Human Lanterns

Crouching Tiger, Flaying Skeleton is quite enjoyable and generally pulls away from the more lurid details, though they love to show the skin he's, well, skinned off of them. There's a rape scene where they cut to seven or eight visual euphemisms that had me laughing. Not that I laugh at rape scenes. Oh God.

Weird Shaw Brothers flick about two feuding kung fu masters in a small town which is being terrorized by a psycho killer. While I appreciate the effort to do something different than the standard "You killed my teacher" revenge plot, none of the attempted horror elements come off very well. There's some blue lights and Evil Dead-cam, and a little bit of gore, but it's still your basic Shaw kung fu flick with quality production values and martial arts. Good, but not quite a classic.

It’s a movie called Human Lanterns, you get everything you were expecting and than some more. Unless you were thinking Human Lanterns was some Bergman romp, than baby oh you are in for something.

Yikes, the skin peeling scenes were brutal. Also, I vote to retitle this movie as Silence of the KICK TO THE FUCKING FACE. Not quite a Venoms flick, but it has at least one of those saintly gentlemen in it, so quality is assured.

There are two story lines that play parallel to each other here the first is about two bratty rich guys, this story is really dull and uninteresting and the other story line is about a deranged killer, this story is more interesting but with a title like "Human Lanterns" I was expecting more.

A strange mixture of the Shaw's period action and gruesome horror. The two aren't necessarily intertwined as well as you would hope, but they dovetail into a final confrontation between the two main characters and the killer nicely. Sun's camera placement is interesting: often letting the action play out, naturally framed by objects in the foreground.

Wuxia with a dab of Texas Chainsaw Massacre? That just can't work, well, not as such. For all their production value, Shaw Brothers just aren't where you go for cutting-edge gore effects. Nor does the wire-fu really cut it if you're in it for the fights. Lastly, it all amounts to exploitation-level tastelessness. And yet I still found this awkward pastiche mysteriously mesmerizing. Maybe the superficial beauty of Shaw sets and costumes threw me off, but somehow, Human Lanterns hits the spot.