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Way of the Dragon (Lee, 1972)




This review contains mild spoilers.

I don’t necessarily think that The Way of the Dragon is a great kung fu movie, but I do think knowledge of its surrounding context helped me appreciate it a bit more. This was Bruce Lee’s third film for Golden Harvest, after two hits with The Big Boss and Fist of Fury. (Confusingly, The Big Boss has also been released as Fists of Fury in North America.) It was also Lee’s first film as director, which only happened after Lee tried to work out a deal with the rival Shaw Brothers studio, which had previously passed on him (or he’d passed on them) as a star. (It is interesting to contemplate if Lee’s cinematic output might be as fondly remembered had he gone with them instead of Golden Harvest. The more rigid house style and quality control of Shaw Brothers productions might make for better movies, but not necessarily ones that let their stars shine as strongly. But I also struggle to think of a Shaw Brothers star, of which there have been some greats, who are larger than life or at least bigger than the movies in the same way Lee was.) Lee at the same time was struggling to get American studios to take him seriously, and with this film was hoping to make something with international appeal that would get him noticed accordingly. While he was supposedly insecure about the film’s quality based on a lukewarm reaction from his brother, the film, on top of outgrossing his previous two films, succeeded in getting him noticed accordingly, as Warner Brothers soon gave him an offer to make Enter the Dragon.

The plot features Lee coming to Rome to help his restaurateuse cousin (the cute as a button Nora Miao, reuniting with him after Fist of Fury), who is antagonized by a white gangster looking to squeeze her for protection money, and it’s not hard to read that as a parallel for Lee’s struggles with the American film industry. The movie foregrounds Lee’s Chinese ethnicity, painting him as rather provincial and showing the characters celebrating Chinese New Year. But at the same time, the tone the movie strikes is quite a bit less nationalistic than Fist of Fury, where Lee declares that the Chinese are “not the sick men of East Asia” and kicks a sign that says “No dogs and Chinese allowed”. Here Lee is obviously proud of his heritage and shows off Chinese boxing to the audience, but he’s not above showing off other styles as well, regardless of origin. (It’s worth noting that his weapon of choice, the nunchaku, are Japanese in origin.) He casts a number of foreign martial artists, with at least one version of the opening credits listing out their qualifications. There’s Hwang In-Shik, the hapkido expert. There’s Robert Wall, who plays a heel here and would return to play heels in Enter the Dragon and Game of Death. And of course there’s Chuck Norris, who at this time was a decorated karate champion but not an established actor. (One wonders if he might have been cast in the John Saxon role in Enter the Dragon had he racked up more onscreen credits at the time. I love John Saxon and he certainly tries in the action scenes, but watching him in that movie is like seeing a kid on a tricycle compete in the Tour De France. Norris certainly would have been a better fit based on his abilities, despite being a weaker actor.)

Even when Lee defeats his foes (at least one of whom gets punched in the balls so hard that he dies), there’s a respect for their art, and Lee pleads for his allies to stop attacking a foe who had already surrendered. The climactic fight has Lee facing Norris in the ruins of the Coliseum (a soundstage during the fight itself, the real location in the surrounding scenes). Norris has a presence that can be flat in bad movies but is appropriately stonefaced here, as if his martial prowess transcends his personhood. The scene plays with a sense of timing that brings to mind spaghetti westerns, with Lee having to figure out how to adapt his style to defeat Norris. In that respect I don’t think it’s quite as accomplished as the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fight in Game of Death in translating his martial arts philosophy, nor is the mise en scene as compellingly incorporated as the climax in Enter the Dragon, but it’s a highly entertaining fight nonetheless. When it reaches its end, the film strikes a melancholy tone, and Lee offers a gesture of respect to the fallen fighter, an indirect acknowledgement of the idea that the martial arts featured are greater than the specifics of the plot in this genre.

