In short: Welcome to the Jungle (2007)

Four horror movie meat idiots (as played by Sandy Gardiner, Veronica Sywak, Callard Harris and Nick Richey) decide to wander into the jungles of Papua New Guinea to find a decades lost millionaire's son on account of some vague rumours and dubious information. After forty-five painful minutes spent in their company, the local population of gene-pool cleansing natives take pity on the audience and kill them off. Hooray, the end.

To begin with the positive, unlike all other cannibal movies, Jonathan Hensleigh's POV horror variation on the theme does not include real (or simulated, for that matter) violence against animals, so kudos for that. Alas, that's all positive aspects of the movie right there. The rest is annoying and idiotic characters - two of them with the superpower to carry enough alcohol for weeks in their backpacks - bitching, bickering and shoving each other, doing things too stupid even for people under stress, and finally, finally, dying in ways that could be shocking if I'd give a crap about any of these twats. Of course, to achieve that sort of connection to the characters, the film shouldn't have gone out of its way to make them at best annoying, but mostly vile and too dumb to believe in them as human beings.

To make matters worse, the film takes way too much time coming to the interesting parts, and once it reached them, I couldn't help but see the film as some sort of lite version of Cannibal Holocaust that not only excises the really morally repugnant parts (like the animal violence) of that movie, but also leaves behind the original's ambiguity when it comes to the treatment of race (in Welcome, all brown people are bad, all white people too stupid to live), the rather complex meditations about the nature of civilization and barbarism (Welcome is a film proudly not containing a single thought), and the still shocking nature of the violence (Welcome just has a bit of gore). This leaves Welcome to the Jungle as the most curious of rip-offs - one that ignores all the good parts of what it is ripping off.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,jonathan hensleigh

On Exploder Button: Icy May: Valkoinen Peura (1952)

aka The White Reindeer

We agents of M.O.S.S. defy your oppressive assumptions about seasons in the northern hemisphere. To prove you (yes you!) wrong, May will be all about ice, snow and everything cold for us. Everything is better in winter, after all. And what other climatic conditions could bring us a movie about a were-reindeer?

Valkoinen Peura not only happens to contain said reindeer but is also a very fine film in other particulars. If you want to know more, click on through to my write-up on ExB!

Technorati-Markierungen: finnish movies,reviews,other places,fantasy,horror,erik blomberg,mirjami kuosmanen,kalervo nissilä

In short: The Three Musketeers (1973) & The Four Musketeers (1974)

(I treat both films as one because there's really no good reason not to, seeing as they were filmed back to back and absolutely belong together).

It is always a dangerous proposition to visit one's childhood favourites again, particularly when those favourites are comedies like Richard Lester's version of Dumas's Three Musketeers. Once, most of us found farts inherently funny, and now - hopefully - we no longer do.

So it is a particular delight when one can watch movies like the ones at hand and come out with the feeling that one was a particularly clever gal or guy when one liked it, already of impeccable taste and with an eye for strangeness.

For strange Lester's film surely is: turning the romantic splendour of the previous versions of the story into a mixture of the comedic, the veracious, and the absurd with the help of "Flashman" writer George MacDonald Fraser does not sound the most - or even fourth-most - obvious way to go about another adaptation of Dumas's novels, but Lester and Fraser really pull it of. A large part of the films' charm is based on the way the often very broad humour and the greater than usual in a swashbuckler authenticity collide, showing off much of what is splendour in other versions of the tale as just as silly as the fashions and mores of our times will look a few hundred years on. The past, the films make clear, was another, quite muddy and rainy (even in undramatic moments), country where people lived and loved and dressed and acted like fools, and where France was overrun with people with - or at least pretending to have - various British accents who were totally unable to agree on a pronounciation of D'Artagnan.

The Three Musketeers could easily have drifted into the realm of deeply cynical deconstruction with this approach, but the film looks at its strange people and times with a look that is as much one of wide-eyed wonder and compassion as it is one of mockery, as if Lester and Fraser had begun with cool distance to their material but soon enough fallen in love with all its inner ironies, its unconscious naiveties, and its sense of adventure that transcends morals.

Add to this a cast of actors like Oliver Reed, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Raquel Welch and Richard Chamberlain in a very good mood (well, Welch is absolutely dreadful and has zero comical timing, but that was to be expected), and Lester's hand for heroically ridiculous (or is it ridiculously heroic?) swashbuckling action, and you have a film I'm inordinately proud to already have loved as a little boy.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,british movies,american movies,adventure,richard lester,oliver reed,raquel welch,richard chamberlain,michael york,frank finlay,christopher lee,faye dunaway

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Battledogs (2013)

Wildlife photographer Donna Voorhees (Ariana Richards), arrives at JFK Airport with a rather nasty wolf bite she got while romping through the wilderness. Because it is that sort of day for her, said bite transforms the poor woman into a werewolf who then proceeds to bite herself through the airport. This particular werewolf virus is highly effective (I suspect it's been crossed with a zombie virus of the "fast zombie" variety), turning everyone who isn't outright killed into another werewolf during the course of five minutes.

The authorities, in their sole show of competence in the whole of the movie, manage to sedate the infected en masse. This leaves them with more than a hundred dead bodies and two hundred and fifty people who turn into werewolves whenever their pulse rates get too high, much like hairier, more bloodthirsty versions of the Incredible Hulk.

The prospective wolfpeople are quarantined on an island outside of New York. While USAMRIID major Brian Hoffman (Craig Sheffer) and CDC doctor Ellen Gordon (Kate Vernon) - mind you, Gordon seem to be the only doctor concerned with the solving the situation - try their best to find the event's patient zero whom they hope will lead them to a cure, the commanding officer of the quarantine zone, General Christopher Monning (Dennis Haysbert), has darker plans.

Monning is the kind of guy who sees a bunch of uncontrollable, highly contagious monsters, and thinks to himself "super soldier", and soon proceeds with a series of idiotic experiments that will produce super soldiers as easily as sending a prayer towards Odin. And if Hoffman gets in his way, he has no moral compunction against solving the situation by dropping a werewolf on the Major from the skies. A man of subtlety, Hoffman is not. Clearly, it's the kind of situation that can only lead to a big werewolf outbreak, exactly the kind of situation the worst president ever (Bill Duke looking oh so very very bored) has only horrifically bad plans to resolve.

Finally, after all those zombie outbreak films, the creative people at the SyFy Channel have decided to use a lot of the tropes of that sub-genre - but with werewolves. It's an idea so logical I'm surprised it took this long until a film like Battledogs came along.

If you're willing to wade through the film's cornucopia of clichés, and plot holes (seriously, how are Monning's actions believable even if you think the military is rather evil, and how can we take two protagonists completely seriously who should already know who their patient zero is because she told them and are just too stupid to realize it?), you will come upon a pretty entertaining little movie.

It's particularly impressive how much value first-time director Alexander Yellen is able to squeeze out of his SyFy Channel budget. There are some excellent shots of the empty streets of New York, a surprising number of stunts and chase-scenes without much CG-help, and werewolves that are designed with a love for detail. Sure, the monsters still move all wrong (the bane of all SyFy effects work ever), but the design emphasises their humanity and gives them slightly cartoony, expressive faces, which comes in particularly handy when Hoffman tries his hand at being the werewolf whisperer.

Plus, this is a movie that sees an assassin werewolf dropping from the sky, Manhattan's bridges exploded by the President's idiotic plan, and soldiers and werewolves battling in central park. And those are just the parts of the film that aren't involved in being a chase thriller in which Monning's people and our heroes do various awesome/cheap chase movie things.

