On July 4, 2022, 88 Films is releasing a Deluxe Collectors Edition Blu-ray (Region B) for Nam Lai-Choi’s 1986 feature, The Seventh Curse. This martial arts, horror and fantasy mix stars Chin Siu Ho (Tai Chi Master), Chow Yun-fat (Project Gutenberg) and Maggie Cheung (Police Story 3: Supercop).
Official details:
When Dr Yuen (Chin Siu-ho) attempts to rescue a girl about to be sacrificed by the Worm Tribe in the middle of a Thailand jungle, he is damned with seven ‘Blood Curses’. Though he finds a temporary antidote this will only last a year and he must return to the jungle to find a permanent cure.
Director: Sen Dao Cast: Jordan Chan Siu-Chun, Deng Jia-Jia, Jiro Wang Dong-Cheng, Lee Beom-Su, Lawrence Ng Kai-Wah, Zhang Xiao-Jue, Xu Ou-Yi, Piao Wen-Xi Running Time: 88 min.
By Paul Bramhall
Before the relationship between China and South Korea deteriorated in 2017, which resulted in China imposing an unofficial ban on all things South Korean – including importing Korean movies and all things K-pop – China enjoyed using Korea as a backdrop for some of its mainstream cinema outings. Specifically the countries popular honeymoon destination of Jeju Island, of which the local honeymooning couples are likely only outnumbered by Chinese tourists, for a brief period (and when I say brief, I mean 2016) it looked like Chinese studios had found a new go-to formula.
Said formula usually involved a quirky caper like plot, comedic and/or attractive Mainland stars, and of course the obligatory Korean cast members to give it some local flavour. So it was we got movies like Bounty Hunters, which paired Wallace Chung with Lee Min-ho, and Bad Guys Always Die, which saw Wilson Chen acting alongside the likes of Son Ye-jin and Shin Hyun-joon. Joining their ranks to make what I like to call the 2016 Jeju Trilogy is Foolish Plan, which sees Hong Kong’s Young and Dangerous luminary Jordan Chan (Fox Hunter, Golden Job) acting along Continue reading →
Bruce Lee will forever be remembered as one of the most influential movie stars of his time – even though he only made five films – as well as a master of martial arts who had a tremendous impact on popular culture. Still, it’s a rarity for someone who passed away nearly 50 years to still have a presence in the contemporary space of pop culture, especially given how much entertainment media has been transformed.
It just speaks to the profound force that Bruce Lee was at the time of his rise. Still an instantly recognizable figure, his work in film transformed the depiction of Asian characters in western media. He introduced a true style of real on-screen action, and his blend of styles is widely credited as paving the way for the mixed martial arts scene. So, perhaps it isn’t a surprise that modern creatives are still drawing from Lee’s work and legacy.
Lee is present in even the newest forms of entertainment
Most famed for his on-screen choreography and distinct martial arts style, it won’t come as a surprise that much of Bruce Lee’s influence in the world of video gaming is in the fighting genre. He is the inspiration behind Maxi in Soulcalibur, Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat, and Fei Long in Street Fighter. You can also find several character skins across gaming to create a Bruce Lee character, as is the case in the latest collaboration for skins in Naraka: Bladepoint.
Most distinctly, however, Marshall Law in Tekken is the character who is the complete embodiment of Bruce Lee in gaming. From fighting style to available outfits and vocals, Marshall Law is the most akin to Bruce Lee, until you get to the icon himself. Even in the new space of online casino gaming and free spins no deposit offers, there is a Bruce Lee slot game at the ready. Found on Casumo Casino, a highly rated platform offering 20 spins on Book of Dead, you can find the official Bruce Lee game, featuring signature weapons and the star himself.
Lee’s works continue in scripts for the screen as well
Two years before his death, Bruce Lee was shopping his concept for a series entitled Ah Sahm, which was rejected by major studios in 1971. In 2015, however, his daughter successfully revived the idea, with the result being the show Warrior. Shannon Lee is the show’s executive producer, with the showrunner being Jonathan Tropper, who crafted the superb Cinemax show Banshee.
Having recently completed its second season, with a third on the way, it was billed as Cinemax’s primary show and now ranks highly on the streaming platform HBO Max. In fact, shortly after its arrival there in 2021, the two-season-old program quickly climbed into the upper echelons of the platform’s most-viewed shows. The series is certainly unique in American media, both in its focus, delivery, and representation, with the protagonist, played by Andrew Koji, taking on a distinctly Bruce Lee-esque persona and style.
