Bovie Movie

A surreal crime drama told as only Jim Jarmusch could, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai stars Forest Whitaker as Ghost Dog, a hit man living in an unidentified but run-down city in what license plates call “The Industrialized State.” Known for his gift of being able to come and go without people noticing him, Ghost Dog is a self-taught samurai who is obsessed with order and his strict personal moral code, drawn from the philosophies of the Japanese warriors. As every samurai needs a leader to whom he swears loyalty, Ghost Dog has devoted himself the service of Louie (John Tormey), a low-level crime boss who once saved his life. When Louie’s superiors decide he must be executed, Ghost Dog leaps into action, methodically wiping out his many enemies. Along with a dizzying series of stylized shoot-outs, Ghost Dog also features carrier pigeons, characters who read Rashomon, a French-speaking ice cream man, and a score by RZA from the top-selling hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, who have their own well-documented obsession with Asian culture. Ghost Dog was screened in competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Exploitation king Fred Olen Ray was well entrenched in his “Erotic Thriller” phase (typified by films like Inner Sanctum) when he turned out this oddball mix of salacious schemes and demonic possession. When creatively blocked horror writer Howard (Ted Prior) buys an oversized jar containing a silly-looking pickled monster from a tiny shop in Chinatown, he quickly falls under the thing’s supernatural influence. Not only can he churn out reams of manuscript pages like never before, he also becomes more sexually aggressive — a change which troubles his reserved wife Peggy (statuesque Sandahl Bergman), particularly after the arrival of sexy blonde live-in secretary Carol (Shannon Tweed, whose presence had become ubiquitous in films of this kind). The plot thickens when we learn that Carol is also conspiring with her partner Murray (Frank Sivero), Howard’s greedy agent, to steal his manuscript. Carol soon becomes the puppet of the thing in the jar as well, playing violent sexual games with the couple, terrorizing Peggy at every turn, and ultimately turning on Murray — leading to a hyper-violent climax which has nearly every character blasting away at his/her co-conspirator with automatic weaponry. Despite the heftier financial backing of Columbia Home Video, this is still exploitation in the classic Ray tradition, filled with the usual bucketloads of nudity and kinky sex, and featuring cameos from such familiar B-movie faces as Ray Silva and Turhan Bey, as well as Kato Kaelin as a busboy in the restaurant scene with Bey.