Reigo: King of the Sea Monsters (2008)

Reigo: King of the Sea Monsters (2008)
aka: Reigo: The Deep Sea Monster vs. the Battleship Yamato; Deep Sea Monster Reigo
Original Title: 深海獣レイゴー
Translation: Deep Sea Beast Reigo

Starring: Taiyo Suguira, Yukijiro Hotaru, Miyavi Matsunoi (as Mai Manami), Yumiko Hayashi, Mickey Curtis, Susumu Kurobe, Yoji Tanaka
Director: Shinpei Hayashiya

In late 2023, Toho Studios in Japan released Godzilla Minus One, a fresh take on the familiar formula that set Godzilla’s initial rampage in the first years after World War II and Japan’s ignominious defeat. The film was an acknowledgement of the Japanese military’s mistakes during that war, not to mention a reminder that the A-bomb strikes were not the only horrors inflicted on Japanese civilians by the American military. Two of the film’s four major monster set pieces were set entirely at sea, inviting comparisons between the film and Jaws. Godzilla Minus One was a worldwide box office hit and won G’s first Oscar for Best Special Effects, something the Legendary films couldn’t pull off with 10X the budget.

The WW2 setting, while novel, was done once before—to my knowledge—in Shinpei Hayashiya’s low-budget Reigo: King of the Deep Sea Monsters, one of a number of indie kaiju films that popped up to keep the genre (barely) afloat during the decade that separated Godzilla: Final Wars and Godzilla (2014). Sadly, a novel setting and interesting premise are torpedoed by the film’s low budget, which gives us 80 minutes of CGI that might have passed muster in a 90s-era Playstation game. The film was a labor of a love by a man who loved the genre, but the entire project has budgetary overreach written all over it.

The movie opens with some documentary footage of the Japanese navy and some variety of explanation about the Yamato-class battleship. The general idea is that for a few decades following the Russo-Japanese War, there was a non-aggression/disarmament pact between Japan, Great Britain and the United States. That pact expired in 1936, and Japan refused to take part in the then London Accords. By 1937, it was already developing the infamous Yamato-class battleship, the star in Japan’s navy. We're then treated to a minute or two of stock underwater footage before being given a glimpse of a giant monster lurking in the depths.

The story proper where an older man and his 40-ish wife are going to a shrine of sorts. She's pregnant and he's about to ship off for adventure on the high seas. The man is Naboru Osako (Yukijiro Hotaru, who was the inspector in the 90s Gamera movies) and he's the artillery officer on the Yamato. We also meet the young Takeshi Kaido (Ultraman Cosmos' Taiyo Sugiura, who sports a haircut that makes him look like a short-haired woman) who's dating a young lady named Chie (Miyavi Matsunoi, of Venus in Eros and 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy). They walk along the beach and talk about how much she’ll miss him, before they trip and Takeshi falls on top of her...how convenient. We then have a brief moment of Takeshi and his grandmother sharing a last meal before he ships off.

Once on board the Yamato, Naboru decides that fidelity is optional for a man who might die at any moment and shacks up with some random island girl who boards the ship with her grandfather. Before Naboru can get make mad monkey love to the girl (played by adult video queen Yumiko Hayashi, who showed up in films with names like Mother and Daughter: Spit Swapping Seduction), her grandfather tells some story about a dragon named Reigo haunting the sea near the island. That can't possibly be a plot point, can it?

A few days later, the sailors spot a pair of strange lights beneath the surface of the sea, which I assume is the filmmakers' homage to Gappa, the Triphibian Monster. They fire some depth charges at it and end up killing themselves a young Reigo monster, although they don't realize it at the time. The next evening or so, they find an American sailor floating in the water, which is some random excuse for some humor involving the English language. You got me. The sailor, Norman Melville (Mickey Curtis, of Gunhed and Kamikaze Taxi) is thrown in the brig and forgotten until the film's climax, when he helps the Japanese soldiers kill Reigo.

