Music Monday: Kissing Rules Edition

Sneakers (1992)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Bishop (Robert Redford), a computer and security expert still nominally on the run from the government for non-sins committed in the 60s, leads a group of freelance weirdos doing the early 90s offline – and a little online – white hat hacking, with a clear Robin Hood streak. The rest of the team are former CIA man Crease (Sidney Poitier), the grown-up of the gang, blind man with excellent ears Whistler (David Strathairn), Forteana and conspiracy nut Mother (Dan Aykroyd, really going out of his comfort zone there), and young guy Carl (River Phoenix). When she and Bishop were still an item, ultra-straight Liz (Mary McDonnell) was also part of the group, but she’s still on good enough terms to help out when asked nicely.

Asking nicely isn’t the strength of the NSA, apparently. Instead, the agency is pressing our heroes into their service to steal a mysterious black box via the magic of not so veiled threats and money. At least our protagonists do have a challenging, and therefore interesting, job in acquiring it.

Unfortunately, once the heist is over, things get dangerous: the box itself is capable of cracking any kind of code and encryption used in the US; worse still, the NSA people aren’t actually working for the NSA but are private service bad guys in the service of one Cosmo (Ben Kingsley). And Cosmo just happens to be part of Bishop’s major past trauma. In any case, an object like the magical box belongs neither in his hand nor in that of the government, so a second heist will have to occur.

And make no mistake, Phil Alden Robinson’s Sneakers is, its outer appearance made out of badly understood and dramatized 90s hi-tech notwithstanding, in many regards a very traditional heist movie, belonging right next to films about sympathetic con-men sticking it to the Man in various forms in the less greed-minded side-arm of the genre.

As is typical, and perfectly fine, for the genre, Sneakers mostly throws plausibility out of the window for its version of the Rule of Cool, safe in the assumption an audience will let implausibilities slide in this context, if you just present them with enough charm. It’s absolutely the right choice, too, and if one hasn’t taken one’s monthly dose of ridiculous but fun plans nearly thwarted by silly problems, and perhaps hasn’t re-watched this in quite some time, Sneakers is a fine way to get one’s hit of these specific genre tropes.

Particularly because its cast is quite as fine as it is, with Redford, Poitier, Strathairn and the rest all providing some great middle-aged star power with performances that not just manage to create perfectly likeable two-note characters but also do the heavy work when it comes to balance the film’s considerable number of – often genuinely funny – jokes, quips and mildly silly situations with the more serious elements of the plot. It does help that most of these guys and the lady are all well versed in the serious as well as the funny stuff, and can shift from one acting stance to the other at a moment’s notice while keeping their characters whole. Well, I’m not terribly happy with Kingsley’s performance, I have to admit, because he falls into his rather typical trap of being all tics, bad accent and far-fetched body language when everyone around him is relaxed and giving the impression of the naturalistic even when portraying an implausible character type. One cannot blame the man for not putting any effort in, though.

On the direction side, things are a bit conservative, certainly never flashy and not exactly inspired. Which seems rather typical of a director whose handful of other films also never suggest much of a directorial personality beyond the ability to hold things together professionally and trust in his actors. While that’s not an approach to direction that’ll ever win many deserved prizes or just critical praise (yes, I know, he directed the curiously beloved by many Field of Dreams, but that thing’s terrible as well as terribly overrated), it works out very well indeed for Sneakers, whose actors are clearly happy to shoulder the main load of the film, and do so with a pleasant lack of vanity.

Three Films Make A Post: You are the experiment

Kain Kafam Hitam (2019): Somehow, it took two directors in form of Yudhistira Bayuadji and Maxime Bouttier to make the most generic, blandest example of the contemporary Indonesian horror wave I have yet seen. As a long-time genre movie fan, I’m perfectly okay with movies that aren’t works of genius and which consist nearly completely of well-worn tropes, but this one really has not a single moment that’s genuinely creepy, instead dragging its audience from one non-set piece, filmed indifferently, to the next. Apparently, the true horror is getting painfully bored by a film not even making the pretence of putting any effort in.

Arctic Void (2022): In comparison, this “stranded on Stavanger after some Fortean stuff happened” film by Darren Mann is a masterpiece. At least, it does start out pretty strong, with an inciting incident that’s cleverly staged and genuinely intriguing.

After the first act, alas, it becomes clear all too quickly that the film doesn’t really have any material for a second or a third one and will mostly drag its feet while nothing happens. At first, the very beautiful shots of an empty arctic township are somewhat interesting, but that attraction does stop eventually too, for one can only watch three mediocre actors doing very little for some time before one expects a theme, a plot, or just a mood to arrive.

The French Dispatch (2021): If you’re Wes Anderson (and the comparison is obviously very unfair to Arctic Void), you can get by with a very personal aesthetic, as this movie of connected shorts set in a France built out of weird ideas dreamt up after a marathon viewing session of pre-80s French cinema demonstrates. The film’s omnibus structure enables Anderson to completely give up on any pretence of interest in a standard narrative. Instead, a bunch of great actors go through a series of Anderson obsessions, tics and concepts, movie and literature quotes as filtered through the director’s by now well-known predilections, until the viewer is either hypnotized by the power of watching the contents of someone’s subconscious turned movie, or annoyed. I’m one of the viewers still very much with Anderson; visiting his mind space as a world put on screen still feels rather singular.

Short Film Friday: The Hidebehind

In short: The Crimson Key (1947)

Mrs Swann (Barnadene Hayes) hires half-boiled private eye Larry Morgan (Kent Taylor) to shadow her husband, who has apparently been acting strangely. Alas, while Larry is sleeping, somebody murders Dr Swann; his wife, rather optimistic concerning Larry’s capabilities after that one if you ask me, decides to keep the detective on the payroll to find out who did in the hubby and why.

So, Larry starts on his investigation and talks to peculiar people, tells his dreams (that is, the plot of the movie) to a Freudian analyst of dubious ethics, chats with an alcoholic society lady (Doris Dowling) more or less locked up by her husband (Dennis Hoey), gets roughed up, and stumbles upon more than just one additional corpse.

This little Fox programmer directed by Eugene Forde is a bit of a favourite of Quentin Tarantino (who also adds the helpful hint that it’s on YouTube), and it’s really not too difficult to see why. Sure, Forde’s direction is more of the straightforward, shoot fast, don’t shoot dumb, try to keep things in focus manner than anything that’ll ever get big stylistic praises, but it’s also very effective in not standing in the way of a very fun script by Irving Elman and a cast that seems to find a lot of enjoyment embodying their slightly stranger versions of standard hardboiled detective character types.

Because talk is cheapest when you’re on a budget – and boy, this surely is on a budget – there’s quite a lot of dialogue and very little action, but the filmmakers clearly put a lot of effort into making every scene with the various characters Larry encounters in his investigation memorable. So most of the dialogue here is fun on some level or another, and every character has some foibles or mannerisms for their actor to milk. Which everyone does absolutely joyfully, leading to a film that mostly uses the set-up of a shoe-leather destroying investigation to realize a series of wonderful little encounters full of witty repartee and more than a little weirdness. Plus, how many other movies are there containing a scene in which a detective presents the plot of the movie he’s in as a dream to a psychoanalyst? It’s delightful.

Alison’s Birthday (1981)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers, especially for the film’s structure and ending!

When she was sixteen, young Alison (Joanne Samuel) had a rather too exciting home-made Ouija board experience. During it, something purporting to be the spirit of her father (her parents both died in a car accident) possessed one of her friends to warn her not to return home to her uncle and aunt for her nineteenth birthday. After which something else manifested and telekinetically killed her friend.

Now Alison is nearing that nineteenth birthday, and she’s not really planning to go home for the day. What a surprise. She’s a bit busy with her life as a record saleswoman and her radio DJ boyfriend Peter (Lou Brown) anyway. Our heroine does change her mind when her aunt Jennifer (Bunney Brooke) suggests that her uncle Dean (John Bluthal) doesn’t have long to live. She does bring Peter with her, even though he isn’t going to sleep at her family’s place.

Not surprisingly, very strange things start to happen that just might suggest that the deadly warning from beyond of a couple of years ago was right on the money, and that the nice aunt and uncle couple may very well have some terrible plans for their niece. In the end, it’s going to be up to Peter to save Alison, which may or may not turn out to be great for the people involved.

Ian Coughlan’s folk/occult horror movie Alison’s Birthday had been quite difficult to see for decades, so my expectations for it were probably a bit higher than was good for my appreciation. There was a degree of disappointment when I finally got to see the film, for it is not, as one may have hoped for, a long lost masterpiece of its sub-genre(s), but a sometimes awkward mix of two very different kinds of horror film that doesn’t quite come together as perfectly as too high expectations would want it to.

However, looked at realistically, this is a fine little bit of horror with a handful of truly great scenes, and otherwise mostly solid ones, which (those are the rules) makes it a rather good film, just not the return of one’s favourite godhood on celluloid.

The film’s structure is peculiar: for its first half, we follow the misadventures of Alison, her exploration of the hidden secrets of her old home (major finds being a mini-Stonehenge in the supposedly snake-infested backyard, where “backyard” is interpreted in a very Australian way, and a genuine crone in the attic), her growing distrust of what functionally were her parents for much of her childhood, her trying to escape the cloying pressures of people being creepily nice and loving – all of which ends with her being drugged and hypnotized and losing her protagonist role.

At which point the film turns into a Dennis Wheatley-ish (if you can imagine Wheatley without his ultra-competent asshole heroes and weird rants about communism and Satan) occult conspiracy tale in which Peter uses his surprisingly good investigative skills to find out what’s going on, and then tries his much less impressive two-fisted hero bit on the cultists he has discovered, while he’s thwarted by their basic competence at being evil at every turn.

Turns out, the would-be macho guy may steal the female protagonist’s occult gaslighting tale right out of her hands, but that doesn’t mean he will not screw up her rescue rather badly, so that she has to bear the brunt of a film’s shock ending.

And it’s a really good shock ending, too, Coughlan hitting a nasty, disturbing and pretty cruel note with true creepy vigour, providing the movie with the true 70s (functionally, 1981 is still the 70s for horror) downer ending poor Alison doesn’t deserve, and which does make up for a scene or two too many of Peter flailing at the hero bit.

It’s certainly an interesting way to tell this particular story, though I do find the Alison-led half of the film more engaging. In part, because Samuel is simply a much better actress than Brown, in part because her slowly figuring out what’s going on with the people supposedly closest to her and trying to escape them without breaking the social contract is just thematically and emotionally much more resonant and engaging, dramatizing the horror of growing up very well indeed. Whereas the tale of an incompetent dude trying to save his girlfriend just doesn’t quite have the same interest.

