Monday, January 31, 2011

Chop Sockey Night: Episode 1: Shadow of the Tiger

I recently picked up Kung Fu Killer Collection Volume One, which defines itself thusly (emphasis NOT added).

Get ready for ACTION featuring 6 of the GREATEST KUNG FU KILLERS of all time in one SUPER 3-PACK COLLECTION! Ferocious fighting and wall to wall thrills and adventure await!

It was $2, so how I could resist? Neither Jackie Chan nor Jet Li stars in any of them, so how good could they be? Neither is Steven Segal for that matter. However, Bruce Li is in one, so could be interesting.

Anyway, I thought they could be mildly entertaining at the least, since I enjoy wire-fu movies like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and the odd kung fu flick I saw as a kid. I watched one a couple of nights ago, and thought it would be fun to review it a little bit. This idea is heavily inspired by everything The Spoony One does at his awesome website The Spoony Experiement, specifically the It Came From Beyond Midnight feature, where in a couple of guys with an old video store watch and commentate on absolutely horrible old films.

The first of the GREATEST KUNG FU KILLERS of all time! is Shadow of the Tiger.

You know it's going to be great when there are two films on one DVD.

Shadow of the Tiger can only be described as kung fu porn. The plot, such as it is, is given to us with five minutes of exposition followed by one fight after another, each as pointless as the next. In fact, there are two fights before we get to the expositing five minutes, and the opening credits showcase the various 'actors' by showing them performing a few minutes of warm up moves in their martial arts style of choice, along with listing some of their credits, which are things like, 'Teaches at such and such school', 'Winner of such and such tournament', etc. Clearly these are actually trained fighters, all quite good at that, and actors not so much.

The box art in and of itself is not bad, showing three of the character faces up close, and smaller in front, one guy kicking another in the face. Awesome! The strange thing is, the guy doing the kicking is the villain. Of the three big faces, one is only present in the movie for one fight, which fight serves to tell us about his opponent. Of the other two faces, neither is actually the Hero of the film.

The movie begins with a bunch of old guys sitting around in a temple explaining out the abbot of their temple has died and left no instructions on who should succeed him. So they determine the leader in the ancient tradition of Mortal Kombat! Wait, sorry, just a regular fight, not to the death or anything. So two old guys get up and fight, and they're surprisingly spry considering one's eyebrows are long enough he probably has to constantly fish them out of his soup. It's got silly stunts in it, it's entertaining and amusing, and eventually they decide somehow that one lost, I didn't quite follow that.

The loser runs off and starts his own school, combining various styles and techniques into a new one (gasp! surprise! the horror, the horror!). They call it Karate, and I guess he went off to Japan to do this, because they kept mentioning Japan when they talked about the actual villain. I don't know, I kind of took it as some underhanded jab from the Chinese at the Japanese, cause historically don't they kind of hate each other? (I'm very white in this aspect, all Asians look the same to me. I can't recognize any of the characteristics that distinguish Chinese from Koreans from Japanese from Cambodians. Sorry, no offense is meant. Seriously, I sometimes can get confused between characters if they're similar enough looking. And don't get me started on the names.)

Anyway, with that racist (hopefully not) sidetrack out of the way, the movie itself takes place some undetermined amount of time after the aforementioned fight, where a student of this runaway monk has come to a town to fight the students of all the schools to show he is better than all of them, and force the other schools to close down. He holds a competition and in turn practitioners of various disciplines get up to face him and get their asses handed to them in seconds. It was pretty awesome. One opponent got kicked off the stage and landed in front of it, unmoving. Several people huddled around him, I don't know, to go through his pockets, or take his pulse, while another challenger arose, got the crap beat out of him, and the next challenger was beaten handily in seconds and kicked off the same point of the stage as the first, landing on top of everybody still huddled around him. I liked it.

The teachers of the schools are all depressed that their students are sissies, unable to face this cursed Japanese intruder, and a few decide to try to hire somebody else to fight him, so they can keep their schools open. The young guy on the cover, whose face you can only see half of decides to go searching for a worthy combatant, leaving the old guys to see after their school. In an amusing scene he tells some fat kid to watch after his students (as if this fat kid, barely more coordinated than I am, can fend off the karate guy). When this guy (we'll call him Sky Blue, because his outfit was and I could track names from one scene to the next) returns home and finds fresh graves at his school, I fully expected it to be the fat kid. Somehow it wasn't, and I have no idea whose it was.

I'm talking too much. Quicker recap. Sky Blue meets up with some guy he knows who was at least thirty years younger than the monks in the opening scene, but kept complaining about how he was old, and slowish and weakish and couldn't possibly fight the Bad Guy (who wore a black karate gi, with a red belt, oooh, black and red, he's obviously Eeeevil). He and his daughter go with Sky Blue to find a Warrior Hero to defeat Bad Guy.

The scene introducing the only female I saw in the picture was quite fun. The dad was showing his daughter off on the streets, he hung some money tied to strings about her neck, and she spun silver plates in her hands. For 50 cents (or that's how I interpreted it) somebody could try to take the money off her, which they could keep ($8 or something). She proceeded to make fools of 3 or 4 guys, while continuously spinning the plates, kicking, dodging flipping, rolling (seriously, the plates spinning the whole time) or occasionally whacking the guys with the plates. Until the crowd bored with the spectacle and left. I like it, even if she was clearly holding plates attached to posts in some of the shots.

Anyway, the trio goes off on a short journey to find the Warrior Hero to beat up Bad Guy. They acquire a drunk guy (the one getting his face mashed on the cover), a waiter who follows them like a lost puppy, even though they tell him repeatedly to leave them alone, a boy he ferries them halfway across a river, then decides to steal their money and dumps them in the water (he turns out to be a famed martial arts expert, who justifies his attempted thievery and murder with the line, "Well, I'm poor". Let's see, there was another guy who liked to gamble but sucked, so he was flat broke, but made in impressive display of disassembling a bamboo scaffolding, and lastly, a reluctant fellow, who fought the guy in the middle of the cover art, as previously mentioned.

When this fight was introduced I didn't know who I was supposed to care about, so I cared about the guy on the cover, because he had cool threads (I didn't realize until afterward he was on the cover). He had a fancy black and red outfit with gold trim, and he also won the fight, so of course they should add him to the group. But apparently he died later, and so was an unsuitable match for the Bad Guy, so the loser got invited to the party. When they approached Loser he was teaching a 4 year old to fight (his nephew or something) and was reluctant to join the group because he had disobeyed his former master by seeking out the previous fight, so now that his master had died of old age he would always honor him by never fighting anyone again. The kid throws a fit about how his uncle told him martial arts were to defend the weak and helpless, yet when such people came seeking aid he turn them away. Guilted into this by a 4 year old Reluctant Guy joined the group. Oh, and there was fighting or some display of martial prowess to introduce each of these characters.

So the group consisting of Old Teacher and daughter, Young Teacher, Thief/Murderer, Drunk, Waiter and Reluctant Guy go fight Bad Guy in Black. They take him on two at a time, which seemed smart to me, but he pretty much kicked them all to the curb, even the girl. Old Teacher did the best, as he noticed that Bad Guy fought barefooted, and he (Old Guy) had shoes on, so he stomped on the guys foot a few times, until Bad Guy beat him to death. Yep, he punched him in the heart a few times and then left so everyone could gather around Old Guy while he died in his daughter's arms. He also gave them Crucial Piece of Advice (something that would have been good to know YESTERDAY!).

Old Dying Guy told them that to defeat Shao Khan (another Mortal Kombat reference) they needed to teach all their styles to one man, so he could fight with many styles mixed together, since that's how Shao Khan was defeating them. Since only one of them hadn't been gravely injured, Reluctant Guy becomes Reluctant Hero. Sky Blue Young Teacher instructs Reluctant Hero in the Monkey technique, although he did so with a broken arm. This was definitely the worst example of fighting in the movie, for when they used the monkey technique, they crouched on the ground like a monkey, pawing at their face, making stupid monkey moves, and there was the horrible chittering of monkeys whenever someone used monkey moves. I know Everybody Loves Monkeys, but honestly, I don't.

The Only Girl had her neck slashed or something, she was bleeding pretty bad after the fight, but somehow taught her technique to Hero-guy, either Waiter-dude or Thief-guy had a broken leg and was holding themself up with a pole while they taught, pretty tricky, and Drunk-guy was blinded. Bad Dude In Black and poked him in the eyes so bad that they were swollen shut and blackened bruises all around them. I've not the faintest idea how he could teach whatever technique was his when he was freaking blind, but he did.

So after the slowest training montage I've ever seen, Hero Guy fights Bad In Black on some rocky shore edge. At first, he's loosing, I think he was only using his own technique, but then he switched (Monkey! shouts the bad guy) and slowly, progressively starts gaining on the bad guy. There were lots of neat moves in this fight, some silly ones, and in the end, Hero Guy kicks Bad Guy out into the water, thereby signifying that the movie was over, as the picture froze before the water finished splashing, the music finished and all faded to black, the end.

All in all, it was okay, I guess, but certainly nothing to go looking for. Made in the mid 70's I think, It was dubbed in English, not horribly done, the picture wasn't great by any means, nor the acting, but the fighting was okay, and I didn't mind it. Apparently it was also rated R, though I couldn't tell you why, unless for violence? I don't know. Sure, it's a lot of fighting, but I wouldn't call it violent. Don't think I'll ever watch it again, but for 33 cents I'm not complaining. The film was 90 minutes long, maybe 10 of which was talking, seriously no more than 7 of that was for the plot. There's probably no reason for anyone to see this film, unless you get it in a collection like this and need something to do while you eat (like I was doing).

Speaking of eating, it's late, I'm hungry, maybe I'll go get some food and queue up the next film in the set, Duel of the Brave One. I love the titles on these films.

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Monday, January 24, 2011

Song of the Week 9

Origin of Symmetry - Muse - 2000

My brother told me I would probably like Muse. I asked where they were from, he told me England and I agreed I probably would like them. I have since found I really enjoy two of their six albums, though I haven't listened to the others yet.

This album is quite hard to only pick two songs from. Bliss, Space Dimentia, and Megalomania are definitely the top 3 songs from the album, and among my favoritest songs ever, but the other pieces are also quite enjoy able. Let's start with Bliss. I love high, electronic sounding, arpeggiated melodies (or really, they're more like harmonies).

Bliss - Origin of Symmetry - Muse

Everything about you is how I wanna be
Your freedom comes naturally
Everything about you resonates happiness
Now I won't settle for less

Give me all the peace and joy in your mind

Everything you pains my envying
Your soul can't hate anything
Everything about you is so easy to love
They're watching you from above

Give me all the peace and joy in your mind
I want the peace and joy in your mind
Give me the peace and joy in your mind

Everything about you resonates happiness
Now I won't settle for less

Give me all the peace and joy in your mind
I want the peace and joy in your mind
Give me the peace and joy in your mind

This song is mostly dark and creepy. I like that.

Space Dementia- Origin of Symmetry - Muse

H8 is the one for me
It gives me all I need
And helps me coexist
With the chill

You make me sick
Because I adore you so
I love all the dirty tricks
And twisted games you play
On me

Space dementia in your eyes and
Peace will arise
And tear us apart

And make us meaningless again
You'll make us wanna die
I'd cut your name in my heart
We'll destroy this world for you
I know you want me to
Feel your pain

Space dementia in your eyes and
Venus will arise
And tear us apart
And make us meaningless again

I LOVE the pipe organ. A couple of days ago I bought an electric guitar, so I can learn to play Through Fire and Flames by Dragonforce (and of course everything by Nightwish), but if there's one other instrument I'd like to learn to play someday, it's the pipe organ. On that note, on to Muse.

Megalomania - Origin of Symmetry - Muse

Paradise comes at a price
That I am not prepared to pay
What were we built for?
Could someone tell me please

The good news is she can't have babies
And won't accept gifts from me
What are they for?
They'll just grow up and break the laws you've loved

Take off your disguise
I know that underneath it's me
Who are you oooh

Useless device it won't suffice
I want a new game to play
When I am gone - it won't be long
Before I disturb you in the dark

And paradise comes at a price
That I am not prepared to pay
What were we built for?
Will someone tell me please

Take off your disguise
I know that underneath it's me

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Thursday, January 20, 2011

Song of the Week 8

The Crypt - Red Flag - 2000

In 2000 I bought a new Red Flag CD, and it seemed like quite a departure from their earlier work. It was also my favorite album for a long time. I believe it was late spring/early summer the next year that Red Flag came to Utah and I went to my first concert (of my own volition). It was at a small goth dance club, the place was a dive, not the kind of place my wife and I usually go, but I had a lot of fun. It was the only time I saw Red Flag in person, probably the only time they were in Utah.

Anyway, my favorite pieces from the record are I See You and Heaven In Medias Res.

