Three Films Make A Post: His bride was EVERYTHING he thought she was…and an air-raid warden besides!

British Intelligence (1940): This propagandistic little spy thriller is actually rather good fun, if you can cope with the limits of its budget and scope. The script is a bit dry and does include not just one but three big didactic speeches about the coming of Hitler (this taking place during World War I to enable a protagonist who is a German spy), but it works as a decently constructed spy mystery.

The film also features fine performances by Margaret Lindsay as our semi-heroine and Boris Karloff. The latter clearly has a lot of fun changing his body language and accent depending on whomever he’s talking to. Which is also a rather neat embodiment of the shifting identity of the kind of double, triple, multiple agent he’s playing here.

The Tomorrow War (2021): That’s a lot more than you can say about this monumental SF action stinker by Chris McKay, a film with a script so unsure about what it is actually about it goes on for thirty minutes after its core plot and relationship has been resolved. Adding insult to the injury of wasting my time by being about half an hour too long, the world building is preposterous – apparently, this takes place in a world where you can easily organize a worldwide draft, but nobody but our heroes thinks about where the enemy is actually coming from - and makes very little sense (even with some timey-whimey hand-waving). I could forgive all of this, if the film’s production design were less blandly generic (the monsters are a particularly boring example of badly digested Giger) and its big action set pieces were a bit more interesting. The direction and production values aren’t bad of course, there’s too much money pumped into the thing, but they also lack any spark of creativity or joy.

Hi Diddle Diddle (1943): This screwball comedy by Andrew L. Stone is a Tarantino favourite, and it’s easy to see why. The moments of meta fourth wall breaking and the play with generic tropes of the style of comedy this is are obvious points to haul the man in – and they do work for me too – but there are also very funny performances by Adolphe Menjou, Pola Negri (as a terrifying Wagnerian opera singer, and Menjou’s wife, no less) and June Havoc. Stylistically, this is as playful as it gets, with many short sharp little asides that bring the film to mind as a guy who just had a brilliant idea and now must tell you all about it. This distractibility in approach could kill any comedy’s pacing stone dead, if not for the fact that most of the distractions the film finds are funny and charming as all get out, enhancing instead of distracting.

Short Film Friday: The Birch

Bullies and tree ladies and handholding, oh my!

In short: Troublesome Night 7 (2000)

Original title: 陰陽路七撞到正

A group of music video makers and a girl group – character names and who is playing them is really of no import given the total lack of characterisation here – come to a backwoods island belonging to Hongkong to “do an MTV”, as the subtitles call it. Because this is a Troublesome Nights movie, the island is haunted by Louis Koo, and the locals are weird and conservative. Very little happens.

Having made six Troublesome Nights movies during the course of two or three years, director Herman Yau apparently lost interest in further involvement in the series, leaving it in the hands of their producer Nam Yin. Nam apparently decided that directing lark is easy and took over the direction reigns for this entry in the series as well. He also decided to break with the anthology format of the earlier films and drag the idea for a single fifteen to twenty minute segment out to very (and I mean very) long ninety minutes. So expect a film with an improbable number of characters most of whom have really no function at all in the narrative apart from standing around during dialogue scenes and making everything take longer than it should. Which, what with the glacial tempo in which Nam drags out what little plot he has, I have to repeat is very long indeed.

Nam’s also clearly not much of a director, showing no interest in even the most minimal mood-building, and apparently believing some slow motion and sped up like the Flash scenes of Koo and his co-spirit do for a spooky time make. The humour, as far as I have been able to make out from a version with pretty poor subtitles, doesn’t exactly seem to be great, either, with badly-timed slapstick that makes the earlier films in the series look like Buster Keaton, and just a lot of rambling from the characters about little of interest or import.

Even though most of the earlier Troublesome Nights weren’t exactly masterpieces, they were clearly made with an eye on providing simple, straightforward entertainment, always at least trying their best with ghosts and jokes alike. Number seven, on the other hand, really feels like an attempt to be as boring as possible, providing none of the cheap thrills an audience must have hoped for, seemingly going out of its way to do as little that’s fun as possible.

The Spooky Family (1990)

Original title: 捉鬼合家歡

Hung Ping (Kent Cheng) is a wizard, exorcist and ghost hunter. Apparently, there’s not terribly much to do anymore in his kind of job, so he moonlights as a mad scientist, experimenting with the ghosts and jiangshi (hopping vampire) he seems to collect like Pokémon, all the while trying to cope with the chaos caused by his dropped on the head son (Cheung Lap-Kei). Why, just now he’s invented a machine with which a human should be able to control the body of a jiangshi! Because the family’s ghost servant (Peter Chan Lung) isn’t supernatural help enough, or something.

Bringing food on the table is Hung Ping’s wife (Pauline Wong Siu-Fung), adept at all kinds of Chinese fortune telling styles, though of a rather dominating temperament. Sometimes, their daughter (Alvina Kong Yan-Yin, I believe) substitutes there.

Things become rather more exciting for the family when a bunch of other wizards who hate our hero – for no reason the film ever bothers telling us – empower an already very powerful jiangshi (Kwan Kwok-Chung) of the “Copper Vampire” subtype (the best kind, we are informed) and put Hung Ping on the thing’s tracks. At first, Hung Ping and son manage to catch the thing, if with a lot of effort, but afterwards, the family seems to catch a real whiff of bad luck. As a matter of act, it’s magical bad luck caused by the jiangshi. Of course, the thing isn’t going to stay trapped forever either. Things become so bad, Hung Ping will even need the help of his “colleague sister” (Nina Li Chi). There’s a whole thing about the unspoken love between these two and the understandable jealousy of the wife, too. At least that’s the sort of problem easily solved in this time and place.

