sequel to Deadlier Than the Male (1967), this is the second of two Bulldog Drummond adventures starring Richard Johnson, who looks rather like Connery with the heavy dark brows
in the first film, Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina got all the best scenes as a pair of assassins always girlishly squabbling. In this film they attempt to improve this aspect by expanding the numbers: Daliah Levi (one of ours: The Detainer from Casino Royale) leads a group of ten sexy saboteurs. Incomprehensible plot has a variety of supersonic jets and speedboats sabotaged, and engineers murdered. Bulldog Drummond is not a spy, but rather an insurance investigator leading the life of a 60s superspy, which is why he gets involved.
Grand finale has Drummond and his two assistants enter the villains headquarters, a fantastic huge hotel like structure along the coast of North Africa, where he discovers the real villain is Carl Peterson (a character from the Bulldog Drummond novels), played by James Villiers (who looks something like Nigel Green, villain from the first adventure).
that army of beautiful saboteurs turn out to be cyborgs, if I understand correctly, with human brains replaced by electronic devices, handy on/off switches on on their necks. The medical details are not explained, they might be robots not flesh and blood but a couple of them make love with the gentlemen in the cast so cyborg makes slightly more sense, even though theres no visible frankenstein type surgical incision scars along the forehead that I noticed.
Also not explained is whether Daliah Levi has an electronic brain, or is all human. What is made clear is she has a vast wardrobe of outrageous and revealing costumes for every new scene. I was most impressed with this ensemble she wore to the big dinner-with-the-villain scene, very nice for the breast fetishists in the audience (or dinner table)
an uncredited Joanne Lumley (another of ours: one of the Angels of Death from OHMSS) plays one of the saboteurs in an early scene, in fact I think she is the first to speak. Robert Morley as a small part as some sort of restauranteur/spy.
ChrisNo1 is yet to leave his review of Carry On Loving, so I'll get in first.
This 1970 Carry On is somewhat below par though a few good ones were to follow... many of the regulars are still there, including the love triangle of Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams, actually maybe that should be a square seeing as Joan Sims would also be there as Sid's bit on the side, with a similar dynamic occurring in the next film, Carry On At Your Convenience.
This one is set at a marriage bureau, but the setting and story don't offer much save the opportunity for a series of sketches, perhaps the reason why clips from this one - usually featuring the excellent Terry Scott - would show up on those Carry On compilation clip shows, where you would be scratching your head thinking, which film was that from?
There's the sense that only the old guard are still hanging around - there's no Jim Dale, possibly being too old to play the awkward young man - but maybe he had better job offers, No Barbara Windsor either - the young generation are taken over by agreeable young actors who didn't quite make their mark in the series although I think both popped up in the next one.
This is Carry On on a shoestring, it must have been made for peanuts because as I've said, not many Carry On stars are there and even then they didn't get paid much. Much could be made of the idea they're trying to be sexier but couldn't really compete with the new permissiveness - as with Hitchcock, if your entire premise is based around societal norms, once those norms change you can lose your raison d'être. But in fairness this one isn't so different to earlier efforts like Carry On Regardless - it's just that one had a bit more conventional charm and this one is sold on its sexiness which is going a bit off. The early ones were written by Norman Hubris who also wrote episodes of The Saint and generally more restrained British comedies like Twice Around the Daffodils. According to imdb, the success of Carry On Nurse in America saw him try his luck over there and there's a stack of writing credits to his name, including The Man from UNCLE. He was replaced by Talbot Rothwell who went for more the innuendo approach which in fairness is what made the Carry Ons what they were.
Anyway, this is fun in an Easter weekend let's open another chocolate egg kind of way. The next one, Convenience, was far better but was one of the few not to turn much of a profit because it was a send up of trade unions and their target audience didn't take kindly to that. It's odd as it owed something to I'm Alright, Jack which Terry Scott had a small role in but didn't appear in this one.
My main takeaway from this is the undercurrent of bullying and deception that is the tone of many of the plot lines, the kind of practical joking played on your adversaries who are meant to generally laugh it off, - rather than the 'sexiness' of the set-ups.
Other than that, most Carry Ons had more a theme or plot to hang the innuendo on, this one doesn't so it's a bit thin but amiable enough.
However, avoid is you want to go in with no more than a taste as it gives a bit more of the plot away. Watching it, I can see how this one might go wrong so we will see. A couple of things in it that put you in mind of Bond-type stuff.
Maybe this isn't on such a different note as it is set just 2 years before Carry On Loving!
If Rob Zombie's prequel to the 60s TV show hasn't quite struck a chord with mainstream audiences this is only because it's uncompromisingly faithful to the bizarre style and dated humour of the original sitcom, a pop cultural curio, with lame jokes and all. Rob Zombie eschews contemporary narrative mores, as well as his established predilections for trailer-trash gore, to satisfy 'The Munsters' purists and play around lovingly with Universal's classic horror tropes.
To succeed in its own terms the film needs basically to do justice to the parts of Herman and Lily: this it certainly does, in both the writing and the performances. Sheri Moon Zombie channels Yvonne De Carlo very well as Lily, a 'trad goth' icon, and Jeff Daniel Phillips follows in Fred Gwynne's huge footsteps with requisite buffonish gusto. Despite the screwball comedy, I believe in these characters' romance: it's that which gives the movie heart. The recurring thematic gags of the TV show about the Munsters' uneasy but well-meaning dis/connection with early 60s Middle America are faithfully re-imagined here once the couple complete their relocation from a kooky Transylvania to the disturbingly wholesome, apple-pie neighbourhood of Mockingbird Lane.
As for Grandpa, he isn't yet Grandpa: he's just the Count - the story is about how Lily meets Herman, and the early days of their marriage - but Daniel Roebuck makes an able substitute for Al Lewis in the part. The rest of Rob Zombie's casting panders to fans of cult TV and film, including Doctor Who actor Sylvester McCoy, rolling his r's as Igor, and roles for Cassandra Peterson (TV's Elvira) and Catherine Schell (OHMSS and 'Space: 1999'), who's as beautiful as ever. Richard Brake has an hilarious double role as Herman's grave-robbing Faustian creator and as the inept Orlock, a nosferatu in the Murnau vein, disco/ techno dancer and Lily's early failed date.
The costumes are sumptious and the gaudy colour palette of the goth-schlock settings and lighting provides a perfect hue for the characters' cartoonish antics: this is the fairground ghost-train aesthetic of the original 'The Munsters', now in vibrant colour! To please fans further there's even an appearance of the family's natty hearse mobile (the Munster Koach) as featured in 'Munster, Go Home!' (1966), the only other worthwhile movie-length iteration of the show.
It's somewhat overlong, sagging a little here and there, but as an afficianado of the TV series I love this. I'm glad Rob Zombie got here before Tim Burton.
Glad you reviewed this, Nap, so I won't need to. My memory of this film is shrouded in fog of a childhood bank holiday weekend in Morcombe, a sea front hotel and nowhere to go, nothing to see because the weather was so inclement. Those were the days when northern seaside hotels had a television salon and some old guy would hog the viewing schedule. So that wet holiday it was Carry On Loving or nowt.
Not a good film. You are right in that Loving returns the franchise to the 'sketch' format presented by Norman Hudis for Carry On Regardless. It didn't work then and was hence never reused until this effort. The final time the format was attempted came with 1978's Carry On Emmanuelle. That was a disaster of some enormity. The films were best when they had some form of coherent story to play with and an institution to take the mickey out of of. Doesn't this one end with a food fight as well? Oh dear. They did that far better in Bugsy Malone and that was a kids movie. Carry On Loving is wrong, wrong, wrong across the board.
A not over successful CBS television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous gothic horror novel. Jack Palance is more than adequate as the titular blood sucking Count, which surprises me, demonstrating that he really could act. He’s aided by some exceptional sound effects editing which amplify the snarls, spits and bellows his version of Dracula intones when on the prowl. The remainder of the mostly British cast are only fair to decent, Nigel Davenport [Van Helsing] and Simon Ward are among them. Some blood, lots of cheap day-for-night shooting and plenty of rummaging about in knackered castles is the order of the day. The film begins with a marvellous crane shot of a wolf pack chasing a horse and carriage to Castle Dracula. It’s all downhill from there.
Of most interest to fans of vampire cinema, director Dan Curtis and writer Richard Matheson [famous from Roger Corman’s ‘Poe’ cycle] decide to make a clear link between the fictional Count Dracula and the historical Prince Vlad Dracul of Transylvania, slayer of the Ottomans and vicious Impaler. They also redefine the Count’s neck lusting of Lucy Westenra into something akin to a romantic beguiling; she is a dead ringer [excuse the pun] for Vlad’s wife who died while he was off vanquishing Turks. This distinct connection was never made before. Dracula’s further pursuit of Mina Harker seems to be carried out merely as revenge after Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood spoil his earth-carrying coffins. The change in story is noteworthy because the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola cinema version made such a huge play of the very same angle, claiming to be the first film to present this particular supernatural era-spanning romance. Clearly it wasn’t. Compounding the copyright, Palance’s prince even wears battle armour similar to that donned by Gary Oldman when impersonating his own Vlad Dracul.
The title card omits the “A” and the Italian title reads as For A Fistful Of Dollars which ties in to the sequel For A Few Dollars More. Clint Eastwood travelled to Spain to make this spaghetti western during the break in his TV series Rawhide, and the rest is history, as they say. Unreleased in the US and Britain until 1967 (after the two sequels had been made) the trilogy was initially greeted with universal disdain by movie critics, which reinforces my opinion that they are clueless and not worth reading, much better to read the reviews of ordinary filmgoers on sites like this. Most of the cast used American sounding pseudonyms.
Based on the Japanese film Yojimbo this has a confident stranger turn up in a town ruled by two opposing families and he cleverly sets them up against each other whilst earning his fistful of dollars from both parties. Sergio Leone directs with great style and his use of close-ups and other tropes like a character becoming visible after a smoke filled screen clears, would pervade into latter films. Ennio Morricone’s score would influence a whole generation of westerns to follow.
Eastwood’s Man With No Name character would become the formula for a whole host of western pulp paperback series in the 70’s. I first saw this at the cinema on a double bill with a Bond movie (YOLT, I think, but not certain) and it made a decent pairing and several more Eastwood/Bond double bills would follow.
