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Yeoh, Rothrock Beat the EVIL to a Pulp! “Yes, Madam!” reviewed! (88 Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Yes, Madam!” on Blu-ray from 88 Films!

Hong Kong’s Inspector Ng and Scotland Yard’s Inspector Carrie Morris reluctantly join forces to solve the murder of an undercover British national on the verge of exposing a fraudulent real estate contract helmed by crooked businessman Mr. Tin.  When a small piece of key case evidence, a microfilm, winds up in the bumbling hands of three low-level thieves after coincidently robbing the undercover British agent’s hotel room, they find themselves at a crossroads; do they give up the kill-for microfilm to the police in the name of self-preservation or ransom it against Mr. Tin’s syndicate for a big payday?  The elusive Mr. Tin becomes enemy number one in Ng and Morris’s crosshairs despite his circumventing the law.  Not deterred by the failed arrest, the tough as nails inspectors track down the microfilm thieves to make their case and take down by force one of Hong Kong’s most powerful criminal organizations.  

An accelerating knockaround action-comedy from Corey Yuen (“Ninja in the Dragon’s Den,” “The Transporter”), “Yes, Madam!” is a fight-heavy, female-driven super cop emprise with martial arts daggers drawn and slicked in a vigorously lubed burlesque dark comedy.  The 1985 Hong Kong production, penned by Barry Wong (“Hard Boiled”) and James Clouse, as his sole credit, teams an unlikely and highly skilled, international partnership between a twosome of type A personalities who not only initially combat each other and then the unscrupulous bad guys and their mischievous plans but also against the historically prejudiced gender role reversals outside the borders of the story.  Action-packed choreography mixed with slapstick comedy, “Yes, Madam!” is entertainingly fun to watch and hard-hitting, produced by stuntman Sammo Hung (“Long Arm of the Law”) and film’s costar John Sham (“Royal Warriors”) and along with Sammo Hung, executive producer Sir Dickson Poon develops “Yes, Madam!” under their cofounded martial arts and action feature producing D&B Films.

If you’re ever looking for a celebrity roots film, a launching pad feature of success, “Yes, Madam!” has that inner circle, star-studded power and deliverance that not only showcases the beginnings of two presently well-known action and martial art film women but also joins the East with the West in a singular chop-socky fracas.  Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), credited as Michelle Khan, and black belt martial arts competitor and World Champion Cynthia Rothrock (“China O’Brien,” “Tiger Claws”) explode to the thousandth degree on screen as apex inspectors forced to work together to take down crime boss Mr. Tin (James Tien, “Fist of Fury”).  They’re fast, they’re ferocious, they’re incredibly talented in what could be considered their debut principal performances, especially Rothrock in her first feature film in which she doesn’t speak an ounce of either of the native Hong Kong’s Cantonese or Mandarin dialects.  Yeoh and Rothrock are top dog heroines in a yard full of marginal, blundering thieves caught in the middle of a grander operation.  Under incognito with pain reliever aliases are actor-producer John Sham (“Winners & Sinners”) as Strepsil, Hoi Mang (“Zu:  Warriors from the Magic Mountain”) as Aspirin, and Hark Tsui (“Working Class”) as Panadol and though they act like, and sort of resemble, the Three Stooges, the three thieves and counterfeiters embody a mutual brotherhood with background history and a all-for-one, one-for-all attitude as their minor caper turns into a full collapse of their con game.  Characters and performances are all over the board between the various groupings in the melee but does weirdly gel together in an artificial way toward a poignant culmination collision of what’s just and unjust that destroys, and unites, friendships and bonds.  “Yes, Madam” rounds out the cast with Melvin Wong, Wai Shum, Eddie Maher, Michael Harry, and Dick Wei (“Five Deadly Venoms”) and Fat Chung (“To Hell with the Devil”) as Mr. Tin’s nonpareil sub-bosses. 

Barreling along from the very beginning of an armored car hijacking turned into a bloody shootout to the grand finale that pageants the marvelous, born-for-this skill of Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock as they plow down foes with acrobatic fists and kicks galore, “Yes, Madam” doesn’t dwindle as a debut disappointment but rather is a tour de force of destruction, drollery, and delictum prevention.  Outlandish at times, of course, with a story slightly straying off course here and there but that feverishly, cyclonic filmmaking condenses to being nothing new or novel for the reputably fast-paced, churn-them-out style of Hong Kong cinema and palpable fighting is taken to a whole new level of ouch and woah.  Multiple takes from various angles equates to the stunts being depressed continuously onto the repeat button, solidifying prolific editor Peter Cheung (“Ready to Rumble,” “Mr. Vampire”) as one of the best in the business, globally, to manage the multiple strands of film and make a coherent and entertaining yarn out of the celluloid chaos.  The crux of the kerfuffle isn’t delineated well enough to justify and muster this kind of police force and exaggerated villainy but the theme majority inside the broadly cartoonish veneer is mostly about respecting the girl boss and grasping friendship that has been taken for granted, dipped in a furiously candy-coated rouse of visually exciting stimulation. 

