Review: Shichinin No Samurai (1954)

Better known as "Seven Samurai" (and proof that I do watch good movies, too), this is one of Akira Kurosawa's best known movies. Even if you haven't seen the movie itself, you've probably seen a variant of it. It was remade (quite well) as a Western in 1960 as "The Magnificent Seven", which is the movie most people are likely to have seen. It was also the basis for several other not-so-good movies (no, I haven't seen them all) including "Battle Beyond the Stars" (1980) and "I Sette Magnifici Gladiatori" ("The Seven Magnificent Gladiators") (1983), which are two that I have heard of, but haven't seen (or rather, I haven't seen "Battle Beyond the Stars" in so long that I don't remember it). The IMDB lists a total of eight remakes of this movie. The remakes have originated in Hong Kong, the US, the Phillipines (okay, that one was a joint US/Phililpines venture), Kazakhstan, India, Italy and Japan (a joint Japan/US release), so obviously the story fired the imaginations of people from many different cultures.

Why was it able to be remade in several different genres and different cultures? Because the basic plot is very simple. In "Sichinin No Samurai", a small Japanese farming village learns that bandits will be raiding them for their food once the harvest is over. After consulting with the Old Man of the village, they decide that the best solution is to try to hire a Samurai to defend them. Since they have no money, they need to find one that will work for food ("Find hungry samurai"). Once one is found, he considers the matter and decides that it will require at least a half-dozen in all to defend the village. He manages to recruit a somewhat diverse group of samurai, and they go to the village to scout things out, prepare the defenses (they make sure to leave only one easy direction for the bandits to attack) and attempt to train the villagers with weapons.

See what I mean about the basic plot being simple? All you need is a group of people (village) that are under threat by another group (bandits) against whom they have (or feel that they have) no defense. The people then seek out someone (samurai/gunslingers/gladiators) to do battle with this threat for them.

What's different is what's done with this basic plot. Kurosawa focused on the relations between the samurai (only 2 of whom knew each other prior to the events of the movie), between the samurai and the villagers, and between the villagers themselves. There are quite a few subplots running through the movie, all of which make for a good story. The bandits themselves have little identity beyond being bandits and a threat to the village and are almost secondary to the story.

So is this movie for everyone? Probably not. For one thing, it's long. Almost 3 1/2 hours long, in fact. The movie never seems to drag, though, so you probably won't mind the length. For another, the Japanese culture is quite different from the Western (Europe and the Americas) culture, so the behavior of the characters may seem a bit strange to some people (there's an awful lot of grovelling and wailing going on by some of the villagers). Lastly, it's in Japanese with subtitles. If there's an English (or any other language) dub of it out there, I'm not aware of it. Personally, I prefer watching a foreign film in its native language with the subtitles (the voices always seem off in dubbed movies), so I haven't looked to see if there's a dubbed version available on DVD. Oh, and it's also in black & white, which seems to bother some people.

Having said all that, do I recommend this movie? Hell yeah! It's a great movie, with great characters, a great story and it's beautifully filmed! I can't think of anything about this movie that I didn't like, and it's rare that I can say that. As long as you don't mind the length (you can always watch it in parts) or the subtitles, you should see this movie!

Review: Sorority House Vampires from Hell (1998)

Yes, that really is a movie (or abomination, one of the two). A couple of years ago, I picked up a few boxed sets of DVDs that shared a common theme. One of these sets was titled "Bite Nite", and contained vampire-themed movies. I picked a DVD at random from it one night and wound up watching "Sorority House Vampires from Hell".


Plot synopsis? I can't do that. First, an internal self-defense mechanism in my brain is trying to blot out the memory of this movie. Secondly, it would have had to have a plot in order for me to summarize it.


Okay okay... As far as I can tell, we have a female vampire that was awakened by a person tripping over her grave. She needs to drink the blood from some number of people (seven, I think) in order to... uh... I have no idea. Become human? Become powerful? Get out of this movie? Something like that. The audio for this movie was horrible, and I was not about to re-watch any of it just to find out what her grand plan was. Meanwhile, we have three women that want to enter a sorority, which has its house in the middle of the woods (the hell?) in the same general area in which our vampire woke up. Also meanwhile, a male vampire has woken up in a basement. This movie is supposedly a comedy (I say supposedly because it never caused me to crack so much as a smile), and the male vampire is supposed to be additional comic relief. His scenes are not funny. They are painful. Very, very painful. I'd describe them, but I do not take joy in the pain of others. The scenes of the male vampire also do not intersect the main movie until the very end... sort of.


Let's see... what else? Well, the movie has a fair bit of female nudity in it. As a typical male, I can admit that I have nothing against female nudity. However, this movie sucked so hard that even that couldn't add anything to it. Adding nudity to this movie has as much effect as tossing spotlights into a black hole. In fact, adding anything to this movie is useless. The only way to improve this movie is by subtraction. If you were to cut about... oh... 86 minutes from this movie, you might have something more entertaining. On an unrelated note, the running time of this movie is 86 minutes.

How bad is this movie? Even the ending doesn't stop the pain... because it has THREE ENDINGS! As I felt relief that the movie was over near the end, it suddenly started running backwards, and then an alternate ending played (no, it wasn't any better than the first one). Then that one ran backwards and ANOTHER alternate ending played. I think that this was the ending in which the male vampire also appeared and intersected the main... er... 'plot'. At that point, I was starting to believe that I was the victim of a curse. It's as if this movie was the cursed video from Ringu or something... if the video killed you by sucking instead of through an angry spirit or something.

If anything that I have written above has convinced you to seek out this movie, then I have but three words for you: DON'T DO IT!!!! Seriously, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE! This movie was so bad that I gave serious consideration to smashing the DVD after it ended. But "Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf" was on Side B. I don't know if it's any good or not, but it has to be better than "Sorority House Vampires from Hell" only because it can't be any worse.

Welcome... or something

Why Schrodinger's Blog? Well, I suppose that as long as no one is reading this blog, it has an equal chance of both existing and not existing. Or rather, as long as no one is reading this blog, no one knows if I'm slacking off and not updating or not.



As for the blog itself, I expect to mostly give my thoughts on movies and books. Just... don't expect too many mini-reviews of new or major movies. Considering the fact that I'm more likely to have a movie like "Bloodsucking Pharoes in Pittsburgh" on my Netflix queue than I am "The Mummy Returns", well... you get the idea.



I'm sure that I'll occasionally have something to say about other topics, as well. I can be pretty hard to shut up when I have something I want to rant about!

Well, that about covers this very informative (or completely useless) first post!