Zeiram 2 (1994)

Zeiram 2 (1994)

Starring: Yuko Moriyama, Yukijiro Hotaru, Kunihiro Ida, Sabu, Kazuhiko Inoue (voice), Mizuho Yoshida
Director: Keita Amemiya
Special FX Director: Hiroshi Kidokoro
Action Director: Akira Ohashi, Mitsuo Abe

Zeiram 2 is an interesting sequel in that it tries to take some of lore created in the (superior) anime Iria: Zeiram the Animation and insert it into the context of the live-action films. It is only partially successful, thanks to the fact that Iria’s long-time rival Fujikuro (actor-director Sabu, who was in Don’t Look Up and Shinjuku Triad Society) has gone from a seasoned veteran trying to exploit Iria’s lack of experience to an annoying punk. But it does have flying umbrellas!

The film is set a few years after the events of the first film. Kamiya (a returning Yukijiro Hotaru) is trying to patch things up with his estranged wife. Teppei is about to marry his long-time girlfriend. And Iria is back on Earth with Bob (Kazuhiko Inoue) and Fujikuro in order to intercept a valuable teleportation device called the Karmelite from a band of space mercenaries. While that particular mission goes off without a hitch, the trouble begins when Iria is given a second, complementary mission.

The Intergalactic Bounty Hunters Union has recently built a new battle robot from the remains of Zeiram, the indestructible alien whom Iria had faced off with a few years earlier. Normally, that would be a very bad idea…wait for it. In any case, Iria supposed to have a duel of sorts with the robot to test its capabilities against a superior target (as opposed to robots and remote-controlled tanks). When Iria shows up in the outskirts of Tokyo to meet it, she is met by even more galactic ruffians. Zeiram does show up and, as per its programming, will not let the interstellar brigands harm her, so it switches into Turbo Mode and slaughters the lot.

The robot is initially not supposed to engage with Iria until a) she gives it orders to and b) they are isolated in a Zone (a pocket dimension meant for doing interplanetary dirty work without alarming the locals). This is where things get complicated. Iria and Bob are betrayed by Fujikuro, who wants to sell the Karmelite on the black market and retire early. To this end, he disables Bob’s hardware and kidnaps Teppei, who had coincidentally caught a glimpse of Iria earlier. So, while Iria is trying to rescue Teppei, she is not around to stop the last surviving star thug from spitting blood all over the Zeiram robot, awakening the little head that was built into it…really people?

This is the equivalent of setting a Krusty doll on “Evil” and Zeiram starts the “exercise,” creating a Zone and trapping itself, Iria, Fujikuro, and Teppei inside. Meanwhile, Kamiya has found his way to the abandoned building that Iria is working out of and fixes Bob and the teleporter. Get ready for more action in the vein of the first film.

The main problem with Zeiram 2 is that after the initial set-up (which probably takes longer than the first movie), it becomes a clone of its predecessor. It’s the same beats: Iria fights with Zeiram and wins; something happens for Zeiram to be revived; Iria is separated from the heroes for an extended period (she doesn’t even interact with them directly until the end); and then there is a final battle set to the Zone slowly deleting itself. Other than the monster designs—and we don’t get any stop-motion this time around (boo!)—there isn’t much to distinguish this from the first movie.

That said, one thing that director Keita Amemiya does well is suspense. There are several situations in which the protagonists find themselves fighting against impossible odds, like when Teppei is tied up with his foot on a landmine while Iria is trapped in a trash compactor room while holding onto a wasp-shaped missile (!) that is trying to fly toward Teppei. Or the climax, where Iria is engaging in a pitched martial arts battle with Zeiram at the top of a Kanon Statue as it “dissolves” from the ground up while the heroes scramble for the Karmelite. And the final scene will have even mildly-invested viewers at the edge of their seat…

The action is pretty good by Japanese standards, although it might pale in comparison to its Hong Kong cousins. The martial arts definitely have the feel of a Super Sentai series (or similar Tokusatsu show), although watching them performed by a GORGEOUS Japanese actress (and her stunt double) makes it more interesting then some Metal Hero. The rest of the action involves LOTS of gunplay and explosions. I enjoy the climax, which starts out as a sword fight, then becomes an aerial dogfight involving a winged Zeiram and Iria on a flying umbrella, and then becomes a martial arts fight, followed by ripping off the end of The Terminator.

