Burning Paradise (1994)

As God is my witness, it had nothing to do with Ed Kowalczyk.  The erstwhile singer for Live used to have a largely shaved head with a long, braided ponytail.  This was something I wanted to do with my hair.  This was also back when I was initially going bald and fought tooth and nail against this by growing what hair I had long (I’m slightly ashamed to say that, yes, Virginia, there was a skullet).  I wanted to just have a small patch of hair growing from the back of my head and a wicked long tail forming from it.  The difference between Mr. Kowalczyk and myself (I assume) is that I was inspired by a lifelong love of martial arts films.  It was to the point that I actually wanted to dye this thing white like the great, old, cinematic Kung Fu masters of old (the better to toss over my shoulder and cackle malevolently).  Thing is, not only was I going bald (something I swiftly learned to accept and let go of fairly gracefully), but what hair I had was insanely curly, so, no matter what length I grew my tresses out to, they wound up being about down to my shoulder once the follicles dried after a shower.  This was in no way like my idiotic attempt to mimic Kurt Harland of Information Society’s locks (a tale I told in a previous review; track it down, if you dare).  This was more like…I hesitate to use the word “serendipity.”  More like dumb luck or shitty coincidence.  Either way, every single time I watch a film like Ringo Lam’s Burning Paradise (aka Huo Shao Hong Lian Si aka Destruction of the Red Lotus Temple aka Rape of the Red Temple), I’m reminded of this ignoble chapter of my life.  Thank Christ, I went completely bald before I was able to get this thing off the ground (but, sadly, before bald was considered sexy).

Burning Paradise is yet another in the long list of films about the legendary Wuxia hero Fong Sai Yuk (here played by Willie Chi).  He and his Shaolin brothers oppose the vicious Manchus, and, while escaping from their clutches, he and his elder Chi-Nun (Kuei Li) meet the lovely Tou-Tou (Carman Lee).  Needless to say, the Manchus clutches are, in fact, inescapable, and our protagonists find themselves prisoners of the reptilian Lord Kung (Kam-Kong Wong), warden of the Red Lotus Temple.  Much martial arts mayhem ensues.

I am in no way an expert on the character of Fong Sai Yuk, and, frankly, I simply don’t have the time to correct this.  I do know that he is an extremely popular character (I’m still confused whether or not he was an actual person, but that’s neither here nor there when discussing films like this one).  The picture’s scenario is one we’ve seen many times before.  Fong is young, highly skilled, and a staunch opponent of a totalitarian government.  This is nothing new in the Wuxia genre.  Truly, a great many movies from a great many countries center on this type of struggle.  The two cinematic genres that best capture this conflict, to my mind, are martial arts films and science fiction films.  This is because it is more palatable to a mass audience to augment the totalitarianism on display to encompass wild flights of fantasy.  It entertains while making a point, one that needs no true reinforcement since most people empathize, on some level, with the notion that their own government is not on their side.  Or worse, they are apathetic to the common folks’ plight (as people love to wryly exclaim, it can never happen here, right?).  What Lam and company do with this movie, and this is something that one could argue that the vast majority of martial arts films do, is play with elements of the western.  It is set in the desert.  The house at the beginning of the film is straight out of the American Southwest (I kept thinking of Stagecoach and The Wild Bunch whenever it was on screen).  The characters are more hands-on versions of gunfighters, their skills being continually challenged until a final duel settles all scores.  The heroes come into a situation where they are required to free a “town” (okay, here a prison full of Shaolin devotees) from a gang of “outlaws” (here an entire government; the major difference between the two genres being this dichotomy).  The heroes are attempting to civilize a savage land (here through their Shaolin beliefs and practices).  The dynamics are essentially the same despite the divergences in the details.  I would argue that Lam understood this connection, because he not only embraces it but also borrows (as just about every filmmaker in existence has, consciously or unconsciously; just ask Orson Welles) from the visual vocabulary of John Ford.  Burning Paradise is littered with frames within frames, and there is even a direct reference to Ford’s famous doorway shot from The Searchers.  This, layered on top of some classic Hong Kong action stylings helps push this film into the top tier of the genre, in my opinion.

