distant signals from the wicked weird cinema of the past
The sort of film that gives you five straight minutes of old women eating chicken while a man in a kabuki mask performs magic tricks for a baby and a shirtless man twirls swords around in the back of a dimly-lit restaurant.
With a presence at the Hollis Flea Market spanning nearly 20 years, and more than a decade of selling VHS tapes, it’s unlikely the Barn will be going anywhere anytime soon. (Ever try to sell out an inventory of 40,000 tapes? Not an easy venture).
Carlos is a former boxing champion hired by the CIA to bring down a homicidal drug dealer in Hawaii. Will he be able to infiltrate the madman’s sprawling defenses and put a stop to the senseless killings? Will he be able to quickly and frequently traverse the island given the cost of gas, or instead be forced to ride a bicycle to get from one location to the next?
A cinematic hero is only as good as the opposing villain. The films that brought us Skywalker-Vader, Creed-Balboa, and Matrix-Bennett are all examples of how contrasting characteristics bring balance to the contentious relationships between protagonists and antagonists. The characters headlining Kinji Fukasaku’s 1968 crime film BLACK LIZARD may or may not have chairs at the same table as the aforementioned duos, but they are definitely in the same restaurant.
At least a decade before organized mixed martial arts provided a platform to answer questions such as “who would win in a fight between a kickboxer and a really overweight sumo wrestler?” a somewhat obscure 1985 film from West Germany sought to provide clarity to a similar proposition, with a slight sartorial spin. (“Who would win in a fight: a guy with mustache in a fur-collar leather jacket, or a tall dude with a mullet in leather pants and a white scarf?”) MACHO MAN puts real-life boxer, Rene Weller, and karate expert, Peter Althof, in a tiny wardrobe closet and shakes it vigorously to see if they’ll fight.
In the U.S., we take the influence of Hong Kong’s “Golden Age” for granted, but you can see its fingerprints on everything from the 2000 film version of CHARLIE’S ANGELS and the UNDISPUTED sequels to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the JOHN WICK films. NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER was a very early version of that classic Hong Kong fight choreography mapped to an American film production, and made primarily for an audience that had gotten its kicks from flicks like THE KARATE KID.
Smoking clowns, unpredictable quips, weird relationship dynamics, alcoholic benders, and murderous sleaze. TO THE DEATH is that rare breed of underground fight film that surprises, confuses, and delights.
The objects that line the shelves of this museum’s walls couldn’t be more different — a pair of oven-melted glasses sits alongside a group of “flip” cell phones and an antique doorknob, among other exhibit configurations — but all of them, now divorced from their primary use, attain artifactual value in this museum setting. However, in the space between an object and the donor who once used it, an odd phenomenon emerges …
Death Ray Dive 