Subway Cinema News

This week saw the release of a pair of 1970s Nikkatsu Roman Porno films from specialty DVD label Mondo Macabro.

The two films really couldn’t be more different, and taken together give a pretty good portrait of the subgenre that lasted from 1971 until the early 80s, producing hundreds of films and making careers for many actresses, screenwriters and directors, quite a number of whom transitioned into more mainstream films after the genre folded.

We helped to broker the deal that allowed Mondo to release these two films, and assisted with title selection—four more great films are on the way, next up being Masaru Konuma’s 1983 Joshu Ori, aka Female Prisoner: Cage, a sleazy women-in-prison epic with some jaw-dropping sequences. Look for it in early 2009.

But back to the titles you can actually buy now.

My favorite of the two, and the only title that has seen previous subtitled DVD release (way back in the early days of the format, as a PAL format disc from a UK label called Pagan Films, also run by the guys behind Mondo Macabro) is Noboru Tanaka’s glossy and respectable 1976 adapation of several Edogawa Rampo stories, The Watcher in the Attic (aka Yaneura no sanpo-sha, which actually translates to “The Walker in the Attic”). Starring Roman Porno starlet Junko Miyashita and future Takashi Miike company actor Renji Ishibashi, the story takes place in Rampo’s favorite Taisho era (the 1920’s), and follows a warder in a boarding house (Ishibashi) who secretly spies on the other tenants from above, through peepholes in the attic floor. One day, he catches sight of a beautiful woman (Miyashita) having sex with a man in a clown suit (no, really). Wanting to learn more about her, he eventually witnesses her commit a murder, but realizes that she knows she’s being watched. He eventually reveals his identity to her and the two begin a destructive love affair that also ends in murder.

Tanaka creates a beautiful period atmosphere on what must have been a shoestring budget, capturing not only the distinctive and opposite impulses of early 20th century Japan - to modernize and become a democracy, yet remain true to its feudal roots - but also the feel of the specific era, the last time before the buildup to World War II when decadence was really permitted in the country, just prior to the military build-up of the early Showa period. (The same era was depicted, with less success, I think, in Oshima’s lauded In the Realm of the Senses. And of course, Tanaka did his own earlier version of the same story in the much-better A Woman Called Sada Abe.)

The horror elements in the film are subdued, but definitely present. It’s a slow-moving film, one that concentrates much more on building its atmosphere and exploring the dark crannies of its characters’ psyches than presenting much action onscreen. Being a Roman Porno, there are the requisite four or five sex scenes, many of them quite sexy, but it’s clear watching the film that Tanaka was reaching for something greater with Watcher, and I think he succeded in creating it, a classic erotic film that not only transcends its genre but is also one of the best of its kind.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, let’s examine the other new Mondo Roman Porno, director Yasuharu Hasebe’s inflammatory Assault! Jack the Ripper (aka Boko kirisaki Jakku). Also made in 1976, the film was Hasebe’s second Roman Porno (after Rape!) after returning to the Nikkatsu fold following his departure in the early 70s, when Nikkatsu transitioned from making action films to making softcore porn. Hasebe was a fixture during late-period Nikkatsu action, making everything from Black Tight Killers to Roughneck to a few of the Stray Cat Rock series entries. In-between, he even made the fourth Female Convict Scorpion film - quite a prolific guy, and still going strong today.

Hasebe’s Roman Porno films are known for their violent and shocking content, and Jack, the first one I’ve had the chance to see, didn’t disappoint in that regard. It’s as sleazy as they come, taking the true story behind films like The Honeymoon Killers—about a couple who lure young women into sexual situations, and then murder them—and giving it a sadistic twist, filled with blood and nudity. Filled with murder sequences where women are stabbed repeatedly in their private parts with a pastry knife, it’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s also surprisingly humorous, featuring enough oddball situations and bizarre character quirks to almost lighten its dark and nasty mood.

