B Plus Movies

When I was a teenager, often my mom would ask me when I was going to stop watching cartoons. With Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Thundar the Barbarian on the TV in the background, I’d say “never”. As I became an adult, I was exposed to Japanese Animation (Anime) and I found mature themes incorporated into the medium that grew along with me, allowing me to still enjoy animation while not having to only experience it as a tool for telling juvenile tales.

One of the first full length Anime works I saw, one that set high expectations for any other Anime I might watch. It was called Ninja Scroll.

Ninja Scroll is a period piece, starting with a ninja for hire named Jubei. He roams the earth, basically spending time being an unparalleled badass more concerned with fulfilling obligations than personal gain. He crosses paths with a ninja girl named Kagero who is on a mission to find out the truth behind plague that has killed a village. The two of them soon discover there’s much more to the death of the village than simple illness.

Jubei meets up with a government agent who presses him into service by poisoning him. The trio continues the investigation and soon find themselves facing a group of supernaturally powerful warriors, one of whom has a history with Jubei. The more they find out the more danger they find themselves in and the price of knowing what is really going on just might be their lives.

Ninja Scroll is remarkably accessible for western audiences as compared to some other Anime which practically expects you to have a native understanding of Japanese folklore and social idoms. Ninja Scroll runs like a pretty standard action movie and displays just how much violence and drama you can pack into a cartoon.

In addition to being beautifully told, it’s also beautifully presented. The approachable nature doesn’t get betrayed by the fantastic elements (including a villain who can turn his skin to stone and another that is capable of electrocuting people with the just a length of wire and his force of will). On the other hand, the fact that it is a cartoon doesn’t dull the edge of the very bloody violence nor the near rape scene nor the sex scenes nor any of the other elements to this rich piece of animation.

Anime has influenced western cinema for years now, like The Matrix or even has been adopted whole cloth, like The Dark Knight prequel, Batman: Gotham Knight. If you wish to delve into this art form but don’t want to have to already understand the significance of giant drops of sweat and spontaneous nosebleeds, then Ninja Scroll is a excellent, if brutal, starting place.

And for that reason I give Ninja Scroll a B+. And not because I fear the Shadow Warriors coming after me for rating it lower. Definitely not.

Roger Ebert, undoubtedly one of the most influential movie critics of my lifetime, was ragged on for reviewing a movie of which he watched only 8 minutes. Now while it’s said one never has a second chance to make a first impression, seeing less than 10% doesn’t usually constitute a proper basis to judge its merits, even if you have seen every movie since the invention of celluloid. Ebert went back, watched the film and apologized for cheating on his first try, basically I think to maintain his cred as a reliable critic.

This is why I usually don’t review movies I’ve not sat entirely through… until today. This friday’s blog gets you a three for one sale, the length of each review corresponding to about how much time I spent watching it.

First up is Strangeland, a film made by Dee Snider, former lead of the band Twisted Sister and hair metal DJ of 2009. I’d been interested in seeing this film, but only caught the last half. The story centers around a sadistic madman calling himself Captain Howdy who likes to play BDSM games with people but isn’t necessarily big on getting their consent first. According to the media I saw about it before hand, it starts with a young girl (the daughter of a cop) meeting the Captain online and getting sucked into his world.

Where I picked it up Howdy had gotten caught, incarcerated, determined to be insane and then released after he forgoes the Captain Howdy persona for his more mild mannered real name. The normal folk of the town can’t stand the thought of leaving him alone which inadvertently brings Howdy back to the surface and starts another string of violence, peircing and seeking after the teen girl from the half of the movie I didn’t see. Her father, the police officer, must once again leap to action and save his little girl from the tattooed and pierced monster that is Captain Howdy.

Dee Snider plays the  villian of Strangeland and does it well. Captain Howdy is genuinely creepy, threatening and believably threatening with just a touch of visionary madman, enough to make you think he’s kinda cool if he wasn’t raping girls and poking people with long needles. On the other hand, the movie makes use two contradictory cliches, marring its edgy, avante garde nature, namely that 1)People into bondage and peircings are always bad and 2)the freaks are always persecuted by the rednecky straights. Both cliches are presented in such a blatant, over the top fashion that you take them for granted (partially due to the excellent talents of Robert Englund) and it’s only until later that your preconceptions have been prayed up.

