Taiwanese-Style Kaiju - UPDATE!

Back in my earlier post on this topic, I mentioned that I was hoping to soon set my hands upon a copy of the 1971 Taiwanese fantasy film Tsu Hong Wu. Well, now I can tell you that I have set, not only my hands, but also my eyes upon Tsu Hong Wu and that, having done so, I can tell you that the information I previously conveyed to you about it was partially wrong. Of course, that also means that the information I conveyed about it was partially right, so let's have a great big, partial "hooray" for me. (As long as there's a "ray" sound in there somewhere so that I can continue in deluding myself that I mostly know what I'm talking about.)

Anyway, in that earlier post I stated that the 1982 Tawanese fantasy film The Fairy and The Devil borrowed all of its monster-intense special effects footage from Tsu Hong Wu. But now, having watched Tsu Hong Wu, I see that, while virtually all of its giant monster footage does indeed appear in The Fairy and The Devil, there is still a great deal of such footage in The Fairy and The Devil that does not appear in Tsu Hong Wu -- much of it, interestingly, featuring the same costumes and sets that were featured in those sequences in Tsu Hong Wu.

For instance, the white ape, red-haired giant and golden dragon from Tsu Hong Wu all make an appearance in Fairy, but the giant, rather than being defeated in battle by the dragon, as he is in Tsu Hong Wu, is instead defeated in Fairy by the white ape, who grows to giant size in order to fight him -- something that he isn't shown doing in the earlier film. In addition to that, Fairy also features some scenes involving monsters -- specifically a giant, kraken-like sea creature and an enormous floating demon head -- that make no appearance whatsoever in Tsu Hong Wu. And, by the way, is this not the geekiest post on this blog ever? Impressive.

Fortunately, it turns out that there has been some discussion about these films on the forums in the past weeks, with one poster in particular, Megatone over at the Cinehound.com forum, doing the hard work of identifying the possible sources of some of this footage. According to him, the aforementioned sea monster sequences in The Fairy and the Devil earlier appeared in the appropriately named Monster from the Sea, a Taiwanese film from (possibly) 1974 helmed by Yu Hon-Cheung, the clearly deranged director of the previously discussed The Dwarf Sorcerer. On top of that, he says, Fairy's sequence involving a fight between the golden dragon and an evil green dragon also appears in the earlier Sea God and Ghosts, a film which I, also apparently mistakenly, characterized as also borrowing all of its effects footage from Tsu Hong Wu.

Still unaccounted for, however, is the origin of the scene pitting the growed-up white ape against the red-haired giant, so there is still plenty of mystery to be wrung from The Fairy and the Devil's hodgepodge of stock monster footage. Also begging for coroboration is another Cinehound poster's translation of Tsu Hong Wu's credits, which apparently list Tsuburaya Productions' Koichi Takano, a special effects director who worked on a number of Tsuburaya's tokasatsu television series, as being responsible for the effects.

As for Tsu Hong Wu itself, the film focuses on the early years of the Hongwu emperor, the first ruler of the Ming Dynasty, covering the period from his birth through his time spent as a young boy at a Buddhist monastery. Of course, this telling of his story also includes lots of magic spells, homonculi, dragons and people being enveloped in cartoon auras, all of which would probably be disputed by some stuffy academic types -- but, hey, they weren't there, right?

As I was admittedly just watching the film for the giant monster battling action, almost all of which was crammed into its final minutes, I have to confess to having been a bit impatient with it, That said, had I been blessed with a copy with legible subtitles, and were I not consumed with such a pressing agenda, I think I would have found it quite entertaining. It's got fairly high production values for a Taiwanese film of its era and a pleasingly light tone. It's just too bad that the grim business of internet-based monster hunting doesn't afford me the time for such trifles. Onward!

It's the 4DK Animalympics! Round 9

Chimp in a fez from Jaani Dost

Skill Set: Come on, he's wearing a fez! Also, cross-dressing.

