Wednesday, April 6, 2006

Tales of Voodoo, Vol. #4

Temple of Hell – 1983

     Aka The Ark of the Sun God, which this movie announced itself to be within the first 30 seconds.  No sign of the words Temple of Hell. This is the second disc I have rented from this company (Videoasia), and the previous Tales of Terror suffered from exactly the same problems. Neither movie is really what it appears to be, and if the movie is asian, you’re in for BIG problems. But more on that later, when I talk about the other side of the disc.

This side, an Italian rip of Indian Jones, is not a terrible flick. The print is fairly bright and clean, and the audio isn’t muddy. Which is a good thing, since there’s no subtitles to help out here. The biggest problem is there’s no Temple of Hell. There’s a temple, and there’s lava, but that’s as close as we come. No demons, no Hell, no kidding. So unless you’re in the mood to see the Italian version of Indy search for the scepter of Gilgamesh, you might want to give this a pass. Oh, and the bad news? This is the better movie of the pair.

Two beers out of five

Cannibal Curse – 1987

     Gosh, where to start? Let’s begin with the fact that there are two audio tracks, neither English, playing simultaneously. It sounds like they dubbed Mandarin over the original Cantonese, without removing the Cantonese track. Every discussion sounded like a crowd having an argument. Good thing you’ve not trying to make heads or tails out of that noise.

So you’re gonna read the subtitles, eh? Good luck with all that. There are Chinese characters, with the English underneath them. Too bad your screen doesn’t go that far. And before you suggest that its me and my hi-feluten TV, you’ll not that it looks that way on my PC. And everyone in the Netflix review section bitches about it. So, we have no idea what anyone is saying. So, we have no idea what’s going on.

Which after the first 30 minutes, is not so bad, as it appears to turn into some kind of China after dark, with more simulated sex than a Joe Sarno movie. Lots of nice oriental boobage here. And believe me when I say, that is the only thing saving this movie from a one. I mean, there’s no cannibals at all. And the movie just calls itself Curse, but I couldn’t even see that anyone was cursed in the movie. But then, I have absolutely NO idea what was going on, except one guy was really getting lucky.

Oh, and it had wacky Chinese sorcerers. Always like them. The bad sorcerer gets lucky too. But then melts when he does it with a different girl. No idea why.

Two beers out of five (could have been a lot higher, if there was only one soundtrack, and the subtitles were visible).