Police Story 1 and 2

 

It’s easy to forget just how long Jackie Chan has been making movies. Like many Asian film stars who make their way to Hollywood careers, Chan already had been a star in his home country for well over a decade and had thirty odd years of film experience before Western audiences were exposed to him. He was already in his forties when he started breaking into the American mainstream, in films like Rumble in the Bronx, Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon, which are likely where most people first saw him. Long before he was dazzling American audiences as he flipped around a room, kicked some bad guys and did something with a chair (there are so many chair scenes in Chan movies), Chan had already honed and perfected his own style of action movie and stunts in Hong Kong, in movies like Project A and Police Story.

 

Made in 1985 and directed by Chan himself, Police Story, like Project A, is a showcase of everything Chan could do as an actor and stuntman. Essentially a series of stunts and scenes stringed together with a crime drama plot, it feels like a culmination of everything Chan wanted to do, from specific stunts to set pieces. It was successful and popular enough to spawn its own series of films. The first two were the only ones to be directed by Chan himself and have largely the same cast, tone and story, so I’ll be doing them together. They’re both good fun (especially the first one), and very, very similar to each other. While I do prefer the two Project A movies, the Police Story series is very likely the more famous and are highly entertaining in their own right and are probably the more famous and popular of his early output.

 

Chan Ka-kui (Jackie Chan) is a hard-working officer in the Hong Kong police department. After single-handedly apprehending notorious gang leader Chu Tu during a botched sting operation, Ka-kui is chosen to be a representative for the police due to his public profile, police skills and commitment to his job. Not having enough evidence to put Chu Tao away for good, the police are forced to release him. The Superintendent want Chu Tu’s girlfriend Salina (Brigitte Lin) to testify in court against him and send Ka-kui to protect her, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung). Chu Tu sends out hitmen to try and kill Salina, putting Ka-kui and May in danger.

 

Things start out in highly impressive fashion with the entire opening sequence – a sting operation that goes awry, leading to a gun fight and a sequence where several cars drive through a shanty town, completely demolishing it (a sequence so impressive that Michael Bay of all people paid homage to it in ‘Bad Boys 2’). Shown from several different angles (including from the stunt cars) it’s the sort of dangerous and realistic stunt that we no longer get these days, where safe, sterile CGI take the thrill and danger out of death-defying action. That sequence is instantly followed by another of Chan’s famed stunts – him hanging on the outside of a speeding bus using an umbrella as it drives through traffic. It’s good stuff and starts things off with a bang.

 

The finale is another highlight, as Chan confronts Chu Tu’s goons in a shopping mall, demolishing a small portion of it in the process. Through a series of fistfights and stunts, Chan and various stuntmen smash through a whole lot of glass panels and displays. It all leads to the film’s climactic stunt (one of Chan’s more recklessly dangerous ones); Chan slides several stories down a pole bare-handed, smashing through hundreds of lights. It’s needlessly dangerous, like most of Chan’s best stunts, but damn if it isn’t a wonder to witness. Between all that is a surprisingly straight and serious cop story peppered with comedy. It’s a fun mix, though largely it acts as an action delivery system. 

The film ends with Chan having what can only be described as a violent emotional breakdown – as Chu Tao is arrested and his lawyer begins to criticise the police, Chan suddenly snaps and violently beats the crap out of both, his face contorted in rage as fellow officers attempt to hold him back. It’s not quite the image or note you’d normally want to end your comedy movie to end on. Of course it’s immediately followed by the sizzle reel of bloopers and stunts gone awry that characterise the credits of Chan’s best films, so you don’t really get to dwell on it too much. Instead you watch in amazement as Chan and his crew get seriously injured pulling off various stunts.

‘More of the same’ seems to be the operative phrase for the first sequel, once again directed by Chan. It’s a bit more restrained compared to the first, particularly with its opening, taking its time before it shows off any big action sequences, but largely this is as straight a sequel that could have been done. It has largely the same cast, a very similar feel and tone. It’s fun as well but there isn’t that much action overall and I’d say that the first film is more fun and exciting overall.

Chan Ka-Kui (Jackie Chan), following the ending of the last film (where he seemed to have a violent mental breakdown) has been reinstated as a police officer, but has been bumped down to traffic patrol as punishment. Still very unsatisfied with the law and concerned about his relationship with his girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung), Chan decides to quit the force and go on holiday with her. But the holiday is over before it even begins: a property firm is being extorted by a gang of bombers who are threatening to blow up their various properties if they don’t pay up. The Hong Kong Police convince Ka-kui to return and help them stop the bombers before anybody else gets hurt. Meanwhile, Chu Tu, the crime boss from the first film, has been granted compassionate release from prison due to having a terminal illness – he’s dedicating his remaining time to ruining Ka-kui’s life.

The few action scenes are good stuff, though very similar to the first film and spread out a lot more. The film begins with a montage of the best stunts and moments from the first film (a lot of Chan sequels tend to do this). Chan fights various goons, in restaurants and playgrounds, giving him plenty of things to flip over, around and through, and the villainous bombers are all adept at fighting. The focus on explosions also means a lot more pyrotechnics. One highlight has Chan, on the top of a speeding bus, duck and dive over hanging signs before jumping through a glass panel. That’s probably the highlight of the film. The finale is the only really ‘big’ action scene, a showdown in a warehouse full of explosives where Chan takes on the gang, leading to the entire warehouse exploding. It’s all fun stuff, though it’s fairly similar to the first. If anything the two films feel as though they could have been shot at the same time, even though there were a few years between them. I guess Chan’s directing style at the time was very particular.

If there’s an obvious weak point, it’d be the bigger focus on the Ka-kui/May relationship. For some reason they decided to double down on that stuff and I can’t say that it works. In the first film, May was an underwritten character who existed to cause some drama and occasional comedy. Here the solution to give her a bigger part is to make her suffer more – she’s constantly being humiliated, attacked or kidnapped by people because of Ka-kui, be it Chu Tu’s men or the gang of bombers. While Chan’s dealing with both, he’s also dealing with May wanting to break up with him, with their relationship scenes treated seriously. The big problem is that Chan and Cheung, while having comedic chemistry, don’t actually have any romantic chemistry at all (to be fair it’s arguable as to whether Chan has ever had romantic chemistry with anybody, but that’s not why you watch his films).