While there's a lot of stupidity in the film, Yellen counteracts that problem with so much verve and a palpable feeling of enthusiasm for the whole nonsensical affair I found it rather impossible to be charmed by it. Battledogs is one of those films that may have many, many dumb moments, but never dull ones; you can hardly ask for more from a film called Battledogs.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,horror,thriller,alexander yellen,dennis haysbert,craig sheffer,kate vernon,ariana richards,reviews

Three Films Make A Post: How does it feel to be next?

3 A.M. 3D (2012): It's been a while since I enjoyed one of these Thai horror anthology movies where every tale is directed by a different director. In 3 A.M.'s case, I actually enjoyed only two thirds of the film, because the last story is a typical horror comedy bit, which is to say, it's neither funny nor horrifying. Star of the show is Kirati Nakintanon's middle story "The Corpse Bride", a charmingly macabre tale about necrophilia, misunderstandings and the vagaries of love that is creepy, beautifully shot and very, very strange, and so good I had already forgotten the absolutely serviceable cursed hair story the film begins with five minutes in.

Spiders 3D (2013): Too much mediocre conspiracy thriller, too little giant spider carnage. Sorry, Tibor.

The Last Stand (2013): It's a long and sad tradition for great directors from all parts of Asia to try their luck in Hollywood and don't really produce anything up to the standards they're capable of. The great Kim Ji-woon is, alas, no exception to the rule, and here delivers a Schwarzenegger vehicle best described with terms like "workmanlike" and "serviceable", the sort of thing any competent filmmaker could have delivered in exactly the same way. It doesn't help that Andrew Knauer's script goes through all the expected action movie clichés without a single interesting idea or a hint of charm.

The resulting movie is an okay Hollywood mainstream action concoction I will remember nothing about next week that wastes a hugely talented director.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,thai movies,american movies,horror,action,kirati nakintanon,tibor takács,arnold schwarzenegger

Music Monday: Dilemnal Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,edwyn collins

The Slams (1973)

Robbing a syndicate operation to the tune of one and a half million dollars must have sounded like a good idea at the time to Curtis Hook (Jim Brown), but a mutual double-cross between him and his partners leaves said partners dead and Hook wounded enough to get caught by the police.

Hook is able to hide the loot in the ruins of an amusement park before his arrest, and the cops can't put much beyond the carrying of a concealed weapon on him yet this still leaves him behind bars for one to five years. Worse still, the syndicate - and really, everyone else in his new prison home too, for the prison grapevine is strong - knows he stole from them and has put out a contract on his life.

The prison syndicate boss, a certain Capiello (Frank DeKova) isn't quite sure if he wants to see Hook dead by the hands of white supremacist Glover (Ted Cassidy), or if he'd rather get Hook to tell him where the money is hidden and kill him afterwards. Capiello and his allies aren't the only ones bothering Hook, either: the prison's major black gang leader Macey (Frenchia Guizon) would love to make nice with Hook, and he has difficulties taking "no" for an answer, while the chief of the prison guards (Roland Bob Harris) would really rather have Hook's loot for himself, even if that means putting pressure on Hook's newscaster girlfriend Iris (Judy Pace).

Hook is pretty good at surviving everybody's attentions, probably quite capable of surviving a full five years. When, however, plans are made to renovate the amusement park, breaking out becomes his only option if he wants to keep his hard-won gains.

The Slams' director Jonathan Kaplan may very well be the ultimate hired gun director. Middling major studio Hollywood thrillers, TV movies, TV shows and an Oscar-winning Jodie Foster joint are merrily dancing in his filmography. It's easy to forget Kaplan started his career as one hell of an exploitation filmmaker for the Cormans. How little seen a grand little movies like The Slams were before they hit Warner's overpriced DVD-R circuit surely didn't help the situation either. At least now, everybody interested have the opportunity to experience the short early phase of his career when Kaplan's movies showed something like an actual personality.

As is now much easier to witness, The Slams is a somewhat archetypal example of the prison movie, with all clichés you might ask for there and accounted for (though the genre-typical homophobia stops quite suddenly, and thankfully early, after half an hour or so), which is of course enough to confuse IMDB-type reviewers into calling a tight and at least partially clever script "weak". In truth, Kaplan's film not only hits the required genre beats, but uses them as the rhythmic base on which a taught, sometimes funny, never boring crime movie is built. It's the sort of script where every single element connects quite wonderfully with every other element with even seeming comic diversions - which are even funny, in their dry way - actually there to create veracity for the film's low budget prison movie world.

Plus, how weak can a prison movie script be whose protagonist class-consciously interprets the American love for identity politics as a form of gang warfare (or is it the other way round?), as just another way for "The Man" to keep the lower classes fighting each other instead of him? Of course, in a film that stands in the political tradition of most exploitation and blaxploitation movies, making this assessment only ever motivates our hero to take his money and run.

Kaplan does exceedingly fine work with what the script offers too, keeping the action sudden and - sometimes nearly shockingly so - brutal, never filming scenes too straightforwardly to have them become boring yet also never showing off too much with his abilities.

Brown is also in very fine form here, making Hook believably human and sympathetic even though his character really is not a very nice person. For my tastes, Brown's acting mix of good old charisma, small meaningful gestures and physicality fits a movie as straightforward as The Slams is at its core best.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,crime,jim brown,judy pace,roland bob harris,jonathan kaplan

In short: Apartment 143 (2011)

Original title: Emergo

This English language Spanish production directed by Carles Torrens belongs to the established POV horror sub-genre most likely to result in interesting movies at the moment, the paranormal investigation film; or at least likely not to end with people running through the woods.

In this particular example of the sub-genre, a trio of intrepid and experienced science-based paranormal investigators (Michael O'Keefe, Fiona Glascott and Rick Gonzalez) come to the apartment of the White family. Ever since the family's mother died in a car accident, father Alan (Kai Lennox), teenage daughter Caitlin (Gia Mantegna) and little boy Benny (Damian Roman), have been plagued by paranormal phenomena running the gamut from pounding and other strange noises, to curious telephone terror, to outright shaking walls. Strangely, even moving from their former house into a cheap apartment hasn't stopped what's going on for long, so Alan must have decided putting up three strangers and their load of equipment, which of course includes a bunch of cameras, in his home for a week is some kind of last chance before something truly horrible happens.

The arrival of the investigators seems to provoke whatever is spooking around the family to heightened activity, and it will take them quite some effort as well as the disclosure of their hosts' family secrets until they can banish whatever is spooking around, until one of those despicable last shot "shock twists" turns the until then rather carefully, if obvious, plot into sheer nonsense.

Fortunately, a badly imagined - or rather not imagined at all but unthinkingly following the most boring of all horror movie conventions - final five seconds really aren't enough to ruin a perfectly decent movie, they're just ending what is until then a conventional and conservative yet quite satisfying film on a needlessly sour note.

Before that, Apartment 143 is a pleasant little spook movie more in the tradition of Paranormal Activity than in that of Blair Witch Project, just without the former's tendency to confuse letting its audience spend forty boring minutes with boring characters doing boring things with dramatic build-up. Turns out you can have the first paranormal activity in your movie after five minutes and still find time to set up characters and relationships while escalating and intensifying what's going on.

