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AICN & Twitch Present International Eye Candy! Norwegian Ninja! Banglar King Kong! Showgirls: Exposed! And much more!
Ladies and gentlemen, you may not realize it yet but on your computer screen right now, lying just below the bottom edge, is quite possibly the most bad ass version of International Eye Candy in history. How bad ass is it? It’s got motorcycles and car chases and fully automatic weaponry. It’s got a man being thrown of the top of a toilet stall. It’s got a ninja attacking sheep. It’s got a cow being lit on fire. Yes, this column has everything a growing boy needs: violence and barbecue rolled into one. It’s also got the most ridiculously trashy version of KING KONG ever thanks to a group of no-doubt-wonderful people in Bangladesh who actually made a musical KONG featuring a man in a bad gorilla suit and released it to theatres there. Life is awesome.
I can’t very well tease you with the KONG that way and then keep you waiting, now can I? Welcome to BANGLAR KING KONG. It’s got singing and dancing and cardboard buildings and snakes and a guy in a gorilla suit. Believe it or not this is a real movie. Real movie theatres showed it. I have no idea if real audiences paid real money to see it.
Is Venezualan feature THE ZERO HOUR (LA HORA CERO) the most bad assed film in this bad ass column? It’s certainly got the most bad ass car. And also one hell of a storyline, one that revolves around a hitman taking control of a medical clinic during a doctor’s strike in Caracas and forcing them to treat his girlfriend. Motorcycles, cars, gunplay and manly men. It’s a short teaser but they packed a lot into it.
Not bad ass at all but potentially pretty damn cool is the new animated feature KUNG FU HUSTLE’s Steven Chow is producing based on his live action feature CJ7. They kind of snuck this one out quietly with nobody much realizing it was in the works until the first teaser popped up this past week, just a month before the film is due to hit screens in China. There are some nice little nods in there that Chow fans should pick up on.
It needs to be said right off the top that Duke Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE POPE is not a BLACK DYNAMITE style grindhouse throwback. No, this is the real thing, a lost gem from the 1970’s rediscovered and polished up and just getting its first ever release now. And as the real thing it features a patently ludicrous plotline – a gangster who wants to kidnap the Pope and hold him for a ransom of one dollar from every Catholic in the world – extreme violence, coarse language and a naked woman compared to a Brillo pad. This is not even remotely work safe, so don’t blame me if it gets you fired.
Any fans of golden-era Shaw Brothers films out there? Because young writer-directors Clement Cheng and Derek Kwok had the surprise hit of the year in Hong Kong with their low budget kung fu comedy GALLANTS in which they went out and cast a stack of old Shaw heroes in the lead parts and let them strut their stuff. The old guys still got it and so does this film, which ends up being a charming a hugely entertaining blast that refuses to get stuck in the past but honours it while drawing it into the present. The trailer for this one has appeared in an earlier IEC column but they’ve now released the full opening credits for the film and they’re just a spot on bit of love for the old ways.
If you’re a fan of Japanese cult film you may think that you’ve already seen the trailer for MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD – the new three part film jointly directed by TOKYO GORE POLICE helmer Yoshihiro Nishimura, MACHINE GIRL’s Noboru Iguchi and VERSUS star Tak Sakaguchi. You may very well have seen something calling itself the official trailer for this film. And it is, I suppose, but it’s the trailer that Toei Video wanted the buying public in Japan to see rather than what the directors wanted people to see. Now this? This is the unofficial ‘splatter’ trailer for the film, one cut personally by Nishimura. And you know what that means: massive sprays of blood and wildly over the top body prosthetics. Ever wonder what a chainsaw ass might look like? Now you can find out.
As a little aside on this, I’ve had the chance to see the full feature already and this is the movie people will look back on and say “That’s where Sakaguchi became a real director.” His directorial work before this has never risen above middling but his work here is fantastic. Iguchi and Nishimura turn in strong work, too, but in my book Sakaguchi totally steals the show.
