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Running on Karma

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There’s an old screenwriting adage that goes, “You can break every rule except one:   Don’t be boring! ” And no one takes that advice to heart more than the Hong Kong film industry.  Any random sampling of films produced since 1980 will turn up bizarre genre mash-ups, wildly eccentric action franchises and melodramatic love stories that take big swings with absolutely no fear of striking out.  And 2003’s  Running on Karma , a Johnnie To / Wai Ka-fai joint, wastes no time throwing ideas into the cinematic blender to serve up another offbeat dish. Biggie (Andy Lau) is a Buddhist monk turned go-go dancing body-builder (give that a minute to sink in) who is also gifted with the ability to see karmic visions of a person’s past life.  This all comes into play when he helps Lee Fung Yee (Cecilia Cheung), an ambitious cop, solve a murder involving two men with no previous relationship with each other. Biggie’s sixth sense and martial arts skill help ...
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Charley Chase at Hal Roach: The Late Silents 1927

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As a niche within a niche, silent films are certainly a hard sell for modern audiences.  Even Turner Classic Movies can only spare a couple hours a week in their schedule on late Sunday nights.  Perhaps because silents are positioned as something to be appreciated rather than enjoyed, dry history lessons held back by their crude technical limitations.  But the newly restored  Charley Chase   at Hal Roach: The Late Silents 1927  proves silent  comedy  was anything but.  A “do-it-all” comedian, Chases’ on camera persona relied less on slapstick than farcical domestic situations.  Unlike Chaplin’s  tramp  character, Charley often played a put-upon everyman just trying to catch a break.  The first two shorts in the set are a prime example:  There Ain’t No Santa Claus  follows his character’s attempt to hide the purchase of a Christmas gift for his wife from his rent-hungry landlord…while...
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Underworld Beauty

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A fairly early film in the career of Seijun Suzuki, 1958’s  Underworld Beauty  never drifts far from the Hollywood noir entries that inspired it.  But as the Japanese director’s first film shot in widescreen, there’s some historical significance in watching what he does with his new toy.  Whether it’s a shadowy sewer, gaudy dance club or cramped office space, Suzuki seems to intuitively know just where his camera should be at all times…even with all that extra space to play with! After release from prison, Miyamoto (Michitaro Mizushima) heads straight for the cache of stolen diamonds that put him there in the first place.  But his intentions are honorable: selling the goods and passing on the proceeds to his pal Mihara who was crippled on the job.  But Oyane (Shinsuke Ashida), who planned the heist, has an agenda of his own.  And so does his artistic-minded underling…and pretty much everyone else in the gang! So when the diamon...
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Weak Spot

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How long do you give a movie to grab your attention?  The curse of the streaming era is that a better option is possibly only click away (full disclosure: I give most blind watches about 10 minutes leeway). But it doesn’t take a full-blown  Bond  action sequence to do the job, just a subtle creative flourish that hints at more inventiveness to come.  Director Peter Fleischmann’s 1975 film  Weak Spot  begins with the suicide of a suspect who leaps to his death from a fourth-story window, filmed with no cuts and a clever off-camera body swap to sell the illusion. For a cinephile, that’s a solid indicator that you’re in good hands the rest of the way. In a nameless country on the mediterranean, Georgis (Ugo Tognazzi) is picked up by the secret service and shuffled from one interrogator to another after being accused of playing a role in a subversive plot.  With no evidence, the Investigator (Michel Piccoli) takes part in an elaborate road-t...
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Love & Crime

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Our culture’s fascination with  true crime  stories didn’t begin with  Dateline .  Even before the media began exploiting them in print you can be sure tales of murder, infidelity and abnormal sexual practices made up a large percentage of social gossip.  So Teruo Ishii’s  Love & Crime  (1969) is really just giving the people what they want: a four-part anthology mostly focused on “poison women” whose predilection for greed and wanton lust made them short-lived media sensations in Japan. Things kick off with  the Toyokaku Inn Incident , involving Kunie Munakata, the first women sentenced to death since the second world war, who seduced her employer, murdered his wife, then finished the job by killing him  as well  to take control of a profitable tourist spot.  Ishii stages each murder with the gruesome enthusiasm of an E.C. comic book come to life, full of bloody axes, rotten corpses and peek-a-boo nudity. It’s hi...
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Horrible History: Four Historical Epics by Chang Cheh

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History is always more interesting with kung fu.  Imagine the college prep scores if only our founding fathers defeated the British with double-bladed scimitars and fighting staffs.  Now that would get the students’ attention!  And so will  Horrible History , the new two-disc set from Eureka that collects four historical epics by legendary Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh. By the mid-‘70s something like 80% of the studio’s output was martial arts flicks. With that sort of demand, the genre understandably began to seep into  other  types of films as well.   Marco Polo  (1975) reimagines the famous merchant’s adventures in China to include fighting alongside the local provinces against the brutal Kublai Khan.  Polo himself (played by peplum star Richard Harrison) takes a backseat in his own story to four blood brothers sworn to avenge their fallen comrade.  An absolute blast from beginning to end, Chang’s sta...
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Incubus

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The films of Ingmar Bergman might be better known for their emotional angst and spiritual turmoil than any supernatural overtones.  But there’s an unmistakable horror element imbedded in his visual style.  And it’s from this that  Incubus , director Leslie Stevens’ nearly-lost 1966 oddity, takes it cue.  Filmed entirely in Esperanto, a  universal  language created at the turn of the 20 th  century, and starring William Shatner, this folk-horror fable feels like a cross between  The Outer Limits  and a European art film. Living a quiet life with his sister, Marc (Shatner) is a modest war hero who becomes a victim of love at first sight with Kia (Allyson Ames), a blonde beauty who tempts him with sexual and moral indiscretions.  But Marc is a victim in more ways than one.  Kia is actually a succubus, luring greedy and vain men to their death as a sacrifice to the dark lord.  However, Marc’s inherent ...
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