Big Jake (1971)

1909. In what’s still not quite a civilized West of the USA, the outlaw gang of John Fain (Richard Boone) attacks the prosperous McCandles ranch, nearly killing one of the family’s sons, while murdering quite a few people and last but not least kidnapping the McCandles’ grandson, Little Jake (Ethan Wayne), for a ransom. Apart from getting together the humungous ransom money of a million dollars, family matriarch Martha (Maureen O’Hara) calls in her estranged husband Jacob aka Big Jake (John Wayne), deeming him the proper kind of brute to deal with brutes.

Jake hasn’t seen (or written to) his sons for over a decade, apparently roaming the West increasing his already huge reputation as a frightening badass, so the family reunion is even more strained than the situation would suggest. But needs must, so Jake has to team up with his sons, the slick-ish James (actual Wayne son Patrick) and the younger Michael (Christopher Mitchum, of course the son of Robert). Everyone will learn a valuable lesson: the best way to solve family troubles is to punch each other in the face a lot, apparently. The bad guys clearly don’t stand a chance.

This final big screen outing directed by George Sherman (he still shot some TV episodes afterwards) is certainly one of the better John Wayne vehicles of its era. It is neither trying to crib from the Spaghetti Western book nor make gestures towards the revisionist Western, which were seldom directions that worked well with Wayne in the lead, instead making much of the more traditional (though not squeaky clean) Western.

There are obviously elements that will not have aged well for every viewer today. It’s not difficult to imagine a reading of the film as celebrating toxic masculinity or some such for all of the scenes in which the male McCandles solve their interpersonal problems by hitting each other in the face (with Wayne inevitably knocking his – grown – sons out). I found this business mostly funny, the film simply realizing that having these larger than life cowboys right at the end of the line for their idea of the West solving their interpersonal problems with a civilized heart to heart (or a stupid shouting match) like you or I would simply doesn’t feel believable in the world of the film, while their solving their problems with companionable violence seems rather fitting to them and their lives, and also funnier.

And this is a film that likes having its little chuckles: apart from the joys of family violence, there’s a lot of comedic business about the contrast between the Old West and all the new ideas and objects that come in from the less rough East, mostly exemplified through Jake’s exasperated reaction to all the new-fangled stuff his sons are into, from automatic guns to motorcycles. Big Jake does of course use this opportunity to put a motorcycle stunt into its Western business, too, for why wouldn’t it? There’s some not completely uninteresting subtext hidden away here too, James and Michael representing young men caught right in the middle between the old and radically new ways, not quite belonging to the former side like Jake, his old buddy Sam Sharpnose (Bruce Cabot) and the villains of the piece do, but also being rather too far away from the places where the new is really happening to be completely part of that, particularly when they go on an old school bandit hunt with their dad.

There’s a lot of cool, classic Western business happening in said bandit hunt too. Sherman seems to go out of his way to include every single type of traditional Western set piece in the movie, all of them realized with great gusto, timing, but also a sense for mood building that’s not always been common in the genre. A particular favourite here is obvious the long showdown between Jake and co and the gang of villains, a showdown that includes a sharpshooter duel, various sub-shootouts, some machete action, and starts with a fantastic staring contest between Wayne and Boone (that also includes some very clever dialogue), both of whom give a hell of a performance against each other. The way Wayne twists Boone’s own threats against him before the shooting really starts is utterly brilliant, hitting home that Wayne may have been an actor with a limited scope but also one who could work wonders inside of it.

Big Jake does very well with its villains, too, providing every one of them with enough (nasty) character to make them memorable threats. On the hero side, things aren’t quite as interesting, but then, part of the point of the whole affair is how larger than life Jake is compared to his surroundings, so him being the centre of non-villainous affairs is not (just) Wayne being vain, but the film following its own argument. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing of interest happening around him – son Patrick and Chris Mitchum are a lot more expressive here than later in their careers (the latter is in fact repeatedly showing off a range of facial expressions he seems to lose over the next decade). It’s a bit of a shame that Maureen O’Hara’s role isn’t larger than it is, for she quite believably plays the only person in the movie willing and able to call Jake on his shit, and also able to win without punching. But then, Big Jake really isn’t a movie about calling macho heroes on their shit (though the film at least does not approve of Jake just ignoring his family for years) but celebrating them going for one last wild ride before the wild rides stop existing.

In short: Collectors (2020)

Original title: 도굴

Warning: vague spoilers ahead!

Kang Dong-goo (Lee Je-hoon) is highly talented grave robber, specialising in plundering archaeological sites with the help of his foster father and his foster sister. He’s a bit of a curious example of his kind, though, giving away whatever money he gets for the stolen goods. He is clearly trying to get into the good books of a very specific collector of illegal archaeological goods and his assistant Se-hee (Shin Hye-sun). Eventually, Dong-goo manages to achieve that goal, and finds himself tasked with stealing a mythical sword hidden in a Joseon era tomb situated right in the middle of Seoul. Fortunately, he has already acquired the help of a rogue archaeologist going by the moniker of Dr Jones (Jo Woo-jin) and the best digger around (Im Won-hee). Now there’s only the little problem of escaping the tender mercies of a tenacious cop, a gangster boss and the collector he’s working for. Well, that’s before we get to Dong-goo’s actual plans.

Because Park Jung-bae’s Collectors isn’t just a grave-robbing heist movie but actually a classic caper movie where a rich bastard gets his just deserts courtesy of a former victim using his own greed against him, this way also a vengeance movie without a climactic killing. In my books, that’s one of the more satisfying genre combinations imaginable, and a filmmaker would truly need to go out of their way to ruin this sort of film for me.

Park certainly doesn’t ruin anything, instead using a slick visual style for a playful jaunt through all kinds of genre standards and tropes, changing an element here and there, and presenting it all well-timed and with (mostly, apart from one somewhat problematic scene) very good humour, never lingering at any set piece or idea too long for the audience to notice their implausibility or for it to become boring. The humour is broad but effective, the set pieces are clever and fun, and the heist – once we realize what it actually is - is rather delightful and fitting to its victims.

Collectors wins quite a few extra points by admitting that stealing cultural treasures is actually a pretty shitty thing to do – something quite a few films of its genres tend to downplay so as not to make their heroes look bad – and using this as part of its plot as well as to make its happy end even happier, which makes a very satisfying piece of popcorn cinema even more satisfying.

Music Monday: A House Edition

Deliver Us from Evil (1973)

A group of men – certainly acquainted for quite some time, though nobody watching their interactions would call them “friends” exactly unless that watcher is very cynical indeed – are on a hiking and camping trip through rather spectacular mountainous terrain. There’s experienced professional guide Dixie (Jim Davis), a guy who really takes his nickname of “Cowboy” rather too seriously (George Kennedy) with his bullshit macho behaviour and the gun worn outside his pants for all the honest world to feel, Arnold Fleming (Charles Aidman) and his son Nick (Jan-Michael Vincent), the latter under a pall of the divorce blues, Al Zabrocki (Jack Weston) who is not built for this sort of thing, and accountant Steven Dennis (Bradford Dillman). No idea why these guys are spending so much time together, it’s not that they seem to like one another much, nor do they know a lot about each other’s lives.

