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Sunday, June 08, 2008

War Gods of the Deep

Release Year: 1965
Country: United States and England
Starring: Vincent Price, David Tomlinson, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, John Le Mesurier, Harry Oscar, Derek Newark, Roy Patrick.
Writer: Charles Bennett, Louis Heyward
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Cinematographer: Stephen Dade
Music: Stanley Black
Producer: George Willoughby
Alternate Titles: City Under the Sea
Availability: Buy it from Amazon
Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us


If the world was just and kind, then the sentence, "It's a movie where Vincent Price stars as a madman who rules over an underwater society of fishmen prone to kidnapping scantily clad beautiful women," would indicate the existence of probably one of the greatest films ever made. But the world is often cold and heartless and it often enjoys toying with us mere mortals as did the petty and jealous Greek gods of old. Therefore, the sentence, "It's a movie where Vincent Price stars as a madman who rules over an underwater society of fishmen prone to kidnapping scantily clad beautiful women," does not indicate the existence of one of the greatest movies of all time, but instead, indicates the existence of a shocking dull film in which Vincent Price sits in a cave while a couple stiffs run around in tunnels, and then some stuff blows up at the end. This, sadly, is the fantasy world conjured up by the lackluster War Gods of the Deep -- a modestly entertaining film in spots, but a tremendous letdown given the talent in front of and behind the camera.

By 1965, the year this film was released, American International Pictures had enjoyed considerable success mining the works of Edgar Allan Poe for a series of films starring Vincent Price (and Ray Milland, once) and directed by Roger Corman. The streak began with Corman's low-budget but lavish looking adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher and continued with The Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Haunted Palace, The Raven, Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia. These films represented something new and relatively risky for AIP, then a studio that specialized in making cheap, fast black and white double features. Corman, inspired by the work that was happening at England's Hammer Studio, convinced AIP to let him shoot in color, a single film, with a bigger budget (though still tiny) and longer shooting schedule (though still incredibly fast). The resulting film, The Fall of the House of Usher, did big time box office for AIP, is considered one of the all-time great horror films, and convinced AIP of a couple things. First, that color films with more money put into them were a worthwhile investment, especially when someone as good as Corman at turning out expensive looking results for pennies was on board. Second, that they should tack Edgar Allan Poe's name onto everything and plumb his works mercilessly.


Although all the films in the first AIP Poe cycle were good, and most of them were great, several of them had very little to do with the Poe poem or short story from which they took their name. The Raven, for example, uses the Poe poem for its opening scene, with Price being plagued by a mysterious raven. But as soon as the raven starts wisecracking in Peter Lorre's voice, you can guess that the Poe material is out the window. The Pit and the Pendulum takes the Poe source material and extends it with a number of subplots original to the screenplay or snatched piecemeal from other sources. And in the case of The Haunted Palace -- one of the very best films in the Poe cycle -- it wasn't based on Poe at all. It was actually based on The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft. But AIP felt that audiences wouldn't know who the hell Lovecraft was. Distributors agreed. And so, despite Corman's protests, it became an Edgar Allan Poe movie.

Dubious connections to the source material not withstanding, all of the films were very good (well, I'm not that fond of Tales of Terror, but that's because I don't care for anthology films), thanks to the line-up they enjoyed: Corman as director, Price (and Milland once) as star, and Richard Matheson as the screenwriter (most of the time). Matheson was to AIP horror what Jimmy Sangster was to Hammer horror: consistently wonderful. In 1965, AIP decided to stretch Poe's connection even further, tapping one of his short tales called The City in the Sea as a source for War Gods of the Deep. But other than having Price read some of the story for the opening credits, War Gods of the Deep has very little to do with Poe. AIP would take a similar approach during it's second round of Poe horror films, with The Witchfinder General being retitled Edgar Allan Poe's The Conqueror Worm -- a title justified by having Price read some of the original poem before the film launched off into a plot that has pretty much nothing to do with the poem or Poe. In that case, however, the movie was good. In the case of War Gods of the Deep, the results were...not as impressive. But it isn't for lack of trying. Although Roger Corman wasn't directing, AIp assigned Jacques Tourneur to the film. Tourneur is perhaps best known as the director of such films as Night of the Demon and the Val Lewton produced films Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. All of them are considered classics, and deservedly so. On top of that, he directed one of the all time great noir films, 1947's Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum. And then there was the classic Burt Lancaster swashbuckler epic The Flame and the Arrow. By the 1960s, however, Tourneur's best years were perhaps behind him, and he found himself working in television and at AIP, first as director of the Poe-esque Comedy of Terrors which features one of my all-time favorite idiotically hilarious scenes (when awful opera singing causes Vincent Price's undertaker top hat to pop off wit a "boop!" sound effect), and then as director on War Gods of the Deep.


And while the film isn't written by Richard Matheson (most famous for being the author who penned I Am Legend, the book that inspired everything from Night of the Living Dead to Last Man on Earth to The Asylum's I Am Omega), AIP did get Charles Bennett, who was no slouch in the screenwriting department. Among his sundry credits are the very first filmed version of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, the black and white version made as part of the Climax! television series, where James Bond goes by Jimmy and was played by Barry Nelson. Bennett also wrote plenty of classic scripts, including work for Hitchcock (Sabotage, Secret Agent, and Foreign Correspondent), the adventure classic King Solomon's Mines, and Tourneur's own Night of the Demon. He was also frequently tapped by producer Irwin Allen both for movie (The Lost World, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) and television (Land of the Giants, the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series) scripts. Of course, there are a few turkeys in his resume, including the epic misfires The Story of Mankind (Irwin Allen's attempt to tell in sweeping epic fashion the complete history of mankind, from caveman times to the present and starring pretty much every B lister and has-been ever, from the past their prime Marx Brothers to Cesar Romero, Peter Lorre, John Carradine, Heddy Lamar, and of course, Vincent Price as Ol' Mr. Scratch) and Cecil B. DeMille's sweeping and often dull tale of piracy and romance on the 19th Century Georgia coast, Reap the Wild Wind. On the other hand, that's the movie where Bennett was smart enough to write a scene where John Wayne battles a giant squid, so that counts for something. Still, that's a basically solid resume, especially for this type of film.

Despite the presence of Vincent Price and the shaky Poe tie-in, War Gods of the Deep isn't considered part of the Poe cycle, not so much because it wasn't directed by Corman, but more because it plays out less like a gothic horror film and more like the Clif Notes version of a Jules Verne fantasy adventure film. Of course, Disney had already made pretty much the be-all and end-all Jules Verne fantasy adventure film in 1954 with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Anything else was going to pale in comparison to a film that had the benefit of Disney's vast financial resources and Kirk Douglas shaking his bon-bon while singing sea chanties and wearing a jaunty little cap. But that never stopped AIP, or anyone else for that matter. And so, in 1965, Tourneur, Bennett, Price, and AIP took us under the ocean for what we all hoped would be a really cool adventure film.


And things start off well enough. Beautiful Jill Tregillis (Susan Hart, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, Pajama Party) is minding her own business in her castle by the coast bedroom when, all of a sudden, she is attacked and kidnapped by a hideous gillman who looks like that dude who helped Lando fly the Millennium Falcon in Return of the Jedi. Perturbed by the kidnapping of his beloved by this uppity haddock, square-jawed hero Ben Harris (reliable Tab Hunter) and his nebbish, ferret-faced sidekick Harold Tufnell-Jones (Disney live-action film regular David Tomilson) follow in leisurely pursuit. And for some reason, Tufnell-Jones (presumably an ancestor of legendary heavy metal guitarist Nigel Tufnell) insists on bring along his trusty pet: a chicken in a basket. Why exactly, this guy goes everywhere with a chicken is a mystery. Why he is a bachelor, of course, is not. Tufnell-Jones and his chicken are there to provide frequent comic relief. Guess how many times you will laugh at their shenanigans!

Ben and the chicken lover soon find themselves in a maze of sub-aquatic (but never the less dry) caves inhabited by a population of long-lived men ruled over by the mad Captain Hugh (Vincent Price). It seems that Price and his men were once smugglers and, while fleeing from the authorities, stumbled upon this network of sub-aquatic caves leading to the remnants of a city constructed by a highly advanced civilization. By the time Price arrived, however, the society was centuries into decline, the secrets of their technology being lost and the former inhabitants being reduced to nothing more than animalistic gillmen. Price and company made themselves at home amid the decaying remains of the city under the sea, and something about the air down there and the lack of exposure to UV light has resulted in them living for hundreds of years.

Price commands the gillmen, for they consider him their god for one reason or another (no problem -- I sort of consider him a god as well) and he had them kidnap Jill for the usual reason: she is the exact spitting image of the captain's long dead true love. When our heroes arrive to rescue her, they promptly get captured but stave off execution by pretending to be geologists who can help Price out with the big problem: the volcano. Everyone spends some time stalking around the cave-palace, which like pretty much every undersea kingdom in the history of movies about undersea kingdoms, is threatened by a nearby underwater volcano that is going to erupt any moment now. Eventually, Ben, Jill, and their comic relief load are forced to don unwieldy Victorian-style scuba gear (which, for some reason, demands gigantic helmets into which you can fit a man's head and his accompanying chicken) and flee for their lives with Hugh and his murderous followers in hot pursuit.

And by hot pursuit, I mean...well, let me explain this in detail. You see, everyone is underwater. When you are in water, you swim. It's really the best way to get around. That's why all fish do it. That's why pretty much everyone does it except for those sprinters who practice by trying to run underwater. That established, we then move on to the fact that watching people swim in movies is usually boring. The pitfalls of scuba scenes in cinema are well documented. So how could you take a scene -- scuba diving underwater -- that could be really boring even if properly done, and ensure that it's even more boring than you could possibly imagine? Well, instead of swimming, the people could be walking underwater. Yes, indeed. War Gods of the Deep is one of the only movies that thought what people really wanted to see was a foot chase on the floor of the ocean, with people flopping about awkwardly and moving incredibly slowly. But that's not really enough, you also have to make the scene go on for like ten minutes, and pad it out with dialog-free close-ups of Tufnell-Jones and his chicken looking around.


Now keep in mind that I have a pretty big tolerance for underwater scenes, owing largely to my fascination with what Cousteau referred to as "the silent world" and my love of diving. So trust me when I tell you that this underwater foot chase scene is one of the most horribly boring scenes I've ever seen. They try to spice things up by having guys shoot crossbows from time to time, but since no one ever actually gets hit, that never pays off. And every now and then, some of the gillmen swim up and mess around with Ben and the crew, presumably confused by the fact that these humans are walking underwater instead of swimming (thus the ability of the gillmen to swim circles around them). Despite the fact tat the gillmen can swim, breathe underwater, and aren't weighed down by cumbersome iron helmets, they aren't very effective at attacking our slowly fleeing heroes. You can pretty much defeat them by swatting at them in that slow-motion way that occurs when you are underwater. It's a tremendous relief when everyone resurfaces inside some weird temple. The volcano explodes, a giant hand falls on Vincent Price, and a singularly terrifying moment occurs when the heroes put their scuba gear back on. Dear God, no! Please! No more scenes of people awkwardly walking around underwater! This time, however, we're in luck, because the good guys crawl out of the water and the movie ends.

I'm not sure what went wrong. Good director, good screenwriter, a good cast. I mean, Tab Hunter is no Doug McClure, but he's fine in this role, even though a lot of people pick on his performance. He's a one-note character, but so is everyone else. And Hunter proves adept at singing the note "stiff straight man." Susan Hart is vapid and has nothing to do, but she does that nothing well. There's no chemistry at all between her and Hunter, and once again, as I did with Arabian Adventure, I can't help but think that this movie would have been greatly improved if our lovers were played by Doug McClure and Caroline Munro. But Hunter and hart are acceptable. Heck, even comic relief guy is unfunny but relatively inoffensive and easy to ignore. To some degree, the blame for this misfire falls on the producer, Louis Heyward, who insisted on monkeying with the script endlessly and much to Tourneur's annoyance. But AIP sided with Heyward in the conflict, and his changes remained despite the protests of Tourneur, Vincent Price (who had great respect for Tourneur and very little respect for Heyward), and original screenwriter Bennett. But that can only go so far in explaining things -- the nail in the coffin of an already flawed work, as it were.

And you know, if I'm replacing cast members, we might as well get rid of David Tomlinson and replace him with Terry-Thomas.

Thrilling scenes from the climax of War Gods of the Deep

Maybe the whole thing played out better on paper, and no realized how boring it was going to be when actually committed to film. Actually, let me alter that. This movie really isn't terrible up until the underwater foot chase. It's no classic of fantasy adventure cinema, but it's harmless enough. But the underwater footage deep sixes the rest of the movie, which just isn't buoyant enough to stay afloat with the dead albatross of the underwater foot chase around it's neck. Is that enough seafarin' allusions for ya? Then let's stop beating that dead seahorse and move on to some of the film's other problems. First and foremost is, and I never thought I'd say this, Vincent Price's performance. We've seen Price play it cool and reserved before to great effect, but the decision for him to play mad Cap'n Hugh with Fall of the Hous eof Usher style reserve was, in my opinion, a tremendous mistake. This movie could have survived its dreadful underwater chase scene if Price had been hamming it up and playing Hugh as crazy and nutty as the script alludes to him being.

Instead, Price's Hugh comes off as dull. The script is too thin to lend the character a sense of gravity, so there's no real emotional reaction to him. He's a villain you hate, or love to hate, or relish, or grow to sympathize with. He merely exists on film for a duration of time, and then a big stone hand falls on him. I mean, this is a mad sea captain living in an undersea city that looks like a crumbling Victorian castle and commanding an army of mutant gillmen while giving speeches about the end of the world. Why on earth would anyone think to play that character with quiet reserve? Vincent Price is, as I think I've written before, one of my favorite actors. Quite possibly, he's my most favorite actor. He never gives less than 100%, and he doesn't give less than 100% here. But the character is so boring, and Price plays it so straight, that War Gods of the Deep becomes perhaps the only film in which Price is upstaged by a irritating guy with a chicken in a basket.

Speaking of the chicken -- what the hell was that about? It's not like the chicken ever does anything wacky, or like it jumps out and pecks Price on the foot or something. It is simply carried around for the entire movie, having no point at all. Even within the realm of unfunny comic relief, surely no one thinks the mere presence of a chicken is hilarious. A monkey, sure. But a chicken? I don't get it. This was apparently one of Louis Heyward's most important contributions t the script, and it's obvious why everyone else involved with the film thought the guy was a jack-ass. It's just another way to pad out a really threadbare script. It seems like Bennett got a great concept but quickly wrote himself into a corner, possibly because of budgetary constraints -- but I'm not going to buy that considering how many exciting and imaginative films were done with as little or even less money.

Not being able to come up with anything for anyone to do, the movie falls back on repetitive dialog scenes in which Vincent Price explains to us that the glowing,pulsating volcano is a threat (because we wouldn't have figured it out after the first warning) or in which Tab Hunter and the guy with the chicken ask other people if they remember how to get to the surface. The sudden presence of a beautiful woman who is to be the sole property of the captain amid an undersea kingdom populated entirely by men lends itself to potential conflict, but that's never bothered with. Or the use of the dim-witted gillmen as thugs and sacrificial lambs who perhaps begin to resent the captain's manipulation of them? But no, it never goes in that direction either. Like the characters in the movie, it just sort of half-heartedly wanders around the same caverns over and over, until the volcano finally erupts.


Still, as dull as this film turns out to be, there are some redeeming qualities. Well, there's one. The sets are really nice. And the gillmen are kind of cool looking, even if they end up having very little to do. Tourneur -- accustomed to working in black and white and employing shadows to great effect -- turns out to be equally adept at manipulating th candy colored Technicolor hues. Although War Gods of the Deep isn't a good film to watch, it's a great film to look at. Tourneur's direction coupled with cinematography by Stephen Dade is gorgeous to behold. And as with the sets, War Gods of the Deep has excellent costumes and the look of a much more expensive production than it actually was.

But that's precious little to go on, especially when you could be spending your time with far superior aquatic adventures, like the aforementioned Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the Japanese film Atragon (from which this film steals some scenes, incidentally). This is also a sad film to end up being the last in Tourneur's career. If only a giant squid had attacked the city or something, but no. That would have been something interesting, and this film is committed to making sure nothing interesting happens. It's all, as I said, a tremendous disappointment given the talented cast and crew assembled. But it's one misstep after another, making War Gods of the Deep the extremely rare crappy fantasy film I actually can't recommend. Well, maybe watch it once...but just once.

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posted by Keith at | 1 Comments


Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Redline

Release Year: 1997
Country: Canada and The Netherlands
Starring: Rutger Hauer, Mark Dacascos, Yvonne Scio, Patrick Dreikauss, Randall William Cook, Michael Mehlmann, Ildiko Szucs, Istvan Kanizsay, John Thompson, Gabor Peter Vincze, Scott Athea, Attila Arpa.
Writer: Tibor Takacs and Brian Irving
Director: Tibor Takacs
Cinematographer: Zoltan David
Music: Guy Zerafa
Producer: Brian Irving
Alternate Titles: Deathline, Armageddon, The Syndicate
Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us


There are those in the world who write about the career of Rutger Hauer in much the same way that other people write about the film career of Elvis Presley, the general approach being one of "ain't that a damn shame?" Hauer made a name for himself in America when he appeared in Ridley Scott's seminal dystopian sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner as Roy Batty, the leader of a gang of renegade androids being hunted down by Harrison Ford, presumably because they kidnapped his family or were on his plane without first obtaining the proper permissions. Hauer was already a familiar face to the ten non-Dutch people who watch Dutch films, and among that small population, the five fans of Dutch cinema who would actually watch Paul Verhoven films. When he appeared as a ruthless terrorist in Night Hawks, people started to take notice. Here was something interesting about the guy. And something scary. When a screenwriter told you Rutger Hauer was a murderous madman, you believed them.

A year later, Blade Runner catapulted Hauer into even wider American consciousness, and it seemed like he was destined for great things. But Blade Runner wasn't quite the hit then that it has become today. Shortly thereafter, he appeared in the fantasy film Ladyhawke, which while not a blockbuster, certainly earned its fair share of fans and let Americans see Hauer as something more than a scary cyborg who howls, drives nails through his own palm, and spends his spare time catching pigeons and jumping around on rooftops. Hauer went on to appear in a string of modest genre hits throughout the 1980s, including The Hitcher, where he fed Pony Boy severed fingers, Flesh + Blood, where he competed for screen time with the frequently nude Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Blood of Heroes, where he and Joan Chen got to slam dog skulls onto a stick in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. However, while each of these films found an audience, none of them became much more than cult hits. Hauer's intensity, his on-screen charisma, and his scary-yet-hot look seemed to imply that he was going to be big, just as soon as he found the right movie. And then something weird happened.


Exactly when and where, I can't say for certain, though I'm willing to say things started to derail round about Blind Fury, which casts Hauer as a blind swordsman fighting the Mob. The modern-day mob, that is, the one with guns and hand grenades and black Crown Victorias; the one that would probably be able to kill just about any swordsman, let alone a blind one. Couple that with the movie where Hauer played a rogue cop who doesn't play by the rules, battling evil terrorist Gene Simmons, and things really start to wobble. His long-anticipated portrayal of the vampire Lestat (Apparently he was Anne Rice's personal choice) never happened, and by the time the movie was made, Hauer was too old, and the role went to Tom Cruise.

Throughout the 1990s, Hauer appeared in a series of misfires coupled with small roles (usually as the villain) in films with cult followings, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which wasn't a hit at the time) and a role in the Most Dangerous Game inspired Surviving the Game, where he got to hunt Ice T. After initial excitement Hauer generated when he made the leap to America, it seems like studios lost any faith in him as a draw. Before too long, he found himself in direct to video film hell, and there he has remained alongside Seagal, Van Damme, and Mark Dacascos (actually, frequently alongside Mark Dacascos), emerging from time to time to appear in a supporting role in higher profile projects like Batman Begins and Smallville.


You could bemoan the state of his career and look at his appearance in things like Dracula III and Scorcher as something to be sad about as you think about what could have been. On the other hand, Hauer is one of that breed of actor who works consistently, averaging four or five movies a year, getting free vacations to whatever location is being used that week, and showing up for small roles in big films at least once a year. Most actors would be more than happy to fail in the way Hauer has failed.

Redline, which was originally titled Deathline, has nothing to do with the underground street racing circuit. For a movie about that, you will have to go see Redline -- the one that features a car on the front cover, instead of Rutger Hauer. Both movies feature lots of hot ladies in really tiny mini-skirts. But the Redline we want is a movie that sees Hauer and his partners Merrick (Dacascos, who is Russian this week) and Marina (Yvonne Scio) as a trio of smugglers in the Russia of the near future, running some sort of biotech you would assume becomes central to the plot at some point. It never does, but it does give us an early opportunity for Merrick and Marina to betray Hauer's Wade and shoot him dead, presumably over the lack of judgment he demonstrates in choosing his outfit from the Glenn Fry "Smuggler's Blues" collection at Sears. Merrick then gets to be doubly evil, thus justifying his growing of a goatee, by betraying Marina as well. The corpses are picked up by Russian police, and for some reason Special Prosecutor Vanya (Randall William Cook) decides to use top secret military technology to bring Wade back from the dead. Thus revived, Wade promptly sets out to do two things: see some boobs, and kill Merrick.

Wade seems to have very little problem with the first task, as the Russia of the near future is much like the Russia of the present: full of hot chicks in skimpy outfits, dancing to bad techno music. Somehow, among all the aspiring models, porn stars, strippers, and prostitutes that Eastern Europe has to throw at him, Wade ends up meeting Katya (also Scio), who happens to look just like Marina. One would expect that this, a story about a resurrected man on a mission of vengeance encountering the a woman who is the spitting image of his deceased true love, would then go right into Rutger Hauer getting wrapped up like a mummy and doing that stiff-armed swat to the shoulder that has killed so many old British guys who dared disturb the tomb of Amon-Ra. Instead, it just continues with the second of Wade's goals, which is to kill Merrick, who has become a player in the Russian mob, though one whose position seems tenuous. I reckon the Russian mob has a thirty-day trial period like any business thinking of hiring a contractor to a full time position.


Of course, if that was the plot, this movie would be far too simple. So we get layer upon layer of ulterior motives. Why did Vanya bring Wade back from the dead? Why do they keep cutting to random scenes of the Russian president (Agnes Banfalvi) giving speeches? Why is Katya helping Wade? Does Mark Dacascos own any shirts, and if he does, is he capable of buttoning the top few buttons? Is there going to be an ill-advised fight scene between Dacascos and Hauer? On the way to answering these and other questions the movie won't make you care about very much, we get to see Rutger Hauer shoot a lot of people. He also gets beat up by a naked female body builder and a topless female boxer who seem to be hanging out in a mansion-turned-nightclub for no real reason other than all Russian mob meetings include a techno dance party and naked female boxers and bodybuilders, gets to have sex with a couple women in a shower (oh yes -- there will be naked Rutger Hauer), gets to have sex with Yvonne Scio, and probably does it a few more times, but I lost track. So if you've been looking for a movie where most of the running time is devoted to Rutger Hauer shooting and screwing, this is your lucky day.

There not much in the way of redeeming factors for this film, but that's never stopped me before. I seem to have a limitless capacity to appreciate dumb direct to DVD movies starring Rutger Hauer and/or Mark Dacascos. Couple that with my previously established weakness for what most of the world considers two-star sci-fi films, and I really had no hope of coming out of Redline as a member of the minority of people who actually enjoyed the film. It's science fiction only in the most bare-boned sense. Hauer and his pals run illegal biotech, but that never matters. There are devices that let you have VR-style dreams, mostly about banging a couple hot Russian chicks in the shower, but we already have the internet, which is full of places where you can go to pretend you are banging two hot Russian chicks in the shower. The future looks pretty much like the present -- which probably isn't that far off from the truth -- and the remnants of Soviet Russia that are littered around lend the film an interesting look. The sprawling mansions, underground dance clubs, and crumbling Soviet-era tenements afford the film a cheap but convincing setting that is a far cry from Blade Runner but better than, say, Flash Future Kungfu.


Hauer's performances can be hit or miss, depending on his mood. He's actually fairly engaging in this movie, even if he spends half of it on autopilot. There are moments when he actually acts, and you get to see a little flash of the magic that Hauer once possessed. He's a little heavier these days than when he played the ultimate combat cyborg and ran around in little black leather biker shorts (obviously purchased from the same store Sting shopped at for Dune), but for a cat in his 50s, he's still doing OK, and he certainly looks to be in better shape for this film that he was in a lot of his previous direct to video outings -- possibly because he knew he was going to be in the nude, as they say, though not as frequently as his female co-star, Yvonne Scio.

Scio's a beauty (I'd go with Kylie Minogue beets Anna Falchi), and she's a far better actress than one usually expects from these sorts of films. Redline seems to be her first English language film after a career in her native Italy. Since then, she's appeared in some bit parts, some television shows, and probably most notable to the sort of people who frequent Teleport City, the Sci-Fi Channel original movie A.I. Assault. I quite like her. She has natural charisma and energy, and even though she's from the "skinny ass-kicker" mold I so rarely buy into, she handles the action scenes believably. The final revelation regarding her character is somewhat ridiculous, but then, pretty much everything about this movie is somewhat ridiculous. Plus, she's an actual woman, born in 1969, not a teenager, and she's kept her freckles. Yeah, I dig Yvonne Scio.


