Notable Cast: Liam Aiken, Joe Adler, Annalise Basso
The works of Edgar Allen Poe have certainly inspired, well,
essentially anything having to remotely deal with macabre material to this day.
Some of it is more directly involved such as direct adaptations and others are
more inspired in tone or concept. The Bloodhound, “inspired” to a great
degree by Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, is a modern retelling
that takes the basic premise and injects a slow burning and often incredibly
uneasy awkwardness to everything. It’s Poe for the A24 age, a tale of collapsing
health and sanity, wrapped in a particular style and approach one might
describe as quirky. If anyone wanted a Wes Anderson style Poe adaption,
embedded with a suffocating sense of oddity and modern impending existential
dread, then look no further than this strange and delightfully uneasy
film.
Notable Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Jason
Mamoa, Ezra Miller, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons
On a normal day, I would start my review for a film with
context, perhaps my expectations, a bit of history, or an angle to address the
“world” that this film was watched in. When it comes to Zack Snyder’s
Justice League, most of our readers already have a strong opinion of the
events that have led to the resulting decision by Warner Bros. in allowing this
new version of the film to exist. There are certainly arguments to be made on
both sides of its existence, the right for an auteur director to have their
vision is one stance that I usually subscribe to, but Zack Snyder’s Justice
League is one that comes with a price attached to it - more than the
reported $70 million that WB forked up to allow Snyder to “finish” his intended
version. However, this is a review of the film and not an analysis of the
problematic lingering effects of it- although I will drop this link to an
article that aptly describes my feelings on the matter: LINK.
Instead, let’s focus on the film itself, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a four-hour epic opus of the now mostly defunct DCEU meant to culminate the scattered and often insanely problematic universe that Zack Snyder was spearheading. Released on HBO Max, as a way to drive viewership to the service, the newly minted Zack Snyder’s Justice League is certainly an improvement over the theatrical version that Joss Whedon had worked on. It’s also a marked improvement over the other two Snyder DC films, Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. Not that it means much as both of those as tragically flawed.
Notable Cast: Jackie Chan, Yang Yang, Ai Lun, Miya
Muqi, Yang Jian Ping, Zhu Zhengting, Jackson Lou, Xu Ruohan, Rahim Achabbakhe,
Eyad Hourani
When Kung Fu Yoga came out in 2017, it quickly
dispelled the notion that perhaps, just perhaps, the combination of director
Stanley Tong and star Jackie Chan could recapture the lunacy of Supercop
and First Strike. It was a mess of a film, but it made some impressive
box office dollars, so why not have them team up again for another massive
international action-adventure flick? This is why we have Vanguard, the
latest hollow attempt at mass appeal riding on the coattails of past success.
With over 10 minutes of credits at the end, the film is 90 more minutes of
sheer outlandish action, punctuated by bright colors and patchy CGI, that aims
to move so quickly from set piece to set piece that its audience might forget
that there should be a movie underneath all of the glitz and glam. What’s left
is a film that is about as effective as a long commercial in terms of
storytelling quality. That presents a problem if its viewer wants more than
just misguided style.
Color me very excited to check out the two wild (and mostly
forgotten) Japanese versions of the character and concept in Arrow Video’s
latest dual feature release of The Invisible Man Appears and The
Invisible Man Vs the Human Fly.
Newly restored to the best possible shape, these two Daiei
productions represent an entirely new perspective on the story from a cultural
standpoint and from a time period standpoint. While the restorations are, in
fact, a little rough around the edges - a point very well addressed at the
beginning of the first film for the film collector’s ready to complain as if
the context of these films even existing still wasn’t a Herculean feat, there
is a lot to digest here from the vantage points of history and as a piece of
entertainment.
Notable Cast: Charlotte Vega, Matthew Modine, Adain
Bradley, Bill Sage, Emma Dumont, Dylan McTee, Daisy Head
The Wrong Turn franchise has been something of a
pleasure of mine. While the first two films in the long-running slasher series
feature some creative and well-executed concepts, in two very different tones,
the rest of the four sequels have de-evolved into low-brow slasher silliness.
The ‘turn off your brain’ kind of entertainment one would expect from a
direct-to-home-video slasher franchise. The latest installment of the series, a
reboot with the clever title Wrong Turn (I hope you all can feel my eye
roll as I type that), aims to not only bring a new life into a franchise
treading water, but one that also aims for loftier goals of embedding a message
into the material. That’s right, no longer is this just a series of films about
inbred cannibals in West Virginia slaughtering people in questionable states of
clothing, but it’s going to say something about it.
Notable Cast: Tak Sakaguchi
When Crazy Samurai 400 Vs 1 was originally announced,
under the simplified title of Crazy Samurai Musashi, it was hard not to
be excited. Mainly because cult favorite action icon, Tak, would be stepping
into the shoes of the titular folk hero, Musashi, for the film. Of course, it
would only get more exciting from there as the film was touting that it would
feature a 77-minute, one-take action sequence that would have our badass ‘hero’
fending off 400 foes.
Granted, once a person starts thinking of the logistics of
such a feat, the excitement lends itself to wariness at the audacity of any
film to attempt it. Could any film truly pull off this kind of incredulous
notion? Could they defy the odds and make it work?
Thanks to our friends at Well Go USA, Crazy Samurai 400
Vs 1 is now available on both their streaming platform Hi-Yah! and via
physical media. The results, while ultimately mixed, are worthy of a viewing
just for the curious. At a strangely brisk 92 minutes in total, the 77-minute
action set-piece constitutes over 83% of the film’s entire run time and the
insanity of that statistic is felt on screen.
Notable Cast: Vincent Zhao, Jiang Yiyi, Diego Dati, Lu
Peng
Also known as: Counter Attack
After the success of Wolf Warrior II as a home-grown
mega-blockbuster that didn’t need the help of the foreign box office to make it
onto the list of highest-grossing films of all time, it’s a bit of a shock that
more films weren’t immediately jumping on board to replicate the success. It
was a film that took a popular actor, in this case, Wu Jing, and made him one of
the biggest box office draws in the nation. Not to mention, the star directed
the film and suddenly he was a hot commodity in that area too. That kind of ego
boost for Wu Jing is impressive. Yet, there wasn't the boom of knock-offs that one might expect. However, speaking of an ego boost, please allow Vincent
Zhao to enter this review.