Not All Heroes Wear Collars

Welcome to the Annual February Shortening! In honor of the shortest month on a blog written by a short woman, all posts are devoted to stories about vertically challenged villains. If you, reader of any height, have your own mini-horror to share, do so in the comments and I'll include you in a final post roundup as the calendar changes!

and for the English speakers:

Quick Plot: Li Tung is growing annoyed by his upstairs neighbors and their late night floor banging (noise-making, not the sexy kind). He knocks on their door to discover an old apologetic man, his attractive daughter, and an even more attractive black cat. The next day, the household has moved, but Li Tung can't quite shake the feeling that something was off. He sneaks into their empty apartment to discover a horrifying bloodstain.

The cops aren't thrilled to waste their morning on what turns out to be cat remains. Li Tung joins police inspector Wang at the modern mansion of suave novelist friend Wisely' to discuss the case further as the city experiences its own unusual crime: the mysterious museum theft of an artifact called "the octagon". 

By a cat.

And mushroom blob monster.

No, they're not working together. See, the cat is actually an alien general in the body a kickass cat, and the mushroom blob monster is its sworn enemy with the power to possess the puny human bodies it touches.The adventurous Wisely is now fully entrenched in helping to save the world, though he, like so many mere mortals, initially suspects the cat of villainy. 

Yes, I know: The Shortening is a month of vertically challenged villains, but The General is actually quite heroic. I THINK he saves the world? But it takes a LITTLE time to make that clear, and when we see him pitted against a lovable mastiff in an all-out brawl, we're not necessarily rooting for him. 

Until, of course, we see his incredible battle skills.

Cinema is filled with memorable fight scenes. Rocky vs. Apollo Creed, Luke vs. Vader, The Bride vs. Vernita Green, Nada vs. Frank. I'm sure there are plenty of listicles with scientific rankings, but I tell you now, dear reader, that if said ranking does not include The General vs. Lau Pu, aka Alien Cat v. Good Dog In Junkyard, then said list should only be used as litter. It means NOTHING.

The Cat was made by Lam Ngai Kai, an extraterrestrial in the form of human director best known for the magnificently zany Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki. The Cat is on par. There are just as many explosions and bug-eyed dummies, plus the added thrills of an electrifying mushroom blob monster and, you know, THE CAT. 

They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Most never make this ANYWHERE.

High Points

I can't possibly oversell the puppet cat vs. paper mache dog junkyard battle because it is EPIC and so much more than you can possibly imagine, so much more than you can ever deserve

Low Points

Until someone promises me that no animals were harmed in the making of The Cat, I'll withhold SOME of my intense enthusiasm 

Lessons Learned

Vodka is the strongest wine in the world

Always stock your home bar with top shelf alcohol, both for optimum cocktail service and most effective molotov cocktail service

Cats are the social equivalent of blacksmiths

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Cat is streaming on the Criterion Channel. Your life will be better after you experience it.

Second Time Singing the Baby Blues

As I compiled my list of Shortening offerings, I became a little worried. It's not February here at the Doll's House without at least one evil toy, but six years into this blog, it's becoming harder and harder to films of that ilk that I haven't seen, written about, or referenced. Are we nearing the end of dollhood?

Goodness no, and thanks to the beauty of Netflix Instant Watch and Hong Kong, I don't even have to resort to whatever outtakes Charles Band has compiled into a 72 minute excuse for a film. Sifting through Netflix, I was thrilled to come upon today's feature. I mean, just LOOK at that cover!

Quick Plot: An attractive young couple moves into a sprawling and fairly isolated home with no drawbacks (save, for the fact that for whatever reason, their only neighbor is a cheerful homeless man living in a shanty of sorts across the street).  A box from the previous owners includes a creepy little doll wearing a turtleneck, and if we learned nothing from Puppetmaster or From Beyond the Grave, it's that one should never relax around a doll in a turtleneck.

Homeless neighbor across the street warns the couple of omens, but they settle in happily, especially after songwriter Hubby (I never caught his name and IMDB is confusing, so I'll call him what his wife does) finds his inspiration. It's pretty much the best scene of all time. Allow me to set up:

Hubby is hanging upside down from the ceiling, which sort of makes sense from a struggling artist with athleticism point of view. As he swings back and forth, Hubby knocks the Creepy Doll In a Turtleneck onto his piano, where it hits a few notes before landing on the ground. Those notes, my friends, are EVIL.