Completing the main cast is our man Mark Dacascos, the Don "The Dragon" Wilson of the 21st century. Dacascos got his start back in the 80s, with a series of bit parts and minor television roles. In 1993, he starred in a movie called Only the Strong, which tried unsuccessfully to convince people that a martial arts based danced practiced mostly by dumpy hippy chicks in dirty linen pants and white dudes with dreadlocks and devil sticks was somehow awesome and the preferred style of combat for all vicious street thugs in Rio, who apparently are more than willing to put their bloodlust on hold long enough for the resident dude with a boom box to find a song with the right rhythm for the fight. While that movie may not have been any more successful than Rooftops at convincing us that capoeira would ever defeat gymkata or Tony Jaa with big-ass elephant tusks strapped to his arms, it did convince a lot of people that Dacascos was someone on which they should keep an eye. In the early 1990s, a lot of Americans were discovering Hong Kong cinema and getting caught up in the films of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao (among others). So the folks prone to paying attention to such things wondered if there wasn't an American star who could even come close. Exposure to Chan's hyper-kinetic, stunt-driven action style meant that audiences were no longer going to buy into guys like Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The answer from the U.S. seemed to come in the form of one of two people: Brandon Lee or Mark Dacascos. But then Brandon died, and Dacascos just never clicked with audiences. He went on to star in Double Dragon, a movie that asked audiences to believe that Mark Dacascos would play second kungfu fiddle to a guy from Party of Five -- the most unbalanced kungfu match-up since Bruce Lee fought Gig Young. Dacascos then became the go-to guy for direct to video action films now that Don Wilson was slowing down, and they were unable to fit anymore numerals after the Bloodfist title. Even in DTV hell, Dacascos managed to shine from time to time. He starred in both Crying Freeman and Sanctuary, two adaptations of manga drawn by Ryoichi Ikegami. When they adapted The Crow for a television, Dacascos played the role formerly inhabited by Brandon Lee (more or less -- I know they are all supposed to be different Crows, but really -- a vengeful kungfu ghost in mime make-up is a vengeful kungfu ghost in mime make-up). He appeared in the rotten Hong Kong action film China Strike Force, a movie that decided the final fight shouldn't be between Dacascos and Aaron Kwok (two actors who know how to fight on screen), but should instead be between Kwok and Coolio...on top of a precariously balanced sheet of glass, meaning that 1) the fight consists mostly of the guys trying to keep their balance and 2) the fight would have stunk anyway, because it was Coolio versus Aaron Kwok. Shortly thereafter, he reminded people how awesome he could be when he showed up in Chris Gans' Brotherhood of the Wolf as a silent native American bad-ass.


The one true highlight of his direct to video career is a film called Drive, but we'll talk about that gem some other time.

Since then, he settled into a comfortable and prolific career in movies only people like us would ever watch, including Solar Strike, The Hunt for Eagle One, Alien Agent, and of more recent infamy, I Am Omega, The Asylum film studio's quickie rip-off of both The Omega Man and I Am Legend (Asylum being the people who gave us such films as Snakes on a Train, The Da Vinci Treasure, and Pirates of Treasure Island, among countless others). Although he usually ends up throwing a punch or a kick here and there, these days he relies very little on his athleticism and martial arts prowess, concentrating instead on his ability to sit in hot tubs, shoot people, and pass for pretty much ethnicity the screenplay calls for.

He also seems to appear with shocking frequency alongside Rutger Hauer, making them sort of the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope of crappy direct to video action and sci-fi films. The partnership that began here with Redline continued with Scorcher and not one but two Hunt for Eagle One movies. Here's to wishing them a long and fruitful joint career as the lords of direct to video action films.


Speaking of the lords of direct to video, you can't escape any discussion of Redline -- and lord knows the world is crawling with people who want to discuss a sci-fi action film in which Rutger Hauer gets beat up by a naked female bodybuilder -- without mentioning the director, Tibor Takacs. The man is responsible for at least one film a week that plays on the Sci-Fi Channel. He's perhaps best known for directing the 1987 cult classic The Gate, but since then he's blessed the world with a whole slew of horrible crap that I seem to watch with alarming regularity and joy: Viper, Tornado Warning, Rats, Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep, Ice Spiders, Mega Snake...Mansquito! He gave the world Mansquito, for crying out loud! And somewhere in there, he managed to direct a Sabrina the Teenage Witch film. His relationship with Dacascos goes as far back as Sanctuary and Redline, both in 1997, and they worked together again on The Crow television series. You know, if you told me that as of tomorrow, all films were going to be directed by Tibor Takacs, star Mark Dacascos and Rutger Hauer (and hot chicks in short skirts), and involve fighting giant snakes and/or spiders, my only real regret would be that there would then be no more Uwe Boll films.

Come to think of it, why hasn't Mark Dacascos been in an Uwe Boll film yet?

Takacs also wrote the screenplay for Redline, along with a guy named Brian Irving who seems to be Takacs' frequent partner in crime. They collaborated together on Rats, Sanctuary, and Nostradamus. Like I said, turn on the Sci-Fi Channel any Saturday, and you are pretty likely to see a film these guys made.


I suppose that this being a work of speculative fiction, one could search for meaning amid all the chaos and scenes of Rutger Hauer killing people. Beneath the sci-fi and action film veneer, this ends up being a political thriller as well, possibly even a spy film. But to read too much meaning into anything is to ignore the greater body of work this writer-director has created. His vision of the future plays like a version of modern-day Russia with a a bunch of Strange Days grafted on to get the film put in the science fiction section. There's absolutely no reason the mysterious Special Prosecutor needs to resurrect a dead Rutger Hauer in order to sick him on the members of a Russian gang as part of some convoluted plot to assassinate the too-friendly and reform-minded president. It seems like his method of planning is to never let anything be done in one step if it can be done in ten. The guy might have even succeeded with his coup had he spent more time figuring out how to just shoot the president, and less time bringing Rutger Hauer back from the dead and hatching assorted schemes with Mark Dacascos, in an attempt to manipulate Dacascos into crossing his mob bosses, so that...oh, really. You know what? Very little of it makes a lick of sense, and if you try and dissect it any further than "Rutger Hauer looks at boobs and tries to kill Mark Dacascos," you are probably going to give up. At least Takacs didn't make the future some totally dystopian Blade Runner meets 1984 (this being before The Matrix) cliche.

In fact, I like the whole idea of scifi films set in Russia and Eastern Europe. The 80s and 90s were dominated by the William Gibson-esque assumption that the future would be dominated by Japan, and everything would be controlled by steely-eyed yakuza in black suits, with a tendency to still use samurai swords even though the rest of the world moved on to guns a couple centuries ago. While Japan still enjoys the reputation of happening fifty years in the future thanks in no small part to their love of flashing cell phones and disturbingly realistic robotic love dolls, it turns out that the future is probably going to play out in places like Russia, China, and oh, let's say India even though they don't like science fiction. Russia certainly lends itself to easy sci-fi. You hardly even have to dress the set. Now all we need is a movie where the dejected future samurai corporate hitmen of Japan have to fight for their livelihood against a bunch of future Russian mob corporate hitmen.


So, what have we said? None of it makes any sense, right? The pace is awkward. Not exactly slow, because Rutger Hauer is always killing people or getting it on, or Mark Dacascos is always getting in or out of the hot tub, but there's no real energy to most of the action. It's a Canadian co-production, and Canadian films often have a weird feel tot he pace. But then, Canadian films are rarely this mean and scummy, so that compensates somewhat for the meandering clip. Much of the film feels like running in place, albeit fairly amusing running in place, because Rutger Hauer is walking around blowing the hell out of anything and everyone with almost no consequences at all (eventually, they put a bounty out on him, which delights the bloodthirsty hobo vigilantes to no end) and not the slightest concern. As far as we can tell, he was a smuggler, but not a killer, so for him to suddenly become a nonchalant killing machine who will just haul off and blow away anyone with even the most tenuous appearance of guilt or malice is...well, I guess if you were a dead guy walking around Russia looking to avenge your own murder, maybe that's the sort of thing that makes you put less value on life. Or maybe Tibor Tikacs just didn't give a shit and figured that watching Rutger Hauer shoot like a thousand guys is more fun than watching Rutger Hauer shoot one guy then agonize about the moral implications of his actions afterward.

All that negative stuff aired, it's probably no surprise that I actually kind of like Redline. It's a modestly entertaining, largely tasteless exercise in gratuitous sex, sleaze, and violence, and that's usually all it takes to make me happy. Throw in some engaging actors, lots of skimpy outfits, big guns, a ludicrous plot, insane amounts of murder that never seem to attract the attention of the police, and Rutger Hauer getting the sleeper hold put on him by a naked bodybuilder chick, and you have the recipe for a decent if idiotic trip to the near future.

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posted by Keith at | 3 Comments


Friday, April 18, 2008

Event Horizon

Release Year: 1997
Country: United States
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill. Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy, Jason Isaacs, Sean Pertwee.
Writer: Phil Eisner
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cinematographer: Adrian Biddle
Music: Michael Kamen
Producer: Jeremy Bolt, Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin
Availability: Buy it from Amazon
Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us


Event Horizon is another one of those movies that I wouldn't review if I wasn't committed to writing about everything I get from Netflix until such time as I see fit to end this third in the series of Netflix Diaries. It's not that Event Horizon isn't the kind of movie I would write about. Haunted spaceships and Sam Neill ripping out his own eyeballs is right up my alley. No, the reason isn't the content, but rather, that fact that this is one of those movies that already has a lot of words spent on it from a variety of sources both in the mainstream and in the realm of cult film fandom. Under such circumstances, it's hard to imagine what i might have to add that is new. In some cases, I can come up with something -- some tiny, meaningless tidbit that is a throwaway line in a movie that then allows me to write endlessly on some idiotic and obscure point. But upon watching Event Horizon, I was left with a distinct lack of ideas when it came to thinking about how I might approach writing about this film with some degree of originality. And now that I've finished the first paragraph, I still have no idea, so with any luck, something will pop up as I stumble along.

I didn't see Event Horizon when it was released. I'm not sure why. I mean, it's a gory film about a spooky spaceship. I think, however, in 1997, I saw maybe three film the entire year, and that was when I went out on dates with a lovely Southern belle. Somehow we ended up at a screening of Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation. So shamed was I that I just packed up and left North Carolina for New York, hoping to lose myself in the throng and hide my shameful secret. But the Netflix Diaries experiments have, in a way, become a curious place for dragging my own horrible secrets into the light for all to see, and on the scale of shameful secrets, "took a date to see Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation" is much worse than "burning passion for Catalina Larranaga" or even "took a date to see Wicked City." It's probably not worse than, "invited a girl over, cooked her a crappy dinner, then made her watch Black Devil Doll from Hell," but it's pretty close.


I was also pretty much broke in 1997. Hell, I was pretty much broke in 2007, but I'd learned to stretch a dollar in those ten years. Whatever the reason, I didn't see many movies that year, and Event Horizon was among the ones I didn't see. Heck, I don't think I knew a thing about it back then, because I didn't even have a TV at the time where I could see important commercials informing of the virtues of films like Event Horizon, B*A*P*S, Kull the Conqueror, or any of the other fine films released that year. In the many years that followed, Event Horizon was off my radar and forgotten about, even though from time to time someone would tell me I should see it. That almost always encourages me not to see a film, as very few people seem to understand the complexities of my taste, and so they assume that I will want to be watching Troma films or other intentionally and ironically crappy movies. People just can't grasp my earnestness. But lately, I've been going back and catching up on a lot of the science fiction I missed in the past ten years or so, and after Screamers, Event Horizon was the next film on the list -- though calling it science fiction is sort of like calling Halloween a "coming of age drama."

Despite the starships, hibernation chambers, spacesuits, and other superficial trappings of science fiction, Event Horizon is most definitely a horror film through and through, hewing closely to the classic set-up of a group of people in an isolated location, being preyed upon by a mysterious and murderous force. It just so happens that outer space is a slightly more isolated location than usual. In this regard, Event Horizon draws upon a history of science fiction horror that includes films like Alien and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires and can be traced back even further to the era of pulp fiction and writers like H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, it's Lovecraft's name that is most often invoked when people attempt to describe this film, even though at no point does Sam Neill yell "Yog Sothoth!" Unfortunately for a lot of people, Lovecraft and horror films were not invoked by the advertising for the film when it was released, which marketed it for the most part as a space adventure with some minor overtones of spookiness. People who went in expecting sci-fi space adventure found themselves confronted by hallucinatory images of demon rape, maggots, people being flayed alive, other people vomiting up their own innards or possibly someone else's arm -- at times, the atrocity exhibition is hard to decipher, but the fact remains that it was not what the average sci-fi fan was expecting. I've never quite understood this type of bait and switch marketing, as it only makes people mad. But I suspect that it has less to do with some sinister attempt to trick sci-fi fans into seeing a horror film and more to do with an ad agency that never bothered to watch the movie they were marketing and just assumed that, since it featured a spaceship, it was a science fiction film.


By the time I saw this movie, of course, the cat was out of the bag, so I knew exactly what I was getting into. Even if I hadn't, it would not have mattered much, since I can roll with horror just as easily as I can science fiction. So that's not what bugs me about this movie. What bugs me is that Event Horizon is this close to being a great movie, and that it comes so close but ultimately fails is, fair or not, much worse than if it had just been a crummy movie from beginning to end. At least then, I could have abandoned any care and gone along with things. That's what gets me through The Chronicles of Riddick, Aeon Flux, and the many other two-star science fiction films for which I seem to have an incredible weakness. But Event Horizon was almost so much more, and while I ultimately like the movie quite a lot, I do so well aware of the bitter taste left by great ideas left poorly explored and a resolution that sees the movie collapse in on itself -- which I guess is fitting in a way for a movie that features the a black hole propulsion system.

The set-up is not unlike that of a couple other "investigating the mysterious ship" movies. I'm thinking specifically of The Black Hole and 2010. In the year 2047, a group of search and rescue astronauts lead by Lawrence Fishburne when he was allowed to show emotion instead of being an emotionless monotonal Matrix guy, are en route to a secret location known only to aerospace scientist Sam Neill. It is soon revealed that they are on their way to rendezvous with the space ship Event Horizon, an experimental craft with the ability to use a black hole generator to warp space and travel massive distances in the blink of an eye. But the ship went missing seven years ago, and there's been no successful contact with the crew since it suddenly re-appeared near the planet Neptune. Captain Miller (Fishburne), Dr. Weir (Neill), and the crew of the rescue ship Lewis and Clark are to make contact with the crew of the Event Horizon and see what the heck is going on. A rough approach through the stormy space surrounding Neptune results in damage to the Lewis and Clark, meaning that whatever happens on board the Event Horizon, they're going to have to stick around a spell to fix their own ship.


Things are hardly soothing on the nerves once the team boards the massive experimental space ship. The crew is gone, and the only trace of them is a garbled transmission full of screaming -- though eventually Miller and company also discover some hideously mutilated remains splayed across the walls. Although the ship's black hole drive is presumably shut down, it still finds time to activate itself and suck a member of Miller's crew into its vortex, returning him in a coma that is only broken long enough for him to babble hysterically about "the darkness inside him" and the nightmarish things he saw on the other side. On top of that, the rest of Miller's crew starts seeing things -- specifically, hallucinations of their dead loved ones. And because horror on top of horror isn't enough, scans of the Event Horizon begin returning reports of widespread bio signals, inferring that something else is on the ship with them. When one of Miller's officers decodes the Event Horizon log, they are met with perverse images of the crew being ripped apart, raped by hideous beasts (or possibly by other members of the crew), and suffering untold and unspeakable horrors. Miller decides that the ship can go to hell, and they're leaving it behind. But Weir seems to feel that the ship has already been to hell, and that somewhere along it's universe-warping journey, the Event Horizon passed into another dimension, one of absolute chaos and evil, and in doing so became a sentient and highly malevolent living organism. The scans are picking up life forms; they're picking up the ship itself, and the hallucinations and other problems are a result of the ship's immune system defending itself from invading organisms.

Or the ship could just be a big ol' hunk of Hell-infused evil. Whatever the case, Miller is as keen on leaving as Weir is on keeping everybody there.

As a concept, I think Event Horizon is tremendous. The idea of a ship's experimental drive warping space tot he point where it rips the fabric of the universe and winds up in another dimension humans could best comprehend as Hell is wonderful, and that sort of "horror among the stars" is right out of the old pulp writings of H.P. Lovecraft, who often tinged his horror with elements of science fiction. The universe into which the Event Horizon passed is glimpsed, but only in tiny, tiny portions, and the film relies again on the old Lovecraft trope of a place so completely evil, so thoroughly perverse and malign, that to merely gaze upon it would drive a man insane. Further, the idea that the ship, once returning in some way or another from that universe, would have become a sentient creature as evil as the universe through which it passed is a concept rife with potential. It's also a set of ideas so vast, so complex, that attempting to tackle them in two hours in a sci-fi horror film is almost certainly doomed to failure.


And that's what happens to poor Event Horizon; it is filled with too many good ideas that are too complex, and there's no hope of the film ever being able to satisfactorily unravel it's science, meta-science, philosophy, and religion. In a way, this isn't a bad thing. To present human characters with a situation far beyond their comprehension and thus leave many questions necessarily half-answered or completely unresolved is fine. There is a way to do that. I just don't think Event Horizon hits the mark. It aims. It makes a valiant effort. But int he end, it just can't get it's head around its own central concepts, and the whole thing devolves into an ending that lets the film down.

But make no mistake about it -- I like this movie. I like it a lot. I think the things it does right make it more than worth the time it takes to watch. My frustration stems purely from the fact that it was well within the grasp of this film to be even better, and it didn't quite make it. It's like one of those break-aways in basketball where one guy has the ball,sprints the length of the court alone, has everyone cheering and going nuts, but then when he goes up for the slam dunk, he somehow screws it up and misses. You know, if he'd just dribbled down and missed a jumper, no worries. But because there was tremendous emotion and pageantry around the idea of a breakaway and dunk, when the guy blows the dunk, it makes the missed basket way more painful -- especially if it comes near the very end and costs them the game. Event Horizon spends most of its running time building up the freak-out and scares (sometimes with cheap jump scares, but usually through the use of genuine atmosphere), but as Roger Ebert said of the movie, "it's all foreboding and never gets to the actual boding."

But let's detach ourselves from disappointment and spend some time talking about what this movie does right. First and foremost is the atmosphere. Although the science fiction setting misled a lot of viewers, it works wonderfully for this type of film. It's basically a slightly more fantastic version of the "old dark house," the remote cabin, or any of the many other locations horror films use to isolate their cast from the outside world -- only more so. Millions of miles from home, on a tiny man-made island, surrounded by an environment that will kill you almost instantly if you set foot outside. That's even more claustrophobic and nerve-wracking than being at some rich weirdo's country manor. And Event Horizon never lets you forget how vulnerable these people are. Their air is running out. One guy ends up outside the ship without a spacesuit. You never lose sight of how fragile humans are in this setting -- something I think could only be replicated by setting your movie in the middle of the ocean. Much of Event Horizon has to do with the concept of tampering in domains man was not meant to see, but while the specific domain may be the Hell Universe, in general it's obvious that even save travel through space in incredibly dangerous, and a tiny mistake or bit of damage can have colossally negative repercussions.


Adding to the ominous air is the Event Horizon itself, which was apparently designed by someone who thought H.R. Giger's stuff was just too cuddly. I'm not sure how practical it is to have a spaceship with such features as a rotating tunnel of spikes and a room full of crawlspaces that are accessed through thorn-covered black panels, but I suspect that few aerospace engineers, even in Russia, are looking to design anything quite this terrifying. Remember when the interiors of spaceships were all white and well-lit? I wonder when the point will come that we decide to move away from that color scheme, and away from various pads and cushions covering stuff, and finally embrace the style that calls for dim, flickering lighting, exposed ductwork and wires, and lots and lots of razor blades and thorns. Practicality issues aside, though, and taken purely as art design, the Event Horizon is magnificent. Production designer Joseph Bennett and visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich bring an immense amount of experience to the game. Yurichich cut his teeth on films like 2001: A Space Odyssey before moving on to supervise visual effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and of course, Ghost Dad. Bennett did design for the cyberpunk cult hit Hardware, and one can see the evidence of all their past work (as well as the ever-present influence of old German expressionism and Giger's work on Alien) in the design of Event Horizon. This isn't a terribly big-budget film, but they do a lot with what they have, giving the entire movie the feel of some twisted, horrific opera.

Another feather in the cap of this film is the cast. None of them inhabit especially well-developed characters. They operate on the level of recognizable stock -- Fishburne is the tough but fair captain; Neill is the scientist consumed by his obsessions; Richard Jones is the wise-cracking black guy. But even when the characters are thin, the performers still give it their all. You feel like they believe what's happening around them, and while they sometimes make dumb decisions, they rarely make decisions that aren't understandable given the circumstances. The exception, perhaps, would be that after Miller spends a long time explaining that the ship will pick you brain and create hallucinations of suffering loved ones, and after everyone in the crew understands this is what the ship is doing, Kathleen Quinlan's Peters still falls for the trick. I've mentioned it in other reviews, but it always annoys me enough that I feel like mentioning it again anytime it happens (and it happens a lot). The hoary old "evil entity transforms into a loved one" shtick grates on my nerves. I mean, you're in outer space, for crying out loud. Obviously, when you've been told that the evil spaceship ghoul thing will make you see visions of your loved ones and use them to lure you to your doom, and then all of a sudden your son appears out of nowhere in a location he absolutely could not be in, well why the hell would you fall for that? Why would your son be running around on a haunted space ship that just returned from Dante's Inferno? I guess you could dismiss it as some sort of hypnotic effect, or the result of mental breakdown making a character unable to reason, but mostly it just always strikes me as lazy writing.


Still, no one turns in a bad performance, even though they're sometimes given very little to do. The bulk of the good stuff goes to Sam Neill, since he gets to play the characters who goes completely bonkers. If anyone had seen Neill in In the Mouth of Madness, they wouldn't have followed him into space, because they would know that spooky H.P. Lovecraft entities tend to follow him around and drive people mad. If Event Horizon succeeds with any one character, it's Neill's Dr. Weir, who starts off sympathetic enough before he is consumed by the horrible mysteries contained within the walls of the Event Horizon. However, one gets the feeling that his character never becomes omniscient, never actually knows what these mysteries are despite his enthusiasm about them. No matter the speeches he may give about boundless evil, other dimensions, and forbidden knowledge, his Faust of a doctor is ultimately as clueless about what's going on and what's going to happen as everyone else's. Although this is likely the product of the screenwriter not knowing himself exactly what was going to happen, the end result is effective. Neill becomes the acolyte of an unseen "holy man," one who speaks only in riddles and fools his followers into thinking they possess some profound understanding or insight when, in fact, they have been fed nothing but meaningless phrases and garbled imagery. There's a tragedy surrounding Dr. Weir, who far from becoming one with the ship and grasping the universe from which it has returned, instead becomes nothing more than a pitiable dupe.

Whether or not screenwriter Phil Eisner meant that to be the case, he should take it. Because the rest of his script is where the concept of Event Horizon starts to unravel. Poking fun at the science is ultimately meaningless -- this is hardly the sort of film you go to for hard facts, and such an exercise would be as futile as poking holes in the space science of Star Wars. Still, it's kind of fun, so why not, provided we remember that stressing fiction over science never kills a movie for me. Heck, one of my favorite science fiction films is Adieu, Galaxy Express 999, and that's about a steam locomotive traveling through the galaxy while a little kid hangs his head out the window. The science of Event Horizon plays out as if it was conceived by someone who was told about Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time by someone else who hadn't actually read the book, but had been around other people discussing it. A Brief History of Time was, of course, one of those great books that everyone bought and no one read, putting it in the rarefied air occupied by other such books: that gigantic Bill Clinton memoir, the 9/11 Commission Report, Ulysses by James Joyce, and The Bible.


Part of what Hawking's book dealt with in its attempt to bring high physics down to a populist level was the topic of black holes. Now I actually read the book, because I'm a nerd like that, and because I had to as part of one of the classes I was taking. It was one of those science classes set up specifically for people who aren't very good with equations, which meant it was mostly full of journalism students and members of the University of Florida football team who would groan anytime the professor tried to relate a fundamental understanding of physics to the act of making a solid pass. Yeah, sure, physics is involved, but it was highly suspect to suggest that Danny Wuerffel spent his time in the huddle scrawling geometry and physics equations into the dirt to figure out how best to get the ball into the hands of wide receiver Reidel Anthony.

Anyway, I think that class gave me about as sound an understanding as would be needed to be the guy that Eisner's friend talked to about black holes. Meaning that I could remember that Hawking made allusions to Dante's Inferno when speaking of the event horizon of a black hole -- that gravitational point of no return from which light itself cannot escape. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," Hawking said, paraphrasing Dante and the sign that hung outside the gates of Hell. He meant, of course, that the pull of a black hole is so great, that if you cross the event horizon, you're not coming back, so you best make peace with the fact that you're dead meat. Now pass that sentiment through me passing it on to someone else, who then tells Phil Eisner that he was drunk at a party the other night, talking about some deep shit like black holes. All of a sudden, that simple quote applied to explain how hopeless it is to escape the pull of a black hole is twisted to mean that a black hole actually could be the gateway to Hell. And poof! Event Horizon's concept is born. It's really not a bad concept, regardless of how misconstrued it may be. Black holes are weird, after all, and the idea that they lead somewhere other than to a horrible death in which you are crushed down to microscopic size by the unbelievable gravitational pressure is hardly new to Event Horizon. And even the best minds are still feeble when up against cosmic phenomena of this scale. So why not? And anyway, the use of the term "event horizon" works in a couple different ways, and it refers as much to a black hole as it does to the Event Horizon itself, which proves to be a flashpoint which, once entered, will not allow the humans to escape.

What's more important to the quality of the screenplay is what Eisner does with the concept, and while he starts off strong, he seems to get lost, allowing the movie at times to devolve into a blood and guts horror film (not bad) and a pastiche of other other movies (slightly less forgivable). I've already mentioned some of the films from which Event Horizon draws, but there are plenty of others. In fact, it lifts wholesale the scene of a river of blood gushing forth from an elevator from The Shining. In fact, you could really view this movie as little more than The Shining meets The Black Hole. Sam Neill's character bears a close resemblance to Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining, and the concept of a haunted house (or spaceship) that causes hallucinations and may itself be alive is an idea shared by both films. Many other elements are lifted from the Russian sci-fi film Solaris, yet another "man battles hallucinations" sci-fi tale. One could also invoke the specter of the old Roger Corman Poe films, especially The Fall of the House of Usher, as it too is about a house infused with evil to the point of becoming a malignant being itself, ending in a fiery collapse much the same as we see at the end of Event Horizon. And the idea of the black hole as a portal to Hell was explored -- with equal awkwardness -- by The Black Hole, a film which sends one of its robotic villains through a black hole and lands him standing on a pillar surrounded by a lake of fire and the souls of the damned. n fact, Event Horizon reflects The Black Hole in many ways -- an exploratory crew finds a long lost ship; that ship' screw has vanished or mostly vanished; things are spooky; and then it all falls apart at the end when the movies both realize that they have ten minutes to explain things that the top scientific minds of the word have been grappling with for decades.