There is still enough of interest going on in Peter’s half of the film to never make Alison’s Birthday boring, mind you, with some delightful moments of bizarre cult activity and a dollop of sequences of people doing research (which always delight me to no end) keeping things at the very least engaging throughout.

In short: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020)

Original title: ドロステのはてで僕ら

Café owner Kato (Kazunari Tosa) learns that the two minute time delay between a monitor in his home above his café and a monitor inside of the place makes it possible to see two minutes into the future. Things become complicated once some of his regulars/friends get wind of the thing; some of them are rather creative with their use of the set-up and manage to enhance it. Also involved are the adorable neighbour Kato is harbouring a crush on (Aki Asakura), and…but that would be needlessly telling.

Clearly, the wonderful One Cut of the Dead has put the idea into the heads of some of the more creative Japanese indie filmmakers that editing is for suckers and precisely choreographed one take movies are the thing to do now. Even better for the quality of the resulting films is that this sort of approach weeds out the boring, the lazy and the sane filmmakers, leaving guys like first-time feature director Junta Yamaguchi to the business of making their own lives very difficult, and their audiences happy.

As Yamaguchi approaches the format he has chosen, he and writer Makoto Ueda clearly use its difficulties and problems as creative fuel, turning what could be a gimmick into an intrinsic and important part of the narrative, and then proceed to go from clever bit to clever bit, from one great joke to the next, using formal restrictions to turn a film with a minimum of locations and characters into something exciting and alive that feels genuinely new.

At the same time, and that’s really the more important connection the film shares with One Cut, this is also a deeply likeable movie with quite a big heart, the sort of thing that’ll make you leave the streaming service of your choice with a big smile on your face not just because the film is clever and exciting, but because it has a heart as big as a Marvel blockbuster to boot.

Music Monday: Passenger Edition

The Glass Cage (1955)

aka The Glass Tomb

Pel Pelham (John Ireland) is a carnival barker as well as a family man. He genuinely loves his job. Well, mostly, it appears, he loves the feeling of divorcing sucker from money in as flamboyant a fashion as he can come up with. Right now, he’s planning on introducing London to the special talents of starvation artist/starving man Henri Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) and his attempt to break his own record by going seventy days without food while on public display in the titular glass cage.

Pel still needs a bit of capital for this, though, so it’s a lucky break when old showbiz pal turned successful business man Tony Lewis (Sidney James) asks Pel for a favour worth 250 pound. Tony, you see, is about to be married to a nice young upper class lady, but an old lady friend is blackmailing him for money. Pel might just be the right guy to talk said lady friend out of it. As it turns out, the business is money easily earned, for the blackmailer is Rena Maroni (Tonia Bern), an old friend of Pel’s. Even better, she has changed her mind about the blackmail anyway and won’t do anything that could embarrass Tony. She was clearly talked into the attempt by someone, but doesn’t tell Pel who.

We learn soon enough that the blackmail instigator is the carny biz world’s favourite agent, Harry Stanton (Geoffrey Keen), and Harry’s so unhappy about Rena’s change of heart, he murders her while Pel and his carny pals are having a party just a flight of steps down. This is just the start of an affair that’ll cost a good handful of people their lives. Fortunately, once under pressure, Pel turns out to be quite a good hobby detective, particularly paired with one Inspector Lindley (Liam Redmond), a man who clearly has a heart for the less upper-crust inhabitants of the world.

This sixty minute cheapie directed by Montgomery Tully is one of the quota quickies Hammer produced with Robert Lippert, and it is certainly one of the better examples of its kind. Tully’s filmmaking is straightforward and effective, with some moments of very clever staging and a couple of scenes that reach for the intensity of US noirs, though the film never attempts the expressionist visuals of those films.

In tone, however, The Glass Cage is certainly close to what one would call a noir, not quite as cynical as its American brethren could get, perhaps simply because its extra short running time doesn’t leave quite enough space to really dig into the messed-up minds of its villains, nor into the complicated personality of its protagonist Pel. What’s there of these depths is, however, well-realized, and works well with the film’s stranger plot details. And they do get strange, particular in a finale that’s slightly more bizarre and macabre than one would expect, and so far-fetched, Cornel Woolrich would have been proud to be associated with the film, if only he had been involved.

Despite the film’s briefness, it at least manages to draw its characters well enough to suggest actual personality and depth to them. In part, that’s thanks to the script’s effective use of shorthand characters tropes, in part because of a cast that fits into these tropes so nicely, they provide them with actual life (and liveliness) and make them memorable. I was particularly impressed by Ireland’s ability to draw Pel as a guy who is at once shifty and trustworthy; a man working a semi-crooked business and loving it without being crooked where it matters.

The film clearly has a lot of fun with showing as much of the carnival business as its budget provided, at the outset using it as a companionable counterpoint to the darker business of the main plot until both eventually intersect more directly. One can’t help but notice that it’s the – by 50s standards – morally dubious carnival people who do most of the killer catching work here, and that the film’s protagonist is even a bit of a conman who wouldn’t go unpunished in more typical 50s fare, and nod approvingly.

