action

Quick Takes: Second-Hand Kung Fu

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There are currently 8,867 films on my Letterboxd watchlist, and roughly 8,000 of them will remain unwatched for all eternity.  Every time a movie looks interesting to me, I toss it into the bottomless watchpit, with no concrete plans to dig it up at any particular time.  Either it’ll tumble out of the Shuffle button at the exact right moment or it will rot there forever, and I think that’s beautiful.  What I’m much more dutiful about it is my physical media watchpile, which fits neatly into one humble box besides my television that I’m not “allowed” to let overfill before bringing home more discs.  Having a physical Blu-ray or DVD in my home is a guarantee that a movie will be watched—soon!—if not only because it then enables me to buy more Blu-rays & DVDs.  The watchbox has been getting a little tight lately, though, so it’s time to clear out a few lingering titles with some short-form reviews. 

I’ve been having especially good luck finding used martial-arts DVDs at local thrift stores this year, so that feels like as good of a category to start this KonMari process with as any.  Listed & reviewed below are four kung fu action flicks I purchased on used DVDs at two local Goodwill stores in 2024 (the one on Tulane Ave in MidCity and the new outlet “bins” location in New Orleans East, in case you’re on the hunt).  They all roughly follow the same story template in which a young fighter is violently wronged, trains for violent revenge, and then takes that revenge against his oppressors in violent spectacle.  Their individual emphases on the wronging, the training, and the avenging vary from film to film, though, as does their entertainment value as vintage martial-arts relics. 

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

By far, the best of this batch is the Shaw Brothers classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which mostly focuses on the training aspect of the kung-fu story template.  While most kung-fu revengers include a martial-arts training montage in which a young fighter is taught fighting skills & Buddhist philosophy in a temple of violence, The 36th Chamber expands that 2nd-act rebirth to stretch over the majority of its runtime.  Gordon Liu plays a young student whose schoolmates & teacher are slaughtered by a fascistic government who sees them as a rebellious threat.  He retreats to a Shaolin temple to learn how to fight back against those government brutes and is reluctantly trained by the monks who live there to be a world-class combatant.  Most of the film features Liu solving physically challenging puzzles while older monks nod in silent approval, and he grows frustrated to be learning discipline rather than vengeance.  His impatience eventually fades as he matures into becoming a deadly weapon of great wisdom, which is a gift he then vows to spread to the common man outside the temple so they can fight their oppressors in great numbers instead of as individual rebels.

I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin in its ideal format: a thrifted Dragon Dynasty-label DVD with a 10min RZA interview reminiscing about marathoning Golden Age martial-arts & porno schlock as a kid in late-70s NYC.  The film would be considered a classic of Hong Kong action cinema without RZA’s help, but his grindhouse cinephilia helped sew its name into the fabric of American culture, so that every time you hear the words “36th Chamber”, “Shaolin” or “Master Killer” (the film’s alternate American title), a Wu-Tang Clan beat automatically plays in your head.  It’s a little silly to include a 2min “Wu-Tang concert video” as an additional special feature, but there’s still some thematic overlap there in how the dozen people performing on stage at once have found strength in numbers that they wouldn’t wield as individual rappers.  In his interview, RZA attempts to contextualize why Hong Kong martial-arts films might have resonated so deeply with him as a young Black youth in America, citing “the underdog thing,” “the brotherhood thing,” and “the escapism” as resonant themes.  The truth is he more likely cited this classic so often in Wu-Tang lyrics simply because it looked & sounded cool.  Either way, he’s right.

The Iron Monkey (1977)

The title & thrills of the 1977 martial-arts revenger The Iron Monkey are so much more generic & forgettable than 36th Chamber‘s that it’s usually only brought up as a footnote to a much more popular 1993 film of the same name, to which it has no narrative relation.  Chen Kuan-tai directs and stars as a frivolous, drunken gambler with a rebel father who is—you guessed it—assassinated by a fascist government.  He cleans up his act at a Shaolin temple and trains for revenge, which he eventually gets hands-on against the General that killed his father at the movie’s climax.  Given the stark-white backdrop of its pop-art opening credits and its genre-dutiful training sequences you might suspect that it was a cheap knockoff of The 36th Chamber . . . until you realize that it was released an entire year earlier.

The Iron Monkey is a standard-issue kung-fu revenger with nothing especially noteworthy about it except that the violence occasionally goes way overboard, especially in the opening sequence where an actual monkey & eagle are forced to fight as symbols of the “Monkey Fist” vs. “Eagle Claw” combat choreography of its central hero & villain.  There’s also a scene where the bad guys show they mean business by choking a child to death, which makes for two pretty alarming choices on when to color outside the lines.  My used DVD copy was a digital scan of a dubbed & scratched film print, which feels indicative of its significance in the larger kung-fu landscape.  I couldn’t tell if the off-screen impact sounds of punches & kicks that are heard but not seen were added by an American distributor hoping to keep the audience’s pulse up or were included in the original mix as a cost-cutting ploy, but the choice was something I had never encountered in a movie before.  I’d rather indulge in that kind of novelty than watching a stressed-out monkey fight an eagle for my entertainment.

