You! Feed my new obsession!

Below is a trailer for the 2008 Korean film Dachimawa Lee, a movie that has sparked my interest in a couple of different ways.



The film, which is the most recent effort from City of Violence director Seung-wan Ryoo, is described as a send-up of South Korean spy and action movies of the 1970s. The seventies saw South Korea's government exert increased control over the country's movie industry and, from what I understand, the resulting films -- which were sometimes referred to as "policy films" -- typically exhibit an uneasy blend of over-the-top action, wooden acting, and government mandated anti-communist propaganda. Now, all of this makes me very interested in seeing Dachimawa Lee, of course, but, as you may have easily predicted, it makes me even more interested in seeing those earlier films upon which the movie is based.

Hungry to know more, I headed over to the Korean Film Archives' Korean Movie Database, where I was able to find some bare-bones information about promising sounding titles like Secret Agent Sang-yong, 1975's A Spy Remaining Behind, and Golden Operation 70 in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, my first cursory internet searches have yielded no indication that any of these films are available on DVD or VCD. (In fact, the sites I found that sell Korean films didn't seem to offer anything that could be considered "vintage" titles at all. Damn these forward-looking Asian nations! Why can't they live in the past like we Americans do?) While I continue the hunt, I thought I'd put the word out in case one of you many readers out there who are smarter and more resourceful (or, in this case, more Korean) than I am might have a suggestion as to how I might track some of these films down. Hey, I'd do the same for you.

Dachimawa Lee will be featured in the upcoming New York Asian Film Festival, which runs from June 19th through July 5th.

Sek Kin 1913 - 2009

I've learned via a post over at Soft Film that Sek Kin -- a man whom I like to think of as the Amrish Puri of Cantonese cinema, and who is known to millions as "Mr. Han Man" from Enter the Dragon -- has passed away. For me Sek's villainous portrayals have provided the high points of more films that I can reliably remember, and he will be greatly missed. To read some of my previous posts regarding the man, click here.

Friday's best pop song ever

Haseena Atom Bomb (Pakistan, 1990)

If you wanted to make the argument that sleaze is an unavoidable byproduct of puritanism, you could do a lot worse for an Exhibit "A" than Haseena Atom Bomb. And I say that with full awareness that my own country, with its dizzying sexual hypocrisy, is in no position to cast stones in that regard. It is these United States, after all, whose porn industry seems to grow in inverse proportion to the sanitization of our mainstream cinema screens, and whose media dedicates as much energy to sexualizing underage pop stars as they do to working themselves into an apocalyptic tizzy over sexting. And let's not spare our pals the Japanese in this matter, either; as their own strident censorship laws, which prevent the depiction of human genitalia or penetration even in hardcore pornography, have lead the marketplace to fill the resulting vacuum with perverted visual delicacies like tentacle porn.

In contrast, Pashto language movies like Haseena Atom Bomb are not even explicit by Western standards. But when you consider that the members of their target audience -- men living in the tribal region along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan -- are forbidden by custom from even gazing upon women outside their immediate family, you get a sense of the yawning gap between public conduct and private desire that they address.

Haseena reminds me a lot of 1970s Telegu action films like Pistolwali, only with everything turned up to eleven. The women are more voluptuous. (Okay, they're fat, to be completely honest -- something on which I imagine even the most sensitized proponents of positive body image would have to concur.) The dances are raunchier, and the camera angles used to film them even more disconcertingly intimate. On top of that, the action is even more frantic and cartoonish; No blow can me shown to have connected with its target sufficiently unless it is shown several times in rapid succession, with the deafening sound accompanying that blow being enough to make Bollywood's trusty old "dishoom dishoom" sound like a limp slap with a wet paper towel in comparison.