Shortly after that, the Yamato is attacked by a school of "Bonefish," which sort of look like the lovechild of Monster X (from Godzilla: Final Wars) and a barracuda. Several sailors are dismembered before the bonefish return to the sea, never to show up in the movie again. The grandfather explained that the bonefish are the harbinger of Reigo. From here on out, the film will mostly be about Japanese men screaming at each other, while the adult Reigo shows up on occasionally to ram a ship in the fleet and blow it up. Reigo is a cool and calculating beast who likes his victims to suffer, since a real kaiju assault would go like Godzilla vs. Biollante, in which the entire fleet is destroyed in a couple of minutes. This goes on until the 70-minute mark, when the sailors flood the bulkheads (or whatever part of the ship that you can intentionally flood), causing the Yamato to tilt to the side, which aligns the huge 18-inch guns with Reigo's chest and allows them to blow a hole in its torso, killing it.

You'd think the movie would end at that point, but you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. The next seven minutes consist of a bizarre epilogue in which we learn that all of the main characters were eventually killed in 1945, when the Yamato was sunk in real life. This epilogue is accompanied by visuals that the characters were resurrected as kabuki disciples of the famous Japanese warrior monk Benkei. The end. Yeah, I couldn't figure that part out, either.

The first time I watched this about a decade ago, I watched it without subtitles. It was a huge slog for me then. Watching it a second time, I can state outright that the film is a huge slog for me. The monster sequences were short and scant, so most of the movie was made up of people standing around and talking. After all, talk is cheap and action costs money. But the direction of the human scenes is so flat and lifeless that I finally understood what "flat and lifeless direction" actually meant. It is basically the Japanese equivalent of a Mega Shark film.

The film was directed by former comedian and monster fan Shinpei Hayashiya, who had also directed the unofficial sequel to the 90s Gamera series, Gamera 4: Truth. Wait a minute? Former comedian-turned-monster movie director? Where have I heard that before? Oh right, Ray Shim, who directed Reptilian and D-War. Now there's a dependable recipe for a cinematic disaster. Anyway, we understand that Hayashiya had limited funds to work with, but his idea of filming the non-monster scenes is to set up the camera up in one place and leave it there for the duration of the scene, which is often several minutes. The lack of any sort of real camerawork or editing makes the movie feel even longer than it is, so that a 70-minute movie feels about as long as the American Godzilla film is.

With regards to the monsters, I have to say that I like Reigo's look. It was designed by Keita Amemiya, best known around these parts for directing the Zeiram/Zeram films and a few Tokusatsu series. The monster model used in some scenes was sculpted by Tomoo Haraguchi, who did special FX work on the live-action adaptation of Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis. The quality of the monster model work is about on the same level of those puppet scenes in the original Godzilla film. The rest of the action (i.e. the monster, the battleship, etc.) is realized via CGI that's on the level of the Godzilla toy commercials from the mid-1990s that I used to see while watching weekday afternoon cartoons. It's really sad. The only monster scene that comes close to working is the death of Reigo, which looks kinda cool. Reigo doesn't have much in the way of powers, accept that he's apparently a living lightning rod, since lightning strikes his body every time he comes to the surface, even when there are no clouds in the sky!

So yeah, this movie is only for the most rabid fan of Japanese daikaiju cinema, what with its boring human scenes, lack of suspense and drama, and bargain-basement CGI effects. You'll easily find more entertainment Googling the film and looking at the pictures, imagining your own film with the monster, than watching this.

Kung-Fu Wonder Child (1986)

Kung-Fu Wonder Child (1986)
Aka: Kung Fu Wonderchild
Original Title: 靈幻童子
Tranlation: Spirit Magical (Psychic) Boy

 

Starring: Lin Hsiao-Lu, Yukari Oshima, Chang Shan, Jack Long Shi-Chia, Lin Yu-Chieh, Lee Gwan-Sin, Li Hai-Hsing, Yang Hsiung, Ma Hok-Man, Sam Ching-Wai
Director: Lee Tso-Nam
Action Director: Alexander Lo Rei, Lucifer Li Hai-Hsing

 

Taiwanese actress Lin Hsiao-Lan is an interesting footnote in the history of the Jade Screen. The diminutive young lady started career at age 13 in the film The Orientation, in which the poster implies that she was playing a young boy, not too unlike Angie Tsang Sze-Man of Iron Monkey. That would become a theme for the first part of career: her short stature and boyish facial features placed her in roles as adolescent or young adult males, usually in comic martial arts-fantasy films. The first of these is the deliriously odd Kung-Fu Wonder Child, pairing her with genre veteran and cult favorite Jack Long, along with an up-and-coming Japanese actress named Yukari Oshima. Heard of her?

