Perhaps the additional scenes could have fleshed out a few of the characters who were overshadowed by the movie’s obsession with promoting the producer’s singers. And maybe with the scenes put back in the correct order, Jackie Chan’s seemingly gratuitous cameo, wouldn’t have felt like a cheap publicity stunt designed solely so that his name and face could be shoehorned onto the DVD cover.

But I rather doubt it. I’m going to hazard a wild guess that all any of that would have done was make the movie nineteen minutes worse.

This was one of those movies that started out in fairly mediocre fashion and only got increasingly putrid as it went along. When I was watching the first fight between a vampire hunter (Reeve of the Anti-Vampire Federation) and some vampires, I thought that it was mildly entertaining in a “at least I’m not having to listen to Twins perform one of their signature Cantonese pop songs” kind of way.

Sure, a lot of the fighting was that ugly mix of Matrix-style slow motion and Hong Kong-style wire effects that succeeds more in looking incredibly fake than in anything else, but the important thing was that a lot of stuff was getting busted up. I never realized how much glass there could be in an underground train station until I saw all the really poorly computer generated glass go flying in all directions.

Those of you hoping that this would be the kind of band infomercial for Twins like KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park was for KISS are going to be sorely disappointed. At the very least, a movie such as this should provide the viewer with silly moments designed to get over the band’s characters super powers (and for some reason these movies starring bands always imbue them with powers far beyond those of mortal bands), but Twins doesn’t even do a number for us!

Shoot, I didn’t even know that this movie was a plot by Twins management to promote them until after I had finished watching the movie and was doing a little background check on the principals. I mean, I knew the movie was also known as Twins Effect, but I just spent the movie waiting for some twins to show up and eventually just chalked the title up to some dodgy (or optimistic) translation issues.

Those of us who aren’t necessarily Twins fans are probably wondering why we shouldn’t just skip this movie altogether (aside from the fact that it’s a really bad movie). Emperor Entertainment Group was thinking about you, too! In addition to Cantonese superstar singing duo Twins, you can also admire the acting of EEG’s obscure Hong Kong pop idol Edison Chen!

Okay, so EEG put a bunch of their pop stars in a movie featuring vampires, but without any of them singing so much as a theme song. Now, what exactly is this movie about then?

One of the Twins is a realtor who sells a church to Edison and his vampire groupies. For some vaguely explained reason, Edison and company are going to be living in the church, though if you’re a bunch of vampires trying to blend in, I’m not sure why you’d be living in a house of God, but maybe some if it will rub off on them and if they aren’t exactly Strong Christians, they can maybe be Weaker Vampires.

Edison and his crew though aren’t the real bad guys. That role would fall to some Eurotrash bloodsucker who is intent on killing off all the members of the vampire royal family so that he can collect their something or other and use their essence or whatever to open up this ancient book that will give him the power to walk around during the daytime, thus making him master of the world somehow.

Helen (the Twins realtor) is the sister of Reeve, the vampire hunter. Reeve’s partner is killed at the beginning of the movie in the train station and his new partner is Gypsy. Gypsy turns out to the other half of Twins.

Gypsy and Helen don’t hit it off very well at first as they engage in a furious rooftop battle over a discarded stuffed animal. Um, wasn’t there a bunch of vampires running around trying to take over the world with a book of the undead or something? Couldn’t the fight over Teddy Ruxpin have waited?

Helen and Gypsy become close once Helen reveals to Gypsy that she has fallen in love with Edison even though Gypsy’s and Reeve’s job is to hunt down monster scum like Edison. She implores Gypsy to speak to Reeve on her behalf and Gypsy agrees.

I don’t recall that much ever came of this because by this time the Eurotrash guy was after Edison and Reeve ended up fighting Eurotrash instead of Edison. The whole movie is a bit like that. Things start up, go nowhere, and new things start up.

And none made anything approaching any sense at all. Why did we move into a church? Why did Helen and Edison crash a wedding on their first date? What’s the deal with all these vampires running around? Who thought it would make any sense for Helen and Edison to not only run into Jackie Chan at that wedding, but also to run into him at a hospital where he was employed as an EMT?

And to have him help fight off some vampires by stuffing them full of antidepressants and then turn up the music so the vampires would be in a better mood and just dance around instead of trying to kill Helen, Edison, and Jackie? Surely that’s not funny in any culture!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Even though we start out promisingly enough with this monkey murder story line, things quickly degenerate from there as Chi Chiu wantonly tosses in a variety of hot button issues that probably were connected in his mind when he came up with this morass of meandering madness, but loses quite a bit in its translation to the big screen.

Thus, we are subjected to a pedophiliac priest, a homosexual affair, a heterosexual affair, a pact with the devil, and mother with a strange obsession with the dead twin. (I’m still trying to figure out how many different ways it was wrong for her to want the surviving twin to put on the dead twin’s zookeeper uniform so that she could pretend that living twin son was really her dead twin son.)

Sam receives a phone call that his brother in Hong Kong has been in an accident and is in a coma. When Sam finally arrives, he finds out that his brother is dead.

Sam’s mom is a drunken ex-nightclub singer who acts bizarrely and complains that Sam’s dad was just a driver and ruined her life. Sam’s dad is dead and Sam blames his mom for his supposed suicide.

There is also a priest that Sam runs into and Sam has issues with him as well, especially since he overhears his mom and the priest talking about keeping something a secret from him.

Sam also encounters a librarian named Mr. Luk and it later turns out that he’s either the Devil or a disciple or just some crazy old man who wants his daughter to get impregnated by Sam.

That seems sort of off the wall, especially since Sam is running around town trying to talk to his old school friend who is now a big time radio star. Sam wants to have sex with the radio star which you would think might put a crimp in Luk’s plan to have his daughter seduce him, but what really ought to cramp Luk’s style is the fact that Sam’s radio star crush is another guy!

Sam isn’t just a one-trick pony though because he’s still got a lot of loving in him that needs expressing, so he ends up screwing Luk’s daughter anyway.

So what does Sam’s liberal views on human sexuality and oddball family and friends have to do with the rest of the movie? Beats me, but Sam was apparently molested by this priest when he was at school and was rescued by the radio star. The radio star then goes on the radio and “outs” the priest for doing that. The priest predictably responds by engaging in antics that only further confuses the audience.

Sam ends up wondering just what in the world he got himself into with this girl because when he shows up at the library toward the end of the film after consummating their affair, Luk informs him that she’s not there, but is a painting.

They also argue about the baby that she’s pregnant with (um, inside the painting, too, I guess) and Sam says he wants the girl back and somehow it all ends with Luk opening a door and asking us if we’re having a nightmare. Uh, yeah. I’d say so.

I’m more than willing to cut a movie some slack and not hold it to any strict interpretation of reality. I understand that artists have to be free to experiment and try different techniques at getting their ideas out there.

I can almost even understand talking about a monkey attack, but never actually showing it (though that clearly is pushing it), but I’m still not even sure what was supposed to be happening in Night Corridor, let alone what did happen.

I never understood what the story with the priest, the radio star, and Sam had to do with the story of Sam, Luk, the daughter, and his brother. Heck I didn’t even understand each of those stories separately!

Ideas were thrown out and died on the vine, withering away from neglect or just from failing to connect them to the other concepts that periodically popped up like noxious film school mushrooms.

There comes a point in time where you can be so fuzzy with your story telling that you cease to be communicating at all with the viewer and Night Corridor hit that moment far too many times to be remotely successful.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

I think it’s also safe to say after watching this movie that the Humane Society doesn’t have too high a profile in Hong Kong. Animal abuse in this movie runs rampant and there’s several scenes that could easily compete with any number of Italian jungle cannibal movies for sheer gross out value.

You’ll also be grossed out by the sweaty psycho at the epicenter of this swirling mass of grubby horror due to his being drenched in his own perspiration constantly while wearing a tight, yucky pink shirt. And his skin condition. And his predilection for having flashbacks involving peeking his mom and her lover!

So yes, the movie does a more than adequate job of giving us a character who we easily believe could snap one day, befriend a bunch of snakes, and use them to carry out his revenge schemes. The only problem is that this guy is so nasty and creepy that you can’t wait for his snake friends to wake up and realize that they’re just being used and turn on him!

Zhihong lives in a shack next to the neighborhood snake shop. I must not live in a big enough city because we don’t have a snake shop, but this snake shop looks to be the equivalent of a General Nutrition Center where they make your supplements fresh, right there while you wait.

Instead of paying some outrageous price for dubious male enhancement products with equally dubious names like Horny Goat Weed, customers at General Reptile Center are paying to eat snake gall bladders. I imagine that snakes everywhere in the Orient breathed a bit easier when Pfizer came to their rescue with Viagra!

Even though Zhihong is the scariest loser imaginable, there’s a hot mama who is hanging around making eyes at him. Her name is Xiujuan and she runs some sort of booth near Zhihong’s house. Zhihong has a crush on her, but instead of ambling next door, asking to borrow a cup of snake gall bladders, and gathering up his courage and asking her out, he sits at home staring at his bondage magazines and playing with himself!

After losing his job due to some bullying hookers and johns as well as being stood up by Xiujuan for a date, Zhihong is surprised to see he has a visitor from the snake shop. It’s a snake that’s had its gall bladder removed, but it is still alive and Zhihong takes a liking to it and sews its wound right up, naming him Xiaobiao in the process.

Once you’ve starting having conversations with escaped reptiles and lose interest in you porn mags, it’s a sure sign that you’ve completely gone over the edge!

It isn’t long before Zhihong gets into another confrontation with the gang of hookers and johns. This time though you’ve got Zhihong screaming “bite her dead!” at Xiaobiao and you get your first snake attack.

These snake attacks are never really that impressive since it either requires a guy out of camera range to thrust a snake at someone or for the same guy to just heave snakes at people, giving us that whole “flying snake” phenomena you only see in movies about killer snakes.

Even though Zhihong’s life is finally looking up (having an army of murderous snakes that kill hookers is an improvement for this guy), his ex-crush, Xiujuan, is forced to make some difficult decisions.

After the death of her father, her friend urges her to become a hooker to start paying the bills. Xiujuan reluctantly agrees since it’s just common sense to sell your body when you’re confronted by a family crisis and she starts hanging out with a scuzzy guy that her friend sets her up with.

The various rapes and murders that follow culminate when the snakes attack a guy armed with samurai sword. This results in slow motion shots of live snakes being chopped in half. You even get to see their parts writhing on the ground!

Whether that’s the most offensive scene in a movie rife with such moments is debatable since you’ve still got the part left where Zhihong decides that he needs to get rid of Xiaobiao and his fellow snakes before the police close in.

So we get to see Zhihong set all these snakes on fire. And they really get burned up. Xiaobiao somehow survives the fire and takes his revenge on Zhihong, finally putting this whole sordid mess out of its misery.

This movie has something to repulse everyone! Women, animal lovers, people adverse to perspiration. It’s all there. No skanky stone is left unturned!

It’s not only an ugly movie, it’s an ugly looking movie. Maybe the shaky zooming shots work fine in kung fu flicks where guys in stringy white beards wearing their pajamas are taunting one another about their fighting skills, but in a movie like this, it doesn’t come across as a stylistic choice so much as a guy being unable to operate the camera properly.

Ultimately, Killer Snakes is just a run of the mill “loser gets revenge with the help of some creepy animals” story you’ve seen before but soaked in a gross combination of off-putting hump scenes and gag-inducing scenes of animal violence. (Just for the record, the off-putting hump scenes were also gag-inducing.)

© 2010 MonsterHunter

There are certain things to expect from a kung fu movie. First of all you need to have a master. This seems a bit obvious because all the young studs that go around kicking the crap out of each other need some training and reason to do all that. So there is a master and he gets the plot going, usually by making some kind of dying declaration like, “you lazy punks need to go out and avenge me” or “please go beat up some of my former students – even though I taught them well, they may have gone bad.” That latter request is the crux of this movie.

Old Master is almost ready to croak. It doesn’t really matter because his kung fu school only has one student, Yang Tieh. That’s another thing about these movies. China must have kung fu schools run by mysterious old geezers about like the United States has Subways run by cranky, pimply-faced kids.

His student spends his time filling up Old Master’s bath with boiling water and listening to the oldster drone on and on about the really cool students he used to have. This is our introduction to the Five Deadly Venoms.

Each Venom has been trained in a specific school of kung fu. They all have catchy insect and animal names. You’ve got centipede, snake, scorpion, lizard, and toad. Can you imagine drawing the short straw and being saddled with the toad gimmick?

Old Master tells us about each Venom’s specific skills and some of it makes sense (the snake guy tries to grab you with his fang-like grip) and some of it doesn’t (the toad has invulnerable skin – I would’ve just thought it would have been real bumpy or something).

Then we see in flashback each person doing a demonstration of their particular brand of kung fu. All the while they do this, they are wearing their special animal or insect mask.

Old Master explains that number 1 and 2 were trained together and that three, four and five came afterwards. The last three don’t know the first two, but no one knows the third and they never used real names so the Old Master doesn’t know what they look like or who they are and I began to break out into a cold sweat because I was sure that this was the problem solving question on the ACT that kept me out of Yale.

With these clues, Old Master tells Yang that he must go to the city and find all the Venoms. Why? Because even though Old Master taught them well, they have left the Poison Clan and they may be trying to steal money from another Old Master that used to teach at Kung Fu Community College before the curriculum was changed from learning martial arts to bathing old men.

Once Yang figures out who the Venoms are, he must defeat the bad ones. Since he is trained in all the schools of kung fu, his knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep and he can only defeat the Venoms by teaming up with another Venom.

After a fair amount of intrigue, Toad is framed for the murder of a family that occurred when some Venoms botched the robbery of the second Old Master. Yang then teams up with the Venom to battle the remaining Venoms. A prolonged fight sequence thankfully ensues.

The fighting is pretty good (I can’t claim to be the biggest fan of kung fu fights in these Old School movies – too much standing around with your arms outstretched while the other guy tries to slap you) and they even work in some wire work, with people bending over way too far, walking on walls and hanging up in the corners of ceilings.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the depth of the story once everyone was in the city and looking for each other. It became one of these movies about the corruption of the ruling class as well as one of those “who do you trust” type affairs. And a movie about guy named Centipede parading around town in a red vest.

