I had to coax, ever so slightly, The Boy into seeing this modern-day Shaw Brothers picture, but not much. The trailer looks like a dumb action flick. But a fun dumb action flick. And he was pondering a bit why it was he would go see something like this where, for example, Hobbes and Shaw—excuse me, Fast and Furious Presents Hobbes and Shaw just leaves him cold. Is it just a kind of hipsterism? (This came up in spades for the second feature, Ne Zha, which is the sort of family film if, produced in America, we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.)

Car chase + bulls. Brilliant, really.

The story (which both of us lost track of at points, but got back fairly early on) is that two orphan boys who are super-smart and high-spirited and best friends (even while being fierce competitors) are approached by kidnappers at the orphanage. One manages to get away while the other looks like he’s done for. His pal hesitates, then runs back and rescues his little buddy—in the process being severely injured and snatched away.

I would think the injury would pretty much be the end of any kidnapping attempt, but the scar is super-important to the plot later on.

Anyway, rather than being sold into sexual slavery (because that’s the tragic most likely event, and we want a fun semi-gritty story, not a crushingly depressing one), he’s trained a school for—well, honestly, I’m not 100% sure what kind of school this was. Some sort of assassin/spy school, which is quite horrifying and not at all as fun as it sounds. Point is, he becomes a hostile agent being used by Evil Bastards Inc. for their grand schemes, which start with getting him on the Hong Kong police force.

But at the point our story begins, the two characters are meeting again, 30 years later, while the one guy is the agent/police-department-mole, and the other is a high-integrity super-cop who knows that there’s a mole in the agency and pretty well suspects both that the guy is his long-lost pal and the mole. They’re on a mission to collect and protect a hacker girl who managed to hack-into (and lock) Evil Bastards Inc.’s system, which is good, because Evil Bastards Inc. has got a lot of tricks up its sleeve.

Mayhem ensues.

Two of these guys we first see as kids. We’re not really supposed to know which right away.

The gun play is good. The car chases, too. The boy-turned-mole isn’t really evil, and that subplot is adequate to allowing us to like him. The acting is good—you like the characters. The bad guys are not super memorable. The hacker girl gets more character development without a lot of screen time than I was expecting. A lot of people get to be heroes, which is to say, they get to die to save innocent lives. This is endearing.

The action ramps up and culminates with (as seen in the trailer) a car chase scene during and co-located with the Running of the bulls in Pamplona. The ending is over-the-top in a fun, comic-book way.

The music is good.

It’s not necessarily a knock-your-socks-off kind of flick but did I mention it’s 98 minutes (with credits)? That’s not snark, that’s the movie telling us, the viewer: “Hey, we got a fun, fast story to tell you and it’s more-or-less completely free of any particularly deep message or politics. We think you’ll have fun.”

Now, when you’re explaining this to your insurance company…

I mean, maybe there’s a subtext in there about…I don’t know what, the evils of capitalism? A lot of Chinese movies will have that, but it’s always phrased in a way where it comes out “Don’t be consumed by materialism”, which is pretty basic advice.

It’s a sequel to a 2016 film which itself was based on a TV series from 2014, with the original actors reprising their roles. I would have guessed (had you asked) that the “Line Walker” premise was just a phrasing device where a few characters passed through to anchor the series and the main stars were replaced—because they died—every time. But death isn’t a very serious thing in Chinese movies, or more accurately, the appearance of damage that should obviously kill someone is only as serious as the character lets it be.

Obviously a pretty common action trope, taken to the nth degree here. It works. I mean, when the bulls come in, you know all bets are off. I wouldn’t be surprised to see everyone back for a sequel.

Cute hacker girl seems more plausible when she’s Asian.

I somehow got the marquee time for this wrong and we ended up a half-hour late for this 20th anniversary showing—which, with all the trailers and folderol meant we only missed the opening scene with Trinity fighting the agents. The Boy and I kind of liked that better, honestly, as it made the film more mysterious and horrifying (even when knowing what was to come) but I think it made it harder for The Flower to get into it.

This effect does not hold up, tragically.

