Do you want Search?
Random Post
Random Post
Search
Search
Golden Bat is Here
InMovie Reviews

The Golden Bat Is Here! (Review)

September 20, 2026By

The Golden Bat Is Here!

aka 黄金バットがやってくる aka Ôgon Batto ga Yattekuru aka Kamishibai Showa History: The Golden Bat is Here
Golden Bat is Here title
1972
Written by Ryōzō Kasahara
Directed by Katsumune Ishida
Golden Bat is Here
Everyone loves Golden Bat (Ogon Batto), the golden skull masked hero who battles evil. Well, everyone who reads TarsTarkas.NET, anyway! Also probably some other people, but they aren’t here right now, so screw ’em! For those of you who are about to watch some great movies, Golden Bat is a super hero, arguably the world’s first modern superhero, who debuted in Japanese kamishibai tales told to children on the street, and moved on to movies, manga, anime, and internet fame.

What is kamishibai? That’s the Japanese street performance that involves storytellers crafting a tale illustrated by painted wood slates or canvases that are primarily narrated to children. Said children would then purchase snacks from the storyteller. Just imagine if people on bikes went around town giving PowerPoint presentations about Spider-Man and then sold you Skittles. It gained massive popularity during the depression, and Golden Bat’s stories were so popular it outlasted pull of modern competition like television that drained the audience. And when there was fond nostalgia for the art form via the now grown children, Golden Bat was the one they talked about. We’ve covered the surviving Golden Bat film before.
Golden Bat is Here
The story of the creation is almost as fun as stories themselves, and that’s what the producers thought as they greenlighted a fictionalized biopicture about the creation of Golden Bat. We get the whole story, sweeping from the pre-war years through the war and defeat of Japan, on through reconstruction. We see the kamishibai outfits being run by what essentially are mafia, gifted storytellers fighting for prime spots and the attention of children, a down on his luck artist getting a chance, a cultural phenomenon growing and adapting with the times. Importantly, it is a fictionalized biographical film about the creators, and outside of a lone fantasy sequence, Golden Bat is not out their cracking heads.

Please forgive if the character names are a bit off, there were no subtitles and I’ve seen several completely different names for characters, which could just be bad fan translations or AI being so wrong the Earth will implode. So buy some implosion insurance! The original illustrator with the vivid and distinct style was Takeo Nagamatsu, and Suzuki Ichiro was the original writer. I am not sure if Suzuki Ichiro participated in the story telling part of kamishibai or just wrote tales behind the scenes. While the film skips part of the origin, originally the character was called Black Bat, but the story evolves and it turns out Black Bat was bad (becoming the character Nazo) and defeated by Golden Bat. Nagamatsu quit after three years to get a more respectable job (his father was not pleased at his artistic career) but you can’t keep a true artist down and he returned to the game just in time for Japan to go to war. The replacement artists were unable to replicate Nagamatsu’s style and colors, children would easily spot replacements and decried them as fakes.

In our film, Zenkichi Kayano (Takuya Fujioka – Gamera vs. Barugon) is our talented storyteller traveling around the city giving shows for excited children and making money by selling snacks and trinkets at the shows. He has a rival storyteller he competes for the best spots, and is generous enough that he’s willing to help out starving artist Tokuhei Kyojima (Keiju Kobayashi – Sanjuro, Godzilla 1985) gets some dinner. The conversation leads to Kyojima getting a job at the kamishibai outfit. Here we meet all the other storytellers, the gangster outfit that runs the racket, and the iron lady Gin (Tanie Kitabayashi) who controls the picture slates distribution.

Soon Kyojima moves from drawing the traditional stories to his own wild creations, which is a golden skull mask-wearing man who battles evil. Thanks to a pack of Golden Bat cigarettes (Yes, this was and still is a real thing!), the character gets a name, and Zenkichi comes up with the action filled stories to go along with the paintings, including the iconic loud laugh. Golden Bat is a hit, and the admiration of children, but more importantly their money, comes rolling in.
Golden Bat is Here
The highlight of the film and all the promotional material is a single fantasy sequence where Zenkichi imagines himself as the Golden Bat and battles Nazo and two villainous thugs in a wrestling ring. It’s silly and hilarious, but would have been more fun if there were more of them! Blending fantasy and reality, audiences can understand. ::checks movie reviews online:: Some audiences can understand. Still, I’ll take what we can get.

