The original One Missed Call was a Takashi Miike movie, though it didn't feel like it for most of the film. It was made in 2003 though, so J-Horror had already become the in thing. Sure enough, it only took two years for a sequel to come along, with another year before the third. All three were directed by different people, which is never a good sign. Then there was a 2005 TV series based on the trilogy and a manga too. The US remake came out in 2008.
We start out with some basic ghost stuff, focused around Miss Kyoko Okudera, a daycare worker, who is talked into ditching her usual study session by her friend and co-worker in favour of going out for a meal at the restaurant her boyfriend Naoto works at. However this plunges her right into the middle of the cellphone chain of death. The owner, Mr Wang, receives a weird phone call from his daughter, which is even more weird given that it's his daughter's phone that he answers. Sure enough, it's a call from the future with an exact foretelling of his imminent demise, and sure enough the ringtone of death spreads among the circle of friends.
Quickly on the scene to investigate are a cop and a journalist who can't fail to see the parallels to the string of 'murders' in the first film, even if the ringtone of death hadn't made it totally obvious. They were centered around a young girl called Mimiko, a creepy little dead girl who was born the product of rape; and the journalist, Takako Nozoe, discovers a link to Taiwan through Mimiko's grandfather who moved there after being released from jail where he served time for killing the lunatic intruder who raped his daughter. By this time the circle of friends is diecreasing Madoka is dead and Kyoko would appear to have only a few days to live.
This is not exactly the greatest sequel in the world; in fact it's pretty poor even as horror sequels go. There are some agreeably freaky scenes, like the one with the briefcase under the bed, but generally the scare factor is down on the usual J-Horror movie. There's also a surprisingly low body count. The gimmick isn't new at all, of course, and the differences aren't enough to matter. Urban legends continually come out of nowhere because they have to, right? Really there's nothing new here at all and what's worse, there's no real attempt to make it all anything less than clumsy. Mimura, the actress who plays Kyoko doesn't get to do a heck of a lot either, though she does buck up about halfway through when she decides to go to Taiwan to find out what's really going on. Naturally she was picked for a reason.
This doesn't make it entirely unwatchable though, even though it keeps veering off in a new directions every five minutes and all these revelations mean that what seems like the whole film is told in explanation dialogue. There's no suspense here, just a vague interest in seeing where director Renpei Tsukamoto (no relation to Shinya that I can tell) takes it. Mostly I think I made it through only because Takako Nozoe is played by Yu Yoshizawa, who is something like the epitome of the professional modern Japanese woman, and I could sit through three hours of Yu Yoshizawa doing nothing but look at the camera. in comparison an hour and a half of her trying to find out just what the heck the film she's in is all about seems like child's play.
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
Clay Pigeons (1998)
Joaquin Phoenix has played a lot of characters who found themselves in a lot of awkward situations, but this one may just take the biscuit. He's Clay Bidwell and as we start the film, he's a small town mechanic in rural Montana shooting bottles in the hills with his best friend, Earl. Life would seem to be pretty good but it only takes a few minutes for everything to turn to utter crap. Earl points a gun at him, threatens to kill him because he knows he's been sleeping with his wife Amanda, then shoots himself. What's more, he's carefully set it all up so that Clay takes the fall.
Now Clay's biggest mistake of all is to tell Amanda what happened. She's a real bitch and refuses to tell her part in the story, so Clay has to find a way out of it all on his own. Then she refuses to leave him alone, even though he wants nothing more to do with her. When he picks up someone else, Amanda turns up and shoots her dead. However, though he doesn't realise it, his biggest problem comes in the form of Lester Long, apparently just some guy he befriends in a bar to play pool and go fishing with, but who doesn't seem to ever go away. And wherever he does go really bad things happen.
This is a Scott Free production, which means that Tony Scott is a co-executive producer and Ridley Scott is a co-producer. I'm sure they lent the production some credence on a grand scale but I don't know if they had any real input on a day to day basis. The key names seem to be new ones. Matt Healy is the writer and he seems to have done precisely nothing else, which is surprising. The director is David Dobkin, who has: he went on to Shanghai Knights, Wedding Crashers and Fred Claus, the latter two of which feature Vince Vaughn, who plays Lester Long here, or the character that uses that pseudonym. He turns on the charm like Brad Pitt as a highly personable serial killer with a unique laugh.
The third name at the top of the credits belongs to Janeane Garofalo, who plays the FBI agent investigating the string of murders, and she's always highly watchable. She doesn't enter the film until halfway through, she doesn't get the sort of flashy scene that tends to go to characters like this. We don't get huge insight into her background or motivations, though there are hints. What we get most is what may just be the real thing: an intelligent woman with a dedication to and a talent for her job, but who doesn't necessarily get those lucky breaks that FBI agents get in the movies, or when she does they don't necessarily pan out the way you might expect. She's very believable indeed and the portrayal is refreshing.
The film itself is refreshing too, for a serial killer movie: it's very laid back and doesn't focus on the technical aspects, instead providing a framework for the actors to flesh out with their characterisation skills. There's no real impact from the crimes, but I don't think that was ever the point. It's the mood that resonates, similarly to something like Tremors. Part of that mood may come from the settings: I'm not used to watching serial killer movies and imagining myself living in such beautiful surroundings, but I felt that in Tremors and I felt it here too. Interesting stuff, though not really what I expected.
Now Clay's biggest mistake of all is to tell Amanda what happened. She's a real bitch and refuses to tell her part in the story, so Clay has to find a way out of it all on his own. Then she refuses to leave him alone, even though he wants nothing more to do with her. When he picks up someone else, Amanda turns up and shoots her dead. However, though he doesn't realise it, his biggest problem comes in the form of Lester Long, apparently just some guy he befriends in a bar to play pool and go fishing with, but who doesn't seem to ever go away. And wherever he does go really bad things happen.
This is a Scott Free production, which means that Tony Scott is a co-executive producer and Ridley Scott is a co-producer. I'm sure they lent the production some credence on a grand scale but I don't know if they had any real input on a day to day basis. The key names seem to be new ones. Matt Healy is the writer and he seems to have done precisely nothing else, which is surprising. The director is David Dobkin, who has: he went on to Shanghai Knights, Wedding Crashers and Fred Claus, the latter two of which feature Vince Vaughn, who plays Lester Long here, or the character that uses that pseudonym. He turns on the charm like Brad Pitt as a highly personable serial killer with a unique laugh.
The third name at the top of the credits belongs to Janeane Garofalo, who plays the FBI agent investigating the string of murders, and she's always highly watchable. She doesn't enter the film until halfway through, she doesn't get the sort of flashy scene that tends to go to characters like this. We don't get huge insight into her background or motivations, though there are hints. What we get most is what may just be the real thing: an intelligent woman with a dedication to and a talent for her job, but who doesn't necessarily get those lucky breaks that FBI agents get in the movies, or when she does they don't necessarily pan out the way you might expect. She's very believable indeed and the portrayal is refreshing.