The weakest part of the movie was Yang. Unlike all the Venoms who were easily memorable and believable (well as believable as anyone can be when they do centipede kung fu), he barely registered.

He also didn’t have a lot to do. He sort of hung around, periodically appearing in scenes for no real reason other than to eat something or flip his hair around. Did I also mention that he was really ugly? It doesn’t matter much, but I didn’t want to give you the impression that this is one of those times when a guy flipping his long, silky hair is a good thing.

The other cool thing about the movie was that had the Venoms fight in their particular style of kung fu and have that actually matter in the outcome of things. This variety of techniques kept the fight scenes from being the monotonous bore that you suspect can occur in these types of movies.

So you had moments like when Snake was trying to kill Toad, but he couldn’t penetrate the skin until Scorpion sliced him with some thrown blades. A good way to keep the audience intrigued for the final battles.

In the end, I don’t imagine that kung fu fans have to be told to see this movie, but for the rest of us, this is as good an entry into 70s kung fu as you’re likely to find.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

I’m as much a Luddite as anyone, but I kind of think that the whole “can’t trust organ transplants because you might get hair plugs from Jack the Ripper that turn you into a killer” angle is rather played out at this point. Let me put it this way: if I’m watching your movie and the only thing I can think of is that Jeff Fahey was involved in a similar project called Body Parts years ago then you probably need to do a rewrite.

So once again, the advances we’ve achieved in science and technology take it in the shorts. In fact, the movie shows us that our main character, Mun, can only achieve true happiness when she turns blind again. It’s one of those “don’t mess with the way nature intended you to be” deals and what’s even better than that, is that since this is a typically unimaginative film she somehow manages to pick up a boyfriend during all this!

You’re seeing strange things and think you might be going crazy and are also trying to adjust to having sight for the first time in twenty years and you also have to time to get hooked up? The only scary thing about this movie was how predictable it was in spite of the confusing details of what she was actually going through.

How exactly does Mun meet her love connection? Would you believe that it’s the hunky young psychotherapist (Dr. Wah) assigned to help her adjust to her newly sighted lifestyle? Of course you would!

In fact, you probably already have guessed that he would be the sort of doctor who would initially dismiss Mun’s claims of seeing ghosts until he slowly realizes that she’s a pretty good looking chick which inevitably boosts her credibility.

Other than being prime boyfriend material though, Dr. Wah is pretty useless. The way he helps her readjust to life with her new eyes is to hold up a stapler and tell her “this is a stapler. Before you could recognize it by touch, but now you’ll have to recognize it by sight.”

How many years of medical school did you go through for that? Doesn’t Mun have family and friends that could do the same thing?

Dr. Wah also turns out to be the nephew of Dr. Lo who did Mun’s cornea transplant. The only reason for this coincidence is to explain why Dr. Lo would give up the confidential records that revealed the identity of the cornea donor. And really, do you need any other reason than that?

Mun and Wah head off to Bangkok, Thailand where the donor, Ling, was from. Ling turns out to have been able to see who was going to die and would sit outside the front door of the house where that person lived and she would cry.

Unsurprisingly, she was not the most popular person in her village and was called a witch and people were really mean and threw rocks at her.

In spite of her cool mutant power, Ling went a little nuts when she foresaw a big disaster in her village that would kill tons of people. She ran around trying to warn people, but no one would listen and then a big fire broke out and roasted several hundred people.

Ling reacted to everyone ignoring her by hanging herself. Once someone got around to cutting Ling down, the did the obvious and shipped her eyes to Hong Kong for Mun to use. But they forgot to exorcise the eyes or erase them or whatever!

Mun and Wah do a meet and greet with Ling’s mom who is still holding a grudge over Ling giving up on herself and taking the easy way out. I laughed out loud when Mun was staying in Ling’s room in an effort to figure out what was going on and she breathlessly announced to Ling’s mom that Ling was trapped in a time warp and was re-enacting her suicide every night!

Time warp? Is there any phrase that immediately leads to a combination of audience eye rolling and laughter than “time warp?” Well, sure, there’s “transporter malfunction”, but I meant a phrase outside of the Star Trek universe.

Once back in Hong Kong, Mun has her own experience with predicting a big disaster that no one will believe. The scene was an exciting, tense one, but since it made no sense in the context of the story, it was totally stupid.

If Ling is no longer haunting our gal, why is Mun still having these visions? And more importantly, why is she suddenly able to predict this big disaster? Sure, it’s a nice bit of symmetry with the story of Ling, but the symmetry is so forced it comes off as purely a stunt to give the movie a big slam-bang finish, as well as to return Mun to her more comfortable world of darkness.