We had split reactions to this one, agreeing on some of it and not on the rest. The Flower liked it the least: We saw it in “Dolby” which is like the old Sensurround system but with more kidney punches.  The Boy liked that part, but The Flower ended up giving her ear plugs to The Barbarienne, which definitely reduced her enjoyment. The Boy and The Barbarienne liked the look of it whereas The Flower thought it looked like old cutscenes from video games The Boy would play. I was sort of taken aback by how dated they were: I had sort of expected them to be in the more loop-around-to-charming but they really looked awful cheesy to me.

The Boy and I liked the characters. The Barbarienne thought Neo had more chemistry with Morpheus than he did with Trinity. The kids all thought it looked very ’90s, but to me it looked like that late ’90s interpretation of the ’80s, a la Fight Club and Three Kings.. The fight choreography still worked, by-and-large. I thought the big lobby fight scene was too slow and silly but The Boy (somewhat surprisingly) was able to embrace it.

In HD you can see Carrie-Anne Moss’s facial hair.

The warning signs are all there of course. Sure you have the vinyl fetish and the androgyny, but most telling of all are the lengthy pseudo-philosophic speeches that would take up 60% of the second movie and 95% of the third one. And probably all their subsequent films, too, but who watches those?

It’s still pretty fun and watchable, though. Keanu’s performance has aged well, probably because he has 20 years of extra distance from the time where his defining role was Ted “Theodore” Logan. (A performance, I maintain, which is still sorely under-rated.)

In fact, we all decided that The Matrix is the alternate timeline where Ted gets shipped off to military school and “Wild Stallions” music never does save the day.

Also, The Flower had moment of shock followed by a bout of the giggles when I told her that Hugo Weaving ended up being cast as the king of the elves and, well, more or less played it exactly the same way. Heh. So, we were glad we saw it, to varying degrees, but it’s a mixed bag. It was rather over-rated at the time: You can get a sense of how large it loomed by the vast number of rip-offs, homages, parodies and spiritual successors it had.

But since it was cutting edge of a constantly evolving technology, it stands as a victim of that success. As The Flower said, “I’ve seen everything it does, only better.” Yowch.

“You will go to Mordorrrrrr.”

Although The Boy had seen (and loved) this movie when it was aired for its 50th anniversary, this was The Flower’s first viewing of the film and she was, as she put it, surprised. It is, I agreed, a rather surprising film. The opening sequence has Lawrence dying in a motorcycle accident, and then features a funeral where a wide variety of viewpoints are expressed, most commonly “I didn’t really know him”. And here is a 220 minute film, after which, the audience isn’t really sure they know the man—nor even if the man knew himself.

“Who’s that comin’ down the street, the sweetest who you’ll ever meet…”

I’m not sure if she liked it. I think she did. I think she thinks she did. But it wasn’t what she was expecting. Lawrence was a complicated man. If I had to describe him, it would be as someone who saw the opportunity to do a great good, but who then touched off a sort of megalomania in himself that was definitely not good. I can’t fault him for it: A certain amount of megalomania (or something very close to it in appearance) might be necessary if you are doing grandiose things, like leading a people out of slavery.

And the fact that he fails, finally—the British did take over, the Bedouin never really could get past their tribal roots, nor have the Arabs done that yet, really—doesn’t really diminish the scale of what he was trying nor the successes that he did have.

Cinematically, it’s the sort of film that maybe shouldn’t work, though it does, and is virtually unthinkable today, on so many levels. It’s a historical drama and, as we all know, history is very problematic. It portrays Arabs as backwards savages. It portrays a white man trying to save them (and failing because they can’t grasp what he’s getting at). Women are hidden (Bedouin culture), or (briefly) cheerleaders, ululating on the hills. Or, they’re raped and brutalized, leading to a brutal slaughter. The only actual Arab in the cast is Omar Sharif.

Identfies as Arab. At least for a paycheck. (Nothing new under the sun.)

And that’s just the content.

The style is long, sometimes static shots of the desert, as a figure emerges from the distance. It’s amazing how compelling this is, how an audience of moviegoers will strain their own eyes trying to make out a shape on the horizon (which, y’know, you can’t do because it’s a film and it’s not in focus until it’s focus, but still you try), and how effective this is at creating a sense of scale, privation and just plain reality.