The film itself is refreshing too, for a serial killer movie: it's very laid back and doesn't focus on the technical aspects, instead providing a framework for the actors to flesh out with their characterisation skills. There's no real impact from the crimes, but I don't think that was ever the point. It's the mood that resonates, similarly to something like Tremors. Part of that mood may come from the settings: I'm not used to watching serial killer movies and imagining myself living in such beautiful surroundings, but I felt that in Tremors and I felt it here too. Interesting stuff, though not really what I expected.
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
Buddy Boy (1999)
The Buddy Boy of the title is Francis and he's something of an introvert: certainly shy around girls. He works in some sort of photo lab but mostly spends his time at home caring for his invalid mother, who cannot walk, making models and apparently masturbating a lot. That isn't enough for confession though, as Francis's priest works under the logic that everyone should go to confession and have something to confess. In other words, the important thing is to rack up a list of bad things so that you can confess about them. Whether this is the key driver for subsequent actions, or whether they're just a happy accident, Francis notices a girl living on the other side of the street and becomes an avid voyeur.
This started out intriguingly (after all how many films dare to begin with the hero masturbating to porn mags?), but I got diverted into wondering about Susan Tyrrell. She plays Sal, Francis's wild and raucous mother, and she has what seem to be amputated legs, thus making her a stay at home invalid reliant on her son to move her around. The thing is that this is a 1999 film, released on 24th March 2000. From what I read, Susan Tyrrell contracted a rare blood disease called essential thrombocythemia in April 2000 that led to her having both legs amputated below the knee. I can't help wondering whether the dates I'm reading are wrong or whether she was already suffering and chose to soldier through. That certainly fits who she is: a character and a trooper.
Anyway, while she's always fascinating to watch and she's an inveterate scene stealer, she's not supposed to be the focus of our film. Francis is and to keep our eyes on him, writer/director Mark Hanlon keeps the camera on him for quite a while. We watch him watching the French girl over the street, then we watch him get thrown weirdly into what are presumably his fantasies. Walking home he intervenes in a mugging: his French girl is fighting off an attacker and he helps her out. She's Gloria and she invites him home for dinner. After a few successful attempts to reject even this semblance of closeness, he turns up and a few nights in they end up in bed together.
Now you'd think that this would be some kind of heaven to a grown up virgin voyeur but it brings its challenges. Beyond his obvious nervousness when talking to the opposite sex, so much so that he stutters, he's unable to quite stop watching her from across the way and he continues doing so long enough to see things that don't quite add up. There are all sorts of subtle nods to David Lynch throughout, not least the apparent discovery of a missing person in one of the photos he's processing at work, but strangest of all is that while Gloria professes to be a strict and passionate Vegan, Francis appears to discover through his voyeurism that she's really a cannibal in private.
I say 'appears' because this film doesn't take any easy ways out to tell us exactly what's happening, it drops hints and expects us to make our own judgement calls. The most obvious interpretation is that Francis is merely going insane, but even if we take that as given, it's still not quite that simple. What caused it? Is any of what he sees real? How much of what we've watched was only inside the head of the lead character? I juggled a lot of answers to those questions. I'm not sure quite how the Catholic imagery and commentary tie in, unless its loosely set up as the cause. There's a lot here about the nature of God and the impact of guilt. Even at the finale we're only given a fresh question.
Whatever it is, it's a powerful film let down only by some inconsistent sound, or so it seemed on the IFC screening I watched. Susan Tyrrell gives a tour de force performance, even for her: there's one scene in particular that will just amaze. Mark Boone Jr is excellent as the building supervisor that seems to move in. Emmanuelle Seigneur is subdued as Gloria but effective. Most notable for me though is Aidan Gillen, probably because I know full well how awesome an actress Tyrrell is so wasn't surprised to find her being awesome here. Gillen, however, was new to me and his performance is resonant in its quietness. He has manic scenes but most are subtle and quiet and stand out as such. Here he's like John Cusack would be if John Cusack was genetically engineered to be in a David Lynch movie.
What's most surprising is that Mark Hanlon, who wrote and directed as well as doing other work behind the scenes, hasn't done a lot else. Beyond this one notable film he has a credit as the writer of Ghost Ship and that's it. I wonder why. I wonder if he's going to crop up at a festival sometime in the near future with a masterpiece that he's spent a decade perfecting. I'd like to know that someone with such obvious talent doesn't have more to his name.
This started out intriguingly (after all how many films dare to begin with the hero masturbating to porn mags?), but I got diverted into wondering about Susan Tyrrell. She plays Sal, Francis's wild and raucous mother, and she has what seem to be amputated legs, thus making her a stay at home invalid reliant on her son to move her around. The thing is that this is a 1999 film, released on 24th March 2000. From what I read, Susan Tyrrell contracted a rare blood disease called essential thrombocythemia in April 2000 that led to her having both legs amputated below the knee. I can't help wondering whether the dates I'm reading are wrong or whether she was already suffering and chose to soldier through. That certainly fits who she is: a character and a trooper.
Anyway, while she's always fascinating to watch and she's an inveterate scene stealer, she's not supposed to be the focus of our film. Francis is and to keep our eyes on him, writer/director Mark Hanlon keeps the camera on him for quite a while. We watch him watching the French girl over the street, then we watch him get thrown weirdly into what are presumably his fantasies. Walking home he intervenes in a mugging: his French girl is fighting off an attacker and he helps her out. She's Gloria and she invites him home for dinner. After a few successful attempts to reject even this semblance of closeness, he turns up and a few nights in they end up in bed together.
Now you'd think that this would be some kind of heaven to a grown up virgin voyeur but it brings its challenges. Beyond his obvious nervousness when talking to the opposite sex, so much so that he stutters, he's unable to quite stop watching her from across the way and he continues doing so long enough to see things that don't quite add up. There are all sorts of subtle nods to David Lynch throughout, not least the apparent discovery of a missing person in one of the photos he's processing at work, but strangest of all is that while Gloria professes to be a strict and passionate Vegan, Francis appears to discover through his voyeurism that she's really a cannibal in private.
I say 'appears' because this film doesn't take any easy ways out to tell us exactly what's happening, it drops hints and expects us to make our own judgement calls. The most obvious interpretation is that Francis is merely going insane, but even if we take that as given, it's still not quite that simple. What caused it? Is any of what he sees real? How much of what we've watched was only inside the head of the lead character? I juggled a lot of answers to those questions. I'm not sure quite how the Catholic imagery and commentary tie in, unless its loosely set up as the cause. There's a lot here about the nature of God and the impact of guilt. Even at the finale we're only given a fresh question.
Whatever it is, it's a powerful film let down only by some inconsistent sound, or so it seemed on the IFC screening I watched. Susan Tyrrell gives a tour de force performance, even for her: there's one scene in particular that will just amaze. Mark Boone Jr is excellent as the building supervisor that seems to move in. Emmanuelle Seigneur is subdued as Gloria but effective. Most notable for me though is Aidan Gillen, probably because I know full well how awesome an actress Tyrrell is so wasn't surprised to find her being awesome here. Gillen, however, was new to me and his performance is resonant in its quietness. He has manic scenes but most are subtle and quiet and stand out as such. Here he's like John Cusack would be if John Cusack was genetically engineered to be in a David Lynch movie.
