The live-action film will star Shun Oguri as Lupin III, Meisa Kuroki as Fujiko Mine, Tetsuji Tamayama as Daisuke Jigen, Go Ayano as Goemon Ishikawa XIII, and Tadanobu Asano as Inspector Koichi Zenigata. It’s directed by Ryuhei Kitamura and it looks like a Ryuhei Kitamura adventure film!
Lifetime wins with The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story!
The film will feature the six most famous cast members, thus skipping the whole Good Morning, Miss Bliss year and jumping right into everything we know and love whenever “Real 90s kids” trends on Twitter. The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story was cast by the same casting director who cast the original series, Robin Lippin. The actors are:
Dylan Everett as Mark-Paul Gosselaar
Sam Kindseth as Dustin Diamond
Julian Works as Mario Lopez
Alyssa Lynch as Tiffani-Amber Thiessen
Tiera Skovbye as Elizabeth Berkley
Taylor Russell McKenzie as Lark Voorhies
They will deal with the pressure of being squeaky clean role models while also having drug-fueled sex orgies (according to Dustin Diamond’s autobiography) If they do even 10% of the things on this list (I know that Mario Lopez rapist story did make American tabloid tv shows because I remember it airing), the film will be amazing and awesome. And maybe it will lead to Saved by the Bell: The New New Class!
Hopefully they do nice parallels to actual episodes, including Jessie being addicted to caffeine pills and Screech dating Tori Spelling. The public will demand that! After all, how are we going to get more gifs for Tumblr if they fail to deliver?
The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story premieres September 1st on Lifetime, and damn right I’ll be watching!
via Buzzfeed (BOO!) of all places
Fight for Survival (Review)
Fight for Survival
aka 十大掌門闖少林 aka The Fight for Shaolin Tamo Mystique aka Shi da zhang men chuang Shao Lin aka Lady Wu Tang
1977
Written and directed by Hou Cheng
Hold on to your hats with shock, as here is a Polly Shang Kuan film where things are weird! I know, right? Who would have thought! As usual, it’s a good weird, part of the kung fu comedy atmosphere of the late 1970s. Fight for Survival/Fight for Shaolin Tamo Mystique (the much cooler name I first learned of the film as!) is packed with a bunch of big named cameos, characters who developed odd body modifications thanks to whatever kung fu specialty they have, gender bending, cornball comedy, and terrible dubbing. If you enjoy characters with extending arms and legs, who employ weird headbutts and walk on their hands, or who are randomly painted up as animals and waiting in rooms at the Shaolin Temple, then you are in for a treat.
The version I have is fullscreen and dubbed, which is a shame, as this film has a lot of neat choreography and costumes that requires a widescreen high-definition transfer to get the best effects. I guess I can expect that the same day the widescreen Monkey War shows up on remastered Blu-ray, aka NEVER! What a shame the wildest and craziest movies are also the most ignored when it comes to high quality.
In this film, Polly’s character Shih Pu Chuan sets out to recover 10 books stolen from the Shaolin Temple, each volume teaching one kung fu technique, and each technique has been mastered by the respective theif of that volume. But, if you only learn one of the kung fu skills, your body soon begins to modify itself based on that kung fu skill. Thus, the guy who learns to extend his arms has permanent long arms. The guy who stretched his legs looks like he’s walking around on stilts. The woman who stole the Positive Kung Fu book turns into a man, and the guy who stole the Negative Kung Fu book turns into a woman. The only way to not get physically screwed up is to learn all the skills so there is a balance. Even Shih Pu Chuan isn’t immune, her female character begins to turn into a man, and her sifu can’t remember how to do Negative Kung Fu. That leads him into discovering the Temple let the books get stolen and her subsequent quest. At one point it is declared that the villains can’t turn back to normal because they are evil, which might be saying that without balance, you are evil. Just remember, folks, every thing in moderation.
Of course, that also leads to yet another film where Polly Shang Kuan plays a gender bending character. This time she’s officially playing someone who is both sexes, though her long term goal is to stay a female. The only real disadvantage of turning male is gaining a faint mustache and having lots of ladies falling in love with you. As the main lady is the woman who used to be the man who stole the Negative Kung Fu book, things become tragic irony.
The main tale of the training and quest only eats up about an hour of the running time, we then have extended scenes where the many cameos attack Shaolin Temple because their followers (some of the followers were involved in the theft and some weren’t) are arrested in public. Now Shih has to defend her home from all these new people, but thankfully she now has lots of skills with which to do so.
The crazy specialties of the thieves gives us some awesome goofy kung fu, along with a whole host of guest stars who pop up when the thieves impersonate them in the beginning, and then return in the end when the real versions of the masters attack the temple. The cast is one of those ridiculously huge casts that makes me want to do a Roll Call 30 people long, and is filled with actors who aren’t identified very well. Luckily, I came to my senses, and it’s only 4 people long! We’re aren’t obsessively stupid at TarsTarkas.NET for nothing!
Like most of the Taiwanese kung fu comedies, the humor is a mix of slapstick and reaction shots. These aren’t films that are taken seriously by hardcore martial arts fans. Add to that the ridiculous dubbing and often awful fullscreen vhs presentation, and you can see why these flicks don’t get any respect. Which is a shame, because the ri-donk-ulousness is awesome! I’ll take a film that knows how to have fun over a dramafest that takes itself far too seriously any day!
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Pteracuda likes to slap!
Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda – Sunday, August 2 at 9PM – In this new Roger Corman movie, the child of Sharktopus goes toe-to-toe with the latest science experiment “Pteracuda” – half Pteradactyl, half Barracuda – in a battle for monster supremacy. A production of New Horizons Pictures, the movie stars Robert Carradine (Django Unchained) and Katie Savoy (Living with Models).
Fortified Links!
**There is a new episode of Frank Conniff’s radio play series Podhouse 90: Dracula Has Risen in the Polls!
**TarsTarkas.NET pal Todd from FourDK will be dropping a book later this year called Funky Bollywood!
**Julius Kassendorf has an amazing love-hate letter to Mahogany, which i believe started out as a lovefest entry on the Dissolve (where a different commenter each day writes an essay about an underloved film, usually on the daily “essential film writing” posts)
**Beth from Beth Loves Bollywood gives us the lowdown on the “rivalry” between Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee that culminated with Jhinder Bondi!
**Film Guinea Pig encounters Darwin’s Nightmare!
**The Cultural Gutter is doing another fundraiser!
**Cinematic Catharsis gets bitten by Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht!
**Teleport-City charges a toll when The Devil Rides Out!
**Blueprint: Review steps into DTV land for Drive Hard!
**Vern meets the mess that is Foodfight!
**Pre-Code.com gets wet with I Cover the Waterfront!
**The League of Dead Films meets Doomsday!
**Someone submitted a FOIA request about Godzilla and got a reply!
**Turban Decay reflects on the passing of Casey Kasem!
**Which legendary animal fires steaming hot poo at you? Find out in Weird and Wonderful Creatures of the Bestiary!
**Joel Hodgson teases possible MST3K crowd-funding perks!
Ever After High gets a movie and series deal on Netflix
All the characters are kids of fairy tale characters, so you get people like Humphrey Dumpty, the son of Humpty Dumpty; Cedar Wood, the daughter of Pinocchio; Dexter Charming, the son of King Charming, the twin of Darling Charming, and younger brother to Daring Charming; and Kitty Cheshire, the daughter of the Cheshire Cat. There are even one or two characters from Monster High that have transferred into Ever After High, because crossover money, baby!
Ever After High has no affiliation with that upcoming Disney Channel movie Descendants which has children of Disney fairy tale characters in high school. It does show that high school is the future of fairy tales.
No word yet on if that rumored live-action Monster High musical film is actually going to get made. UPDATE: @rwmead has pointed out they confirmed a 2016 release date last month, so fingers crossed!
via THR