Near the end of World War 2, a team of Russian soldiers find themselves battling an army of reanimate corpses turned into horrific killing machines built by the deranged descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
Actually, the plot is simpler than that, it's basically a slasher film where the killers hack their way through soldiers rather than fornicating teenagers. With the added bonus of a mad scientist ranting towards the end. Plus, the monsters are actors in costumes, which unfortunately feels like a novelty these days.
If you love all things horror, then this movie is pure fun with a side order of imaginatively scary monsters. If you like plot and story however, it's a bit thin in those departments. Even worse is the film's use of shaky cam. It doesn't make the movie feel any more real, as if it was footage released from old Soviet archives. No, it just gives me flashbacks of playing Wolfenstein 3D as a teenager. Filmmakers who may be reading this please take note: skaky cam is a perfectly fine filmmaking technique that should never be used again. EVER.
What's that? You say "But I have a legitimate reason to use shaky cam..."
No. No you don't. No Shaky Cam.
Despite these shortcomings, I enjoyed this movie. It's the perfect type of movie to watch late at night with a bunch of friends with the lights out. Or if you can't decide between watching Enemy at the Gates or Hellraiser.
This ridiculously fun Shaw Brothers movie features the perfect mix of action, comedy and kung fu. Just about the only kung fu movie I've seen that comes close to this one in terms of pure fun is Iron Monkey (1993).
When the local gangster Tuan finds the beautiful young actress, Miss Chen, he must have her in his brothel. The only problem is that her brother Chen (played by martial arts choreographer Lau Kar-leung) is a Kung Fu master known for his monkey style and his powerful Monkey Fist. This problem is easily dealt with, as Tuan tricks Chen leading to his disgrace and Miss Chen volunteering to work in Tuan's brothel. Before letting Chen go, Tuan breaks Chen's hands so that he ca
n never use his Monkey Fist again.
When we next see Chen, he is a broken man working with his trained monkey as a street performer. To add insult to injury, street thugs shake him down every night and take all his earnings. Chen is befriended only by the orphan and petty thief, Monkey (Hsiao Ho). When the street thugs kill Chen's monkey, Monkey seeks revenge against them, only to get beaten up by them. Monkey convinces Chen to teach him his monkey style to him and if you've seen only a few examples of the "master teaches a protegee" sub-genre of kung fu movies you can get a pretty good feel for how that goes.
After a good deal of physical training Monkey returns to town and solidly humiliates the street thugs in a hilarious fight in the streets. Forcing them to take him to their boss, the street thug leads him to Tuan's brothel where he is attacked by the army of hired muscle he finds their and barely escapes with his life (thanks to the aid of Miss Chen). He returns to Chen for even more kung fu training. In the end Chen and Monkey return to Tuan's brothel for the final confrontation, but if you want to find out how that goes, you'll have to watch the movie for your self.
This is why he's called Monkey.
As I said at the beginning of this article this movie is pure fun. While it lacks the layers of intrigue of The Five Deadly Venoms, or the eccentric cast of exotic characters of Master of the Flying Guillotine, and sticks to the formula of it's own particular sub-genre, this movie is an excellent example of the 70s Kung Fu genre. If you have an interest in the genre, you should definitely add this one to your must watch list.
The Simians have returned and they still want Earth for their new home. Unfortunately, like the last time (Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla). Godzilla stands in their way. Their solution? They pose as human and put together a project to build a new Mechagodzilla with which to battle Godzilla (the previous one was destroyed by Godzilla, and the beginning of the movie has a recap of that battle).
Now, the more astute of you may be asking,"But that sounds kinda like their last evil world domination plot?" Apparently also recognizing this flaw in their plans, the Simian's leader, Mugal (Goro Mutusumi) enlists the help of mad scientist, Dr. Shinzo Mafune (Akihko Hirata) and his cyborg daughter, Katsura Mafune.
