Beauty’s Evil Roses (Review)
Beauty’s Evil Roses
aka Se jiang II zhi xie mei gui
1992
Directed by Lam Wah-Chuen
Written by Chan Hiu-Bing
Beauty’s Evil Roses is somewhat famous in the circle of people who watch Hong Kong cult cinema because it is pretty darn weird. Besides being a weird Category III film, it also falls into the genre of movies that have weird S&M-type scenes, creepy tentacle stuff, and goofy Thai witchcraft battles. The creepy tentacle stuff is the types of things you expect to see out of Japan, not Hong Kong. The best stuff is the crazy goofy witch effects, especially when the Taoist priest is battling the Thai witches (why to all the evils in the universe in Hong Kong films come from Thailand? Because the city fears the wild frontier!)
So we have crazy witch cults, girls getting kidnapped, lesbians, cops doing cop stuff, more characters than you can shake a rape tentacle at, confusion, goofy effects, lesbians, gender-neutral evil deities, lesbians, Taoist priests, battles in outer space, lesbians, and lesbians. Seems like a winner to me.
Despite this being a VHS copy, the film did get a cheap DVD release at some point. But we don’t have it, so you can’t see it! Nyah nyah nyah!
The cast list is very sketchy, I did my best but make no promises as to the accuracy. So if there are errors, it is your fault for noticing them, and I will use my Lathe of Heaven powers to alter reality so my guesses are correct. That’s what you get for doubting my cast listing skills!
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Category III, Hong Kong, Lam Wah-Chuen, Tentacles, Weird Asia, wizards and witches playing with wands
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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High School Ghosthustlers (Review)
High School Ghosthustlers
2000
Starring
Senna Matsuda as Kyoko
Yuka Nakamori as Emi
Yuko Kitamura as Mayu
Directed by Yoshinori Nishikiori
High School Girls, Ghosts, penis monsters, live action hentai, Japan, if you like that stuff, here is a movie containing it. It’s campy trash, but it’s somewhat fun. And with three Japanese Models as main characters, it has plenty of eye candy to cover the boring stretches. After a slow opening, quickly interswitched with a high school girl jumping to her death, and then Kyoko is bungee jumping while Mayu and Emi sit talking. They are members of the Supernatural Phenomenon Research Club at their school. Their club is sponsored by Mr Shimada, who tells Emi, Kyoko, and Mayu that people this was part of a series of suicides and people are talking about the school being cursed, and he wants the girls to investigate. Of the girls, Kyoko is most interested in supernatural phenomenon because she wishes to see her dead grandmother again. Emi is the daughter of some sort of monk that performs exorcisms, and has some psychic powers. Mayu is basically there to fall down and ghosts to catch, and uses a ghost detector that looks like a toy gun. But the brave Mr. Shimada now has three high school girls wandering around an empty high school at midnight knowing that many high school girls have recently killed themselves. Around 12:30, they hear piano music, which turns out to be the weird janitor. As Kyoko and Emi go to the bathroom, Mayu gets attacked by scissors which cut off part of her clothes (oh, the horror :P). It is, naturally, the weird janitor, and Kyoko and Emi show up to help, and the Janitor tries to hypnotize Kyoko to kill herself, but she just beats the crap out of him. And he was responsible for the other girls’ deaths, so now the trio are heroines.
Read more…
Categories: Bad, Movie Reviews Tags: ghosts, Japan, Japanese Schoolgirls, Senna Matsuda, Tentacles, Weird Asia, Women who kick butt, Yoshinori Nishikiori, Yuka Nakamori, Yuko Kitamura
