(Trailer) Kibakichi (Ryuji Harada), dressed in rags and an ugly hat, is an itinerant swordsman with matted hair who is wandering the byroads of feudal Japan. He also just happens to be a werewolf. (Although, in truth, the term "werewolf" is Western and actually wrong: he is one of the last of his people, a village of yokai whose non-human form is that of a wolfen bipedal beast.)
As is to be expected of any Japanese samurai film, three minutes into the brown-tinted landscape he gets attacked by a band of bloodthirsty bandits who promptly lose limbs and life. 
They die, he continues his way, and — after passing a doom-saying blind woman and chopping his way past a few kappa — he soon wanders into a sleepy village with a casino. The criminals and filth that come to play, however, leave much more than just their money: they serve as food for the village inhabitants, a variety of different forms of yokai who have struck a deal with the local humans (in form of the Yakuzi) to rid the neighborhood of unwelcome scum in exchange for the permission of peaceful residence.
All would seem fine and dandy, were it not for the simple fact that the movie's central theme is: never trust a human! The deal made by the local Yakuzi (all dressed in ankle-length leather outfits stolen from The Matrix) was one of politics: the friendship with the feared yokai ensured that the tilt of power in the regional politics was in their favor. 
With the arrival of western war machinery — Gatling guns, pistols and grenades — and the resultant military strength, the yokai are rendered expendable and the decision is made that they should be used for target practice. When the Yakuzi roll into town and begin to mow the yokai down, Kibakichi takes up his sword and basically disseminates everyone in an extended scene of ineptly staged and blood-drenched slaughter, the gore of which is only exceeded by the amount of laughter the fight also instigates...
Tomoo Haraguchi's Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden (or Werewolf Warrior I) is probably so intrinsically Japanese in its plot, characterization and execution that it is possibly impossible for Joe Schmoe Westerner to see where and how the film fits within its originating culture, but transplanted onto my DVD player here in Europe, and viewed through my Western eyes, the film wallows deeply, totally and unapologetically in the nether regions of guilty treasures and sleazy trash. 
It is, without a doubt, a truly psychotronic film: a Japanese B-movie oddity that definitely appeals most to fans of bad Godzilla and shogun movies, for the film combines the best — or worst, depending on how one looks at it — of both genres, only without Godzilla. Were it not for the ripped and chopped off bodily appendages and spurting blood, the general filmic execution is that of a children's film. Indeed, each and every monster that appears in the film is a product of the traditional Japanese paper-mâché and fake-fur school of costume design: no monster is as scary as it is hilariously laughable.
Regrettably, despite a promising opening scene and a entertaining grand final, most of what occurs in-between is so slow that despite the film's at times endearingly dilettantish execution, once too often Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden makes the unforgivable mistake of being boring. Still, the movie does have a strangely perverse fascination, much like that of the crack of a fat workman's ass when his loose pants slip too far down: you can't help but stare, even if you don't want to.
If you enjoy bad films, then Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden might be just the right thing for you... Hell, how can a true purveyor of bad films not find something to like in a movie with werewolves, monsters, samurai, Gatling guns and grenades?
Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden was followed by a sequel the same year. In all likelihood the two films were filmed in tandem, for the female nutcase werewolf with the razor-edged boomerang makes a brief introductory appearance in this flick only to disappear completely until Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden 2.
The Gathering is director Brian Gilbert’s first foray into the field of "horror" after already doing mainstream comedy (Vice Versa, 1988), mainstream drama (Not Without My Daughter, 1991) and critic-pleasing historical drama (Wilde, 1997). And, as to be expected, The Gathering is a pleasingly middle-of-the-road horror suspense film, well-made but with no surprises. About the only thing that makes the flick truly watchable is the headlining star, Christina Ricci, just at the point of her career when she decided to lose the baby fat and for the killer bod. OK, she had a killer bod even with baby fat – see John Waters' Pecker (1998) and Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999) for primely droolable Ricci – but around the time of The Gathering she obviously upped the diet pills or used her finger a lot more, for she strolls around looking like a dreamily top-heavy model — an amazing feat considering how tall she is in real life. But, regrettably, although she is the best thing about the film, she also keeps her clothes on for the whole film. (The only commonly available version of The Gathering is the Weinstein Version, which was trimmed of ten minutes – including a sex scene featuring Ricci.)
