Not the true story and not about Count Dracula, but about the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker to at least bastardise the name Vlad Draculea for his famous gothic horror novel of 1896. This insipid and rather dull mock-up of an epic concerns the travails of Vlad III of Wallachia – note, not even Transylvania – who is considered a Romanian national hero for driving the Ottoman Turks out of the country. The reprive was only temporary; they were soon back. Writer Thomas Baum plays fast and loose with history. Very fast for the movie is only ninety minutes long. Very loose too, as myth and fact are blended with cinematic notions and the Catholic supernatural. It is unexciting as an epic, interesting as a socio-politico-religious commentary and only becomes chilling towards its gloomy, but atmospherically ghostly climax. The cast is composed of unknowns and oddities. People like Jane March and Roger Daltry pop up and look totally out of place in all that 15th Century garb and verse. Rudolf Martin is the bloody ‘Impaler’ and he plays him with a downcast, grim expression, his eyesight barely even leaves the floor, his brows hooded over like a hawk’s. Martin would go on to play the actual fictional Count in a fun episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer entitled Buffy Vs Dracula. Basically, this film is toilet. I found out after viewing that it was made-for-television, which explains much.
@chrisno1 I remember that edition very well 😁as far as I know it’s the only movie made from the book series, which is a shame because Darker Than Amber is excellent.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Following on from the success of the previous years GET CARTER this hard-boiled British thriller directed by Douglas Hickox is a rough, tough pulp actioner set in grimy London locations not seen on tourist tours. Oliver Reed is perfectly cast as a vicious convict whose wife, our own Jill St. John, finally decides to pay him a visit after five months inside, only to inform him she's pregnant and wants a divorce. After smashing his hand straight through the glass partition separating them, his attempt to strangle her fails, but he swears to get her. He then breaks out of jail with fellow inmate Ian MacShane and tracks her down. The prison escape is suspensefully handled, Hickox constantly surprises with his framing and rapid-fire editing and doesn't pull any punches as far as the violence is concerned. There’s top-notch support from Edward Woodward as the cop who originally sent Reed down, and Mike Pratt (of RANDALL AND HOPKIRK (DECEASED)) as the prison warden who turns a blind eye during the break out. There’s also a decent twist which turns events on its head.
It’s not as good as GET CARTER but it’s a damn good effort.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
This prequel to The Transporter Trilogy misses Jason Stathan and therefore much of the tongue in cheek machismo. Ed Skrein, whatever his talents, is no replacement. Also missing is Francois Berleand as the ruffled Insp. Tarconi. He is replaced by Ray Stevenson as Frank Martin Sr, who it turns out is a British secret service agent, a man who likes a bottle of wine, turns a blind eye to his son’s illegal driving gigs and is about as randy an Englishman as you can find in the French Riviera. The sex is embarrassing for it feels entirely inappropriate in a movie about women escaping prostitution for those same women to fall so willingly and mockingly into bed with the heroes and their fathers. It doesn’t help that at the time one of their number is severely injured after taking a bullet through the stomach. You wonder who’s looking after the poor girl while all this copulation is going on. Little oversights in plotting occur over and again in this film and effectively ruin it as any kind of spectacle. I know we shouldn’t be taking any Transporter film very seriously, but the story ought to make sense, character-wise and narratively. Refueled just doesn’t. They can’t even spell it right [one L only - really ?].
The major problem though is the movie’s star. Ed Skrein’s version of Frank Martin is a distinctly below average action hero. Admittedly he isn’t expected to do much except fight and drive cars, but I found his wispy delivery and blank as a brick wall expression very hard to live with. He’s clearly watched the previous movies, but an impersonation such as this does not flatter Mr Stathan. I am not even going to mention the remainder of the cast, who are a grim faced lot at the best of times. The four females of interest keep swapping wigs and dresses and I had no idea who was who. The villains are stupid. The plot is something to do with stealing millions from a high class pimp. It’s kind of reimagining Ocean’s 11 on the Riviera with hookers and pimps instead of gamblers and casino bosses. Action proliferates faster than you can say ‘Transporter’. I suppose it’s entertaining in a totally mindless fashion, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it again.
THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANY WARFARE (2024) with Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, and Til Schweiger. Directed by Guy Ritchie.
The premise: It's 1942 and German u-boats are sinking too many ships in the Atlantic. Britain is faced with solving the problem of these u-boats as America won't commit to entering the war until the convoys can traverse the ocean in relative safety. Churchill, against his advisors, commissions an unacknowledged mission to blow up the u-boat supply base on the Spanish island of Fernando Po. Enter Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) who is busted out of prison to lead this mission. Hijinks ensue.
This is actually a pretty fun movie. Cavill is having a blast here, dispatching Nazis with a wry smile, a fun comment, and (occasionally) with his tongue hanging out. The good news is that most of the rest of the cast is in on the fun with Alan Ritchson arguably stealing the movie as Anders Lassen. You'll have a smile on your face during most of the action sequences due the way that they're staged and the way that they employ a black comedic tone. The only real problem that I had with the film is that it peaks early with the sequence at the end of the first act where the team 'rescues' Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) from Nazis. That sequence is amazing in terms of action and comedy, and the film never quite hits that energy level again. Once you're done there, the film has a ton of setup for the third act involving a lot of talking and planning. There's good stuff in there but the film really slows down. The good news is that the third act is essentially a big heist sequence and it's really a lot of fun. It's not at the level of that earlier sequence but It's still satisfying and engaging.
There are plenty of nods to James Bond in the film. Ian Fleming is present as one of the planners of the mission, the Cary Elwes character is called 'M', and so forth. The end credits even bluntly state that the Cavill character was one of the primary influences on James Bond.
Recommended for an afternoon matinee. The wife and I had fun and most of the theater seemed to enjoy it. It's not essential viewing by any means but it's entertaining enough. This isn't one of Guy Ritchie's best films but it's worth watching once.
The plot is simple, two prison escapees (we don’t know what they were imprisoned for so we don’t know if we should root for them or not ) try to make it across endless miles of wilderness on foot. It’s survival of the fittest, as the duo pit their wits against a pursuit helicopter. Shaw (who also wrote the script) is the wizened MacConnachie, while MacDowell plays the weaker Ansell (foreseeing the Jaws characterisations between Shaw and Dreyfuss).
Director Joseph Losey strips the story to its bare essentials as we see the pair endure the gruelling physical ordeal they are faced with, they steal food and an old rifle, and gradually become uneasy traveling companions. They avoid soldiers, fire bombs and the omnipresent helicopter. Both characters remain underdeveloped, but when Shaw becomes obsessed with destroying the helicopter, you can see the basis of his Quint turn in Jaws. Eventually they get to what looks like what they have been searching for - it looks like a military compound or border control, but the film isn’t quite over yet.
What makes this film worth watching is the stunning helicopter footage as it skims the terrain, stalking the pair as they cross the harsh landscape. The pilots are never seen and everyone else in the film has their eyes covered by sunglasses or goggles, reminiscent of “the man with no eyes” in Cool Hand Luke. In the end the movie is too pretentious for it’s own good and because of the lack of insight into the escapees we end up not really caring what happens.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
With Richard Roundtree’s ultra cool portrayal of a private eye, backed up by Isaac Hayes’s wonderful funky score, this exploded onto the circuit at the beginning of the 70’s and made blaxploitation a genre that was to affect even the James Bond franchise.
Shaft is hired by gang boss Moses Gunn to find his kidnapped daughter. When the clues lead to a black militant activist things hot up as he gets caught in a turf war between rival crime gangs who want to take Harlem over for themselves.
Gordon Parks effortlessly directs the thrilling action and Roundtree gives a very charismatic performance in a film that would spawn two sequels and a television series. Ultimately, making 25 times it’s budget, this spawned the blaxploitation genre where we would see the good, the bad and the ugly in the following decade.
“Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?… Who’s the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all around? Shaft, John Shaft” You better believe it.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Loved that and the sequels. The TV version was much weaker, being too toned down to convey the character and his environment in the way that made the movies memorable.
