Reviews

I watched the English dubbed version released on Mei Ah dvd, and it leaves much to be desired. For starters, most reviewers appear to have missed that a great deal of the film is told in flashback... and this is not at all the fault of the viewer. Incredibly, the blurb on the dvd case also gets it wrong. Plus, I only figured it out after puzzling over several things that didn't make sense, and then watching portions of the film over again. Once you know, however... you know.

What we actually have here is a wraparound story in which Carter Wong plays a Prince who has had the deceased Emperor's Will altered in order to allow him to steal the throne from the rightful heir (presumably, his brother). Worse, he orders the other Prince to be tossed into a dungeon on trumped up charges to await sentencing. Unfortunately, the fate of the brother is left hanging, as he is never mentioned again.

Carter receives intelligence indicating that the monks at Shaolin are planning a revolt. He is counseled to send troops, but says that he will wait until the next day to make his decision.

THIS IS WHERE THE FLASHBACK BEGINS... it is signaled by a screen wipe and a glimpse of a bronze statue that we will see again in the next scene.

While strolling through the village, Carter encounters a monk selling small bronze statues of Shaolin fighters. He inquires about them and learns that students who graduate from Shaolin have a dragon tattoo on one of their arms. He buys one of these statues and thinks to himself: "Hmmmm... I should go to Shaolin to train there."

Carter goes to a cafe and witnesses a cocky and cute (though disguised as a man) Polly Shang-kuan cleverly kicking the crap out of several men. Carter decides he'll have a go at Polly too. The monk from before breaks it up.

Carter continues strolling and helps a pretty girl out of a jam. Smitten, he goes to visit her later, but she is with another man (Tien Peng, who starred with Carter in 18 BRONZEMEN), and this man appears to be good at kung fu. Carter challenges the man to a fight and loses to him, but not before noticing that he has a dragon tattoo on his arm. This, of course, reinforces his interest in studying at Shaolin.

Pretending to be a commoner, Carter goes to the Temple to become a student, but they won't even allow him inside the gate. Eventually, they agree to let him in, but won't allow him to become a student until he proves himself worthy. To do this, he is made to carry water in small buckets, medium buckets, large buckets, and then larger and larger and larger buckets. Also, large bundles of sticks. None of this seems to make any impression, but then he is witnessed eating 19 steamed buns (one more than the number of Bronzemen... coincidence?), and suddenly... he is told that he has been deemed ready.

Where other monks train for 10 years of more before asking to be allowed to challenge the 18 levels of Bronzemen tests, Carter believes he's ready almost immediately. He tries and fails over and over again. Among his challenges are Single Finger Fu, Coin Toss Fu and - in the end - Completus Interuptus Fu! FU THAT, I say!

WE THEN FLASH FORWARD.

Carter is Emperor and his 2nd day on the job begins with Polly Shang-kuan (this time identifying as a woman) trying to kill him in order to get revenge for the murder of her father, a General that we have not seen nor heard anything about. This is probably a reference to a historical occurrence, though it could also be a case of the dubbing simply being incorrect in ID'ing the murdered man as a General (Carter did murder someone in one of the opening scenes, but that person did not appear to be a General).

Carter next receives updated intelligence regarding Shaolin. The monks there have been ordered to attack! Carter asks his court for opinions, learns of a new weapon that can destroy the monks, and orders many of these weapons to be made.

One might expect there to then be a final act in which his forces attack Shaolin, but nope... the movie very abruptly ends there as if it's part one of a two parter. That's unfortunate, had there been more of an ending, and had the flashback been clear, I'd have enjoyed this far more than I did. As is, I'd say it's more fun than 18 BRONZEMEN, but not nearly as fun as one of its two follow-ups, THE EIGHT MASTERS (I've yet to see the BLAZING TEMPLE, the film that came between RETURN and EIGHT. I've read enough about it, however, to know that - as with the other three films - there are no reoccurring characters... just reoccurring cast members).

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think this film is about our refusal to accept the potential for reprehensible violence in those close to us. Or even in nature. The bad element is always fashioned an outsider. When something truly awful happens, it's THEM not US. Something like THAT can simply NOT HAPPEN HERE. And our media comically contribute to this ridiculously false narrative with distancing, trivialization and spin... all as our beloved civic leaders busily position and protect themselves. Or maybe it's about the man in the moon. Your choice.

This film has a decided focus on women's issues including a look at sexual exploitation in the acting/modeling business, the constant pressure a woman feels to remain young-looking in order to keep their stinkin' husband from cheating, the life of self-loathing that can follow in the wake of certain mother/daughter issues, the bullying a female child is subjected to when she is not seen as being as pretty as her classmates, and the personal and professional difficulties that can come later in life for women judged less attractive. Given this focus, it is peculiar that the film appears to tell parents that they should not worry about their unattractive female children because a) the bullies are more likely to live with guilt over this, than the victims are to be damaged, and b) the girls can always choose to have plastic surgery when they're older! What I WANT to think is that there's a subtitle translation issue, and what was MEANT was that girls choosing plastic surgery should be made to feel no more stigma about doing so, than one should feel in choosing to be a "housewife" over other careers. I fear that this massaging of the message is merely wishful thinking on my part, however. Other qualms: In what world would a young attractive woman be horny for (I don't care if he's a physician of not) an old troll like Eric Tsang? Also, is it possible that a woman in HK – particularly one in the modeling/acting industry – would not have ever considered having oral sex with her husband? And even harder to believe, how is it possible that an extremely handsome and popular man would not have even ever asked his wife if she might consider oral sex? All that said, I enjoyed this film a lot, despite it's ultimate insensitivity to the very issues it observes.

