by ·Comments Off on Cloud (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Ryosuke and Akiko are a young couple driven by money (he’s new, she starred in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy). He quits his factory job to get rich buying junk (like pricey Sailor Moon snowglobes) and reselling it online, guided by schoolmate Muraoka (the First Love guy) and with help from very loyal assistant Sano.

But somebody is after him from the beginning, laying tripwires in his bike path and throwing car parts through his window, and soon his online identity gets doxxed and a gang of aggrieved customers who got ripped off by his fake designer handbags are after him, breaking into his house and Serpent’s Path-ing him for revenge. I’m not sure what all this double-crossing gun intrigue adds up to, besides the dreamlike final scene which spells out that unchecked greed will lead you to hell.

The Arkanoid Conspiracy:

Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:

The sound mix elevates the humming of Yoshii’s computer monitor, as if the digitally transmitted virus of Pulse were still going strong years later. The inexplicable proliferation of evil is often Kurosawa’s beat, which can help explain the derangement exhibited by Yoshii’s enemies, a portrayal of capitalism’s deleterious effects as ethics-overriding brainworms. Maintaining a surface tonal grimness while turning the screws on Yoshii, Cloud is nonetheless one of Kurosawa’s goofier outings, full of manic outbursts and violence whose extravagance borders on comic.

by ·Comments Off on Silvestre (1982, Joao Cesar Monteiro)

Supremely cool movie, the artificial look gave me flashbacks to Perceval Le Gallois. I guess I like Monteiro now, and there’s plenty more to see.

Without Affinity I don’t know how to remove weird watermarks:

Maria de Medeiros looked exactly the same age 22 years later in The Saddest Music in the World, doesn’t transform from a damsel into the warrior Silvestre until the last 40 minutes. Her sister was in Francisca the same year, went on to star in Tabu. Luis Miguel Cintra is the villain here, and Paio also played second fiddle to Cintra in Ilha dos Amores and Satin Slipper.

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent’s Path (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.

by ·Comments Off on The Temple Woods Gang (2022, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)

Local gang carjacks some valuables from a Saudi prince who likes to dance incognito at grungy clubs. The gang is friendly with Mr. Pons, whose mom just died, and they seem like good-natured dudes, hanging out feeding the pigeons, but the prince’s guy hires Elite Jim, who suspects these guys straight away, and quickly hunts/kills them all. Mr. Pons is an ex-army sniper, which means he’s got a long gun wrapped in a carpet hidden in a storage locker somewhere, and out it comes for some fast revenge. I wouldn’t have started watching if I’d remembered Rabah made the decently forgettable South Terminal, but this one’s better: a grounded version of the crime/revenge movie.

by ·Comments Off on Rebel Ridge (2024, Jeremy Saulnier)

Mid-Sized Sedan is an elite ex-military dude trying to bail out his doomed brother, but a corrupt small-town sheriff’s department decides to fuck with him, so MSS must take revenge with the help of a cute whistleblower. Mostly this is tense and excellent, but it gets too tangled and plotty. They could’ve taken a lesson from another movie about a one-man war against crooked authority figure Don Johnson by streamlining the story in the movie’s second half, not adding more and more story.

by ·Comments Off on Curse of Chucky (2013, Don Mancini)

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.

by ·Comments Off on The River and Death (1955, Luis Buñuel)

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.

by ·Comments Off on The Blade (1995, Tsui Hark)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Bones (2001, Ernest R. Dickerson)

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: