Time for another trip o’ Gentle Visitors to explore the weird and wonderful horror cinema of Asia with your Favorite Movie Watching Catgirl… this time out with a “Nekolishous”  look at the recently released Malay horror effort, “Penanggal”. No hopping vampires… no “ghost in a sack” pocongs… no long haired hantu… not even tree demon kuntilanaks…. this time we get perhaps the freakiest and scariest Asian folklore critter of them all, the flying vampire head called the penanggalan!! Yep. If you’ve been watching Asian horror films as long as this wee lady then you certainly know all about this critter…

Our synopsis? Well try this on: “In 1930s rural Malaysia, tragically deformed young Murni unknowingly inherits evil ghostly powers from her grandmother, Mak Ajeng, which terrifies the village folk in Kampung Jawa, forcing her to flee. Abused by the villagers for her unwanted powers, Murni is saved by the intersession of righteous stranger Syed Yusof. Smitten with him, she is unable to avoid drawing him into becoming hopelessly entangled in her doomed life as a creature of the night.”

Oh heck, yes…. Definitely no darn way a certain goofy kitten is gonna pass this one up. No way… no how. You, however, can benefit from my impulsive desire to risk a couple of dollars on a whim by just reading along to see if this particular monster movie flies or flops before you plunk down your hard earned money for a copy….  C’mon, silly… you know you wanna…

Oh yeah…. ever since a lil’ Indonesian film called “Mystics In Bali” this lady has know all about the penanggalan. What could be crazier and more scary than a woman’s head with it’s gooey, bloody intestines dangling away underneath it as it flies around in the dead of night drinking menstrual blood, eating placentas and intestines… now there’s an “Ewwww” factor for you!! Brrrrr!! So creepy!! Since encountering that film, I’ve snapped up about every one of these goofy monster movies ever made, so naturally when I saw the Trailer for this one, I was hooked.

I’d like to say it was as nifty a film as I had hoped…. Yep. I’d really like to say that. But… unfortunately all such “flying vampire/witch head” movies aren’t created equal and although this one is certainly a slick looking production… especially for a Malay film… it just didn’t succeed at wowing this horror junkie… Sigh…

The basic story isn’t to blame. It’s a relatively simple one… our central heroine Murni (played by Ummi Nazeera) is a poor rural girl growing up in a simple village in 1930′s Malaysia. She’s lonely and despised by her fellow villagers due to two things… her really freaky skin affliction and her association with her grandmother Mak Ajeng (played by Normah Damanhuri). Grandma is some sort of witch, having made a pact with the forces of Evil that grant her the dread powers of the penanggal. Naturally the villagers are getting really cranky every time she swoops in on local women as they give birth to eat their newborn babies. Yep… you just know that’s eventually going to raise that angry mob of torch wielding villagers bent on revenge. Grandma dies in the inferno of her burning hut, but not before passing her pact and evil powers on to Murni, along with her hunchback manservant and bodyguard.

So OK… the downside? Well… Murni now transforms nightly into the horrible vampire monster to prey upon the locals whether she wants to or not. The Upside? Hmmmm? For one thing, now that she’s got the curse, that nasty skin condition she’s always had goes away and Murni turns out to be a pretty hot babe after all. Ahhhh…. and now she’s also a witch too, with her own arsenal of evil magic powers to bewitch and ensnare her victims…. She also inherits her Grandma’s super secret hut out in the jungle, hidden away by the powers of evil magic to keep her safe from the constant searching by vengeful local guys seeking some payback for her attacks on their wives and babies. (Personally… I wonder why her Grandma never seemed to use that hut to stay safe rather than letting the locals hunt her down… seems a stupid lapse on her part, but that’s just one of the irritating plot holes in this one….)

It’s those nagging plot holes that kept your Favorite Catgirl from really liking this one as much as I wanted to. For one… there’s the death of Murni’s parents. Was it an accident? There’s a hint that Grandma might just have had a hand in that… that maybe she wasn’t even really Murni’s real grandma at all. Some really important… really interesting stuff that is just barely hinted at and then dropped like a hot potato never to return to the story at all. Grrrrr!!!! But… but…. inquiring Catgirls wanna know!!! And they never tell us!!

Then there’s the whole “evil pact”…. I mean, what the heck is the point of it? What the heck did Grandma get out of that deal? Why did she make it in the first place? Apparently there was some provision in it that meant she had to pass it along to an heir, but for goodness sake… why? Hmmmm? Maybe the Forces of Evil had a “Two for One” special going on…. or maybe a “Friends and Family” plan? Really got no clue.

And… what about Murni herself? Outside of seeming to want to use her new “non-ugly” looks to find friends and romance, she seems pretty darn OK with the whole nightly painful decapitating transformation to the title monster and it’s midnight gory snack-fest. Can’t say I found much to be sympathetic in her character. Sorry… but that’s pretty much the  truth.

Ahhhh…. and the most puzzling plot thread of the whole thing? How about the inclusion of an arranged marriage for our hero Syed Yusof Al-Attas (played by Azri Iskandar) before he runs into Murni and becomes bewitched and smitten with her for the last half of our story. Sharifah Zahrah Al-Sagof (played by Fasha Sandha) seems like an important character. Beautiful and righteous and filled with concern for her missing fiance she accompanies his brother Umar to find him once he falls into Murni’s clutches. There’s some hint that maybe she and Yusof’s brother Umar (played by Zul Arifin) will find romance along the way (assuming Yusof and Murni manage to overcome the problems of their own doomed affair…) but naturally, chaste and proper as she is, Neko knew that seemed a long shot. One huge problem. She fills the middle third of our story with all those possibilities, only to get horribly scarred by Murni’s acidic blood during an attack…. and then just plain disappears from the plot entirely. Yep. Even when Murni dies at the climax and Yusof miraculously survives thanks to the power of Faith, we never see her again… no mention of whether she lives or dies or if she and Yusof ever do get married. Nothing at all…. Say what? What the heck was she even doing in this story, anyways?

That’s “Penanggal’s” problem in a nutshell all right. Too many unanswered questions… too many plot threats dropped without any reasonable explanation or any rational reason for existing in the first place. Thinly written characters that you just can’t become invested in. The result is a mess of a story with too many contradictory elements and shaky plot motivations all of which manage to derail any possible enjoyment overall. Sigh….

A shame too. The whole folklore behind the penanggalan is just so creepy and cool. There’s so much that could have been done here to make a really good film. But it just plain wasn’t. Sorry but I’m afraid I can only give this one a scant 2 “Meows” out of 5… mostly on the strength of atmosphere and special effects alone. The writers and director might have blown it, but the technical aspects of the film are very well done indeed, especially for a low budget Malay horror effort.

Still… if you want a peek for yourself.. at least the Region 3 DVD is definitely budget friendly at around 6-9$ US with reasonably well done English subtitles and can be found fairly easily.  I suppose that’s some comfort….

Yep… as always there’s a Trailer, filled with all the creepy flying vampire head goodness you might want.

Little Miyuki loved her Saturday mornings…. A big bowl of Rice Crispies, some toast and jam, and a double feature of cheesy monster movies on TV. A weekly ritual which help shape that wee lil’ slip of a kitten into the crazy movie obsessed Catgirl I am today. I always loved those movies. Sure they had the most primitive “special effects” ever… and even then I just knew those films were silly and unintentionally funny, but goodness how I loved watching them. So… when independent filmmaker Mike Mendez decided to put out his latest film, “Big Ass Spider!”, I’m fairly certain that he had someone like me in mind as a perfect example of his target audience…..

Our synopsis goes: “Alex Mathis, freelance exterminator visits an emergency room after being bitten by a spider while on the job. As he’s upstairs receiving treatment, a mortician down in the morgue is attacked by a huge spider hidden inside a recently arrived corpse. Alex, a self-proclaimed spider expert, sets out to find and exterminate the critter, but quickly learns that this is definitely no simple spider. Instead, it turns out to be a top secret military experiment gone horribly wrong. Not long after, the Army quickly descends on the hospital to try to contain the scene. Unfortunately neither they… nor Alex… are adequately prepared to tackle the menace that is… the Big Ass Spider!!”

A giant mutant bug attacking a city and battling the Army. Oh yeah… Neko’s certainly been there before, and golly gee whiz… it’s usually pretty darn fun. Well… at least for me. Carolyn’s a good sport, and usually puts up with my movies full of ghosts, and aliens, and kung-fu crazies, but creepy crawly bugs just make her skin crawl. Looks like I’m gonna owe her a romantic comedy….

Anyways…. you, o’ Gentle Visitors are a different story. You, like a certain goofy kitten, really like these sorts of Grade Z monster films (and if you don’t.. well… boy are you reading the wrong blog, Hehehehe!!) , so whatcha waiting for? Hurry up and “Read On” and let me tell you all about this one!!

Atomic mutant bugs on a rampage. Now there’s a genre staple from my childhood. They used to churn these things out by the dozens back in the day… some pretty darn good, like “Them!” and “Tarantula” to some pretty darn silly ones like “The Black Scorpion” or “The Giant Spider Invasion”. Guess what? I watched them all. Apparently… so did a lot of other crazy fans. It’s for these movie junkies that a movie like “Big Ass Spider!” gets made.

Our story revolves around the buddy comedy pair-up of exterminator Alex Mathis (played by Greg Grunberg) and hospital security guard Jose (played by Lombardo Boyar) who team up after a chance meeting at the emergency room to battle a giant mutant spider that threatens to destroy Los Angeles. Along the way they encounter sexy Army Lieutenant Karly Brant (played by Clare Kramer) and her superior, Major Braxton Tanner (played by Ray Wise) who are futility trying to keep the existence of the mutant monster a secret while still managing to somehow engage it in deadly combat within the city.

It’s a neat idea… one that the SyFy channel managed to use to make a staple of the sort of made-for-TV monster movie fare they seem to specialize in these days. Now mind you… those movies are usually pretty darn terrible fly-by-night productions barely rescued from the trash bin at the last moment to fill programing time at that cable network. However… most of those films know they are pretty much utter crap. Yet.. they somehow manage to rise above it by actually celebrating that very factor, reveling in their ludicrously silly plots, bad acting by nobodies and a few “once-were- somebodies”, along with their laughably cheap looking CGI effects, and it’s that spunky “never-say-too-cheesy” attitude that “Big Ass Spider!” tries to emulate here. For the most part they pretty much succeed in doing just that and even raise the bar a wee bit from time to time. Of particular note in that area is the CGI, which is surprisingly good stuff, the product fittingly enough of ICE Animations, a Pakistani effects group which ought to be given some serious praise for their work throughout. It’s polished, effective, and not at all laughably fake looking like most of the films this one is imitating. Great work guys.

If you watch these sorts of films, then I really don’t need to go into too much detail about the story… trust me it sticks pretty much to the “Giant Bug Stomp-athon” playbook. You know… Giant bug shows up… guy meets girl… girl detests guy… big bug eats some folk… the army shows up… all heck breaks loose… lots of stuff gets destroyed… big explosions… lots of shooting… butt loads of army and civilians die… hero mans up in time to save girl, help army destroy monster… all ends well. Yep. That’s our story.

Like most of these modern takes on this old story, there’s gotta be some comedy thrown in. Those great old black & white films of the 50′s and 60′s lil’ Miyuki watched took all this stuff seriously, but nowadays the idea of big killer bugs seems to go down much better with a few laughs. Here I’d say, “Big Ass Spider!” is at it’s weakest, misfiring and fizzling a bit as it struggles to do any of that. Lombardo Boyar as Jose does his level best to do the comedy sidekick bit, but unfortunately the writers really didn’t give him enough ammunition to pull it off with great success. Maybe that’s the fault of the frantic pace this one takes to tell it’s story. It does seem rushed at points, with only 80 minutes to tell it’s tale as our big ol’ bug goes from chihuahua scaled menace to Godzilla sized city ravager in under an hour. I could have stood to see a couple of more minutes of more personal stuff between our leads scattered here and there throughout to help make the laughs work. It can be done…. “Tremors” managed to take it’s silly burrowing worm monsters and tell a very funny monster movie plot in roughly 96 minutes.  Oh well….

So basically this one ends up being a fairly nice lil’ bit of lite entertainment but nothing more. Palatable and easy to follow, but with no real meat to it’s bones. I give it 3 “Meows” out of 5 but can’t really recommend that you rush right out to grab a copy. Nope. This one is probably one you’ll want to catch when it hits TV, and then it’ll probably bring back some fun nostalgic memories of the “big bug rampage” films you might have watched as a kid.

But…. no matter what any other critics say… it’s still head and shoulders a much better film than “Sharknado”…

Yep…. and now it’s time for a peek at the Trailer… enjoy!

So…. how about a Malay horror film about big killer snakes? Yep.. that’s what your favorite Catgirl’s got for you this time out o’ Gentle Visitors, and to be specific we’re taking a quick peek at “Ular”, the recently released island snake survival/horror effort by director Jason Chong and produced by Showbiz Productions Sdn. Bhd. The word “ular” itself is apparently translated from Malay simply as “snake” and a quick look at the Trailer had this wee lady thinking it’s come sort of a local low budget horror cross between “Anaconda” and “Snakes On A Plane”. But with a whole lot less swearing by Samuel L. Jackson… Hmmmm? “Snakes on an Island” maybe?

Our synopsis? Try this on for style: “Myra, a top crime reporter is sent to do a review of a vacation resort on an island along with a lucky group of sweepstake winners after being suspended from work, and is horrified by what she learns. The island is inhabited by a horde of giant snakes, kept out of the resort only by an electric fence. When the power is down during a heavy storm, the giant snakes are let loose, and the island’s inhabitants have to band together to survive the night.”

Well, this wee lady is certainly game for a movie with oodles of hungry killer snakes, so it wasn’t really all that hard a sell… especially at the crazy low price Malay DVD’s are known for. Wonder if you too might want an evening of deadly snake horror goodness? Then by now, you know the drill…

So… as our film gets going they waste no time showing us just how crazy dangerous these big ol’ snakes are. Somewhere on our picturesque luxury resort island, a couple of construction guys are working away in some dingy dark tunnel… just the sort of creepy place you’d expect monsters to hang out in. Guess what? It’s the secret lair of some of these giant pythons and they do what big hungry constrictor snakes do best… sneak up and grab a hold of you and squish you all dead. Yep… it’s gonna be one of those kinds of stories…

Then we jump to Kuala Lumpur where our heroine crime reporter Myra (played by Lisa Surihani)  is being scolded by her boss. She’s recently been involved in some sort of scandal… the exact details of which I didn’t quite get a handle on, but trust me… it isn’t really important to our story… and as a result, her editor is sending her away to Pulau Batik to do some sort of puff piece review of the new luxury vacation resort there. She’s not really happy about being sidelined for such a worthless task, and to make matters worse, she’ll be on assignment with Remy (played by Yusry Abd Halim) an ex-boyfriend who works at the same newspaper as a photographer. They are currently not on speaking terms… having broken up some time before our movie starts, and Myra is… to say the least.. not exactly happy at having to spend the assignment in his company.

Once there we get introduced to the cast of victims for this one, pretty much consisting of the usual stock characters you’d expect to find in a plot like this one. There’s the married couple with their baby girl… the two flirty party girls and their pet cat… the sleazy rich old business guy looking for illicit sexy fun (see the two flirty party girls… sigh…)… two overly stereotypically flamboyant gay guys… and our two resort owners, Aziz (played by Namron) and his wife, and their dour knife wielding head of security Rambo (Unfortunately not played by Sylvester Stallone… ). Yep… just enough people to assure a good hearty body count once the big ol’ snakes go on the rampage.

How come they haven’t already chowed down on the resort staff? Well that would be because of the honking dangerous electric fence that surrounds the entire place. Shades of “Jurassic Park” anyone? Oooohh!! Ooohh!! Psssssttt!!! Just a small suggestion to anybody thinking of building a theme park, vacation resort, nudist colony, retirement community… whatever… on any island filled to the brim with deadly snakes, killer dinosaurs, inbred cannibal freaks, or any other kooky man eating things that might infest the place…. Please install a back-up generator to kick in when… not if it happens, but when it happens... that system fails. Trust me, it’ll really help mitigate the lawsuits that inevitably follow such an easily predictable event…. I’m just sayin’….

Mind you… we wouldn’t have much of a story without such goofy oversights, but hey…. a little common sense goes a long way. You’d think at least Myra would have figured something stupid was about to happen once she see that fence… but nooooo. She’s too darn distracted by the presence of Remy and whatever pre-movie relationship baggage they’ve got going on.

Anyways…. the electric fence? Yep, that gets put out of commission almost immediately by our two gay guys so they can go have a sexy frolic in the jungle. Not the smartest idea in the world. At least we a spared any further embarrassingly bad “sissy boy” portrayals of male homosexuals the like of which usually fills such Malay, Indonesian, or Thai horror films.

Once the fence goes down, the snakes slip in and start gobbling up our cast one by one forcing Myra and the rest to put aside their differences in a desperate bid to survive until the supply boat returns in a couple of days. Ummmm… yeah. Another thing. If you did do something as goofy as build a vacation resort on an island with killer snakes I’m thinking that you should also have a handy escape boat ready for… oh, I don’t know…. escaping from the snakes if necessary? Yep. Like I said, this story basically seems to have thrown any common sense completely out the window. Even my sweetie rolled in close on the couch to ask lil’ ol’ me the perfectly reasonable question, “Ummm, sweetie? If the island has always been infested with big killer snakes, what did they eat before these idiots came along?” Yes…. what indeed? Inquiring Catgirls soooo have no clue….

So… do Myra and Remy survive? Do they patch up their relationship? Do giant snakes poop in the jungle? Guess you’ll have to watch this one to find out, ’cause this wee Catgirl’s not gonna tell you.

Ummmm.. yeah. I guess I’d have to say “Ular” left me a bit cold, overall. It’s not a truly bad film…. but it’s fair to say it doesn’t strive to be a good one either. At best, it’s here to sell some movie tickets and make a simple payday for most involved. The story is one overused to death and filled with plot holes and just plain lapses in common sense and logic that can’t be overlooked. The acting, while not terrible, is most definitely not inspired either. The sets and effects? All very adequate, if also hitting just the bare minimum needed to pull things off. A shame really as Malaysian filmmakers have shown this wee lady on a number of other occasions that they are capable of doing better. That results in a paltry 2 “Meows” out of 5 for this one when all is said and done. Sorry Malaysia, you just didn’t do it for me this time out…

The disc itself is reasonably good with a widescreen English subtitled format… and at least it comes along at the very budget friendly price I like from Malay releases so there’s that. Still.. unless you’ve seen every “killer snake” movie ever shown on SyFy channel and are a heck of a fan of that genre, you won’t miss much by giving “Ular” a pass.

Here’s our Trailer… all sneaky and filled with killer snake goodness!! (And mostly better than the entire movie itself…)

I know, I know…. I’ve let things slip away from me again, and I’m sorry my ambitious plans for improving my posting here have fallen short… again.  So… how about this wee Catgirl making up for it by taking time for another “shared review” with our Blogging friend and fellow Asian cinema fan Stephen here at the Litterbox and over at his new Blog “Gweilo Ramblings”? Our last couple of efforts have tended to focus on Korean film, but this time out, we thought we might just shake things up a bit with a look at director Juno Mak’s new Chinese Horror effort “Rigor Mortis”, just out on English subtitled Region 3 DVD. So… if you are up for it Gentle Visitors, let’s see if the venerable “Hopping Vampire” film still has a bit of life… or should that be “unlife?… left in it.

You’ve slipped, I’ve slipped. Maybe us Asian film fans are just utterly unreliable? Anyway, glad to be here Miyu! Thank you for welcoming me in as always. Now how about you give us one of your lil’ synopsis things?