And if you now believe that Chin Yet-Sang’s Hong Kong horror comedy The Spooky Family plays any of this in a plot-centric manner, I’ve clearly gotten you quite confused. The post-Mr Vampire Hong Kong horror comedy genre isn’t terribly interested in plotting at the best of times, and in this particular case, the film is really a series of sketches, magical martial arts sequences and gags that uses the jiangshi business as a pretext for showing us all this rather than the film’s reason for being.

That’s not a bad thing in this particular case, for nearly every single scenes is pure Hong Kong style gold, full of bizarre ideas presented with greatest glee and joy, expectedly excellent wire and non-wire fu with choreography that hits the perfect spot between serious beat ups and slapstick, and an acting ensemble that does the physical parts with the same sharpness as the verbal comedy. They are so good at it, this is one of those comparatively rare Chinese language comedies where parts of the non physical comedy work for this non-Cantonese speaker, particularly when Pauline Wong and Nina Li get into it.

Also involved are various colours of magical light, Billy Lau in an absolutely hilarious cameo fight as Hung Ping’s old nemesis, “The Top Wizard”, using mostly gimmick variations of Western stage magic tricks and gadgets in his fights while dressed like a late 1980s pop star. It’s a thing to behold, but really just one of dozens of ideas and little and big jokes the film relentlessly throws at its audience: there’s the whole jiangshi remote control bit, the more traditional (for this kind of movie) binding and pin based fighting style of Colleague Sister, the literal magic of a happy family photo, a skit in which the Wife tricks a gang of really stupid cops, and so much martial arts slapstick of the highest order, only a dead person (sorry, jiangshi in my audience) could watch this one without laughing, and then laughing some more, and then contemplating why they don’t collect supernatural creatures.

In short: Action Man (1967)

Original title: Le soleil des voyous

After a pretty successful career as a criminal (mostly in Indochina, it seems), Denis Farrand (Jean Gabin) has retired into the more or less straight life as a club and restaurant owner, married a woman who wouldn’t approve of his getting back to his old business, and is getting bored out of his mind. A plan to rob the payroll of the US forces in France is percolating in his brain – it’s one of those opportunities that just drops into a guy’s lap – but he’s not quite bored enough yet to act on it.

That changes when Farrand’s refusal to allow the underlings of the local crime bosses to sell drugs in his restaurant leads to a reunion with his old good buddy and crony Jim Beckley (Robert Stack). Which is to say, Beckley is part of the group of goons sent to convince Farrand otherwise, but obviously changes his mind on seeing his old buddy in trouble. With a partner, the whole bank and payroll thing looks too tempting to resist, particularly since Farrand’s plan is pretty great.

So great, the heist itself isn’t what goes wrong in this particular heist movie – it’s the aftermath, when said local crime bosses as well as a female partner the deeply misogynist Farrand never wanted (Margaret Lee) start making trouble that’s going to be the problem here.

The English language title for Jean Delannoy’s heist movie is pretty damn absurd – neither the now apparently touchable Robert Stack nor Jean Gabin in his 60s are any kind of action men (though giving that epithet to Gabin at this stage in his career is rather funny), and the film only has a couple of scenes that would qualify as action scenes. In truth, this is a calm, focussed and collected heist movie that stages its (pretty imaginative and fun) heist with the same precision it uses to portray an aftermath that sees the result of Gabin’s calm calculations destroyed by all of those pesky little human things like emotions and plain stupidity.

On the way, we get quite a few scenes of Gabin doing that curious Gabin thing where phlegmatic acting suddenly feels as if it were incredibly emotionally expressive, some neat variations on gangster movie standards, as well as one of the finer bloodless heists I’ve seen on screen. There’s also a thematic line running through the film – embodied in Gabin’s Farrand as well as Lee’s Betty - where boredom is the true enemy of happiness, the inability to live a boring life like everybody else (when they’re lucky) leading to doom and destruction.

Music Monday: Borrowed Time Edition

Troublesome Night 4 (1998)

Original title: 陰陽路4與鬼同行

Various groups of Hongkong citizens who arrived on the same plane in Manila, Philippines encounter local ghosts and ghoulies in three slightly connected tales of horror.

In the first one, Alan (Timmy Hung Tin-Ming) is rather surprised when he learns the package his company has tasked him with to deliver contains human ashes; even more so when he realizes there’s a ghost haunting the ashes. On the more positive side, a friendly local from his company (Anthony Cortez) is very helpful indeed. So what when he seems to have sex with the ghost (unless Alan dreams it)?

Tale number two concerns honeymooners Wing (Louis Koo) and Apple (Pauline Suen) and what happens to them after Apple closes a hotel bible. After having heard some dire news about Wing’s fidelity from one of those random Chinese soothsayers apparently roaming Manila’s streets, and following a couple of weird omens Apple does her subconscious best to make her new ideas about Wing’s nature come true. Will he cheat on her with a really aggressive stripper with a – dumb – philosophic bent (Anna Capri)? Or will Apple learn a valuable lesson through the suffering of her husband?

