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Chad
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Posted: August 6, 2004 at 12:00am
Throughout the world, there are 666 portals to the "other side", and it just so happens that portal #444 is located in Japan, that being the forest of resurrection. Prisoner KSC2-303 and a partner of his have just escaped from a maximum-security prison, and are to meet up with some Yakuza henchmen at a designated spot in said forest. When the henchmen arrive, they say that they must wait for their boss to arrive before continuing onwards. While they're standing around waiting for the boss to arrive, one of the henchmen pull a young girl out of their car; apparently, the boss had told them to kidnap her and bring her here as well. KSC2-303 doesn't particularly care for their treatment of this lady and warns them to let her go, which yields no results. A gun-fight ensues, leaving the main guy in this group dead and a lot of guns pointed at everybody in the location. Suddenly, the guy who had been shot and killed gets up and starts attacking everyone, only to be put down yet again by a very large number of gunshot wounds. KSC2-303 and the girl escape, but the henchmen are quick to chase them through the woods, leading to numerous fight scenes involving guns, swords, and even a severed head.
There's a major storyline twist around the midway point of this film which keeps things going from there, but revealing such would be too much of a spoiler; therefore, I'll leave the description at that. However, in the grand scheme of things, there's really not a whole lot to the storyline... some pieces will be uncovered, a fight-scene will occur, some more pieces will be discovered, and back to another fight-scene. Normally, this would lead to boredom very quickly, but oddly enough, it didn't in this case due to the successful migration of a good storyline and excellent fight-scenes. It seems as though the film-makers knew that the storyline wouldn't work out well over the course of a full-length film, so they stretched it out with plenty of action and sub-plots... which again, would normally have came off as being quite high on the lameness scale, but it worked out great here.
Those fight-scenes were a thing of beauty, and really made the film. Since there's so many of them throughout the movie, I was expecting that they would start to get boring and redundant eventually, but the originality and thought put into each scene kept things fresh in each scene. Imagine, if you will, the great back-and-forth martial arts exchanges from one of the better Bruce Lee films, mixed in with some great swordplay, with a hearty helping of Matrix-inspired gun-scenes (though none of the cheesy slow-motion bullet dodging) and then top things off with some Evil Dead-style black comedy and gallons of gore. A very odd combination, but that would be about the best example I could come up with. As I mentioned, these scenes all had a lot of thought put into them, which came off great on screen; you never see the same trick pulled twice, there's tons of surprises thrown into the action, and the camera-work involved here was top-notch.
Overall, this movie was lacking a bit in the storyline department (in quantity, not quality), but more than made up for that with lots of great action sequences. I'd suggest the viewing of it, definitely. 8/10 from myself.
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Ginose
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Posted: September 9, 2005 at 5:32pm
This was an action packed slaughter, blood and guns flew everywhere. For martial arts fans and action fans, no doubt in my mind.
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thrasher
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Posted: June 2, 2006 at 1:03pm
I saw this movie quite awhile back, after hearing a lot of fairly positive reviews. I liked it to an extent, probably what would be no more than a 6/10. Maybe it was a taste thing, but the movie didn't really keep my interest completely through it, and I think its runtime could've been trimmed down at least 20 minutes or so. Like everyone has said before, there were some well shot action sequences, and some good gore, but in the end I guess I actually did want a bit more of a story.
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Edd
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Posted: March 31, 2008 at 9:56am
Zombies plus the Matrix plus guns and swords? Uwe Boll couldn't have fucked this one up. 10/10
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Kezia Vadimas
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Posted: July 13, 2008 at 9:05am
Great movie! Blood, gore, martial arts, guns, swords, zombies, comedy, who could ask for more? Fun, fun, fun!
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