Our lil’ “synopsis thing” goes as follows: “Rising to fame with his role as a vampire hunter in the movie Mr. Vampire in the 80s, action star Siu Ho (Chin Siu Ho playing a fantasized version of himself) is now a down-and-out middle-aged man who lives alone in the haunted unit numbered 2442 in a dreary public housing estate. With a broken family and a career that has gone downhill, Siu Ho tries to end his life in his own apartment but ends up having his body possessed by a pair of twin ghosts. Saved by exorcist Ah Yau (Anthony Chan), Siu Ho decides to help his ex-tenant Yeung Fung (Kara Hui) and her son after finding out about their family tragedy. Unknown to them all, Aunt Mui (Paw Hee Ching), a kindhearted old lady in the neighborhood, has a secret coffin hidden in her flat which foreshadows the beginning of a horrific encounter with an old familiar… and apparently very real… Evil.”

Oooohhh!! This lady’s been aching for this one since seeing the Trailer, crazy horror film junkie that I am… Will it score big with both Stephen and I or land badly with an audible “plop”? Only one way to know… and that’s to give it a look see. You of course, can benefit from our fanatic desires for Asian horror thrills by simply kicking back and giving both our reviews a read (take a peek over HERE for Stephen’s version… ) as we trade opinions. (Pssst!! That’s your cue to “Read On”!!… poke, poke!! )

Ahhhh… the glory days of Hong Kong cinema… and with that exuberant explosion of film, the first chance for a Western audience… and a certain wee Catgirl… to experience the creepy Horror/ Comedy mash-ups that were the “Hopping Vampire” genre. At one point it seemed as if was nearly impossible to have a HK horror film without including the “Jiang Shi” in much the same way that the Indonesians cant seem to make one nowadays without our friend the “ghost-in-a-sack”, the Pocong. Silly… oh yes, especially to most Western audience sensibilities… but also so darn unique and entertaining as well. I first encountered them in the classic “Mr. Vampire” on a suspiciously bootleg-looking VHS tape picked up at an Asian market during a trip to the city with friends waaaay back in my freshman year of college. Crazy… goofy…. and hardly the least bit scary… it was still the neatest thing since “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein” that I’d ever seen… and with Kung-Fu!! One viewing later… and I was hooked.

I have to be totally honest here. My experiences with the genre are a little complex. On the one hand, “Mr Vampire” was one of the very first Hong Kong films I ever saw (late night crazy movie night on one of our terrestrial channels), but on the other hand little Stephen wanted his horror to be a little more hardcore back then. And also, Hong Kong humour can be bloody near impenetrable sometimes. Except when it is being all “Three Stooges” or as you say “Abbott and Costello”.

Well… I’m a few years…. **ahem**… “more seasoned”… than I was back in those days, but I’m still a big fan of that genre. Hong Kong somehow stopped really making them for a few years… most of their subsequent “vampire” movies looking a lot more like the monsters in our Western films than the traditional ones in the old stories. But luckily… singer, record producer, actor, and now freshman director, Juno Mak at least, thinks there’s some legitimate scares and thrills left in those quaint Jiang Shi legends and decided to see what he might do with the genre.

“Rigor Mortis” is his first attempt in the directors chair, and having watched it I can say he certainly strikes this lady as as big a fan of the genre as I am. It’s a good attempt to meld the best of that old Chinese movie folklore with the edgier, bloodier, more vicious approach to horror film-making you see in Japan, Korea, and Thailand. Much of that is due, no doubt, to his co-producer on this film, Takashi Shimizu, who was behind the “Ju-on” series in Japan.

Juno Mak certainly is an interesting character. Fairly derided as a pop star, he has slowly worked his way down the film ladder, starting with a bit of Producing and Script Writing (along with some acting) before sitting down behind the lens proper. What his previous work suggests is very much a love of genre films, and a desire to reinvent. So I was excited to see what he could do. Despite the involvement of Takashi Shimizu, whose “Ju-on” films I detest!

Well Shimizu’s influence is definitely felt in the two ghostly twins subplot, but this is primarily a Chinese film…. despite many elements that would be comfortable in any “Long Haired Ghost” film out of Japan… and wisely director Mak makes a conscious effort to include as many veteran film stars from the heyday of the HK Hopping Vampire craze to balance things out, including our story’s main protagonist Siu-hou Chin (one of the stars of the classic films “Mr Vampire”, “Vampire Vs Vampire”, “Chinese Vampire Story”, “The Seventh Curse” & “Vampire Warriors”), who pretty much plays a fictionalized version of himself throughout our story.

And this is something I thought was very clever, I do like a bit of meta-textual narrative myself, although it did take a little bit of google and wikipedia for me to actually understand.

Our story starts as the final apocalyptic battle of the film ends… with Uncle Yau (played by Anthony Chan, fellow veteran of “Mr. Vampire” as well as “Mr Vampire 4″) slumped against a wall, one arm missing and smoking a last cigarette while Chin lies in a heap nearby, both of them looking battered, muddy, torn to bits and most certainly near death. Chin rolls over to face the dawning sky…. and begins our tale with a brief monologue:  “I left this village when I was 13, and became a leading man when I was 16 – I never thought it would be when I hit 50 that I finally become human. They say film stories are absurd – but I think real life is more so….”

I am a bit torn over this… not a big fan of showing us how things end up BEFORE we have met everyone, kind of takes away a good deal of suspense in my opinion.

Truthfully I wasn’t terribly fond of that framing device either… too much information delivered far too early… But it leads to the bulk of our tale, told in flashback and beginning as has-been movie idol Chin moves into the dreary and rundown public apartment tower that becomes the backdrop for all the horror to come.  He used to be somebody… but that was years ago… and the residents barely seem to notice the celebrity as he makes his way to apartment 2442 with the help of security guard Uncle Yin (played by Hoi-Pang Lo). Chin could care less about being unnoticed… as he doesn’t really intend to stay long in their midst. Nope… Chin’s life has hit rock bottom and with the final loss of a wife that finds him a useless and embarrassing nobody and the little son he loves and will never be allowed to see again, he’s decided that his pitiful Life is nothing he wants to endure any longer. He intends Apartment 2442 to be merely the last stop in his fall, and the place he’s chosen to die. Too bad somebody else already beat him to it there…

I actually found the backstory of Chin’s family a little underdeveloped. I couldn’t work out if his family had died, or simply disowned him. The voice-mail from his son and the drawn on wristwatch were great bits of character, but I am an inquisitive sort, and I wanted to know more.

Things get weird even before that when Uncle Yin makes a big deal out of carrying out the ordinarily traditional blessing done to welcome a new resident to their apartment…. and it’s pretty darn easy to see that the place freaks him out, but Chin ignores those creepy red flags and after Yin departs, carries on with his plan to hang himself from the ceiling light. Then shit gets freaky….

Two female ghosts appear…. crawling out of the floor beneath a dust sheet as Chin strangles and then try to possess his body. Luckily for him they are thwarted at the last minute by the unexpectedly timely intervention of resident noodle shop owner… and former vampire hunter… Yau, who saves Chin, beats the ghosts out of him and then deals with the panicked neighbors.

From that point forward, wearing the marks of the noose around his neck, Chin becomes immersed in the odd and unsettling supernatural goings-on at the apartment while he struggles to understand the “second chance” he’s been given and his personal need to somehow repay Yau. The story slows down a bit here… our ghosts keep plaguing Chin, looking for another chance to get him, and he becomes aware of the strained lives of the others in the building. Like nice Aunty Mui (played by Hee Ching Paw) and her husband Tung (played by Richard Ng of “Mr Vampire 3″), bedraggled and possibly crazy homeless mother Feng (played by Kara Hui of “A Chinese Ghost Story (2011)”) and her white haired son Pak, or creepy Gau, Uncle Yau’s rival and nemesis here at the housing estate.

This was the part of the film I actually enjoyed the most. There is a tender relationship between Mui and Tung, a nice switch on expectations with Feng and especially Pak, and Gau I think I am more sympathetic towards than you.

They all have their parts to play in the horror to come, some willingly, some reluctantly. Eventually things come to a head when Gau “aids” grieving Auntie Mui in restoring her husband to “life” through Black Magic and ends up unleashing her resurrected husband on the residents of the apartment building as an unstoppably deadly Jiangshi vampire coupled with the powers of the begrudged spirits of the murdered twins that once lived… and then horribly died… in Chin’s apartment.

Although definitely a bit slow in the beginning, this is where our film picks up. Chin and Yau reluctantly team up to fight the vampire, Yau with his knowledge of all things Taoist sorcery and vampire lore, and Chin with his skills at wushu, learned after years and years of HK action movies. The resulting battle is tense and completely unlike the more comedic ones this Catgirl remembers from those old movies. If nothing else, “Rigor Mortis” definitely manages to make the Jiangshi a terrifying monster rather than a goofy comedic plot element. Nope… this particular critter is badass. Seriously.

Vampire Tung is seriously badass. Although the final battle I found a little confusing to follow, Mak had turned a comedic threat into a serious one. But I so wish it had more time to be shown off.

I just wish there had been more screen time to enjoy that. The real horror elements don’t get into gear until well over 2/3rds of the way into this one. Yes, yes… the ghostly twins have some moments early on, but even they and their tragic back-story are merely teasing side plots to the story of the vampire itself.

Meh. Those ghostly twins. I liked their back story. And I understand how they fed into the main plot. But they really were a cgi-tastic diversion and side-show.

Now mind you… while overall this wee Catgirl found the film to be pretty good, I’m afraid not all is without problems here. There are some minor quibbles that left nagging questions for me. Like our villain Mr. Gau… He’s definitely the bad guy of the story, a rival “sorcerer-for-hire” to the more principled Yau, but exactly what their relationship is is never really explained. They don’t like each other… that much is plain to see, but what’s the basis of that dislike? It’s never mentioned, but could have helped explain the most puzzling idea of the story. That, of course, is why in heck Gau would want to raise up a Jiangshi in the first place. He doesn’t strike one as an idiot… he’s completely aware of the danger such a monster represents.. and yet he not only does it, but leaves the monster in the tender care of an old lady with no idea of the true nature of the monster she’s hiding away and only the most vague instructions on it’s care…. rules that sound as dumb and arbitrary as the ones from “Gremlins”….. no wonder it gets loose and promptly goes on a rampage.

Now this I actually got. I totally agree with you about how come Yau and Gau seem to have an enmity that isn’t given any real explanation. But I think Gau had the bigger picture in mind. He was using Mui here. The idea was that Vampire Tung could have been a strong enough vessel to rid room 2442 of the powerful twins. So his end goal was laudable, his means of doing so far less justified.

Then there’s the “accidental” death of Uncle Tung. He’s killed by a fall down the concrete stairwell in the apartment complex. A fall that seems to be the fault of some ghostly child that tricks him into tripping on the stairs… but what ghost is it? We never learn… it doesn’t get mentioned again and, unless I missed something… seemingly is unrelated to either the ghost twins of 2442, our evil resident sorcerer Gau, or… well… anything else. Grrrr, how I dislike random plot threads….

Nope. I have no idea either. All that talk of children’s voices and so on.. one wonders if there was yet another subplot excised from the final film. Though with what you are about to say, they maybe didn’t excise enough!

Another inexplicable thing…. at one point mid way through our story Chin and crazy Feng’s little boy Pak witness a ghostly procession of 12 foot tall ghosts in traditional traveling clothing from out of a kung-fu movie moving through the hall ways of the building. It’s eerie… it’s creepy… and it apparently has nothing at all to do with anything in the story, nor is it mentioned or explained again. Say what? Random ghostly haunting? Who the heck knows… but boy could Chin and Yau have used these guys help at the conclusion during their final deadly fight  with the vampire.

So… that seems to be my overall feeling here. There’s a lot of good stuff on hand. Great classic actors from all the old movies I watched and loved… lots of good atmospheric settings.. a nice melding of Chinese and Japanese flavors in the horrors on display… and a truly gruesome and effectively scary hopping vampire. Put all those together and they make for a basically satisfying if somewhat uneven cinema experience that doesn’t disappoint, but that could have perhaps been a bit tighter and better paced with maybe a little more logic and plot cohesiveness added. Stephen might disagree with lil’ ol’ me, but I lean towards a 3 “Meows” for this one, and I’d be interested in seeing more of Juno Mak’s efforts in future if this one is to be considered his debut in the director’s chair. He’s got a few things to learn, but there’s obvious talent and a real eye for things evident too.

I somewhat liked it. I thought it was smart, good looking, full of love. I liked the stuff where he reinvented and re-purposed ideas. Loved the meta-textual elements. Sadly, it was just too bloody busy. We could have happily dropped whole subplots and given a much tighter and more satisfying movie. But I am given hope that Mak might be a real talent. I’ll actually agree with you on the “Meow” rating. Solid, unspectacular but with much to respect, and to adore.

Yep. Overall a nice night for me and Carolyn to share some quality “movie time” on the couch. It hasn’t made her any more of a fan of the wild films I love, but then this girl is just too darn fond of these sorts of goofy films to live without. Thank goodness she’s a good sport and I’ve oodles of good blogging friends like Stephen to share them with… Can’t wait till next time.

We have a Trailer of course… as if this wee lady would ever make you leave a review without one…

In my endless search for nifty new foreign DVD goodies, Neko’s recently been poking about Latin America for a horror movie fix and scored a winner with the 2013 English subtitle friendly Spanish Region 2 release of the Venezuelan film “La Casa Del Fin De Los Tiempos” aka “The House At The End of Time”.

Our synopsis? How’s this grab you… “Weird and mysterious events obscure the real truth behind a woman’s supposed murder of her husband and the disappearance of a son that result in her imprisonment for 30 long years. Paroled to house arrest in the same creepy home she left years ago, Dulce discovers that those eerie mysteries still exist and still link her to the past and that crime in ways she never imagined…”

Creepy haunted house… unexplained supernatural goings-on…. and murder!! OK… OK… I’m on board. Like there would actually be any chance I wouldn’t be…. Wanna know all the details for your own self? Then by all means, “Read On”… C’mon…. is this wee Catgirl really gonna have to beg?

So… OK… Here’s a question for you, Gentle Visitors: “When is a ghost story not a ghost story?”

Well that’s what “La Casa Del Fin De Los Tiempos” is all about all wrapped up in a nutshell. I mean, “it quacks like a duck” and all, but then it pulls the old ” bait & switch” with a viewer just when you think you know whats going on. Ordinarily that sort of thing really ticks this kitten off. I mean… when I scootch down on the couch with my sweet Carolyn all excited to watch a scary ghost story, I expect to see a scary ghost story. Lots of movies before have done the whole “reasonable explanations for all the supernatural stuff” twist to me…. and I always hate it sooooo darn much! Yep…. that’s right. I’m looking at you Chinese Horror films under communist film censors… and you too, Hindi films. All of you. Stop trying to tell Neko to grow up and be a “big girl” and stop believing in ghosts. Hey…. I like ghosts. And monsters, witches, ninjas, atomic mutants, Bigfoot, cannibal hillbillies, and Hitler’s pickled brain-in-a-jar. (I swear… That last one is hidden away by order of Winston Churchill  in a secure vault under the Tower of London…. Seriously, I just know it…  Hehehehe!!!)

So…. errrr…. your Favorite Catgirl’s rambling crazy rant aside, does that mean this one isn’t a supernatural suspense thriller?

Luckily for us, it still is. Just not the one you might have expected from watching the Trailer. Nope. Not at all. It’s soooo darn much smarter than just the old “bait & switch” Scooby-Doo plot and actually managed to take it’s story in a direction completely unexpected while preserving the creepy ideas that made me want to see it in the first place. Yay!!

Mind you now… that means I can’t really go much into the plot of the story this time out without blowing that for my Gentle Visitors, so bear with me while I try my own hand at obscuring the details all the while gushing about how much I really enjoyed this one.

Its starts out pretty much like you might expect a ghost story to, with our heroine Dulce (played by Ruddy Rodríguez) waking up in a darkened hallway amid shards of broken glass, her face slashed and bleeding, obviously terrified and confused. Frantically she searches the eerie old house for her son Leopoldo (played by Rosmel Bustamante)… and in the process finds her husband Juan José (played by Gonzalo Cubero) in the cellar, dying from a kitchen knife jammed deeply into his chest. While the shock of that discovery still shakes her… she finally glimpses her son… only to see him yanked away into darkness right before her eyes. Impossibly… he’s nowhere to be found in the creepy cellar room he was pulled into and from which there is no other exit. When dawn comes, the police arrive… they listen to Dulce’s insane story of ghosts… find her dead husband’s body still with the knife sticking in his chest covered with Dulce’s own fingerprints and charge her with the murders of both her husband and her inexplicably missing son. This is usually where most movies end… but for “La Casa Del Fin De Los Tiempos”, we’re only getting started.

30 years pass, and by some quirk of the Venezuelan penal system, the now aged Dulce is paroled from prison to house arrest for humanitarian reasons. Taken back to the scene of her horrible experiences, she’s confined to the house by two police officers and allowed only a single visitor, a local priest (played by Guillermo García). He’s curious about Dulce, and through his curiosity gets her to start opening up about the events before and leading up to that terrible night. The more he hears of her story… the more convinced he becomes that perhaps she’s telling the truth… that she didn’t murder her husband and son… and that maybe her deepest fears are real. That they were killed by the house itself…. Ooooohhhh!! Sounds like time for a flashback…

And the middle of our story is just that. We travel back 30 years to find a younger Dulce living a miserable life with a husband she really doesn’t love in a creepy mansion he got for a pittance from the government eager to sell an ill-omened  property to anyone willing to buy it. Ill-omened? Why certainly… the place has had oodles of inhabitants since it was built by a crazy Masonic Englishman in the 1880′s… all of whom have mysteriously disappeared without a trace over the years. Awww… crap. Isn’t that always the way it goes?

At this time, Dulce is shown to have two sons…. the older Leopoldo whom we’ve seen, and an adorable younger son Rodrigo (played by Héctor Mercado). The two boys are inseparable lil’ rascals, trying Dulce’s patience with their endless shenanigans around the neighborhood, while the perennially out-of-work Juan José wears away at Dulce’s tolerance and desire for something better for herself and the boys. They’ve been in the house for 5 long years without much else going on… until now.

Strange events begin to happen, and Dulce and Leopoldo begin to think that perhaps they are no longer alone in the rambling mansion… until one night when some strange woman tries to attack the both of them. Human or Ghost? No one knows… not even the creepy prerequisite blind medium Dulce brings to the house…. and the police are skeptical of any weird story, chalking it all up to the strained marital relations that are obvious to them from the get go.

Whoever the intruder is… she’s got a warning for them. A cryptic note for Dulce telling her Juan José will try to kill Leopoldo… and an even weirder warning for Leopoldo to avoid his younger brother for the next three days or risk losing him. Naturally… Juan José puts a stop to any idea of Leopoldo not keeping track of his little brother, and soon Rodrigo is accidentally killed by a baseball to the face at the hands of Leopoldo. Oops.

Naturally that’s gonna create problems. Poor Leopoldo is wracked with guilt… and worse… Dulce has been keeping a secret from them all that guarantees Rodrigo’s death will now push Juan José to the brink of murder.

This is where things start to speed up and the whole idea of a “ghost story” goes flying out the window. Can’t really tell you much more without ruining things, but let me tease you by saying that by the time all is revealed, our heroine is both innocent… and guilty… of the murder of her husband and the mysterious fate of Leopoldo. How? Well this wee lady thinks you are going to want to find that out for yourself. It’ll be worth it….

Director and screenwriter Alejandro Hidalgo out does himself with this one. He actually manages to do one sweet little take on the ol’ “Ghost story with no ghost” tease. Our story here is simple, yet suitably twisted enough to let it all play out in a way I found very enjoyable without making a viewer feel cheated. There’s great cinematography and atmosphere supported by a cast of excellent actors all combined to give one a very satisfying experience movie-wise. This one was a very, very pleasant surprise indeed and even made my usually picky sweetie happy with it’s plot that didn’t leave her confused by all the foreign stuff the way some of my cinema choices can. This picky ghost lovin’ Catgirl can easily give it a well deserved 4 “Meows” out of 5 for doing things in such a clever and well orchestrated fashion. (Yep… I  sure scored big “girlfriend points” with this one…. And my Carolyn also found the ending both sad and touching all at the same time… just as I’m thinking most of my Gentle Visitors will as well.)

