Day Shift (2022)

Pretending to be a freelance pool cleaner, Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) is actually a freelance vampire hunter, selling the teeth of the undead for profit (and no, the film never explains how this system actually works, or who is buying the stuff). He once was a union vampire hunter but was thrown out of the organization for irresponsible behaviour.

Because our hero is just that kind of a guy, he’s also separated from his family, not for lack of love but because he’s irresponsible and uses his work as an excuse for his absenteeism. Though I am not too sure the film actually understands this. Also, he never had the vampire talk with his wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) and little daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax). Right now, Jocely threatens to move away unless Bud can come up with enough money for Paige’s school tuition and braces. Apparently, you only learn you have to pay five thousand dollars tuition a week before they come due.

Clearly, the only way to solve these problems is to get back into the vampire hunter’s union, which Bud manages with the help of mythical vampire hunter Big John Elliott (Snoop Dogg, who is pretty awesome in this one). Of course, the union boss hates Bud and insists on desk jock Seth (Dave Franco) accompanying and watching him.

Which becomes particularly difficult because Bud has killed the actual daughter of budding master vampire Audrey (Karla Souza), who does not take well to this sort of thing.

From moment to moment, there’s fun to be had in the series of unthinkingly deployed clichés director J.J. Perry calls a movie. You can certainly see the extensive experience Perry has with stunt work, and get quite a few good to great action set pieces (which is more than you can say about the clearly much more costly The Gray Man which also comes to us via Netflix like this one), as if someone had thrown a bit of money to a direct to video action movie. Which at the very least keeps the film from ever becoming boring. In fact, once the triple action sequence climax starts, things become downright entertaining to watch, with well choreographed action filmed with vigour and without permanent cutting away.

All of which would make for a pretty awesome piece of horror comedy action cinema if not for a terrible script that can only ever think of anything as a set-up of a joke but doesn’t understand that your world building can only be a decent basis for jokes when it actually hangs together. That doesn’t mean it can’t be absurd – see something like the Men in Black films for how to do it right – but once your world only seems to be the set-up for jokes, those jokes should at the very least be pretty good. Day Shift believes a guy repeatedly pissing himself when he encounters vampires to be the epitome of humour, and so has its problems distracting from the fact that its world makes little sense, its characters are buddy cop movie clichés without any changes made to them and certainly no development, and that its plot can’t seem to focus for a second. How shoddy is the plotting? The film plays the old “the bad guy blackmailed this pretty woman to get close to our hero” card with a character Bud has met exactly one time before her “betrayal”.

Particularly painful is the late movie revelation that vampires in this world don’t actually have to murder people and still keep free will and their old personalities. Which, if you – unlike writers Tyler Tice and Shay Hatten – think about it for a second, means Bud is randomly murdering potentially innocent people for their teeth for a living.

Yet, there are still these very fun fights (including a cameo by house favourite Scott Adkins) keeping Day Shift generally watchable and entertaining.

In short: The House of Snails (2021)

Original title: La casa del caracol

Warning: I’ll have to spoil the next-to-last twist!

Antonio Prieto (Javier Rey), full-time writer with writer’s block as well as part-time prick, moves to a small Spanish village for inspiration. Because it’s apparently that kind of day, he acquires a dog nobody shows any interest in and a potential love interest in one Berta (Paz Vega) while he’s still arriving. Though it’s not all good, for he also begins to encounter the first of a lot of curious superstitions and rituals the villagers hold to. Some, though by far not enough to be good for a movie title, are snail-related. Most of the superstitions, however, concern the village curse which is supposed to explain the large number of deformations among the local population. Apparently – this is something Antonio will take some time to find out – every decade or so, someone is possessed by (or begins embodying) an evil spirit and rips and tears through the population until killed.

Of course, this is also the kind of place where a mentally ill man is locked up in a shed in the woods, so one might doubt the veracity of the tale.

All the while, Antonio gets closer to Berta, and pisses off most everyone else in the village, until a series of killings – first of animals, then of a girl – starts. You’ll never guess who the killer is, right?

Or at least, that’s what Macarena Astorga’s film genuinely seems to believe. I suppose the film is working from the theory that most viewers will never have seen a movie with a ridiculous twist in their lives, and so will eventually play that “reveal” of something most viewers will have feared is going to be the explanation of the plot in excruciating detail that nearly borders on parody. This so-called big twist is only made more palatable by the fact that the film’s final twist is even more hair-raisingly contrived. Hooray?

It’s a bit of a shame, too, for whenever the film pretends to be more of a folk horror film than a stupid example of psychological horror, it’s perfectly decent, even with a couple of cool little flourishes when it comes to the villagers’ beliefs. Sure, Astorga’s work at creating mood is still only middling here, at best, but I’d rather have continued watching the decent, middling folk horror movie than the braindead bit of psycho horror it becomes.

Music Monday: Pam and Eddie Edition

Prey (2022)

1719, in the territory of a tribe of Comanche on the Great Plains. Mid-20s teen Naru (Amber Midthunder) wants to become a warrior rather badly. She certainly has at least half the skill set and double the brains to do it, but not surprisingly, what we see of the rest of her tribe is less than happy to see a young woman trying to become a warrior.

It doesn’t make things easier for Naru that she has many of the character traits of a typical YA heroine, so she’s stubborn when compromise could get her further, capable but not as insanely capable as she seems to believe herself – which is to say, she’s human – moody and broody, and not at all great with people. She’s also in something of a competition with her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers). Taabe’s not always unsympathetic to his sister and her capabilities, but he’s also the star young warrior of the tribe, and clearly doesn’t quite get how much harder his sister has to work for the same gain, or just doesn’t want to see it.

All these problems become rather dangerous for everyone involved once a young warrior is killed by something. Taabe and most of the others believe he has been killed by a puma, but Naru finds tracks and hints that suggest something more dangerous. Like, for example, one of the hunting-mad aliens of the other Predator movies.

Eventually, of course, it will fall to Naru to conquer the alien killer.

There are moments, quite a few even, when Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey is a great, tight, survival thriller about a young, capable, and rather deadly young woman in a fight for her life and her tribe’s respect against a technologically superior force, her own people’s failings, and some of those other alien invaders that will historically be their downfall. Some of the action set pieces are very clever indeed, using the by now well-known traits of our alien menace and the historical situation in inventive and very exciting ways.

