Quickie Reviews: Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and Kung-Fu Hustle

[jeriendhal]

Because you just can't have enough Guy in Rubber Suit vs. Guy in Tin Suit action, or Hong Kong action thrown into a blender with a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla is first up. In this revisionist history version of the Godzilla mythos, all of the films previously made in the past fifty years are ignored except for the first Godzilla film. So a half century after being skeletonized by the Oxygen Bomb, another Godzillasaurus is heading towards Tokyo Bay. In the first round he tears up a unit of those ubiquitous Maser Cannon trucks we've seen in every other Godzilla movie (part of the generic Anti-Megalosaurus Force), leaving a sole female survivor with a bad case of Top Gun Syndrome. [1]

Top scientists are called in, including our romatic lead with his obnoxious daughter Kenny (that's not her name but let's face it, she's a Kenny) in tow. Their brilliant solution? Build a giant robot to fight the giant monster, using the preserved bones of the original Godzilla as the frame, and a sample of the original Big G's DNA to run the biological computer controlling the thing.

Anybody else seeing the small problem here?

As Godzilla movies go, this one is fairly good. The SCIENCE! at the core of thing is complete nonsense, but it's got a fair smattering of characterization going on with our Godzilla attack survivor, and the battles between Godzilla and M-Godzilla are at least as good as the ones in Godzilla vs. King Godirah. It also manages a fair balance between humor and serious action. The filmmakers even acknowledge the series' past history, with a little nod towards the old joke of Japanese school kids being granted complete access to highly sensitive military bases.

Rent it.


[1] AKA "My buddies died so I can prove myself at the big climax of the film."



Next up, Kung-Fu Hustle, a send-up of all the Hong Kong Kng-Fu movies made from the early seventies too... well, now, really. In it, the vicious Axe Gang (and we do mean vicious. In the opener the gang leader shoots an unarmed woman in the back) attempts to take over the aptly named "Pig Sty Alley", a Singapore slum run by a loud-mouthed landlady in curlers and a cigarette in her mouth, and her hapless, put-upon hubby. Unfortunately the Axe gang discovers that the Alley is crawling (okay, it's got five) top level martial artists. But the real trouble lies with the hapless Sing (Stephen Chow), a wanna-be thug who learned what little he knows about martial arts from a how-to manual.

Will the Axe Gang come up with a secret weapon to defeat Pig Sty Alley's protectors? Will Sing discover his true martial arts abilities? Will the gay tailor get any respect from the local coolie and the meat pie vendor? Will there be a knock-down dragout fight between our hero, the main villian, and about a bazillion mooks armed with axes? In the end, will Sing gain the heart of the beautiful mute ice-cream vendor he tried to defend as a child?

If you're asking yourself these questions, you haven't seen many of these movies, have you?

Anyway, this is "Enter the Dragon" as if produced by the makers of the Airplane movies. The action is cartoonish (literally, with a Warners Brothers chase scene in the middle of it) and the characters broad, mostly played by Hong Kong kung-fu vets parodying the same characters they always play in these films. Despite this, some bits aren't for the kiddies, especially a flashback to Sing's childhood, where he literally gets pissed on by a local gang of bullies.

But hey, any film that features the Chinese equivilent of the Blues Brothers playing a duet on the Worlds Deadliest Mandolin is at least worth taking a look at.