Three Films Make A Post: Freedom always comes with a price.

A Prayer for the Dying (1987): This one’s not exactly one of Mike Hodges’s great achievements as a director. It tonally wavers between his rather different masterpieces already out at the time, Get Carter and Flash Gordon. So some of the film’s gangster/IRA business is more than just bordering on the camp (take nearly every single scene with Alan Bates’s gangster boss/mortician and much of the overdone Catholic imagery), while other parts of the film have the grey nihilism you’d probably expect from Hodges doing this specific plot. The film’s major problem is that these two sides of the film don’t actually seem to belong together at all, as if the director had used a coin toss before shooting any given scene to come up with its tone. It’s still an interesting film, and never a boring one, mind you, it’s just not terribly good. Though Mickey Rourke’s Irish accent is never less than hilarious.

The Closet aka 클로젯 (keul-lo-jet) (2018 or 2020, depending on the source): Kim Kwang-bin’s South Korean horror film about the disappearance of a daughter thanks to a creature that uses closet doors as dimension doors and the father (Ha Jung-woo) who is trying to rescue her with the help of a somewhat untrustworthy exorcist (Kim Nam-gil) is certainly not going to go down in my books as one of the great horror films from the country. It starts strong, connecting the shared trauma of father and daughter caused by the death of the mother in an accident nicely with the supernatural elements, but once the kid’s gone, things turn into a certainly fast and furious but also not terribly creepy or scary series of jump scares and okay horror set pieces, keeping everything that’s going on too much on the surface and too focussed on cheap and easy shocks. As a carnival ride, it’s still a fair piece of work.

The Big Swindle aka 범죄의 재구성 (2003): Also from South Korea but made a decade earlier, Choi Dong-hoon’s heist movie mixes broad and subtle comedy and silly and clever ideas to excellent effect, using the complicated flashback structure beloved by South Korean cinema at the time to make its series of heists, betrayals, revenges, secrets and lies rather more complicated than it actually is. Complicated, not confusing, though, for Choi has a clear eye for character motivation (even when these motives are hidden or confused), and while the characters’ various plans only make sense in a movie world, they absolutely make sense for these characters to have.


The film presents this with great verve, a love for visual gags, and a game cast consisting of people like Park Shin-yang, Baek Yoon-sik and Yum Jung-ah.

Flash Gordon (1980)

Ever so slightly mad scientist Dr Hans Zarkoff (Topol, who like Prince and Madonna only needs one damn name, thank you very much) is convinced that the series of seemingly natural catastrophes hitting earth is caused by alien forces. As your do, he has built a rocket in his own, large, shed, to prove it and save Earth, too, but it turns out to find co-pilots willing and able to push down one foot pedal lest one’s rocket explodes is rather more difficult than you’d expect. Fortunately, said (un)natural catastrophes do lead to a plane crash right into Zarkoff’s rocket barn. On board the plane are football star Flash Gordon (Sam Jones) and his instant love interest Dale Arden (Melody Anderson), and they are easily convinced to help out with the Earth saving when threatened with a gun.

Once the trio is in space, Zarkoff turns out to have been perfectly right. Evil space Emperor Ming (Max von Sydow) of the planet Mongo is trying to destroy Earth for his entertainment. Fortunately, Flash turns out to be a proper, pure-hearted hero in the Captain America-mold, so Project: Save Earth just might proceed eventually.

As anyone who knows me or has been reading this blog for a bit will probably know, I’m not a fan of camp at all, nor of that most horrible of all sins a movie fan can commit – liking things ironically. So my deep and abiding love for Mike Hodges’s certainly very campy Flash Gordon doesn’t really fit my usual viewing habits. But then, I don’t love this film ironically but with all of my heart; and the film’s camp sensibilities seem mostly to consist of allowing itself to become as artificial and strange as possible, the people involved finding the point where even the strangest shit becomes joyful.

Mike Hodges (much beloved around here for Get Carter, Croupier and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) seems like a strange choice of director for an adaptation of a classic movie serial/comic strip, and you’d certainly not approach making a science fiction adventure movie as he does today, but he clearly brought a wild visual imagination and a sense for goofy joy to the proceedings his other films (you might exclude Pulp) weren’t the place to demonstrate. Hodges also turns out to be a master of how to pace this sort of crazy space adventure, which is breathlessly and with something exciting happening every single second.

