Jonathan Creek, Series One (1997)

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) uses his considerable powers of logic and imagination to invent tricks and illusions for the sleazy stage magician Adam Klaus (Anthony Head, in a hilariously slimy one episode performance). Sometimes, that’s bad news for potentially levitating elephants. Over the course of the first series’ five episodes, Jonathan finds himself roped into solving various locked room mysteries and impossible crimes by Maddy Magellan (Caroline Quentin), an investigative reporter specializing in using means foul or fair to uncover miscarriages of justice. The two also develop the will they/won’t they dynamic apparently beloved of all TV and romance writers.

This long-running – in the weird, sporadic way of BBC TV shows – mystery series is particularly beloved among mystery and crime fans who prefer the strange mental contortions of the locked room mystery style to grittier or more realistic fare. Even though I’ll probably never stop loving my hardboiled detectives, I’ve grown much fonder of this sort approach to crime over the years, particularly since the purer strains of this approach often show a deep love for the outré, the bizarre and the grotesque that fits very nicely indeed into my tastes. One must just give up on ideas on murder methods being probable and often on the niceties of characterization as well.

The latter isn’t a problem for Jonathan Creek, however. Writer, creator and what the Americans would call show runner David Renwick uses his comedy background to populate the world of bizarre crimes Jonathan Creek takes place in with characters who are usually ever so slightly off. This solves a couple of problems impossible crime can run into rather nicely for the show. The improbability of murder methods and their constructions is easily waved away now: these weird numpties populating the series would never murder anyone in a sensible and direct way, so the building of fake rooms and overcomplicated alibis seem perfectly logical in context. Furthermore, the humour helps the series avoid turning into a sequence of scenes of a guy explaining and theorizing about a crime at the audience. There’s still quite a bit of that, but it is organically integrated into proceedings where the next gag is seldom far away, and where the interplay between Jonathan and Maddy keeps the explain-y scenes light without needing to make them stupid.

Renwick’s jokes hit more often than not, and even when they tend to rather broad satire – particularly of showbiz and popular culture - and the easy gag, they are typically nicely timed and simply work.

Apart from its mysteries and the fun character interplay, the show also puts rather a lot of effort into bits and pieces of weird worldbuilding – Klaus’s stage show and some of the background of fictional 70s rock act Edwin Drood are particular highlights in this first season, though the titular House of Monkeys of the last episode is nothing to sneeze at either. This actually increases the impression the show takes place in a rather fun parallel world that’s exactly like ours (well, the one of 1997), just with a much better quality of murders.

At the same time, the mysteries and their solutions are often as fun and clever as they are improbable; even this early on, the show also seems to find proper delight in playing with certain genre expectations while keeping very strictly to those you can’t play with without breaking the locked room/improbable crime genre.

Three Films Make A Post: If you can't smoke it, drink it, spend it or love it… forget it.

Payday (1973): Sleazy country star Maury Dann (Rip Torn) is on the road, lying, bullying and sliming his way across the USA while growing increasingly deranged.

I’m a big fan of 70s grimdark, but this nearly plotless portrait of a horrible man doing horrible things, horribly, by Daryl Duke actually beats me. It’s not that I can’t appreciate its skewering of the 70s country star, Duke’s version of hyperrealist style, or the great, though somewhat one-note performances, it’s just that I miss some moments of genuine humanity to measure Maury’s horridness against. Or, come to think of it, Maury showing one or two not redeeming but not horrible character traits to put some shading into the black and black of the movie at hand. Hell, the guy can’t even sing.

Tiger Zinda Hai (2017): This Bollywood piece of action-heavy super spy cinema sequel certainly charms with its series of overblown, wonderfully unrealistic action sequences, its treatment of BIG EMOTIONS that makes its predecessor look downright restrained, and its larger than life (in the best way) star performances by Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif.

Director Ali Abbas Zafar (who also co-wrote) also puts a lot of effort into fulfilling the increasingly mandatory quota of Indian jingoism while at the same time doing subtle and not so subtle things that complicate and humanize this jingoism, in ways I’m not at all sure I’m interpreting in the way they are meant to be understood. It’s a fun big damn action blockbuster in any case.