In this modern world of so called “influencers” ( a joke in itself), this is truly influential and unmissable viewing.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
the trilogy was initially greeted with universal disdain by movie critics, which reinforces my opinion that they are clueless and not worth reading, much better to read the reviews of ordinary filmgoers on sites like this.
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but sites like this did not exist in 1964. I wonder how word spread about such films in the day? as fars I understand these were popular hits upon release in America, and influenced New Hollywood.
without checking I assume modern day critics all claim to know how important these films are to film history, and inherently "good" regardless of historic import. I know it works like that for music, many of the most historically important albums were trashed or ignored upon release, and references like the Rolling Stone Record Guide tended to replace their original reviews in later editions as consensus evolved.
I tried to find some reviews of the Dollars trilogy, and found this thread on a Leone fan forum: Reviews at time of movie release
it says Pauline Kael hated Good Bad and the Ugly but does not quote her.
Roger Ebert is quoted, and this is interesting:
"I [first] saw [Good Bad and the Ugly] sitting in the front row of the balcony of the Oriental Theatre, whose vast wide screen was ideal for Leone's operatic compositions. I responded strongly, but had been a movie critic less than a year, and did not always have the wisdom to value instinct over prudence. Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art"
...interesting because Ebert championed Russ Meyer of all the disreputable fimmakers and wrote one of his films (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). He usually likes some weird trashy cult type stuff, and therefor I usually look for his reviews. Three stars is still pretty good even if he later decided it was worth four.
I would like to see what Kael said. She trashed some of my favourite films ever, but expresses her opinions very well so is worth reading
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edit: here is Pauline Kael's review of Good Bad and the Ugly . its not true she "hated" it, she does seem fascinated by the question of how a foreigner recreates an American genre. She specifically argues Leone gets the scale wrong and loses the human element. which is weird, because when I watch John Ford for example the main thing I always notice is the scale of the landscape makes the humans seem to have no place here. but Ford's characters were better defined.
Pauline Kael doesn't specifically state what the western hero stands for, so she's making an assumption without verification. Leone's western movies deliberately twisted the idea of a western hero, and Kael, unlike the audiences she mentions, misses this. They got it, she and many other critics didn't. Retrospectively most now do.
Regards A Fistful of Dollars, Nov 1964, Variety Magazine:
"Crackerjack western made in Italy and Spain by a group of Italians and an international cast with James Bondian vigour and tongue-in-cheek approach to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons. Early Italo figures indicate it's a major candidate to be sleeper of the year. Also that word-of-mouth, rather than cast strength or ad campaign, is a true selling point... This is a hard hitting item, ably directed, splendidly lensed, neatly acted, which has all the ingredients wanted by action fans and then some."
And Dario Argento, when he was a critic, before his film career took off:
"My reaction to the first Leone picture was enthusiastic, but the other Italian critics mainly said it was a terrible picture. Too crude in every way... I went to the Supercinema in Rome to see it with three young friends. We were surprised. Surprised because this was a western we dreamed of seeing - the historical western was not so inventive, not so crazy, not so stylish, not so violent."
Leone recalled his pet 'enemy' screenwriter Ageo Savioli gave the film a glowing assessment, ["It was a thoughtful review, which even suggested connections between Fistful and the works of John Ford."] before learning that the American director 'Bob Robertson' was Leone's pseudonym.
All quotes from Something to do with Death by Christopher Frayling, 2000.
Over the last decade Jonathan Sothcott has been prolific in releasing a series of British movies, usually of the “cockney geezer” gangster kind. They are low budget and usually around the 90 minute mark with violence and sex in abundance. What’s not to like? Well, when they star actors with some charisma, like Ian Ogilvy, it all works fine, but in this case soap-opera actor Billy Murray hasn’t got the same magnetic presence and it all looks a bit cartoonish.
Crime boss John Morgan (Murray) returns to London from Turkey and straight into a confrontation with Scotland Yard copper Frank Conway (Nick Moran) and criminal overlord Damien Osbourne (Bruce Payne). He also has family problems with his younger brother and nephew who are at loggerheads. His daughter, played by Sir Roger’s granddaughter Ambra Moore, introduces him to her new girlfriend Zoe at a family dinner which he arranges to reconcile the family so they can all move forward peacefully - it doesn’t quite work out the way John intends.
For a film of this type it gets strangely bogged down in a lot of uninteresting chat which is supposed to be relevant but isn’t. Our own Julian Glover turns up as a crooked solicitor in a scene he is obviously enjoying but the acting plaudits have to go to Lucy Aarden as Zoe who gives a great performance and outshines everyone else.
The direction by James Crow is as flat as a pancake, but it is mercifully short at 82 minutes, so not all bad.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
In this sequel to Our Man Flint, James Coburn returns as the supercool secret agent, this time up against a feminist organisation who have kidnapped the President and replaced him with a double. Released only three months before YOLT this steals some of the thunder from that film with the climactic spacecraft scenes, which are actually superior in quality with a budget a third of the price. The sets, of course, pale into insignificance compared to the wonderful volcano, but this is a lot of fun only hampered by some talky padding and an uninspiring weak female lead in Jean Hale. It would have been far better to have given the role to Yvonne Craig who plays the sexy ballerina and in which way Coburn has a genuine rapport with.
The Flint duo of films were the best of the multitude of spy spoofs that invaded the 60’s. The Austin Powers films (which I dislike) would parody these in particular (why parody a parody.? Pointless.)
Good fun.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The BBC's Easter showing of The Sound of Music (1965)
Much-misunderstood battle of the sexes psychodrama. A single Viennese baroness, on the cusp of middle age, hopes to win the heart and hand in marriage of a handsome eligible widower of some wealth who lives in the outskirts of Salzburg. However, she reckons without the presence of sly ingenue called Maria who has her own designs on the naval captain.
The piece is essentially a reworking of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca - the twist being that the fiancé ought to be more of a match for the established housekeeper, given the age reversal.
Film students are divided over whether The Sound of Music is an allegory of the Catholic Church’s instinct for self-preservation - if so, it’s a mixed message as it’s made clear early on that it regards Maria as a dangerous influence, a viper in the bosom, ‘a willow the whip, a clown… she’ll out pester any pest, drive a hornet from its next’ so the situation is made pretty obvious. She is cast out by the Reverend Mother, much in the manner of Eve in search of Adam and an apple.
But it’s also said to represent the rise of Hitler, with both the aristocracy and flippant Viennese city dwellers fatally underestimating the young, upwardly mobile corporal and his hold on simple and backward country folk and their affiliation with Grimm’s fairy tales.
Now some of you are probably thinking, what’s Napoleon Plural on about now, he’s making merry with a beloved bit of family viewing. Of course, what I describe is not quite the film you sit down to every Bank Holiday Monday. Filming for the above treatment was well underway when the original von Trapp family got wind of it and - understandably unimpressed with its depiction of the matriarch as scheming sociopath - had American lawyers threaten to shut it down. With a million dollar budget at stake, scenes were dropped and rewrites hastily ordered, including the addition of musical numbers. That is why, unusually for a musical, you won’t see the local Austrian actors doing any complex dance steps - they simply weren’t able to do that while the singing voices could be easily dubbed - by American kids of course, including speaking voices. The rest - rightly or wrongly - is cinema history.
The opening scene, in which the young Fraulein Maria is discovered in a compromising position with the Abbey gamekeeper in the shed was replaced by the Lindt chocolate box aerial opener of the Austrian alps. That the film spends so much time on an early account of Maria in effect grooms the audience just as she would goes on to groom the Captain’s children, though a chilling scene in which the Austrian kids relate in chilling detail their favourite horror tableaus in a night-time chat hosted by their new governess - sort of Grimm’s greatest hits - was reworked into the mawkish song My Favourite Things.
Likewise, thanks to a few cut-ins, the scene in which the young nun inflicts psychological torture on the children during dinner - the original scene made it clear that she had wormed their most horrible secrets out of them via the housekeeper and she may just be about to reveal all unless they allow her to stay, is transformed into a - mostly - piece of light comedy.
But what is amazing you’ll find is just how much of the original treatment makes it into the final film. The first meeting between the baroness and the young fraulein, for instance. Here the novice nun is bang to rights - she’s placed her kids, one of them a mere toddler, in a dangerous situation on the river where the boat capsizes. (Some have suggested that the original treatment saw the murderous Maria proceed to bump off the children one by one - sort of Kind Hearts for Coronets - but this is unconfirmed.)
Sure that a sacking is about to take place, the baroness tactfully withdraws - a tactical error that underestimates her opponent, in fact suggests she doesn’t even recognise her as an opponent.
Despite her guilt, Maria engages in gaslighting, turning the blame on the Captain in a barnstorming tour de force performance by Julie Andrews. We see Maria, hitherto the cautious strategist, throw everything at it, weaponising her sex to goad the Captain out of his comfort zone. and Just as it could go either way, we hear the sound of the children singing - in a state of vulnerability and bewilderment, the lonely and widowed Captain von Trapp relents from his task in hand. Not since Demi Moore winged it in the final courtroom scenes of Disclosure, almost turning the tables on her opponent Michael Douglas, would anything in cinema history come to close.
Upon such moments, fate and history can turn. From that scene on, the baroness doesn’t stand a chance. When she attempts to regain the initiative by suggesting a ball - in which of course the Viennese society lady would be in her element, we see her briefly and for the only time win the happy appreciation of the von Trapp children who are delighted to see their father come round. The wily Maria curtails this immediately by ordering them to bed, allowing her to regroup.
Thereafter, the supposedly young and innocent nun weaponises the children against the interloper at every turn. It’s a devastating depiction of outright cruelty, the established and complacent world order no match for a new amoral hardness. The ball goes ahead, but Maria stages an alternative tableau with von Trapp’s children outside, to lure their father away from the bright lights. For all that, they are allowed to steal the show with a piece of fluff orchestrated by you know who, at every turn determined to make herself indispensable while - you will notice - never actually doing any schooling that might make her unpopular with her charges.
Original treatments included a Black Narcissus-style showdown at a clifftop abbey between the baroness and her young love rival, another saw a dispute over a child’s welfare in which the older woman was framed and then consigned to a Bavarian asylum for the rest of her days, while Maria ate cake in the country mansion that was meant to be hers. There is some talk that in luring the Captain and their kids away from the house, Maria’s aim was simply place them in the clutches of Nazi Germany - neutral Swizterland is nowhere near Salzburg - so allowing the house to be appropriated as a Nazi stronghold. The fate of the children and the Captain is left unclear.
