Movies Seen Recently: Mr. Canton and Lady Rose, Runaway, Revenge of the Living Dead Girls

Mr. Canton and Lady Rose, aka Miracles: The Canton Godfather (1989) – Right after Jackie Chan’s first flush of for-real American stardom, he started making two movies a year — one American and very Americanized, and one in Hong Kong.  This is the Hong Kong feature for 1989, and Chan (director and star) plays it up for the home audience: Set in 1930s Hong Kong, the plot is instigated by a mispronounced word, and several scenes hinge on whether the characters are speaking Mandarin or Cantonese.

Chan is a country boy, new to the city, who becomes a major gang leader almost instantly thanks to a misunderstanding (and the unquestioning loyalty of the gang).  He attributes his change of fortune to the rose he bought from a street vendor for luck, so he makes sure he purchases another rose from her before every major meeting or event, and when he has a chance to repay the flower vendor by an elaborate charade to convince her daughter’s groom’s family that she’s rich and well-connected, he bends the resources of his gang to the task.

Which sounds like a straightforward storyline, but there’s meandering all over the place (two hours and nineteen minutes of it), and naturally some stunt-filled fight scenes that make me tired just watching.  Very worth watching, as long as you don’t need to get anywhere in a hurry.

Runaway (1984) – I had a much better opinion of this movie when I last saw it, at least thirty years ago.  This time around, I see:

• clumsy use of “explaining it to the rookie” to bring the audience up to speed
• a bizarre willingness of society to accept laborer robots as any everyday thing, even though they malfunction and “go rogue” often enough that there’s a special office of the police (!!) to deal with it
• establishment of the protagonist’s fear of heights so blatantly that it might as well be wearing a flashing neon sign, “THIS IS GOING TO FIGURE IN THE FINAL ACT”
• a huuuge arbitrary coincidence that clues the cops into the plot
• Rube-Goldbergian murder plots
• a built-in Boy Hostage

Not Michael Crichton’s finest hour. The robotic spiders are cool, though.

The Revenge of the Living Dead Girls (1987) – Schlocky and lame Euro-horror zombie flick, combining the hackneyed elements of American zombie films (unscrupulous industrialists dumping toxic waste that raises the dead!) with annoying Euro-cinema elements (orphaned plot threads and overage nudity).  The whole middle section seems like the scenes were arranged out of order, but trying to rearrange them in my head (while not paying attention to anything going on in the movie) didn’t help.