Three Films Make A Post: Witness the Beginning of Evil.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021): I was actually mildly excited about the Resident Evil world being put in different hands after about a hundred films by Mila Jovovich’s husband, but the resulting movie director/writer Johannes Roberts cooks up really isn’t a step up for the franchise at all. It’s a mess of a film that seems more interested in squeezing in as many videogame characters and nods towards various Resident Evil games as possible than constructing a working narrative, with way too many characters who have no reason to be on screen at all taking up run time as well as some of the viewer’s lifetime, the film cutting back and forth between these non-entities in a way that destroys the rhythm a big loud horror action movie like this desperately needs to work.

Instead of getting the adrenaline pumping, the film drags, then drags some more, and then drags again; the action sequences are staged without weight and feel random and inconsequential, and there’s simply no sense of tension to anything on screen.

The Beast aka The Wasteland aka El páramo (2021): This Spanish Netflix horror film by David Casademunt sets its sights rather a bit higher than Roberts’s film does, trying to talk about monsters and mental illness and frontier life and difficult families, all through the tale of a family that has fled 18th century wars into the wasteland (geographically and emotionally) of the film’s best title. I say trying, because like Raccoon City, it often lacks the focus it needs to succeed at its difficult task, though there are a handful of scenes in here that do produce the cold chill and the emotional complexity it so clearly aims for. The film’s main problem really isn’t only a lack of focus. There’s also Casademunt’s unsubtle direction, a tendency to overplay emotional beats and add a lot of slow motion and showy camera work in the tackiest manner imaginable exactly at those points when the film should trust its actors, namely Imma Cuesta and young Asier Flores, who both do what they can with what the film provides.

Devicansky Svirka aka Song of the Virgins aka The Maiden’s Tune (1973): By far the most artistically successful movie in today’s post is this fifty-five minute teleplay made in Yugoslavia when that country still existed. Directed by Djordje Kadijevic who also made the brilliant Leptirica/The She-Butterfly, this is a pretty incredible mix of early 70s arthouse sensibilities and the Gothic, a tale of psychosexual weirdness that is much better experienced than described which ends its very highbrow (and I mean that in a good way) tale with one of the greatest High Gothic scenes I’ve ever seen, the sort of thing that would have driven Poe-cycle phase Corman or even Bava mad with envy if they’d seen it, marrying sex and death and music in the most perfect way.

Short Film Friday: Ignore It

In short: Don’t Panic (1987)

Late teen Michael (Jon Michael Bischof) has just moved to Mexico City with his mother. Still, his birthday party is quite a large one, though mostly filled with kids he neither really knows nor likes, or virtual strangers like his instant crush Alex (Gabriela Hassel).

One of the local idiots, Tony (Juan Ignacio Aranda), brings an ouija board (as always, for reasons I’ll never understand, pronounced by everyone as “WeeGee”) to the festivities. Using it apparently awakens some kind of evil force, and so Michael soon has a whole load problems of the sort teenagers outside of horror movies usually miss out on: his eyes turn a merry red at times, and he has visions in which some of his class mates and acquaintances are stabbed to death with a dagger. It may or may not be some sort of mental connection to the supernatural killer – the film sure isn’t going to tell. Later on, there’s also a head made out of TV static making regular appearances, warning Michael who the next victim is going to be, and asking him to get them out of town. When he tries, he can add psychiatric attention to his problems.

Despite all the murder and mayhem around him, our hero still finds time and mind space to successfully romance Alex, of course.

Just having watched Rubén Galindo Jr.’s somewhat insane and most certainly insanely entertaining Grave Robbers some weeks ago, I was going into this earlier piece of Mexican 80s horror by the same director with particularly high hopes. Unfortunately, they weren’t really fulfilled, for where the Galindo’s next movie reaches some remarkable heights of individual, late 80s-tinged craziness, Don’t Panic is a rather less exciting mix of 80s horror cheese and variations (he said politely) on scenes from other, more popular horror movies of the decade. There’s rather a lot of the first two Nightmare on Elm Street movies in the film, but really, if you made a successful 80s teen horror movie, you’ll probably find elements cribbed from it, or at least played with in an obvious manner, in here, too.

Though, to be fair, there’s a certain amount of visual flair to the supernatural set pieces here that does stand Galindo Jr. in good stead, even if none of the ideas in the movie are actually his. Alas, the film does take its time getting there, frontloading the terrible teen romance and dire scenes of improbable teen interactions before the going gets good, so a viewer will have to keep awake by critiquing 80s fashion and counting very slowly to one thousand through the film’s first third or so.

But hey, we will always have Grave Robbers.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)

Mumbling and muttering academic Professor Parkins (Michael Hordern) checks into a hotel on the Norfolk coast for his vacation, which he mostly seems to have planned – in so far as he does any planning – to spend writing and on surprisingly vigorous coastal walks (unlike in the original story, golfing is out).

On one of said walks, Parkins finds an ancient whistle half-buried in the sand. Taking it home to the hotel, he discovers a Latin inscription on it, carrying the not at all concerning words “Who is this who is coming”. For reasons best known to himself, Parkins blows the whistle and is afterwards plagued by nightmares of some shadowy, deeply disturbing figure on the beach, as well as a feeling of being followed in real life, until things climax in something very disturbing happening in his hotel bedroom.

This short TV movie directed and adapted by Jonathan Miller (and based on one of the greatest ghost stories ever written) is of course the model that would some years later create one of the BBC’s great achievements in horror and supernatural television, the annual Ghost Story for Christmas, often based, as is this one, on the father of the modern ghost story, M.R. James.

