Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS - trailer

Danish title: ILSE, HUNULVEN FRA SS. The trailer is from a Danish ex-rental VHS.
Thanks to Diabolik for the FB upload.




Thanks to Kent for the Danish ad-mat (posted on Uncut.dk forum).

One armed executioners

How cool is this!! Our friend in Filipino fandom Andrew Leavold just came back from the Philippines where he spent time with about everyone who was ever working in Filipino films! I'm not jealous. Not at all. Not AT all (yeah right).



Photo copyright Andrew Leavold.

...and five years down the line I get the tape!

Gee! Five or six yrs ago I found the Indo war flick DAREDEVIL COMMANDOS on very old Danish VHS (carton case release from Westcon Home Video). Only, the tape inside the case was another release from the same label: The Korean war flick MISSION INFERNO! Fortunately, I managed to find another copy of DAREDEVIL COMMANDOS after a couple of years but still no case for MISSION INFERNO! Then skip to five years later (today) and I finally find another copy of MISSION INFERNO in an op-shop, this time WITH the original cardboard case and including the correct tape!!! Sometimes you NEED to be patient to be a collector!

Is it a good movie I hear you ask. Hell no. But it's RARE. Haha.
Check my old post about it here.

Best track ever on a Sunday

I wanted to check if Baby Woodrose's cover version of "Baby the World Ain't Round it's Square" (from their cover version album "Dropout!") might be on YouTube but instead I found this awesome version by the original band, The Savages. According to the Baby Woodrose booklet The Savages hailed from Bermuda. The uploader mentions that the (interesting) footage is from the Columbia university riots in '68 over the school's support of the Government's war in Vietnam.

Tiger Cage kicking Tiger Cage 2's ass

I received my new TIGER CAGE 1-3 DVDs from HK this week. They're brand new releases and have been mucho wanted for years by me and every other 1980s HK film fan on the block! A couple of weeks back I tried to watch my mainland China Zoke DVD of TIGER CAGE 2 but it kept freezing, stuttering and in the end it just gave up (or I did).

The Mandarin only audio was kinda annoying too. The audio was less than perfect, and also, due to mainland Chinese not being familiar with all the HK English expressions those are usually gone from Mandarin dubs (you know Hongkongese usually use a lot of English expressions in Cantonese, "Yes/no, madam/sir", "this is an order", "bye-bye", etc). And it kinda sounds unfamiliar not to have all those standard, English terms. To me it does anyway.

Anyway, so it was cool to finally be able to watch TIGER CAGE 2 all thru to the end. And since I'd already watched half of the Zoke DVD I started with #2 of the Fortune Star/Joy Sales DVDs. And that was a good thing too!! TIGER CAGE 2 is a great film, highly entertaining, violent, and funny. And it's got cute Rosamund Kwan in it too. But then I watched TIGER CAGE 1!!!

Before I watched #2 I thought it would probably become my favourite simply cos it has Cynthia Khan in it but, firstly, she's not in the movie very much, her part is nothing more than a meaty cameo, and secondly, I... watched #1 yesterday!! Whoah!! TIGER CAGE 2 is good but TIGER CAGE 1 is TWICE as good! Really!

TC2 is violent and it's full-on all the way but it's also light in tone thru out. The scenes of Donnie Yen and Romasund Kwan's characters trying to escape while handcuffed to each other are great fun. And the slapstick scenes of Rosamund spitting noodless in Donnie's face and Donnie-pissing-himself scenes are great fun but stuff like that is just absent from the first film. TIGER CAGE has a more serious tone and deeper character characterisations which the sequel just doesn't get near of.

When I watched TC1 I kept thinking "this is very good", and it really is! Very violent, gory, people die left and right (including characters who you think are gonna last to the end) and Simon Yam delivers (once again) a great performance as the bad guy. Arrrh, Simon Yam! "Look, I'm not gay but if I had to fuck a guy, I mean if I haaaad to fuck a guy, if my life depended on it... I'd fuck Simon Yam" [Clarence in TRUE ROMANCE, altho about Elvis]. I haven't watched part three and most reports are that it sucks but most reporters suck these days anyway so I'm gonna keep an open mind for that one too. It stars American Chinese actor Michael Wong.