Chan is in fine form both comedic and athletically in both films, and Officer Ka-kui is pretty much the same role he’d played a few times before and a few times after. I will say, in these first two films at least, that Ka-kui is a little more unstable and angry compared to other Chan characters, like Dragon Ma from Project A. While he goes through similar plot beats (both ended up going vigilante), Ka-kui gets increasingly frustrated and furious at both the criminals who openly break the law and at the police inspectors and officials who don’t support or back-up the police officers. I guess with Ka-kui Chan tried to show more of a dramatic range than usual, but it’s a bit odd. The rest of the cast in both films are all game for what are largely one-note roles, like the stern police Superintendent who has it out for Ka-kui. In particular, Brigitte Lin and Maggie Cheung have thankless roles, the former little more than a plot device who needs to be rescued and the latter as Chan’s long-suffering girlfriend, especially in the sequel. I like Maggie Cheung, but a lot of her career involved her playing the whiny girlfriend who complains a lot and gets kidnapped.

 

These first two Police Story films do have something of a problem with tone, particularly the first one. They’re all over the place, switching from light and comedic to dark and serious at the drop of a hat. The opening of the first film is surprisingly serious, with its realistic gun violence (well, for a Jackie Chan comedy/action film), heaps of dead/injured cops, crying children and the focus on a random panicky officer cracking under pressure during the violence. Not long after that you have scenes of light-hearted slapstick or juvenile silliness, like a lame elevator fart joke or a scene where Chan, having stepped in a cowpat, wipes it off his shoe by imitating Michael Jackson’s dance moves. It’s tonal whiplash, especially since the underlying plot is pretty much serious business in both despite the comedy.

 

Speaking of comedy, it’s the usual sort for this era of Jackie Chan movies. There is a lot of athletic slapstick, some occasionally juvenile humour and a lot of farcical comedic misunderstandings. It’s mostly funny stuff, especially if you’re into it, though the darker aspects occasionally poke through and make it weird. Take the scene where Ka-kui is left alone to handle all the phones at the station while simultaneously arranging a date with his girlfriend and trying to eat a bowl of noodles – Chan juggles four separate phones and conversations, tangling the cables as he scoots around the office in a roller chair. It’d be light-hearted stuff if it wasn’t for the fact that two of the calls are for harrowing stuff – one woman is being beaten by her husband and another wants to report a rape. Not exactly the sort of subject matter you’d expect for wacky hijinks, but it’s treated as humour.

 

If you cut out all the comedic interludes and slapstick, the base plot of both films is really tried-and-true crime thriller territory. There are crime lords, corrupt cops, witness protections, wiretapping, blackmail, extortion, attempted assassinations, being framed for murder, bombings of public buildings, heroes becoming fugitives and a desperate and dangerous last-minute dash to get your hands on incriminating evidence/stop the villains – it’s all stuff that works in a serious dramatic film. Whether it works in what are essentially action/comedy movies is up to the viewer I guess (I’d say it mostly works), but it’s hard not to notice how serious the main plots are and how straight they’re handled.

Samurai Commando: Mission 1549

Sometime all it takes is a title or premise to make a film. Samurai Commando: Mission 1549 is a Sci-fi Military Action Time Travel Historical Samurai Drama film. I’ll admit the title alone, in all its silliness, was enough to get me interested, but thankfully I found that the movie was earnest and enjoyable enough to live up to that title. It won’t be for everybody, with its static filmmaking, thinly written characters, oddly straight take on its plot and shoddy CGI effects, but beyond all that it’s a fun little adventure movie.

The Japanese army are performing an experimental test of an electromagnetic shield designed to protect military soldiers and equipment. The test goes awry when everything within the shield radius, including a platoon of armed soldiers led by Colonel Matoba, heavy artillery, tanks and helicopters, are transported hundreds of years into the past to a battlefield in Sengoku period Japan where they’re attacked by Samurai. Where they once stood in the present is a grassy field that, based on soil samples, dates back to the year 1549. Three days later there’s another event returns the field to the past, but brings a wounded Samurai, Shichibei, to the present.

Two year later, temporal black holes have begun appearing across Japan, causing widespread havoc. The military believe that the missing platoon have altered the course of history, which is destroying the present. To stop this they begin Operation Romeo, a rescue mission to retrieve the missing soldiers and hopefully restore the present. They conscript former soldier Kashima into their team due to his past experience working with Matoba, while displaced Samurai Shichibei comes to return home. But on arrival they find that Colonel Matoba and his platoon have taken control, with Matoba taking the place of warlord Oda Nobunaga, using his historical knowledge and future technology to change the past and take over Japan and the world.

It’s a fun little adventure film, though it had an oddly familiar feel to me. The types of characters (particularly the reluctant military hero), the focus on the military personnel and equipment, some of the cast and even the way it was shot reminded me of the Godzilla movies of the 90s (minus the giant lizard monster). With a little research I discovered that it was directed by Maasaki Tezuka, who actually helmed a bunch of Godzilla movies, which explains a lot. The way scenes are shot and framed is very similar to some Godzilla movies. The use of miniatures and often cheesy looking effects also bring to mind the sort of ridiculous space-aged technologies they’d bring out in Godzilla movies. Only here they’re mixed with feudal Japan-styled sets and costumes. It’s a pretty fun mix.

It also feels as though it was adapted from a Michael Crichton novel. To be more specific, at first glance it has a very similar set-up to Timeline, the 1999 Michael Crichton-penned novel/2003 Richard Donner-directed film where historians used an experimental machine and were transported hundreds of years back in time to France during the Hundred Years War where they had to stop history from being changed. While one might naturally assume Samurai Commando is a rip-off, the truth is stranger: apparently Samurai Commando predates Timeline by being based on a manga/film from the seventies (starring Sonny Chiba no less!).

As a mixture of genres, it does pretty well. The time travel stuff is mostly just set-up and to give a ticking clock element to the film (they’ve only got three days to save the present and return home). It doesn’t dwell on it too much and never gets bogged down in it. The military stuff is fun (there are so many Godzilla-esque establishing shots of tanks, APCs and military formations – only with Samurai!). One thing that might be a little odd is the Samurai drama and historical aspects of the film and the characters in general. They’re almost all one-dimensional, though the actors are certainly game (nobody is slumming here) – they just don’t have that much to them. The film clips along at a great pace, but the trade-off is that it doesn’t spend much time developing characters. Not that it really feels like it needs it – this is a fun little movie that does exactly what it sets out to do.