Time rolls on as it always does, and the world marches towards war. The passage of time is told to us via kamishibai, and we drop in during the Allied push across the Pacific. By now Golden Bat is sporting a patriotic outfit complete with an Imperial Japan flag on his chest an a samurai blade, while the storytellers like Zenkichi are now dressed in military uniforms. Don’t worry, the evil Nazo works for America! This is accurate to real life as kamishibai was used by Imperial Japan as propaganda.

As the war goes badly, Zenkichi is hauled away by the authorities, and the replacement storytellers are not up to snuff! This is also what happened to some storytellers, because the propaganda arm did not like it if you went off script or were too flashy telling the story and distracted from what the story’s message was. Eventually the bombings burn many of the Golden Bat art blocks, along with much of Japan. Japan surrenders, we are now in the post-war period, Godzilla is about to terrorize…oh, wait, wrong post-war Japan movie! The kamishibai group works together to survive, Zenkichi has been released and can join them too. Time slips further and we soon hit the Korean War era and later 1964, where kamishibai has been replaced by tv, but the now adults who grew up on it are having a sort of cultural renaissance and want to celebrate their heritage.

While most of the office characters beyond the main two blend together, Tanie Kitabayashi’s Gin is incredibly memorable, and not just because it’s a much younger woman playing an old lady. This seemed to be Kitabayashi’s deal, which makes it hilarious that the part she is best known for in the west is as the grandma in My Neighbor Totoro, which happened late enough in her career she didn’t have to fake her age when she recorded the lines. This would make Golden Bat laugh his crazy laugh, but to be fair, he does that for everything.
Golden Bat is Here
Despite Gin and the fantasy Golden Bat sequence, the film is more melodramatic than comedy. We see shattered lives in post-war Japan, the children who enjoyed the shows are the same ones who went off to war, many to return broken if they returned at all. Characters fall into depression, there is drama with gangsters fighting over territory, and one of Kyojima’s bosses tries to muscle in on the lady he keeps having meetcute interactions with, but Kyojima eventually marries her.

One aspect that drew me to this film beyond the Golden Bat connection was that according to a certain wiki, this film was considered lost media. Now, it wasn’t lost lost, it still existed. It was lost in that you couldn’t just go watch it wherever you wanted to, at least until someone just posted it in the comments section! So, yeah, not lost at all, but the version we have is a lower quality digital capture. What is important is this is not lost and now you can easily find it online. It did not have legitimate English subtitles last I checked, and parts of this are dialogue heavy even if the basic plot and character interactions are easy to understand without needing to know the language. So you can watch it, but unless you are really interested in Golden Bat, kamishibai, or post-war Japan scenes, this might be a pass until a solid restoration and subtitle job has been completed.
Golden Bat is Here

Kilink vs Frankenstein poster
InMovie Reviews

Kilink Frankestayn ve Dr. No’ya Karsi (Review)

March 30, 2026By

Kilink Frankestayn ve Dr. No’ya Karsi

aka Kilink vs Frankenstein
Kilink vs Frankenstein poster
1968Sinematurk Link
Written and directed by Nuri Akinci
Kilink vs Frankenstein
It’s that time again! Time for a film that was once lost to be found and we all marvel at it! Real Mysterious Order-heads know that there are a bunch of films about guys in skeleton suits running around being anti-heroes or just plain villains but also sometimes being heroes.

