UFC: Best of 2009 is a Spike tv special. The basic cable network has a long-running deal with the mixed martial arts promotional giant, showing free fight cards, dubbed Ultimate Fight Night, nearly every month and the reality show The Ultimate Fighter. Also, to kill some airtime, they round up specials like this.

How the fights are chosen is anyone's guess. They throw in the big names, of course, so champions and top draws make the grade. Quick, brutal KO's are always well-represented. The other remaining category seems to be slobberknocker fights where technique is thrown out the window in favor of three rounds of caveman slinging.

The format actually does a decent job of overview, going over all of the champions, how their year played out, how the title holders maintained their dominance or were defeated. Top contenders in every division are also showcased, setting the stage...Read the entire review

Though it doesn't help, the problem with Kirenji Girls Combat School isn't the micro budget. I can excuse that they didn't have an available building wherein they could paint the titular schools graffiti covered walls. Instead, the cheap substitute is obvious canvas and if you could be possibly fooled by distance, actors fall into the faux-concrete wall which visibly wrinkles.

Less forgiving is the fx. In the first hour of this two-part DTV film, it is clear they could only pony up the money for one scene. In trying to ape the source materials manga roots, they throw in a cartoonish shattered wall and minor impact fx, but it ends up distracting because the execution is subpar by even an amateur dabblers standards. I've seen kids on Youtube who execute better fx with basic programs.

Again, though it doesn't help, I will not fault the source. The story is typical stuff. Slugger Maki wander...Read the entire review

At the root of Guns and Talks writer/director Jin Jang's Murder, Take One (2005) is an interesting idea. An idea, never fulfilled.

The film is technically competent and, even if some characters are one-dimensional, well-preformed. That said, its not enough, and I'm about to write one of those reviews that basically touches on all the sour spots because it is that kind of film, one where most every positive has some off note attached to it.

First of all, this is a two hour film, more than enough time to leisurely set up a premise, but the setup is all rushed in the first few minutes. During the opening, we learn of the murder of a thirty-something girl in a hotel room). The investigation into her death will take place on live tv, a whole building has been assigned to house the prosecuting detectives, suspects, and the tv crew. For the next forty-five minutes (a day, more or less, in r...Read the entire review

Briefly, for those that don't know, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a show about a ordinary Joe, or Joel, and his two wise-cracking robots Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo. The trio are stuck in space by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Bealieu) or his mother Pearl (Mary Jo Pehl) depending on the era you are watching. They are forced to watch bad movies, which they make fun of, and generally they goof around a lot. It began in 1988 on cable access in Minneapolis, then ran on The Comedy Channel which quickly morphed into Comedy Central. The show was briefly canceled after its seventh season only to be picked up by the SciFi Channel for three more seasons, ending its run in 1999. Further, MST3k did one feature film and the various teams of hosts, actors, writers, etc. have gone on to other flick chaffing projects like Cinematic Titanic, Read the entire review

Be it between the extremes of exacting revenge for a criminally harmed loved one to punching a snotty barista, even the most devoted peacenik probably has some tinge of vigilantism. Its only natural. No matter how civilized we like to think we are, sometimes, there is that knee jerk wish to deal with any problem, no didactic red tape in the way, just pure reaction. And, sometimes that reaction could be violently expressed.

Ah Kin (Anthony Wong) is a good man. A bit of a milquetoast but a good man. He seems to be on the right path in life, his hard work at the insurance agency putting him in line for a promotion and at home he has a loving wife with a baby on the way. Then it all goes to Hell. Late one night, his wife has complications. They desperately try to hail a taxi, get one who decides he doesn't want a bleeding pregnant woman in his car, and the driver takes off, accidentally dragging Ah Kin'...Read the entire review

Originally airing from 1963 to 1989 and relaunched in 2005, Doctor Who has become the Bonanza or The Simpsons of science fiction television. If you need some detailed backstory before diving into this review, I suggest you consult wikipedia, but, in brief, it concerns a renegade time-traveling alien known only as The Doctor, who vaults through time and space in his vehicle the TARDIS, getting into all sort of trouble along with various companions. The Keys of Marinus is a tale from the travels of the first Doctor

The Doctor (William Hartnell) and companions, granddaughter Susan (Carol Ann Ford), and teachers Ian (William Russell) and Barbara (Jacqueline Hill) arrive on the planet Marinus, specifically on a desolate island with a beach of glass surrounded by an acid sea. They find their way into a structure where they are attacked. Aided by the building protector, Arb...Read the entire review

When you say Teacher's Pet is a Korean film about the affair between a teacher and student, the knee jerk reaction is that it is probably a ho-hum, tabloidish story. Fairly well-worn, salacious subject matter, older teacher, young student, a secret dalliance hinging on an abuse of authority. Luckily the film eschews any melodrama and is instead a lightly comic charmer with some touches of magic realism.