It’s full of anachronisms, which is part of the fun really. Matoba is dressed completely in traditional Japanese garb, but still has his military watch on. Seeing Samurai run around with machine guns or wearing improvised ghillie suits is a lot of fun, as is the mixing of military action with old-school Samurai drama. Even the look and overall feel have their own charm, and the effects, as goofy and dated as they can look (the occasional CGI is pretty bad), add to the overall silliness.

Samurai Commando is probably more grounded than a movie with that title deserves to be. They really didn’t need to put in as much effort as they did, but what they’ve done is pretty good.

R100

I watch a lot of Asian cinema. I’m not entirely sure why, and it’s reaching the level of a compulsion, but something fascinates me about the cinematic output of Asia, from the Chinese chop-socky flicks of the seventies, the ghost/curse-heavy Japanese horror scene of the early 00s, dark and depressing South Korean thrillers, Thailand’s ridiculous and oft-silly action flicks, Hong Kong’s kung-fu movies and Indonesia’s recent breakout of brutal action films. I find it all very interesting, though there are some genres I just never know what to expect from. While I’ve grown very familiar with Japanese horror films, Yakuza flicks, Samurai dramas and live-action Manga adaptations, there is one genre that continues to baffle me: Japanese comedy. I know the comedy genre is a big one, and highly subjective, but I’ve never been able to get a handle on any of the Japanese comedies I’ve seen. They’re all just so…strange? Weird? Absurd? I don’t even know how I’d characterise them.

Thus we get to R100, an exceptionally weird Japanese comedy that starts out as a risqué dramedy before becoming something vastly different. R100 is sort of amazing, especially if you go in with no prior knowledge or expectations (meaning reading the previous sentence effectively spoiled the ufn). Actually, maybe having a pre-conceived notion of what the film will be like might make its surprises even more impactful. It certainly tricks you into thinking you’ve got it figured out before it suddenly switches gears on you. In that way it’s similar to a vastly different Japanese film, Takashi Miike’s psycho-thriller ‘Audition’. That movie lulls you into a false sense of security in its first half, playing out like an ordinary drama before things get dark and twisted. R100 is vaguely like that, in that the first half eases you into a state of comfort where you think you’ve got the movie figured out, and then it does everything possible to go against any logical expectations you might have.

Takafumi is an honest, hard-working furniture salesman who lives an ordinary, drab life devoid of excitement. His wife has been in a coma for several years and he raises his young son in the small apartment where they live. Takafumi decides to try and spice up his life by joining the mysterious and secretive Club Bondage, an eccentric and exclusive S+M club with a peculiar contract: no ‘play’ happens at the club itself, and instead he will have a series of ‘dates’ with a variety of dominatrix at public places where he’ll be humiliated and beaten in various ways. The contract lasts for one year and cannot be cancelled. At first Takafumi enjoys it – the excitement brings some much-needed joy and unpredictability into his life, and helps him get through his otherwise depressing and monotonous day-to-day routine. But soon the S+M play starts to intrude into the rest of his life as the dominatrix begin to target his professional life and his family too. And then things get weird.

R100 is a movie that wilfully defies your expectations by first playing exactly to them. The early dramedy is played as earnestly as possible (with some exceptions). Initially, you really feel bad for Takafumi in his ordinary day-to-day life. Perpetually wearing the same drab suit every time, powerless to save his wife and doing his best to raise his son, you feel sorry for him. And then, when things start to get more dangerous and dark (and silly), you feel for him even more. By the end though, things have moved beyond such matters. R100’s turns are baffling and bizarre, but never boring. Part of the film’s success is that it can change gears so quickly and drastically while remaining very funny and extremely watchable.

The film generally has a dreary, almost colourless filter on almost everything. Rooms rarely vary in colour from any variation of grey, light brown or off-white. This starts to fade a little in the latter part of the movie, but for the most part the film matches the drab, joyless, ordinary life Takafumi lives. There are some visual quirks though, particularly when the dominatrix get involved. Whenever Takafumi is reaching some sort of ecstasy, his face is distorted as his eyes turn black, his cheeks puff up and ephemeral ripples emanate from his head. It’s a peculiar visual image, one that gets repeated throughout and is often used as a comedic punchline. Another great source of humour is the fun poked at the normally uptight, overly polite and professional Japanese people themselves:  whenever he’s being beaten or humiliated in public, everybody around awkwardly averts their eyes and tries to go about their business as though it’s not happening at all.

Initially the film manages the thin line between drama and comedy quite well, especially when letting the comedy gently segue into borderline horror. A sombre walk home down the street after Takafumi visits his comatose wife is sad, until it’s punctuated by a leather-clad woman appearing from out of nowhere to kick the shit out of him. Horror movie sting sounds begin to herald the appearance of dominatrix. It manages to remain funny even when it seems to go unexpectedly dark, before it takes a sharp, off-road turn into weirdness. By the final third the film has evolved (or maybe devolved) into something completely different. It’s impossible to go into without spoiling it, but things get ridiculous. Whether this is good or bad will depend on your own tastes, but I enjoyed it.

More than anything else, R100 caught me by surprise. I was so sure early on that I knew exactly what it was and where it was going, but it purposefully swerved away from all of that. I still have absolutely no handle on Japanese comedy (I might understand even less now) but I had a lot of fun watching R100. 

Terra Formars

Terra Formars is a sci-fi action movie directed by Takashi Miike and based on the popular Japanese manga series of the same name. What’s it about? A team of people with bug-based superpowers battling highly evolved, insanely deadly humanoid cockroach men on Mars. Thinking about it, the highly prolific Takashi Miike was pretty much the perfect choice of director for this sort of movie. It’s certainly very familiar territory for the man, whose cinematic oeuvre consists of a lot of adaptations, from manga, anime, videogames, books and plays. It also seems like it’d be right up his wheelhouse, with its ridiculous, violent premise. And it largely is – the movie, while nowhere near perfect and with its share of flaws, is a lot of fun in his hands. It adheres to its source material very closely with one key difference – the film seems happy to acknowledge its own silliness with a helping of campiness in its performances and production ideas. The film, with a fair few tweaks and differences, is also a shockingly faithful adaptation of the beginning of both the anime and manga.

