ASHURA--Another one.
It was 5£ DVD sale season again, and I just had to get me some new additions to my collection. Especially when City of God was now 5 quid, I just felt like I could afford one or two more.
So the Bride of Frankenstein (1931) ended up in my shopping bag, along with Ashura-a new japanese movie that I had never seen or heard before.
Here's the blurb:
Izumo, a retired demon killer who now passes his time as a kabuki actor in 19th century Tokyo. After accidentally killing a child, Izumo swore never to draw his sword again but evil is afoot and a conspiracy is in full swing to awaken the powerful demon queen Ashura. Can Izumo really stand back and watch the demons take over the world, or will he join the fight once more and battle the forces of evil?
Being a fan of Princess Monoke, Pom Poko, Spirited Away, Zatoichi and Shogun, I knew that there are a lot of good less-known movies in Japan-or movies based on Japan. The movie itself seemed like a serious philosophical flick loaded with the rich occult of Japan. I mean, check out the cover...
Frickin' amazing, huh?
Everything in the outside seemed thoughtful and different. I felt like I may be watching a live-action film of something alike Princess Mononoke, and that was why I felt I HAD to buy it.
So as soon as I could, I dropped my stuff and fired up my DVD in my comp.
Okay, that was very cool. Really cool beginning. Oni girl appears, film's taking a subtle creepy turn...and two guys in black with sharp blades appear.
A confrontation ensues?
Whoa, hey, a nun appears. Okay, so she sucks with her 3VIL acting skillz, but at least she's got the evil powerful-matron thing going on. According to the old sensei of the demon hunters, she is Bizan, and she is planning to resurrect Ashura; so demons can take over the world.
Oni girl Emishi and Bizan get away, leaving the demon hunters (DH) to ponder and chortle to themselves (?!). Why, we can only assume that maybe they were getting bored with their job.
But what IS Ashura?
Ooh, nice definition. MUY feminist-friendly.
Soon we get introduced to our characters. While crashing a festival we meet three of our men. Izumo, our main hero who has allied with the DH, and his friend Jaku and sensei. Jaku is the violent Wolverine-without-the-angst guy with an improbable hairdo who likes his job. The three of them get right to the exterminatin' (though sensei just sits there, mumbling some mumbo-jumbo for some reason). This is where we see the first flaws of the film.
First off, the demons are only normal people with green eyes and teeth, and tend to only lunge at their attackers with their mouths open. Secondly, Jaku and Izumo suck bad at killing their enemies. It's almost as if there's some game going on in how many demons you can kill WITHOUT stabbing them through and slicing their heads and limbs off.
Which pisses me off a little. If Shogun can do realistic deaths and destruction-then so can Ashura. Apparently Shogun was only showing on TV at the time so that meant they DON'T have to work so hard and have that much of a budget...I still remember that scene when Blackthorn first sees a samurai slice off a man's head for not bowing fast enough. And I remembered it as shocking and realistic. I doubt the actor was really slicing heads off extras, but it goes to show that japanese weapons ARE FUCKING SHARP.
Which is why I don't get why there aren't any flying limbs by now.
Izumo gets sidetracked as he's somehow drawn to an abandoned Buddhist temple, where he meets a mysterious little girl begging him to kill her through fucking with his mind telepathy. There's some strange face-melting effects, and Izumo winds up stabbing the apparition of the girl.
But ooh! Wait, it's all a terrible flash-back-dream. Izumo wakes up in his ritzy pad, now a famous kabuki actor (How?). Five years had passed, and Izumo has since left the DH after “accidentally” killing the ghost girl.
Then one night while riding a boat through town, he meets the Night Camellia, a famous member of a ninja group that got the town constabulary riled up every time they appear. The Night Camellia somehow got separated from the others by her sucky ninja-poser skills, and not only drops her disguise accidentally, but also drops a hairpin. Which Izumo manages to get hold of.
This causes the Night Camellia to come sneaking into his home at the next evening, and that's when our hero Izumo becomes Mr. Creepy-Touchy-Feely over our young and gaspy ninja. He asks her if they've met before, and before the Night Camellia can try to shove him away and escape...!
What the Fuck?!
OH COME ON!! What the HELL is that for?!
