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Sprocket Holed - August 2006

Man From Deep River

August 29th 2006 05:26


“The Man from Deep River” is one of those drive-in classics from the seventies. It has a reputation that has been upheld not by quality but by its decent into obscurity. I had been far to young to see it in its heyday and lived vicariously off of the tales of others. It has a lot of fans. The recent blink and you’ll miss it release “Vampires: The Turning” played homage in it’s opening Thai boxing scene.


Well, the truth is, it isn’t that good. White arsehole kills a man in a Bangkok bar and flees to take photos up near the Burmese border. A “savage” tribe captures him. He tries to escape and ends up killing the tribe’s best warrior. The tribe torture him so he can now become a member of the tribe (their ways are not our ways). He finds true love with the chief’s daughter who he calls his “Little Black Savage”. Trouble is on the way, however. The neighbouring tribe of cannibals like to fuck what they eat.

There’s a whole lot of animal cruelty and a soundtrack that makes you think you are riding an elevator on the way to visit your accountant. This is also the film that opened the gates for the Italian “Cannibal” movie craze. Those films, however gruelling, are infinitely better than this. There is at least some attempt in “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Cannibal Ferox” to question the racism casually deployed by these kind of story lines. In those films, it is the invading Europeans who bring about the downfall of themselves.

Director, Umberto Lenzi, claims a lot of innovations for his work and boasts about the debt later directors owe to him. He, however, never mentions “A Man called Horse” starring Richard Harris. That might clue you into the way this film got its finance up and running. If that was a hit… The thing is, what goes around comes around and it would be fairly difficult to make a film without any influences.


“The Man from Deep River” remains as a point of interest to genre obsessives and that probably includes me. It is too flatly directed to invoke emotion until the very ending. Maybe Lenzi wanted to suggest that the protagonist was not really human until he accepted his place within the tribe. That, however, may be giving him too much credit.
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Millenium Actress

August 29th 2006 05:22
People often talk about Anime like it is all one big thing pumped out by the same big old machine. In truth, it is a genre full of nooks and crannies and little out of the way tracks. At one end of the spectrum live those nearly never ending battle cartoons like Dragonball-Z which shift into the quasi-mystical and damn near unintelligible Science Fiction of Evangelion. All of which bear absolutely no resemblance to stuff like Steam Boy, Howl’s Moving Castle or Tokyo Godfathers. (Hint: Anyone who has ever loved movies will not be disappointed by any of those three titles.)

With Millennium Actress, director Satoshi Kon (Hint: Also responsible for the brilliant Tokyo Godfathers) brings us a tale that just comes so far out of left field that, if it were live action, you’d probably be looking at a Lynch or a Cronenberg. Basically, Genya Tachibana is a TV producer obsessed with an aging actress named Chiyoko Fujiwara who now lives in seclusion. He finally tracks her down and, by returning a piece of memorabilia to her, secures an interview.

No sooner does Chiyoko start recalling her life story than reality begins to slip. Genya and his cameraman find themselves slipping into her memories. Her real life memories aren’t exactly linear either. As she becomes an actress, these storylines begin to become entangled in her life too. As an actress she had drawn on her real life emotions to play the roles and now they too become part of her raw experience.

This means we also travel through a thousand years of Japanese history, from the feudal state period into an imagined space age. In an interview, the director talks about the importance of this though, I admit, I found the connections (with the notable exception of the rocket scene) superficial at best. They do, however, add a fair degree of spectacle to the proceedings.

If that doesn’t sound like it will bore the pants off of you, you should pick this up. If you do think it will bore the pants off of you, you will be wrong.


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Bill and Ted

August 29th 2006 05:18
Two Wyld dudes. Two Wyld films.

I don’t know what universe you guys are from but, in mine, Bill and Ted rock. For those of you haven’t had the very great pleasure of meeting these esteemed gentlemen, let me explain. Bill and Ted are like totally the least likely dudes to bring about the golden age of mankind because they make your slackest of friends look like born again workaholics. Even that mate of yours who hasn’t changed his bong water in like three score and seven years, he looks positively industrious beside our two high school going heroes.

They want success for their band “Wyld Stallyons” and expend all their available effort on preparing their stage introductions but none on such essential skills such as learning to play instruments or write songs. In fact, viewers will probably suspect that any kind of writing, reading or arithmetic is beyond these fellows. Not that we mind. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter play the pair in such a likeable manner that all is forgiven. You wouldn’t scold your pet puppy for failing calculus, would you?