The plot closely follows the manga/anime’s beginning. Mankind attempts to terraform Mars by sending probes full of moss and cockroaches to alter the atmosphere. Five hundred years later and Mars’ surface now has breathable air capable of sustaining human life. Eccentric scientist Dr Honda assembles a team of forcibly recruits a crew of desperate undesirables for a mission to head to Mars, ostensibly to exterminate the cockroaches so that human colonisation can eventually start. Given mysterious surgery to survive the trip, the ragtag team of the space shuttle BUGS 2 lands on Mars and promptly discover that the cockroaches have drastically evolved. Known as terraformars, they’re tall, muscular humanoids with amazing speed and strength, and a violent hate of humans. As the terraformars attack, the BUGS 2 crew must fight for survival. They’re not completely helpless – Dr Honda has spliced insect DNA into them, genetically modifying them with bug-based powers to fight the terraformars and escape the planet.

The plot is an almost 1:1 telling of the manga’s beginning, with every key plot point and development and most of its characters being brought over. Overall it works pretty well, though there are some downsides to it. Since I was familiar with the original, I knew what to expect so I can’t exactly comment on how somebody else would find it. The cast of characters is large and, for the most part, not developed at all. While a few characters have something approximating personality and backstory (particularly our hero Shokichi and the over the top Dr Honda), just as many have not much going on barring a few lines of dialogue and a broad character archetype to inhabit. Some have fun with the little they’re given, but for the most part a lot of characters are just fodder to be killed off. This is something due to the source material, which constantly introduces slews of new characters only to immediately kill them off. It does mean that you don’t really have an attachment to any of the characters, meaning some scenes typically lack tension since you don’t really care if they die or not. Of the characters, the ridiculous Dr Honda is probably the most, fun, and the most interesting in the sense that he’s completely different from his original counterpart. He’s the most camp of the lot and a lot of fun to watch.

Whenever a character uses their bug powers, through injecting a special chemical into their necks, we get a quick explanation of what bug’s powers they’re getting. I liked these moments, which were ridiculous and acted as sort of mini Richard-Attenborough-by-way-of-superpowers styled factoids for some strange insects. These moments are lifted from the manga, but I really liked how they were shown here, stylistically and visually. The transformations themselves are campy, as the characters grow insect-like appendages and transform, Power Rangers’ style. They basically become like cheesy costumed superheroes, and it’s a lot of fun. The movie doesn’t pretend that these transformations aren’t silly, and the vibrant colours and ridiculous prosthetics are a lot of fun. Towards the end things briefly touch into body-horror territory with overdosing on the bug serum, but not for long. It’s something that would have been nice to be delved deeper into.

The terraformars themselves are actually pretty damn great looking to the point I was pretty impressed (I’m not usually impressed by the CGI effects in Miike movies). Unlike the human’s insect transformations, the terraformars are completely CGI creations (though some physical gore props do show up at times), and they look pretty amazing and completely faithful to their original designs. Speaking of which, the actual terraformar designs are quite odd, being a cross between cockroaches and Neanderthal humans (they tend to carry oversized clubs as well). I will say that they’re very obviously CGI and their otherness does make them stand out, but considering the ridiculousness of their design I think it works fine. Unfortunately not all of the CGI is up to par, with some pretty bad effects at times, particularly during the bigger action moments. While the Terra Formars are impressively detailed when shown up close, any scene showing a horde of them or having them do something complicated (like scuttling over the ship) looks noticeably bad. This extends to some action moments, particularly some moments of the finale, looking pretty bad.

The action, when it happens, is fun and punchy but nothing particularly special. Humans and terraformars are crushed, torn apart and dismembered, with all the gore being bursts of CGI blood (though the terraformar’s have white blood). Since the terraformars are CGI, there can be an initial little bit of disconnect since the cast are largely punching at nothing (though the explosions of white that splash around give the idea of impact) but the overall effect works pretty well. Again it’s when things zoom out to show large groups being battled that things don’t look quite as good. The choreography is minimalistic (to the point of non-existence) but it’s classic Miike action, with big wound-up punches, dropkicks and stomps being used by both humans and terraformars alike. I will say that it isn’t quite as gruesome as the manga series.  

The sets and costumes are both pretty great and really sell the science fiction aspect of the film. Mars surface itself is suitably Mars-like, which equates to a red, rocky desert. As a result the scenes on the Mars surface tend to be a bit drab and uninteresting, particularly compared to the comforting sci-fi familiarity of the space shuttle’s interior (the control room design, mixed with holodeck technology felt like a mix of Event Horizon and Prometheus). I actually quite liked the sci-fi elements of the film. The costumes and visual effects were pretty great, with the space suits looking pretty good, the technology looking great and while a lot of the aspects are familiar (pretty much every big-budget sci-fi film has elements like these) they looked good here.

With a few exceptions, mostly tied to serious character backstory (often laid down at inopportune times), the film never takes itself particularly seriously. It’s clear pretty much instantly, with the ridiculous hair styles and basic, broad personalities of its largely disposable cast (much like the source material, most characters exists just to be slaughtered). While the tone does veer into serious territory at times and the pace tends to drag, the overall campiness of the production, with its bug transformations, its CGI humanoid cockroaches and tone it all works pretty well. It remains fun throughout, even when the tone turns more serious towards the end. In contrast, the Terra Formar manga/anime both play the premise completely straight, often to the point of unintentional bathos. I appreciated that the movie acknowledged its silliness, whether intentionally or not (some of the ridiculousness is chuckle inducing in the film, while the manga played it seriously) and it made for a fun ride.

A lot of the film’s issues, relating to characters, story and details, can be traced back to the source material. There is a big level of inconsistency as to how powerful the terraformars themselves are. They’re shown to be insanely fast and powerful, but they don’t often use their speed (barring one or two times you never see them use it again). At times they’re able to decapitate somebody in a single swipe, but at other times a punch will just knock somebody back. The biggest inconsistency, and one that stems directly from the manga, is the lethality of the terraformars themselves between an individual one and a group of them. Initially a single terraformar seems capable of slaughtering through several people effortlessly, yet in another scene a single person is able to kill a whole bunch of them. It’s inconsistent. And when there’s a group surrounding our heroes they never just swarm them, instead heading in one after the other. But these are issues stemming directly from the manga. More specific to the film is how characters rarely seem to be in a rush or a panic about the terraformars.

It contributes to the film’s weird pacing and structure issues. That’s a complaint I have for a lot of Takashi Miike films (he’s pretty consistent in his excess), and while it isn’t a dealbreaker, it is notable. For the most part it runs at a pretty steady momentum, with a few flashbacks to character’s backstories thrown around, and it gets right into its terraformar action after it sets up its world and plot. From about the halfway point, where a few twists and plot developments occur, it becomes a bit slower and meandering as it takes the time to explain to its characters (and the audience) the twists and what is happening. When some characters seem to be spending large chunks of the movie just standing around while the deadly terraformars are closing in it’s a bit weird, but the movie brings things together at the end, tying things up (though the ending feels open, due to it being the end of the beginning of the still-running manga/anime series).

