“Someone’s always giving me the arse!”

Tits and Guns and Blood and Tits.

Jason Statham‘s big-dick energy once again sees him running rampage in Los Angeles streets, mowing down gangsters, and getting laid in public.

This movie’s predecessor, CRANK (2006) followed hitman Chev Chelios (Statham) after he was injected with a drug that would kill him if his adrenalin dropped below a certain level. Think SPEED on, uh, crank… It made for a ramped non-stop actioner as Chelios hunted the gangsters who injected him, whilst keeping his heart beating at suicide levels. Now, in CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, a Chinese mob boss, impressed with the indestructible masculinity of Chelios’s heart, has taken it for himself and transplanted Chelios with a mechanical one that needs constant jolts of electricity to continue pumping – sending Chelios on another ultra-octane quest: chasing down his heart-nappers to get it back!

Sorry, did I mention CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE is batshit insane? The fact it doesn’t take itself seriously makes it blackly hilarious as well.

The Chinese mob boss Poon Dong (who else but David Carradine?!) doesn’t simply kill Chelios, due to the One-Line Plothole-Fix: to harvest all of Chelios’s manly organs one at a time.

HIGH VOLTAGE features new brain-addled characters, like hooker Bai Ling, more repulsive than even Miley Cyrus; thug Joseph Julian Soria (who recently displayed his next-level chops in HAMLET 2), and Art Hsu as slimy Johnny Yang, who is roughed up so much while grasping a cooler with Chelios’s heart in it, I’m sure it must be mush by now.

Other eccentric side-characters from CRANK return, sprinkled into the mucky-muck like shards of glass in pudding: girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart), whom Chelios discovers stripping (“I thought you were dead!” – so that’s a reason to become a stripper? She would ride Chelios reverse-cowboy in public on the horse track, while real jockeys race by them); Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakum), “I was a certified heart surgeon – at least I was – I’m pretty sure I can put your heart back in”; and Efren Ramirez in a hilarious turn as Venus, the (wink wink) “twin brother” of Kaylo, Chelios’s transvestite pal who got killed in the last movie.

Allying with Chelios to avenge his brother’s murder, Venus reveals he has “Full Body Tourette’s” that spasms his whole body at the worst of times. Is this a real condition? Hell, no! ALL Tourette’s affects your “full body” – uncontrollable tics, shrugs, grimacing are all symptoms of Tourette’s, not just– motherfucker piss shit cunt–

The funny thing is, these once-unimportant characters being reprised by the same actors in this installment somehow makes them important in this universe, and therefore warrant mentioning – hell, even Glenn Howerton returns as The Intern (in 2006, ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA was finding its feet – by this movie’s release, everyone knows the sociopath Dennis Reynolds…

“I’ve got that Best Director On Roller Skates award on LOCK!”

Released in April 2009, almost like an April Fool’s joke on cinema with its hyper-reality and ultra-violence and mega-resilient human bodies, co-writers-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor smash-cut HIGH VOLTAGE like a runaway 18-wheeler around the grimiest, slimiest parts of Los Angeles; in other words – Los Angeles.

And they put Chev Chelios through the ringer – cops beat him with nightsticks until they tase him and he explodes out from under them, stealing the taser to use on himself until the charge runs out; he sees a man mistreating a dog with an electric collar, puts the collar on himself and makes the owner press the button; he attaches himself to jumper cables – one on the nip, one on the tongue; he creates friction by rubbing himself on a terrified old lady, who tells reporters: “He looked like one of those trainspotting fellows!”; he chases Johnny Yang to – what else? – a high voltage plant, where he makes Fluffy Movie Sparks fly to his heart’s content…

The filmmaking is like Robert Rodriguez meeting Danny Boyle, both accosting Edgar Wright. Filmed with filters wide open, making the sunny day look sweltering; crash-cuts, slamming cams, Dutch angles, titles onscreen, diabolical inserts and music cues; Ron Jeremy cameo!; Jennifer’s dad from BREAKING BAD is news anchor!; soundtrack by Mike Patton (Faith No More); Clifton Collins Jr chews scenery as the Big Bad, making thug Soria cut off his own nipples for losing Chelios!; Verona, Big Bad from CRANK, is now a head in cryo-liquid (think: FUTURAMA), just being kept alive to see Chelios defeated! Not with that Big Dick energy he won’t be!… Disturbing. Hilarious. Insane.

Guns. Blood. Tits. Big dick.

END

Disco Death.

David Carradine can always claim that he once beat up Rocky! Grasshopper versus Balboa in a battle to the ketchup.

After Carradine’s KUNG FU and before Sylvester Stallone’s ROCKY, the two renowned pugilists would clash in this DEATH RACE 2000 where arts were not martial, the most famous boxer was still Muhammad Ali, and acting was optional.

When being HIT by a car was simply not painful enough.

