There’s an entire generation of kids who first discovered Motley Crue through their 2019 Netflix biopic, The Dirt. These new fans are more familiar with the band’s off stage antics than their back catalog, and I can’t blame anyone who has only recently discovered the band for wondering… what was the big deal? Vince Neil’s vocal performances have been notoriously awful for at least a decade, the band heavily leans on backing tracks in concert, and it’s public knowledge that every member of the band hates the other three. Throughout the band’s wild history, drummer Tommy Lee quit (he later returned), vocalist Vince Neil quit and/or was fired (he also returned), and most recently guitarist Mick Mars quit and/or was fired in 2023. The only member who never quit the band is bassist Nikki Sixx, although he did temporarily die from a heroin overdose for a few minutes so technically he was out of the band while dead. The best decision the band ever made was to retire from touring while before turned into a nostalgic act… and then they returned to touring as a nostalgic act.

While I can understand younger fans seeing Motley Crue as a bunch of washed up has-beens, that wasn’t always the case. In 1983, the members of Motley Crue were lean and mean. They looked like demonic extras from a Mad Max film, filled their stage with pentagrams and fire, and blew away every other band on the Hollywood Strip. The band divided their time equally between rocking, fighting, drinking, and screwing. They were the baddest, dirtiest, sleaziest band around — no stage, hotel, or female fan was safe from their antics. They were Motley Crue.

Shout at the Devil was the band’s second album and if not their best work, certainly their most consistent. Every song on the album was tailor made to represent (if not sculpt) the band’s image. Every song is related to one the band’s pastimes (mostly fighting and screwing), with the occasional dip into family-friendly (read: marketable) Satanism. The album’s two singles, “Looks That Kill” and “Too Young to Fall in Love” made their way into MTV rotation and introduced an army of teenagers (including myself) to their torch-waving, leather-wearing image.

In addition to the album’s original 11 tracks, the 40th anniversary release contains five additional remastered demos. Three are demo versions of songs from this same album (“Shout at the Devil”, “Looks that Kill”, and “Too Young to Fall in Love”). We also get “Hotter than Hell” (which eventually morphed into “Louder than Hell” and appeared on Theater of Pain) and “Black Widow,” an unreleased track. All five of these tracks have appeared on previous releases, with the first four demos appearing on the 20th anniversary release of Shout at the Devil and “Black Widow” appearing on the the greatest hits compilation Red, White, and Crue. Motley Crue is well known for including new cover tunes and unreleased tracks on their greatest hits and re-released albums, and it’s unfortunate that this one contains no new material.

Inside the limited edition are enough collectibles and bonus items to convince your friends you’ve been collecting Motley Crue merchandise since the early days. There’s a paper Ouija board and a metal Motley Crue planchette, some art prints, a set of tarot cards featuring the members of the band, a devilish ceramic candle holder, the album on vinyl, a second vinyl album containing all the demos (which features additional demos for “Knock ’em Dead Kid” and “I Will Survive”, both of which have also been previously released), two 7″ singles wrapped in a red banana that says “Shout at the Devil” in Latin, the album on cassette, and the album on CD. There’s a lot of stuff in the box and fans of the band and album won’t be disappointed. How many of your friends have polished metal Motley Crue planchettes?

The mix on the CD is brand new, and this is quite possibly the best these songs have ever sounded. Songs on the CD are slightly louder than the 2003 20th Anniversary release, and miles above the original CD release. When alternating between the 2003 and 2023 releases you can tell the guitars are slightly brighter and the bass is a little more pronounced, but the difference is very slight.

Look, I get it. Mick Mars, who just semi-retired from the band, is in his 70s. The other members of the band are in the 60s. They’re not “in their prime.” But there was a time when they were, and it during the Shout at the Devil era. If you want to hear the best version of arguably the band’s best album, this is it.

Link: Shout at the Devil 40th Anniversary Limited Edition Box Set

V/H/S is a series of horror anthology films that consist mostly of found footage style short stories. The latest (sixth) in the series, V/H/S/85, contains stories that take place in the mid-80s, thus the name. Consistent with the film’s theme, all the footage is of VHS-quality.

