Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

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You’re sending me enough Canadian dollars to buy it?!?
I'm sending you emotional support. It's better than Canadian money.



I'm sending you emotional support. It's better than Canadian money.



This is me right now.



I'm sending you emotional support. It's better than Canadian money.
What’s the exchange rate on that?



You will notice from the choice of gifs that MKS is a man of violence and cruelty (waving a sword around) while I'm a man of peace and love (sending hearts).



Seems a little steep. Maybe wait for a sale.
I’ve yet to see them actually make their 4Ks affordable during a sale. But if they do and I haven’t blown all my money on Criterions…

Maybe.



Speaking of sales, VS's Halfway to Black Friday sale is coming up soon...and I haven't watched most of what I picked up during their last sale...



Speaking of sales, VS's Halfway to Black Friday sale is coming up soon...and I haven't watched most of what I picked up during their last sale...
I still have a disgusting amount of un watched Criterions, Arrow and Kino. I could reasonably stop buying all together and be set with watches for the foreseeable future.

But what’s the fun in that? Got that 4K Miami Connection pre-ordered even though I own the OOP Drafthouse Blu.



I still have a disgusting amount of un watched Criterions, Arrow and Kino. I could reasonably stop buying all together and be set with watches for the foreseeable future.

But what’s the fun in that? Got that 4K Miami Connection pre-ordered even though I own the OOP Drafthouse Blu.
I got a Criterion Channel subscription hoping that I would start spending less money on Blu-rays. But my habit just shifted to other labels.



I got a Criterion Channel subscription hoping that I would start spending less money on Blu-rays. But my habit just shifted to other labels.
I got CC too but mainly use it for stuff that they don’t put out on disc. My buying habits have remained egregious.



For anyone who turned in for me and Rock trying to find 70s gay, horror-erotica, I never read far enough into this cinepunx interview about Sex Demon, that other titles are recommended at the bottom:
(I mostly saw the interview come up when I googled to see if I could buy Sex Demon yet)



https://cinepunx.com/conjuring-a-sex...beth-purchell/



Elizabeth Purchell co-hosts the Ask Any Buddy podcast about vintage gay porn. I've listened to a few episodes and they've been very in-depth and full of valuable context. She's also on Letterboxd as schlockvalue. Worth a follow if you're interested in the genre.



The Street Fighter (Ozawa, 1974)



After the death of Bruce Lee, there was an attempt to market Sonny Chiba as his successor, yet comparing Lee's work to The Street Fighter and its sequels, their presences couldn't be more different. Lee's characters carried themselves with a certain dignity and swagger. Chiba's protagonist is brusque at the best of times, animalistic when he goes to work. Lee as a fighter was graceful, measured. Chiba, as the American poster for The Street Fighter suggests, fights dirty. When you see Lee in the climaxes of Enter the Dragon and The Way of the Dragon, you can see how storytelling, mise en scene, philosophy and choreography come together. Chiba in combat is a man possessed, an instrument of violence. If Klaus Kinski could do karate, one expects it would look like this. Both of their films have their share of blood, but Chiba relishes any opportunity for additional brutality.

And I think that gets to the fundamental difference between the characters they played. Lee's heroes are just that: heroes. There's a reason he's been an aspirational figure for decades. In these movies, Chiba's character is at best morally compromised and at times capable of evil. When The Street Fighter opens, Chiba rescues a death row inmate from execution. But after the inmate's brother and sister are unable to pay up, Chiba gets in a fight that leads to the brother's gruesome death (Chiba's culpability is questionable as the brother accidentally leaps out the window) and then sells the sister into sexual slavery (Chiba's culpability is undeniable in this case). This is supposed to be our hero? But as the movie progresses, we learn that Chiba himself was once the victim of great cruelty, his father having killed by Japanese occupying forces in China after being suspected of espionage. The movie brings this up not to excuse him but to frame him as an arguably tragic figure. He metes out cruelty because it is all he knows.

All of this creates a certain amount of poignancy in his efforts to do noble deeds, which frequently end in tragedy, although a certain patronizing quality does emerge in Chiba's treatment of the female characters. The second movie, The Return of the Street Fighter, has him warm up to a denim-clad orphan whom he tries to keep at an arm's length, while the last movie, The Street Fighter's Last Revenge, has him pushing away an interested suitor, telling her "You're not the girl for Dracula." (He then puts on a mask with fangs, and at several other points dramatically removes his mask Mission: Impossible style.) He also turns down a request to take another mercenary played by Etsuko Shihomi under his wing, with this amusing but also offensive exchange.

"You fight well for a woman."

"So what if I'm a woman? I'm Huo Fong, a fire bird from Taiwan. A lone wolf killer like you."

"I don't care if you're a fire bird or a grilled chicken."

"What?"

"You're ten years too early to fight against me. Put on your makeup and start husband hunting. You're not too bad actually."
Shihomi also played the woman who was sold into sexual slavery in the first movie, and no, this isn't the same character. Shihomi and Chiba reunite in Sister Street Fighter, and while I don't recall their character names, I'd wager they played different ones there too, because if they were the same, Shihomi's character would have had a superhuman ability to turn the other cheek.

I think a political dimension can be read into the movies as well. The first movie has Chiba face off against an international crime syndicate, the second one brings in a sort of non-aligned movement of karate clubs in different countries, and the third has a political corruption plot. How coherent this is in terms of a left-right spectrum I cannot say, but it evoke a certain disaffection that might have been felt in Japan at that time. In that context, Chiba's perverse professional code comes into focus. If you pay him, he will do the job, no matter how dirty. If you try to rip him off, watch out!

