Tobe Hooper’s 2003 re-imaging of the 1973 grindhouse classic
“The Toolbox Murders” was a minor underground success that momentarily put
Hooper back on track as a horror director to keep an eye out for (though he
would later derail his career again as expected). Though I enjoyed it, “Toolbox
Murders” was a flawed slasher flick that despite its rushed, open ending really
didn’t beckon for, or deserve, a sequel. It served its purpose as an enjoyable
hour and half for slasher fans but this genre is littered with sequels and we
all knew one was not far behind. What we didn’t know was the production hell
and behind-the-camera drama that would ensue that would delay the official
release of this follow-up for more than a decade. Now after a few title changes
and the director and producers putting their differences aside, Shout! Factory unleashes this cursed sequel to the masses and it comes to no surprise it was
not worth the wait.
The killer from the original (now credited as TBK in the
credits instead of Coffin Baby) survives his fall, decides to kidnap the sister
of the survivor of the original (how the hell did he know where she lived?),
takes her back to his lair and tortures her for a majority of the films running time with
annoying “time passing” title cards that popup every five minutes.
Fans will notice right away that barely any cast or
crew names from Hooper’s version return. Director Dean Jones was the special
make-up effects artist on the previous film and the man behind the make-up
returns as our grisly faced killer. Other than that everything else is
different, even the damn tone of the film. For the past 10 years there has been
an emergence of films that focus on pain, gore and torture that began with a little film called “Saw”.
Don’t get me wrong as I do like many of the films in this relatively new horror
film movement but it has produced many third rate knock-offs which is what “Toolbox
Murders 2” essentially is. This is the result if mockbuster production company The
Asylum decided to make their own “Saw” film – it’s that bad.
With any of these torture films, the film is only strong
as your players and if the actors can’t realistically portray their pain and
agony then the film will fail, which “Toolbox Murders 2” ultimately does as our
lead actress Chauntal Lewis can’t convincingly convey her emotional and physical abuse. Here
character is also all over the map, from strong willed to a whimpering willow.
We are even graced with legendary actor Bruce Dern giving a cameo but he is
thoroughly wasted in his supernatural twist of a subplot.
What we also have here is another “franchise” where the filmmakers
fall in love with their villain. Unlike Freddy, Jason, hell even Jigsaw of the “Saw”
franchise, Coffin Baby (err.. I mean TBK) just isn’t interesting enough to carry a film. The first
film tried to create an aura of mystery around him with some occult surrounds
in the building he terrorized but all that is thrown out the window for blood,
pain and torture and all the supernatural elements feel shoehorned in. With no
plot, an uninteresting villain, ham-fisted acting and directing that barely ekes
above amateurish we are left with a hollow, uninteresting waste of a film. Quite frankly I was bored throughout.
Far more interesting than the film is the troubled
backstory. It seems soon after completion the director went and shot additional
footage, cutting all ties to Hooper’s film and released it under the title
Coffin Baby (Image Entertainment even released it on DVD in 2013 under this title but good luck finding
it now). Legal battles ensued until the director and producers put their
differences aside and the new footage was scrapped and the version Shout!
Factory released on DVD and Blu-ray is the original vision as devised in the
script. I have not seen the “Coffin Baby” cut of the film but if this is
considered the “definitive cut” it’s hard to believe how unbelievably bad that
version has to be but fans on facebook do ensure me that cut is better... perhaps I will find out for myself one day.
Love him or hate him (or both), but Eli Roth has a knack for
causing controversy. His Hostel films certainly garnered their fair share of
both love and hate from fans and critics, but that didn’t stop them from being
talked about. A key factor that kept them (and still keeps them) as
conversation topics long after their actual impact has faded. This is also
going to be the legacy of his latest horror film, the cannibal survival flick The Green Inferno, as the film has earned
its fair share of controversy and clever marketing schemes to keep it relevant.
After an extensive delay in release, the film finally hit theaters and the
results are much different than expected – for both better and worse.
Justine (Izzo) is a college freshmen looking to leave an
impact on the world around her. She becomes captivated with a local activist
Alejandro (Levy) and joins his cause for fighting off some evil land
developers in the Amazon and ends up with a select group actually heading down
to stream a protest live online. While things are not always what they seem, a
terrible turn of events finds the activists within the hands of one of the
tribes they were trying to protect…and next in line to be their dinner.
Gore party!
