The Girl in the Fog (2017)

Original title: La ragazza nella nebbia

One December, 23rd, teenager Anna Lou disappears from a secluded little town in the Italian Alps. Big city investigator Vogel (Toni Servillo) is called in to take care of the case. On the outside, Vogel is the picture of a serious, professional and competent policeman, but the direction he takes in his investigation soon makes clear that he sees himself not as a seeker of truth or justice but as the man brought in to give the public what it wants. Truth, justice or the actual well-being of a victim and their family, or the actual guilt of the people he accuses of a crime  hardly even register on his compass. In fact, the film does suggest he’s one of those famous high-functioning sociopaths, though it does so subtly and ambiguously.

So when Vogel latches on on some vague, highly circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of local school teacher Loris Martini (Alessio Boni), he spends most of his time manipulating the press against the man, and very little on actual investigative work whatsoever. Consequently, the rather complicated truth of the matter is going to elude him for quite some time.

As far as twisty, psychologically motivated crime thrillers go, Donato Carrisi’s film based on his own novel is certainly right up there with the cream of the crop. It’s a film that hardly makes a misstep, easily convincing its audience even of the really much too complicated villainous plan that has way too many moments that’ll only work when total strangers act exactly as the perpetrator wants this will eventually to have been about on the plot-level.

Carrisi achieves this through a calm, focussed presentation that may not be as cold as his protagonists are but lacks any love for melodrama, calmly observing private catastrophes where other films would aim straight for the audience’s adrenal glands, making a deeper emotional impact exactly by not straining so hard for it on a surface level. Even though I am not a fan of the twisty thriller format in general, the director/writer’s calm and sure hand works wonders to convince even of slight implausibilities, mostly because there’s never any doubt the film knows where it wants to go and how to get there; it’s also playing fair with its audience, providing us all the clues we need to understand what’s really going on, but subtly enough to not stick our noses into it.

The film’s rather economical that way too, with scenes often taking on a kind of double-meaning – one looked when looked at straightforwardly, one with a cynical eye – so that even something a simple as a framing device in which Vogel has a little nightly chat with a psychiatrist (Jean Reno) is used for more than just straightforward narrative purposes. At the same time, the plot doesn’t feel overloaded, its intricate construction presented as if all of this were very straightforward and perfectly natural.


On a philosophical level, this is so cynical I’m tempted to call it a neo noir, even though its actual DNA seems closer to contemporary thrillers and – eventually – highly constructed mysteries. It’s not just that every single one of the authority figures (except for the female head of the local police, who doesn’t have much actual authority here, though) in a so-called respectable job in the film turns out to be utterly untrustworthy, at best fixated on giving the public appearance of doing their duty and making money through it, but never interested in what that duty is actually supposed to mean. The The Girl in the Fog clearly argues that this is indeed the way the world works. If there is any kind of crude justice actually happening (the film keeps this act off-screen, of course), it’s not actual justice but only the result of Vogel’s aggrieved vanity.

Three Films Make A Post: The Phoenix Will Rise!

The Marshes (2018): This Australian horror movie by Roger Scott about three biologists encountering something or someone pretty nasty in some marshland right out in the middle of nowhere brings me back to my old favourite concept of “boring competence”. There’s nothing really wrong with the film at all: it is competently structured, competently written (though lacking in any originality), competently staged and competently acted. Yet, despite the film’s worst sin being the pretty harmless tendency to keep the cameras close to the characters in scenes where showing a bit more of the landscape would actually be more threatening and claustrophobic, it all adds up to a film I find much less enjoyable than all this competence would suggest. There’s just a total lack of any adventurous spirit on display here I find rather dispiriting.

The Sonata (2018): In comparison, Andrew Desmond’s film about a violinist (Freya Tingley) finding an unpublished violin sonata in her estranged father’s (flashback late great Rutger Hauer) estate and the somewhat devilish consequences thereof should actually be a lesser movie. At least, its direction – while hitting some great moments of modern gothic atmosphere – is less slick, the film’s budgetary constraints are quite a bit more visible (don’t mention the CGI Devil). However, the film tells its old-fashioned tale of music and the devil with much more conviction, as well as an organic sense for the proper atmosphere the Australian movie lacks despite its higher technical values.


Captive State (2019): Completely unrelated to any of this is Rupert Wyatt’s film about a secret resistance operating in a post alien invasion USA (as is tradition in these films, it doesn’t care about the rest of the world) whose new alien overlords have taken rather a lot from the playbook of the contemporary demagogue. It’s a fantastic, dark, and moody piece for as long as Wyatt is following a great cast (counting among its numbers John Goodman, Ashton Sanders and Vera Farmiga and other fine actresses and actors) to explore this brave new world. There’s a nice eye for the telling and weird detail and a general sense of calmness and control to Wyatt’s direction in these parts of the film that make the slow progression of things enormously convincing. Alas, once the PLOT truly rears its ugly head, all of this gets subsumed by one of these contemporary Hollywood “clever” plans which can only work if everyone involved acts exactly like the planner expected – and often not in terribly convincing or psychologically sound ways either.

Past Misdeeds: (The) Shepherd (1999)

aka Cybercity

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

It’s after the end of the world (again and again and again). This time the sweet one-two punch of World War III and an ecological catastrophe has turned our blue planet brown, so humanity has fled underground. There, our descendants dwell in what looks surprisingly like often pretty foggy warehouse sets, suffer from a lack of decent lighting that can only cause depression and off-screen monologues, and are dominated by various competing religious cults and sects.

Our hero of the evening, one properly action movie monikered guy known as Boris Dakota (C. Thomas Howell) works as a Shepherd – an enforcer/killer – for Miles (Roddy Piper) whose religion seems to be what happens when an Evangelical TV preacher goes worse. Miles’s guys (and it’s only guys) seem to be – as far as I parse the intensely vague world building of the film – one of the big two crazy cults in the underground world. Right now, Miles’s guys are living in a truce with the other big cult, the skimpy leather-clad girls of Lilith (Heidi von Palleske), keeping the apocalypse after the apocalypse at bay by not killing each other in public. Or something.

Dakota for his part isn’t much of a believer in anything anymore, since he suffers from the classical action hero traumatic past of a murdered wife and son, and now spends the time he doesn’t kill people for Miles and his old friend Lyndon (Mackenzie Gray) growling off-screen monologues about how much humanity sucks, and watching virtual low-res memories and screen savers of his family on what looks suspiciously like sun glasses, an awesome invention the film never even bothers to name but that will have excellent uses when it comes to hurting the audience’s eyes, as well as for exposition, and other random stuff.

However, when Dakota is assigned a new and - as he hopes and Miles will make sure - last target, something you might at first confuse with a plot surfaces, for said target, one Sophia (Marina Anderson) just happens to have a son right of the age Dakota’s kid was when he was murdered. So obviously, Dakota saves Sophia and the child from other assassins instead of killing her and attempts to take on the role of their protector. At first, Sophia isn’t all too keen on Dakota but after enough lackluster attacks on them, she surely will come around.

As you might suspect after this meandering synopsis of not much of a plot, if you go looking into this Roger Corman production directed by Peter Hayman expecting much of an actual movie as people generally understand the term, you might be a mite disappointed. The plot – such as it is – is really just a series of lamely reproduced clichés presented with all the enthusiasm and coherence of a late period Santo movie (which, if you don’t know your lucha cinema, means none whatsoever), with character actions and motivations that often don’t even make sense in the very broad interpretation of the word we use when talking about post-apocalyptic action cinema, underground (aka “we can’t afford to shoot outside, and Bronson Canyon’s too far away”) division. I, at least, can make neither heads nor tails out of the whole conspiracy angle between Miles and Lilith’s cults. If indeed there even is such an angle. I think it says everything about the quality of the writing here I’m not sure either way. Or, to take another example, why exactly does Lyndon act as he does in the final scenes? How the hell should the script know?

Obviously, things like suspense or excitement are right out in Shepherd, particularly since the action scenes are of the just barely competent type that neither wants to be creative nor exciting and just hovers around words like “there”. And nope, we don’t even get to see a titanic throw-down between Howell and Piper, which is probably for the better seeing how slowly Howell moves here.

However, while Shepherd is barely watchable as a serious piece of post-apocalyptic action film, it is a pretty brilliant lump of utter, inexplicable nonsense, and what creativity was involved behind the camera was clearly concentrated on a) providing various actors with as many opportunities for scenery chewing as possible, and b) adding absolutely pointless yet awesome nonsense/stuff/random insanity to as many scenes as possible. So Shepherd gifts us with great moments in cinema like Roddy Piper living in his own memory glasses world where he does the whole sub-Jesus thing, bare-chested and carrying around a humongous crucifix on his back (shades of Philip K. Dick there, also, obviously). Roddy also dreams of hitting people with one of those crosses-on-a-stick (that’s the technical term, right, religious readers?) bishops and the like carry around, literally likes to kick his henchmen when they are down, and spends most of his screen time angrily ranting and raving in sentences that can’t be meant to make sense. Truly, that part of the film is a thing to behold. And while Howell didn’t get the message about the scenery chewing beyond “do a manly growly voice, dude”, von Palleske and Lyndon in particular really join in the fun with gusto.

Other joys here are the random appearance of a cannibalistic punk (this is not a film who could afford a gang of them, sorry) who leads our hero back to the boy with his awesome power of smelling little boys (seriously), a just as random Roddy Piper crucifixion, and last but not least a cameo by good old David Carradine.

Carradine is not a man to be trifled with in the finding nothing undignified sweepstakes, so his character is only listed as “Ventriloquist” in the credits. And indeed, David is one, and because this film is very special indeed, David Carradine isn’t just a ventriloquist but has his star turn here drugging C. Thomas Howell, then straddling him while good old C. Thomas dreams of having sex with a woman quite clearly not David Carradine, and proceeding to strangle our hero with his ventriloquist’s doll. A doll, that, for reasons I don’t even want to think about, also seems to be trans.


And this, ladies and gentlemen, should really answer anyone’s questions about whether Shepherd is worth watching.

In short: Gone with the Pope (197x/2010)

After coming out of prison and doing a bit of professional killing for the mob, sad and sleazy gangster Paul (Duke Mitchell), unwilling to live off his rich girlfriend, decides to grab his three best buddies with equally bible appropriate first names from prison and go on a boating trip with them on said girlfriend’s yacht to make them and him feel better. Well, that’s what he tells them and his girlfriend. In reality, Paul has decided they are going to kidnap the Pope (Lorenzo Dardado) and ransom him for the tidy sum of one dollar from every Catholic in the world. Paul does let himself talk down from that last bit, though, and only goes for 50 cents pC (that’s the official acronym) in the end.

The popenapping goes through without a hitch. But with the Pope come problems. Namely, despite some awkward (yet very funny) rants by Paul about the old theological chestnut of the absence of god in the face of evil, the holy dude conquers his friends’ hearts, and basically adopts them, so that Paul has to let everyone go be holy and sails off into the sunset himself alone. The rousing spiritual bit is followed by a bit more violence, sex, and some glowing Catholic iconography in the film’s meaningful end.

Shot in the mid-70’s by writer/director/star and producer Duke Mitchell, this pretty bizarre and damn brilliant piece of cinematic strangeness was only finished long after Mitchell’s death, based on a work print, the negatives and Mitchell’s notes, which has been quite the service to mankind. The very best thing about the film as it now stands is how little it feels like anyone involved in its post-production is treating it ironically. Instead, they are clearly trying to realize Mitchell’s vision with all the respect it is due.

Well, one could argue with much more respect than it is actually due, but that would make one a bit boring as well as a heartless bastard, so I’m not going to. As it stands, said vision is certainly pretty singular, answering the call of mid-70s high profile mafia movies with a mixture of sleaze and exploitational values, theological concerns expressed with the sort of wide-eyed naivety you wouldn’t expect from a guy who looks – well, indeed was – an over the hill night club act, through scenes of hetero men buddying up rather more physically than you ever get to see around where I live, and being pulled back to Earth via some gob-smacking casual racism.


While acting and production values are certainly on the dubious side – though only ever boring in about the first five minutes of boring mafia table talk – there’s also a beguiling sense of authenticity to them. Sure, my brain told me, these guys can’t actually act, and this dialogue is absurd (though again, never boring), but boy, do I believe this is more like actual mid-70s gangsters acted, looked and felt like anyone in The Godfather, and looks much more like the world of shady bars and hotel rooms they lived in. It’s an astonishing film.

Taste of Fear (1961)

aka Scream of Fear

Not having seen her father for nearly ten years after her parents’ divorce, wheelchair-bound Penny Appleby (Susan Strasberg) travels to his coastal villa in France, following a somewhat surprising invitation. Penny’s father is away on business, so Penny is greeted by her stepmother Jane (Ann Todd). Jane makes quite an effort to make her feel welcome, as awkward as the situation between a young woman and the second wife of her father she’s never met before is at its core.

However, something is very wrong at the villa. Starting on the very first night of her stay, Penny repeatedly encounters what looks a lot like the corpse of her father propped up in macabre manner. Of course, when Penny’s trying to show the corpse to Jane or hunky chauffeur Robert (Ronald Lewis), the thing disappears. Very quickly, Jane starts mumbling about the “neurotic tendencies” Penny has supposedly displayed in childhood. The doctor Jane calls in, supposedly a friend of Penny’s father, the very rude Dr Pierre Gerrard (Christopher “Frenchman” Lee), does love to go on in the same manner, making dinners with him rather a strain on everyone’s nerves. At least Robert – just call him “Bob” – is a lot of help, sharing some of the doubts Penny is developing.

Despite the great success (particularly for such a small company) of their horror films, beloved Hammer Studios weren’t exclusively making horror films in the sixties. Following the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho, Jimmy Sangster wrote about five or six (depending on which ones you count) twisty thrillers clearly influenced and encouraged by that film, yet never simply copying it. Rather, Sangster takes some of Psycho’s formal inventions, its play with the audience and its expectations, and thinks them further for his own purposes.

Case in point is the first film of this group, as directed by Seth Holt, using the viewer’s knowledge of the structure of a gaslighting-type film against them to pull off quite some clever things not just once but twice. The film doesn’t only use the audience’s assumptions about genre and characters, though – the characters themselves repeatedly fall into the same trap of taking what’s on the surface of others on very literal face value. Treating people as types and tropes is a dangerous thing, as it turns out. I’m not actually going to spoil the twists here despite the film’s age, because when a plot twist is as well constructed and wonderfully timed as those here are, its writer deserves the respect no to have it spoiled.

Despite not really being a horror film, Taste does feature some wonderfully macabre moments, too. The business with Penny’s father’s corpse is effectively creepy, Holt shooting these scenes as expressionistically influenced nightmares that stand in fine contrast to the many scenes of black and white sunlight surrounding them. And the final destiny of one of the film’s villains – in a move typical for the film probably the lesser one – has a sense of dreadful yet deserved irony many a horror twist ending strives for.

Holt does some grand work in other regards too, staging scenes in ways that make them feel so intimate, the film’s threats seem all the more personal. Generally, Holt as well as Sangster’s script like to keep events and emotions tightly controlled, in fact enhancing their impact by not overplaying them like many another film would. In lesser hands, the plot, where nobody involved, if still alive, will end up any happier than before, would be material for shrill melodrama, but Holt and Sangster let their audience figure out for themselves how much of a parade of broken people doing broken things we are actually witnessing.

Young Susan Strasberg is a great casting choice, too, projecting vulnerability and confusion yet also a hidden reservoir – clearly unexpected to the rest of the world – of strength and determination she desperately needs. The rest of the cast is up to the same fine standards – with the exception of Lee’s “French” accent – though this is really Strasberg’s show.


Really, said accent is the only thing I can find fault with in Taste of Fear, and if a bit of a ropey accent is the worst thing a film has to offer, nobody can fault me if I call it a little masterpiece.

In short: The Courier (2019)

A nameless black market courier (Olga Kurylenko) working in London is supposed to deliver some technical doodad needed for the secure off-site statement of one Nick Murch (Amit Shah) against crazy evil rich mastermind Ezekiel Manning (Gary Oldman). Turns out what she actually unwittingly delivers is a packet full of cyanide gas meant to kill Nick as well as those of his protectors not on Manning’s payroll and frame her for the killing. Fortunately, the good woman is a deserted Russian wet work specialist and really doesn’t like to be fucked with in this way, so she saves Nick and begins a game of “Die Hard in a Parking Garage” with Manning’s henchpeople.

Zackary Adler’s The Courier is a great example of the problems of many contemporary direct to home video action films, or really, the problems these things often have becoming actual movies (you gotta ask Martin Scorsese if that would make them “cinema”) instead of strange patchwork concoctions.

One of the biggest hurdles standing between a low budget action movie of this type and becoming good is the desperate need to get some name actors in. Sure, getting a couple of scenes of Gary Oldman looks good in the press material, and he’s certainly not phoning his stuff in here, but there’s also not enough Gary Oldman to sell him as the main villain of the piece – that he is never interacting with the The Courier’s heroine certainly doesn’t help with that either. So the film needs additional villains hanging on the phone with each other a lot, our villain’s daughter whose function in the plot is exactly zero, and whatever other filler it can come up with (like an insipidly written court scene), permanently cutting away from the actual business of survival in the parking lot at hand to things and scenes irrelevant or boring, repeatedly sabotaging its own potential at momentum. Frankly, as much as I love Oldman, and as much fun as he has chewing the scenery, as little has what he does to do with the rest of the movie. He could have been replaced by a voice on the telephone shouting commands without the film losing anything of import to its quality as a movie; its quality as a saleable product would probably suffer, but as a viewer I want a watchable movie much more than a saleable product.

Of course, given the amount of other filler, I’m not terribly sure the film could actually afford Kurylenko and Shah for more shooting days, which is a particular shame since Kurylenko is fully applying herself even in her worst movies, and Shah’s only one good role away from a really decent career.

All of this is particularly disappointing – again all too typical for this kind of action movie - because whenever the film gets around to Kurylenko doing her Bruce Willis bit (with Shah in a nice twist consigned to the kind of role action movies traditionally cast with women), Adler turns out to be a pretty fine director of action in a minimalist setting, finding a surprising amount of action set-ups for a rather small space, and using the always game Kurylenko well, too.


Alas, forty minutes of fun and sixty minutes of filler do not a (good) movie make.