The chimp wearing a fez is an iconic figure in the world of screen animals. It is for this reason that, despite the fact that I only have a pale ghost of a memory of even watching Jaani Dost, I am including Bollywood's tribute to him therein in the Animalympics. What I do remember about the chimp wearing a fez from Jaani Dost is that he was evil, and that the chimp who played him executed a double turn worthy of Peter Sellers by also portraying the female chimp wearing a sari who was the love interest of the chimp wearing a fez. This of course opened up the potential for all kinds of disturbingly literal representations of simian self love, but at least it provided a momentary distraction from the spectacle of Dharmendra and Jeetendra running around in superhero suits while each proclaiming himself The Lion King. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the chimp wearing a fez wasn't even given a name in Jaani Dost. In any case, I'm not going to watch it again to make sure. That movie was terrible.

Just for the awesomeness

Behold the Spotnicks, a Swedish instrumental group who, during their early 60s heyday, performed dressed in awesome looking spacesuits. I've found that not only do I enjoy these clips for the visual joy they provide, but also that I really dig the group's music, which sounds like it emanates from some spectral meeting point between Les Paul and Joe Meek.

I also think that this hypnotic clip for their "Spotnicks Theme" is sheer brilliance:



And guess what? They're still together! No sign of the spacesuits though.

Friday's best pop songs ever

The Brain Stealers (Hong Kong, 1968)

The Brain Stealers’ villain, one Dr. Zero, wants to get his hands on a certain growth-accelerating serum so that he can create an army of supermen and conquer the world. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill scheme for a villain in a 1960s spy movie, until you consider the comparatively mundane smuggling and counterfeiting operations that the Shaw Brothers typically had the evil masterminds in their espionage films of the period undertake. In that light, it comes across as a rare example of one of their super villains for once coming equipped with proportionate ambitions. Hard to say why this was, exactly. After all, the Shaws' kung fu films had no shortage of scoundrels with their sights set on ruling the fabled Martial World. But when it came to our own, not-nearly-so-martial world, it seems the biggest picture your average Mr. Big could wrap his head around was the transport of some phony dollars to the Philippines hidden in the trunks of old cars.

Anyway, the man responsible for the sought-after growth-accelerating serum is Hong Kong scientist Dr. Li Zong-Hua (Goo Man-Chung). The authorities at UN Intelligence already suspect that Li has been targeted by Dr. Zero, given that the villain has abducted several other scientists of compatible disciplines from around the globe, and so recruit Li's daughter Chiu-Lan to be their agent within the Li camp. The stated reason for this is that, in a very brief demonstration, Chiu-Lan has proven herself to be pretty good at Judo, though I also suspect that the fact that she has the sultry looks and ability to model mod fashions to pleasing effect that any heroine in a fluffy spy caper of this type should have has something to do with it. And to slam the point home, Chiu-Lan is played by Lily Ho, who had already proven herself adept at exactly this type of role in the Shaws' earlier Angel With the Iron Fists and The Angel Strikes Back.

The means by which Dr. Zero hopes to hijack Li and his formula involves a "nuclear device" of his own invention that enables him to suck the brain from one person and put it into the body of another. To this end, he kidnaps Li's son Yuan Ming (Chin Feng) and shuffles his brain with that of one of his criminal minions, a fellow by the name of Peter, after which said minion is sent off to infiltrate the virtuous Dr. Li's family circle. Unfortunately, even with the benefit of his subject's actual body to work with, Peter proves to be terrible at the whole evil double business. In addition to failing to recognize Yau-Ming's colleagues, he is scowly while Yau-Ming is typically cheerful, left-handed while Yau-Ming favors his right, and whiskey-swilling while Yau-Ming is a teetotaler. As a result, the members of the Li household not all that surprisingly suspect him of being a bit hinky from the outset. It is perhaps, then, out of a feeling of having nothing to lose that Peter eventually blows his cover completely by trying to force himself upon Chiu-Lan (and no, I can’t believe they went there either).

Meanwhile, the executives of a Japanese chemical company hire former Interpol agent Chang Tse-Xia (Lin Chi-Yung) to steal Li's formula for their own commercial purposes. Hence it is not long before Tse-Xia crosses paths with Chiu-Lan and the romantic sparks begin to fly. His shadowy agenda notwithstanding (The Brain Stealers’ clear position is that corporate espionage exists on a far more forgivable plane than the political kind), one ends up hoping that the rakish Tse-Xia is successful in winning Chiu-Lan’s heart, because Chiu-Lan’s fiancé is played by the strictly vanilla actor Peter Chen Ho, who song-and-danced alongside Lily Ho in Brain Stealers director Inoue Umetsugu’s earlier Hong Kong Nocturne, and is hence something of a sop. Unfortunately, the sexual politics of Hong Kong films of this era are such that such an upset is unlikely to occur. Unless, of course, there was to be some kind of surprising last minute twist…