Girl in the Case (1944): A lawyer (Edmund Lowe) who is also an expert on safecracking and lockpicking (it’s a hobby) and his wife (Janis Carter) are sucked into an increasingly complicated case, concerning Nazi spies, a locked trunk, and a particularly stupid police force.

Tonally, William Berke’s B-movie marries mystery and screwball comedy, probably in an attempt to reach the same tone as the later of the Thin Man films. Lowe and Carter are no Powell and Loy – and really should acquire a dog – and Berke no W.S. Van Dyke, but there’s a breezy quality to the film, and a likeability to its basic silliness that makes it pretty difficult to dislike it. If one is at all interested in this era’s mystery comedies, obviously. I’m always happy about movies concerning mismatched couples solving crimes while cracking jokes.

The Phantom of the Convent (1934)

Original title: El fantasma del convento

Friends Alfonso (Enrique del Campo), Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), and Eduardo’s wife Cristina (Marta Ruel) find themselves lost in the woods at night. A rather creepy man shows them the way to a monastery they have heard curious rumours bordering on fairy tales about. The friends expect the place to be a ruin, but in actuality, it is populated with monks who have taken a vow of silence they occasionally break for exposition. Thus, the ideal place for the trio to stay the night instead of staying lost in the woods.

However, the monastery seems to have a strange influence on the visitors that brings out their repressed desires and the darkest sides of their personalities. Eduardo and Cristina have been quietly lusting after one another for quite some now, but on this night in this place, this desire turns destructive – Cristina turns into a proper femme fatale, while Eduardo just can’t help but stop lying to himself about his feelings and now believes that taking his best friend’s well-being into consideration is rather less important than getting the man out of the way.

When they are not consumed by their private drama, the visitors are spooked by various strange occurrences – monks that seem to disappear where there’s no place for them to disappear to, monks badly hiding their skeletal hands, and a door nailed shut with a cross from behind which horrifying, human cries drift.

The Phantom of the Convent is a very early example of Mexican Gothic horror, featuring motives that would reoccur in movies from the country as a matter of course during the next four decades at least. Here, director Fernando de Fuentes (also responsible for the first Mexican talkie only three years earlier in 1931, or so the Internet tells me) still seems somewhat uneasy with the truly creepy stuff in a couple of scenes, whereas others demonstrate a firm grasp on the proper use of the interplay of light and shadow to create the mood of dream-like strangeness which best occurs in dilapidated surroundings that is so important for this particular style of horror, whatever its country of origin.

There are also rather a lot of hints at one of Mexican popular cinema’s great strengths in the coming decades – the ability to use genre tropes and visual hallmarks of an international tradition and mix them productively with more local interests and ideas. Here, it’s a – to my eyes, nearly a hundred years later, on a different continent – specifically Mexican Catholicism expressing itself through typical Gothic horror monks and the mood of an old-fashioned ghost story. There are also some surprisingly unpleasant looking corpses in the film’s later stages that surprised me to find in a film from 1934, from anywhere, but that are clearly inspired by the same type of mummification process we find in the mummies of Guanajuato.

As it goes with cinema from a very different era, Phantom of the Convent pacing isn’t really to modern tastes – there’s a tendency of scenes to go on a bit too long for my contemporary (non-blockbuster mode) tastes, and the feeling of a film pulling some punches it needn’t have pulled even in 1934, but there’s also a sense of languid, Gothic beauty (a Poe idea of beauty for sure) to The Phantom of the Convent that makes up for these failings in spades.

Love Massacre (1981)

Original title: 愛殺

The film takes place among a group of Hong Kong expat students living in the United States. Joy (Tina Lau Tin-Lan), who appears to suffer from a psychosis, attempts suicide when her boyfriend Louie (Charlie Chin Chiang-Lin) decides to move to New York without her.

Louie – who isn’t a complete tool - and their friend Ivy (Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia) really don’t know how to help Joy anymore, so they ask Joy’s brother Chiu Chung (Chang Kuo-Chu) to fly in from Hong Kong to help hi sister somehow. At first, the plan seems to work out well enough, but once the married Chiu Chung and Ivy start an affair, Joy’s getting even worse than before, and finally goes through with killing herself.

