Wednesday, December 16, 2020

And that’s a wrap

for this year for the blog. Normal service will resume on Thursday, the 7th January.

Until then, I wish my readers real and imaginary as good a festive season (whatever festival you prefer, of course) as they can get under the current circumstances and a happy and healthy beginning to a hopefully slightly less exciting year.

Otherwise, joining a Cthulhu cult might turn out to be an alternative.

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

In short: Danur (2017)

aka Danur: I Can See Ghosts

When she was a child, Risa (Asha Kenyeri) lived with her usually absent parents in the country mansion of her grandmother. Her loneliness was disrupted by a trio of children she took some time to identify as ghosts, and apart from their encouraging her to suicide as the cure for loneliness, it really wouldn’t have needed the intervention of a priest (?) severing their bonds.

A decade or so later, the family returns to grandmother’s mansion. The parents are still usually absent, so it falls to Risa (now played by Prilly Latuconsina) to take care of her little sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle Skornicki) as well as grandmother (Inggrid Widjanarko), who must have suffered one or more strokes and is bedridden, can’t speak, and looks generally frightened and unhappy. Any time now, there’s supposed to be a nurse coming in to help Risa out with her familial duties.

One night, a creepy woman calling herself Asih (Shareefa Daanish) appears, assuring that she is indeed the nurse and not the spirit of a woman dwelling in a banyan tree with a terrible fixation on little girls out to get Riri. Ominous things ensue.

Eventually, Risa will need to reawaken her connection to her old dead kid buddies if she wants to save her family.

If I believe the Wikipedia, Awi Suryadi’s Danur was and is the highest grossing film in the new-ish Indonesian horror boom. At least it was successful enough to spawn two sequels I’m hopefully going to get around to writing up one of these days. The film at hand is stylistically a lot softer than the May the Devil Take Yous and Queens of Black Magic of this world, standing in a continuing sub-genre of films about young women (sometimes cursed with) the ability to see and communicate with the spirit world. Often, like here, the main character has to take on a protective role not only towards innocents threatened by the supernatural but also towards a younger sibling whose own mediumistic powers are just awakening.

While still having proper hauntings that are an actual physical and spiritual threat, these films feature little gore and tend to be friendlier, sometimes more openly religious than their somewhat ruder siblings.

Danur is a good example for most of these elements. Asih – a lovely creepy turn by Daanish who does make an immense impression through strange body language and staring – may very well drag your sister to the spirit world (a place looking exactly like your house but drenched in Bava colours and a bit of dry ice fog) to drown her, but she’s not going to induce anyone to cut their face off. That’s not to say the film isn’t putting the work in to creep you out: there are some excellent scenes between Asih and the grandmother, playing on the old woman’s horrible helplessness; some clever plays with the invisibility of spirits to most people (unless they look through their own legs, apparently) and a generally carefully built mood of pleasant creepiness.

Apparently, in Indonesia, unlike other parts of the world, a horror film does not need to be a jump scare fest to be a mainstream commercial success in the cinemas.

Sunday, December 13, 2020

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Retired British officer Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) is visiting one of those curious fictional Balkan countries that pop up so often in Hollywood, the pulps, and comics for a fishing trip. As a matter of fact, the country in Anthony Hope’s novel this is based on, called Ruritania there and not named in the film, is often seen as the earliest example of the made up Eastern-ish European country in popular culture.

In any case, a peaceful fishing trip it’s not going to be for the man, for he just happens to look exactly like the very soon to be crowned king of the country, also called Rudolf, and Rudolf the king is in a spot of bother no true Englishman of Rudolf the Brit’s type is going to let him hang in. Being a notorious carouser and alcoholic gadfly, the king isn’t well loved by his subjects, leaving the door wide open for his perpetually coldly angry and pretty evil brother “Black” Michael (Raymond Massey). Really, simply drugging Rudolf on the night before his coronation should do the trick, providing Michael with an opening to declare himself regent, marry Rudolf’s betrothed Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), and probably rename the country into Latveria.

As it happens, said drugging is taking place right when Rudolf the Brit is present, palling around with the king after a chance encounter. Because nobody would believe the truth, the king’s oldest and most-suffering retainer, Colonel Zapt (C. Aubrey Smith) comes up with a plan: why not let his king’s virtual twin go through the coronation to thwart Michael’s plans, without anyone knowing any better?

This is of course only the beginning of a series of intrigues, romantic interludes and curious adventures for our Rudolf.

The Prisoner of Zenda is, in its nature and type, a kissing cousin – or really rather a making out heavily in the backyard cousin – of the swashbuckler, really only missing that particular genre descriptor in my eyes because its moments of physical derring-do are nearly completely relegated to the final act. It’s a very fine final act, though.

And really, this is me doing genre nit-picking and not me complaining about the actual film, for the adventure and romance movie we get here is indeed one of the great achievements of classic Hollywood. Not only because it puts quite a few of the British actors working in Hollywood at the time into one movie – for what is more continental European than guys from Oxbridge to American eyes, apart from lederhosen – but because it really does wonders with them.

This is one of those films that don’t just feature a perfectly cast hero in Ronald Colman, who does the wit, the romance and the physical demands of the role more than just justice. Nearly everyone else on screen is more than just fit to type, enhancing the traditionally flat characters in a film like this through mild ironies, charisma, and a hand for the telling details of body language and intonation. Even Raymond Massey’s Michael is only not considered one of the great screen villains because he’s overshadowed by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.’s Rudolf von Hentzau, the most fun to watch bastard imaginable, whom I left out of the plot synopsis as well the roles played by Mary Astor and David Niven because synopsising the film’s finely wrought net of dramatic interpersonal relations and improbable intrigue would have to go into novel, or at least movie, length.

Apparently, this was a bit of a difficult production, director John Cromwell having some kind of beef or the other with about half of the main cast – which sounds ridiculous going by what we see of them on screen – so that some scenes may or may not have been shot by someone else. George Cukor was supposedly shooting whatever, as well as, and more probably to my eyes, W.S. Van Dyke doing work on the fencing scene in the climax. Whoever told DP James Wong Howe in any given scene what to do (or was wise enough to let him get on with his business) did a bang-up job in any case, creating one of the best fairy-tale Europes of the American subconscious, built out of sumptuous, beautiful and exotic scenes gliding into another elegantly, everything culminating in a finale that visually seems to take place in the direct neighbourhood of Universal’s backlot Europe of shadows and expressionist castles.

It’s as perfect as anything you’ll see.

Saturday, December 12, 2020

Three Films Make A Post: He's good at taking friends

Come Play (2020): If you are one of those peculiar people who think The Babadook isn’t great, you might like Jacob Chase’s risible rip-off instead. After all, it does replace careful writing and thoughtful characterisation with jump scares and regurgitated tropes, grinds down the personality of the original in favour of bland slickness and basically sands down everything that’s good about the film it is ripping off into nothing, while not even acknowledging the debt officially. It’s everything that doesn’t work about contemporary mainstream horror squashed into a single film, without anything about this part of the movie universe that’s actually worthwhile and good (and there’s a lot of that to go) making an appearance.

In a way, the film’s total, nearly aggressive, blandness is some kind of achievement, I’m sure, but not one anyone should be proud of.

Boss Level (2020): By all rights, a film by Joe Carnahan about Frank Grillo as a man of violence with the usual problems finding himself caught in a time loop, fighting ridiculous caricatures again and again, should at the very least be a pretty fun watch. It never really was one for me, though. The film’s ironic use of clichés is never actually as smart and funny as it apparently believes it is, and the attempts of making an audience connect with Grillo’s character suffer heavily from him being a vapid idiot and an arsehole (and not the interesting kind) whose rise to heroism is something the film declares instead of actually doing anything to convince the audience of.

The action is perfectly okay, but I wish the filmmakers had taken a good hard look at a lot of low budget action movies with basic plots but heavy emotional stakes, skipped the ironic sneer, and instead learned something from them about how to creatively turn violence into an expression of a dozen different emotions.

Moonshine County Express (1977): Hicksploitation and carsploitation have never been my greatest loves in exploitation cinema, so I’m not sure if my enjoying Gus Trikonis’s example of the form more than most would be a recommendation to anyone who actually likes the sub-genre. It’s certainly always nice to find a female-led (Susan Howard, Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick) exploitation film that takes said females’ attempts at taking vengeance on the killers of her dead dad (Morgan Woodward working for William Conrad are the guilty parties) seriously, adding John Saxon as the male helper, but really not making him terribly effectual or useful, and letting the villains and the women drive the plot.

Stylistically, Trikonis moves convincingly from mid-70s style brutal-ish shoot-outs, to corny but mostly inoffensive humour, to a bit of drama, and to the mandatory car chases and back again, letting things get a little weird from time to time as they should be in exploitation cinema, yet finding his way back from there, too.

Friday, December 11, 2020

Past Misdeeds: SAGA: Curse of the Shadow (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Welcome to the extremely generic secondary fantasy world of SAGA that is – I’m not kidding – the background for a bunch of – possibly popular – fantasy miniatures!

There’s trouble afoot in whatever the damn land this takes place in is called. A shadowy cult of undead and cursed known as the Shadow Cabal (or sometimes just the Shadow) is planning a ritual to bring the Elder God of Death back from wherever he is, with hopefully resulting undead armies and other fun stuff for the junior fantasy conqueror who can’t get any dragons. One of the younger gods of good (though her interpretation of the concept of “good” will leave quite a bit to be desired during the course of the film), known as the Prophetess, gets wind of the problem and sends out her cleric (though he seems to be more of a paladin, D&D class-wise) Keltus the Wanderer (Richard McWilliams) to solve the situation, because clearly, this is the kind of problem that you wouldn’t throw a few people more at.