The film also does a good job of concentrating on its small, decent, cast and its single location (okay, there is one scene taking place in a subway and two outside or in a car), using the basic claustrophobia of cheap housing to heighten the feeling of supernatural threat; there really is not much room to run away to here. There's not much more to Apartment 143, but in a film that so clearly knows what it is and what it sets out to do, this sort of self-restraint is rather a virtue.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,in short,horror,fiona glascott,michael o'keefe,rick gonzalez,kai lennox,gia mantegna

On Exploder Button: The Black Room (1935)

Karloff! Roy William Neill when Nigel Bruce isn't around! Karloff again! A script with depth!

Might this be the best gothic melodrama you haven't heard about? Click on over to my column on Exploder Button to find out!

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,other places,roy william neill,boris karloff,marian marsh,robert allen,thurston hall,gothic,melodrama

Goodbye Ray Harryhausen

When the news of what for many of us was clearly more than just the master of stop motion animation broke, the reaction on the Internet and particularly on Twitter once again made clear how important Harryhausen and his work were for so many people. Not just the expected movie guys, but comics artists, writers and musicians shared their love for the man's work, driving again home that those of us interested in the worlds of imagination live in a house Ray helped build, a place of the imagination that connects many people in all their differences.

For me, as for many of us geeks, nerds and mutants, Harryhausen was a creator of childhood memories right next to the smile of my parents, the first book I read hidden under the covers of my bed, and that perfect moment of awe when I discovered Lovecraft for the first time. Harryhausen's films (and they were so often clearly his films), particularly the mythologicals, added a sense of wonder not just to the screen but to life which for me never had much to do with "escapism" but helped me realize that, however much crap life throws at you, there's also imagination, and love, and kindness; call it teaching me truth, call it optimism. For that, thank you Ray.

 

(If you want to read the handful of pieces about movies with Harryhausen's involvement I did on here, please follow this useful link. Unfortunately, they don't concern my very favourite part of Harryhausen's body of work, the mythologicals, for I've still not figured out how to write about movies this close to my heart.)

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,ray harryhausen

SyFy vs. the Mynd: Wyvern (2009)

The loveable eccentric inhabitants of a small town in Alaska are at the height of said eccentricity after a full dose of the old midnight sun. Alas, their being kind of crazy doesn't safe them when melting ice frees a wyvern from its monstrous sleep. As you know, global warming is responsible for nearly as many monster attacks as the mad science of the military-industrial complex.

The wyvern is a curious beast. It's not just mindlessly sweeping down from the skies to nibble people's heads off, it does have enough brains to cut off the only road out of town, and even lays simple traps. Might be hillbilly philosopher Hoss (Northern Exposure's Barry Corbin who is also joined by Elaine Miles from the same show) is right, and this wyvern really is a mythological creature rather than just a hungry animal. Be that as it may, the townsfolk - particularly former ice road trucker with an ice road trucking accident based trauma Jake (Nick Chinlund), café owner/waitress Claire (Erin Karpluk), DJ Hampton (Tinsel Korey) and retired military Colonel Travis (Don S. Davis, who, I'm sorry to say, will always be Scully's dad to me) - will have to use all their working class abilities (it's, to get parenthetical here, quite interesting to note how often the heroes of SyFy Channel movies belong to the working class, by the way; even SyFy scientists usually feel curiously working class, at least the sane ones) to defend themselves against the creature.

One thing my half-way insane consumption of SyFy Channel movies in the last few weeks has brought back into perspective for me again is how little a film being formulaic or not has to do with the enjoyment I can get out of it (or not). A good director of films like these - as Wyvern's Steven R. Monroe definitely is - will make even the most formulaic of monster movie rituals interesting or fun, and a good script - as Jason Bourque's script for Wyvern surely is - will include enough that is different from the formula next to the trope check marks. It is a game of small changes and minor twists to be sure, yet these small things are what makes the difference between boredom and fun. Wyvern stays on the fun side of formula throughout, keeping the balance between cheesiness, the expected, and the not quite expected just right. It also helps that its high concept seems to have been "Northern Exposure with a giant monster", and everything gets better when you put a giant monster in (they are a lot like snow in that way).

Actually keeping in the tradition of Northern Exposure, Wyvern manages to turn its cliché characters loveable and charming, making them much more interesting - and sadder monster victims - than the more usual bunch of asshats. Half of that effect is thanks to Bourque's script that knows when to be funny - yes, the film is actually funny when it wants to be - as well as it knows how to sell a silly backstory like Jake's ice road trucking accident (that of course killed his brother) in earnest. The film's cast of experienced TV and low budget character actors are carrying the other half of the effect, generally turning clichés personable and likeable.

By now, I have to say that I also really enjoy that other way SyFy brings variations into their films by having them take place in a variety of US states - generally played by British Columbia, Bulgaria, or Louisiana. The local colour is of course never true "local colour" but a strange backyard version of exoticism that may be annoying when you're finding the place where you live portrayed unrealistically, yet really helps add personality to a movie.

One major surprise for me with Wyvern is its monster, or rather, its monster effects. The CGI in many SyFy movies seems needlessly crappy, probably because so many of them are about swarms of things eating people, which can't be good for detail work on a budget; though some single monsters are pretty bad too. Most of the time, it's a flaw I've learned to tolerate by now. However, Wyvern's CGI is actually pretty darn impressive with few - if any - of the flaws I mention in every second write-up of this series. Like the rest of Wyvern, its monster is realized with a degree of love and care that seems to go beyond the dictates of mere professionalism.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,syfy vs the mynd,horror,giant monsters,steven r. monroe,nick chinlund,erin karpluk,barry corbin,tinsel korey,don s. davis

Icy May ( & SyFy vs. The Mynd): Ice Spiders (2007)

We agents of M.O.S.S. defy your oppressive assumptions about seasons in the northern hemisphere. To prove you (yes you!) wrong, May will be all about ice, snow and everything cold for us. Everything is better in winter, after all. And what is more typical of the cold months of the year than spiders?

Panic in a small ski resort in the mountains of Utah. The neighbouring secret government lab experimenting on helpless spiders with gene grafts from their ancestors has hit a spot of bother, and now half a dozen hungry giant spiders on steroids (not a metaphor) are roaming the mountain looking for food, which is to say, ski resort vacationers.

Still, the spiders shouldn't be much of a problem, for spiders generally can't cope with cold too well, but mad scientist Professor Marks (David Milbern) has doped them up so much, they don't even care about the weather anymore. Since the soldiers stationed to protect the spiders aren't very good at their job (and, you know, not actually stationed where the spiders were but a twenty minutes drive away), it falls on not mad scientist Dr. Sommers (Vanessa Williams), skiing instructor, ex-marine and nearly Olympic ski talent Dash Dashiell (Patrick Muldoon), and ski resort owner Frank Stone (Stephen J. Cannell) to heroically fight off the ice spider menace. Unfortunately, our ski resort is the only place in the USA where no firearms at all can be found, so our heroes will need all their creativity and natural talents (skiing, pulling levers, running) to survive.

There's an old saying among my people that states "everything is better with ice and snow", and Tibor Takács' Ice Spiders clearly displays the truth of it, for the ice-bound nature of our SyFy menace of the week does provide ample opportunity for things like spider shenanigans on a ski lift (pro-tip: don't jump down) and a climactic race between our heroic ski instructor and three skittering, jumping, and tittering CGI spiders. Truly, it is a thing only possible in the Great White of Utah.

All of this is - obviously - supremely silly business, exactly the sort of thing that could descend into the deepest chasm of camp, but through powers won in a long career of films made from the most dubious of scripts (or at least with the most dubious of stories), Takács manages to keep things funny-silly instead of "oh-look-how-ironic-and-subversive-I-am-because-I'm-crap". It's mostly the director's judicious sense of pacing that makes the difference here, I think, as well as the ability to know when a silly joke works, and when making it would annoy.