I looked up the films in the Asian Trash Cinema book and good ol'e Thomas Weisser states these films are popular with chop socky fans (!!) but that "more demanding critics have complained over the simplistic story lines". Huh? Like, huh?? Did he even watch the films?? You never know what's gonna happen in the first film and the character and story development is far from being simple. Sure we're talking a violent crime/action film here but the alternative would be to not make a violent crime/action film. Weisser seemed to think films that had people fighting in them were automatically "chop socky". Well, they aren't.

To the best of my knowledge chop socky is a term used to describe old-skool kung fu films from the 60s and 70s. Not present day action films made in the 1980s! The fact that he states "Cynthia [Khan] was made for these kinds of roles" makes me think he really didn't watch TC2 or sat at the table and had his dinner while it was on cos this really isn't Cynthia Khan's film. At all!! She's in the movie for something like 6-7 minutes! The ATC book is cool as it includes most of the 80s films but plot descriptions and shit is just so off the mark that, well, it's off the mark.

About the DVD specs (as mentioned I haven't watched part 3 but I assume it's the same): The DVDs are kinda barebone releases but the remastered prints look great and that's what's important here! And one thing that has surprised everyone is they actually include the original Cantonese mono audio tracks as well as the bastard 5.1 mixes.

It would have been nice if TC2 had included the alternative end scene in the extras but I'm not surprised Fortune Star didn't. They're just not the people to bother with "nonsense" like that. We got two trailers on each disc (the original trailer and a new one made for this release) and some picture galleries. The subtitles are the old wonky ones but I can live with that, new ones would have been nice though. Someone who worked as a translator for Joy Sales said this on Asia Dvd Guide forum about Fortune Star's attitude: "Fortune Star actually laughed at the idea of a reworking on the English subs."


And lastly (and totally unrelated), check out this cool Tee!! I want one!! xD xD xD

Over My Dead Body (1983)

Thanks to a tip from Kenneth M. of Cinehound forum I'm now the happy owner of this cute baby! OVER MY DEAD BODY from the Philippines, 1983. It's ultra rare! And gee gosh golly it was mega cheap too! (well, "cheap" in the land of the serious ex-rental video collectors, LOL).



Credits from the seller's page:

IN ENGLISH WITH GREEK SUBTITLES

Director:
Arsenio Bautista

Cast
(Cast overview, first billed only)
Tony Ferrer
Bembol Roco
Efren Reyes Jr.
Raul Aragon (as Raoul Aragon)
Anna Marie Gutierrez
Lolita Marquez
Jing Abalos
Dave Brodett
Charlie Davao
Romy Diaz
Baldo Marro
Bomber Moran
Boy Padilla
Robert Talabis (as Bobby Talabis)
Vic Varrion

Country:
Philippines

Company:
Sunfilms International

Finally! The Ocean Shores VHS release of BRUTAL SORCERY is finally headed in the right direction!!!

BRUTAL SORCERY is one of the old dark and nasty Hong Kong horror movies that seemed to have a curse of its own! For the longest time I just COULD NOT get hold of that damn Ocean Shores tape!! Every time (which isn't very often as it's a quite rare VHS) it turned up on eBay some schmuck with more money would always beat me on the finishing line. But not this time, not last night, no sir'ee! xD xD xD

I'm rather skint at the moment but just out of principle I put 50 bucks on the tape as I knew with myself that I'd truly and utterly HATE my own guts if some schmendrick (who might not even know what the movie is) won it for 25 dollars or something - simply because nobody else placed a bid.

I "knew" that I wasn't gonna win it with 50 dollars but at least I could feel comfort in knowing I'd done what I could. I was so sure that I wasn't gonna win this most treasured Ocean Shores tape that I didn't even care to follow the auction. Well, lo and behold, I opened my email account today and the first email that I see says... "You won this item on eBay: BRUTAL SORCERY - rare Horror, Ocean Shores-demonic gore". Arrrgh! Auto winning bid: 43 dollars!!!

But needless to say there's always something else to worry about and I wasn't even sure the seller would accept my winning bid and he was in his full right not to do so. The auction was listed as: "Ships to: United States" so if the seller hadn't been happy with a winning bid of $43 he could have said "Sorry, buddy, you don't live in the US" and cancelled the auction. Fortunately he didn't and cheers to him for that. Whoever he is.

Ahh, BRUTAL SORCERY. Just try and say it slowly... BRRUUUTTTAAALLL SOOOORCEERYYY. Ahhh. And yes, it's the one where a possessed family man has a chicken and he... no, you really need to watch it. :D


PS: Unfortunately, there's never been a DVD release of the film. There's an un-subbed Ocean Shores VCD in Cantonese/Mandarin, and a Cantonese language VHS from Japan but that's about it I'm afraid. And both are just as rare as the OS tape. Click the label for the title if you'd like to check the covers for the two other releases.

Sort Sol documentary from 1984

Readers who are able to spell their way thru the lingo of the old Vikings and who're also into the old Danish band Sort Sol (aka Sods) might wanna check out my new review of the documentary film OMKRING EN SORT SOL - ET PORTRÆT AF SODS over in the Danish section.

The Danish SUAREZ connection

 My friend Hans-Jørn found this rare and VERY obscure trailer for Bobby A. Suarez' film HITMAN (aka American Commandos / Philippines, 1986) on a Danish ex-rental video tape! It's obscure not least because it plays out as a music video instead of an actual film trailer!! And an even more obscure twist is that HITMAN was partly backed by Danish financing as it was produced by Danish producer Just Betzer. Betzer is also credited as executive producer on Suarez' SEACHERS OF THE VOODOO MOUNTAINS (aka Warriors of the Apocalypse / Philippines, 1985). The music is composed by Danish composer Ole Høyer and the female singer is Danish/American Debbie Cameron who was "world famous" in Denmark thru out the 1980s. SEACHERS OF THE VOODOO MOUNTAINS on VHS from Denmark. It would have been fun to interview Just Betzer about his collaboration with Suarez but unfortunately he passed away a few years back. 

It's interesting to see that these films aren't even listed in his credits on the Danish Film Institute site. Danes who get famous for work overseas don't necessarily get any love for it on home-soil. The same goes for Anders Hove; Every little vampire movie fan in the US knows and loves him for his awesome vampire character Radu in the SUBSPECIES films. Nobody in Denmark gives a fuck about that and these films are usually not even mentioned when his films are listed on Danish film sites. Instead people talk about his work in TV Christmas calender shows for kids, etc. How very sad! 

And one more thing in regards to Just Benzer; Yesterday, I received DarkSky's new (very cool!) DVD release of Suarez ONE ARMED EXECUTIONER and CLEOPATRA WONG and in Andrew Leavold's interview with Bobby Suarez he talks about a Scandinavian film director who came over to visit him in the Philippines and who wanted to buy Bobby's camera (he didn't sell it tho). I wonder if that might have been Betzer? (VHS, Denmark) Thanks to Diabolik for uploading (and re-uploading) the trailer to YT for me! Cheers mate!! This is a re-post that was originally posted on WHEN THE VIETNAM WAR RAGED... IN THE PHILIPPINES blog in November, 2010.

NB: This post has been updated several times. 

Best ever MOON LEE dance scene on a Sunday night

PS: I have no idea if Moon Lee does her own singing here. I was about to say "probably not" but then again every film star in HK seems to have a singing career so why not Moon Lee. I mean Ricky Hui ("the human Droopy") has a singing career for Christ's sakes!! (Ricky Hui is the goofy and hapless helper in MR VAMPIRE and he's the guy in HAUNTED COP SHOP II who gets to utter the best line of all lines in all movies ever made from any country: "I'll always think of him when I urinate" [after a friend has been killed by electrocution]).