Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Title: Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun, James Wong, Victor Wong

Review:

You guys ever seen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)? That’s the one in which Peter Weller discovers a way to go to other dimensions by traveling through solid matter? Well, anyways, at the ending of that film, a sequel entitled: Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League was promised. Unfortunately, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai didn’t make much money at the box office, so that sequel never came to be. But there’s this myth amongst hard core Buckaroo fans that says that Big Trouble in Little China is actually the unofficial sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. How did this rumor come about? Well, I didn’t know this until the other day when I reviewed The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and one of my readers pointed this fact out to me, but W.D. Richter, the guy who wrote The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai also wrote Big Trouble in Little China. That’s right my friends, these two nutty, misunderstood films come from the same brilliant mind. Kind of makes sense don’t it?

 For those not in the know, Big Trouble in Little China is a ghost story about Lo Pan, an ancient Chinese emperor who died centuries ago but is now looking for a way to become flesh again. Problem is he has to marry a girl with green eyes in order to do so. Enter Wang Chi and Jack Burton, two buddies who are on their way to the airport to pick up Wang’s girlfriend ‘Miao Yin’, a Chinese girl who’s coming from China to reunite with Wang, her fiancé. Unfortunately, before Wang and Miao Yin can reunite she is kidnapped by a group of thugs who work for Lo Pan, the ghost who wants to be a man. Apparently Miao Yin is the girl who can fit his bill. She does have green eyes after all! Will Wang and Jack have what it takes to infiltrate Lo Pan’s temple and rescue Miao Yin before she marries Lo Pan? Will Jack ever get his truck back?  

All he wants is his truck back

I started my review for Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai by comparing both of these films, and I didn’t even know they were related in this way! My brain somehow connected both of these films in the same review, which I think is really weird. So anyhow, in my review for Buckaroo I compared the two because both of these films are so offbeat and bizarre that the studios that produced them just didn’t know how to market them to the masses. These movies are what are known in the film industry as a “tough sell” something that Hollywood doesn’t like at all, they like their films to be easily marketable, with an easily identifiable target audience. Who do you sell a movie like Big Trouble in Little China to? If you ask me I would’ve just sold it as a modern day Kung Fu flick, which it essentially is, but apparently the marketing department at 20^th Century Fox didn’t know what the hell to do with this movie, so they invested very little into promoting it. Another film lost millions because studios couldn’t make heads or tails of the film. Strange how easily a studio can get cold feet with a production because they think it’s too weird and it won’t make any money. But time always proves all these silly producers wrong, and so Big Trouble in Little China has become a solid cult favorite. The people who love this movie, really love this movie. This proves once again that studio heads know jack, they’ll market the hell out of Transformers 2, a terrible film in my opinion, but won’t market Big Trouble in Little China, which was very obviously a good movie.

Truth is, Big Trouble in Little China is an easy movie to love. I’m a huge fan so excuse me if I gush about it for the next few paragraphs.  It has so many fun characters, they can’t seem to ever stop yapping, and the stuff they talk about is just hilarious. I mean, seriously, how many of you folks out there agree that Big Trouble in Little China is one of the most quotable films ever? I know right? In the dvd commentary for this film Carpenter and Russell call Jack Burton’s dialog ‘Burtonisms’ which are basically little golden nuggets of wisdom that the character of Jack Burton spews throughout the whole movie. I’m talking about thought provoking stuff like:  “It’s all in the reflexes” and “You’d have to be some kind of a fool to think we’re all alone in this universe!” Trust me, there’s more where those came from, and if I’m not back in ten minutes “call the president!”  So yeah folks, what we have here is one of those extremely quotable films. I haven’t been quoting this movie all my life for nothing!

Going back to the whole thing about Big Trouble in Little China being an unofficial sequel to Buckaroo Banzai, the real dirt on the story is this:  the film had originally been written as a western by two guys: Gary Goldman (this is one of the guys who wrote the script for Total Recall (1989)) and David Z. Weinstein.  Apparently this version of the film was going to prove to be too expensive! In that script they didn’t steal Jacks truck, they stole his horse! So anyhow, thing is the studio thought it was going to be a tough movie to produce so they brought in W. D. Richter to rewrite the thing, they wanted him to set the story in a contemporary setting, so that audiences could identify better with it; funny how they still managed to produce a film that didn’t connect with audiences! But anyways, W. D. Richter took the opportunity to inject elements into the Big Trouble in Little China script that were meant for the unproduced Buckaroo Banzai sequel! Knowing  this takes my enjoyment of the film to a whole different level! Now I’m always going to see Burton as the truck driving version of Buckaroo Banzai! 

Aside from all these Buckaroo Banzai connections, Big Trouble in Little China is an extremely entertaining movie on its own. What I personally enjoy about it is how crazy it gets. We’re talking about a Chinese ghost that wants to be flesh again so he can rule the universe from beyond the grave, or check into a psycho ward, whichever comes first! We’re talking about a movie where characters can have sword battles in mid air and ancient sorcerers have huge magic battles! This is a film in which we can see flying eye monsters that have telepathic abilities! A film with characters that can manipulate lightning and air! I mean, here’s a film with a ten foot tall ghost who shoots light out his eyes for crying out loud! This my friends, was John Carpenter’s version of a Shaw Bros. Fantasy/ Kung Fu movie and I loved every second of it. There’s no denying it’s an offbeat film, but that’s what I love about it. Even Russell himself was afraid of making it because he was afraid it’d be too weird. You see, Kurt Russell had done a series of box office bombs before Big Trouble in Little China (for example Carpenter’s own The Thing (1982)) and he didn’t want to make another one. Yet, he committed to the film anyways because Carpenter and Russell are not just co-workers, these guys are friends, they’ve been making films since Escape from New York (1981)! Russell and Carpenter understand each other, it’s something that’s quite obvious when you hear the dvd commentary for Big Trouble In Little China. According to both Russell and Carpenter’s commentary, the film was getting great results with tests audiences, so much so that they both thought it was going to be a hit! Unfortunately, thanks to 20^th Century Fox’s botched marketing techniques, no one knew about the film when it was released and so kaput, it died.

But a movie flopping in theaters does not equal a bad film, in rare occasions it’s quite the opposite, the film simply slipped by the public’s consciousness. It’s not our fault that the studio didn’t sell it to us properly, something that’s supposed to be their forte. So anyways, even though Big Trouble in Little China was a huge money looser for the studio, I The Film Connoisseur, guarantee you’ll have a good time with it. Think about this: in what other film are you going to see a underground Chinese temple with glowing neon nights? Or people who become Kung Fu Masters by drinking out of a seven demon bag? Nowhere but in Big Trouble in Little China that’s where! This is a film that openly embraces its fantasy roots and asks no questions about it. We have monsters, magic, and Kung Fu in this movie, what’s not to like? James Wong is great as Lo Pan; a brilliant performance in what in my opinion is the best role of his life. Russell, Cattrall, both of the Wongs and Dunn, they all make for a Motley Crue of crazy, funny, people who all act like they are high on coke, they reminded me of Buckaroo’s group of sidekicks, “ The Hong Kong Cavaliers”, aha! If you ask me, this is one of Carpenter’s best films; production values, visual effects and script wise, this movie is top notch every step of the way. At the very least it’s on my list of top five John Carpenter films.  It shouldn’t have bombed the way it did. But it’s all cool; we now have it on dvd and Blue Ray and it’s legions of fans grow every day. Oh and there’s a possible remake on the horizon! If it doesn’t work, just remember what Jack Burton always says at a time like this. Old Jack always says: “What the hell!”  

Rating:  5 out of 5  

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Title: Prince of Darkness (1987)

Director: John Carpenter

Written by: John Carpenter

Stars: Donald Pleasance, Victor Wong, Alice Cooper, Dennis Dun

Review:

John Carpenter’s career is filled with really high ups and some medium size downs. By this I mean that when Carpenter makes a good movie, it’s a really good movie. And when he doesn’t make them great, they are just “watchable”. For example The Thing (1982), Escape from New York (1981), Halloween (1978) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994) (to name just a few of the really good ones) are all excellent in my book. Unfortunately in between those films Carpenter also made films like Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), Escape from L.A. (1996) and Ghost of Mars (2001), which are some of Carpenters not so great films. In my opinion, they don’t really represent Carpenter at his full potential. Prince of Darkness, the film I’ll be talking about today, falls somewhere in that second category of “not so great” yet watchable Carpenter films. Not great, not horrible, just watchable.

Story is about this group of scientists who are brought together to try and decipher a great mystery that the Catholic Church has been keeping from all of humanity for far too long. You see, the church has a secret sect called “The Brotherhood of Sleep” which has been guarding a container that holds the entity known to all Catholics across the world as the Anti-Christ! Yes my friends were talking about the son of Satan here! The scientists are called in by a priest to try and decipher the mystery behind the container. This container lays hidden deep within the catacombs of an old church in the middle of the city. Little by little the malevolent force within the container starts to exert its evil influence over the small group of scientists. Will the evil contained within escape? Or will the end of civilization as we know it commence?