Three asshats (played by Simon Lui, Wayne Lai and, umm, Cheung Tat-Ming, I believe) really want to use their vacation for, and I quote, “whoring”, but seem to have not completely surprising trouble finding anyone wanting to sleep with them even for money. Eventually, they end up in a very special nightclub, and learn a valuable lesson about the importance of having enough fingers to hack off and throw at monsters, as well as the deadly sins of Catholicism.

Clearly, having warned the public about the supernatural dangers occurring in Hongkong in the first three films of the anthology series, director Herman Yau and the recurring members of the cast needed a bit of a vacation in the Philippines, only to turn their touristy gaze of spooky comedy on the strange rituals of that most exotic of religions, Catholicism. Or rather, some aspects of the Filipino version of the same, which does put a bit more emphasis on actual bodily suffering in the here and now than most interpretations of the creed you’ll encounter in Europe.

This attempt really makes up large parts of the considerable charm of this entry into the series: there’s nothing quite as wonderful as seeing something you know pretty well yourself through the eyes of someone for whom it is not really a cultural basic, looking for exploitational value. Yau is pretty great at finding the weird, the exploitational and the interesting in this view of Filipino Catholicism (that of course will have little to do with actual Filipino Catholicism), turning out one of the most entertaining and strange films in the series (or rather, as much of the series as I’ve managed to see). He also provides practically every single ghost with its own green spot light, always at least trying to make his standard spooks actually spooky, as well as the jokes actually funny, neither of which is something you can always hope for in the Yau-less future of this series.

The first story is doing the least with the Filipino surroundings, telling a straightforward tale of love lost expressed through ghosts, but it’s a fine way to ease an audience into the film with things everyone around the world will pretty easily understand (don’t tell me about your weird culture that doesn’t know romantic love, please). There’s also the first appearance of on-screen nudity in the film – a first in the series, I believe - all of which will be provided by the Filipino actresses, some shaped like you’d expect in an exploitation movie, some doing the old “old hag-like nude woman” thing.

In the second tale, the film really starts approaching Catholic ideas of sin and fidelity, making rather a lot of peculiar bible quotes and ending up on an interpretation of Catholic sexual moral that has very little to do with actual Catholicism but works rather well as an exoticizing of Catholic morals, with quite a bit of nudity and general weirdness thrown in.

The final tale then really goes all out, featuring some traditional Filipino monsters, scenes where our protagonists throw their own hacked off fingers at their enemies to drive them away, a ghosts and ghoulies judicial sessions that explains their sins to the characters in a language they literally cannot understand, and ends up with a lot of spooky dream-like imagery as well as a handful of great bad jokes. Again, the interpretation of sin and punishment the film espouses is bizarre, but it’s bizarre in an absolutely charming and interesting manner that turns what would be a terribly – though not completely undeservedly – moralizing tale into the sort of whacked out weirdness that always makes my day. Teachable moment: if you’re a sleazy man, you really should try to find yourself actual prostitutes instead of monsters with a religious bent.

Three Films Make A Post: Fear comes to the surface

The Ice Road (2021): Look, I don’t expect a movie about Liam Neeson doing dangerous ice road trucking to save some miners to have a deep, involving script, but the series of painfully obvious clichés and embarrassing “characterisation” writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh offers here really doesn’t cut it. The writing’s so needlessly bad, you won’t be surprised to realize Hensleigh’s one of the main writers of sodding Armageddon; and unlike J.J. Abrams, he has apparently learned nothing in the decades between.

Compared to the writing, the action sequences are downright decent, but not so good as to be able to make up for how crap and boring the script is. Neeson phoning the phoned in script in doesn’t help, but you only could help this one out by having a hundred minute Nicolas Cage-style freak-out – and not even Cage would be putting that amount of effort into a film this bad.

What Lies Below (2020): Fish people still want to inseminate human women. Spoiler, I suppose? Anyway, speaking of films with weak scripts by their directors, this one always threatens to become good or interesting and to explore any of the themes it just touches on the surface a little, before running away afraid of its own courage. So if you’re looking for a film that explores the horrific elements of budding sexuality, the rifts even in happy families, or the destructive abilities of a really hot guy, or even one that just tells its tale of theoretically fucked up interspecies sex in the appropriately sordid manner, this ain’t it. I’d love to say what Braden R. Duemmler’s movie actually is. Alas, the film itself doesn’t seem to know what to do with material rich in resonance and can’t even manage to get its easy (given the set-up) #metoo points in. Let’s not even speak of finding an identity beyond mishandled horror and suspense sequences, and a tendency to mess up scenes by showing too little. An extra raised eyebrow to casting a grown woman (Ema Horvath) closer to thirty than to sixteen as your sixteen year old lead.

Vampira and Me (2012): After the horrors of the first two movies in this entry, Ray Greene’s loving and exhaustive documentary about Maila Nurmi aka Vampira’s short time in the spotlight feels particularly wonderful: it’s a film made by a guy with great love and personal knowledge of his subject, with a great ability for digging out archive material as well as an eye for the use of found footage. Greene does great work putting his friend Nurmi into her proper historical context, arguing for her importance and import in a convincing and non-manipulative manner, and painting a picture of her life and times through rare interview footage of a very intelligent and charming elderly Nurmi and all those enticing and interesting details he managed to dig out. One could argue that Greene’s a bit too close to his subject but the film seems so driven by genuine compassion and love, critical distance just isn’t the point. Bonus points for avoiding the talking head effect.

