In short: The Misfits (2021)

A bunch of, well, misfits on a Robin Hood trip (Nick Cannon, Jamie Chung, Rami Jaber and Mike Angelo) attempt to rope experienced conman Richard Pace (Pierce Brosnan) into their newest project of stealing terrorist gold. Even though his archenemy Schultz (Tim Roth) is involved with the terrorists, Pace is rather reticent doing anything for no monetary gain. Fortunately he changes his mind when he learns that his estranged do-gooder daughter Hope (Hermione Corfield) is part of the gang. So, after more than half an hour of feet dragging, a heist does eventually ensue.

Poor old Renny Harlin’s newest movie The Misfits has some major problems. Harlin himself isn’t one of them – while this isn’t one of his more interesting and stylish directing jobs, he does his best to get picture postcard shots of Dubai, Pierce Brosnan and the two or three fast cars that were in the budget.

Alas, he has to work from a terrible script by Kurt Wimmer and Robert Henny (who both have written some terrible films in their time, with a couple of decent ones sprinkled in) that seems to have little idea on how to properly structure and pace a heist movie. Sure, as with nearly every heist film made in the last decade or so, the Fast and Furious films have clearly become structural models, so one can’t go into a film like this expecting old school heist movie beats, but if you aim for being a big fat action heist movie with cars, you actually need to deliver the action early and often and find a way to sandwich the character work in-between. The Misfits seems to have been made in the belief that such a thing is easy, and so of course drags when it should move and moves when it should take a breather. It certainly doesn’t help that the film can’t actually afford big set pieces, and is simply not clever enough to then come up with clever ones it can actually afford.

Instead, there’s quite a bit of absolutely terrible comedy, drab character work, and a heist without tension with “twists” you can at best shrug about.

There’s also the little problem that an ensemble movie like this actually needs a fully capable ensemble: while Brosnan is certainly not unwilling to work, he also seems rather too conscious he is slumming. Chung and Corfield are perfectly decent presences throughout, at least. Roth – the villain with the most screen time and theoretically a great actor for this sort of material -seems too bored to do much whatsoever, and Cannon’s performance is simply terrible, not just because he has to deliver most of the “funny” lines (though that certainly isn’t helping). Angelo and Jaber for their parts are just kinda there, doing nothing any man-shaped piece of cardboard couldn’t do just as well. All of which makes it rather difficult to root for or against anyone here.

The Cloning of Clifford Swimmer (1974)

Clifford Swimmer (Peter Haskell in a wonderfully punchable performance) is the living embodiment of all the shittiest bits of 70s masculinity: he’s egotistical, self-serving, and much dumber than he clearly believes to be. He’s also emotionally abusive towards his wife Janet (Sheree North), undermining her wherever and however he can; obviously, his little stepson Todd (Lace Kerwin) does not fare any better. At least Cliff seems not to use physical violence on the both of them, for whatever that’s worth under the circumstances.

Despite his humongous ego and even bigger mouth, Swimmer is also a bit of a loser in his job, where his only real success seems to be that he’s having an affair with his assistant Madeline (Sharon Farrell). Though even she’s getting rather impatient with his unwillingness to commit. Why anyone would want to be chained to this asshole is anybody’s guess, there. Though, to be fair again, she is his chosen squeeze in his one day plan of just running away, buying a boat in the Caribbean and living the lazy life there, which is more thought than his family gets.

However, because it is the 70s, even macho shitheels like Swimmer go to a therapist. As it turns out, Dr Laszlo (Keene Curtis) moonlights as a mad scientist and thinks this particular patient is just the man he could use for an experiment in cloning, so Swimmer could run off and leave his family none the wiser with a clone taking his place. As it happens, the clone has parts of Swimmer’s memories and personality, but also shows all the kindness and sense the original must have lost ages ago, the kind of a guy a family could learn to love. Of course, continuing his shitty streak, Original Swimmer does leave his better version and family in debt to a loan shark he uses to actually finance his running away; and the Caribbean life doesn’t turn out to great either, because Swimmer’s taking himself with him wherever he goes.

This ABC TV movie was part of a late night series of cheaply produced films under the “The Wide World of Mystery” umbrella. The line was clearly budgeted quite a bit lower than your Movie of the Weeks at the time, and so TV cameras and a handful of studio sets is all the film at hand has to work with. Director Lela Swift does her best with what she’s got, but then, she directed quite a bit of TV in this budget bracket, like a lot of “Dark Shadows” episodes for Dan Curtis, so she was probably used to suffering, and had experience with making do, and so manages to make the film as visually appealing as she could under the circumstances.

So the film’s actual star has to be the script by George Lefferts. It’s a weird concoction, really, a mixture of an angry critique of a very specific type of 70s male shithead with a bit of low budget science fiction and a couple of noir tropes treated seriously. It’s not the most surprising thing you’ll ever encounter, but like Swift’s direction, Lefferts’ script is crafted well enough to work, particularly when the very decent acting ensemble get their fingers on it. Things are also just weird enough to be fun, elements like the wonderful dead pan junk science and the film’s non sequitur twist ending suggesting a certain degree of irony from the filmmakers that’s never getting in the way of the things they try to treat seriously, namely the portrait of a shitty man in decline.

In short: Run Coyote Run (1987)

A Interpol agent with psychic powers (Renee Harmon) is looking for the killers of her sister. Her investigation – which mostly consists of hanging around various places in California and having psychic flashes to other movies – is in turns hindered by her grumpy old man boss, mob goons (one of whom is also a biker preacher with a hankering for a TV ministry), voices from the off, and others. What others? The film ain’t telling, that’s for sure, and trying to figure it out will turn you into a Lovecraft protagonist.