Anyway, Keltus will have to team up with anger management impaired elven bounty hunter Nemyt (Danielle Chuchran), cursed with the sign of the shadow and therefore eventual evilness by an orc shaman she has killed, and former orc chieftain Kullimon the Black (Paul D. Hunt), whose tribe has been taken over by the Shadow against his will, to resolve the situation.

Apart from the whole evil cult thing, other problems arise: Keltus’s plan to fight his enemy is really the sort of thing that could all too easily end up actually helping the Shadow and damn Nemyt’s soul; Nemyt hates all orcs with a passion, and Kullimon isn’t too keen on elves or human clerics himself; and Keltus’s goddess really seems to be more Lawful Evil than any other alignment.

Fortunately, these particular elves, orcs and men might just be able to get over the things that divide them, might just have quite a bit of heroic back bone when they need it, and the Prophetess just might not be the only goddess interested in Keltus (for reasons I don’t even want to speculate about).

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m convinced in these post Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit times, we live in something of a golden age of low to extremely low budget sword and sorcery and fantasy cinema. Sure, many of the resulting films look like their elves, orcs, and monsters were created with resources left over from various LARPing sessions, and their plots are generally made with secondary world fantasy cookie cutters, but that’s the kind of minor stuff that is not going to keep me from enjoying a film about people and creatures with pointy ears going at each other with swords.

Curse (or whichever of its many titles you choose) certainly has its problems in the plot department, with the basic quest being pretty bland, and its not very interesting attempts at turning the whole affair into a redemption story for Keltus and Nemyt falling flat by virtue of at least Keltus never doing anything much worthy of redemption. Instead, Keltus eventually gets killed and then revived by a goddess with a love of hopeless causes, without having to actually do anything for it, and Nemyt’s redemptive act only carries the most tenuous connections with the things she needs to redeem herself for. On the other hand, the characters are generally likeable, particularly Hunt’s Kullimon, who seems rather more worldly than his two future friends, and certainly gets all the best lines. It helps that the film’s core trio of actors is decent enough, with Hunt and Chuchran even charismatic enough it’s not too difficult to ignore all the grunting and snarling they have to do.

The rest of the script is basically competent, with decent pacing, and a clear idea of the fact that this sort of film really needs a fight against a different creature or enemy every fifteen minutes or so much more than it needs anything else.

These fights are quite well done, too, with Chuchran (who gets to have an acrobatic fighting style not too far off from that of a wuxia film character) and Hunt making for attractive screen fighters even in those moments where there’s clearly no stunt person substitution going on, and some very fun choreography that makes much of the film’s limited resources. Director John Lyde for his part provides ample space for the fights and fighters to shine in, using little obfuscation of what is going on on screen. McWilliams, on the other hand, often looks as if he’s just stumbling after his sword in these scenes, but two out of three ain’t bad.

The make-up and effects are all over the place in quality with Kullimon’s orc make-up one of Curse’s high points, the sort of make-up job that might not look real but keeps the actor’s face expressive enough for him to still act. Among the rest of the effects, there’s some ridiculous stuff (the final enemy, for example who looks like nothing so much like a mid-level boss from a video game made in 2006 or so), some neat, some mediocre, and a dwarf who looks to so weirdly artificial he actually hits the same sort of freakishness as your run of the mill evil clown.

All this adds up to something better than I’d ask of a tiny low budget sword and sorcery movie. The film does perhaps take its plot a bit too seriously for some tastes, but if the film itself didn’t why should the audience? If you’re not willing to just accept the D&D module style of the whole affair, this is not a film actually meant for you anyway, I very much suspect. I have no problems with that, and so feel myself in a good position to enjoy how much Lyde et al just go for it, and how fun the resulting film turns out to be.

And even though much of the dialogue is a bit too heavy and portentous for its own good, there’s actually a nice series of witty lines too, not so self-conscious as to rip you out of the world the film tries so hard – if cheaply - to create but enough of it to add to the sense of fun I got from the film.

All in all, Curse of the Shadow is a positive surprise, at least if you like the things D&D level fantasy or Italian sword and sorcery films have to offer, or just enjoy watching very competent people fighting on screen.

Thursday, December 10, 2020

In short: (The) Devil(‘s) Kiss (1974/76)

Original title: La perversa caricia de Satán

After the suicide of her husband left their estate in ruins, the former countess Moncorn has started a new life under the identity of Claire Grandier (Silvia Solar), medium. She has partnered with one Professor Gruber (Olivier Mathot), specialist in telepathy, mad scientist, and owner of a weak heart, working their séance trade in exactly those circles her husband and she moved in once, now usually without getting recognized by her former acquaintances. Well, the Duke de Haussemont (José Nieto) does recognize her when she holds a séance at a party in his castle. Driven by what might be a bit of a guilty conscience as well as some fascination concerning what happens at the séance, de Haussemont invites Claire and the Professor to perform their further occult studies in his home.

The two agree, for this invitation is indeed part of their evil plans. The Professor is developing some sort of compound that can bring the dead back to a kind of life, and once it is ready, Claire is going to conjure up a demonic spirit to inhabit the freshly not-living body, so that the Professor can then control it with his telepathic abilities to take vengeance on Claire’s enemies. In the world of this film, zombies are complicated to make.

On paper, particularly given that it was made during the height of European horror in Spain and Andorra(!), Jordi Gigó’s Devil’s Kiss (I’m going to keep to this version of the title) sounds all kinds of wonderful, and everyone who loves this era and type of filmmaking will probably imagine all sorts of awesome and exciting things with this set-up. Alas, awesome and exciting are not to be with this one, a film cursed with pacing so leaden, you might just think you’re being too hard on poor old lead, as well as camerawork so bland and boring, calling it an aesthetic or a style would be plain preposterous.

As a rule, I am perfectly alright with things happening slowly in movies, but Gigó (who also scripted) really has no sense of drama or flair at all, making much of the film a chore to get through, the film moving slower than its own zombie.

However, apart from some eye-gougingly ugly (in the best way) 70s style in fashion and interior decoration to gawk at while one is yawning, the film, at least the subtitled version I watched, has some delightfully absurd dialogue to offer. Now, I’m not saying that lines like “Thank god, we had time to hide the dwarf and the coffin” or “Let’s hope I’m strong enough to control the satanic mind that will take control of the poor guy’s body” make crawling through the whole affair worthwhile, but they pretty much do, and I am indeed saying it, so make of this, as of the film, what you will. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

At Sword’s Point (1952)

Twenty years (supposedly, for the ages of most of our heroes suggest thirty-five or so) after the original adventures of the Three Musketeers, France is in turmoil. Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu are both dead, and the kid who will become Louis XIV still has some years to go to come of age. Queen Anne (Gladys Cooper) does her best to keep the country together as best as she can, but she’s old and ill, and fighting the ruthless Duc de Lavalle (Robert Douglas) for the fate of the kingdom.

Lavalle uses his increasing power and barely hidden violence to push for a marriage with Anne’s daughter Henriette (Nancy Gates), clearly planning to do away with Louis once he is nicely positioned as the only throne candidate standing. By now, the Queen has become quite desperate, hiding Louis away at a secret spot somewhere in the country, and repeatedly attempting to ask the King of Spain for help in keeping the situation stable. All of her couriers to Spain, however, have found themselves on the pointy ends of Lavalle’s men.

In desperation, the Queen remembers the men who served their country so well twenty years past, and sends for the former Musketeers.

Because time works a bit strangely in this France, all four are now either dead or too old for action (damn that gout!). Fortunately, they have children at just the right age who all happen to share their fathers’ character traits and abilities perfectly. Who’d have thunk!

So now it is up to D’Artagnan Jr. (Cornel Wilde), Aramis Jr. (Dan O’Herlihy), Porthos Jr. (Alan Hale Jr,), and Athos Jr. to save the day. Did I say Athos Jr.? In fact, it’s his daughter Claire (Maureen O’Hara) taking up her old man’s banner!

Swashbucklers often tended to have somewhat meatier roles for actresses even outside of the villainess roles and the melodramas where they were allowed to have personalities at the time when this was made. So it’s not a complete surprise that Lewis Allen’s very free (so free the original novel isn’t “Three Musketeers: The Next Generation” at all) adaptation of Dumas’s Musketeer Sequel “Twenty Years Later”, provides O’Hara with so prominent a role even when it comes to the fights, but it’s still a joy to watch.

Interestingly, the film does so while still using some of the standard tropes a woman goes through in adventure fiction, so she still is the romantic objective of the main character, and there’s a lot of flirting; it’s just that Allen, or the handful of scriptwriters, never uses this to diminish Claire. She’s just your standard adventure movie heroine who also happens to have the courage and conviction usually left to the male heroes, and the fencing skills to back it up.

This does of course also practically automatically turn her into the most complex and rounded character on screen. Of course, it does help that the script doesn’t go the route where the badass woman is suddenly turned incompetent once she’s fallen for the hero; nor do the other three, once Claire has demonstrated her fighting prowess, try to keep her away from the action or ever doubt her capabilities. The film and its characters simply accept that being deeply romanceable and being deeply capable aren’t mutually exclusive.

O’Hara seems to relish this role, too, providing Claire with the same kind of swagger and humour the other musketeers are supposed to have. She’s really throwing herself into the fencing sequences, too.

The other musketeers aren’t quite as awesome. Wilde is certainly fine in the fights, but he’s not quite as youthful and charming as the script pretends he is, ending up a bit too stolid, O’Herlihy doesn’t get a lot to do, and Hale Jr. seems to have difficulty enough with the little he is supposed to do already. The thing is, O’Hara’s good enough to make that a matter of little to no import.