The film’s only weakness is that the writing of Greene’s narration can tend to the overblown (“Midnight struck hard. And then it wouldn’t leave.”), but it doesn’t get quite this silly often enough this would threaten to overwhelm everything that’s great about the film.

When It's That Kind of a Day, Post Some Weird Fiction

In short: Total Recall (1990)

Truth be told, I’ve never been the greatest admirer of Paul Verhoeven’s US films. Sure, there are Robocop and Flesh & Blood, but even those I respect rather more than I do love them. My problem with this phase is its excessiveness, or rather, its excessiveness in exactly those aspects I least enjoy in a movie: camp so thick and aggressive it is basically weaponized, sledgehammer satire loud and shrill and aimed at all the easiest targets, usually paired with some of the old ultra-violence and the sleaze I do enjoy to just shout down anything about the films that might be subtle. The problem with this kind of excess for me is how tiresome it quickly becomes. Sure, the first half hour of Verhoeven shouting incessantly into my face is entertaining in a freakshow kind of way but afterwards my mind and attention start to wander, and after an hour, I find myself actually bored by all the noise.

Despite probably being the most controlled of Verhoeven’s film of this time, I can’t say I feel terribly differently about this adaptation of a (very) short Philip K. Dick story. For my taste, the film’s Dickian moments are drowned out by Verhoeven’s excess, the tendency to shout plot beats instead of simply hitting them, the terrible action movie one-liners Schwarzenegger spouts (like the constructed everyman he’s supposed to be, right?). There is, to be fair, a lot of imagination on screen when it comes to production design and worldbuilding, and the SF action movie meets spy conspiracy thriller plot is well enough constructed, it is just all drowned out by the soup of visual and aural noise Verhoeven builds up. That situation is of course not improved when what should be the film’s human anchor is represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of an actor. Schwarzenegger’s line delivery is at its worst here, and his attempts at presenting as a human are deeply unconvincing.

The action is of course as competently realized as possible, but I can’t say I ever felt emotionally or viscerally involved (re-)watching any of it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,action,paul verhoeven,arnold schwarzenegger,michael ironside,sharon stone,ronny cox

The Vikings (1958)

Warning: there’s more implied backstory and story rape in this one than on-screen in most pinkus

After Orson Welles and a pretty cool animation have schooled us about some Viking Facts™ – few of which were close to historical facts even when this was made – and the film has prologued us with fifteen minutes of information it’ll need to repeat anyway, because most of the characters have no clue about what’s going on in their lives, the film slowly comes to the actual meat of its tale.

Ragnar Lodbrok (Ernest Borgnine, I kid you not) rules a bunch of Vikings as their rapist king, helped out by his pretty-faced (and also rapist) son LL Einar (Kirk Douglas, who was actually a couple of months older then Borgnine, and not as you know not pretty). They rape, they pillage, they terrorize the British Isles, you know the deal. Three, ahem, I mean two decades ago, Ragnar captured himself a baby slave named Eric (now grown up to be played by Tony Curtis). Eric, as we know thanks to the pointless prologue but the characters will have to find out about throughout the film, is actually the product of one of Ragnar’s rape sprees, his mother being the former Queen of Northumbria. He’s also not at all friendly with his secret half-brother. Early in the movie, he’s going so far as attacking Einar with a falcon who comes from the Fulci school of falcons and promptly mutilates one of Einar’s eyes, also making him unpretty (the film indeed suggesting that Kirk Douglas was pretty before).

Attempts of getting rid of Eric afterwards are thwarted by Odin, who’d really rather want the film to be longer than fifty minutes. Relations do stay strained, though, and once Einar kidnaps Welsh princess Morgana (Janet Leigh) and both men fall for her, things certainly don’t improve. Morgana does prefer Eric (one supposes that him not wishing to rape her helps there too), even more so once he absconds with her in the direction of the British Isles. It could be the beginning of a wonderful love affair, if not for the fact that Morgana is promised to the – decidedly nasty – King of Northumbria, Aella (Frank Thring doing a wonderful Vincent Price imitation), and is not one to go back on the word of her father. Lots and lots of further melodramatic reversals of fate happen, until Eric and Einar even team up to rescue Morgana from Northumbria, before they go back to try and kill each other again.

After this, do I even have to say that Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings is a deeply silly movie, as well as the kind of film where playing a drinking game based on historical inaccuracies could be downright deadly? But then, who goes into a movie where Ernest Borgnine plays the father of Kirk Douglas, and all two, plus Tony Curtis (who is also meant to be kinda macho), are supposed to be Vikings expecting any kind of historical realism? This is the realm of pure adventure fantasy, and really needs to be approached as taking place on that much better plane.

Once you’ve put things into the proper perspective, you actually might get quite a bit of fun out of the whole affair. Sure, some contemporary tastes will certain shy away from the amount of sexual violence that must have happened in the backstory and which Einar would just love to commit onscreen. The film’s very heavily implying that Ragnar and Einar both can’t get it up properly with a willing partner and even have love and violence all mixed up in their tiny little brains. I’m honestly not at all sure how the filmmakers got away with that one.

However, the film is at least not pro rape at all (not necessarily a matter of course in 50s cinema), but clearly implying the problem with Ragnar and Einar isn’t that they’re not Christian, or barbarians (most Christian non-barbarians in the film are not much better going by modern, hell, even 50s morals than these two, in fact) but that they’re rapists.

This is of course all background matter for the film, and not even I would argue this is in any way, shape or form its main interest.