A quick primer – Pulp characters who were super criminals have existed for a long time, but one of the most influential was France’s Fantômas, created in 1911 by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. Fantômas was a criminal genius who ran rings around the police while also stealing and murdering whoever he wanted in bizarre methods. The tales proved popular and spawned a whole series of sequels, imitators, and appearances in other media. Several iterations of villain heroes later, and we have comic character Diabolik, a ruthless thief who evolved over time into an honorable thief. Shortly after was the skeleton-suited Kriminal, who had a similar villain to hero arc but did so sooner (despite being a clear copy of Diabolik!) This lead to Killing (also known as Satanik and later Sadistik), another skeleton suited villain, but this one starred in photo novels instead of comics, was much more lurid, and never really gained the heroic edge. Kilink is a rip off of him, but pulls elements from all the characters and thanks to there being a lot of different unauthorized Kilink films from different creators, he can be whatever type of character is needed for a ridiculous pulp plot to happen!
Kilink vs Frankenstein
We’ve covered Kilink before in 1967’s Kilink Istanbul’da, which had a direct sequel in Kilink Uçan Adama Karsi and was followed by two more from the same director (Yilmaz Atadeniz) – Klink: Soy ve Öldür (Kilink: Strip and Kill) and the possibly lost Kilink: Caniler Krali). There was also Cango Korkusuz Adam/Django vs. Kilink, and Sihirbazlar Kralı Mandrake Kiling’in Peşinde/Kilink vs Mandrake. Other Kilink films in the 60s and 70s include Şaşkın Hafiye Kilink’e Karşı, Killing Ölüm Saçıyor, Kilink Sarışın Tehlike, and Killing Kolsuz Kahramana Karşı (though I’m not 100% sure the last one is supposed to be Kilink or just using the original source character Killing!) There is also a lady Kilink film with Dişi Kilink. There are some modern Kilink films as well that perhaps we will get to someday soon. Many of the older films have partial lost elements, and several others were unavailable for years before they finally showed up. When they did, there was a rumor that fellow missing Kilink film Kilink vs Frankenstein still existed somehow, but it was never confirmed, and everyone was trapped in a world of rumors and whispers. Until a reel was found, and what survived was preserved and shared with the world. So thanks to the magical magic of cinemagic, we all get to see the exciting adventures of a guy in a skeleton suit battling Frankenstein and Dr. No! Miracles happen, people!

You know this is magical because the print jerks around violently with scratches and marks on many frames, and the audio quality varies from bad to distorted. It’s jam packed with plenty of crackles and hiss acting as their own background diegetic over the stolen soundtrack. It’s like we are receiving an ancient transmission from an alternate Earth, where skeleton-clad criminals ruled the land thieving at will, while still destroying the competition and any random monsters they run into along the way.
Kilink vs Frankenstein
As is usual, the characters are from a hodge-podge of sources. Kilink is clearly Killing from a more smoothed down era, with clear defined theft goals but also running around with a lady love who is just as thiefalicious as him. He will kill and steal as needed, but often does so to other criminals with less scruples. The villainous Dr. No is more of a Fu Manchu Yellow Peril stereotype than the cinematic Dr. No (played by Joseph Wiseman), who was still a stereotype. He has several goons, with one clearly named Pumanchu which is not only hilarious but also clearly lays out the thought process. He’s the chauffer/main heavy. Other henches include Oko-Moko (who owns or runs Dr. No’s yacht and has his name largely displayed on the side) and Liz, who I believe she is his girl and not his daughter. There is a second group of villains who don’t seem to be referencing anything I recognize and exist only to add drama before they are all destroyed as well. Uh, spoilers?

This is writer/director/producer Nuri Akinci’s only brush with the Kilink franchise, but he does have a hefty amount of Turkish films on his resume. Most importantly, he wrote/directed/produced the Turkish version of Columbo, Alo Colombo: Çiglik, which I never knew I needed to exist until now!

The villains are up to no good, making trouble in a Turkish neighborhood as they prepare to do something diabolical to lovely lady Mina. Suddenly, Kilink pops out of a garbage can and begins to beat them all up. Not only is this an amazing introduction, but the fight choreography was clearly well thought out and executed, a far cry above the random fist fights you’d often see in these serial-inspired pulp films. Kilink…takes out the trash! And rescues Mina, who is his flame, and soon the pair are stealing Dr. No’s yacht (the Oko-Moko, captained by the above-mentioned Oko-Moko) and off to steal a golden statue.
Kilink vs Frankenstein
The golden statue was stolen by the second group of criminals, but Dr. No has both a desire of revenge against Kilink and a desire to steal the golden statue for himself so the villain groups cross paths. Dr. No is also secretly rebuilding Frankenstein(‘s Monster, but let’s just pretend I’m typing that out each time) as the big plot against Kilink. Frankenstein needs blood, specifically the blood of young ladies, which is just an excuse for showing young ladies in peril and then scantily clad as they are hooked up to a machine. Liz dresses up as Kilink to abduct these ladies, which both frames Kilink and gives us a lady Kilink outside of the (so far) missing film, 1967’s Dişi Kilink.

