New York Ninja (John Liu and Kurtis M. Spieler, 2021)

After his wife (voiced by Ginger Lynn) is murdered, TV sound man/martial artist Liu (John Liu; voiced by Don ‘the Dragon’ Wilson) masks up to fight for vengeance and justice as New York’s Ninja!

A bridge between Wuxia cinema, the eighties Ninja craze and the New York-based grindhouse fare of Frank Henenlotter, William Lustig and James Glickenhaus, New York Ninja is a glorious one-off.

Shot in 1984 guerrilla-style on the streets of New York, the film was unfinished for decades until Vinegar Syndrome’s Kurtis M. Spieler set about resurrecting and releasing it.

This a movie of refractions - original auteur John Liu’s adoption of the then-popular Ninja craze, and ‘re-director’ Kurtis M. Spieler’s reassembly of the film, with the mostly unknown cast given voice by an assembly of martial arts luminaries.

Despite the extended postproduction, Spieler’s reconstruction and the celebrity stunt casting accentuates and supports the film’s home-made qualities.

Like the filmmakers behind Hundreds of Beavers, the re-post-filmmakers behind New York Ninja seem to recognise the potency of the film’s aesthetic choices and limitations.

The specific effect of watching actors running through undressed New York streets has a visceral, tangible sense of place. The cheap visual effects makeup gives a queasy, uncanny edge to the villain’s degeneration. 

Because of how shaky the actual production values are (including the dubbing), the reconstructed New York Ninja bottles a specific vibe of the era and style of pictures its original creators were striving towards.

It is no mere homage, but a renovation. It is reclaiming something that already existed and polishing to make it the best version of what it was intended to be (at least in spirit, if not literal narrative).  

In some ways it feels like a Cannon movie made by talented amateurs, yet there is a sweetness and warmth to the film that feels all of its own.

My one regret is that, like Miami Connection, I did not get the chance to discover this movie for the first time in a theatre, with a crowd.

I cannot say I loved it, but its scrappy can-do spirit, and the atmosphere of the New York locations are something to be appreciated.

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Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell, 1988)

After unearthing a strange skull, archaeology student Angus (Peter Capaldi) and local aristocrat James d'Ampton (Hugh Grant) fall prey to their mysterious neighbour Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe).

Lady Sylvia is an acolyte of the countryside's most famous legend, the d'Ampton worm, a large, snake-like dragon who used to plague the area hundreds of years before.

When the skull vanishes, so do the locals - and it falls to our unlikely heroes to face down Lady Sylvia before she can resurrect her reptilian master.

I had only seen one Ken Russell film before this - his Harry Palmer instalment Billion Dollar Brain.

I need to do a deep dive into his work.

From beginning to end, Lair of the White Worm feels like a pisstake.

It has some scares ( some of Lady Sylvia’s attacks) and audiovisual delirium, but the emphasis is designed to expose the story’s artifice.

Russell claimed it was a comedy, and Lair of the White Worm works as a demented parody of a Hammer horror.

Amanda Donohoe is delightfully deadpan as the antagonist, and a young Hugh Grant is fine as the local aristocrat who stumbles into his ancestor’s legacy.

The film has its oversized tongue in cheek, but I think watching it on a computer did not help. It might take a couple of viewings but its grip on the tone feels a shade off.

As the film progresses, its heightened gothic surrealism begins to gel, and the film turns into a series of darkly cartoonish punchlines: A snake man charmed by a bagpiper; The mongoose - the iconic snake foe - ends up part of a gruesome pratfall.

The most striking scenes are the video superimpositions. Depicting visions of Roman soldiers attacking maidens while the Lambton Worm wraps itself around a crucified Jesus while flames overlay every image, these scenes are a jolt of MTV-inspired hell.

The film’s use of familiar horror conventions is consistently off, as though Russell is more interested in exposing the artifice of this genre exercise.

It feels disinterested, but not in a way that leads to the film’s sense of frivolity - it should be noted that the novel it is based on is regarded as one of the worst in the genre (akin to the fossilised skull discovered at the beginning).