Anyone approaching this particular case of filmmaking should keep in mind as a safety measure: do not try to understand, just let it flow over you. I did, and I’ve got the headache to prove it.

This is a long lost product of the frightening creative partnership between James “Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!!!” Bryan and Renee “Frozen Scream” Harmon. Clearly, these two bonded on their shared hatred for logic and common sense, and boy does the film show. This is at once a sequel to and a remake of the duo’s Lady Streetfighter (obviously not to be confused with Sister Streetfighter with Etsuko Shihomi) in which Harmon plays the sister of that film’s main character, as well as said main character herself in the multitude of scenes taken from it. Because that’s not enough to turn this into the true sort of patchwork movie this is going for, there are also three or four other movies with Bryan and/or Harmon involvement used as sources for non-flashback parts of the movie. Consequently, there’s a strip joint in the film that is at once situated in the late 70s and the late 80s worlds of highly impoverished sets; Harmon ages and de-ages in rapid succession; a climactic fight scene pretends that dressing up two guys in the new footage similarly to two completely different looking guys from old footage will make it possible to just cut two bad fights together to form one ultra-bad one; the soundtrack contains pearls like a joke synth version of a certain spaghetti western theme, as well as what I can only call an assortment of random stuff.

There’s so much of this high effort low effort nonsense involved in the film, you have to ask yourself if there wasn’t an easier way to make a movie than to cut bits and pieces of new footage and scenes from half a dozen other films together and pretend it’s a narrative (there are even plot twists which make as little sense as anything else in here, of course). Only Doctor Frankenstein can understand.

Music Monday: Been Edition

Dead of Winter (1987)

The luck of struggling actress/waitress Julie Rose (Mary Steenburgen) finally seem to turn. Her newest audition with the friendly Mr Murray (Roddy McDowell) goes swimmingly. Apparently, the lead actress of the project Mr Murray’s clients are shooting has very suddenly left the film, and they are basically searching for a lookalike who can take on the job as quickly as possible. Julie very much does look alike, apparently.

There’s only a screentest with the director somewhere in a mansion in the cold middle of nowhere in Canada to go through before fame and fortune come around. Once our heroine has arrived at said mansion, things with the director, one Joseph Lewis (Jan Rubes) go rather well too. That is, until Julie finds herself drugged and minus one finger. It’s not in the service of extreme method acting either, but part of an overcomplicated blackmail plot in which Murray and Lewis want to use Julie as a pawn, with rather dubious chances of survival for her afterwards.

A melodramatic and rather dark and intense thriller like Dead of Winter isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when I think about director Arthur Penn. However, the man clearly knew his way around this genre as well as most others he was working in, so this turns out to be a rather great time.

Despite what many a filmmaker working this particular mine seems to believe, this style of very constructed, twisty and implausible thriller is not terribly easy to make. It’s not enough to simply throw plot twists at your audience while the music gets very loud and to quote Hitchcock, badly. For this subtype of the thriller – which often at least borders on horror – to grab a viewer, a director really needs to pull out all the stops and create as intense and emotional a mood as possible, undermining the sceptical viewer’s ability to and interest in thinking the plot through as much as possible, instead manipulating us into buying into a heightened intensity of feelings and excitement; it’s very much the same approach you’d take in an action movie, a romantic comedy or a horror film, for the most part.

Penn does so wonderfully, pulling Julie into a series of paranoid set pieces that sometimes become pleasantly surreal at the edges, never really giving her – or the audience – the time or space to breathe and think things through. This way, implausible twists seem to fit perfectly into the film’s very own reality, the film’s moments of ruthless brutality feel absolutely logical, and the viewer is as much pulled into the narrative’s flow as are its characters.

There’s quite a bit of actual mood building as well as thematic work via gothic and domestic suspense tropes here too. So Julie does not just have to fight two pretty crazy men, but also the willingness of authority figures to buy into “hysterical woman” clichés (as real world authority figures, alas, love to do as well), while moving through the spaces of a very traditional (and very effectively filmed) old dark house in the middle of snowy nowhere. Interestingly enough, it’s not cool calculation as much as Julie’s ability to act just as crazy and brutal as her captors that saves her day here, the film perhaps ever so slightly suggesting that a woman losing her shit under the circumstances at hand and using just as bizarre ploys as her enemies may be just the most natural reaction and healthiest reaction to the proceedings, rather than “hysteria”.

Steenburgen sells all of this wonderfully, working with a fine understanding of how and when she needs to escalate to more extreme emotions, but never letting us forget the very basic human core of Julie. Whereas McDowall and Rubes really dive into moments of wonderful scenery chewing, both actors finding the point where this makes them creepy instead of ridiculous, which isn’t always – well, practically never - a given with McDowall in my experience.

So Dead of Winter turns out to be a particularly fine example of its style, barely stepping a foot wrong.

Three Films Make A Post: Pain Don’t Hurt

Don’t Breathe 2 (2021): I really loved the first Don’t Breathe movie, but this much more violent and body count based sequel directed by the first film’s co-writer Rodo Sayagues (who also co-wrote with the first film’s Fede Alvarez again) is just terrible. Instead of a tight – if not terrible plausible – focussed thriller plot, the only structure here is a series of plot twists that start rather stupid and quickly become so vacuously idiotic, throwing tomatoes at the filmmakers feels like a perfectly civilized reaction to their assumption of a basically braindead audience. Their absurdly misguided decision to turn the first film’s villain into a redemptive anti-hero doesn’t exactly buy them any patience either. On a technical level, many of the scenes here are perfectly capable and competent filmmaking, but that’s really not enough when a script is quite as lazy and stupid as this one.