Things are looking bad for our dynamic duo. If Bill fails school, his Dad is going to send him off to military college thus putting paid to their musical aspirations. Given Bill’s less than sterling academic credentials, this is all looking like a fait accompli not to mention being totally heinous and bogus.

Fortunately, these future dudes from the Golden age of mankind can’t be having any of that. If Bill fails his History presentation, the Golden age of mankind just ain’t gonna be happening any time soon. That’d also probably mean they would vanish in some kind of puff of existential paradox so they send this cool guy called Rufus back with his time machine to save the day.

That’s about all you really need to be told. It is just that dumb but nowhere near as dumb as it pretends to be. You don’t need to have seen Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” to laugh as Bill and Ted battle with Death but it doesn’t hurt either. You know what I’m saying?

I’m not going to try and kid you that these films are great art. I’m not going to tell you that there is genius at work between the frames. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t recommend them wholeheartedly. Trust me on this. People cannot live by brains alone. There comes a time when you have to kick back and have some big dumb fun.

Be excellent to each other.




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V For Vendetta

August 26th 2006 01:41
Once upon a time, I used to work in a comic shop. These old farts used to come in and talk about the golden age and silver age of comics (gold being the era around the creation of Batman and Superman and Silver being the birth of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men). They bored the bejesus out of me. Sure, I could appreciate the art work but the writing? Do me a favour. Shut up about the writing. Thought bubbles crammed with extrapolation or the kind of angst that would have even given Hamlet cause to turn around and tell these costumed buffoons to get a life.

“Oh Woe is me, “ these mighty masked men would howl. “I have the power of a God and I can’t get a root.” (International readers might want to note that root is archaic Australian slang for shagging, doing the dirty dog, creating the beast with two backs, poking, porking or getting way past third base.) Now these concerns may be relevant to your average fourteen year old but, when confronted by fifty year olds who still associate with this kind of tosh, they become more than a little creepy


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Bowling For Moore

August 26th 2006 01:39
How would you describe Michael Moore to a recently arrived alien species?

I can’t exactly call him the poster boy of the anti-capitalist, anti-war movement. Nobody would want to wake up and see that face grinning down at them from their bedroom wall. Besides, there has been too much deforestation as it is without making impossible demands on the paper industry to produce life size facsimiles of this great man


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Robert De Niro's Waiting

August 26th 2006 01:36
Some have reached for laurel wreath and dubbed him greatest actor of his generation. They look out over his body of work and see what? Genius? I’m sorry but this is one parade that needs more than just a a simple raining down upon. This parade needs to be pissed upon from a very great height indeed. Bobby De Niro... I’m talking to you!

Given his recent run of alleged re-invention comedies, De Niro seems - to mix a metaphor or three - to now wear the role of a sitting duck wearing a mod target t-shirt in a barrel. The gun is loaded but I’m telling myself “don’t shoot!” This target is too easy. Be fair. Play nice. These days, even his most ardent fans now talk about how this guy used to be great. How, ala Raging Bull, he used to be a contender. The consensus runs something like “Man, you used to be beautiful. What happened to you


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Snakes on a Plane

August 22nd 2006 23:45
A night of being sick has taught me a few things:

(1) Going to the toilet all night is not fun


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A History of Violence

August 21st 2006 02:03


As far as I’m concerned, this is just about as good as movie making gets. David Cronenberg is the kind of director who just gets better as he goes on. This is film making at its most economical. There is no flab. Every scene is there not just for one reason but at least two. Big ideas and art play in perfect harmony with crowd pleasing thrills


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Walk The Line

August 21st 2006 00:21
Feel free to read this review in a fake American accent. Gosh darn it, I know I'll try to write it in one.

Look, I can't tell you how much I wanted to hate this movie. Of all the genres in all the world, the Hollywood Celebrity bio pic has got to be the most loathsome. They go this happened and then this and then this. Hollywood bio pics are the cinematic equivalent of a primary school essay about what little Johnny did on his holiday


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A Ma Soeur!

August 19th 2006 00:39
I don't get it. Last night I was actually thinking to myself that all I've been watching lately is Horror and Science Fiction movies. I was thinking I should cast my net wider and review something else. I reached over to my pile of unwatched DVDs and selected a French Movie with two people making kissy faces on the cover. Below them were the collected laurels of various World Wide Film festivals. I thought that I was in fairly safe territory.

Well "A Ma Soeur!" isn't a cozy night by the fire place. It is filled with a kind of rising dread that left me clutching the chair in fear of what the next scene would contain. When I give you a rough plot outline, you wont understand why but let me try anyway


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The Wicker Man

August 18th 2006 04:50
I admit it. The first time I saw “The Wicker Man”, I just didn’t get it. Admittedly, I was just a wee lad. The film started with the same kind of rural familiarity that would return to bore the living crap out of you in such dreary TV fodder as “Heartbeat”. That nice policeman, Edward Woodward, goes to Summerisle only to reach an ignoble end at the hands of some fairly unpleasant pagans. There was no hope, no redemption. The film made as much sense as eating paddle pops in Antarctica.

