In Dark Feathers, a geisha-themed melodrama, we are introduced to Kate (played by Crystal J. Huang, also co-director and co-writer), a dancer, photographer and all-around femme fatale who can crack chestnuts with her vaginal muscles – apparently this is a traditional test of the geisha’s abilities. Kate’s private life is a tangled web involving a private detective, the detective’s wife who is also Kate’s dance instructor, and what claims to be a noble samurai clan, though they certainly seem more like the Yakuza.
I think the idea here is to update Japanese jidaigeki cinema to contemporary America – sort of the inverse of what Kurosawa did with Western material such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear: Dark Feathers is set in a sort of alternate San Francisco, with an extensive network of geisha, princesses, samurai et cetera. In some ways this calls to mind the alternate, martial arts/samurai-themed world of Kill Bill, a connection reinforced by the presence here of Michael Madsen. Madsen is one of many former stars of the 80s and 90s now taking bit parts in low-budget fare. He also once declared that only about five or six of his films had been good, and Species II in particular was “a crock of shit”. One wonders what he made of Dark Feathers. He certainly doesn’t seem happy to be here, for, like Samuel L. Jackson in Secret Invasion, he spends almost all of his brief screentime sat in a chair; though unlike Jackson he cannot enunciate, his voice now so gruff he sounds like a Batman parody. Remember, kids: smoking destroys lives and ruins careers.
Still, he’s not alone in his unintelligibility; in this film we hear many thick accents, most of them Chinese, though with Japanese, French, Eastern European, etc. all thrown into the mix. You’ll be glad for the subtitles in the occasional Japanese-language scenes. This, I presume, applies even to Japanese speakers, since there are so few echt Japanese actors in the Asian parts.
Director/writer/star Crystal Huang is best-known as a dancer; indeed, her previous directorial credits are all for dance videos, which probably explains the large chunk of the film which is given over to a ballroom dancing subplot. The dance sequences themselves, unsurprisingly, are the only real standout – those and the costuming. Presumably to make up for a lack of experience in non-dance directing, Huang co-directs alongside a veteran of more than thirty films, Nicholas Ryan. Unfortunately, these are mostly assistant director credits on such items as Titanic 666, Asteroid-a-Geddon, and Fast and Fierce: Death Race, which sounds like it doesn’t know which Jason Statham actioner it’s trying to rip off.
The result of all this is that, when no-one’s dancing, we get the low-rent, underlit, get-it-done-in-one feel of any Asylum mockbuster, which have become so well-known that Asylum now has its own imitators. Characters give soap opera-level performances, the very, very brief action scenes feel more like rehearsals for fight sequences than fight sequences and, for all the bisexual love affairs going on, the picture is oddly chaste, with one brief peck on the lips being as steamy as things ever get. Perhaps this out of a sense of decorum on the part of the director(s), though it comes off more as a simple case of actresses too squeamish to commit to a love scene. This is a curious situation in a film which isn’t afraid to give us the best vaginal nutcracker scene you’ll see on film.