Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite films.  It never played Charleston to the best of my knowledge.  I first saw it on Pay Per View and fell in love with it instantly.  I love the mixing of timelines and story elements.  I loved the Tarantino dialogue and the characters.  It was instantly quotable and the characters, any of them, could have easily slipped into a sequel movie of their own.

My daughter had never seen Pulp Fiction and asked if we could watch it.  I said sure and pulled out the 2 disc collector’s edition DVD.  I flipped it over and found out the film was a lot longer than I realized.  Pulp Fiction is 154 minutes.  I figured it was around 120.  It never felt like two and a half hours when I sat down and watched it before.  I guess that’s the mark of a good movie.  You don’t feel the time.  Some movies you feel every single minute of.  I’ve watched a few of them.  But Pulp Fiction was one of those films where you just get so caught up in the movie that you don’t notice how long the movie has been running.

The biggest problem I seem to have with movies that I have such an affinity toward is that I have the worst time trying to write about them.  I can sit down with a film that I’ve never seen, and if I love it, I can write about it fairly easily.  If I watch a film that I absolutely hate, I can usually write about that fairly easily, but a film that already occupies a slot in my top ten, is harder for me to write about for some reason.  For that reason I’ll just say that Pulp Fiction is a 4 star movie in my book.  It is easily in my top 10 films of all time if not in my top 5.  If you haven’t seen it, go rent it or buy it right now.

Happy Tree Friends Blood Sample B

My daughter needed me to take her to a sleepover on Wednesday and the DVR was screaming for me to clear some space before Thursday night when Community, Parks & Recreation, The Office, 30 Rock, Archer and Project Runway all go looking for space to get recorded.  I needed something incredibly short, so it was back to the mini disc Happy Tree Friend Blood Samples. 

The second one in the series features Cuddles on the cover with one of his bunny ears chopped off.  As I mentioned in my review of Blood Sample A-, the Happy Tree Friends are like Care Bears or My Little Pony if they were written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and Takashi Miike.  They are extremely graphic and extremely violent.  They are also extremely funny if you have a twisted sense of humor.

The second volume features 6 cartoons, 2 smoochies, a kringle and some other bonuses.  The cartoons on this disc include Spin Fun Knowin’ Ya in which the little critters learn the dangers of asking Lumpy to spin the merry-go-round faster.  Class Act is a Christmas themed episode with the gang putting on a school Christmas play that ends with blood, gore, dismemberment and the school burning down and blowing up.  Chip Off The Ol’ Block has Pop and Cub mowing the grass.  Pop is dozing in the hammock as Cub pushes the mower.  When the little guy gets the blade stuck on a brick he reaches under to remove the obstruction.  Pop wakes up just in time to save his boy and take over the mowing.  Unfortunately Pop decides to run the mower over a pile of broken glass and syringes which get shot out the side of the mower hurling toward little Cub.  It’s a Happy Tree Friends cartoon.  These things never end well for the little animals.

Rounding out the cartoons are the two part Happy Trails featuring Lumpy as the bus driver on a trip that goes from bad to stranded on a deserted island patrolled by a hungry shark.  Keepin It Reel features the Tree Friends enjoying a movie until a strobing effect sends Flippy into a wartime flashback. 

The smoochies feature Cuddles and Sniffles.  Cuddles comes with three options that involve taking care of the little rabbit.  Sniffles allows you to give one of three objects to the brainy little aardvark.  The kringle has Lumpy skiing and impaling two of the tree friends on his skis.  The cheery holiday message: Hope I Run Into You This Season.

Another great collection of the Happy Tree Friends that easily rates a 10 on the Night Flight scale.

Bitch Slap

One of the sites I frequently check online is http://www.traileraddict.com/ .  Last year I stumbled across a trailer and a featurette for a film called Bitch Slap.  The featurette in particular was quite funny.  I decided if I got the chance I wanted to see Bitch Slap.  Needless to say, the movie never made it to my little corner of the world, however this weekend the DVD did.  I was looking in Target and stumbled across Bitch Slap for only $12.  I figured if it was half as funny, half as clever and half as campy as the trailer and featurette had been, that it was easily worth the price. 

