There have been so many complaints about The Order 1886 over the past week regarding how good or bad of a game it is, even going so far as to question if it even qualifies as a video game. Most of them are meaningless. We've heard that:
Friday, February 20, 2015
Godfrey Ho
Godfrey Ho is one of my favorite directors. This man directed eighty-seven movies from 1980 through 1989. Of those eighty-seven films, forty-seven of them have the word "ninja" in the title. That's a lot of ninja movies. A Hong Kong version of Ed Wood, Godfrey Ho's secret was getting tons of footage of movies from the sixties no one cared about, editing in a few minutes of footage he would shoot of western actors dressed as ninja, dubbing English dialogue over the whole thing (even over the new actors that are clearly speaking English anyway), and calling it a new movie. Similar to the Superman/Superman II controversy, he convinced his staple of US actors that they were filming two or three action films, then would take a few minutes of each of these "films" and edit them into dozens of separate movies culled from the dregs of Hong Kong schlock.
Monday, February 9, 2015
The Blood of Heroes / Salute of the Jugger
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time watching cartoons on Saturday morning, and I spent a lot of time playing video games. The most important way to spend time for me, though, was watching a tv station called WPIX. It became The WB Television Network in 1995, and after a lot of changing hands between Warner Brothers, CBS and others it's roughly what we now know as CW. "WPIX" itself still exists in NYC in the form of PIX-11, but it's a shell of its former movie marathon, Star Trek syndicating glory.
All weekend I'd get to see a huge variety of movies thanks to this station, and there was no gauge for critical popularity. A typical Saturday would give us a solid block of Apocalypse Now, The Puma Man, Clash of the Titans, and Flash Gordon. The Sunday after would have Mad Max, Blade Runner, The Thing, and The Godfather. It wasn't a sci-fi or action movie or drama themed channel but, rather, a channel of whatever they got their hands on. So you'd have classic stuff like The Exorcist mixed in with Cyborg Cop, every weeknight and all weekend. Most of these movies were ubiquitous in fine video rental establishments throughout the city, but one stuck with me that I never saw anywhere else, The Blood of Heroes.
I only saw this movie on WPIX once in 1991 and thought it was awesome. It stuck with me due to my love of post apocalyptic movies and because of its mostly visual storytelling. Years later, I got a job working at a Blockbuster Video in NJ in 2000. Despite regularly taking advantage of their free rentals for employees, special order requests, and being able to access any Blockbuster's inventory listings, I could never find a copy of The Blood of Heroes. The only US VHS release was out of print, and unlike other 80s cult films it did not get an internet fueled surge of popularity to get it re-released in the late 90's.
Fortunately, the movie kept a small following in Europe (under the name Salute of the Jugger), to the point of the fictional sport of the film, jugger, being turned into a real one still played to this day. It stayed in print fairly regularly there, and, following a 2001 DVD release, Lions Gate released the US cut of the film on DVD in the US and Canada in 2003. Like plenty of budget DVDs, this was taped off someone's worn out VHS copy, and looks and sounds awful, but at least I could finally see it again!
It holds up.
All weekend I'd get to see a huge variety of movies thanks to this station, and there was no gauge for critical popularity. A typical Saturday would give us a solid block of Apocalypse Now, The Puma Man, Clash of the Titans, and Flash Gordon. The Sunday after would have Mad Max, Blade Runner, The Thing, and The Godfather. It wasn't a sci-fi or action movie or drama themed channel but, rather, a channel of whatever they got their hands on. So you'd have classic stuff like The Exorcist mixed in with Cyborg Cop, every weeknight and all weekend. Most of these movies were ubiquitous in fine video rental establishments throughout the city, but one stuck with me that I never saw anywhere else, The Blood of Heroes.
I only saw this movie on WPIX once in 1991 and thought it was awesome. It stuck with me due to my love of post apocalyptic movies and because of its mostly visual storytelling. Years later, I got a job working at a Blockbuster Video in NJ in 2000. Despite regularly taking advantage of their free rentals for employees, special order requests, and being able to access any Blockbuster's inventory listings, I could never find a copy of The Blood of Heroes. The only US VHS release was out of print, and unlike other 80s cult films it did not get an internet fueled surge of popularity to get it re-released in the late 90's.
Fortunately, the movie kept a small following in Europe (under the name Salute of the Jugger), to the point of the fictional sport of the film, jugger, being turned into a real one still played to this day. It stayed in print fairly regularly there, and, following a 2001 DVD release, Lions Gate released the US cut of the film on DVD in the US and Canada in 2003. Like plenty of budget DVDs, this was taped off someone's worn out VHS copy, and looks and sounds awful, but at least I could finally see it again!
It holds up.
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