Part of what made my New Year’s Eve celebrations so memorable was watching the first full trailer for The Raid 2: Berandal. Holy fucking shit.
Director Gareth Evans’ tweets leading up to it, along with the glimpse in the original teaser released earlier last year, had me particularly pumped for the car action in it, and by golly did that deliver. And the fighting? Just as great as I’d hoped. There’s a shitload of tidbits to enjoy in the trailer, including an enticing tease of what looks to be the final fight, but my favourite of them is the baseball bat beating. Yeeesh, it’s brutal. We also get another painfully brief look at Hammer Girl, who I cannot wait to see more of. Evans has explained that Baseball Bat Man and Hammer Girl are brother and sister and have a backstory that means they’re both rather childlike, as well as being particularly deadly… Sounds cool. I hope we get to see them kick ass side-by-side at some point.
The only shot I’m not a huge fan of is the aerial shot of the huge fight in mud. It’s very impressive, but there’s so much going on I can’t drink it all in. I guess it’ll be cool once the Blu-ray comes out to watch that fight several times and focus on a different part of the screen during each. Anyhow, The Raid 2: Berandal is still very much my number one most exciting film of 2014.
Another film I’m really keen on is Jackie Chan’s Police Story 2013. It looks terrific, with a promising mix of fistfights, gunfights, car action and amazing stunts. Directed by Shen Ding (Little Big Soldier), it has no connection to Chan’s earlier Police Story movies and looks to be quite serious in tone. Chan is pulling stern Shinjuku Incident–style facial expressions, not his wacky comedic ones.
Police Story 2013 will probably make it to the big screen here, albeit briefly. You have to be quick with these films here – Firestorm came for about a week over Christmas and I bloody missed it. Don’t even get me started on Drug War again, god damn it. Another martial arts film releasing this year is Once Upon a Time in Shanghai. Directed by Wong Ching Po, this one stars Sammo Hung, Philip Ng and Andy On with choreography by Yuen Woo Ping. It looks to be very much a loving throwback to oldschool Kung Fu films.
By now you’re probably sick to death of all the Best of 2013 lists, top tens, top fifteens and all that shit. But hang on a minute, I found a couple that are noteworthy and you’ve probably not seen them. The good folk at martialartsmoviejunkie.com did a kind of tournament on their website to decide what the best on-screen fight of 2013 was. The grand champion was this:
Bad costumes, bad set design, bad acting, bad scripting, bad music… but great fighting, for about 60 seconds. It’s definitely not my favourite fight of 2013, but it’s well worth a watch, as are some of the other high ranking fight scenes in their tournament.
Over at Budomate.com, a poll was conducted to find out what their website users’ favourite fight scene of the year was, and Stone Cold Steve Austin vs Jerry Trimble from a movie called The Package came up on top. So of course I immediately went and hired it out. This direct-to-DVD movie stars Austin in the lead with Dolph Lundgren as a mean man and it’s bad, but pretty fun. The fistfights are indeed cool, but there’s a lot of that thing where one guy is punching the other guy, and the guy getting punched just lets his guard down and takes it for several blows before deciding to fight back, then the other guy does. The gunfight direction is pretty poor but I still found myself enjoying them. It’s mostly Austin’s awesome demeanour that make The Package worth watching. He duel-wields beefy sub-machineguns at one point which pleased me quite a bit.
While The Package had Budomate’s favourite fight scene, their overall favourite movie was one that I’ve eagerly awaited for several months – the Scott Adkins vehicle Ninja: Shadow of a Tear. I’m still yet to see it, fighting the temptation to order a US Blu-ray and clinging to hopes it’ll get a local release soon. There’ve been a bunch of interviews published online with both director Isaac Florentine and Adkins to promote its release on Blu-ray, DVD and streaming in the US. They make for thoroughly good reading – google a few while you’re pretending to work at your desk. One of the better interviews was a great episode of the Behind The Mask podcast. Check out the whole thing (embedded below), but here’s an excerpt that I found really interesting, and a bit sad:
BEHIND THE MASK: Big budget Hollywood action movies aren’t as pure. Do you think the action genre – as far as the mainstream is concerned – is dying? Or are we on the verge of a revival, with films like ‘The Raid’?
ISAAC FLORENTINE: The Raid, I don’t know if that is mainstream, unfortunately.
Yeah it was definitely an indie film. But I mean, at least action is thriving somewhere, because box office figures are proving otherwise with the Arnie and Sly movies.
Here is something that I discovered. Nu Image has done so many movies, the Undisputed movies, etc. I told them, “let’s do something with Tony Jaa”. They looked into the numbers and talked to the buyers and said no. I point to The Raid and Ong Bak, and they tell me, “Isaac, those movies hardly made any money in America. They are totally marginal for us, even as genre lovers that appreciate these movies, we appreciate their beauty. But for the mainstream it means nothing.”
