Three Films Make A Post: A new depth of fear

Gods of the Deep (2023): British low budget one man movie making army Charlie Steeds returns to the Lovecraftian well, including a pretty fantastic God of the Deep/homemade Cthulhu effect.

Otherwise, this is at first dominated by the joys of cheap underwater sci fi sets that sometimes reminded me pleasantly of Juan Piquer Simón’s own cardboard underwater horror/sf affair The Rift, to then turn into a mix of cheap weird psychedelia with terrible action movie dialogue and some dollops from Aliens.

It’s all very 80s Italian in its approach to, ahem, creative borrowing, which, depending on one’s taste, is either a damning indictment of the film, or, if you’re me, a gateway to the kind of fun they don’t usually make this way anymore.

London Overground (2016): John Rogers’s documentary finds that most London of writers, Iain Sinclair, retracing the steps he took for his book of the same title, with the involvement of some of the usual suspects. Like a lot of later Sinclair, this is a mix of insightful observations on London and the changes in her, an old man ranting at clouds while walking, and a portrait of a man finding poetry in the sort of thing most people would just walk on by and ignore.

Thus are some of the typical problems of Sinclair’s work on display. Predominantly, the inability to separate the critique of the capitalist horrors inflicted on a place from one’s own nostalgia for the ideal version of the place that only ever existed in one’s mind – or in this case the books one wrote, which can lead to the impression that Sinclair is against any change whatsoever (which I don’t believe he actually is).

However, there’s much to think about and look at here that would be lost without Sinclair or this film.

Top Line (1988): A writer (Franco Nero) procrastinating and sleeping around in Colombia is put on the trail of a great conspiracy that hides the trail of alien influences on earth. Various forces – like a sadistic Nazi played by George Kennedy of all people – try to hinder or murder him. Among those forces is a wonderfully blatant – and pretty good looking, effects wise – Terminator rip-off, for we are back in the arms of the actual Italian rip-off machine in all its confused oddness. Here, James Cameron meets the UFO conspiracy and traces of the 80s jungle adventure movie, Nero goes shirtless a lot, and little happens that makes much sense.

On the plus side, little happens that makes much sense that isn’t also pretty awesome or entertaining. From time to time, director Nello Rossati even manages an actually suspenseful scene – the preposterous but great sequence of Kennedy hunting Nero through a cactus field comes to mind. If not that, he at least comes up with something memorably goofy. Why wasn’t the Arnie Terminator smashed by an angry bull?

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

1987. Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe), the Vatican’s very own exorcist, is in some troubles with church politics. A young career cardinal has made himself the speaker of people who find the whole exorcism thing rather problematic in the modern world, and tries to push Amorth out of office, making a pretty grumpy – when he’s not winking at nuns - old man even grumpier. The Pope (Franco Nero, logically cast as the Polish pope in a movie where Russell Crowe is supposed to be Italian) is on our rebel establishment hero’s side, though, so it’s clear right from the start of the movie that nothing will come out of this for Amorth. Why the sub plot is in the movie anyway, only god or the pope will know.

Anyway, once that business is pushed aside, the Pope sends Amorth to Spain. There, an American widow (Alex Essoe, again wasted in a plot point role, alas) and her teenage kids (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney and Laurel Marsden) have moved into an old abbey her husband has mysteriously bequeathed to her, and are soon in rather dire possession troubles. The abbey, it appears, harbours a particularly dark secret, that will need all of Amorth’s experience to uncover. Things are so dangerous, even the Pope will be affected.

As regular readers of my diatribes and vague ideas here will know, I’m not much of a fan of Western possession horror; I don’t even like The Exorcist. There’s just something about the sub-genre as it is practiced in American and British movies that sticks in my atheist craw, even though I’m usually perfectly capable of appreciating religious art and sometimes even thought. All too often, I find this sort of affair comical rather than horrific, even when it is not sprinkled with problematic moralizing like the Conjuring films (which to me stand in the direct tradition of things like The Exorcist).

Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist certainly is not the exorcism movie to convert me – or anyone else for that matter – to exorcism movies as a serious or effective horror sub-genre (I hope), but I found myself having one hell of a time with it. Though, it has to be said, probably not for the reasons the filmmakers wanted.

It is clear from the very start that this is a Very Serious Movie that goes for an overblown, turned up to Eleven tone, Big Dramatic Flashbacks, and Deep Dark Secrets (capitalization probably in the script this way) – it really is pompous as all that. What makes the film so amusing is that this pomposity is in the service of a story that may start as a drab, overly plotted exorcism-by-the-numbers tale but increasingly drifts off into the realm of extremely pulpy nonsense with gates to hell in abbey cellars, possession double play and blood-puking popes which rub against the self-serious nature of the storytelling in ways that can’t help but be incredibly entertaining. The film’s final act gets absolutely bonkers with this stuff in a way that I’d call absolutely gleeful, if the film’s general air didn’t suggest it’s simply not intelligent enough to actually be this way on purpose. Which does not make it any less entertaining, of course.

Watching an over-emoting, unkindly aged Russell Crowe with a terrible Italian accent throw himself into this nonsense with the full force of his old star personality is pretty great, as well; I’m not quite sure he’s buying into the absurdity or does mean his performance seriously, but I do salute his effort to make (weird) decisions and go with whatever is thrown at him; mostly it’s blood, as a matter of fact.

The Pope’s Exorcist gets special bonus points for an ending that desperately wants to open up the possibility of a Pope’s-Exorcistiverse, with potentially 199 other films. Personally, I hope for The Pope’s Exorcist vs Sadako next.

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.

In short: Die Hard 2 (1990)

Clearly, the only way to top an instant classic like the first Die Hard is to make a film that is basically the same but just a little different than the original, and definitely louder and bigger. However, Renny Harlin’s sequel still features a relatively constrained place for John McClane (who else but Bruce Willis again?) to get increasingly beat up in.

If you squint a little, you can see hints about the wrong direction the series will head towards in the future, but even though this one softens the class politics of the first film quite a bit – not so much discerning between working class and bosses anymore but more aiming for people willing to do their actual jobs versus those there only to play politics – and doesn’t really feature any of the random moments of veracity I loved particularly in the first one, there’s still quite a bit of humanity in here to ground the action. After all, how many other big loud US action movies are there whose hero breaks down crying after not managing to save an airplane full of people? Or how many of them realize that, if you want to make a guy’s wife (a returning Bonnie Bedelia with slightly less frightening hair than in the first film) a part of the film’s emotional and very real stake, you really need to show her coping with her own duress, too, which also turns her from a price to be won into a person an audience wants to see saved?

While it is completely outrageous and far-fetched, the sequel’s plot is still also well-constructed in its unfolding, playing fair with its plot twists, and not so much aiming to provide an excuse for the action sequences but making them an organic part of a flow. Things need to move in an action movie, is what I’m saying (alas too late for the writers of the next Die Hard film to hear), and it’s even better when they move in interesting and fun directions even when nothing explodes.


Speaking of explosions, I believe Harlin was at the time the second best director of big US action movies (after Die Hard’s John McTiernan, obviously), and it shows here. There’s an appropriate heft to many of the action sequences but also a sense of good fun that turns the potentially annoying smart-ass moments of the film into something enjoyable, like a corny joke told by a good friend.

Past Misdeeds: High Crime (1973)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
 
Genuan Commissioner Belli (Franco Nero) is one of those highly irascible cops movie Italy is full of, always screaming and raging about the terrors of corruption etc and etc.
Belli's unwillingness to play politics and his nearly comical impatience lead to frequent clashes between him and the chief of detectives, Commissioner Scavoni (James Whitmore), but the older cop obviously respects Belli's passion for justice a lot and treats the younger man with the patience one has for talented if absolutely mad little children.