Correspondingly, the histrionics on display are over the top to the extent of losing sight of it completely, with every line delivered in a full-throated bellow and every hysterically caricatured reaction shot accompanied by an ear-shattering clap of thunder. Yes, impossible as it may be to believe, Pashto filmmakers offer up a cinema that even Pistolwali director K.S.R. Doss -- a man whom I had previously thought was about as committed an enemy of subtlety as one could encounter -- can look down upon for its brashness and lack of refinement. Add to this a lack of budget and technical skill made plain by the film's grade school play level sets and abundance of dodgy camera work and the picture is complete. Haseena Atom Bomb comes at you as a film whose every mottled frame screams its utter trashiness at you, holding you forcefully by the shoulders as it does so in order that you may fully savor its ghastly, crazy homeless person breath.

Haseena and its like are also similar to Telegu films like Pistolwali in their heavy reliance on revenge themes - which is not surprising, given the prominent part vengeance plays in the Pashtun people's traditional code. In Haseena's case, we get, not just one, but three avengers. For starters, there is our titular heroine, announced at the film's beginning by a theme song, "Main Hoon Haseena Atom Bomb", whose picturization sees starlet Mussarat Shaheen's every utterance of her name punctuated by a thrust of her generous posterior and stock footage of a volcano erupting. Haseena is set on the vengeance trail after she is subjected to a protracted gang rape at the hands of a band of leering thugs on her wedding night, an act which her attackers top off by stringing her husband from the rafters and forcing him to stand on Haseena's shoulders until the poor woman's collapse from exhaustion sends him swinging.

Understandably hacked off over this treatment, Haseena sets out to murder her assailants one by one, an act which she typically accomplishes after first tantalizing her intended prey with a seductive dance. And these dances, once seen, are not soon to be forgotten: an unholy alliance between obese flesh and clingy synthetic fabrics -- often made even more constricting by the liberal application of water -- captured by the heat-seeking lens of a resolutely crotch-fixated camera. Thus is the fly drawn into our heroine's web, at which point he ends up being on the receiving end of some extremely loud fake kung fu before being strung up himself in the same manner as Haseena's betrothed. (As a side note, I wanted to mention that one of these dance numbers features Haseena singing a song that's set to the tune of "Kaate Nahin Katte Ye Din" from Mr. India.)

But alongside all of this we also get a parallel narrative -- a "lost and found" story of sorts -- about a brother and sister, separated by tragedy, who each pursue their own path to vengeance. He is a portly fellow in an awful disco shirt who rides around on a white horse, heroically intervening in the frequent gang rapes that seem to have replaced casual greetings in Haseena's milieu. His weapon of choice: A huge hypodermic needle, which he uses to spear and then drain the blood from his opponents. She is an equally portly (not judging; describing) young lady with a taste for leopard print spandex who prefers the use of her fists when it comes to giving lowlifes their comeuppance -- and who comes equipped with a ringleted paramour who's a ringer for the singer in REO Speedwagon. In addition, Haseena somehow also manages to shoehorn in a subplot involving Inspector Shabana, a lady cop who, when not hot on giant hypo guy's trail, is having romantic daydreams about her boss.

In fact, there is so much going on in Haseena Atom Bomb and -- for those English speakers like myself trying to fathom it without the aid of subtitles -- so little obvious connection between it, that, had there not been a brief scene in which Haseena and hypodermic guy appeared together, I would have just assumed that it was several different movies patched together. It didn't help matters that the version of Haseena I ended up getting my hands on appears to be severely truncated, clocking in at just over two hours when, as I understand it, the original is more in the two-and-a-half to three hour range. However, I'm not convinced that having the missing footage would serve to tie things together all that much, since the film's director, Saeed Ali Khan, doesn't give any signs of being all that concerned about doing so himself. At the film's conclusion, Haseena's path never proves to converge with that of the other characters, with each of their stories reaching their violent crescendos separately as the action cuts back and forth between them (in Hypo guy's case, involving some pretty nifty forklift-fu). Given that, I imagine that most of what I'm missing from Haseena Atom Bomb is more of the sexy dancing and implied sexual violence that appears to be its reason for being. Which is perfectly okay, really. I got the idea.