There are other moments when Naru is saved by the hero’s death exemption rather than her own abilities or even just luck (which is the thing that saves most of us sooner or later, or just doesn’t); moments when the film’s feminist messaging feels the need to hammer its point home in the most unnecessary way when it would be much more effective to simply show instead of tell us by seeing Naru prevail as well as the things she prevails over; and moments when Naru and the rest of her tribe act so much the contemporary YA characters, it can become difficult to care about her or them, or believe they are actually members of a tribal community from the 18th Century.

The good parts of the film definitely prevail, certainly enough to make this a film well worth watching as well as the second best movie in the Predator franchise (which sounds like a bit of a back-handed compliment, but isn’t meant to be in this case). Prey’s problem is simply that its good parts are exquisite, while the bad parts are nothing which could not have been fixed by a little more subtlety and care in the script. So this could have been a real classic, yet can’t quite get away from its flaws enough for that, and merely ends up being pretty great.

Three Films Make A Post: World War Two was just ending. World War Murphy is about to begin.

Murphy’s War (1971): When he was on, Peter Yates could be a great director; when he was off he did tend to make at the very least interesting failures. Murphy’s War, a film about an Irish airplane mechanic with an improbable accent despite being played by Peter O’Toole who makes increasingly insane attempts at taking vengeance on a German U-Boat crew right at the end of World War II, lands somewhere in the middle. There are some riveting set pieces, some excellent tender or hard character moments, but the film is also full of scenes that go on far longer than they need to or should. Worse, it never manages to convince me of Murphy’s increasing derangement, never really finds an angle to show his inner life in a way that makes sense. It doesn’t help that the ending jumps gleefully over the line between the heightened intensity and absurdity of an action movie ending and sheer, goofy nonsense.

La muerte del chacal (1984): This mixture of Mexican action cinema standards and giallo and slasher tropes directed by Pedro Galindo III and starring the dynamic facial hair of brother duo Mario and Fernando Almada is not a perfect film by far – it does tend to drag rather a lot in its first half – but it certainly has a couple of really neat ideas. Particularly the way the mid-act plot twist runs against all audience expectations is rather a thing to behold, especially in a film where you’d never expect any such thing to happen.

After this, the film turns full-on slasher, with still a bit too much feet-dragging for its own good, but also some genuinely cool suspense scenes and stylish kills, as well as an awesomely goofy scene in which one Almeda kills a Doberman with his bare hands in a manner so ridiculous, even a dog person might laugh.

Incantation (2022): I know, quite a few people go really nuts about Kevin Ko’s Taiwanese POV horror movie. It is certainly a film made with the highest competence, full of well-timed shocks, with some creepy ideas, but I also find it nearly aggressively derivative of the traditions of J-Horror and creepypasta (its big, obvious plot twist is taken directly from the latter realm). Which does not make it a bad movie, or even an unenjoyable one, but one that’s a bit too much like a clockwork made out of stolen and borrowed parts to truly do something for me.

Short Film Friday: Momo

In short: The Gray Man (2022)

A CIA killer (Ryan Gosling, whose popularity I’ll never get, because he doesn’t act in any sense of the word beyond acting as some sort of hole in a movie for a viewer to project whatever into and has little charisma I’d see) finds himself first on the run from his own people, and then looking to free the kidnapped sick child of his mentor (Billy Bob Thornton) while fighting off the the private sector incompetents of bad guy Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, clearly having a blast with the villain role; also at least some recognizable character traits). A pacemaker with GPS is involved, so you can imagine how the rest of the script is.

On the corporate franchise side of movie making, brother duo Anthony and Joe Russo are responsible for some of my favourite Marvel movies – I’d even go so far as to call Captain America: The Winter Soldier one of the best action movies ever made in Hollywood – but their non-superhero action thrillers for Netflix suggest that Marvel’s presumably heavier hand is exactly what they need. Without that sort of guidance, we get movies as bad as Extraction, or as aggressively tedious as this one, a movie that somehow manages to make two hours of action sequences seem long and pretty boring. At least the incessant noise keeps one awake.

It doesn’t help here that none of the action sequences are anything more than big budget competent, lacking in inventiveness, interesting staging and the spark that makes a movie explosion fun, nor that the not-Bourne super spy script all of the action is based on is mostly pretty damn terrible. At least, it has more holes than most victims of Hansen’s or Six’s shoot-outs, does character motivation so badly, it would have been better not to even bother, and wastes a mostly great cast on nothing whatsoever. Because that’s not enough, the movie is also excruciatingly long-winded, and jumps from country to country without ever making any use of the different locations. This could all have happened in a warehouse and not looked or felt any less interesting.

Threshold (2020)

Siblings Leo (Joey Millin) and Virginia (Madison West) are not on the best of terms these days, despite apparently once having been rather close. This has probably something to do with your typical incongruity of character traits: name, Virginia is a drug addict with a long history of relapses and Leo is a bit of a prick at the best of times.

Though, to be fair to the guy, when Leo is called in to drive Virginia to rehab, he’s doing it, even though he is going through some heavy divorce proceedings himself; he does it with a lot of grumbling, of course.

The thing is, or so Virginia says once Leo arrives at her place, she’s not actually on any drugs anymore but has been cursed by a cult that magically detoxed her when she was at her worst. Part of this curse is a curious psychical/physical connection to another guy. Basically, she feels some of the things he feels, particularly pain, or, as it turns out, drug highs. Virginia is convinced that if she could only meet the other half of this curious curse, things could be resolved. Eventually, she manages to convince Leo to help her get to the other side of the United States, where she’s probably meant to go to find her magical other half. On the way, there’s a lot of bitching and bonding between the siblings, and some curious encounters with the low key weird.

This is the second time I attempted to watch Powell Robinson and Patrick Robert Young’s Threshold. The first time around, I quickly lost interest in the film’s series of – often clearly improvised – scenes of Leo and Virginia bitching, whining and sometimes bonding. There’s a rather rambling quality to the film, even with a length of barely eighty minutes, which can get annoying rather quickly if one isn’t in the mood for this approach to filmmaking and road movies at the moment.