Like lots of these anthology-style films, the stories in V/H/S/85 are short stories, all of which contain some sort of “twist.” Unfortunately, it seems like so much time and effort has been put into making the segments look as though they were filmed in the 80s that many of the segments seem so light on content that some of them feel half baked. Each segment was created by different writers and directors so everything feels disjointed — it’s as if they’re all from the 1985, but different versions of 1985. V/H/S/85 is a direct-to-Shudder (streaming) release and so even though several of the directors involved in the project are established, the segments are less about taking artistic chances and more about concept ideas that aren’t completely fleshed out.

Bordering on unwatchable is “God of Death,” a short in which a Mexican news broadcast is interrupted by an earthquake. As cameras continue to roll and rescue personnel work to free those who have been trapped, we learn that the news station sits atop ancient Aztec ruins, which were in turn home to ancient (and now hungry) Aztec monsters. It’s the type of plot that anyone who has ever read a horror story, has heard of H.P. Lovecraft, or frankly has been to Mexico could come up with in about 30 seconds. If you’re looking for deeper meaning here, you’ll find none. An earthquake freed some monsters and now they’re gonna getcha. The end. If this segment weren’t bad enough, it’s shot with handheld footage and is presented completely in Spanish, which means you’ll be trying to read subtitles over shaky-cam footage. No gracias.

Equally as bad but in all new ways is “TKNOGD,” featuring a female performance artist who leverages the latest technology (a virtual reality headset) to perform some sort of Satanic ritual. Things go wrong by going right and a virtual demon appears in her headset to give her the business. The crowd of dozens mistakes her suffering as part of the performance, and she receives a standing ovation as she lays dead on the stage. People being killed on stage and having the audience think it’s part of a performance is not a new idea, neither is virtual reality things harming people in real life. The best thing about this one is that it’s short.

Then there’s “No Wake” and “Ambrosia”, two parts to the same story. In “No Wake,” a group of college kids go swimming in a lake (big sign, “no swimming”) and are ultimately mowed down by a sniper’s bullets. There’s no motive and 80% of this short is scene setting (“gosh, you’ve never heard of Pet Sematary?”). The story ends abruptly with a vow by the remaining kids to get revenge. An hour later that comes in the form of “Ambrosia,” in which we get to see the killer’s point of view, first hand. The story ends two minutes too early, leaving viewers to wonder what’s happening and what will happen. Like most of the anthology’s stories, not enough is explained.

While most of the stories feel undercooked, “Dreamkill” feels like a week-long meal crammed into a TV dinner-sized container. The story begins with detectives receiving a VHS tape in the mail that contains footage of a particularly gruesome (think “Saw”) murder dated three days in the future. This story is less horror than it is an extremely gory detective short story featuring a pair of detectives and one really out of place looking goth kid. Were people dressing like Marilyn Manson in 1985? Not in Oklahoma, they weren’t! This one actually has some good twists and turns and was the only story I wished were longer.

There’s a wrap around story about a shapeshifting alien named Rory that’s interspliced between the other segments. It’s part The Thing and part Alien, presented in the style of an analog horror documentary tape. Again, it’s like 49% of the time was spent on the aesthetic, 49% was spent on special effects, and 2% was spent on the plot. Shapeshifting alien looks human and kills people? Seen it.

There’s a way that people speak in movies about the 80s that does not reflect how people spoke in the 80s. Do you remember anyone geeking out about beta over VHS in 1985? It happens two or three times in this movie. In one scene, a guy asks some girl what brand of “VCR deck” she has. Nobody in 1985 cared what brand of VCR you owned. I’m not even sure I knew! It’s not all, but enough of the dialog is that “oh WOW is that a Rubik’s brand Rubik’s cube puzzle!?” type of nonsense that nobody ever said and makes it feel less like something from the 80s and more like an 80s tribute from someone who probably didn’t live through it.