The Gathering begins with the discovery a buried church from the 1st century in the rural English town of Ashly Wake, a church that features a hitherto unknown scene in relief of a group of people watching the crucified Jesus. Simon Kirkman (Stephen Kirkman), a well-known iconoclast religious scholar just happens to live in the neighborhood, so he undertakes the excavation and studies. In turn, his wife Marion Kirkman (Kerry Fox) just happens to run over an American drifter Cassie (Ricci), who awakens in the hospital bereft of her own memory but able to recognize the young son of the Kirkman’s by name. Invited to stay with the Krikmans until she regains her memory, Cassie is not only soon plagued by nasty visions but also begins seeing unfriendly, silent strangers hanging around the town. Like some sexy Nancy Drew she follows selected clues to a loner mechanic Frederick Michael Argyle (Peter McNamara) and learns that something terrible is going to happen soon; worse, she comes to realize that the young man she has been spending time with (and, in the Weinstein version, has screwed) is not what he appears to be — nor, for that matter, is she!
The plot circles around the concept that a group of 13 rubberneck spectators who once watched the crucifixion of Christ have been doomed by The Angry God to wander the earth forever, continually turning up at places where inevitable tragedies are to occur. (Busy folks, to say the least – whether they cause the events or just witness the events blurs on occasion in the movie.) Combine this idea with the above description, and you can pretty much figure out any and all the major twists that happen in The Gathering. In fact, the only true surprises are those leading up to the church’s discovery and they all happen within the first five minutes of the film.
Well acted and well shot, the film is not really all that terrible — it’s just that it isn’t really all the original or exciting either, and is also somewhat illogical at times. The Gathering is pleasant, neo-religious supernatural suspense film about the possibilities of redemption, but it is also nothing to write home about. There are both better horror and better Christina Ricci films available out there.
(Trailer) Beginning with the film’s first 10 seconds, during which an abysmally banal disco-tinged tune narrating the heart pains of an android infatuated lover is sung, it becomes obvious that Luk Kim Ming's Robotrix is going to be a typically mindless, logicless, overtly cheap, multi-violent, sexist Hong Kong lark, totally without any socially redeeming values and statements — in other words, truly great fun.
Robotrix is one of those (to the average Joe Westerner) unknown Asian trash films whose unexpected discovery makes you come back for more, faithfully wading through a ton of other Hong Kong crap before finding the next fun-filled romp. Advertised as the film that started and set the standard in Hong Kong for "Category III" movies, the film quickly makes the meaning of "Category III" obvious to everyone, 
even if the term is unknown off the island. Aside from showing the unshowable taboo of all Asian films, namely frontal female nudes with pubes, this film features one or two relatively realistic fuck scenes, as well as the biggest tits one can probably find on an Asian woman. The deliciously bulbous mounds are definitely big enough to make Russ Meyer go jumping for his home-movie camera were he still alive, and at least in the case of the character Selina, the bouncing love pillows are look very real. The violence itself is not as often or as well choreographed as in most films of this ilk, but Robotrix definitely is an extremely bloody movie, squirting red in quantities not normally seen outside of an Italian slasher film.
As to be expected, although the content is not, the acting is generally on the level of a low budget 1970’s era Disney kid’s film, alá Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), full of actors rolling their eyes and mugging for the camera. However, the film is so ridiculous from start to finish, so inexcusably exploitive and unredeeming, that the slapstick tendencies become an integral part to the overall fun.
