Books: Call backs.

The most unsettling thing about the English translation of Ryu Murakami's Audition, the novelistic source for the flagship Asian-extreme cult hit of the same title, is the curious sense of déjà vu. This is, of course, partially due to the face that, unlike the book's original readership, you've most likely seen or heard of the flick long before any exposure to its source material. Though another source of your déjà vu is the book's cover: A minimalist eye in a circle pattern that recalls Chip Kidd's early, non-collage, J-pop themed work, the instant reaction on seeing it is to ask, "Didn't Vertical publish this four years ago?"

In fact, this is the first time Murakami's novel has appeared in English and it's coming out with the Norton colophon on the spine.

It's hard to imagine that this particular tome has much of an audience outside of the curious cultists of the widely praised 1999 Takashi Miike adaptation, so I'll state that the plot of the flick and the book are essentially the same. The book includes more preliminary meetings between love-seeking widower Aoyama and the mysterious Asami. The book never shows were Asami lives, so the who subplot abut the previous victim now living in a bag happens only in the film. The film also shifts plot points around, getting to the confrontation scene quicker. Curiously, the film chooses to make a image of Aoyama's last wife the thing that focus's Asami's vengeful rage on Aoyama. In contrast, the book makes a mention of Shige, Aoyama's teenage son, the thing that drives Asami into a murderous rage.

The real distinctions between the book and the novel come in 1) the characterizations of the two main characters, 2) Murakami's aesthetic philosophy of tell don't show, and 3) an almost aggressively retro sexuality that's so misogynistic I would have been tempted to view it as satirical if I detected even the slightest hint of smirk from Murakami.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the book and its adaptation is the way the author originally conceived of the two main characters. Miike ran with a haunted, somewhat fragile Aoyama. Until his interest in Asami is awakened, the viewer got the feeling that he was being frog-marched through the motions of the wife-finding process by his friends and family. As Murakami wrote him, Aoyama is a more confident character. He's made peace with the passing of his first wife by throwing himself in his work. His sexual needs he's met through the judicious use of bar wenches and professionals. At the opening of the book, Aoyama realizes that he's gotten the business to where it needs to go and he is finally ready to consider remarriage. Instead of situating the emotional core of the character in conflict between the memory of his first wife and his growing passion for a new woman, Murakami built the character around his sudden, irrational, obsessive interest in Asami. He's not torn some much as head over heels.

The biggest surprise for fans of the film will be Asami's original. Unlike the film, with its sinister scenes of Asami living in her psycho-spartan living quarters with the mauled near-vegetable previous victim, Asami in the book seems like a fully functioning individual. She's talkative, charming, and out-going. She's more sexually aggressive and engaged with the world around her. She's up front about her grim background, which is revealed in conversation in the book well before we get it in the film. In contrast to the film, Asami is mysterious only in that not all the details of her reported backstory line up. She's still mighty crazy, as Aoyama learns to his great dismay, but she seems less like a utter psycho with a thin layer of sane than a most sane person with a overly powerful crazy trigger. The difference this makes is notable. From the book, one gets the sense that Asami was actually in-it-to-win-it before her jealousy over Aoyama's son flipped her crazy switch. This potential for happiness is something the movie, with its considerably more insane Asami, dismisses fairly quickly.

Though I actually prefer the leads as Murakami conceived them, the book doesn't quite impress the way the film does for two major reasons. The first of these is Murakami's style.