Chiu Chung is understandably hit hard by this and deteriorates much further than anyone could have expected, for he really is mentally just as unwell as his sister was, he’s just better at hiding this in front of strangers. He returns to Hong Kong, but does not become more stable there. In fact, he murders his wife (his former psychiatrist no less!) to then return to the USA and start stalking Ivy and murdering every woman in her closer surroundings he deems “uncooperative”.

Patrick Tam Kar-Ming is one of the less sung heroes of Hong Kong’s New Wave cinema. Given the quality of those of his movies I’ve managed to see (I don’t trust my old, negative, review of his The Sword anymore in this context), I suspect this has rather more to do with their bad availability than their quality.

Love Massacre is a case in point. At once a cool, serious but not compassionless, exploration of an extreme of mental illness and eventually a pretty brutal thriller of great formal strength and cold beauty, this is the kind of film that would normally put a filmmaker on the map of the greats. However, the best way to see Love Massacre at the moment is a Laser Disc rip with decidedly not great subtitles (though not as bad as some for Hong Kong films), so there’s only talk about it at all among those movie fans actually looking for this sort of thing and knowing where to find it, instead of the somewhat larger audience of more strictly law-abiding connoisseurs it deserves.

The washed out colours of a Laser Disc aren’t particularly wonderful in a film as strictly and meaningfully colour composed as this one either, but even so, there’s an intense cold power to Tam’s strict use of clearly separated colours, as is to his just as strictly composed use of the frame. In the latter, Love Massacre shows some visual kinship to the best works of Dario Argento, yet where Argento does tend to get emotionally involved in the acts of violence and the more grotesque elements of his films, Tam watches them with a cooler and more distanced eye that does get increasingly disquieting the longer the film goes on, and the more unpleasant the violence gets exactly because it seems so dispassionate.

Still, despite the cold eye, when there isn’t violence on screen, there is also a feeling of thoughtful compassion running through it, or at least a genuine human interest in its characters. Tam does show this for killer and victims and those in-between alike, which makes the whole affair’s distanced visual beauty a particularly interesting and individual decision. An artistically risky one, as well, but one that makes Love Massacre particularly worth watching.

Three Films Make A Post: First There Were Ten…

And Then There Were None (1945): This mystery directed by René Clair is the first of a considerable number of adaptations of Agatha Christie’s best novel (and thankfully uses the US version of the book’s title, for while I’m all for not pretending the past was nicer or better than it was, I’d rather not have to type that one out) wherein ten people isolated on an island are murdered one by one in ways based on nursery rhyme that also mirror some hidden unpunished crimes they committed. Once the plot really gets going and the first characters have been killed, Clair’s direction turns increasingly moody and tense; things take on a feeling of Gothic dread mixed with a rather more modern paranoia.

It would be a perfect version of the material if not for the fact it replaces the grim ending of the novel with a ridiculous happy ending for at least a couple of characters. But then, many of the adaptations that follow will make the same – dubious – decision and this version of it does not ruin the film in any way; it just provokes raised eyebrows.

Righting Wrongs aka Above the Law aka 執法先鋒 (1986): A Hong Kong police Inspector (Cynthia Rothrock) on the trail of a prosecutor turned vigilante murderer (Yuen Biao) uncovers the much worse misdeeds of a colleague. A lot of pretty damn brutal violence ensues.

Despite some painfully obvious stunt double replacements – would it really have killed them to give the guy a Rothrock-style wig? – for some of the most dangerous stunts, the fights in this Corey Yuen Kwai joint are impeccable, highly creative and at times so brutal I felt myself wince on impact of bodies with hard surfaces. In the plot around the action, the film shows a total commitment to let terrible things happen to the kind of people who’d be absolutely taboo in US (or German, if we had action cinema, for that matter) films, providing proceedings a dangerous edge as well as a great basis for its melodramatic elements. Combined, it’s a bit of a classic.

