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Fans of Asian cinema know – and appreciate – that things can get very weird, very quick.  For instance, a standard cop movie can turn into a slapstick zombie sitcom at a moment’s notice.  Which is exactly what happens in  The Blue Jean Monster  (1991), a left-of-center action comedy that pretty much defines Hong Kong’s all-bets-are-off filmmaking aesthetic.  Joe is a gung-ho police officer whose wife is expecting their first child when he’s killed trying to apprehend a gang of bank robbers.  But an electrical jolt revives him, granting superstrength and an immunity to pain as long as he’s  re-charged  every so often.  Hoping to last just long enough to get revenge  and  bring his baby into the world, Joe enlists the aid of a pair of live-in teens to help disguise his condition and track down the bad guys.   Unapologetically goofy and prone to hit below the belt,  The Blue Jean Monster  is pretty uneven when it comes to generating laughs  or  thrills .   A few early scenes of intense vi

Despite staging a comeback in terms of fashion, music and film, the ‘80s had an  anything goes  personality that’s impossible to recreate.  Country music, hair metal and power ballads mingled comfortably together on Top 40 radio, and while no one would ever label the decade as  open minded  there was more wiggle room for films to drift out of their genre.  In the world of Hong Kong cinema, always quick to bend with a new trend, that’s never more obvious than in 1988’s  The Inspector Wears Skirts , the first entry in what would become a four-film series that was a progenitor of the  Girls with Guns  wave of the ‘90s.  After an international incident exposes a need for more women on the force, Hong Kong officials create the SKIRT squad, selecting two dozen female candidates to train under the guidance of Madam Wu (Sibelle Hu) and Madam Law (Cynthia Rothrock).  But their biggest challenge is getting a leg up on their male counterparts, a troupe of goofball misogynists out to prove their p

The Facts of Murder  (1959) is a small miracle of a movie, made with Hitchcockian complexity, matched with Howard Hawks’ feel for dialogue and the emotional resonance of the great Italian Neorealism movement.  If that sort of name-dropping and film school braggadocio is intimidating, don’t bother doing the research.  Peitro Germi’s film doesn’t require vast cinematic knowledge to appreciate. It’s a movie ripe for rediscovery, a genre film that makes it’s Hollywood contemporaries seem almost amateurish. Investigating a simple robbery, Commissioner Ingravalla’s (writer/director/star Peitro Germi) case turns into a complicated murder mystery involving a dead aristocrat, her estranged husband, and a staff full of teenage suspects.  Unlike the ridiculously convoluted (and sometimes  nonsensical ) “giallos” that would rule Italy in the next decade,  The Facts of Murder  adds up to something more.  Not only does that plot make sense, it makes you constantly reassess the suspects with each nar

The American Dream wasn’t exclusive to America.  In post-war Japan, the boom years led to rampant consumerism and a rise in middle class aspirations that usurped traditional ideas of family honor.  In short, it was every salaryman for himself.  And Yuzo Kawashima’s  Elegant Beast  (1962) pulls back the curtains on one family living well above their means…by any means necessary.   The Maeda’s live in a stylish  danchi  housing complex – modern apartment units with all the amenities.  But their lifestyle is supported by their children, Yuko and Hisano, who they’ve coached to become unapologetic grifters.  Things gets dicey however when Hisano’s lover, also his partner in an embezzling scheme, walks away from the relationship with all the money.  After the boss threatens to go public with the crime – and his  own  extramarital affair – the family scrambles to find a new source of income to keep up with the neighbors…even at the neighbor’s expense.   Elegant Beast  is satire at its most cu

When a box set reaches Volume 3 you can assume it has a built-in audience of buyers.  Not to mention the fact that spaghetti western fans have been pretty hard up for new titles lately.  But rest assured, Arrow Video’s four movie set  Savage Guns  has more to offer than just more of the same.  Each title takes the genre down a different path, blending politics, counter-culture and psychedelia for a unique viewing experience. Paolo Bianchini’s  I Want Him Dead  (1968) might be the most straightforward of the bunch, starring Craig Hill as a scruffy-faced stranger out to avenge the murder of his sister, a mission that puts him at odds with an arms dealer looking to extend his profits from the Civil War.  A serious and bloody affair (Hill’s character take a beating in every scene), the performances here are well above the curve, particularly love interest Lea Massari who typically worked in more prestigious projects.  And Bianchini’s wonderful use of landscape ranks right up there with  Th

