Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I’ve been finding it a little… tiring… keeping up AMAD and Fest coverage, but I’ve been managing pretty well, seeing what I want to see at the Fest while finding time for the AMAD movies. All this is a long round about way of saying sorry for only popping out a few reviews from Fantastic Fest after 3 ½ days.
But I’m going to make up for it now with two reviews of fucking crazy awesome movies out of Asia. Let’s start with:
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD
Along with LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (read my review here!), THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD still holds the top spot now a third of the way into Fantastic Fest.
Holy crap what a great movie this is. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to describe it, but I’m having some difficulty. I’ve been calling it a Noodle Western in conversation with my friends. I’m sure I’m much less original than I think I am, but you can’t call this a Spaghetti Western despite it’s huge, throbbing Sergio Leone boner.
But it’s not crazy weird Asian cinema either. It is crazy and weird, but not excessively so. I recently received a screener for Takashi Miike’s SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO and couldn’t get more than 40 minutes through it, and I love Miike. But goddamn is it horrible… stylized to a nauseating level.
Korean director Ji-woon Kim (A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, A BITTERSWEET LIFE) manages to make a fucking epic Western which is firmly rooted in the language of Asian filmmaking, but he makes it accessible.
I think what he really does right is he took inspiration from Leone’s Westerns without aping his shots, even in a movie that is stealing THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY’s main structure. Kim is every bit as visually brilliant as Leone was, but in a completely different way.
The film opens as our three leads all show up on a train speeding through Manchuria. One of them (The Weird) is a thief robbing it, another (The Bad) is an assassin hired by a rich man to steal a map off of one of the passengers and the last (the Good) is a bounty hunter chasing down The Bad.
The Good is played by Woo-sung Jung, an actor I’m not familiar with, but he plays The Good as the ultimate badass. He’s a good guy, but he has the Clint Eastwood ambiguity to him without just flat out copying Eastwood’s iconic Man With No Name.
The Bad is played by Byung-hun Lee (A BITTERSWEET LIFE, HERO and Storm Shadow in the upcoming GI JOE movie), who plays him a little more theatrical than Lee Van Cleef and slightly more insane.
The Weird is played by Kang-ho Song (who you should remember as the lead guy in THE HOST) and is by far my favorite character in the movie.
Kang-ho Song is a brilliant comedian. His timing here is fantastic and he somehow takes a bumbling character and keep him from becoming Jar Jar Binks. His mistakes are rooted in reality and for every fuck-up he has a moment where you know this dude knows his shit.
His weapon of choice is double-fisting lugers and he knows how to use them.
The Weird’s introductory scene is fantastic, the reveal perfect and he captures the essense of the character within seconds, letting you know what you’re in for. He’s a happy-go-lucky guy, obsessed with rich stuff and women and deadly when he has to be… and a little accident-prone.
The whole opening train sequence is brilliant, the kind of opening that you’re in awe of, but you worry about because it’s so big, so effortlessly told (cutting from each of the characters who have different fights and situations that intersect with the other characters at different points) that you’re sure it can only be downhill from here.
But that’s the thing, the movie opens like a shot out of cannon, the first 30 minutes going by in the blink of an eye, it seems, and the rest of the movie not only lives up to the first action sequence, but in many ways surpasses it.
The main quest of the story is finding the X on a map purportedly leading to an incredible amount of buried treasure, but it gets fucking huge as everybody and their mother is on the tail of The Weird as he weaves in and out of trouble trying to find his fortune and glory.
Imagine, if you will, Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach are approaching the cemetery in GBU, but instead of just Lee Van Cleef converging on the same spot they also had both the North and South armies with all their weaponry also converging on that same spot after the treasure and you get an idea of how fucking crazy this movie gets in the third act.
I can’t recommend this movie enough. No restrictions. Anybody who claims to like movies has to like this one. It’s the law. Charming, brutally suspenseful and just the perfect mixture of comedy, action, drama, western and fucked-up-awesome. It’s just pure entertainment, an effortlessly visually brilliant movie from Ji-woon Kim. It’s a gem and another movie that will have a guaranteed spot in my favorites of the year.