The Eye wanders around over predictable ground in an admittedly slick package, and in the course of trying to put its own spin on this overused horror plot only manages to muddle it up into a increasing incomprehensibility as it slogs along (the movie takes forever to get going – wasting the first hour establishing Mun’s ability to see dead people again and again) toward its confusing and tacked on climax. Only worth watching if you have someone else’s eyes to waste.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Ebola Syndrome is not really what I’d call well made. The very workmanlike visuals and camera work will remind you more of one of those Italian jungle-cannibal movies and there’s maybe one slow motion scene, as if they knew that every Hong Kong film needed a little bit of that, but it isn’t particularly well done or effective.

That said, the movie is full of gore, sex, and Anthony Wong is pretty much way out of control from start to finish as the psycho Kai, so it lives up to its reputation as the movie to show your mainstream friends (if you have any) at parties to gross them out.

Kai is your average run of the mill creep that has a hankering for other people’s wives when they’re out working. Kai kicks his adventure off by humping some chick in Hong Kong while her hubby is away. Naturally hubby comes home and is less than amused that Kai is dipping his chopstick into his wife. This results in a good old fashioned beat down, complete with pissing scene!

Kai goes on the offensive, killing the husband, the husband’s buddy, and the woman. The woman had turned on Kai as soon as her husband came home, so I don’t think any of us can argue with Kai’s decision to break off their romance in this fashion.

Meanwhile, the woman’s young daughter is around and so Kai dumps gasoline on her and before he can fire her up, someone interrupts him and he takes off never to be seen again in Hong Kong until years later.

Fast forward several years to South Africa. South Africa? Yup, I don’t know what Kai is doing down in South Africa, but you can be sure it involves screwing women and complaining about being bullied.

That’s one of Kai’s lovable quirks. Even though he’s an accomplished killer, he still whines about being picked on by everyone!

His next target is his friend’s wife. She and Kai’s friend run the Chinese restaurant where he has taken up residence and found employment as a waiter.

She’s always yelling at him about something or other and he fumes about it, complaining to whoever will listen and spitting in the food.

Even though his buddy’s wife rags on him mercilessly, he still enjoys listening in on his buddy and the wife having sex. Kai is so into that he grabs some raw meat from the restaurant and cuts an opening in it and proceeds to use it in such a manner that makes you realize what a wussy movie American Pie was!

When Kai is finished with his business he puts the meat back in the fridge. (Insert “secret sauce” joke here.)

As if being a crabby waiter prone to doing the most unsanitary things to the customers’ food imaginable wasn’t enough for Kai, his pal takes him out into the African countryside to get some fresh meat for the restaurant.

There’s two Zulu corpses next to the dead pigs that our restaurateurs are going to buy. The Zulu guy selling them the pigs tells them that the Zulus died from Ebola. Kai also manages to pick up some Ebola for himself after raping a non responsive native girl.

Lots more stuff happens in this movie and things pick up speed once Kai has himself a dose of Ebola. He just happens to be the one in ten million people that it infects, causing a bad fever, but doesn’t ultimately kill.

Kai goes on a raping and killing spree and once everyone starts croaking and flopping around all over Johannesburg, Kai decides it’s time to cash out of the restaurant biz and go back to Hong Kong.

Along the way, the girl that he tried to burn to death sees him in South Africa and tries to tell the authorities, but they tell her what I and any half decent scriptwriter would have told her: you seeing him here after all those years is just too much of a coincidence to be believable.

Ebola Syndrome is a movie that has so little of value to recommend that you can’t help but admire it. There is no hero per se. The girl who survived her encounter with Kai is rarely seen and the movie focuses almost exclusively on Kai and his free-wheeling lifestyle.

Anthony Wong is great at looking like a total scuzz – a bit portly and sometimes with a little greasy pony tail Steven Seagal would be proud of. He even uses a disguise with this awful-looking mustache!

You watch this train wreck in spite of yourself because you wonder what Kai has up his sleeve next. How much damage can he do? How many terrible things is he capable of?

Gory, nasty entertainment that is so far over the top, you’ll be laughing to keep from gagging. A very good “party movie” that will keep your friends grimacing throughout.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The movie itself is a tiresome bore, straining unsuccessfully to be at times shocking and by turns slightly amusing with Three Stooges-style slapstick comedy (though I don’t recall the Stooges ever tossing around a severed breast at each other, but then again, I was never their biggest fan and could have missed that particular short which was undoubtedly entitled something like “Breast Friends”), but only managing to evoke “get on with it already” and “is this all the gore there is” reactions from the degenerate types that would have actually gone to the trouble of buying this movie.

Directors Billy Tang and Danny Lee (who plays the lead cop in the movie also named Lee) show us over and over that they really have no idea how to make an effective serial killer movie. This is apparent right from the beginning when they serve up the obligatory prologue that is supposed to show us how cab driver Lam Gor-Yu became such a twisted freak that a Category III Hong Kong movie needed to be named after him. It’s a mish-mash of parental neglect, abuse, and his own dirty thoughts that mold him into the fine young loner he eventually becomes.

