Retro Review: PRAY FOR DEATH (1985)

PRAY FOR DEATH
(US - 1985)

A top-notch Sho Kosugi ninja film that's not from Cannon but sure feels like it, PRAY FOR DEATH is just out on Blu-ray from Arrow in its uncut version that originally got it slapped with an X rating in 1985 (the R-rated theatrical cut is also included). There's a few nasty bits, but by today's standards, it's not that extreme. Following his success with Cannon's NINJA trilogy (ENTER THE NINJA, REVENGE OF THE NINJA, NINJA III: THE DOMINATION), Kosugi moved to TV with THE MASTER and starred in 1985's 9 DEATHS OF THE NINJA. Probably his best film away from Cannon, PRAY FOR DEATH is a similar revenge saga along the lines of the genre-best REVENGE OF THE NINJA, with Kosugi and his half-American/half-Japanese wife (Donna Kei Benz) and sons (his own sons Kane and Shane Kosugi) leaving Japan to pursue a life in America, specifically the mean streets of Houston, TX. Buying a dilapidated bar from an old man (Parley Baer) and turning it into a Japanese restaurant, Kosugi is unaware that the backroom is being used as a drug and stolen merch drop-off for corrupt cops and flunkies of the city's chief asshole criminal businessman (Michael Constantine). When a priceless necklace called the Van Atta (humbly named after producer Don Van Atta) turns up missing from the drop-off, Constantine and his chief enforcer (screenwriter James Booth as "Limehouse Willie," giving himself a ludicrously over-the-top character to play) think Kosugi took it and start coming after him and his family. Needless to say, Kosugi, a quiet man who has buried his lethal ninja past after a horrific family tragedy, gets pretty pissed off.

There's some brutal and bloody fight scenes throughout, all well-handled by journeyman director Gordon Hessler, whose career ran the gamut from replacing the late Michael Reeves on the Vincent Price/Christopher Lee horror film THE OBLONG BOX (1969) to putting up with four out-of-control egos on the TV-movie KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK (1978). Hessler would direct two more films with the ninja legend: 1987's RAGE OF HONOR (coming soon from Arrow) and 1992's JOURNEY OF HONOR, a big-budget 17th century period adventure that ended up going straight-to-video. Kosugi kicks ass throughout PRAY FOR DEATH and his final showdown with Booth--who looks like an enraged Richard Kind--is as drawn-out and ridiculous as any Peter vs. the Giant Chicken fight on FAMILY GUY. Also with veteran character actor Norman Burton, some blatant 007 ripoff opening credits, and the infectious and very '80s Peggy Abernathy theme song "Back to the Shadows." Mandatory Kosugi. (R, 94 mins/Unrated, 98 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR (2013); SWEETWATER (2013); and LAST LOVE (2013)

NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR
(US - 2013)

After the release of 2010's NINJA, a formulaic throwback to the likes of ENTER THE NINJA and AMERICAN NINJA, director and DTV action auteur Isaac Florentine and star Scott Adkins both expressed disappointment at the outcome, with Florentine saying the film relied too much on CGI and wirework.  For the sequel, both he and Adkins wanted to make a back-to-basics martial-arts movie, essentially crafting it as a do-over to function as both a sequel and a reboot.  Well, they got it right this time.  NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is maybe the best movie Golan & Globus never made.  The CGI is very conservatively used, mainly on greenscreen work and background visuals, and even the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX seems to have brought their A-game for this one.  Adkins, who starred in Florentine's two excellent sequels to Walter Hill's UNDISPUTED, has been slowly making a name for himself in the cult action scene, with increasing visibility in films like THE EXPENDABLES 2 (as Jean-Claude Van Damme's chief henchman) and John Hyams' amazing UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING, as well as a brief supporting role in the Oscar-nominated ZERO DARK THIRTY.  And Florentine really needed to get back on the horse after the disappointment of NINJA and the disastrous ASSASSIN'S BULLET, easily his worst film.  NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is a ninja film in the classic tradition, and looks much more expensive than it really is.  It's a shame that it, and Florentine for that matter, are confined to the world of DTV. 30 years ago, this would've been released in theaters and it would've been a hit.