Which brings us to its main interest: rousing, swashbuckling adventure full of silly ideas (just look at the infamous boat rowing scene for the last one), cast with actors who really do know how to throw themselves into all kinds of on-screen derring-do. Fleischer does stage the big action set pieces very nicely indeed, making great use of the full Technicolor screen particular in the last half hour or so, and generally finds something interesting to film even when guys aren’t hitting each other with swords and axes.

The production design, while historically dubious, is often rather wonderful, too. There has clearly been some love put into the little details that make something look more impressive, so we get things like every Viking shield having its own, individual ornamentation and many other worldbuilding details hidden and not so hidden in the backgrounds. This helps make all the silly adventure and melodrama feel rooted, and provides The Vikings with quite a bit of visual magic even after all these decades.

In short: A Dark Path (2020)

Abi (Makenna Guyler) is accompanying her sister Lilly (Mari Beaseley) to the hen party of one of Lilly’s friends. Because it’s apparently cheaper to fly out to get drunk than simply get drunk in the UK, the thing takes place in what I will from now on call Unnamed Eastern European Country (UEEC). Abi’s a bit of a party pooper, according to her sister, for a very bad experience that would have turned out even worse if she hadn’t found a very useful propensity for violence in herself, has made her rather careful when it comes to letting herself go completely.

The morning after all drinks are drunk and puke and other bodily fluids have been removed, the sisters get into their car to make their way to the airport the flight’s gonna be leaving from. Alas, Lilly has broken their car’s satnav while drunk, and Unnamed Eastern European Country has no cell service available anywhere, apparently. People don’t seem to live there, either. So, eventually, the sisters find themselves stranded in the deep dark woods of UEEC at night. Which would be bad enough by itself, but they have somehow managed to find the monster infested deep dark woods. Well, at least there are some other people with British accents with the same problems around.

For a film with as many flaws as it has, Nicholas Winter’s (who is also responsible for the script) A Dark Path is still a perfectly watchable little horror movie. While the film is unwilling or unable to situate its sister characters in anything that feels even like the horror movie version of an actual place – you’d need details and specificity for that where the script uses vague hand-waving motions – its character writing isn’t half bad, turning out a pair of sisters that seem flawed yet likeable in a believable enough manner. As always, this secures the film at least some viewer interest in the fate of these characters, not exactly turning things extremely  but at least somewhat interesting.

The two leads, particularly Guyler who has to carry most of the second half of A Dark Path alone, are certainly the best thing about the film, providing tension where the script and the direction can’t quite on their own, and making the most out of the moments when the script actual contains concrete emotional beats.

The film’s pretty well structured too, clearly not believing in filler and coming in at the 75 minutes its simple plot needs.

Rather less great is the utterly terrible monster suit. To be fair, the film keeps the thing out of sight for as long as it can, but it still looks shoddy even when only shown as a shadow, with suit acting and sound design to match, making the third act less convincing as the acting and Winter’s capable enough suspense direction deserve.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,nicholas winter,makenna guyler,mari beaseley,horror

Music Monday: Secret Plan Edition

Unstoppable (2018)

aka Raging Bull

Original title: 성난황소

Once, Kang Dong-cheol (Ma Dong-seok) was a rather successful gang boss known for his very effective fists (which nearly become like unto a thing of iron). But marrying civilian Ji-soo (Song Ji-hyo) – described as “an angel” but clearly the kind of angel who does carry a flaming sword and a pretty sharp tongue too – convinced him to retire. Now, he’s in the fish wholesale business, and overcompensates for his past by acting so meekly, he’s letting himself being pushed around by idiots he’d have (deservedly) wrecked as his old self. Much to Ji-soo’s pained disapproval, Dong-cheol has also become a bit of a glutton for putting money he doesn’t really have into shady projects that’ll never pay off.

The peaceful life ends when a series of chance happenings points Gi-tae (Kim Sung-oh), the psychopathic leader of a human trafficking (and illegal plastic surgery) ring, in the direction of Ji-soo. When he and his gang kidnap her, Dong-cheol has to get back to some of his old form and manner to rescue her; while Gi-tae should probably look for a better rock to hide under.

Obviously, Kim Min-ho’s Unstoppable is a movie built on some of the rules of the Taken-alike. For my tastes, it’s a particular good example of that action thriller sub-genre that makes efforts to get rid of some its problems and seems generally less mean-spirited as many of the (often highly entertaining, don’t get me wrong) films in which Liam Neeson punches foreigners with his gigantic former CIA fists.

There is, for one, very little punching of foreigners, South Korean villains being well and good enough for our hero, or rather, his fists. There’s also comparatively little torture on screen, most of it ending up with threats and bad jokes, the film believably working on the assumption that Ma punching you and giving you a patented dead eyed stare should really be just as effective.

The film also does its best to get rid of some of the dramatically lame conventions of its sub-genre. So we actually get introduced to Ji-soo as a character before she’s kidnapped, turning her into a lot more than a quest object in the process; and later on, she actually gets her own sub-plot in which she tries to escape her kidnappers in some of the best suspense sequences in the film, at once making the stakes more emotionally involving for the audience (did anyone ever care for Liam’s “Little Girl” as a person?), and giving Ji-soo as a character room to breath.