Murakami (the other Murakami of Japanese lit fame) is, if his press is to be believed, something of a minor god in the Land of the Rising Sun. Called the "Maradona of Japanese literature," a rock star who cranks out novels as well, he won his first major lit award when he was still a college student. His books regularly chart and, as of this writing, six of his 15 novels are translated into English. In '05, The New Yorker featured one of his short stories. So, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the ham-fisted voice of Audition was some sort of one of experiment of his and that he's not usually this bad. I've never read anything else, so I'm just taking that on faith. But I find it hard to believe that a writer whose style evokes allusions to Dan Brown at his most tour-guidey cast such a large shadow. Maybe the Japanese mean that Murakami is to literature was Maradona is to literature. To be fair, Murakami's writing is considerably more brisk than Brown's: Audition weighs in at a slender 180-odd pages and it can be easily read in a sitting. Still, both show a weird tendency to give brand names and exact measurements where more qualitative description is needed, replace figurative language with Google harvest, and use exposition to such a degree and in such a way that you get the feeling neither trusts the reader to make the correct mental links. For example, Murakami's idea of foreshadowing is to simply break the flow of the story and explicitly tell the reader that Aoyama did not know the "unspeakable doom" that is going to befall him. Thanks for the heads-up, Ryu. Murakami is careful to leave no stone unexplicated.

If the prose can sometimes seem graceless, it's downright nimble compared to the book's thematic engagement with gender politics in modern Japan. Murakami has a theory about the anxious relationship between the sexes in modern, post-economic miracle Japan. It goes like this: Bitches is crazy.

Many critics tried to draw feminist gold out of the violent arc of the protags' ill-fated affair when Miike's adaptation hit American shores. It's a doomed project that even Miike warned against, but the temptation to try read Asami's gore-soaked rampage as poetic vengeance for the phallocratic dominance of the male gaze is too strong to condemn critics who copped that easy out. These film studies degrees aren't going to give themselves out, after all. But the truth is that Miike's Aoyama is simply too much of a nebbish fool to take seriously as the symbol of the patriarchy. From the moment he meets Asami, it is immediately clear that he's out of his league and under her control as assuredly as the chopped-up sack dweller she keeps at her flat. As for the moral complexity of the issue, while Aoyama's methods were insincere, so was Asami's presentation of herself as anything other than a psycho who keeps crippled victims back at the pad to torture. The only the juvenile moral absolutism that holds Asami, as the oppressed, can do wrong would suggest the scope of their crimes are in any way commensurate. The despised sometimes become despicable. Anyway moral vision that can't accommodate that fact of human nature is as much an exercise in projection as Aoyama's love-blind fetishization of Asami is.

But I digress. Murakami's vision at least has the benefit of being unambiguous. Aoyama's first wife is a distinctly Pacific Tiger reworking of the Madonna archetype. She was Aoyama's link to a wealthy family. She supported his career. And when it came time for Aoyama to scratch that itch with a extracurricular nookie, his sainted dead wife took it with the dignity and class and stoicism that, the reader is meant to believe, was the true measure of Japanese womanhood. She put up with his adultery without complaint and dedicated herself to the raising of their son.

In contrast to his dead wife, the women Aoyama meets in his quest to find a new wife are shallow, psycho, slutty, gold-diggers. When Aoyama first broaches the idea of finding a new wife, his friend proposes the audition system partially because he's convinced that a good hearted doofus like Aoyama would be eaten up by the girls that prowl the streets these days. When Aoyama's son is told that his pops is back on the market, he warns him about a 15-year-old girl at his school who turned out to be running an after-school sideline as an S&M dominatrix. The repeated refrain of these warnings is, "What the hell is wrong with women these days?" Shige repeated discusses how he plans to get his bride mail order from some Eastern European country that can be take the adjectival form of "breakaway." They'll at least be grateful. Lest we think this is some sexist observation, Murakami puts this same warning in the mouth of one of Aoyama's female employees. A young woman whose success as a buyer of foreign media rights, Murakami notes, has been her ability to suppress her own opinion and reflect the opinion of the masses. (With profound insight in the psyche of the female of the species, among the four non-vile women in the book are Aoyama's corporate lackey and his maid: both women he employs. The third is maternal barmaid figure. The fourth's dead before the novel begins.)

Notably nobody says anything like, "Who are these sick guys who are shelling out yen to get nasty with an underaged dominatrix?"

The British edition of Audition, by Bloomsbury, was released with the cheeky tagline, "Where have all the good girls gone?" Norton has the good sense not to go that route. And that's the best sense on display here.

Merry You Know What!

Movie: Showing the monster.