After the runaway success of the eventual musical, the cast were under strict orders to never mention the original treatment - this is proven by the fact that Christoper Plummer went to his death never mentioning anything of it, and nor has Julie Andrews.
Good review, @CoolHandBond. I've only seen a bit of the first Derek Flint film on TV many years ago. If I remember correctly that was the one that had a plot about an evil organisation changing the weather for their own nefarious ends. Your comment about parodying a parody reminds me of a review for Casino Royale (1967) that I read in a TV magazine back in 1997 - that it was proof that you shouldn't spoof a spoof! 😀
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Stephen King wrote this American version of the Amicus portmanteau British horror movies of the 60’s and 70’s. Linked by a roaming cat we get three stories and the first involves James Woods as a smoker who signs up with Quitters Inc. who claim to have a 100% success rate in getting people to quit smoking. It’s not long before he realises that not abiding by the rules is not good for his family. The second story leads to a man being made to circumnavigate a ledge outside a penthouse apartment to save the life of his lover. The final story has a small troll terrorising a young girl in her bedroom.
All three stories are pretty good, the first one steals the ending of a Roald Dahl story but is effective all the same. The second is very tense, especially for those who suffer from vertigo. The third is the weakest and the only one that King did not adapt from one of his own published short stories.
I like the anthology horror format in movies and this is nicely done.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
starring Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest who has learned the true identity of a killer while taking confession, but cannot reveal the truth because of his vows even when he himself becomes the prime suspect. Also Anne Baxter as the MP's wife Clift was in love with before taking his vows (another secret he cannot tell) and Karl Malden as the cop who accuses him.
Best part of the film by far is that it was filmed on location in the old part of Quebec City, beautiful architecture and cobblestone streets. Typical Hitchcock climax shows off the Château Frontenac hotel.
Otherwise this is a strangely oldfashioned film, made just as Hitchcock was about to enter his most creative phase. In black and white, and very talky without much of the black humour or wild camera experiments we can usually expect.
I don't know enough about Hitchcock's career behind the scenes, but it seems he had a dry stretch between Notorious (1946) and Rear Window (1954), with Strangers on a Train being the only really essential film in between. Guess that happens when you make 50 odd films, and looking at his filmography I count at least 16 films everybody absolutely has to see. but that stretch is almost as conspicuous as his earliest British period, or the late years after The Birds as lesser Hitchcock. anybody know what was going on during those eight years?
You are right, he did have an extended dry spell of fair to middling films, during which he experimented a little with filmmaking techniques. He used colour for the first time, tried to make Rope to look like one seamless take, made Dial M for Murder in 3D - pretty certain Rear Window was originally conceived for 3D also until Hitch saw how dodgy it looked on Dial M. He had a rum spread of films in the thirties too, after Blackmail, not really recovering until The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. However, I would say all his films are worth watching as they demonstrate the craft of building a film and its story, sometimes a little too obviously, but always with effortless brio.
Rope and Dial M... I'm tempted to say are essential, but theyre mostly interesting for technical experiments, and for their stars (Stewart and Kelly respectively). whereas Strangers... is one of those Hitchcock films where people still write essays decades later analysing the abnormal psychology and how the filmmaking supports that psychology (and its got that carousel climax). That might be the dividing line for defining essential Hitchcock, which specific films have people written doctoral theses about? out of 50 odd films thatd still be a lot of films, I'm sure, but itd be some more than others
I'm just wondering why Hitchcock made a string of mostly lesser films before hitting his greatest period in the 50s. I know his earliest British films, before the Man who knew too Much, he was basically an employee making the films he was assigned. The Lodger and Blackmail stand out because they are so prototypical, but mostly theres comedies, romances, boxing films, subjects I've yet to motivate myself to watch.
I've read he had a lot of interference from Selznick and other studio bosses when he first moved to Hollywood, so even though his early 40s films are almost all classics he was still the one being treated as cattle. Then he seems to lose inspiration after Notorious, and then eight years later he begins that run from Rear Window through to The Birds of (lets say some of) the greatest films of all time. Rear Window is almost like a comeback film. So why was he in a relative slump for those eight years? what suddenly changed when he got to Rear Window?
and I agree all 50 odd films are worth watching, theres always signature Hitchcock touches to be spotted. The Pleasure Garden for example, his first film ever, is the story of two showgirls, doesnt sound like typical Hitchcock fare. He himself claimed The Lodger was the first true Hitchcock film. But nearly the first shot of The Pleasure Garden is a man in the audience using his opera glasses to zoom in on the dancers' legs; even in this unlikely debut, he's implicating the audience as voyeur from the very beginning! you wouldn't catch that if you decided to skip lesser Hitchcock.
'Jason Lives' is a slasher horror pic which manages to be both disturbing and tongue-in-cheek, preparing the way for movies like 'Scream'. By this point in the 'Friday 13th' series it strains credulity to the limit that folk still regard Camp Crystal Lake (or Camp Blood, as it's now dubbed) a choice location for a vacation!
In the opening scene a couple of ill-fated dudes dig up Jason's grave, driven by a foolish notion of burning his remains and consigning him to hell forever. This nicely tips the hat to the Golden Age of Universal horror and (especially) to Hammer. A resurgent Jason acquires supernatural invincibility, a talent for relentlessly returning from the dead. The problem is that, although this invites comparisons with Karloff's Frankenstein Monster or Christopher Lee's Dracula, the bemasked killing behemoth which is Jason entirely lacks the pathos of the former or the transgressive charisma of the latter. Indeed, I've never understood why Jason built up such a fan following - or Michael Myers, for the matter of that.
Part VI has some rules of engagement for Jason: he'll pass on preying on child campers but he regards their hormonal camp supervisors as fair game, together with cops, comedy paintballers and gravediggers - or anyone else unfortunate enough to cross his path. It couldn't and shouldn't be any other way, of course, but, in-world, this modicum of restraint on his part means that he isn't a completely indiscriminate monster.
The 'final girl' (Jennifer Cooke) is plucky and sexual, has plenty of agency and ends up putting paid to Jason in the lake with a motorised boat propeller.
It's cute that Jason gets his own gunbarrel moment at the top of this movie - a cheeky reference to Bond, during the titles. Also, 'Jason Lives' was released a year before TLD, which makes me wonder whether the black humour of the SAS paintballing business in TLD's PTS - "You're dead!" - owes something to the paintballers' encounter with Jason here.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I watched this by chance (it was my mate's turn to pick) and it wouldn't normally have been the kind of film I would like. No surprises that I didn't much, then.
Matt Damon stars in the story of how Nike came to hire Michael Jordan for their advertising. A starry supporting cast (Affleck himself, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman) and a story I for one knew nothing about though it might be common knowledge to those more interested in sports than me (which is most of the planet).
Jordan himself isn't directly shown, just hints and glimpses of a tall young actor, and the focus for his side is on his mother played by Davis- who is fine, of course. Damon and Affleck are their customary reliable selves.
Not a film I'd want to see again, but competent.
Edit - it's set in 1984 and the music features songs from that year. That part my similarly aged friend and I enjoyed!
I've a bit of a treat for you all. I'll be releasing this to the press on Monday but I wanted to give ajb first dibs.
Some of you will have heard rumours of a planned sequel to The Sound of Music, said to be scheduled for 1968, though it's seen as very much an urban myth. On paper it made perfect sense, given that the studio 20th Century Fox was in financial difficulty in the early 60s due to calamitous overspending on the epic Cleopatra, then the cancelled Something's Got To Give, due to the death of its star Marilyn Monroe. It was chiefly the tremendous success of The Sound of Music that put the studio back in the black (war epic The Longest Day also helped). So you can see that while the musical did not lend itself to a sequel in any way, that rarely stops a studio from at least trying (something similar was mooted for Titanic, in its day the most successful film of all time.)
Like I say, it's all urban myth though a photo did emerge of Christoper Plummer in lederhosen against a backdrop of 1960s Salzburg. I can now reveal that in fact filming was well underway and have in fact obtained footage from a source that I cannot disclose.
One key problem was how to make a sequel when - as I have pointed out - none was artistically required. Not only that, few of the stars were willing to reprise their role - indeed, after the costly antics of previous studio flops, the one appeal of TSOM was its cast of relative unknowns. The one they did have on board was Christopher Plummer. Set in modern day Salzburg, the treatment saw Captain von Trapp return to Austria - having spent two decades abroad in the US - to exact revenge on the betrayers who had sold his family out and usurped the family mansion.
A sort of ill-advised dark comedy of the kind the 1960s oft specialised in, the tone from the footage I viewed varies enormously. Much of what we see consists of Plummer taking a tourist guide to Salzburg on the vengeance trail against closet Nazis, treacherous Catholics, perfidious manservants, each death artfully appropriate to the target. The opening, however, in which von Trapp speeds along the summer autobahn in his open top sports car really does have you comparing the dates of The Italian Job, released around the same time.
No singer - Plummer's singing voice was dubbed in The Sound of Music - the film attempts to fit its musical brief by seeing our leading man put on a vinyl record after each slaying - the song in question a nod to the manner of death. It is thought that the studio was branching out into pop around this time and this would help furnish a lucrative soundtrack.
It's thought that Plummer's weariness with the success of the hit musical may have prompted him to embrace this ill-advised sequel - certainly there's no sign of Julie Andrews here though as I say, none of the other actors were big names anyway - one bit of dialogue suggests that von Trapp continues his tragic theme on account of his entire family having been wiped out in a plane crash, the pilot having been distracted by some impromptu onboard karaoke. Certainly the tone is very odd - sort of Death Wish, Kind Hearts & Coronets and The Odessa File all in one.
There is some lovely footage of 1960s Salzburg on offer, albeit the kind you see in Talking Pictures TV's The Footage Detectives. A poster depicting Plummer at his most vulpine, smirking a Dalton smile with the tagline 'These are a few of his favourite things!" suggests it might have worked. But from the footage I viewed - Plummer in fine comic form in some scenes - it's hard to see how this would have been a hit require by the studio. And of course it wasn't, as three weeks into filming The Sound of Murder - yes, they were going with that title -was canned.