The actors are no help at all: Muldoon, Williams, and Millbern are all kinds of dreadful and earnest, neither able to convey any believable human emotion, nor fit to deliver their lines; it says something rather rude about them that TV producer Cannell is the best actor in the film. But hey, it's not as if the rest of the cast weren't at least trying, and it just might be exactly the misguided earnestness of their performances which make our heroes somewhat endearing. It sure isn't the characterization. Truthfully, I don't really care (much) about the quality of the acting in a SyFy creature feature as long as I get to regularly see giant spiders munch on people.

This, Ice Spiders provides in spades, and tops it off with letting the munching happen in ice and snow, therefore earning itself my seal of approval.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,in short,syfy vs the mynd,horror,tibor takács,patrick muldoon,vanessa williams,stephen j. cannell

Music Monday: New Lover Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,josh ritter

Ordine Firmato In Bianco (1974)

aka Orders Signed In White

Following orders of his mafia bosses, Luca Albanese (director Gianni Manera) - a man we are traumatically informed carries "balls like watermelons" - and some colleagues rob a safe with a lot of money. Against their orders, one of the gang members shoots a civilian, so word comes down for the team and their girlfriends to lay low somewhere with the money until the eye of the public looks elsewhere.

Alas, some masked, gloved killer strangles one of the girlfriends in the safe house (but don't worry, only after the mandatory random lesbian shenanigans), painting her brow white. Clearly, a new safe house is in order, so the gang goes to the summer country house of one of the girlfriends' uncles in Abruzzo. To nobody's surprise, the killer, slowly, oh so very slowly, kills himself through the cast while babbling nonsense, and nobody else does anything of import.

Now, this short description makes Gianni Manera's Ordine sound like a taught little thriller attempting to find the golden middle ground between eurocrime and giallo, but in truth, the film is an absolute mess made by a director who couldn't tell a story to save his life. Stylistically, the film jumps randomly between cliché giallo shots as reconstructed by a blind man editing with a pair of paper scissors, would-be existential dialogue scenes, and melodramatic gangster shit that doesn't seem to realize you have to earn your melodrama. There's an awkwardness surrounding every single element of the film.

The plot is presented as a series of random vignettes, overlong transition scenes, sudden inexplicably bizarre dream sequences, and clichés half-remembered and badly digested from other movies until they turn into something like a baked-beans induced nightmare, full of non-sequitur dialogue ("Don't you think it's…who knows? Something? Strange?" is rather typical for the film's style), sudden outbreaks of monologizing about one of the gang's dream to make a film, and what can only be described as random pieces of other films. Quite consequently, Ordine also ends on what feels like fifteen minutes ripped out of a totally different film about a minor character, some sort of political sub-Damiani abomination. It's clear that Manera would very much have liked for the film to be read as a political allegory, or some sort of existentialist tract (the assistant director was supposedly called "Albert Camus", for Sartre's sake!) but it probably would have helped his case if he had actually shot one.

Don't get me wrong, though. If you have the patience to wade through the film's needlessly long transitional scenes, don't fall asleep even though its scenes just never seem to want to end, and are able to see Manera's attempts to have not a single coherent conversation in his movie as rather charming, you may find Ordine Firmato In Bianco to be rather hypnotic in its incoherence, interesting in Manera's technical incompetence, and really just way too strange to be ignored. The film does at the very least contain a handful of scenes so awkwardly staged and bizarre it's quite impossible for me not to feel the kind of misguided love one feels for a mutant teddy bear. Just take the endless sequence where the crazy wife (I think) of the caretaker of house number two (whom I didn't mention before because she doesn't actually have a reason to be in the movie) finds her husband knifed by the killer and is then hunted through the house by her half-dead husband. It's stupid, ill-advised and goes on much too long, but it's also the kind of scene you just won't find in a sane movie.

I'm not saying this lightly, but Manera's technical awkwardness, the obvious lack of a budget, the absolute loopiness of his dialogue, and the sheer unfulfilled ambition of Ordine Firmato In Bianco remind me most of saintly Edward Wood (jr.). And really, what greater compliment could I make a movie and a filmmaker than that?

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,wtf,giallo,eurocrime,gianni manera

In short: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

After watching the final film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, I've worked through various pieces of criticism about it, and I have to agree with about fifty percent of it. So yes, I agree this is a perhaps overlong, often overreaching and internally conflicted film. However, I actually think these things aren't bugs here, they are features; indeed they are for me what makes this a great film.

The thing with the film's overreaching, the way it wants to be about three or four films at once (one of them even a superhero version of A Tale of Two Cities) really comes down to what you expect of your multi-multi-million dollar movies: a tight, slick product, or an actual creative endeavour that sometimes won't be able to fulfil everything it tries, but that makes up for the moments - in this case about twenty percent of the time - when it fails with a willingness to go to interesting, sometimes even surprising, places between the spectacle and loud melodrama the blockbuster business affords. In other words, if we as an audience want our mainstream entertainment to take risks, we also have to accept that not everything in it will work out perfectly and slickly, that there will be roughness, but also honest excitement and actual ideas when things work out, which is what happens in about eighty percent of the movie.

The Dark Knight Rises is a film full of conflicting impulses in its narrative, its politics, its emotions, even its concept of heroism; despite being a superhero movie, it's a film lacking moral certainty (especially in the few moments when it pretends to have it). Things here are messy, and clear-cut answers are not to be found; this is about striving and asking questions, and questioning answers which for my tastes fits the character of Batman much better than making him a barrel-chested 70s love god and international adventurer or a grim and gritty psychopath. It's these cracks and the breaks in the film's structure and meaning that truly make the film work for me, its imperfections working as a reflection of the messiness of reality as well as the messiness of dreams.

Despite the remaining prevalence of Michael Baysian crap, it's a pretty exciting time for blockbuster cinema right now, when movies as different and great in their own ways like this or The Avengers can be made and will be watched by millions, movies that have no problems with pushing all the spectacle buttons while still being ambitious and aggressively non-dumb.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,christopher nolan,christian bale,gary oldman,tom hardy,joseph gordon-levitt,anne hathaway,marion cotillard,michael caine,superheroes,sf

In short: Hit Man (1972)

Tyrone Tackett (Bernie Casey) returns to his native Los Angeles from Oakland, where he works for a shady porn tycoon, to attend the funeral of his brother. Tyrone's brother supposedly drove to death in his car while drunk (though there are also hints of suicide), but Tyrone quickly figures something was wrong with the death. It's not very difficult to think so, really, what with a couple of gangsters working for Tyrone's former boss, porn tycoon and racist Nano Zito (Don Diamond), following him just as soon as he arrives in town, pressing him to leave again right after the funeral, his brother's girlfriend having nothing to say to him at all, and his niece Rochelle (Candy All) just acting off.

Threats of any kind don't work on Tyrone, so he starts to ask questions, annoy powerful people, and give as much violence back as he receives until he'll find out how and why his brother truly died. He also finds time to sleep with any woman (including Pam Grier when she was Pamela Grier) he encounters. One would not want to be in the shoes of anyone he finds responsible for the death.

George Armitage's Hit Man is based on Ted Lewis's Jack Returns Home, the same novel Mike Hodges's classic British crime movie Get Carter adapts. For me, this resulted in a rather confusing viewing experience where nearly identical scenes play out just slightly different, yet the film as a whole feels utterly different from Get Carter. It's a bit like meeting someone who nearly looks like a dear old friend, but isn't; still, you can't help yourself and compare, and really become confused when your mysterious stranger suddenly goes off in a totally different direction.