Prior to its release, the marketing team was really pushing how disturbing and violent The Green
Inferno is. People faint at showings, clips and trailers are banned from
social media, etc. Partnered with Eli Roth’s own claim that The Green Inferno was meant to be a
throwback film to the cannibal exploitation films of the 70s, it’s hard not to
get one’s expectations up. However, for horror fans even remotely versed in the
likes of the genre with classics like Cannibal
Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, and
their ilk, then you will probably come out disappointed. The Green Inferno is not nearly as controversial, disturbing, or
gross as most of those films. For a modern mainstream audience the film is
certain to get some reactions, but for those looking for a true throwback film
then The Green Inferno is not it. It
is most certainly an inspired love letter to the genre, but it’s done with a
very obvious Roth spin on the material and it’s not going to be what some are
expecting.
With that being said, I will fully admit that I had a
fucking blast watching The Green Inferno.
Eli Roth injects a remarkable amount of humor into the film which had me
laughing through a majority of the run time (it also helps that he has a
strange knack for making disturbing sequences so over the top that it’s hard
not to laugh) and the film really piles on some of the ridiculous gore pieces
in the latter half. For those looking for plenty of gore, the film certainly
has it. Thanks to some top notch effects, a lot of the horror and disturbing
elements are provided in full gory glory. To its benefit, The Green Inferno
keeps a lot of the kills more diverse than just ‘being eaten’ so that allows things to be more interesting – even if some of them are obviously set up by elements
in the first half and oddly forced into the plot. A death by killer ants,
for example, doesn’t work nearly as well as one would hope in a film like this.
One of the bigger issues that arises in The Green Inferno though is it’s often over the top writing. The
characters of the film, outside of our leading lady Lorenza Izzo, are painted
in rather broad stroke ways and many of them seem to be more akin to
caricatures than characters – a move that tends to undermine the potential
horror later on. If anything, the way the characters are portrayed really only
works once for a truly horrifying death sequence, the first one of their
entrapment, which is an elongated one that had the audience cringing. The
villainous head of the activist group, as an example, is such an asshole that
at times it comes off as comical. The dialogue doesn’t tend to be any better. At
this point though, this style of detail-less characters and extreme circumstances
seems to be Eli Roth’s elements of writing. If it was anything else, then I
would have been surprised. It doesn’t make for a great film, but it definitely
makes for an entertaining one in the end.
I love how you decorated your home.
If you’re expecting The
Green Inferno to be a pure throwback, then you probably won’t love the
film. If you are skeptical of Eli Roth’s style of dark humor and intense gore,
then it won’t change your mind. If you go into the film knowing that it is very
much an Eli Roth film and one that piles on some strange moments with tons of
gore then it’s hard not to be utterly entertained by its outrageousness. It’s
hardly as great as some of the marketing made it out to be, but it’s still a
blast to watch with the proper expectations. It still comes with a big bloody
recommendation.
Ho (Ti Lung) and his partner Mark (Chow Yun Fat) have been
one of the leaders in running a black market scheme out of Hong Kong for quite
some time. They are training a new recruit Shing (Waise Lee) when a deal in
Taiwan goes horribly awry. This leaves Ho in prison for five years and when he
gets out, he wants to take his life straight. His police officer brother (Leslie
Cheung) doesn’t believe him, his partner Mark doesn’t understand, and a new crime
boss seems to want him dead. There is still a lot of work to do to rectify his
wrongs.
A Better Tomorrow
is the kind of action film where the action, no matter how good, takes a back
seat to the character work on display here. While Chow Yun Fat gets a lot of
credit for this movie, more on that in a minute, and there is essentially three
lead roles, the heart and soul of this movie rests with Ti Lung’s Ho. Shaking
off some of the more stand up heroics of his time with the Shaw Brothers
studio, he plays the perfect weathered and well-intentioned gangster here and
it’s his emotional journey that lifts this film up. He is surrounded by some
serious talent in the secondary cast and it’s easy to see why Chow Yun Fat
comes off as the face of this film when he steals so many sequences. His hot
headed and often desperate cool portrayal is the perfect balance to Ti Lung and
Chow Yun Fat destroys what could have been a throw away “best friend” role. The
chemistry on screen between the three leads is impeccable and it truly is the
biggest reason to see A Better Tomorrow.
With that being said, the rest of the film is also top notch
quality. John Woo takes his now patented “gun fu” style to dramatic heights
here with some massive melodramatic scores and an ability to capture movement
and depth like few of his Hong Kong action peers. As an action film, A Better Tomorrow is potent. It never
shies away from the violence, a sequence where Chow Yun Fat pulls a one man
assassination on a dinner party almost entirely in slow motion stands out, and
it uses its character work and dramatic tension as a build to explosive bursts - bursts of gun fire, explosions, and horrific hand to hand fights that punctuate
turning points in the plot. The style might be called ‘heroic bloodshed,’ but
rarely does any of the action pieces feel heroic as much as a needed break from
the building atmosphere. John Woo shoots them in such a way that they feel
artful and dance like (earning his movies the loving term ‘bullet ballets’) and
it’s this ability to balance the plot and character progressions in action
sequences that makes A Better Tomorrow
the game changer it remains.