V/H/S/85 was a direct-to-Shudder release and is being touted as one of the better entries in the V/H/S series, which doesn’t speak well of the others.

This post contains major spoilers.

You ever have one of those days, maybe a road trip or a vacation, where nothing went right?

In The Descent, six spelunking women head out on an adventure to explore a system of caves located in North Carolina. The girls are all expert climbers, and have done their homework prior to entering the cave. They’ve brought all the equipment necessary to get them into and out of the cave, made sure that the cave has three exits in case anything goes wrong, and even brought a map of the cave in case they get lost.

But when it rains, it pours. A cave in blocks the path the original entrance to the cave, and in the following scene another girl admits that they’ve actually entered an unmapped, unexplored cave (she was hoping they would name it after them). The group finds themselves stuck underground with no known exit, a finite amount of light, and no extended source of food or water. This day couldn’t get any worse!

(Ten minutes later, a series of mole-like humanoid creatures arrive intent on eating the girls’ faces.)

It’s been a long time since I sat through a movie as tense as The Descent, a film that is constantly tightening the screws of tension. While I’m not particularly claustrophobic, I think almost anyone would squirm if they were crawling through a crevice barely large enough to fit through when the sound of rocks breaking surrounded them. Everything in the movie is a ticking clock — lights, food, water, air, and ultimately, the relationships. No one has a cell phone, no one is sure which passage leads to the surface, and every time the group stops to gather their wits, “crawlers” arrive to attack. At first it’s one, then it’s more than one, and before long it’s a lot more than one. Imagine if in Jaws the protagonists were scuba divers running out of air and trapped under ice.

Final spoiler warning.

Sarah, the film’s main protagonist, suffers more tragedies than the rest of the group. In the beginning of the film, her husband and daughter are killed in a head on collision, and her best friend, Juno, abandons her. Inside the cave, Sarah learns that Juno had an affair with Sarah’s husband, which weighs into her decision to abandon Juno and let the crawlers feast upon her face. At the end of the film, Sarah finds the exit and makes her escape as the sole survivor of the group.

That is, if you watched the American version. In the UK release, which is roughly a minute longer, Sarah’s escape turns out to be a hallucination. After a quick jump scare, the film cuts back to Sarah in the cave, about to meet the latest wave of crawlers. Survivor count, zero.

Sometimes, the sharks win.

In 2023’s Gran Turismo, Jann (“Yan”) Mardenborough — one of the world’s best players of the video game Gran Turismo — is one of ten gamers selected to join a new racing team headed by Nissan. Nissan’s “GT Academy” team, led by marketing genius Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), brings in retired racer Jack Salter (David Harbour) to put these Gran Turismo experts through their paces in real cars on a real track, with the ultimate goal of turning the winner of GT Academy into a very real race car driver.

Gran Turismo is based on a true story. Well, Danny Moore isn’t a real person, and neither is Jack Salter. Also, Jann didn’t win the first GT Academy; he competed in the third. The film also leaves out the four months of training the gamers received before driving real cars. But, for what it’s worth, Jann Mardenborough is a real guy, and he really did win a Gran Turismo tournament, and he did eventually become a real race car driver. I suppose Gran Turismo was indeed based on a true story, heavy on the “based on.” If you want to be perfectly honest, the credits should actually read “based on The Last Starfighter,” but I digress.

Jann overcomes a few struggles along his journey, but not that many. His dad wants his son to go back to college, or come to work with him, or start playing soccer, or really just do anything except play Gran Turismo on his PlayStation all day. Every single person in the racing world, including a lot of Nissan executives, think the program is a bad idea, but… eh. They let ’em race anyway. Several drivers (some on his own team, some on the circuit) give Jann a hard time for being a videogame player, but they stop pretty quick. It’s not as if Jann doesn’t run into conflict along the way, it’s that each one just kind of fades away on its own. Even when Jann is involved in a serious accident, mentor Salter says “that sucked bro you gotta race some more” and Jann says “okay” and vroom vroom, off he goes.