I don’t think The Way of the Dragon is a great kung fu film, as there’s enough dead air and lack of polish to keep it from greatness, but I’ve grown accustomed to the idea that some films are more fun to spend time in than get through and that applied to my viewing experience here. Lee is clearly working out a directing style here, and it’s enjoyable to see him play with tone, particularly in early scenes that pull from silent comedy where he has to figure out how to get a meal without speaking a word of English. There’s also a scene where his cousin lectures him on acclimating to local customs and informs him that people here are really friendly, resulting in him getting obliviously picked up by Italian Beauty Malisa Longo (as the credits refer to her, right after listing the martial artists in the cast). Lee’s magnetism as a performer can’t be overestimated, but I do like how he plays with his presence, making him not just heroic and highly skilled but also funny and kind of a rube. Regarding the action scenes, the crew apparently was not prepared for Lee’s insistence on multiple takes, so while they lack the slickness of the average Shaw Brothers production, they do a great job of showing off Lee’s martial arts prowess and physicality. The camera pores over Lee’s physique as he flexes in a manner akin to the hardbody action films of the ‘80s. (This happens most memorably prior to his fight with Norris, where his movements are likened to that of a nearby kitten.) This might seem arrogant in other situations but is easily justified here. Were I built like Lee (I am not) and directing myself in a kung fu movie (I am not), I would show off my body as well. In the words of Max Bialystock, when you’ve got it, flaunt it.




Started this page off on a classier note (which will immediately deteriorate once I get around to writing about the last couple of movies I watched).



A Virgin Among the Living Dead (Franco, 1973)



I would not consider myself a member of the Jess Franco fanclub, and from my limited experience with his work, I've run pretty hot and cold. There are times when his work has definitely clicked with me, and others when I've found the experience excruciating (even with one of his better liked films), or at least been left wondering what really distinguishes him from some of the other cult directors with whom he gets compared. There are obvious similarities on paper between Franco and, say, Jean Rollin, another director with a light touch and a sense of atmosphere so delicate that it almost evaporates when you think you've put your finger on it. (Rollin also shares Franco's penchant for female nudity, and hey, I'm not complaining. You might even say that I run hot and cold on Franco because his movies feature hot ladies and chilly-looking weather. I'll be here all week.) Yet putting a Franco beside a Rollin, it does seem that they move differently, even if describing how exactly they move is something I've found difficult. (The sheer volume of Franco's output also presents a certain challenge. When someone has made so maddening an amount of movies, how many do you need to see to get a representative sample? And how many of them are actually good?) Of course, being in the proximity of all the Franco-heads on Letterboxd has made me more inclined to dig further into his work and really nail down his essence, and in that respect, A Virgin Among the Living Dead has been one of my most rewarding viewings yet.

The story concerns a young woman (Christina von Blanc) who comes to visit her relatives in a remote castle for the reading of her recently deceased father's will. At first she is happy to have them for company, but as the title suggests, things are not exactly what they seem. Stylistically, this shares plenty of Franco's trademarks: the zooms, of course, but wide-angle lenses that lend an imposing and cavernous quality to the castle, and bluish lighting that casts a pall over the proceedings. More than most of his films I've seen, this seems attentive to the actors' faces: the way Howard Vernon's eyes almost bulge out of his head; the soft, droopy features of Franco himself (he is no better an actor here as I've seen him elsewhere, but casts himself more pointedly here); the fullness of Britt Nichols' pout; and the round, emotive eyes of von Blanc. Von Blanc might not be a great actress in the traditional sense, but with those eyes of hers she's able to sell her character's poignancy and provide an emotional core to the movie. The movie wisely grounds the proceedings in her perspective, and the visual style feels more experiential than in some of his other films, like when the wide angle lens is pointed up towards the trees as the heroine ventures further into the woods. I read an argument that this was Franco's attempt to deal with his grief from Soledad Miranda's death, and with his stylistic approach a bit more focused, the atmosphere more funereal, and his exploitative tendencies relatively restrained (or at least more purposefully deployed), I found the overall result quite moving.