The Possessed (1977): Though I dislike Jerry Thorpe’s exorcism TV movie quite a bit a well, at least this seems to have been made with the assumption of a non-idiot audience. In fact, the film makes the quite clever choice not to be the TV-lessened version of The Exorcist you’d expect it to be, but clearly aims for more psychological horror. Tonally, it’s often going for psychodrama more than anything else. Alas, the writing’s not really sharp or insightful enough to make this work as a piece of 70s Slow Horror, and as it goes with films which are consciously slow when they don’t succeed, things drag rather painfully. A lack of dramatic flair is a problem, too, leaving this rather too quiet for its own good.

After Pilkington (1987): This product of the BBC’s teleplay culture, written by Simon Gray and directed by Christopher Morahan, starring Bob Peck and Miranda Richardson in two brilliant performances, on the other hand, achieves all of the goals it sets itself remarkably well. It manages to be at once a social satire about midlife crisis and types of educated lonely men and the women they turn real women into in their minds, a comedy that becomes darker in tone and humour the longer things go on, and a thriller with an intense and psychologically fitting climax that is also desperately sad.

It is all these things while also making the feat look easy, direction and script elegantly and precisely shifting modes and tones, leaving the right spaces for the performances.

Another short break

I'm taking another week off from my daily scribblings here to mentally prepare for the best month of the year. Normal service will resume on September, 25th.

In short: Lady in Black (1958)

Original title: Damen I svart

Private detective couple Kajsa (Annalisa Ericson) and John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten) are going on a long-awaited holiday in the country, supposedly to get away from crime. Too bad they’re going to visit Kaja’s friend Inger von Schilden (Anita Björk), who is in a bit of trouble, and not just because she has an affair with the assistant of her husband Christian (Sven Lindberg). Soon enough, a series of murders start, perhaps committed by the area’s local ghost, the titular Lady in Black. Clues, however, and a lot of them too, point towards Inger as a rather more corporeal suspect, if a very clumsy one.

Of course, the Hillmans investigate, alas assisted by their stuttering odious comic relief assistant Freddy (Nis Hallberg), who has followed them to the country.

This is the first of a commercially quite successful series of films about the detective couple directed by Arne Mattsson.Tonally and formally these are close relations to the Italian proto giallos and the German Edgar Wallace krimis that started up at about the same time. Clearly, something good was in the air in Europe at the time.

As far as I’ve read, Swedish critics never did warm to Mattsson, putting him down for his commercial instincts (a problem well known to German genre directors of the time as well), and, absurdly, even mocked his propensity to, you know, move his camera. Which indeed, he does here, too, stylishly and intelligently, emphasising and deepening character relations with it, something he does with some eccentric but effective framing choices in many a scene as well. Mattsson also puts quite some effort into expressionist/noir plays with shadow and light, which pays off particularly well in the scenes involving the Lady.

The script, as is often the case with films like this, isn’t quite as great as Mattsson’s visual realization. The humour really hasn’t aged terribly well (if it ever was funny at all), the sexy bits are not terribly sexy if you’re not from the 50s, and the melodrama and connected characterisation is sometimes a bit stiff. However, the mystery at the film’s core works rather well in the film’s decidedly non-naturalistic world, and the Hillmans make a fun detective couple. It is particularly nice to see in a film from this era how much Kajsa is actually doing on her own account, and how matter of factly the film treats her as her husband’s equal, something this film does much better than any of the Wallace movies from my native Germany ever managed (or even tried).

Lady in Black is really a wonderful film as a whole, aiming to be a crowd pleaser but doing so stylishly.

You’ll Like My Mother (1972)

Eight months pregnant Francesca (Patty Duke) comes to a small town in Minnesota to visit the mother of her dead husband. They have never met before, and Francesca’s letters about her husband’s death and her pregnancy have gone unanswered.

The Kinsolving mansion is situated even further out of a rather out of the way town, which is less than ideal in the midst of a Minnesota winter, even if you’re not pregnant like our heroine. Once Francesca has managed to arrived there, she very quickly wishes she hadn’t, for her husband’s mother (Rosemary Murphy) treats her as coldly and horribly as possible, suggesting that Francesca could be any random pregnant woman out for money without exactly saying that. To be fair, she’s just as horrible to her own daughter, Kathleen (Sian Barbara Allen), a “feebleminded” (quoth her mother) young woman, she clearly emotionally abuses on a regular basis. Curiously, Francesca’s husband never mentioned having a sister to her. But then, he also suggested she’d like his mother.

Our heroine really doesn’t need this sort of crap in her life, and would leave at once and most probably never return, if not for the fact that a blizzard hits the place and will make the way back to the bus station completely impossible. As it turns out, for quite some days.

As if being thrown together with an old monster like Mrs Kinsolving wasn’t bad enough, there’s something wrong about the whole situation, perhaps even the house itself: Mrs Kinsolving, a certified nurse, she’ll have you know, is rather happily drugging Francesca whenever possible (for her own good, of course), and confining her to quarters. But there seems to be someone else stalking through the house, too, someone Mrs Kinsolving seems to want to hide and protect, but also to keep away from Francesca.

I know You’ll Like My Mother’s director Lamont Johnson mostly as a TV director, but this seems to be one of his projects that managed to make its way to a cinema premiere. Plot-wise, it is not a million miles away from the sort of thriller you’d have found on TV in this era (or in a Lifetime movie with added self-sabotaging irony and camp today), though some of the film’s more lurid suggestions would certainly have been sanded down for the small screen.

The film is very good at using its very traditional thriller tropes, first isolating Francesca from all help (like the very helpful and surprisingly friendly people in the surrounding area) efficiently and believably, and then slowly heightening the threats surrounding her from the sort of things to make one uneasy and uncomfortable to truly traumatic and threatening. There’s very effective use of our heroine’s initial emotional isolation. All of her expectations of familial and female solidarity are quickly undermined by the sheer shittiness of Mrs Kinsolving’s behaviour.