This time around, I was in the proper frame of mind, though, and even though I still believe that a couple of scenes could have used a judicious bit of pruning, I actually found myself getting into the groove of the complicated sibling relationship here, the peculiar rhythms of the film, as well as the genuine quality of the acting, and the sense of truthfulness this conjures up.

I also felt rather happy with the film’s treatment of the weirdness that’s part of the siblings’ road trip through the US of motels and side-roads that tends to go over so well with us Europeans, the way the film’s stranger moments spiritually seem to fit these in-between places perfectly, getting at the connection between the liminal places of deeply quotidian life and the Weird in ways not easy to reach, or to explain. Eventually, everything culminates in a well-staged, deeply low budget in the best way, and also deeply strange climax that’s pretty much perfect for Threshold. Including a last second “gotcha!” bit that’s absolutely in keeping with the rest of the film, and simply very fun.

In short: The Sacred Spirit (2021)

Original title: Espíritu sagrado

This sort-of arthouse dramedy with certain genre connections by Chema García Ibarra is one of those sad cases of a movie much praised by most every critic writing about it that does nothing whatsoever for me even though I do understand and see the artistry it is lauded for. Alas, it’s artistry in service of nothing I personally have any interest in.

That’s because Ibarra is all about techniques I usually – and specifically here – just can’t stand in a movie: consciously static visual language that’s supposed to distance the viewer from the characters and their world, where I see immersion into a world (even an unpleasant world) as one of the goals of cinema. The cold, emotional distance the film keeps to its character and their inner worlds, where I really want to understand their emotions and inner lives, perhaps even feel for them/with them or against them instead of just looking at them from the outside like a tourist without a guidebook. The monotonous delivery of every single line of dialogue, often described as naturalism by certain critics, even though it is no such thing for anyone not exclusively talking to robots, but rather what happens when you take amateur actors without experience and don’t show them how to emote on camera, another distancing technique I particularly loathe. Add to this humour so deadpan you probably need to be dead to laugh about it, and you can count me out, however interesting some of Ibarra’s ideas are on paper.

Music Monday: Tall and Mighty Edition

Grand Slam (1967)

Original title: Ad ogni costo

Retiring from his job as a professor at a Brazilian girl’s school, James Anders (Edward G. Robinson) goes to visit a childhood buddy of his, Mark Milford (Adolfo Celi), with a plan a lifetime in the making. On paper, the former academic has a complicated yet eminently feasible and thoroughly thought out idea for getting at a considerable amount of diamonds from a building right across from his old school. While the good Professor was teaching, Milford has become quite an exalted member of the mob, so he should be able to provide Anders with a specialized crew for the job.

In fact, Milford has an index catalogue worth of criminals on offer, sorted by keywords like “Playboy”, “Vatican”, or “Syndicate Killer”. So off Anders goes to instruct a military man (Klaus Kinski), a playboy (Robert Hoffman), an electronics expert (Riccardo Cucciolla) and a safe cracker (George Rigaud) in his plans.

Once in Rio, the Professor is mostly going to be hands-off, leaving his team to sort out various snatches in the plan – for example, it turns out seducing a Hollywood-frumpy middle-aged woman (Janet Leigh) is more difficult for our playboy than expected – and go through the old dance of shouty discussions and double-crosses without him.

Giuliano Montaldo’s Grand Slam is a somewhat typical example of the kind of crime and heist movie made as a European co-production – and therefore carrying a somewhat higher budget – that occurred pretty regularly in the latter half of the 60s. In this particular case it’s an Italian, Spanish and German co-production, but fortunately, the Italian side provides most of the behind the camera workforce. The money is otherwise well used in some globe-trotting location shots.

There’s the usual cast of European character actors and Hollywood stars on the downwards trajectories of their careers. All of them mix rather well here. Robinson nicely uses a certain grandfatherly quality to underplay how ruthless his character actually is. Leigh does more with the role of the seduced than you’d expect in this sort of thing. Everybody else is excellently cast to type, with Kinski for once not playing an outright psycho but a mostly calm, cool, and exceedingly dangerous professional, and he’s doing it rather well.

On the technical side, Grand Slam is utterly competent filmmaking that provides exactly the kind of suspense and the reversals of fortune you’ll expect going on in a satisfying and effective manner, without ever climbing quite the heights it should need for greatness. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, though it really leaves me with relatively little to write about.

Very little, that is, apart from the fact that Grand Slam quietly and off-handedly pulls no punches when it comes to showing how shitty our criminals actually are. The seduction plot most other films would play as a bit of a joke, for example, is deathly serious. Montaldo is very clear about the cruelty of this particular approach, and Leigh is only too happy to act accordingly. Because of this, the inevitable double crosses feel purposefully constructed to be such, instead of being a trope; and the film’s final, deeply cynical twist doesn’t come out of nowhere but is perfectly in keeping with everything Grand Slam taught us before about what kind of people we’re watching here.

Three Films Make A Post: There's the first one. There's the right one. And there's the one you never forget.

Goodnight, My Love (1972): This TV movie set in the classic hardboiled private eye era of the 1940s in Los Angeles prefigures the kind of humour writer/director Peter Hyams – here at the beginning of his career as a feature director - would perfect a couple of years later in Busted and some of his following films. In the film at hand, it’s not quite there yet: the coarseness needed couldn’t really be injected into a TV movie, and the lighter parts of the humour never quite land. What’s left is an atypical role for Richard Boone (with Michael Dunn as his sidekick), a couple of moments where the genre homage actually sings, and quite a few shots that look better than the budget should have allowed.

Baby It’s You (1983): This romance is about as straightforwardly commercial as the film of John Sayles as a director ever got, which is not to say the bad kind of commercial at all. Rather, Sayles’s sensibilities allow him to take a very typical romance set-up and fill it with the kind of life that complicates things while still keeping to the core tenets of the genre (something Sayles always has been particularly good at). So this is a sometimes comedic romance that also talks about class divisions but never lets its interest in the politics of class get in the way. Instead Sayles uses his understanding of these things to strengthen and deepen the story and its characters, thereby getting a stronger emotional resonance. Add two pretty damn great performances by Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano, as well as some of the best use of later pop music in a period piece you’ll encounter in a movie life, and you simply have a great film, a romance that’s honest but never wants to be something horrible like an anti-romance.