To be sure, Haseena Atom Bomb is a singular viewing experience, providing a not inconsiderable amount of trashy thrills to anyone who's up for the ride. But there's such an unremitting grotesquery to those thrills that I'm inclined to keep my experience of it at just that: singular. Omar Khan, in his review of the film over at The Hotspot Online, is right to see similarities in it to the early work of John Waters. But while, even at their most debased, Waters' freak shows always had an air of the celebratory about them, Haseena's suffocatingly masculine, crotch-cam view of the world it presents implicates its viewer in a spectacle that is all unalloyed prurience. As such - and in spite of all the reckless energy put into that presentation - it comes off as feeling more than a tad dreary.

Cotton. Jerry Cotton.

Chances are that most readers of this blog who have any knowledge of American actor George Nader at all do so as a result of him being the star of Robot Monster, a 1953 film that has earned its rightful place alongside Plan 9 From Outer Space as an exemplar of the worst its medium has to offer. However, those readers might be surprised to know that Robot Monster, despite its fearsome awfulness, was still successful enough to provide something of a stepping stone for Nader, and that the actor went on to have a fairly long and varied career in film and television in its wake. Taken under contract by Universal shortly after Robot Monster's release, Nader was groomed by the studio to be one of its hunky young leading men, though, in that regard, the actor would never manage to emerge from the shadow of his more successful friend, Rock Hudson. After a period of consistent but inauspicious feature work, he moved on to television, where, throughout the late fifties and early sixties, he appeared as a guest star on a number of series, eventually landing the title role in a short-lived syndicated show called Shannon.

I haven't been able to find a clear account of what specific circumstances lead to Hollywood going sour on George Nader. But it seems pretty clear that it involved an unhappy collision between the obsessive machinations of Confidential magazine publisher Robert Harrison and the simple fact that George Nader was gay. While not "out" in the modern sense, Nader at the time shared a home with his longtime partner, Mark Miller, and, unlike other of his peers, resisted studio pressure to enter into a phony marriage -- though he was known to go on the occasional PR-mandated "date" with a female starlet. I've found a number of sources that refer to rumors that Nader was offered up as a sacrifice by Universal in order to quell a story that Confidential was planning to run on Rock Hudson. The actor Tab Hunter is known to have fallen prey to a similar deal on Hudson's behalf, which may, depending on how you look at it, either lend veracity or shed doubt upon those rumors as they apply to Nader. Whatever the case, though, it's clear that, by the mid-sixties, work was drying up for Nader on these shores. In response, he and Miller packed up their lives and relocated to West Germany.

And it is in Germany that Nader's career entered an interesting new phase, starting, in 1965, with him being cast as the lead in a new series of films to be produced by the studio Allianz Filmproduktion. These were to be based on the adventures of Jerry Cotton, a fictional, Manhattan-based FBI agent who was at the center of a popular and exhaustively voluminous series of German pulp novels (something that, judging from the equally voluminous Kommissar X and Perry Rhodan book series, the German publishing industry apparently thrives upon). The resulting low budget productions ended up being enormously popular with German audiences, and would eventually come to comprise eight films in all, all made between 1965 and 1969, and all starring Nader as their hero. As a result, Nader became one of the country's most popular actors during the period, neck-and-neck with fellow American -- and former Tarzan -- Lex Barker, who played the recurring role of Old Shatterhand in the much beloved Winnetou films.

Despite the Jerry Cotton films relying on standard cops-and-robbers elements for their plots, they are today considered to nestle cozily within the Eurospy genre. And to understand why, one need only watch them. These are movies that would not exist in the absence of James Bond; In contrast to other cinematic treatments of the FBI's exploits from the era -- many of which take on a more procedural approach, emphasizing the machine-like precision of the organization as a whole -- the Cotton films are really all about Jerry, depicting him as a kind of super agent who, despite being teamed with a partner played by German actor Heinz Weiss, could conceivably defeat any nemesis single-handedly. In addition, his red Jaguar E-Type and tailored suits testify to a taste for the finer things well beyond the reach of any real-life G-Man. Overall, you get the sense that the filmmakers didn't put a lot of thought into the jurisdictional issues and niggling points of law that delineate the actual Bureau's scope of operations, with the clear priority instead being the presentation of a Bondian fantasy world steeped in action, speed, style and violence.

At this point I've only seen two of the Cotton films: the series' second entry, Operation Hurricane: Friday Noon (aka Schusse Aus Dem Geigenkasten) and 1967's The Body in Central Park (aka Der Morderclub Von Brooklyn), which was the fifth entry in the series and the first to be filmed in color. (My Teleport City colleague David Foster has in-depth reviews of some of the other Jerry Cotton films over on his fine blog Permission To Kill.) For me, one of the things that was most striking about these films is how, despite the obviously meager resources that the filmmakers had to work with, so much effort is dedicated to establishing the New York setting. This is accomplished by way of lots of stock footage and photographic backdrops, shooting on only the most anonymous German locations possible, and scenes in which the actors are very obviously standing on a tiny soundstage in front of a rear projection of Times Square. This arsenal of primitive gimmicks contributes to there being something just a bit "off" to the overall feel of things, and -- in complete opposition to the intention behind them -- a strange, neither-here-nor-there sense of placeless-ness that I found more than a little captivating.

I also found it interesting that, unlike in the Bond films that were so clearly an influence, Jerry is not provided with the expected array of female conquests to signpost his virility and sexual magnetism. In other words, despite what the promotional materials might lead you to believe, there are no "Cotton Girls" to 007's "Bond Girls". It's tempting to see a connection between this aspect of Jerry's milieu and the private life of the actor who played him, but this de-emphasizing of sex is reportedly a feature of Cotton's print adventures as well. In any case, I found the change refreshing, as it afforded a break from the leering schoolboy humor that usually passes for sexual sophistication in Eurospy films.

But the impression I get above all else about the Cotton series is that they are films that work very, very hard to entertain their audience, which is more than I can say about a lot of other films in their genre. Despite the threadbare nature of what you see on screen, the pacing is always tight and brisk, with rousing action scenes cropping up at dependable intervals. Nader shows a game commitment to the physical aspects of his role and, despite many of his stunt sequences being accomplished by way of some pretty rinky-dink studio trickery, always seems to be up for crawling around on the top of a moving train, or clinging to the side of a careening truck -- both being the kind of set pieces that came to be trademarks of the series. Providing a further highlight is the musical score by Peter Thomas -- a man whose work I've already praised in my review of the German sci-fi series Raumpatrouille Orion -- which serves to coat the sometimes homely, Saturday matinee aspects of the onscreen action with a sheen of sleek sixties style.

All in all, I found the two Jerry Cotton films I watched to be very satisfying, and am looking forward to delving further into the series. Not only is their star a fascinating figure, but the films themselves are quite an interesting hybrid: combining the distinctive Eurospy style with the spirit of classic Hollywood studio programmers like the Mike Shane and Mr. Moto series, capped off with an endearing oddness that is uniquely their own. Nader would move on from the series, of course, and would later retire from acting to pursue writing, eventually penning a sci-fi novel, Chrome, that was revolutionary for its gay themes. That, however, is a subject for someone else's blog. Our beat here at 4DK, after all, is the outlands of world pop cinema. And with his onscreen personification of Jerry Cotton, the German G-Man, Mr. Nader has already provided us with plenty to consider.

Friday's best pop song ever

(Vocals by the inimitable Francoise Hardy.)

James Bond 777 (India, 1971)

Given my extremely limited exposure to the Telegu language cinema of the 1970s, the fact that I could pick out three familiar faces among James Bond 777's cast makes the film, for me at least, something of an all-star affair. Of course, given the abysmal condition of the copy that I watched, picking out the actors was a task similar to trying to identify animal shapes in cloud formations. Still, when the Tollywood galaxy of stars plays host to such distinctive celestial bodies as these, its hard to be mistaken. Ladies and gentlemen, our stars:

Tollywood superstar Krishna, who also starred in the previously reviewed Kaun Saccha Kaun Jhoota, as secret agent James Bond 777, aka Kishore. (Apparently, in this instance, "James Bond" is just a job title, rather than someone's actual name.)

