What was the last movie you watched?

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Vengeance of a Snowgirl ( 1971 )
With this, I complete the Lo Wei set. This was one of the last films he made for Shaw Brothers, and the last of his films the studio releases, just two weeks before  The Big Boss, Bruce Lee's first starring movie which Lo Wei directed. Wei was one of the directors and stars who defected from Shaw Brothers when the rival studio Golden Harvest was formed. Sammo Hung plays one of the henchmen for the villain in this film, and would follow Wei to Golden Harvest. This is a film with a lot of wuxia tropes. A mysterious crippled girl who is also an exceptional swordswoman has killed a clan leader, and vows to kill three other clan members. Ten years earlier the four clan leaders killed both her parents when trying to take the mythical Crystal Sword from them which her father had inherited from his master. The second half of the film has the girl going on a quest to heal her legs, which can only be done if she emerges her legs in a mythical hot spring that is in the center of an ice field that will freeze anyone instantly who tries to cross it, unless they are holding a magic gem which can be found inside a volcano, which can only be entered if that person is wearing magic heat resistant armor that is in possession of a prince with master kung fu skills. So basically the revenge plot is sidetracked for a fantasy subplot. Still, a fun film, and something unexpectantly that good from Lo Wei.

The Craft ( 1996 )
One thing I am getting sick of is not being to locate the films in my own home video library. Boxes and boxes of DVDs and Blu Rays, and everything is mixed up. As I had said before, they were originally not mixed up, but lazy family members and their lazy friends wo would peruse the boxes looking for films would then put things back in the wrong boxes. A few films we were in the mood to watch and could not find. This turned up, and was the closest thing to something we were in the mood to watch. Not really a bad film, with exception to the MTV style editing. Pretty much a made for the MTV viewers film, full of the teen actors who were popular with TRL viewers of the late 90s. The entire time watching it, I was constantly reminded how much this one was promoted on MTV back then, especially with the 2026 MTV VMA's airing the next day. This was also nominated for Best Fight on the MTV Movie Awards, although the end battle is very underwhelming.

[stethacantus]

Marco Polo ( 1975 )
This week I begin watching the next EUREKA Shaw Brothers set called Horrible History. Not a very good title. It is supposed to have four historical epics from Chang Cheh, but at least one of the movies here was not based on any historical events. Four films, none of which were previously released on home video in North America. All four have English dubs, yet for some reason are not included on this set. It may as well been called The Complete Richard Harrison set, as it includes both of his films he made for Shaw Brothers. And sadly, according to Wikipedia, Harrison just died a week ago at age 90. He had an interesting career. An actor who got nothing but bit parts in Hollywood, he eventually moved to Italy where he was offered starring roles in various sword and sandal movies, eventually moving on to spaghetti westerns. He was offered the lead in A Fist Full of Dollars , but turned it down. The role instead went to another American actor with little success back in Hollywood, Clint Eastwood, turning him into an international star, and eventually a major Hollywood star. Harrison's career went into decline with the decline of the spaghetti western, and he eventually found himself in Hong Kong where Shaw Brothers offered him a two picture deal, although by the second film Harrison was reduced to a bit part. From there he stared in increasingly cheaper foreign productions. He hit the lowest point of his career when offered a starting role in what he thought was a single ninja film shot by Godfrey Ho. The footage he shot was edited into at least 24 separate ninja movies, none of which he was paid for, but have since picked up a cult following among Godfrey Ho fans.

Marco Polo was yet another attempt by Shaw Brothers to branch out into the international market  with a film starring a well known American actor. The decision to base a film on Marco Polo was due to the historical explorer being very familiar with Americans and Europeans, although mostly as a swimming pool game that had nothing to do with the man. You may remember Marco Polo from grade school as the Italian explorer who brought the invention of noodles back to Europe, although that was recently proven to be a myth. The fact that Harrison was a star in Italy was another reason Shaw Brothers chose the Italian explorer Marco Polo as the subject of the film. As for the United States where Shaw Brothers hoped a film about Marco Polo would be a big hit... The distributor changed the name to The Four Assassins, and Marco Polo is neither mentioned anywhere on the movie poster, or in any of the trailers.