Be that as it may, when they hear on the radio that a guy we’re not going to call D.B. Cooper/Loki has parachuted earthwards with his ill-gotten skyjacking money, and then witness someone indeed dropping down via parachute, they decide to go on the hunt for him. Cowboy takes that rather seriously indeed, shooting the unarmed man in the back while he’s trying to escape, killing him. Most of the group seem rather more interested in the guy’s monetary plunder than the fine points of murder and self defence, and decide to grab the money and carry it to civilisation. Or they could just keep it? Well, Dixie as well as the audience, know quite well where this is going to go.

This ABC Movie of the Week directed by Boris Sagal looks rather on the costlier side of 70s TV movies. Shot on location in Oregon, the wilderness survival parts of the narrative look really rather impressive, as if at least the people behind the camera were relishing the opportunity to shoot some visual treats for once. In front of the camera, you can find some rather authentically exhausted looking men (no women in this movie at all), the mostly middle-aged plus cast clearly going through a pretty exhausting time.

That’s rather useful for the performances, adding some authenticity to solid 70s TV style performances by most and softening the problems of a script that does tend to the verbally didactic when it comes to the lure of money, even though even an early 70s TV audience would not have been surprised by the whole greed and barbarity angle and certainly needn’t be told quite this bluntly. There are, however, also quiet character moments which also help make up for the too loud moments and provide the actors with some room to do their thing more subtly.

The survival adventure moments don’t just look impressive for a TV movie (or really any low budget film) but are also staged with quite a bit of flair, adding a quality of actual physical danger that makes the very quick mental breakdown of the characters more plausible, and really turns Deliver Us from Evil into a film well worth watching, even if it feels the need to hit you over the head with its message.

Three Films Make A Post: For justice. For loyalty. For friendship.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005): I am really rather fond of the handful of films Tommy Lee Jones directed. While also centred around Jones as an actor, these films are prime examples of a quiet and collected post-New Hollywood filmmaking style, never stylistically showy, but always shot in such a way as to help keep actors and their characters at the centre. This one also recommends itself through a really peculiar sense of humour, the willingness to leave questions unanswered, as well as a what feels like a the conviction to meet characters on their own terms, and follow the lines of inquiry that leads to. Curiously enough, given how Jones is supposed to be on set, these lines tend to lead to compassion (not an uncritical one, mind you) and understanding, not the kitschy idea of these concepts, but the sort of thing that’s actual work for everyone involved.

Alone on the Pacific aka Taiheiyô hitoribotchi (1963): Kenichie (Yujiro Ishihara) makes it his young life’s goal to cross the Pacific to the USA in a one person sailboat. For much of its running time, the film cuts between our hero’s misadventures at sea and his growing up disaffected, eventually planning his trip. Director Kon Ichikawa doesn’t really lean into the adventure elements of the tale too hard – though he is perfectly willing and able to portray some of Kenichie’s troubles at sea, he is more interested in a meticulous portrayal of the state of mind a body at the borders of its endurance can reach, touching the surreal and the stylistically theatrical because these seem to be closest to the state of mind Kenichie gets into. There’s also quite a bit of social commentary towards post war Japan and the way it treats its youth, but I’m not terribly sure I’m the right audience for that part of the film.

At Close Range (1986): James Foley’s version of a true crime story is a deeply frustrating movie. The cast, with a young Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn and so on is brilliant. Foley even seems to realize this and provides them with a lot of big scenes to do big actor things in. The problem is that most of these scenes are utterly wrong-headed, never giving the actors the material to be people instead of characters in a movie built out of clichés from other movies. The script (by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan) makes the impression of being written by people who have never met one of the small town and rural poor before, portraying people, their motivations and actions in ways that never feel anything but wrong. On the direction side, Foley polishes everything to a sheen that often works against the story he is trying to tell, making poverty and the world rural noir tales are made of look like an overdirected 80s ad, making it impossible to believe in these characters and the places they are supposed to inhabit.

Old(ish) Time Radio: The Book of Hell

Thanks to podcasts and a lot of creative people professional and amateur, the horror audiodrama (and really, all other kinds as well) have been having something of a well-deserved boom for a couple of years now.

In the 80s, things weren't quite that rosy outside of German cassette audiodrama theoretically made for children that included lots of adaptations of German "Heftromane" (sort of like pulps, but less free in content and format, and very German) as well as tapes based on the Nightmare on Elm Street films that were my first encounter with the franchise.

In Canada, there were three seasons of one of the best horror anthology series ever made, Nightfall.

Just listen to this:

In short: Signed: Arsène Lupin (1959)

Original title: Signé, Arsène Lupin

After having fought as an ace pilot under the name of André Laroche, gentleman thief Arsène Lupin (Robert Lamoureux) takes a well-deserved time out flirting with nurses at a hospital. He’s getting bored eventually, particularly when his more serious love interest, mysterious Romanian Aurélia Valéano (Alida Valli) signals she’s losing interest in him by deciding to bring a friend with her on all future visits.

As luck will have it, an old criminal acquaintance of Lupin, La Ballu (director Yves Robert) has heard of a nice heist opportunity Lupin’s particular criminal genius would be needed for. Our hero is a bit rusty after all that war and the following relaxation it seems, and is actually surprised when La Ballu betrays him, absconding with some painting from Flemish masters. To add insult to injury, La Ballu also sends the police Lupin’s way, but that rusty, he’s not.

Because La Ballu really likes to rub it in, he’s now committing his next heist (again, Flemish paintings are involved) using Lupin’s name. Which is particularly rude since he’s not a gentleman thief and has no compunctions against violence and murder.

This is not the sort of thing Lupin’s just going to let slide, particularly not since all that Flemish painting business suggests to him that there’s something more interesting going on than just your standard thievery. Cue a treasure hunt.

As should be obvious after the description, this version of Arsène Lupin is very far away from a future of tragic backstories told through interminable flashbacks, or from any kind of serious commentary on the problems of the actual world. Instead, Yves Robert’s film is a light, charming piece of fluff with a hero who has a friendly wink for every single woman he meets (all of them, beautiful, obviously, and all of them completely charmed by the guy’s moustache), has ridiculous yet always effective plans for every situation, and faces trouble with a sort of insouciant coolness just this side of smug.

Thanks to director Yves Robert’s hand for the appropriate featherlight tone and the sort of pacing that only stops going merrily from fun adventure scene (light action included) to fun scene to rest for a scene of our hero making light of authority, or to present a neat and silly pulpy idea like showing his valet Albert (Jacques Dufilho) taking explosives from the logical place in their kind of household, the medicine cabinet.

All of this looks very fine indeed and, while it is certainly the old-fashioned kind of fun, never feels stuffy or melodramatic. But then, this was made by a director who casts himself as a villain who is more often than not the butt of the joke, so there’s a bit of friendly irony to be expected.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

Warning: I still can’t stand the Conjuring series!

After hapless paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson, or his reanimated corpse, given his even more complete lack of expression this time around) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga, as typical for this series putting more effort in than anybody else involved in the project, and getting nothing for it) cock up another investigation, a young man catches demon and kills his boss/friend while possessed. The idiot couple convinces the guy’s lawyer to go with the old “my client’s innocent on account of demonic possession” defence and proceed to find out what’s actually going on in the case – which they might have done before they attempted an exorcism, which might have made this a movie not based on its protagonists being really bad at their job. Hilarity ensues.