Music Monday: Change Edition

Satan’s School for Girls (1973)

When her sister commits suicide under – as the audience witnesses in the prologue – very mysterious circumstances while on premises belonging to the private school for girls she goes to, Elizabeth Sayers (Pamela Franklin), travels to the school in Salem herself, enrolling under an assumed name for some undercover investigation. Liz’s new classmates seem friendly enough, if sometimes a bit high-strung, but that’s probably just college life.

Further investigation does suggest something sinister going on there, though. There are strange noises in the night, a secret room in the cellar, and the rate of death through misadventure or suicide among the girls becomes rather high for a place quite this small. Is the headmistress (Jo Van Fleet) – generally called “the Dragon” – somehow involved? And what about the clearly deranged psychology teacher (Lloyd Bochner) and his obsession with rats in mazes? Is perhaps the not at all suspiciously hip and (supposedly) hunky Mr Clampett (Roy Thinnes) quite a bit more sinister than he pretends to be? And where was Satan when the girls died?

Well, if you haven’t figured the answers to these questions out in about a third of the time Elizabeth does, I really don’t know what to say. Of course, the obviousness of its plot doesn’t actually detract from the virtues of David Lowell Rich’s Aaron Spelling-produced bit of 70s TV horror. And really, can we blame a sensible young woman for not figuring out one of her teachers is actually Satan trying to recruit a coven of eight late teenage witches by charming and cajoling them into collective suicide?

So, yes, the plot is really rather on the silly side but it’s the good kind of silly that sees a witch and/or Satan under every rock, distrusts all authority (because Satan is the ultimate seducer of headmistresses, it turns out), and would really have a cover of a girl in a white nightgown running away from an old mansion if it only could get away with it, and were a novel. Thusly, even if you’re like me and find Thinnes’s supposed charm here rather smarmy and obvious, and peg him as a clear creep, the film’s charm is always obvious as well. All of this places the film somewhere in the realm of the gothic romance revival and the least extreme stories in contemporary, code approved, horror comics. I’d probably live there if I could.

Of course, if you’re of a mind to, you can interpret certain elements of the film as a commentary on actual 70s cults but the film’s just too old-fashioned and cheesy to really be read that way unless one is an academic looking for something to over-interpret.

Rich turns out to be one among the extremely competent TV horror directors here, showing a certain flair for the use of limited light sources – resulting in some lovely atmospheric scenes of Elizabeth sneaking through the house at night – and adding a couple of scenes that hint at a darker underside to supernatural things than most of what we actually see. There’s the honestly creepy scene where Satan breaks the already pretty cracked headmistress completely, and about as menacing a murder scene as you can get when you can’t show blood involving a man, a body of water, and some wooden poles brandished by rather merciless teens. And, eventually, there are also the sweet, sweet tones of horrible betrayal. Even the ending’s pretty nasty for a TV movie.


All of which does certainly put Satan’s School for Girls into the highest tier of 70s US TV horror, as I’m sure our old buddy Satan will agree.

Three Films Make A Post: Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.

Young Adult (2011): On one hand, I have complete respect for Jason Reitman’s willingness to make a film about a woman hitting a tough spot and returning to her small town home that doesn’t espouse small town virtues as the be all and end all of “true” life and adulthood. On the other hand, the resulting film is then - quite consequently – about a character who experiences things but never learns anything from them, who doesn’t change for better or for worse, the only point seeming that some people can’t change, even if they are shitty and broken enough to need it, which is neither news nor particularly interesting to me. Sure, there is a lot to be said against all those movies about the cleansing power of returning home, but replacing hope with nothing isn’t a terrible convincing proposition either, however well Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt are selling this (Patrick Wilson is his usual nonentity, which might be a purposeful casting decision here).

Prince Avalanche (2013): Also not exactly to my tastes is this one, directed by David Gordon Green, in which Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch at least do make something out of their experience of doing – sometimes – road work on a godforsaken road. I’m not terribly convinced by the tone of the affair, though, Green desperately trying to elevate the pretty bare script into something universal but never quite succeeding for me. But then, I usually have the problem with Green’s more serious-minded films of not seeing that he’s actually saying those as much about life, love and the rest he seems to think his films do. That might just be me, though.


Freaks (2018): Let’s finish on this film by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (of Leprechaun: Origins “fame”) which first casts what turns out to be a really bad X-Men movie as an intriguing and atmospheric mystery about a little girl (Lexy Kolker) building the wrong picture of a complicated world her father (hey, it’s Emile Hirsch again) doesn’t bother even attempting to explain to her. The more the film explains about what is actually going on with and in the world here, the more stupid it gets, though, reaching a sort of apex of awkward dialogue, bizarre writing choices and characters who will do any damn shit because it is in the script in a climax that has to be seen to be believed. And to think that much of what’s happened could have been avoided if any of the grown-ups here had at least attempted to explain the world to Chloe, the kid character, something like “some of us have special powers, bad people hunt those with special powers; we have special powers, therefor we must hide, yes, even from ice cream vans and the lady next door”.

Past Misdeeds: The Babadook (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Amelia (Essie Davis), widowed and quite isolated from the rest of the world ever since her husband died in an accident while driving her to the hospital when she was in labour, lives alone with her little son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Even more than six years after her husband’s death, Amelia has still not managed to really cope with it, finding herself alone and with a difficult child, her main human contacts being a pretty horrible rich girl friend, her elderly neighbour, and a colleague at work whose obvious interest in her she can’t or won’t notice. Her situation certainly isn’t improved by a shit job as a nurse for the sick and elderly, by the fact that Samuel has major behavioural problems nobody seems to bother to actually treat (his school’s only answer to the problems is wanting to pull him out of class and into one-to-one-tutoring, as if the concepts of child psychiatry and psychology had never been invented), and by Amelia’s own untreated mental health problems.

Right now, things are bad, and the cracks in Amelia’s and Samuel’s life are beginning to grow too large to just ignore, but the true downward spiral starts when Amelia reads a children’s pop-up picture book she doesn’t remember buying at all to the always over-anxious and over-imaginative Samuel . “The Babadook” as it is called, frightens Samuel to death. He becomes convinced the book’s titular monster is lurking in their home, meaning them ill. This does of course make his behavioural troubles even worse, which in turn worsens Amelia’s psychological deterioration, until she too begins to encounter strange and inexplicable things. It might be a shared delusion, it might be a big fat metaphor for child abuse, or it might be that something truly horrible has stepped into lives that weren’t all that happy to begin with.

There’s really little else I can do when confronted with as individual, clever, ambiguous and strange a horror movie as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook than lavish it with praise. Sure, from time to time, if you want to, you can see the film’s probably miniscule budget showing. However that’s really only something that applies when you look for the signs of it, for The Babadook is a film finely focused on what it can do instead of attempting those things it can’t afford to.

So it only features a handful of actors, but all of them are great – with Essie Davis giving an absolutely outstanding tour de force performance that is utterly convincing even in her most violent mood swings and never ever feels like the actress just showing off, and Noah Wiseman really managing to at once make his Samuel so believably exhausting it’s no wonder Amelia has difficulties coping even ignoring her copious other problems, yet also making believable the boy’s joy, his love for his mother and his sadness, turning what could be caricatures in lesser hands into people.

Kent does some fantastic things with her basic set-up, not only keeping the outward truth of what we see in the film ambiguous but also making its supernatural (or not) elements so meaningful and expressive of a lot of things – like the kind of negative feelings towards their children parents aren’t allowed to admit, the slowly growing resentment coming from a life that went off the rails one day and never got back there, with little visible opportunity for things turning around, the fear of losing one’s child as well as that of losing one’s mind, and so on - their actual reality inside the film’s real world seems to be beside the point. And we’re not talking about the horrors of allegory here, where everything has to have a specific meaning and no thought needs to be put into establishing the world surrounding the allegory as believable, but the point where a film’s constructed reality becomes so easy to accept, several completely divergent interpretations of what’s going on in it can be true at the same time, characters locking their horrors up in the cellar and feeding it worms being real and a metaphor at the same time, one way of looking at it actually strengthening the other.

Kent never makes a false step throughout the whole of the movie, neither on the directing nor on the writing side, presenting the illogical and the strange as a (un)natural part of the film’s world, setting up terrific moments of suspense and executing them just as brilliantly, as if this were the easiest thing in the world. Even more impressive, Kent, in her first feature film, already has a visual language all her own, most probably based on a deep knowledge of the horror films that came before, but feeling characteristic, personal, and completely disinterested in using the horror film techniques that are in fashion when they don’t fit the situation at all. Consequently, jump scares are replaced with a creeping dread, and mood and suspense become supremely important.


I’m also very, very fond of The Babadook’s clever use of special effects that is - not just in the monster design - influenced by the expressionist silent films it very expressly champions (as well as by Edward Gorey, I suspect). And how often can you say a phrase like this about a film and not mean “Tim Burton Gothic” (not that I have much against Burton, traitor against opinions I’m supposed to have that I am) but – again – something that seems much more to be part of a personal vision?

In short: Ad Astra (2019)

A relatively near future where everyone is heavily tranquilized (or all actors are drugged, who knows for sure?). Energy surges apparently coming from Neptune blast through our solar system. Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) and his daddy issues very slowly make their way towards the planet to perhaps do something about the situation as well as said issues.

I’m not one to blame a science fiction movie for not being a colourful adventure full of talking trees and raccoons with PTSD (though, actually…), but if you want to make a less adventuresome science fiction movie, please don’t end up like James Gray’s po-faced epic here, telling a tiny, clichéd story over two hours that feel more like years.