I didn’t see this one on the original Venezuelan DVD… in fact I’m not even certain one exists. I managed to find this on on a Spanish Region 2 release, done Widescreen and letterboxed with good separate subtitles in both English and French for those of us not conversant in Spanish. It was a tad bit pricy to import here to my lil’ Litterbox all the way from Spain, but given my enjoyment, well worth the 30$ US it came to.

Yep…. now there’s a Trailer available, and to leave things in our usual way…. here it goes.. Enjoy!!

Time for another trip to Malaysia for this wee Catgirl as we take a peek this time out at yet another Malay vampire horror offering, “Paku: Bila Cinta Menjadi Seram”. In this one we get tragically doomed romance… shamanism and black magic… and a much more scary look at their local vampire, the Pontianak than our last few Malay films have given us. Always a good thing in this lady’s book… ;)

The synopsis goes like this: “Loving young couple, Fahmi and Raina seem to have it all. A tender romantic life together and a cute daughter they both love. Tragically, disaster strikes while Raina is pregnant with their second child and she gets crushed to death inside their car during the disastrous collapse of their apartment building one fateful day. Unable to live without her, Fahmi does the most desperate thing he could think of, to try and bring her back to life with the help of a shaman in violation of all the laws of Allah that they might be together. But… Raina is not a human anymore… now she is a blood hungry Pontianak… and only Evil can come from her continued existence in the Mortal world.”

Yep. Definitely sounds like my kind of movie. Think it might also be yours, Gentle Visitor? Wanna know more about the creepy goings-on? Then, by goodness, you know what comes next… ;)

This one is a minor little film, and one I almost missed picking up when it became available in Malaysia. You see, there was another recent Malay horror film also titled “Paku” that came out on DVD just a wee bit ago, and sadly… it was one of the one that made an appearance without the usual English subtitles most Malay DVD’s have.  Given that… I almost passed this one up, only figuring out it was an entirely different film while trying in vain to hunt down subtitles to that first one. Luckily… I say almost…

This version of “Paku” came to me along with a few other recent Malay discs and was…. surprisingly… hard subbed into English. Hard subbed? Yep, I kid you not. It’s the way some of these from Malay DVD distributor, Golden Satellite Distribution, seem to come. Weird…. given that they were never really intended for export outside of Malaysia, but instead produced for domestic audiences that should only need the Malay audio track and I would think would find those un-removeable subtitles in a foreign language just downright annoying. But what the heck do I know…. maybe there’s a sizable chunk of Malays that don’t speak Malaysian. (Pssst! Gentle Visitors… feel free to educate a curious kitten on this subject. C’mon… chime in and let me know!! ;) )

Anyhoo… this one gets going as we get introduced to Fahmi and Raina (played by Johan Asari and Aisha Ilias respectively), a young couple who are locked in the throws of loving bliss with a sweet little daughter and another child on the way. They seem to have it all… Until tragedy strikes and shatters that happy existence forever.

One day… with the help of some CGI effects… their apartment building suffers a catastrophic collapse while they are just outside in their car. Fahmi manages to escape and save his daughter Sophie just in the nick of time… but poor Raina gets trapped by a sticky seat-belt and is crushed along with the car right before their horrified eyes.

She dies at hospital and Fahmi goes to pieces. Despite his wise old father’s assurances that all things are part of Allah’s plan… that Raina will be at her reward in Heaven, Fahmi can’t let her go. His obsession traps her spirit between worlds and pretty soon it isn’t long before he’s dead set on bringing her back from beyond the grave so they can go back to their happy marriage together once more. Ummm…. yeah…. somehow you just know that’s not gonna go well.

Eventually he isolates himself from his traumatized daughter, sending her to live with his parents while he works his grief out… but in reality, he just wants the secrecy to work with a shaman guy to effect Raina’s return. Yep… this guy is more than willing to use the powers of Black Sorcery to first let Fahmi chat with the spirit of his wife by enticing her to possess the body of his best buddy… all the while making the surprising attempt to tell Fahmi just how wrong and evil all this stuff is. Yep… he’s a pretty strange practitioner of the Dark Arts, alright. Naturally Fahmi still can’t let it all go, so of course that leads the shaman to decide that to make everything work for Fahmi, they’ll need to dig up Raina’s corpse, pound a big ol’ coffin nail through the top of her head, sacrifice her lil’ pet bunny rabbit, and transform her into a Pontianak. Yep… that oughta fix things.

Mind you… our shaman still keeps telling Fahmi that this is about the most evil thing he could do to be with Raina, so I can’t really figure out why he did it, being so darn dead set against such evil stuff. Must be a “Black Sorcerers Union” rule or something…. Oh well… at least now we’re gonna get some vampire action. ;)

By day… Raina seems all normal and pretty and loving…. the perfect wife he remembers. But… once night falls, Raina gets…. well… all freaky. She starts prowling the night, hunting down her loving hubby’s enemies from work… the ones so darn pissed that Fahmi seems to have become his company’s “golden boy” practically overnight. Little do they dream it’s all because of some supernatural rule that says the master of a Pontianak becomes lucky in all his business dealings. Stupidly… they enlist their own evil shaman to slap some witchcraft curse on Fahmi, only to have vampire Raina swoop in and whack their shaman and send his curse after them instead. Yep Karma’s a bitch…. Too bad Fahmi’s also gonna have to pay for his own bad Karma before everything is over and done.

This is… unfortunately the part of the film that is at it’s weakest. I mean… who did Fahmi think he was gonna fool when he just starts living his life again with the wife everybody knows died horribly in that apartment collapse? There’s some goofy plot stuff where Fahmi sticks a wig on Raina and insists to people that this new Raina isn’t that Raina. That they don’t look that much alike… but all that stuff is pretty darn stupid and shouldn’t have fooled anybody. I mean what the heck did he think he was going to tell his parents… or his daughter for that matter… when they dropped by to see how he was coping. About the only people it does seem to fool are the idiots at his office, and I’m here to tell you, they had to be pretty thick for that to happen. Oh well… let’s not let a little thing like common sense get in the way of our vampire fun….. ;)

OK, OK… now having a bloodthirsty vampire bride has to eventually bite you in the ass (No pun intended…. Ok… maybe a little pun intended… ;) ) and as our film reaches it’s climax, Raina starts having problems maintaining her pretense of being human. She gives birth to their child…. which sorta freaks the shaman guy out a bit given she’s a dead woman after all… and so they employ a nanny to help with things. Yep… you guessed it. The nanny starts figuring out not all is kosher with her new mistress and pretty soon all heck breaks loose. Shaman guy makes his dramatic appearance… tells Fahmi that Raina is a tortured soul and that he must agree to send her spirit to Hell to end the horror he has unleashed. Yep… it’s too late for that and vampire Raina goes all crazy ass on him before he can work the appropriate spell to end things. Awww  crap, right?

Luckily for us, Fahmi’s dad seems to be somewhat more than just a very moral old guy. He’s got some Holy scriptures that let him open a big ol’ crack to Hell so that Raina can be sucked down along with the demon baby to eternal damnation saving Fahmi and Sophie just in the nick of time.

Yep. That’s pretty much it. Not the most satisfying ending, but at least it neatly sews up our somewhat spurious plot all in around 90 minutes.

So what’s the overall verdict? Well… “Paku” honestly isn’t the most coherent or sensible story I’ve seen out of Malaysia and some of it required your Favorite Catgirl to dial up her personal “Suspension of Disbelief” meter to seriously questionable levels with only dubious success at best. Still… I did enjoy the romantic stuff between our leads Johan Asari and Aisha Ilias. They make a cute couple. They just really do, and maybe it’s my own need to go all soft and gooshy about romance and love of late, but for me this part of the film worked. The effects weren’t bad either… and have to say it was certainly nice to get a Malay Pontianak film that didn’t treat it’s monster as fodder for comedy for once. That leaves me feeling  perhaps a bit more generous than I might otherwise be.

With that I can let this one squeak from 2 to 3 “Meows” out of 5. Not a great film, certainly flawed in some very basic ways, but better than many I’ve seen  out of Malaysia of late. The DVD? Disappointingly hard subbed into English as I’ve mentioned, but hey… at least it’s subtitled at all, unlike that other “Paku” film I mistook this one for initially. On the plus side… it’s a cheap one for movie nite at right around 8-9$ US and as always… that’s greatly appreciated here at “La Casa De Neko”…. But… in reality it’s probably not a disc I’d expect many of you Gentle Visitors to want to rush right out and grab a copy of. That’s just how it is…. :)

What’s that? The Trailer, you ask? But of course!! ;)

Well… it’s finally here. The Region 2 UK DVD release for the 2013 Vietnamese swordplay adventure “Mỹ Nhân Kế 3D” aka “The Lady Assassin”that I’ve been waiting for anxiously for like what seems forever!! I know this one was supposed to be another “shared review” with Stephen from Gweilo Ramblings but seeing as he’s already covered this one over at the Asian cinema blog Easternkicks.com, I can’t see making him repeat himself all over again so instead I thought I’d go ahead and do one of my own and not bug him again quite so soon. (Pssst! No worries Stephen… we’ll get the chance next month if you like when the Vietnamese horror goodie “House in the Alley” comes out on Region 1 DVD… ;)

Our synopsis for this one goes along these lines: “In the remote Duong Son Tavern, the beautiful and mysterious landlady Kieu Thi along with the help of her three gorgeous hostesses lures weary travelers, bandits and officials into her establishment for what they promise will be an unforgettable time. But rather than selling their bodies, the women rob and murder their guests, hording a growing pile of gold for a rainy day. Their latest haul reveals a coffin which conceals a beautiful young noblewoman – the bound and desperate Linh Lan. She begs them to spare her life and train her in their martial art style, to become an assassin, so she can kill evil general Quan Du, who she claims murdered her family. Kieu Thi agrees, and takes Linh Lan under her wing, but it soon transpires that not everyone at Duong Son Tavern is who they originally claimed to be.”

Pretty Vietnamese girls with deadly Kung Fu skills… plenty of slimy evil bastards that truly need killing… some sweet love and romance for spice… (maybe a little subtle lesbian subtext too if I’ve learned anything about exploitation film-making… )…and… wait for it…. some anachronistic beach volleyball! Yep… seems a certain wannabe Wuxia Princess is gonna have all the bases covered with this one and then some… ;)

So, by the time this DVD finally arrived, I’d been driven nearly crazy with anticipation for it…. If there was one thing about those old Shaw Brothers Kung Fu classics that I watched as an eager and impressionable little girl, it was the very clear idea that you could grow up to be a very pretty… very sexy… and very feminine girl and still manage to kick serious butt… just like the big boys!! As a result.. when this crazy lil girl wasn’t trying to be her favorite heroine “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”, I was jumping about swooshing an old curtain rod around and fantasizing about a life of perilous Martial Arts adventures as “Snow Leopard Swordmistress Miyuki”…. (Yes, yes… “Snow Leopard”… because darn it… they are just soooo amazingly pretty kitties compared to tigers or lions…at least that was wee Miyuki’s opinion after seeing them once on a National Geographic TV special… or was it Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom? ;) )

Well… I’m a grown woman now (although at times Carolyn and a few others might dispute that… :) ), but those old childhood fantasies still have their power, and having rediscovered the Wuxia film in college, I find that I still enjoy those sorts of stories just as much now as waaaay back in my youth. From a look at the Trailer for this one… I’d say that’s the case for a lot of other people too. I’m thinking this film was made just for those of us who still think “Come Drink With Me” might possibly be the greatest swordplay film ever made…

However… in fairness… it must be said that this one is a lot more about our bevy of gorgeous Vietnamese ladies than the kung-fu. Sort of the way “Charlie’s Angels” isn’t quite the police show that “Cops” is…. ;) (Not that my sweetie was complaining, mind you… for once she actually seemed to perk up during one of our Kung Fu  flavored Movie Nites. But then… **ahem**… she does have a certain weakness for sexy Asian ladies. ;) )

And yes… even your Favorite Catgirl herself has to admit, the ladies were pretty darn sexy… but their kung-fu skills were definitely not their greatest assets on display throughout this one. Sigh… At least the Vietnamese stunt team behind it all knows their stuff. Thanks to them, the girls manage a passable display of wire-fu antics that… accidentally or on purpose… was a fairly credible imitation of some of the early Shaw actresses I remember from back in the day. It gives this one that “vintage feel” and makes for a nice homage to those old films… and given the limitations of budget and the fact that this film is a Vietnamese movie rather than a big budget Chinese one, makes for more than acceptable results overall.

So what about our story? A simple one that certainly sounds like one of those old movies too. Madam Kieu Thi (played by Vietnamese fashion model Thanh Hang) runs a tea-house brothel waaaay out in the boondocks where she and her bevy of beautiful prostitute/ waitresses waylay stupid male travelers with their own version of the old “honey trap”. She’s a ruthless and highly skilled Martial Artist… although no mention is made in our story of exactly how she acquired her lethal skills… and has collected her girls and taught them the skills of the assassin. The girls follow her order to the letter… all hoping that eventually they’ll amass enough gold to split up and go their separate ways and live better lives than the miserable ones that landed them here.

After one such ambush of a group of wanderers nets them a coffin, they discover pretty young kidnapped noblewoman Linh Lan (played by actress and model Tang Thanh Ha) trussed up inside, last survivor of the massacre of her family. Rather than kill her outright, she’s given the choice of undergoing the rigorous training to join their gang and earn the skills she’ll need to hunt down wicked General Quan Du (played by Thai-Hoa Le), the man responsible for her family tragedy.

Ahhhh… so it’s that kind of story, right? Yep. Revenge melodrama with the prerequisite “training montage” and everything. Here’s where the beach volleyball comes in… ;) I mean… if you are going to have a bunch of frisky ladies learning to kill people they might as well do it while playing volleyball, right? And if you are going to play volleyball, it might as well be at the beach, right? And… if you’ve gotten all sweaty playing beach volleyball…. errr… I mean practicing kung-fu… then you’ve got to cool down in a “girl’s only” hot tub when you are done, right? You’d be crazy not to…. Heck… it worked for the “Dead Or Alive” girls, and from watching this one, I’d say it seems somebody in Vietnam paid oodles of attention to that fine film, Hehehehe!!

Mind you… all this goofy plot anachronism does allow Linh Lan to learn to use our ladies’ signature weapon. A big wiffleball on a rope… color coordinated to each girl’s costume… to it’s best potential as a weapon of death. Flying guillotine it ain’t, but it’s a fun weapon none the less and suits the “fluffy and girly” tone to a tee. Sort of like “Barbie Meets Master Killer”.

Now… as with all such melodrama, there’s a few “twist” elements to the plot that rear their ugly heads. Can’t tell you all about them without spoiling it all, but let’s just say that a few relationships get strained by the end of this one and things wont end well for… well… most everybody by the time the dust settles.

There are a few odd moments here and there where the plot seems forced… where things from before the story starts don’t seem to get introduced or explained adequately and the introduction of our villain only in the final climax without any real lead-in just seems awkward and wrong, but having seen few Vietnamese films, I’m not really sure if this is typical of their narrative style and pacing so I’m willing to let these minor objections slide.

Now… you might be getting the sense that I didn’t like this one. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is a downright silly film filled with non-martial artists and loads of risqué titillatingly hinted lesbian moments… especially between Madam Kieu Thi and our heroine Linh Lan. However, none of it is tasteless or overdone, and for me at least, brought back memories of the 1972 Shaw film “Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan”. Now there’s a film about killer courtesans….. ;) But… all in all… that’s exactly what “Mỹ Nhân Kế 3D” gets right. It pays homage to those old movies without making them seem silly or stupid and lets you know the film makers enjoyed watching them too… just like you did.

Given that, I can actually recommend this one rather wholeheartedly and give it 4 “Meows” out of 5 not for being the best Martial Art film ever made today, but for being a pretty good imitation of the way they used to do them in the primitive golden era of the kung-fu film. The recent Terracotta Films Region 2 release is an excellent way to watch it too, keeping the widescreen presentation intact, original Vietnamese audio, and adding terrific English language subtitles for those of us not born in southeast Asia but who sometimes wish we were. :)

Well… that seems to wrap things up this time out, and as always before we go, I leave you with a look at the Trailer! Enjoy!

How about some Hindi ghost story goodness? Well this time out, I thought we might take a quick look at 2013′s “Aatma: Feel It Around You”, starring Bipasha Basu, Doyel Dhawan, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. It’s been another of those films I’ve wanted to see for quite some while, but locating a DVD has been terribly, terribly frustrating indeed. My dogged pursuit has finally paid off, and at last I’ve gotten a look-see at all the ghostly goings-on and can do a proper review.

Our synopsis goes like this: “Abused wife and mother Maya discovers that her precious daughter Nia seems to have invented an imaginary friend… one that turns out to be Nia’s father Abhay, whom Maya divorced and who has been absent from his daughter’s life ever since. This is disturbing enough, given that her violent husband is in actuality dead in an automobile accident, although Maya kept that a secret from Nia. Her daughter, blind to his monstrous side, worships him still and aches for her father’s return. A return that brings his evil spirit back to the Mortal World to seek out his ghostly revenge on Maya and all those he feels responsible for trying to separate them and those trying to keep him from taking Nia with him back to the Other Side.”

An interesting plot… especially given the usually shabby way women get treated in Hindi film. I crossed my lil’ fingers that this time out, the usually misogynistic nature of Hindi film might give way to something less patronizing and let our heroine strike back against the well entrenched gender roles forced on them by a very male centric culture. It’s a horror film… and fantasy usually lets more liberal ideas loose… Did it break free? Let’s find out, shall we?

If you know anything about your Favorite Catgirl movie fanatic, you know I absolutely detest those movies where women get to only be the victims. Or those where it’s assumed we’re all air-headed idiots desperately in need of some strong man to show us the way. Worse still are those that treat us as mere possessions… “things” that ought to be glad merely to be “worthy” of being “chosen” as some man’s wife. Or… worst of all… those that tell women that wanting anything better means it’s right and proper that horrible supernatural things can happen to us as repayment… that it’s all “our own fault” when we get tortured or killed. Nothing makes my blood boil faster than that.

Luckily… that’s not the case at all with “Aatma”. Our heroine Maya (played by Bipasha Basu), get’s handed the fairly common crappy deal of having her parents pick her husband… based of course on the utterly stupid idea that he’s got the right job, the right income, and the right connections to make him socially acceptable and a good husband. Unfortunately in reality he’s a violent, irrationally jealous, and downright insane piece of crap…. After he beats poor Maya and sends her to the hospital, they actually realize…. and surprising for a Hindi film… actually admit their mistake and back Maya in divorcing him. Not only that… but they support her taking near complete custody of little Nia (played by Doyel Dhawan), a decision that infuriates Abhay (played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) to the point where he swears revenge against them all for trying to separate him from the daughter he feels is his most precious possession. Thrown out of court after his crazy threat, he tears off through traffic, only to end up getting killed in a deadly car crash. Maya… who loves her daughter… decides not to tell her of her father’s death, trying to spare her feelings and not tarnish her memories of the father she loved.

Nia keeps waiting for her absent father to return… not knowing he’s gone forever. Eventually weird and eerie things start occurring as Abhay’s spirit… his “aatma”… is drawn back from beyond death by his daughter’s love. Unfortunately he’s still an evil, crazy, brutal thug… and he’s decided that he’ll have his daughter back if he has to kill her and drag her soul with him to the Other Side. Oh…. and he really… really… wants to hurt and punish Maya too for her “betrayal”. Awwww crap….