It’s called Death Race because that’s soooo testicular, and it’s set in 2000 because that’s soooo The Future. Society has degenerated to a bloodthirsty dystopia, where an annual road race that involves running down pedestrians across the country is broadcast and viewed with animal enthusiasm. That’s the only aspect of this trash cult actioner that holds any worth – it’s a saw-toothed satire on the game show mentality that was sweeping First World countries in the mid-70s (though it more closely resembles the “Reality TV” craze that is the bane of intelligent television in this modern dumb epoch).

Everything else about this scatterbrained road rager is worthless. No surprise when we see the producer – Roger Corman! At the time, his reputation was still plastic, coming off many low budget stinkers but with enough clout to get a movie made. Nowadays he has longevity on his side, and is regarded as an industry playa – but he is still producing low budget stinkers! (Dare you doubt? Choose wisely from DINOSHARK (2010), PIRANHACONDA (2012), or SHARKTOPUS VS. MERMANTULA (2014). What price integrity, Roger?)

Drivers have names as flamboyant as their death machines: Nero the Hero (Martin Kove) Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Stallone), and Frankenstein (Carradine). Their cars are outfitted with supposedly gory instruments of death lining the grilles. But they’re all as plastic as the host of the TV show Death Race (played by DJ Don Steele).

Poffy ”Spatula” Cucumber

Simone Griffith is totally hot, totally NVP, totally tits navigator for Frankenstein. But she’s really undercover, part of a resistance group who are even worse actors than the drivers. The Resistance are against the President and his murderous car race, and will kill anyone to stop the race that kills anyone. But Simone comes down with Stockholm Syndrome and gets naked for Frankenstein. Thankfully, the soundtrack switches from jaunty disco music to irritating romantic music for a few minutes.

What I want to know is: Who is monitoring these kills? How are we seeing these drivers onscreen? The more people they kill the more points they get, so why are they driving on bare roads across country? Why not drive through a shopping mall? How does the pilot who is shooting at Frankenstein think Frankenstein is going to hear him ordering him to stop when Frankenstein has no intercom in his car?

Stallone has the personality of a belligerent cabbage. How he ever got funding and the permission to write and star in ROCKY this same year is a mystery for a greater mind than mine to solve. When Kung Fu Master starts beating on him, there’s no stopping the disco.

END

Bridal Power.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
— William Congreve, “The Mourning Bride” (1697).

The second installment of Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL masterpiece blasts in with “Chapter Six”– Yes, a movie starting at Chapter Six is audacious enough, but this chapter itself is a flashback to the events that engined the revenge of VOLUME 1 – the previous film. Audacity, genius, or insanity?

chapter six: massacre at two pines

DAUGHTER TO THE SLAUGHTER! Assassin Beatrix Kiddo aka The Bride (Uma Thurman) attends her wedding rehearsal with her redneck fiancé (who looks like Bobcat Goldthwait) at Two Pines Chapel, when Bill (David Carradine) unexpectedly appears. We learn, though cryptic dialogue, that Bill is the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, of which The Bride was a member, that he is The Bride’s ex-lover, and that the baby she is gravid with is his. To Bobcat, she introduces Bill as her father (and we see a “surprised” look cross Carradine’s face that is simultaneously hilarious and a testament to his acting prowess).

Then the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (Michael Madsen, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah) enters the chapel and guns down everyone.

With this wedding, The Bride aka Black Mamba wanted out of the Squad, but, like all assassins, her boss would not let her leave with her life.

And KILL BILL VOLUME 2 continues its mad dash for gory…

chapter seven: the lonely grave of paula shultz

ANOTHER NAIL… Flashforward from the end of Chapter 1 in the last film. Keeping up, pagans? Having disposed of O-Ren Ishii and Vernita Fox, The Bride goes after Budd aka Sidewinder (Madsen)–

And I have a problem with her method.

After all her expertise, after knowing her wily enemy, after all the skulking to deal a death blow efficiently, she stupidly flings his trailer door open and rushes headlong into a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Quentin, you do us an injustice! Are we to believe The Bride could be that girly-silly? Further, Budd does not simply shoot her dead, but buries her alive in the manner of a Batman villain. Will she escape? Doi…

chapter eight: the cruel tutelage of pai mei

COCKY CHOP SOCKY! Flashback to The Bride’s training by an overcheesed Chinese sensei ripped from the reels of old kung fu cinema. Master Pai Mei is Chia Hui Liu (he played Johnny Mo in VOLUME 1!) so it’s quite laughably obvious he is a young guy with old guy makeup. But with Liu’s eccentric, sarcastic performance, the audacity works!

Tarantino leaches and grains the filmstock to make it look like those trashy 1970’s kung fu films; wirework, superhuman disciplines and Pai Mei’s cruel swishing of his footlong beard.

chapter nine: elle and i

EYE-EYE! The Bride takes one step closer to Bill by meeting the eye-patched Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) head-on. Here again we marvel at fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s inventiveness, as what could have been just another samurai fight is transformed into a scrabbling, punching, trash-filled mêlée in the confined space of Budd’s trailer. Elle continually tries to unsheathe her sword and bangs it on the roof and walls, while the camera itself seems to fight for space to film the hand-to-hand blonde-on-blonde. And we eventually “see” the pun in the title of this chapter…

last chapter: face to face

KILLING BILL. The Bride has come a long way for just this vengeful, bloody moment and finds – her daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine), thought dead, happily playing with Bill.