Scavoni himself has a secret file full of information that he wishes to use to bring the whole network of corruption and crime that dominates his city to fall, yet he does not dare to use what he has too early out of fear that all his efforts might go to waste.
Life in Genua isn't going to get easier for the two. A new organisation tries to bust in on the turf of the city's aging crime lord Caffiero (Fernando Ray), and the new guys are even more brutal and reckless than the Mafia the police knows. A bunch of car chases and shoot-outs later, all tracks lead Belli to the highly respected industrialist clan of the Grivas, but witnesses have the sad habit of dying.
Belli is finally able to shout Scavoni into using the material he has on the Grivas, but the old cop is murdered and his files lost before he has even begun to make a ruckus.
Scavoni's death just intensifies Belli's crusade, a crusade that will in the end be very costly for everyone involved, especially Belli's loved ones.

Enzo G. Castellari's High Crime is one of the core films of the Italian police film genre of the 70s and to me, it is one of the best parts of it.
That the film is highly kinetic and racing from one brilliantly filmed action sequence to the next is par for the course in the genre, yet Castellari's action - always given a rhythm of its own by a hypnotic score by the de Angelis brothers -  feels somehow more driven and desperate than the action scenes in the films of his contemporaries. There's a special feeling of recklessness and wildness at High Crime's heart you won't find in European films, even other Italian cop movies, too often and that connects Castellari's work in my mind with the sheer madness of Hong Kong cinema of the 80s and early 90s.

But even here, the action is not all there is to the film. I remember more than one film of the genre I had difficulties to stomach on account of their unpleasant politics which usually just start with the supposedly heroic cops getting mightily pissed off by the fact that they have to keep to the laws they are sworn to protect. The longing for a police state is often quite strong in these films and makes me in cases like the films of Umberto Lenzi nearly physically uncomfortable. Now, I wouldn't call High Crime's politics pleasant, but they are a lot more complex than in some of the lesser films of the genre. It is very helpful that Belli may be overtly irascible and not exactly a stickler for human rights, but at least we never see him torture gay people or fake evidence. Basically, Belli comes over as a decent man in a society teetering on the edge of chaos, much more interested in getting the big fish than in kicking in the teeth of some junkie. Actually, one of the things the film seems to say the loudest is "look at the big picture to end corruption".

It does of course help quite a bit that Franco Nero plays Belli as highly sympathetic in his desperation for change, an impression that is strengthened further by the scenes he has with his girlfriend (Delia Boccardo) and his daughter. That a pleasant family life won't be in the card for Belli is obvious from the beginning, but the way Castellari handles the things that were bound to happen to the two is at once so ruthless and so right (in the context of the film, mind you) that I couldn't help but be impressed.

One of my pet theories about directors of action films is that the great ones can't be judged by the quality of their action sequences alone, but by the quality of the melodrama in their films and the way they use this melodrama to heighten the tension and meaning of their action. That's the reason why the American action cinema of the 80s does so little for me - they just didn't know what to do with their heroes' emotions, if they admitted to the existence of them at all.

Castellari knew.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,cops,franco nero,enzo g. castellari,reviews,action,james whitmore,past misdeeds

In short: Le Moine (1972)

aka The Monk

Ambrosio (Franco Nero) is the superstar preacher of his local abbey, full of fiery hatred against the things of the Flesh (even marriage is too icky a concept for him), and a fitting self-righteous attitude.

Things go well for Ambrosio until he learns that a young novice who clearly had him thinking unvirginal thoughts already is in fact Mathilde (Nathalie Delon), a woman; a woman, at that, who has smuggled herself into the order just to be with him. Realizing this and getting seduced into fornication are as obvious as my talent for similes. Once Ambrosio has started on the sinning, he's on a downwards path of sins from lies through more fornication through the lusting after teenage girls through murder. Mathilde is enabling Ambrosio's fall wherever she can, for she has been sent by the devil himself to tempt the monk, and really seems to have fun doing her job.

Things may or may not become difficult for the increasingly insane Ambrosio once the inquisition comes to town.

Adonis Kyrou's adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis's classic Gothic novel The Monk is a rather dispiriting case of a film taking a much too timid approach to its material to be successful; and that despite a script co-written by Luis Bunuel among whose failures timidity isn't usually counted.