The film is filled with early 1990s CGI (not great), miniature explosions, and your standard Japanese suitmation. I like the redesign for Zeiram. What I don’t like is the dog monster it creates—both the suit and the way the monster is created. Anyway, there’s enough fun action to keep most viewers entertained, plus Yuko Moriyama is always easy on the eyes. I just wish the film tried to set itself apart more form its predecessor.

The Seventh Curse (1986)

The Seventh Curse (1986)
Chinese Title: 原振俠與衛斯理
Translation: Yuen Zan-Hap and Wisely

Starring: Chin Siu-Ho, Maggie Cheung, Dick Wei, Chui Sau-Lai, Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong, Chow Yun-Fat, Sibelle Hu Hui-Chung, Ni Kuang, Chor Yuen, Yasuaki Kurata, Wong Jing
Director: Lam Nai-Choi
Action Director: Yuen Bun

This is one of those films that could only be made in Hong Kong. It is a bizarre mixture of occult horror, gross-out graphic violence, and 80s Hong Kong action beats, with a helping of (dumb) comedy and nudity for good measure. I learned of it from Asian Cult Cinema, but never made any effort to find it because the book’s description made it sound like a nauseating gorefest. It is that, sorta, although the film moves at such a fast clip that it never stops to dwell on the gore.

The film opens at a party attended by a pair of adventurers—Yuen Zan-Hap (Chin Siu-Ho, of Fist of Legend and Masked Avengers) and Wisely (Chow Yun-Fat, of A Better Tomorrow 2 and Hard Boiled)—and a famous author (legendary screenwriter Ni Kuang). The movie suddenly cuts to a hostage situation somewhere else in town, where the police (led by Yasuaki Kurata in a non-fighting role) enlist the assistance of Yuen to play a fake doctor (he is a doctor of something) and attend to a hostage who has just had a heart attack. Although a policewoman (Kara Hui in a cameo) is supposed to accompany him dressed as a nurse, she gets knocked out by a reporter, Tsui Hung (Maggie Cheung, Police Story and The Heroic Trio), who dons her clothing. Once inside, things go south, but Yuen manages to detonate a flash bomb, which allows the SWAT team to storm the place.

What does this have to do with the rest of the movie? Nothing, other than introduce Chin Siu-Ho’s and Maggie Cheung’s characters.

Back at home, Yuen is about to engage in sexy time with his girlfriend (Fairlie Ruth Kordick, of In the Line of Duty IV and Live Hard) when he is assaulted from behind by a mysterious man named Black Dragon (Dick Wei). After a scuffle involving kickboxing and broken furniture—standard 80s action fare—Black Dragon informs Yuen that his Blood Curse has been activated and that he needs to go to Thailand before it kills him. He also warns Yuen to abstain from sex, but Yuen ignores him and suffers a ruptured blood vessel in his leg as a result.

Yuen goes to see Wisely and tells him the story of how he got cursed. A year before, Yuen was a medical trip to the boonies of Thailand. While walking around and taking in scenery, he came across a bathing beauty, “Betsy” (Tsui Sau-Lai, of Killer’s Nocturne and The Last Blood), who is a princess of the Worm Tribe. Later on, he and the other adventurers come across a ritual of the Worm Tribe in which a man and a woman are chosen to be sacrificed to the “Old Ancestor,” a reanimated skeleton monster. Yuen saves Betsy from the monster, although the evil sorcerer Aquala (Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong, of Butterfly and Sword and Girls Unbuttoned) has his flunkies kill the entire team, including the leader (Ken Boyle), by pouring a potion on him and causing him to explode into a mess of maggots. Betsy and Yuen are cursed with the Blood Curse, but Betsy prolongs the latter’s life by cutting her tits open and giving him a parasite to swallow…TF???

Back to the present, Wisely tells Yuen to do back to Thailand and find the Black Dragon. Yuen goes there and is followed by Tsui Hung, who is rich enough to hire a team of mercenaries to go with them into the jungles of Thailand. They eventually meet up with Wisely and his mercenaries. And then things get weird.

The Seventh Curse is not very scary per se, but it is graphic and full of slimy monsters and horrible deaths. The film moves at a mile a minute and crams A LOT of material into a scant 83-minute run time. The breathless pacing means that some over-the-top death scenes that many cameramen would spend time leering at are treated in almost an offhand manner, because there is more madness to portray. Then again, this is the sort of movie that has the balls to place actually children under a two-ton stone grinder (even Western horror movies are loathe to kill of children characters).

