BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA @ 40

Trucker Jack Burton wins a bet with his friend Wang Chi who can't pay up straight away but if Jack can give him a lift home he can settle. Oh, he needs to pick up his arranged marriage wife from the airport. Things get a little confused and the missus to be gets abducted by a gang. Jack and Wang are hot on the trail which leads to a weird world of wizards and underground bunkers. Cue title.

By the middle of the decade John Carpenter had a swag of genre hits and cult titles up his sleeve and took to this when its writers gave him the gig. It had begun as a western but then had been modernised until it was set in present day San Francisco among the Chinese community and the netherworld below it, featuring martial arts and magic. There's not only a lot of Hong Kong style wirework but the technique itself is mentioned in dialogue.

There is little point in describing the plot of this one. The action takes over, allowing for some character development, and doesn't stop until the end brings the inevitable pairings and scissions before the credits roll. That makes it sound shallow but this movie's glee at throwing out tough situation after tough situation will keep the shortest attention span occupied for its whole runtime.

The cast does their best to stretch their cartoony characters to fit the colour and art direction. Dennis Dun adds more depth here than to his gawky goof in Prince of Darkness two years later, and makes a lot out of his action hero by accident. Kurt Russell surely has the most fun out of his boastful and bumbling self-appointed action king role, getting inadvertently injured more than anyone else and being wrong in most of the decisive decisions he makes. Standing as he did beside the Schwazeneggers and Stallones of the era, he presents something like what an action man might be like in real life, all one liners and incompetence. And then there is the young Kim Cattrall, the weak link who can't quite resolve the jarring mix of Marilyn Monroe and Kathleen Turner and ends up short of her character's comedy and decisiveness. But it is James Hong who steals everything as Lo Pan the sorcerer, an evil ancient man here and a feeble old man by the light of day, whose lust for immortality is grounded in more fleshly lusts that might have reminded the likes of Kim Cattrall of more than one casting sessions when starting out.

In a few ways, Big Trouble is like a funny presage of the more serious idea of Prince of Darkness with a pair of forces drawing together for an apocalypse. More pertinently, if you were to watch all of Carpenter's movies back to back from Dark Star to They Live, Big Trouble would be a welcome action comedy between the solemnity of Starman and the sci-fi doom of Prince of Darkness. If it is neglected in his canon even by fans it's surely not because of underperforming at the box office (the mighty Thing also had that honour) but more from the inconvenience of its jutting out. Christine is better recalled even if it is less Carpenter than Stephen King. Perhaps fans just wanted more Snake Plissken or MacReady from Kurt Russell or found the refusal to overly stereotype the Chinese community against the times. Nevertheless, it's one of Carpenter's most persistently fun from all his works and does its job with every viewing.

Viewing notes: I watched the Disney+ presentation at Blu-Ray resolution and sound which is superb and fitting. You can still buy a well polished DVD at a low price point.

Review: THE MONKEY

A family is cursed with toy monkey that can cause violent death. Twin brothers Bill and Hal notice this quality in the toy early as they witness the ghastly deaths of their baby sitter and mother. Hal blames Bill for the latter and a life of savage estrangement awaits them but not before they drop the toy down a well. As adults they go about their life struggles until the monkey resurfaces at a yard sale. Can you say unfinished business?

Up to this point, you are going to need some resilience if you watch this one. It's billed as a horror comedy and the best I can say about that is that you can see it trying. the cast is variously deadpan and over animated in the way that the most excruciating satires are. The screen is splattered with visual jokes that show their working and come to what ought to be explosive payoffs but just feel like polished examples of jokes. It's an Ikea approach of parts fulfilment rather than organic force.

Theo James plays the twins and for most of the film we ride with the good twin and he plays it like old vanilla. The bad twin gets all the lines and art direction to make him compelling but we don't get him until the third act by which time the mechanics of the story take over and things move instead of hang around looking blackly arch. And then it ends.

A friend of mine has a nervous habit. They will rupture a conversation they are having with a correction or contradiction. If that gets through they will keep doing it until that's what the conversation becomes, each time rounding things of with a loud and mirthless laugh. Generally, I can look around this and remember the film of friendship around us but when it gets that oppressive and anti-communicative that it turns into a creepy automatic form of abuse, I need to either let it through until I can escape or start pushing back. When that's a movie that doesn't admit of interaction, the sense of exhaustion kicks in early and remains even through the more appealing passages.

I had tried to get into a cinema to see this but missed the first week when my preferred morning screenings were available. I almost made it to one yesterday but it was pulled by the venue. So I found it for rent online. By that time I had forgotten why I was so interested in seeing it. Looked kind of goofy in trailers, about the same kind of level as Heart Eyes. It wasn't until I watched the credits did I understand my enthusiasm. The Monkey was directed by Osgood Perkins.

Osgood Perkins has made a name for himself with strong, off-centre fare like The Blackcoat's Daughter and Longlegs, stories with horror dressing around impressively solemn and tragic cores. He's just getting better at them. This time he tried a comedy and, like most that try to blend funny and scary he failed and it feels like he assumed that a confident intellectual grasp of what makes a joke work is not enough to actually make it work.

See, this is not just me being tin-eared with comedy. My sense of humour ranges from the elaborate wit of Shakespeare to farting preacher videos on YouTube (try it, they never get old). I also own that just because I don't laugh doesn't mean others won't. The repellent Wes Anderson has legions of fans who think he is a genius. They aren't necessarily wrong but they can have him. But when I see anyone approach a creative project as mathematically as this my resistance bristles and stands firm to repel boarders. That said, I am always ready to be wrong with a first impression. Then, when that impression is only mildly challenged by what I see before collapsing back to what made it in the first place, I admit defeat. This unlovely film wasted me and not in a good way. Please Oz, let's get back to creepy, next time.

Viewing notes: I watched this as a rental stream through Prime. It was a lot cheaper than if I had gone to a cinema for it. All the usual online rentals will offer it for the time being.