The movie exists in a number of versions, and my reaction above is to Franco's original director's cut, originally released with the (misleading) title Christina, Princess of Eroticism. Apparently the producers weren't too happy with the downer-ass (but still atmospheric and sexy) movie that Franco turned out, so they insisted on releasing a version with more sex scenes. One of these, which can be seen on the Kino Blu-ray, features Franco regular Alice Arno in a mask and cape presiding over an orgy. I have to wonder if viewers at the time could tell this scene was shot after, but seeing it now, the fact that it shares none of the same actors or has a remotely similar colour scheme is a dead giveaway. (There's a brief cutaway to the actors from the original version standing on a hill in a lame attempt to hide the seams.) The movie was re-released in 1981 in an attempt to squeeze even more pennies out of the production, and this time came with zombie footage directed by Jean Rollin. (This was where it's best known title came from, in an attempt to cash in on the zombie craze, although I'd have loved to see this with an audience who went into this expecting Dawn of the Dead or Zombie.) These scenes, while noticeably not the same film when watching it in a presentable HD transfer, at least have a similar colour scheme (that might have perhaps fooled viewers seeing it on VHS) and, because Rollin and Franco are not miles apart in the sense of atmosphere there direction conjures, move similarly enough to the real movie. I did find these scenes enjoyable in their own way, but in the context of the greater film, they render the sense of the menace a little too concrete. Franco's style may still feel a little too elusive for me to fully define, but I can tell when something is off.




Also of note is this awesome but wildly misleading poster for the movie.





There are ZERO skeleton ladies shooting laser beams from their eyes. Not a single one.



The Strangeness (Phillips, 1985)



Sometimes all you need for a movie is a great setting. Take The Strangeness. This is a movie about a group of explorers venturing into an abandoned mine to look for gold. It's a simple premise, but the mine setting carries the movie a long way. It's dark and claustrophobic, and the realities of the setting give the story a great deal of tension even before we realize there's something untoward lurking about in the mine. I'm extremely partial to low budget movies where their production circumstances bleed into the story to add to the suspense. I bring it up constantly but you can see how first wave slashers, like the original Friday the 13th, feel not at all divorced from their shooting locations and take on a real immediacy as a result. Watching The Strangeness you might be fooled into thinking the same applies here, but surprisingly, given the movie's low budget, most of the mine scenes were shot on a well disguised set. While I would have liked to wax poetic about the voodoo of location, the fact is the movie is not hampered by this reality. The sets are that good.

Of course, something needs to happen in the movie for it to be enjoyable as well (you can't go for ninety minutes with only ambling mine footage), and the plot here introduces a monstrous creature that starts killing off our heroes one by one. Anyone making a monster movie in the '80s would have seen or at least been aware of Alien, and this movie shares with that one a kind of sexual menace in the creature design. There's no putting it delicately: the monster looks like both a dick and a pussy. It's cylindrical frame gives it a penis-like stature, while it's mouth opening is unabashedly vaginal in appearance. The monster was designed by Chris Huntley, who claims that this was not done consciously and chalks up the sexual dimensions of the design to the fact that he was closeted at the time. The original design also included a shell, which was supposed to make the monster look like a snail but would have likely looked scrotal in profile. In any case, this is one unpleasant looking mother****er, although it's tempered a bit by some pretty winning stop motion effects (one scene has the monster eating a character, which looks like Bob the Builder getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner). Although it doesn't make that sexual menace diegetic as in Alien, it does share with that movie a nefarious capitalist justification for the heroes' mission. Never, ever trust the moneymen, especially when creepy caves and dick-vag-hybrid monsters are involved.

And it would be unfair for me to chalk up the movie's success to those couple of elements without noting that it's directed quite effectively. The reason that the mine sets are so damn convincing is that they're lit so evocatively. Many scenes are shot seemingly with just diegetic light sources, like the lights on the heroes' helmets or their flares, so that your visibility lines up plausibly to theirs. It almost doesn't matter that you can barely tell the characters apart (an obnoxious writer, a Brit of questionable experience and the boss are the only ones that stand out), because you very much feel like you're in their shoes. I understand that this movie never got a proper theatrical release and only came out on video at the time, and I imagine seeing it on a muddy VHS copy could have made these stylistic choices pretty frustrating, but seeing it on Blu-ray, shot after shot bathed in darkness with just a flashlight or two puncturing the wall of solid black have a palpable effect. The movie's best moment has one of the characters using the flash of a camera for visibility, each burst of light more disorienting than seemingly helpful, until the monster bursts into the frame.




Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
There's no putting it delicately: the monster looks like both a dick and a pussy. It's cylindrical frame gives it a penis-like stature, while it's mouth opening is unabashedly vaginal in appearance. The monster was designed by Chris Huntley, who claims that this was not done consciously and chalks up the sexual dimensions of the design to the fact that he was closeted at the time.
Maybe the fact that director Melanie Anne Phillips is also known as David Michael Hillman has something to do with it.
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Maybe the fact that director Melanie Anne Phillips is also known as David Michael Hillman has something to do with it.
From what I'm gathering, "David Michael Hillman" might have just been a pseudonym, although Phillips was married to a woman at the time. I suspect there's an interesting queer read on this movie. Even putting aside the dick monster, it's surprisingly free of the kind of pandering elements you get in horror that's more overtly hetero in its perspective.



I Drink Your Blood (Durston, 1970)



Now, I can't say how apparent it is to strangers on the Internet, but if anyone has the misfortune of meeting me in real life, they'll know that I'm a huge square. I tuck in my shirt. (Even on Casual Fridays. Sorry, I don't believe in wearing long sleeve button-up shirts untucked, but will allow a few exceptions. Am I talking about clothes again? Yes.) I pay my taxes. I avoid jay-walking when possible. I've never even smoked a doobie. (Even though it's legal here.) What all this has to do with movies is anybody's guess, but let's entertain a hypothetical here. If a gang of dirty hippies rolled up into my town, how would I react? Probably indifferently, what they do is their business. What if they were a gang of devil-worshipping hippies? Again, what they do is their business. What if they started antagonizing the townsfolk? Would I do anything then? Yes, I would. I would very likely soil myself and then call the police (on the hippies, not on myself). Would I, I dunno, give them a bunch of meat pies tainted with rabid blood? Unlikely, but I probably wouldn't feel too bad if somebody did that in this chain of events.

This is roughly the plot of I Drink Your Blood, in which a gang of devil-worshipping hippies roll into a small town, rape a local girl, rough up an old man and give him acid, and then fall into a rabid, murderous frenzy after being fed contaminated meat pies by the old man's vengeful grandson. The obvious inspiration for the subject matter would have been the Manson murders, and the film was released as part of a double feature with I Eat Your Skin a year after Manson's conviction to capitalize on that publicity. (When combined with the similarly titled I Spit On Your Corpse and I Spit On Your Grave, one can extrapolate a tetralogy wherein a cannibal finishes up his meal and buries his victim unceremoniously after. Pointing out the movies have nothing to do with each other would only spoil the fun.) And this ripped-from-the-headlines quality lends the film a reading as a nightmare for a certain reactionary element in society, wherein the counterculture threatens to upend all that the mainstream holds dear. There are similarities to Night of the Living Dead in that respect, but while George Romero admits the result was somewhat accidental on his part (he's said many times that he cast Duane Jones simply for being the best man for the job), I Drink Your Blood is more calculated in its effect.

That the gang's most important members (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, who is Indian, George Patterson, who is black, and Jadin Wong, who is Chinese) are people of colour leans into this interpretation, but it's worth noting that these actors are also the most charismatic in the cast, which challenges the audience's sympathies. (Would you rather root for the lame-o kid who spiked the meat pies and his grandpa or these cool, groovy dudes and chicks?) Chowdhury, a dancer by training, is especially magnetic, and brings a physicality that makes him compelling both before and after the rabies-induced insanity. And while he's certainly othered, as far as American movies go, it's a pretty unusual role for a South Asian actor, and his Indian heritage isn't made a point of the way Patterson's blackness and Wong's Asian heritage are. The latter has a scene that brings to mind a famous photograph that would have very much been in public awareness at the time, and despite how insensitive it arguably is, the movie is piling up two-fisted images fast enough at that point that there's no denying to generates the necessary jolt in the viewer.

