Friday, July 30, 2010

Jason goes to Holehead--Closing Night

It's over, feels like it took forever. Don't know what I'll do now...oh, hey, Jewfest is already half over.

But first, three movies last night

First up, Holehead ended how it started...literally, with DEATH KAPPA. Okay, some background--a kappa is a friendly Japanese goblin with a turtle-shell back, a plate on his head, and an insatiable hunger for cucumbers. Seriously. In the first half of the movie, a singer returns to her home town, where immediately a gang of drunk-driving teens kills her grandmother and knocks a kappa mummy into the ocean, where it comes back to life. The girl and the kappa become friends, as her grandmother was the keeper of the Kappa. But she can't stop the psycho Japanese neo-imperialists bent on taking over the world with an army of fish-mutant soldiers cloned from the skin of the mummified kappa. And they end up nuking the world. And then it becomes a completely different movie, with a Godzilla knock-off attacking the city, until a giant, red-eyed death kappa shows up, defeats the monster, and starts attacking the city itself. And it's ridiculously cheesy--intentionally and obviously using toys on strings as the aircraft attacking a man in a suit. The giant cucumber scene and the death of the reporter are hilarious. And then some bad singing and it ends. Wow. And I didn't even mention the disturbingly white professor who explains this all. All this needed was random inserts of Random Burr walking through rubble.

So then more Japanese weirdness with the reprise of the opening night film, MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD. It seems some people (for some reason, mostly girls) are really a race of mutants with different "treasures"--weapons integrated into their body like ass-chainsaws or boob-swords (I think a lot of the movie was written by rolling a pair of dice--one with body parts and one with weapons). And they're led by a psycho with a phallic belly-sword who's bent on destroying all humans. Our hero (who until her powers manifest on her 16th birthday was the victim of school bullies) still holds some allegiance to humans, and so has to fight the mutants (with the help of two friends), save the humans, and usher in an era of peace. Or something, it's just a crazy excuse for mutant fighting, and it's awesome. Although I have to say enough--Holehead has overdone it on Japanese weirdness this year (MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD, DEATH KAPPA, ALIEN VS NINJA, ROBOGEISHA, SAMURAI PRINCESS, VAMPIRE GIRL VS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL). Given that, MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD was near the best of the bunch (the best was ALIEN VS NINJA).

And finally the festival ended with the most charismatic introduction ever (everyone else ran off somewhere, so I stepped up to introduce it) and a silly bit of fluff from Hong Kong, FUTURE X-COPS. Andy Lau stars as a cop in a Utopian future where Dr. Masterson has invented a solar energy system that makes fossil fuels obsolete. Problem is, the oil companies don't take it lying down, and try to assassinate him. The cops have a good bead on them, though, and even the toughest cyborgs can't get to him, although they do kill Andy's wife. And then, with little explanation, they steal a time travel machine to go back and kill Dr. Masterson as a kid (where have I heard that idea before?) So Andy travels back, with his own cyborg body, sets up a life in the past, and tracks them down. Only one rule--he can't change the past by doing something stupid like falling in love or showing his future technology powers. Oops, he does both. Ya know, I could have just grooved to the silly plot, which is derivative but gleefully enough done to enjoy. But the CGI was so awful I literally thought during the opening scene that this was an animated movie with a few human faces pasted in. Bad, bad CGI! Be more realistic!

And that, finally, is the end of Holehead 2010.

Total Running Time: 275 minutes
My Total Minutes: 191,665

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