shanmonster | I Need to Win a Lottery

The stress continues. I just found out there's a possibility The ShanMonster Page may be homeless come the end of the month. It's a cough-up-$400 kind of thing to keep the server online, and since I don't have even ten percent of that, my site may disappear. Crikey!

I also just got back from another job interview. I think it went well, but at this point, I'm feeling less and less capable of judging how these things go. I need some good references, but I'm loathe to ask people to say how great I am. It goes completely against my nature, but is part of the whole gaining employment ritual. Ugh.

A few people (Dmitri, Linda, Siobhan, and Greg) did show up for the chop sokky extravaganza last night, but none of them were the ones who'd wanted the movie night in the first place. People are so strange. We ended up watching Ghost Warrior and Legend of the Eight Samurai. Ghost Warrior is one of those movies I purchased expecting it to be absolutely dreadful, and comedic for that reason. It had all the signs of being a terrible movie. Proudly emblazoned on the video case is "By the makers of Troll." That alone makes it look awful. The plot synopsis cemented this belief. It's about a Samurai from the 1500s who runs amok in 1980s California.

Astonishingly enough, the movie is very good. Sure, there's a whole buttload of suspension of disbelief, but the acting is strong, especially on the part of Hiroshi Fujioka. Watching him makes it easy to suspend disbelief. He is very skilled with his weapons, and his demeanor is redolent with bushido. I'd like to watch more of his films, even though they look uniformly awful. Maybe he's the Japanese version of Rutger Hauer--a good actor with undiscriminating taste when it comes to acting gigs.

Legend of the Eight Samurai, on the other hand, is just as bad as you'd think it should be. The plot bounces around in a most confusing fashion, but who cares about what's going on, anyway? The word Samurai is interchanged with Ninja in this story. The cast includes such characters as The Princess, Necktie Ninja, pantsless Samurai, unloved lady ninja, Elvis Samurai, The Evil Queen, the old lady who tears her own face off, and a bevy of poisonous women. Throw in tentacles and glowing blue balls, and the MST3K-style jokes happen all on their own. For ease of comprehension, all you need to remember is that the way of the Samurai is death, and expect a final deathcount of Shakespearian proportions.