A respectable and effective back-to-basics story, cutting itself free from the previous sequels by simply setting a new Chucky loose in a house full of new victims, then belatedly explaining how the various movies tie together.

Delivery of a mysterious doll, screaming ensues, and gramma is dead and the doll forgotten. Wheelchair single mom Mika (Fiona “daughter of Brad” Dourif) is joined by her horrible sister (“Mother Mortis” of the Insidious series) and her husband (a Hallmark Christmas movie actor) and the local priest (Adolfo Martinez of sci-fi rip-off The Terminators) so we’ll have more people to kill off. The priest suffers a car-accident decapitation, the babysitter is electrocuted via laptop and horrible sister is stabbed in the face. Husband thinks Mika did all this, until Chucky smashes his face with an axe. Mike decapitates the doll but that’s ineffective, and he wheelchairs her through the second-floor railing. While she’s bleeding out he explains that he was close with her late mom, and she’s the one who called the cops leading to the toy store chase at the beginning of part one. Now that we’ve established continuity we can have late-movie cameos by Jenny Tilly and the original Andy, all still alive at the end as Mika is shipped to the hospital for the criminally insane.

Simple fable of a violent vendetta town cluttered up with twenty characters and a flashback structure so it seems more complex than it is. Hunky doctor Gerardo, recovering from polio in the big city, is being challenged by Romulo to a duel back in his hometown. He explains that the men of his family and another have been killing each other for generations, each killer hiding out on a nearby island for a penance period afterwards. Gerardo goes home at his mom’s request, agrees to meet Romulo on the island but refuses to shoot him – an anti-macho softie ending as the two men hug it out.

Romulo is Friday in the Robinson Crusoe movie, the town priest also played priests in Archibaldo de la Cruz and El, and peacekeeping elder Don Nemesio plays the title role in the as-seen-on-MST3K Santa Claus.

Apprentice blacksmith Vincent Zhao is set to become the new shop master when he learns details of his father’s death at the hands of a heavily-tattooed Clubfoot, so he takes dad’s broken sword and heads off on a revenge quest. But the boss’s daughter likes him and tries to follow, and when he tries to help her he loses an arm.

Long frustrating recovery/training process ensues, Vincent now with some girl in another town. Sure enough he gets his revenge after inventing a one-armed half-sword whirling fighting style, and stays with the new girl, the boss’s daughter still pining for him into old age. After the increasingly safe cookie-cutter comedy-action style of the Once Upon a Time series, the most notable thing here is the electrifying anything-goes filmmaking technique, turning the action into abstract jags (as opposed to the abstract smears of Ashes of Time), matching the brutality of the story.

Demon Knight director returns with a gang of (mostly) lower-tier actors. Patrick buys a spooky murder house to turn it into a club with buddies Tia and The Resurrection Brothers. This makes Patrick’s rich realtor dad J-Bird and neighbor Pam Grier very nervous. Movie is boring and bad for 45 minutes, then they get to resurrecting Snoop Dogg and it turns crazy.

It seems Snoop was the local mensch until crack dealer Eddie Mack murdered him along with corrupt cop Loopy Lupovich, Snoop’s friend J-Bird and gf Grier betraying him out of fear. Resurrection bro Maurice finds Snoop’s skeleton and steals his ring, then Snoop reconstitutes a la Frank in Hellraiser and a ghost dog eats Maurice then vomits maggots all over Patrick and the club (also very Hellraiser). Undead Snoop proceeds to burn the place down then goes on a revenge spree until he and Grier self-immolate together. All this has already been covered in Biosalong.

Patrick had costarred with Tupac in Juice, and his girl / Grier’s daughter had recently played Diana Ross in a biopic. The corrupt cop costarred in Howling IV, realtor dad is from Dead Presidents, and the crack dealer was in Tales from the Hood, which is what Katy keeps calling this movie. Tia (the girl who gives the ghost dog a burger) is horror royalty, having starred in Ginger Snaps the year before.