Strangeland, despite its flaws, gets a B+ from me. Go Dee Snider. Next.

The Devil’s Rejects is the sequel to the 70’s horror homage House of 1000 Corpses. Rockstar/Producer/Director Rob Zombie put this retro, ready-for-grindhouse movie onto screens at a time when I was already becoming bored with torture porn like Saw and Hostel, not because they’d lost their bite, but because watching people be savaged for two hours just seemed less enjoyable than other things people might do on film.

Picking up where it’s predecessor left off, The Devil’s Recjects starts with a family we met in House of 1000 Corpses of sadistic rednecks who have killed enough hapless teenagers to finally bring down upon them a fanatical cop who wants to see them dead more than he wants to see them arrested. Many of the family are caught or killed in the first few minutes of the film, leaving three to hit the road and go on the run.

Featuring Sid Haig (B movie god), Bill Mosely (also of B+ Movie Repo: The Genetic Opera) and Sheri Moon-Zombie (Rob’s wife), The Devil’s Rejects has some intense and believable performances. It also has just enough gore to remind you of the first movie and enough gun play to distinguish itself from it’s origins. The movie attempts to blur the line between the heroes and the villians of the piece, but when one of your main characters has a thing for cutting off people’s faces and wearing them, such lines are less likely to be blurry and much more likely to simply denote the people in the movie we despise from the people we simply dislike.

I only saw the first half, up until the point where the audience is supposed to start relating to the murderous trio and while I’m told the finale is kind of touching, I don’t think I’ll be missing out by not going back for the rest of it.

Rob Zombie did succeed though, in making the grade of movie he wanted. This is one reason the half watched The Devil’s Rejects earns a B from me.

And finally…

I caught about fifteen minutes of Never Cry Werewolf on the Sci-Fi channel one night. It was enough to make me convinced that whoever green-lit a remake of Fright Night with Kevin Sorbo as the most notable actor and a werewolf instead of a vampire as the villian might not have been completely in the wrong, but whoever then let them take this concept and make a poorly acted, poorly shot and poorly scripted monster movie afterwords should be tied up with leg warmers and pelted with Rubik’s cubes for assaulting one of my teenage favorites.

Never Cry Werewolf gets a D from me, not sinking any lower because I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt that the majority of the movie that I didn’t see contains something of redeeming value.

Any of these you think would have gotten a better rating if I’d watched the whole thing? Feel free to comment below.

When I was a kid, I never understood why the Oscar always went to the biographies over the sorts of films that I liked. I didn’t understand what went into Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Gandhi or F. Murray Abraham’s skillful work as Salieri in Amadeus. Besides, those movies didn’t have explosions or swordfights or superpowers or anything that I understood to be special effects.

Perhaps I’d have developed an apprecation at a younger age if I’d seen more biographies like The Libertine.

The Libertine first came to my attention because it was to feature a guy-guy kiss with some actor and the always entertaining Johnny Depp.  It was enough to make me wonder what sort of film it might be, enough to make me record and watch it, even if, alas, the scene was cut. What wasn’t cut, however, was the great deal of guy-girl kissing that went on, along with far more explict sexual themes, fighting, drinking and general examples of bad behaviour.

The movie’s subject is John Wilmot, The Earl of Rochester, who was a poet in the 17th century and a notorious scoundrel. The first scene is Rochester, played by Depp, staring straight into the camera and explaining that we will not like him, that’s okay and that despite that we’ll want to sleep with him and that’s okay too. Thus the tone is set for a tale of drama, debauchery and tragedy.

Not a light hearted picture by any stretch, it does feature some fine acting and some truly beautiful sets. In addition to the excellent work of Depp (even if he is using much the same accent he uses for all English charcters of his), there is some fine work by John Malkovich as King Charles II. The film is blatant and honest in its storytelling, exposing us to both the good and bad in the characters and doing so honestly, allowing us to make up our own minds with a minimum of bias.

The pacing of the film is good and the majority of the interactions between the characters are very believable, though there’s a climactic scene that takes place in parliment that seemed a little forced to me. That said, there’s little in which to be disappointed where the story is concerned. It’s not a happy tale but it is an understandable one.