I enjoyed Terra Formars. It was as ridiculous and silly as it needed to be and was a shockingly faithful adaptation. I will say that my opinion is biased – I’m a fan of Takashi Miike movies and I’m familiar with the manga series, so I went in with measured expectations. But I had a lot of fun with it. I’ve seen a lot of Takashi Miike movies, and can say a lot of them aren’t very good (it’s a coin flip whether a Miike movie will end up being good or bad) and the recent influx of manga/anime based live-action movie adaptations (like Parasyte or Attack on Titan) have been pretty awful, but this one, with its sense of fun (which feels intentional) gave an enjoyable, though uneven, ride. I could forgive its faults and had a good time with this one.

Darr @ the Mall

While I’ve dedicated about half of this blog to reviews of Asian movies, I’ve yet to really touch on India, or the wide, weird world of Bollywood and Hindi movies. I guess the reason would be that, comparatively, I haven’t seem nowhere near as many of them as I have of Japanese, Hong Kong, Malaysian and South Korean films. Another big aspect would be that a lot of the Hindi/Bollywood films I have seen have been pretty damn awful. Bollywood is a huge industry, but it ain’t exactly the most creative. You’d be surprised at how many Bollywood movies are just direct ripoffs/blatant unlicensed remakes of other successful movies. Stealing ideas, or outright copying movies plots (and even posters) is just a thing Bollywood has done for years.

Well it’s time to do a Bollywood movie anyway, and considering the other half of this blog has been dedicated to horror movies I might as well do a Bollywood Horror movie, because such a thing does exist. So we get Darr @ the Mall, an inept ‘horror’ movie that doesn’t know or care about what it’s doing but instead copies ideas and imagery from dozens of other movies and shoves them on screen. What joy.

 

The Amity Mall, the largest shopping mall in India, has just finished construction and is due to celebrate its inauguration. Despite not yet opening, it has a horrible reputation due to a series of mysteriously ‘accidental’ deaths of staff and construction workers, causing the locals and media to consider the place haunted. Vishnu is hired as the mall’s new security chief after the death of the previous one. The mall’s owners, Mr. Manchanda and Mr. Khan, are holding a party on the eve of the inauguration to celebrate with their adult children, including Manchanda’s daughter Ahana, various investors and associates. As the party goes on and Ahana and her friends explore the empty mall, Vishnu investigates mysterious apparitions and discovers a vengeful spirit is haunting the mall, killing those it crosses paths with. It traps Vishnu, Manchanda, Khan and their family members in the mall and hunts them down, as the group attempts to escape.

So it’s a pretty standard, familiar shell of a plot all things considered. It’s actually the plot of a few horror movies shoved together really – ‘trapped in a shopping mall’ is the premise of a lot, like Dawn of the Dead of Chopping Mall, but even the far more specific ‘ghost haunts shopping mall before it opens’ is stolen wholesale from the Japanese horror-thriller ‘Into the Mirror’, as well as it’s crappy American remake ‘Mirrors’ (which starred Kiefer Sutherland as an alcoholic ex-cop who just wants his kids). The movie even cribs a few visuals from it. Unoriginality of the premise aside, this set-up is actually pretty decent for a little horror movie, provided it has a few things: a good pace, entertaining characters, creepy atmosphere and great kills. Darr doesn’t have any of these things.

Darr has a horribly languid pace, prone to meandering detours into nothingness as it lazes around for most of its (unnecessarily long) two hour length. Two hours is a very long time in horror movie terms, and Darr uses it in the worst possible way – it takes a full seventy minutes before the film gets to the ‘trapped in the mall’ part. Those seventy minutes are spent mostly on characters wandering around, or Ahana and her unlikeable relatives/friends getting into underwritten relationship drama. When the ghost does turn up proper, it drags even more since it has another fifty minutes to get through, so you’re mostly watching characters wander around in the dark until they get killed off. Speaking of unlikeable, the characters are so thinly written and boring that I struggle to remember anything about them. They don’t have personalities and the cast don’t bother to give the poorly written and laughable script any effort. Darr also has a really distracting and confusing issue with dialogue. Characters switch from speaking in Hindi to English randomly, sometimes within the same sentence. It’s baffling, especially when they’ll start a sentence in English, then trail off into Hindi while occasionally throwing in an English word or phrase. I have no idea why they did it – to whose benefit is it?

 

Vishnu just seems confused for the entire movie, never really reacting the way that he should but instead standing around looking as though he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. Which, considering the rest of the movie, might be closer to reality than one would think. According to the story Vishnu is meant to be in his late twenties, but the actor they chose for him is clearly in his forties which is ridiculous (his throat is so coarse with lines It looks like he survived being hanged several times). Sure, American horror movies tend to hire twentysomethings to play teens, but they at least look young. I assume he’s a well-known actor, because otherwise why the hell would they have chosen him? There’s nothing to his character but that’s true of everybody else. Nobody has any chemistry or charisma and nobody interacts in any way that makes sense. Why is Machanda so familiar with Vishnu when the latter has only been working there overnight? Why does the movie try and do a weird Vishnu x Ahana thing when they don’t even know each other and barely even speak?

The party, despite having at least forty people attending, suddenly disappears when the movie decides it’s finally time to get on with it. I don’t know what happened to any of those people, including the group of singers and dancers who do a little music number, but the movie decides that’s not important anymore even though it’s spent so long dwelling on it. I’d also like to point out just how confusing the actual geography of the mall is, and how the party itself seems to exist in some sort of pocket dimension. I’m not even entirely sure the party is in the mall at all – its interior is a nightclub, and there’s never a scene showing anybody heading into or out of the mall. Establishing shots aren’t the films forte, but then again nothing is. In fact, you never really get a sense of where anything is in the wall and even the scenes inside show it’s clearly empty and unfinished. It really feels like they shot the movie in several different places, with the cramped underground security rooms full of assorted haunted house junk (Creepy mannequins! Old pictures! Jars!) not fitting in at all with the sleek mall interior, which itself doesn’t fit right with the mall’s grassy exterior.

