Thursday, April 11, 2013

Three Films Make A Post: THE FRENCH FILM BANNED IN FRANCE!

Raw Deal (1986): Welcome to the mid-80s, when action movie heroes looked like gorillas, Schwarzenegger wasn't too awkward in front of the camera (though I find the man's tendency to fondle his own biceps rather disturbing), and women's hair looked like artificial weed. John Irvin's movie is your archetypal bread and butter Schwarzenegger vehicle of the era, lacking the insanity of Commando and the brilliance of Predator. It's fun enough if you need to fill up on shoot-outs and explosions, but it lacks that certain something (be it good or bad) that makes an action movie memorable.

The Parasite Doctor Suzune: Evolution (2011): Despite both films probably having been shot back to back, I enjoyed part two of this parasite-based exploitation romps quite a bit less than the first one. It's probably because it has less of everything except maid costumes: less action, less nudity, less crazy nonsense, fewer locations. Okay, there's more walking through an empty warehouse while nothing is happening, and certainly more flashbacks to the first film and the flashbacks from the first film, but that's the kind of more I'd have preferred less of.

Plunder Road (1957): Now this is quite more like it. Hubert Cornfield's laconic 50s heist movie that knows that the heist is only a success when you actually get away with your loot only doesn't get its own full-length piece from me because it's oh so very laconic and matter-of-fact that writing about the film would become an act of reproduction, for everything here is visible in the film's surface; even what you'd generally call the subtext concerning the relationship between humans and machines standing which represent a cruelly indifferent universe is on the surface in Plunder Road.

In that sense, it's a film trying and succeeding at turning rather complicated notions into a straightforward (and cheap) crime movie, treating some of the philosophical ideas at work in the much more chaotic film noir in a different manner.

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