SIX-STRING SAMURAI (United States)
A review by Mark R. Leeper in bullet-list form
from the Toronto Internation Film Festival
CAPSULE: In a post-holocaust world, a guy who dresses like Buddy Holly and fights like Sanjuro struggles his way to "Lost Vegas" where he will be "the King." No new ideas, no plot, just a string of fights and music. Rating: 1 (0 to 10), -2 (-4 to +4)
- Directed by Lance Mungia. Starring Jeffery Falcon. Written (if that is the right word) by Mungia and Falcon. - The director claims to be a fan of Akira Kurosawa, and imitates the fight scenes in some of his films fairly well. But he has missed a very important aspect of Kurasowa'a work. If you walk out of a Kurasowa film for ten minutes the plot will have advanced and you will need to do something to catch up. The plot of this film does not advance. If you walk out of SIX-STRING SAMURAI for ten minutes, you will have missed no plot complications beyond whom the title character is fighting and you will enriched your life by ten minutes. I recommend at least eight such absences during the course of the film. - Alternate history in which the USSR defeated the US in a 1957 atomic war. - Music is supplied by The Red Elvises who rely on doing rock versions of classical Slavic music. - Yet another film in which the props all seem to come from a particularly impoverished junkyard. Costumes seem to be from Good Will. - Words don't fit characters' lips, as if incompetently redubbed in the studio. - If there was a nuclear war in 1957, where do the Eisenhower dollars come from that one set of baddies are flipping?
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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