The movie itself can barely be called a story about Marco Polo. He is there, but just barely has anything to do with the plot. It takes place during the Yuan Dynasty, which much like the Qing Dynasty, was installed by invaders who treated the native Chinese like second class citizens. The Yuan were Mongolians while the Qing were Manchurians. The Chinese in both Dynasties spent decades attempting to revolt against their oppressors. However, almost all of the martial arts films take place during the Qing Dynasty for a few reasons. First, they were more recent, and everyone's grandparents were alive during the last years of the dynasty. Second, the final ruler, the Dowager empress, was responsible for the downfall of China to the Europeans. And third, those were they years the legendary Shaolin students revolted against the government. If not that Marco Polo too place in the Yuan, it probably would have been rebels against Manchus again. Anyway, Marco visits China and immediately gets invited to a banquet by the emperor Kublai Khan. As entertainment, several fighters have death matches, which doesn't seem to phase Marco. Three of the best fighters are chosen by Khan to be his personal bodyguards. Including Johnny Wang Lung Wei and Leung Kar Yan ( a.k.a. Beardey ) Both actors usually played villains in Shaw Brothers films, so no surprise there. But the third bodyguard is played by Gordon Liu, who almost always played a heroic character, usually Shaolin monks.  Kublia Khan asks Marco to become his head of his police after a failed assassination attempt. Marco tracks a mortally wounded rebel back to his lair where the three bodyguards kill him and his co-conspirator and takes the assassin's wife prisoner. Four other assassins ( one of them played by Alexander Fu Sheng ) show up and free her, and they are followed to the mansion of a wealthy Chinese clan leader. While Marco and the authorities keep watch from outside the estate property, the clan leader teaches the four assassins martial arts. One learns iron palm, one a style that gives him iron skin, one who learns a style that gives him incredible strength,  and one a style that incorporates flips and summersaults. Each of them are training to counter the martial arts style of each bodyguard. ( the one learning super strength tasked with holding off the entire Yuan army while the other three fight their foes. Just before the final fight, Marco finally realizes Kublai Khan is  a bad person, and warns everyone at the estate that the army is planning to attack, allowing the clan leader and everyone else to sneak off while the four assassins stay behind to wipe out the army and Khan's three bodyguards in a final bloody showdown. Like i said, Marco Polo is given very little to do in this movie but keep surveillance on a suspected rebel base, and most of the movie is the training of the four assassins. So not much of a historic epic, and not something a history teacher would assign their students to watch.


Pixels ( 2015 )
The only reason I rewatched this one was because I could not remember if I actually liked it or not. One of those films that is only entertaining because of the special effects, but at least isn't boring. But none of the jokes land.

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The Pirate ( 1973 )
Based on Cheung Po Tsai, a Chinese  pirate captain from the early 1800s who would later become a naval commander for the Quing Empire. It this film, Quing generals are hunting for pirates including Cheung Po Tsai. His ship having been damaged after a battle with Portuguese merchants, he orders it secretly moored in a secluded bay while he goes into the nearest town disguised as a rich merchant in order to buy material needed to make repairs. There he discovers corrupt Quing officials who have been deliberately damaging the ships of the local fishermen in order to charge them money for the repairs. After promising the nearly bankrupt villagers that he will bring them money, he decides to rob the corrupt Quing official. Ti Lung plays the charismatic Cheung Po Tsai, while David Chiang plays Genera Wu Yee, who his traveling incognito in order to find and capture Cheung Po Tsai. So this is basically an Iron Triangle film. One of those movies I have heard about a lot, but has until now not been available on home video in North America. Not really a martial arts classic, but an interesting experiment by Chang Cheh as his one and only pirate movie.


Carbon Copy ( 1981 )
Quite often when I try to buy a movie on DVD, the only option is to get it in a set, or as a double feature. Usually as one of those budget sets. And when that happens, I had always felt obligated to watch the additional films. About ten years ago I wanted to buy Meteor Man for my live action superhero movie collection. I purchased from Amazon what I though was going to be the MGM Home Video release. It turns out MGM Home Video had suddenly gone defunct with every one of their releases going out of print simultaneously. This release was from another company called TGG Direct, who apparently acquired the rights to films in the MGM catalog for budget releases. This copy of Meteor Man came in a box with a small circle at the bottom with the words "Bonus Movie   Carbon Copy". The disc itself has the poster artwork from both films, so this was originally going to be a double movie release rather than Meteor Man with Carbon Copy as a bonus feature. You can still buy Meteor Man from TGG Direct, but this time in a set called 20 Fantastic Family Movies, which includes Meteor Man, Carbon Copy, an a lot of movies with Disney titles, but adaptions of the same fairy tales by cheaper animation companies. Oh, and the public domain Max Fleischer version of Gulliver's Travels. Fortunately I didn't have to buy that one. I would be stuck watching all of those films. I was going to watch Carbon Copy. Eventually. But I got Meteor Man around the time I had purchased a lot of other superhero films... and forgot I had it. Last week while trying to reorganize at least some of the films I have in boxes, I found Meteor Man, and realized it had that bonus film I had not seen yet. I had a few new films coming in last week I was going to start watching, but decided I needed to get to this first. Also, they are repairing the electric grid on our block which was temporarily fixed when it was burned out last July during the heat wave. Brand new transformers being put in to replace the tractor trailer with the transformer sitting on the corner. We were warned that we could have a loss of power between 5PM and 11PM. So, I wanted to watch a movie I would not mind shutting off midway through.