Can our hero steal the statue, defeat both sets of enemies, defeat Frankenstein, and clear his name of the murders he didn’t do but not the thefts he did do, all in the remaining time and surviving footage? For that you will have to watch yourself!

Overall, with a short run time and disintegrating elements, Kilink Frankestayn ve Dr. No’ya Karsi is a fantastic bit of Turkish pulp cheese that will keep you entertained throughout even if there are a few disappointing elements (namely the big title fight is not as action-packed as advertised, or even much of anything!) Recommended to track down and enjoy, who knows when we will see another Kilink film emerge from the shadows!

SON!
Kilink vs Frankenstein

Supergirl 1973
InMovie Reviews

Supergirl (Review)

February 24, 2026By

Supergirl

Supergirl 1973
1973
Written by Leni Gen Pabalan
Directed by Howard Petersen
Supergirl 1973
As we have seen time and time again, a lot of amazing Filipino pop cinema is thought lost forever. For most of the films, we can only stare at surviving image stills and posters, read recollections of those lucky enough to see the films, and dream of what might have been. And if we are lucky, occasionally someone finds a beat up 16mm reel where Supergirl fights a giant frog, a lady mad scientist, and zombies! Yes, we are talking about Supergirl from 1973, starring Pinky Montilla as the titular heroine, who gains the powers of Supergirl from a magic ring given to her by a gigantic fairy. Yes, it’s not a straight adaptation, but it’s a fun adaptation that verges on being a horror picture due to some gruesome deaths (including major characters!), stalking zombies, and the monster frog rampage. This is what we are here for, a creation that is familiar yet completely different, with a pop culture life of its own.

A coastal town of farmers can’t become an idyllic village because there are just too darn many pirates raiding the village, murdering people and grabbing all the food. Neneng (Pinky Montilla) lives with her blind sister (Mildred Ortega) and younger brother, they are often targeted by the rampaging pirates due to being young kids who are easy to push aside to steal all their hard-grown crops. That is until a gigantic fairy (Barbara Perez) gives Neneng a magic ring that will allow her to turn into Supergirl (it is unclear if Supergirl is an existing concept in this universe or just how this power manifests) and she begins to beat the crap out of pirates.
Supergirl 1973
You’d think just beating up pirates would be enough, but this town also has a mad scientist (the amazing Odette Khan) and her daughter living in town. The Scientist has her hunchback (played by frequent Odette Khan costar Enrico Villa) dig up corpses so she can experiment on bringing back the dead. Raising the dead is something the daughter really wants, because her beloved boyfriend Cesar has died. There is a hilarious scene of the Hunchback dragging Cesar’s massive coffin through the roads near Neneng’s farm as all three siblings are depressed and annoyed at the noise preventing them from sleeping. They aren’t annoyed enough to do anything about it, almost as if they get awoken by dragged coffins constantly!

The Scientist first tests her revitalizing potion on a dead frog, but it doesn’t seem to work. The Hunchback disposes of the frog…who then pops back to life a little while later, only now with the side effect of rapid growth. Very rapid growth. Soon, a gigantic frog is smashing through the town and chomping down on the people! Everyone is screaming and running, while the blind sister can’t seem to understand that everyone is running away from something and runs right at the frog. Soon she is grabbed by its gigantic tongue, which wraps around her and raises her into the air. Her fiancé arrives and attacks the frog, only to get stomped. At this point I am not sure if Neneng is unaware she is Supergirl or just forgets, but she finally activates her ring and transforms. She then just punches the frog in the nose a few dozen times until it dies. However, it is too late for her sister and her fiancé, who die in each other’s arms.
Supergirl 1973
Cesar does get revived, but just wanders away from the Scientist’s house and is found in town. The villagers know he is supposed to be dead and start mobbing the Scientist, who vows revenge by raising the dead. Which means now Supergirl will have to face some of her dead family who died earlier in the film as she tries to save the town and stop all the mad science and zombie action!

