A weekend in means I have plenty of time to make use of my TV. This time around, there were a handful of movies watched and some of my favorite episodes of old anthology TV shows.
Shaolin vs. Evil Dead is a Hong Kong supernatural kung fu film a friend of mine lent me ages ago. I finally got around to watching it. I found it quite entertaining, but a bit off in a few ways. First and foremost, dubbed versions of Honk Kong films always leave me with that “Kung Fu Theater” Saturday afternoon feeling–all flash and no quality. Well, this film didn’t have a lot of flash and the quality wasn’t helped by the very silly sounding dubbed voices for most of the characters.
The plot has potential, though it seems to be heavy on the Chinese mythology (so if you’re not willing to leave your supernatural pre-suppositions at home, you’ll hate it) which takes a little getting used to. Basically, it’s the story of a priest and his young apprentices who are leading the bodies of the dead back to their home town for burial. Along the way, they encounter a haunted village and have a run in with an old acquaintance of the priest–an ex-best friend who trained under the same master but went off on his own when he wasn’t picked to take over the school. Yeah, that last part is pretty standard kung fu film plot, but it plays well in this case.
Overall, the film’s really not that bad. Some of the editing leaves me wondering what they were thinking, but there are some very nice shots between the awkward cuts. The worst of the editing problems happens right at the end. Just as the dust is settling from a climactic fight scene, the credits roll. I though my DVD had skipped a chapter. It had not. A little looking online shows that there’s a second part to the movie out there somewhere. If the action scenes running along side the credits are form that, then it’s a whole lot better action-wise than this film was.
After the flying fists smashed the undead, I popped in a disk of episodes from The Twilight Zone and was pleasantly greeted with a couple of very hopeful and well-done episodes. Of course, I remember them well from when I first saw them, this particular incarnation of the show was very influential for me growing up. The episodes caught were Time and Teresa Golowitz, Voices in the Earth, Song of the Younger World and The Girl I Married. If you’ve never seen this version of TZ, you should. Unlike the most recent incarnation, the producers understood that it’s more about the writing than the faces on the screen (not that they were hurting for on screen talent back in 85, they just managed to get the best of both worlds).
Those episodes were followed up with the original Ocean’s Eleven (which I’ve owned for a while but never watched). The story is more than a bit different from the more recent version, but the feel is very similar. Or at least it is if you know anything about the Rat Pack. This is your basic heist film and this version is nowhere near as complex as the new one. Sinatra and crew were all in the same outfit during World War II and get together to help a shady character rob five casinos on the Vegas strip. As much fun as this version is–complete with song and dance number from Sammy Davis, Jr., and more than a couple of songs from Dean Martin–I like the complexity of the new one much more. 1960 was obviously a much simpler time when it came to security. The extras on the DVD that I have are really neat. They have little mini-documentaries about the five casinos featured in the film.
A little more browsing through my DVD collection brought me to The Last Man on Earth, starring the impeccable Vincent Price. Since there’s another new version of this coming out soon with Will Smith, I figured it was appropriate. The story centers around Dr. Robert Morgan (Price) who has spent the last three years holed up in a suburban house, completely alone except for the still-shambling victims of a plague that seems to have eliminated all life on Earth except for him. The film unfolds slowly and is thick with desperation and hopelessness. Being based on a story by Richard Matheson, you really have to deviate far from the original plot in order to make something bad. This film is far from bad, but may move too slowly for the more MTV accustomed viewers that often complain about older films. It will be interesting to see how the newest version plays out, especially how they deal with the end of the film (which in this version is a little depressing, yet not at all unexpected).
Because I was still wide awake and raring to go, I popped in my copy of The Boondock Saints, yet another film I’ve been recommended numerous times but never actually seen. I obviously should have listened sooner. This film is fantastic. The cinematography is creative and (most of the time) perfect for setting the mood of the scenes. The music is well places and quite effective. The acting is top notch–especially from Willem Dafoe who once again proves he can play strange like nobody’s business.
The plot is an exciting and off-beat story of two brothers in Boston who accidentally start a war with the Russian mob after picking a fight in the local bar with the enforcers who come to collect the protection money. That leads to a night in prison where they have a vision–God tells them to, basically, go out and kill bad people. So like good Catholics, they do just that. The results are intense, action-packed and often quite humorous as they appear to actually need divine intervention (or at least amazingly good luck) to not get killed. Dafoe plays an FBI agent assigned to track them down. Billy Connolly appears as “Il Duche”–an almost mythical killer the Italian mob brings out of prison to help take out the brothers MacManus. That, of course, doesn’t quite go as they had hoped.
If you haven’t seen this film, you should. Yes, it is violent and there’s a whole lot of swearing. But it is also creative and very well done. If watched with your brain turned on, it even poses some very good questions about law enforcement and the state of the world.
That, more or less, capped off Saturday night. Sunday afternoon found me tuning in (via InDemand) to a handful of episodes from one of my other favorite anthology series, Amazing Stories. This particular group featured one of my all-time favorite episodes, Gather Ye Acorns. In it a tree troll tells a young boy to hold on to being a kid as long as possible. This leads the kid to be a world-class slacker (after working his tail off to get just the right car, of course). For most of his life, he never works and just holds on to the things that he loved most as a child. Sure he’s living out of his car and looks like a filthy bum. Sure he doesn’t have any friends and his family disowned him. But it all pays off in the end. This episode has two very nice quotes in it. The first is “The world has plenty of doctors and lawyers, what it needs is a few more dreamers.” And the second (which is, perhaps, the most counter-productive–and yet so totally true–quote floating around in my head) is “Lag behind long enough and you’ll find that the world will have to catch up with you.”
Yes, it was a weekend full of nostalgia and generally good films. Only thing that would make it better would have been to watch all of them with an audience. But that’s what movie nights are for, right?
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