For large parts of its running time, Hit Man feels much looser and more leisurely than the British movie, with Tackett sharing Carter's propensity for violence but seeming much more relaxed and at one with himself, even when he's dodging bullets and paying people back for racist insults. Casey's performance is rather laid back, and while he is no young Michael Caine, he does give Tackett more depth than the first look at his pimp-tastic clothes leads one to expect. The whole "unstoppable sex god" thing does get tiresome, though.

Tonally, Armitage's film feels less dark, even though both movies do share a plot. Armitage clearly loves slightly off-beat humour where Hodges just looks at the world with grim distance. I wouldn't exactly call Hit Man friendlier (it does after all end with Casey basically killing everyone) but it does at least crack a smile from time to time. Armitage's movie also changes the final fate of its protagonist, which to me felt like the result of a lack of courage.

I'd rather prefer to be able to talk about Hit Man without permanently comparing it to Get Carter but both films are just too close to each other to; and in direct comparison Hit Man is just the lesser movie, even though it certainly is a good one.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,crime,george armitage,barney casey,pam grier

Icy May (& SyFy vs. The Mynd): Ice Road Terror (2011)

We agents of M.O.S.S. defy your oppressive assumptions about seasons in the northern hemisphere. To prove you (yes you!) wrong, May will be all about ice, snow and everything cold for us. Everything is better in winter, after all. What better way for me to begin this exciting venture than by taking a look at those Alaskan heroes, ice road truckers?

Little do Alaskan ice road truckers and best buddies Jack (Ty Olsson) and Neil (Dylan Neal) expect their final haul of the season before the ice road is melting to be quite as dangerous. Sure, having one of two trucks full of explosives, and environmental scientist Rachel (Brea Grant) as part of their load while the road they're driving on is already turning to slush sure sounds interesting and dangerous enough, but it's also - except for the scientist - all in a normal day's work for the two guys.

However, things that happen at the site our heroes are driving to are a bit out of the ordinary. I do at least assume it's not an every day occurrence up in the icy north for illegal blasting operations to free a living and very hungry specimen of a giant lizard from Inuit legend that may or may not belong to the dinosaur species called "Predator X" (environmental scientists know just about everything). The lizard proceeds to eat everyone it finds (apart from two characters needed for exposition to our heroes, obviously) Soon enough, our protagonist trio find themselves in a race against the ill-mannered CGI beast, the weather, and everything else the script can come up with.

It's not difficult to imagine the thought processes that led SyFy Channel executives to this one. Everyone, they must have thought, loves ice road truckers (a phenomenon I only ever realized is a phenomenon thanks to the movie) and everyone likes Wages of Fear, so filming a variation of the movie taking place in Alaska (or "British Columbia", as we call it) and adding an evil giant lizard to it really must have been a no-brainer. And honestly, they weren't wrong about this one.

As TV veteran (a guy with particularly many films with the word "Christmas" in their title, so at the very least an expert in filming the best white thing I know, snow) director Terry Ingram films it, Ice Road Terror is a perfectly great little movie based on a perfect low budget movie idea. Ingram doesn't linger on the weaknesses - see all my reviews of all SyFy movies ever - of his CGI monster too much, and stages a few surprisingly dynamic monster attack and truck stunt scenes that are really rather on the exciting - if physically dubious - side.

After about half of the movie is through, Ice Road Terror turns into a more typical "characters hole up in a hut and try to keep the monster out" film, which may sound a bit disappointing but is actually a good decision. There is, after all, only so much cheap action you can stage with two trucks, ice, snow, and a giant CGI lizard before things start to get boring and repetitive. The change of pace also gives the movie space to include Michael "Colonel Tigh" Hogan and Merrilyn Gann in rather delightful performances as owners of the only truck stop in in ice road county, which helps with characterization as well as providing opportunity for a smidgen of gore.

When Ice Road Terror doesn't spend its time on the lizard action - and this is a movie going out of its way to include as much as possible of said lizard action - it does the expected clichéd character work in a perfectly likeable manner, assisted by a cast full of perfectly likeable actors being, well, perfectly likeable.

Surely, that's more than anyone can expect from a movie that marries Wages of Fear, the working class romanticism of idealized trucker-dom, and a frigging giant lizard.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,in short,horror,giant monsters,brea grant,ty olsson,dylan neal,michael hogan,terry ingram

In short: The Bay (2012)

A small US town is hit by an outbreak of something particularly nasty thanks to a mixture of radioactivity, polluted chicken shit, and the traditions of the eco horror movie. Things get rather horrible for the place. We are - of course - witnessing events via a documentary made out of footage shot by various people all around town.

Isn't it rather strange that it needs Barry Levinson, the director of fucking Rain Man to make creative use of the POV horror style rather than his more horror based colleagues, breathing life into a sub-genre that has grown pretty stale through everybody's insistence to attempt to remake Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity again and again and again? And if I, as someone still somewhat beholden to POV horror, am getting impatient with the genre, I can't even imagine what sane people will think about it.
Levinson's approach differs in two major aspects from POV standards.

Firstly, where most POV horror uses the found footage approach to limit its perspective very closely to a handful of characters in one place, Levinson takes different kinds of footage to create a larger view of a community hit by a catastrophe, still leaving room for individual horrors but showing the individual suffering as part of a bigger whole. That approach feels particularly fresh because films about (minor) apocalypses seldom use it; if you think about it, it's really rather close to the 70s disaster movie formula, just without the interest in washed-up stars and Charlton Heston speaking into things, and carrying a much nastier undertone. And make no mistake about it, The Bay's catastrophe isn't just a particularly icky one, this is also a film perfectly willing and able to kill off the kinds of characters all of Levinson's Hollywood instincts should actually make sacrosanct. The whole thing really gets surprisingly unpleasant, as if the director had discovered his inner exploitation filmmaker and indulged him as much as possible.

Secondly, The Bay's danger isn't a supernatural one, but belongs into the hoary and wonderful tradition of eco horror, a sub-genre I'd call rather more science-fictional if the science in it ever were much good. This leaves Levinson open to actually explain what's going on in the film without having to betray the gruesomeness of it all. It's not that I don't love ambiguity, it is, however, from time to time nice to encounter a film that just wants to shout its background story into your face while nasty things eat away at its tongue.

Subtle, The Bay consequently isn't: the characters - though decently acted by people like Kristen Connolly and Kether Donohue - are drawn in the broadest of strokes, the conspiracy theorist elements are a bit talk radio (though they don't include the Illuminati nor reptoids, so it's not that bad), and the narrative has the bluntness of an object the film wants to cave your head in with, but there's something to be said for a lack of subtlety when the resulting film feels as unpleasant and tight as The Bay does. I think I've just forgiven Barry Levinson for Rain Man (though not for the reactionary bullshit of Sphere).

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,sf,barry levinson,kristen connolly,kether donohue

Music Monday: Pye Corner Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,pye corner audio

Das Indische Tuch (1963)

aka The Indian Scarf

After Lord Lebanon dies of a heart attack that looks a lot like him being strangled with a scarf, a rather large group of disparate family members is called together for the reading of his will by lawyer Frank Tanner (Heinz Drache). Lebanon's wife, Lady Emily (Elisabeth Flickenschildt) and her obsessive pianist son Edward (Hans Clarin) aren't too happy to share their inheritance with people like the Lord's bastard son Peter Ross (Klaus Kinski), the pretty young Isla (Corny Collins), explorer Sir Henry (Siegfried Schürenberg for once not working for the Yard), or Mrs Tilling (Gisela Uhlen) who is - gasp! - married, unhappily so, to an American (Hans Nielsen).

