Dreams and Fantasies

Ms. Spenser was out of town this weekend, bur I didn't load up on "guy flicks" like Practical Magic. Instead, I went with another genre she doesn't care for: Chinese action fantasy. This made a good tie-in with D&D. There was one little problem - I slept through most of them. 

From Netflix, I got Iron Mask (2020), featuring Jackie (some) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (very little). It starts with three men in a dungeon (Tower of London?). They are Jackie Chan, a man in an iron mask (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and a cartographer (Jason Flemyng). Each is shackled to a different wall, with their arm chains connect. So when Chan scratches his head, it pulls Flemyng's arm out straight. Theur Jailer is Arnold, with a villainous beard.

They all escape, of course. Flemyng goes on a mappng expedition in Eastern Russia, ruled by what turns out to be a fake Peter the Great. Chan goes to China. The guy in the mask turns out to be the real Peter. That's about all I remember. 

This movie is actually the sequel to a Russian movie called Viy (2014), which I have never heard of. Based on the same Gogol story as the 1967 movie which I have heard of - in fact, this inspired me to order the DVD for the 1967 movie from Movies Unlimited.

I followed this up with The Knight of Shadows (2019), a Jackie Chan DVD from the library. In this one, Jackie is a demon hunter, but the demons he collects tend to be cute little ones who help him in his quests. There is a dragon. I think. This sort of looks like a kid's movie, with computer game CGI. But fun.

Another one from the library, The Thousand Faces of Dunjia (2018) might be the most confusing - or maybe the one I watched while sleepiest. A dunjia is some sort of ultimate weapon, protected by a mystical sphere, or maybe a warrior clan called something like cimenu. The heads clans need it to protect the world from some extraterrestrial beings. One such turns into a naive, naked human woman, who likes to hug the lead warrior. 

OK, I can't tell you much about what happens in these movies. But it's not because I didn't enjoy them. They were fun to watch, full of action and fantastic scenes. They are great to watch while drowsing because of the quality dreams they inspire, but I'd watch these again awake, even the Russo-Chinese one. There's not really much Arnold in it - and I think him and Jackie fight! Might have dreamed that part.