When I was in college, I had a roomie - a big-time King fan - said that H. P. Lovecraft's greatest flaw was that he "showed the monster." I assumed, at the time, he was evoking the horror fancies widely held and oft repeated axiom that what one imagines is far more horrific than whatever one sees. (Aside from vastly over-estimating the imaginative powers of most of us, this bit of conventional wisdom has long since passed from insight to received orthodoxy to ill-understood critical superstition: "Subtle" is now applied to movies paradoxically as a form of praise not because the films are subtle in anything they do, but rather because there's a general consensus that subtle is good.) Though, on thinking further, I realized that my roomie's complaint could hold equally to King, an author he held to be the pinnacle of horror lit. Sooner or later, King puts his cards on the table an one sees the Overlook's topiary come to life or the giant sewer spider who was just pretending to be a freaky clown. King shows the monster, so the reveal was not, in and of itself, a deal breaker.

But my roomie was, I think, right in that there's something odd about reveal in Lovecraft's works. When he claimed that Lovecraft's biggest flaw was the reveal, I agreed even though, on further thought, I think it is a misdiagnosis. What's unique about Lovecraft's reveals is that they're bizarrely precise. Think of it this way: We all know what Cthulhu looks like. My wife, who has never read a single Lovecraft story and kinda totally hates horror as an entire genre, knows what Cthulhu looks like. Stumpy legs, pear shaped body, decorative bat-like wings, octopus head. (That's perhaps the most fun sentence fragment I've ever had the pleasure to write.) Not only can my dear wife tell you what he looks like, she can recognize cartoonish abstractions - I have t-shirt with a fairly minimalist cartoon Cthulhu at a pay-phone making the "collect call of Cthulhu" that she thinks is kinda charming in a utterly dorky way - and she gets jokes that require you have a semi-detailed mental image of the beast. The reason she knows that Cthulhu is suffering from middle-age spread is that nobody ever represents him any other way. There's a curious continuity to visual representations of Lovecraft's monsters that, I think, can only partially be ascribed to artistic tradition and the normal course of influence. Much of this continuity is do to the fact that Lovecraft often gave abnormal exact descriptions of his monsters. I say "abnormal" in the sense that Lovecraft intended his beasties to be sanity-shattering unspeakables from beyond space and time, yet there's usually one witness who - despite being rendered to utter insanity by their encounter with other dimensional bad craziness - provides readers with a detailed account of the monster that resembles some ecologist's field report. Lovecraft's monsters are visually stable because he left little open to debate.

I can understand why a fright fan would perceive this as a flaw. The conflict between the mind-breaking nature of the beast and the calm the precision of the narration seems like a tonal stumble. It seems as if we're being asked to believe that the narrator, confronting something that defies all reason and embodies the fragile mortality of all life as we know it, took scrupulous notes. But what makes Lovecraft's horror universe unique is the insight that our sense of the real is relative. People on the insane train look like a mad blur as they shoot by those of us standing still on the platform of Not Crazy Station. But if you're sitting on the train, you perceive the details of everything inside the passenger car with "normal" clarity. It's all the stuff on the platform of Not Crazy Station that looks like a confusing smear of light and color. The mad in Lovecraft's world are not deranged because they've taken leave of their senses. Instead, their frame of reference has shifted to include details that undermine their previous paradigm. Once they've fully witnessed the horror that undergirds the flimsy structures of the modern world, how are they supposed to make sense of the insubstantial details that make up the mundane world the rest of us live in? Madness in Lovecraft's universe isn't a dark form of mysticism, it's the survivor's guilt of the witness.

Takashi Shimizu's 2004 grindingly bleak vampire un-romance, Marebito, is the first Lovecraftian film I've ever seen that captures that unique precision. A low-fi moody horror that embraces it's limitations, the cold and exacting spirit of Marebito prefigures the icy aesthetic of the much-loved later vamp flick Let the Right One In, though the former completely lacks the latter's genuinely subtle deconstruction of vampiric romanticism.

