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Sunday, November 09, 2008Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter Release Year: 1974Country: England Starring: Horst Janson, Caroline Munro, John Cater, John Carson, Shane Briant, Lois Daine, William Hobbs, Brian Tully, Robert James, Perry Soblosky, Paul Greenwood, Lisa Collings, Ian Hendry. Writer: Brian Clemens Director: Brian Clemens Cinematographer: Ian Wilson Music: Laurie Johnson Producer: Brian Clemens Alternate Titles: Vampire Castle Availability: Buy it from Amazon  At the end of the day, I have to shrug and surrender to my baser side and say that Michael Carreras probably needed to be kicked in the shin at least once. Possibly more than once, but at least once. Allow me to explain myself. Michael Carreras was the son of Hammer Studio founder James Carreras, and he used that relationship to finagle himself a more or less permanent fixture in the hierarchy of the studio, until eventually the reigns were passed to him entirely and the whole show collapsed. Now not everything with the name of Michael Carrereas on it was an embarrassing display of nepotism. In fact, there is much about Michael's involvement with his father's studio that is of high merit. He served as producer for most of the studio's best films. As a director, he was a mixed bag, but he did manage to deliver The Lost Continent, one of Hammer's loopiest and most hilariously daft adventure films. And after directing a decidedly pedestrian follow-up to Hammer's smash hit The Mummy, he redeemed himself somewhat by stepping in to finish the job of directing the superb Blood from the Mummy's Tomb when original director Seth Holt passed away. No, there is much about Michael's tenure at Hammer that is worth celebrating. It's just that at some point in the 1970s, he lost his fucking mind. I think by now, we've covered the demise of Hammer Studio in the 1970s enough times that I don't need to go into much detail here. You should know the drill by now. The Hammer formula, which had been so bold in the early 50s and throughout the 60s, failed to keep pace with changing social values and cinematic trends so that, by the end of the 1960s, their once fierce and rebellious content looked quaint and old-fashioned compared to what everyone else was doing. Studio head Michael Carreras was thus desperate to right a sinking ship and discover some way to keep the studio afloat. On top of that, however, was lumped the general collapse of the British film industry, meaning that Carreras suddenly went from trying to save a sinking ship to trying to save a sinking lifeboat tied to a sinking ship. It is not, obviously, an enviable position in which to have been. But it was not an unwinnable situation, as other studios would prove. The key was to adapt. But it was with the task of adapting that Carerras proved singularly untalented despite -- and likely because of -- all else he'd accomplished.
Horror films had changed dramatically, thanks in large part to the pioneering films of Hammer. With the release of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen, horror showed a marked move toward not just Satanic-themed films, but toward more cynical "evil triumphs" films. While major studios were finally deeming horror a genre worthy of their attention, low budget and independent film makers were turning out stuff like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, far more visceral and completely different than anythng that had come before and certainly muchmore extreme than anything Hammer was willing or even able to produce with the BBFC looming over them. The focus of horror shifted significantly from England tot he United States, and since the United States had always been a major market for Hammer's product, they found it hard to compete with the home team. Things were no different in mainland Europe, where the Italian giallo thrillers were also pushing the envelope far beyond what British censors would allow Hammer to get away with. The boys from Bray may have pushed the envelope in terms of sex and violence for ten years, but by the time "The End" appeared, good usually triumphed and the creature, either tragic or evil, was vanquished. But these new horror films were happy to let evil win. There was no way Hammer could compete with that, just as there was no way they could compete with a major Hollywood studio taking an interest in horror. Lower budget American horror film, largely produced by American International Pictures and their imitators, surpassed in sex and violence the Hammer product that had helped inspire them so many years before. AIP, in particular, seemed to understand that while there would always be big studio horror films aimed at adults, for horror to survive as a whole, a shift had to be made away from adults and toward teenagers. Teens, since the early days of AIP, had played a central role in the success of the studios films. Post World War II, there was a whole generation of young people who began earning money not to help the family survive, but so they could spend it on the stuff they wanted. Most films, however, were aimed either at adults or children. AIP stepped in and made movies for teenagers, and the results were solid gold.
Hammer, by contrast, had never really targeted teens as an audience. When, toward the end of the studio's lifespan and desperate for some new revenue stream, Hammer finally tried to throw a bone to the younger generation, it was generally pretty feeble and had the feel of old men trying to write in the persona of a younger person about whom they knew next to nothing. Thus you get the goofball but not unappealing mixture of 60s mods and early 70s hippies that show up in Dracula AD 1972. But even disregarding the screwy attempts at seeming young, Hammer wasn't speaking to the kids. Whenever AIP made a movie for teens, they were keen on making sure there were as few adults present as possible. Those who were, were often ineffectual authority figures, crackpots, or oppressive parents against whom we rooted for the kids to rebel. In the end, it was the younger generation that saved the day, usually in some way that involved a surfing competition or young hot rodders zipping around a small southwestern town in their dune buggies. Hammer, by contrast, could never really divorce itself from authoritative paternal figures. So while Dracula AD 1972 may have been full of hep kids spewing misguided attempts at youth slang, it's stolid old Peter Cushing who sweeps in to clean up the mess and save the day. And as photos have proven and our friend El Santo has said, you can dress Peter Cushing up in a hip hop jacket and baseball cap, but there's still the stuffiest stuffy old man suit in the word beneath it all.
So Michael Carreras was creating a no-win situation for himself. On the one hand, he wanted to find something new and invigorating for the studio to do. On the other hand, his ideas were terrible and all seemed to revolve around comedies about people tripping while going up the steps of a public bus. On the one hand, he said Hammer needed a new direction, something away from horror or more in line with what modern horror had become. On the other hand (Hammer had a lot of hands), at the end of the day, all he could think of was to do the same old, same old, but with more nudity. He wanted to do something different, then he complained when directors tried to do something different. In a word, Michael Carreras was lost. I don't know what blinded him exactly other than having too many fires to deal with while being too stuck in his old ways, because the remedy he needed was right in front of him. With the tanks of both the Dracula and Frankenstein films very nearly empty, Hammer turned to three other stabs at vampire films in hopes that something might stick and give them a new franchise that would keep the studio hobbling along for at least another year. The most successful of these attempts was the Karnstein trilogy, three films based loosely on Carmilla and notable for being the point at which Hammer finally shrugged and started showing boobs (thanks laregely to the involvement of AIP as a production partner). The trilogy produced two of Hammer's very best horror films (Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil) and one of their very worst (Lust for a Vampire). The second attempt was Vampire Circus, in which the studio attempted to put a twist on their vampire theme by looking toward the dreamier, more hallucinogenic horror films of continental Europe (specifically France and Italy). It's a very good movie, but it was simply too weird for Hammer, and possibly too weird for most British and American audiences, or so thought Carreras.
The third attempt was a curious combination of the studio's tried and true vampire formula mixed with a dash of the old swashbuckling "pirate movies without pirate ships" Hammer made in the early 60s, combined with something Hammer had never put in any of their previous horror films: a sense of humor. This was Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, and it remains my very favorite Hammer film and one of my favorite films in general. A pity that Michael Carreras didn't see things the way I did. While Hammer in the 70s may have been flailing, that doesn't mean they didn't produce a lot of great movies. In fact, it was likely because the studio was in such dire straights that they were willing to try almost anything -- or at least claim that they would try almost anything, sort of like how I'll claim to eat anything at least once, until someone actually calls my bluff and tries to stuff a grub in my mouth. This meant that an influx of new talent emerged from the long shadows of Terence Fisher, Jimmy Sangster, and the rest of the extremely talented but rather aged old guard. Among the men employed by Hammer to try and freshen things up a big was Brian Clemens, best known at the time as one of the integral parts of the hugely popular British television series, The Avengers. In that way, perhaps, Hammer had hired one of the very men who was helping to destroy the studio. The success of The Avengers was unparalleled, and while it may have started out initially as just a television show, by 1967, it was being shot in color and boasting production values that would rival many films. On top of that, the series had the perfect blend of old guard, represented by Patrick MacNee as John Steed with his bowler and suits, and new -- as embodied first by Honor Blackman, but then taken to a whole new level by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. The scripts hewed to a basic formula, but they were highlighted by smart dialog and witty banter between the two incredibly likable leads. And even Steed, despite looking every bit the British gentleman, had a streak of rebelliousness and irreverence that made him appealing to younger viewers.
Production company ITC was quick to follow the example set by The Avengers, and before anyone knew it, British television was full of action and adventure series that were in color, trotted the globe (or at least parts of England made up to look like the globe), and took far more risks than more expensive, slower to adapt movies. If you were a bright young writer or director looking to do something unusual, you were much better off working on one of the many ITC shows -- first espionage and, in the 70s, bad-ass cop shows. I don't have the data to claim that these high production value shows were the main reason the film industry was hurting, but they certainly made a dent. When Clemens got the chance to direct a film for Hammer, he went for it (The Avengers having wrapped up by that time). The story he brought with him was very much of The Avengers mode, with a sassier female character than Hammer had ever had before, a script full of wit and dark humor, and perhaps most striking of all, a hero. As Clemens described things, part of the problem he saw with Hammer's Dracula films wasn't so much that they were slaves to convention; it was that Dracula was the hero, or the anti-hero a the very least. Even though you knew he would die at the end, you still went to root for Dracula, because the people lined up as his nominal opponents were so incredibly forgettable and had been since the third film. Gone were the days when you had a hero as charismatic as Peter Cushing to cheer for. Dracula, Prince of Darkness had that gun-toting friar, but since him, who was there to go against Dracula? A seemingly endless parade of trembling clergymen and forgettable young blond guys named Paul. For lack of anything else, audiences began to side with Dracula -- which is a testament to just how boring the heroes were, since Dracula usually had about five minutes of total screentime and spoke like three sentences.
Clemens wanted to change that, to give audiences a vampire movie where the vampires were the bad guys again and where there was a proper hero for whom people could root. For this character, Clemens drew largely upon the swashbuckling heroes of the past, and so was born Kronos, a vampire hunter -- possibly immortal himself -- possessed of a mysterious history, a knowing smirk, and a professor friend who, while older and wiser, is far away from the "knows what's best for you" paternalism of Cushing's Van Helsing. There was something of the counter-culture about both Kronos and his adviser, Professor Hieronymos Grost. Grost's knowledge, after all, is of an arcane and in some cases profane nature, and if Kronos was a captain in some army, it must have been the same army as Oddball from Kelly's Heroes. They seem both to have eschewed the traditional authoritative hierarchy of academia and the military in favor of just cruising around on their own, doing their own thing. This lack of respect for authority extends as well to other circles of the upper class: religious leaders, community leaders, the rich and powerful -- Grost and Kronos seem happiest away from these types, camping out in a barn with a hot servant girl they rescued from being executed. Clemens further twists the traditional vampire movie formula by proposing a world in which there are as many different types of vampires as there are types of dog, each with its own unique characteristics, powers, and weaknesses. In another nod to the film's appeal to youth over tradition, the vampires against which Kronos finds himself pitted do not drain their victims of blood, but of youth. Likewise, the way in which you kill one vampire might not work on another (a conundrum which results in the film's most devilishly funny scene, in which Kronos and Grost cycle through the entire array of ways they know to kill vampires, until they finally find one that works). In a way, this representation of vampires is a natural outgrowth of the theories on vampirism presented by Cushing's Van Helsing way back in Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula. Back then, before Dracula became a Satanic prince of evil and conjured demon, Van Helsing framed the vampire in purely scientific terms. They were a part of our natural world, albeit a part that did not conform to the behavior one expected of creatures who looked like humans. Vampirism was a communicable disease rather than some Satanic curse or the result of corny rituals. Captain Kronos seems to pick this thread up and expand it, creating an entirely new species within which there are many natural variations.
Although I can't say for certain if it was intended as such, it also works as a pointed satirical jab at the vast proliferation of ways in which you could kill and resurrect Dracula that were created out of necessity to facilitate yet another sequel. By the end of things, vampires were being killed by stakes, crucifixes, icy creeks, hawthorn bushes, lightning, windmills...who could keep track? So in the world of Kronos, you never quite know what will kill a vampire. Tradition does not work. Nor do you know exactly what effect its bite will have on you. As I said, I don't think it's an accident that the vampires in this film prey upon the young and drain them of their youth. In the climate of the 1970s, it's the established powerbase exploiting the young, crushing them under the weight of an increasingly creaky traditional society, draining them of their vitality even as the vampires feed upon it for their own energy. Although other Hammer films had taken swipes at certain established authority figures -- witness, for example, the corrupt men in Taste the Blood of Dracula, or the ineffectual and cowardly priest in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave -- this one the first time since perhaps The Pirates of Blood River that the studio gave audiences an uppity, charismatic, young firebrand willing to buck the system. Hell, Kronos even smokes the occasional 18th century doobie! At last, there was a Hammer movie and a Hammer hero that young people could actually get behind and perhaps even relate to. Someone who was more like one of them rather than like a parent, standing around waiting to disapprove and tell the whippersnappers how to properly do things. Clemens' movie is different right out of the gate. Just as he was a Hammer outsider, working with a cast comprised largely of newcomers and outsiders, he also went outside the norm in searching for a composer and a style of music to accompany the film. He tapped Laurie Johnson, who had worked previously on The Avengers, among many other projects for film and television, to give the movie a theme that stood in stark contrast to the masterful but overly familiar "Hammer horror sound" created primarily by James Bernard. Bernard's scores were heavy, bombastic, and thunderous. Johnson's theme for Captain Kronos, however, is fast moving and much lighter. It's a combination of a theme from a swashbuckling film with the theme from a horror film, very much a reflection of Grost and Kronos themselves. Where as Bernard's themes stalk and stomp, Johnson's theme here gallops and parries.
Far away from the three piece Harris tweed and pocket watch look of most vampire hunters, Kronos is a mixture of pirate and soldier in appearance, with bushy blond hair and a rapier. Grost, by contrast, is a bespectacled, goateed hunchback, though he's far from grotesque. They are two halves of a whole -- the muscle and charm in Kronos, the brains and wit in Grost. For the lead role, they cast German actor Horst Jansen, and he certainly looks the part. Tall, confident, sexy, and swaggering. Even though they're in the same profession, there's very little of Van Helsing about the man. Kronos looks less likely to have been spending his days steeped in researching of arcane folklore and more likely to be lying on the beach, a tan young woman on one side and his surfboard on the other. What he learns, he learns through experience or via the wise counsel of Grost. Unfortunately, Jasen's limited English results in something of a wooden performance, though for me it never really mars the film, as he's carried by John Cater as Grost, a more than capable actor who is so good and so charming in his role that you don't even notice most of the time that he's a hunchback -- though on occasion I mistook him for Lenin. Luckily, Grost is way more fun to be around and is a lot less likely than Lenin to have you executed for some trifle. The duo are en route to a town that has been plagued by a series of mysterious attacks on young people who are found after the attack drained of decades and aged to the point of death. Kronos stops to liberate a beautiful young gypsy woman (Caroline Munro, recently featured in the studio's Dracula AD 1972), who has been condemned for something Kronos and Grost find idiotic by men whom Grost and Kronos find equally idiotic. Thankful for her liberation, she swears servitude to the two adventurers, and while neither man seems overly keen on having a slave, neither does any man seem to find much fault in being accompanied everywhere by Caroline Munro in a peasant blouse with a plunging neckline. And later, when she offers herself to Kronos, he does what any man would do, and does not hesitate. A hero who smokes weed and enjoys sex? Where do they come up with this crazy stuff? Kronos and Grost have been summoned by their old friend, Dr. Marcus (John Carson), who resides in the beleaguered town and knows that his two friends specialize these days in dealing with such peculiarities. Kronos, in particular, has it in for vampires, as both his mother and sister were killed by one. And while the process of draining a victim of youth rather than blood is slightly beyond the pale of a traditional vampire, Grost recognizes that tradition only accounts for a small percentage of what people know or don't know about vampires. Soon the gang is on the case, sword fighting and riddle solving their way to the culprit behind the strange murders.
The overriding philosophy behind this movie seems to be that Hammer horror hadn't been scary for a long time, and it wasn't going to be scary anymore. So why not make one that was exciting? And that's exactly what Clemens did. Captain Kronos moves fast and boasts plenty of action. Jansen may be a bit stiff with his lines, but he looks good in a fight scene, and he gets plenty of them. Clemens' experience with television meant he knew a lot about taking a meager budget and limited sets and making them seem far more lavish and expansive than they actually were. The result is one of the best looking films Hammer made during the period. Clemens made a lot of use of outdoor locations, which when coupled with the tone of the story makes Captain Kronos feel much more epic than the largely soundstage-bound Dracula films. He pulls off an epic feel, or at least a mini-epic feel, in much the same way John Gilling did when directing the "pirate movies without pirate ships" for Hammer a decade earlier. The supporting cast is top notch. Cater and Carson are old hands, and they deliver the goods as all solid British pros know how to do. Caroline Munro was on the fast track to becoming an icon, and while her role here as the gypsy Clara isn't as iconic as, say, the space bikini in Star Crash, it's still a role that is both energetic and sexy. There's something about the woman that simply transcends everything. They really don't make them like her anymore, do they? While her role here may not be as meaty as the lads', it's still one of the best developed female roles Hammer ever had. There's no doubt as to why she became an icon. She has more charisma than my brain can even process. If Hammer was looking for something new, a franchise upon which to hang the fortunes of the studio, they had found it. Captain Kronos is just that good. Unfortunately, Carreras was waiting around like one the youth sucking vampires from the movie. In Carreras' own words, he visited the set one day to see how things were going and was aghast at what he saw. Clemens and his crew, Carreras felt, were not handling the material with the proper gravitas. Instead, they were making light of things, having a bit of fun, injecting a wicked sense of humor into a previously humorless genre. Clemens did not, according to Carreras, get it. He didn't understand the proper tone of a Hammer horror film the way the old guys did. In other words, Carreras hired Clemens to give him something fresh and inventive, and then he got pissed off when Clemens gave him just that.
As much as Carrereas' attitude irritates me, and as much as it embodies everything that was wrong with Hammer's attempts to adapt to the changing times, it's hard to lie the failure of Captain Kronos to become a franchise player entirely at the feet of the floundering studio head. Audiences had already lost interest in Hammer. The studio was done for. It would have taken a miracle to save it, and while Captain Kronos is cracking good entertainment, it's not a miracle. Along with audiences, distributors had lost interest in Hammer as well. One of the things that had kept Hammer afloat was their fruitful partnership with American distributors. But those days were over, because Americans were doing Hammer better than Hammer, and under a ratings code that was far more liberal than what the British Board of Film Censors wanted to be. As such, it took almost two years for Captain Kronos to get released, and by that time, the game was over. Hammer had used up the last of its audience good will, and viewers didn't embrace the film despite the fact that the few reviews it received were generally positive. It's a shame, isn't it? Clemens vision for Captain Kronos as a film series was pretty cool, with Kronos appearing throughout different periods across the centuries, carrying on his battle with the undead and revealing that there was a much longer history behind the man than has hinted at in the first movie. When it was evident that there was no way Hammer was going to make it, and thus there would be no second or third Kronos film, talk shifted to production of a television series. Nothing ever came of that, either, and with the exception of a few appearances in a Hammer comic book, Kronos faded from existence until more recently, when it was rediscovered and people started thinking, "Holy crap, this movie is great!" Now it enjoys a lace in many people's top five Hammer films, making it sort of the On Her Majesty's Secret Service of the vampire movie world. Which is doubly fitting since that once-maligned entry into the James Bond Franchise was saddled with a stiff leading man and found itself situated in a time when the series was trying to recover from the loss of the iconic Sean Connery (and the rise of social discontent). Like Horst Jansen, George Lazenby was top notch in the action scenes though, and just as Horst had a cool sidekick and a gorgeous gal, Lazenby was carried by a cool ally and the best Bond girl of all time, The Avengers' Diana Rigg. What's more, it's a shame Hammer couldn't pull out of the collapse. Maybe if Captain Kronos had been a bigger box office hit, and maybe if Michael Carreras had shown a little faith in the film, then Hammer could have made good on that tantalizing poster art for movies they intended to make but never had a chance to get to. Don't tell me you don't want to see Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls or didn't hope Hammer wold make good on all that cheesecake nudie sci-fi artwork on the poster for When the Earth Cracked Open. Sure, they probably would have ended up less like the insanely awesome movies in my mind and more like one of those "lost world" films from Amicus Studio, but you know what? I loved those "lost world" movies from Amicus, so I would have been pretty psyched to watch something in which cheap looking little models of biplanes and blimps go head to head with wobbly pterodactyls on strings.
But those are exercises in what might have been, and while fun, the fact is there was never a Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls or a Captain Kronos series. No Kronos fighting vampires down through the ages. What we have instead is a single Captain Kronos that happens to be an incredibly good film. It's really everything I want from my entertainment. Fast paced, witty, irreverent but also a very good entry into the genre with which it is toying. I don't think I'd argue that there aren't flaws for people to find in the film, but if they are there, I'm not really all that concerned with finding them. Had this been the last film Hammer made, it would have been a perfect swan song. Our heroes, riding off beyond the horizon to face down evil. Would we ever see them again? Who knows? Instead, Hammer ended up with a few more death twitches and even more misguided attempts at finding a new market. Among these were an ill-advised attempt to replace the lost American market with the exploding Hong Kong market by partnering with the Shaw Brothers studios to produce two films: the plodding action caper Shatter starring Stuart Whitman and Shaw Bros superstar Ti Lung, and the entertaining but ridiculous Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, starring Peter Cushing and Shaw Bros' star David Chiang. Both were attempts to cash in on the rising kungfu craze, and both failed. In the case of Shatter, it was hard to convince audiences that they should stop watching Bruce Lee and Five Fingers of Death and concentrate instead on a movie in which Stuart Whitman wanders around. It was like trying to convince Hong Kong audiences in the 80s to stop watching Jackie Chan and embrace Steven Seagal. Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires featured Cushing as Van Helsing, traipsing around China, but it never really feels like an actual Dracula film -- possibly because venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee finally made good on his boast and refused to appear in the picture, even though Dracula transforms into a Chinese guy in the very beginning of the picture. Instead, it feels like a Shaw Brothers kungfu film into which Peter Cushing wandered by accident. It's pretty fun, in my opinion, but there's no mystery as to why it wasn't the film that salvaged Hammer's reputation. The end to Hammer horror finally came in 1976, in the form of To the Devil...A Daughter, Hammer's painfully horrible attempt to cash in on the devil worship movie craze that seized us in the 70s. Too bad the film was dreadful -- in my opinion the only completely unwatchable horror film Hammer ever made. It's too bad Kronos wasn't around to put that one down before it sucked so much life out of us. But so it goes, and whatever might have happened doesn't change how much I enjoy Captain Kronos. I suppose I'm happy to be watching these films after the fact. I've never felt that Hammer films were stodgy or old-fashioned, or that they had dated poorly, but that's probably because I'm watching them from a vantage point removed from the original cycle. If I'd been able to write reviews in the late 60s or early 70s, I probably would have been complaining about the lack of originality, so on and so forth. I love Hammer films. I love the old ones. I love the ones from the 70s. Heck, I even enjoy failures like Curse of the Mummy's Tomb and Lust for a Vampire. In nearly two decades of film production, Hammer made one solitary horror film I can say I hate. That, my friends, is not a bad record, and I guess if I'd been in the shoes of Michael Carreras, I would have been as confused as he was. But then, I'm just a writer and a fan, not the head of a studio. I expect more from him than I would from myself, what with how it was his job and all. I appreciate everything the pioneers did -- Jimmy Sangster, Terence Fisher, James Bernard, John Gilling -- my God but they made some incredible films. And I love the years in which Hammer was trying to figure the strange new world out. I love Twins of Evil, Vampire Circus, Taste the Blood of Dracula, and I don't hate Lust for a Vampire or even Horror of Frankenstein. So flailing or not, misguided or not, with the final credits having rolled on Hammer (I'll believe the persistent "we're back!" press releases and announced productions when I see at least one final product), all I can do is raise a glass of brandy to them (I prefer scotch, but what would Peter Cushing say?) and say, with complete earnestness, "Thank you."  Labels: Action: Adventure, B-Masters Roundtable, Horror: Vampires, Stars: Caroline Munro, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1974 posted by Keith at 12:14 PM | 9 Comments Friday, August 08, 2008The White Hell of Piz Palu Release Year: 1929Country: Germany Starring: Gustav Diessl, Leni Riefenstahl, Ernst Petersen, Ernst Udet, Mizzi Gotzel, Otto Spring. Writer: Arnold Fanck, Ladislaus Vajda Director: Arnold Fanck, G.W. Pabst Cinematographer: Sepp Allgeier, Richard Angst, Hans Schneeberger Producer: H.R. Sokel Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us This movie offers so many potential avenues from which I could approach it that I'm finding it almost as overwhelming as climbing the north face of the Eiger while an unknown assassin tries to kill me because he knows I'm trying to kill him. There's the career of geologist-filmmaker Arnold Fanck, whose fascination with mountains and mountaineering resulting in a series of films possessed of breathtaking beauty and power. There's the subject of mountaineering itself, and of the depiction of mountain climbing in film. There's the subject of silent film, and more specifically, silent spectacle and action films, which were far more lavish and epic in scope than most people ever imagine. And perhaps the 900 pound gorilla in the room is the bizarre and difficult career of German actress turned Nazi propagandist and, until her death in 2003 at the age of 101, the world's oldest living certified scuba diver, Leni Riefenstahl. Hers is a story of incredible talent, revolutionary film technique, terrifying loyalty to Adolf Hitler, arrest by a naval intelligence officer working with a John Ford film crew, war crimes, and after the dust settled, a career as an underwater nature photographer. I'll try to cover them all, but forgive me if I'm a bit scattershot in my style. Well, more scattershot than usual, which is really saying something. After all, it's rather nice outside right now, and I'm thinking about going climbing instead of finishing this review. So let's begin at the beginning, a very good place to start. Oh man, this review is chocked with the potential for awful Alps-related film references. I prmise that, as far as I know, that is going to be the only one I make. Heidi. There. I said it, just to get it out there. Now we're done.
But the beginning to which I'm referring is the beginning of modern feature filmmaking. When I was a young lad full of energy and vim, I did not have very much interest in silent film. I'd seen plenty of them, all the usual suspects a horror film fan sees early in his viewing career: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis (including the one with the rockin' 80s soundtrack). They were interesting, but I preferred movies with talking. Later in life, I grew to appreciate and adore silent films much more, but even now I don't get excited about discussing any of the classic silent horror films from Germany -- not because I don't love them, but rather because such a tremendous amount of ink has already been spent on them by much smarter people than me, and there's really not a lot I can add to the discussion of German expressionism, the Weimer Republic, or vergangenheits-bewaltigung that hasn't been covered by someone who, unlike me, actually knows what the hell they're talking about. In high school, we had to watch The Birth of a Nation because it was a valuable lesson in the history of perceptions regarding the Civil War and race relations, and also because cinema pioneer D.W. Griffith was buried in the small Methodist church a couple minutes away -- the very same church I attended as a youth and had my first and eventual ruinous run-ins with religious authority. It was a pretty typical looking small-town country church: whitewash wood, a steeple, no air conditioning, heavy wooden pews filled with sweating men and women in their Sunday finery, furiously fanning themselves with those cardboard fans attached to a Popsicle stick and featuring a painting of kindly Jesus waving at you or blessing you or possibly just fanning you because he grew up in the Middle East, and he understands what it means to be hot. Anyway, in the church cemetery were a variety of crumbling old graves, and right in the middle of them was the grave of D.W. Griffith.
Griffith, for those who may be unfamiliar with the early days of feature film making, was one of the fathers of the modern feature film. Along with a group of film makers in Europe, many of them Italian, and inspired by the Italian costumed spectacle Cabiria, Griffith was at the forefront of exploring what could be done with a motion picture camera and the ability to work on location rather than being bound to stages and sets like plays. Unfortunately, Griffith chose to explore these new possibilities in the form of a film called Birth of a Nation. The movie tells the story of the Antebellum South, when all the black slaves were suddenly free and immediately set about raping white women and dancing while getting drunk on cheap booze on the floor of the Senate. So basically, the slaves were all freed and acted like legally elected, white congressmen. The only thing standing between these unruly throngs of free, violent black folks (who, I should mention, were all happy and content as slaves,with gumdrop smiles and the freedom to hambone solo on the banks of rivers filled with chocolate and gold) and proud white America was the noble and chivalrous order of the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah, so you pretty much get the picture, right? regardless, this was where it all began: the first American feature film. At the time of its release, Birth of a Nation was wildly popular -- America wasn't exactly racial paradise in 1915, and there were veterans of the Civil War still floating around. Civil rights groups protested the film, but that did precious little to diminish it int he eyes of a white America for which black freedom was still a relatively new thing. It seems that Griffith himself was ultimately horrified by the reaction many audiences had to the film, reactions that often involved race rioting and violence. His next film, Intolerance, was an attempt to undo some of what he'd wrought with Birth of a Nation, by showing the evils slavery has caused through time. The film was another lavish spectacle in the spirit of the great Italian spectacles like Cabiria, but it was a failure both politically and financially. Griffith's career never recovered. Though he was one of the founding artists of United Artists, he wasn't with the company for long, and the final years of his life were spent in relative seclusion. Despite all he may have contributed to the history of cinema, Griffith's name was forever linked with that single movie, and it forever shadows -- perhaps rightfully so -- everything else he did.
Of course, I didn't know any of this in 1977, darting around the cemetery at Mount Tabor and poking around his grave. The grave is still there, of course, though the quaint church building has been replaced by one of those generic, pre-fab deals Methodists seem oddly fond of. Still, that grave connects to the movie we're actually here to discuss, as the career of German actress Leni Riefenstahl is very similar. Riefenstahl began her career in front of the camera, but it was behind it that she made her lasting contribution to cinema. Many of the techniques we now take for granted -- moving the camera around, crane shots, dolly shots -- can be traced back to Riefenstahl. Along with a host of other German filmmakers, she made cinema far more kinetic, far more dynamic, than it had been before. Unfortunately, she chose to showcase much of her incredible talent in Triumph of the Will, a film whose primary aim was to show how glorious Hitler and the Third Reich was. Like Griffith, pretty much anything you did before and after a film like that is going to be overshadowed. And among the things Riefenstahl did before Triumph of the Will was star in a series of sweeping mountaineering epics directed by geologist and outdoor sporting enthusiast Arnold Fanck. The White Hell of Piz Palu represents the middle entry in a thematic trilogy that began with The Holy Mountain and ended with Storm Over Mont Blanc (SOS Iceberg is sort of a cousin), all three starring Riefenstahl, directed by Fanck, and concerning people who get in a lot of trouble up in the Alps. In the case of Piz Palu, the trouble begins straight away with a trio of climbers making an ascent up the titular mountain. Piz Palu was and remains notable for being covered in a lot of ice, and it is this ice, in combination with a warm wind, that causes such trouble for healthy young lovers Dr. Johannes and Maria Krafft (Gustaff Deissl and Mizzi Gotzel respectively) and guide Christian (Otto Spring). A snow slide catches them off guard, and poor Maria plunges into a crevasse, leaving Johannes kneeling helpless at the edge while Christian makes his way down the mountain in search of help, though both men know there's precious little hope of it amounting to anything other than body recovery.