Return of the Tiger (1977)

Just because a martial arts film is cheap doesn’t mean it’s worthless.  I was much more enthused by the Brucesploitation novelty Return of Tiger, which starred “Bruce Li” as yet another wronged son avenging the murder of his father.  Supposedly a sequel to a film called Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (which starred Li as an entirely different character), Return of the Tiger skips the hero’s training montage to instead detail the training of his enemies.  Bruce Li and “special guest star” Angela Mao show up ready to do battle, but their Enemy No. 1 (Paul L. Smith, Altman’s Bluto) is continuously training a kung-fu army of underlings to protect his empire.  As a result, the film has incredibly athletic martial arts sequences, but most of them are confined to the relatively drab setting of an Olympic training gym — including Li’s intro in the music video style opening credits.  Mao’s intro is also literally gymnastic, in that she initially fights off the gang leader’s nameless goons while jumping on a trampoline and launching herself off a balance beam.  As her special credit suggests, she steals the show.

While Return of the Tiger follows a familiar wronging-training-avenging story template, it does distinguish itself from the other films on this list in its contemporary setting.  The main Bad Guy in the film is not some empirical warlord of the 18th Century; he’s a heroin dealer who runs a shipyard.  My English-dub DVD copy (“digitally mastered” by the fine folks at Reel Entertainment in Digital, which cannot be a real company) not only overdubs the dialogue but also replaces the soundtrack with incredibly baffling song choices, including a nightclub scene set to Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” while a lounge singer mouths lyrics to an entirely different song.  It’s a nice change of setting for the genre, and the fights staged there are accomplished in their precision & brutality. 

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

The first-act wronging of The One-Armed Swordsman is two-fold, which doubles the amount of training sequences the film gets to indulge in.  First, a young child watches his father get slaughtered (go figure), then is raised by a kung-fu master to become the formidable Hong Kong action hero Jimmy Wang.  Only, the fellow students at his temple are jealous of his skills and spiteful of having to be equals with the son of a (dead) servant, so in an overboard schoolyard bullying incident they cut off his sword-carrying arm.  Wang survives, improbably, and then trains again to re-learn how to fight with just one arm before local bandits get out of hand and harm untrained villagers who need protection.  Despite this doubling down on its training-for-revenge sequences, much of the runtime involves debates between our titular hero and his wife about whether he should relearn his fighting skills at all, since it’s a like he’s inviting violence into the family home — like how gun owners are statistically more likely to be killed by guns.  The title & premise make it sound like a gimmicky wuxia novelty, but in practice it’s a surprisingly classy drama set inside of a series of illustrated postcards . . . with some occasional swordfight gore.

What I mostly learned from this loose group of titles is that the Dragon Dynasty-label DVDs of classic Shaw Brother titles are a sign of quality & class, and they’re worth picking up any time you stumble across one at a Goodwill.  The best special feature included on this particular disc was a short career-retrospective documentary on its director, Chang Cheh, which added at least a dozen titles to my ever-expanding Letterboxd watchlist.  I’ll likely never get to them all unless they fall into my lap as used media, where tangibility means accountability and quality varies wildly.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Drive (1997)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, Britnee, James, and Hanna discuss the 1997 DTV actioner Drive, recommended by a listener for its “transcendently unhinged Brittany Murphy performance.”

00:00 Welcome
03:38 Drive (1997)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Righting Wrongs (1986)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

When I hear Cynthia Rothrock’s name, I immediately picture her hanging off scaffolding in what appears to be a mall’s parking garage, throwing punches & kicks at fellow martial artist Karen Sheperd, who attacks her with sharpened, weaponized jewelry.  I’ve seen that clip shared hundreds of times out of times out of context on social media, so it was amusing to learn that there isn’t really much additional context to speak of.  Sheperd’s assassin character is only in the movie Righting Wrongs for those few minutes, and Rothrock spends most of the runtime chasing & fighting the film’s hero, played by Yuen Biao.  The Vinegar Syndrome release of the film includes a 1990s Golden Harvest “documentary” that’s basically just a highlight reel of the action cinema studio’s best fights, titled The Best of the Martial Arts Films.  Seemingly half of the fights from that docu-advertisement are pulled from Righting Wrongs (billed as Above the Law), including the entirety of the Rothrock-Sheperd showdown.  That’s because every fight sequence in the movie rules, and they each stand on their own as individual art pieces outside their duty to the plot.  They’re so incredible, in fact, that you can know & respect the name “Cynthia Rothrock” just from seeing those clips in isolation, without having ever seen a full Cynthia Rothrock film.

Rothrock stars in Righting Wrongs as a kickass, righteous cop, and yet the movie ultimately makes it clear that it hates all cops — the perfect formula for an action film.  Yuen Biao headlines as a prosecutor who’s frustrated with his job’s inability to bring high-end criminals to justice, so he becomes a murderous vigilante.  Rothrock’s colonialist cop fights to stop him, essentially fighting against justice by doing her job as the white-lady enforcer of British rule over Hong Kong.  Everyone at the police station refers to her as “Madam,” which means that the title of her previous film Yes, Madam! is repeated constantly in-dialogue.  This one is just as great as that debut outing, both directed by Cory Yuen.  They have the same spectacular martial artistry and the same grim worldview – ending on a bleak, defeatist note where the corrupt Bad Guys higher up the food chain always win (as long as you watch the Hong Kong cuts of Righting Wrongs, anyway; the extended international versions shoehorn in an ending where the Good Guys improbably prevail).  The only difference, really, is whether you’re more in the mood to watch Rothrock fight alongside Yuen Biao or alongside Michelle Yeoh, to which there are no wrong answers, only right ones.

