Change Your Image
Kojiro Abe
Reviews
Morozko (1965)
Bizarre, yes. Underrated, perhaps.
I understand that some of you, who have never seen the MST3K version and have apparently only seen the original Russian version of the film, are sticking up for this film. The reason most Americans hate it is because of two reasons. First, the US version is atrociously dubbed, more ridiculous and worse than any Godzilla or Hong Kong film. The plot makes very little sense and the voices coming out of the characters' mouthes are amoung the most ridiculous ever I have ever heard. And the second is the fact that it was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), a show where a guy and two robots sit through a film and crack jokes (this was actually their forth Russian fantasy movie), thus destroying any dignity the film may have had.
The plot, to an American anyway, seems like a bizarre mishmash of various fairy tales such as Cinderella (girl's life is mad miserable by evil stepsister and stepmother, she eventually meets a prince), Hansel and Gretal (an old witch tries to cook the prince) and Beauty and the Beast (the prince is cursed and turned into a bear), with a bit of Lord of the Rings thrown in (talking, walking trees, funny little dwarves). And then there's the title character, Jack Frost (called Father Frost in ths original version), a sort of Santa Clause-esque character who runs around frosting trees and doesn't appear until after 2/3 of this film is over. Apparently, however, this film is actually made up of Russian folklore elements, according to everyone who is into Russian culture and has seen the original version of this film (which explains some of the Tolkien-esque bits, since one of the places Professor Tolkien got his ideas for Middle Earth was Slavic folklore).
Since all I have seen is the MST3K version, I don't really think it's fair of me to judge this film. Yes, to me it seemed really bizarre and whacked, like the Brothers Grimm on LSD, but if I knew more about Russian folklore and could see a subtitled version of this film, I might understand and like it more.
Junior Rodeo Daredevils (1949)
For those who enjoy seeing children thrown from the backs of raging broncos.
This is a pretty darn creepy late 40s short taking place in the West (apparantly Texas) in the late 1940s. I'm really not sure if this is staged or faked, but a showing of it today would anger both animal and children's right activists. It begins with a couple of mischevious youngsters trying to prank a local psycho named Billy Slater by tying a tin can to his horse's tail. Billy catches them, lassos them, and is just about to hang them, but he has a last moment change of heart and decides to spare their lives and instead have them organize a junior rodeo, which is really far more sadistic. He has the kids make posters and then the whole town comes. It is a ghastly freakshow, as poor, innocent kids are thrown from the backs of raging broncos, trampled, maimed, and just plain humilated. It's just as bad for the poor animals as well, who are all humilated and tortured (especially the poor calves). Like Catching Trouble, another vaguely similar short (that also showed on MST3K) it was totally acceptable in it's time, but today would draw outraged crys from both the PETA and the children's rights groups. It was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and is lampooned quite hilariously. Along with Catching Trouble and Days of Our Years, this is one of the more disturbing of MST3K shorts.
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)
A real murky mess.
This film is truly a murky mess, inept in every possible manner. The film has a very stereotypical plot common in pratically every other horror movie (including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which the plot is rather similar to). A young couple and their daughter get lost out in seedy country of El Paso Texas. So they stop at the nearest house to ask for directions. As you can guess, this is a big freaking mistake! They are met by Torgo, the wobbly, bizarre voiced handy-man, who tells them not to stay, because, as he says "The master would not approve". They beg him, and finally he caves, though he warns "The master will be very disturbed." Soon the "master", a Satan-like character bearing a resemblance to Frank Zappa, wakes up and all sorts of horrible things start to happen to family. The ending could be one of the most loathesome, downbeat endings ever.
There are many bad movies. But none of them have the all around ineptness of this (though Space Mutiny comes pretty close). Many films are really bad and cheap, but at least they often have some interesting camera angles and are often fun to watch. Manos has none of that. It's just 70 minutes of murky boredom. If it had beautiful photography, fine acting and the filmmakers tried to make the best of their budget (like many good independent films), it could have been a Night of the Living Dead-like classic. The photography is the definition of murkyness, it looks like an extremely faded Super 8 film and there is not one interesting, imaginative shot in the whole film, and combined with the content it end up looking exactly like a Satanist's home movies. And the sound quality is just as bad, perhaps even a bit worse. The camera the filmmakers used could not record sound (and they were obviously too stupid or too cheap to carry a sound recorder of some kind with them), so the whole film is dubbed, really, really badly. All the voices are done by two people, and they all sound exactly alike, and are so overracted it's downright asinine (especially poor Torgo). The actor's may have been good, but we don't know that. And I found it very sad (and at same time rather darky hilarious), that the man who played Torgo commited suicide shortly after this was released, just proving how much of a downer being in a mind numbingly bad movie can be. This whole mess of a film just proves that fertilizer salesmen aren't good filmmakers! Even watching your relatives home movies is far less boring than this. However, the film was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and that episode is truly a hoot, a true MST3K classic.
Denchû kozô no bôken (1987)
A very, very weird film from the master of the weird.
