Super 8 – The movie of my childhood?

Two creative geniuses coming together to make a movie for children of the 80s.  Spielberg and Lucas?  Nope, but half right.  Spielberg and JJ Abrams.  Super 8 recently landed on Netflix and I have to say, for many reasons this movie is my childhood encapsulated.

First, no, I never ran into an alien as a kid (that I know of…some of my teachers might have been from other planets…).  I also never made a movie with a bunch of friends.  What I do share in common with the film is that I am from the area of Ohio where the movie is set.  Granted, they filmed in West Virginia, so the terrain is a bit more hilly than Ohio, but it still looks about right, right down to the town watertower.  My home town is, in fact, just on the opposite side of Dayton from where the fictional Lillian is located.  It had about the same population (a little less, perhaps) and was similar in a lot of ways.  No town police – the Sheriff was the law in town.  The bicycles all parked in metal racks outside the school.  The kids wearing awful clothes…

Technically speaking the kids in Super 8 are a little older than I would have been in 1979.  They look to be about 10-12, I would have been about 5-6, but there’s so much there that is memorable to me.  You’d think the movie was filmed in the early 80s, even with the incredible effects.  Only the alien’s more “modern” appearance throws it off, but this is made up for by the “cosmic rubik’s cubes”.  Of COURSE a space ship in the late 70s/early 80s would be made of rubik’s cubes!

There’s more than just the setting that pulls at me, however.  The big kid who also likes the girl.  The spaz who loves firecrackers.  The kid who always follows the rules.  They all feel like people I knew growing up.

I’ve heard people describe Super 8 as a new version of the Goonies.  In some ways, that’s correct.  To me, however, it’s like a love note from my past, reminding me of days when you worried more about who got first-ups in a pick-up game of baseball than if you’re putting enough into your 401K.

If you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it. It really is a great movie, and deserves a lot more credit than it’s gotten.  Also, Elle Fanning is a remarkable young actress and I’ll be honest, she puts her older sister to shame in this movie.  Oh, and watch to the end of the credits – you get to see the movie the kids were making.  It’s horrible, of course, but at the same time it’s cute and corny…much like the real movie.

 

X-Men First Class sequel – Days of Future Past!

Holy hell, the title for the X-Men First Class sequel has been announced, and it’s Days of Future Past, possibly the second greatest X-Men story ever (after Dark Phoenix).

For those who weren’t huge X-Men fans in the 1980s, Days of Future Past was a two issue story where Kitty Pride’s adult self possessed the body of her younger self to warn the X-Men of an impending attack on Senator Kelly.  This attack would lead to a world where giant robots called Sentinels basically control everything and mutants are kept in concentration camps.  This story introduced a number of very important elements into the X-Men mythology: Senator Kelly, who was in the first movie, Project Wideawake (the government plan to build Sentinels), and last but certainly not least, Rachel Summers, my favorite X-Man ever.

Rachel was the catalyst for sending adult Kitty’s mind back in time, so hopefully she’ll show up in this movie.  I mean, seriously, why NOT show the kid of two of the X-Men?  It would be pretty awesome, especially if people put two and two together and ask how Scott could be her dad…

Anyway, the story shows a bleak future to remind the X-Men that while things are bad, they can always get worse.  Considering this story is essential to the X-mythology, I’m surprised it took until now for it to be made.  The only bad things are that first, Kitty isn’t likely to be the main character (she isn’t in the First Class lineup) and the most iconic scene, Wolverine being vaporized by a Sentinel, won’t happen as Hugh Jackman won’t be in this as Wolverine.  Still, I have high hopes for Rachel.  Maybe we’ll get a young Jean Grey in this one and Rachel will possess her mother’s form?

In any event, the movie won’t be out for a few years, so plenty of speculation will come.

 

A Shining prequel?

The Sun is reporting that The Shining may soon have a prequel.  Which “The Shining”?  Kubrick’s version, sadly, not the novel.

The movie supposedly will focus on Jack Torrance’s predecessor, Grady, and is being put together by the creative teams from Shutter Island and Black Swan.  Both good movies, but I kind of doubt they can pull off something great here.