“I had a chance to watch Ninja: Shadow of a Tear with people that like the genre, festival people, and they loved it. I saw it with mainstream audiences, people that go to the mall and are happy seeing any other movie, they didn’t care. It doesn’t mean nothing for them that you see a fight that is filmed all in one shot or there are a million cuts, or if the technique is clean or not clean. They don’t care. I think by now the audience is used to these watered down, huge movies that are all CGI, they all look and sound the same, in the fights you don’t see what is going on as it’s all cut cut cut. That’s what they are being fed. There’s a herd mentality that comes into it, they’ll go buy a ticket and say it’s good, even though it’s not good.”
Both Adkins and Florentine are crying for help from their fans, too. Help in the form of money. Basically, we need to get money back to these guys in order for them to continue servicing us discerning action fans with the premium entertainment they provide. If we want to see an Undisputed 4 and Ninja 3, and we do, we need to actually pay to see Ninja: Shadow of a Tear. I don’t want to do a soapbox thing here, I’m far from an anti-piracy crusader, but it’s these smaller movies that don’t make much in cinemas that will die if they don’t make any money off home release. They’re much, much more vulnerable than the big studio trash Florentine describes above. Even if you can’t wait for the local release, don’t want to buy one off Amazon and do download a copy, please then buy the thing when it is finally released here. If we all do that, hopefully we’ll be treated to more action of this quality. Plus these movies are awesome to have on Blu-ray, just to put on your favourite fights in beautiful 1080p when you have a mate or two over, preaching the quality action gospel to them.
That bloke there doing the sweet as Die Hard reference is The Dead Lands director Toa Fraser on the last day of that film’s 2013 shoot. They’re back into production now and I’d highly recommend following Fraser on Twitter; he posts cool updates about the film and film in general. I don’t have any further updates from this one following my last blog, except that I discovered the film’s international sales (excluding Aussie and NZ) are being handled by XYZ Films. This is another reason to be excited about it, as this company is responsible for getting some particularly wonderful genre films in front of eyeballs, and they’re saying all the right things… “XYZ Films has been working closely with Fraser … to design action sequences featuring a lot of hand to hand Maori combat, very similar to the way The Raid brought Silat to the screen for the first time”.
Universal has announced their plans for Fast & Furious 7 after the tragic death of Paul Walker. The film’s release has been pushed from midway through this year to April 2015. According to online reports, Walker’s character Brian O’Connor will be “retired in a way… [which] will satisfy fans of the franchise and make use of the existing footage of Walker”. So it sounds like he won’t be killed off and will instead leave the gang and its wild vehicular warfare ways, which probably means Mia Toretto – his wife played by Jordana Brewster and sister of Vin Diesel’s character Dominic Toretto – will go with him, and their son. Or will it? Interesting.
The above clip is a particularly brutal one released for upcoming female fight film Raze, starring Zoe Bell. Still no word on a local release, but by crikey I hope it comes here. After a festival run last year, it’s being released in cinemas and streaming in the US this month. Bell and a few others involved with the film have done some press to support the release which give further details. “We made a film that doesn’t get done a lot, we wanted real fight and real emotions, and the outcome was shocking to people,” Bell told Shockya.com when asked if the film was somehow a metaphor to female exploitation. “Just the fact that this film has made people ask questions like yours, is a statement in itself about the role of women in society.” There’s been more talk of Bell starring in an Expenda-belles movie, too, but she’s not confirmed this herself. She’s definitely keen though.
I dipped into my favourite Charles Bronson film again recently, which is not Once Upon a Time in the West, but rather Death Wish 3. It’s to me more of a comedy than an action film, but it is most certainly an action film, one belonging to the divine sub-genre of vigilante movies and from the legendary studio that was Cannon Films. The hard-edged grittiness and semblance of realism of the first two Death Wish films is removed for Paul Kersey’s third murderous crusade against criminals, with the ludicrousness and bodycount getting ramped way up to glorious mid-80s Rambo and Commando levels. But it’s much more hilariously silly than even those silly fun movies; seriously, I can’t recommend this one enough.
In it, Kersey travels to New York and goes up against a bizarre street gang that look like they’ve wondered in from the set of Zardoz. They’re a multicultural bunch that identify themselves with red and black facepaint and are led by a feeble-looking chap with a disgusting reverse mohawk. One of his gang members is named The Giggler. Another is Bill from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Kersey dispatches hundreds of these people, whom he usually refers to as ‘creeps’, with various weapons including an enormous 8 inch barrel Wildey Hunter pistol, a couple of WWII mounted machineguns, a rocket launcher and Home Alone-style booby traps. As that list suggests, Death Wish 3 ascends to all-out war by its climax. There’s a completely insane amount of carnage and explosions going on and all the while Bronson’s facial expression never changes from a vaguely interested scowl. The acting is lovably bad, but the braindead writing is what elevates this film to its extreme levels of enjoyment. For a start, the NYPD chief not only condones Kersey’s war against the creeps, he blackmails him into starting it. At some point Kersey forms an intimate relationship a woman young enough to be his granddaughter and, naturally, she is murdered shortly thereafter. Civilians cartoonishly cheer Kersey on as he massacres criminals, eventually joining in with him and gunning down scum of their own. It’s amazing.
You don’t need to have seen the prior movies and Death Wish 3 is easily available from DVD places around the nation. Go watch it.