The main problem for me with this movie is that there is absolutely no pay off. The movie is all build up, build up, build up without a satisfying climax. Basically, the whole movie consists of this group of people being scared of the green slime that swirls inside of a container thing. Supposedly the green slime is the ultimate evil in the universe! The Catholics think it’s the anti-Christ, but the scientists think that it might be alien in origin. One thing is for certain, the green slime does make weird things happen. The green slime escapes the container and turns people into ravenous murderous zombies! It makes homeless people turn into murderers as well! And for some reason, it turns ants into flesh eating creatures! Pretty nifty stuff for a vat of green slime huh?

In Prince of Darkness, there’s always that ominous feeling, like we are going to get to see whatever is inside the container at some point. The characters keep talking about it, they feel the room getting colder, they feel an evil presence, and they keep looking at the container like it’s the most evil thing they have ever seen. After all this build up, I’m expecting something cool because after all, this movie comes to us from John Carpenter, the guy who gave us The Thing! Unfortunately, when the movie is close to finishing and no creature, monster, demon or devil shows up, you feel like you’ve been had. All we get to see of the ultimate evil in the universe is its hand! I’m thinking that Carpenter was trying to make a film in which he could scare you without showing you a whole lot. And that’s a valid notion; unfortunately, the movie feels like a half hearted effort that keeps repeating the same themes all the way to the end. It stretches things to make up for the fact that the story wont go any further!

But I guess for a movie made with a budget of 3 million dollars, this isn’t that bad at all. Carpenter made a deal with a company called “Alive Films” in which he would get to make various films with them, at a budget of 3 million each. He only ended up making two movies for Alive Films: They Live (1988) and Prince of Darkness. This low budget approach that Carpenter took with Alive Films is probably the reason why Prince of Darkness and They Live never truly live up to their full potential. They Live for example is a film about an alien race trying to invade earth, which is really an epic storyline; but keeping true to its low budget nature, the film only reveals the true appearance of the aliens only when they use these special glasses that allow us to see them. And when we do get to see the aliens, its nothing spectacular, they look like bug eyed purple skeletons. A simple yet effective make up effect. The film is deliberately kept at a small scale, and I love that movie for what it is. On Prince of Darkness, we can tell the films story is kept deliberately small because the film is about a container that holds the greatest evil in the universe; yet all the movie gives us is a bunch of scared scientists turning into zombies inside of an old church.

But I don’t want to sound like I absolutely loath this movie because I don’t. I enjoyed the science vs. religion angle. There is always that constant debate of religious myth versus scientific fact. The movie does a good job of mixing the two. Carpenter plays with catholic secrecy on this movie, where the “Brotherhood of Sleep” has kept guard over the container for years and years without anyone knowing much about it. This secrecy within the Catholic Church is a theme he later revisited in Vampires (1998). There’s some gory fun to be had on this one, though it’s not too over the top. Lovers of heavy metal get Alice Cooper playing the leader of the homeless zombies that hover outside of the church’s gates. And it was cool seeing some of the cast members of Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (Victor Wong and Dennis Dun) working with Carpenter again. I also enjoyed the films dreadful atmosphere, this is something that Carpenter has always been good at. Creating that feeling of dread.

The movie has many elements in common with John Carpenter’s own The Thing. The green slime inside of the container is probably alien in nature and it spits out this liquid that transforms people into zombies, making people turn on each other. Like in The thing, Prince of Darkness has that element of distrust amongst people by turning people you once considered friends into deadly enemies. The only difference between both films being that the levels of tention felt in Prince of Darkness are nowhere nearly as high as those displayed on The Thing. This film also reminded me of Phantasm (1979) because it mixes science fiction with religion, and it has that dimensional portal thing going for it as well.

I guess the thing with this movie is that it pales in comparison with Carpenter’s bigger films like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. It feels like it deliberately took a minimalist approach with its storytelling. If there’s an upside to Prince of Darkness it’s that it was interesting seeing Carpenter trying something different, stretching his storytelling muscles by telling a story that’s smaller in scope. Prince of Darkness and They Live both have that epic-ness in their background, but their budgets never let that epic side emerge. My advice is, if you want to see a movie about people locked up in a spooky church with some real demons, watch Michelle Soavi’s The Church (1989). Now there’s a movie that won’t disappoint ya!

 

Rating: 3 out of 5