Everyone please send some extra special good vibes in the direction of our friend Clubside Chris, the Technical Expert (see photo) of outlawvern.com. I’ve learned from social media that he’s in the hospital. It sounds like he’s gonna be okay, but he’s going through a huge ordeal and hopefully it won’t embarrass him if I take this opportunity to show some appreciation for all that he’s done for me.
If you don’t know the story, Clubside Chris is the guy who years ago decided to register outlawvern.com and give it to me because he couldn’t stand to see my important academic works sitting on a shitty Geocities sight. I actually turned him down because I had some notion about creating profound works that only the truly enlightened would be able to read because they would overlook that it looked like crap and was on a free sight that normal humans abandoned like 10 years earlier. A couple years after his kind offer my crappy sight went kaput and I contacted him (convinced he was offended that I turned him down before) and he was generous enough to help me out.
At my weirdo request he went through alot of trouble to create a WordPress template that would mimic the crappy look of my Geocities sight. And when I got sick of that (and after it possibly gave one poor guy a seizure) he made this nicer looking one we use today. He also made a forum after you guys kept requesting it. So Paul and alot of spambots owe him gratitude for that.
Chris is also the guy who convinced me to start posting my links on Twitter and Facebook. I thought the whole idea of Twitter was ridiculous, but he convinced me to give it a fair shot, and… whoops. Sometimes when I’m procrastinating from writing I wish I wasn’t so addicted to it, but it has really helped me to bring in more readers and stay in touch with people and stuff.
Chris continues to keep the sight operating and answer my ignorant questions when I have them. The most insane part of all is that he’s done it all for free, in fact at a loss. It’s incredible how much he’s done for me and for everyone who likes to read my reviews and for the community here. I also sometimes get the impression my politics can be offensive to him, and yet he’s never ditched me over it. He is a good guy. Thank you Chris.
Walter Hill’s HARD TIMES could almost be a western or a samurai movie, but it happens to be a bareknuckle brawler movie instead. In fact I think it’s the template for my beloved sub-genre of the underground fight circuit movie. Charles Bronson as a guy named Chaney wanders into town (New Orleans circa 1933) on the back of a train. He’s so broke he can’t afford a coffee refill, but he sees a bunch of guys going into a warehouse across the street and he decides to follow them in. Turns out they’re there to gamble on a bare knuckle fight.
Talk about a revenge story! Yuki, a.k.a. Lady Snowblood (Meiko Kaji from the FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION series), has been raised from birth specifically for vengeance. Nothing else. No coloring, no jump rope, just “let’s get you ready to track down some people and chop them the fuck up.” It all started when four scumbags (three men, one woman) attacked a couple, killing the man and raping the woman. When the woman later killed one of the attackers she was put in jail, where she died giving birth to Yuki.
In the opening of LADY DRAGON, Kathy Galagher (Cynthia Rothrock) arrives late to her underground fight. The crowd goes silent from cheering on her opponent when she enters in silhouette, a mysterious figure of intimidation in a pointy druid hood, carrying a gym bag, her footsteps echoing like Walker in 
“Equation-wise the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended. We work on the other side of time. We’ll bring them here through either isotope teleportation, trans-molecularization, or better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.”
Poor Azumi (Aya Ueto) is one of the best young swordswomen you ever did see, but it’s because she’s lived such a fucked up life. In the opening scene we see how she ended up like she did. When she was a little girl the Master (Yoshio Harada, 
There’s something I love about a movie where English Tom Hardy, Swedish Noomi Rapace and Belgian Matthias Schoenaerts play Brooklyn neighborhood folks. It’s this international cast, directed by Michaël R. Roskam (who previously did the “Best Foreign Language Film” Academy Award nominee BULLHEAD starring Schoenaerts) but there’s still a theme of characters having to correct each other’s ignorant statements about nationalities and languages: no, those gangsters aren’t from Russia, they’re from Chechnya. And you call them Chechens, not “Chechnyans.” And the language they speak in Brazil is called Portueguese, not Brazilian.
I’m still lacking in my knowledge of westerns. I know some of the bigger spaghetti westerns and some of the modern ones, but not many of the original ones those are playing off of. And I know every once in a while I oughta school myself on the basics and the classics so here I am watching 1952’s HIGH NOON directed by Frederick Zinnemann.