So begins the ghostly assault on Maya and the rest of our cast. It goes pretty much like you’d expect, with Abhay’s ghost killing everybody who either annoys his precious little girl… like classmate and bully Paras who picks on her at school or her strict teacher Mrs. Sinha who has little patience for Nia’s talking to invisible imaginary people in class… or anyone trying to aid Maya like her mom or a helpful sympathetic Hindi priest (played by Darshan Jariwala) .

Our priest does what he can before Abhay kills him… and it isn’t much. He does explain Abhay’s return, telling Maya that the bond of love between Nia and her father brought him to the Mortal world… and that only that same bond of love between Nia and her mother prevents Abhay from just stealing Nia away. Before he can do that he’ll have to sever that bond somehow and get Nia to agree to come away with him. Ahhhh… and he also tells her that no mortal being can fight an aatma and have any chance to win. Ummmm… that isn’t good…

By now, the body count has the police involved in the form of Inspector Raza (played by Jaideep Ahlawa) who knows something creepy and supernatural is afoot, but who is powerless to act on his suspicions by virtue of needing to follow modern police procedures that have no room for the weird or the supernatural. He spends a lot of time throughout most of the story trying to coax Maya into admitting to him the real truth behind her problem… although what he thinks that will accomplish is never really explained. Eventually he’s forced to arrest Maya for the murder of her closest friend, a frame engineered by Abhay to have her separated from Nia long enough for him to convince his daughter that her mother doesn’t really love her after all. By then, nobody believes her but Raza, and so she gets hauled off to the insane asylum and thrown into a rubber room.

Killing Maya’s mother and the priest, Abhay nearly succeeds too… but it’s “Spoiler Alert” time, as our film’s ending nears it means Neko’s gonna have to risk telling you how this one ends to properly wrap it all up. Remember the priest’s words from earlier? “No Mortal being can defeat an Aatma”. Yep. Maya makes a terrible decision, and trapped in a sanitarium without any hope of escape, she kills herself by beating her head against the wall so that her spirit can seek out Nia and fight Abhay on equal terms at our story’s climax. Does it work? Well we do get a happy… if somewhat bittersweet ending… so let’s just say this wee Catgirl’s belief in the power of love to defeat evil remains intact. ;)

This one was actually a pretty good little film, all in all, and I’m wondering why it took so darn long for me to find a copy to watch on DVD. The one I did find on eBay with English subtitles turned out to be a somewhat suspiciously dodgy one… most likely a bootleg… so I can’t really recommend you rush right out to get a copy for yourselves. I do still want a better copy, so once the “Movie Fairies” smile and one pops up I’ll grab another for sure. For a Hindi film, it was a rare chance to see a strong female heroine strike back and prevail against against the usual casual cultural misogyny of Indian cinema. (Nothing personal guys… I actually like and do watch a lot of Indian film, but in many ways it’s so subtly pervasive that the Hindi audiences themselves probably don’t even notice it… and that’s the real problem…) I can give “Aatma” a good 3 “Meows” of of 5 for being a simple, and overall entertaining bit of horror film storytelling. So… hurry up and release a proper DVD… I’m waiting for it!

And while we wait… here’s a look at the Trailer to whet your appetites!

I’m still on the injured list and hanging out here all alone at home… Today’s review? So, how about a quick trip with this wee Catgirl to exotic Turkey by way of Germany for some good old fashioned “Exorcist” style Satanic horror as only the Turks can do it? Well Ok then, buckle up ’cause this time out it’s a look at the Region 2 release of 2013′s scream fest, “Şeytan-i Racim”.

The synopsis… translated from the Turkish… goes like this: “Emrah and Salih are two roommates together at University in İstanbul. While everything was going normal, Salih suddenly starts to learn about “the magic science” known as “havas”. Salih’s curiosity about magic becomes his obsession. Salih, wants to control the djin’s which live in Djins’ world. Emrah doesn’t know anything about this, but because he lives with him it isn’t long before he is ensnared in his friend’s growing trafficking with Evil. When Salih loses control of everything, Emrah begins to have nightmares, and soon flees to his parents house in İzmit. Although he expects to find serenity there, the djins follow and continue to torment him. When Emrah finds out that his family is not capable of aiding him, he finds a solution by going to Bakırcı Mehmet Efendi, an expert in these things. But, once hidden truths are revealed at last, will it be in time to save his soul and end the horror?”

Now if you’ve seen any Turkish horror, then you know that they just plain don’t mess around when it comes to heaping on the scares. Nope. When it comes to messing with the powers of Evil, the Turks don’t hold back. That always makes for some creepy chills and really intense horror the way this wee lady likes her movies. Mind you… they don’t always do it while making a whole lot of sense… but sometimes that’s the chance I have to take when looking for my foreign Horror movie goodies. How’s this one then? Guess we’ll all find out…. ;)

So… your Favorite Catgirl snagged herself a copy of this one on eBay direct from Turkey… where most local Region 2 DVD’s there for horror films usually come with pretty darn good English subtitles for those of us who need them. Most DVD’s that is… but not all. As it turned out, this particular one wasn’t subbed into English, but instead into German. German? Really? Yes… it seems there’s a big minority of Turks living in Germany these days and as a result a lot of Turkish film also gets released there to cater to that expatriate group as well as a German domestic audience that has acquired a liking for all things Turkish. Well… ordinarily that would have made watching this one a wee bit difficult for yours truly… so naturally I just had to get all stubborn and try to hunt down some subtitles I could use with it. But a few days search online proved to be a fruitless endeavor. So what’s an annoyed Catgirl to do when stuck with such a problem? Why strip those annoying German subs off the disc… auto-translate them into English… spend a long afternoon adjusting them by context into correct English usage… and then finally restore them to the film to be able to watch it. Yes… I know… A whole butt load of work just to watch a movie, but then I can be a doggedly stubborn little kitten when something annoys me. So… now that it’s done, I’m thinking most of you are probably wondering if all that effort was even worth it? ;)

Our story starts with some rather grisly surgical scenes… at first you don’t quite know what’s going on and then a young woman starts moaning and the blood starts flowing, and it isn’t long before you realize it’s an abortion happening (without benefit of pain killers by the sound of it… :( ) before we suddenly switch gears to the main story. Not to worry though… we’ll get back to this nasty bit of business eventually.

The story’s main character, our hero Emrah (played by Ugur Günes) is a young University student sharing lodgings with another student named Salih (played by Ertunç Uygun). Emrah is awoken from a horrible nightmare one night by weird sounds coming from Salih’s room, and witnesses freaky black smoke crawling around under his door with almost a life of it’s own. Breaking in on his roommate, he finds no trace of the smoke… and manages to piss Salih off by awakening him seemingly for nothing. This is merely the beginning of the crazy stuff that starts to plague or hero and it isn’t long before the strange and secretive behavior of his roommate starts to get even worse and really become a problem.

Emrah’s nightmares continue… along with the addition of some really disturbing hallucinations during his waking hours, all of which seem connected somehow to whatever bizarre things Salih is up to in his room. Naturally Emrah can’t avoid spying on Salih and eventually finds that he’s involved in performing some of those forbidden rituals to contact the Jinn… those demonic critters that just fill all these Turkish horror movies to the brim. Just exactly what Salih wants from all this isn’t all that clear, but stupidly Emrah lets himself become involved in it all in an attempt to understand the frightening nightmares and hallucinations he’s experiencing more and more often.

Oh yeah… really smart Emrah… especially given the way trafficking with magic, sorcery, or witchcraft in Turkey always ends with Satan messing you up but good. But… what the heck does any of this have to do with that whole abortion scene at the very beginning?

Well… our boy Emrah had himself a girlfriend named Nurdan (played by Kübra Balcan) before all this weird shit started happening. Yes, yes…. she ended up pregnant, and although Emrah got all pissed off and swore it wasn’t his fault, he did do that really stupid macho “give the girl money for the abortion” thing right before breaking it off with her. Grrrr…. what an a**hole… Now Neko’s sort of hoping the Jinn really mess you up but good, butthead.

However, it turns out… as badly as Emrah handled things, eventually he discovers that Salih was the real one ultimately responsible for Nurdan’s pregnancy, having always had a secret crush on her. You see… apparently he used the power of the Jinns to shape-shift into the likeness of Emrah one evening while his roommate was away and then rape Nurdan, who never knew it wasn’t Emrah who assaulted and shamed her. Mind you… our boy Emrah wouldn’t have believed poor Nurdan no matter what she’d have told him about things and his flirtation with the evil ceremonies has already damned him anyway so he’s screwed either way.

Trying to hide from it all back home with mom and dad doesn’t work… and Salih only ends up institutionalized in a sanitarium, so it becomes necessary for Emrah to seek the only help remaining…. a reputed expert on the supernatural living way out in some nearly deserted village in the middle of nowhere.

Bakırcı Mehmet Efendi (played by Altan Gordum) makes his living there as a coppersmith, when he’s not putting the holy whammy on evil Jinn and with his help Emrah tries to save both him and Salih from the consequences of their evil deeds. Does it work? Well… we do get the usual scary Islamic style ritual to drive away evil… but since our boy is damned in the eyes of Allah, you just know he’s not gonna have a happy outcome once the dust settle at the climax.

It’s all filmed in that very smooth and polished way that modern Turkish film is done when they have the right budget. The acting is competent if a bit over-the-top and melodramatic at times, and the sets, cinematography and effects are all pretty good too. However… I can’t really say this one goes anywhere novel or new for a Turkish horror film, and the way poor Nurdan is introduced and then used merely as a plot element before being dropped without any resolution to her own plight kind of definitely left a sour taste in my mouth. Emrah… as our story’s hero.. isn’t at all a sympathetic character (in fact, once I saw him deal so shabbily with Nurdan, I have to admit this wee lady wanted him dead…. in the most painful manner possible) so there’s really nobody to root for in any meaningful way. Never a good way for a movie to draw me in and make me happy.

With that, I suppose “Şeytan-i Racim” get’s a barely earned 3 “Meows” out of 5. It’s an OK film… with very good production values, but just not one with a story I’d recommend if you have to go to all the efforts I did just to watch it. Mind you… I do think those efforts were ultimately worthwhile, if for no other reason than to show me I can do that sort of work should another film I badly want to see stubbornly refuse to be released subtitled in future. Gotta look for those “silver linings”… :)

Trailer? You betcha! :)

It’s the “End of the World As We Know It” Movie Fest Month here at the ol’ Litterbox this April and I thought I’d start things out with our old friends, the Zombies and a look at the “Zombie Apocalypse”, Israeli style, with the recent Region 1 DVD for “Cannon Fodder” aka “Battle of the Undead”. Yep… all the fun of the seemingly endless Middle East bickering between Arab and Jew…. but now with 100% more flesh eating zombie action!! Amazingly thought provoking film-making with deep sociopolitical messages about the futility of violence in solving the divide between disparate cultures at conflict? Naaawww… not if we’re lucky… ;)

Our synopsis is: “Doron, an Israeli military security operative, is forced by a superior to take on one last mission before retiring from the endless killing between Israeli soldiers and Arab terrorists. He is tasked to lead a commando team and covertly go into Lebanon to capture a top member of the Hezbollah terrorist organization. But not all is as it seems, and Doron soon discovers that there is a far greater threat to Israel at hand than Hezbollah – the dead are rising. After the horrifying Battle of the Undead, the Middle East will never be the same! “

Well  “army guys versus monsters” is always a pretty safe bet for an evening of movie fun… at least for this wee lady, so there’s a good chance I’ll be liking this one. Wanna find out if you’d like it too? Then, by goodness, you know what comes next…. ;)

Now this Catgirl has seen the Zombie Apocalypse reach just about every part of the globe in my cinema journeys, but I’m always interested to see those films from the viewpoint of the locals whenever possible. We’ve seen Israel weather the Apocalypse on the big screen in the US made blockbuster “World War Z”… but that pretty much was a very “American” look at how it would all go down and a lot of zombie fans worldwide thought we definitely got it all wrong. With the release of “Cannon Fodder” we get a much more Israeli spin on how it would go. And surprisingly… they seem to have pretty much the same instinctive distrust of the “powers that be” and their motives as it pertains to the Apocalypse as we here in the good’ ol’ USA.

In “Cannon Fodder”, we get pretty much that classic ol’ “conspiracy theory” plot spun against the backdrop of the Arab/Israeli conflict. Basically… our films hero, Doron (played by Liron Levo) is one of those shadowy commando guys that always seem to exist in these sorts of stories to do all the “dirty deeds” his government needs done to try to win the war against the terrorist elements threatening Israel. That’s a thankless, grueling, and ultimately soul crushing job that love off country and a strong sense of duty can only make tolerable for just so long. As our film begins, he’s had enough. He’s got a new wife, Michal (played by Shira Katzenelenbogen), and a chance to leave that life of violence and death behind, but as always… there’s just that “one last job” needing to be done. Yep… we’ve certainly heard that one before….

Doron let’s himself get talked into leading that mission… to capture a vital member of the Hezbollah leadership… by his old mentor, General Gideon (played by Amit Leor) despite the sensible protests of that pretty wife. Big… big mistake… but aren’t those vital secret missions always like that? Sigh….

He hooks up with his squad of soldiers and sneaks into Lebanon looking for their target all the while as more and more suspicious “combat casualties” are rolling into the military hospital back on his base. The Israeli border with Lebanon… now that was really somewhat of a letdown. I mean… I can’t really believe it’s actually nothing more than an unguarded chain-link fence you can drive right up to in any old civilian van and then just crawl under. Somehow all those years of news reports about armed conflict in the Middle East had me expecting… well… something… anything… more formidable. Really, really, unbelievably unimpressive…. No check points loaded with soldiers… no deadly minefields and barbed wire entanglements… no open kill zone bracketed by mortars and artillery…. or even a deceptively placid “no-man’s-land” under surveillance from both the Israeli and Lebanese armies. Just a single goofy fence, and a broken one at that. Heck…. even Pee Wee Herman could infiltrate Israel through this thing!! I have to say…. I was really disappointed by this rather stupid notion, and even Carolyn was a bit incredulous of it all. (Any of my Gentle Visitors with real knowledge of this border… Feel free to weigh in on the accuracy of this plot notion, I’d really be interested to hear if this is credible or not… But seriously… I’ve seen better security against trespassing at my local Walmart than is shown here.)

Anyways… it’s Zombie action we’re looking for, and once our brave commandos enter Lebanon they start running up against them pretty darn quickly. These are portrayed as the fairly standard gory shambling dead we know and love… with practical make-up effects that are basic and effective even if they aren’t particularly amazing or noteworthy. That fairly well sets the general tone for this movie. It’s mostly what you’d expect from the genre… very workmanlike and simple mostly hitting all the right notes… but certainly not the scary, thrill a minute gore-fest some other Zombie films are.

Eventually… after finding the zombified remains of the previous squad of soldiers sent to achieve this mission, (Yeah, yeah… you just knew that old story plot would get thrown in…) our guys find the Hezbollah safe house and capture the only surviving member there, Noelle (played by Yafit Shalev), the daughter of the man they were here to grab.

Although they don’t believe her, she tries to warn them about the Zombies… zombies that her scientist father accidentally created while working on a bio-weapon not for Hezbollah, but for Israel. Yep…. turns out General Gideon is the real bad guy behind all this mess, and he’s sent our hero to clean things up and bring Noelle’s father out to safety so they can work on a cure before the virus ravages both Lebanon and Israel. Oh…. and keep all that nasty illegal bio-weapon stuff a secret while they are at it, of course.

Doron finds all that out and eventually he and his surviving men team find a way to put all the political macho posturing behind them to team up with Noelle, fight their way out through the horde of zombies, and try to save the day. Ahhhh and naturally also to try and get him some payback for being used by Gideon. Does it work out? C’mon, people…. it’s a “Zombie Apocalypse” film…. so you just know it ain’t gonna turn out well. Yep. Humanity is screwed once again. ;)

All in all… I have to say this one was a bit disappointing. I hadn’t expected a big zombie battle to equal the overblown budget of a blockbuster like “World War Z”, but I had expected something more than I got. The acting on hand is adequate, although the characters are all pretty much the standard stereotypes, but the dialog and writing is clumsy and at times pretty ho-hum. Special effects… hmmmm… some pretty dodgy CGI scattered throughout gives the feel of a badly done TV movie… not a help to make this one something special. Makeup effects were primitive, although adequate and certainly nothing to cheer about. Pretty much the entire film left me with that unimpressed “Blehhhh” feeling… and I actually like goofy bad movies. It’s won a bunch of awards at film shows, but honestly I can’t really see why. Maybe I’m just tooooo darn picky a Zombie lovin’ Catgirl….

With that I suppose it’s fair to give this one a tepid 2 “Meows” out of 5. It’s just so, so, sooo darn overwhelmingly a rehash of ideas done before by much better films. Had it somehow had it’s own kooky flavor…. either by being so freakishly gory or hilariously funny… or had anything special in it’s own right, I might have enjoyed it more, but sometimes that’s how it goes. Sorry Israel… you’re gonna have to work a little harder next time. The DVD? Well, the Region 1 release is certainly fine, keeping the original widescreen presentation and Hebrew/English audio intact along with some good separate English subtitles for when things got hard to follow. It’s available for right around 15-20$ US and if Zombie films are your thing, you’d probably want a DVD just for the novelty of having it, but I can’t really recommend your rush right out to find a copy.

There’s a Trailer… and here it goes…

So… if we’re gonna do a proper “End of the World As We Know It” festival this month, then it’s a given that I’m gonna have to do a review of the classic 1951 George Pal film, “When Worlds Collide”. (Psssst! It also lets me do a nostalgic “Lil’ Kitten Classic” Review too at the same time… Gotta love those nifty 2-for1′s!! ;) ) This granddaddy of cinema Sci-fi doomsday stories has it all… volcanic disruptions, forest fires, earthquakes, massive tsunamis and floods, along with the pre-apocalyptic breakdown of society right before our earth gets gobbled up by a rampaging alien sun. Yep… you really can’t get anymore “Doomsday” than that…

If you’ve been unlucky enough not to have seen this classic, then our synopsis for it goes as follows: “A dying star hurtles through space on an unavoidable collision course with Earth. The last hope of Earth’s citizens lies in the hands of daredevil pilot Dave Randall and brilliant astronomer Doc Hendron, who will supervise the construction and flight of an interplanetary rocketship that will carry a handful of lucky human survivors to start the race anew on a strange new planet.”

Now this one is a real classic. Schlocky and dated and oh, soooo darn melodramatic, it’s still manages to be a big screen cinematic experience that even today still holds up as great entertainment, at least in a certain goofy movie loving Catgirl’s honest opinion. What? You need convincing? Why then just “Read On” and let this wee Catgirl plead her case and perhaps make it one of your favorite “old movies” too! ;)

Ahhhh… George Pal… now there’s a man who loved the “classics”. Books I mean… especially the works of H.G. Wells, and he’s the showman who spent a good part of his career putting those old Sci-fi films on the big screen for a generation of people in the 50′s and 60′s in what were some of the most ambitious blockbuster films of his time. I wasn’t born early enough to see those films at the cinema, but by the time this wee kitten was an impressionable girl in the late 70′s and early 80′s, those very same films were running on practically every TV channel, staples on Sci-Fi movie marathons and Saturday afternoon creature features. “When Worlds Collide” was one of lil’ Miyuki’s favorites….

Now… it’s worth mentioning, that even then, that title was a bit deceptive…. no worlds actually collide… instead this one chronicles the destruction of Earth by a wandering red giant star named Bellus that hurtles through our solar system wreaking havoc as it whizzes through. But that’s a pretty minor story point… although even wee Miyuki scratched her head over it for a bit waaaay back when.

It’s a fairly simple story, in the beginning, daredevil pilot Dave Randall (played by Richard Derr) gets the job of flying some top-secret celestial photographs from South African astronomer Dr. Emery Bronson (played by Hayden Rorke) to his colleague Dr. Cole Hendron (played by Larry Keating) in America. Luckily for him this lets him in on the big secret that Bronson discovered… that a rogue star named Bellus is hurtling through the cosmos on a direct collision course with Earth. Awwww crap….

Now our hero is kind of bummed out by this news… especially after meeting Dr. Hendron’s brainy and pretty daughter Joyce (played by Barbara Rush). Nothing like Doomsday to put the damper on budding romance…. but Joyce really likes “average Joe” Dave, and manages to find ways to convince her dad to keep him around even after his delivery job is done. That’s to facilitate the old “love triangle” part of a good melodrama, since she’s already involved with hunky doctor Tony Drake (played by Peter Hansen). You just know that jealousy and rivalry over Joyce will ensue… but that somehow by the end of our film our two heroes will become best buddies and team up to save humanity. It’s just that kind of story.

We get the usual refusal to see the truth of the coming disaster when our scientists try to warn the UN of the inevitable destruction to come. (Sounds a lot like the “ostrich approach” to Global Warming we see at the UN today…) They get laughed at and promptly dismissed as quacks and doomsayers. But luckily for our heroes, self-centered, wheelchair-bound billionaire industrialist Sidney Stanton (played by John Hoyt) has enough sense to pledge his fortune to make their seemingly impossibly harebrained scheme to build a rocket ark to fly to Bellus’ companion planet, Zyra a reality. Just in case the smart guys are right….

Naturally billionaire Stanton insists that he’ll be the guy picking the lucky survivors who get space on the rocket ship, but eventually this gets vetoed by the good guys who actually intend on trying to be both democratic as well as smart in selecting only the best and brightest of people to be the Adam’s and Eve’s of a fresh start for mankind. For his contribution, our mean old industrialist gets his place assured…. even though he’s a major league a-hole. (Don’t worry… you just know he’s not gonna manage to make the trip… that’s also a given plot notion for a story like this… )

Next up… there’s the whole “love triangle” thing between our leads to work out as the plot moves along, and the Earth suffers all those preliminary disasters leading up to the final days. The guys even find an adorable waif and his lil’ doggie to oooh and ahhh over adding just the right amount of 50′s style family values to our story.

At our climax, all heck breaks loose… the best and brightest not selected to go all riot and try to seize the ship like rats fleeing a sinking ship. But… with only minutes to spare they launch themselves into space, narrowly missing sharing the horrible fate of the Earth, swallowed and BBQ’ed by Bellus. They make it to Zyra, crash land on a glacier, and then marvel at the alien vista of the strange new world that is now their home. Roll those credits!!

Like his other Sci-Fi epics, George Pal fills this one up with lots and lots of, for the day, pretty darn amazing special effects modeling to tell his story. Along with some creative use of old stock footage from news reels of natural disasters and the like to stretch the budget. ;) For the most part, it works pretty darn well. The effects are, of course, no match for the CGI stuff you see today, but for me at least, it matches the overall feel and tone of the story really well. Yes, yes… at times it can be a bit dated and stiff with lots of very 1950′s American WASP notions about how society works, and a quaint “Buck Rodgers” gee-whiz kind of technology for the futuristic stuff on display, but even so there’s still a lot to like about the film seen as a whole. (Personally… I can’t believe that with WW2 so recent an event back then, there weren’t a lot of really smart German rocket scientists lurking around the launch site, but hey… there weren’t a lot of black people or Asians either… Hmmmm? I guess it really was a different time.)

Ultimately… this one has to be viewed as a product of it’s time. By today’s standards, it’s hopelessly dated and basically flawed in many ways, but despite that still makes for some really neat cinema viewing. There are a few old movies that I can watch almost each and every time they come on TV… and this is one of them. This wee Catgirl gives this one a hearty 4 “Meows” out of 5 and I can’t recommend it too much if somehow you’ve never ever managed to see it. It’s available on DVD… and usually for a really nice price, but if you like, wait for it to turn up on TV. Turner Classic and AMC run it regularly, and that perhaps capture the memories of the experience I have for it the best. Just be sure to have lots of cold soda and hot popcorn, dress up in your most comfortable PJ’s while you lie on a couple of pillows on the living room floor, and just put your common sense and grown-up notions on hold for a bit. Ahhhh yes…. that’ll do it…Nostalgia, it’s a wonderful feeling. ;)

Trailer? Why yep… of course Neko’s got that covered. :)

I know… I’m really late, late late with this… but here’s our next Review in our “End Of The World As We Know It” festival here at the Litterbox, director  Jorge Torregrossa’s 2012 Spanish film “Fin” aka “The End”. Yep… the “Apocalypse”, Spanish style… (I wonder if it comes with Sangria?) ;)

Our synopsis goes like this: “A group of old friends gets together for a weekend reunion in a remote mountain cabin. Years have gone by and yet nothing seems to have changed between them. But lurking behind the laughter and stories is a murky episode from their shared past that continues to haunt them. A strange, sudden inexplicable celestial incident alters their plans, leaving all electrical power mysteriously drained and stranding them and with no line of communication to the outside world. As they hike their way for help, the group starts to disintegrate, just as a new natural order is unveiled before their astonished eyes. “

So what’s the big Apocalypse up to this time? Aliens? Pandemics? The big ol’ Biblical “Judgement Day”? From the Trailer, it’s hard to say… so if you are as curious as a certain wee movie watchin’ kitten, I guess there are only two ways to find out. You could just run right out and find a copy to watch for yourself… or… you could grab a warm cup of coffee, kick back and relax, and let a certain goofy Catgirl tell you all about it before you plunk down your cash for a DVD. (Me…. I’m banking that you’ll choose the second choice…. ;) )

So let’s get to it shall we?

The dreaded Apocalypse.. the “End of Days”…. mostly movies have given us a fairly violent list of scenarios for just exactly how it’s likely to go down when it happens… mostly pretty darn terrifying… none of them nice… none of them pretty. But… what if that’s all completely wrong? What if the world ends not with a bang… but a whimper? In a nutshell, that exactly what “Fin” has in mind. Based on a novel by David Monteagudo, “Fin” offers us a much more quiet end for everything… and, in some ways, a much more eerie one when all is said and done. A quiet Apocalypse? Yep… this wee lady kids you not…

As our story gets underway, we observe a scruffy man feverishly working away at a sketchbook of charcoal drawings filled with crazy pictures that let you know his trolley doesn’t quite make it all the way to the station… if you know what I mean. He’s Ángel (played by Eugenio Mira), and he’s seeing visions…. visions about the End of the World. He knows it’s coming… and he’s desperate to warn his old friends… even if his insanity has alienated and driven them away for the last 20 odd years. So he gets in contact with Sara (played by Carmen Ruiz), the only one of them still maintaining any connection with him and convinces her to gather them all at the mountain house where they spent time all those years ago… without mentioning that it’s at his request, of course.

In any other movie… this notion would have far more sinister motives connected to it, perhaps with Ángel plotting a little payback before the World bids adieu, but surprisingly that’s not on tap for this story. No… Ángel truly just wants to warn his friends about the terrors to come, maybe explain it to them, but sadly he never gets the chance.

But before we get to that, we shift things to our film’s real hero Félix (played by Daniel Grao) on his way to that cozy little mountain cabin along with his girlfriend Eva (played by Clara Lago). He’s nervous about this reunion, and with good reason… seems he and his friends are those sorts of friends that probably were never all that close to start with. Not only that… they’ve share a shameful secret concerning Ángel and just exactly why he’s more than a bit disturbed. That all comes to the surface once he arrives and all those old rivalries and old secrets come back for one more airing during a drunken drug fueled bonfire. Think “The Big Chill” but with stupid macho posturing, simmering resentments, and without the comedy…. and in Spanish. ;)

Right at the climax of that party, the Apocalypse happens. The sky lights up… there’s weird thunderous sounds and the instant recognition by all that something odd has just happened. But… other than a mysterious loss of power, everything seems fine. Unable to do anything with their cars, our friends decide to sleep things off and get things straightened out in the morning.

But, once morning comes, things start going from merely weird and annoying to creepy and potentially dangerous. Phones are all dead… both cell and landlines, none of the cars will work, and one of the party, Rafa (played by Antonio Garrido) is inexplicably missing. The remaining group decides to hike down the mountain to look for help, and as they do the full scope of things becomes clear. People are just plain missing. There are deserted cars… deserted houses… even crashing jet liners… all with signs that make it look as if the people just plain… evaporated somehow… leaving everything behind. Just like the “Mary Celeste”. Worse… one by one the same thing keeps happening to our little group. Awww crap…

It’s a very “Twilight Zone” sort of feeling. There’s moments of sheer terror, like when our little ragtag group gets trapped on a perilous mountain path during a stampede of terrified goats, and the hordes of hungry dogs packing together and becoming aggressive in their pursuit of food… and then there’s the quieter, odder moments, like when Félix starts noticing that the stars themselves are inexplicably disappearing too from the night sky. What the heck is going on?

All this stress… and the idea that somehow Ángel is behind it all, seeking revenge for the intentional drug overdose forced on him all those years ago at the hands of his supposed friends.. begins to tear apart the group dynamics. It doesn’t even end with the discovery of Ángel’s body in a car crash that happened hours before the weird celestial fire-show. Nope. By then half of the group is gone without a trace, and the truth behind most of the group’s secrets lie open for all to know.

We discover that Félix and Eva aren’t really a couple after all… she’s just a pretty young prostitute he hired to play that part, a job which now has her trapped with them in this predicament. Ladies man Hugo (played by Andrés Velencoso) never loved his wife Cova (played by Blanca Romero)… he’s just with her to keep himself from being a lonely loser. Félix’s ex-lover, Maribel (played by Maribel Verdú) might be married with two kids she loves… but still wants Félix even though she’s never admitted it to anyone. And every one of them blames themselves for ruining Ángel’s life, although none wants to take responsibility for the deed.

So basically, that’s what this one ends up being. More of a character study than any sort of nail biting look at the world unraveling into chaos. But… strangely enough, that’s a good thing.

About the only thing this wee lady has to gripe about is how we never quite figure out just exactly what the heck is going on. Seriously. For me that was both puzzling and annoying, but ultimately I think in a goofy fashion, that’s the way it’s meant to play out. I’m still thinking about it all days after seeing it…. and I still haven’t wrapped my lil’ brain around it all.

I can honestly say, that as things unwound, I didn’t expect to end up liking this one as much as I did. That is due in great part, I think to the very character driven nature of the story. I really did get sucked into that, wondering who, if anybody, would make it through to the end, and even rooting for my favorites to be those very ones. Did my favorites make it? Well, I’m not going to tell you, but this Catgirl’s pretty sure you too will want to find out for yourself with a viewing sometime.

I give “Fin” a firm 4 “Meows” out of 5. It’s definitely not the movie I expected when we started watching it… but ultimately it was a satisfying one none the less. Anybody who prefers the subtle chills of say, the “Twilight Zone” as opposed to the mutant fueled violence of “Mad Max” will probably be very happy. I saw this one on the UK Region 2 DVD release… which come with a widescreen presentation and original Spanish audio accompanied with oddly hard subbed English subtitles that work… although I always wonder about the need for such, when the DVD format easily supports separate subs. At least those subtitles spend their time well down the the lower black bar and don’t intrude on the film more than necessary…. Want a copy? You ought to be able to score one for right around 15-20$ US at all the usual places. Go ahead… you’ll like it too I think.

As always… I’ve hunted down a Trailer to whet your appetite for more… so enjoy! ;)

Whew…. I’m still at things, although there are times I think I need to clone myself to get it all done… Here we go again with some more “End of the World As We Know It” fun here at the Litterbox with another Spanish film,  “Los Últimos Días” aka “The Last Days”, that takes the idea of the Apocalypse and gives it yet another somewhat unique and unexpected cause as it’s premise. No big explosions… no global pandemic… no ravenous monsters or aliens… no divine rapture… Nope. Nothing but good ol’ agoraphobia. Well… OK… “agoraphobia on steroids”… but still… really nothing more than just being afraid of the great outdoors. Hmmm? So you think it doesn’t really sound all that bad to you? Just fort up inside your cozy house with all your stuff and wait for the “crazy” to harmlessly pass on by? Certainly nothing “world shattering”, eh? Well…. you’d be soooo sooo wrong.

Our synopsis goes like this: “2013. A mysterious epidemic spreads across the planet. Soon all of humanity develops an irrational fear of open spaces that causes panic attacks so severe they result in almost instant death. Eventually, the world population finds itself trapped inside buildings. As the Spanish city of Barcelona descends into chaos, Marc and his colleague Enrique, set off together on an almost impossible quest to cross the city and find Julia, his missing girlfriend, and Enrique’s hospitalized father, without somehow managing to ever go outside.”

Yep… talk about an original idea. When I saw the Trailer for this one, I just knew I was hooked. Luckily for me… right around that time, the UK Region 2 DVD made it’s appearance. One quick shopping trip later and this wee Catgirl hooked herself up with a copy just in time for our Apocalypse Movie Marathon. So… if you still want more End of the World fun, then just hunker down and “Read On” to hear all the details…. ;)

Gotta hand it to the Spanish. Of the films I’ve selected for our “End of the World” themed reviews, they seem to have come up with the most original takes on the subject. So far, that’s been a good thing. A really good thing. Not that Neko doesn’t like her rampaging “heavy metal” cannibal marauders and zombies and mutants as much as the next girl, but now and again a little something different can be a nice thing too, plot-wise.

We definitely get that here. Oh yes, indeed.

Our film gets underway as we are introduced to our main character and hero Marc (played by Quim Gutiérrez) and his longtime girlfriend Julia (played by Marta Etura). They’re that typical modern young urban couple you see in a lot of films. Each with their own career… Marc as some kind of computer security programmer working at a big faceless company, and artistic Julia as a self employed puppet and doll-maker… and each wanting something different from a relationship based more on young love and passion than on thinking about marriage and the long term notion of being together. Julia’s biological clock has struck the hour, and she’s ready for the “next big thing” commitment wise. A baby. Marc’s baby. But he’s too ground under by his work pressures and the very real possibility that his job is perilously close to termination over problems with the rushed project he’s writing code for. For him it’s just not the right time… and you get the feeling he’s actually not interested in the possibility of it ever being the right time. That creates problems between him and Julia… especially since she’s already discovered she’s pregnant. Not that she tells him…. which turns out to be a bad idea once the proverbial shit hits the fan.

And what would that “shit” be? How about the ever so quiet arrival of a peculiar epidemic, striking almost randomly at first across the entire globe. Some weird and inexplicable outbreak that isn’t even recognized as a threat until it’s entirely too darn late to stop it. People become housebound. Think those “hoarders” you see on the Discovery Channel crossed with those violent Japanese “hikikomori”. They almost get missed at first… but as more and more people become affected, the truth becomes unavoidable. People are somehow becoming violently allergic to open spaces at a dangerous rapid rate. A mental derangement? A physical one? The truth is never explained, and it makes the result all that much more frightening. Marc has a fight with Julia… and angrily storms off to work only to have the “syndrome” strike him once he’s there trapping him at work with all of the others similarly affected. That’s when our story really takes off.

With the pockets of people trapped here and there throughout the city and the slow breakdown of civil services, communications, and the like, the survivors begin to deal with the reality of trying to survive with only what they can find within the limited spaces they find themselves trapped in. Yep…. there’s going to be eating of rats and pigeons… and even cannibalism, along with the general breakdown of all law and order. Pretty soon our hero Marc decides he’s got to try to reach Julia, somehow, anyhow. So… towards that end he finds himself in a somewhat uneasy alliance with Enrique (played by José Coronado). Enrique is the “hired gun” that the company had sent to fire the dead weight on the project, and Marc and he most definitely didn’t get off to the best of starts back before all the crazy got a hold of things, but now each of them needs the other to pull of an impossible journey. Marc has the food, water and supplies once owned by the first of his office-mates to succumb to the syndrome, and Enrique has a battery powered GPS stolen from a car in the parking garage that will allow them to navigate the subway tunnels, sewers and crawlspaces beneath Barcelona. They hate each other. That much is plain, but they also need each other and so with the situation worsening moment by moment, a truce is forged. Enrique will help Marc reach Julia and then he’ll be given the rest of the supplies he needs to reach his father, languishing in a nursing hospital.

This is perhaps the best part of the film, as our duo navigates their way through the underground passages of the city avoiding threats from desperate survivors bent on living at any cost, to dealing with escaped wildlife from the Barcelona zoo (a giant grizzly bear they have to fight in a church… one nasty, bad ass fight…), and all the while discovering that despite hating each other before all this started, now they are forging a mutual bond in the face of all obstacles that will make them friends.

So… it’s a buddy film? Ummmm? Sort of. It’s also an individual examination of their own lives. Marc has to come to terms with the idea that he truly loves Julia beyond all reason. Especially once he discovers she’s pregnant with his child, alone and without him lost somewhere in the city. Yeah, the world sucks… it’s doubtful that the two of them will find each other let alone raise a child together in a world like this, but that doesn’t matter. He has to accept that it doesn’t change the simple basic truth. “Life just happens”. You can’t control it… can’t avoid it… can’t plan it into submission. You either roll with it, or it rolls over you and leaves you in ruins. Enrique on his part, has to realize that his life isn’t without meaning as well. Once a loner, confident that he could make it on his own merits, he becomes entangled in Marc’s plight and comes to realize the importance of having human connections, of mattering to someone.

It’s a hard trip. Dangerous and deadly with moments of utter despair and terror balanced against softer moments of joyful triumph, such as one scene in which our pair manage to sidestep the prohibition of going outside to seize the moment and cleverly team up to capture the desperately needed drinking water of a torrential thunderstorm. There’s a lot of good bits like this scattered throughout and even though things don’t end perfectly for our heroes, there’s an ultimate triumph for them both by the end, when it’s revealed that children born after the “syndrome” seem totally unaffected by it, giving us a sense that although the old world is dead, there will be a new society to rise again from the ruins of that world to build their own future. (Yes… yes…. Marc and Julia are reunited by the end… it’s just that kind of story. Like you all couldn’t have guessed it, o’ Gentle Visitors… ;) )

I definitely liked this one. So did my sweet Carolyn, who’s usually a bit more on the fence about some of my foreign language movie choices. I give this one a well deserved 4 “Meows” out of 5 and I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open for more such offbeat Spanish goodies in the future. ;) It’s a simple story, told well, with some great acting by our leads and nice overall direction and cinematography. The British Region 2 DVD is presented widescreen and with excellent English subtitles… although again these are hard-subbed rather than selectable (I’m beginning to wonder if this is going to be a continuing trend with UK DVD releases). It’s available most of the usual places for right around 12-18$ US and is certainly a pretty good choice given that the Spanish DVD is probably a bit pricy to import for most of you. (Although crazy lil’ me might have to snag a copy just for fun….)

Our Trailer? Yep right on time, as always… ;)

I’m back with more Apocalyptic fun and another Review in our “End of the World As We Know It” movie marathon here at the Litterbox with another nostalgic “Lil’ Kitten Classic” from 1963… the British Sci-fi horror classic, “The Day of the Triffids”. A horrible global epidemic of blindness… a savage worldwide attack by ambulatory carnivorous plants… and civilization crumbles!! Ummmm? Wait a moment? “Killer Plants”? Really? Seriously? Oh yes, indeed, Gentle Visitors…. Add this to your list of possible Doomsday scenarios. The entire human race reduced to nothing more than walking Miracle-Gro for an invasion by hungry walking plants from outer space. :)

Our synopsis? How’s this grab you: “On a beautiful clear night in 1963, people all around the world are treated to a once -in-a-lifetime blazing spectacular from deep space… a meteor shower. In London, merchant seaman Bill Masen misses the show as he’s hospitalized with damaged eyes following emergency surgery. The following morning he awakens to find no one answering his bell. He removes the bandages himself and soon realizes that he one of the few people still left with sight as everyone who observed the meteor shower is now blind. Society quickly collapses beneath this unexpected event coupled with the sudden onslaught of the Triffids, flesh eating plants that are now surprisingly ambulatory, spreading  rapidly and devouring the helpless human race.”