Umetsugu Inoue was the most prolific, as well as one of the most successful, of the number of Japanese directors that Shaw Brothers recruited during the 60s. Before coming to Hong Kong he had worked for what was, given the tendency of Japanese film professionals of the era to be staunch company men, a surprising array of Japanese studios -- including Nikkatsu, Daei, Toei and Shochiku –- and had worked in various genres, including swordplay and gangster films. He was also responsible for bringing the first adaptation of Edogawa Rampo’s Black Lizard to the screen in 1963, five years before Kinji Fukasaku’s more well known version. Once ensconced at Shaw, he became known for frothy and vibrantly colorful musicals like the aforementioned Hong Kong Nocturne and feather-light romantic comedies seemingly molded to the template of the Rock Hudson and Doris Day films. Though he did helm one other spy caper for the Shaws, 1967’s Operation Lipstick, such films were definitely a departure for him genre-wise in terms of his work for the studio. That is not to say, however, that The Brain Stealers doesn’t bare his distinctive imprint.

Sadly, The Brain Stealers is among those films in the Shaw catalog that Celestial never got around to releasing on DVD, so I was forced to make due with a glitchy gray market DVD made from an obviously well-worn VHS source. As a result, what I saw was less the movie itself than a pale and jittery ghost of it. Even so, it was hard to miss Inoue’s penchant for flamboyant art design and costuming, especially as exhibited in Dr. Zero’s fabulously cartoonish subterranean lair and Lily Ho’s Carnaby Street inflected wardrobe. (Dr. Zero himself is no slouch in terms of OTT representation, either, coming accessorized as he does with a black cape, eye patch and disfiguring facial scars – basically the whole super-villain package.) In addition, the giddy convolutions of the movie’s plot have an antic and farcical quality to them that, if played less straight, would not be out of place in one of the director’s comedies of the period. So basically Inoue here brings his own style to the SB brand of Bond-alike nonsense -- usually handled in a much more utilitarian manner by Lo Wei -- and definitely stakes a claim for it as his own.

In fact, for the first half of The Brain Stealers, it almost seems like Inoue has gotten so involved in reeling out the film’s multiple characters and intrigues that he has forgotten to deliver those fizzy action set pieces that such a film typically leads us to expect. The one exception is a fight that takes place in Dr. Li’s animal testing lab, during which a ravenous hawk that Peter/Yuan Ming has set free as a distraction buzzes the participants perilously as they deal and dodge each other’s blows. This all changes once the film’s action moves to Tokyo and things really kick into gear, going in quick succession from a dramatic fight atop the Tokyo Tower to an assassination attempt by a sultry female snake charmer -- all leading, of course, to a climactic conflagration in Dr. Zero’s den of evil with all it’s acid pits, spike-walled rooms, and giant eyeball adorned holding chambers.

The Brain Stealers’ combination of 50s sci-fi, para-Bondian spy-jinks and general 1960s silliness makes for a very fun watch. Or I should say it would, were it available to us in a format that was actually watchable. Getting through the murky and stuttering disc that I was stuck with, complete with its barely legible subtitles that were cut off on either side, was something of a chore. But it’s a testament to the film that I was motivated to soldier through it despite that, and was even able to eke out a fair amount of enjoyment from it. In fact, my only real complaint about the film itself is that Lily Ho’s character is less emancipated than one might hope, and essentially teeters uneasily between being a kickass heroine in the Emma Peel mode and filling the stock role of the scientist’s imperiled daughter that you always find in these movies. Of course, her similar treatment in the Angel movies shouldn’t lead anyone to expect much different, and we should probably just be thankful that this time there’s at least some compensation in there being a bit more of a feminine sensibility overall.

So, in closing, I’m going to resort to something that I know has become a bit of a nagging refrain on this blog, by which I mean my once again ending a positive review of a film by pleading that someone please, please, please release it on a proper DVD. Even as a jittering ghost, The Brain Stealers entertains, but on a lovingly prepared disc, presented in all its comic-book-colorful glory, it would completely rock.