It is not interested in horror as an affect, but as a miss-en-scene to be rearranged to suit the filmmakers’ sense of irony.

While stories like the Lambton Worm carry warnings, maybe the film’s message that these warnings are destined to be ignored. 

It is a little patchy (some of the younger actors are wooden) but the film is hilarious and rather sexy.

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Rampage (William Friedkin, 1987)

 

Put on the case of serial killer Charlie Reece (Alex McArthur), prosecutor Anthony Fraser (Michael Beihn) has been tasked with finding him sane so he can face the death penalty.

Fraser’s personal opposition to the death penalty is quickly dissolved as he learns the full extent of Reece’s crimes.

As the trial progresses, Fraser and Reece’s defence team clash over the legal definition of insanity.

Rampage is a movie about human nature, and the ways in which we try to define and restrict specific kinds of behaviour.

If that sounds interesting, Rampage might be the movie for you.

According to his autobiography, Friedkin made the movie because of his own feelings about the death penalty.

While he opposed it as a younger filmmaker, by the mid-eighties, he had completely changed his position.

Attracted by the source novel’s focus on the legal defence of ‘insanity’, Friedkin took over the adaptation himself.

The film opens with Alex Reece’s first murders. His initial attacks are shot mostly from a distance, in wide shots that show the unsettling banality of the killer as he violates these bland suburban settings.

The violence is not shown - instead the film cuts away, or cuts to images of Reece rubbing blood over his naked body while lions prowl in a cage behind him.

Friedkin also avoids sticking with Reece’s subjectivity - keeping him at a remove so that the film’s central enigma is maintained.

Friedkin might have been pro-death penalty, but the film ends up being far more ambiguous - the characters and the film never arrive at a definitive decision on Reece’s culpability, let alone a definition for insanity (legal or otherwise).

While the details are interesting, one wishes the film was a little more fleshed-out.

Michael Beihn is not bad as the prosecutor but the character comes across as a little underwritten.

The whole movie feels like a legal quandary, without enough human drama to make it as compelling as it could be.

An interesting watch, but it feels like a better, more troubling film is just out of reach.

Related

To Live and Die in LA

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Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2023)

After his applejack business goes under, Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) becomes a fur trapper - and gets on the wrong side of the local beaver community.

Released as part of the Terror-Fi film festival, Hundreds of Beavers is the kind of movie I used to crave.

Watching it felt like going home. This is the kind of movie that makes me want to create!

The presentation was probably the best I could have asked for. The cinema that hosted my screening played a Merrie Melody starring Bugs Bunny before the film, providing a tonal entree to the experience.

It is a debt the movie is not shy about flaunting, but its chief success is avoiding feeling like a one trick pony.

It is also not trying to be a literal translation of a Warner Brothers cartoon - it evokes the surreal, hyper-kineticism and rubbery physicality, but in ways that feel indebted to cinema’s early days.

Literalism is the true enemy here - the film is deliberately heightened in its aesthetic, but the humour is not self-defeating.

The film benefits from the dead seriousness of lead performer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews and the filmmakers.

Special mention should be given to the score, by Chris Ryan - he appears to have taken the right lessons from Elmer Bernstein's work for Airplane!, by underscoring the emotion of the melodramatic storyline, rather than trying to add to the farce.

This collective non-winking at the audience makes the film’s humour self-sustaining.

Despite the film’s obvious effects and limitations (there are multiple instances where the costumed performers trip or stumble into each other), there is no sense that the film is making fun of itself.

A gem.

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OUT NOW: Thanksgiving (Eli Roth, 2023)

A year after a tragic riot at a Black Friday sale, the small town of Plymouth, Mass is trying to move on.

Until someone dressed as a pilgrim decides that cutting off heads is a better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than cutting prices...

Based on the faux trailer from 2007’s exploitation tribute Grindhouse, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving does exactly what it says on the tin.