This was amazing and well worth tracking down, once the premise is set up you know there will be action of a somewhat coherent nature at a regular pace. The visuals are like a checklist of amazing comic book plots mashed together. We have a man in suit giant frog with a tongue wrapping around a screaming woman and giant feet stomping anyone in its way. Enrico Villagive it his all as the creepy hunchback, and has a surprise transformation during the final battle sequences. The film killing off a chunk of its cast only to reanimate them as zombies for the heroine to battle against is a great plot twist, and the black and white film allows for striking visuals combined with effective makeup on the characters to make them look like the dead.
Supergirl 1973
One other thing, everyone in the village seems to live on a farm with 99 quadrillion ducks which are always quacking in the background. This means no matter what is happening, there is almost always a bunch of quacking and possibly a herd of ducks running around behind the action. It is hilarious I love it, unintentional worldbuilding that almost makes me want to start a duck farm myself!

Pinky Montilla not only was Supergirl, she appeared in other superhero flicks Fight! Batman, Fight! (1973) and Fantastika vs. Wonderwoman (1976). The Batman film is long gone, while a small clip of Fantastika vs. Wonderwoman exists, which means maybe some day we will all get lucky! Pinky made a few horror films such as The Devil’s Daughter (1974) and Sangre Montilla (1975), as well as some drama pictures. Most of her films were from Prima Productions, and by the early 80s she had left the industry.
Supergirl 1973
I had long dismissed Supergirl as a movie I’d never get to see, just one of many amazing posters a Pinoy cinema now vanished. Message board posts talk about how the film used to play all the time on afternoon tv (Channel 9 and BBC). Real pop cinemaheads know that the status of film preservation in the Philippines is dire, due to multiple reasons such as the environment not being ideal for film storage, the costs of maintaining such storage, and destruction of media due to political turmoil. So when a gift like this appears, it is your duty to check it out. The 16mm reels were found in 2015 and are surprisingly intact, the obvious missing portions being the credits and occasional chunks of audio. The restoration replaced the audio with instrumentals that occasionally break right back into dialogue mid-sentence if that portion of the film survived. Luckily, the story is developed enough through the visual medium that you would know what is happening even if there was no sound at all, or even with no subtitles. It is truly a Super Miracle, and thanks to the power of Solar just putting it on youtube, it doesn’t even take effort for you to watch it! So go see something you’ve never seen before!

Space Monster Wangmagwi
InMovie Reviews

Space Monster Wangmagwi (Review)

January 30, 2026By

Space Monster Wangmagwi

aka 우주괴인 왕마귀 aka Ujugoein Wangmagwi
Space Monster Wangmagwi
1967
Written by Byeon Ha-yeong
Directed by Kwon Hyeok-jin
Space Monster Wangmagwi
When you’ve lived in the global pop cinema trenches as long as I have, you’ve heard of hundreds of films that exist only as tattered movie posters, a few existing publicity stills, and if we are lucky, a brief clip that was used as footage in another movie. Every once in a while there is a flash of luck, someone finds a reel in an attic, a film archive realizes something is misnamed, or a film spontaneously appears online, no one knows why. Maybe the film was cursed to not exist unless it did brave deeds in a cinematic afterlife. Whatever the reason, lost films and the occasional miracles are a fact of life. And that’s what we are talking about today.

A long time ago, on the internet, there was a story about a film. A Korean giant monster movie that still existed, but for whatever reasons was hidden away in a film archive. All we knew of 1967’s Space Monster Wangmagwi (우주괴인 왕마귀) was a few still images and a story about the film being sued by the producers of Yongary. It wasn’t a secret that the film existed, but we didn’t know anything else about it. All we know was it just wasn’t allowed outside to play!

Until it was!