We don't quite know that yet, and actually, now that I think through the rest of the movie, maybe they're just a byproduct? See, Baby Blues has a lot going on, but it doesn't seem in any hurry to actually deal with it all.

In addition to an EVIL song (it's so evil that it causes one pop star to get into a car accident and another to spill a lot of scotch) co-produced by a Creepy Doll In a Turtleneck, Wifey Tian (but c'mon: let's call her Wifey) becomes pregnant with twins after an amorous evening overseen by the Creepy Doll In a Turtleneck whose eyes bleed. When one child doesn't survive, Wifey is diagnosed with the titular 'baby blues,' postpartem depression that in this case, leads her to treat the Creepy Doll In a Turtleneck Whose Eyes Bleed as if he were her elder baby boy Jimmy.

I have no idea who Baby Blues was made for. In an American theater, it would probably be rated PG-13, although its storyline is far more geared towards adults with career and family worries than the typical Friday night young adult and tween crowd who just want to see some jump scares. There's an odd reluctance to ever REALLY go for darkness, even though there is certainly some horrific subject matter at play.

Thankfully, we're not talking about that OTHER low budget horror film I watched a few years ago also called Baby Blues. That movie made me want to track the filmmaker down and perform Bart Simpson quality prank phone calls on his private line. We're not in that camp.

This Baby Blues is just tonally very strange. Our only real body count comes from the tragedy of a stillborn birth and a few hazy flashbacks about the fates of past residents of the home. There's a genuinely horrific moment involving a baby being dropped from a very high deck, but it's ultimately resolved in a rather easy manner that undercuts its own horror.

Still, we do get a dream sequence that involves an evil child in a tuxedo, and for that, I give this film a passing grade.

High Points

When Wifey is kind of dull, her little bike-riding, punch-giving, wine-drinking, popstar-slamming tomboy sister is KICK. ASS.

Low Points

The general lightness of a movie that seems to want to go darker kept me from loving Baby Blues, although I was always interested in where it was going

Lessons Learned

CPR can pretty easily be achieved by simply beating up a new corpse

Doctors don't lie!

Like all media, Baby Blues teaches us a well-known fact: anytime a woman vomits, she will, within two minutes, discover that she is pregnant

Never doubt the warnings given by the friendly homeless man who just so happens to occupy the shanty across the street

Rent/Bury/Buy

It's hard to recommend Baby Blues because I feel that the majority of horror film fans will be annoyed and disappointed. But there's something strangely charming about such an innocent take on a killer (sorta) doll movie. Viewers who don't require a high body count in their horror may be able to enjoy this for its quirks. I certainly did.

Just Like Oz, But With More Asians & Less Rape

Due to Gmail’s one weak spot of user unfriendliness, I accidentally deleted my original draft of Riki Oh: The Story of Riki. As all you writers out there know, losing a few paragraphs is more than disheartening. It can kill that spark of inspiration, making you wonder if it’s worth going on when so much passion has already been wasted.

Then I thought about the scene where a character seemingly commits hari-kari, then calls his opponent over so that he can try to strangle the victor with his own now-hanging-out intestines, prompting a cheeky villain on the sidelines to comment “He’s got a lot of guts!” and it dawned on me that NOT sharing this film with you readers would be a crime worthy of being choked to death by someone’s entrails.

Quick Plot: In the future of 2001 (just go with it), prison facilities have become privatized and are now handled by greedy corporations, prompting plenty of corruption and in-house crime. Enter Riki Oh, a young man who sets metal detectors on fire because he’s so badass, he never had five bullets removed from his chest. Riki was a former student of some Jedi-like martial art practice, rendering him invincible and awesome. Ain’t no crooked assistant warden’s glass eye and hook hand gonna beat THAT!

But oh, how glorious it is to see him and his minions try! Remember how awesome Punisher: War Zone was for featuring multiple punch-through-facings? Riki Oh makes that movie look like My Little Pony, and sure, now I’m having a strange craving to see a reimagined My Little Pony with face punchings and Dominic West, but that’s beside the point, the point being Riki Oh is amazing.