Dr Mafune has a normally peaceful giant aquatic dinosaur, the Titanosaurus, under his mind control. Dr Mafune shares the Simans' goal of destroying humanity and loans them the use of his Titanosaurus. Actually he seems to be more eager to destroy humanity than the Simians as he unleashes Titanosaurus on Yokosuka. And at this point we can ignore the actions of the non-kaiju characters and enjoy the carnage as Godzilla battles Mechagodzilla and the Titanosaurus in Yokosuka and the Japanese country side.
This movie was the last of Toho's Showa era Godzilla movies, they wouldn't make another one until 1984 when they rebooted the series with The Return of Godzilla. It was also the last movie directed by Ishiro Honda, who directed not only the original Godzilla in 1954, but a series of interesting tokusatsu films from the 50's through the 70's.
I'd recommend this movie to any Godzilla fan, and if you wanna see more in this vein, I'd suggest also watching Destroy All Monsters, and King Kong Escapes.
When militant bikini-model amazons ride out on the warpath it is up to local superhero Dharma (Aldo Canti) to protect the villages in the valley (that is why they give him one-fifth of all their harvests after all!) But Dharma can't fight off an army of Amazons with just his mad jumping skills, his spiffy leather mask, and his half-length red cape, so he enlists the help of superstrong Moog (Marc Hannibal) and kung fu master Chung (Shaw Brothers actor Hua Yueh). Together the three of them spend much of the following ninety minutes getting into fights. With all this fighting going on, will they ever manage to find enough down time to fashion a stockpile of homemade firebombs and three wooden tanks for their final battle against the amazons?
This movie was a co-production by legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers and Italian studio Cinemotografica, and was released the same year Shaw Brothers released the better know Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires with Hammer Studios. The film was shot in Italy and despite the Shaw Brother's participation, it doesn't have that their Hong-Kong movies do.
Should you decide to look up this movie yourself, I must warn you, the soundtrack just might drive you to jab pencils into you ear.
For a long while now I've had a special place in my heart for all of Hammer horror movies, but if pressed I would have to offer this little gem as my favorite.
When Dr Marcus (John Carson), a medical doctor living in a small village notices young girls being drained of their youth, he calls in a old army friend of his, Captain Kronos (Horst Janson). Kronos bears the scars of his time in the army and of a vampire attack, which upon surviving he devoted his life to hunting vampires. Kronos is accompanied by Caroline Munro as the film's obligatory pretty girl and by his hunchback assistant Professor Hieronymus Grost, who acts the brains of the operation to Kronos's brawn.
The movie departs greatly from the formula used in Hammer's Dracula series in a couple of important ways: First, in the universe of Kronos, there are many different types of vampires each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses, and a major (and unintentionally funny) plot point of the movie revolves around the character's attempts to discover how to kill the vampire. Second, Kronos is able to battle the vampire on equal footing and the movies climax is an between Kronos and the vampire, both of them master swordsmen. Today audiences expect that of their vampire hunters, but keep in mind this movie was made in 1974 and Peter Cushing's Van Helsing was representative of the heroes in vampire up to then, and movie audiences expected vampire hunters to battle their foes by waiting for sunup and throwing the curtains open.
This movie stands out as one of Hammer's more creative vampire movies. The director of the movie (Brian Clemens) had wanted to do a series around these characters, but it never came to pass as Hammer was having financial problems by this point. If there is some parallel universe out there somewhere where the director got to film his Kronos series instead of this lone movie, I would give almost anything to be able to visit it long enough to see a Kronos marathon.
Near the end of World War 2, a team of Russian soldiers find themselves battling an army of reanimate corpses turned into horrific killing machines built by the deranged descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
Actually, the plot is simpler than that, it's basically a slasher film where the killers hack their way through soldiers rather than fornicating teenagers. With the added bonus of a mad scientist ranting towards the end. Plus, the monsters are actors in costumes, which unfortunately feels like a novelty these days.
