Sunday, February 27, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
I Love My Noodles!
Vifon Phu Gia Mien Cua
I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is this; this instant noodle was a tremendously pleasant surprise. It’s a crab flavored soup, with vermicelli noodles, and some dehydrated vegetable product, but I wasn’t expecting much really.
The broth is excellent, one of the best I’ve had in a very long time. It really does taste of the sea and I was really surprised to see that among the ingredient list were such things as crab, shrimp, and fish. Yes, the real stuff, not artificial crab flavor, and other things of that such.
Now for the bad news, I really don’t like the vermicelli, they’re mung bean noodles, and boy are they ever tough and chewy. The directions say to let the noodles sit covered in the boiling hot water for three minutes, but this does not appear to be long enough for the noodles to properly cook, so let it sit longer, and you might find the finished product a bit more satisfying.
I must say, I’ve been finding that a lot of the best instant noodles on the market are the ones made by Vifon, and I plan on trying even more of their products in the future.
Sick, Disturbing, and Shocking...
Dr. Lamb (1992)
In the early to mid-nineties, a series of ultra gory, very disturbing, and downright gross movies came out of Hong Kong. They were generally referred to as category three true crime movies. The most infamous and perhaps earliest example of these movies was Dr. Lamb. Some might argue that the Untold Story was the most infamous of these films, but Dr. Lamb was certainly the first, and it had a major impact on the entire Hong Kong film industry. Like many other countries, Hong Kong’s film community rewards any successful film with a ton of rip-offs, and in the case of this movie, the public was rewarded with a great flood of gross, ugly, and very inhumane horror movies featuring very depraved killers engaging in some really sick behavior.
In fact, by comparison, some of the stuff that followed Dr. Lamb makes this movie seem downright tame in retrospect. That said; this film is still shocking nearly twenty years later.
Dr. Lamb features Simon Yam as a cab-driving killer that hunts women. He kills them, photographs their dead bodies in various poses, and eventually starts having sex with the dead bodies. He gets caught when he goes to get the photos developed, which I must say is the dumbest move I’ve ever heard of, the fact that supposedly that is how the actual case got cracked in reality, earns the real life killer a place in the hall of fame of the world’s dumbest criminals.
Simon Yam’s performance coupled with the co-direction of both Danny Lee and Billy Tang is what makes this movie work. Simon Yam is absolutely over-the-top in this movie; his performance takes the term maniacal to a brand new level. When he started howling in a certain scene, I knew he’d gotten way too much into character. But, I say that as a compliment to the thespian, not as a knock on his acting skills.
Once he is caught, the film turns into a series of torture sequences that are shocking to say the least, not just the torture that Yam performed against his victims, but the torture that the cops perform on Yam to get him to confess to his crimes. This is something that seems okay in Hong Kong films, the crowd tends to cheer when a villain is getting beaten to a pulp, with his hands tied, and totally lacking in the ability to defend himself. It’s hard to properly describe these scenes, they are the kind of thing you’d never see in an American movie, and they are sort of unique to this sub-genre.
I hate to give a negative review to this movie, not only because it is kind of a classic of this bizarre sub-genre, but also because it seems very apparent to me that the filmmakers were trying very hard to make something worthy of praise. I also feel a bit hypocritical because I could easily turn around and give a good review to a million equally repulsive movies, but in this case, it didn’t work for me.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
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