Carbon Copy was one of those films I didn't want to see. When it came out, Siskle and Ebert gave it bad reviews. I think it made their worst list for the year. And it seemed like a really boring film. George Segal is a wealthy businessman working for his wife's father who owns the company. One day Denzel Washington shows up in his office and informs George that he is his son from a woman he had dated eighteen years earlier. One word gets out that he has an illegitimate black son, his wife throws home out, demands a divorce, claims all their bank accounts, and he is fired from the company, so ends up living with his black son in the ghetto. This movie is important for a couple of reasons. It was the first film made by RKO since the studio closed in the 1950s. It was also Denzel Washington's first movie. The comedy is formulaic, with some really bad slapstick thrown in. There is also the heavy-handed social commentary. The film is poorly executed, and only carried by the talents of the cast, who were too good for a film like this.  It wasn't as bad as I feared it would be. But fails at every single attempt at comedy.

[stethacantus]

The Boxer Rebellion ( 1976 )
Chang Cheh's  two and a half hour historical epic of the failed rebellion of Chinese against the foreign countries which had colonized them. By 1900 several European nations held control over China, along with the United States and Japan, each which controlled their own slice of the country. During this time there was mass poverty and food shortages which the Empress Dowager blamed on the controlling foreigners rather than her own  poor governess. Meanwhile Christian missionaries attempted to forcefully convert the Buddhists into Christians, outlawing the religion in various territories, and either destroying Buddhist temples, or converting them into Christian churches.  This lead to the arise of a popular cult which claimed they had magic which could make their members ( called The Boxers by the European who assumed their King Fu was a version of boxing ) invulnerable to bullets. Numbering in the tens of thousands, the Boxers held siege to a town where the European consulates lived. They were repelled by the Eight Nation Alliance, an army of combined armed forces from Germany, Japan, Russia, England, The United States, France, Italy and Austria-Hungry. The Boxers Kung Fu was no match for the bullets of the Alliance, and were wiped out. Chang Cheh's film vilifies both the cult that controlled the Boxers, and the foreigners who caused the unrest in the first place and brutalized innocent Chinese citizens in the aftermath. He also shows an unflattering version of the Dowager Emperess who had encouraged the Boxers to attack the foreigners, even though she had caused most of the hardships that riled up the Boxers in the first place. A pretty simple film. Four friends who are martial arts experts join the Boxer cult as teachers, however begin to realize the so-called magic which were to protect them from bullets does not work. One of them is killed when the Boxer army unsuccessfully attacks a Japanese army outpost and is gunned down. However, the cult leader spreads lies that he personally killed 900 Japanese soldiers, and that anyone that didn't loose their faith during the attack wasn't harmed by the bullets. So he orders the rest of the Boxers to attack the foreign stronghold. Offscreen they are defeated by the Eight Naton Alliance. Despite this being the most expensive martial arts film Shaw Brothers ever made, they apparently didn't have the money to depict the battle of the Boxers against the Alliance. Instead, the remaining three friends, who stayed back in Beijing, learn about the defeat from the retreating Boxers. and that the army is preparing to attack the capitol city, as well as the Forbidden City where the Emperess lives. One of the three is killed in a futile fight to keep the armed forces from invading the city. The Emperess escapes by dressing as a peasant and sneaking out of the capitol with her court. The cult leader too decides to escape by changing his clothes to that of a commoner. At this point Richard Harrison enters the film as the German General Waldersee who is in charge of the Alliance. The two remaining martial artists have been sneaking around the city and surprise attacking soldiers, earning themselves a wanted poster. They trick Waldersee into visiting an old flame of his so they can have a meeting with him. They get him to agree to order the troops from raping and pillaging the Chinese, in return they will stop killing soldiers. Waldersee warns them that he will hunt both of them down, and they dare him to try. One of the martial artists makes it past soldiers and out of the city where he finds the cult leader and defeats him in a fight. The other ends up dying while fighting the Japanese platoon that has ignored Waldersee's orders and tried to rape his girlfriend. He manages to kill them all, and dies standing up, earning him a solute from the other generals who see the aftermath. Apparently there was a much longer cut of this movie that was never released, including much more of the suggested love triangle between one of the martial artists, Waldersee and their mutual old flame. Despite being the passion project of Chang Cheh, it ends up being one of his lesser films. Still entertaining though. I remembered it as The Bloody Avengers when shown on television as a 90 minute version.