The third entry into the The Conjuringverse’s main series still has man of the problems that made its predecessors so badly to digest for me: there’s – obviously, inevitably – the series’ use of right-wing Christian scam artists as if they were cuddly heroes; a really boring mythology based on the worst US-style Evangelical Christianity has to offer; a general lack of weirdness, ambiguity, or just plain craziness, the series not only being ideologically conservative but also in its approach to the supernatural. To be fair, TDMMDI, as directed by Michael Chaves, does lose at least one central weakness of its predecessors, their total dependency on Big Set Pieces™ and jump scares.

Given that our protagonists are supposed to be crack psychic detectives, the decision to replace much of the loud bits of the earlier movies by showing them committing to an actual investigation makes a lot of sense, too. Unfortunately, nobody of the half a dozen or so people credited with the script seems to have much of a clue of how to write investigative horror. So more than half of the film consists of the Warrens going through one of the slowest and most boring investigations in the history of fictional occult detectives, intercut with scenes of the travails of our main possession victim (Ruairi O’Connor, playing a guy without any character traits perfectly) so that at least some mild spooky stuff happens. Said spooky stuff consists of some random, tired and badly timed horror bits, Chaves showing little flair for the genre.

Ironically, this move away from the series standards actually gives me a whole new appreciation for the comparative care (perhaps even artfulness) the earlier movies in the franchise take with their set pieces and jump scares, and the creators’ willingness to at least entertain their audience. The film at hand is about as entertaining as watching paint dry. To add even further irony – and as a good example of its generally shoddy writing – the film isn’t even good as an example of the kind of Christian religious horror whose rhetoric it espouses: after all, it’s not any power invested by God into a deserving individual (say a priest) or simply the Sweet Baby Jesus who saves the day against the film’s underused antagonist (who is just as wasted as is the great John “I’m only in it for the exposition” Noble), it’s the rather more worldly love between couples and a big damn sledgehammer. Which my secular person does find rather more sympathetic – if only the script had actually prepared this as a thematic element before it used it, or had shown anything of it as part of its background lore. Not even one “Also, demons are allergic to love” comes from Noble.

I really do appreciate that the series attempts to go into somewhat new directions with this, but there’s so little of import or interest happening in this version of investigative horror, it might as well not have bothered. But hey, the title makes clear it’s not the filmmakers who are to blame, so there’s that.

A Thrilling Development: A Place to Die (1973)

“Thriller”, season 1 episode 7

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.

Dr Nelson (Bryan Marshall) and his wife Tessa (Alexandra Hay) come to one of those very traditional British villages so he can take over the position of the local general practitioner. His predecessor seems to have left his position in a bit of a hurry, but I’m sure there’s nothing at all to fear here. The villagers, at least, may be a bit weird - and tend to a foot deformity they just aren’t willing to show their new doctor – but otherwise they are certainly very welcoming indeed. They seem to have taken a particular shine to Tessa, acting rather, well, worshipful towards her. So worshipful in fact that Tessa quickly becomes uneasy with the attention (her husband, as is tradition in these cases, does take rather longer). Indeed, the villagers believe her to be prophesied to take a very special role in their Lady Day celebration, a celebration, it has to be said, that seems to be rather far removed from the traditional Christianity their choice of feast day suggests.

If all of this sounds to you rather a lot as if this episode of Thriller (as directed by Peter Jefferies and written by Terence Feely) is dabbling in what we’d now call folk horror, you’re completely right. Indeed, it’s interesting how much this innocent little TV movie fits into genre borders created much later, featuring pretty much all the elements you’d include if you’d make a folk horror by the numbers movie today. Obviously, this never gets as explicitly nasty or strange as Blood on Satan’s Claw and isn’t as subversive and clever as The Wickerman but there’s quite a bit of rather disturbing stuff very effectively suggested, particularly in the final act. Jefferies (your typical British TV hired gun going by his IMDB credits) does also manage to squeeze some very moody moments out of the little production values he has – again particularly in the final act.

The film’s biggest strengths and most interesting aspect is how effectively it mixes the weirdness of the villagers, their behaviour and their beliefs with the mundanity of their world and lives, so that our protagonist’s housekeeper apparently can’t see any strangeness in her position as both a cult member and a worshipper and the woman who keeps the couple’s house clean; the big star of the ritual and village fool (or really, Fool) of the place is mostly spending his time carrying groceries; and the final ritual does not take place in a stone circle or something of that kind, but the village shop. The utterly mundane and the murderously weird are apparently inextricably entwined in Merry Old England.

Music Monday: Chinese Medicine Edition

The Empty Man (2020)

When her teenage daughter Amanda (Sasha Frolova) disappears, leaving behind a message about something called “The Empty Man” on a mirror, possibly written in blood, Nora Quail (Marin Ireland) asks family friend James Lasombra (James Badge Dale) for help. James is the owner of a gun shop now, but earlier in life, he was an undercover cop, and he’s certainly willing to go to places and ask questions the actual police won’t while generally keeping on civil footing with the cops. Driven by trauma and a tendency to strange visions or dreams, James follows Amanda’s trail through the shadows of an urban myth concerning said Empty Man, to a cosmicist cult dressing itself up in self help clothes, and, eventually, into even darker places.

It is rather frustrating that any commercial prospects for David Prior’s adaptation of motives of Cullen Bunn’s and Vanesa Del Rey’s still unfinished comic series “The Empty Man” that’s best to see as a form of prequel to the comics, may have had died with the Disney’s acquisition of Fox and the PR-less dumping of the film in some cinemas and on streaming (apparently, there’s not even a BluRay in the making), seeing how this is certainly one of the best mid-budget (which in our genre means the highest budget) horror/weird fiction movies of the last decades.

On the other hand, the film’s love for really digging into cosmicist and nihilist philosophy not just on the lore level, but metaphorically, in its character work, as well as a comment on the genre it is working in, may very well not be the sort of thing to drag The Conjuring et al from their ill-gotten throne under better circumstances. Hell, it’s possible it’s not even going to interest much of an audience apart from those viewers and critics that have been singing its praises ever since they stumbled upon it despite all of Disney’s efforts to not make money from it. The film’s commercial failure is not for a lack of Prior trying, for while this is a deeply thought through, slow paced and detail obsessed movie, its director is not at all averse to the nice horror set piece, dropping in what feels like homages to all different kind of horror sub-genres, with some particularly heavy nods towards Hideo Nakata-style J-horror and the giallo. Of course, the former always had a whiff of cosmic horror anyway in the way its monsters related to the people they haunt, so there’s more than just homage work, it’s a director using stylistic elements learned from kindred spirits. Prior is very style-conscious, filling his film with slow, lingering shots loaded with meaning, and putting so much telling background detail on the screen, the film really needs rewatching for all of that alone.