The monsters include the Little Ghost, a fetus-like monster that can burrow into a victim’s body and pop out of the stomach; the Old Ancestor, which is a well-designed skeleton rod puppet; and the second form of the Old Ancestor, which looks like the winged version of the Xenomorph that got its own toy, but never actually showed up in the movies(!!!).

There are a handful of fight scenes, choreographed by Seven Fortune Yuen Bun, best known for his numerous Tsui Hark collaborations. The choreography itself is pretty standard 80s kickboxing, of the sort you’d find in a Sammo Hung or Corey Yuen movie of the same period. Chin Siu-Ho and Dick Wei are great martial artists and get a decent showcase for their talents—and this is a rare good guy role for Dick. During the opening hostage sequence, Chin Siu-Ho gets to trade blows with Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, who plays the head of the terrorists. Then Dick and Chin get to throwdown, with people getting thrown through tables in the most painful looking ways possible. Near the end, both men have to fight a bunch of Thai monks atop of a giant Buddha statue, which ends on a visual cribbed from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

People expecting Chow Yun-Fat to do a lot in this movie will be disappointed. His Wisely character (also the subject of The Legend of Wisely and The Cat) is mainly a glorified cameo, showing up early on and whenever black magic exposition is needed. Nonetheless, most people who stumble across The Seventh Curse will never forget the finale, where Chow Yun-Fat shows up out of nowhere in order to blow up a Xenomorph-esque demon with a rocket launcher. That sort of randomness is just the perfect way to end an equally random movie.

The Beekeeper (2024)

The Beekeeper (2024)

Starring: Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Bobby Naderi, Minnie Driver, Phylicia Rashad, Jeremy Irons
Director: David Ayer
Action Director: Jeremy Marinas

It was on any one of The Critical Drinker’s videos, probably his review of A Working Man, where he basically said that Jason Statham had become this generation’s Steven Seagal. Although his action movies have been reasonably successful—I think this one was his most, raking in over 160 million dollars on a 40-million-dollar budget—they do have a certain degree of “saminess” that Seagal’s films have. You know, the one where Statham plays a former special forces/CIA badass who’s living the quiet life, until something compels him to get back in the game and crush skulls, which his character can do better than everybody else around him. You know the drill.

This one has an especially “interesting” premise.

When we meet Adam Clay (Statham, of The Expendables and The Transporter), he is working as a beekeeper at the estate of retired teacher Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad, best known as Claire Huxtable on “The Cosby Show”). Parker lives out in the sticks away from her daughter, mainly running a children’s charity with her free time. She also cooks and “takes care of” Adam, which makes the quiet loner especially grateful.

One evening, Eloise Parker is on her laptop when a window pops up declaring that the data on her computer has been compromised and that her data is in danger. She calls the Hot Line, which puts her in contact with Mickey Garnett (David Witts, who later had small role in A Working Man), the manager of a data scamming outfit that preys on the elderly, robbing them of their retirement, savings, inheritances, etc. Mickey “helpfully” gets Eloise to install some shady software, which allows his employees to hack into her computer and clean out all her accounts, including 20 million dollars from the charity. Parker doesn’t take it so well: she shoots herself that same evening.

When Adam Clay shows up at the house to check in on her, he comes across her dead body and is immediately mistaken for her killer by Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman, who mainly works in theater, but will return for this movie’s sequel), Eloise’s FBI agent daughter. She has Adam arrested, although forensic testing quickly rules out foul play and her mother’s death is declared to be a suicide. Verona did happen to look at the laptop and see the name of the data company that Eloise had called, which she passes onto Adam.

At this point, we get to the part we all were expecting. Adam pulls a secret phone out of a beehive (heh) and calls his old employers, asking for a favor: find the address of the data company. It takes a little while, but these are Ops of the Blackest Sort, so they can get [shiz] done. Adam pays them a visit, beating up all the security guards and burning the rather large building to the ground. At this point, Mickey is forced to bring the matter to his boss, Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson, of the Hunger Games movies). Danforth is head of Danforth Enterprises, a company that used to belong to his father, but has since lapsed to the son and his (unseen at the moment) mother. The company runs multiple businesses, all of which are meant to run tech support scams.

Danforth tells Mickey to “handle” the situation, which results in him and some Hired Goons going to Parker’s house, burning it down, and following Clay to the barn he rents. As we might expect in a Jason Statham movie, Clay kills the hired help and lets Mickey go, albeit minus four fingers. From this point, Clay takes his fight to Danforth, although not before killing Mickey by putting him into a bungee vest, strapping the cord to a truck, and running the truck off a bridge. Wouldn’t have been easier just to have killed him back at the barn?