And because Japanese cult films hate to live in a vacuum, here’s another one to keep MGS company. Jointly directed by Seiji Chiba and Yuji Shimomura (DEATH TRANCE), ALIEN VS NINJA is exactly what the title suggests: an epic battle between weirdly futuristic ninjas and a rubber-suit alien that crashes to earth just outside their village encased in a meteor. Loaded with action – surprisingly good action, actually, what with Shimomura being one of Japan’s most in demand fight choreographers – deliciously squishy gore effects and plenty of ninja versus alien hand to hand combat this thing is just a giddy good time. An unfinished version of the trailer leaked a while back but this is the real thing, all polished up and ready to go with English subtitles included.
Though they’re still holding back the head explosions there’s a new clip from Quentin Dupieux’s angry psychic tire movie RUBBER out there that explains the source of Robert the Tire’s rage. Genocide! Genocide I say!
Believe it or not that BANGLAR KING KONG trailer is not the cheapest, trashiest looking thing to appear in the IEC this time out. No, that honour belongs to Marc Vorlander and his unauthorized sequel to SHOWGIRLS, which seems to go by a different title every time it surfaces but is now known as SHOWGIRLS: EXPOSED. And I’m sure I’ll get an email or two from Vorlander calling me out for calling it cheap looking – It’s ART! It’s ART! – but that’s what it is. Particularly when you consider that the man has been claiming to have a twenty million dollar budget for this thing.
Four more minutes arrived in public recently. For more baffling, largely naked and yet completely un-arousing minutes. Sheer incompetence or brilliant marketing? You make the call.
I leave the task of wiping the SHOWGIRLS taint out of your minds to Quebec film maker Nicolas Bolduc and his KING CHICKEN. They’re up to it.
Any Fantastic Festers who caught the visually sumptuous TRUFFE at last year’s festival are already aware of Bolduc’s work, though they probably don’t know it. He’s one of the most gifted and in demand cinematographers here in Canada and is now making the move into directing. This is just a taste of his new short but a damn fine taste it is.
You know what makes a good match with film noir? Cryogenically frozen mariachi singers, cat suited female assassins and the odd UFO here and there. Welcome to the world of LA PANTERA NEGRA (THE BLACK PANTHER), a bizarre and gorgeous genre mashup from the same Mexican film school program that backed this year’s Cannes-selected cannibal drama WE ARE WHAT WE ARE. Though PANTERA was finished before WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, the promotional campaign for it is continuing along with a brand new trailer for the picture. And it’s just as baffling and gorgeous as the film itself – I’ve seen it, it’s fun – is.
Trust these animals. They speak – err, sing – the truth. Everybody loves a lesbian.
Nope, not a MEET THE FEEBLES follow-up but MONGRELS, a new show coming soon to BBC Three in the UK.
Since collecting awards at Fantastic Fest and numerous other festivals around the globe, Richard Gale’s THE HORRIBLY SLOW MURDERER WITH THE EXTREMELY INEFFICIENT WEAPON – the weapon being a spoon – has gone on to become a legitimate online phenomenon, racking up millions of views and prompting Gale to continue the saga of the evil Ginosaji and his hapless victim. He’s been taking suggestions online as far as ways his poor hero can stave off slow, spoony death and the most common so far has been why not match spoon for spoon. Gale shows us.
Indonesian martial arts film MERANTAU has had quite the run over the past year, winning an Audience Award at Fantastic Fest and Best Picture at Action Fest which, of course, leads to hte obvious questions of what’s next for director Gareth Evans and star Iko Uwais.
The answer is BERANDAL, a project that promises a much harder edged role for Uwais than the everyman-hero he played in MERANTAU. This one is a prison gang film, a role Uwais has been bulking up for, and though it’s not yet in production the director and star did get together to shoot a quick promo to sell the concept and tone to potential investors. This was done before Uwais started his training regimen and cut his hair for the role so he still looks pretty much as he did in MERANTAU but you’ll get the point.
Yep, second edition of the IEC in a row to feature an appearance by Takeshi Koike’s scifi racing anime REDLINE. But unlike the weirdly jazz inflected teaser that was released for the international market last time out, the new Japanese teaser actually aims to capture the true energy and tone of the film. FUNKY FOREST director Katsuhito Ishii wrote the script for this one so expect some lunacy.