Also: It made $70 million at the box office, which I think pretty comfortably put it at #1 for the next couple of years: El Cid, another highly problematic film released earlier that year, made a whopping $30M at the box office. The next year would see the release of the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, which would come close by making $60M. But it wouldn’t be until the following year, with From Russia With Love that another film would pass Lawrence (with nearly $80M). Well, okay, the numbers are a little dodgy, as Hollywood’s numbers always are—gotta screw everyone!—and Box Office Mojo says the movie only made $45M, but the point stands. It was hugely popular.

“I come from a land from a faraway place where the caravan camels roam…”

There aren’t a lot of 3:40 minute movies I can bring myself to watch, but once again, I feel like this is a movie I could easily watch again. The Boy, too, was very excited by it, because there was so much he had missed the first time around. It is just an amazing picture on so many levels.

Ben Mankiewicz said there was a $100,000 screen-test done with Albert Finney. You look out on the desert and see the hundreds, maybe thousands of people, all camping out in the desert. (There probably were some mattes in there, but there were definitely a LOT of people, too.) You hear Jarré’s unforgettable score, with the theme played approximately a zillion times in the four hours, and you just get an amazing sense of competence at every level combined with no meager aesthetic brilliance.

It is a wonder.

Oh, Florence.

An atheist MMA fighter develops stigmata and ends up punching demons for Jesus? How can you not love that premise? Well, I’ll tell you how: You can be a mainstream critic.

I don’t have any review sites I visit regularly any more: IMDB became fairly worthless years ago, and Metacritic (which I probably hit the most these days) has a system that tends to put everything into a narrow band of “meh”. After the Captain Marvel fiasco, it was apparent that Rotten Tomatoes is essentially owned by Disney and SJWs—and, honestly, long before that, they seemed to be rating nearly every big Hollywood release as good or great or The Best Movie Ever.

But RT shall be forever remembered as the home of the “Jesus split”: Any movie featuring the merest mention of Jesus was going to get at least a 30-point hit from the critics. I noticed that The Divine Fury had a whopping 89/38 split, and I was sold. I mean, even more sold, because again: atheist MMA fighter who punches demons.

You’re gonna need an old priest and a young priest. Don’t ask why, you just are.

Of course, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Yong-hoo is a boy who lives with (and adores) his policeman father. One day at church, the priest mentions prayer and he asks his dad if he didn’t love his mom, who died in childbirth. The father is startled and asked why, and the boy tells him, well, if he prayed enough, she’d have lived. Now, the father replies that he thinks the mother just prayed harder for Yong-hoo’s well-being, which is sort of a slippery slope theologically speaking, but perhaps understandable under the circumstances.

Inevitably, the father ends up being injured by a street-racing villain (who also happens to be possessed) and Yong-hoo prays fervently with the priest to keep his dad alive. But, alas, the father dies anyway and Yong-hoo renounces God in a quite dramatic fashion. And ever more “sees red” whenever he comes into contact with The Cross.

I mean, his eyes glow red. I don’t know if it was meant literally but it’s shown literally. And Yong-hoo hears voices. Like, Friday the 13th-style voices.

So, not really an atheist, though hardly the first person to claim the mantle of “atheist” when they just hate God.

I’d be put out, too.

Anyway, Yong-hoo ends up with stigmata. They don’t hurt or get infected. They just won’t heal, and they do tend to, em, ebb and flow, as it were, sometimes bleeding a lot more than others. He ends up going to a Korean astrologer—his driver gives this amusing spiel, and we are reminded that Korea is simultaneously very Christian and very pagan (see The Wailing)—and the astrologer tells him to go to this church that night, where a man would help him.

And when he gets there, what should be going on in that church but a good, old-fashioned exorcism! And it’s going badly. Lo and behold, Yong-hoo discovers, in the natural course of events, that his stigmata are instant exorcism-ers. He also discovers that a cross and blessings from the old Father (Sung Ki-Ahn) stop the voices in his head and allow him to get some sleep without all those demon-infested nightmares.