Prior works a lot with visual parallels, moments where gestures and postures call back to things seen earlier in the movie, shapes that repeat in background and foreground, and motives and visual metaphors that shift meaning. Fitting to the philosophy it presents, it is a film full of ambiguities where the reality of much what we see is regularly put into doubt, where identities and the relationships between people seem to shift and be rebuilt, with only trauma and pain staying the same; even when trauma may not be real as we understand it. The film is so ambiguous, even its seemingly clear cut twist ending can be read very differently indeed, the film telling two very different stories that just happen to end in the same catastrophe.

I really admire how Prior creates this shifting sense and a feeling of liminality by being very controlled and precise about what he shows and how, the film creating a feeling of utter ambiguity and existential dread through control, focus and precision – like meditation going very wrong indeed (or if you follow the ideas of many characters in the film, very right indeed). The cast really seems to get that too, Dale entering every frame he is in (which is basically every frame after the prologue) giving off an impression of dislocation, being very much there in body but in doubt of everything in mind, whereas Frolova and Ireland manage to give their characters a diffuseness around their edges without drifting off into the abstract.

The Empty Man is simply such a great, accomplished film, so assured of itself (as if made by a filmmaker putting everything into a single shot at a feature film, though I hope it’s not going to be his only film), so perfectly okay with not being for everyone, it’s just a joy to watch. If cosmicism gives you joy, obviously.

Three Films Make A Post: Nobody Runs Forever

Wrath of Man (2021): What do you do if you somehow end up with a plot and characters that’ll at most give you an hour of movie, even though you really need to make one that at least scratches at the two hour door? Guy Ritchie apparently decided to go for a structure full of time jumps and perspective changes, like a cut rate Tarantino without brains or taste. Not that surprisingly, instead of solving the problem of too little plot and flat characters, this exacerbates it by rubbing (really, pressing) the audience’s noses in it, going out of its way to not just show but repeat over and over that there’s nothing at all going on here you haven’t seen before or these actors haven’t done before – often in much better movies that actually had something you’d call pacing, or a script. The film also suffers from some of the worst tough guy dialogue I’ve encountered in a long time (perhaps because Ritchie’s struggling with the LA surroundings?). Particularly the first act is chock full of some of the most idiotic macho dialogue you’ll ever have the misfortune to hear.

Séance (2021): Keeping with films that seem to wildly overestimate their intelligence, how about this pseudo neo giallo by Simon Barrett (co-writer of most of the films of Adam Green). It’s one of those films that seem inexplicably smug about their own intelligence while never actually bothering to put the work into showing said intelligence, pretending stuff that’s obvious from the beginning is a last act surprise, and apparently believing that even the tiniest change in a cliché is something to be praised by an adoring audience.

Worse for a film that so obviously wants to be a giallo is the mediocre sense of style. It’s a professionally made film, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re looking for style as substance (or even just style interesting enough to be worth mentioning), or an ability to create moods via visual storytelling, you’re out of luck. But hey, at least Barrett manages to show us all of Suki Waterhouse’s facial expressions quite extensively – or rather her one facial expression.

The Mule (2018): Leave it to this piece of what at first looks like oldmansploitation with and by the one and only Clint Eastwood to save my mood. It’s a leisurely paced peace of work, pretty episodically structured, yet it is that way because it wants to do a bit more than give Clint a final outing, in the process waving in the direction not only of his serious classics but also of the film star phase of his career when he was perfectly willing to share the stage with an ape. So there’s the expected amount of tear-jerking old age business (the film works for ever single one of your tears, though) about a guy who only learns what’s most important in life when he’s at the end of it, but also a lot of old man swagger, curious humour that charms the way Eastwood’s character is supposed to charm, encounters with the modern world that leave our protagonist bemused, amused and a bit wiser, a tiny bit of action, and a tendency to treat every single character as a complicated human being, be they cops, Mexican cartel soldiers or migrant workers.

Speaking of Texas

In short: Perfect Strangers (1984)

aka Blind Alley

Johnny Ross (Brad Rijn) is working as a “subtle” killer for the New York mob. He’s a bit of their pet killer because there’s apparently nothing connecting him to the life of crime whatsoever. That changes when the toddler Matthew (Matthew Stockley) witnesses Johnny’s newest killing.

Johnny’s not that kind of asshole, so he doesn’t do anything to the kid. His bosses are very unhappy about the decision. After all, Johnny’s going to be completely useless in the future with a witness who can’t even talk or walk too well hanging over him. In fact, to the mafia he’s going to be completely useless even if he’s only getting arrested once without any actual legal trouble, for…reasons. The only way out of the problem is for Johnny to charm himself into the life of Matthew’s mother Sally (Anne Carlisle) and arrange an accident for the kid. Which makes total sense, I’m sure.

The films of Larry Cohen often have a messy quality about them, with plots that don’t always hold up to logical scrutiny, and an approach to any given scene that puts a heavy emphasis on adlibbing. The former, Cohen often makes up for with dark humour, heavy New York local colour and the ability to make his audience believe that any crazy shit can and will happen in one of his movies.

The latter adds charm and fun when he’s working with actors like Michael Moriarty, who live for that sort of thing. In the case of Perfect Strangers, alas, even a kind viewer will have to admit that Brad Rijn is no Michael Moriarty – in fact, Rijn’s the sort of actor who looks so uncomfortable in front of a camera, I wouldn’t trust him with fully fleshed out and thought through scenes. To make matters worse, the poor bastard’s improvisational partner in too many scenes is a sodding toddler, a breed that does not tend to give a guy hanging on the ropes a “yes, and” or a “no, but”.

Unlike in your typical Cohen film, there’s not much help from any character actors to find either. Only female lead Anne Carlisle and Ann Magnuson (who at least knows how to act in front of a camera) do much that’s worth a damn there, despite some really Cohen-typical funny set-ups for shenanigans with a mafia boss who is also a barber, some business with a private eye with a heavy German accent, and so on.

On the positive side, while it is terribly messy, the film has moments where it becomes bizarre enough to be interesting. There is, for example, an absurd suspense scene where Matthew wanders through Johnny’s apartment while our protagonist tries to hide him from mafia goons, played perfectly straight as if this were a sensible thing to base a suspense scene on.

If that sort of thing is enough for anyone but me and other weirdoes is anyone’s guess, but at the very least, Perfect Strangers tries not to bore its viewers too much.

Army of the Dead (2021)

After a zombie outbreak (of ragers and shamblers) in the city, Las Vegas has been quarantined, surrounded by a wall of construction containers. There’s also some business about a refugee camp surrounding the city that seems very much like the film (rightfully) sticking it to ICE. The – most probably very orange – president of the US has decided to finally just nuke the city, just in time for the 4th of July.

Shady billionaire Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) hires zombie war hero turned diner cook Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) for a little project that really needs to happen before the end of Vegas: secretly – and highly illegally – getting rather a lot of money out of a casino vault.

Scott’s team is going to consist of old friends and partners as well as the mandatory wild cards. As with all heists, problems arise: Scott’s estranged daughter (Ella Purnell) tags along to rescue a friend from the city, there’s treachery in the ranks (committed by exactly the guy everyone expects to betray them), and the zombies turn out rather less mindless than they should be; also Frank Frazetta fans.

How much or how little one likes Zack Snyder’s Netflix zombierama Army of the Dead will probably depend on one’s willingness to survive the huge amounts of self-indulgence on display. This is most definitely a film made by a guy who’d be the wacky one in a comedy act, desperately needing a straight person in the editing room to say no to him. Because there’s nobody of that description around, Snyder puts whatever the hell he thinks is cool into the film, if it’s good for the movie as a whole or not. This certainly leads to a film that’s going to surprise a viewer quite regularly – sometimes with how daft Snyder is actually getting, at other times causing admiration for pretty much the same thing. It’s not terribly good for the film as a dramatic unit, lending everything a stop and start pacing as well as lacking focus.

On the plus side, this also makes Army of the Dead a film that’s very seldom boring, full as it is of genuinely cool zombie world building, a Siegfried and Roy tiger gone very right indeed, visual homages to Frank Frazetta, and a tendency to in turns completely lean into genre tropes, in others to playfully and very consciously go out of the way to not fulfil them.

Tonally, the film’s all over the place, turning from the goofiest low brow humour imaginable to perfectly serious attempts at character work at the drop of a hat, apparently relishing idiotic jokes and needlessly deep back stories equally, clearly following the maximalist rule that when much is good than too much can only be better. Really, it’s a cheesy metal cover made movie, often actually as cool as it believes to be, at other times so dumb it is rather charming.

In between the veritable shower of the very very dumb and the actually rather pointlessly clever, Snyder has also packed quite a few great action scenes. In fact, in the hands of filmmakers willing to set themselves some limits, decide which of four films happening at the same time they are actually trying to make, and focus on making it, this could have been one of the great action horror movies. In practice, Army of the Dead is a whole lot of fun and deeply stupid as well as clever ideas thrown into a mixer and then shot by a guy who does know how to make any old crap look slick. Is it a “good” movie? Probably not, but it’s so entertaining in its lack of inhibitions and so full of its director’s personal obsessions, it certainly is a very fun one indeed. Depending on the day you had, that can be quite a bit better than a good one.

In short: Goshu the Cellist (1982)

aka Gauche the Cellist

Japan in what I believe to be the early Showa Era. By day, young Goshu is taking care of his little country hut and garden, by night he walks into the city and becomes part of a small, Western-style orchestra. They mostly seem to be accompanying silent movies, but they are also rehearsing Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (also known as his Pastoral Symphony) for a performance coming up in just a few days. Goshu is the regular victim of their conductor’s hissy fits, who seems to follow the truly classic tradition of classical music that says the best art is produced when you squash people under your feet.

In the nights before the great performance, Goshu is in turn visited by different talking, somewhat anthropomorphic animals – a cat our protagonist treats very rudely indeed, a cuckoo who isn’t faring that much better, a tanuki that helps him figure out some of the nuances of rhythm and a mouse mother and her sick child who bring out Goshu’s compassionate side and explain the healing power of music.

Made over the course of six years and barely clocking in for more than an hour, future Ghibli co-founder – and long time creative partner of Miyazaki – Isao Takahata’s Goshu is a particularly lovely and artful piece of anime. I find the contrast between Miyazaki’s work and what Takahata does here particularly interesting. There’s a clear, shared sensibility when it comes the fantastical and a sense of wonder, but where Miyazaki’s work tends to have a strong plot to hang the wonder on, Takahata would here clearly be happy to have none at all, reaching a mixture of wonder and metaphor in different ways. Of course, this is a film that’s not just about music but one that’s striving to be like music itself, so narrative really isn’t the point here at all; even program music (like the 6th in the kind of interpretation the film is working from) is not really narrative music, after all.

There’s a floating quality not just to the visual depictions of music and music making here – at times via simple yet also simply beautiful visualisation, at times through a look at music as a physical process producing wondrous things in the mind – even the Showa streets scenes (wonderfully contrasting with the pastoral world Goshu so fittingly inhabits by day) have this quality. Takahata, and therefor his audience, has the ability to look at opposites with the same eye of wonder and joy.

Music Monday: Back in Line Edition

A Monstrous Corpse (1981)

Original title: Goeshi

Somewhere in rural South Korea. The experimental ultra-sonic emitter used by a group of scientists to “just” mass destroy vermin and insects (something that surely wouldn’t have any ecological repercussions) also happens to turn the dead into the living dead, who then proceed to break necks and drink the blood of the living. A Taiwanese ecologists who just happens to be in the area because of a nearby conference he’ll never get to and the woman he-met cute in an intensely awkward way are our best bet against the zombie menace, for the scientists responsible for the mess are as clueless about what’s going on as their idea of how experimentation works suggests, and the police is, as always in South Korean movies, good for carrying torches at best, always getting in the way as a matter of course.

I’d love to tell you who is playing anyone here, but the English language Internet isn’t exactly full of this kind of helpful information about Goeshi, and the relative dearth of movies from South Korea of these era that actually still exist makes it pretty impossible for me to recognize anyone by their faces. I can at least report that this was directed by Kang Beom-gu and is an – often rather close – remake of Jorge Grau’s wonderful The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue.

This isn’t as good as the Spanish movie, for the most part. Probably for reasons of personal survival for the filmmakers given the rather less than democratically open era in South Korea at the time, the film is toning the political elements of the original down rather a lot, so that the eco-political elements as well as the criticism on the corrupt nature of authority don’t quite disappear but do take on a rather less complicated and logical form. Though parts of this may very well have something to do with the less than ideal quality of the subtitles available for the film at hand which have their difficulties with expressing even simple things properly, and certainly won’t express any subtleties.

Having said this, even in the rather scratched and salmon-coloured version with some of the gore cut the Korean Film Archive got together (and put onto YouTube for all of our joy and education), this is still a very fun and often impressive looking film, though, with some sharp – for some perhaps to sharp - editing in the action scenes, clever blocking, some fine zombie acting, and – even visible in the dubious colour scheme of the print – some very moody use of gel-coloured light in the traditional colours of horror.

It is of course also interesting to compare the cultural shifts between the Spanish movie and the South Korean one, the way the zombies here have a clearly Asian vibe that makes them feel like siblings of our beloved hopping vampires (if anyone reading this can clue me in on how the Korean parallel creature which certainly must exist is called, I’ll be eternally, if no-prize style, grateful), how the ultra-sonic emitter bit turns more mad science-y, the difference in graveyard and morgue design. Never let anyone tell you horror movies won’t teach you anything.

But really, why am I even talking, seeing as the film is freely available – and perfectly legally at that.

Three Films Make A Post: Something wonderful is about to happen

Fantasma aka Bloody Ballet (2018): This indie production directed by Bret Mullen clearly wants to be an 80s giallo, starting with its original title (apparently, the ballet title is the ill-advised work of the distributor, who really didn’t understand the film’s audience in the least), continuing through lighting, production design, the script’s use of mental illness (which nobody should confuse with an attempt at portraying actual mental illness and be offended by), plotting, acting style and camera work. At times, it’s about as cool an emulation of its chosen style as can be, but there are also quite a few scenes that simply go on too long, and double the amount of dream sequences needed. None of that makes the movie unwatchable or unlikeable, but these problems do keep the movie down enough to keep it from being as good the better of its predecessors.

