Thailand’s Chocolate and Denmark’s Fighter opened the flood gates for a female-fronted martial arts revival in 2008 and the gates show no sign of closing any time soon.  Coming in 2009 are Japan’s High Kick Girl and Hong Kong’s Coweb, the common thread between the films being that all feature first time actresses who are real life fighters and do all of their own fight and stunt work.

Coweb marks the directorial debut of Xiong Xin Xin, a familiar name to martial arts fans around the globe thanks to his acting role as Clubfoot in the Once Upon A Time In China films.  Xiong has been absent from the screen for a while now but that’s only because he’s been busy working as a fight choreographer and now as a director.  The star?  Jiang Luxia, who was spotted on the Hong Kong martial art reality show The Disciple, a show sponsored by Jackie Chan to find the next generation of Hong Kong screen fighters - a successful move as a number of finalist are appearing in upcoming films.  Here’s a synopsis:

Newcomer 蒋露霞 Jiang Luxia, a finalist of The Disciple reality TV show, plays the lead role as Guangdong wushu coach Nie Yi Yi who gets implicated by a kidnap case in Hong Kong. It’s up to her to battle waves after waves of fighters to rescue her employer and his wife who are kidnapped. Little did she know that her fights are being captured on video and broadcast live via a website which serves as an illegal online gambling den…

When we first wrote about this back in September there was a trailer and a pair of clips available on the official website.  Those have disappeared now but a new trailer has just surfaced which you can find below the break.  The video quality is lower than I’d like but the fight quality is nice and high.

Continue Reading "2009: Year of the Chick Fight!  First Proper Trailer For Xiong Xin Xin’s COWEB!"...

Look at that man sitting there all cross legged in the water.  So peaceful.  So tranquil.  What you don’t know is that if this image were moving his jaws would probably be working away - chewing and chewing and chewing.  And what he’d be chewing would most likely be human flesh!  Heh ...

The film is titled Naan Kadavul, a long-in-production Tamil effort that seems to have preferred to work only with single-named talent.  The director is known simply as Bala, the lead actor Arya and the lead actress Pooja.  The title translates to I Am God and the film tracks the life of an Aghori, an Indian sect that is rumored to practice cannibalism.  That last bit is key to appreciating the trailer which is dominated by shots of Arya chewing.  And chewing.  And chewing.

Check it out below the break!

Continue Reading "This Man Will Kick Your Ass.  And Then Eat It."...

We’ve been following the progress of Levent Semerci’s Nefes in these pages for well over a year now for one very simple reason:  it looks simply fantastic.  A war drama in the classic style of Platoon or others that balance out drama with action, Semerci’s film tracks the life of a young man from enlistment through to active military service in an active, hostile region - protecting an alpine relay station against extremist and terrorist forces.  Beautifully shot with a good dose of realism ensured by Semerci hiring largely unknown actors, having them trained by retired military officers, and basing the story on the memoirs of actual military servicemen this just looks like potent, raw stuff.

We’ve posted two trailers for the film in the past and a third has just arrived.  Very, very impressive.

Continue Reading "A Third Trailer For Hugely Impressive Turkish War Film NEFES"...

While Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow is soon to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival the film has made a wee stop here at Twitch before arriving in Utah.  How so?  Well, we’ve got two brand new extended clips from the film, both of them featuring English subtitles and one of which features a good dose of the Undead Reich.  The other one’s just got sex.  Here’s how the ‘dancers describe it:

For eight medical students, Easter vacation begins innocently enough. They pack their cars full of ski equipment and enough beer to fuel their escape from everyday life to the snowy, isolated hills outside of Øksfjord, Norway. Once there, they receive a late-night visit from a shady hiker, who tells them a story about Nazi occupation of the area during World War II. After doing their fair share of raping and pillaging, the dreaded battalion faced a brutal and vengeful uprising by the citizens of the town. The soldiers who managed to survive the onslaught, including their dreaded leader Colonel Herzog, were driven into the hills by the angry mob, where they supposedly froze to death, never to be seen again. But if the horror genre has taught us anything, it’s that the raucous behavior and promiscuity of the younger generation always have a way of bringing evil spirits back to life.Director Tommy Wirkola pulls no punches in the carnage department—heads roll, blood flows, and entrails ooze as the young vacationers attempt to make it through the night. Wirkola adeptly utilizes the snow’s eerie and ominous backdrop to its fullest extent while orchestrating this wickedly gory, yet somehow delightful, tale of Nazi zombie terror.

Check the new clips plus the original trailers below the break!

Continue Reading "Beware The Nazi Snow Zombies!  Two New Clips From DEAD SNOW!"...

This edition of our weekly Twitch Video Player Salutes… was written in the past, a few days prior to Christmas Day, when Tom Cruise’s latest film Valkyrie would open. Having that in mind I decided it was appropriate to look back at the early career of mega-star Tom Cruise. [Oh, I could just imagine the ribbing I was going to get for this as I wrote this before leaving on holidays.]

He was a Tom Cruise who was just bursting onto the scene in Hollywood. He was a Tom Cruise that had yet to use the every day couch as a trampoline and ignore the advances of medical science in favor of another [snicker] science. This was Tom before everything went pear shaped. This was innocent Tom. This was pure Tom. This was… Tom Cruise the Younger!

Continue Reading "The Twitch Video Player Salutes Tom Cruise the Younger!"...

The current wave of female focused martial arts films - Fighter (Denmark), Coweb (Hong Kong), Chocolate (Thailand) - now has a Japanese entry in the field.  It’s titled High Kick Girl and the young starlet is Rina Takeda.  Like the others Takeda can really fight, in this case the discipline of choice being karate. The first teaser has just arrived on the scene and, yes, she kicks rather high.  Check it below the break.

Continue Reading "Quite Possibly The Most Aptly Titled Film Ever Now Has An Equally Apt Teaser."...

Oh, this makes Todd a happy boy.  Though I really love Norway’s Kristoffer Joner in straight drama - the man is not considered one of the region’s very best for nothing, after all - I have always thought that the man is particularly well suited to genre film.  Joner has a sort of washed out, wan, everyman quality to him that allows a smart director to play just about anything off of him, a quality Pal Sletaune put to stunning use in 2005’s Naboer (Next Door).  Joner hasn’t done genre since but he’s back into the fold now - and back in a big way - playing the lead in Pål Øie’s Skjult (Hidden).

Kai Knutsen fled through the woods, from his crazed mother 20 years ago. Now the woman he hated more than anything on earth is dead, and he has inherited the house in the forest. It has a cruel secret.

The first teaser for this has just arrived and it is a pretty compelling stew of stuff.  The haunted house factor is definitely in full force, as is an element of survival horror plus a healthy does of psych-thriller, all of it beautifully shot and constructed.  Yes, please.  Check the teaser out below the break.

Continue Reading "Kristoffer Joner Returns To Horror With SKJULT (HIDDEN)"...

Director Shinpei Hayashiya raised more than a few eyebrows a few years back with the trailer for Deep Sea Monster Reigo, his throwback tribute to classic Japanese kaiju - giant monster - films.  The trailer for Reigo got fans all in a tizzy and then the film was held up by lengthy production delays and generally slammed by those who saw it for a host of budget related shortfalls and some dodgy CGI.  But that hasn’t stopped Hayashiya from going back to the well with Deep Sea Monster Raiga in which his creature takes to the land for some serious stomping.  The first teaser has come out and impresses with its sense of authenticity - this could be a vintage Toho film - but the real hook is a brilliant nod to the big G himself.  I won’t say more than that, just check it out.  The teaser is below the break.

Continue Reading "Shinpei Hayashiya Says “Please Godzilla, Don’t Sue Me!”"...

We first wrote about Zak Forsman’s Heart Of Now all the way back in March, struck by a promotional reel for the film released at the time.  Forsman is one of the organizing forces behind Sabi Pictures, a sort of film collective that shoots heavily improvised and workshopped films Dogme style, high on intimacy and incredibly striking visually.  Forsman’s previous short, I F-cking Hate You, was a fantastic bit of work - dead solid emotionally while also being very funny, while also proving that adherence to the Dogme rules is now reason for your film to look bad because despite being all hand held and naturally lit, this thing looked amazing.  And now here comes most of that crew with a feature length effort ...

“Heart of Now” concerns a young woman (Marion Kerr) with a profound longing for a sense of family. Devastated by her boyfriend’s sudden withdrawal from their relationship, Amber’s circumstance thrusts her back into the presence of the father-figure (Kelly McCracken) that abandoned her and her dying mother nearly a decade ago. Amber confronts the deeper issues at the very heart of her suffering, and finds transcendence in a brief moment at the very heart of now.

Check the trailer out below the break.

Continue Reading "First Proper Trailer For Zak Forsman’s HEART OF NOW"...

It’s been a while since ICeland’s first and only Oscar nominated feature director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson released a film, his last being Niceland in 2004. Since then he’s been producing mostly, titles like Guy X, Beowulf and Grendel and most recently Baltasar Kormakur’s Reykjavik Rotterdam. He has how ever been filming a documentary on the down low that will be released next January here in Iceland and is about a woman’s search for answers about her son’s autism called Sunshine Boy.

Autism is a strange disease which affects each person differently, it can completely shut a person down or transform him/her in to a some sort of genius. Did you know for instance that NASA is the largest employer of autistic individuals in the US? Why? Because they are incredible problem solvers and mathematicians. Can you imagine that individuals that most people would label “retarded” or mentally ill are the ones that put people in to outer space?
Most of today technology is designed by autistic people, it’s even thought that Albert Einstein was autistic. The problem is that despite our medical knowledge we are not really sure what causes autism or how to treat it. There are different schools of thought on this subject but this film focuses on how to get in touch with the persons trapped inside their bodies.