Definitely more of a “graduate level” Roman Porno title, it’ll definitely please the audience open to its particular kind of entertainment, but it won’t win any new converts who don’t already appreciate the genre. In fact, it’s just the kind of film people like to refer to when they condemn Japanese softcore cinema as nothing but violent porn. They’re wrong, but it’s an easy argument to make on the surface.

Both discs present the films fully remastered and featuring well-scripted English subtitles. The discs look great, too—these are the same remastered versions previously released in Japan by Geneon, but without English subtitles. All the subsequent Mondo Roman Porno titles will feature similarly polished transfers.

Extras include a Mondo Macabro documentary on Nikkatsu and the Roman Porno genre, originally produced a number of years ago but updated now with new interviews and clips. Featured in the doc are Nikkatsu actress Kozuko Shirakawa, director Seijun Suzuki (who never made a Roman Porno film!), film critic Toshiyuki Matsushima, artist Romain Slocombe, and critic / author Jasper Sharp. Sharp also turns up on both discs in a separate introduction to each film, which covers the overall genre, the director’s career, and notes on the actresses and the reception each film has received. Also included are trailers for both films, plus three others forthcoming in the collection. The only one missing is Akio Jissoji’s bizarre Marquis de Sade romp The Prosperity of Vice (aka Akutoku no sakae), which is one definitely worth waiting for!  —MW

The terrific Fantastic Fest genre film festival, hosted by the Alamo Drafthouse, wrapped up last week in Austin, Texas. Here’s a short wrap-up of all the films I was able to catch while there. Only a few Asian-related ones (several of the others had already been screened by Subway this summer, like TOKYO GORE POLICE), but overall a great lineup, and a fun festival overall.

TOKYO! - two out of three ain’t bad. This high-profile anthology film features mostly Japanese casts in mixed-genre stories about Tokyo life. Unfortunately, the one that tries to concern itself the most with the city (the middle episode “Merde,” from French director Leos Carax) is the worst, and difficult to sit through. But the opening episode from Michel Gondry (”Interior Design”) more than makes up for it, telling a heartbreaking but beautiful story about a young girl (Steven Seagal’s daughter Ayako Fujitani) who comes to the city but finds herself feeling unbearably alone. Seguing into magical realism toward the end, and featuring a cast composed of big-name Japanese stars, it’s worth seeing the movie for this segment alone. What a treat, then, that Bong Joon-ho’s final segment (”Shaking Tokyo”) is also pretty damn good, about a middle-aged hikikomori (shut-in) who needs an act of nature to get him to change his life. Think of it as two excellent short films with an extra-long intermission.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD - the long-awaited “kimchee western” from A BITTERSWEET LIFE and TALE OF TWO SISTERS director Kim Ji-woon, which was featured heavily in the ACTION BOYS documentary we screened at NYAFF this summer. And as expected, the stuntmen are the true stars of the movie, no surprise for a film that reputedly used every single stuntman working in Korea at the time. It certainly shows onscreen, with some of the most jaw-dropping action sequences I’ve seen in recent years. But it’s also clear that this is what inspired Kim to make the movie, as it pretty much plays out as a series of great setpieces strung together by a threadbare plot that’s little more than a remake of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (and other Italian westerns, with a bit of THE ROAD WARRIOR thrown in for good measure). Song Kang-ho (THE HOST), playing “the Weird,” does his best to liven things up, and his performance manages to rescue several scenes that threaten to overstep the boundary between homage and rip-off, and overall the movie is marvelously entertaining, but just a bit disappointing for something that took so long to make and cost more than any other South Korean film in history.

GACHI BOY - another disappointment. This big-budget Japanese comedy felt more like a TV show than a feature film, despite its promising premise of a MEMENTO-like memory-loss victim who takes up amateur wrestling as a way of restarting his life following an accident. But with slow pacing, jokes that don’t quite work, and an overlong running time (also a problem with GBW, above), it quickly grated on my nerves.