The three leads are doing a pretty great job: Ma, as mentioned, has the whole business about becoming a force of (punching) nature while staring at you threateningly down pat, but he’s also believably vulnerable when he needs to be, selling the goofy meek guy who falls for stupid plans just as well as the tougher self. Song’s note-perfect as his sometimes beleaguered, sometimes charmed wife, getting to nag without becoming the “nagging wife” trope, and showing a lot of strength and guts when the situation calls for it, making the question why a tough alpha type gangster would want to give up his old life and personality for love more or less a no-brainer and selling her as an actual person who is going to do something to save herself too.

Last but not least, Kim Sung-oh’s performance as the crazy kidnapper boss is fantastically overacted in the best manner, completely vile, sometimes in a funny way, always genuinely punchable and sometimes just as genuinely frightening. It’s pretty much how you’d imagine the Joker to be without make-up (and if DC ever wanted to cast anyone but a white guy in the role, they have the perfect candidate right here). The actor sells Gi-tae as an actual threat, too, and very much as the guy you’d most want to see get punched out by Ma. In fact, waiting for the guy getting to get his lights punched out is one of the great joys of the film at hand.

Tonally, the film’s very typical of South Korean action and thriller cinema, with a lot of comedy elements involved but staged so that the humour never gets in the way of the serious business, but actually grounds it as comic relief is supposed to do but nearly never does. Given Kim Min-ho’s general hand with action and suspense sequences in Unstoppable, it’s probably a good thing too.

Three Films Make A Post: Record it all, I want you to know why we did this

Scarlett (2020): The titular Scarlett (Melanie Stone) has to use all the asskicking techniques her spy daddy taught her when he is kidnapped. And whenever John Lyde’s film gets around to showing that, the film is a perfectly decent and pretty fun bit of cheapo action, shot with a degree of verve and with enough reversals in situations to keep interest up. Alas, the film suffers from a series of pointless flashback sequences which try to hit home about Scarlett and Dad’s relationship what a viewer will have understood in the first couple of scenes, destroying pacing and patience in the progress.

La cueva aka In Darkness We Fall (2014): A Spanish group of annoying assholes and nitwits on vacation manage to stumble into a cave and get lost there. Unfortunately, one of them carries a camera, so we have to suffer through eighty minutes of bickering, cannibalism, shouting and moaning, POV-style.

I know, I know, “people are the worst” nihilism is always a thing to bank on in horror, but in the case of Alfredo Montero’s film, people aren’t the worst because the film makes a convincing argument concerning this, but because its script makes them perfectly unlikeable and annoying; they fall towards cannibalism with the thorough enthusiasm of a conservative cutting social budgets. The characters also act like idiots throughout, even once they’ve gotten lost never bothering to mark where they’ve already looked for an exit,not  trying to preserve water instead of starting on the cannibal holocaust, and so on and so forth.

Untitled Horror Movie (2021): And welcome to the present of POV horror, another Zoom horror movie brought to you by The Pandemic™. Nick Simon’s movie is trying to find its own niche as a very meta kind of horror comedy, where actors from a fictional The C&W-style urban fantasy series trying to shoot a horror movie via Zoom before the inevitable axing of their show (and conjuring up a demon in the process) are indeed played by actors actually working in that field. The humour isn’t very deep or complex, and a lot of the Hollywood jokes are exactly the ones you’d expect, but the actors clearly have fun making light of themselves and their world. The film is also well directed, generally doing at least one thing that must have been at least partially difficult to realize under lockdown per scene. Even though the horror elements won’t keep anyone awake at night, they’re not boring either.

Friday Short Film Rec: The Cunning Man

In short: The Comancheros (1961)

After arresting professional gambler – and man with an awesome name – Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) for killing a man in a duel in Louisiana, Texas Ranger Jake Cutter (John Wayne) repeatedly finds himself pushed into teaming up with the guy. Especially once the Ranger he gets the mission to break up a very particular gang of arms dealers known as Comancheros that rile up (and arm) the Comanches. The usual stuff about growing respect and understanding happens, of course.

This John Wayne (and Stuart Whitman) vehicle is the final movie directed by Michael Curtiz, director of many a great movie and some that annoyed me considerably (and may still be great movies if you’re not me) and it is very much a mixed bag. It’s certainly  one of those Westerns that doesn’t play very well today ideologically, its crappy treatment of Native Americans having a certain whiff of conviction instead of being a mere genre trope, which doesn’t really surprise given its star’s real life politics.

Structurally, it’s a bit of a mess, often playing more as a series of scenes connected by very tenuous strands than a proper narrative or a character piece. On the positive side, at least half of those single scenes are very strong indeed, particularly whenever the film posits Wayne - at this stage of his career still not a great actor but one who had gotten very comfortable with the possibilities afforded by his considerable screen presence - as a guy who is actually hiding quite a bit of wisdom about matters of the human heart he has won through hard experience under his tough guy exterior. There’s some good Western action too, though the Indian attacks tend to the overly generic, and Curtiz doesn’t always seem to have the staging as well in hand as he could.

The film is also spending too little time on its most interesting character, Pilar Graile (Ina Balin), the daughter of the Comanchero leader as well as the instant love of Whitman’s life and the problems of being an independent (clearly raised Libertarian, poor kid) woman falling in love but wanting to keep control of her life. Balin is great with what the film gives her, really making much of the fact the script isn’t portraying her character as a shrew nor as an idiot once she’s properly in love. I really want a remake that’s all about her.