However, before Tanner is actually allowed to read the will and anyone is coming into one's fortune, the whole family has to spend six days and six nights in the family manor in Scotland together. Soon, it looks like one among the gathered - perhaps with the help of butler Bonwit (Eddi Arent, of course) or handyman Chiko (Ady Berber)? - would really rather prefer a larger share of the inheritance and begins to strangle a family member per night with one among the numerous Indian scarfs in the house.

Thanks to a fortuitously arrived storm front, the mansion is cut off from the outside world, so it falls to Tanner to play amateur detective and find out who is killing off people left and right before nobody is left to read a will to.

Das Indische Tuch is far from your typical Rialto Edgar Wallace adaptation (except for the number of murders, of course), for it rather prefers to be your typical old dark house movie, despite a deplorable lack of men in gorilla suits. It's a nice change-up for the series, and, given the small number of necessary sets, was probably also a nice way for Rialto to save a little cash. Why, even the mandatory outside shot of the old dark house is replaced with a highly theatrical slide in an act of conscious artificiality.

That sort of artificiality is of course something director Alfred Vohrer excelled at, and he consequently uses Das Indische Tuch to wallow in everything anti-naturalistic he loves so well - dramatic zooms, cameras positioned at curious places and angles, lots of shots of people peeping at other people through various holes, steaming phallus-shaped objects, and moments of what Germany in the early 60s imagined to be risqué filmmaking that look all the more awkward because they're positioned among so many sexual symbols.

Vohrer, ably assisted by production designers Walter Kutz and Wilhelm Vorwerg, also loves to include never explained, utterly weird details in the sets, like the gigantic Beethoven bust (who knew Beethoven's head was that of a three meter giant?) standing behind Hans Clarin's piano, and the stuffed horse taking up a third of the music room. The Vohrer-typical moments of high melodrama are more often than not pulled in rather ironic directions by these curious elements of the film - creepy and loud mother/son relationships take on a rather funny dimension when played out in front of a stuffed horse.

The film also finds time to update the rule of Chekhov's Gun to that of Vohrer's Tarantula, gives Kinski and Clarin time to show off their respective skills at making crazy-eyes, teaches us that all artists as well as all members of noble families who aren't young women for the leading man to romance are crazy, includes an often absurdly chipper Peter Thomas score, and ends on one of those silly, self-conscious notes Vohrer loved so dearly.

Needless to say, Das Indische Tuch feels often even more like a black comedy than your usual Vohrer krimi, but since I found myself laughing about its jokes and strange digressions more often than not, I don't think that's a bad thing. After all, how could one make an old dark house movie in 1963 while keeping a straight face?

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,comedy,alfred vohrer,heinz drache,klaus kinski,corny collins,eddi arent,siegfried schürenberg,hans clarin,elisabeth flickenschildt

Three Films Make A Post: Horror so incredible it stretches the mind of man beyond the breaking point!

Armored Car Robbery (1950): Working for RKO's b-unit, Richard Fleischer learned early on some of the virtues that would make him one of the better work-for-hire directors in years to come: an ability to tell a story in the most economical manner while still giving it room to breathe. Case in point is this hard-boiled movie about the hunt for a quartet of armoured car robbers, a film that uses its 67 minutes of runtime to the fullest, trusting in the abilities of a fine cast (particularly Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens and William Talman), and its audience's knowledge of the basics of the genre its working in. I'm tempted to say there's not quite enough depth to Armored Car Robbery but then, like its title, this is a movie that is all about a slick, polished surface that already says all there is to say.

The Crimes Of The Black Cat aka Sette Scialli Di Seta Gialla (1972): For most of its running time, Sergio Pastore's giallo comes down on the side of the giallo as a murder mystery, using a lot of favourite giallo bits and bobs (the amateur detective, fashion models as the main victim group, the black-gloved killer) in an entertaining, yet also somewhat conservative and certainly not lurid manner. Which is a curious thing to say about a movie about a blind composer (played by old wooden face Anthony Steffen with a quiet intensity of obsession I'm not surprised anymore now that I've seen him in enough movies where he actually acts) hunting a killer who uses a black cat as his murder weapon, but there you have it.

The film only becomes truly lurid and crazy with its last murder and final plot twist; fortunately, as the very solid and stylish suspense scene surrounding that final twist and luridness demonstrate, Pastore is well equipped to make a perfectly fun film even without the lurid and the crazy whose absence so often breaks a giallo.

Eyeball (1975): This one is generally treated as one of Umberto Lenzi's best giallos but I can't say I see it. Sure, there's a killer in a stylish red raincoat haunting Barcelona stealing eyeballs, but the red raincoat is as stylish as anything here gets, and the eyeball-stealing less lurid than is sounds. Meanwhile the plot slowly plods along, the mystery bores a bit, and the murders just aren't all that interesting. It's an okay film to watch if you don't have anything exciting at hand, but that's as far as it goes for me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,in short,crime,giallo,richard fleischer,charles mcgraw,adele jergens,william talman,sergio pastore,anthony steffen,umberto lenzi

On Exploder Button: SyFy vs. The Mynd: Carny (2009)

People will call me mad when I tell them that this Lou Diamond Phillips starring SyFy movie by the director of Kaw is one of the best pieces of US small town horror I know, but then, we can keep this our little secret, right?

To share in it, just hop on over to Exploder Button and KNOW.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,horror,syfy vs the mynd,sheldon wilson,lou diamond phillips,alan c. peterson,vlasta vrana,simone-élise girard

In short: Kuutamosonaatti (1988)

Because she was mildly naughty, her agency ships model Anni (Tiina Björkman) off for a few days away from the limelight. Anni ends up in a hut somewhere far out in the Finnish countryside, with her teenage brother Johannes (Kim Gunell) supposedly bound to follow the next day.

Of course, we all know about the pleasures of country life from many a horror movie, so it'll come as no surprise when Anni's closest neighbours turn out to be rather peculiar. The Kyyröläs consist of a religiously crazy Mum (Soli Labbart), her panty-stealing giggling crazy son Arvo (Kari Sorvali) and Sulo (Mikko Kivinen), the son so crazy the family locks him up in the root cellar so he doesn't roam the snowy woods at night, howling like a wolf.

Needless to say, pretty Anni soon awakens the interest of Arvo, whose particular type of country hospitality becomes increasingly threatening. Cue "Dueling Banjos".

As is obvious by now, Olli Soinio's Finnish backwoods horror film Kuutamosonaatti (which translates into "Moonlight Sonata") sets out to prove that the language of evil, unwashed country people hunting much prettier city folk is very much an international one. And what could be better than to use the rural landscape of your (sometimes metaphorical) backyard if you're making a low budget movie?

As far as the violence goes, the film at hand is on the more harmless side of its genre. There aren't all that many characters to kill off gorily, and the film prefers a mixture of dry, off-beat humour which my very basic knowledge of Finnish film and music interprets as typical of the country, and classic tricks of suspense and thriller filmmaking as brought down to us by Hitchcock (who even has a kind of guest appearance).

While that may disappoint the gore hounds among its audience, Kuutamosonaatti's suspense scenes were effective enough to keep me interested. Sure, there's a degree of silliness to the set-up of various scenes you need to ignore to enjoy the film on a straightforward level, but if you do, there's a pretty tight low budget movie to enjoy.

