Thirteen (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Coming of Age, Drama, Teen, Theatrical

***/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Thirteenby Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'm a bit surprised to have liked Thirteen as much as I did. For one thing, it has no particular point of view–things simply happen in and of themselves and aren't much related to the outside world. For another, the film is somewhat obvious in the way it depicts its various outrages, almost cuing us to register their brutal nature instead of simply letting us draw our own conclusions. But Thirteen's heavy-handed chaos mirrors that of its teenage protagonist, who is in the grip of emotions she doesn't understand and whose responses are as arbitrary as they are destructive. The agony depicted is real, and while the film is no aesthetic miracle, it manages to blast through its limitations with its primary emotion.

American Wedding (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

American Pie: The Wedding
*½/****
starring Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas
screenplay by Adam Herz
directed by Jesse Dylan

by Walter Chaw Joining the Porky’s triptych as teensploitation smut franchises that have made it to three instalments (the Revenge of the Nerds series has four chapters, but only the first two are really all that smutty), American Pie finds (hopefully) its conclusion in the dreadfully incomplete-feeling American Wedding. A series of set-ups without punchlines that compensate for the deficiency by featuring a truly impressive number of random de-pantsings, people caught in unlikely tableaux that are inevitably mistaken for some sort of sexual deviancy, and a stable of stock characters so locked into their exploitative roles that existential questions of predestination and choice tickle at making the picture interesting. Featuring the best fecal-consumption-mined-for-yuks scene since the second Austin Powers movie (though a disappointingly minimal amount of gratuitous nudity), American Wedding can, in all honesty, be analyzed with profit as a satire of the whole tits-and-zits genre. It resembles Jurassic Park III in its general disdain for its audience and fatigue with its own shake-and-bake premise, but it does have a couple of laughs–the best bits involving a surreal dance-off and a ridiculously convoluted sequence with a pair of role-playing strippers.

Mondays in the Sun (2002); Freaky Friday (2003); The Eye (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

Los Lunes al sol
**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar, José Ángel Egido, Nieve de Medina
screenplay by Fernando León de Aranda, Ignacio del Moral
directed by Fernando León de Aranda

FREAKY FRIDAY
**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Harold Gould, Mark Harmon
screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel by Mary Rodgers
directed by Mark S. Waters

Jian gui
*½/****
starring Angelica Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha Rujinanon, Yut Lai So
screenplay by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang & Danny Pang
directed by Oxide Pang & Danny Pang

Mondaysfreakyeyeby Walter Chaw Fernando León de Aranda's Mondays in the Sun is probably best described as a Spanish version of Fred Schepisi's Last Orders: a journal of a depressed nation's aging gentry, ferrying one of their own on to the great symbolic hereafter. It aspires to the sort of myth of Vittorio Di Sica's neo-realism, portraying the plight of the dispossessed working class in its unadorned splendour, succeeding by the end only to be a repetitive tattoo around the threadbare theme of men defined by work and destroyed by obsolescence. A castration melodrama in several anecdotal horizontal movements, Mondays in the Sun loses steam and tests patience by making its one point to exhaustion. A scene where the great Javier Bardem rails at the fable of the grasshopper and the ants ("This is bunk! It has no sympathy for someone who is born a grasshopper instead of an ant!") says almost all there is to say about the film, while a lingering close-up of Bardem's battered mug in all its injured brute eloquence is, by itself again, enough.

The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy
written and directed by Peter Mullan

by Walter Chaw Most discussions of Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters will probably focus on the extent to which the story that it relates is inspired by truth; the Catholic Church has been predictably swift in its blanket condemnation, while the film’s supporters have presented actual “Magdalene Laundry” survivors who attest that the reality was actually much grimmer. The skeleton truth of the film, then, falls somewhere between those extremes, and its presentation, likewise, vacillates between elegant reserve and keening hysteria. The picture is a fictional treatment of the forced labour of tens of thousands of “wayward” girls in the convents of the Irish Catholic order of the Sisters of the Magdalene–compelled through intimidation and abuse to literally wash their sins away with backbreaking work scrubbing butcher’s whites and the like under Dickensian conditions. When it works (as in a prologue and conclusion that mute dialogue in an approximation of collective guilt), it works on the strength of Mullan’s smooth visual sensibility and narrative acumen. And when it doesn’t work (as in a subplot concerning a priest stridently not a “man of God”), the film tends to grate and, worse, cast doubt on the extent to which Mullan’s willing to go to take sides on his subject.

