p e n g u i n d e v i l

Admittedly, I’ve never been much of a fan of martial arts films. I’ve seen some Shaw Brothers films from the 1970’s that I found quite appealing, but not much else. And I really didn’t like those recent big extravaganzas like crouching tiger. But alas, Stephen Chow has bridged those two genres and made an instant classic. Easily one of the great films of all time, Kung Fu Hustle is a rambunctious mixed bag of dance, gangsterness, kung fu, comedy, action and superheroes. A nutty concept and story that could easily have been done wrong in so many ways but ended up being basically a flawless blend of the above.

When some insulted gangsters decide to beat a slum into submission, they don’t realize not only that a handful of Kung Fu masters have retired there, but that those dangerous masters are not their worst threat! While this old Shanghai seems to be overrun with warring gangs, the only problems in this slum are the badly maintained facilities and the pushy and mean old cheapskate landlord lady and her philandering silk pajama wearing husband. That is until Donut and Sing, two losers who claim to be members of the notorious Axe Gang show up and try to blackmail the barber! The two aren’t really part of the Axe Gang, but they dream of being gangsters and seem to think that if they act accordingly, they will realize their dreams.

The denizens of the place turn against the two and so they make an Axe Gang call for help. And help actually does arrive, lots and lots of help. The Axe Gang is a large powerful uber-stylish gang filled with men in black suit and tie, black top hats and wielding hatchets. Led by the thoroughly bad and ruthless Brother Sum, they care little for anything except for flaunting their coolness and power.

Right off the bat in this confrontation, one of the Axe gang leaders gets his back broken mysteriously and they take their threats of retaliation against the slum one step too far. After cowering for a while, one of the tradesmen steps up and everything changes! It turns out that some of the tradesmen are super-duper, fly through the air, kung fu masters. The film becomes an endless stream of crazy, over the top, cgi’d kung fu sequences, involving lots of silly humor and an amazing amount of resilience on the parts of the characters… And fun and stylish antics of the ever glorious members of the Axe Gang.

Surprisingly, even with the great numbers of gang members, the masters in the slum turn out to be too much for the Axe… Twelve Kicks from the Tam School, Iron Fist from the Hung School and The Hexagon Staff have outlandish and amazing warriors skills that leave the gang bruised and looking for some help itself. They call in the number two killers, a couple of top rank musicians who play a wicked mean Guqin and once again seem to be unstoppable! How many times can the masters meet greater masters.

Seemingly quite a lot, because that is all just the first half and it turns out that you never know who might be harboring some fantastic Kung Fu Master skills and maybe that chintzy Kung Fu book that Sing picked up when he was a kid had more to it than meets the eye… The moves they have in this are ridiculously wonderful and great fun to watch, especially with how serious they are all taken. I highly recommend it to anyone, even those who aren’t interested.

Due to a recommendation from some fellows at the office, well not a recommendation so much as a “I can’t believe that you haven’t seen it”, I went and watched They Live. I’ve never bothered to see it mainly due to how hit and miss John Carpenter is and the sunglasses part of the premise sounded so dumb that I just couldn’t take it. Well, I must say that I am glad that I finally got around to it. I thought it was actually pretty good. Roddy Piper, yes, is no actor. But he plays a down on his luck fellow, new to Los Angeles, who stumbles upon some sunglasses that give him a new, grayscale vision of the world. The notion is that the USA is controlled by aliens who use a mind control signal so that humans see them as humans and so that all of the brainwashing propaganda that is doled out to the public doesn’t appear to them as propaganda. As one might guess, he has a hard time getting anyone to try the glasses on, but that is one of the weakest elements of the film. Face it, how hard would it be to convince someone to put on a pair of sunglasses? There are some strange scenes (including a macho 6 minute fight scene in an alley) where Roddy just can’t get someone to try on these sunglasses. He never actually makes an attempt to convince people, to say “Why don’t you just try them on and see what you can see?”. In one, someone says that regardless of what she sees, she’ll tells him that she’ll see whatever he says he sees. He just gives up there and puts the glasses in his pocket. Doesn’t he realize that regardless of what she said to him, she would believe him if she put them on? Isn’t that his goal? And then when he basically starts punching some guy in the face since he doesn’t want to put the glasses on instead of maybe giving him a reason to put them on… So those scenes are a bit dumb. As he runs around yelling at the aliens he ends up being “framed” as a mass murdering lunatic so the chase is on as he tries to find other humans who know that truth, while avoiding the authorities. The movie is quite cheap, mainly taking place out of doors in the city, and the sunglass idea is dumb. But on the good side, it actually kind of fun. I like its rather slow pacing and not continual action. The score, while a bit odd and repetitive, does make for good, um, atmospherics, and while the sunglasses idea is silly, it is actually done to a nice effect. See, all of our signs and books and magazines are just thought control messages, presented in a nice 1980’s generic groceries type manner which is quite 1984ish. But the people can’t see that, due to the mind control signal. We just see Time, Newsweek, People and all of that. With the glasses on though, you see them as they actually read to our minds.