The Libertine presents John Wilmot as a sort of 17th century James Dean, a rock star amongst poets, reveling in his wantoness and imperfections while, able to let you know up front that he’s a horrible person, use that fact as an attraction and when the truth of it comes to pass then simply ask what it was you expected. His story is one worth hearing, either as entertainment or warning, and the version of it that was brought to film presents it in a way that is very pleasing to the eye.

The Libertine gets a solid B+. Even if it could have used more explosions. But then again, so could have Gandhi.

 Being a white male in 2009 America, I occasionally feel uncomfortable. To some, I’m the enemy, lumped in with oppressors, exploiters and opportunists. And sadly, growing up in deepest, darkest South Carolina, I understand where some of the stereotype comes from and have seen all too closely the reality of bigotry and a sense of misplaced entitlement based upon race.

To some extent, that’s why I felt myself laughing one minute and wincing the next at CSA: The Confederate States of America.

Done as a fictional documentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America is an alternate history in which the South won the American Civil War. We are given news clips, scenes from fictional films and commentary by a pair of “scholars” detailing a United States in which slavery remained legal to modern times and the Stars and Bars replaced Old Glory. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the commercials, about half of which show products that were at one time sold in America and that feature slave imagery in their marketing.

The film takes its inspiration both from real events of the civil war and moments in history and blends them with a healthy dose of conjecture to craft its setting. The TV show Cops is replaced by Runaways, where cops catch escaped slaves. America didn’t enter into World War I, but did invade South America. Hitler was an ally and when JFK won, it was on an anti-slavery platform.

CSA: The Confederate States of America asks more “What if?” rather than stating ”Could have been”. At times, it’s a cautionary reminder of just how recently America was just fine with slave labor and at other times, it’s a parody of the attitudes that keep bigotry alive today. Not faint hearted, it embraces its suppositions and follows them to their logical conclusions even when it requires being patently offensive.

CSA: The Confederate States of America isn’t exactly the sort of film you just pop in because you’re bored. The N word gets said quite a lot and there are many comedic scenes that are hard to laugh at because of the injustices they use as gag material. That aside, the acting in it is done well, even if sometimes the actors seem about to burst out laughing while reciting the more ridiculous claims once really voiced by whites about blacks. The cinematography is stripped down, as suits the film’s premise and stands in stark contrast to the fake movie clips and news reels combined into the narrative.

CSA: The Confederate States of America gets a B from me, even if it made me nervous and ashamed to watch it: nervous because of the truth of it and ashamed because the truth was about people and places I know well. One would hope that we’ve moved on as a country from the time that we accepted the sale of one human being to another, but if we ever underestimate how important it was that we left that behind or how far civil rights have come, then its movies like this that in their simplicity and frankness serve to show the dark paths we could have traveled.

I don’t normally review movies that were made on any sort of three digit budget or major ad campaign. But today, I feel I need to make an exception for a film that belongs in the B+ Catalog mostly for its subject matter, the stuff of geek discussions for decades. The source material, a ground breaking comic mini series that later was collected as a graphic novel, was called unfilmable and even by the most rabid fans was something that was thought to be best left to a cable serial and even then could only be expected to be presented in some watered down form.

I’m talking about Watchmen.

Describing the plot of Watchmen  is difficult because in its shortest explanation, it’s misleading and any description that does it justice is better given by just handing someone the book. Trying to meet these challenges in the middle, I’ll try to summarize thusly: The Watchmen are a group of superheroes, only second group of their kind in a world very much like our own, at least up until the 1940’s in which the first group of superheroes became active. The Watchmen are mostly retired, forced to hang up their masks by an act of congress outlawing costumed vigilanttes.  The members include:

• Nite Owl, a gadgeteer and idealist.
• Silk Spectre, a second generation crimefighter.
• The Comedian, who goes on to work black ops for the government.
• Rorschach, a nigh-psychopathic crusader who refused to retire.
• Dr. Manhattan, a former physicist given godlike powers who works for the government on scientific projects even as he slowly is losing touch with his humanity.

In the first few minutes of the story, the Comedian dies. Rorschach investigates and starts tracking down his former team mates to warn them someone might be targeting heroes. As the members of the team come to grips with both who they are and who they were, a plot unfolds that may be either the key to ending… or starting… world war III.

The world of Watchmen is a rich one and has a steep learning curve as we must accept in a glance that it’s the 80’s, Richard Nixon is still president and that America won in Vietnam. The director does an excellent job of summing this up in the opening credits, one of the best cinematic sequences of the film,  but still there’s a lot for the viewer to take in with only a short mentions and glances to convey it.