In the case of Event Horizon, all the talk of physics versus metaphysics, of a ship powered by pure evil, of a rip in the fabric of space that leads to a Hellraiser universe, lead to an anti-climatic and predictable fist fight between Miller and Weir. Though it is similar to The Fall of the House of Usher, and though it's a suitably horrific and downbeat ending for the decent guy Miller, it seems ultimately to be a resolution that fails the film's attempts at something more complex. I don't need the questions to be answered. In fact, I prefer that they try and fail, discovering that comprehension of what awaits them is simply beyond the boundaries of the human brain. But a fist fight and an explosion seemed somehow to be less than what should have been delivered. It may not be entirely Eisner's fault, though. Apparently some forty minutes was cut from the movie in order to achieve a manageable running time (1997 was a few years too early for genre films to run three hours or more and still get a wide release) and an R-rating (the 90s represented MPAA judges in a reactionary phase as an answer to the gore and nudity soaked anarchy of the 70s and 80s). Fans hoped that the footage would be restored at some point, and that such restoration would smooth out many of the wrinkles that prevent Event Horizon from achieving its ambitions, but so far such wishes have gone unsatisfied. Even when released to DVD, the film was still the theatrical cut. Whether or not it will ever be fully restored is up in the air, but given that we live in an era when almost everything, no matter how obscure or trashy, is getting lovingly reconstructed by some madman, there's still the possibility that a more complete version will emerge and we can re-assess the film based on that.

Until then, though, we have to work with what we get to watch, and as presented, Event Horizon is an almost great movie that loses its way and relies on too many scenes from other movies and too many cheap jolts. I do wish horror films would retire that bit where someone is scared, and then someone come sup behind them and grabs them on the shoulder, refusing to speak until the other person and the audience have gotten a cheap scare. Really -- have you ever approached a person in complete silence, from behind, and grabbed them by the shoulder? Yes, you have, but that's because you were intentionally trying to scare that person. In all other instances, no one does this, and yet horror films feature it like every other scene. What makes it frustrating here is that Event Horizon doesn't need to rely on these weak scares. It has plenty of legitimate scares and an over-arching feeling of doom and eeriness. Falling back on juvenile tactics like the shoulder grab is just gratuitous and sloppy. At least they didn't have a scene where a cat jumped out of a box or something.


And really, perhaps I am being like this movie: searching for something that isn't attained, being more serious than I should. Taken as nothing more than a horror film with sci-fi dressing, I really think Event Horizon is a success. It definitely has the feel of an old pulp -- right down to losing track of itself over the course of its running time. Director Paul W.S. Anderson is no stranger to fans of pulpy movies, having directed Mortal Kombat before this (but not Mortal Kombat II), and Resident Evil after, among other things. I have a curious love-hate relationship with Anderson's films in that I love some, hate others, but rarely find myself somewhere in between. Flaws aside, I love Event Horizon. And even more flaws aside, I love the Resident Evil movies, and Mortal Kombat, even (though not Mortal Kombat II). I guess I'm lukewarm on Soldier, so there's one middle ground movie. But I hate with a passion the Alien vs. Predator films, even more than I hate Mortal Kombat II. Still that's a lot of hits any only one real miss for me (granted, I'm not a discriminating viewer), so I guess I like Anderson as a director, and I think Event Horizon is probably the best film he's made and will likely make. At its worst, it is grade-A horror hokum, full of mumbo jumbo and ideas that don't really pan out. And I can deal with that just fine. Heck, like I said, I probably would have preferred if the film was that way from beginning to end instead of flirting with brilliance in spots, only to fold at the last second. But regardless, this is good, gruesome pulp fiction, full of the creeping unknown and vague talk about dimensions of madness and torture that only Cthulhu, Pinhead, and the makers of the Ilsa films can imagine. Anderson's direction is sure-handed, and he and cinematographer Adrian Biddle make wonderful use of the warped madhouse the production team has created for them.

So, huh. I guess I did have a lot to say about Event Horizon. Funny the things you learn about yourself when faced with writing about a movie where Sam Neill digs out his own eyeballs. I was pleasantly surprised by it. I didn't expect it to be as good as it was, and even though it's a shame it wasn't as good as it could have been, at the end of the day, I'm happy enough. I'm also happy I didn't see it in 1997, because even though I would have liked it then, perhaps even more than I do now, the fact of the matter is that Southern belle was actually willing to still enter into a relationship with me even after I made her see things like Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation, City of Darkness, and Alien 4. I don't know if that tenuous, early romance could have survived Event Horizon as well, especially considering the fact that she never made me go see Titanic, like every other girlfriend did in 1997. I guess I could have sold Event Horizon with no more or less deception than the original marketing team if I positioned it as "kind of like Titanic, in that it is about people on a doomed ship."

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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The Moonstone

Release Year: 1934
Country: United States
Starring: David Manners, Phyllis Barry, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Jameson Thomas, Herbert Bunston, Charles Irwin, Elspeth Dudgeon, John Davidson, Claude King, Olaf Hytten, Evalyn Bostock, Fred Walton.
Writer: Adele Buffington
Director: Reginald Barker
Cinematographer: Robert Planck
Music: Abe Meyer
Producer: Paul Malvern
Availability: Buy it from Amazon
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The Moonstone marks our first real foray into a universe in which we will be spending a lot of time as I work my way through this latest round of Netflix Diaries: the Poverty Row thriller. An understanding of what Poverty Row was -- if not an actual appreciation for its product -- is an important part of any cult film education (and given the way you kids are allowed to make up any damn thing and call it a college major these days, you can probably go PhD in Cult Film Studies or some such nonsense, when you should be spending your time in college learning about Hammurabi, thermodynamics, and beer funnels), because Poverty Row is where the b-movie was born. So let's set the stage.

The more popular movies became, the more demand there was for something -- sometimes, anything -- to fill the marquee. There was only so much the big studios could produce, and the hunger for cinematic entertainment was fast starting to outpace production schedules. When the studio system -- by which certain production studios were allowed to own and operate their own theaters, showing only their own movies -- was broken up, it opened the door for a number of prospective upstart studios to step in and both fill the void with their own product as well as find a screen on which to play it. Newly independent theater owners often paired these films of lesser prestige with a film from one of the big studios -- the b-picture to the a-picture main event.

The b-movies were often produced very quickly and on the cheap, usually with a cast of unknowns, though sometimes they'd score a star whose name had some marquee value during the silent era. Most of the major studios eventually started their own b-movie production machines, and these films benefited from access to recognizable contract players from the studio as well as all the sets, props, and costumes that had been used in other, bigger budget productions. This is why b-movies like the Mister Moto series look far more lavish and expensive than they actually were. They had access to all the stuff that was lying around for the bigger budget Charlie Chan films.


But the bulk of the b-movies and programming filler was produced by smaller studios. Among these studios, few were as prolific and respectable (relatively speaking) as Monogram. So successful was Monogram, in fact, that it soon took on the appearance of a "little major," with it's own stable of contract players, directors, writers, and sets. Monograms and the studios like them were dubbed "Poverty Row," as much a reference to the budgets they had to work with as it was a reference to less cultured hoi polloi who flocked to see the cheapies. This was truly the cinema of the people, giving the unwashed masses like you and me exactly what we wanted. And what we wanted, at least at the time, was westerns and thrillers. It's the thrillers that concern us today, and The Moonstone is a perfect place to begin.

In 1868, an author by the name of Wilkie Collins had published a story called The Moonstone which is generally considered the first English-language mystery novel. Of course, as soon as something is proclaimed to be the first of anything, someone else is going to show up with ample evidence why some other work deserves the honor being considered the first. Look at attempts to pin down the first slasher film. For a while, everyone agreed that it was Halloween, but then some smartie pants started maintaining that it was actually Mario Bava's Bay of Blood, and then it was Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, and now I think it's gotten to the point where the world's first slasher film is actually attributed to Sophocles.

So whether or not The Moonstone is the world's first English language detective and mystery novel, instead of the C. Auguste Dupin stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the fact remains that T.S. Eliot called it the first English detective novel, and who's going to argue with T.S. Eliot? W.B. Yeats? Please. Whatever the case, Collins' story sets the template for the many, many detective thrillers that would follow. There's the isolated British manor house, the large group of suspects brought together in a common location, copious red herrings, amateur sleuthing by one or two people who are also among the gathered cast of characters, and of course, the gruff inspector from Scotland Yard. In particular, The Moonstone deals with the theft of a precious stone from a young British heiress.


The movie sticks to the original novel in some basic respects, but for the most part it varies quite remarkably. One of the the elements that made the novel such a success was its references to drug use. That aspect of the novel's script is excised entirely from the plot of the film, seeing as such open depiction of drug use and abuse was strictly taboo in 1934 -- the very same year that the Hayes Code enacted in 1930 was put into heavy enforcement. Monogram certainly wasn't in a financial position to take on the United States government and defend their picture, so the easier route was simply to write around the opium. Additionally, the novel takes place over the course of many, many months. In the movie, everything takes place in the course of twenty-four hours. Where as three mysterious jugglers from India play a major role in the novel -- the moonstone was originally stolen by a British officer in India, and disciples of the god from whose forehead it was stolen have sworn to get it back, no matter how many generations it takes -- in the movie, there is only a single Indian, a servant, who has very little to do other than show up for some questioning. In fact,the movie, while entertaining, the whole movie plays like an adaptation of the novel done by someone who sort of read the novel a long time ago and is now doing their best to remember what they can.

On the night of her birthday, young Ann Verinder (Phyllis Barry) receives the gift of the Moonstone, though how good a gift it is remains dubious. Although obviously precious, the stone has a bloody past and carries a curse. Originally stolen by a shifty British officer in India (as in the novel), the Moonstone has since been the object of spookiness, with various Indians swearing revenge on the family of the man who stole it and to return it to its rightful home, whatever the cost. On top of the oogy boogy factor, Ann seems to only know people who would have some sinister reason for wanting to steal the jewel. Her own father is in dire financial straights, and the Moonstone could save him from ruin. A moneylender to whom her father owes most of the money is keen on the stone as well. The family's young maid is a former thief. A cousin's servant happens to be Indian. The assistant doctor that works with Ann's father has a terrible secret about his past.

Not surprisingly, amid all these potential thieves, the Moonstone ends up being stolen -- from right under Ann's pillow, no less. I've always wondered about people who put precious items under their pillow for safekeeping -- that includes guns. Now I guess if you are one of those people who lies perfectly still, on your back, with your hands folded across your chest in angelic repose, then putting valuable sunder your pillow would be fine. But seriously, how many of you sleep like that? And how many of you sleep in two dozen different positions over the course of a night, including ones where you wake up and find your knee against your chin and your pillow shoved between your knees, with a second pillow somehow ending up on the floor clear on the other side of the room? If I went to sleep with a Moonstone under my pillow, there's a good chance that I would wake up and find the thing under the dresser, stuck between my butt cheeks, or possibly in the fridge, since I tend to get up in the middle of the night and sleepily make myself bowls of cereal.


And especially if I knew my house was full of people who might want to steal the jewel, I'd find somewhere safer than under my pillow. First, why would you be friends with nothing but people who want to steal your cursed birthday present? Second, if you are a well-to-do heiress, even one who doesn't know her father has secretly blown the family fortune, you still have your big British manor house, and I'm pretty sure there must be a secure place for such things as cursed moonstones. I mean, even if the attempt to steal the stone woke you up, what's to stop the thief from wearing a mask and punching you in the face? So really, I guess what I'm saying is, if your security system is to put your valuables under a pillow then lie a wispy British heiress on top of it, you deserve to have your moonstone stolen.

Complicating the case is the fact that a number of odd things happened at conveniently inconvenient times: the arrival of the moneylender, the departure of Ann's father int he middle of the night to deliver a baby, and the arrival of a storm so violent that no one could possibly leave the house. Also on hand is Inspector Cuff of Scotland Yard (Charles Irwin), dispatched upon hearing about Ann's inheritance because Scotland Yard expected such a young and naive owner would be the victim of treachery. One by one, Cuff grills the inhabitants of the house, airing their dirty laundry and conveniently explaining for the audience what the motivation for theft would be. As Cuff goes about his business, Ann's father falls ill with pneumonia contracted whilst mucking about in the storm, delivering babies, and a number of people decide to solve the mystery themselves. The only real clue is a smudge left on the door by a careless thief -- a very careless thief, because the smudge is gigantic.

And then, just as the mystery is getting good and mysterious, everything is wrapped up in like three minutes with a minimum of fuss, and the movie ends.

According to some sources, this movie's original running time was a little over an hour, as was customary for cheap films of this period. But all the existing copies that have been released on DVD run just under fifty minutes. So somewhere there are ten to fifteen minutes of this film lying around that are not included in the version I watched. While that still makes for a brisk movie, it would explain a number of plot threads that are introduced and never really picked up again. It would also make for a little more suspense than we get with the movie in its current state, which although it is wrapped up in more or less the same way as the novel, comes very abruptly and without any sense of a big reveal.


But first, let's talk about the good. For an early thriller based on an early thriller, and with a minimal budget, The Moonstone is pretty entertaining. It confines itself to two locations -- or only one, if you discount the opening scene in a Scotland Yard office -- and a small cast, with the whole thing feeling a bit like a stage production, but the movie never looks or feels as cheap as it is, even if the exterior of the mansion is just a model. Monogram obviously put some time and effort into the production, and that extra care translates into a more impressive end product that Poverty Row often gave us. On top of that, there's no real weak link in the cast. Most of them were experienced hands, if not well-known actors. Phyllis Barry was a bit player in all sorts of films, including the Errol Flynn epic The Prince and the Pauper and one of the Bulldog Drummond films. She was usually relegated to roles like "Barmaid" and "Housekeeper," but given something a little more substantial, she acquits herself nicely.

John Davidson gets to parade around in a turban, making menacing intense eyes as Yandoo, the Indian servant who may or may not be part of a cult dedicated to retrieving the Moonstone. Davidson had been in movies for almost twenty years by the time he appeared in The Moonstone, starting his career way back in 1915 -- not quite the dawn of the feature film, but awful close. His experience with silent film is most likely the reason Davidson is able to do so much with only a few lines of dialog. It's too bad that his role is relegated to something relatively unimportant in the movie, because the Indians in the novel apparently had more to do.

The most recognizable face for cult film fans is probably David Manners, best known for inhabiting the role of Jonathan Harker in Todd Browning's 1931 production of Dracula. Manning went on to appear in Universal's The Mummy, as well. In fact, very few members of the cast of The Moonstone could be considered inexperienced, and their adeptness at the craft is evident. Poverty Row features sometimes saddled the audiences with remarkably wooden actors, but that's not the case here.

Similarly, director Reginald Barker was an old hand, having begun his directing career in 1912. The Moonstone actually comes to us at the end of his career -- just as the novel came at the end of Wilkie Collins' career -- and it's obvious that, even if this is a B production, it's being helmed by a man who knows what he's doing. As with director Michael Curtiz, who made Captain Blood just one year later, and as with many of the directors working at the time, Barker's experience with silent films translates into an effective use of things like light and shadow and the facial expressions of the actors -- the tools you had to use in a film when dialog couldn't do the talking for you. Barker's direction and little flourishes keep the film from feeling static, even though this is a movie comprised almost entirely of people sitting around.


In fact, if there's a weak component to this film besides the rushed ending, it's the dialog, which is bland but relatively harmless. However, in a movie in which there is almost no action at all, it needs to make up for that with cracking good dialog, and The Moonstone falters in this regard. Scriptwriter Adele Buffington wrote about seventy-five billion Poverty Row westerns, and the screenplay for The Moonstone smacks of what I would call "rushed competence." It's a perfectly serviceable script, but it takes the easiest route and avoids dealing with any of the complicated affairs that made the novel more engrossing. The drug references are dropped almost entirely, with the final solution coming in the guise of a medicine considerably less controversial that laudanum.

Wilkie Collins was, himself, an addict, and drew on his own experiences with laudanum for the story. However, drug references would hardly fly under the new Hayes Code, so Buffington more or less drops it. He also does considerably less with the thief-turned-maid character than does the original novel, and she, like Yandoo and a number of the suspects, more or less disappears after she has her interview with Inspector Cuff. But like I said, this is "rushed competence." Buffington has an hour to tell the story, instead of a novel. Subplots and extraneous digressions, interesting though they may have been, had to be cut. Buffington's final product is perfectly serviceable, but one can't help but notice that inside this good movie is a great movie that was never quite made.

The Moonstone lacks the spark of the better films of the time, and even of the better Poverty Row productions. The Mister Moto films didn't just enjoy access to the props from the Charlie Chan movies; they also benefited from snappier dialog and pacing. And when compared to other low budget thrillers, like the Bulldog Drummond films, the short-comings of The Moonstone become more obvious. Luckily, since it clocks in at about three-quarters of an hour, the movie never affords itself the chance to get dull. Still, acceptable but uninspired dialog is what prevents The Moonstone from being a must-see on entertainment terms instead of just historical importance terms.

Still, The Moonstone makes for a fun, if brief, way to spend some time. Well shot, well acted, and at least adequately written. In terms of Poverty Row productions from an independent like Monogram, it represents the top of the heap, though I wouldn't say it's the best. But films like this are where it all began. In the conventions a movie like The Moonstone establishes, we see the bits and pieces that will become everything from horror films to giallo. Even Hitchcock did much of his best work in the same confines defined by the Moonstone novel. If you're interested in where modern cult films come from, The Moonstone should be on your list of things to watch. Heck, even if you don't like it as much as I did (and I liked it enough, though it's not a film I'd run through the streets singing the merits of -- I save that honor for Howling II), it took you less than an hour to watch it.

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Saturday, April 05, 2008

Captain Blood

Release Year: 1935
Country: 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
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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.

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Friday, April 04, 2008

Arabian Adventure

Release Year: 1979
Country: 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.

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Friday, March 28, 2008

Phantom of Soho

Release Year: 1964
Country: Germany
Starring: Dieter Borsche, Barbara Rutting, Hans Sohnker, Peter Vogel, Helga Sommerfeld, Werner Peters, Hans Nielsen, Stanislav Ledinek, Otto Waldis, Hans Hamacher, Elisabeth Flickenschildt.
Writer: Ladislas Fodor
Director: Franz Josef Gottlieb
Cinematographer: Richard Angst
Music: Martin Bottcher
Producer: Artur Brauner
Original Title: Das Phantom von Soho
Availability: Buy it from Amazon


There are a couple key themes that define Teleport City and to which I frequently refer. First among these is that Teleport City was always envisioned as a response to the taunt, "Get a life!" or, alternately, "Get a girlfriend!" Part of the reason the reviews I write so often diverge into tangential stories about silly adventures, history (both accurate and suspect), and the circumstances under which I've viewed these movies and how said circumstances have influenced my reactions is because I like to illustrate what I've learned and experienced first-hand from my many strange years in cult film fandom: that we do have lives, often exceptionally fun lives at that. The second of the over-arching themes that inform Teleport City is that you should be happy this is your hobby, because you will never want for new material. No matter how much you've seen, you've never seen it all, and you will discover new and amazing films from all over the world with pleasing regularity. Exploring these films leads, often, to exploring other cultures, other countries, other customs and histories, and learning about far more than simply the film you happen to be watching.

Case in point would be the little sub-genre -- "family" might be more appropriate -- known as "krimi," a series of fantastical German murder mystery movies based on the works of British author Edgar Wallace and drawing influence from a sprawling landscape of source material that includes pulp adventures, noir crime dramas, James Bond, and old horror films. Until a few years ago, I'd never heard of "krimi" films. Back in the day, I had a German film class in what we then referred t as "college," or sometimes "university." Back in this time period, I would ride to class on my pennyfarthing bicycle beneath trees dripping with the vibrantly colored leaves of fall, my letterman sweater rakishly unbuttoned and my books slung around my shoulder in a satchel, whistling the latest hit by The Ink Spots and thinking of my sweetheart Annabeth and the grand we time we'd have that weekend when I would borrow my chum's horseless motor carriage to drive her up to the country for a picnic, where I would serenade her with some ukulele playing. Oh, that was truly the golden fall of '92!


The film class covered the basics of German film -- meaning we watched some Metropolis, Doctor Caligari, Nosferatu, Triumph of the Will, Jew Suss, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum, American Friend, The Seventh Cross, and the dreaded The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. Although the professor was a grand man and once scheduled a make-up class at his own home, where he had an early, pre-flatscreen television version of a home theater, an indoor pool, and a feast of spaetzel and bratwurst (apparently being the head of the Germanic and Slavic Languages department married to the head of the Russian Language department has its perks beyond just being able to stage the siege of Stalingrad in your back yard every night), and even though he taught me the word vergangenheits-bewaltigung, there was no mention of krimi. For that matter, there was no mention of the Jerry Cotton FBI-adventure films starring George Nader, or of Superargo, so in the end, I have to question the quality of education I received. Still, and despite The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, one of the better film classes I took, even though (and possibly because) the professor wasn't trained in film studies. Plus, Sigfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler was a fine book, and the class itself benefited from sharing a semester with a "Women and Film" class which was excruciating (this is what you get when you do schedule drop-add at the last minute -- please, o Lord! No more Jane Campion!).

I also learned that I wanted a Wiemar Republic era nightclub in my house. Later, of course, I became more of a grown up and dispensed with such childish fantasies. Nowadays, I want a Jess Franco nightclub in my house.

With this basic foundation in German cinema, it was many years before I visited that nation's movies again, and when I did, it was a decidedly different type of film than those I'd been watching in school. Fewer pensive stares and excessively long takes, and more George Nader and his perfectly sculpted hair jumping out of Jaguar cars and shooting gangsters. When the book Fear Without Frontiers came out, I got my first glimpse at the weird world of krimi and knew, immediately, that this was a type of film I was going to want to see. As is often the case, however, recent knowledge and enthusiasm abut a certain film or type of films has no direct correlation to the ability to actually obtain and watch the movies. So while I could sit in my study, contentedly puffing on my pipe and sipping a glass of fine Glenrothes as I marveled at photos of skull-faced killers and arch-villains in pointy crimson hoods or frog outfits, I could not carry my enthusiasm out to my own home theater for viewing. My only option at the time was to shell out stacks of lettuce in exchange for bootleg copies of dubious quality.


But the era of DVD often rewards the cheap and patient, and too long ago, Alpha Video -- DVD-era heir to the throne of Goodtimes Video -- was kind enough to make bootleg copies of dubious quality unnecessary, as one could now freely purchse semi-bootleg copies of dubious quality, but for four dollars instead of fourteen. Alpha Video dumped a number of krimi onto cheap DVDs, followed shortly by an "Edgar Wallace Collection" released by Retrocinema. I also discovered that some of the films I already owned were, in fact, based in some degree on the works of Edgar Wallace, though in at least some of these cases, the connection is dubious. In others, the whims and obsessions of the director override any other identity the film may possess. That is to say, The Devil Came from Akasava is not a krimi; it is a Jess Franco film. Slowly, and far more lazily than someone who possesses actual drive and motivation, I was able to piece together a half-ass knowledge of the history of Edgar Wallace and how the Germans came to love him so much that they based a bunch of cheap movies on his stories.

Wallace was born in the London slums in the latter half of the 1800s, his father an actor, his mother a dancer -- two professions and a life that we can see reflected as major influences in Wallace's work. In 1896, he found himself stationed in South Africa, serving in the Boer War and developing a nascent writing career as a reporter. His work attracted the attention of none other than Rudyard Kipling, who encouraged Wallace to continue his writing career. Wallace, himself a great admirer of Kipling, wisely took the advice, and before too long, he was making enough money as a foreign correspondent in South Africa to afford a wife and a comfortable existence for the both of them. Then, just as quickly, he lost all his money, because that's the way us writers are. After returning to England in 1902, he published his first serialized novel in 1905, but once again he proved a better writer than financial adviser, as a crackpot promotional scheme that offered readers a reward if they could figure out the solution to the book resulted in lawsuits, bankruptcy, and the loss of his copyright for the story.

But at least he had a new career, even if he had to maintain it to stay one step ahead of poverty -- something I'm sure no other writer has ever experienced. It was a relatively unspectacular career for some time, but in 1921, something suddenly caught fire. It was in this year that Wallace's name became synonymous with mystery writing. By 1928, it is reported that nearly a quarter of the books being printed in England were Edgar Wallace mysteries. He managed to get himself a plum job as the figurehead president at British Lion Films, which meant that he would be getting cuts of all future and past films based on his work. In 1931, after an unsuccessful bid for Parliament (the gambling habit came back to haunt him), he went to the United States and attempted to scare up a screenwriting job for himself. He had a hard time finding takers for any but one of his scripts, and that one he managed to sell to RKO Pictures, though they insisted on a different title, something more exotic than The Beast. And so was born King Kong. Wallace died shortly afterward, in 1932. By that time, he had written some 250 books and plays, countless short stories, and left his family $68,000 -- not a bad sum in 1932, so long as you ignore that it was countered by the $400,000 in debt he amassed as a result of gambling on the ponies and a love of throwing big parties.


One of his sons, Bryan Edgar, himself a budding writer, took on the task of selling his late father's work for the screen and of writing new books in the style of and "inspired by the work of Edgar Wallace." So I guess he was like a proto-Christopher Tolkien. When Bryan Edgar moved to West Germany after the war, he brought with him the infectious enthusiasm for his father's work that had resulted in so many books and so many films based on those books. Wallace's stories were very popular in Germany throughout the 1920s, thought exactly how this came to be I'm not sure. I guess it was part of the treaty the Allies made Germany sign at the end of World War I. "Cede all territories, disarm and disband your military, make Kaiser Wilhelm shave his mustache, and oh yes, you must read Edgar Wallace novels" -- that's the actual text of the Treaty of Versailles, though I would by irresponsible if I didn't mention that there is a hand-written addition, in pencil, from U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, ever anxious to be fair and forgiving, that says, "You can sell the books after you are done reading them, or trade them for a slice of bread." Needless to say, this conciliatory amendment enraged David Lloyd George, who proceeded to doodle a picture on the back of the treaty of Woodrow Wilson and Kaiser Wilhelm, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Unfortunately for Prime Minister Lloyd George, he was caught doing this by Georges Clemenceau, who used this knowledge to force England to cede its claim to Wilhelm's mustache, which would now become the property of France and be placed prominently on the face of Clemenceau himself so as to teach Lloyd George a lesson about being naughty.

