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Guilty Pleasure – Tekken

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  • Title: Tekken
  • IMDb: link

Tekken movie reviewThrowback Tuesday takes us back to 2009’s adaptation of the Tekken video game franchise. Set in a dystopian 2039, the film follows Jin Kazama (Jonathan Patrick Foo) enter the Iron Fist tournament after the death of his mother (Tamlyn Tomita) where he’ll face off against the likes of Marshall Law (Cung Le), Miguel Caballero Rojo (Roger Huerta), Yoshimitsu (Gary Ray Stearns), and Bryan Fury (Gary Daniels) while hoping to kill the man he blames for his mother’s death Heihachi Mishima (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa).

Tekken is a throwaway action flick that offers some fun while it focuses on the tournament and Jin’s journey. Sure, it gets a bit lost when Kazuya Mishima (Ian Anthony Dale) begins screwing with the tournament in order to kill Jin before he has a chance to win, revealing the truth about Jin’s parentage in the process, but there’s plenty of dumb fun to go around and we get Kelly Overton looking as good as humanly possible as the flirtatious Christie Monteiro, along with Candîce Hillebrand and Marian Zapico as the Williams sisters and Mircea Monroe as Jin’s girlfriend.

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Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time

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  • Title: Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
  • IMDb: link

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time movie reviewThe long-delayed final film in the Rebuild of Evangelion film series wraps up the story of Shinji Ikari (Megumi Ogata / Spike Spencer), looming angels, and the end of the world. The film finally sees the light of day more than eight years after the release of the last movie.

As with the other feature film adaptations of the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time is beautiful, bizarre, at times haunting, and often confusing. It’s certainly a step-up from the third, and weakest, entry into the franchise, although it does have to work extra hard while relying on quite a bit of monologuing to wrap up the tale.

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Batman: The Long Halloween (Part Two)

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  • Title: Batman: The Long Halloween (Part Two)
  • IMDb: link

Batman: The Long Halloween (Part Two) DVD reviewBatman: The Long Halloween (Part Two) concludes the two-part adaptation of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale‘s thirteen-issue maxi-series. Part Two races through the remainder of the story with more villains, more holidays, flashbacks to a young Bruce Wayne, the birth of Two-Face (Josh Duhamel), and (when it remembers to get around to it) the final unmasking of the Holiday killer. The adaptation takes a more definitive approach to Gilda (Julie Nathanson), playing off the heavy foreshadowing from Part One.

The movie jumps around a bit, and with so much focus on Bat-villains such as Poison Ivy (Katee Sackhoff) and Scarecrow (Robin Atkin Downes) who both put Batman out of action for a bit (seriously, Batman gets his ass handed to him quite a bit here), the actual Holiday mystery gets buried. The script also dives into a bit more of the mobster plot, and its ties to the Wayne family, along with the reveal of Catwoman‘s (Naya Rivera) interest in the Falcone family.

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Big Doll House

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  • Title: Big Doll House
  • IMDb: link

Big Doll House movie reviewThrowback Tuesday takes us back to 1971’s Big Doll House. Produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman, the film kicked-off a jungle subset of the women-in-prison genre starring Judith Brown, Roberta Collins, Pam Grier, Brooke Mills, Pat Woodell, and Gina Stuart as inmates in a prison of an unnamed tropical country run by an evil warden (Christiane Schmidtmer) and overseen by the Nazi-like torturer Lucien (Kathryn Loder). Collins, Grier, and Brown would all return for the similarly themed Women in Cages released the same year.

Pushing the boundaries of what was allowed in the loosened ratings of the time, the independent film follows the basic format of the exploitation genre putting the women in various compromising positions guaranteed to get their clothes off such as strip searches, group shower scenes, catfights (one even in mud), lesbian and bondage scenes, and torture. We also get a revolution and escape plot, which would become part of the sub-genre, culminating in the group’s attempt to escape the prison during the movie’s climax. Although not the main character, the film is notable for launching Grier’s career in this genre and blaxploitation films.

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Summer of Soul

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  • Title: Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
  • IMDb: link

Summer of Soul movie reviewIn the same summer as Woodstock, the Harlem Cultural Festival held a series of concerts to celebrate African American music and culture. The more than 40 hours of concert footage has been sitting around for decades and now can finally be seen.

Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson weaves the performances together with a cultural narrative and interviews from surviving performers and attendees. Along with the numerous great performances, Summer of Soul also captures the immense crowds present at the events only to see the concert be lost to time. Until now.

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