Fantastic Fest 2011 – The Holding/Let The Bullets Fly/The Day Without Policeman

This is a pretty light day at the Festival. There just wasn’t a lot that I was super interested in and the movies that I was interested in got away from me.

But, let’s get started, eh?

THE HOLDING (2011)

Directed by: Susan Jacobson
Written by: James Dormer

“Farmville was never this brutal”? Seriously? That’s all Horrortalk could come up with? And I don’t get paid for this shit.

Cassie Naylor (Kierston Wareing) just killed her husband. We don’t really know why, but she did it with the help of the old man who helps on the farm, Cooper (David Bradley, aka ARGUS FILCH!!). Now she has to keep her head above water on the farm while raising two young girls.

Along comes Aden (Vincent Regan), a lonely drifter who says that he knew her husband back in the day. All of her problems seem to be solved, but is Aden all that he says he is?

There’s absolutely nothing new here. This is the same movie that you’ve seen a dozen times. But sometimes, that just doesn’t matter. Sometimes the same old story works just fine as long as it’s written, directed and acted competently. And all three things are in place here, so it’s a perfectly enjoyable flick.

Special props should probably go to Regan for edging that line between savior and angel of death without tipping the scales until absolutely necessary.

Check it out if you’ve got nothing better to do. If you’re sick of this story, though, you can skip it and not worry too much about it.

LET THE BULLETS FLY (2010)

Directed by: Wen Jiang
Written by: Wen Jiang
Based on story by: Ma Shitu

I really didn’t know anything about this one, either. When I found out, though, that it was going to be Chow Yun-fat with guns, I was there.

Chow plays a super-corrupt master of a prefecture of China in the 1920s. When a well-known bandit named Pocky Zhang (writer/director Jiang) shows up posing as the governor of one of Chow’s cities, the bullets do fly.

Pocky and his boys robbed a train with the real governor aboard. Everyone was killed except for Counselor Tang (Xiogang Feng) and the governor’s wife (Carina Lou). The two of them join the fight against Master Wu.

Almost like a Western in structure, Let The Bullets Fly does just what the title says it will, all with tongue placed firmly in cheek. This is, first and foremost, a comedy, which is not something that I’ve seen Chow Yun-fat do very often. He’s pretty good at it, though. One guy at the screening said that it felt like a Stephen Chow movie that wasn’t as good. Honestly, though, this is better than just about any Stephen Chow movie I’ve ever seen. Besides Kung-Fu Hustle, that guy is just not funny. Sorry.

I really enjoyed this one. There were enough double-crosses to go around and the plot moved through the entire 132 minute run-time. It helped that Chow and Wen were so good as foils.

Definitely one to check out if you’re into Hong Kong films at all. Maybe not as good as the heyday films, but still pretty fun.

THE DAY WITHOUT POLICEMAN (1993)

Directed by: Gwing-Kai Lee
Written by:Ping-Kit Koo/Kwong-fai Lai/Johnny Lee/Desmond Wu

Speaking of Hong Kong’s heyday, this film is from that era…which doesn’t mean that it’s quality.

Let me start this review with this: I love Hong Kong film, especially from the late 80s and early 90s. Classics like John Woo’s Better Tomorrow series (actually, just about any John Woo movie of that time), Full Contact, The Bride With White Hair and lots and lots of other great films were made in about a ten year period. Many of them were better than anything Hollywood was putting out at the time.

Then there were movies like The Day Without Policeman.

You see, somewhere in the late 80s, HK finally decided to join the rest of the world and put a ratings system into place. They created a rating called Category III that allowed filmmakers to put as many boobs and as much blood into a movie as they wanted to. Mr. Woo took advantage of this to make some truly amazing action movies.

Others, however, decided to go a slightly different route. They took a queue from the American grindhouse movies of the 70s and just exploited the shit out of everything they could…mostly women. They had much more greed than talent.

This doesn’t make these movies unwatchable. You see, when HK movies are good, they’re great. When they’re bad…they could be even better. Movies like Sex & Zen (or, as my friends and I like to call it, Two Girls And One Flute), The Fruit Is Swelling (where a six year old girl’s spirit enters an 18 year old girl’s body…and learns about sex) and Erotic Ghost Story (where a guy has lots and lots of sex with ghosts) were the norm.

The Day Without Policeman is on the more violent side of any of those “wonderful” films. It’s an action film. This means that every woman in the film has to get raped, beaten, kicked, stabbed, shot and, otherwise completely demoralized. Most of the men have all of these things but the rape happen to them, too.

And there is lots of blood. Buckets of it, in fact.

This film stars Simon Yam (who was actually in a lot of good films) as the worst policeman ever. I don’t mean he takes bribes or beats people senseless for no reason. I mean he’s completely incompetent and ineffectual…and not in a funny Rowan Atkinson sort of way. More in a “people die because he sits there and watches it happen” sort of way.

He has a reason for it: a horrible phobia of AK-47s. He watched his partner get gunned down by one and hasn’t been the same sense. His wife left him soon after because he folded into himself. He, of course, is still in love with her, but he just can’t get it up anymore. (Yes, this is strangely important to the “plot.”)

Months go by and he’s been demoted to being a cop on a small island off the coast of HK. Mainland Chinese guys come in (with AK-47s, of course) and wreak havoc on the island, basically killing everyone in their path…and he can’t do anything about it because he’s crying in the corner.

I hated this guy. A lot. He was worthless. Luckily, enough outrageous stuff was going on around him that the movie was still…um…enjoyable? It was enjoyable in that “HOLY SHIT! THAT JUST HAPPENED!” way. He watches his soon to be ex-wife get raped. The baddies kill a child. A large man rapes a woman while constantly saying, “Uhbuh! Uhbuh! Uhbuh!” (Apparently, this means “Comfortable?”) Our “hero” tells his wife, “Your sister is with the gays! She might get raped!” (Um…what?)

That’s another thing about these movies: the subtitles are amazing. They make absolutely no sense most of the time, even if you don’t pay attention to the bad grammar. They seem to have been written by someone who didn’t speak English AND was in the middle of a mescaline trip. It’s surreal and, strangely, perfect.

With all of its illogic, strange dialogue and just overall ineptness, The Day Without Policeman is NOT a good film by any means. It’s pretty awful, in fact. Bottom of the HK barrel stuff. BUT, it’s one of those movies that you can watch and laugh at from moment one. It would be pretty difficult to find a copy of this movie at this point (totally out of print and maybe never even released on DVD…only laserdisc), but you could watch it with a bunch of drunk friends and have a pretty damn good time with it.

If, of course, you can handle about 50 pounds of rape.