It WOULD be possible to do a good Shining prequel movie.  You’d need to focus on a part of the story completely cut out of the Kubrick version; Horace Derwent, the slimy millionaire/gangster who restored the Overlook in the 1940s.  He’s also known as “the guy in the bear suit”, and he got up to all sorts of deviant behavior in the remote mountain hotel.

According to the novel, Derwent bought the Overlook in the early 40s and used a lot of his own money restoring it.  For a time it became a notorious retreat for the rich and famous.  Derwent’s parties often devolved into orgies, and more than a few folks were killed at the Overlook, some with guns, others with drug overdoses.  Derwent’s hotel became a sort of cesspit of immorality hidden in the Rockies, which lasted into the early 50s when people finally found other places to hang out and have their parties.

Unfortunately, the odds are that most of this will be forgotten, again, and we’ll get a pretty run of the mill horror movie where you could just do an “Edit-Replace All” of Grady for Jack Torrance.

 

Here, let me ruin The Dark Knight Rises for you…

Here’s the resolution of the main plot.

 

Some of you will laugh.  Others will realize…yeah…it is.

 

Absentia – awesome horror movie on Netflix

Netflix can be hit or miss when it comes to horror movies.  They have some really good ones (Grave Encounters, for example) and some really bad ones (100 Feet, for example).  One of the newest is a film called Absentia.  The movie has won a number of awards, but it never got a wide release, which is too bad, because it’s a very, very scary film.

Warning, spoilers follow.

The movie’s plot is very simple and very straight-forward, with no real subplots to bog down the scary.  A woman, Tricia, who is very pregnant, is about to have her missing husband, Daniel, declared legally dead in absentia.  He disappeared seven years earlier.  Her sister, recovering (or not so recovering) drug addict and free spirit, Callie, comes to help her pack up and move on to the next chapter in her life.  And across from her apartment is what looks like an unassuming pedestrian tunnel through a hill…

Callie goes running every day and happens to run through the tunnel.  She encounters what she assumes is a homeless man who is amazed she can see him.  He tries to trade various trinkets with her to get her to take a message to his son, but she runs off.  Later she takes food to the tunnel, but the man is gone, so she leaves it.  The next day, a pile of trinkets are on her sister’s doorstep.  She returns these to the tunnel, but a young man holding a trash bag tells her not to do that.  She, of course, does it anyway.  Later, she finds her bed full of trinkets, which the police bag up and note have been reported stolen from neighbors.

Tricia starts having horrific visions of her missing husband, which her therapist tells her are normal, no matter how terrifying, and she tries to block them out.  Eventually she gets the death certificate, finds a new apartment, and is ready to move on, but the visions remain.  She agrees to go out on a real date with the detective who’s been working her husband’s case, who also happens to be the father of her unborn child.  They leave her apartment and she sees her husband in the street and tries to will the hallucination away…only it’s not a hallucination, it’s real.  Her husband, emaciated and badly beaten, has returned.

Daniel is rushed to the hospital and Tricia’s life is turned upside down.  She doesn’t know what to think, and Daniel is incapable of explaining where he’s been for seven years or how he got animal bones in his stomach.  He is eventually released and brought back home, where Tricia tries to deal with his return and Callie slips back into drugs.  Tricia has a late night meeting with the detective to break off their relationship.  While she’s out, Daniel comes into Callie’s room and tells her she shouldn’t have traded with “it”, that “it gets fixated” and that it, whatever it was that took him, is in the wall of his bedroom.  Callie doesn’t believe him at first, but then she hears a noise and sees the thing, an insect like creature only glimpsed in the movie, skitter past her door.

While Tricia is talking with her boyfriend, the thing takes Daniel.  A drugged out Callie tries to save him, but the thing drags him to the tunnel and absorbs him into the walls.  Callie finds Tricia, and her world it turned upside down again.  The police, of course, don’t believe Callie’s tale of a monster bug thing, and can tell she’s strung out, but she maintains that she saw what she saw.  Tricia, an emotional wreck, tries to come to grips with what all has happened.

Callie finds evidence that the area has had disappearances like Daniel’s for many years, dating back to the 1800s, and she tries to convince Tricia that there was a monster.  Tricia denies this, blames herself for Daniel leaving as she believes he caught her kissing the detective, and generally becomes even more of a wreck.  Eventually the sisters reconcile after a body is found in the tunnel, that of the “homeless man”, who was actually another missing person.  His son was the guy with the trash bag who warned Callie not to trade with the tunnel, and he was delivering a puppy…apparently for the people trapped in the tunnel to eat.

