WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Sushi Girl

In 1992, Quentin Tarantino shot several thousand volts through the crime genre with ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and inspired a slew of self-consciously quirky caper movies. In 2005, Eli Roth fashioned himself as the poster boy for torture porn with ‘Hostel’ and, yup, inspired a slew of self-consciously nasty horror movies. Perhaps the only real surprise is that it’s taken so long for someone to sashay into a production meeting and say, “Hey, guys, let’s do ‘Reservoir Dogs’ meets ‘Hostel’.”

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big hand for Kern Saxton’s ‘Sushi Girl’. (If you’re scratching your cranium and trying to place the name, Saxton’s previous credits include short film ‘Porntourage’ and feature debut zombie-movie-as-drug-addiction metaphor ‘Deader Living Through Chemistry’. Subtlety is not the gentleman’s strong point.)

Please take a seat – you’ll be duct-taped to it and savagely beaten in a moment – while we do some work on a plot synopsis. Fish (Noah Hathaway) gets out of prison after six years. He’s kept his mouth shut and ensured that the crew who were with him on the botched diamond heist he ended up in the slammer for have stayed free. He’s spent six years wondering what exactly happened to said diamonds.

Funnily enough, the rest of the crew have been wondering the same thing and they’ve come to the conclusion that Fish somehow managed to stash them before the cops nailed him. Thus it is that Fish is invited to an ostensible welcome home meal at a Chinese restaurant where the main course is a selection of raw fish artfully arranged on the voluptuous body of a naked woman.

No, that kind of thing never happens at my local Chinese restaurant, either. (There are as yet undiscovered tribes in Papua New Guinea who just know what the first comment on this post is going to be.)

So: gathered in this pressure cooker environment (it’s a surprise the sushi isn’t deep fried by the end of the movie) are gang boss Duke (Tony Todd), lank-haired thug Max (Andy Mackenzie), lisping slob Crow (Mark Hamill), and the increasingly nervous Francis (James Duval). Francis is nervous because he thinks Fish might not have had off with the diamonds after all. And he’s very nervous because he’s wearing a wire. Subject of casting choices, Hamill’s every moment onscreen is horribly disturbing. Not because of his characterisation but for how scarily the former Luke Skywalker resembles Jabba the Hutt.

Francis is in a minority as regards belief in Fish’s innocence. No sooner have a couple of glasses of saki been downed and an entrée or two slobbered off the human serving platter that is the eponymous woman (Courtney Palm) than Fish has been forcibly restrained, Duke is laying some threatening and terribly faux-Tarantino dialogue on him, and Max and Crow are playing a game of one-upmanship with Fish as an extremely brutalised pawn.

In purely narrative terms, what this amounts to is: Max fucks Fish’s shit up; small piece of backstory unfolds; Crow fucks Fish’s shit up; another piece of backstory unfolds; repeat; repeat; Mexican standoff; “twist” ending. I say twist ending because the moment you start wondering why the film is titled for a character who does nowt but lie on a table with bits of fish strategically draped over her, then you’re pretty much on course for taking an educated guess at the direction the story takes in its last quarter of an hour. In purely aesthetic terms, it’s wall-to-wall beat-down violence – by fist, toolbox, broken bottle or good old-fashioned handgun – all the way.

‘Sushi Girl’ would be very easy to write off as derivative and uninspired, but for four things.

First, Saxton and his co-writer Destin Pfaff are immensely genre-savvy, knocking exactly how to time the narrative beats, when to cut away from dark, claustrophobic interiors and deliver a blast of action as the heist plays out in flashback.

Secondly, the film assembles a trash-movie-lover’s dream cast only to riff on them subversively: case in point, Danny Trejo wanders into movie, immediately brandishes a machete and is just as summarily despatched. It’s like a distilled version of Samuel L Jackson giving his big scenery chewing speech in ‘Deep Blue Sea’ only to be chowed down by a shark seconds later.

Thirdly, there is absolutely no fucking let up in tension, and for this alone it genuinely earns its comparison to ‘Reservoir Dogs’.

Fourthly – and this is what seals the deal – it utterly looks the biz. Of the spoof trailers that were the chief joy of Tarantino and Rodriguez’s ‘Grindhouse’, ‘Machete’ and ‘Machete Kills’ brought some of the lo-fi grubbiness to the big screen (the former brilliantly, the latter disappointingly), while ‘Hobo with a Shotgun’ swamped its drive-in aesthetic in a miasma of what-the-fuckery. ‘Sushi Girl’, though … ‘Sushi Girl’ looks every bit the 70s drive-in exploitationer; the kind of thing that would fall foul of the video nasties witch-hunt in the UK a decade later. It was made in 2012. The dark cynical blood of 1971 pumps through every frame of it.

Danny Trejo

This is how you cut a birthday cake!

Happy 69th to Danny Trejo. I can't frickin' wait for 'Machete Kills'.

Machete

It’s amazing how indifferent some people can be in the face of total, unapologetic, non-PC, old-school cool.

‘Grindhouse’ was a cineaste’s wet dream – and I say that as someone who has yet to see ‘Grindhouse’ in its intended cut (watching the DVDs of ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ with a quick sprint to the computer at the half-way mark to watch the fake trailers as downloads is about as close as I’ve come to the proper ‘Grindhouse’ experience). Two exploitationers back-to-back: dirty, cheesy and full-on retro, one directed by Robert Rodriguez, the other by Quentin Tarantino – who could say no to that?

