Smash Cut

Ah, Twitch. You can always count on that site for the best updates, and this one’s no exception: an exclusive presentation of the first trailer for Samurai Princess.

I showed you the scorching one-sheet image above when I first  blogged about this destined-for-cult-classic-status, psychotronic Japanese actioner at the beginning of the month. The poster’s image of lead star/adult video actress Aino Kishi was probably enough to get your tongues wagging, but the preview delivers on many, many more levels, folks. We’re talking explosive breasts and scissor feet here.

Watch the trailer here on Twitch. You can visit the Official Samurai Princess Website for more details as they arrive.

“New Samurai is Born.” Indeed!

Literally! The preview clocks in at around a minute-and-a-half, but only about ten seconds of it is gunplay-free. And that’s a good thing, in my book.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I’m all about Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To and any offering from his Milkyway Image production company. I’ve been tracking his latest effort Vengeance, starring French crooner/thesp Johnny Hallyday, for quite some time, and posting info and teasers whenever possible.

A new entry obviously means new material, and this one’s the best yet: an international trailer for the potboiler about a French assassin-turned-chef who’s forced to pick up pistols once again when someone rubs out his loved ones. It’s stylish, action-packed, and atmospheric. In short, it’s another Johnnie To classic!

Go to the Official Vengeance Website to take a look at the goodies offered there (stills, press notes, and interviews, for starters), or paste your eyes below on the blazing trailer. Wake up and smell the cordite, kids!

About a month ago, I blogged about Korean writer/director Chan-wook Park’s upcoming subversive take on vampires entitled Thirst (a.k.a. Bakjwi). That earlier posting linked to a tantalizing but brief little teaser.

Well, I’m happy to say that a website has been created for the horror/drama about a priest whose tastes run blood-red after partaking in an botched medical experiment, and it sports an impressive goodie: a new preview. It’s unsubtitled, but much more provocative and stylish than its predecssor.

The full-length trailer can be seen on the Official Thirst Website now. Even if you’re totally sick of all things vampiric, I think there’s a chance that you might discover something novel or at least a tad unusual here. Thirst is scheduled for an April 30 release in South Korea.

Chinese filmmaker Chuan Lu is on a roll. His last movie, 2004’s Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, a dramatization of the hard-nail efforts by a group of volunteers to prevent the illegal poaching of a near-extinct species of Tibetan antelope, won almost unanimous praise from critics and viewers alike. If you haven’t seen Kekexili, I highly recommend that you stop reading this post — now — and rent or even buy the DVD. It’s that relentless, harrowing and powerful. Seriously.

And if the advance accolades are any indication, his latest effort, City of Life and Death, may very well exceed the greatness of its predecessor. A dramatization of the shocking six-week Nanking Massacre, which began on December 9, 1937, after the Chinese city was captured by Japanese troops, the film has been scoring kudos from big-shots like movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and Marco Müller, the director of the vaunted Venice Film Festival. Both have reportedly lavished praise on the black and white war-time drama, with Weinstein allegedly hoping to come up with a distribution deal that will put the film in his stable.

The unsubtitled City of Life and Death teaser (which sports the film’s original title of Nanjing Nanjing) can be viewed here courtesy of Sina.com. It doesn’t exactly show much, but Chuan proved his chops — and then some — with Kekexili, so I’m definitely looking forward to this one. At any rate, it’s sure to be better than the Hollywood version of the events, last year’s watered-down The Children of Huang Shi.

A sequel gets cranked out, of course!

But what makes the prospect of Ip Man 2 — a follow-up to last year’s excellent biopic about Bruce Lee’s revolutionary martial arts instructor, Ip Man — is that the talented kung fu choreographer/actor/director Sammo Hung (that’s him, third from the right, taking off the shades in the March 31, 2009, Ip Man 2 press conference) will be performing in the film as well as supervising the action. Hung is an amazing force to reckon with on-screen: he may look portly, but he can move lightning-fast (he did train alongside Jackie Chan, after all), and in the sequel he’ll play a Hung Gar kung fu master who’ll clash with Wing Chun practitioner Ip Man, played again by Donnie Yen.

And if you’ve never seen Yen go mano-a-mano with Hung before, then…you’ve never seen action! Well, maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole, but just get ready to pick your gaping jaw off the ground after you check out this clip from 2005’s stellar Hong Kong police actioner Sha Po Lang (which happened to be directed by Ip Man and Ip Man 2 helmer Wilson Yip) which climaxes in a down-n-dirty rumble with those two Chinese superstars trading blows.

From the oh-so-delightfully-twisted minds behind loony Japanese genre fare like The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police (movies that are exactly what their titles describe them to be) comes Samurai Princess. And if the poster pictured above is any indication, then Yoshihiro Nishimura — the director of Tokyo Gore Police and effects supervisor on Machine Girl and Princess — will be three for three with his trifecta of pics that deliver on the promise of their names (not to mention poster campaigns).

Distributor CREi offers this plot description:

Erotic-grotesque action film from Japan to worldwide viewers! Produced by Yoshihiro Nishimura, a world-famous special effects director!

The story takes place sometime, somewhere in a world during the Samurai era, where people live together with highly developed mechanical dolls. However, excessively-developed mechanical dolls start causing harm to the human society, leading to ghastly bloodshed happening all over the place. Under the circumstances, Kyoraku, a mad scientist, creates a female ninja mechanical doll. Equipped with 11 types of built-in weapons, the ninja doll, who will not die even if she is slashed by a sword or shot by a gun, is virtually indestructible.

As of this moment, there’s no Samurai Princess trailer, but there is an official website that is, simply, a mega-image of the poster. Nothing else to check out as of yet, but that does mean that you get an even more ginormous pic of star Yukari Tateishi than the one I’ve hooked you up with.

Everybody wants to go Bollywood these days, and I guess the Italian Stallion is no exception, even if it’s just for a walk-on.

Kambakkht Ishq (which is also known as Incredible Love) is an action/comedy/romance/musical vehicle for Indian superstar Akshay Kumar, who can probably do the musclebound-funny-heartthrob character in his sleep at this point. Anyway, Kumar stars as a world-renowned stuntman who’s tops in Hollywood (hence all the guest appearances by celebs and quasi-stars like Stallone, Denise Richards and, allegedly, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carmen Electra). And yet, for all his glory and fortune, the guy just can’t find the right gal. Naturally, his first encounter with a supermodel (played by the always-enchanting Kareena Kapoor) is like oil and water, but…hey, I wouldn’t have called this movie a part-romance if sparks weren’t going to fly, right? The film is sure to be another one of those jokey “movies about movies” but you can always count on Bollywood to deliver, at the very least, some unbridled energy and glamor.

You can check out the trailer for Kambakkht Ishq, complete with Stallone appearance, over here.

Also known as Korkusuz, 1986’s Rampage is probably best known (if at all) as the Turkish version of Rambo: First Blood Part II. And by “version,” I mean shameless rip-off.

The thing is, if you’ve never seen a Turkish “adaptation” of a Hollywood hit (such as the legendary Dünyayi kurtaran adam, a.k.a. Turkish Star Wars), then you’re missing out. The flicks may grab everything from their source inspirations with a copyright-infringing zeal that would leave any legal team in the dust, but they spit and whirl those elements with such devilish (or should I say “dervish-like”) glee that they often surpass the originals in terms of pure entertainment value. And Rampage — which is, amazingly enough, from the very same mastermind director of Turkish Star Wars, Çetin Inanç — could deliver the goods in exactly that manner.

What’s Rampage about? A Turkish commando has to kick a lot of bad-guy ass. Whadja think it was about?

Take a look at the amazing Rampage trailer on the DVD’s official website, courtesy of its releasing studio Dark Maze. Or, better yet, have a gander at this clip.

If Taiwanese cinema is known at all in the United States, it’s generally amongst the arthouse aficionados who groove to the deliberately-paced, slice-of-life-fueled dramas from New Taiwan Cinema alumni like Cannes-favorites Hou Hsiao-hsien and the late, great Edward Yang.

Taiwan’s film industry has never been as prolific or as profitable as that of, say, Hong Kong, but you have to give its local talent credit for overcoming financial and technological difficulties and continuing to make world-class efforts that keep them on the international scene. In addition, once in a blue moon, some daring soul actually tries his hand at making a genre pic: a shoot-’em-up, for example, or a thriller. And now, the country’s produced a film that’s going to let it join an ever-growing club: the Trans-Continental Slasher Society. Yup, even Taiwan couldn’t resist the temptation of making a maniacal-killer-on-the-rampage movie, and why not? They’re cheap and audiences tend to eat them up (not to mention slasher pics traverse linguistic boundaries very, very easily).

Invitation Only seems to toe the line of every horror trope — masked baddie, nubile victims, etc. — but who knows, it could still be fun. Check out the trailer that’s embedded on the film’s official website, if you dare to learn more.

It was really only a couple of weeks ago when I first posted about the forthcoming live-action interpretation of the 2000 anime vampire/action classic, Blood: The Last Vampire.

Well, it now seems as if people are salivating for more, because the hype machine is still chugging along at full steam, with a brand-new trailer popping up online courtesy of Yahoo! Japan. It’s not subtitled, but a good amount of it is actually in English so you shouldn’t have any problems following along.

The thing is, now that I’ve actually heard the delivery of the English dialogue (particularly that of lead actress Gianna Jun), I’m toning down my expectations a bit. Some of the performances seem a bit…uh…stiff, which can (and should) be expected given the fact that English isn’t exactly the native tongue of many of the performers. But I can’t deny that the not-so-fluent passages are more than a little distracting. Nevertheless, director Chris Nahon obviously has an eye for flashy style, and the extended footage shows off the movie’s exciting sheen.

Check out the trailer here. (Click on the highlighted blue characters above the paragraph of Japanese text in order to access the preview.)