Trying to get her life back together, Tricia and Callie talk, come to an understanding, and both start feeling better.  Then, as they head to bed, the creature comes and takes Tricia.  Callie goes to the police, but they don’t believe her, and think maybe she had a drug deal that went bad.  They let her go, but warn her to stay in the area.  She goes to the tunnel and offers to trade herself for her sister.  What she gets instead is the dead fetus.  The creature then takes her, and all that is left is an envelope with the evidence Callie gathered left for the detective.  He, of course, ignores it.

The movie works well for a number of reasons.  One, and most importantly, they don’t show everything.  The monster is never clearly seen.  It slithers past quickly, is seen in shaky shots that don’t allow you to focus, and it remains menacing by having features that are wrong.  For example, it seems to have human like arms and legs, but the body of a silverfish, along with prehensile antennae.  However, since you never really see it, it’s hard to say.

The second reason the movie works is the music and sound.  Ominous music or just tones play throughout the movie, so you never know when something is going to jump out.  Another big plus was during the running scenes where the camera follows Callie, the music from her headphones is not heard clearly.  Movies tend to do this, which puts you essentially in the head of the character.  By NOT doing this, the movie makes you more of an observer, so you don’t know what might happen.

Finally, the acting in this movie is spot on.  Courtney Bell (Tricia) and Katie Parker (Callie) come off as real sisters.  They don’t have that forced vibe that most movie siblings have.  They feel organically connected.  These two women carry the whole film, and the range of emotion on each of them is very impressive.  They don’t look like they’re in a low budget indie horror flick, and I hope to see more of them in the future.

If you like scary monster movies, Absentia is a really good movie for a dark and stormy night.  I highly recommend a watch.

 

Guardians of the Galaxy – What you need to know about Marvel’s next big movie

Unless you live under a rock (and maybe you do), you’ve probably heard the big news from Marvel Studios at SDCC this past weekend.  Actually, it’s a lot of news, so maybe you’ve missed some bits.  Let me sum up: we have titles for two new movies – Thor 2: The Dark World and Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier.  No surprise on the Cap movie…Winter Soldier is the name for Bucky Barnes, last seen falling from a train in the Alps in Captain America 1, and most comic fans were expecting the second film to bring him in.  Also, Ant-Man is on, directed by Edgar Wright, and looks amazing.  Iron Man 3 is going to be awesome with Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin.  But the big news, the most awesome of all news was confirmation that there is a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and it’s got a release date: August 1, 2014.

Nerdgasm

The movie will have the above characters (from left to right): Drax the Destroyer, Groot, Star Lord, Rocket Raccoon, and Gamora.

So who are these people and why should you care?

Basically, the Guardians of the Galaxy are the Avengers of space.  We don’t know how the movie version will come together, so let’s talk about how the comics team formed.  Basically two times in a row heavy hitters threatened the entire galaxy.  First was Annihilus, an insect/humanoid from the Negative Zone (another dimension) who broke through to reality and, along with his massive army and Galactus-powered weapon known as the Annihilation Wave (the dude put Galactus…yes, THAT Galactus…into his machine as a battery!) almost wiped out all life.  He was stopped by a collection of “cosmic heroes”, while the folks on Earth were blissfully unaware.

The second threat hit just a few months later, a techno-organic race known as the Phalanx who cut off a huge portion of space from the rest of the galaxy and started turning folks into the Borg (well, basically…Marvel and Star Trek don’t have a partnership anymore).  These machines beings were actually being led by the old Avenger’s villain, Ultron, who was ultimately stopped by…well, see above, cosmic heroes.  Mostly the same ones.

In the aftermath, the heroes looked at each other and said, “you know what?  Maybe we need to have a group on stand by in case stuff like this happens again.”  And thus the Guardians of the Galaxy were born.  Their mission was to prevent big catastrophes like the Annihilation War and the Conquest War (the names for the two previous near-galaxy destroying wars) from happening.  In the comics, they were based in the severed head of a Celestial on the edge of the universe.  Those who know comics might have just re-read that twice…yes, I said severed head of a Celestial.  No, they had no idea what could do that or how, but the head was quite functional as a space base, in a crazy Babylon 5/DS9 sort of way (they weren’t the only folks on the head).  Their mission control was a telepathic Russian dog named Cosmo.  Just…don’t ask.