The Cuckoo (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Russia, Theatrical, War

Kukushka
**/****
starring Anni-Christina Juuso, Ville Haapasalo, Viktor Bychkov
written and directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin

by Bill Chambers As with the ineffably similar No Man’s Land, Danis Tanovic’s “Twilight Zone”-esque morality play in which a Bosnian and a Serb duke it out while the dead body of a Serb soldier threatens to detonate a landmine between them, when you’re done watching The Cuckoo, you’re done thinking about it as well. Both films make their points too baldly–the stress of analysis and the joy of drawing conclusions are pleasures you won’t much experience after a viewing of The Cuckoo despite its having the pretense of being profound. An awkwardly-translated quote that writer-director Aleksander Rogozhkin provided for the film’s North American pressbook–“I don’t write scripts, I write novels for cinema… I could just note ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from a rifle,’ but it will be an absolutely different approach if I write ‘Sniper Veiko shoots from old Austrian rifle, with optical sight rifle'”–is telling: he’s not a man who likes to leave many doors open to interpretation.

Gigli (2003)

Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Gangster, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bartha, Lenny Venito
written and directed by Martin Brest

by Walter Chaw While it doesn’t live up to its hype as the worst film ever made, Martin Brest’s Gigli, with its creepy contention that Ben Affleck is the cure for lesbianism, certainly makes a run for the most unintentionally hilarious film ever made. Its first mistake is in giving not one, but two charisma vortexes the leading roles, the sucking black hole this creates at the film’s centre thrown into sharp relief whenever a real actor (Christopher Walken, Al Pacino) makes a cameo appearance. The most surprising thing about Gigli isn’t the failed casting gambit or the gruesomely over-written dialogue (this isn’t anyone’s first film, after all), however, but rather the idea that Jennifer Lopez would authorize the reduction of her famously outsized posterior on the posters–abandoning (after mocking it in Maid in Manhattan–which, as it happens, was written by Brest’s Meet Joe Black scribe Kevin Wade) what is arguably the only thing so far about Lopez that hasn’t proven to be facile and over-hyped.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Theatrical, UK, Western

*/****
starring Bob Dylan, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson
screenplay by Bob Dylan & Larry Charles, writing under very dumb pseudonyms
directed by Larry Charles

Maskedanonymousby Walter Chaw The three or four times that Larry Charles's Masked and Anonymous features musical performances by its star Bob Dylan (particularly a rousing rendition of "Dixie"), the picture manages to be something just north of unbearable. The rest of the time, it's an interminable ego trip through Dylan's towering sense of self-importance, his almost total inability to relate with reality, and that curious phenomena of popular artists who are at once imperiously patronizing and desperate to be seen as common men. When failed concert promoter Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) asks down-on-his-luck folk singer Jack Fate (Dylan) about the importance of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to American rock-and-lore, the inanity of the answer (and the evasiveness of Dylan's demeanour–"Well, it matters to someone, I guess") isn't mysterious so much as inane and disingenuous; even the evocation of social phenomena as important and galvanizing to roots rock and the inner city as the myth of Stagger Lee is tossed off with a wry flick of the hand. Pretending that he doesn't know himself to be an icon in American music (and, arguably, even of American letters) is the worst kind of arrogance: the sin of false modesty, which Dylan doesn't wear particularly well and is frightfully unbecoming besides.

I Capture the Castle (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas
screenplay by Heidi Thomas, based on the novel by Dodie Smith
directed by Tim Fywell

by Walter Chaw A breezy light romantic caste-comedy in the vein of Cold Comfort Farm or any of a number of Jane Austens, Tim Fywell’s mannered comedy of manners I Capture the Castle is marked by some fine performances and hampered by a blueprint so threadbare that it has, by now, taken on something of its own unnatural half-life. Boasting one of the less revolting endlessly reproducible master-plots that needs only a new cast and crew to bring it shambling to Frankenstein-ian life, the heavy-booted I Capture the Castle lumbers from meet-cute to early-hate-into-blossoming-love to the idea of ‘marrying poetically’ that has been a staple of roundelay romance since Shakespeare and before. It’s a crowd-pleaser, then, in the sense that the word describes a film with no surprises, no controversy, a charming location, and a dangerous level of sweetness. Perhaps ‘crowd pacifier’ is a better term.

