Moving away from old PD Project material, this is something that was entirely new to me. This is a 1976 Taiwanese kaiju film originally titled Zhan shen, but also known as Hong Kong Calamity, Kuan Yu Battles with the Aliens, and Gwan Gung vs Aliens. Martians invade the Earth to punish Earthlings for their abuse of science. The only force that can defeat the Martians is Kuan Yu, a former general now worshiped as a god. He can only manifest, though, if a statue of his likeness is carved with enough excellence and sincerity.
In other words, you have a 100-foot-tall ancient Chinese general using his kung fu against laser-wielding aliens, but only if Linus chooses the right pumpkin patch to wait in overnight.
Naturally it’s my film of the year.
In all seriousness, this movie’s a hoot and it’s the first time I’ve seen palpable translation errors improve the watching experience. A lot of cultural signifiers get lost in translation, something that can end up making sci-fi, fantasy, and horror movies in other languages seem at once more inventive and uncanny: something is being said here with the expectation that you’ll understand and the fact that you don’t makes it feel even more like an illicit pleasure, like you’re listening in on something you’re not supposed to.
The translation issues with this film aren’t questions of dubbing, though, it’s the subtitles. The whole movie is subtitled in Mandarin and English, but the English doesn’t make sense, at least, it doesn’t make sense when you can read it. Most of the time parts of it are cropped out on the left and right or are simply unreadable as they’re white text on a pale and fading print. At best you get snippets that border on comprehensibility which makes them even more compelling. You’re not looking at nonsense, but it feels a step away from saying what it means.
I should note that I became aware of this movie through Gold Ninja Video, a distribution company that focuses on BluRay releases of obscure and public domain features. They prepared a copy of this film which led me to the version on The Internet Archive. It’s always nice to see a company dedicated to maintaining the wilder side of the film scene.
Wrap Up:
The Good: Throwing everything at the wall. There are so many goofy elements in this movie that I’ve forgotten most of them. You have hilarious reaction shots to the aliens’ arrival, bizarre effects of alien interference, and so many odd character moments.
The aliens’ joie de vivre. The kaiju here don’t just stomp through the city destroying buildings, they strut! They look like they’re dancing at various points and it just amplifies the silliness of everything which of course serves to amplify the joy.
The Bad: The print is really washed out. I joke in the episode that this looks to be a copy of a VCD bootleg of a VHS bootleg of a cam rip, but that may be the actual lineage of this copy. The film only circulated as a bootleg VCD for years. And while I may joke about the subtitle issue, it does prove to be a problem in that it creates the sense that you could potentially understand what’s happening if you just rewound and looked at the subtitle a little harder. I went through this movie pretty thoroughly. Let me assure you, it does not help.
Production note: This episode has the longest set of host segments so far. If you don’t include the music video I cut for the episode, it’s the second longest after Gappa. Once I had the idea of doing the member drive riff for the host segments, they kind of took on a life of their own.
Regarding the “member drive,” that’s a moment of me kidding on the square. Obviously it’s all a joke, but I do feel a certain way about having so few subscribers and views. I’m not looking for thousands or even hundreds of views by this point, but I do have the goal of averaging about one new subscriber per week. While I’m having a lot of fun making this show and getting stranger and stranger with both the edits and the movies shown, it is a lot of work and it’s hard not to ask why I’m putting all that effort in. This episode took me about 8 hours from recording the script to editing the final version, and that’s not an unusual amount of time for one of these. I gotta ask why I’m putting the time into this instead of watching movies in my queue or playing the games that I’ve bought.
But to end on a more positive note, editing the music video was such a joy. It came together relatively quickly although there are things I would do to make it better if I were to spend more time on it. Every time I watch it I just start cracking up, though. As I said on Twitter and Facebook as I was working on it, I kept repeating, “So fucking jaunty” in response to the Martians. I wouldn’t say I’m proud of the video as much as I am still surprisingly entertained by it.
No comments:
Post a Comment