Students of my previous piece on the first film won't be surprised to learn that the actual Captain Von Trapp - still alive and kicking in the US - hit the studio with a law suit (having changed leaders during this time, nobody flagged up the same problem that had beset the first film). Being low budget - no real stars, no expensive studio sets - helped them cut their losses while Plummer demanded and got significant hush money on top of his original fee - he never mentioned this sequel. Footage was kept safely in a studio vault though rumours persisted that some copies were spirited behind the Iron Curtain making investigation a near impossibility. I myself was only tipped off by a Belgrade builder who did a lovely job on my side wall.
If you want more details, pick up a copy of Monday's Daily Mail - they've promised a double-page spread on it, though it might be held off in favour of '200 Benefits of Brexit' - we shall see...
That's quite a scoop. Fascinating stuff. And from the sound (of music) of it, this unmade sequel might well have been more my cup of tea than the original film that we do have.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Lee Cronin's demonic spatter fest lacks much of the humour which Sam Raimi so memorably blended with horror in the original 'Evil Dead' movies (1981 and 1987), but 'Rise' does unfold like a proper 'Evil Dead' entry, with scares aplenty, and it's a cut above Fede Alvarez's 2013 joyless re-make.
'Rise' marks a departure in that, this time, the unleashed demons prey on a family, likeably leftfield characters accommodated in a condemned building in LA, rather than on a group of young friends hanging out in a shack in the woods (though the 'classic' shack set-up is briefly tributed in a prologue: the main body of the movie is a flashback from this). It's this which suppresses humour in favour of more disturbing themes: the shift of focus away from the ordeals of the likes of Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his chums in the 80s towards a struggling family being destroyed by demonic possession. (By the way, there's no cameo for Executive Producer Campbell in this one. Remembering 2013, I did sit through the full end credits of 'Rise' to see if Ash would butt in for a final word again, MCU-style, but mercifully no!)
To be fair, the Alvarez revival had rather a neat conceit going for it: on that occasion, the young people's purpose in gathering in the woods was to support one of their number, an addict (Jane Levy), in going cold turkey and 'overcoming her demons'. Thus the themes of demonic possession and body horror carried some metaphorical significance, before it all escalated into full-scale spatter.
In 'Rise', if there is a conceit, it's to do with troubled maternity. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) is the mother killed and possessed by a demon - a frightening figure indeed, given that Ellie's been raising three kids alone. (There's something about Ms Sutherland's good looks which seems so right for this genre: her facial bone structure screams horror diva!) The heroine of the piece is Ellie's sister Beth (Lilly Sullivan), a drop-out guitar technician dealing with an unplanned pregnancy - or failing to deal with it. Beth's situation resonates. When all the blood-soaked craziness kicks off, the movie seems at times, probably inadvertently, to be promoting a pro-life agenda, punishing Beth for the mess she's in personally.
'Rise' delivers its visceral thrills and spills in ways which will satisfy horror fans nostalgic for the age of the 'video nasty'. Gore freaks will particularly welcome the idea, pitched in the movie's lore, that the only way to defeat the demons is through total body dismemberment! My main criticism of Cronin's aesthetics is that it all becomes tiringly unrelenting. The film needs a quieter moment or two during the final act, for dramatic pause and reflection. (I'm thinking of Friedkin's masterpiece, 'The Exorcist', when Kinderman interviews Chris or when Merrin and Karras take time out, part way through the exorcism.)
My other criticism is that the final act becomes distractingly allusive, connecting in self-indulgent ways with movies outside the 'Evil Dead' series. It's not as if the characters aren't well enough drawn to merit a clear trajectory in their own terms. There's an obvious replay of an iconic moment from Kubrick's 'The Shining', seemingly having no point to it other than the allusion itself. Then Beth and Kassie (Nell Fisher) turn into Ripley and Newt of James Cameron's 'Aliens' - which amplifies maternity themes again, but 'in quotation marks'. Finally Beth gets to deliver a punchline when despatching the demon, becoming a Sarah Connor figure (James Cameron again). Admittedly, it's a good line!
Worth seeing, but not for the fainthearted.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Well, the Arsenal are on the slide, the weather is hit and miss, St George’s Day is around the corner, so too a coronation, I've been drinking at the Cask and I’m running short of cash. A Saturday night in then and time for my annual trawl through the adrenaline fuelled testosterone pumped two hours of action spy thriller that is XXX.
Vin Diesel was still on the up when he made this preposterous James Bond rip off that out does its contemporary by being simple to understand and packing its scenario with enough guns, bombs, cars, stunts, exotic women, Czech landscapes, deadly viruses and death metal to keep the post-Cold War PS2 & Xbox generations happy. Xander Cage is a law breaking daredevil who advertises his brand of rebellion via the internet. Mr Gibbons thinks he can be of use to the N.S.A. in tracking a mystery microchip which has gone missing in Prague, chiefly because Xander’s type of rebel is exactly the kind of dude the dastardly terror organisation Anarchy 99 will welcome into their midst.
The movie kicks off with a tuxedoed spy being pursued and eliminated at a fiery rock concert. He’s as out of place as James Bond was in the Rio Carnival. Next we meet our hero, performing crazy parachute stunts from Corvette sports cars, rather the kind of thing our James Bond might do. The mission has to delay a little while Xander Cage is recruited into the fold, but these scenes allow us to appreciate his endeavours and his bad ass attitude as much as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr Gibbons does. Thrown reluctantly into an undercover operation, Xander behaves like a rough house, arrogant, American adrenaline junkie and naturally ingratiates himself quickly into the leadership of the terror group. Here he meets the delectable delights of Asia Argento’s undercover F.S.B. agent and takes to swapping one liners with all and sundry, including a college fresh scientist who resembles a poshed up version of Q.
The plot vanishes into the background and if you concentrate too hard you’ll notice all the holes in it. Never mind. Action and more action is the order of the day, some of it quite worthwhile, much of it a continuous homage to all things James Bond. Given the nature of Die Another Day, which did the trick to such an excruciating degree the film ended up mocking itself, XXX comes across as gently reverential. The writer, producers and director have figured out the formula – investigation, infiltration, discovery, escape, return and destroy – and play it to the hilt and with tongue in cheek, but not lolling about in its own cleverness.
The film is well made too. Good photography, slick editing, a host of fun yet glibly unfunny villains, a beautiful girl or two, a wild thrash metal soundtrack, a decent unshowy script, starchy directing, well-performed stunts; even the impossible snowboard chase feels genuine, utilising better CGI than James Bond’s similar escapade windsurfing on sea ice.
Comparisons are not really fair, but while I can take or leave Die Another Day, this is firm watching for me. Vin Diesel pins down the lead role with less of a wink and more of a stupefied squirm of his astonished mouth. He knows it’s all well-presented garbage and plays it exactly to the audience’s expectations.
Yep. A whole lotta loud spine shaking fun is going on. Great stuff.
A Sunday night nostalgia fest on Legend, the Vintage Vault, with two brutal Hammer Horror pictures that highlight the studio’s best storytelling antics to the full.
First up is Terence Fisher’s excellent Dracula, Prince of Darkness which famously top-bills Christopher Lee as the titular Count, yet refrains from introducing him until almost two-thirds of the action has elapsed. Then, resurrected by the blood of a hapless tourist, he fails to utter a single word of dialogue. Remarkable.
Andrew Kier draws the most attention as the ruthless vampire hunter Father Sandor. He’s the Abbot of a monastery of worldly monks, who think nothing of staking the undead. Sandor warns a quartet of British tourists to avoid the castle at Karlsbad. Abandoned at sundown by their frightened coach driver, the foursome are rescued by a driverless carriage which escorts them to Castle Dracula, where they find dinner laid and a spooky manservant unpacking their luggage. Only Barbara Steele’s Helen Kent suspects all is not as it seems. The manservant is Klove, played with much creepiness and a limp by Philip Latham. He turns homicidal after sunset and then draws Miss Steele into the rejuvenated Count’s arms and fangs.
There is a tremendous looming atmosphere and a sense of impending dread throughout the opening three-quarters of an hour, as the tourists explore the castle, are confused, scared and pleasantly surprised all at once. The audience waits over and over for the appearance of Dracula. The moment of becoming is well orchestrated. The blood is redder than red should be. [Ugh.] Lee’s hand clasps the side of his tomb, the devil-ring we saw at abandoned on the tiles at the end of 1958’s Dracula clearly visible. Oh, yes, he’s back alright.
Dracula hasn’t bargained on tough as grog Father Sandor though. The writers cleverly insert elements of Bram Stoker’s original story into the screenplay, so we have the coffins travelling in a carriage, a hissing succubus, the temptation of a maiden [although she’s not a virgin; Diana Kent is married] and an interpretation of Renfield, here called Ludwig and portrayed brilliantly as a God-fearing, fly-eating simpleton by Thorley Walters. Much tension abounds.
Best of all is Suzan Farmer, who portrays the heroine. One of Hammer’s better starlets, this beautiful actress never quite gained the recognition she deserved, become type cast as a sort of corseted, bosomy blonde damsel. [I'm rather partial to corseted, bosomy, blondes... but that's another story.] Tremendously affecting, she brings scenes to life with an effortlessness that plays neatly and innocently against the thorough thespian turns of Steele and Francis Matthews, Farmer’s on-screen husband. The moment where Steele provokes her into opening a window is quite chilling, so too her mesmerism by Count Dracula. The bedroom scene where she exhibits rational fear and pleads with her husband to leave the castle is notable for not being as ham-fistedly presumptuous as usual. We genuinely believe in her uncertainties. It is no surprise to find she is on hand to deliver the first blow in Dracula’s demise, another first for women in Hammer’s generally misogynistic world.
A belter of a horror flick which doesn’t exactly terrorise, but succeeds in being exciting while suspending our disbelief beyond where it ought to stop. Probably Hammer’s best Dracula movie.
Comments
Simon also levels up when he gets control of that helmet.
Some Girls Do, 1969
currently up on youtube
sequel to Deadlier Than the Male (1967), this is the second of two Bulldog Drummond adventures starring Richard Johnson, who looks rather like Connery with the heavy dark brows
in the first film, Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina got all the best scenes as a pair of assassins always girlishly squabbling. In this film they attempt to improve this aspect by expanding the numbers: Daliah Levi (one of ours: The Detainer from Casino Royale) leads a group of ten sexy saboteurs. Incomprehensible plot has a variety of supersonic jets and speedboats sabotaged, and engineers murdered. Bulldog Drummond is not a spy, but rather an insurance investigator leading the life of a 60s superspy, which is why he gets involved.