For all of its thematic preoccupations with The Justice System’s inability to enact true justice (or to protect children from being stabbed & exploded, which happens onscreen more than you might expect), Righting Wrongs is mostly an excuse to stage cool, elaborate fight sequences, almost as much so as the Best of the Martial Arts Films infomercial.  Yuen Biao puts in some incredible, death-defying stunts here, which should be no surprise to anyone familiar with his background as one of the Seven Little Fortunes, alongside his “brothers” Jackie Chan & Sammo Hung.  After winning a fistfight against a half-dozen speeding cars in a parking garage, he later hangs from a rope trailing from a small airplane.  It’s exhilarating but worrying.  He also risks severe injury in a scene where Rothrock attempts to handcuff him in arrest on an apartment balcony, so he moves the fight to the flimsy railing in evasion.  Rothrock also makes skillful use of those handcuffs in a scene where she arrests several gangsters in a mahjong parlor, pulling them from a leather garter under her skirt to cuff them all to a chair with a single pair.  Still, her highlight fight is the standalone showdown with Karen Sheperd, which has somewhat overshadowed the rest of the film’s legacy online. It’s one great fight among many, a spoil of riches you can only find in Golden Age Hong Kong action cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains (1994)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the sapphic wuxia action fantasy The Dragon Chronicles: The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains (1994), as suggested by ascalaphid’s Letterboxd list Wuxia Wizard Wars.

00:00 Wuxia Wizard Wars

03:14 Last Things (2024)
08:35 I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
16:55 Civil War (2024)
22:30 Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1982)
25:38 MaXXXine (2024)
32:30 Kingsman – The Secret Service (2014)
37:15 Psycho (1960)
45:28 The Front Room (2024)
51:43 Cure (1997)
57:00 Fresh Kill (1994)
1:03:18 The Substance (2024)

1:07:22 The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains (1994)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Vendetta (1986)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There are currently no fewer than four feature films that populate on Tubi when you search for the title “Vendetta“.  That’s including longer titles like Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy but excluding partial matches like Midnight Vendetta or Vendetta Road.  Honestly, I thought there’d be more.  Vendetta is such a vague, generic title for the exact kind of cheap-o action revenge flicks that pad out Tubi’s vast library that I would not have been surprised if the results tallied to at least a dozen.  Still, among the half-dozen or so Vendettas currently streaming on Tubi, it’s unlikely any are half as entertaining as the crown jewel of the collection, the one from 1986.  A sleazy women-in-prison revenge thriller about a stuntwoman scorned, 1986’s Vendetta mixes two familiar genres into one surprisingly novel, volatile concoction.  Just like there’s a long tradition of titling your generic revenge actioner Vendetta, there’s also a long tradition of highlighting behind-the-scenes stunt actors as real-life, authentic action heroes, from classic novelties like 1978’s Stunt Rock to this year’s big-screen adaptation of The Fall Guy.  Likewise, there’s also a long tradition of leering exploitation films that offer a risqué peak at the intimate sex & violence of women’s prisons, often with more salacious titles like Caged Heat, The Naked Cage, Sex Hell, and Sadomania.  As far as I can tell, though, Vendetta ’86 is the only film that’s thought to combine all of those genre tropes into a single 90min exploitation pic, and it deserves some respect for that efficiency.

Vendetta opens during a Fulci-style zombie stampede, inexplicably set in small-town 1980s America instead of 70s-sleaze Italy.  After running from a rabid hoard of Italo zombies, our hero is shown collapsed and burning alive on city pavement.  This, of course, turns out to be just another day on the job for the professional stuntwoman played by Karen Chase, who cheerfully pops up from this controlled burn shoot as soon as the fire-extinguishers cool her down.  She doesn’t even bother to change out of her charred jumpsuit before speeding off to the wrap party, waving along her younger, even bubblier sister.  Soon, it becomes apparent that the staged free-falls, car chases, and bare-knuckled brawls of the movie-within-the-movie aren’t nearly as dangerous as the small-town mentality of its shooting location.  After downing a few brewskies at the local bar (while a band of new-wave punks play square-dance country schtick in the background), the younger sister sneaks out with the cutest roughneck she can find and immediately finds trouble.  He sexually assaults her, she shoots him dead with his own pistol, and the local cops, judge, and jury unsurprisingly side with their hometown boy instead of the Hollywood outsider who killed him in self-defense.  Worse yet, the local-yokel bullying continues once the teenager lands in prison, quickly getting her killed after she refuses the hard drugs and sexual advances of the top dog of the prison yard (It’s Always Sunny‘s Sandy Martin).  It’s up to the stuntwoman, then, to seek true justice and avenge her sister’s murder, purposefully getting herself locked up so she can kill the women responsible one by one in a newfound, immoral use for her martial-arts skills.

Every plot point of Vendetta is pure exploitation, but it more often implies than it dwells on the grislier details.  The instigating roadside rape that lands our hero behind bars is shocking but not eroticized.  Admittedly, the prison-yard bullying that escalates that tragedy is eroticized, leaning into the lesbian leering of the wider women-in-prison genre.  Still, there are no actual sex scenes to speak of, just some casual nudity as women hang around the showers and locker rooms as spectators to the violence.  The contraband drug trade that fuels that violence gets pretty salacious too, with multiple scenes of forced heroin injection raising the dramatic stakes at every turn.  All of this sensational material is softened by sincere scenes of intense melodrama scored by Lifetime music cues, affording Vendetta an oddly tender touch for a VHS-era exploitation picture.  It’s also just as much an excuse for Karen Chase to road-test action stunts outside of a movie set as it is an excuse to position her in mildly salacious women’s prison scenarios.  It’s essentially the soft-rock Skinemax version of Stunt Rock, complete with a climactic stage performance from a drag king Prince impersonator in the prison cafeteria to match the wizardly stadium rock act of its predecessor.  It’s all very disjointed, but it’s also all very 80s, which you might expect from the only feature film directed by Bruce Logan, cinematographer for the original Tron.  It’s also all exactly what you’d expect from a revenge picture titled Vendetta streaming on Tubi, except with maybe three or four Vendetta movies’ worth of plot & novelty for the price* of one.