By the gods, he unleashed the String of Fate no Jitsu!
Okay, I've never seen that EVEN be referred to out of anime. The first and only time was in Excel Saga and it was meant to be a gag. Here, I have no words.
Well, it turns out Bizan and Emishi were keeping their eyes on our ninja girl. Since her first appearance she was having a strange growth on one of her shoulderblades, and that is the evidence that she is Ashura (that and the mole gives her away).
Meanwhile, the DH has been taken over by Jaku, who decides to kill his sensei and have the others zombified to join Bizan in gaining the power of Ashura. Now it's no longer Bizan and Emishi watching our heroine, and it's time to go on offensive.
Poor Night Camellia was forced to run to the theatre from Jaku's men. She bumps into Izumo, Mr. Creepy-Touchy-Feely gets clingy on her, but Izumo is unmasked by Jaku before his fellow actors and is forced to fight him.
In the next scene, Night Camellia warms up to the poor arrogant bastard that has no idea about personal space yet saved her, and meets up with him for a scene where she is obliged to talk about herself because previously it was all about Izumo and the DH.
The Night Camellia is in fact a girl named Tsubaki, and she has lost her memory of what she was before the singsong/ninja girls took her in. All she knows is that she had her flower pin when she was found, which is why she foolishly carries it everywhere since she'd “risk her life to get it back”.
She then asks him about the strange mark on her body, which becomes a real disturbing scene.
First, here's the mark. See? It looks like a bad case of an eczema sore. It looks painful.
So what does Izumo do?
He presses his hand hard on the sore. Tsubaki's response is very clear.
Ow. Ow. Ow. Tsubaki, you've hereby entered into a world of pain.
Oh for crying out loud--
This is basically the character of Izumo. One, total, fucktard. You can gush for all you like on how they clearly belong and it's just cultural differences yadda yadda, I just know a lot of japanese women that would have stabbed him in the gut for his behaviour. Even Lady toda Buntaro I'll tell ya.
So cliches ensue. Tsubaki gets kidnapped by Jaku, Izumo has to save her...Jaku loses to Izumo despite that Jaku has by then should have more practice in beating the crap out of people NOT IZUMO. But apparently, no, because Izumo is the chosen one. Izumo gets injured, Bizan lets them both go, so Tsubaki can act the servile wench by tending his wounds and having sex with him. Bla dee blah blah fast-forward.
In their throes of passion, Tsubaki gets a vision, wrenches out of Creepy Izumo's embrace (Haha! Cockblocked!), starts losing her mind and wanders outside towards the...the...what the fuck...the same...abandoned...temple that Izumo had apparently killed her.
Apparently, Izumo stayed in the town festering with the demons he and Jaku had to kill after he had his traumatic event of killing (child)Tsubaki. 5 years later, Izumo was forced to confront the fact that he and Tsubaki HAVE met before, and that he didn't do a good job in doing what that stupid girl told him do.
All of a sudden Tsubaki begs him to kill her. Izumo slaps her sore AGAIN. Tsubaki realizes, for some reason, that she doesn't want to be a demon, though she's supposedly not even human TO START WITH.
The sore spreads up to her very face, and she confesses that she hates Izumo because apparently it's his fault that 'she fell in love with him'. Whatever. JEEZ.
To explain this all so much more articulately, Bizan helpfully tells Izumo that Tsubaki is in fact NOT human. NEVER WAS.
She was born in this world as just a child spirit, waiting many years for the moment until she meets her 'killer'. As it turns out, what brought her rebirth was really surges of emotion. Like fear, lust love. It made her transform into a normal-looking young woman and finally into Ashura.
Ashura makes her first appearance on the sky. Here, instead of a mysterious, earthy creature of ancient nature on the DVD cover, she looks like this abomination.
Christ, she looks like some anime/video game freak from Dynasty Warriors.
Apparently Ashura has some SERIOUS issues with becoming a demon queen. She hates herself and Izumo for being transformed. She's even willing to make all humans and demons suffer for her seriously bad excuse of angst.
I mean, COME ON. You're a demon queen! Instead of a lowly girl who isn't even as good as her friends as a ninja (which by the way, you HAVE NEVER EXPLAINED WHY you are one), you've now become something powerful to reckon with. You have followers and otherworldly creatures bowing to you, your own giant castle, and you don't have to suffer Izumo clapping his hand on anything painful you happen to have on your person!
But, this wouldn't be a badly-written movie if Ashura considered her great luck. Instead she sets Tokyo on fire with thousands of giant meteors and sets her demons out to attack its citizens.
Seeing his city in absolute chaos, Izumo finally gets ready and sets out to lay siege on Ashura's castle.
Terribly choreographed fighting ensues. With no flying heads and limbs of course. Before making his way to Ashura he happens to stop in front of a window and see the outside of the floating castle in the sky.
Describing the burning of millions of homes and innocent victims of Tokyo.
Y'know, I seriously wished this movie had warned me that this is a pure martial-arts movie through and through. The ending is completely emphasized with crap fighting and Izumo being labelled several times as THE STRONGEST and THE CHOSEN ONE DESU. All the while as Ashura makes a shit job in being a demon queen by being hateful and suicidal.
In the end, Ashura and Izumo die with everlasting love (*RETCH*) while killing each other. Everything gets back to normal, and the legend of Izumo and Ashura is recorded as one of the 'famous legendary romances ~*' of Japan. The End.
So. This movie. Is absolute shite. It's not shit as in it's good. It's so shit it'll suck out any remote happiness you once had and remembered and make you feel like killing yourself in the end-because IT'S SO BAD.
There were actually barely any references of Japanese occult or magic. Only Emishi seems to stand as a familiar relic of traditional spirits, but other than that, you might as well been seeing evil characters from Power Rangers. The storyline is obviously crap. Unless your friends find shit like this funny, your friends would hate you for a long, long time afterwards. I've meant to like this movie, I wanted to, I actually tried through the first 30 minutes, but after that I found myself so bored and annoyed that I was reading a school book before I knew it.
Watching this movie is like watching a bad Inu Yasha/Fushigi Yugi fanfic on Live. Thus, Ashura gets a big GIANT 0 POINTS!
For the producer's impudence in tricking me to buying this movie from its pretty package, I will now head to the park to play Frisbee with his DVD. Maybe even try to toss it as far as I can into the ocean of Tynemouth.
So the Bride of Frankenstein (1931) ended up in my shopping bag, along with Ashura-a new japanese movie that I had never seen or heard before.
Here's the blurb:
Izumo, a retired demon killer who now passes his time as a kabuki actor in 19th century Tokyo. After accidentally killing a child, Izumo swore never to draw his sword again but evil is afoot and a conspiracy is in full swing to awaken the powerful demon queen Ashura. Can Izumo really stand back and watch the demons take over the world, or will he join the fight once more and battle the forces of evil?
Being a fan of Princess Monoke, Pom Poko, Spirited Away, Zatoichi and Shogun, I knew that there are a lot of good less-known movies in Japan-or movies based on Japan. The movie itself seemed like a serious philosophical flick loaded with the rich occult of Japan. I mean, check out the cover...
Frickin' amazing, huh?
Everything in the outside seemed thoughtful and different. I felt like I may be watching a live-action film of something alike Princess Mononoke, and that was why I felt I HAD to buy it.
So as soon as I could, I dropped my stuff and fired up my DVD in my comp.
Okay, that was very cool. Really cool beginning. Oni girl appears, film's taking a subtle creepy turn...and two guys in black with sharp blades appear.
A confrontation ensues?
Whoa, hey, a nun appears. Okay, so she sucks with her 3VIL acting skillz, but at least she's got the evil powerful-matron thing going on. According to the old sensei of the demon hunters, she is Bizan, and she is planning to resurrect Ashura; so demons can take over the world.
Oni girl Emishi and Bizan get away, leaving the demon hunters (DH) to ponder and chortle to themselves (?!). Why, we can only assume that maybe they were getting bored with their job.
But what IS Ashura?
Ooh, nice definition. MUY feminist-friendly.
Soon we get introduced to our characters. While crashing a festival we meet three of our men. Izumo, our main hero who has allied with the DH, and his friend Jaku and sensei. Jaku is the violent Wolverine-without-the-angst guy with an improbable hairdo who likes his job. The three of them get right to the exterminatin' (though sensei just sits there, mumbling some mumbo-jumbo for some reason). This is where we see the first flaws of the film.
First off, the demons are only normal people with green eyes and teeth, and tend to only lunge at their attackers with their mouths open. Secondly, Jaku and Izumo suck bad at killing their enemies. It's almost as if there's some game going on in how many demons you can kill WITHOUT stabbing them through and slicing their heads and limbs off.
Which pisses me off a little. If Shogun can do realistic deaths and destruction-then so can Ashura. Apparently Shogun was only showing on TV at the time so that meant they DON'T have to work so hard and have that much of a budget...I still remember that scene when Blackthorn first sees a samurai slice off a man's head for not bowing fast enough. And I remembered it as shocking and realistic. I doubt the actor was really slicing heads off extras, but it goes to show that japanese weapons ARE FUCKING SHARP.
Which is why I don't get why there aren't any flying limbs by now.
Izumo gets sidetracked as he's somehow drawn to an abandoned Buddhist temple, where he meets a mysterious little girl begging him to kill her through fucking with his mind telepathy. There's some strange face-melting effects, and Izumo winds up stabbing the apparition of the girl.
But ooh! Wait, it's all a terrible flash-back-dream. Izumo wakes up in his ritzy pad, now a famous kabuki actor (How?). Five years had passed, and Izumo has since left the DH after “accidentally” killing the ghost girl.
Then one night while riding a boat through town, he meets the Night Camellia, a famous member of a ninja group that got the town constabulary riled up every time they appear. The Night Camellia somehow got separated from the others by her sucky ninja-poser skills, and not only drops her disguise accidentally, but also drops a hairpin. Which Izumo manages to get hold of.
This causes the Night Camellia to come sneaking into his home at the next evening, and that's when our hero Izumo becomes Mr. Creepy-Touchy-Feely over our young and gaspy ninja. He asks her if they've met before, and before the Night Camellia can try to shove him away and escape...!
What the Fuck?!
OH COME ON!! What the HELL is that for?!
By the gods, he unleashed the String of Fate no Jitsu!
Okay, I've never seen that EVEN be referred to out of anime. The first and only time was in Excel Saga and it was meant to be a gag. Here, I have no words.
Well, it turns out Bizan and Emishi were keeping their eyes on our ninja girl. Since her first appearance she was having a strange growth on one of her shoulderblades, and that is the evidence that she is Ashura (that and the mole gives her away).
Meanwhile, the DH has been taken over by Jaku, who decides to kill his sensei and have the others zombified to join Bizan in gaining the power of Ashura. Now it's no longer Bizan and Emishi watching our heroine, and it's time to go on offensive.
Poor Night Camellia was forced to run to the theatre from Jaku's men. She bumps into Izumo, Mr. Creepy-Touchy-Feely gets clingy on her, but Izumo is unmasked by Jaku before his fellow actors and is forced to fight him.
In the next scene, Night Camellia warms up to the poor arrogant bastard that has no idea about personal space yet saved her, and meets up with him for a scene where she is obliged to talk about herself because previously it was all about Izumo and the DH.
The Night Camellia is in fact a girl named Tsubaki, and she has lost her memory of what she was before the singsong/ninja girls took her in. All she knows is that she had her flower pin when she was found, which is why she foolishly carries it everywhere since she'd “risk her life to get it back”.
She then asks him about the strange mark on her body, which becomes a real disturbing scene.
First, here's the mark. See? It looks like a bad case of an eczema sore. It looks painful.
So what does Izumo do?
He presses his hand hard on the sore. Tsubaki's response is very clear.
Ow. Ow. Ow. Tsubaki, you've hereby entered into a world of pain.
Oh for crying out loud--
This is basically the character of Izumo. One, total, fucktard. You can gush for all you like on how they clearly belong and it's just cultural differences yadda yadda, I just know a lot of japanese women that would have stabbed him in the gut for his behaviour. Even Lady toda Buntaro I'll tell ya.
So cliches ensue. Tsubaki gets kidnapped by Jaku, Izumo has to save her...Jaku loses to Izumo despite that Jaku has by then should have more practice in beating the crap out of people NOT IZUMO. But apparently, no, because Izumo is the chosen one. Izumo gets injured, Bizan lets them both go, so Tsubaki can act the servile wench by tending his wounds and having sex with him. Bla dee blah blah fast-forward.