Pink Eiga retrospective - this was a program I presented with Jasper Sharp, whose BEHIND THE PINK CURTAIN encyclopedia of Japanese sex cinema was launched at the festival. We screened four pink films, each from a separate decade, and I think it all went pretty well. For more details, see here.

SEVENTH MOON - not really an Asian film per se, but an American production directed by one half of the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT team, shot and set in rural China. But why?, I kept asking myself. One of the worst films I watched, this is a by-the-numbers story about a young married couple out of their comfort zone and trying to survive the night while being stalked by strange, supernatural creatures. The Chinese setting serves no purpose other than to make it more difficult for them to understand what’s going on, something that could have been achieved by setting the film in any number of other locations. Muddily shot on digital video and taking place almost entirely in the dark, this one was a trial from start to finish.

And now for the non-Asian selections…

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO - Kevin Smith’s new comedy, which was also the opening night film. This one is about two Platonic friends (omnipresent Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks) who decide to shoot a sex film as a way out of their no-money situation. Intermittently funny, it’s never as filthy or transgressive as I think the filmmaker considers it to be, and in the end it’s just forgettable. For KS fans only.

ASTROPIA - another light-hearted comedy with a sexual element, but this time from Iceland. Iceland?! Yes, indeed, and the filmmakers are calling this the first commercial film ever made in that country, at least in recent years. It’s certainly a far cry from arthouse fare like COLD FEVER or 101 REYKJAVIK, shot on a miniscule budget and about a mainstream young woman who starts working in a role-playing game shop in order to make ends meet. One of the main geeks who frequent the store takes a liking to her, a humorous criminal subplot is introduced, and you can tell where things go from there. Innovative in its combination of fantasy and reality, and really hooked into the subculture it represents (what other film features in-jokes from Warhammer 2K?), it’s light fun and goes down easy.

CARGO 200 -the feel-bad movie of the festival! From successful Russian filmmaker Alexei Balabanov (BROTHER), this one tanked in its home country but ought to find an appreciative audience abroad among adventurous viewers, like Balabanov’s amazing 1998 period psychosexual drama about the birth of cinema, OF FREAKS AND MEN. Like that previous film, this one’s an ensemble tale but set in the period just before the birth of glasnost and Mikhail Gorbachev. The events depicted in the film are best discovered when you watch it, but they concern a young woman who’s abducted by a government official, an atheist university professor who begins to doubt his worldview, a rural couple implicated in a shocking crime, and the horrible, slimy hypocrisy of people in general, right at the dawn of what most Russians consider their emergence from the dark ages. Any surprise that audiences stayed away from this one at home? By the way, the title refers to the code name used by the government to refer to soldiers’ corpses being returned home from the war in Afghanistan. Yeah, fun stuff here. The small DVD label Disinformation picked this one up for the US market, one of the first nonfiction features they’ve acquired.

EX-DRUMMER - another feel-bad flick, this time from Belgium. Based on an ambitious novel, it follows an elitist writer who decides to go slumming one day and mess around with the lives of a trio of misfit losers who’ve formed a punk band. While it doesn’t quite descend to the depths of soul-crushing horror depicted in CARGO 200, it comes mighty close, depicting mass murder, anal rape played for laughs, infanticide, drug use, sexual terror, gay bashing, and hardcore sex. But it leavens its nihilism with a great soundtrack and stylish cinematography. A breathtaking debut from first-time feature filmmaker Koen Mortier, and amazingly still undistributed in the US.

REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA - SAW sequel director Darren Lynn Bousman’s dream project (co-conceived with composer and writer Terrance Dzunich) languishes in the same distribution hell that blew the release of MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN and THE BURROWERS (see below): stuck in-between studio heads at Lionsgate. But it may affect this film least of the three, as it’s a cult hit waiting to happen, a dark and bloody musical camp-fest starring Anthony Head from BUFFY, opera diva Sarah Brightman, Paul Sorvino, DEVIL’S REJECTS star (and TEXAS CHAINSAW 2 Chop-Top!) Bill Moseley, Nivek Ogre from Skinny Puppy and yes, Paris Hilton, whose face actually falls off at one point in the film. Set in a future society where people are addicted to both cosmetic surgery and an illegal painkiller created from corpse-fluid, it’s MOULIN ROUGE for the horror and Goth set, and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s definitely a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, and you’ll know in the first two minutes which side of the fence you fall on. I was a bit skeptical at the opening, but the songs get better as the movie goes on and by the midway point, I was hooked and can’t wait to see it again.