But all of Clay’s rhetoric about “protecting the hive” gets back to Danforth. He tells his “conservator”, Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), about the situation. Westwyld is a former CIA director and (I think) may have been Danforth’s stepfather for a while, but now he just babysits the young punk…or bails him out when his penchant for drugs and hookers gets him in trouble. That said, Westwyld is well aware that the term “Beekeeper” is Intelligence jargon for something really bad, which at one point results in Westwyld giving Danforth the “John Wick Speech”…or the Col. Trautman speech.

Westwyld calls in a favor to the current CIA chief, Janet Harward (Minnie Driver, of Grosse Pointe Blank), and asks her to help them. She contacts the Beekeepers and accuses Clay of being a rogue agent. When their own assassin (Megan Le) cannot stop him, the CIA has no choice but to get their best men together and stop Clay. At the same time, the FBI (led by Verona) is on Clay’s trail, too. And when we learn the truth about Danforth and his family connections, several other intelligence agencies will end up getting involved, too.

So, what is a Beekeeper? It is essentially an intelligence agency working on the periphery (or perhaps even farther away) from the likes of the FBI, CIA, or NSA. One might say that they are forever working in “Ghost Protocol” mode and basically answer to nobody but themselves. They have the right to eliminate any entity they see as a threat to the good ol’ US of A (“the hive”) with no bureaucracy to stand in their way. Adam Clay is a former Beekeeper, which is why he can kick so much ass, even before he starts using a gun.

That is a very Steven Seagal movie plot. Former CIA black ops agent? Unbeatable in combat? A government conspiracy and intelligence agents trying to silence him? You get that in most of Seagal’s movies. The main difference between Seagal and Statham is that the latter has a lot of natural charisma and, in the 25 years or so since he became an action actor, Statham has stayed in reasonably good shape. Yes, he more or less plays the same character in all his movies—although his British crime movies and some of his earlier films allowed him some more leeway—but if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.

I do find it interesting how the story in this one gradually grows in scope. It starts off with Statham taking on a single computer data center. He then takes his fight to the parent company. By the end, he is practically facing off with the entire US government and all of its major intelligence agencies. When one of the characters picks up a book on beekeeping and reads about a bee whose job it is to kill the queen when the current one can no longer perform her function, it is supposed to be foreshadowing that Clay may very well take his fight to the President (themselves).

If you like this kind of action movie, you should enjoy The Beekeeper. The action scenes were staged by Jeremy Marinas, who is best known for his work on John Wick 4 and From the World of John Wick: The Ballerina. Most of the fight scenes are very short, with Statham dispatching a roomful of baddies in a few punches each, with the occasional front kick or side kick thrown for good measure. His enemies do “level up” as the film progresses: security guards -> hired goons -> FBI SWAT team -> CIA Swat Team -> the best mercenaries in the world. If you like Jason Statham and his screen fighting skills, there is no reason to not like this movie. There is a lot of action and it’s all well staged. The main thing is that Statham is nearly invincible in this, only taking damage in his fight with the head of the mercenaries, Lazarus (Taylor James).

The violence is often quite graphic, such as him blowing up an elevator, which results in one character getting bisected when it falls down the shaft. And yet…the sequel is being directed by Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto. That guy did the hyper-violent movies Headshot; The Night Comes For Us; and Shadow Strays (which may be the worst of the three). So, I can see The Beekeeper 2 getting spectacularly violent.

My main qualm with this film was the profanity. Although I'm not totally against it, this one had so many F-bombs being dropped that it became distracting. I accept that sort of thing in a 90s "In the hood" films or a Tarantino movie, but in a fun, check-your-brain-at-the-door actioner, you don't need 100+ uses of the word f*ck.

Statham is now pushing 60 and shows no signs of slowing down. The year after this, he did A Working Man, which brought in 89 million on a similar budget to this. This year he has given us Shelter, which didn’t do as well as his previous two films, and will soon release Mutiny, which will be Statham’s Under Siege (at least in general premise). Plus he has the sequel to this one due out next year. I really have to applaud Statham for keeping up this action hero shtick for as long as he has. Too bad that by the time he reaches Stallone’s age, we’ll probably no longer have any action heroes of his caliber to do an Expendables reboot.