Additionally, if you've seen as many backwoods horror movies as I have, you learn to enjoy the slight differences in local colour, and Kuutamosonaatti's well photographed snowy North of Finland provides a marked and pleasant difference in a genre generally taking place in the woods somewhere in Backwoodlandia, USA. There are also too few tractor chase scenes in the genre outside of Finland.

Technorati-Markierungen: finnish movies,in short,horror,olli soinio,tiina björkman,kim gunell,kari sorvali

In short: Assassination (1967)

Spy Jonathan Chandler (Henry Silva) is saved from the electric chair - to which he was condemned for a crime he may or may not have actually committed - by his spy masters, so he can take on the role of his non-existent brother Philip and attempt to infiltrate some sort of dangerous group that will much later turn out to plan the assassination of a US senator to disrupt peace talks between the USA and the USSR. Plagued by an identity crisis, an unresolved obsession with his wife (Evelyn Stewart), and a thirst for vengeance towards someone or something, Chandler stumbles from New York to Hamburg, confused, attacked and threatened by his own side, as well as the side he's supposed to infiltrate.

This debut feature of director Emilio Miraglia (whom you should know from two fine, and sometimes equally ambiguous giallos - The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave) is a Eurospy movie only if you call every movie about spies made in Europe one, but it's tonally too different from other films of the genre to fit the label for my taste. Rather, it's a film working at inducing a feeling of alienation in its viewers equal to the confusion and alienation of its protagonist. It does this via a spy movie assassination plot that isn't really explained, character whose motives are not just being slightly ambiguous but opaque to utterly confusing, and a conscious avoidance of explaining anything that's going on for most of its running time. It's a bit as if Kafka instead of Ian Fleming had written the James Bond books, and Italian filmmakers were now desperately trying to rip off the adventures of James K. instead.

Watching Assassination is a peculiar experience which is as close as suffering from actual hallucinations instead of just watching a movie as some of the weirdest noirs were, the film always threatening to break down on itself completely. The movie is just held together by Miraglia's very stylish direction, a particularly intense Henry Silva going through the film as if it were a series of hallucinations he'd just love to punch in the face, and Evelyn Stewart making patented Evelyn Stewart tragic suffering faces. Though "held together" really is a rather relative description for a film as purposefully confusing and frayed as this one is.

In any case, Assassination is a pretty fantastic movie if you're willing to share in its perspective on life as a tragic, perhaps frightening and quite unanswerable question for an hour and a half of your time.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,emilio miraglia,henry silva,evelyn stewart,fred beir,spies

On Dario Argento's Dracula 3D (2012)

I'm pretty sure Argento's version of Dracula will automatically get the critical drubbing all his late period films get, be they great like Mother of Tears, abominations like Giallo and The Card Player, or fine workman-like efforts like his Masters of Horror episodes. Argento shares the fate of his co-sufferers in directing horror films like George Romero and John Carpenter of having turned their once rabid fanbases against themselves by continuing to change their styles. And we all know by now that "fans" only stay "fans" as long as you give them exactly what they expect, lest they turn into a highly enthusiastic lynch mob that wouldn't even realize if you made the best movie of your career. Thusly, the Internet has turned my private definition of "fan" into "person who hates something so much (s)he won't stop shouting about how horrible it is", but I digress.

Not that Dracula (3D) is the best movie of Argento's career. It is, in fact, a rather curious artefact that attempts - and perhaps half of the time succeeds - to build a luridly dream-like mood out of a mixture of operatic theatricality, cheapness, misguided uses of modern technology, an improbably bad soundtrack, and plain weirdness. When this works, Dracula becomes rather magical, like a pulpy version of that weird vampire sex dream (vampirism is all about sex and domination for Argento here) you once had after reading Bram Stoker and drinking too much red wine. When it fails, Dracula turns into a horrible mess half bad soap opera, half gore flick made by a teenager.

The most curious thing about it is how easily the film slips from one extreme to the next, with nearly awe-inspiring moments of Gothic horror turning into poor cheese and back again at the drop of a hat. Really everything in Dracula is changing from one moment to the next in this way - the acting (with generally lovely actors like Asia Argento, Thomas "Dracula" Kretschmann and Rutger Hauer as the least interesting Van Helsing imaginable) is convincing in one sentence, stiff in the next, and melodramatically overdone in the next, the special effects permanently meander between decent practical effects, utterly horrid CG most SyFy channel movies were ashamed of, and beautiful and imaginative CG, while the script wanders between homages to every other Dracula adaptation in existence, clever changes to the original (for example, not taking the plot to England doesn't just put away the xenophobic subtext, and is good for the budget but also makes the film dramatically tighter, or rather would make it tighter if this were a film interested in it; and I love what the film in the end does with the old, terrible "Mina is the reincarnation of Dracula's wife" bit), random weird shit I can't help but approve of (I'll just say "mantis"), and stuff that is of little use however you look at it.

Locations and sets are at times beautiful and atmospheric, and at other times so ill lit they have the fake, plastic-y look of a doll house. In this Dracula, the sublime and the ridiculous don't just go hand in hand, they change from one into the other like a hyperactive werewolf. I'm actually pretty sure Argento does this all on purpose (for he can hardly not see it), but what his purpose is - apart from making it much easier for people to hate on the film without having to think about it - I surely don't know.

What I do know is that, even though Argento's Dracula surely isn't his best film, or even a good one, it is a film containing as much personality, strangeness and idiosyncrasy as I could have wished for. It's certainly not the film I would have wanted Argento to make, but then I'm convinced that if you're expecting any artist, in whatever part of his or her career, to do the exact sort of thing you want from her or him, you're doing art appreciation wrong.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,thoughts,dario argento,horror,asia argento,rutger hauer,thomas kretschmann

Music Monday: Dilemna Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,edwyn collins

The Master Touch (1972)

Original title: Un Uomo Da Rispettare

aka A Man To Respect

High-tech (by standards of the early 70s) thief Steve Wallace (Kirk Douglas) has barely been released from a Hamburg prison when Miller (Wolfgang Preiss), an old associate - but surely no friend - of his, tries his hardest to convince him to just another heist. Miller entices Steve with the sheer impossibility of breaking into a vault so high-tech, it's controlled by one of those "computer" thingies.

Miller's technique, and a bit of a looksee, do indeed convince Steve that the vault is just the job for him, but he doesn't want anything to do with Miller, who, after all, would want half the take and tends to have faces smashed in by his enforcer (Romano Puppo) where Steve prefers a non-violent approach to his job. Still, Steve will need a partner for the plan he has developed. Consequently, the aging thief finds himself one in form of trapeze artist Marco (Giuliano Gemma). Marco doesn't know anything about safecracking, but is willing to learn.

Problems do of course arise. Steve's wife Anna (Florinda Bolkan) wants her husband to end his life as a criminal; it's not so much out of moral abhorrence (Steve is, after all, a non-violent criminal robbing banks and other institutions of that type) but because his jail time has been very hard on her, and she can't imagine going through another year or two without him. That's particularly bad because Steve's plan to rob the vault and keep Miller off his back absolutely includes further jail time. And as if that weren't enough, heists do have the tendency to go wrong.

In the fourth decade of his career, at a point where most other actors of his generation were either starting to rest on their laurels or take an early semi-retirement on TV, Kirk Douglas went weird, taking on roles in peculiar comedies, Italian end times movies, and Michele Lupo's The Master Touch.