Picking up where NINJA left off, Casey Bowman (Adkins) is living in Japan with his pregnant wife Namiko (Mika Hijii), the daughter of his late sensei.  When Namiko is brutally killed, an enraged, grieving Casey goes to Thailand to visit the dojo of her family friend Nakabara (Kane Kosugi, son of ninja genre legend Sho Kosugi).  Unable to contain his anger and prone to violent outbursts that bring shame to Nakabara's dojo, Casey decides to avenge Namiko's death after Nakabara tells him of a longstanding grudge held against his and Namiko's family by Myanmar drug cartel lord Goro (Shun Sugata).  Of course, Casey journeys to Myanmar and proceeds to ninja the living shit out Goro's organization and anyone who gets in his way.  David White's script won't win any awards for originality and, based on the fact that a prominently billed genre figure has very little to do, you'll probably figure out the twist long before Casey does, but with its jaw-dropping fight choreography, NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is one of the top action films of 2013, and further proof that Florentine and Adkins are ready for bigger and better things.  There's absolutely no reason--other than the big-name actors' inability to keep up with his requirements--that Florentine shouldn't be helming something like THE EXPENDABLES 3.  There's always the possibility that he enjoys the relative autonomy he's granted working for Avi Lerner's Millennium/NuImage and is happy with the niche he's carved for himself.  After all, his experiences away from the company were unpleasant for him (I liked Florentine's 2008 Van Damme film THE SHEPHERD, though Stage 6 Films took it away from him in post-production) and/or his fans (the less said about ASSASSIN'S BULLET, the better), but even with a fervent cult following, Florentine is the best-kept secret in action filmmaking, and NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is the real deal.  (R, 95 mins, also streaming on Netflix)


SWEETWATER
(US/UK/Germany/Canada - 2013)

With the ever-changing world of film distribution, good films inevitably get lost in the shuffle, often getting dumped in a just a few theaters and quietly turning up on DVD or on streaming services. The $7 million-budgeted SWEETWATER, which grossed a paltry $6000 during its very limited US theatrical release, isn't necessarily a "good" movie by the classic definition, but it's entertaining to an almost absurd degree, a frequently audacious and gleefully nasty little gem that comes very close to being the PUNISHER: WAR ZONE of westerns.  The Prophet Josiah (Jason Isaacs) is an insane minister/cult leader in the small, middle-of-nowhere Sweetwater, New Mexico.  After a property dispute involving his sheep grazing on the land of struggling--and unwelcome--immigrant farmer Miguel Ramirez (Eduardo Noriega) escalates, Josiah brutally kills Ramirez and has his underling Daniel (country music star Jason Aldean) bury the body.  Ramirez's pregnant, ex-prostitute wife Sarah (January Jones) awaits his return, miscarries, and is then abducted and raped by Josiah (who calls the vile act "purification"), who already has two wives and a daughter he intends to make his third (at one point, regarding his young daughter, he suggests the experienced Sarah "teach her how to fuck"), in addition to his fanatically-devoted flock, which seems to constitute the entire racist population of Sweetwater.  Meanwhile, eccentric lawman Cornelius Jackson (Ed Harris) arrives in town and immediately declares himself sheriff.  He ends up in Sweetwater while on the trail of two missing brothers (played by director/co-writer Logan Miller and his twin brother, co-writer Noah) who never turned up at their sister's ranch.  They were killed by Josiah for trespassing on the outskirts of his property, where they built a camp after a series of unfortunate travel mishaps, like a busted wagon wheel and a dead horse. With Sweetwater being the place directly in the middle of where they came from and where they were headed, it doesn't take long for Jackson to zero in on Josiah.

SWEETWATER actually has enough space to accommodate two thoroughly demented performances:  Isaacs is great in a fire-and-brimstone way as the homicidal Prophet Josiah, while Harris, who's never cut this loose onscreen before, enthusiastically hams it up as the not-quite-all-there Jackson.  Introduced screaming into a canyon, Harris just gets crazier from there, dancing his way into Sweetwater as he beats the shit out of the useless sheriff, exhumes the corpses of the two brothers and leaves them in Josiah's dining room, and later recites Lord Byron as Josiah crucifies him upside-down.  Jones underplays it as Sarah, which is fitting since the Millers basically turn her into a frontier Terminator once she escapes from Josiah's stronghold and goes on a vengeance-fueled killing spree throughout Sweetwater.  Let's just say SWEETWATER is the kind of movie where a masturbating, pantsless Peeping Tom gets a gun shoved up his ass and the trigger pulled.  It's the kind of movie where Harris' Jackson is attending a formal dinner at Josiah's and asks "You ever fuck a sheep?" before taking a knife and carving a map into the Prophet's cherished oak table.  Mean, misanthropic, hilarious, and often in questionable taste, the tragically under-the-radar, hard-R SWEETWATER is a film that should be embraced with open arms by connoisseurs of Batshit Cinema.  You know who you are.  (R, 94 mins)


LAST LOVE
(Germany/Belgium/US/France - 2013)

It's easy to imagine the meeting where the producers of LAST LOVE approached Michael Caine and told him something along the lines of "It's like VENUS with Peter O'Toole, but with you!"  The film ultimately goes in a bit of a different direction, but the comparison is still appropriate.  Caine is Matthew Morgan, a retired American philosophy professor living in Paris, still coping with the death of his wife Joan (Jane Alexander) three years earlier.  He still sees her and talks to her, and more or less goes about his days detached and biding his time until it's his turn to go.  Matthew befriends Pauline (Clemence Poesy), a young dance instructor he repeatedly sees on the bus.  The two become close friends, with Matthew being a father figure for her.  Matthew may or may not develop romantic feelings for her, but whatever he feels prompts him to (perhaps half-heartedly) attempt suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills.  Enter Matthew's estranged children, Miles (Justin Kirk) and Karen (Gillian Anderson), who come over from the States to convince him to move back home.  He refuses to leave Paris, where he's stayed since Joan's cancer diagnosis, at which time she decided to live out her last days there.  They're also suspicious of what's going on with "the French bimbo" who's entered their father's life.  When the self-absorbed Karen heads home, Miles, whose own wife just left him, decides to stick around as Pauline attempts to heal the rift between father and son.

This is one of those films where there's inevitable Big Revelations and the expected airing of long-dormant grievances.  Working from Francoise Dorner's novel La Douceur Assassine (translated: "Murderous Sweetness"), writer/director Sandra Nettelbeck (MOSTLY MARTHA) goes into areas that a mainstream American film wouldn't, chiefly that Matthew is kind of a prick to his kids.  And not in an amusing curmudgeonly way, either.  He tells Pauline that he never really wanted to have children but only did so to make Joan happy, and despite his expectations that he would, he never warmed up to the idea.  Once Joan passed on, it seems both Matthew and his children realized they had nothing more holding them together.  What Pauline provides for Matthew is that fatherly bond that he never felt with his own children.  In that sense, it's almost a European art film take on GRAN TORINO if you consider the way Clint Eastwood feels a kinship with his Hmong neighbors that he never felt with his own family, in similar tatters after the matriarch's passing.  LAST LOVE provides a nice showcase for 80-year-old Caine, though his attempt at an American accent is inconsistent, to put it mildly.  He slips into his usual Michael Caine voice a lot, but his idea of sounding American is mainly to talk deeper and slower. You wouldn't even know he's supposed to be playing an American if it wasn't mentioned in every other scene.  But, living legend that he is, he still maintains the screen presence.  His scenes with Poesy are sensitively and believably conveyed by the actors.  US distributor Image Entertainment didn't even try to do anything with this, dropping half of the title (it was released overseas as MR. MORGAN'S LAST LOVE) and giving it a one-screen US release a few weeks before its DVD/Blu-ray debut.  The film and its star deserved a little more effort than that.  By no means a great film, but it's a nice, low-key one that Caine fans will want to seek out.  (Unrated, 116 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MIAMI CONNECTION (1988)

MIAMI CONNECTION
(US - 1988)

Directed by Richard Park.  Written by Joseph Diamond and Richard Park.  Cast: Y.K. Kim, Vincent Hirsch, Joseph Diamond, Maurice Smith, Angelo Janotti, Kathy Collier, William Ergle, Si Y. Jo, Richard Park, William Young, Jack McLaughlin, John Escobar.  (Unrated, 87 mins)

Since being filmed in central Florida in 1986 at the height of the staggeringly prolific B-movie ninja craze, MIAMI CONNECTION has taken a strange and unexpected journey from lost film to cult movie sensation.  The brainchild of Z-grade NINJA TURF director Richard Park and Korean Tae Kwon Do instructor/motivational speaker/co-producer Grandmaster Y.K. Kim, MIAMI CONNECTION centers on Dragon Sound, Orlando's top Tae Kwon Do rockers: guitarist Mark (Kim), singer/guitarist Tom (Angelo Janotti), keyboardist Jim (Maurice Smith), drummer Jack (co-writer Joseph Diamond), bassist John (Vincent Hirsch), and new female singer and John's girlfriend Jane (Kathy Collier).  Dragon Sound gets a steady gig as the house band at Park Avenue ("Central Florida's hottest nightclub"), which enrages the frontman (Jack McLaughlin) of the band they replaced.  On top of that, Jane's insanely jealous brother Jeff (William Ergle), the Orlando distributor for Yoshito (Si Y. Jo), Miami's top cocaine dealer, doesn't want her seeing John.  While the members of Dragon Sound (orphaned best friends who live together and attend the University of Central Florida) just want to live by the philosophies of Tae Kwon Do, play their music, hang out at the restaurant owned by fatherly Uncle Song (Park), and tour the world to promote peace and goodwill, they have to deal with the kung-fu treachery of Jeff's goons and the lethal ninja motorcycle gang dispatched by Yoshito.

Park (who died in 2006 and never got to see MIAMI CONNECTION's cult rebirth) saw Kim giving a Tae Kwon Do demonstration on a Korean talk show and wanted to make a movie with him.  Kim had moved from Seoul to Orlando in 1976, where he opened a Tae Kwon Do school. The cast is made up of non-professional actors, and almost all of the main co-stars were Kim's students and most of them agreed to work as crew members as well (Janotti, who could actually play guitar and read music, helped write Dragon Sound's songs).  They were a group of friends who sincerely believed in this project.  Kim tried to shop it around to various distributors and nobody was interested in it.  According to the Blu-ray liner notes by Alamo Drafthouse Cinema programmer Zack Carlson (more on him shortly), Kim took the advice of one distribution agent and made some significant changes to the film without Park's involvement, reshooting a large chunk of it despite having no filmmaking experience and referring to a filmmaking how-to book between shots, totally learning how to direct on the fly (Park still retains sole directing credit).  The film managed to get picked up by the low-rent grindhouse outfit Manson International and it opened on about eight screens in the Orlando area in September of 1988, where it died a quick death and vanished, seemingly never to be heard from again.  A disappointed Kim abandoned his dreams of movie stardom and returned to operating his successful Tae Kwon Do school, unaware that his instantly obscure film would be accidentally rediscovered over two decades later.

Cut to 2009, when Carlson stumbles upon a listing for a 35mm print of something called MIAMI CONNECTION while browsing eBay.  Just out of idle curiosity, he purchases it for the Buy-It-Now price of $50 and decides to screen it at the Alamo Drafthouse in the hipster mecca of Austin, TX for the cinema's "Weird Wednesday" program, with the caveat that no one had watched it and he had no idea what it was about.  The audience loved it and the film immediately became a must-see staple at the Alamo Drafthouse, eventually getting a national theatrical release on the midnight movie circuit in the fall of 2012, followed by a recent Blu-ray and DVD release. Unlike a lot of midnight movies these days, where the usual justification for watching and mocking it is that "it's so bad, it's good," MIAMI CONNECTION, while terribly-made, laughably naive, and displaying everything aesthetically horrible about 1986 (the mullets, the fashions, the music) is undeniably infectiously entertaining.  Even the most cynical, seen-it-all cineaste will find themselves being won over by the unbelievable, heart-on-its-sleeve sincerity of the film.  The fight scenes are ineptly staged, the script is a joke (early on, marvel at one of the clumsiest exposition drops ever in the way Jane shoehorns her backstory in after John meets her after class; shouldn't he already know these things about her if they're a couple?), the acting is atrocious (you haven't lived until you've seen Smith deliver Jim's heartfelt monologue about his long-lost father), you can barely understand anything Kim says, the editing is less than fluid (some scenes just stop), and the songs are awful...but you won't be able to help yourself.  You will be cheering Dragon Sound on.  You will be singing along to such songs as "Friends" and "Against the Ninja."  You will, despite every fiber of your being telling you that it's wrong, have a genuine blast watching this thing.

Image Entertainment/Drafthouse Films' Blu-ray (1.85:1 anamorphic) looks surprisingly good considering that the original negative was damaged in flooding from a hurricane in 2004.  Carlson hosts a commentary track featuring Kim and Diamond, and all five members of Dragon Sound are interviewed in another segment.  Also included in the special features are Park's original, far more downbeat ending, deleted scenes (the best being Dragon Sound getting booted out of a music instrument store by the irate manager, fed up with them always coming in to jam but never buying anything), and footage from a Dragon Sound reunion show (!) at the 2012 Fantastic Fest.  YES!

Unlike bad-movie favorites of recent years like TROLL 2 , THE ROOM, and BIRDEMIC, MIAMI CONNECTION is that rare bad movie that you find yourself not mocking with hipper-than-thou snark, but legitimately enjoying.  It's genuinely earnest, well-meaning, and filled with hokey positivity that will win over even the most jaded viewer. In other words, you have to be a total dick to not find this thing incredibly entertaining and Y.K. Kim's belated, dreams-really-do-come-true success story oddly moving.  What else can I say?  I love MIAMI CONNECTION.