88 Films adds “Yes, Madam!” into their U.S. distribution cache with a new, well-curated Blu-ray release.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 presented 2K scanned and restored feature has the original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 in the Hong Kong cut. Beautifully diffused and vibrant color, there’s no hue deficiency under this well-lit production, restored to nicely detail skin tones and textures in every aspect of the lighting. No issues with compression during the rapid-fired sequence cells, such as aliasing or ghosting, and black levels are solid albeit there’s not a ton, if any, negative space to experience as even the night shots are illuminated in a “moon” diffusion. Delineation reflects a deepened background contrasted against foreground objects, creating ideal space between objects in what is mostly a close quartered, hand-to-hand combat with only a handful of medium, medium-long shots to make the scenes more realistic than choreographed on a wider frame. Two audio options encoded are the original Cantonese DTS-HD 2.0 mono and an English DTS-HD 5.1, both use ADR dialogue which incurs only minor negative separation and synch between actor and script. Cantonese track fairs slightly better with the native tongue but much like the story’s brisk pace, vocals are also quick as a whip and often times outpace the lips. What’s interesting about “Yes, Madam!’ is the score which is credited to Romeo Díaz (“A Chinese Ghost Story”) but samples much of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” in tense moments. “Halloween” comes through so prominently that it shadows and hurts Díaz’s own work, if any of it exists. Ambience tracks work with the grain with some of the fighting emphasized for chop-socky effect. English subtitles synch fine and have scribed errorfree. Product special features an audio commentary by Frank Djeng on the Hong Kong cut, a new interview with star Cynthia Rothrock, Rothrock and Djeng also provide select scene commentary, a new interview with Mang Hoi who played Aspirin, archive interview with Michelle Yeoh, an archive Battling Babes featurette, and with the Hong Kong trailer rounding things out. New action-packed compositional artwork from graphic designer Sean Langmore graces the primary cover art with original artwork on the reverse side. The disc art is pressed to promenade the two female actresses and there is nothing across the way in the insert clips. The region A playback release has a runtime of 93 minutes and is listed as not rated.

Last Rites: There’s nothing more to say other than “Yes, Madam!” A top-notch, assertive action film starring two worldclass women in the fighting subgenre who stir in the cool and the kickass with silky, smooth ease.

“Yes, Madam!” on Blu-ray from 88 Films!

Re-Electrifying a Dead Cop to Stop EVIL! “The Blue Jean Monster” reviewed! (88 Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Click Here to Purchase “The Blue Jean Monster” available on Blu-ray!

Soon-to-be first-time dad Tsu Hsiang can’t wait to meet his son.  Often times, his cop vocation intrudes on being there for his wife during her pregnancy as his torn between work and family, trying to be a good man in both regards, but when a tip comes through of a suspected bank robbery, Hsiang can’t neglect his duty and pursues the thieves in a high speed and gun-blazing chase that ends in his death as a construction site pile of steel rebar crushes him during the arrest.  His corpse left under the rebar overnight, a storm causes a transformer to fall on top of him and a cat providing a mystical lifeforce.  The electrical currents course through his dead body, reanimating him with the superhuman strength and invulnerable to pain, but with a cost as Tsiang is slowly rotting away, unable to heal or enjoy any of his senses.  Tsiang also has to recharge his body with electrical volts direct to body in order to continue being reanimated.  With time running out, the cop’s two goals are to meet his unborn child and to capture the gang responsible for him becoming an undead monster. 

While “The Blue Jean Monster” is not the eminent representation of comedy-action with elements of science fictional horror to come out of the Hong Kong movie industry, the early 90’s Category III film does rank high marshalling an entertaining “Dead Heat” (1988) interpretation for Eastern audiences.  The sophomore film of director Ivan Lai, aka Kai-Ming Lai, (“Daughter of Darkness,” “The Peeping Tom”) and the last script credit for Kam-Hung Ng emerges as a bucket list imbroglio of the inexplicable mysticisms at play as well as the good die young but win in the end.  The Jonathan Chow (“Haunted Jail House”) produced film is a coproduction of Golden Harvest Films, Diagonal Pictures, and Paragon Films. 

Not just a mindless killing machine resurrected like an electrified phoenix for revenge and murderous rout, Tsu Hsiang’s rebirth out of death arouses complications around fleeting special moments.  Playing exactly his profile of a mid-30-year-old is the late “Her Vengeance” and “The Killer” actor Fui-on Shing as a cop torn between life and death, literally.  Struggling to comprehend what’s happened to him, Tsu Hsiang has no time to explore the root cause; instead, Hsiang instantly moves forward, learning on the fly, his newfound postmortem powers of invulnerability, immense strength, and to be exasperated right into a pale-eyed version of the angry Hulk.  Shing’s duality on levity and fierce cleaves “The Blue Jean Monster” into its well-intended multifaceted of genres with soft buttery ease.  Shing’s square jaw and large frame doesn’t quell the lighter touch he brings an even softer side to Tsu Hsiang with his intake of Power Steering (Wai-Kit Tse, “Mr. Vampire 1992”), a street nickname for a former hooligan took under Hsiang’s wing after killing his father, in a supposed criminal altercation gone awry.  Power Steering best friend Gucci (“Gloria Yip, “Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky”) becomes the primary target for the gang as she inadvertently becomes a hostage and winds up with the thieves’ hard stolen loot.  The circular, trifold connection between Hsiang, the troublesome young acquaintances, and the gang, helmed by Japanese actor Jun Kunimura (“Audition”) creates double edged complications Hsiang has to juggle and manage while being undead and a soon-to-be father.  Mei-yee Wu, Bei-Dak Lai, and “Mr. Vampire’s” Siu-Fung Wong playing Fui-on Shing’s wife Chu along with “Sex and Zen” star Amy Yip as the lustfully bosomed Death Ray, a gay man conversion therapy seductress, fill out the cast. 

The 1991 film has fast-paced action, politically incorrect humor, and spectacular physical and hand-drawn visual effects.   “The Blue Jean Monster” relied heavily on the skill of the cast and crew to elevate a staggering, fast-and-loose story that barely bridges gaps of its presaged plot holes.  There’s also some fast-and-loose editing slips that expose oversights, such as reused unmasking scene of Jun Kunimura’s head robber and showing five members of a five-member gang huddled behind a flipped van in a scene that was supposed to be sans Kunimura as his character was chasing after Gucci and the money through a construction zone.  Yet, “The Blue Jean Monster” is too enjoyable, too funny, and too drop-dead neat that any and all flaws can be written off as negligible.  Heedless humor encapsulates an antiquated way of thinking that shapes “The Blue Jean Monster” into a time bygone novelty.  When Tsu and Power Steering are suspected gay lovers, as they’re physically intertwined in electrocution to recharge Tsu undeadness, and AIDs becomes the center of the joke, casually tossed in a handful of times even by the brief portrayal of two colorfully sweater-wearing, feminine-displayed men wanting nothing to do with Tsu and Power Steering’s misperceived actions for fear of the deadly virus.  That just epitomizes the slapstick wackiness this not typical but warranted Cat III feature that transfixes with a lot of borderline insensitive satire kneaded into the modish action and special effects of every other Hong Kong film in a saturated market. 

“The Blue Jean Monster” takes over United States and North America courtesy of the UK distributor 88 Films, through MVD Visual from the Fortune Star Media Limited catalogue, with a new AVC encoded, 1080p high definition, Blu-ray.  The BD50 comes top of the line within the limits of the format with a bitrate decoding the original aspect ratioed widescreen 1.85:1 presented and newly restored 2K scanned film an average of at or just under 35Mbps.  Nearly being a non-issue coinciding with a pristine original print, the dual layer disc offers plenty of breathing room to display “The Blue Jean Monster’s’ range of motion, sufferable color palette, painted composite effects, and masterstrokes in lighting a fast-paced pressing without the blight of artefacts.  A few darker scenes are not as rich because of compositional effects but still render significantly with detail under a slightly more penetrating grain.  The overall grain naturally infuses with the 35mm print and translates nicely to a transferred digital scan.   The original, uncompressed Cantonese LPCM 2.0 mono track is the sole offering that, in truth, is all this comical, cosmic caper needs with agreeable action Foley and ambience and some looney absurdity tacked on for good measure.  None of the assortment ever sounds pressed and squished through the single channel suggesting a pretty clean, well-kempt sound design from over the years.  ADR dialogue favors less spatial position but that’s expected with 90’s Hong Kong cinema and is also well-preserved in its fidelity with a clear and damage free recording.  English subtitles are optionally available.  This special edition includes a new interview with assistant director Sam Leong Man Made Monster, the original Hong Kong trailer, and image gallery.  The limited-edition set comes with reflective and glistening slipcase sheathing the same but lusterless composite illustration, artwork created by James Neal.  Inside the green Amaray Blu-ray case, the reverse side of the cover art sports the original Hong Kong one sheet illustration stretching both ends, inferring nearly all the action and characters in the story, along with a doubled-sided cardboard poster of the reversible cover art.  The not rated release comes region locked on A and B and has a runtime of 96 minutes.

Last Rites: If a fan of “Dead Heat,” “The Blue Jean Monster” can prolong the action-caffeinated, narcotized high with supercharged unrest, necropsy humor, and the walking, talking, inexplicable undead in another stellar package and quality release from 88 Films!

Click Here to Purchase “The Blue Jean Monster” available on Blu-ray!

EVIL Has the Right to Remain Dead! “Magic Cop” reviewed! (88 Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

No Two-Bit Magician In ‘Magic Cop” on Blu-ray!  

Hong Kong cops are confounded by a chaotic drug bust when learning that their female suspect, who had managed to overpower an entire unit of male officers and even take a bullet ambling deadpan into the streets, had died 7 days prior.  An outlying officer, and practicing Taoist, Uncle Feng is called to Hong Kong to not only quickly solve the narcotic crime but also investigate the unnatural properties of the case.  Feng is accompanied by his city eager niece Lin and two Hong Kong cops, a Taoist devotee and skeptic of Ancient Chinese spiritual mythologies.  Together, they track the drug trail to The Sorceress, a Japanese witch with powers that rival Feng and that can resurrect the dead into zombies and vampires to do her bidding, such as trafficking narcotics.  When the investigation closes in her business, The Sorceress and her right arm, skilled fighter plan to remove the only man worthy of stopping her.

Fans of Ricky Lau’s “Mr. Vampire” will once again be amazed and entertained by the fantastical and mystical action of Stephen Tung Wai’s “Magic Cop.”  Tung, a fellow martial artist and stunt man who had roles in “The Fatal Flying Guillotine” and John Woo’s “Hard Boiled,” helms his debut directorial penned by Chi-Leung Shum (“Vampire vs Vampire”) and the longtime Stephen Chow script writer Kan-Cheung Tsang (“Shaolin Soccer,” “Kung-Fu Hustle”).  The screenwriting duo brought lighting quick comedy to the mostly fictionally invented yet sprinkled with slivers of hard-pressed veracity and definitive entertaining occultism and what resulted resurrected “Mr. Vampire” semblance out of the being a period piece and into the modern day, backdropped in the year of 1990 when the film was released.  Long rumored to be the fifth sequel of the “Mr. Vampire” franchise, “Magic Cop” is a coproduction between Movie Impact Limited, Millifame Productions Limited, and Media Asia Film with star Ching-Ying Lam producing.

“Magic Cop,” and even “Mr. Vampire,” wouldn’t have such a cult following if it wasn’t for the Vulcan eyebrows and thin mustache of Ching-Ying Lam in costume.  The short-statured, Shanghai-born Lam delivers the same vigorous choreography and tranquil demeanor to this particularly stoic character of Uncle Feng, a Taoist practitioner to essentially wrangle unruly entities and please the spirits in the in-between our world.  Feng is old world and finds himself in surrounded by modernism when in Hong Kong, goaded by the young lead sergeant attached the case.  Practical as well as disrespectful, Sgt. Lam (Wilson Lam, “Ghost for Sale”) epitomizes today’s, or rather back then the 1990’s, modern man who has forgotten tradition and deference to those who came before.  Though padded with a fair amount of comedy coursing throughout, balanced against the impeccably edited tango fight sequences, Sgt’ Lam’s partner, known only as Sgt. 2237 played by “Centipede Horror’s” Kiu-Wai Miu, risibly wants to understudy Uncle Feng’s powers while Feng’s niece Lin, played by Mei-Wah Wong of “The Chinese Ghostbusters,” provides the subtle and quirky opposite sex that catches of the philandering eyes of Sgt. Lam.  The ragtag quartet of influx mindsets and personalities become challenged by their single common goal, to stop whoever is behind breathing life into the formidable dead and stop the unorthodox method of drug smuggling.  Former Japanese bodybuilder Michiko Nishwaki (“City Cops”) embodied that very dark magic antagonist.  Nishiwaki handles The Sorceress character with ease despite not having a surfeit army under her thumb; instead, this forces Nishiwaki to become the entire villain body with the slight, full-contact support for her right-hand bodyguard (Billy Chow, “Future Cops”) and a couple of undead lackeys, including Frankie Chi-Leung Chan of “Riki-Oh.”  “Magic Cop’s” cast rounds out completely with well-versed and seasoned, late actor Wu Ma (“Mr. Vampire,” “Return of the Demon”) as the chief inspector polarized in a complicated history with Uncle Feng.

