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.

Death Kappa (2010)

Death Kappa (2010)
Director: Tomoo Haraguchi 

So, Monster X Strikes Back was more or less a sequel-cum-remake-cum-parody from the start. Big Man Japan was something of a satire of both the genre and Japanese society until the final reel, at which point it became an outright parody. Death Kappa, which came out two years after Monster X Strikes Back, sort of straddles the line between "affectionate homage" and "genre parody", with some of the human scenes being played more or less seriously, others not, some of the FX being good (by suitmation standards), and some of them almost looking intentionally fake.

The film stars Misato Hirata (of the Ultraman Mebius series) as Kanako, a woman hailing from a small village in Northern(?) Japan who is returning home after a disastrously failed bid to become an idol. As soon as she returns home, her grandmother is killed in front of her by reckless, drunken youth. Kanako takes it upon herself to continue her grandmother's legacy and become a miko (or shrine maiden) and tend to the local kami, a kappa. Thanks to the the aforementioned youth, one of the kappa idols is knocked into sea, which awakens into a real kappa. Funnily enough, the creature is enamored by the stupid pop single that Kanako released--lyrics like "I'm wearing panties again today" and "I promise I'll bleed for you as I wait on the beach" suggest that Kanako was the Japanese equivalent to Rebecca Black.

Anyway, there is an evil outfit known as the National Guard operating inside the same village. They are creating a race of evil fish men in order to restore Japan to its Nationalists, militaristic roots--watch for Shin Godzilla director Hideaki Anno as the director of the Guard. The evil scientist is a black-clad lady (Mika, of Abashiri Ikka: The Movie) who sometimes dresses as a witch, and sometimes as a dominatrix. She is the granddaughter of a WW2-era scientist who had started the fish man project and wants to continue his legacy. We are meant to draw parallels between the two women with regards to continuing their grandparents' legacy: one good, one evil.

Anyway, Kanako is kidnapped by the National Guard, who try to transform her into fish girl. She is rescued by the kappa, who sumo wrestles the guards into submission. Evil Scientist Girl goes insane and shoots everyone--including her grandfather's dessicated corpse--with a machine gun before detonating a nuclear weapon inside the base. The explosion mutates one of the fishmen into a Godzilla-esque monster called Hangyolas, who attacks "the city". After all the military hardware fails to destroy it, a kaiju-sized Kappa shows up. Let the monster wrestling begin...

On one hand, the monster suits are really detailed and look great on screen. There are some good miniatures and old school kaiju fans may enjoy the old school effects (tanks, maser cannons, jets, etc.). The monster wrestling is also more entertaining than the Guilala-vs-Take-Majin fight in Monster X Strikes Back. And the first half is strange enough that some might find it entertaining. The monster Hangyolas is very reminiscent of Titanosaurus from Terror of Mechagodzilla--and Kappa's entrance into the final fight by blasting Hangyolas from offscreen with a blue-colored blast is a callback to that movie. Director Tomoo Haraguchi, who did creature design on the Heisei Gamera films and directed Sakuya, Slayer of Demons, really knows his way around the genre.

The problem is the rest. The human element disappears almost entirely from the second half of the movie, except for the nameless military brass. There is a running joke of the soldiers being asked to shoot the monster with their standard-issue assault rifles, only to get scared and scream out for their mothers. The movie ends with Kanako reappearing out of nowhere to charm and calm down an angry Kappa, which begs the question: "Wasn't she killed in the atomic explosion?" And the early scenes of the fishmen killing youth are rather graphic for an otherwise cheesy, goofy film. And speaking of goofy, as good as the miniatures are, the scenes of fighter jets attacking Hangyolas show the piano wire suspending them, which makes me wonder if it was intentional (making it a parody) or something they just didn't know how to hide (which just makes it bad).

In the end, this movie is a lot like how I view Eight-Legged Freaks, which didn't know if it wanted to be Tremors (an update of 50s, desert-set sci-fi) or a spoof. Although both types of films can have humor, the humor of each is of a different sort. And that is how I felt about Death Kappa. It needed a clearer idea of its own identity.