Space Monster Wangmagwi
Yep, Space Monster Wangmagwi got a bluray release! Finally, this long imprisoned holy grail is there, for everyone to see! To see…that it isn’t very good! Ooh, sick burn on Wangmagwi there. Don’t worry, the film can take it. It’s definitely an odd flick that doesn’t conform to a lot of established structure for giant monster movies while still delivering a lot of giant monster tropes and action. It is one of those odd disappointments, where despite being disappointed, the movie sticks in your mind like some sort of feral child occasionally stabbing you with a tiny knife. Uh, spoilers!

Aliens from outer space arrive in our solar system and set a plan in motion to conquer the Earth! This will be accomplished by tossing a monster onto the planet, and Earth will cause the monster to grow to giant size, thus allowing him to smash everything and the aliens win. Look, it’s not a very good plan, but it’s the plan these guys have! The aliens wear suits that make them look like the alien invaders from Invasion of the Neptune Men, and the King Kong influences are so incredibly obvious they might as well have had Wangmagwi battle a tyrannosaur. Or battle Yongary. Hey, now that’s a sequel idea! Someone get Yongary on the phone! What? He ate the phone?

The aliens take advantage of a giant hurricane making landfall to disguise their attack. This does not work, they are detected immediately. No matter, the monster will smash everything, let’s stick with the plan, there was no budget for a Plan B!

Our human plot involves a couple about to get married, but the man is called away to help with the hurricane evacuations. His fiancé continues to plan for her wedding to take place despite a very large storm and later the very large rampaging monster. Sometimes you have to just give up the deposit and reschedule! Never fear, the monster Wangmagwi takes a liking to her and carries her around like a doll. At some point a homeless child also gets grabbed by the monster, the kid goes full goblin mode and sneaks into the monster’s cavernous ears and nose chambers and just starts stabbing with his pocket knife. These scenes were disgusting but also hilarious. You’ve probably never seen a classic man in suit monster movie where a child is running around inside the monster’s nose.

Space Monster Wangmagwi being a product of the early 1960s gives it the freedom to react to the changing landscape of the monster movies. The Gojira series’s dramatic wartime echoes had begun to cool as the movies began to explore more lighter sides. Wangmagwi decided that a lot of lighter asides was what was needed, and just crams them in at odd intervals between scenes of the monster smashing cities. Yep, random comic relief to break up the tension. Just imagine if every quip in a Marvel movie was instead a three minute sketch.
Space Monster Wangmagwi
The special effects are perfectly fine, I wouldn’t call them bad for the era and there are a lot of miniatures that gets smashed up by the rampaging monster. That’s the stuff I love, tear up them models, Wangmagwi! The biggest problem is the monster itself, it’s just too obviously a guy in a suit with a mask that barely moves. It is on the level of the budget monsters you’d see on very young kit focused tokusatsu shows, where they were trying to stretch things until the end of the season. They at least tried to make part of the mouth wiggle around, which isn’t nothing, but just makes the rest of the lack of movement more obvious. Heck, there is a giant a tongue permanently stuck out. The rigid mask is an odd contrast to the running plot thread of characters climbing around and inside of the monster’s head. The perfect opportunity to incorporate facial movement as characters were literally stabbing the face. Or say the stabbings caused facial paralysis!

Speaking of paralysis, most of the characters are one-dimensional and don’t have anything interesting going on. They are just adequate to be positive role models about defending Korea while also being forgettable enough that it doesn’t matter. The main exception is the child, Squirrel (Jeon Sang-cheol), who is an orphan that lives on the edges of society, even breaking into the abandoned house of the heroine while the area is evacuated to gorge on some food. He’s so rough and tumble of a scamp, but also another representative of Korea overcoming struggle to try to rebuild itself after a devastating civil war, and portrayed in a way that just isn’t normally seen. While most of this film is destined to fade away in my mind, I’m always going to remember his character as something real and raw just shoved into the midst of this silly monster movie.
Space Monster Wangmagwi
One of the big theories for why Space Monster Wangmagwi was disappeared for so long was that they were embarrassed by the movie. It wasn’t very good, it didn’t know what it wanted to be, and Yongary showed up the same year, in full color, and ate its lunch like Godzilla eats Tokyo. How can Wangmagwi compete with a movie where a giant monster bleeds to death from his butt? I’d hide my films, too. In fact, I am hiding them right now. If you solve a series of clues…
Space Monster Wangmagwi
While I don’t think this is embarrassingly bad, it certainly never lived up to the legend, and not even the shadow of the legend. Not worth hiding away, but not worth celebrating. Wangmagwi instead was transformed from failure into a lost media holy grail, one destined to one day return and give us all hope that finding other lost kaiju films was not only possible, but would happen. Heck, we just might find us Gogola or Tokyo 1960! Okay, probably not. But we did get to see this movie, thanks to the power of someone giving them some money! We all learned something, like when sometimes you unlock Pandora’s Box, the box is just full of boring! And I’ll be there, bored as heck, baby!

20th anniversary cake
InSite News

20 Years of TarsTarkas.NET

June 29, 2024By

20th anniversary cake

Twenty years and still the #1 enemy of Bratz everywhere


Twenty freaking years? Has it been so long? (Yes, a Willow quote, enjoy) When I first started TarsTarkas.NET back in the days of yore, little did I think that it would still be up 20 years on. I definitely don’t remember agreeing that I should get older as time passes, what a load of bunk! Someone really needs to arrest this Father Time character. It’s almost impossible for something to last 20 years on the internet, but here we are. Standing atop a mountain of website corpses. Beating the odds with weird stuff for cool people. And if you are reading this, you are one of those cool people.

Since its inception, TarsTarkas.NET has delivered reviews of global cult and pop cinema, as well as a host of additional reviews, articles, news, podcasts, and plenty of abortive attempts at new projects and features. As much as I could, I tried to get as much and as accurate information as possible in the reviews, turning many of them into long essays with historical information and context. I also strived to be fair to the films, judging them in context with what they are supposed to be and what they represent. As much fun as ripping into awful trash is, it gets repetitive after a while. I mostly just want to talk about the films I love. If I didn’t love these films, I wouldn’t have spent twenty years talking about them. I hope I introduced many people to a whole host of cinematic delights they had never heard of and will spend years chasing down. Heck, I haven’t written a review in far too long, but I’m still hunting down rare and ridiculous movies. If anything, the queue to be written about has just grown exponentially, along with my to-be-watched list.

We’ve evolved from hand-coded html to Mambo/Joomla to WordPress, including a variety of themes and looks. We’ve switched hosting providers as the site grew and shrank. There was a lot of behind the scenes stuff I was doing off and on the past two years. Getting the website updated after too long of neglect. That included all sorts or troubleshooting, plug-in swapping, server program installing, manual reading, furious googling, swearing, theme switching (I’ll probably get a new premium theme eventually), wigit error checking, new graphics, solving why some tables look strange on mobile (only 300-ish articles I’ll have to fix that on lol), and more minutia that I continue to swat aside like the flies they are. I’ve become an expert in hosting and web management, hacking together custom plugins, dealing with several lawsuit threats (all garbage but entertaining garbage), updating web services, and getting things mostly fixed.

The world of cinema has changed as well we’ve gone through multiple cycles of video store/direct to dvd booms, busts, Netflix, RedBox, the entire MCU, mergers, IP buy-ups, the rise of streaming services, and now those streaming services collapsing under their own costs and mismanagement. Through it all, there has been a lot of cinema gems, a lot of cinema sludge, and a heaping host of boring gray in between.

We’ve made lots of friends along the way, and lost a few close ones. RIP Todd Stadtman, you will never be forgotten. A dream is to one day do more things with collaborators, but first I need to find time to do anything at all first!

The biggest thing is always time. I had hoped I would have gotten more free time to keep writing, but life just doesn’t want things to be that way at the moment. There are brief periods here and there, but it’s not like before when I could just hang out at a bookstore for a few hours and have two or three reviews written. There’s a toddler running around now that gets the attention first. But he does have school and he does go to sleep.

The old old reviews are a little…rough. My writing has improved over the decades and hopefully hasn’t degraded too much during my hiatus. I have done some writing, mostly fiction. Some may be available someday, and if I get free time, you can occasionally find me in the SomethingAwful forums’s Thunderdome writing contests (usually getting near last place, but not always!) I’m also prepping some new reviews, which I think I have promised before, but I really am. There’s been multiple Godzilla films that came out since we hit the pause button! Heck, 2024 had TWO Godzilla films!! There are multiple streaming and web shows! It’s a new golden age. Plenty of weird new films have come out that deserve bigger audiences. Not only that, several films that were basically lost films have shown up in the past few years. All sorts of cool and weird stuff. As we head into the unknown future, might as well learn about some cool films!

Sure, the web dying and a grass-roots effort to try to bring back interesting sites helps motivate me to keep going. But I’d be doing it even if that groundswell wasn’t happening. I just like doing it. And I want to keep doing it. Twenty years is just the beginning!

InMovie News, Site News

Beautiful Thrilling Bloody Sword print on Blu-Ray complete with Tars Tarkas commentary!

November 16, 2021By

Do you like swords? Do you like thrills? Do you like boutique Blu-Ray companies and freshly scanned 2K prints of obscure Taiwanese fantasy Snow White films filled with monsters and mayhem? Sure, we all do, but now you can get all those great flavors in one simple package with the Thrilling Bloody Sword Blu-Ray from Gold Ninja Video! I’ve seen the print, and it is freaking beautiful! Much much better than the blurry and washed out VHS and tv rips that are circulating around the web, ones that we ourselves used in our review of Thrilling Sword way back in the long long time ago. And how have I seen the print before the official release? Because I’m in the official release! Yes, Thrilling Sword has a commentary track with yours truly, Tars Tarkas, giving color commentary and interesting factoids along with Gold Ninja Video founder Justin Decloux! Somehow, I found time to get this done despite having a toddler running around demanding all my time, because this release is just awesome and Thrilling Sword/Thrilling Bloody Sword/神劍動山河 deserves a much wider audience! You got seven generals shrunk down to small size (sometimes they even have all seven actors in the scene, but usually not), a queen giving birth to a ball of flesh, a guy turned into a bear, Satan, giant monsters, frog men, definitely not Rodan, totally not King Ghidorah, unsafe flames, trippy visuals, a guy with a butt on his head, phantom limbs, and much much more! This is a movie that when you describe it to people, they don’t believe you! Now they can not believe you but in 2K! It’s a steal at only $20! Plus, you can always rag on me forever for whatever minor error I made in the commentary track! But I guarantee it is 99% correct.

Just look at the beauty of it!

ORDER IT TODAY! Limited to 800 copies!

NOTE: THIS IS A PRE-ORDER. BLU-RAYS WILL START SHIPPING ON NOVEMBER 22, 2021

Watch a Teaser Here

A NEW 2K SCAN OF THE ONLY SURVIVING 35MM PRINT

DOUBLE NOTE: If you selected the Subscription Perk from the Gold Ninja Video Indiegogo campaign this will be included, so you don’t need to order it, and it will ship when it becomes available.

There’s nothing like THRILLING BLOODY SWORD, a head-spinning slice of Taiwanese psychotronic cinema that builds a fantasy action movie out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, impossible fight scenes, and a cavalcade of monsters that include a cyclops, a pterodactyl and Satan himself!

A comet impregnates a queen. She gives birth to a fleshy egg. In disgust, the king tosses the egg in the river. Seven little people stumble onto the egg. They stab it with a knife and find a cute baby inside – who grows up to be a beautiful princess. One day, she runs into a prince fighting a multi-headed dragon, and of course, the two royals fall in love. Unfortunately, a group of dastardly wizards want to keep them apart, and they’ll use every creature at their disposal to do it!

Previously available in only a washed-out video transfer, Gold Ninja Video is proud to present this super colourful film in a new 2K Scan taken from the only-surviving 35mm print commissioned exclusively for this release.

In Mandarin with burnt-in English subtitles.

SPECIAL FEATURES

*Commentary Track by World Pop Cinema Scholar Tars Tarkas and Justin Decloux

*He Wrote Every Punch: The Career of Writer/Director Chang Hsin-Yi

*A Beginner’s Guide to Psychotronic Taiwanese Cinema

*Bonus Feature Film: Incredible Kung Fu Mission (1979)

I said to ORDER IT TODAY! Why are you still here? Get to buying, bub!

Older 
123