SUFFERING OF NINKO -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 7/26/18

 

For those with a taste for the unusual, SUFFERING OF NINKO (2016) should prove a delectable, perhaps even sumptous treat. While hardly the nuttiest Asian supernatural film set in ancient Japan that I've ever seen, it easily ranks as one of my more keenly unusual movie-watching experiences.

The establishing shots alone let us know that we're in for a beautifully rendered film by first time feature director (and writer and producer and editor) Norihiro Niwatsukino, whose credits on the project mark it as an intensely personal vision.

Set in Japan's Edo period (around the 16th century or so), the story begins in a monastery where young monk Ninko (Masato Tsujioka) is the most ardent and hardworking of all his peers. But for all his virtue and spiritual purity, he suffers from a terrible burden--he is incredibly, insanely irresistible to every woman he comes into contact with.

At first this is depicted with subtle hints of lighthearted comedy despite the film's solemn tone, with Ninko's excursions into a nearby village with his brothers to beg for alms descending into chaos as all the women in the area converge upon the group to grab, grope, drool over, and attempt to seduce the hapless Ninko with every feminine trick in their book and a few that are clearly made up on the spot.

Ninko's ordeal is deftly portrayed by showing us how his zen meditation sessions first serve as a source of peace and spiritual comfort but gradually evolve into furious psycho-sexual fever dreams that have him writhing in sexual agony before finally driving him out of his mind.

This sequence is the most surreal of the film and is enhanced by Edo-inspired drawings and animations (which recur throughout the film to add to its old Japanese storytelling style) and an unusual rendition of Ravel's "Bolero" played with traditional Japanese instruments.

Here we also get one of the first hints that Ninko is being haunted and perhaps stalked by a powerful supernatural female entity with long black hair, whom we see dancing seductively behind a bland-expression mask.

After recovering his senses, Ninko is ordered to set off on a journey of self-discovery to confront his problems and deal with them head on.  The narrative really gets going when he meets a mercenary ronin named Kanzo (Hideta Iwahashi) and the two of them are hired by local villagers to hunt down an evil sorceress, Yama-onna (Miho Wakabayashi), who seduces men with her irresistible sexuality and drains them of their lifeforce, leaving only lifeless, mummified husks.

We've seen hints of Yama-onna appearing teasingly to Ninko throughout the film, as though she senses his own sexual power and sees it, and him, as a challenge.  Ninko, meanwhile, suffers even more when it occurs to him that he may in fact be some kind of inhuman sexual creature himself.

Kanzo, the roguish swordsman, looks upon all this as an amusing (he likes Ninko) and profitable challenge to his skills.  Writer and director Norihiro Niwatsukino brings them all together for a surprising and, in some ways, exhilarating climax (in more ways than one) in which the film's narrative subtleties and eye-filling supernatural wonders intertwine. 

Old-fashioned storytelling blends with modern sex and violence to create a unique viewing experience in SUFFERING OF NINKO.  Those indulging in this enticing buffet of ancient Japanese delights will be well served.

TECH SPECS
Running Time: 70 mins.
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audio: Stereo
Language: Japanese w/English Subtitles
Street Date: August 14, 2018
DVD SRP: $19.95

SUFFERING OF NINKO -- DVD Review by Porfle

A CURE FOR WELLNESS -- Blu-ray/DVD Review by Porfle

 

 

Originally posted on 6/6/17

 

 

Every once in a while a movie comes along that you can just delve into, like a pool of water, and float around in for awhile.  A CURE FOR WELLNESS (20th Century Fox, 2017) has a lot to do with water, with its theraputic baths, isolation tanks, humid steam rooms, and dark, murky depths creepy-crawling with slithering eels and even more horrific things.  After delving into this inky nightmare, you may come out feeling a little waterlogged. 

The setting is a sprawling mountainside "wellness retreat" in Austria where people go for the waters, but rarely come back.  (We discover later that it has a particularly sordid past.)  Pembroke has fled there to escape prosecution in a big Wall Street scam, so ambitious junior exec Lockhart (Dane DeHaan, CHRONICLE, LAWLESS), himself under threat of prison time, has been sent to retrieve the older man in order for him to serve as the company's official scapegoat. 

When we meet him, we see that young Lockhart is just a hair's breadth away from forever losing his own soul to his work. A shred of decency still surfaces from time to time, as when he visits his ailing mother in a nursing home or dwells on the memory of the day his father, himself mired in a similar scandal, committed suicide before his eyes. 

 

He's all business when the hospital staff give him the runaround about Pembroke, yet a shocking accident leaves him stunned, confused, and helpless, his broken leg encased in a cast and his fate in the hands of quiet but firmly authoritative Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs). 

Barely mobile on a pair of crutches, a woozy Lockhart finally manages to locate Pembroke but the mystery of Dr. Volmer and the wellness center has only begun to draw him inexorably into a nightmare of horror that will reach epic proportions. 