Befitting the best filmic treatment of Lovecraft's insight into the psyche of witnesses of the deep horror of the universe, the chief protag of Marebito is a chronic witness. Masuoka (played with dead pan schlubbishiness by Shinya Tsukamoto) is a freelance video journalist whose professional life is basically a gloss on his kink. A video feed junkie, Masuoka lives a shut-in otakuish existence alternately sitting in front of a bank of video monitors or walking the streets hidden behind a video camera. He so obsessive that, even without a camera, his standard vision appears to include static and other video artifacts. One has to give credit to Marebito for finally giving a character a dramatically sensible reason for continuing to record his horrific misadventures. The flick's first-person bits exist not because it makes sense that anybody would film such things, but rather because Masuoka is a compulsive filmer.

Masuoka is also a wonderful example of that most Lovecraftian of characters: the terror connoisseur. Masuoka is driven to break the ice of his frigid existence by subjecting himself to varieties of terror. The downside is, of course, that Masuoka is always seeking greater and greater terrors. At the point we meet him, Masouka is already declaring things like fear of death to be mediocre strains of fright.

Masouka's life takes a swerve when he films a suicide in the Tokyo subway. Convinced that the dead man had experienced some transcendent horror, Masuoka plunges into the tunnels under Tokyo to experience this suicide-inducing horror for himself. There he finds an unbelievably immense network of tunnels and ruins - a series of subterranean works that link the worlds cities and constitute a near "hollow earth" world of their own - built by ancient civilizations and unknown powers. He also finds a naked, feral young woman chained to deep within the ruins. In what might well be intended to be taken as an expression of suicidal tendencies, Masuoka takes the captive home.

Masuoka gives his new roommate the name F. Like an adopted stray, F initially spends most of her time hiding behind the furniture. She doesn't eat or drink and, according to Masuoka's voiceover narration, she's only awake for about three hours a day. She doesn't speak and she seems unable to make any sort of vocalizations. She has a mouth full of distressingly sharp chompers. Not long he brings her home, F is stricken with some wasting disease. She begins to weaken and suffer seizures. After suffering an injury - he gets his ass handed to him by a guy who takes offense at his incessant videotaping - Masuoka discovers that F has a Audrey II-ish thirst for blood.

As if keeping a nameless young feral blood-drinking chick in your tiny studio wasn't hassle enough, Masuoka must also deal with a possibly cracked woman who insists that Masuoka is her husband and a mysterious man in black who can talk without opening his mouth and appears to have designs on F.

Some props need to be given to Tomomi Miyashita, who has the thankless task of acting out the role of F. x F may be the worst role ever written for a woman. A lolicon Kaspar Hauser, F is an extreme embodiment of a dozen or so horrible feminine stereotypes: helpless victim, irrational womanhood, man-eater, voiceless sex object, prematurely ripe nubility, and so on. But Miyashita plays the hell out of it by grounding her performance in astutely observed motions. Her F evokes a mishmash of animals, from spiders to bear cubs, giving an absurd character a realist weight that it probably didn't deserve.

Despite the claim made in Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, I do not think Marebito is intended to be understood as an adaptation of any specific Lovecraft story. There's an explicit mention of the Mountains of Madness, but that's about as far as it goes. Rather, this flick is set against the backdrop of a Lovecraftian universe. What the film nails like no other Lovecraft influenced film does is the concrete details of the uncanny. Discussing the decision to use Dali as the designer of the dream sequences in Spellbound, Hitchcock said that Dali understood the crisp nature of dreams. We don't experience dreamscapes as a hazy, wispy ghost world. It feels solid. The uncanny in Marebito has that solidity to it. An exemplary moment in the flick is when, exploring the seemingly endless Tokyo underworld, Masuoka runs across the man he saw commit suicide. They have an extended discussion and, eventually, Masuoka lets drop the fact that he saw this cat plunge a big freaking knife into his own eye and up into his brain. Without any notable distress, the dead man decides that, if he's really dead, he should probably not hang around talking to live people. He turns out a lantern he's holding and vanishes. Much is made about the horror trope of the "thing that should not be." Though what's usually being discussed is some familiar hack-piece of horror schlock, the borrowed Gothic finery of a past era wrapped around the soft-core proclivities of modern era. Marebito recovers a deeper sense of the uncanny in that it shows how natural the impossible can feel. It's easy, too easy, the film says, to suddenly be too far lost to return to the normal.