For many a viewer, this proto-Ghost Story for Christmas is one of, if not the greatest of them all, and really, it’s not difficult to see why: the calm and slow beginning and the stark and effective black and white photography create a sense of place and a mood of something ineffably dreadful lurking just beyond the borders of the very quotidian; the handful of effects are used so cleverly, they are actually Jamesian in affect and method as well as in an eventual ruthlessness typical of the endings of Monty’s tales that’s not at all sanded down for television; and the sound design does much to add to all this.

For something that was really meant to be shown once and then thrown away (long-suffering friends of vintage British television do of course still have fits of anger about the BBC’s nightmarish decision to just overwrite the tapes of some of their old programs), there’s an astonishing amount of art and thoughtfulness on display. The filmmakers of this – like of a lot of other BBC productions – work on a Hollywood Poverty Row budget with the love, care, and effort of proper artists, and so Miller’s editing rhythm’s and staging decisions provide the film with a nearly hypnotic quality, something ineffable that turns a slow and theoretically straightforward tale into something very special indeed.

Now, I’ve gone on record somewhere that I don’t actually love this particular James adaptation as much as many others do mostly because of the much-praised performance of Michael Hordern, who portrays the somewhat obtuse but basically sensible Parkins of the story as a mumbling, brabbling absent-minded horror of a man barely able to communicate. I can’t say I’ve grown to love the performance over the years. I still believe Hordern is just too much here, but I’ve grown less irritated by it, and therefore less distracted by it also, and now find myself disagreeing with his acting decisions without finding them ruining the filmmaking for me anymore, finally – after a decade or so – leaving me just as much in love with the filmmaking and mood of Whistle and I’ll Come to You as everyone else who cares about these wonders of British television is.

In short: Bangkok Dark Tales (2019)

This is yet another Thai horror anthology film. As is typically the case with these films, we get three half hour tales directed by different directors, in this case, Thanvimol Onpapliw, Alwa Ritsila and Anusorn Soisa-Ngim (who is also listed as “head writer”). Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to find out who directed which segment.

The first tale concerns a young woman with somewhat problematic morals and a really rude streak spending New Year’s Eve in her office with two interns and a security guard (who is also a secret stalker, apparently) to fix up some financial data left in disarray after the death of her predecessor. If she manages the finish the job until January, 2nd, she’ll get promoted, if not, fired. That’s not going to be the main problem of her night, for she finds herself beleaguered by visions of a ghost version of her predecessor in a cheap Santa suit, as well as an actual masked maniac with an axe, also dressed in said cheap Santa outfit. It’s all good, cheap fun. The direction aims for a mix of very traditional suspense and a number of increasingly ridiculous twists, and mostly hits its mark well in both regards, never making our heroine quite nasty enough for the audience to lose interest in her fate.

Segment number two is about what happens to a couple that walks into the unused, and very, very haunted, fifth theatre of a cinema that once was a Hindu temple. After some “funny” business, the segment gets into a nice groove of red lights, creepy grinning ghost people, and disturbing things happening on a cinema screen the characters have turned their backs to. Things take on exactly the kind of nightmare logic I like best in my horror, and really never lose this mood until the end of the story, turning this into my favourite segment of the film at hand.

Segment number three, alas, is the dud all anthologies must by universal law contain. It’s also a waste of a bunch of creepily designed ghosts on the supposedly comical tale of two students/prostitutes/would-be net idols, spending a month in a house in Bangkok that turns out to be haunted by the victims of a family tragedy. The problem here is how unfunny the jokes are – at least if you don’t speak the Thai language and can only go by subtitles and physical acting – and how little the comedy and the ghosts really seem to connect.

Still, two good segments out of three aren’t bad at all, so this is easily enough recommended for a bit of light horrific fun.

Music Monday: Butterfly Edition

The Glove (1979)

Sam Kellog (John Saxon), something of a loveable loser, works as a bounty hunter to – barely, if at all – pay the child support he owes his ex-wife for their daughter. While he’s perfectly willing and able to beat you up when he’s trying to catch you, he’s a bit too soft to be a proper money-grubbing bastard, bound to let a target go if their particular true sob-story is too much for his feelings.

Right now, a very large man we’ll soon know as Victor Hale (Rosey Grier), dressed in body armour, is using the titular steel glove to occasionally but heavily beat up a specific group of former and current prison guards. It’s gotten so bad, the local prison guard union has put out a bounty of $20,000 to whoever catches Victor, preferably dead instead of alive. Sam would really rather like that money, but finding and catching Victor is much more difficult than you’d think. Turns out the supposed violent maniac is otherwise a genuinely lovely person with a tragic backstory who is nice to neighbours and kids, and has a surprisingly pleasant singing voice. So it’s not that easy to find anyone willing to sell information on him, even more so when the guy trying to buy is white like Sam.

While marketing and title suggest a bit of fun and brutal exploitation, in reality Ross Hagen’s The Glove is quite a different film that mixes a couple of brutal gloved-based beatings with many a scene of Rosey Grier (in a much better performance than he gave as racist Ray Milland’s second head) being nice to people, and many more scenes of Sam episodically going through his sad sack bounty hunter daily life, letting a nice elderly lady go, learning that gay people can hit you really hard as well, and philosophizing about the evils of a world that’s all about the dollar, while having to hustle for it himself. Also, going through a lot of off-screen monologuing to somehow stitch this thing together.