The story, too, has a steep learning curve. This story doesn’t hold back or pull punches, presenting to us an attempted rape, graphic consensual sex, gruesome violence, nudity both male and female, all of which is used to immerse you in a time and place of moral greys, devoid of easy choices.

Watchmen provides a counterpoint to the ugliness in its world with very human characters with very understandable motivations, from Nite Owl’s struggle to overcome the mediocrity in his life as a retired superhero to a former supervillian struggling with the fact he’s dieing of cancer. The people we meet are extreme personalities, but their outlook seems appropriate given the extremes of the world in which they live. If you watch this movie, you will not like all of the characters, but you will get where they are coming from.

Visually, the movie is amazing, lifting images straight off the page and setting them in motion. The gritty streets, spotless boardrooms and warm-but-dull apartments each move the story along as much as the dialog, the plot or the more spectacular effects. Watchmen is  as much an experience as a piece of cinema, something you must more surrender to than watch.

I was a fan of the book well before I saw the movie and while I was in the theater, this let me overlook some of the movie’s flaws. A couple of weeks later, I can see the holes in the work, from simple things like a character producing a gun that they had no reason to have to the moments in the dialog (mostly from Silk Spectre’s mom) that were not delivered as convincingly as they really could have been. There are moments whose signifigance goes unexplained, places where the pacing could be better and scenes where we get close ups when a short glimpse would have served just as well.

Watchmen is proving to be a commerical failure, which is sad because it’s a bold experiment and as edgy as movies get. It rivals Sin City and Pulp Fiction in it’s willingess to point you towards the unthinkable and not flinch. It rivals The Dark Knight in making the superhero acessable and real. It will be a movie that might be remembered for its brave choices if it is not overlooked for its spectacal.

For all its successes and all its failures, I give Watchmen a B.  I’m not sure I’m ready to go back into the theater and watch it again, but I will be waiting eagerly for the DVD release and the eventual, inevitable extended cut. This is not a movie for everyone but is more than just a movie for the comic book geeks like me. It’s B movie subject matter with an A list budget and a script that I won’t even try to rate, because I don’t feel up to juding the classics.

I trained for about a year and a half at an amazing martial arts school in Atlanta, once upon a time. The school, named the Francis Fong Academy, taught at least six or seven styles from Filipino stick fighting to  Brazilian jujitsu to Wing Chun Kung Fu. The classes were intense at times, always enjoyable and challenging, but there was one class, one art taught at the school that, while I admired it, I would look at and say “those guys are crazy.” Specifically, it was Muay Thai kickboxing.

If you’ve never seen it performed, I recommend checking out Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior.

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is a primarily a vehicle to display the considerable talents of Tony Jaa, an up and coming martial arts star. This man does things with his body that most people only think possible in video games. In the tradition of one of his inspirations, Jackie Chan, he did all his own stunts in Ong-Bak,  including doing running jumps through hoops about the diameter of a hubcap and leaping over people using other people as launchpads.

But enough with the fanboy talk. Let’s talk about the movie.

Ong-Bak starts with Tony’s character living in a remote village and respected as the town’s golden boy, the protector of it’s golden Buddha statue, the title referenced Ong-Bak. The statue gets stolen by art smugglers and Tony has to go into the city to get it back. He hooks up with a cousin living in the city, a small time hustler who seems to be trying to forget his country past. The cousin helps Tony reluctantly, mostly because he thinks he can use Tony’s skills to make a lot of money in boxing matches, and after a few sidetracks, they eventually find out that their statue’s theives are headed up by a Bond worthy villian (complete with wheel chair and implanted voicebox) and his drug injecting psycho second in command badass. The two will face them (well mostly Tony) to return the village treasure and prove that good guys still win.

Ong-Bak has a lot of the hallmarks of a freshman movie. It goes down well trod roads in terms of plot and the characters are not exactly vast conudrums of personality.  The action is beautiful to watch but in some scenes appears forced and practically screams “hey, watch this… it’s going to be cool,” which would be really obnoxious if wasn’t actually so bloody cool.

