American Chinatown (1996)

When I lived in Philadelphia, my roommate and I were heavily into Hong Kong cinema (or, at least, we thought we were; there were enthusiasts who eclipsed us, then and now).  The Western world was just getting on the Woo, Lam, etcetera bandwagon, and we were no different.  Of course, we had both seen plenty of martial arts films when we were young (giving us an appreciation and a love for the works of filmmakers like Chang Cheh, Lau Kar-leung, and so on), but these new(er) films were something altogether different.  Sure, the plots and characters were relatively the same.  The difference lay in the technical aspects.  The camerawork was kinetic and inventive, while still clearly telling a story, and the stunt work was on another level.  They felt insane and viscerally real at the same time.

Now, I had heard of Keith Li’s Centipede Horror from one of the grey market VHS catalogs I had sent away for (remember those?), and it seemed right up my alley.  After all, it was a horror movie, no?  It’s right there in the title.  My roommate and I went on down to Chinatown and opened an account at a small, Chinese video/grocery store (around the area of the Trocadero on Arch Street, but I’m not totally clear on the exact location, not that it matters all that much).  The first two tapes we rented that day were Stanley Tong’s Swordsman 2 and Centipede Horror.  We both loved Swordsman 2 (despite those weird scenes of the characters singing like they were doing whip-its all day long), but I don’t think we made it more than thirty minutes (if that) through Centipede Horror before we popped the tape out.  The film was grotty and dumb and made little to no sense.  See, we were used to only a portion of Asian cinema, and this was everything that was not.  Having now immersed myself a bit more in the multitude of Asian cinema offerings, I’ve always meant to revisit Centipede Horror to see if there’s anything redeeming about it.  I do not, however, need to ever rewatch Richard Park’s (aka Woo-sang Park) American Chinatown because I now know how little redemptive value it has.

Lily (Liat Goodson) is the victim of an attempted gang rape, but the cholos attempting it are thwarted and roughed up by Yong (Tae-joon Lee, billed here as simply Taejoon, as if he were Taimak or Gerardo [both apt descriptors]).  As their love sort of blossoms, Yong goes about his gang business under the leadership of fellow one-time orphan (what is with Park and orphans, anyway?) Eric (Robert Z’Dar).  But Yong’s twin paths come into direct conflict with each other, and only one can be followed to happiness (or something, in theory).

Park’s Miami Connection is a film which has recently been rediscovered, resurrected, and regaled by hipsters, cult cinema lovers, and trash junkies the world over.  It’s fun because, even when it’s being serious, there’s a level of naïve optimism (sure, the members of Dragon Sound were all “orpans,” but they were also the members of Dragon Sound, a band whose enthusiasm and subject matter make The Wiggles look like G.G. Allin) that’s infectious.  The same cannot be said for American Chinatown.  This film is self-serious and cloyingly melodramatic while toying with the tropes of badass cinema (most particularly Heroic Bloodshed films) which it doesn’t completely understand.  Yes, there are plenty of fights, and these, at least, are handled well enough in the choreography department.  Park, thankfully, also shoots many of these scenes wide enough to see what’s going on and to appreciate the physical talents of the performers.  Where Park fails is in creating empathy for his characters and in crafting believable (even for a film like this) interpersonal moments and relationships between said characters (not good in a movie which relies upon them so heavily).  Some examples of the choice dialogue.  “You don’t want a guy like me!”  “College frat boys don’t turn you on anymore?”  “Why are you doing this to me?”  “You’re my only hope and dream.”  All of this is delivered with the conviction of a dish rag (though Z’Dar does an admirable job working with nothing, as usual).  I should stop there.  I don’t want people to get the wrong idea and want to see this movie (I suspect there are those who would want to, regardless).

Nearly every scene in American Chinatown could (and maybe should) start with a title card reading, “Suddenly…!”  The movie opens like a case of whiplash with the three cholos (I kept thinking of Mike Muir from Suicidal Tendencies; Sorry, Mike) already well into their assault on Lily.  Suddenly…!  Yong appears out of nowhere to save the day.  Suddenly…!  Yong battles two urban samurai types and a kabuki guy.  For no reason I could discern and with no impetus for this encounter.  Yong is stabbed in the guts.  Suddenly…!  He’s living on a boat somewhere, and God only knows how much time has passed.  Yong beats villain Wong (Sung-Ki Jun).  Suddenly…!  He’s attacked by two other henchmen (this is not the order in which things are done, Mr. Park), who may be the samurai guys he fought before, maybe not.  The entirety of this film is just pieces thrown together like this.  But if I want to watch random stuff for a couple of hours, I can go on Youtube.  At least there I could get suggestions for other videos that might be of interest.