When spooky things happen, they’re not interesting. Because it’s about ghosts, that means we get every ghost cliché possible, and because it’s Darr it means it’s all scenes taken from other movies. Things move in the background when characters aren’t looking, people hear voices or sounds or see things and freak out. When people finally start dying, it’s even more disappointing. The vast majority of the deaths occur off-screen or are shot in such a way that you can’t see what is going on. Darr is a big fan of having the screen turn completely black in place of showing any action. It’s either that or just showing a shadow or silhouette of a death or the bloodthirsty spectre, since those are the cheapest, laziest way of doing it.

 

I haven’t talked yet of the spooky spectre, and that’s mostly because it’s absolutely pathetic. It’s a poorly animated skeleton lady in a smog cloud. Sometimes it looks like a creepy ghost lady, specifically the maiden in black from The Maiden in Black (because Darr will steal from anything). Other times it’s just a black cloud that’s barely visible in the black void most scenes tend to inhabit. Other than ghost cloud/lady, there are also ghost children which look just as bad. Effects work is never great in these sorts of movies, but it’s just so especially awful. Even worse are the random green screen effects used occasionally for no apparent reason. One, involving a flashback, has a characters silhouette against an obviously computer generated inferno, the flames, looking as though they came from a Playstation 1 game, looping over and over. The worst is in the finale, where the survivors try and run to safety towards outside, only the outside is clearly a backdrop that’s been placed there – you can visibly see that it’s a flat surface. What the hell?

The film is hard to watch, not just because of everything mentioned above but mostly because the lighting, framing and blocking is atrocious. From a technical point of view, this is amateur (two) hour(s), because it’s aggravatingly difficult to see what’s going on in most scenes. Most scenes are lit poorly, while some aren’t lit at all, so you’re staring at near pitch-blackness as you struggle to make out what you’re looking at. Sure, the mall is meant to be dark and spooky and haunted, but when you can’t see what’s happening then what’s the point of watching? When you can actually see, the film manages to screw things up anyway, often throwing blinding light sources in your face (Vishnu constantly points his flashlight directly into the camera, meaning you can’t see anything anyway), or there’ll be something in the way of the shot, blocking it. As such, it’s an ugly and cluttered movie. It’s abundantly clear that the filmmakers don’t actually understand horror movies or how tension and atmosphere are meant to work. Every attempt made has been stolen, poorly, from other horror movies. Darr is often embarrassing in the way it shamelessly steals ideas and imagery from other horror movies and shoves them on screen. You can often even pick exactly what movie they’re liberally copying, from the yellow raincoat-clad ghost from Dark Water, to the rusty nightmare realm of Silent Hill. None of these things mesh well, or even have any bearing or significance to the plot; they’re just there seemingly because the filmmakers saw it worked in other horror movies and decided to steal it. It’s not homage or a reference, it’s just taking bits and pieces form other films and stapling them onto your own. Even other small details, like how the mall is called the Amity Mall, are almost painful little references.

Because this is a movie from Bollywood, we get music numbers thrown in. No, it’s not what you’re thinking – it isn’t a musical and the characters don’t suddenly burst into song or sing their predicament. That would have at least been funny. Instead we get the equivalent of an obnoxious music video spliced into the middle of the film, a glitzy club-music track I assume to be titled Pina Colada, because that’s what the girl who looked like a pig in lipstick rolled into latex and fishnet stockings singing it kept repeating over and over again. It comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with the story or any of the characters, fucks up the tone and is gone, never mentioned again. Another scene also has a music track, complete with lyrics, play for no reason. The scene seems to end and the song stops as we cut away and the film’s ‘plot’ continues for a few minutes, but then we cut back and the song resumes from where it’d stopped mid-lyrics, which is the weirdest thing ever. It’s important to note that these songs were apparently actually written specifically for this movie, because that’s how Bollywood works. The other music, from atmospherics to incidental pieces are often out of place or silly. The building-tension noises sound like they’re stolen from cheesy 80s cartoons, and any attempts at spooky horror sounds are almost like parody versions of the music from actual horror movies.

 

Darr @ the Mall is really, really bad. Hell, I’d say that the baffling, meaningless inclusion of the @ symbol in the title is a pretty big signifier of the sheer incompetence and laziness at play here (they seriously couldn’t have just written ‘at’? or just even named it something more interesting?). It’s a horror movie made by people who have watched other horror movies but didn’t understand them, but decided to try and copy them anyway. The Bollywood slant just makes it stranger, with so much obvious meddling (I feel like it was just a vehicle for that music number), that you can’t help but feel they weren’t even interested in making it into a horror movie. Maybe it was just made to be somebody’s tax dodge or something. That might explain what it’s such a hack job

Hatchet 3

Hatchet 3 sucks. It has an absolutely massive amount of gore (varying wildly in quality) and dozens of kills but, again, it lacks the heart, soul and fun of the original. It’s also has almost no plot and the thinnest reason to exist of them all. Adam Green no longer directs, instead producing (though he does cameo once again as a drunk, a role he also played in the first two films). His absence behind the camera is obvious, as this movie feels amateurish and much looser. The film work itself is obviously cheap and nasty, with ugly sets, poor acting and a total lack of style or atmosphere. The gore effects also look really cheap, and not in a particularly endearing way. If anything, it has the look and feel of an amateur fan film based around Hatchet, rather than a proper continuation.

 

Starting immediately at the end of Hatchet 2, sole survivor Marybeth has seemingly killed Victor Crowley, only for him to suddenly revive, establishing that he can’t be killed by conventional methods - within the swamp he’ll always resurrect.  On arrival back in town covered in blood after managing another escape, she’s quickly arrested by the cops who blame her for the massacre of the tour group from the first film and the hunting posse from the second film. While the police interrogate her, a group of paramedics are sent to the swamp to look for any survivors, only to get slaughtered themselves, but not before putting out a distress signal.

While a massive group of armed police and FBI Special Forces agents go into the swamp on a search/destroy rescue mission, Marybeth finds herself behind bars and being grilled by local journalist and self-appointed Victor Crowley expert Amanda. Amanda has a plan to finally end Victor forever by bringing him what he wants most – his father – and she needs Marybeth’s help to do it.

Danielle Harris continues to showcase why she’s never seen mainstream success. She’s just horrible, and her Marybeth is still so thoroughly unlikeable it’s insane. I didn’t think it was possible for her to get worse than she was in Hatchet 2, but somehow she manages it. She’s bitchier now than ever before, but just as whiny. Thankfully she’s sidelined for about half of the film. Seriously, she’s absent for the vast majority of the movie’s action, sent on a useless errand while the bulk of the action and killing takes place elsewhere.