The film’s main problem is that it is desperately trying to be a movie about human psychology but clearly has no clue how to go about it. So we get stuff like the ridiculous scene in which Pitt’s character is attacked by a monkey (in space, nobody can hear you fling poo), quickly followed by another one of his endless “psych evaluations” in which he talks about his unexpressed anger. It’s as if the monkey is some kind of…metaphor!? Whoa. This is symptomatic for a film that clearly can’t imagine an audience that has Pitt’s character arc from the white middle-aged dude who is repressing his feelings to the white middle-aged dude who isn’t anymore because he wrestled his father (in space!) figured out after the first ten minutes or so, and so dooms us to twiddle our thumbs watching Pitt not express feelings until the film gets up to speed too. And if you still don’t get it, let’s add a mumbled, pointless, and monotone monologue by Pitt that tells us exclusively things we either already understand or that the film should show us instead of mumble at us, as per the cinematic rule of “show, don’t mumble!”.


All of which is a particular problem since that’s all there is to the film: its world building is perfunctory and vague, the acting is bland and impersonal (with Pitt, usually a guy who works well within the parameters of his limited abilities, clearly out of his depth), and it consciously rejects all visionary elements and concepts of science fiction (what I’d call the good and important stuff), aiming for a philosophy of tending one’s own garden instead, perhaps mumbling of awe and wonder but certainly never showing them.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

It’s Halloween, 1968. Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), a horror-loving outsider with the ambition of becoming a writer, convinces her two friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur) to visit the spooky old Bellows mansion at the edge of town, a place connected to more than just one story of a haunting. Well, they’ll have to visits the place after they’ve played a prank on town bully Tommy (Austin Abrams), and have had to hide in the car of hot teenage drifter Ramón (Michael Garza).

That visit to the house, now accompanied by Ramón, who rather hits it off with Stella, doesn’t go too well, and not just because Tommy locks them into the cellar. Turns out the place is at least as haunted as everyone says; and while the kids escape the thing that goes bump in that particular night, things only become worse in the following days and nights, for Stella took a book of handwritten stories from the house, stories that now turn into reality on her and her friends.

Apparently, not everyone loved André Øvredal’s adaptation (as produced and co-written by the great Guillermo del Toro) of the beloved collections of horrific American and British folk tales as retold by Alvin Schwartz as much as I did, but I can’t find any flaw with the film at all, unless one thinks it strictly needed to be an anthology movie. I do appreciate most everything in the film at hand, not just that it is teen-oriented horror that doesn’t try to be so cool it can only ever end up uncool, but that it actually tries to speak to very precise anxieties of very specific kids, using some clichés in the character set-up but from then on out developing these characters and what they are afraid of with all seriousness.

At the same time, the film also grounds the horror in a very specific place and time, as well as the social realities of the characters – including the daily casual racism facing Ramón even from those people who are otherwise not horrible human beings (something that pop-cultural portrayals of racism often avoids showing) – not as the main thrust of the film but as something that can’t help but define parts of a person’s world.

Stories are, after all, connected to the reality they are told in, and the film is all about stories, obviously specifically horror stories, why we tell them, how we tell them, but also, particularly fitting in a film based on folklore retellings, how stories shape our interpretation of the world around us, and may very well shape the world around us in turn, and not always in the best way, as well as the way a creepy story can mask some horrors of the real world instead of revealing them.


But even ignoring this part of the film – even if I’m not sure I’d want to – Scary Stories is pretty wonderful, Øvredal handling the macabre tales in the movie with his usual good timing and sense for creating a creepy mood (turns out that works from Norwegian fjords, to morgues, to Midwestern small towns for him), and a flair for showing just the right amount of the weird stuff. I found myself particularly intrigued by the film’s use of colour, often using traditionally warm colours in connection with the supernatural and the creepy, perhaps suggesting how much more real and alive a story can feel than drab reality.

In short: Blinded by the Light (2019)

Sometimes, you read about the basic idea of a film, and can’t imagine not liking it. Case in point is Gurinder Chadha’s Blinded by the Light, the tale of 1987 Pakistani Brit Javed (Viveik Kalra), who learns to understand himself, his family, and his town, as well as how to go out of his shell, become a writer and fall in love for the first time through the music of Bruce Springsteen. What’s not to like, right? Unfortunately, while the idea of the film at hand is rather lovely, inclusive, heart-warming and well meant, the execution of that idea is at once so harmless and so on the nose, I found myself cringing more than enjoying myself or learning something about anyone’s actual experiences of life.

There are two main problems with the film. The first one is the script’s inability to express emotions through anything but the Springsteen quotes (and about a third of the dialogue truly consists of Kalra declaiming Springsteen, which is not what song lyrics are made for, as much as I love Bruce) or bland statements of fact like “I don’t really get along with my father”, the whole deal about “show, don’t tell” you might have heard about clearly not having made its way to Luton. This approach may give the film a certain heart on its sleeve sort of charm if you’re much less cynical than I am, but reads to me as a complete inability to talk about feelings, Kalra’s identity, or the world beyond anything but the most superficial level.


Which brings me directly to the film’s other problem, its harmlessness that does acknowledge things like the horrible racism its protagonist has to suffer under, as well as the alienated cultural position Javed as the son of immigrants finds himself in, but never dare look at these things in anything but the blandest, most superficial manner, clearly deathly afraid that if it would portray actual emotions and thoughts instead of gestures pointing towards them, it would lose its whole feelgood appeal. Of course, the exact opposite is true: what the film needs is a less bland and streamlined emotional and intellectual landscape to earn that feelgood appeal. Something Bruce Springsteen would understand.

Music Monday: Medo Edition

Le Silencieux (1973)

aka The Silent One

aka Escape to Nowhere

When a delegation of Soviet nuclear physicists concerned with nuclear fusion visit London, one among their number, one Anton Haliakov (Lino Ventura) apparently dies under rather dubious circumstances. In truth, MI5 is faking the man’s death, for they believe he is actually the French nuclear physicist Clément Tibère, who has supposedly killed but in truth kidnapped by the Soviets some sixteen years ago. That turns out to be quite true, but Tibère’s not at all happy for his unasked for rescue. It’s not that he’s much of a believer in the communist cause as interpreted by Soviet Russia, he’s just convinced that the KGB’s going to find and kill him sooner or later, and he rather likes being not dead.

His scepticism is certainly not unfounded, for the British spies, in classically cynical fashion, are really not at all interested in his well-being. They only want some information about who the Soviet spies among their own nuclear physicists are. Tibère’s just meant to tell them and then go on his merry way, with a bit of money and without any promises of protection as his prize. Eventually, after some threats and a bit of torture, Tibère gives the British what they want, and they do indeed lift hardly a finger to at least get the man out of London alive. Fortunately – it would be a short film otherwise – Tibère did work for allied intelligence during World War II, and so does know some tradecraft, managing to evade the KGB agents who are quickly on his trail, at least for a time. He decides that if he’s going to be killed anyway, he might as well be killed at home in France, and proceeds to make his way there. Perhaps he’s even going to find a way to save his life in the end?

Claude Pinoteau’s Le Silencieux belongs to the earnest kind of spy film, far from James Bond and Eurospy shenanigans, aiming for a serious treatment of espionage, and demonstrating quite a bit of the melancholy and philosophical thought in the existentialist manner that dwell on this branch of the spy movie tree.

Of course, being a serious film made in a very serious manner, I can’t help but nitpick a little at one of its central conceits, namely, that MI5 would just set Tibère loose after squeezing a small, if important, amount of information out of him. I’m not suggesting they’d have too many ethical concerns here to let him go to his doom, but given that Tibère has been part of the Soviet nuclear program for sixteen years, seems to have been trusted enough to be taken to the West, and is a frigging nuclear physicist, you’d think they’d find other informational and practical uses for him. But then we wouldn’t have a film whose main thrust is showing Ventura making his unsmiling way through Europe, chased by spies through various gritty suspense and low-key action sequences, so I do understand the actual reason for this ever so slight oversight.

Said suspense and action sequences are fine enough: nobody would ever confuse Pinoteau with John Frankenheimer, but he shows a more than decent understanding of the creation of a fictional space that feels as if characters were actually moving through real spaces which is so important for scenes of chase and evasion. The director also makes effective use of urban as well as – rather attractive – rural locations, showing Ventura’s character isolated and alone, with the stiff back of somebody hunted, either dwarfed by empty spaces or caged in by people and architecture. In a clever move, the film doesn’t put any efforts into individualizing or characterising Tibère’s hunters, adding a paranoid layer by keeping them basically faceless and utterly impersonal.


The film’s also rather effective in the quieter moments when Tibère slowly and gravely re-discovers a half-buried past he had to work hard to forget once he found himself in the USSR. That Ventura is as utterly convincing in these scenes as he is running for his life hardly needs mention.

Three Films Make A Post: When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them.