Interestingly, the film then begins to introduce an increasing, believable and genuine emotional bond between Francesca and Kathleen. Often – and rather surprisingly in a film of this vintage – it even stops treating Kathleen as a plot device and starts treating her as a full, complicated human being the same way it does its three other main characters. In fact, Kathleen turns out to be the most competent and effective character when actual danger for life and limb looms, becoming rather a lot more proactive than you’d expect of anyone with a psychological or mental problem in a film of this vintage. At the same time, Lamont is a capable enough director, and Jo Heims an insightful enough writer, for these more positive and humane elements not to rob the movie of its tension; they just give us all the more reason to root for Francesca and Kathleen.

The performances are fine throughout. Duke walks the line between fragility and resourcefulness very convincing indeed, Allen never slips into caricature, and Rosemary Murphy just happens to give one of the great evil middle-aged woman performances, while not lacking nuance.

That’s rather a lot for this kind of unassuming thriller, and You’ll Like My Mother uses all of it rather well throughout its running time.

In short: Love Crazy (1941)

Steve (William Powell) and Susan (Myrna Loy) Ireland are a very happily married couple, until their latest wedding anniversary turns into a series of comedic misunderstandings, certainly helped by Steve’s seeming inability to ever just say straightforwardly what the hell is going on. Soon, Susan is convinced Steve is cheating on her with the ex-girlfriend (Patrick Grayson) he dropped to marry her (or the other way round, depending on who you ask) and puts in for a very, very quick divorce. Steve decides his only way out of this trouble is to pretend to be insane, which would delay the divorce long enough for him to explain to Susan what actually happened, eventually. Alas, the man is declared rather more insane than he had hoped for.

I’m sure quite a few elements of this Powell/Loy vehicle directed by Jack Conway would not go over well right now with everyone. Its portrayal of mental illness is certainly, even for a film from its era, on the risible side, cliched and more than just a bit stupid; though, on the plus side, it clearly finds the business and practice of psychiatry just as hilarious as it does the mentally ill. If one isn’t grabbed by outrage by the thought of a film from the early 40s being terribly of its time, one might even suggest the film quietly argues that mental health and “normality” are very much things depending on the perspective of the onlooker. But then, this might indeed be a bit too much to put on a screwball comedy quite as low-brown in the style of its humour as this one is. Then again, when reading as many negative things into movies seems to be a perfectly serviceable critical approach, perhaps I’m allowed the opposite too, from time to time?

I’m generally not a fan of comedy quite this low-brow, but the slapstick timing is often impeccable, especially when Powell is throwing himself bodily into perfectly ridiculous situations, mugging towards Loy whose job here is mostly being the straight woman to Powell’s mania, or to be wonderfully sarcastic. It’s very bread and butter comedy in this sense, but it’s the best bread and butter and town, served with perfect flair.

Music Monday: Days Like These Edition

Gawain and the Green Knight (1973)

Things have calmed down a little too much in the realm of King Arthur (Anthony Sharp), so his knights have become rather unknightly over the years. It’s gotten so bad, the old man invites everyone to a Yule feast he then starts with pointedly denying his knights food and going on the beginning of a kingly old man rant that’ll probably eventually talk about knights and lawns.

Fortunately for everyone involved (including the audience), a mysterious Green Knight (Nigel Green, appropriately enough) appears and challenges the King’s men to a knightly game. He will give anyone willing one free strike with his very own axe, and will only afterwards return a strike in the same manner. After much shuffling of feet and, some awkward stares and another hissy fit from the King, squire Gawain (Murray Head, so the jokes really write themselves with this one) steps forward, gets quickly knighted by his King and proceeds to lop the Green Knight’s head off. Unfortunately, that’s not much of a bother to the Knight, who simply puts his noggin back on. He’s rather impressed by Gawain’s courage, though, and so gives the young man a respite from his own, most probably more lethal head-loss, and postpones the return strike for a year. If Gawain should manage to find the Knight and win against him in a duel during this time, all’s going to be okay. Why, the Knight is even going to send our young hero signs and portents to guide him to wherever Green Knights dwell. Which will mostly mean that Gawain and his squire Humphrey (David Leland) will proceed to wander around England and pop up wherever they hear about someone or something being green (seriously), when in doubt trying to kill them.

It’s not a great approach to questing, I believe, but it does quickly provide Gawain with his very own lady love (Ciaran Madden), an absolute must for the questing knight, and certainly keeps him busy for the year.

As David Lowery will probably tell you, one of the problems when adapting the chivalric romance of Gawain and the Green Knight is that its beguiling set-up that so clearly suggests something about the pagan past haunting Christianity’s ideas about knighthood is quickly followed by the author going - to paraphrase – “and many adventures were had by Gawain, but adventures are boring, so let me just list some of them and then jump ahead in time so we can have a really good talk about the fine points of the chivalric code” and then spending most of the poem not on any dramatically potent stuff about the conflict between honour and humanity but on tedious rules-lawyering.

Which is something no post-medieval audience of any kind outside of very specific academic circles will have any time for, leaving the heavy lifting of the main part of any script using the source to the writers of said script: the job of creating thematic connections and perhaps even a plot and not just a tantalizing set-up.

