The Sorcerer and the White Snake
The Sorcerer and the White Snake
aka 白蛇傳說 aka It’s Love aka Bai she chuan shuo aka Madame White Snake
2011
Written by Charcoal Tan, Tsang Kan-Cheung, and Sze-To Cheuk-Hon
Directed by Tony Ching Siu-Tung
Action Directors – Tony Ching Siu-Tung and Wong Ming-Kin
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Ice Age 5: Journey to Mt. Doom!
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The Sorcerer and the White Snake is a big budget effects bonanza that also doubles as a sleeping aide. Thanks to China attempting to become a major player in the movie department, they’ve begun adopting the worst aspect of Hollywood blockbusters. Giant empty special effects, bland characters, story arcs that go nowhere, and a film made as generic and non-offensive as possible to ensure the widest possible audience. Sadly, that also makes The Sorcerer and the White Snake just like so many of those big budget films in that it is not very good. Now, I can’t fault them entirely for being inspired by generic Hollywood junk, that’s most likely the films that are imported over to China that clean up in the box office. But in the race to show how China can do it too, they failed to realize what China is doing is failing just as bad.
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We’ve come to avenge Ting Ting from Thunder of Gigantic Serpent!
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When making The Sorcerer and the White Snake, the producers decided the most interesting part about this classic love story was a supporting character who fought spirits. My thinking is they wanted to do a familiar story but also wanted to do a film with huge action sequences. The only feasible way was to graft it onto the classic White Snake story. But it just doesn’t work. The original tale is diluted and weakened, while the Monk’s expanded story receives little payoff. This decision even further boggles the mind because they kept the title It’s Love, which hints that the film should be focused on the couple and not the monk. The biggest sin of all is the action sequences ring hollow and bland. Large portions of what should have made the film great were sacrificed for spectacles that focues on looking good over actual impact. Thousands of people at thousands of computers worked for thousands of hours to make me bored. Many of the huge battles fail to even convey a sense of danger for the combatants, even when the entire ocean is turning into giant tidal waves with giant snakes swimming around, no one seems to be in real danger.
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Someone wasn’t paying attention when they read the Book of Genesis!
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But are there bright spots? Well, the film certainly looks very nice. Good cinematography. Moments of the action sequences are good, but not enough. This paragraph should be longer, but I really can’t think of anything.
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By that time, my mouse lungs were aching for air.
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It is legally impossible to talk about The Sorcerer and the White Snake without bringing up the last well known theatrical version of this story, Green Snake. I’m serious. Lawyers will call you and yell. While Tsui Hark’s film is a masterpiece, it is a completely different story (based, in fact, on a separate work, the book Green Snake by Lilian Lee!) Comparing Green Snake to The Sorcerer and the White Snake is like complaining because The Muppets Wizard of Oz isn’t enough like Wicked. They are two different stories with two different tales, with the same narrative starting point. And this post isn’t about Green Snake, it’s about The Sorcerer and the White Snake.
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I hate it when I’m in the bamboo forest and a rap video breaks out…
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Let’s meet the cast, then I’ll point out some places where the film did okay and where I got annoyed.
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So much CGI, the excitemenZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz…..
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Discount Puppet Explosion 411 – Episode 108 – Mega Python vs. Gatoroid
Discount Puppet Explosion 411 – Two teams battle to review B movies for fabulous prizes
In this episode, Team Bastards takes on the Asylum’s classic matchup film, Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. Debbie Gibson and Tiffany battle using lizards as proxies in an escalating war of reptilian giantism.
Categories: Movies, Video Reviews Tags: A Martinez, Asylum, Debbie Gibson, Discount Puppet Explosion 411, giant snake movie, Micky Dolenz, Tiffany
Grendel
Grendel
2007
Directed by Nick Lyon
SciFi Channel is worse than the monsters in the films it continues to pump out at a hypersonic rate. At least in their films, the monster dies at the end after killing off most of the cast. In reality, SciFi Channel cannot be stopped, and no matter how many of their films are taken down, the network remains strong and continues to send its armies against the good people of the world. Whenever the people are in danger, there will always be heroes who rise to the challenge to fight the monsters. Once again, the Dragon Slayers have mobilized to take on a creature sewing destruction upon the lands. In this case, that monster is Grendel, based on the epic poem Beowulf. Based on may be too kind of a word. Grendel shares some of the same character names as Beowulf, and some of the same plot. The details change, a lot. To the point that one wonders if they read the original poem, or even the Cliff Notes. Heck, had they watched the Star Trek Voyager episode about Beowulf they would have been more accurate. Instead, we have some sort of super-crossbow that fires explosive rockets.
A few brief notes on the literary wonder that is Beowulf. With events taking place in the late 5th through early 6th centuries A.D. Beowulf gives a glimpse into a period rich with battles, heroes and epic lore. One of the few surviving epics in Old English it is often referred to as, "The Oldest English Epic". Beloved by scholars it inspired Tolkien (who was an authority on the text) and many another author. It has, surprisingly seen little attention on film, the Christopher Lambert film of the name was a futuristic SciFi piece with little relation to the epic. 2005′s Beowulf & Grendel reworked the source material to tell a moralistic tale with Grendel as a misunderstood primitive. It received mixed reviews (Iain says, "I liked it for the most part"). A motion capture adaptation is to be released in 2007, this appears to be attempting to stick within the vein of epic.