Skip ahead a bit, to the same mountain, where hearty newlyweds Hans (Ernst Peterson) and Maria (Leni Riefenstahl) have decided, apparently, to celebrate their marriage by hiking up into the Alps and staying in one of the many shelters that dot all the popular hiking and climbing routes. From time to time their friend Flieger (real life World War One flying ace Ernst Udet) buzzes them in his biplane and drops little bottles of champagne attached to wee parachutes. It's all very healthy and fun and vigorous, so much so that Maria is more than happy to cavort happily in the snow while wearing a skirt and sleeveless blouse. Things turn dour, however, when Johannes shows up at the shelter. Maria does her best to befriend the haunted climber, who returns to Piz Palu every season in a vain search for his wife's body. Hans, on the other hand, seems alternately fascinated by the gloomy man and irritated that he's lurking around. I guess that's what happens when you spend your honeymoon in a public cabin in the Alps. You're just asking for a damned soul to show up and recount his haunted past to you. Maria discovers that, while he was waiting for Christian to return with help from the town at the foot of the mountain, Johannes thought he could hear Maria (his Maria -- that the two women have the same name is no accident, I'm sure) shouting for help. Both horrified and elated by the thought that his wife might still be alive, injured at the bottom of the crevasse, Johannes begins a reckless solo descent into the cavernous crack. But when he reaches the literal end of his rope, there is no one there and no sign of Maria. Since then, he has combed the mountain for her, but to no avail and with no ability to do it effectively without a support team. Well, obviously, he's about to get one, and this trio's ascent isn't going to go any better than the first time Johannes attempted Piz Palu.
There's a lot of stuff to admire in this film, but you're really going to need to like mountaineering, because that's the film's obsession. Fanck was a naturalist, after all, and Piz Palu itself is the star of this film. I thought it was fascinating. Being a beginner climber myself, though one with no aspirations to go anywhere where the photo of me includes having an ice-encrusted beard (I'll stick to boulders and mountains of a shorter stature than The Matterhorn), these movies serve as an incredible, documentary-like look at Alpine climbing in the early years of the 20th century. In fact, this movie could very well be regarded as a documentary about mountain climbing with some make believe drama injected. Fanck, working alongside co-directed G.W. Pabst, films much of the movie on location and with actual mountaineering going on. And given modern clothing and safety systems, watching it done old school -- in heavy wool and with almost no equipment other than a rope, and ax, crampons, and that famous German/Swiss physical culture can-do vitality -- is interesting. But make no mistake, given the choice between climbing in heavy wool and knee socks or performance fleece and ultra-5000 space age wicking material, I'm sticking with modern gear, regardless of how cool someone looks kitted out in the old style duds. And the climbing in this film is truly breathtaking, especially when it concentrates on Johannes' dangerous descent into the crevasse. Watching the way the climber wedges his way into small spaces, makes crazy leaps, dangles over nothing -- there have been decades of mountain films made since this one, but few capture the activity with such raw energy. Fanck is a documentarian by nature, and he doesn't rely on camera tricks and snazzy editing. He simply puts the camera in place -- which itself must have been quite a feat of climbing and rappelling -- and lets the action speak for itself. Most of the film's drama stems from this approach, as one gets the feeling that the actors are in as much danger as the characters they are playing. A second descent into an icy network of caverns and crevasses, this one performed by a rescue team searching for the bodies of a university climbing team caught in an avalanche -- succeeds in creating a completely alien, eerie universe. Shadowy men with flares move through the ice tunnels, casting reflections and smoke in all directions.
Secondary to the presence of the mountain and the act of climbing, then simply trying to survive, it, is the human drama. One of the things that sets this film apart from many of the silent era is that the acting is subdued and natural, never reverting to any of that extremely exaggerated pantomiming that has become synonymous with performances of the era. I love films of the silent era, but even I have to admit that many of the performances in even the best of films are so stylized and artificial that it becomes hard to relate to the characters. Not so in The White Hell of Piz Palu. Everyone looks and acts like a regular person, and as such, it becomes very easy to identify with them. It would have been easy for Gustaff Deissl to express his melancholy by doing the "crazy panic face" and "furtive glancing back and forth before burying head in hands." Instead, we get a deceptively powerful scene where he sits in stoic contemplation, listening to the dripping of a melting icicle that reminds of the melting icicles that surrounded him as he waited desperately at the edge of the cliff for Christian to return with help. But instead of doing the freak out or the over-sold "making an O with my mouth" face, he simply sits there, winces slightly, then quietly gets up, walks outside, and breaks off the icicle. It's a perfect example of how complicated acting can be. There's the hammy over the top way to go, and there's the very accomplished and dramatic but still obviously acting way to go (the "win an Oscar" method). Deissl goes the third, less journeyed route, which is to act in a way that makes the audience forget you are acting. Simply put, I believe this guy.
The film hints at but never develops a romantic triangle. It's obvious that Maria (the Riefenstahl one) is entranced by this dark, brooding, rugged man who climbs the most dangerous mountains in Europe by himself in a hopeless search for his dead wife. And it's just as obvious that Hans develops an almost immediate inferiority complex, feeling that measured against Joannes, he himself is less of a man. But once again, the film plays the melodrama with subtlety, and never turns Hans into some cartoonish jealous lover. His insecurity around Johannes first manifests itself in a need to engage in a bout of manly firewood chopping, and later to accompanying Johannes on his quest, thus enabling Johannes to cover territory that can't be covered solo. Finally, it culminates in Hans insisting on walking point for a while, and it's then that the trouble really begins, even though it's not entirely Hans' fault. An avalanche injures Hans, and the ensuing rescue attempt results in Johannes breaking a leg, leaving the trio stranded atop the mountain hoping that Christian will notice their entry into the mountain hut log and assemble some sort of rescue. Hans eventually succumbs to high altitude cerebral edema (altitude sickness to you and me), resulting in him becoming delirious and, at times, even suicidal. Needless to say, the romantic triangle that could have developed never trudges into such predictable territory as romantic triangles often do, and it is soon replaced by the simple tale of three people attempting to survive near impossible odds.
Riefenstahl impresses as an actress, and if you are able to forget for a moment that she would go on a few years later to turn Hitler into a godlike Wotan figure descending from the clouds to deliver rousing speeches to masses of Sieg Heiling Germans, she exudes an instant likability. She's not exactly attractive -- not in the way one could instantly accept the likes of Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, or Josephine Baker -- but there's such a natural air of vitality and energy about her that she endears herself. She's sort of like the tomboy best friend, the cute one you don't date but love to go hiking with. Of course, this best friend eventually turns out to be a Nazi propagandist, and that sort of sours the milk. In 1933, after making her last film as an actress (SOS Iceberg, again with Fanck), Riefenstahl launched her career as a director. The Blue Light treads familiar territory, as it is set in the Alps and once again prominently features mountaineering. But where as Fanck strove for as much realism as possible, Riefenstahl's film goes whole hog in on mysticism. It was while watching her in movies like these that Hitler became infatuated with Riefenstahl and began the process of bringing her into the Nazi party. Riefenstahl directed a series of pro-German, if not pro-Nazi, documentaries, all of which are considered landmark technical achievements. These included a documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics and 1933's Victory of Faith, a propaganda piece that became something of an embarrassment when one of the chief subjects, Ernst Rohm, was executed during the Night of the Long Knives. Rohm was an open homosexual, as were several other prominent members of the paramilitary stormtrooper organization Sturmabteilung, of which Rohm was in command. Rohm was eventually caught up in the purge and charged by Himmler and Goring with plotting to overthrow Hitler. Hitler, however, still considered Rohm a friend, and did as much as he could to put off the man's death. When Rohm refused to commit "honorable suicide" however, he was executed, with his homosexuality being the on-record reason. Once the war was rolling, Riefenstahl's career became even harder to sort out. She was active in filming a number of victory parades, such as Hitler's triumphant parade through conquered Poland, and was on hand during the killing of a number of civilians in retaliation for resistance efforts. Pictures of Leni at the execution were used to both condemn and exonerate her. She was indeed present, but she is also noticeably upset. What's the story? In her own words, she attempted to prevent the executions but was forced back a gunpoint by German soldiers. War being what it is, who knows? She continued her propaganda work, though, filming the aforementioned victory parade in 1939. She also began work on a feature film adaptation of Tiefland, a production that included in its crew a number of forced labor conscripts from German concentration camps.
Fate seems to have been committed to keeping the actress-director's life as weird as possible. When the war in Europe ended, novelist-screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who was with the Navy at the time working on Allied propaganda films being directed by John Ford (some of which can be downloaded from archive.org and are really worth a look), wa tasked with arresting Riefenstahl. The Allies wanted her in Nuremberg for the War Crimes trials, so that she could identify various people in her films. Riefenstahl herself did not stand trial, but many were skeptical of her claims that she was just an innocent bystander who had no idea what concentration camps were or "what the Nazis were really up to" -- especially when that statement was coupled with a statement that she made propaganda films because Goebbels threatened to send her to a concentration camp if she didn't. History, of course, is a nasty knot to untangle, especially in times of conflict. That was pretty much it for her career. She attempted to return to film making but found few people willing to finance her projects. Tiefland was finally released in 1954. Eventually, she turned to still photography and worked for a while in The Sudan. At the age of 72 -- though she lied and said she was 52 in order to do it -- she became a certified diver and began a career as an underwater photographer. Her contributions to the history of cinema are as great as they are terrible, and she remains a very divisive person to discuss. However, divorced of its political context and the frightening results it helped yield, her pioneering contributions to film making cannot be denied. In her films we find the birth of much of the modern language of cinema. Even as her subject matter repulses most, her technique is breathtaking. It's hard, even knowing what we know, to watch something like Triumph of the Will or Olympia and not get swept up by how beautiful it is. It's not unlike watching the work of D.W. Griffith, who was, in my opinion, nowhere near the league of Riefenstahl. But he still made sweeping films, and one can't help but get caught up momentarily in the spectacle before the reality of what you're watching sets in again. Director Arnold Fanck apparently ran afoul of German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels early on. After making such films as Storm Over Mont Blanc -- a film featuring a French hero -- Fanck found it increasingly difficult to work, until he finally capitulated and began working on projects for both the German and Japanese government. When the war ended, Fanck's career was dead, and he faded into obscurity, his final days being spent working as a lumberjack. It wasn't until more recently that Fanck's adventure films were rediscovered and he collected groups of admirers who appreciated his much more natural approach to film making. At the behest of Leni Riefenstahl, White Hell of Piz Palu was co-directed by G.W. Pabst. Pabst split his time between German and American projects, as well as between cinema and opera. It was in one of Pabst's films, in fact, that Deissl had his first role. In the end, though, they are all of them the human subplot dominated by the Alps-sized shadow cast by the leading lady.
But even she is outsized by the mountain itself. Mountain adventure films have come and gone since then, and most of the movement has been toward the goofy and embarrassing. Arnold Fanck is really where this type of adventure begins, though, and even if his became a largely forgotten name, his adventure films still stand as some of the best ever made, and his combination of documentary and drama informs many modern films. His camera studies the mountain intently, dwells on the natural wonders such behemoths generate: the dance of cloud shadows over snow fields and rags, the glistening tunnels and pits of ice fields, the bizarre swirls of powder kicked up by winds cascading over the peaks. One gets a feel for every nook and cranny, every nub, jug, and crimpy little handhold. And that helps us understand the pain of the characters as they toil up the spine of this beast. Unencumbered by the modern thirst for special effects, madcap editing, and overblown theatrics, Fanck simply lets the mountain be a mountain, and the end result is both hypnotic and scary. It's going to brutalize you, probably even kill you. But you can't stop yourself from going anyway. As exciting as White Hell of Piz Palu is in many places, it's also unevenly paced. After the opening disaster, the film settles down for nearly forty minutes of drama that alternates between being effective and simply dragging on for too long and becoming tedious. Even though the acting is natural and there is much in the film that is subtle, it also has its moments of clunkiness, specifically in the overly long way it goes about telling us just how happy and delightful Hans and Maria are. And while it is punctuated by Johannes' panicked descent into the crevasse -- quite possibly my favorite part of the film -- his time in the mountain hut consists of far too much pensive staring while symbolic snow melts. But then, Fanck goes and does something like the shot of Johannes outside, smoking a cigarette while sitting on an old wooden fence with the whole of the Alps spreading out behind him, and it pulls you right back in. Silent films trade in images, by necessity, and Fanck manages on many occasions to capture scenes of iconic beauty. Still, despite these missteps, White Hell of Piz Palu emerges as a truly fascinating and exciting film from the dawn of action-adventure cinema. Once we're on the mountain itself, the film is tense and well-executed, not to mention jaw-dropping in some of the stunts that aren't even stunts as much as they are just examples of how dangerous mountaineering was (and is). If I had to compare it to any modern movie, it would be the docu-drama Touching the Void, or the slightly older documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest. Both films, like White Hell of Piz Palu, capture both the menace and the beauty of such natural wonders and our enduring fascination with trying to climb them. When our trio suffers onscreen, it's easy to feel their suffering. When they stand on the threshold of rescue only to have hope vanish, we feel it. And when Fanck shows us ice-encrusted Piz Palu towering over the landscape, we feel the oppressive weight of its menace as well as the stunning allure of its beauty.  Labels: Action: Adventure, B-Masters Roundtable, Country: Germany, Year: 1929 posted by Keith at 3:57 PM | 2 Comments Friday, June 27, 2008The Land That Time Forgot Release Year: 1975Country: England, United States Starring: Doug McClure, John McEnery, Susan Penhaligon, Keith Barron, Anthony Ainley, Godfrey James, Bobby Parr, Declan Mulholland, Colin Farrell, Ben Howard, Roy Holder. Writer: James Cawthorn, Michael Moorcock Director: Kevin Connor Cinematographer: Alan Hume Music: Douglas Gamley Producer: John Dark Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us For many years, England's Amicus Productions was the scrappy studio living in the shadow of and following the lead of the higher profile Hammer Studio. In fact, so closely did Amicus follow Hammer's horror lead that much of their output continue to be mistakenly labeled as Hammer Horror. Amicus often used the same actors -- including Peter Cushing and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee -- and directors -- including Freddie Francis and Roy Ward Baker -- and went for a similar feel. There are, however, several differences. For starters, most of Amicus' horror films were set in the present day, or at least more recently than Hammer Victorian-era gothic tales. Also, having been founded by Americans, Amicus often looked overseas for established genre talent rather than sticking primarily to English stars. Thus, you get a film like Madhouse or Scream and Scream Again, both of which starred American horror icon Vincent Price. And finally, although Amicus is known these days primarily for their horror output -- and especially their horror anthology films like Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, The House that Dripped Blood, Vault of Horrors, and Tales from the Crypt -- they also produced a number of science-fiction and sci-fi tinged horror films. Hammer did this as well, at least for a little while and most successfully with their Quatermass films, but once Dracula, the mummy, and Frankenstein became established hits, Hammer pretty much jettisoned sci-fi in favor of straight Gothic horror. Amicus, on the other hand, constantly dabbled in the speculative genre. Their first, and easily their best known sci-fi outings, if for no other reason than the association they have with one of the biggest sci-fi cult hits of all time, are their two Doctor Who films starring Peter Cushing as the mysterious time-traveler. At the time, the television series was still shot in black and white. Amicus looked toward two of the very best story arcs from the first Doctor's series (William Hartnell's stories The Daleks and The Daleks' Invasion of Earth), and redid them, only with a bigger budget and in eye-popping Technicolor. Although the movies were rehashes with some departures from the series (Peter Cushing, for example, actually refers to himself as "Doctor Who" and with no hint of being an alien -- which, while out of step for the series as we know it, was still in line with the series at the time), they were hits for Amicus, as the appeal of seeing Doctor Who in color and starring one of England's most beloved actors was a huge draw.
Amicus dabbled in sci-fi on and off in the ensuing years, with generally good results (They Came From Beyond Space), and one or two clunkers (The Deadly Bees). When the British film industry tanked at the beginning of the 1970s, small studios like Amicus were hit particularly hard. Hammer collapsed entirely, despite making some of their best horror films during the early years of that decade. Amicus limped on, however, producing some genuinely interesting films, like the bizarre and enjoyable mash-up of horror, science fiction, and Eurospy films that was Scream and Scream Again. But as the decade wore on, the belt-tightening became more and more extreme. Looking for a way to keep their craft afloat, Amicus decided to put their faith in a series of science fiction/fantasy adventure films based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It didn't work, for a number of reasons, even though the films proved relatively popular with kids and remain nostalgic favorites for people like me. The first of these films was The Land that Time Forgot, not to be confused with The Land Before Time. Both feature dinosaurs, but only one features a shrieking caveman being torn apart by a pterodactyl dangling from absurdly visible wires.
Back in the 1970s, The Land That Time Forgot played pretty regularly on television. Although I know I saw it in the theaters (it was distributed in America by AIP, whose infusion of cash as co-producers was the only thing that enabled Amicus to get these final films finished), my memories are of watching it on television, and fairly frequently at that. These days, now that I have progressed from being a five year old with the mentality of an eight year old, to being a thirty-six year old with the mentality of...well, a nine year old if we are generous, I can see just how threadbare the productions really were. It didn't matter to me then, of course, and it didn't matter to most kids despite the fact that so many people try to project the sophistication of their adult life onto their childhood. "Even as a kid, I could tell these films were cheap," they claim, and it's almost never true. Most children view films differently than adults. When a film is cheap and boring, the cheapness doesn't really register (what do you have, at age six or seven, to even judge cheapness by) and the boring parts wash over you like water off a duck's back. You tune out when it gets boring, and all you remember afterward are the cool parts. Thus, even really crummy movies can seem relatively enjoyable, because you don't remember the dull bits; all you remember is the shrieking caveman being torn apart by a pterodactyl. Oh sure, I know some of you watched these movies with the keen eye of a wizened critic even at age six, and you turned your nose up at how juvenile they were even when you were juvenile. Well, I hope you had fun watching Kramer versus Kramer as a child, while the rest of us were watching dinosaurs fighting a submarine while Doug McClure punched cavemen in the face. I'm sure your childhood was much better off for your refined sense of cinematic value when you were in first grade. I, of course, was hopelessly lowbrow and common as a child. As an adult, as you know by know, I am equally hopeless and lowbrow. While that means that I am still pleased by loads of cheap juvenile crap while being bored by indie films in which quirky dysfunctional families learn to accept one another, it also means that I also get to enjoy most of filmgoing experiences, shrugging off most films with an, "Ehh, that was alll right." It keeps me happy and keeps the blood pressure low, even if it deprives me of any claim to righteous fury over how base and moronic most entertainment has become. I've made my peace with this, and I'm happier rolling with the punches and genuinely enjoying films than I am being hyper-critical and getting upset about something as silly as a movie. Which means than even though I can see how floppy the rubber dinosaurs are, and even though I can see the wires on the pterodactyl, and even though I can tell the caveman in its mouth is a wind-up action doll, I still really enjoy The Land That Time Forgot.
The year is 1916 or 1917. The United States has yet to enter into World War I, which has yet to be named World War I, but we are more visible in our support of the Allied cause. In turn, Germany has announced the practice of unrestricted submarine warfare. At the start of the war, Germany operated its much feared u-boat fleet under certain restrictions in regard to the rules of good sportsmanship during a war. They would not, for example, attack civilian vessels, limiting themselves to torpedoing identifiable military ships belonging to their enemies (mostly England). As the war in Western Europe ground to a stalemate, Germany began to revise their u-boat strategy, first attacking any ships belonging to their enemies, and then any ships belonging to anyone they though might be helping their enemies (thus bring American ships under fire), and then, finally, they pretty much started torpedoing anything that wasn't German. The policy of unrestricted submarine warfare was one of the major tipping points that brought the U.S. into the war (though it wasn't the coup de grace -- that being a telegram from Germany pitching a plan to bring Mexico into the war on the side of the Germans). The Germans maintained that most of the so-called civilian ships they attacked were carrying weapons and supplies to the beleaguered Brits, who were deviously smuggling equipment from American suppliers aboard such civilian craft. The Land that Time Forgot picks up its story during this time of expanding u-boat warfare. German submarine captain Von Schoenvorts has just finished torpedoing a ship of the type described above: civilian but suspected of containing smuggled supplies. Despite the job being well done, and although he believes in the German cause, Von Schoenvorts is in no mood to celebrate killing civilians. He'd be even less celebratory if he knew one of the civilians who survived was American entrepreneur Doug McClure, here playing a guy named Bowen Tyler, but he's pretty much just Doug McClure. Isn't he always? And we always thankful for it? McClure is adrift now, along with the one other survivor who, lucky for McClure, happens to be hot and female (Susan Penhaligon), and lucky for the script, also happens to be a scientist. I think she's a biologist, but really, she seems to be one of those classic movie style scientists who knows a lot about everything (except mechanical stuff, since she is, of course, just a girl). Thanks to my sister, herself a bilogist, I have met many other scientists and many other biologists, and they always seem to be very specialized in what they do. My sister, for example, can tell you pretty much everything you need to know about various types of bats and blind cave fish, but I think if you dropped a caveman off in her lab and asked her about him, she'd have little more to say than what could be gleaned from watching Encino Man, which is that cavemen love to party and swing from things. But Susan Penhaligon's Lisa Clayton is as comfortable finding her way around a protozoa as she is a caveman, a diplodicus, or Doug McClure. She's also handy with geography, and she probably knows a few things about botany. But not mechanical stuff. That's for the guys, and luckily, Doug McClure happens to be the son of a guy who designs submarines. But it is the early 20th Century, so perhaps science was still more generalized, like how centuries before, Sir Isaac Newton could be good at calculus, physics, and poking metal rods into his own eye sockets to see how deformation of the eyeball affected seeing.
So when it happens that a few other survivors happen by, all of them British sailors, and our merry band happens to find the U-boat that torpedoed them, they are well suited for a hostile take-over. And so begins a cat and mouse battle between the Germans and Brits plus Doug McClure, with each side trying to either out-muscle or out-sneak the other side to get the upper hand and win/lose control of the submarine. Now you might be wondering whether you're watching a movie about Doug McClure fighting dinosaurs or a WWI era submarine adventure. And indeed, the first half of this film concerns itself primarily with Great War era U-boat shenanigans. However, I never really found these proceedings to be dull, as not only do I like WWI stuff, but I also like the glimpses into the characters -- specifically von Schoenvorts (himself an amateur naturalist). When the move/counter move mini-war on the sub results in the ship ending up off the coast of Antarctica, very low on fuel and with no hope of reaching a supply ship or port -- the two sides form an uneasy alliance in an attempt to figure out how the hell to get themselves out of the mess they've gotten into. A large cave from which pours forth warm, fresh water, seems the best possible alternative, because when in doubt, why not take your submarine into a completely uncharted cave. But they do, and despite some close scrapes, they safely navigate through and into... An amazing tropical prehistoric wonderland!
Previously, we looked at the Doug McClure fantasy adventure film At the Earth's Core, from the same production company and director, and reflected briefly on the history of hollow earth theories that inspired the various "world within the world" adventures stories like Pellucidar, the series upon which the film was based. This time around, we're tackling a theory that had a very similar evolution from scientific theory to discredited crackpot theory to fodder for pulp sci-fi and adventure writers. And once again, tracing the origins of such beliefs takes us far back in time. As with the caves and earthquakes, fissures and sinkholes, that most likely let primitive man to conceptualize a world below the surface of the earth, so too can we assume that the birth of the idea of the arctic as a place of magic comes from it being an equally impenetrable and difficult to understand region. In the days before performance fleece and Russian ice breakers, the remote, freezing north must have been nearly as impenetrable as the depths of the oceans. But men ventured there, from time to time, and when they did, who knows what things they beheld -- augmented, of course, by the old timey storytellers' penchant for bullshit. Early accounts of Greek thinkers theorized that, because the northern stars didn't seem to rotate around the earth in the same fashion as other stars, that they must be above an equally unusual land. Although polar exploration was likely out of the question, the Arctic circle itself was well within reach of ancient man, provided he brought enough furs and mukluks. But the Greeks simply made up their own stories about this curious place to the north, beneath the Arktos constellations. They "theorized" -- perhaps with the aid of Dionysus -- that this land existed above the north wind, and thus was pleasant in climate if you survive the curtain of murderous cold that surrounded it. The land was, furthermore, once populated by advanced beings known as the Hyperboreans who, being lucky enough to live in such an awesome world, were basically gods. However, the toil of a perfect existence eventually wore them down, and out of boredom, the Hyperboreans drown themselves.
In 330 B.C., someone actually did bother to set out for these mysterious northern lands. Greek astronomer Pytheus purportedly sailed north of the British Isles and discovered there a land he dubbed Thule, where during the Summer Solstice the sun did not set. Pytheas attempted to continue his harsh northward trek, but the ship was turned back by an impenetrable wall of what he referred to as "sea lungs." Fantastic at the time, we can today understand the basic truths behind Pytheas' accounts. Thule could be any of the lands north of Britain: The Shetlands, the coasts of assorted Scandanavian countries. Non-setting suns in these regions at certain times of the year are understood and accounted for. And sea lungs are, more than likely, massive icebergs and floes. Long after Pytheas journey tot he north, more and more stories began to filter down, often from early British and Norse sailors. These stories, given the average ancient sailor's penchant for bullshitting as well as any other storyteller, became increasingly fanciful. Aside from the ancient Greek idea of a lush tropical paradise beyond the curtain of cold, these early explorers added pygmies and various monsters to the mix. In the late 1500s, England mounted official expeditions to the region, largely in hopes of laying claim to it as part of the empire. It was even claimed that King Arthur, the quasi-mythical father of what was then modern England, mounted expeditions to the arctic regions. The early Elizabethan efforts, while both brave and groundbreaking, did little to advance the cause of the northernmost world being within England's sphere of influence. It turns out that the chief problem with exploring the Arctic is that most of the people who try it die of starvation and exposure, provided they aren't frozen or drowned when their ships hits an iceberg. Or simply go mad when they find their ships iced in and unable to free themselves. But despite all that, it was during this era that England established tenuous toeholds in places as far north as the Baffin Islands.
Exploration picked up again in the 1800s. This time it was ignited by stories of a navigable "northwest passage," a sailing route clear of ice than would allow ships to sail over the top of the world, thus saving untold months that had to be spent sailing around the giant continents that got in the way of easy sailing between, say, England and India. This time, they weren't just shooting for the arctic regions; they were aiming for the very Pole itself. Not surprisingly, a science fiction writer beat them to it. Although little of it made it into subsequent -- and more familiar -- film versions, Mary Shelley's original novel, Frankenstein, is concerned to a large degree with an ill-fated arctic expedition, the captain of which seems bitterly and ironically disappointed that there isn't any mystical tropical paradise to greet them at journey's end; there is, instead, only more and harsher cold. It is on this expedition that they encounter another ill-fated arctic traveler, Victor Von Frankenstein, traveling with his now infamous creature. While most film versions of the story concern themselves purely with the creation of the monster of Frankenstein's Jacob's Ladder-strewn laboratory and the eventual destruction of the creature by torch-wielding peasants storming the castle, the book actually ends with the creature escaping toward the North Pole, presumably going there to die. Exploiting the fervor over dramatic leaps in exploring the world during the 1800s and relying on the old myths and legends, the science fiction and pulp writers of the era began cranking out a number of stories about the discovery of strange lands at the top and bottom of the world. Most of these fell within the realm of what we can today classify as "lost worlds" literature. As the remote corners of the earth became less remote, new discoveries of ancient civilizations were happening with stunning rapidity. Most dramatic among these was the excavation of ancient Egyptian sites, but similar excavations and scientific expeditions were taking place everywhere from the heart of the Amazon Jungle to the steppes of Mongolia. Scientists were having a field day, and so too were the writers of fantastic fiction. In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe entered into the game with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a fictionalized account of a man's incredible adventure at the South Pole and of the mysterious creatures he encountered. Incredibly, the story was thought for a time to be a work of non-fiction.
When explorers finally did penetrate the top of the world, thus dispelling any myths about tropical islands or gigantic holes leading to an advanced society of learned elders who dwelt inside the earth, it did little to, well, dispel myths about tropical islands or gigantic holes leading to an advanced society of learned elders who dwelt inside the earth. H.P. Lovecraft wrote a pseudo-sequel to Poe's work, entitled At the Mountain of Madness, which proffers the hole into which Pym fell into lead to a land populated by his now famous shoggoths. A group of German mystics founded something called the Thule Society in 1912, combining the more or less believable accounts of Pyhtean's voyage north with the more fantastical old belief in the Hyperboreans, then layering on top of that a healthy dose of master race B.S. and anti-Semitism. According to the Thule Society, Thule wasn't just a name for some existing northern land before such places had names known to Greeks. It was, in fact, an actual island, one populated by the super-advanced Hyperboreans who, like the Atlanteans (and the Muu-ians, and the Lemorians, and the Seatopians), perished when their island paradise sank into the sea. However, a few Hyperboreans escaped and became the German race, condemned to live out their lives on the European mainland amid all the Jews and other inferior races who wore pants and stuff, instead of the silver lame mini-tunics with golden shoulder pads and tiaras, which is what I assume all super-advanced inhabitants of lost continents wore. The Thule Society eventually went on to be a Nazi farm team, and no one ever addressed the fact that while the Jews may have been inferior, at least their continent never sank into the sea. You would think that something as daft and racist as the Thule Society would have finally put the "mystic arctic" theories to rest. But then, you'd be underestimating the strong desire in people to believe really ridiculous shit. In fact, post World War II, theories about secret paradises above the Arctic Circle enjoyed a resurgence, with the claim now added that the North Pole was a base for UFOs piloted not by space aliens with an affinity for anally probing Midwestern farmers, but by Nazis who had escaped after Word War II and rediscovered ancient Hyperborean technology, allowing them to build experimental flying saucers to be used when the Fourth Reich rose up and conquered the world. Once again, pulp writers had a field day. These days, despite the fact that commercial flights pass over it and young women ski across it, and rich people drink champagne and go there on giant Russian ships to look at polar bears, conspiracy theories about secret UFO bases, gateways to the hollow earth, and lush tropical paradises at the North Pole still enjoy a surprisingly high degree of popularity, with all the evidence to the contrary dismissed as "a government cover-up." Such theories were lent further fuel when, in 2004, researchers began digging up fossil evidence that at some point (we're talking hundreds of thousands of years ago) the Arctic enjoyed a subtropical climate. That this would have been long before the dawn of man is of little consequence, the Hyperboreans of course being a totally different race. Unfortunately, arctic researchers have turned up little more than the fossilized remnants of plants. To date, they have found no ray guns, UFOs, or silver lame mini-tunics.