I’ve seen precisely two Thai made movies, this and Monday’s murky gunplay drama Bangkok Dangerous. Based on those two extremes, I’m gladlly looking forward to exposing my eyeballs to more Thai work because of the potential and gutsy film making that they represent. Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is not as challenging as some other films, but it is fun and visually interesting, a popcorn flick with a side of drunken noodles. Take a look at monday’s review to see what I thought of Bangkok Dangerous, but as for Ong-Bak, I give it a very enthusiastic B.

But I wouldn’t say that to Tony Jaa’s face. That guy could beat the crap out of me.

And now announcing, the very first B+ Poll:
I recently saw Watchmen in the theater, and now having had a week or so to brew the details in my head, I think it might be worth reviewing here. My reservation is that it’s a big budget movie that everyone has heard about, so not exactly the sort of thing I usually review here. Would you like to see me break character for Friday’s review and pass on my opinion of the movie or would you like another movie reviewed from the bargain bin?

Please leave comments below.

American film makers crib a lot of notes off of the works of other cultures. Reservoir Dogs, which starts with a bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong has a lot in common with the Chinese film City on Fire, which towards the end has bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong. Even the film giant that is Star Wars bears a remarkable semblance to the Japanese film The Hidden Fortress. And as you might not have heard of the Asian films I just mentioned, it goes without saying that the Asian inspiration for films in the states doesn’t always get the mention it deserves.So imagine when I found out that when I thought I was recording Nic Cage’s 2008 movie Bangkok Dangerous I was in fact recording a Thai film called Bangkok Dangerous.

A little internet research and found out that Cage’s film was a remake of the Thai movie I’d found on cable. I was happy either way, as the 2008 movie got mediocre reviews but this one I had no warnings about to influence my opinon. So what did I find?

Bangkok Dangerous features a deaf and mute hitman named Kong. He lives a simple life, drinking beer and eating food from street vendors and supporting his best friend Joe, a semi-retired hitman who has to let jobs pass because he took a bullet through the hand. Joe’s ex-girlfriend Aom is their go between, meeting Kong and Joe at a seedy strip club to hand them their assignments.

The movie takes a lot of efforts to explain to us who these people are, what their life is like and how a deaf kid got into the business of killing people for money. The blood spatters and moral grays are juxtaposed against a believable innocence in Kong’s personality, most apparent as we see him fall in love with someone completely outside his usual world. This part of the movie moves a bit slow, but does a good job of making us care about the characters without letting us forget that they are criminals and thugs.

But this is the sort of story that doesn’t move along until something goes wrong.

Aom gets a lot of unwelcome attention from a brutal member of the gang. Joe kills the wrong person. And eventually, Kong has to turn his guns on those who employed him.

I’ve seen more dialogue in some restaurant menus than in this film, but that didn’t hurt it. The director told the story through images and subtleties, taking the full advantage of the visuals to tell us a visual story. Facial expressions and lighting take the place of plot exposition, helping us identify with a main character that lives without sound.

The images we’re shown help accentuate the fact that this is in no way a happy film, sometimes generating disgust and horror with a glimpse in ways other movies do with broad panoramas. One character is the victim of a rape, which we’re shown at first in flashes, a technique that communicates the chaos of the moment so that when later we see it plainly it almost seems redundant.

More morality tale than popcorn flick, Bangkok Dangerous is not an easy movie to watch, but once you commit to it, it brings you into the streets of Bangkok fully and surrounds you with the world the director wants to show you. Sometimes a little slow, sometimes going too far with interesting camera angles, it’s not a perfect film but something that a fan of Asian, Noir or even just gritty cinema can enjoy. For its flaws, it rises only to a B rating in my scale, but a B I give without reservation to a movie I never expected. 

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the queen mother of all midnight/cult/b movies. Combining the elements of sci-fi, kinky sex and rock and roll, watching this movie is a religious experience for some, a point of self discovery for others. The addition of audience participation rose it to a new level, but even on its own, RHPS is a gem of bizarre cinema. Reviewing it would be like reviewing the Bible as literature: praise it and I’m preaching to the choir, rag on it and I rankle the fanatics and get agreement only from those who already do not hold the work as sacred.

But did you know it had… a sequel? It’s called Shock Treatment, and that’s what I’m reviewing today.

Richard O’Brien wrote a couple of sequels to The Rocky Horror Picture Show that never got made, due to some of the original cast not being available. My guess is also that the studios involved were reluctant to try to market O’Brien’s mind onto the general public. This is probably why Shock Treatment was released straight to the “midnight movie” circuit in 1981.

