Not to be confused with the insane Jimmy Wang Yu production, the slick 1974 Shaw Brothers offering The Flying Guillotine is much more grounded in reality; as grounded as anything involving flying guillotines, anyhow. Legend has it the eponymous weapon was utilized by Imperial assassins in the Qing dynasty, specifically during Yongzheng’s reign between 1722 and 1735. All period evidence that remains consists of crude drawings and scattered bits of folklore. Needless to say, no actual flying guillotines have been recovered, but that didn’t stop the Chinese film industry from reviving them for a brief heyday in the mid-70s.

Our story involves the usual Manchurian oppression of the simple, hardworking lower class, and the typical pining for the bygone glory days of the Ming and Han dynasties. Any chop-socky fan worth his salt will take this meat-and-potatoes setup as a given, but director Meng Hua Ho must ensure no member of the audience is left behind:

We immediately cut to a scene in the Imperial throne room, where two humble Lords plead for the ethical and fair treatment of the working class. Yongzheng will have none of it! Summoning forth faithful retainer Xin Kang, played by Shaw Brothers regular Feng Ku, the gleefully evil emperor orders his subordinate to devise a way to assassinate the two outspoken Lords without arousing any suspicion from the already very, very suspicious populace. To add another item to the nearly impossible list of demands, ”It must be done at no fewer than 100 paces!!” Xin has no choice but to accept the assignment.

Despondent, he takes a walk through the marketplace and watches street performers spin plates on upraised poles, then spies a troupe of old men spinning wooden tops with long ropes. Then, out of the sky, a beam of light pierces through and angels descend from the heavens to give Xin some sort of divine inspiration. How in the hell he comes up with the idea for the flying guillotine from watching a few seconds of street performance is a mystery that not even the editor can solve for us. In literally no time flat, Xin’s got himself a working prototype, complete with bronze skullcap, descending mesh screen, and interlocked blades to snip off the victim’s gulliver. 

The next logical step is to decapitate a few wooden mannequins:

Of course, he succeeds with flying colors, and it’s off to the Imperial Palace for the grand unveiling.

So there you have it: the birth of the most badass weapon ever to grace the silver screen, taking up no more than five minutes of our film’s running time.  But this is only the first stage of the ridiculously elaborate plan to execute two uppity Lords. Now Xin is tasked with rounding up a dozen of the most skilled and loyal Imperial warriors for some rather unusual special forces training. A jump cut is all it takes for him to recruit his crew of 12 Flying Guillotiners, lead them on their sacred unbreakable oaths to the Emperor, and sacrifice a ceremonial chicken to seal the deal. Once you spill chicken blood over that altar, there’s absolutely no turning back.

The training begins in usual kung fu style: our recruits negotiate a sandy obstacle course with a climbing pole, gymnastic hand loops dangling from chains, and naturally, behead the requisite wooden mannequins. Two of the trainees prove to be quick studies: noble Ma Teng (Kuan Tai Chen, star of Boxer from Shantung) and despicable rat Ah Kun (Shaw Brothers stock villain Hung Wei), who we immediately know will turn out to be the protagonist and eventual antagonist, respectively. Also one of them is a mole feeding dubious intelligence to the Emperor on a nightly basis. No bonus points if you figure out his identity before the other characters do.

All the while, an increasingly paranoid Yongzhen keeps a close eye on these trainees, becoming convinced that his own safety might someday be jeopardized. Understandably so; who wouldn’t soil themselves upon seeing this abomination flying towards their noggin while emitting an eerie buzz-saw sound? Nonetheless, he studies the training sequences as closely as we do.

Save for a fleeting exchange of fisticuffs between Ma Teng and Ah Kun on the obstacle course, there is a distinct dearth of action to be seen in the first act of The Flying Guillotine, unless you count violence inflicted upon wooden target men. The hand-to-hand combat is stiffly choreographed, with obvious blocking, rigorously memorized cues, and men sent flying from blows that clearly do not connect. Once the story really kicks into high gear, however, it’s almost impossible to keep up with the escalating body count. Heads are detached from torsos in an alarming frequency not seen since the French Revolution.