It hits all the money shots from the trailer, but the best compliment I can give the film is that it manages to avoid feeling like it is trying to string those images together.

The cast are solid, the script is functional, and even the gore and the edge of nihilistic glee carries a certain familiarity. The opening scene - the initial Black Friday sale-turned-crowd crush - gets close to raising temperatures - packing a frenzy, energy and mean streak that the rest of the film cannot quite match.

The killer’s look is effective, and the film makes some effective use of Thanksgiving iconography. 

The original trailer attempted to echo the aesthetics of early 80s slashers. Its film adaptation does not go for that level of verisimilitude - Instagram plays a key role - but in its unpretentious efficiency, it feels more spiritually aligned with that era of slashers. 

If you are a fan of The Prowler or any slasher from 1981, Thanksgiving will feel like comfort food.

Related

Friday the 13th

Part II

Part 3D

The Final Chapter

A New Beginning 

Jason Lives

The New Blood

Jason Takes Manhattan

The Prowler

Terror Train

Silent Night, Deadly Night

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The Man who almost killed James Bond

In this season of The James Bond Cocktail Hour podcast, we are covering the six year gap between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye, covering everything James Bond-related, from books to comics to video games, to non-Bond properties which tried to fill the gap.

If you ever wondered why Timothy Dalton's third movie never happened, Giancarlo Parretti is a big reason why.

Check out our episode on him at the link below!

Check out the episode at the link below:

No Time To Die (review)

No Time To Die (commentary)

Pierce Brosnan - The Bond In Waiting 

GoldenEye & Spymaker - The Secret Lives of Ian Fleming

Nikita

Total Recall

Fire, Ice and Dynamite & Bullseye!

The Russia House

BrokenClaw

Lethal Weapon & Die Hard

If Looks Could Kill

Hudson Hawk

The Rocketeer

Black Cat

Timebomb

Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country

The Man From Barbarossa

James Bond Jr 

James Bond Jr. and other lost adventures, with Mark Edlitz 

Timothy Dalton's Bond 17 (Mark I) 

Permission to Die

Memoirs of an Invisible Man & The King's Man

Live Wire 

Sneakers 

Blue Ice

The Harry Palmer Trilogy

Freddie as F.R.O.7 

Death is Forever

Timothy Dalton's Bond 17 (Mark II), Part 1

Timothy Dalton's Bond 17 (Mark II), Part 2 

Serpent's Tooth

Timothy Dalton's Bond 17 - comparing the different visions 

The Man who almost killed James Bond

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The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

 When a hit goes wrong, a contract killer (Michael Fassbender) finds his carefully organised life under threat from his former employer.

I do not know how to feel about The Killer.

I went in completely cold - I only knew the top line talent (David Fincher, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker), and I didn’t even know Netflix was involved until the logo dropped.

I cannot help feeling underwhelmed - There is something breezily inconsequential about the movie, and maybe it will become more engrossing on the small screen.

Like Fincher’s Panic Room, this is a potboiler.

But there is something missing.

Maybe it is the familiarity: An existential hitman, a hit gone wrong, a loved one is harmed, a quest to kill those who wronged him.

Fincher plays with some of the genre’s style - keeping the camera at a remove, avoiding becoming too engrossed in the killer’s actions. 

Like the character, The Killer is not a movie that revels in violence. It is a movie about characters who have been damaged or hollowed out by it.

With the character’s obsession with finesse, it is hard not to read the character as an extension of the filmmaker’s own exacting process. It also feels lazy.

Maybe this movie is just what it is. Maybe my expectations were too high, or it was too familiar to live up to my initial impression of the filmmakers’ involvement.

Watching Fassbinder run around various locations, infiltrating and killing his way around the world, I started imagining the movie as his take on James Bond. Not that there are any similarities - there was such a familiarity to the movie that I was trying to keep myself engaged. 

I have never left a Fincher movie forgetting I have seen it.

I tried writing about this movie after I watched it in theatres, but I didn’t have anything to write about.

And then I forgot about it until it popped up on Netflix.

What does that say?

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