The cast of Shock Treatment has a lot in common with the RHPS even if the roster of characters doesn’t. Richard O’Brien (Riff Raff of the first film) plays a demented doctor and Patricia Quinn (Magenta) plays his assistant while Nell Campbell (Columbia) plays a nurse. Charles Gray (The Criminologist and bond villain Blofeld) plays a Judge. The characters that do return include Brad and Janet, but they are played by different actors, Cliff de Young and Jessica Harper, respectively.

The story begins with Brad and Janet getting on a game show called Marriage Maze. Brads nerves are shot because of his experiences from the first movie and very soon, the couple finds out the show is more than they expected. Brad ends up in a padded room wearing a straitjacket while Janet gets whisked away under the promise of stardom, fame and the freedom to be as self centered as she wants to be. Eventually they learn this is all orchestrated by the head of the studio and soon Brad must confront that unseen hand directly.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was written by O’Brien as a result of him questioning his sexual identity. While not always apparent on the surface, the RHPS carries this subtext throughout and has subtle layers to explore behind the music and fishnets. Likewise,  Shock Treatment seems to be a commentary on life in the late 70’s and early 80’s, when shallowness was promoted as lifestyle and suburban sensibilities were starting to butt up against the culture of New York and LA in the hearts and minds of Americans.

Shock Treatment takes a look at topics as varied as celebrity, drug use, traditional gender roles and televangelists, presenting these commentaries to both the audience in the theater and the audience within the movie, the film mostly being set in an expansive TV studio. There’s a lot of surreality to this film and for people expecting an extension of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment is a bizarre jolt that is at the same time less controversial yet more challenging.

The film’s music is not quite as infectious as “The Time Warp” or “Sweet Transvestite”, staying more pop than rock and even flirting with country and western. The songs work well to move the narrative along but with a few exceptions, you won’t find yourself humming them afterward the way many did after hearing “Dammit, Janet”.

This movie seemed to be built with the hope that the audience participation that sprung up in front of it’s predecessor would grow in front of this one, too. Pauses are left after easily twistable phrases are spoken and often the actors are framed looking straight at the camera, prompting the audience for a response almost. The problem with that is the live portion of the Rocky experience  started organically and of its own; you can’t force lightning to strike twice.

Shock Treatment  can stand alone, though even if you’ve seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the sequel is a little confusing. While I didn’t think it was a waste of time and I was happy to gain the movie geek status point of being able to say I’ve seen it, Shock Treatment isn’t a must see for the film fanatic but more of an interesting note in the saga of the Midnight Movie phenomenon in general. For a while, it was available in a 2-pack with the RHPS and if you see them together, I definitely suggest picking them up. I’m just not sure I’d tell anyone “Dude, you have to watch this.”

Shock Treatment gets a C from me, which may be slightly lower because of the high standard against which I think it is set. If you lived through the early 80’s, you’ll get more out of it than otherwise and if you’re already the sort that dresses up in fishnets and cries “slut” every time you see Susan Serandon, then you’ll see this flick on another level as well. It may not be your favorite movie, but the only way you’ll walk out of this feeling completely disappointed is if you expect it to be like seeing Rocky all over again.

Because after all, you can only be a virgin once.

Edit: Due to some constraints at work, I won’t be publishing a Wednesday B+ Movie Review. A new review will be up on Friday, March 13th .

Film making has come a long way from it’s roots. Technologies from green screen and CGI to wire fu and Steadicam have added tools upon which directors can draw to bring stories to life in ways that those who invented the first motion picture cameras would undoubtedly have found unimaginable.

Sometimes though, it’s impressive to see what was done with the art form in its infancy, such as the marvelous film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

A silent film, complete with the dialogue cards between shots, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a peek back into the history of film and specifically into the evolution of the horror film. The plot revolves around a man telling the tale of meeting Dr. Caligari and Cesare, a somnambulist . The good Doctor keeps Cesare in the title referenced cabinet, presenting him in a sideshow act where Cesare steps out and warns and audience member that they will be “dead by dawn”. Questions start being raised when the grim predictions come true.