What's most surprising is that Mark Hanlon, who wrote and directed as well as doing other work behind the scenes, hasn't done a lot else. Beyond this one notable film he has a credit as the writer of Ghost Ship and that's it. I wonder why. I wonder if he's going to crop up at a festival sometime in the near future with a masterpiece that he's spent a decade perfecting. I'd like to know that someone with such obvious talent doesn't have more to his name.
Sunday, 28 December 2008
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006)
Jack Smith is precisely the sort of person I want to see a documentary about. He's an underground filmmaker, apparently a pivotal figure, massively influential and cited by people I know about, but he's so underground that I haven't even heard of him. Usually such people are so far underground because they did precisely what they wanted to do, without any nods to compromise or commercial success. Nowadays the internet is a gift for people like this, but if they worked their particular brand of magic before the internet came along, they're usually forgotten names except to small groups of the faithful.
All this makes Jack Smith a complete discovery to me and Mary Jordan's documentary makes him one fascinating enough to follow up on. Of course because I know nothing whatsoever about him I have no way of knowing whether it's accurate or not, but it was fascinating enough that I want to find that out for myself. I discovered something else too. The imagery in Smith's early photos and film clips reminded me very much of the exotica of the twenties and thirties, all eastern mystics and Rudolph Valentino and Universal horror, with a healthy dose of Robert E Howard pulp fantasy. However there's another important name who comprises the link in the chain between them and Smith and that's Maria Montez.
Montez was an exotic actress from the Dominican Republic who starred in a batch of eastern adventure movies in the forties, generally B movies for Universal like White Savage, Cobra Woman or Gypsy Wildcat. What else she became was a catalyst as she's really the icon from which all high camp culture spun. She's the missing link that when merged with performance art and gay culture, transvestite culture and fetish culture gives us everything from Pink Flamingos to the Rio de Janeiro carnival to Andy Warhol's Factory (Warhol was a collaborator and follower of Jack Smith and seems to have stolen his entire repertoire from him). And the point at which all this began seems to be when Jack Smith did what he did in the sixties, with photography and performance and film, and with the furore that sparked over his 1963 film Flaming Creatures, banned in 22 states and 4 countries.
The deliberate avoidance of commerciality, which became something of a manifesto for Smith, is one reason why his work is so obscure today, but it's only one. As this documentary progressed, the more I saw similarities with Derailroaded, Josh Rubin's documentary on Wild Man Fischer, in that like Fischer, Smith was really his own worst enemy. In his aim of attaining complete purity as an artist, in his obvious hatred of capitalism and in some sort of rebellion against the easy way ever being a good one, he seems to have deliberately sabotaged his own career. What's more he seems to have known he was doing it and chosen the reasons why. Flaming Creatures was his last completed film, because he deliberately chose to leave everything that followed unfinished, because 'they' can't ban something that isn't finished.
I don't know whether it was mental illness, personality quirks or just the logical extension of certain personal beliefs that led Smith down the roads that he took, but he certainly appeared aware and unapologetic of what he was doing. Though he died in 1989 he lives on today through whole genres that emerged through his challenging of cultural barriers and especially in a number of other people.
There's certainly a huge amount of Jack Smith in Crispin Glover, down to his vocal style and handwriting, let alone whole swathes of What Is It? He's obviously a major influence on the cinematic philosophies of Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Waters and David Lynch, thus making him in one sense the grandfather of the midnight movie. Had it been made a decade later, something like Flaming Creatures would have fallen into that category too. I can see his influence in Fellini's Satyricon and apparently it's even more apparent in Juliet of the Spirits. And that's just the film influences. I'm far less able to speak to his influences in music, photography and performing arts, but they're apparently as widespread and pervasive. Fascinating.
All this makes Jack Smith a complete discovery to me and Mary Jordan's documentary makes him one fascinating enough to follow up on. Of course because I know nothing whatsoever about him I have no way of knowing whether it's accurate or not, but it was fascinating enough that I want to find that out for myself. I discovered something else too. The imagery in Smith's early photos and film clips reminded me very much of the exotica of the twenties and thirties, all eastern mystics and Rudolph Valentino and Universal horror, with a healthy dose of Robert E Howard pulp fantasy. However there's another important name who comprises the link in the chain between them and Smith and that's Maria Montez.
Montez was an exotic actress from the Dominican Republic who starred in a batch of eastern adventure movies in the forties, generally B movies for Universal like White Savage, Cobra Woman or Gypsy Wildcat. What else she became was a catalyst as she's really the icon from which all high camp culture spun. She's the missing link that when merged with performance art and gay culture, transvestite culture and fetish culture gives us everything from Pink Flamingos to the Rio de Janeiro carnival to Andy Warhol's Factory (Warhol was a collaborator and follower of Jack Smith and seems to have stolen his entire repertoire from him). And the point at which all this began seems to be when Jack Smith did what he did in the sixties, with photography and performance and film, and with the furore that sparked over his 1963 film Flaming Creatures, banned in 22 states and 4 countries.
The deliberate avoidance of commerciality, which became something of a manifesto for Smith, is one reason why his work is so obscure today, but it's only one. As this documentary progressed, the more I saw similarities with Derailroaded, Josh Rubin's documentary on Wild Man Fischer, in that like Fischer, Smith was really his own worst enemy. In his aim of attaining complete purity as an artist, in his obvious hatred of capitalism and in some sort of rebellion against the easy way ever being a good one, he seems to have deliberately sabotaged his own career. What's more he seems to have known he was doing it and chosen the reasons why. Flaming Creatures was his last completed film, because he deliberately chose to leave everything that followed unfinished, because 'they' can't ban something that isn't finished.
I don't know whether it was mental illness, personality quirks or just the logical extension of certain personal beliefs that led Smith down the roads that he took, but he certainly appeared aware and unapologetic of what he was doing. Though he died in 1989 he lives on today through whole genres that emerged through his challenging of cultural barriers and especially in a number of other people.
There's certainly a huge amount of Jack Smith in Crispin Glover, down to his vocal style and handwriting, let alone whole swathes of What Is It? He's obviously a major influence on the cinematic philosophies of Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Waters and David Lynch, thus making him in one sense the grandfather of the midnight movie. Had it been made a decade later, something like Flaming Creatures would have fallen into that category too. I can see his influence in Fellini's Satyricon and apparently it's even more apparent in Juliet of the Spirits. And that's just the film influences. I'm far less able to speak to his influences in music, photography and performing arts, but they're apparently as widespread and pervasive. Fascinating.
Blood Freak (1972)
This 1972 film has been made available by Something Weird Video, which should suggest just how strange it really is. It's a safe bet that anything that they release that you have the remotest chance of seeing anywhere else is going to be very strange indeed and this is one is certainly pretty unique. Sure, it's a bad film in so many ways it's almost unreal, but it's pretty unique as bad films go. Ed Wood is the obvious comparison for a few reasons: partly because the ideas far outreach the talents of those involved, not to mention the budget, but also partly because of the quality but partly because of the narration. Periodically the film is interrupted to allow co-director Brad Grinter to read us some commentary off the papers on his desk. I'm so used to Plan 9 from Outer Space by now that I subconsciously translated his words into the intonations of Criswell. It would have been an improvement.
