Yes, kids, the leaves have changed color and the weather has turned colder since last we spoke but the maddeningly busy festival season that has kept us from one another for these past weeks is now past and the path to our reunion is clear. Yes, it is Todd from Twitch here with the first edition of International Eye Candy in ... well, honestly I don’t have the first damn clue how long it’s been. That’s how long it’s been. So, as a token of apology this time out, rather than just going back over the past couple weeks in the world of film this time out I’ll be going back a solid month. So it’s a big one and I hope you’re wearing your kung-fu pants, because we’ve got LOTS of it: Two new films starring Donnie Yen, the return of THE REBEL’s Johnny Nguyen and Veronica Ngo, a CG enhanced extravaganza from the Pang Brothers, plus the triumphant return of THE MATRIX choreographer Yuen Woo Ping to the director’s chair. Plus we’ve got INFERNAL AFFAIRS star Andy Lau flying what must be the cheapest space ship ever put on film. Strap in, here we go!

The fu is coming but before we get there: cowboys! And not just any cowboys, either. No, these are French ones, with a brand new theatrical trailer and an extended two minute clip from James (HELLPHONE) Huth’s live action adaptation of Morris and Goscinny’s classic comic series LUCKY LUKE. Jean Dujardin – you know him from 99 FRANCS and OSS 117, or at least you should – is in the title role and we’ve been in love with this one pretty much from the word go. The look is spot on, the casting of Dujardin is a stroke of genius and the early character teasers are spectacular. But you know what they say about teasers: You only need thirty seconds of good footage to cut one, the real test comes when people can see something a bit longer-form. And that time has come with both the lengthy theatrical trailer and the extended clip hitting and both are absolutely fantastic. Yep. I love this.

Find the trailer here and the extended clip here.

Okay, here comes your first piece of the fu and it’s a good one. To westerners who dabble in martial arts film, Yuen Woo Ping will likely always be best known as the guy who choreographed THE MATRIX films and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON but to those of us who dig a little deeper into the genre, he’ll always be much more. Yuen is the head of one of the oldest and most influential clans of film martial artists Hong Kong has ever produced, a literal living legend who has hand his hand in more than one true classic of the genre whether as a choreographer, director or performer. This is the man who made Donnie Yen a star and choreographed Jet Li’s finest screen performance (that’d be FIST OF LEGEND, for the record) and it’s been well nigh forever since he directed one of his own projects. But he’s got one now. It’s called TRUE LEGEND, it draws on one of the classic characters from Chinese folklore, it’s got one whale of a cast - including what very well may be David Carradine’s final on-screen role – and Yuen has got a little wrinkle up his sleeve as well. Yep, the look and feel of this is old school all the way except for one key factor: He shot it in 3D. No clue how many 3D screens they actually have in China and Hong Kong but this’ll be filling them all up soon and – if the just-released full trailer is any indication – it’ll be filling them up for a good long time.

Find the TRUE LEGEND trailer here

From China we take a little jaunt across the continent to India, where we find SHABRI. Produced by the once-great but recently slidden into mediocrity Ram Gopal Varma, this one looks like it may just have the goods to propel RGV back into prominence. Varma has always been a sort of anti-Bollywood Bollywood director, a guy who works within that industry but seems to generally detest all the things that people associate with it. While others are making Technicolor song and dance fests, Varma’s best work has been dark and gritty with nary a dance sequence to be found. He likes to base his stories in real life and in SHABRI he seems to have found a good one: The story of Mumbai’s first female crime boss. Varma’s leaving directing duties here to Lalit Marathe and, honestly, I take that as a good point as well, with nearly all of the best work Varma has been associated with coming with him purely in the producer role. The trailer looks like riveting, gritty stuff.

Find the SHABRI trailer here

From India we head now to the old country, all the way up into the mountains of Switzerland – a nation not exactly known for any sort of film industry but which is having a little genre renaissance right now. Swiss scifi picture CARGO was covered in an earlier IEC and now the same distributor is poised to launch crime thriller VERSO on the populace. You’ve seen the basic story done many times before, no doubt – it’s your basic hot headed cop destroying his own life and family thanks to his obsessive fixation on his goal – but writer-director Xavier Ruiz looks to execute this with a blend of slick style and harsh grit that separates it from the pack. Unless, of course, your pack happens to be made up of people like Michael Mann. Then Ruiz would fit right in.