As nifty as that accomplishment is, Marebito is a seriously flawed film. What was meant to be a sort of deliberate, stately pace often feels glacial. In a 90 minute flick, we don't reach the underworld until the half hour mark. We don't discover F drinks blood until we hit 50 minutes. I'm all for letting a flick develop naturally; but when a 90 minute flick feels like it's dragging, then you've got a pacing problem. The glacial pace of the film kills efforts at suspense. The end result is that the film is grim, but rarely tense. Worse yet, there's a late game "twist" that is, as so many of these surprises are, unnecessary and illogical. I'm not sure what screenwriting textbook out there is telling students there must be an act three game changer in every story, but it is seriously time for film schools to consider adopting a different text.

Too somber to be fun, Marebito is a curious if not entirely successful take on the vampire theme. Still, it is an earnest experiment that hits on several levels. In the horror blog game, "different" is reserved for sloppy gonzo films of the exploitation era that are, in fact, depressingly common. There are entire bloggers who have made their careers praising the seemingly endless march of these "unique" product lines. Marebito is truly different. Like They Come Back, which came out the same year, it takes a familiar horror premise and goes in a creative direction so odd it stretches the definition of horror. The cost of this innovation is that its footing is unsteady. Whether that's for you or not, I leave to your discretion.

Stuff: Consider the bloodbath.

Because I'm a horror blogger, I don't feel weird saying that I've been pondering a bloodbath. Specifically, I've been pondering the claim that the Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Báthory Erzsébet in Hungarian) bathed in the blood of her victims to preserve her youth and beauty. I've just completed The Blood Countess, the Andrei Codrescu. This literary shot of, literally, blood-soaked Eastern European history has given me a curious appreciation of one of Eastern Europe iconic historical monsters. But let's just talk bloodbaths today.

From a historical standpoint, the reality of the countess's legendary bloodbaths are ill supported by the record. During the countess's semi-secret trial, which lasted from 1610 to 1611, Báthory's accusers compiled testimony from more than 300 witnesses. The court notaries were all-to-happy to record any scrap of evidence that Báthory was a psychopathic witch. Their records are full of descriptions of brutal torture and savage sexual abuse. And yet, despite the value such a story to prosecutors, the court records are entirely silent on the issue of bathing in blood.

The first written record of the famed Báthory bloodbaths appears in a 1729 tract titled Tragica Historica. This tract, written by a Jesuit scholar, is the earliest written account of the case. However, the scholar had no access to the court notaries' documentation (the witness testimony was not released until 1765 and was not published until 1817). Where this scholar heard these accusations is unclear. Perhaps, with their obvious themes of feminine vanity and blasphemy, the Jesuit simply made up the stories to make an instructive example to the faithful out of the Protestant countess's downfall.

From an anatomical standpoint, a bloodbath seems no more likely. First and foremost, there's simply not that much blood in the human body. The average human contains about 1.3 gallons of blood; that is just slightly more fluid than comes in a large jug of milk. That's plenty to splash over yourself, but hardly enough to fill a tub with. One could assume, of course, that Báthory used the blood of more than one victim per bath. (Claims of the total number of victims she claimed vary wildly, from the low 30s to more than 650. The latter number is unlikely, but, for our purposes, it the range allows the distinct possibility of multiple victims.) Let’s assume Báthory had a fairly small tub to bathe in and that she was trying to get away with using as little blood as possible, so we’ll say she needs 25 gallons.