'Capricorn One'. The story of a faked US mission to Mars. It's a long time since I've seen that one but it was an enjoyable enough romp. I had to laugh at the scene where Elliot Gould's Investigative journalist character had his car tampered with by unnamed US agents when he was getting a little too close to the truth for their liking. Classic film stuff, brakes fail, handbrake cut, accelerator jams open, gear lever doesn't work, 100mph speed indicator, etc. After a comical drive at 5x speeded up film, the car plunges off a bridge and into a river in what would have obviously been a fatal crash, but Elliot appears from the submerged wreckage and swims to safety without so much as a bumped forehead.
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
Taylor Adams’ novel upon which this nervy little thriller is based has decent reviews on Good Reads. Like IMDB that is not a signpost to success. The film got middling reviews, the best words mostly reserved for Havanna Rose Liu’s turn as a drug addict who escapes rehab and winds up in all sorts of trouble at a snowed-in visitor centre in the Salt Lake mountains. It’s a grim affair, initially a bit dull and cliche at the rehab centre, then bleakly believable as five characters assemble at the only point of alpine refuge. Things liven up when Liu discovers a kidnapped child in one of the vehicles – but whose vehicle is it and how can she free the victim without arousing suspicion? Trivial dialogue from Marvel Comic Universe pens-men Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari expands on the basic premise but only succeeds in making the story rather tired. A lot of play is made about Liu’s druggie history and the fact her Mum is dying and I couldn’t help think that in the old days movie makers wouldn’t dwell on these as they bear no relevance to the action which unfolds on screen. I thought we might be in for a kind of modern snow-bound replay of The Petrified Forest, and a tense standoff midway almost proved it. What we eventually get is a gruesome splatter fest of stabbings, shootings and strangulations. Editor Andy Canny may as well have not bothered as his work seems non-existent in the suspense stakes. Director Damien Power just about keeps pace, but there’s not much even he can do with a blood soaked second half of much disappointment.
Cult movie director Pete Walker has more infamous films on his CV than this empty-headed entry. Based on a daily newspaper comic strip this has our own Anouska Hempel as famous blonde bombshell model, Tiffany Jones. Ray Brooks plays an awkward photographer who constantly walks in on half-naked Tiffany at inopportune moments, which is the films sole attempt at humour. When the nefarious president of Zirdana takes a fancy to Tiffany, she's hired for a fake photo shoot and soon thrust into a hotbed of political intrigue and lust. With Wint and Kidd style way-out spies, mob gun dealers and the real ruler of the country (a handsome prince), Tiffany manages to be kidnapped, mistaken for a hooker (not much imagination required), and eventually sets up the fake president during a garden party where little clothing is required.
It sounds a lot more fun than it actually is, but the lovely Anouska Hempel does embrace her role and takes every opportunity to take off her top and display her ample bosom. Of course, acting isn’t the paramount issue here, so we get gaudy 70’s fashions, limp humour and Tiffany’s splendid curves. The movie has plenty of bare flesh, but damn little else.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I had never heard of this before watching it a couple of weeks ago, and as I quite like the post-apocalyptic genre, and it’s got a cast with some star names, I thought I’d give it a go. Unfortunately it’s directed flatly by Richard Compton, who’s last feature it would be before transcending into directing television episodes, it's a humourless, below-par bore, seemingly unaware of its cliches.
With the aid of some poor matte paintings we see that the world is a mess. Cities are bereft, seas are poisoned, and the usual bands of survivors scavenge for food. Richard Harris stars as a weary adventurer. After his wife (Rod Stewart’s then current squeeze Alana Hamilton) is raped and killed by the titular gang, Harris plods across the barren countryside, in search of the legendary Genesis (“a place where things still grow"), with the ravagers in pursuit.
As Harris wanders about, he's attacked with rocks, meets Art Carney (as a crazy old soldier with a bomb shelter full of food) and blind lawyer Seymour Cassel (who doesn’t last very long), discovers an underground society, and then gets the hots for Ann Turkel (the real life wife of Harris) who seems to be contracted to star in every film that Harris is in (maybe to quell his alcohol habit), still we don’t mind as she is rather lovely. Meanwhile, Woody Strode plays a member of a peaceful community, living on a rusty old battleship, that takes Harris and his followers onboard. Ernest Borgnine turns up (in bug-eyed acting mode) as the boat's paranoid dictator, who creates some languid tension, just before the Ravagers attack.
There isn’t an original idea in sight, and you’d be forgiven to think that parts of the script had been lifted from Logan’s Run. The infrequent action scenes are slackly handled and edited, and even worse for this sort of film, there is no gratuitous sex or violence.
I can see why I’d never heard of this movie before.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Not sure I have ever heard of Tiffany Jones. Which is odd. Cleopatra Jones, yes. Was there an accompanying novel @CoolHandBond ? Somewhere in the recess of my mind, or maybe it is all conjured by your sterling review 😀
There was a newspaper comic strip, originally in the Daily Sketch and then transferred to the sister paper Daily Mail when it folded. Whether any collections were printed in book form (as the Bond strips have been) I’m not sure, I certainly never saw one. As far as I know there was no paperback novelisation tie-in either.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Goldeneye - no typo, it's the potted Ian Fleming biopic, taking us from his time in World War II to the opening of the first James Bond film. It's a whistle stop tour even of that, daft and facile but not without a certain charm. One benefit is Charles Dance as Fleming, I can't think of a better actor to play him - he captures the superiority of the man albeit he's a bit too muscular to portray the spindly legged fop - they do try to play up the Fleming/Bond similarities.
The vibe is very much the contemporary The Singing Detective, in fact almost every scene has some Cole Porter or Noel Coward song in it. Biographer John Pearson was meant to be co-writer but it's hard to see what of this really came from Fleming's life. I don't know what our own @Silhouette Man makes of this? You walk out the room to make a coffee and it's on to the next episodic adventure. It's all very lightweight and not terribly credible.
It's redeemed in part by a supporting cast, many of whom like Dance, who was in FYEO of course, would go on to be in Bond films - Julian Fellowes from TND is Fleming's pal Noel Coward - he's not bad but not quite there either, and lo and behold that's a young Christoph Waltz as a German agent. Phyllis 'Lovejoy" Logan is Anne Fleming, there's also Richard Griffiths and Donald Hewlett, head of entertainments in 70s sitcom It Aint Half Hot Mum, the latter two playing M-type characters. There's also the vixenish Marsha Fitzalan, who I recalled as Alan B'stard's sexy two-timing wife in sitcom The New Statesman, which really should be due a reshowing.
This 1989 TV drama is therefore more enjoyable than it really should be in a lazy sort of way. The dialogue does that thing Beatles biopics often try to do, shoehorning in various references in an unsubtle way. The soundtrack tries to hint at the James Bond theme but can't quite go there, even the poster for Dr No outside the cinema in Jamaica seems to be a naff mock-up rather than the actual design, then again maybe it really was like that. There's a couple of scenes it appears the actual Bond producers may have filched, in particular Fleming nursing a strong drink in front of a mirror (Casino Royale).
It was on Talking Pictures TV and may well pop up again.
"This is where we leave you Mr Bond."
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,923Chief of Staff
edited April 29
@Napoleon Plural, thanks to your earlier heads up about this - I recorded it and watched it last night…I used to have this on dvd (it was given away free in some paper or other years ago)…I have to say, I think you’ve absolutely nailed it in your above review 🍸 I’m guessing all the budget for this was spent on hiring Goldeneye itself as the rest was pretty shonky 👀
Thanks Sir Miles. One thing Goldeneye did offer is that even though it's self-referential in a corny sort of way in its nods to the actual Bond films, certain set-ups do capture the Boys Own Adventure tone that the films used to have - it's still less self-referential than most of the Bond films of the last 25 years and even the Craig era. I couldn't help but enjoy watching how certain scenes might play out, there was a sincerity - almost an innocence, certainly a straightforwardness - about some of it that I found pleasing, and imo absent in recent movies.