Grand finale has Drummond and his two assistants enter the villains headquarters, a fantastic huge hotel like structure along the coast of North Africa, where he discovers the real villain is Carl Peterson (a character from the Bulldog Drummond novels), played by James Villiers (who looks something like Nigel Green, villain from the first adventure).
that army of beautiful saboteurs turn out to be cyborgs, if I understand correctly, with human brains replaced by electronic devices, handy on/off switches on on their necks. The medical details are not explained, they might be robots not flesh and blood but a couple of them make love with the gentlemen in the cast so cyborg makes slightly more sense, even though theres no visible frankenstein type surgical incision scars along the forehead that I noticed.
Also not explained is whether Daliah Levi has an electronic brain, or is all human. What is made clear is she has a vast wardrobe of outrageous and revealing costumes for every new scene. I was most impressed with this ensemble she wore to the big dinner-with-the-villain scene, very nice for the breast fetishists in the audience (or dinner table)
an uncredited Joanne Lumley (another of ours: one of the Angels of Death from OHMSS) plays one of the saboteurs in an early scene, in fact I think she is the first to speak. Robert Morley as a small part as some sort of restauranteur/spy.
ChrisNo1 is yet to leave his review of Carry On Loving, so I'll get in first.
This 1970 Carry On is somewhat below par though a few good ones were to follow... many of the regulars are still there, including the love triangle of Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams, actually maybe that should be a square seeing as Joan Sims would also be there as Sid's bit on the side, with a similar dynamic occurring in the next film, Carry On At Your Convenience.
This one is set at a marriage bureau, but the setting and story don't offer much save the opportunity for a series of sketches, perhaps the reason why clips from this one - usually featuring the excellent Terry Scott - would show up on those Carry On compilation clip shows, where you would be scratching your head thinking, which film was that from?
There's the sense that only the old guard are still hanging around - there's no Jim Dale, possibly being too old to play the awkward young man - but maybe he had better job offers, No Barbara Windsor either - the young generation are taken over by agreeable young actors who didn't quite make their mark in the series although I think both popped up in the next one.
This is Carry On on a shoestring, it must have been made for peanuts because as I've said, not many Carry On stars are there and even then they didn't get paid much. Much could be made of the idea they're trying to be sexier but couldn't really compete with the new permissiveness - as with Hitchcock, if your entire premise is based around societal norms, once those norms change you can lose your raison d'être. But in fairness this one isn't so different to earlier efforts like Carry On Regardless - it's just that one had a bit more conventional charm and this one is sold on its sexiness which is going a bit off. The early ones were written by Norman Hubris who also wrote episodes of The Saint and generally more restrained British comedies like Twice Around the Daffodils. According to imdb, the success of Carry On Nurse in America saw him try his luck over there and there's a stack of writing credits to his name, including The Man from UNCLE. He was replaced by Talbot Rothwell who went for more the innuendo approach which in fairness is what made the Carry Ons what they were.
Anyway, this is fun in an Easter weekend let's open another chocolate egg kind of way. The next one, Convenience, was far better but was one of the few not to turn much of a profit because it was a send up of trade unions and their target audience didn't take kindly to that. It's odd as it owed something to I'm Alright, Jack which Terry Scott had a small role in but didn't appear in this one.
My main takeaway from this is the undercurrent of bullying and deception that is the tone of many of the plot lines, the kind of practical joking played on your adversaries who are meant to generally laugh it off, - rather than the 'sexiness' of the set-ups.
Other than that, most Carry Ons had more a theme or plot to hang the innuendo on, this one doesn't so it's a bit thin but amiable enough.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
On a different note, the new Indiana Jones trailer has dropped.
However, avoid is you want to go in with no more than a taste as it gives a bit more of the plot away. Watching it, I can see how this one might go wrong so we will see. A couple of things in it that put you in mind of Bond-type stuff.
Maybe this isn't on such a different note as it is set just 2 years before Carry On Loving!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE MUNSTERS (2022)
If Rob Zombie's prequel to the 60s TV show hasn't quite struck a chord with mainstream audiences this is only because it's uncompromisingly faithful to the bizarre style and dated humour of the original sitcom, a pop cultural curio, with lame jokes and all. Rob Zombie eschews contemporary narrative mores, as well as his established predilections for trailer-trash gore, to satisfy 'The Munsters' purists and play around lovingly with Universal's classic horror tropes.
To succeed in its own terms the film needs basically to do justice to the parts of Herman and Lily: this it certainly does, in both the writing and the performances. Sheri Moon Zombie channels Yvonne De Carlo very well as Lily, a 'trad goth' icon, and Jeff Daniel Phillips follows in Fred Gwynne's huge footsteps with requisite buffonish gusto. Despite the screwball comedy, I believe in these characters' romance: it's that which gives the movie heart. The recurring thematic gags of the TV show about the Munsters' uneasy but well-meaning dis/connection with early 60s Middle America are faithfully re-imagined here once the couple complete their relocation from a kooky Transylvania to the disturbingly wholesome, apple-pie neighbourhood of Mockingbird Lane.
As for Grandpa, he isn't yet Grandpa: he's just the Count - the story is about how Lily meets Herman, and the early days of their marriage - but Daniel Roebuck makes an able substitute for Al Lewis in the part. The rest of Rob Zombie's casting panders to fans of cult TV and film, including Doctor Who actor Sylvester McCoy, rolling his r's as Igor, and roles for Cassandra Peterson (TV's Elvira) and Catherine Schell (OHMSS and 'Space: 1999'), who's as beautiful as ever. Richard Brake has an hilarious double role as Herman's grave-robbing Faustian creator and as the inept Orlock, a nosferatu in the Murnau vein, disco/ techno dancer and Lily's early failed date.
The costumes are sumptious and the gaudy colour palette of the goth-schlock settings and lighting provides a perfect hue for the characters' cartoonish antics: this is the fairground ghost-train aesthetic of the original 'The Munsters', now in vibrant colour! To please fans further there's even an appearance of the family's natty hearse mobile (the Munster Koach) as featured in 'Munster, Go Home!' (1966), the only other worthwhile movie-length iteration of the show.
It's somewhat overlong, sagging a little here and there, but as an afficianado of the TV series I love this. I'm glad Rob Zombie got here before Tim Burton.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8TTIqK9nFH8
Glad you reviewed this, Nap, so I won't need to. My memory of this film is shrouded in fog of a childhood bank holiday weekend in Morcombe, a sea front hotel and nowhere to go, nothing to see because the weather was so inclement. Those were the days when northern seaside hotels had a television salon and some old guy would hog the viewing schedule. So that wet holiday it was Carry On Loving or nowt.
Not a good film. You are right in that Loving returns the franchise to the 'sketch' format presented by Norman Hudis for Carry On Regardless. It didn't work then and was hence never reused until this effort. The final time the format was attempted came with 1978's Carry On Emmanuelle. That was a disaster of some enormity. The films were best when they had some form of coherent story to play with and an institution to take the mickey out of of. Doesn't this one end with a food fight as well? Oh dear. They did that far better in Bugsy Malone and that was a kids movie. Carry On Loving is wrong, wrong, wrong across the board.
DRACULA (1974)
A not over successful CBS television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous gothic horror novel. Jack Palance is more than adequate as the titular blood sucking Count, which surprises me, demonstrating that he really could act. He’s aided by some exceptional sound effects editing which amplify the snarls, spits and bellows his version of Dracula intones when on the prowl. The remainder of the mostly British cast are only fair to decent, Nigel Davenport [Van Helsing] and Simon Ward are among them. Some blood, lots of cheap day-for-night shooting and plenty of rummaging about in knackered castles is the order of the day. The film begins with a marvellous crane shot of a wolf pack chasing a horse and carriage to Castle Dracula. It’s all downhill from there.
Of most interest to fans of vampire cinema, director Dan Curtis and writer Richard Matheson [famous from Roger Corman’s ‘Poe’ cycle] decide to make a clear link between the fictional Count Dracula and the historical Prince Vlad Dracul of Transylvania, slayer of the Ottomans and vicious Impaler. They also redefine the Count’s neck lusting of Lucy Westenra into something akin to a romantic beguiling; she is a dead ringer [excuse the pun] for Vlad’s wife who died while he was off vanquishing Turks. This distinct connection was never made before. Dracula’s further pursuit of Mina Harker seems to be carried out merely as revenge after Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood spoil his earth-carrying coffins. The change in story is noteworthy because the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola cinema version made such a huge play of the very same angle, claiming to be the first film to present this particular supernatural era-spanning romance. Clearly it wasn’t. Compounding the copyright, Palance’s prince even wears battle armour similar to that donned by Gary Oldman when impersonating his own Vlad Dracul.
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964)
The title card omits the “A” and the Italian title reads as For A Fistful Of Dollars which ties in to the sequel For A Few Dollars More. Clint Eastwood travelled to Spain to make this spaghetti western during the break in his TV series Rawhide, and the rest is history, as they say. Unreleased in the US and Britain until 1967 (after the two sequels had been made) the trilogy was initially greeted with universal disdain by movie critics, which reinforces my opinion that they are clueless and not worth reading, much better to read the reviews of ordinary filmgoers on sites like this. Most of the cast used American sounding pseudonyms.
Based on the Japanese film Yojimbo this has a confident stranger turn up in a town ruled by two opposing families and he cleverly sets them up against each other whilst earning his fistful of dollars from both parties. Sergio Leone directs with great style and his use of close-ups and other tropes like a character becoming visible after a smoke filled screen clears, would pervade into latter films. Ennio Morricone’s score would influence a whole generation of westerns to follow.
Eastwood’s Man With No Name character would become the formula for a whole host of western pulp paperback series in the 70’s. I first saw this at the cinema on a double bill with a Bond movie (YOLT, I think, but not certain) and it made a decent pairing and several more Eastwood/Bond double bills would follow.
In this modern world of so called “influencers” ( a joke in itself), this is truly influential and unmissable viewing.
coolhand said:
the trilogy was initially greeted with universal disdain by movie critics, which reinforces my opinion that they are clueless and not worth reading, much better to read the reviews of ordinary filmgoers on sites like this.