By my way of thinking, the biggest hurdle Báthory would need to overcome to actually bathe in human blood is the conflict between the time it would take to desanguinate an entire human body and the speed with which blood congeals. Congeal-rates are hard to pin down because exposure to oxygen is a factor, so every specific container has a slightly different congeal-rate. But we can conduct a thought experiment. Just like breathing a fine red wine, the congealing of blood is a product of the surface area available for air/blood interaction. How much air touches the surface of the blood has an impact on how fast the blood congeals. In this case, we've got a scenario in which we have a deep reservoir of blood with a relatively small surface area exposed to the air. Unable to conduct any real experiment, I propose that an analogous scenario happens when people make blood pudding. To make blood pudding, you cook the blood in a large metal pot. Though the size is off, the proportion of surface are to depth isn't bad. According to a random selection of blood pudding recipes, cooks report that serious congealing begins in about 5 minutes. By 10 minutes, the blood congeals into solid lump. Again, a bath tub full of blood would be much larger and take more time, but even if we triple the congealing time, we're making a mess of this whole thing in about a quarter of an hour. Let's be generous and take an outside figure. Our hypothetical blood bath becomes a gooey, clumpy, gravy-like mess at the half hour mark.

So, how long does it take to desanguinate somebody? That's an interesting problem. First, desanguinating somebody is actually really, really hard to do. Even if you have a Hostel II scenario, in which a living victim is upside down and their heart is helping pump the blood out, only about four pints of human blood will leave the body before the person dies and the heart stops beating. With modern technology, you can pump the blood out yourself, but the process is not quick. With the tech Báthory would have had at her disposal, the time and effort increases greatly. And time is not on her side. Assuming you go low-tech, for each victim, you're only getting about half a gallon of blood every five minutes. Done serially, you'd have congealing problems before you got even three gallons. Theoretically, one could try to drain all the victims in parallel, but then you'd need an ever-larger draining pan, which would mean an increased congeal-rate as the surface are increased air/blood interactions.

Just taking into account these issues, we can see that truly bathing in blood would have been a massive undertaking. It would have involved at nine least victims, all extensively prepped. It would have required a pair of butchers that trained for the event. None of that would have been impossible, mind you. But it seems, given what an elaborate and not especially secret undertaking it would had to have been, unlikely that nobody in the voluminous court records would have mentioned it. Considerably less ornate and private instances of sadism made their way into the record.

Music: "A working example of faith versus physics."

El-P and Nine Inch Nails.

Pairing Mr. Reznor with Mr. Meline - post-industrial music's iconic one-man army with the mad genius ringleader of DefJux's left-field circus - is one of those ideas that so obvious that nobody thought to do it for an embarrassingly long time. Though I imagine everybody involved wondered if putting two artists with such distinct production approaches was letting one too many cooks into the kitchen, the result - "Flyentology" off of El-P's excellent I'll Sleep When Your Dead - successfully fuses Reznor's droning, crunching death disco dirge with EL Producto's cubist take on the driving, propulsive Bomb Squad Era thumping that once served as the engine room for band's like Public Enemy.

It works, is what I'm saying.

Plus the paranoid sci-fi horror invasion cartoon that serves as its is nifty.

Music: Ain't no hole in the washtub.

This isn't horror in even the broadest sense of the term, but if you're as old as I am, then Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas just might have been an important part of your Christmas seasons back when HBO seemed to play it regularly every holiday season for nearly a decade. I think it's fair to say this now deuterocanonical holiday flick has got a special place in the heart of Southern folks of certain age.

If any of that means anything to you, Aquarium Drunkard has posted a dubiously legal soundtrack to the entire flick. Get it while you can.

Music: Neo-prog taco-eating werewolf.

And he fights a vampire.

Here's Bear in Heaven's "Werewolf."

It's like two dudes who got too old and got kicked off the set of New Moon had a drunken brawl outside a Motel 6 in Rich Creek, Virginia, while a Catherine Wheel tribute band attempted its first Lungfish cover in the background.

At least, that's what I thought it was like.

Bear In Heaven - Werewolf from Hometapes on Vimeo.

Movies: Da' mystery of less boxing.

The social contract between audience member and auteur is signed on the basis of the of the promise of the title. A title vouches for everything that follows and, boiled to its very essence, the experience of film appreciation is the raw and immediate moment of feeling the joys and disappointments of working out that promise. NB: This is different than film criticism. Film criticism is to film appreciation what conducting an autopsy is to watching ballet.