Dunkirk (2017): Of the couple of reviews that don’t heap praise on Christopher Nolan’s somewhat different war film – a genre that’s not generally about retreat even if it is set against war as such – the ones that don’t complain about its lack of diversity - which I understand but personally don’t find relevant as a criterion for the quality of a film as a film - criticize its sentimentality. That one, I really don’t get, for if the film has one stark and obvious virtue to me apart from an incredible realization on a technical level, it is how much it avoids sentimentality in its treatment of material that could all too easily fall into that trap. Instead, it explores the humanity of defeat and humanity in defeat in a manner I find deeply compassionate, using Nolan’s huge technical acumen to get to a very human core of emotions the characters don’t ever precisely state because they cannot be precisely stated but only demonstrated. Which the film does as well as any film I’d care to mention.

Alice in Earnestland (2014): Where I find the core of Nolan’s film pretty easy to grasp and understand, I have a bit more trouble with Ahn Gook-jin’s dark comedy. It does fit nicely into the large number of contemporary South Korean films about class divisions and the shittiness of being one of the working poor, but having watched it, I’m not terribly sure what it is trying to say about this. The quirky structure it shares with many a film from Korea doesn’t make an attempt to understand what this one’s actually about on more than a plot level more difficult too. Some of the film’s weirdness and humour is certainly attractive, and some of it unattractive in a highly entertaining way bordering on splatstick (not to be confused with slapstick); I’m just not confident it adds up to much beyond that.


The Shop Around the Corner (1940): And here’s the point where I unmask as a total barbarian, for I do not prefer Ernst Lubitsch’s original version of the “a couple who hate each other in real life are unknowingly in love in letters” set-up to its later versions. It’s not just because I would have preferred the later movies’ emphasis on the romantic parts of the tale (though I certainly would) in this first version, too, I also don’t find the depiction of the social aquarium of the titular shop it puts in the romance’s place all that riveting. Of course, there are moments where the film delights with precise insight and a good joke or three, but there’s also a lot of restating of things the film has said just a couple of scenes before, and some truly obnoxious character work by William Tracy. Add to that the tragic fact that I’m not actually very fond of James Stewart in this stage of his career, and you might understand why I don’t find this classic all that classic.

Past Misdeeds: The Shadow (1994)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Seemingly bored millionaire Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) actually has a rather interesting hobby during his nights: so he can atone for the sins of his past as drug-dealing warlord in Asia and channel his inner evil into something good a Buddhist monk has taught Cranston the power to cloud men’s minds, providing him with basic invisibility and other fun powers. So by night, Cranston turns into the mysterious crime-fighting vigilante only known as The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and fights New York’s underworld, recruiting people like taxi driver Moe Shrevnitz (Peter Boyle) as his agents.

The Shadow’s life becomes rather more difficult when Shiwan Khan (John Lone), the last descendant of Genghis Khan arrives in town. Shiwan Khan has learned the same mystical powers as The Shadow. but he’s quite violently not bought into that whole atonement business at all. Instead, Khan plans to use his power to conquer the world, a plan that clearly can’t help but start with the kidnapping of one Dr Reinhardt Lane (a horribly underused Ian McKellen), and end with the threat of a rather prematurely produced nuclear bomb. The Shadow for his part will do all in his power to safe New York from destruction.

It’s quite easy to play the game of imagining one’s own perfect The Shadow movie out of whichever bits and pieces of Walter Gibson’s pulp novel series and the radio show it spawned and that would influence the continuing novels if Gibson wanted (which he didn’t) or not one prefers. The more pulp knowledgeable among the reviewers of Russell Mulcahy’s film tend to do that, of course, which generally results in attempts to compare the poor film with the pure perfection of one’s dream adaptation, a process that can only lead to tears.

If I, by now grounded a bit more in Shadow lore than I was when I first watched and enjoyed the actual film at hand, would play the old game of pick and choose myself, this would certainly be a different proposal, one which would keep the Shadow himself quite a bit more mysterious than the actual film does (probably turning the Lamont Cranston identity into the pure mask Gibson in the end decided it to be), which would play up the role of the Shadow’s agents, give Penelope Ann Miller’s Margo Lane a bit more to do than fetchingly wear awesome dresses and not get kidnapped, certainly provide the Shadow with a rather more creepy laugh, and would most definitely hire someone for The Shadow’s facial prosthetics who knows what they are doing.

However, not being one’s dream movie seems to be The Shadow’s main problem, at least as far as that curious bird, the 90’s blockbuster pulp movie adaptation/superhero movie in the wake of the success of Tim Burton’s miserable first Batman film goes. The rest of the weaknesses are just your typical mid-90s blockbuster stuff, things I take as a part of the genre make-up of the film. So The Shadow quite expectedly demonstrates a horrible fear of actually being dark when it is required to be and a love for rather lame hero’s journey stuff business even if that approach to heroics doesn’t fit the actual hero it concerns itself with at all.

However, despite all these flaws and various possible niggles, I still enjoy Mulcahy’s film a lot, beginning with its surprising success at taking one of the Shadow’s “yellow peril” enemies and not having him end up as a horrible racist caricature. In part, that’s thanks to David Koepp’s script only using the most neutral tropes of this sort of thing - and to good effect – adding knowing nods like Shiwan Khan’s sartorial liking for Brooks Brothers suits, but to a larger degree, Khan works thanks to a performance by John Lone that goes through ranting, raving, and clever little jokes with a wonderful physical presence and just the right amount of irony. Never so much of the latter it drifts into the realm of camp – generally not a problem of this particular film anyway, thankfully – but enough to turn Khan into something different from a racist caricature, not a bad guy because of his skin colour but because of his character.

And then there’s the other great joy of the film, its incredibly artificial style in the whole of its production design reaching from costumes to architecture. All of it locates The Shadow in an artificial dream world of style that takes iconic elements of 30s and 40s fashion and architecture and blows them up to ridiculously beautiful proportions, a 30s and 40s of the imagination. I believe we have Tim Burton’s Batman – if you ask me a much less entertaining adaptation of a piece of pulp culture – to thank for a mainstream production being allowed to indulge in this kind of way.

In any case, it’s this aspect of the film that turns it into a film not of the “style over substance” kind certain critics love to talk about and that I have only very seldom encountered myself, but one where – like in a Choer Yuen wuxia but of course not as incandescently – style is substance, dragging an audience into a world that very consciously isn’t the real one, treating cinema as a place of shared cultural dreams, or in this particular case, a place where an audience can dream about their own contemporary ideas of shared cultural dreams gone by. Not so we can self-consciously point and laugh and tell ourselves how morally superior we are to the past but – perhaps – to find the point where the old dreams and the new touch.


Mulcahy as a director is a perfect choice for this sort of thing, having spent the better parts of a career going up and down and up again making films that try to tell all they have to say through their surfaces (polished like mirrors), leading audiences into places that are often more akin to dreams than they are to stories as such; unless they end up being Highlander II: The Quickening, but putting shared dreamscapes on screen isn’t easy, so failure’s a natural risk there.

In short: Holiday Inn (1941)

Say what you will about Mark Sandrich’s tale of showbiz woe in which Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are vying for Marjorie Reynolds, but it certainly is ambitious in its attempt to encompass all holidays known to North Americans (half of which involve presidents, apparently) in a single movie fit for all holidays, with each and every one of them getting their own Irving Berlin tune.

For my tastes, Berlin always was the least interesting big name songwriter of this sort of thing at his time, tending to be a bit too tame and conventional, frankly a wee bit boring, when compared to the Porters and Gershwins of the world. So it’ll come as no surprise that I don’t actually think much about most of his ditties here, with the obvious exceptions of “Easter Parade” and the unstoppable juggernaut of proper holiday sentimentality that is “White Christmas”. But to be fair to Berlin, and to pretend I’m not an insufferable snob when it comes to my favourites in the Great American Songbook, holiday songs aren’t easy.

The film knows on which side its bread is buttered, too, seeing as White Christmas is the only song used twice here. Otherwise this is a very typical musical comedy of its time, with Crosby crooning second rate Berlin holiday songs, Fred Astaire mostly – there are a couple of exceptions – coasting through comparatively uninventive choreography, getting by on charm and the fact that he’s Astaire (which works out nicely for him and for at least this viewer), Reynolds making no impression whatsoever, and the typically obvious jokes falling flat more often than not, though not in an unpleasant manner.


There are a couple of interesting elements here, like a rather meta ending that seems to belong to a much more inventive, and perhaps emotionally more involving, movie, or how a film that includes a, probably well-meant, blackface number (for Lincoln’s Birthday, no less) that’ll make 2010s and 2020s audiences cringe also treats its black characters (who are of course and alas a maid played by Louise Beavers and her children) with comparative dignity and humanity. Despite that and its status as at least a minor holiday classic, I simply don’t believe Holiday Inn’s a terribly great film. Thanks to Old Hollywood magic doing its work, it is, however, still a slick and watchable production, and at least we’ll always have “White Christmas”.

The Lake Vampire (2018)

Original title: El Vampiro del Lago

Venezuela. Ernesto Navarro (Sócrates Serrano) is earning his bread as a journalist, but because he’s written a pretty unpopular novel years ago (“It’s a cult novel”, he’ll tell everyone he meets, if they want to know or not), he’s calling himself a “writer”. He has a mild case of being a manipulative prick, too, which turns out to be a useful character trait when he becomes fascinated with a series of murders. The perpetrator only leaves behind the heads of his victims, but forensic evidence suggests he is somehow draining them of blood before the beheadings. On one occasion, the killer also leaves behind the burnt remains of a copy of Ernesto’s book, signed no less, so it’s really no wonder that our protagonist turns from interested in the case as a source for a new book to slightly obsessed with it.