The 12 Flying Guillotiners, led by Xin Kang, begin dressing in black and venturing out every night like ninjas, stalking the rooftops of Feng Yang in search of traitorous heads to remove. The two Lords from the opening scene are dealt with in no time flat, with pathetic ease. Who would blame the Emperor for wanting to get the most out of his awesome new weapon, and his dozen skilled hitmen? New targets are added to the hitlist almost as quickly as they are summarily decapitated.

All well and good, but this is a mainstream studio production designed to appeal to the ultra-nationalist sensibilities of the Chinese moviegoing populace, so about halfway through, the story becomes one of rebellion. Sick of being a fascist tool for a paranoid despot, Ma Teng decides to jump ship and turn his back on the Empire, away from the poisoned teat of Imperial corruption and into the open arms of the working class. After a lengthy nighttime escape sequence, with plenty of awkward swordplay, Ma Teng is on the lam and must deal with the stigma of being Feng Yang’s Most Wanted. Can he start a new life as a humble farmer, all the while dodging the dogged pursuit of his former allies and the lengthy reach of their fearsome flying guillotines?

And maybe, just maybe, he could hook up and start a new family in the process.

In spite of its simplistic storyline, with clear-cut black-and-white morality leaving zero room for ambiguity, Meng Hua Ho keeps the pace humming along at a rapid clip, keeps the stage blood flowing, and racks up an impressive number of on-screen decapitations. According to more than one source, The Flying Guillotine actually holds the record for most beheadings in a feature film; somewhere in the neighborhood of 25, all told. You could try to keep track but it would be a fruitless effort. Just sit back, turn your brain off, and marvel at the unparalleled spectacle.

At the end of the day, the moral is simple. Yongzheng = bad, working class = good.

Above all, the flying guillotine always wins. Always.

Inception, the latest attempt to make Leonardo DiCaprio a weighty actor, fails in this impossible quest. All the ingredients of Inception are spot-on; great acting, a beguiling premise, a relentless film-noir atmosphere, and clean special effects. But having all the right notes does not necessarily make for a good film. I would hazard that Inception is a victim of its own poor editing, which in the end is far and away the most important aspect of filmmaking. Inception spends too much time dangling the premise before our noses while falling far short of a film’s most important task—creating sympathy and empathy for its characters.

DiCaprio plays Dominic the Extractor, who specializes in stealing ideas of dreams and planting ideas into people’s heads. His fellow cast members are a who’s who in A-list actors who are given frustratingly bland characters: Ken Wantabe giving us the inscrutable Asian routine once again, Joseph Gordon-Levitt still looking like a teenager, Michael Caine’s obligatory wizened old man shtick, Marion Cotillard as the wounded dream-wife always looking for a excuse to stab someone, and a surprisingly restrained (and therefore tolerable) Ellen Page playing a newly hired dream architect who should have been a major character in the story, but barely shows up in the film. Even the great Cillian Murphy (who I still refer to as “My Man Scarecrow”) is handed the most cliché of conflicts, the inability to satisfy his domineering father. He looks as bored as Jeff Bridges did in Iron Man. In essence, Inception boasts a very good looking, talented cast, but the characters inspire nothing but apathy and a sinking feeling of been there-done that.

The plot piles on top of itself like a triple-decker sandwich that’s either about to collapse or give you lockjaw. Inception has none of the Mobius strip charm of Momento or Lost Highway. There are dreams inside of dreams inside of dreams, but all these dives in the human subconscious begin to resemble each other like suburban strip malls. Look, there’s an auto-cypher of a happy family, little children laughing and running into Dominic’s arms, on the beach, naturally. And there’s the stop-motion Matrix style physics to make you feel disoriented. One of the great lines of the movie refers to the fact that you never think a dream is strange until you wake up, yet this intriguing truth is never explored. I was wondering about that until I realized that almost none of these dreams are actually strange.

The crux of Inception’s failure is, ironically enough, the blandness of its imagination. You would think that a technology such as dream manipulation would be an earth-shattering, game changing device, like the automobile or sliced bread. But alas, this most wondrous of inventions is merely at the service at some mundane corporate espionage plot device, some attempt to corner the energy market. Ho hum. And the poverty of the dreamscapes is surprising as well. The dreams we enter are anonymous cities populated by buildings of Dominic and his wife Mallorie’s nostalgia, grey streets that resemble some dreary downtown of a Midwestern city. The only scene that held any interest for me was the opium den of dreams run by chemist Yusuf (a jovially charming Dileep Rao), hinting that all this dream manipulation is becoming this generation’s crack cocaine. Now that’s a premise that could suspend my disbelief. An overbearing score by by Hans Zimmer only helps muddle the scenes, desperately trying to extract drama when there is none.

You’d figure with the unlimited potential of the human imagination, you’d have a sex orgy on a space station or a dinosaur rodeo, but I suppose married life means being shackled to a boring imagination. In short, this film is a more smartly dressed, far less obnoxious version of the migraine-inducing Strange Days. As much as I tried to suspend my disbelief, my dreams weren’t having it. Inception is not a terrible film—it’s too well acted and yes, too well directed (particularly in the case of the Taming of the Page); rather, I would describe Inception as disappointing, after the fearless 70s-style moral ambiguity and rich characterization of Nolan’s Batman films. Perhaps Inception deserves another look on my part, but I simply don’t give a hoot about Dominic and his tortured psyche. It’s nothing a halfway competent psychiatrist couldn’t sort out.

The Slithis is a strange creature, indeed; borne of unchecked seepage from a Venice Beach nuclear power plant and the inbred hillbilly cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, he emerges from a drainage canal early in the A.M. to feast on local denizens. But the charming humanoid beast is almost an afterthought until the third act of Spawn of the Slithis, a film which is perfectly content to plant its tranquilized ass on the couch and sloooooowly tell the tale of Wayne Connors, a high school journalism teacher, and his profound disillusionment with the current generation of students, who produce the “worst high school newspaper in the nation” under his ever more jaded aegis. Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs for the Baby Boomers reared during the ultra-conservative Eisenhower Era, who have their optimism dashed against the rocks time and time again by the hippie generation. “Teaching’s beginning to be a big turn-off,” he laments to his wife, who is a woman named Jeff, as they leave his sorry campus for their humble Love Shack and a night full of red wine and Quaaludes.

Sporadic Slithis attacks give Wayne a grim new lease on life, giving him the opportunity to use his Los Angeles press card(!?) and fanangle his way into a string of murder investigations. Since the LA County Coroner must have been stoned on elephant tranquilizers, the Overacting Police Chief declares that the Slithis meals are merely the work of a Mansonian “Satanic Death Cult”. If you’re willing to accept that plot contrivance, you may be functionally retarded. For those who aren’t suffering from severe cognitive impairment, there happens to be a bottled solution that comes in many flavors to suit your particular pleasure. All the actors seem to be drunk or stoned or flying eight miles high, and what’s more, director Steven Traxler’s skewed vision of LA is populated mostly by drunken transients who specifically drink economy-priced red wine. You should probably do the same.

There is an “investigation” carried out by Wayne the high school newspaper editor, wherein he illegally lifts evidence from multiple crime scenes, conveniently left open and unguarded for anyone to walk in, and sends them to his pal “Doctor John” for analysis. Since none of the characters seem to have any sort of background or history, it’s unclear whether the hippie-bearded Doc is a high school science teacher, or just some rogue biologist who spends his free time getting stoned and poring over conspiracy theories.

After a brief period of befuddlement, mandated by the script, the good doctor shows up at Wayne and Jeff’s house one night, unannounced and most likely blitzed out of his hairy gourd, and begins an incredibly insane tale of nuclear waste, stagnant marshes, and radioactive dirt. The Man is trying to play God with his unstable nuclear power plants, nature is becoming polluted, Mother Earth is bleeding, blah blah blah… but then John builds to a kicker:

“It’s one of the most important discoveries in scientific history, and they called this radioactive silt…”

…

“…Slithis.”

How and why Doctor John decided to bombard us with this info overload is a question best left unanswered. What’s more important is the actor’s hilarious, intoxicated delivery of the exposition, and the fact that said info-dump serves no purpose in Wayne’s investigation whatsoever. Sure, it sets up an unexplained scene where Wayne and Jeff go to the igloo-shaped house of a former nuclear scientist, but what comes out of that is just more crap about how Man Shouldn’t Play God. Oh, and a hilarious close-up of the scientist’s “radiation-scarred” visage.

Put as simply as possible, Spawn of the Slithis is about a monster mutated by radioactive silt that comes out at night to feast on society’s undesirables. When it finally decides to become a poor ripoff of Jaws, complete with a hardscrabble crew scraped together and placed on a lonely wooden boat, the narrative is already lying dead in the water and stinking like carp left out in the sun. The film would barely qualify for feature-length if the editing was tighter, and Traxler’s infatuation with his high-speed slow motion camera slows things down even more. There’s one fact that makes it stand out in the overcrowded pool of horrible monster movies, and that’s the basic level of competence behind the scenes, coupled with an earnest desire to make a significant work of art. While there’s no doubt that it fails to achieve any sort of depth, the attempt at subtext is fascinating in the same way of a slow motion train derailment.

Feasting on drunken hobos by night, swimming in irradiated ocean water by day, the Slithis leads a lonesome yet unpretentious lifestyle. His choice of victims leaves plenty up to interpretation: from slum inhabitants to transients to the sexually uninhibited swingers of the Me Generation. The attack scenes are surprisingly gruesome and drawn out, complete with a subjective Slithis-Cam for terrifying split-diopter POV shots. Yet there is a gaping hole in the middle of the story: the monster drops out of sight for a half-hour lacuna while Wayne wanders the city interrogating homeless drunks and charters a boat from a black man named Christopher Columbus, who uses the word “mother” as an all-purpose noun and is obsessed with handshake etiquette. His hobo interrogations lead to a dead end, but Columbus is all too happy to aid Wayne in his thrilling quest to gather specimens from the ocean floor for thorough radiation analysis. There is little to do but bide our time by drinking or otherwise putting yourself in the same mindset as the cast and crew, waiting for the real protagonist to crawl out of the ocean once more.

Once our hero makes his triumphant return, it’s a real doozy. First, a disorienting jump cut puts us in the middle of a bizarre nightclub where patrons make drunken bets on turtle races as an MC provides moronic running commentary. It is in this hideous milieu where libidinous swinger Doug sets sights on virginal vacationer Jennifer, who is 18 but “could pass for 20″. Spirited away by this mustachioed Lothario in his blue Volkswagen Beetle, she all too easily surrenders her humble life story: a lifelong resident of backwoods Suska, North Dakota, Jennifer was just waiting for the day when she would be old enough to jump ship and immerse herself in the bright lights, spinning disco balls, Free Love and free-flowing cocaine of the Big City. And along came her knight in bell-bottoms and leisure suit and dress shirt unbuttoned down to his navel.

Once aboard Doug’s houseboat, the Casanova of Venice Beach lights a couple of candles flanking a B&W framed picture of himself(?!) and doles out the obligatory red wine. For the sake of your sanity, please follow suit.

As Doug reaches behind the love seat for a switch, our minds are left racing. What hideous contraption could he possibly have hidden in this den of horrors? Lamely, it’s just a power switch for some red lights to provide the “romantic ambience” of a nuclear meltdown. Poor, poor naive little Jennifer thinks she’s reeled in a catch. The  awkward, PG rated foreplay commences.