Yep…. I know, I know…. it all sounds pretty darn goofy. But… not really any more goofy than the sudden reanimation of the brain munching undead, our old friends, the Zombies. Lil Miyuki saw this one on a Saturday morning “Creature Feature” TV waaaay back in the late 70′s (Or so my vague memories tell me…) and I remember being pretty darn sacred by the whole notion of big killer weeds with poison stingers. Scared enough to still remember it all fondly some 30 odd years later, and that’s saying something… So, if you recall this neat lil’ story too, than how about you “Read On” Gentle Visitor and share some of those feeling with this wee Catgirl? Unlike the Triffids, I promise I won’t bite…. ;)

This one is based of course, on the classic 1951 science fiction novel of the same name by John Wyndham. However… it’s not a particularly faithful retelling of that story as this wee lady found out years later when reading the book in High School. (Isn’t that always the way?) By many standards, it’s really nothing more than a somewhat dated bit of mid 60′s Sci-fi monster movie film making from which most of the novel’s social commentary has been excised in order to make room for more killer plant mayhem and the like. However… for the most part that actually works better I think than if it had tried to stick closer to it’s source material. Sometimes… simpler is better.

So how scary is the idea of walking carnivorous shrubbery when you really look at it? Actually not all that bad when you factor in the whole idea of a freakish outbreak of global blindness. In many ways, the Triffids fill pretty much the same role in an Apocalypse as Zombies. Sure they aren’t all that smart… sure they aren’t really a match one on one for an alert, armed opponent, properly equipped and prepared for them, but like our old friends the “Living Impaired”…. Triffids come in hordes, they have no fear of death, no morale problems and they just keep right on coming no matter what. Yep… they just don’t fight fair. Throw in something to take away humans main advantage… orderly civilization itself… and then all bets are off.

So just what do killer plants do? Why shamble on up and smack you around with some bushy bits while delivering a nasty poison sting to kill you, of course. Then they just sort of hang about while the natural decay process turns your corpse into delicious and nutritious mulch. Yep… I know…. Eeeeewwwhhh!! ;)

Well then… a story about such nasty vegetation needs a pretty special cast to keep one interested while all the horticultural homicide goes on and heading that up we have leading man Howard Keel starring as our merchant seaman hero Bill Masen. He’s filled with that “everyman” morality and spirit that means he’s going to spend most of our movie battling not only our deadly vegetation but also trying to save other lucky survivors from the scumbag villains of humanity that always seem to show up at times like this. He starts off by rescuing school girl, Susan (played by Janina Faye) from a train wreck before making his escape from the deathtrap that is London by boat. The two of them cross the English channel to France where they find temporary refuge at a quaint country chateau being used by some other survivors, a man named Coker (played by Mervyn Johns) and a woman Christine Durant (played by Nicole Maurey), as a safe haven for themselves and some others. They can see as well, having both been hospitalized and unconscious during the meteor storm following a car accident. Unfortunately for them, right after they get there, a roving gang of sighted convicts loosed by the catastrophe decide to swoop in and raid the place… and if that isn’t enough, a big old honking swarm of Triffids decide to crash the party as well.

After some nasty action, our heroes, now with sexy Christine tagging along as love interest, make their way to the NATO military base at Toulon hoping to find some sort of organized help. No such luck… but there is a rumor that the entire crew of a submarine submerged on long duration secret military maneuvers during the meteor storm, have escaped blindness and that they are based in Spain at the naval base at Cadiz. Now that sounds promising… right? But wait…. there’s something else going on as well!!

Apparently the original script for “Day of the Triffids” ran a little short, so later on, before it’s release, additional footage was crammed in to pad things out featuring a plot notion featuring marine research biologist Tom Goodwin (played by Kieron Moore) and his wife Karen (played by Janette Scott). They are stranded by the Apocalypse on a lonely storm wracked island in an old lighthouse where they’ve supposedly been involved in some sort of study on marine life. Well… that and playing out the old “troubled marriage on the rocks” bit, plot wise… They both managed to miss that big old once-in-a-lifetime celestial spectacle… so of course they can both see still. Handy, especially once those nasty Triffids show up and start sprouting on the island. While not the traveling roadshow that our other lil’ group is, the duo do actually manage to ramp up some serious scares once we get to that whole “trapped in the lighthouse” part of our story. Yes.. yes… even though they’ve lost the spark in their marriage, nothing can bring two lovers together again like battling man-eating plants side by side. You just know by the end of this one, they’ll be back together again once mankind reasserts it’s rightful place over all vegetation-kind. ;)

So… while all that’s going on Bill, Susan, and Christine find themselves trapped with an old Spanish couple, Luis de la Vega (played by Geoffrey Matthews) and his wife, Teresa (played by Gilgi Hauser) at their hacienda. Luis clues them in about the submarine and he’s got a radio so our boy Bill can find out that there’s one final survivor pickup at a nearby beach the very next day, all they have to do is fort up for the night and wait for dawn. At first everything seems good, Bill electrifies the fence around the place to keep the Triffids at bay, handy since Teresa is pregnant and due to give birth any minute now and can’t possibly travel. Naturally before they make their getaway, the biggest horde of Triffids they’ve ever seen arrive. The electric fence can’t hold them back… nor can the improvised flamethrower Bill rigs out of a gasoline tanker stop them… but in true heroic fashion, Bill leads them away using the loudspeaker of an ice-cream truck, giving Susan, Christine and the de la Vegas a chance to escape. Yeah, yeah… don’t worry.. he’ll lose the Triffids and manage to rendezvous with them at the submarine in time for our happy ending… it’s just that sort of Apocalypse after-all. ;)

So what about scientist Tom and his wife Karen? Well they get to do that really cool “last stand” at the lighthouse thing as the Triffids smash their way in and fight to climb up the lighthouse to get at them, all so our hero can discover… ever so conveniently… that the fire-hose of the lighthouse is pumping seawater and that the Triffids are as allergic to seawater as Dracula is to sunlight. Yep… it’s melts them into green goo faster than Dorothy melted the Wicked Witch of the West. Ummmm? Yeah…. I’m with you on this… that’s kind of a dumb vulnerability, but hey… this wee Catgirl didn’t write the script. Sigh…. even wee Miyuki wasn’t impressed.

Mind you, given that 70% of the earth is covered with seawater, it does mean humanity can now easily win the war against the Triffids and make for a tidy ending to our film. Well… except for most everybody still being blind, that is. But let’s not let a little thing like that dampen the celebration! We still get to put one in the “win” column. Yep. Humanity 1… Triffids 0. ;)

So… having watched this one again after all these years, I’d have to say this was one of those times when my sense of nostalgia doesn’t quite match the reality of the film as it really stands. “The Day of the Triffids” isn’t really all that great a film, when you get right down to it. It’s quaint, and it does actually have some really neat ideas that I can see got recycled quite heavily in a lot of later Zombie Apocalypse films, but for the most part it’s awfully dated and pretty much by the numbers, story wise. The acting is adequate, but not outstanding. The effects aren’t all that amazing, and the Triffids themselves have the look of one of the monsters from Irwin Allen’s “Lost In Space” TV show, sometimes a guy in a rubber plant suit… sometimes a puppet… sometimes what looks like stop motion animation… all depending upon what they had to be able to do. About the best thing that could be said is that they were waaaay more convincing than the critters from 1968′s Japanese Sci-fi effort “The Green Slime”. The ending? Practically stolen from “War of the Worlds”. Still…. and don’t ask me why…. I really actually like this goofy film. Yep, I admit it.

Given that I give “The Day of the Triffids” a firm 3 “Meows” out of 5. Goodness knows there are people that will roll their eyes at that, but I stand by my feelings on this one. Sure it’s hokey and stupid and dated as all heck, but it still has that certain something that makes me smile and want to watch. Don’t have a clue why…. maybe it’s just that satisfying idea of seeing mankind win that eternal war against the Plant kingdom. Who knows? Anyways… if you too, have that same undefinable attachment to the goofy films of your misspent youth, then luckily for you, this is a fairly easy one to find a copy of on DVD at usually a pretty nice budget price too. (C’mon… if you are visiting me here at my lil’ Litterbox, then I already know you are a “bad” movie fan at heart… just come out and admit it.. ;) )

Have I got a Trailer? But of course!! :)

A new month and hopefully some well deserved free time for this wee lady following a busy few weeks. How best to celebrate? Well… how about we start off with another of our trans-Atlantic shared film reviews with our fellow Asian film fanatic Stephen over at Gweilo Ramblings? Yep… now that’s just the ticket… ;) Our film choice for this time out? Well how about we skip our usual cozy DVD-at-home for an evening out at the real cinema and a quick look at the recent Americanized reboot of an old monster movie classic, “Godzilla”? Giant monsters… army guys fighting said giant monsters… lots of crazy destruction and mayhem to be had by all. Hehehe.… and they even do it all with mostly English dialog to boot. My sweet Carolyn will be soooo happy… :)

Not sure “Godzilla” is really a method of celebration! But thanks for welcoming me back to the Litterbox. Now this one is a film I was somewhat suspicious about. The trailers didn’t look hopeful, but I knew the director had a lot of genre love for monster movies. But for me – could it beat that one scene in “Pacific Rim”? Anyway, how about you give us a little cat girl-styled synopsis?

Let’s see… our synopsis goes like this here: “In Japan, dedicated nuclear power-plant manager Joe Brody reports to work at the plant with his wife Sandra, who works in the reactor, where not all is well. Joe has begun to suspect that some recent suspiciously patterned seismic activity may be something more sinister than shifting tectonic plates and is actually a grave threat to the plant itself. Once there, a freak earthshock causes the plant to go into meltdown and Sandra gets caught on the wrong side of the containment door, dying literally before Joe’s eyes. Following the disaster a massive cover-up ensues. Fifteen years later, Joe’s son Ford has grown up and become a bomb-disposal expert in the U.S. military. He’s just returned home to his wife Elle and their son Sam when he gets word that his father been arrested in Japan. Long estranged from his father, who was written off as a conspiracy theorist nutcase for his failed efforts to prove the Japanese government was attempting to hide something about the earlier disaster, Ford nevertheless ventures to Japan to get him out of jail. Once there, he is drawn into his father’s obsession and reluctantly agrees to join him in traveling to their old home in the quarantined zone. Subsequently taken into custody, the pair end up in the very plant where Joe used to work, and where scientist Dr. Ichiro Serizawa is studying a massive cocoon-like structure that appears to feed on radiation. The situation turns critical when the events of the present begin to mirror those of the past, and a terrifying winged-creature dubbed a “MUTO” is unleashed. Meanwhile, as the military attempts to devise a plan to destroy the beast, signals indicate that it had been calling out to something before it broke free, and the scientists learn that it has also awoken a towering, godlike leviathan dubbed “Godzilla”, that has lain dormant for decades, and may be mankind’s only hope for restoring the balance of nature.”

Ok … sounds like it’s a pretty basic plot. So then, there’s no possible way they could screw this up, right? Weeeelll… don’t forget… we Americans have tried this before. (At least this time they haven’t invited Matthew Broderick to the party…. Thank goodness…) So with that in mind, let’s all see how it plays out shall we? Grab your popcorn… ;)

Maybe best not to waste too much time on the last effort by Hollywood. That was an awful disappointment!

So… If you grew up in the 70′s and 80′s like a certain goofy Catgirl, then you probably spent a number of hours gleefully watching all those crazy “rubber suited” monster epics that rolled out of Japan to become as much a part of American movie entertainment as they did Japanese movie culture. Yep. At their heart they were pretty darn goofy. Big silly clumsy leviathans that staggered around miniature city sets like crazy baseball mascots crossed with drunken ex-boxers hopelessly lost yet still looking for that one last big championship fight. Somehow they always managed to destroy that city…. face off against the teeny tiny military forces arrayed to stop them, and usually have some big no-holds-barred grudge-match smackdown with another of their kind… all for the entertainment of oodles and oodles of kids that couldn’t ever get enough. Yep. That was the formula. But the craziest thing…. That silly formula actually worked!! Every… darn… time.

Lil’ Miyuki saw them all. The King of them all was, of course, “Godzilla”…. or “Gojira” as my Mom always corrected me… Ishirō Honda’s iconic walking talking metaphor for the atomic bomb. Main character of some 30 odd films, it’s fair to say the impact of the character on the genre is as enormous as Godzilla himself. Naturally… even we here in America have been impressed. So much so that we’ve been tinkering with things since the very beginning. 1954′s classic didn’t even make it to the screen without… **ahem**… a few American touches thrown in to make it more, shall we say… “viewer friendly” for a US audience that isn’t always as forgiving of foreign movie fare as we might be. Oh yes…. I still remember my Grandma’s perplexed reaction to Raymond Burr when this one played on Saturday morning TV.

But even the dubbing… the edits… the endless tinkering just wasn’t enough. So… it was inevitable that eventually we Americans would have to take a crack at Godzilla ourselves. And so… in 1998… Roland Emmerich screwed it up. Royally. There’s just no other polite way to put it. But let us not dwell on the craptastic nature of that film. Instead let’s just be glad that Japan didn’t demand we never, ever go anywhere near their beloved monster again.

I did tell you not to dwell! Personally although we are of a similar vintage, I never really watched too many of these films in the past. I have seen one or two, and I know the basic ideas and general goofiness around them. My real introduction was the bizarre Hanna-Barbara/Toho produced cartoon. Which was a strange sort of Scooby-doo clone. With a version of Scrappy-doo called “Godzooky”. So there is worse than Emmerich out there I promise you.

OMG!! I remember that cartoon! That version portrayed our Godzilla as a pretty much “trained poodle” pet of some bunch of scientists who could be called up to whup on monsters and aliens and the like. Soooo demeaning!! You’re right… so much worse….  :oops:

That means this one’s better? Right? Is that what your Favorite Catgirl is hinting? Ummmmm? Errrrr? Well…. Sort of.

It is fair to say we here in America learned what not to do with Godzilla. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean we figured out what we could do with him.

Sigh…. Basically I’m sorry to say, we somehow missed yet again what the entire “Kaiju” genre is all about. It’s not a platform for deeply emotional human stories like the ones that take up most of this film. It is occasionally a metaphor for other stuff…. stuff we feel uncomfortable talking about without putting those ideas into fictional form. Like the horrors of nuclear war… or the destruction of a modern world by forces completely beyond human control… or the ultimate futility of human excess and greed in the face of unstoppable natural forces. But…. more than anything else… it’s supposed to be about giant unstoppable crazy monsters beating the living hell out of each other while smashing stuff to utter crap. Yep… nothing deep or meaningful. Just the guilty joy of witnessing utter destruction on a scale completely beyond reality.

I could beg to differ. Godzilla is very much born out of the Japanese experience with Atomic energy. But then gain. You can have the subtext and still have giant monsters bashing the living crap out of each other. And this one very much kept that on the periphery on the whole.

Unfortunately for those of us who watched this one… we didn’t get all that much of that. Not that there weren’t plenty of opportunities. The vague pictures shown in the background news reports suggest that the slug-fest between Godzilla and his insectoid foes in Honolulu was a doozy. What did we get instead? Lots of lame subplots with our army hero and some nameless lil’ Japanese tourist boy…. Oooohhh…. and the doggy that almost drowned. Grrrr. Well… OK. Las Vegas gets trashed too. But again…. we mostly get some pretty CGI pictures of the aftermath.

Some of those subplots…. just totally underdeveloped. And went nowhere. The little Japanese boy one was particularly galling. It went nowhere. And seems utterly unlinked to anything else in the movie.

All of this is a real shame too. When Godzilla is front and center, it’s plain to see that this time out, they just about got him right. He’s big. He’s hefty. He’s got a mean look like an aging Mike Tyson somehow crossed with both a pit bull and a crocodile… and just as ornery as that combination suggests. He’s really got the look of a contender for “King Of The Monsters”. One look and you know he’s here to kick serious ass. I just sooooo wish they had let him.

Agreed, visually I loved this Godzilla. He had heft. But also he looked somewhat old and world weary. I wasn’t so fussed about him taking an hour to appear, but the way they kept bringing him up only to pan away to much less interesting stuff became quite wearisome.

So then. That means that our story has to hang solely on the human characters. But here… “Godzilla” blows it yet again, giving us nothing more than a mostly bloated cast of mostly cardboard stereotypes and a lame “all American” boy-next-door and his wife and kids to try to hold our interest. Why even our main “hero’s” biggest climactic moment…. standing bravely at his moment of his certain near death… pistol in hand… made me just so darn disappointed with it’s utter stupidity. I mean really… a 9mm pistol? Really? After watching these leviathans take pointblank tank rounds without so much as a tickle? Was he that badly hit in the head that he thought that was going to do anything useful? But yet that’s what the writers would have us believe is the “heroic” thing to do at a moment like that…

I don’t mind focusing on the human interest. If the people are interesting. But really. Ford Brody is utterly lacking in anything interesting at all. And the whole pistol thing was mind-numbingly dumb. I understand stress. And the heat of the moment. But seriously!!

I think I would have been able to invest more emotionally in those human stories if there had been a better overall balance between those story elements and the action, but the scales seemed awfully out of balance. At least to me anyway…

Yep. That’s pretty much this film’s notion of story in a nutshell. It also explains why it left me so cold. Ultimately… “Godzilla” ends up being a “monster movie” that doesn’t really want to be a “monster movie”. Problem is… it doesn’t want to be anything else either. With that, I can really honestly give it a paltry 2 “Meows” out of 5. Seriously. The CGI made a credible Godzilla a very real possibility…. and for the life of me I can’t understand why it wasn’t gone after with even half the effort and craft of the most low budget Scifi “Sharknado” sequel. Oh well. Chances are we’ll see another attempt… probably right around summer, 2020 if experience tells me anything. Maybe next time out, we’ll get somebody who actually likes Godzilla behind the scenes rather than one that just figures there’s money to be made. One can only hope.

I actually am going to go against convention here and unusually like a movie more than you. I think it is worthy of 3 “Meows”. I loved the opening 30 minutes, and technically it was fantastic. It just failed because of the rubbish human interest plot lines and a central character that was so dull it defies explanation.

Hehehe… it had to happen eventually, Stephen. I guess I’m just a lil’ goofy when it come to these sorts of films. For me, “Monster Movies” are all about the monsters…. Anyways… as always, it’s been fun sharing opinions with you, and until next time, here’s to our next foray into cinema goodness!! So… for more Kaiju goodness don’t forget to check out the extra added “flip-side” to my ramblings by checking out Stephen’s “Godzilla” review at his blog HERE!! And, before I forget, as is customary here at the ol’ Litterbox, naturally we end things with a Trailer. :)

Yep… I know you’ve noticed… I’ve been terribly terribly absent again, but finally I’m back here at the ol’ Litterbox and it’s time for your Favorite Catgirl Princess to take a wee side trip to exotic Vietnam for our next creepy movie review, with a look at the recent Region 1 DVD release for Vietnamese writer-director Lê Văn Kiệt’s 2012 ghost story “Ngôi Nhà Trong Hẻm” aka “House In The Alley”.

Our synopsis goes like this: “House in the Alley follows Thanh and Thao, a young successful couple living in Saigon about to begin a new happy chapter in their lives, parenthood. However, that dream becomes a nightmare, with the violent death of their son. Thanh begins to see a drastic change in Thao, and becomes concerned. She is withdrawn, compulsive, and prone to hallucination. But he can only do his best, also handling a major crisis with his business. Their house itself changes. Scratches appear on walls, furniture is vandalized, something is haunting them. Wracked with guilt and isolated, Thao is convinced their son is cursing them from the grave. Thao becomes almost unrecognizable as the paranormal takes over her body. Tormented by the thought of losing his wife, Thanh searches for clues to the history behind their house past, uncovering a secret many hoped to forget.”