The film also centers heavily on the idea of passions.  Fong is passionate about his fight against the Manchus.  He is passionate about how he finds his Shaolin brother Hong (Yamson Domingo) in the temple prison.  He is passionate about Tou-Tou, and not just physically.  Similarly, characters like Boroke (Chun Lam), Kung’s right hand, have passions outside the martial world.  She craves the touch of a man, allowing her feelings to sway her professional decisions.  Tou-Tou is a former brothel worker, a place where passion is rented, yet she cares enough about Fong to sacrifice her freedom for him.  The setting for the film is a metaphor for Hell, its inhabitants working constantly at blazing forges, shaping weapons for their enemies to use against the prisoners’ friends and families.  Perhaps the most significant symbol of passion is the villain Kung.  In public, he is aloof, can’t be bothered with these gnats that pester him so.  In private is another matter.  When he goes to Tou-Tou for the first time, he wants her to resist, to fight back, to give him some sense that he’s still alive.  His bigger passion, however, is art.  He paints throughout the film, dark, ominous images, reflective of his soul.  He even incorporates art into his Kung Fu style, using paper like flying daggers and paint droplets like bullets.  

Burning Paradise is as kinetic, inventive, and awe-inspiring as any Hong Kong action film I can think of (perhaps even moreso than many).  Lam marries the darker elements (and there are some pretty dark elements in this thing) with fast-moving action with bouts of gore with some great humor beats (that are refreshingly un-cringeworthy and mesh nicely into the rhythm).  It does all of this while giving its characters some depth and compelling us to want to follow the villains as much as the heroes.

MVT:  Lam’s near-flawless union of the variegated components.

Make or Break:  The bedroom scene between Kung and Tou-Tou is simultaneously scary, insightful, and melancholy.

Score:  8/10

Darkside Blues (1994)

Let me see if I can get this right.  The Hazuki family run a corporation called Persona Century that basically owns most of the world.  A group of resistance fighters (the Anti-Personas) struggle against them and their Enhanced Human assassins.  Mai (Kotono Mitsuishi) and Kenzo (Akio Otsuka) are a couple of mercenaries (?) who call themselves Messiah, and they are hired by a wounded revolutionary named Tatsuya to protect him.  Meanwhile, the nebulous Darkside (Akira Natsuki) comes on the scene in his intergalactic carriage, and there’s a young boy named Katari (Nozomu Sasaki) who may be more than he seems (but what does he seem to be?).

If ever a nation embraced the whole Goth thing (and embraced it early), I would suggest from an outsider’s perspective that it was the Japanese.  At least partially inspired by the punk movement, Goths love their eyeliner, puffy shirts, and late Eighteenth/early Nineteenth Century outerwear.  While, Noboyasu and Yoshimichi Furukawa’s Darkside Blues showcases at least two out of three of these things, it also combines them with the other thing the Japanese seem to love: science fiction.  Perhaps the best example of this melding of aesthetics is the Vampire Hunter D franchise, but unfortunately, we’re not discussing those.  So, for example, the Hazukis live on an asteroid that orbits the Earth.  The aforementioned Enhanced Humans are basically psychotic cyborgs.  There is a machine that turns people into gold statues.  Mai has a wrist blaster.  On the Goth side, the Hazuki manse is baroque and grotesque like Dracula’s castle is typically portrayed.  The first shot of the film is a clock with thirteen hours on it.  A gross-looking spider swings off it and drapes it in red webbing.  Darkside dresses like Baron Frankenstein (though I would contend the biggest influence on the character is likely Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, another Goth icon), and his horse-drawn carriage moves through time and space (he enters the film via a ripple in the fourth dimension, which I always thought was Time, but what do I know?) like the Silver Surfer’s surfboard or The Doctor’s TARDIS.  Like everything else in the film, however, the two artistic tastes just kind of float around in each other’s proximity.  They don’t combine with each other, they don’t really define anything in the film, and there’s so much left unsaid about almost everything having anything to do with them, it’s confusing as hell.

