As I mentioned in a few recent reviews, I was one of the guests on the podcast Postcards From a Dying World, talking about the films of Jet Li. I had fun and it was a good excuse to fill in or revisit some of his movies (a couple more of those reviews coming soon).
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And by the way this is part two in a trilogy of Chinese cinema episodes. I’m excited to listen to the other two because honestly the guests are much more impressive than me: Part 1 has Dan Halsted, the Portland film programmer you may have heard on RZA’s commentaries and who stars in the legendary story of the guy who tracked down a treasure trove of pristine Shaw Brothers beneath an abandoned theater. Part 3 – Best Hong Kong Cinema of the ’80s and ’90s – has Lisa Morton (author of The Cinema of Tsui Hark), Joey O’Bryan (screenwriter of FULLTIME KILLER, MOTORWAY, DOWNRANGE and TRIPLE THREAT) and Jeff Briggs (archivist at Warner Brothers and Hong Kong cinema expert).
If you check out my episode let me know your top Jet Li movies so I know which ones I need to hurry up and watch or re-watch.
TURBULENCE is kind of an also-ran in the world of ‘90s studio thrillers. They used to put pretty big budgets into these mainstream action/thriller hybrids, especially if they starred Harrison Ford and/or Tommy Lee Jones. I guess psycho Ray Liotta is a little more low rent than that, and heroine Lauren Holly wasn’t exactly a Jodie-Foster-sized marquee name (she was known for Picket Fences and DUMB AND DUMBER). But if Wikipedia is correct, the budget for this one was bigger than THE FUGITIVE, 
MOTHER KRAMPUS (2017) is a quite serious and pretty gory b-movie from the UK that claims to be “Based on the German Urban Legend of Frau Perchta, the Christmas Witch, who takes a child each night over the 12 days of Christmas.” Maybe C.J. or any of the other German readers can let us know if they’ve ever heard of such a thing. With a little reading I learned she’s a pagan goddess of the Alps, a guardian of beasts and does have some association with the 12 Days of Christmas. She often has one oversized foot and an iron beak, both of which are sorely missing in this cinematic depiction. In some legends she has servants who look like Krampus, but they’re not Krampus, and she doesn’t have them in this movie anyway, so the title is bullshit. But it is a specifically Christmas-themed horror story about an evil hag who comes out of the woods to kill people at Christmas time and that I can get behind.
CAMPFIRE TALES is a very low budget horror anthology released in 1991. After directors William Cooke and Paul Talbot graduated from college in 1987 they decided to build a film around “The Hook,” a short they’d made in their senior year 16mm class. The stories are very simplistic – unusually light on gimmicks and ironic twists for this type of material – and the filmmaking is not what would traditionally be considered “good.” But being made by beginners with no money gives it that scrappy underdog charm where you’re excited for anything they kind of pull off, and since it was made by young people in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s there’s some relatability and nostalgia for somebody like me who may or may not have come of age around that time.
If there’s a more unlikely sci-fi franchise than the SKYLINE saga that doesn’t star Vin Diesel, I don’t know what it is. The series began with 2010’s SKYLINE, directed by Greg and Colin Strause (
After I watched 
BLOOD BEAT (1983) is another Christmas-set (as opposed to Christmas-themed) horror movie that I watched on Shudder. This one I had heard of as a notably crazy movie, and I knew it had been released on blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome. It’s about a family being stalked by the spirit of a samurai. I believe.
I’m going to be on a podcast soon where the topic of the week is Jet Li movies. There are still many I haven’t seen, so I wanted to fill in a couple of blanks before recording. DR. WAI IN “THE SCRIPTURE WITH NO WORDS” from 1996 seemed like an important one to get to because it’s directed and choreographed by the great Ching Siu-Tung (his directorial followup to 
I was in the mood for some more Christmas horror, and I tried this movie BODY – the 2015 American movie, not the 2015 Polish movie – for the following two reasons: it showed up in Shudder’s holiday section, and the running time was 75 minutes. I had not heard of it, but it’s something that played the Slamdance Film Festival and is distributed by Adam Yauch’s company Oscilloscope Laboratories.
