MANHUNT (2018) ** ½

John Woo returns to his action roots with the occasionally exhilarating, but mostly uneven Manhunt.  Some Woo fans will bemoan the fact that it’s more of a thriller than his action fests of the past.  (It definitely hews closer to The Fugitive than The Killer.)  Still, there are enough shootouts, chase scenes (one involving a jet ski), slow motion, freeze frames, and random shots of doves flying about to keep his die-hard fans satisfied.

Du Qiu (Hanyu Zhang) is a lawyer for a big-time pharmaceutical company.  When he is framed for murder, he is forced to go on the run.  Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hot shot detective who believes he’s innocent, but is still obliged to bring him in.  Things get complicated when a pair of lady assassins (Stephy Qi and Ji-won Ha) join the fray. 

The opening is a lot of fun and involves a wonderful bit of misdirection that leads up to an impressive shootout.  I also liked the fact that being a cinephile is enough to not only bond two complete strangers but also prevent them from killing one another later in the film.  However, after the exciting set-up, the bright spots become fewer and fewer.

Most of this is overly familiar, but Woo is able to make it work most of the time.  His penchant for macho tough guy bromances helps propel the movie along even though the plot is spinning its wheels.  It’s only in the third act when it completely goes off the rails when it takes a detour into sci-fi territory.  Even though none of this comes close to matching the films from his heyday, Manhunt remains a solid exercise in action filmmaking from one of the old masters.

WARCRAFT (2016) * ½

I had pretty much gotten out of gaming by the time the whole World of Warcraft craze hit.  I think it even stopped being a phenomenon by the time this film adaptation came out.  Having never played the game, I really have nothing to compare it to.  To me, it plays like a third-rate version of Lord of the Rings.  Or perhaps a second-rate Dungeons and Dragons.  Either way, it doesn’t really work.  Die-hard WOW fans’ mileage will vary.

The special effects are the big stumbling block.  I mean, the scope of Duncan (Moon) Jones’ film is quite ambitious.  I’m sure it takes thousands of technicians sitting around computers to make such a sprawling, CGI-heavy epic like this.  It’s just that it’s maybe a bit too ambitious for its own good.  The various orc designs only occasionally look near-photo realistic.  Most of the time though, they look so cartoony that it just feels like you’re watching a video game.  Imagine if the Hulk dressed up in D & D cosplay and that might give you an idea of what these orcs look like.

On the human side of things, there’s no one to really root for, mostly because they’re your basic underdeveloped kings, knights, and magicians you’d see in this sort of thing.  The typically intense Ben Foster is hilariously miscast as a Merlin-type wizard, which doesn’t help.  The fact that he’s played by Foster kind of tips off that he’ll eventually turn into your more typical Foster character late in the game.  The only one who comes close to leaving an impression is Paula Patton as the half-orc slave who betrays her people to help the humans.  

Warcraft is watchable for the first half-hour or so.  Then it just gets bogged down with a lot of boring backstabbing and double-crossing subplots between the various species.  The big Braveheart-style battles in the finale don’t do much to pique your interest either.  I will admit, the cheesy-looking Golem that pops up near the end is kind of cool, if only because it resembles an old school stop-motion monster.  Maybe that’s what’s missing from the film; a bit of that old school moviemaking magic.  With all the state-of-the-art effects at Jones’ disposal, all we get is a film that’s about as much fun as watching somebody else playing a video game.

AKA:  Warcraft:  The Beginning.

LET MY PUPPETS COME (1976) ****

Let My Puppets Come is the world’s first puppet musical comedy porno movie.  Leave it to Gerard Damiano, the director of The Devil in Miss Jones to come up with something like this.  Sure, the idea of puppets singing, cursing, and fucking seems crude and obvious, but the surprising thing is, it manages to get a lot of laughs.  Although I can’t quite say I was aroused by all this, I have to admit the sight of puppets going at it works better than you’d probably expect.  

A trio of brothers are up to their necks in debt.  “Mr. Big” is giving them 24 hours to pay up, so they have to think up a get-rich-quick scheme, and fast.  They decide to pool their resources and, naturally, make a porno.  

Previously only available in a shortened forty-three-minute version, Vinegar Syndrome has released Let My Puppets Come it in its original uncut form.  Now we can see it in all its puppet-fucking glory.  Even at seventy-five minutes, it feels like half that because it whizzes by at such a dizzying clip.  

The scenes of puppets sucking and fucking are warped, weird, and/or just plain fun.  One involves a dog fucking its owner.  Another has the “head nurse” blowing her terminally ill patient.  (This is the only scene that contains an actual onscreen “orgasm”.)  Pinocchio, predictably, bangs girls with his nose.  

This was probably the inspiration for Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles.  It’s not as consistently funny or crazy as that film, but man, is it something to see.  If there is a complaint, its that the human cast is kind of sparse, so there’s only a handful of nude scenes involving flesh and blood women.  Even then, these scenes manage to get some big laughs.  

Besides, pornos with human casts are a dime a dozen.  Pornos with puppets are precious and few.  Thank God Vinegar Syndrome is there to preserve this one for all time.

SANTO VS. INFERNAL MEN (1961) * ½

Joaquin Cordero stars as a cop who goes undercover to bust a ring of drug smugglers.  Whenever he’s in a tight spot, the famed Mexican wrestler El Santo shows up to save his bacon.  Eventually, the bad guys discover Cordero’s identity and kidnap his best girl (Gina Romand).  

Santo vs. Infernal Men is El Santo’s second movie and it’s painfully obvious the filmmakers hadn’t quite figured out the formula yet.  It was filmed back-to-back in Cuba with his first film, Brain of Evil, and it feels more like a Cuban travelogue than an honest to goodness El Santo adventure.  There are long stretches where nothing happens, and a good deal of time is spent on Cordero hanging out on a fishing boat or lounging around the docks.  The musical numbers also pale to the ones we’d see in future installments.  (A mariachi band performs two songs, and there’s a lone nightclub dance routine.)

The big problem is that El Santo plays second fiddle to the boring hero and only occasionally pops up to bust some heads.  In fact, El Santo’s character almost feels like a power-up in a video game.  If there’s too many bad guys for Cordero to handle, he calls on El Santo to clear the screen of his enemies.  Unfortunately, like most video game power-ups, El Santo’s appearances are a limited commodity.  

It would be one thing if the action was sparse, but what action we do get is lackluster at best.  There’s also a potentially great set-up for a finale aboard a rollercoaster that ultimately goes nowhere.  Thankfully, the series got much better as it went along, especially when the filmmakers finally figured out they should give El Santo more to do.  I mean, why would you hire Mexico’s most famous wrestler to be in your movie and then have him play second banana to a far inferior leading man?  Not only that, they don’t give him a single wrestling match!  Aye caramba! 

TRA-LA-LA-LA-LA LA-VOLTA: LUCKY NUMBERS (2000) ***

Battlefield Earth was a notorious bomb that put a severe snag in John Travolta’s career.  What people tend to forget is that his next movie, Lucky Numbers made even less at the box office.  It only made $10 million dollars (half of what Battlefield Earth made) against a $63 million budget.  The difference between the two is that Lucky Numbers is actually a lot of fun.  Despite not finding an audience, this black comedy has plenty of laughs and a dark sense of humor, which helps, especially when the plot threatens to spin out of control in the late going.  The Christmas setting also makes it a perfect watch around the holidays.  

Smarting from several bad investments, local Harrisburg weatherman Russ Richards (Travolta) is desperate for cash.  His girlfriend Crystal (Lisa Kudrow) works with him at the television station, drawing numbers for the local lottery.  Along with his sleazy buddy Gig (Tim Roth, Travolta’s Pulp Fiction co-star), Russ and Crystal hatch a plan to rig the lottery in their favor.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I wouldn’t dream of revealing how they go about rigging the lottery.  Heck, most of the fun comes from seeing how their well-oiled plan falls apart.  The film gets wilder and wilder as it goes along with crazy and crazier characters getting in on the scheme.  The supporting cast are aces, and keep you watching even when Adam (Cabin Boy) Resnick’s script gets needlessly convoluted in the third act.  Ed O’Neill is especially good as Travolta’s boss (who’s also banging Kudrow), and there’s some great bits by Bill Pullman as a dim-witted cop and Michael Moore as the patsy hired to pick up the winnings.

Even when the cavalcade of offbeat characters is circling around the plot, Travolta remains a constant center.  It wouldn’t work if he wasn’t likeable and we didn’t want to see him succeed, even if he does do some extremely shady shit to get his hands on the loot.  It’s a shame he doesn’t get much of an opportunity to play comedic roles anymore because you forget how effortlessly he can do it.

AKA:  Magic Numbers.

TRA-LA-LA-LA-LA LA-VOLTA: PRIMARY COLORS (1998) ***

Throughout December, we will be putting the spotlight on one of my favorite stars of all time, John Travolta.  Hopefully, this will be a good way to catch up on a few of his films I’ve missed and fill in some gaps from his filmography.  I hope this will put you all in the holiday spirit and have you singing “Tra-La-La-La-La La-Volta!”