The film’s plot, while certainly not brilliant, does help there also. Things never stand still for too long, the plot is always providing opportunities for scenes of men doing hearty belly-laughs while fighting, desperate acrobatic feats, a bit of pathos and romance, and a lot of intrigue. All of it is presented in an expertly timed manner, and really never lets a boring minute come to pass, using RKO’s not titanic purse strings to their technicoloured fullest.

Speaking of intrigue, even though Douglas’s performance is more solid than truly memorable, the script does provide him with a series of somewhat sensible plots, turning him memorable and interesting as a villain simply by virtue of his plans actually making logical sense in a swashbuckling world, therefor providing the heroes with actual odds and stakes to fight against and for, respectively.

All of which only improves At Sword’s Point, a film that could have gotten away with being the Maureen O’Hara show, even more.

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

In short: The Owners (2020)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers, but you have seen a movie before, haven’t you?

Country numbskulls in cliché chav garb Nathan (Ian Kenny) and Terry (Andrew Ellis) team up with their equally ridiculous pro small time criminal Gaz (Jake Curran) to rob the huge mansion of their town’s – one hopes retired – physician, Doctor Huggins (Sylvester McCoy). It isn’t exactly difficult finding a time when the Doctor (tee-hee) and his dementia-plagued wife Ellen (Rita Tushingham) aren’t home.

However, because these people are risible idiots, they accidentally drag Nathan’s girlfriend Mary (Maisie Williams) into the affair, or at least the mansion. Things don’t improve when the supposedly full safe Terry has been talking about turns out to be mechanical instead of the electronic kind Gaz would supposedly be able to crack (given the lack of criminal effectiveness on display, I’m sceptical). So, the idiots decide to turn the break-in into a home invasion, against Mary’s half-hearted protests, and get the safe’s code out of the doctor by force. Needless to say, they have problems realizing this goal; and because this is a horror film, the elderly gentleman and his wife are of course serial killers, among other things.

French director Julius Berg’s The Owners is a bit of a mess, mostly because the script by Berg, Mathieu Gompel and Geoff Cox can’t find another way to drive their narrative forward apart from making every single character outrageously stupid. Sure, for one of them, there will be a plot twist-y reason to not act effectively towards the criminal goal, but that just opens a different can of him being stupid in a different way, and really makes little sense when you, apparently unlike the writers, spend more than five minutes to think about the mechanics of his specific betrayal. And the film’s really not so exciting that a viewer won’t find any time pondering these things as a viewer.

The script also has its problems with effective characterisation. At first it introduces its protagonists (such as they are) as risible clichés of poor people who don’t seem to have a single trait that seems to connect them to human beings as you can encounter them outside of bad comedy. Then, pretty suddenly, the audience is expected to care for them as if they were actual well-rounded characters with recognizable character traits; in the next scene, everyone’s made out of cardboard again, and back and forth, and so on.

Tonally, the film tries its hardest to be some kind of black comedy horror thriller, something it actually succeeds at once it becomes a film about Mary versus the crazy elderly, and can fall back on mild grotesquery and classic suspense techniques, as well as a trio of actors in Williams, the delightful McCoy, and Tushingham, who do their very best to elevate the material to something that’s actually fun and entertaining to watch, even when it is lacking in depth.

Really, it’s one third of a good – in the sense of “entertaining” – movie, grafted onto two thirds of outright nonsense.

Sunday, December 6, 2020

Satu Suro (2019)

Towards the late stages of her pregnancy, Adinda (Citra Kirana) and her horror-hating atheist (so you know he knows little about genre tropes and will need to change his ways) screenwriter husband Bayu (Nino Fernandez) move into a large cabin on a mountain side. The goal is apparently to get away from the Big City (which I assume is Jakarta) and its stresses. However, the new country home turns out to not have been the greatest choice when one’s goal is stress avoidance.

Whenever she’s alone, Adinda has various threatening, and clearly supernatural, encounters. There’s also a creepy old lady (Yati Surachman, certainly this week’s winner of the “best creepy old lady in a movie” award) sneaking around, and when our poor heroine has dreams, it’s stuff like a nightmare about first puking up nails and razorblades on chains of hair, followed by a new-born.

So it is rather par for the course that the night the baby is finally coming is the one before the first of Suro, a day which, following some Indonesian beliefs, is the highest holiday of demons and spirits. So it might not come as too much of a surprise for any viewer that Adinda’s night at the hospital will turn into a series of encounters with standard Indonesian spooks, ghoulies, the ghosts of demon worshipping doctors and nurses, and other nasty entities. Bayu, on the other hand, will be rather surprised when the nice, modern hospital he left his wife in has turned into a clearly abandoned ruin while he was fetching some stuff from home and eating a bit at an expository food vendor’s stall. But don’t you worry, he’ll meet his share of nasty supernatural entities as well. Which is only fair since what is going on is connected to his family background.

From over here in Europe, it’s so nice to see the new wave of Indonesian horror and the way it celebrates its influences by classic Indonesian horror from the 70s and 80s, not falling into the nostalgia trap and instead using this as a way of broadening influences and looking for connections. Many a film, certainly Anggy Umbara’s Satu Suro, also seem to take away from the classics a willingness to let loose and just go there, not thinking about taste (and sometimes logic) so much it stifles the imagination, taking the risk of becoming a bit goofy when it also means to become more than a bit awesome (in both main meanings of that word).

Despite featuring a surprisingly complicated and involved back story, Satu Suro is a film very much in the tradition of the horror film as campfire tale or haunted house ride, firstly interested in presenting a series of creepy scenes and shocks, with in-depth plot development and deep characterisation a secondary thing. What’s here when it comes to the latter is rather perfunctory, things like Bayu’s turn to religion coming over as a bit of standard trope resolution business (and probably a nice way to calm down a censor or two), the film chomping at the bit to come to the next cool ghoul, depict some demon worshipping ritual, or feature a pretty great series of scenes in which the creepy old lady also turns out to be a badass creepy old lady (and more). Just wait until she pulls out her magical whip.

However, Umbara does not fall into the trap of making the series of spirits and demons we encounter as completely random as they at first appear. Their appearance and behaviour is actually integrated into the background, already elevating the film above the random jump scare school of horror of certain US mainstream horror franchises by virtue of actually connecting things. And even though that story is a concoction of clichés and tropes, it does push the film through its increasingly weird and inspired series of supernatural and occult encounters nicely. As do the performances by Kirana and Fernandez who provide the proper amount of humanity needed in between the loud stuff.

The digital effects aren’t always great (though about half of them are), but this is one of those films where the wonderful ideas beat the not always perfect execution nicely. Turns out I don’t really care if the magic whip of the creepy old lady looks believable, as long as it is used as nicely as it is here.

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Three Films Make A Post: The Best Loved Bandit Of All Time!

On the Rocks (2020): This is another one of those films where I seem to have seen a very different movie than most other people. After comparisons with classic screwball comedies, praises for its New York-ness and with Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in front of the camera and Sofia Coppola behind it, I was pumped for a bit of light yet fun entertainment. What I actually got was a rich people’s problems film where poor people only exist as waiters, waitresses and drivers to serve as a background for some of the least interesting marital and daddy issues imaginable. Most of the film may take place in New York, but it’s certainly no part of New York anyone but the upper class twats inhabiting it would ever want to see. It’s all just very dull to look at, and that dullness runs through most of the film – it’s slow, the emotional stakes for this viewer are very low, and when it comes to light charm, humour and hidden depths, you won’t want to throw out your Nora Ephron movies.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): So let’s get back eight decades into the past to find something more lively. Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood version of elements of British folklore is of course one of the best swashbucklers every made, and a film that still plays rather wonderfully. Sure, as always, there are elements very much of its time especially when it comes to characterisation, and I’m always flabbergasted by the Richard the Lionheart love (a guy who clearly didn’t give a crap about the country he was supposed to rule, what with him always gallivanting off to a crusade or two, or finding other business to be away on), but otherwise, this is a flawless movie, from Errol Flynn’s ability to play a smug bastard but still make him charming and likeable, over the eye-popping colour palette, to an astonishing amount of clever and playful little touches and ideas in the script. There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure.

The Green Room aka La chambre verte (1978): I have to admit that I’ve never been a particular admirer of Henry James, not even of his visits in the realms of the supernatural and the borderline weird, but the man’s body of work certainly has resulted in quite a few great movies. Case in point is this one, where François Truffaut mixes James’s story “The Altar of the Dead” with elements of a couple of other short stories that apparently connected with the director’s own haunted thoughts about the people in his life he lost. The result is an emotionally and intellectually complex meditation on what we owe the dead, how the memory of the dead can dramatically overshadow the ability to live life itself.

So it is very much a ghost story, though one without any ghosts but the ones the protagonist, as well played by Truffaut in his last stint as an actor, creates through his inability to let go of the love as well as his grudges against the dead. I don’t really want to pretend it’s a horror film in anything but the broadest sense, yet it does at the very least tell of a haunted man and incorporates some finely wrought gothic imagery. Beside being brilliant.

Friday, December 4, 2020

Past Misdeeds: The Machine (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

In a near future dominated by a new Cold War between the West and China with a new arms race taking place on the field of cybernetics. Scientist Ava (Caity Lotz) has brought the AI she is developing as close to getting through the touring test as any AI has ever managed. Despite misgivings, she hires on to a secret UK military project lead by the brilliant Vincent (Toby Stephens).

Vincent has been working on brain implants that will give soldiers back those brain functions they lost in various unpleasant ways, and he has been so successful some of these soldiers are actually working as guards on the underground base where his – and now Ava’s – experiments take place. On the negative side, some months after they get their implants, the soldiers lose their ability to speak and tend to become rather, well, inhuman in their behaviour. Curiously enough, nobody involved in the project seems to think anything of the behavioural changes beyond the muteness, and somehow also everybody seems to miss that the cybered-up soldiers actually can talk to each other in some kind of machine language.

