George Takei – Wise Cafe (International)

While i’m no Saberspark, i feel this deserves to be spotlighted for it’s such a weird, messy and obtuse piece of animation cinema and its tale has all the juicy bits, from misguided inception, development hell rot, leeching off an already established film, Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank has it all.

If nothing else because somehow a sequel/tie-in game for it was released last year and i recently found out to my complete bewilderment.

Nothing to with the Sega Genesis videogame Brutal: Paws Of Fury, they both just happened to be recycling Bubsy naming conventions for when you can’t be arsed to make jokes, just puns, and taking a martial arts-asian aesthetics, though for different reasons since The Legend Of Hank is not a ’90s film, but a product of the late 2000s-2010s, when it was still in vogue to remake foreign (often Asian) films for the “american-internation market”, in a way also a product of the same vein of racism already tapped into the 90s by most western shows and games.

For the youngins it might sound strange, but especially in the late 2000s you couldn’t blink without seeing America remake a Japanese horror film, heck, they even remade Park Chan Wook’s Old Boy, they couldn’t stand the idea of something not being western enough at the time, especially if it dared ail from a country in the Asian sphere, so to speak.

Unless Tarantino did it.

I say this because this movie was pitched in this climate, back in 2010, as Blazing Samurai, an animated remake of Mel Brook’s beloved western parody Blazing Saddles.

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I didn’t plan to do a Jim Wynorski-A-Thon when i accidentally started watching movies in my saved list that would soon abandon Amazon Prime Video (or gate themselves beyond another paywall), and i’m tired having to preface this already, but i can’t say i really wanted to see this movie that much.

Then again, i did put in the “watch for later” list because the robots in the thumbnail looked like the martian war machines in H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds.

Plot is sadly not as interesting, with a couple of experimental robots sporting advanced IA being carried on a plane over a desert Pacific island, plane crashes, and Navy Seals (because the OSI is busy learning not to plug the entire mainframe into a single wall socket) are sent in to recapture the robots, as they turned against the humans, and they’re getting smarter and smarter….

Script convenient criminals also happen to be arrive on the island, as they manage to get the helicopter stuck there after robbing 2 milions from a passenger cruise, but then again, the Navy (Such As) Seals might as well bring nerf guns, despite knowing the “supah” robots can be harmed only by a specific weapon. And they know because the scientist’s daughter, also a scientist and carrying on her father’s work, told me it is so.

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Tag: George Takei

Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank/Blazing Samurai (2022) [REVIEW] | “You know…. morons”

Shockwave A.K.A. I.A. Assault (2006) [REVIEW] | Wynorski’s War Of The Worlds