Into the Picture Scroll: The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa (2005): I’m not sure if I should call this a formally atypical documentary or an experiment in narrative filmmaking. Director Sumiko Haneda (who has quickly become a favourite around these parts) retells the story told on one of the most important picture scrolls in Japanese art history with the help of voice work, traditional Japanese ballad storytelling, slow, closely-framed pans over the fantastic art of the scroll, nature shots to establish locations, and some narrative about the life of its creator and how the scroll might mirror some of it.

It’s a fascinating and immersive way to tell a story and the story of the story, turning this into a captivating deep dive into a piece of art and culture that’s also, very quietly and thoughtfully, formally daring. Which appears to have been one of Haneda’s particular talents.

Short Film Friday: Windblown

In short: Omnibus: William Blake: The Soul of Albion (2000) & Tolkien: The Master of Middle-Earth (2001)

One of the definite advantages of state-funded – yet in the tradition I’m speaking of still journalistically independent – television of decades past has always been the room this left for sometimes surprisingly in-depth culture programming. Of course, this has been eroded away in decades past in various ways in most European countries, but when the idea of state-funded television as an educational device based on the assumption that people aren’t stupid and can cope with a wee bit of intellectual stimulation, and that ratings aren’t the only thing all TV has to be about was still kicking, it could produce things like the BBC’s long-running series of arts and culture documentations running under the “Omnibus” banner. As far as I understand most of them were produced directly for the BBC, but there were also some examples bought for the UK, because it simply makes more sense to have Americans look at the history of gospel etc. Formally, these documentaries could even get somewhat experimental.

These two particular examples concerning the poetry and visual art of William Blake and the life, writing and influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, respectively, are really more in the late period standard style of these documentaries, mixing a couple of staged shots – mostly used to create mood or illustrate things for which the films have no fitting archive material – with found footage, shots of art (there are some fascinating close-ups of Blake’s work. for example), or in case of the Tolkien doc rather rare interview footage of Tolkien himself, as well as actual experts in aspects of the works of the artists at hand. So yes. expect Peter Ackroyd and Humphrey Carpenter in the Blake and the Tolkien, respectively, though there’s also space to take some by-roads that aren’t as fully expected. There’s also time enough to provide these experts with space to give full thoughts instead of soundbites, which really helps keep these documentaries interesting and informative even a couple of decades later.

There’s a sense of seriousness and genuine interest in the subjects running through these two documentaries, which really are descriptors I would applied to many old Omnibus episodes I’ve encountered.

Escape to Athena (1979)

Greece during World War II, shortly before the Allied invasion. Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore with a really weird accent) is not your typical Nazi, he only plays one to get what he wants, and tries to keep victims to a minimum. Having worked as a shady art dealer before the war, what Hecht wants is to plunder the ancient treasures of Greece, as he has done with those of other countries before. For this, he’s acquired his own little collection of POWs useful in this sort of thing, like archaeologist Professor Blake (David Niven), climber and all-around athletic wonder Nat Judson (Richard Roundtree), and non-cooking cook Bruno Rotelli (Sonny Bono, but don’t worry). The plus for these guys is that they are kept on a comparatively long leash by a man who’s not going to shoot or torture them for the smallest affront. As they well should, they use this to make the Nazis’ life in Greece as difficult as possible with repeated escape attempts and small and large sabotages.

Things get even more lively when Hecht acquires stand-up comic Charlie Dane (Elliott Gould) as his new scribe (don’t ask), and Charlie’s burlesque dancing partner Dottie Del Mar (Stefanie Powers) as the woman he wishes to convince of sleeping with him. These two bring with them even more anarchic energy then the rest of Hecht’s crew, as well as contact with the Greek resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas). Following various acts of repression by the SS, and because there’s a submarine station that needs to be destroyed before the Allied landing, Zeno and Hecht’s crazy kids decide to simply take over the Nazi base.

Afterwards, there’s perhaps time to steal some art treasures from a nearby mountain cloister, unless there’s something more relevant to the war effort there, of course.

At times, George Pan Cosmatos’s Escape to Athena has a tone comparable to the great World War II action comedy Kelly’s Heroes. It’s never quite as brilliant, mind you, but if you can live with a less than serious approach to World War II, this is still one of the better examples of the form. Particularly the film’s first half is full of off the cuff, often clearly adlibbed, humour that can get so bizarre to border on the nonsensical. House favourite Elliott Gould has some of the best absurd non-sequitur lines here, of course (and I’m pretty sure he’s come up with them himself). Those often make little sense but are outrageously funny as the man delivers them. In the more scripted feeling bits, Moore – at the height of being James Bond – actually manages to turn an art-stealing Wehrmacht officer into so charming a rogue, I’m even perfectly willing to buy into his later changing of sides to the good guys; whereas Powers really does the traditional role of the perhaps not quite as ditzy stripper with the best of ‘em.

Even in the early and lighter parts of the film, there are moments that are perfectly honest about the actual experience of Nazi occupation and resistance work. Cosmatos portrays cruelties and senseless slaughter matter-of-factly and with no misguided attempts at squeezing humour in there as well; these are the things that happen around them while our POWs are in their private little comedy, and this comedy, for one, is not going to pretend otherwise.

As little as it’s going to pretend that developments like finding that Dottie is an expert diver perfectly fit for the business of blowing up submarines, or the bizarre show our heroes put on to distract the Nazis once it’s time to take over their base, are anything less than great, goofy fun.

Eventually, everybody does land in a somewhat harsher bit of war action than they were before in scenes of action movie mayhem that late 70s style Cosmatos handles with the expected panache. The big battle in the town’s streets and the grand finale on the mountain are particularly great. So great that it seems fair to director and characters that they are allowed to go out like they came in with some hot dance moves by Savalas and various bits of funny business.

Why this extremely entertaining, goofy but not stupid piece of filmmaking has landed on more than one list of the worst films ever made, I have no idea.

In short: Scarab (1983)

Politicians and scientists around the world are committing suicide after getting stung (or something) by dead scarabs somebody hides in their clothing. The responsible party is a guy calling himself Khepera (Rip Torn) who likes to rant and rave in a dark chamber, dressed in excellently stupid “Egyptian” garb. He may or may not be a former Nazi scientist; now, he believes he is the reincarnated high priest/lover (or something) of another god (or something) he’s trying to resurrect. When he’s not shouting angry nonsense, he is surrounded by a bunch of half-naked high priest/god/whatever groupies who apparently enjoy being groped by an ugly older guy. There’s also some business about Khepera getting cockblocked by his sex partner’s lower half turning into that of a pig. Who knows what that’s about?