Every film critic has a handful of movies that it’s impossible for them to be objective about, films discovered in early adolescence that resonate in some way as to make them simply  perfect  – flaws and all.  For me that list includes Walter Hill’s  The Warriors  (1979), which ran on The Movie Channel non-stop for years during my latchkey era, part of a rotating schedule which included  Dressed to Kill ,  Blow Out  and  Tourist Trap  (whoever was programming that channel deserves a serious pat on the back).  Based on the novel by Sol Yurick, which itself was based on the classical Greek text  Anabasis , Hill’s film is a celebration of 1970’s New York, the urban equivalent of  Mad Max , where street gangs rule the night and honor is as tough to defend as your home turf.   After being framed for the death of Cyrus, a modern-day messiah, the Warriors must make their way from the Bronx all the way back to Coney Island while being chased by every gang in the city.  The journey bounces from

Filtering international politics through the lens of action-movie escapism isn’t exactly rare in Hong Kong cinema.  Current events pop up as plot devices all the time as a means to inspire car chases, gunplay and hand-to-hand-to-foot combat.  But Johnny Mak’s  Long Arm of the Law  (1984) has a bit more on its mind than just getting your pulse racing. Big Tung is the leader of a group of mainlanders – called the Big Circle gang - who sneak into the city to do some crimes; specifically, a jewelry heist set-up by Tai, a shady gangster who uses the new recruits to kill a crooked cop.  Now wanted by the police, the boys are torn between sticking it out in Hong Kong and its tempting consumer-driven lifestyle or hightailing for home with nothing to show for their trouble.   Mak’s film unfolds with a remarkable amount of ambivalence towards its main characters.  The Big Circle gang aren’t exactly traditional protagonists; their smash-and-grab stick-ups result in a score of dead cops and innoce

As physical media uncovers more obscure titles, it also opens up unexpected cinematic borders.  Case in point,  Kill Butterfly Kill  (1983), a Taiwanese rape/revenge/martial arts flick that was part of the wave of  “Black Movies” ushering in action, gangster and related exploitation during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.   Very few of these ever made it out of Taiwan and even fewer received subtitles.  So the Blu-ray premiere courtesy of Neon Eagle Video is quite a coup, and even includes a couple of alternate versions for good measure. In a cut-to-the-chase opening sequence, Donna is laboriously raped by five men in a drunken stupor.  Six years later, she’s ready for revenge, teaming up with a hired assassin to carve her pound of flesh from each of the culprits, now successful figures in various facets of the criminal underworld.  With the element of surprise, her plan seems almost foolproof.  But once the bad guys realize they’re marked men, the hunter becomes the hunted once again.  

A sprawling, overstuffed critique of Hollywood and the American Dream, John Schlesinger’s  The Day of the Locust  (1975) exemplifies and best and worst of ‘70s cinema.  In an era when directors were briefly at the top of the food chain, the result was often an exercise in enthusiastic self-satisfaction with a tendency to look back at the industry’s Golden Age as a well-camouflaged sham on not just the moviegoing public but the industry itself.  Schlesinger’s film, based on a 1939 novel, portrays Hollywoodland as one of the seven levels of hell long overdue for an apocalyptic comeuppance.  Is anyone surprised? Arriving with a silver spoon from Yale’s School of Fine Arts, Tod Hackett (William Atherton) is promptly taken under the wing of Paramount executive Claude Estee (Richard Dysart) who puts him to work designing sets for an upcoming war picture.  He falls hard for Faye Greener (Karen Black), a hard-to-get blonde working as an extra, who just so happens to live in a cheap bungalow ne

After the onslaught of radioactive bugs and dinosaurs ran their course on cinema screens in the early ‘50s, Hammer Films became the new name in horror.  Building their empire off classic copyright-free monster icons like Dracula and the Wolf man, they created a roadmap for other independent producers to follow, producers like Herman Cohen.  His double-bill of  I was a Teenage Werewolf  and  I Was a Teenage Frankenstein  were big profit makers for AIP, enough so that he branched out overseas to concoct  Horrors of the Black Museum  (1959), a kitchen-sink slasher that revels in its sadistic, over-the-top kill sequences. Crime reporter/novelist Edmond Bancroft arrogantly confronts the police – in print and in person – over their inability able to solve a series of gruesome murders, all committed using elaborate tools and techniques found in Scotland Yard’s infamous “Black Museum.”  The museum itself is off-limits to the general public, but Bancroft has created his  own  in a high-tech dun