AFFD

by Steve Norwood

In the 70’s and 80’s, martial arts films went through their heyday, the glory of Bruce Lee trailing off into doldrums epitomized by the age of Michael Dudikoff.  Many of these films contained stories of internship and revenge, one often leading to the other.  While the acting and production values varied greatly, the action sequences often made many of the experiences worthwhile.  Martial arts became the hook for grander, more powerfully-acted arthouse dramas in the 90’s and 00’s, a subgenre almost completely owned by Zhang Yimou.  But the straight-up genre version of the martial arts film has pretty much gone the way of subpar straight-to-DVD entries not worth mentioning.  Director James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA) decided that the old, forgotten genre film needed a new coat of paint, and has created a thrilling update in NINJA ASSASSIN. 

Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it was clearly made with the intention of showing the audience a rousing good time.  The film moves so quickly that its flaws (and there are several) do not hamper the fun; there is no socially relevant message deep within the story, while depth of character and plotting are cut short with every action set-piece.  It’s a film made to showcase fast, violent action, first and foremost, and in this it succeeds quite handily.

Raizo (Korean pop star Rain) was trained from early childhood under the brutal and exacting tutelage of the Master of the Ozunu Clan, an organization that has created ninja assassins for centuries in complete secrecy.  Raizo rebelled against the clan near the end of his training, and has since made it his duty to wipe out the Ozunu ninja, including his former Master (played by veteran martial arts icon Sho Kosugi).  Meanwhile, plucky Europol agent Mika (Naomie Harris) makes a connection between a string of political assassinations and a mythical band of killers dating as far back as feudal Japan.  In widening her investigation, Mika makes herself (and most of Europol) a target for the silent, shadowy agents.   It’s only a matter of time before wide-eyed Mika ends up with a very determined and able protector.

Bad day at the dojo...

NINJA ASSASSIN’s strengths are polar opposites: action sequences are tightly paced and thrilling, while flashbacks to Raizo’s training are more methodical and dramatic.  But make no mistake, both are brutal and violent;  why use a light sprinkling of gore when severed body parts and great gouts of blood are available?  And if your tolerance for violence falters when it comes to children, let’s just say you’ll have some uncomfortable moments during those training scenes.

Though one might question the wisdom of shooting many scenes of shadow-traversing ninja in utter darkness, creating an occasionally muddled image on screen, McTeigue has made a very polished and effective film.  After V FOR VENDETTA’s similarly good-looking take on more daunting socio-political themes and NINJA ASSASSIN’s lightning-fast thrills, McTeigue should be in a good position to handle any job Hollywood sees fit to offer (it’s been announced that he will co-direct the 2011 production of X-MEN ORIGINS: MAGNETO).

And let’s face it, not every film can be TOKYO SONATA.  There is a time for lofty drama, and a time for the well-crafted rollercoaster ride.  NINJA ASSASSIN is a solid effort that balances all those important films with something fun.

(Ninja Assassin releases nationwide on November 25th)

by Steve Norwood

When I was very young, one of the coolest films was a meeting of creatures from two separate worlds: FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN.  At the time, this was a crazy idea: take two of the best classic creatures and have them face off; who wouldn’t want to watch that?  As it turned out, they actually didn’t meet up until very late in the film.  But at that age, it was a thrill to see it happen.

Team Nishimura has specialized in Things You Never Thought You’d See.  They have practically created a cottage industry of spewing blood, shredded flesh and body modification, all immersed in a silly, almost childish sense of humor.  But don’t mistake their films for family events.  The makers of such memorable titles as TOKYO GORE POLICE and the upcoming ROBOGEISHA do not truck in safe entertainments, and  VAMPIRE GIRL VS. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL arrives with little that anyone but a diehard fan could appreciate…or stomach.   And this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Essentially a love story at its core, VGVFG takes on the guise of a high school musical that removes song and dance and adds power drills, gory Valentine’s Day treats, and various sharp implements.  The kids and the mayhem they get involved in are nothing like you would expect, even if you are versed in horror films.  The first thing you realize is that the school is divided into many cliques: the Ganguro club, for example, is made up of a group of girls in varying states of blackface; not out of any mean-spirited racism, but thanks to a nearly devout sense of black pride they can never realize in their own skin.  There is also the local division of wrist cutters who practice their slicing skills with great fervor, as if a chess team gone anemic.  These social groups are shocking at first, but you actually find them rather sweet after a while.  They know what they want, they are committed to attaining it, and they take their causes seriously but have no ill-will towards others.