While all this still sounds rather humanitarian, if badly organized, the experimental subjects are basically held as prisoners, and the experiments at large are not exactly in tune with any rules on human experiments. And of course, Vincent’s ridiculously evil boss Thomson (Denis Lawson) dreams about mind-controlled cyborg super soldiers and killer/spy androids, and little of helping people cope with brain damage. Vincent for his part is only involved in the whole project because he wants to find a way to cure his brain-damaged little daughter.

Soon after she arrives on base, Ava has quite the breakthrough with her AI, getting her to evolve what rather looks like actual consciousness; unfortunately, she also digs into the project’s secrets without hiding her trails very well, which gets her killed by a fake Chinese assassin.

Vincent, who was really rather fond of her, builds an android body made in Ava’s image to house her AI (also Caity Lotz, obviously). While he is trying to nurture the strange new artificial kind of life he has helped give birth to, and understand what it is Ava and he actually created, Thomson does of course go the killer android route faster than you can say “Terminator”, with a rather more thoughtful and complicated version of the expected results.

Caradog W. James’s The Machine is the curious case of a film that has some major and very obvious flaws yet that I’d still highly recommend to anyone with even a mild interest in clever low budget science fiction. As my – still quite abridged for a film that doesn’t even reach the ninety minute mark – plot synopsis probably shows, the major problem of the film – beyond some dubious lines of dialogue - is that it tries to squeeze too many elements into too short a running time and too low a budget to do everything included in it justice. This leads to a state of affairs where something like the eventual replacement of the human race through artificial life – reminding me of a Terminator prequel that sympathizes with the machines - which would usually be quite enough to base a film on is just one among a huge number of things The Machine is about in one way or the other.

There’s also some pop philosophical thought about the nature of humanity and love, the transhumanist element as represented by the cybernetically enhanced soldiers, the question of moral responsibility in research, the evilness of evil governments (of evil), father daughter relationships, the problems with selling one’s soul, and various assorted ideas. Come to think of it, it’s a bit of a surprise the film actually finds time to think about any of this at all while still keeping its plot together. Not that it’s a very complicated plot, or a very surprising one, but, if you ignore some plot holes that might actually be explained by shoddy “results before security” thinking by the project’s boss Thomson (as if his evil evilness of evil weren’t enough), and behaviour by Vincent that smells more of wilful blindness than plot hole to me, it’s coherent, makes sense, and hangs together well with the film’s various thematic interests – all one hundred of them.

Even more surprising is how deeply engaging the film stays even though it can’t do its cornucopia of ideas as much justice as I would have wished for, how much it still manages to do with some of these ideas, and how it builds fascinating stuff like the suggested implant soldier culture out of a few scenes and a handful of suggestions of meaning. Really, the reason for my disappointment with The Machine not getting too deeply into any single one of its elements lies in how interesting the surface here is, and how much further this wee low budget movie mostly shot in one of those warehouse-looking sets goes in thinking about transhumanism and AI rebellion (of a sort) than any contemporary mainstream production that could actually afford to do much much more but just won’t. There really aren’t – for example – many movies that suggest the replacement of the old (aka humans) by the new (aka AIs) might be a natural thing in a cosmic sense, while at the same time keeping enough sympathy for humanity, as the dramatically ironic ending demonstrates. Perhaps Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning would be comparable, if you stretch the word “mainstream” a bit far, though Hyams does of course talk a very different filmic language from James, even though both visibly appreciate the stranger edges of their given genres.

The Machine is also full of nods in the direction of the films about AIs, cyborgs and androids that came before it. It’s mostly films from the 80s of course, because that was pretty much the high water mark of films thinking about the nature of humanity via AIs etc, beyond the Pinocchio riffs. It will hardly be a coincidence how much the Ava/Machine looks like it came out of Blade Runner and even the handful of echoes of Universal Soldier included seem quite consciously positioned. It would be rather silly to pretend not to be influenced by the films that came before thinking about the same things one thinks about, after all.

A final reason for the impressive effect The Machine had on me despite its obvious flaws is Caity Lotz’s performance as the Machine, with a body language that suggests the alienness of something that never had a body before, as well as the fragility of a child, but also demonstrates an ability to switch to the appropriate body language for the more violent stuff. Her performance also makes it that much easier to get over some of the more problematic moments of the film’s dialogue like my personal favourite “I didn’t know man and clown were the same”.

The Machine really is much better than you’d expect of it, a film that perhaps attempts too much than it could reasonably achieve yet still offers a lot, if you’re inclined to look at it from the right angle.

Thursday, December 3, 2020

In short: Mount. NABI (2014)

Warning: discussion of definitely non-consensual intercourse with a guy in a shitty monster costume!

A group of people shooting a shoe-string indie horror movie in ye olde POV style witness some strange light up the titular mountain. Despite a creepy guy hitting trees with a shovel warning them off, they climb towards the light and right into becoming part of an actual POV horror film.

There’s a mysterious rapey, murderous mountain monster (or is it an alien?) going about, and quickly, men are ripped apart, women are raped, and a lot of screams are screamed. Female lead Tana Akiyama is an excellent screamer deserving, perhaps, of less unpleasant stuff to scream about.

I don’t really want to play the moral apostle about Seiji Chiba’s weirdly punctuated Mount. Nabi, though, the rape is just pretty much the only thing in here you won’t see in most other POV horror movies, too. Well, it’s got more gore in it, too, but the gore, as is the execution of the perfectly fine concept of its monster suit, is pretty bad, even for a cheap little bit of horror like this one.

So, back to the film’s only notable feature. At least the rape sequence isn’t really shot to turn an audience on, but instead is clearly meant to shock, perhaps, revolt, or, when it comes to the shadow of the monster penis, make one laugh. The problem is that Chiba’s filmmaking really isn’t strong enough to invoke any of these feelings. Instead, I found myself annoyed by its use of rape as a shortcut to making an audience squirm, the whole thing becoming perfectly pointless when it doesn’t even invoke an authentic emotion in a viewer.

But “pointless” does rather seem the main word to describe the film.

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Vivarium (2019)

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are on the young couple’s lookout for a first house. Their search leads them to an encounter with a rather peculiar estate agent (Jonathan Aris) who is really, really keen on showing them one of his houses.

The development where it is situated looks like a nightmare of bland pastels, breathing a kind of ordered artificiality that does suggest the whole thing is the product of minds who don’t quite understand concepts like houses or home. While they are exploring the house on offer, which turns out to breathe just the same kind of nightmarishly blandness as its surroundings, the estate agent disappears. Worse still, Gemma and Tom can’t find a way out of the development of perfectly identical buildings under a perfectly unchanging sky, neither on foot nor by car. In the end, they always end up at “their” house again. They are trapped.

Somebody is dropping off perfectly bland groceries tasting like a perfectly bland simulacrum of the real thing when they aren’t looking, so they do not risk dying, at least. After some time, said somebody is dropping off a baby too, with a note explaining that the couple will be freed if they take care of it.

At first, the baby seems normal enough, but it grows much faster than a normal human being would, and the boy (Senan Jennings, later Eanna Hardwicke) it becomes is even less so, copying and imitating its “parents” in ways that seem built to break them.

While I’m sure its style and tone will be annoying to quite a few viewers, to my eyes, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium is an absolute masterpiece. There aren’t terribly many movies aiming for something parallel to the tone of modern non-cosmicist weird fiction, or Robert Aickman, but this one’s not just aiming, it is hitting perfectly what it is trying to achieve.

There’s a fantastically nightmarish quality to the whole film, a design sense that perfectly suggests the setting to be a copy of something human as constructed by something deeply non-human, emphasising the passive-aggressive power of blandness and the horrors of a place that is absolutely ordered to someone else’s rules. The place Gemma and Tom find themselves in is hell, even if it isn’t the hell of Christianity, and their captors are not demons. In fact, the film isn’t calling these captors evil exactly. Instead, in one of the most interesting aspects of the film, it makes them so ambiguous it is never clear if they are malevolent, indifferent, or simply don’t understand these or any other human concepts at all. It simply makes clear there’s little difference between malevolence and indifference if the entity that is either malevolent or indifferent has nearly absolute power over you.

It’s no wonder that the characters break in these kind of surroundings even before they are ordered to take care of their very own changeling, and the way they are breaking is very well done indeed, Finnegan portraying how a very non-realistic pressure drives Gemma and Tom apart in effectively realist ways, thereby finding a way to ground a film based in something we can’t quite relate to through the humanity of his characters. Poots and Eisenberg are both very strong here, really helping to provide the film with an empathetic emotional resonance as well as the more abstract one.Their reaction to something they can’t comprehend is utterly comprehensible, and becomes increasingly heart-breaking the worse their mental states become. In fact, I have seldom seen a film where I wished some Hollywood ending for the characters; though the whole tone and style makes it clear they are doomed from the start.

And that’s before I’ve even mentioned their horrible child-thing, copying and repeating in what feels like a cruel parody of an actual child, screeching for food, and sucking all energy out of Gemma, while Tom’s simply starting to dig a hole instead of confronting what is going on. Which does obviously more than just hint toward a metaphorical angle of this being about the horrors of conformity, the fears of young parenthood, etc. Yet even though the film’s most certainly about these things, it never loses the feel of watching people confronted with something they can’t comprehend, and which can’t truly comprehend them either. That some of this also fits into some modern Fortean ideas about transdimensional entities is just added icing on the cake.

But really, what makes Vivarium so great is that it takes all of these ideas and influences and turns them into a, sometimes very darkly funny, nightmare, holding to its mood perfectly and without wavering.