A grave robber is chased onto the road and accidentally run over by taxi driver, Philip Ko Fei. Ko Fei gets out of the car to check on the man, but he has disappeared, only to reappear in Ko Fei's back seat. He tells Ko Fei that he is a Taoist wizard and he used black magic to save himself from death. He also tell's Ko Fei that he (Ko Fei) is now cursed to a life of misfortune for having crossing paths with him. Sure enough, we soon discover that Ko Fei's wife is having an affair with the married Norman Chu. Roughly 20 minutes of unspectacular nude romping leads up to Chu refusing her offer of the both of them leaving their spouses for one another. She gets angry and jumps out of the car, but not before the pair have an ugly encounter with a couple of cocky young men in a red sports car. Both cars leave, and the woman then makes her way to a phone booth, where she calls her hubby's taxi dispatcher to ask that they send Ko Fei over immediately to fetch her. Before he gets there, however, the guys in the red sports car return. They abduct her and take her to an abandoned mansion, where one of them rapes her and knocks her about a bit, accidentally causing her to fall over a balcony ledge to her death. Upon arriving at the phone booth, Ko Fei receives another call from the taxi dispatcher informing him that his wife is now at the mansion, a message that seems rather curious, given that nobody at the mansion had access to a phone, and – in fact – when questioned later, the dispatcher says she made no such call to Ko Fei. Ko Fei then seeks out the Taoist wizard for help and THAT is when the film really begins to get good. It takes a LONG time to get to this point (maybe 40 minutes), but everything from this point on is great fun involving a reanimated corpse with a need to be "seeded", the demonic possession of Norman Chu's wife, and the bloody, explosive birth of the corpse's revenge-seeking evil seed!

This is an unusual film that follows Neddy (the very fit Burt Lancaster, 53 years old at the time of filming), as he decides to swim (and hike) from one friends private luxury pool located at one end of a large well-to-do county, to his own home at the other end of the county, via a series of widely spread apart pools belonging – mostly - to socialite friends. On it's surface, it can appear to be the story of a man who has lost his money and social position, yet has little or no memory of this loss. What it is actually about, I believe, is the rapid passage of our adult lives. Even in our middle-ages, we start out feeling young, healthy and full of both friends and confidence, yet – far faster than we are able to recognize – we lose one thing after another, usually due to our own poor choices, finally ending up cold, exhausted and alone. This is partially signaled in the film by the ever-faster change of both the seasons and weather, but also in the change in people's attitudes toward Neddy, most dramatically, in the lightening fast change of heart Julie (Janet Landgard) exhibits toward him. To Neddy, she is in one moment infatuated with him, and in the next repulsed, but I contend - in reality - a fair amount of time has passed from the beginning of their stroll together (when she seemed barely more than a child), until the end of their journey, by which point she appears to be a somewhat more mature, experienced woman with an apartment and job in the city. Along his own path in life, Neddy has cheated on his wife, taken fromfriends without giving back, unthinkingly distanced himself from other friends for long periods of time, and deliberately turned his back on childhood friends as he climbed social ladders that they could not. And – seemingly (to him, anyway), in the mere blink of an eye - he realizes that he has lost everything... his wife, his lover, the respect of his children, and every single scrap of his status. He has not only become unwelcome at the pools of his former friends, but has become so "dirty" that he is not even welcome at the public pool, where even the attendants snub and insult him.

Frank Darabont, the director of SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and THE GREEN MILE, once again adapts a Stephen King story and somehow manages to create an entertaining little jump-shocker, despite the story being little more than a rewrite of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD... right down to a horrifyingly downbeat ending. Disappointingly, this films ending lacks the pitch black social criticism of Romero's ending, wherein - of course - the "establishment" rescuers ended up killing the films heroic survivor. Instead, in this version, the rescuers are merely too late to stop our hero from doing something horrific, yet they are seemingly quite successfully at saving many others. Thus, in the end, the "moral" of THE MIST seems to simply be about the power of fear to make us behave toward each other in terrible ways. Sure, there's an important message there, but it lacks the political bite of the message in the film that it borrows from, thus making it feel inferior. And by substituting creatures-from-another-dimension for zombies, the film also loses an additional, dread-inspiring, man-against-himself element.

But enough with comparisons to NOTLD, you say? OK, but there's also this... by setting the story in a supermarket, King has also borrowed significantly from another Romero film, DAWN OF THE DEAD. And sadly, it does so without including any equivalent to DAWN's darkly comic social critique. In short, THE MIST can't help but be compared to these other films, and these comparisons can only leave it lacking. Though I enjoyed THE MIST, and would certainly watch it again, I very much wish King had found a more fully original structure to hang his story on.