Depressingly, as it turned out, plenty of people. Maybe the fact that Rob and Quent wanted them to spend – shock, horror – over three and a half hours in a movie theatre was too gruelling. Maybe the concept of getting to watch two movies for the price of one seemed too good to be true and they stayed away out of sheer suspicion. Maybe the prospect of Rose MacGowan with a machinegun leg, Vanessa Ferlito lap-dancing and Kurt Russell being all kinds of badass was rather déclassé. Whatever reason, the fact remains: the underperformance of ‘Grindhouse’ at the US box office meant that a movie I’d been getting excited about in a way I normally reserve for Mrs F limped out onto UK screens as two separate releases, in the wrong order, with about three months between them.

Four years down the line, I remain slightly peeved by this.

One of the chief in-jokey pleasures of ‘Grindhouse’ was the spoof trailers. Eli Roth’s ‘Thanksgiving’ managed, in three minutes, to be the best thing he’s ever made; Rob Zombie’s ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’ was madness in miniature, all Ilsa references, swastika armbands, Nic Cage going apeshit and Beethoven’s Ninth on the soundtrack; and Edgar Wright’s ‘Don’t’ nailed an entire subgenre of the Video Nasties list. But best of all was Rodriguez’s ‘Machete’, a masterpiece in miniature featuring Danny Trejo being a bad muthafucka in authentically grainy footage and kissing off the audience with greatest tag line ever.

“They just fucked with the wrong Mexican.”

Speculation was immediate: would Rodriguez extrapolate ‘Machete’ into a full feature? I prayed like no atheist, en-fox-holed or not, has ever prayed. Like Baron von Frankenstein raising his fists to heaven as the thunderstorm crashes, screaming, “Liiiiiiiiiiive! LIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!”, I sent the unyielding force of sheer will across the miles and the oceans in the general direction of Troublemaker Studios: “Make it,” I cried; “maaaaaaaaaaaaake iiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!”

Eventually, word trickled out. ‘Machete’ was casting. Danny Trejo was on board, natch. Robert de Niro. Steven Seagal. Jessica Alba. Michelle Rodriguez. Cheech Marin. Lindsay Lohan. Holy Mary mother of a made up character!!! Danny fuckin’ Trejo, Robert fuckin’ de Niro, Cheech fuckin’ Marin and Lindsay fuckin’ Lohan in the same fuckin’ movie!!! (Yes, I know that’s a lot of profanity, but danged if it isn’t an accurate representation of how stoked I was getting for ‘Machete’.)

Then – finally – it opened. It opened in the UK freakin’ ages after it opened in America. (Oh, my fellow bloggers Stateside, how I cursed as I read review after review on your blogs, knowing that I still had a couple of months till the Trej-meister fucked up shit my side of the pond. There’s your dictionary definition of frustration: right there!)

A funny thing happened during all of this. While the faithful (ie. my aforementioned fellow bloggers) were giving ‘Machete’ its dues, the get cinema-going unwashed collectively went “meh” and didn’t really give a shit. ‘Machete’ kind of came and went, not boding well for the Bond-style post-credits that “Machete will return in ‘Machete Kills’ … and ‘Machete Kills Again’.”

My lords, ladies and gentlemen, guys and gals, dudes and dudesses, cats and chicks, blokes and birds, let me state this once and for all. For the record. Let me tell it on the mountain, shout it from the rooftops, write in the sky and piss it in big yellow letters in the snow:

I did not go “meh” over ‘Machete’. Quite the contrary, oh my brothers.

I. Goddamn. Bloody. Love. ‘Machete’.

I love ‘Machete’ because it gives Danny Trejo an honest-to-God leading role and the man goes for it in fine style; because it’s got a Jessica Alba performance that’s not entirely insufferable; because Robert de Niro seems to be enjoying himself onscreen for only the second time in the last decade (the other occasion being ‘Stardust’); because Cheech Marin as a shotgun wielding priest quite simply redefines iconography; because Michelle Rodriguez looks tough and sexy in equal measures to their point where you’d probably be too scared to buy her a pint let alone spill it; because Lindsay Lohan’s first scene depicts her as a coked up socialite and her last as a gun-toting nun; because pudgy, whispering action start has-been Steven Seagal redeems himself for decades’ worth of unadulterated crap; and because the Crazy Babysitter Twins turn up in ridiculously skimpy nurses uniforms and fire off Uzis.

I love ‘Machete’ because it’s a 100-minute rollercoaster showcase for Danny Trejo fucking up the shit of all who cross him in a variety of gratuitous, capillary-siphoning and – most importantly of all – imaginative ways. This is a film where the hero utilizes knives, guns, swords, strimmers, surgical equipment, pimped-up cars that bounce a lot, and a motorbike with a gatling gun welded to the handlebars in his fight for truth, justice and rights of the downtrodden Mexican working class.

I love ‘Machete’ because it exists in a movie movie universe of unrestrained over-the-topness that makes ‘Kill Bill’ look like a Mike Leigh production*; because it looks more authentically like a 70’s exploitation than either part of ‘Grindhouse’; and because the contemporary touchstones are witheringly subverted (“Machete don’t text”).

I love ‘Machete’, in other words, because it manages to be batshit crazy and utterly true to itself at one and the same time. I love it because Rodriguez and his co-director Ethan Manquis obviously didn’t have a single imperative – commercial or aesthetic – beyond having a good time and making the kind of movie they wanted to make. Gracias, dudes.

*Which, granted, would be interesting. Imagine: Imelda Staunton as The Bride and Jim Broadbent as Bill. Scene: a suburban kitchen. Bill is sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and reading the Racing Post. Enter The Bride, laden down with shopping. The Bride: “You’re a right bloody sod you are, Bill. I ask you to do the pots and put the oven on and what do you do? You sit there smoking! I bet you put money on the horses again and lost it, didn’t yer? Didn’t yer?” Bill says nothing. The Bride starts crying histrionically. “I wish I’d never bloody married you, Bill.”