Find the VERSO trailer here

Yeah, you know where this is going already ... Tarik Saleh’s animated feature METROPIA is old hat to readers of the IEC by this point, with earlier trailers and clips already having made the cut, but fresh off of its successful US debut at Fantastic Fest the Swedish distributors went and released a brand new theatrical trailer for the film. This is dark, bleakly humorous stuff, with a fantastic cast of voices – Vincent Gallo, Udo Kier, Juliette Lewis, Peter Skarsgaard – and a bizarre storyline that revolves around mind control via shampoo.

Find the full METROPIA trailer here

Right. We’ve done the master, now it’s time for the student. Director Daniel (BLACK MASK) Lee may not be enough to inspire confidence or excitement but the idea of Donnie Yen cast as a middle ages Chinese secret service agent? Oh, yes please. Yen is – quite clearly, in my opinion – the greatest screen fighter in the world right now and with him already having announced his intended retirement date of 2013 – from acting, anyway, he’ll continue working behind the scenes – we’ve got to horde up all of his remaining work between now and then. Luckily, this one looks pretty fun. All that’s released so far is an initial teaser that sets more mood than it shows action but what it shows is pretty impressive. Donnie’s bulked up for this one and – somewhat surprisingly, given his reputation – has allowed Lee to have him look his actual age to lend a bit of believability to his character. Is this the same Donnie Yen who basically cast himself as a teenager in DRAGON TIGER GATE a few years ago? The guy’s finally growing up and hitting his peak mere moments before walking away from it all ...

Find the 14 BLADES teaser here

Heh. I got accused of being bribed to like this one. Silly people, all you’ve got to do to get me to say nice things about your movie is make something that actually looks good. Failing that, hookers and cocaine are always a good fall-back position but in this case it was definitely the actually looking good part that won out.

The debut film from Paweł Borowski – and, I believe, the first live action feature produced by stellar effects and animation company Platige Image- ZERO is a sort of chain reaction sort of film, a thriller that passes through a single twenty four hour period by simply following the dialogue. We go in to a scene, something happens, and then the camera follows the last person to speak as we move on to whatever comes next. It looks slick, smart, and like absolutely fascinating viewing. I’m hooked one hundred percent.

Find the ZERO trailer here

And if all that structural experimentation has got you feeling woozy, then go here to see France being attacked by giant crabs. That is all.

And from that we move to something a little bit darker, namely PATIENT X – the new Filipino horror film from Yam Laranas. The director of hit scare flick SIGAW – which Laranas himself remade in English as THE ECHO with the help of THE RING and THE GRUDGE producer Roy Lee – Laranas returned home to create PATIENT X, a creature feature based on the Filipino legend of the aswang. Not familiar? Picture a vampire but stripped of the glamour, a humanoid creature immortal unless killed under very specific circumstances that hunts human prey to eat their entrails. While vampires are technically parasites, aswangs are full on predators, hunting their unfortunate victims in packs. This one hits screens in The Philippines next week but the full trailer and a TV spot are available now.

Find the full trailer here and a bloody teaser here.

Anybody else here homesick for the days when Italy was ground zero for all manner of smart genre fare, the purveyors of slashers, thrillers and all manner of other fare? Well, I certainly am, and so I am a very happy boy indeed whenever something emerges from the Italian scene that looks to restore some of that lost lustre to their sadly faded industry. Enter LA DOPPIA ORA, an intelligent adult thriller that took its bow at the Venice Film Festival last month. It’s a world away from the giallo pictures that Italy built its reputation on but compelling nonetheless, a story of ill fated love and murder beautifully shot and built around compelling, complex characters. Regardless of the country of origin, the world just doesn’t get enough of these.

