I rented Iron Monkey on DVD this weekend. Very cool flick. The acting is poor to awful and the plot is straight out of a saturday morning cartoon, but still it’s a fun and entertaining flick with awesome kung fu action. If you’re a fan of kung fu flicks you’ll almost definitely like it. Plus some of the dialog is great for unexpected laughs – at one point a 12-13 year old kid exclaims

My kungfu is good!

After beating ass on a gang of thugs.

Yes it is son, yes it is 😉

On a whim, I bid on a copy of a Japanese flick, Battle Royale, after catching a reference to it that piqued my interest. I watched it this weekend. The plot is a sort of mix of Arnold’s “the Running Man” and “Lord of the Flies” with a hint of “the Most Dangerous Game.’ A 40 or so person junior high school class of Japanese students is sentenced to Battle Royale on an uninhabited island. Each is given a random weapon, some supplies, and forced to wear a collar that will explode if they try to escape or linger too long in areas of the island that have been declared off limits. They have 3 days to kill each other off down to the last student, otherwise all of their collars will explode, killing everyone. What follows is brutal (and I mean brutal) violence as the kids careen around the island doing each other in with crossbows, automatic weapons, hatchets, poison, and various other implements of violence.

All in all it was an entertaining ‘b’ caliber flick. The ending is too pat, the violence is disgustingly explicit, and there are some plot holes you could park a corrola in, but I still enjoyed it.

Apparantly there is zero hope of this ever making it to the US. As far as I can tell the best way to score a copy is off of ebay, where you can find it for as little as $6 on VCD and around $20 on DVD.

I saw Following last night. This is by the same fellow who did Memento, which I really enjoyed, so I had high hopes for this movie. I was not disappointed. This is a ‘small’ movie – unknown cast, low budget, only a few sets and a few characters, and it’s shot in black and white. Even so it’s compelling stuff with a tight script and a tense ‘where is this going’ feel to it. Plus the director plays with sequence such that you really have to pay a bit of attention to keep track of where you are in the story. Not to the degree that he does in Memento but enough that you have to pay attention to it. All in all I would say Memento was the more entertaining movie, but that’s not to say you should skip this one. Three stars from me.

I went to see Brotherhood of the Wolf this weekend. It’s well worth catching while it’s still in the theaters. It’s a horror/martial arts/period piece flick from, of all places, France. The plot’s based on a historical event, but just barely, and covers the appearance of a murderous supernatural beast in rural France and the efforts of the main characters to get rid of it. The action is truly superb and the cinematography is very cool, lots of swooping camera angles, slo-mo/fastforwad effects and really awesome morphs between scenes. The movie is also chock full of great costumes and sets. Be warned though – it’s subtitled and it clocks in at over 2 and a half hours. And about 30 minutes of this feels a bit….it could have stayed on the cutting room floor and the movie would have been just as good. But still, all in all, well worth your $7.

Between Lord of the Rings and this movie I am really wishing they would bring back the intermission. People need to pee and 2 and a half hours is too frigging long to sit in rapt attention.

I don’t have anything particularly erudite to say about this flick, but I warn you in no uncertain terms, it’s an utter piece of crap. The movie has no redeeming qualities. Well, ok, wait, there is one redeeming quality – one of the annoying characters ends up being killed off. But it’s the least annoying character in a movie populated with very annoying characters so it’s small solace. Don’t rent it, don’t watch it on cable, don’t even watch it on regular tv. That’s my .02 cents.