Samurai Cop

Sean Baker

Oh my dear lord. Finally watched it. Now I have to go on a deep dive in to Amir Shervan's filmography. I was aware of some of his US titles because when I was renting props for Tangerine, I came across a small business located in Thai Town, Los Angeles called Cop Prop Shop. (They have a website) I walk in to the office and there are mini posters of Amir's films all over. I recognized the Hollywood Cop poster and asked what the deal was. They happened to be good friends and provided the guns, etc for Amir's films. I looked in to Shervan's filmography and found that his last film, Samurai Cop, was already gaining infamy. I just watched Edge of the Ax recently. That's another example of foreign sensibilities revealing themselves through dialogue and behavior of characters. Well Larraz has nothing on Shervan. I don't think there has ever been a better example of "lost in translation" than this film. On top of that, not a second of this film disappoints. There is a head scratcher in every frame of this film. It's a feat. I hope somebody is working on an Amir Shervan documentary. I want to know more about this guy. And does anyone out there know how to find his Iranian work?Watched the Cinema Epoch Blu-ray.

matt lynch1.5

"There's only one thing in this world I want. I want you to find that motherfuckin' Japanese gangster. I want you to kill him, and I want you to kill every one of his men. I want you to burn his house into a bloodbath. Don't leave anybody alive! And when they're all dead you come back to me, and all three of us'll turn our badges in, say goodbye to it. We'll be off this police force for good." -- actual dialogue

ScreeningNotes2.0

"Why'd you go under?""'Cause I'm an undercover cop!"There's no way of talking about a movie like this without discussing the nature of rating movies. I've seen The Room and Troll 2 and countless features from The Asylum, and Samurai Cop is without contest the most poorly made film I've ever seen. To rate it accurately in terms of quality, my system has to be stretched to new levels to accommodate the incredible extent of its failure. It stands alone at its own individual level of ineptitude. But for me, putting it at the ½ star it deserves and calling it a day ignores the potential entertainment value of such a unique catastrophe. I've had a bit of a fraught relationship with the idea of "so bad it's good" movies. My experience of The Wicker Man remake wasn't really anything but boring, and I have a hard time describing movies like Sharknado as "bad" because they essentially succeed in their objective of being a trashy b-movie. But here we have something which I can finally say is so bad it's good.Part of me wishes professors would show movies like this in film school, because there's a sense in which this is nothing but an endless series of teachable moments. Want to learn about continuity editing? There are inconsistencies between every single cut. Even something simple like shot-reverse-shot conversations feature characters in entirely different locations between alternating frames. Need a counter-example for how to write compelling dialogue? The script sounds like it was written by someone who couldn't speak English but didn't want anyone to proofread what they came up with.In Red Letter Media's commentary track for the film, Jay Bauman calls this "the cinematic equivalent of Engrish." You can sort of understand what they're trying to go for with each scene, but it's a constant struggle to figure out the most basic elements like what's supposed to be happening or what we're supposed to be feeling. This movie is harder to follow than Primer simply because it doesn't know how to tell the most rudimentary of crime stories.The overall effect of this combination of failures is that Samurai Cop feels like a movie about a bunch of aliens in human suits struggling to survive in an alternate universe where reality is unstable and their surroundings are in a state of constant flux. And if that doesn't sound like a great time to you then I don't know what else to say.Best of the Worst