*free with ads

-Brandon Ledet

Showdown in Little Tokyo (1992)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Growing up, I only knew the bookends of Brandon Lee’s biography: birth and death.  Brandon Lee was born famous as the son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee and, shockingly, died at the height of that fame while filming his breakout role in the goth superhero classic The Crow.  There were obviously other highlights to his fame in the 28 years between those bookends, but I don’t remember them happening in real time.  I’ve since been getting to know Lee posthumously as he randomly appears on the covers of used DVDs at local thrift stores, starring in low-rent martial arts actioners with titles like Laser Mission, Rapid Fire, and Kung Fu: The Movie.  He’s not especially talented as a dramatic actor in any of those forgotten action cheapies, but he does share his father’s talents for sharp, convincing fight choreography and, not for nothing, his father’s handsomeness.  Maybe that’s why Lee was paired with a more charismatic actor for his leap from Hong Kong to Hollywood productions in 1992’s Showdown in Little Tokyo.  Just a couple short years before his major break in The Crow, Lee was cast as a sidekick to cartoon muscle freak Dolph Lundgren, who gets all of the best one-liners and over-the-top stunts while Lee plays straight man, cheering him on.  Like Laser Mission, I had never heard of this film before I found it at the thrift store, and it helped flesh out my understanding of Lee’s brief movie star career between birth & death.  Unlike Laser Mission, though, it was a memorably fun, goofy action flick regardless of its significance to Lee’s biography.

A sleazy Los Angeles buddy cop movie from the director of Commando, Showdown in Little Tokyo has great pedigree as a VHS-era action classic.  It also has one of the most racist premises in that canon, which is no small feat for an era obsessed with urban and immigrant crime.  Brandon Lee (a half-Chinese actor) plays a half-Japanese cop who was raised in California, disconnected from his cultural heritage.  Dolph Lundgren (a Swedish actor) plays an all-American cop who was raised in Japan, submerged in that heritage, so he serves as Lee’s tour guide on all of the finer points of Japanese culture as they take down the yakuza stronghold in Little Tokyo.  It’s a racist angle on mismatched multicultural partnership that’s not at all helped by the decision to avoid subtitling most of the Japanese dialogue, nor by the Orientalist notes of the soundtrack cues whenever they encounter the head of the yakuza (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, of Mortal Kombat fame).  And yet, even though the central white-cop-Asian-cop dynamic of Showdown in Little Tokyo is heinous in concept, it’s often adorable in practice.  Lundgren & Lee have an oddly romantic rapport, even partnering up after a meet-cute fight scene and spending some quality time at a local bathhouse.  In the movie’s most often-quoted scene, Lee compliments the size of Lundgren’s penis after spotting him disrobing for a soak in the hot tub, remarking “You have the biggest dick I’ve ever seen on a man,” to which Lundgren replies, “Thank you.”  The two end that exchange unsure how to say “I love you” in a macho way, so they opt for “Don’t get killed,” and “You too,” instead.  Since they can’t have sex with each other for 1980s reasons, they’re assigned to protect the life of Tia Carrere from the yakuza, whom Lundgren beds while Lee salivates, but it’s mostly a formality.

The homoeroticism of Showdown in Little Tokyo is apparent as soon as the opening credits, which are a dreamlike montage of biceps, swords, guns, abs, and tattoo ink shot with the erotic tenderness of a Red Shoe Diaries episode.  The women of the film get little to do beyond being rescued and stripping topless – sometimes as erotic dancers, sometimes as erotic sumo wrestlers, sometimes as live sushi platters, always as objects. Otherwise, it’s a film entirely about men and the male form.  Having defined the pinnacle of the genre with Commando, director Mark Lester has an eye for the shameless beefcake ultraviolence and an ear for the groany, juvenile one-liners that make for a memorable action classic.  Lundgren doesn’t have Schwarzenegger’s comedic chops, but he still fires off line-deliveries of phrases like “This is illegal, and it pisses me off,” and “If I don’t have breakfast, I get grumpy.  I don’t think you’ll like me grumpy” with enough deadpan bravado for those moments to land.  More importantly, he looks like a cartoon superhero in the flesh, especially with the exaggerated shoulder pads of his Japanese-themed leather jacket extending his frame.  Lee doesn’t come anywhere close to touching Lundgren’s action-star charisma here, but the movie also isn’t all that interested in giving him a chance to do so.  He’s just there to pump up Lundgren’s ego, compliment the gargantuan size of his dick, and give credibility to the phrase “reverse racism.”  Thankfully, Lester often distracts from that uneasy dynamic with enough explosions, swordfights, and beheadings to get away with the worst cross-cultural impulses of the script.  He has complained about the studio removing 10 minutes of footage from the final cut without his permission, but what’s left is one of the leanest, funniest, gayest action novelties of its era (and, by default, of Lee’s entire career).