Add to this the fact that Darkside is also a drifter cowboy figure (he does wear boots and spurs) in the tradition of Yojimbo, High Plains Drifter, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, et al (and please note, I’m fully aware that two of these are remakes of another of them).  He appears in a town that needs him, does something to save them (this is extremely arguable in this case), and then kind of fades away.  He stays at the local small time hotel with the “colorful” proprietor (here an old woman and her cat).  Mai naively falls in love with him, even though this love can never be requited (he’s a loner, Mai; a rebel).  What Darkside doesn’t have like a cowboy is a six-shooter.  Instead, he does this thing where he transports whomever he’s with into another dimension.  There, they can battle, relive past traumas, and so forth.  Darkside refers to what he does as “Renewal,” like he’s an amalgamation of a shrink and some New Age bullshit guru.  Instead of dueling in the streets, Darkside forces people to face the truth about themselves.  That said, he’s not above actually fighting and/or killing people in this dreamtime realm of his; it’s just not his go-to maneuver.  

Doorways play a large part in the film.  Everything from windows to mirrors to, yes, doorways are employed, and they relate to the idea of portals.  Katari carries around a small glass globe, and he uses it to open doorways to (I’m assuming here) the Fourth Dimension.  This same portal manifests in the gigantic mirror in the Hazuki compound.  It also appears in the entrance to Tamaki Hazuki’s personal torture chamber.  Darkside makes his arrival through all of these simultaneously.  The doors to the Mirage Hotel where our protagonist stays are focused on at great length, and the lobby itself is a portal to the individual rooms, which I would imagine is really convenient if you’re a lodger there (or a bellboy).  I believe all of these in some way or another involve the concept of Renewal that Darkside keeps hitting on, because they all deal, diametrically or obliquely, with time, mistakes of the past, and the opportunity to change oneself.  The darkness in which Darkside envelops his “patients” and/or enemies is Truth.  Some will be transformed by it, others will be destroyed by it.

Nonetheless, for all that I think the film is trying to do, it fails fairly miserably.  The primary reason for this is because the film is so hellbent on the bigger picture that the details which should support it are indistinct, undeveloped, and, in many cases, unresolved.  The world the movie tries to set up is hinted at just enough to give us a rough idea and nothing more.  There is no resolution to the Mai/Darkside relationship.  There is no resolution to the conflict between the revolutionaries and the Hazukis.  We never even see the patriarch of the family, and there is a sister who is shown very briefly in the beginning and then totally written off with a throwaway line.  Brother Enji Hazuki shows up but never interacts with the rest of his family.  Darkside is likely one of the most passive characters in the history of storytelling, despite the importance implied by his appearance in it.  Katari is introduced as a character who will be integral to the story.  He isn’t.  At all.  The film only settles one storyline, and even there, we’re left hanging with where this is going.  In fact, the film doesn’t really end at all.  It just stops.  Was there supposed to be a sequel?  Is there a series?  Is this based on a manga that explains any of this crap better than this film does?  If you care about the answers to any of these questions, I really can’t help you, because I found myself not giving the slightest of shits (okay, I did do some digging just for the sake of curiosity, and the manga this is based on was created by Hideyuki Kikuchi, who also created Vampire Hunter D, so there’s one mystery solved).  Darkside Blues is so sketchy it should have been animated in pencils only.

MVT:  The film has all the elements for a fun, interesting tale.

Make or Break:  If you can make it through the first five minutes of this movie, and you like what you see, you’ll be fine.  If all you’re doing by the end of that time is squinting at the screen and scratching your head, you’ll be better off tuning out.

Score: 4/10    

The High Crusade (1994)

Directed by: Klaus Knoesel  and Holger Neuhäuser

Run time: 100 minutes

To say this movie is an adaptation of the book The High Crusade by Poul Anderson is the same as saying that the script was written by a lawyer and a seeing eye dog. In the book The High Crusade, a group of English knights are getting ready to attack the French. They are interrupted by alien expedition force who also are looking for a fight. The English knights don't really care who's ass gets kicked as long as they are doing the kicking and proceed to wipe out the aliens. With their new found ship and alien weapons the English knights encourage the captured alien pilot to take them to Jerusalem so they can free the holy lands. The alien pilot instead takes the knights to one of the alien planets. These knight came to fight, liberate, and chew gum and gum hasn't been invented yet. So the knights go on a crusade destroying the alien empire.