We’re talking having a character sew up his wound with his very own dangling skin. We’re talking screaming alone in a rainy prison yard as if The Shawshank Redemption could hear ten years into the future. We’ve got wacky dubbing that lets extras sound like low level New Yawkahs in a ‘40s gangster movie and multiple villains with extreme haircuts. As if that weren’t enough, as if we lowly viewers even DESERVED anything more, there is an outstanding use of a terrible dummy on display at the 2/3rds mark.

I loved this movie. I love everyone involved in making this exist, I love LOVE love everyone and anyone who had any place in seeing that this film got seen by me, from the boys at VCinema for recommending it eons ago to the Netflix employee who sealed the envelope and dropped it in the mail for my beloved postal representative to deliver to my apartment. This is a ridiculous film, one filled from top to bottom with organs being torn out of oversized bodies, men turning into gobbly giants, and heroes poking out villains’ eyes to immediately toss aside for the fastest moving vultures to swoop in and feast upon.

This movie is pure glory.

High Points

The part where it started

Low Points

The part where it ended

Lessons Learned

Human beings can be very breakable

The going rate for commissioning a kill inside prison walls in 2001? 30 pounds of rice

There is nothing that can’t be punched through, be it cement or human stomachs

Rent/Bury/Buy

Here’s a film screaming for a deluxe special edition Blu Ray—nay, here’s a film PUNCHING YOU THROUGH YOUR MOHAWKED FACE for a deluxe special edition Blu Ray. Watching Riki Oh: The Story of Riki was easily one of the most fun-filled viewing experiences I’ve had in some time, and by golly, I would be a terrible person if I didn’t convince you to do the same. Blind buy it, and if that means selling your VHS porn collection (on display in the warden’s office, no less) in order to do so, then that’s the price you pay.

Not the One With Rachel Weisz

“In a crazy city, if one is to survive, one must be more than crazy.”

 Easily one of the best opening quotes I’ve heard!

 Quick Plot: We open with the brutal slaying of an apartment security guard in 2007.

 We’ll get back to that.

Meet Sheung (Josie Ho, redeeming herself from the horrid Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li), a bank telemarketer by day, retail employee by night, and unhappy dreamer during both. Sheung longs to buy her own flat in the spiffy part of town, something she’s wanted ever since her unhappy childhood where she witnessed her own neighbors cruelly driven out of their homes by greedy developers and violent mobs.  Now an adult with just enough savings, Sheung is ready to make an offer on a 2-bedroom with a seaside view and nothing--NOTHING--will stop her.

 So back to that strangle-stab...

Dream Home is essentially a slasher, but one done with such innovation that it almost elevates the category. Sheung embarks on a brutal murder spree, but the film threads that one massacre throughout its running time, alternating between Sheung’s childhood flashbacks, the buildup towards the sale gone wrong, and Sheung’s determined attacks upon anyone in her way, be they drunk punks, trigger-happy cops, or wealthy pregnant women.

As a result of its structure, Dream Home does something very important: it makes us understand Sheung’s actions. That’s not to say we agree with them or cheer her on--no character can be likable enough to do what she does with a vacuum to a mom-to-be--but we see how and why an everyday woman could take this path. Sheung has dreamt about this chance for her entire life, and just when she gets it, that pesky housing market takes another turn and suddenly, it’s once again out of her reach. It’s NOT fair, but of course, that doesn’t justify mass homicide.

There’s a smart mix of horror, smart satire, and gooey old gore in Dream Home. The marriage isn’t perfect, but for 100 minutes, it’s incredibly fascinating.

High Points

Dream Home isn’t quite a black comedy, but there are some hysterically horrific elements to it, especially once the bloodshed really starts to drip. A fairly lengthy sequence involving sharp bongs, a naked hooker, and Sheung’s determinism is both a great horror scene AND bit of comedy

Low Notes

I didn’t quite have this problem, but I know many a viewer has taken issue with Sheung’s coldness and the idea that our protagonist has little redeeming value. I’m going to draw a strained comparison to Kristen Wiig’s unhappy Annie in Bridesmaids, another female character making the wrong decisions. Like Annie, Sheung dates a man who treats her terribly and feels sorry for herself, even if her life is still easier than many. I don’t know about you, but I know both women because we ARE human. Too often films—particularly horror—delegate female characters to simple Madonna or whore categories. Sheung is by no means cinema’s new treasure, but her flaws are real and fascinating

Lessons Learned

All men care about is the 19th hole

Forcing cocaine upon a passed out drunk will reward you with having your crotch vomited upon

When in doubt, pay for the night. Hourly love motel rates are a secret killer

Rent/Bury/Buy

I had heard plenty of other bloggers recommend Dream Home (beginning with Mattsuzaka with this fine older review) and having finally sat down with it, I couldn’t agree more. This is as funny as it is scary, satirical in its view of class lines but shocking in its violence. Best of all, it’s a slasher with a brain, one that toys with structure in a way I’ve never quite seen. Stream it on Instant Watch if you can or pick it up cheap. Trust me. It’s good.