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but sites like this did not exist in 1964. I wonder how word spread about such films in the day? as fars I understand these were popular hits upon release in America, and influenced New Hollywood.
without checking I assume modern day critics all claim to know how important these films are to film history, and inherently "good" regardless of historic import. I know it works like that for music, many of the most historically important albums were trashed or ignored upon release, and references like the Rolling Stone Record Guide tended to replace their original reviews in later editions as consensus evolved.
I tried to find some reviews of the Dollars trilogy, and found this thread on a Leone fan forum: Reviews at time of movie release
it says Pauline Kael hated Good Bad and the Ugly but does not quote her.
Roger Ebert is quoted, and this is interesting:
"I [first] saw [Good Bad and the Ugly] sitting in the front row of the balcony of the Oriental Theatre, whose vast wide screen was ideal for Leone's operatic compositions. I responded strongly, but had been a movie critic less than a year, and did not always have the wisdom to value instinct over prudence. Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art"
...interesting because Ebert championed Russ Meyer of all the disreputable fimmakers and wrote one of his films (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). He usually likes some weird trashy cult type stuff, and therefor I usually look for his reviews. Three stars is still pretty good even if he later decided it was worth four.
I would like to see what Kael said. She trashed some of my favourite films ever, but expresses her opinions very well so is worth reading
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edit: here is Pauline Kael's review of Good Bad and the Ugly . its not true she "hated" it, she does seem fascinated by the question of how a foreigner recreates an American genre. She specifically argues Leone gets the scale wrong and loses the human element. which is weird, because when I watch John Ford for example the main thing I always notice is the scale of the landscape makes the humans seem to have no place here. but Ford's characters were better defined.
Pauline Kael doesn't specifically state what the western hero stands for, so she's making an assumption without verification. Leone's western movies deliberately twisted the idea of a western hero, and Kael, unlike the audiences she mentions, misses this. They got it, she and many other critics didn't. Retrospectively most now do.
Regards A Fistful of Dollars, Nov 1964, Variety Magazine:
"Crackerjack western made in Italy and Spain by a group of Italians and an international cast with James Bondian vigour and tongue-in-cheek approach to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons. Early Italo figures indicate it's a major candidate to be sleeper of the year. Also that word-of-mouth, rather than cast strength or ad campaign, is a true selling point... This is a hard hitting item, ably directed, splendidly lensed, neatly acted, which has all the ingredients wanted by action fans and then some."
And Dario Argento, when he was a critic, before his film career took off:
"My reaction to the first Leone picture was enthusiastic, but the other Italian critics mainly said it was a terrible picture. Too crude in every way... I went to the Supercinema in Rome to see it with three young friends. We were surprised. Surprised because this was a western we dreamed of seeing - the historical western was not so inventive, not so crazy, not so stylish, not so violent."
Leone recalled his pet 'enemy' screenwriter Ageo Savioli gave the film a glowing assessment, ["It was a thoughtful review, which even suggested connections between Fistful and the works of John Ford."] before learning that the American director 'Bob Robertson' was Leone's pseudonym.
All quotes from Something to do with Death by Christopher Frayling, 2000.
My review was a few months back: https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1052724#Comment_1052724
NEMESIS (2021)
Over the last decade Jonathan Sothcott has been prolific in releasing a series of British movies, usually of the “cockney geezer” gangster kind. They are low budget and usually around the 90 minute mark with violence and sex in abundance. What’s not to like? Well, when they star actors with some charisma, like Ian Ogilvy, it all works fine, but in this case soap-opera actor Billy Murray hasn’t got the same magnetic presence and it all looks a bit cartoonish.
Crime boss John Morgan (Murray) returns to London from Turkey and straight into a confrontation with Scotland Yard copper Frank Conway (Nick Moran) and criminal overlord Damien Osbourne (Bruce Payne). He also has family problems with his younger brother and nephew who are at loggerheads. His daughter, played by Sir Roger’s granddaughter Ambra Moore, introduces him to her new girlfriend Zoe at a family dinner which he arranges to reconcile the family so they can all move forward peacefully - it doesn’t quite work out the way John intends.
For a film of this type it gets strangely bogged down in a lot of uninteresting chat which is supposed to be relevant but isn’t. Our own Julian Glover turns up as a crooked solicitor in a scene he is obviously enjoying but the acting plaudits have to go to Lucy Aarden as Zoe who gives a great performance and outshines everyone else.
The direction by James Crow is as flat as a pancake, but it is mercifully short at 82 minutes, so not all bad.
IN LIKE FLINT (1967)
In this sequel to Our Man Flint, James Coburn returns as the supercool secret agent, this time up against a feminist organisation who have kidnapped the President and replaced him with a double. Released only three months before YOLT this steals some of the thunder from that film with the climactic spacecraft scenes, which are actually superior in quality with a budget a third of the price. The sets, of course, pale into insignificance compared to the wonderful volcano, but this is a lot of fun only hampered by some talky padding and an uninspiring weak female lead in Jean Hale. It would have been far better to have given the role to Yvonne Craig who plays the sexy ballerina and in which way Coburn has a genuine rapport with.
The Flint duo of films were the best of the multitude of spy spoofs that invaded the 60’s. The Austin Powers films (which I dislike) would parody these in particular (why parody a parody.? Pointless.)
Good fun.
The BBC's Easter showing of The Sound of Music (1965)
Much-misunderstood battle of the sexes psychodrama. A single Viennese baroness, on the cusp of middle age, hopes to win the heart and hand in marriage of a handsome eligible widower of some wealth who lives in the outskirts of Salzburg. However, she reckons without the presence of sly ingenue called Maria who has her own designs on the naval captain.
The piece is essentially a reworking of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca - the twist being that the fiancé ought to be more of a match for the established housekeeper, given the age reversal.
Film students are divided over whether The Sound of Music is an allegory of the Catholic Church’s instinct for self-preservation - if so, it’s a mixed message as it’s made clear early on that it regards Maria as a dangerous influence, a viper in the bosom, ‘a willow the whip, a clown… she’ll out pester any pest, drive a hornet from its next’ so the situation is made pretty obvious. She is cast out by the Reverend Mother, much in the manner of Eve in search of Adam and an apple.
But it’s also said to represent the rise of Hitler, with both the aristocracy and flippant Viennese city dwellers fatally underestimating the young, upwardly mobile corporal and his hold on simple and backward country folk and their affiliation with Grimm’s fairy tales.
Now some of you are probably thinking, what’s Napoleon Plural on about now, he’s making merry with a beloved bit of family viewing. Of course, what I describe is not quite the film you sit down to every Bank Holiday Monday. Filming for the above treatment was well underway when the original von Trapp family got wind of it and - understandably unimpressed with its depiction of the matriarch as scheming sociopath - had American lawyers threaten to shut it down. With a million dollar budget at stake, scenes were dropped and rewrites hastily ordered, including the addition of musical numbers. That is why, unusually for a musical, you won’t see the local Austrian actors doing any complex dance steps - they simply weren’t able to do that while the singing voices could be easily dubbed - by American kids of course, including speaking voices. The rest - rightly or wrongly - is cinema history.
The opening scene, in which the young Fraulein Maria is discovered in a compromising position with the Abbey gamekeeper in the shed was replaced by the Lindt chocolate box aerial opener of the Austrian alps. That the film spends so much time on an early account of Maria in effect grooms the audience just as she would goes on to groom the Captain’s children, though a chilling scene in which the Austrian kids relate in chilling detail their favourite horror tableaus in a night-time chat hosted by their new governess - sort of Grimm’s greatest hits - was reworked into the mawkish song My Favourite Things.
Likewise, thanks to a few cut-ins, the scene in which the young nun inflicts psychological torture on the children during dinner - the original scene made it clear that she had wormed their most horrible secrets out of them via the housekeeper and she may just be about to reveal all unless they allow her to stay, is transformed into a - mostly - piece of light comedy.
But what is amazing you’ll find is just how much of the original treatment makes it into the final film. The first meeting between the baroness and the young fraulein, for instance. Here the novice nun is bang to rights - she’s placed her kids, one of them a mere toddler, in a dangerous situation on the river where the boat capsizes. (Some have suggested that the original treatment saw the murderous Maria proceed to bump off the children one by one - sort of Kind Hearts for Coronets - but this is unconfirmed.)
Sure that a sacking is about to take place, the baroness tactfully withdraws - a tactical error that underestimates her opponent, in fact suggests she doesn’t even recognise her as an opponent.
Despite her guilt, Maria engages in gaslighting, turning the blame on the Captain in a barnstorming tour de force performance by Julie Andrews. We see Maria, hitherto the cautious strategist, throw everything at it, weaponising her sex to goad the Captain out of his comfort zone. and Just as it could go either way, we hear the sound of the children singing - in a state of vulnerability and bewilderment, the lonely and widowed Captain von Trapp relents from his task in hand. Not since Demi Moore winged it in the final courtroom scenes of Disclosure, almost turning the tables on her opponent Michael Douglas, would anything in cinema history come to close.
Upon such moments, fate and history can turn. From that scene on, the baroness doesn’t stand a chance. When she attempts to regain the initiative by suggesting a ball - in which of course the Viennese society lady would be in her element, we see her briefly and for the only time win the happy appreciation of the von Trapp children who are delighted to see their father come round. The wily Maria curtails this immediately by ordering them to bed, allowing her to regroup.
Thereafter, the supposedly young and innocent nun weaponises the children against the interloper at every turn. It’s a devastating depiction of outright cruelty, the established and complacent world order no match for a new amoral hardness. The ball goes ahead, but Maria stages an alternative tableau with von Trapp’s children outside, to lure their father away from the bright lights. For all that, they are allowed to steal the show with a piece of fluff orchestrated by you know who, at every turn determined to make herself indispensable while - you will notice - never actually doing any schooling that might make her unpopular with her charges.
Original treatments included a Black Narcissus-style showdown at a clifftop abbey between the baroness and her young love rival, another saw a dispute over a child’s welfare in which the older woman was framed and then consigned to a Bavarian asylum for the rest of her days, while Maria ate cake in the country mansion that was meant to be hers. There is some talk that in luring the Captain and their kids away from the house, Maria’s aim was simply place them in the clutches of Nazi Germany - neutral Swizterland is nowhere near Salzburg - so allowing the house to be appropriated as a Nazi stronghold. The fate of the children and the Captain is left unclear.