The movie begins with a magician (Sam Ching-Wai, of Magic of Spell and Retreat of the Godfather) and his daughter running afoul of an evil sorcerer known only as “The Priest” (Li Hai-Hsing, Shaolin Temple Against Lama and Ninja vs the Shaolin Guard). The two engage in a battle of skills that involve wire-assisted leaps, controlling objects via telekinesis, and shooting lasers from their hands. The Priest proves to be the stronger, and makes off with his victims’ souls and a magical artifact known as the Silver Skull.

Switch to the local Taoist temple, where the bumbling instructor (Wong Kwan-Hung, of Return of the Bastard Swordsman and Rape in Public Sea) is teaching Maoshan magic to the students. This includes singing and dancing while chanting cheerleader-esque spells and making objects appear out of nowhere. There are two upstarts among the students (played by William Yen and Tang Heng-Wu), whose antics get them constant beatings from the teacher and Senior Brother Chang Kong (Yang Hsiung).

Their only respite is their friendship with the Hsiu Chuen (Lin Hsiao-Lan, of Child of Peach and Magic of Spell), the grandson of the temple cook, Hua Won (Jack Long, of The 7 Grandmasters and The Mystery of Chess Boxing). Hsiu has learned by magic and kung fu from her grandfather, who is secretly a master of the Southern Maoshan, of which the ill-fated master from the beginning was also a master. She helps the two poor saps get their comeuppance on the teacher and his assistant, usually in comic fashion.

In a third subplot, we are introduced Hai Qiuxue, the daughter/sister of the victims from the first scene. She is played by Yukari Oshima, who was in the earliest stages of her film career at this point. Qiuxue is wandering the countryside looking for her father and sister, unaware of their recent tussle with The Priest. In a sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Hai Chi-Hsue comes across a pair of jiangshi, or hopping vampire, children who are looking for their dad. She lets them accompany her until dad shows up and tries to kill Miss Hai. She does not take too kindly to that and unleashes her lethal legwork on him until he relents. Apparently, the jiangshi had received a message from “The Priest” to kill her, but nothing is made of that afterward.

The Priest’s two “wardens”—The Legend of Wisely’s Chung Shui-Fuk and Magic Warriors’s Chu Kwan-Yeung-- are sent to keep tabs on Hai Qiuxue, and Hsiu Chuen and his friends from the temple come to her rescue. Our heroes eventually discover the Priest’s hideout, where he keeps the souls of his victims in urns, guarded by a green-haired zombie, the Ghost King, who is also a kung fu dynamo. Their first encounter with the Priest—who is also the abbot of the Temple—almost costs them their lives, although it alerts the grandpa to the Priest’s evil plot: use the Silver Skull and his own Gold Skull as conduits for him to drain the lifeforce from the souls of the magicians whose souls he has captured. Acquiring their abilities, he will become the most powerful sorcerer in the world!

Of course, that synopsis glosses over most of the second act, which is mainly a series of comic interactions between Hsiu Chuen, his two friends, and Senior Brother, who always bullies them. In one scene that would not fly in the @MeToo era, Hsiu Chuen casts a love spell over the basket seller that Senior Brother Chang is smitten with—his own sister-in-law! Once she’s in his embrace, Hsiu retracts the spell. The basket seller, horrified that Chang Kong is so closer to her, has him arrested for sexual assault!

That would be the biggest problem with the film, is that it really doesn’t have an actual story. There’s a conflict that needs to be resolved in the final half hour, but most of the movie is made up of magical shenanigans and comic non-sequiturs. The lack of the story keeps the film from being as memorable as it should be, since it would be easy to the supernatural hijinks without the context of a story to place them.