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

In short: This House Possessed (1981)

After having some kind of breakdown on stage, singer (he has a spiel about not being a rock singer, but no pop singer either that is nearly as painful as his music going on) Gary Straihorn (Parker Stevenson) has a longer guest spot in a hospital. He’s hitting it off, to put it mildly, with intensely cute nurse Sheila Moore (Lisa Eilbacher). So much so that he hires her as is live-in nurse for further convalescence and romance (his infatuation is reciprocated, don’t you worry). Because they both like one of the houses he is looking to rent, he just buys the place right off. It’s an interesting house, to say the least, tricked out with all the proto smart home devices the early 80s can provide.

It also turns out to be haunted; as a matter of fact, long before Sheila and Gary move in, it has already watched them on its security monitors, clearly looking forward to their stay.

The couple’s medical ethics breaking romance does run a bit roughly: he’s about as sensitive as a rock, and she is clearly haunted by something in her past she is not sharing. The appearance of some model who really wants to return into Gary’s pants doesn’t help there, nor does the increasingly temperamental haunting that uses much lesser technology to much better (and more murderous) effect than today’s AI assistants. Why, does it all have something to do with Sheila’s past?

William Wiard’s This House Possessed is another fine entry into the history of US TV horror movies. It brings a comparatively original premise – there’s still really little done with modern haunted houses on screen today – to which it applies quite a bit of, often slightly goofy, imagination, and hits on a couple of really fine horror sequences.

The climax is a fantastic example of how to do something that feels big on a modest budget, and the way David Levinson integrates the characters with the haunting is very effective even if you see some of what’s going on between Sheila and the house coming a mile away. Plus, how many films do you know about a love triangle between man, woman, and house?

Much of this is of course also cheesy as heck. The state of the art fantasy version of 80s technology, Straihorn’s horrifying music and some choice timely fashion do really turn this into a bit of a time capsule that can ever so slightly distract from this actually being a horror film. Until we get to the next surprisingly imaginative moment of technological haunting, that is. Wiard doesn’t consciously play things camp, instead taking the romance, the haunting, and (Cthulhu help us) even the music very seriously indeed, which is one of the main reasons any of this works as well as it actually does.

Sunday, November 29, 2020

The Queen of Black Magic (2019)

Original title: Ratu Ilmu Hitam

A group of people who grew up together in a country orphanage, and grew as close as birth family there, mostly coupling up with their foster siblings, too, gathers back there to say a last goodbye to the apparently beloved orphanage boss Bandi (Yayu Unru). The new batch of kids is away on a bus tour over the weekend, so it seems like a good time for a reunion.

And a reunion it certainly is: the dark secrets haunting the lives of the grown-up orphans come back in a more literally form of haunting, and soon, ghosts and ghoulies appear, and half of the cast loses their minds in various very unpleasant ways. A nested series of dark secrets is revealed, and sins of the past have to be paid off in gory and very unappetizing ways.

Kimo Stamboel’s Queen of Black Magic (written by the redoubtable Joko Anwar) is only nominally a remake of the classic Suzzanna vehicle, using some elements of the older film but really being its own thing, the nostalgia relegated to the end credits. Hilariously enough, part of that nostalgia is a still shot of a bowl of maggots and worms, but then, once you’ve gotten through the scenes of centipede horror the film at hand features (enough of it you might also sell it as a remake of Centipede Horror), you might feel nostalgic towards that bowl too.

But really, centipedes, (self-)mutilation and all kinds of increasingly insane gory fun (and “fun) until the climax goes for a veritable hell on Earth of the grotesque are quite a ways away when the movie starts. Stamboel spends the first half of the running time carefully establishing character relations and those parts of their shared past the characters admit to, even among each other, effectively suggesting the holes in their stories and the peculiarities in their behaviours without outright explaining them or pointing them out.

So when the supernatural violence begins to explode, it’s really a very traditional, as well as as very effective way to confront the characters with the lies and secrets of their pasts while drenching them in blood and bodily fluids. It’s not one of those highly moralizing films where nasty people get what they deserve, though. Rather, there are degrees to everyone’s guilt, Stamboel making pretty clear that, as terrible as some of the things some of the characters did were, there were quite a few extenuating circumstances, and the traumas inflicted on them in their childhoods were price enough for anyone to pay for any sin. Behind the gore, there’s some clear knowledge of the way abuse can twist its victims into accomplices of their abusers, leaving behind minefields of guilt, and silent quotidian horrors.

And it’s not as if the supernatural vengeance were in any way, shape or form interested in punishing anyone in appropriate ways. Indeed, the film makes a point of the perpetrator of the vengeance being so warped by their own pain and trauma, she simply doesn’t care if she hurt or kills innocents not even born when the initial incidents took place; it’s not so much about vengeance anymore, but a wish to perpetuate the pain inflicted on oneself. Again, Stamboel works quite a few truths about the true horrors of abuse into his little fest of nasty visuals. In fact, one might argue that all the blood, mutilation, child death and centipedes are Stamboel’s way to ease the bitter pills about abuse he has to offer down our throats a bit more easily, the icky bits actually making it possible to watch what amounts to a tragedy about cycles of abuse.

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Three Films Make A Post: Boy Meets Dog

Love and Monsters aka Monster Problems (2020): If you’re patient enough to get through the film’s atrocious first twenty minutes that combine lots of exposition, crappy jokes and an intensely annoying main character, you, as was I, might be surprised by how entertaining Michael Matthews’s science fiction comedy adventure with medium sized monsters then becomes. It’s still a movie with not a single original bone its body, mind you, insists on a very traditional way for a guy to turn into a hero™, and ends trying to sell us people inspired by a speech of our protagonist going out for what amounts to mass suicide as a hopeful ending, but at least, it puts its borrowed bits and pieces into a pleasant series of adventures. More often than not, it’s really quite charming in its undemanding way, and if you survive the first act, you’ll probably be entertained on rainy Sunday morning.

Maigret voit rouge aka Maigret Sees Red (1963): This is the second time Jean Gabin steps into the shoes of Simenon’s police inspector hero of oh so very many novels and adaptations. Directed by Gilles Grangier, this outing finds Maigret hunting a trio of actual American gangsters using their particularly violent methods (US crime is to this film as Russian crime to today’s US crime cinema) on his home turf. It’s clearly a matter of national honour, with a low-level nationalist vibe running through affairs that would be much more annoying if Grangier’s nice eye for interesting side characters, Gabin’s always lovely (and often pretty funny if he wants it to be) low-key acting style, and the film’s absurd ideas about the way US gangsters of its time worked, weren’t so damn distracting and charming. It’s certainly as pulpy in mood as Maigret gets.

El esqueleto de la señora Morales aka Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (1960): This macabre thriller/comedy by Rogelio A. González is generally seen as a gem of Mexican cinema, its heavy-handed satire of Mexican bourgeois mores clearly the thing to delight the people compiling “The Most Important Mexican Films of All Time” lists and such. The film’s gender politics have aged rather badly, though, as has its critique on the bourgeoisie. Chabrol, this ain't.

If you’re like me coming at it from a more genre savvy perspective, the satire, the black comedy and the thriller elements here don’t always fit together all that well or effectively, and while González repeatedly shoots very beautiful scenes, there’s little here to see rather more disreputable kinds of Mexican cinema haven’t done quite a bit better. On a curious note, this is also one of the few adaptations of a work by Arthur Machen, though not adapting anything of the part of Machen’s body of work I’d actually like to see adapted.

Friday, November 27, 2020

Past Misdeeds: Violet & Daisy (2011)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) are silly teenagers (or in Violet's case a young woman using a not quite age-appropriate teenage persona to protect herself from things she and the film can't speak about directly) and best friends. Or really rather "only friends", for they are both too weird for the general populace. Together, they don't fight crime but work as professional killers. They're the sort of professional killers whose thoughts after the rent are pop stars and dresses, though.

Their latest hit develops a curious dynamic. It isn't, after all, every day that a hit person's victim reacts to finding two armed girls asleep on his couch by putting a blanket over them, nor are offers of cookies day-to-day experiences in the killing business. Of course, their victim (James Gandolfini) is rather atypical in that he actually wants to die and has therefor done his best to piss the leaders of two independent criminal organizations off to get his death wish fulfilled. Our heroines are not quite prepared for this kind of situation, and soon a peculiar sort of friendship develops between them - in particular the more classically sane Daisy, who really only ever became a killer to be with Violet - and their prospective victim, with unexpected and expected expressions of humanity.

To complicate matters, there are also the number one killer of Violet's and Daisy's organization (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the killing troupe of the other gang, and the kind of lies you tell people because you love them to cope with.

At first, Geoffrey Fletcher's Violet & Daisy seems to be another movie in the never ending line of would-be Tarantino gangster movies, the kind of film Tarantino hasn't been making for a long time, or ever, and the kind of film his imitators generally painfully not succeed at making anyhow. The longer the film goes on, though, the clearer it becomes that Fletcher isn't really making one of those films at all but something much more interesting and individual.

Violet & Daisy does share some of the surface aspects of the semi-Tarantino genre but the film's emotional core and the direction of its intelligence are both completely different from that horrible non-genre. And not just because of its protagonists' prolonged teenage-hood, but because Fletcher's main interest seems to lie in examining the way in which people, young women like Violet and Daisy as well as older men like Gandolfini's Michael, can grow sideways and crooked, yet still deserve some basic human compassion. The film doesn't believe that compassion then magically fixes everything but it does believe in it making things better, even if an act of compassion is as twisted as the one Michael provides for Daisy in the end.

I was at first rather uncomfortable with the way the film's portrayal of its female main characters, with horrible clichés about teenage girls hanging in the air, but here, too, things became more clear and more interesting the longer the film went on. Fletcher is neither out to reduce the two to the clichés they at first seem to be, nor does he look down on them. Turns out a girl can be a professional killer for dresses and still be a complex character; it's as if Fletcher had actually met teenage girls.