So, there’s your movie: Action exorcisms plus story arc as our hero learns not to blame or hate God for not giving him what we wanted.

Is she possessed? Or is her mother just crazy (or possessed)?

Much like Roar (which we saw the same day), it’s not great but it’s good, solid fun. It doesn’t hate you, moviegoer, and for all the Christian references—I mean, we’re performing exorcisms, here—it isn’t preachy. Obviously, the critics have to hate it because it’s full of Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s and holy water and rosary beads and all that, and it generally validates the notion that there is Good and Evil and Christian clergy are on the side of Good, while drug-addled materialistic blood-sacrificing cultists are on the side of Evil. This passes for controversial among the smart class, I guess.

But The Boy liked it. And The Flower, who is not used to double-features, also liked it a great deal (more than Roar). Seo-Joon Park (who had a small role in Be With You) is a likable hero, even when he’s being tempted by demons to violence. Do-Hwan Woo is appropriately evil as the…well, I’m not sure what he was, exactly. I think he was human but he was so vested with demonic powers, he might as well have been human. Seung-Joon Lee has a nice role as the father.

Worth a watch, if you’re in the mood and not a Christophobe.

If you love punching…

At one point, most of the Korean movies we had seen were about Japan invading, or about evil Japanese occupiers, etc. (Last year’s The Great Battle was different in that it was China that was invading.) It’s probably not true any more but we can say confidently that the Evil Japan Well is not one the Koreans are afraid to go to. That said, if The Battle: Roar to Victory stands out, it’s because it deeps very drinkly of that well, indeed.

Villainous monsters shrouded in—nah, I just couldn’t find a good image. Maybe I should go to Korean Google?

The movie is about a 1920 battle where a ragtag bunch of farmers, thieves and merchants delivered a blow to the Japanese Imperial Army by luring them into a deep gorge where, if all goes well, they will be set upon by the more regular forces. Our farmer’s army—a concept beloved to any American—is already tormenting the Japanese with their guerrilla attacks when they find themselves couriering money to Manchuria to keep the resistance forces alive. Well, not couriering so much as providing cover for the couriers.

Honestly, I couldn’t quite figure this part out. The money has to get through or the war is over (for the Koreans) but it seems like that money has no actual impact on the story of the battle itself. It’s not like the money gets through and then a bunch of soldiers say, “OK, we’re in.” Maybe it was for longer term issues. I’d probably know if I were Korean.

“Here’s where we’ll lose the plot.”

Our hero is the always charming Yoo Hae-jin (the criminal in Mal-Mo-E: The Secret Mission, 1987: When The Day Comes) who’s kind of like a Korean Lee Marvin. We see his character in a flashback when some Japanese soldiers blow up his little brother, who sacrifices his life for him. Now he’s running this bunch of fighters, and doing the occasional official mission while harassing the Japanese as circumstances permit. A lot of the regular army think the band really are just thieves (and some of them were in the past) so they don’t have a lot of support.

By contrast, Lee Jang-ha (Jun-yeol Ryu, Little Forest, Believer, A Heart Blackened) is a young, serious man on some kind of mysterious mission that seems to be related to the money but then maybe isn’t, and he’s doing a lot of risky stuff.

There’s a bunch of military maneuvering in the movie which I could follow pretty well. About the end of the movie, when it seemed like maybe this early plotting wasn’t going to pay off, they recapped it and tied everything together, which was nice. I assume this was a natural extension of the fact that this battle actually happened, but it helped make sense out of things.

“And things seemed to be going so well.”

The overall vibe is kind of The Expendables-ish in that (per The Boy), the characters never felt endangered. This gets Rambo-esque at the end as Yoo’s character charges through artillery fire without a scratch or hesitation. The characters are likable, however, and it’s fun to watch them interact. Jo Woo-jin (1987, Rampant) is particularly enjoyable as the former-thief current-sniper pal of Yoo, who is exasperated by Yoo’s complete inability to hit anything with a bullet. Yoo’s swordfighting also makes for some fun moments. There’s apparently a big cameo at the end but I didn’t really get it because, hey, not that up on my Korean culture.