In their throes of passion, Tsubaki gets a vision, wrenches out of Creepy Izumo's embrace (Haha! Cockblocked!), starts losing her mind and wanders outside towards the...the...what the fuck...the same...abandoned...temple that Izumo had apparently killed her.
Apparently, Izumo stayed in the town festering with the demons he and Jaku had to kill after he had his traumatic event of killing (child)Tsubaki. 5 years later, Izumo was forced to confront the fact that he and Tsubaki HAVE met before, and that he didn't do a good job in doing what that stupid girl told him do.
All of a sudden Tsubaki begs him to kill her. Izumo slaps her sore AGAIN. Tsubaki realizes, for some reason, that she doesn't want to be a demon, though she's supposedly not even human TO START WITH.
The sore spreads up to her very face, and she confesses that she hates Izumo because apparently it's his fault that 'she fell in love with him'. Whatever. JEEZ.
To explain this all so much more articulately, Bizan helpfully tells Izumo that Tsubaki is in fact NOT human. NEVER WAS.
She was born in this world as just a child spirit, waiting many years for the moment until she meets her 'killer'. As it turns out, what brought her rebirth was really surges of emotion. Like fear, lust love. It made her transform into a normal-looking young woman and finally into Ashura.
Ashura makes her first appearance on the sky. Here, instead of a mysterious, earthy creature of ancient nature on the DVD cover, she looks like this abomination.
Christ, she looks like some anime/video game freak from Dynasty Warriors.
Apparently Ashura has some SERIOUS issues with becoming a demon queen. She hates herself and Izumo for being transformed. She's even willing to make all humans and demons suffer for her seriously bad excuse of angst.
I mean, COME ON. You're a demon queen! Instead of a lowly girl who isn't even as good as her friends as a ninja (which by the way, you HAVE NEVER EXPLAINED WHY you are one), you've now become something powerful to reckon with. You have followers and otherworldly creatures bowing to you, your own giant castle, and you don't have to suffer Izumo clapping his hand on anything painful you happen to have on your person!
But, this wouldn't be a badly-written movie if Ashura considered her great luck. Instead she sets Tokyo on fire with thousands of giant meteors and sets her demons out to attack its citizens.
Seeing his city in absolute chaos, Izumo finally gets ready and sets out to lay siege on Ashura's castle.
Terribly choreographed fighting ensues. With no flying heads and limbs of course. Before making his way to Ashura he happens to stop in front of a window and see the outside of the floating castle in the sky.
Describing the burning of millions of homes and innocent victims of Tokyo.
Y'know, I seriously wished this movie had warned me that this is a pure martial-arts movie through and through. The ending is completely emphasized with crap fighting and Izumo being labelled several times as THE STRONGEST and THE CHOSEN ONE DESU. All the while as Ashura makes a shit job in being a demon queen by being hateful and suicidal.
In the end, Ashura and Izumo die with everlasting love (*RETCH*) while killing each other. Everything gets back to normal, and the legend of Izumo and Ashura is recorded as one of the 'famous legendary romances ~*' of Japan. The End.
So. This movie. Is absolute shite. It's not shit as in it's good. It's so shit it'll suck out any remote happiness you once had and remembered and make you feel like killing yourself in the end-because IT'S SO BAD.
There were actually barely any references of Japanese occult or magic. Only Emishi seems to stand as a familiar relic of traditional spirits, but other than that, you might as well been seeing evil characters from Power Rangers. The storyline is obviously crap. Unless your friends find shit like this funny, your friends would hate you for a long, long time afterwards. I've meant to like this movie, I wanted to, I actually tried through the first 30 minutes, but after that I found myself so bored and annoyed that I was reading a school book before I knew it.
Watching this movie is like watching a bad Inu Yasha/Fushigi Yugi fanfic on Live. Thus, Ashura gets a big GIANT 0 POINTS!
For the producer's impudence in tricking me to buying this movie from its pretty package, I will now head to the park to play Frisbee with his DVD. Maybe even try to toss it as far as I can into the ocean of Tynemouth.