Say what you want about the intense bro-mance you will
experience in A Better Tomorrow or
its almost overpowering emotional beats that shine brighter than the already
magnificent action set pieces, but this film is a classic – pure and simple. It
set up the international careers for almost all of its principal cast and crew
(outside of Ti Lung, who had already had a decade of being a Hong Kong A-lister
at this point) and it set the ground work principals for what modern action
films should be to this day. A Better
Tomorrow might not be what many people expect when it comes to classic
action, but it’s so much more.
Director: Kimiyoshi Yasuda Notable Cast: Shintaro Katsu, Jimmy Wang Yu, Cheung Yik, Wang Ling, Hama Yuko, Kagawa Masato
As the end of the Zatoichi
franchise comes near, it’s obvious that the filmmakers and producers were
running out of ideas to make the films unique. I mean, this is the 22nd
film in the series after all. It’s understandable. So they obviously turned to
gimmicks and tricks to keep things fresh. The results have been something of a
roller coaster ride of quality for the films and the previous entry, Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival, was
a big eclectic and entertaining mess. However, the series seemed intent on
bringing in the new fresh elements and for this next entry our blind heroic
swordsman is destined to meet blades with one of China’s legendary martial
artists– Wang Kang, the one armed swordsman played by the iconic Jimmy Wang Yu.
While it’s not quite as soul devouring as the last time Zatoichi met with
another franchise character in Zatoichi
Meets Yojimbo, Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman is still a massively entertaining and fast paced flick
worthy of this high end franchise.
Wang Kang (Jimmy Wang Yu) is in Japan to visit an old friend
who has returned to study at a temple. When he befriends another Chinese couple
with a young son, he forges a quick bond. Unfortunately, a mistake by the young
boy leaves his parents dead and Wang Kang on the run from the local
authorities. When Zatoichi (Shintaro Katsu) gets involved in a desperate
attempt to help, things only turn for the worse and the two legendary swordsmen
will find themselves destined to drawn blades on one another by the end of this
adventure.
What I enjoyed best about Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman is that it is a return to
form for the series by having Zatoichi be (more or less) a victim of circumstance again. He
essentially has no part in the events that kick off this adventure and
continually throughout the film there is a theme of assumption and
miscommunication that only exasperates the growing tension and violence around
the two heroes. It’s a strong and emotionally effective theme that only gathers
momentum as the film continues and it consumes a plethora of characters as it
snowballs. The viewer begins to feel somewhat bad for both of the heroes as they
continually find themselves swimming against the current to ‘do the right thing’
and it makes the film a riveting and invested watch for its audience. It also
allows the film to navigate a narrative that seems straight forward on the
surface, but is remarkably dense and subtle in its execution. Whether it’s the strong
slew of secondary characters or the moments where we see a new problem
gestating for our heroes, the film knocks it out of the park as it unfolds –
slowly – but very meticulously.
Of course, the film is easily made better by the
performances of both Shintaro Katsu and Jimmy Wang Yu. Both gentleman have
carried the films of their franchises with their screen presence and swift
charming portrayals. It’s fairly unfortunate that, as a Zatoichi film, Wang Kang’s character gets a slightly less dynamic
character arc and the film doesn’t nearly capture what made him so fascinating
in his own films. They throw in a few things here in there to showcase the
wuxia style of his “mythos” by his ability to leap into tall trees and his
staunch respect and intensity towards retaining honor, but it comes off as too
little to really build the interesting combination that having a wuxia hero in
a chanbara film could have crafted. It leads to some fun and clever fight
sequences (although I would be lying if I said that I was somewhat disappointed
by the short length of the final duel as it feels more like a Japanese action
sequence rather than a Hong Kong one) and the humor works spot on, but there
could have been even more fun then what the film uses.
All in all, Zatoichi
Meets the One Armed Swordsman is still a fun and well executed flick. It
doesn’t quite grasp the great wuxia elements that Wang Kang’s character could
have brought to the table, but it wholly works as a Zatoichi flick. The performances are spot on and the visuals are
strong enough to sell a lot of the plot heavy twists and turns that the film
takes. It’s certainly not a perfect film, but this is one that has a lot of
replay ability as I head towards the finish line of this franchise. Fans will
love this one, even if it could have been slightly better.