LEFT BANK - glossy Belgian thriller about a young woman who moves in with a new boyfriend across the river in the newly-gentrified “left bank”. An apartment building built on land with a mysterious and spooky history, paranoia about the people around her and wounds that won’t heal point to trouble on the horizon. Pretty by-the-numbers and not very scary, it’s predictable up until the final scene, which veers so far off into left field that it alienated most of the audience in the screening where I saw it. Despite this, it doesn’t add up to very much.

SAUNA - Fantastic Fest loves to pull in entries from all over the globe, and this Finnish horror tale is no exception. Gorgeously shot and set in the 16th century (!), it follows two brothers who are on a joint Swedish-Russian expedition to determine the new borders between their countries. One brother is a veteran of the recently-ended wars with double-digit deaths on his conscience; the other is a scholar with a sensitive disposition. Out in the northern wilds, they come across a village that shouldn’t be there, located in the depths of an unmapped swamp and inhabited by the cleanest peasants any of them have ever seen. The cleanliness comes from a sauna the village is guarding, not only as a place for baths and restoration but also for bathing the dead. And of course, something lurks in the sauna that nobody quite understands, but it’s malevolent and hungry. While this sounds like it could come off very silly, it’s actually incredibly moody and effective. Things turn bloody toward the end, but for the most part the film is a well-acted, slow-burning study of both the characters and the current of the times, between peace and war. It’s a heady film at times - nothing is really explained in the end - and covers BIG topics like God, faith, religion, death, war, guilt and brotherhood. But it’s a unique film in both its setting and ambitions, and will hopefully find a US distributor and audience patient enough to discover its secrets. It’s a big step up for the director, too, whose previous film was the oddball Finnish martial arts hybrid JADE WARRIOR.

JCVD - Grady pretty much summed this one up in his previous post, and I loved it, too. You will believe a fallen star action hero can actually turn in a great performance, and make you cry.

THE BURROWERS - the new film from SOFT FOR DIGGING and S&MAN director J.T. Petty, being billed as a horror western with monsters that owe a debt to TREMORS. Unfortunately, going into the movie with expectations like that will lead to disappointment, as J.T. has created a unique genre hybrid that doesn’t really satisfy the requirements of either the western or the horror film, but holds some charms of its own. Slowly-paced, but with a good payoff climactic encounter with the monsters, the charms of the movie really rest on the shoulders of its characters, led by one of my favorite character actors, Clancy Brown. Just seeing him all duded up, on the back of a horse, cradling a firearm, makes the film worth seeing.

Nacho Vigalondo short films - the charismatic director of last year’s TIME CRIMES (due this fall from Magnet Releasing) returned this year with a package of short films, including his Oscar-nominated “7:35 in the Morning”. I can’t think of many other new filmmakers out there with the kind of comic sensitibilities Nacho has, plus he’s pretty adept at lo-fi sci-fi, as well. Hopefully these shorts will find their way into the TIME CRIMES DVD package, as they’re all worth a watch. Check out the Fantastic Fest link for the titles and scour YouTube, if you’re interested - some of them have been posted there.

ESTOMAGO - a light but funny Brazilian film about a guy from the country who comes into the city and begins working as a chef, as well as romancing a local hooker. Lots of food porn here, and a bit of a twist ending (that’s easy to see coming), it’s forgettable but entertaining.

NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD - one of the best films of the fest, a feature documentary on the heyday of Australian exploitation filmmaking, covering low-budget horror, giant animal movies, road rage films (like MAD MAX), sexploitation comedies, and more. Featuring interviews with just about everybody in the Aussie film industry (but where’s the Toecutter, Hugh Keays-Byrne?) and tons and tons of clips, it makes you want to run right out and find all the films it talks about. Which I’m doing right now.