It’s fun. It’s patriotic. Makes you proud to be a Korean. It reminded me a bit of Warriors of the Dawn (the movie that started it all) but lacks the same sort of realism. Still worth checking out, though.

Yoo Hae-Jin about to make friends with some tourists.

Part of the problem with modern Hollywood fare is that, not only are the movies terrible—or at least terribly bland—the trailers are awful. You can’t tell whether you want to see a movie because the trailers are all the same and they all seem to spoil whatever meager surprise the movie might have in store. In the case of Ready or Not, for example, there are no less than two accidental murders (“accidental murders” makes sense in context) shown which set the tone, yes, but also spoil a lot of the early jokes. And AMC is showing 20+ minutes of trailers now, not to mention pre-trailer “content” as if we didn’t all have so much consarn content in our lives we actually needed more.

I swear, it’s less of a commitment these days to get married than to go to a show.

But I sat through one of these 20 minute trailer/torture sessions and learned the following:

• LOUD is EXCITING!
• LOUD is DRAMATIC!
• LOUD is FUNNY!
• LOUD is SCARY!
• LOUD is EVERYTHING!

I mean, I assume that 1) I’m an old man, and; 2) young whippersnappers today are just hollering their heads off while texting on their gizmos instead of paying attention to the (awful, awful) trailers. But the aggressive loudness and corporate sameness of the trailers actually makes the current crop of movies look worse than they probably are.

But, hell, I pay my $25/month tithe to AMC so I’m gonna see a damned movie, no matter how awful. And I had a feeling that this one might be to my taste, as I love a good black comedy—or even a bad one, to be honest. (I’m not as picky as my critique might suggest.)

And? Well, Ready or Not was good. It’s not gonna knock your socks off by any means, but it’s fun and well-made, and (as The Boy) pointed out, made by people who seemed to actually care about what’s going on.

Andie MacDowell, looking like she cares. (She does, but she’s gonna kill you anyway.)

The story is simple: Grace (Samra Weaving, Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Montana) has married Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien, Arrival) and per family tradition, the new member must play a game. Alex’s very wealthy family runs a gaming dominion—board games, quaintly enough—and this is just one of their little quirks. Why, the two most recently married siblings played Old Maid and chess. How charming!

But Grace gets “Hide and Seek”, and as the movie opener shows, in hide-and-seek, the new member hides and the rest of the family seeks—and kills—the hapless newlywed. This happened 30 years earlier and we see Alex’s older brother Daniel (played in adult form by Adam Brody, Yoga Hosers) protecting him from viewing the murder or participating. (Daniel is now an alcoholic jerk who likes to hit on Grace.)

Anyway, this is your set up: A bunch of rich people and their servants chasing Grace around a mansion and points beyond.

It doesn’t end well for the servants.

The story raises a lot of questions, of course: We can gloss over the whole underlying question of why would anyone do this, though the movie gives us a premise that is serviceable enough for the genre. But what the movie does rather well is address the emotional “why”. Why would Alex, who presumably genuinely loves Grace, put her into this situation? The movie gives us several possible answers all while raising a lot of absolutely necessary questions regarding Alex’s character. This creates some good tension.

And it’s the sort of thing that The Boy and I talk about when we say “somebody cared”. It’s easy enough to have some cool effects and thrilling moments all piled up into a hash. But when you treat your characters with a certain amount of respect—not just as vehicles for plot points—you get what we call “a real movie”.

For example, it’s very clear that none of the Le Domases really wants to do this. They feel they must. And they’re not especially competent—a fact highlighted in the over-revealing trailer—which leads to the darker comedic moments. But they all have different reactions to their fates.

Alex’s mom, Becky (played by Andie Macdowell, whom I liked better here at 60 than I did in heyday in the ’90s) is really nice to Grace and seems to really mean it. But she also really means it when she sets out to kill her—for the family. Meanwhile, brother-in-law Fitch (Kristian Bruun, Mark O’Brien’s co-star in How To Plan An Orgy In A Small Town), is very much on the fence as to whether or not the murder is really necessary. By contrast, Daniel’s wife Charity (the very hot Elyse Levesque, who shares credits with Bruun on “Orphan Black”) is in the “better safe than sorry” camp.