It's the 4DK Animalympics! Round 8

Puppy from Hunterwali

Skill Set: Loyalty, equestrianism

I am clearly an awful man. Hunterwali is rife with rape, talk of honor killing, and brutal violence. But at the end of it, a dog rides a horse. What do I take away from it? That's right, it's the movie where a dog rides a horse. Don't hold it against Puppy, though. He can ride a horse.

From the Lucha Diaries Vaults: El Aguila Real (Mexico, 1971)

It’s time for From the Lucha Diaries Vaults again, which can only mean one thing. That little thing called “life” has once again stepped in and prevented me from watching any obscure old foreign pulp movies to review for you, thus forcing me to recycle old content from The Lucha Diaries to keep things rolling over.

For those of you who are new to this ritual, The Lucha Diaries is a site that I created a couple years ago in connection with my project to watch and write capsule reviews of as many classic Mexican Wrestling movies as I could get my hands on. Said project continued until I developed a rare, highly selective form of hysterical blindness that resulted in me only being able to see a static image of a crudely drawn vase of flowers whenever I looked at any movie containing Superzan.

So basically From the Lucha Diaries Vaults is a lot like one of those clip-based flashback episodes that your favorite sitcom used to air as mid-season filler. So much so, in fact, that we might as well frame it in the same way. So here goes.

RICHIE
Hey, guys! Remember when Todd watched El Aguila Real… and then WROTE about it?

POTSY
What a nerd!

JOANIE
I love Chachi!

THE FONZ
Aaaaaaaay!

Suddenly things start to go all wobbly as we FADE TO:

******

So I woke up last night with this horrible idea that some Spanish speaking person might happen across this site and try to run it through Babel Fish or Google Translator or something, and that the resulting garbled interpretation would somehow make me look like more of an asshole than I am -- or, at least, a different kind of asshole than the kind I'm trying to portray myself as. I mean, those things might work okay with a site that's actually trying to dispense clear, practical information about its chosen subject, but when a site's subject is just a springboard for its author to engage in self involved ramblings and transparent attempts at cleverness, it's a different story. To reassure myself, I ran my review of Triunfo de los Campeones Justicieros through Babel Fish, translating it first into Spanish and then back into English, and got this result:

“I do not know the jails work. I am not elegant that way. But I think that they can work in the same way that the films of Justicieros Champions work. The fact that these films offer to equipment of the greatest stars of the masked fight, and it aspires, the marks he touching to say that they are less than the sum of his pieces...”

While it's true that I don't know the jails work -- and that may or may not be a testament to my inelegance -- this did not exactly put my mind to rest. There must be a solution to this problem, though none presents itself at the moment. Whatever I do, however, it's clear that I'll eventually have to get around to talking about El Aguila Real, as much as I want to avoid doing so.

My viewing of El Aguila Real represents another dip into the stinky troth that is Netflix's selection of Santo films. It's also a product of my recent efforts to plow through some of these lesser Santo movies and avoid the inevitable result of cherry picking my way through the catalog (i.e. that I would be left staring out across a dispiriting wasteland of lucha movie detritus with no remaining high points to break up the monotony). So far this campaign has put me in contact with the listless Santo en la Frontera del Terror, the alluringly horrible Santo Frente a la Muerte and the surprisingly not so sucky Santo contra los Secuestradores.

While those movies all had their small share of saving graces to put alongside their many sins, it never occurred to me in the case of any of them to think, "Well, at least it didn't have any animal cruelty in it!" El Aguila Real, on the other hand, can be summarized as follows: Boring bit, boring bit, footage of a real horse tumbling down a cliff, tedium, footage of a real cockfight, snore, snore, Santo forcing a house cat to drink poison, zzzzzzzzzz, footage of a real rabbit being shot, drool, snort, an eagle being forced into a burlap bag and slammed against a wall, boring, boring, the end. In other words, like a crazy alcoholic parent, El Aguila Real keeps waking you from a sound sleep for the sole purpose of traumatizing you.

Now, as far as animal snuff goes, I know that arguments can be made about artistic justifications for such material in some cases, but we're not talking about The Rules of the Game here. And if you are so obstinate as to doubt that fact, that you need proof that revered French auteur Jean Renoir did not in fact direct the Santo film El Aguila Real under a pseudonym, just ask yourself whether Renoir would have relied quite so heavily on the abysmal comic relief antics of Santo's manager Carlos Suarez as the director here does.