Anyway, the Guardians mostly spent their time sealing up holes in reality that came about due to all the bad stuff that happened in the wars.  Nasty things came through the holes, and the Guardians stopped them and sealed up the holes to try to prevent space from unraveling.  In the end, they failed, and the third war, the War of Kings between the leader of the Inhumans, Black Bolt and the Emperor of the Shi’ar, Vulcan (aka Gabriel Summers, the third Summers brother, brother of Cyclops and Havok of the X-Men) ripped a huge hole in space time.  In fact, it opened a hole directly to the Cancerverse, a horrible universe where “life won”, and everything is consumed by undying Lovecraftian monsters.  It’s seriously a Lovecraft universe, including things like “the Lens of Leng”…pretty awesome if you ask me.

Imagine that’s your night sky…forever!

Anyway, so the Guardians ultimately failed, but the point is that they were, for a while, a pretty good defense against the evil stuff leaking through the cracks in the universe.

“But wait,” you say, “weren’t the Guardians of the Galaxy some group from the future who wore horrible outfits?”  Yes, there originally was a group call the Guardians of the Galaxy that were from the future.  The whole comic was set in the 31st century and the group were basically space Avengers then.  Some folks get all nostalgic for this group, but honestly, they were mostly a Marvel rip off of Justice League and…well, folks, they weren’t all that awesome.  They didn’t have a talking Raccoon with big guns.

Speaking of Rocket, let’s talk about the cast.  I’ll limit myself to the movie cast here, which I admit leaves out several very interesting characters (including the space lesbians…no, I’m not kidding).

Let’s begin with the leader of the Guardians, Star Lord.  Star Lord has a pretty complicated back story, but basically you can sum it up as this: he’s the human.  He’s pretty much just a normal guy in the middle of all of this.  Now, that’s not to say he’s a guy from Earth.  He’s not.  He’s more Han Solo than Joe Blow from down the street.  But he’s still just a regular guy, no power, nothing super special about him.  But he is a very good leader, and he’s just generally a good guy who will get things done, no matter the cost to him or his team.  Star Lord will no doubt be the guy you’re meant to identify with, the lens through which we see these cosmic heroes.

Next up is my favorite, Rocket Raccoon.  Rocket is exactly that, a raccoon.  He was “evolved” to gain human level intelligence and the ability to stand up and use his paws more like hands to help tend to mentally ill patients on the world he comes from (Halfworld).  He, of course, had other ideas and ran off to be a space pirate.  Rocket is the heart of the team in many ways.  He’s the comedic support, but he’s also usually the common sense of the team.  He’s the one who will point out that splitting up is what they always do in the movies and will get you killed.  And he does know movies…he has a collectors edition of Beaches he ordered from eBay.  He knows Earth culture and will often make pop culture references.  Other than his snappy banter, Rocket does have some abilities.  He’s a raccoon, with the keen senses of that animal.  He’s also a tactical genius: he can very quickly assess a situation and give very effective advice to Star Lord on what to do.  He also is able to wield Improbably Big Guns easily, and prefers heavy weapons and explosives.  He and Groot make a pretty badass team.

Speaking of our pal, Groot, let’s talk about him.  Groot is a sentient, mobile tree.  He’s actually the monarch of Planet X, exiled from his people.  All Groot ever says is, “I AM GROOT!”, though it’s been implied that he’s actually saying other things, if you understand his language (much like Chewbacca just seems to roar, but Han can understand him).  Groot seems to understand everyone else just fine.  Groot is big, strong and tough, and often acts as transport for Rocket and his huge machine guns.  Groot is made of wood, however, so he’s actually quite flammable.  This has been a point in several comics, and more than once, Groot has “sacrificed” himself for the team, setting himself on fire to take down a bad guy in a spectacular way.  The thing is, Groot is a plant…he can regrow himself from a small shoot.  SPOILER ALERT: Two years out, here’s my spoiler – the GotG movie will end with Groot being on fire and taking out the bad guy and will be all sad…until the very end where we see a tiny Groot growing from a shoot of his original body.