Alas, in the case of Stephen Weeks’s Gawain and the Green Knight, little of that sort of heavy lifting seems to have been done by Weeks in his guise as writer, nor by his co-writer Philip M. Breen. Sure, there are recurring characters, but otherwise, Gawain’s various adventures feel completely disconnected and have little to do with his quest for the Green Knight; nor does the film put any thought into what its Green Knight actually means, to its world, for Gawain, or thematically. Weeks may have understood that himself, for a decade later, he directed yet another version of the same tale in Sword of the Valiant. Of course, having watched that one in all of its cheesy glory, you will be hard pressed to call it an improvement as an adaptation of the material.

The film at hand’s script problems would be more easily acceptable if most of our hero’s adventures were a little more interesting to watch. In part, this is certainly the fault of the movie’s clearly miniscule budget that leads to costumes often looking as if they were put together from the musty stores of some amateur theatre production. Speaking of production design here feels exceedingly optimistic. The action sequences are equally impoverished, with little flair for staging a swordfight on the cheap. That’s not helped by the director’s curious fixation on fights in which our hero is fighting an enemy on horseback while unhorsed himself, something that could be properly exciting if treated well, but just looks particularly amateurish here even the first time around. By fight number four in this style, it’s just tiresome.

The film’s not a total wash, however: there’s certainly joy to be found in its pompous narrator (who never tells anything that needed telling, of course) and the way the equally pompous and VERY DRAMATIC score by Ron Goodwin starts to feel like some kind of sarcastic commentary on the impoverished miming of people in bad costumes through medieval ruins we witness. Every scene that features the seneschal of Fortinbras or the guy’s son is automatically enhanced by their sheer, maniacal overacting, and a supposedly bereft queen changing her mind from killing the knight who bested her husband to marrying him once she sees Murray Head’s face isn’t too bad either, particularly since nobody involved actually seems to understand this to be funny.

That’s certainly enough to keep me awake and mildly entertained for ninety minutes. Sane peoples’ mileages may very well vary.

In short: Demonic (2021)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Neill Blomkamp’s pandemic-shot variation on the demonic possession flick about a woman (Carly Pope) having to confront the traumatic past about her mother’s big murder spree a couple of decades ago is a weird one. It’s full of potentially cool (and silly) plot elements like a very cheap looking mind-meld machine that lets Blomkamp use some new-fangled not-rotoscope technique for no visible artistic needs or gains, or the completely incompetent Vatican tactical exorcism squad that hides under the guise of a small town experimental medical company (or something). These things are somehow supposed to live in the same world as a serious treatment of family trauma, which again is supposed to co-exist with characters who tend to either speak in vague insinuations or awkward exposition.

The film’s plotting is a complete mess. Characters have a fifty/fifty chance of either acting completely rational for horror movie characters (like calling the police on encountering the house of a friend empty, dark and with the front door wide open) or absurdly stupid (like quickly agreeing to an experimental mind-meld procedure with one’s clinically insane mother by an incredibly sketchy company, without even telling anyone of one’s idiot decision); important plot elements are introduced at weird and awkward moments, or just introduced in a throw-away line ten minutes before they are needed. You’d think the Holy Lance kept by the Vatican for a thousand years would be a bit of a bigger thing, for example. But then, you’d also think our heroine’s changing view on her mother mind be a central point of the movie, building an actual character arc instead of getting pulled out for a scene or two for some bullshit reason only Blomkamp himself understands (perhaps). Why, one might even think that’s an element useful for a proper, dramatic ending that connects disparate elements of the plot, instead of using a Holy Lance ex machina.

On the positive side, this is certainly not as boring as its absurdly generic title. Watching Demonic, I had the impression of witnessing a fistfight between about three to five different movies of very different tones neither of them ever seems to win, Blomkamp’s script crying out for quite a bit of editing work by a professional, someone who’d provide some actual structure and form to the film’s bunch of cool and stupid ideas, and/or someone able to coherently identify and present the film’s emotional core. Our director/writer/producer obviously lacks these abilities.

Short Film Friday: Munchhausen

In short: The A-Team (2010)

I’m not sure this actually needs to be said, but Joe Carnahan is a weird director. Extremely talented and an able to turn his not inconsiderable budgets into true crowd pleasers (if for a very specific kind of crowd), most of what he does feels as individual and personal as any auteur-style movie you’d care to mention. Stylistically, he always uses state of the art and budget techniques of the Tony Scott school that’ll make many a critic automatically use the word “edgy”. I’d argue that, when Carnahan is on, he’s not “edgy” but a filmmaker whose films actually have an edge acquired by an uncommon mix of the ability to direct actors and use sometimes grating film techniques to often very intelligent effect. When he isn’t on, he’s making Boss Level instead of Narc.

This star-studded (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Sharlto Copley and Patrick Wilson are certainly quite the 2010 cast list, and would still get quite a few behinds in seats ten years later) variation and prequel to many a nerd’s (including this writer’s) foundational action TV show is somewhere between the two. For my taste, the film’s at its best when it provides its cast with opportunities to play their characters outrageously larger than life or when it comes up with the silliest possible set-ups for action sequences (the thing with the flying tank wouldn’t cut realism muster in a Fast & Furious movie even today). It falters, whenever it tries to hitch the bigness or the silliness to moments of more traditional, semi-naturalistic character work, never really managing to connect the two modes properly. Which is a bit strange, since connecting the outrageous with proper, believable and serious character moments is often one of Carnahan’s biggest strengths.

Conceptually, The A-Team suffers a bit from its apparently unquenchable need to turn the strange innocence of the original series cynically violent. So this movie adaptation of a series where nobody ever died from being shot at with automatic weapons has a body count too large to calculate; in an even shittier move, it also feels the need to treat non-violence as something bad in a man that needs to be gotten rid of and disposed of while the score shits out triumphant music, turning the fun pretend violence surrounding it moment pretty sour for this viewer, and really not helping the film as a whole with its tonal difficulties.