As Lockhart, Dane DeHaan carries on the troubled, introspective persona that worked so well in CHRONICLE but with an added assertiveness which helps him survive the series of traumatic events to come.  Jason Isaacs, whose range extends from strutting martinet (SOLDIER) to manly good-guy type ("Case Histories"), flexes his talents as the outwardly calm, vaguely sinister Dr. Volmer.

Also on hand is the aptly-named Mia Goth (EVEREST, THE SURVIVALIST) as Hannah, the clinic's only young patient, who fascinates Lockhart with a beauty and a demeanor which are both strangely ethereal.  Unable to recall her own past and seemingly out of place in her own time, she presents Lockhart with an added incentive to get to the bottom of the ghastly events taking place in the dungeon-like bowels of the retreat where patients are taken, never to return.

I'm loathe to reveal more, save to say that A CURE FOR WELLNESS is like an intoxicating therapeutic bath in undiluted Goth that immerses the viewer in a tantalizing mystery wrapped in surrealism, horror, and even an element or two of the classic monster movie. 

All of which is presented by director Gore Verbinski (THE RING, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, THE LONE RANGER) in visual terms so imaginative and cinematically splendid that almost every shot could qualify as an entry in an avant-garde photography competition. 

The wellness clinic setting alone is a marvel of production design with its retro, late 19th/early-20th-century look and hissing, sweating, almost steampunk iron-and-rivets technology cloaked beneath the outer beauty of the colorful mountainside. 

Names such as David Lynch, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, and others kept going through my mind as I watched, taking much pleasure in the visuals even as the story recalls hints of Stoker, Lovecraft, and Poe. 

Indeed, Lockhart's arrival at the wellness center early in the film is similar to Renfield entering Dracula's castle in DRACULA.  Both are men on a mission who arrive sane, and then, after encountering vampires in either the figurative or literal sense, find themselves inescapably lost in a hellish madness.  Both films are equally fun to watch, but A CURE FOR WELLNESS is like a darkly scenic rollercoaster ride through a vast carnival spook house. 


Digital HD, Blu-ray & DVD Special Features Include
.    Deleted Sequence: “It’s Wonderful Here”
.    Meditations
.    Water is the Cure
.    Air is the Cure
.    Earth is the Cure
.    The Score
.    Trailers
.    Theatrical trailer
.    Red Band trailer

.    International trailer

.    Digital download

A CURE FOR WELLNESS Disc Specifications
Street Date:         June 6, 2017
Prebook Date:    May 3, 2017
Screen Format:     Widescreen 16:9 (1.78:1)
Audio:         English 7.1 DTS-HD-MA / Spanish 5.1 DD / French 5.1 DD (Blu-ray)
English 5.1 DD / Spanish 2.0 Surround DD / French 2.0 Surround DD (DVD)
Subtitles:        English / French / Spanish (Blu-ray & DVD)
Total Run Time:    Approximately 146 minutes
Rating:        R
Closed Captioned:     Yes

Watch the Trailer:

A CURE FOR WELLNESS -- Blu-ray/DVD Review by Porfle

MADE ME DO IT -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 11/27/18

 

A quick, down and dirty shoot (as described by the filmmakers) on a very low budget sometimes yields surprisingly good results, as it has in the case of the horror-thriller MADE ME DO IT (Indican Pictures, 2017).

What director and co-writer (with Matthew John Koppin) Benjamin Ironside Koppin set out to do was to get some talented people together and "Frankenstein" (his word) a movie together taking the old FRIDAY THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN slasher templates and doing an homage with a few curves and angles thrown in.

The main victims aren't the usual rowdy, party-hardy bunch--just pensive college student Ali Hooper (Anna B. Shaffer), her younger brother Nick (Jason Gregory London), and her boyfriend Jason (Liston Spence).

Ali's home for the weekend (no keg party or summer camp in the woods this time) but her estranged parents are gone, leaving just her and the guys having a quiet, unpleasantly introspective time of things.

It's just the right situation to be crashed by the standard masked serial killer, but this time he's a stringy, weepy nerd named Thomas (Kyle Van Vonderen) who spends most of his time banished to his bedroom by a sadistic, abusive aunt and living in a fantasy world of funny drawings that come to life and masks that he makes out of paper plates.

Thomas is a "special needs" sort of kid who couldn't hurt a fly--that is, until he puts on his "Barbara" mask, because "Barbara" is just the take-charge, take-no-prisoners sort of person Thomas could never be.  And "Barbara" is angry at the world.  Very angry.

That's the set-up, and from there MADE ME DO IT takes us into a scary campfire tale where Thomas silently stalks the night in his creepy mask and wields his bloody axe, leaving a trail of bodies all the way to Ali and Nick's house.

Much of the subsequent action is similar to what happens in THE STRANGERS, in which masked killers home-invaded a young couple and terrorized them for no apparent reason.

Here, we get just the same spooky ambience with the inhabitants of the dark, shadowy house (the electricity, alas, has gone off) cowering in fear as they try to elude the unknown stalker, who keeps popping up where they least expect him.

The director builds the suspense well for most of the film, although some scenes tend to meander a bit as Ali gets contemplative about the whole thing.  The film spends a lot of time pondering Thomas' psychological state and how he got that way, and our interest in this runs hot and cold.

Meanwhile, Thomas goes off on several freaky mind-trips involving his dead parents, his imaginary animal friends, his horrible aunt, "Barbara" (of course), and other images that come flying at us via various media such as 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm film, scratchy VHS tape, and crude animations--all of which are quite well-done and fun to look at.  (These are explored in more detail in one of several making-of featurettes included on the DVD.)

With a rousing final confrontation and a pretty keen twist right at the fadeout, MADE ME DO IT stacks up as one of the more interesting modestly-mounted slasher flicks of recent years, and is way better than watching the usual teen campers getting sliced and diced in the woods by some Jason wannabe.

MADE ME DO IT -- DVD Review by Porfle

MULTIPLE SARCASMS -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 8/8/10

Back in the old days when I owned the only VCR in the family, my sisters would go to the video store and come back with bags full of chick flicks, which I would have to suffer through.  I'm not sure if even they would've enjoyed writer-director Brooks Branch's MULTIPLE SARCASMS (2010), but, to be fair, I suspect that they still would've derived some mysterious and indefinable emotional sustenance from it which totally escapes me.

A disheveled Timothy Hutton plays Gabriel, who wanders through the movie being vaguely dissatisfied with his life as a successful architect with an attractive wife (Dana Delaney as "Annie") and a darling daughter, Lizzie (India Ennenga), both of whom love him.  Sounds great, but darn it, he isn't living his life--it's living him!  (Or something like that.)  So he decides to let everything go to hell while he writes a play which, conveniently, is about his life so that he can put all of his self-pity into words while striving to "find himself."

Mira Sorvino is Cari, a fantasy BFF who's inexplicably supportive and excited about everything Gabe does, while Stockard Channing is his agent Pamela who urges him to complete the play so they can dish it up to an eager public.  Poor Gabe, however, can't do that because he doesn't know how the story comes out yet--he must finish wrecking his life before he can write the ending.  So whenever he breaks up with Annie, fritters away his job, publicly humiliates his daughter, or makes a drunken pass at Cari, we next find the soulful scribe hunched over his typewriter recording it all for posterity. 

Gabe says repeatedly that he doesn't know why he feels "shitty" about his relatively good life, and neither do we.  So why should we care?  He's a one-man self-pity party obsessively scrutinizing himself through a whine-o-scope and it gets old really fast.  After awhile, in fact, he starts to come off less as a troubled aspiring artist and more like a guy who's developing serious mental problems.

The film shuffles from one dull dialogue scene to the next with Gabe either being passively confrontational with Annie, seeking support from Cari or his sympathetic gay co-worker Rocky (a semi-amusing Mario Van Peebles), or proving to Lizzie (and us) that he's still a really good dad so that we'll sympathize with him, too.  As you might guess, each foray into the turbulent terrain of his aching heart is accentuated by tender acoustic guitar and piano ballads by the likes of Yusuf "Cat Stevens" Islam. 

Some of these scenes, particularly one between Gabe and Cari in her office, are just plain drama-class awful, the actors coming off as jaded old pros noodling over their lines together without putting any real effort into them.  The script isn't much help, as in this exchange between Annie and Gabe:

"I love you, but..." (pause) "I am really angry..." (pause) "inside."
"We need to get ourselves back, Annie."

Young India Ennenga as Lizzie gives what is probably the film's best performance and gets to deliver one of its few really funny lines to Hutton:  "I don't know, I guess I'm just PMS-ing or something--you know, like you and Mom?"  Dana Delaney does her best with a thankless role, almost making me forgive her for ruining TOMBSTONE, while Mira Sorvino has very little to work with. 

The DVD from Image Entertainment is in 1.78:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.  Subtitles are in English and Spanish.  Extras include a "making of" featurette, cast and crew interviews, and a trailer.

After you're done giggling at the clever title, MULTIPLE SARCASMS offers little in the way of amusing comedy or interesting drama.  In one scene, Stockard Channing as Gabe's brassy agent Pamela pretty succinctly sums up what I've been thinking throughout the film:  "Gabriel, I love you, I really do, but this f**king whining white guy shit has gotta stop."

MULTIPLE SARCASMS -- DVD Review by Porfle

Does Kiko Cry "Mommy!" At The End Of SON OF KONG? (1933) (video)

"Son Of Kong" is a delightful, fairytale-tinged follow-up to "King Kong."

(You can read our review of it HERE.)

Kong's son "Kiko" is a likable character played for laughs and sympathy...
...with decidedly human-like qualities.

Kiko's life is threatened when the island begins to sink...
...and his foot gets caught in a crevice.

Does the poor little soul actually call for his Mommy?

What do you think?


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

Does Kiko Cry "Mommy!" At The End Of SON OF KONG? (1933) (video)