DOA: Dead Or Alive (?)
Last night I saw this feminist martial
arts film called DOA: Dead Or Alive. There
is no question mark. It’s not Dead Or Alive?,
it’s just Dead Or Alive period. When the title already kicks grammar’s ass,
you know you’re in for a show. They
aren’t offering you a choice of death or life.
They’re telling you, motherfucker.
However they do offer you a choice of blonde, brunette, or purple
hair. I will also warn you that this
film is not a sequel to The Quick And The Dead, although there is a moment of Sharon Stone
homagerie where a lady uncrosses and recrosses her legs and a room full of law enforcement
officials oogle her twat.
This film
follows the formula of Enter The Dragon,
where a bunch of wacky fighters who all have interesting backstories
and styles get recruited to go to an island and fight in a secret tournament,
but something evil is going on elsewhere on the island. This film has been remade a couple times now,
once as The Quest, staring
Jean-Claude Van Damme, and as Mortal Kombat, starring Goro. I have to say
I really like this set up for a story.
And I think DOA puts a good
feminist spin on it with some original characters. The main fighters in this film are
women. These ladies are tough and mostly
fight in bikinis, which shows that once they’re done
kicking your ass, they’re going to fight a yeast infection.
There’s one
character who is a Ninja Princess, which is a pretty classy job title. She lives on top of a very high mountain in a
walled fortress and has several hundred guards who’s
job it is to protect her. But their job
is to protect from the outside also by never letting her leave and experience
life beyond the palace walls. But she
wants to find out how her brother died at the DOA tournament last year so she
escapes. Her escape involved getting all
her hundreds of guards to bow and then running super fast over their shoulders,
throwing a sword into the palace wall and jumping off with a hang glider and
floating to freedom. I think she’s got
that guy from the Shawshank Redemption beat in terms of
elaborateness, but I don’t feel her discretion was tested as much. I think the palace employee who signed for
the hang glider is going to have some explaining to do.
There’s also a lady who’s a Master Thief
running from the law. She’s the one who
does the Sharon Stone impression I
was telling you about. There’s a good
scene before they even get to the tournament where she gets out of the shower
and a bunch of FBI guys are in her hotel room.
This scene is really well choreographed to avoid nudity because she’s
fighting naked and using her towel as a weapon.
It’s like one of those Austin
Powers scenes where they use all sorts of wacky camera angles to obstruct
the nudity, only this time as an actual action sequence.
The one agent
has his gun aimed at her and is holding her bra. She does some ninja moves and kicks his hand
so that the bra and the gun fly into the air and she sticks up her arms and the
bra slides on her and then the pistol lands right in her hand and she aims it
at the agent and commands him to fasten her bra. Like all women, she has to make a big scene
just to get a little support. The way
they shot her bra and the pistol flying into the air and how it landed on her
made it look like the hotel room was thirty feet tall, which was kind of a continuity
error. When they show the room from
other angles you can tell it’s a normal hotel room and that the pistol would
bounce off the eight foot ceiling right away and the bra wouldn’t float down
all slowly. But I found the rest of this
scene totally believable.
I think I should
tell you about the sound effects in this film, because in my opinion, they are
a really important part of the entertainment that is DOA: Dead Or Alive. Since this is a feminist movie, there are the
obligatory scenes where a lady grabs a fella’s balls
and squeezes them while telling him something important. They’ve decided to punctuate these scenes
with the classic cracking sound of a truck driving over a mound of
walnuts.
As somebody
interested in the history of cinema, I would like to know when this screen
convention started. I was watching Serpico the
other day and there’s a part where the cops kick a handcuffed criminal in the
balls and it makes the non-sound that real testicles make in conflict
situations. Those of you with balls can
pause from this review and squeeze yourself to appreciate the silence, and you
ladies will have to ask your boyfriend or math teacher or Jackass cast member of choice or whoever to help you with this.
I’m pretty sure, the rise of the loud
cracking noise of groin hits can be tied to the advent of Ben Stiller in
cinema, but I’d like to pinpoint exactly when it began. Any help with this would be greatly
appreciated. I would also like filmmakers
to develop a noise for girls getting kicked in the crotch. My suggestion would be that of a rubber boot
getting pulled out of mud, but maybe a trumpet or something would go over
better with test audiences.
My favorite
sound effect in DOA: The
Dead And/Or The Alive is when this muscular guy flexes his biceps
and it makes the sounds of guns cocking.
That was pretty clever since lots of guys call this “the gun show”. There’s also a part where a girl winds up a
kick and it makes the sound of a pump-action shotgun being pumped and then when
she delivers the kick the sound is of the shotgun firing.
There’s also a
big fight scene when a daughter and father are forced to fight each other. They’re southern hillbilly folk, so the
filmmakers have them wrastle around ending up in all
these sexual positions and even have the father bite the inner thigh of his
daughter to really play up all the humour that lies
in incest. But those clever sound
technicians once again use their skills by playing goofy banjo music to really
drive home the hillbilly humour of this scene. I’m sure Kid Rock appreciated it.
There’s some
other really great fight choreography in this film. It gets a little avant-garde in one scene,
but it’s not as artsy as The Fountain. The artsy scene is one that uses visuals to
examine the nature of competition through several forms. This fight scene takes place in the rain in a
swamp, so it transitions from fighting, to wet t-shirt contest, to mud
wrestling. To me, that’s like having a
baseball game where the guys ride motocross bikes around the bases and there’s
two guys playing chess on the pitcher’s mound.
But don’t worry, this abstract examination of
competition and mix-medium tour de force doesn’t overpower the entertainment
value of the film. And neither does the
religious commentary. There’s a scene
where a Buddha full of money explodes and crushes Eric Roberts. But otherwise this film isn’t too artsy and I
really don’t want to scare you off with high-concept mud wrestling and
character actors like Eric Roberts.
Believe me, this is a very accessible film.
I’ve done a bit research utilizing the
internet device and found out that this film is based on a video game. I think they’ve stayed really true to form
because this film has all the hallmarks of the old fighting games I used to
play such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter
II. Before the fights an offscreen synthesized voice announces the fighters names,
the fighters then strike poses, and then the voice says “Fight!” and the word
‘fight’ even appears on the screen in flashing letters. The characters even have those power bars
across the top of the screen letting you know how much fight they still have in
them. However this film does not do the whole “Finish Him!” thing like Motral
Kombat.
Speaking as a completist, I believe strongly
in finishing the proverbial him.
This
groundbreaking film also uses other techniques of bridging the video game world
with the world of feminist cinema. A lot
of the backgrounds are computer animated and whenever they show an establishing
shot of a big building it is also clearly accomplished through computers. They computer animate lots
of things to give it that video game feel. There’s also one scene where the fighter
girls take a break and switch out of their combat bikinis into leisure bikinis
and play beach volleyball. They computer
animate the volleyball so that the actresses don’t have to worry about playing
well and can focus on their performances so that their breasts don’t break
character.
I’m guessing
this video game must be one of the best video games ever made if it resembles
this movie at all. Even if it doesn’t
feature Eric Roberts’s brand of acting I’m sure this game is still better than
that Halo nonsense everybody is so obsessed with.
I think you guys
can tell that I had really good time watching this film, and I hope I didn’t
scare you away from renting it by mentioning the more high-concept scenes. This isn’t one of those Oscarbait
movies about the interconnected lives of a bunch of heroin addicts with
subtitles or whatever. This is really a
feminist film for everybody.
I present my
closing argument:
DOA: Dead or Alive has a scene where a couple is in bed
trying to get it on, in the romantic sense of the expression, and two ninjas
come fighting through the wall and interrupt them. This fight scene continues to have the losing
fighter get kicked off a balcony where he lands in a hot tub below and
interrupts a second romantic encounter.
And if that doesn’t describe your kind of movie, then maybe you just
don’t believe in gender equality.
Peace out.
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