High Risk (1981)

After buying weapons from a cameo-ing Ernest Borgnine, a quartet of Americans (James Brolin, Bruce Davison, Cleavon Little and Chick Vennera) are flown into Colombia (Mexico) by a couple of ex Vietnam vets much more accustomed to this sort of affair. They plan to steal the ill-gotten gains of a local drug lord (James Coburn). Our protagonists’ main problem is that they are all perfectly unaccustomed to violence, have two brain cells going between all four of them (these are the kind of people who take a yappy family dog on their drug money heist) at the best of times, and may have read the word “planning” once on a toilet wall but were distracted by the drawing of a tit.

Still, after some misadventures and bad decisions our – ahem – heroes actually manage to steal a good five million dollars. Alas, two of them are captured very soon indeed (might have something to do with taking a whole night’s rest while actively hounded by the drug lord’s people; or not setting a watch), while the other two escape with most of the money but wake the interest of some local rebels/bandits/whatever under the demented leadership of one Mariano (Anthony Quinn, as we all know a member of every ethnicity on Earth that isn’t white in the US-sense of the word). Lots of tedious business ensues; Lindsay Wagner pops up.

Stewart Raffill’s High Risk is often listed as an action comedy, and if you’ve only ever read a plot synopsis or two and looked at the film posters, you may very well come to the conclusion that it indeed is one. Having actually gone through the experience of watching the film, I’ve rather come to the impression that the filmmakers were the same kind of bumbling incompetents their character turned out to be. There are a lot of elements in here that could by all rights only belong into a comedy - like the business with the dog, or Coburn having a little bull fight as an aperitif to a torture session. However, these are never presented in a way anyone would confuse with being funny or the film attempting to be funny. At the same time, it’s all just too dumb to be taken seriously by anyone.

And yet, the film presents its stupid ideas in so straight-faced a manner, it’s simply impossible to believe the filmmakers were seeing the joke there at all. Which is actually too bad, for an action comedy about people throwing themselves into the violent life without having the slightest capability or the lack of humanity needed for it bumbling through an action movie plot could be very funny indeed; in fact, given that this is about Americans doing the same in a Central American state, you might even turn this material into a pretty great political satire. None of this happens here, though. Instead, this is a film about a bunch of people who are very bad at what they do fighting against various groups of other people who aren’t terribly great at it either, full of dumb plot developments and underdevelopments, plotted so amateurishly, one might wish oneself back to the slickness of homegrown SOV horror movies.

The actors clearly have no idea what the hell this is supposed to be either: The lead quartet looks bored, Wagner mildly bemused, and Coburn just shrugs and shows his teeth while grimacing (his usual move when not wanting to apply any of his actual considerable talent). Quinn does of course chew the scenery like a madman, because what’s a guy to do when confronted with a project like this one?

In short: La dame d’onze heures (1948)

Clearly rich French adventurer and man about town Stanislas-Octave Seminario (Paul Meurisse) – called SOS by all and sundry because they need all the help they can get, one supposes – has just returned to France from some colonial adventuring somewhere in Africa. One of the first things he does is to visit the Pescaras, one suspects mostly because he’s already had an eye on the family’s daughter Muriel (Micheline Francey) when last he was in France. He’s a bit too late for romancing, though, for Muriel now has her very own fiancée, pharmacist Paul Wantz (Pierre-Louis).

Fortunately, SOS’s upper lip is as stiff as if he were British, and adventure is calling anyway: for father Pescara (Pierre Renoir) has been receiving mysterious – and pretty vague – blackmail letters for quite some time now. It is obvious to our hero that the elder Pescara knows more about the rhyme and reason of the situation than he lets on, but when the man is murdered, SOS starts on a thorough investigation.

Jean Devaivre’s La dame is a pretty strange film. In part, it’s your typical French melodramatic mystery of its time, made with the expected self-important gestures, full of characters who seem to be absurdly full of themselves, with dialogue that aims for the poetic but rather often achieves the constipated. But it also seems to be highly influenced by the noir, adding many an element of visual disquiet and curious intensity to its deeply bourgeois style of mystery. Intensity really seems to be Devaivre’s thing, so much so that things sometimes border on self-parody; but just as often the film reaches a pulpy and stylistically free-floating energy that must have perked up the ears of quite a few future nouvelle vague filmmakers, if they ever encountered the film.

Devaivre packs a lot of stuff into the film, too, filling it to the brim with comedic relief butlers, perfectly pointless stage magicians, romance, late 40s style punch-ups, and red herrings – a viewer might get drunk or confused by all of it. Even better, the film then adds moments of great inventive eccentricity, like an important flashback being achieved via our hero reading a long, long, very long stenotype we see unrolled to nearly hide the whole floor of his room, until the whole mystery plot reveals itself as the filmmaker’s excuse to do whatever the hell he’s interested in doing in any given scene. This might not be terribly enjoyable for fans of strict formalism in their movies but really results in a pretty joyous film that just hits whatever stylistic aim its director had at any given day.

Music Monday: Mercy Edition

Ozone (1993)

Detective Eddie Boone (James Black) and his buddy and partner Mike Weitz (Tom Hoover) are on the drug beat. One night they are lured into a trap by their snitch Squeaky (Michael Cagnoli). Mike disappears encountering some of the zombie-like victims of the new drug Ozone, while Eddie gets injected with a small dose of it.

The bust going tits up does of course lead to the expected trouble with the cops’ captain (Jerry Camp); on the other hand, he doesn’t seem too bothered with one of his men just disappearing for quite some time. Eddie, on the other hand, is very much bothered, and begins an odyssey through the strangest parts of his city at night, searching for his friend and encountering ever more bizarre Ozone-made mutants and weird situations. At the same time he also has to fight the psychological and physical changes that little dose of the drug he got hit with inflicts upon him.

