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יום רביעי, 6 באפריל 2011

Desert of Blood - Seductive vampire femme fatal




Desert of Blood is a half-baked muddled film about a moody conflicted vampire hanging out in Mexico, alternately chomping and lusting after American co-eds. It's a bland mish-mash that ruins what few interesting ideas it has...
Like this hot blond vamp girl. She's into seducing poor morons in bars and snacking on them




And given the vamp protagonists ambivalence towards actually snacking on people, she may have served as a proper unambiguous threat... 


Except she's dealt with via a series of slapstick pokes and badly edited cutaways from the action before the film is halfway done, completely removing any interest I may have had in the action.

The fight scenes are also choreographed in that insufferably bad (yet convenient for bad directors) style where only one character acts at one time, while the rest just stand around and look at the action until their "turn" to act comes along. Bah


It's not the worst of vamp flicks, and you could spend an hour and half goggling at the pretty people... if you don't bother to think about how good the movie could have been had it been halfway coherent. 

יום שישי, 18 במרץ 2011

Tekken (2010) - fighting sistas Nina and Anna Willaims

Amazon Link

I wonder about tournament movies as well as movies based on tournament games. Mortal Kombat has cracked the "secret" to a good tournament B-movie way back in 1995 - rip off "Enter the Dragon" (which has served as the inspiration to tournament games). Opening narration, fight scene, character development, backstory, fight scene, character development, comic relief, fight scene, continue until climax. I'm not the only one who thinks that is the case:See the Jabootu review of Mortal Kombat for more details  
Fast pace, likeable (or not completely annoying) characters, decent fight scene choreography... in theory, it's hard to mess up. Unless, of course, your characters are retarded, you have no idea how to stage a fight scene, and your plot is an overstuffed mixture of 6 different games and your own stupid ideas.

Which brings us to Tekken. A bad movie for all of the above reasons, it really earns my ire for the treatment of the two bad girls. Now, Anna and Nina are rival siblings, one good, one bad (or one mercenary while the other psychotically sadistic, whatever) who's beauty and fighting skills have been using to great effect in the games, and to a greater effect in the anime  and... to a far lesser extent here.

Let us review. (I'm skipping a scene where the two, dressed as ninjas, attack the protagonist, since the flickering lighting and atrocious choreography of the scene combine to give me a seizure and a rage apoplexy at once)
 
 The two are the lovers and enforcers of the films secondary villain (grandson of the main villain on whose machinations too much time is spent). No trace of their traditional Caine/Abel rivalry remains


And they have a threesome with him. Even that, the movie can't get right. If it shows us anything beyond vague lingerie glimpses, it would forfeit the age-rating that would get the most butts in the seats, so it merely teases in the most frustrating and pointless way. 

For much of the rest of the movie, they just stand around, glowering. 


Skipping the ninja attack scene for the above-mentioned reasons...

The most action either sees if a fight with the heroine for Nina



As I mentioned above, the movie really can't do fight choreography, so their contest is neither visually interesting, villainously vicious or exploitationally sexy.  

As for Anna? She just disappears from the film, having fulfilled her lack of purpose. No tournament fights, no attacks on the hero.

Tekken was disappointing for a lot of reasons, and you can add poor utilization of excellent evil babe material to the list.

יום שני, 7 במרץ 2011

Chanbara Striptease - Bare breasted ninja leader



 I've learned of this movie thanks to the (vaguely connected?) incredibly stupid game with a similar title . The game is bad (and doesn't feature enough bad girls for my liking :P) but the movie... well, it's also bad, but it features an excellent bad girl. In fact, that's a consistent trend in cinema entertainment - if your movie is good overall, the chances that you'll turn to evil babe fanservice is unfortunately much lower.
 In this case exploitation of the recent "ninja + boobs + bad costumes and worse fight choreography trend" combined with a weird time travel plot creates a mindless and pointless film... but it gets right to the point with the bad girl - played by a busty AV idol, she wants nothing more than to have sex, exploit the villagers (for money and sex slaves) and occasionally use her bare-boobed fighting powers to discipline villagers who try to resist. What's not to like?


 She shows up when the heroine tries to help the simple villagers defend themselves from bandits (thankfully, this doesn't devolve into a Seven Samurai ripoff)





She's here to figure out who's boobs are stronger






Yep, both heroine and villainess practice a martial arts technique that requires them to fight bare-breasted (something that should be taught to as many an aspiring heroine/baddie as possible, IMO)
 

Of course, after the first confrontation she retreats, offering the villagers reprieve in return for handing the heroine over
 This really only serves to pad out the movies running time and sex scene count.

Since now the heroine must battle her way past the ninja coterie while the bad girl entertains herself with a sex-slave. 



You know, I bad on bad fight choreography and all that (neither girl has even a days worth of stage-fighting instructions)



But I have to give the movie props for both the bare breasted action



And for going all out with the sexual-style fanservicey fighting techniques. 


Too many movie go only halfway with the silliness or the sexiness - not this one. Fighting tactics that including locking the blade down with your boobs and shooting it at the enemy? Hell yes. 


Logic seems to dictate the bustier baddie would win in a breast-powered face-off... but we know that logic isn't necessarily what motivates film conclusions, right? 


יום שבת, 26 בפברואר 2011

Bitten - Hot innocent (?) vamp girl

Amazon link

 Ah, vampire flicks. I simultaneously get the fascination and am baffled by it - in theory, any sort of mythological monster could have been re-worked into an expression of psychological/sexual issues, and have been as prevalent (imagine a world where we would have had Bram Stocker's Werewolf-cula. And eventually a twilight saga with the focus shifted to team Jacob)

Anyways, I'm pretty sure that we, as a culture, have exhausted the subject so much, that's all the really left are subversions (sparkly sparkly subversions) and cheap exploitations of the vamp as a sexual/lesbian creature (I think there have been at least 5 vampire stripper flicks a year coming out since the 90's).

Or a combination of both, like this film about Silent Bob's partner discovering that the straggler he picked up really weird and taking stupidly long to figure out she's a vamp.



 Maybe because he's too busy macking on her (for very good reasons)


He does figure it out when his bitchy ex

Runs into his new sort-girlfriend

And is quickly transformed into a corpse

The confrontation between the two

Quickly turns into a sex scene. 0_0


It's a really creepy scene, that works quite well.


Anyways, at the bodies start piling up, they have to be disposed of...


Only to suddenly spring back to unlife, craving blood!

Vamp girl is forced to show of her ass... err, perform an impromptu staking. 



Things settle down when she promises she'll only feed on blood packs... but look at that. That's a shifty eyed traitor shot.
So we're not too surprised when a hot
(if slightly underlit) threesome
which seems to end peacefully
Turns out to be a feeding ground.
Jay has had enough, and decides it's time to put a stake to work
But vamp girl isn't going down so easily.


It's an interesting movie concept with a fairly good script and the right amount of nudity, sunk only by...

The two main actors. Vamp girl has got a rocking body, but that's pretty much it, and Jay should stick to Kevin Smith movie. I didn't mind so much when I started watching, due to comparing the flick to generic vampsploitation stuff, but ones is started doing relatively smart things, the two really weighed it down. Still, vamp girl has got (in an Al Pacino impression) "A GREAT EVERYTHING" and there's plenty of vamping action, complete with a bloody threesome, so you may check it out for the decent script or for the fangy stuff.