Unlike most recent Hong Kong exploitation fare, Luk Kim Ming’s direction is relatively staid and old fashioned, and he never indulges in the more extreme MTV aesthetic favored by many modern Hong Kong trashmakers. This actually results in a much more enjoyable film, as most of the more extreme filmatic pyrotechnics practiced in Hong Kong (as in such films as Her Name Is Cat (1998)) seldom serve to do anything more than pad the film out, confuse the already mindless plot or simply induce headaches. The subtitles, like normal, feature translations that are so bad that they induce laughter, if not occasionally making the plot hard to follow. (Some of the more obvious mistakes include "psychic" for "psycho", "petty cop" for "lowly cop" and "mutilated" for "destroyed.") Needless to say, the dubbed version is equally unprofessional, the lips never matching the words being said.
The plot is wonderfully inane. Chesty cop Selena gets a bullet between the boobs when the horny prince she is guarding, just finished from frolicking naked (in front of a half-dozen guards) in a pool with 4 or 5 naked babes, gets kidnapped by Mr. Super Nasty, a powerful robot installed with bad guy Yamamoto’s feelings (i.e., soul). Yamamoto is out to get the prince’s sheik father to finance the building of an army of robots, most likely so that Yamamoto can rule the world, though this is never stated. The sheik himself is at the Future World Expo, viewing robots, when the American Android goes bonkers after sustaining damage while fighting the German Android during a test presentation.
Saved by mega-breasted android Ann (Amy Yip), he and the police promptly engage Dr. Sara, Ann’s creator, to find his son. She puts Selina’s feelings/soul in a robot reproduction, and super-boobs number two is created. Ann and Selina join up with the police task force out to stop Yamamoto, who has the tendency to throw naked hookers out of hotel room windows and punch huge indentations into the bodies the men who get in his way.
A few sex scenes later, including one in which Ann — logically undercover as a whore — decides to find out what sex is like, Dr. Sara ends up removing the eyes from a lowlife snitch that Yamamoto has killed because, as in Dario Argento’s equally misinformed 1971 film Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the image of his killer’s should be imprinted on his retinas. Thus the sheik’s bodyguards are revealed as being in on the plan, and are followed to their next meeting with Yamamoto, who, for some inexplicable reason, slaughters them. 
The ensuing fight between Ann and Selina against Yamamoto ends with the bad guy half-blown apart but with the two girls running off before they can finish the job so as to keep Ann’s robot identity secret from Joe, Selina’s boyfriend cop. Angry, Yamamoto goes home to his hideout in a car junk yard and drills a few holes in the prince’s leg.....
And the film still has 45 minutes to go!
Between the ten years spanning between Roy Del Ruth’s version of The Maltese Falcon (1931) and John Huston’s 1941 universally acknowledged classic version of the story, German-born William Dieterle, one time star of German silents — including Paul Leni's expressionist masterpiece Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924) — made a truly substandard variation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel starring Betty Davis and Warren William.
Satan Met a Lady, made in 1936, is a screwball comedy vaguely along the lines as W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man (1934), only not even half as good. Dieterle has little grasp of his material, and shows little evidence of being the man who went on three years later to direct the all time best rendition of The Hunchback of Notre Dam (1939), starring Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. (But then, that film was also not a comedy.) Likewise, Dieterle’s stars in Satan Met A Lady don’t exactly excel either. In terms of comic interaction, nothing in the film gets even close to being half as charismatic or as witty as that of Myrna Loy and William Powell. Dramatically, well, it is to be expected that a film meant to be a screwball comedy would hardly achieve any of the nuances of performances to be found in Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon. Strangest of all, though featuring the same producer (Henry Blanke) and scriptwriter (Brown Holmes) as Roy Del Ruth’s 1931 film, Satan Met a Lady pales terribly even in comparison to the oldest version of the story.