Sounds pretty much like the kind of film yours truly likes… with creepy ghosts, paranormally induced insanity… and more than a wee bit of supernatural “conflict resolution” with all sorts of sharp and pointy tools. ;) Ought to be oodles of fun, or as my sweet wifey always says “Oh no… not another of your crazy foreign psycho ghost movies….”. Why, yes, my dearest Carolyn… it’s looks like exactly that. Yes, yes…. I know…. I’m sooooo gonna owe her a big loving kiss, some quality cuddle time, and Romantic comedy choice for our next Movie Nite. :)

However… as most of my Gentle Visitors here at the ol’ Litterbox seem to share this wee lady’s taste in atrocious horror movies, I expect all of you will probably want to “Read On” and find out just what might be in store for you if this DVD is on your own particular “must see” list so let’s give it a try shall we?

So. A Vietnamese ghost story? Really? In my feverishly fanatic collecting of Asian horror cinema over the years I honestly haven’t managed to see all that many Vietnamese movies…. mostly just a few martial arts swordplay epics and one or two modern cops n’ robbers efforts and never a real Vietnamese horror film. (I really don’t count 2005′s “Oan Hồn” aka “Spirits” which I reviewed waaaaay back then, as it was actually made here in the US rather than in Vietnam itself… ) Not that Vietnam doesn’t make horror movies…. they most certainly do, however I’ve just never had all that much luck running into any of them. I’m told that DVD’s in Vietnam itself are quite unlike those I’m used to from other Asian locales too. For one thing…. they seem to come on 2 discs like the old VCD format. Why? Darned if I know. Maybe they don’t want to pay licensing for the format… sorta like Disney. Me? I’ve never managed to even ever find one directly from Vietnam itself. Anyways… when I first got news of this one, I figured it too would remain elusive much like the others I’d heard of. Luckily for me, director Lê Văn Kiệt managed to get some fairly good Western press on “Ngôi Nhà Trong Hẻm” when it came out back in 2012 and even though it took two whole years to happen, eventually it was picked up for distribution on a decent Region 1 DVD release from Shout! Factory. Not to mention… also with nice  accurate English subtitles along for the ride… Yay!! ;)

It’s a pretty slick looking film too, rather than the quaint shoestring budgeted effort I’d expected to experience. Kudos to director Lê Văn Kiệt for hiring Joel Spezeski as cinematographer on this one giving the film a much more polished overall look than most other local productions mange to achieve. I can tell you, the result was a bigger hit with Carolyn than some of my… ummmm… shall we say, “less ambitious”… Asian films often are. The story? Well, that’s a simple one too, and therefore oodles easier to digest for my sweetheart than many from that part of the world can be at times.

We start off with a particularly gruesome miscarriage that happens to our heroine Thao (played by Thanh Van Ngo aka Veronica Ngo). It’s one of those home births… with a midwife attending who arrives during a typhoon and takes one look at Thao and knows this particular birth is soooo gonna crash and burn like the Hindenburg. Yep. No amount of towels and hot water will stop this from ending so badly.

Well… one stillborn baby later and poor Thao has that sort of mental breakdown that leaves her hubby Thanh (played by Son Bao Tran) with no way to console her other than to give in to her obsessive need to keep the baby hanging around in his tiny lil’ coffin here at home rather than seeing to any sort of proper funerary rite. Yep, our hero’s got problems. He loves his achingly pretty but mentally shattered wife even if he has to shield her from his no-nonsense mother (played by Tran Bich) who thinks she just ought to suck it up and get over things. His mother. She’s… well… there’s really no nice way to put it. She’s a bitch. A real Queen Bitch of the First Order. Bad news is, she’s also Thanh’s boss at work and browbeats him endlessly about just plain slapping some sense into Thao, and then manning up to handle the labor problems that are threatening to torpedo the family business but good. She’s never liked Thao, and this tragedy just reinforces her idea that Thanh’s marriage was a stupid mistake on his part anyway.

Sound depressing enough? Oh yeah. But don’t worry… things are going to get sooo darn much worse.

Basically, our story then starts going to some pretty scary places as Thao starts experiencing hallucinations and exhibiting all those crazy postpartum depression symptoms you’d expect to see on a Lifetime network movie-of-the-week melodrama… but with ghosts.

The house. It’s a really roomy and somewhat upscale place for a young couple to afford. Mind you… it’s a wee bit rundown, a bit of a fixer-upper, and there’s a reason why. Seems along with the unburied baby-in-a-box that our young couple keeps in their bedroom, the house was once also the scene of a tragic fire that killed a bunch of children who now apparently haunt the house and seek to maliciously mess with anyone daring to live there. Poor Thanh ends up juggling a lot of stuff by mid-film. His domineering mother… his wife, descending into grief fueled homicidal madness… and both the ghosts of his unborn son and some evil urchins trying to kill them both. Cue the standard ghostly giggling just out of frame… the weird noises on the roof at night… the scampering little figures just out of the corner of your eye.

None of this is particularly novel or new. Trust me, this wee Catgirl’s seen plenty of similar stories. Even so, although there’s precious few surprises on hand, the whole thing moves along reasonably well, building suspense as we wait for poor Thao’s cheese to completely fall off her cracker. You just know. That’s when things will get frisky.

Naturally our film pushes things to that nasty place where loving wife starts hunting down loving hubby with a big honking axe and you just know somebody’s gonna lose a body part before it all gets resolved for good or ill. I mean… hey… it worked in “The Shining”…. ;)

So what’s the verdict? Well, “Ngôi Nhà Trong Hẻm” doesn’t score for originality story wise, but I’d have to say it does at least understand what it’s trying to do and makes an honest effort to get there in a way that takes that rather overused story and works it for what it’s worth. However… when you consider where this one was made… it’s a pretty darn good effort from a rather unexpected film industry. The acting is pretty good, if uninspired and I found both leads very convincing within the confines of the tale at hand. The ghostly action was well done… but in a way, felt almost unnecessary. Without it, the story probably would have worked as a simple psychological thriller about postpartum depression driving our heroine to murder and mayhem. In fact, given how poorly the angle about the haunting was handled, I almost would have preferred that it play out that way. To me anyway, the ghosts seemed kind of “tacked on” to appeal to ghost story fans rather than being a necessary part of the story. Maybe there was something subtle and cultural to it all, but I’d have to say this wee Catgirl missed it….

I give it all a respectable 3 “Meows” out of 5, again mostly for being a very professional looking film from a place I don’t expect to see such fare from. It’s worth a look, most definitely if Asian horror is your thing, but just don’t expect too much more from it than this and you’ll be fine. The Region 1 DVD by Shout! Factory is excellent with good subtitles, a widescreen letterbox format… and it’s certainly budget conscious too, available from most places for right around 10-15$ US. Heck, it’s even available at your local Walmart…. ;)

There’s a nifty Trailer available… with oodles and oodles of creepy ghost action for those still on the fence about giving it a look. Give it a peek, why don’t you?

Woo-Hoo!! Yours truly has finally scored herself another of those elusive films I’ve been looking for, both high and low, for quite a while, the 2012 Philippine Aswang action/horror/comedy “Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles”. Yep… this one’s been a terribly hard one to pounce on, but at last it’s mine! Which means, of course, Gentle Visitors, I’m gonna be able to tell you all about it in a suitably “nekolishous” review just in case you’ve been aching to see it too. :)

Our synopsis goes like this: “With dark shades on and a burning cigarette between his lips, Makoy will do whatever it takes to win back his girlfriend Sonia’s, who’s pregnant with their child. He makes the trip to remote Pulupandan, her hometown, and is quickly rebuffed by Sonia’s mother. Tired of his laziness, and devil-may-care attitude, Sonia refuses to see him as well. But Makoy has never been one to give up. With the help of Sonia’s father and his ever-dependable helper Bart, Makoy stays in town to surprise Sonia on her birthday. But alas, Makoy gets into trouble with a group of townsfolk who transform into tiktik—horrific, man-eating creatures with a taste for fetuses that are still in the womb! They are angry, and they are hungry for revenge. Will their thirst for blood and retribution be quenched? Will Makoy finally get his act together, protect Sonia and their baby, and once and for all prove himself worthy of their love? Who will win in the battle between men and monsters?”

Oooohh!! Oodles more cannibal aswang fun and games done in a style that looks super influenced by the CGI work in “300″ or “Sin City”. Some action, some romance, and naturally this wee lady loves the Philippine aswang folklore on hand, even if all the movies I’ve watched all seem to have completely differing ideas on just what these critters are all about. From the Trailer, it looks like they’ve gone and done yet another version this time out, but boy does it look crazy and fun. I’m sooooo there!! Wanna know how it went? Then by now you know the drill… ;)

Yep. This one has taken me a good long time to track down. When it first came out back in 2012, I figured it wouldn’t be all that hard to get a copy of… Philippine DVD’s usually being released fairly quickly after the theatrical run of a movie… but boy… was I wrong. To date, I’ve never even seen a sign of a domestic Philippine DVD for this one, although I’ve run across vague references to such. Oh well… it was such a big budget film with excellent Western entertainment press coverage that I assumed somebody would snag it for Region 1 DVD release fairly soon. Ummmm… nope. Not yet anyways. There were the inevitable dodgy bootlegs that started showing up on eBay and the like… but I genuinely try to avoid those and their terrible, terrible auto-translated subtitles like the plague. Finally… a legitimate version popped up in Germany. Germany? Hey… whatever… weirder things have happened. But…. although subtitled into German, there were still no English subtitles to be had. Grrrr!!! (Patience Miyuki…. patience….) Just about when I’d almost given up, another release happened. On Region 4… in Australia. This time out… thanks mostly to the fact that they speak English there, the subtitles I’ve been aching for were finally on board as well. Yay!! Sometimes the “Movie Fairies” smile on this wee Catgirl… :)

This film is the first full-length Filipino film entirely shot on green screen chroma key or “color-separation overlay” as it’s called in the UK. Practically the entire film was done on a sound-stage including most of the exterior “location” shots seen throughout. The result has that look that reminds one heavily of the cartoonish “graphic novel” appearance of Western made blockbuster films like “300″ or “Sin City”, and much was done to emulate those films in tone while still trying to stay firmly a very distinctly Philippine film. It does indeed have a very unique look for a Filipino horror movie which, for me anyways, worked pretty well to showcase the story on hand.

That story is a pretty darn B-movie simple one too, which is actually an asset to bolster the lurid comic book feel of the film. It starts out by introducing us to our hero Makoy (played by Dingdong Dantes) enduring a grueling overland trek in one of the ramshackle three wheeled motorbikes that serve as rural transport in the rustic provinces of the Philippines. Right away we get the sense that our boy Makoy is one of those smart-ass hustler/playboy types out for his own interests and doing just enough to get by without having to commit to having real responsibilities weighing him down. He’s on his way to Pulupandan in the Western Visayas to find his girlfriend Sonia (played by actress/model Lovi Poe) who’s left him after an argument to return home to stay with her family. What our boy doesn’t know is that Sonia is pregnant with his child… at least not till he arrives at Sonia’s family home and gets a less than friendly greeting from Sonia’s angry Mom Fely (played by Janice de Belen). One look at him and Fely is sure there’s no way she’s putting up with Makoy’s “bad boy” attitude or letting him anywhere near her daughter again.

Surprised by the impending arrival of his child, Makoy’s resolve to patch things up with Sonia only grows…. mostly at first out of that Macho controlling way some guys feel for their “baby momma” rather than any real concern or feeling for Sonia herself. In fact… as our story gets underway, he’s what one might politely refer to as a Royal Asshole…. This wee Catgirl took an immediate dislike to his character… much to my sweet Carolyn’s amusement. She could sense my simmering dislike for Makoy right off the bat and it’s never a good thing to rub this wee lady the wrong way when you are trying to be the hero of the story.

Luckily for Makoy, Sonia’s father Nestor (played by Joey Marquez) is much more laid back and can see some vestige of worth in Makoy, and so along with his sidekick Bart (played by Ramon Bautista), conspires to see if he can’t help Makoy patch things up with his daughter. Coincidentally it’s Sonia’s birthday and the family is planning a big party to celebrate both that and the imminent arrival of the new baby. Makoy gets the idea to play “big man” by providing the money for a proper feast and so they head to the local village to find a pig for the BBQ. It turns out there isn’t one available there at a reasonable price, so Bart suggests they give his cousin, Ringo (played by Mike Gayoso) a visit in the next village and that he’d give them a good deal on one. This is where things start to go bad fast….

Oh yeah. You see… creepy cousin Ringo’s family are all “Tiktiks”, horrific man-eating aswang with a special taste for fetuses that are still in the womb. Makoy makes the mistake of telling them about Sonia’s pregnancy and also manages to piss them off by trying to push the negotiations for the price of the pig to a stupidly insulting low amount. They get sent along by an angry Ringo without making a deal, but his son, Kulot (played by RJ Salvador) goes behind his father’s back to make a deal with Makoy anyway that will allow him to then disguise himself as a pig with his eerie aswang shapeshifting powers and be taken home with them. The rest of the aswang clan follow, waiting for Kulot to signal them to attack their unsuspecting victims. Awww crap… not the old “Trojan Pig” plan… ;)

Back at Sonia’s home, Nestor manages to get his wife to calm down enough to let Makoy stay for the celebrations, even though he still can’t seem to get a handle on his attitude enough to convince Sonia that his desire to reconcile and change his ways is sincere. In a weird way… the evil Tiktik provide him with just the kick in the pants he needs to “man up” and become the potential husband Sonia both wants and desperately needs. Kulot isn’t there at the house for long before the delicious scent of pregnant Sonia has him transforming into his monstrously humanoid form to creep upstairs to her room and make an attempt to snack on her and the baby. Makoy and Nestor, hearing her scream, are just in time to kill the evil monster and save Sonia, but the rest of the aswang clan is surrounding the house by now and they make an attack to try to avenge their sibling and snatch away Sonia.

The film abandons all subtlety at this point, and poor Bart gets accused of being in cahoots with his cousins. I was actually a bit confused by this as the character of Bart is shown throughout the story as most definitely one of the “good guys”, and he knows all the aswang lore they need to protect themselves for the remainder of the film. Given that, I found it strange that either he didn’t know all his relatives were actually monsters… very unlikely given how much he knows about the aswang… or that knowing they were hiding in the village pretending to be humans, he still sent Nestor and Makoy to buy a pig for pregnant Sonia’s party from them and somehow didn’t expect the baby eating monsters to not try to show up for a tasty morsel like that. That one element seems a bit silly… so perhaps it’s best to kind of ignore that lapse in logic…

What kind of aswang lore are we talking about? Well, these “Tiktiks” are some kind of shapeshifting monsters, who can look human, but also can change into animal form as well, as example, Kulot’s little piggy trick. They also have this semi-monster form… mostly human, but with fangs and claws, crazy red eyes, and the ability to leap around like grasshoppers and scamper up wall on all fours like Spiderman. They are super fast, super strong, but they do have weaknesses…. both garlic and salt burn them like acid and it seems that if they are exposed to sunlight while not hidden in human form, they are destroyed. Wanna know when you are in trouble? Why if you can hear their eerie calls reeeeaaally well, then you are safe. They share that same quirk as the Indonesian Kuntilanak that they sound fainter and fainter as they creep up on you until… when you can’t hear them at all… they are probably right behind you. Oooohhh!!! Not only that… there’s a herbal elixir that you can get that boils in it’s bottle when they approach. Neat, eh? Neko certainly thought so….

That means that the last half of the film is pretty much devoted to an armed standoff between Makoy and Sonia’s family on one side and the besieging monsters on the other, each trying to get the upper hand before sunrise brings the fight to a close. There’s lots of crazy fights, plenty of CGI monster action, and even a welcome reformation of Makoy from butthead to real hero as things move along. Naturally we lose characters along the way… and one by one the evil monsters all get taken out, till the big climax when Makoy gets to face off against the Tiktik demon patriarch Tatang (played by Roi Vinzon) in a wuxia style battle to the death to save both Sonia and his newborn son.

So the humans do win? Yeah, yeah…. it’s that kind of simple “good vs. evil” plot after all, but it’s all done in a very fast frantically paced comic book style that works fairly well for the material. I even managed to find myself rooting for Makoy by about two thirds of the way through the story… not bad considering how much I despised him at first. Leading man Dingdong Dantes does a pretty stand-up job playing Makoy in a way that redeems his character successfully by films end without seeming too unlikely or too forced. Unfortunately, as Sonia, Lovi Poe is given a lot less chance to stand out here, spending most of the film doing the whole “OMG… I’m sooo about to give birth” bit. I wish she’d have been given more of an active role than just the typical damsel in distress, but sadly that’s just not the case.

Still… “Tiktik” is a spunky lil’ film that aspires to be a crazy horror comic book come to life on screen, and by goodness, it actually manages to do just that for the most part. It’s hokey at times… it’s downright stretching the boundaries of common sense at other moments, but all in all it actually works. Wanna see a “Night of the Living Dead” style siege between people and cannibal monsters with wacky folklore and subtitles? Then “Tiktik” is probably right up your alley. This wee Catgirl gives it 4 “Meows” out of 5 for both knowing it’s job and then just plain doing it.

The Australian Region 4 DVD for this one is excellent, if a bit pricy at right around 30$ US. It’s done in widescreen letterboxed format with perfect English subtitles, and has both some deleted scenes as well as a “Making of” feature. There might be a more budget friendly version somewhere down the road, but until then, this one would certainly fill the bill if you…. like a certain movie crazy kitten… just can’t wait anymore. So… if goofy werewolf/vampire/demon baby eating things are your cup of tea, then what are you waiting for? C’mon…. you know you gotta see it… ;)

As always I’ve got you a Trailer so you can have a wee lil’ look-see for yourself! Enjoy!

Our Honeymoon trip approaches, but there’s still time for a few more Reviews… (if only this wee lady can get herself properly motivated that is ;) ) … and this time out it’s off to India for a look at the Bollywood sexploitation/ horror film “Ragini MMS 2″, sequel to the original “found footage horror” effort of 2011 which your Favorite Catgirl already reviewed HERE. The original was a somewhat surprising hit at the box office with it’s scandalous premise and it was inevitable that there would be a sequel somewhere down the line. Well, now it’s finally here, and starring Canadian born porn film starlet Sunny Leone… probably cast more for her scandalous reputation than anything else, but will even that help this sequel sink or swim? Guess we’ll find out, eh? ;)

Our synopsis goes along these lines: “In the summer of 2011, a couple’s dirty weekend turned into their worst nightmare as an MMS attempt of their most private moments, went horribly wrong. Unimaginable & inexplicable things began to happen and they found themselves at the mercy of forces beyond the realm of understanding, This was the “Ragini MMS Scandal”. Now, 2 years later a young enthusiastic crew and an over-the-top film director re-visit this farmhouse in a bid to make a film on this shocking yet sexy MMS Scandal. The film top-lines adult film star Sunny Leone, who is playing herself in this “film-within a-film”. As destiny would have it, the unassuming crew is led onto finding the horrors that inhabit the house. As strange and creepy things begin to befall them they realize there’s no return from here – THEY ARE TRAPPED! The only way to escape is to destroy the evil spirits for which they need to unearth the back story of the house… only to release a bigger, untold truth!”

Ummmm? I have to admit, I was a bit on the fence about watching this one, especially given the somewhat shabby way our heroine Ragini was treated in the original, and porn films really aren’t this lady’s cup of tea… but then Hindi films always tease more than revel in such trappings, so there’s really no way to know for certain what’s in store without just taking a deep breath, wishing for some luck from the “Movie Faeries” and just going for it…. and Hindi DVD’s are soooo inexpensive!! So, if risque sexploitative films work for you, then just scamper along with this Catgirl and we’ll see what potentially naughty Hindi thrills and chills are here to be had, shall we? ;)

So… given this wee Catgirl’s aversion to the somewhat misogynistic way Hindi film can sometimes treat women characters, I originally had a somewhat uneasy feeling about even giving this film a look-see. The addition of porn starlet Sunny Leone to the cast didn’t exactly thrill me either. But…. then I remembered my surprise at Japanese AV star Sora Aoi in “Big Tits Zombie”…. who turned out to be both refreshingly likeable as well as not a bad little actress when all was said and done. Could Miss Leone also turn out to be such a “diamond-in-the-rough”? Ok… Ok… curious lil’ me just had to know. One quick internet search later and a copy of the film was mine.