See the important things you learn when you read a review at Teleport City?

Anyway, much like the British, the Germans were keen on making cinematic adaptations of Edgar Wallace novels. However, all production of these films was halted, and indeed the books themselves were banned, with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. When Bryan Edgar Wallace arrived in West Germany after the war, his appearance coincided with a general revival of interest in crime films, thanks in no small part to the films of the French New Wave, who were keen on drawing influences from old American noir and crime films and championing genres of cinema previously dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration. The atmosphere was right, and before too long, interest in Wallace's works was revived, and so too was the production of films based on those novels. In 1959, with the release of The Fellowship of the Frog, the krimi was born.

There were two competing studios cranking out Edgar Wallace movies at the time, though most fans consider the string of films released by Rialto to be the definitive krimi series. Most of the films were dubbed into English for American audiences, and some were retitled for distribution elsewhere. Over time, the films based of works by Edgar Wallace became mixed in with the films based on the works of Bryan Edgar Wallace, writing in his father's style. The result is a bit confusing, especially so far removed from the original years of release and with so little information previously available. The end result is a wonderful krimi maze as convoluted and confusing, yet fun to wander through, as the plots of the films themselves.

Phantom of Soho is among the films attributed to Edgar Wallace but actually the work of his son, and rather than being one of the Rialo productions, was made by the studio CCC. As far as krimi go, it is not considered to be the best, but that's no indication that it isn't very good, and it still serves as a textbook example of the shared elements of Edgar Wallace krimi. As with all exceptionally convoluted and twisted stories, it can be distilled into one very simple idea: someone is killing people in and around a cabaret in London's seamy Soho district, and Scotland Yard needs to catch the killer. As with most "whodunits," we encounter a number of possible suspects, including a massage therapist employed by the owner of the club, a knife-throwing fake Arab, a beautiful dancer and photographer, a salty old fisherman, a writer, and even the chief of Scotland Yard himself. Attempting to crack the case is stolid British inspector Patten (Dieter Borsche) and his rather bizarre assistant, Hallam (Peter Vogel). Cracking the case consists of the two inspectors spending a lot of time hanging out in the nightclub that seems somehow inextricably linked to the strange murders. Soon, we are neck deep in a plot that involves insurance fraud, blackmail, lots of women in black lingerie, and lost of people skulking about dark, twisting, and excessively foggy Soho streets.


Although Phantom of Soho is not a Rialto production, and although it is based on a novel by Bryan Edgar Wallace rather than his father, it's still quite a fun, old fashioned mystery with a few modern twists (primarily in the form of half-naked women parading about the place, and even a couple very brief glimpses of nudity -- which must have been novel at the time for a mainstream film, and it contains pretty much everything that defines the krimi. First and foremost, there is the outrageous villain. The titular phantom of Soho is perhaps less outlandish than some of its krimi compatriots, largely because the phantom remains unseen for the majority of the film, represented only by a point of view shot in which we see only the killer's hands, wearing sparkly silver gloves and brandishing a knife. But when the appearance of the phantom is finally revealed, it is suitably creepy and fulfills the krimi tendency to feature criminal masterminds in outfits that are at once very cool and utterly absurd. I don't see how, even in a seedy neighborhood, you could parade around in sparkly gloves, a funerary shroud, and a decaying skull mask without attracting at least some attention, but then, this is only a loose interpretation of reality, so I guess such things are permissible. Edgar Walllace was a pulp writer, after all, and the pulps thrived on such villains. And besides, around this same time, Kriminal would have been running around in a full-on skeleton-themed body stocking, so maybe it was just one of the many trends of London in the swingin' 60s.

We also have the requisite cast of potential suspects, suspicion being removed from them one by one and each succumbs to the blade o the mysterious phantom, until finally we are left with the core possibilities: the writer, the dancer/photographer, the doctor/physical therapist, the club owner, and the chief of Scotland Yard. All are connected in some way to a plot involving the sinking of an ocean liner in order to collect on the insurance money (this is not a central mystery to the plot, and is revealed fairly early in the story). The eventual reveal isn't entirely a surprise, but then, it rarely is these days, given how many movies have been made in this style. And besides, the fun of the krimi is rarely in being fooled by the unmasking of the killer. It's in the ride, and Phantom of Soho is an interesting ride indeed, steeped in eerie atmosphere cribbed from film noir and old horror films. The Soho of this movie is a fantastic, almost mythical creation, the result of someone who might never have been to Soho trying to make it up based on the things they've heard about it -- not at all unlike American and Italian Westerns serving up a mythical version of the Old West based on legend and romance rather than hard facts. This Soho is, as I said, covered in fog at all hours of the day and night. Clandestine couplings and seedy goings-on take place in every club, in the shadows of every alley, the rooms of every hotel, every movement softened to impressionism by the ever-present mist that clings to the neighborhood like the shroud of death itself. The Phantom of Soho exists in a fantasy world composed of such images -- similar in a way to the city occupied by the heroes and villains of Streets of Fire so many years later -- and seemingly equal parts 1920s romanticism and 1960s modernism, resulting in a film that exists in a time and place that is familiar but not quite real. This is realized through the use of studio sets and location shooting on the streets of Hamburg. The final product is a recreation of London that is completely unreal yet totally believable, obviously recognizable but with a hint of the alien, as if something lurking in that fog just isn't quite right. It is the conjuring of this mood that serves to be the greatest attribute of The Phantom of Soho, for the plot itself is somewhat slow and prone to lots of talking.

Just as the movie strives to create a mythical London, so too does it strive to create fiction-perfect ideals of Scotland Yard inspectors in the persons of Patten and Hallam. Patten is the stock stoic cop in a trenchcoat, navigating the seedy underbelly of London without ever seeming to be uncomfortable or distracted by the women in their underwear that thankfully populate the focal point of the crimes. His opposite number is Hallam, who represents one of the genuinely funny comic relief character, primarily because the comedy of his character comes not from broad attempts at slapstick, but rather from the fact that the presentation of the character is just so weird. It's a Germanic interpretation of the famous dry wit of the Brits ("At last, I can realize the dream of arresting my own boss."). In a modern production of this film, Hallam would be played by Cripsen Glover. As it is, Peter Vogel looks like a Peter Sellers character and really makes the whole film worth watching -- well, him and Helga Sommerfeld as Corrine, the dancer/photographer who spends most of the movie in fetching black lingerie and little else. Actor Peter Vogel was a tragic case, obviously talented but prone to depression. He attempted to kill himself on one occasion, by jumping out of a window during a film premier, and succeeded in another attempt at suicide, this time by poisoning himself. I really don't know the details of his life and career, but his turn as Hallam is really inspired.


But if there is a real star of the film it's the art design and direction. Director Franz Josef Gottlieb spent the 60s directing similar murder mysteries and pulp-inspired adventures, bringing an avant garde touch to his films that was most likely informed by French interpretations of American noir and the old German horror film's fascination with expressionism and strange shot set-ups. The Phantom of Soho is full of arty composition and awkward angles, but far from feeling gratuitous, these decisions seem perfectly in line with the bizarre feel of the film and the desire to create a sense of familiar reality that is, at the same time, disturbingly unreal. This is probably thanks largely to Swiss cinematographer Richard Angst, whose career stretched as far back as the pre-Hitler Weimar era of the 1920s. Very early in his career, Angst found himself working alongside Leni Riefenstahl, one of Germany's most talented and most notorious film personalities, on Arnold Frank's demanding cycle of mountaineering adventure films: The White Hell of Pitz Palu, Storm Over Mount Blanc, White Frenzy, and S.O.S. Iceberg. Cutting his teeth in the silent era of German film undoubtedly informed the cinematographer's sense of the surreal, and his experience on those challenging films helped him become one of the great cinematographers of early adventure cinema. In 1959, when legendary German director Fritz Lang returned to Germany for the first time since World War II (Lang not being especially friendly with the Nazis, nor they with him), he hired Angst for the color remake of his earlier India-themed epics, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb. Angst's approach to Phantom of Soho works wonderfully, infusing the film with a unique feel and tying it through imagery to the horror films of the silent era, just as the plot of the film would later tie into a new type of thriller: the Italian giallo.

There is much that is similar between the krimi and the giallo, and especially The Phantom of Soho, which is one of the more lurid krimis, and the work of Dario Argento. The krimi films grew from the pulp stories, with a dash of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes thrown in, and integrated the whodunit mystery with elements of horror and the fantastic. Giallo would take the same hybrid approach, one foot in horror and the other in the murder mystery, though the Italians did not carry over the reliance on a pulpy, outrageous villain in a crazy costume. But much of what we can see in the giallo cycle of the 1970s is present already in The Phantom of Soho: the mysterious killer, the list of suspects, the preoccupation with seedy locations, the inclusion of art and artists (specifically, writers, models/dancers, and photographers), and the protagonists working his way doggedly through a progressively more tangled web are all elements that became de rigueur for gialli -- themselves outgrowths of the Italian pulp novels from which they take their name ("giallo" or yellow -- because the books were easily identified by their signifying yellow covers).


Central to the plot of The Phantom of Soho is both photography and, even moreso, writing. Among the many potential suspects in the film is a woman with a successful career as a writer and an intimate relationship with the head of Scotland Yard. She challenges the inspectors to solve the case before she does, confident that as a writer with a fresh and sometimes outlandish imagination, she is better suited for working such an unusual case as that of the phantom of Soho. In this sense, the movie becomes a story that is writing itself as it goes. Argento would use this same concept in his 1982 thriller, Tenebrae, which while not being a remake of The Phantom of Soho, certainly uses the Bryan Edgar Wallace story and the related movie as its inspiration and basis.

Although the pace of the film is slow -- too slow for some people, with too meager a pay-off at the end -- I think it's a great little movie. The atmosphere is incredible, the cinematography inventive, and the story both strange and entertaining. It plays an important role in the long history of thrillers, and especially n thrillers infused with elements of the horrific. As an introduction to the world of Edgar Wallace and German krimi, one should probably start with The Fellowship of the Frog or any of the Rialto productions available on DVD. Being written by Wallace's son and produced by CCC, The Phantom of Soho is more of a "related tangent," and shouldn't be used as a basis for building a working knowledge of krimi -- though it absolutely should be included in any expansion of one's knowledge.


Kaiser Wilhelm, his hotly contested mustache, and his Phantom of Soho themed hat.

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Monday, March 24, 2008

Night Creatures

Release Year: 1961
Country: 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.

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Friday, April 07, 2006

For Your Height Only

Release Year: 1979
Country: The Philippines
Starring: Weng Weng, Mike Cohen, Tony Ferrer, Carmi Martin, Ruben Ramos, Beth Sandoval.
Writer: Cora Caballes
Director: Eddie Nicart
Cinematographer: Val Dauz
Producer: Peter M. Caballes
Availability: Buy it from Amazon


I was all excited to kick off a month of anime reviews with the epic adventure of Odin, and then my disc shows up from Netflix with a big ol' crack down the middle. With the bitter salt taste of tears in my mouth as they rolled down my sagging old man jowls, I realized that I was going to have to wait for a replacement disc to show up before I could explore the glorious word of the Photon Space Sailer Starlight, thus upsetting my Machiavellian scheme to inflict one of the most bloated, glorious disasters in anime history on you in a way that would make you think, "That truly sounds terrible; I must see it."

So then, I thought to myself, well, I should just continue with the Netflix Diary idea, which would mean moving on to Millennium Mambo and For Your Height Only. That sounded pretty good, but then I started watching the Tamil film Abhay, and it was so thoroughly insane and mind-blowing that I thought, "Surely it is this that I must review, for it is such a grand and gloriously psychotic work of art!" And then I was going to use that to do a month of Bollywood that would include everything from pipe-smoking chimps in sequined fezzes to evil bald criminal masterminds in Nehru jackets. But then, at roughly a hundred minutes into the movie (halfway, for you people unacquainted with the running time of Indian films), I discovered that DEI's disc is defective (I had previously rented the movie and thought the dying at the hundred minute mark was on account of the scratched up quality of the disc), thus leaving me hanging right at the moment that Abhay the psycho turns into a cartoon and spins my most beloved Manisha Koirala round and round on his big-ass knife (the whole movie is that plum crazy). I threw my arms to the tumultuous heavens and growled with a great guttural snarl, "Why do the Gods desire me to never finish Abhay???"

So here I sit today, impatiently awaiting my replacement copy of Odin and hoping I can scare up a non-defective copy of Abhay at some point in the next week or two (India Weekly has a different version for sale, but just to compound the insults heaped 'pon me, their online order form is malfunctioning today), wondering what I should do to keep the reviews from growing stale. So I guess I'm back to following the Netflix queue, which has piled up in the last week as I've been a bit busy with other pursuits. So out of the potential titles waiting to be reviewed, I think I'll go with For Your Height Only, mainly because I have not had enough time to watch Millennium Mambo, Lady Snowblood, or The Occultist, though The Occultist looks pretty wretched, so I'm excited about that. The Patlabor III/Ghost in the Shell II review was pretty heavy, so I'm itching to dig into some more humorous material.


When it comes to humorous material, however, For Your Height Only pretty much writes itself. I wrote in the review of Nigahen about what I call the Something Weird Phenomenon -- when a movie's basic description turns out to be far more entertaining sounding than the movie itself. The Filipino action film For Your Height Only can be summed up as, "A three-foot tall midget superspy in a leisure suit uses a boomerang fishing hat, jet pack, and kungfu to tear a bloody path through the criminal underworld." One would think, with a description that fabulous, that surely For Your Height Only would be another example of the Something Weird Phenomenon. It is a monumental feat, accompanied by angels blowing mightily upon trumpets of gold, that For Your Height Only manages to live up to and perhaps even surpass the expectations instilled in the viewed by so striking a summary.

Suffice it to say that this is really one of those movies you just need to see before you can grasp just how wonderful it is. This is the sort of movie that gave birth to this website. For Your Height Only was actually one of the first movies ever reviewed on Teleport City, though if you were to ask me the exact date, about all I could say to you would be, "You know, Nathan Shumate over at Cold Fusion Video was smart enough to keep track of the posting dates of his reviews." Like most of my early reviews, it was of exceptionally poor quality, as opposed to our current standard of just "shockingly poor quality." In time, I deleted the review with the intention of rewriting the whole thing so as to pay proper respects to a movie in which the leading hero is referred lovingly as being, "small and petite, like a potato."

So it is with considerable anxiousness in regards to my own abilities as a writer that I open a bottle of fine champagne and say, "Weng Weng, Agent 00, welcome back."


As a bit of a disclaimer, let me first say that I'm in love with The Philippines. I have great affection for any country that is tropical and manages to blend both South Asian and Latino culture, along with all the political instability and tendency toward upheaval and shoe collecting those two cultural guidepost entail (yes, thank God our great American political culture is totally free of any corruption or incompetence). Plus, it's one of the few places where a fat guy with a greasy moustache and an unbuttoned Aloha shirt can still be an action hero. Some day, I would like to live there.

The world of Filipino cinema is a pretty messy place, but like the seedy back streets of Manila, it's well worth picking your way through and becoming acquainted with some of the more flamboyant members of the society. Filipino cinema leapt into the global cult film consciousness thanks in large part to their willingness to play host to Hong Kong and American film industry cast-offs. The Philippines ha acted in many ways like the Italian film industry in that they love to latch onto an exploit a trend, but with even less money. In the 1970s, they produced a slew of cut-rate kungfu films -- and I mean cut-rate even when compared to cut-rate Hong Kong kungfu films. During the 1980s, the post-apocalypse and crappy action films fell into the loving embrace of their bosomy Filipino lover, resulting in some of the most daft entries into each genre, often prefaced with the title, "A Cirio Santiago Production." Santiago was sort of the Filipino answer to Golan and Globus, a filmmaker who never saw a concept that couldn't be drained for every penny it was worth, and then some so long as he added some nudity.

In the 1990s, when the Girls With Guns trend that delighted us for many years in Hong Kong finally fell out of favor with audiences who preferred, it would seem, romantic comedies, the entire trend packed its bags and headed toward the Philippines, where genre staples like Yukari Oshima and Cynthia Khan found new life in really bad films.


For Your Height Only is the Filipino attempt to cash in on the James Bond inspired trend of the 1960s, except that it came out in 1979. It's not because they were Johnny Come Lately on the spy trend; it's because star Weng Weng was worth waiting for. Star Weng Weng stands three feet tall, making him one of the shortest secret agents in espionage history, at least until Tom Cruise came along (sorry, it was such an easy joke, but I couldn't help myself). In fact, Weng is on record as being the shortest leading man in movie history. Beyond that, however, the man called Weng Weng has lived a life every bit as shrouded in mystery as that of the secret agent character that catapulted him to international stardom. What little we know about him is a heady concoction of fact and unconfirmed legend. Some say he worked the blue movie circuit for a while, though as far as I know, no one has ever turned up any evidence of this, and more than likely, it just seemed like a funny rumor to start, like John Denver being a Special Forces sniper during the Vietnam War (he was actually a sniper during WWII, and then was cryogenically frozen and revived when it was time for someone to sing Sunshine on My Shoulder). All I know is that when the moon is full and the tradewinds are sweet with the scent of coconut oil that has been spread on the flat, tan belly of a languidly relaxing topless island girl, you can still here Weng Weng, voice, drifting through the palm trees, saying something wise like, "Ow, my wuttle head!"

For a man's man, actions will always speak louder that words, and while the story of Weng Weng may be shrouded in mystery and lies, we do have For Your Height Only -- For Y'ur Height Only, as the credits dub it -- which sees Weng Weng donning a white leisure suit to do battle with the forces of evil, as the forces of evil believe that, "the forces of good are our sword enemies! They must be exterminated -- and I mean lethally!" When a top research scientist is kidnapped by thugs working for the mysterious Mr. Giant (one guess as to how tall he turns out to be), Filipino secret agent Weng is interrupted in the middle of reclining with a cocktail with a couple hot babes by the side of his pool. Weng is a lover, and no woman in this film is able to resist his charms, but he's also a fighter, and when duty calls, it's time for the broads to hit the bricks.


Weng is armed by his chief with an array of James Bond style gadgets that were apparently the gadgets the British Secret Service received as a result of their "Design your own spy gadget" contest that was held for children ages 8-12. He gets a goofy looking old man hat that doesn't match his debonair look (it looks like it should have fishing lures affixed to it for ease of access when the bass start a' bitin'), but it is remote controlled, which means he can fling it at would-be foes and then steer it with his watch, thus annoying the foe to no end as the otherwise innocuous and harmless hat flutters about in their faces, sort of like a medium sized moth or one of those discarded shopping bags that gets swept up by a gust of wind and plasters itself momentarily to your shin. He also has a pair of X-ray glasses which are perfect for looking at bosomy secretaries in his chief's office, a special gun, and a pen that "looks like a normal pen, but it's a weapon. Has many uses," none of which are explained to us. I assume Weng can just jab it in a guy's throat, but if that's the case, it's not really that impressive an invention, because they already have pens and toothbrushes that are specially designed for murder (you can get them at Pottery Barn).

Now properly equipped, Weng immediately sets out on his mission, befriending a woman named Lola -- just one of several women who will fall for the small guy's suave moves -- and this guy has both disco moves and hardcore kungfu skills. Giant's henchmen do their best to kill Weng as he chops, slices, shoots, and jet packs his way toward Mr. Giant's secret lair on an island called Secret Island.


For Your Height Only does not skimp in the least on the action. Weng can't walk down a street in Manila for more than a few steps before someone is taking potshots at him, forcing him into a storm of secret agent fury. The choreography in the fight scenes is played slightly for laughs, as Weng flips, flies, and is flung all over the place with surprising agility. At the same time, however, the choreography is still pretty good. The fights move briskly, and Weng pulls off quite a few decent stunts (obviously, he doesn't use a stunt double), including a lot of dangling and jumping about as he is chased through and over the rides in a parking lot carnival. His sword fight with a bunch of thugs is pretty good, too -- especially when he does the weird "aiming with my sword" thing where he rests the blade on his forearm and looks down it like the sights of a rifle. I don't want to say that the power of his kungfu is entirely believable, but it's filmed in such a way that, at least within the context of a film about a babe-bangin' midget secret agent, you can buy that Weng is a bad-ass.

The film strikes a pretty good balance between serious action and goofy comedy -- some of which comes from the dub, which peppers the dialogue with a little more hamminess than I assume was resent in the original. Most of the comedy works well, though it does rely heavily on the simple appeal of the visual gag of seeing a guy under three feet tall who kicks the ass of the villains and makes sweet, sweet love to the womens. Weng isn't a great actor, but he handles his role well, pulls off the action, and manages to be fairly charming in a goofy way. He's no Roger Moore, but he's doing a decent enough imitation of a Roger Moore Mini-Me. The supporting cast -- well, since everyone is dubbed anyway, and it sounds as if some of the dialogue was rewritten to be funnier (which, in a rare occurrence, it actually manages to be), there's not much point in attempting to assess the acting.


The music is largely stolen from or based on the music from the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. Everything about the film is dirt cheap, but it's competently if unspectacularly made never the less. It looks better than many independent films with more money, and as good as some of the bottom-of-the-barrel Eurospy movies from the 1960s. Not having much money means that you're not really going to get that jet-set international feel. The villains drive a powder blue Volkswagon, and Weng seems to walk to all his locations, probably because that's how he keeps fit. Weng's wardrobe is pretty impressive, though, as he boasts an array of suits and shirts with big collars and open chests. The gals seem fond of Capri pants and tropical-print blouses. There aren't really any special effects at which to fail, at least up until Weng straps on his jet pack and flies to Mr. Giant's secret lair. It looks like they just strap him to a crane and swing him around -- he even kicks his feet playfully as he drifts through the air with a sparkler sticking out his rear.

One thing for sure, For Your Height Only never takes a break from the action and always has another trick up its sleeve -- whether it's a sword fight, a disco scene, or Weng just looking like a stone cold killer as he runs down the street with an M-16 that's just as tall as he is. For Your Height Only really wants nothing more than to thrill and entertain and be a good time at the movies, and it certainly accomplishes that. It's a tremendous amount of fun, not just because it's a Filipino midget spy kungfu action extravaganza, but also because halfway through, you pretty much forget that Weng is such a small guy, and you realize that you're enjoying the movie, cheap as it is, simply because it's an enjoyable movie.

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posted by Keith at | 5 Comments


Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Ghost in the Shell II/Patlabor III

Ghost in the Shell: Innocence -- 2004, Japan. Starring Akio Otsuka, Atsuko Tanaka, Koichi Yamadera, Tamio Oki, Yutaka Nakano, Naoto Takenaka. Directed by Mamoru Oshii. Written by Masamune Shirow, Mamoru Oshii. Purchase from Amazon.com

Patlabor: WXIII -- 2002, Japan. Starring Katsuhiko Watabiki, Hiroaki Hirata, Atsuko Tanaka, Ryunosuke Obayashi, Mina Tominaga, Toshio Furukawa. Directed by Takuji Endo, Fumihiko Takayama. Written by Tori Miki. Purchase from Amazon.com


Sorry if this review is a little dense on technical info, as opposed to being dense int he way my reviews usually are.

There isn't a lot of anime reviewed at Teleport City, and I'm not entirely certain why. The dearth of anime reviews is certainly not an accurate reflection of my viewing habits. I'm not hardcore student of the game, but it's not as if there's never been an anime title flitting across my television screen. I guess I just always figured that so many more knowledgeable people were already writing about the stuff that there was no real point to adding my voice to the chorus. There was, for the most part, very little of significance I would have to add to the discourse.

But then, it's rare that I have anything significant to add to any sort of discourse, and since I tend to watch a lot of titles that have fallen out of favor or been all but forgotten as the eternal sands of time shift ever forward and bury everything under the advancing mountain of Naruto episodes, I figured there was no real point to avoiding such reviews. It's important, after all, that crusty old dudes like me dedicate ourselves to reminding the younger generations about Golgo 13, Wicked City, and of course, Odin (you will bow to Odin). There have been a couple anime reviews on Teleport City in the past -- both of Leiji Masumoto creations -- but those reviews were written a long time ago, when the world was young and the site was still in its infancy, and both are of particularly poor quality and thus not entirely worth the time it would take you to find them in the archives. So just as 2006 is the year for increasing the amount of Bollywood representation on Teleport City, so too shall it be the glorious year that I review a couple more anime titles.


Having prefaced this entire piece with the proclamation that I watch mostly old stuff that the bulk of anime fandom has no interest in exploring, thus leaving it relegated to the ranks of a few aging bums who can't figure out what the hell thing it is people at conventions have with cat ears, I now intend to undercut that entirely by reviewing one of the higher profile anime feature films to make the rounds in the United States. Trust me, though, in the next week or so I'll review both Golgo 13 and Odin, and the elation you will feel shall cause you to run triumphantly up and down boarding ramps, high-fiving your fellow travelers as soaring glam metal plays in the background. It just so happens, however, that the wheel of fate that controls my Netflix queue served up two of the more well-known titles before the onslaught of nostalgic classics lined up behind them.

Normally, I would hesitate to link two reviews together so closely, as it short-circuits their stand-alone long-term lifespan once they're filed away in the archives. But Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence and Patlabor: WXIII not only showed up at the same time, but also share a number of traits that makes combining the two titles into a single review logical, at least from the viewpoint looking out from the twisted sinews of my brain, soaked as it is in rum and whatever addictive pixie dust they sprinkle on Girl Scout Cookie Thin Mints.

Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence and Patlabor: WXIII made the arthouse circuits around the United States at more or less the same time, give or take a year. Close enough for atom bombs, anyway. Both were received well by critics. Innocence was received well by fans. Patlabor somewhat less so, for a number of reasons. Chief among those reasons would be that Ghost in the Shell enjoys a much higher profile in the United States, either because the darker cyberpunk edge is more appealing to American fans, or because it features a hot, nearly-naked cyborg chick with a huge rack (of guns, I mean), while Patlabor has the merely cute, fully-clothed Noa Izumi. Both films took the bold step of eschewing the characters with which the series is most strongly identified in favor of focusing on previously supporting or entirely new characters. And both films are essentially detective stories that apply an old-fashioned approach to science fiction in which the technology and gee-whiz futurism is scaled back in favor of a plot centered primarily on characters -- which is nt entirely unexpected given the tendencies displayed in the overall body of work associated with both franchises.