"This is where we leave you Mr Bond."
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,865MI6 Agent
It's been so many years since I watched this Fleming biopic that I sadly can't remember a whole lot about it. I only saw it once (as @Sir Miles said it was free with a newspaper once years ago). I remember thinking it was pretty accurate in places from what I knew of Fleming's life. I recall a scene where Fleming was interviewed at Goldeneye by a film crew and it quoted from I think the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview with Fleming conducted shortly before his death in 1964. As you say, Charles Dance was brilliant as Fleming and he really looked like him too. I didn't realise that Christopher Waltz was in it, that's interesting. I remember it being much better than the Spymaker film that starred Jason Connery as Fleming that came out around the same time, 1990 I think it was. It was definitely fictionalised and had Fleming as a kind of Bond figure going on missions abroad. I suppose there's always the temptation for writers to dramatise Fleming's life to overemphasise the links between Fleming and his later literary creation. I do prefer fact over fiction in biopics, some creative licence aside. I also remember enjoying the Bondmaker BBC Fleming biopic from 2005 though I only saw it once at the time and haven't seen it since. It was accurate to Fleming's life from what I can recall too.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
There weren’t many spaghetti westerns that came up to Sergio Leone’s standards but this is one of the very best that equalled the status of the Dollars trilogy. Director Damiano Damiani keeps the film moving quickly with the type of characters and bloodshed expected from the genre, while the script sneaks some political subtext in amongst the action-packed set pieces, like Leone did with the later A Fistful Of Dynamite.
The setting is the Mexican Revolution, and Gian Maria Volonte (The first two dollar movies) plays bandit leader El Chuncho, and Klaus Kinski (also in For A Few Dollars More) is Chuncho’s loony religious brother, Santo. While raiding a train to steal a gun shipment the rebels are helped out by Gringo (Lou Castel), who joins their ranks and treks around the terrain in a pinstripe suit and fedora.
Our own sexy Martine Beswick is the lone female in the band, who infiltrates a fort as a whore, and then blasts a hole in the wall with a horde of dynamite. The story gets meaty when El Chuncho liberates the town of San Miguel, and decides to stay and continue protecting the townsfolk - meanwhile Gringo’s real motives come to the fore.
Dubbing aside, the performances are excellent all around, it’s beautifully shot and full of engaging characters, the only anomaly is why the director didn’t go on to better things.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
“Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin to sound the depth of that thou wilt profess.”
Christopher Marlowe’s words act like a portent for the unfolding non-drama which follows.
Dr Faustus is a film with a deserved dreadful reputation. It is a reimagining of Richard Burton’s and Nevil Coghill’s staging of the play for the 1966 Oxford University Dramatic Society. The theatre production got shoddy reviews and Burton didn’t return to the stage for a decade. The film memoire is shoddy too and you can see why the Oxford show was panned. Basically, Marlowe’s exceptional play about temptation, damnation and the Devil is cut to ribbons, leaving Burton all asunder as he wanders from cheap sound stage to cheap sound stage. The script might have worked if the direction and production design was up to standard, but Burton and Coghill are unimaginative and the sets look like they’ve escaped from Star Trek or possibly Oxford University. The film was part financed by Dino Di Laurentis’ Venfilms and you wish he’d overseen the project and injected more enthusiasm. The performances from the amateur cast are – basically – amateurish. Only Andreas Teuber succeeds as an elegant, pious Mephistopheles. Elizabeth Taylor has a silent, multiple role as Helen of Troy and all the world’s glamourous temptations. The atmosphere is quiet haunting and I kept wondering what Roger Corman would have made of it. The general air of decadence and horror seems to cry out for his unique, twisted touch.
The film does have moments of cinematic interest: the eerie music score; the emphasis on the occult as opposed to the soul; decent low-key SFX; a wonderful close-up of a skull’s eye-socket which reveals a harem of naked women, lounging around as if they’ve escaped from the cover a Jimi Hendrix LP; the Freudian image of a rose closing its petals; gloomy photography. It is not enough. Only Marlowe’s great text keeps one interested: “The reward of sin is death – A magician is a mighty god – What art thou Faustus but a man condemned to die? – Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribe, for where we are is hell and where hell is we must ever be – Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the towers of Ilium? – The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike – etc etc etc.”
Otherwise, this Doctor is a bit of a dud.
Note:
Speaking of ‘duds’, Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a modern retelling of the Faust legend with a crackling screenplay from Peter Cook was released in the same year and is much better. It starred Cook as George Spiggot [Mephistopheles] and Dudley Moore as Stanley Moon [Faust].
We often see the statement - ”This is a true story, these events really happened...." at the beginning of movies and they often are spurious (as in the Fargo film and television series) and this is probably so in this movie, even though it’s based on the infamous Ed Gein, graverobber and murderer. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho both drew inspiration from Gein and this film manages to capture the bizarre perversity of the real-life horror story. It’s bleak and oppressive, showcasing nightmarish situations. Roberts Blossom (Home Alone, Escape From Alcatraz) is, as always, believable in his role, this time as the sexually repressed mummy’s boy driven by loneliness to dig up his mother's corpse and then provide "companions" for her. Blossom inspires pity along with revulsion and slow-motion photography makes these moments horrifying. A chase through snow covered woods is very tense. Unfortunately, the film is seriously flawed by an on-screen narrator who intrudes in front of the camera to inform us of Blossom’s actions and feelings. Aside from these irritating intrusions, Deranged is a genuinely scary and disturbing film which, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, relies on terrifying content rather than gallons of blood.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Jingoistic comic strip stuff that wears its intentions on its sleeve from the opening bars of the militaristic theme tune. Harrison Ford acquits himself as only Harrison Ford can playing a gung-ho President who saves the passengers on the titular aeroplane. Director Wolfgang Petersen remarkably raises tensions almost as often as the script reveals plot holes. Fights, gunbattles and explosions galore. Fun if you want it.
From a modern perspective, it is interesting to hear Gary Oldman’s crazed Kazakh terrorist spout the values and borders of Imperial Stalinist Russia, exactly the ideology of the world as currently fostered by Vladimir Putin.
Pharaoh Jack Hawkins returns from the wars and gets enslaved architect James Robertson Justice to design a massive pyramid for his final resting place in return for his peoples freedom. Along the way, he takes a second wife, sexy Joan Collins. As the mammoth pyramid rises slowly to completion, manipulative Joan arranges the deaths of Pharaoh & his first wife, leaving herself in line to rule Egypt. The final twist makes for one of the best endings to any movie.
Jack Hawkins gives his usual dependable performance but his Pharaoh is too egocentric and despotic to gain much viewer sympathy. Joan Collins, in her first big role, is um…Joan Collins, we get the camp, bitchy, stilted performance that stood her in good stead for the rest of her career.
Director Howard Hawks handles the vast scenes, employing thousands of extras and superb sets, with assurance and they are among the best ever filmed and Dimitri Tiomkins's majestic score is right up there in the forefront of epic soundtracks. Lacking the major pull of star names the film lost money and Hawks would take a break before returning to helm the classic western Rio Bravo.
It's a stunning spectacle, very much undervalued.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
About as subtle as being hit by a brick, Monkey Man is full of flashy visuals but lacks any sense of personal drive, odd as one of the characters tells Dev Patel’s constantly blood-soaked hero ‘Kid’: “You must stop fighting for the pain and start fighting for a purpose.” Kid’s story arc is hopelessly confused, veering from child to adulthood via a flurry of flashbacks but without thought and composition. Intercutting snippets of Kid’s past floods the narrative with clues galore, yet somewhere the writers, producers and director – mostly Mr Patel himself – forget to explain Kid’s deeper motivation. Eventually, we learn he’s an avenging angel. By then all the good stuff has happened and what remains is a long-winded trawl. Kid takes spiritual inspiration from a monkey god of Hindu myth and seeks the slayer of his mother, a brutish police chief in league with a corrupt political guru. The vivid, entertaining yet inexplicable first half centres in and around a low rent / high cost whore house where the ugly clients masquerade as representations of the respectable and disreputable elite. Latterly the hero takes shelter with a kung fu fighting commune of transsexuals. It’s that kind of film.