Eye in the Labyrinth (1972)

Original title: L'occhio nel labirinto

Following a dream in which she sees him stabbed to death in somewhat labyrinthine surroundings, Julie (Rosemary Dexter), starts to investigate the disappearance of her psychiatrist and lover Luca (Horst Frank). Nobody else, not even his colleagues, seem all that bothered by his disappearance to places unknown, but then, everything we learn about the guy’s character throughout the movie suggests they are most probably throwing a secret party celebrating his absence when Julie’s not looking.

Something’s really fishy about Luca’s fate, though. For one, an armed guy with a gun appears and attempts to smack Luca’s whereabouts out of Julie, something that only strengthens her resolve to find out what’s going on. Not enough to get her to go to the police, mind you, for she has visa issues. Once our heroine manages to find some curious clues leading to a small coastal town where Luca might have gone to, things turn really strange. There are repeated, awkward, attempts at Julie’s life, while her most helpful contact is a gropy disgraced American gangster (Adolfo Celi) who now lives in the cellar of an orphanage. Every other man she meets is a sleaze and/or a voyeur, too.

Eventually, Julie finds out that Luca stayed for some time at a villa on a nearby island where a group of weird bohemians flock around a female millionaire, but what he did there and where he went are quite different questions.

Internally, I had Eye in the Labyrinth’s director Maria Caiano flagged as the kind of Italian genre director who managed to follow every fad and make decent and entertaining but not spectacular movies in it. This giallo, though, is very special indeed. While it is absolutely fulfilling its genre quota of nudity (Julie does tend to undress at the slightest provocation) and violence, it also really hits a wonderful point of low budget surrealism: everything around our heroine takes on the visual qualities of a labyrinth, be it the run-down building that nearly collapses on her head at the beginning, the orphanage or even the villa; everything is filmed with a sense of slight dislocation. In fact, there’s so much of it, the film doesn’t even have to bother with a trip scene when somebody takes actual LSD.

There’s also a wonderful thread of paranoia running through the film. It’s not just that everyone here is a shit heel with no ethical values (and Luca probably was the worst of them all, turning Julie’s search for him more than just a little ironic and sad even before she finds out the identity of the killer). Motives are shifting and dubious too, as are genders, sexual interests and power structures between people. It’s a world where you can’t be sure of anyone, and where even the strange orphan boy who might be your best witness is also a sleazy little voyeur watching you while you sleep (of course in the nude, because Julie does everything in the nude). Julie is confronted with an astonishing amount of sexual harassment of one kind or the other too. The film’s never quite saying that this sort of pressure on a young woman is one of the shittiest elements of the society it takes place in and may have dire consequences for everyone involved, deforming trust and human connections in the worst possible ways, but it is most certainly suggesting it, at least when you’re watching it today.

Of course, human connection and trust twisted and deformed, and how this twists and deforms the human subject does seem to be the main theme running through Eye in the Labyrinth – apart from nudity and violence, of course – with nearly every scene, sometimes in an underhanded and tricky way you’ll only get later on like the business with a witness and a car, making a practical demonstration of some of these things, until stabbing someone to death seems rather more like a logical reaction to circumstances than madness.

A small summer break

I'm resting my tentacles for a couple of days. Normal service around here will resume on Wednesday, July the 14th.

Music Monday: Something Something Outside Edition

Blind Witness (2019)

aka (the even more generic) The Witness

Original title: 見えない目撃者 (Mienai Mokugekisha)

Just when she has graduated from her police training as the best person in her class, Natsume (Riho Yoshioka) causes a car accident that leaves her blind and kills her teenage brother. So much for the police career, too, obviously, though there are no other legal troubles following for her, apparently. The PTSD and the loss of her sight is gonna be punishment enough.

Three years later, when the main part of the film is set, Natsume is clearly still trying to cope with what she caused, and feeling pretty useless and helpless. However, she’s also rather courageous when angry and exits a row with her mother by simply walking off with her seeing eye dog, having to cross half of her city to get home. On the way, she witnesses what she believes to be the abduction of a teenage girl. The police – clearly not understanding that blind people in movies are all at least half of the time Daredevil – are rather sceptical of her tale at first. They do check up on a second witness – soon to be high school drop-out Haruma (Mahiro Takasugi) – but what he’s telling them doesn’t really support the important parts of Natsume’s tale, so they drop the case, such as it is.

Natsume knows what she’s heard (and smelled and etc), though, and has a pretty great investigative mind to boot, so she’s starting on an investigation of her own, soon getting Haruma with the program, digging up enough material to at least convince veteran policeman Kimura (Tomorowo Taguchi) that there’s a series of kidnappings of teenage girls in the sex trade happening – perhaps even something still worse than that.

As regular readers will know, I’m not terribly fond of the serial killer thriller sub-genre, a part of the thriller and horror genres that has always felt terribly limited in scope and possibilities to me (though there are of course exceptions to the rule), with movie serial killers also simply not being all that scary or interesting to me.

Having said that, I enjoyed Junichi Mori’s remake of the South Korean film Blind (which I haven’t seen, so can’t compare) just fine. It’s not exactly doing much new with its genre, but I found myself appreciating its unhurried pace, the competent and until the final act consciously undramatic performances, as well as the willingness it shows to change protagonists for a bit when it doesn’t make sense for our amateur detectives to find a clue but for their official ally.

Once we get to it, the killer and his ritual are perfectly workable stuff, rather more realistic than some of the very convoluted modes typical of the genre, yet feeling threatening enough. Until the final act, it’s all presented very calmly, with a couple of well done stalking scenes to keep the audience engaged, but mostly focussed on the investigation – where the calm tone fits very well.