We'll delve into the thematic similarities in greater detail shortly, but I also want to mention, for those who don't know (and even for those who do, since you've already read this far into the sentence, and there's no point in turning back now), that Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor share several common links behind the camera as well. To bring up to speed anyone who may not follow the ins and outs of the Japanese animation and comic book world, here's the gist of things. Ghost in the Shell, like pretty much most Japanese cartoons, started life as manga (Japanese comic book) written by a cat named Masamune Shirow. Shirow wrote all sorts of stuff that got plenty popular during the eighties and nineties, including Black Magic M-66, Appleseed, and Dominion: Tank Police. When it came time to turn Shirow's Ghost in the Shell comic into a feature film, director Mamoru Oshii was tapped to sit in the seat. Oshii was best known at the time as the director of the Patlabor series, based on comics written by Yuki Masami. Oshii also directed the first two Patlabor feature films, as well as a host of other projects with substantial followings, including Jin Roh, some of the Urusei Yatsura (Lum) movies, and the live action/computer animation hybrid Avalon. If you ask the average casual fan of anime to name a few directors, there's pretty much a 95% chance that if they can name anyone, they're going to say Mamoru Oshii and Haiyao Miyazaki. If you are lucky, they may be able to trot out Katsuhiro Otomo, but more likely they'll just say, "Oh, and that guy who made Akira."


Because, presumably, Oshii was occupied with Innocence, he was unable to serve as director for the third Patlabor film, which was instead directed by the team of Takayama Fumihiko (who has previously directed Gundam: War in a Pocket and the original Bubblegum Crisis OAV) and Takuji Endo (a first-time director whose only previous experience was as a second unit director for the TV series X -- it never even occurred to me that an animated film would have a second unit, but I guess it makes sense, even if you're just sending them across the room to shoot the animated establishing shots and landscapes). Not being able to rely on Oshii to direct the third film might have seemed a hindrance to carrying over the tone of the first two films, which were fairly dark and serious, in contrast to the series which had relied as much on comedy as it did action and tension to create and hold onto the huge fanbase that followed Patlabor throughout its entire television and OAV run. But Fumihiko seemed a decent fit even if he wasn't the superstar Oshii was, and he did come from an eighties background that suits the feel and fans of Patlabor.

Of the two titles, Patlabor definitely came with more baggage than Ghost in the Shell. Besides the manga, there was the much-beloved television run and two OAV series, not to mention the two previous films. Patlabor has never enjoyed the soaring popularity in the United States that I thought it deserved, but even so, there were more than enough fans to put the pressure on the third film, especially since the original two had been so good. Ghost in the Shell, conversely, had the manga and only one other movie. Since the average -- and I'm referring to this proverbial person a lot -- anime fan doesn't read very much manga, we can almost discount its influence in both instances. Ghost in the Shell also had a television run in the form of Stand Alone Complex, but at the time of Innocence's release in the United States, very few people had seen the television series, and even so it was only in its first season.

You could argue, of course, that Patlabor never aired on American television, nor did it get a VHS release. Therefore, that body of material is as viably dismissed as the manga. On the one hand, I'd say you have a point. On the other, I'd say that it's because none of it aired that it becomes that much more valuable. The only people who had seen Patlabor, for the most part, were hardcore fans, people who had taken the time to seek out fansubs when no other alternative existed. Their affection for the show was pretty intense. So the people who would be seeing a Patlabor movie would be, presumably, well versed in and dedicated to the series history, where as Ghost in the Shell, with its higher profile name and less back material, would tend to attract a more casual viewer.

Thus, parting ways with the main character from the first Ghost in the Shell film was less of a gamble than parting ways with the entire core of characters established in the Patlabor titles, at least as I see it. But both films are notable for their willingness to shift attention to other characters. In the case of Ghost in the Shell, Innocence concentrates on cyborg cops Batou (voiced by Akio Otsuka) and Togusa (Koichi Yamedera, who has a tendency to show up in bit parts in Godzilla movies but is probably best known as the voice of Spike Spiegel on Cowboy Bebop or as Captain Harlock on all the more recent Matsumoto titles).


Batou is pretty familiar as he plays a pretty big role in the first film as Major Kusanagi's partner. Togusa gets a fair amount of attention in the Stand Alone Complex series, but fans who saw Innocence before Stand Alone Complex will be fairly unfamiliar with him, though because of the TV show he became my favorite character and emerges as an obvious counterweight to Kusanagi, who shows up in Innocence only at the very end, and then only as a disembodied consciousness downloaded temporarily into a body. Incidentally, Kusanagi is voiced by actress Atsuko Tanaka, who among other credits, appears as Saeko Misaki, one of the main characters in Patlabor: WXIII.

Where Kusanagi is so dedicated to technical modification of the human that, by this film, she has ceased having a body at all and exists only as a "ghost" in cyberspace, Togusa is the least cybernetically enhanced member of Section 9, the special police force to which he, Batou, and formerly Kusanagi belong. Togusa has cybernetic implants in his brain, as all police do, but that's it, and even that he seems to have solely because it's a requirement of the job. Somewhere between the two extremes stand Batou, heavily modified but also perfectly happy maintaining his existence as a physical human being.

Similarly, Patlabor: WXIII does not focus on the ensemble cast that makes up Special Vehicles Unit 2, the focus of all the previous entries in the series (though the second movie focuses less on the unit as a whole and more on a single character, their captain Goto), and instead concentrates on two police officers, the aging Detective Kusumi (who I assumed was the same character as aging Detective Matsui from the first Patlabor film, but I'm pretty sure I was wrong about that, though they might as well be the same) and the younger Detective Hata. Kusumi is voiced by Katsuhiko Watabiki, who has surprisingly few credits to his name but did appear in Junya Sato's 1988 historical epic The Silk Road, which I haven't seen in a good dozen years or so. Hata is voiced by Hiroaki Hirata, who has done some work in the new Galaxy Express but seems to spend most his time doing work on Digimon. He also did the voice of Koga in Innocence. See, these two ventures really ought to just do a cross-over at some point. You wouldn't even have to hire much additional cast.

The plots of the two movies are neither entirely similar or dissimilar, and what they do share is as much a product of ongoing thematic links between the two titles as it is the simple result of there being a few pervading themes that run through the greater bulk of Japanese science fiction anime. Let's begin with Innocence, which kicks the action off by informing us that Major Kusanagi has more or less disappeared entirely into the net, leaving her former partner, Batou, to team up with Togusa on a case involving the tendency of a particular model of "doll" -- basically a life-size, computerized humanoid robot that can be employed for a variety of purposes (you can guess some of them) -- to go on the fritz and murder their owners before self-destructing. As with the first film, and as with much of Shirow's writing, the film dwells heavily on popular anime themes such as the merging of man and machine and the difference in human versus machine intelligence, and when does the latter start to become the former -- or in the case of increasingly cybernetically enhanced humans, vice versa. Batou and Togusa follow the trail of clues through the yakuza underworld and finally to the doll manufacturing plant itself for the final revelation as to why these robots are killing their masters.

Innocence is served well by a thoughtful, expertly paced story that relies heavily on identification with the two main characters, which it pulls off remarkably well. Sad, in a way, that animated cartoon characters are often more fleshed out and better written these days than their live-action film counterparts, who rely increasingly on flashy visuals and computer animation to carry flat scripts and thin characterization. There's a Masamune Shirow penned story in there somewhere. Although Innocence isn't exactly lacking for action (anyone who has seen the previous film or episodes of Stand Alone Complex knows that it's rarely an action-oriented show anyway), the sublime moments come in the down time between shoot-outs. Batou's interaction with his dog is particularly strong, albeit it simple, at making you warm to his character. I think it was a wise decision to place the weight of the story on his solid shoulders. As a man who is equal parts futuristic cyborg and old fashioned flesh and bone lug, he proves to be the most compelling of the Ghost in the Shell characters. Even though Togusa may be my favorite, he's too far to one end of the spectrum to effectively embody the push-pull between technology and biology that sits at the core of Shirow's entire Ghost in the Shell universe. Batou, on the other hand, is perfect for this.

When the film does shift to action, it's executed remarkably well. A mix-up in a yakuza bar and a hallucinogenic freak out in a supermarket are warm-ups for the finale though, which is both exciting, sad, and hypnotic as Batou and Kusanagi (or at least, her consciousness downloaded into one of the doll bodies) fight their way through a labyrinthine factory en route to uncovering the truth at the core of the case. The interaction of image and music is, as with the first film, dramatic, and Kenji Kawaii provides another stellar score for this film, same as the first and with obvious common elements to tie them closely together.

Even though it isn't an action scene per se, there's one scene in particular that is almost overwhelming in how well it's pulled off, and although the rich texture and detail of the animation (which is, as is often the case these days, a mix of perfectly realized cel animation and so-so computer animation) can't be denied, it's really the use of Kawaii's music that makes it so effective. This would be the surreal parade sequence that occurs as Togusa and Batou hunt down a potential informant. Absolutely stunning sequence, though I don't know if I could really explain why. It's one of those scenes that just really sticks with me because it works so hard at creating a completely unreal world that is also completely real and recognizable as something not all that far off base.

I've always thought, though it wasn't my original thought, that both horror and science fiction are at their most effective when they take realty and tweak it just enough to make it feel at once comfortably familiar and unnervingly alien. Blade Runner excelled in this capacity, and its no surprise that a film like Blade Runner became the inspiration for so much Japanese animation -- especially Ghost in the Shell, which seems to understand how to be influenced by Blade Runner more than most movies do. Meaning, that is, that Ghost in the Shell takes pointers from Blade Runner's art design, which many movies do, but also knows how to tie it in with similar but not identical questions about the future.

Anyway, it's a great scene. The first tour we get of Neo Tokyo in Akira is another such scene that sticks with me even though it's almost a throwaway establishing shot. But it's another hyper colorful blend of intensely detailed art and expertly conducted music that lets you glimpse a world both completely outrageous yet imminently believable.

The finale of Innocence is similarly haunting, both in the action sequences involving the battle with wave after wave of unblinking, flailing dolls and in the final revelation, which unlike many revelations, makes perfect sense placed within the overall theme of Ghost in the Shell. The movie at this point is transfixing through and through, but it obtains an even higher level here, one that is really flat-out mind-blowing. Suddenly, the horror and beauty of everything you've seen -- from garish Chinatown parades to twisted laboratories, twitching half-dead gynoids, Batou's apartment -- comes crashing you’re your head, and you, or rather I, realized just how gorgeous and powerful Innocence was. It's almost a Stendahl Syndrome sort of experience -- there is so much to absorb, everything is so detailed, so rife with meaning and theology and philosophy, that at some point you simply can't take it all in. I watched Innocence spread out over two nights, then watched it again in its entirety a night later. Still, even as I'm writing this epically long-winded review, the main thought in my mind is, "I want to watch it again right now." It's like heroin, or maybe Girl Scout cookies, which are even more addictive (and delicious) than heroin.

Its central questions remain vital as we advance toward a future that may not be exactly like Ghost in the Shell in the details, but certainly bears some considerable likenesses. We may not be downloading our consciousness William Gibson style into the internet, but we're certainly uploading more and more of our personal lives and social interactions. Our party invitations, friend networks, personal diaries -- these things have all become part of a colossally confused and often nigh unintelligible jumble, but this is really only a decade or so into this new medium we call the Web. The potential for it to play an ever-increasing role in our lives exists, even if it still seems like the stuff of Ghost in the Shell and Neuromancer at this point.

If we've proven anything as a race it's that we're absolutely wretched at accurately predicting the way technological advancement will shape our future. There are simply too many variables and unexpecteds that come form left field. I mean, who, when Henry Ford hopped atop his first automobile, could see that the invention of the car would not only change the face of transportation, but would be a direct cause of the rise in the importance of Middle Eastern nations, which in turn means we take an active interest in places that were previously nothing but backwaters visited by religious pilgrims and pipe-smoking British archaeologists who needed some more mummies. Look at how network technology has transformed society in just a few short years, and then try to imagine what it could do with another fifty. This isn't to imply that the change is either good or bad, simply that it has happened and will continue to happen, and that impossibly far-fetched things have a nasty habit of becoming run-of-the-mill realities if you give them a few years.


Likewise, Ghost in the Shell pokes at the question of what becomes of us, morally and spiritually, as the convergence of technology and biology advances. The Gynoid (all female in form, obviously fromt he name) dolls that are going berserk are regarded as malfunctioning machines, but at what point do increasingly human machines become the moral equivalent of increasingly mechanized humans? Where is the line that divides a gynoid from Batou, or from Kusanagi, who is still considered human even though she has forsaken her body and become a completely digital lifeform. Is it the heritage of having once been human? In that case, then what of machines that are infused in some way with human consciousness? Or human babies that are given cybernetic modifications shortly after birth?

This may seem like waxing philosophic on hypothetical questions invented purely so we could wax philosophic about them, but science fiction usually adds a layer of the fantastic on top of something otherwise real. Think of online crime, something with which we're still attempting to learn how to grapple. Not credit card fraud, mind you, but something like online stalking. At what point does an act committed in a virtual, digital environment deserve to carry the same weight as a similar crime in the real world? And the more time we spend online, doesn't that legitimize it as an equally real world as the physical world? Can you cheat on a spouse online, and how is it the same and different from doing it in person? We may not have implants and cybernetic eyes and arms, but we're an increasingly mech/tech oriented society. As machines continue to become increasingly commonplace as the conduit for our communication and interaction, at what point does our online presence become as liable for our deeds as our physical body?

Exploring these questions in general, and in particular the ever-evolving relationship between humans and the machines we build, is certainly nothing unique to Ghost in the Shell. It is, I would say, the prevailing theme in most science fiction anime from the 1980s on. Masamune Shirow's stories just happen to be the most literate in ruminating on these topics, though he stops short of ever really making a definite proclamation about the future, which is wise. Speculative fiction's job is to pose questions, not provide answers. This isn't just an excuse for vagueness, however. The world is stuffed with sci-fi that tries to pass its ill-conceived and half-baked plots off as speculative or "open ended" when in fact they're just bad. Innocence asks the questions, but it remembers to ask the questions in a way that makes you actually want to ruminate on them a spell after the film is finished.

Patlabor: WXIII does the same thing differently, or maybe it's something different the same way. I'm not sure. Patlabor has always been somewhat less fanciful in its vision of the future (which was, at the time, 1999). The basic science fiction premise is that a variety of large robots are commonly employed in a variety of heavy lifting tasks such as construction. But these aren't Gundam type super robots. For the most part, they're ugly, functionally designed, pieces of construction equipment. Only within the realm of police and military work to these robots -- labors -- take on a more anthropomorphic appearance. With the rise of labors, there was also a rise in labor-related crimes, most of which consists of crackpots in bulky construction labors smashing things up. Sort of like joyriding through Manhattan on a backhoe. To combat this new type of crime, the police began using the patrol labor - patlabor, for short.

But other than that, the future of Patlabor looks pretty much like the present, even more so than Ghost in the Shell, which also stays close to reality, or at least presents its fancier elements in such a way as to make them seem perfectly integrated in a world that is still full of convenience stores, apartments, and droopy faced dogs. But Patlabor really is just the present, but with fancier construction equipment.

So now you have the basics, and you can pretty much forget them because labors, patrol or otherwise, play an exceptionally tiny role in the plot of WXIII, which seems to ask many of the same questions as Innocence, but as relates to the continuing evolution of artificial biological life forms rather than electronic ones. Strange things are afoot in Tokyo Bay. Fish populations have plummeted, and construction labors working around the bay keep turning up smashed, with the drivers either missing or gorily splashed across the scene of the crime. Detectives Kusumi and Hata are called in to investigate the murders and presumable acts of sabotage, which may or may not be related to a controversial artificial land mass being developed in Tokyo Bay, which has been the source of much protest and trouble for much of the Patlabor series, film and television. The two cops quickly discover that all the labors were manufactured by Schaft Enterprises, or at the very least were running on Schaft motors.

Eventually, however, they discover that the crimes have nothing to do with the labors, and that there is, in fact, a monster in the Bay. It may seem a bit weird if all you've seen is the Patlabor movies, but the television series never shied away from paying homage to old giant monster movies. Kusumi and Hata then begin to trace the origin of the monster in hopes that discovering where it came from will help them figure out how the heck to deal with it, especially since it seems to boast incredibly regenerative powers.


The story that serves as the basis for WXIII was, some have said, not written to be a Patlabor story. However, it's not hard to retrofit it for the Patlabor universe, even if it isn't about the familiar Patlabor characters. Series regulars Noa and Shinohara make a brief cameo, and SV2 captain Goto has a couple brief scenes, but for the most part, no one from the previous Patlabor titles shows up until the very end, when the nature of the monster has been revealed and SV2 is called out to deal with subduing the thing. Fans were pretty evenly split on this approach to the movie, but it seems to me to be a natural progression based on the previous two films. The first one deals pretty normally with the SV2 crew. The second film, however, relegates every character but Goto to cameos and centers almost entirely on the enigmatic captain who seems to be a lazy bum but has far more going on in his head and his past than anyone would guess. In the third film, then, it doesn't seem that far-fetched that Goto himself becomes a cameo appearance and the story focuses on characters even further removed from SV2. As with Patlabor II, the story itself is very compelling, so that once you get over the absence of your favorite characters, you are quickly drawn in. Then, when the familiar faces of SV2 do show up at the end, it's like a reunion with old friends you're much more excited to see because of their absence up to that point.

I don't think WXIII realizes Kusumi, Hata, or Professor Saeko Misaki quite as well as Innocence does Batou and Kogusa, but both are still interesting. They just don't come with as much philosophical baggage. Kusumi is old and Hata is young, but that's not really something that plays a large role in their dynamic. It's not as if Kusumi is some old dude who can't deal with all this crazy new stuff. He's pretty competent, though hindered by a bum leg. And Hata isn't some hothead who chafes the old man. He just a good understudy. Where the philosophy of WXIII comes into play is with Professor Misaki and the creature lurking in Tokyo Bay. It's asks the same questions, in many ways, as Innocence. At what point do our biological experiments become living creatures entitled to the rights of other animals? When does something stop becoming an experiment? It never really meanders into the "tampering in God's domain" admonishment, and seems to basically say that, one way or the other, biological advances are coming. They may hit stumbling blocks, like moral opposition to stem cell research, but that doesn't mean they aren't coming. And when they do, when we start making breakthroughs, are we going to be ready to deal with the results? The safe answer, based on our track record, would be, "probably not." And while these things may not manifest as a giant creature grown from cancer cells, their impact on society could be no less dramatic.

WXIII is a slow film. There is very little action, and most of what we get is a police procedural. Fans of the Patlabor series probably won't be surprised by this though. The series was already well-known for being a giant robot anime that often had nothing to do with giant robots. The labors could disappear for several episodes as the series explored characters or simply took time out for a ghost story. In fact, some of the best episodes of both the television series and OAVs were the ones that didn't feature the labors (I'm thinking, Goto and SV1's Captain Nagumo have to spend the night in a love motel, or the Kanuka vs. Kumagami drinking contest episode), so the absence of labors until the very end is no big surprise. In pacing and tone, WXIII plays out much less like sci-fi action anime and compares more favorably to features like Tokyo Godfathers or Millennium Actress, only with a giant monster lurking in the bay. Slow doesn't mean boring though, at least not to me, and while some fans thought the double whammy of no SV2 characters and so little action was enough to sink the film, I still found it entirely compelling and quite thoughtful, not to mention tense and exciting when the action does make an appearance (as with the wonderfully done first meeting between Hata, Kusumi, and the monster).

Artistically, WXIII represents a perfect example of the quantum leap in quality that Japanese animation is capable of. As with Ghost in the Shell and some of the other mentioned titles, this is a realist approach to animation. There are no wacky faces or other familiar tropes of popular anime (although some of those did appear frequently in the Patlabor television series, but not in the Stand Alone Complex series). As with Innocence, backgrounds are richly detailed and character designs are true to real life. It may not be Oshii directing the action, but his protoges certainly don't let the master down. And once again, Kenji Kawaii supplies an evocative and effective score to accompany the stunning art and thoughtful script.

I don't think, in the end, that WXIII is quite as good a movie as Innocence, but it's still a damn fine example of just how good Japanese animated films can be. If it had spent a little more time in getting us to warm up to Hata and Kusumi the way we warm to Batou, it would have been flawless. The two films work very well together, and though viewing them side by side certainly isn't a requirement, it was a fulfilling experience for me. I don't think you need to be overly familiar with the mythology of either franchise, though it wouldn't hurt to bone up on the basics, especially since the Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell material represents, for me anyway, some the absolute best material film and television has to offer (and possibly comics, but I've never really read any of them), regardless of country or whether or not it happens to be live action or animated. Along with a few other choice selections, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence and Patlabor: WXIII stand up as sublime triumphs of anime features.

And then there's Odin...

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Monday, March 27, 2006

Nigahen: Nagina II

1989, India. Starring Sridevi, Aroona Irani, Jagdeep, Pran, Sunny Deol, Anupam Kher, Gulshan Grover, Anjana Mumtaz. Directed by Harmesh Malhotra.

One of the many things that really steams my monkeys is when a movie's summary sounds like a tremendous amount of fun, but the actual experience of watching it is more akin to having someone hammer nails into your sternum. In other words -- it's an interesting story, but you really wouldn't want to experience it yourself. You know, like some time you've sat down with a friend and the friend says, "Last week I watched a movie where a roller skating chimp in a rhinestone g-string swings around a cricket bat and has to save the world from nuclear annihilation." And you, being a wise and tasteful viewer, immediately think to yourself, "Ahh, this does indeed sound like a grand ol' time at the movies!" But then your friend sighs and says, "Actually, it was pretty boring. You're better off not watching it."

So you go home for the night, but secretly you are thinking to yourself, "I don't know. That monkey has a cricket bat and a g-string. I bet it's all right." So, against the advice of your friend, you watch the movie anyway, and it turns out that, yep, it's pretty much a soul-crushing bore. And you're angry not so much because you wasted time watching the movie as you are angry that someone could make a movie with a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat and have the execution come out so horribly boring. And not only that, but then this means that the idea for a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat has been wasted on a rotten movie, and now someone with the potential for making a good movie about a chimp in a sequined g-string waving a cricket bat can't make that movie, because the idea has already been used up.

Nigahen is such a movie. If I say to you, "Sonny Deol fights snake spirits who shoot laser beams out of their eyes while some priest in a fake Rollie Fingers moustache rolls around a lot during wind and lightning storms," then you're going to think, "Sounds pretty good to me. And there will be musical numbers!" And I was with you, right up to the point where I started watching the movie and realized that, in reality, it was going to be a slightly tougher row to hoe than I first thought.

But let's begin with Sonny Deol rather than the movie itself. Since one of my goals for 2006 is to increase the Bollywood representation on Teleport City, it's was pretty much a given that we'd be getting to Sonny Deol pretty quickly, though I didn't expect it to be in a film like this. I assumed it would be one of the movies where he's cracking Pakistani skulls and blowing stuff up. Yet somehow the supernatural drama Nigahen came up in the queue before Maa Tujhe Salaam, Indian, Border, or any of the other roughly eighteen thousand films he made in a three-year span where he plays a heroic and patriotic Indian officer fighting evil, moustache-twirling Pakistani terrorists -- though, to be fair, Nigahen does include a moustache or two well worth twirling.

Sonny Deol is sort of the Sylvester Stallone of India. Like other muscular action heroes, he doesn't have a tough name (Sonny, Sylvester, Arnold). He's good-looking in a rough and tumble sort of way -- more of a likeable lug than an actual sex symbol. He's a bad-ass, but he's also a nice guy, willing to punch you in the face or dance with you through the Alps. Like Stallone, he went through a period where he was pretty respectable (his Rocky/Nighthawks phase), but then started appearing in more and more ludicrous flag-waving actioners (his Rambo phase). All in all, however, Sonny Deol is pretty much a Bollywood institution -- not on the level of Amitabh, but still a pretty big and enduring part of the scene.

So, with Sonny's place in Bollywood summarized, let's move on to Nigahen, which is a sequel to the film Nagina, which I have not seen since no one seems to offer it for rent, and the one or two places I looked for it to purchase, should I want to apply my dollars in such a way (and I don't know that I would), listed it as out of stock. But I think I can get the gist of thinks, thanks in no small part to the convenient visual summary of the film provided during the credits of this sequel. The basics seem to be that we have some snake spirits, they protect some people, a wizard with a handlebar moustache wants a magic gem. There may be more to it than that, but that's enough to get you to the point you need to be to grasp the sequel, which seems to be more or less the same thing, except the two leads from the previous film are killed off, presumably in between movies, but you needn't let that bother you since the same actress (the lovely Sridevi) will be appearing as the daughter of the character she played in the first film.

We meet her first as a child being adopted by her grandfather, or possibly uncle. We then skip eighteen years ahead, as the now-grown Neelam returns to her ancestral home to witness the fact that the progress of time for the other characters has been realized by having them wear really shoddy silver wigs. What she doesn't know about the house and her family history is that her mother could transform into a snake, and two more snakes (her deceased parents?) show up from time to time to watch over her and communicate to her by shooting animated blue beams that cause the film to freeze almost as if someone was simply drawing on a still photo. This highlights one of the most peculiar and impressive feats of this film, which is to take a film made in 1989 and make it look like a film from 1979.

Neelam also isn't privy to the fact that her next door neighbor is a shrieking, screaming, sweating ranting, raving holy man lunatic named Garaknath (Anupam Kher). He's got the twirling-worthy moustache here, in case you are keeping track of that sort of thing. Garaknath has a tendency to sit cross-legged on the floor until wild bolts of lightning and gusts of wind blow him over, at which time he will inevitably spring to his feet, wave his trident around, and scream, "Bhairavnath!" over and over, which happens to be the name of his mentor, killed in the first film by the heroic couple who were off-handedly disposed of between the end credits of that film and beginning of this one. Garaknath is so committed to stealing the sacred gem his guru sought in the first film that he has sworn to eat nary a morsel until it is in his hands and he can use it to become all-powerful, whatever that may mean. For a guy who hasn't eaten in a decade or more, Garaknath is looking pretty good, and by good, I mean he has mangy hair and sweats profusely, which the camera lovingly captures in a series of close-ups that would make Sergio Leone proud.

