Smash Cut

Just to get this out of the way, I’m not posting about the 1993 actioner that starred Tom Berenger, ‘kay?

I’m writing about the 2009 Hong Kong Sniper directed by Dante Lam, a fellow who’s made about thirteen other films since 1997 — a pretty impressive tally — amongst which are the excellent Chinese mob satire Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone and the gritty policier Beast Cops, which more than lives up to its name.

Sniper may be best known amongst the H.K. cinema fan community, however, as one of the last films to star pop-idol/actor Edison Chen. Chen dropped out of the limelight many months ago after an embarrassing sex scandal in which some rather “private” photos of himself in flagrante delicto with some of Hong Kong’s best known female starlets were leaked to the public. Only time will tell if the public “forgives” Chen for his transgressions, or if the negative publicity from the scandal might actually boost ticket sales.

Nevertheless, director Lam has a great track record and I have to say that I’m looking forward to this action yarn about an ace shooter and his young trainee who have to take down a deadshot killer — who naturally happens to be an ex-colleague of the top sniper.

Check out the brand-new, English-subtitled trailer for the film over here.

In case you missed the headlines, here in good ol’ New York City we’ve got a problem. A big problem. We’ve become flooded with nasty, little, blood-sucking bedbugs and, apparently, the critters are popping up in such multitudes that the situation can truthfully be described as “epidemic”.

All this insect frenzy makes it the perfect time, in my opinion, to have a horror movie about an unwanted, potentially unstoppable invasion by our six-legged neighbors, and Mel Gibson’s company Icon Productions is probably hoping that Infestation is exactly what I (and others) have been waiting for.

Unfortunately, this tale of a ne’er-do-well slacker faced by a sudden population explosion of giant bugs is more of a yuk-fest than a yuck-fest, judging from the preview. I don’t know, I was hoping for something a little more…nasty, I guess, than funny. But I suppose that bugs on a rampage just don’t seem like a genuine, credible problem to studio execs. Hey, move to New York, I tell ya!

You can go to the film’s official website for more info, or check out the trailer below. Maybe the flick will be more to your taste than it is to mine.

Well, the fellas over at Bloody Disgusting got themselves a nice scoop that they’re sharing with us: a scene that never made it into the final cut of that modern vampire classic.

Let the Right One In is one of those rare genre efforts that won over both its target fan-base — the the horror afficionados — and mainstream critics, a batch of blow-hards who are rarely dependable to endorse a movie where things go bump in the night. And even though Tomas Alfredson’s decidedly contemporary yet classic take on blood-suckers didn’t win any love from the Academy Awards (not even a Best Foreign Language Film nomination…for shame, Oscars, for shame…), it’s developed a loyal following, one that’s sure to snap up copies of the DVD that’s streeting on March 10.

Anyway, if you need to get yourself a new fix of those gloomy, swoony, Swedish adolescents, go here to tide yourself over with the aforementioned cut clip until the disc arrives.

Ah, the good ol’ U. S. of A. We have so much, and yet it’s tough to get your daily dose of trash cinema when you want it.

Case in point: old-school Times Square-era grindhouse auteur and sleaze preservationist Frank Henenlotter, the genius behind such twisted (and twistedly hilarious) fare as Basket Case, Brain Damage and the brilliantly-titled Frankenhooker, has a (relatively) new film. But here in the States, we’re gonna have to wait a while before we can see it. That is, if it ever gets domestic distribution.

2008’s Bad Biology is one of Henenlotter’s patented bravura mash-ups of kink and gore. I mean, how can you lose with a movie that sported tag-lines of “A God Awful Love Story” and “Death By Orgasm”? Here’s all you need to know: “I was born with seven clits.” Yes, that’s the first line of the film, and if that doesn’t tell you whether or not you’re the “right audience” for this picture, then I don’t know what will. Those who cracked up can read on, I guess, and those who are totally offended can go here.

Anyway, Bad Biology’s official website summarizes the movie thusly:

“Acclaimed horror director Frank Henenlotter makes a deliciously perverse return to outrageous form with Bad Biology, a bizarre and twisted story of a genitally-deformed woman’s search for sexual fulfilment.

Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) is a beautiful nymphomaniac with seven clitorises, giving her a constant craving for sexual stimulation. Just across town lies the solution to her frustration: Batz (Anthony Sneed), whose own sexual shortcomings have led him to inject steroids directly into his own penis….

A jaw-dropping horror-comedy guaranteed to shock, Bad Biology is outrageous, offensive, riotously funny and destined for cult classic status.”

Anyway, if that sounds like a blast to you then…you’re shit out of luck, unless you have a DVD player that can handle discs from other territories. That’s because it’s only the surprisingly open-minded U.K. market that’s putting this bad-boy out, and you can score a copy via links on the film’s official website.

And if you wanna see more, you can check out a trailer at the same place.

About five years ago, a young, Chile-born, Spanish filmmaker by the name of Alejandro Amenábar took the world by storm with his deeply-affecting and beautifully-lensed euthanasia drama, The Sea Inside (a.k.a. Mar adentro), scoring a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and solidifying Javier Bardem’s international movie-star status in the process.

Some of you may not realize, however, that Amenábar was already a force to be reckoned with before he made that Academy Award-winner. He was responsible for a couple of highly influential Spanish genre efforts — 1996’s snuff-film chiller Thesis (a.k.a. Tesis) and the hallucinatory 1997 mystery, Open Your Eyes (a.k.a. Abre los ojos, which was ineptly remade in 2001 as the Tom Cruise vehicle, Vanilla Sky) — as well as the old-fashioned Hollywood ghost-story The Others.

Now he’s back with a very hush-hush project, a mega-budget historical epic called Agora. Set in Roman Egypt, the movie focuses on the rising wave of Christianity that enveloped the country and the challenges the religion posed for Hypatia (played by Rachel Weisz), the renowned philosopher and atheist of ancient Alexandria.

As I said, this movie’s had a lid kept tightly sealed over it, but it seems that an unsubtitled trailer has been leaked, which you can watch over here while it lasts. The film’s subject matter may sound deep and overly intellectual, but the stylish preview seems to promise a lot of drama and excitement, both physical and intellectual. Welcome back to the silver screen, Mr. Amenábar!

Ya know, I tend to avoid paying attention to each year’s marketing-driven Oscar selections, but there is one category that does garner a look from me, to the extent that I actually do make the effort to try to see every nominee in the group: Best Animated Short Film.

Aside from the fact that the batch of shorts — which are, I’m sure, selected by a process just as insider-driven and political as the big features — offers a diverse, eclectic array of visual and narrative styles, I’m always stunned by the storytelling efficiency of the films. As the nominated features get more and more bloated every year, the animated shorts (as opposed to the live action ones, which often strike me as stylistically dull and uninteresting in plot) maintain a lovely standard of economy.

If you ever lament the fact that you don’t have access to those works, cheer up: all of this year’s nominees are now available for download via iTunes, including the Pixar-produced hungry-magician’s-rabbit-in-revolt charmer Presto, whose promo art is pictured above and which was — Goll-E — for my money far better executed than the movie it preceded in theaters. For a detailed commentary on all of the shorts, check out The Onion’s article on the five titles here.

Download the Best Animated Short Film nominees.

If you read this blog with any regularity, you probably figure that I tend to focus on films that are a bit out of the mainstream, or have a preference for psycho killers and space aliens. That’s…not exactly incorrect, but at the same time I do love the classics. And on that note, I can’t deny that Francis Ford Coppola’s rightfully revered mafia magnum opus, 1971’s The Godfather, is totally deserving of the endless attention and accolades it has received since its release, and is worthy of being such a huge cornerstone of our pop culture.

And yet it’s tough not to think that everything that could possibly be said, thought, or written about the epic drama has been done already. I certainly believed that to be the case.

But now, journalist Mark Seal over at Vanity Fair has written a boffo piece entitled “The Godfather Wars” that somehow manages to spin the mob movie’s behind-the-scenes mythos into a brand new light, and has scripted a “making of” tale that’s as criminally engrossing as the film itself.

Do yourself a favor (rather than doing it for someone who might expect a favor in return sometime in the near future) and read the article here.

Back in 1961, a film distributor dubbing itself the Art Theater Guild started up in Japan to bring edgy European cinema to the country’s masses. I guess the organization — which came to be known as the ATG — got bitten by the movie-making bug and found influence in the esoteric foreign fare it released, because in 1967 the Guild started to independently produce its own feature films.

The movies made by ATG were innovative, experimental and quite often taboo-busting, dealing with a myriad of controversial subjects including incest, homosexuality, and anarchy. Some of Japan’s most highly-regarded directors, such as the always provocative Nagisa Oshima and the avant-garde Shuji Terayama, had their first tastes of international recognition through the work they made for Art Theater Guild. And yet, the distributor/production company is still relatively unknown, even in its native Japan.

The daring folks at New York’s Japan Society are hoping to rectify that oversight, starting today, February 18, with their series “Shinjuku Ecstasy,” which is named for the ATG’s main theater, the Shinjuku Bunka, which allowed countercultural artists of all stripes to gather, create and exhibit their ground-breaking work.

The series runs until March 1, and you can go here to check out the schedule and buy tickets. Some of the highlights include the groundbreaking 1969 queer cinema feature Funeral Parade of Roses (pictured at the top), and 1971’s rebelliously-titled Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Into the Street, which probably deserves your time and money just for its name alone! You can toss some molotovs and let flashbacks melt your brain while you watch the psychedelic English-subtitled trailer for the latter here.

A couple of years ago, Spanish horror filmmakers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza made a modest but well-executed chiller about a Barcelona-based news reporter who was stuck covering the graveyard shift at a local fire department, only to find that her hunger for a big news story was going to be fulfilled that night with terrifying results.

Simply but cleverly entitled [REC], the faux-documentary-styled horror opus caught on with international gorehounds and spawned a Hollywood remake, last year’s Quarantine.

As can be expected with a genre trendsetter in any country, sequels pop up for surprise hits, and lo and behold here’s [REC] 2. Balagueró and Plaza helmed this follow-up — to their credit, they didn’t pass the buck to some underlings, so clearly they believe in their franchise — and judging from the latest teaser for the film, it promises…well, more of the same. But if [REC] 2 is as unfettered and swiftly-paced as its predecessor, it should provide, at the very least, a good time at the movies.

You can watch the tantalizing, unsubtitled teaser now.