Director/writer/editor/producer etc J.R. Bookwalter is of course one, if not the godfather of the DIY type of US indie horror. Ozone may very well be his magnum opus (unless there’s still something great coming from him, something I’d be very happy about). It’s a little wonder for a film of its type, the sort of thing where ambition, actual ability (I’ll always believe that Bookwalter could have been one of the great popular horror directors if a company threw some actual, no strings attached, money at him), and a bit of luck come together to make a damn good film, instead of “just” a damn good film made on the semi-professional level.

Sure, there are moments when the seat of their pants filmmaking is visible, and the acting’s not consistently great, but Ozone never feels like a film that needs its viewer to excuse its flaws with it being indie, because so much of it is simply exactly like it is supposed to be. Of the course, the way it is supposed to be isn’t necessarily the way a mainstream horror movie should be shaped – but that’s only a bad thing if you need all movies to follow the same rules all of the time. A horrible idea, if you ask me.

One of the clear stars of the production are the incredible special effects that begin with relatively standard pizza face pseudo-zombie business but very quickly - once Eddie starts on his odyssey through the night - escalate into realms of the creepily surreal close in style and quality to what Screaming Mad George sometimes did in/for Brian Yuzna productions. There’s so much incredible stuff on screen here – including a sex scene to ween anyone off of sex scenes for the future – the film would be worth your time for it alone.

However, Ozone also works very well indeed as one of those films about a character dropped into the dark side of his city, learning – potentially terrible – truths about the nightside of his world as well as himself. It’s actually rather effective at this, turning up the weirdness of living by night via the power of the surreal and the strange. Dark underbellies, it turns out here, are darker and much weirder than you think.

Apart from Bookwalter’s fun use of well-worn cop and action movie tropes, the film’s mood often feels like an early 90s indie horror version of the more surreal and weird end of 70s US horror, films like Lemora, a Child’s Tale of the Supernatural or Messiah of Evil, movies which, as this one does, weren’t afraid of ignoring the favoured filmmaking handbooks of their time and just went for doing what felt right. There’s a degree of fearlessness that comes with this territory I find absolutely admirable, a willingness to do whatever feels right for a film, rules and budgets be damned.

Three Films Make A Post: He was a world-class criminal and a working-class hero.

The General (1998): This gangster movie by the great John Boorman about Irish burglar, robber (etc) and perhaps part-time national anti-hero Martin Cahill (portrayed by Brendan Gleeson with perfect nuance even when the character he portrays would deny possessing any of that) was all the rage with critics when it came out, and really doesn’t seem to be part of any conversation anymore. It’s definitely a John Boorman movie in its willingness to be peculiar: at times, it feels more like a very strange comedy than your typical biopic. It portrays its protagonist with as much sarcasm as it does reverence (though there’s some of that, also), understanding the very specific working class charm of the man as well as the fact that he also was a scumbag. Boorman is never willing to make any total statements about his subject, instead treating Cahill as the sort of complicated and contradictory person we all are, denying the audience the easy way of seeing him as a hero or as a villain, therefor denying the kind of easy judgement that sees everyone as either all-virtuous or all-bad that’s all the rage at this political moment in time.

Confessions of a Police Captain aka Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica (1971): If you go into this Damiano Damiani joint hoping for more typical hard-hitting Italian 70s cop movie fare, you’ll probably be a little disappointed, for as is so often the case with the director, he’s really only interested in providing as much of the exploitative stuff as he needs to let his social criticism go down easier with an audience. That approach is not always to my taste because it does tend to suggest a pretty patronising view on Damiani’s audience, but in this film, the director avoids most of the spirited monologing he loves so well and instead makes his points via the conflict between a bitter police captain (Martin Balsam) and an idealistic young D.A. (Franco Nero, cleverly and effectively cast against type), who want the same things but completely disagree on how to achieve them, arguing against political and societal corruption by showing what it does to individuals and their view of the world.

It’s a very effective film at this, and even better for the fact that this is one of the Damiani films where the director seems to have put as much heart and energy into the more generic crime elements as he has into the political side of the film, letting one enhance the other quite wonderfully.

Jaca Pocong (2018): A nurse (Acha Septriasa) is tasked to travel to a lonely country home to change an IV and make an injection, but quickly finds herself roped into a wake. Of course, there’s spooky stuff happening. And some of said spooky stuff in Hadrah Daeng Ratu’s Indonesian horror film is rather effective; the spookery is also rather generic in its nature, with only the not quite as worn out last act twist providing a hint of half-originality to the proceedings. It’s not a bad film before that, mind you, just one that seems so satisfied with standards shocks and suspense moments, it never gets too exciting.

On the other hand, it is crafted carefully enough that it also never becomes boring, so there’s that.

Audiodrama Recommendation: Apocalypse Songs

I more or less stumbled upon this fine, five-part audiodrama from New Zealand that seems to have made little splash even in the world of non-corporate audiodrama in podcast form.

It mixes a lot of elements that are very much catnip to me: the fake documentary format, the traces of a one cassette "outsider artist"-type musician, strange prophecy through music, mental illness, and the weight of the past on people responsible for very little of it; hauntings without ghosts.

It's very well realized too, with mostly sharp and effective writing that never tries to do too much or too little with its material, and a highly effective soundscape, where the sound itself of old tapes becomes rather important.

Plus, the music we hear does actually sound and feel a lot like what it is supposed to be, providing an extra layer of reality to the story.