Joh In-yeong (Kim Jeong-eun) is a math teacher who takes a liking to a sullen young student Lee Seok (Lee Tae-seong) in part because he reminds her of her first love, who coincidentally(?) was also named- you guessed it- Lee Seok. Meanwhile, another Joh In-yeong, we'll call her Joh In-yeong II (Jeong Yu-mi), a schoolgirl, is also in love with a Lee Seok doppelganger in both appearance and name.

Initially, I thought that the film was mixing up flashbacks between the current and past...Read the entire review

'09 was a weird year for the UFC. While the events were selling well and had steady fan traction, the last half of the year found injury after injury mucking up their now, mostly bi monthly, fight cards.

And, so it goes that both the headliner and co-main event of UFC 106 on November 21, 2009 in Las Vegas were marred, first by the original main event of Brock Lesner versus Shane Carwin being scrapped due to Lesner coming down with a mystery ailment (later diagnosed as diverticulitis) and then, at the beginning of October, Mark Coleman sustained a leg injury forcing him out of his supporting-turned-headlining bout with Tito Ortiz. Thus, the headliner inexplicably became a rushed rematch between Forrest Griffin and Ortiz. This wasn't exactly a rematch fans had been clamoring for since both Griffin and Ortiz were coming off a couple of losses and Ortiz had been inactive due to one of his many a con...Read the entire review

While the usual marriage of elements always make for a great film, in action filmdom you can get a passing grade so long as you deliver one crucial element. Logic can be thrown out the window. Settings don't have to be stellar. Characters can be cardboard and the accompanying acting stiff. Plots can be threadbare. You just need that one hinge: action delivered at a decent, thrilling, and coherent clip.

For instance, in the 2009 Thai film Fireball, it doesn't matter that our lead hero Tai takes the place of his twin brother Tan (Preeti Barameeanant) and no one is the wiser, despite logic that assumes the twins would have undergone extensive tattooing in order to have the exact same tattoos. That doesn't matter, so long as he kicks some ass.

One shouldn't care that the sport of Fireball itself, a five on five underground basketball game where the winner is the team to score the first goal or ...Read the entire review

The film making scene that offered Herman Yau the opportunity to make Category III classics like The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome no longer exists in Hong Kong, but the man continues to plug away and remains active with all kinds of low budget b-film efforts. Even if the fires of his off the wall film making have dimmed and its unlikely we'll see another Taxi Hunter out of the man, I'm kinda' glad his like is still out there. Unfortunately, The First 7th Night is a supernatural suspense tale that, while not horrible, is a mediocre vehicle unlikely to leave much of an impression.

Cabbie Long (Gordon Lam), nicknamed the Mapking, lives out of his cab. His trunk is full of his laundry, he hotplates his meals, the fleet of cabs parked under a dark underpass waiting for fares doubles as his neighborhood and family. Late one night he gets an odd fare in Pony (Julian Cheung), ...Read the entire review

A common question around cult film circles the past decade (+) is, "When are we going to find the next big horror auteur?" Prospects have been pretty middling. Are Eli Roth, Alexandre Aja, or Brad Anderson really the closest we're going to come to the next Cronenberg, Romero, or Fulci? *Weeps*

Getting even less love is the exploitation film. Its sort of natural as its really a porous genre of subgenres, encompassing everything from biker flicks to blacksploitaiton. A product of the late 60's/early 70's disillusionment and the emergence of mature film ratings, the sleaze genre all but died out when low budget film makers switched their focus to teen sex comedies, softcore, action films, and the like throughout the 80's. Tarantino and Rodrigueiz's Grindhouse teasingly opened the door to an exploitation resurgence before it's box-office fizzle, but one can still find guys like Run Bitc...Read the entire review

Writer/director James R. Gorrie's The Indian (2007) is a small film that aims for a one two punch of tearjerker territory- a person hoping for atonement (of the usual father & son dynamic) and the terminal illness flick.

Skip (Sal Landi) is a sleazy, middle-aged, self-absorbed producer, who through years of boozing and drugging has contracted Hepatis C and reduced his liver to a husk. In order to live, he needs a partial liver transplant from a blood relative, and it turns out his only match is probably Danny (Matt Dallas), the troubled, bedheaded, resentful son he abandoned and pawned off on his sister after Danny's mother died in a car accident.

Deadbeat daddy gets his opportunity to insinuate himself in Danny's life when his sister must go out of town for work and Skip ponies up the money to get Danny out of trouble for an attempted breaking an entering charge. While they live togeth...Read the entire review

My knee jerk reaction when seeing trailers for films like Kazaam, Space Jam, or Double Team was to laugh at the poor basketball fans who would actually pay to see their athletic heroes stiffly act in a feature film. Of course, I grew up watching exploitation films with football stars like Fred Williamson and Jim Brown. Though of course, that was on video over a decade later and I didn't have a clue they were sports figures until years later. To me, they were just badass black actors. And don't get me started on my love for Gymkata.

Now I pay penance for my hypocritical mockery. I basically follow three sports, tennis, boxing, and mixed martial arts. The latter has become a breeding ground for athletes who think they too can be movie stars or, at the very least, play at being movie stars in their months off between trai...Read the entire review

Though I have only seen two of her films, The Headless Woman (2008) and The Swamp (2001), I think it is safe to say that Argentinian director/writer Lucrecia Martel has taken up the mantle of exploring the existential crisis of the idle rich much like Luis Bunuel and Michelangelo Antonioni so deftly did throughout their careers.

A pair of boys and a dog are paying in an empty canal by a dirt road. Soon, a middle-aged bourgeoisie woman, Veronica/Vero (María Onetto), distractedly drives by and violently hits a bump. She looks in her rear view mirror and sees a dog lying in the road. Upset, she stops for a moment, then goes to the hospital where she gets her head scanned. Something is not quite right with Veronica. She walks away from the hospital without filling out her forms. She avoids speaking much, just blankly smiles while others chatter around her. It is like she is sleepwalkin...Read the entire review

100 fights.

That's a lot of fights.

100, to be exact.

Basically, the Ultimate 100 was UFC and Spike TV's idea for a series of one hour specials, a breakdown of the organizations one-hundred best scraps as determined by an online fan poll.

The list came out and it was mostly as expected. The number one was a given, Forrest Griffin versus Stephan Bonnar from the The Ultimate Fighter live finale, a game changing, casual viewer-grabbing fight that is looked upon as the breakthrough for the UFC's modern wave of mainstream success. The list was also very recent era heavy, few fights from the early, trashier, no holds barred days are on the list, and barely any from the as yet on DVD dark days when the org was off cable ppv and barely scraping by.

A big oversight came from not including some fights from former champions like Frank Shamrock and Andrei Arlovski. Shamrock has long been vocal about hi...Read the entire review

Moon in the Gutter (1983) is one of those wobbly curio's in a directors biography. For Jean-Jacques Beineix, the film is sandwiched between his well received debut Diva (1981) and what is regarded as his masterpiece Betty Blue (1986). It is fair to call The Moon in the Gutter a sophomore slump because it was an expensive project from a fresh, promising director that met a lukewarm to absolutely cold reaction, the kind of overly ambitious work that caused critics to huff and put the studio behind it in the red.

Dockworker Gerard (Gérard Depardieu) is haunted by the death of his sister, who was raped and immediately committed suicide. He pays nightly visits to the blood-stained alleyway where she was found and keeps his ears out for clues into who could have caused her death. His father and brother have dealt with the death by descending into drunken-sullenness and drunken...Read the entire review

The beautiful thing about the Shaw Bros 1975 film Disciples of Shaolin is that the probable reason that makes it a side-stepped sleeper is also what makes it great.

As a lead, Gordon Liu was great at being virtuous.

Jackie Chan is a perfect man in peril.

Sonny Chiba mines sleazy-heroics like no one else.

Ti Lung was just everyman tough.

Disciples of Shaolin's lead Alexander Fu Sheng was an awesome jerk. And, when I say "jerk," I mean to a Gregg Henry or 80's James Spader level of prickishness.

Fu Sheng is a pretty well-regarded star in the kung fu film community, probably lesser known to casual fans as he didn't have as many crossover English language imports during kung fu's 70's heyday. He was one of the Shaw's top box office hunks, his main selling point being his good looks. His characters often had a charming quality that reflected his (action movie relative) pinup visage...Read the entire review

I have serious doubts that a single soul watching UFC 1 believed that the event would evolve into a fringe sport much less make it to event 100. But, 16 years later, from no-holds barred freakshow to mainstream sport, there we were. July 11th, Las Vegas, Nevada, UFC 100, 1.6 million in pay per view buys.