Now amid all of this (1922, to be exact), Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the story The Land that Time Forgot. And many years later, a nearly bankrupt Amicus Productions sent Doug McClure to the fantastic tropical lost world of Caprona, where he and the combined German and British crew soon discover the land is positively crawling with dinosaurs -- and dinosaurs from various epochs. They also discover cavemen who, like the dinosaurs, seem to be in varied states of evolutionary advancement. Through her incredible ability to interpret caveman grunts and chest slapping, as well as her ability to look through a microscope with von Schoenvorts, Lisa is able to divine the mysteries of Caprona. It seems that evolution in this lost world occurs not over a period of millenniums, but within the span of a single lifetime, with great evolutionary steps being taken as part of a mysterious metamorphosis. The further south one travels, the more advanced the humans become. While Lisa and von Schoenvorts are fascinated by this biological phenomenon, and while Doug McClure seems happy to pal around with a caveman and shoot dinosaurs, most of the sailors on both sides are keen to get the hell out of Caprona so they can stop being eaten by dinosaurs and return to the safety and luxury of World War One. When they discover crude oil, they discover the means of their escape. However, like all lost worlds, this one is menaced by a restless volcano that could blow at any minute. As with Kevin Connor's other adventures based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land that Time Forgot is low-budget and crammed with tons of really awful special effects. In 1925, Harry Hoyt and Marion Fairfax's silent film version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World became the first "lost world" movie, and it was said at the time that the special effects work of Willis O'Brien (who would later go on to do the effects for the original King Kong) were so good that audiences at the time would be completely fooled into thinking the film was a documentary with actual footage of actual living dinosaurs. I don't know how many people did believe the dinosaurs were real, but it's safe to say that the effects in 1925 were far better than the effects we see in 1975. The Land that Time Forgot isn't quite as bad as, say, Mighty Gorga bad, but they are pretty terrible. On the other hand, they are colorful and hypnotic. As a kid, I was fascinated by them and not phased by how shoddy they were. As an adult, I still think they are fun. And what the movie lacks in quality it more than makes up for in quantity, because once the u-boat arrives in Caprona, all vestiges of the rather serious World War One maritime adventure vanish, and the dinosaur and caveman attacks come more or less non-stop. As McClure and his buddies venture further and further south, the evolutionary mysteries of the lost world become even more puzzling. So do the geographical mysteries, because although it is assumed that they have hiked days away from the lake that is their base, everyone seems to be able to job back to the submarine within a matter of minutes.
The cast, comprised mostly of the usual British stalwarts, is solid. McClure turns in his usual performance, but that's really all I ever want from him. Yet again, he's a regular Joe who runs up against the fantastic and deals with it mostly by punching it in the face. Some people don't care for McClure's style. I'm not among those people, but even if I was, I'd have to admit that his final "we are so fucked" expression as he watched the submarine disappear is incredible. Connor's direction is, also, about the same as always, meaning that he correctly positions the camera and shoots his scenes, but never adds very much character to the film. I sort of prefer that style of direction to the overbearingly tricky "look at me and how clever I am" style of self-indulgent direction we see today. Connor recognizes that his movie is colorful and full of crude rubber dinosaur, and you don't add much to the formula by zooming the camera around and doing lots of crazy editing. Although I'm sure this film benefits in some degree from my own nostalgia regarding it, the end result is the same. I really like it. It's one of those rainy Saturday afternoon matinee films that seeks to do little more than entertain you. Aside from plenty of fun dinosaur and caveman adventure, The Land that Time Forgot offers up really one of the most downbeat and apocalyptic endings of any movie aimed at kids. As McClure tries to rescue Lisa from a band of slightly more advanced cavemen (naturally they kidnapped her), the volcano erupts (also naturally). As they struggle to make it back to the submarine, the truce between the Germans and the Brits finally starts to break down. Von Schoenvorts, the sentimentalist, wants to wait for McClure and Lisa. His first mate, a realist, wants to leave before it's too late. In the end, no one wins, as pretty much everyone guns down everyone else, and the cave collapses, crushing the submarine and the few in it who were still alive. McClure and Lisa are stranded in Caprona, with nothing to do except follow the land's mysteries ever further south, until at last they reach what is, for all intents and purposes, the end of the world. There, they toss a message in a bottle into the raging Antarctic seas, hoping against all hope that someone, someday, will find it, believe it, and come rescue them. And unfortunately, someone did. Labels: Action: Adventure, Director: Kevin Conner, Fantasy, Series: Oceans Against Us, Stars: Doug McClure, Studio: Amicus, Year: 1975 posted by Keith at 12:26 PM | 7 Comments Thursday, June 19, 2008Pirates of Blood River Release Year: 1962Country: England Starring: Kerwin Mathews, Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, Glenn Corbett, Marla Landi, Michael Ripper, Peter Arne, Oliver Reed, Jack Stewart, Marie Devereux, Desmond Llewelyn. Writer: Jimmy Sangster Director: John Gilling Cinematographer: Arthur Grant Music: Gary Hughes Producer: Anthony Nelson Keys Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us After taking several years off, the 1950s saw the return of the pirate movie, thanks largely to the efforts of Walt Disney. In 1950, Disney produced a colorful, fast-paced, and smartly written adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure tale, Treasure Island. Two non-Disney sequels -- the directly related Long John Silver and the dubiously connected Return to Treasure Island -- followed in 1954, and a TV series came out in 1955. Plus, it seemed like every other episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney" featured either pirates or kids in coonskin caps solving a mystery in a spot called Pirate's Cove. Along similar lines, Disney released a classic version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and in 1958, the first of the Sinbad films featuring special effects by Ray Harryhausen showed up. While these last two weren't pirate movies per se, they still had the air of old fashioned high seas adventure and swashbuckling about them. So someone at England's Hammer Studios, possibly Anthony Nelson Keys or Michael Carreras, walks up to screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and says to him, "Jimmy, old boy, we want to make a pirate film, and we want you to write it." Sangster, fresh off the astounding success of his scripts for Hammer's most famous films -- Horror of Dracula, The Mummy, and Curse of Frankenstein, among others, excitedly agrees. It'll be fun to bring the Hammer style into the realm of swashbuckling pirate movies. Sangster's mind is undoubtedly already formulating a story when Keys and/or Carreras adds, "Only here's the thing: we don't have any money for a boat, so don't write a script that features a pirate ship."
A pirate movie without a pirate ship? Sangster, by his own admission, was somewhat baffled by the whole idea. Of course, pretty much every pirate movie sets a good deal of its action on land. Errol Flynn's Captain Blood spends at least as much time on land as he does standing in heroic poses at the wheel of a ship, yelling "avast" and "me hearties." But he does spend time standing in heroic poses at the wheel of a ship, yelling "avast" and "me hearties." And his films feature plenty of ship-to-ship action, raids, and cannon fire. Ditto the Disney films. Plenty of on-land action, but also plenty of ship-to-ship shenanigans. It's hard to believe that even the tiny budgets within which the average Hammer Studio film had to operate couldn't be stretched in some way to come up with a pirate ship for their pirate movie, since hard to believe that anyone would make a pirate movie without a ship. But no. Sangster's task remained the same: write a pirate movie without a pirate ship. By 1962, Hammer had become synonymous with horror films, even though the studio's output before the release of the above-mentioned "big three" delved into pretty much every genre, as most studios would. But once Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein were released, it was all about Hammer horror. Any other type of production was pushed to the back burner, both by the studio itself and by the public, who proved in those early days to have a near insatiable appetite for the lurid, colorful style of sex and blood Hammer routinely used to outrage critics and members of the decency police. But the desire remained, however flickering, to make sure Hammer didn't become just a horror factory, and doing a period piece pirate film seemed like a nice fit. They could recycle most of the props and costumes from their other films. And although they weren't horror films, pirates lent themselves to easy adaptation to horror film tropes, what with all the skulls and creeping about and stabbing each other that went on in them. They just couldn't have a boat, although they were afforded a few seconds of stock footage of someone else's boat to show during the credits.
In some ways, perhaps, this rather large restriction ended up helping Sangster, because the end result is a cracking good adventure story in which you barely even notice that the pirates never set foot onto a ship. Onto a raft, yes, but never a ship. I'd expect no less from Sangster, who is, in my opinion,easily one of the best screenwriters who ever entered the business. Unable to fall back on pirate movie standards like the cannon battle and a scene of guys with swords clenched in their teeth swinging from one ship to another, the harried screenwriter delivers instead a landlocked pirate film that, in many ways, plays out like an American western, albeit one with far more men adorned with a variety of colorful silk scarves. American Kerwin Mathews -- Sinbad in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad -- stars as fiery young Jonathon Standing, the member of a Huguenots settlement on a remote island somewhere that I don't think is ever clearly defined. The Huguenots were basically the early Protestants, frequently at odds with Catholic kings and churches and prone to being persecuted and going to war with dominant Catholics throughout the 1500s, well into the 1600s. The island settlement, then, is one of relative secrecy, and it is lorded over by a council of religious elders who dole out law based on strict Protestant interpretations of the The Bible. This apparently worked well for many years, but by the time Jonathon Standing comes around to make out with buxom Hammer glamour regular Marie Devareaux, the council has become largely corrupt, creating tension throughout the townsfolk, who feel that the elders have given in to petty power obsessions and greed rather than dictating the word of God. Jonathan's own father is the head of the council, but even if some vestige of an honest and noble man still exists within old Jason Standing (Andrew Kier, actually the same age as Kerwin Mathews), he is too weak-willed against the other members of the council for it to matter. In fact, when Jonathan himself violates the rules of the town by comforting the abused wife of one of the council members, Jason condemns the popular young man to hard labor in the colony's prison -- a virtual death sentence, we learn. The conviction of Jonathan only serves to make the crowds angrier, but like most angry crowds, there is much muttering beneath the breath and complaining, but no one is quite ready yet to take up the torches and pitchforks.
In prison, Jonathan fares poorly, as his popularity with hoi polloi makes him a target of the sadistic guards. So it isn't long after his clothes have been reduced to prison regulation tatters that he escapes, leading his captors on a wild chase through the island's swamps before coming face to face with Count Dracula! Well, with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, here playing French pirate captain LaRoche and sporting a deformed hand and an eyepatch. LaRoche makes about as nice as a ruthless, cold-hearted pirate can and cuts a deal with Jonathan. In exchange for the Huguenots not telling anyone LaRoche and his crew use the cove as a rest stop, LaRoche will...actually, I sort of forgot what his end of the bargain was. It doesn't really matter, because as soon as Jonathan leads them toward the settlement, the pirates start killing and making demands about a treasure they claim is hidden within the town. Jonathan knows they are mad, that there is no treasure, but that doesn't stop the motley band of cutthroats from laying siege to the town. The townsfolk rally to their own defense and seem to be holding their own for a while, but their wooden walls were meant to defend against wild animals and jungle critters, not well-armed pirates. LaRoche and his gang soon capture the town, promising to hang people until the elders give up the treasure. It's up to Jonathan and his young friends to wage a guerrilla style war against the occupiers, culminating in a fairly unsurprising revelation about the alleged treasure and the giant statue of the town founder and a fairly exciting duel between Jonathan and LaRoche.
Despite the lack of a pirate ship, Pirates of Blood River has a tremendous amount going for it. Chief among its many assets is the cast, buoyed by a likable Kerwin Mathews and an exceptional venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who gets to stretch his acting chops a little more than usual in the role of LaRoche. Lee was a big star by 1962, but two of his biggest roles had been entirely speechless, and one afforded him like three lines and five minutes of screen time. He was known, therefore, far more for the characters he played than he was as venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee the actor. Pirates of Blood River lets him come out from behind the bandages, scar make-up, and fangs and, in their place, wear an eye patch and speak with a French accent. LaRoche is a good character, one that interests viewers because it's obvious that there is much more to the him than we are ever allowed to discover. How did he lose his eye? What happened to his hand? How did he become a pirate? Why is he so haunted and determined? None of these questions are ever answered, and that allowed LaRoche to be interesting without being over-exposed. We are teased with his mysterious past, but it's never demystified for us. Free from the fetters of playing a creature, venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee seems to really be giving it his all, channeling perhaps Basil Rathbone's backstabbing French pirate from Captain Blood. He also handles the swordplay well. The duel between he and Mathews is excellent, and even though he is tall and lanky and playing a guy with one eye and a gnarled arm, you never really doubt that venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee could whup you if he wanted to.
Propping up the pirate end of things are some of Hammer's most reliable supporting players, including Michael Ripper in a rare non-innkeeper role. Here he is LaRoche's supposed best friend, though it's obvious LaRoche doesn't consider anyone a friend. Ripper really gets to ham it up, speaking with a bombastic uber-pirate style that would make Long John Silver himself proud. Also int he cast of scalawags is a young Oliver Reed, though he's not really around terribly long. The entire crew tears into their roles with joyous abandon, as merry and drunk as they are threatening and violent. On the other side of the fence is another set of villains: the town elders. Just as ruthless, just as greedy, only far more devious about it. Caught in between these two forces are Jonathan and the townspeople who respect him as a voice of reason and proponent of liberty. It's very much a "freaks versus the squares" cultural battle and not unlike what we would see a few years later in Mario Bava's Danger Diabolik: hip young people caught between two opposing yet similar monoliths of status quo society. For Diabolik, it was a corrupt government and organized crime; for Jonathan, it is a corrupt theocracy and a bunch of pirates. In the end, neither side appeals to our free spirits, and they chose to reject them both. Hammer often found itself in trouble with religious authorities because of the content of their films. They usually weaseled their way out of it at the last second by having Peter Cushing clutch a Bible or something, thus proving that the film was good and moral. In the case of The Pirates of Blood River, despite the absence of a Frankenstein monster, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster really gets to lash out against religious intolerance and hypocrisy. The elders start out kind of jerky, and then you think maybe Jonathan's father will have some sort of a change of heart at some point. But he only gets worse, and he is willing to see every single person in the town butchered rather than give up the treasure about which only he knows. In the end, he gets his just desserts, as does the dastardly LaRoche, leaving Jonathan to start society anew.
Although this was a decidedly non-horror adventure film, there are still horrific elements in the movie, as there would be in other of Hammer's subsequent pirate movies. The opening sequence, in which Jonathan is discovered making out with a married woman, is probably the film's most horrific scene. Pursued through the swamp by vengeful town elders, the poor woman stumbles into the titular Blood River, which happens to be infested with piranhas. As originally filmed, the poor girl screams and thrashes about as blood bubbles up all around her. The piranhas themselves are wonderfully realized by nothing more than having rapidly moving ripples spread out across the water. Hammer wanted the film to receive a much more family friendly rating, in the spirit of increased returns and inspired no doubt by the exciting but family-friendly Disney pirate films. The scene was eventually cut down to remove the blood, and then restored years later for the film's long-awaited debut on DVD. It's a chilling scene, and director John Gilling plays it wise by letting the imagination do most of the work. The screaming and the blood is graphic enough. He doesn't undercut the power of the moment by cutting to a shot of a rubber piranha. I do regret, however, that they don't cap the scene with a shot of a perfectly intact, bleach white plastic skeleton bobbing to the surface. That's always classy. But I guess Hammer was saving all their skeleton-related pirate hijinks for Night Creatures. I don't know what other cuts Hammer made to the film that have since been restored. The sword wounds are all pretty bloody. Not Lone Wolf and Cub geyser of blood bloody, but when a guy gets impaled, the sword on which he was impaled comes back all covered in grue. Still, I suppose that's about as family friendly as Hammer was capable of being, and it's family friendly enough for me. i don't come from the school of thought that maintains all children's fare must be bloodless, harmless, and never ever scare the wee ones. I'd much rather take my family to see Pirates of Blood River than a movie where a sass-talking CGI animal learns a skill that helps him win a contest while referencing pop culture.
That does bring us to another of the film's sundry assets: director John Gilling. By all accounts, Gilling was difficult to work with even under the best circumstances. In the case of Pirates of Blood River, it seems he was nearly intolerable. Gilling wasn't meant to be the director originally, but the man they'd assigned to the job had been in a spot of trouble with the American Un-Activities Committee, that embarrassment of a Congressional organization that spent so much time and money trying to ferret out commies and liberals int he motion picture industry. Kerwin Mathews was nervous about working with such a man, fearing that the long arm of stupidity would reach him even in England and ruin his career back home. Not that, by 1962, Mathews had much of a career. But it was enough that the supposedly bankable American was uncomfortable, so the director was replaced by an unenthusiastic John Gilling. As a director, coming into a production for which there is already a script, a cast, a crew, and sets is usually thought to be rather an unenviable situation, and Gilling wasn't shy about letting his displeasure be known. Still, however big a jerk he might have been on set, the end results were usually fantastic. That was certainly the case in 1966, when he directed one of my favorite Hammer horror films, Plague of the Zombies. And it's the case with this film as well. Pirates of Blood River, even without a ship, is a fast-paced, well-made adventure tale. As cranky as Gilling may have been, there's no doubt that he still put himself into making the best possible movie he could. Released in 1962, it'd be a little disingenuous to claim that the movie was influenced by something like Vietnam, even though there is a definite counter-culture air about the story. More than likely, and as I alluded to earlier, the film was influenced both by previous pirate films and by Westerns. The Huguenot settlement, with it's rough-hewn wooden walls, has the look of a pioneer fort. And the pirates laying siege to it is reminiscent of Western movie Indians doing the same. However, at some point in the film, the roles are reversed, and the pirates become the victims of hit and run warfare waged by Jonathan and his band of fighters who, despite being outmanned and outgunned, use their intimate knowledge of the jungle around them to pick the pirates off a few at a time, leaving the brigands harried, demoralized, and eventually, mutinous. That the pirates are French only supplies another link to the emerging conflict in Vietnam, but as Sangster has never mentioned this in an interview, I think it's more a case of coincidence and hindsight equipping us with the ability to infuse the film with influences and meanings that aren't there. Still, it's kind of fun, and it keeps film studies professors in business and away from actual film work, where they would do untold amounts of damage with their crackpot experimental videos.
So make a pirate movie, they told Jimmy Sangster, one in which the only time the pirates are in the water is when they board a poorly made raft that sinks shortly after being launched. Whatever the challenges may have been, he pulled it off. And Hammer pulled it off. The Pirates of Blood River was well received by audiences, and in true Hammer fashion, that meant they would do their best to milk the popularity for as long as they could. Over the next couple of years, Hammer produced several more pirate films, usually with the same cast. They even sprang for a mock ship for one of the films, and they intended to recycle it for other pirate films until it caught on fire. Captain Clegg, also known as Night Creatures, was released in 1962 as well and continued the Hammer style of making pirate movies set entirely on land. In 1963 came The Scarlet Blade (the only Hammer pirate film that, as of this writing, remains unavailable on DVD). And in 1964, with The Devil Ship Pirates, they finally sprang for that mock-up of a ship, even though that film, like the others, takes place largely on land and sets. But that was about it for Hammer pirate movies. The ship accidentally caught on fire and thus couldn't be reused (though the burning was incorporated into the film). As if that accident signified something more, production of Hammer swashbucklers more or less came to a close with that film as the studio focused itself almost entirely on horror films. So while it may not have the panache of an Errol Flynn movie or the budget of a Disney live action film,and while it may not have a pirate ship in it, The Pirates of Blood River is still a solid adventure tale, with plenty of action, a dependable cast, and a look that fools you into thinking this is a much higher budget film than it actually is. It's nice to see these old Hammer swashbucklers getting some attention. Now if someone would only get around to releasing the rest of their caveman adventure movies and Moon Zero Two, I'd be a happy lad.  Labels: Action: Adventure, Pirates, Series: Oceans Against Us, Stars: Christopher Lee, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1962 posted by Keith at 5:41 AM | 4 Comments Saturday, April 05, 2008Captain Blood Release Year: 1935Country: United States Starring: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone, Ross Alexander, Guy Kibbee, Henry Stephenson, Robert Barrat, Hobart Cavanaugh, Donald Meek. Writer: Casey Robinson Director: Michael Curtiz Cinematographer: Ernest Haller and Hal Mohr Music: Erich Korngold Producer: Harry Joe Brown and Gordon Hollingshead Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Although I didn't make an official announcement, as of Night Creatures I am doing my third "Netxflix Diaries" experiment, meaning that I am reviewing everything (except television shows) that comes to me via Netflix. I've done it a couple times before, and I always enjoy it because, while it is exhausting to accelerate my pace to keep up with my five-at-a-time rental plan (actually six, but one of those is for the girlfriend, and there is no way I'm reviewing Mo'nique films), I enjoy the fact that it actually forces me to watch the movies I rent, and it forces me to review outside my comfort zone. This can result in some embarrassment, as I clumsily struggle to review films of the French New Wave or get get caught with something like Embrace the Darkness II in my queue (sorry -- I just really have a thing for Catalina Larranaga). But I like these challenges, feeble though they may be when compared to the labors of Hercules or the dashin' Prince Hasan. It helps foster an air of diversity here, rather than letting me slink along reviewing nothing but movies featuring guys in skull masks. Not that this round has thus far produced much that is far outside Teleport City's usual sphere of influence -- a Hammer film, a German krimi, a silly Arabian adventure film that no one in the world likes but me. And nothing in the immediate future is going to be terribly surprising -- a bunch of historical epics, some science fiction (actually, I noticed that I rarely review sci-fi, even though I watch a lot of it), and a slew of Poverty Row mystery films, among other things. But within each of these are things I wouldn't normally review. For instance, I probably never would have reviewed Captain Blood, even though I think it's a fantastic film. But here we are, and this allows me to expound -- because you know I love not getting around to the actual review until like the final three paragraphs -- on something I know I mentioned once before but can't remember exactly where. Teleport City is, by and large, a cult film site. It would seem, upon first impression, that a film like Captain Blood, or many of the old films that I regularly watch, would be ill at home here. After all, they are classics. Does anyone need one more person telling you Captain Blood is great? Or that any of these old films are great? I mean, everyone already knows that, right? It's common knowledge, and everyone has seen these films a thousand times. Well, while that may have been true at some point, it hardly holds up well today. In fact, even many of the best-known films of the 50s and earlier have, in today's pop cinema landscape, been so completely forgotten that they have achieved a level of obscurity that rivals that of any of the other cult films we might be prone to discussing. This they accomplish despite being widely available, widely discussed in the past, and cherished by the handful of people who still bother with old black and white films.
But for many people, and through no real fault of their own (it's hard to seek out and watch something if no one tells you it exists), these films might as well be as mysterious and esoteric as a Filipino superhero film in which a woman in a silver space bikini fights a vampire. The sources to which these people (and by "these people," I mean those who are roughly my age or younger) -- often do not mention old films, and so they become forgotten relics despite their merits and the best efforts of Turner Classic Movies (also known as the cable channel most in need of going HD). Additionally, older films have the reputation of being crude and overly talky, full of antiquated melodrama, weird acting styles, crummy special effects, and endless scenes of well-dressed people sitting around in living rooms doing nothing at all. Where this impression of older films come from, I am not entirely certain, because anyone who takes the time to dig a little deeper into cinema's past has discovered that action, adventure, and intrigue were staples of the film industry of the 30s and 40s just as much as they are today, and in many cases, the action, adventure, and stuntwork on display in black and whites from bygone eras surpasses anything that is done today, hamstrung as we are by an over-reliance on CGI and insurance-related litigation. I am confident that the type of people who seek out the movies regularly discussed on Teleport City are the same people who are open to (if not already actively engaged in) exploring older films and understanding that most of the conceptions people have about them are wrong. And so, a film like Captain Blood, or Gunga Din, or any of the old noir and Poverty Row thrillers we'll be getting to in due time, actually fit in at Teleport City every bit as well as the films of Jess Franco or Antonio Margheriti. Turning up amazing and forgotten films doesn't always require you to travel to Manila and spend a month digging through the crates out back of a grimy video rental store. Sometimes, all you have to do is skip the "Midnight Movies" section of wherever you go to rent or purchase films, and walk (or click) over to the "Classics" section.
Which brings us, with a shorter digression than usual, to Captain Blood. I watched a lot of black and white adventure films when I was a kid. There was no cable television where I lived, and there were no VCRs, so you were left with whatever they played on regular television (which, back then, went off the air around one in the morning and wasn't filled with nothing but Everybody Loves Raymond reruns), and that often meant watching black and white films, most likely because the rights to them could be had for cheap, and they were likely to be acceptable for television broadcast without the need for much editing. So I developed a taste for them, because really, that's all we had save for the Godzilla films on the weekend. However, through some cruel twist of fate, I never saw any old pirate movies. I saw plenty of other types of adventure films, and I'm pretty sure I saw Mutiny on the Bounty and Moby Dick at least once a week, but if I saw any of the old swashbuckling pirate films, I don't remember them -- and given my bizarre propensity for remembering weird things like that, it seems unlikely that I would have sat through an Errol Flynn pirate movie and not remembered it. Ahhh, Errol Flynn. Allow me, if you will, to indulge for a moment one of my gentlemanly crushes -- or admiration, if flirtations with homosexuality make you uncomfortable for some reason (and if they do, you need to grow a little more backbone). I have never shied away from such things and see no reason to do so. My taste in men falls primarily along the traditional lines of masculinity as defined in the 30s and 40s my matinee idols like Errol Flynn and Clarke Gable. Bogart and Mitchum. Cary Grant, of course. And wiry little Fred Astaire for his amazing power to look amazing in clothes no man should be able to pull off. Even with today's leading men -- a talent pool largely devoid of any real charisma or air of rugged masculinity -- I gravitate toward the few men who radiate that old-school air (which smells of mentholated shaving cream and woody musk): Clooney, Denzel, drunken Russell Crowe, and lately Josh Brolin. And this guy at the climbing wall at my gym. But few and far between are the lads who cut such a shape as the men of the 30s and 40s. They knew how to dress, they knew how to throw a punch, they knew how to drink, and they knew how to handle the ladies except for Bette Davis, who no one could handle nor should much want to. Of these men, I was early on familiar with the films of Bogart and Gable, Grant and of course Mitchum -- who was and remains still my Grandpa Harley's favorite actor and role model in life (photos of my grandfather as a young man are striking in their likeness). But while I knew Flynn by name, I knew practically nothing about his films and had never seen one until much later in my life. Ah well, so much the better. It's always nice to know something is waiting just over the horizon, yet to be discovered. Since then, I've worked hard to improve my familiarity with Flynn, his tumultuous life, and his films. And now you, dear reader, get to be the recipient of my hard-earned knowledge, so long as "hard-earned" means "I read a book."
Flynn's career as a leading man began with Captain Blood. Before this movie, he had a couple small roles but had done very little that would make people sit up and take notice. 1935 was a big year for filmmaking, and a number of my favorite big-budget (for the time) adventure films come from that year -- Mutiny on the Bounty starring Clarke Gable, Howard Hawks' Barbary Coast, and Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades, among other films. Additionally, 1935 saw the release of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which I have not seen but am keen to do so, as it stars Gary Cooper and deals with one of my sundry pet obsessions -- that being the portrayal in Western cinema of Raj-era India (and from a time when India was still a British colony). Somewhere amid that parade of bright lights and star power, Warner Brothers decided to release a pirate film by a director no one knew and starring two leads no one had ever heard of. Pirate movies were difficult enough as it was. During the silent era, Douglas Fairbanks was able to buckle his swashes all over the place, but with the introduction of sound, production of seafaring fare became problematic, as the technology and technique was not yet sufficiently advanced to deal with all the creaking, cracking, and crashing that comes with filming on a ship and on the ocean. This resulted in swashbucklers that were less about the swashing of buckles (or is the buckling of swashes) and more about guys sitting around inside their cabin -- which could be conveniently created on a studio sound stage. Captain Blood, as Warner's film was to be called, was to be an attempt to return to the more action-oriented style of Fairbanks, troubles with sound recording on the high seas be damned. But there were other problems facing the production. The first actor to whom Warner offered the role of Captain Blood turned it down, as did the second. That left them flailing, somewhat, until finally they settled on taking a chance on one of their bit players, a Tasmanian by the name of Errol Flynn. Playing opposite him as the lead female was another newcomer, Olivia de Havilland. Unknown starlets were one thing and hardly uncommon. They could easily be made into overnight sensations by pairing them with an established leading man. But now, Captain Blood was saddled with two newcomers, and on top of that, it was being directed by Michael Curtiz, a man whose experience lay almost entirely in the early, silent days of filmmaking and who was hardly a name to contend with spectacle-makers like Howard Hawks and Cecil B. DeMille. I'm not sure what Warner Brothers' expectations for the film's performance were at the time, but it'd be hard to argue that it was anything but an underdog and that Warner was taking a gamble when they bet their million dollars on this unproven cast.