And in connection with the NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD premiere, Fantastic Fest also had a mini-retrospective of some of the films covered in the documentary, including ROAD WARRIOR (presented outdoors in a parking lot), RAZORBACK and two I caught: the giant (pro-) crocodile movie DARK AGE and the action extravaganza THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, starring Jimmy Wang Yu, George Lazenby, and featuring cameos from Sammo Hung, plus Yuen Kwai, Yuen Biao and Lam Ching-ying in blink-or-miss-them cameos during a fight scene or two. It’s a super-entertaining film, and surprisingly the first narrative feature from its director, the prolific Brian Trenchard-Smith, who was on hand to discuss the film and the industry which produced it.

There were a couple of other retro titles presented at FF, as well: a newly-restored version of the fourth APES film, CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, which has been restored to its original pre-release, R-rated version, and is a stunner. FF also broke their budget in re-creating the “Percepto” seat buzzers William Castle originally created for screenings of his Vincent Price classic THE TINGLER. Fun, but the buzzers didn’t quite work.

Finally, three of the more anticipated titles of the fest.

ACOLYTES - Aussie director John Hewitt was in attendance at the fest, and seems like a really great guy. I wasn’t as thrilled by this KIDS meets a serial killer thriller, about a trio of youths in the suburbs who discover the identity of a serial killer in their midst, and then try to blackmail him into murdering a pesky bully for them. Things get bloody, and more than a little cliched, by the time it wraps up 90 minutes later. Stylishly directed, the script is the weak point here, never really pulling together the disparate elements of the story. In fact, I thought the Larry Clark-style youth relationships were handled a lot better than the thriller elements.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN - the lead characters get even younger in this moody and wonderful Swedish horror film that hasn’t yet gotten a negative review that I’ve seen. A young boy in a wintery suburb meets the girl next door, who happens to be a vampire. I thought the film had a major Stephen King feel to it, in a good way, based on how it uses an ensemble cast to tell the story of a small town beset by supernatural events but rooted in the characters and everyday lives of its inhabitants. And like a lot of early King works, it doesn’t skimp on the horror elements, with multiple bloody deaths and much vampire lore incorporated into the plot. But towering above all that are the performances of the two young leads, who create not only believable characters but also an authentic-feeling relationship between them.

MARTYRS - again, I agree with Grady. This is one sick puppy of a movie, but oh so good. I think I switched allegiances three times in the film, initially appreciating it, then growing sick of it, and then realizing I loved it toward the end. It’s going to play with your emotions, possibly make you sick - or angry, and might even upset you so much that you wind up hating it, but it’ll definitely provoke some kind of strong reaction in everybody who sees it, which is more than you can say for most films these days. It’s a slasher movie where the victim is your soul.      —MW

Back from Toronto, and here’s what I saw in no particular order.

BLINDNESS - my contender for worst movie of the year, so far. Pretentious claptrap that’s really a rape/revenge movie shot by a director who doesn’t have the guts to admit it. Notable only if you have a fetish for seeing Julianne Moore step in human feces in her bare feet so it squishes up between her toes.

DEAD GIRL - American indie about a bunch of teenagers who find a zombie lady chained up in a basement and turn her into their undead sex slave. This should have been a tasteless, over-the-top, stomach-churning tour de force but instead the directors (it took two) tried to twist it into a dramatic film about two best friends growing up. In doing so, they managed to water down their soup until it skipped “tasteless” and went right to “bland.” Note to future directors: a movie about teenagers raping zombies is not considered a “calling card” in Hollywood, so you’re probably better off not trying to make it one.

ACHILLES & THE TORTOISE - Takeshi Kitano says he’s “stuck” and in a creative slump. It shows.