After the runaway success of the eventual musical, the cast were under strict orders to never mention the original treatment - this is proven by the fact that Christoper Plummer went to his death never mentioning anything of it, and nor has Julie Andrews.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
What the f@@@ did I just read ?
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Good review, @CoolHandBond. I've only seen a bit of the first Derek Flint film on TV many years ago. If I remember correctly that was the one that had a plot about an evil organisation changing the weather for their own nefarious ends. Your comment about parodying a parody reminds me of a review for Casino Royale (1967) that I read in a TV magazine back in 1997 - that it was proof that you shouldn't spoof a spoof! 😀
To quote a popular saying in this country: I'm as confused as a recently released fart in a vicer chair! 😂
CAT’S EYE (1985)
Stephen King wrote this American version of the Amicus portmanteau British horror movies of the 60’s and 70’s. Linked by a roaming cat we get three stories and the first involves James Woods as a smoker who signs up with Quitters Inc. who claim to have a 100% success rate in getting people to quit smoking. It’s not long before he realises that not abiding by the rules is not good for his family. The second story leads to a man being made to circumnavigate a ledge outside a penthouse apartment to save the life of his lover. The final story has a small troll terrorising a young girl in her bedroom.
All three stories are pretty good, the first one steals the ending of a Roald Dahl story but is effective all the same. The second is very tense, especially for those who suffer from vertigo. The third is the weakest and the only one that King did not adapt from one of his own published short stories.
I like the anthology horror format in movies and this is nicely done.
I Confess
Hitchcock, 1953
starring Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest who has learned the true identity of a killer while taking confession, but cannot reveal the truth because of his vows even when he himself becomes the prime suspect. Also Anne Baxter as the MP's wife Clift was in love with before taking his vows (another secret he cannot tell) and Karl Malden as the cop who accuses him.
Best part of the film by far is that it was filmed on location in the old part of Quebec City, beautiful architecture and cobblestone streets. Typical Hitchcock climax shows off the Château Frontenac hotel.
Otherwise this is a strangely oldfashioned film, made just as Hitchcock was about to enter his most creative phase. In black and white, and very talky without much of the black humour or wild camera experiments we can usually expect.
I don't know enough about Hitchcock's career behind the scenes, but it seems he had a dry stretch between Notorious (1946) and Rear Window (1954), with Strangers on a Train being the only really essential film in between. Guess that happens when you make 50 odd films, and looking at his filmography I count at least 16 films everybody absolutely has to see. but that stretch is almost as conspicuous as his earliest British period, or the late years after The Birds as lesser Hitchcock. anybody know what was going on during those eight years?
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You are right, he did have an extended dry spell of fair to middling films, during which he experimented a little with filmmaking techniques. He used colour for the first time, tried to make Rope to look like one seamless take, made Dial M for Murder in 3D - pretty certain Rear Window was originally conceived for 3D also until Hitch saw how dodgy it looked on Dial M. He had a rum spread of films in the thirties too, after Blackmail, not really recovering until The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. However, I would say all his films are worth watching as they demonstrate the craft of building a film and its story, sometimes a little too obviously, but always with effortless brio.
Rope and Dial M... I'm tempted to say are essential, but theyre mostly interesting for technical experiments, and for their stars (Stewart and Kelly respectively). whereas Strangers... is one of those Hitchcock films where people still write essays decades later analysing the abnormal psychology and how the filmmaking supports that psychology (and its got that carousel climax). That might be the dividing line for defining essential Hitchcock, which specific films have people written doctoral theses about? out of 50 odd films thatd still be a lot of films, I'm sure, but itd be some more than others
I'm just wondering why Hitchcock made a string of mostly lesser films before hitting his greatest period in the 50s. I know his earliest British films, before the Man who knew too Much, he was basically an employee making the films he was assigned. The Lodger and Blackmail stand out because they are so prototypical, but mostly theres comedies, romances, boxing films, subjects I've yet to motivate myself to watch.
I've read he had a lot of interference from Selznick and other studio bosses when he first moved to Hollywood, so even though his early 40s films are almost all classics he was still the one being treated as cattle. Then he seems to lose inspiration after Notorious, and then eight years later he begins that run from Rear Window through to The Birds of (lets say some of) the greatest films of all time. Rear Window is almost like a comeback film. So why was he in a relative slump for those eight years? what suddenly changed when he got to Rear Window?
and I agree all 50 odd films are worth watching, theres always signature Hitchcock touches to be spotted. The Pleasure Garden for example, his first film ever, is the story of two showgirls, doesnt sound like typical Hitchcock fare. He himself claimed The Lodger was the first true Hitchcock film. But nearly the first shot of The Pleasure Garden is a man in the audience using his opera glasses to zoom in on the dancers' legs; even in this unlikely debut, he's implicating the audience as voyeur from the very beginning! you wouldn't catch that if you decided to skip lesser Hitchcock.
FRIDAY 13th PART VI: JASON LIVES (1986)
'Jason Lives' is a slasher horror pic which manages to be both disturbing and tongue-in-cheek, preparing the way for movies like 'Scream'. By this point in the 'Friday 13th' series it strains credulity to the limit that folk still regard Camp Crystal Lake (or Camp Blood, as it's now dubbed) a choice location for a vacation!
In the opening scene a couple of ill-fated dudes dig up Jason's grave, driven by a foolish notion of burning his remains and consigning him to hell forever. This nicely tips the hat to the Golden Age of Universal horror and (especially) to Hammer. A resurgent Jason acquires supernatural invincibility, a talent for relentlessly returning from the dead. The problem is that, although this invites comparisons with Karloff's Frankenstein Monster or Christopher Lee's Dracula, the bemasked killing behemoth which is Jason entirely lacks the pathos of the former or the transgressive charisma of the latter. Indeed, I've never understood why Jason built up such a fan following - or Michael Myers, for the matter of that.
Part VI has some rules of engagement for Jason: he'll pass on preying on child campers but he regards their hormonal camp supervisors as fair game, together with cops, comedy paintballers and gravediggers - or anyone else unfortunate enough to cross his path. It couldn't and shouldn't be any other way, of course, but, in-world, this modicum of restraint on his part means that he isn't a completely indiscriminate monster.
The 'final girl' (Jennifer Cooke) is plucky and sexual, has plenty of agency and ends up putting paid to Jason in the lake with a motorised boat propeller.
It's cute that Jason gets his own gunbarrel moment at the top of this movie - a cheeky reference to Bond, during the titles. Also, 'Jason Lives' was released a year before TLD, which makes me wonder whether the black humour of the SAS paintballing business in TLD's PTS - "You're dead!" - owes something to the paintballers' encounter with Jason here.
Air (2023) Directed by Ben Affleck
I watched this by chance (it was my mate's turn to pick) and it wouldn't normally have been the kind of film I would like. No surprises that I didn't much, then.
Matt Damon stars in the story of how Nike came to hire Michael Jordan for their advertising. A starry supporting cast (Affleck himself, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman) and a story I for one knew nothing about though it might be common knowledge to those more interested in sports than me (which is most of the planet).
Jordan himself isn't directly shown, just hints and glimpses of a tall young actor, and the focus for his side is on his mother played by Davis- who is fine, of course. Damon and Affleck are their customary reliable selves.
Not a film I'd want to see again, but competent.
Edit - it's set in 1984 and the music features songs from that year. That part my similarly aged friend and I enjoyed!
I've a bit of a treat for you all. I'll be releasing this to the press on Monday but I wanted to give ajb first dibs.
Some of you will have heard rumours of a planned sequel to The Sound of Music, said to be scheduled for 1968, though it's seen as very much an urban myth. On paper it made perfect sense, given that the studio 20th Century Fox was in financial difficulty in the early 60s due to calamitous overspending on the epic Cleopatra, then the cancelled Something's Got To Give, due to the death of its star Marilyn Monroe. It was chiefly the tremendous success of The Sound of Music that put the studio back in the black (war epic The Longest Day also helped). So you can see that while the musical did not lend itself to a sequel in any way, that rarely stops a studio from at least trying (something similar was mooted for Titanic, in its day the most successful film of all time.)
Like I say, it's all urban myth though a photo did emerge of Christoper Plummer in lederhosen against a backdrop of 1960s Salzburg. I can now reveal that in fact filming was well underway and have in fact obtained footage from a source that I cannot disclose.
One key problem was how to make a sequel when - as I have pointed out - none was artistically required. Not only that, few of the stars were willing to reprise their role - indeed, after the costly antics of previous studio flops, the one appeal of TSOM was its cast of relative unknowns. The one they did have on board was Christopher Plummer. Set in modern day Salzburg, the treatment saw Captain von Trapp return to Austria - having spent two decades abroad in the US - to exact revenge on the betrayers who had sold his family out and usurped the family mansion.
A sort of ill-advised dark comedy of the kind the 1960s oft specialised in, the tone from the footage I viewed varies enormously. Much of what we see consists of Plummer taking a tourist guide to Salzburg on the vengeance trail against closet Nazis, treacherous Catholics, perfidious manservants, each death artfully appropriate to the target. The opening, however, in which von Trapp speeds along the summer autobahn in his open top sports car really does have you comparing the dates of The Italian Job, released around the same time.
No singer - Plummer's singing voice was dubbed in The Sound of Music - the film attempts to fit its musical brief by seeing our leading man put on a vinyl record after each slaying - the song in question a nod to the manner of death. It is thought that the studio was branching out into pop around this time and this would help furnish a lucrative soundtrack.
It's thought that Plummer's weariness with the success of the hit musical may have prompted him to embrace this ill-advised sequel - certainly there's no sign of Julie Andrews here though as I say, none of the other actors were big names anyway - one bit of dialogue suggests that von Trapp continues his tragic theme on account of his entire family having been wiped out in a plane crash, the pilot having been distracted by some impromptu onboard karaoke. Certainly the tone is very odd - sort of Death Wish, Kind Hearts & Coronets and The Odessa File all in one.
