Twistedwing Recommends... Deer Tick 'The Black Dirt Sessions' (CD) ****

Twistedwing Recommends... The Crazies (DVD) ****

"A highly polished little zombie-shocker with plenty of fun to be had."

REVIEW: THE TREASURE HUNTER (DVD) **

Title: The Treasure Hunter

Release date: 12th July 2010

Certificate: 15
Running time: 102 mins
Director: Yen-ping Chu
Starring: Chiling Lin, Jay Chou, Eric Tsang, Daoming Chen
Genre: Action/Adventure/Romance
Studio: E1
Format: DVD
Country: Taiwan

When Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer) pulled out of The Green Hornet reinvention scheduled for release in 2011, many were left baffled by director Michael Gondry’s decision to cast Jay Chou, gargantuan pop star, as Kato; stepping into the shoes movie phenomenon Bruce Lee left behind. With Seth Rogen already mysteriously cast as The Hornet (he did write the screenplay) anticipation for its release is slightly muted. The Treasure Hunter, starring Chou and available to buy this month, provides the perfect opportunity to assess his acting credentials in a film billed as ‘Indiana Jones meets The Mummy’…

Lan Ting (Red Cliff’s Chiling Lin), an adventure novelist living in the City, agrees to meet up with her estranged father; the man she hasn’t forgiven for leaving home so he could explore ancient ruins instead of raising a family. A collision on route ensures she never sees her father, awakening days later in a desert, held hostage, used as a bargaining tool for an ancient map that will lead her captors to a secret tomb filled with treasures.

Met instead by Ting’s childhood friend Qiaofei (Chou), with news of her father’s mysterious demise and the map her enemies have been seeking, she is attacked, along with the others, by more furtive foes hell-bent on retrieving the map and killing all those that have seen it. Narrowly escaping, the custodians and convicts must join forces and overcome their differences if they are to banish the ghosts of old and ultimately prevail…

Director Yen-ping Chu must have thought he had potential gold in his hands by pairing two of Taiwan’s hottest properties together for this supposedly exhilarating desert romp. Sadly, although Jay Chou and Chiling Lin are both attractive to look at and handle their roles more than adequately, they’re let down by a nonsensical story in which too many characters spend the duration of the film doing very little. It wouldn’t be so bad if the twosome had some kind of chemistry going on, but their relationship is more wooden than Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman’s in Attack of the Clones.

Chou spends the majority of the movie with the same glum facial expression, no matter what emotion he’s supposed to be conveying, whilst Lan Ting seems almost worried to get too close to her co-star in case she upsets his adoring teenage fan base. Fortunately, seeing as the film is a cross between Indiana Jones and The Mummy, at least the viewer will be rewarded with tremendous action and adventure, right?

Well, not quite. Whilst the CGI is easy on the eye, obvious wire-work ruins the few fight scenes we are forced to endure. Chou’s performance suffers heavily with this, the punches he throws are tamer than those witnessed on a school playground; Bruce Lee has nothing to fear whatsoever. Admittedly, the duel between Qiaofei and a masked Dao Dao is briefly entertaining, but Chu’s decision to have a young boy play guitar during it is simply baffling.

Considering its running time, there are surprisingly few action scenes. The Sandstorm Legion offer some menace but they also provide the film with its first of many illogicalities; can horses really outrun a car and a motorcycle? The finale, located in the lost tomb, finally raises some interest, involving a zombie and some white-haired ghosts, but it suffers from similar flaws; the scenes just aren’t long enough and lack any kind of tension. All too often characters are introduced to offer brief conflict; the Eagle of the Desert is much talked about during the opening scenes, but the duel between him and Qiaofei is lost in a sandstorm of sentimentality.

Lan Ting’s character infuriates simply because the death of her father has little impact on her persona. She basically grieves for two minutes, accepts it and moves on. Even when they are confronted by his apparent murderer, more of a mummy than a man, she’s primarily concerned about hitting the deadline for her next novel, or whether Qiaofei still loves her after all these years. As for the murderous mummy, another villain popping up to satisfy the audiences need for Chou to play tough, the Andrex puppy would probably offer more resistance.

Director Yen-ping Chu never commits to a particular tone, somehow managing to steal the worst parts from films of similar ilk, molding them into a bland, pointless experience. The amount of money spent to achieve this is staggeringly obvious; some of the visuals are a feast for the eyes. But while he handles the visual aspect of the film with style, wire-work aside, he is rather careless with the amount of annoying, and frustratingly redundant performances – Pork Rib (Eric Tsang) is supposedly the clown of the piece, but he’s so over the top it hurts, and others drift in and out offering very little to a plot lacking in mystery, suspense or drama.

Playing tribute to Indiana Jones and The Mummy, The Treasure Hunter manages to plunder all of the worst bits from both to create a mess of a movie. Devoid of originality, plot and action, only die-hard Jay Chou fans will find anything here worth to treasure.

MEAT GRINDER: EXCLUSIVE SHOTS

REVIEW: MEAT GRINDER (DVD)

Revenge is often a dish best eaten cold. Just ask Fruit Chan, director of Dumplings (2004), originally conceived as one chapter of a three-part horror omnibus (Three… Extremes) before he served up more of the same dark satire, just in larger portions, making the bloated feature-length even harder to swallow. Tiwa Moeithaisong’s ‘Meat Grinder’ follows a similar recipe, and now ominously appears on our menus for the first time.

A young man, searching for his fiancé Aoi in 1970’s Thailand, confronts her employee Buss (Mai Charoenpura), a troubled woman haunted by memories of her horrific upbringing. Pushing Buss too far, he is brutally dealt with, tacked to a wooden floor by his fingernails, left to marinade for the foreseeable future. Whilst he bravely tries to escape, a riot on the streets outside her home offers Buss a unique business opportunity – the lifeless body of a man dumped in her noodle-cart the missing ingredient to her new business venture; her very own noodle shop, just like the one her mother once owned.

Using her old lady’s unconventional recipes and techniques (grinding human flesh to make the perfect meat) her noodle dishes are an instant success. The restaurant quickly becomes one of the hottest eateries in town, introducing Buss to Attapon, a young man who offers her the warmth she’s always craved. But when his desire to seek out his missing friend gives rise to a grim discovery, Buss’s past catches up with her again; love and happiness replaced on the specials board with bloody retribution…

Horror films have always been full of nasty, uncongenial imagery - a lot of the most foul, unrepentant violence aimed at women. While American studios continue with this trend, bombarding us with torture porn, copying the success of the Hostel and Saw series’ with pale franchises, world cinema has responded with much more meatier offerings, quite literally.

In the striking opening sequence to Meat Grinder we watch the grainy footage of a victim being dispactched, chopped and prepared in gloriously sadistic detail. Five minutes in, a young man searching for his fiance has his leg hacked off before being nailed to the floor in gruesome, look away now, close-up. Director Tiwa Moeithaisong certainly knows how to get right down to business, leaving the viewer in no doubt as to where this one is heading.

Or perhaps not, because while the film is genuinely stomach churning throughout (Buss’s landlord and his flunkeys foolishly demanding unpaid rent the highlight), Moeithaisong has managed to sidestep the torture-porn tag by infusing the blood and gore with an engaging story, intertwined by a clever plot structure that enables to hold the viewer’s interest.

Flashbacks aren’t just used to explain Buss’s harrowing past. By skipping several scenes before retelling them out of sequence, suspense is created by disorientating the audience but never baffling them. This is largely down to the striking visuals, jumping from colour to monochrome and then back again, edited seamlessly so that the viewer never loses their bearings. The only criticism with the constant use of flashbacks is that by the final act you could be left completely drained by the countless atrocities Buss has had to endure since childhood.

Complete with atmospheric visuals (Buss’s world is more blue than Pandora) and a soundtrack that switches from romantic love songs to very uncomfortable haunting melodies (the opening score cannot be bettered), Meat Grinder is surprisingly crafted with an extreme amount of care; its love montage halfway through dares to include such deliberate audience provocations as blood and mutilation mixed with kinky nudity and loving massages. Yet it works, and is one of the most memorable scenes, revealing a twist that, although much too familiar these days, packs a timely emotional punch.

Mai Charoenpura handles her role superbly with a brooding menace; she’s at her most interesting before the slightly disappointing and ever so predictable finale (the repetitive giggling of Buss’s inner thoughts also begin to grate). Then there’s the character Nid, a neighbour’s daughter who foolishly begins a relationship with Attapon not long after his break-up with Buss. Despite little screen-time, she somehow fashions more than enough empathy in time for the final act. Maybe it’s because she is easy on the eye or because Buss is a complete fruitcake, but it cleverly moves the story on to the next level just as you start to wonder quite where this film has left to go.

Admittedly there’s a ring of familiarity about almost everything on offer here, and how Buss manages to keep the place a secret from the police is a question oddly left unanswered, but it never ends up coming off as torture porn for lazy horror junkies. Instead, it manages to grip from its first shot, continuing with a succession of gory, sometimes suspenseful, shock-scare scenes, emotional punch, and some fine performances from the mostly revered characters.

Relying more on mood rather than over the top visuals, this is a return to the intelligent side of exploitation horror. Refreshingly marinated with an intriguing story to give it flavour, and coupled with lashings and lashings of gory mayhem, Meat Grinder is an absolute treat from start to finish.

FILM REVIEW: FREEZER (DVD) ****

Title: Freezer

Release date: 2002

Certificate: 18
Running time: 103 mins
Director: Takashi Ishii
Starring: Harumi Inoue, Naoto Takenaka, Kazuki Kitamura, Shingo Tsurumi
Genre: Thriller
Format: DVD
Country: Japan

At the start of the millennium exploitation movies were few and far between. Films such as I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left and The Virgin Spring had left the subgenre with little room to breathe. Unsurprising then, that Takashi Ishii briefly moved away from the exploitation genre that dominated his early works and directed Gonin, making him an international name. His films have always been largely preoccupied with revenge, and Freezer was to be no exception. Whereas Irreversible, released two years later, drew critical acclaim mainly for not glorifying the life that had been destroyed but to mourn it, Freezer was first to shift the focus from gory revenge and concentrate on the victim as she struggled to cope with the memories she thought she had buried deep inside her. Irreversible may be more celebrated but Freezer also demands your attention.

Chirhiro, a beautiful girl, has a new life in Tokyo, having escaped the memories of being raped by three men while they filmed the vicious attack five years earlier. Engaged to one of her work colleagues, Yusuke, she has a lot to look forward to, when, without warning, one of the rapists appears and threatens to turn her life into a living hell unless she does what he says. Armed with a videotape and photographs of the rape to keep her in line, with news that the other two rapists are on their way for a horrifying reunion, the tormentor’s presence is all too much. Pushed to the limits of despair, Chirhiro must resort to extreme acts of revenge if she is to destroy the ghosts from her past forever…

Big Brother, the once inventive, now much maligned reality game-show was first broadcast in 2000; the same year Freezer hit Japanese cinemas. The largely objective camera viewpoint used in it is also favoured by Ishii; Freezer works because the audience is drawn into its oppressive surroundings, their voyeuristic stance enhanced by wide-angle lenses used to unsettling effect. An early sequence sees Chirhiro and her useless boyfriend Yusuke laughing and joking as they enjoy an evening meal out with work colleagues. Partly improvised, its realism creates enough empathy in that one scene alone. The message is clear: this could happen to anyone.

Filmed and paced as an art film but crammed with nudity and violence, this is one of the most distinctive and most tasteful entries in the exploitation genre, simply because of the performance by the striking Harumi Inoue. Her natural beauty, clearly evident here, isn’t enough to elicit sympathy for her plight. It’s true she makes some questionable decisions, at one point reverting to the brainless woman who had allowed her tormentors to blackmail her days earlier. But its hard, and ultimately interesting, to understand and accept the decision-making from a person in such a futile position. If Chirhiro was to simply bludgeon every aggressor to death then she would lack the personality that differentiates her from her foes. Obviously, she wants revenge, and the audience is rooting for that too, but it’s her spiral into madness that takes this film onto another level.

Although the three villains are all slightly in your face and over the top (Kitamura Kazuki’s character Hirokawa gets it just about right with a charming nastiness) it’s Shunsuke Matsuoka who has the painful job of trying to put some personality into Chirhiro’s future husband. Barely in it from the get go, when he is confronted by the mysterious stranger manhandling his girlfriend in his own workplace he simply allows it to happen like a complete nonentity; he eventually has the courage to visit her for answers, but on discovering the news that Chirhiro’s new flat-mate raped her, instead of flying off the handle and letting rip, he looks completely broken hearted and walks away from it all, leaving her alone with the man she fears most. It’s as if his character was only written in the script to allow for a brutal final act.

Takashi Ishii builds the suspense masterfully in the first (her mad pursuit along the corridor to retrieve photographs posted to her neighbours tense and exciting), so when the first antagonist is finally picked off it’s a joy to behold, with knowing winks to Hitchcock’s Psycho, even if her weapon of choice is bound to leave most viewers dumbfounded. The men are dispatched in understated fashion, not one for the gore hounds despite still indulging in the red stuff, whilst Chirhiro’s descent into madness is chillingly powerful (her line “they’re so beautiful when you freeze them” is darkly comic and ultimately disturbing).

Claustrophobic but beautiful, especially in the final third when a power cut threatens to reveal Chirhiro’s new hobby, Ishii has done a wonderful job on the visuals; death and misery have never looked more bewitching. There’s an argument against the constant nudity, mainly involving the gorgeous Harumi Inoue, but it’s less about being gratuitous and, along with the snowfalls, more of a visual metaphor. Chirhiro will never have a virtuous life; will never make a clean break, no matter how many times she tries to cleanse herself. Ishii realises, and eventually we do too, that in the final analysis she will never be as pure as the driven snow (the original crime happened during a snowstorm) so in the pouring rain she has no choice but to make an unalterable break with the past.

Without ever glorifying the horrific acts that fuel Chirhiro’s bloody vengeance, Freezer is for the most part well-paced and surprisingly beautiful, with a compelling and intensely dramatic performance from its lead.

DVD REVIEW: SOUL EATER: PART ONE ****

Title: Soul Eater: Part One
Release date: 28th June 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 325 mins
Director: Takuya Igarashi
Starring: Chiaki Omigawa, Kouki Uchiyama, Akeno Watanabe, Emiri Katou, Houko Kuwashima
Genre: Animation
Studio: Manga
Format: DVD
Country: Japan

Based on the manga written and illustrated by Atsushi Okubo, Soul Eater was first released as three separate one-shots serialised in two Gangan Powered special editions and one Gangan Wing issue way back in 2003. The anime first appeared on TV Tokyo in 2008. Finally available on DVD, part one brings together the first 13 episodes, promising frenetic action, zombies, gangsters, necromancers, mad doctors and the hottest witch in town. What’s not to like?

At the Death Weapon Meister Academy (DWMA), Maka and her partner, human-weapon Soul, have collected the spirits of 99 evil mortals, needing just one from a witch to transform Soul into a death scythe, a weapon of great power that will retain order and balance to Death City. Failing, the gifted youngsters have to start all over again, but they’re not alone. The cocky but gifted Black Star and his weapon partner Tsubaki struggle to form a workable relationship whilst new student Death the Kid must overcome his aversion to asymmetry if he and his partners Liz and Patty are to succeed in bringing down the destructive enemies threatening to collect non-evil human souls to transform one of their own into a Kishin, an evil demon God that would plunge the world into madness…

Soul Eater, like its main antagonist Medusa, is a beautiful but flawed creature. Packed with salacious humour, lengthy action sequences and stylish imagery it demands attention. Its influences can be traced all the way to genres as disparate as British Hammer Horror (with its mad scientists and mummies) and Poliziotteschi films (episode seven takes place in a crime-riddled Italy), though neither can compete with the brashness of old-school Shounen Manga.

