In this English-language actioner from Hong Kong, two cops (one of whom is Aaron Kwok of Storm Riders, though they look so much like twins, I could hardly tell them apart) are out to quash a mob ring that, for the first time, is channeling drugs into mainland China. Heading the operation is cocksure Mark Dacascos (of Brotherhood of the Wolf and Cradle 2 the Grave), eager to work out the details of a $14 million coke transaction with his visiting supplier, played by rap star Coolio, who must’ve had it worked into his contract to have his character be named Coolio as well. Three times he says, “Man, I could get used to this ***censored***!” Assisting them is a mysterious cutie not afraid to strip naked when she’s accused of wearing a wire.

For all its flaws – not much of a story, Coolio – China Strike Force delivers in the action department. From the opening training sequence, the film moves to a foot chase on a busy highway with the pursued and pursuer eventually jumping from moving vehicle to moving vehicle. There’s also a great, high-octane car chase between a Lamborghini and a race car, plus several rounds of martial-arts showdowns. But the biggest and best stunt is saved for last, with the characters battling on a constantly tilting plate-glass window suspended high above the city.

Not surprisingly, old pro Stanley Tong – director of several Jackie Chan films, including Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop – is behind the camera. The affable leads all speak English very well, so no one can accuse Miramax of poor dubbing this time around. Be sure and stick around for the Chan-tastic ouch-takes at the end credits.

The DVD includes trailers for other martial-arts-related Dimension films, including Shaolin Soccer, Invincible, Equilibrium and Quentin Tarnatino’s hotly anticipated Kill Bill.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

Following the overrated El Mariachi and the underrated Desperado, Robert Rodriguez’s Once upon a Time in Mexico completes a trilogy awash in grimy locations, power-packed shootouts and outrageous stunts. This entry had every right to best its predecessors, but comes up a few rounds short.

Antonio Banderas and his hair return as El Mariachi, the guitar-strumming gunslinger. He’s hired by a CIA agent – the occasionally three-armed Johnny Depp – to kill one Gen. Marquez, the military madman who brutally murdered El Mariachi’s wife (Salma Hayek) and child in cold blood. Meanwhile, Marquez is poised to overthrow Mexico’s new president, while Depp plays off and/or sets up informant Cheech Marin, retired FBI agent Ruben Blades, curvy cop Eva Mendez and dog-toting scumbag Mickey Rourke (now resembling a puffy orangutan), the right-hand man to drug cartel kingpin Willem Dafoe. How do all these characters fit together and what are their motives? I wish I could tell you, but this movie is so needlessly complex that it would take a finely detailed flowchart to figure it all out.

Because the story is so convoluted, it’s hard to invest much in Mexico for its often-slow first half. The pace quickens (and mood lightens) considerably in the home stretch, set during a chaotic Day of the Dead celebration-***censored***-riot. That’s when Rodriguez’s kinetic visual trademarks take spark. All of the action set pieces are over-the-top and first-rate, if a bit too choppy.

As he did with Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp elevates this movie to another level entirely. Without him, I’m afraid Mexico wouldn’t have enough to recommend, even with the tricked-out lethal guitars and Darkman-like character running around. He’s quirky and funny and relegates Banderas to a supporting character in his own franchise.

You’d think a flick with Hayek in one hand and Mendez in another would know how to juggle (and jiggle) properly. The previous films in this trilogy are models of simplicity, but here Rodriguez has too many things he wants to show you, too many tricks up his rolled-up sleeve. And in trying to cram them all within 90 minutes, he fails to sew the thread that gets you from Point A to Point B without any snags during the ride.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

After watching Once Upon a Time in Mexico, I am more convinced than ever that Desperado is a ***censored*** near perfect action movie. The story is simple. The action sequences are incredible. The main character wreaks major havoc. The girl is super-hot. The plot of the movie is so simple that a viewer can start watching at any time and get totally immersed in the film.

In stark contrast to this simplicity, Once Upon a Time in Mexico is large, sprawling and messy. This is the third film in Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi trilogy. However, the focus is no longer solely on the gun-slinging guitar player and his quest for revenge. In fact, it’s hardly even about El Mariachi at all… And that may be the movies problem. 

Once Upon a Time in Mexico tells the story of a whole bunch of people plotting to overthrow the president of Mexico. The players include Johnny Depp as a CIA agent, Willem Dafoe as the leader of a drug cartel, Ruben Blades as a former FBI agent out for revenge, Eva Mendes as some kind of law enforcement agent and Mickey Rourke as a henchman who carries a chihuahua around with him all the time. To be fair, Rodriguez has created a very interesting cast of characters here. There are just too many of them. It’s an overload reminiscent of the SPY KIDS movies, except with people instead of gadgets.

The fact that all these characters are double-crossing each other makes it even harder to become emotionally involved in the movie. It almost seems like Rodriguez has been taking screenwriting lessons from George Lucas. Just as we don’t care about the political crap in the Star Wars movies, we don’t care about a bunch of people staging a coup in an El Mariachi movie. We want to see El Mariachi shooting people, playing guitar, banging Salma Hayek and jumping out of big fiery explosions.

At the center of all the political maneuverings is El Mariachi himself. Apparently a lot of time has passed since Desperado and we get filled in through flashbacks. I won’t go into details, but El Mariachi has had a pretty rough go of it between films and his revenge now has a new target. Mexico is most interesting when focused on El Mariachi. Antonio Banderas doesn’t get too many lines, but he doesn’t need them. His body language and facial expressions tell us everything we need to know about the character.

Johnny Depp’s corrupt CIA agent is a great character and immensely fun to watch. Rodriguez obviously realizes this, because Depp is probably on-screen for as much time as El Mariachi himself. He’s not a hero or a villain, but he’s a fascinating character and Depp seems to have a great time playing him. However, I’m still not sure what the hell he was up to.

When Mexico does flare up with action sequences, they are as visually exciting as ever. There are a few great set-pieces here, including a scene with a bus that echoes the bus sequence in the first El Mariachi.  I was a little fearful that his time spent making kiddie movies, would soften his action movie chops. I shouldn’t have worried. Mexico seems almost gleefully gory. Bodies fly all over the screen. Eyeballs get drilled out. Kneecaps get shot off. Plastic surgeries go awry. It’s grotesque comic-book style mayhem.

Rodriguez is trying to do something bigger and better than he has done in the past. While I don’t think most of it succeeds, at least he still delivers the goods: lots of action, interesting characters and exciting filmmaking. You may be confused, but you won’t be bored. In fact, you may find yourself considering a second viewing of this film, just to get it all straightened out.

Rodriguez has created an interesting world filled with colorful characters in this series. While I’m sure he is eager to move on to different things, I hope we haven’t seen the last of El Mariachi and Rodriguez’s Mexico.

The Creeper, everyone’s favorite old-record listenin’, knittin’ lovin’, jitney drivin’ scarecrow impersonator is back, and this time his face looks more like a vagina than ever. (If you really want to get technical about it, he looks like a cross between a vagina and the Wishmaster. Or maybe he looks like the Wishmaster’s vagina?)

But vaginas aside, this movie is ridiculous.  The script, apparently written by Tom of Finland and directed by Robert Mapplethorpe, does nothing but put teenage boys into one scenario after another that enables them to take their shirt off. One scene has about ten guys sunning themselves half-naked on top of a bus. You almost expect one of them to say “Hey fellas, my pants are so tight, I think I’m gonna take them off.” But then, five minutes later, in the crucial urination scene, one guy pulls his pants down all the way to his ankles to ***censored***. Who does that in front of other guys? Well, my guess is director Victor Salva, forever known as not the director of Powder, but as the child-molesting director of Powder. I guess this film was part of his court-ordered sentence of telling everyone in America he enjoys the smooth hairlessness of a pre-teen’s nutsack. Thank you, Meagan’s law!

So anyway, the Creeper is back, offing kids one by one on a bus. That’s it until the last twenty minutes when the ever-so-welcomed presence of Ray Wise shows up to somewhat take-out the Creeper with some giant spear throwing action. But it’s much too short and then the ending leaves you to believe it was all for nothing. Which it was.

But really, the worst thing is the epilogue, where we are flashed-forward 23 years into the future and Wise and son have the Creeper on display for the public a five bucks a pop. I don’t know what this is to imply? If there’s a Jeepers Creepers 3, will it take place in the year 2026? And if so, why are the kids driving a 1960’s truck? Why not a flying hovercar that runs on garbage? Also, why is the guy armed with only a shot-gun and that giant-spear thing to defend himself if it wakes up? If this is the future, should they have some sort of photon-disintegrator that would do a better job? I simply refuse to believe that 23 years from now, that’s the best you can do on the weapons front.

Wait a second-I just though of something. Those weapons didn’t work so well the first time he used them. If he had such a hell of a time dispatching the Creeper in the first place, why keep him in one piece, tied up with only some ropes and chains? You ***censored*** need to cut that guy up into 100 different pieces and bury him in 100 different places all over the world. It just seems like the smartest thing to do. But then again, I’m smart enough to not get mixed up with ancient Vagina-face monsters.

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Louis Fowler is a frequent contributor to Cinema Eye and Hitch Magazine. He is also the publisher of Damaged Magazine, a new issue of which is coming soon.

I was originally going to write this review on a Tuesday night, exactly one day after I went to a screening of it with four other people. But I knew I would see it again on Friday because my girlfriend Emily wanted to see it with me. She was actually a little upset that I went to see it without her, mostly because I have been talking about it all summer, calling it “the best movie ever.” Of course I was being facetious, but a part of me-the uber-horror nerd in me-was hoping that I could actually be right about that.

After the Monday screening, I will admit I was kind of left with a sense of disappointment. Maybe it was all the nay-saying that was going on around me (the majority opinion in my party was that it sucked), but I felt let-down. I felt like a kid who wanted a Red Rider BB gun for Christmas but instead got socks. It just really wasn’t what I expected. It seemed like a mean, spiteful trick, played on us by mean, spiteful filmmakers. Horrible script, horrible acting, horrible direction…but then something happened.

On the ride back to Rod’s, I came to this realization: this is a ***censored*** Freddy/Jason movie. This isn’t Shakespeare. This isn’t Citizen Kane. This is a movie about a dream-stalking, bad-pun spewing, child-molesting demon with knives on his right hand fighting an undead machete-wielding retarded mama’s boy in a goalie mask. It’s not supposed to be good. It’s not supposed to be high art. It’s supposed to be Freddy vs. Jason.

And then I felt good.

So after seeing F vs. J two more times (once with the aforementioned Emily and then last night with another friend), I can roundly say I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. Yes the set-up is stupid, but how else are you going to get them together? Box social? No, you need a plot contrivance and here, it works.

My only actual complaint about it is that it takes thirty minutes to really get started-movies like this should be rearing to go. Anytime the story leave Freddy or Jason and focuses on the teens, it becomes tedious-just ***censored*** kill them already.

Yes the dialogue is horrible and the acting even more so, but hell, it’s such a fun ride you don’t care. The humor that started with Jason X is here (albeit mostly of the stoner variety, which reminds me: there’s a guy in here who does a constant impersonation of Jason Mewes through out the whole thing, right down to costumes and vernacular; why not just hire Jay-it’s not like he’s that expensive, and with this crowd, he’d probably actually be a big draw).

The film is loaded with plenty o’tits and the gore is plentiful. When Jason and Freddy do meet (at Camp Crystal Lake, which is luckily being renovated with steel poles and fresh propane tanks), the film reaches an apex that most other summer offering wished (Matrix, I’m looking in you’re direction!). The ending (a cheap shot if I ever saw one) leaves plenty of room for a sequel, which, knowing me, I’ll call the “best movie ever” when I see the trailer.

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Louis Fowler is a frequent contributor to Cinema Eye and Hitch Magazine. He is also the publisher of Damaged Magazine, a new issue of which is coming soon.