Fans of videogames, or racing, or especially rans of racing videogames will enjoy this film. The cinematography during the racing scenes is amazing, and while I’m quite sure much of it is digital, it’s difficult to spot the difference. Cameras zoom in, around, and even through cars, occasionally peeking inside engines to show us, you know, mechanical thingies on the brink of self-destruction churning away. There are plenty of commentators, in-ear chatter, and pop-up information to ensure audiences are always (literally and figuratively) in the loop.

Viewers are reminded multiple times that Jann honed his skills by playing Gran Turismo on his PlayStation. When a part of his car fails, he know why because of the game. Jann even knows how to drive faster, better, and which lines to take thanks to the game. The only thing missing from this film is a QR code at the end to purchase Gran Turismo.

Gran Turismo requires a little suspension of belief, the least of which comes from the fact that the world’s greatest ten Gran Turismo players are all beautiful and thin, but the dream of being appreciated in real life for being good at playing videogames is likely to help teenage boys overcome that hurdle. If you like movies where kids get to give the whole world the middle finger while standing on the winner’s podium, this is the film for you. It’s the feel good hit of 2023. Well, not that part where a guy gets killed, but the rest of it, sure — feel good!

I went into Slotherhouse mostly blind, knowing only the title and a vague hint that the film featured a killer sloth. I hadn’t even seen the trailer. With only very little information there were things I expected to see in this film. I expected to see a slow-moving animal that probably kills people. Things I didn’t expect to see were a sloth driving a car, taking selfies on an iPhone with its victims, or fighting for control of a handgun. This ain’t your parents’ sloth. Also, why do your parents have a sloth?

The sloth in question is captured by a poacher from its natural habitat and smuggled into the US to be sold as an exotic pet by a guy who is totally not Joe Exotic (his name is O-Exotic). The sloth ultimately ends up in the possession of Emily Young, a college senior who quickly learns that the cute, furry animal brings her a surge of popularity in her sorority; so much so that she decides to challenge the sorority’s mega-bitch defacto president. Not everyone in the house is pleased about their sorority’s new mascot, and before long those same girls begin to mysteriously disappear.

As ridiculous at the premise and antics of the sloth are, the film doesn’t go far enough in a lot of ways. To be honest I’m not sure what earned the film its PG-13 rating. In the 1980s, every member of this sorority would appear topless at least once. Here, several pledges go through a hazing process in which they enter a shower completely clothed. Most of the deaths are implied and appear off screen. The violence is on par with most made for television horror films. Where the film does get a little extreme is in the silliness of the sloth’s actions. We learn early on that the little guy is smart, but by the time we see him using someone’s laptop, all bets are off. As the sloth steals a car, buckles his seatbelt, and speeds off to commit another murder, all I could do was laugh. It’s all in good fun, and everybody’s in on it.

Slotherhouse is better than it deserves to be but not as good as it could have been. If you’re going to go over the top with your premise, you’ve got to go all the way with your plot, your violence, your language, your everything. Instead what we get here is a pretty middle of the road sorority murder mystery with one very out there killer. What would have worked here was an over the top, frantic horror film. Instead, mostly, we get a “slow” burner.

One of the challenges with enjoying older films is that there are barriers between the story and its audience. Sometimes the films are in black and white and are presented with mono sound, which instantly give them a dated feel. Sometimes there’s overacting, often a result of vaudeville and silent actors adapting to the “talkies” of the 1930s. The films are typically heavily dialog driven, with special effects in their infancy. All of these things can combine to create distance.

About halfway through [i]The Champ[/i], eight-year-old “Dink” (Jackie Cooper) comes home to discover a horse trailer hauling away his horse, “Little Champ.” Moments later, Dink’s dad — a washed-up, former heavyweight boxing champion referred to only as “The Champ” (Wallace Beery) by his son — is forced to tell Dink that he lost the horse in a game of cards. “I’ll win him back, just as soon as I can get some dough,” offers the hungover Champ, but a despondent Dink retreats to a stump and is about to cry when the Champ grabs his face. “Get that lip up before you lose it,” he says, closing the boys mouth with his oversized boxing hands. He then forces the boy to smile, something we can imagine has happened a thousand times before in this complicated relationship.

The Champ, you see, is down on his luck. No longer boxing, The Champ now lives in Tijuana and passes his time drinking, gambling, and raising his son Dink, in that order. Through a chance encounter at a horse race, The Champ’s ex-wife Linda spots The Champ and Dink, whom she has not seen since he was an infant. Linda and new rich husband want to take the Dink and give him a better life, but having lost his title, his money, his home, and his honor, Dink is all The Champ has left.

[i]The Champ[/i] overcomes all those barriers I mentioned by presenting a small number of characters, all of whom viewers become emotionally invested in. Motivation and emotion are front and center here; we know why Dink wants to remain with The Champ, we know why Linda wants to rescue Dink from the squalor he lives in, and can feel the struggle The Champ is going through as he weighs what’s best for himself against what’s best for Dink. When The Champ finally reenters the ring against his doctor’s orders as Dink cheers him on, we can feel it. [i]The Champ[/i] is a film about losing, and winning, and sometimes, losing by winning.

Throughout the film, Jackie Cooper shows amazing range for a kid and demonstrates why he went on to become one of the biggest child stars of the 1930s. The role of The Champ revitalized the career of Wallace Berry, who signed a contract with MGM guaranteeing he would be paid $1 more than any other studio actor, making him the highest paid actor of his time. Director King Vidor went on to direct the black and white scenes in The Wizard of Oz and is best known for directing 1956’s War and Peace. Berry won the best actor Oscar for this role (in a controversial “tie”) and both he and Cooper badmouthed one another, swearing to never work together again, which they never did, until co-starring in Treasure Island which was released the following year. The champs were back.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Minutes after the original source material entered the public domain, production began on Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. According to the film, the once friendly animals inhabiting the 100 Acre Woods fell on dark times after Christopher Robin went off to college and left them behind. During the following winter, the animals became so desperate for food that they killed and ate Eeyore, which turned them back into feral killing machines with a hatred for all humanity, especially one Christopher Robin.

Not long thereafter we meet a group of college-aged girls having a fun-filled weekend in those same woods. It doesn’t take long for Pooh and Piglet to sniff out these uninvited guests and have them for dinner… and I don’t mean as guests. Only one of the girls has any sort of back story, and they’re all interchangeable. Even if you wanted to tell them apart, you couldn’t.

Then again, that’s not who the audience is rooting for. After one of the girls is abducted from the hot tub, she quickly finds herself hog-tied (no pun intended) in the driveway. After Piglet gives the signal, Pooh inches forward in a Dodge Charger until the front wheel slowly rolls over her skull, sending her brains in one direction and her eyeballs in the other. Of course there’s no rest for the wicked, and in a series of murders that would make Michael Myers jealous, Piglet (armed with his trusty sledgehammer) and Pooh (a fan of knives) chase, torture, and slaughter most everyone they come across. And while I don’t think we’re supposed to be rooting for the killers, it’s hard to feel sorry for the humans when they’re all so dumb. When three of the girls run up on Pooh killing one of their friends, they stick around for several minutes to watch the action instead of running in the other direction. In another scene, two of the girls sitting inside a car with the keys in the ignition watch a five minute brawl before deciding it might be a good time to drive away. Imagine what actions you might take if two creatures showed up to kill you and your friends. Everybody in the film consistently does the opposite of what you just thought of.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey ventures into the realm of torture porn. There’s no real plot and nobody worth rooting for. Even when Jason or Freddy slice their way through a film, somebody somewhere is planning a counter attack. Not here. The closest Pooh comes to meeting his match is in the form of a random hippy armed with a crowbar, who unfortunately gets his face karate-chopped off. The film desperately could have used more humor and camp and a little less blood; I doubt that’s what we’ll get in the sequel, which is already being teased with a 2024 release date.

Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to capturing the excitement and charm of the classic role playing game on film. Dungeons & Dragons, released in 2000, currently has a 9% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Its 2005 sequel, Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God saw a limited release in North America, and the third film in the series, 2012’s Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness, was a direct-to-video release. Arguably the best version of Dungeons & Dragons to make it to a screen was the children’s Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s.

After several years of legal delays (which ostensibly gave audiences enough time to rinse the memory of those previous films from their mouths), the franchise is back with 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. The resurgence of interest in tabletop RPGs combined with the success of shows like Game of Thrones and the D&D-laden Stranger Things surely contributed to the desire to bring the franchise that started it all back to the big screen one more time.

Honor Among Thieves opens with some backstory and character introduction. Edgin (Chris Pine), the charismatic thief, and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), his right-hand muscle, were caught attempting to steal a magical tablet and sent to prison. Before long they’re out and have teamed up with an amateur sorcerer named Simon and a shape-shifting druid named Doric on a quest to retrieve the tablet from their old friends who turn out not to be so friendly.

At its core Honor Among Thieves is a heist movie, but to its defense it’s an entertaining and funny one. There are plenty of one-liners and bumbling plans to keep you entertained, and perhaps the best part is you don’t need to be familiar with Dungeons & Dragons to enjoy the film or get the jokes. To be sure there are plenty of D&D references scattered throughout the film; fans of the game will recognize specific creatures, weapons, and locations like Neverwinter and Underdark. Sharp viewers may even catch a cameo from another party of adventures last seen in an 80s animated series…

Several of the film’s subplots fell flat for me, and it wouldn’t surprise me if large amounts of this film were cut for running time. Elgin’s entire motivation for seeking this magic tablet is to resurrect his dead wife, who we see in a couple of flashbacks and never really get sold on their relationship. There’s also a brief reconnection between Helga the fighter and her former partner, a 3′ tall halfling who isn’t mentioned before or after. While I’m sure this was intended so audiences might see a lighter side of Helga, all I kept thinking about was a 3′ tall halfling in bed with a barbarian woman. Tiny magic staff, work your power! The entire adventure is an attempt to reunite Elgin with his estranged young daughter, who again we see so little of that I couldn’t care less if the two ever reconnected. Honor Among Thieves has plenty of action, jokes, and special effects, but it’s pretty weak when it comes to establishing any kind of emotional connection to any of the characters. When major characters face danger (or even death) I found myself saying… meh?

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is harmless and entertaining and if it gets kids to roll a 20-sided-die and try D&D for the first time, that’s good enough for me.

The same movie critics who lauded 1996’s Scream for being original, self-aware, and revitalizing horror films will absolutely love 2022’s identically named Scream. Where the former was praised for going meta by calling out and breaking the cliched rules of the genre, the latest film in the series goes meta meta by referencing the series itself.

Scream (2022) opens with a scene that mirrors Drew Barrymore’s scene from the original’s opening scene. In the fictional Scream universe, a series of movies called Stab based on the events (murders) that took place in the Scream universe were released. When a new generation of teens begin to once again meet the Ghostface killer they quickly realize they are being targeted by a copycat murderer attempting to recreated the past, and the only people who can help the kids from 2022’s Scream are the ones who survived 1996’s Scream.

A pivotal bit of exposition toward the end of the first act explains to the teens (and viewers) what’s happening. “We’re stuck in a requel,” says one of the teens, all of whom are both potentially the killer and on the chopping block. “A requel is not quite a reboot, and not quite a sequel.” The character points out that requels don’t have any weight unless original characters connect it with the original franchise. She references several recent films including Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Halloween, and true to her theory, it isn’t long before Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Dewey Rules (David Arquette) have all returned to the Screamiverse.