And before we can forget that Tarantino is the master of making mundane dialogue sound compelling and nerve-wracking, Bill launches into monologue after monologue. He speaks of B.B.’s goldfish, he speaks of Superman being the real identity and Clark Kent being the disguise, he speaks of his love for The Bride, yet everything he says in that measured rasp is like winding a spring tighter until it threatens to explode in your face. (We even get a quick, darkly funny flashback to The Bride discovering her pregnancy – just as an assassin has tracked her down. The dialogue in this scene is bravura not only for Tarantino’s writing but for the actors pulling it off so convincingly.) We wonder whether Bill isn’t speaking so much because he knows a reckoning is imminent and that one of them is going to die tonight, so wishes to prolong his time with the woman he obviously loves, but whom he must kill out of principle or be killed out of principle.

After the massive fight sequence with the Crazy 88s in VOLUME 1, we wondered how Tarantino and Woo-Ping could top each successive fight scene. They did. It was not a case of escalating the violence, but moving it in different directions. Unlike the STAR WARS saga, where Lucas and his choreographers kept repeating themselves (see one lightsaber battle, seen ’em all – even poor Yoda got boring with his dynamic ghetto moves), Tarantino and Woo-Ping never rehash the same old moves. As Elle’s fight was an ingenious closed quarters brawl, The Bride and Bill’s last pitched battle is fought with katanas and hands and the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique (ain’t the language just beautiful?!) – while sitting in chairs!

Like Leone on heat, like Kurosawa on angel dust, like an American pioneer, like a Japanese traditionalist, the KILL BILL saga proves there is only one person who makes movies – like Quentin Tarantino.

END

Revenge is a Bumblebee.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.
— opening text, KILL BILL, VOL. 1

Something about Uma Thurman in her yellow and black top-to-toe leather, lopping limbs and severing arteries – how hot is that?!

Quentin Tarantino writes and directs KILL BILL VOLUME 1, an epic masterpiece of simple brutal story, brutally vicious direction, viciously creative dismemberment, and revenge as cold as liquid nitrogen.

Tarantino once again defies modern movie convention and structures KILL BILL not in Three Acts but in two whole movies, this VOLUME 1 made up of five chapters of dynamite keg vignettes. And, sticking to his own inimitable convention, each of the Chapters hits the ground running like a reservoir dog.

We are told the KILL BILL epic is “Based on the character of The Bride, created by Q & U.” That would be Quentin and Uma. This was the period in Tarantino’s life when he was infatuated with Thurman, calling her his “muse”; and why wouldn’t he be? Uma possesses that intangible inclination to sometimes look like a man with her big nose and strange lips, yet throughout this rambling saga, she is absolutely beautiful – and my summation of why may not sit with most men; it is because she never tries to be feminine or sexy or alluring – most of the time she is covered in blood, mucus, sweat, grime, snow, water; she is intense, threatening, sarcastic, haughty, baleful, desolate, determined. Never weak. Never dependent. Never “feminine.” So hot.

chapter one: 2

CATFIGHT! Girl on girl violence between Thurman as a vengeful warrior known as The Bride (although her actual character name is purposefully bleeped out) and Vivica A. Fox as Vernita, her opponent from the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. We do not realize until the end of this sequence why the Chapter is called ‘2.’ Before she drives off, Uma crosses Vernita’s name off a list – it is the second name crossed off. The first name already crossed off is “O-Ren Ishii.” True to non-chrono form, Tarantino has dropped us somewhere in the middle of his movie and half the fun is in putting the jigsaw together while his crazy train is going off the rails.

chapter two: the blood splattered bride

MASSACRE! A wedding chapel in El Paso, Texas; a heavily-pregnant bride (Thurman) left for dead. Four Years Later, this Bride wakes from a coma in a hospital bed, just in time to stave off another unconscious rape from one of intern Buck’s paying customers. She makes off with Buck’s “Pussy Wagon.” (“You know that I ain’t braggin’ / She’s a real pussy wagon – greased lightning!”… Greased Lightning, from GREASE, 1978.) He won’t need it anymore on accounta her thoughtful crushing of his head in a hospital door.

Though we still do not know exactly what is going on (except that The Bride is out for revenge on the people who “killed” her), Tarantino has an uncanny knack of keeping his films kinetic with his gunslinger direction and eclectic soundtrack. Every element of the film works in concert to create a perception of immediacy, of wanting to be a part of this hip, cool animal; there is narration, there are flashbacks and flash-forwards; there are split frames and crafty reveals; there are Eastern musical motifs overlaid with Western rock, and suddenly–