GOMORRAH - imagine all three PUSHER movies, plus two more, crammed into one, sprawling picture about the modern day mafia in Naples. Then cast it with some of the funniest-looking people in Italian cinema, including a 6′1″ kid who weighs 70 pounds and has a nose the size of Rhode Island. Also: machine guns. One of the best of the fest and coming from IFC in January, 2009.

ASHES OF TIME REDUX - no longer completely off-the-wall and batshit-crazy, WKW has used a new, more mature soundtrack and a subtle, linear editing plan to transform ASHES from a surreal object of contemplation spiked with HK commercial cinema craziness into a movie that fits in well with his post IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE career. Something is lost in the process, something is gained. At least Norah Jones is missing.

DETROIT METAL CITY - the Japanese flick that settles several questions. First, when in doubt, inject more death metal, not less. Second, death metal deserves more movies. Third, Tim Burton should make those movies. Fourth, Kenichi Matsuyama (L in the DEATH NOTE movies, Sir Johannes Krauser II in DETROIT METAL CITY) is one of the best actors in Japan today.

JCVD - I’ve always thought that Jean Claude Van Damme was a better actor than he was given credit for, and I’m so happy to be proved right. He may never hit these heights again, but it’s as if his entire career to date was preparation for this movie. Is it perfect? Hell no. But I cried twice and the stuck-up audience of nerds and old fogeys at the Press and Industry screening where I saw it gave it cheers and applause at the end, something I didn’t see at any other P&I screenings.

TREELESS MOUNTAIN - if this was 1968, some exploitation distributor in America would give this Korean art film the total drive-in treatment. New title: THE BUG EATERS. Tag line: “See them eating the flaming bodies of crickets…while they’re still alive! They don’t wash their clothes! They don’t cut their hair! They wait and wait for a bus…that never comes! THE BUG EATERS!!!!!” The kind of movie that makes you want to adopt a little abused Korean child if they’re as cute as the ones onscreen.

THE BURROWERS - seeing the Lionsgate logo on the front of this film conveys instantly that this 19th Century Western monster movie is destined to go direct to the video store shelves, and that’s too bad. Its ambition outstrips its abilities, but this SEARCHERS meets TREMORS flick is smarter and better made than it has any right to be, given its low budget and its oddball, unclassifiable genre. It’s bound to disappoint action fans because it’s got more mood than monsters, but it’ll also disappoint the arthouse crowd to whom its “White people are bad” message is old hat. Resting uneasily in some twilight zone, neither fish nor fowl, it’s the kind of movie that people are going to discover for themselves on DVD and wonder, “How did this get made? Why didn’t I hear about it sooner? What kind of world do we live in where a movie this good gets less of a push than MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN?”

MARTYRS - French people are sick. That’s the only explanation I have for the rash of horror flicks coming out of the land of stinky cheese: INSIDE, FRONTIER(S) and now this. The less you know about it the better, because this movie switches gears like a hungover trucker on an uphill drive: frequently and with the scream of shredding metal and the smell of burning oil. Slated for the video store shelves courtesy of the Weinstein Company, this is the next step in horror movies - a film not content to scare you or gross you out, but wanting to make a philosophical point doing so. In the last third it’ll lose most of its audience (myself included) but then it comes back with a mind-blowing ending that sent one viewer at Midnight Madness out into the lobby, blowing chunks. Have you ever thought about god, power, life and death while heaving out your guts in the toilet bowl? After seeing MARTYRS, you will.

SKY CRAWLERS - Mamoru Oshii has made a masterful animated picture. Too bad it’s really, really boring. After turning on a massive audience of fans with GHOST IN THE SHELL, Oshii seems to be devoting the rest of his career to turning them right back off. If boring the audience to death is his intent then: mission accomplished.

NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD - the surprise of the fest. A documentary about Australian exploitation movies that is one of the most entertaining movies of the year. You will come to like Quentin Tarantino. You will want to see HOWLING 3 - THE MARSUPIALS. You will learn to hate Jimmy Wang Yu. Up is down and black is white.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE NAGA - a commercial Thai film about a bunch of crooks who become Buddhist monks in order to infiltrate a monastery and rescue their hidden loot from a recent bank job. Being a commercial Thai film, it mixes melodrama, religious films, gangster movies, a little bit of horror and some comedy until you have a starnge mish mash that works more as a cultural curiosity and an essay on Thai Buddhism than it does as a crime film.

EDEN LOG - another French film, and one that’s bound for America via Magnolia’s Magnet imprint. It’s great to see ambitious, cerebral, HEAVY METAL-influenced low budget filmmaking especially when it’s pulled off with this much confidence, swagger and style. But when the director came out for the Q&A and asked, “Can anybody tell me where to get some cocaine?” I looked around to see if I could score, too. The operative word here is “brooding.” This movie broods like a mofo.

Up at the Toronto International Film Festival and, to be honest, it’s pretty sleepy in terms of Asian films. Here’s what I’ve seen:

BLINDNESS - not an Asian flick per se, this adaptation of the award-winning novel of the same name is about a plague of blindness that strikes the world, leading to the infected blind being quarantined in unsupervised prison camps that quickly descend into anarchy and hideousness. Mark Ruffalo goes blind and his still-seeing wife, Julianne Moore, follows him into quarantine. Danny Glover is on hand, as is Gael Garcia Bernal and Sandra Oh, who has a small part as Minister of Health. This is one of those annoying movies that stretches for allegory, where characters have numbers instead of names, and many of the most annoying tropes of psuedo-intellectual filmmaking such as “Wise Old Black Man who Utters Wisdom” (Danny Glover - what? Morgan Freeman wasn’t available?), “Cleansing Showers of Rain that Wash Away Everyone’s Sins” and “Piano Being Played beautifully in Middle of Bombed Out City.” Tedious, moronic and tiresome this is a movie that constantly features running water, showers, rain, spilled liquids and dripping milk and it’ll send you running to the bathroom every five minutes to pee. Yoshino Kimura, the hooker with the heart of gold in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, plays the wife of the first victim of the blindness, who’s played by Yusuke Iseya (DOG IN A SIDECAR, MEMORIES OF MATSUKO and he and Yoshino were in SUICIDE SONG together). They’re both good, but the movie’s such a bore that it hardly matters. Their paint just dries a little better than everyone else’s.

ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE - the newest flick from Takeshi Kitano, this is a straight-forward story of the making of a young painter, covering his life from youth to middle age. If there wasn’t Kitano’s name on the credits and if it didn’t start with an anime sequence, it would feel like a mid-century, human realist film from Shochiku. Tons of fun paintings, a lot of them by Kitano, and sharp editing make the first 2/3 of this movie a low key treat. But the second Kitano himself shows up playing the artist in middle age, careful observation is traded for leering slapstick and by the time it ends with a typically Kitano reaffirmation of the bonds of marriage you’re already heading for the exit.

GOMORRA - the best foreign film I’ve seen up here so far, this Italian flick only features Chinese folks incidentally, but it’s an amazing crime film about the reach of the modern day mafia in Naples that’s slated for a January 2009 release from IFC Films. If you liked the PUSHER movies then this is like taking all three of them at once.

Today is a beautiful day because today marks the release of the Image DVD of HUMAN LANTERNS, the 1982 Shaw Brothers horror/kung fu thriller about two rich guys who hate each other so much that they get into…a Lantern Making Contest! But since they’re rich guys they have to hire someone else to make the lanterns for them and so they hire…a lunatic who makes lanterns out of human skin! Spooky, gory and atmospheric, the Image DVD also includes lots of gore that was previously cut including…boiling mercury poured directly onto a living human brain!

DVD Verdict sez: “When the Shaw Brothers floodgates were thrown open, all manner of bizarre creations came pouring out. As bizarre goes, HUMAN LANTERNS is in its very own league. If I were to watch another 50 crazy kung-fu movies, I doubt any of them would even approach the insanity that is this film.”

See a decorative hanging made entirely of DECAPITATED HUMAN HEADS!