Captain Blood tells the story of righteous Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn), who finds himself on the wrong end of King James' temper during the 1685 rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth. Monmouth was previously known as James Scott and more previously still as James Croft, the illegitimate son of King Charles II. The Duke of Monmouth was a title created specifically for him, presumably to keep him out of the hair of other contenders for the throne. It didn't work. When Charles died and James II, Monmouth's uncle, was crowned King of England, Monmouth -- who had a long and distinguished military career -- felt severely slighted. He had himself crowned king in exile (he was, at the time, living in the Dutch provinces), and in 1685 launched a revolt meant to bring down James II and the Catholic-influenced reign. The rebellion, like many rebellions, started off strong, but when people started dying, the rebellion went the way of so many others. People deserted Monmouth en masse, and before too long, his rebellion was crushed at the battle of Sedgemoore. Monmouth himself was captured, tried, and executed. It is during this battle that our hero Peter Blood -- himself no fan of James II but also of the opinion that the Duke of Monmouth was going to be just as rotten -- is asked to save the life of a wounded man. Blood, having no committed political leaning, relies instead on his sacred oath as a doctor, which compels him to help those he can. When King James' men bust in and find him, they aren't as keen on the Hippocratic Oath as Blood, and he soon finds himself in prison and on trial for treason. Brought before a judge whose only interest is in sending men to the gallows, the future looks bleak for the well-meaning and eloquent doctor, until King James is convinced that, aside from being hugely unpopular with the people, his gory orgy of retribution and hanging is a waste of manpower that would be better used as slaves in the colonies of the New World. So it is that Blood finds himself spared from the noose but shipped off toward a fate often considered far worse. Incidentally, my own ancestors from Scotland followed pretty close behind him, getting themselves in a spot of trouble in 1689 and finding themselves shipped off to some place called America -- or so the family legend goes. Family legend also includes my grandfather beheading Adolf Hitler, so read into that what you will. In Jamaica, Blood continues to be uppity and proud and smart, a trait that immediately rubs local plantation Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill) the wrong way. However, Bishop's niece Arabella (de Havilland) takes a liking to Blood and purchases him for ten pounds, only to discover that he is hardly thankful to her, as slavery is still slavery. Blood finds himself in considerably better standing than his fellow slaves when his skills as a doctor are put to use healing the governor, who suffers from a painful bout o' gout. Still as he is a man of honor and a natural-born leader, he does everything he can to protect his boys and irritate Bishop, who is infuriated that Blood's role as doctor to the governor allows hims to get away with so much. Blood eventually hatches an escape plan, though he runs into a snag when a Spanish warship attacks the city. In the ensuing chaos, Blood leads the slaves first to freedom, then across the bay, where they board the Spanish warship while its proper owners are busy looting the town. Possessed now of their freedom and a fine ship, but not a home, Blood drafts a series of Buccaneers' Articles, and so begins their lives as pirates.
Watching Flynn in this role, it's hard to believe this is his first time as a leading man. He handles the role with astounding proficiency. It is impossibly not to cheer for Captain Blood, and the script provides Flynn ample opportunity to deliver stirring speeches about freedom and tyranny, punctuated by scenes of guys firing muskets and cannons and swinging from the rigging of giant sailing ships. Flynn handles his stirring speeches with the same aplomb as he does the action scenes. He is the very definition of roguish charm, and he is assisted by a series of perfect foils, which include the thoroughly loathsome Colonel Bishop and the shifty French pirate Levasseur (played brilliantly by Basil Rathbone). Although it happened somewhat by chance, it seems that, in the end, Captain Blood was constructed purely to turn Errol Flynn into the dashing, swashbuckling heartthrob he became. Recognizing the chance that has fallen into his lap, Flynn does not disappoint. Although Flynn is the center of attention, Olivia de Havilland fares well to, The script by Casey Robinson grants her a stronger character than was usual for the time, while still keeping her as a believable member of the female sex during the late 1600s -- as opposed to modern tendencies to create strong women by flying in the face of history and filling themselves with scantily-clad, often skinny warrior-women who are, for some reason, all proficient at Chinese style swordplay and martial arts. Arabelle may not take part in the swashbuckling, but when it comes to nerve and intelligence, she is nearly the match of Blood and very much the superior of Colonel Bishop. She had Flynn strike up an easy chemistry that makes the romantic portion of the film believable. There's no question why a woman would fall in love with Blood, and there's very little mystery behind Blood's attraction to Arabella. The two young stars were paired in subsequent films, and rumors persisted that the two of them were romantically involved off-screen as well, though de Havilland has always denied this, citing Flynn's status as a married man -- which is sort of a novel defense, knowing what we know about Flynn and his voracious appetite for drinking and womanizing. These appetites would plague him throughout his life, culminating in a statutory rape charge he was eventually found not guilty of -- though even a Flynn fan like me has to question the accuracy of the outcome given that, later in his life, Flynn was courting a fifteen-year-old. But for the most part, Flynn's off-screen dalliances and poor judgment did little to tarnish his popularity or his image as a noble hero. More damaging to his career was his failure to enlist in World War II (can you imagine a current leading man's career being damaged on account of his failure to enlist?) while still playing war heroes on-screen. In fact, Flynn had enlisted -- several times, and to every branch of the armed forces. Each time he was rejected on account of a series of health issues that included a weak heart (he suffered several heart attacks throughout his life), a bout with tuberculosis and malaria, and a permanently injured back. The film studio was unwilling to publicize Flynn's reason for not serving, as they felt that it was better to keep a tight lid on the star's growing health concerns. Thus, Flynn was left behind to make films like Objective Burma while the war was won by guys like Jimmy Stewart.
As I siad, the two newcomers are anchored by a solid supporting cast headed up by Basil Rathbone and Lionel Atwill. Both make for memorable villains, though Atwill's merely rotten Bishop is left in the wake of Rathbone's lamboyant French pirate. Although he's only on-screen briefly, there's no forgetting him. At the time, Rathbone was on the cusp of super-stardom. Having already eked out a comfortable career for himself as a supporting player, Rathbone would rocket to fame when he took on the role of Sherlock Holmes. Both Rathbone and Atwill are fondly remembered by horror fans for their work in that genre as well. Both of them play wonderfully off the fresh-faced and enthusiastic Flynn, and the duel between Rathbone and Flynn is one of the all-time greats. Whatever his personal demons may have been, Captain Blood turned Flynn into a superstar, and the role defined the type of role he would play for most of his career just as it defined the swashbuckling hero. Flynn went on to star in more pirate films, including the wonderful Sea Hawk, as well as series of adventure films that includes The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Objective Burma, They Died With Their Boots On, and The Dawn Patrol, alongside his real-life friend David Niven. Other actors were quick to work within the persona created by Flynn, including Tyrone Power, who sometimes did it almost as well as Flynn. But almost means that, to this day, Flynn remains the very last word in swashbuckling heroes. Director Micahel Curtiz fared much worse after this film. Although he went on to direct a number of the above-mentioned Errol Flynn swashbucklers, his career was all but killed when he took yet another huge gamble -- this time casting an actor known almost entirely for playing b-grade heavies in crime films as a romantic lead. That actor was Humphrey Bogart, and the movie, which was released under the title Casablanca, is all but forgotten these days. In reality, of course, Curtiz did all right. He even made a habit of giving unproven actors a big break. Flynn, and then Bogart as a romantic lead. Later in his career, Curtiz was one of the few directors who was willing to give Elvis Presley a real role, that being King Creole, which is generally regarded by many as Elvis' one truly great film and performance. Curtiz, having cut his teeth in silent era market of Europe, brings many of the sensibilities of those films into Captain Blood (and many subsequent films). Chief among these is his use of shadows and lighting, which is used to great effect many times throughout the film. Curtiz also solves the problem of shooting on location and around the ocean with a clever use of sets, location shooting, and convincing use of miniatures. Ship decks and cabins are sets, put into context with shots of actual ships on the ocean. The battles are staged in a similar fashion, and the sword fight between Blood and Levasseur is yet another combination of set and location.
Curtiz solution for the sound while shooting on a beach or aboard a ship is simple: he doesn't use sound. Blood and Levasseur's duel is shot without sound and on an actual beach, relying instead on the music by Erich Korngold to do the talking. When there is dialog, Curtiz switches to a series of convincing sets. He handles ship settings in the same way, restricting dialog to scenes that can be created on a set while scenes of actual ships are accompanied by Korngold's orchestration and the foley artist's ample cannon shots. The battles -- and there are several good ones -- also rely on miniature work mixed with actual ships, and are achieved with a remarkable degree of effectiveness. The final battle, in particular, in which Blood and his men take on a duo of French warships, is particularly exciting and well executed. There are several shots where I have no idea whether or not they're using miniatures or actual ships. I doubt anyone guessed Captain Blood would become the perfect storm of stars, director, music, and spirit that it did, but that's usually how it happens. As far as swashbucklers and pirate movies go, you'd be hard pressed to find one better, and if you did, it would probably also star Errol Flynn. As far as my opinion goes, I hardly have much more to add. Although I was late in coming to this ad other Flynn films, I consider it one of the absolute best adventure films ever made, crammed to bursting with strong characters, great ship-to-ship battles, sword fights, and romance. The film proved to be a tremendous hit, nabbing an Oscar nominations for best picture (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was also nominated, but all fell before the might of The Mutiny on the Bounty) as well as sound direction. In addition, in 1935 you were still allowed to cast write-in votes, and as a result, Michael Curtiz found himself nominated for best directing honors, Casey Robinson for best screenplay, and Erich Korngold for his score. In a field that was very thick, this film full of and by unknowns didn't do too bad. Labels: Action: Adventure, Netflix Diary, Pirates, Stars: Errol Flynn, Year: 1935 posted by Keith at 4:48 PM | 7 Comments Friday, April 04, 2008Arabian Adventure Release Year: 1979Country: England Starring: Puneet Sira, Oliver Tobias, Christopher Lee, Milo O'Shea, Emma Samms, Peter Cushing, Capucine, Mickey Rooney, John Wyman, John Ratzenberger, Milton Reid. Writer: Brian Hayle Director: Kevin Conner Cinematographer: Alan Hume Music: Ken Thorne Producer: John Dark Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us In my review of The Phantom of Soho, I talked about a few of the over-arching themes that run throughout everything we do here at Teleport City. I'd like to mention, for this review, another of the many themes that define what we do here: the idea that my level of intelligence and sophistication has evolved very little since I was ten years old. The years 1976 to 1986, roughly spanning ages four to fourteen for me, seem to be when I discovered the bulk of what I would end up liking for the rest of my life. At the time, my enthusiasm for entertainment that was sometimes, to be charitable, of dubious merit, could be chalked up to simple naivety -- the juvenile tastes of a juvenile. Perfectly acceptable, even if it did mean that I was prone to celebrating things like Treasure of the Four Crowns and Gymkata. However, years -- nay, decades -- later, I find that when I go back and revisit these films so beloved in my youth, rather than having a quiet chuckle at how silly I was back then, I actually enjoy them just as much. And sometimes even more. Time after time, I've sat down to be disillusioned, or to wonder how I could have liked such lowbrow fare when I could have spent my time brushing up on classic works of literature, only to find myself hooting with glee and running about the room in unabashed glee as I witnessed some fantastical orgy of ninja gore or oiled-up barbarians. Think of it as my childlike sense of wonder, if you are feeling generous, or shake your head in sorrow as you realize that I did indeed completely stop growing mentally at age fourteen. Still, one must assume that even I have my limits, and there must be a film at there that I loved as a kid and would not still love as an adult. I was told countless times by many people I trust that the 1979 fantasy film Arabian Adventure would be that film. Because make no mistake about it -- I loved this film when I was it in the theaters. Looking back on it, I could remember very little. I don't think I ever saw it again after that first time. All I could recall about the film was a genie, something about Mickey Rooney inside a giant golden clockwork robot, and magic carpet dogfights. Heck, I didn't even remember that it starred venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. I have no idea why I didn't remember him but did remember Mickey Rooney. I don't think I was a big Mickey Rooney fan in my youth. In fact, I think I've only ever seen two Mickey Rooney films in my entire life.
Anyway, for years I snooped around, hoping to discover that Arabian Adventure had suddenly appeared on home video in some format that wouldn't require me to shell out $30 for someone's crappy VHS bootleg with a label hand-written in pencil. But for one reason or another, it always seemed to be MIA, and so I was left celebrating the merits of the film while all those around me who had seen it more recently made with the ominous proclamations of, "You're going to be disappointed with that one, chief." Impossible! I mean -- seriously: magic carpet dog fights! Finally, after years of waiting outside a temple, seated in the lotus position and refusing both food and water, ignoring the rain, the snow, the scorching heat, the jackals, the police telling me to move along, after all of that, one day I performed my hopeful little search on Netflix, and low and behold, there it was. Arabian Adventure! Needless to say, I had to bump certain classics, like Kickboxer IV (oh, the things I'll do for Michelle Krasnoo...the things I'd let her do to me...), a little lower on the list, but it was worth it to move this long-awaited gem from my youth to the top of the queue. Finally, the moment of truth had arrived. Would Arabian Adventure prove to be, as has been predicted by soothsayers and friends with my best interests at heart, a massive disappointment, forcing me to call into question everything I've ever held dear, permanently casting a gloomy shadow of resentment and melancholy over my childhood? Or would my seemingly indefatigable ability to pleased by damn near anything triumph, reinforcing the idea that I see the world through the rose-colored lenses of a child and also have the brain of a seven-year-old?
Well, I've rewatched the movie now, and let me say this: magic carpet dogfights. Yes, it's true; my bottomless lack of taste (I'm watching Navy SEALS as I write this) and sound judgment wins again! I enjoyed Arabian Adventure to no end, reveled in every clunky special effect, thrilled to scenes of guys gliding around on magic carpets suspended by wires, and looked with the kind eyes of an old friend upon the visage of Mickey Rooney running around inside not one, but three giant golden clockwork robots. And then there's venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee as the evil caliph Alquazar, doing his usual shtick and sporting a big ol' mustache. And then there's a kid with a monkey, a beautiful princess, a dashing prince, a scheming fat guy, some chick who lives inside a sapphire, Peter Cushing as the world's least convincing Arab, and did I mention that this movie has magic carpet dogfights? Yes, I did. And what makes my adoration of this film all the more shameful is that it has all these things, but doesn't do anything particularly interesting with them. The prince and princess are boring. Mickey Rooney is irritating and seems to have been bitten by a radioactive community theater performer and thus been imbued with all the proportional over-acting and hamming abilities that come with such a position in life. The special effects,while ambitious, are rarely any good. The entire movie plays like a fan-made "greatest hits of the Arabian Nights" highlight reel. And none of that seems to matter to me.
So here's the deal. The film begins with young Majeed (Puneet Sira) and his pet monkey arriving in a matte painting of the ancient Arabian city of Jhador, populated primarily by second unit stock footage of camels and guys sitting around in doorways. Majeed has arrived in the middle of sweeping events. People are plotting the overthrow of the ruthless Caliph Dracula (venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee), while Caliph Dracula himself is plotting to recover the mystical Rose of Elil, a sacred artifact that will, in some vague way, grant him the ultimate power to rule over the world, or something to that effect. Artifacts that grant you the power to rule the world are rarely clear on exactly how they plan to go about it. They are, in that way, very much like your modern politician -- all full of promises and rhetoric, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, the promises tend to fall apart. But that's small potatoes to worry about for a guy who has somehow managed to imprison his own soul in a fire pit and spends his free time taunting it. For its part, the soul spends most of its time being sort of petulant and whiny and generally making you understand why Caliph Dracula imprisoned it in the first place. Unable to retrieve the rose himself, for it must be plucked by a pure and righteous hand, Caliph Dracula enlists the aid of dashin' Prince Hasan (Oliver Tobias), who has fallen in love with Princess Zuliera (Emma Samms) despite having never actually seen or met her, and who seems completely oblivious to the fact that Caliph Dracula is evil and enjoys crushing his subjects beneath the iron fist of his mad tyranny. But he looks damn good in his swashbuckling Arabian prince outfit. Majeed ends up in possession of a magic gem that contains a trapped sorceress (Capucine) who, grateful for him releasing her, grants Majeed three life-saving wishes. Through typical movie convolution, this results in Majeed suddenly appearing on the back of a magic carpet piloted by dashin' Prince Hasan and Khasim (Milo O'Shea), a spy assigned by Caliph Dracula to accompany dashin' Prince Hasan and stab him in the back (literally) once he has the rose. Needless to say, Khasim is vexed that this half-naked young rascal has suddenly appeared out of nowhere on their magic carpet, and so he spends the bulk of their flight trying to knock him off.
Their quest for the magic rose leads them on a variety of adventures that involve a murderous genie (big Milton Reid, sporting weird googly eyes), a trio of fire-breathing monsters that end up being controlled by Mickey Rooney, and a lake of guys who try to grab your legs. As far as trials go, I have to admit, I've seen more challenging. I mean, Hercules had to clean stables that hadn't been cleaned in dozens of years, and dashin' Prince Hasan has to defeat Mickey Rooney? That hardly seems fair -- especially when Majeed does all the work. I mean, maybe the psychotic laughing genie would have posed a threat if he had been able to hit the broadside of a mosque with his magic firebolts, but he proves incapable of hitting a squirming fat guy all of five feet away -- and then he gets defeated when dashin' Prince Hasan tips over a bottle! That's Scooby Doo quality adventure right there. The quests get more challenging when Khasim pulls his power play. Before too long, dashin' Prince Hasan and Majeed find themselves leading a revolution, rescuing a princess, fighting with Caliph Dracula in a lake of fire, and engaging in magic carpet dogfights with Caliph Dracula's all-carpet air force of guy's who primary skill seems to be to wave their swords awkwardly at dashin' Prince Hasan, while he waves his sword awkwardly at them, causing hem to fall off their magic carpets. Someone should look into seat belts or something for those things. Lyz at And You Call Yourself a Scientist -- one of my absolute favorite movie sites on the web -- said of Arabian Adventure, "It is hard to imagine any but the least discriminating of viewers -- of any age -- really enjoying this film." And I can't really debate her on this matter. Instead, about all I can do is admit that it has been my goal to live the sort of life and put forth the sort of opinions that would result in my eventual tombstone reading, "America's Least Discerning Viewer." My other choice for an epitaph was, "It Took a Dozen Texas Marshals to Finally Bring Him Down." Anyway, I freely admit that pretty much all of the criticisms that someone could lay at the feet of Arabian Adventure stick with the tenacity of an extra-gooey Wacky Wall Walker fresh out of the gum machine capsule. None of these should come as any shock if you are familiar with the writer-director team who brought you this movie. Because the last couple of movies they brought you were were just as bad or even worse (and yeah -- I liked them, too).
Director Kevin Conner and screenwriter Brian Hayles are responsible for a trio of Edgar Rice Burroughs inspired fantasy adventure films: At the Earth's Core, starring Doug McClure, Caroline Munro, and Peter Cushing (and featuring one of the single greatest lines and deliveries in movie history: "You cannot mesmerize me! I'm British!"), and the one-two punch of The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot, both starring just Doug McClure. Hayles and Conner (they toured with Seals and Croft, I think) also made Warlords of Atlantis, which stars Doug McClure but is not based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs story . It does often get me confused when I think it's War Gods of the Deep, which featured Vincent Price and Tab Hunter -- and buddy, Tab Hunter is no Doug McClure. Oliver Tobias, also, is no Doug McClure. Anyway, the films of Conner and Hayles are almost universally reviled by everyone except, apparently, me. And I have loved every last one of them. Even The People that Time Forgot. Even Arabian Adventure, though it could have really used some Doug McClure. In fact, given that the wooden dullness of our prince and princess is one of Arabian Adventure's greatest weaknesses, the film could have been improved immensely if dashin' Prince Hasan had been played by Doug McClure and Princess Zuleira played by Caroline Munro. But I guess Doug McClure was too rugged and Joe Don Baker-esque to play a dashing prince (since he specialized in playing cool Americans in British films), and Caroline Munro had already been an Arabian princess in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Still, man that would have been awesome, or at least more awesome than Oliver Tobias and Emma Samms -- both of whom look the part but offer very little in the way of charisma.
As bad as Conner and Hayles' previous movies may have been, at least each of them had something that could keep people from being totally cranky about watching them. Land that Time Forgot enjoyed the services of Doug McClure and features WWI German U-boat guys fighting dinosaurs, and that's enough for me. People that Time Forgot enjoys the services of Doug McClure with a caveman beard and Sarah Douglas in expedition jodhpurs. And At the Earth's Core? My Lord! It's got Doug McClure fighting night immobile paper mache monsters, Caroline Munro in a loin cloth waving a knife around, and Peter Cushing in one of the most hilarious "absent minded professor" roles ever. Plus, it has the line "You cannot mesmerize me! I'm British!" -- which is bested only by Cushing's line in Horror Express where, indignant at the suggestion that he could have been possessed by the monster stalking the train, exclaims, "Monsters?!?! We're British!" Arabian Adventure does not have the benefit of charismatic players like Munro, McClure, or Peter Cushing -- which is an odd thing to say, since it features Peter Cushing. Cushing is one of a handful of "special guest stars," which is a nice way of saying that they owed Conner some sort of a favor or something. Cushing appears in a bit role as a holy man imprisoned in Caliph Dracula's dungeon, and as an Arab holy man, Peter Cushing is a very convincing 19th century British scientist. The other guest stars -- Mickey Rooney and Milo O'Shea -- have larger parts and even pass themselves off fairly believably as Arabs (by the standards of fat Irish guys pretending to be Arabs), but each one seems intent on outdoing the other in the field of hammy over-acting. I suppose that's good, because no one else seemed all that interested in putting any effort into their parts. Actually, that's not true. I firmly believe that Oliver Tobias tried really hard. But he's the film's Keanu Reeves. He's earnest, good looking,and really wants to do a good job; he just can't. But at least the script gives him some chances to shine, even if he fails as an actor to rise tot he occasion. He gets to have badly executed sword fights, fly around on magic carpets, jump over stuff, and tip over a genie bottle. Poor Emma Samms is saddled with a character so thinly written that the poor actress was doomed to be boring before the first frame was ever shot. Her princess is a sheltered woman who has never left the confines of Caliph Dracula's palace. She has nothing to do but walk from room to room, and eventually sit around and listen to Caliph Dracula's imprisoned soul complain about being imprisoned. Eventually, dashin' Prince Hasan rescues her. Or really, Majeed rescues her and dashin' Prince Hasan happens to be int he same general area and of legal age, so what are you gonna do?
Speaking of which, although I apparently didn't mind them as a kid, as an adult I usually hate movies starring children. I don't care for children in general, so watching a movie about one just seems pointless to me. But young Indian actor Puneet Sira seems possessed of all the charisma and charm that is lacking in Samms and Tobias. It's hard not to compare him to Sabu, the young Indian star of films like Arabian Nights and Thief of Baghdad. So let me compare him to Sabu. As a Sabu stand-in, he's exceptional, and we should be thankful that Conner at least took the time to find a likable and talented child instead of just casting Sabu, then in his...oh. Umm, then in his grave. OK, backing away from whatever Old Man Sabu joke I was hoping to make... Which leaves us with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. Although his character is called Alquazar in this film, I prefer to refer to him as Caliph Dracula for two reasons. First, I know doing stuff like that irritates venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee (who I'm sure reads this site all the time) to no end, and any chance I have to irritate venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee is a chance I can't let pass me by. Second, he basically gives the exact same performance he gave in Satanic Rites of Dracula, and Dracula AD 1972, and the Fu Manchu movies (they apparently let him keep the mustache from those films, because he has it on here), and honestly -- most of the movies he's ever been in. Don't get me wrong -- he does it very well most of the time, but it does tend to get a tad familiar. His character here is given very little to do other than wait around in his lair while his minion does all the hard work (a la Dracula AD 1972), so venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee doesn't really seem to be giving it his all.
Eventually, he gets in a really clumsy battle with dashin' Prince Hasan, then chases Majeed up a rock, but that's about it. Oh, and he turns a fat guy into a frog. But he doesn't seem to be enjoying it very much, and once again, I can't help but think how much better this film would have been if they'd cast someone else -- Vincent Price, for example. Oh, now there's a movie! Vincent Price, Doug McClure, and Caroline Munro! If I had myself a magic sapphire genie, that would be my first wish. My second wish would be that venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee wrote me an email about how my jokes hurt his feelings, and then he ends the email with a sad face emoticon. Of course, my third wish would be that George Clooney was my friend. We're both Kentucky boys, after all. Since Doug McClure is, sadly, no longer with us, I'd let Clooney be in my remake of Arabian Adventure. I don't know who I'd get for Alquazar. Luckily, Caroline Munro, now nearly 60, is every bit as hot and talented as she was in her 20s. Maybe I could cast Alec Baldwin as Alquazar. Or venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee! So you may be asking yourself how I can spend the bulk of a review talking about how crappy a film is, then use that as criteria for concluding that I love the movie. Hey, this is Teleport City, baby, and the scientific method simply does not apply. And yeah, Arabian Adventure fails on a lot of levels for a lot of people. But not for me, because I had as much fun watching it today as I had watching nigh those many years ago. The lack of charisma in the leads doesn't bug me. The fact that venerated horror film icon is giving a "just collecting a paycheck until I can go on to better films like Howling II and An Eye For An Eye" performance doesn't bother me. The weak effects don't bother me. The film is childish and clunky, and I love it. I love the magic carpet dogfights. I love the crummy sword fights. I love all the opulent but obvious matte painting backgrounds.
Speaking of obviously painted backgrounds, now is as good a time as any to breach the subject of the special effects. In 1977, as you may have heard, Star Wars was released upon the unsuspecting masses, and whatever its merits as a film (and I'm not trying to seem edgy by being a Star Wars hater -- I loved it then and I love it still today), there's no real credible way to deny the profound impact it had on special effects. It represented a quantum leap forward, and while you can say that nothing was ever the same after that, the fact is that there were a few stragglers that came in post-Star Wars but with very pre-Star Wars effects. Sometimes this had to do with the effects supervisor. Sometimes it had to do with the budget. In the case of Arabian Adventure, I'm pretty sure it was both. Like most sci-fi and fantasy films that came in the wake of Star Wars, Arabian Adventure billed itself as a Star Wars like special effects extravaganza. If Star Wars was like watching Harry Houdini make an elephant vanish, Arabian Adventure was like watching a clumsy kid try to pull off a trick from his Blackstone the Magician illusion set. It's cute, even charming in its way, but also sort of awkward and embarrassing. Special effects supervisor George Gibbs shoots for the moon and ends up a fair distance from his target. He was early in his career, having worked previously with director Kevin Conner on Warlords of Atlantis, and then doing some model work on Richard Donner's Superman before moving on to this film. Hamstrung by a small budget and limited resources, I think he intended to rely heavily on the gee whiz quaintness of his approach and on the untrained eyes of young children. The most ambitious effects are the magic carpets, realized through a combination of rear-screen projection, hoisting guys around on wires, and then letting little plastic guys tear around scale models of the city. None of these work terribly well, but there is a charm to watching little action figures on flying carpets wobble about in between scale model minarets. The other big effects are the genie -- which is simple superimposition and animation, and sahib Rooney's giant monsters, which are miniatures that rely on forced perspective shots that are sometimes effective and sometimes make Majeed look like a giant.
Still, I always appreciate a crude effect, and Arabian Adventure is endearing in it's unwillingness to live within its means. This film certainly didn't kill Gibbs' career, and he went on to create all sorts of wildly uneven visual or effects for everything from 1980's Flash Gordon to Conan the Barbarian. Obviously, the got got really good at his craft pretty quickly, and he went on to work on films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Brazil, Alien 3, and more recently, From Hell and Doom. His work in Arabian Adventure is without a doubt a throwback to effects that probably weren't even considered all that good in 1969, let alone 1979, but like I said -- they're sort of cute. In fact, pretty much everyone who worked on the effects for this film went on to very successful, and in some cases award-winning, careers. It goes without saying that none of those awards were for Arabian Adventure. I have a tremendous weakness (one of many) for fantastic romanticized visions of ancient Arabia, and as pedestrian as some may find it, Arabian Adventure manages to satisfy the kid in me. I mean, don't misunderstand -- this film is nowhere near the caliber of the old Arabian Nights film, or either the Douglas Fairbanks or Sabu versions of The Thief of Badhdad. And it's not in the league of the 1960s Sinbad movies with effects by Ray Harryhausen. But as dumb Saturday matinee fare, I still enjoy Arabian Adventure despite the sundry flaws. It would make a perfect double bill with Sinbad of the Seven Seas starring Lou Ferrigno. Labels: Action: Adventure, Director: Kevin Conner, Fantasy, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Year: 1979 posted by Keith at 4:46 PM | 4 Comments Monday, March 24, 2008Night Creatures Release Year: 1961Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Yvonne Romain, Patrick Allen, Oliver Reed, Michael Ripper, Martin Benson, David Lodge, Derek Francis, Daphne Anderson, Milton Reid, Jack MacGowran, Sydney Bromley. Writer: Anthony Hinds, John Temple-Smith Director: Peter Graham Scott Cinematographer: Arthur Grant Music: Don Banks Producer: John Temple-Smith Original Title: Captain Clegg Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Although England's Hammer Studio made a variety of films, the trio of Horror of Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein, and The Mummy solidified the direction of the studio and its identity with the public for the remainder of its life. And not without good reason. In their heyday, and even long after the studio had fallen into disrepair, Hammer showed a panache for producing lavish looking gothic horror that was simply unmatchable. America's AIP came close with Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe inspired cycle of films starring Vincent Price, but no one could approach Hammer's consistency and longevity in producing world-class horror. Starting in 1958 and continuing throughout the 60s, and into the studio's final days in the first half of the 1970s, Hammer produced an unbelievable string of incredible horror films -- almost every one of them a hit -- buoyed by the one-two punch of venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's Dracula films and Peter Cushing's Frankenstein series. It's understandable that Hammer would focus on the genre that helped define them as a major player on the global film production scene, but even as the monsters and madmen were overrunning the studio, Hammer was still doing its best to make non-horror fare, including some noir-style thrillers, war films, and a series of swashbucklers. Over the years, these films have been largely overshadowed by the horror product, and in fact most have been extremely difficult to get a hold of them, with very few being released on home video, at least here in the United States. Thus, they became all but forgotten, even though they often used the same directors, writers, and stars (specifically Cushing and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee) as the horror films and were often films worth remembering.