Turns out Ernesto can’t be too bad a journalist, after all, for he manages to acquire rather a lot of interesting information about the case in a very short time once he starts on actual research. Apparently, he learns, this is not at all the only serial murder case in Venezuelas’s recent past with this rather specific modus operandi; these things have been going on for decades, if not longer. Ernesto makes contact with a now retired policeman who investigated some of these cases. After some dithering Jeremias Morales (Miguel Ángel Landa), as he is called, begins telling Ernesto some extensive flashback tales, also including a flashback inside the flashback to things about an investigation in a very similar case in the early 20th Century. The killer may very well be an immortal vampire, involved in a pact with Satan and assisted by some kind of occult conspiracy.

Carl Zitelmann’s Venezuelan horror film – with a healthy dose of the mystery genre – The Lake Vampire is an interesting little film. Its flaws are clear and obvious. It is a very talky film, and not all of that talk seems strictly necessary for plot, character, mood or theme, but rather based on the director’s enjoyment of simply showing his very game cast – Landa’s effortless grumpy old-man charm is particularly lovely – interacting with one another. I’m also not terribly sure the flashback structure needed to be quite this extensive, for while all of it is certainly useful to a degree to establish how far back the cases of vampirism the film is about reach into the past of Venezuela, and do quite a bit to ground the tale in the country as a specific place with its specific history, too, there’s a bit too much repeated detail for my taste.

On the other hand, this is definitely for once a talky film with interesting dialogue that shows a sardonic edge befitting a tale of vampires, serial killers and the devil, eschewing pop culture witticisms for a perfectly fitting, more old-fashioned kind of refinement. I also found myself rather taken with the construction of the occult business here, the cleverly underplayed insanity actually feeling coherent and true to the characters involved instead of built for a shocking/idiotic twist for once.


Visually, the film sometimes struggles a bit with the period sequences, clearly not having enough of a budget for full-on recreation, but Zitelmann nails all of the film’s central scenes of horror, and does handle all of the extensive talking very well, too. There’s also quite a bit of something still relatively seldom seen in – especially supernatural - horror movies: effective scenes of horror by daylight, carried by the director’s eye for creepy landscape shots. Nature can be as claustrophobic as a locked room, after all.

In short: Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Having been filmed applying a lot of foot to a drug dealer’s head, veteran – the sort of veteran without any chance of promotion, really – cop Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and his somewhat younger partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), are suspended for six weeks (which seems to put the film into the realm of total fantasy, but hey). This does hit both of them financially quite hard, and Brett, with a wife suffering from MS and a daughter who seems to be a favourite object of bullying and assault in the predominantly black and poor neighbourhood the family live in, decides he is owed more than what he’s getting from life, so why not try and steal some drug money?

At the same time, the film also looks in on small time criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles), who has just come out of jail, with little prospect of taking care of his wheelchair-bound son or his own junkie mother who has started turning tricks to survive. The only way for Henry and his family to stay afloat will be a return to the criminal life.

Both of these plotlines will converge in a violent bank robbery and the following grab for the loot.

I’ve seen various reviews tut-tutting at S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete for being some kind of Conservative (which appears to be the word Americans use when they mean “fascist”) apologia for police violence, and if I had seen only the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, I might even have concurred. But Zahler’s – his actual political opinions don’t terribly matter here – too interesting a director to actually go this boring and unpleasant route. The film’s conscious parallel construction between the - very similar if you strip away some of the concessions of class and race - lives of Brett and Henry (even though it does spend more time on the former than the latter) in practice really rather reads like a subtle critique of the system and the forces that push people like these two into corners they can only fight their way out by becoming objectively worse men, leaving somewhat more naturally decent men bleeding out by the wayside.

Mainly, though, the film is interested in understanding its characters, the place they come from and the places they go to, using the pretty traditional genre tale it tells to explore characters rather than issues, and in the end, when it has to decide between making a point about issues or staying true to these characters, always comes down on the side of the latter.


Formally, this is a slow, long film, with scenes and shots that go on much longer than has ever been en vogue in movies (even in the 70s, when something akin to this sort of approach was rather more common). At first glance, this might suggest a bit of an inability to edit things down to something tighter and more functional, but it’s really another way the film focuses on its characters, exploring them slowly and methodically, putting the need to understand them far above any pressures of making them move. The way Zahler does it, it really works out brilliantly, too, trading in speed for precision, and outward drama for intimate understanding.

Music Monday: Millersdale Edition

Candy Corn (2019)

1980. A trio of young men in a peaceful US small town has a very dubious Halloween tradition: beating up or otherwise abusing the developmentally challenged Jacob (Nate Chaney). This time around, they even bring guests in form of a girlfriend (Madison Russ) who isn’t at all happy about any of this and grown-up town asshole Gus (Sky Elobar). Oh, they – or really, mostly the ringleader, the local sheriff’s son Mike (Jimothy Beckholt) – also manage to kill Jacob this time around.

But don’t you worry, Jacob has been more or less adopted by the fall carnival that’s in town, and its leader, one Dr. Death (Pancho Molar) – or Lester, if you want to be prosaic – has just the right ritual for the occasion, bringing Jacob back as an undead avenger. You can imagine what’s going to happen, even though Mike’s dad the Sheriff (Courtney Gains) isn’t half bad for small town police in a horror movie.

Halloween-themed low budget horror movies are a dime a dozen now; most of them never find their way onto my blog because getting down on dreadful semi-professional productions is neither fun nor interesting to do (unless I find a movie truly annoying, or think it owes me for my time). Josh Hasty’s Candy Corn (or rather Josh Hasty’s Candy Corn going by the title credits, but I won’t) is actually a pleasant surprise in this regard.

It’s not a perfect film, suffering from the usual problems of its budget bracket. You probably know the drill: some of the actors in minor roles are less than ideal, there’s a bit of shooting around locations and crowds the film can’t afford to actually show all that much, the editing’s slightly off in some transitions – though acting and editing are otherwise at least fine, often better.

However, these are not problems that kill a film, at least not in my book, and Candy Corn does much more right than it does wrong in a lot of other respects. While there are quite a few nods to the genre traditions you’d expect a film like this to nod towards (starting with the title font looking right out of John Carpenter’s original Halloween), it is not the gore fest with no interest in its characters you’d imagine, but seems most interested in the impact of the deaths on the characters around them, spending quite a bit of time on the reaction of these small town cops who don’t usually even carry weapons to the murders, as well as showing many a scene of characters stunned by the aftermath of undead Jacob’s violence. Which actually does something rather interesting, turning this from a tale about a vengeance from the grave an audience can be emotionally satisfied by into one that’s more disquieting, a tale where everyone loses.


This interest in doing actual character work can also be seen in the way the film treats Dr. Death – in a fine performance by Moler - and his relationship to the other carnies (Tony Todd guest-stars as one, because he has been cursed by some eldritch abomination to be in every horror movie), portraying a guy who has been twisted by past bad experiences, and probably truly believes he’s doing the right thing, but also uses this emotional baggage to employ control over his peers. It’s all rather complex for what could be a very straightforward little slasher movie, and for my tastes, this added complexity makes up for the aforementioned flaws quite well.

Three Films Make A Post: Putting the Normal in Paranormal

Extra Ordinary (2019): This lovely little Irish horror comedy by Mike Ahern and Edna Loughman does something very few horror comedies try and even fewer succeed at by actually being a romantic horror comedy. It also manages the difficult task to find a spot from where to poke gently fun at its sad and lonely medium turned driving instructor heroine Rose Dooley (Maeve Higgins) without ever turning nasty towards her or her romantic interest, one Martin Martin (Barry Ward). The other great joy here lies in the filmmakers’ wonderful touch for very specific absurd details, so the evil Satanist of the film is a Christian hippie-ish pop one hit wonder turned occult villain and mediums turn to driving instruction after a tragic death.

The film also gets quite some mileage out of old horror comedy chestnuts like the whole virginity business – it turns out real quickies can be a boon when a movie comes to its, ahem, climax – never afraid of going the low humour route, but certainly knowing when to get high in its humour too.

Dark Light (2019): At its beginning, Padraig Reynolds’s horror film about the monster troubles one woman (Jessica Madsen) encounters when she and her little daughter return to the old empty family home following a divorce, feels promising enough, establishing the basics of its plot well enough, and feeling pretty moody even if it is looking a bit cheap. Alas, the visual promise is pretty quickly sabotaged by a script that never bothers to think anything through, full of people whose actions make no frigging sense.

Or can anyone tell my why a disappeared child doesn’t result in a major attempt at finding it even if the local Sheriff thinks the mother killed her and buried her “somewhere very special”, despite there not having been any time for any clever body hiding since someone last saw the kid alive? These things – and this us just one of many examples in the film, don’t even get me started on its terrible portrayal of mental illness even though that’s one of its central plot devices – simply come over as lazy to a viewer, undermining any trust that the thing actually knows where it is going and if that direction is worthwhile. Turns out it doesn’t and it isn’t, by the way.

The Banker (1989): In comparison, William Webb’s movie about  rich banker Spaulding Osbourne (Duncan Regehr) murdering prostitutes with a crossbow because he believes he is possessed by some kind of South American God facing up against a cop named Dan (Robert Forster) is downright clever. At least, it hates the rich, which is honestly a step up from Dark Light.