The other co-director is Steve Hawkes, who also plays the lead role of Herschell. In fact he's so important that the opening credits mention that he's the star both before and after all the other credits. He's a big guy who looks like a cross between Hugh Jackman and Alvin Stardust with a large quiff and what looks like a pretty nasty burn on his arms. We first see him heading down the Florida Turnpike on his bike, in footage that's as jerky as Cloverfield ever was. Obviously Hawkes and Grinter couldn't afford a steadicam and didn't have the talent to build one the way Peter Jackson did for Bad Taste.
Anyway, he helps out a young lady who's wearing a short skirt and having car trouble. She's Angel and she invites him home in thanks, but she's not the sort of character you'd think. This may be how porn films start but this is far from a porn film and Angel is far from the sort of character you'd find in one. She's a bible basher and so offers Herschell a place to stay out of the goodness of her heart. Unfortunately she's also offered a place to her sister Ann and seemingly no end of her friends, all of whom seem to be professional drug dealers. Herschell's a good guy too but I don't know how he could have made it this far given that all it takes to persuade him to smoke something is to call him a coward. So in no time flat, good guy Herschell is a drug addict boffing Ann.
He still has Angel to help him out though and joining her at some sort of impromptu bible study session lands him a job. He's hired by the owner of the Midway Turkey Farm and Hatchery, which means he gets one day of solid work throwing turkeys around and then he starts getting used as a guinea pig in supposedly routine human food experiments. Given that I'm sure you're wondering by now why the film is called Blood Freak, I should explain that one day of eating experimental turkey at the turkey farm turns him into one. He jiggles about for a while in a field like Elvis having an epileptic fit, then heads home to show Ann that he's mutated from Herschell into Herschell with a bizarre turkey mask over his head.
The logic of this story is such that Ann doesn't have a problem with him being a turkey. OK, she's known him for a whole two days at this point and she does initially faint in shock at the sight but it takes her a whole thirty seconds to progress to the point where she calmly wonders aloud about where their relationship will lead and what their future children are going to look like. After all she doesn't actually have to look at him. Yeah, the logic is quite astounding. You won't be too surprised to find that while she's dreaming about Herschell and being unwittingly traded for drugs, Herschell is out searching the town for people doing drugs, hanging them upside down, slitting their throats and drinking their drug altered blood.
There are other twists here This is an amazing film. No, that doesn't mean good in any way, shape or form, but it's certainly amazing. It's a film to watch and ask just what the filmmakers were thinking. They certainly had a point to make here and they had all sorts of ideas, both philosophical and cinematic, to expound. Yet the question remains: what were they thinking. Did they honestly think that the sort of filmgoers who would turn out to see Blood Freak would watch this and be persuaded to give up hard drugs or turn to Jesus?
That certainly appears to be the moral tone: if you're a good Christian you don't even really need to be in the film much, just turn up at the beginning and end of the film to be a catalyst for change. Meanwhile everyone else suffers through panic, depression, addiction, hallucination, death or strange mutation into weird turkey headed monsters killing to feed an unavoidable urge to drink the blood of drug addicts. The irony is that the narrator is throwing all this moral high ground at us while choking on a cigarette. The production obviously didn't have enough funds to take a second shot of that scene. So this could be an attempt to convert us all out of fear to the teachings of Jesus, or it could be a social comment on the American presence in Vietnam. Maybe it's just a straight anti-drug film. Whatever it is, it's amazing and the most amazing thing is that somebody would make it.
The other co-director is Steve Hawkes, who also plays the lead role of Herschell. In fact he's so important that the opening credits mention that he's the star both before and after all the other credits. He's a big guy who looks like a cross between Hugh Jackman and Alvin Stardust with a large quiff and what looks like a pretty nasty burn on his arms. We first see him heading down the Florida Turnpike on his bike, in footage that's as jerky as Cloverfield ever was. Obviously Hawkes and Grinter couldn't afford a steadicam and didn't have the talent to build one the way Peter Jackson did for Bad Taste.
Anyway, he helps out a young lady who's wearing a short skirt and having car trouble. She's Angel and she invites him home in thanks, but she's not the sort of character you'd think. This may be how porn films start but this is far from a porn film and Angel is far from the sort of character you'd find in one. She's a bible basher and so offers Herschell a place to stay out of the goodness of her heart. Unfortunately she's also offered a place to her sister Ann and seemingly no end of her friends, all of whom seem to be professional drug dealers. Herschell's a good guy too but I don't know how he could have made it this far given that all it takes to persuade him to smoke something is to call him a coward. So in no time flat, good guy Herschell is a drug addict boffing Ann.
He still has Angel to help him out though and joining her at some sort of impromptu bible study session lands him a job. He's hired by the owner of the Midway Turkey Farm and Hatchery, which means he gets one day of solid work throwing turkeys around and then he starts getting used as a guinea pig in supposedly routine human food experiments. Given that I'm sure you're wondering by now why the film is called Blood Freak, I should explain that one day of eating experimental turkey at the turkey farm turns him into one. He jiggles about for a while in a field like Elvis having an epileptic fit, then heads home to show Ann that he's mutated from Herschell into Herschell with a bizarre turkey mask over his head.
The logic of this story is such that Ann doesn't have a problem with him being a turkey. OK, she's known him for a whole two days at this point and she does initially faint in shock at the sight but it takes her a whole thirty seconds to progress to the point where she calmly wonders aloud about where their relationship will lead and what their future children are going to look like. After all she doesn't actually have to look at him. Yeah, the logic is quite astounding. You won't be too surprised to find that while she's dreaming about Herschell and being unwittingly traded for drugs, Herschell is out searching the town for people doing drugs, hanging them upside down, slitting their throats and drinking their drug altered blood.
There are other twists here This is an amazing film. No, that doesn't mean good in any way, shape or form, but it's certainly amazing. It's a film to watch and ask just what the filmmakers were thinking. They certainly had a point to make here and they had all sorts of ideas, both philosophical and cinematic, to expound. Yet the question remains: what were they thinking. Did they honestly think that the sort of filmgoers who would turn out to see Blood Freak would watch this and be persuaded to give up hard drugs or turn to Jesus?
That certainly appears to be the moral tone: if you're a good Christian you don't even really need to be in the film much, just turn up at the beginning and end of the film to be a catalyst for change. Meanwhile everyone else suffers through panic, depression, addiction, hallucination, death or strange mutation into weird turkey headed monsters killing to feed an unavoidable urge to drink the blood of drug addicts. The irony is that the narrator is throwing all this moral high ground at us while choking on a cigarette. The production obviously didn't have enough funds to take a second shot of that scene. So this could be an attempt to convert us all out of fear to the teachings of Jesus, or it could be a social comment on the American presence in Vietnam. Maybe it's just a straight anti-drug film. Whatever it is, it's amazing and the most amazing thing is that somebody would make it.
Friday, 26 December 2008
Halloween (2007)
This one's been on my must see list for a while, though I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out. I've heard good things about it and I've heard bad things about it. Reading between the lines, it seemed that it was likely to be a pretty good film as long as you weren't expecting something like the original John Carpenter version from 1978. And it became pretty obvious from moment one that it wasn't going to be the same film and it wasn't going to have the same tone. This is definitely an update for a different generation.