But what’s that? A knocking on the door? Surely it’s just Rex, the friendly neighborhood peeping tom, doing his daily run on Doug’s well-stocked liquor cabinet? Surely nothing could be more important than stealing third base before diving headfirst into the home plate? And yet, and yet… there always remains the possibility of a former hook-up coming to call, and after all, what could be sweeter than parlaying this successful pickup into a threesome? Hoping against hope, Doug ascends the stairs, with Traxler fetishizing his every move with Hitchcockian intensity, then crosses the cabin while bathed in sanguine light, then slicks back his hair, then sloooowly moving for the doorknob, and then

GWAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHNNNNNN

A familiar scaly hand pulls Doug from his haven of moral iniquity and into the harsh realities of life!! There is much rejoicing, much spilling of stage blood, and much red-tinted Slithis action. The beast is back, and hungrier than ever! Would it be redundant to highlight, again, how satisfying this sequence becomes?

What ho? The sounds of a lass crying for her dear departed beau, in spite of all the inhuman groaning, bone snapping and flesh rending! What could be sweeter than a virginal North Dakotan for dessert? And yet… we have come to know this couple better than some of us know ourselves, shared their hopes and dreams and lusts and perversions. Paradoxically, we share the beast’s bloodlust and we want to see Jennifer obey Doug’s softly cooed command to “get naked”, which prove to be his last words uttered as a sentient being. Were it not for Jennifer’s promiscuity, she would not even be in this debacle, and were it not for her naivete in crying for a dead lover, the Slithis would not mosey on board Doug’s Love Boat for his second helping.

This is easily the most drawn out monster attack in the film, a tour de force of conflicting moralities, tragically wasted youth, nature’s inhumanity to man, and copious red lighting. As we’re immersed in the color of sin, Traxler further implicates the audience with multiple cuts to the split-diopter Slithis-Cam, lingering on Jennifer’s mortal terror and fragile, writhing form. Then the attack, inevitably, turns into a molestation, recalling the poster depicting our lovely monster with a scantily clad bride cradled in his loving arms: another paradoxical image that recalls the inner torment of the eponymous 40 foot ape of King Kong. The agonizingly drawn out attack is like some first-year film student’s tribute to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom filtered through The Horror of Party Beach. Was the monster once human, or did humans unknowingly create the monster with their unchecked nuclear power plants? Is this sequence brilliant or idiotic? Have I really gone through an entire 12 pack of Schlitz?

We end with a shot that practically oozes depth and meaning and subtext, etc.

The hilarity doesn’t let up at all, when in the next scene Wayne makes a visit to the police station to check in on the mentally unbalanced Stupid Chief, whose acting style can best be described as “like Vincent Price on amphetamines.” Even when he’s serving as the meat in the middle of a Bad Actor Sandwich, doing his business in the background, this nutcase chews scenery with all the gusto of a failed classically trained Shakespearean actor. The hilarity remains on a constant high pretty much throughout the rest of the film.

Had enough ham to wash down with all that red wine? Good, because now we’re on board the humble SS. Creation piloted by the one and only Christopher Columbus, as Traxler shamelessly rips off Jaws with all the weird fever-dream logic of Jaws the Revenge. It’s kind of refreshing that nobody discovers some simple household chemical that reduces the Slithis back to his radioactive silt stage, so instead Wayne and Chris must engage the creature in a mano a mano streetfight involving a shotgun and numerous improvised weapons. For those of us rooting for the monster, the ultimate outcome is kind of refreshing; the heroes snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by abiding in the Order of Mother Nature. In other words, Christopher Columbus babbles some jibba-jabba about the infinite possibilities of the ocean, the order of chaos, and the Dismal Tide. And then… well, it’s insane. And the screen goes negative. If you have any theories as to what the last shot signifies, please let us know. If you can make it through without dousing your brain with alcohol, you are either very brave or very stupid.