Warren William, who died in 1948, was a popular star now long forgotten, best known amongst film fanatics as a one-time Perry Mason (in four films), Philo Vance (twice) and, most regularly, as Michael Lanyard, better known as The Lone Wolf. In Satan Met a Lady he plays Ted Shayne, a skirt-chasing private detective who comes back to his hometown and restarts his partnership with his old P.I. partner Ames (Porter Hall), who promptly gets bumped off in a graveyard while tailing someone for client Valerie Purvis (Bette Davis). Though not particularly put out by Ames’ death, Shayne sets out to find out whodunit. Between his dizzy secretary, Ames’ widow and the various other ladies that distract him, Shayne discovers that a bunch of people are all after some mythical horn supposedly filled with priceless jewels...
The rest of the story we all more or less know, but instead of Sidney Greenstreet we have Alison Skipworth, and instead of Peter Lorre we get Maynard Holmes. And nowhere do we have anything all that funny, or even worth watching. Bette Davis made many a great film in her life, but this ain’t one of them.
(Trailer) Kibakichi (Ryuji Harada), dressed in rags and an ugly hat, is an itinerant swordsman with matted hair who is wandering the byroads of feudal Japan. He also just happens to be a werewolf. (Although, in truth, the term "werewolf" is Western and actually wrong: he is one of the last of his people, a village of yokai whose non-human form is that of a wolfen bipedal beast.) 
They die, he continues his way, and — after passing a doom-saying blind woman and chopping his way past a few kappa — he soon wanders into a sleepy village with a casino. The criminals and filth that come to play, however, leave much more than just their money: they serve as food for the village inhabitants, a variety of different forms of yokai who have struck a deal with the local humans (in form of the Yakuzi) to rid the neighborhood of unwelcome scum in exchange for the permission of peaceful residence.
All would seem fine and dandy, were it not for the simple fact that the movie's central theme is: never trust a human! The deal made by the local Yakuzi (all dressed in ankle-length leather outfits stolen from The Matrix) was one of politics: the friendship with the feared yokai ensured that the tilt of power in the regional politics was in their favor. 
With the arrival of western war machinery — Gatling guns, pistols and grenades — and the resultant military strength, the yokai are rendered expendable and the decision is made that they should be used for target practice. When the Yakuzi roll into town and begin to mow the yokai down, Kibakichi takes up his sword and basically disseminates everyone in an extended scene of ineptly staged and blood-drenched slaughter, the gore of which is only exceeded by the amount of laughter the fight also instigates...
Tomoo Haraguchi's Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden (or Werewolf Warrior I) is probably so intrinsically Japanese in its plot, characterization and execution that it is possibly impossible for Joe Schmoe Westerner to see where and how the film fits within its originating culture, but transplanted onto my DVD player here in Europe, and viewed through my Western eyes, the film wallows deeply, totally and unapologetically in the nether regions of guilty treasures and sleazy trash. 
It is, without a doubt, a truly psychotronic film: a Japanese B-movie oddity that definitely appeals most to fans of bad Godzilla and shogun movies, for the film combines the best — or worst, depending on how one looks at it — of both genres, only without Godzilla. Were it not for the ripped and chopped off bodily appendages and spurting blood, the general filmic execution is that of a children's film. Indeed, each and every monster that appears in the film is a product of the traditional Japanese paper-mâché and fake-fur school of costume design: no monster is as scary as it is hilariously laughable.
Regrettably, despite a promising opening scene and a entertaining grand final, most of what occurs in-between is so slow that despite the film's at times endearingly dilettantish execution, once too often Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden makes the unforgivable mistake of being boring. Still, the movie does have a strangely perverse fascination, much like that of the crack of a fat workman's ass when his loose pants slip too far down: you can't help but stare, even if you don't want to.
If you enjoy bad films, then Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden might be just the right thing for you... Hell, how can a true purveyor of bad films not find something to like in a movie with werewolves, monsters, samurai, Gatling guns and grenades?