So there is a good message, albeit presented in a rather blunt and trite manner. It is basically an anti-corporation/consumerism movie. Very bluntly presenting a case that is anti-consumerism, anti-television, anti-conformity and anti-greed. The world is controlled by humanoid aliens who live among us, everything around us is subliminal propaganda and all of it is kept in place via a controlling signal broadcast via TV broadcasting. While everything appears normal, when you put the glasses on, it enables you to see past the signal, and causes headaches at the same time.

As the aliens are basically people with dark corpse-like faces, the idea that all you have to do is spread these sunglasses around to people and they will realize that they are being kept as “livestock” will become apparent. There is a small (and getting smaller) group working against them, trying to get these sunglasses spread around so that people can see the truth and see who is really controlling things and Roddy gets involved with them to try and save the world from these funny aliens.

There is always something new out there, isn’t there? Even when it’s old. Now I’ve been a Judas Priest fan for quite some time having seen them live in 1982 and I’ve been pretty consistently listening to the 6 albums that they put out from 1978 to 1984; from Killing Machine (aka Hell Bent for Leather) through Defenders of the Faith, though in the last twenty years it has primarily been Point of Entry (of course), British Steel and Unleashed in the East. But I’ve rarely heard anything past that. Turbo makes me vomit, but Painkiller is good… I’ve never heard so much as a minute from their 4 other later albums. Oddly, I’ve never made an attempt to hear their first 4 albums. I think I’ve long owned a copy of Stained Class, but I don’t recall ever listening to it. I certainly have seen them in the stores enough over the years and thinking of all the crap I’ve bought in that time, I really don’t know why I never picked them up. Anyway, why all this? Well, I finally decided to give their second album a try, 1976’s Sad Wings of Destiny.

I think I did because I’ve loved Unleashed in the East for so long (thinking it one of the best live albums out there) and 4 of my favorite songs on it (especially Tyrant), I’d never heard any other way, since they reside on this record. Finally I thought, I wonder what the non-live versions sound like. Well, colour me bad. The album is great! A greater discovery for me then the Scorpion’s Speedy’s Coming was 30 years after it’s release.

Sad Wings of Destiny is easily my second favorite priest album now, right up there with Point of Entry… Why are my favorite Priest albums their least metal? I don’t know, but this certainly isn’t metal by any modern definition. And it’s much different from their later music. The music itself sounds quite sparse with Rob’s vocal very much in the foreground. To some extent it seems somewhat proggie, with some odd choruses (check out Victim of Changes and the “even greater than the live version”, Tyrant for some great vocal stylings) and there is even an instrumental piano piece, which is one of the two tracks that I can do without. Anyway, it’s hands down a great album, and it’s a weird album. One that I have to listen to a good deal to make up for all these years. Maybe I don’t need to bother with Unleashed anymore, since I don’t particularly care for live music anyway…

In a similar vein, I recently made another discovery from the vaults. While I was never as big an Iron Maiden fan, I still spent more than my share of life listening to The Number of the Beast. And I also had selected tracks from the two following albums that I give a lot of airplay to, but I’d never given their preceding album a shot. A lot of people have always recommended it suggesting that DiAnno is a better vocalist that Dickinson and that it’s less poppy. So now, Iron Maiden’s Killers.