The movie sacrifices all its drama when it’s told in flashback by Lam while he’s in custody at the police station. We see him strangle chicks, hack them up (mostly off camera, so don’t get too excited – though red liquid sprays all over a few times), screw them, and also causes the woman cop to barf all over whenever they’re watching the video that he made of all this.

The movie manages to plod for the first thirty minutes as the cops stumble onto some dirty photos, trace them back to Lam, arrest him and his entire family and then beat him up, until it becomes clear that he doesn’t mind the pain all that much. So then they put his family in a room with him (after showing them the dirty pictures that he took of his niece) and they beat him up and cuss him out and finally he says that yes, I killed a couple hookers.

The cops search his house, find dissecting books, more photos and severed breasts in bottles, one of which gets dropped onto a cop’s back. The expected hilarity ensues. The other cops make fun of the woman cop who the boobie landed on when she complained that her back now itched and they said that she was going to get “sloughing” disease. I’m all for hostile work environments, but come on!

There isn’t anything in Dr. Lamb that we haven’t seen done a hundred times before in other sleazy films. Can I really be so jaded that seeing a guy bang a corpse elicits a glance at the clock to see if this will also be the climax of the movie and signify that it’s just about all wrapped up? Yes I can! And after the whole severed breast gag where can you go anyway?

Other than the prologue and Lam’s babbling about dirty women and innocents, none of the flashbacks serve to shed any light on what motivates this guy to do not just what he did, but how he accomplished it. All we have is this guy killing a couple of broads and chopping them up.

There are attempts at a little style in this movie with rain drenched shots and other techniques which try to show us that Tang and Lee can move the camera around and use different colored lights, but much of the movie is shot in plain-Jane fashion at the police station, so it just looks like a run-of-the-mill Hong Kong flick with some semi-elaborately staged kill scenes.

If you’re looking for an icky Hong Kong movie that lives up to its rep, get yourself a dose of Ebola Syndrome. That one went over the top and stayed there, proud of its nasty nature and infused with enough dark humor to keep you wincing and smirking at the same time. It was crude and gross, but you weren’t bored.

In Dr. Lamb, you may as well be watching some American movie about a serial killer for as little new ground as this one trod. Nothing worth noting in this scurvy entry in the genre except for the occasionally hilarious subtitles. As one guy tells the police after they beat him, “my bladder is injury”. I feel your feel, bro!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The three guys are named Professor (he carries around a video camera), Soldier (he carries around a big knife), and Ken (all Asian movies are required to feature a character with some form of the name Ken – usually Kenny).

The three girls are named Linda (Professor’s girlfriend), BeBe (Soldier’s girlfriend) and Winnie (Ken’s girlfriend).

Now that you know the main characters, we can set about killing them off. But first Soldier takes everyone’s cell phones and hides them for some murky and ultimately stupid reason, thus assuring the killer free reign until the boat home arrives in the morning.

We know there’s going to be problems even before Soldier and his pals show up because at the very beginning of the movie we see a man wrapped in rags chasing a couple of kids down and chainsawing them into ground chuck. We never learn anything about the killer (including his name), but he loves his family and chainsaws anyone that he comes across. And really, what more is there to know about a person?

Ken’s a track star and he’s pretty concerned with beating Johnny in the championship race and in a moment that just screams “plot point!” in large glowing letters, Ken’s girlfriend gives him a pair of something they call “nail shoes” which look to be football cleats.

Ken knows his girlfriend loves him and pays her back by giving her a kiss and trying to get into her deserted island cutoffs. Being the good girl who goes off with her boyfriend to a deserted island, she says no.

Ken does what anyone would do and runs off in the direction of the cliff that is handily nearby. This rather melodramatic display of sexual frustration only serves to show us that with those cleats on, that Ken can stop on a dime, thus ensuring that at the end of the movie, he will again be stopping at the edge of the cliff and someone (probably with a chainsaw and an anger management problem and without cleats) will go pell-mell off the cliff.

Did I mention what type of shoes these were? Lotto. Been a long ass time since I heard anything out of those shoes. The only thing about Lottos I remember is that you could change the color of the logo on the shoe because they came with these Velcro patches. It was pretty much up there on the cool-o-meter with the Michael Jackson endorsed L.A. Gear shoe.

But what about our condom salesmen? There’s guys named Boar, Pervert, Hwan, Boar’s girlfriend, and a skinny dude with long hair that I never caught the handle for. I read somewhere that this movie had some sexual humor cut out in between its theatrical and home video release, so maybe all the interaction between Boar, Pervert, and Skinny Dude made sense when they filmed it.

Pervert and Skinny Dude are played for laughs (kind of the slasher equivalent of R2D2 and C3P0) and blather on about telling porno stories and Boar tells them that his girlfriend will tell them porno stories once he’s done screwing her.