Running just over an hour, in grainy black and white, it would be easy to dismiss this film as a curiosity only of interest studying history or that have already seen all that Hollywood has to offer from it’s more modern catalogue. The thing is, even over 85 years from it’s release,  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is an amazing film to watch. The use of distorted backdrops and creepy lighting give this movie a twisted, tense feel that most slasher flicks only hope to achieve. The storytelling is top notch and provides some genuinely disturbing moments that even modern audiences jaded by the likes of Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can appreciate. More than a simple or obsolete cinematic reference, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is creepy, well made and very watchable despite its antique presentation.

The original version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is available today as well as a critically acclaimed 2005 remake. It has been referenced in many works of music and cinema and its influence can be seen in the works of Tim Burton and other modern film makers who delve into the dark and bizarre. Probably the oldes movie I’ve ever personally seen, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari gets the B+ rating and is recommended viewing for anyone who can accept that good cinema was possible before Industrial Light and Magic ever burned a frame to celluloid.

Movie trivia is a strange comfort for the film buff, not because it lets us know more about the story but because we connect more with business of movie making. Knowing that Viggo Mortensen wasn’t the first pick to play Aragorn (it was Stuart Townsend) doesn’t make the movie better in the telling but it does speak to the actor’s ability and connect us more to the efforts that went into making the Lord of the Rings trilogy so amazing. False trivia, conversely, disconnects from that experience and reminds us that we are but consumers of a product.

For instance, I’ve been mistaken for years that the abandoned script for the propoesed sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, reviewed Wednesday, was cannibalized to make the script for the movie I’m reviewing today, Big Trouble in Little China.

Big Trouble in Little China brings us into the life of Jack Burton, played by Kurt Russel, a loud mouthed truck driver who has friends in Chinatown including Wang Chi (played by Asian character actor Dennis Dun) who is on his way to meet his bride, a Chinese woman with green eyes. Unfortunately, Wang’s would be bride gets kidnapped at the airport by members of a Chinese gang. Jack and Wang (I feel dirty typing that) head down to Chinatown to find her and end up in the middle of a war between rival gangs. This might all be well and good except the battle is joined by three mythical Chinese warriors, the Three Storms in the service of their master, Lo Pan who is a wheelchair bound invalid during business hours but spends more of his time as immortal evil sorcerer (played by another master character actor, James Hong).

Then it gets weird.

We meet Egg Shen (played by Victor Wong), a historian and peasant magician who drives a Tour bus and is the guy who knows what’s going on. Also joining the fight is Gracie Long (played by the still hot Kim Cattrall), a woman looking into the disappearance of Asian girls into prostution rings. Together with the help of one of the gangs of Chinatown, this group must take on Lo Pan, his warriors and demons to keep the sorceror from becoming immortal.

Big Trouble in Little China plays on sterotypes, the unexpected mixed with the expected.  Where a drama would break those stereotypes with insight and displays of humanity, director John Carpenter decided to break those sterotypes with explosions, lightning and the flash of swords. But the thing that makes this movie memorable is Jack Burton, the ugly American.

For the most part, Jack has no idea what’s going on even as he’s trying to overcome the dangers of his situation. In Asian cinema, the viewer is often handed bucketloads of concepts and cleverly named artifacts (Six Demon Bag!) and just expected to accept that these esoteric references are vitally important to the situation. I have no idea if Asian veiwers are any less confused than American ones, but if you’re born in the states and don’t have a degree in Asian Studies, then you probably just look up at the screen and just like Jack Burton go “okay, I can deal with this… whatever this is”.

Because of that aspect of confusion in the midst of action, we connect with Jack and take this fantastic and over the top world at face value, so no matter how strange or twisted the next scene is, the suspension of disbelief stays firmly in place and the time that might be spent with long and complicated plot exposition for the Anglos in the crowd is instead spent shooting things and in general kicking butt.

Big Trouble in Little China is sort of an ubiquitous find in department store $5 bins. I’ve seen in packaged on the same disc with movies that have nothing in common with it except gunfire. I’m not sure if this is a testament to its logevity or a mark against it’s public opinion, but either way it’s easy to find.

If you buy only one obscure, cheap 80’s movie this year, make it this one.  Big Trouble in Little China is fun, confusing, cool and bizarre. It’s a B+ film all the way and perhaps one of the best weird Asian flim with an American main chracter and that wasn’t made in Asia.

Watch it and see if you don’t end up quoting it for a week. I dare you.