Next is Gamora.  I’m not sure how the movie will handle this, but Gamora is the daughter of Thanos, the big purple guy from the end of the Avengers.  She’s pretty much a badass assassin, trained from birth to be her father’s ultimate weapon.  Until, of course, she broke free of him and went off to do what she wanted to do instead.  She’d kill her dad, but that’s what he wants (he’s in love with the incarnation of Death), so she just basically goes off and does what she wants.  She was designed to be the ultimate assassin – her speed, strength and endurance are superhuman, she’s a master of pretty much all known martial arts, expert in most weapons, even her looks were engineered to help her carry out her missions.  She’s also effectively ageless and  has a healing factor (not as good as Wolverine, but she survived immolation from a stellar storm and was able to regrow her skin in a matter of weeks).  She favors melee weapons, especially her sword, mostly because it’s more fun for her to kill that way.  Oh, and she can survive in space without special gear, at least for a while – that may be important in the movie.

Finally we have Drax the Destroyer.  Drax has had several incarnation, with this one being based mostly on Vin Diesel’s portrayal of Riddick from Pitch Black.  Drax was actually a human from Earth, attacked by Thanos along with his wife and daughter (who goes on to be one of the space lesbians…) and eventually turned into a rage fueled green killing machine.  Sound like the Hulk?  He is, in some respects.  He’s about as strong as the Hulk, though without the potential to continue to get stronger when he gets angrier.  He’s also a deadly hand to hand combatant, nearly as good as Gamora (and he’d argue better), and he has a similar resistance to physical injury and healing factor.  Not surprising since they were both granted their superhuman abilities by Thanos.  Drax has a serious grudge against Thanos and sometimes doesn’t listen to orders if they get in the way of trying to kill Big Purple.  Like Gamora, he can also survive in space without gear.  He favors knives and close range combat, but honestly he’ll use anything he can get to get the job done.  Think of him as “Space Wolverine” and you’ve got a good idea of what he’s like.

Missing from the movie line-up are Adam Warlock, who would take a whole article to explain, Phylla-Vel…who is even harder to explain, Cosmo the space dog (maybe he’ll be in the movie…Cosmo is more mission control than front line), Jack Flagg, Mantis (I don’t even want to try to explain her), and Vince Astro from the original Guardians…he’s got Captain America’s shield (from an alternate timeline).  All of these characters are, when you look, a hell of a lot harder to explain.  Human, talking raccoon, tree man, sexy space assassin and space Wolverine are pretty simple to get behind.  Some of these other folks could have textbooks filled with their history and still not make much sense (Mantis sort of spans both Marvel and DC universes…).

Basically you have heroes who are not super powerful up against a galaxy full of bad guys who want to wipe out every living being.  And they do it all with the folks on Earth none the wiser.

I hope you enjoyed this little primer.  We’ll see in two years how well what I wrote matches up.

 

This is not Scarlett Johansson

This is a toy of Scarlett, a 1/6th scale toy from Hot Toys.  Dear lord, how realistic can you get?  While I doubt every unit they ship will be this perfect, that’s damned amazing for a toy.  And I’m sure there will be more than a few guys who…uh…enjoy this toy more than they should.

Now can they make a 1:1 scale?

See more at Comics Alliance.

 

Watching Bad Movies: Yakuza Weapon

Welcome back to Watching Bad Movies.  Today I’m watching “Yakuza Weapon” for you…but honestly, you should go watch this film.  It’s so bad, so irredeemably awful, that it’s worth watching just to see how bad it is.

O.k., let’s start with a recap of the plot.  The movie starts off with two military groups going head to head in a jungle.  One side has black clad warriors who literally can’t be killed.  Our main character, Shozo, says that bullets only hit you if you fear them, which he clearly does not.  He rushes enemy positions, kills them with his martial arts, and at one point steps on a landmine and instead of being worried, asks for more explosives so they will propel him all the way to the enemy camp.  They do, and he kills the leader of the other side.  Then a group of Japanese secret agents drop in to tell Shozo that his father is dead.  While Shozo hates his father, he does decide to return to Japan with his two buddies to see what’s up.