Baddies:

Come die with us:

Georgie (John “Drew’s dad” Barrymore) is a 17yo nerd, his dad (Preston Foster of The Informer) a bartender, both of them getting shaken down by every tough guy in town – particularly big man Howard St. John (Strait-Jacket and Shockproof). Revenge on his mind, Georgie puts on a suit, grabs his dad’s gun, and goes out to find St. John.

Along the way he gets confused by liquor… has a nightmare flashback during a drum solo at a club… mortifyingly tries to condescendingly compliment a Black singer… makes out with Joan Lorring (The Verdict)… tries to pick up a baby while holding a gun… meets a poodle… learns some harsh truths about his pop and the world. The kid does try to kill St. John, but “just creased him” according to the cops, then decides “nothing matters to me anymore, and there’s nobody I matter to.” Dark little movie, with the sound recording quality of a ’30s film. Losey made this the same year as M, and fled to Europe before editing was finished to escape the anti-communist brigade.

Same idea as Serpent’s Path – this time Sho Aikawa’s daughter is the victim, and he dispatches some guy he assumes to be the killer within ten minutes of movie time. Now what?

A guy who looks suspiciously like Creepy but is another actor – somebody Sho presumably killed horribly in Dead or Alive, and the star of Kitano’s Getting Any? – offers the directionless Sho a job at his “import/export” company. The business of this company involves Sho stamping an endless pile of documents in a shabby office while the other guys have some kinda shakedown/blackmail/hitman thing going on. These guys appear small-time, so the boss gets involved, and the boss’s boss, and they want to recruit Sho and put down the others, but they don’t go down so easy. Similar look and tone to the other movie, but goes in a more traditionally yakuza direction.

In here somewhere is Chief Ren Osugi of Nightmare Detective… Ren’s Sonatine and Fireworks costar Susumu Terajima… Kill Bill boss Shun Sugata… but I didn’t catch character names, so I’ll sort it out during the next Kitano or Miike binge.

Kurosawa is a White Dog fan:

Great writeup by John Lehtonen. A small piece:

Eyes of the Spider is a film of emptiness, its protagonist hollowed at the outset. Empty time and empty people, and what is projected onto and, eventually, out of this emptiness. Tonally and generically dynamic, it moves its cipher hero (and Aikawa’s iconographic image) through a variety of generic scenarios and roles: the husband, the salaryman, the yakuza.

I had watched either Serpent’s Path or Eyes of the Spider (I forget which one) in the pre-blog era on VCD so after enjoying Chime (and before this year’s Serpent’s Path remake) it’s time to re/watch these in HD. They both hinge on a kid’s abduction/murder, and each main character’s plot spirals out of control, in very different ways.

Creepy Teruyuki Kagawa kidnaps gangster Yûrei Yanagi (Boiling Point) with the help of Creepy’s math professor friend Sho(w) Aikawa. But the gangster says another guy did the crime, and they have to keep kidnapping gangsters. The second guy (the husband in Door) fingers a third guy (a minor player in early Miike films), who takes them to the room where they’ve made torture videos for profit (these rooms were common in late 90s/early 00s horror).

Sho and Creepy:

Why is Professor Sho capably handling all the details and abductions here, what’s his deal? And why is he privately coaching the abductees on what to say? I guess he’s just trying to help kill as many members of this organization as possible – including Creepy, who it’s revealed used to work in their organization and therefore thought his own family would be exempt from the business. Darkest subject matter given a matter-of-fact tone with an absurd edge.

Michael Sicinski:

Formally, we can already see Kurosawa’s primary style taking shape; the clinical viewpoint and tendency toward long shots emphasize both an objective, godlike perspective as well as a sense that the film frame is a container, trapping its characters in culture and history. If the overt narrative of Serpent’s Path is somewhat vague, Kurosawa fills in all the crevices with a pervasive dread. Considering Kurosawa’s earliest work was purely genre based, here we see him breaking away from those strictures in a fairly dramatic fashion.

Starts as a decent movie with great music, then a bereft revenge dad comes into the defunct police station pursued by a gang of killers, their initial attack kills the lesser actors, and the second half of the film is nothing but perfection.

