Shen jian dong shan he (1981)

... aka: 神劍動山河

... aka: Excalibur Moves Mountains and Rivers

... aka: Heaven Sword

... aka: Thrilling Bloody Sword

... aka: Thrilling Sword

Directed by:

Chang Shing-I (Hsin-Yi Chang)

You know what Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was missing? Laser fights, demonic creatures, blood, ghosts, living skeletons, fire-breathing dragons with nine heads, talking chickens encouraging mob violence, fart humor, decapitations, bisection, swords going up asses and weird biblical allusions. Thankfully, this warped Taiwanese children's fantasy is around to remedy those oversights.

At a royal palace, Queen I-mei (Fanny Fong Fang-Fang), is in the middle of delivering her first child when a flaming meteor flies down from the heavens, hits her in the stomach and forces her to push out a giant, bloody, pulsating cocoon, instantly killing her! The king, Gau-shien (Han Chin), then orders his men to put the infant in a basket and send it down river a la Baby Moses. The basket floats through the Happy Forest and right to the village of the seven dwarfs. They initially plot to eat the "flesh ball" but after stabbing it, it spits out smoke and opens to reveal a (human) baby girl. Thinking she has been sent from the heavens, they name her Yaur-gi. Seventeen years later, Yaur-gi (also Fanny Fong) has grown into a beautiful young woman. After almost falling off a cliff trying to grab a flower, she's rescued by handsome Prince Yur-juhn (Shang-Chien Liu) and it's love at first sight.

Meanwhile, a duck-lipped cyclops monster is going around slaughtering people, so the king calls for reinforcements. Female exorcist Gi-err (Elsa Yang) shows up and demonstrates her formidable powers by making an imperial minister's head do 360 degree spins and levitating a sword and impaling a warrior with it. She calls forth her friend, black magician Shiah-ker (Yi Chang), and the two are easily able to defeat the monster. Against the wishes of chief advisor Minister Gan (Shih Chin), the king then promotes the two exorcists to head up his security detail. What he doesn't realize is that his new friends actually sent the monster there to begin with just so they could kill it and then infiltrate the kingdom. The two are working in cahoots with a master demon called Ah-Du and their ultimate goal is to take over the king's empire.

Back at the dwarf village, the love-struck Yaur-gi becomes depressed because the prince, who's been busy slaying a nine-headed sea monster the evil infiltrators have conjured up, hasn't returned to see her. She saves a white bunny with an injured leg, which then transforms into a giggly white "fairy of the forest" (Ling-Ling Hsia) who then offers to grant her any wish she wants. Any guesses as to what she wishes for? In order to get close to the prince, Yaur-gi poses as a maid but her cover is quickly blown since she's a dead-ringer for her mother - the late queen - and is wearing a necklace left in the basket with her when she was sent upstream. She does manage to briefly talk with the prince, who agrees to come see her. Unfortunately, he comes in the form of a man-in-a-suit bear after the evil sorcerers cast a spell on him.

With help from the little fairy, Yaur-gi and her dwarf dads concoct a magical potion in a giant barrel and place the bear prince inside. The kicker is that he has to stay submerged for an entire week for it to work. But since this movie just loves to make stuff up as it goes along, the barrel is opened early when Shiah-ker shows up to kill him and the fairy then whips up an "elixir" to save him. Shiah-ker kidnaps the princess and takes her to hell, where she's possessed by a demon and then agrees to marry him instead of the prince. The only way to put a stop to the madness is by retrieving "the thunder sword," which is said to be hidden in an underwater cave, and a few other essentials needed to defeat the bad guys, which also requires beating a vast array of monsters.

Monsters, you say? Yes, this has them... and tons of them I might add. Aside from the aforementioned cyclops, multi-headed "siren" and demon master, there's a man in a pterodactyl suit, frog monsters played by men covered in black spandex with flippers on their hands and feet hopping around on their butts, four near-indestructible bronze muscleman statues come to life, each with a unique weapon and just one vulnerable point on their bodies (including up the ass!), a bloody corpse that can detach its arms and feet, a set of large flying dentures (!) and a giant genie with heavy eye makeup and a plastic butt (!) on its head.

Aside from all of the fx work (which is technically awful if we're to be honest with ourselves yet still fun) and the fact this is all just too weird to outright ignore, Sword also benefits a lot from nice bold colors and surprisingly good production design, sets, props, weaponry and costumes. But then we have the rest of the movie to contend with...

The story takes forever to really take shape and lurches along for the first hour or so until it finally settles into a hero's quest type of scenario. Some of the main characters are also extremely annoying, starting with the princess, who's a complete nitwit. She's always moping around, just stands there and refuses to ever help anybody, casually knocks over a protective statue that she's been told to stay away from countless times and has to be told repeatedly not to open the lid to the healing bath for the prince or else it will KILL him. I'm not sure why everyone's jumping at the bit to try to marry this chick. She'll probably end up getting whoever does killed! Hopefully no one ever gives her access to nuclear codes or allows her near a button that says "Only hit in case of emergency" in the future or we're all in trouble.

Even worse are the dwarfs. They're loud, klutzy, dumb and obnoxious, spit food into each other's mouths, fart in the talking chicken's face ("It smells bad!") and constantly smack, kick, push and punch each other accompanied by goofy Three Stooges-style sound effects. I doubt even small children would find their antics amusing. The music is all stolen from other sources. I noticed The Burning and Battlestar Galactica but there's other familiar music here that I've heard before but can't quite place.

Up until recently all that existed for this one was a cloudy full screen VHS print. That is until a 35mm print was finally located. It's been given a 2K restoration from its original camera negative for its Blu-ray release from Gold Ninja Video. There are lots of scratches and damage on this print, not necessarily a bad thing in my eyes (or perhaps yours either), but a lot of the visual effects that were added in post cause the background detail to blur. There's talk of a full restoration coming soon.

★★1/2

Kawaii Akuma (1982) (TV)

... aka: 可愛い悪魔

... aka: Cute Devil

... aka: Lovely Devils

Directed by:

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Made for Japan's Nippon TV / JOAX-DTV / Channel 4, this is widely described as a Japanese take on The Bad Seed, though writing it off as just that isn't quite capturing the full essence of the film and  those expecting another frenzied HAUSU from director Ôbayashi also need to keep their expectations in check. Things begin at a lavish, fairy tale-style wedding ceremony between young groom Koji (Hiroyuki Watanabe, who sadly committed suicide just last year) and his bride Kuyuko (Nao Asuka). After they're whisked off to the reception by a horse-drawn white carriage, Koji's cute little 5-year-old niece Alice becomes infatuated with Kuyuko's veil and repeatedly asks if she can have it. Fuyuko finally puts her foot down and explains that she plans on keeping it until the day she dies as a memento of the wedding. "Until you die?" returns Alice. Fuyuko shrugs and runs into the house to fix her makeup as the photographer is gathering everyone outside. Suddenly, the new bride comes flying out of an upstairs window and dies a twisted, bloody mass on the ground below. Approaching the body, Alice then turns to her mother and asks if she can have the veil now.

We then jump to Vienna, Austria at the "same day, same time," where Fuyuko's sister, Ryoko (Kumiko Akiyoshi), a music student and accomplished pianist, is in the middle of a heated lover's quarrel. As her boyfriends walks out of the door, she angrily whispers "Die!" Suddenly, there's the sound of a car crash. She looks out of the window to see that her ex, having been struck by the car, has indeed died. Blaming herself for the accident, Ryoko has a mental breakdown, starts beating her head against the wall, attempts suicide and has to be taken to a mental institution. It seems they've finally gotten through to her after three long years, at least to the extent where she can return to society.

Koji decides to take Ryoko back to his beautiful oceanfront mansion to work as a governess and tutor. Though he doesn't have a child of his own, Koji lives with his widowed sister, Keiko (Miyoko Akaza), and her daughter, Alice (Tina Jackson). You remember her? The little girl who got her veil? She's now slightly older (8) but, it turns out, hasn't changed much otherwise. In fact, her initial fear of Ryoko staying in the home stems from paranoia that she's there to take the veil back! Once she finds out she can keep it, Alice reverts back to cute little girl persona.

Ryoko's first night there, she's woken in the middle of the night when the veil is tossed over her. Keiko comes in, tells her not worry and that Alice likes to play jokes. The following morning, Alice denies playing the joke and Keiko denies either knowing about it or even coming into her room and having a conversation with her at all. Ryoko then starts seeing visions of her deceased sister, clad in her veil and wedding gown, lurking around the mansion grounds late at night. This casts a shadow of doubt about her actual recovery from her mental break. Or perhaps it could all be by design...

Keiko, an alcoholic who isn't the picture of sanity herself, may intentionally be stirring up trouble and has a variety of different possibly motives for doing so. She could be trying to make Ryoko lose her mind again. She could be trying to make her out to be an unreliable witness so the validity of everything she claims to hear or see in the future will always be in doubt. Or she could be trying to drive her out of the home for her own safety, to protect her against her sociopath daughter. Either way, she's been picking up on the fact that there's some mutual attraction between Ryoko and her brother and wastes no time running to tell Koji all about Ryoko's various incidents, suggesting he consult her former doctor immediately and send her somewhere else to convalesce.

Little Alice soon starts showing her true colors again in scenes that ARE quite obviously swiped from the 1953 classic this is often compared to. When she loses out on a doll prize during a singing competition, her teacher who awarded it to someone else mysteriously falls to her death from a bridge... after being bludgeoned in the head with a metal instrument... after Ryoko had already caught Alice up late at night hammering metal onto the bottom of her shoes. Alice later suggests the death was "divine retribution" for her not giving her the doll she so rightfully deserved.

This also has a Henry Daigle (groundskeeper from the original Seed) substitute in the form of a scumbag drug addict / sex predator / yo-yo aficionado who lives in a shack by the river and happens to witness Alice cleaning blood off her shoes after the teacher's death. Instead of going to the police, he attempts to use it as blackmail to get "favors" from both Ryoko (whom he first suspects is Alice's mother) and even little Alice herself ("I'll hand them over if you give me a kiss"). Ryoko attempts to leverage her position with the creep; sex in exchange for him getting Alice on tape admitting to her crimes, but he meets a fiery end instead thanks to some spilled gasoline and a firecracker. As all of this is going on, Ryoko tries in vain to convince Koji of Alice's true nature, but will he or anyone else believe a "precious" 8-year-old could be responsible for such ghastly crimes?

Seeing how I don't agreed with the general consensus that Hausu is a masterpiece, I'm not one bit surprised I also found many of the same exact strengths and weaknesses from a film made by the same guy just five years later. While this is nothing like the spastic, colorful pop art fx bonanza Hausu, it does share a similarity in that its greatest strengths lie in its visuals. The shots here are well-framed and frequently imaginative, the art direction is nice, there's decent use made of matte paintings for seaside landscapes, neatly-done flashback scenes with centralized color and sepia edges and some slightly surreal dream / hallucination sequences thrown in. That all helps to somewhat spruce up the middling script.

Where this didn't sit so well for me was how simple plot revelations are delivered to us with zero nuance. This is filled with so many comically unsubtle, soap opera-esque zoom shots and blaring music cues any time something peculiar is happening it almost reads as some kind of parody of old Gothic melodramas. At times I suspected that may have been an intentional angle the director was working, but that doesn't entirely appear to be the case. Instead of going for the over-the-top, theatrical histrionics that are a staple of classic Gothic films (and also the work turned in by Nancy Kelly and Eileen Heckart in the original Seed), he has the cast pitch their performances in a more mannered fashion.

The Ryoko and Keiko characters are saddled with various mental issues, neuroses and secrets, which work early on as a way to cast suspicion on multiple characters, but it's ultimately just a distraction that eventually gets cast aside for a basic final reel psychoanalysis of Alice, delivered to us in heavy-handed fashion. She suffers from something called "abnormal attachment" syndrome after losing her father to suicide and is now compulsively fixated on getting whatever she wants whenever she wants it. Killing is just a means to an end for her. Alice has similarly leeched onto her uncle as her new father figure and will lash out at anyone who threatens to come between them. Quite a complex psychological makeup for the little peanut, huh?

The level of exaggeration eventually becomes a bit of a turn off here too, especially considering the film spends 90% of its time trying to be plausible only to then do a 180 into bonkers territory right at the end. The finale features such silly moments as the young psycho tipping a large glass vase over some upstairs railing and having it fall directing and snugly on top of someone's head without shattering, suffocating them to death. Alice also rigs a bunch of booby traps around the house, like fastening a fountain pin to a mouse trap, which somehow rockets it across the room with such force it sticks into a wall 20 feet away. The tiny 8-year-old menace also flings a large scythe all the way across a lawn at our protagonist as if she's suddenly been granted superhuman strength. An ambiguous final scene is then trotted out that may (or may not) explain all of this.

Playing small roles here are Shin Kishida (best known for playing the vampire in both LAKE OF DRACULA and EVIL OF DRACULA) and Tôru Minegishi (also in the director's Visitor in the Eye and The Aimed School). To my knowledge, this has never been released here in America. The Japanese DVD from Dimention (not to be confused with Dimension) isn't English friendly, though fan-made English subs are available. It's worth a look for the stylish directorial touches and isolated moments of interest. Just don't expect to be blown away.

★★1/2