That's pretty much the plot in a nutshell: crazy holy man tries to steal sacred gem, and noble girl guided by snakes foils him. You might be thinking to yourself, "Hey, I thought Sunny Deol was in this." He does show up eventually to fall in love with Neelam, and it turns out he is a snake boy who was raised by the villainous Garaknath, who among other things, kept him in a basket for fourteen years. Who knew living in a basket for fourteen years makes you come out looking like Sonny Deol? Deol's character is pretty much a buffoon here, and Sonny has the open-mouthed, slack-jawed look of befuddlement down pat. Other than that, he doesn't have much reason to be other than to hang around and occasionally drive a tractor.

So if you think that sweaty moustachio'd madmen trying to steal magical gems from snake girls sounds like the makings of a good movie, you're right. And if you further suspect that the final results aren't nearly as much fun as they sound -- well, frankly, given how the whole intro was about that very phenomenon (which I call the "Something Weird phenomenon," in honor of the many titles released by Something Weird that sound cool but end up being godawful boring), it's not that impressive if you guess it applies to Nigahen. A lot of this movie is just flat out uninteresting, which is pretty remarkable given the number of snakes shooting magic beams out of their eyes we have on display here. There's a lot of comic relief from a guy whose shtick seems to be based entirely on an "Oh my goodness, my wife is so fat!" routine that wouldn't have even gotten a chuckle out of a Depression era vaudeville crowd. Maybe if he'd also dressed in drag and been swatted with brooms -- at least then he could have been a hit with fans of Hong Kong variety shows. But there's way too much of that in between supernatural snake action.

The editing only makes matters worse. And I say editing only under the good faith that they actually hired an editor, because any evidence of his craft is barely detectable in the film. When Neelam is hypnotized by the snakes, who then lead her on a slow somnambulistic stroll out of the house, across the lawn, and into the temple ruins where the sacred gem is hidden in a pretty obvious spot, we get to watch pretty much the whole stroll. It just goes on and on, until finally some lightning and wind kicks up to blow Garaknash over, so we cut to him rolling on the floor, then leaping up to yell, "Bhairavnath!"

And you better get used to him doing that, too, because he's pretty much the best part of the whole movie. With Sonny not being allowed to jump cars through office buildings or shoot grenade launchers, the bulk of the film's entertainment value comes form Garaknash chewing scenery with a voracious William Shatner-esque glee. Garaknesh is obviously an over-the-top comic book style villain, and actor Anupam Kher seems to operate under the assumption that the only way to play him is by going way over over-the-top. And if you think he might maybe look somewhat familiar, even though you haven't seen too many Bollywood films, then perhaps you're remembering him as the stern but loving father from Bend it Like Beckham, a movie that slightly annoys me because, seriously, no love for Parminder Nagra? Keira Knightley had to go and pull a Harrison Ford by stealing all the fame that should have been more evenly distributed. And Parminder? Hey, I have nothing against Keira (well, I have King Arthur against her), but Parminder Nagra is much hotter.

Uh, where was I? Oh yeah, Anupam Kher and his handlebar moustache, enduring through the ages. He was also in Ziddi some years later, also with Sonny Deol, where I think Sonny does get to drive a car through the front of an office building, or something like that. It was one of the first Bollywood action films I saw, and I can't remember a whole lot about it except that, well, it was kind of silly. And he was in Bride and Prejudice, so I guess there's a law saying that if you are trying to make a Bollywood/Hollywood crossover -- but not actually Bollywood/Hollywood -- then you should hire Anupam Kher. I know I would.

The other half of the film belongs to Sridevi, who spends most of the film walking around looking beautiful before she finally gets her snake powers and delivers a musical supernatural finale that actually does live up to the promise on which the rest of the film fails to deliver. Sridevi has been (and continues) acting in the Hindi film industry since getting her start as a child actor in 1967. Since then, she's made over 250 movies and was one of the biggest stars in Bollywood. She doesn't have an impressive moustache like Anupam Kher, but that's usually not what you're looking for in a Bollywood leading lady. She does have eyes to die for and is a decent actress. Together, she and Kher will pretty much make you forget poor Sonny Deol is even in this movie.

As I said, the finale of the movie, in which Garaknesh and Neelam battle one another through the use of song and dance and, weirdly enough, a magical mongoose made of bread, delivers everything you want it to. Too bad you had to sit through two hours of rather plodding production before that. To make matters worse, at least for us non-Hindi speakers, the subtitles stop about a third of the way into the film, and come back in the final third but out of phase with the action on the screen, so that the subtitles are appearing two or three lines after the dialogue they're supposed to be translating.

A pretty disappointing movie considering the premise I hear the first film was much better. Snake spirit movies are nothing out of the ordinary for Indian films, or for many other south Asian industries. Sometimes, it seems the Thai film industry is comprised of 70 percent snake spirit movies, twenty percent romantic comedies, and ten percent movies where guys smash each other with war chariots and big mallets. Even Hong Kong has more than it's share of snake spirit movies, so with so many to chose from, there's no real reason to settle for something as disappointing as Nigahen.

It's obvious that producer/director Harmesh Malhotra found himself with a surprise hit on his hands with the film Nagina and slapped this together with a minimum of effort and care in order to cash in on the success of the first film. It's a slapdash production right up until the end, which is worth skipping forward to if you happen to have the movie lying around, or if it is delivered to you one night by two snakes with mysterious intelligence. If such an event happens to you, be sure to throw your arms unto the heavens and scream, "Bhairavnath!" over and over for minutes on end. It'll be slightly more entertaining than sitting through Nigahen.

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Friday, March 24, 2006

Devil Came from Akasava

1971, Germany/Spain. Starring Soledad Miranda, Fred Williams, Horst Tappert, Ewa Stromberg, Siegfried Schurenberg, Walter Rilla, Paul Muller, Blandine Ebinger. Directed by Jess Franco. Written by Paul Andre, Ladislas Fodor, Jess Franco. Purchase from Amazon.com

If you run a site like I do, full of the sort of vitamin-packed goodness that has kids in rolled-up jeans and coon skin caps throwing their glasses of rich, chocolaty Ovaltine over their shoulder with reckless disregard for the public good, in order that they may get to Teleport City's most recent post that much quicker on their rickety soapbox scooters, then there are certain inevitabilities you have to face. For instance, you're probably going to write about Zombie Lake sooner or later. You're probably going to know more about the careers of Wings Hauser and Michael Pare than any sane person would. And, sooner or later, you're going to have to review a Jess Franco film.

Franco is a looming monolith that casts a long shadow over the cinematic landscape, a monolith constructed purely out of sheer force of volume. This Spanish-born director, who has worked in Spain as well as Italy, France, Germany, and on occasion, the United States, has made roughly seventy-three million films since the 1960s, and he shows little sign of letting up. In fact, if you break down the cinema of the world based on number of productions per nation, Jess Franco alone qualifies as a sovereign film-producing state, falling just below India but well above Hong Kong and the United States in terms of number of films produced per year. Like any good European cult film director, Franco has worked in every genre conceivable, and perhaps more than a few you of which you wouldn't want any conception whatsoever. Horror, adventure, espionage, thriller, comedy, even a hardcore film or two -- Franco has been there, done that, and most likely in a way that is imminently interesting and often thoroughly unwatchable. How he manages to capture two mutually exclusive reactions is one of the great mysteries of Jess Franco's career, and likely the main reason people keep coming back to his films despite being bored stiff (or in the case of his saucier films, bored but not stiff) by every one of them they've ever seen.

There's really no effective way to describe Jess Franco to the uninitiated. He is something they will simply have to discover ont heir own, n small bits and pieces, perhaps completely unaware of the fact that they are learning things about Jess Franco, until the day they wake up and realize they understand him, though they may not like him, and they certainly won't be able to articulate their comprehension to others. If anyone tries to puzzle you with one of those Zen koans, your reply should be to simply show them a Jess Franco film.

The thing that makes Franco so unique among the legions of oddball Eurocult directors is that, although he's certainly working in exploitation, he has a very definite artistic vision in even the worst of his films -- and believe me, "the worst of the films" describes the bulk of his film work. Beneath the avalanche of half-assed productions and trashy films, however, lingers the haunting realization that Franco is actually possessed of a tremendous amount of talent in certain respects, making him not unlike guys like Jean Rollin or Ray Dennis Steckler. Steckler, as an example, has never made an especially good film, though he certainly has his moments. But if you sit down, sad as this may found, and really study The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, there's quite a bit about that film, especially in the realm of cinematography and the ability to create an exceptionally eerie atmosphere, that is quite accomplished. French director Jean Rollin was the same way. He was a master of the quirky, off-kilter mood.


But where guys like Rollin, Steckler, and Franco fall down is in the fact that they are so driven by a vision, however cracked it may be, that they attempt to control as much of the film as possible. This means, on the one hand, that they are able to truly put an auteur's stamp on each film. It also means, unfortunately, that whatever weaknesses they may have (for Rollin and Franco, being of the European cult school, this usually manifests itself in the script and pacing of a film, when they bothered with a script) are significantly augmented by the exclusion of outside voices. Franco is left to wallow in his own vision, and thus in his own excesses, often allowing a film to completely lose focus in favor of dwelling on tiny bits and pieces that fascinate him but simply don't resound with audiences. Franco had his talents -- Orson Welles, of all people, considered Franco a kindred spirit and employed him as a cameraman and second unit director, if I'm not mistaken (and I might be).

Thus, watching a Jess Franco film is like going on an archaeological dig. You turn up a lot of useless junk, but from time to time, particularly if you are digging in the mud of cinematography, lighting, costuming, mood, and music, you turn up some real choice pieces.

It is traditional, for anyone setting out to write their first review of a Jess Franco film, to begin with his highest profile cult movie, Vampyro Lesbos, a movie that has managed to enter the annals of cult film history based purely on the strength of its title. It is a fine movie with which to begin, because it showcases pretty much every Jess Franco quirk and obsession, not to mention the fact that it boasts a performance by sultry Eurocult beauty Soledad Miranda, who until her untimely death, served as Jess Franco's muse (after her death, Franco would wander lost for a spell until finding Lina Romay, an actress whose willingness to do pretty much anything made her the perfect match for Franco -- she still appears regularly in his films, all these decades later, and often still totally in the buff).


Somehow, I just never got around to reviewing Vampyro Lesbos, just as somehow, I've managed to go all these years without reviewing, as far as I can remember, a Jess Franco film. Well, the latter I can rectify here and now, but as for the former, I'm afraid that the wheel of fate has been spun and landed on a lesser-known, at least until it's recent DVD release, film called The Devil Came from Akasava, though it came out the same yearas Vampyro Lesbos and also stars Soledad Miranda in (and out of) eye-popping outfits and features plenty of Jess Franco trademarks, though none will be so obvious as his undying commitment to the zoom lens.

Coming out in 1971, The Devil Came from Akasava (which is based on a story by mystery writer Edgar Wallace) was a bit late to jump the Eurospy bandwagon of the 1960s, which Franco had previously entered with his thoroughly ridiculous and highly entertaining Danger! Death Ray. Still, when a movie is this utterly strange, we can forgive it showing up to the dance a little late, especially since it shows up clad in silver boots and a see-through black tunic thing. Our action, if you want to call it that, begins in the fictional country of Akasava, where a geologist discovers the fabled Philosopher's Stone that can turn any metal into gold. The only problem with the stone is that exposure to it causes one's face to fry. Oh, and it also turns you into a zombie. So, right away, we're going to have zombies, spies, and Soledad Miranda striptease performance art? I guess you can see why Franco has his admirers.

No sooner has the geologist found the stone than he is getting shot at. He manages to deliver the stone to Doctor Thorrsen (German cult movie mainstay Horst Tappert, who would work with Franco on a regular basis during the 1970s), but it isn't long before someone show sup to off the assistant geologist and steal the stone. Then Thorrsen himself mysteriously vanishes while, at the same time, back in London, a mysterious man in the shadows who may or may not be Alfred Hitchcock is lurking behind the curtains in Thorrsen's office, just long enough to kill a man sneaking in to try and crack a safe. How's that for intrigue?


It's enough to get sexy British intelligence agent Soledad Miranda assigned to the case, and like any good female operative, she ascertains that the best way to approach the case would be to travel to Akasava and immediately get a job as a stripper in one of those arty, weirdly-lit strip-jazz clubs that only exist in Jess Franco films yet exist in every Jess Franco film. Here is the first, most noticeable, and most enjoyable of Franco's reoccurring obsessions. It kills the man to go ten minutes without inserting a performance art striptease at a jazz club full of swirling lights and candy colors. The man should have made a Bollywood film at some point in his career, because he shares the same affection for cutting to the musical number and the hot dancing girl, regardless of whether or not it has anything at all to do with the scene before or after it, or with the movie in general. Thing is, though these scenes were often gratuitous asides, it's obvious that Franco (himself an avid jazz fan and musician) adores them. They are shot and choreographed beautifully, and Franco's taste in groovy sixties cocktail lounge jazz is impeccable. I've certainly had worse times at the movies than watching Soledad Miranda dance (if you want to call it that; it's more a series of stylized poses -- "voguing," I suppose) while breezy lounge music from some of Europe's most accomplished composers of swanky bachelor pad music go wild.

Miranda teams up with Fred Williams as Rex Forrester, a detective from Scotland Yard, who all things considered, seem a little out of their jurisdiction operating in a fictional African nation, but jurisdictional squabbles are really the least of anyone's concerns in a movie with magic stones, Lugers, zombies, and avant-garde jazz-strip clubs. Together, at a very languid and meandering pace, they get around in one way or another of working on the case at hand, tracking down Thorrsen and recovering the stone. Like most Franco films, The Devil Came from Akasava walks to it's own idiosyncratic beat, and it takes its sweet time getting anywhere, allowing Franco to linger on whatever catches his fancy. Luckily, mor etimes than not, that's Soledad Miranda, the sort of women who make sit perfectly clear how a man could be instantly smitten and totally obsessed by a single glimpse. In the world of Eurocult starlets, Edwidge Fenech has always been my favorite, but Soledad Miranda, with dark hair and dark eyes and an engaging yet reserved personality, is the kind of intoxicatingly beautiful woman over whom men willingly destroy themselves. She certainly had that effect on Franco. And film of his in which she appears is about her, even if she isn't the main character, and Franco shoots her like a work of art.

One is sort of blinded by her beauty, but even if her presence alone wasn't enough to overshadow the rest of the cast, it wouldn't matter, because there's really not much to this film. Franco populates his film with a cast of experienced B-movie actors, all of whom turn in exactly the performance you expect from a band of such professionals -- which is to say, some are good, and some are just weird. Besides, Soledad, the real star of the film is the zoom lens, which Franco employs with almost gleeful abandon, zooming slowly, zooming rapidly, on any and every thing that happens to catch he camera's eye. It gets disorienting after a while, as the mere act of walking down a hallway seems to justify Franco zooming in and out. Often called the cheap man's dolly shot, the zoom can be petty brutally abused. Witness the deadly "slow zoom" of any number of home vacation movies. It seems like a good idea when you are doing it, like the "slow pan," but when you have to sit through a shot that takes a full two minutes to zoom into some detail, all you can do in the end is curse the day your father ever learned what that button did.

Still, there are times when a director or cinematographer can use the zoom to great effect. For example, whenever a cool guy walks into the room in a kungfu film. You just know you're getting a fast zoom in on his face, which can be really disconcerting if the character happens to be played by Lo Lie in the mid-to-late 1970s, when his case of Greasy Uglies was in full effect. Jess Franco, however, seems to zoom as often as possible, very rapidly, usually with no discernable reason other than to keep the shot moving. The end result is that a rather run-of-the-mill trashy James Bond knock-off like The Devil Came from Akasava becomes suddenly hallucinatory. Creating a dreamlike atmosphere is the primary goal in many European cult films, but while we expect it from a vampire or zombie or ghost film, seeing the same technique applied to a straight-forward spy thriller is really odd. Pleasant, though, and along with Soledad Miranda, it's that quirky approach to filmmaking that saves an otherwise dull spy film from going on the scrapheap alongside clunkers like Agent for H.A.R.M..

There's nothing particularly exciting about The Devil Came from Akasava. The action, when it does come, is pretty clumsy and not the least bit thrilling. The espionage isn't particularly engaging, either. But the film appeals to me never the less, perhaps because I can sympathize and relate to Franco's weird pacing and personal quirks. There are times when I simply can't struggle through one of his films -- A Virgin Among the Living Dead remains to this day one of the most excruciating chores to finish that I've ever failed at completing -- but The Devil Came from Akasava is much breezier, eye-catching and fun, helped in large part by Franco's dwelling on Soledad Miranda, a goofy spy plot, and some really good Euro-lounge cocktail music, which gets better when it's employed at really inopportune times that should be tense and exciting save for the breathless "la de do za zu!" female vocals accompanying the action.

The Devil Came from Akasava is probably one of Franco's more accessible film from the 1970s, when he really started getting weird. He even appears (as he often does) in a small role. But the film belongs to Soledad Miranda, and she remains the over-arching reason to watch. She made three films in 1971, all with Franco: this, Vampyro Lesbos, and the Lesbos follow-up, She Killed in Ecstasy. It was shortly after completing the filming of The Devil Came from Akasava that she was killed in a car wreck. Like Franco, we were all the worse off for her tragic passing.

As far as cheap Eurospy films go, this one clicks nicely into the middle of the pack, though Franco's offbeat direction and Miranda's presence lift above other middle-of-the-road spy films. I have a weakness for goofy spy films, though, so be forewarned that not only to do I go into The Devil Came from Akasava with a higher Franco tolerance than many, I also have a soft spot for European spy capers. So The Devil Came from Akasava is definitely not the sort of spy film I'd recommend to everyone, but I would recommend it to a select few, and you know, if you are looking to dip your toe into the Jess Franco pool, which is deep and wide and rather choked with weeds and surface scum, I think it's a more accessible starting point than Vampyro Lesbos, though really, what you should do is set aside a night and just watch all three Miranda-Franco films from 1971 in a row. That'll do some glorious damage to ya, right there.

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Monday, March 20, 2006

Fire and Ice

1983, United States. Starring Randy Norton, Cynthia Leake, Steve Sandor, Sean Hannon, Leo Gordon, William Ostrander, Eileen O'Reill, Elizabeth Lloyd Shaw, Micky Morton, Tamarah Park. Directed by Ralph Bakshi. Written by Gerry Thomas and Roy Conway. Purchase from Amazon.com.

OK, let's talk some Dungeons & Dragons before we dig into the film review proper. It'll help you understand the background which makes it possible for me to so love a film like Fire and Ice as much as I do. It's also one of those inevitable subjects, and it's best we get it out of the way now. Geeks and nerds will always bring it up. For us, D&D is sort of like heroin is to skinny rock stars. You go through a period of brief flirtation, end up heavily addicted to the point where it destroys your social life, and you sit around, all high on your drug, saying things that seem deep and philosophical to you but are really just idiotic, like, "Man, what if you put a Portable Hole inside a Bag of Holding?" or, "Man, wouldn't it be cool if Gary Gygax was here right now?"

Then you go through a period of recovery, followed by a relapse, then finally get clean and spend the next thirty years talking about how you "used to do heroin" or "used to play D&D" to whoever has the misfortune of being in a position to have to listen to you. Possibly the only thing worse than people telling you stories about when they were stoned and stared at a wall for seven hours, or people reading you their erotic vampire fanfic, is crusty old farts telling you about how they used to roll the twenty-sided die -- and yeah, try sidling up to someone in a bar one night and asking them if they'd "like to roll the twenty-sided die." You'll be lucky if your potential mate-date doesn't yell, "Blee yark!" in your face and take you back to their keep on the borderlands to show you their collection of smoky crystalline dice that they store in a leather pouch they bought at last year's medieval festival.

Speaking of which, when did it become acceptable to show up to medieval fairs dressed as an elf? Since when did that become an acceptable historic recreation of the times? I mean, a sprite or a kobold I could understand, but an elf? For that matter, when did camouflage pants and combat boots become acceptable attire? For God's sake, man, where're your jerkins??? I think if you're going to dress up for a medieval fair, you should have to meet some minimum standard of historical accuracy. At the very least, you shouldn't be able to wear a long Fruit of the Loom t-shirt with a belt cinched around it. It should be like dining at a fancy restaurant. You don't have proper attire? Well, sir, please don this complimentary King Henry VIII robe. OK, hoi polloi I can excuse, but the people who actively take part in the festival events? It just doesn't seem fair to me that some guy went out and forged his own full suit of plate mail armor, and then the guy next to him bought two rolls of Reynolds Wrap and a sheet of poster board.


But this is just one of those things, like how Paganism makes me mad because it's all fruity sweetness and light hippies flitting about and saying "Blessed be!" and "Goddess bless you," instead of doing what it was Pagans were busy doing before the sixties ruined it all, which was hitting people in the chest with giant battle axes then drinking blood from the cleaved skulls of their enemies. We didn't "drum circle" the Romans out of Scotland, people.

I'm just saying that if you are dressing up for the Renaissance Festival, at the very least you should have to invest in a pair of those tan rawhide Robin Hood boots that were popular with the pickup-driving guys when I was a kid.

Still, I suppose it could be worse. Anime fandom seems to have been overrun by fat guys dressed as cats, where all they do is draw whiskers on their face and throw on some cardboard ears and a pipe cleaner tail. You know what that outfit is, buddy? That's what the loser kid throws together for Halloween. Some people spend hours and hours crafted outrageously complex and detailed costumes to showcase their nerdiness. I think those people should be allowed to kick the ass of anyone who shows up dressed as a cat person, wearing normal clothes but with a cheap tail and ears taped to themselves. Likewise, the guy who makes his own authentic armor should be able to use his Morning Star of Clobberin' +3 on anyone who show sup to a medieval fair wearing their normal clothes, but with a cape thrown on.

I mean, this is why Civil War reinacters don't give you guys no respect, man.

So where was I? Sorry, I can get pretty worked up when a topic is this important. So yeah, like many other nerds, I dabbled in the black art of D&D. Funny, in retrospect, how hysterical people were over the evil of the game. If you remember, D&D was going to either turn us all into devil worshippers (also fond of just throwing cheap cloaks over their street clothes instead of going all the way and putting on red Danksin unitards) or it was going to cause the youth of America to become so lost in this amazing world of make-believe and fantasy that all concept of the real world would disintegrate, leaving us with a society full of people wearing fake elf ears and cheap cloaks. Hmm. I guess they were right, after all.

My flirtation with this world full of dungeons and dragons began at an early age thanks to the fact that an old boyfriend of my mother's happened to be one of the early employees at TSR, so he funneled me a steady stream of the old basic and advanced box sets that came in the red and aquamarine boxes respectively. I guess I was in fourth grade when we put together our geeky little campaign, though back then D&D was considered less dorky and more dangerous, sort of like how video games were dangerous, then became dorky, and now are back to the point where thug kids host video-game related public access cable shows about them. For the most part, we'd gather at a friend's house, cheat on our character sheets for a while, consult various charts, then play the game for half an hour (usually Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, because we liked to equip our characters with lasers and such) or so before retiring to play outside or watch a movie.

Four times out of five, the movie would be a barbarian movie not entirely dissimilar to the game of D&D we'd just abandoned in mid-campaign. Actually, there was a 97% chance that the movie would be Beastmaster. But we've covered that territory before, so if you need to hear jokes about Beastmaster and watching barbarian movies, go back and read one of our previous sword and sorcery movie reviews.

Somehow, the animated Ralph Bakshi feature Fire and Ice managed to slip through the cracks, though I can't imagine it didn't make the early 1980s cable TV rounds. It's perfect late-night HBO fare. If I'd seen it back then, I would have embraced it whole-heartedly and probably proclaimed it the best thing I'd ever seen. Or something to that effect. Alas, it was never to be, and although Heavy Metal was inescapable at the time, Fire and Ice remained unseen by me until the recent DVD release allowed me to go back and see how Bakshi's sword and sorcery cartoon had aged over the years.

In brief, Fire and Ice is the animated feature film equivalent of trying to buy saucy fantasy comic magazine Heavy Metal at age thirteen, praying that the B. Dalton check-out clerk doesn't realize that the magazine is a veritable horn o' plenty of naked chicks riding dragons around acid-trip landscapes that look like something the guy down the street would have airbrushed onto the side of his custom van. And then, if you do manage to score, you have to forever hide the torrid tome amongst your copies of Dragon magazine for fear that the big-breasted zebra-striped woman on the cover might otherwise arouse parental suspicion, resulting in them just happening to randomly open the magazine to one of the naughtier Guido Crepax stories.

Ralph Bakshi is a director and artist who was at the forefront of a lot of innovative new ideas, but he was always at the forefront in a way that would only facilitate his ambitions crashing and burning, only to have someone else basically hatch the same idea a few years later with great success. Bakshi first made headlines by directing a raunchy cartoon for adults named Fritz the Cat, forever destined to be picked up by accident by aging vaudeville fans who mistake it for Felix the Cat. At the time of the film's release, the concept of cartoon movies for adults, packed full of cursing, drug use, and sex, was pretty alien, and it's likely that more than a few ill-informed parents took their screaming, crying broods out for a fun day at the cartoon movie only to discover after the lights went down that they were in a grindhouse theater full of guys in raincoats jerking off to anthropomorphic cat women (if you've been to an anime convention lately, you've seen that some things never change).

Soon thereafter, Bakshi decided that what he wanted to do with his time was make an animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings trilogy. To realize his vision, Bakshi would rely on a technique called rotoscoping -- that is, filming live actors, then tracing the artwork over them. Bakshi's ambition was admirable, but it was a fair leap across the chasm from ambition to realization, and The Lord of the Rings failed to make the jump. The film is an uncomfortable mish-mash of questionable character design (ugly gap-toothed hobbits, Boromir the Viking, Aragorn the Navajo), impressive animation, and shocking lapses in the quality of rotoscoping that results in frequent shifts from animation to live-action actors who look nothing like their animated counterparts horsing around against heavily tinted backgrounds. It also didn't help that funding was a major stumbling block, and Bakshi ran out of time and money two books into the three-book adventure.