Pervert and Skinny Dude have to take a leak so they go out and do that, while standing right next to each other (this leads to all the usual “size” jokes) and somehow or other this retarded guy shows up and tries to help them out, if you catch my meaning!

This leads first to the retard getting peed on (whoops!), then somehow he gets set on fire (uh-oh!). All the while this retarded guy (who really plays it up with an extreme close up of his rotted, crooked teeth!) is shouting “tattoo! tattoo!” presumably admiring the tattoo that Pervert has on his arm.

Now I guess you could say that Pervert and Skinny Dude were a couple of guys so hardened in their dislike for retards that they wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, because they haul ass out of there, leaving the retard (and Pervert later called him, “Nuts” so that’s what we’ll call him from here on out) to smolder in the weeds.

Nuts goes back to his house and screams as his dad checks out his burned arm. Nuts’ dad is the chainsaw guy and he is really pissed. Apparently this guy is a leper, because he has his head and arms all covered in nasty rags and because the other characters refer to him as “leprous.”

He’s not much of a talker and just howls in rage when he sees what they’ve done to his boy. Dad fires up the chainsaw and goes hunting. He also tries to get Nuts laid! I wish he was my dad!

Other than the fact that this is a product of Hong Kong, The Deadly Camp is a fairly typical slasher movie, and while not the worst one you’ve ever seen, it’s nowhere near what you’d call “good.” There’s really no explanation for the why the killer is what he is and the fact that he has a weirdo retarded son and an equally psychotic wife seems a bit much. There’s not any kind of story except the old “people run around and get killed for no reason” plot we’ve come to expect from such efforts.

The characters are complete unknowns to us so their deaths don’t affect us in any discernible way. The fact that their names serve to define them is a clear indication of the lack of effort in developing anything remotely resembling interesting people.

You can’t even praise this for its gore. There isn’t much to speak off since most of the violence takes place off camera, which isn’t a wise move when the entire movie is being sold on its brutality. Still, it chugs along with an 80 minute running time and about ten or so kills.

I wouldn’t advise spending much money on this one since you aren’t ever likely to watch it again, but if you want a new slasher movie that goes through most of the motions and resembles a hundred other flicks of the same type, but with Asian actors, leper killers, and questionable treatment of retards then go ahead and strap on your Lottos and have at it!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Bio Zombie is a movie out of Hong Kong that puts a frenetic, comedic spin on the zombie genre and is surprisingly entertaining once the zombies finally start rampaging in the second half of the movie.

The film uses a formula of “yucks and yucky” pretty well in what amounts to a hyperactive (and therefore easier to sit through) rip-off of Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. And no , I don’t call a movie a Dawn Of The Dead rip-off just because it has zombies in it. I call it a rip-off because it has zombies in it and these zombies just happen to trap a group of people in a shopping mall.

But this is no carbon copy. Since this is a Hong Kong shopping mall, it seems to be located underground and be very cramped and instead of having Waldenbooks and Orange Julius it has a VCD shop and a sushi bar.

You also can see the difference between characters in an American zombie movie and a Chinese one. An American zombie film might star guys named Peter and Roger who might be helicopter pilots or SWAT team guys. In this movie, Woody Invincible and Crazy Bee work in the VCD store.

A VCD store that sells lots of pirated movies and one where Woody and Crazy get into fights with the customers who don’t like the quality of their bootlegs. “If you don’t like how it looks, why don’t you pay to see it in the theater” one of them barks to some whiny cheapskate. You don’t hear that down at the Sam Goody in your local mall.

Adhering to the conventions of the genre, the movie selects “government experiment” from its two choices (the other being meteorite) as to how the zombie problem is started. Believe it or not, the stuff that turns people into zombies was allegedly created by the Iraqis! Why didn’t we know about that? Stupid liberal media bias!

It’s in liquid form and packaged like a soft drink and the next thing you know Crazy Bee and Woody Invincible are giving some unknowingly to a guy they just ran over! Shoot, we all know how parched a guy can get when he’s got tire marks on his head!

The first half of the movie is a bit on the slow side, especially when it comes to the presence or lack thereof of anything resembling a Bio Zombie. There is one initial attack that eventually leads to Woody and Crazy getting their hands on the zombie juice, but other than that, there’s a bunch of time spent with Woody and Crazy as they try to get their boss’ car repaired, though I never really quite caught on to what that was all about. I think it may have been the same car they ran the guy over with.

We also have to meet some other folks who hang out at the mall including two tomatoes named Jelly and Rolls, the nerdy guy who works at the sushi bar and has the hots for Rolls, a bickering husband and wife named the Kuis who traffic in electronics goods of questionable origins, and a mall security cop named Ox. (He’s really big. And no, I have no idea why they called her Jelly.)

The zombie stuff starts when the guy Woody and Crazy ran over comes back to life and finds his way from their car to the mall and runs amok. Anyone he bites eventually turns into a zombie and as you might expect, these zombies also crave human flesh.