One reason I’d always avoided was because it doesn’t have Bruce Dickinson singing on it, but man, it’s good. As above, Killers is now right up there as my second favorite Maiden album, with nary a bad song on it. Its music is quite a bit rougher than Beast, and much more so than their dramatic balladeering. It features some great instrumental and the fantastic track Wrathchild, which is the crazy old school metal high point of the album. though I could do without the bonus tracks on the CD…

I don’t know why I’d avoided these so long, but it’s nice to discover music from a loved band that is better than anything they’ve put out in decades.

Thinking Jack Hill, Sid Haig and, of course, Pam Grier… I figured that I can’t go wrong, so I finally watched the classic old exploitation film, The Big Bird Cage. While it didn’t exactly feature a big bird cage, it was a big bird something, a big bore and a big letdown. Though my limited experience with W.I.P. films is that they tend to be pretty dull, I was thinking there would have to be at least a little good stuff going on with these folks involved. Right off that bat, it didn’t seem it. The movie starts off at a big boring women’s work farm, where nothing seems to happen except bad homosexual stereotypes, bad acting and ripped clothes, luckily we are soon whisked away to a hopping night club where Sid Haig and Pam Grier are the musical entertainment… While this turns out to be tedious also, it is brief and Sid’s two-tone blue and white pants are almost worth watching the first 8 minutes for. Though even he walks through this film like it’s a big joke. Anyway, it turns out that they are actually the leaders of a lame revolutionary gang who are here to rob these cheap looking society folk. What do these have to do with each other? Well, it seems that the revolutionaries are so enamored with Pam that they decide that they need more women for their revolution. So they set Pam up to get sent to the work camp so the revolutionaries can overthrow it and steal all the women for themselves! Sadly, almost the entire rest of the film takes place in that boring work camp in the jungle where you have nothing but the memories of a mud wrestling fight between Pam and Sid and their musical number to give you hope that something fun might happen.

But no. It doesn’t deliver. The first half of the movie is almost unbearably dull. You may find yourself rubbing your temples and looking at the time elapsed to ponder how much more of this there is to sit through. The drama with the uptight warden, the “gay” prison guards, the infighting between the girls, the “hard labor” and the danger of the bird cage never really comes to anything but a bunch of unconvincing talk. Admittedly, once Pam gets to the camp and starts trying to take over the other girls, it does perk up and we get some saucy cat-fightin’ action going on…

But it never manages to really get interesting. There are more mud wrestles, hanging by hair, crushing by machinery and a lady who strips down and covers herself in chicken fat so she can run without people being able to get a hold of her… But it’s all boring and badly done. Sid Haig’s hammy performance reminds you that even he had to find some way to perk it up so that he could stay awake. Luckily, people who saw this when it came out only had a year to wait for the release of the true awesome classic, Coffy!

I admit that most of us find some element of “dysfunction” in our family’s, but sometimes I wonder how many families out there are really off their rockers. Sometimes it seems like there must be more of them than I would expect. Why do I think about this right now? Well, there are all of those “celebrity” documentaries where you find out just how wacky and annoying some families are, ones that make my family seem pleasingly calm and collected… Films such as Grey Gardens and Crumb… Maybe even The Devil According to Daniel Johnston. But I think we’ve just seen the most extreme… You’re Gonna Miss Me. First off, no, I don’t have any particular interest in schizophrenia or craziness in general, so I don’t know why I end up watching these. I think that (except for the Daniel Johnston one) I didn’t really have any idea how the people involved would really be before I sat down to watch them. We ended up getting this because we heard it was good and because I knew absolutely nothing about Roky Erickson except for that there was an old band called 13th Floor Elevators and that I used to see a lot of old concert flyer’s for the band.