Back in Japan, Shozo discovers that his father was set up by his two junior partners, one of which is still a lowly toady while the other, Kurawaki, has become the defacto head of the Yakuza.  Kurawaki also informs Nayoko, a female Yakuza, of his unhealthy fascination with her, and tells her that she will be his.  However, it turns out the Nayoko was betrothed to Shozo long ago, and has been eagerly awaiting his return.  Shozo slaughters his way through some punks and is basically indestructible until Nayoko tracks him down…she’s about the only one who can beat him up, mostly because he won’t fight back.  He manages to elude her (as he’s clearly not ready to settle down), and goes on to check out his old haunts.

Nayoko shooting at Shozo, because nothing says love like automatic fire

Unfortunately, Kurawaki decides to kidnap Nayoko, kill Shozo’s old friend, and basically set a trap for Shozo in his giant metal tower in the middle of Tokyo.  On each level is a powerful opponent Shozo will have to face to save his fiance.  Shozo, however, doesn’t really care that Nayoko is in the tower (he didn’t even care she’d been kidnapped), and instead of fighting his way up, he and his friend simply blow up the tower, leaving only one floor.  This does save Nayoko from Kurawaki’s nefarious clutches (he had her chained up, wearing a sailor fuku, a pigtail wig and glasses so she looks like she did as a little girl, and he’d just attached a sex toy to a special harness on his belt…), but also pisses her off.  Kurawaki’s assault helicopter saves the slimy crime boss and his weirdo companion, and also manages to blow off Shozo’s right arm and left leg.  This, of course, only pisses Shozo off even more, and he shoots down the helicopter with a grenade launcher.

The Japanese secret agents return, this time to rebuilt Shozo into “the most powerful Yakuza ever”, which entails installing a Vulcan mini-gun in his right arm and a missile launcher in his left leg.  The hospital where they perform the operation is attacked and Shozo gets his first taste of his new powers.  Though they hurt to use, he’s highly impressed.  A second attack wave comes just after Shozo and Nayoko have a fight, and Nayoko is again kidnapped.  While Shozo and team fight their way through the new enhanced thugs (there’s a subplot about hyper-heroine…but whatever), Kurawaki taunts Nayoko with his secret weapon, Shozo’s old best friend, Tetsu, the only man to fight Shozo to a standstill.

Shozo eventually encounters Tetsu, who wields the strangest weapon you’ll ever see…his dead sister.  Earlier in the film we see men attack Tetsu’s family home, including raping and murdering his sister.  Now basically dead inside (and a hyper-heroine junkie), Tetsu has gone to work for Kurawaki, who rebuilt Tetsu’s sister into a living weapon.  She’s bulletproof, has a gun in her mouth, fingers and toes, and oh yeah, a missile launcher where her coochie should be.  Did I mention she was naked and he swings her around like a martial arts weapon?

Most safe-for-work image I could find

At one point, he drops her to the floor and her head slides off her neck to reveal a heavy machine gun, which fires as he dry humps her.  I can’t make this up, folks.  That’s what happens.  The whole scene is…freaky, especially when Shozo finally defeats the sister-cum-assault rifle by launching himself (with his missile launcher leg) across to room so he can punch her ass-missile launcher and cause the warhead to detonate inside her.  It’s…seriously, I can’t even describe how fucked up this scene is, and yet funny at the same time.

With the sister of death defeated, Shozo and Tetsu proceed to beat each other senseless until Shozo eventually wins.  He finds Kurawaki, who has installed a nuclear weapon in Shozo’s father’s corpse.  Declaring the Yakuza don’t fear nuclear weapons (according to Shozo, Yakuza fear nothing…except perhaps arranged marriages), Shozo kills Kurawaki and sets off the bomb.  And the movie ends.

That’s pretty much it, folks.  Now, a little background.  Apparently this movie was made over the course of 12 days and on a pretty slim budget.  Even for that, the hand to gun and back is decent CGI, nothing special, but nice.  The movie never takes itself seriously, which is also good.  The action has some lulls from time to time, and it has some parts where you can really see how low budget this is (some of the bad guys literally explode in a red CGI spray when shot by Shozo’s gun, which while funny, looks kind of silly).  On the other hand, it has a guy swinging a naked girl around and using her orifices as weapons.

