Night Watch, Valley of the Wolves, Tachiguishi Retsuden

There's a Russian horror movie coming out soon called Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor, or Ночной дозор, in Russian). It's "part 1 of an epic horror trilogy". The sequel, Day Watch, opened to colossal business in Russia this January. It looks like it's got some superficial similarities to the Underworld movies -- an ancient truce between supernatural beings turns into a modern-day war of the monsters -- but it looks quite ambitious. I must see this movie.

Variety's asian film blog, Kaiju Shakedown, has a piece about the subtitles in Night Watch, and the Night Watch trailer is at Apple's movie trailers site. It comes out in NYC this weekend; I haven't located any San Diego showtime info yet, but I did see a poster at the Mission Valley AMC.

A word about how I found Kaiju Shakedown: I was rambling around the web, and I inadvertently wandered into the shoutdown-show area of MSNBC's web site. There was a discussion of a new film, "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq", a Turkish action movie (based on a Turkish TV series) with US bad guys, two of which are played by Billy Zane and Gary Busey. Kaiju Shakedown's author, Grady Hendrix, appeared on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" to discuss the movie. Not too surprisingly, curteous debate was mostly absent. Hendrix talks a bit about the experience on his blog, likening it more to professional wrestling than to actual discussion.

I've always found it interesting how US filmmakers used Soviets as bad guys during the Cold War, not as propaganda per se, but rather because, well, the US audience viewed the USSR as the enemy, and so it was kinda what you would expect. Also, Soviets were viewed as ruthless and amoral in the pursuit of their objectives, and anybody so perceived makes a pretty good villain (or perhaps a nice tainted good guy, if you need one of those). These days, the US government is probably perceived as ruthless and amoral, so it doesn't surprise me that people making movies for a Muslim audience might use caricatures of Americans as their villains. The film is probably a big ol' stinker, but I'd be interested to see it.

I'd additionally recommend Kaiju Shakedown for interesting Asian film bits, such as an item on "Tachiguishi Retsuden" which led to a trailer, which looks just great. Weird, but great.