by ClockworkVirus » Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:35 pm
I enjoyed LA HORDE but it is a pretty sloppy piece of entertainment. I did like that fight in the kitchen where the zombie gets a fridge dropped on her, though. Probably the best zombie melee fight I've seen in a movie -- it just goes on and on in a kind of deranged catfight and the zombie takes an huge amount of punishment before dropping. A convincingly nasty scene in a fairly cartoonish super-zombie movie.
Just watched ICHI THE KILLER again. It's good, but not as good as I recall it being when I saw it a few years ago. Its preponderance of brutal violence against women probably disturbed me more than it disturbed the women I watched it with, oddly enough, and I would call it an effective film for being that blunt and nasty, and commend the actors on believably selling some very, very taxing scenes. But like a lot of Japanese horror flicks (and Miike flicks especially) the movie as a whole is overlong, self-indulgent, badly-paced and in need of a skilled editor to tighten up the endless scenes of boardroom meetings and slow, brooding conversations between its roster of minor characters. The 2001-era CGI gore that crops up throughout the movie is plain goofy, which gels uneasily with the darker themes of sadomasochism it's trying to convey, although you can see a direct line from that splat-stick gore to latter-day J-horror movies like Tokyo Gore Police and The Machine Girl. In the end, Ichi is a good watch and deserves some of its infamy, but it isn't quite the jaw-dropping, neon-saturated, thrilling gorefest that I remembered. Maybe that movie exists only in my mind.