With the bulk of Hammer horror films now released on DVD (with the exception of Twins of Evil and Vampire Circus, both of which remain curiously MIA in the United States), and with these releases bringing in some new fans and revitalizing interest among the older fans, distributors have begun dipping into the vast body of Hammer's non-horror work. Over the past year or two, two volumes of Hammer noir and crime films were released, along with some of the more obscure psychological thrillers. And in early 2008, it was announced that Hammer's collection of swashbuckling pirate movies was finally going to be released. With any luck, the near future will also see the release of Hammer's war films and the remaining caveman adventures (oh When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, where are you?). The first of Hammer's pirate films to make it to DVD in the US was Captain Clegg, a curious beast of a film that got released first primarily because it was marketed in the US, at the time of its original release, as a horror film. Appearing under the title Night Creatures, the movie found its way onto a recent double feature release with The Evil of Frankenstein. And while Night Creatures does contain an element of horror, anyone who goes into it looking for scares is going to be confused. Hammer's dalliance with pirate films began in 1961 with the release of The Pirates of Blood River, starring venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, 7th Voyage of Sinbad's Kerwin Mathews, and Hammer bit player Michael Ripper in a rare feature role. Hammer's production values were never higher than they were in the first half of the 1960s, where seemingly everything they touched came out looking astounding, and The Pirates of Blood River benefits from Hammer's attention to detail -- not to mention from venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee in one of his best Hammer performances and a chance to see Michael Ripper doing more than playing "the suspicious barkeep."
It also starred young Oliver Reed, for whom 1960-1961 was an exceptionally good year. His first film as the lead -- Curse of the Werewolf -- came out in 1960, and he was charged with the task of supporting the film entirely on his own, in the middle of a Hammer horror frenzy that was defined almost entirely by Cushing and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. For Oliver Reed, a totally untested leading man, to be trusted with the lead in Hammer's first color horror film that didn't star Cushing or venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee was both a tremendous opportunity and a huge gamble. It paid off, though, and although Curse of the Werewolf never attained the iconic status of the Dracula and Frankenstein films, it became one of the most respected. From there, Reed was paired with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee for The Pirates of Blood River, and then, that same year appeared alongside Peter Cushing in Captain Clegg, the second of Hammer's pirate outings. But while The Pirates of Blood River was a somewhat more traditional swashbuckler, Captain Clegg is a crazy mix of pirate, horror, and detective films. Things start off piratey enough, with the mutilation and stranding of a crew member (big Milton Reid -- one of those actors you know by sight if not by name) for attacking the wife of the captain, a mysterious and ruthless pirate by the name of Clegg. Leaving the dastardly crewman to his fate sans food, water, ears, or tongue, the film then skips ahead a number of years to the remote British town of Dymchurch, which is being visited by no-nonsense British Navy captain Collier (Patrick Allen and his magnificently manly chin -- only Chuck Conners stands a chance against him) who suspects the small hamlet of being an offloading center for liquor smugglers. But Dymchurch hardly seems to be a den of smugglers and rapscallions, populated as it is by jolly coffin makers (Michael Ripper), upstanding squires (Derek Francis), upstanding squire's sons (Oliver Reed), and the benign local parson, Blyss (Peter Cushing). Collier, however, is an experienced hand at flushing out smugglers, so he's hardly taken in by innocent looks alone. However, a number of surprise inspections and raids lead to nothing but property damage and the ruffling of the town Squire's feathers as Collier and his men accuse various townsfolk of ill doings only to come up empty handed every time. At this point, the film resembles a thriller or mystery far more than it does a pirate adventure.
Parson Blyss himself remains cordial with the captain, reminding the townsfolk that the man is just doing his job, but even the kindly parson is offput when he is attacked by one of Collier's crew -- the very man stranded and mutilated by Clegg, it turns out. Collier apparently discovered the man shortly after Clegg abandoned him, as Collier was hot on the trail of the pirate at the time. Since then, they'd kept him on as a crewman for heavy lifting, menial tasks, and amusement, even though the former pirate is prone to getting drunk and attacking people. Collier's pursuit of Clegg, ironically enough, ended in Dymchurch, where the wily pirate was finally captured and hanged, Blyss himself delivering the final rites and convincing the local church to allow Clegg a proper burial in exchange for an apparent change of heart the pirate had while incarcerated. Plus, Blyss just likes to believe int he good of everyone. Clegg isn't the only dead man causing Collier. Legend has it that the marshes around Dymchurch are haunted by phantoms. In fact, a man was recently killed by them. Collier, ever the enlightened man of reason, sees little reason to believe in the phantoms, and in fact he is highly suspicious of them since the man most recently killed by them happened to be Collier's own man, who had previously tipped the captain off to the smuggling going on in Dymchurch. And it isn't very long before the viewer is clued in to the fact that smuggling is going on, and pretty much the entire town is in on it. Blyss is the brains behind the operation, coffin maker Mipps the operations man, and any daring-do that needs to be performed is handled by the Squire's son and lookout, Harry Cobtree. Using a series of secret compartments and tunnels centering around the church and Mipps' coffin shop, the town regularly runs illegal French wine, even under the very nose of Collier. The phantoms -- glowing skeletal horsemen -- are, naturally, just members of the local smuggling ring, who find the threat of ghostly marsh phantoms to be advantageous to the smuggling profession. Things start to get complicated for our merry smugglers not just because Collier is so persistent in his investigations, but also because one of their member is lusting after a barmaid, Imogene (Yvonne Romaine), who is in love with Harry Cobtree. In a drunken rage, he attacks the young woman and, when rebuffed, reveals to her than she is actually the daughter of the notorious Captain Clegg, and that furthermore, he is willing to expose the smuggling operation to Collier. Imogene is terrified by the revelation that she is Clegg's daughter, for fear that this knowledge will spoil her in the eyes of young Harry, who should already be forbidden from her on account of their different classes. But Harry is hardly phased by such outdated constraints, and Imogene discovers that he and Blyss already knew she was Clegg's daughter. Blyss, sensing that Collier is close to unraveling their smuggling plot, begins arranging for Harry and Imogene to be wed then escape the town before the net is drawn closed around them. When Harry is wounded while serving as lookout for one of the operations, Collier launches an all-out attack on the smugglers, but Blyss and Mipps are his equal, and a game of cat and mouse ensues that comes to a dramatic end inside Blyss' chapel. Despite the fact that the revelation at the end of the movie is hardly a surprise, Night Creatures succeeds in being a cracking good yarn that draws its suspense not from the solving of the mystery -- the smugglers are all named very early in the film -- but by developing those people as characters then allowing you to revel in the race and maneuvering against Collier. Captain Clegg was originally meant to be called Dr. Syn, a remake of an earlier film which itself was based on Russell Thorndike's novel, Dr. Syn. But by a strange coincidence, Disney happened to develop an interest in this otherwise forgotten novel and film from the 1930s at the same time as Hammer. Needless to say, Hammer wasn't in a position to challenge Disney, who had already obtained the rights to the Syn title and character. However, Disney was willing to play ball with Hammer, and aside from requiring that they change the name of the title character, Disney was more than happy to allow Hammer to proceed with production.
Disney's version, called The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh but also known as Dr. Syn Alias The Scarecrow, was released in 1963 and featured Patrick McGoohan (of The Prisoner fame, among other things) in the lead role. Being a made of television movie, it was decidedly more family-friendly than Hammer's version, with its horse-mounted ghouls, exhumed bodies, mutilated pirates, and other such trappings. Still, there's very little in Captain Clegg to prevent being a rip-roaring good time for young and old alike, and any foolhardy young lad such as I was would have been delighted by it (remembering, of course, that there was a time when children's films could contain murder, shrieking ghosts, drunks, and Sean Connery punching people in the face). I've not seen the Disney version, and I won't dismiss it out of hand because Disney has been known to produce some damn fine pirate and adventure entertainment (such as the three Treasure Island films). Although Disney's competing version kept Captain Clegg off the American radar, these days Hammer's version is the one you can find on DVD, while Dr. Syn Alias The Scarecrow has become wickedly hard to track down. It was released on VHS a long time ago and played at some point on the Disney Channel (as bootlegs bearing the channel's logo attest to). I know there has been some word of the old Wonderful World of Disney series -- of which Dr. Syn was a part -- finally finding their way on to DVD, so one can only hope that this little pirate adventure sees the light of day once again. Night Creature's script by Anthony Hinds (one of Hammer's most reliable producers-turned-screenwriters, having penned Curse of the Werewolf, Kiss of the Vampire, and a number of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy movies) is expertly paced and hues closely to the original film. Even though it never really becomes a swashbuckling adventure (although Peter Cushing does get to swing from a chandelier) or a horror film, Hinds exploits the trappings of both genres to create a thrilling hybrid driven by strong characters and solid British acting. Although Cushing is the star attraction (and rightfully so), most Hammer fans are overly delighted that Michael Ripper gets such a meaty role. Ripper's career is defined by tiny roles, almost always as a cranky innkeeper or barman who refuses to give our hero a room for the night, then makes a horrified face when someone says the name Frankenstein or Dracula. Despite the brevity of each of these roles, Ripper never gave anything that his absolute all. With Night Creatures, he gets a meaty role, and he makes the most of it. In fact, despite Cushing being the headliner, the bulk of the on-screen action is in the hands of Ripper and young Oliver Reed. Neither lets the film down, just as the script doesn't let them down. It's hard to believe that Reed was so inexperienced an actor. He exhibits an easy charisma and likability that pulls you in and really makes you care about the character. Reed's career was a rocky and uneven one, owing primarily to a fondness for the drink. In the 1960s, Hammer was hungry for someone young to augment the team of Cushing and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. Reed seemed to fit the bill perfectly, and indeed after turns in Curse of the Werewolf, The Pirates of Blood River, Captain Clegg, and some of Hammer's psychological thrillers, it seemed like Hammer had a winner on their hands. Good looking, athletic, and possessed of abundant charisma that could be channeled with equal skill into warmth, intensity, and pathos, Reed was a star on the rise. He was even on the short list (which actually seems to have been very long, given the number of people that are always mentioned as having been on it) to replace Sean Connery as James Bond, and the thought of Oliver Reed in On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- well, I liked Lazenby, and I love that movie, but had Reed been allowed to bring that deadly combination of charm and smoldering intensity to the role, I think he would have done then what wasn't really accomplished until Daniel Craig took over the role in Casino Royale.
Unfortunately for Reed, his professional successes were balanced with personal trials. Stormy marriages were one thing, but when Reed was forced to endure endless barrages of questions about his drinking. Such interrogation by TV hosts and reporters often lead to the actor losing his temper, and his reputation for a drunk and a hothead plagued him for years, even when he was still making quality films. Unfortunately for Hammer, Reed never became the pair of shoulders that could carry the studio through tough times, as he was by then on to different opportunities. The task of being Hammer's "next big thing" then fell on the shoulders of Ralph Bates, who certainly had the chops. But by the time Bates was on the Hammer scene, it was too late, and nothing was going to stop Hammer's collapse. Reed enjoyed success throughout the 60s and into the 70s, but by the 1980s, his star had faded considerably. Reed seemed to take it in stride. Although he continued drinking, he seemed happy to settle down to a relatively quiet life with his wife, at least until 1999 when Ridley Scott came knocking and offered Reed a part in Gladiator. It ended up being one of those rare parts perfectly suited for reviving the career of an old hand who had gone through stormy times and emerged older and wiser, ready to take on the role of elder statesman. Sadly, it was not to be for Reed, and he died of heart failure during the making of the film. Still, it must have felt good to be in the saddle again, and although it is done so posthumously, his role in Gladiator ended up being one of his best. Of course, none of this praise for Ripper or Reed is meant to sell the rest of the cast short. It's just that, in the case of Peter Cushing, do you really need me to tell you how good he was? It's Peter Cushing, for crying out loud! He was always good. As the resident piece of Hammer glamour (I spell it with a "u" for England), Yvonne Romain doesn't have terribly much to do other than look pretty (which she does with ease -- if not for Caroline Munroe, she might be the prettiest of all Hammer's starlets), but I always found the Hammer beauties to be as able at acting as they were at being eye candy, and when she's given something to do, Romain is as solid as the rest of the cast. She was already experienced with both period adventure films and horror, having appeared in such cult favorites as Circus of Horrors, Curse of the Werewolf (where she co-starred alongside Oliver Reed), episodes of The Saint (which, granted, pretty much every actor in England appeared in at some point), and Patrick McGoohan's espionage series Danger Man. And let's not leave off poor ol' square-jawed Patrick Allen as Captain Collier. It would have been easy for this film to make us root for the smugglers by making Collier a grade A jerk, but instead, Collier is ever noble, if a bit stiff, and the smugglers are forced to make us like them by force of their own character rather than depending on him as a foil. Collier is nothing other than completely honest and straight-forward, a model officer of the British Navy. And Allen is perfectly cast, not just because he has that incredible jaw and an air of authority. His accomplishments as an actor are too numerous to list, and long with Cushing, he's probably the most experienced of the cast members. He even showed up in the Japanese sci-fi film Gorath! Director Peter Graham Scott wasn't a Hammer films regular, working primarily in television, but he does an excellent job here with a script that allows him to wander between creepiness (the marsh phantoms, the old windmill and the scarecrow) and adventure. This is really an actor's movie, though, as many Hammer films were, and the chief function of the director in these cases was to know what he was doing and do it without getting in the way -- which is exactly what Scott does. As such, he's not a name a lot of people know, but sometimes the best director for a movie is the one who can make you completely unaware of the director. He does lend the film rather a unique look for Hammer films of the time by shooting on location and outdoors, rather than relying entirely on the Bray Studio sound stages.
I'm looking forward to the release of Hammer's other pirate films, because while this one may be tangential at best to the swashbuckling genre, it still manages to be a superb adventure film with a real "boy's own adventure" feel to it. What with long dead pirates, ghosts in the swamp, scarecrows, secret passages, and smugglers, it could have easily been a Hardy Boys adventure. I feel a bit guilty that I haven't said more about Peter Cushing, but like I said, what more can you say? The man went into everything with total commitment, and Captain Clegg is one of his finest roles. The script plays wonderfully off Cushing's slight appearance. When first we meet him in this film, he looks dainty and frail, and hardly the sort of man who could command a band of smugglers prone to dressing up like skeletons and galloping through the swamps. But when it comes time for him to take charge, the transformation is remarkable, and you absolutely believe him as the leader of men. "Absolutely believing him" is pretty much the very definition of Cushing's film career, as he was remarkably gifted at making whatever was happening, no matter how outlandish, seem absolutely real. Here, he benefits greatly from Hinds' script, which affords him a degree of complexity and depth very similar to what he enjoyed and challenged audiences with in the Frankenstein movies. He is ostensibly the bad guy, heading up a smuggling ring, killing off informers, and foiling Collier's attempts to do an honest man's work. But if he's a bad guy, Cushing's Blyss is hardly evil, and his scenes with Oliver Reed and Yvonne Rainer allow him to radiate warmth and care. As with the movie itself, Cushing's role here is not among his iconic performances, but it probably should be. We'll have plenty of chances to talk further about Peter Cushing. It's not every day that you get to say more about Michael Ripper than, "he was excellent as the grumpy bartender." Whether you call it Captain Clegg or Night Creatures is unimportant. By any name, it's top notch adventure all the way around. Labels: Action: Adventure, Guys Dressed as Skeletons, Netflix Diary, Pirates, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1961 posted by Keith at 11:58 PM | 8 Comments Wednesday, November 28, 2007Diamonds of Kilimandjaro Release Year: 1983Country: France/Spain/maybe Germany? Starring: Katja Bienert, Antonio Mayans, Aline Mess, Albino Graziani, Javier Maiza, Olivier Mathot, Ana Stern, Daniel White, Lina Romay. Writer: Jess Franco and Olivier Mathot Director: Jess Franco Cinematographer: Jess Franco Music: Jess Franco and Daniel White Original Title: El Tesoro de la Diosa Blanca Availability: Buy it from Amazon  The phrase "Jess Franco at his worst" is something that should strike fear in the hearts of even the stoutest of cult film aficionados, to say nothing of the mainstream masses who go about their daily lives in blissful ignorance of the sundry celluloid abominations lurking in the dank, shadowy alleys of the cinematic landscape. Even at his best, Jess Franco manages to illicit negative reactions (to put it politely) to his work from the vast majority of viewers. And Jess Franco at his worst? The sane mind dare not even imagine what such a beast would look like! I, as has been stated elsewhere, am a fan of Jess Franco, and a pretty big fan at that. And as a fan of Franco, I recognize that often times the dank, shadowy alley leads to the secret door that opens up into a magical psychedelic jazz strip club decorated with garish pop art excess and populated by the bizarre and decadent fringes of lunatic society. I freely admit that, for one not predisposed toward Franco's peculiar predilections and directorial quirks, his films can be inaccessible and rather impenetrable -- which I guess is my way of skirting around calling them boring and incompetent. As for myself, my appreciation of Franco and of the Franco aesthetic has grown over the years, aged like a fine wine, until I have reached the point where I positively adore his warped creations. If I could have any filmmaker's career, I would most likely end up picking Jess Franco. If nothing else, imagine the sheer number of bizarre stories he must have amassed over the decades of his long career as a cult filmmaker on the fringe.
Franco himself probably could have picked the film career of any other filmmaker to be his own, but he eventually picked Jess Franco as well. He was not always the maverick nutjob over-indulging in his own obsessions. There was a time, however brief and long ago, that Franco flirted with mainstream acceptability and garnered praise and work from more established and well-respected members of the cinematic industry. But every time the choice was presented to him: play the game and be accepted or play by your own rules and remain on the fringe, Franco took the fringe route. You can chalk this up to whatever you want: dedication to a personal vision, artistic madness, or the inability to make a sound business decision. It's probably all three, and then some. Whatever the case, Franco become a filmmaker so prolific and so committed to his own idiosyncrasies that at some point he may very well have stopped making movies in specific genres and became a genre unto himself. If you know Jess Franco, then you know what I mean when I say "a Jess Franco film." You know that there are tropes and themes that run through most all of his films regardless of whether they are horror, science fiction, espionage, sexploitation -- all other labels applied to his films are secondary to that of "a Jess Franco film." And at times, not only is Jess Franco a genre unto himself, but his films attain such lofty levels of bizarreness that they perhaps stop being movies at all and become some entirely new and incomprehensible type of art. Or maybe he's just bad at what he does. Whatever the case, and probably because Franco and I seem to share a lot of common interests, fetishes, and obsessions, I have grown to look upon his body of work with considerable fondness and respect.
And I am not alone. As more and more of his films find their way to DVD in uncut and properly presented formats, Franco's fanbase is growing. However, even among his fans, the jungle adventure Diamonds of Kilimandjaro (their spelling, not mine) gets very little love. Even those with a tremendous talent for digesting Franco seem to regard Diamonds of Kilimandjaro and it's follow-up, Golden Temple Amazons, as among the very worst films Franco ever made. And while "Jess Franco at his worst" is more than enough to keep most people away (hell, "Jess Franco" alone is enough to keep most people away), that phrase is, in turn, more than enough to make me think, "Man, this I gotta see!" So with my love of Franco in general established, let me further say that I also have a weakness for jungle adventure movies. Some of the earliest films I remember seeing were the old Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller, and between those and all the Poverty Row b-movie adventures about jungle goddesses that filled Matinee at the Bijou when I was a kid, plus a dollop of old pulp stories when I could find them, I knew that jungles were full of crocodile wrestling, hot chicks in loin cloths, lost treasure, ancient crumbling cities carved into the sides of cliffs, and oblivious British professor types in pith helmets explaining some anthropological point as they puff on a pipe and fail to realize that they are slowly sinking in quicksand. And men of adventure -- men like me -- would stride through those leafy quagmires with a machete in one hand, a colonial rifle in the other, and harvest glorious tales of adventure and romance. Yes sir, that was the life for me. And even though I'm in my thirties now, I still haven't let go of the dream that one day I'll be living that kind of life. The closest I can get is the jungle adventure film, all full of the good stuff I just mentioned, and usually even fuller of scenes consisting of the stars pointing at something off camera, followed by a cut to grainy stock footage of an elephant or a rhino or something.
So that brings us to Diamonds of Kilimandjaro, an old fashioned jungle adventure film as directed by Jess Franco and produced by Eurocine Studios in France. Man, for a guy like me, it just keeps getting better! Eurocine was infamous for being the production house that looked at the very cheapest, laziest, and sleaziest of European exploitation films and felt that they could do it even cheaper, lazier, and sleazier. In fact, "Cheaper, Lazier, and Sleazier" might have been their corporate mission statement, and as far as I can tell, they always lived up to it. You knew that with any Eurocine production, you were going to get a plot that had been written on the back of a used napkin five minutes before filming started. You knew you would get stars with no interest in acting in the movie. You knew you would get a director who was considered to be the worst by most people but was still working beneath himself when working for Eurocine. And perhaps most defining of all, you knew you were going to get a whole lot of nudity. I've always wanted to research and write two film books. One would be a history of exploitation filmmaking in Florida, when folks like David Friedman, HG Lewis, and Doris Wishman were running wild and setting gorillas loose in nudist colonies. The other would be a history of Eurocine, driven by personal anecdotes from the people who worked for and with them. It must have been insane, and any book on the subject would be a tome of ultra-cheap filmmaking techniques and hilarious personal accounts. Sounds like a job for Tim Lucas and Pete Toombs! Among cult film fans, Eurocine's best-known production is probably Zombie Lake, a film of staggering incompetence directed by one of my favorite directors, Jean Rollin, after another of my favorite directors (Jess Franco) turned it down because the movie was just too cheap and crappy. Too cheap and crappy for Jess Franco, huh? Truly, it boggles the mind. But Franco wouldn't get through a lifetime career in exploitation films without doing some work for Eurocine. Diamonds of Kilimandjaro and Golden Temple Amazons were two of the movies Franco apparently didn't think were as cheap and shoddy and ill-conceived as Zombie Lake. And while even Franco fans seem to hate both films, I have to admit that, well, just like Zombie Lake, I kinda like them. Actually, I more than kinda like them.
Diamonds of Kilimandjaro is basically the end product of someone at Eurocine getting stoned and proposing a movie probably with the description, "It'd be like Tarzan, but with tits!" And from what I can tell, that's about as far as you had to go with concepts and pitches at Eurocine. All that's left to do is call Jess Franco and tell him to have the film done in a week or two. Diamonds of Kilimandjaro begins with a plane crash, as all good Tarzan rip-offs do. The only survivors are a caricature of a Scotsman and his daughter, Diana, who grows up to be German sexploitation actress Katja Bienert. For some reason, the natives who find them decide to worship the Scotsman as a god, even though they already seem to know what white people are and thus shouldn't really be so enraptured when one of them drops by wearing a knit cap and kilt. Years later, an expedition to the jungle results in an explorer running into Diana, who has an aversion to wearing tops -- an affliction all women in this movie seem to have. When she frees him after the others want to put him to death for trying to take sacred diamonds from the jungle (actually, it's a small chunk of amethyst), the explorer returns to civilization and reports to the dying matron Hermine (Lina Romay in heavy old-person make-up) that her daughter is still alive. Hermine then commissions an expedition to find the child and return her to civilized society. So begins the adventures of one of the worst-equipped jungle expeditions of all time. Two of the guys (Albino Graziani as the dickish but ultimately moral Fred, and Antonio Mayans as the friendly but ultimately immoral Al) at least spring for proper jungle attire, or as proper as dungarees and t-shirts can be. But the other guy, Diana's drunkard uncle or something, played by Olivier Mathot, shows up wearing his finest flared slacks and loafers. Still, that's nothing compared to his wife, Lita (played by Mari Carmen Nieto, aka Ana Stern), who shows up for their jungle adventure wearing the same tank top, denim cut-off hot pants, and high-heeled, hot pink 1980s scrunchy boots that she would later wear in Jess Franco's Mansion of the Living Dead. Seriously, someone needed to get this woman one of those old Banana Republic catalogs, from back when the catalogs were digest sized and printed on thick brown paper, and all the clothes were safari and adventure themed, with lots of tales about rum and gauchos and jungle expeditions thrown in for good measure. Lucky for all involved, Lita's questionable taste in rain forest hiking attire will not be much of an issue, as she spends much of the movie naked.
In fact, if you are going to like Diamonds of Kilimandjaro, you are going to have to really like two things: naked women and random shots of jungle foliage, because that's about all this movie is comprised of. In fact, they should have just titled it Tits and Foliage, because it's not like I wouldn't watch a movie called Tits and Foliage. In fact, I'd probably be more likely to watch Tits and Foliage than something called Diamonds of Kilimandjaro. Plus, the movie is full of tits and foliage, but there are no diamonds, and there is no Kilimandjaro. For like 89 minutes this is a movie about a group of dumb people trying to find a naked white chick in the jungle while a naked black chick in the jungle throws spears at them. And then in the last minute, some Scotsman in a hut stammers, "You are here to steal the treasure!" Huh? Treasure? What treasure? What the hell is anyone in this movie talking about? If you asked me if I like this movie, the answer would be an enthusiastic "yes!" If you asked me why I liked this movie, I would sort of shuffle and mumble and get all awkward like a little kid who has just been asked what the teacher just said after being caught not paying attention. Certainly, there are very few, if any, artistic merits about Diamonds of Kilimandjaro. Most of the signature Jess Franco flourishes are absent. There's no jazzy psychedelic score. There's no ultra-cool pop art nightclub. There's no interesting cinematography or direction. Jess pretty much sits the camera in the jungle (or a Spanish stand-in for a jungle) and lets stuff happen in front of it. If the movie is short on running time, no problem. He'll just shoot fifteen seconds worth of random palm fronds and jungle scrub to pad things out. Still short on time? Might as well use some of that stock rhino footage Eurocine found lying around in a warehouse somewhere. It's obvious that Franco was as bored making this movie as most people are watching it. And yet, I really like the movie. Is it the threadbare plot? Is it the bored acting? The listless direction? The plodding pace? I can't say for sure, but something about this movie delighted me. I guess, Like I said before, I'm just a sucker for jungle movies, especially when they feature an adventurer in high-heeled, hot pink 1980s scrunchy boots.
Lead actress Katja Bienert has little to do beyond walk around the jungle naked. When she is given more than that to do -- swinging from a vine, for example, the results are usually pretty good evidence for why she wasn't given much to do beyond walking around the jungle naked. She sort of flails around on the vine for a second and is obviously about to fall right before Franco cuts away and dubs in a war cry that sounds more like, well, the sound you make when you are about to fall. I don't think even Tarzan himself would have seemed as cool if his war cry had been, "Whoops!" Bienert looks good in a loin cloth, of course, and she worked with Franco a number of times before and after this film, including Eugenie, Lillian the Perverted Virgin, and one I absolutely must see, Linda -- aka Naked Super Witches of the Rio Amore. In fact, as late as 2002, she was still working with Franco, appearing in Killer Barbys vs. Dracula, as well as doing a fair amount of work on German television shows. As you might guess from the titles that make up the body of her work, she hasn't exactly achieved an air of respectability, but then, neither has Teleport City, and I'd probably be much happier hanging out with Katja Bienert than I would with Meryl Streep or the Dali Lama. Sorry, Your Holiness, but I'm bailing on you to hang out with a German sex film star, because that's the kind of awesome guy I am. Katja spends the bulk of Diamonds of Kilimandjaro looking vaguely confused and amused, which is nice because that's how I spent the bulk of Diamonds of Kilimandjaro, too. Albino Graziani is another Franco regular. In fact, I don't think he ever worked with anyone but Franco. He stars here as Fred, vying for Alpha Male status on the expedition with the less boisterous Antonio Mayans. But while Fred spends all his time carrying around a gun and shouting, Mayans is busy laying every female he sees, including Lita and, eventually, Diana herself. If there's anything close to a complex character in this film -- and there really isn't, to be honest -- it's Fred, who reacts with disgust when he learns that there is more to this expedition than he was initially told. It turns out that Lita and boozy uncle whatever his name was are intent on making sure Diana never returns to civilization, lest they lose out on their inheritance. Al himself eventually has a crisis of conscience as well but ultimately sacrifices principal in order to steal the diamonds that are actually amethyst. Pretty much all of his character development takes place in the span of thirty seconds, which is convenient if you lead an active lifestyle and don't have a lot of time to spend watching some dude with a beard discover himself and ultimately succumb to temptation and greed.