Vijaya Lalitha, who also starred in Kaun Saccha Kaun Jhoota, again fighting alongside Krishna, this time in the role of Sopa, the two-fisted female counterpart to agent 777.


Jyothi Laxmi, the star of the previously reviewed Pistolwali, playing a dual role as both femme fatale Jamilla and her less evil duplicate, a stroke of casting genius that allows her to have a catfight with herself during the film's rousing finale.

Oh, and also: at the helm, director K.S.R. Doss, the man behind Pistolwali, as well as a bunch of other female-centric Telegu action films, including the awesome sounding Rani Mera Naam.

As you can clearly see, Krishna's pompadour is as majestically towering as ever in James Bond 777, but there is another man on the scene whose 'do is every bit as formidable. That man is the evil mastermind known by his underlings as "Boss". Needless to say, the presence of two hairstyles of such equally monolithic proportions necessitates a battle to the death. In this Kishore is aided both by his righteousness and the able assistance of lady cop Sopa, as well as a comic relief sidekick who seems for all intents and purposes to be Tollywood's answer to Jagdeep. For his part, the Boss has at his disposal a small army of robotic goons in referee shirts and Panama hats, as well as a couple of female lieutenants ready and willing to do his dirty work. The first of these lieutenants is the aforementioned Jamilla, who operates from a secret lair hidden beneath a "Beauty Paralour". The other is Cindy, who seems to spend an awful lot of her time berating her minions, calling them "bloody fools" and whatnot.

The Boss also commands a trio of the most friendly-looking attack dogs in cinema history. The onus for portraying these beasts' menace falls entirely upon the film's human actors, who must react to their adorableness with expressions of abject terror.

James Bond 777 offered pretty much everything that I'm now learning to expect from these old Tollywood actioners: weird hair, crotch-grinding dance numbers filmed from uncomfortably intimate angles, and lots of crazy fights. It also managed to squeeze the familiar tropes of the James Bond series into the more comfortable Tollywood format of the family revenge film. In classic fashion, a prologue shows young Kishore's parents being murdered before his eyes by the movie's main villain, an injury that drives him to become the super secret agent of the film's title. Similarly, Sopa's father is also murdered by the heavy, which proves to be her motivation for joining Kishore in his fight. Of course, true to spy movie conventions, the villains also have some kind of grand diabolical scheme that the heroes are trying to prevent, but the film's lack of English subs prevents me from telling you what it is. I do know that it in part involved having the dogs rob a bank, though.

The movie -- as if you needed to be told -- is a glaringly low-budget affair, and in trying to cover up for its shortcomings employs a device that struck me as being very similar to the one used in the equally cash-strapped Mithun Chrakraborty-fronted James Bond knock-off, Gunmaster G-9, which was made several years later. In that film, whenever something took place on screen that was perhaps less spectacular than what the filmmakers had envisioned in their heads, the soundtrack blared with the character's theme tune, accompanied by an enthusiastic off-screen voice shouting "Gunmaster! G-9!" -- as if you could simply be hectored into getting excited over a pathetically underwhelming miniature effect or the sight of Mithun stepping out of a VW van while wiping sandwich crumbs off his lips. Similarly, James Bond 777 kicks in with a rousing theme tune and a female voice excitedly cooing "James Bond, triple seven!" whenever we're forced to confront, say, a motorcycle chase that's composed of lots of embarrassingly obvious rear projection.

Not that James Bond 777 doesn't provide its fair share of legitimate thrills, mind you. I was especially impressed by a pole fight sequence involving Vijaya Lalitha that looked like it was taken straight out of an old Shaw Brothers movie. I'd read that Hong Kong martial arts films were particularly popular in southern India during this period, and here is the visual proof.