At this point the movie is at a fever pitch, having shifted to a vision of societal collapse not unlike the Romero film, with the heroes at one point holing themselves up in a none-too-secure-looking house while evading a mindless, violent mob. How the movie reaches this scale I won't exactly reveal and I didn't bother to research whether rabies can in fact be spread in the method employed in this movie, but will hint that the movie's use of a certain plot device subverts the usual kind of threat present when exploitation movies pander with sex scenes. Despite not being polished in the obvious sense, the movie also finds neat stylistic touches, as when it likens the buzz of an electric knife to the thrum of the electronic drone prevalent on the soundtrack. (The scene in question features Lynn Lowry, making her debut here. She has no dialogue, yet her off-kilter presence and distinct features make an impact.) This is far from the most violent movie on the Video Nasties list, and wasn't even the most violent movie released up to that point (Herschell Gordon Lewis had made more graphic movies in the preceding decade), but the fact that it places the violence in a context of societal upheaval, as well as its energetic delivery, give it a sense of real transgression. I'm obviously against censorship and the like, but I can understand why this ended up in a list of banned movies.




You think One-Eyed Man knows the Laser-Skull Lady from A Virgin Among the Living Dead?





(That's the face I assume Laser-Skull Lady makes when they meet. The hearts are lasers.)



The Deadly Spawn (McKeown, 1983)



As I noted in my review of The Strangeness, for anyone making a monster movie in the '80s, the influence of Alien was inescapable. That movie approached the sexual dimensions of the creature design from a completely different (and impressively unpleasant-looking) angle. The Deadly Spawn takes a completely different tack to the design. What if a kid watched Alien when they were way too young? What if they saw it with their fingers covering their eyes so that they didn't even get too good of a look? The alien had a lot of teeth, right? A whole mouthful of god knows how many? How many heads did it have? Are we sure it had just one? Why not two or three? What if they had just five minutes to draw what they thought the alien looked like? With a lot more time you'd likely end up with a lot more teeth and a lot more heads, but the result of those five minutes would likely look something like the monster in The Deadly Spawn, which has a finite number of teeth and heads but more than anybody would like to run into when venturing into their basement. There are also a lot of little monsters, which push up the number of teeth and heads even higher. I make this comparison not to suggest that the movie is lazy with its creature design, but that it feels filtered through a child's imagination. It's a great monster, all the more so because it seems the product of a specific perspective.

Of course, a great monster by itself wouldn't make a good movie, and I'm sure we've all seen examples of monsters saddled with movies not up to their standard. (What comes to mind for me is Tombs of the Blind Dead, which I found interminable whenever the camera wasn't pointed directly at the Blind Dead. Sadly, this composed a non-zero amount of runtime. Would not recommend, unless you really, really need your Blind Dead fix.) This thankfully is not such a case, as it extends the sensibilities that inspired the monster design to the movie around it. The horror is grounded in the realities of the characters' domestic existence, like when a character first encounters the monster in their dark, creaky basement. (I watched this the same weekend as The Strangeness, and while not as aggressive as that movie in this respect, I think this too makes tense use of limited light sources in this sequence.) The movie's funniest sequence involves a brunch meeting between some little old ladies which takes a gruesome turn, with the characters initially trying to pretend something isn't amiss and that the green sauce doesn't actually taste a little funky so as not to offend one of the hosts.

The movie is also surprisingly sturdy in the characterization department. The heroes here are refreshingly not the dumbassed horndog teens who populated the T&A-filled slasher movies of the era, but smart, methodical science students who attempt a logical approach to dealing with the situation. (One of them dissects one of the little monsters, which looks like a sausage casing filled with pasta.) The characters are defined as such so that when the movie metes out unexpected fates for them, it actually has an impact beyond the gruesome imagery. (This is not a movie where you can tell from the beginning who will make it to the end, even if the changing availability of the actors can be credited for its most shocking scene.) Most surprisingly is that the best character in the movie happens to be a kid. I've seen any number of terrible child actors and obnoxious children show up in horror movies (there was one in I Drink Your Blood, and a particularly egregious example in Trick or Treats, wherein you actively root for the mad slasher to take out the little bastard; and who could forget Bob from The House by the Cemetery?), so it's quite refreshing that the kid here is actually a pretty good actor and quite believable in the context of the movie. It also helps that as a monster kid, his perspective aligns with that of the movie and gives the events that transpire a certain catharsis. Which is a fancy way of saying that this kid kind of rules and so does this movie.




I can only hope a month that contains The Strangeness and The Deadly Spawn would also include Winterbeast.