This movie has next to nothing to do with the plot of the book. Father Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) narrates the adventures of Sir Not Robin of Locksley and his collection of fools. The movie proper starts just before Sir Not Robin of Locksley's wedding to Lady 50's Stereotype. The two of them met at an archery contest for her hand and she agreed to the marriage if Sir Not Robin would not go to war. To make Sir Not Robin more suitable for Lady Stereotype taste in men a stereotypical Frenchmen who spends more time seducing Lady Stereotype than his job. Finally there is Sir Not Robin's friend Sir Idiot. Sir Idiot likes wenches, leading idiotic charges, and being an idiot. Now that we have meet most major characters on to what could passes for a plot.

Sir Not Robin and Lady Stereotype's wedding is interrupted by a messenger from the crusades who is being chased by three Saracens. Sir Not Robin takes out the Saracens with oversized arrow and learns from the dying messenger that some other English Lord is being overrun and needs reinforcements from some other lord that is not Sir Not Robin. Being the twit and sassenach Sir Not Robin vows to set out to the holy lands the next day to help this lord. That night the aliens arrive and start attacking Sir Not Robin's keep. Sir Not Robin and his forces fight back, destroy the expedition force, and capture the pilot. Father Sallah and two idiots are tasked with learning the alien language and everything they can about the ship.

Father Sallah learns the alien language, Sir Not Robin packs everyone from his keep into the ship, and the lot of idiots get the alien pilot to fly them to Jerusalem. The alien instead goes to his home planet. This leads to the humans and the aliens trying to out stupid each other for the rest of the film. Eventually the aliens prove to be much dumber than the humans and the best part of the movie happens. It ends.

This movie was funnier when I first watched it on cable. The aliens had subtitles when they were not speaking English unlike the DVD were they don't and some of the humour is lost because of that. Otherwise it is a dumb comedy and the kind of dumb comedy you have to be in the mood for. An example of the kind of humour this movie has is an exchange between Sir Not Robin and Sir Idiot. They are debating which is a better weapon, the alien tech or a bow and arrow. As luck would have it, a pair of rabbits appear and they conduct a test to see which weapon is better. Sir Idiot used the alien weapon and turned his rabbit into ash. Sir Not Robin used a bow and arrow and had a rabbit for diner. So clearly the bow and arrow was the better technology.

If you are looking for a stupid comedy, you are in the mood for a stupid comedy, and it shows up on cable or streaming this is the movie for you. Otherwise it is a movie that you can go your entire life not seeing and you will not miss a thing.

Make or Break: This movie tries too hard to be funny. It's like a high school production of Monty Python sketches done badly. Lots energy and cringe for very little pay off.

MVP: Jim Bean Devil's Cut and Pepsi. A little bit of bourbon makes anything watchable.

Score: 3.5 out of 10

                    

Plankton (1994)

**SPOILER-ISH**

Over the years, it’s often been said that fish is “brain food.”  What this means is that eating fish helps with both cognition and memory (so long as it doesn’t contain high levels of mercury, of course).  The basic hypothesis behind this is that the high levels of Omega-3 fatty acids found in some types of fish help produce more complex fatty acids which in turn bolster brain cell walls.  This is why so many drug manufacturers peddle their Omega-3 pills to anyone with the money to buy them (and probably more than a few without it).  However, a recent study conducted at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center posits that Omega-3 is of far less consequence than popularly believed, in yet another case of “He Said, She Said” that the medical industry loves to go through every couple of years (“Red meat is bad for you,” “No, wait.  It’s good for you,” “No, wait…”).  

Aside from the occasional piece of salmon or Chilean sea bass, I’m not overly fond of seafood, myself.  Maybe this is why I have a memory like a sieve (then again, maybe not).  But what I’ve noticed about the expression “brain food” is that it is commonly misused in terms of making you smarter, and that’s simply not the case.  It aids your brain in functioning better, but it doesn’t augment intelligence.  There are likely as many inherently “smart” people who don’t eat fish as there are “dumb” people who eat it ritually.  If you seek proof of this, simply take a gander at Alvaro Passeri’s Plankton (aka Creatures from the Abyss, aka Sea Devils, aka Object X, aka Piranha 4 [I didn’t even know there was a third one]), because the film contains one of the most repulsive scenes of idiots eating fish I have ever witnessed.