Which does of course mean that the film mostly doesn’t work as a thriller, crime, or action movie – apart from that couple of genuinely effective beatings – but is more like a road movie that takes place in a single city, with John Saxon encountering various characters and having fun interactions with them that reveal his flaws and virtues as well as, perhaps, some of the flaws of the world he lives in. Thanks to what must have been quite a bit of adlibbing and a cast that for some reason managed to attract everyone from Saxon to Grier to Joanna Cassidy, from Joan Blondell(!) to Aldo Ray the result is rather fun to watch, at least if you’re like me and just like to see interesting characters interact.

The film goes about its business so charmingly, I’m even willing to believe its somewhat anti-capitalist and anti-racist agenda to be genuine, though not thought through or argued well.

Technically, The Glove is all over the place: there’s a lot of standard competent 70s exploitation filmmaking here, but also improbable stuff like an incredible moment where the actors obviously flub not just a line but a whole dialogue interchange, but the camera just rolls on through the grins and the suppressed giggles. It’s pretty shoddy in that regard, but in context of the leisurely rest of the film, this just adds to The Glove’s curiously companionable quality. It’s as if you’re not watching a product or a work of art, but simply a group of people doing stuff while a camera happens to roll.

Three Films Make A Post: And you thought that other HOUSE was bad

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021): I already wasn’t terribly happy with the first Venom movie, what with its combo of a crap script and uninventive action, but compared to this second attempt at a movie, that thing was a masterpiece. Instead of even a bad script, this is based on what really just a series of badly connected memes that’ll probably go well on Instagram but certainly do not a movie make, terrible acting by a bunch of people who can do so much better, some of the worst effects you will see in this budget bracket, and direction by Andy Serkis that suggests he’s not even acquainted with the concept of tone, much less able to provide this nonsensical mess with one.

Perhaps the writer of the next Venom movie might take a look at some of the better comics runs of the characters and just crib from there?

The Hypnosis aka 최면 (2021): In comparison, this deeply mediocre horror movie by Choi Jae-hoon with its much too obvious twists, its indifferent character writing and its never more than okay staging at least feels like it is at trying for coherence in tone, style and narrative. Sure, it mostly only manages to land there in the blandest manner imaginable, and ends up being the kind of film you’ll watch and forget in a manner of minutes, but at least it isn’t going out of its way to become a bad time.

The House on Straw Hill aka Trauma aka Exposé (1976): By all rights, this pretty sleazy British thriller with Linda Hayden and Udo Kier (and barely anyone else) as directed and written by James Kenelm Clarke should be a much better time, if in a pretty unpleasant way. There are certainly all the elements here that make comparable exploitation movies (mostly from Italy) a good bad time, but things never come together as they should: the sleazy bits feel more awkward than anything else, the thriller narrative is much too predictable (not helped by a narrative style that shows always too much or too little), and the film’s attempts at being artsy (always useful for exploitation, obviously) manage to at the same time weaken the sleaze and feel like a put-on.

That's quite a lot of music, I've been told

In short: Puppet on a Chain (1970)

Because a trio of drug dealers are murdered in the USA, some US drug-centric law enforcement agency sends their agent Paul Sherman (Sven-Bertil Taube, who is about as American as I am), and extra secret undercover agent Maggie (Barbara Parkins) to Amsterdam to put a stop to that part of the drug trade once and for all. The Dutch colleagues aren’t terribly impressed by him, or enamoured by the idea, and don’t know about Maggie.

From then on, Sherman tortures and murders his way through Amsterdam, following leads and clues in the least effective yet most violent manner imaginable.

Say what you will against Geoffrey Reeve’s Alistair MacLean adaptation Puppet on a Chain, but it is most certainly a film ahead of its time, prefiguring the asshole on a rampage movie style by someone like Michael Winner for quite a few years. Sherman is a deeply unpleasant hero, a law enforcement agent who seems to go out of his way to break ever law imaginable, all of the time, even in situations where going by the book would make rather a lot more sense. He’s usually more violent than he needs to be and lacks in any actual investigative skills. Much worse for my sometimes rather amoral tastes when it comes to this kind of movie, he’s no fun at all, with no character traits apart from a badly written love affair with Maggie (who is of course killed off to motivate him to further violence), and played by Taube with all the verve and charisma of a concrete pillar.

It would be enough to make a boy rather cranky, if not for a couple of saving graces that eventually do make the adventures of an unpleasant prick doing unpleasant things for little reason at least decently entertaining. For one, there’s a certain degree of weirdness running through much of the plot, with villains who occasionally seem to think they are in a giallo, and so tend to rather creative corpse presentations and plans that make even less sense than Sherman’s investigative techniques. Corpses just look better in traditional Dutch garb.

Secondly, some of the action sequences are pretty decent too. The film’s major claim to fame is a long and pretty great motorboat chase scene; that one’s not directed by Reeve, but by Don Sharp, who also did some other trouble shooting. If I were a cynical man, I’d suggest all the good bits were Sharp’s responsibility.

Some Thoughts About Scream (1996)

Wes Craven’s Scream is one of those certified horror movie classics beloved by millions - including quite a few writers, friends, and filmmakers whose tastes I tend to trust - I never did get along with too well. Because it is such a classic beloved by many people with good taste, I do tend to try and get into the film every half a decade or so, and what better time for that attempt (again) shortly before the late sequel hits.