Womanizing sleazy reporter Murphy (Robert Ginty) somehow stumbles upon some of the vague and impenetrable facts of the matter. Mostly because he realizes a woman we will learn to be called Elenea (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) who sometimes dresses up as a nurse appears at several of the more public suicides. And because he’s a sleaze and she’s a reasonably attractive woman, he starts following her around.

Turns out Elenea is something like a white witch working against Khepera for reasons. She’s also, as it happens, the ideal body Khepera needs for his reincarnation business. Eventually, everyone ends up wherever the villain is shacked up, where low budget Aztecs and Egyptians become one single group of horrible costuming, and a bizarre climax ensues.

If this description of Steven-Charles Jaffe’s weird adventure/horror movie Scarab sounds a bit confused and somewhat woozy, then that’s because watching the film has the quality of walking through somebody’s half remembered dream – and not just because of the whole thing’s worn-out VHS source.

There’s a meandering quality to proceedings I usually connect more with Italian genre cinema. The plot doesn’t follow any kind of sensible narrative structure, instead scenes of Torn shouting mad mastermind nonsense, Ginty being an aw shucks sleazoid, exposition that explains very little indeed, adventure movie tropes on the cheap, and random utter weirdness like that thing with Torn and the suddenly pig-bodied lady just happen whenever and however the movie seems to feel like it. Later, we also get an evil witch for Elenea to psychically/magically (the film doesn’t tell or explain, of course) duel, a horde of henchmen in sackcloth and lucha ski masks for Ginty to fight, much of it shot from peculiar angles and drenched in what’s either print damage or dry ice.

Very little here connects, makes sense, or has any depth, but as a waking dream, Scarab is a rather fantastic experience; most certainly, it’s never even the tiniest bit boring.

Music Monday: Years Edition

Maigret (2022)

An old and tired Commissioner Maigret (an authentically old and tired looking Gérard Depardieu), fighting with ailing health and what looks a lot like depression, is tasked to clear up the murder of an unidentified young woman who was found dead wearing a pre-war evening dress. His investigations will eventually lead him to the dirty, self-centred secrets of the rich, as is so often the case.

Of course, as often happens in the Maigret books by Georges Simenon, as well as in many of their adaptations, solving the mystery isn’t really what’s central to veteran filmmaker Patrice Leconte’s Maigret. Rather, it’s a film immersing itself and the viewer in its main character’s investigative technique of just listening, trying to avoid judgement (yet not compassion), letting things develop slowly and carefully, and only causing as much damage to the people in whose lives he becomes involved as is strictly necessary.

The film is pervaded by a mood of old-man melancholia, which makes a lot of sense given the ages of its director/screenwriter and its star. This isn’t a sadness based on empty nostalgia for some golden past – the Maigrets and Lecontes of this world know all too well that such a thing never existed to pretend otherwise – but something caused by the realization of one’s slow but inexorable slipping away into darkness, and the personal losses incurred. In this version of Maigret’s particular case, there’s also the quiet desperation one can begin to feel when looking at a world that never seems to change for the better for long; or at small, perfectly avoidable tragedies like the case at the core of the film that just repeat with mild variations again and again throughout time and space; and at the use or uselessness of always coming into things after the fact, when nothing can be done but containing damage and assigning guilt.

The whole of the film is focussed on this mood, and this group of feelings, the things and truths they lead Maigret to. So much so that being a more straightforward mystery would get in the way of the film’s core interests. Thus, Leconte goes out of his way to ignore all aspects of the script that could be used to build suspense in his audience and only ever shows any interest at all in them when they can be used to further character moments, while ignoring what Hitchcock would have done.

For me, this approach does work rather well, particularly with a central performance by Depardieu that seems to draw performance and actual personality into an unsolvable knot, and a very strong supporting cast of actors young and old – like Jade Labeste playing a young woman in comparable straits to the murder victim, or Aurore Clément as the mother of one of our suspects.

Of course, if you go into this expecting any kind of traditional mystery or police procedural, you will be sorely disappointed; that doesn’t mean Maigret does not successfully achieve exactly what it is setting out to do.

Three Films Make A Post: It's not important where we are going. I just want you to drive.

Drive All Night (2021): Night-time cab rides (or new-fangled ride share rides, aka cab rides with worse paid, less insured drivers) with more or less mysterious passengers are still a nice set-up for movies in quite a few genres, though not one always used as well as you’d wish. Peter Hsieh’s film featuring Yutaka Takeuchi as the cabbie and Lexy Hammonds as the mysterious passenger doesn’t quite hit every note right for me. There’s sometimes too vague a quality surrounding this mix of noir tropes, Lynch-inspired weirdness, and hallucinations even for my ambiguity positive taste. However, Hsieh clearly understands the beauty of night rides, so there are quite a few good scenes of people in cars. This is not me damning with faint praise.

Cracked (2022): This piece of Thai horror directed by first time filmmaker Surapong Ploensang is rather too generic in its building of scares and shocks to ever quite work for me, particularly since the film seems actually afraid of getting deeper into its less generic aspects. So, not surprisingly, its characters never do much of emotional or intellectual interest either despite their trauma load. Plus, there’s some really bad possessed child acting in here in an era where I suspect that playing possessed is one of the first things they teach kids on the child actor clone farm.

On the positive side, like with a lot of ultra-generic horror, this is still a perfectly decent way to while away ninety minutes or so. Just don’t expect any emotional impact, or really anything you’ll remember about the film a week after you’ve seen it.

The Awful Truth (1937): One of the reasons why screwball comedies often land in these clean-out posts is not that I don’t love them (I really, really do), but it’s that this kind of comedy is particularly difficult to write about, unless you want to get into historical and sociological analysis, which seems to run counter to the actual experience of watching these films. Because watching Leo McCarey’s movie does not really see me thinking about its representation of male-female relationships, nor how its portrayal of marriage sheds light on the mores of its time. Rather, it distracts me from these more worthy proceeds by making me laugh, repeatedly and heartily.