Tokyo Sunrise (2015): I didn’t like this male-centric sort of road movie by Ryutaro Nakagawa quite as much as his Summer Blooms and Mio on the Shore. In fact, in theme and partial road movie structure, it feels like a bit of a warm-up for Summer Blooms. The film never quite convinced me that its flashback elements were necessary and wouldn’t have better been simply implied (as most of these things would be in those later films by the director), and its metaphorical level seems a bit blunt and too obvious. On the other hand, there are still some great scenes throughout the film; just in this one, you have to wade through less great ones to get to them.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984): A director needs a certain amount of guts to dare make a sequel to Kubrick’s 2001 (quite a few people I know argue Arthur C. Clarke never should have written his sequels either), so if nothing else, you have to give Peter Hyams (who also produced, wrote and was the director of photography) that. If a viewer goes in expecting something close to the tone and style of the Kubrick movie, they are bound to be disappointed, for Hyams’s idea of science fiction is a rather different one. It is concerned with the contrast between the political tensions/madness on Earth and space, and the need to leave these divisions behind to be able to reach understanding of the cosmos, not so much on a spiritual level, but a practical one.

If you’re willing to go with that, this actually turns out to be a rather great film, with the lived in naturalistic feeling of technology you’d expect of Hyams (see Outland, Project Capricorn), fine performances by Roy Scheider, John Lithgow and Helen Mirren, and one of the better variations of American filmmakers’ sad obsession with aliens pressing humanity into peace by threatening us with genocide.

Horror Movie Talk Recommendation

I don't think I've ever written or said anything about Mick Garris as a director that wasn't negative or downright rude. However, he's clearly a personable man, and turns that virtue into being a great interviewer of people in creative fields, clearly managing to create the kind of environment that gets directors, actors and writers to talk relaxed, freely and honestly, while still having structured interviews instead of random rambles, with just the right questions that get his subjects to talk interestingly.

So his always resurrecting (really, the show's like Hammer's version of Dracula in that regard) interview podcast Post Mortem is something not to be missed by anyone.

This is apparently the landing page for the podcast right now. It comes highly recommended for anyone who likes, loves, adores (etc) horror and has a degree of interest in how the movie sausage gets made.

In short: The Vanished (2017)

Original title: 사라진 밤

aka Lost Night

aka The Body

Warning: there will be some structural spoilers!

On a dark and rainy night, the body of high level female corporate executive Yoon Seol-hee (Kim Hee-ae) disappears from the morgue before her autopsy can take place. There are circumstances that may have a hint of the supernatural - if the supernatural hits guards on the head from behind, that is.

Ironically, it’s this disappearance that gets Yoon’s trophy husband, pharmacology professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo) into trouble, at least with policeman Woo Joong-sik (Kim Sang-kyung). It is deserved trouble, too, for Jin-han has indeed murdered his wife so he can be together with his pregnant girlfriend Hye-jin (Han Ji-an). He has, however, shown no interest at all in blocking an autopsy, for he is sure that the experimental drug he used to kill her is absolutely untraceable. Still, Joong-sik, like a drunk (yes, he does have a tragic traumatic event in his past, why do you ask), angry dog with a bone, isn’t letting go of Jin-han now, even once he is threatened by political pressure and the common sense of his underlings.

At the same time, Jin-han is becoming more and more convinced his wife isn’t actually dead and everything that’s happening now is part of a sadistic revenge plan. Which, given what we see of the woman in flashbacks, wouldn’t exactly come as a surprise.

Lee Chang-hee’s The Vanished is, as is to be expected, a very slickly made film, technically flawless, with always at least competent acting and a well-paced script, too. In fact, Lee’s technical chops as a director and writer manage to sell one of those overconstructed thriller plots that should be not just implausible but utterly ridiculous when put on screen, not exactly turning the ridiculous into the sublime but into the very, very entertaining.

There’s some great use of visual and acoustic tropes of the horror genre used as red herrings, adding a degree of playfulness that never becomes too large to distract from the well-tuned machine that is the movie.

Of course, like a lot of thrillers of the type, The Vanished isn’t a particularly emotionally involving film, having to hide or obfuscate all character motivations, pasts and character traits so its plot won’t break down, sacrificing everything to the surface thrill. Which isn’t as much of a problem here as it could be because Lee never pretends that his film is anything but what it is, so there’s no disappointment in the twisty thriller indeed being a twisty thriller instead of a twisty psychological thriller.

Alphabet City (1984)

Until now, drug dealer Johnny (Vincent Spano) has had quite the career, going up through the ranks fast. Doubts must have trickled in already with the birth of his little baby Renee (Christina Marie Denihan), with his artist wife Angie’s (Kate Vernon) various attempts to talk him out of the life of crime, his partner and friend Lippy’s (Michael Winslow, yes, the guy with the noise imitation shtick) slow descent into addiction, and his younger sister Sophia’s (Jami Gertz) start into the life of a prostitute

The night the film takes place in turns out to be the final straw, though, when Johnny is tasked with burning down the tenement building his mother (Zohra Lampert) and sister are living in. At first he’s just not very happy doing it, but then decides completely against it, well knowing that this will probably lead to very unhealthy consequences for him, while the building’s just going to be burned down by some other asshole as some great career move.

So it’s clear Johnny, together with Angie and the baby, will have to flee New York at the end of the night. Until then, he’s going to drift through the night, steal the money he’s usually collecting for his boss as his own private pension fund (the guy’s going to want to kill him anyway, right?), and try to survive if there are already people after him (which of course there are).

On a plot level, Amos Poe’s Alphabet City sounds like a pretty typical and not terribly original crime movie. It certainly is as close as Poe – coming out of the New York No-Wave – ever came to mainstream cinema. It is still as stylized and weird as you’ll find this sort of plot treated, using the set-up as an excuse for Spano to drift through the neon-coloured New York night, encounter strange people and peculiar variations on standard genre situations. The drug den, for example, must be seen to be believed, and cannot be explained with the few words I have. The genre’s expected action set pieces are staged and filmed as weirdly as the director could get away with too, clearly made with a knowledge of the more classic way to do things and a decision against doing anything that way.

The film’s structure does of course make this an older sibling to other movies about characters drifting and running through neon lit city nights like Into the Night or After Hours, a sub-genre which to me always feels a little like condensed road movies, trying to express the richness and strangeness of a city – or at least a certain number of city blocks – through episodic encounters, trying to capture a spirit of the place more than paint an outwardly realistic picture.

Poe’s New York here is drenched in all the colours of Dario Argento, turning the gritty New York of its time into a dream- and nightmarescape, with Johnny as our increasingly desperate Virgil, pointing out the circles of the damned. Alphabet City is much more an attempt at creating a sense of place through mood and strangeness than a proper narrative; it is also never less than riveting, explaining the love and desperation many of its inhabitants seem to have felt towards their city when this was made in the only way feelings like that can be explained – ambiguously and with a bit of the weird involved.

In short: Lost in New York (1989)

Original title: Perdues sans New York

An old woman tells of her childhood when she and a friend, reading a book of adventure tales, were dreaming themselves to be transformed into older bodies (Adeline and Funny Abitbol) by the Moon Goddess and transported to New York City. There, they find themselves separated, stepping through various places and times as well as moments from the sort of pulp and serial culture apparently beloved by all French people (and me). Irma Vep is suggested, and there’s of course a white (see-through) clad vampire too, as well as roses and graveyards.

