Today was a less exhausting afternoon double feature for me, a nice respite from the drizzly weather. It was all about over the top fantasy action with Wu Xia classic Duel to the Death and 70’s Tokusatsu (live action superhero) adaptation Karate-Robo Zaborgar.
Duel to the Death was a far out trip. The Wu Xia genre passed me by or perhaps I was just not hip to it in its hay day, so I was not sure what to expect. Consider my socks completely knocked off. The movie is filled with insanely imaginative action sequences and clearly joins others from its time in influencing more modern martial arts epics that make use of effects to add magic and superhuman abilities to the already exciting battle scenes. There is something exhilarating about these early efforts to make these fantastical scenes come to life on a lower budget.
While I usually try to describe as little about a movie’s plot as possible, I feel it would do nothing to harm the enjoyment of the film to give some insight, not to mention the choppilyy told story can be a little difficult to follow. Two young martial artists, one from China and the other from Japan, are on a path towards a high stakes showdown. Its outcome will determine which martial arts school is the most prestigious, not to mention being a matter of national pride. As the contest draws nearer, background forces on both sides reveal themselves to be corrupt, undermining the validity of the battle even though both combatants want nothing less than a fair match to determine the better fighter.
One such force from team Japan consists of multi-talented ninjas. I am not entirely sure what they are up to, but their cleverly conceived antics make for some of the most entertaining moments of the movie. They zip and zoom through forests, explode upon defeat, and join together to form one giant foe.
After dispensing with these distractions, the dueslists face off. The final battle is breathtaking for its lightning fast pace and harrowing cliff side setting. The angles of the shots are also something to marvel at.
Duel to the Death is truly a triumph of fantastic ideas over slick and expensive production. It isn’t flawless. There are moments of awkward dialogue and effects that are from realistic looking (the cause of enthusiastic laughter that only adds to the movie’s appeal). But inspired filmmaking like this doesn’t need to be perfect to be triumphant.
Karate –Robo Zaborgar left me a bit disappointed. This may be because I am a big fan of director Iguchi Noboro and what he does, and had extremely high expectations of this latest film. It could also be that the lo-fi marvels coming out of the festival’s retro focused programming this year are making me feel a bit cold towards heavily wrought CGI intensive movies. I’ll start with the good and then get into what I felt was not so good, while hopefully still leaving you curious to check out its second screening if it’s the kind of film for you.
The good: The film does look absolutely amazing. Iguchi’s visuals are highly accomplished and maintain signatures from his previous films (no Japanese director that I know of renders better walking castle robot constructions!). If you want to see a fighting robot designed in the ‘70s with nearly the exact same look as it did back then, but fluid, dynamic movements, then that is exactly what you are going to get. Both actors portraying the lead, Robo Zaborgar’s human counterpart Daimon Yutaka, put on inspired performances with wonderful moments of comic excess. The film maintains much of the campy attitude of the original television show it was based on. The movie is also truly unconventional.
The not-so-good: The film has some interesting ideas, but I feel that they come at the cost of a lot of entertainment. Midway through the film, we flash forward to a much older, washed up Daimon Yutaka after a FUBAR confrontation with the forces of the evil organization, SIGMA. While it is a hilarious idea to show what happens when the usually ageless characters of television action serials grow up, it made for a mess of a film. In hindsight you could see it coming early on as the action raced at breakneck speed to a frantic, jumbled resolution to make way for the bizarre second act.
The focus on the aged super hero comes about as a result of the introduction of a love angle between Yutaka and henchwoman Miss Borg. At first, it was a charming twist on the usual static repetitive nature of these kinds of show, but that was before realizing the sordid mess of relationships and melodrama that would later come.
The inclusion of clips from the original tv show in the end credits led me on a rushed bit of research to see if these strange elements were in fact a part of the original series. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it was not. I like the way the original sounded better. I don’t fault Iguchi for making changes. His idea to show a more unhinged protagonist than the original’s merely excitable hero was brilliant. Likewise, the introduction of flirtations between the snarly Miss Borg and Yutaka (which I am not sure happened in the original series or not) was also a lot of fun to behold. I just don’t think he needed to change as much as he did, and can’t help but feel that if Iguchi stuck to keeping things a bit more shallow and straightforward, the movie would’ve been much more exciting. There are countless ways he could’ve riffed on evil robots and humorous functions for Zaborgar. In the end, it felt like there were only a few.
In fact, I preferred Iguchi’s previous film, Robo Geisha. The effects were far less polished, but that made for much of its outsider charm. With that lower budget picture, he did more with less and went all in with outrageous concepts, lewdness, and violence. This time around, the movie was only kinda raunchy, kinda outrageous, and kinda violent. As a result, it ended up being only kind of a good movie when it could’ve been a spectacular one.
Tomorrow on the 4th of July, I’ll be watching an early one (ABRAXAS) and a late one (THE LAST DAYS OF THE WORLD), both of them from Japan. Report to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment