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Highway to Hell

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The third feature film from director low-budget Texas auteur Bret McCormick, Highway to Hell (1990) is a ride-or-die for fans of regional action epics. Mass murderer Toby Gilmore (Benton Jennings) escapes from prison to continue his random killing spree, grabbing a pretty hostage (Blue Thompson) along the way, dodging pursuit from a cop (Richard Harrison) with a personal grudge. Like most of McCormick’s films, this one lives and dies on enthusiasm rather than resources. And lead actor Benton Jennings has the former in spades! In a performance that veers from chaotic to hilarious, his turn as the gun crazy Gilmore is equal parts Nicolas Cage, Rutger Hauer and Yosemite Sam, throwing a temper tantrum at every inanimate object in sight. He’s like the overly committed lead singer of a punk band, spitting, swearing and sweating through every scene at full volume. And dragging the entire movie along with him. Highway to Hell adds a few production upgrades that make it seem more profess...
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Agitator

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Movie gangsters come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and temperaments. There’s enough variety to apply a variation on the open-ended quote from Civil War , “But kind of gangster are you!” I mean, there’s Scorsese gangsters, Guy Ritchie gangsters, Suzuki gangsters even Tarantino gangsters. And while Takashi Miike gangsters probably don’t crack the top ten, they are most decidedly a breed of their own. 2001’s Agitator finds the director’s technique evolving alongside with his yakuza counterparts in a decidedly mature, and, compared to his V-Cinema creations, retrogressively conservative take on Japanese mafiosos. Yoichi (Naoto Takenaka) and Kunihiko (Masaya Kato) are sworn brothers in the Higuchi Gang under the banner of the Yokomizo family. But their loyalties are tested when a pair of high-ranking assassinations sets rival gangs against one-another in a secret plot to wrest control from within and without. Appalled by their leaders’ lack of loyalty – not to mention backbone – Yoic...
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Picture of a Nymph

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Even a creative genius isn’t born in a vacuum. While Sam Raimi’s visual razzle-dazzle in The   Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2  were wildly entertaining, any self-respecting fan of Asian cinema could see the influences written on the cabin walls. That’s not an insult. In fact, it’s an opportunity for fans to branch out into the Hong Kong horror-fantasy genre for more of the same. Take 1987’s Picture of a Nymph , itself a retread of A Chinese Ghost Story , which pits a pair of demon hunters against the only supernatural force they weren’t prepared for: true love. The adopted son of a Taoist monk, Shih Erh, (played by Yuen Biao) strikes up a friendship with a desperate scholar (Lawrence Ng) who falls in love with a wandering ghost (Joey Wang) kidnapped on her wedding day by a local spirit. Unsympathetic to their doomed love affair, Shih’s master wants to send them all back to the hell they came from. But his student takes a stand to prove that love can still survive beyond the ...
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She Shoots Straight

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Martial arts movie fans are a pretty forgiving bunch…probably second only to horror fans. The structure and predictability both genres are part of their charm. So audiences are often willing to praise second-rate material simply because there’s so darn much of it. Which makes it all the more shocking when a movie comes along that really brings its “A” game. Fifteen minutes into 1990’s She Shoots Straight and you realize this is what all those movies were trying to achieve in the first place! When Mina (Joyce Godenzi) marries into the Huang family, she butts heads with her husband’s four sisters, particularly Chia Ling (Carina Lau), who’s jealous of her new sister-in-law’s reputation in the police force. But a tragedy brings them together in pursuit of a vicious gang of Vietnamese thieves intent on covering the tracks of their most recent crime. That means taking out members of the Huang family one by one. Produced by Sammo Hung’s Bo Ho Film Company and utilizing his top-notch...
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Duel to the Death

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Your chances of dying from a 20-foot-tall ninja made up of 30 ninjas standing on top of each other are low, but as 1983’s Duel to the Death proves, not totally impossible. The directorial debut of action choreographer Tony Ching is a riotously inventive hodge-podge of wuxia, kung-fu, chanbara and the aforementioned army of mystical ninja warriors that never stops trying to top itself. Two warriors are chosen to compete in a once-a-decade contest that will determine the superiority of Chinese or Japanese martial arts. But subterfuge on both sides results in a series of assassination attempts that bring the combatants together to defend their mutual sense of honor and fair play. Meanwhile, the daughter of their host wages her own campaign to fulfill her clans’ destiny and break into this elitest boys’ club. Duel to the Deat h manages to be both ridiculous and thoughtful at the same time, offering up a respectful view of Japanese culture and combat that was all too rare in Hong Kon...
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Force: Five

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It took a long time for Bruce Lee to get “discovered” in the U.S. By the time Enter the Dragon turned him into a phenomenon, he was already gone, leaving behind opportunistic producers eager to wring out his legacy and a handful of celebrity students to carry on his techniques. Chuck Norris might be the most famous of the bunch, but Joe Lewis was arguably the most formidable. A karate champion and early evangelist of American kickboxing, Lewis clearly had his eye on replicating his mentor’s big screen success. Instead, his debut, Jaguar Lives! (1979) found more fame years later on MST3K than it did in theaters. It’s follow-up, Force: Five (1981) is still a clumsy martial-arts mishmash stitched together from TV-grade stunt work and flat performances…but it’s aged to the point where an audiences can laugh with it rather than at it. Recruited to rescue a senator’s daughter from a drug-smuggling cult leader, Jim Martin (Lewis) gathers his own team of superfriends (including karat...
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The Japanese Godfather Trilogy

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When it comes to films that reveal the inner workings of mafia crime families, The Godfather (1972) was far from the first of its kind. As far back as New York Confidential (1955), screenwriters were laying the groundwork for power-hungry dons, resentful daughters, stoic hitmen and crooked politicians. So the Japanese Godfather Trilogy  (1977 – 1978) isn’t exactly breaking new ground, merely shifting the setting to a new locale and reinforcing the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. As head of the Nakajima group, Sakura (Shin Saburi) understands a brutal truth of the modern era: a business that isn’t growing is already dying. So he pushes his second in command, Tatsumi (Koji Tsuruta) to expand the yakuza empire into legitimate territory, crossing paths with political figures who all want a piece of the pie…but whose morals are even lower than the criminals they publicly condemn. In part two, Ambition , Matsugae (Hiroki Matsukata) carries on with the campaign, ope...
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