The Travoltassance lasted from 1994 to 2000.  That of course, was the time John Travolta’s career reignited with the success of Pulp Fiction till the time he made the infamous turkey Battlefield Earth.  Sure, he made some good movies past 2000, but his career just wasn’t the same afterwards.  Primary Colors was made near the tail end of the Travoltassance.  In this time in his career, he could work with top notch director (Mike Nichols) and an Oscar-winning supporting cast (Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates).  Now he’s so ingrained in the DTV world, it hardly seems possible he could achieve that again.  Still, it’s a good reminder of how great he could be given the right role, script, and director.

Travolta plays Governor Stanton, who of course, is supposed to be Bill Clinton.  A young idealistic staffer (Adrian Lester) joins his team with high hopes for a better future for himself and his country.  He naturally gets caught up in all the ballyhoo as Stanton goes from being a longshot underdog to a serious contender for the Democratic nomination.  

I had avoided this for years, mostly because I’m not really into politics and Clinton seemed like a much-too obvious target for ridicule.  Nichols is smart enough to make the film less about the issues and focuses more on the political bobbing and weaving among the candidates on the campaign trail.  He takes a shine to Stanton’s ramshackle crew of oddballs who run the campaign, and even though they are painted in broad strokes, they’re enormously fun to watch.  Bates is a hoot, but it’s Rob Reiner who gets the biggest laughs in a hilarious cameo as a talk radio show host.

These supporting characters kind of come and go, but Lester’s character is the only real constant, which is a shame as he’s less a character and more of a human moral compass.  When Stanton is down and out, he’s there to cheer him on.  When Stanton shows a more sinister nature, he takes him to task for not living up to his potential.  

Even though the filmmakers aren’t afraid to show Clint… I mean… Stanton in a poor light at times, it’s not nearly as savage as it could’ve been.  They just paint him as a flawed man who’s a straight shooter that has good ideas, and charisma to spare, but just can’t seem to keep his dick in his pants.  As such, Travolta delivers a fine performance.  He does a dead-on Clinton impression, but leaves a little room for dramatic interpretation, giving you a fully realized character and not a caricature.  He’s especially good in his scenes with Thompson, who captures Hillary’s power-hungry zeal perfectly, while still giving her a measure of humanity.  

It’s Bates though who gets the best line of the movie when she calls a tabloid reporter, “A wet fart of a human turd”.  

BATWOMAN (1968) ***

A mad scientist is running around Acapulco sucking out the pineal glands of Mexican wrestlers.  Stymied, the police call on Batwoman (Maura Monti) to help catch the madman.  Not only is she a crack shot with a pistol, an equestrian, and a scuba diver, she’s also a top-notch wrestler!  Batwoman finds the killer by infiltrating the local wrestling scene.  From there, she follows the mad doctor back to his laboratory (aboard a yacht!) where she finds out he’s created a killer fish man!  Naturally, he wants to create a fish woman too, and thinks Batwoman is perfectly suited for his diabolical experiments.

Directed by Mexican exploitation legend, Rene (Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy) Cardona, Batwoman has some serious lulls in between the good stuff.  Things particularly bog down during the long underwater scenes.  Stick with it though, because this movie contains some of the funniest Mexican monster mashing outside of an El Santo movie.  

What I liked about Batwoman, was that it wasn’t just a straight rip-off of the old Batman TV show.  Sure, the fights are similarly staged, but they don’t feature the trademark cartoon bubbles that say “BIFF!” and “POW!”  (Although I’m sure they would’ve if the budget was bigger.)  Although Batwoman wears an Adam West-inspired costume while she’s in the wrestling ring, when she’s out fighting crime, she only wears her cowl and a blue bikini (!), which helps set her apart from the Caped Crusader.  

There is one thing that makes Batwoman like the Batman of the comics, although it was probably accidental.  In one scene, Batwoman escapes the mad doctor’s lab by throwing acid in his face.  It leaves him looking like Two-Face, who of course wasn’t in the old show, but was a fixture in the comics. 

If the scene of Batwoman presiding over an autopsy in a skimpy bikini doesn’t sell you on this movie, the creation of the fish man will.  The mad scientist has his scuba divers plant an action figure at the bottom of the ocean.  He then blasts it with radiation, and it turns into a Creature from the Black Lagoon-inspired monster!   The creature, dubbed “Pisces”, looks like a Sleestak from Land of the Lost, painted red and his fights with Batwoman are a lot of fun. 

Speaking of fighting, there’s only one scene of Batwoman in the wrestling ring, which is kind of disappointing.  We do however get a few scenes of her practicing her moves in the gym, so there’s that.  Monti, who rarely is seen without her mask, is quite sexy, and it’s a shame she didn’t return for Batwoman’s further adventures.