Movie Breakdown: Rigor Mortis (Noah)

People are doing traditional-style reviews all over the web, so we decided to try something different.  In each “breakdown” we’ll take a look at what a film’s marketing lead us to believe, how the movie actually played, and then what we learned from it all.  Read on!

The Impression:

Amongst the blood explosions and flying dead ghost ninja twins in the trailer for this film, there were brief title cards flaunting the fact that it won many many many Hong Kong Film Awards. I don’t know what a Hong Kong Film Award is, but it makes me think this movie is going to be pretty choice.

The Reality:

I want to say my total lack of understanding of what was going on in this film is a cultural thing, like not enjoying durian or horse penis soup, but I’m pretty sure the bigger issue at hand is the idea of the film being some sort of mish-mash between a ghost story, a drama, a wuxia, a horror film and buddy comedy. Let me try to explain it from memory: a guy moves into a pretty grim apartment and hates it so much he tries to hang himself on the first day, but he’s saved by a guy who cooks rice balls and does sweet ninja moves. There’s a lot of blood and a guy who smokes cigarettes and two twins who shoot black vines out of their hands and a flashback to the twins killing a guy and then themselves and then sitting in a well lit room all covered in more blood. And there’s a lady and a old guy who isn’t happy with kids or something, but then a ghost kid pushes him down the stairs but his wife saves him by stitching dog tags to his face. And then the guy who tried to hang himself teams up with the guy who cooks rice to fight the dog-tag face guy and the twins and there’s a lot of blood and the rice cooker guy gets his arm torn off and the hung dude (whoa, perv) gets a pole shoved through him and there are a lot of black tentacle things and then the twins and the dog-tag face guy merge into one green faced, dog tag guy and then there’s grey clay and fire and water and some other stuff and then it ended. I think I was supposed to feel happy at the end, but I just felt sort of confused and not in the good way like after I do whip-its or sniff glue.

The Lesson:

The Hong Kong Film Awards are batshit crazy.

Rigor Mortis opens in select cities on June 6.