For a start one of the freakiest things about the original Halloween was that we had no clue that the murderer at the beginning, Michael Myers, was a kid until he walks outside and his parents turn up. Here we get the whole background as to what may have driven him to do some of what he did. His mother seems to care but she's an exotic dancer whose new husband or boyfriend is a drunken abusive mess of a man. Life at home sucks but life at school isn't any better. He gets picked on, partly because he looks like a girl and partly because of who his family are.
So one day, which is Halloween, naturally, he flips out big time, killing more than just the topless babysitter. For a start he beats to death one of his bullies in the woods. Then he comes home, slitting the father figure's throat, beating the babysitter's boyfriend to death with a baseball bat and finally knifing the babysitter. It's all totally brutal, which fits the aim of a splat pack director like Rob Zombie. However while Zombie doesn't appear to care about the suspenseful tone of the original (the second half of this film is a rush through pretty much the whole of the original), he's obviously a huge fan of the material and chose to delve pretty deep into the psychology of it, along with the gore. After all, while Carpenter's version is undeniably a suspense classic, it really doesn't have a heck of a lot going on in it.
That original kicked in pretty quickly. Carpenter gave us the murder scene, then the escape scene and we're into the horror film we know and love. He doesn't mess around: scene one tells us Michael Myers is a dangerous psychopathic murderer, scene two tells us that he's back out in the public, then we have the rest of the film to get scared. Here we have background at home, background at school, background in Smith's Grove Sanitarium, background as we jump forward fifteen years, background even as Michael Myers escapes. How much of this background really makes any difference is really up for question but some of it is certainly interesting and some of it is certainly freaky. I liked Danny Trejo's character and how he played out.
And here's the chief reason to watch this version of Halloween: the people Rob Zombie got to play the roles. As a film it's actually pretty decent, obviously made with respect. While it's not Carpenter's Halloween by a long chalk, he has a good stab at it. But where Carpenter had Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence, Zombie has half the icons of horror cinema to play with and he has fun doing so. Even before he escapes from the sanitarium, Michael kills off not just Trejo but Sybil Danning too. On the way back to Haddonfield he takes out Ken Foree, from the original Dawn of the Dead. Not there any more is Dr Sam Loomis, a part owned by Donald Pleasance but done justice to here by Malcolm McDowell.
And once he's out, we meet plenty more names. Running the sanatarium are people like Udo Kier and Clint Howard. The Haddonfield sheriff is Brad Dourif, Chucky himself, though I know him from so much more than that role. The groundskeeper at the cemetery is Zombie regular, Sid Haig. The adoptive mother of Laurie, the baby sister that Michael goes back to Haddonfield to find, is Dee Wallace Stone, from Cujo. Even the gun store clerk is Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, of all people.
And of course none of these are the leads, McDowell the notable exception. Scout Taylor-Compton is a worthy successor to Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, though the pretty accurate cultural updates make me yearn for the 1970s. She's obviously pushing for a career as a remake scream queen because beyond this 2007 appearance, she also had a lead role in the 2008 remake of April Fool's Day and auditioned for the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th. As Zombie restructured the film, there's plenty of Michael Myers as a ten year old and a grown up. 6' 10" Tyler Mane, probably best known as Sabretooth from the X-Men films, is the adult Michael and he did some serious studying for the part. I really admired the quizzical turns of his head as he calmly studies the chaos he wreaks.
Most fascinating though is the young Michael: he's Daeg Faerch, who is an angelic girlish little kid, but who can turn on the evil with a glance. Loomis is able to talk about the eyes of Michael Myers so effectively because of what Faerch does in these early scenes. He's also a rather talented young man, or so it would seem. Still very much a child actor, he's already prolific, not just in major Hollywood films like this or Hancock, but in seriously deep things like Marat/Sade and Waiting for Godot on stage. Amazingly he's also a scriptwriter and director, from the age of eight, no less. Something tells me we're going to see a lot of this guy in the future.
For a start one of the freakiest things about the original Halloween was that we had no clue that the murderer at the beginning, Michael Myers, was a kid until he walks outside and his parents turn up. Here we get the whole background as to what may have driven him to do some of what he did. His mother seems to care but she's an exotic dancer whose new husband or boyfriend is a drunken abusive mess of a man. Life at home sucks but life at school isn't any better. He gets picked on, partly because he looks like a girl and partly because of who his family are.
So one day, which is Halloween, naturally, he flips out big time, killing more than just the topless babysitter. For a start he beats to death one of his bullies in the woods. Then he comes home, slitting the father figure's throat, beating the babysitter's boyfriend to death with a baseball bat and finally knifing the babysitter. It's all totally brutal, which fits the aim of a splat pack director like Rob Zombie. However while Zombie doesn't appear to care about the suspenseful tone of the original (the second half of this film is a rush through pretty much the whole of the original), he's obviously a huge fan of the material and chose to delve pretty deep into the psychology of it, along with the gore. After all, while Carpenter's version is undeniably a suspense classic, it really doesn't have a heck of a lot going on in it.
That original kicked in pretty quickly. Carpenter gave us the murder scene, then the escape scene and we're into the horror film we know and love. He doesn't mess around: scene one tells us Michael Myers is a dangerous psychopathic murderer, scene two tells us that he's back out in the public, then we have the rest of the film to get scared. Here we have background at home, background at school, background in Smith's Grove Sanitarium, background as we jump forward fifteen years, background even as Michael Myers escapes. How much of this background really makes any difference is really up for question but some of it is certainly interesting and some of it is certainly freaky. I liked Danny Trejo's character and how he played out.
And here's the chief reason to watch this version of Halloween: the people Rob Zombie got to play the roles. As a film it's actually pretty decent, obviously made with respect. While it's not Carpenter's Halloween by a long chalk, he has a good stab at it. But where Carpenter had Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence, Zombie has half the icons of horror cinema to play with and he has fun doing so. Even before he escapes from the sanitarium, Michael kills off not just Trejo but Sybil Danning too. On the way back to Haddonfield he takes out Ken Foree, from the original Dawn of the Dead. Not there any more is Dr Sam Loomis, a part owned by Donald Pleasance but done justice to here by Malcolm McDowell.
And once he's out, we meet plenty more names. Running the sanatarium are people like Udo Kier and Clint Howard. The Haddonfield sheriff is Brad Dourif, Chucky himself, though I know him from so much more than that role. The groundskeeper at the cemetery is Zombie regular, Sid Haig. The adoptive mother of Laurie, the baby sister that Michael goes back to Haddonfield to find, is Dee Wallace Stone, from Cujo. Even the gun store clerk is Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, of all people.
And of course none of these are the leads, McDowell the notable exception. Scout Taylor-Compton is a worthy successor to Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, though the pretty accurate cultural updates make me yearn for the 1970s. She's obviously pushing for a career as a remake scream queen because beyond this 2007 appearance, she also had a lead role in the 2008 remake of April Fool's Day and auditioned for the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th. As Zombie restructured the film, there's plenty of Michael Myers as a ten year old and a grown up. 6' 10" Tyler Mane, probably best known as Sabretooth from the X-Men films, is the adult Michael and he did some serious studying for the part. I really admired the quizzical turns of his head as he calmly studies the chaos he wreaks.