For this is indeed a Jean Rollin movie, pretty much his final relevant film before his re-emergence at the end of the 90s. As will be typical of the late period movies, this isn’t really baby’s first Rollin movie, presenting as it does all of Rollin’s favourite moments and symbols in a way unvarnished even by the little plot he typically had use for. As such, this often feels a bit like an essay, or keeping with the film’s language as well as the obsessions of its filmmaker, a dream, about what a Rollin movie is, more than the thing itself. It is using a language quite a fewer viewers – especially those not already as madly in love with Rollin’s films as ideas and in practice as some of us are – are bound to find pretentious. I wouldn’t blame anyone for that. To me, however, it’s not pretentious if it is true and genuine, and there’s little I find truer than this distillation of Rollin’s main themes, obsessions and visual interests.

There are some new-ish elements on display here too, particularly the way Rollin shoots what should be an ultra-realistic slice of life of an actual city, but somehow still manages to give it the haze of a dream, treating the audience to a view on a thing that’s ultra-real yet still feels dream-like and peculiar.

All of this is obviously not for everyone, and if you’re planning on dipping a toe into Rollin’s ocean (neighbouring a dramatic coast with a castle ruin), you’ll probably want to do that with a different film first and return to this dream of New York, childhood wonders and aging, later.

Music Monday: Tin Foil Edition

Murder Rock (1984)

aka Murder-Rock: Dancing Death

Original title: Murderock – Uccide a passo di danza

An advanced dancing class of aerobics-style hopping promises the “kids” (that’s what the film calls this group of young women and men in their twenties) getting through the somewhat harsh treatment of former dancing nearly-star Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos getting up to some increasingly phantasmagorical scenery-chewing) a bright future with a big time Broadway company.

Well, as a matter of fact, said company only needs three dancers, a revelation that’s certainly going to lead to a lot of drama once it leaks down to the students. On the plus side, a mysterious killer begins murdering their way through the students, using chloroform and a stylish pin, so someone’s probably gonna end up as default member of the final three, dancing talent or lack thereof notwithstanding.

The investigating police lieutenant, Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) – given director Lucio Fulci’s love for the arts, I’m pretty sure named after the great writer of the weird –, certainly can see the wish to better oneself as a dancer as a murder motive. However, there’s a lot else going on, from a suit sleeping his way through what appears to be basically all of the dancers, to the jealousy of Candice’s predecessor Margie (Geretta Geretta), doomed to be her replacement’s assistant.

Then there’s the series of curious dreams Candice has in which she is followed by a man she has never seen before (Ray Lovelock) and who is trying to kill her with a stylish pin that looks a lot like the murder weapon. Turns out the guy is real, called George Webb, and in showbusiness, though not terribly successful thanks to some shadiness in his past. Obviously, Candice starts on a relationship with him right away. I can’t see how this could go wrong.

Murder Rock is usually not listed among many people’s favourite Lucio Fulci films, and I was certainly included among that number until my recent revisit of the movie. Now, I’m not quite willing to put it up on the pedestal of one of his very best films, but there is actually a lot to like about this giallo.

Of course, very fitting for a Fulci movie, before you can get to the pleasure you have to go through some pain, namely the film’s first third or so featuring a horrifying number of dance numbers in the aerobics inspired style you’d expect from an fad-conscious Italian movie made in 1984. There’s a lot of sweaty, aggressive swinging of body parts towards the camera, and so much crotch work, as well as crotch-level camera work, that a film whose actual nudity consists of some bare breasts feels wildly sleazy in a somewhat unpleasant way. The music, by Keith Emerson in his Italian soundtrack composer phase, gets appropriately painful in these sequences, but it is also immensely catchy in a way which suggests Fulci and Emerson cackling gleefully at the damage they are doing to innocent brains who only came to witness some crotch shaking and murder.

Eventually, the film does get away from the dancing a little, only returning to it for some actually pretty clever throwbacks to earlier scenes, and to ratchet up the intensity of the killer reveal, the filmmakers clearly having come to the conclusion their audience is now singing about paranoia coming their way without any outward help needed anymore. Once Murder Rock has reached that point, it turns into an often dream-like (in the patented Fulci way) giallo that seems genuinely interested in turning the destructive effects of the incessant striving for fame and glory into a horror movie. Quite a bit of what we see and hear from the characters may have little to do with realistic human psychology but works rather well to hammer away at that theme with the help of a cast of characters where not a single non-cop member isn’t in some way, shape or form obsessed with and damaged by becoming successful. Which is quite the thing to witness in a crotch-shake heavy movie called Murder Rock.

Curiously enough for a director and a genre not known for logical consistency but fitting to the rest of the script, even the plotting is not as weird as it first seems. In fact, a lot of what feels like a series of plot holes in the first acts does make perfect sense once we get to the reveal of our killer, the film simply playing fair with its audience like a proper, old-fashioned mystery would. Imagine Agathe Christie with more leotards and aerobics. Of course, the plot makes sense in the melodramatically heightened world the film takes place in rather than by the rules of real world logic, but who watching a Fulci movie would want it any other way?

A final way in which Murder Rock plays against expectations is a choice of murder method that basically completely blocks Fulci from doing any of his at this point in his career patented gloopy gore stuff at all, suggesting a director interested in doing things a bit differently this time around. The quality of the murder scenes demonstrates rather well that Fulci could have gone completely gore-less if he had wanted and still would have been able to make proper horror movies, but clearly, the great man couldn’t resist the lure of a good eye mutilation forever.

Three Films Make A Post: A Western Classic in the tradition of 'Shane' and 'High Noon'.

Bite the Bullet (1975): This Western (not at all in the tradition of Shane and High Noon, whatever the taglines said) by Richard Brooks concerns an early 20th Century horse race across the Southwest of the USA. It’s a film certainly interested in the adventure, and the physical toll these adventures take, but at its core, the film does very much treat its race as a way to explore the nature of the USA, the divisions of class and race, the way crass commercialism can turn into acts of quiet heroism, the vagaries of love on an aging cowboy’s wages, and the way people of a certain age drag their pasts around with them. With Gene Hackman, James Coburn, Candice Bergen, Ben Johnson, Jan-Micheal Vincent and so on, it has a cast that helps Brooks turn something that could be a bit too didactic for its own good into something at once lively and epic.

Rancho Deluxe (1975): Frank Perry’s Rancho Deluxe, made in the same year, seems also very interested in the question of America. But unlike the Brooks film, it also has an anarchic quality to it and quite a few jokes, good, bad, and strange to make, so it never quite seems to come to an argument, and certainly no conclusion, except that sex and nudity are good (and pretty funny), rich people suck (in a very non-sexual manner), and that there’s something to be said for having a very peculiar sense of humour. And everything’s better with Jeff Bridges and Harry Dean Stanton, of course.

Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976): Keeping with the decade, this AIP production directed by Mark L. Lester does its best to transfer the kind of Bonnie and Clyde doomed gangster plot that’s more at home in the depression era US into then contemporary times, with mixed results. From time to time, the film really hits on a moment or two that manages to cast very different times in parallel; at other times, it just seems to go through the sub-genre motions and couldn’t afford the period dress. The performances by our titular characters, Marjoe Gortner (also getting to preach for a moment) and Lynda Carter (who also sings and is nude, providing for more than one kink, it that’s why you’re here), are a mixed bag too, both making at least half of their scenes more interesting through their presence and choice, the other half more awkward.