Magic fans will surely get their fill with Kung Fu Wonder Child. The movie opens with an explosion of flying fabrics, animated qi blasts and pyrotechnics. Riding on the coattails of the popular Mr. Vampire, the three aforementioned Jiangshi show up in the first act, undoubtedly to attract fans of that film. Beyond that, the film gives us love spells, heat spells, cold spells, invisibility spells, magic that turns people into kung fu marionettes and more! At one point, Lin Hsiao-Lan is shrunk to the height of three inches and has to fight a Facehugger and a giant centipede!

And then you get to the finale, which is brimming with craziness: our heroes fight a zombie; a character grows a second head from his forehead; the protagonists attack the Priest with literal hand cannons and a multi-barrel gun made of bamboo; and finally, the villain turns into a dragon. Not a dragon puppet. Not a stop motion dragon. But a 2-D, cel-animated dragon that interacts with the characters like a low-budget Roger Rabbit. It’s just plain nuts.

There is a fair amount of fighting, courtesy of Taiwanese actor Alexander Lo Rei and Li Hai-Hsing. The best action belongs to Yukari Oshima and her awesome legwork. Jack Long gets to bust out a few moves, mainly in a later fight against the Priest’s Wardens. Lin Hsiao-Lu fights mainly using wire-assisted acrobatics, but the choreography around them is pretty decent. There are some decent moves on display during the climax, although the choreographers play down the protagonists’ abilities in order to demonstrate just how powerful the main villain is.

In the end, the film is solid trip into the realm of weirdness that is Chinese fantasy. Fans of Shaw Brothers classics like Battle Wizard and Boxer’s Omen, or Yuen Woo-Ping’s Miracle Fighters and Drunkard series, should easily find something to enjoy. Hong Kong neophytes may either be put off by the “anything goes” attitude, or get sucked into it all. And if you do get sucked into it, be comforted that Lin Hsiao-Lu made a few more of these films. 

Fulltime Killer (2001)

Fulltime Killer (2001)
Original Title: 全職殺手
Translation: Full Time Killer

 

Starring: Andy Lau Tak-Wah, Takashi Sorimachi, Simon Yam Tat-Wah, Kelly Lin Hsi-Lei, Cherrie Ying Choi-Yi, Lam Suet
Director: Johnnie To
Action Director: Wong Chi-Wai

 

O(no)—Takashi Sorimachi, of GTO: The Movie--is a professional killer. And he’s pretty darn good at it. He’s suave, cool, and collected. He has the nerves of steel necessary to gun a pair of armed men down in the middle of a busy train station. And he lacks moral qualms that might prevent him from gunning down a childhood friend who was at the scene of the crime just to guarantee that no one will snitch on him. He is so good, in fact, that he is considered the top assassin in all of Asia.

Tok (Andy Lau, of Moment of Romance and As Tears Go By), on the other hand, is an up-and-comer—the sort of guy who will do any job for a pittance. He also has nerves of steel, such that he can fill a holding cell on the first floor of a Thai prison with grenades and stroll calmly out of the building before they detonate. He is a huge fan of cinema, especially action movies, and has a flamboyant, out-in-the-open style that suggests he’s performing his killings for the camera (how meta!). However, he does have a weakness: rapidly flashing lights.

Finally, there is Chin (Kelly Lin, of Martial Angels and Reign of Assassins). She’s a Taiwanese-born resident of Hong Kong who speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, English and Japanese. She works a day job in a tiny video rental store for Japanese films and acts as Ono’s cleaning lady on week nights. The only caveat is that Ono doesn’t actually live in his apartment. He hangs out in a second, cramped, run-down apartment across the street, observing Chin as she just does whatever she wants and then cleans up when convenient. He knows it. She knows it. She even undresses in front of the window in hopes of garnering a reaction from her employer. But nothing.

