Yes, boys and girls, it’s Todd from Twitch here again which means it must be time for my regular fortnightly installment of International Eye Candy, a regular round up of the very best trailers from around the world over the past two weeks. In this round: THE GRUDGE’s Takashi Shimizu goes lo-fi! FRANKENHOOKER director returns! Dutch Nazi Zombies! Polish gore! Abel Ferrara stripping! Van Damme throwing a tantrum! And more, more more!
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Harry et al for providing me the opportunity to use the word fortnightly in public.
Shall we begin with some nudity? Why, yes, I believe we shall. The film is GO GO TALES, from cult director Abel Ferrara of BAD LIEUTENANT fame and, frankly, I’m at a loss to explain why this thing isn’t out there in public yet. A pretty high profile cult director, a comedy set in a strip club and a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Bob Hoskins and Asia Argento? Plus a public premiere at the 2007 Cannes festival? Seems like a sure seller to me but, bizarrely, there’s not even a proper trailer for it yet. What there is – and what I’ve got – are a pair of extended scenes from the film. Naughty bits included, workplace viewing not recommended.
You can check the clips here
What goes better with sex than violence? Nothing! That’s what! We’ll get to some violence of a much more serious kind a little farther down but right now I’ve got Hong Kong star Shawn Yue popping caps in ghostly asses. It’s RULE #1, the new action-horror from Singapore’s Kelvin Tong who made waves on the fest circuit a few years ago with a little flick called THE MAID. Yue stars as a cop assigned to a unit that investigates paranormal activity. This is actually the second Asian film to mine this sort of territory in the past couple years and I’m kind of enjoying the trend … it’s big, stupid fun …
Details and trailer here
And speaking of big, stupid, ghostly fun, have I got a treat for you. Between the various Japanese and English versions of the JU-ON / GRUDGE franchise Takashi Shimizu has made basically the same film seven times over the past few years. And believe it or not he’s actually had time to do a few other things, too, which I guess is the benefit of simply recycling your scares from JU-ON to GRUDGE films – no need to waste time with pesky things like script writing. Anyway, one other recent Shimizu effort was the impressive art-horror flick MAREBITO and he also has an ongoing sort of short-film-duel / drunken bet going on with director Keisuke Toyoshima. One of them makes a low budget science fiction short, the other counters with low budget horror. The results are titled, appropriately enough GHOST VERSUS ALIEN and the third installment is going theatrical in Japan. Utter trash, but trash of a brilliant, very fun kind. Instant cult hit? You betcha.
Details and trailer here
Right. We’re going to stay in Asia a bit longer now but change gears significantly in the process. For a fun time, walk up to the biggest anime geek you know and say something insulting about Mamoru Oshii. If they have an ounce of sense in them they’ll slap you silly. Oshii is a god amongst animators – and not a half bad love action film maker, either – with a resume most would kill for. PATLABOR? JIN ROH? GHOST IN THE SHELL? All Oshii. And he’s back. His latest is titled THE SKY CRAWLERS and that really should be all you need to know. Trailer’s damn tasty.
Find the trailer and details here
Okay, okay … I can’t promise that we won’t go back but it’s time to get out of Asia for a bit. We head to Poland, a nation with a very long cinematic history dominated by arthouse fare. And deservedly so, frankly, as the nation has produced more than their share of legitimate cinematic greats. And now also what looks to be a very disturbing – and likely very gorey – horror film. Titled PORA MROKU it’s about a group of friends captured and subjected to medical experimentation in the name of achieving immortality – not for them, obviously – and it combines a nasty hard edge with some sumptuous photography. Hopes are very high for this one …
You’ll find the trailer and details here
America’s part of the world, right? So if you happen to be somewhere else it counts as international, right? That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it both for this one and another coming up in just a bit. But what’s this one?
A new film by low budget maestro John Lechago titled BIO SLIME. Pure eighties creature and gore goodness in this one. Yes, the acting looks as though it could be a bit dodgy but those effects shots are fantastically icky in a very Raimi / Jackson / BLOBby sort of way …
You’ll find details and a trailer here
The first of two zombie films in today’s column comes courtesy of Chile’s Jorge Olguin and his picture SOLOS. And while I’m tiring of the zombie sub genre as a whole right now – everybody and their younger brother seems to have either just made or is actively pitching a zombie project these days – both of these have got my interest.
We’ve written about Olguin’s effort before, it’s Chile’s first ever zombie film and looks to build a pretty stinging slap at his country’s recent political history into the story. Plus it just looks exceptionally well put together, which you’d expect from a man whose next film is being produced by Guillermo Del Toro. I pointed to the trailer in an earlier column and now I’ve got a behind the scenes reel that feature more footage. Very tasty.
Details, trailer and behind the scenes reel here
And speaking of Del Toro, many of you will no doubt be familiar with a little Spanish Civil War fairy tale he made a while back titled THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, a film many fans – myself among them – dukes it out with PAN’S LABYRINTH as Del Toro’s very best. Well, the screen writer for that film was Antonio Trashorras and he’s currently hard at work preparing what appears to be Spain’s first ever martial arts film. Titled EXTREMO it stars Spanish fighter Teo García and is set in a very noir sort of underworld that obviously draws on SIN CITY as a source of inspiration. It’s not slated to go into production until the fall but the powers that be behind the film have gone out and shot a promotional teaser to sell the concept of the project to potential investors and it’s an impressive piece of work.