I know that this is a broken record lament of mine, but I don't care. Will somebody please, please, pleeeease release James Bond 777 on an English subtitled DVD -- preferably one that, if at all possible, doesn't look like its mastering process involved using the surviving negative to snare bottom-dwellers from the bed of a stagnant lake? The fact that I enjoyed it despite all of the impediments that an angry god threw in my way indicates that, were said impediments removed, I would be moved to spout solid blocks of gold-tinged hyperbole from my mouth like some kind of xtacy-fueled verbal Pez dispenser. Want! Want! Want!

Um, was that clear enough for y'all?

Hyderabad calling XLU. Pompadour containment
breach imminent. Do you read me?

Wait... what?

Wow. Why did I review Times Square? Oh, I remember: Because the theme of this month's B-Masters Roundtable is youth counterculture, captured under the pithy title "These Kids Today". Check out my full review, just posted over at Teleport City.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! (Japan, 1963)

To those of you unfamiliar with the catalog of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki, please be assured that I did not vomit up that title in a fit of text-based Tourette's Syndrome. Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! is an example of Suzuki's work at the peak of the Nikkatsu Action boom, before he got bored with the cookie-cutter scripts he was being handed and created those surreal provocations -- Branded To Kill, Tokyo Drifter -- that would not only insure he'd forever have the term "maverick" affixed to his name, but also get his ass fired by his masters at Nikkatsu. The film amply demonstrates those strengths that made Suzuki an asset to the studio's stable of directors in the first place -- namely his ability to turn out a tightly constructed and expertly paced genre picture with a not inconsiderable amount of style. In other words, exactly the type of film that Nikkatsu, at that point in its history, had staked its reputation upon. At the same time, Detective Bureau also evidences the mordant humor and flamboyant use of color that would come to be considered trademarks of his more challenging and legend-building works.

Suzuki's leading man of choice, Nikkatsu tough guy Jo Shishido, stars here as a wily private detective who convinces the police to let him take part in an undercover operation in order to get the goods on a mysterious gang. The gang has been making its fortune by robbing other, more established criminal outfits of their ill-gotten loot -- most recently a large cache of stolen military weapons -- with the result that Tokyo's underworld has been turned upside down and is now boiling on the brink of full-blown war. Shishido gains entrance into the gang when he steps in to stop one of its captured members from being the victim of a jailhouse lynching at the hands of a Yakuza mob. From this point the film takes us through all of the close scrapes and tense masquerades that are familiar from other "deep cover" type cops and robbers tales, though frequently these episodes play out in a fashion that is more humorous than suspenseful. The rakish detective's former conquests keep turning up at inconvenient moments, for instance, and the efforts of his two oddball assistants often threaten to be more hurtful to his cause than helpful.

Detective Bureau could definitely be described as a comic action film. But its comedy, I'm happy to report, derives more from the absurd twists of its plot and the quirkiness of its characters than from, as is all too often the case, any unnecessary funny business being inserted into it. As such, that humor lends a breezy, irreverent tone to the proceedings that makes the story seem to careen along that much faster -- and which adds an extra bit of "pop" to the film's already bristling sense of pop art style. This more whimsical approach to the genre should not, however, lead you to expect any skimping on the violent action that was Nikkatsu's -- and Suzuki's -- stock in trade, as the film's raucous final act conclusively demonstrates.

I loved Detective Bureau 2-3. It's not Suzuki's best, but it's resoundingly successful at what it sets out to be. It's an example of how, when handled with this level of assurance, simple genre cinema can evoke in the viewer the pure, giddy delight that comes from knowing you're in the hands of a master. It's a point at which you know you can just sit back and enjoy the ride for all its colorful, stylish and attitude-dripping turns, secure in the knowledge that you're not going to be let down. Highly recommended.

Your Jesus didn't bring us any candy

America, you are a weak and sinful nation. That's alright by me, of course. Just don't go crying to Baptist firebrand Estus W. Pirkle about it when the Commies overrun your town and start driving bamboo spikes through your children's heads. That, as far as I can gather, is the message of If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, the subject of my latest review over at Teleport City.