The slashing and the stalking as well as the more typical action movie business are decently realized (you know when it was shot, and you pretty much know how it’ll look), Regehr chews the scenery appropriately, and Robert Forster does his unkempt Robert Forster thing. He also isn’t exactly playing your typical cop on the edge; in fact, even though Dan is a bit of a slop, he seems downright nice and polite in moments where your typical example of the trope would already go berserk, which is a pleasant change from the expected to encounter in a pretty minor film.

Past Misdeeds: The Killings at Outpost Zeta (1980)

It’s a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Planet Zeta is supposed to become an important stepping stone for further interplanetary explorations for an entity called “Star Fleet” that surely has nothing at all to do with a different organisation called “Starfleet”. Alas, contact with the first preparatory mission on Zeta breaks off after a while, with no hints at what might have happened to the new, small outpost made out of cardboard and spit. The first rescue mission disappears without a trace too, as does the second one, and for mysterious reasons, keeping regular contact with one’s rescue missions that might suggest what happens to them seems not to be Star Fleet’s modus operandi, which gets particularly interesting once the audience can experience how slow this film’s particular menace actually operates.

Because three is the magic number, Star Fleet - in form of a very concerned looking gentleman with a liking for coffee that suggests him for a guest spot in the coming revival of Twin Peaks – decides to send out a third rescue mission, this time the sort of special suicide mission whose elite volunteer team members get extra insurance and have to make their testaments before going out. Must be very reassuring.

Once our heroes – character names and such seem rather irrelevant here, but of course there’s a female rookie who will do a lot of screeching and panicking as well as a paranoid security man who will fail very hard, as well as a Hero – arrive at Outpost Zeta, they soon discover the sucked out corpses of most of their predecessors and of the initial base team. Would you believe aliens (and a humungous amount of human stupidity) are involved in the affair? Our heroes might investigate, but it’s nappy time first.

Some of my readers do perhaps have vague recollections of The Killings at Outpost Zeta’s directors, producers, etc. Robert “Bob” Emenegger and Allan Sandler as part of the fascinating mixture of bullshit, paranoia and authentic folkloric weirdness that is US UFO culture (have a semi-random link), and that has given me much joy over the years. However, apart from Fortean documentaries and such, the partners also cranked out about ten ultra cheap SF movies for the TV and/or early home video circuit during 1980 and 1981. These movies shared parts of their casts, their sets, and their props, with no set too barren and no prop too ridiculous looking to reuse, an approach to movie making Roger Corman and I approve of.

Not surprisingly, the futures of Outpost Zeta and its brethren are highly influenced by other low budget films, Star Trek and pulp SF, describing a time when all rooms will have a somewhat cardboard-like look to them, people will dress in the most peculiar uniforms, and a laser gun (a prop that’s used in all the Emenegger/Sandler films I’ve seen, because it is just that incredible) will be a red plastic tube with a glued on handle that begs the question why the producers didn’t just buy some toy guns for more believable looking weapons. Not cheap enough, I suppose. In other words, Outpost Zeta is a visual brother to things like the much beloved (by me) science fiction films of Alfonso Brescia (with whom they also share the recycling approach to material), though in the plot and idea department, Outpost Zeta never reaches the heights of lunacy – or lunatic metaphor - Brescia aimed for, instead arriving at more sane levels of cardboard pulp Sci Fi. Formally, on the other hand…

If cheap sets, ridiculous costumes, and horrible to mediocre acting aren’t things to dissuade one from a film, one might find a lot to love about The Killings at Outpost Zeta, and not just the sheer power of its cheap sets, ridiculous costumes and horrible to mediocre acting. Emenegger’s and Sandler’s direction, for example, is a thing to behold, full of fisheye lenses, curious camera angles, alien-eye view shots that combine into a kind of garage-made psychedelia. This slightly fevered mood is even strengthened by performances that often seem to grasp wildly – and randomly – at pathos, or psychological turmoil, or DRAMA, and a wonderful/horrible, definitely wonderfully strange synth soundtrack by Emenegger himself. In space, it seems, things are very different.

While the form of Outpost Zeta suggests the 70s in its home made tendency to mild trippiness, its content would have found a place among the films of US horror/SF cinema of the 50s without a problem, having not a single idea that wouldn’t have fit in these simpler times.
Surprisingly enough, the film’s monsters even make sense. At least they are coherent in a pulp SF sort of way instead of developing random powers whenever the plot needs them. The script as a whole is unexpectedly well-paced, containing a lot of somewhat loopy ideas it still brings together coherently in so far as it does take care to establish the rules of its universe and then stick to them, developing the action – as far as it can afford anything that can be called action at all without having to show its monsters too often – logically from there. This makes for a pleasant sort of old-fashioned SF monster movie that just happens to be delivered in a delightfully strange form.


That is of course exactly how I like my low budget SF films, and consequently, I had a lot of fun with The Killings at Outpost Zeta. This surely won’t be the last time I’ll spent with an Emenegger/Sandler production.

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

Lately, fashion photographer with aspirations towards art Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway), has been running on fumes. It’s no wonder, since her latest and controversial period of work – consisting of tacky and slick “tasteful” sex and violence photos that were in reality shot by the inexplicably respected Helmut Newton – is inspired by visions and nightmares, in which, as she will soon enough learn, sees actual crimes she then feels drawn to restage in her photos. Now, things are getting worse for her when she starts to witness murders apparently live through the Vaseline-smeared eyes of a killer; most of these victims will belong to her associates and hangers-on.

Even before she goes and tells the cops of her visions, the relation to her earlier photos and actual crimes scenes has drawn the interest of one Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones). Neville is understandably sceptical of Laura’s tales of telepathy, as well as of her art, but he is also clearly smitten by her. Plus, given the identity of the new batch of victims, it stands to reason the killer is someone from her entourage too. And really, there are some good candidates there, like her irascible manager/assistant Donald (René Auberjonois), her driver Tommy (Brad Dourif) with his criminal record, and her sleazy parasite of an ex-husband (Raúl Juliá).

Today, Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars is mostly, if at all, mentioned as a footnote in the career of John Carpenter, who wrote the original treatment and script, and then got his first taste of the Hollywood rewriting machine, leaving him typically disgruntled. Given most of Carpenter’s work, I don’t think he’s responsible for the badly dragging middle part of the film that tries to distract the audience from the near total absence of any actual plot development by adding a few more murders.

The film’s not all dragging middle, though, and the first and last act both seem to put this plainly into the realm of American thrillers trying to adopt elements of the giallo. The setting at the borders between fashion industry and art world and the instant glamour this theoretically provides – in practice Mars’s work is ass-ugly – is very typical, as is the film’s focus on visual aesthetics as a way to clue an audience in on characters and theme through mood instead of narrative motion, an approach the more mainstream areas of US genre cinema are often not terribly comfortable with. There are certainly some good moments in this regard in the film - particularly the repeated use of mirror motifs is very effective not just visually but also thematically in its blurring of the line between the seen and the seeing. It also repeatedly suggests the very specific mental illness the killer will turn out to suffer from without clueing this so hard as to be too obvious. Still, the film is never quite consistent in this approach, wavering between Italian stylization and late 70s US grubbiness in rather unproductive ways.

The fine cast are also doing their best to play through and around the often very bland dialogue (the romance scenes between Dunaway and Jones, though for once actually necessary for the narrative to work, are a particularly egregious example), and sinking their teeth into the film’s grittier moments.


Eyes of Laura Mars simply doesn’t come quite together as a movie, not ending up as any real disappointment but promising more than it can actually deliver.

Torture Garden (1967)

After visiting his torture-based mobile cabinet of wax that’s apparently part of a fairground sideshow, the proprietor, one Dr Diabolo (Burgess Meredith), invites five of his customers (Michael Bryant, Beverly Adams, Barbara Ewing, Jack Palance and Michael Ripper, who confusingly enough does not seem to play an innkeeper) to a very special show. There, he presents warnings of possible futures where they do evil by getting them to stare at the shears of a figure of Atropos. Since this is an Amicus anthology movie, every vision makes one segment of the movie.

First up is “Enoch”, in which something that presents as a cat develops a rather unholy influence on a young would-be playboy who basically murdered his uncle.

Then follows “Terror Over Hollywood”, in which we learn the rather boring secret that keeps certain Hollywood stars seemingly immortal. No, it’s not cosmetic surgery or the injection of snake toxins, silly!

Next up is “Mr. Steinway”, concerning that most classic of love triangle between Man, Woman and Grand Piano.

We finish up on “The Man Who Collected Poe”, where the greatest of all Poe collectors (Peter Cushing) meets a rather too enthusiastic sharer (Jack Palance) in his interest.

Poor Michael Ripper doesn’t actually get his own segment but is used to close the framing story. You’ll never guess who Dr Diabolo actually is (if you are very, very slow)!

As friends of weird fiction and literary horror will probably have noticed (if you didn’t simply know already), the segments of this film directed by the great Freddie Francis are all based on stories by the equally great Robert Bloch (who did so much more than just write the novel Hitchock’s Psycho is based on). In fact, this is one of the three Amicus anthology films scripted by Bloch himself. So it’s no surprise it is full of the man’s interest in classic supernatural authors as well as (usually aberrant) psychology, with a healthy dose of the macabre added for good measure.

Quality-wise, this isn’t my favourite of the Bloch/Amicus bunch (that would obviously be Asylum), but it does have quite a bit to recommend it. Well, “Terror Over Hollywood” is just bland, taking way too much time to come to a not terribly interesting or shocking ending, but every anthology needs to have one single bad entry at least. “Enoch” provides Francis with some nice opportunities for creating a creepy, gothic-style mood; this is also one of the few films I know which feature an evil cat the filmmakers actually manage to make look rather sinister.

“Mr. Steinway” works best if you treat it as a work of black humour of the most sardonic type; its psychological basis is a bit too obvious and so outdated it weakens the whole thing considerably if you take it too seriously. On the other hand, a pianist having an unhealthy connection to his supernaturally endowed instrument certainly isn’t without resonance.

The last one’s the greatest treasure here, though, and “The Man Who Collected Poe” doesn’t just have an excellent joke in its title, but also features a particularly huge dose of Francis’s patented gothic mood – this time aiming for a heated version of the same very fitting to the tale’s Poe theme – and a great outing by Jack Palance. Seeing Palance orgasmically (I’m not even sure that’s a metaphor) rubbing himself against all sorts of Poe paraphernalia is quite the thing, as grotesquely funny as it is creepy. Even better is the script’s emphasis on his obsession with Poe and all thing weird being so great, he’d be perfectly willing to die for it, if it only provides him with a kind of total communion with his love.


This final segment alone, in combination with Meredith’s most excellent mugging as the Devil (spoiler?), would be worth the entry, but the rest of the film, “Hollywood” excepted, really isn’t bad at all either to watch on a rainy night.

In short: Rambo: Last Blood (2019)

Elderly mass murderer John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), suffering from his usual bouts of PTSD and mumbling about the darkness inside of him, has retired to a horse ranch in Arizona. He has somehow managed to acquire a little replacement family in form of Maria Beltran (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). Gabrielle’s mother having died years ago, and her father having disappeared from her life, Rambo has taken on a bit of father role and the official title of “Uncle John”.

He’s also dug an extensive tunnel system below the ranch, just in case he’s ever gonna need it for the action-packed climax of a movie. Let’s just call them Chekhov’s Tunnels.

Secretly, with the help of a rather dubious friend who lives in Mexico, Gabrielle has been searching for the whereabouts of her father. Eventually, she finds his contact address and runs off to visit him. He turns out to be a total prick, but at least, unlike her friend, he isn’t selling her to the Cartels as future drug-addicted prostitute.

As soon as Rambo realizes what has happened, he goes after Gabrielle, but he’s only able to bring her back home dead. He’s no Liam Neeson, apparently. The inevitable revenge killing spree ensues.

Adrian Grünberg’s supposedly final (I believe that when Stallone dies without making another one) entry into the Rambo franchise sits in a rather awkward place, at once trying to be very serious movie doing very serious character stuff and the kind of film that ends in a bit of gory violence, and not surprisingly ending up not succeeding at either one of it. I much prefer John Rambo, which simple wanted to be a brutal little action movie with a guy who looks like a weather-beaten rock formation in the title role, and succeeded at that supposedly simpler goal.

This rather more ambitious film can’t even pace itself right, taking over an hour to do not much more than introduce a handful of characters and get a seventeen year old girl killed, seemingly convinced of the profundity of its character work even though it doesn’t actually do more than other action films manage in an economical fifteen minutes. I’m also not at all happy about the decision to turn the film into a revenge tale in the end, where showing Rambo protecting actual living people would suggest at least some character development beyond the “woe is me! the darkness!” business the film finds so inexplicably interesting. That would also turn the film into something slightly different from the tale of a guy who does the same bloody crap again and again, as well as provide the climax with stakes somewhat higher than the question if Rambo will survive and kill everyone or kill everyone and survive. All of this, of course, wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the film had committed itself to be a blunt action movie – but once you go the road towards a supposed exploration of character, you then need to actually deliver it.


The action movie bits – taking up about fifteen to twenty minutes or so of the running time – are decent enough, rather gory, but presented with bland professionalism that hinders them from becoming exciting. The lack of interesting villains doesn’t help here, either, but then, this version of Rambo isn’t a particularly interesting hero either.

Music Monday: Godly Edition

Ready or Not (2019)

Grace (Samara Weaving) certainly didn’t expect that marrying into the rich (through board games!), rude and rather eccentric family of Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien) would end up with her spending her wedding night quite the way it’s turning out. There’s a family ritual involved everyone marrying into the family must go through, you see, so whosoever becomes part of the family has to draw a card containing the name of a game from a box. That box has been handed down through the generations and comes with a nice little story of what sounds decidedly like a family deal with the devil. Poor Grace, or lucky Grace, depending on one’s point of view, alas, draws the somewhat problematic card of “Hide and Seek”.

Nobody tells her what the special family variant of this single deadly game in the deck entails, and soon, her new family is hunting Grace through the house trying to hobble her with weapons and catch her so they can sacrifice her to Satan. Neither Alex nor his black sheep brother Daniel (Adam Brody) are quite in with this particular program, but family is difficult, and rich boys tend to lack backbone. Man, but the rich are different.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not is a pretty great example of what focussed direction, a game cast, and wonderful timing can make out of a very simple basic idea. One could hold it against the horror comedy that its social criticism isn’t terribly complicated and just a bit obvious – a problem it shares with most “the x are terrible” films - but the film does put visible effort not in the basic situation but into why in the hell anyone would take part in this thing – apart from as it will turn out very well justified fear for one’s own life – and so those family members that aren’t total caricatures make actual sense as people doing absurd and violent things for believably shitty people reasons. Which I believe to be quite an achievement to get into a film that is basically one long sequence of chases through a couple of rooms and corridors and a patch of woods with captures and reversals of fortune. It’s fascinating how small the scale of the film actually is when one thinks about it; yet the actual movie never feels small or constrained, but focussed and doing exactly what it sets out to do in the best way possible.

This is also one of the rare horror comedies to always manage to find the right split between the jokes and the suspense, often intermingling both brilliantly. There’s nary a moment where the humour stands in the way of the suspense or vice versa, leaving us with a film that is as exciting as it is funny.

In large part, this is the achievement of the lean and minimal yet very clever script and of a director duo who really make the most of the opportunities that come with this sort of thing. However, there’s also a great cast who can shift between the coarser and subtler moments of the writing with ease, adding dimension without showboating. Samara Weaving is obviously great, throwing herself into every single scene with the kind of controlled abandon that makes a great horror actress, while shifting from dry quipping to actual human emotion and back again with natural ease, but the supporting cast hits every note as wonderfully. Why, even Andie McDowell does not seem to have been made out of wood for once.


In addition to all that, Ready or Not looks rather fantastic too, making as much of wood-panelled walls and soft light as any horror film I can remember. It’s a joy to watch from start to finish, even avoiding the lame twist ending that some horror filmmakers now seem to think is mandated by law in the genre, simply wrapping up its plot in a fitting manner.

Three Films Make A Post: The Price Is Blood

Climax (2018): Leave it to very French director Gaspar Noé to make a film about a group of dancers getting dosed with LSD and going on a shared trip of dance, sex, violence and death that can feel excessive and abstract at the same time, breaking taboos without getting smug about it. Stylistically, it goes through the sort of intensities of colour, movement and behaviour a viewer will by now expect of the director – an audience not okay with strobe lights and a lot of shrieking need not apply – yet the film never feels to be the wrong kind of self-indulgent, Noé always getting to a point eventually even if his films seem to be meandering. Style in this director’s case is still an important part of the substance of his movies.

Under the Silver Lake (2018): This, the film writer/director David Robert Mitchell made after the brilliant It Follows, on the other hand is very self-indulgent indeed. It’s yet another one of those LA movies apparently made explicitly so that filmmakers existing in their LA bubble can wink and smile smugly at the other inhabitants of said bubble watching, full of in-jokes only the LA-obsessed will tolerate and apparently vacant of any wish to communicate with the rest of the world. Add to this general air of group masturbation a pie made out of badly digested Pynchon and Lynch, and you have a film I want to punch in the face rather badly, even though I’ve only got a tiny non-punching guy’s fist available, and am not into punching on general principle anyway.

There’s certainly a lot of technically excellent filmmaking on display here, but I’ll wait for that to be applied to something other than a bloated, 140 minute in-joke, thank you very much. Though, given how different this one is from Mitchell’s other two features, and those from one another, I might not have too long to wait; at least, one can’t blame the man for simply repeating himself.

Breaking Away (1979): Rather better at using an actual place – in this case the somewhat unglamorous and therefor infinite more interesting Bloomington, Indiana – to actually speak about something of interest to people not living there is this coming-of-age comedy by Peter Yates (also a man of very different films). It treats the feelings of young working class men of not belonging into the world of their parents but also being blocked from participating in the world the people born rich or richer seem to enjoy so much with delicacy, dignity, and a sense of whimsy, not going the poverty porn route of painting everyone and everything in the bleakest possible way yet also not looking away from shit.


Yates’s treatment of the material is so clear-eyed and even-handed, he even sells a climactic cycling event as meaningful and exciting to a guy like me who could care less about people riding bikes in circles (even though it’s a nice metaphor for the human condition). There’s also brilliant, idiosyncratic use of classical music in a context where most movies would go for Springsteen or would-be Springsteen, and great performances by Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, a tiny Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley.