Up first this week is the most mainstream release we got, Last Breath. Starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole and Cliff Curtis, it’s based on a fantastic true story about deep sea divers. Harrelson plays the aging veteran, Cole the young newcomer, Liu the cocky one and Curtis is the head of the ship. On a job to fix pipes deep in the ocean, bad weather hits the ship while Liu and Cole are on their dive. Liu is able to make it back to the ship, but Cole isn’t. The crew will not give up on him and the divers and crew do everything they can to save their diver. We’ve seen similar movies before (Deepwater Horizon immediately comes to mind), but the film is entertaining enough to hold your attention despite the lack of originality. What saves the film is its short runtime. It gets right into the heart of the action and never goes off course (pun intended). Harrelson and Curtis can do these types of parts in their sleep, but they bring a lot of experience to a youngish cast. Being based on a true story you can probably guess the outcome, but I’m alright with that too because it never attempts to be something it’s not. It’s tight both in runtime and in its environment and the film looks beautiful for what it is. You feel trapped like the diver which helps hold your attention. It’s geared towards a 35+ male audience and I think that audience will eat it up. The Blu-ray comes with commentary, making-of and other bonus features.
Second we have Bloody Axe Wound which gets points for originality, but it also doesn’t make a lick of sense. I like the idea of the film, but it complicates itself too much and leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. The main plot is about a local serial killer in a small town. He kills teens and with the help of his adopted daughter, he can be resurrected if the killing goes wrong. That makes perfect sense and by having the daughter who wants to be part of the family business, it’s pretty original. The problem is, he runs a video store that sells horror movies involving his kills and someone mysteriously picks his victims and none of that really gets explained how. If he’s the killer, why is Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the movies within a movie? That element made zero sense to me whatsoever and that’s a shame because it has some great kills and gore and could have been a surprise gem that’s fun. I simply didn’t understand it and wish it was just a straight forward small town serial killer replaced by his daughter when he’s not recovered enough to kill. It tries to outsmart itself instead of simply being a fun horror flick.
Next we have two Russ Meyer films from Severin. I’ve seen a few of his movies over the past few months through Severin and to me he makes two kinds of movies: B-movies that at least have a plot and softcore porn. We get one of each this week. First is Motorpsycho with Alex Rocco! This black & white flick is about a trio of bikers causing havoc. It has sexual escapades like you expect from Meyer, but at least there’s a story to be had. Rocco plays a veterinarian whose wife is assaulted by the trio and sets out to get revenge on them. He teams up with another woman who was traveling with a man killed by them. It’s very 1960s with how we viewed bikers back then. They played their music loud and got in everyone’s way. The dancing made me laugh and it very much feels like a biker outcast flick of the time period. Pretty cool seeing Alex Rocco’s big screen debut.
The second Meyer film is Up! which pretty much feels like softcore porn. It opens with Hitler being into BDSM and being eaten by a piranha and then we meet a hitchhiker who is raped, but she kills the man. A cop sees it but helps her cover it up. There’s a diner with a waitress and others who all seem to sleep together. There is more rape, more murder, everyone has something against everyone else and a character ends up being a cop. I genuinely have no idea what this movie was about, but you expect that in a mid 1970s Meyer flick. The plot is irrelevant when you have nudity every five minutes. I’m sure it’s a beloved classic to Meyer fans, but of the two, I preferred Motorpsycho.
Next we have The Adventurers which is a mid 1990s film starring Andy Lau. As a child in Cambodia, Wai Lok-yan (Lau) witnesses his parents and sister murdered. He moves to Thailand to become a pilot and get revenge on the man who murdered his family. With the help of his uncle (a CIA affiliate like his father), Yan moves to San Francisco to get close to the daughter of the man he seeks. He gets involved in a rival gang war, the daughter and mistress of the man he’s after and much more. Lau is fantastic in the role and it’s one of his films I hadn’t seen before. It’s from director Ringo Lam before he started making Hollywood films and it has multiple locations around the world. Lau fans will really enjoy this new release which comes with commentary, interviews and more. If you are a fan of the film, this is a neat release worth adding to your collection.
The Magnificent Chang Cheh features two films from famed director Chang Cheh. Those films are The Magnificent Trio and Magnificent Wanderers. Cheh made nearly 100 films for Shaw Brothers and this was a cool release after another box set of his films came my way weeks back. If you dig 1960s and 1970s era martial arts flicks you’ll totally dig these. I’ve always enjoyed the production value and costuming of these films and sure, by today’s standards the action sequences are nowhere close to what we see in The Raid or a John Wick film, but for the time they were top-notch. The Magnificent Trio (from the mid 60s) sees a soldier swordsman team up with with other men to defend local farmers after they kidnapped a magistrate’s daughter because of taxation. Magnificent Wanderers is about a group of wanderers who team up with a wealthy man to fight against the Mongol army. Each film has a great style to it with fantastic costuming and choreography. Most of the same actors are used in Cheh films and you can see the chemistry they bring to the table. The two film Blu-ray comes with multiple commentaries and more.
Continuing our run on Asian cinema, next is V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal, a 5-disc, 9 movie collection. Before there was straight-to-streaming movies there was straight-to-video and this is a collection of films created for VHS and other home video releases. Most are short with at least one coming in under an hour. They are crime dramas that get right into the action and wrap up pretty nicely. Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage is about a cop going after the man who killed his partner and who teams up with a nun that had millions stolen from the same bad guy. Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet is a Yakuza flick where a young man new to the game is told he must put out a hit and do time for it. Stranger is about a taxi driver who thinks she’s being followed by someone in her past. She has a shady past with a man and money embezzling and she thinks he’s back and stalking her. Carlos is another Yakuza movie where a Brazilian-Japanese criminal thinks he can play rival Yakuza gangs against each other. Burning Dog is about a group of thieves trying to take down a US military site, but can they be trusted? Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat is a return to the famous Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise when an assassin goes undercover to free Scorpion from prison (probably my favorite of the collection). The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses is about a man who wants revenge on the Yakuza after his girlfriend is killed in a shootout. Danger Point: The Road to Hell is about two hired guns who have a hit go wrong and their working relationship is put into trouble. XX: Beautiful Hunter is about a female assassin trained by a blind priest, but her next target is the man she loves and soon she’s the target. Each film comes with an introduction and other bonus features include trailers, essays and more. If you’re like me and enjoy Asian dramas especially Yakuza stories, you’ll dig this.
Last we have Ultraman Z: The Complete Series from Mill Creek Entertainment. This actually came out last week, but I wrote down the wrong release date so that’s 100% on me. If you’ve been collecting Mill Creek’s Ultraman releases you’ll want to add this to your collection. I’m a bit burned out on them at this point and still prefer the older series that I grew up on. This is about a monster being destroyed in the past and being splintered off into pieces that eventually causes havoc throughout. A new threat wants to harness all that power while on Earth a new unit (Storage) is formed to deal with Earth’s monster threats. Ultraman Zero and Ultraman Z fight in a battle together and then Z heads to Earth to fight the powerful monster. It feels like a lot of the recent shows which if you are a fan you’ll enjoy. I’ll probably take a break for a while because with all the characters crossing over and being spun off to their own series, it feels repetitive at this point.
The Nerds Templar 