BLACK LIZARD (1968) - a Japanese gem, not on DVD

BLACK LIZARD
(1968, Japan, Kurotokage)

Entertaining comic strip crime thriller with a cross-dressed villainess…

I recently rewatched Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, and thought I should see the famous writer in one of his acting roles. Though he’s only in Black Lizard for a brief cameo, there's plenty else to enjoy.

The atmosphere is very ‘Mishima’ throughout, with it’s overly poetic dialogue and death/beauty obsessed characters. The script is based on his stage adaption of an Edgar Rampo novel. Rampo was a potent source for cinema adaption, and his work is still of high interest. The 1968 film of his Horror of Malformed Men has finally been released on DVD this year in the US, as has Blind Beast vs Dwarf and Rampo Noir. One of Shinya Tsukamoto's best films, Gemini (1999) is also from a Rampo novel.


The story of Black Lizard features his regular hero, Detective Akechi, one of Japan’s favourite sleuths (who was pitted against his fictional rival Kindaichi in a recent Japanese TV movie). Kogoro Akechi is more of a Humphrey Bogart private dick, unafraid to slum it in the sleazier corners of the big city.

Master Detective Akechi’s chief adversary is the bloodthirsty Black Lizard, a woman who’ll do anything to get what she wants. The twist is, the character is expertly played by a female impersonator. The opening titles hint at the unusual, by using illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, which also decorate the Black Lizard’s nightclub (psychedelically lit like a sixties Batman episode). But while Beardsley represents debauchery and adventurous sexuality, the cross-dressing actor is still meant to be playing a woman, and not a character in drag.

This makes most of the film extraordinary, with Akihiro Maruyama delivering an excellent though exaggerated performance as a power-crazed woman. While it’s definitely camp, it’s restrained enough to also qualify as realism. The illusion seems to have been enhanced by using an actress to ‘loop’ the actors dialogue.

The Black Lizard’s crime capers are more James Bond than profit-orientated. If she wants something, she goes after it using kidnap, faked suicides and brute force, in outlandish schemes reminiscent of Danger: Diabolik (released in Italy the same year). The action is very pulpy, with plot holes everywhere, but the melodrama and the style is more important. Black Lizard designs elaborate schemes to foil Detective Akechi, who she also loves. But to escape with her heist, she really should kill him...


The director is the prolific Kinji Fukasaku, who many of us first encountered on his last ever film – Battle Royale. But back in the sixties, he was already courting controversy, though I don't know whether this film was designed to spoof the earlier 1962 movie adaption of the same novel.

The lush 2.35 widescreen camerawork is fluid but expertly executed, with a precise and jazzy use of the zoom lens. The unique cast and colour palette all combine to create a visual style that all the money in Fort Knox couldn't possibly recreate now.

With the talent involved here, it’s a shame this isn’t on DVD. Perhaps there are rights issues with the Mishima estate? If this ever becomes available, it can still easily be enjoyed today.

The C I N E B E A T S flickr site has a trove of screengrabs to whet your appetites.


UPDATE: October 2007
Cinebeats later published an informative and fully illustrated backstory to the film - though my browser has a slight problem loading her page properly.

One compensation is that Fukusaku's 1969 follow-up to Black Lizard, called Black Rose Mansion, is available on DVD in the US. I think Tartan were about to bring this out in the UK when the company folded. With a smaller, almost house-bound story, most of the action takes place inside a gentlemen's club. But when the house entertainer is played by the unique Akihiro Maruyama, it's still a hypnotic and entertaining melodrama.

Black Rose Mansion was on release singly and in a Fukusaku triple-bill with two more freewheeling sixties movies Blackmail Is My Life and If You Were Young: Rage. More details here on DVD Times.

DRAGON WARS (2007) and Korean monster movies

DRAGON WARS
or D-War

(2007, South Korea)

The Host and Dragon Wars are both South Korean films, both monster movies. They are however completely different experiences, with vastly alternate methods of gaining international attention.

Downtown Los Angeles under attack from duelling giant monsters and a demon army. Tanks on the streets, chopper chases through the skyscrapers...

Dragon Wars finally landed after years in production, also known under the less catchy title of D-War. It had a huge marketing push in the US, leading to a nationwide 1500 screen opening in cinemas. Is this the way for other non-English speaking countries to make it big in movies?

D-War starts with a confusing flashback/flashforward within a flashback structure to set up the story, an obviously condensed section of narrative. There's an ancient monster trying to find one woman, who has the power to make the giant lizard (that looks like a snake) even more powerful - enough to destroy the world…

There's an impressive early battle scene (one of the few actually shot in South Korea) but the film fails to entertain again until the centrepiece showdown, which is almost as much fun as the climax of Michael Bay's Transformers. Los Angeles gets a thorough trashing as a monster army faces off against the police and the army, while two dragons fight over the girl, chasing her around and up the skyscrapers.

The only parts of the film sections that made sense to me were the action scenes, due to the mind-bogglingly bad dialogue and story logic. If it wasn't for the monster scale of the action, this would also look dangerously similar to those Anaconda movies. While the city battle is realistic enough, the effects falter again at the climax, in a low resolution Lord of the Rings fantasy dreamscape, with matching low-res dragons.

I'd have gladly sacrificed the CGI effects budget for the baffling 'monster army' subplot (and its repetitive walk-cycle), in order to finance a better script. If the forces of evil have their own dragon, why do they also need an army?

Besides the US locations are a mostly US cast. Jason Behr (Roswell, The Grudge) chooses one expression and sticks with it for the entire film, though he deserves an award for looking relaxed and happy in front of D-War posters at the publicity junkets. Robert Forster (Alligator, Medium Cool) gets lumbered with a loooong initial stretch of exposition about what Imoogi and Buraki are (don't ask), while hoping a Black Hole will once again swallow him up.

The FX action is the only reason to see this, as the monster wades through some impressively destroyed buildings, while chasing our heros. But strangely, all the CGI shots appear to be severely cropped, top and bottom. The 2.35 letterbox makes the composition of these shots look like mistakes, where the dragons' eyes are repeatedly lost out of the top of the frame, and their bellies running along the ground (crucial for integrating a non-existent object into its surroundings) is often missing from bottom of frame.


Though largely shot round Los Angeles, D-War is a South Korean film. Written and directed by Hyung-rae Shim (who graced us with Reptilian, an obvious dry run). The CGI visual effects were all created in a new facility in South Korea.

The film has bent over backwards to get success in the US. It's from a strange cyclical urge for the country to try and make money from giant movie monsters. While D-War is less of a train wreck than earlier Korean quasi-kaiju (see below), it still can't match any average standard of film-making. Nor can it hope to match the quality of the The Host, a far cheaper film, also from South Korea, also hoping for international attention. But D-War is a fascinating demonstration of the furthest extent of compromise in international cinema.

Even with exceptionally poor reviews, Dragon Wars huge marketing push has encouraged so many to see it, that it's far better known and even considered more fun than The Host. This recent unexpected reaction has left me baffled. So expect to see more enjoyably bad big budget movies from other countries, all shot in English.


The west generates enough mindless entertainment like this already. I enjoy Korean cinema for the culture, actors I've not seen before, new ideas, new locations... I don’t need more movies shot in L.A., where practically every TV show and movie is shot. They even went to Bronson Canyon, a cliched location for Hollywood even back in the fifties! I honestly thought D-War would at least strike a balance and keep more of it in Korea.


The Host succeeded in breaking away from monster movie cliches by focusing on the human characters. Before the beast arrives, we're already involved in the dysfunctional family. It defies the genre by working in drama, humour, political satire, and presenting an overview of life in big city Korea. The Host also features some of Korea's top acting talent. If you want a strong story, actual acting, characters, humour, consistent special effects and even a little subtext, The Host is the only South Korean monster movie on the map.

Either way, fans of both The Host and D-War may soon be rewarded with sequels. The battle continues…

Dragon Wars is out on on DVD and Blu-Ray.



Other bad Korean monster movies:

As Japan made an industry out of watchable giant monster movies, South Korea jealously tried to make it's own...


Yongary (1967)
The name of Yongary has long been regarded as the worst of the Asian giant monsters... (Black Hole review here).


Pulgasari (1985)
...until North Korea came up with this. Kim Song Il kidnapped South Korean director, Sang-ok Shin, to make this tale of a man in a monster suit pretending to be the evils of capitalism. Rarely seen till now, it's best that way. Black Hole review here.


Reptilian (2000)
Inspired by America's 1998 makeover of Godzilla, South Korea resurrected Yonggary with CGI. D-Wars’ director Hyung-rae Shim's took an early crack at the American market in 2000, with Reptilian, wisely changing the movie's name. Like D-War, Reptilian also had an all-American cast, CGI monsters, and flaming car wrecks being dropped near fleeing stuntmen.


Serious monster fans may have wisely missed Reptilian, reviews certainly recommended them to. The shoddy CGI monster, well-designed but extremely low on resolution, let's down the live-action work, which offers impressive explosions and modelwork that would have integrated nicely with suitmation and not dated as harshly.

The awful story, acting and other details are barely compensated for by the one original scene in the movie - when soldiers attack using flying jetpacks and a rocket launcher!

FIDO (2006) another marvellous rom-zom-com

FIDO

(2006, USA/Canada)

After seeing the poster with a little boy leading a pet zombie on a leash, I hoped I was going to love this one. I do!

I wasn’t expecting it to be set in square-jawed suburban fifties America, where picket fence neighbourhood communities are protected by a ring of steel and omnipresent firepower. The riff is that radiation has caused the dead to rise again, but instead of treating it like something new, the story picks up as if the entire George Romero trilogy timeline has already taken place – zombies have almost over-run society but been beaten back in the zombie wars (that Romero wanted to depict in the original Day of the Dead).

Also following on from that film, the zombies have started to regain their original memories and skills. In Fido, this means that they are now ripe for domestication, as long as they wear electronic collars to curb their craving for human flesh.

To me, this is a natural progression on from Day of the Dead (1985). It could be a sequel that Romero never made. Zombie competition is hot at the moment, mostly trying to rekindle the thrills of the gory seventies, but Fido attempts something new with the mythos and gives us a sort of comedy version of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes!

Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix trilogy) is superb as an uptight housewife who gets a zombie just to keep up with the neighbours. Her husband, played by Dylan Baker (Happiness, The Cell), is more interested in golf than raising his son. While Timmy is struggling to understand the principles of zombie slavery at school, but keeps ignoring the rules to see what happens. Well, if you’re not careful with your pet zombie, it’s likely that there’ll be a local scandal, disapproving looks, flesh-eating, and creeping outbreak of serial zombification…


While the story is inventive and rewarding, with a host of enjoyable character actors really enjoying the fifties surroundings. The movie pulls its punches on gore, shocks, belly-laughs and even zombie sex, resulting almost in a kids movie largely centred around the neighbourhood children. But with regular scenes of flesh-eating and some splattery head wounds, it’s hard to recommend to the early teens.

Several dramatic themes are built up but left open-ended, and at times the story seems to rush past plot points between scenes, making it look like a shortened version of the intended story.

But it’s good-natured, with everyone playing it straight and ignoring the bizarreness of the premise. It’s blackly humourless without being grim and makes few political points with such a heavily loaded scenario.

The beautiful metallic cars and primary colours contrast with the miserable zombies’ grey pallour, yet there’s still could be a place for them in middle America, if there can be zombie integration.


K’Sun Ray as Timmy, holds the film on track whenever Carrie-Anne Moss isn’t around. Tim Blake Nelson (spectacularly stupid in the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?) has a great part as an eccentric neighbour with a zombie playmate. Fido himself is played by an unrecognisable Billy Connolly, who builds on the classic portrayal of zombie Bub (Sherman Howard) also from the first Day of the Dead. Well, there aren’t many other performances of zombies with dawning self-awareness around to study.

The usually bearded actor/comedian is hugely popular in the UK, where this still hasn’t been released. It’s a cult movie - come on, you’ll make money!


Fido can be tracked down on DVD in the US (from Lionsgate) and around Europe (but not the UK).

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CUTIE HONEY - THE LIVE (2007) new TV action series

CUTIE HONEY - THE LIVE
(2007, Japan)

Tokyo TV - 25 x 25 minute episodes

This is a new live-action TV series, based on the classic anime and manga, but following up the recent success of the live-action movie, which was even released on DVD in the US. Although the new series isn’t as futuristic as the movie, and also lacks Erika Sato (The Slit-Mouthed Woman) in the lead, it still provides sexed-up Kamen Rider thrills with huge buckets of humour.

Cutie Honey, a ditzy do-gooding android, even manages to work her bust into the weekly kickboxing fights with the enemy hordes. There's also some brief topless nudity, indicating that this was aired later at night.

Honey is usually chirpy and naïve in her many undercover disguises, though of course she's hiding on Earth disguised as a schoolgirl. She saves up her aggression and skills for her transformations into a one-woman fighting machine. Mikie Hara appears to be doing many of the complex fighting scenes herself.

The story concerns the evil organisation Panther Claw's six-pronged attack on law-abiding society, including the use of alien nano-technology to turn humans into bio-weapons and mobile phones into swords!

Only Honey Kisaragi can physically stop them, but as usual she still needs help. Besides her usual dapper, private eye, sidekick Seiji Hayami (Syouma Yamamoto), she befriends the surprisingly informative occupants of a riverside shanty village (now a common sight with so many homeless people in Japan's big cities). Also, it appears that she's not the only super-android in the neighbourhood...


Cutie Honey is a perfect chance to dress up a beautiful actress in a wild variety of sexy wish-fulfilment outfits, catering for an ogling audience. Though it's treated in a cheeky way, rather than laciviously. The good-natured, infantile, slapstick humour alternates with the fairly nasty antics of the invading aliens. It's a uniquely bizarre comedy superhero adventure that you can only find on televisions far, far away.

Cutie Honey has appeared in many anime series that are just now appearing on DVD in the USA. Whether or not Cutie Honey - The Live will follow up these and the movie, remains to be seen.


Volume 1 of a non-subtitled DVD release is imminent in Japan. Available, for instance, here from CD Japan.

The Japanese website for the series can be found here.

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PERSONA (2000) - Chiaki Kuriyama - behind the mask

PERSONA
(2000, Japan, Kamen Gakuen)

No, no, not the one by Ingmar Bergman

Need mystique and allure? Who ya gonna call? Time for another Chiaki movie...


A schoolboy arrives in class wearing a featureless mask. He says it’s to disguise himself from bullies. As other students start wearing masks, the ploy works because he’s no longer recognised. As masks begin to catch on around the city, pushed by an influential fashion guru, one schoolgirl sets out to investigate who’s making the masks and why. She even finds a secret society clubhouse hosting a type of Eyes Wide Shut masqued orgy. But, when a mask burns someone’s face off, she teams up with a reporter to solve the mystery of the masks.

From the downbeat opening, I was hoping for a supernatural thriller. But this strangely turns into a typical Japanese mystery movie (like any of the Kindaichi series). It starts off teasing that something spooky is afoot, but in fact there’s a more Scooby Doo explanation. Which is a shame, because the film starts powerfully and mysteriously, exploring themes of identity, invisibility, and even anonymous sex (though the teenage orgy gets no more racy than open-mouthed kissing).


There are still some early startling mask scares, certainly enough to send mask-o-phobes behind the sofa. But halfway through, it settles into a dot-the-dot Murder She Wrote mystery among some 80’s style fashion shows. Surely curly perms and new romantic make-up weren’t still around Japan in 2000?

Although this is directed by Takashi Komatsu, who made the interesting Kidan, I really wanted to see this for Chiaki Kuriyama. She only has a small role, but it’s good to see her alongside Tatsuya Fujiwara just before they were in Battle Royale together.


Though this almost looks like a two-part TV special, with a critical shift in tone in the second half, the perky lead, Maya Kurosu, manages to hold it all together. The potential of the story could have been explored more thoroughly - what if Hachigatsu could remake the second half…

Persona seems to be a rare title on DVD outside of Europe. I watched the UK region 2 PAL release from Terra.

