I first saw this on a bootleg DVD that I bought off of eBay in high school. It was a less than clean VHS rip that had a blurry, tracking lined picture and audio that made long sections of dialogue completely indecipherable. In some ways that added to the charm and felt especially sleazy.
This wasn't something that I ever expected to get a Criterion release or for it to be something I'd be watching in an actual theater. Yet…
Oddball wuxia/horror mashup that I couldn't help but wish was just a little bit weirder. Still, that giallo red blood and the skull mask make it worth the watch.
This ended up being more cyberpunk lite than the John Wick knockoff I was expecting. I enjoyed the first, lazier half of the movie that introduces its cast of mostly characters like an Agathie Christie novel. Eventually the plot kicks in and things start happening just because they need to. Still, some decent action and it's entertaining throughout.
There are bad movies and then there are trainwrecks. There are movies that swing for the fences and manage to make every wrong choice along the way. There are passion projects that have sat and simmered for so long that the makers have lost all objectivity and sense of an audience. These are the movies that should be preserved and studied, treated as a case study into just how off the rails something can go. There are bad movies and…