One of the film's tricks to achieve its obvious goal of complexity and ambiguity is by playing with audience expectations. The best example for this is the casting the 30-year-old Bledel not as we'd (ironically) expect - and some typically dense IMDB reviews even complain about - out of painful movie experience as an actual teenager, but as a woman who acts like a teenager to keep things in her past at bay the film can only ever hint at or show in a metaphorical dream sequence, because the character just can't articulate them. And yes, this is the sort of film willing to be ambiguous enough to just tell (or not tell, depending on your perspective) its audience something important about one of its main characters via a metaphorical dream sequence.

It being a rather black comedy, Violet & Daisy very often happens to be not just surprisingly profound and emotionally complicated but also to be very funny. The interplay between Gandolfini, Ronan and Bledel really sells practically every joke in the movie, with no moment played too broadly. The trio is just as good in the film's more serious moments (though this is the kind of film where the humour is part of the serious business too, and vice versa, so it's rather difficult to keep them apart), playing off each other beautifully in ways that feel natural in a film little interested in realism but very much in feeling emotionally and philosophically real. They're so great together it's rather unfair to single one of them out, but I have to say, if Saoirse Ronan is this great at selling complexity in a role a lesser actress could have turned into a mere caricature when she isn't even twenty yet, what kind of performances will she be able to give in ten years? [Future me feels decidedly vindicated here.]

So, if you're in the market for a non-naturalistic film about growing up, compassion, and bloody violent murder, Violet & Daisy will be for you. I'd even recommend it if you're not.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

In short: Cameron’s Closet (1988)

Cameron (Scott Curtis) is a little kid with X-Men level psychokinetic powers, and has been the favourite test subject of his psychologist(?) father Owen (Tab Hunter) for quite some time. Alas, Owen did make the mistake of letting Cameron use a statuette of a Mayan “demon” which somehow allowed the thing to use Cameron as some sort of conductor into our world, where it moved into the kid’s closet. All this information, the film will explain in excruciating detail throughout its first hour or so, but everyone who isn’t a zombie (sorry, zombies!) will have figured out most of this after the film’s prologue, in which Owen’s attempt to somehow get rid of the demon – or kill Cameron? – ends in a pretty ridiculous decapitation with his own trusty machete for him.

Cameron ends up in the care of his borderline alcoholic mother (Kim Lankford) and her idiot budding child abuser boyfriend Bob (Gary Hudson). The demon soon enough burns Bob’s eyes out and throws him out of a window, which seems to be the proper way to treat the guy. Alas, this is also the point where the film slows to a crawl and spends a lot of time with intensely boring cop Sam Taliaferro (Cotter Smith), whose main claim to any interest at all is his tendency for weird dreams that do influence his on the job performance. He has to team up with police psychologist Dr Haley (Mel Harris) in this, who is of course not just the police’s child psychologist on call but also the woman he can’t open up to in his mandated sittings. You can imagine the character trajectory, and alas, so could I.

After a long, long time of Cameron being involved in little business of interest and the police bores finding out way too many details about everything the audience already knows, something may happen eventually.

Well, indeed it does, but if my subtle (cough) hints haven’t made it clear already, the main problem of Armand Mastroianni’s Cameron’s Closet is its apparent belief that it is a movie not about supernatural business involving a little kid but one about a very slow and boring police investigation conducted by a guy lacking in whit, charm and screen personality. Most of the first hour after Bob’s well deserved death is excruciating and generally pretty pointless, packing fifteen minutes of plot into forty-five, and lacking anything meant to keep an audience awake. As a director, Mastroianni doesn’t seem acquainted with the concept of mood building, and his style is the sort of bad TV movie bland many TV movies do not suffer from.

So it’s rather a huge surprise that the final act turns relatively entertaining, like a whacked out low budget version of Poltergeist, with a bit more gore and one of Carlo Rambaldi’s least convincing creations. A head or two are melted, excellently bad child acting happens right into a demon’s face, and things turn from soul-destroying boredom to stupid semi-fun.

Why, there’s even a scene of a character travelling into a cheap version of the spirit realm, Taliaferro trying to punch a demon in the face there. Given how much the rest of the film drags, that’s more than anyone could have expected of it.

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

The New Mutants (2020)

After a catastrophic event which apparently destroyed her whole township with her family within it, Dani Moonstar (Blue Hunt) finds herself in the clinic of one Dr Reyes (Alice Braga). It’s a bit of a strange place, with Reyes alone taking care of only a handful of patients. Apart from Dani, there are Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams), Ilyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton), and Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga). All of them are mutants whose lack of control over their powers has cost loved ones (or in Ilyana’s and Rahne’s case, not so loved ones) their lives.

As Reyes tells it, she is supposed to help the kids achieve control over their powers so they can take the next step her mysterious superiors have chosen for them. Not surprisingly given this language, the place is also a cage, surrounded by an indestructible force field, and Reyes changes tack between helpful counsellor and prison warden with disturbing ease.

Ever since Dani has arrived, the clinic seems to have become haunted, too, and the young mutants will have to confront their greatest fears, learn to work together, and uncover the true goals of Reyes. Well, a bit of smooching is also involved, because that’s what future X-Men are supposed to do in their downtime, just ask Chris Claremont.

After it has been shuffled through release dates for years for no fault of its own, Josh Boone’s The New Mutants has turned into the last of the Fox style X-Men movies, a state of affairs that has not helped the reception of the film much, I believe. Then there are also the expectations of the first adaptation of a particularly beloved comic to cope with. These expectations, a film can only survive if it is an absolute masterpiece, which the film at hand isn’t. So it’s no surprise that New Mutants hasn’t been a smashing success even with the nerd press or those parts of the mainstream who don’t automatically rant nonsense about the end of cinema through superhero movies.

However, while not a masterpiece, Boone’s film isn’t a bad one at all. At the very least, even if one is unkind towards it, the it is made pretty interesting by the decision to replace some standard superhero movie tropes with (light) horror touches (and a lot of nods towards the third Nightmare on Elm Street). After all, the backgrounds of troubled teenagers in the real world are only one step away from being a horror movie anyway, mutant powers only sharpening the metaphor, as is right and proper for the franchise as well as the specific comics this adapts. The realization of the horror sequences shows rather clearly why the film is only a good movie instead of a great one in my book, though. They are just not that creepy, Boone never quite finding a visual language that makes the weight of horror the protagonists feel towards them completely believable. In part, that’s really a problem of visual choices by the director, in part it’s the film’s very middling effects as well as the less than creative design work done to bring elements of the comics on screen. It’s not Shazam level terrible, but it does weaken the film’s emotional heft considerably.

On the other hand, the film’s narrative (script by Boone and Knate Lee) does have a pleasantly clear idea of what it wants to be about and the ways it believes teenagers can overcome heavy emotional loads (and horror movie scares) through the power of diverse families of choice. There’s an obvious reason why the kids are repeatedly shown watching Whedon’s “Buffy”, and while this sort of thing is obviously a simplification of how we get through life, it does speak to some things I at least believe to be true and important, while treating its characters and their concerns with respect and love.

There is little in the film that doesn’t directly speak to its thematic concerns, leading to a very focused and low key movie that only fulfils the expectations on the amount of action and loudness a modern superhero movie has to show as much as it needs to if it actually wants to get a budget. Though the climactic action scene really not being that great a catharsis it should narratively and thematically be seems to have a lot to do with that budget not being high enough.

Yet still, The New Mutants is a very interesting, and often also a very entertaining, film, ending the Fox X-Men movies on an unexpected yet fitting note.

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

In short: Borley Rectory (2017)

This is a lovely animated documentary by Ashely Thorpe about one of Britain’s favourite haunted places, Borley Rectory, home of haunted vicars, a dead nun with a habit of staring into your window when you’re trying to eat, a headless coachman and many a rock thrown by Harry Price (or ghosts, depending on one’s preferences).

The film is putting all kinds of these wild and less wild tales into a mix of rotoscoped actors, digital as well as hands-on animation, with narration by Julian Sands, and people like Reese Shearsmith and Jonathan Rigby involved in the acting. This seems rather heavily involved with a certain generation of intelligent (mostly male) British horror etc people like the above mentioned and works in its animated documentary format on parallel interests to them: the Usborne Book of Ghosts is invoked, Stephen Volk is quoted, the gothic elements of the best Borley Rectory stories are put to the fore, and there’s a playfulness that never devolves into wink-wink nudge-nudge style irony on display. The film’s highly distinctive visual style creates the properly spooky mood, meant to feel as if the viewer is gazing at old film material run through a digital filter, and meeting this goal wonderfully. There’s a vein of nostalgia apparent here to, and, given the artificiality of the form Thorpe has chosen, one that is very conscious of the fact it is nostalgia for a time, perhaps things, that never really did exist. I believe one can fairly use the “hauntology” label here.

Of course, if you want your supernatural documentaries to be either involved in debunking or long conspiratorial speeches about them trying to keep the truth hidden, this is most probably not going to be for you. When it comes to its hauntings, Borley Rectory is decidedly uninterested in questions of truth and fakery, deciding to tell the story of a place that has taken on the quality of folklore as such stories should be told.

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

Original title: Mekagojira no Gyakushū (メカゴジラの逆襲)

A short time after the end of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, a submarine working with Interpol is searching the ocean floor for the remains of Mechagodzilla, when it is destroyed by a titanic amphibian kaiju the film is going to insist is a dinosaur, soon to be dubbed Titanosaurus.

It turns out the aliens from the last movie haven’t given up and are trying to smash Japan (the rest of the world to follow later) to build a beautiful, orderly New Tokyo for them to dwell in from the rubble. They are planning to use said Titanosaurus as well as a rebuilt Mechagodzilla for the smashing, and as their tools to destroy mankind’s most competent protector – as it happens also the one with the best theme song – Godzilla. To be able to control Titanosaurus, the aliens – apparently coming from somewhere romantically dubbed Blackhole Planet 3 which does explain their wish to move pretty well – have managed to win over tragically mad scientist Dr Mafune (Akihiko Hirata), who comes in a package deal with his somewhat mysterious daughter Katsura (Tomoko Ai).

