NEWS
EVENTS
5 most bizarre (yet brilliant) foreign movies
Other | Wednesday 21st September 2011 | Osh
The world is made up of hundreds of countries, and yet in cinemas here we only see movies from two (Britain and America) so we often forget that other people have a movie industry too. From Nollywood to East Asia, you have the good, the bad and the downright crazy, so here are a few strange but awesome films which never quite made it to our tiny island.
Chelsea vs Liverpool (Nigeria)
There are tons of head-scratching films that emerge from African cinema, but Chelsea vs Liverpool is probably the most naff movie I have ever seen. Its plot, which I believe was supposed to be about football fan violence, is almost indecipherable, and it seems to just be made up of a random selection of scenes that actually have very little to do with football, except that the characters all wear cheap knock-off replica shirts. You can clearly see them pulling punches and kicks in the fight scenes; they are all waving plastic (or seemingly, in one case, styrofoam) guns, and the gunshot sound effect sounds like someone slamming a baking tray against a hollow wall.
The entire film is available on Youtube if you type in ‘Chelsea and Liverpool Nigerian Movie’, or you can just watch the trailer. While you’re there, search ‘festival of slaps’ to watch a fantastic scene from another Nollywood film that didn’t quite make this list, Royal Lust, a prime example of ham-acting and cheesy production.
Best quote: [After hailing down motorcyclist] “Are you going to... Eh... [Clearly forgets line and looks past camera for cue]... Kabanna! Kabanna?”
Martyrs (France)
This festival of blood and gore, which appeared on my Paris hotel room television in 2009, actually adheres somewhat to the conventional horror movie format in that it consists of a whiny young white woman running around screaming. However, there is more to it than just that. Without spoiling too much of the plot, a traumatized young woman shows up at the home of the couple she believes tortured her as a child, and brutally murders their whole family to satisfy some sort of imagined monster which is haunting her.
Her friend arrives to help her dispose of the bodies, but while she is doing so the first woman snaps and slits her own throat. Several more people kill themselves or are slain by others until some suited heavies show up, cuing a plot twist worthy of a more recent M. Night Shyamalan movie. All this had my friend and I, who had innocently switched on our TV in search of some French football highlights, glued to the screen in total awe and bafflement.
Best quote: Who cares, it’s all in French anyway.
Shaolin Soccer (China)
Released to cash in on the hype surrounding the 2002 World Cup in Korea/Japan (the first to be held in Asia), this film’s name is pretty self explanatory. Imagine a cross between Kung Fu Hustle and a footballing version of Dodgeball, and you are pretty much there. A group of six brothers from an unnamed Chinese city decide that they are fed up with their mediocre lives, and use their supreme martial arts skills to play football. They find a bum, whose glittering football career was ended by an angry fan with a bat, to coach them, and enter an open national tournament where they face other ridiculous teams such as Team Moustache (a team of women in unconvincing disguises) and Team Evil (...come on).
In the typical fashion of cheesy Asian martial arts films, their kung fu skills give them various superpowers, and the result is a hilarious flick that is well worth watching. It stars Stephen Chow, who later did appear in Kung Fu Hustle, and it was actually dubbed into English and released in the West, so if you look you can probably find it online. I recommend you at least watch the trailer on Youtube.
Best quote: [To friend who has shaved her head] “What did you do? You look like ET! Phone home like ET, you don’t belong on Earth!”
For Your Height Only (The Philippines)
I don’t even know where to start with this one. This low-budget Filipino James Bond rip off starred Weng Weng, who was under three feet tall (the pun in the title is just brilliant!), which on its own is enough to make you want to watch the movie. The adorable-yet-bad-ass mini-Bond ‘Agent 00’ marauds around the Philippines in search of a kidnapped American scientist, and watching the tiny Weng burst into a terrorist hideout wielding a hilariously over-sized assault rifle is an awesome experience.
But there is more; the script is littered with cheesy, old-fashioned villain quotes like, “They must be exterminated, and I mean lethally”, and the fight scenes are so false and over-exaggerated that they make the giant ‘POW!’s in Adam West’s Batman look realistic.
Best quote: [At the gadgets briefing, which would feature Q’s creations in a Bond movie] “You know you’re our main man, 00. Here’s your gun. There’s a silencer and one full clip... As you know, our budget is a concern.”
Three Mighty Men (Turkey)
Another low-budget rip-off makes top spot, though this time the victims are none other than the superheroes Santo, Captain America, and Spiderman. This film portrays our beloved Spidey as an insane criminal boss with massive eyebrows, who goes around murdering random people with a switchblade and using his web to sneak into the homes of vulnerable women. At one point he gleefully tortures a victim by forcing guinea pigs to scratch the man’s eyes out.
The Turkish police hire Captain America and Santo to catch him, but when they do, they find that this Spiderman has an inexplicable ability to instantly regenerate himself in different places, meaning that most of the film consists essentially of two overweight Turkish men in cheap superhero costumes fruitlessly chasing a third overweight Turkish man in a cheap superhero costume around Turkey. He even keeps stopping to pull the stereotypical villainous shifty-eyed pose. No English translation of the film exists, so unless you understand fluent Turkish, you won’t get much more from the film than that.