A english subtitled trailer has been released so you all can take a gander and it’s after the break.

Continue Reading "Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Sunshine Boy trailer"...

Around this time lat year I was raving about a Russian short film titled The Collector and its director, Egor Abramenko.  Abramenko showed huge promise with his short, so much so that I happily brought the film to these shores for some festivals that I was working with and compared the icy precision of his compositions to Korea’s Park Chan Wook.  It’s high praise, I know, but Abramenko deserved it.  And now he’s back, joined once again by The Collector actors Yaroslav Zhalnin and Natalia Rusinova. 

The film is titled Polaroid Love, a half hour short that mines very different territory than The Collector - this is more of a quiet drama - but is no less impressive.  In fact, the film has already won a trio of awards at the VGIK Film Festival - Best Actor, Bet Editing and Best Production.  Abramenko has made a complete, English subtitled version available online and we’ve got it below the break.

Continue Reading "THE COLLECTOR’s Egor Abramenko Returns With POLAROID LOVE"...

Masatoshi Nagase is one of the great unsung heroes of Japanese film, a hugely reliable character actor with seemingly unerring taste in projects who - despite a huge body of work - remains largely unknown by name.  Tell people that you’ve got a new movie starring Masatoshi Nagase and you’ll probably get mostly blank looks.  Tell them you’ve got a new movie with the guy from Funuke Show Some Love You Losers, Sakuran, The Hidden Blade, and the Mike Hama films - in which he plays the titular detective - and then you’re on to something.

And now Nagase stars with Koji Yakusho in Gelatin Silver, Love, the much awaited debut feature from acclaimed still photographer Kazumi Kurigami.  Nagase plays a photographer hired by Yakusho to follow a hired killer played by the beautiful Rie Miyazawa.  I’ve been checking the website for this one a few times every week for the past couple months and today was finally rewarded with the first trailer for the picture.  The verdict?  It looks just as good as you’d expect coming from a high profile photographer.  Very nice.  Check it below the break.

Continue Reading "Masatoshi Nagase Stars In GELATIN SILVER, LOVE"...

Yep, we say farewell to Christmas with the first teaser for Phil Claydon’s Lesbian Vampire Killers.  It’s brief but you can’t really expect them to show it all off this far before the March release, now can you?  I’ve seen significantly more of the film than what’s included in this teaser and from what I’ve seen yes, it absolutely does live up to the title.  And as this makes clear they very definitely know what sort of film they’ve made.  Check it below the break!

Continue Reading "It’s Monday Morning.  Time For Some LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS."...

A couple years back Quebecois director Erik Canuel made a big splash here in Canada with his action comedy Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a film that skewered language relations here in Canada but did so in such an engaging way that it became a huge hit not only in his native Quebec but also across English speaking Canada - a rare occurrence since Canadian films hardly ever get significant theatrical releases in the English speaking territories of the country and French Canadian films even less so.  And now Canuel is back, with his latest feature - the much darker, but still comedic Cadavres - due to release in February.

Cadavres is a tragicomedy about the deadly feelings that unite a brother and sister who have nothing in common. Raymond is a jealous, misanthropic couch potato. Angèle is a sexy TV starlet, childish and disillusioned. One Halloween, their mother, Solange, suddenly dies. Raymond calls his sister for the first time in 10 years. Against all expectations, she agrees to meet him and launches an investigation into their mother’s death, in keeping with her role as a police commissioner on TV. But nothing is ever simple with the Marchildons. What with Raymond’s dithering, and the ghost of Solange haunting her children, and Angèle going crazy receiving guests who are as bizarre as they are bothersome – not to mention the bodies piling up in the basement—it’s hard to maintain a dignified composure. But then again, things were always slightly twisted in the Marchildon household.

I’m not quite sure how to describe the visual mix in this but it looks simply fantastic and since we’ve got the trailer and a clip below the break I don’t really need to, now do I?

Continue Reading "Erik Canuel Returns With CADAVRES!"...

It aint showing a whole lot more than the previous teasers but a fresh - and slightly longer - teaser for the live action adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga MW has just arrived online.  And for those who only know Tezuka as the creator of the classic Astroboy, well, you’re in for a surprise because this is darker stuff by far.

What’s it about?  Here’s how Nippon Cinema summarized:

When a top secret chemical compound called MW infects an island near Okinawa, the military is sent in to kill all the victims and cover up the incident. A survivor named Michio Yuki (Hiroshi Tamaki) grows up to become a highly-successful banker, but he is slowly being driven mad by the effects of MW. After committing a series of ruthless crimes to get revenge against the people responsible for the cover-up, he decides that the only way to truly get revenge is to unleash MW on the world and exterminate the entire human race.

Continue Reading "A Fresh Teaser For The Live Action Adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s MW"...