Mafune has his reasons for hating humanity. Once a pioneer in underwater agriculture, he then turned to experiments concerned with trying to control animals as if they were robots. When he discovered the peaceful Titanosaurus swimming around in its natural habitat, he decided to make mind-controlling it his next big project. This led to his rejection by the rest of the scientific community, half of which seems to have poopooed the idea of the existence of Titanosaurus despite living on the same planet as Godzilla and company, the other half of which simply wasn’t keen on animal mind control. Afterwards, a mental breakdown and years of poverty that killed his dutiful wife.

Helping out on Godzilla’s side of the equation are the usual assortment of people in lab coats and suits, as well as marine biologist Akira Ichinose (Katsuhiko Sasaki) and his old school buddy turned Interpol agent Jiro Murakoshi (Katsumasa Uchida). Also, the potential power of love and long buried humanity.

Terror of Mechagodzilla, set as a direct sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla was the very last hurray of the Showa era Godzilla films, holding the sad record of having been the commercially least successful entry in the series at the time it came out. Nowadays, the steady stream of home video versions has of course turned it into a commercially rather successful kind of commercial flop, all without the magic of Hollywood accounting. This film is also the return of the great Ishiro Honda to the Godzilla franchise, and big screen movie direction, as well as his final feature film as a director before he did some intermittent work for and with Akira Kurosawa in the final decades of his life.

It is also a much better film than its clearly low budget and the trajectory of the Godzilla movies suggest. While I’ll always defend the Jun Fukudas of this world for being purveyors of fun nonsense at the worst of times, the comparison of this direct sequel by Honda to a Fukuda movie does not exactly make Fukuda look good. Honda had the same diminished production values to work against yet the resulting film is simply better in every possible aspect, from the character work right through to the realization of the monster fights.

Rather more pertinent, Honda is much better at keeping an audience interested between the rare monster fights (Godzilla himself makes his first non-flashback appearance when the film is already half over). Or really, in this case, Honda simply avoids the feeling of the alien invasion plot, the mad science business and the desperately sad background of some of the villains being any kind of filler between the fights by making the often much-loathed bits of a kaiju concerning humans, as always was his wont, important parts of the actual point of the film. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a somewhat silly pulp alien invasion plot with bad guys so sadistic, they cut the vocal chords of their prisoners just in case they might escape their clutches, a cyborg woman, and some of the silliest helmets any alien invader ever wore, but Honda uses of all of this to treat many of his regular humanist concerns, showing much more interest in motivations and self-justifications of characters than you’d usually get in this sort of film, and doing it so well, a viewer might find oneself actually caring.

Of course, this is also thanks to Yukiko Takayama’s (yes, it’s that pleasant and alas rare occurrence of a woman writing a kaiju) script, that hides some complexity and a lot of intelligence between fun monster fights and Interpol versus alien invaders, clearly sharing in Honda’s understanding of how to join pulp fun and serious themes without losing the fun.

Another element that makes Fukuda look bad in comparison is Honda’s direction of the monster fights. They are few, and they are certainly cheaper than anything made at the height of the series but Honda uses all the tricks - the slow motion, the camera angles from below, editing to the rhythm of Ifukube’s (who wasn’t involved in the Fukuda film either) music, and so on – he has learned over a long career of having men in monster suits smash Tokyo to give the fights weight and drama. In Terror’s particular case, there’s also the excellent intercutting between the climax of the human drama and the monster fights to mention, which is perfectly timed, providing a series of emotional jolts that don’t distract from the city smashing business but enhances it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how a master takes a bow.

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Three Films Make A Post: Do You Believe In Monsters?

Lost Child aka Tatterdemalion (2017): Sold as a horror film, this in really isn’t one, but rather a film using certain genre tropes of folk horror – as well as some from Appalachian/Ozarks noir – to tell a naturalistically minded story about a woman trying to cope with her past by returning home and the PTSD healing power of found family. This could be the sort of “heart-warming” approach to actual people’s problems and lives that tends to piss me off to no end, but director Ramaa Mosley does demonstrate you can make this sort of movie in a convincing manner. Part of the film’s effectiveness lies in Mosley’s control over the genre elements she uses: the folk horror bits are convincing as folk horror, the mountain noir elements are indeed told in the right tone, and their shift into the friendlier US version of the kitchen sink drama works on a craftsmanship level. That I’d rather have seen a real horror movie or noir is not the film’s fault.

Ritual of Evil (1970): This sequel to the first TV adventure of psychiatrist/occult detective David Sorell (Louis Jourdan) without the important behind the scenes talent of the first one makes it pretty obvious why there wasn’t the projected series following it: it’s pretty damn dreadful, replacing the clever mix of literary horror traditions and the then modern occult horror with loads of barely digestible early 70s psychobabble, characterization that’s the direct result of someone actually believing that nonsense and writing his characters accordingly, and plotting that goes nowhere interesting very, very tediously. The helpings of lifestyles of the rich and famous soap operatics don’t improve things either, nor does director Robert Day’s vehement inability to understand what makes a scene macabre, and what just stupid. Tragically, the man could do a decent scene, as the prologue proves whose proper horror mood blows the rest of the film completely out of the water.

Zombeavers (2014): Jordan Rubin’s little horror comedy that could goes to show that if you just commit completely to a bad joke, think through all of its possible permutations and treat it as if it were a good one for long enough, it might indeed, as if by magic, turn into a very funny one. It does help to find a handful of actresses and actors equally willing to play through the joke with as straight a face as possible, and here, too, Zombeavers wins.

And hell, if you ever wanted to learn practically every single joke about beavers you’d care to hear, the film’s got your back there too.

Friday, November 20, 2020

Past Misdeeds: Jaal (1986)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

With his mother developing a consumption-like illness that makes it impossible for her to keep continuing the cooking work that paid for the family's food and education, and since his father has been dead for quite a few years, it now falls to kind-hearted part-time badass Shankar (Mithun Chakraborty) to earn the money that pays the rent.

His first attempts are - of course without his fault - without much success. His luck changes when a mysterious woman calling herself Sundari (Rekha) makes Shankar an offer he can't refuse. She's going to pay him quite a lot of money if he'll do whatever she asks of him for two years. Once Shankar has reluctantly agreed, Sundari tells him what his first mission for her is going to be: he is to go to a small village and somehow slime himself into the trust of the local evil Thakur, a man named Bhanu Pratap Singh (Amrit Pal).

Obviously (well, for everyone except for Shankar), Sundari has chosen Shankar for a reason. Soon enough our hero will learn the truth about the death of his father (Vinod Mehra) and a sticky and complicated past, find his true love (Mandakini), lead a minor revolution, and kick people in various parts of their anatomy with all the power his Mithun fu provides him with. And if you think I just left out about a dozen minor plot lines, detours, and flash backs, you're absolutely right.

It's been quite some time since I've last watched a Bollywood movie, and as always when I let this happen, I'm asking myself afterwards: why the heck did I take so much time to look towards India again? Thanks to the watchalong efforts of my delightful friend Beth, I'm back in the groove again, and we couldn't have chosen a better film than the delectable Jaal (which means "Trap", and is not to be confused with other Hindi movies name Jaal). Apart from being pretty damn fun to watch, Jaal also again made clear some things one really should keep in mind when watching masala of the 70s and 80s, lest one’s false expectations turn an incredible experience into something dreary and annoying.

Jaal's mixture of melodrama, a complicated backstory to be revealed sooner or later, overheated action, sudden bursts of psychedelia, musical numbers (written by Anu Malik) in at times frightening and always imaginative choreography, unfunny humour (responsible here: Jagdeep, one of the true horrors of the ages) and plain weirdness for weirdness' sake looks typical of masala movies even to a Bollywood dabbler like me; the only things missing to the formula are a death scene for Mithun's Ma and long-lost siblings at odds with each other. Of course, and that's the main thing I need to remind myself of whenever I dabble in Bollywood movies of this style, one shouldn't go into most of these films in search of originality or a sensible, linearly presented plot but to enjoy them scene for scene in a game of "whatever will they come up with next". These films were after all meant to include something for every potential member of their Indian audiences, which is not something that makes coherence as Hollywood praises it (and often doesn't achieve for completely different reasons) an easy or even useful element of what the films were supposed to be and do. The masala approach does lend itself to produce joy, though.

In Jaal's case, what the filmmakers came up with to produce that joy are delights like Mithun hitting someone with his crotch (to my disappointment only once, or I could have used the phrase "crotch fu" to describe his fighting style), Rekha's vengeance plans including awesome details like provoking one of the bad guys into a heart attack via an aerobic themed (well, nominally breakdance themed) musical number that for some reason also features mimes. Which, now that I think about it years later, is more than enough to give anyone a heart attack. There are also needle-dropped Madonna songs, the misadventures of the easiest marks for a confidence trick ever, Rekha doing her patented (and inspired/awesome) glowering, moral confusion, women getting very very wet during a musical number, magical jumping boots that appear for one scene only to forever disappear from the film afterwards, girls with guns, some deeply problematic ideas about prostitution that collide with some rather more humane and progressive ideas about prostitution and never get directly resolved into what I'd call a position, and a baseball match that ends with Moon Moon Sen being board-cified in a sexually suggestive position I'd really rather would have expected - and raised an eyebrow at - in a Japanese film.