The males in this film are very, very male, indeed.  Yong always kicks first, asks questions later.  He always wears sunglasses, indoors and out, day or night.  He’s meant to be a real cool cat, but he comes off like a flipping jerk.  Eric talks and acts like a kid playing at tough guy.  He’s also wishy-washy, though this isn’t because he’s volatile; the writing is just bad.  Wong and his goons are as unmemorable as you can get.  They show up every few minutes for a fight scene, and that’s it.  Jim (Bobby Kim) comes close to having something to do as a mentor to Yong and a foil for Eric, but he, too, ultimately plays like just another sad sack.  And then there’s poor Lily.  Jane (Kathy Collier) in Miami Connection was an ancillary character (think the Daphne to Dragon Sound’s Scooby Gang), but she was still a more active part of that film than Lily is here.  Lily exists solely to look good, be sexually assaulted by men, and be saved by Yong.  There’s one excruciatingly implausible “subplot” involving her “sisterly” relationship with Eric (and how in the hell do Yong and Lily not realize that they both know Eric if they’re both supposed to be so goddamned close to him?), but it blows in the wind like everything else interesting in this film might have done but didn’t.  It’s tough for me to decide what’s worse, watching American Chinatown or watching a mouthful of centipedes spew out of people’s mouths.  But I definitely know which way I’m leaning.

MVT:  The fight scenes are okay.  And plentiful.

Make or Break:  The opening scene is jarring, confusing (at first), and surreal in the suddenness with which everything happens.

Score:  4/10

Horrible High Heels (1996)

Hey, let’s talk about my feet!  For as long as I can remember, my feet have been grotesquely wide (around a triple E width, if that helps any).  The last pair of normal sneakers I had were Welcome Back Kotter ones when I was a kid (it said, “Up Your Nose with a Rubber Hose” and other snazzy bon mots around the sides).  I could never wear Chuck Taylors, because my feet poured out over the tops of the soles (but fuck if I didn’t try).  My first pair of Doc Martens were regular width (because that’s all that anyone sold, and this was before they were available on every street corner in the world, and they were expensive as all hell compared to the shoes I would normally buy), and the breaking-in period was pure hell.  Since then, I’ve discovered companies that that specialize in wide width shoes, but it’s still a crapshoot buying them, because you have to buy them over the internet (the sneakers I have been buying this way have started giving me corns, so now it’s back to the drawing board). 

  

And then there’s the flatness of my feet.  I’m fairly convinced that I have no arches to speak of, so, of course, I have to wear special arch supports.  The beauty of these babies is that they’re made of plastic, so they tend to give you shin splints until you get used to them.  They also make it sound like you’re walking on ducks, they squeak so much.  To put it simply, footwear and I don’t get along.  I don’t even think the human leather shoes of Wai On Chan, Cheng Chow, and Chiang-Bang Mao’s Horrible High Heels (aka Ren Pi Guo Zheng Xie aka Bloody Shoe) would fit me any better than any others do.  It doesn’t help that I can’t walk for shit in high heels.

Lee Kang (Hung Fung) is the proprietor of a small shoe cobbling business.  He’s also a degenerate gambler of the lowest order, and, after getting knocked out during a row over his habit with young Sherry, he’s skinned alive by a masked lunatic (whose identity is obvious, even before you meet him without the mask).  Lee’s son Tien (Lam Chak-Ming) comes home from university with hoochie mama Wendy (Suen Tong), and he almost seems to give a rat’s ass about finding his missing father.  Wang, one of Sherry’s co-workers, finds a cheap source for fantastically soft leather (have you guessed yet who the murderer is?) and has some dealings with his nephew Ah-Nan (Siu Yuk-Lung), who works for triad boss Kuen (Shing Fui-On), a man very interested in the wholesale of women’s shoes.  Is that enough for you?

This film could have some interesting things to say, and it almost does.  For example, there’s the aspect of mad love going on.  Sherry pines for Tien (why is anyone’s guess, as the man is blanker than a sheet of copy paper and has fewer sides), and the entrance of Wendy makes her go a little crazy (there’s even a nice cat fight just to prove this).  Sherry goes to extreme lengths to get Tien, naturally, because he’s the man she deserves, and she was there first.  Wang pines for Sherry, and he also will go to extreme lengths to have her.  He even has a photo of her at home with her mouth cut out (you don’t have to wonder why; they make it excruciatingly clear in the movie).  I can’t imagine that being in any way satisfying, and I can only cringe at the abrasions one could incur with such a prop.  However, Sherry ultimately rejects Wang, which makes him go even crazier.  But just being in Wang’s presence is enough to infect Sherry with Wang’s insanity.  That she winds up as she does in the end stems not only from her commiseration with this guy but also (and more importantly) from her abuse at the hands of men in general.  Sherry is the embodiment of puppy love turned inside out and gone dark.  