This movie is the story of the Elevators rise to fame in San Francisco, Roky’s decline into drug usage, his arrest for marijuana possession, his consequent incarceration for 3 years in a mental hospital for the criminally insane, his musical career after his release and his general physical and mental decline. Yes, Roky is another schizophrenic drug casualty (though I got the sense that he was maybe a bit off kilter prior to his drug usage). The main focus here is his decline, especially the last 20 years under the care of his mother who is a “crazy old bat” (for lack of a better term), one whose crazed religious insanity gives a bad name to christianity (not that it needed anyone else to do that) and whose hoarding and medical paranoia gives a bad name to those of us who hoard and are paranoid of the medical establishment. She is obsessed with assuaging the blame for his condition that she feels that she is saddled with from everyone… People are so misunderstanding about the care she has given Roky. She is treating his schizophrenia with absolutely nothing. She is treating his everything with nothing. He is unmedicated, completely ungroomed with an abscessing mouth, and he lives in an dumpy little apartment in Austin (is there some national plot to make Texas look as unappealing as possible in movies and on TV?). The apartment is a horrible mess of clutter and continually running noisy electronics, where his mother just lets him be and do his thing.

Also in this blend are his four brothers who are hopeful that something can be done to straighten Roky out. Primarily his youngest brother Sumner who now lives in Pittsburgh where he is the tuba player (tubist?) for the Pittsburgh Symphony. Sumner has decided that he can care of his brother better, so a lot of the focus is on getting Roky out of the care of his mother and into the care of Sumner who feels that he can care for him, medicate him and get him some therapy so that he can get himself back together and maybe start performing again (which he hasn’t done in 20 years). The movie is pretty interesting, there are interviews with Gibby and Billy Gibbons and lots of old footage of the Elevators playing, Roky is a charming old sweetheart and though Sumner maybe doesn’t really know what he is getting himself into, his heart is certainly in the right place. Plus he lives in possibly the strangest house I have ever seen.

And though I hate TV as much as the next guy, I must make a little comment about Lost. First off, yes, I admit it’s a crappy show: bad actors, lame characters, dumb scripts and such a convoluted and ridiculous storyline that it’s obvious that the writers go out of their way to throw as much ludicrous crap out as they can every week. I tried to avoid it as much as possible, but I would occasionally trot over to watch some of it when Caitlin was watching it, as the computer was in the same room and the sounds coming from the TV were so full of action that I couldn’t help but glance. Anyway, that said, I now watch it. Why? Well into that mix of bad actors, dumb annoying characters and bad writing and storyline, they threw Michael Emerson and his character of Benjamin Linus. Suddenly, this show had one of my favorite characters on TV going for it. Not only is Emerson a reasonably good actor, but to have a character appear who is both intelligent, interesting, charismatic and doesn’t have his head up his $%# like the rest of them was so relieving that the rest of it became somewhat bearable… If only to see what Ben would pull next with this gaggle of fools. And to top it off, he is a relentless bad$%# (as was perfectly well shown in this last episode’s desert scene with the two unlucky horsemen). Most of the other characters are so bad that it’s hard to sit through them: Sawyer (probably the worst character of them all), Kate, Jack… The list goes on. The only thing I don’t like about the Ben Linus character is that he has made me a watcher of this lame show. Okay, all else isn’t lost with the show… Locke and Hurley are both good characters and well-played, but one is a little too putzy and the other is a little too irritating to bring me into the show.

Feeling that good old time AIP/Hammer feeling, I watched The Haunted Palace. Another one of that great MGM Midnite Movies series and a rather confused Lovecraft adaptation… Confused in the normal sense, where one take the bones of a Lovecraft story, cobbles on some other story bits and then throws in some completely un-Lovecraft stuff. This one though is made all the more so by titling it after a Poe poem, having the Poe piece read at the beginning and the end of the movie and placing it more in the time of Poe. That aside, it is a rather good Corman/Price film. Taking on the story of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Price plays Ward, a man who has inherited the house of a long dead ancestor up in the old seaside town of Arkham. He arrives in town in good spirits with his wife and the intention of moving in but he gets a rather unpleasant greeting. The townsfolk feel that this ancestor, Joseph Curwin, was a warlock who was up to some nefarious activities with the young ladies of the town and who then cursed the population… when they tied him to a tree and burned him to death. Though that was 110 years ago, people haven’t forgotten, maybe because they are all the same actors and their ancestors? But also maybe because a good portion of the population are strangely disfigured, including one mysterious beast looked in an attic. The folks are not pleased to see the house occupied again, especially not by an ancestor of that dreaded warlock… And one who bears such a striking resemblance to him. But they do meet a fairly friendly fellow and he helps them to find their goal. When they finally make inside the house, they are greeted by the friendly caretaker, Simon (played by Lon Chaney) which is rather strange since the outer door was locked from the outside and covered in webs…