Find the LA DOPPIA ORA trailer here

And now it’s back to the martial arts action! One of only two men in the world who has fought both Jet Li and Tony Jaa on screen – a cookie for you if you can name the other without looking it up – as well as being the guy in the suit for the first two SPIDER-MAN flicks, Vietnamese-American stunt man and martial artist Johnny Nguyen didn’t get the chance to step out as a leading man in his own right until he went back to Vietnam a few years ago to make THE REBEL. A film he wrote and produced himself – with his brother Charlie directing – THE REBEL both launched Nguyen on to the international stage and introduced him to model-actress Veronica Ngo. Nguyen trained Ngo up in martial arts for THE REBEL and she took to it so naturally that the two are pairing up once again for the simply titled CLASH. A thoroughly modern story this time, the film adds car chases and gun play to the mix and looks like just far too much fun. A shorter – and less bloody – version of the film is being prepped for Vietnamese release in December before the more full-blooded version comes to the rest of the world in 2010 and the first trailer is looking damn good.

Find the CLASH trailer here

Swedish thriller THE APE was a surprise favourite of mine when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, a film that I knew nothing at all about going into. And in retrospect I’m more than a little grateful that I knew so little about it going in because it’s just that sort of film, a little puzzle box of a picture that wants you to try and figure it out as it goes. You start simply with a man waking up on a bathroom floor covered in blood that may or may not be his and then you follow him through his day. What happened? Why? How? Entertaining the different possibilities is the entire charm of the film and that sort of vagueness is what makes cutting a trailer for it so incredibly difficult. That hasn’t stopped them from trying, though, and so far they’ve got two. The first – which I personally think gives up a bit too much – is a fairly conventional approach while the second – which I greatly prefer – is more of a mood piece that aims to establish the uneasy tone of the film rather than explaining anything and does even that simply by employing a sequence that was actually edited out of the finished picture. You choose which you want to see but definitely do keep an eye out for this one.

Find the first trailer here and the second one here

We’ve been kind of alternating between the high brow and the low throughout this entire column so here it goes again. We now follow one of the artier entries in this edition of the IEC with Hong Kong megastar Andy Lau starring in a total, unrepentant piece of cult scifi trash. It’s Wong Jing’s FUTURE X COPS, the special effects budget looks like it was about five bucks (I’m exaggerating but not by much), and it looks like far too much trashy fun.

Find the FUTURE X COPS trailer here

For an effects extravaganza that probably cost a tenth of what FUTURE X COPS did but looks ten times better, I recommend heading to Ireland and checking out Gary Shore’s CUP OF TEARS. Fans of Kaz Kiriya and the look he achieved in CASSHERN and GOEMON, strap in and get ready for this one, because Shore is an out-and-out effects genius and what he’s creating here – the film is still in production, as far as I understand – is a period set martial arts fantasy. Yes, it’s an Irish produced martial arts fantasy. Let that sink in a bit. Then go look at it and wonder why Ireland hasn’t done it before, because this is bloody well gorgeous.

Find the CUP OF TEARS trailer here

What the hell, let’s stick with the theme. The Pang Brothers’ upcoming martial arts fantasy THE STORM WARRIORS – sequel to huge Hong Kong hit THE STORM RIDERS – is coming nearer to its December release and so, a little earlier than expected, what they’re billing as the final theatrical trailer has just been released. And, as you’d expect from a duo of the top visual stylists in all of Asia unleashed in a 300-style green screen wonderland, the result is pure eye candy. Whether the story will hang together is always the question when you’re dealing with the Pangs but this sure is pretty.

Find the STORM WARRIORS trailer here

And now some eye candy of an entirely different variety. Director Paul King is already well known to fans of cult British comedy, the man having sat at the helm of hit TV series THE MIGHTY BOOSH for, I do believe, its entire run. And now he has taken the step to features with BUNNY AND THE BULL, a film which – while not at all a BOOSH film – should make King’s existing fans rather happy while earning him a whole lot more. And those new fans will likely come, unless I am badly mistaken, out of the Church of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.

A road movie set entirely in one man’s flat, BUNNY AND THE BULL uses found objects, cardboard, glass bottles, anything really, to create its immersive worlds as the lead character retraces the path to a tragedy through his own memories, his mind grabbing on to articles within his apartment and using them as building materials for his memories. The film’s marketing suffers a major disconnect from its actual content – this is a much more melancholic film than the trailer would have you believe – but the visual charms are there in full force.