Undeterred, Bakshi forged boldly forward, sticking to the fantasy formula for Fire and Ice, which was released in the immediate wake of Conan the Barbarian's success and the launching of the sword and sorcery trend that delighted us for so many hours when we'd grown tired of using our imaginations to slay trolls and other beasts lurking in the pages of the Monster Manual and beloved Fiend Folio. Where Lord of the Rings held the promise of Bakshi merging his adult-oriented artwork with the world of Tolkien, the hook for Fire and Ice was that it was an artistic collaboration between Bakshi and one of the most famous pulp artists of all time, Frank Frazetta.

Frazetta rose to prominence as one of the most in-demand artists of the heyday of pulp fiction, gaining particular notoriety for his illustration of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and while you can't exactly claim that he invented fantasy artwork, he certainly defined it for quite some time, up until the point when Haji Sorayama started drawing hot, naked robot chicks and Boris Vallejo picked up the fantasy art gauntlet. But Frazetta was The Man for decades, creating a style that showcased beefy, axe-wielding barbarians in furry loincloths and big-breasted, big-booty women in tiny, tiny magical bikinis. It would seem, at least in the early 1980s, that his artwork would be a good match for Ralph Bakshi's animation style. Something more adult-oriented, full of gibbering goblins, bare-chested barbarians, and buxom babes. Working from Frazetta character designs and the basic template of a fantasy tale as defined by decades of pulp fiction, and plagued as always by budget short-comings and a general lack of interest from audiences, Bakshi gave us Fire and Ice.

Fire and Ice involves a clash of two cultures. First, there is the evil, skinny blue guy Nekron, who would be played by David Bowie if this was a big-budget, live-action film. Nekron lives in a land of ice and glaciers and dreams of making the rest of the world as dismal and bleak as his North Dakota-esque ice kingdom. Standing in his way is the king of Fire Keep, who has harnessed the power of the volcanoes that surround his kingdom. Nekron's scheming mother devises a plan to kidnap Teegra, the hot big-booty daughter of the king of Fire Keep, and thus force him to negotiate a surrender. But being evil, Nekron's minions are mostly sub-human goblins who don't seem to be very good at much of anything other than riding atop advancing glaciers while hooting and waving clubs. Teegra escapes (using the ever-effective "look at my nipples while I writhe about in the water" method of escape), gets captured, escapes, get captured, so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, a hunky barbarian named Larn survives Nekron's attack on his village and takes to wandering the land, killing goblins whenever he happens to come across them. He and Teegra eventually hook up, and then a dude named Darkwolf, in a big wolfhead hood, shows up to do some damage as well. The whole thing ends with a wild assault-by-dragon on Nekron's icy fortress.

It is by no accounts a perfect film. Bakshi relies once again on the technique of rotoscoping, realized here in infinitely better fashion than in the awkward Lord of the Rings. Although this is once again a film made by first filming live-action actors on a soundstage, then animating over the top of them, there are no points at which we just get tinted footage of the live-action actors. The actual animated look is consistent, and the rotoscoping provides for very fluid and realistic movement of the characters. Unfortunately, Frazetta relies heavily on moody shading and lighting, and in that sense, Bakshi's animation falls flat -- literally. There's no real attempt, save for one or two scenes, at creating a sense of depth or lighting. Bakshi just doesn't have the time and resources to achieve such detail, and thus Frazetta's characters look less like Frazetta creations and more like Bakshi's character designs from Lord of the Rings, but better looking. There's also a funny part in one of the DVD extras where Frazetta explains that he always assumed that somewhere out there were women who looked like the women he drew, at least up until the process of rotoscoping, and thus needing to find a real woman to serve as the actress base of his design for Teegra, the booty-shaking daughter of the good king of Fire Keep.

Although it fails to capture the nuance of Frazetta's original artwork, Fire and Ice still boasts pretty good if standard artwork. It reminds me of how much I miss the look of hand-drawn animation. Computer-assisted artwork results in really smooth, really slick lines and shading. By comparison, something like Fire and Ice -- which was really a stylistic throwback even upon its initial release -- looks likes a series of animated sketches, with bolder outlines, rougher around the edges. But I really like that raw look, though I have nothing against the more refined lines of modern animation. The backgrounds are also highly stylized, almost impressionist, which means they look cool and were easier to draw. With more time and better technology, Bakshi might have been able to realize a more fully developed style of animation for this film, with more inventive lighting and shading, resulting in something that looks less like a bigger budget version of The Herculoids. But he didn't have those things, and the end results are still enough fun for me to forgive him.

In fact, the entire film was completed by just a tiny handful of artists working from Frazetta's character designs and Bakshi's live-action stars, which makes the TV cartoon quality moments excusable and the more richly realized moments truly impressive. One of the artists was none other than Peter Chung, who animated the dragonhawk finale and would go on to create his own scantily-clad, impossibly-proportioned heroine some years later when he wrote and animated a little show called Aeon Flux.


The acting is, at best, workmanlike, but it suits the style of the film. None of the live-action actors were anyone especially accomplished, unless you count an appearance on Glen Larson's Buck Rogers to be an accomplishment. Steve Sandor, who provides the voice of Darkwolf, is probably the most experienced actor of the bunch, having logged countless hours working on pretty much every television show that was made from Star Trek on. Luckily, the dialogue doesn't demand much of anyone, so they all glide by pretty easily and without anything really sticking as a particularly bad acting job, though a few huffs and puffs during running scenes are looped in a little too loudly.

The script by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas (the duo also worked on the script for Conan the Destroyer, and both together and separately, worked on a number of famous cartoon TV shows, including The Transformers and GI Joe) is pretty paint by numbers pulp fantasy. It doesn't do anything you don't expect it to do, and each of the characters depends on you recognizing a familiar pulp archetype. There is no back story for anyone. We have no idea who any of these people really are, or why they're doing what they do. We don't know who Nekron really is. We have no idea why Darkwolf shows up and joins forces with Larn. The extras tell us that an original draft of the movie explained that he was Nekron's father, but that never shows up -- nor is it even hinted at -- in the finished product. The thing is, none of the characters really need a complicated (or even simple) back story, because the dependence on the target audience's familiarity with stock pulp characters gets the job done. Nekron does the things he does because he's bad. Larn is good. Darkwolf is cool and mysterious. Teegra is scantily clad (even for a fantasy film princess) in a thong and flimsy bikini top and has jiggling boobs and booty cheeks. If you need any more information than that, then you've missed the point of this type of throwback story, which is to show guys in loincloths beating up goblins, intercut with leering shots of Teegra's ass as she crawls through the swamp.

I would imagine a movie like Fire and Ice appeals to a very select population of people. It was a failure upon its initial release, though like most Bakshi films it built up a cult following after the fact. Measured against modern fantasy films that take advantage of cutting edge computer animation (Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy being the benchmark), something as modest as Fire and Ice can't really measure up, but you're sort of making a mistake if you pit a small-budget pulp fantasy movie from 1983 against something of that stature. Older fantasy fans, however, will probably find a lot in Fire and Ice that appeals to them, especially if they favor old-style pulp storytelling and artwork. I thoroughly enjoy Fire and Ice, beginning to end, and find it consistently entertaining and fascinating, not to mention beautifully realized despite the typical Bakshi-project budget constraints. It's a lot more enjoyable and successful as a piece of animated filmmaking than Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, and the influence of Frazetta, while not completely realized, adds even further to the old-fashioned pulp novel feel of the movie.

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posted by Keith at | 4 Comments


Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Oldboy

Release Year: 2003
Country: South Korea
Starring: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang, Dae-han Ji, Dal-su Oh, Byeong-ok Kim, Seung-Shin Lee, Jin-seo Yun, Dae-yeon Lee, Kwang-rok Oh, Tae-kyung Oh, Yeon-suk Ahn, Il-han Oo.
Writer: Jo-yun Hwang and Chun-hyeong Lim
Director: Chan-wook Park
Cinematographer: Jeong-hun Jeong
Music: Yeong-wook Jo
Producer: Seung-yong Lim
Availability: Buy it from Amazon


2003, South Korea. Starring Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang, Dae-han Ji, Dal-su Oh. Directed by Chan-wook Park. Written by Jo-yun Hwang, Chun-hyeong Lim. Purchase from Amazon.com.

Mainstream Korean films seem dedicated to one goal above all others: to be more Hollywood than Hollywood. To be bigger, faster, more technically accomplished, more slickly produced. There is little on display in most big Korean films that isn't complete cliche, very little that could be considered in any way original. On the surface, that may sound like a criticism. But what Korean films do with genre convention and cliche, much of the time, is execute it with such astounding panache and skill that it's still remarkable despite the lack of originality. Every cliche is executed as it should be, with absolute precision and skill. Take Shiri, for instance, the film that really sparked interest in Korean cinema over here in the United States (well, that and Yongary). Shiri is a pat and predictable film from beginning to end. Nothing in it is unexpected, and no genre requirement goes unfilled. But damn, it just executes those cliches so well!

Oldboy comes to the west with a considerable amount of fanfare, having garnered awards at Cannes, as if such awards mean anything at all these days. I think at some point, every single film ever made will have won some sort of an award. Suffice it to say, there hasn't been a Korean film with this much stateside buzz surrounding it since Shiri and My Sassy Gal stormed the scene a couple years ago. And once again, what we have on our hands is a very cliche film in which everything that needs to happen does, but is presented so expertly that the end result is a hugely entertaining foray into an increasingly twisted tale of revenge. If Shiri was the Korean film industry doing the Hollywood action film several magnitudes better and more violent, then Oldboy is the same industry's response to the popularity of the genre-bending master of the sicko revenge film, Takashi Miike.

Drunken oaf Oh Dae-su (Shiri's Choi Min-sik) is bailed out of jail one night by a friend. On the way home to see his little daughter and wife after his night of carousing and doubtlessly drinking a lot of Hienekin and wrapping his tie around his head, Dae-su simply vanishes. He wakes up in a fortified hotel room, with absolutely no idea where he is, why he's there, or who is doing this to him. He is there for fifteen years until one day, the very same day he has finally completed a tunnel to the outside through his wall, he is given a new set of clothes and a fat wad of cash and simply released without any explanation whatsoever. Completely lost as to what has just happened to him, he vows to track down the people who did this to him and extract some answers by any means necessary.

It's a lean but exceptional premise for a film, indeed something that would seem right at home in a Miike or Hitchcock film, or even a Raymond Chandler novel. Oldboy possesses the same kind of quirky lack of balance that inhabits those works. It isn't long before Dae-su has managed to trace his way back to the hotel prison, and it doesn't even take that long to go fromt here to the person who paid to have him imprisoned. Oldboy's central mystery isn't who, but why. Dae-su must find out why he was imprisoned, first because the need to know is burning him up, and later because a sushi chef with whom he has struck up an awkward romantic relationship is placed under threat of death. Slowly, however, the film shifts focus even from that quest and we discover that Dae-su's revenge against his captors is secondary to the complicated revenge plot that has been hatched against him for reasons he can't understand. As he progresses from one clue, one fractured memory to the next, the revelations create an increasingly twisted and sick picture of what's happening.


Oldboy draws its strength primarily from the atmosphere. The slick direction by Chan-wook Park (JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) not only result sin a gorgeous, colorful film, but it greatly augments the feeling of bewilderment and anger engulfing Dae-su. The slow move from a simple tale of revenge into territory that is truly bizarre is perfectly accomplished, once again illustrating that the best way to unsettle someone is to take a very familiar world and subtly, slowly warp it into something alien and grotesque. Oldboy does this so well that you hardly even notice that the film is getting increasingly sicker with each fragment of a clue that is recovered. Although Miike would seem to me to be the obvious inspiration for this type of film, Park's steady approach resists the gory excesses and lack of focus that identify Miike's films, which is why I feel it's apt to say Oldboy falls somewhere between Miike and Hitchock, or a particularly surreal old hardboiled detective novel. The web of ever-more perverse characters and realizations wouldn't be entirely out of place in a Raymond Chandler novel, populated as they were by pornographers, drunks, lecherous scumbags, and decadent California aristocracy. When the final pieces of Dae-su's torture snap into place, it isn't entirely unexpected -- I'd guessed what the revelation would be already -- but it's unsettling and effective regardless.

Although there is action in the film, it's hardly an action film. Having nothing better to do while locked in a hotel room for fifteen years, Dae-su decides to get into shape. One of the central elements to the overarching themes of the film is the transformation that takes place in Dae-su. When we first meet him, he's not necessarily a bad guy. He's just a useless chump. As wrong as what happens to him is, it's never the less responsible for transforming him into an entirely different type of person: physically fit, focused, determined. At the same time, we get the sense that this transformation has been engineered for him specifically so that he'll have so much more to lose when the hammer falls. His sudden explosion from being more or less entombed alive to being free means that every emotion, every feeling, every event is possessed of much greater power than would otherwise be. One of the first things he does upon obtaining his freedom is go to a sushi bar and order something, anything that is alive.

So although this is a character study more than an action film, the nature of Dae-su's heightened awareness of everything around him means that he's going to explode into fits of rage from time to time, especially when someone is standing in the way of him obtaining the next level of truth. There are a few fight scenes, and a couple particularly sadistic torture scenes that don't quite plumb the gratuitous depths of Takashi Miike at his most insane but are never the less grueling to behold. But, as with the series of increasingly twisted revelations, none of the violence seems out of place. The man has been locked up for fifteen years, after all, in solitary confinement, with no explanation as to why. He's bound to be a little frazzled, and within the context of his character, everything he does makes sense. Still, dental work performed by hammer is pretty intense.

When the hammer does fall, it's precisely because Dae-su is now focused and driven that he gets deeper and deeper into the secrets that lie behind his imprisonment and, consequently, the revelations that will conspire to destroy his present. These revelations never come across as contrived or happening simply because something needs to happen to propel the script along to its climax. The screenplay by Jo-yun Hwang and Chun-hyeong Lim is perfectly paced and presents each layer as an organic and entirely believable outgrowth of the previous, even during the end when things begin to get exceptionally complex and a little far-fetched. Within the confines of the film's internal logic, however, they make perfect sense and remain solidly believable.

The film is peppered with bits and pieces of comedy, but it never dominates the situation, and the film remains for the most part, tensely paced and hauntingly grim. It's obvious almost from the beginning that no good is going to come of anything that happens in the film, and Dae-su is a sympathetic enough character that the knowledge that this is all going to end badly for him keeps you involved in the story. The villain of the piece, Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) is acceptably freaky, but the film relies largely on the talents of Hye-jeong Kang as cute, beleaguered sushi chef Mi-do, who finds herself thrust into Dae-su's life seemingly at random, though the viewer knows it's very unlikely that anything happening to Dae-su is happening at random. Her career is really only just beginning, but she turns in a strong performance here, matching up very well with the far more experienced and accomplished Min-sik Choi. You know bad things are probably going to happen to her as well, and you really just don't want them to.

All in all, quite a nerve-wracking though enjoyable film. I really like Park's direction in this movie. It's slick without indulging into overkill. The color palette goes for the over-saturated, ultra-rich look that is enjoying increasing popularity, a welcome change for me from all the washed-out or blue/yellow tinted films we've been suffering through the past few years. It works to make the very normal world around Dae-su seem not quite right, as if there is something off-kilter and sinister and somewhat fairytale-like about it, albeit one of those fairytales where everyone ends up cooked by witches or eaten by trolls. After watching a string of really awful Korean sci-fi films that looked beautiful but were almost impossible to watch (Yesterday and Natural City), it was nice to see another Korean film that doesn't skimp on cutting edge production but also remembers to wrap it around a compelling, intensely tragic, and haunting movie.

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posted by Keith at | 1 Comments


Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Disco Dancer

1982, India. Starring Mithun Chakraborty, Kim, Kalpana Iyer, Om Puri, Gita Siddharth, Yusuf Khan, Bob Christo, Om Shivpuri, Karan Razdan, Rajesh Khanna. Directed by Babbar Subhash.

Well, if I'm going to kick off another prolonged period of trying to review everything that comes to me through Netflix (minus TV shows -- I'm up for watching every episode of Cleopatra 2525, but not for writing about them all), this seems like a fine way to kick things off. At the same time, it's difficult to grapple with actually getting one's head around a movie of this nature, which seems to have been made under the premise that if you took the combined gaudiness and sparkle of Saturday Night Fever, Xanadu, and that movie where Jeff Goldblum runs the disco and Marv "the Leatherman" Gomez dances in the parking lot, then all that would be missing was, you know, an extra little dash of sparkle and over-the-top camp value. And kungfu fights. Leave it to Bollywood to not only make a tacky, eye-searing, completely delirious disco film, but to feel like they need to jack it up on steroids, complete with the overwrought melodrama and breakneck shifting of genres that one comes to expect from a Bollywood production.

Our action begins back in olden times (the 1960s, I assume). Actually, no, scratch that. Our action begins with the opening credits, which are sort of like looking at Christmas lights through translucent Christmas ornaments. The theme song isn't so much a disco song as it is something you might find preprogrammed into a Casio keyboard -- and why it is always a Casio keyboard? Anyway, whoever composed this song leans pretty heavily on the "Fill" button. Ahh, if only keyboards at Radio Shack really did come with one of the preprogrammed beats being "Bollywood Extravaganza."

Young Anil whiles away the hours playing drums and flute with his late father's friend, Raju (Rajesh Khanna), who has the power to create "pew pew" disco laser sound effects out of thin air. Acquaint yourself with the sound effect, because you're going to be hearing it a lot. Their show attracts the attention of a young girl, who invites Anil and his mother, Radha (Gita Siddharth) into her rich father's fenced-in compound for a little musical fun. Unfortunately, the father (Om Shivpuri, who looks like he ate Anthony Wong and was last seen around these parts in Don alongside Amitabh Bachchan) isn't as fond of young ragamuffins dancing and playing music with his daughter, so he slaps the kid around, slaps the mom around, then frames them for theft.


The stigma of being criminals follows them around town as if it was a giant mob of jeering locals. It seems this way because it is a giant mob of jeering locals. Hounded and disgraced, Anil and his mother -- who still feeds him by hand even though he's perfectly capable of feeding himself -- decide to leave the slums of Bombay and seek a better life down in Goa. Anil, angry at the scorn heaped upon his typically saintly mother, vows to avenge the insult.

Years later in Goa, which seems a much nicer place to live than the shantytown slums of Bombay, Anil has grown to be a strapping young lad in the form of Mithun Chakraborty (Elaan, Kismet, working as a wedding singer for fat women ho marry midgets in top hats. He's not rich, and his mother still feeds him by hand, which was mildly gross when he was little but is downright disturbing behavior in a grown man. I suppose someone could lay out the cultural and traditional reasons why this is symbolic of this or that, but still, come on! It's a grown man who gets hand-fed by his mother, who take sit as a great honor that she could stuff mushy rice into an adult man's mouth. Anil vows that he will become a successful performer and lavish his mom with the honor of feeding a rich man by hand. Also, he'll pay his wedding band a little better.

Meanwhile, across town evil disco kingpin Sam (Karan Razdan ) is showing us why we all watched this movie in the first place. Dressed as shiny man from the future circa 1977, evil moustachio'd Sam engages in some of the worst dancing I've ever seen -- and I've seen myself dance. He sort of flings his arms around and rolls awkwardly on the floor while his back-up dancers and female co-star do the work. From time to time, he'll shimmy up with all the grace of a bowl of egg noodles and yell something to justify his paycheck. The overall impression the Sam, the lord of the disco, leaves on the viewer is, "Huh, well how about that?" I mean, this guy is a bad dancer. Denny Terrio weeps every time this spastic lunatic pelvic thrusts his way onto the rainbow-colored dance floor. How Sam stole godfather of the disco status from Rudy Ray Moore is beyond me. I assume Sam is the king of all disco dancers purely because everyone else had already stopped disco dancing a couple years prior, so there's just not that much competition.


Sam is a dick, of course, who speaks of himself in the third person, and his father happens to be one dastardly P.N. Oberoi, the very same man who slapped Anil around those many years ago. When Sam's manager, David Brown (Om Puri), gets fed up with Sam's womanizing and drunken rants, he vows to find a new disco star and crush Sam. Sam laughs, as villains are wont to do. Obviously, David Brown sees Anil, who happens to be dancing down the side of the street one night in a scene that teaches us that in India even the street lights are blazing, star-shaped disco beacons. After a quick name change to Jimmy, the candy-colored adventure really begins.

Jimmy's (Anil if you're nasty, or his mother) first show looks like it might be a disaster. Sam enlists the aid of his sister, Rita (Kim -- just Kim), and her friends to show up and heckle Jimmy. Jimmy is phased for a second, but he quickly takes it all in good stride and turns the jeers into cheers by showcasing the thing that makes him a better "greatest disco dancer in all of India" than Sam; specifically, Jimmy actually can dance, though like Sam he can't resist floundering about on the floor and kicking his legs in the air like someone just injected him with pure essence of "Jane Fonda Video Workout." Was rolling around really considered a big dance move in India? Oh well, all I know is that the music and the set owes as much to disco as it does to "Incense and Peppermint." Seriously, it looks like sixties era Spinal Tap is about to step onto the stage and play "Listen to the Flower People." And Rita's boots? Let me just say that there was so much insane stuff in Disco Dancer (we're only at the thirty minute mark here) that I filled several pages of my notebook, and one page has nothing scrawled on it but, "My God, those boots!" They're like shiny gold pirate go-go boots or something. Just...I mean...they're just fabulous!


The show, seen by literally dozens of people, cements Jimmy as the number one disco king. Sam, never one to acquiesce with dignity or grace, throws a fit and makes his dad hire some goons to beat Jimmy up. The plot to bring Jimmy down becomes increasingly complex and Machiavellian, culminating in a sinister plan to kill Jimmy with an electric guitar. Will Jimmy escape the murder plot? Will people die tragically? Will Jimmy get over his subsequent crippling fear of guitars in time to face off against the Disco Kings and Queens of Africa and France in the big international disco competition? Disco Dancer will answer all these questions and more, and the answers will come to you in the dead of night, and they will be wearing a black leather jumpsuit fringed with chicken feathers and adorned by a headband with zebra striped horns attached to it.

Most Bollywood productions are a bit overwhelming to the senses of sight and sound, to say nothing of the simple art of being able to think straight. Disco Dancer, however, crams in even more weirdness than usual, which is really saying something. It's an absolutely delirious experience that will leave you reeling, staggering, possibly damaged, but also smiling and laughing. There's such a joyous overabundance of energy in the film that it can't help but delight you with its overzealous desire to be completely bonkers. When Jimmy faces off against a gang of finger-snapping thugs, it seems they might get the better of him until he fights back -- with finger snapping of his own. Let this be a lesson to all aspiring thugs -- don't finger snap at a man who can finger snap back at you -- but with an added echo effect on his snaps!

What makes this film interesting...well, let's be honest. What makes this film interesting is the insane costuming and art design during the plentiful musical numbers (not as many as an Elvis movie, but close). But what's also interesting is that the film doesn't follow what you'd think would be the conventional path of a "poor kid makes it big" movie, which almost always has the hero growing spoiled and conceited, possibly addicted to drugs, before either dying or having a moment of profound revelation. Such worldly temptations never enter into Jimmy's world (though Sam seems to like himself the heroin). When he promises to pay his band well if he ever makes it big, he comes back after he makes it big and pays them well. When he promises his mom that he will let her feed him by hand when he is rich and powerful, he does just that. He gets perhaps a bit overzealous in crushing Oberoi, never seeming to realize that it was Oberoi's slight that gave him the burning desire to thrash about in shiny spandex, but Sam and Oberoi are such jerks that it doesn't matter. It's kind of a disco Count of Monte Cristo. Jimmy even saves his old neighborhood from destruction at the hands of Oberoi's henchmen, even though the town jeered at him and his mother all those years ago.


The story is pretty well paced, believe it or not, and even decently written. Well, sort of. It's all completely absurd, but the film's great strength is that no one seems to realize its absurd. You can't call this camp, because camp implies some sort of intentional goofiness. Every second of this film drips with serious earnest, as if the makers truly believe that disco dancing can save the world. You have the usually Bollywood conventions -- the saintly mother, the tragic deaths, the glorious rebirths, romance, and kungfu fights. There's very little that is subtle about the film, but a few things are clever, such as when, in a drunken depression after the tragic death, Jimmy collapses on the side of the street with his head resting on a giant chain. Can Jimmy unshackle himself from this sorrow?

Mithun Chakraborty does a decent job as Anil/Jimmy. He spends a lot of time brooding, but even more time disco dancing the night away or breaking out the kungfu on some bald guy who supposed to be the deadliest pop star murderer in Europe but in reality gets his ass kicked constantly by Jimmy. As Jimmy's eventual love interest, Rita has little to do besides wait around for her chance to sing and dance in order to bring Jimmy out of his stupor for the finale. The supporting cast of villains is superb, though, and both P.N. and Sam Oberoi ooze sleaze.

From an art design standpoint, it looks like Disney got drunk with a clown and a medieval harlequin, ate a bunch of Sweet Tarts, then threw up all over the screen. Everything is glittering and flashing, a point that is driven home by the film's adoration of the little "bew bew bew!" laser sound effect that seems to have fallen out of favor with foley artists these days. Too bad. Flashing lights, mirrors, and so much shiny skintight lame (male and female) that even Russian disco dancers were shielding their eyes from the brilliance and calling it "all a bit much, da comrade?" That's how all Russians talked in the 1980s, remember. But what pushes the whole glorious mess into extremes John Waters could only dream of is the absolute shoddiness of the costumes on displays. I've never been a big fan of the disco look, but this is the disco look as purchased from the Halloween costume aisle of the local Walgreens. At one point, backup dancers prance onto the stage wearing light blue long johns, pink capes, cheerleader skirts, and black socks -- and that's just a tiny, tantalizing taste of the costuming insanity that runs rampant throughout this film.


That happens during the film's stand-out sequence, the disco ode to Krishna musical number. This is one for the books, people, a production number so completely bizarre and over-the-top that it'd bring a tear to Freddie Mercury's eye. When I was doing screenshots to accompany this review, I ended up with fifty or so just of this one number, as I struggle din vain to capture every moment of its unabashed weirdness. It's sort of like how a person will snaps a hundred photos of the Grand Canyon in an attempt to convey the vastness of what they are seeing. It never works, and likewise, at the end of the day all people should see at least this musical number before they die.

