Missile Test

A Chinese Ghost Story

A Chinese Ghost Story, from Hong Kong actor, stuntman, and filmmaker Siu-Ting Ching (screenplay by Songling Pu and Kai-Chi Yuen), is, according to the internet, a xianxia film. Xianxia are ‘closely related to the wuxia and shenmo genres.’ There is some cultural illiteracy here, on my part, but those strange new terms basically mean ‘based within Chinese mythology.’ Now we’re getting somewhere. If one has seen a Hong Kong martial arts flick that takes place before the emergence of modern China, one will be familiar with the look and feel of A Chinese Ghost Story. It’s a piece of fantasy, encompassing demons and the supernatural, with Hong Kong martial arts movie trickery thrown in, and comedy to keep things light.

The movie follows Leslie Cheung as Ling Choi San, a debt collector suffering from multiple slapstick maladies, who makes the mistake of spending a night in a haunted temple. There, he meets Yin Chek Ha (Wu Ma), a swordsman who retired from the civil service in disgust at the corruption, and now spends his time ridding the country of evil spirits. Yin Chek Ha is at the temple because it has recently been taken over by an evil tree demon (Siu-Ming Lau). All the inhabitants and caretakers have been killed and turned into stop motion zombies by the tree demon. It has also seized some recently deceased souls, which it uses to capture more innocent people to feed its insatiable appetite. Continue reading “A Chinese Ghost Story”

Silent Night, Deadly Night

People get all twisted over small stuff. We see it often. A large chunk of modern media thrives on the outrage machine. It drives engagement, sputters out after a week or so, then the talking heads find something else with which to rile up the masses. This has been going on for a long time. Even way back in 1984, before the World Wide Web kicked the machine into overdrive, we were carving out chunks of our lives to be outrageously pissed at something that didn’t matter.

Silent Night, Deadly Night, the classic slasher flick from director Charles E. Sellier Jr., caught the attention of the outrage machine. Groups picketed theaters that were showing it, and Phil Donahue dedicated an episode of his talkshow to it. Why? Because the killer in this movie dresses as Santa Claus. That was it. That was the outrage. Santa was such a sacred cow to enough people that they were offended by the very idea of a killer Santa. The behavior of a fictional character was an attack on an institution — Christmas — that they held dear. This is familiar ground today for a certain subset of cable news viewers, but what a stupid thing to get angry about. The anger got so intense that the film was pulled from distribution after only a couple of weeks, home video releases were few, and the intact film was in danger of being lost, despite cult success and a string of sequels. Anyway… Continue reading “Silent Night, Deadly Night”

Whistle

Whistle, the 2025 horror film from writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy, is something of a throwback. The conceit of a cursed object whose use brings unexpected, and sometimes ironic, death was a more common theme in horror of decades past. Paired with a cast of teenagers, films like this have been a rich breeding ground of explorations into coming of age and the sudden salience of one’s mortality. There’s a reason most of these films have young protagonists. Done correctly, these flicks give the young’uns serious chills. Done even more correctly, there is plenty of bloody mayhem for the gorehounds among us. Continue reading “Whistle”

Eww.

The Corpse Vanishes

Sixty-four minutes. That’s it. The Corpse Vanishes, one of five movies featuring Bela Lugosi in 1942, uses just sixty-four minutes to tell its story. That’s not unusual for the time, but there is a ruthless efficiency to this flick that many others lack. Director Wallace Fox made sure there was nary a wasted frame in this movie, even though he filmed the same opening twice.

A strange occurrence of serial criminality has descended on the city. Brides are dying at the altar, then men, posing as undertakers, take away the corpse, never to be seen again. The film opens at one of these weddings. The bride swoons, a doctor pronounces her dead, and the body is taken, Bela Lugosi’s leering face the only clue to her fate. Then, just minutes later, another wedding with the same outcome, only this one was attended by Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters), an intrepid reporter from the local paper. Continue reading “The Corpse Vanishes”

Moonbase

There is the nucleus of a good movie in Moonbase, the 1997 sci-fi thriller from director Paolo Mazzucato and screenwriters Brian DiMuccio and Dino Vendini. It doesn’t score high in the originality sweepstakes, but it is one of the vast breed of films that could be summarized as, “Die Hard on a…” In this case, it’s Die Hard on the moon. There is a band of bad guys with a charismatic leader who invade and occupy a confined space. They hold people hostage. There is one unlikely hero that can save the day. Well, at least, this flick teases the one hero. What viewers get is more of an ensemble effort, but that’s just a small detail. It’s the big stuff that dooms this flick. Continue reading “Moonbase”

Miami Connection

What an incredible shitty movie. I don’t mean incredibly shitty, although it is, but an incredible example of substandard cinema. It’s inept and outrageous in all the right spots. Behind it is yet another tale of filmmaking perseverance that laughs in the face of personal doubts and industry gatekeepers. It’s not a good movie, but it is entertaining, and that is the first purpose of film.

According to the internet, so it must be true, Korean immigrant and Orlando businessman Y.K. Kim, who owned a number of taekwondo studios in the area, appeared on a South Korean talkshow promoting a book on taekwondo. One of the viewers happened to be Woo-sang Park, a filmmaker with over a dozen credits. Park was inspired by Kim’s interview, contacted him, and convinced him to collaborate on a movie. Kim took to the project with gusto, working on the story, raising money using his business as collateral, working hard to try and get distribution, and, after Park moved on to other projects, directing reshoots. The result was Miami Connection. Continue reading “Miami Connection”

Omega Syndrome

We usually prefer our 1980s shitty action flicks to have come from Cannon or Action International Pictures. Those two companies have warmed up many a chilly night in the Missile Test compound. But, New World Pictures, Roger Corman’s behemoth, could be counted on to take a break from its regularly scheduled horror, sci-fi, and good movies, to churn out a suitable action stinker.

Today’s film is Omega Syndrome, which is obscure enough that it isn’t, as of this writing, on the list of New World Pictures’ films on their Wikipedia page. But, their logo is right there at the beginning of the movie. Continue reading “Omega Syndrome”

Electric Dragon 80,000V

Electric Dragon 80,000V movie poster Here at Missile Test, we love films with brevity. Keep it tight, don’t overstay one’s welcome, and try not to have multiple points after denouement when the credits could have begun to roll. We get it. Film is art, and artists have something to say. Cutting a film can feel like lopping limbs off of their own children. But there is little worse in film than having to sit through bloat. That won’t be a problem with Electric Dragon 80,000V, from Japanese filmmaker Gakuryu Ishii. This film clocks in at a brisk fifty-five minutes, and if a viewer can’t sit still for that long, it isn’t Ishii’s fault.

Dragon is one of those Japanese sci-fi flicks from the era (it was released in 2001) that relies on frenetic pace and cyberpunk visuals to tell the story. There is a story, but it’s peripheral to the visual dance of the movie.

Tadanobu Asano plays Dragon Eye Morrison, a young man whose violent tendencies were treated with electro-shock therapy, leaving him with superhuman abilities to throw electricity around. He finds inner peace by playing wild electric guitar, and spends his free time hunting down lost lizards in the back alleys and storm drains of urban Japan. This guy is the protagonist. Continue reading “Electric Dragon 80,000V”