A quiet moment in VGVFG

Amidst the many factions are Mizushima, a good looking and much sought-after young man, and Monami, a transfer student with a little secret: she’s a vampire, and she wants Mizushima to be one, too.  But Keiko, who leads the Frilly Girls Club (I don’t know…they all had lacy clothes so I’m just guessing), has already laid claim to Mizushima, and with a deranged Vice Principal for a father and a very bad temper she sets out to reclaim her man and get rid of the new girl.  But nothing’s very easy in high school, especially when your new hunchbacked janitor is a servant of the local vampire.

VGVFG gets off to a wild start, with a battle that has Monami tearing apart three creatures, leaving only a stack of skulls.  In these first moments VGVFG gives you most of what you need to know about the techniques to follow: enough prolonged rending of limbs and excessive blood spray (camera lenses frequently are awash in blood), but it only hints at the film’s ultimate flaws.  For as sharp as its humor can be, and as outrageous as the violence becomes, VGVFG does get bogged down in its own excesses.  If you can stomach what you’re seeing, you may still find the overlong sequences at any given moment a bit boring, despite the action.  The filmmakers’ editing style does not help either, with several scenes coming across as amateurishly repetitive .  Flaws are far more obvious on the big screen, so perhaps the film will benefit from DVD viewing. 

Still, the very spirit of the film is so agreeable that you if you can handle the exceeding gruesomeness, you have a hard time not getting caught up in the sheer giddiness of it all.  Team Nishimura has indeed created their own film genre: Japanese Splatter Slapstick.

by Steve Norwood

The Mo Brothers grabbed the attention of horror aficionados and the Indonesian ratings board with their short film DARA, an excellent, grisly and very sly film about a woman who runs a restaurant and has men over to dinner at her home, only to mete out sinister plans upon the would-be suitors.  The film garnered so much notice that the directing team (they aren’t really brothers) decided to expand the experience into a feature-length horror film that maintains the high scare quotient of the short, even if its overall theme seems rather familiar to American horror audiences.  Thus MACABRE was born.

A quiet moment in MACABRE

With a fresh-faced, likeable group of actors and a casually believable opening scene, the film quickly gets under way as a group of friends help a young woman on a stormy night and end up at a house in the country.  The woman’s mother, the wide-eyed and dubiously prim Dara, welcomes the group to rest and eat a special feast she has prepared.  When the friends find themselves drugged and bound in a room that more closely resembles an abattoir, any audience member with a shred of familiarity for the genre knows terror and mayhem will quickly follow. 

MACABRE specializes in a time-honored cycle of scare routines: quiet and creepy moments, frantic chases and blunt, gory attacks.  But it feels very fresh here, perhaps because it does not have the cruel glaze of most current American horror attempts, despite the horrific goings-on in Dara’s home.   With their polished style and ability to dish out effective mood and thrills, the Mo Brothers are definitely a team to watch.

Celebrate Halloween early with AFFD and Texas Frightmare Weekend at the Studio Movie Grill-Addison. Enjoy a double feature of two excellent, spectacular, gory, fun Asian horror flicks, and participate in our Costume Contest. Come dressed as your favorite Asian horror character. Prize for Best Costume plus lots of other door prizes.

The Films:

9:30PM – MACABRE aka Rumah Dara

A high-spirited road trip is interrupted when a group of friends pick up a girl who has just been robbed, taking her home to a mysterious house in the deep woods. No good deed goes unpunished, to the tune of severed limbs, decapitations, and several flavors of graphic mayhem. Full length expansion of The Mo Brothers short DARA.

Trailer – WARNING! Graphic Content

11:30PM – VAMPIRE GIRL VS. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL

Two girls, one boy, a mad scientist lab, and blood-laced sweet treats – high school love triangles go berzerk in this body-modified,
gore-spouting, self-mutilating, seriously un-PC romp from the director of TOKYO GORE POLICE.

