Kung Fu Cyborg
Kung Fu Cyborg
aka Kei hei hup aka Kung Fu Cyborg: Metallic Attraction
2009
Directed by Jeffery Lau
Jeffery Lau declared he wanted to do Chinese Transformers, and have his robots be “the incarnation of Oriental wisdom and strength.” Okay. Lau is no stranger to science fiction, as anyone who has seen A Chinese Tall Story can testify. Kung Fu Cyborg was originally titled Robot, then the title was turned into the easier to remember Metallic Attraction: Kung Fu Cyborg. Except for when it was called Kung Fu Cyborg: Metallic Attraction! Or just Kung Fu Cyborg. D’Oh! So we’ll just call it Kung Fu Cyborg when we refer to it, even if we slip up later. Just ignore the slip ups. They are not the droids you are looking for.
But in any event, here are a bunch of cool posters for Kung Fu Cyborg.
This is a long movie, approaching Korean standard of length. One could easily trim 30 minutes and it would do nothing but help the film along. The length is because it seems like two movies smooshed together, an origin story and a second story. Unfortunately, that means things will be dragging. And dragging. And lots of side plots happen. And it takes forever for the freaking robots to do their robot thing. Which is sort of why I watched the movie in the first place. Before this introduction gets as long as the pre-robot fight scenes in Kung Fu Cyborg, let’s just get to the Roll Call!
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Alex Fong Lik-Sun, Betty Sun Li, CGI trainwreck, cool robots, Eric Tsang Chi-Wai, Gan Wei, Hong Kong, Hopping Vampires, Hu Jun, Jeffery Lau, Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei, Wu Jing
Antoo Fighter
Antoo Fighter
2008
SinemaMalasysia Link
Directed by Azizi Chunk
What we got here is sort of Malaysian Ghostbusters, but they use stick weapons instead of proton packs. Instead of busting ghosts we’re fighting monsters and demons. The mood is humorous, not taken too seriously, sort of like the actual Ghostbusters. With people running around in wacky costumes fighting monsters, the film can’t not be entertaining, double negative or not. Good fun. What other film let’s you see a giant Monsters Inc. character battle a giant robot? Take that, Iron Man!
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Amran Tompel, Awie, Azizi Chunk, Bront Palarae, CGI trainwreck, cool robots, ghosts, Hada Hidzir, Hantu demon, Harun Salim Bachik, Hopping Vampires, long black haired ghosts, Malaysia, Nasrizal Ngasri, Pontianaks, Radhi, Scha, Shoffi Jikan
The Terminators
The Terminators
2009
Directed by Xavier S. Puslowski
The Asylum makes a living producing mockbusters, which are DTV films with titles deceptively similar to films that have hit the theater the same week the DTV film hits video store shelves, thus people rent it by mistake and get enraged at what they saw. It is a strategy that works, gets them lots of press, and on occasion produces a film that’s better than the film it is mockbusting. TarsTarkas.NET has covered the mockbusters Transmorphers and Dragon (and will be covering more soon!), though those two films were done long ago when Leigh Scott was responsible for most of The Asylum’s output and better mockbusters. He has since left to do his own thing, and I haven’t really seen any post-Scott films from Asylum until now. Does it measure up? Read on and find out!
On first glance, you would think that The Asylum would get their pants sued off for the title alone. The Terminators? That doesn’t leave much room for error in what they are trying to mockbuster. But as The Asylum got lots of free publicity when they were threatened over the title of their The Day the Earth Stood Still mockbuster The Day the Earth Stopped, it is understandable why they would want to push the envelope again. From the trailer, it became obvious that they were using both the Terminator films and the remake Battlestar Galactica series as inspirations for the story and design, and that became even more obvious upon seeing the completed film.
What did happen is if you went to The Asylum’s Website, you saw no mention of the film. Sources say they did receive a cease and desist, but released the film regardless while scrubbing all promotion of it on their own pages. Sneaky, and calling someone’s bluff. The information was returned about a week later and is still up as of the time of writing this review.
One of the major problems with the film is the pacing. I am generally forgiving when it comes to bad effects (even if I point them out I find them charming) but as the Terminator franchise is generally known for fast-paced action, The Terminators is more on the lines of jogging action. A few sequences have brief bits of excitement on the scale of a bigger production (the van chase, the space battles), but most of the film is just the same robot guy walking along and killing people. Granted, there is no way that a small budgeted film like this could pull of complicated car chase sequences, nor are they expected, but when you are using all CGI for space shots, just go for broke and fund a few thousand dollars worth of cooler shots that will get people talking more.
This is Xavier S. Puslowski’s first film, though he has been the assistant director on many Asylum films (and if the rumors are true, he was basically the director on at least one of them thanks to the real director not doing anything!) Writer David Michael Latt is the current writer for what looks like everything the Asylum has done in the past few years, though this time he was working with story elements from lesser Asylum player William Morey. One common theme on Asylum productions is thinking big, so you can’t fault them for wanting to be able to do awesome stuff. The problem lies in their ability to do awesome stuff, which doesn’t always work with tiny budgets.
It is the future, and everyone owns a robot slave, called a TR4, all of which look identical, some bodybuilder. Yeah. I can totally see a sinister-looking model like that getting bought by families in the suburbs to cook breakfast. Of course, this movie would have not looked like the film it is mockbusting had the cyborgs all looked like Mrs. Doubtfire, but it would have been insane. Also, in this future where we have cyborgs and space stations and starships, everything else is modern day. In fact, the cars are all older model cars, probably because most of them are destroyed and a buying a new car would eat up the whole budget (it’s not like Chrysler is going to give them free cars, but maybe they should since they are broke and could use the publicity The Terminators could give them!)
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: A Martinez, Asylum, cool robots, David Michael Latt, Dustin Harnish, Jeremy London, Lauren Walsh, Lucinda Rogers, mockbuster, Paul Logan, Sara Tomko, Xavier S. Puslowski
Transmorphers
Transmorphers
2007
Directed and Written by Leigh Scott
Transmorphers! Morph than meets the eye! Wait a minute, that’s the theme to Transformers, not Transmophers, another in the long line of “mock”busters from The Asylum. We previously encountered them in the first Dragon Slayers team-up with FantasyFilmscapes.com in the movie Dragon, which was mysteriously named similar to Eragon. In addition to having elements similar to Transformers, Transmorphers borrows from several famous science fiction movies, the most obvious will be The Terminator and The Matrix. We’ll point out the rest as the references happen. Before we can get to the plot, first we must address the disk. Simply put, the Transmorphers DVD shipped with an incomplete movie. Large swaths of the film are out of sound sync, and many effects are incomplete. Guns shoot silently or no lasers exit the end. CGI at times is embarrassingly bad. In fact, the film is so bad that The Asylum went back and completed the film and fixed the sound problems, and any new DVDs are supposed to have the completed film. Well, I’m not about to track down another copy of the film to play Russian roulette to see if I got a corrected version. Transmorphers was filmed under the title Robot Wars, but everyone working on it pretty much knew it was going to get a new title that would sound familiar to a certain big budget film coming out.
Ignoring those major flaws, how is the film? Actually, it is pretty entertaining. Giving the budget constraints and time spent on the film, it was amazing what was produced. Writer/Director Leigh Scott gives a few tidbits of information from his interview on YourVideoStoreShelf.com about production for The Asylum and why he won’t be working for them anymore. Scott is known for creating a large bulk of The Asylum’s mockbusters and for going on message boards and arguing with irate watchers of his films. As for now, humanity is driven underground thanks to an invasion of alien robots.
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Amy Weber, Asylum, CGI trainwreck, cool robots, Eliza Swenson, Griff Furst, Jeff Denton, Jessica Bork, Leigh Scott, Lesbians, Matt Wolf, Michael Tower, mockbuster, Shaley Scott
Astro Boy – Fuhrer ZZZ
Astro Boy – Fuhrer ZZZ
1962
Astro Boy is a Japanese manga/anime created by Osamu Tezuka in Japan in 1951. He is one of the most recognizable faces in cartoons, not just manga. A string of projects have been created over the years, including the popular 1960′s cartoons that spread Astro Boy throughout the world. What is of most interest to us now is the 1958-59 live action TV series on Japan TV developed by MBS. In 1962 they released either a continuation movie or a string of TV episodes that follow the Fuhrer ZZZ story in the manga as a movie, which still circulates today in bootleg format. Thus, we got blurry scenes, no subtitles for the Japanese, and little or no information about the film or any of the actors. We don’t even have an accurate array of the character names, especially since the Peg Leg guy doesn’t even get a name in the manga this is based on! But it is a good window into Japanese TV of the late ’50s and how it was turning into the groovy 60s with superheroes and other fun effects. And where else are you going to see a kid dressed up as Astro Boy fighting villains? Certainly not on Cnn.com!
As stated before, the film has no subtitles, so certain things are inferred by actions or deduction. There is precious little information about this film anywhere. There isn’t even a definite explanation on where it came from, if it is some TV episodes strung together or a movie sequel to the TV series. The series dates from 1958-59, but the few sources date this film as 1962. That could be an error, or a movie could have been strung together from episodes a few years later to capitalize on the cartoon series. Or maybe a sequel movie was greenlit. What is important is we don’t know.
In addition, I am not that familiar with Astro Boy the cartoon, so many of the characters I had to look up their back stories. It also matters that this TV adaptation doesn’t have some of the main characters from the comic, and uses its own versions of some main characters as well. So the Roll Call is as accurate as possible, but TarsTarkas.NET does not guarantee accuracy. But we did the best we could, and this should be the best review of the Astro Boy Movie to ever hit the net. We can’t even locate an imdb.com entry (but that is not unusual for a film here.)
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: cool robots, Japan, Osamu Tezuka, We don't need no stinking subtitles
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
2005
Starring
Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent
Mos Def as Ford Prefect
Zooey Deschanel as Trillian
Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox
Alan Rickman as Marvin (voice)
Warwick Davis as Marvin (body)
The classic work by Douglas Adams finally comes to the silver screen. Twenty years or so it took, with pitfalls all the way. It was originally a radio play, then a book, then sequels, miniseries, video games, and towels followed. Finally, after years of stalling, the movie has been realized. Douglas Adams died, but the film continued onward. He did manage to contribute a lot toward the script before he left us. I myself read the books in high school years ago, but had not read them recently, so they were not fresh on my mind. I did not want to constantly compare the film to the books, so I stayed away from them until after the show. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or HG2G as the slang goes (Or even H2G2, which is being used as well as typos rapidly expand their stranglehold upon the English language) the movie has some big shoes to fill and big expectations to meet.
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Alan Rickman, cool robots, Douglas Adams, Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Sam Rockwell, The book was better, Warwick Davis, Zooey Deschanel