With this newest try, my opinion of the film has in so far improved that I don’t actually actively hate it anymore. My heavy dislike, I’ve realized, is not so much for Craven’s film itself, but for the legion of smug, “ironic” teen slashers that followed it – some of them scripted by Scream’s Kevin Williamson, to be sure.

It’s not that I’ve started to love the meta horror elements of the film at hand, mind you: I’m still of the opinion that the script doesn’t really do much more with slasher clichés than to point them out, not fulfilling all of them for sure, but usually not really replacing them with something I find terribly interesting or engaging. or haven’t seen in dozens of giallos done with more style. There’s a sense of smug self-satisfaction running through this arm of horror as a whole I’m never going to become fond of, particularly when this smugness isn’t grounded in as much intelligence as the pose suggests, and never seems to rise above mere cleverness.

In Scream’s specific case, I’m also not at all fond of the final reveal of the killer as a couple of mad people clichés in desperate need of an attic. The film does its very best to make them act as stupidly as possible, so as to make a viewer really work at getting to believe these stupid pricks are criminal masterminds who have managed to fake a couple of murders before (and yes, I know what the later films do about this problem, but there’s no hint on screen that’s something Williamson and Craven were already planning here). Which is not helped by the acting of our villain actors in the final scene, which is so broad as to border on the offensive.

To be fair to the Williamson’s script, the killers’ earlier scenes work excellently when you already know whodunnit, adding a macabre dimension to these interactions on a re-watch, while also playing fair with the audience, something that’s certainly difficult to achieve if you don’t want the genre-savvy viewer to cop to the killers’ identity early on.

The serious – or semi-funny – thriller and murder set pieces still don’t get me as excited as they do my peers and imaginary enemies, alas. It’s not that I find any of them uninteresting, incompetently done or anything else that would make my opinion spectacularly irritating to true fans of the film (and more power to you) – I just don’t find them anything more than slick and competent, following classic suspense models well, but adding little stylistically or thematically that I find particularly involving. But then, I’ve never shared the admiration for Wes Craven as a director, either, so take that for what you will.

But hey, perhaps I’ll change my mind about all of this in the 2030s, when my next attempt at a re-watch is going to be due. Until then, I rather re-watch Scream 2 again, the one film in the franchise I genuinely love.

In short: McCanick (2013)

When he hears that his old acquaintance, a young man called Simon Weeks (Cory Monteith) has been released from prison early, policeman Eugene McCanick (David Morse) starts an increasingly irrational and dangerous attempt to find Weeks and most probably do something very violent to him. In a series of flashbacks, what at first seems like your classical movie revenge trip is revealed to be something more human and much sadder: the attempt of a coward to avoid having to look at himself in the mirror and be honest to himself for once in his life. As it goes with cases like this, other people will have to suffer so that McCanick won’t have to take responsibility for anything in his messed up life.

Even though Josh C. Waller’s direction is focused and clever, and the supporting actors are doing fine work, McCanick really is the David Morse show, a state of things that seems only fair towards an actor who has spent large parts of his career supporting others on screen. Not surprisingly, Morse makes the most out of the opportunity, providing McCanick with complexity and humanity even once the script has reached the point where the flashbacks disclose how petty the secret that drives McCanick actually is. That’s rather important in a film featuring a central character who is such a coward he’d rather see people dead than have someone walk around free who knows about his actual sexual preferences and who actually seems to think he could assuage his own feelings of guilt by just adding more and more to be guilty about.

Waller’s direction and Morse’s acting are good enough to keep McCanick interesting and human once this turning point in the film is reached, while Daniel Noah’s script takes great care to not forgot that the cop’s victims are human beings with all the good and bad that entails, too. It’s the kind of old-fashioned humanist approach films of this sub-genre have never been exactly full of, and thankfully in a version that does keep the hand-wringing down regardless.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,josh c. waller,david morse,cory monteith,crime,drama

Music Monday: Guilty Edition

Side Effect (2020)

Original title: Pobochnyi effekt

Following a home invasion and an attempted rape that resulted in the loss of their unborn child, the marriage of singer Olya (Marina Vasileva) and architect Andrey (Semyon Serzin) is on the ropes. They’re now separated from each other, with Andrey desperately trying to win Olya back and somehow drag her into better mental health at the same time; not a winning combination, that.

We’ll never quite figure out what Olya thinks about what happened and Andrey’s guilt in the proceedings until very late in the film, but Andrey himself feels particularly guilty for not having done some stupid violent thing that would only have gotten him killed to protect her. Eventually he is desperate enough to go to the witch Mara (Aleksandra Revenko), whose fungi-based spellcraft is supposed to be the absolute state of the magical art. Andrey simply wants a spell to make Olya forget what happened, which surely will make his own guilt disappear as well, and bring their marriage back on the old track, right?

As it happens, Mara not only provides a fine little fungus for Andrey to secretly – what’s “consensual”? – feed to Olya to do the partial amnesia job, but also wants the couple to housesit her large apartment in a constructivist nightmare of a building. Apparently, so that the spores in the air there can do their job on Olya, and Mara’s fungi will be properly fumigated while she’s away.