In short: Alas Pati: Hutan Mati (2018)

A group of students spend much of their free time making YouTube videos of the sporty type. They have copped to the fact that doing that while visiting creepy and supposedly haunted places brings quite a few more views, so they decide to visit Alas Pati, the wood of the dead. It’s not a place anyone’s supposed to visit, particularly not its open air cemetery where corpses aren’t buried but put onto scaffoldings. Our protagonists don’t just visit, they start playing around with the corpses, until one of them gets staked in a pretty improbable accident. Because these kids are obviously idiots, they don’t try to help their friend or contact the authorities, but just run and pretend nothing ever happened.

Not surprisingly in a horror movie, they quickly find they are now haunted by poltergeist activity, horrible dreams and other assorted supernatural manifestations.

The main problem of this Indonesian teen horror movie directed by Jose Poernomo should be obvious from this short synopsis alone: our hot protagonists are so stupid and callous, it is very difficult to sympathize with them. These are, after all, people who think that nobody will ask them questions when a close associate disappears after a shared trip they weren’t exactly mum about beforehand; they are also people who’re just going to leave the corpse of someone who was supposed to be their friend rotting away in some godforsaken wood (or to even bother checking if she’s actually dead). Making them even less likeable is their near complete lack of character traits. These kids are so nondescript, they don’t even fall into standard horror movie types, and so add boringness to their other sins of character.

The only reason why Alas Pati is at least a watchable movie is Poernomo’s ability to threaten these unpleasant idiots in perfectly decent horror set pieces that often show a pretty good idea of basic human anxieties. Of course, these set pieces would probably be rather better than just decent if there was any reason to care about these characters. As it stands, Poernomo at least turns a film that should by all rights be completely uninvolving decently watchable.

Cold Sweat (1970)

Original title: De la part des copains

Korean War veteran Joe Martin (Charles Bronson) is living with his wife Fabienne (Liv Ullmann) and her daughter Michèle (Yannick Delulle) at the Côte D’Azur, working his own small boat charter service. The marriage seems somewhat tense thanks to Joe suffering from what we’d now call PTSD. He’s drinking too much and holds back emotionally. As it turns out when one a rather nasty character from Joe’s past named Whitey (Michel Constantin) turns up one summer evening, Joe has also been holding back some facts from his past, as well as his actual name.

You see, seven years ago, he was part of break-out from a military prison organized by one of his former commanding officers, one Captain Ross (the very American James Mason). When Katanga (Jean Topart), one of the other members of the group, murdered a random cop for not much of a reason during the break-out, Joe was having none of it, simply taking off with the escape car, leaving the rest of the men to fend for themselves.

For some reason, Whitey really needs Joe’s boat now, to transport something to or from a Turkish vessel anchored somewhere in the area, and he’s certainly not the kind of guy unwilling to threaten a wife and a kid (if available). Joe, on the other hand, is not the kind of guy to tolerate that very well, killing Whitey and getting rid of his body rather efficiently – with a little help from Fabienne.

Of course, this is not he end of the couple’s problems, for soon enough, the rest of the former break-out gang – Ross, Katanga, and one Gelardi (Luigi Pistilli), turn up. They, too are very much into threatening families and really want Joe’s boat, as well as, probably, a bit of vengeance. So our protagonist agrees to their demands, until the right moment comes to make his displeasure known more violently.

In theory, Cold Sweat is a French production, but it’s one of those international joints that really don’t feel specifically regional apart from its setting. The cast is a merry mixture of people from all over the globe, as is good tradition in European genre filmmaking of this era. Rather less common in this sort of thing, the director isn’t French or Italian but veteran British filmmaker Terence Young.

The script, indeed written by two Frenchmen, is based on a novel by Richard Matheson and follows the Gold Medal paperback style of late 60s, early 70s thriller, something a lot of French filmmakers (and one assumes producers) seem to have admired quite a bit. For good reasons, too, because this style of the thriller, with focussed plots that still manage to squeeze in some surprisingly deep characterization, and an update of a noirish philosophical outlook tend to adapt really rather well to the screen, often without there being too big of a need for major changes. Unfortunately, I can’t say if the film at hand does actually make many changes to the plot, because this is one of the Matheson books I’ve never gotten around to reading.

As it stands on screen, it’s a fine bit of early 70s thriller in any case, with sharp plotting, not terribly deep but effective characterization and a real sense for the tense set-up followed by a follow-through that always escalates the drama of any given situation. As we all know, Young was a wonderful director for this kind of thing, usually not showing himself beholden to the stodgier style of some of his British contemporaries but using the increased technical possibilities of changing times in filmmaking to the fullest.

Particularly the film’s final act where is Joe racing and scrabbling to save his loved ones through ever increasing problems and dangers is absolutely fantastic. There’s a brilliantly done car race against the clock that isn’t even the film’s proper climax to enjoy, for example. The sequence is edited and shot so sharply, Young can even check in on the quieter tension between the surviving rest of the characters during it without lessening its impact, instead ratcheting up the suspense with this device, as it is meant to do but all too often doesn’t.

Acting-wise, Cold Sweat is mostly a fine proposition, the cast of character actors performing just as good as you can expect them to (which is why people like I love character actors often more than the proper movie stars – consistency and quiet capability is the thing), Bronson’s suggesting much about Joe’s inner life by tensing and untensing his shoulders (seriously) and also gets some pretty fun tough guy lines, while Ullmann provides a stock character with actual life. The only problem spot here is James Mason, or rather, James Mason as played by his bad, oh so bad, American accent, a thing so awesome (like giant tentacled monsters are awesome) it apparently does not leave room for much of an actual performance.

But then, he would have been dubbed by someone just as bad in most Italian movies, so we do at least get to experience what this great actor believed Americans sound like.

Cold Sweat is obviously still a wonderful piece of European/International thriller.