What better way to kick this off with CAT 3 Hong Kong gorefest GONG TAU. What's cat 3? It's the adult-only video rating for hk movies, usually reserved for rubbish soft porn or rather nasty and graphic pieces like the "All Night Long" series and "Bunman". This one is a schizo police thriller/supernatural horror, and you know it means business when you get a stabbed baby in the first 15 minutes or so.Who's responsible for the perforated páistí? Why it's Gong Tau, or basically a kind of asian voodoo curse, in this case the nasty Needle Gong Tau, which has been cast on an unfortunate policeman's family.
But Needle Gong Tau is small beer compared to the worst of all gung tau, thats right you guessed it, FLYING HEAD GONG TAU, which is brilliantly demonstrated when the evil magician-lad's head remotely detaches from his body, pulling all his internal organs out after it. Why he does this I'm not actually sure...apparently detaching your head utilising Flying Head Gong Tau gives you added vampiric ju-ju....or something. At least we're spared seeing him trying to get his newly floaty head and attached organs back into his body...have to assume a painful and prolonged arse-related re-entry. But what with this, stabbed babies, graphic autopsies, people throwing up centipedes and exploding hands you can see why this has gotten itself Hong Kong's equivalent of a NC-17 rating. It's odd because the other half of the movie is standard issue police thriller, with alley shootouts and informers being shouted at. Strange.
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES
If you thought most anime consisted of massively-eyed japanese schoolgirls being arsetentacled by leering paedophile demons, well, you'd be partially correct. But what of Studio Ghibli? Having only seen Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, both of which I enjoyed, I was a little puzzled by the awe that people like John Lassiter of Pixar hold for this legendary japanese animation company. Not any more. Grave of the Fireflies is a masterpiece of depression...who'd have thought a movie about two children slowly dying of malnutrition would be such a downer? Beautifully crafted, although I always have a aesthetic issue with the cliche jap animation "eyes five time larger than the mouth" approach. If you saw someone like that in real life you'd run a mile or try to kill it with fire. It's 20 years old now, but its grief-stricken sincerity and anti-war messages are genuinely timeless. As always, get the subtitled version, not the cheesily dubbed one. A work of rare power, which addresses distressing themes that Pixar - never mind Disney or those bean-counting c**ts at Dreamworks - will never, ever have the courage to deal with. But I'll not watch it again...no f**king way.
CARGO
Low budget Swiss version of Sunshine would be a lazy way to describe this, so lets go with that. But I'm not damning it with faint praise, i thought Sunshine was a solid sci-fi which more good points than bad, and this apparently low-budget sci-fi really does deliver, visually at least. After seeing low budget sfx miscarraiges like Gene Generation and the disastrous Mutant Chronicles this shows how a restrainted budget (apparently around 3 million quid??) can, with the right art and production direction and superb cinematography lend an appropriately epic, big budget feel. The story involves a crew on a long space voyage who awake from hypersleep to find something's amiss...yes nul points when it comes to originality. It's quite a slow burner...not enough really happens to justify the 2 hour+ running time but it just looks so impressive I'm giving it a pass anyway. And it's better than Pandorum.
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