If martial arts movies or Hong Kong movies more generally are your thing, chances are you have heard of Iron Monkey. You might even be a huge fan of it. Iron Monkey, Yuen Woo-Ping‘s 1993 Kung Fu romp starring Donnie Yen, Yu Rong-kwong and Jean Wang rode (at least in […]
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Walk on the Wild Side is a 1962 black and white drama by Edward Dymtryk starring Laurence Harvey. In the early thirties, Dove Linkhorn (Laurence Harvey) and Kitty Twist (Jane Fonda) meet in Texas, on the road making do as hobos, on their invididual way to New Orleans. Kitty takes […]
Trying to increase my #Japanuary dosage just a little bit more (also see my recent review of Irezumi), I went for Blind Beast (Môjû) next. Arrow Video’s BluRay release seems like a great opportunity to further expand my short exursion into the work of Yasuzo Masumura who also directed this […]
The most outstanding bit about Suddenly (1954, Dir. Lewis Allen) is its plotline. Gangsters led by Frank Sinatra’s John Baron hold up a family hostage in order to secure the perfect vantage point to assassinate their target, who happens to be the president of the United States of America. Evocative […]
Irezumi (japanese for tattoo), also known as Kiss of the Spider Woman, is a drama from 1966 directed by Yasuzo Masumura (Blind Beast) based roughly on a short story from 1910. Otsuya (Ayako Wakao), the beautiful and ambitious daughter of a businessman, runs off with Shinsuke (Akio Hasegawa), a timid […]
Ringo Lam‘s Wild Search is a Hong Kong crime drama released in 1989. Out of the films of that era, it’s not among the better known movies, at least not internationally. This may be about to change, with a restored version available for rediscovery of this gem. The movie is […]
The main reason I am writing this is the release of the two sequels, so I am gonna try to focus less on the original and a bit more on the overall trilogy and the two sequels especially. Needless to say, as is recently the law, whenever Blue Underground digs […]
Quentin Tarantino‘s love for Spaghetti Westerns is well-known. Time and again, elements of Spaghetti Westerns have found a reference in his works. For instance, Ennio Morricone‘s L’arena which plays while Paco faces off against Curly in The Mercenary (1968), is adapted well into the Bride’s attempt to free hserself from the coffin […]
“Crime doesn’t pay” is a well-defined trope explored in the world of cinema. A simpler examination of this trope could be in form of the villainous characters receiving their comeuppance at the hands of the heroic forces like Indio being shot to death in a duel against Colonel Mortimer in […]
While US Senator Chapman (Charles Durning), his love interest and secretary Laurel Scott (Katharine Ross) and an advisor take a break from politics on their boat off the coast of Honolulu late in the year 1941, Warren Lasky (Martin Sheen), an advisor for a military contractor, joins Captain Yelland (Dirk […]