Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi may have made megabucks directing the overrated Spider-Man trilogy, but good-natured, in-your-face horror is where his heart lies, and Drag Me to Hell is a welcome return to his Evil Dead days of joyous moviemaking. Alison Lohman is in charge of bank loans but refuses to oblige an old woman who turns out to have infernal connections. It’s all (ahem) downhill from there. Justin Long plays Lohman’s boyfriend, and has about as much success withstanding Pure Evil as he did in Jeepers Creepers.
Hatchet
Shot three years ago, this amalgam of Southern Comfort and Friday the 13th is being rushed into theaters with little advertising, but that may not be a reason to avoid it; it is, after all, something that Sam Raimi might have made when he was a lot younger. A bunch of youngsters in New Orleans for Mardi Gras fall foul of a local psycho in this fanboy’s dream of a cast including Kane Hodder (Jason in the later Friday the 13th films) as the unwelcoming southerner Victor Crowley, Robert Englund (Freddy Kreuger), the wonderful Tony Todd (Candyman) as “Reverend Zombie” and special effects ace/director John Carl Beuchler. It’s not clear if the Taiwan release is the US R-rated or unrated version. Starts tomorrow.
Grace Is Gone
The American love of the road movie continues as John Cusack takes his daughters way, way out of town (Florida) to find a way to tell them that their mother, a soldier, was killed in Iraq. A brief diversion sees Cusack visit his anti-war brother, but apart from that all the drama is in the anticipation of a sad revelation for the children and Cusack coming to terms with his loss. Reviewers had problems with the production qualities of this movie, but plenty of nice things to say about the cast.
Jerichow
Intriguing film about a Turkish small businessman in the east German town of Jerichow who married a woman by paying off her debts and now must hire a driver/minder — a rather unsettling disgraced soldier — to help him make ends meet. The Postman Always Rings Twice is the frame as the wife and the minder, both Germans, get it on behind our wistful hero’s back, but for this movie lust takes a back seat to the worthlessness of money as a measure of self-worth.
All’s Well Ends Well 2009 (家有囍事2009)
The latest entry in this Hong Kong comedy series features returning producer-star Raymond Wong (黃百鳴) and Sandra Ng (吳君如), a slew of in-jokes and middling celebrities. Ng is a stubbornly single professional woman whose marital status is blocking other family members from tying the knot. Enter matchmaker Louis Koo (古天樂). The curious thing about this film is that it was a successful Lunar New Year release in Hong Kong but has taken almost six months to get here. Does it take this long for a film with the China market in mind to get dubbed into Mandarin?
Pleasure Factory
Set in Singapore’s Geylang red light district and starring Taiwan’s Yang Kui-mei (楊貴媚), this undernourished tale from 2007 of prostitutes and their clients mixes artiness and docudrama to superficial effect. Variety magazine was the most dismissive, blasting every aspect of production, direction and acting and concluding that Pleasure Factory “borders on the inept.” A shame, really, because the grim subject matter is full of opportunities. Starts tomorrow.
Cineplex 46th Anniversary Festival
Local distributor Cineplex thinks 46 is a number worth celebrating, and it certainly is for audiences that like a bit of eroticism and sex in their art house movie diet. The shame of it is that the films selected are very recent; what about a 40-year-old release? Still, there’s good stuff here: Claude Lelouch’s Chances or Coincidences, Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Goya’s Ghosts, Salsa, The Whore and the Whale, Sex and Lucia, Summer Palace (頤和園) and a cut version of Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. Screening at the Majestic theater in Ximending until July 17.
Killer Bees
A German TV movie gets a minor theatrical release in which errant scientists and experiments trigger a possible cataclysm, resulting in a hunt for the queen bee before everything is lost. That’s funny ... isn’t the disappearance of bees supposed to be a serious ecological problem? Nothing in the film can match the poster, which has a human hand enveloped by angry insects and seems to have been borrowed from a US production with similar content. Original title: Die Bienen: Toedliche Bedrohung.
Der Bibelcode
Another German TV movie, this time ripping off The Da Vinci Code, in which the pope is implicated in a conspiracy that has our heroes globe-hopping with killers in tow until the final confrontation (not with the Antichrist, sadly; this is not The Final Conflict). Some Taiwan sources list this release as Bible Code II, but it should not be confused with the US documentary of the same name. One final warning: the original version runs for three hours in two parts, so Heaven knows what kind of chopped-up version is screening here.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located