We watched Silent Night Zombie Night off of Amazon Prime and shouldn't have. It certainly doesn't live up to the Prime in Amazon Prime. This will serve as a warning for you, it's one helluva piece of boring shit. It's 90 minute length seemed much longer. It wasn't keeping our attention, that's for sure. The only thing notable about the movie is they made it for $100,000. As the title indicates it's Christmas and there are zombies. Problem is, there's hardly any Christmas. It's Los Angeles and there's no snow. They toss in the odd christmas carol on the soundtrack but the film makers lack the imagination to Xmas it up a bit. The zombies do come in two flavors; slow shambling Night Of The Living Dead types and some swift angry bitey 28 Days Later types. The thing is, writer and director Sean Cain just sucks at making a movie. It's totally awful, the script is stupid and there's one cliche after another. The actors are barely watchable and that's partly because the words they say make little sense. That's another thing, the movie has much too much drama in it and it's so poorly written it's hard to watch. Everyone watching was complaining about the dialog by saying words out loud. Sperhauk blames the popularity of The Walking Dead and that's certainly a show that has way too many scenes with people whining to each other about their problems. So don't bother with SNZN, it's pretty damn poor, don't fuckin' watch it, I mean it. I gave it a 1 on the IMDb and that was the lowest I could vote and still vote. It scores a 4.6, it's much worse than that and needs to be brought down a peg or two.
Our second movie was much better made but suffered from the same dramatic problem. The Sword Identity is a 2012 Chinese movie about a sword, some warriors, 4 martial arts schools and their masters. It scores a 4.9 on the IMDb and it's should be a bit better than that. Some of the people on the site and in other reviews seemed to dislike the slow moving story but it seems a lot of them were expecting some sort of Hong Kong action film. It's not that, it's more of an art film. There's more introspection than poking swords into people. Hardly anyone actually dies. Two swordsmen come into a small town and challenge the four schools. They have a sword that isn't part of the Chinese martial arts tradition and that causes a stir. That seems to be at the heart of the story, traditon versus new ideas. The sword in question was created as a counter to the Japanese Katana by General Qi. He was a real guy but I'm not sure if the sword was. I'd not seen anything like it in other Chinese movies and I can't see anything when I Google it. I did find a mention of a sword in this paragraph from a bio of the general.
Qi's book also mentions staff fighting (Qi got his from General You DaYou) and the Miao Dao two handed battle sword (Shuang Shou Dao) which some people think he got from his enemy pirates but was actually developed in the Tang Dynasty and adopted by the Japanese from which to model their Ken. There is some feeling, however, that Qi might have wanted to revive training in this weapon after seeing it so effective in the hands of his nemesis.
When I looked up that sword mention it looked a lot different than the sword in the movie. Not sure what to think but luckily I won't care as the thought will slip out of my brain soon. The Japanese used to attack China in the past, on a pretty regular basis, and General Qi Jiguang was one of the mainland's best defenders. He doesn't appear in the movie, two of his men do, they are the men challenging the schools for the right to have their weapon accepted by the martial arts masters. There's a lot more story than that, much of melodrama about the lives of the locals. You can actually see the whole movie on the IMDb for free. I put a link to it above. I liked the movie well enough but it's likely that I wouldn't bother seeing it again.
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