Of course, the naive villagers may just know more than one might give them credit for, as Ward starts acting quite strange his first night in the house, almost like he has a split personality. Yes, of course, Price has become possessed by Curwin, and Simon is in fact one of Curwin’s co-warlocks, and they are eager to continue in their long delayed work to follow through the Necronomicon to mate human women with the Elder Gods (actually with one of the worst creature effects that I’ve ever seen)… But not before Curwin gets his vengeance against the people whose ancestors wronged him so long ago.

As with most of these, It is a great dramatic and atmospheric piece with a great period look, nice sets, lots of fog and dramatic painted backgrounds and a great score. Vincent Price does his usual fantastic job and it is a good story. One of the better of these great collaborations!

And in a much lesser moment, we also watched Body of Evidence. I’ve seen it enough times and it is a mediocre enough movie that it seems that it barely warrants mentioning, but when it came out, 15 years ago, it seemed notable for a couple of reasons: Madonna prancing about nude all over the place and all of the scenes shot in Portland. Of course, the city gets jumbled up as always seems to happen with urban geography. In this silly movie, Madonna plays a lady who seeks out older wealthy men with weak hearts so that she can sleep them to the big sleep, by using her body (the evidence, get it?) to excite them past the point that their old hearts can handle. Willem Defoe is her attorney who isn’t quite sure about her, but she manages to bring him over to her side. I’m not too fond of either of them as actors and the movie is really just not good. Plus it also stars a number of other actors that I am unsure of (Joe Mantegna and Jurgen Prochnow?)… But it does have, in fairly small roles, both Frank Langella & Julianne Moore, neither of whom I can quibble with. I wouldn’t recommend it, though I used to like to watch it as a double feature with Boxing Helena, though that is much more bearable movie.

Though I’d actually been wanting to watch Live and Let Die, we don’t own that movie, so I settled with a different Bond in You Only Live Twice. As the title says, my Bond fandom has also had two lives. Back in 1980ish, the beloved Guild Theater would play the entire Bond series every January. What this means is that by my mid teens I’d seen all of the first 11 Bond films, in a theater, at least 6 times (except for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). In that youthful naivety I preferred Roger Moore over Sean Connery, but I still considered George Lazenby to be a travesty. Poor guy. Actually, I haven’t see most of the movies since then and I realize that I should give On Her Majesty’s Secret Service another chance, as it was the first movie that I ever walked out of midway through. But enough about that. When I watch a Bond movie, I just can’t help but think over my past with them, and how my thoughts have changed about the various movies since those glorious years when I would see each film once or twice every January. Sadly, it really was what I spent the year looking forward to… More so than summer vacation and Christmas. But back to the movie

In You Only Live Twice, things start of with the the capture of an American space capsule (while in space!) which leads to some accusations from the Americans against the Russians. When a Soviet space capsule is also captured, the cold war really heats up! Then James Bond dies in bed, but it turns out to a an elaborate hoax to help in his quest to solve this mystery before the Americans launch their next crew into space.

Even though the Americans are prepping their button fingers as they are intent that the Russians are behind this, the evidence leads to Japan so that is where Bond is. He teams up with the Japanese secret service (and its big batch of ninjas), goes undercover as a Japanese man himself and goes off against SPECTRE! While it is generally a good tale, as with most Bond films, You Only Live Twice is a mixed bag. It has some great things going for it, primarily Donald Pleasence as Blofeld (in the performance that really set the standard for SPECTRE, though his escape sequence is so odd and dumb that it’s hard to place in the context of a super villain) and his amazing volcano/base set, which must be one of the largest film sets ever built.