For a little taste, here’s the trailer… which blissfully doesn’t ruin much of the movie, but shows how badass it is:
TOKYO GORE POLICE
I was not blown away by the effortless badassery of TOKYO GORE POLICE, but I had an incredibly fun time with the movie. I can’t and won’t compare it to THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD, which was brilliant on every level, because that’s just not fair.
TOKYO GORE POLICE is the movie you watch when you want to see just how fucked up Asian cinema can be. It’s like SUICIDE CLUB or Miike’s good movies (AUDITION, ICHI THE KILLER, VISITOR Q, HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS, etc). In fact, director Yoshihiro Nishimura was an effects guy prior to directing and did the effects for SUICIDE CLUB.
This movie is about a girl cop, part of a special unit whose job it is to kill a new breed of killer walking the streets. They call them engineers and they look normal until you hurt them. Whatever part of their body is hurt is mutated into a deadly weapon.
For instance, the first one we see gets his arm blown off by the regular SWAT-like squad while swinging around his favorite weapon, a chainsaw. The arm regrows, but instead of a hand he now has a meaty-chainsaw thing.
Ruka (Eihi Shiina, who you’ll fondly remember as the fucked up girl-next door acupuncture obsessed villain in Miike’s AUDITION) is called in to take him out, which she does without much effort. The trick is finding a key-shaped tumor implanted somewhere in their body and either remove it or damage it. If you don’t do that, they’ll just keep regenerating into more and more dangerous beings.
Her father was a top cop assassinated in front of her as a young girl and that assassination not only prompts Ruka to be the best she can be, but also may play a part in what’s going down with the rise of the engineers.
Throughout the movie we get ROBOCOP-like breaks to commercials completely satirizing modern culture, especially the cutter culture. Check out two of these commercials below, courtesy of the always on the ball Todd at Twitch:
That’s just the tip of the iceberg with this movie. Seriously. You’re seeing a few pics from the movie peppered in this review and you still don’t know how fucked up this really gets.
I think it is going for goriest movie of the ever title, challenging BLOOD FEAST, CANNIBAL FEROX and THE STORY OF RICKY in a Battle Royale Cage Match.
Does it make much sense? Is there a solid, original plot? Naw, not really. You go with it. Every time you try to get yourself hung up on those little things a dude gets his cock bitten off or a giant horned helmet Police Captain walks in a quadruple amputee dressed in Gimp leather and wearing a leash or a snail woman pops up or a hunchback scientist decides to join in the fight with a giant gun that shoots nothing but forearms and fists… and you go, “Oh yeah. This is just a fucked up, I-can’t-believe-I’m-seeing-what-I’m-seeing movie."
I mean… and this is a spoiler… but fuck it. A cop goes to a freak-whorehouse… gets his dick bitten off, but manages to cut the freak-prostitute in half, which turns her bottom half into a giant alligator mouth, which chases him around the room and into the hall before eating his leg (remember, his dick was the first thing to go, so he’s doing all this with a fountain of dick-blood (did DGDB have something to do with this movie?!?) spewing the whole time. He has a tumor placed in him after he defeats the alligator vagina whore and suddenly shows up at the police station… with his injured parts now weapons… and he looks like this:
As you can plainly see, it’s not a movie that can be recommended to everyone. This is not high art, but it’s high entertainment without a doubt. At least for sick fuckers like me, who will love this movie to death.
So much blood gushes in this movie that it stopped being sick after 5 minutes. I had to run after the movie, but I heard someone asked the director how much blood was used and he told them “At least 3 tons.” And that, I would say, might be a conservative estimate.
It’s a hard movie to describe, but I hope the visual aides I’ve tracked down have helped give you folks an idea of what the movie is. TOKYO GORE POLICE is definitely the type of movie that has to be seen in order to believed.
Okay, two more down, only another dozen to go… until I add another 4 on tomorrow…
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
