Smash!
The track record of 21st century film adaptations of Marvel Comics characters continues here with what may be the best of the lot so far.
I’ve had mixed feelings toward how the character’s origin has been monkeyed with – you just can’t beat that “born in the heart of a nuclear explosion” riff. But since the comic origin would only take only a few minutes to tell, and the origin story is the whole story of the film, writer James Shamus’ plot quickly grew on me. Stan Lee stole the whole thing from Amazing Colossal Man anyway. Continue reading
sure, Die Another Day (known during pre-production as Beyond the Ice) contains all the elements that have made this series so successful (no need to recount what those are, since just about everybody knows them). But the format seems to work best when it treads the line between pure escapism and the gritty atmosphere of international tensions. Here, we’re asked to follow Bond too far into science fiction. 
Master of the Flying Guillotine DVD
You gotta take your hat off to this new ultimate DVD edition
There were a number of martial arts pictures made during the 1970s around one of the strangest weapons of warfare ever created, the Flying Guillotine. Basically a heavy hat on a light chain, it was thrown over a victims head, after which a section would drop down and with a flick of the wrist, blades would converge inside and neatly nip off the victim’s noggin. Shaw Brothers started this mini craze with The Flying Guillotine in 1974.
Jimmy Wang Yu became a star playing the character One-Armed Boxer in a series of films (starting with One-Armed Swordsman in 1967, made with Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-Leung), and here borrows the Flying Guillotine concept for a new adventure, a sequel to his One-Armed Boxer. Continue reading →