I See You - The Crypt - Red Flag

I've seen faces on a runaway ghost train
Bound for nowhere, going nowhere
Having no shame

I've seen the light at the end of the tunnel
Oncoming train, captain insane
At the end of the tunnel

I see you, I see you
I see you, I see you
You see me too but I'm getting through

I've seen the righteous
So filled with hate
Define a foe is all they know
Their common trait

I've seen people who lack ambition
Take a life without a knife
For recognition

I see you, I see you
I see you, I see you
You see me too but I'm getting through
You see me too but I'm getting through
I see you, I see you
I see you, I see you

As mentioned in the previous Song of the Week post, Red Flag started making their CDs neat looking, and I think it started with The Crypt. Pressed in glossy black plastic, this is one of the best looking CDs I have, and I think it spawned the 'Megablack' name used for the singles from this album. You can't quite tell from this picture, but the edges and inside of the disc are black, the bottom side is even prettier. I'd take a picture of mine, but unfortunately it's currently trapped in a car CD player that won't release it.

There's not much I'll say about this song, except that it's possibly the most moving song I've ever heard.

Heaven In Medias Res - The Crypt - Red Flag

My love has died and they have lied
There is no heaven
My lover sleeps and no one weeps
Cause there's no heaven

Set the table, try to dine
But I'm unable to pour the wine
Only one glass still remains
Sadly for me, no one complains

Then night falls and she calls
No longer my name, my name

My love has died and they have lied
There is no heaven
My lover sleeps and no one weeps
Cause there's no heaven

I cry out loud but my tears do not fall
They have all cried and died with my love

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Monday, January 17, 2011

Song of the Week 7

End Titles - Blade Runner - 1994

According to Discogs.com, Vangelis started writing music at age 4, and performed his first live concert at age 6. That's pretty impressive. I've heard only 3 of his albums, one is really quite good, one is mediocre, and the third had only one song I liked. Oh, and the theme to 1492 - Conquest of Paradise was also really good. The Blade Runner soundtrack is the mediocre one, unfortunately, I don't particularly care for most of the music (nor the movie, for that matter), but it does have one of my most favoritest songs ever, the song that got me interested in Vangelis in the first place, off a soundtrack compilation CD. The track in question, is the End Titles piece.

End Titles - Blade Runner - Vangelis

View this album at Discogs.com

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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Pic of the Day 156

Dragon Skull! Part of the World of Warcraft Premium Series 2, Thrall figure. By DC Unlimited.

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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Song of the Week 6

I Am the Wind - Red Flag - 2001

It's time to resume the songs of the week feature.

This week, a band that I was introduced to by a coworker during my early high school years. Red Flag is a synthpop band founded in 1984 in San Diego by English born brothers Chris and Mark Reynolds. They achieved some fame in the late 80's with Russian Radio and If I Ever. During the 1990's they formed their own independent record label to continue producing music. In 2003 Mark, who had been the primary vocalist of the band committed suicide. Chris declared that Red Flag was over, but four years later decided to relaunch the band as a solo project. Coincidentally, Chris sounds nearly identical to Mark as a singer, and has been quite prolific, releasing a number of albums and many singles.

This week's song is from the 2001-2001 Fear Series I Am the Wind single, the remix of the b-side I Love You To Death. One thing that I always enjoyed about Red Flag and the fact that they produce their own CDs, is that the CDs are fabricated to match the theme of the album. For example, the Crypt's CD is cast in glossy black plastic. The Fear Series (from the album Fear of a Red Planet) are in a beautiful translucent red.

I Love You To Death (Suffocation Mix) - I Am the Wind - Red Flag

Lay with me
And after the rhapsody
I'll share my philosophy
The irony, I love you to death

With eloquence
I bathe in your radiance
Savor every utterance
The irony, I love you to death

Love
Fire
Love
Higher (higher) (higher)

Melody
And in your eyes, poetry
Behind your smile, mystery
The irony, I love you to death

I'm your angel
All your fears I'll dispel
I'm not from Heaven or from Hell
The irony, I love you to death

Love
Fire
Love
Higher (higher) (higher)

I know this must be love
I know this must be love
What else would I think of?
Am I awake within a dream?

And every night
From dusk 'til dawn
We'll take flight
With you at my arm
We reign supreme
We're awake within a dream

View this album at Discogs.com

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