06 March 2009

New Stuff

Some newly acquired VHS tapes and a DVD title I was hoping would be screenable at Kung Fu Grindhouse.
I heard I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist was just bizarre, and it's an early Troma production so it's bound to have something going for it.
When I saw Space Camp on the clearance shelf I snatched it up thinking it had to be one of those promotional movie projects, almost like a safety video with a plot, but in this case with an obvious commercial aspect. It is commercial but it's also plotty enough that it has a DVD release. Eh, whatever, I guess it can still be entertainingly bad even if it's not hard to find.
To Sleep with a Vampire, hmmmm, I'll admit that one intrigued me because of Charlie Spradling (Ski School, Puppetmaster 2), but there is another reason as well. It's one of the super cheap films that were filmed at Roger Cormans studio during I think the middle 90's. At that time they were cranking out skin flicks in 3 or four nights, using the same sets that bigger budget (in the Corman sense) films were using during the day. Just two actors and some dialogue. That's it.
Soul Brothers of Kung Fu was a random purchase from HKFlix because the plot semed amusing. Fortunately it is, despite the fact it was released by BanZai Media who has a penchant for releasing grainy, faded, fullscreen VHS transfers as "Special Edition".
Soul Brothers stars Bruce Li as Bruce Li, an awesome martial artist who idolizes Bruce Lee but works as a day laborer in Hong Kong. He saves a young black kid from being beat up, and starts training him. Over the course of the film they incur the wrath of some mafia dudes I think, and Bruce starts to practice a crazy pressure point technique involving the testicles. Well that's creative. Anyway in the end of course they confron the bad guys and Bruce uses his awesome new skill to actually stab the baddies to death with his fingers. All the restored footage advertised on the back of the sleeve was really not noticeable except for the alternate ending which ran (in full screen) after the climax. It was a lot gorier and happier if you can believe that. All in all Soul Brothers was pretty good, the fighting was pretty coarse and there were some talky bits but the payoff was decent, and thankfully, the print was actually good.

1 comment:

Regis said...

Space Camp was on par with Flight of the Navigator and The Goonies in terms of how excited I was as an eight-year-old to see it in the theater.