rommiej

"The Five Deadly Venoms" was a pretty enjoyable kung-fu movie, so I was kind of looking forward to seeing "The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms." Unfortunately, it was a big disappointment. While "The Return of ..." has its moments, it's pretty much your average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill kung-fu movie, featuring interminable (though fairly well choreographed) fight sequences strung together by a thin plot line. The characters and their various handicaps may have been unique at the time (you can probably blame this for inspiring "Crippled Masters"), but the biggest problem for me was that this movie has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with "The Five Deadly Venoms." You can't really even make the stretch: there are four main characters - not five - and none of them has been trained in the style of a venomous insect or reptile. There is no mention whatsoever of any venom, deadly or otherwise. Aside from sharing many of the same actors, the two movies are completely unrelated. So why is this one titled as if it's a sequel? Very annoying.

"American Movie" is a satisfying documentary of a wanna-be filmmaker with probably more ambition than common sense. Mark Borchardt is 30 years old, lives with his parents, supports three children by vacuuming a funeral home, and has accrued something like $10,000 in debt without completing a single film project. His already dubious mental stability is exacerbated by the fact that he drinks too much beer, gets high often and is so focused on his "dream" that he willingly lets "American Movie's" documentary crew turn his life into a voyeuristic freak-show. It's a situation that I think worked more successfully in the independent/unreleased documentary "Driver 23" (essentially the same story, only this time the "visionary" wanted to be a heavy metal star), but the crackpot cast of people who populate "American Movie" (Mark's burnout friends, his emotionally distant parents and poor, pitiful uncle Bill) make it a hilarious and occasionally poignant film that's definitely worth a rental.