How to Deal (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mandy Moore, Allison Janney, Alexandra Holden, Peter Gallagher
screenplay by Neena Beber, based on the novels Someone Like You and That Summer by Sarah Dessen
directed by Clare Kilner

Howtodealby Walter Chaw Based on a pair of Sarah Dessen novels that apparently deal with the tribulations of a particularly sour adolescent girl, Clare Kilner’s How to Deal is a disastrously twee Judy Blume knock-off that compacts every ill of growing up female into a hysterical parcel of over-reaching and hollow sanctimony. It’s the kind of movie that has its maudlin protagonist reading Madame Bovary to parse, I guess, some portion of romantic martyrdom when the irony of the reference is that at the root of Emma Bovary’s problems arguably lies her infatuation with mealy romance novels into which she might substitute herself for the heroines (not forgetting the role of Dessen’s books in the first place). Irony and incompetence being the two rules of the day as Kilner and her cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (once Gus Van Sant’s DP, now relegated to stuff like this and Britney Spears’s Crossroads) make unforgivable decisions in lighting and camera placement that cast How to Deal as an unintentional horror film with at least three scenes loaded with tension and free-floating anxiety for no good reason save that the filmmakers don’t seem to know what the hell they’re doing.

Bad Boys II (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Theatrical, Will Smith

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw The very curious thing about Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest dip into the shallow end is that for as vile as it is, for as putrid and unforgivable as it is, Bad Boys II may be the first Bay/Bruckheimer collaboration that marks a clear debt to a filmmaking tradition other than that blazed by John McTiernan. Sure, it’s got the slick surfaces and the ear-shattering explosions, the impossible sets (a cop can afford a few acres of prime beachfront property in Florida only in this breed of American mainstream twaddle) and class hatred (complete with fetishistic worship of guns and cars and all other things associated with diminutive penis size), but what Bad Boys II also has is a child’s working knowledge of the incendiary Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” cinema of the 1980s. What it lacks is that genre’s sense of gravity, interest in the balance between good and evil, and the mysterious bonds between men–it’s missing finesse in its choreography, purpose in its relentless bloodletting, even a basic understanding of decency and honour. Without any recognizable human qualities, then, what Bad Boys II presents to the world is something genuinely sinister and twisted: nothing more than a reptilian collage of seething and hatred that stands as possibly the most misanthropic, nihilistic, exploitative, hopeless film ever released as a major studio’s mainstream blockbuster. It is easily the most expensive exploitation film I’ve ever seen–and besides, not nearly so funny or interesting as the similarly-themed Joe Piscopo/Treat Williams shoestring vehicle Dead Heat of many moons ago.

The Sea (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Iceland, Norway, Theatrical

Hafið
*/****
starring Gunnar Eyjólfsson, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Hélène de Fougerolles, Kristbjörg Kjeld
screenplay by Baltasar Kormákur, based on the play by Olafur Haukur Símonarson
directed by Baltasar Kormákur

by Walter Chaw A family melodrama that’s a little like Chekhov but a lot more like Telemundo, Baltasar Kormákur’s The Sea (Hafið) takes the bare bones of “King Lear” and fashions from them the sort of bleeding hair-render that runs roughshod through the Altman/Bergman canon without the benefit of genius. Its use of foreground, of mannered close-ups and overlapping dialogue, of old men journaling their lives at the end of their lives, all feel at odds with the film’s weightless, familiar tale of an old man shackled to the ideal of a better era in opposition with subsequent generations of useless, snivelling bastard children trying to feed off the corpse of said better era, the irony of that Icelandic tradition including a sort of culturally institutionalized rape (the contention of which I find to be not merely shockingly reductive, but deeply suspect besides) mentioned but left unexamined for the most part. The problems of The Sea aren’t restricted to this reliance on reckless ascriptions of cultural archetype for irony or poignancy (an Ayn Rand-ian predilection for staging hypothetical, unwinnable arguments in their extreme), extending to issues as problematic as a script (adapted from a Olafur Haukur Símonarson play by Kormákur, a sometime-actor who appeared as the mad scientist in Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing) that is as repetitive in regards to dialogue as to scenario.

