Serdar | Genji Press

With a title like SARS Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis, how can you possibly go wrong? Imagine, if you can, a Thai spoof of action/horror films in the same vein as Scary Movie and you’ve sort of got the template for this nutty bit of genre-splicing and shotgun-spray parody, garnished liberally with cartoon sound effects. In the first ten minutes alone I ticked off potshots at Blade, Kill Bill, 28 Days Later, Shawn / Dawn of the Dead, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon — oh, and there’s an animated credit sequence that plays like a genre spoof unto itself. Why pay for only one parody when you can get ten of them wholesale?

SW:BZC played to sold-out audiences at various film festivals last year, including Otakon 2005 (where it apparently was so popular they slotted in a second screening of it to accommodate an overflow audience). It’s easy to see why: it’s dumb, obvious, crass, juvenile, politically incorrect (how about a plot thread about a guy losing his virginity to a transsexual?) and very funny — a guaranteed crowd-pleaser even for audiences who’ve never seen a Thai movie before. Not that SW:BZC has much to do with the rest of the Thai filmmaking scene out there right now (at least, not at first glance), but it’s not as if it needs to be. Too bad so many moviegoers seem to have an automatic aversion to subtitles, since SW:BZC is at least as funny as any of the English-language so-called comedies they’ve paid to see in theaters.

Raiser of Gales, the second of Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D novels, did two things that impressed me: It kept and renewed my interest in the series, and presented me with a story and a set of characters that are that markedly more absorbing than the original installment. In fact, I somewhat regret this not being the first book: it’s, all around, a better story than the series-opener. If it weren’t for the fact that the first book sets up most everything we need to know — everything from the idiosyncrasies of D’s livelihood to the weird being that seems to live symbiotically inside his hand — I’d recommend that people skip directly to Gales. It’s a more rewarding read, even for people who open the D books not expecting anything more than a thrill ride.

The most disconcerting thing about the Ghost in the Shell mythology is something that, oddly enough, parallels Star Wars. The further the material has been taken from its creator (manga artist Masamune Shirow), the more interesting it has become — which implies that Shirow was most interested in the things about it that were least interesting to everyone else. That or he simply hadn’t found a way to make those things interesting to us. George Lucas may have been deeply enamored of the relationship between Amidala and Anakin, but we saw no evidence onscreen of what was so interesting to him.

Masamune Shirow is a fantastically creative visual artist, one of the best in the business. He is not, however, a very engaging storyteller, and almost every time he’s sat down to cull together a story out of his torrent of wild images, the results have been disappointing. Orion, for instance, was essentially one giant shaggy-dog joke — a flood of terminology and ideas and metaphors and references used to support a plot that wouldn’t otherwise have deserved a ten-page short. Appleseed was probably his best moment, but it ultimately worked better as an animated feature (two of them, in fact) than it did on paper.

Shadowless Sword is an okay movie that’s forever just on the threshold of becoming a far better one, but don’t let that keep you from seeing it. According to a formula that critic Pauline Kael once laid down, the movies are so rarely ever good art that if you can’t appreciate good entertainment when it does come, you’re fighting a losing battle. This applies universally, regardless of genre, language or country of origin, and I’ve seen plenty of movies from abroad that fulfill this dictum. Shadowless Sword may not be art, but it does what it does well enough that grousing about it not shooting high or far enough may be misplaced.

Like Japan and the samurai genre, Korea has become a font of movies that draw on its own violent and colorful past. Sword is set in the 7th century, one of Korea’s more divisive and turbulent eras, during which kingdoms routinely invaded each other, leaders were assassinated and (according to this film, anyway) sword-wielding heroes routinely defied the laws of physics to defend their comrades and their honor. The film opens with one such assassination / flaunting of gravity, the death of the Balhae clan leader at the hands of the Dongranguk’s brute squad, the appropriately-named “Killer Blade Army”. Their freakish looks and outlandish weapons steal every scene they have, and made me reflect on how a good adventure is often only as interesting as its villain (if only because they’re the ones who force the heroes to be heroes).

Tie-ins, or novels that are created to cash in on a particular franchise — like a movie or TV show — are one of my guilty pleasures. Sometimes they’re interesting in a forensic way, because the novels are often prepared from early shooting drafts of the script and cranked out hurriedly to hit the streets just before the film itself appears; as a result, you can sometimes discover things that were dropped from the movie before it hit the screen — something that happened with Alan Dean Foster’s Alien and Jack Martin’s Videodrome tie-ins. Sometimes they’re just pleasant time-wasters, and aren’t meant to be anything more than that. And sometimes, very rarely, they are something like art: Orson Scott Card’s novelization of The Abyss wasn’t just a cash-in, but a real novel about real people, and Card went so far as to get James Cameron’s blessing for the end result.

After the high that was Raiser of Gales, the Vampire Hunter D series plunges to a rather dreary and functional low with Demon Deathchase. This is easily the weakest book in the series so far, not just because it’s a blatant and depressing retread of the basic elements of the D stories but because it has been assembled with such indifference to the possibilities the series brings up. The title fits nicely: it’s a chase, no more and no less, and after the chase is over the story ends like a door being slammed in our faces. The previous two books, even when they were at the most shameless in their determination to entertain, weren’t this callous to the reader.