Aesthetically, in design and and stylistic approach, the film has something of the fever dream of a pubescent boy (that’s a compliment) mixed with a bit of LSD, as realized via special effects that often seem to consciously point back in the direction of the Flash Gordon serial, and others that have their basis more in stage special effects than what you’d expect any typical effects crew of a 1980s film to come up with. If you can get rid of that pesky idea of realism, the things the film has to show, its series of increasingly bizarre costumes, its multi-coloured liquid skies, the pantomime style creatures, are true wonders to behold, and look like nothing you’ll see in any other SF movie. Well, I suspect some of the SF films of Alfredo Brescia would have loved to look like Flash does, yet never had the money or the craftsmen, but that’s about it. If you always imagined your space operas to look like a dream of adventure and space rather than an attempt to mimic reality, this is the film for you.

Adding to this very special sense of wonder is a soundtrack by Queen I am contractually obliged to describe as “ass-kicking”. It also happens to be true. Queen, much like Flash Gordon, were of course masters at being absolutely sincere in their campiness, overblown in a way that’s meant to build an exciting dream world simply bigger and more interesting than reality, and therefore the perfect fit for the things their guitars, synths and Mercurys accompany.

But that’s not all what I love about the film. It also doubles down on the kinky aspects of the material it adapts to a nearly ridiculous degree, so much so that I have not the faintest idea how a film featuring Ming mindwhammying Dale to a public orgasm or Ornella Muti’s Princess Aura sticking her tongue into whatever male mouth available, and which clearly thinks that slightly (or very) weird sex stuff is simply fun did get a PG rating at the time. Sure, there’s a deplorable lack of nudity, but much of the film seems so sexually overheated in various kinky manners that undressing anyone just seems like overkill. I would be very surprised if Hodges and the scriptwriters hadn’t studied Flesh Gordon quite extensively, is what I’m saying.

Because that’s still not enough, Hodges also manages to often turn a film made of the stuff of dreams, plain weird shit and basically anti-realistic special effects into a thing of great excitement, turning out big “fuck yeah” moments again and again, even if his hawk men carry the most un-flightworthy wings imaginable and his hero happens to ride an improbable silver air/space scooter. The film’s just shamelessly going with it all, and you’d be a sad old coot not to enjoy it.


The actors sure seem to enjoy themselves, too. Sam Jones – probably fortuitously – is the eternal heart on his sleeve straight man to a whole horde of scenery chewers doing their spirited best, with Brian Blessed doing his Brian Blessed thing to a blessed degree, while von Sydow, sporting some of the most gloriously absurd costumes imaginable, achieves astonishing feats of BIG GOOFY YET SERIOUS EVIL BORN FROM BOREDOM. And that’s only the most obvious two in a horde of actors all tuning into exactly the same frequency. Even better – nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, in the cast seems to come to the material from a position of superiority. Instead, everyone digs into the absurdity of much of what’s going on and treats it like it was Shakespeare, treating the often wonderfully bizarre dialogue to the most incredible line readings. It’s glorious and wondrous to behold (and hear), but then, so is everything else about this film.

Three Films Make A Post: From his French maid, he got Private Lessons. Now his English professor is giving him a REAL education.

Croupier (2008): Despite making the British gangster movie early on in his career with Get Carter, director Mike Hodges’s career has had a strange stop and start structure – with more stops than starts – with a small number of films which tend to range wildly in quality. Croupier is fantastic, though, shot by Hodges in seemingly simple pictures, very much focussed on Clive Owen (in a fantastic performance) as a man who is nearly devoid of all actual humanity and ends up losing the bit of it he has. All the  while, the films is pretending it is a happy (or at least light) end. The film is based on a script by Paul Mayersberg that is a study of absences – the protagonist’s lack of actual human connection, the lack of scruples of the characters he interacts with, and much more philosophical voids that seem to be embodied in the roulette wheel.

Blame! (2017): Going by the productions they buy and co-produce, the Japanese arm of Netflix is on pretty good terms with Tsutomu Nihei, so this neat one-shot anime based on one of Nihei’s early manga doesn’t come as a surprise, exactly. The budget’s probably only on the level of an OVA, but the Nihei-based designs of a weird, techno-biological future city out of control are as wonderful to look at as in Nihei’s manga, and while the plot isn’t exactly deeply memorable (which fits well with the original too), it does bring standard anime and weird far future SF elements together effectively. Certainly well enough to carry ninety minutes of Nihei’s designs, action, and melancholia for a lost future.