Here's an early Super 8 film that Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo, Tokyo Fist), made after Phantom of Regular Size and before Tetsuo. It actually quite elaborate for something done in 8mm, in fact nearly as elaborate as Tetsuo and it's nearly as long as well, clocking in about 50 minutes. It's also done in color, like Phantom of Regular Size, is in color, so it kind of looks more like Tetsuo II than the Tetsuo. I saw the film in raw Japanese, so the plot made no sense whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure that even if I perfectly understood Japanese I wouldn't get the plot. It does has far more dialogue than Tetsuo, however, so maybe there's something I'm not getting. It involves a boy with a weird electric pole sticking out of his back. He's constantly being bulled by other kids and he only has one friend. And to make things worse, he's then whisked off to an alternate dimension world where these weird vampires rule the planet (Tommoro Taguchi and the director himself both play vampires). Then the plot gets really weird, as the kid teams up with this lady with a book on her head to fight them. Then there's lots of sick blood draining, nudity, blood curdling screams, transformations, and the kid learns to use his electric pole to light bulbs and meets another electric rod man like himself.
As I said, this movie is very, very weird, but it has that wonderful independent film spirit that most of Tsukamoto's films have and it's very interesting to watch someone's early movies. A better quality, subtitled version would be nice someday and maybe I'd be able to understand this plot just a bit better.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
A truly astounding fantasy film.
As many others agree, this film is truly astounding, one of my favorite movies. It certainly takes the cake as the best fantasy film (far better than Willow and even beating out Ridley Scott's magnificent Legend), infact it may very well be one of the best sci-fi/fantasy films as well. Long have filmmakers sought to make a film adaption of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy novel. John Boorman was originally going to do it, even Stanley Kubrick considered making it before he made The Shining. But all the directors who considered it ended up dropping it, mainly because Tolkien's universe was just too big to put on film without sacrificing something. In the end, the only versions that were made was Ralph Bakshi's atrocious rotoscoped version and the bizarre Rankin Bass conclusion The Return of the King, which turned it all into a musical. Now cut to twenty years later, where truly innovative New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson (Bad Taste, Braindead, The Frighteners), took on the project. He decided that the technology was good enough to properly adapt Tolkien's world to film, and him and his special effects company Weta got to work on creating Tolkien's world. He even used his home country to stand in for Middle Earth and shot all three films simultaniously. The plot involves an extremely powerful ring forged by a dark lord called Sauron in the land of Middle Earth and then taken from his hand. The ring then passed from owner to owner, finally ending up in the hands of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit from the Shire who finds it in the cave of a horrible frog-like creature named Gollum during his travels with 13 dwarves and a wizard named Gandalf to reclaim the dwarves' treasure from a dragon named Smaug. 60 years later, Bilbo disappears on his 111th birthday, betroathing the ring to his nephew, Frodo. However, the wizard Gandalf soon realizes that this is the one ring and that Sauron has returned and is looking for it and so Frodo and his hobbit friends Sam, Merry and Pippin begin a journey to a village called Bree where Gandalf is supposed to meet them. On the way there they are terrorised by nine ghostly riders in black, in reality the Nazgul, Sauron's nine servants, but finally make it to Bree. Gandalf however is not there, but they do meet a rugged, mysterious man named Strider, who takes them out of Bree and into Rivendell, the home of the elves. In Rivendell, Strider is revealed to be Aragorn, the true heir of Gondor, the land of men, and a large council from all around Middle Earth discusses what to do with the ring. Frodo agrees to take the ring into Mordor, a hellish, barren wasteland where Sauron resides, and cast it into Mount Doom, the place it was forged and the only place where it can be destroyed. Accompanying him are Sam; Merry and Pippin; Gandalf; Aragorn; Legolas, an elf from Mirkwood; Gimli, a dwarf; and Boromier, the son of Denethor, the steward of Gondor. But this will in no way be an easy task, as both the forces of Sauron and the forces of Saruman, an evil wizard, are after the ring. And the first of the trilogy did not dissapoint one bit. Simply put, it is truly astounding. PJ did a truly fabulous job turning the books to film. The cinematography is simply breathtaking and truly transports you into another world and the special effects are simply unbelievable and very deserving of their Oscar. I usually am less than fond of CGI (I prefer the old days of Godzilla and Ray Harryhausen), but the CGI work here is simply breathtaking and very believable, often looking very much like a modern day variant on the stop motion effects of Ray Harryhausen or Willis O. Brien. And CGI is not used too much either. There is plenty of old style effects to be found as well, and it is all blended seamlessly. The makeup is also fantastic, totally tranforming actors into the creatures of Middle Earth. And the same with the costumes, which are all very reminiscent of Tolkien's largest influence, early Anglo-Saxon culture (such as Beowulf). The monsters and demons are some of the best things about the movie. Sauron (in his physical form seen at the beginning of the film) looks like a medieval Darth Vader, the Nazgul are magnificently terrifying (looking like combinations of the Headless Horseman and the Ghost of Christmas Past), and the hundreds of Orcs are really cool looking (especially the ones in the Mines of Moria), all looking truly twisted and evil. The Uruk-Hai of Saruman are also awesome, looking like a very evil looking combination of Orcs and gorillas. And the Balrog, WOW! Despite all the film's incredibly strong points, it does have a few weak points, but mainly those involve the cutting of Tolkien's dialogue and the cutting some good chapters (though Tom Bombadil had to go!).