That first attack: seemingly infinite guys getting blown away trying to climb through windows, like a zombie invasion. When the cops start tossing guns to their prisoners to help defend the station, you know Carpenter means business. Afterwards, the gang hides the bodies outside and lays low waiting for the next wave, while passing patrol cars get reports of gunfire but can’t see anything. Prison transporter Starker is among the dead, and the sick prisoner, and a police secretary – we’re left with her coworker Leigh, Death Row Wilson, Lt. Bishop, and Prisoner Wells, who makes it underground to a getaway car but gets blown away by thugs hiding within. The other three, low on ammo, hold off the second attack with the help of a mobile barricade and some explosives.

Remade, reportedly not very well, with Laurence Fishburne and Ethan Hawke in the 2000s. The late Starker was rewarded for his service with roles in three more Carpenter pictures. Leigh starred in a Jean Eustache movie of all things, then disappeared so hard that there was a documentary about the attempt to locate her. Wilson was a TV non-regular with a small part in Eraserhead. Wells became a regular in the Rocky franchise the same year. And I hope Bishop had a fine theater career because his other movies looked terrible, until 40+ years later when Carpenter fan Rob Zombie cast him in 3 From Hell.

On Oscars night I thought we should watch something that never* won an award, and so, Conan.

Painted-up horseback killers arrive and destroy young Conan’s town, kill his dad first, then James Earl Jones (with beautiful long hair and named Salsa Doom) beheads Conan’s mom and takes all the town’s kids to be millwheel slaves. Our kid grows into Arnold whilst pushing the millwheel, then gets thrown into gladiator battle where he caves in the other guy’s head, leading to a montage of him killing a lot of guys and “realizing his sense of worth,” haha. After the one-on-one fights in Universal Soldier 6, the chaotic action mishmash of this was bound to disappoint. Impressed, his slavemasters send him to fighting school but some redbeard randomly frees him then he immediately finds a kickass Earth God sword.

The Empty Man, Earth God:

Arnold doesn’t know how to socialize properly, so he has sex with a sorceress while she’s in the middle of reciting his prophecy, then hurls her into the fireplace. He meets Gerry Lopez (thief, archer, and surfer in Milius’s Big Wednesday) and they run around Spain to the lovely adventure music of Basil Poledouris (later a Verhoeven accomplice). Soon after he punches a camel, they meet a cute lady thief (Sandahl Bergman of Hell Comes to Frogtown) and together rob a snake-cult tower and behead the snake god within.

King Max von Sydow congratulates them and sends them on a mission to unkidnap his daughter from the snake cult. Conan ditches the others and runs the rescue mission solo for some reason, asking directions from some hippies, and meeting wizard Mako (The Bird People in China) who lends him a camel, which he learns should be ridden, not punched. Arriving in snaketown, Arnold seduces some guy to steal his cult robes, but he’s not very sneaky and Salsa Doom’s men crucify him on the tree of woe. Really shouldn’t have come alone.

His buddies arrive belatedly and Mako kwaidans him back to life. They sneak in and massacre the palace guards, getting green soup everywhere, while Salsa Doom transforms into a snake and crawls off. The cute girl thief dies of snake wounds before Arnold can find a fireplace to hurl her into. Arnold heals up and goes back to slash his way through more guys, with help from buddies Gerry and Mako and the ghost of his dead girlfriend, beheads Salsa Jones and all the cultists go home. Ends slowly, with a sequel setup, but instead of Conan the Destroyer (a Richard Fleischer/Jack Cardiff joint, shorter, with Grace Jones) I think I’m supposed to watch the Lucio Fulci ripoff Conquest.

*This lost Saturn awards to Star Trek II, Tron, E.T., The Dark Crystal, and Poltergeist, a pretty good lot, but in 2001 it won a DVD commentary award. I listened to a couple minutes of commentary around the camel-punching scene, and nah, I would’ve gone with Charlie’s Angels.

Guess this was technically a rewatch since I remember catching it on cable at Brad’s house in 1983… now that it’s fresh in my mind, bring on the new Mandico version. Milius had recently cowritten Apocalypse Now and 1941, I guess he was into warfare in every era. Producer Dino de Laurentiis also made Halloween III and Amityville II this year, and Edward Pressman and Oliver Stone had just made The Hand.