But of course, it has some things going against it. The series was starting to get a bit campy with self reference and oh my gosh, the makeup attempts! When they attempt to make Connery pass for a Japanese man, they basically give him a bad haircut and eye shadow! And one thing that has always bothered me is that they go to such lengths to keep him undercover: fake death and funeral and trying to pass him of as Japanese… But no one seems to notice, as the whole time people are making attempts against his life. Who are they? We don’t know. I would suspect SPECTRE, but then you would think that Blofeld would have a better idea of Bond’s whereabouts! Blofeld is a bit of a disappointment, between his great evil villain persona and his crazy plot to start a world war, he suffers from that standard SPECTRE failing of not just killing Bond when he has the chance.

Finally, though the disc itself is good, with a nice picture quality, the DVD titles are terrible. They are some “techie modern” look that doesn’t go with this old movie at all. It’s funny how back in the day they put to together such great opening titles for this movie… You’d think that maybe they could have used them as some kind of a base for the DVD menus, instead of the lame stuff that they did use.

While I’m not a particular fan of the phrase “guilty pleasure”, as I tend to like what I like enough to have no negative feelings about it, I would say that the closest liking I have that I would consider a guilty pleasure would be this movie, Stargate. It has all of that bad stuff: annoying corniness, romance, silly macho stuff, bad science and feel good scenes. And I couldn’t really have much interest in the starring cast: Kurt Russell, Jaye Davidson and James Spader (most of their characters are rather unnotable, anyway)… But there is a framework that I find worthwhile. As an old fan of Science Fiction movies, I find Stargate’s rendition of future science to be refreshingly different then that which is seen in most movies; the technology is generally represented as something totally different then what one expects to see in one of these movies. Stargate (which here is quite unnecessarily an “extended cut”) starts off with an unneeded scene that gives away probably more than they should bother with, but then we come to the present era. An archaeologist in the time of the great Egyptian pillaging of the 1920’s comes across a mysterious and fascinating set of cover stones while digging around in the desert. He’s with his daughter who pockets a neat gold medallion with the eye of Ra on it. We then jump forward to the present when his daughter has brought together some scientists under the aegis of the Air Force, and they are locked away in an underground bunker trying to decipher the full meanings of the stones… And what was found under them.

James Spader is a linguistic scientist who is down on his luck due to the excessive radicalness of his theories (he believes that the Egyptians did not build the pyramids) who is drafted to join the team as they seem to have stalled. Of course, his idiosyncratic brilliance leads him to uncover the missing piece of the puzzle, and as one has probably guessed, this enables them to activate the Stargate. Which is a gate to a planet orbiting a far away star. There they find out why someone had this gate created and we are treated to an interesting twist on world history.

Spader goes along with the team (led by Russell as a soldier with a deathwish), to see what’s on the other side of the gate. This is the hardest part of the movie, as the science of the Air Force is so implausible (I’m sorry, you can’t follow a beacon as it rapidly travels millions of light years or receive data transmissions across those distances, especially in real-time), and then if you forgive its implausibility, they easily could have solved the puzzle, knowing what they seem to know, without seeking more help. But once you get past that scene, the movie gets pretty fun. The whole historical revisionist angle to it is a lot of fun, and blended with the odd, rather timeless seeming, advanced technology that they encounter, makes it fairly easy to get to the suspension of disbelief that is so nice for these movies to inspire.

So yes, six and a half dozen, it is an intriguing Science Fiction film, with some clever and original technology, a interesting historical angle, nice specials effects and a fun story concept… But sometimes the combination of corniness, melodrama and dry seriousness is a bit distracting. The interactions that they have with this other world’s inhabitants can be pretty silly, including a hokey routine with a 5th Avenue bar and lots of miming.