And what in the name of god was Christopher Lee doing running around in very unappealing drag? If he was expecting to get lucky dressed like that, he would have had to have found a sailor who was not only blind but drunk too


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Night of the Ghouls

August 18th 2006 04:47
So, I picked up the DVD for the princely sum of $4.99. Yes, it was time to replace my worn fifteenth generation video copy because it had become hideously and irretrievably wrapped within the guts of my VCR. Read on now, gentle reader, as I bestow upon you the strange and eerie truth behind.... Night of the Ghouls.

Ed Wood is frequently described as the worst director of all time. Having sat through the "Lost in Space" movie, I find this claim difficult to substantiate even within the narrower constraints of genre. Ed Wood’s films may be bad in the traditional sense but somehow they manage to defy not only description and disbelief but also criticism. They appear fully formed from an alternate universe where many of the regular conventions do not apply. Eddie's films have quirks. They have so many quirks that there is little room left for anything that isn't quirky. When you hear that much overused expression "a quirky comedy" do not listen. Once you have seen an Ed Wood film, only then will you know the true meaning of the word quirky


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Bladerunner

August 18th 2006 04:46
Bladerunner, based on Phillip K Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", tells the story of a near future world where humanity has created artificial humans called replicants to provide cheap slave labour in an off world colonisation program. Those people who remain are a sorry lot living in a decayed ruin of a planet.

A group of replicants escape and return to Earth. A reticent Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) is recalled to duty as a "Bladerunner", a man whose duty it is to "retire" the rebellious androids. That's the story; hero cop tracks down bad robots and kills them. Sounds, um... like a lesser Sty Stallone flick that you'd only watch under duress on a rainy Monday night. Wrong. It is not the story but how the story is approached that makes it such an interesting and must see film


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Hellraiser: Hellseeker

August 16th 2006 06:58
Ah, the horror franchise. One would think this would be the perfect testing ground for new directorial talent to try radical ideas. Push boundaries. The audience is there and most of them don’t discriminate if the body count is up from the last instalment. The DVD rights are in place so the damn thing has paid for itself. Take a chance. Live a little. Imagine the possibilities…

No, I tried. I sat here long and hard and sought those glorious moments in cinema history that sprung from sequel hell. Friday the Thirteenth; The Final Chapter? Some have suggested it is a far superior film to the original. Then again, that wouldn’t have been too hard, surely. Halloween H2O? Some muttered about a renaissance but they were just kidding themselves. I mean, the fact that you didn’t fall asleep before the final reel is hardly justification for any lost masterpiece tag


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Prince of Darkness

August 16th 2006 06:55
Let me warn you, I’m a fan. I know John Carpenter’s 1987 Satan in a bottle epic is due for an Australian DVD release in a couple of weeks. It didn’t matter. When I spotted that overpriced import copy, my pockets emptied in eager anticipation. Finally I could get to see it in widescreen again. Nobody uses the 2.35:1 ratio like Carpenter. Nobody. He fills the edges of that rectangle with a palpable sense of menace. Watching his movies in pan and scan is about as exciting as watching them with the sound turned down. I want to share this excitement with you. I want you to know why something as dumb as this could fill me with such joy.

Dumb? Well, Carpenter wrote this under the name of Martin Quartermass in reference to a series of nineteen fifties British Sci-fi Horror flicks. Harking back to an era when men in rubber monster suits could be explained by a dose of radiation, Carpenter doesn’t demand you suspend your disbelief. He demands you leave it in the car outside


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City Hunter

August 16th 2006 06:52
Back in the days of vinyl records, there used to be some labels that you trusted to provide you with your teenage kicks. Tamla Motown delivered those big urban beats by the truck load. If you found anything on Texas’ International Artists imprint you were guaranteed the very best of drug fucked garage psychedelia. Citadel, Stiff, Tommy Boy, Trojan; the names keep coming. If you digged a particularly esoteric branch of the musical tree, you learnt to trust a brand name over artist and non existent airplay.

Which brings me to Hong Kong Legends. Okay, I know it is a peculiar little backwater of the Universal group of companies but, unusually, someone in the corporate wasteland seems to actually give a shit about what goes out on the label. Even if you haven’t seen or heard of a particular film, anything carrying that particular logo is worth picking up


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