Inspiration seems to come from Hindu mythology, but cinematically director Patel evokes Leone, Bruce Lee, Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 1, the John Wick series [it’s namechecked!] and just about any Jason Stathan martial art extravaganza. The editing is faster than lightening. The photography is very dark and curiously focused, aligned as if we are always looking up from beneath everyone’s knees. This rat’s eye view of the world feels entirely appropriate for the distressing content and filthy people involved.
I can’t tell you if Monkey Man is any good – I don’t feel qualified to attach value to any of these modern ultra-violent thrillers – but I can tell you it overstays itself at a wearisome two hours.
We watched this last year. It's pretty fantastic with a great overall sense of scale and a real wallop of an ending. Martin Scorsese lists it as one of his absolute favorite films and I can see why.
I don’t know enough about Amy Winehouse to tell if this film is a dramatically altered/sanitised/lawyer friendly version of her life or not. I can say that the actress playing Amy was pretty good and her singing sounded enough like Amy’s to pass although I believe that strong fans weren’t pleased.
There were the usual plot beats that one finds in any star musician’s biopic, plus enough nods to “girl power” to please a young female target audience. The supporting cast were all adequate to good. The film was directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, whose husband Aaron has been mentioned in these pages more than once as a possible 007.
Any film that’s going to kick off proceedings with the opening bars of Get It On by T-Rex is getting my vote. The Bank Job isn’t about glam rock although it is about surface values, which is about as deep as any characterisation goes in this good looking, entertaining and engaging heist movie. Writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais take for inspiration a real life robbery carried out by Brian Reader, the same crook who masterminded the Hatton Garden Job, which has also made it onto celluloid. Reader always denied his involvement, but the men eventually captured were all his associates.
This version of the events of that real Baker Street Robbery (11 Sept 1971) retains much genuine detail, but drastically alters plenty of fact and turns the escapade into fun fiction, with an edge. The screenplay has humour and plenty of twists as a bunch of amateur thieves set out to steal the contents of a safe deposit vault. Unknown to them, members of the local underworld, an unscrupulous brothel madam and a reactionary Black Power politician all store their secrets in the same vault. The thieves end up with more than just the police hunting them down – gangsters, bent coppers, porn kings and MI5 all want to recover the contents of various safety boxes.
Jason Stathan shines as Terry Leather, a family man with a dodgy past and an unshaven chin who becomes the figurehead of the operation. Stathan proves again, as he did in Snatch and Spy, that he can act really well when he needs to. Leather has been set up by Saffron Burrows’s ignoble Martine, who in turn has been coerced by MI5 in their attempt to recover incriminating photos of Princess Margaret. Into the mix is thrown Micheal X [Peter de Jersey], a real figure whose activities as a self-styled black revolutionary brought him into conflict with the British authorities in the UK and his native Trinidad. Most of the sequences involving Micheal X are genuine incidents: early on we see him chain up and torture a white landlord using a slave collar; later there is a clever scene where he holds court at a dinner party attended by his biographer John Stevenson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and the US lawyer William Kunstler, who all supported his civil rights propaganda. Our own Colin Salmon crops up as one of Micheal X’s followers, swiftly seducing Hattie Morohan’s naïve secret agent Gale Benson. [In real life Benson was a very attractive figure in London’s high society, murdered in Trinidad on Micheal X’s orders for ridiculously petty reasons; her death led to his eventual death sentence in 1975.] David Suchet’s calmly menacing pornographer Lew Vogel is a composite of several true-life Soho gangsters. The cast features a roster of known faces who flit in and about the action with much suitability; the eagle-eyed will notice Rolling Stone Mick Jagger as a worried looking security guard. Nobody feels out of place among the flares, bad beer, pay phones and black marias, although they do film some scenes on conspicuously modern underground carriages.
As always with these kind of movies, a series of fortuitous events get the gang into and out of trouble. Tension mounts effectively. Antipodean director Roger Donaldson does a decent job of propelling the narrative quickly, concisely and with some authority. The Bank Job isn’t a flashy ‘let’s edit the balls out of this thing’ kind of movie. It is solid, effective and purposeful with enough neat touches to remind us we are in the cinematic world of crime. It has probably passed him by now, but Donaldson would be a good shout for a Bond movie.
I’ve watched The Bank Job three or four times and it never fails to entertain, retaining its slice of downbeat seventies experience while piling on the necessary elements of intrigue, suspense and sharp, lad’s own humour. It was very successful and deserved to be.
This isn’t the first time I’ve reviewed this effective exploitation movie in this thread, but it’s a movie I keep coming back to watch because it is everything that is required in this perfect example of the genre.
After atmospheric credits, where Leonard Rosenman’s sinister music plays while fog rises from behind the silhouette of a malevolent looking tree, we are quickly introduced to best friends and business partners Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. Together with their wives Loretta Swit and Lara Parker they take off for a hard earned vacation in Oates’s brand new, state of the art RV. At the end of the first day they set up camp by an isolated creek. Late that night, while sharing a few drinks, the two men witness the execution and sacrifice of a young woman by a group of Satanists. When the coven discover that they are being watched, it marks the beginning of a cross state pursuit, with the couples not knowing where or who to turn to for help.
Jack Starrett keeps his direction extremely tight, and at 84 minutes the film barely stops for breath, racking up tension filled chases with moments of extreme suspense. An atmosphere of eerie creepiness pervades the movie in the non-action scenes, ratcheting up the suspenseful mood of the movie. Starrett was also an actor (and was memorable as the sadistic deputy in First Blood who falls from the helicopter) and handles the tense script by exploitation legends Wes Bishop and Lee Frost with masterful assurance (he also plays a bit part in this movie).
Warren Oates delivers another first class performance, he had the ability to make his characters seem so believable and real, and he interacts well with Peter Fonda, who also delivers one of the better performances of his post Easy Rider years. Swit and Parker are not really given much to do, but they look scared and scream hysterically in all the right places. The ending is a cracker, too.
Race With The Devil deserves to be seen, hopefully, this review might inspire a few people to watch it.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
After missing out on TMWTGG at the Prince Charles due to a sudden work committment, this evening I took in that Ian Fleming biopic you guys all reviewed recently:
GOLDENEYE (1989)
Anglia Television’s version of the life of Ian Lancaster Fleming is enjoyable enough in a sort of dandified fashion. The film is based on John Pearson’s biography, but is elaborated on quite dramatically. Pearson’s work was just about the best version of Fleming’s life around at the time. From my reading some years ago, I don’t remember the incidents as they are described here. What I most enjoyed about it was the moments of James Bondian speculation: the transposed dialogue, people he meets, work colleagues, girlfriends, conversations, skin diving, a female adjutant pursuing him on a motorcycle, a trip to a health clinic, etc. These hint at the manner in which Fleming’s training as an observant journalist contributed to his writings. Others, such as the flirtation with a brusque, steely secretary or the man in a bar stroking a white Persian cat, reflect the film series, which is extremely odd. Hence, I found the resultant unfolding action rather amusing, which I think was the intention. Nobody in the cast really gives much of a serious face to it, not even Charles Dance, who is as dapper, charming and introspective, as I sense Fleming probably was [reading Revalator’s Interview series tells us that…]. I enjoyed Dance’s performance as Fleming immensely. There is a particular scene in the offices of The Times when he sticks a cigarette holder between his teeth and offers that snakily toothy smile that we saw on the back of all those Pan paperbacks. Very neat.
Certainly an intriguing effort. On a point of interest, is that the same edition of Birds of the West Indies that Pierce Brosnan picks up in Die Another Day?
Comments
DARK PRINCE: THE TRUE STORY OF DRACULA (2000)
Not the true story and not about Count Dracula, but about the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker to at least bastardise the name Vlad Draculea for his famous gothic horror novel of 1896. This insipid and rather dull mock-up of an epic concerns the travails of Vlad III of Wallachia – note, not even Transylvania – who is considered a Romanian national hero for driving the Ottoman Turks out of the country. The reprive was only temporary; they were soon back. Writer Thomas Baum plays fast and loose with history. Very fast for the movie is only ninety minutes long. Very loose too, as myth and fact are blended with cinematic notions and the Catholic supernatural. It is unexciting as an epic, interesting as a socio-politico-religious commentary and only becomes chilling towards its gloomy, but atmospherically ghostly climax. The cast is composed of unknowns and oddities. People like Jane March and Roger Daltry pop up and look totally out of place in all that 15th Century garb and verse. Rudolf Martin is the bloody ‘Impaler’ and he plays him with a downcast, grim expression, his eyesight barely even leaves the floor, his brows hooded over like a hawk’s. Martin would go on to play the actual fictional Count in a fun episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer entitled Buffy Vs Dracula. Basically, this film is toilet. I found out after viewing that it was made-for-television, which explains much.
@chrisno1 I remember that edition very well 😁as far as I know it’s the only movie made from the book series, which is a shame because Darker Than Amber is excellent.
SITTING TARGET (1972)
Following on from the success of the previous years GET CARTER this hard-boiled British thriller directed by Douglas Hickox is a rough, tough pulp actioner set in grimy London locations not seen on tourist tours. Oliver Reed is perfectly cast as a vicious convict whose wife, our own Jill St. John, finally decides to pay him a visit after five months inside, only to inform him she's pregnant and wants a divorce. After smashing his hand straight through the glass partition separating them, his attempt to strangle her fails, but he swears to get her. He then breaks out of jail with fellow inmate Ian MacShane and tracks her down. The prison escape is suspensefully handled, Hickox constantly surprises with his framing and rapid-fire editing and doesn't pull any punches as far as the violence is concerned. There’s top-notch support from Edward Woodward as the cop who originally sent Reed down, and Mike Pratt (of RANDALL AND HOPKIRK (DECEASED)) as the prison warden who turns a blind eye during the break out. There’s also a decent twist which turns events on its head.
It’s not as good as GET CARTER but it’s a damn good effort.
THE TRANSPORTER REFUELED (2015)
This prequel to The Transporter Trilogy misses Jason Stathan and therefore much of the tongue in cheek machismo. Ed Skrein, whatever his talents, is no replacement. Also missing is Francois Berleand as the ruffled Insp. Tarconi. He is replaced by Ray Stevenson as Frank Martin Sr, who it turns out is a British secret service agent, a man who likes a bottle of wine, turns a blind eye to his son’s illegal driving gigs and is about as randy an Englishman as you can find in the French Riviera. The sex is embarrassing for it feels entirely inappropriate in a movie about women escaping prostitution for those same women to fall so willingly and mockingly into bed with the heroes and their fathers. It doesn’t help that at the time one of their number is severely injured after taking a bullet through the stomach. You wonder who’s looking after the poor girl while all this copulation is going on. Little oversights in plotting occur over and again in this film and effectively ruin it as any kind of spectacle. I know we shouldn’t be taking any Transporter film very seriously, but the story ought to make sense, character-wise and narratively. Refueled just doesn’t. They can’t even spell it right [one L only - really ?].
The major problem though is the movie’s star. Ed Skrein’s version of Frank Martin is a distinctly below average action hero. Admittedly he isn’t expected to do much except fight and drive cars, but I found his wispy delivery and blank as a brick wall expression very hard to live with. He’s clearly watched the previous movies, but an impersonation such as this does not flatter Mr Stathan. I am not even going to mention the remainder of the cast, who are a grim faced lot at the best of times. The four females of interest keep swapping wigs and dresses and I had no idea who was who. The villains are stupid. The plot is something to do with stealing millions from a high class pimp. It’s kind of reimagining Ocean’s 11 on the Riviera with hookers and pimps instead of gamblers and casino bosses. Action proliferates faster than you can say ‘Transporter’. I suppose it’s entertaining in a totally mindless fashion, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it again.
THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANY WARFARE (2024) with Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, and Til Schweiger. Directed by Guy Ritchie.
The premise: It's 1942 and German u-boats are sinking too many ships in the Atlantic. Britain is faced with solving the problem of these u-boats as America won't commit to entering the war until the convoys can traverse the ocean in relative safety. Churchill, against his advisors, commissions an unacknowledged mission to blow up the u-boat supply base on the Spanish island of Fernando Po. Enter Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) who is busted out of prison to lead this mission. Hijinks ensue.
This is actually a pretty fun movie. Cavill is having a blast here, dispatching Nazis with a wry smile, a fun comment, and (occasionally) with his tongue hanging out. The good news is that most of the rest of the cast is in on the fun with Alan Ritchson arguably stealing the movie as Anders Lassen. You'll have a smile on your face during most of the action sequences due the way that they're staged and the way that they employ a black comedic tone. The only real problem that I had with the film is that it peaks early with the sequence at the end of the first act where the team 'rescues' Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) from Nazis. That sequence is amazing in terms of action and comedy, and the film never quite hits that energy level again. Once you're done there, the film has a ton of setup for the third act involving a lot of talking and planning. There's good stuff in there but the film really slows down. The good news is that the third act is essentially a big heist sequence and it's really a lot of fun. It's not at the level of that earlier sequence but It's still satisfying and engaging.
There are plenty of nods to James Bond in the film. Ian Fleming is present as one of the planners of the mission, the Cary Elwes character is called 'M', and so forth. The end credits even bluntly state that the Cavill character was one of the primary influences on James Bond.
Recommended for an afternoon matinee. The wife and I had fun and most of the theater seemed to enjoy it. It's not essential viewing by any means but it's entertaining enough. This isn't one of Guy Ritchie's best films but it's worth watching once.
FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE (1970)
The plot is simple, two prison escapees (we don’t know what they were imprisoned for so we don’t know if we should root for them or not ) try to make it across endless miles of wilderness on foot. It’s survival of the fittest, as the duo pit their wits against a pursuit helicopter. Shaw (who also wrote the script) is the wizened MacConnachie, while MacDowell plays the weaker Ansell (foreseeing the Jaws characterisations between Shaw and Dreyfuss).
Director Joseph Losey strips the story to its bare essentials as we see the pair endure the gruelling physical ordeal they are faced with, they steal food and an old rifle, and gradually become uneasy traveling companions. They avoid soldiers, fire bombs and the omnipresent helicopter. Both characters remain underdeveloped, but when Shaw becomes obsessed with destroying the helicopter, you can see the basis of his Quint turn in Jaws. Eventually they get to what looks like what they have been searching for - it looks like a military compound or border control, but the film isn’t quite over yet.
What makes this film worth watching is the stunning helicopter footage as it skims the terrain, stalking the pair as they cross the harsh landscape. The pilots are never seen and everyone else in the film has their eyes covered by sunglasses or goggles, reminiscent of “the man with no eyes” in Cool Hand Luke. In the end the movie is too pretentious for it’s own good and because of the lack of insight into the escapees we end up not really caring what happens.
SHAFT (1971)
With Richard Roundtree’s ultra cool portrayal of a private eye, backed up by Isaac Hayes’s wonderful funky score, this exploded onto the circuit at the beginning of the 70’s and made blaxploitation a genre that was to affect even the James Bond franchise.
Shaft is hired by gang boss Moses Gunn to find his kidnapped daughter. When the clues lead to a black militant activist things hot up as he gets caught in a turf war between rival crime gangs who want to take Harlem over for themselves.
Gordon Parks effortlessly directs the thrilling action and Roundtree gives a very charismatic performance in a film that would spawn two sequels and a television series. Ultimately, making 25 times it’s budget, this spawned the blaxploitation genre where we would see the good, the bad and the ugly in the following decade.
“Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?… Who’s the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all around? Shaft, John Shaft” You better believe it.
Loved that and the sequels. The TV version was much weaker, being too toned down to convey the character and his environment in the way that made the movies memorable.
'Capricorn One'. The story of a faked US mission to Mars. It's a long time since I've seen that one but it was an enjoyable enough romp. I had to laugh at the scene where Elliot Gould's Investigative journalist character had his car tampered with by unnamed US agents when he was getting a little too close to the truth for their liking. Classic film stuff, brakes fail, handbrake cut, accelerator jams open, gear lever doesn't work, 100mph speed indicator, etc. After a comical drive at 5x speeded up film, the car plunges off a bridge and into a river in what would have obviously been a fatal crash, but Elliot appears from the submerged wreckage and swims to safety without so much as a bumped forehead.
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
NO EXIT (2022)
Taylor Adams’ novel upon which this nervy little thriller is based has decent reviews on Good Reads. Like IMDB that is not a signpost to success. The film got middling reviews, the best words mostly reserved for Havanna Rose Liu’s turn as a drug addict who escapes rehab and winds up in all sorts of trouble at a snowed-in visitor centre in the Salt Lake mountains. It’s a grim affair, initially a bit dull and cliche at the rehab centre, then bleakly believable as five characters assemble at the only point of alpine refuge. Things liven up when Liu discovers a kidnapped child in one of the vehicles – but whose vehicle is it and how can she free the victim without arousing suspicion? Trivial dialogue from Marvel Comic Universe pens-men Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari expands on the basic premise but only succeeds in making the story rather tired. A lot of play is made about Liu’s druggie history and the fact her Mum is dying and I couldn’t help think that in the old days movie makers wouldn’t dwell on these as they bear no relevance to the action which unfolds on screen. I thought we might be in for a kind of modern snow-bound replay of The Petrified Forest, and a tense standoff midway almost proved it. What we eventually get is a gruesome splatter fest of stabbings, shootings and strangulations. Editor Andy Canny may as well have not bothered as his work seems non-existent in the suspense stakes. Director Damien Power just about keeps pace, but there’s not much even he can do with a blood soaked second half of much disappointment.
I like Capricorn One - always worth a watch.
TIFFANY JONES (1973)
Cult movie director Pete Walker has more infamous films on his CV than this empty-headed entry. Based on a daily newspaper comic strip this has our own Anouska Hempel as famous blonde bombshell model, Tiffany Jones. Ray Brooks plays an awkward photographer who constantly walks in on half-naked Tiffany at inopportune moments, which is the films sole attempt at humour. When the nefarious president of Zirdana takes a fancy to Tiffany, she's hired for a fake photo shoot and soon thrust into a hotbed of political intrigue and lust. With Wint and Kidd style way-out spies, mob gun dealers and the real ruler of the country (a handsome prince), Tiffany manages to be kidnapped, mistaken for a hooker (not much imagination required), and eventually sets up the fake president during a garden party where little clothing is required.
It sounds a lot more fun than it actually is, but the lovely Anouska Hempel does embrace her role and takes every opportunity to take off her top and display her ample bosom. Of course, acting isn’t the paramount issue here, so we get gaudy 70’s fashions, limp humour and Tiffany’s splendid curves. The movie has plenty of bare flesh, but damn little else.
RAVAGERS (1979)
I had never heard of this before watching it a couple of weeks ago, and as I quite like the post-apocalyptic genre, and it’s got a cast with some star names, I thought I’d give it a go. Unfortunately it’s directed flatly by Richard Compton, who’s last feature it would be before transcending into directing television episodes, it's a humourless, below-par bore, seemingly unaware of its cliches.
With the aid of some poor matte paintings we see that the world is a mess. Cities are bereft, seas are poisoned, and the usual bands of survivors scavenge for food. Richard Harris stars as a weary adventurer. After his wife (Rod Stewart’s then current squeeze Alana Hamilton) is raped and killed by the titular gang, Harris plods across the barren countryside, in search of the legendary Genesis (“a place where things still grow"), with the ravagers in pursuit.
As Harris wanders about, he's attacked with rocks, meets Art Carney (as a crazy old soldier with a bomb shelter full of food) and blind lawyer Seymour Cassel (who doesn’t last very long), discovers an underground society, and then gets the hots for Ann Turkel (the real life wife of Harris) who seems to be contracted to star in every film that Harris is in (maybe to quell his alcohol habit), still we don’t mind as she is rather lovely. Meanwhile, Woody Strode plays a member of a peaceful community, living on a rusty old battleship, that takes Harris and his followers onboard. Ernest Borgnine turns up (in bug-eyed acting mode) as the boat's paranoid dictator, who creates some languid tension, just before the Ravagers attack.
There isn’t an original idea in sight, and you’d be forgiven to think that parts of the script had been lifted from Logan’s Run. The infrequent action scenes are slackly handled and edited, and even worse for this sort of film, there is no gratuitous sex or violence.
I can see why I’d never heard of this movie before.
Not sure I have ever heard of Tiffany Jones. Which is odd. Cleopatra Jones, yes. Was there an accompanying novel @CoolHandBond ? Somewhere in the recess of my mind, or maybe it is all conjured by your sterling review 😀
There was a newspaper comic strip, originally in the Daily Sketch and then transferred to the sister paper Daily Mail when it folded. Whether any collections were printed in book form (as the Bond strips have been) I’m not sure, I certainly never saw one. As far as I know there was no paperback novelisation tie-in either.
Goldeneye - no typo, it's the potted Ian Fleming biopic, taking us from his time in World War II to the opening of the first James Bond film. It's a whistle stop tour even of that, daft and facile but not without a certain charm. One benefit is Charles Dance as Fleming, I can't think of a better actor to play him - he captures the superiority of the man albeit he's a bit too muscular to portray the spindly legged fop - they do try to play up the Fleming/Bond similarities.
The vibe is very much the contemporary The Singing Detective, in fact almost every scene has some Cole Porter or Noel Coward song in it. Biographer John Pearson was meant to be co-writer but it's hard to see what of this really came from Fleming's life. I don't know what our own @Silhouette Man makes of this? You walk out the room to make a coffee and it's on to the next episodic adventure. It's all very lightweight and not terribly credible.
It's redeemed in part by a supporting cast, many of whom like Dance, who was in FYEO of course, would go on to be in Bond films - Julian Fellowes from TND is Fleming's pal Noel Coward - he's not bad but not quite there either, and lo and behold that's a young Christoph Waltz as a German agent. Phyllis 'Lovejoy" Logan is Anne Fleming, there's also Richard Griffiths and Donald Hewlett, head of entertainments in 70s sitcom It Aint Half Hot Mum, the latter two playing M-type characters. There's also the vixenish Marsha Fitzalan, who I recalled as Alan B'stard's sexy two-timing wife in sitcom The New Statesman, which really should be due a reshowing.
This 1989 TV drama is therefore more enjoyable than it really should be in a lazy sort of way. The dialogue does that thing Beatles biopics often try to do, shoehorning in various references in an unsubtle way. The soundtrack tries to hint at the James Bond theme but can't quite go there, even the poster for Dr No outside the cinema in Jamaica seems to be a naff mock-up rather than the actual design, then again maybe it really was like that. There's a couple of scenes it appears the actual Bond producers may have filched, in particular Fleming nursing a strong drink in front of a mirror (Casino Royale).
It was on Talking Pictures TV and may well pop up again.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@Napoleon Plural, thanks to your earlier heads up about this - I recorded it and watched it last night…I used to have this on dvd (it was given away free in some paper or other years ago)…I have to say, I think you’ve absolutely nailed it in your above review 🍸 I’m guessing all the budget for this was spent on hiring Goldeneye itself as the rest was pretty shonky 👀
Thanks Sir Miles. One thing Goldeneye did offer is that even though it's self-referential in a corny sort of way in its nods to the actual Bond films, certain set-ups do capture the Boys Own Adventure tone that the films used to have - it's still less self-referential than most of the Bond films of the last 25 years and even the Craig era. I couldn't help but enjoy watching how certain scenes might play out, there was a sincerity - almost an innocence, certainly a straightforwardness - about some of it that I found pleasing, and imo absent in recent movies.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It's been so many years since I watched this Fleming biopic that I sadly can't remember a whole lot about it. I only saw it once (as @Sir Miles said it was free with a newspaper once years ago). I remember thinking it was pretty accurate in places from what I knew of Fleming's life. I recall a scene where Fleming was interviewed at Goldeneye by a film crew and it quoted from I think the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview with Fleming conducted shortly before his death in 1964. As you say, Charles Dance was brilliant as Fleming and he really looked like him too. I didn't realise that Christopher Waltz was in it, that's interesting. I remember it being much better than the Spymaker film that starred Jason Connery as Fleming that came out around the same time, 1990 I think it was. It was definitely fictionalised and had Fleming as a kind of Bond figure going on missions abroad. I suppose there's always the temptation for writers to dramatise Fleming's life to overemphasise the links between Fleming and his later literary creation. I do prefer fact over fiction in biopics, some creative licence aside. I also remember enjoying the Bondmaker BBC Fleming biopic from 2005 though I only saw it once at the time and haven't seen it since. It was accurate to Fleming's life from what I can recall too.
A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL (1966).
There weren’t many spaghetti westerns that came up to Sergio Leone’s standards but this is one of the very best that equalled the status of the Dollars trilogy. Director Damiano Damiani keeps the film moving quickly with the type of characters and bloodshed expected from the genre, while the script sneaks some political subtext in amongst the action-packed set pieces, like Leone did with the later A Fistful Of Dynamite.
The setting is the Mexican Revolution, and Gian Maria Volonte (The first two dollar movies) plays bandit leader El Chuncho, and Klaus Kinski (also in For A Few Dollars More) is Chuncho’s loony religious brother, Santo. While raiding a train to steal a gun shipment the rebels are helped out by Gringo (Lou Castel), who joins their ranks and treks around the terrain in a pinstripe suit and fedora.
Our own sexy Martine Beswick is the lone female in the band, who infiltrates a fort as a whore, and then blasts a hole in the wall with a horde of dynamite. The story gets meaty when El Chuncho liberates the town of San Miguel, and decides to stay and continue protecting the townsfolk - meanwhile Gringo’s real motives come to the fore.
Dubbing aside, the performances are excellent all around, it’s beautifully shot and full of engaging characters, the only anomaly is why the director didn’t go on to better things.
DR FAUSTUS (1967)
“Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin to sound the depth of that thou wilt profess.”
Christopher Marlowe’s words act like a portent for the unfolding non-drama which follows.
Dr Faustus is a film with a deserved dreadful reputation. It is a reimagining of Richard Burton’s and Nevil Coghill’s staging of the play for the 1966 Oxford University Dramatic Society. The theatre production got shoddy reviews and Burton didn’t return to the stage for a decade. The film memoire is shoddy too and you can see why the Oxford show was panned. Basically, Marlowe’s exceptional play about temptation, damnation and the Devil is cut to ribbons, leaving Burton all asunder as he wanders from cheap sound stage to cheap sound stage. The script might have worked if the direction and production design was up to standard, but Burton and Coghill are unimaginative and the sets look like they’ve escaped from Star Trek or possibly Oxford University. The film was part financed by Dino Di Laurentis’ Venfilms and you wish he’d overseen the project and injected more enthusiasm. The performances from the amateur cast are – basically – amateurish. Only Andreas Teuber succeeds as an elegant, pious Mephistopheles. Elizabeth Taylor has a silent, multiple role as Helen of Troy and all the world’s glamourous temptations. The atmosphere is quiet haunting and I kept wondering what Roger Corman would have made of it. The general air of decadence and horror seems to cry out for his unique, twisted touch.
The film does have moments of cinematic interest: the eerie music score; the emphasis on the occult as opposed to the soul; decent low-key SFX; a wonderful close-up of a skull’s eye-socket which reveals a harem of naked women, lounging around as if they’ve escaped from the cover a Jimi Hendrix LP; the Freudian image of a rose closing its petals; gloomy photography. It is not enough. Only Marlowe’s great text keeps one interested: “The reward of sin is death – A magician is a mighty god – What art thou Faustus but a man condemned to die? – Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribe, for where we are is hell and where hell is we must ever be – Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the towers of Ilium? – The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike – etc etc etc.”
Otherwise, this Doctor is a bit of a dud.
Note:
Speaking of ‘duds’, Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a modern retelling of the Faust legend with a crackling screenplay from Peter Cook was released in the same year and is much better. It starred Cook as George Spiggot [Mephistopheles] and Dudley Moore as Stanley Moon [Faust].
Deranged (1974)
We often see the statement - ”This is a true story, these events really happened...." at the beginning of movies and they often are spurious (as in the Fargo film and television series) and this is probably so in this movie, even though it’s based on the infamous Ed Gein, graverobber and murderer. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho both drew inspiration from Gein and this film manages to capture the bizarre perversity of the real-life horror story. It’s bleak and oppressive, showcasing nightmarish situations. Roberts Blossom (Home Alone, Escape From Alcatraz) is, as always, believable in his role, this time as the sexually repressed mummy’s boy driven by loneliness to dig up his mother's corpse and then provide "companions" for her. Blossom inspires pity along with revulsion and slow-motion photography makes these moments horrifying. A chase through snow covered woods is very tense. Unfortunately, the film is seriously flawed by an on-screen narrator who intrudes in front of the camera to inform us of Blossom’s actions and feelings. Aside from these irritating intrusions, Deranged is a genuinely scary and disturbing film which, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, relies on terrifying content rather than gallons of blood.
AIR FORCE ONE (1997)
A bloodbath on the Presidential airplane.
Jingoistic comic strip stuff that wears its intentions on its sleeve from the opening bars of the militaristic theme tune. Harrison Ford acquits himself as only Harrison Ford can playing a gung-ho President who saves the passengers on the titular aeroplane. Director Wolfgang Petersen remarkably raises tensions almost as often as the script reveals plot holes. Fights, gunbattles and explosions galore. Fun if you want it.
From a modern perspective, it is interesting to hear Gary Oldman’s crazed Kazakh terrorist spout the values and borders of Imperial Stalinist Russia, exactly the ideology of the world as currently fostered by Vladimir Putin.
Land Of The Pharaohs (1955)
Pharaoh Jack Hawkins returns from the wars and gets enslaved architect James Robertson Justice to design a massive pyramid for his final resting place in return for his peoples freedom. Along the way, he takes a second wife, sexy Joan Collins. As the mammoth pyramid rises slowly to completion, manipulative Joan arranges the deaths of Pharaoh & his first wife, leaving herself in line to rule Egypt. The final twist makes for one of the best endings to any movie.
Jack Hawkins gives his usual dependable performance but his Pharaoh is too egocentric and despotic to gain much viewer sympathy. Joan Collins, in her first big role, is um…Joan Collins, we get the camp, bitchy, stilted performance that stood her in good stead for the rest of her career.
Director Howard Hawks handles the vast scenes, employing thousands of extras and superb sets, with assurance and they are among the best ever filmed and Dimitri Tiomkins's majestic score is right up there in the forefront of epic soundtracks. Lacking the major pull of star names the film lost money and Hawks would take a break before returning to helm the classic western Rio Bravo.
It's a stunning spectacle, very much undervalued.
MONKEY MAN (2024)
About as subtle as being hit by a brick, Monkey Man is full of flashy visuals but lacks any sense of personal drive, odd as one of the characters tells Dev Patel’s constantly blood-soaked hero ‘Kid’: “You must stop fighting for the pain and start fighting for a purpose.” Kid’s story arc is hopelessly confused, veering from child to adulthood via a flurry of flashbacks but without thought and composition. Intercutting snippets of Kid’s past floods the narrative with clues galore, yet somewhere the writers, producers and director – mostly Mr Patel himself – forget to explain Kid’s deeper motivation. Eventually, we learn he’s an avenging angel. By then all the good stuff has happened and what remains is a long-winded trawl. Kid takes spiritual inspiration from a monkey god of Hindu myth and seeks the slayer of his mother, a brutish police chief in league with a corrupt political guru. The vivid, entertaining yet inexplicable first half centres in and around a low rent / high cost whore house where the ugly clients masquerade as representations of the respectable and disreputable elite. Latterly the hero takes shelter with a kung fu fighting commune of transsexuals. It’s that kind of film.
Inspiration seems to come from Hindu mythology, but cinematically director Patel evokes Leone, Bruce Lee, Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 1, the John Wick series [it’s namechecked!] and just about any Jason Stathan martial art extravaganza. The editing is faster than lightening. The photography is very dark and curiously focused, aligned as if we are always looking up from beneath everyone’s knees. This rat’s eye view of the world feels entirely appropriate for the distressing content and filthy people involved.
I can’t tell you if Monkey Man is any good – I don’t feel qualified to attach value to any of these modern ultra-violent thrillers – but I can tell you it overstays itself at a wearisome two hours.
We watched this last year. It's pretty fantastic with a great overall sense of scale and a real wallop of an ending. Martin Scorsese lists it as one of his absolute favorite films and I can see why.
Back In Black 2024
I don’t know enough about Amy Winehouse to tell if this film is a dramatically altered/sanitised/lawyer friendly version of her life or not. I can say that the actress playing Amy was pretty good and her singing sounded enough like Amy’s to pass although I believe that strong fans weren’t pleased.
There were the usual plot beats that one finds in any star musician’s biopic, plus enough nods to “girl power” to please a young female target audience. The supporting cast were all adequate to good. The film was directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, whose husband Aaron has been mentioned in these pages more than once as a possible 007.
THE BANK JOB (2008)
Any film that’s going to kick off proceedings with the opening bars of Get It On by T-Rex is getting my vote. The Bank Job isn’t about glam rock although it is about surface values, which is about as deep as any characterisation goes in this good looking, entertaining and engaging heist movie. Writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais take for inspiration a real life robbery carried out by Brian Reader, the same crook who masterminded the Hatton Garden Job, which has also made it onto celluloid. Reader always denied his involvement, but the men eventually captured were all his associates.
This version of the events of that real Baker Street Robbery (11 Sept 1971) retains much genuine detail, but drastically alters plenty of fact and turns the escapade into fun fiction, with an edge. The screenplay has humour and plenty of twists as a bunch of amateur thieves set out to steal the contents of a safe deposit vault. Unknown to them, members of the local underworld, an unscrupulous brothel madam and a reactionary Black Power politician all store their secrets in the same vault. The thieves end up with more than just the police hunting them down – gangsters, bent coppers, porn kings and MI5 all want to recover the contents of various safety boxes.
Jason Stathan shines as Terry Leather, a family man with a dodgy past and an unshaven chin who becomes the figurehead of the operation. Stathan proves again, as he did in Snatch and Spy, that he can act really well when he needs to. Leather has been set up by Saffron Burrows’s ignoble Martine, who in turn has been coerced by MI5 in their attempt to recover incriminating photos of Princess Margaret. Into the mix is thrown Micheal X [Peter de Jersey], a real figure whose activities as a self-styled black revolutionary brought him into conflict with the British authorities in the UK and his native Trinidad. Most of the sequences involving Micheal X are genuine incidents: early on we see him chain up and torture a white landlord using a slave collar; later there is a clever scene where he holds court at a dinner party attended by his biographer John Stevenson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and the US lawyer William Kunstler, who all supported his civil rights propaganda. Our own Colin Salmon crops up as one of Micheal X’s followers, swiftly seducing Hattie Morohan’s naïve secret agent Gale Benson. [In real life Benson was a very attractive figure in London’s high society, murdered in Trinidad on Micheal X’s orders for ridiculously petty reasons; her death led to his eventual death sentence in 1975.] David Suchet’s calmly menacing pornographer Lew Vogel is a composite of several true-life Soho gangsters. The cast features a roster of known faces who flit in and about the action with much suitability; the eagle-eyed will notice Rolling Stone Mick Jagger as a worried looking security guard. Nobody feels out of place among the flares, bad beer, pay phones and black marias, although they do film some scenes on conspicuously modern underground carriages.
As always with these kind of movies, a series of fortuitous events get the gang into and out of trouble. Tension mounts effectively. Antipodean director Roger Donaldson does a decent job of propelling the narrative quickly, concisely and with some authority. The Bank Job isn’t a flashy ‘let’s edit the balls out of this thing’ kind of movie. It is solid, effective and purposeful with enough neat touches to remind us we are in the cinematic world of crime. It has probably passed him by now, but Donaldson would be a good shout for a Bond movie.
I’ve watched The Bank Job three or four times and it never fails to entertain, retaining its slice of downbeat seventies experience while piling on the necessary elements of intrigue, suspense and sharp, lad’s own humour. It was very successful and deserved to be.
RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975)
This isn’t the first time I’ve reviewed this effective exploitation movie in this thread, but it’s a movie I keep coming back to watch because it is everything that is required in this perfect example of the genre.
After atmospheric credits, where Leonard Rosenman’s sinister music plays while fog rises from behind the silhouette of a malevolent looking tree, we are quickly introduced to best friends and business partners Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. Together with their wives Loretta Swit and Lara Parker they take off for a hard earned vacation in Oates’s brand new, state of the art RV. At the end of the first day they set up camp by an isolated creek. Late that night, while sharing a few drinks, the two men witness the execution and sacrifice of a young woman by a group of Satanists. When the coven discover that they are being watched, it marks the beginning of a cross state pursuit, with the couples not knowing where or who to turn to for help.
Jack Starrett keeps his direction extremely tight, and at 84 minutes the film barely stops for breath, racking up tension filled chases with moments of extreme suspense. An atmosphere of eerie creepiness pervades the movie in the non-action scenes, ratcheting up the suspenseful mood of the movie. Starrett was also an actor (and was memorable as the sadistic deputy in First Blood who falls from the helicopter) and handles the tense script by exploitation legends Wes Bishop and Lee Frost with masterful assurance (he also plays a bit part in this movie).
Warren Oates delivers another first class performance, he had the ability to make his characters seem so believable and real, and he interacts well with Peter Fonda, who also delivers one of the better performances of his post Easy Rider years. Swit and Parker are not really given much to do, but they look scared and scream hysterically in all the right places. The ending is a cracker, too.
Race With The Devil deserves to be seen, hopefully, this review might inspire a few people to watch it.
After missing out on TMWTGG at the Prince Charles due to a sudden work committment, this evening I took in that Ian Fleming biopic you guys all reviewed recently:
GOLDENEYE (1989)
Anglia Television’s version of the life of Ian Lancaster Fleming is enjoyable enough in a sort of dandified fashion. The film is based on John Pearson’s biography, but is elaborated on quite dramatically. Pearson’s work was just about the best version of Fleming’s life around at the time. From my reading some years ago, I don’t remember the incidents as they are described here. What I most enjoyed about it was the moments of James Bondian speculation: the transposed dialogue, people he meets, work colleagues, girlfriends, conversations, skin diving, a female adjutant pursuing him on a motorcycle, a trip to a health clinic, etc. These hint at the manner in which Fleming’s training as an observant journalist contributed to his writings. Others, such as the flirtation with a brusque, steely secretary or the man in a bar stroking a white Persian cat, reflect the film series, which is extremely odd. Hence, I found the resultant unfolding action rather amusing, which I think was the intention. Nobody in the cast really gives much of a serious face to it, not even Charles Dance, who is as dapper, charming and introspective, as I sense Fleming probably was [reading Revalator’s Interview series tells us that…]. I enjoyed Dance’s performance as Fleming immensely. There is a particular scene in the offices of The Times when he sticks a cigarette holder between his teeth and offers that snakily toothy smile that we saw on the back of all those Pan paperbacks. Very neat.
Certainly an intriguing effort. On a point of interest, is that the same edition of Birds of the West Indies that Pierce Brosnan picks up in Die Another Day?