Kill Boksoon aka 길복순 (2023): Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon) is a hassled single mom as well as a legendary professional killer working for one of these absurd and fun organizations of killers movies about killers adore so much. Eventually, inter-organization political intrigue puts her on the kill list of her employers, which turns out to be a bit awkward for the bunch of killers and killer adjacent fools she’ll have to dispatch.

Byun Sung-Hyun’s action movie is very much on the stylized, comics (manhwa?) affine side of this sort of thing (and most probably influenced by the John Wick films), clearly having a lot of fun creating the underground world Boksoon is eventually going to smash while providing space for ample amounts of cool to brilliant action.

Monolith (2022)

Disgraced after failing to do some crucial background checks during an investigation, a journalist (Lily Sullivan) coming from a wealthy background has turned solo podcaster with one of those “unsolved mysteries” style endeavours.

When she is sent the contact of a woman who once came into contact with a mysterious black brick, the journalist starts on a series of phone interviews that suggest a number of these bricks exist. People who are somehow touched by them, or perhaps are only hear or think about them enough, begin to suffer from hallucinations and strange obsessions, drifting towards violence and madness, or change in disturbing, perhaps unnatural, ways.

Our interviewer, clearly an obsessive personality already, is no exception to these effects. While her podcast becomes a bit of sensation, she appears to become increasingly unhinged by what she learns, sliding towards a confrontation with the lies and omissions at the core of her life as well as whatever force is embodied in the black bricks.

Matt Vesely’s Monolith is a wonderful example of contemporary weird fiction filmmaking. It uses some very of the moment cultural artefacts and concepts – true crime/weirdness podcasting, conspiracy culture and its online and real life consequences – but doesn’t quite tell the story you’d expect it to tell with them.

There’s a strong through line of cultural criticism embodied via in its protagonist running through the film, but apart from some to on the nose metaphorical work in the end, much of Monolith manages to keep the feeling of metaphors and meanings not quite resolving that I believe to be one of the more exciting and defining elements of the Weird. The interesting point in this kind of film to me is never the clear explanation, but the scenes when possible meanings float just before they coalesce. Once they do coalesce here, they do lose some of their special vibe, but thankfully there’s nothing wrong with the story the film is then telling. Apart from it telling a very specific one, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s.

That the landing on actual meaning works out as well as it does for the movie has a lot to do with Lily Sullivan’s performance. Sullivan never loses a quality of basic humanity even once we learn less than great things about her. Of course, it does help that the film never seems too interested in having her go through judgement and punishment as much as it is in a painful transformation towards betterment – at least in my reading of the movie.

Formally, Vesely manages to make a film consisting of a single woman looking at screens and talking on the phone with various people we only ever get to hear in a clearly expansive but also pretty expensive house feel dynamic and exciting, or tense and claustrophobic, depending on the needs of the film.

The use of short, enigmatic scenes that describe the feeling of the things the interviewer hears rather more than precisely show what she is told strengthens the truly Weird (in the sense that needs the capital W) mood of the first two acts wonderfully, and provides Monolith with a very specific rhythm that is great joy to experience.

Out of Darkness (2022)

Following their strong, arrogant prick of a leader Adem (Chuku Modu) a small splinter group of a stone age tribe of early humans have crossed a large body of water to find new, hopefully better lands full of game and cosy caves, or so is the picture apparently gained through visions Adem paints of the place. The group consists of Adem’s pregnant mate Avé (Iola Evans), his brother Geirr (Kit Young), his son Heron (Luna Mwezi), old guy with a whole sackful of chips on his shoulder Odal (Arno Lüning) and stray outsider Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), there to provide whatever is needed.

That new land full of game and green grass of Adem’s imagination, nay, conviction, is rather less pleasant than advertised. Food sources seem to be scarce, as is shelter. One can’t help but notice these particular hunters and gatherers apparently don’t really forage for things very thoroughly. Stones are most definitely left unturned, so the complete absence of game is an even bigger problem here than it would be for more competent groups.

This isn’t going to be the tribe’s only problem for very long, though, for something dangerous is lurking in the shadows, stalking the group and picking them off one by one. Adem’s promised new land might very well eat them all, as promised lands have the habit to.