In an age of entertainment media where audiences want to see stories from different communities to those who have dominated the screen for decades, Bruce Lee’s concept looked perfect on paper. Throw in a real dedication to his work by his daughter, and a showrunner who proved to be a nuanced supporter of representation and diversity in Banshee, and Warrior looks to be the perfect show for modern TV.
Bruce Lee wasn’t just an icon of his era, but clearly, he’s still a pop-culture favorite even 50 years later.
On August 1, 2022, Eureka is releasing the Blu-ray (Region B) for Johnnie To’s 1999 thriller, Running Out of Time, as well as its 2001 sequel, Running Out of Time 2.
Official details:
Johnnie To’s Running Out of Time 1 & 2; two slickly made cat-and-mouse thrillers, and starring Andy Lau (Infernal Affairs), Lan Ching-wan (A Hero Never Dies) and Ekin Cheng (TheStorm Riders); scanned and restored in 2K and available for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK as part of The Masters of Cinema Series.
Acclaimed director Johnnie To helms this visually dazzling and nail-bitingly intense action thriller that became one of Hong Kong’s biggest box Continue reading →
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi Cast: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Reika Kirishima, Park Yu-rim, Jin Dae-yeon, Sonia Yuan, Ahn Hwitae, Perry Dizon,Satoko Abe, Masaki Okada Running Time: 179 min.
By Paul Bramhall
It’s perhaps a testament to how much inspiration Japanese author Haruki Murakami is capable of instilling in those who read his work, when you consider that Drive My Car is the second of his short stores in recent years to be adapted into an epic piece of cinema. Korean director Lee Chang-dong adapted the short story Barn Burning from The Elephant Vanishes omnibus into 2018’s Burning, clocking in at 2 & ½ hours, and in 2021 Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s adapted the short story Drive My Car from the omnibus Men Without Women. Despite the source material being less than 40 pages, transferred to screen Drive My Car transforms into a 3-hour meditation on loss, identity, and what it means to come to terms with a past that can never be fully understood.
Only the 2nd Japanese movie to win the Best International Picture Academy Award after Departures in 2008, Hamaguchi plays with the narrative structure of Murakami’s original work in a way which allows it to connect with audiences more coherently, and promises a richer experience on repeated viewings. Hidetoshi Nishijima (Casshern, Dolls) and Reika Kirishima (Heaven’s Door, Norwegian Wood) are a happily married couple involved in the arts, with Nishijima a successful stage actor and director, and Kirishima a script writer. Nishijima is invited to Vladivostok as a judge at a festival, however when his flight is delayed by a day due to bad weather he returns home, only to find his wife Continue reading →
“The Super Dimension Fortress Macross” Japanese DVD Cover
After years of development hell, Sony is moving forward – slowly but surely – with a big screen, live-action adaptation of Robotech, a popular animated TV show that aired in the United States in 1985.
Robotech will chronicle three generations of humans and the giant transformable robots they pilot as they defend earth from an alien invasion.
Previously, James Wan (The Conjuring, Furious 7), Nic Mathieu (Spectral) and Andy Muschietti (It, Mama) were attached to direct, but now Robotech is now in the hands of Rhys Thomas (Marvel’s Hawkeye).
Director: Lou Kennedy Co-director: Brandon De-Wilde Cast: Ke Huy Quan, Eddie Saavedra, Ed Neil, Jerry Trimble, Bolo Yeung, Wendell C. Whitaker Running Time: 85 min.
By Henry McKeand
How’s this for an early-90s time capsule? Breathing Fire is a film so dedicated to its Xtreme teenage aesthetic that the plot revolves around a group of kickboxing bank robbers searching for a slice of pizza. Just when you think it couldn’t get more radical, the two young heroes turn out to be martial arts prodigies who turn even boring chores into electro hip-hop dance competitions. These are Power Rangers characters filtered through a sun-soaked DTV action filter—Chuck Norris acolytes with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle personalities.
These characters exist in a movie that belongs to the unofficial “evil henchman played by Bolo Yeung” subgenre of American action cinema. Everyone’s trying to kick like JCVD and the whole thing is shot like a Fat Boys music video. It’s a visual celebration of yuppie American excess, but it worships at the altar of HK action and uses a Taiwanese crew to craft bold, workmanlike fight sequences. It’s clearly shot in contemporary California, but there’s something alien about its world—dialogue delivered by native English speakers is stilted to the point of sounding dubbed.
