Category: Entertainment

Greetings once again, my fellow luxuriants of the ludicrous, to another edition of Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, let’s dip our toes into another great and underappreciated genre of film, Hong Kong wuxia (kung fu) films of the 70s & 80s. Today we’ll be taking a look at 天龍八部, or as you round-eyed devils have dubbed it, The Battle Wizard.

I must profess to having a soft place in my heart for old trashy kung fu movies. Those of you my age or a bit older probably remember these as being staples on late-night cable, when they were just trying to fill air space. The silly dubbing, ham-fisted acting, convoluted story lines, and most importantly, the high-flying martial arts action are ambrosia for the aficionado of trash cinema.

And brother, The Battle Wizard delivers on all these fronts. It’s a Shaw Bros. production, which may not mean anything to you, until I tell you that if you ever saw a fucked up cheesy Technicolor kung fu movie on tv at 2 a.m., it was probably from this production company. This particular film is based on a serialized novel whose title variously translates as Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils or Eight Books of the Heavenly Dragon. The novel deals in archetypes based on Buddhist cosmology, so it’s all a bit complicated to explain in a blog post.

The film opens with a guy getting caught in bed with his mistress, by her husband. Rookie mistake. Of course they immediately fight, but it turns out the philanderer has mastered the ancient martial art technique of shooting lasers out of your finger. He shoots the husband in the knees, and then as he tries to flee, injured, he gets shot again by the finger laser, which results in both of his legs falling off below the knee. Somehow the husband disappears over the roof, running away on his stubs. Back inside, the philanderer’s wife reveals to his side-piece that he’s actually a prince and could never marry gutter trash like her. Take THAT, bitch!

Twenty years later, we cut to an underground cave. The cuckold has built extendable iron bird-legs for himself that can destroy rocks, because of course he has. He’s hanging out with a half-human reptile-man of some sort, whose provenance is never explained. Through the magic of exposition, we learn that Prince Philanderer is now king, and has a boy. Killing the son should be just the revenge Iron Bird Legs is looking for, so he dispatches Reptile to the surface world to enact his revenge labor for him.

On the other side of the street, Gutter Trash’s daughter by Prince Philanderer is all grown up, and has mastered the ancient martial arts technique of firing lasers out of the end of an oversized novelty thigh bone. Her mother sends her out into the world to enact her revenge labor, on Prince Philanderer’s wife. She also tells Bone Shooter to always veil her face, because all men are worthless scum. See, SJWs aren’t new, they even existed in China 1,000 years ago.

MEANWHILE, AT THE HALL OF JUSTICE, sonny-boy is moping about because his old man, now King Philanderer, is trying to make him study kung fu. All the boy wants to do is read old Chinese sages and be a scholar-philosopher. After fighting with his parents over it (who claim that no one can govern unless they can also kick ass), he sullenly runs away to prove that you don’t have to be Chuck Norris to make it in the world.

Here’s where shit really starts to get weird. Deep breath: he meets a woman who can mind-control snakes and kicks his ass because she knows kung fu. They’re captured by bandits, but Snake Woman uses her powers to help Pacifist Son escape. She sends him to find a particular woman that can rescue her. Pacifist Son asks several wanderers in the forest, and eventually learns that the chick is a hated witch. Heart in throat he approaches her hideout to beg for help for Snake Woman. Turns out, the witch is Bone Shooter. What a twist! So Bone Shooter shows up, kills the bandits, frees Snake Woman (who promptly fucks right off until near the end of the film), and has to allow Pacifist Son to see her face because he sucked poison out of her wound sustained during the fight with the bandits. They’re then ambushed by Reptile, but survive because it turns out a giant red snake lives in the river and because it ate nothing but ginseng and deer antlers it’s whole life, it somehow grants magic super martial arts powers to anybody who drinks it’s blood (I swear that is the exact explanation given in the film). So in desperation Pacifist Son bites the snake and drinks it’s blood, sending Reptile scurrying back to tell Iron Bird Legs about this intriguing development. Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter go back to the palace because they want to get married, but find out they’re half-siblings through King Philanderer. Iron Bird Legs springs an ambush and captures Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter, throwing them into a pit (after an awkwardly weird scene of Reptile stripping and fondling the woman) where they have to fight a super-strong man in a cheap gorilla costume. Pacifist Son uses his snake invincibility to eat a magic poisonous frog that Snake Woman had given him earlier; this somehow makes him go Super Saiyan, and he defeats the magic carnivorous gorilla and escapes from the pit. There’s a final show-down with Bone Shooter, Snake Woman, Reptile, Pacifist Son, and Iron Bird Legs, where everybody shoots a shit-ton of lasers out of their hands at each other. Eventually the good guys kill all the bad guys, the end.

This is an amusing diversion for a variety of reasons. The effects are, of course, garish and silly by today’s standards, but I profess a certain fondness for the earnestness of the efforts of people burdened by a lack of both money, and skill. The plot is simply marvelous. Everyone trying to get revenge on everyone else, magical beings all over the place, the most crowded fucking forest I’ve ever seen in my life. The most interesting aspect to me, though, is the explicit turning of the usual trope of the weakling Chinese valuing faggoty scholarship in the classics over the vigorous manly martial valor that we value in the West. In this movie, the protagonist explicitly tries to be the very model of a perfect Confucian ruler, and is ridiculed for it, and basically gives up on it like 15 minutes into the film when he first agrees to let Snake Woman try and teach him kung fu.

If you’re already partial to this kind of film, you’ll love it. It’s got everything you could ever want from a 1970s low-budget Hong Kong import, including a hilarious scene of a horse falling to it’s death over a cliff. If you don’t already like this kind of film, it has nothing for you that would make you change your mind. I rate this film 3.5 Glowing Hands out of 7. Props to anybody who can name the movie this image is from without looking it up.

Greetings once again, my fellow travelers in the transgressive, to another installment of Reviews You’ll (Probably) Never Use.

Last week as you’ll recall, we explored a little of the background of the wonderful Italian crime and horror genre called giallo. This week, before getting to our feature review, we’ll explore three of the main personalities which shaped and defined the giallo over the years.

Undoubtedly the father of giallo, and indeed of Italian horror in general, is Mario Bava. Born in 1914, Bava got his first taste of directing in 1956 when, as cinematographer for I Vampiri, he was asked to finish the film when the hired director walked out on the project. He later went on to direct the gothic horror masterpiece Black Sunday (not the one about the football game, this one is better) and began directing what are widely considered to be the first true giallo films in the early 60s. Bava’s start as a cinematographer and special effects man provided the early shape of the genre as being primarily concerned with the immediate visual impact on screen and the relegation of other aspects to subsidiary status. His son also made films, but aside from a promising turn with Demons, has utterly failed to live up to his old man.

Next, we have the great Lucio Fulci. His film Zombi 2 was the subject of last week’s review (not linked here because linking to my own posts seems weirdly like masturbating), and if you watched or read that, you know his game. While his wonderful Don’t Torture A Duckling showcased a fine directorial ability, in general, he became known as the king of Italian gore. Despite getting his start in comedies, eventually his films were watched with a grim fascination by folks eager to see just how much brutal violence someone could get away with putting on screen. Seriously, if you have a problem with a slow close-up shot of an open eyeball having a straight razor dragged across it, don’t watch The New York Ripper. But really you should to you know, not be a pussy. His Gates of Hell trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery) are all good to excellent and worth watching for any serious fan of horror. The Beyond is probably my personal favorite Italian horror film from this era.

Finally, we come to the director of tonight’s film, one Dario Argento. He managed to have both a prolific and influential directorial career and to produce a pretty decent-looking daughter. He will be appearing at Texas Frightmare Weekend, and I will share a photo of the gentleman after I obtain my signature and regale him with stories of how much I love his movie because fuck knows he hasn’t heard that a thousand times from rando overweight white bald misanthropes. He started off as a screenwriter for Sergio Leone on spaghetti westerns but came into his own when he moved to giallo. In fact, his nearly flawless masterpiece, Deep Red, is considered by many critics to be the supreme expression of the giallo form. No less a personage than John Carpenter has frequently cited its influence on him when making American slasher innovator, Halloween. He’s fallen off recently (seriously, I bought his Dracula starring Rutger Hauer sight unseen, and returned it, it was that fucking bad), but man, when the guy was in his prime, he could make a fucking great movie experience. One thing I’ve always thought a bit off, however, was his willingness to direct his own daughter in nude scenes. How does that go? “OK sweetie, that was a good take, but now I want to see your titties a little bit more to the left, and rub that nipple a bit more sensuously. Yes, that’s the way…rub it slowly for daddy.” I mean, I know they’re Italian, and so their mores are going to be less “the corporation bought us lunch today so we can meet a deadline” and more “fuck it, let’s hit this bottle and sportfuck until the sun comes up,” but shit man, there are limits.