L-to-R: Bruun, Melanie Scrofano (who plays Bruun’s drug-addled wife), Henry Czerny (as papa Le Domas), MacDowell and Levesque.

In other words, from a comical/comic-book premise, we get characters who act how people might actually act in such bizarre circumstances. So you end up caring. That means that when Grace suffers, you feel some of that pain. When she nearly gets away, you root for her to make it that last mile. When she stops one of her attackers, you’re happy for her, in sort of a grim way. This is a hard thing to do in black comedy, which has a tendency to flatten characters out to make some sort of ironic point.

I realized how it was going to play out just before the climax of the film, but at the point where there was only one reasonable dramatic choice, so it kept me guessing as long as it could—without ruining itself by trying to add a shocking twist! I could tell from the beats how the denouement was going to go as well, and it was a bit…garish…I guess you’d call it? But it was probably the only thing a modern audience would’ve accepted, so no points deducted there.

As bright as a bride on the morning after her wedding.

It’s probably difficult to imagine in our climate-hysterical modern days but the ’70s had it all over us in the “nature gone amok” genre. In classic pagan tradition, nature was just a generally malicious thing whether it was killer bees or earthquakes—but one way or another she was pissed and we were gonna pay. If the $15M box office for this $300K movie is accurate, Bill Rebane’s Wisconsin-based magnum opus finished ahead of The French Connection II and The Eiger Sanction but behind the Bronson/Ireland thriller Breakout and the Burt Reynold’s comedy W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen The Giant Spider Invasion. It was a staple of late night T.V. when I was growing up. It’s weird and funny and kind of amazing that it achieved what it did at the budget it had—on an apparently disastrous shoot where spiders didn’t work and guys hiding in VW vans were suffocating while trying to move spider arms, and things weren’t breaking down or blowing up when they should, only when they might actually hurt someone.

And this would always be part of the teaser. Only it was grainier.

Alan Hale (Jr.) plays a small town sheriff who barely leaves his office (classic low budget trick) and Barbara Hale (no relation) plays a scientist who comes with a fellow scientist (longtime TV actor Steve Brodie) to discover what fell from the sky into a pasture in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, it fell in the farm of (veteran character actor) Robert Eaton and (TV legend) Leslie Parrish, the former of whom is a jerk and the town whore’s #1 customer, and the latter of whom is an alcoholic (and not precisely a prostitute but certainly a cheap date). The meteor-ish object that hits the ground is full of geodes that may or may not be diamonds—movie characters repeatedly say they’re not but also demonstrate complete unreliability.

It’s the sort of plot that would lead to murder and mayhem in most circumstances, but here it all just leads to spiders. Lots and lots of spiders. (Oh, and there’s a preacher who interacts with literally none of the movie’s characters, though the characters do reference him a lot.)

The actors did their own stunts, which is somehow more amusing than the usual B-movie case where it’s very obvious they don’t.

And these are some gorgeous spiders, too. I actually felt a little bad for them, being in this movie. Tarantulas are not really show-biz people, and they get buffeted around and dropped onto people and I think it was a good edit, but it looks like one gets squashed with an iron. The girl in her underwear squashing the tarantula with the iron was usually the scene they’d show when this movie was going to be on “The Late, Late Show” or whatever.

But the fake spiders are great, too. Cars in tarantula costumes. Puppets of some kind. I’m still not sure how they did the scene with the giant spider in the street. I guess it was more of a marionette, but while it’s completely unconvincing on any level, it’s fun. Which sort of sums up this movie.

It’s a shame making this wasn’t as fun as it looked.

This is great riffing material and Mike, Bill and Kevin do a great job here. There’s a lot of good guffaws and giggles, and there are plenty of moments—especially in the opening short which is all done with the creepiest marionettes and is about using the telephone sensibly—where no commentary is needed.

Kevin Murphy has another great song for this one, too, in the style of Neil Young, called “Giant Spider on the Highway”. Worth watching!

“Well, it’s 9AM somewhere.”