Earlier this week French animator Yann Benedi released GIANT, the first in what he promises will be a series of short animations detailing the history of giants in the world and the difficulties they face when interacting with humans. This is one of the most unique and charming things I’ve come across in a good long while and I cannot recommend it enough. It may just be the best minute and a half of your day.
Ask any resident of Singapore about Old Changi Hospital and chances are pretty good they’ve got some sort of story or legend about the place they can share with you. It’s a truly notorious site, a former hospital transformed into a POW camp during the Japanese occupation, a period when its halls hosted more than a few beatings and torture sessions.
Nearby residents have believed for years that the place is haunted and a local documentary crew went in little while back to shoot what was intended to be a straight-up documentary about the history of the place and the legends surrounding it. Then things went weird. At this point separating truth from fiction – or at least potential fiction – becomes difficult but what is clear is, first, that Changi is an actual place and that residents take the legends about it seriously, and second, that the film which has been completed is radically different than the one the producers set out to make. Why? Did they realize there were more lucrative avenues to explore? Or did something supernatural actually happen there? You be the judge.
Right. Burning cow. It comes courtesy of a new Japanese trailer for Takashi Miike’s THIRTEEN ASSASSINS, a sort of DIRTY SOZEN-like samurai action picture that has featured in this column before. And if Miike, burning cow, and DIRTY DOZEN aren’t enough to get you to check it out I honestly don’t know what is so I’ll leave it at that.
Now here’s something a little different. Rather than a feature film based on a video game’s content – a la PRINCE OF PERSIA – SAMURAI is a film that proposes to use that actual guts of a video game to create a brand new world.
To be directed by Jerry O’Flaherty – well known in video games circles as the art designer and cinematic director for GEARS OF WAR – SAMURAI will be shot on green screen with the environments created entirely with the Unreal video game engine. To prove this is possible O’Flaherty rounded up a small crew and in just two days, for a total budget of under a thousand dollars, created a minute long demonstration of the technology in action. Verdict? Can he do it? Damn straight he can, the end results living somewhere in the same neighbourhood as a Kaz (CASSHERN, GOEMON) Kiriya film but more fluid.
Off we go now to Korea where, sweet lord, it looks like Won Bin is about to become a major new action star. Won’s been close to being a major star before having been right on the cusp of hitting the top tier of the local industry when he had to leave to fulfill his mandatory military service. He was gone for five years but now that he’s back he’s wasting no time at all. He was the lead in Bong Joon-Ho’s MOTHER and now he’s set to hit screens again in THE MAN FROM NOWHERE. The story has the sort of melodramatic edge that will either destroy it or lift it into the rarified air of the best John Woo – he plays a former special agent trying to save a young girl from a gang of human organ traffickers – and if the trailer is anything to judge by it looks like it could very well be the latter. The guy’s got charisma to spare and the director matches him beat for beat in the style department. Very tasty.
How to wrap up a column filled to the brim with so much bad-assery? Only one option. Time for a NORWEGIAN NINJA. New from the producer of Nazi-zombie comedy DEAD SNOW, NORWEGIAN NINJA is an odd one. The main character – Arne Treholt – is one hundred percent a real person, a former high ranking Norwegian diplomat who was sentenced to twenty years in prison as a Soviet spy at the height of the cold war and now lives in exile in Cyprus, but the story they’ve woven around him? Maybe not so much ...
You see, after being raised during the period in question and being asked to swallow all sorts of ridiculous claims about what was going on during the 80s, writer-director Thomas Cappelen Malling asked himself a very simple question. If he was expected to believe all the ridiculous things being fed to him in the media was it any harder to believe that Arne Treholt was not a spy at all but actually the leader of a secret ninja force? This film is the result, a goofy spy comedy, sure, but one in which all of the historical aspects – newsreel footage, interviews, etc – are 100% real, just placed in a radically different context. A context that involves flying cars, underwater assaults, a man carrying a wolf and oh so much more.
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