What director Stephen Tung Wai boils down in essence is another variation of good executants of spirit humbled caretakers versus the wicked necromancers existing inside the fabric of the highly praised and cult-following “Mr. Vampire” universe.  Frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that derivativity since Ching-Ying Lam, Mr. Vampire himself, produces and stars as the titular hero.  Lam can conjure whatever-the-hell he wants in order to battle Hell itself.   “Magic Cop” is also a well-made, entertaining story, balanced between the contest wizardry, slapstick comedy, and the character dynamics, and stacked with improbable yet gratifying step-intensive fight orchestration that has gawked early martial arts films a wonder to behold and continues to do so to today but now trickles with pizzazz more-after-more due to put in place industry safety measures.  “Magic Cop” contains that lost art of potentially hazardous palatable physicality that beguiles more than the movie’s faux magic exhibited on screen.  To add to the authenticity, very little painted composited visual effects were used with makeup and the actors doing much of the heavy lifting with the editing team of Ting-Hung Kuo and Kee Charm Wu in full cut-and-paste fortifying mode to button up each sequence with comprehendible continuity of each punch, kick, and magical chopsocky.  One overtone made well known in “Magic Cop” is the unfillable chasms between old and new, respect and disrespect, and myth and science from whence solves no problems until some unified common ground can be reached in order to succeed, in this case, to stop a bitch of a witch.    

An age-resistance 35mm print scanned onto a buffed 2K Blu-ray that extracts the best print elements to-date. The AVC encoded, 1080p, Blu-ray presents Stephen Tung Wai’s picture in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. A fine-tooth comb through the celluloid couldn’t unveil any major issue with the 88 Films release. Colors are richly grafted within the sabulous surfaces that are exceedingly defined with delimited, shadow-creating depth. Decoding speeds average around 35Mbps on a BD50, securing categorical choiceness amongst other releases and formats (that is until the potential 4K release). The release comes packed with four audio options to explore: The original Cantonese DTS-HD master audio 2.0 mix, a Cantonese DTS-HD 2.0 home video mix, an English DTS-HD 5.1 master audio dub, and an English DTS-HD 2.0 dub. Between the variated audio mixes, we preferred the original Cantonese DTS-HD 2.0 due to its cadence with the image and welcoming exactness through the lossless compression process. You can make do with the other three options, but the fidelity is much better with the original mix and only anti-subtitle sectarians would be pleased with an English dub. English subtitles are optional and synch well the dialogue but be prepared to speed read as the pacing is quick much like the dialect. Software special features include an audio commentary with Hong Kong film experts Frank Djeng and Marc Walkow, an alternate, standard definition Taiwanese cut of the film with alternate score, an interview with director Stephen Tung Wai, image gallery, and trailer. Endowed with a limited-edition, cardboard slipcover, the dark green Blu-ray snapper has newly illustrated, front cover artwork by Manchester graphic designer and 88 Films resident artist Sean Longmore, which is also on the cardboard O-slip. The reversible cover art has a reproduction of the original Hong Kong poster art. Stuffed in the insert is a mini-folded poster of Longmore’s front cover and a disc art, a scene moment captured in spherical rotunda, of the opening sequence. Available with a regional playback limited to A and B, the 88 Films release is not rated and has a runtime of 88 minutes. ‘Magic Cop, perhaps, wasn’t the sole proprietor of influence but certainly had a black talisman plying hand in the substrata of more Western favorites like “Big Trouble in Little China” and is a crucial cornerstone in representing the best of the Hong Kong Golden Age of cinema.

No Two-Bit Magician In ‘Magic Cop” on Blu-ray!