Anyway, that brings us to our feature tonight, Argento’s Suspiria. The film was inspired by Suspiria de Profundis, a series of short essays by English author Thomas De Quincey. Argento thought to make three films out of the three Sorrows recounted in the essay: “Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears,” “Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs,” and “Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.” Argento would indeed go on to complete his plan with Inferno in 1980 and The Mother of Tears finally in 2007, but let’s not digress onto those paths and ruin future reviews.

The film follows American dance student Jessica Harper as she attends a prestigious academy in Freiburg, only to discover that it’s a front for witches, just like all Arthur Murray Dance Studios in real life. Suspiria is pretty much the only famous thing Harper did, though she apparently was in Minority Report in a role I don’t recall just from reading the name.

Jessica’s introduction to the academy is seeing a student flee from it while ranting during a storm. The fleeing student is then murdered in most satisfying fashion. She goes to her friend’s apartment, and a random hairy-armed intruder stabs her so damn many times in the sternum that her heart is exposed, then we get a nice close-up shot of the knife being stabbed directly into the beating heart. Then she’s hung from the skylight, the shattered debris of which falls and buries itself in her aforementioned friend’s skull. It’s easily the best opening to any movie ever made, and if you disagree, you can fuck right off with your incorrect opinions which can be disproved mathematically.

So Jessica meets the various eccentrics who staff and study at the academy. Creepy things happen, people die, and she starts to get suspicious. There’s a great scene where the blind pianist’s guide dog is possessed and rips out his owner’s throat, and tears chunks of meat out of him until a couple of polizei come running over to chase him away. Her friend Stefania Casini tries to run away from an unseen murderous fiend with a straight razor, only to fall into a storage room filled entirely with razor wire. WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK? It’s giallo, it doesn’t matter or need any explanation! But seriously as she’s struggling with the razor wire and getting cut up she gets her throat slit with the straight razor. Very tragic.

Eventually, Jessica discovers that the academy was founded by an old evil witch, and after parsing out the meaning of the opening runaway’s rant is able to find the secret passage where the academy staff congregate to perform black magic. The main baddy animates poor Stefania’s corpse, crucified on a coffin and now with needles in its eyes for some reason, to attack Jessica, but our brave Final Girl is able to see through the witch’s glamour and kill her, which causes the other witches to apparently suffer cranial bleeding and migraine headaches while the whole house tears itself apart.

Honestly, the plot isn’t as convoluted as some critics make it out to be. You do have to pay attention and give the usual allowance for a giallo film’s somewhat blasé attachment to narrative flow, but that just comes with the territory. The real sparkle of this film is in the visual realm. The entire thing is shot in imbibition Technicolor, which was seen in films such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind but was no longer widely used at the time. It produces a more vibrant, vivid color palette, almost to the point of garishness, though of course, that’s only a good thing in certain circumstances, of which this happens to be one. There is heavy emphasis on strong primary colors as the background in many scenes – the academy walls are deep blue and red velvet, and in a scene where sheets are set up as a screen so the ladies can sleep without a horde of maggots falling on them through the ceiling (watch the damn movie), as soon as the lights are out a nightmarish red backlight pulses through everything. Even in a bedroom, at night, there will be what looks like bright green or blue spotlights shining onto the actor’s faces. The damn skylight the initial victim is hung from is an enormous mosaic of bright colors. The entire thing is like a kaleidoscope given form and is really quite remarkable, and I can’t recommend it enough. Lord only knows how great it would be to watch it blazed (note to self: what am I doing this weekend?). Maybe the best part is what I have lovingly dubbed the Disco Peacock in the main witch’s bedroom. I desperately want one of these, and it also would be suitable for extended viewing while blazed.

Again, though, this is very much in the realm of art for the sake of art, so don’t go expecting some kind of Tarantino-esque dialog or Oscar-nominated stories of black folks overcoming oppression. It’s all enhanced with a great soundtrack by Goblin, long-time collaborators with Argento, and mentioned in my previous post. It’s less accessible to a standard horror audience than Zombi 2, but is ultimately superior. I award Suspiria 13 Sexy Witches out of 15.