Showing posts with label Week of Hong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Week of Hong. Show all posts

14 April 2012

Blade In Hong Kong



United States - 1985
Director - Reza Badiyi
Interglobal Homer Video, 1989, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

I wish I could end my contribution to this whole Hong debacle with something awesome, humorous or intelligent to say about James Hong's presence in this film. Frankly I wish I could say anything about the film at all. It seems so ripe for asinine drunken ranting thanks to a title that features the actor's name and a plot that appears on its surface to welcome disdain. Iranian American director Badivi was a prolific force in television during his life, helming numerous episodes of shows as diverse as Baywatch, Hawaii Five-O, Mission: Impossible, Cagney & Lacey, Mortal Kombat and Start Trek DS9. This movie just begs to be watched.

Unfortunately the tape was fried. I popped it in the old Video Cassette Recorder and the picture just rolled and rolled and rolled like a toddler at a grade-school gymnastics show. So bad that the audio track wouldn't work and the static prevented me even seeing much of anything. I'm gonna try and burn it to DVD and see if that will take care of the problem, (it often does,) but until then, Leslie and James will have to wait.

I want to thank all the writers (and artists) who participated in Week of Hong. Like our prior events it is always a privilege to have such enthusiastic people wax poetic about such seemingly trivial things. I hope that they, our readers and new writers will be inspired to share their thoughts in upcoming events! Contact us here at Lost Video Archive to participate, more is coming soon!


Week of Hong Contributors
Lost Video Archive - Teen Lust, Gladiator Cop, Cyber Bandits and Blade in Hong Kong
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12 April 2012

Gladiator Cop


United States – 1994
Director – Nick Rotundo
Monarch Home Video, 1995, VHS
Run Time – 1 hour, 32 minutes

Douche!
If you’ve seen the poet-shirted epic Ring of Steel, you’ll empathize when I say that it is almost impossible to get enough of that fucking film. I watched it five or six times (they blur together) before I was able to squeeze out this shitty review. The subsequent month was difficult indeed knowing that there wasn’t any more. Sure, I could have watched Ring of Steel a seventh time, but as anyone who is passionate about film knows, you have to give it space. It’s like a drug, the more you take the higher your tolerance. After a while it just loses its potency, its magic, and you have to detox.

So it goes with Ring of Steel. As much as I need it, I’ve got to let it steep for a while. Sometimes though, things just work out. When I signed myself up for this Week of Hong debacle I didn’t really know what to do. I figured a plan would shake itself out once I had something to work with, so I just went online and picked a handful of the cheapest James Hong VHS tapes I could find and ordered them sight unseen. Not only did Gladiator Cop satisfy my primal craving for ponytail-man-bangs (a favorite from RoS) and illegal fight-to-the-death LARP nerdery, but it was also my first Lorenzo Lamas movie. That’s a pretty rich meal to digest all at once; like truffles deep-fried in duck-fat.

Mr. Hong doesn’t make his appearance until a little ways into the film, but it’s a zinger of a role. Often times he just has a teeny bit-part in these low budget STV flicks but not so here. Lamas plays Garrett, a cocky and uncouth ex-police detective who moonlights as a champion fencer. When the famed sword of Alexander the Great is stolen from the local museum where his collagen injected curator girlfriend works, Garrett traces the theft to the illicit roid-nerd death-match circuit. Garrett doesn’t know it yet, but as it turns out he is the reincarnation of Alexander the Great and surely destined to wield that damned sword before the end of this epic. Using his telepathic ability to fondle corpses and see how they died, he tracks the sword to one Parmenion (a real historical figure played here by James Hong,) Alexander the Great's rival, now reincarnated to seek revenge. It’s a little far-fetched I know, but these two guys really play it to the hilt. Even though I received the less graphic version (apparently there are some boobs somewhere,) this aperitif is exactly the appetite whetting I was looking for as I count the days until my Ring of Steel anniversary viewing later this month. Bon Apetit!


Thanks to TS Filmvault for the trailer.

Week of Hong Contributors
Lost Video Archive - Teen Lust, Gladiator Cop, Cyber Bandits and Blade in Hong Kong
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11 April 2012

Cyber Bandits


United States - 1994
Director - Erik Fleming
Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1995, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

Cyber Bandits is a low-budget middle-90's action/drama that relies on barely-there technological concepts like CD's and virtual reality to lend itself a thin veneer of edginess. While it is probably most notable for starring Grace Jones as the daughter of James Hong, Cyber Bandits also goes down in my ledger for starring a guy who looks like my uncle and for being generally boring and poorly-acted and  laughable.


James Hong manages, despite his roughly 2 and a half minutes of screen time, to be the most interesting character in the film

Thanks to all the Week of Hong Contributors
Lost Video Archive - Teen Lust, Gladiator Cop, Cyber Bandits and Blade in Hong Kong
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10 April 2012

Teen Lust




United States - 1978
Director - James Hong
Lightning Video, 1985, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

The distinction between savage and civilized culture is often a hazy and subjective one. Our parents humor seems naive to us now while ours seems cynical to them. But that’s a long and ugly debate which is better served elsewhere because I’m not here to argue about comedic-relativism except as it applies to Teen Lust, an independent comedy produced and directed in 1978/9 by the man of the week, Mr. James Hong.

By most measures, Teen Lust is just your average, albeit extra low budget, teen sex comedy. It’s got sweet cars, over-acted nerds, stoners, an overweight outcast, nudity and loads of lowbrow humor. The protagonists are two just-graduated high-school girls who take summer jobs at the local police department as part of the Explorer Scout program (now called Venturing.) Over the course of the film’s antics and jokes about the mentally disabled, both girls end up having sex with their cop-mentors. These days of course statutory rape is pretty much frowned upon. Relatively speaking though, in 1979 it was a humorous opportunity to show adult men fondling (what are supposed to be) teen aged girls. I would like to think that this indicates some measure of cultural advancement since then, but I doubt that a movie genre that fundamentally relies on sexist objectification is much of a litmus test.

Still, while wallowing in the usual, Teen Lust does do something rather uncommon. Boys in these films are typically congratulated for having sex with older women (getting experience) and/or sleeping around (proving their manhood,) while the girls are confined to the virgin/whore/ dichotomy. In Teen Lust though Carol and Neely essentially reverse this role and become “self actualized” through this little act of rebellion. It’s a bit of a slippery twist the film is performing at this point, suggesting that it is both okay for women to be sexually liberated and yet, still necessary (or at least recommended) for their identities to be defined by their sexual utility and/or attachment to men. The box art is a perfect example of this faux-rebellion, giving us a double-layered objectification experience. As the girl on the box ogles (or hallucinates?) the undressing hunk, we ogle her ogling. In a way it lets us off the self-analysis hook by saying more-or-less “See, they do it too, so it’s okay!”

Without getting too pedantic and concocting a bunch of wind-baggy socio-cultural analysis it would be best to cut to the quick; Teen Lust is not a very good movie. Released under at least three different titles at various times in its 33 year history, it has earned a mostly negative reputation from the people who bother to write online reviews. Appealing to some of these viewers is the fact that Carol is played by Norwegian actress Kirsten Baker who graced a dozen or so low budget features in the early 80’s. But between the boobs (not hers,) which can only carry a movie so far, the jokes only get worse (and more offensive) and Teen Lust begins to drag. It reminds me of Tim Kincaid's "legit" films with the disjointed narrative feeling of a porno minus the sex. It has a sequence of events and a conclusion, but in many respects they feel unrelated. They exist in the same space, but seem unable to coalesce. Sure, Hong's first attempt at non-adult directing is bad in that endearing low-budget laughable-good-try kind of way, but in the end, especially at the end, it doesn’t have much point.

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