One thing I found interesting was the DVD case.  When Zack and Miri Make a Porno came out on DVD, the retail giants forced Miramax to offer a DVD case with the title listed as only Zack and Miri.  The porno was excised from the title (which is why I bought my copy at Borders in Huntington where the title was still displayed in all its glory).  With Bitch Slap they couldn’t just drop the word Bitch from the title, but they couldn’t risk little kids and the easily offended seeing the word and upsetting some of their customers.  The novel solution was a yellow sticker reading “Get Slapped!” placed on the shrink wrap over the offending word.  Just hope they don’t look at the spine of the DVD.

So Friday night I pop Bitch Slap into the DVD player.  Anyone familiar with the films of Russ Meyer would feel as though they were watching a Russ Meyer lite film as the movie starts.  The film starts with a woman in the desert surrounded by fires and carnage wailing to the heavens about why this had to happen.  Then Memento-like we are taken back to several hours ago.  A car pulls up and the three women emerge from inside.  The camera, however, lingers on the women’s legs and then travels up to stop and linger even longer on their breasts.  We get multiple angle shots of their breasts getting out of the vehicle, sometimes in split screen even.  The only differences between this and Russ Meyer were that the breasts were clothed and they were not freakishly large.  They weren’t small, mind you, but just the normal enhanced breasts that Hollywood seems to be full of.

From this point the film continues in two directions.  The main storyline barrels forward toward the scene of destruction the film opened with, while the secondary story moves backward showing us how these events came to pass and how the various characters came to cross paths.  The reverse reveal isn’t as clever as Memento, but it is much better than a low budget film named Bitch Slap would lead you to believe it could be.  The main storyline sticks to the basics of an exploitation film.  There are bad girls on the run with big guns and there are bad guys out to get the girls as well.  Of course the girls are also just as likely to turn on each other, provided they aren’t trying to “turn on” each other as each of them is shown to be either lesbian or extremely bi-sexual.  It should be noted that the sex in Bitch Slap is just a tease.  There is very little nudity in the film and what little bit there is involves background characters not the main stars.  In fact the main character that gets saddled with the most revealing outfit is not any of the three women.  It is bad guy Gage played by Michael Hurst of Hercules fame, who runs around in a tiny black leathery jock strap.  Trust me, you will never look at Hercules friend Iolaus the same way after seeing Hurst playing Gage.

Speaking of Hercules, the producers, writers and director were alums of Hercules and Xena, so they got Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor to cameo in the film.  Sorbo plays a super secret agent named Phoenix while Lawless and O’Connor play nuns.  The other big name in the film is Zoe Bell who acts as stunt coordinator, stunt double and plays the small role of Rawhide.  Zoe was heavily involved in the Kill Bill films and had a featured role in the Death Proof section of Grindhouse.

I got the feeling that several of the characters in Bitch Slap would have been quite at home in a Tarantino film, but the film itself is just not as fun as Tarantino’s work.  And Quentin wouldn’t have made such an issue of the girl’s sexuality.  Overall, Bitch Slap isn’t a bad movie for what it intended to be, but it seems at times that the filmmakers couldn’t decide if it was an over the top exploitation film or whether it wanted to be a satire of those types of films.  There is nothing wrong with either type of film in my book, but you need to commit to one or the other.  Bitch Slap doesn’t seem willing to do that.

One area where the DVD does excel is in the bonus features.  There is a series of three making of featurettes that form one large documentary on making a B movie.  It is very informative and entertaining as well.  In fact the documentary was easily worth the $12 by itself.  As for the movie, I give it 2 1/2 stars.  I’m not anxious to get Bitch Slapped again any time in the immediate future, but I would check out a sequel or future project from Rick Jacobson and Eric Gruendemann.  I also would love to see America Olivo (Camero) in another film with a more experienced director.  As the crazy one of the trio she plays her role perfectly and she has a great look in the way she carries herself.  The scene with her and the nuns was one of my favorites, and her battles with Kinki (Minae Noji, also a stand out) and her razor edged yo-yo were very well done as well.

Legend Of The 8 Samurai

When I bought my first VHS recorder back in 1982, new movies were usually around $79 and up.  Prerecorded movies were viewed as a rental item with very low interest in purchasing by the general public.  One of the first major releases to buck this trend was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan which had a SRP of $39.99.  At that price lots of people opted to buy rather than rent.  As the cost of video tape dropped, the first public domain videos began hitting the market.  Good Times was one of the big makers of there usually older, often lower quality transfer videos.  I bought several of them at the cheap price of $9.99 and later $5.00 or less.

When DVD entered the market, the price of a new DVD was usually much less than the cost of a new VHS.  VHS was still initially priced mainly for the rental market, and after several months, the price would drop to $19.99 or less and the public would start buying copies.  DVD was viewed as a collector’s format and so the DVDs were released at a lower take home price, bypassing the initial rental pricing structure.  Despite the new discs having lower pricing, it took a couple of years before public domain DVDs began to pop up.  Once they did, one of the best places to find these cheap (and often shoddily produced) DVDs was the dollar store.  Dollar Tree got in a plethora of these movies, cartoons and old TV shows for $1 on DVD.  I bought quite a few of them over the years as many of these titles were not available in high quality editions. 

During a Sunday drive down into Logan, WV one day, my wife and I stopped at a roadside locally owned convenience store.  This was not a chain store and they had all sorts of stuff in addition to drinks and snacks.  One thing they had in abundance was public domain DVDs.  Most of them were $1 although some were as high as $2.  I found quite a few that I didn’t have and hadn’t seen elsewhere.  There were various cartoons and movies including a DVD with a drawing of a samurai warrior on the cover and the title Legend of the 8 Samurai.  It had Sonny Chiba, and it was only $1.  I bought it and took it back to add to my collection.

Saturday I was trying to find a short film to watch when the idea of checking out some of the Dollar Store DVDs hit me.  I scanned over the running times and finally settled on Legend of the 8 Samurai which was billed as 53 minutes.  That allowed me to catch up some of my postings and watch the film before I left for work.  As the film progressed, I kept thinking it was going to have to really come together fast if it was going to end in 53 minutes.  Over 60 minutes into it, I suddenly realized that the running time must have been a typo.  Sure enough, when I hit menu, it revealed that I was in chapter 3 of 6.  A quick check of the IMDb showed the run time at 133 minutes.  I had to shut the film off and plan on finishing it after work.

Once I was able to finish the film, I must admit to being pleasantly surprised.  I was first introduced to Sonny Chiba in the movie True Romance with a script by Quentin Tarantino.  One of the characters in True Romance loves Sonny Chiba and explains why Chiba is such a badass.  I was intrigued and picked up several Sonny Chiba videos at the time.  I watched some of the Streetfighter series as well as another film (The Bodyguard, I believe).  I liked what I saw.  The Chiba in Legend of the 8 Samurai, however, is not the same badass as the Streetfighter Chiba.  He still knows how to fight and commands respect, but he’s not constantly maiming,  killing, or just inflicting pain. 

The storyline concerns a family that has returned from the dead seeking to destroy a rival family.  They have killed all of the ruling family except for one, Princess Shizu.  An old man has helped the princess to escape.  Motofuji and the evil queen send out their armies to track her down and bring the princess to them, but the princess is part of an ancient prophecy that involves her gathering together 8 warriors that each have a magical crystal which when returned to the proper place will give them the means to destroy Motofuji, the queen and the rest of the Hikita family.

If not for the violence and some rough language sprinkled here and there, this would be the perfect film for kids.  It reminded me of watching Inframan at the Kearse theater with Keith Harris when we were young.  If your kids can handle a little blood and some PG level cursing, it’s still a good film for them.  There is a lot of old style Saturday matinee action.  There is also an evil witch that turns into a skeletal centipede type monster and a flying snake monster that kidnaps the princess as well.

The only personal issue I had with the film had to do with the DVD transfer.  The picture is dark and many of the scenes appear washed out.  That is the problem with these cheap DVDs, but despite the flaws, it was well worth the dollar I paid.  The DVD also contains a preview of other titles the company offers, but that is it as far as bonus features.

The editing on this film is fast paced to the point that some scenes seem to happen with no explanation of who, what, where or why.  Eventually all is revealed, but at one point I was a little confused for several minutes as we jumped to a wedding sequence with people we had not met yet.  Despite this, I really liked the movie.  I give it 3 stars.