Of course, things become less calm for the final act, but the tonal shift itself is realized as calmly and efficiently as most of the film. The series of only mildly over the top suspense scenes that ensues is not terribly plausible, but definitely well done as well as pleasantly gruesome, leaving the film on a high note.

Three Films Make A Post: An Old Man and his Mule Go West

A Perfect Enemy (2020): Don’t you just hate it when a film clearly thinks it is oh so very very clever, but actually confuses cleverness with being contrived and far-fetched? Case in point (at least for me) is this example of the type by Kike Maíllo, one of those films that thinks they are twisty and formally complex, when in fact they are a bit tedious and increasingly obvious. The plot, such as it is, would – after judicious rewrites to get rid of the faux cleverness - have made for a nice thirty minute episode of something like Inside No. 9, but is stretched out to ninety minutes full of pointless detail and the film shouting “look how clever I am!”.

There’s a nice, scenery chewing lead performance by Athena Strates without whose efforts the whole thing would become completely tedious, but her counterpart Tomasz Kot approaches his role so low key, she might as well not have bothered, while their surroundings scream of technical achievement in the filmmaking arts without any idea how to properly apply it.

Terror and Black Lace aka Terror y encajes negros (1986): Keeping with the tediousness, how about this sleazy Mexican number that starts as a sex comedy and continues in that way for way too long, until it turns into a mock giallo about a serial killing hair fetishist. From time to time, there’s a genuinely creepy scene popping up, and the hetero pervs among us will not complain about all the ways the film comes up with to show off attractive women with little or nothing on. Alas, even the latter gets tedious after a while, while the former’s mostly used to keep the audience awake through all the tedium. If I were a nicer guy, I’d probably suggest that Luis Alcoriza is trying to satirize the Mid-80s Mexican bourgeoisie like a cut-rate Chabrol during the sex comedy parts, but Chabrol was never this relentlessly boring.

An added minus is that every single character here is thoroughly unlikeable, either a serial killer, an abusive husband, or women trading sex for material goods, with no complexity to help a viewer tolerate them.

Abduction (2019): Last but certainly best today is this direct to home entertainment science fiction and action movie by the dependable Ernie Barbarash, starring Scott Adkins and Andy On. Adkins is laying it on a bit too thick this time around for my tastes, but then, the action is surrounded by a lot of weird to totally cracked alien abduction business that’s at least partially expressed through the language of martial arts cinema (so the aliens are really into chi-driven dimensional travel because this is a Chinese production after all), so subtlety clearly isn’t asked for. If you think that sounds a bit dumb but also rather a lot of fun, you have the film pegged perfectly; and if you’re like me, and always wanted your cheap but well-staged action (Barbarash and his leads know what they’re doing in this regard) paired with affordable interdimensional shenanigans (see On run through the same patch of park again and again, trapped in a loop, watch Adkins realize he’s been abducted for decades etc), you’re going to enjoy this just fine.

When Ian Met Ray

 Ian Fleming interviewing a drunk Raymond Chandler. Found via the great Greil Marcus.

A Thrilling Development: Kiss Me and Die (1974)

aka “The Savage Curse”

“Thriller”, season 2, episode 3

For some general remarks about the British TV show “Thriller” and its stylistic setup, please take a look at my first write-up of an episode.

American Robert Stone (George Chakiris) supposedly comes to one of those small English villages for a bit of rest and relaxation and a bit of photographing. He’s rather good at becoming friendly with the people living in the village too, quickly and effectively becoming a part of the local pub culture. But then, in truth he isn’t a tourist, but is working in the investigative business, so he is supposed to be good at these things. At the moment, Robert is on a rather personal mission, looking for his brother who was last seen in this charming little hamlet before he mysteriously vanished.

Robert is quickly drawn to the mysteries of the local manor house (always a good place to look for the creepy stuff when you’re in the UK). As his brother before him, he is very quickly smitten with Dominie Lanceford (Jenny Agutter), who is rich, utterly charming in a gothic romance heroine way, and seems just a little bit eccentric. Her uncle Jonathan (Anton Diffring), on the other hand, while perfectly polite, even friendly, is clearly crazy as the bird of your choice, apparently spending most of his day exhorting the virtues of Edgar Allan Poe to whoever wanders near him. Given the Poe connection, I’m sure there’s nothing problematic at all going to happen at a masked ball, and taking up the offer of some amontillado is certainly not dangerous at all.

But then, one of the charms of this particular episode of thriller is that Robert is completely clueless about Poe’s work – he clearly hasn’t even seen the Corman movies – and rightfully seen as a barbarian not knowing some of the best parts of his own culture by Jonathan. Therefore he is a perfectly valid target for Poe-style shenanigans, as well as the sort of main character whose denseness really makes a Poe reader groan. Detective or not, Robert’s a bit of an idiot, not just for repeating – doppelganger-like, as Poe would approve of – his brother’s doomed love affair but also for not taking a look at Poe’s work even though he quickly starts to think that something is very wrong with the Lancefords.

Despite of its typically low budget, the episode/film, as directed by John Sichel does make quite a bit of the Poe connection, putting effort if not money into the most excellent masked ball as well as the expected premature burial. This is also one of the Thriller entries that spends quite a bit of time in outside locations in its first acts, and so can work in some rather good suspense sequences on actual film stock.

This one’s really rather lovely, with fine early work by Agutter, a cracking gothic villain turn by Diffring, and a plot that clearly enjoys playing with Poe and gothic tropes.