Five people, including a pair of sexpot sisters (Laura Di Palma and Ann Wolf), a non-sexpot girl (Sharon Twomey; we can tell she is not a cinematic nympho because she wears spandex rather than a revealing bikini like the other two), her smart (he wears glasses but doesn’t eat fish) boyfriend (Clay Rogers), and their annoying perv friend (Michael Bon) go out for a little rafting in the Atlantic Ocean.  Getting caught in a deluge, they come upon a seemingly deserted Oceanographic Research Institute boat, do some awkward partying, and get attacked by some semi-aquatic monsters.

This movie is a combination of two things: John Carpenter’s The Thing and Dead Teenager/Cabin in the Woods films.  To the first point, the film has creatures which emerge from being frozen to terrorize humans.  Said creatures come from an environment inhospitable to humans (here the briny deep rather than the cold reaches of outer space).  It has a small group of people in an isolated location which ostensibly ratchets up the tensions between them (this also plays to the second point).  It has monsters that inhabit their victims’ bodies and transform.  It has a big explosion at the end which may or may not have destroyed the threat.  It has stop motion effects.  

To the second point, you have a mix of boys and girls whose sole purpose in life is to party and have sex and get picked off in gruesome ways (with the exception of the couple who are actually devoted to each other and thus are earmarked for final couple status).  You have the two single chicks stripping, showering, and so forth for the camera (“I think it’s time for a new bra”).  You have the extremely irritating “fun guy” character whom no one in their right mind would put up with for more than about five minutes before wanting to kill him (he likes to play practical jokes, talk about the size of his dick, and cajole his pals into taking unidentified drugs with him).  Said “cabin” in this instance even has a dark, cobweb-festooned “basement” where horrible things may lurk around any corner (including, but not limited to, a babbling scientist played by trash cinema [and television] director Deran Sarafian, who is also named after a character in the Carpenter film [Clark]).

Where Plankton distinguishes itself is in the level of sheer weirdness with which it imbues every single frame of its runtime.  There is a talking, winking clock (it’s shaped like some half-assed, cycloptic fish/mermaid/thing) that comments on what’s going on and blithers incessantly, usually at the same time.  There is a character vomiting up green slime with beetles and worm-type things in it (this puddle of puke will remain on the floor for the remainder of the film, even when other characters go into the bathroom to shower or wash up; I cannot, in my wildest dreams imagine the smell not being overpowering, and I’m amazed no one steps in it).  In the “These Things Happen” category, there is a character having sex with living fossils (offscreen; I haven’t yet decided whether this is merciful or not, though I’m leaning toward the latter, all things considered).  There is a character oozing caviar out of her vagina.  There is an oversexed A.I. in the bathroom who moans lasciviously and heavily encourages getting dirty while getting clean (and evacuating, but there’s a lid for every pot, I suppose).  There is a fish-stomping scene that would likely have thrilled John Waters to no end.  There is the supposition that androgynous fish-monsters become sexually aggressive when stimulated by “inquisitive minds” (I guess I can buy that one).  At every turn, the film strives to outdo itself in strangeness and sleaze, and boy howdy, does it succeed.  

This is what makes the well-trodden plot feel fresh (or at the very least interesting).  This is not to say that it’s well-made, because it isn’t.  The film’s opening intercuts the “kids” out on the ocean with smash cuts of closeups of the monster (flicking its tongue, shrieking, et cetera) and Clark assumedly being attacked/molested by same.  But the way that this is done is completely incoherent.  Naturally, this matches the rest of the film, which chugs along, constantly topping whatever bizarre plot point/dialogue/nude scene occurred mere moments before, none of it making any sense whatsoever, but somehow still managing to be massively entertaining.  The one solid piece of information that I could glean from this film is that no one involved in its production actually eats fish on a regular basis.

MVT:  The film is nuts in that marvelous way that drunk people sitting around and solving all the world’s problems with a type of “it made sense at the time” logic both fascinates and confounds. 

Make or Break:  The big sex scene starts with a character stroking the giant phallus on a brass lamp (to turn it on; get it?) and proceeds (uphill? downhill?) from there.  It’s indescribably in poor taste across the board, but I couldn’t turn away (sort of like staring at a traffic accident, but without real human beings coming to harm).

Score:  7/10