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 >>

THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE

1959/Director: Roy Del Ruth/Writer: Orville H. Hampton

Cast: Beverly Garland, Bruce Bennett, Lon Chaney Jr., George Macready

Lately I have been getting in lots of old horror and sci-fi films I have always heard about but have never seen. I grew up with images in magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland of films like Invisible Invaders, Gorgo, Not of this Earth (the original) and many others but never caught them on any creature feature shows while growing up. By the time VHS came out I seemed to have lost some interest in these old films and followed a different and often darker path for many years. Now suddenly I find myself drawn back to these often harmless and quaint little gems and recall how Forrest J. Ackerman handled them with such care despite their often corny stories and shabby production values. One film I finally got around to seeing for the first time at the ripe old age of fifty one is 1959’s The Alligator People. Of course before I ever see a film I have an image of the film in my mind and in the case of The Alligator People the actual movie just did not come close. Not for better or worse but the movie was not what I had conjured up in my mind based on old pictures I had seen in horror magazines. For one thing the film should probably be called The Alligator Person since that is about the total number of alligator people we deal with for the most part. There are people covered in odd shaped shrouds that we assume are also alligator people in some state of mutation but nothing much ever happens with them though the images of them being herded about are a bit creepy.

MORE OF THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE HERE >>

I have not posted anything here in ten days and that is a long time for me. Just sort of stepping back I guess and want to rethink where I want to be going with this site. Have been busy setting up the new podcast page but have no motivation yet to do a new podcast. Have several films in my draft folders here but cannot finish up the articles. I guess sometimes we have to take a break and come back refreshed. Next post will be a review of The Alligator People, a mutli-film ‘Necrofile’ post and after that I am going to focus hard on film reviews. I will still sprinkle the site up with comic book stuff and some music selections but really want to focus on pandering the types of films I love seeking out, watching and writing about. Those are older films, b-movies, exploitation films, mid-night movies, select foreign films and influential but forgotten dramas,westerns and comedies. I have no shortage of films here and am watching one or two a day on average. I watch more than I go do a good review on. I may be changing some approaches to that. Shorter reviews. Less spoilers. Fewer images. But it is hard for me not to get into a long review of some of these films once I start uncovering trivia and information. I simply am a little burned out lately. My teaching job is stressful at times as is my day to day life in China and after a while I sort of get worn down and need to recharge. I have also had insomnia for a while and my thinking is not as organized as it should but that will pass I hope. In short I am still committed to my cult film/trash cinema & culture blog. I just need some time to refocus and come back with a new perspective. Next: The Alligator People!

THE LAST HORROR FILM aka FANATIC

1982/Director: David Winters/Writers: Judd Hamilton, Tom Klassen

Cast: Caroline Munro, Joe Spinell,  Judd Hamilton, Devin Goldenberg, David Winters, Susanne Benton, Filomena Spagnuolo( Mary Spinell)

I am certain even the most modest horror film fan has heard of Hammer and Bond girl Caroline Munro. Her long brunette hair and statuesque features are simply stunning and she has starred in some fairly memorable horror flicks like The Abominable Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Slaughter High and the shlocky Italian sci-fi film Starcrush. One of her co-stars in Starcrush was New York City veteran character actor Joe Spinell. Spinell’s name may be less familiar to many except for the cognoscenti of b-films. He is more known as a supporting actor and had small roles in The Godfather, The Seven-Ups, Rocky and Taxi Driver before he had his first starring role in the 1980 William Lustig splatter film Maniac. We will get to Maniac in the second part of this double feature and instead will start off with what is sort of a follow up to Maniac pairing Munro and Spinell up again. That film is 1982’s The Last Horror Movie or Fanatic was it was originally released as on DVD. I got a hold of the Fanatic version of the film and not the new Troma release of the movie that is supposed to include a few extra minutes of scenes and some extras including commentaries and interviews. I have to be honest I never listen to DVD commentaries. Simply never. So I do not know if I going to go out of my way to find the Troma release but we will see. I would be interested in the interviews with Spinell’s buddy Luke Walter and Maniac director William Lustig who seems to have stopped directing films (his last being Uncle Sam, which I liked, in 1997) and now produces and is the head honcho at Blue Underground DVD.