Actually, one of my favorite things about the Eurocine films I've seen is that they all try to throw in some deep, important message amid all the gratuitous scenes of naked jungle chicks and skinny dippers. Diamonds of Kilimandjaro has the moral conflict between Fred and Al. It has the moral conflict between the primitive and civilized. It has the moral conflict over whether it is right to take Diana from the jungle if she does not want to leave -- would she even know if she wanted to leave? And it throws in an angry, frighteningly hot black chick (Aline Mess, also in the jungle adventure Devil Hunter with Al Cliver and possessed of the most alluring bloodthirsty snarl I've seen in a while) who knows these white fools are no gods and have only come to plunder her land. Mess seems to relish her role, and if there's anyone to watch this movie for, it's her. She spends the entire thing running naked through the jungle, beheading obnoxious jackasses with unbridled glee, doing sexy ritual dances, and throwing spears at irritating people. You could be offended by the stereotypical portrayal of blacks as primitive and superstitious, but I look at her behavior and think, "Man, what's not to love about this girl?" Plus, she's like the only one who isn't falling for the "white man from sky is god!" shtick. Oh, and there's the moral trickiness of a father who hangs out with his naked daughter in the jungle all day, but the film seems unconcerned with that one. It is European, after all. But the script, penned by Franco and Olivier Mathot in a writing session that probably lasted twenty minutes, crams all these "big ideas" in with no real thought. Not that Diamonds of Kilimandjaro is deep or meaningful in any way. Hell, I'm like one of maybe three people in the entire world who love this film, and even I wouldn't try to sell that claim. It's like something I would have written when I was twelve and all hopped up on jungle adventure movies and copies of Penthouse than my friend's dad had hidden in their utility closet. Franco at his worst? I don't really think so. Diamonds of Kilimandjaro is certainly not Franco at his best, but I really thought this goofy mess of a film was kind of fun. I can't justify it, and don't feel like I even need to. I certainly wouldn't promise you that you will like it as much as I did. But I did like Diamonds of Kilimandjaro. It really is a throwback to old style adventure films, only without much adventure and with more nudity. It has nothing to do with the better known Italian jungle films of the 80s, all of which were gory, serious cannibal movies. Compared to those, and even with the near-constant gratuitous nudity, Diamonds of Kilimandjaro is sort of this dumb, innocent old-fashioned movie. It has a charm for me I can neither explain nor deny. It's pure, idiotic cheesecake, and then it attempts to cram complex thematic elements in between the scenes of Ana Stern skinny dipping and Ana Stern getting laid and Ana Stern wearing her high-heeled, hot pink 1980s scrunchy boots, and Katja Bienert topless and falling out of trees. I admire that. Labels: Action: Adventure, Director: Jess Franco, Sexploitation, Year: 1983 posted by Keith at 11:40 AM | 2 Comments Friday, April 06, 2007Macao
1952, United States. Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Thomas Gomez, Gloria Grahame, Brad Dexter, Edward Ashley, Philip Ahn, Vladimir Sokoloff. Directed by Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray. Written by Stanley Rubin and Bernard C. Schoenfeld. Buy it from Amazon
 .Macao starring one of Teleport City's favorite half-asleep actors, Robert Mitchum, is an exceptionally good thriller, not exactly a noir film but a solid old school crime thriller with good pacing, cool characters, and a great twist. Despite the exotic setting, it doesn't bank too heavily on the "shadowy Chinatown" style of filmmaking, and there are no Caucasians in fake eyelids parading about. Actually, no, there is apparently one, but it's so well done that i didn't even notice. In fact, there are very few Asian characters at all, other than a couple of assassins and a lot of background extras. Instead, the film focuses on a small group of ex-patriots who have converged on the infamously decadent and borderline lawless Portuguese colony. Big time crook Vincent Halloran runs an upscale gambling parlor in the colony, where he must stay, a spider trapped in his own web, for fear of the British police waiting to arrest him for a whole host of crimes committed in Hong Kong, the most recent of which involved the murder of an undercover cop from New York. Unfortunately for the Brits, they have no jurisdiction in Macao, and the corrupt Portuguese officials are happy to have Halloran in their country. Enter a trio of Americans who arrive via steamer for a variety of reasons. Tough talking brunette Julie (Jane Russell) is looking to start over as a singer, after wandering the world and becoming disillusioned with its inhabitants. Goofy salesman Lawrence Trumble (William Bendix) is looking to set up shop and make some cash selling an array of junk. And mysterious wanderer and ex-soldier Nick Cochran (Mitchum) doesn't seem to have any real purpose in Macao, though the fact that he is from New York clues Holloran and his toadie police chief Sebastian (Thomas Gomez) into the fact that Cochran is there looking to take Holloran down for the murder of the other New York cop. So begins a cat and mouse game involving guys in awesome old suits. Halloran hires Julie to sing in his nightclub and tries to pay Cochran to get the hell out of town. Cochran never seems overly interested or disinterested in Halloran's offers, but the two become wary business partners when Trumble -- who seems to be slightly more crooked than his "golly gee" exterior lets on -- brings Cochran in on a deal to sell a posh diamond necklace to Halloran. The only hitch is that the necklace is in Hong Kong, and if Halloran leaves Macao, the Hong Kong cops will nab him as soon as he's three miles off the coast. The only problem Cochran runs into with the deal is that Halloran recognizes the diamonds as coming from a necklace he himself is the owner of. I'm frequently impressed by how lean yet well-developed the plots of so many old movies are. I mean, this is a pretty basic story: gangster kills a cop, hides out in a lawless haven, and another cop goes in to bring him out. And yet the plot is so expertly executed, the dialog is so good, and the actors are so committed to their roles that the movie becomes substantial. Modern movies rely heavily on convoluted, tangled plots and sub-plots to flesh out running time and compensate for bland or shallow characters. In Macao, the plot is secondary, just a way to explain why these people are here. The movie belongs to the actors, and it's a pretty fabulous cast. Russell is picture perfect as the femme fatale of the piece, tough and sassy but also kind and romantic when the time is right. She plays the disillusioned woman of the world well, never veering into the realm of caricature or over-the-top cartoonishness. She's thoroughly believable as Julie. Ditto our man Mitchum. Robert Mitchum is probably my all-time favorite actor. Everything about him is cool, and no man ever made high-waist pants look so slick. When he was younger, my grandpa Harley used to style himself after Mitchum as much as possible: same style of clothes, same hair, same swagger, and I have to say, if ever there was a man worthy of emulation, Robert Mitchum was certainly him. Brad Dexter is deliciously sinister as the big boss, who is equal parts businessman and gangster, more than happy to avoid conflict if he can bribe his way out of it. Rounding out the core cast, William Bendix is great as the amiable traveling salesman who is revealed to be more than he seems. Mitchum and Russell were the reason the movie was made. After their successful pairing in His Kind of Woman (which is similar to Macao in some ways and features an outstanding performance by Vincent Price, among others), legendary producer and batshit insane dude with Kleenex boxes on his feet, Howard Hughes, was keen on making the most of the success of and chemistry between the two -- though it would seem that his primary goal was oriented far more around Russell than Mitchum, who was already an established leading man's man. And most of Hughes interest in building up Russell seemed to be focused on his enormous bustline rather than her acting prowess. Russell does a good job here, despite where Hughes' eyes may have been. I referred to her as a femme fatale, but that's not entirely correct, just as Macao isn't really film noir. She's not there to lead the hero to his destruction or anything. If the film has anything close to a femme fatale, it's Gloria Grahame as Holloran's number one dice thrower. For my money, Grahame's looks blow Russell out of the water, and her character here is a good mix of femme fatale and wounded lover. I would have loved to see her get a more substantial role in this movie. And this movie belongs to them, the actors, not to the plot. This is definitely an actor's film, and the story is there to serve the development of these characters and their interaction with one another. The only real subplot involves Margie (Gloria Grahame), a woman in the employ of Halloran and who seems to be in love with her dashing but dangerous boss. She is none too happy when Julie shows up and catches Halloran's eye. But other than that, screenwriters keep things nice and streamlined. If I haven't mentioned it before, I really dig old black and white "Chinatown intrigue" movies. I've gone over the key ingredients before: secret passages, elegant gambling clubs, sinister assassins with curved daggers lurking in the shadows. I can watch pretty much anything that contains these elements. Drawing from the pulp stories of guys like Sax Rohmer (if you want the full run down on the history of Sax Rohmer and Yellow Peril pulps, check out our review of Face of Fu Manchu), shady Chinatown shenanigans became a staple of the Poverty Row B-movie quickies that were churned out to fill out the undercard in theaters during the 30s and 40s. Most of these movies weren't very good, and most of them didn't seem to know a whole lot about Asia or Asians (elements of Japanese and Chinese culture and style are freely mixed depending on how little the writer knew). When Rohmer was writing, you were free to hate, fear, and understand all Asians equally. Once World War II started, Chinese were good guys and Japanese were inscrutable evil demons. Then there was the Communist revolution, and someone had to go back into their own Yellow Peril propaganda leaflets and swap the two nationalities, so that the Japanese were our buddies and the Chinese were a hulking red menace poised to crush the entire world beneath the weight of Communism. A number of higher profile films also relied on Western infatuation with and anxiety over the exoticism and alleged inaccessibility various Asian cultures. Highest profile among these would be the Charlie Chan films, which traded heavily in spooky Chinatown stuff and walked a thin path between Ogami Ito's two lakes of fire. On the one hand, Charlie Chan and his Chinese pals were the heroes, and the white folks were usually revealed to be either incompetent boobs or villains. On the other hand, Chan himself was played by a Caucasian actor in fake eyelids and false teeth, throwing out a lot of "Ah so" and "honorable grandfather say" dialog. In my opinion, the final tally is in favor of Charlie Chan being more positive than negative when it comes to race relations. A clumsy looking step by today's standards, but then, today's standards are pretty much all talk, no action, as we've gone from employing fake Asians to be cool characters to employing real Asians to be kungfu guys. It's a shame there's still a stigma attached to the name of Charlie Chan, though, because many of the early movies were really quite good, and it's an idea that's ripe with remake potential (preferably in a period setting, as a modern-day Charlie Chan wouldn't be as cool). The one person I've heard lately speaking about desire to resurrect the franchise is, of all people, Lucy Liu. More power to her, says I. Well, I says that and also, "I love your freckles." Although Chan was the marquee character, there were plenty of others cut from the same cloth. Hungarian horror and noir film icon Peter Lorre played Japanese super-sleuth Mister Moto in a long-running and generally high-quality series of films. Boris Karloff did time as the Mysterious Mr. Wong, and Fu Manchu was always lurking somewhere in the background. Related to these Chinatown movies were movies set in China, usually in Hong Kong, with its intriguing blend of ancient Chinese mystery and recognizable to the West imperial British rule. You could spice up a mundane thriller pretty well if you simply plopped it down in "the Orient." Macao was directed by Josef von Sternberg, last seen here as the director of another fabulous "Orient noir" set in a lawless Casbah-esque location, 1941's The Shanghai Gesture. The two films would make a fabulous double bill (one could imagine that you'd catch a steamer from Shanghai to Macao and find it captained by Clark Gable a la China Seas). As with The Shanghai Gesture, and as with all of his films, von Sternberg applies meticulous detail to the look of his film. Despite the title and the setting, Macao is not steeped in Orientalism or exoticism. The key locations are a hotel and Halloran's nightclub, and although both bear the obvious stamp of being Chinese in design, neither is excessively so. The primary function of Macao isn't t be alien or exotic; it's to serve as a criminal haven. One could have just as easily set this film in The Casbah, or 1930s Shanghai, or any place where the threads of international law begin to fray and those who would cut them are able to find sanctuary. Unlike The Shanghai Gesture, Macao doesn't revel in or become intoxicated by the decadence of the setting. It is fairly sedate by comparison, though this shouldn't imply that it is in any way less elegant in its design. The men all look sharp, clad in tuxedos and pale, tropical weight suits. Jane Russell parades through the film in a number of swanky looking dresses and ornate pieces of jewelry. Where as the casino in The Shanghai Gesture was a hallucinogenic, near dreamlike palace of vice and shady, doomed souls, Halloran's casino in Macao is much less symbolic affair. It is, by and large, simply a casino, treated by the art design as a place of business rather than as some twisted den of pleasure and destruction. Halloran's office is an office. It has nice decor, but it's just an office -- a far cry from Mother Gin Sling's ornate office that bordered on throne room. But both settings serve their inhabitant well. Halloran is, after all, a very real-world crooked businessman, and his main concern is maintaining his power and making cash. Gin Sling was a half-mad woman bent on revenge, and her primary goal was to destroy in the most elaborate way possible those she saw as having ruined her. Running a casino was little more than a means to the end of revenge. I said earlier that Macao, despite coming from the era of the noir film and being a film about cops and criminals, isn't exactly noir. It certainly has elements of the noir film -- the mysterious and flawed protagonist, the powerful businessman/criminal, crooked cops, and a hard-as-nails dame -- but it lacks a certain claustrophobic bleakness (and close-ups of the faces of sweating guys in undershirts) that informs the noir film. We may have haunted characters, but they are not hopeless or self-destructive. Von Sternberg infuses Macao with less a sense of desperation and more a sense of adventure. Julie and Nick Cochran would be more at home among the ranks of globe-trotting thrill-seekers than they would the damned and depressed denizens of noir, and Macao has more in common with high-spirited adventure fare like China Seas than with noir films like A Touch of Evil. Despite being a crime film, Macao is just too snappy, and too much fun, to really be considered noir. It also sports a sense of humor, though it's hardly a comedy. Bedix's Trumble is the closest thing the movie comes to having a comic relief character, and he's hardly comic relief. He just gets in a few jokes. What comedy there is, is subdued and pretty effective. And there are no "wacky Oriental" characters (just an assassin and an old man), and at no point do I recall that musical snippet -- you know the one -- that usually plays whenever an Asian character enters a scene. This was von Sternberg's final film, and by all accounts, it was a troubled production. Von Sternberg himself hadn't worked for a while when the infamous Howard Hughes tapped him as director for this film. Von Sternberg found Hughes an impossible producer who forced too many meddling clowns" into the affair, and both Mitchum and Russell developed an intense dislike for von Sternberg on account of the way he treated his crew. Things got so bad that, at some point, Mitchum flat out refused to work with von Sternberg any further, and von Sternberg was summarily dismissed and replaced by top notch noir director Nicholas Ray (They Live By Night, In a Lonely Place, and later Rebel without a Cause and King of Kings). Despite this, the film still remains largely the vision of von Sternberg. As with The Shanghai Gesture, it seems Macao is largely overshadowed by what many critics dwell on as his signature masterpiece, The Blue Angel. Despite the troubled production and the need to call in Ray to finish (and reshoot much of) the film, I found Macao to be an extremely enjoyable adventure film, with a decent sense of romance, nice sets, and great cast anchored by the chemistry between Mitchum and Russell. A snappy script with a good sense of humor and a great (and surprising) twist make it, if not must-see swanky cinema, then at least should-see cinema. Labels: Action: Adventure, Director: Josef von Sternberg, Director: Nicholas Ray, Film Noir, Stars: Robert Mitchum, Year: 1952 posted by Keith at 6:47 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, April 04, 2007Naksha
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 2006, India. Starring Sunny Deol, Vivek Oberoi, Sameera Reddy, Jackie Shroff, Suhasini Mulay, Navni Parihar, Liliput, Mridula Chandrashekar. Directed by Sachin Bajaj. Written by Milap Zaveri and Tushar Hiranandani.
For anyone who ever watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and was disappointed that, for all its over-the-top absurdities, it didn't feature a scene where Harrison Ford punches a midget and makes him fly across a field, then Naksha is the movie for you. Only it's not Harrison ford doing the punching; it's action cinema mainstay Sonny Deol. But hell, if anyone in the world is going to punch a midget and make him fly across a field, then it's going to be Sonny. Jackie Chan may have tried it at some point, but he's past the days of being able to do that anymore -- although he is an appropriate actor to bring up in our discussion of this movie, as although Naksha gets compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark (because all adventure films get compared to Raiders), the films it more accurately resembles would be the modern-setting adventure films of the late, great Cannon Studios, like Treasure of the Four Crowns or that thing where Chuck Norris and Lou Gossett, Jr. bicker and hunt for gold or whatever; or, perhaps even more closely, Naksha resembles the globe-trotting adventure antics of Hong Kong adventure films like Jackie Chan's two superb Armor of God films and Michelle Yeoh's entertaining but fabulously awful The Touch. In fact, if you took the armor from Armor of God (although, technically, we never even see the armor, do we?) and plopped it into the finale of The Touch, with a dollop of The Rundown thrown in for good measure, you'd basically have Naksha, the tale of two brothers and a tag-along hot chick who traverse the mountainous jungle wilderness in search of a secret temple and a sacred relic that could turn villain Jackie Shroff into an invincible superman, instead of turning him into the twin of French actor Jean Reno, which seems to be nature's own plan for Shroff.
Pretty boy Viveik Oberoi stars as Vicky, a fun-loving goofball who likes to spend his night at sexy dance clubs where the singers implore you to "shake what your momma gave you," even though poorly proofread subtitles insist that they are saying "shake what your momma told you" (and this after they tell is the lyrics to "Sway are "when the rubber rhythm starts to play"). I generally don't pick on subtitles, especially on DVDs that are marketed to a population that speaks something other than English. The inclusion of English subs is a nice consideration for the rest of us, and so I don't really complain when things stray from precise grammar. But still, man -- you should at least be able to properly subtitle in English the lines that are actually delivered in English. I only say this because I was all into shaking what my momma gave me, but then if I am only able to shake what my momma told me, I'm not gong to be allowed to shake anything other than Shake and Bake -- and going to a sexy dance club to shake a bag of raw chicken and crumblings is not what I'd consider getting my money's worth.
While hosting a bachelor party for his pal, Vicky meets dancer Riya (Sameera Reddy), who chastises him for being a low down dirty dog and such, and that's pretty much that. But when Vicky learns that his father, a famed archaeologist who died mysteriously some years before, may have been murdered while trying to protect a map to a sacred relic, he suddenly kicks himself into intrepid adventurer mode and sets out to find the lost relic -- which happens to be the armor and earrings worn by Karna during his legendary battle with Arjun, as described in the Hindu book The Mahabharata (which is a religious book in much the same way The Old Testament is: presumably -- and often verifiable -- historical events are mixed with or attributed to the intervention of gods and the supernatural). Whoever dons the armor and earrings will be rendered invincible.
Also searching for the armor is the dastardly Bali Bhaiyya, played by Bollywood veteran Jackie Shroff. Bhaiyya has no real back story other than the fact that he's the one who is responsible for the death of Vicky's dad. Exactly who Bhaiyya is, we never really find out, but adventure movies always have a villainous guy looking for the same treasure. In Raiders it was Belloq, in The Touch it was Count Dracula himself, Richard Roxburgh. And here it's Jackie Shroff. They're all pretty much the same: possessed of seemingly unlimited wealth (while the hero always seems to be rougher around the edges) and an unlimited number of incompetent but well-armed henchmen. Said henchmen quickly pick up Vicky's trail, and although he proves himself an able enough fighter (though the fights themselves can't stand up to similar fights in either The Touch or, most certainly, the mind-blowing fights -- few and far between though they may be -- in Armor of God), he is soon overpowered and find himself strung up in a vacant building, about to be eviscerated by Bhaiyya's goons. Until, that is, Sonny Deol crashes through the ceiling in slow motion and starts blowing cats away and punching them across the room.
Up until this point, the film has been pretty so-so, with a typical adventure film "discovering the plot" build up and a lead who was neither good nor bad, but simply a null value that wasn't going to engage me for the full film. But as soon as Sonny comes smashing through the building like The Incredible Hulk, wearing his old school Banana Republic safari man hat (some of you may remember when Banana Republic was entirely safari and adventure themed -- they had pretty awesome catalogs back then, digest size and printed on thick brown paper and full of stories about rum and clippers and such in between pictures of bush hats and waterproof duster jackets), well that's when the movie actually begins. From there on out, there's a few minutes sprinkled here and there dedicated to our main cast bickering with each other, but for the most part it's all Sonny beating the crap out of people and walking in slow motion and shit blows up around him. Sonny plays Veer, Vicky's long lost brother. It turns out that when Vicky called his mom to tell her where he was, she in turn called Veer and asked him to bring Vicky home. So Veer then used his incredible powers of teleportation to get to the remote little village where Vicky was being held captive, then used his incredible powers of ESP (or possible Google Maps) to locate the exact building in which Vicky was being held. Forget Karna's magic armor. Veer already seems possessed of near godlike omnipotence -- plus he can smash through buildings and punch guys so hard they fly across the room.
Vicky properly saved, Veer goes about the task of trying to bring the rascally younger brother home -- which proves difficult, as Vicky is nothing if not sneaky. Things get further complicated when, in the middle of the goddamned jungle far from home, the two brothers run into Riya, trapped in an out-of-control raft in a raging river. Apparently, she went on holiday and booked a white water adventure with an outfitter who takes women in their regular street clothes and plops them into a novelty-grade raft and sets them out into class IV rapids without partners or guides. The movie spends a little too much time with the trio monkeying about in the jungle (though sadly, and surprisingly, there are no hijinks or comedy bits involving actual monkeys), but that's forgivable as soon as Bhaiyya and his goons catch up and we get a parade of exploding trucks, kungfu fights, shotguns that seem to fire atomic bombs, and a scene in which the heroes run afoul of a tribe of pygmies that whip out some serious kungfu skills on Sonny (in a scene lifted wholesale from The Rundown -- even going so far as to hire an Ernie Reyes Jr. look-alike for the fight) before everyone makes up and gets drunk and dances through the village. And on the village. I don't know how happy the midget tribe was to have a big lug like Sonny Deol dancing on their roofs. I mean, if he can smash through the roof of full-size building, who knows what kind of damage he could do to the mud and grass hut of a guy named Liliput.
Eventually, everyone gets back to the business of trying to recover Karna's artifacts, leading to a big showdown in the hidden mountain temple, which is of course stuffed to the gills with booby traps (most of which are stolen from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and candles that light themselves. Naksha is a pretty dumb movie, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like it. I liked it a lot. But then, keep in mind that I like pretty much all adventure movies, even those Tomb Raider movies no one else liked (in fact, I loved those), and even Treasure of the Four Crowns. Naksha is better than Treasure of the Four Crowns, and better than The Touch, but it's still no Raiders of the Lost Ark. But then, nothing is (not even the other Indiana Jones films), so it's not really all that fair or useful to say a movie isn't as good as Raiders, which just might be the greatest adventure movie ever made. Still, measured against the rest of the world's adventure films (including those Antonio Margheriti adventure films starring David Warbeck), Naksha measures up pretty well despite the fact that the plot depends on a couple tremendously gigantic coincidences. At this point in the history of adventure films, however, I'm used to just looking the other way when a female from earlier in the movie shows up at random in a raft on a river in the middle of a remote jungle. Or when Sonny Deol travels at the speed of light to the location where his little brother is being tortured. Or the fact that everyone solves all the treasure map's clues by sort of staring off into the distance until "revelation music with chanting in it" plays and gives them the answer to the puzzle.
But there's a word for watching a guy sit for ten years trying to decipher clues on an esoteric map, and that word is "archeology." And since real archaeologists rarely get in kungfu fights with midgets or get involved in magical battles in secret temples, lets leave their work as the purview of The Discovery Channel, and let's let adventure films be populated by guys like Sonny Deol blowing up trucks and swinging around sawed off shotguns. You may notice that, while Viveik Oberoi is ostensibly the hero of this movie, I've barely mentioned him. That's because he's not even there. Not really. There's a reason Ajay Devgan is the guy everyone remembers from Company, even though Viveik was the main character, and there's a reason we're talking about Sonny a lot more in Naksha. Oberoi doesn't really strike me as a bad actor; it's just that he spends pretty much the entire movie mugging for the camera and going over-the-top in a way that makes him less like the hero and more like the hero's odious comic relief sidekick. Which leaves the actual hero work squarely on the beefy shoulders of workhorse Sonny Deol, where it belongs. Sonny is getting on in years but I still have absolutely no problem buying him as an action hero. I also have no problem at all buying Sonny as a legitimate tough guy. The trend these days is to feature uber-scultped male model types as action heroes. Sure the bodies look good in a gym, but do any of these lads strike you as someone you'd want to depend on in a fight? Who has your back: John Abraham or Sonny Deol? I'd be much happier knowing that a guy like Sonny Deol, with his treetrunk arms and a little bit of fat, has my back. When I reviewed Kamal Hassan's Abhay a while back, I compared Hassan's build to Joe Don Baker, or to many of the beefy redneck guys with whom I grew up. Ask 'em to show you their six pack, and they'll take you to the fridge. But you damn sure know that when push comes to shove, for all their beer guy and excess body fat, these guys are more than capable of hammering pretty much anyone into the ground. Sonny definitely falls in that category. When Viveik Oberoi punches someone, you sort of shrug and go, "Eh, it's a movie." But when Sonny punches someone, you believe that someone would fly across the room and through a wall.
The other person to pay attention to in this film is Jackie Shroff. Again, we see that while Viveik may have been seen as the handsome, young lead, this movie really belongs to the veterans. Where as Oberoi's over-the-top mugging comes off as lame, Shroff gets to go just as over the top as the villain of the piece, but he executes his scenery chewing turn with ace perfection. As I mentioned earlier, he is almost totally devoid of character. He is evil because the movie says he is evil, and because he is willing to gun down a village full of kungfu midgets. But beyond that, the movie pretty much relies on you recognizing a well established adventure film archetype. And honestly -- is his sinister plan really worth all this effort to prevent? The armor may make you invincible, but I still bet it would be pretty hard for one guy wearing heavy armor to conquer the entire world. I guess these villains never really expect to succeed in their mad schemes, so they don't think through the actual logistics of their proposed global conquest. But whatever the short-comings of his plan may be, Jackie still gives his all despite being in such a goofy movie. You could jettison Oberoi and Sameera Reddy from this film entirely and just leave the whole thing up to Deol and Shroff, and you'd probably be better off for it. Speaking of which -- I almost forgot Sameera Reddy was in this movie. She has absolutely no purpose other than to be the pretty girl and get captured every now and again by Shroff's goons. Her turn isn't really bad -- we're not talking Kate Capshaw here -- but there's certainly no point to it, either. So at least she's no Kate Capshaw, but she's also no Karen Allen. She looks good in the musical numbers though (of which there are only a couple), and I guess that's about all she's supposed to do.
Plotwise, you can pretty much guess that this movie isn't exactly a work of art. Coincidences abound, things happen for no reason, and people just seem to appear in places with very little effort or explanation, sort of like how Tony Jaa was always able to teleport to wherever he thought someone would be who might know where his elephants were in Tom Yung Goong. within the realm of adventure films, the plot is actually better -- or at least more sensical -- than many, but that's really not saying a lot. The plot isn't really the point here, though. The armor is just a MacGuffin that allows the movie to indulge in a parade of exploding trucks, shotgun battles, and kungfu fights. And in this capacity, Naksha delivers the goods in excess. Really, in excess. No truck explodes when five trucks could explode instead. And nothing just explodes when it could explode and shoot end over end, fifty feet up into the air. And no one gets punched and falls down when they could get punched and fly like a hundred feet back and through a wall or a tree or a windshield. The action is way over the top, well into the realm of the cartoonish, but it's still pretty good fun. It does make for a weird transition when the wacky action has serious consequences, but awkward shifts in tone are hardly the sole property of Naksha.
I've brought up both Armor of God and The Touch fairly often in this review, which probably doesn't mean a whole lot to people haven't seen either of those films. First of all, if you haven't seen Armor of God yet, you should. The bad slapstick comedy is more than made up for when Jackie starts kicking people so hard it makes them flip over backwards, hit their shins on the edge of a wooden table, then flip over backwards again before hitting the ground (you really just need to see it). It's the second most painful looking abuse Jackie has visited upon a stuntman (the first being in Police Story, when he kicks that dude on the escalator and makes him flip backward and land chest first on the edge of the metal stairs and then he bounces -- again, you have to see it to understand just how painful it looks). As for The Touch -- not so much. It's really pretty bad, even though I still watch it from time to time just because I like adventure movies, and the cinematography is nice to look at, and so is Michelle Yeoh. Naksha resembles The Touch in that it takes the traditional adventure film and attempts to graft some sort of cultural religious context onto the action. In the case of The Touch, it was Buddhism, and obviously here it's Hinduism. However, I'd say the lessons in Hinduism (taught to us in cartoon format) to be taught by Naksha are about as trustworthy as the American history taught to us by National Treasure, so I wouldn't use this movie in place of reading the actual historical texts. Actually, I would. But you shouldn't.
It's this, and the supernatural ending, that makes Naksha feel like The Touch, though I would qualify that statement by saying that Naksha is a much more enjoyable movie. Director Sachin Bajaj finds himself in that position for the first time, and even though it looks like he got the job through the ancient tradition of nepotism (his father is a film distributor in India and is listed as the producer of Naksha), Bajaj handles the job well. Not perfectly, but well. The pacing is OK, there's a little too much reliance on slow-motion during action scenes (though this is a global trend and not anything unique to Bajaj), and the cinematography (by Vijay Arora, who does have a lot of experience in the field) nicely captures the landscapes and contributes the exotic feel that is so important to a successful adventure film. Incidentally, The Touch was directed by a cinematographer-turned-director too, and while that film is frequently gorgeous, it's rarely good. If Bajaj was still a novice director, he at least had the good sense to surround him with a capable crew.
There's also a fair number of special effects which, for the most part, are realized fairly well. I don't know the exact budget of Naksha, but it sure wasn't small, and it showcases India's continually improving skill with CGI effects. Not everything is pulled off perfectly, but if I were to assume the budget to be roughly the same or slightly lower than The Touch, the effects in Naksha pretty much blow that film out of the water. That said, the CGI in The Touch was pretty awful, and Naksha doesn't even deserve to be dragged down to that level by an act of comparison. There are also a fair number of practical effects, as well as the kungfu fights. India, like pretty much the rest of the world, has never quite gotten the knack of filming a superb kungfu fight the way they can (or could) in Hong Kong. So there's no kungfu showdown of the quality we get at the end of Jackie Chan's Armor of God when Jackie takes on an entire monastery full of evil monks and a gang of leather-clad, high-heel wearing kungfu amazons. But then, even Hong Kong and even Jackie can't deliver fight scenes like that anymore, so that style of hyper-kinetic, bone jarring acrobatic kungfu seems to be the exclusive domain of Tony Jaa. That said, I wouldn't really expect to see someone with Sonny Deol's build going all 1980s Jackie Chan in a movie. Deol is a classic tough guy, and his job is to move slower but with thunderous power. The fight choreography in Naksha is OK, maybe slightly above average if you average out the quality of fight scenes all over the world. It does rely a lot on the gravity defying wirework that is so en vogue and has been so since the 90s in Hong Kong (though it was only discovered recently by the rest of the world). But since the fight scenes are, for the most part, possessed of a cartoonish over-the-top quality anyway, the wirework doesn't detract. And Sonny still looks solid just punch or kicking guys square in the jaw. I guess Viveik Oberoi gets in some action, too, but honestly -- is he still even in this movie? However well Deol might acquit himself in the action scenes, and however charismatic and likable a performer may be, one thing that does astound me about the man is that, after some twenty-odd years or so as a leading man, the guy still hasn't learned to dance. Naksha has only a few musical numbers, and Deol is involved in only two of them. And one of those isn't even in the movie. It's just a music video tacked on to the credits. And it's here that Deol's proficiency for the dancin' rears its ugly head. The other musical number in which he's involved is the drunken revelry with the tribe of kungfu midgets, and his job there is mostly to drink, smash some clay pots, and stomp around like a joyous madman. That he can do. But the non-sequiter final musical number pasted into the closing credits calls for actual dancing, and while Viveik and Sammera wriggle and writhe about with skill, Deol dances with all the grace, rhythm, and timing of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster. I don't know how you stick around in Bollywood as long as Sonny has without learning how to dance, but somehow he manages. Still, when you think about it, if you have an action-packed kungfu adventure movie full of lost treasure, secret maps, and exploding trucks, do you want your hero to look good in the post-adventure dance number, or do you want him to look good kicking ass in the rest of the movie? Let Viveik and Sameera have their paltry moment to shine in the "freaky freaky Friday night" closing credit song, because Deol owns the rest of the film. Actually, the director must have realized that dropping Deol into the middle of a bunch of dancers for a music video was a bad idea, because eventually, he stops making Sonny try to dance and just lets him lounge about surrounded by hot, squirming chicks -- which is the way things ought to be for Sonny.