You’ll find the promo trailer here
High class? Hell, no. In fact I fear I may be sent to hell for the sole reason that I am currently hosting the trailer for Frank Hennenlotter’s BAD BIOLOGY on Twitch. But hey … it’s the new one from the director of FRANKENHOOKER and it’s a charming little love story about a pair of sexual freaks who find fulfillment in one another. Remove the charming part and that was all true. The proper trailer is now out and it’s so far away from being work safe that it’s in another area code.
Find the trailer here. And hope your mom doesn’t walk in.
Again I ask you: what goes better with sex than violence? Nothing! That’s what!
The violence in this case comes in the form of KARAOKE TERROR, one fantastic little Japanese cult film that I’d about given hope of ever seeing on these shores. Scripted by Ryu Murakami – known to the reading types out there as the author of COIN LOCKER BABIES and to the film geeks as the screen writer of Takashi Miike’s AUDITION – the film stars Ryuhei Matsuda (NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE) and Masanobu Ando (BATTLE ROYALE) in a ridiculously violent film about a gang of karaoke singing young men locked in a battle to the death with similarly karaoke singing middle aged women. This thing is very bloody, very absurd and – in an extreme rarity for a film watched in translation – insanely quotable. Now go marvel at the goodness.
Details and three trailers here
More Asian blood? Right … it’s just a quick hop over the sea to Korea, where we find dueling serial killers in OUR TOWN. This one’s kind of flown under the radar until recently but the word is out and the word is good. Very good, even, and the trailer looks like very impressive, truly disturbing stuff based around a pair of compelling, off kilter performances.
Details and trailer here
More Shawn Yue! What can I say, the guy’s in bloody well everything coming out of Hong Kong these days …
This one’s SHAMO, a Hong Kong / Japan co production based on the ultra violent manga of the same name. Yue’s character is imprisoned for the murder of his parents and is, shall we say, not treated kindly on the inside. By the time he comes out he’s a hardened, violent sociopath who attempts to rise to the top of the heap in the fighting arena. DOG BITE DOG’s Soi Cheang directs so you know it’s not going to be bright, cheery stuff.
You’ll find details and trailers here
Monty Python may not have been fond of the Belgians but I am and am looking forward to seeing one Belgian’s return to the big screen, in particular. Jean Claude Van Damme star vehicle is one we’ve written about here before and it’s one that I’m hugely looking forward to. Why? It’s the sort of self-referential meta-film that Charlie Kaufmann has made a career of and, having seen an extended reel from it at the European Film Market, I can say that this thing looks positively genius.
Van Damme stars as Van Damme, playing himself in the middle of a series of personal crises – all of them ripped from his own life, including losing custody of his child hood, his substance abuse problems, etc – while shooting a big new action film. Everything kind of boils over when he is caught in the middle of a bank robbery and the police mistake him for the thief thanks to video footage of ol’ Jean Claude throwing a full on temper tantrum when the teller refuses to spot him a few hundred bucks. We’ve shared a couple promotional spots for the film already and now the first proper footage from the film itself has made it online, having been copied from a French TV broadcast.
Find details and the footage here
We’re nearing the end now and this seems an appropriate time to turn our attention to something a little bit more serious, recent Chinese blockbuster THE ASSEMBLY. It’s the latest from Feng Xiaogang, the director of THE BANQUET (a sumptuous wuxia take on HAMLET), and is a full on, big budget war film with production support from the team behind technically astounding Korean war effort TAEGUKGI.
Calling it a Chinese answer to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is both easy and fairly accurate and so that’s what I’ll do here. The film is due for release in the UK this week and we’ve got both the UK trailer and the Chinese version, both of them loaded up with stunning imagery. All the press on these says it’s got the story to back up the pictures, too, which makes it one of the big films to see this year.
You’ll find the trailers here
And, finally, we move from the sublime to the ridiculous. The ridiculous in this case also being very bloody. Dutch Nazi-zombie film WORST CASE SCENARIO created a huge buzz a few years back with a pair of absolutely stunning promo spots prepared to sell the film to investors. Frankly, this film could – and should – be the APOCALYPSE NOW of zombie films, the concept is brilliant and the execution even better. The thing is just jaw dropping and all signs appeared to be go until it turned out that the original producer couldn’t make good on his promises, the funding dried up and the whole enterprise appeared to be dead in the water. Which is a very bad pun, inserted just for those who have seen the promos.
Anyway, the thing about zombies is that they just won’t stay dead. The team behind the film has stuck with it, they’ve found new money and things are now moving rapidly towards production, so rapidly that the crew recently pillaged a warehouse to liberate many of the large scale sets used by Paul Verhoeven on his very serious World War II film BLACK BOOK for reuse in their much less serious effort.
Check the promos here to see why this is the Holy Grail of zombie films
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