Trailer – WARNING! Graphic Content

Tickets: $20 for the night, or $12.50 per film

PURCHASE TICKETS ONLINE or pay cash at the door.

FREE for AFFD Members. Become an AFFD member today!

by Steve Norwood

The first Fun Trivia Fact on IMDB about the Korean box-office smash HAEUNDAE is: “The film’s title is taken from Haeundae Beach, a wealthy sea-side resort area south-east of the city of Busan, South Korea.  ‘Haeun’ translates as ‘Sea & Clouds’.”  Until I read this, I was under the impression that the word meant “tsunami”, since that is the U.S. title for the film (and since the film is all about a massive wave that causes a great deal of wreckage and tears for the people of Busan).  It seemed to make sense, but wrong as it is, I was very pleased to find out that Korean disaster films are as joyously chaotic as anything Americans could create.  For much of its run-time, HAEUNDAE is a sweet-natured, almost goofy tale about a dozen residents of the city who end up finding out too late that massive walls of water and pedestrian activities do not mix.

Nothing could mess up our holiday plans...

The relationships of all the characters are so many and tangled that it does help to keep a scorecard.  Man-sik is a troubled former fisherman in love with Yeon-hee, who is struggling to keep her sea-side cafe afloat.  Hyeong-sik is a rescue worker who is pursued by Hee-mi, who tends to bite his lip when they kiss.  And Kim-hwi is a scientist who balances tracking an oncoming tsunami with his own domestic issues: his ex, Yoo-jin, refuses to tell their daughter that Kim-hwi is her father.  This is a fraction of the characters weaving in and out of the story.

Much of the more excitable domestic activity verges on slapstick, but late in the film, when a mega-tsunami strikes with a mere ten minutes to evacuate, the tone shifts sharply to gut-wrenching, tear-jerking poignancy. Of all the possible victims, I’ll mention that the two child actors in the film (who are both phenomenally cute and acquit themselves quite well on screen) do survive the mayhem.  There are moments throughout the final act when characters we’ve grown to like are washed away by ridiculously powerful waves…and were this not a film one would expect we would never see them again.   But this is an entertainment, first and foremost, and HAEUNDAE is a crowd-pleasing effort in a subgenre that was practically created by Hollywood.

It was pleasantly suprising to find out that the film outsold new installments of mainstream Hollywood horror franchises as well as national top-grossers on Friday and Saturday at the start of its exclusive run in the Dallas area.  It is currently showing at the AMC Grapevine Mills theater.

By Steve Norwood

While he only displayed vivid splashes of it during the grim acts that made up his famed Vengeance Trilogy, director Park Chan-wook has a very wicked sensibility, and revels in it with his darkly-comic and sexually urgent new feature, THIRST. A film about vampirism that does not require a generic re-envisioning of the Dracula mythos, THIRST mirrors the sexualized pulp of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice more than any horror genre tricks of recent years. Which is to say some horrific things happen in the film, but its purpose does not seem to be scaring the audience as much as luring them into familiar non-horror settings, only to puncture the perceptions of vampire tales as easily as it does victims’ throats.

Sang -hyun (The Host’s Song Kang-ho) is a priest working the last rites circuit in a hospital, yet is dissatisfied in merely comforting the sick and dying. To better assist his fellow man, he volunteers for a secret medical project that aims to eradicate a deadly virus. After being infected, he receives a transfusion of tainted blood and soon dies, but mysteriously awakens. The source of the bad blood is never known, and the fact that such small, unaddressed details don’t bog the film down is to its credit. Immediately heralded as a “bandaged saint”, Sang-hyun is followed by worshipers who look to him to heal their ailing family members. Once back at the hospital, he realizes that his senses are heightened and his virus scars begin to heal themselves when he consumes blood. In no time, he begins siphoning the stuff from comatose patients, a harmless method that doesn’t require killing innocent victims.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re back to this website for awhile, but we’re working on something new. Please check Festival 2009 for the AFFD 2009 festival website, and keep checking back for updates.