See Lo Lieh, Chen Kuan-tai and Lo Meng fight to the death in a ghoulish house of horrors full of vats of boiling human hamburger!

Marvel at the enormous sets and big budgets used to tell this terrible tale that is like a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie with martial arts and swank production values. An entire house destroyed with one well-placed kick! Women flayed alive! Bratty rich men fighting bodyguards armed with fans and dancing in formation! The terrible Skull Monkey!

If you buy one DVD today…make it HUMAN LANTERNS! The best horror/martial arts/women-being-turned-into-decorative-lanterns movie ever made!

(John Charles provides more sober commentary on the previous disc of this movie - the missing footage he mentions looks like it’s been restored, or leastways I can’t imagine the flaying scenes getting any gorier)

(Buy it on Amazon)

Wonderful Town at Anthology Film Archives through July 24th

Currently, the Thai film industry is mired in a depressingly bleak state in which only low brow comedy, action, teenage romance and horror can compete in the local commercial market place. The industry is nearly devoid of thoughtful films for adults or for more adventurous movie goers. Only a few years back it seemed that Thai films were on the verge of a renaissance, but the lack of box office success of many of these “New Wave” films forced the big three movie production companies to become risk averse and grab on to proven genres. Some serious new Thai filmmakers have adapted to this reality by making smart artistic films within those genre walls - Banjong Pisanthanakul and Pakpoom Wongpoom with the two horror films SHUTTER and ALONE and Chukiat Sakveerakul with the psycho drama 13 BELOVED and the controversial teenage romance between two boys, LOVE OF SIAM. Pen-ek Ratanaruang is one of the few directors who have been able to disdainfully turn their backs on the local box office because of his international standing due to films like PLOY, INVISIBLE WAVES and LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. On the other hand, Wisit Sasanatieng, the director of the magnificently surreal Thai cowboy musical TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER has been forced into genre servitude with his lackluster horror film, THE UNSEEABLE.

Barely noticeable within Thailand is a small independent film movement that primarily has had director Apichatpong Weerasethakul at its forefront. Films of his such as BLISSFULLY YOURS, TROPICAL MALADY and SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY have gained an art house following internationally, but little if any recognition or theatrical play at home.  Now this new independent artistic vision has broken on to the international film scene with WONDERFUL TOWN. Produced partly by grants from the Pusan and the Rotterdam Film festivals as well as other foreign investors, this debut from Aditya Assarat has been picked up in the United States by Kino and has scored itself a one-week run at the Anthology Film Archives. It has garnered awards in a number of festivals and has received terrific reviews from The New York Times, The New York Post and Time Out NY. Deservedly so.

As the film opens, waves roll gently upon the shore but the irony of this and what it symbolizes only becomes apparent as the film progresses. Things are not always what they first appear. A few years earlier the nearby town was hit by the 2004 tsunami and claimed thousands of lives. The water has long receded but not the emotional damage it left behind. Melancholy lingers everywhere and as the camera evocatively captures this gloomy mood in the dark lush landscapes, the broken down moss covered buildings, the missing people and the rain heavy clouds, a certain haunted menace begins to creep into the narrative. Ton arrives from Bangkok to work as an architect on a construction site and he stays at a small plain hotel run by Na, a young woman with very little happening in her life. Ton asks her if there is a room available, not realizing the absurdity of his question -  all the rooms are available and no other guests are ever witnessed – this seems to be a dying town. The two strike up a friendship of lonely souls that inevitably drifts into something more, but it plays out constantly against an ominous backdrop of threatening weather, gossiping neighbors and, eventually, bad intentions.  The story moves at a lethargic, almost hypnotic pace, but it feels perfectly in rhythm with the stillness, the silence and the isolation that surrounds these two characters. It creates an uneasy, expectant feeling that stays with you as you walk out of the theater into the bright sunshine.  - BN

7 and 9 p.m. at the Anthology Film Archives until Thursday, 7/24
92 minutes