Forest of (Boredom to) Death

We’ve all seen M. Night Shamalaongadong’s The Happening. We’ve all learned the wonders of SCIENCE! and the horror of DYING BEES! and non-importance of sharing TEERAMEESUE! and, perhaps most importantly, the absolute wonders of something called a HOT DOG. If The Happening has done anything of note in the 21st century, that something is make it far easier for any other film to feature evil flora and come off with at least one compliment:

It’s better than The Happening.

Marky Mark almost always agrees with that statement

Quick Plot: An unusual forest is becoming home to a gaggle of suicides and a vicious rape-murder. When an investigating detective dies of a heart attack under the trees, a flighty reporter named May launches an exploitive news series on the forest’s mystical hauntings, trying her darnest to rein in some help from her botanist boyfriend Shu-Hoi, an obsessive man who’d rather carry out experiments in his greenhouse. A dead-serious female detective named Ha (stop it, it’s not funny) jumps on the case with some help from Shu-Hoi, dragging the sleazy suspected rapist into the woods with a gang of reporters where the trees somehow drag out a hilarious, condom-eating confession.

That’s about the first hour of Forest of Death, though it feels akin to three weeks and half a Monday. This is a slowwwwwww film. And not an overly interesting one, despite the promise of evil forestry, ghosts, rape, and condom snacks. 

The idea of a botanist hero is fun. But Shu-Hoi is not. He’s a handsome enough scientist, but saddle the poor nerd with a shrewish Gale Weathers-lite girlfriend and it’s hard to really like him. As Detective Ha, Shu Qi is easily the most interesting character onscreen, but it’s a shame that the film feels the need to hint at a relationship that’s never actually there between her and Shu-Hoi. It’s like Forest of Death made a bold decision to feature a strong female center, then remembered she was attractive and hence warranted a tepid love triangle. It’s somewhat insulting.

There’s also the matters of storytelling and pacing, something Forest of Death seems to make up as it goes along. Once the main crime is resolved (rather hilariously, might I add), the film just kind of limps along for another half hour. It’s as if you entered a wave pool where the waves were REALLY rough, then it was time to turn it off and you hung out, eventually realizing the waves would never come back on because the person that pushes the wave button is taking a really long lunch. So you leave. And the credits roll. And Emily is left feeling very unhappy.

High Points

I like the idea of these three stories--Ha’s investigation, May’s sensationalist reporting and Shu-Hoi’s plant talking--and how they could interweave. It’s certainly not a bad starting point for a film...

Low Points

...except Forest of Death never does anything interesting at all with them

Lessons Learned

Hong Kong journalists are, on average, 17 years old

Post-coital secret sharing only works when you or your partner enjoy the coitus

Lab plants dig a good funky beat

Rent/Bury/Buy

Meh. I watched Forest of Death because it was expiring on Instant Watch and now that it’s gone, good riddance. This isn’t an awful or incompetent movie, but I personally kind of sorta really did hate it. Slow, plodding, aimless, and somehow unoriginal despite being about lie detecting plants. Hardcore Asian horror enthusiasts might still appreciate some of its aspects, but I’d much rather pop in Little Shop of Horrors and recall my childhood crush on Rick Moranis than sit through this one again. 

Then again, I kind of ALWAYS want to watch Little Shop of Horrors and moon over Rick Moranis’ adorableness, so perhaps that’s an unfair comparison. Here’s a better one: I’d rather watch William Friedken stumble all over a tree lover-themed horror film in The Guardian than rewatch Forest of Death. 

Heck, I’d rather watch William Friedken eat a condom than rewatch this movie. I’d rather--

I’ll stop before I say something illegal. We’ll leave the last word to Oscar nominee Marky Mark: