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Reviews
Daininjutsu eiga Watari (1966)
A classic ninja fantasy fable
Watari is a tale of a young Iga ninja boy in feudal Japan, and seems to be a children adventure film, although the plot is surprisingly complicated (internal ninja intrigues and laws) and there is a considerable amount of blood and death and even several dead children, something one would rather not except from such type of movie.
My reception of this film may be distorted, as I'm a huge fan of most things ninja, but I greatly enjoyed the movie. The plot is captivating albeit a bit confusing, and the lead child actor seemed to be to be really good in the titular character's role. One point of special notice is an use of a battle axes (including by Watari), something I don't recall from any any other samurai-era picture.
One thing kept bugging me through the movie: the film is from 1966 and it really shows in its use of special effects in the presentation of ninpo ("ninja magic") lore, which by the todays standards are just really bad. Some sequences are also really trippy and just plain silly, (with the rainbow scene I thought is like Sesame Street on LSD and this with the giant enemy resembling something by the Monty Python group), and another literally cartoonish and also very odd. Not enough to deter a ninja nut like me, though, and it's just several minutes in total.
There's apparently a sequel called The Magic Sword of Watari.
Also thanks for Ninja80 website for directing me to this movie.
Saboteur (1984)
Why an entry on this game on IMDb? I have no idea.
Look, I have no problem with video games, if only the games in question are at least a little bit like a movies (actors used for voicing/motion capture, etc).
But this game has not even one word spoken by anyone. It has no real story and no dialogues (or monologues for that matter). It was made by a single person, programmer Clive Townsend. It is as cinematic as, say, Pac-man is (no, I won't try and see if there's a Pac-man article too).
And hey, what's up with its rating of 9.7 - maybe a quarter century(!) ago in 1984, but it's now REALLY outdated.
I believe this entry should be deleted, because it makes a joke out of IMDb.
Chistilishche (1998)
Russian ultra-nationalist exploitation film
First of all, the other reviewers said things like "sort of a documentary-like this movie", "this one shows what really happened", and even a "terrific documentary drama". This is completely wrong, as this is a fictional story about fictional characters. In short, it's a fiction - and it doesn't have a documentary feeling neither.
The movie is utterly unrealistic portrayal of the possibly bloodiest battle of Grozny of 1994-1995. Taking place in the biggest city in the North Caucasus region, there is a complete absence of civilians (thousands of which died, Russians and Chechens) - but there are, to cite another reviewer, "women snipers (from the Baltics), black mercenaries (speaking in English)" (both being Russian propaganda myths). The Russian tank survives multiple RPG hits to be knocked-out (after it fires many salvos despite the Chechen fighters standing in a line like a firing squad carrying grenade launchers even before it opens fire), but the Chechen tank is destroyed after being hit once. There's not a single RPG-7 ("Chechen atom bomb") in the movie, everyone fire just a one-shot Mukha launchers. The Russians use ASG (heavy automatic grenade launcher on a tripod) to shoot at people inside the same building, few meters from them, just for a "cool" execution (target being a man carrying a wounded). And so on.
Chistilishche is a weird movie. It's full of strange, pointless gore (like the Russian tank - there is only one such working in the movie - driving back and forth on a Russian bodies in a long close-up scene), but it's not an anti-war film. Writer and director Aleksandr Nevzorov is a Russian ultra-nationalist and Duma deputy who supported this war at the time when it was extremely unpopular. It's a grind-house propaganda flick, like if John Wayne's Green Berets was made by Lucio Fulci.
In addition, not only Nevzorov tried to get all discredited myths into one movie, he also helped to create new ones, which then circulated further. To cite The Jamestown Foundation's review of a book The Wolves of Islam:
"The sensational tone of the book is set in the opening pages, which warn that "graphic descriptions of terror, acts of torture, and human cruelty in this book will disturb the reader." Indeed, much of the first half of the book is devoted to detailed descriptions of various atrocities allegedly committed by Chechens. The author devotes some space to a gruesome account of the crucifixion and mutilation of a Russian soldier during the 1994 battle for Grozny. The "crucifixion of the innocent soldier" is a recurring propaganda motif that dates back to the Belgian front in the First World War (where the victim is usually described as a Canadian soldier victimized by Germans). But the author insists on the authenticity of his account, citing a scene from a novel (though Murphy does not describe it as such) by Vyacheslav Mironov and a similar scene from the 1997 movie Purgatory (Chistilishche), made by Russian nationalist and Duma deputy Aleksandr Nevzorov."
I find it unsettling this movie's user score is higher than of the critically-acclaimed (Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated) Kavkazskiy plennik (Prisoner of the Mountains/Caucasus), which is a so much better film about the same war.
Grayeagle (1977)
I don't think it's "remake of The Searchers"
It's rather Revisionist Western answer to this movie. It's as much of romance as adventure/drama/whatever, and actually I enjoyed it much more (which was't that hard, since I didn't enjoy The Searchers at all).
I don't remember this movie clearly because I've only see it once and quite long tim ago, but I thought it was pretty good for 1977 a western, at least back then. Some people here compared this film to Dances With Wolves, but for me it reminded me rather more of Soldier Blue, actually (no, there was no violence against women and children, and no soldiers for that matter). It's a little flick and I don't remember no mass scenes, and this reminded me of 84 Charlie Mopic. The actor playing the titular character was probably the most persuading white-guy "Indian" I've seen... maybe because he's so heavily body-painted and hardly spoke at all?
Frankly, I don't know why so low general rating just under average. I gave it strong seven, and it's a sincere rating of this movie as a whole. I'd like to see it again.