 

Amanda is played by Caroline Williams, probably best known for starring in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (original, not remake and I hate how horror movies have gotten to the point where I have to mention whether a horror movie sequel is a remake or not). She gives actual energy to her character, something that is missing from everybody else in the movie. Speaking of, with only three exceptions the film seems to be made up entirely of random, forgettable actors, almost all of them amateurish and seemingly taken in off the street. Of the three, one is the same guy who played Justin and Shaun (acting as a third brother I guess, though it’s never mentioned), and another is the actor who played Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13^th remake, which seems done in a weird way to have two actors who played the iconic masked killer in the same film.

There’s an extended cameo by Sid Haig that makes up a fair amount of the weak side-plot. Sid Haig, like many old horror stars ready for cameos, can be terrible if you don’t know how to use him for something fun or interesting (something only Rob Zombie seems to know how to do). Here he just riffs off his Captain Spaulding performance from House of 1000 Corpses, being loudmouthed and racist. It’s almost as though the director saw that movie and said to him ‘just do that’. He feels so out of place here, but then again I can’t say the film has a particularly solid feel otherwise. It’s like a patchwork of disparate, amateurish parts shoved together, unsure of what its own tone should be.

The vast majority of the film then has you watching characters that are so forgettable and unrealised that they lack names wander through a forest until Victor appears and massacres them. The action is almost non-stop, and Victor kills a huge number of people, but it never really elevates above ‘meh’. I think since they’re mostly so disposable, and we don’t know anything about these random people that seeing them get hacked apart or ripped open doesn’t mean anything. The kills are brutal but less inventive and elaborate than what was in the first two films. Still, if you just want to watch a slaughter fest then it works well enough. It’s especially laughable when the movie takes a handful of digs at Hatchet 2’s plot, which was also thin and lacking in logic, but Hatchet 3 feels worse because the plot is nothing. Amanda and Marybeth’s quest has them drive to an old guy’s house for half the movie, while the meantime is spent with random extras getting killed until the two can get back to the swamp. The movie literally kills time by killing people.

 

Hatchet 2 established pretty well that Victor Crowley, burly physical presence aside, was a ghost. So watching a bunch of idiots try to kill him is sort of a null point, since we already know he can’t die conventionally, so all the guns and rockets shot at him aren’t going to work. The way they ultimately do kill Victor is actually pretty solid and works well in the makings of his origin from the original movie. Victor is undead, constantly searching for his father. To finally put him to rest, he needs to be given his father, his cremated remains conveniently being held by a racist old coot in the boonies. Once Victor is given his father’s ashes by Marybeth, his body suddenly decomposes, skin and muscle sloughing off until he’s reduced to a gnarled skeleton. Marybeth, bleeding out and wielding a shotgun, blasts his remains into nothingness. It’s a good ending to a disappointing movie, though it’s basically the same ending Hatchet 2 had.

And that’s the end of the Hatchet trilogy. Three films over about eight years, and only one of them is good. The rest sort of show the sad progression most horror series go through – the awesome first film, the second one that goes too serious or changes what people liked in the first one, and the cynically/lazily made sequels from that point on. The first Hatchet was a really fun time, and not so much a breath of fresh air, but a nostalgic one – it took horror movies back to the fun, gory little entertainers that we don’t get too often anymore. But with each sequel it became something far less interesting, slowly becoming the sort of garbage the original was initially an alternative to. I still wholeheartedly recommend the first film, which I still count as a fantastic movie. The second is disappointing, offering some cool kills and not much else, and 3 is just a bad movie altogether, despite its high body count. While I like the character of Victor Crowley, I do hope that this is the end for him, since the way these sequels have been spiralling downwards hasn’t been a good thing. 

Hatchet 2

I really liked the first Hatchet. I feel that bears repeating. So I was excited when I heard that they had made a sequel. I know horror movie sequels can often be a pissweak endeavour, but I figured that something that offered dumb, gory fun like the original Hatchet could spawn something even better if they went bigger and more ridiculous with it. It also helped that it was being made by the same director, Adam Green. It all sounded like it was going to be a massive fun time, but unfortunately Hatchet 2 is a massive disappointment.

I don’t like Hatchet 2 and the reason is simple - Hatchet 2 just isn’t fun overall. The silliness and knowing humour of the first movie are both pretty much completely gone as the sequel tries to outdo it in terms of gore and nastiness, and tries to go serious with it. There’s still some occasional humour and some characters are thrown in as comic relief, but it feels out of place with the more serious tone the movie seems to be going for. The gore and kills are pretty awesome, but it’s a nastier, uglier movie than the first, lacking the humorous charm of the original. It almost feels as though it was made by an entirely different person. The shots are closer, there’s more shakycam and it’s pretty uninspired in terms of mood and lighting, at least compared to the original’s often hokey charms. As to why this happened, I feel it’d be due to director Adam Green having a substantial change in priorities and preferences in the years since the original, stretching out even to his filmmaking style. Hatchet 2 has a more claustrophobic feel, with a lot of close ups and most locations feeling small or narrow.

The first and most noticeable change is that they replaced Marybeth’s actress with Danielle Harris, a D-class horror film actress who, despite appearing in a lot of horror movies over the last few decades, really sucks at the whole ‘acting’ thing. She’s a total bore here. More than that, she’s a funpire – she actively sucks the fun out of the movie with every scene she’s in. Being bitchy and generically ‘tough’ (swearing a lot and threatening everybody does not make for good characterisation, dialing the redneck aspect of the character up to a ridiculous degree) she plays the film ‘seriously’, and a noticeable change to the Marybeth from the original film. She also has one eyebrow raised through the entire film, making her look constantly surprised (that’s largely just Harris’ look in general though). Marybeth is too serious and brooding and whiny here and it really hurts the movie, especially since she’s the focus of it. She’s also become far less capable, spending her time being mostly useless and just screaming when shit gets real. I know it’s weird to put so much focus so early in this review on a single issue as simple as a recasting, but honestly it’s one of the film’s biggest issues for me. She’s just so awful that she sours the entire movie.

Taking place immediately at the end of the original Hatchet, Marybeth (Danielle Harris) narrowly escapes from Victor Crowley’s clutches, makes it out of the swamp and heads back to town. She immediately seeks out Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd), to learn more about Victor and how to stop him, and together they form a posse of hunters to go back into the swamp to try and kill Crowley for good. Marybeth is hoping to retrieve the bodies of her father and brother to give them a proper burial, and her uncle comes along to make sure she’s ok. But Reverend Zombie has his own plans – he believes that Victor Crowley’s spirit can only be sated if he gets revenge by killing those responsible for his death and he’s lured them into the hunting party for that purpose.

