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”
What a disappointing movie. With a title like Venomous and a poster featuring a giant snake’s head on the attack, I was expecting this direct-to-video cheapie to be a ripoff of Anaconda. Instead, it’s a ripoff of Outbreak. All the epidemiological plot points are there, and every character has an analogue. But, Treat Williams is no Dustin Hoffman, Mary Page Keller is no Rene Russo, Hannes Jaenicke is no Kevin Spacey (are we allowed to like his acting again, yet?), and Geoff Pierson is no frickin’ Morgan Freeman.
It’s Friday the 13th! In October! Missile Test couldn’t possibly let the day go by without watching a Friday the 13th flick, and this one is a doozy. By 2001, the original Friday the 13th franchise was on its last legs. The producers, recognizing that the old formula had been ground into dust by overuse, decided to shake things up. And by shake things up, I mean they all contracted serious cases of the awfuckits and sent their franchise property into space. That’s right, no more summer camp and no more Crystal Lake. This film takes place in outer space…in the future. Hell yeah.
John Carpenter is one of my favorite directors. He’s not on the Mount Rushmore of filmmakers, but his best films can be thought of as eminently watchable. They are respected. They are known and successful enough that a lot have been remade. But he also has some films that are not so good. It would be easy to blame Carpenter’s poorer quality films on budget, but that does not compute. Carpenter worked magic with the measly budgets he had in Halloween and Escape from New York. Rather, something happened in the late 1980s, starting with Prince of Darkness in 1987, that precipitated a steady decline. There were still sparks of life in his films, but that eminently watchable quality of his films seemed to fly away. In its place was substituted cheapness, sometimes of rank quality, and this turn was inexplicable from a filmmaker who had done so much with so little throughout his career.
What a putrid, rotten mess of a movie. I was really hoping before I sat down to watch this movie for Stallone Month that it was not as bad as I remembered — that time had distorted what I recalled being one of the worst films I have ever seen. As it turned out, this memory was a reliable one. I hate this movie. I haven’t hated a movie this much since I reviewed Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave. In fact, this movie joins the short list of films I absolutely despise.