Then, there’s the idea of “skin trades” (and not just in terms of animals, unless you count people as animals, which is fair play) and how fashion feeds into it.  Consumers and vendors love the human leather shoes.  Sherry and her fellow employees love working with the leather, and the money they make off their sales thrills them.  During the first human skinning, the killer exclaims, “I started my fortune with this leather.”  As in films such as Eating Raoul, this guy discovers discover that not only are people as easy to kill and use as animals are but they’re also cheaper and of a higher quality.  It’s just that this movie hasn’t a humorous bone in its body.    

Being a Category III film, Horrible High Heels does its level best to fulfill the promise of that rating.  It opens, for no narrative reason whatsoever, in a slaughterhouse, and we get to see cows being killed and cut up in graphic detail.  That’s about as subtle as this film gets.  There is plenty of rape for everyone, and this is combined with humiliation (as if rape, in and of itself, isn’t humiliating enough).  One victim is micturated on.  Another is stripped, beaten, made to walk on all fours like a dog, and forced to touch herself with amputated body parts.  This isn’t to say that the consensual sex scenes are any more pleasant.  They are as softcore as can be, leaving nothing to the imagination (well, a little), and they are just as skanky as any of the rape scenes.  They have a grimy aura to them, and the participants look dazed and sweaty.  Even when the characters want to be having sex, they still look like they couldn’t be further away.

The greatest fault of Horrible High Heels is that it’s incredibly scattershot to the point that you can completely believe that this thing was made by three directors, because it doesn’t follow any of its storylines coherently.  It also doesn’t really give a shit about what’s going on in any of them.  The human tanning angle is dropped halfway through the film.  The Ah-Nan/triad aspect doesn’t relate to the rest of the film except by the thinnest of threads.  The search for Lee that started this whole thing comes up only sporadically and with as much gusto as a nonagenarian’s exercise routine.  The characters change into completely different personalities at the drop of a hat.  The cops are completely subplot material until the end, when they suddenly become action heroes, just because (as does Tien in one of the more amusing sequences of the film).  With how salacious this movie is, it’s astounding how stultifying it manages to be.  If nothing else, its title at least delivers on two things: There are high heels in the film, and it’s horrible.

MVT:  The gutter-level sleaze.  Come on, you were watching this for some other reason?

Make or Break:  The opening scene in the abattoir may put some off their feed and spoil their libidos.  Then again, it may kickstart others’ engines.

Score:  3/10 

The Phantom (1996)

Guns in movies are rarely treated properly, both in how they function and in how they are used.  We all know the old tropes.  They quite often have a seemingly limitless supply of ammunition, only running out as a plot convenience in order to throw a curveball at the shooter.  When people do run out of bullets, they whip their weapon (not a euphemism) at their enemy, as if this will in any way be effective, and, of course, discounting that they’ll ever get more bullets to reload.  After killing an enemy who also has guns, characters will neither take those guns for future use nor check the body for ammunition they can use.  Characters who go underwater while having a gun on their person emerge from the water and immediately start flawlessly shooting, as if the water wouldn’t affect the bullets or the mechanism at all (the exception to this that stands out in my mind is the fantastic sequence in the Coen Bros’ No Country for Old Men).  By turns, audiences forgive, deride, and cherish these instances, and this is usually based on context.  In a film like Taxi Driver, the realism of the filmic world demands that the weapons behave in a verisimilitudinous fashion.  Conversely, in something like Rambo: First Blood Part 2, the expectation is that Rambo would never run out of bullets, because he is a fantasy character in a fantasy world (he is, after all, re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War for all Americans).  

But even in far-fetched circumstances, there are some utilizations of firearms that both dumbfound and generate incredulity.  Not to be too much the doryphore, but such an instance occurs in Simon Wincer’s The Phantom.  Chasing after the badguys, the Phantom (Billy Zane) uses his twin AMT Hardballer .45s to slide down an elevator cable.  Never mind the physics of the descent.  Between the heat generated on the guns and the friction from the cables, those firearms would be better suited for paperweights than weapons from there on out (one instance where throwing guns at an enemy would actually make sense).  It’s funny that this stood out to me, especially considering that the film is a complete flight of fancy in every way, though I can say that it didn’t ruin the experience at all.  But stand out it did.

The Phantom guards the Bengale Jungle from all intruders, sworn to fight greed and cruelty in all their forms.  He becomes entwined in the fiendish plot of rich villain Xander Drax (Treat Williams) to combine and harness the power of three mystic skulls (one gold, one silver, one jade) for his own villainous ends.  The upshot is that he also reconnects with college sweetheart and adventurer Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson).  Much globetrotting and thrills ensue.

The Phantom is a comic strip character created in 1936 by Lee Falk and distributed by King Features Syndicate.  While the strip is still being produced and printed today (obviously not by Falk, who passed away in 1999), his characters have also appeared in comic books, prose books, animated series, and live-action serials, and that’s to say nothing of the merchandising that comes with a property of this magnitude.  Falk was quoted as saying, “To me, The Phantom and Mandrake [the Magician] are very real – much more than the people walking around whom I don’t see very much.”  This sums up the key to making stories about characters like this (in fact, characters in any genre) work well.  The creators have to believe in them and the world they inhabit.  When they don’t, the result tends to be self-consciously hollow, fetishizing the heightened aspects rather than dealing with these realities as a whole.  As a sidebar, this is why I think a great many of the films which are done in a “retro” fashion (as well as the slew of recent genre spoof movies) simply don’t work; the filmmakers are so busy winking at the audience with the superficial elements rather than crafting a solid film with compelling characters and narratives.  Back to the point, Wincer’s film works for me because it treats almost everything in it with the same perspective.  The action works just as well as the humor does (I realize that co-executive producer and proposed director Joe Dante said that the film was intended, first and foremost, to be comical but was played “disastrously” straight, an opinion with which I have to say I disagree).  It’s light throughout, and if anything, the film owes tons to Steven Spielberg not only in its visual style but also in its tone, which is very reminiscent of his Indiana Jones series (ironic in that his and George Lucas’ franchise was influenced at least partially by strips like The Phantom, but not entirely surprising, since Wincer directed several episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam also penned the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).     

One facet of the movie which stands out is its conflict between technology/civilization and mysticism/primitivity.  Clearly, the jungle that the Phantom inhabits is a wild place, and the Phantom himself is looked upon as a quasi-demigod.  The natives in the area believe him to be immortal, referring to him as “The Ghost Who Walks,” but this is a legend created to maintain order (the mantle of Phantom is a legacy passed down from fathers to sons [I believe Kit Walker, the Phantom of this story, is the 21^st in the line, though I could be wrong about that]).  The Phantom does not impose his will on those who look up to him.  He simply fights in their name in order for them to continue to keep their freedoms (something we all wish were more commonplace).  Diana connects the two worlds directly (though Kit can exist in both as indicated by his trip to New York City, his true place is in the primal forest).  She comes from a high society family, but she is an adventurer at heart, and while she quite prefers the latter to the former, she can handle both well.  In fact, when we are introduced to her, she has just returned from the Yukon where she contracted malaria, and she leaps at the opportunity to go into the jungle at her newspaperman Uncle Dave’s (Bill Smitrovich) mention.  Conversely, Drax is the force of corporate greed.  His world is ensconced in concrete, steel, and glass, and he kills people at a whim right on his own property because the lawmakers/peacekeepers in this modern society are thoroughly corrupt and in his pocket.  His intent is to use the ancient skulls (a form of technology in the guise of magic, if we take Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as law) as weapons, the implication being that innocent people would be the targets (as they are always the collateral damage of warfare, which is how Drax wants to use the artifacts), and thus being a force of subjugation.  The Phantom is the antithesis of everything Drax is as a character (with the exception of wealth, although Kit’s fortune comes from precious stones which he treats like baubles), and it is with this quality that he defeats him (still, truth be told, the Phantom also has a form of primitive technology akin to the skulls which aid him in this, and he does use firearms, so in this way, he is a synthesis between civilized and primitive, a trait many pulp heroes share).

The Phantom is an enjoyable, airy action/adventure film.  The cinematography by David Burr is gorgeous, and the mobile camerawork is dynamic and fluid.  The stuntwork and effects are impressive as all get out.  The action itself is filled with tension and follows the structure of series like Indiana Jones and James Bond, where it rises and falls, and most importantly, escalates.  It’s not enough for the Phantom to be stuck in a truck on a rickety rope bridge.  No, he is stuck in a truck on a rickety rope bridge with an innocent kid tied up in the back, the ropes breaking, a several hundred foot fall beneath, and only one hand free to do anything.  This is after a chase through the jungle, some fisticuffs, and more.  This is not the Batman series (1989 – 1997), though it was clearly produced because of that franchise, but they share certain flavors.  That said, this film does distinguish itself enough from the Warner Bros films and satisfies enough to be its own thing and worth seeing for a good time.

MVT:  The production values, its design, cinematography, locations, and so on are grand, especially considering its $45 million budget (which unfortunately wasn’t even recouped from its theatrical release).

Make or Break:  The initial action set piece sets the bar in all respects for the film, and the ones that proceed from it match it quite nicely in quality.

Score:  7/10