It’s never a less than interesting film, though – and even this early in his career, Lester knew how to shoot a great low budget action scene or three.

Keeping with the last couple of Fridays

why not some Nanci Griffith?

In short: Sasquatch (2021)

During the 90s, while “visiting a friend” at a California cannabis farm, future investigative reporter David Holthouse heard a crazy rumour about some people having been murdered by a Sasquatch there.

Now, a couple of decades later, this Hulu true crime miniseries directed by Joshua Rofé and produced by the company of the Duplass brothers follows Holthouse’s attempts to get at the truth behind the crazy story. While certainly not being a bigfoot believer, Holthouse is clearly convinced that there’s something worthwhile to find out here. Turns out he’s right.

Generally, I am not the greatest fan of the true crime genre. In my eyes, large parts of it are sensationalist wallowing in other people’s suffering that all too often also tends to try and squeeze reality into the structure of a dramatic narrative, a shape that simply does not fit. Let’s not even talk about the needy way these things always want to end up on a big reveal of “THE TRUTH”, even if it is actually wild speculation.

There are of course exception to the rule: I have more time for the politically more engaged arm of the genre that tries to seek justice for the marginalized and the ignored. Of course, these, too, can fall into melodrama, but they don’t do so regularly. Shit, it turns out, is bad enough without filmmakers (and writers, and so on), having to make it worse.

There’s another string to the genre too, books and films that use a central crime to explore a whole social and historical place, which tends to be the part of the genre I’m most interested in. As it happens, the series at hand turns out to belong to that area of its genre, using much of its running time on building context. It starts out with something of a potted, localized mini-history of bigfoot hunting most viewers vaguely in touch with that material will probably not find terribly new but then segues into an exploration of the culture of commercial (and at that time illegal) marijuana growers in California, the negative impact the war on drugs had on it (turns out the naively used state violence made the situation much more violent instead of doing anything against drugs), putting Holthouse’s investigation into its proper context.

From time to time, the series does indulge in a bit of melodrama when it comes to the investigation, but mostly, it’s an often highly interesting and – dare I say it – educational dive into a culture and the changes it goes through. That the series also ends up with a not completely implausible sounding working theory it actually calls a theory about that whole bigfoot murder business is certainly another notch in its cap.

The Woman in the Window (2021)

Warning: there will at least be structural spoilers

Child psychologist Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is going through a very rough patch. Separated from her husband and child, she is holed up in her house in New York, unable to go out due to her agoraphobia, and heavily medicated with a potent mix of psychopharmacology and alcohol. Her main hobby apart from falling down drunk while watching Hitchcock movies is watching her neighbours, all of whom seem completely oblivious to the strategic use of curtains to protect one’s privacy.

The closest actual human contact Anna seems to have is the tenant in her basement, David (Wyatt Russell), a bit of a shady character. That changes once Anna gets to know the new neighbours from across the street, the Russells. She is visited in turn by the family’s teenage son Ethan (Fred Hechinger), and his mother Jane (Julianne Moore), whose behaviour very much suggests that husband Alistair (Gary Oldman) is an abuser.

Anna can’t help but want to get involved, and once she witnesses what she believes to be the murder of Jane, she also gets the police involved. You know how that’s going to work out for her in a thriller of this type in any case, and that’s before we come to the moment when Russell introduces a completely different woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh wasted on a complete nothing of a role) as his wife. And let’s not even speak about Anna’s traumatic past and what that says about her state of mind.

For its first hour or so, I really bought into Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window as a very interesting, clever and visually satisfying variation on Hitchcock’s Rear Window that centres – as per the rules of modern revisionist thriller filmmaking – on the female experience instead of on that of a pretty shitty man played by James Stewart (who seemed to realize his characters’ shittiness in Hitchcock movies much more so than his director did, but I digress). At that point the film also recommends itself as visually schooled not only in Hitchcock but also in all the favourite colours of the giallo, and featuring a pretty insane cast circling around a great, big (this is never a film for subtlety) performance by Amy Adams. Until the hour mark, the film additionally seems to do its best to use its protagonist’s mental illness as a part of its plotting but also respect mental illness and treat it loudly but humanely.

Unfortunately, all of this is thrown out of the window at the hour mark, when the whole film turns into a real shitshow of idiot plot twists, stupid revelations and clichés about mental illness most contemporary slasher movies would think twice to use. Also there to annoy me and ruin my fun are a budding serial killer (because nothing is so great for a psychological thriller as a villain who doesn’t have much of actual psychology, apparently), and the kind of whoa, twist! plotting that gives up on everything that has been interesting before in a movie just for the cheapest and tackiest effect, pissing on established character psychology in service of the laziest plotting and storytelling imaginable (script by Tracy Letts). That the ridiculously overwrought happy end also suggests the best way to get rid of one’s trauma induced mental illness is to suffer through even more trauma does not exactly help the film’s case either.

In short: Man on a Swing (1974)

Lee Tucker (Cliff Robertson), the chief of police in an American small town, encounters one of the worst crimes his home has ever seen. A teenage girl has been murdered and later disposed off in a somewhat ritualistic seeming manner. Tucker – clearly a professional – starts on a methodical investigation that does not seem to be leading anywhere. Normal proceedings are very much interrupted when a man called Franklin Wills (Joel Grey) contacts the police. Factory worker by day and psychic in his free time, Wills has a strange charisma, and even stranger habits. He also seems to know details about the crime nobody but the police and the killer know about, which is of course the sort of thing Tucker is bound to notice.

Tucker begins to treat Wills like a puzzle to solve, at times using him like a genuine source, at times as a suspect, always as the sort of object that doesn’t quite fit into any category he – or anyone with a rational mindset – can completely comprehend.

On paper, Frank Perry’s Man on a Swing is a police procedural “based on true case”. The direction most often emphasises the detail-oriented elements of Tucker’s style of police work with a near documentarian eye, really focussing camera and audience eye on the way lines of investigation are arrived at and explored. Perry’s doing his best not to bore with this, though, often getting in and out of scenes with some kind of elegant or clever edit or another, never wasting his or our time on the details that have no bearing on cases or characters.

It’s only around Wills when the film seems to loosen its nearly documentary belt, music and camera work becoming much more consciously dramatic; that same contrast is mirrored in the acting styles of the film’s main characters: Cliff Robertson is all laid back and thoughtful, with small, precise gestures, where Grey is all nerve and shaking, quaking and jittering, mood-swings and tension.

These contrasts in style seem to me to be rather the point of the film, a successful if not always easy to watch attempt to portray a moment where two very different views of the world – a practical materialism and irrationalism – come into contact and onto a collision course. Throughout the film, there’s always the impression that Tucker and Wills can’t come to grips with each other because their respective toolboxes for viewing the world are simply not made to comprehend one another. So as much as Tucker tries to rationally understand Wills, and Wills tries to emotionally manipulate Tucker, they never do manage to get the other really as deeply into their grasps as they want to, not even with the film’s cold reveal at the end that suggests so many serial killer media to come.