With it's singular combination of boredom and pointless slaughter, El Aguila Real stakes out a new frontier of Santo movie badness, one that actually serves to elevate other bad lucha movies. As a result, I am now forced to reevaluate Santo contra los Cazodores de Cabezas with a more forgiving eye, and may even issue a formal apology to Superzan. So thanks for that, El Aguila Real. In terms of plot, in can be said that the film offers a change of pace from other Santo films, in that it's basically a rural melodrama, but that's not enough to recommend it. Nor is the fact that it showcases the singing of star Irma Serrano, though the scenes of her pitching woo with our masked hero are admittedly pretty hysterical.

To sum up, in the interest of better international communication, I will render my final verdict in Babel Fish: “The true Aguila is a bad film. Stay far from her!”

Friday's best pop song ever: extra creepy edition

Pedro: The blog!

Michael Barnum (not pictured) has been a longtime contributor to this blog by way of his always helpful and informative comments, not to mention the many sage film recommendations he's generously beamed my way over the past months. More importantly, he is an accomplished writer on the subject of world cult cinema, having leant his journalistic talents to such esteemed publications as Video Watchdog and FilmFax. These qualifications and others have had a lot of us blogger types wondering why the heck Michael hasn't staked out his own little bit of turf in the blogosphere. Well, now we need wonder no more. Behold Michael's inspiredly-named Pedro (The Ape Bomb) Blog, by which he will be sharing with us sun-avoidant monitor jockeys his exhaustive knowledge of B movies from Bollywood and beyond. Welcome to the fold, Michael. One of us! One of us!

It's the 4DK Animalympics! Round 7

Zippy from Insaniyat

Skill Set: Well, just look at the cute little dickens!

While Bollywood's premiere chimpsploitation star Pedro, the Ape Bomb is possessed of many talents, there is one area in which he is soundly lacking: adorableness. And that's where Zippy comes in. Unfortunately, if Memsaab's review is to believed, Zippy's adorableness is all that Insaniyat has going for it. On the plus side, though, if we are to further believe the above screencap, he also has the power of speech! Pedro, we heard, also had the power of speech, but had to have his dialogue dubbed over with chimp sounds due to his propensity for reciting heart-stoppingly obscene limericks whenever within earshot of a microphone. No such unsavory behavior for our Zippy, though, as his only desire in life is to be your own special widdle cuddly wuddly woo woo. Okay, I just threw up a little bit.

Tarzan & King Kong (India, 1965)

Tarzan & King Kong begins with a plane crash very similar to the one we saw in Boxer, a furious shuffling of stock footage in which the type and vintage of the imperiled plane changes several times from shot to shot.

As certain death approaches, we see intrepid pilot Dana Andrews heroically struggling to maintain control of the craft.

I think this particular footage comes from the 1960
Hollywood film The Crowded Sky.

Finally the aircraft, now a WW II era fighter plane, crashes to the ground in flames, and with it disappears all traces of Laura and Hot Rods to Hell star Dana Andrews from the remainder of Tarzan & King Kong.

Fortunately, there are other actors who, unlike Dana, actually appeared in Tarzan & King Kong voluntarily. And one of them is Mumtaz, who plays crash survivor Sharmilla, who, along with her faithful manservant Bismilla (No! We will not let you go. Let him goooooo!... sorry), finds herself floating post-crash in a river in the middle of the jungle wilds. Also fortunately, on hand to save her is none other than Tarzan himself.

Now, despite the fact that Dara Singh is featured in the cast of Tarzan & King Kong -- and given prominent place on the packaging by those people who depend upon the sale of VCDs of Tarzan & King Kong to make their living -- and the additional fact that Dara Singh would portray Tarzan during the very same year in Tarzan Comes to Delhi, the lord of the jungle is here portrayed by Dara’s little bro Randhawa. Dara, it turns out, only makes a brief appearance, presumably to give his sibling’s movie a little extra box office “oomph”.