Andrew Cumming’s Out of Darkness is in many aspects a very typical stone age adventure movie, in so far as it absolutely mirrors the interests and fears of its own time much more than it does attempt an actual portray of stone age life. The difference is that, where, say, the late 60s/early 70s version of the stone age was a world of deeply silly adventure and fur bikinis, this version is mostly there to teach its audience valuable lessons about the evils of patriarchy, the human tendency to fear and hate the different and the unknown (though, given what the unknown does to our protagonists out of its own fear of the unknown, I can’t blame them for their reactions to it as much as the film does), and that a woman’s body belongs to herself.

All very worthwhile things to speak and think about of course, but also, one can’t help but think, not things actual stone age people would have wasted much of a thought on, unless you want to argue that the inner life of Grok the cave woman is basically the same as that of Inga the modern woman.

However, as there was absolutely nothing wrong with the old fur bikini movies using the far past as their adventure playground, there is also not much wrong about a contemporary movie using the same past to explore its own interests. Well, it could be a bit more subtle about it from time to time – the awkward post-climax voiceover provided so the most stupid audience members understand what the film is talking about really is a bridge too far for me – but often, its putting contemporary troubles into the past does what this approach is clearly meant to do: put the evils of a particular kind of masculinity, and how it feels to be at the receiving end of it into a clearer, more brutal form. This makes it easier to understand its victims by helping us empathize with them more clearly and lets us thrill to the moment when they regain – or gain for the first time – agency.

It does help the film’s case as well that it is rather good at portraying what I assume to be one of the most basic of human fears – being lost in the dark, stalked by something whose nature appears so alien it might very well not be natural, of starving and being very much alone in a seemingly empty world, thrown together with a handful of people who are only interested in the use you can be to them.

Particularly the first two acts are full of scenes that most certainly aren’t believable portrayals of actual stone age life, but feel true to what we imagine it might have felt like in its most dramatic and horrifying moments, the horrors of staring into the darkness, something invisible staring back at you.

Thus, Out of Darkness often feels like the cross of stone age adventure and horror movie I didn’t know I needed before.

Three Films Make A Post: The heist begins at 40,000 ft.

Lift (2024): This Netflix production as directed by F. Gary Gray is rather astonishing. Astonishing in how forgettable it is. If I hadn’t made a couple of notes while watching it, I’d remember not a thing about it a week after having seen it. Going by these notes, this is a heist movie neither charming enough to be light fun, nor serious enough to ever build up any stakes one might care about.

It also contains a terribly written romance between Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and a somewhat inexplicable performance by Vincent D’Onofrio, who is certainly doing something that may or may not have anything to do with an attempt at being Udo Kier.

Otherwise, there’s nothing here to even waste another sentence on.

Lovely, Dark and Deep (2023): Screenwriter Teresa Sutherland’s feature debut is a very frustrating movie. In its beginning stages, it makes interesting and creepy use of the urban myth of the mass disappearances in US National Parks, with quite a few shots of mildly disturbing background happenings our protagonist doesn’t notice. In these early stages the film builds a wonderful mood of the weird and the outré.

Alas, its back half consists of what amounts to an endless dream sequence in which said protagonist – Georgina Campbell, wasted –works through emotional issues through the most hackneyed and obvious symbolism possible at tedious length, until the film finally ends. The Weird turns into the boringly prosaic.

Life of Belle (2024): I had heard rather nice buzz about Shawn Robinson’s POV horror (in the Paranormal Activity vein) piece. I can’t say the film does very much for me at all. While its approach to a child filming random childish crap while the borders of her world slowly break down in the background is certainly interesting, it’s also a bit tedious. That the film goes quite as heavy on the “mentally ill equals evil” part of the horror equation because it tries to be too subtle about its supernatural bits doesn’t exactly make it more likeable. Though I do have to give it props for not being afraid of eventually leading its audience into tasteful but disturbing scenes of child abuse.