As is so often the case with masala movies, it's difficult to talk about Jaal as the sum of its parts, because, as explained above, a lot of masala films (there are of course humungous amounts of exceptions to this rule) don't seem all that interested in being the sort of thematically coherent whole that is best looked at as the sum of its parts. Consequently, it makes little sense to judge the merits of a film like Jaal that way, or to get cranky at it for not following the rules of filmmaking made to construct and understand something with very different goals. Why, it would be like looking at a Hollywood blockbuster the same way as you would look at an arthouse movie. So instead, I like to look at these films and praise (or not) them for the amount of joy their succession of single scenes provided me with while watching.

Seen from this angle, Jaal looks pretty darn great to me, seeing as it contains not a single boring minute, and is never afraid to just throw in anything director Umesh Mehra found cool on that particular morning.

Thursday, November 19, 2020

In short: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)

Original title: ゴジラ対メカゴジラ, Gojira tai Mekagojira

There’s trouble brewing in that most exotic of places, Okinawa. A priestess has apocalyptic visions, something the film calls “space titanium” is found in a local cave, and an excavation opens up a treasure trove of objects, including a pretty apocalyptic sounding prophecy and a statuette of an Okinawan protector godhood with the somewhat culturally improbable name of “King Caesar”.

And wouldn’t you know it, very quickly, parts of the prophecy come true. Godzilla, with a very unpleasant new voice and yellow-coloured nuclear breath starts on a minor rampage, has a little bout with the always outclassed Anguirus (despite their friendship, human characters comment with shock), until another, correctly voiced version of Godzilla appears and fights the impostor. Said impostor turns out to be a Godzilla-shaped mecha and proceeds to kick our hero’s ass.

Afterwards, it’s time to spend more time with the humans, who uncover that Mechagodzilla is part of an invasion plot of evil alien monkey people and have spy fy adventures which will eventually bring us to the climactic fight.

By 1974, the second generation of filmmakers working on the Godzilla films, who were never as beloved as the simply brilliant bubble around Ishiro Honda, was pretty much on the ropes. Kaiju cinema was one of the genres having particular commercial difficulties with the competition coming from TV. That situation was certainly not helped by first generation kaiju people like Tsuburaya making arguably better kaiju and tokusatsu entertainment for the small screen than guys like poor Jun Fukuda did for the big one.

Fukuda never managed to really fill the footsteps left by Honda as Toho’s main director of kaiju cinema, his competent craftsmanship not really standing up to the comparison with Honda’s – often quiet - brilliance. But then, I don’t necessarily need a film concerning a silly alien invasion by mildly evil monkey people and Godzilla turning Magneto to fight a mecha version of itself to be brilliant. As cheap and joyful entertainment, I like Fukuda’s last Godzilla movie just fine.

It is of course a shame that the budget only left space for two relatively small scale monster sequences (I prefer lots of kaiju in my kaiju movies, strangely enough), but Fukuda and company do make the best out of what they have, trying to put at least a good silly idea into every thirty seconds of these fights. There’s obviously Godzilla’s sudden magnetic powers to mention there, but I’m also very fond of our hero’s jack in the box style appearance to the climactic fight, or that he’s literally screwing his bad copy’s head off in the end.

The light and pulpy invasion nonsense in the middle is entertaining enough too. Fukuda could by now probably shoot stuff like this in his sleep, but here, again, he does his best to provide something of entertainment value every couple of minutes, be it goofy monkey masks for the aliens, a cackling Interpol agent, or just some mild but not boring chases and punch ups.

There’s really worse things to spend one’s time on than Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, and if that sounds like a somewhat underwhelming recommendation, a recommendation it still is.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Graverobbers (1988)

aka Dead Mate

Nora Mae (Elizabeth Mannino) lives a rather sad life. She has managed to upgrade from being a New York prostitute to a Nowhere, USA night shift waitress, but is plagued by gory nightmares, terminal boredom, and an obnoxious condom salesman. Enter John Henry Cox (David Gregory), who waltzes into her diner, acquaints herself with her marital status, and at once proposes marriage, whipping out a proper diamond ring. Having some sort of spell when the ring cuts her finger, Nora says yes to the total stranger with the creepy look, and off the happy (?) couple drive to Henry’s hometown of Newbury (apparently a great place to live forever) in his shiny limousine.

Well, actually, the limousine is not so much a limousine as it is a hearse (Nora knows less about cars than I do, it seems, but then all those Fast & Furious movies had to pay off for me sometime), because Henry turns out to be the town’s mortician. Greeted by the creepy and weird (as well as weirdly acted) local people of importance, the couple is married at once. The wedding night’s rather interesting, Henry insisting on Nora not moving at all. But then, she’s probably had to suffer worse.

The next morning sees Henry giving Nora the grand tour. Most conspicuous is “The Preparation Room”, which she is never to enter. Unlike certain fairy tale wives, she’s even going to hold to that, and instead finds a way to spy on what’s going on inside. What is going on is necrophilia, weird mortuary science (Seabury Quinn to the courtesy phone, please) and tasteful talk about dead bodies not infecting you with AIDS. Turns out many of the townspeople are necrophiliacs, and also undead. Henry does have a tendency to murder his wives, too.

Straw Weisman’s (who is still working as a producer today) Graverobbers is quite the thing. Not necessarily a good thing, but if you’re like me, interested in the late stages of US regional horror filmmaking, or are okay with a film being weird instead of good, certainly a thing of interest.

Tonally, the film is a complete mess, with serious gore, tasteless sleaze like the first necrophily scene, and many a moment where it’s completely unclear what kind of emotion the film is actually trying to evoke crashing into standard thriller woman in peril tropes and a scene about an undead gentleman riding a motorbike. The whole thing has a very off the cuff vibe, as if the writer (hey, it’s Straw Weisman again) had simply jotted down ideas for set pieces, some things obviously borrowed from films deeply out of the film’s league like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and Dead and Buried, had stuck on a risibly dumb twist ending and called it a movie.

So this is absolutely not a film able to suck anyone in with anything amounting to a consistent mood. Its tone is just too disjointed for this, particularly since most of the humour falls down with the dull thud of a dead body dropping out of a coffin, and the film’s greatest ambition seems to be that of being a black comedy – unless when it is not. The only thing connecting everything is a certain weirdness, a weirdness coming from Weisman’s direction, that clearly tries to be stylish but doesn’t quite seem to know how to get there, and an acting ensemble mostly consisting of one or two credit actors who apparently have even less of a clue of what the film’s actually going for than the people behind the camera and so go off on tangents, speak in monotones or act way too hysterically, depending on the time of the day. And don’t even ask me if Larry Bockius’s (the man playing the Sheriff) face is getting so red because that’s needed to spit out dialogue, he’s having a heart attack on set, or what?

Obviously, little of what’s going on in the narrative makes even a lick of sense even if you accept unexplained undeath and a town of necrophiliacs as par for the course. Basically, it’s Elizabeth Mannino looking very pretty while pointlessly walking around and encountering weird shit. The film’s ending has an excuse for that, of course, but if you’re going the “it’s all been a dream, a vision, or whatever” route, you really need to plan your film with that in mind instead of using it as an excuse for its failings.

All of this does obviously make for a less than satisfying movie if you’re looking for even a lick of sense, but Graverobbers is one of those films that can be very enjoyable if you meet it halfway and just wait and see what kind of weird crap it is going to throw at you next. Suddenly zombies? Sure. Undead biker? Yes! Our heroine suddenly shouting “No more one night stands in hell!” for no reason whatsoever? Yup. And really, watched this way, Graverobbers is seldom not entertaining, making it, par the cult movie rule book, a pretty great movie (though not a good one).

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

In short: Number One with a Bullet (1987)

It’s the 80s, so you will be not terribly surprised to hear that this one’s about an odd couple of terrible cops much better at killing than at investigating anything, as they are stomping down on civil and human rights and are shouted at by their bosses. Wait, actually, this is more realistic than I wanted to give it credit for.

But seriously, the mandatory crazy slob of a cop here is a guy called Barzack (Robert Carradine). When he’s not obsessing about a drug boss he just can’t seem to kill, ahem, put behind bars, he’s wallowing in self pity, eating unhealthily, sabotaging his partner’s sex life, avoiding his mother, torturing junkies and stalking his ex-wife (Valerie Bertinelli), who, because this is a movie, still holds a bit of a torch for him too, for inexplicable reasons. His more together buddy and partner is the suave hobby jazz trumpeter and full-time ladies’ man Hazeltine (Billy Dee Williams). Obviously, the film spends more time with Barzack, because the audience might enjoy themselves otherwise.

I won’t really talk about the plot in any more depth, because we all know more or less what happens in this sort of thing.

Most 80s buddy cop movies play pretty badly to most modern audiences; police brutality, it appears, has stopped to be funny and entertaining for many people. While I’d be perfectly willing to defend more than a few of the genre brethren of Jack Smight’s Number One with a Bullet (not because but despite of their failings), the film at hand really isn’t worth it, for there’s nothing here that makes up for any of its politics. To wit: the action – apart from a short sequence concerning people attempting to flatten Williams – is perfunctory and really not up to the standards of craziness you’d hope for in a Cannon production like this. Barzack is completely insufferable, though the film seems to believe its audience will react with something more akin to “oh, look at that poor broken man”. Instead he’s making this viewer wish for the bad guys to win this time so Barzack will at least stop whining and leave his ex-wife in peace. Williams is wasted on being Carradine’s foil getting very little of interest to do for himself. Let’s not even talk about the plotting that leans on complete nonsense like the protagonists leaving a guy hanging from a building after they have tortured him, so that he can then be conveniently killed by a bad guy, leading to their well-deserved suspension we apparently are supposed to feel to be scandalous.

And then there’s what goes as “humour” for this one, clearly written without the secret knowledge that jokes are supposed to be funny.

It’s rather a disappointing movie coming from an experienced hired hand director like Smight.