Its audaciousness irritates just as much as fascinates, especially in the opening episodes when we are introduced to the three main protagonists. Excluding Maka and her human-weapon Soul, the other two, Black Star especially, are just plain annoying. Whilst Death Kid’s struggle to cope with anything not evenly shaped brings levels of playground humour, Black Star’s cockiness brings nothing but maddening frustration; episode two is a real struggle until its ‘Shadow Star’ finale finally hits the right notes. In fairness, as the story progresses the two characters become less of a headache, but it’s very hard to root for something that rattles someone’s cage so much.

Bursting with invention and a slew of impressive weapons certain to delight all, Soul Eater’s pace is fast and furious with a delirious score of rock and hip-hop to keep things wild and rowdy right from the polished opening credits. Sadly, the interest in its lengthy opening sequence wanes after a few episodes, and the lure of the skip chapter function on the remote control is too difficult to resist. Even some of the episodes suffer from being more filler than killer; the main plot lost in the sheer effort to make even the most banal show ludicrously entertaining.

This isn’t a massive problem; the fight scenes ripped straight from the best beat-em-ups are for the most part a joy to behold; its humour, although aimed at teenage boys mostly, is often titillating and right on the money. Episode nine, introducing the legend that is Excalibur, is a complete riot thanks to its clever twisting of a classic tale. Director Takuya Igarashi is in no rush to reveal the main plot, which is just as well seeing as there are 51 episodes in total, but it’s his use of lingering shots and moments of complete silence that pack an unexpected emotional punch.

Soul Eater’s universe is a joy to behold; even the sun and the moon have personalities, inspired by Okubo’s favourite manga Dr. Slump. It’s this attention to detail that really satisfies (the concept of arrows pointing out the obvious, or simply to show us where we should be looking is innovative and amusing), the inclusion of madcap characters ripped from other genres setting it apart from the crowd. Takuya is well aware of his target audience’s expectations and he truly delivers the goods. But he’s also savvy enough to incorporate emotion and depth to his characters and the world that encompasses them, which could, if given the chance, appeal to more than just horny teenage boys (the female characters are clearly the strongest, the males stupid for the most part).

Not only is Soul Eater a feast for the eyes, sticking faithfully to Atsushi Okubo’s original work, it’s also packed with boisterous witticisms, be it verbal or visual, and brilliantly realised personas (even the most deranged antagonists are somehow endearing). In short, Soul Eater is a riot from start to finish. Whether it can sustain as much interest over another 38 episodes remains to be seen (it does seem like a ridiculously long ride) but for now, part two can’t come quick enough.

Regardless of its deficiencies, annoying protagonists and moments of banality, movie fans will find plenty in the inventive Soul Eater to keep them entertained. From mind-boggling action to bawdy humour, from astounding imagery to a pumping soundtrack, this first-rate anime has it all.

OWN THIS: SOUL EATER: SEASON ONE (DVD)

“A super-cool, boisterous and action-packed series full of irreverent gallows humour, Soul Eater is one of the most visually and thematically appealing animes to come along in quite some time.”

The two-disc Soul Eater Part One brings together the first 13 episodes of the 51 episode series that Anime News Network has described as having “a delicious sharp edge on it that slices in and hooks deep from the start.”

Series: Soul Eater: Part One
Release date: 28th June 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 325 mins
Director: Takuya Igarashi
Starring: Chiaki Omigawa, Kouki Uchiyama, Akeno Watanabe, Emiri Katou,
Houko Kuwashima
Genre: Animation
Studio: Manga
Format: DVD
Country: Japan