Versus (2000)

Please don't spend money on this.

Best movie ever!

Absolutely the worst movie.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Rather bizarre film which I didn't really understand until the gone the midway point to be honest. The plot is odd and not entirely explained as you are spoon fed bits of it very slowly.Its a blend of horror, comedy, sci-fi and fantasy really, almost has an 'Evil Dead' quality to it really, that kind of dark humour with over the top extreme characters. Mix that with a kind of 'Mortal Kombat' style plot about opening portals to other worlds which lie within the Forest of Resurrection but only with the blood of a certain woman etc...a bit clichéd but fun.The whole thing is highly stylised like all Japanese action films...its slicker than a frogs bathing suit. The main hero has dark longish hair and a full length black leather trench coat with black leather pants, dare I say looking a bit 'Crow-esque' there. There's plenty of martial arts, sword play, clever editing along with unique camera angles. Personally I think there has been an element of 'The Matrix' borrowed for this film, well that and quite a few other films, originality is not high on the agenda.Its well known as a cult but I wasn't overly stunned by it, its cool but nothing special really, a bit too clichéd for me. This type of thing popped up a lot after that Keanu Reeves film came out, everybody suddenly realised long black trench coats were uber cool, gets a bit tiresome watching it.5/10

Those crazy Chinese, they sure know how to make crazy films. I had a friend once who went to China- he said they didn't have cars but used dragons to drive about instead. Crazy! Especially as dragons are extinct. Versus isn't really a real film, it's really based on an assortment of fight em ups for the computer. Games such as Mortil Come Back World, Road Fighter 2: Championship Edition, and Streets Of Age. The crazy twist comes via the fact that we have not only humans fighting each other, but other creatures too- con men, vampires, weredogs, werecats, zomboids, Bagginses, people of the Aisle Of Man, Santa etc. The basic plot sees a Chinese mafia man re-stealing his girlfriend from a rival mafia man who had re-re-stolen her from the man who his re-stealing her from him. The baddie sends his most trusted warriors after the goodies in a progression of difficulty, starting with a brown belt unarmed amateur, working up through expert bearded swordsmen, giants, and Miyagi, all the way to entire platoons of tanks armed with nukes. Our hero is a decent fighter, but he can only take so much and is ripped to ribbons. Luckily though he is killed in an ancient Indian burial ground on a full moon and comes back as a zomboid. He then has to fight his way out of the Underworld against Medusa, Hitler, and Samuel Peyps only to try to re-re-re-rescue his girlfriend (who has been cheating on him with an Eskimo). Not a lot of the film made sense, especially the parts that weren't in English, and most of the effects and acting left much to be desired. I suppose I can't complain given that the film was made for 10 Yen, but when you see that Parannoying Actively was only made for 80 dollars there really is not excuse.Best Scene: When one of the bad guys is being kicked into the air you can see the string and pulley system being operated by a man in the trees in the background. If you freeze frame that part and zoom in you can see that it is none other than 1980s cast off Rick Moranis.

Versus aims to be a stylish, cool action flick with a healthy mixture of gore, gun-play, and martial arts. Unfortunately, a lot of those attempts at being stylish and cool, end up coming off as cheesy. All the silly posing and failed attempts at humor don't do a lot to help Versus, and neither does the fact that the characters are almost universally annoying and uninteresting. The story is something about zombies and resurrection forests and portals to hell. The word "convoluted" comes to mind. The frequent action scenes could have been the movie's saving grace, but they were uniformly uninspired and routine. The gore wasn't funny or copious enough to warrant any attention. The acting is bad. Not "campy bad" or "hilariously bad", just bad. The kind that's difficult to watch.If you couldn't tell, I thoroughly disliked Versus. I've seen a lot of great Japanese action flicks. This wasn't one of them.

Looking at the cover of the movie you would expect a Matrix style movie, but you are going to watch something REEEEALY different than The Matrix. As i said in the summary, Versus is a Excellent mix of gore and action, accompained by martial arts, gunplay and swords. The movie begins with a poor zombie getting sliced by a samurai, the samurai kills other zombies and the samurai gets killed by a mysterious character. After this prologue, you see 2 guys that just escaped from a holiday in prison. They meet some gangsters (or Yakuza, since this movie is Japanese), the gangsters are going to help our heroes escape from the police, but something goes wrong. We discover that the yakuza guys kidnapped a girl, apparently the main guy (anyway, no character in this movie is called by it's name, check the cast i am not joking) is not a big fan of violence against womens, and "accidentally" one of the yakuza guys gets killed and he becomes a zombie (also, the guy who we see after the prologue that is escaping with the main character gets killed) ! The main character escapes with the girl, but the yakuza boss wants to starts a manhunt, but zombies will go in the middle of the action. LET THE BLOODBATH BEGIN !!!! Anyway, i really enjoyed Versus, a lot of people considered it "boring" or "slow paced", also there is a final revelation (calm down, i am not going to spoil it). i like Ryûhei Kitamura, i think that he is a good director and the performance of Tak Sakaguchi was awesome, cold and cool, even the rest of the cast did an awesome job.