The zombies can only dispatched by a shot to the head, completing the movie’s slavish imitation of the Romero zombie mythos. (They do explain how the characters figure out that you need to shoot them in the head by having Crazy flashback to his hours of playing Sega’s House Of The Dead video game and recalling how you had to kill the zombies in that game. So this movie is actually copying a video game that copied the Romero zombie movies.)

Initially, no one believes that the problems in the mall aren’t being caused by Woody and Crazy and they are taken into custody by the police at the mall. They only manage to escape after a zombie attack on the cops and this leaves Woody running down the hall screaming that the zombies are coming, while hauling around a computer monitor that he is still handcuffed to. Mr. Kui sees this and as Woody is running past hollering about the zombies, Kui shouts after him, “are you threatening me?” That’s the kind of wacky stuff missing from that other mall-zombie flick.

The rest of the movie involves Woody, Crazy and the rest fending off the zombies in a variety of locations in the mall.

There was some gore in this movie, but nothing on the level of one of the Romero or Italian efforts. You had some severed limbs and some head trauma (Woody armed himself with a rechargeable drill), but no one was wallowing in pig guts or anything.

They also parodied the House Of The Dead video game a few more times, which alternately came off as amusing or just plain odd (like when Woody was out of bullets and the screen flashed “RELOAD” or when he was trying to operate some equipment and a symbol indicating he didn’t have a key flashed), but nothing was beat into the ground so that it became irritating.

The downbeat ending seems a bit off key considering the relative lack of seriousness that had preceded it, but with the death of one of the main characters, the humor evaporated from it, so it probably shouldn’t have been totally unexpected.

A good, fast, change of pace in the zombie genre that’s one of those loud, spastic efforts ideal for parties.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

In spite of the monks’ non-interventionist policy, the people do what they can to rebel. Since they don’t know any kung fu magic though, they get caught by the bad guys constantly and this results in beat downs, the destruction of businesses, and good old fashioned executions.

Any concerns though that this movie is going to get bogged down by lots of plotting, politics, and riding to and from secret camps is immediately put to rest when in the first five minutes of the movie, a rebel takes on a bad guy at a public execution in the greatest screen depiction of a fight between a guy with two swords and a guy with a battle axe ever!

This is a culture that respects a kick ass brawl, so even the bad guy wants a fair fight, one on one. And then once he slices up one of the rebel’s arms, the bad guy announces that he will beat him one handed!

San Te is a young man who knows right from wrong and he knows that the bad guys are really, really wrong! After getting mixed up with the rebellion, he ends up on the run, determined to make it to the Shaolin temple so that he can learn kung fu and return to help his people.

Despite opposition from some of the monks, he is allowed to stay and after a year of sweeping the floor he complains that he wants to learn kung fu, but all he’s gotten to do so far is KP duty. He is told that all he had to do is to ask and which chamber does he want to start out at?

San Te says the top chamber is the place for him! Do I even have to tell you that after a visit to the top chamber, he revises his goals and says that maybe the bottom chamber has its advantages, too?

What follows is the single best and lengthiest training montage in all of film! We follow San Te for the next five years as he moves from chamber to chamber mastering all sorts of skills and super powers.

If you thought being a Shaolin master killer was just about throwing kicks and punches in your pajamas, then you obviously need to go back to the first chamber straight away. You must know balance and speed and be able to run across logs floating on water.

You must develop your arm strength by carrying water buckets while knives are strapped to your biceps so that if you lower your arms, you’ll slice yourself. You must master all the various weapons of a Shaolin monk including swords and pole fighting.

Your eyes must be as quick as your body. And your head must be as hard as your oiled up chest. San Te battles his way through all these trials until he is given the option of which chamber he would like to teach at.

The end of his training is but the beginning of a new phase of San Te’s life. What is the 36th Chamber of the title? Has San Te forgotten those he left behind in his old life? Is it possible to break the centuries-old code prohibiting monks from teaching laymen and concerning themselves with laymen’s affairs?

Will we see San Te put all the skills he’s learned to use against the Tartars? What do you think? San Te invented an entirely new weapon while at the temple. Do you think he’s not going to be trying that out on some barbarian’s skull?

This one delivers fantastically staged action and battles involving multitudes of skilled fighters without a lot of cheesy slow motion or computer enhanced trickery or guys flying around unnaturally on wires like with some of these fake kung fu gods.

The remaking of San Te from young villager to accomplished monk is the centerpiece of the film and the sheer variety and inventiveness of tasks make watching the transformation a pleasure.

Like Five Deadly Venoms, this is an excellent place to start your kung fu education. This one was followed by two sequels, The Return To The 36th Chamber and Disciples Of The 36th Chamber which is good because it’ll mean I won’t wear out this DVD as soon as I otherwise would have.

© 2010 MonsterHunter