Chelsea vs Liverpool (Nigeria)
There are tons of head-scratching films that emerge from African cinema, but Chelsea vs Liverpool is probably the most naff movie I have ever seen. Its plot, which I believe was supposed to be about football fan violence, is almost indecipherable, and it seems to just be made up of a random selection of scenes that actually have very little to do with football, except that the characters all wear cheap knock-off replica shirts. You can clearly see them pulling punches and kicks in the fight scenes; they are all waving plastic (or seemingly, in one case, styrofoam) guns, and the gunshot sound effect sounds like someone slamming a baking tray against a hollow wall.
The entire film is available on Youtube if you type in ‘Chelsea and Liverpool Nigerian Movie’, or you can just watch the trailer. While you’re there, search ‘festival of slaps’ to watch a fantastic scene from another Nollywood film that didn’t quite make this list, Royal Lust, a prime example of ham-acting and cheesy production.
Best quote: [After hailing down motorcyclist] “Are you going to... Eh... [Clearly forgets line and looks past camera for cue]... Kabanna! Kabanna?”
Martyrs (France)
This festival of blood and gore, which appeared on my Paris hotel room television in 2009, actually adheres somewhat to the conventional horror movie format in that it consists of a whiny young white woman running around screaming. However, there is more to it than just that. Without spoiling too much of the plot, a traumatized young woman shows up at the home of the couple she believes tortured her as a child, and brutally murders their whole family to satisfy some sort of imagined monster which is haunting her.
Her friend arrives to help her dispose of the bodies, but while she is doing so the first woman snaps and slits her own throat. Several more people kill themselves or are slain by others until some suited heavies show up, cuing a plot twist worthy of a more recent M. Night Shyamalan movie. All this had my friend and I, who had innocently switched on our TV in search of some French football highlights, glued to the screen in total awe and bafflement.
Best quote: Who cares, it’s all in French anyway.
Shaolin Soccer (China)
Released to cash in on the hype surrounding the 2002 World Cup in Korea/Japan (the first to be held in Asia), this film’s name is pretty self explanatory. Imagine a cross between Kung Fu Hustle and a footballing version of Dodgeball, and you are pretty much there. A group of six brothers from an unnamed Chinese city decide that they are fed up with their mediocre lives, and use their supreme martial arts skills to play football. They find a bum, whose glittering football career was ended by an angry fan with a bat, to coach them, and enter an open national tournament where they face other ridiculous teams such as Team Moustache (a team of women in unconvincing disguises) and Team Evil (...come on).
In the typical fashion of cheesy Asian martial arts films, their kung fu skills give them various superpowers, and the result is a hilarious flick that is well worth watching. It stars Stephen Chow, who later did appear in Kung Fu Hustle, and it was actually dubbed into English and released in the West, so if you look you can probably find it online. I recommend you at least watch the trailer on Youtube.
Best quote: [To friend who has shaved her head] “What did you do? You look like ET! Phone home like ET, you don’t belong on Earth!”
For Your Height Only (The Philippines)
I don’t even know where to start with this one. This low-budget Filipino James Bond rip off starred Weng Weng, who was under three feet tall (the pun in the title is just brilliant!), which on its own is enough to make you want to watch the movie. The adorable-yet-bad-ass mini-Bond ‘Agent 00’ marauds around the Philippines in search of a kidnapped American scientist, and watching the tiny Weng burst into a terrorist hideout wielding a hilariously over-sized assault rifle is an awesome experience.
But there is more; the script is littered with cheesy, old-fashioned villain quotes like, “They must be exterminated, and I mean lethally”, and the fight scenes are so false and over-exaggerated that they make the giant ‘POW!’s in Adam West’s Batman look realistic.
Best quote: [At the gadgets briefing, which would feature Q’s creations in a Bond movie] “You know you’re our main man, 00. Here’s your gun. There’s a silencer and one full clip... As you know, our budget is a concern.”
Three Mighty Men (Turkey)
Another low-budget rip-off makes top spot, though this time the victims are none other than the superheroes Santo, Captain America, and Spiderman. This film portrays our beloved Spidey as an insane criminal boss with massive eyebrows, who goes around murdering random people with a switchblade and using his web to sneak into the homes of vulnerable women. At one point he gleefully tortures a victim by forcing guinea pigs to scratch the man’s eyes out.
The Turkish police hire Captain America and Santo to catch him, but when they do, they find that this Spiderman has an inexplicable ability to instantly regenerate himself in different places, meaning that most of the film consists essentially of two overweight Turkish men in cheap superhero costumes fruitlessly chasing a third overweight Turkish man in a cheap superhero costume around Turkey. He even keeps stopping to pull the stereotypical villainous shifty-eyed pose. No English translation of the film exists, so unless you understand fluent Turkish, you won’t get much more from the film than that.