Electric Dreams ( 1984 )
I saw this movie a couple of times on television back in the 80s. At the time Virginia Madsen was among the actresses I had a crush on, which is why I even bothered to sit through it. While a very imperfect film, I liked it. Not loved it, just liked it. About twenty years ago I went through a phase where I began to buy movies featuring my 80s crushes. Amazon was selling the DVDs as cheaply as $5. Back in the day I would have either needed to go to a theater to see these films, or wait a few years for them to air on television. Most of them didn't. Too small to be picked up by the big three networks, and too expensive to license by local television. I did finally get a VCR, but even then it was hit or miss if any of my local Blockbusters had the movie. They were good at having multiple copies of new releases, but unlike the mom and pop video stores, did a piss poor job maintaining  releases older than a year. Fifteen years later, it was like hitting a goldmine. Here were a bunch of films I had been dying to see because one of my favorite actresses was in it, and usually after they showed a really sexy scene from the movie with her on Siskel & Ebert or Entertainment Tonight. Now suddenly I could get them all. Find out how bad those movies I was dying to see were, but was too cheap to buy a movie ticket for. With actresses who seemed like sexy goddesses back then, and are no longer who I am crushing for. Electric Dreams was not the sexiest film with Virginia Madsen from that time period. That would be Class where she is briefly topless in a ripped shirt gag. But it was a film I sort of liked. But it was one of the few I actually got around to seeing and had sort of liked. But sadly, it was not on DVD. It had a VHS release in one of those oversized boxes, but was never released on DVD in the United States. Supposedly MGM Home Video was planning on re-releasing it on DVD, although most likely as a pan and scan using the VHS master. Those plans ended when Warner Bros. acquired the MGM Home Video library. I waited years for one of the boutique labels to pick it up, but either the rights are a mess, or no one is interested in the film. It has had plenty of foreign releases, but always region locked. Unti this recent German Blu Ray release, which was region free. Still, I waited because I was sure it would eventually get a North American release. It didn't, and the German release was going OOP, so I decided now or never. And I bet that I will suddenly be reading that Shout! factory or one of the other boutique labels will be releasing it tomorrow. The copy I now am stuck with isn't too bad. The movie is still called Electric Dreams on the box and not some German name. It does have the original English language soundtrack and English subtitles. The menu is in German, but the extras are in English. My biggest complaint is that the company that released this didn't license the soundtrack. So some songs that are supposed to be in the movie are replaced with generic 80s synth music. But as far as I can tell, only three songs. Two of them hits from Culture Club, which is a shame as Culture Club had written original songs for the movie. Basically, the music written specifically for this film, like Culture Club's Love is Love, Jeff Lynne's Video and Philip Oakey's Together In Electric Dreams are still in the movie. But Karma Chameleon and Phil Collin's You Can't Hurry Love exist only in the closing credits. I believe they were only used as brief background music when Miles walks into stores, or someone passes by holding a boom box. Still, the film is a bit incomplete without them. If an American boutique does release this film, I am hoping there is a full restoration of the soundtrack. Also missing is the original MGM logo which was jokingly a puppet, but is removed on this version and replaced with the current CGI logo.

Like I said, not really a good film. It was directed by Steve Barron, the music video director for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, and would direct A-ha's Take On Me and Dire Straits Money For Nothing right after completing this film. He would go on to direct the first live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film. It would seem that this was a perfect film for him, as it was one of those movies the studio was building around a pop soundtrack. But it seems to have a lot of shots and scenes missing, as if the budget ran low and pages of the script were torn out. Or perhaps the footage was shot and this film was just badly edited.  Although I doubt that as the editor was later nominated for an academy award for L.A. Confidential. The plot has a nerdy architect buying a home computer, and damaging it when he tries to link it with his work computer, then dumps champagne into it when it starts to smoke. Somehow this does something to the computer chips inside which causes the PC to become an AI who befriends the architect. That is until both of them fall in love with a beautiful girl who moves into the same building ( Virginia Madsen ) and the computer attempts to destroy the architects life. None of the themes are fully explored, and it appears as if there was never a proper budget for any AI antics. But there are a few nice scenes, and one of the best soundtracks of the 80s with quite a few really good songs. I just wish the film lived up to it's opening credits.  where two computer prompts have a conversation. Still, despite the flaws, is worth finally owning.

[torgosPizza]

Logan's Run ( 1976 )
King Kong ( 1976 )
Decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of two 1976 films, and these are the two I saw in the theaters on their first run. Logan's Run was quickly forgotten when Star Wars raised the bar for Science fiction movies a year later. But it has great campy scenes, like Box the killer robot. King Kong is well made, but has a very disappointing Skull Island with only one other monster, a giant snake.

I seem to recall that we were supposed to do a commentary on Logan's Run at some point... several Comic-Cons ago!