I think it is a legal requirement these three 80s monster movies are all watched it close proximity (I probbaly even prefer it to The Strangeness...but that might be because I watched that one off a VHS rip which was very not good)



I might hold off on Winterbeast because it doesn't seem to be on Tubi yet. I'll probably grab it during VS's next sale.



Friedelmania!



I recently watched I Drink Your Blood, and while it was far from the most graphic thing I've ever seen, I can understand why, with its forceful delivery of its exploitative elements, it ended up on the Video Nasties list. In contrast, Frederick R. Friedel's Axe feels like the furthest thing from the other film's blatant provocation. There are graphic elements, for sure, but the movie stumbles into them with an almost childlike nonchalance, which likely reflects the headspace of the protagonist, a young woman with the mind of a child who cares for her elderly, disabled grandfather. Their simple existence is interrupted by a trio of criminals looking for a quiet place to hide out, but given their respective capacities for violence (the criminals having just committed a murder, the heroine seen robotically killing chickens), the situation deteriorates quickly. The movie runs under seventy minutes, but Friedel's direction opts for a slow burn, preferring to build tension through what the characters do with their hands (fiddling with cigars, trimming their nails, reaching for a straight razor). His visual approach is disjointed (a scene where the heroine contemplates how to use her razor is spliced together from a jagged assemblage of angles), which only enhances the sense of claustrophobia, and he gets a jolt out of the way the candy red hue of the blood contrasts with the earthy tones of the rest of the movie. (This contrast is anticipated by the opening titles, with flowery, elegant text announcing the names of the actors followed by the crude, angular font announcing the title.) And lest one think this is a completely humourless enterprise, Friedel gets in a ketchup-blood gag, which he later echoes in one of the film's most disturbing moments.

Jack Canon, who played one of the criminals in Axe, returns in Friedel's followup, Kidnapped Coed. Like that movie, the title sounds more salacious than the actual movie. Here Canon plays a man who kidnaps an heiress to hold her for ransom, but pretty soon his plan goes sideways and they end up falling in love. Like Axe, this also is not devoid of exploitative elements, but once it gets them out of the way in an unpleasant yet effective early scene, it settles into the rhythms of a road movie, with Canon and the heroine slowly forming a bond, a relationship that feels natural thanks to Friedel's willingness to hold on quieter moments. There's also an absurdist streak at play, with the heroes encountering bizarre or hostile locals at seemingly every turn (a kid who flips them off unprovoked, a birdwatching group that nearly finds their hideout, a retired sheriff who comes at them with a pitchfork). It feels cliched to make comparisons to certain auteurs ("Lynchian" is so overused as to lose all meaning), but you get the sense that Friedel drew inspiration from Terence Malick's Badlands, even if the antagonism in his movie goes in a different direction. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the final scene features an electronic take on "The Blue Danube".

Friedel apparently was completely screwed over financially with Axe and Kidnapped Coed, so in an attempt to finally make some damn money off of his work, he edited them together into a new feature called Bloody Brothers, which parallels the plots of both movies with the framing device that Jack Canon's dual performances represent twins who decide to go on crime sprees on the same day. It very obviously doesn't work as a complete movie given the completely unrelated storylines (although the way Friedel ties them together at the end is clever enough), but is worth seeing for fans of those two films as an interesting experiment in contrasts. Despite both movies having been made on meager budgets and within a few months of each other, the difference in their rhythms and sense of space (jagged and claustrophobic in Axe, leisurely and open in Kidnapped Coed) becomes heightened when juxtaposed with each other. (It helps that as both movies run well under an hour and a half, Friedel is able to combine them coherently enough into a ninety-minute feature and let their respective segments play out so as not to lose their original character.) And the movie ultimately works as a pretty nice tribute to Canon as an actor, allowing you to savour the contrasts between the characters and the nuance he brings to the ruthless, cold-blooded criminal in Axe and the troubled but not heartless kidnapper in Kidnapped Coed.






The tagline is accurate to the letter, but not the spirit, of the story.



Rock is catching up on all the classics!
Yeah, just gotta write about the Ray Dennis Steckler pornos I watched and then we're all set.