Smash Cut

On this most wonderful Christmas Eve, I’ve got a special treat for all of you: the travesty that Jedi-mastermind George Lucas would like to have buried under Mt. Everest and never see unearthed again. No, I’m not talking about Hayden Christensen either.

It’s The Star Wars Holiday Special, the bonkers 1978 TV feature that has the considerable plus of providing the first-ever (animated) introduction of the bad-ass bounty hunter Boba Fett. However, it also sports the mind-numbing musical ineptitude of Beatrice Arthur and Jefferson Starship, amongst many others, and weird, holiday-inspired Wookie digressions with Chewbacca and his family.

If you view a collection of clips from the program here, you can really understand Lucas’s embarrassment. But his pain is our pleasure, I suppose.

Happy Holidays to all, and have a laugh with/at Princess Leia as she croons…uh…”Happy Life Day.”

Okay, like most everyone, I was more than a little underwhelmed by rocker/filmmaker Rob Zombie’s totally unnecessary 2007 reboot of the horror classic Halloween. But I’ve always liked the guy’s spirit, and his unabashed love for exploitation cinema.

So I’ve been wondering if his sleazy, long-gestating, masked-wrestler + zombies + mad doctor + strippers animated feature The Haunted World of El Superbeasto was ever going to see the light of day. Seems like I’d been hearing about it for a couple of years, and was forever seeing its listing on IMDB, without ever finding any updates.

Well, lo and behold, I guess my wait has been rewarded, because according to Zombie’s site Zombie World, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is “coming soon” and there are five brand new stills (including one of a stitched-up Frankenstripper-type gal) to whet our appetites. Let’s see if this wonky genre mash-up actually gets a theatrical. I, for one, would pay good money to see a film where critically-acclaimed thesp Paul Giamatti voices a character named Dr. Satan!

The official El Superbeasto website is here. I’m sure when a trailer becomes available, it’ll get posted there first.

A lot of you die-hard fans of cult cinema may already know about Trailers from Hell — the neat-o-riffic site featuring indie/genre luminaries like Joe Dante, Jack Hill, John Landis, Eli Roth, Rick Baker and Allison Anders — to name a few — as they introduce and comment upon some of their favorite movie previews (some of which are, arguably, better than the films themselves). It’s not only one of the most entertaining sites out there, its also one of the most edifying: a snapshot of/history lesson about the promotion of some (very often unjustly marginalized) cinematic relics, led by a clutch of the most knowledgeable fans/filmmakers out there (Dante and Landis are always particularly good).

Now, just in time for the holidays, the resourceful ladies and gents at Trailers for Hell have posted a wonderful rarity: the absolutely beautiful 1964 short film The Hangman, by the late animator/designer Paul Julian. Julian animated some terrific opening credits for pictures like The Terror and Dementia 13, and his gifted sense of style really shines in this rarely seen, unforgettable short.

Check it out right now over at the current homepage for Trailers from Hell.

Not Bill Murray, or even Wesley Snipes for that matter.

The man for the job is your friendly neighborhood aikido expert, Steven Seagal, that’s who!

Yep, our favorite paunchy, whispering tough guy is back in yet another direct-to-video (or maybe we should say direct-to-DVD these days) effort that’s smashingly titled Against the Dark. Seagal? Vampires? Sounds too cheesy to be true — and judging from the trailer it is — but it’s a combo that seems destined to have me howling, so you can count me in.

The movie seems to be kind of a lazy mish-mash of 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. You know, some mega-plague wipes out most humans leaving only a rag-tag bunch to kick some undead ass. Good thing Seagal is one of them so that the postapocalyptic desolation can provide some (probably unintentional) yuks. “He lives by the sword. They will die by it.” Indeed!

Here’s the trailer.

As you regular readers know, I’ve previously blogged about action maestro John Woo’s massive historical epic Red Cliff a good few times at this point.

Well…sorry for flogging the same (not so dead) horse, but here’s another posting.

Trust me, though, it’s always worth it. Part II of Red Cliff follows up right where the box-office smash Part I left off, and promises even more military intrigue, hot-blooded drama and large-scale warfare. Just in time for its only-days-away Asian-market roll-out, a new (unsubtitled) Mandarin language trailer has surfaced. This one (unlike the Vietnamese-subtitled preview I linked to back in mid-November) is primarily for Woo’s native Chinese market.

Check out the grandiosity of the trailer over here.

…some hard-as-nails knuckle sandwiches, zinging arrows that go boom, heavy artillery blazing away, twirling blades, and massive, testosterone-fueled explosions. That’s how I sincerely feel now, after having seen this.

What, or who, pray tell, could send holiday wishes of that magnitude?