Like with Lovely, Dark and Deep, there is a clear influence of creepypasta on display; like that movie, and a lot of creepypasta itself, Life of Belle has trouble getting beyond showing a handful of creepy images and calling that a movie.

The Safecracker (1958)

Colley Dawson (Ray Milland), designing safes for rich people who use them to lock up treasures for nobody to see, has enough of the small life: fast cars, pretty women and touching said treasures loom large in his mind. So when an antiques dealer (Barry Jones) makes him an offer to put his talents to a safe-cracking use, Colley is easily convinced to start on a rather lucrative side-career.

To have use of his ill-gotten gains right here and now without alerting the police with a sudden influx of money, Colley starts on a double life, playing the daring safe-cracker and playboy under an assumed name on the weekends while keeping up his old life-style – including living with his elderly mum – on weekdays. Eventually, he gets caught when he ignores warning signs and directed warnings. He is sentenced to a ten year prison sentence.

However, in 1941, when World War II isn’t going terribly well for the British, Colley’s talents are in demand for a commando mission. The mission’s goal is to photograph secret documents kept in a safe in mansion in occupied Belgium that would disclose the whole of German spy operations in the UK. Particularly, doing this without the Nazis figuring out it happened would be quite a success for the British. Offered a full pardon on success, Colley agrees to take part in the mission, despite his decided lack of patriotism.

Ray Milland dabbled in directing from time to time, and clearly was a fan of directing himself. He’s still trying to hang on to his old charming, somewhat roguish image here in 1958, but at this stage in his career, “roguish” often turned out somewhat sleazy. Which isn’t a bad fit for Colley at all, though I was never quite sure Milland actually realized that was the impression he gave.

As a director, Milland isn’t terrible; he certainly isn’t great either. He has a tendency to use the least interesting shot in too many scenes, and doesn’t have a great hand for pacing either, leading to a lack of tension and a sluggishness not great in the sort of genres this is dabbling in.

The script doesn’t help there either. Structurally, this is a film of two halves from different genres, both of them not terrible successful. First, we have a heist movie that isn’t terribly interested in actually making the safe-cracking business exciting, focussed on a character who doesn’t change in any way once he’s turned from safe-maker to safe-cracker. Thus, the film is more going through the motions of a crime movie than actually being one. The second half does the same with war movie tropes. Again, there’s little tension; again, Colley isn’t changed by any of his experiences; again there’s an aimless, ambling quality to the way scenes are set-up. Not even the climactic raid appears to be all that tense.

Now, one could argue the decision to not have Colley experience any sort of inner redemptive arc as a somewhat interesting and uncommon decision, but since this leaves us with a character that goes through hardship and error completely without much of interest to an audience happening with him, I’d argue it’s an inherently boring decision as well. In the hands of more accomplished director and much more accomplished writers, one could of course do something with this reversal of expectations about how this sort of film is supposed to play out, but as it stands, this just makes a pretty lifeless film even more uninvolving.

Bucktown (1975)

Big city hard ass Duke (Fred Williamson) comes to the conveniently named Bucktown to bury his estranged brother who owned a nightclub there. For dubious reasons of The Law, Duke must stay in town for at least sixty days to put his brother’s affairs in order.

Given that he’s hassled early on by the corrupt and racist police force, whose main reasons to exist seem to be racketeering and extortion (and who will of course also turn out to be responsible for the death of Duke’s brother, as if that ever was in any doubt), that’s not a great proposition. Because a man needs something to do, and the buck needs to flow, Duke lets himself be convinced by a hustling kid and by Harley (Bernie Hamilton), an alcoholic buddy of his brother, to reopen the nightclub for a bit. This also gets him far into the good books and the bed of his brother’s girlfriend Aretha (Pam Grier).

When Duke very violently disagrees with paying the protection money the police expects of him, things do start to look a bit bleak for his continued survival, so he calls in an old buddy of his from the city, the gangster Roy (Thalmus Rasulala). Once Roy arrives with three generally unpleasant mooks (one of them played by the late, great Carl Weathers) in tow, he and Duke begin to gleefully murder their way through the cops.