Just as the 1996 film lovingly poked fun at horror films, the 2022 film attempts to do the same by eating its own tail. The characters end up partying in the same house that appeared in the first film, 25 years later. During one particularly meta moment, Ghostface sneaks up behind a teenager on a couch as she watches the scene from the fictional Stab in which Ghostface sneaks up behind a teenager sitting on a couch; that scene, of course, is a recreation of a scene in 1996’s Scream in which Ghostface sneaked up behind a teenager on a couch — the same couch in the same room we’re watching again — and killed them. As the teen on the television mockingly screams “look behind you!” unaware that Ghostface is standing behind them with a knife, the teen we’re watching also screams “look behind you!”, unaware that Ghostface is behind her, too — same room, same couch, same knife. Anyone who doesn’t see what’s about to happen would not survive as a character in a Scream film.

The returning characters have seen it all before, and while within a knife’s blade of the fourth wall, explain the formula to the other characters. They conject on who the killer or killers may be, who will die, and what will happen, and pretty much nail it all. That’s not to say there aren’t shocks and surprises along the way, but at the end of the day these characters have seen it, we’ve seen it, and now we’ve seen them see it, which is kind of the point.

I don’t know that the killer’s motive or the big Scooby-Doo reveal toward the end helps Scream make any more or less sense than any of the other films. Ten years after Scream 4 and 25 years after the original debuted, the new crew (RIP Wes Craven) bring the story to a mostly logical solution. The rules are both mocked and followed, and according to IMDB’s trivia section, the final rule of scary movies — something the actors and characters weren’t privy to at the time of filming — will be followed. Based on the success of this film, a sixth film in the series has already been greenlit.

In [i]Magnificent Warriors[/i], female Chinese secret agent Fok Ming-ming is sent to a city near Tibet to connect with another secret agent and rescue the ruler of the city, Youda. Ming-ming is told she will know her connection because of the watch he wears, but when she arrives she initially teams up with a silly conman who ended up with the watch. Ming-ming eventually finds the right contact, Youda brings along his girlfriend, and soon the pack of five are leading a Chinese rebellion against the Japanese soldiers occupying the city.

I’ve watched a lot of kung-fu movies and most of them are set either in China or modern day, but this film feels like a World War II film — and, at times, an Indiana Jones film. The setting is a small city near Tibet during the Second Sino-Japanese War, so there are a lot of sandbags, and Jeeps, and soldiers with rifles and bayonets, and at least one aerial dogfight. Ming-ming arrives in a yellow biplane and is handy with a whip, which adds to the Indiana Jones feel.

The pacing of this movie is slightly off. The film is exactly 90 minutes long, with three nearly exactly 30 minute acts. The first act has plenty of action, but mostly with characters we’ll never see again, and it’s not until the end of the first act that Ming-ming actually arrives in the city and the story begins. In the second act the team is assembled and the mission is underway, but before you know it that’s over and we’re back into a full-on WWII film. The film’s structure follows the 30/30/30 plot arc to a fault; if this film were made today, it would be more like 10/35/35/10.

What sets this film apart, other than the rather unique setting, is the amazing cast. Michelle Yeoh plays Fok Ming-ming, a full 35 years before film critics were goo-gooing over her performance in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Yeoh’s work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Supercop, and tons of other films established her in the martial arts pantheon, but her fight scenes in this movie rival her contemporaries. The conman she crosses paths with is played by Richard Ng, mostly known from his appearances in all the Lucky Stars films. Ng is one of those guys that can make you laugh one second and knuckle up moments later. Secret Agent 001, Ming-ming’s original connection, is played by Derek Yee (Tung-sing), who appeared in more than 40 Shaw Brothers films before eventually becoming the chairman of the Hong Kong Film Awards Association in 2017.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/lqZj1wr.jpg[/img]

[i]Magnificent Warriors[/i] isn’t a great movie, but it’s a good movie with some great scenes. The scale bounces between small fights between a couple of people and large-scale fights that take place between the entire city and a regimen of soldiers. Like a lot of these films, [i]Magnificent Warriors[/i] isn’t sure what it wants to be — an Indiana Jones film, a WWII film, or a straight up kung-fu films. It does each of these things pretty well, but not a great job of combining them seamlessly into one coherent movie.