Tok is obsessed with O, hoping to take his place as the world’s (or Asia’s) greatest hitman. That means that he has not only figured out where the guy “lives,” but who his housekeeper is. Tok drops in on Chin’s work wearing a Bill Clinton mask (notice the poster of Point Break on the wall). Tok asks Chin on a date and she accepts. They go to the movies, out to a café, and Tok even tells her straight-up that he’s a professional assassin. He even teaches her how to use a sniper rifle, taking a page from Léon: The Professional. Chin finds herself taken with Tok’s over-the-top demeanor.

Of course, it does not take long for their paths to cross. Tok is betrayed by his employer, Fat Ice (Lam Suet, of Legendary Assassin and The Mission), during a hit at a subway station in Singapore. Ono is betrayed by his agent during a hit in Macau, which leads to a tense stand-off at a church between him and Tok (sniping at him from afar). Meanwhile, Interpol is on both men’s tail, especially Ono’s, following the murder of the Japanese civilian in Malaysia. Interpol is represented by Agent Albert Lee (Simon Yam, of Mission Kill and Cypress Tigers) and his partner, Gigi (Cherrie Ying, Rob-B Hood and Kung Fu Chefs). Lee is especially obsessed with bringing in both men, which will come to head with a particularly blood shootout at Ono’s apartment. But the story doesn’t end there…

Like The Mission and Exiled, this is a rather quirky little action-drama, benefitting from Johnnie To’s and Wai Ka-Fei’s surrealistic touches and Andy Lau’s compelling overacting. Andy Lau is a trip, going around in public wearing a Bill Clinton mask, and then throwing it off and enjoying the spotlight, even when he’s blowing away his targets in public. He’s a movie buff and has convinced himself that he is living in one. There is a neat scene right before the climax where the three main characters sit down for a meal and have a lively conversation, making jokes in Japanese and enjoying themselves. At the drop of a hat, the entire film becomes somber again as they two men head to the warehouse for their final showdown. Takashi Sorimachi plays his role straight, a nice foil to the Lau’s madness. Kelly Lin plays her role more as a curious observer, although the thrills of interacting with professional hitmen intrigue her enough that when the [crap] hits the fan, she whips out a sniper rifle as if she knows what she’s doing.

The technical aspects of the film are mostly impeccable. The editing by frequent Johnnie To collaborator David Richardson was nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award—he eventually won for Trivisa. The photography by Cheng Siu-Keung—he photographed lots of Johnnie To films and the directed Forbidden Arsenal and Sea Wolves—is fantastic. Only a brief moment of CGI before a grenade explosion took me out of the movie, and that was only for a few seconds in an early scene. He makes up for it with the expertly shot climactic shot of the two main characters exchanging gunfire as fireworks go off around them. The movie also makes great use of classical and opera music, like playing Rosini’s “Largo al factotum della citta” from The Barber of Seville or Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” during pitched gunfights. The effect is flawless.

The action was staged by Wong Chi-Wai, a long-time B-lister in Hong Kong cinema. He got his start in Taiwanese films like The Invincible Kung Fu Trio and Guy with Secret Kung Fu, and was able to evolve to working on late-period Shaw Brothers movies, like New Tales of the Flying Fox. His career was rather nondescript after that, working on a number of lesser-known crime and bullet-ballet films. He did work with Johnnie To both on this and Exiled, although he never became a To regular like his editor, writer and cinematographer.

The action is here is almost exclusively gunplay. The opening hit is pretty straight forward, but the following sequence with Andy Lau delivering shotgun blasts to unsuspecting Thai policemen is a bit more bombastic. Lau also wields a shotgun in a second hit in the middle of a busy street in Hong Kong. Things get even more kinetic with the aforementioned Macau job, which starts off as vehicular hit and quickly becomes a game of cat and mouse between the two main characters, one of whom has the other pinned down with a sniper rifle. The tour-de-force is the apartment shootout, where Ono and Chin trade shots with the HK SWAT team, who is trying to fence them in on both sides…and that’s before Tok’s sniper rifle gets involved. The finale is a gunfight in a dark warehouse that features night vision goggles, UZIs, shotguns and fireworks. It’s a stylist end to a stylist film, made more appealing to nerd types like me by having the characters talk about the video game “Metal Slug” before things go to hell!