How to Train Your Dragon
After finally managing to wrangle my son into the van, my wife and I managed to catch a Sunday afternoon screening of the latest 3-D Animated film for kids. Because the Pup doesn’t like to wear the glasses and my wife gets dizzy, we only managed to catch the film in regular 2-D and I sat back with a little package of nachos in order to avoid the stomach tearing effects of the popcorn my son regularly purchases for these little flicks. This is your fairly standard little “coming of age” story set to a Viking background and featuring a beautiful display of animated dragons. It was a satisfying afternoon film, something I’d probably wind up buying for both my wife and son to catch on a lazy evening at home but I’m not sure where else I could take the review.
Honestly, it’s not a bad film and I had a lot of fun watching it. But it was pretty much a “paint by numbers” story that didn’t try too hard to be much more than what it was, though the animation was absolutely top of the line and the action sequences were extremely well conceived. There were a number of moralizing points the story tried to make, and it pretty much succeeded on all counts without being too preachy or offensively condescending. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.
4 out of 5.
Shadow Hunters
“Moonlight”, “Daylight”, and Jubei are three ronin Samurai who sell their swords for the sole purpose of foiling Ninja schemes and protecting the Clans from the confiscatory practices of a corrupt Shogunate. When a distant mountain family is threatened by the “Shadows” (ninja operatives for the Shogunate), the three swordsmen ride in and deliver sword slinging justice in bloody geysers of furious vengeance! They are tasked with accompanying a Clan Samurai as he presents a document bearing the Shoguns’ seal that guarantees possession of the fiefdom to the mountain family. The tale of each Ronin unfolds throughout their journey, so we understand precisely why they hunt the shadows and why they’ve accepted their station in the order of things as lowly “wavemen.”
Another furious chambara release from the folks over at AnimEigo, Shadow Hunters is a fairly standard sword epic with colorful characters and fantastic martial arts. Look, I just really love these movies… they might not be for everyone. There are a ton of other films who take the same cues and similar action sequences, from the Lone wolf & Cub series to Zatoichi. Shadow Hunters ranks up there with some of the best, and I look forward to watching additional films in the series. The DVD is packaged pretty nicely with some additional liner notes in the subtitles, including explanations on some of the terminology and historical annotations for events at the time. We also get a few trailers for additional AnimeIgo “samurai cinema” releases.
4 out of 5.
Frightmare
I swear I caught this film at some point in the 80’s, but completely forgot anything at all related to the story or any scene involved. This is an almost entirely uninspired rehash of several plot points found in “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” when an aging actor passes away and his body is stolen from his gimmicked death trap of a mausoleum. There is very little to set this film apart from the hundreds of mind-numbing low budget horror releases at the time, and yet Frightmare must have had something going for it because I had not once considered throwing my remote control through the screen. In point of fact, my wife actually found she was somewhat engaged by the films primary antagonist and kept tuning in from her WoW game to take a gander.
3 out of 5.
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