MORE OF JOE SPINELL IN THE LAST HORROR MOVIE AND MANIAC HERE >>

While I have not gotten much posting done recently I have nonetheless been busy behind the scenes. I have been working with audio files and trying to replace some of the files that stopped working in previous posts. There were more than I realized. I also set up a second blog as a sub-domain from this one that will host only my podcast and beatcast material. All podcast post here will be removed and transferred to the new site which is up and running finally. I am about finsihed posting my old podcasts and next will be my old beatcasts (original tunes) as well as getting off my arse and doing some new podcasts. I never really liked mixing up the podcast with the regular movie osts on this site. Setting up the sub-domain was harder than I thought it would be and I had help and advice from the helpful tech people over at maiahost.com in getting it off the ground. If you’re looking for some great specials on a self-hosted blog you should go check out some of the deals going on there now. I have set up a new Feedburner RSS feed for the new site and you can find in my side bar under the image link for my podcast/beatcast, next to the Viddler vidget thing. I will be deleting my old Feedburner feeds for my podcast soon. The site itself is still fresh but please check it out and give me some feedback. It will focus only on podcasts and beatcast and maybe some video stuff one day. No movie reviews or stuff like that. All your Uranium Cafe podcasting needs in one nifty place. Hopefully my audio hosting issues are behind me. My advice is to self host your files if you want them to remain somewhat permanent. You may have to pay some money to someone but in the end it is better. I tried so many ‘free’ file hosting services with nothing but one regret after another. Hopefully all of this will be the motivation I need to get back to doing the podcast section of The Uranium Cafe.

Lately I am not too much in reviewing films though I have more than a few reviews in the draft folder I am finishing up and should be back to some film material with my next post. But for now I am happy to be back to being able to post audio files and I am going to try to promote a band I really have come to enjoy since hearing their rendition of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. The song was played over the closing titles of the excellent Matt Dillon directed film City of Ghosts. The story takes place in Cambodia and I highly recommend the film and while it is a newer film I am planning a review of it here at the Café in the future. The band is Dengue Fever (I think pronounced dung-yi fever like the mosquito borne disease) and the band is the creation of brothers Zac (guitar and vocals) and Ethan Hotlzman (classic surfy Farfisa organ). While traveling through Cambodia the brothers were so enthralled by the style of music they heard they decided to form a band that played 60’s based Cambodian pop music with a slightly psychedelic San Francisco twist to the sound. They decided they needed a genuine Khmer singer and searched the clubs and karaoke bars of Little Phnom Penh in San Fransisco until they found the vivacious and talented Chhom Nimol performing with a small group of singers. She had a presence and voice that stood out and the brothers approached her. Nimol’s Cambodian friends were a little shocked and concerned at the wild appearance of the Hotlzman brothers and warned her to stay away but  she took the chance and a friendship and tight band were quickly formed. Nimol was a very successful karaoke singer and was able to support herself and was trying to have her family sent over to the States with her earnings. The little band has earned a good degree of success now and is on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label and I hope Nimol has been able to move her family closer to her. Most of the songs are covers of classic Cambodian pop songs but there are some originals and a few songs in English as well. As you may or may not know I live in Kunming China and I traveled to Laos for a month before and was so delighted to hear some style of music down there that was not the crappy J-Pop style music that is copied all over China these days. These are great songs and Nimol is a fantastic singer with heart and soul and you do not have to understand the words of the songs to understand the message.

COOL SONG SELECTIONS AND A VIDEO FOR SEEING HANDS BY DENGUE FEVER HERE >>