I did finally got around to watching 300. It is a visually enticing movie of the Battle of Thermopylae, but not a historical drama, it instead is a movie adaptation of a graphic novel based on the battle. As such it is heavily cgi’d and sepia-toned for much of the film, following a similar production philosophy to the previous years Sin City, which was also an adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel, neither of which have I read. As a film, 300 is certainly the lesser of the two, though I was more intrigued by its previews. There is less to the characters and less to the story and, while it did look good, it was rather dull. The majority of the running time is fight scenes, but rather than being scenes of fighting they are more like slow-motion poses… Lots and lots of slow motion poses, with some well placed CGI’d blood and some very nice costume design. It also has less interesting characters and though it is based on some rather exciting historical events, the plot is flat and the modernization of the characters is a bit unnerving. Also, there is way too much narration that is maybe that’s a carry over from the graphic novel, but it seemed unnecessary here, and served to lessen ones chances of getting involved in the film. It ends up coming across as a rather cheap production that has been covered up with all sorts of digital lighting and image effects. Don’t get me wrong, they certainly put in some excitement and dramatic scenes and it is generally a good looking movie with very nice visual effects, including some rather gruesome. Though as with all things of this sort, I imagine that the computer effects would gain even more luster on the big screen.

The story of King Leonidas of Sparta taking his body guard out to halt the threatening advance of the limitlessly huge army of the Persians led by a very unusual rendition of King Xerxes. As there is an advantageous land bottleneck between Sparta and the Persians, the King and his 300 men march out to hold this narrow pass against wave after wave of Persian troops. As the Persians attempt to break through, they send group after group down the narrow path. Each different group has a unique look and strategy and large numbers and all of these battles are slow motion. The slow-motion battle scenes that seem to take up most of the movie can be exciting, coated with cgi blood sprays and severed limbs and all those sorts of goodies, but the other fight bits stand out mainly for their dramatic choreography.

While it is a good looking movie, with some nice exciting action scenes and some good visuals, there is little meat to the film. In addition to the fighting, there are also some few minutes of political conflict back in the city, but they seem a bit secondary. I imagine that as a comic book adaptation it may be both literal and entertaining, but as a movie, it’s a nice looking sheen and some slow motion action scenes set on a rather unnotable production. One that also includes a few bad rock video moments. On the plus side, the lead fellow (Gerald Butler, whose previous movie Beowulf and Grendel I would recommend) does a fine job, and there is some pretty cool costuming, especially the outfits of the Immortals.

Though I’ve always been hesitant about it due to it’s name, I watched Duck, You Sucker! A title, which while silly, is still better then the far too banal title that it was also released under, A Fistful of Dynamite. This is Leone’s movie immediately following Once Upon a Time in the West, which makes it a run of 5 straight classic westerns for him. Taking place in Mexico during the time of the Mexican Revolution the story starts off with the entertaining robbery of some rude richies riding about in the fanciest stagecoach I’ve ever seen. They are robbed by a family, literally, of bandits. After the robbery, the bandits set of towards some mysterious explosions in the distance and their futures take a dramatic change in direction. See, this bandit family is led by Juan, who has a dream of robbing the bank in Mesa Verde. When they get to those explosions, they encounter John, an IRA explosives guy on the run, who claims to be prospecting for silver. John has no interest in even acknowledging them, but Juan see the explosions, thinks of the bank and gets an idea. They team up, sort of, and it is the story of their travels as they go from somewhat reluctant and hostile partners together in pursuit of robbing a bank, to being close friends tightly in the midst of Revolution!

Rod Steiger is quite good as Juan, as he fills his role with great muster and enthusiasm (including a rather entertaining accent) which makes it convincing, despite the ethnicity issues. John is played with his usual fine charisma by James Coburn, though his Irish accent can’t help but lead to some frequent grimacing and eyebrow raising. Their relationship is the core of the film, with only a handful of other characters with any substance, and its a good one. There is some nice dialogue (though I could do without hearing anyone utter the title) and it is an impressive production. Though Duck, You Sucker! does have a lot of the serious feel of the his previous westerns, it is also a somewhat more comedic matter, not as bad as the level to which the Italian western was descending, but it is certainly a more melodramatic film than the earlier ones.

Even with its elevated emotive content, and at times it does get a bit artsy, with flashbacks galore (done in a soothing 1970’s French film style of foggy-lensed, slow motion emotion), it is still a serious film, with some serious subject matter. The revolution is shown clearly, with the mixed agendas of the revolutionaries, and the fascistic ways and stylings of the government. There are firing squads, evil military commanders and back-stabbing traitors all shown in a very serious manner. And, I must add, it has another one of those great Morricone soundtracks.