Most fascinating though is the young Michael: he's Daeg Faerch, who is an angelic girlish little kid, but who can turn on the evil with a glance. Loomis is able to talk about the eyes of Michael Myers so effectively because of what Faerch does in these early scenes. He's also a rather talented young man, or so it would seem. Still very much a child actor, he's already prolific, not just in major Hollywood films like this or Hancock, but in seriously deep things like Marat/Sade and Waiting for Godot on stage. Amazingly he's also a scriptwriter and director, from the age of eight, no less. Something tells me we're going to see a lot of this guy in the future.
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
Return from Witch Mountain (1978)
Escape to Witch Mountain was enough of a kit for Disney to come back for a sequel, and they had both the good sense to keep the same child actors as the first film and also bring in a couple of name stars to back them up. That means Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann as Tia and Tony, with no lesser names than Bette Davis and Christopher Lee as the villains of the piece, Letha Wedge and Victor Gammon. It doesn't take too long for them to tangle either because while these kids are aliens with superpowers, whose race is trying to hide from the rest of the world, they all suck at hiding anything.
They probably inherit that from Uncle Bene, played by a returning Denver Pyle, who drops the kids off in his flying saucer right on the 50 yard line of the Pasadena Rose Bowl, which has to be the single dumbest place anyone can pick if they're trying to hide from the rest of the world, even if it's off season. So Tia and Tony head off to experience the big city, but on a slight pause because the taxi runs out of gas they both end up in precisely the wrong company.
Tony 'sees' a man about to fall off a roof so goes to save him, not paying any attention to the villains of the piece who were standing in the otherwise deserted street trying to mind control him. Naturally the next step is to mind control Tony for nefarious ends. First up is an attempt to rob the museum of $3m in gold bars, in broad daylight, by wreaking bizarre chaos in front of all and sundry. Tia tries to come to the rescue but ends up in the middle of a suspiciously multiracial kiddie gang fight and wins the day for the Earthquake gang by levitating garbage cans up in the air and dropping on the heads of the opposing gang. So Rocky, Muscles, Dazzler and Crusher get to become her inept backup.
You can see part of the problem already, I'm sure. This is really dumb I mean really dumb. Tony and Tia don't do a bad job at all, especially given the material, but to even suggest the main stars are working more than a little beneath their level is a horrendous understatement. For someone of the calibre of Bette Davis to be reduced to spouting inane drivel like this is more than a mild insult. It doesn't help that she looks like a dwarf next to Christopher Lee. Now Lee has made a career habit of alternating great classics with utter garbage. This is far closer to the latter, and his role is as stereotypical a one dimensional megalomaniac as you've seen in a low budget Bond rip off. Bette Davis doesn't even get that much to play with.
And they're the big stars. There are others slumming it further down the cast list, like Anthony James, always a talented and sleazy henchman but just a moron here. On the other hand, the kids playing the Earthquake gang belong in something like this. The Earthquake gang are something like a Z-grade version of The Goonies. When it comes to a choice between Poindexter or the Feldmeister, there isn't even a contest. Don't get me started on a Jeffrey Jacquet against Jonathan Ke Quan battle. The best of the bunch is the little guy from The Apple Dumpling Gang and that doesn't say much.
There are so many holes in the story it's unreal but don't get me wrong, this may well be awesomely scary and suspenseful to an eight year old. I could imagine the chase scene especially being very effective to young audiences, and much of the rest of the film too. The catch is that anyone over the age of eight will think it's incredibly dumb and the older they are, the more dumb it will become. It's definitely one to watch young and keep fond memories of without ever actually watching it again.
They probably inherit that from Uncle Bene, played by a returning Denver Pyle, who drops the kids off in his flying saucer right on the 50 yard line of the Pasadena Rose Bowl, which has to be the single dumbest place anyone can pick if they're trying to hide from the rest of the world, even if it's off season. So Tia and Tony head off to experience the big city, but on a slight pause because the taxi runs out of gas they both end up in precisely the wrong company.
Tony 'sees' a man about to fall off a roof so goes to save him, not paying any attention to the villains of the piece who were standing in the otherwise deserted street trying to mind control him. Naturally the next step is to mind control Tony for nefarious ends. First up is an attempt to rob the museum of $3m in gold bars, in broad daylight, by wreaking bizarre chaos in front of all and sundry. Tia tries to come to the rescue but ends up in the middle of a suspiciously multiracial kiddie gang fight and wins the day for the Earthquake gang by levitating garbage cans up in the air and dropping on the heads of the opposing gang. So Rocky, Muscles, Dazzler and Crusher get to become her inept backup.
You can see part of the problem already, I'm sure. This is really dumb I mean really dumb. Tony and Tia don't do a bad job at all, especially given the material, but to even suggest the main stars are working more than a little beneath their level is a horrendous understatement. For someone of the calibre of Bette Davis to be reduced to spouting inane drivel like this is more than a mild insult. It doesn't help that she looks like a dwarf next to Christopher Lee. Now Lee has made a career habit of alternating great classics with utter garbage. This is far closer to the latter, and his role is as stereotypical a one dimensional megalomaniac as you've seen in a low budget Bond rip off. Bette Davis doesn't even get that much to play with.
And they're the big stars. There are others slumming it further down the cast list, like Anthony James, always a talented and sleazy henchman but just a moron here. On the other hand, the kids playing the Earthquake gang belong in something like this. The Earthquake gang are something like a Z-grade version of The Goonies. When it comes to a choice between Poindexter or the Feldmeister, there isn't even a contest. Don't get me started on a Jeffrey Jacquet against Jonathan Ke Quan battle. The best of the bunch is the little guy from The Apple Dumpling Gang and that doesn't say much.
There are so many holes in the story it's unreal but don't get me wrong, this may well be awesomely scary and suspenseful to an eight year old. I could imagine the chase scene especially being very effective to young audiences, and much of the rest of the film too. The catch is that anyone over the age of eight will think it's incredibly dumb and the older they are, the more dumb it will become. It's definitely one to watch young and keep fond memories of without ever actually watching it again.
Sunday, 21 December 2008
Adventure (1945)
It smacks of a little arrogance to call a film something as generic as Adventure. It can't help but suggest that it's the definitive adventure film of all time and with an implied boast like that it's doomed to failure. Sure enough, even with a decent cast it quickly falls apart at the seams and makes next to no sense whatsoever. The title also makes it harder to find given that any search for it brings up half the other films ever made too. As such it's my 60th Clark Gable, putting me three quarters of the way through his filmography.
Gable is Harry Patterson, a bo'sun in the Merchant Marines whose ship is promptly torpedoed not far out of Chile and not far into the movie. He's one of five sailors who survive on a makeshift raft and are rescued after five days, but by that time Harry's friend Mudgin has promised God everything under the sun: he won't drink, he won't play with girls, he won't pull a knife in a fight and he'll give his life's savings to the church. Of course back on land in San Francisco, he breaks all four of his promises on day one, though one was accidental, and so he witnesses his immortal soul leaving his body.
And so off goes Mudgin to find some sort of redemption, with Harry in tow to help him, and they end up in a library talking to Emily Sears. Mudgin is played by Thomas Mitchell, so is as sincere and heartfelt as you could imagine, but Harry and Emily are so much at loggerheads that you can almost see steam coming out of the ears when they're talking to each other. Gable didn't tend to play the most sophisticated characters but this one blisters into Emily's life like an uncouth tornado who not only can't whisper, he can't talk either: he spends the entire film barking out whatever he feels like and he doesn't hold back with his cynicism.
Emily hates everything he stands for, which may not have been much of a stretch for Greer Garson, who apparently didn't like Gable at all. So naturally it takes about a week for them to get married, even though Harry is chasing after her roommate Helen Melohn, played with no end of full on snorting, pouting and wide eyed gaping by Joan Blondell. No, this doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. I'm not sure how or why the filmmakers ever thought it did. Gable and Garson don't work well as a pair, though there are two pairs here that do: Gable and Blondell spark well off each other, though both are overacting shamelessly; and Garson and Mitchell have some great scenes together.
Unfortunately there's not a lot here at the end of the day. Mitchell steals the show, as he was wont to do, though there's decent support from the other sailors: Tom Tully, John Qualen and Richard Haydn. But with the quality of the cast, it really surprises how painful and embarrassing the film gets. There are odd points at which the story says something profound and the actors fall in line with it and it works. And then two minutes later it's all over and the rest of the film pales into comparison. It plays like a waste of a lot of powerful talent and it deserves to be hard to find amongst all the other films with Adventure in the title.
Gable is Harry Patterson, a bo'sun in the Merchant Marines whose ship is promptly torpedoed not far out of Chile and not far into the movie. He's one of five sailors who survive on a makeshift raft and are rescued after five days, but by that time Harry's friend Mudgin has promised God everything under the sun: he won't drink, he won't play with girls, he won't pull a knife in a fight and he'll give his life's savings to the church. Of course back on land in San Francisco, he breaks all four of his promises on day one, though one was accidental, and so he witnesses his immortal soul leaving his body.
And so off goes Mudgin to find some sort of redemption, with Harry in tow to help him, and they end up in a library talking to Emily Sears. Mudgin is played by Thomas Mitchell, so is as sincere and heartfelt as you could imagine, but Harry and Emily are so much at loggerheads that you can almost see steam coming out of the ears when they're talking to each other. Gable didn't tend to play the most sophisticated characters but this one blisters into Emily's life like an uncouth tornado who not only can't whisper, he can't talk either: he spends the entire film barking out whatever he feels like and he doesn't hold back with his cynicism.
Emily hates everything he stands for, which may not have been much of a stretch for Greer Garson, who apparently didn't like Gable at all. So naturally it takes about a week for them to get married, even though Harry is chasing after her roommate Helen Melohn, played with no end of full on snorting, pouting and wide eyed gaping by Joan Blondell. No, this doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. I'm not sure how or why the filmmakers ever thought it did. Gable and Garson don't work well as a pair, though there are two pairs here that do: Gable and Blondell spark well off each other, though both are overacting shamelessly; and Garson and Mitchell have some great scenes together.
Unfortunately there's not a lot here at the end of the day. Mitchell steals the show, as he was wont to do, though there's decent support from the other sailors: Tom Tully, John Qualen and Richard Haydn. But with the quality of the cast, it really surprises how painful and embarrassing the film gets. There are odd points at which the story says something profound and the actors fall in line with it and it works. And then two minutes later it's all over and the rest of the film pales into comparison. It plays like a waste of a lot of powerful talent and it deserves to be hard to find amongst all the other films with Adventure in the title.
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Reunion in France (1942)
This one looked so odd that I couldn't resist it: a Jules Dassin movie, made Stateside but set in France, starring Joan Crawford and with John Wayne in a supporting role. Here's why it sounds so ridiculous. Dassin was a major directorial name in the States with films like Night and the City, Brute Force and The Naked City, but he was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House on Un-American Activities about his past involvement with the Communists so he moved to France. There he made the films that made him famous, not least Rififi, the granddaddy of all heist movies. This one is a patriotic film, made in the country that kicked him out but set in the country that took him in.
Crawford makes sense as a lead actress in a Hollywood film but she's playing a spoiled and selfish brat of a woman. Given that Crawford could very easily be described as a spoiled and selfish brat of a woman, she would appear to be playing herself and it's impossible to see the character without seeing the actress. Wayne was almost never a supporting actor, so much so that he holds the record for the most leading roles in films at 142. There are apparently only 11 films that have him as a supporting actor and this may well be my first. So this becomes a telling film for Dassin and Crawford and a rare one for Wayne.
We're in Paris in 1940. It's the ninth of May and the war is 'too uneventful to be taken seriously and too far away to worry about'. The speech being broadcast on the radio tells the people that the Germans are stuck helpless behind the Maginot line and France is as safe as could be. So Michelle de la Becque ignores the war utterly with a haughty shake of her head and takes the train to Biarritz. Her fiance, Robert Cortot, is on the committee for the industrial defence of the nation, so remains behind in Paris.
Of course this was all complete nonsense. The Germans ignore the Maginot Line as surely as Michelle ignored the Germans. They attack Biarritz just like everywhere else and Michelle gets a well deserved wake up call, as the bullets dance around her and prams roll away from dead mothers. Dassin must have been watching Battleship Potemkin. When Michelle gets back to Paris, it's a completely different place, with swastikas draped down the train station she left from and Germans running parts of the war from her confiscated house. Worst of all, her fiance is doing part of that himself and on her first day back he introduces her to people like Ulrich Windler, head of the Gestapo in Paris.
This is not a great film but it's fascinating to watch Crawford. The question is of course is what Crawford would do in the same situations her character finds herself in. I've never been a huge Crawford fan, partly because I first heard about her along with all the Bette Davis rivalry, and it's quite plain that Davis was a far better actress. However she's opened my eyes a few times and she did so here too. Michelle de la Becque populates this film with so many left handed compliments it's unreal, often to the most inappropriate people in the most inappropriate circumstances, and it's not difficult to believe that Crawford herself would have said the same things. There's no doubt that she had balls.
Wayne is more than a little out of place but he has fun with the role. Naturally it's hardly surprising to see him in a patriotic film but it's hardly a John Wayne film. Dassin throws in some interesting shots and setups here and there but it's hardly an essential Dassin film either. It's really a Crawford film, with solid performances from Philip Dorn as Robert Cortot and John Carradine, who plays the head of the Gestapo with relish. I also particularly liked the black American band singing in English about how bad Hitler is because the German tourists avidly listening don't speak English.
Crawford makes sense as a lead actress in a Hollywood film but she's playing a spoiled and selfish brat of a woman. Given that Crawford could very easily be described as a spoiled and selfish brat of a woman, she would appear to be playing herself and it's impossible to see the character without seeing the actress. Wayne was almost never a supporting actor, so much so that he holds the record for the most leading roles in films at 142. There are apparently only 11 films that have him as a supporting actor and this may well be my first. So this becomes a telling film for Dassin and Crawford and a rare one for Wayne.
We're in Paris in 1940. It's the ninth of May and the war is 'too uneventful to be taken seriously and too far away to worry about'. The speech being broadcast on the radio tells the people that the Germans are stuck helpless behind the Maginot line and France is as safe as could be. So Michelle de la Becque ignores the war utterly with a haughty shake of her head and takes the train to Biarritz. Her fiance, Robert Cortot, is on the committee for the industrial defence of the nation, so remains behind in Paris.
Of course this was all complete nonsense. The Germans ignore the Maginot Line as surely as Michelle ignored the Germans. They attack Biarritz just like everywhere else and Michelle gets a well deserved wake up call, as the bullets dance around her and prams roll away from dead mothers. Dassin must have been watching Battleship Potemkin. When Michelle gets back to Paris, it's a completely different place, with swastikas draped down the train station she left from and Germans running parts of the war from her confiscated house. Worst of all, her fiance is doing part of that himself and on her first day back he introduces her to people like Ulrich Windler, head of the Gestapo in Paris.
This is not a great film but it's fascinating to watch Crawford. The question is of course is what Crawford would do in the same situations her character finds herself in. I've never been a huge Crawford fan, partly because I first heard about her along with all the Bette Davis rivalry, and it's quite plain that Davis was a far better actress. However she's opened my eyes a few times and she did so here too. Michelle de la Becque populates this film with so many left handed compliments it's unreal, often to the most inappropriate people in the most inappropriate circumstances, and it's not difficult to believe that Crawford herself would have said the same things. There's no doubt that she had balls.
Wayne is more than a little out of place but he has fun with the role. Naturally it's hardly surprising to see him in a patriotic film but it's hardly a John Wayne film. Dassin throws in some interesting shots and setups here and there but it's hardly an essential Dassin film either. It's really a Crawford film, with solid performances from Philip Dorn as Robert Cortot and John Carradine, who plays the head of the Gestapo with relish. I also particularly liked the black American band singing in English about how bad Hitler is because the German tourists avidly listening don't speak English.
Friday, 19 December 2008
The Law vs Billy the Kid (1954)
William Bonney is good at getting into trouble. On the way back from the fields to Parson's Farm to get paid, he antagonises a co-worker by drinking his bottle down. When he finds that he gets paid half what everyone else gets he steals the other half, killing a man who comes after him. Naturally he's as quick on the draw as anyone around him. After crossing the line into Lincoln County, he lassos and kills a steer to eat, only to find that the ranch owner, John Tunstall, is getting plagued by rustlers and thinks the worst. Then when that's sorted out and Bonney and his friend Garrett are sat down to dinner with their host, he falls for Tunstall's niece and makes an enemy of his foreman, Bob Ollinger.
Of course William Bonney is better known as Billy the Kid. Scott Brady is a wooden chiselled serial hero version of Billy and he certainly isn't a kid, being 29 years old when he made this film and looking a few years older (the real Billy died at 21). Of course his friend Garrett is Pat Garrett, here played by James Griffith and just as calm and firm as he should be. The tension between them builds when the crooked sheriff and his posse kill Tunstall in cold blood. Billy takes it personally and goes gunning for the whole posse. Garrett, on the other hand, is appointed sheriff by the governor, and so his first job is to bring in his friend.
Brady reminds me of a cross between Chester Morris and Laurence Tierney, though Brady pales in comparison. He stands and moves like Morris but can't match his character and humour and he looks and sounds like Tierney but he can't reach his menace and machismo. I'm not too surprised to find that I've seen him in but not remembered him from a number of other films, from Undertow in 1949 to Gremlins in 1984, by way of Johnny Guitar and Wicked, Wicked. However I was far more surprised than I should have been to find that the similarity to Tierney is completely understandable: he's Tierney's younger brother, the middle one of three acting brothers and the one who didn't continually get into trouble.
Griffith is much better as Pat Garrett, and while there are too many plot holes and leaps for him to act around, he comes off solidly as the sort of capable and trustworthy character who would be respected quickly and strongly by everyone around him. Griffith is by far the best thing about this film. Once a musician in the band of Spike Jones, he became an actor who specialised in westerns, though I've mostly seen him in low budget horror movies and in supporting roles in major star vehicles. It's easy to see why he played in so many westerns as he was a great fit for that sort of role.
Backing them up are a solid Paul Cavanagh as Tunstall, an Englishman in the old west; a wasted Betta St John as Nita, Tunstall's niece and Billy the Kid's love interest; and Alan Hale Jr as the villainous Bob Ollinger. However the name I recorded this film for is the director, William Castle. I'm trying to catch all the Castles I can to see how his career evolved. This comes towards the end of his mid period, after the the crime series but before the gimmick horror films. It's certainly a capable film, from a directorial standpoint: the problems come from the quality of the acting, the equipment or the script. However there's nothing to really make it stand out. It's not a patch on Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid but it's much better than the Howard Hughes version, The Outlaw. Perhaps I'd rank it just a little lower than Young Guns.
Of course William Bonney is better known as Billy the Kid. Scott Brady is a wooden chiselled serial hero version of Billy and he certainly isn't a kid, being 29 years old when he made this film and looking a few years older (the real Billy died at 21). Of course his friend Garrett is Pat Garrett, here played by James Griffith and just as calm and firm as he should be. The tension between them builds when the crooked sheriff and his posse kill Tunstall in cold blood. Billy takes it personally and goes gunning for the whole posse. Garrett, on the other hand, is appointed sheriff by the governor, and so his first job is to bring in his friend.
Brady reminds me of a cross between Chester Morris and Laurence Tierney, though Brady pales in comparison. He stands and moves like Morris but can't match his character and humour and he looks and sounds like Tierney but he can't reach his menace and machismo. I'm not too surprised to find that I've seen him in but not remembered him from a number of other films, from Undertow in 1949 to Gremlins in 1984, by way of Johnny Guitar and Wicked, Wicked. However I was far more surprised than I should have been to find that the similarity to Tierney is completely understandable: he's Tierney's younger brother, the middle one of three acting brothers and the one who didn't continually get into trouble.
Griffith is much better as Pat Garrett, and while there are too many plot holes and leaps for him to act around, he comes off solidly as the sort of capable and trustworthy character who would be respected quickly and strongly by everyone around him. Griffith is by far the best thing about this film. Once a musician in the band of Spike Jones, he became an actor who specialised in westerns, though I've mostly seen him in low budget horror movies and in supporting roles in major star vehicles. It's easy to see why he played in so many westerns as he was a great fit for that sort of role.
Backing them up are a solid Paul Cavanagh as Tunstall, an Englishman in the old west; a wasted Betta St John as Nita, Tunstall's niece and Billy the Kid's love interest; and Alan Hale Jr as the villainous Bob Ollinger. However the name I recorded this film for is the director, William Castle. I'm trying to catch all the Castles I can to see how his career evolved. This comes towards the end of his mid period, after the the crime series but before the gimmick horror films. It's certainly a capable film, from a directorial standpoint: the problems come from the quality of the acting, the equipment or the script. However there's nothing to really make it stand out. It's not a patch on Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid but it's much better than the Howard Hughes version, The Outlaw. Perhaps I'd rank it just a little lower than Young Guns.
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