• Gambling Ghost
• Game Kids
• Ghost In The Shell
• Golden Swallow, The
• Great Massacre, The

Gambling Ghost

Sammo Hung plays three roles as grandfather, father and son... the latter two of whom are in gambling trouble with gangsters, and are helped out of it by the ghost of grandfather. Except for the opening scene, this comedy bears no resemblance to the God Of Gamblers series.

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Game Kids

Ah, yes... the old mistaken identiy mix-up plot. It's worked in literature and film many times over the decades, and it works again here. Andy Lau appears in both the lead role... a young, childlike man trying to get from mainland China to Hong Kong with some Chinese government officials after him... and in a cameo, as a man who is his double in every way... except that he's a dwarf. Where the inevitable comic chaos comes in is this: a high-ranking mobster dies, and on his deathbed recommends his brother (Andy the dwarf) as his ideal replacement. The gang sends for him and he arrives at the airport at exactly the same time "regular Andy" is there, and... well, you can guess the rest. As Andy, mistaken as being "Dragon" (whom they were actually waiting for) is taken into the gang and becomes one of them (a mobster's daughter even falls in love with him and wants to marry him), he knows he doesn't belong... but he's living too much of the high-life to tell anyone that, and he luckily has just enough of the right kind of skills to fool his new companions. Lau seldom is seen in a role this silly... it's more the kind of thing you expect from Stephen Chau... but he seems very at ease with all the foolishness, having a grand time playing a chronological adult whose greatest joys in life are still teen-age things like Batman paraphernalia and video games. You'll shakes your head in astonishment, too, at his several scenes as the real "Dragon"... things don't get much sillier than a barely four-foot Andy Lau running from and fighting full-size opponents. This is the kind of movie in which we see a band playing a tune live in a night club in which the lead instrument is the saxophone, and when we notice that there's no saxophone player on stage, we just shrug it off, because that makes as much sense as anything else in the film. For a change, though, that's a good thing. Not too mention a very funny thing.

Also starring Aaron Kwok, Rosamund Kwan, Ng Man Tat and Sandra Ng. Directed by Gordon Chan. (Review written: 8/14/02)

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Ghost In The Shell

One of the truly legendary Anime films of the past decade, and for good reason. Fans of "Cyber-punk" science-fiction writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have seen their share of attempts to recreate those writers' kinds of worlds on the movie screen, the vast majority of them being collossal failures. Not this time. In a world of the indefinite future, it's not at all uncommon for a police officer to have had computer enhancement on their brains, and mechanical enhancement of their bodies, until they're more human than machine (this is true not only of the police). This is the story of two such police officers who are tracking down a sinister character known as the "Puppet Master," who has downloaded his consciousness into a mechanical being of SOME kind... but nobody knows for sure what. There's no shortage of dazzling action, but in the midst of all that (without ever slowing down the story), you get characters philosophizing about how much of their mind of body can be changed... or combined with another, in some cases... without losing the essential quality that makes them "themself," not to mention the ever-popular "what exactly is it that makes a human?" (Philip K. Dick would love this film). Add to this the numerous scenes that "take place" entirely inside computers and on various electronic systems, and you have one of the most thoughtful, intelligent action movies you'll ever see. Not very many films will satisfy both a 14-year-old boy AND an older viewer looking for a little something more, but Ghost In The Shell does the job quite effectively.

Directed by Mamoru Oshii. (Review written: 7/10/02)

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The Golden Swallow

Scholar Anthony Wong is understandably stunned to learn that the beautiful young woman he has married is a former demon in the service of an evil, man-eating (literally) tree demon he once battled nearly to the death, and that she also once took the form of a golden swallow that he rescued from a group of mischievous boys. He's adjusted to this shock remarkably well, though, UNTIL the tree demon returns, determined both to return his wife (Cherie Chung) to her service, and to finish off that long-ago battle with Wong. A pair of Taoist priests played by Richard Ng and Eric Tsang MIGHT be able to help him, if they can just stop fighting amongst themselves over who's the better-looking and who has the best martial arts skills. Fans of the Chinese Ghost Story movies will be on familiar ground here, with flying ghosts and swordsmen, earth-shattering duels of magic, and frequent trips from the realm of mortals to that of spirits and back again. The Golden Swallow juggles these story elements, which it handles just about on a par with those more famous films, with an amusing string of comic relief sequences with Ng and Tsang as the Laurel and Hardy of swordplay. And if you think you know enough about how these ghost movies work to figure out what's going to happen next... well, maybe you do, but this film may still have a surprise or two in store for you. If you enjoy a good action-packed journey into the realm of the supernatural mixed with a bit of slapstick comedy, The Golden Swallow is a film you won't want to miss.

Director: O Sing Pui (1987)

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The Great Massacre

Part of a series of movie videos hosted by famous film ninja Sho Kosugi under the umbrella title Ninja Theatre, this film (which features no ninjas) is an absolutely hysterical masterpiece of comedy. Don't let the fact that it wasn't intended to be funny keep you from laughing. Some may remember an old Woody Allen movie called What's Up Tiger Lily, in which he dubbed deliberately funny new dialogue onto a "serious" Japanese spy movie. That was a funny movie, but this one is much funnier. Plot? PLOT, you ask? Trying to get all the "plot" strands of this movie tied together and making sense is somewhat like that remark JFK once made about dealing with bureaucracy... it's like trying to nail jello to a wall. This film could actually make Wong Jing at his most incoherent look meticulously plotted. But it SEEMS to be something about a noble warrior named Shau Shek, who just wants to marry his love Su Yee and live in peace, but finds this diffictult as the result of sinister forces who are committing murders across the land and trying to pin them on him. (It's supposed to help them rule the land eventually, somehow... don't ask why, just enjoy). To list all the ways in which The Great Massacre goes off track in hilarious fashion would require an entire book as long as The Tale Of Genji. But here are just a very few: dubbing so awful you see characters speaking long before they ever open their mouths (and how about those "face to face" conversations while characters face opposite directions?), editing for the American release so choppy you get the impression this might actually be put together from three or four completely different unrelated films, and dialogue with pauses so large you could drive a truck through them ("are you"... long pause... "trying to tell me"... LONGER pause... "that I'll have to"... INSANELY long pause... "wait until"... pause long enough for you to fly off for a two week vacation... "he tries to kill me?"). It's hard to say how serious a film this was before the American distributors got ahold of it... it would almost HAVE TO have been a much more straight-ahead swordplay film. But what we have here is truly a masterpiece of a very unique kind... a wonderfully awful piece of bad cinema that absolutely deserves to be ranked right up there with the classics of the genre like Plan 9 From Outer Space. You might want to put some padding on your forehead before watching it, because you will be constantly slapping your head and exclaiming "WHAT??!!" in scene after scene. If only more INTENDED comedies were as funny as The Great Massacre.

Starring Leung Ka Yuen, Mang Fai, Yang Chu Chu and Ko Fair. Directed by Wang Yue. (Review written: 1/6/03)

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