The Hidden (1987): This is a veritable classic that crosses SF horror, action movie and cop buddy movie in what I believe to be director Jack Sholder’s finest hour. The script (by Jim Kouf) is deceptively clever in building up the tale of the body hopping sociopathic alien with the loud taste in music, hiding a surprising amount of thought about the nature of civilisation and humanity under a wonderful escalation of violence and craziness, sardonic – violent - humour and an (actually very controlled) anarchic surface.

Sholder always was at least an ultra-competent craftsman, and when a script gave him the opportunity – as this one did – to really dig into crazy action movie stuff, weirdness, and hidden cleverness, things can turn out rather special, with nary a boring or stupid second on screen, particularly not in the moments when the film pretends to be stupid. It’s what the professional blurb writer would call a rollercoaster ride of excitement, and for once, blurbese is just the right language to use.


As a bonus, we get  Michael Nouri, Kyle MacLachlan at the peak of his curious, pretty, alienness (always feeling a bit like a Lynch character, if Lynch was involved in a project or not), and a cast of strong character actors, often playing the alien.

In short: Black Rainbow (1989)

Is there an official explanation for what happened with Mike Hodges at the beginning of the 80s? Sure, we can explain Flash Gordon with the kicking powers of the Horrible Boot of Camp (a creature I can only imagine being drawn by Jack Kirby), but why is the rest of Hodges (small) output of that decade equally messy and confused, and - alas - not equally entertaining? I don't dare to take a guess.

Anyhow, Black Rainbow is pretty much what you can expect from the director in that decade; in the spirit of the film's non-structure, let me describe it in a single, ridiculously long sentence with lots of parentheses, for that's exactly how it plays out. Black Rainbow is written with a lack of coherence that makes most giallos look logical (let me get that straight, a medium nobody in a position of authority believes foretells the identity of a murderer, so the bad guys send a professional killer after her, whose success will be the best way to ensure people will believe what she said?), sees Hodges frequently preach at the film's audience through the mouths of his characters (and hey, Mr Hodges, sir, you can't let your medium criticize her public's willingness to believe in a better afterlife and give her actually working prophetic powers and still make a sensible argument), contains the sort of scenery-chewing performance you get when you tell Jason Robards to put out all the stops (if that's a plus or a minus depends on your love for Robards; mine was tested), has an ending that is probably supposed to be ambiguous but just looks as if the writer didn't have a clue about how to actually end the convoluted mess, is overloaded with narrative elements that just don't fit together and sure as hell don't have a function (it's a Southern Gothic, so there must be a mad dead mother and implications of incest in Rosanna Arquette's background, plus what's up with Tom Hulce's marriage? Now that I think about it, why is his character even in here, seeing as he doesn't do anything a newspaper headline couldn't), and annoys me personally with a handful of scenes that suggest that Hodges might have made a fantastic piece of (tourist-y) Southern Gothic here, if he'd just had used the precision and ability to be clear even when backstories and characters are complicated his 70s films demonstrated again and again.

As it stands, Black Rainbow is a highly interesting mess.

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In short: Get Carter (1971)

London gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) returns to his Northern industrial hometown to find out the truth about the supposed accidental death of his straight brother Frank. His London bosses don't want him to make a mess by crossing their local partners, but once pointed in the direction he will go, Jack isn't somebody who can be dissuaded by anything.

Get Carter is a rather very cynical gangster/revenge flick from the bizarre filmography of Mike Hodges, and probably the director's best one at that. Influenced by film noir, John Boorman's Point Blank and the painful ugliness of its setting, Caine's Carter walks through the film as someone who does not give a shit about himself anymore; he hasn't, as his gaze tells us, for a long time. When the few things he actually cares about are destroyed, he answers with the only things he truly understands: violence of the very casual kind and a rage he neatly holds in its cage until the opportune moment to let it out has come.

Hodges seems to find a certain delight in showing us some of the most consequent and least moral acts of vengeance that can be found on film, all too fitting for the city where they take place, itself an act of architectural violence.

A slight leavening of the blackest of humor only emphasizes the meanness and hopelessness of the film. I'm not sure if hopelessness is even a fitting word for the world Get Carter creates. Hopelessness implies at least the existence of hope - Hodges is not that optimistic here.

Another thing I found rather remarkable was the fact that the film avoids the temptation to let the viewer identify with its protagonist - we're there to gaze into the abyss, not become it.

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