The plot revolves around Tony, played by Eddie Saavedra, and his adopted Vietnamese brother Charlie, played by Ke Huy Quan. Unbeknownst to them, their father Michael, played by Jerry Trimble, is a ruthless criminal who has stored the loot from a major gold heist in a vault that requires two keys to enter. Naturally, he and his gang encrust the keys into a plastic pizza and then cut the pizza into several slices, meaning they need each other to access the gold. Through a series of misadventures, Tony and Charlie are introduced to Annie (played by Laura Hamilton), the daughter Continue reading →
Director: Kim Doo-young Cast: Lee Dong-jun, Steven Seagal, Kim Hye-Ri, Eun Seo-Woo, Ki Joo-Bong, Kim Jung-Tae, Lim Ho, Lim Hyeok-Pil, Simon Rhee, So-yeon Kim, Jun Won-Joo Running Time: 100 min.
By Paul Bramhall
The likelihood is you’ve never found yourself asking if there’s a Korean version of Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson, but just on the off chance that you have, then let me put forward the case for Lee Dong-jun. A three-time taekwondo world champion and regular member of the Korean national team in the 1980s, similar to Wilson he converted to acting once his competitive career had run its course, turning up in various tough guy roles to dispense precision timed kicks to the face. It would be 1996’s Charisma that arguably offered up the best opportunity for Dong-jun to show off his skills, one of many direct-to-video taekwondo gangster flicks that Korea cranked out throughout the 1990’s, and the directorial debut of Kim Doo-young.
Doo-young would only go on to direct 2 more movies after his debut, the first being 2003’s Dying or Live about a restaurant delivery driver who’s obsessed with Bruce Lee, and the second coming a year later in the form of Clementine. His final feature is noteworthy because it finally gave Dong-jun star billing in a taekwondo movie, and to top it all off, the selling point was that his main opponent would be Steven Seagal! The master of mumbling and Aikido had his final cinematic outing just a couple of years prior with 2002’s Half Past Dead, and in 2004 many were still dazed and confused as to what direction Seagal’s career was headed in (including me!). DTV seemed to be the order of the day, and while The Foreigner was unwatchable dreck, Belly of the Beast saw legendary Hong Kong director and choreographer Ching Siu-Tung at the helm. So, Steven Seagal Continue reading →
On July 19, 2022, Criterion is releasing the Blu-ray and DVD for Drive My Car (read our review), a 2021 film from co-writer (with Takamasa Oe) and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. This award-winning, critically acclaimed film stars Hidetoshi Nishijima (Mozu: The Movie), Masaki Okada (Rage) and Toko Miura (Silent Rain).
Official details:
Only Ryusuke Hamaguchi—with his extraordinary sensitivity to the mysterious resonances of human interactions—could sweep up international awards and galvanize audiences everywhere with a pensive, three-hour movie about an experimental staging of an Anton Chekhov play, presented in nine languages and adapted from Haruki Murakami stories. With Continue reading →
On July 5, 2022, Criterion is releasing the 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD for Okja, from Bong Joon-ho (The Snowpiercer), the acclaimed director of the 2006 Korean monster masterpieceThe Host, as well as the 2019 sensation, Parasite.
Read the official details below:
Master genre exploder Bong Joon Ho swirls pathos, dark satire, action, and horror into an exhilarating twenty-first-century fairy tale. An all-star cast including Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun, and Jake Gyllenhaal is led by An Seo Hyun as Mija, a South Korean girl growing up on an Edenic mountainside with her grandfather and best friend: Okja, a giant, empathetic “superpig” created as part of a secret GMO experiment. When Continue reading →
Today’s Deal on Fire is the 4K + Blu-ray + Digital set for The Karate Kid Collection, which includes The Karate Kid, The Karate Kid II and The Karate Kid III (The Next Karate Kid is absent from this collection).
Director: Dan Kwan Co-director: Daniel Scheinert Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sunita Mani, Aaron Lazar, Audrey Wasilewski Running Time: 139 min.