And that’s pretty much all you need to know.  The movie is worth watching just for that screen, not because it’s pornographic…it’s actually more cringe-worthy than sexy in any way, but because it’s just so surreal and yet by that point in the film you’re just like, “yeah, let’s go with this.”

Yakuza Weapons reminds me most of a toned down Tokyo Gore Police or Machine-Gun Girl, but it’s got attitude to spare, and naked girls as weapons, so maybe this one is actually worth a watch.  It’s on Netflix right now, so if  you have an hour and a half to waste, give it a look.

 

Godzilla vs. Cthulhu

I loves me some Godzilla.  I REALLY loves me some Cthulhu.  So like chocolate and peanut butter, putting them together seems like an awesome combination.

AND IT IS!

Attention Hollywood: MAKE THIS IMMEDIATELY!

I had no idea there was so much fan work of this type, but there are indeed GvC fans out there.  There’s even a whole story on fanfiction.net.  I will warn you, the links above exceed your daily allowable dose for awesome.

So awesome, your pants may spontaneously explode

Now to put on my nerd cap.  Let’s decide who would win in a battle between these titans.

On the one hand, Godzilla has regeneration, terrifying claws, a thick, semi-prehensile tail usable as a whip, and atomic fire breath.  On the other hand, Cthulhu.  Seriously, he’s a god.  He can make you go mad just from looking at him.  He also can’t actually die, so…points to Cthulhu here.  But wait!  Godzilla has, if he isn’t smashing Tokyo to ruins, the support of the Japanese, especially small children who often discover the enemy’s weakness and manage to communicate it to Godzilla just in time (no, seriously, this is like the plot of half the Godzilla movies out there).  And what is Cthulhu’s weakness?  The Star Stones of Mnar, of course.  Assuming the Japanese government could produce a giant Star Stone for Godzilla to wear like a wrestling championship belt, and let’s be honest, they probably have one sitting in a warehouse right now just in case this very scenario occurs, Godzilla may be able to force Cthulhu back to his drowned home in dread R’yleh.

Final decision here: it would be a draw, not dissimilar to Godzilla vs. King Kong.  Godzilla may force Cthulhu away, but killing him?  Not going to happen.  Meanwhile, ‘zilla would probably sustain horrible injuries along with unimaginable nightmares and insanity, and would like have to spend some time in a sanitorium before slowly plodding back into the briny depths.

 

Watching Bad Movies: Pray For Death (1985)

Welcome to a new feature here on the Mask where I, your humble author, will watch and summarize (and comment on) bad movies.  Why put myself through this?  Well honestly, it’s funny.

We’re going to start this little experiment with 1985′s ninja flick, Pray for Death.  Now first of all, I’m about 99.9% sure I saw this movie as a kid, and I’m also about 99.9% sure I blocked it from my memory because it was so bad.

First, though, let’s talk about the plot.  There is one, which is surprising for an 80s American martial arts film, but it’s about as paper thin as the shoji screens used to “ninja” up the sets.  Basically the Saito family moves from Japan to the US (San Francisco) and renovate an old restaurant that some thugs have been using to hide stolen goods.  One of the thugs, a cop on the take, steals a necklace and the mob guys think that the Saitos had something do with it.

After killing the former owner of the restaurant and nearly running down Mrs Saito and her youngest child, Akira (yes, his name is Akira…this was before the anime and actually that’s not that uncommon of a name in Japan, so we’ll let this slide) returns to his ninja roots and delivers his message: mess with my family again and you will pray for death.  Of course, the mob guys don’t listen and the main hit-man cuts himself to get taken to the hospital.  He waits til night time, disables a doctor, and goes to Mrs. Saito’s room, where he gets creative (off screen) with a scalpel.  Despite being a ninja movie, this film has very, very little blood in it, so all we see is her nose bleeding later on, but the mob guy does have to wash some red splatters from his face and neck before moving on to the kid’s room.  There, the two worst cops in history let him in, and only the timely intervention of the police lieutenant saves the little boy.

His wife dead and the mob still out to get him (note that by now they know he had nothing to do with taking the stolen necklace, but he “knows too much”, so he and his family have to die), Akira carries his still mostly catatonic son from the hospital, berating the police lieutenant about America being the “land of the free…to die!”  He takes his injured son and his older son to a warehouse, and then goes through a truly awful “ninja” montage to get his mojo back, which includes forging a sword…apparently this warehouse just happened to have a forge, anvil, and a convenient lump of sword grade steel.  His oldest son builds some “ninja” gear onto his Huffy Thunder and proceeds to defend the warehouse from goons in a terrible scene which includes firing a slingshot point blank into a dude’s junk.

Finally ready to go, Akira dons his ninja helmet…no, really, he has a ninja helmet…

What every ninja is wearing this season

…and he goes off to kill off the mob.  And mostly he succeeds.  The big boss and his thugs are no match for the ninja, who flips, slashes and ninja stars his way through the mansion (that he had no way of knowing where was…except, perhaps, through ninja-sense).  The hitman who killed his wife drives off and the ninja gives chase, eventually hanging underneath the thug’s pickup for what must have been an hour or so.

In a final climactic fight, the two who are apparently evenly matched even though the thug is, you know, just a guy who breaks kneecaps and doesn’t have any actual apparent training, fight their way through several warehouses, including one full of mannequins, and another which is apparently set up for logging…I don’t really get why there’s a warehouse with a giant saw blade, but the second I saw it, I knew it would play into the ending.  Indeed it does.  Akira and the thug fight tensely for what seems like a million hours, and finally Akira deploys his secret weapon: not sucking at fighting.  He does also take that ridiculous ninja star off his hat to stop the saw blade, but seriously, he wins by basically remembering he knows how to fight and his opponent basically doesn’t.  A couple of good hits later and the bad guy is pinned to the log on its way into the huge saw blade.  In his last moments he does, indeed, pray for death.

The movie ends with Akira and his sons standing at his wife’s grave.  The end.

The ninja in this movie is played by…well…the ninja, Sho Kosugi.  He’s most famous for Revenge of the Ninja (which I’ll watch for you soon), and in the 80s he was pretty much the definition of a ninja.  His sons in this film, and pretty much any other film where he has kids, are played by his real sons, Kane and Shane.  Kane is an actor himself, but the interesting thing is he and his father are no longer on speaking terms, so much so that Sho once said his son was a “coward” for going off to be an actor on Japanese television.

O.k., so lets go over some of the awful parts of this film.  First, the bad guys are a mishmash of every 80s bad guy, literally.  There are so many, “oh, that guy!” moments that you’ll think you’re watching a Magnum P.I. marathon.  Scratch that, a Magnum marathon would be good.  Then you have the ninja outfit, complete with shiny armor and…that helmet.  Seriously, tell me he wasn’t the inspiration for TMNT’s Shredder.  But the worst, the absolute worst, was the kid’s ninja bicycle.  It has a smoke screen, slingshot, and nunchuk holder, all of which he uses to kick the ass of about a dozen guys.

I mentioned that this movie has very little blood.  Compared to other ninja movies of the 80s, this thing is nearly PG rated.  No blood, little to no swearing, and absolutely no nudity.  The closest you get is some belly dancers who are wearing more than you’ll see on most modest women at the beach.  I’m pretty sure this was one of the movies that began the trend of trying to package ninjas for kids.  After all, what’s more wholesome family fun than an ancient sect of assassins?

The movie goes light on the ninja magic angle.  While Akira can leap about inhumanly high, for a ninja movie his moves are pretty tame.  He uses flash and smoke grenades, but never vanishes.  It’s almost a more realistic film because he uses the smoke bombs to distract, not escape.  He does fling shuriken with deadly accuracy, including using the one from his hat to stop the saw controls, but generally he takes a pretty bad beating from the bad guys and none of the martial arts looks more advanced than something you could see at your local karate studio.  Other than the flips over people, and the throwing weapons, the movie is pretty accurate in the hand to hand department.

There’s so much about this movie that’s just awful, from the acting to the recycled sets, the flashback to Akira being forced to kill his brother who was about to steal from the family ninja shrine, and the old master who warns Akira never to reveal that he is a ninja, but honestly it was mostly par for the course for 80s ninja flicks, which often served as a B-reel at drive-ins.  It’s simply amazing to me that just a year later, we got Big Trouble in Little China.