If you want more Chiaki Kuriyama, this obsessive website is scarily thorough...

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SHIVER (2003) - Seven meets The Ring in Hong Kong

SHIVER
(2003, Hong Kong, Sam Hon)

A unsteady balance between Hong Kong thriller and horror

There's currently little in my Hong Kong section, here in the Black Hole, because I like my horror free of slapstick and kung-fu, (Mr Vampire is of course an exception). Serious HK horror is relatively thin on the ground, though I’m still digging around. Even if I include the Pang brothers, who don’t exclusively get funded by Hong Kong, but rather as multi-territory co-productions - for example, The Eye is listed as Hong Kong/Singapore and was mostly shot in Thailand.

Now that China, Hong Kong’s major new market, has again banned horror films, things are looking serious for horror there. Recently, I tried out Andrew Lau's Haunted School which was pretty poor. I now take a look at Shiver, which looks like it was made in the early nineties, with basic filmaking techniques, flat lighting and live sound.

Chen Ming (Francis Ng) and Sum-Yi’s marriage is in trouble. Things are so bad, even their divorce is in trouble! Stuck in traffic, they get caught in a shoot out and Sum-Yi (Athena Chu) gets hit in the head. She survives, but finds that she can see ghosts… and predict serial murders. It’s handy that she's married to a cop.

As her visions get scarier, and her behaviour gets more hazardous, hubbie is closing in the serial killer. Though it’s hard to identify with Chen when Sum-Yi’s doctor, Ko Chun (Nick Cheung) is a far more compassionate character.

Like Chen’s driving, the movie veers wildly around between good and bad. The script mixes up the genres and throws in some good twists, aiming to please serial killer and horror fans, with police shootouts and car chases thrown in. I was also shocked to see full-frontal male nudity, on a corpse with its legs sawn off by chainsaw. There’s something you don’t see every day.


But many scenes have serious drawbacks, which I'll credit to the low budget rather than inexperience – director Siu-Hung Chung’s track record is certainly long enough. There’s a good enough cast, but they’re made to look bad by slack, unflinching editing during the harshest emotional scenes. There’s also a multiple car crash which is haltingly edited. Add to that some rather dated make-up effects. If you want actors to look stressed, don’t paint them green. If you want corpses to look like they're out of Seven, don’t use plastic.

The action gets really confusing towards the end, when inexplicable motivations really pile up. In short, our hero the cop is a really lousy detective, a lousy shot, and a lousy medic. Plus, we get to hear way too much of his annoying mobile ringtone.

Finally, one of the minor characters is called Kitty Chow. Is that a brand name of catfood in the US?

In some scenes, I started getting into Shiver - the drama worked, the tension worked, but then something really cheap or stupid happened. Shiver is almost good, it just needed a bit more care in the execution.

Added to the dated production values, is this old-style HK DVD from Universe Video, before they improved their releases. There are poorly-translated subtitles in mangled English, a non-anamorphic widescreen picture, and it's from a soft print that jumps at all the edits.


I'll keep looking for Hong Kong horrors that match the quality achieved by the Pang brothers. I also have high hopes for the live-action BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE, being made there at the moment.

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GOLDFRAPP - SEVENTH TREE - thank goodness

I don't talk about music much here, because the chances we all like the same movies and all like the same music are pretty slim. But when one of your favourite bands release a new album when you're having a shit week, I feel that some sort of thanks are in order.

Goldfrapp have released a new album. It takes a different direction from their previous Supernature by being gentler but still delicious. They seem to have returned, almost but not quite, to Felt Mountain territory. In one track, Alison's vocals stray up into the ether, where only The Cocteau Twins used to dwell.

The promo video for the first single A&E shows how the band are determined not to repeat themselves or follow any trends. It's also still good to see a video when you think "how did they do that?". There's also a short film included in the special edition release of the album and one of the A&E single releases, that talks about the new album while showing us footage from their new animal-oriented photoshoots, intercut with random super-8 gorgeousness.

More about Goldfrapp here and here...

Thank you.

(But please release a compilation of all your promo videos on DVD. And a DVD of your Supernature concert. I know you recorded it on HD, I was in the audience that night...)

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