Short Film Friday: Display

In short: Il fascino dell’insolito: La mezzatinta (1980)

Architect Marco (Sergio Fiorentini) gets into possession of a curious mezzotint of a stately Italian villa. It’s a haunted picture, indeed, for slowly but surely, it changes, showing how a hooded figure breaks into the villa, only to return with a little baby in its arms. After some time, the figure becomes clear enough so that Marco can see it is Death in female form. Other people can see the picture’s peculiar behaviour as well, so it’s not Marco’s admittedly somewhat fragile and melodramatic mind playing tricks on him during his midlife crisis.

The whole thing obviously deeply disturbs Marco, so much so, his obsession with the picture’s meaning puts an ever increasing strain on the relationship between him and his wife Lidia (Marisa Belli). Which, given his tendency to long monologues of self-flagellation and whining about “the times”, is already somewhat strained.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I though Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of M.R. James’s story “The Mezzotint” was the first and only time this tale was professionally adapted. Then, a fansubbed version of this episode from an Italian series of short TV movies of the supernatural and the fantastic came into my grubby hands, and I learned better.

Directed by Biagio Proietti, the film uses Monty’s story as a starting and ending point, making changes to some of the tale’s central details – for good thematic reasons in the case of the nature of the baby-stealing figure – and filling in the middle with some of the sort of heightened melodrama that thinks it’s Bergman but has rather a lot more to do with rich people whining about their so-called existential problems. Which would be perfectly fine, if the film also explained why I should care about Marco’s problems, or find what his incessant whining eventually leads to all that tragic.

It’s not a bad little TV movie, mind you. Fiorentini and Belli certainly put quite a bit of work into their portrayal of insufferable suffering, and whenever the film remembers its basis in a ghost story, Proietti actually manages to evoke some properly spooky moods. In between set-bound scenes, there are a handful of very atmospheric location shots in which Marco and/or the camera explore the surroundings of the creepy yet grand villa by night; some of the scenes of Marco just staring disturbed at the picture work just as well, creating a mood of desperation and dread you don’t actually get out of reading one of James’s more harmless stories. There’s also a fantastic electronic score that manages to keep the mood weird even when we return to monologues about our protagonist’s midlife crisis.

While I’m not too fond of the film’s thematic main direction, this is still a very interesting attempt at contemporizing the original story, showing at least some moments of fine filmmaking in the process, as well.

Diabolically Yours (1967)

Original title: Diaboliquement vôtre

A man (Alain Delon) wakes up after a car accident with only little to none memory of who or what he is. There’s a woman our guy is pretty sure he doesn’t know named Christiane (Senta Berger) who says she is his wife, and that his name is Georges Campos. Georges (as I’ll call him to make things easier) isn’t quite sure about any of this, but since it is 1967, and this is Senta Berger who’s making eyes at him, he’s not really motivated to disagree too hard.

When Christiane takes Georges home, he learns he is supposed to be stinking rich as well as excellently married. Apparently, he, Christiane, his best bud Freddie (Sergio Fantoni) – who also happens to be a doctor – and their servant Kim (Peter Mosbacher doing some pretty embarrassing yellowface) have just returned from seven years of successful business in Hong Kong (as far as I remember my colonial lore, the place colonialist screw-ups go to make it) to settle down in a rich person’s mansion in the country. Georges doesn’t seem to really buy any of this, but is totally going to go with it for most of the rest of the film, though he does tend to waver and whine quite a bit.

There are some pretty screwy things going on around him. There’s the little fact that Christiane and Freddie hold him in the house like a virtual prisoner despite only very minor physical injuries, the mysterious medication he is supposed to take every evening, the voice in the night that tells him details about his life and occasionally suggests he kill himself, the various accidents that very well could kill him. Georges’s own dog would rather kill him than recognize him, as well, and Christiane, while going through an extensive “loving wife” routine won’t even kiss him, and certainly isn’t going to have sex with him, however much he tries to wheedle himself into her panties. The last thing seems to be foremost in our protagonist’s mind; and he doesn’t even know about the dom/sub thing Christiane and Kim have going.

I’m generally not terribly fond of the long-running “people fuck around with an amnesiac’s mind” sub-genre of the thriller. It’s so well-worn, the twists tend to be particularly obviously and seldom terribly interesting, and the plans of the film’s antagonists tend to the ludicrously contrived. As they are here.

Julien Duvivier – while certainly perfectly able to shoot a lot of candy-coloured interiors and make them look really good – in his final stint behind the camera isn’t really the kind of director to distract from these flaws very well. Duvivier does tend to the plushy and the stiff – a handful of smash-cuts really don’t change much about it – and does love to make an already draggy and talky script feel even longer. Of course, part of the problem is that there’s so little material for him to work with here. There’s plot and incident for about half the film’s running time, and the writers seem so hard-pressed to come up with anything that’ll actually lead to suspenseful sequences, they tend to repeat everything they do come up with two or three times.

It’s all very obvious, as well – there’s really never any doubt that Delon’s character is not actually Georges, and that the rest of the household is conspiring to trap and kill him, but are very bad indeed at it. The best they can come up with is making our protagonist extremely horny, which doesn’t sell terribly well anymore today once it gets into the realm of sexual violence, either.

As if it weren’t already difficult to sympathize with a guy who is as much of a racist prick as he is.

In a different movie, I’d probably commend Diabolically’s dark and cynical ending, but in the context of all the treading of water the film gets up to before it, it simply hasn’t worked at all to earn this particular ending.

In short: Last Looks (2021)

Former cop with a conscience – therefore the “former” - Charlie Waldo (Charlie “Yawn” Hunnam) is roped back into the crime solving life when his ex-wife Lorena (Morena Baccarin) disappears just after trying to convince him to help her exonerate British ham actor Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson) for the murder of his wife. All, so that Shakespearean Pinch can continue his work playing a Southern judge on TV. Charlie’s soon up to his neck (and repeatedly knocked out, as is the tradition) in the case. This also involves a sexy kindergarten teacher (Lucy Fry), a producer with a particularly weird looking head (Rupert Friend), a drug dealer who wants his “mem” (Jacob Scipio), and several old enemies from the police force (among them Clancy Brown).

It might have been better if our protagonist had stayed in his trailer in the woods.