Once that’s over, Duke expects Roy and the goons to go back to the city. Instead, Roy decides to stay in town and take over the police business, legal and illegal. Duke’s not too happy with this, because he clearly didn’t plan on replacing one group of violent shits with another one, and apparently thought better of Roy. Which, giving their whole companionable killing spree, seems somewhat peculiar. Eventually, the former friends will come to blows.

Before going into Arthur Marks’s blaxploitation movie Bucktown, it is probably best to temper one’s expectations a little. Specifically, the promise of Fred Williamson and Pam Grier starring in the same movie isn’t fulfilled in quite the way I would have hoped for: Williamson’s as Williamson as he always is, but Grier’s role in the movie is strictly being The Girl, so don’t expect razors hidden in afros, much asskicking or just coolness from her. She is unfortunately in the movie mostly for the melodramatic outbursts of awkward dialogue, which doesn’t at all play to her strengths as an actress or as an on-screen personality.

Having put the film’s great disappointment out of the way, there is rather a lot to like about the rest of the movie: its portrayal of the police force of Bucktown as just another gang goes even further than the racist and corrupt police forces in most other blaxploitation movies that at least seem to involve law enforcement work from time to time do; but then going another step further and positing that gangsters and pimps aren’t a great replacement for that role either puts the whole thing dangerously close to being a blaxploitation film that actually critiques the kind of violent but awesome (in the movies) types of black men that are the bread and butter of these films as well.

Of course, this being an exploitation movie, it also takes great delight at showing us the badassery of Duke and Roy quipping while brutally murdering some – admittedly very nasty – people, and certainly is never going to make a – for it obviously hypocritical – final stand against answering brutal violence with even more brutal violence.

It does, however, use the somewhat less awkward opportunity to portray the kind of close, male friendship that would later become one of the core interests of Hong Kong’s heroic bloodshed movie beyond the (heroic) bloodshed. These scenes of Duke and Roy first being buddies in violence and then growing increasingly disenchanted with one another – Roy’s disgust with Duke’s apparent growing of a tiny little bit of conscience is played particularly well by Rasulala – are the strongest of the film’s dramatic scenes. Rasulala and Williamson play off one another wonderfully whatever their relation, suggesting a lot of the men’s personal history without never needing to explain them.

That their final throw down is the climax of their relationship as well as the film’s best action scene – not that there’s anything wrong with the earlier action – seems rather fitting in this context.

The Valachi Papers (1972)

This Dino de Laurentiis production directed by Terence Young just about managed to beat The Godfather to the cinemas, but didn’t make much of a splash there; nor is it as well-remembered as even the least of Coppola’s gangster movie trilogy would eventually become.

Which certainly has a lot to do with how little this rates in any aspect compared to the Coppola film. Instead of turning the true crime plot about real life Mafia goon turned federal witness Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson) into an exploration of a man’s relationship to the criminal world he betrays, or even just an actual exploration of anything but the surface of that world, this just races through plot points probably taken from the book this is based on, hitting on anthropological bits of Mafia rituals, murders and Valachi’s love life (Jill Ireland inevitably makes her appearance there) in turn, but never stopping to connect any of this to become something you might want to call an actual narrative.

Watching this, it’s not difficult to imagine Martin Scorsese suffering through it as well, only to think he can certainly do this better by using actual themes and characters and even – gosh! – connecting those, while keeping to the life-long scope of the film, coming up with Goodfellas in the process, a film that’s directly comparable in its scope and basic set-up, but does everything right The Valachi Papers can’t even seem to imagine doing.

Despite the gritty visual quality native to movies made at this point in time, there’s a blandness to the film that’s more than just a little infuriating, a feeling as if nobody involved could actually be bothered to add any personality or depth to the proceedings. The sloppiness of the period parts – where no attempt seems to have been made to hide out of period background details to a degree even I noticed it – adds further to this air of a film that’s just not bothering. Which, as always, leaves the question why a viewer should.