But ultimately these movies are an excuse to watch Chiba **** people's shit up, and in that sense, they're quite diverting. These are '70s Toei productions and as a result feature some very handsome widescreen cinematography, which makes the violence more startling. Chiba throws his opponents against the cramped edges of the frame in the rough and tumble fight scenes, which are punctuated with bursts of ultraviolence (an x-ray shot of a crushed skull, eyes popped out by a punch to the back of the head, other assorted Fulcian eye trauma, castration, ripped throats and more). In that sense, the first film is the best as it metes out the gore with the most frequency and gusto. (It was famously slapped with an X rating for violence alone.) The climax, drenched in rain for added dramatic flair, has Chiba tearing out his opponent's throat and holding it up to the camera in a flourish that imitates 3-D. Folks, this is what we go to the movies for.




Bruce Lee Against Supermen (Ng, 1975)




This review contains mild spoilers.

Now, when a movie promises you a Bruce Lee imitator running around in a cape and fighting one or more superpowered foes, there's a baseline of entertainment value it should offer, right? What's most surprising about Bruce Lee Against Supermen is how dull it is. Ostensibly, it offers plenty of the schlocky thrills endemic to Bruceploitation. And, as a martial arts movie, it has plenty of fight scenes, all of which are shot coherently and not cut too aggressively. Yet all of this is executed with the least amount of energy possible. Even in the fight scenes, there's a secret ingredient missing. They're serviceable but rarely inspired. Perhaps the problem is with Li himself. He's been good elsewhere, but here he's too dignified a presence and too much in the shadow of the real Bruce Lee for him to ever really pop off the screen and breathe some life into the proceedings. But the movie's real kryptonite proves to be its reliance on chase scenes. There are a few of them in the movie, and they're interminable. The cars clip along at the most leisurely of paces and are rarely seen together in the same frame, something which holds true for the foot chases as well.

The plot, if you must know, concerns a professor who's developed a formula that might cure world hunger. Naturally, some bad guys want to steal it, so they kidnap him, and it's up to our hero Bruce Li to rescue him. I've seen a few Bruceploitation movies now, and this is the first one that rips off The Green Hornet. That being said, while I've never seen the show, I'm pretty sure that Bruce Lee played Kato and not the Green Hornet. Yet here, Li appears dressed as Kato in a few early scenes, yet the bad guys consistently refer to him as the Green Hornet. I suspect the filmmakers were about as familiar with the source material as the makers of The Dragon Lives Again were with The Godfather (as in, not very).

Also of note is that the professor has a sexy daughter, who briefly stops working so she can go skinny dipping, which provides one of the film's lascivious highlights. She also bonds with Li over a pop song montage, but proves jealous when she finds him in bed with another woman and the two ladies proceed to have a catfight in the shower. You see, the woman had picked up Li in a bar, where they talked over the phone from opposite ends of the bar. (Li wore a hideous sportcoat in this scene.) I should also add that the sex scene is scored with Kraftwerk's "Autobahn". This is the other one of the film's lascivious highlights.

As far as superheroics go, Li wears a superhero costume once at the beginning and once at the end, and never in between. Li has a friend in these scenes in a matching costume, but he is also never seen in between. The supermen in the title of the movie refer to a bad guy in black tights and a cape, who is recruited by the villains with the promise of "a hundred thousand in cash, ten nice girls, and a truck full of booze", which seems like a pretty good deal. There are also a couple of other sorta superpowered villains in black tights and mime makeup. At one point they pass frisbees to each other while Li is trapped between them, in one of the film's action-packed highlights. These guys also turn on the big bad at the end because they don't like the villains' treatment of women, so it's nice to know they have principles. Li also has another buddy who helps him out during fight scenes, using a slingshot to ward away some goons in another of the film's action-packed highlights. He does not get to wear a cape.

If any of that sounds fun, I'll concede that I was a bit tired and perhaps not in the right state of mind to enjoy this, so I hope you get more out of it than I do.




I had to dig through my diary to find what I believe was a night of a brucesploitation double feature.


It looks like it was
Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave

The Dragon Lives Again


I am trying to read the descriptions to figure out which one was which. The one with the more comical premise ultimately turned into the more shallow experience (in the underworld, Bruce Lee fights The Man with No Name, Emmanuelle, James Bond, and The Exorcist).


The other one, I remember enjoying more, but don't remember a damn thing about it at all. I seem to recall the protagonist carrying a (cardboard) box.



I had to dig through my diary to find what I believe was a night of a brucesploitation double feature.


It looks like it was
Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave

The Dragon Lives Again


I am trying to read the descriptions to figure out which one was which. The one with the more comical premise ultimately turned into the more shallow experience (in the underworld, Bruce Lee fights The Man with No Name, Emmanuelle, James Bond, and The Exorcist).


The other one, I remember enjoying more, but don't remember a damn thing about it at all. I seem to recall the protagonist carrying a (cardboard) box.
The first one is The Dragon Lives Again. But shallow? Bah! Not only does he kung fu fight several of his foes (and some of them, like the Godfather, don't resemble their source material at all), but he also befriends Popeye and saves another friend from a sex-induced heart attack caused by Emmanuelle. It is a film of many layers (fighting, friendship, sex-induced heart attacks).


I heard the other one has nothing to do with its premise so I never checked it out, but the poster is great.





According to These Fists Break Bricks, none of that happens in the actual movie.