Anyway, Tarzan & King Kong is a rollicking, Bollywood B movie jungle adventure in the mold of Zimbo. As such, it runs through a checklist of all of those jungle perils that such a movie should contain: snakes, crocodiles, primitive traps filled with pointy sticks, etc. But just as in Zimbo, the jungle’s biggest threat turns out to be female jealousy, personified here in the form of evil jungle queen Shibani, played by 4DK favorite Bela Bose. Despite the fact that Tarzan is portrayed here as a great grunting dumbass, Shibani is downright heartsick over the big lug, and is none too happy to see that he has just had a new leopard-fur-clad playmate air delivered.

For a brief time, life is one big jungle idyll for Tarzan and Sharmilla, she being apparently not all that attached to civilization in the first place. Given that this is a movie from the mid-sixties, said idyll includes Sharmilla teaching Tarzan how to do the Twist.

But it’s not long before the wrath of Shibani comes down upon them, and their little cargo cult recreation of Shindig must come to an end. The queen’s first volley involves an outright attempt to nab Tarzan Sadie Hawkins-style with the help of her movie savage minions. Tarzan, however, manages to escape from her clutches before she is able to give him her evil jungle queen cooties.

The Queen’s next move is to recruit world famous Punjabi wrestling star and Bollywood B movie hero Dara Singh to work his patented moves on Tarzan, leading to a nail-biting brother-on-brother smack-down.

When this tactic somewhat unbelievably fails, Shibani then has Sharmilla kidnapped and chained up in her dungeon, where she is threatened by the Queen’s military commander Romy with his oversized prop carving fork.

All in all, Shibani, rather than being just a two dimensional villain, ends up being sort of a tragic figure here. She obviously loves Tarzan, and has followed all of the normal avenues in expressing those feelings to him, throwing him in a cage, abducting and threatening his loved ones, and hiring massive wrestlers to beat him to a pulp. Still his heart remains cold to her. Is there nothing she can do?

What makes matters worse is that, as she has been driven to distraction by her unrequited crush, her kingdom has meanwhile fallen into decadence and depravity, as represented by this staged wrestling match between two white women, which comes across more like a very sedate demonstration of some standard wrestling flips and holds.

Then it becomes time for the big guns. Paradoxically, though the title of the earlier King Kong turned out to simply refer to the ring name of an obese Hungarian wrestler, Tarzan & King Kong actually delivers as far as giving us a rampaging giant ape. Sort of.

But then the fat Hungarian wrestler is here too. Bonus!

A frenzied climactic battle rages between Tarzan and the ape, during which we can clearly see just how tore up the ape costume is, with one big piece flopping around in the back as if he were wearing a furry hoodie.

Finally Tarzan mercilessly stabs -- well, more like pokes -- the creature to death with his big knife, and the ape gets his Oscar moment by going through some fairly histrionic death throes. Then Queen Shibani meets her tragic end by taking a blade meant for Tarzan, to which Tarzan and Sharmilla both say “Sad” and make that little sarcastic tear drop gesture you do by running your finger down your cheek. Then they both jump onto an elephant and ride off into the sunset.

Sees ya!

While Tarzan & King Kong represents another case where my viewing experience would have been greatly enhanced by English subtitles, I must say that Moser Baer’s VCD was remarkably crisp looking as these things go. MB also gets big points for their relatively unobtrusive onscreen logo. I’ve come to accept that watching an Indian -- and, for that matter most any country’s -- VCD means having a company logo appear somewhere onscreen throughout, but other manufacturers would do well to follow MB’s example of making that logo semi-transparent. It gets the message across without being quite so obnoxious, basically. The VCD was also pleasingly round and quite shiny, which is always nice.

I am not a professional interviewer (see evidence below)

Funny thing about the internet is that it seems like, sooner or later, pieces of every one of your past lives will eventually float back to you. Provided you Google yourself enough, that is. Case in point: the video below, which is something I had literally completely forgotten about until I happened upon it on YouTube yesterday. It's an interview I did with American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel back in 1988. Of course, my interviewing skills -- at least during this first segment -- consist mostly of me just saying "mm hm" a lot while Mark goes about his business of being dourly hilarious.

This video is the first of seven parts that have been posted on YouTube, adding up to about an hour of unedited footage, including frequent technical adjustments by the crew and Mark and I grousing about the person who was sent out to buy beer being a bit tardy. Probably a bit a slog for most of you, but if you're at all a fan of Mark and his music, there's definitely some things of interest here, especially as the interview goes on and things get a little, um, looser.