The Master Touch isn't a particularly weird film in itself but it is also a far cry from the movies the actor could have starred in at this point in his career that'd see him just point his face in the direction of the camera and go through the motions. At its core, this is a very typical heist movie, containing everything you'd expect from such a film yet giving everything just enough of a little twist to make it a very good heist movie, even for a viewer more than used to what the genre has to offer; see, for example, the film's rejection of the femme fatale concept.

However, Lupo's movie also contains elements rather less typical of its genre, like an absolutely insane car chase between Gemma and Puppo through the streets of Hamburg that looks and feels incredibly dangerous, seeing as it ends with both cars involved nearly totally destroyed. Hamburg itself looks at its least appealing here, as it mainly seems to consist of the dirtiest part of its harbour, grey and brown streets, and grey industrial buildings sitting under the typically grey skies of Northern Germany. If the rules of the heist movie (quite in opposition to the caper movie) wouldn't nearly guarantee it already, Hamburg's rather noirish appearance does suggest things won't end well for anyone involved.

In contrast to Hamburg's ugly side, much of the film's interior action tends towards the modernist and semi-futuristic, with a vault and safe-cracking tools that involve all the polished silver, blinking lights, and emptiness the Future of 1972 had to offer. It's a curiously nostalgic feeling watching computers large as a room, a few video cameras and what amounts to a microphone-based alarm system treated as awe-inspiring technological advances only a genius thief could conquer, but the film treats this aspect with such reverence and care, it does never become ridiculous from my jaded perspective on technology. It helps that Steve's plan actually makes sense with the technology given. The use of music to distract the computer system also has a finely poetic touch, and just feels right even if it may be slightly absurd in practice. Of course, once you witness Douglas wearing a rather wonderful suit (I say this with the full conviction of a man who neither wears suits nor likes suits as a concept) oozing tension and charisma while going through the absurd and not so absurd elements of his heist, there's no room for doubting you're witnessing something very serious and exciting.

Clarity is a particularly important part of every good heist sequence, because the audience usually needs to have a clear picture of what's going on in several places at once. The Master Touch's heist sequence shows Lupo as a director very much in control of the pacing of his heist sequence. Lupo clearly knew the importance of every edit here, resulting in a sequence with a highly impressive flow that alone would be enough to recommend the film.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,crime,michele lupo,kirk douglas,florinda bolkan,giuliano gemma

SyFy vs. the Mind: Heebie Jeebies (2013)

Because gold-loving local "businessman" Billy Butler (Michael Badalucco, going from annoying odious comic relief to delightful scenery-chewing) can't leave his family's old goldmine alone, a horrifying monster begins munching on the local townsfolk. The thing eats and bleeds gold, exudes a fear-inducing gas and looks like several corpses moulded together to form a large maw on legs, which, as we will learn later on, is pretty much exactly what it is.

The only people standing between the town and a hungry monster are deputy sheriff Todd Crane (Robert Belushi, second runner up for the title of "blandest hero in a movie I watched this week"), his secret love interest Doctor Theresa Lim (Cathy Shim), and the grumpy yet incompetent sheriff (Carl Savering). The latter's answer to a mass murder by monster in his town isn't to call in real police but to assemble a hunting party of local monster meat. As if that weren't bad enough, Todd for his part suffers from debilitating panic attacks that make him totally unfit for police work and rather problematic for heroism, and Theresa is hobbled by the fact that the script treats her as the only sane person in town but doesn't actually let her do anything. But hey, at least she has an expository Grandmother (Lucille Soong), and a younger sister (Olivia Ku) perfectly positioned to help Todd's sister (Evie Thompson) out at not being the only teenage girl threatened by a monster.

Heebie Jeebies is among that number of SyFy Originals (I still want to set the word "original" in quotation marks sometimes) that do their job as inoffensive, silly monster movies with pride and conviction. If you won't to see the movie equivalent of decent fast food, this will fill you and make you happy for ninety minutes.

Despite its basic silliness, and its hugely predictable structure Heebie Jeebies (directed by a certain Thomas L. Callaway who mostly seems to work as a cinematographer, and written by writer/actor/director/everything Trent Haaga) does from time to time put a little effort into giving its clichés some slight twists, proving it wasn't written by a robot. I do appreciate a film that has a very peculiar monster with just as peculiar habits which actually make sense in the context of its creation; I also can't help but root for a film doing right by its expository Grandmother, using her with a casual sense of irony while making fun of the "inscrutable oriental" thing. It's also nice to find a film like this that just has a somewhat multi-racial cast as a matter of course (though it still has rather problematic black characters, if you're thinking "representation of diversity rather" than "useful characters for a monster movie narrative").

And, you know, this is a movie featuring a CGI and rubber gloves monster made out of murdered (by the evil capitalist's evil capitalist ancestors, obviously) Asian miners, eating and bleeding gold and exuding fear gas, which in practice isn't quite as awesome and subversive as it sounds on paper, but really provides Heebie Jeebies with the bit of strangeness and individuality it needs to entertain jaded old fools like me.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,horror,thomas l. callaway,robert belushi,cathy shim,michael badalucco,lucille soong

On Exploder Button: Masks (2011)

As I might have mentioned here once or twice, I'm generally not a fan of contemporary German horror movies at all, which has a lot to do with the fact that pure gore movies just bore me, and pure gore movies seem to be what German indie horror directors want to make.

From time to time, I do encounter a German genre film I actually like, and Masks certainly is one of those. How, why, and wherefore I'm explaining in my column on Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,other places,horror,andreas marschall,giallo,susen ermich,julita witt

In short: The Summoned (1992)

aka The Demon Lover

Jenny Harris (Ashlie Rhey) has a rather difficult time with the men in her life: her husband is an abusive jerk who cheats on her, and her boss is a rude ass. Her new neighbour Rebecca (Gwen Somers) proposes that finding herself a fantasy lover is the way to solve her problems. A little séance later, and Jenny does in fact have her very own dream lover (Sean Morrow). Despite him being a beer-bellied guy with a creepy face, he seems rather irresistible and at first improves Jenny's mood quite a bit.

What our heroine doesn't suspect is that her dream lover is in fact an incubus, and while his tendency to magically rough up her husband a little when he's particularly nasty to her is rather great, he also just loves to go out and murder any women Jenny has negative thoughts towards, be it her husband's lover, or her best friend. It's all enough for a girl to romantically re-orient herself towards the cop husband of the murdered girlfriend of one's husband.

Mike Tristano's The Summoned is just the kind of low grade would-be softcore porn horror crap a doctor would prescribe against insomnia. It's got all the hallmarks of a movie primarily made to show its presumed horny audience a few breasts and a bit of dry-humping, with the plot and the horror parts only there to give the film a slight appearance of being more complex than a Playboy photo spread.

Even with a film made in the pre-Internet era, there's the question who it was made for. I'd rather imagine an audience looking for porn would, you know, rather prefer to watch an actual porn movie. Yet even if you were looking for softcore porn, you'd probably rather watch a film that puts a slight bit of imagination into its sex scenes, which The Summoned clearly doesn't.

If you're lucky, this kind of shot-on-video concoction can still provide some joy by way of weirdness, personality or just plain wrongness. Unfortunately, this isn't The Summoned's forte either. Sure, the plot is dumb, the narrative structure slow and boring, the acting amateurish and full of dubious line deliveries and awkward pauses, the special effects crap, the cameos by Robert Z'Dar and Michelle Bauer short and useless, but nothing here has any actual personality. It's just bad in a bored and boring, characterless way that entices fingers towards the fast-forward button and lulls minds to sleep. You might as well just watch a reality TV show.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,exploitation,ashlie rhey