True blue yakuza movies have gone the way of the western and the musical: when I get one, it's an event, since filmmakers these days don't pick a dead genre cuz they wanna make money, they do it cuz they have a fondness and remembrance for a flavor most everyone else has forgotten.
It's a good thing Hell Dogs doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, when the wheel has been left in in a junkyard to rot. Instead, Masaro Harada,…
Much like director Miike's long and uneven career, this one has such insane moments of giddy grotesque shock and inventive vision that convinces me this man is nothing but genius, it almost makes me forget about about the overlong stretches of asleep at the wheel driving in between that otherwise convinces me this man is nothing but hack.
Flappy arm hospital gunfight is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Cleverly choreographed, complex, dangerous, funny.
Too bad the rest of it isn’t as slick. The glam rock color palette suggests Scott Pilgrim and the offbeat tone suggests Shoot ‘Em Up, but the leaden dialogue just doesn’t have the wit to be either. Why are the talky bits so momentum killing? People just standing still blabbering stops the movie dead. The action is not transcendent enough for me…
Who needs Cirque du Soleil when you’ve got the Venom Mob?
Entertaining as an acrobatic show, almost enough to overcome my pet peeves of near endless impressive but weightless fighting that gradually ceases to tell a story and only exists to bemuse itself.
The first act grabs me hard in terms of setting up a domino’s effect of vicious violence that not only establishes strong character motivations of all sides, and is also entirely unique as a superhero team origin…
