Well, I was out sick yesterday… I’m pretty sure I can’t blame the movies that we watched Tuesday night, but it is tempting.
The first one was a Gary Daniels vehicle named “Fatal Blade.” Now, having seen “Black Friday” we had high hopes for a similar stinker… In that respect we were kinda disappointed, since the movie was pretty decent. The initial pacing was glacial, and by the end all of the plot strings were tangled into a hideous morass, but the action scenes were quite good and it actually had pretty decent production values. It does have some great clips though, including a pause in the middle of the climactic fight when the Yakuza assassin asks Gary Daniel’s L.A. Cop “What the hell are you doing here?” in Japanese and he replies, “I have no idea what you just said.”
The second movie was the killer… It was a “Mothra” rip-off called “Gappa: The Triphibian Montsers!” The plot was absolutely faithful to the standard formula: Scientists employed by greedy rich man steal infant monster from primitive island and release it after the parents stomp all over Japan. And it was bad… I won’t get into the details here, but the company that did this film tried to ride the coattails of Toho studios and failed utterly. They just didn’t have the same… I dunno, ‘magic.’ Plus their rubber-suit technology was years behind their competition.