At first, things go as Andrey had hoped, and Olya not just gets back with him the very same night she has imbibed a fungus-enhanced cake but actually seems to feel somewhat happier. To nobody’s surprise but Andrey’s, things don’t stay positive once the couple moves into Mara’s apartment. While Olya indeed begins to forget parts of her trauma and even the traumatic event itself, she gets flashes and spurts of the rape attempt that seem even worse than before because they now lack in any real life context she can remember. Other disturbing things begin happening as well, of course. Why, it’s as if Mara – a rather present absence in her apartment – has some sort of very unkind plan for the couple.

Aleksey Kazakov’s Side Effect is rather different from the somewhat more generic Russian horror movies I’ve seen during the last few years. There’s something rather more serious-minded about the film, and it is clearly an honest attempt at exploring the results of trauma and guilt on a relationship through its tale of pretty nasty witchcraft. Even our villainess’s evil is the result of a trauma of her own, just that her reaction to it is an attempt to perpetuate her own suffering on others unlucky enough to remind her of it.

The further the film gets into its plot, the more it expresses its interests through a mix of surrealism and the folkloric, using potent images from Slavic folklore to position itself right at the border between a very dark fairy-tale and more free-floating strangeness to try and speak of dark and sad psychological currents through the lens of the Weird.

It’s a very interesting attempt at this kind of exploration, making much of moody as well as meaningful production design, and taking on an increasingly nightmarish as well as metaphorical quality, where someone’s death can be easily reversed only to increase a person’s suffering, and where the ghosts of the past can put a very physical effort into helping out the living.

Three Films Make A Post: Seven Suicides - and they roared back as The Living Dead.

Psychomania aka The Death Wheelers (1973): For the longest time, I didn’t get along with this particular bit of British bikersploitation/folk horror by Don Sharp at all. It’s not a complete surprise, for the film does have some undeniable drawbacks: the pacing is – rather atypical for Sharp – leaden, until it suddenly isn’t because it’s time for a stunt sequence; the bikers seem awfully well-groomed and polite even when they are undead and working for Satan; and the script never seems to agree with itself on the proper tone for the affair. On the other hand, and that’s what rather worked for me this time around: the stunt sequences are really great in mixing Sharp’s excellent instincts for action with a very British looking mundanity, and the folk horror tale has moments of proper weirdness that very consciously resemble folk tales about deals with the devil, until everything culminates in a set piece that absolutely should be part of a modern (as of ‘73) version of an actual folk tale.

Antlers (2021): I’m honestly more than a bit confused about what to make of this film by Scott Cooper. It’s at once an attempt to use a version of the wendigo myth to talk about circles of abuse and poverty, and a monster movie (with an awesome looking creature) so traditional, it could have been on the SyFy Channel before they go lost in the bad jokes. Which might have worked out fine indeed, if the script had ever found a way to actually connect its disparate impulses to build a proper whole.

Instead, the narrative drags the characters back and forth between two very different kinds of movie, without ever even seeming to make an attempt to convince its audience why they belong together.

The Negotiation aka 협상 | hyeob-sang (2018): That sort of thing could never happen to this ultra-slick South Korean thriller by Lee Jong-seok about a very intense hostage negotiation that turns into a series of twists and revelations. It’s all very professionally done, acted well (particularly Son Ye-jin as our hostage negotiating heroine does a wonderful star turn), and really rather exciting.

It is also somewhat predictable for anyone who knows this style of movie – it’s just made so well I didn’t actually find myself caring it is in a terribly negative way – and mostly surprises by not going for the sort of deep formal or thematic turn many highly commercial films from Korea love to take despite this sort of thing supposedly not how highly commercial films are done.

Short Film Friday: A Quiet Room in Walthamstow

In short: Wekufe (2016)

Students Paula (Paula Figueroa) and her boyfriend Matias (Matias Aldea) travel to the Chilean island province of Chiloé, where she is planning on shooting a report – as some kind of college work, I suppose – about the very high percentage of rape, incest, sexual assault and unwanted pregnancies on the island. People say it’s all because of the incubus demon dwarves roaming the forests of the place; others, like Paula, rather prefer the inheritance of colonialism, poverty, and the cultural, social and economical gap between the descendants of the initial native population and those of the colonialists as an explanation. Matias, on the other hand, just wants to shoot a found footage horror movie, demons or politics be damned.

Which is indeed what he’s going to do, if a rather more real one than he probably wished for.

Turns out you still can add some new elements to the ole POV horror formula and easily make it a bit more lively and contemporary. At least Javier Attridge’s Chilean example of the form does this rather well, managing to tell a folk horror tale that is also sceptical about some of the forms and tropes of its own genre. That may sound a bit too much like having one’s cake and eating it too, but Attridge’s script is clever enough to still make this work as a horror film. Mostly by not treating groups of people with comparable backgrounds as a single group-thinking body, realizing that this sort of homogeneity simply doesn’t exist in reality.

The filmmaker manages to turn Wekufe into an effective little horror movie that does hit quite a few of the expected tropes – but with mild yet important variations – and keeps things well-shot and well-paced, both not always a given in POV horror, as we all well know. There are even a couple of wonderfully creepy scenes, shot by daylight with everything important clearly visible. The only element about Wekufe that didn’t completely work for me were the scenes early on where the characters poo-poo the usual clichés of POV horror. That sort of thing does tend to feel twee rather than clever to me.

Of course, if that’s the biggest criticism I have towards a POV horror movie, it is rather successful at what it does.