So the plot of this one gets going with a clever notion… let’s assume that the first “Ragini MMS” was real and leaked to Youtube or something like that. Naturally somebody would want to cash in on something as exploitatively titillating as a ghostly sex scandal that ends in multiple murder and madness. Enter sleazy failing exploitation film director Rocks (played by Parvin Dabas) looking for that project that will make him both rich and famous, finally scoring himself the respect he’s ached for throughout his career. He announces a film fictionalization of the Ragini story and to really ramp up the hype, signs porn starlet Sunny Leone (playing herself) to fill the roll of Ragini. Cue the big media intro and perquisite Bollywood sexy dance sequence!!

Miss Leone immediately grabs your attention… and much of the film revolves crucially around her. Luckily… and thankfully… she’s actually up for the challenge. The whole idea of her professional life as a porn star is actually important to the story… not just there to titillate and lure in an audience hoping for some naughty action to unfold. The plot portrays her as a very real, very professional woman, with a strong sense of self and unashamed of what is a fairly unacceptable profession by Hindi standards. Many opportunities pop up for the usual “macho” Bollywood masculine attempts to conquer such a “loose’ woman, only to have her turn the tables on them and show a surprising strength of character. Good for her!! If Sunny is really anything like the characterization of herself shown here, then she’s a remarkable person indeed. At the very least… I have to admit, it turns out she’s a reasonably talented actress who is definitely more than just someone who could just be marginalized or dismissed by her choice of profession.

So… anyway… once she’s on board for our story the film shifts to it’s other big exploitative draw, and that would be director Rock’s idea to film his “true story” at the actual haunted bungalow where the tragedy took place. Ummm… wait a moment… that sounds kind of dumb…. but since when has that ever stopped somebody in one of these sorts of horror stories? :)

Sunny, aware that she’s mostly here to draw a curious audience with her scandalous reputation, wants this to be a real serious attempt to do justice to Ragini and her tragic story. So it’s off to the asylum for a visit with poor crazy Ragini (played by Kainaz Motivala, reprising her role from the earlier film) to give Sunny the inspiration she feels necessary to give a proper performance. Nice idea… with terrible results. Ragini you see is still being haunted by the spirit of the witch from the first movie, and once Sunny visits her, the ghost decides to shift her attentions to Miss Leone, possessing her quietly and awaiting it’s chance to visit revenge and terror on the film crew once they all reach the bungalow. Damn…. you just had to see that coming, didn’t you?

Now this is a Hindi film… so along with being a musical it also has to be a romance story too… and that would require a hunky guy to woo Miss Leone so we get a brooding handsome scriptwriter named Satya (played by Saahil Prem) to fit the bill. He starts off with a big preconceived idea about Sunny as being a big slutty bimbo and definitely doesn’t want anything to do with her, but slowly comes to see her as a real person and someone he can respect as an artist trying to be more than just a sex symbol. There’s that smoldering desire that all these Hindi films like as the two of them pussyfoot around each other trying hard not to admit the attraction they feel and the chemistry here works, at least it did for me, without ending up feeling cheap or forced in any way. Another nice surprise.

The story picks up pretty quickly, as the cast and crew of our film slowly get haunted one by one, and killed off, each in some grisly way at the hands of our possessed heroine. While all this stuff is happening, there’s a side plot involving a psychiatrist, Dr. Meera Dutta (played by Divya Dutta) , who is one of those sciency people who love investigating paranormal stuff. You all know the type…. She takes up Ragini’s case and after going through all the old news clippings and video tapes of Ragini, she’s the one who finally finds out the real truth behind the haunting. Too bad it’s not in time to save Ragini herself, who dies by stabbing herself to death with that creepy rattle from the first film…

Turns out the ghost wasn’t a witch… just a married woman with two daughters and a son who dies after falling down a well. She goes all crazy with grief and tries to figure out a way to resurrect him from the dead. That leads her to fall under the influence of an evil Tantric priest who claimed to perform black magic. He sacrifices her two daughters by chopping off their heads, and then… with the angry villagers beating down the doors… he puts the murder weapon in her hands and makes his escape. The villagers… believing her guilty of the killings and the practice of witchcraft… punish her by hanging her from a tree, stoning her, and burning her alive. Somehow… she survives all that long enough to curse them all and then commit suicide by stabbing herself in the neck with the rattle-toy her son used to play with. Just like she said in the first movie… “I am not a witch…. I did not kill my children… This is my home…. I will never leave….”

Naturally by the time bright Dr. Meera figures this all out, poor Sunny, possessed by the spirit, has already killed most everybody by either luring them into having sex or killing them after catching them by surprise when they are all alone and is soooo soooo darn close to killing Satya too. She rushes to the bungalow just in time for our big Exorcist inspired climax. Will Dr. Meera save the day? Will Sunny get “un-possessed”? Will she and hunky Satya get beyond her sordid reputation and get together? Guess you’ll have to watch the movie and find out… ;)

I have to say, all-in-all I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. It’s actually a much better film than it needed to be to make money. It’s simple… uncomplicated… a wee bit naughty at times, but fairly restrained and modest given the material. The acting is good, especially Miss Leone as our heroine. She’s shown throughout as a very sympathetic, smart, and spunky woman. She does much of her dialog in English of course, but also speaks excellent Hindi as well. She’ll probably never dethrone Meryl Streep as an actress, but “Ragini MMS 2″ is definitely a film she can be proud to have taken a role in. Heck… it’ll probably be the only film of hers this wee Catgirl will ever watch, unless she sees fit to continue her mainstream career….

With that, I give “Ragini MMS 2″ a very respectable 3 “Meows” out of 5. It’s available on a reasonably priced Hindi All Region disc in widescreen letterboxed format with those excellent English subs we’ve all come to expect on big budget Hindi discs. So, if Bollywood horror is one your favorites list, picking up a copy is a no-brainer. ;)

Yep… there’s a Trailer and, if you are as goofy for ghost stories as a certain Catgirl, then by now you are probably more than a wee bit curious to see it for yourselves, so here goes! ;)

Now that we’re home again, it’s time for a quick swing through the sunny Philippines for a look at 2013′s ghost story “Pagpag: Siyam na Buhay”. Pagpag? Now that’s a funny sounding Tagalog word… Helpful Wikipedia tells me that it refers to a local Philippine folklore practice that one should never go home directly after visiting a wake since it risks bringing evil spirits to one’s home. One should first shake off whatever curse there may be to avoid being followed by the soul of the dead. Seems I’ve heard of similar superstitions and notions from right here in the good ol’ US of A. However… as one might expect, this wee Catgirl’s always ready for some creepy ghost story goodness, so was there any chance I’d miss this one? ;)

The quick synopsis goes as follows: “A spirit of a recent dead man hunts down nine persons and tries to kill them after the victims ignored local superstitions during his wake, one of them being that no one should go home directly after visiting a wake so that the spirit of the dead will not follow. This disrespect leads to a haunting terror and death for those who transgress against the old ways.”

Yep. Ghostly curses and vengeance from beyond the grave. Neko is soooo there. So what the heck are we waiting for o’ Gentle Visitors? By all means, “Read On” for all the details! :)

This one is a fairly simple one plot wise… It’s the old “small group of young adults run afoul of the supernatural with deadly results” cliche. We’ve all seen it before, so at least it’ll be an easy one for non-Filipino audiences to follow. Like my poor subtitle-shy sweetie… bless her heart. ;)

There’s a couple of twists thrown in to spice things up involving Satanic contracts and the resurrection of the dead, but those side-plots don’t really overly complicate things tooo darn much.  Remember my movie mantra… “Sometimes Simple is better…”. ;)

So this one primarily concerns our hunky hero Cedric (played by Daniel Padilla) and his friends; Hannah (played by Michelle Vito), Ashley (played by Miles Ocampo), Justin (played by CJ Navato) and Rico (played by Dominic Roque). They are a pretty tight lil’ group who do just about everything together including rolling around Manila together doing all the silly stuff teenagers do. Like carnivals and hanging out… It’s during one of these pastimes that Cedric gets into an argument with Hannah… who’s under the impression that they are boyfriend and girlfriend… which ends in Cedric revealing that he doesn’t really have serious feelings for Hannah and doesn’t really want any kind of relationship beyond just having some fun. She doesn’t take that well and basically goes all “drama queen” on him for “leading her on”. How tiring…. :(

Eventually this leads to a fight in the car that causes them to run off the road right near the home of Lucy (played by Shaina Magdayao) who is holding the funeral wake for her husband Roman (played by Paulo Avelino). Since this is waaaay out in the boondocks, they end up attending the funeral while they wait for help to get the car going. The funeral service is being attended by pretty funeral manager Leni (played by Kathryn Bernardo) whom Cedric has run into before. Literally. It seems he’s destined to keep doing that… and even though Leni keeps trying to avoid him, they just keep meeting up again and again. You just know they are going to end up a couple… even if they both seem to really dislike each other… it’s just that sort of movie. ;)

So anyways… it’s at this wake that everybody makes the stupid mistake of not honoring all the little superstitions and traditions designed to keep the restless spirits of the deceased from attaching themselves to the living and wreaking havoc. The rest of our film pretty much consists of the nasty ways that the dead can mess you up if you aren’t respectful and observant. Oh, that and the blossoming romance that develops between irresponsible Cedric and shy introverted Leni of course.

Add in a little sub-plot in which Lucy is trying to fulfill a Satanic deal to return her beloved husband from beyond the grave by collecting 9 souls to trade for Roman’s and you’ve just about got everything you need for a fairly straightforward horror movie. One or two odd plot twists in which some characters are discovered to be other than they truly appear, added just for spice… Yep… it’s all here.

Philippine films usually have a really weird mix of straight up Catholic religious ideas coupled with old Tagalog folklore traditions, and “Pagpag” uses all of that to fairly nice effect. While in a lot of ways, the result resembles Indonesian horror films, it’s just different enough to have it’s own unique flavor. That scores well with me for a bit of change of pace from my usual horror movie fare.

Without spilling the ending, let’s just say it’s fair to guess that a large percentage of our cast gets killed in some nasty ways… the evil Lucy and Roman discover the error of trying to deal with the Devil… and by the end, Cedric and Leni fall in love. Pretty much by the books and as expected. The characters are adequately if not inspiringly played… although there are no standout performances here overall.

So… all in all… “Pagpag” isn’t the most original film to come out of the Philippines, and certainly makes no real effort to distinguish itself from any other of the Tagalog horror films I’ve seen, but it does do it’s job reasonably well. Enough to garner a respectable 3 “Meows” out of 5 from this wee Catgirl for being a simple and unpretentious effort worth an evening’s viewing here at “La Casa de Neko”. It’s available on a Region free widescreen NTSC formatted DVD and can be obtained for right around 15-20$ US in the usual places. If, like a certain crazy Cat lady, you like seeing odd lil’ Asian horror films, that is… ;)

Trailer? Hahaha!! Would I ever forget one? ;)

So… are you ready for some no-holds-barred hand-to-hand in your face Martial Arts action? This wee Catgirl most certainly is, and luckily for me Indonesia is ready to answer my needs with “The Raid 2: Berandal”, the sequel to the surprisingly brutal and well-made original film by director Gareth Evans and again starring the absolutely amazing Iko Uwais in the role of young undercover policeman Rama. More bone-crunching pain… more wild and crazy fight scenes… oodles and oodles of brutal martial art mayhem… yep this lady is ready…. Are you?

Our synopsis goes like this: “Following immediately after the events of “The Raid: Redemption”, Rama (Iko Uwais) is forced to reinvent himself as an undercover cop in order to provide protection for his wife and child. Working for the anti-corruption task-force led by the one person he can trust, Bunawar, he is given a mission to engage himself as an enforcer for a local mob boss, Bangun. Finding a way in through Bangun’s son Uco, Rama must hunt for information linking Bangun with police force corruption. All the while, he harbors a dangerous and personal vendetta for revenge and justice that threatens to consume him- and bring both this mission and the organized crime syndicates crashing down.”

Hands down, “The Raid” is probably one of the best Action films ever filmed… and definitely one of Indonesia’s most impressive movies ever released, so when a sequel was announced, your Favorite Catgirl put it right to the top of her list of “Must Have” DVD’s… and now it’s here. Wanna know if it’s a winner as well? Then what the heck are you waiting for? ;)

Oh, my goodness, yes. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this one for quite a while now. Naturally it showed up my my mailbox the very Saturday before Carolyn and I whisked ourselves off on our whirlwind honeymoon tour of the Western US… so we didn’t get a chance to watch it till we got back. Then… as seems to happen whenever I’ve got a good film to Review… stuff just piled up on yours truly making this a bear of a DVD review to actually sit down and finish for you Gentle Visitors. By now I imagine the more fanatic amongst you have already caught it for yourselves, but I suppose there still a wee bit of room for a certain Catgirl to give you her impressions before the opportunity passes. ;)

Our story starts this time out within hours of the events of the last film. Rama’s criminal brother Andi (played by Donny Alamsyah) seemed pretty much in control of things as that story wrapped up, but even though I expected him to be an important player in the sequel, he’s almost immediately taken out of the story by being ruthlessly executed by Bejo (played by Alex Abbad), another crime boss who quickly steps in to take advantage of the situation and eliminate a rival while Andi’s newly inherited gang is weakened and still reeling from the bloodshed we saw in “The Raid”. Awww crap. I really wanted to see the tension of that brotherly relationship get fully explored this time out as both Rama and Andi continued to work within their respective roles while trying to keep their secrets from those around them. Unfortunately director Gareth Evans wasn’t interested in telling that particular story… instead opting to try to take Rama into a more ambitious and far more complicated story involving gang wars and police corruption.

It’s an ambitious move… and I wish I could say it worked as well as the sparse, simple story of the first film, but unfortunately, when all is said and done, it really doesn’t. Why? Well let’s examine that.

Whereas “The Raid: Redemption” kept it’s fast paced story focused squarely on the action and it’s claustrophobic one-building setting, “The Raid 2: Berandal” tries to shoehorn in just too many side-plots, colorful locations, and characters in a way that none of them are actually able to become fully realized by the films conclusion in a very satisfactory manner.

We have Rama’s superior Bunawar… who basically blackmails Rama into going undercover, yet in no way seems able to provide him with any support or help throughout the film. Yes… yes… he’s supposedly protecting Rama’s wife and son, but we never get any indication that they are even ever meaningfully threatened at all throughout the film. Ahhhh… yeah… Rama’s wife and son… now there are two more characters that you have to wonder about. From a narrative standpoint they don’t even seem necessary to the story… and provoke more questions than answers as the plot unwinds. One nagging point is Rama’s prison term. Supposedly he has to spend 2 years undercover in prison just to get close to a crimelord’s son… something that we see for the first third of our film… and yet even though it’s as if he’s dropped of the face of the earth, his loving wife seems oblivious to that. Say what? Yeah. About the most unbelievable plot idea I’ve ever heard. Considering the lack of any real role for them, it almost would have made better sense to have had both his brother Andi killed, and his family murdered in reprisal to give him a real reason to disappear into Bunawar’s complex undercover scheme filled with a smoldering insatiable need to get the sort of bloody revenge that would have given this story some meat. Nasty… yes… but all good revenge melodrama revolves around such terrible events.

Another change is the shift in focus away from the story being primarily about Rama himself, and to the rival ganglords and their minions instead. Not that they aren’t some of the most nasty and well realized villains you’d ever get for a story like this, but ultimately the story is supposed to be Rama’s and by diluting his screen time and moving him out of the spotlight the story suffers in this wee lady’s opinion. In some ways, it’s almost the secondary characters that the most intriguing throughout. Like Prakoso (played by Yayan Ruhian, who also played head badguy Mad Dog in the original film). Here Yayan Ruhian gets the classic role of hired killer living that bleak dead end existence that has pushed him away from his wife and child, made him a walking ghost of a man with only Misery and Death as his companions. He’s an unrepentant killer and you just know he’s going to end badly… and he does… as one of the film’s multitude of casualties, but I ended up more involved in his back-story and in his character than I ever could Rama’s this time out. That’s a shame too… but it’s pretty much the truth.

Other notable characters are the assassin duo of Hammergirl (My personal fav this time out…) and Baseball Guy (played by Julie Estelle and Very Try Yulisman respectively). Now here’s a colorful couple of characters. Basically these two are only here for the violent eye candy that well choreographed fight scenes that a story like this needs as well as one of the final “boss battles” you know has to happen near the film’s climax. Still… whenever these two are on screen, the action is just plain bloody amazing. They were definitely characters I would have liked to see more back story for… unfortunately they are left fairly two-dimensional and unfinished. What was their story? How did Hammergirl get blinded? Why were they in the assassination business? A flashback or two would have been nice.

So… my disappointments aside, what did I like about this one then? Well, I have to say that even if the story was less straightforward than last time out, it was well crafted. There are a few thorny holes in the continuity… a couple of place where character motivation doesn’t exactly ring true.. but all in all it works in the way most modern gang stories work. The fight scenes are as before, of course, just amazing. We get more of the brutal Indonesian Silat action that made the first film so distinctly different from the horde of other Martial art films out there. Apparently Silat likes to mix it up right in your face, up close and personal, and most of the fight scenes go out of their way to reinforce that impression. We get a prison fight that has our hero Rama face off against a huge mob of attackers… all while trapped inside a toilet stall. Later on there’s another dust up inside the tight confines of a moving car that pits our hero against four other occupants along with gun wielding pursuers in other vehicles that show all the art’s most punishing moves. There are fights in cluttered alleys…. in narrow hallways… in just about every ridiculously confined place you can imagine. Add in a boss battle near the end between Rama and a dual karambit wielding hitman in which our two fighters basically slash each other into hamburger and you’ll get the idea that Silat definitely isn’t a fighting style for wussies…. Oh yeah. They definitely get the action stuff right.

It’s all filmed too with a skilled and polished cinematography that swoops around all that action in ways that seem almost impossible to achieve. Even if there are some quibbles with the story, “The Raid 2″ still shows that they definitely do know how to do top notch work in the Indonesian film industry.

Ultimately though, I’d still have to say that perhaps Edwards reached a little too far in trying to top the original. The film’s longer running time… 2 hours and 8 minutes… is longer than the first film’s 100 minutes or so, but where the first one has the breakneck feel of a roller coaster to it’s pacing, “The Raid 2″ feels as if it drags a bit to fill the space between it’s action sequences rather than maintaining that same adrenalin fueled feeling that “The Raid: Redemption” invoked nearly from start to finish.

Given all that… I still enjoyed the film, as did Carolyn (even if I did make her watch it with me in the original Indonesian with subtitles… I’m such a stubborn lil’ kitten about my foreign films… ;) ). However, for me at least… “The Raid 2″ only scores a good solid 3 “Meows” out of 5 thus proving once again the difficulties of making a sequel that can blow away the original. It’s another good solid action film, just not the breakaway hit that the first one was. The DVD? Well, the Region 1 release is done widescreen and letterboxed with both the original Indonesian audio and subtitles as well as an excellent English dub for those so inclined. There’s some “making of” features and trailers worth a look and it’s available pretty easily most places you’d expect. If you are a Martial Art movie fan like this wee lady, you’ll probably find it more than entertaining for an evening’s bloody movie watching fun.

Well… that’s that…. What? Oh, yes… Of course there’s a Trailer… I mean.. isn’t there always a Trailer? ;)