CABIN FEVER 2: SPRING FEVER (2009)

It's not a good sign when the writer/ director publicly disowns a movie after being denied his request to have his name removed from the credits, but that's when happened with CABIN FEVER 2. I don't know anything about this Ti West dude, but if he made it and he hates it then it's a pretty safe bet that the movie is gonna suck.

I actually liked the first one cause it was kinda an oddball movie that was something different (sadly nothing good can be said about the rest of Eli Roth's career, 2001 MANIACS was one of the worst things I've ever seen and the only good thing about HOSTEL was Takashi Miike's 3 second cameo). Part 2 though is just a disaster. With a name like "Spring Fever" I was expecting it to happen on Spring Break with a bunch of hot chick's in bikini's, but no it's just a lame and very short tale of the water supply from the original making local high school students sick. After the opening scene there is zero action for nearly 30 minutes then the prom starts and people get sick, puke, bleed and die. It's very lame and the story is pretty much nonexistent.

The only thing that I even found interesting was the lead actor dude was the corpse rapist from DEAD GIRL. Other than that this movie could disappear off the face of the Earth and nobody would give a fuck. Skip it. Also when I say short I'm not bullshitting the official runtime says 87 minutes, but that's misleading cause it's more like 70. They padded it with the lame intro and shitty credits for probably 5-8 minutes and then the horrible tacked on strip club ending that was probably 10 minutes long and fucking looked like it was filmed in somebody's living room. Avoid this movie!

4BIA (2008)

I hope to Satan this isn't what passes for horror in Thailand.

OK, we have four short stories here:

"Happiness", the interesting for 10 minutes then stupid for the rest story of a cute chick with a broken leg who's hanging out in her apartment. She's bored as fuck so when she's gets a strange text from an unidentified number asking to chat, she's all up for it(stupid). Soon the messages start getting creepy and the girl freaks out. It's all very silly and the ending is fucking stupid.

"Tit for Tat", the worst of the lot mainly due to the extremely annoying style it was filmed. I have no idea why the director felt that having the lights pulsating the entire time would be a good idea, but it drove me fucking nuts! The story is your standard high-school-nerd-bullied-by-bullies-puts-a-curse-on-them revenge bullshit. Very lame, zero suspense, very little blood, but plenty of shitty CGI effects. Fucking horrible.

"In the Middle", four buddies go rafting. One drowns and then haunts the others. Dumb as dirt. One of the guys had a shirt that said "Bullshit" on it, so I smiled at that.

"Last Flight", suspenseless tale of a flight attendant who's banging some chicks wife. The wife dies and her ghost haunts her during a long flight. Stupid as shit and if I'd written such a stupid story I wouldn't even wipe my ass with it. You ever wiped your ass with copy paper? It hurts!

Fuck this movie for boring me. No nudity, no scares, very little blood, no laughs. Fuck this turd. Skip it, I wish I had.

DETROIT METAL CITY (2008)

I rented this solely cause the cover looked cool and I like metal. I kinda figured it was going to be lame, but I ended up really enjoying myself. The "metal" I wouldn't consider true metal, but that's my only complaint. That and the fact that Rosa Kato didn't have a 30 minute nude scene, but oh well.

The story is pretty funny: this dorky country boy moves to Tokyo and has dreams of singing really queer love songs, but he accidentally ends up as the lead singer/ guitarist for a Satanic glam metal band called Detroit Metal City. He does it just to pay the bills but then his worst nightmare comes true: they become famous! To make matters even worse, the girl that he's in love with hates DMC so naturally this leads to all kinds of mistaken identity hijinks that were pretty goddamn funny. Including one where he has a concert right next door to where he's suppost to meet her for a date, so he ends up running back and forth between the two! There's also a surprisingly sweet moment concerning his mother that I thought really pushed the movie past being funny to actually having a soul and a good message.

The best part of the movie was Ken'ichi Matsuyama's performance. He had me giggling the entire movie. His nerd guy character was so fucking stupid and over the top that I couldn't stop laughing. But then his glam metal guy was completely different to the point that I kept forgetting that it was the nerd guy in makeup. Outstanding performance. I think that if anybody else had been in the role the entire movie would have just ended up stupid.

Is that Lady Sue from RAN?!

THE HIDDEN BLADE (2004)

This is my second Yoji Yamada film (the first being THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI) and I might be going out on a limb here, but based on these two films I think that when it comes to samurai movies he's as talented as Kurosawa. Yamada's style is different: less fighting and more about the character of the samurai, his place in society and his dedication to family. But because of this when the fighting finally does happen you'll be so emotionally invested in the character that you'll be on the edge of your seat!

Like TTS, THB is based on the writings of Shuhei Fujisawa (and thanks to Yamada I bought the only book he has in English and it's wonderful!). This time the samurai is single and lives with his elderly mother. They once had a servant girl that he secretly (even to himself?) loved but she was married into a merchant family at the beginning of the film. Fast forward three years and his mother is dead and by chance he bumps in the ex-servant girl in the market. She tries to put on a happy face, but you can see she's hurting inside. Months go by and he continues his day-to-day activities as a lower samurai, which includes learning modern Western weaponry, then while hanging out at his sister's home he overhears her talking about how the ex-servant girl has be mistreated by her family and sick for two months. Infuriated by this news he goes to her home and finds her suffering from malnutrition and neglected. He takes her home and nurses her back to health. This doesn't sit well with the higher ups, so when an childhood friend of the samurai is found to be secretly plotting against the shogunate our hero is ordered to go kill him.

Of course, I skipping over a lot of stuff, as not to ruin the film for you, but I will tell you there is an assassination scene towards the end of the movie that is the slickest shit I've ever seen in my life! It was awesome! It actually reminded me of the scene in the "Hannibal" novel (not the shitty movie) where this guy is paid to fuck with Hannibal Lecter but ends up dead without realizing that he'd been stabbed.

Anyway, this movie's great, almost as good as THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI, but not quite. I think Hiroyuki Sanada's performance in that film was so perfect that it was impossible for Masatoshi Nagase to match it. Also the samurai in TTS had two adorable daughter's that would have been orphaned if he died, so that really ratcheted up the tension. All said and done THE HIDDEN BLADE is a excellent film and just makes me even more excited to see what else Yoji Yamada has done.

I'M A CYBORG, BUT THAT'S OK (2006)

A young woman who secretly thinks that she's a cyborg is committed to a psychiatric hospital after she slits her wrist, inserts some wires and plugs the wires into a wall outlet. Once inside she meets a whole slew of bizarre people and...well, that's pretty much the entire movie.

IACBTOK is a good movie and it had some charming moments - my favorite being the rice eating scene - but it's way, way too long. It would have an magical short film, but there's nowhere near enough story to justify this being a full-length movie. Good movie with interesting visuals, but I expected more from Chan-wook Park.

Sorry for the short review, but there's really nothing more to say, besides: what's up with that ending?! What even happened?