-Brandon Ledet

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Gen-Z nostalgia for the early aughts aesthetic has been a tough adjustment for me, a Millennial nerd who suffered through that era in real time.  I do not think back to frosted tips, muddy JNCO strips, or Paris Hilton DJ sets with any lingering fondness.  If anything, I see that time as the nadir of modern pop culture.  I recognize that this is the same personal bias that my parent’s generation felt when Millennials aestheticized the 1980s during my college years.  Where I saw new wave neon punks & synths, they flashed back to cheap beer and overly teased, fried hair.  Likewise, there’s a novelty to hearing Limp Bizkit & Linkin Park for the first time in the 2020s that I can’t share as someone who vividly remembers my own cringey years as a nü metal dipshit when those groups first premiered on Alt Rock Radio™.  So, no, I cannot share in any cultural reclamation for the early-aughts movie adaptation of the Charlie’s Angels TV show, in which music video director McG amplifies all of the cheese & sleaze of the era to maximum volume.  Opening with a KoЯn guitar riff, a casually racist gag in which Drew Barrymore goes undercover as Black man in LL Cool J’s skin, and nonstop thinspo ogling of uniformly skinny women’s exposed midriffs, Charlie’s Angels wastes no time with its vicious onslaught of eraly-2000s kitsch.  It’s cinema’s most efficient, thorough crash course in the grotesque cheapness of the early aughts, celebrating everything I loathe about the era and my own participation in it with alarming gusto. 

Its sequel, however, is innocent.  If you do find yourself wanting to indulge in some delicious 2000s kitsch without making yourself sick on day-old fast food, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is the much healthier option.  You don’t even have to bother rewatching the 2000 original, since the sequel reintroduces its central trio of undercover lady spies with newly sharpened personalities for a fresh start.  Drew Barrymore plays a tough-but-girly tomboy, Lucy Liu plays an overachieving perfectionist, and Cameron Diaz plays a goofball ditz with a heart of gold.  They’re all best friends and frequently save the world while dating cute guys; it’s pretty easy to follow without any additional background info.  It also repeats a lot of the more successful gags (along with some of the more racist ones) from the first movie but does a much better job connecting them in the edit instead of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – not much, in the original’s case.  The only way Full Throttle is inferior, really, is that it’s significantly less gross than the first Charlie’s Angels film, making it less accurate as a time capsule of pop culture’s darkest days in the early 2000s. It makes up for it by continuing to pummel the audience with nonstop needle drops & cameos, though.  P!nk, Eve, The Olsen Twins, and members of OutKast, Jackass, and The Pussycat Dolls all appear onscreen while Kid Rock, Nickelback, and Rage Against the Machine rage on the soundtrack.  You never lose track of the movie’s place in time.

Regardless of Full Throttle‘s relationship with the first Charlie’s Angels film or with early-aughts culture at large, it’s a consistently entertaining, maximalist novelty.  Full Throttle is, at heart, a charmingly goofy action movie that makes great use of McG’s candy-coated music video aesthetic, disregarding the guiding laws of physics & good taste to deliver the most joyously over-the-top pleasures it can in every frame.  The girls now have the superhuman power of flight, Crispin Glover frequently disrupts scenes as a feral goblin assassin with no effect on the plot (wielding a sword and only communicating in yelps), and every set piece is an excuse for kitschy costume & production design stunts, often set against a full backdrop of CG flames.  The Angels are costumed as nuns, shipyard welders, strippers, hotdog vendors, and car wash babes during their world-saving adventures as they fight off a bikini-clad Demi Moore and an oiled-up Justin Theroux sporting an Astro Boy fauxhawk.  Whereas the first film was entirely about the fashionista posturing of those outfit changes, McG wastes no time getting to the action this go-round.  Within 10 seconds of entering the frame, Diaz hops onto a mechanical bull to distract a bar full of Mongolian brutes while her teammates rescue a political prisoner, eventually erupting the room into a free-for-all brawl.  Soon, they’re flying through the air in and out of exploding helicopters, and staging wuxia-style gunfights on flying motorcycles.  It took the Fast & Furious franchise seven films to get to the delirious CG action nonsense this series achieved in two.

Full Throttle might be McG’s best movie, but its only strong competition is the straight-to-Netflix 80s-nostalgia horror The Babysitter, so that’s a weak superlative.  What’s more important is how much of an improvement it is over his first crack at this franchise, to the point where he’s somewhat rehabilitated my disgust with the early-aughts pop culture that’s currently making a comeback.  You can even feel that positive shift in which respective Prodigy song the two films choose as their central motif: “Smack My Bitch Up” for the first Charlie’s Angels, betraying its underling baseline cultural misogyny, and “Firestarter” for Full Throttle, punctuating its ludicrously explosive action payoffs.  It’s even apparent in the two films’ appreciation for the Tom Green brand of shock comedy that was rampant in that era.  In the first film, Green appears onscreen himself as an empty symbol, relatively restrained in an extended cameo role that references his real-life tabloid romance with Barrymore.  By contrast, Full Throttle is not afraid to get its hands dirty, prompting Diaz to participate in the live, gooey birth of a baby cow in a sight gag that would’ve been perfectly suited for Green’s magnum opus Freddy Got Fingered.  Having just fallen in love with her sadistically prankish romcom The Sweetest Thing, I’m starting to develop a genuine fondness for Diaz’s gross-out goofball humor in that era, which I suppose means I’m warming up to the idea of appreciating early 2000s culture at large.  I’m just not quite ready to hear KoЯn score a fight scene yet without a little winking irony to soften the blow.  Those Issues Tour memories are still a little too fresh.