There is some lovely footage of 1960s Salzburg on offer, albeit the kind you see in Talking Pictures TV's The Footage Detectives. A poster depicting Plummer at his most vulpine, smirking a Dalton smile with the tagline 'These are a few of his favourite things!" suggests it might have worked. But from the footage I viewed - Plummer in fine comic form in some scenes - it's hard to see how this would have been a hit require by the studio. And of course it wasn't, as three weeks into filming The Sound of Murder - yes, they were going with that title - was canned.
Students of my previous piece on the first film won't be surprised to learn that the actual Captain Von Trapp - still alive and kicking in the US - hit the studio with a law suit (having changed leaders during this time, nobody flagged up the same problem that had beset the first film). Being low budget - no real stars, no expensive studio sets - helped them cut their losses while Plummer demanded and got significant hush money on top of his original fee - he never mentioned this sequel. Footage was kept safely in a studio vault though rumours persisted that some copies were spirited behind the Iron Curtain making investigation a near impossibility. I myself was only tipped off by a Belgrade builder who did a lovely job on my side wall.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thank you for sharing that with us, @Napoleon Plural. Much appreciated.
(Love it! 😁😁😁)
If you want more details, pick up a copy of Monday's Daily Mail - they've promised a double-page spread on it, though it might be held off in favour of '200 Benefits of Brexit' - we shall see...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
That's quite a scoop. Fascinating stuff. And from the sound (of music) of it, this unmade sequel might well have been more my cup of tea than the original film that we do have.
EVIL DEAD RISE (2023)
Spoilers
Lee Cronin's demonic spatter fest lacks much of the humour which Sam Raimi so memorably blended with horror in the original 'Evil Dead' movies (1981 and 1987), but 'Rise' does unfold like a proper 'Evil Dead' entry, with scares aplenty, and it's a cut above Fede Alvarez's 2013 joyless re-make.
'Rise' marks a departure in that, this time, the unleashed demons prey on a family, likeably leftfield characters accommodated in a condemned building in LA, rather than on a group of young friends hanging out in a shack in the woods (though the 'classic' shack set-up is briefly tributed in a prologue: the main body of the movie is a flashback from this). It's this which suppresses humour in favour of more disturbing themes: the shift of focus away from the ordeals of the likes of Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his chums in the 80s towards a struggling family being destroyed by demonic possession. (By the way, there's no cameo for Executive Producer Campbell in this one. Remembering 2013, I did sit through the full end credits of 'Rise' to see if Ash would butt in for a final word again, MCU-style, but mercifully no!)
To be fair, the Alvarez revival had rather a neat conceit going for it: on that occasion, the young people's purpose in gathering in the woods was to support one of their number, an addict (Jane Levy), in going cold turkey and 'overcoming her demons'. Thus the themes of demonic possession and body horror carried some metaphorical significance, before it all escalated into full-scale spatter.
In 'Rise', if there is a conceit, it's to do with troubled maternity. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) is the mother killed and possessed by a demon - a frightening figure indeed, given that Ellie's been raising three kids alone. (There's something about Ms Sutherland's good looks which seems so right for this genre: her facial bone structure screams horror diva!) The heroine of the piece is Ellie's sister Beth (Lilly Sullivan), a drop-out guitar technician dealing with an unplanned pregnancy - or failing to deal with it. Beth's situation resonates. When all the blood-soaked craziness kicks off, the movie seems at times, probably inadvertently, to be promoting a pro-life agenda, punishing Beth for the mess she's in personally.
'Rise' delivers its visceral thrills and spills in ways which will satisfy horror fans nostalgic for the age of the 'video nasty'. Gore freaks will particularly welcome the idea, pitched in the movie's lore, that the only way to defeat the demons is through total body dismemberment! My main criticism of Cronin's aesthetics is that it all becomes tiringly unrelenting. The film needs a quieter moment or two during the final act, for dramatic pause and reflection. (I'm thinking of Friedkin's masterpiece, 'The Exorcist', when Kinderman interviews Chris or when Merrin and Karras take time out, part way through the exorcism.)
My other criticism is that the final act becomes distractingly allusive, connecting in self-indulgent ways with movies outside the 'Evil Dead' series. It's not as if the characters aren't well enough drawn to merit a clear trajectory in their own terms. There's an obvious replay of an iconic moment from Kubrick's 'The Shining', seemingly having no point to it other than the allusion itself. Then Beth and Kassie (Nell Fisher) turn into Ripley and Newt of James Cameron's 'Aliens' - which amplifies maternity themes again, but 'in quotation marks'. Finally Beth gets to deliver a punchline when despatching the demon, becoming a Sarah Connor figure (James Cameron again). Admittedly, it's a good line!
Worth seeing, but not for the fainthearted.
XXX (2002)
Well, the Arsenal are on the slide, the weather is hit and miss, St George’s Day is around the corner, so too a coronation, I've been drinking at the Cask and I’m running short of cash. A Saturday night in then and time for my annual trawl through the adrenaline fuelled testosterone pumped two hours of action spy thriller that is XXX.
Vin Diesel was still on the up when he made this preposterous James Bond rip off that out does its contemporary by being simple to understand and packing its scenario with enough guns, bombs, cars, stunts, exotic women, Czech landscapes, deadly viruses and death metal to keep the post-Cold War PS2 & Xbox generations happy. Xander Cage is a law breaking daredevil who advertises his brand of rebellion via the internet. Mr Gibbons thinks he can be of use to the N.S.A. in tracking a mystery microchip which has gone missing in Prague, chiefly because Xander’s type of rebel is exactly the kind of dude the dastardly terror organisation Anarchy 99 will welcome into their midst.
The movie kicks off with a tuxedoed spy being pursued and eliminated at a fiery rock concert. He’s as out of place as James Bond was in the Rio Carnival. Next we meet our hero, performing crazy parachute stunts from Corvette sports cars, rather the kind of thing our James Bond might do. The mission has to delay a little while Xander Cage is recruited into the fold, but these scenes allow us to appreciate his endeavours and his bad ass attitude as much as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr Gibbons does. Thrown reluctantly into an undercover operation, Xander behaves like a rough house, arrogant, American adrenaline junkie and naturally ingratiates himself quickly into the leadership of the terror group. Here he meets the delectable delights of Asia Argento’s undercover F.S.B. agent and takes to swapping one liners with all and sundry, including a college fresh scientist who resembles a poshed up version of Q.
The plot vanishes into the background and if you concentrate too hard you’ll notice all the holes in it. Never mind. Action and more action is the order of the day, some of it quite worthwhile, much of it a continuous homage to all things James Bond. Given the nature of Die Another Day, which did the trick to such an excruciating degree the film ended up mocking itself, XXX comes across as gently reverential. The writer, producers and director have figured out the formula – investigation, infiltration, discovery, escape, return and destroy – and play it to the hilt and with tongue in cheek, but not lolling about in its own cleverness.
The film is well made too. Good photography, slick editing, a host of fun yet glibly unfunny villains, a beautiful girl or two, a wild thrash metal soundtrack, a decent unshowy script, starchy directing, well-performed stunts; even the impossible snowboard chase feels genuine, utilising better CGI than James Bond’s similar escapade windsurfing on sea ice.
Comparisons are not really fair, but while I can take or leave Die Another Day, this is firm watching for me. Vin Diesel pins down the lead role with less of a wink and more of a stupefied squirm of his astonished mouth. He knows it’s all well-presented garbage and plays it exactly to the audience’s expectations.
Yep. A whole lotta loud spine shaking fun is going on. Great stuff.
DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966)
A Sunday night nostalgia fest on Legend, the Vintage Vault, with two brutal Hammer Horror pictures that highlight the studio’s best storytelling antics to the full.
First up is Terence Fisher’s excellent Dracula, Prince of Darkness which famously top-bills Christopher Lee as the titular Count, yet refrains from introducing him until almost two-thirds of the action has elapsed. Then, resurrected by the blood of a hapless tourist, he fails to utter a single word of dialogue. Remarkable.
Andrew Kier draws the most attention as the ruthless vampire hunter Father Sandor. He’s the Abbot of a monastery of worldly monks, who think nothing of staking the undead. Sandor warns a quartet of British tourists to avoid the castle at Karlsbad. Abandoned at sundown by their frightened coach driver, the foursome are rescued by a driverless carriage which escorts them to Castle Dracula, where they find dinner laid and a spooky manservant unpacking their luggage. Only Barbara Steele’s Helen Kent suspects all is not as it seems. The manservant is Klove, played with much creepiness and a limp by Philip Latham. He turns homicidal after sunset and then draws Miss Steele into the rejuvenated Count’s arms and fangs.
There is a tremendous looming atmosphere and a sense of impending dread throughout the opening three-quarters of an hour, as the tourists explore the castle, are confused, scared and pleasantly surprised all at once. The audience waits over and over for the appearance of Dracula. The moment of becoming is well orchestrated. The blood is redder than red should be. [Ugh.] Lee’s hand clasps the side of his tomb, the devil-ring we saw at abandoned on the tiles at the end of 1958’s Dracula clearly visible. Oh, yes, he’s back alright.
Dracula hasn’t bargained on tough as grog Father Sandor though. The writers cleverly insert elements of Bram Stoker’s original story into the screenplay, so we have the coffins travelling in a carriage, a hissing succubus, the temptation of a maiden [although she’s not a virgin; Diana Kent is married] and an interpretation of Renfield, here called Ludwig and portrayed brilliantly as a God-fearing, fly-eating simpleton by Thorley Walters. Much tension abounds.
Best of all is Suzan Farmer, who portrays the heroine. One of Hammer’s better starlets, this beautiful actress never quite gained the recognition she deserved, become type cast as a sort of corseted, bosomy blonde damsel. [I'm rather partial to corseted, bosomy, blondes... but that's another story.] Tremendously affecting, she brings scenes to life with an effortlessness that plays neatly and innocently against the thorough thespian turns of Steele and Francis Matthews, Farmer’s on-screen husband. The moment where Steele provokes her into opening a window is quite chilling, so too her mesmerism by Count Dracula. The bedroom scene where she exhibits rational fear and pleads with her husband to leave the castle is notable for not being as ham-fistedly presumptuous as usual. We genuinely believe in her uncertainties. It is no surprise to find she is on hand to deliver the first blow in Dracula’s demise, another first for women in Hammer’s generally misogynistic world.
A belter of a horror flick which doesn’t exactly terrorise, but succeeds in being exciting while suspending our disbelief beyond where it ought to stop. Probably Hammer’s best Dracula movie.