The Guys (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Anthony LaPaglia, Irene Walsh, Jim Simpson
 screenplay by Anne Nelson and Jim Simpson, based on the play by Nelson
directed by Jim Simpson

by Walter Chaw As it manifests itself in popular art, the instinct to revisit the sins of the past for the purposes of reconciliation will as often take the unbecoming forms of self-congratulation or exploitation. The same urge to couch criticism in terms of personal reminiscence (“It’s good because it reminds me of my cat”), the same compulsion that drives middlebrow cineastes to donate five bucks to the ARC after a screening of The Other Sister, informs this variety of salutary cinema. Very fond of taking the correct stance on issues that are not particularly controversial, films like Jim Simpson’s The Guys (based on a briefly-timely stage play by Anne Nelson) allow for simpering middle-class navel-gazers to feel as though they’re involved in some way with events outside the breakfast nook. When Joan (Sigourney Weaver) says that she feels impotent in the face of 9/11 because she’s merely a journalist (devaluing the amazing work of THE NEW YORK TIMES following the atrocity) and grieving fire captain Nick (Anthony LaPaglia) responds, “Well, that’s your tool,” we’re dealing with self-righteous self-aggrandizing. And when Joan marvels, “When was the last time someone needed a writer,” the only possible response is: right around the time someone decided to adapt “The Guys” for the screen.

Gasoline (2002)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Italy, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

Benzina
**/****
starring Maya Sansa, Regina Orioli, Pietro Ragusa, Mariella Valentini
screenplay by Anne Riitta Ciccone & Monica Stambrini, based on the novel by Elena Stancanelli
directed by Monica Stambrini

Benzina

by Bill Chambers Scarlett Johansson-esque Regina Orioli stars in Monica Stambrini’s Gasoline (Benzina) (hereafter Benzina) as Lenni, a bespectacled loner who went looking for work at a coffee bar/gas station one day and found love with its proprietor, Stella (Maya Sansa). When Lenni’s mother (Mariella Valentini) comes to visit and tries to talk her once-presumed-straight daughter out of her gay lifestyle, a scuffle ensues between madre and Stella in which the former is inevitably accidentally killed; even more inevitably, Stella doesn’t think they should tell the police despite her innocence looking forensically sound; and most inevitably of all, Lenni’s mom had a fortune in her purse. If you’re playing the home game and guessed that Stella and Len go on the lam, give yourself ten points–twenty if you had it down that they would do so with a body in the trunk.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, France, Theatrical, UK

**/****
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Patrick Gilmore & Tim Johnson

by Walter Chaw Making almost no impression at all, DreamWorks’ latest animated flick is a lot like their last animated flick, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron: an endlessly-reproducible light romantic cartoon heavy on the derring-do and gender slapstick, and light on anything that could possibly be construed as memorable. The most noteworthy thing about the picture, in fact, is that it exposes the surprising quickness with which DreamWorks’ has become that which it most disdains: Disney redux–its sixth animated feature satisfying the maxim of joining what can’t be beaten and getting as entrenched and boring as Treasure Planet in the process. As soon as it’s declared that the quest of the film is for the “Book of Peace,” it’s already past time to let the eye-rolling commence.

The Hard Word (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*½/****
starring Guy Pearce, Rachel Griffiths, Robert Taylor, Joel Edgerton
written and directed by Scott Rogers

Hardwordby Walter Chaw You’d think that POME (“Prisoners of Mother England”) would be better at making a crime drama, but Scott Roberts’s hyphenate debut The Hard Word is a flaccid ripper of Kubrick’s The Killing thick in avuncular vernacular and notably thin of any real meat. Between a few funny throwaways (a character refers to Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Dick’s autobiographical survey of paranoia and drug psychosis, as a primer for modern marriage), and some decidedly David Lynch-ian violence, the picture feels a lot like a mish-mash of post-mod noir ideas (the butcher, the redeemed femme, cannibalism) arranged with little respect for rhyme and reason. Style over substance, the whole thing is delivered in accents so under-looped and thick that it occasionally falls out as a cast of Brad Pitt’s Snatch pikeys performing Tarantino outtakes.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Demi Moore
screenplay by John August and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by McG

Charliesangelsfullthrottleby Walter Chaw Even its subtitle an onanistic entendre, McG’s excrescent Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle takes self-awareness to the level of pornography in what boils down to one of the most queasily interesting trainwrecks in recent memory. It leaves the joyful goofiness of the first film in the dust of the “wanton slut” school of feminism, uncomfortable innuendo (incest just isn’t all that funny), and a parade of star cameos that would have derailed the film were it not already a mere series of references to other films. What the picture represents, in a very real way, is the death of cinema, swallowed whole by the same instinct that drives television: strobe cuts, shallow titillation, barely subsumed fetishism, gleeful stupidity… all fuelled entirely by a knowledge of medium. The picture doesn’t have any sort of meaning outside of the cinematic–it’s essentially a warm spasm of pop cultural goop, an extended succession of money shots with none of that distracting filler (plot, character, tension, purpose) that weighs down pictures exhibiting some measure of non-commercial ambition.

Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Theatrical

****/****
directed by Andrew Jarecki

“Only that which has no history is definable”
-Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 1887

by Walter Chaw The rare film to encapsulate the macro and the micro with eloquence and no little existential disquiet, Andrew Jarecki’s amazing documentary Capturing the Friedmans tackles issues like the nature of film, the slipperiness of memory, and the unreliability of identity in ways that are uncomfortable and prickly. The revelations in the film about modern cultural anthropology are indescribably delicious, speaking to pleasure in a way that Jonathan Rosenbaum once identified as including the sensations of fear and unbalance–as an experience, the picture is as exhilaratingly unnerving as only an illicit document can be. When, early in the piece, eldest son of the Friedman clan David addresses the camera directly in what he warns is a personal journal, Capturing the Friedmans subverts the exploitive voyeurism that defines cinema, particularly pornographic cinema, in a way that is as cannily, uniquely, ironically filmic as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. It’s something we feel we shouldn’t be watching–a realization that, once established (within the first minutes of the picture), finds the audience formulated helpless and naked before the film’s reptilian regard.

The Wild Dogs (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Thom Fitzgerald, David Hayman, Alberta Watson, Rachel Blanchard
written and directed by Tom Fitzgerald

Wilddogsby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s a lot to be said against Thom Fitzgerald’s The Wild Dogs, a film that, when faced with abject poverty and suffering, doesn’t really know how to resolve its feelings and compensates by resorting to bad doom-laden metaphors. But as it flails wildly in the hopes of hitting a target, there’s no denying that the film occasionally does, and that when it does it often scores a direct hit. Even if Fitzgerald can’t solve the problems of a crumbling Bucharest, he evokes the state of wanting to extremely well, thus saving his film from the sanctimony that another director might have brought to the subject.

Alex & Emma (2003)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Luke Wilson, Kate Hudson, Rob Reiner, Sophie Marceau
screenplay by Jeremy Leven
directed by Rob Reiner

Alexandemmaby Walter Chaw We’ve been here with Rob Reiner before, the whimsical fantasy film manifesting in the pretty good (but pretty overrated) The Princess Bride (as well as the cheerfully awful North), while the romance between a prototypical thug and a difficult woman found shape in the Woody Allen film that everyone could agree on, When Harry Met Sally… (and the grotesquely unwatchable The Story of Us). Watching a Reiner film, then, at least post-’80s, is a little like playing Russian Roulette with a pair of eye-gouging forks–and, too often, playing to lose. Not so much an auteur as a bookmark and a warm body, Reiner is the Mantovani of movie directors, and the extent to which you like a tongue bath is a succinct barometer of how much you’ll appreciate his later films. With that in mind, Alex & Emma is so free of conflict and originality that watching it is actually a little like watching good avant-garde cinema: Freed from the constraints of narrative, one enters something like a fugue state, where the images flit by on screen in the simulacrum of sense, eliciting meanings in ironic counterpoint to traditional significance.

Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, Netherlands, Theatrical, Vampire

The Era of Vampires
*/****
starring Chan Kwok Kwan, Ken Chang, Suet Lam, Michael Chow Man-Kin
screenplay by Tsui Hark
directed by Wellson Chin

by Walter Chaw An incomprehensible bit of garbage produced and written by legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark, Vampire Hunters juggles at least three plots and drops each of them repeatedly and egregiously. Its lore is confused and its heroes are unremarkable but for the unusual degree to which they’re inept and disinteresting. The promise inherent in a chop-socky wuxia opus concerning a quintet of fearless vampire hunters and a cadre of zombies is almost infinite, making the abject failure of the piece something almost awe-inspiring. Though it’s tempting to blame director Wellson Chin’s propensity to stage fight scenes in unrelieved murk, the real culprit of the piece may be a bad guy who looks and moves a lot like a mannequin on a string. William Castle, eat your heart out.