The problem is that The Monk is a novel whose feverish and sensationalist tone cries out for an equally feverish and sensationalist movie. Kyrou, however, seems to think it an appropriate way to treat paedophilia, cannibalism, debauchery, black magic and murder with the sort of distance that doesn't love anything more than to stop short before showing or saying anything directly that might offend someone, where it would be rather more useful to try and offend everyone. Even the usual criticism of organized religion and particularly Catholicism in this sort of thing is reluctant and just not very convincing, as if the film were directed by someone too soft to ever step outside the boundaries of good taste. Which is of course the death knell for a film that should by all rights do nothing but step outside of these boundaries, and then throw faeces at them.

Visually, Kyrou isn't too interesting a director either. There's a certain blandness in his direction that doesn't even milk a (most probably Bunuel-derived) set-up like Nicol Williamson's paedophilic mock-Christian child procession for anything of what it's worth.

In other words, what The Monk needs are the slimy and fearless hands of an exploitation director. Consequently a lot of nunsploitation movies not based on The Monk are much closer to the spirit of the  original work than this nominal adaptation. They are also not nice, and not tepid, and surely not as polite as Kyrou's film is, never provoking the question this version of The Monk raises: what's the point?

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,italian movies,german movies,in short,gothic,horror,adonis kyrou,franco nero,nathalie delon,nicol williamson

High Crime (1973)

Today on WTF-Film I hold forth on Enzo G. Castellari's epochal High Crime with Franco Nero and admit to certain physical weaknesses when it comes to Italian crime movies.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,cops,franco nero,enzo g. castellari,reviews,action,james whitmore,other places

In short: Hitch Hike (1977)

aka The Naked Prey

Walter (Franco Nero) and Eve (Corinne Clery) Mancini have a less than stellar marriage. He's an alcoholic low-life journalist and she is the disillusioned daughter of his boss and the only thing that keeps them together besides copious amounts of mutual hatred is sex.

Especially for Eve emotional disgust and sexual pleasure seem to be things that just go together.

The charming couple is just trying to get back to LA after an unpleasant camping trip somewhere in the American South-West (looking very much like the Italian country-side), when they pick up a hitch-hiker standing by the side of the road.

As this is a movie, this turns out to be not the brightest idea. Adam Konitz (David Hess) - the hitch-hiker - is on the run from the police and some dubious friends of his while carrying a suitcase full of dollars. Adam is also violently psychotic. At first, the thug wants to use the pair as a cover or - if necessary - hostages to get over the border, but when he learns that Walter is a journalist he gets it into his head that someone really should write a book about his life.

That's just the beginning of one of the many cat and mouse games that will go on between the characters.

Hitch Hike's director Pasquale Festa Campanile was mostly specialized in comedies, often sex comedies, and so his successes or failures usually fall outside of my fields of expertise. As a cynical thriller Hitch Hike is a highly interesting aberration in his body of work.

Campanile does "thriller" a little differently from the way the genre is usually handled. Films of the genre usually stand or fall with a tension based on tightness and density, while Hitch Hike is loosely structured liked a road movie. That the film still works excellently can be explained by a handful of things, the first among them Campanile's hand for great photography and editing, followed by some excellent acting jobs by all three main actors and a script that actually knows how to surprise while keeping its characters believable enough.

The characters are really what holds the film together, the various occurrences in the script slowly revealing different sides to them while keeping explanations for their acts at least to a degree ambiguous.

As a bonus, there's a mostly great, idiosyncratic Ennio Morricone soundtrack. Mostly, because someone found it fit to include something I can only call "the hateful song of hate" and believe me, you won't soon forget that one. Especially since its permanent, Tokyo Drifter-like repetition will really burn it into your brain. But hey, who said everything about a film has to be pleasant?

Hitch Hike does in fact have more unpleasant things going on than just the song. It is sleazy and its perspective on humanity is highly cynical. Yet Campanile treats these elements of the film as classy as you will see in a film featuring David Hess without making it look cowardly or prudish.

When it comes to loose but mean little exploitation thrillers, Hitch Hike is a hidden pearl.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,thriller,exploitation,franco nero,corinne clery,david hess,in short,pasquale festa campanile