By Paul Bramhall
As an actress Michelle Yeoh has made an impact in every decade she’s been active. In the 80’s she kick-started the Girls with Guns genre in her first starring role with Yes, Madam!. In the 90’s she came out of retirement and proceeded to give both Jackie Chan and James Bond a run for their money, co-starring along side Chan in Police Story 3: Supercop, and being the first Asian Bond girl in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies. In the 2000’s she’d star in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and in doing so introduced the wuxia genre to the world in a way which no other film has before or since, and in the 2010’s she featured in the first Hollywood movie to have a leading cast consisting entirely of Asians with the (appropriately titled) Crazy Rich Asians. Now in 2022 Yeoh once again leaves her mark on the 2020’s by headlining Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The sophomore feature length production from the duo known as Daniels – consisting of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once follows 2016’s Swiss Army Man, and if anything shows their knack for the off-kilter and quirky certainly wasn’t a one off. The plot focuses on Yeoh’s laundromat owner who’s having a particularly stressful day. On top of needing to prepare for a tax audit by the IRS, her demanding father is flying in for a Chinese New Year party taking place later on the same day, her stubborn daughter wants to bring her girlfriend, and she’s Continue reading →
Director: Keita Amemiya Cast: Yuji Kishimoto, Mai Hosho, Yasuaki Honda, Dai Matsumoto, Kazuhiko Inoue, Sumisu Andi Running Time: 51/71 min.
By Henry McKeand
There’s cerebral, lore driven science fiction, and then there’s something like Mechanical Violator Hakaider: a lizard-brained action fantasy with little patience for traditional world-building or character development. Directed by Keita Amemiya (Zeiram, Kamen Rider ZO) and based on the 1972 tokusatsu series Android Kikaider, the film is a blissfully short piece of violent, industrial cyberpunk that prioritizes special effects and atmosphere over all else.
The original Kikaider series focused on the titular android, a superhero who regularly faced off against Hakaider, a villainous android. Like most tokusatsu shows, the series focused primarily on colorful spectacle, which was enough to warrant a manga adaptation and a follow-up series, Kikaider 01. These original shows were created by Shotaro Ishinomori, and they featured the same bright suits and high-concept heroics as other Ishinomori properties such as Kamen Rider and Super Sentai.
By the time the 90s rolled around, tastes had evolved, and what was once a failproof formula had started to feel tame. Kikaider still had loyal fans, but two decades of cultural changes meant that modernizing the franchise would be tricky. Luckily, Amemiya turned out to be the perfect director for the job, and the resulting Mechanical Violator Hakaider captures so much of what’s charming Continue reading →
On May 17, 2022, Raven Banner will be releasing a Blu-ray for The Sadness(read our review), the debut feature from writer/director Rob Jabbaz. The film will also making its streaming debut on the Shudder streaming platform on May 12, 2022.
Produced and filmed in Taiwan, critics are calling The Sadness “The most violent and depraed zombie movie ever made”.
The city of Taipei suddenly erupts into bloody chaos as ordinary people are compulsively driven to enact the most cruel and ghastly things they can imagine. Murder, torture, and mutilation are only the beginning… A young couple is pushed to the limits of sanity as they try to reunite amid the violence and depravity. The age Continue reading →
Director: Kwon Oh-Seung Cast: Jin Ki-Joo, Wi Ha-Joon, Park Hoon, Gil Hae-Yeon, Kim Hye-Yoon, Na Eun-Saem, Kim Yoo-Ri, Kang Sang-Won, Lee Sang-Eun, Lim Seung-Min Running Time: 100 min.
By Paul Bramhall
When looking at landmark movies that came to define Korean cinema in the 21st century, it shouldn’t take too long before Na Hong-jin’s 2008 serial killer thriller The Chaser is brought into the discussion.Sure there had been serial killer thrillers before, notably Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder from 2003, however it was The Chaser’s stripped down ticking clock narrative, pitting a former cop turned pimp versus a hammer wielding prostitute killer, that kick started a wave of similarly themed productions. Few were able to match the power and intensity of Hong-jin’s debut though, and by the time the 2020’s rolled around the Korean serial killer thriller as we’d come to know it had all but disappeared.That is until 2021, when another first-time director in the form of Kwon Oh-seung decided to go the serial killer route for his debut, Midnight.
Midnight sees Wi Ha-joon (Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, Coin Locker Girl) as a suave psychopath with a penchant for killing women.This fact is established in the opening scene, wherein he does exactly that, luring a lady who’s just wrapped up working in a secluded part of town into his van by offering a lift to the main road.Of course, she never makes it.Things don’t go quite to plan for Ha-joon with his next victim though, a girl who he stabs in the stomach and dumps in a dark alley out of sight.She’s able to muster the strength to throw her shoes into the street in the hope of grabbing someone’s attention, and it proves enough to catch the eye of a passer-by played by Jin Ki-joo (Little Forest, The Land of Happiness).The twist on the standard genre tropes come in the form of Ki-joo’s character Continue reading →
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RELEASE DATE: July 4, 2022
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