I should probably mention that the songs in this movie are awful. The score is pretty much the de rigueur "faux tribal" orchestration so common to modern adventure films, with lots of enthusiastic "Ho! Whoa ho!" chanting and percussion punctuated by flutes and that "haunting moaning" for moments of introspection and revelation. If you've seen an adventure film in the last fifteen years, you pretty much know the score. But the songs for the musical numbers -- my God! The song where they party with the pygmies is OK as it's just an extension of the score, and sounds like one of those "tribal music written by white guy" songs you hear on Globe Trekker. But then there's the "Shake what your momma gave you song" and the "freaky freaky Friday night" song -- there's a reason neither of these set the pop charts ablaze (as far as I can tell). The other song is performed when Jackie Shroff's standard issue "hot, evil mercenary chick in booty shorts" performs a little number for the goons, but honestly, I can't even remember how that sounds now, because all I can think about is that horrible "freaky freaky Friday night" song. Both Oberoi and Deol were in a bit of a slump when they starred in this film, and Naksha didn't do a whole lot to revive them. It also seems that Naksha had a pretty big budget, and adventure/treasure hunt films of this nature are pretty scarce in the overall cinematic landscape of Indian cinema. I guess Bajaj was hoping the stars and the relative uniqueness of the genre would translate into box office success. No dice, though it was a fun effort despite the box office failure and mixed reviews in India, ranging from "dumb fun" to "mindless idiocy and harbinger of the end of Indian cinema." Some felt that it wasn't "Indian" enough (for that perhaps they should watch the Sonny Deol film Indian -- I mean, how much more Indian can you get than to call your film Indian), or more accurately, that it was too Hollywood. This is a criticism that has been leveled at a lot of cinema these days -- from Hong Kong to Korea to France (could Sachin Bajaj become the Luc Besson of India??? -- I mean, I already cracked that Jackie Shroff looks like Jean Reno, so this is the next logical step), and personally, it doesn't fly with me.
We are no longer in an era of localized, regional cinema. That era died the day DVD stores and movie review websites went online. The cinema of one country has always influenced the cinema of another. Even if the audience wasn't aware, the filmmakers certainly were. Italian spectacle films of the silent era influenced American filmmakers, who set out to incorporate the larger-than-life opulence into their own films. And then the Technicolor spectacles of Hollywood during the 50s in turn revived spectacle filmmaking in Italy during the 1960s. Westerns became spaghetti westerns which in turn were heavily influenced by Japanese samurai films. And now, Hong Kong action films of the previous two decades heavily influence American films, which in turn influence Hong Kong films. Thanks to the interconnectivity of the Web, fans and even casual filmgoers are more aware of this global exchange than ever before. I mean, twenty years ago, when I first started watching Hong Kong action films, I never would have dreamed I'd hear my parents speak with familiarity about Chow Yun-fat or Michelle Yeoh. So yes -- Naksha has some very Hollywood elements. It also has some very Indian elements, as well as elements of Hong Kong cinema and Luc Besson's crop of French action films that have destroyed French film the same way Naksha and Dhoom have destroyed Indian cinema. I've never been a big fan of nation-state borders serving as barriers to artistic expression, and if the Internet has done anything positive besides deliver cheap, plentiful porn to the world, it's that it has facilitated the breakdown of walls between artists and fans across the world the way no fanzine or convention could ever dream of. So in this climate, what does it mean for a film or a genre to be "too Hollywood" or "not Indian enough?" Doesn't this confine film -- and all other forms of artistic expression -- to regionalized ghettos? If you film is an Indian film, it must fulfill these requirements, and it must not do these things. How is this mode of thinking in any way beneficial to filmmaking, or to art? How does this in any way encourage experimentation or evolution? At the same time, how does aping another country's cinema help cultivate the pieces of filmmaking that make your cinema unique on the global scene? Are we talking about genre topics, or technical aspects and camera tricks involved with filmmaking -- or does "too Hollywood" have less to do with the film and more to do with the moral values presented (for what it's worth, the moral values presented in Naksha include, "Indian mythology is awesome," "Don't conquer the world," and "stick by family")?
Of course, there's also the debate over what "destroyed such and such cinema" even means. Does applying techniques and values from Hollywood films somehow happen at the expense of obliterating that which makes another country's film unique? Isn't it possible to use the one without losing the other? I mean, Hollywood draws influence from all over the world, but no one is really saying that Hong Kong cinema destroyed Hollywood. In the end, "too Hollywood" is generally a criticism leveled at films by the same people who would still hate "Hollywood" even if they were American -- and here, Hollywood ceases to mean "Hollywood," or even "American" cinema, and instead is used as a synonym for "big, dumb popcorn movies," which are perceived by some as being automatically possessed of far less artistic merit or social value than smaller, quieter films. But then, this is again hardly an argument that restricts itself to India, or to any one country, and it has been raging pointlessly (though often times entertainingly so) since the birth of feature films. In the case of Naksha, the film did well in large cities but tanked everywhere else -- and since most of India is everywhere else, you can't really get by without it. Does a film like this represent a rift between urban areas, where perhaps people are more open to change, and rural areas, where something not identified as traditional is met with suspicion and hostility? If so, once again this is hardly a situation unique to India, but it does spotlight one of the great problems we face as our world becomes more connected and the varied cultures of the world continue to collide and meld into something new. It seems the more some people want to move ahead into this new arena, the more other people want to pull away from it. And both sides of this tug-of-war have plenty that justifies their position. I was originally -- before I derailed myself into this random thought exercise -- going to review this movie with nary a mention of "Bollywood" other than as a passing reference, because I think the role of a movie on the global scene is more important than its role in a restricted subsection, even one as large as Bollywood. Other people, with a greater sense of national pride, or a greater concern over maintaining the purity of their culture against outside influences, rather than embracing global accessibility and co-mingling, obviously don't feel the same way, and I'm not going to make proclamations on who is wrong or right, even though it's obvious where I stand. From day one of Teleport City, we have roamed the globe in search of cool and outlandish movies -- that's why a review of an Indian film that is too Hollywood contains so many references to Hong Kong films, Tony Jaa, Luc Besson, and David Warbeck. As far as I'm concerned, our regional cinema is planet Earth -- and I only use that limit because the shipping on movies from Io is so expensive and takes twenty-two years. Plus, man, who wants to watch a movie full of pretentious Ionians chain smoking and mumbling about how the view of Jupiter looming in the sky so perfectly embodies their personal existential crisis -- and from what I've seen of Ionian cinema, that's pretty much all there is, as the Ionian Luc Besson has not yet come around to destroy Ionian cinema. A review of a goofy, fun-loving flick like Naksha is hardly the best place for contemplation on the globalization and cross-pollination of culture, art, and entertainment, and this is certainly not meant as a defense of Naksha's sundry faults. It's hard to argue against anyone who claims this movie is stupid, because Naksha is pretty stupid. And that alone is enough to legitimately dismiss it as bad. I happen to have a different standard, though, and the movie was OK in my book. But what we're talking about here is not whether the film is good or bad, but whether it is too foreign or not, and whether such arguments have much meaning anymore.
I think it's valuable to look at a film in terms of its native cultural and industry context. It's important to understand the prevailing trends and cultural mores from which a film emerges. And in many ways, although people who frown upon pop culture are loathe to admit it, you can learna lot about people by learning about what people like in the pop culture and entertainment. There's no way to understand Indian films without making some effort to at least get the basics of Indian film and cultural history under your belt. At the same time, I also think it's important to remove films from that context and look at them as members of a more globalized cinema scene. In that sense, whether or not Naksha is "Bollywood enough," whatever that may mean, is hardly an important question for me. I don't care, to be honest. Others may care a lot, and that's just a matter of your point of view on things. I, personally, am not a "fan of Bollywood;" I'm a fan of film, wherever it may come from. But this debate probably deserves a more respectable forum than Naksha as reviewed by Teleport City, so I'll lay it to rest here unresolved. What matters most to me right now is, how does Naksha measure up against its contemporaries in adventure cinema from the rest of the world? And honestly, despite the obvious script gaffs and Oberoi's mugging, Naksha holds up pretty well against the rest of the pack -- but depending on how dumb you think the rest of the pack is, you may enjoy this film a lot less than I did. It's got a playful sense of adventure, decent pacing, some fun fights, nice locations, solid veterans in Shroff and Deol, an appropriately supernatural blow-out for the finale, and lots of people tearing about in Land Rovers. Theater audiences may have met the film with a resounding, "meh," if they even took the time to do that, but I have to say, I really had fun. Plus you know: kungfu fight between Sonny Deol and a guy who was like four feet tall. Crap. I think I like the "freaky freaky Friday night" song... Labels: Action: Adventure, Bollywood, Musicals, Stars: Jackie Shroff, Stars: Sonny Deol, Stars: Vivek Oberoi, Year: 2006 posted by Keith at 6:06 PM | 7 Comments Monday, October 20, 2003Treasure of the Four Crowns
1982, Spain/United States. Starring Tony Anthony, Lewis Gordon, Jerry Lazarus, Ana Obregon, Gene Quintano, Francisco Rabal, Emiliano Redondo, Francisco Villena. Directed by Ferdinando Baldi.
All the films that fall into that general category of "cool when I was in elementary school" have this common peculiarity. I, as well as most of the people with whom I saw them, remember one or two particular scenes from each movie, and not much more up until we start watching again, at which time the floodgates of memories both shameful and grand are thrown open. With Sword and the Sorcerer, for example, everyone remembered the slimy wizard making the witch's chest explode, and everyone remembered the steamy bathhouse scene, but not much else. In the case of Beastmaster, another classic from a bygone era, we each remembered some green guys who wrapped their leathery wings around people and dissolved them, and we remembered Tanya Roberts bathing nude under a waterfall. In Revenge of the Ninja it was a tremendous spray of blood as Sho Kosugi kills the villain at the end, and two naked people getting killed in the middle of having sex in a hot tub. There may be a pattern here. I'm not sure. In the case of the oft-forgotten Indiana Jones rip-off, Treasure of the Four Crowns, all anyone could remember was "something about a lot of flaming rocks swinging around on really obvious wires." There's a good reason this is the thing we all remember. We remember it because nothing else really happens in the whole damn film. Sure, it claims to be action-packed, in the tradition of course of the recent hit Raiders of the Lost Ark, but unless you count among the action sequences the scenes in which a middle aged man struggles to grab hold of a floating key that makes electronica music play, then the truth is that action scenes are few and far between. Specifically, there is one at the beginning of the film, one at the end, and neither are really worth a damn for anything beyond the sheer hilarious incompetence on display.
Although few people seem to remember this little gem of a film, and by gem I mean small chunk of gravel, it caused a minor stir upon its initial release, and I have fond memories of the day we all loaded up for our friend Jason Morgan's birthday party (I think it was his) after school and went to see this film, which aside from promising us nonstop action both bigger and better than what we'd so recently enjoyed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, was also shot in glorious 3D! It's always disappointed me a tad that the 3D trend hasn't been revived. Oh sure, you can pay $700 to go to an amusement park where one of the shows is a 3D feature with someone like Rick Moranis or Eric Idle in it, but those are isolated instances in specialized circumstances. Back in the 1980s, let me tell ya, we knew how to live. Sure our music sucked and we all wore those tan Bass dress shoes with the backs squashed down for no real reason. Sure, we made stars out of Nu Shuz and Rockwell, but we also braved bold, new paths forever etched in the annals of history. One of the biggest was probably the flight of the first space shuttle, but only slightly below that in terms of global impact was the explosion in the popularity of 3D movies that failed miserably to be good movies or look very 3D. I can't remember if the trend started on television or the movie houses, but my first 3D memory was the groundbreaking broadcast of Creature from the Black Lagoon in dramatic 3D. You had to go down to the local Convenient food mart (now called something else, I think) where you could get a free pair of the red and blue cardboard glasses that sawed into your ears. Then you, your family, and your friends could all huddle around the television and watch this historic event. It's weird in this day of twenty-four hour media saturation, to think of anything on television being a national event, but these were simpler times. When a miniseries like The Day After promised to blow our minds, the nation ground to a halt in order to watch. It's a curious thing I don't think could be recreated today. Sure, there were lots of people excited about the final episode of Seinfeld, but it just wasn't the same.
The biggest thing I remember about that night spent watching Creature from the Black Lagoon in dimension-bending 3D was how amazingly un-3D it looked. For starters, it aired on local channel WDRB-TV 41. This was a time before cable, so we all had to struggle with the rabbit ear antennae as best we could. The end result was that there was no such thing as a clear picture, at least not on a local independent channel like 41. Thus much of the potential 3D effect was no doubt watered down by the snow and occasionally weak and wavy signal. Plus, the 3D technology just sort of sucked. But it was still sort of cool, so they did it again a little while later with that movie about the gorilla that escapes and spends a lot of time reaching at the camera. Now, I know many of you out there are younger than me and can't clearly remember a time when gorillas were terrifying beyond the scope of mere words. But for those of you as old as or older than me, you remember - if you dare. Rampaging gorillas were a huge deal back then, though not as much so as they had been in the 1940s when every other movie featured the Bowery Boys and Bela Lugosi being chased by a gorilla and every other television show was another episode of The Little Rascals in which Spanky and the gang try to scare Buckwheat with a fake gorilla, only a real gorilla escapes and causes all sorts of hilarious escapades. If it wasn't that episode, then it would be another one where they have to defend their fort from other kids by dressing up like pirates and flinging Limburger cheese at them. I know it's a level of sophistication to which many of you young kids can't fully relate, and I pity you that the world has become so dumbed-down that it no longer appreciates the subtle humor of black guy whose afro stands up or a scene in which a drunk guy sees a gorilla run by him in downtown New York, causing him to look at his bottle of ripple, look at the gorilla, look at the ripple, then throw the bottle away as he proclaims, "I gotta lay off this stuff!" I weep for a generation that cannot see the humor in Ruth Buzzi's strained-voice, purse-swinging, crazy woman character. Okay, so I crossed the codger line there. Even I didn't find Ruth Buzzi funny. I don't think anyone did, with the possible exception of the people on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, and they were all plastered anyway. Existing parallel to the 3D rage on the television was a growing revival of 3D movies on the big screen. In the span of a few short years, or possibly even months, we were hit head-on with films like Spacehunter, Friday the 13th Part III, Weird Al Yancovich's ground-breaking In 3D album, and of course the film we're here to discuss today, Treasure of the Four Crowns. The main problem uniting all these movies was that, while every producer knew he wanted to cash in on the trend, no one really had much imagination when it came to taking full advantage of the potential of 3D effects. Thus you get scene after scene of a guy reaching toward the camera or pointing a speargun at the screen (I think that was done in all three films I mentioned). In the case of Friday the 13th Part III, it was especially sad how little they came up with. I mean, it's a movie about a crazed invincible killer, and besides being the movie that introduces the hockey mask (I think), the best 3D effects they could come up with were the chilling "here comes some popcorn!" scene or the shocking "Watch out! I'm doing yoyo tricks!" scene. Not exactly what fans wanted. Pretty much every other scene in the action-adventure disaster that is Treasure of the Four Crowns involves a guy sticking something toward the camera in an exaggerated manner and for an unrealistically long time. Pretty much anything that isn't bolted down gets picked up and waved into the camera. Keys, sticks, guns, fingers, bottles of booze, skeleton arms, spears, dangling bits of string, even a squirrel. You name it, and someone held it in front of the camera in a very unnatural looking way. It is, in many ways, the least ludicrous thing about this movie. The movie opens with Star Wars like scrolling words on a space background. They explain to us that some things, like this movie, simply cannot be understood. These things include, aside from the movie Treasure of the Four Crowns, the actual four crowns, which contain gems that, when united by a man in a windbreaker, can either usher in an era of peace of prosperity or unleash a world where good is forever entangled in battle with evil, which I guess would be, well, the current world. I've never quite understood how a couple little gems or amulets or anything could usher in an era of anything. Just because you can shoot some animated beams out doesn't really translate into changing the world. Sure, both Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Lord of the Rings featured magic items with the power to change the world, but that was only if they were used as weapons by a guy who already had a pretty big army beforehand. If Sauron had just been some lonely wizard living in a cave, it's unlikely the One Ring would have changed much of anything, and if Hitler didn't already have his army in place, he wouldn't even be able to lift the Ark of the Covenant. But, for the sake of this movie, let's assume that these jewels do have unspeakable powers. The opening narration then goes on to tell us that, even as we are reading this, a soldier of fortune is seeking out artifacts that will unlock the power of the crowns. That soldier of fortune, that man, is JT Striker. JT Striker sounds like one of those TGI Fridays rip-off restaurants where you are served potato skins by an overzealous waitstaff all named Josh or Justin or Megan. In a way, this image is not so far off from the image we see of JT Striker, a rugged man of the world, an adventurer, rogue, international soldier of fortune who has come to raid an ancient castle while wearing a Members' Only jacket and a pair of Haggar slacks. I was immediately reminded of the "greatest athletes in the world" from Gymkata, most of whom were very pasty, doughy middle-aged guys in jogging suits who looked more like used car salesmen than they did the greatest athletes ever known to man. I would find, as Treasure of the Four Crowns progressed, that it in fact had far more in common with Gymkata than it did with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sadly, in my twisted, sick universe, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Anyway, JT Striker, exuding all the manly ruggedness of a guy who puts on a nylon warm-up suit and power-walks through the mall for exercise during his lunch break, is busy attempting to pick his way through a jungle cave filled with booby traps that result in a lame 3D effect at every step. Spears, vines, JT's ass and crotch, and at one point something resembling a squirrel, or possibly a woodchuck, gets thrust toward the camera to provide thrill-a-minute action. JT, of course, being one of the greatest soldiers of fortune ever to step out from behind the counter of a Rexall Drugstore, manages to evade even the deadly spring-loaded squirrel and soon finds himself shoving his crotch into the camera as he shimmies down a space-age looking corridor while weird Forbidden Planet type music plays. What the hell??? At the bottom of the shaft, he lands inside what looks to be the basement of one of those King Henry's Feast type themed restaurant where all the community theater people go on the rare days when a Renaissance Festival isn't within driving distance of their homes. I thought he was in a jungle just a second ago, but whatever. I suppose there could be castles full of medieval artifacts in the middle of the Amazon. Can you prove otherwise? Have you ever been on a treasure hunting expedition to the Amazon? Well, JT Striker has, and he didn't even have to buy safari clothes. He just wore some slacks and a red warm-up jacket. He didn't even bring a burro or treacherous Hispanic sidekick. Heck, he didn't even bring a sack or a backpack or anything. The aim of his edge-of-your-seat adventuring is to retrieve a magic key that has a tendency to make electronic "whoo whee woo" music play as it levitates around aimlessly, causing things to blow up. Picking up the key triggers about a million booby traps, each one deftly foiled by Striker using the method known in the business as "dumb luck." Most of the booby traps cause something to fly toward the camera. Now, "seeing the string" is a staple of any bad movie filled with even worse special effects. We all know that there are multitudinous sci-fi films in which you can spy the wires holding planets and spaceships in place. Treasure of the Four Crowns takes this to a bold new level however by refusing to include even a single shot where you can't see the string that the various items wobble around on. You might be saying to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet it was less noticeable in 3D," and I would then have to laugh at you. Even as a ten year old who could be dazzled by something as obviously shoddy as Thundarr the Barbarian, seeing the historically incompetent effects in this movie truly astounded me. I mean, how many decades have they been doing the levitating shtick in movies? And they can't even get that right? Hell, I was able to do a better job in high school video productions we made for English and history classes. It also causes a crossbow to levitate through the air, or at least to wobble precariously on the end of a wire. Striker chooses to stand motionless, directly in front of the crossbow, waiting until it begins to fire bolts at him before he dives to safety in the nick of time, providing us with much tension and rousing action, or at least an excuse to ask the question, "Why would anyone stand motionless, directly in front of a levitating crossbow?" All sorts of stuff starts to explode while ghost noises tease us that the moldy old skeletons lining the walls will spring to live and deliver some serious undead action. Sadly, that is beyond the scope of the budget, so some of them just sort of fall over a little. Striker escapes out a nearby window, which begs the question why didn't he just come in that way to begin with instead of dealing with that out-of-place jungle cave full of traps? As he runs, or lumbers I suppose, over the lawn in dramatic slow motion, things blow up for no reason and showers of sparks rain down from strategically placed flashpots. If there was any doubt that this movie would not live up to the promise of out-adventuring Indiana Jones, I think we had them addressed during that riveting opening action sequence, and I use the term "action" in the sense that it means a middle age man in Members' Only jacket running in slow motion through a field of exploding flashpots. Some people call that action. I call it a Billy Squires concert.
Back in civilization, which begs the question of just where the hell this castle was in the first place, Striker sells the key to the nutty Professor Montgomery, who does what all professors do in movies like this, which is rant incoherently about a relic possessed of unspeakable power. Basically, he recites that bit of scrolling text from the beginning of the film. You know, I may not have gone to Harvard or Oxford or Cumberland Community College, but I did go to college, where I took several anthropology and ancient history classes. At no point in my entire five years (switched majors a year from graduation), did I ever have a teacher who, on the side, quested after ancient relics of unspeakable power. In fact, they didn't even hire people to quest for relics, and with all due respect to Indiana Jones, I tend to doubt the existence of these adventuring professors who have magic amulets and scepters lying about in their office. Like I said, maybe I just went to the wrong university, because never did I have a class with a nutcase professor with some cockamamie theory about the lost Amulet of Zag-nalthriglil that would allow the possessor to conquer the world. I did, however, have a film theory teacher who used to jump up on the table during class and do suggestive interpretational dances to film noir music. Montgomery uses the key to unlock one of the three sacred crowns. I know, I know. There are four sacred crowns. There's actually only three. One apparently got destroyed a long time ago, which would seem to render the whole threat of uniting the crowns somewhat moot. Inside the crown is a slip of paper. That's about it. Oh yeah, the key makes some stuff pop and fly at the camera because it's been a few minutes since anything was flung at us through the miracle of 3D technology. The professor and his little buddy, an incredibly grating smarmy guy, want to hire Striker to obtain the other two crowns, which are in the possession of a really lame religious cult. Montgomery promises that those two crowns have treasures in them slightly more interesting than a scrap of old paper. Personally, I'm thinking the whole treasure of the crowns thing is going to be as anti-climatic as the safe of the Andrea Doria or Al Capone's secret vault. Striker is apparently on my side, as he delivers the "bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo speech" and combines it with the "I've got better things to do than get killed," though apparently he doesn't since when we first met him he was braving the menaces of a dead squirrel and a persistent buzzard. Some more swinging the key about on a string and the promise of a lot of money eventually convince Striker not to return to his job as manager of the Airway men's department just yet. And I say Airway because they didn't have Target back then. To pull off this task, Striker insists on assembling his team of seasoned adventurers. First there is Rick, the alcoholic mountain climber. Here the movie really misses a golden opportunity to exploit the "drunken double take" joke of which I spoke earlier. Just as Striker is about to give up on the drunken Rick, the key starts doing that flying around thing. This scene goes on for what must be ten minutes, and it would have been a perfect opportunity to have Rick do the thing where he looks at the bottle then throws it away. Instead, Striker manages the awesome feat of eventually catching the slowly drifting key after a lot of stuff explodes, and Rick, figuring that this asshole just let a little magic key blow up his whole cabin, decides he's game for some adventure. Next up is Socrates, who is working a shameful gig as a clown in some back alley vaudeville show. Like Rick, Socrates is initially hesitant to risk his life and give up all the prestige and public adoration that comes from being a clown in a failed vaudeville show. But he'll come along so long as Striker agrees to also put Socrates' dearest Liz in mortal peril as well. Liz, aside from being something of a knockout, is a trapeze artist. So, the world is going to be saved from the clutches of an evil cult by a guy in a Members' Only jacket, a vaudeville clown, a trapeze artist, a drunk, and a grating yuppie. Oh, do I ever wanna get my hands on the guy who decided to entrust my fate to a washed-up clown! This whole sequence has gone on for a very long time, and most of it has been comprised of scene after scene of the key flying around and making glass and steam fly toward the camera. The movie is well over halfway finished at this point, and we've had one dull action sequence, an abbreviated clown act, some goofing off on a trapeze, and a bunch of exposition and shots of a key levitating to and fro. Maybe the people who were going to out-adventure Indiana Jones missed the part where, by the halfway point, they'd had about a dozen fist fights, shoot-outs, car chases, sword fights, funny monkeys who do the Seig Hiel salute, explosions, a froggy looking guy named Toht, and we've been to America, Nepal, and Egypt. Somehow, Treasure of the Four Crowns' procession of scenes involving Striker attempting to convince a clown to help him raid this fortress aren't quite the same. Indiana Jones gets Sallah, a barrel-chested hero of a sidekick with a booming voice, while Striker has a guy who, on a good day, reminds you of some sleazy coke-snorting disco yuppie who drives a Corvette. I mean, even Gymkata had a bunch of fight and chase scenes by this point. Sure they were lame beyond mortal comprehension, but at least they were there. Treasure of the Four Crowns is only a step above what real archeology would be like, which is sitting in a room reading books for two years before you go out to the Gobi Desert to brush rocks with a cotton swab. But hey, now that we have the impressive action team assembled, I'm sure the pace will pick up. No wait, first they have to spend some time going over the various traps and security devices that pepper the cult's compound. The crowns are in a room protected by dozens of those laser beam security devices, a big metal cage, and a floor that causes a piercing alarm to go off if you so much as drop a feather on it. And then the statue upon which the crowns themselves rest is packed with assorted booby traps as well. Since they can't get in through the front door, so to speak, their only option is to use a series of ropes, pulleys, and trapeze contraptions to crawl across the ceiling! And luckily, Striker just happen to assemble a team containing a mountain climber and a trapeze artist. I'm not sure exactly where the aging clown with a heart condition comes in.
Then there's one of those scenes where the magic key flies around for about nine hours as everyone grimaces in slow motion as stuff explodes and flies into the camera. Apparently, this is how the movie defines scintillating action, but I guess I've been spoiled to the point where watching someone whiz a key around on the end of a string simply fails to impress me anymore. While the leader of the cult holds one of those, "I shall heal this sickly woman" meetings to impress new recruits, Striker and his team go into action, or as much into action as this leisurely paced film will allow. It occurs to me that this cult doesn't seem especially interested in using the power of the crowns so much as they just like having them locked away in the big secure room for no real reason. It's not like they were actively trying to use the crowns for evil, nor were they actively pursuing the key that would unlock their allegedly awesome power. In fact, if Professor Montgomery wouldn't have started this whole mess up, it's probable that this cult would never to anything more dastardly than shanghai the occasional homeless guy and indoctrinate him to love "the master" as he wears a burlap sack and picks potatoes for the Rapture. Tension builds to a fever pitch, or at least a slightly warmer pitch than it had been watching the key fly around, as Striker and his band evade the ninja guards in novelty masks and proceed to crawl very slowly across the ceiling, stopping occasionally to nearly fall or trigger an alarm so we get scenes of incredible nail-biting suspense, or at least a lot of scenes featuring middle aged guys hanging upside down and making "hyngg!" noises. They also scream a lot when they fall, which seems not so wise to do when a ninja in a funny mask is right outside the door feeling pissed that, while he does get to wear the cool ninja soldier outfit, he has to ruin it all because the cult leader insists on the stupid big-nose masks. After about eleven hours of crawling around, Striker is finally in position to get the crowns. Then the old clown has a heart attack, which frankly serves Striker right for ever thinking that an old clown would be a good adventurer, and the drunken Rick is impaled by a bunch of spears that shoot up out of the altar in front of the crowns. Then some steam blows on Striker, and the alarm finally goes off after all this screaming and triggering of booby traps. The yuppie guy triggers yet another trap and is either bitten by a fake snake or impaled by a spear. Since whatever it is, is shooting directly at the camera in glorious 3D, it's difficult to tell. Then he gets crushed too! Man, that guy just had no luck. As the ninjas and their leader close in, Striker unlocks the crowns and grabs the jewels, which causes lights to go off while his head spins round and round in a scene that literally had me falling off the couch with unbridled laughter. And from here on out, it only gets better. As I describe the finale, you will probably write me off as having dropped acid or had one too many warm cans of Michelob, but I assure you my sobriety was intact even if my sanity was not by the film's end. The jewels flash various colors, and suddenly Striker turns into a hideously deformed mutant with gel oozing out of the side of his face. As he growls without opening his mouth so as to avoid dislodging the shoddy latex they slapped on his face, the jewels begin spewing flame! The ninjas try to mow the mutant Striker down with machine gun fire, but it has no effect, as he swings the flame around and cooks everyone. Then he makes giant flaming rocks fly around the room on cables so obvious they might as well be glow-in-the-dark. I mean, they didn't even attempt to hide the wires! As Striker's supernatural wrath mounts, it unleashes a spinning rod covered with sparklers, which swings back and forth from more ridiculously visible wires. Then the cult leader melts in a blaze of special effects work not quite as impressive as when all those Nazis melted in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Just as the possessed monster Striker is about to shoot the flames at Liz, who has been crouching up on a ceiling beam this whole time, she calls out his name and, of course, he manages to regain control of himself just in time to hug her. Yeah, you think I'm joking, but I'm actually making it less absurd than it actually is. Professor Montgomery arrives in a helicopter to spirit them away through a nearby window.
Just to make sure everything ends as stupidly as possible, Striker does his best to convey "the pain of sacrifice, and for what?" as he throws one of the jewels into the fire, presumably for one of the surviving ninjas to find and use as a relic of unspeakable power. Apparently the whole part about the jewels being able to end disease and hunger just wasn't payment enough for the valiant sacrifice of a drunk mountain climber and a washed up vaudeville clown. With the lunkheaded script, the pathetic "action," and special effects that would even embarrass Ed Wood Jr., it's easy to say Treasure of the Four Crowns is one of the worst movies ever made. It's easy to say it because it's pretty much true. I mean, this movie is bad. Really bad. Even when I was a kid I recognized how mind-bogglingly cheap and incompetent this movie was. Few and far between are the movies that showcase so little respect for and so much contempt for their audience. They didn't even make a half-hearted attempt to conceal all the wires, figuring I suppose that we'd be so wowed by the endless scenes of keys and woodchucks and Striker's ass comin' at us in 3D that we wouldn't mind a few short-comings in the other effects. This is the movie that you need to see if you'd ever wondered if a film could make you say, "Well, it wasn't near as good as Gymkata." This movie sets it's sights on Indiana Jones but fails even to match the pommel horse fury of John Cabot. At it's highest point, this movie almost manages to attain the same level as the lowest points in Gymkata. And as you might suspect, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire mess. Let's face it, they don't make movies this bad anymore. Sure, they make plenty of bad movies, but those movies are slick, high-tech, well-produced bores. They're not the kind of movies where the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a clown, even if the clown is named Socrates. I guarantee you Treasure of the Four Crowns, with its three crowns in the movie, will be one of the most awful films you have ever seen, and I also guarantee you that you'd be hard pressed to have a more enjoyable time witnessing such garbage. It'd be different if they'd tried to make a comedy or a spoof, but their intention was to make one of the greatest adventure films the world had ever seen. Who are "they," you ask? What fool of a producer could possibly think this movie was more action-packed and exciting than Raiders of the Lost Ark when, in reality, it wasn't even as good as a lesser episode of Tales of the Golden Monkey? What man could be so collossally stupid as to think this movie was anything but complete and utter crap? Golan and Globus, my friends. Golan and Globus.
Depending on who you are and what sort of movies you like, Menahem Golan and his partner in crime Yoram Globus are either geniuses who have littered the world with some of most laughable yet enjoyably lame movies ever made, or they are simply farts straight from the bowels of Lucifer himself. Under the banner of their Studio, Cannon Films, these two seem to have the career goal of making Dino DeLaurentus look like a producer of classy films. The Cannon filmography stretches back into the 1960s and includes such ground-breaking cinematic bottom-feeders as Lady Chatterly's Lovers, The Barbarians, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, those Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies where the gods all live on the Moon, Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo, and more Chuck Norris films than you want to know about. They gave us Bo Derek in Bolero, Sylvia Kristel in Mata Hari, and Mathilda May strutting around naked and making Patrick Stewart explode in Lifeforce. They gave us Rappin' starring a young Mario Van Peebles, and King Solomon's Mines starring a not so young Richard Chamberlain. They gave us Hot Resort as well as Hot Chili. From their horn of plenty sprung not just Cobra starring Sylvester Stallone, but also Over the Top. I could list the films that benefited from Cannon's Midas Touch, but it would take days. Suffice it to say that any fan of the worst film has to offer owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Golan and Globus and their complete and total lack of shame. It is with considerable disappointment in myself that I look back at the films that defined my years of pre-pubescent enlightenment and realize just how many of them came from the hallowed halls of Cannon. Scary as it is, I can safely say that without their steady and relentless stream of complete garbage, sleaze, and worthless junk throughout the 1980s, I would not be the man I am today. What really elevates these guys, what really makes them special, isn't just that they produced films like Cyborg and Delta Force. No, what really sets them apart from the pack is that not only did they produce those films, but they also produced exploitive rip-offs of their own products, resulting in films like American Cyborg and Delta Force One. It's one thing to exploit a trend, but it's operating on a whole new plane when you manage to exploit your own exploitation of a trend. Treasure of the Four Crowns is just another jewel in their own eerie collection of crowns with the power to destroy - or heal - the world. It all depends on who wields the power of a mystic gem like Alien from LA or Goin' Bananas, not to be confused with Goin' Ape featuring Tony Danza. No, that gem was produced by the far more respectable Robert Rosen, who also gave us the gift of Revenge. Within the greater cinematic landscape, Treasure of the Four Crowns is an hilariously pathetic attempt at filmmaking that falls so incredibly short of the goals it sets for itself and the promotional bragging that it did that you can't help but love it. It's like those D&D hopeless characters with an ability score of three for everything. But the character, as weak and worthless as he may be, is still lovable, and possesses at least one really cool magic item. In the case of Treasure of the Four Crowns, the magic item is the outlandish but comptentent score by Ennio Morricone, who must have owed Golan or Globus a big favor. Within the confines of Cannon fodder, if you will, it's pretty much par for the course. As a kid, I found it amazingly stupid yet hilariously enjoyable. As an adult, I find once again that I have not advanced much beyond the level of maturity I had attained by age ten. Labels: Action: Adventure, Studio: Cannon, Year: 1982 posted by Keith at 1:37 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, July 20, 2003The Touch
2002, Hong Kong. Starring Michelle Yeoh, Ben Chaplin, Richard Roxburgh, Brandon Chang, Dane Cook, Winston Chao, Gabriel Harrison, Emmanuel Lanzi, Sihung Lung, Kenneth Tsang, Margaret Wang. Directed by Peter Pau.
I love a good adventure film. In fact, I love an average adventure film, and when it comes right down to it, I'm not all that opposed to even a crummy adventure film. As long as people are hacking through the jungle with a machete or struggling to solve the riddles of an ancient booby trapped temple, I'm probably going to be, at the very least, mildly satisfied. Something about even the most ham-fisted adventure yarns makes me happy, and my tolerance for their peculiarities and short-comings is pretty high. I am, after all, the guy who thought Tomb Raider was a decent amount of fun and even enjoyed myself during Cannon Films fodder like King Solomon's Mines and Treasure of the Four Crowns. It takes a mighty effort like Dark Mission or The Tomb to challenge my ability to enjoy even the lamest adventure film. It's most likely because those films, even the ones lurking right down there near the bottom of the barrel, appeal to that part of me that always assumed he would be doing much the same thing as Indiana Jones. Swinging on vines while being pursued by angry natives, decoding secret messages hidden in ancient tomes, and of course, wooing some beautiful librarian or professor type as we board the night train to Turkistan or some such exotic locale where men in tight suits and fezzes would attempt to assassinate me in order to protect some terrible secret that has been savagely guarded for a thousand years. It was a given that this would be my life, just as it was a given that those assassins would never actually succeed. After all, no one wants to dream of the day they are successfully murdered by a guy sunglasses and a fez. There was no question that I would never end up as some goofball sitting in front of a computer monitor all day syncing up graphs and slides to droning streaming video about mutual fund management. And even as I sit here, fund management videos close at hand, I've never fully given up on the hope that one day I'll lead a life of adventure, romance, and intrigue, or at least mild excitement. Call me a dreamer, an eternal optimist, or just pathetic. No matter the mounting evidence to the contrary, I refuse to believe that all my life has in store for me is video editing and the consumption of Hot Pockets. Come hell or high water, I will live the sort of life that allows me to regale bored friends and acquaintances with tales of the time I visited the far reaches of the globe, even if I wasn't raiding tombs for priceless artifacts or battling secret sects while riding the Orient Express. Of course, such dreams also require me to ignore the fact that the world is a far less exotic and mysterious place than it was seventy years ago. The Orient Express is no more, and even the far reaches of the globe tend to afford one easy access to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Not that I think the rest of the world should continue to exist as it did in the 19th century purely to provide me with an exotic playground, but there's still a sense of loss anytime you travel thousands of miles and multiple continents only to end up watching Tango and Cash on television. Much like me, there are filmmakers out there who defy the reality of our world and still crank out the occasional adventure film. Emboldened by her newfound position as the most recognizable female action star in the entire world, Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Yes Madam, Tomorrow Never Dies) decided to become such a person by bankrolling her own big-budget adventure film. Michelle Yeoh took her earnings, invested them in establishing her own production company, and set out to realize what must be one of no more than a few remaining unfulfilled dreams: to make her own movie, at least as producer. The ingredients she lined up on her counter were impressive. She would star, of course, because she's Michelle Yeoh, and she's cool (my words, not hers). Acclaimed cinematographer Peter Pau (The Killer, Bride With White Hair, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Swordsman) would give it a whirl as director. And her cast would be international, but not with a bunch of nobodies, as is usually the case when Hong Kong films sign up Caucasian actors. No, she'd get some recognizable faces. Maybe not A-List Hollywood actors, but The Truth About Cats and Dogs' Ben Chaplin is at least somebody, and he's certainly proven he's possessed of some skill when it comes to his chosen profession. Richard Roxburgh as the villain would lend additional credibility to the Caucasian cast, having as he does under his filmographic belt hits like Mission Impossible II and Moulin Rouge. Finally, taking a note no doubt from many of Jackie Chan's more recent productions (including Who Am I and Mr. Nice Guy), and a lot of recent Hong Kong films in general, the movie would be made in English with an eye on overseas success. Filming in English seems more and more popular these days in Hong Kong, perhaps because their films are far more popular with overseas cult crowds than they are with the local folks. Just when we thought the Hong Kong film industry could get no sicker, 2002 handed them one of their worst years ever. The film Psychedelic Cop was supposed to be a big deal. It was pulled from theaters after one week when no more than ten people went to see it - and that's ten as in ten, not as in I'm exaggerating to make a point. With so little interest on the home turf, it's no big surprise that a lot of people making Hong Kong films are banking on overseas distribution and putting success in the US DVD market above the seemingly hopeless scenario presented at home. Anyone who has struggled through Gen Y Cops or China Strike Force will tell you that Hong Kong films shot with primarily English dialogue can be a nightmarish affair. The dialogue, for one, is often painfully awkward and obviously written by someone who doesn't speak English as a first language. Often times, despite the presence of English words, the sentences still sound like a foreign language. Why the native English speakers mouthing some of the dialogue don't correct it on the fly I do not know, but the end result is sometimes amusing, usually stupefying. The second problem is that many of the actors speaking the words are, to put it lightly, pathetic. In the case of Chinese stars struggling with English dialogue, we can forgive them. For all those native Americans and Canadians, on the other hand (and this includes the Asian ones), there's no excuse for some of those readings. Daniel Wu, I'm looking in your direction. The Touch avoids the problem of misunderstanding its English by being written by - or at least corrected by -- people who have it as their primary tongue. The scriptwriting duo of Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud (who also collaborated on the superb Running Out of Time and the, shall we say less than superb, Black Mask II) hail from France, but they at least have English language actors who bother to make sure the dialogue doesn't come out sounding like some bizarre moonman language. This is Michelle Yeoh's film, after all. She's proven herself not just fluent in English, but also able to act quite well in the language. And the white actors are real actors, not some Caucasians they picked up off the street on the way to the shoot. Chaplin and Roxburgh and most of the supporting cast can do the job. Unfortunately, there's also Brandon Chang. When looking for the most laughably awful actor in both Cantonese and English, people often cite poor old Michael Wong. Well, Daniel Wu makes Michael Wong seem like Daniel Day Lewis. Brandon Chan, then, makes Daniel Wu seem like, well, Michael Wong I guess. They get more painful with each step down the ladder. There is one unfortunate side effect to Michelle surrounding herself with competent Caucasian actors -- her own acting comes across as fairly wooden. When she's in action, she's fine, but when she's dealing with the dialogue, she invests very little emotion into most of it -- which is especially painful during her soul-searching romantic scenes. But we'll come to the romance soon enough. Making the film seem more like a sure thing, at least as Saturday matinee fun fare, is the fact that Michelle decided to go with a rousing Indiana Jones style adventure full of sweeping locales, hair-raising action, and a hint of mysticism. She'd done this once, early in her career with Magnificent Warriors. Though uneven thanks to some ill advised drama and some even worse comedy, Magnificent Warriors delivered Michelle in top form as a swashbuckling kungfu heroine. If it wasn't Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was at least better than High Road to China. Sadly, if Magnificent Warriors was on the level of High Road to China, The Touch, at it's best, is a good episode of Relic Hunter. Now I confess that I actually enjoy many episodes of Relic Hunter, if for no other reason than Tia Carerre in her bust-enhancing adventure woman outfit can brighten even the grayest of Saturday afternoons. But I would never put even the best episode of Relic Hunter on the list of things that need to be made into sweeping full-feature adventure films. They work because they remain on the small screen. The Touch takes the same short-comings and silliness present in Relic Hunter, then magnifies them tenfold by sticking them on the big screen. Michelle Yeoh stars as Yin, an accomplished circus performer who's ex (Ben Chaplin) dabbles in tomb raiding, if you will. A series of events lead her and Chaplin on a quest to recover a sacred treasure before it falls into the hands of the evil Karl. Richard Roxburgh plays Karl, and while he chews all the scenery required to turn in the standard satisfying over-the-top villain, I can think of a lot better names for your main villain than Karl. Nothing against the Karls of the world. I know quite a few, and all of them have been pretty nice guys. But Karl sounds more like a guy who will come over and help you fix a tire on your car than it sounds like the name of someone bent on wielding magic power beyond the comprehension of mere mortals such as we. Maybe I'm wrong, and the Karls al have a secret plan to one day rule us all, but in the end I'm much more apprehensive about your Fritzes and your Napoleans and any of those guys who have names that resemble something menacing, like Victor von Doom or Sidney Scythe or anyone called Damien. You know guys with names like that are just itching to accidentally get super powers and then lust after domination of the entire planet. They never seem to realize that ruling the planet isn't all jewels and harem girls. They're also going to have to deal with trade disputes and coming up with a workable prescription drug plans for the seniors of the globe. Just once I'd like to see Doctor Doom have to delay his plans to build a universe-warping death ray because he has to attend a meeting with the head of the Department of Sanitation. Karl seems at least partially aware of the fact that his name isn't entirely menacing, so he makes sure to spell it with a "K." That increases the menace somewhat, but with his distinct lack of a goatee, Karl is still not all that imposing. Karl, despite his friendly working-class name, is one of those grade-A prick type of villains who always yells at his henchmen and calls them idiots in front of the other henchmen. I never understood how these guys get ahead in the villain world. For starters, they always seem to hire incompetent boobs. Maybe these villains wouldn't have to shriek at their underlings so much if they were able to pick decent underlings in the first place. It's your own fault for hiring idiots. But even if you're saddled with a bunch of bumblers, how does it advance your chances of success to constantly remind them of what losers they are? It's not like any of these criminal masterminds do it in a way that translates into "tough love" or would inspire their minions to try a little harder next time. No, they just yell, "Pathetic fool!" in their shrillest Cobra Commander voice. I'm surprised more of these guys don't find themselves with a bullet in the back of their head. At least some of Karl's men are adept at the job of being evil, and the ones who aren't are actually somewhat funny. Of course, competent or not, they all get their asses handed to them by Michelle as she and Karl race one another to an ancient hidden temple full of booby traps. Complicating matters is the fact that Karl has taken Yin's astoundingly dense little brother as a hostage. And they get his girlfriend as an added bonus. So okay, nothing terribly original in the plot department, but I've forgiven that countless times and am always willing to do it again. A story can be old and formulaic as long as it's told with a dash of style. The Touch doesn't entirely succeed in that aspect. Peter Pau, who remains a cinematographer at heart, captures some gorgeous scenery, but I'm always hesitant to compliment the cinematography of a film set in places like the Gobi Desert or the plains of wild Africa. I mean, it doesn't take a maestro to set a camera up on an epic vista and capture images of an epic vista. Instead of praising people who let the scenery do all the work for them, I think we should give out an award for cinematographers and directors who shoot in dramatic places but manage to really screw it up. No, the film's dramatic scenery certainly doesn't let it down. Nor does the cast. The problem is all in the script, which is tired and predictable and not entirely thought out. No, let me backtrack. The problem is mostly the script. The eye-poppingly awful CGI effects during the finale also contribute a hearty portion of laughable badness to an otherwise average adventure film. The main aspect people look for in a Michelle Yeoh film is fun action and fighting. There's a decent amount of fighting here, some of it pretty good and some of it leaving a little to be desired. Michelle we can all buy as a kungfu bad-ass who can sail through the air, but poor Ben Chaplin looks out of place as an ass-kicker. Sometimes an action film is full of people who struggle through dramatic scenes in anticipation of their next action sequence. Ben is the opposite. With each awkward punch, he looks like he's just biding his time until he can toss out another impish quip. He's a good actor, and he acquits himself fine in the acting department in this film, but the man is no action star. Choreography comes courtesy of Phillip Kwok, aka Kuo Chui of Five Deadly Venoms fame. He seems to be building a solid career as a guy who can make white people look good in martial arts action (working recently on Brotherhood of the Wolf). And I suppose technically he succeeds here. It's not that Ben Chaplin looks terrible when he breaks out the martial arts. It's just that he looks like, well, Ben Chaplin. He's too recognizable as "the nice guy" to be believable as a fighter, and the script isn't meaty enough to make the casting work. It is, however, smart enough to let Michelle handle most of the foot-to-ass action, and she looks good as always. She certainly doesn't show her age, and the wires only interfere with the action from time to time. Most of the action is martial arts based. There are no car chases or anything like that, and contrary to nearly every other "exotic locales" type of adventure film, no one knocks over a street vendor's fruit cart. Comedian Dane Cook is the real surprise in the film as Karl's bumbling brother. It's a stock character, and one that generally proves more painful than funny, but Cook performs well and gets quite a few chuckles even with slightly tired material. The rest of the cast has to look wise and troubled or evil and angry. Chaplin and Yeoh are both charming performers, but while they have ample "buddy film" chemistry, they have zero romantic chemistry. Their tired role as "former lovers thrust together for a wild adventure" feels as unrealistic as it is painfully overused in films. Why is it that folks in film can't go ten minutes without finding themselves reunited with a former flame in order to conquer some zany obstacle? They're simply not believable as star-crossed lovers brought together once again by a fabulous adventure, and as much as I hate to say it, most of the blame lies on Michelle. Even though we've all seen her flex considerable dramatic muscle, she looks much more comfortable jumping off a trailer to kick some guy in the head than she does in her supposedly tender scenes with Chaplin. The music was composed by none other than Basil Pouledouris, best known for his incredible Conan the Barbarian score. It's good stuff, but hardly as memorable as his classic barbarian brass. One of the things that really serves to undermine the film's effectiveness is the atrocious CGI during the finale. Bad special effects are fine and all, but these are really bad, and not even in a fun way. The film's international release was pushed back because distributors didn't want to release a movie with computer effects that would make people long for the realism of The Last Starfighter. It doesn't help that the entire finale is devoid of any emotional impact at all. Bad effects can be saved by a fun yarn, after all. A lack of any emotional impact means that there's very little around to redeem the awful effects, which look like something you might be able to produce after half-assing your way through the beginner's tutorial on whatever CGI effects program they used. The story meanders on with such thinness that it becomes impossible to feel engaged by any of the characters. The film's finale drums this in as what should have been a major dramatic twist elicits nary more than a second of "Nooo!" style screaming before everyone seems to forget about it entirely. If the characters don't care about the characters, why should we? And that's what really keeps the film from being the adventure romp it was meant to be. There is no emotional engagement. The characters are not unlikeable, but they're pretty bland. There's no lovable rogue like Indiana Jones nor tough woman like Marion. Heck, there's not even anyone as compelling as that bald Nazi with the mustache who got chopped up by the plane propeller. Aside from all that, your heroes and villains need to dress cool. Most of the people here look like they just stepped out of a J Crew catalog, and while J Crew clothes may be fine for yachting and reading GQ, they're not suitable attire for globe-trotting adventure. Michelle gets it right once they get to the desert, but everyone else still looks like they just got off their job as a waiter at some hipster restaurant in the East Village. The Touch, for a lot of reasons other than garb, never becomes more than another in the long line of films that imitate Raiders of the Lost Ark without understanding how to work with the elements that made that film such a fantastic and enduring adventure. The pacing is wildly uneven. It takes a while to get things going, and once they are in motion, they sort of sputter along like the jalopy Michelle and Ben attempt to drive across the desert. The big budget bloats the film, but the script can't keep up with the size. Thunderball was a bloated action-adventure film, but it still kept a brisk pace and wry wit that helped it avoid being crushed by its own weight. Not so, here. The Touch can never rise above its own contrivances. I understand it was a labor of love for Michelle. All I can do is say that it was a nice effort, and I wish her better luck next time. She knew how to collect all the pieces. Now she has to learn how to make them work together. Ultimately, The Touch as a whole never lives up to its individual parts. So many wonderful ingredients went into the film, but the end result was more of a mess than a grand confection. The film just feels flat and uninspired despite the charm of the cast and the beauty of Pau's camerawork. The end result of The Touch is a movie that should have been great, and instead is just sort of okay. I certainly didn't regret watching it, and it has some decent moments. In a movie like this, though, the flashes of fun only serve to make the lackluster quality of the rest of the film all the more evident. It's definitely not going to be the international hit they were probably hoping for. Instead, it's a mildly entertaining adventure film that stumbles over it's own weak story and doesn't offer up enough high-energy elements to make you forget that what you're watching isn't very good. It's not Raiders of the Lost Ark, that's for sure, but at least it isn't Treasure of the Four Crowns. Labels: Action: Adventure, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 2002 posted by Keith at 1:31 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, January 03, 2001Gymkata 1985, United States. Starring Kurt Thomas, Tetchie Agbayani, Richard Norton, Edward Bell, John Barrett, Conan Lee, Bob Schott, Buck Kartalian, Eric Lawson, Sonny Barnes, Tadashi Yamashita. Directed by Robert Clouse. Buy it from Amazon .Lately, I've been curating (at least in my own mind), a retrospective film series entitled "The Most Important Films of the Reagan Era." This ongoing series, which is currently in regular rotation in my living room and not really anywhere else (museums and arthouse theaters -- call me) eschews the predictable mainstream Oscar winners of the decade and focuses instead on forgotten, obscure, and misunderstood, preferably ones in which ninjas spit spikey jacks into gangsters' faces. The series includes most of the films that I feel defined the decade, or at least defined me during that decade. Streets of Fire, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Flash Gordon, Commando, Howling II, Breakin', Krull -- the roster is deep, to say the least, and even the bench warmers could be starters on any other team. If you are familiar either with me or with my work on this site, it probably comes as no shock that I rank Gymkata as one of the most valuable players on this amazing and occasionally sparkly team. I've been pushing this movie on people for decades, armed at first with little more than my cherished VHS copy in it's oversized gray MGM/UA box. Since then, and much to my delight, Gymkata has become a touchstone of pop culture references. People know it, even if they haven't seen it, and knowing, as you know, is half the battle. And while some people get irritated when something they've been name-dropping for years suddenly gets embraced by the larger mainstream non-mainstream society (Chuck Norris karate jeans being the most recent example), I bear no ill will toward those who are late in coming to Gymkata. Lord knows there are plenty of things for which I showed up late. I don't consider it to be some secret to be guarded jealously and to the death by fanatic soldiers armed with weird masks, AK-47s, and scimitars. As far as I'm concerned, the more people who have the word "gymkata" on their lips, the better. I saw Gymkata when it first made the rounds on cable television, a glorious belle epoque during which you could expect to see Beastmaster, Revenge of the Ninja, and Sword and the Sorcerer on an almost daily basis -- and in fact, you would even enjoy watching them on a daily basis. I didn't know a whole lot about the sort of films I would one day grow to obsess about -- or at least, I didn't know about them as a viable academic field of study where one could obtain a PhD from a number of unaccredited but well-respected institutions of higher learning located in the various former Soviet republics. I knew it was something special then, and even when I went through that phase where I was discovering Hong Kong action films and thus turning my nose up at anything from the United States, Gymkata remained entirely free from criticism. The world of American-made martial arts films has never been a bastion of quality filmmaking or fight choreography. And yet, I am mysteriously drawn to them. Like bloody scenes of carnage as I pass by a car wreck on the interstate, no matter how hard I try, I cannot avert my eyes from films like Marked for Death or any of the eleven thousand Bolo Yeung films that were made during the 1980s. I could seek counseling, try to find help for this problem I have, for my vast knowledge of Dale "Apollo" Cook films or ability to recount the plots, however thin, of Don "The Dragon" Wilson's five hundred or so Bloodfist films. I can't remember which Friday the 13th is which after part three, yet I can tell you all about Bloodfist IV: Die Trying. But in the end, no counseling need be sought. These days, I have made my peace with American martial arts films, accepting that I like them just because I like them, and not trying to justify in any ironic "so bad they're good" way. At the end of the day, even though the acting is terrible and the martial arts are often worse, I just like them. And I think I first contracted this affliction in the mid 1980s after watching Gymkata, even if it remained in a dormant state throughout the early half of the 1990s when I was busy getting hip to Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. Gymkata absolutely enthralled me. I mean, here was a movie that was bad. Really bad. No one else in the world but me liked it, let alone continued to watch it and recommend it to people, who invariably come back to me with looks of anger permanently etched upon their faces. Doubters to a man, and who was proven right in the end? Now, in the era of DVD and throw-away pop culture references, we have become legion enough that, during a public vote held through Amazon, MGM found themselves compelled by the voices of freedom, democracy, and anyone who likes pommel horse fight scenes to put Gymkata out on DVD. Now, instead of being met with curious glances and mutters of, “He seemed like such a nice boy,” when I profess my love for Gymkata, people instead rally round me, and clad in Haggar comfort-fit slacks and nylon windbreakers, we run through the streets in victory, stopping only when we see a set of parallel bars on which we need to swing and twirl about. The action of Gymkata revolves around 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas -- or so we assumed him to be. Honestly, I can't remember if Kurt ever won gold, but we always assumed he did and thus referred to him as such. In retrospect, he might not have even been on the 1984 Olympic gymnastics team. Does it really matter, I mean to anyone except people who are interested in the basic concepts of factual accuracy and journalistic fundamentals? In Gymkata, he plays a gymnast (wow!), in much the same way that 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Mitch Gaylord (now I'm pretty sure he did win gold in 1984 -- but mostly I'm just sure that for months after that, it was common to homophobically insult someone by calling them a "Mitch Gay-lord") played a gymnast in his one and only film (that I know of), American Anthem. Now if you want to see a bad gymnastics movie, there's your movie for the night. The government recruits 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas to compete in a deadly game where the price of failure could be your life. This game is creatively called The Game. The nations of the world each send their best athletes to the small mountain nation of Kabrastan or some such fake place populated by people who are vaguely Arabic, vaguely Nepalese, vaguely Tibetan, and, well, at least a little bit Australian since Richard Norton is among them. Whoever wins the game -- if anyone at all wins -- will have their one wish granted. Not a wish like for the ability to teleport or turn into a sexy woman whenever you feel like it (my two main wishes). No, they are just lame favors. Like the US wants to build a radar station or something. Great wish, guys. We really need another radar station. The trick, however, is that in the history of The Game, no one has ever successfully completed it. 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas wants to go because his dad competed in the game before, and mysteriously disappeared. Actually, if people who lose the game all get killed, it's really not that mysterious a disappearance, I suppose. To prepare, 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas must endure the most rigorous training regiment ever devised by man, so that he may create the martial arts form known as "gymkata" -- a blend of karate and 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas's own special brand of impressive floor exercise and tumbling techniques. Most o the most intense training ever involves hanging out in the woods with Tadashi Yamashita, who forces 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas to do things like backflip into a pile of leaves. Seriously -- are you training to take on the world's greatest athletes in a deadly game where the cost of failure could be your life, or are you just warming up for the Fall Harvest festival? Scenes of Yamashita serving 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas some delicious hot cider on a hayride were not included, unfortunately. The true test of skill, however, consists of 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas having to walk up some stairs on his hands. I'm not saying that being able to do that isn't impressive, but I'm not sure how useful a skill it's going to be in The Game. Heck, even backflipping into a pile of leaves could be seen to have some practical application if, say, you needed to quickly hide in a nearby pile of leaves or you were Dennis the Menace and wanted to mess up the leaves Mr. Wilson has been diligently raking all morning. For some reason, the cute daughter of the Kabrastani king decides to help 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas train for the games. She suspects treachery perpetrated by Richard Norton, who goes through the entire movie wearing a furry bathroom mat. He's supposed to be evil because he wants to overthrow the king, and because he cheats when serving as one of The Game's primary obstacles, but considering that the king regularly hosts horrific bloodsports for his own amusements, it's entirely possible that Richard Norton is a courageous freedom fighter around whom the whole of the population would gather as he lead them out of this barbaric dark age and into an era of peace and freedom. At the same time, though, he wears a furry bathmat vest, so I guess the king, whatever his penchant for staging elaborate atrocity shows, gets the edge. Intrigue faces our heroic duo at every turn, as people shoot at them and randomly throw spears in their direction as they wander down the crowded streets of more vaguely Arabic nations. There are so many bizarrely staged encounters with "the locals" that the film at times takes on a purely hallucinogenic air, not entirely unlike that surreal sense of weirdness that permeates every frame of that other great pillar of classic 80s cinema, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. Luckily, the cities of the Middle East and Asia are littered with gymnastics equipment, allowing 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas to use nonparallel bars randomly located in alleys to his advantage as he fights using the deadly art of gymkata, which consists mostly of flipping back and forth and spinning around on bars until assassins politely and slowly walk toward you so you can eventually kick them in the face as your spinning around. Kurt, aided by the princess, also has to get into Kabrastan, as no roads lead to the nation, and no planes fly there. This is a good excuse for one of those five-second shots of someone rafting down a river, which are surprisingly commonplace in action films of the 1980s. When the game finally gets going, 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas and the princess quickly uncover Richard Norton's heinous plot to free Kabrastan from what I now assume to be the iron grip of terror in which the current king holds it. But never mind that. He wears that stupid vest, and the king has a cute daughter. Maybe if Norton called frequent co-star Cynthia Rothrock in as reinforcements, he'd be faring better. As it is, his army is comprised almost entirely of guys whose sole skill seems to be standing at the edge of cliff, getting shot with an arrow, then yelping and falling over the cliff, clutching wherever they need to hold the arrow in place. The greatest athletes from the four corners of the globe are, for the most part, doughy middle aged-businessmen looking losers in bad 1980s nylon jogging suits and even worse hairpieces. No wonder no one has ever survived The Game. I mean, this is the best the world has to offer? With the exception of 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas and Hong Kong action actor and notable egomaniac Conan Lee in a small role as a guy who dies pretty quickly, these dumpy nobodies remind of those yuppie guys who used to powerwalk through the mall on their lunch breaks for exercise. These goofy out-of-shape 40-somethings with headbands, jogging suits, and a giant 1980s cell phone speed walking through the mall -- your town had them too, right? Anyway, they have to do stuff like climb ropes and run through a town of crazy cannibals while Richard Norton and his army of ninjas shoot arrows at them. 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas almost dies in the Town of Crazies, but luckily, there is a pommel horse in the town square that he can incorporate into his fight against the 80 year old senior citizens trying to poke him with pitchforks and other implements often carried by crazed cannibalistic peasants from 1172 AD. That alone is worth the price of admission, but think of all that other good stuff we got to watch! Random gym equipment, an army on Ninjas led by a man in a furry jacket, martial arts, gymkata fury, a princess who strips down to a form fitting black bodysuit, cold war paranoia, super intense training where the ultimate test of skill is the ability to tumble in leaves and walk up the stairs on your hands (didn't Remo Williams have to do that, too?), and all sorts of wild action and exotic locations modeled after Pakistan and that place from The Man Who Would Be King. Labels: Action: Adventure, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 3:28 PM | 0 Comments |
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