TarsTarkas.NET and FantasyFilmscapes.com are doing another tag-team review. As usual, the opening segment is collaborative, after that, we will be alternating every 15 minutes of film between Tars Tarkas from here and Iain Norman from FantasyFilmscapes.com. Once you have gone through this version of the review, be sure to drop by FantasyFilmscapes.com’s version, with different pictures, different formatting, and plenty of other content on that site as well. Now let’s begin:
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Alexis Peters, Ben Cross, CGI trainwreck, Chris Bruno, Chuck Hittinger, giant snake movie, Grendel, Jack Minor, Marina Sirtis, Nick Lyon, SciFi Channel, Slaying the Dragon
Bruce Lee in New Guinea
Bruce Lee in New Guinea
aka She nu yu chao aka Bruce Li in New Guinea
1978
Starring
Bruce Li (Ho Chung Tao) as Chang Wang-li (aka Bruce Lee)
Chan Sing as Great Snake Wizard Guru
Danna as Ann Kawa
Chin-kun Li as Chin Sang
??? as Tu Yung – one of the guides (shorter)
??? as The crosseyed guide
??? as Cheng Pow
Directed by C.Y. Yang
Bruce Li is Bruce Lee is Chang Wang-li in Bruce Lee in New Guinea, part of Bruce-ploitation Mania of the 1970′s and 1980′s. Bruce Li (real name Ho Chung Tao) was one of the dozens of Bruce Lee imitators renamed Bruce Something or Something Lee in the wake of the death of the King of Kung Fu. Bruce Lee ended up doing all sorts of wacky things once every other movie coming out of Hong Kong was patterned after him to make a quick buck. This is not as wacky as some of them (The Clones of Bruce Lee anyone?) but is still pretty silly. The real question is, would the real Bruce Lee bother going to New Guinea? I think not! Bruce Lee (Li) does end up on Snake Worship Island, I don’t want to give away what they worship there, but it isn’t King Kong. Let’s just say Wacking Day would be a sacrilegious event. It’s important to note that Bruce Li is not supposed to be Bruce Lee, but some guy named Chang Wang-li, an anthropologist who is not a former 1970′s martial arts star, thus the “Bruce Lee” in the title is a complete lie. Not that the producers would care after they got your hard earned money. Sometimes this film is more truthfully titled Bruce Li in New Guinea. Co-starring is the lovely Danna as the Princess, who was being pushed as an international sex symbol at this time, but soon faded to obscurity. Much like this film, except it was never pushed as anything more than a cheap buck, and it shows that, in spades.
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Bolo Yeung Sze, Bruce Li Shao-Lung, Brucesploitation, Chan Sing, Dana, giant snake movie, Hong Kong, Larry Lee Gam-Kwan, mad monkey time, martial arts, San Kuai, To Siu-Ming, Yeung Gat-Aau, Yue Tau-Wan
Komodo vs. Cobra
Komodo vs. Cobra
2005
Starring
Michelle Borth as Susan Richardson
Jerri Manthey as Sandra Crescent
Glori-Anne Gilbert as Darla
Ryan McTavish as Jerry
Ted Monte as Ted
Chris Neville as Lerner
Michael Paré as Mike
Jay Richardson as Dr. Richardson
Renee Talbert as Carrie
Delpano Wills as Marsden
Directed by Jim Wynorski
Komodo vs. Cobra!!! KvC!! Giant komodo vs. a giant cobra. This should be a winner! In the name of Boa vs. Python, another fun SciFi Channel monster vs monster film. But what should easily be a winner can often become a chore as cheapness conspires to clutch a loser of a film from the jaws of winningness. What else do you expect when your director is Jim Wynorski and it doesn’t involve naked chicks? Having nothing to do with either Curse of the Komodo or King Cobra, despite Wynorski’s work on CotK, this film tries to set itself in an independent universe. That’s the excuse, then, for making this film 95% identical to CotK. Many of the same major scene reenact themselves, many of the same sets are reused, and at least four actors and the director/writer are the same. This is akin to just taking the CotK film and adding a King Cobra wandering around digitally added to the background in a few scenes and calling it a new movie. Oh, our title characters fight, all right. At the very end of the movie, for about two minutes. That’s it. Despite them saying repeatedly that there are many giant cobras and giant komodo, we don’t even get a hint that they fight each other except one small scene in the flashbacks where they hiss a lot. This isn’t like Naked Lunch, where no one ate a lunch while naked, this is SciFi Channel, we want a damn monster fight. And this movie which promises a monster fight in it’s title is determined to deny us what we so desperately desire. In the end, all it does is tick you off. Really tick you off. Freaking tick you off. Tick you of like a MoFo! GARRRRRRRGGGGHHH!!!
The movie opens promising enough. Three people are running through the jungle of a tropical isle. It’s Dr. Richardson, his daughter Susan, and a third man we’ll call Orson Welles, because he was The Third Man. Their running is useless, because they are cut off by Johnny Komodo. Johnny Komodo looks a little different from CotK, he’s got a more dinosaur-shaped head. He’s just as immune to bullets, as none of the ones fired seem to have any effect on him. Johnny Komodo shows that the Jim Wynorski watched Jurassic Park, as komodo can now not see you unless you move, like the T-Rex. Orson Welles runs off, which attracts Johnny Komodo and he chomps down on Orson Welles. Dr. Richardson and Susan escape then and set up shop by a lake, looking around for a bit, until Johnny Cobra emerges from the lake, and has Dr. Richardson chops for dinner. Now Susan is all alone…
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