Thriller

Double Vision (2002)

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If Seven had more of a supernatural bent and was heavily steeped in Asian culture, it might look like Double Vision, a superb serial killer effort from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The killer first strikes when a CEO is discovered in his office dead from drowning, yet with no signs of water to be found. Later, a senator’s mistress is burned to death in her apartment, but with no indication of fire present.

Troubled cop Tony Leung (Red Cliff) is baffled, as is the rest of the force, so they call on the expertise of American FBI agent David Morse for help. What they discover in their investigation proves more complicated than anything they’ve encountered in their work before.

The reveal of the killer proves to be anticlimactic, but then the film makes up for it by throwing a huge, steel-plated monkey wrench into the plot that really shakes things up – something I would never expect. The last act isn’t as good as the setup since the focus shifts from suspenseful to spiritual, but Chen Kuo Fu’s film as a whole is extremely well-crafted and anchored by two solid leads. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Gold (1972)

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Watching, absorbing and trying to stay awake during Gold, you not only realize why Kent State happened, but why it was also fully justified. As a matter of fact, I was so charged up after viewing this musty, shot-in-1968 relic that I went down to my local college campus and shot three kids playing Hacky Sack.

Okay, not really, but I did kick their sack into the sewer just to spite them, and to spite this movie. Like many lost-film obsessives, when word hit that Gold was going to get a proper DVD release, I was excited, picturing an Alejandro Jodorowsky-lite countercultural epic, possibly a pre-indie, all-hippie take on the well-documented American Dream of the ’60s, complete with multicolored acid trips, psych-rock freak-outs and plenty of flower-power pubic hair. At least that’s what I was promised, dammit.

Instead, I got a fifth-rate group of stoned community theater rejects/draft-dodgers — led by “comedian” Del Close — dressed as famed mass-murderer Che Guevara, rolling around in the mud while espousing anti-war sentiments and aimlessly driving sputtering jalopies. Improvised elections are held on a train, The MC5 blares on the soundtrack, and everyone remains happily unemployable. If this is what the young people were doing while our boys were dying face-down in the Vietnam jungles, sign me up to the Ohio National Guard and hand me a bayonet!

With no rhyme, reason or proper editing techniques, it’s as if the school from Billy Jack made a movie and decided to write the screenplay after the thing was already in theaters. Never clever, funny nor enlightening, Gold is a total, unwatchable mess. It’s the Altamont of free-love flicks with every frame a pool cue to Meredith Hunter’s skull. And this Del Close guy: In every book about comedy, every tastemaker to come out of Second City or The Groundlings raves on and on about this so-called “father of improvisational comedy” as “the funniest man you’ve never heard of.” If Gold is any inclination of his talents, there’s a reason for that.

Gold: You blew it, man. —Louis Fowler

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Martial Arts

Game of Death II (1981)

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I’ve never seen anything quite like Game of Death II, in which the late Bruce Lee unwittingly reprises his role as Billy Lo from the misbegotten Game of Death. Like that 1978 turd, this is a Bruceploitation film, utilizing as much Bruce stock footage as they can get away with, and creating an illusion that he’s the star by shooting a double from the back, from the side or obscured by household items. But whereas that film was a chore to sit through, this hack job is a hoot.

If there’s a story to it, I sure didn’t catch it, but Billy fights his way through several colorful opponents before tragically dying at the film’s midpoint when he falls from a helicopter. For the second half, his brother, Bobby (Tong Lung), enters and becomes the main character, seeking revenge for Billy’s death.

That’s when things get crazy. Like my favorite scene, when Billy is sucking face with a fully naked skank. She tries to kill him, the lights go out, and a lion (obviously a guy in a suit) bursts through the wall and chases them around the room. Read that sentence again and let it sink in. I also dug the finale, which takes place in the underground “tower of death,” a high-tech, booby-trapped, spy-type lair that suggests the film is a cut-rate Enter the Dragon impostor. There Bobby takes on several henchmen and a guy in a Tarzan suit, just because.

Although the film itself is pretty funny (not on purpose), the martial arts on display in Game of Death II are pretty serious stuff, courtesy of fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Matrix; Kill Bill and just about everything else that rules. —Rod Lott

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