Given that, consider the promise inherent in the title of Douglas Kung's 2006 genre mash-up soap-fu horror actioner: Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power. Seriously. Read it again. Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power.

That's an insane promise. It isn't Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Mediocre Power. It isn't Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Sufficient Power. Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Plenty of Power. Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Perfectly Adequate Power.

This is Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power! Shaolin! Evil Dead! Ultimate! Power! You need that many exclamation points just to say the freakin' title right. Here's one more! 'Cause it can take it!

If jaded film criticism had a face, that title would punch it in the nuts.

Of course, as any horror fan knows, the defining characteristic of horror fandom is disappointment. When Sturgeon proposed his law that 90% of creative endeavors are crap, he did warn us that our culture would store all that crap in a single genre.

To nobody's surprise, Shaolin vs. Evil Dead 2: Ultimate Power cannot live up to the promise of the title. It makes a game effort, but what film can support that many exclamation points?

The flick starts off with a well crafted bit of wirework-fu, as a Shaolin student named Dragon and his wife Phoenix take on a crew of raping and pillaging banditti. During the course of the battle the bandit queen - a wonderful, but wasted character, but that's kind of the film's signature move: this flick throws away material that filmmakers of greater sanity and competence could build careers on - strikes Dragon and Phoenix wit a poison tipped sword.

The poison doesn't immediately off either of our heroes, but "uncle" - the elder statesman of the Shaolin temple clan of D & P - warns Dragon that the poison has tainted the growing child in Phoenix's tum-tum. The poison complicates Phoenix's labor and she dies in childbirth. The loss is especially bitter because, just as Phoenix passes away, a young student from a neighboring temple arrives with an elixir which can retard advance of the toxin. Uncle tells Dragon that he must take the elixir in order to give Innocence, the aspirational name given to Dragon and Phoenix's tainted spawn, a moral counterbalance to the toxin in his system. Dragon also ends up adopting the young messenger, Roam Chow.

As Dragon ages into the leader of the clan (characters in this flick experience Peanuts-style aging: they age in spurts, stalling out for a bit at the next dramatically convenient age), he struggles to tame his son's vicious tendencies. Dragon places a young female martial arts student under Innocence's supervision, hoping to inspire some sense of responsibility and honor within him. But, Innocence is one of those primally savage creatures: Like Grendel and happiness, civility seems to pain Innocence. It's at those moments one realizes that the character's name is not ironic.

It becomes clear to Dragon that Innocence is a jerk. Convinced that Innocence's cruelty makes him an unsuitable leader, Dragon chooses his adopted son as the next leader of the clan. This goes over like a tub of warm vomit with Innocence, who promptly flees the temple with a stolen magic sword. The rest of the movie tracks the parallel lives of Roam Chow and Innocence as they head to their inevitable collision.

Sadly, it's that collision that is the film's Achilles heel. The first two-thirds of the flick recall the dense, operatic story-telling of classic epic martial arts action filmmaking. That the film captures that sense is all the more noteworthy given the film's technical limitations: Shot in dim digital video and marred with subpar CGI, the film's sweeping scope is achieved in the face of truly mediocre visuals. However, by the end, the plot goes from cleverly tangled to baggy. Even under the more relaxed rules of martial arts cinema, the film introduces inexplicable complications and resolutions and becomes a mess of unnecessary starts and stops that kills forward momentum and sorely tries viewer patience. This confused jumble even overwhelms director Douglas who, painted into a corner, ends his flick with a sudden, out-of-nowhere villain-offing meteor strike. Seriously. It's like they ran out of paper for the screenplay and decided to type on the final line: "Exit all, hit by meteor."

To make things worse, the whole "versus the evil dead" bit of the promise is buried in the last third of the flick. As part of the third act pile on, an army of leaping vampires is thrown into the mix.

Lest I make this sound like a candidate for psychotronicness, SvED2UP (pronounced "saved 2 up") is not some raw explosion of cinematic craziness. The film drags through what should be a mind-blowing climax. That the final act is sloppy is, perhaps, excusable. That it is oddly boring is less so.