None other than one individual: John Rambo. Yes, ladies and gents, someone far more witty and creative than I — not to mention a person with much, much more spare time on his/her hands, obviously — carefully edited various clips (along with some hilariously appropriate sound effects) of Sylvester Stallone in bone-crunching action as that four-film headlining character, and created the ultimate Season’s Greeting to end them all.

Here it is: “Rambo Bells.”

If you saw 2004’s French action spectacle Banlieue 13 (a.k.a. District 13), you had the pleasure of enjoying a fleet-footed Escape from New York-esque riff that combined the French acrobatics of parkour-fueled fisticuffs with a drum-tight narrative of two men fighting against a system of bureaucratic evildoing.

Proving that you can’t keep a couple of good guys down, stars Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle (who’s largely credited as one of the founders of parkour) have returned to more near-future French inner city mayhem (a banlieue is akin to an American ghetto or ‘hood), along with the unstoppably prolific writer/producer Luc Besson, in Banlieue 13 - Ultimatum.

The plot seems to have been kept kind of mum at this point, although advance footage indicates that the heroes may be facing down cops rather than (primarily) thugs in the sequel. Expect a slight bit of thumb-tweaking towards the powers-that-be as with the first film, with a firm focus being placed on the physical stunts and action.

Don’t believe me? Check out the kick-ass unsubtitled teaser here.

Also, the film’s official website has some fun behind-the-scenes video diaries to watch (probably even better if you parlez Français).

Banlieue 13 - Ultimatum opens on February 18, 2009.

If you saw 2005’s Hong Kong action spectacular Sha Po Lang (a.k.a. Kill Zone), you were probably, like me, totally freakin’ blown away by this scene and left wondering, “Who was that amazing guy sporting shades and dressed in white? Was he even human to have been able to move so fast?”

Well, the answer to the first question is Wu Jing (a.k.a. Jacky Wu), and the answer to the second is “Yes, he’s human, but the reason why he’s such an amazing martial artist is that he’s trained since he was six years old and was discovered by none other than Yuen Woo-ping, the fight choreographer for 1999’s The Matrix!”

Now, after about thirteen years of making other people look good, Wu stars in and has co-directed his own down-and-dirty, old-school-style chopsocky fight flick, Legendary Assassin (a.k.a. Long nga). A stripped-down, bare-knuckled story about a small island with brewing cops-vs.-thugs tensions that boil over and explode when a mysterious drifter appears in town, the movie really exists to showcase Wu’s amazing physical talents and to wow you with its stunning action setpieces. The film just opened in Hong Kong this month, so expect DVDs to start floating into the U.S. sometime in the near future.

Check out the bone-cracking, English-subtitled Legendary Assassin trailer over here.

That’s right Hollywood big-shots, Japanese wow-master Kazuaki Kiriya is back with his follow-up to 2004’s stunning Casshern, his effects-laden live-action interpretation of the hit ’70s anime of the same name. Kiriya’s updating of the robot-fighting hero was one of the most visually stunning films to emerge that year, and one that — in my mind — not only set the standard for “digital backlot“-style moviemaking, but also still reigns champ to this day. (And no, I’m not talking about the butchered version that’s available on DVD in the U.S., which had about 25 min. hacked from it without Kiriya’s approval.)

All that might change on May 1, 2009, when the ambitious fantasy Goemon is unleashed onto movie screens. Expect a lot of brains to turn into mush and eyeballs to glaze over in wonderment. What’s it about? Who knows! (Maybe if one of you kind readers out there happens to be Japanese-savvy, you’ll drop me a line and lemme know.) Doesn’t matter, really, just sit back, go to the film’s official website, and watch the Goemon trailer so that you can be floored by one lovely image after another.

I’ve already thrown down the gauntlet for New Yorkers to devote their upcoming Dec. 12 (tomorrow, ya’ll!) to checking out the anime feature The Sky Crawlers at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s special screening event.

Well, now I’m hoping that those same folks — and other like-minded cinephiles in Los Angeles — will pony up some dough the very same weekend for the tense time-travel thriller Timecrimes (a.k.a. Los Cronocrímenes). The gutsy genre-friends at Magnolia Pictures are opening the Spanish film in NY and LA on the 12th, and it’s great that they’re putting this festival favorite on our screens.

Directed by Nacho Vigalondo, Timecrimes focuses on a man named Héctor (Karra Elejalde) who spies something that seems like a naked woman in the woods. His curiosity flings him into a series of temporally loopy, terrifying events that escalate into horrifying and brain-frying directions.

Vigalondo really knows how to keep his movie zipping along with a clever narrative and appropriate stylistic flourishes. I’ve always felt that Spanish filmmakers really know how to pull of genre fun, and Timecrimes is a great time at the cinema.

Visit the film’s official website so that you can get more info about it, and watch the trailer too.