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The Guyver  (1991), although based on an original manga character, certainly owes it existence onscreen to the success of the first live-action  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles  movie released the year prior.  Produced by Brian Yuzna who brings along a slew of familiar names from his previous films and co-directed by effects veterans Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang, this is a movie meant to make an impression on undiscriminating kids.  Of course, almost  every  kid is undiscriminating (how else do you explain dinosaur chicken nuggets?) and  The Guyver  hits them with a one-two punch of slimy superhero action and corny jokes that tastes terrific with a side of ranch. Accidently bonding with the alien space armor his girlfriend’s dad smuggled out of a top-secret lab, Sean inherits the kung-fu skills he always wanted along with cosmic invulnerability and some high-tech weaponry.  But the evil Zoalord (David Gale) and his hen...

What would you get if you crossed   Jaws   with   Godzilla ?     Well, probably   The Meg .     But the multi-national 1979 production   Crocodile , shot in Thailand, produced by Korea with special effects by Japan, also fits the bill.     This nature-gone-wild flick add some atomic mutation to the mix, resulting in a 60-foot reptile complete with glowing red eyes and an insatiable appetite for locals and tourists alike.   After their families are devoured on vacation, a pair of dedicated physicians pool their resources to hunt down the oversized monster that did them dirty.  But not before said crocodile tears apart several villages and plenty of unsuspecting water buffalo on its way back to its ocean home.  Hiring out a local fisherman, our heroes take to the water in hopes of taking the monster on on its home turf.   With its odd combination of miniature work, animatronics and nature photography, the...

Special features might be an endangered species on home video as far as the major studios are concerned.  But boutique labels like Radiance understand that physical media collectors want the most complete history of a film’s production, cultural influences and legacy as possible.  Which is especially important when it comes to foreign titles released to a U.S. audience for the first time.  In the case of 1971’s  Sympathy for the Underdog , a fairly standard yakuza story at first glance, the extras reveal another layer of social and racial complexity that would likely slip by completely unnoticed.  Fresh out of a ten-year prison stint, Gunji (Koji Tsuruta) is reunited with the few remaining members of his old gang who remained loyal.  But the criminal landscape has changed in the last decade, so Gunji shifts his base of operation to Okinawa, where the competition is less fierce and the U.S. dollar reigns supreme.  Gunji and his boys ...

The trouble with movies determined to make a political statement is they often lose their audience along the way.  Film can be a terrifically persuasive media, but when entertainment is bogged by the weight of its arguments, you’re left with - at best - a heavy-handed message movie or - at worst – the worst sort of well-intentioned propaganda.  But in his debut feature,  Bandits of Orgosolo  (1960), director Vittorio De Seta tackles the same issues as the original adherents of Italian  neorealism  and layers them beneath a Hitchcockian  wrong man  plot that never insults his audience’s intelligence  or  attention span.  A law-abiding Sardian shepherd, Michele, gets mixed up with a trio of poachers who kill a member of the carabinieri during their escape.  Labeled guilty by association, Michele dodges his pursuers while enlisting the help of his younger brother to protect his sheep, their only source of income....

The dirty little secret about a lot of teen sex comedies of the ‘80s is they weren’t  really  all that dirty.  Hidden underneath all that crass marketing and titillating trailers were subtle coming-of-age stories exploring the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic details of teenage life.   The Last American Virgin ,  Little Darlings  and, most famously,  Fast Times at Ridgemont High  were all far more thoughtful and emotional than critics at the time gave them credit for.  And 1982’s  Homework , casting a pre- Dynasty  Joan Collins as the sexual mentor for her daughter’s boyfriend, falls into the same category.   Tommy (Michael Morgan) and his group of friends are suffering from a variety of sexual frustrations:  Lisa is obsessed with a trendy rock star, Gilles is a horny French exchange student, Mix is an on-the-make lothario, Cookie is a curious choir girl and Ralph has it bad for their young French teac...

 If you’ve made it this far in  The Inspector Wears Skirts  franchise you’ve likely already been sold on the odd combination of physical comedy, blood squibs and boob jokes.  An only-in-Hong-Kong amalgamation of  Police Academy  hijinks and early ‘90s action, director Wellson Chin doesn’t deviate from the formula much in these next two installments; but he certainly  perfects  it to the point where new members of the SKIRT squad are easily swapped in for old pros. TIWS3: Raid on Royal Casino Marine  begins with the usual training camp shenanigans, but with Inspector Kan (Stanley Fung) now in charge after his marriage to former SKIRT leader Madame Wu (Sibelle Hu).  The squad is tasked with going undercover aboard a gambling cruise to sort out who’s responsible for the theft of missing police weaponry.   A sort of passing of the torch entry, this one gives Sandra Ng the biggest spotlight in the series.  Her comic r...

If you thought the well had run dry on undiscovered martial arts films, Eureka’s new release of 1975’s  The Valiant Ones  will quickly change your mind.  Produced at the tail end of popularity for the  wuxia  film, whose elegant style and period settings were soon replaced by kung fu street fighters and gratuitous bloodshed, director King Hu had was already responsible for the best entries the genre had to offer ( Come Drink with Me, Dragon  Inn and A  Touch of Zen ).  Here he bends conventions a bit to produce a crowd-pleasing mix of textbook wuxia iconography with the elevated action modern audiences had come to expect. With the coastal regions of China under attack by Japanese pirates –  wokou  – the leaders call in a special anti-terrorist squad to push the bandits out of their country once and for all.  Led by General Yu Dayou, this dirty-half dozen quickly uncovers a conspiracy  within  the government ...

Produced at the height of the Sundance era, when post-modern twists and genre-mashups were reinventing the idea of the “independent” film,  Mute Witness  (1995) is a thriller with moderate ambitions.  But that in itself was a refreshing change of pace from the rash of overbaked  Basic Instinct  clones cluttering theaters at the time.  Writer-director Anthony Waller’s movie is a Hitchcockian throwback with delusions of DePalma’s sexual depravity.  But for all its snuff film plot devices and final girl histrionics, there’s a Scooby Doo innocence that prevails over those commercial impulses. Working special effects on a low-budget slasher shooting in Moscow, Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina) witnesses what she believes to be a snuff-film-in-progress shooting in the studio after hours.  The two culprits insist it was a fake, but Billy’s handicap (she’s a mute, hence the film’s title) makes it hard to plead her case.  Russian a...

Whether they planned it or not, Radiance has programmed the perfect  Shogun  prequel by releasing their three-disc  Shinobi  set just a few weeks after the trendiest show in years wrapped up.  Set during the feudal period of Japan’s Era of the Warring States,  Shinobi No Mono: Band of Assassins  (1962),  Revenge  (1963) and  Resurrection  (1963), follows the political maneuverings of the country’s three great unifiers in their attempts to secure power over equally ambitious domain lords.  But, taking a right turn into crowd-pleasing historical fiction, a secret society of ninjas – complete with covert assassinations and fake news – is actually writing the  real  history of Japan. Band of Assassins  introduces us to Ishikawa Goemon, a master of all the tricks of ninjitsu, but still naïve to the ways of the world.  He’s easily manipulated by his master into setting one clan against another, dist...