It’s pretty obvious that Tim Kirkby’s movie really, really wants to be a throwback to idiosyncratic 70s private eye movies, aka a kind of movie I like rather a lot. Alas, it suffers from various problems that get in the way of these ambitions again and again.

For one, Kirkby’s personality-free direction is as far from Robert Altman – or Peter Hyams, for that matter – as you can get while still making movies in this particular niche of the genre. Then, Charlie Hunnam most certainly is no Elliott Gould (or Walter Matthau, or James Garner, etc), but in fact still one of the most boring and personality-free actors to put on a stupid beard and not emote into a camera you can encounter. Though, to be fair, the only actors on screen here who seem to have come awake and willing to put even a minimum amount of work in are Fry, Gibson (whose acting has improved as much as his private personality has gotten worse over the years, ironically enough) and Brown. Everybody else seems to suffer from a bad case of “what the hell am I doing here”, or, as in our lead’s case, have never been terribly good to begin with.

The script – by sitcom writer/producer Howard Michael Gould, apparently adapting his own novel, badly, unless it’s a bad novel – meanders from one scene to the next, going through jokes bad, tired, and seldom surprisingly funny, while never getting the point of why those 70s crime movies were strangely paced and meandering, or what would be needed to get away with this today.

Music Monday: Unearthing Edition

The Day of the Wolves (1971)

A very secretive criminal mastermind (Jan Murray) summons various independent criminals for a mysterious plan he’ll only disclose when everyone involved is shacked up in a ghost town in the desert. They have been brought there blindfolded, and everyone has been instructed to grow a luscious beard before arriving, to make it more difficult for them to identify each other later on, or know where they are. Because names are the enemy of secrecy and not turning in one’s partners when caught, nobody is allowed to use their names either, and gets a number instead. Of course, not appearing on a TV show would probably help there too.

Number 1’s plan is to assault a new town in the desert with a population of 7,000, and police force of three. Because this is 1971, cutting the place off from the outside world for a couple of hours of criminal work is eminently feasible.

While the self-declared “wolves” are training for their coup, Peter Anderson (Richard Egan), the town’s chief of police (which seems quite the title under the circumstances) is asked to resign by the town board. Apparently, he is a bit of a hard ass when it comes to misdemeanours, and has made himself unpopular with the town council by asking for more men and material to fend off potential actual crime when the crime statistics point towards a big fat zero. Obviously, he’s going to do the action hero bit once the gang arrives in town, because he’s a bit of an Old West lawman at heart.

Directed and produced by Filipino filmmaker Ferde Grofe Jr., The Day of the Wolves was independently produced in the hopes to sell it on to TV – which eventually happened. Because of the independent status of the film, this doesn’t really look and feel much like most in-house productions of TV movies, but has a rough, gritty structure that feels rather more like a grindhouse movie with blood and the breasts excised than the slicker stuff directors like John Llewellyn Moxey would put on the TV screen.

That’s not a complaint, at least for those of us who enjoy exploitation films of this era not just for the sex and the violence but also for the texture of their filmmaking (and film stock). There’s a certain grimy mood perfect for a crime movie that seems to naturally follow the combination of a low budget well used, the limited but creatively used possibilities for more complicated staging and camera set-ups, the sometimes very rough editing, and all the things time has done to the film stock of the inferior prints that still seem to be the only way to see the film at hand.

It is a rather straightforward film with a straightforward plot, perhaps inspired by one of Donald E. Westlake's Parker novels, “The Score”. Not inspired enough to really grumble about plagiarism, mind you. Rather, Day of the Wolves uses the same basic idea for a big crime as the novel does to then go its own way. It’s a bit of a shame that part of said “own way” is the whole plot about Egan’s stiffly played Peter Anderson. That part of the film is never complex or interesting enough to actually deserve the time spent on it, but this early in the 70s, selling a movie with gangster protagonists – some of whom get away with it to boot! - wouldn’t have passed censorship muster. However, we still get a pretty wonderful, oh so very 70s ending only a monster would want to spoil.

Despite Egan, the film flows quite well, with some surprisingly meaty action set pieces Grofe Jr directs with quite a bit of vigour. The low budget mostly seems to have gotten in the way of buying decent fake beards for our criminals, and who’d want it any other way?

Three Films Make A Post: Norman Bates is back home with Mother again!

Psycho III (1986): At the time when this was made, critics inexplicably saw this second Psycho sequel as clearly superior to the actually brilliant second one (about which I’ll hopefully write someday). I simply can’t see it: Anthony Perkins’s direction is bland and often aims for a sub-Ken Russell style of camp he’s simply not good enough a director to reach, the script is obvious and not very interesting, and even Perkins’s performance is lacking the element of humanity he found in the Hitchcock original and even more so in the second movie.

Otherwise, this repeats a couple of the least interesting plot beats of film number two and has scenes that “nod” to the original in a way only Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot reshoot managed to surpass in pointlessness.

Watcher (2022): On paper, Chloe Okuno’s thriller about an American woman either becoming paranoid or becoming the future victim of a killer in Bucharest is yet another “Girl/Woman in the Whatever” thriller, this time with quite a few direct homages to Hitchcock (that guy again). But Okuno manages to actually recontextualize the Hitchcockian elements and use them to build a female perspective that runs parallel as well as against Hitchcock’s often creepily male one, enriching a genre while clearly following most of its rules. The film’s visual style and feel also very pleasantly reminded me of the best giallos as well as a little of Don’t Look Now. Add to this highly focussed and effective performances, particularly by genre stalwarts Maika Monroe and Burn Gorman, and you have quite the film.

Patience (After Sebald) (2012): Ending on an equally high note, there’s this hypnotic documentary by Grant Gee that follows the traces of W.G. Sebald and his great book “The Rings of Saturn” in a manner as digressive and complicated as its subject.

Most of what would usually be talking heads in this kind of film comes from the off, which leaves space for longer thoughts and sentences and enables Gee to strengthen and deepen, or counterpoint, ideas via his successful attempts at recreating the mood and style of Sebald’s photography. The film’s understanding of how important mood is for its subject is rather impressive anyway; it also explains why this needs to be a movie instead of a monograph.

