Day: September 10, 2012

By Joe Bendel. It is an area so cold and remote, even Germans find it depressing. Yet, a mysterious crime boss envisions it as the next winter playground for the rich and beautiful. He is clearly rather cracked—a fact that leads to many complications for the hitman-protagonist of Tomasz Thomson’s Snowman’s Land (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Being a hired killer was a real grind for Walter, even before he botches a workaday assignment. With his contractor down on him, the slovenly Walter needs to lay low for a while. Out of nowhere, he is offered the seemingly perfect gig, subbing for a colleague somewhere vaguely to the east. Essentially, he is to house sit the mountain villa of a notorious gangster widely thought to be dead. As it happens, old Berger is alive and as erratic as ever.

Walter will have a buddy for this assignment, but the presence of the unstable Micky will prove a mixed blessing at best. When the younger thug accidentally kills Berger’s unfaithful trophy wife Sibylle in a freak accident, Walter’s peaceful retreat becomes anything but. Things will get bloody as Burger and Kazik, his lieutenant with a “third eye,” start demanding answers.

Snowman might be German, but it is stylistically compatible with the recent bumper crop of Scandinavian thrillers, featuring a similar brew of lethal black-and-blue comedy against a Nordic backdrop. Thomson keeps the double-crosses coming at a good clip, without excessively plundering the Tarantino playbook. He and cinematographer Ralf Mendle actually create a pretty creepy vibe, as Walter’s colleagues and tormentors descend into madness. While starting as a gangster movie, Snowman almost evolves into a Carpathian Shining.

Jürgen Riβmann has the appropriate morose hound-dog presence as Walter, the comparative gentle giant of an assassin. However, the film’s real strengths are its villains, played with set-chewing dash by Reiner Schöne and Waléria Kanischtscheff, as Berger and Kazik, respectively. Though not long for the film, Eva-Katrin Hermann’s Sibylle makes a convincingly shrewish femme fatale. Suffering in comparison, Thomas Wodianka comes across somewhat blandly as the immature Micky.

While not redefining any genres, Snowman is quite an entertaining, character-driven one-blasted-thing-after-another thriller. Sort of a chamber gangster piece, Snowman’s Land is recommended for those who appreciate laughs derived from blood and paranoia, when it opens this Friday (9/14) in New York at the Cinema Village.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on September 10th, 2012 at 12:34pm.

By Joe Bendel. Don’t call it a knock-off—this is a reboot. Yutaka Daimon’s crime-fighting partner is a robot that can turn itself into a motorcycle. You could say he transforms—just like he did in the early 1970’s Japanese television series Denjin Zaborger. The spelling is slightly different, but the spirit is the same in Noboru Iguchi’s Karate-Robo Zaborgar (trailer here), which officially launches on DVD and Blu-ray this Tuesday from Well Go USA.

Somehow fabricated with the DNA of his twin brother who died in infancy, Zaborgar represents more than a weaponized motor bike to Daimon. He considers him a brother. Nursing a grudge against Sigma, the THRUSH-like international crime syndicate that killed his (their) father, Daimon is obsessed with “righteousness.” Yet, he frequently finds himself protecting venal politicians (and their DNA) from Sigma’s machinations. Further complicating matters, the secret agent starts developing feelings for Miss Borg, the chief hench-cyborg of Sigma’s evil wheelchair-bound mastermind, Dr. Akunomiya. Despite her initial resistance, Miss Borg begins to reciprocate his affections. Their resulting affair clouds Daimon’s judgment, leading to his disgrace and the apparent destruction of Zaborgar.

But wait, there’s more, including possible redemption for the older but possibly dumber Daimon and even a relationship with Akiko, the cyborg-daughter he never knew he had. He needs to get his act together quickly, though, before Akunomiya completes his plan to turn Akiko into a giant, mindless, city-stomping robot. Tokyo property values are depending on Daimon and maybe a rebuilt, reprogrammed Zaborgar.

Based on the clips of the original 1974 show seen during the closing credits, KRZ is remarkably faithful to its original source material. A production of Sushi Typhoon, Nikkatsu’s low budget genre specialists, from Iguchi and FX director Yoshihiro Nishimura, the behind classics like Machine Girl, KRZ does not feature the sort of extreme gore fanboys might be expecting. The Film Society of Lincoln Center actually programmed it as part of the children’s series, but that was really pushing it. After all, those busty cyborgs have some lethal torpedoes. It also has a strangely downbeat vibe at times.

Given Iguchi and Nishimura’s reputation as Japan’s answer to Troma, the effects in KRZ are surprisingly well rendered, even including the little remote-controlled bots coming out of Zaborgar’s head and feet. Conversely, the performances are as cheesy as you would expect, except maybe more so. As the tandem of Daimons, Yasuhisa Furuhara and Itsuji Itao are especially wooden and relentlessly un-self-aware. Still, Mami Yamasaki somehow maintains her dignity as the tragic Miss Borg, regardless of her Metropolis-fetish wardrobe.

Not exactly a masterpiece of world cinema, KRZ still has a weird way of invoking nostalgia in viewers, even if they never saw Denjin Zaborger in the first place. Anyone familiar with Ultraman of the mid 1960’s, or the subsequent Power Rangers, will be able to get it. More of an exercise in manic energy than a comic send-up, per se, Karate-Robo Zaborgar is recommended for specifically self-identifying fans old-school Japanese sci-fi monster movies when it releases tomorrow (9/11) on DVD and Blu-ray from Well Go USA.

Posted on September 10th, 2012 at 12:32pm.

By Joe Bendel. You’d think monsters would be anti-social, but strangely enough, they can often be found sharing haunted digs. This leads to a bit of friction between the Mummy and the Frankensteins. Alas, the former pharaoh gets the worst of it in Dawn Brown’s stop-motion animated short House of Monsters, which just completed an Oscar qualifying run at the Laemmle and should now have plenty of festival action ahead of it.

One of the drawbacks of being undead is dry itchiness of desiccated skin. Fortunately, there is a mad scientist in the house to prescribe something for the Mummy. Once quite the catch, he would like to put the moves on Frankenstein’s Bride. Despite an assist from Dracula, things turn out rather badly for him. No worries. Classic monsters never die, they just come back for revenge later.

Brown, a frequent animator and special effects artist on Tim Burton films, is something of a one-man band on House, serving as writer, director, animator, and producer. Animation enthusiasts should be duly impressed by the quality and rich detail of Brown’s work here. It is easy to see why she has been in such demand. In fact, one might suspect her contributions have been the best part of many big budget films she has worked on. While House is a complete, self-contained (but admittedly brief) story, it could easily serve as a pilot or constituent episode of a longer monster project in the future.

Also an artist for Vampirella comic books, Brown clearly understands and shares an enduring affection for these characters. Indeed, you can never go wrong with the iconic undead scampering about an old dark house. While never too macabre for children, the real audience will probably be nostalgic adults who read Famous Monsters of Filmland as pre-teens and never outgrew their love of the classic Universal monster movies. (The opening title even evokes Ackerman’s famous fan magazine’s type treatment.)

At just over seven minutes, most fans will be left wanting more, which is probably the idea. Recommended for animations connoisseurs and famous creature lovers, House of Monsters should be coming to a festival near you soon and deserves a serious look come awards season.

Posted on September 10th, 2012 at 12:30pm.