April 17th - O is for Orochi the Eight-Headed Dragon
It was a choice between this and Omega Man, and today I don’t really feel like watching something so suspenseful, so here we have a movie from Japan! This is a typical Japanese monster movie in action and in filming styles. There are many small scale models used when special effects like flames are being used on the cityscape. While this story takes place in feudal Japan, it still follows the basic monster movie plots though. You don’t actually get to see the monster until most of the way into the movie. There are some other monsters in this movie other than the one the movie’s named after, but you’d think you’d name the movie after the monster if it was more prevalent.
Character wise, they’re not very impressive as people. They’re quite impressive as fighters though. Heck, one guy can shoot laser beams out of his eyes! They do the typical things from Asian action movies including gravity defying jumps and death defying sword fights. There is lots of back story provided, but having to have all those actiony super powers makes them stiff and stoic. There’s a romance in this movie, but it becomes ridiculous when the two show almost know emotion while having a deep loving conversation.
The monster design is pretty good and they do make formidable enemies (most of the time). They provide contrast to the fights at the beginning of the film with the hordes of men. Unfortunately none of these fights do anything to speed up the movie. By about an hour in I was going to give up because it wasn’t moving fast enough. Not that the story wasn’t interesting, it was just REALLY slow.
SO, in conclusion, the monsters are great, but we don’t see nearly enough of them, the characters are stale but interesting, and the plot is long and sometimes hard to follow. There are some obvious continuity flaws and some ridiculous fight sequences. This movie gets 2 “Oh, my God!”s out of 5. Oh yeah, when you defeat the bad guy, don’t think the movie’s over! You still have to fight the eight-headed dragon!
LOL! Because defeating the bad guy wasn't enough? This one will probably go on my "never-see-that-film" list--so thank you for the service of placing it there. You know, I wouldn't mind owning and eight-headed dragon though. =)
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