Versus (2000) Maybe I'm becoming an old
fogie or the sizable rat droppings in my trailer are giving me some type of
weird hantavirus, but for some reason, I didn't find much about the
zombie-swordsman-gangster epic Versus to be all that interesting. Oh, sure you've got your gore scenes, your fight
scenes, and your continuously and utterly generic pulsating electronica
soundtrack going, but for two hours? Let me break this down for you in terms
you can understand. There are some movies I watch and I manage to remember the
characters' names. Then there are those movies I see that the characters' names
kind of elude me a bit, so I go to the Internet Movie Database and look them up
and am immediately berating myself for being senile enough to have forgotten
them in the first place. A third category of movie is where I have no idea who
did what, even after looking up the cast on the web. Something like Evil Dead Trap or any Godzilla movie falls into that group. Finally, there is that very rare occasion where
I don't remember any names and upon looking up the cast, there aren't any names
either.
This is the category that Versus falls into, a movie so caught up in posing and stuntwork, that some dude
somewhere in Osaka forgot to bother naming any of these morons that stand
around in the forest and hack and slash one another for upwards of two hours.
I've always thought that if you're going to be stuck out in the woods battling
for your very soul against zombie hoards, you should at least give your name to
your opponent. It's more dramatic that way, to battle someone and say things
like, "Now, Kenny "- remember this is a Japanese movie - "prepare to have to
your blood spilt by I, the great Kenji, so that I may open the gates of the
Forest of Resurrection!" It's just so much more epic. The only notation as to who was who in this movie was that the main
character was listed as being Prisoner KSC2-303, which isn't nearly as catchy
as KSC2-303's mom must have thought it was when she was still delirious from
child birth and gave him that moniker.  There's a prologue that starts the movie off involving some samurai type dudes
hassling each other in the forest. It didn't make a lot sense then and didn't
make much more sense until about three-fourths of the way through the movie
when me and Prisoner KSC2-303 (say have you met THX-1180?) finally dope out
that he has been reincarnated to fight this really tough guy again five hundred
years ago. I'm not sure of the point of all that since KSC got his ass handed
to him the first time he threw down with this punk, but I would note that the
modern version of KSC comes equipped with happening new hairdo and a Columbine
(I mean Matrix) style black leather trench coat, so if he gets wiped up like the mess my dog
made on my disconnection notice from the cable tv guys, he'll at least look
very GQ when he does.
Okay, so back in the present, KSC arrives in this forest along with a pal of
his and these two have just busted out of prison. This is one of those whacky
gore movies like some early Peter Jackson stuff because one of the prisoners
arrives with one of his hands inside a handcuff. There is also another hand
inside the other cuff, but the rest of that particular person is strangely
absent. They meet up in the forest with some Japanese gangsters that all cool
kids know is really called the Yakuza. We all remember the Yakuza from smash
hit movies like Michael Douglas' Black Rain and Chris Farley's Beverly Hills Ninja (there were Yakuza in that right? Why don't you go ahead and rent it and let
me know if I guessed right, hehehe). I was never sure exactly what these gangsters were doing in the forest or why
the prisoners met them there or what. We heard some loose talk that someone
wanted the girl (a girl is brought there as well) and KSC (probably stands for
Kenny Super Cool) alive. Maybe they were working for this bad guy that lives
forever and hangs out in the forest waiting for his old buddies (the guy and
the girl) to get themselves reincarnated. That doesn't make much sense to me,
but this a movie that babbles on about 666 portals and this forest being the
444th portal (wait, I'm getting it... 444 is 2/3 of 666 and 2/3 can be
represented as about .666 - well .667 but you get my point.) to the other side.
God, do I hate movies about portals. There's always something really bad on
the other side and some goon is going to try something crazy to open it up.
I've never seen it work to any lasting effect, so the threat of it is pretty
much lost on me, but I suppose opening up a portal to something unspeakable and
unimaginable is easier than coming up with some type of story.  So there's a lot of standing around in the woods with all these gangsters and
there's some arguing and blah blah about kidnapping the dame and someone tries
to steal her and the next thing we know everyone is shooting at each other and
trying to kill Kenny Super Cool. In addition to all this, all these dead
bodies start popping out of the ground and some of the gangsters that get
killed just don't seem to want to stay dead. What you get are very long
stretches of elaborately staged gun fights with some kung fu thrown in. Bodies
get blown up, blood flows and some of the gangsters try to demonstrate what
passes for characterization in this film.
There's the scaredy cat gangster who runs away a lot and can't shoot straight.