Music Monday: Hawkmoon (not Dorian) Edition

Metamorphosis (2022)

Original title: Yi bian bao long

After catching a very weird giant snake that escaped from a dubious gene research facility, biologist (weird wildlife expert?) and all-around honourable man of action Liang (Gao Shuang) hires on with the research outfit responsible for the monstrosity. His ex-girlfriend, scientist Shi Wen (Sun Ruiqi) is working there as well, and there’s still clearly still a lot going on between them. It’s a bad time for romance, though, for escaping giant snakes aren’t the place’s only problem: the T-Rex the researchers have cobbled together out of the genetical material of other animals breaks out of its cage as well, and now starts hunting the research staff. Liang and Shi Wen do their best to keep everyone alive, but herding these bickering scientists is rather a lot like herding the proverbial cats.

To make matters worse, the perhaps cow-sized T-Rex mutates whenever it encounters deadly force, and eventually evolves to acquire interesting traits like a prehensile tongue and super-chameleon-like stealth powers. All very much to the delight of the mad scientist who actually owns the facility.

Apparently, while I wasn’t looking Chinese streaming services have started to fill the niche for cheap and cheerful CGI monster movies left deserted when the SyFy Channel jumped the Sharknado, and I’m all for it. Chen Liangyan’s Metamorphosis follows all the of the important rules of this particular genre, showing off its dubious but certainly not charmless creatures early and often, while only wasting time on the human characters to create a modicum of plot forward momentum.

Mostly, the people are in here to get eaten, look pretty, bicker to make us happy for them getting eaten, and be heroic, and the cast fulfil these functions as well as can be hoped for. Showing good sense for the kind of movie this is, Chen puts little emphasis on the interpersonal dramatics, and instead hits the monster action as quickly as possible, while doing his best to keep away from too much repetition through the wonderful goofiness of the monster’s mutations. Thanks to an economical runtime of just seventy minutes, this plan works out fine for the movie and at least this viewer.

I have a lot of time for cheap monster movies, and certainly ones that understand the basic needs they are made to fulfil quite as well as Metamorphosis does – the tropes and clichés are the point of these films, not something to be shamefacedly avoided, so wallowing in them is indeed a good thing.

Plus, there’s very little I can say against a film that follows Chekhov’s edict while replacing a boring gun over a fireplace with a colourful giant CGI snake.

Circle of Danger (1951)

Some years after the end of World War II. Having made enough money in the underwater salvaging business to afford it, Clay Douglas (Ray Milland) travels to the UK to figure out the truth of the mysterious circumstances that resulted in the death of his brother during the war. All Clay really knows is that his brother died on a joint commando raid with British forces, but he has a curious feeling that there’s more to the death than “just” the vagaries of war.

Now Clay has the funds to travel around Great Britain from Wales to Scotland to meet up with the survivors of the raid who also happened to survive the war. His doubts grow with the reticence the men show to speak of what happened to his brother; this certainly makes his investigation rather difficult.

Because a man needs a hobby, Clay has an early meet-cute with americanophile Elspeth Graham (Patricia Roc) who is as obviously smitten with him as he is with her. Turns out investigating a mystery and romancing a woman at the same time is something of a juggling act Clay isn’t terribly well cut out for.

Going by the bare plot description I did expect Circle of Danger to be a – perhaps Hitchockian, perhaps early 50s paranoid – thriller somewhat in the vein of perpetual house favourite Ministry of Fear (a film that of course also features Milland). In actuality, this is a very leisurely mystery that spends as much if not more time on Elspeth’s and Clay’s romance as it does on a very minorly realized mystery. Quite a bit of the film looks and feels a bit like a tourist board ad as well, with Milland strolling through very different parts of the UK in the studio and some beautifully shot locations director Jacques Tourneur shows from their prettiest sides.

I don’t know the – usually great – Tourneur as a director of fare this light, but once I accepted that nothing about this affair is going to be tight, exciting, or tense, and clearly isn’t meant to be any of those things, I did start to enjoy myself with it.

After all, Milland is still in his charming leading man phase, and as always a joy to behold going through these particular motions, the romance is improbable enough to work, and Tourneur shoots even the least exciting criminal investigation with great style. As an added bonus, the suddenly very tight five minutes during the climax feature an incredible use of wide empty spaces for a suspense scene.