Thrilling Sword (Review)
Thrilling Sword
aka Shen jian dong shan he
1981
Directed by Cheung San-Yee
Written by Shing-Ming Huang
This film rules!
It is a Taiwanese take on Snow White, which needed giant monsters, guys turned into bears, demon worship, and crystal swords. Take that, Disney! The film is filled with fantastic elements, just when you think the film has exhausted its supply of weird wonderness, it shows that Thrilling Sword has barely scratched the surface. Parts of the film remind me of He-Man, to the point where I suddenly became interested in He-Man again after years of not being interested and now know all sorts of new stuff about He-Man.
Thrilling Sword is one of many awesome fantasy films that came out of the Taiwanese film industry. At the time, they were competing with the Shaw Brothers and their elaborate and expensive productions. No Taiwanese company could compete in making their films look just as good, but that didn’t stop them from trying or from going over the top with the fantasy aspects. And that makes the films that came out of Taiwan from the 1970s and 80s some of the weirdest and most fun films. It is a shame that so many of the films are hard to find or even lost. Many of the surviving films are only found on fullscreen VHS tapes that are running on thirty years old (luckily, most have been archived digitally, so even if the film never is released again it won’t disappear.) This particular rip is taken from a TV broadcast, which is supposed to be more widescreen than the fullscreen VHS releases of Thrilling Sword, but then I saw a VCD case while looking up cast info on the film, so there is at least VCD copies around, which means there might be a DVD somewhere, but who knows how good that copy is. But this is one film I would put extra time into hunting down an upgrade for.
Thrilling Sword has also been released under the titles Heaven Sword and Thrilling Bloody Sword. So now you know. Director Cheung San Yee also directed a few classics such as Lady Constables and Snaky Knight Fights Against Mantis. He also wrote Island Warriors and came up with the story for Challenge of the Lady Ninja.
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The Dwarves!
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Raising the roof!
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Voodoo Dollz: Lust Potion #9 (Review)
Voodoo Dollz: Lust Potion #9
2008
Directed by Fred Olen Ray (as Nicholas Medina)
Voodoo Dollz is a satirization of those awful movies where girls go to private school and there are secret witches and devil worshiping going on. Many of these films are from the 1970’s, thus have slow pacing, awful cameras, and look like everyone is high on Mary Jane. Thankfully, most of the boring stuff is dropped from this entry, and we get an erotic parody done up Fred Olen Ray style! Many of the familiar females make an appearance, and we get one, lone male entry – Alexandre Boisvert, aka Voodoo, thus giving us the title Voodoo Dollz. There is no Evan Stone, Bart Batram, Ted Newsom, or Jay Richardson. But the many many women means lots of lesbian encounters!
The movie has recently came out on DVD, but as I am poor I had to dub this off of the free cable that comes with renting. I bet you can’t figure out which channel it was on! Stupid logos. Is there even any action in this (of the non-sex kind?) Maybe three seconds of tossing candles. At least these films captured directly off of cable look better than the older screen captures from the SciFi Channel films I taped on vhs and then tried to screencap.
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Hey, man…there is a voodoo doll in the opening credits! I get it! Read more…
The Eight Hilarious Gods (Review)
The Eight Hilarious Gods
aka Siu baa sin
1993
Directed by Jeffrey Chiang Gu-Jun
Hong Kong does their take on Hakkenden, the tale that gave us Legend of Eight Samurai and Message From Space. Except it is a pure comedy and no one marries a dog. That’s good, as this film is about as related to the traditional Japanese story as Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter is to the Gospel of Luke. It does have some recognizable Hong Kong stars (even to Western audience members only slightly familiar with Hong Kong cinema) and some nice fantasy fights for a comedy, but isn’t afraid to dwell in the poop jokes or to murder children just so the audience can go “WTF?” So let’s all go “WTF?” together!
This version of the film comes from one of those double-VHS tapes, found in the double-size VHS boxes that old-school video stores had. The only video store I know by name that still carries those is Le Video in San Francisco, but some of the old-school Chinatown rental stores have this as well. The double-tape explains why there are numbers after the title, because there are two title screens, one for each tape. Old school is the best school, baby! There ain’t no forced commercials here like on DVD. Sure, the picture quality isn’t the best, but it’s not like this film is begging for a remastered DVD. It should be remastered.
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