Yet more notes on recent viewing, featuring horror – both high and low end – some documentaries and action movies, gritty realism and slick fantasy … eclectic and somewhat random.
Fall 2024 viewing round-up, part five
Tag: Asian Film
The 5th Hong Kong International Film Festival, part two
The second instalment of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival in 1981 covers films from Thailand, Turkey, China, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Spring 2024 viewing, part two
Continuing my survey of what I’ve been watching this Spring… Mondo Macabro Mondo Macabro is a label I haven’t mentioned much here, though they specialize in genre movies from around the world and I’ve discovered some real oddities through them – like H. Tjut Djalil’s Mystics in Bali (1981) and Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1975). […]
Spring 2024 viewing, part one
Springtime viewing includes monsters and murderous mayhem, found-footage rawness and classical Hollywood craft, psycho killers and ancient evil, along with a couple of westerns with different attitudes towards violence on the frontier.
Winter 2024 viewing, part two: Vinegar Syndrome
Recent Vinegar Syndrome releases offer a range of genres and styles and widely varying degrees of satisfaction – there’s Hong Kong action, Indonesian horror, experimental indie sci-fi, neo-noir and feminist vigilante violence, giant rats, Biblical horror and quite a bit of sex and violence.
What I haven’t been writing about
Although I write regularly here about the movies I watch, there are a lot more I don’t get around to mentioning – the reasons for what write about or ignore are not entirely clear.
Summer grab-bag, part one
As usual, there’s no coherent pattern to what I spend my time watching. In the past few months, I given my overtaxed attention to quite a few movies from the ’70s and ’80s – British sex comedies and cop movies, Italian gialli, French and Spanish thrillers, Chinese martial arts movies and an Australian superhero musical – plus a pair of recent Korean action movies and two ultra-low-budget do-it-yourself movies from the ’90s.
Asia extreme
Although there are obviously differences from culture to culture, many Asian movies share a tendency to to ignore the kind of “realism” Western, and particularly American, movies so often feel is necessary – which is one reason so many U.S. remakes of Asian genre movies take on a pedestrian quality nowhere evident in the originals. Three recent Asian movies – from Korea, Japan and China – use different approaches to explore societies in which economic and social inequality engender violence and to some degree madness. One uses blackly comic satire, one pushes genre tropes to absurd extremes, and one pushes neorealism into the realm of nightmare.
Speed reviewing, Nov. 2019 – part two
International hit men, a widescreen travelogue, Asian action, World War Two, sex with an immortal monster, the zombie apocalypse, necrophilia and interstellar space travel … another mixed bag of recent viewing.
Late summer viewing 2014, part one
Horror, action, mindless violence and exploitation: summer viewing has involved a lot of switching off my brain and watching undemanding genre movies.
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