If you are a fan of A Chinese Ghost Story, or if you simply enjoy a solid supernatural film, there’s a lot to love in Enchanting Shadow. It’s the sort of elegant, artfully crafted sort of film you don’t see much of any more, with an attention to detail that wouldn’t be matched until Chu Yuan started directed wuxia movies for the same studio. Enchanting Shadow is one of the first significant films in the fledgling Hong Kong horror scene and would be worth seeing for historical importance alone. Luckily, it has a lot more to offer the viewer than a mere film history lesson. It’s a beautifully acted, beautifully crafted, genuinely creepy high point in the long tradition of good old fashioned ghost stories.

And GALLANTS (2010) does just that

In an industry that doesn’t really feature seniors as anything other than background characters or cheap comic relief (“Oh, look — they’re having Betty White curse again”), and seems to worship at the altar of youth, Gallants never allows it’s older cast to be presented as novelties. Yeah, for long time fans, seeing Bruce Leung, Chen Kuan-tai, Lo Meng, and Siu Yam-yam in action once more is a treat, but the movie would betray its own theme if it allowed itself to simply get by on nostalgia alone. The writing-directing team of Clement Cheng, Kwok Chi-kin, and Frankie Tam don’t have much experience between them, but they work hard to make Gallants heartfelt, honest, and witty, and something much more than a crass exercise in exploiting yesteryear. Like the cast, the crew puts everything into trying to make this movie good. And just like it does for the character sin the movie, that unwillingness to compromise, or to take the easy route, is what makes Gallants such a tremendously enjoyable movie.

LITTLE BIG SOLDIER
In 2009, Chan made Shinjuku Incident. It was not the Jackie Chan movie people expected. This movie saw a much grimmer Chan, something more along the lines of the glimpse we got in Ringo Lam’s Crime Story. Here was a Jackie Chan who was no longer trying to deny his age. Here was a Jackie Can who was trying to make a good movie, with a good script and good acting. After years of poopy diaper jokes and Jennifer Love Hewitt striking Karate Kid poses, Shinjuku Incident seemed to be saying that it was time to start paying attention to Jackie Chan again. And then, in 2010, came Little Big Soldier, and Jackie Chan fans, covered in cobwebs and the dust of the wasteland, knew that our time in the wilderness was finally at an end.

Watching…

KUNGFU CHEFS (2009)

If you are looking for a sign that Hong Kong is lifting itself out of the abyss it’s film industry collapsed into in the early days of the new millennium, Kung Fu Chefs is not the sign for which you are questing. It’s cheap, shoddy, sloppy, and generally idiotic. But it’s not lazy, it’s not mean-spirited, and it’s not lethargic. This isn’t the kind of movie that will turn someone into a Hong Kong movie fan, but if you’ve been one for a long time, and you remember the old days of renting VHS tapes from the local Chinese grocery store and sifting through all sorts of goofy junk while boiling your bag of frozen potstickers, then you might, like me, find a movie worth enjoying amid all this nonsense.

It quickly becomes clear that our visit to Curtain Guy’s office is for the purpose of a little pregame exposition, which is all pure 1960s spy movie boilerplate: A kidnapped scientist; a new kind of atomic device that could “destroy all human life” if it should fall into “the wrong hands”; a one week window to recover the device before those wrong hands that it’s fallen into start touching all over it; a clandestine atomic laboratory — perhaps located beneath the Mediterranean Sea — that needs to be located before it’s too late. The superior then outlines for the attendant anonymous functionary those attributes that the agent assigned to the job must possess: “Perfect understanding of Italian, French, and a complete understanding of nuclear science. And the man must also be an expert sailor.”

Even though the cast and crew are making a lark of a movie, Hasebe never lets it collapse under the weight of its own self-awareness. He understands that the best spoof of the campy spy film of the 1960s also has to be a very enjoyable spy film, and Black Tight Killers doesn’t forget to entertain. Kobayashi, as usual, throws himself into the role’s physical aspects with gusto, and he and the girls who make up the black tight squad get to have frequent fights with fists, feet, guns, bamboo bazookas, and of course more mundane weapons like killer albums and ninja chewing gum. The whole thing is light, frothy, and totally ridiculous. Black Tight Killers looks like some scamp replaced the crew’s cameras with kaleidoscopes

THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI

I’ve always felt that movies with certain titles have an obligation to live up to those titles. For instance, any movie with a title like The Werewolf and the Yeti needs to be a movie full of scenes where a werewolf fights a yeti. If the movie doesn’t live up to that title, then you’ve just ruined humanity’s chances of getting an awesome movie in which a werewolf fights a yeti. It’s just unfair to use up an awesome title/concept on a crappy movie. So when I first heard that a movie called The Werewolf and the Yeti existed, I was both excited and reticent. excited because — well, come on. Werewolf versus yeti. Reticent because I couldn’t help but think, “if this movie isn’t any good, then it ruins my chances of seeing the movie a title like The Werewolf and the Yeti deserves.” When, upon further investigation, I discovered that the movie was one of Spanish actor Jacinto Molina’s — aka Paul Naschy — many werewolf movies, I didn’t know whether to let my hopes rise or plummet. Somehow, I ended up letting them do both, and somehow, the movie fulfilled both those suspicions.

ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN

One of the oft cited complaints about this film is that The Abominable Snowman doesn’t get much of a look in during the film, and that is very true. Director, Val Guest has said that makeup and costumes at that time were not really up to the task of creating an effective and frightening looking monster. He therefore believed that ‘what was not seen’ was actually going to be more frightening than anything the special effects, wardrobe and makeup departments could create. Subsequently he chose to only show the snowman in small glimpses, allowing the monster to live in the ‘theatre of your mind’, rather than being unconvincingly paraded in front of your face.

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
Therein probably lies the reason that many of the older Bollywood films, that many would consider B-grade, are worth investigating. Here I am foolishly trying to apply conventional film analysis to a Bollywood film, and what’s it doing? It’s screwing right out from under me. It can’t be pigeonholed and broken down like some piece of pre-fabricated, production line entertainment. They aren’t made that way. Earlier, I compared Wanted: Dead or Alive to Leone’s westerns and the Trinity films, and while those influences are definitely in this film, it is still a very different beast to those cited films. Fistful of Dollars never had mirror balls and chorus lines of cowboys grooving away to a disco beat.