Opening the broadcast card was Yoshihiro Akiyama versus Alan Belcher. Debuting Korean judoka and striker Akiyama is a huge boon to the UFC and its expansion into South Korea, where Akiyama is a star athlete, singer, model, commercial pitchman, and all around sexual powerhouse (that last part is for the die hard fans). Belcher is a good debut test, the kind of fairly well-rounded journeyman whose record goes win-lose-win-lose when facing mid to top tier opposition. This close, back and forth fight that leaves both men busted-up and winded is somewhat marred by commentator Joe Rogan screaming robbery w...Read the entire review

Rika is your average Japanese schoolgirl. At least average for Jpn DTV films, which means she is about three to five years too old and has collagen implanted lips. As a matter of fact, I think every girl in Zombie Hunter Rika had artificially puffed lips. Its that kind of film.

Anyway, Rika and her friend hop the train to visit her long lost grandpa, a surgical genius and swordsman, who has been incommunicado for a few years. They step off the train to find that the prefecture is overrun with zombies. Aided by a scheming lothario, they make it to gramps house only to find that grandpa has become catatonic and married a black widow, who coincidentally is scheming with the lothario to poison the old man for his life insurance. This is immaterial, just an excuse to put two unsympathetic characters in the film to get eaten by zombies, and that is fine by me.

Eventually, a ragtag group is fo...Read the entire review

Briefly, for those that don't know, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a show about a ordinary Joe, or Joel, and his two wise-cracking robots. The trio are stuck in space by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, where they are forced to watch bad movies. It began in 1988 on cable access in Minneapolis, then ran on The Comedy Channel which quickly morphed into Comedy Central. The show was briefly canceled after its seventh season only to be picked up by the SciFi Channel for three more seasons before ending its run in 1999. Further, MST3k did one feature film and the various teams of hosts, actors, writers, etc. have gone on to other flick chaffing projects like Cinematic Titanic, Rifftrax, and The Film Crew.

Vol. XVI is Shout Factory's fourth Mystery Science Theater 3000 release since they picked up...Read the entire review

I must admit, I didn't really give Supernatural a fair chance. In the wake of Buffy and Angel reaching their ends, Supernatural was one of the WB (now The CW) networks answers to nab that young/hip skewing fantasy series audience. While I was a fan of Buffy and Angel, I didn't bemoan their conclusion because the shows had run their course and gotten fairly weak. I wasn't looking to fill the void and was skeptical of the glut of modern geek shows that the networks were churning out. So, after watching only two episodes of Supernatural (series one, episodes 2 & 3), I wrote it off. I described it to a friend as, "What would happen if Abercrombie and Fitch produced Phantasm 2. Two pretty boy models driving around in a muscle car solving X-Files."

The show stuck around but rather than find that promising, I figured it was just the same aud...Read the entire review

If only Marco Zaror had been born two decades earlier the man would have found himself with a much more promising action career. As it stands now, there isn't much call for employment of hunky meatslab actors with martial and acrobatic skills. In the heyday of the 80's and 90's action boom, there was a place for guys like Zaror. I could see the him in a Bruno Mattei Nam shoot 'em up (imagine the boxcover tagline: Zaror Goes To War!), a gonzo Arizal Filipino action number, maybe Godfrey Ho ninja film, an Italian post-apocalypse or barbarian flick, and surely the doors of Cannon films would have been open to casting him as a thug or a monosyllabic lead.

Following Kiltro, Mirageman (2007) stands as the second film from the Chilean duo of star, Zaror, and writer/director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. Its another low budget number an...Read the entire review

I first became aware of Mike Kelly via his stuffed animal sculptures, famously used as the cover image for Sonic Youth's "Dirty" album. Those stuffed animal sculptures are also a good example of the divide between artists intention and critical/audience perception. Kelly never intended the natty, soiled, knit forms to be seen as representing childhood trauma or loss of innocence but that is how they were perceived. It opened him up explore works based on repressed memory and how art is often looked at as being born of tragedy.

I first saw glimpses of Day is Done on the PBS series Art in the Twenty-first Century. The work is a multimedia installation project that Kelly developed, basically transforming a large art space with sculptures, art, music, and video, an overall experience. Its a multitasking bit that is increasingly common in galleries these days. After all, were in an age when a phone...Read the entire review

It was about the time that the grunting gimp in the pig mask and butchers apron began to sodomize the captive screaming husband that I mentally checked out of The Butcher. As a film fan and reviewer, I'd pretty much seen enough to form my opinion of it.

Basically, The Butcher is a Korean take on Japanese torture films, those of the lo-fi, found footage variety like the infamous initial entries into the Guinea Pig series, Devil's Experiment and Flower of Flesh and Blood.

The film is all POV footage, beginning with the cherub-faced assistant filming himself peeing against a wall, strolling through the dilapidated farm complex with its decaying walls and spare corrugated tin roof, then walking into the room where four captives sit, bound and beaten, cameras strapped to their heads through which we get the rest of our views.

Then the bespectacled director shows up and ta...Read the entire review

Based on a popular comic series, directed by blockbuster helmer Andrew Lau, then fresh off the Young and Dangerous films, featuring an all star cast as well as HK's first use of wall-to-wall computer generated effects, 1997's The Storm Riders needed to be a hit. The gamble paid off and topped the Hong Kong box office alongside popular imports like a little film called Titantic.

The plot is typical, convoluted fantasy stuff, no doubt compounded by the fact that, like the Shaw swordplay films of the 70's based on popular adventure novels, volume upon volume and years worth of story was crammed into a films running time. One assumes the producers were courting an audience already familiar with the material, dropping in characters and asides whose relevance is lost to those who are unfamiliar.

Its all in a name as Lord Conqueror (Sonny Chiba) likes to conquer stuff and is told he...Read the entire review

"Give up the monkey. Your freedom will be gone forever. Forget the dictates of your heart."

Italian surrealist Marco Ferreri's was a well-established provocateur for decades before his first English language feature 1977's Bye Bye Monkey, the Italian title Ciao Maschio more aptly translating to "Goodbye Masculinity." With lead Gérard Depardieu and frequent Ferreri actor Marcello Mastroianni, Ferreri headed to New York and made a film about a man, his baby monkey, and the ruination of time on mankind.

Gerard Lafayette (Gérard Depardieu) is a young man living in a post-apocalyptic New York where the human occupation is sparse. People are outnumbered by rats so much that poison is being sprayed on streets. Lafayette has two jobs, wiring electronic rigging in a museum dedicated to the rise and fall of Imperial Rome and doing lighting for a feminist theater troupe. He also frequently h...Read the entire review

The Shaw Brothers 1974 Tai Chi martial arts film The Shadow Boxer lifts its plot, like so many post-Bruce Lee films, from The Big Boss. Star Chen Wo Fu is a low level laborer named Ku Ding, who has taken a vow to not use his considerable martial skills against anyone. The unscrupulous bosses try to short change the road crew any way they can, evidenced in the films opening scene where they arrange to pay the men on their only day off and make them sweat it out in the hot sun for hours before giving them a fraction of what they are actually owed. While Ku Ding refuses to fight back, his buddy is not so passive and begins to voice his disgust and give the men a leader to rally behind. Compounding matters, the snobby boss of the cruel overseer's has an eye on Ku Ding's girl and wants to challenge Ku Ding's master to a fight and he'll get both by whatever means necessary.

Genres always hav...Read the entire review

I have never played a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) or any online co-operative game. The closest I've come is going into a chat room with a virtual world and people represented by avatar's back in, oh, '97 or '98- forget the name of it, sorry. Basically all I did was wander around and annoy people, talking like a pirate, silently stand right between two people chatting, etc, until I was booted, then my friends and I would laugh and move on to whatever goofy pursuit we were doing that weekend.

While I've known both average Joe's and total nerds who are avid video and/or role playing gamers, my basic image of the kind of people who really dedicate years of their lives to a virtual fantasy world isn't that far removed from the World of Warcraft episode of South Park. I just don't understand how one doesn't grow bored with meaningless fantasy accomplishment or can form a true frie...Read the entire review

The Next Doctor 2008 Christmas special served as the beginning of the end for current show runner, and this episode's writer, Russel Davies and principle actor David Tennant. Rather than play a regular full season, Doctor Who's 2009 season begins, typically at first, with the annual Christmas episode and then four one hour episodes including a two parter finale. For this special, Davies decided to play cute, cuing into what the fans were buzzing about, "With Tennant exiting, who will be the next actor to shoulder Doctor Who?"