Find the BUNNY AND THE BULL trailer here

And now I present to you a man dressed in a chicken suit falling from a tree and crushing a live chicken. Repeatedly.

Remember what I said up above about Italy and giallo film? Well, if you want a good giallo the place to go now, apparently, is actually Belgium from whence has emerged AMER. I almost didn’t include this one because the teaser is such a tease but I got a look at the film at the massive Sitges festival in Spain – it’s Cannes for genre film, basically – and absolutely fell in love. God damn, I love this movie. It’s a film that refuses to recycle the past glories of giallo while being one made by film makers so familiar with that language they have made it fully and completely their own. It’s a breath taking piece of work that fully deserves that amazing poster art created for it.

Find the AMER teaser here

Oh, lord. What to say about THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE? It was the discovery of Fantastic Fest 09 for me, a film proudly declared by its creator to be “100% Medically Accurate”. Which is truly saying something when you’ve created a film about a mad doctor surgically connecting a trio of victims from mouth to asshole. It’s Miike meets Cronenberg and while they haven’t cut a trailer for this thing they have released a small collection of clips.

Ride the HUMAN CENTIPEDE here

Is it okay to refer to Nicolo Donato’s BROTHERHOOD as BROKEBACK HISTORY X? Because that’s how I’m going to refer to it from now on. And, just in case you need that explained, here it is: Young man drawn into Denmark’s neo-Nazi movement at least partially because he’s in love with one of the movement’s (male) members. I’m sure that he’d be happier to know the feelings were returned if gay love in neo-Nazi circles wasn’t quickly followed by many big, heavy boots to the face. The cast of this is fantastic – Thure Lindhart and Nicolas Bro fill key roles – and the trailer impresses. Expect this to draw plenty of attention on the fest circuit over the coming year.

Find the BROTHERHOOD trailer here

I normally throw a few shorts into each IEC column but this time – despite the super-sized nature of this particular edition – there’s only one. And this is it.

New from Polish director Grzegorz Jonkajtys – best known for his Cannes-selected animated short ARK – is 36 STAIRS, a dystopic vision of the future in which the human body needs to be bio-mechanically altered just to cope with the levels of pollution and the greatest threat to life is the cancellation of your health insurance. It’s bleak and beautiful stuff but would you really expect anything else from a guy who did effects on HELLBOY, PAN’S LABYRINTH, TERMINATOR SALVATION and SIN CITY?

Find the 36 STAIRS trailer here

Okay, this one takes some explaining. The region of Hakodate in Japan is a major producer of squid. Such a major producer, in fact, that the local tourist board has recently launched an online tourism campaign to draw attention to the district using a series of Robot-Squid short films. These have been very successful.

But not content with just making their own stuff, the tourism board is now Squidifying other people’s stuff, provided that it has some sort of connection to Hakodate. What about arthouse film IT’S ON ME? That was shot in Hakodate, right? No squids in the movie, sadly, but now there are in the trailer! Space ships, too. And robot battles. All of them layered in to the actual footage of the actual trailer for what looks to be a very serious little character drama. And you know what? I’d kill to see a movie with giant robot squid rampaging unnoticed behind a town full of people too caught up int heir daily lives to particularly care.

Get squiddy here

Okay, one last bit of fu here before we wrap things up. Teddy Chen’s BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS should be familiar to readers of the IEC, the film having been covered here a couple times before now but it’s back in by virtue of a whopping eight minute clip of the film having been released to the masses. Bloody well everyone is in this one – Donny Yen, Nicholas Tse, Tony Leung and more – and producers have created a full scale standing set of turn-of-the-century Hong Kong to shoot it in to make sure everything looks and feels authentic. Expectations? Sky high.

Find the BODYGUARDS clip here

And, finally, we close things off with GHOST IN THE SHELL director Mamoru Oshii’s first feature length live action effort since AVALON. Titled ASSAULT GIRLS features Oscar nominated actress Rinko Kikuchi as one of a trio of heavily armed women stalking giant sand worms through a post-apocalyptic desert. Beautiful women. Big guns. What more does a growing boy need?

Find the ASSAULT GIRLS trailer here