early 70’s and yet has a few twists make it a little surprising as well.

MORE BLACK MAGIC II HERE >>

TODAY’S THRILLING TOHO FREATURE:

MATANGO-ATATCK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE

SEE THE ISHIRO HONDA CLASSIC MATANGO HERE >>

TODAY’S FEATURE: TOKYO GORE POLICE

(HORRIBLY DUBBED IN ENGLISH)

MORE TOKYO GORE POLICE >>

HOMEMADE CLIP OF ACTION SCENES

FROM THE MACHINE GIRL

“This is one of the best movies ever made!

Upskirt karate rules!”

Ghidorah from Chainsaw Maintenance

THE MACHINE GIRL

2008/Director: Noboru Iguchi/Writer: Noboru Iguchi

Cast: Minase Yashiro, Asami, Kentaro Shimazu, Honoka, Nobuhiro Nishihara

Noburu Iguchi

The director of Sudakan Boy (which I have queued up to see soon) Noburu Iguchi basically delivers the gory goods in this TokyoShock science-fiction Yakuza revenge blood bath starring gravure model Minase Yashiro. Also in the mix are Japanese AV stars Asami and Honoka. Now I am far from an expert in these matters (though I have done ample research) but I am pretty sure the difference in the terms is that a gravure (a term for how photos are developed for glossy magazines) models pose provocatively but rarely nude or in explicit sexual situations. An AV (adult video) star on the other hand basically does everything you can image plus some things you never have and with the cutest, most innocent faces imaginable. Well there is no nudity in The Machine Girl so don’t get excited. What flesh we see is usually covered in blood and slimy internal organs. While the CGI effects have been criticized online here I have seen much worse and had no major problems myself. The film never looked like a video game to me. If more Japanese horror/action/school girl gore films were being done like this I would praise the genre more rather than berate it or struggle to find kinder words.

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UZUMAKI

2000/Director: Higuchinsky/Writers: Junji Ito (manga), Kengo Kaji (supervising screenwriter)

Cast: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Hinako Saeki, Eun-Kyung Shin, Keiko Takahashi, Ren Osugi

I think I have mentioned in a few previous posts about my ambivalence towards more modern Japanese  horror films(and Asian in general, though I consider Japan to be yardstick by which the rest of Asian cultures is measured, for better or worse), or cinema in general. With rare exceptions I find most of it  all wanting and repetitive and I much prefer the Japanese cinema prior to about 1970. Uzumaki is for me one  of the exceptions. I had long put off watching this movie for one reason or another, but it was on my list of films to see before I died so I finally popped it in the DVD player and was morbidly pleased with the results, though it is a far from a perfect horror film. I got the BT from demonnoid.com and was surprised to the find the entire manga comic series by Junji Ito included. I included, free of charge, a few pages for readers to check out. To honest I had no ideas this was based on a comic book unit I opened the folder. But like the film I was pleased with the story and art which I glanced over. I tend to not like the goofy looking fairy like characters that adorn the majority of manga comics and I felt the pen and ink drawing sin Junji Ito’s story to look more like the b/w independent stuff coming out of the US from places like Fantagraphic books, which to me are better drawings.

MORE UZUMAKE HERE >>