Short Film Friday: The Door

In short: Silver Bears (1977)

Ivan Passer’s caper comedy has one of the more convoluted plots I’ve encountered; not difficult to understand while watching the film, mind you, just absurdly complicated to explain. Given that it concerns an attempt by the Mafia to buy a Swiss bank for money laundering purposes as thought up by a bright Brit (Michael Caine), that needs an Italian Prince (Louis Jourdan in a genuinely good performance, which is not something I say lightly or often about the man) to work, and will eventually involve an attempt to break the world’s silver monopoly with silver provided by a pair of Moroccan ex-nobility (Stéphane Audran and David Warner), as well as a romance sub-plot with Cybill Shepherd in one of the least convincing attempts to make a beautiful woman look frumpy, this should be rather a good time.

Yet it isn’t. Worse, the film doesn’t work for reasons that are really hard to explain. Especially when you keep in mind that not one of the actors puts in a bad or lazy performance (one might argue about Shepherd here, but she simply appears to try and have fun with a not terribly interesting role, and is at the very least charming as hell in the role), and that the script contains about one funny or clever idea a minute. Passer’s direction certainly isn’t offensive either. It does lack a certain degree of spark that would probably be helpful to the movie, but the director paces scenes well, and generally gets out of the way of his cast.

Still, there’s a curious lack of impact to everything in Silver Bears: jokes, the decidedly pretty locations, the plot, the perfectly good performances are all there. Yet somehow, they manage to leave little impression, at least on this viewer.

Dark Glasses (2022)

aka Black Glasses

Original title: Occhiali neri

As if two-fisted prostitute Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) didn’t have enough trouble with fighting off horrible costumers, she becomes the next target of a serial killer murdering sex workers. Diana manages to escape a first murder attempt via a car chase, but ends up crashing into a car of a Chinese family. The parents of the family are killed or lethally wounded, and only a little boy we will later learn to be named Chin (Andrea Zhang) survives. Diana herself is blinded in the crash, while the killer gets away unscathed and unidentified.

Being a rather tough cookie, our heroine only falls into depression over her new disability for a very short time, and becomes independent again very quickly indeed with the help of public service lady Rita (Asia Argento) and her very own seeing eye/attack dog. Diana feels guilty about the accident and visits little Chin in his orphanage. During this, she impresses him so greatly, he soon turns up at her doorstep, asking her for shelter until his mother gets out of the coma she’s clearly never going to get out of. Diana has no problem harbouring an escaped orphan, and the duo buddy up quite nicely.

Alas, the killer – remember him? – still has his mind set upon murdering Diana. Surely, now that she’s blind and taking care of a little boy, she’s going to be easier to kill…

Most viewers seem to loathe this late entry into the career of the once great Dario Argento with a passion, so much so I found myself somewhat surprised by actually being entertained by it, sometimes even charmed by its wackier elements. But then, if I remember correctly, I did even find quite a few things to enjoy about Argento’s Dracula.

This giallo is certainly a technically and formally much superior proposition to that movie. Argento doesn’t seem to be in as wildly and trashy an experimental mood as he was there, but he has not returned to the blandness of Giallo or The Card Player either. Though this is still far from the style and beauty of Argento’s classic movies, he does seem to attempt to return to some of the aesthetic pleasures of his past. So here, you can at the very least witness some technically accomplished stalk and suspense sequences, quite a handful of carefully framed shots, and a film that has a degree of visual flow and drive again. Compared to the giallos from Argento’s bad phase, this feels not so much like a return to form, but like a return to genuine interest in the aesthetic forms and joys that were always Argento’s great strengths.

Of course, if one really wants to, one should have no problem smacking Dark Glasses down for the often highly peculiar ways its script finds to get Diana and Chin into trouble, ways rather off the trodden paths of plot logic and reason; it’s not so much that no character here ever makes good decisions, it’s that everyone always makes the most bizarre ones imaginable. Also, there are snakes in the weirdest places. The thing is, narrative logic has never been one of Argento’s strengths, and I really can’t bring myself to criticize the man for exactly the dream logic I’ve so often praised about his films. Particularly since the script puts quite a bit of effort into developments becoming increasingly intense-hysterical in a way that may or may not be Argento poking a bit of fun at himself, or just the great old man being himself very much indeed.

There are also some rather new developments in Argento land, namely a streak of friendly sentimentality that comes to the fore in the whole Chin business (which it is best to simply accept as the film delivers it instead of thinking about it, too hard or at all) as well as in his continued love for murderous animals as seen in the dog business; though there, the sentimentality is obviously spiced with a bit of gore. Argento’s gotten so soft, Asia is only brutally murdered in this one.

That’s what we call “Altersmilde” in Germany.

In short: By Our Selves (2015)

Apart from a handful of exceptions, I’ve never gotten along with much experimental cinema. That’s not the films’ fault, I believe, but more one of those idiosyncratic and personal reactions to art, and I do tend to neither get these things nor develop a feeling for or from them.

So I was a bit surprised that this experimental (though not abstract) piece of filmmaking by Andrew Kotting (sometimes Kötting) did actually speak to me and held my interest throughout. But then, it is following the route John Clare – embodied by the great Toby Jones – took on his escape from an asylum in Essex to his home in Northamptonshire (for other non-Brits like me: that’s quite an expedition on foot, four days in Clare’s case) through what’s now predominantly industrialized agricultural fields and roads full of lorries, with the writer Iain Sinclair as a goat-masked guiding spirit or follower, and even one of the rare-ish appearances of Alan Moore. So it is very much operating in my cultural comfort zone of the discomforted. If it weren’t, I probably wouldn’t have the faintest idea what this thing is even about, but there’s nothing wrong with this sort of project not bringing its own handbook.

It’s an often strikingly shot film, suggesting parallels between Clare’s fractured mind and the human-caused fractures in the landscape we encounter. Though Kotting also still finds a place for the strange - even if it is now by necessity a wilful strangeness filtered through the intellect – even if it is by going through his own movie dressed as a straw bear. For some tastes, this will all be a bit too consciously eccentric in execution, something that’s certainly not helped by Kotting’s puckish sense of humour, but for me, the film works as a way of putting concepts and thoughts that aren’t always best helped by clarity, precision and earnestness into life.

Plus, I could watch Toby Jones doing anything for hours.

Music Monday: No One's Listening Edition