For those that don't know, Doctor Who as a fantasy series is pretty much shouldered by two key aspects: the ability of our hero to, with relative but sometimes chaotic ease, travel anywhere through time and space, and that he has a certain number of lives/incarnations, regenerating from one body and slightly different personality type after another one dies. Thus, the sh...Read the entire review

Tough Mugs, Dames, Hatchet Men, Mobsters, Knockovers, Knock Offs, Bloody Knuckles, and Blazing Iron courtesy of the Nikkatsu film studio. Five films made between 1957-'67. Two films each for two of the studios biggest stars* and one early entry from one of the studios most notorious and acclaimed directors.

The Rusty Knife (1958). The Udaka police pinch their worst local mob boss, Katsumata, on a minor assault charge and plea with the public to come forward with any information that will help them keep the gangster in the clink. A minor criminal* informs the police that he and two others witnessed Katsumata murder a councilman a few years back and stage it like a suicide. Really all the rat wants is a payoff. Katsumata has the rat drowned and offers hush money to the...Read the entire review

In the history of art, "Outsider Art," is a newer category. The term basically applies to people who were never formally trained, often were unrecognized or barely recognized during their lifetimes, and additionally consist of types who live on the fringes of society, people who are largely isolated/outside the norm due to affliction, disorders, choice, or some amalgam of all of the above.

James Castle (1899-1977) was a deaf Idaho based artist. While Castle could make rudimentary noises, he could not speak. Attending a school for the deaf through the fifth grade, Castle's skills of communication remained limited to a few very basic signs and some comprehension of written language but nothing that would be considered literate. This adds an unanswerable wrinkle to Castle regarding ...Read the entire review

My third Xiaogang Feng film and now I finally know what kind of director the man is. My first two, Big Shots Funeral and The Banquet, were extremely divergent films, the former a stylistically low key comedy, the latter a lavishly produced opulent epic. Assembly (2007) is also different from those two, a period dramatic war film, what we in the States refer to as "Oscar bait" (and catch some awards it did). Artistically, the mainland Chinese director works within the same territory as a Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, or a William Wyler. I can safely say, the man aims to be a crowd pleaser.

Beginning in 1948, the film, which is based on a true story, follows Gu Zidi (Zhang Hangyu), a soldier fighting in the PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) during the Chines...Read the entire review

Planet of the Dead is the first of four specials that mark the end of actor David Tennant and producer/writer/relauncher Russel T. Davies tenure on Doctor Who. Instead of a traditional season, they decided to take the special route to mark the transition between Tennant/Davies and new Doc actor Matt Smith and new show producer Stephen Moffat. Davies serves as head writer of this last stretch of Doctor Who's which includes the Christmas 2008 special The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars, and the two part conclusion airing at the end of this year, The End of Time.

The Doctor jumps on a bus. Holding a buzzing gizmo in one hand and a chocolate egg in the other, he is tracing some kind of universal anomaly something-or-other. The bus goes through the anomaly leaving the Doctor and the passengers stranded on a desert alien planet.

The other passengers...Read the entire review

Labeled as "The Cinema of Transgression" by film maker Nick Zedd, there was, in the early to mid 80's, born a brief film movement out of NY. The style was rough, mostly dirtied up Super8, which reflected the low rent gutter settings, the film makers income, and subject matter which often mingled violence and pornography hand and hand.

While other directors get some clip treatment, the real focus in LLIK YOUR IDOLS is on Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, the twin heads of "The Cinema of Transgression." The movement did not have some extreme laserlike focus and roundtable group of collaborative talent like, say, Dogma 95 attempted, so it makes sense to focus on Zedd and Kern as the standouts. Kern because of his then and post scene popularity, and Zedd because of his doggedness, phrase coining, and manifesto writing. Other commentors include filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston M...Read the entire review

Ahhh, Ginza. Gamblers paradise and gamblers hell. Land where the walls are littered with nudie pin-ups.

As skilled with a pool cue or cards as she is with a sword, Nami (Meiko Kaji) returns to her old stomping grounds with a serious goal in mind: find her father's killer. Before she can even get her sandals on Giza concrete, Nami defends a young woman, Hanae, from some scurrilous gangsters. Hanae's father had a run of bad luck and sold off his unwilling daughter to cover gambling debts. Nami takes up the cause of winning, literally, Hanae's freedom, so her first steps back into Ginza society instantly draw the ire of the local crimelord Aiboshi. Nami gets Hanae a job as a nightclub hostess in a joint run by an old friend, Miyoko. She also crosses paths and finds an ally in low level pimp, Ryuji (Sonny Chiba).

Aiboshi makes Nami an offer she should not refuse, to be his card dealer, which she lik...Read the entire review