So basically it’s an excuse to have another bunch of characters head into the swamp to get killed off one by one, something that feels especially hollow considering the original’s charm. The overall far more serious tone is what hurts it the most I feel, since the scenes when people aren’t getting hacked up by Crowley are so long and interminably dull. Seeing Marybeth argue with her uncle about going into the swamp for five minutes is so dull I just feel like fast forwarding through it. It’s not even a long movie, coming in at about seventy or so minutes, but boy hell does it feel long and drawn out in those first forty minutes.

Speaking of which, the first forty minutes of the movie, barring some small callback cameos to the original and a pretty fun/gross pre-title kill, are a total freaking borefest made up of characters spouting exposition and Marybeth complaining. And this is the biggest problem with the movie: Marybeth is not an interesting or likeable character. She wasn’t interesting in the first film, and she isn’t here so focusing on her was a big mistake. In the first one her character’s lack of character wasn’t too much of an issue because she wasn’t the focus and everybody else was a ridiculous caricature. She wasn’t the lynchpin holding the movie together despite her final girl status, so she never brought it down. In this one however she’s the focus of attention and just constantly brings everything down with how endlessly serious she is. They want her struggle and issues to carry weight, and they really, really don’t, so she just comes across as annoying and whiny. She’s also an idiot to boot this time around. In the first film her trepidation made sense – she was wary of the legend of Crowley, but wanted to find her missing family so she braved it anyway, not entirely aware of what she was facing. This time she knows exactly what the danger is, and yet she comes across as dumber, more naive and less capable than she was before. And holy hell is she whiny. I feel the need to bring this up yet again, since she spends so much of the film endlessly complaining.

Once they get to the swamp and things actually start happening it improves, but it also devolves a bit and becomes a loose collection of gory kills. The hunting party instantly splits up for no reason as the various side characters go about their own little agendas. That at least is a nice little excuse for why they’d otherwise pointlessly split up (two guys want to hunt alligators for cash, which calls back to the gator hunting mentioned in the first film), and the Reverend’s ulterior motives explains why he never tries to stop them. Otherwise with everybody split up and getting killed individually it breaks the pace of the movie in a weird way, especially since the characters are all completely unaware of what happened to each other and never get mentioned - they don’t even try to stick together or check on each other, they just wander around aimlessly getting hacked apart.

This is where the film tries to bring in some humour with its side characters, but it’s pretty weird. We get a collection of hillbillies and assorted hunters, none of whom are particularly memorable. There is the one black guy who sings a song I assume to be titled ‘Chicken and Biscuits and Gravy’, since those are the sole words repeated ad infimum. He hits on Marybeth and is a goofball, and that’s his entire character. There are a few hillbillies who just talk about being hillbilliesm and also a really out of place pairing between a hunter and his almost stalker-ish ex-girlfriend who comes with him on the dangerous murder hunt so she can seduce him. They’re a weird mob, but you won’t really care or remember them. Tony Todd is good as Reverend Zombie, though it is weird to see what was a cameo role being expanded into a main character, though a secretly villainous one. His voice is still amazing, the sort of deep, evil voice that you’d expect a Disney villain to have, but the humour is gone now. In a weird little bit of casting, the guy who played hapless tour guide Shaun in the first film comes back to play Shaun’s brother Justin, which is a bit weird. Even he lacks the humour he had in the first film.

We get an updated backstory to Victor Crowley and his curse, which is a bit weird. Attempts at changing horror villain’s backstories and origins have a history of never working out too well in anything really, and there wasn’t anything wrong with his story in the first place. The additions here also don’t really change anything, other than giving an unneeded explanation to something that wasn’t particularly important. Victor’s father, Thomas Crowley, had a sick and ailing wife. He got a live-in nurse to look after her, and ended up falling in love with her and having an affair. His dying wife found out and lay down a voodoo curse on them both before dying. Some nine months later and the nurse gave birth to the disfigured Victor, the sight of which made her die of shock. It’s a pretty benign addition actually, and does very little other than explaining Victor’s appearance and apparent immortality as being due to voodoo.

Reverend Zombie thinks that Victor Crowley will only leave once his vengeful spirit has been appeased by killing off those who had wronged him – the teenagers who had burnt down his shack and indirectly caused his death. In the decades since they’ve grown into men and they’re exactly the same men Zombie invites to join the posse. In another retcon, Marybeth’s dead dad (Freddy Kreuger’s short cameo from the first film) is also one of those grown teens, purposelessly linking Marybeth to Victor. A lot of horror movies tend to do this, since linking characters is an easy way to make a dull, uninteresting character important in some way. In this case it gives an excuse as to why we’re still being subjected to Marybeth, when she could have just as easily been replaced by anybody. Reverend Zombie explicitly says at the beginning that Victor Crowley is a ghost (he calls him a ‘repeater’ as he constantly relives the night he was killed), and as such can’t be killed in conventional methods, but Marybeth sort of ignores him completely to try and shoot him to death, even though that didn’t work in the first film.

Crowley himself has undergone something of an apparent redesign, most noticeable in his face, which is larger and more leathery this time around. He even looks bigger and more hulking this time through. Kane Hodder does another great job in making Crowley exactly the sort of monster man you’d never want to be caught by. So while a lot of the other changes have been disappointing, Victor Crowley as a character is still a lot of fun and really deserved a better sequel. The film’s saving grace is the gory kills, which are brutal, gross, often creative and pretty funny. The opener sets the bar – a hillbilly is strangled with his own intestines until his head pops off – and from there the goriness continues. Faces are caved in with hatchets, heads are torn open by propellers and a massive chainsaw is used to slice through some guys groin-first. There is a lot of blood and gore thrown around, and it’s pretty cool, though some effects do look cheap. Overall though, these are some pretty awesome kills.

The ending here is one I like. It has the exact same sudden abruptness as the first film’s ending, but it’s the reverse situation. It has an air of finality about it, far better than the first film’s sudden stop, and at least ends the movie with a bang. The journey there is sadly mostly a frustrating test of patience, especially through the dull first half, but those kills and that ending at least bring it over the line. Oddly enough, despite how apparently final this ending is, yet another Hatchet sequel was made a few years later.