Wicked City (1992) - Peter Mak Tai Kit

I'm just going to start off by mentioning that I watched this under the pretense that it was the 1987 anime. I had no idea this thing even existed up until yesterday. For some reason, this Hong Kong live action version of the anime is set to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. This doesn't really have anything to do with the plot, so I guess it is was done to draw some crude parallels between the threat of invading demons and the PRC. Hong Kong is flooded with a new demon drug called "happiness" and two buddies from the "anti-monster squad" has to close down the operation. In-between making demons explode, we find cops sobbing about how demon-ancestry is getting in the way of being promoted in the corps and an awkward human-demon love story. Wicked City features a bunch of odd stuff really - dudes fighting clocks, people banging pinball-machines, monsters riding planes 9/11-style and some ludicrous fights towards the end. The second half is pretty entertaining, it could probably work for a movie night. Apparently produced by Tsui Hark.

The Order of the Black Eagle (1987) - Worth Keeter

After being promised Orson Welles, nazis, explosions, baboons and "Adolf Hitler as Himself", there was no way I could not watch Order of the Black Eagle. In addition, my curiosity was peaked by the fact that it is described as a "pseudo-parody"on wikipedia (what does that even mean?!). Duncan Jax, super spy and baboon caretaker, has to stop neo-nazis in a generic South American country from achieving world domination. You see, the local top nazi and Orson Welles-impersonator, has managed to come up with a dubious plan involving "proton beams" and satellites, in-between eating whole chickens in his temple ruin-lair. Also, he has stored Hitler in cryogenic sleep in the basement, but that's really just a side treat and not relevant to the plans of world domination. Needless to say Duncan Jax and "Boon" the baboon has to set things straight, and do so by means of covert operations and shooting everyone in the face. The Order of the Black Eagle is a relatively ghastly affair in most ways, with constant interspersed closeups of "Boons" two only (and appalling) facial expressions. Ghastly but also rather entertaining. Give it a go if you want to know why baboon actors isn't "a thing".

Bewitched Area of Thousand Years (1991) - Lai Wan

Long time no see! I have no plans to stop watching junk anytime soon, I've just been lazy with updates. A bozo enters a cursed snake temple after having repeatedly and explicitly been told that it is a terribly bad idea by the local witchdoctor. Of course the witchdoctor was right, and the poor sod soon finds himself under the spell of a snake devil! He turns into a weird-ass snake fiend (with snakes for hands) and bothers the local aborigines for the next twenty years or so, until he by chance attacks his long lost daughter. This leads to some textbook Taiwanese possession shenanigans mixed up with confusing elements of family and/or love-drama. As usual it all culminates in a showdown where the local taoist/wizard/witchdoctor sets things straight by means of animal blood. Bewitched Area of Thousand Years is on the bottom end of the mediocre-scale. It is a straightforward (albeit cheap-as-dung) Taiwanese black magic feature about vicious snake devils. The copy I watched offered less than optimal viewing conditions, as it was dubbed in Thai with badly cropped subs in English. Furthermore it seems to have been ripped from a Thai VCD sourced from a shoddy tape or something. In general the movie looks astonishingly cheap. Great stuff for the snake devil crowd.