-Brandon Ledet

Angrier Young Men

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I had two conflicting thoughts about Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan’s role in the recent sci-fi blockbuster Kalki 2898 AD.  My first thought was that it was interesting to see an actor known for embodying the “Angry Young Man” archetype in 1970s Bollywood productions play a wizened, centuries-old warrior opposite a rebellious young man played by Tollywood star Prabhas, like a ceremonial passing of the torch.  My second thought was that I have no idea what I’m talking about.  I am aware enough of the Angry Young Man trope that Bachchan’s name rattles around in my head while watching his echoes in films as old as the 1982 Saturday Night Fever riff Disco Dancer and as recent as Dev Patel’s 2024 John Wick riff Monkey Man.  And yet, it is very likely that Kalki 2898 was the first time I had ever actually seen Bachchan act onscreen.  A lot of this is a circumstance of access.  I enjoy the ritual of driving out to Elmwood on the weekends to watch 3-hour Indian action films, but those are all new-release titles.  I’m missing a century’s worth of cinematic context when I watch these modern mutations of the masala genre.  It was fun to see Shah Rukh Khan play two dueling roles in last year’s over-the-top actioner Jawan, for instance, but there are several other examples of him indulging in that one-man special effect from past decades that I’ve entirely missed.  Likewise, any glimpse I’ll get of Bachchan this way will be as an older, gentler man than the roles that made him famous.

Thankfully, I did happen to find a quintessential Angry Young Man title from Bachchan’s back catalog on a used DVD at a local Goodwill.  1975’s Deewaar was an early star-making vehicle for Bachchan, the same year he made Sholay.  He plays a petty criminal who spends his entire life sinning & hustling so that his younger, gentler brother can be properly educated and afford the opportunities he missed.  This dynamic eventually sours when the younger brother (Shashi Kapoor) grows up to become a squeaky-clean cop, assigned by higher-ups to take Bachchan down.  The two boys play tug-of-war with their mother’s affections – the cop living a noble life and the criminal bringing shame on the family, just like their absent father.  The sly moral trick that Deewaar plays is in praising the cop while glorifying the criminal. Sure, Kapoor gets equal screentime against Bachchan, and all of the film’s songs are cutesy romantic trysts hyping him up as a handsome leading man.  It’s Bachchan’s brooding anger as a scrappy fighter who has to work outside the system to thrive that really sells the film’s commercial appeal, though.  He smokes.  He drinks.  He has premarital sex.  He enters his first big fight scene reclined in chair, feet kicked up, and ripping cigs while a gang of nameless goons are foolishly looking for him, about to get all their asses kicked by a single opponent.  Simply put, he’s cool – a true hero of the people.

Because I don’t often have enough context to understand the bigger picture of Indian action cinema as a standalone industry, I’m often left to compare these movies against their closest Hollywood equivalents.  To my uneducated eyes, Kalki 2898 is Prabhas’s Dune; Saaho is Prabhas’s Fast & Furious; Radhe Shyam is Prabhas’s Titanic; etc.  My best understanding of Deewaar, then, was as the Indian equivalent of Blacksploitation pictures of the 1970s.  Bachchan’s stylish, furious rebellion on the impoverished streets of Mumbai recalled American independent pictures of the time like Coffy, SuperFly, and The Mack.  They appear to take inspiration from the same martial arts schlock, if nothing else, and their populist revenge against corrupt elites affords them similar political messaging.  In that context, Bachchan’s anger against an unjust world is totally justified, even if Deewaar still feels the need to wag a finger at the immorality of his crimes.  When Dev Patel can barely suppress his anger with the corrupt policemen who slaughtered his mother and burned his village to the ground long enough to exact his revenge in Monkey Man, he’s brooding in Bachchan’s shadow.  That anger is doubled in S.S. Rajamouli’s recent international hit RRR, in which the unlikely pair of Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr. lock biceps to exact revenge on British colonizers, both players struggling to not blow their cover in separate, intertwined Angry Young Men plots.  In Gully Boy, Ranveer Singh raps his way through it.  When I first saw it in theaters, all I could think about was Eminem’s hero arc in 8 Mile; now I’m imagining what it would be like if Bachchan had to battle-rap his way to glory instead of solving problems with his fists.

One interesting variation on the Angry Young Man is in the recent single-location actioner Kill, in which one lone hero fights off an army of murderous thieves on a moving commuter train.  A generic mashup of Snowpiercer & The Raid, Kill‘s entertainment value relies more on the relentless brutality of its violence than on the complexity of its themes.  Since Bachchan was already on my mind, though, I couldn’t help but think about how its Indian army commando hero (Lakshya) both falls in line with and defies the basic tropes of the Angry Young Man archetype.  On the one hand, you would think that because he’s an army brute who beats up petty criminals the entire runtime, he’d be too entrenched in the ruling-class establishment to qualify as a proper Angry Young Man anti-hero.  If anything, the most vicious of the villainous thieves (Raghav Juyal) would’ve filled that role in a better-rounded narrative where he wasn’t such a sadistic psychopath.  And yet, because Lakshya is fighting specifically to protect and avenge a fiancée whose wealthy father wouldn’t allow him to marry because he isn’t of the right caste, I’d say that he at least partially qualifies.  He’s a character defined entirely by his anger, lashing out at the thieves who’ve taken the train hostage with a ferocity that goes from heroic to monstrous as the violence escalates.  At one point, Juyal remarks in wonder that “the commando’s love has dropped on us like a bomb.”  It’s like watching Bachchan’s big one-on-many warehouse fight from Deewaar stretched out to a continuous 100-min action sequence, just with less coherent political messaging behind its thousands of bare-knuckle punches.

Frankly, I also saw a lot of the cheapness of Deewaar reflected in the independent production values of Kill.  By now, Bachchan is internationally famous and starring in the most expensive Indian film productions of all time, like Kalki 2898.  In the 70s, he was still scrappy and hungry, which might mean that the furious brutality of Lakshya’s performance in Kill will lead to bigger roles down the line.  In the meantime, I’ll be busying myself trying to pick up the scraps of Bachchan’s back catalog that I can access at home.  The only reason I got to see Deewaar with English subtitles is because I happened to pick it up at a West Bank thrift store that has since closed down.  Luckily, the more widely remembered Sholay is currently available to stream on Tubi, free with ads.  Not having actually seen an early Bachchan film before now has never stopped me from referencing his Angry Young Man persona in the past, though.  His impact on the go-to narrative tropes of Indian action cinema are evident to even the greenest newcomers.

-Brandon Ledet

Kalki 2898 AD (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Sometimes, a movie can be so aggressively derivative that it crosses a threshold into becoming thrillingly unique.  Recently, Vera Drew’s copyright-skirting The People’s Joker melted eight decades of Batman comics & movies into a shockingly personal, vulnerable self-portrait.  One of this year’s buzziest horror films, In a Violent Nature, is a novelty slasher that simulates the sensation of watching a Friday the 13th sequel on an overdose of cough syrup.  Further back, vintage Hong Kong action schlock like The Seventh Curse and The Dragon Lives Again “borrowed” familiar icons from better-funded American productions for their own absurd purposes, theorizing what it might be like if Indiana Jones had to fight off Xenomorphs or if “Bruce Lee” teamed up with “Popeye” to beat up “Dracula” in Hell.  Lucio Fulci might not have been doing his most personal, innovative work when making an unsanctioned sequel to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but without Italian producers’ complete disregard for American copyright, we never would have gotten the underwater zombie-on-shark fight scene of Zombi 2.  Genuinely transcendent, imaginative art can result from filmmakers being shamelessly derivative, as long as they fully embrace the practice and push it to its extreme.  Just call it “post-modern” and all is forgiven.

That’s why I was pleased to discover that the big-budget South Indian sci-fi film Kalki 2828 AD is even more derivative than I initially expected.  All of the promotional materials for the film led me to believe it was a mockbuster version of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, distinguished only from a Syfy Channel knockoff of that series by the fact that it boasts the biggest budget of any Indian production to date.  It turns out that Kalki 2898 is less of an overly expensive Dune bootleg than it is a more general sampler of any & every big-budget sci-fi property you can name: Dune, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Fury Road, Guardians of the Galaxy, everything. As a result, the movie it ended up reminding me most of was The Fifth Element: a mostly goofy genre derivative with a few genuinely transcendent moments all of its own making.  By the time a flashback reveals that its wisecracking anti-hero was trained by his mentor using laser-swords, it’s clear that the movie is uninterested in hiding its artistic debts to pre-existing material.  When it climaxes with a giant wizard figure doing Gandalf’s “You shall not pass!” routine during a bridge-fight with said anti-hero in a Transformers-styled mech suit, it’s also clear that those obvious debts do not matter.  Kalki 2898 may be derivative, but it’s also deliriously, deliciously entertaining.

Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan stars as the Gandalf-like wizard of that bridge fight: a wizened but weary warrior who has been cursed with immortality for a past sin but eventually uses his extended centuries on earth for good.  Tollywood action star Prabhas (of Baahubali fame) pilots the smart-car mech suit in that fight as a Han Solo type: a mercenary bad-boy who only does good when it fits his selfish needs.  They’re fighting over possession of a pregnant damsel in distress (Deepika Padukone, of last year’s Pathaan), who’s believed to be carrying a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.  There’s, of course, a prophecy going around that her child could be The One: a warrior savior who will bring light to a desert hell planet that has been suffering in greed & darkness.  Throw in a fascistic Empire who exploits the labor of the many to pamper the lives of the privileged few, and you’ve got the basic building blocks of a standard Dune or Star Wars knockoff, except maybe one with a concerning amount of attention paid to the Empire’s search for “fertile females.”  Kalki 2898 constantly refers to major events of Hindu mythology in flashbacks that can be disorienting for uninformed Western viewers, but so much of its story is borrowed from a universal source of worship (corporate pop-culture IP) that the knowledge gap doesn’t matter all too much.

If there’s any way that Kalki 2898 closely adheres to its Dune inspiration in particular, it’s that it abruptly ends after three hours with only half a story told.  One of the final images is a title card promising that the adventure will continue in the “Kalki Cinematic Universe,” and it’s been a while since I was excited instead of annoyed by that serialized approach to cinematic storytelling.  That’s not the only hack move it pulls that would’ve annoyed me in most American blockbusters either.  It includes many for-their-own sake cameos that wink to an insider audience (including one for Baahubali director S.S. Rajamouli); it follows up its “until next time . . .” title card with a mid-credits post-script that promises an evolution for the big bad villain.  Worse, early flashbacks include horrendous de-aging CGI effects for Bachchan that betray the fact that the film was rushed to market before it was fully completed, with production having wrapped only a month before release.  None of those usual red flags bothered me here, though, no more than I was bothered by watching it play around with the pre-fabricated action figures of more famous sci-fi properties.  Kalki 2898 AD is playful & extreme enough in its scene-to-scene action that any questions of artistic integrity or originality feel beside the point.

-Brandon Ledet

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

The evening after seeing Furiosa, I was visiting with a friend who had attended a different screening, and although they admitted that they had “been fighting for their life” after taking an edible, they spouted off a piece of criticism that I was stunned to hear: “I just wish there had been more action and less dialogue.” I couldn’t believe it; I’ve been teasing them about it for weeks now. I can’t conceive of how this movie could have tweaked the mayhem/monologue ratio of what was happening on screen in that direction even the tiniest bit. People have slept on this one, and the long time between the last installment and this one means that I can hardly blame them, but Furiosa is every bit as good as Fury Road, in that they’re both instant classics. 

The film opens on child Furiosa, living in a green oasis somewhere in Australia (and trust me, we start in orbit here and dive down to the continent because George Miller wants you to know for sure that we are in Australia). She and another little girl are picking peaches when they come upon a group of scavengers feasting on a horse, with the intention of bringing the head back to their leader as proof of their discovery; Furiosa attempts to sabotage their motorcycles but is captured. Her mother pursues her captors and the two of them manage to pick off most of the bikers, with the last survivor making it back to the scavenger encampment with Furiosa, managing only to tell that he found a green place but not where before Furiosa fatally wounds him. When Furiosa’s mother is tortured to death by the leader of the camp, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), she stops speaking and becomes Dementus’s prisoner/replacement child, and she learns a great deal about the world that was through the teachings of Dementus’s “History Man” (George Shevtsov), who also serves as this film’s narrator. Through various changes of circumstance and squabbles among the disparate groups of scavengers, young Furiosa ends up taken by Immortan Joe, the main villain of Fury Road, to be one of his broodmares; she escapes from this by weaponizing the attention that she receives from Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), cleverly giving him the slip when he tries to “have” her for himself. She slips out into the Citadel and disappears … for now. The rest of the film picks up years later, with Anya Taylor-Joy now in the lead role, but I don’t want to give away any more than I already have. 

I came to Fury Road a bit late, having only seen it for the first time within the past couple of years. There’s a whole Sliding Doors other world where I saw it on early release. Nine years ago, a friend and I were going to meet up to go see Jurassic World, but because we got confused about which theater was which, we ended up getting there too late. This was back when the theater chain in question, Alamo Drafthouse, wasn’t owned by Sony and hadn’t already started to go downhill because it was starting to spread itself too thin too quickly, so although it was their (good) policy to not allow us into the movie after it had started, they gave us a raincheck for another movie in the future and offered us an open in spot in either of the next two films that were starting, both in ten minutes: Mad Max: Fury Road or … Terminator Genisys. We chose Genisys, of course, because obviously the new Terminator was going to be so much better than a different decades-too-late addition to a genre defining sci-fi franchise. Right? Obviously, no one remembers Genisys fondly (except for me, and I’ll come right out and say right now that my appreciation was 90% hormonal and not really related to the text as an artistic endeavor), but Fury Road has been touted as one of the greatest movies ever made since it first hit the big screen. Even as a latecomer to the phenom, I was completely captivated by it — its audacity, its scope, its vision. It’s a work of genius, and the only problem with that is that this film, which rivals it in many ways and even occasionally surpasses it in others, is being measured against it and found wanting. And I just don’t get it! 

There does seem to have been a cult of personality that has been built up around Fury Road that has pushed past the limits of what the film is into making up legends about it. That is, there are people online who seem to think that every effect is practical and that there’s no CGI in the film. For one thing, Huh? and for another, Whuh? See, my friend that I went to see this with had never seen Fury Road, and when her mom came to town and wanted to see this one (because of her general affection for Anya Taylor-Joy as a performer rather than out of any interest in Furiosa in character or concept), she was hesitant. She decided to give it a shot based on the fact that this was a prequel and thus she wouldn’t be missing anything; she enjoyed it a lot, and we started watching Fury Road the following day, and the difference in these two movies and what is demonstrably computer generated … there’s no light between them. Fury Road starts with Max eating a two-headed lizard that’s just as cartoony as the mammal that we see in the desert in Furiosa. You have to be a fool to believe that there’s no CGI in Fury Road, and the same things that look fake in one look fake in the other. 

That’s fine, actually! There are all sorts of fun new desert weirdos, methods of “road war,” and plans within plans in this one. Since it’s the past, we get to see one of Joe’s other sons that’s dead by the time of Road in the form of the hilariously named Scrotus (Josh Helman), who’s even more unstable than Erectus. The real standout here, though, is Hemsworth’s Dementus, who almost steals the show. Furiosa, by her nature, is a quiet, nearly silent character who deflects attention, while Dementus is a gloryhound with the temperament of a child, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. The guy gets around in a chariot drawn by three motorcycles; that’s just cool, man, I don’t know what to tell you. Even his entourage is fun, with one of his allies in the first of the film’s chapters is “The Octoboss,” a gothy gang leader whose presence is established throughout the film by the sudden appearance of a giant, tentacled, Lovecraftian kite, which wasn’t even my favorite new thing in the sky in this one (that would be the paratroopers and kite-sailors, which are super awesome but get taken down so swiftly and easily that you understand why they don’t appear after this). I know it seems like I’m going from topic to topic really quickly here, but that’s the pace at which this film is moving, so take it all in. 

Furiosa doesn’t seem to have done very well financially, which means it may already be too late to see it in your market as you read this. That’s a shame. It’s not lost on me that, nine years ago, what was most readily available for me to access via the theater was all IP franchise material: Terminator, Jurassic World, and Fury Road. I made the wrong choice that day back in 2015, but you could just as easily make that mistake at the movies this year, as right now my closest multiplex is screening Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, and … Fury Road. If you still can see this one on the big screen, you should take advantage of that opportunity. This is going to be a long, hot, franchise driven summer, and if there’s something that’s worth spending money for a ticket and popcorn for, it’s Furiosa. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond