Big Trouble in Little China

Friday, May 18 - Saturday, May 19, 2012

35mm print “‘Ready, Jack?’ asks Kurt Russell’s Chinese buddy before another fraught round of mayhem beneath the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. ‘I was born ready’, comes back the growled response; and it is this level of conscious self-mockery which saves the John Wayne posturing and genre high kicks from being just another climber on the Raiders of the Lost Ark band wagon. Russell is the T-shirted bozo trucker, who only has to fire his gun into the ceiling for the plaster to fall on his head. Down the mean catacombs and underground streams of Chinatown he goes, in search of something or other and encountering every Chinese cliché known to man: devil women, 900-year-old sages, water tortures, black magic monsters. The icing on all this cake is a load of kung-fuey… Carpenter has always been a skilful genre mechanic, breathing life into old forms.” – Time Out (London)

• Country USA
• Rating PG-13
• Year 1986
• Running Time 99 minutes
• Director John Carpenter

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