There's the gangster who wears a sleeveless vest (important because everyone is
dressed in black suits like they were some type of Eurotrash - what - no greasy
pony tail?) and then there's the guy whose main claim to fame is that he sports
the same type of wuss-boy wavy hair style favored by Quinn Snyder, the sweaty
young coach of the vastly overrated Missouri Tiger basketball team. He's sure
no Quinn Buckner. Now, this Quinn Snyder look-alike (I think I'll just call him Quinn for easy
reference) is also one of those dudes that's really confident in his abilities
and doesn't seem to be all that flummoxed by the fact that the dead have risen
and decided to walk the earth complete with semi automatic weapons, so Quinn
stands around making faces, throwing knives, and screaming periodically as he
dispatches several zombies. Along the way, Kenny Super Cool's prison buddy (I
think they call them "bitches" in the big house) has gotten himself wasted by
someone and KSC has gotten himself a gun and the girl and gone about the
business of shooting and/or kung fu-ing anything that moves. He's got this cool little gimmick where he hits the girl and knocks her out
whenever he has go battle zombies or gangsters. I think that little move has a
real chance to catch on here in the States, though I suspect it would be used
whenever the game was on and your old lady kept walking in front of it. I
wasn't real sure what the deal was with this forest (I mean, I knew it
resurrected people and stuff, but what were all those people doing there with
guns?) but I'm thinking that this just happened to be the same forest that the
gangsters would take people out to and kill and then bury them with their
expensive and still loaded weapons. I'm assuming that policy probably was
reviewed after the incidents in this film. Eventually, the big bad guy shows himself and he turns out to be a skinny dude
with scraggly facial hair. He first encounters the gangsters and pretty much
wipes them out (except for Scaredy Cat who ran off screaming for the hills). We
get a taste of his powers when he sticks his hand into Quinn's body and babbles
on about how he was going to give him this way cool power that you could only
have while dead. It turns out that this really dope power is the ability to
scurry around on the ground like a crab. Not exactly as advertised, I'd say. Once that little encounter is over, KSC and his babe run into that crazy scene
and she's all about getting out of there ASAP. She obviously knows what is
going on with Scraggly so they hightail it out of there. They run into a guy
who has red hair and flies around a little and there's some fighting between
him and KSC and KSC is getting nowhere until the red haired guy gets whacked
upside his head by a big rock from the girl. At some point, the movie sort of
lets on through some flashbacks that KSC is the reincarnation of this
goody-goody from 500 years ago that battled Scraggly and lost and that the girl
is the reincarnation of this chick that KSC tried to protect from Scraggly.  It seems that Scraggly needs her blood to open up one of those fool gates that
populate forest-dwelling horror movies like this. He didn't get it five
hundred years ago because KSC decapitated the girl rather than let Scraggly get
ahold of her (my hero!) and so Scraggly has waited patiently all this time for
her to reappear. He and KSC battle and KSC gets killed again (give it up
already, loser!). However, the girl cuts her hand and bleeds all over him
(watch the leather trench coat babe!) and he gets resurrected later on to fight
this dude a third and final time.
Of course, while he's busy getting reincarnated, Scraggly captures the girl and
tries to use her blood to open up the gates of somewhere or other (we know they
ain't the gates of hell, cause those are over in Dunwich), but nothing happens.
Imagine his surprise when he finds out that she went and wasted her
gate-opening/resurrection powers on that no account Kenny Super Cool! He gets
really irate and then tries to play it off like it was no big whoop, because he
really wanted the resurrected blood of Kenny Super Cool all along. The movie also contains a pointless subplot (and I think "subplot" is being
charitable) about the two cops or whatever that KSC and his prison boyfriend
escaped from. This movie likes to think that having a guy run around with his
hand ripped off and showing very little ill effects is the height of comedy.
See, sometimes he'll try and punch someone with his bloody stump and it kind of
hurts a little. Funny stuff, but haven't we seen that done with more aplomb in
about eighty Evil Dead movies? These guys don't really exist for any reason, but to give us some more people
to kill and to provide KSC a way to get an eight foot long gun that some of us
would most likely call Mega Weapon. KSC uses Mega Weapon to literally blow
apart each of these two coppers and that's the end of that subplot, though one
of them does come in with the "my reflexes are 500 times faster than Mike
Tyson" take. Who the hell is Mike Tyson? So, it all comes down to a big battle between a resurrected KSC (comes complete
with catchphrase, "I never lose.") and Scraggly. There's a lot of sword
fighting and people twirling through the air and a fair amount of John
Woo-style posing while the camera spins endlessly around them as they
inexplicably stand still for about two minutes, instead of whacking the piss
out of each other. KSC finally gets a good cut in on Scraggly's neck, KSC runs up Scraggly's body
real fast and delivers some kind of mid-air kick that rips Scraggly's head
clean off. He and his honey get on a motorcycle (apparently left there by one
of the many nameless dopes that wandered into the forest on gang-related
business) and they ride off into the sunset. But wait, there's more! An
epilogue 99 years in the future reunites everyone again for more posing,
threats, and fights. Too stupid to believe. This is probably a movie best played while you have a party going on with a
trailer full of your no-good friends that are too drunk to care that nothing in
the movie really makes any sense. I would say that this is a triumph of style
over substance, but since we've seen the posing, the gore, and the fight scenes
in several other movies, I'll have to call it a failure of style over
substance. There is barely a story to speak of and every one of the characters
is either cannon fodder or is such a mystery that you don't care about them.
We don't know anything about KSC or his girl or their relationship with one
another. They could have played up that "love through the ages and several
lifetimes" angle, but they didn't. We don't know anything about Scraggly or
his reason for existence or if he has any connection to KSC or the girl beyond
wanting their dumb blood for some retarded gate opening. It's pretty much two
hours of fight scenes and little else. Sometimes, you sit back and appreciate
the effort that went into choreographing and filming them, other times, you'd
wish that they'd give you something of substance to make the fight scenes
actually matter. Having a hero that did more than act with his hair probably
would have helped also. KSC, just because your feathered hair falls over your
left eye all the time, doesn't mean that you are interesting. Captain Harlock's
hair did the same thing and he intrigued me more. And he was a cartoon
character.
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