The Chairman (1969)

There seems a bit of the old "yellow peril" in this film where Gregory Peck travels to China to try and find an experimental enzyme that could revolutionise agriculture and thus make Chairman Mao's China unstoppable of course...

What Peck doesn't know is that US, Soviet and UK intelligence have a rather nefarious double plan, they've implanted a bomb in his head and hope to kill Mao too. Although the film is named "The Chairman" Mao only has a single scene in the film.

It is a ridiculous film full of stereotypes though Communist China was a rather closed and mysterious society at the time so i guess we can cut them a little bit of slack of that score. As a spy though Peck sometimes makes Bond look realistic and the plot does rely on the "bad guys" being a bit stupid too much.

The worst thing to fault the movie about is that it is a little dull if we are to be honest though certainly worth watching for the cheese value. The late 60s computer technology was cool though.

Blood Money (1991)

Blood Money (also known as The Killers Edge) is an incredible movie... sometimes incredible low quality...

A counterfeiting gang is iced by a rival gang led by Robert Z'dar and cop Wings Hauser leads the investigation.

So that sounds OK huh? The idea of the movie is decent enough (if not terribly original) but problem is the execution is rather poor. The acting and sound shoddy and the less said about some of the camerawork the better.

People get killed by the score and at the drop of a hat, after this film Hauser and Z'dar must have reduced the population of LA by about 20%. The action though isn't that bad, the problem is the film is padded out a bit too much including by some cheap looking Vietnam War flashbacks.

The final showdown is quite bizarre but as the rest of the film makes little sense maybe it's the ending that was required.

Stoner (1974)

Dating back to the early 1970s when Bruce Lee was still fresh in people's minds and kung fu and martial arts was big business worldwide (or at least the current in-thing) comes Stoner, starring George Lazenby. Bruce Lee was apparently originally set to star in this fairly standard but slightly odd film but after his untimely death it was decided to make the film anyway. Angela Mao was bought in as George's co-star. Let the hard kung-fu action begin!

There is a kind of plot, something involving an evil gangster mastermind (who has an excellent rotating desk) creating explosives and drug smuggling in his (evil of course) underground lair but the plot is just a bare frame on which to hang a sequence of pretty excellent fighting set pieces.

The result is undeniably cheesy, fairly confusing but also pretty entertaining. It is a 70s period piece and perhaps nothing that original from the time but worth seeing all the same. After all how many HK kung-fu movies had an ex-James Bond in them?!

My Hero II (1993)

Dicky Cheung plays a comic book writer who has two major problems: 1) his mum is insane 2) his comics are crap. His boss tells him to come back with a good story or else... He then runs into a bona fide triad hoodlum, how better to get inspiration than to watch the real thing? By a strange co-incidence the triad is his neighbour... and has the hots for his mum. 

Singer Vivian Lai is also in the film and has the hots for Dicky, but she remains unfulfilled. Never mind, she can maybe comfort herself that her part in the film probably contains some of the worst acting in history of movies. Perhaps that's why Vivian did not make that many movies...

Dicky gets drawn into the triad world... and ends up the hero of course. And his comic sells huge. Bizarre humour, sometimes hilarious, often just weird and a good lash of violence. Plus a good dollop of fantasy and weirdness... far too much weirdness.

Often the film slips into comic mode with several strange tangents. Its basically a car crash of a movie. You remain on edge watching it, torn between switching it off and destroying the VCD into a billion pieces and continuing to watch this... crime (for that's what it is) onscreen.

Is it worth seeing? I think there is just enough goodness to recommend a viewing, at least just to see how bad some things can be. If you like Vivian Lai as a singer this is worth seeing her on screen on one of her few outings.

Future War (1997)

Future War is my kind of movie: a cheese-fest of badly choreographed action which makes no sense whatsoever.

So Future War, what is it about? A war in the future at a guess. Or is it? There is a revolt aboard a space ship anyway, that counts as the "future" part of the war but a human slave escapes and ends up on present day Earth... though he is being pursued by tyrannosaurs and Robert Z'dar as a cyborg hunter.

The runaway slave is helped by a nun (of course!) The battle for the universe ends up being between future cyborgs and their dinosaur hunters and... a street gang.

Now it may sound totally ridiculous (and it is) but the film is genuinely brilliant. Its hilarious, but most probably not intentionally.

The acting is shoddy, the sets cheap (much of the film seems to take place in an empty cardboard box warehouse) and the effects cheaper (the dinosaurs seem to vary in size for some reason). Its a terrible terrible film. Therefore of course I loved every minute of it. This really is a film you need in your life.