And then when they trotted out the disco king and queen of Africa and France -- Christ Almighty! That's when my head exploded. This is the best disco has to offer? No wonder Jimmy beats them all. The African disco lords move like Dawn of the Dead zombies, and I don't know what the hell the French guy was supposed to be doing. I think he was breaking out that Russian dance where they squat and kick their legs out. That's a hard dance to do. If only French Disco King had known all he had to do was fall down and writhe around amid a nest of flashing lights!

It seems obvious that the person who put together this motley massacre of taste had only a vague notion of what disco culture was, and took the little knowledge they did have and multiplied the fantastical insanity of it a thousandfold. The end result is like some weird sort of DIY disco world, where people are just scraping together whatever zany ensemble they can and making up their own spastic thrashing and calling it disco dancing. Actually, some of the outfits look like things that would be trotted out in cheap Italian sci-fi and post-apocalypse films during the 1980s, or perhaps things worn in the Glen Larson Buck Rogers television series crossed with Breakin' and Fame. It probably helps that this movie was released in 1982, a year or so too late for the real disco craze, but early enough to latch on to that last, dying breath while, at the same time, being able to draw on a rich body of neon-trimmed mirrors with Patrick Nagel artwork airbrushed on them. Sort of like those glam metal bands that came around in 1992 and just missed the boat. So fret not, Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns, and Danger Danger, for there's a little bit of that ol' Disco Dancer magic at work in your showing up to the party after everyone else had gone home.

I gather that Disco Dancer has a bit of a legendary reputation amongst people who seek out bad films, especially bad films from Bollywood, and while there's nothing in the movie that isn't completely ludicrous, I have to say that there was not a drop of irony in my embrace of this film. It's just so insanely, beautifully gaudy and completely nuts. I hesitated and was even a bit embarrassed to admit that I had a lot of fun watching Asambhav. I have no such reservations regarding Disco Dancer. This movie is pure, simple, candy-wrapper-colored fun.

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Monday, February 20, 2006

Asambhav

2004, India. Starring Arjun Rampal, Priyanka Chopra, Naseeruddin Shah, Sharat Saxena, Milind Gunaji, Mohan Agashe, Mukesh Rishi, Tej Sapru, Chetan Hansraj, Tom Alter, Arif Zakaria. Directed by Rajiv Rai.

Here at Teleport City, we are not exactly what you would call experts on Bollywood. In fact, with only a few recent films, a passle of actioners from the seventies starring Amitabh Bachchan, and a couple insane Ramsay Brothers horror films from the eighties under our cinematic belts, we're still more or less neophytes lost amid the swirling colors and opulent song and dance numbers. But that doesn't mean we haven't done our theoretical research, read up on the subject, marveled at the number of academic books that have been written in English on the Indian film industry, and gasped at how few non-academic, popular entertainment books have been written about a cinema that considers popular appeal so vastly important. In short, we've done some homework, but we're not yet at the stage where we cease to be dazzled by the simple display of vibrant color, overblown spectacle, and writhing, scantily clad Bollywood beauties.

Originally, the term Bollywood referred to a very specific, albeit large, category of film, that being commercial pop movies made in Bombay (Mumbai if you're nasty) and filmed in the Hindi language. The term has lost much of it's original selectiveness, however, and is now often applied to any film from India, be it arthouse or popular, be it filmed in Hindi, Tamil, Bengalese, or what have you. In a weird way, this is almost appropriate. Though India is a vastly diverse country with equally diverse cultures reflected in regional cinema, the overarching goal of the original Bollywood films was to create sort of an "uber-India," where the various cultures and people came together and existed in a quasi-real or completely fantastic India. So it is no big surprise that the term now refers to pretty much anything that comes from the Indian sub-continent.

While we may not be seasoned veterans of the Bollywood scene the way we are with old Hong Kong films or the collected works of Bruno Mattei (my goal is to make a Bruno Mattei joke in every single thing I ever write, from this moment on), and while I myself may at least still be swayed toward enjoyment by the bright colors and pageantry of a Bollywood production, that doesn't mean I'm completely blind to a film that takes missteps. Case in point: Rajiv Rai's high-tech terrorist thriller, Asambhav. It's been said that in an effort to appeal to as massive a population as possible, the average Hindi film tries to cram every film genre into a single movie. Asambhav is the rare entry that maintains a relatively narrow thematic focus -- this is an action film, stripped of the romantic comedy and estranged mother that appear in almost every other film, be they action or horror or whatever -- but it makes up for its lack of schizophrenic genre-hopping by trying to cram every single editing and camera trick from the last ten years into one film, and often into one scene, and occasionally into a single shot. The result is a dizzying nightmare of over-direction that turns an otherwise average action film into a complete wreck that could almost amuse you if it wasn't so busy inducing seizures.

Arjun Rampal plays Aadit Arya, super-duper Army commando and part-time international spy. When evil Kashmiri Muslims hatch a scheme to kidnap the President of India while he is in Switzerland, it's up to Arya, and for some reason only Arya, to foil the dastardly scheme. You might think that the kidnapping of a country's president would inspire a slightly more forceful reaction and better security, but I guess the security here is orchestrated by the same people who arranged the security for the transport of weapons-grade plutonium in James Glickenhaus' The Soldier. And I also thought the whole evil Pakistani/Kashmiri Muslim thing was played out in Indian cinema a few years ago. Didn't Sonny Deol single-handedly defeat the entire Pakistani army and all radical Muslim terrorists groups simply by staring at them in an intense fashion with a flag waving behind him in slow motion? Years after the fact, however, Rai returns to that seemingly eternal well, though frankly, the whole Kashmiri/Pakistani thing is really little more than window dressing by this point. It doesn't feel like the movie's heart is really into it, not like it was in Border or Maa Tuj Salaam, which if I'm not mistaken, actually had evil Pakistanis twirling their moustaches and relishing the thought of blowing up Indian women and children. Now there was some jingoistic idiocy you could really get behind. Trotting out the evil Pakistanis again, especially during a ceasefire, is sort of like if John Milius had just gotten around to making Red Dawn this year. I mean, it's not like tensions have dissipated, but the timing just seems way off.

But it doesn't really matter, because this film really has nothing to do with politics. It is even less informative about Indian-Pakistani-Kashmiri conflicts than the glut of "dastardly Pakistani" films that came out in the late nineties and early part of this decade. I reckon they assume you pretty much got the gist of things at this point, so they throw the Kashmiri terrorists in as a way to get the ball rolling without having to explain motivation.

In Switzerland, Arya poses as a reporter and meets the obligatory hot female pop star, Alisha (Priyanka Chopra). Since this is a Bollywood film, we can't have just one plot. So Alisha is the unwitting drug mule for slick Switzerland-based Indian criminal Sam Hans (Naseeruddin Shah, who steals the film, though that's no big feat considering the rest of the cast), who works with her handlers to hide the drugs inside musical instruments. Having Alisha in the movie means that we now have our excuse for gratuitous musical numbers, though in all honesty, they're pretty tame by comparison to many musical numbers. Most of them are just passed off as club performances or video shoots, which is kind of weak even if it is more "realistic." None of the songs are all that catchy, and the choreography is pretty listless. In an effort to add to the realism, we frequently cut from people who do look hot and are able to dance to people who don't and can't. Seeing big hulking gangster henchmen beaming big, goofy smiles and doing that "I can't really dance" dance is pretty funny, though.

Eventually, we learn that Sam is involved with the terrorists who kidnap the president, but he's hardly in the scheme for political reasons. And since he's the coolest character in the film, you can also figure that he'll be the one with ulterior motives and depth of character that allow for the obligatory "moment of redemption." There's another subplot that unveils the fact that someone in the Indian Embassy has betrayed their country as well and is in league with the terrorists. Incidentally, the Indian Embassy in Switzerland is apparently staffed by a number of incredibly leggy bombshells in micro-skirts and cleavage-revealing tops. Let's pray they never discover the boxy, ill-fitting pantsuit.

Will Arya be able to uncover the truth of this conspiracy? Can Alisha team up with him to escape the grips of her drug-meddling, murderous captors? Will Arya be able to kungfu so many different villains?

Naseeruddin Shah seems to be channeling a bit of Gary Oldman crossed with Graham Norton's wardrobe in his portrayal of Sam Hans. He's almost flamboyant, but stops just short of scene-chewing or going needlessly over-the-top, though he does wear lots of lavender silk suits and whatnot. Whatever the case, he turns in a good performance made better by the fact that everyone else is pretty bad. The hitman in the long shiny blue trenchcoat is just silly, and he looks sort of like Benny Urquidez mixed with Christian Slater, but with none of the menace such an abomination would actually exude. Our hero Arya is pretty much a non-entity through most of the film. He shows up from time to time to kungfu the crap out of people, but Arjun Rampal really isn't much of an actor at this point in his career. He looks good, he handles action believably, but his character is thoroughly uninteresting. Villains are always the better and more complex characters, and it takes an actor of tremendous talent or a very good (for the hero) or bad (for the villain) screenwriter to make the hero more interesting than the villain. Compared to Sam Hans, Arya barely even registers. For long stretches of film, you'll forget that he's even in it.

As if often the case in an action film from any country, Priyanka Chopra has little more to do besides tag along, get captured, and look hot. She does all these things well, and also handles most of the movie's musical numbers. The one that doesn't involve her is also the only one that isn't set in a club and grounded in some daft semblance of reality. Upon successfully kidnapping the president, the vile terrorist organization retires to their lair of villainy to celebrate with a musical number that involves a very hot, very scantily clad woman singing and dancing with a whole cast of bald gay guys in short shorts, combat boots, and chain mail. It's like these terrorists pack an entire dance troupe of Right Said Fred clones with them. Maybe they should have just unleashed their nightmarish Right Said Fred army on the world. No one would be expecting some Islamic Fundamentalist to stand in front of a camera and broadcast through Al Jazeera that he's "too sexy for this Jihad!"

But then, this terrorist organization does have a martial arts hitman in a shiny blue trenchcoat, and a squad that drives around Switzerland in generic "mercenary" fatigues, including a woman in camo booty shorts and a halter top. And you thought the revolution was all chadors and guys with scraggly beards. This is by far the battiest musical number, and as such, the best. Alisha's first and third numbers are OK, but her duet with Arya (again, in a club where they have been urged to sing together) is completely lackluster. To his credit, Arya looks like he can't wait to get the musical number over with so he can go kick someone's ass.

There are a couple things this film does differently than the average Bollywood film, and even the average Bollywood action film. Most noticeable is the more or less complete absence of a romantic subplot. Oh sure Alisha and Arya are going to fall in love, but the film spends hardly any time at all on this. There's not even a musical montage of them set against the various famous landmarks of the world. No, they simply meet, and then we assume they're in love because this is a movie and they're the male and female leads. Some Bollywood films would spend a good hour on a romantic comedy subplot, but Asambhav is content to simply take the well-worn path all action films take, and just say, "Look, they fall in love, OK?" Then it's on to some kungfu.

There's also precious little comic relief. Arya gets saddled with a comic relief sidekick agent in Switzerland, but his mugging is graciously limited. I mean, it's still never funny when he does get to do his comic relief shtick, but that's the same for action films the world over, and at least this one is quick to shut the guy up.

Even with all that, the director must have thought that the real star of the film was the director, because he crams every cheap trick and technique he can into the film. It's like watching distilled essence of 24 mixed with Mission: Impossible, which seems to be this film's main inspiration, especially since "mission asambhav" translates more or less to "mission impossible." Or if that's too good for you, then Mission: Impossible 2.

For starters, this film can't go ten seconds without a split screen. Sometimes, it's five or six different frames in one shot. And it's not just in scenes where split screen might heighten the tension or give us an alternate point of view. No, much of the time, it happens when something as mundane as a guy reaching for a tissue is all that's going on. Need to pick up a pencil? Show three different angles, and make sure one of them is in slow motion with thumping techno music in the background. This movie also loves that thing where you start in slow motion, then the action speeds up to super-hyper fast motion for a second, then goes back to slow motion. Once again, this is used at the drop of a hat, often with no meaning at all. Walking down the street? Why not shoot it slow-hyper-slow? And it's not like anyone is walking to a fight or anything. They're just walking down to the mailbox to see if their new issue of India Times has arrived.

There's also the tendency to have "ghost images" of a person appear, again for no real reason. Rather than augmenting or working with the action in the movie, all these goofy tricks simply distract you. They muddy the waters. They stink of a first-time music video director getting final edit on a feature film, though Rai is not a first-time director. He's just a bad director, apparently. The one thing I will say in his defense, however, is that as far as I remember, there was not a single instance of "bullet time." And let that be a lesson to all other directors: if bullet time is too tired even for Rajid Rai, who has never seen a stupid editing trick he didn't like, then it's really past its prime. So let bullet time go, people. Let it go. Rajit Rai did, and he replaced it with doing four-thousand split screens in one shot. Or roughly around that number.

It's amazing just how crippling over-direction can be. The Bourne Supremacy was an excellent thriller made nearly unwatchable by an awful director who couldn't stop quick-editing and shaking the camera around. Asambhav would not be an especially good film even if it had a good director, but Rajid Rai's relentless over-indulgence really pulls the carpet out from under what was otherwise an unimpressive-but-enjoyable action film. At the same time, I might have been bored if this movie had been competently directed. The sheer insanity exhibited by Rai does, I must admit, turn this film into an absolute disaster, but one that is largely entertaining. I don't like to pull the "so bad it's good" card all that often, but it sort of applies here. You have an average film. It's made awful by an over-indulgent director. But then, it becomes so over-indulgent, so awful, that it comes full circle and manages to be sort of entertaining in a way. It's by no means much of a recommendation, but it's the best I can do. The fight scenes are solid but uninspired. The acting is mostly below-average. The musical numbers are largely unengaging. But you know, the whole thing is such a hideous eyesore that it kept me watching.

Plus, Sam Hans was all right. Every single time he shows up on screen, no matter how mundane his appearance, the soundtrack blares with "O Fortuna." And it can't bear to stop the song. They thought it was so cool that even when Sam talks, they keep "O Fortuna" rolling, only at a nearly inaudible level. As soon as Sam pauses, the song volume rockets back up, then back down if he speaks again.

So Asambhav really has few redeeming features (Naseeruddin Shah's hamming is the only one I can think of at the moment. Well, that and Priyanka Chopra's midriff, and that crazy-ass hard gay musical number the terrorists put on). It's a crummy action film with awful direction. It's a completely soulless, paint-by-numbers action film that could have been churned out by a computer. It's never thrilling, and the lead male and female character disappear for large swaths of film, and you don't even notice or care because they were pretty boring anyway. This movie is a total bomb, and that didn't stop me from enjoying it for the same reasons that I enjoyed Gymkata and Treasure of the Four Crowns and Pray for Death. That reason: complete, twisted sickness. Don't listen to me, because I'm going to tell you to go ahead and see Asambhav. The near universal chorus of bad reviews this movie received are right, and I am wrong. Don't do it. I told you to watch Zombie 4: After Death, and now I'm telling you to try Asambhav. Why do you even trust me any more? For God's sake, man, that's the road to madness!!!

Asambhav -- pretty much the greatest movie ever made.

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Monday, November 28, 2005

The Shanghai Gesture

1941, United States. Starring Ona Munson, Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Victor Mature, Phyllis Brooks, Mike Mazurki. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Adapted by Josef von Sternberg from the play by John Colton. Purchase from Amazon.com.

If you ever want to see a scene that perfectly captures a heady air of decadence and mania without going all over the top and Caligula on you, look no further than the scene in Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture that introduces us to the opulent gambling parlor operated by the enigmatic Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson). Centered above the main gambling floor, the shot assumes a bird's eye view of the hall and its inhabitants as it spiral downward into the fray, where people drink, gamble, and flirt with an orgiastic glee as the delirious music swells. It's an incredibly effective and a perfect way to sum up this oddball noir drama set in the indulgent underbelly of Shanghai just prior to World War II.

Shanghai at that time was the hub of Asia, a rich seaport that every country wanted to control and where every two-bit con artist, hustler, adventurer, gambler, mercenary, and romantic could go to chase their dreams of fame, fortune, and power. It was Weimar Germany in Asia, complete with a citizenry too bleary-eyed from the decadent lifestyle prevalent in the city to realize that fascism and war was knocking on their door. The city was split up among various foreign powers all vying for increased control of the city. France had their own concession, but the International Settlement was the hub of Shanghai, and it was controlled largely by the British tai pans with input from American and French representatives as well as, as the war progressed and Japan expanded its conquest of China, Japan and Germany. The Chinese inhabitants were largely second-class citizens banned from entry into the city's most popular places, though a number of the country's most powerful and most famous native criminals flourished. The population of Shanghai was truly diverse, comprised of the aforementioned nationalities as well as a massive number of Indian Sikhs, Russians and Eastern European Jews seeking asylum from the Communist Revolution and escalating Nazi persecution, respectively.

Set against this backdrop is the story of the Shanghai Gesture, the archetypical story of a collection of "damned souls" collected together to smoke and betray one another. Sitting in the center of the web is Mother Gin Sling, owner of one of the largest gambling and drinking establishments in the city. Ona Munson is obviously not Chinese, but if you watch old movies dealing with Asian characters, that's nothing out of the ordinary. However, The Shanghai Gesture opts for an almost absurd approach to itself. Everything is larger than life and informed by von Sternberg's penchant for the highly stylized, artistic approach of German expressionism. Thus Ona Munson isn't just a Caucasian actor in fake eyelids. She's an over-the-top near-parody of the commonplace Caucasian actor masquerading as an Asian character. Her costumes are wild, her hair and eye makeup greatly exaggerated. I doubt this was any sort of political or social commentary on whites playing Asians as much as it was simply part of von Sternberg's overall absurdist aesthetic.

Enter into the picture British tycoon Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston), who wants to shut Gin Sling's debauched palace down to make room for his own developments and plans for the city. Rounding out the cast of characters caught in the web are Charteris' naive daughter (Gene Tierney, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Laura) who becomes corrupted by the pleasures and sins offered at the nightclub, brassy blonde Dixie (Phyllis Brooks) who comes to Shanghai and ends up getting a job at the nightclub, and suave ladies' man and con artist Doctor Omar (Victor Mature -- young and dashing enough to demonstrate why he was, at one time, considered a major matinee idol), who seduces both Phyllis and Victoria Charteris -- who goes by the nickname Poppy, as a not-too-subdued allusion to an addiction and to the original story's opium den setting. Sir Guy and Mother Gin Sling try to outmaneuver one another, resulting in a Lunar new Year's feast in which Gin Sling calls together to corrupted souls that form the nucleus of the story (as well as a few random others just to fill out the place settings) and reveals a series of dark secrets that she hopes will keep everything and everyone under her control.

The Shanghai Gesture was originally a play set in an opium den, but when it made the leap to the silver screen, censors balked at the idea of having it set in such an unsavory place. Since gambling was considered a more Hayes Code-friendly vice than opium smoking, they made the switch. Beyond that, I'll confess total ignorance of the contents of the play, and so won't comment on how the movie compares. As a movie, though, it is fabulous. Von Sternberg, who honed his skills at creating decadence in films like The Blue Angel, expertly creates an air of sated over-indulgence in which sin and seduction has become so commonplace that the inhabitants of the city have lost all moral bearing. The sets are grand and spectacular despite this being a relatively low budget production filmed entirely on sound stages. Nothing is realistic, but everything is believable. It has a tremendous sense of style that creates grand scope where there might otherwise be none, and not until In the Mood for Love would a period film set in a not-too-distant Chinese city create such fervor for art and fashion. If you are ever searching for a great theme for a party, look no further than this movie. Ona Munson's Gin Sling wardrobe is outlandish and gorgeous, and Victor Mature looks picture-perfect as the chain-smoking Arab playboy in a smart slim-cut suit and fez. Walter Huston also appears every bit the staunch and condescending British authoritarian, though he manages to invest his character with a sense of dignity and reserve that keeps him from becoming unlikable. This is largely a plot and character driven piece, and the actors have complete command of the characters and dialogue.

Despite the machinations and air of decay, there is also a sweeping sense of romance, though it's hardly the sort of romance that makes the covers of romance novels. The Shanghai Gesture exaggerates the state of Shanghai at the time, but only just, and the whole thing take son a dreamy, almost narcotic appeal. It's hard not to want to lose yourself in the neon-drenched back alleys and glittering nightclubs, even though you know it's ultimately going to destroy you. There are worse ways to go, after all. More than anything else, this movie is about creating a particular atmosphere. You can't take your eyes off the movie. It completely pulls you into this bizarre Sodom and Gomorrah of alcoholics and romantics, crushed souls and vengeful rivals.

The Shanghai Gesture isn't an especially well-known title these days, even with the noir revival that has been brought on by the release of so many old films on DVD. But don't let its obscurity relative to something like The Maltese Falcon fool you. It deserves much more attention than it gets, and it illustrates one of the forgotten traits of a lot of great noir films; the willingness to be experimental and completely weird in a way that makes everything seem absurd yet somehow still utterly believable.

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Sunday, November 20, 2005

The Big Sleep

1946, United States. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone, Peggy Knudsen, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Bob Steele, Elisha Cook Jr., Louis Jean Heydt. Directed by Howard Hawks. Written by William Faulkner. Purchase from Amazon.com.

It's not every day you see a line-up like this: original book by Raymond Chandler, screenplay by William Faulkner, with Howard Hawks directing and Humphrey Bogart in the lead role as iconic hardboiled private eye Philip Marlowe. That's an all-star assembly of talent if ever there was one. Still, tackling such a great book is always risky business, and since The Big Sleep is one of my favorites, I was anxious to see what they'd do with the source material, which isn't unfilmable by any stretch of the imagination but does contain certain quirks and oddities that would make it tricky material to handle.

No need to worry, because the film adaptation succeeds at faithfully following most of the book while taking a few Hollywood liberties that don't betray the original story -- though I'd have been happier with the book's ending being shot instead of the film's revision, but that's minor for me.

Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe (Bogart, who was custom made for the role) is hired by an wealthy old man to suss out the validity of a blackmail attempt and determine whether the man should just pay up or try to get rough with the blackmailer. At the center of the controversy is one of the old man's two daughters (Martha Vickers). She's a wild one with all sorts of kinks the old man either doesn't know about or, more likely, simply pretends not to know about. The other sister, Vivian (Lauren Bacall) is more reserved, though like anyone in this type of film, she too has her vices and secrets (gambling being the primary one). She is convinced that her father has hired Marlowe to find a missing man, a sentiment shared by many of the cops, thugs, hustlers, and crime bosses Marlowe encounters as he tracks the blackmail scheme and, invariably, gets involved in a rind that includes murder, pornography, and kidnapping -- among other things. Chandler always packed his books with a dizzying number of outlandish yet still believable plot twists, and Faulkner's screenplay does its best to cram as many as possible into the 114 minute running time.

So what does the movie do right? Pretty much everything. In my opinion, this is Bogart's best role -- better even than Casablanca and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, better even than High Sierra or The Maltese Falcon. Bogart's possibly my favorite actor (in as much as I can make up my mind about such things), and he's perfect for the role of the world-weary Marlowe, who puts on a tough guy act but whose character is underscored by a sense of chivalry and melancholy loneliness. Bogart captures all the aspects that make Marlowe such a compelling literary character, and he handles the quips and comedy -- which are an equally essential part of Marlowe -- with perfect timing and delivery. The best compliment you can pay an actor inhabiting the skin of a literary character, as I see things, is to say that the actor plays it the way you would want to see it played. That's what Bogart does. He says the lines the way I wanted them to be said, perfectly and absolutely.

His partner in crime is Lauren Bacall, still an acting neophyte at the time of this production and in rather a precarious situation. Although she'd received accolades for her role in her debut film, To Have and Have Not, critics savaged her sophomore role in Confidential Agent. If she got nailed with another round of negative reviews, it would pretty much mean the end of her career (as there were no Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies at the time). As it's told, her work in The Big Sleep was less than stellar, resulting in her agent requesting that Hawks go back and refilm certain scenes to give Bacall a second chance and avoid what could be a career-ending performance. Since Hawks obviously had a vested interest in making the best movie possible, he agreed and months after shooting had wrapped, he rounded up key members of the cast and reshot a number of scenes.

The result was exactly what everyone hoped for. The chemistry between Bacall and Bogart crackles with energy, and not just because they would become eventual real-life husband and wife. Cinema is littered with the corpses of husband-wife duets in which their characters exhibit absolutely no connection and chemistry. It helps, of course, that Bogie and Bacall had Chandler's dialogue to work with. Faulkner sticks pretty closely to a lot of Chandler's language, and when he veers from the source, he still manages to perfectly blend new material with the original. The back and forth between the principles is wonderful, easily one of the best pairings in film history. I'm not even a very big fan of Lauren Bacall, but with close direction, a strong script, and Bogart to bounce things off of, she turns in a world-class performance.

That said, I prefer the original cut of the film, at least in certain regards. There are scenes in it -- specifically between Marlowe, the cops, and the assistant DA -- that are crucial to making more sense of the plot. I've never understood why the later version of the film cut that scene. The DVD release contains both versions of the film. The later version is definitely better for Bacall; the earlier version is definitely better for the plot. As it's cut in the 1946 "final" release, the plot becomes even more incomprehensible than in the 1944 version. But it's not like Chandler's source material was all that straight-forward. Reportedly, Howard Hawks contacted Chandler himself to sort out some details, specifically about who killed the Sternwood family butler. Upon rereading his own story, reviewing his notes, and thinking about it a while, Chandler told Hawks he wasn't really sure. I'm thankful both cuts are on the disc, because they're both spectacular films.

Marlowe's running narrative is what makes Chandler's books good, but the assortment of deliciously bizarre and seedy supporting characters is what often elevates them to the sublime. Hawks relies on a host of solid supporting actors to bring the world of Philip Marlowe to life. The key to Chandler's books has always been that they take place in a slightly askew universe. Certain coincidences occur to propel the story forward, but within the confines of the world he constructs, Chandler's stories follow the rules they set for themselves. The Big Sleep is a world of decadent libertines and crazy nympho girls, of harried cops and slick gamblers, petty blackmailers and three-time-losers. Faulkner's screenplay doesn't leave any of them out, though they do crank down some of the more controversial aspects of the book to placate the Hayes Code censors (the homosexual relationship between two of the supporting characters is overt in the book but only hinted at in the movie).

As I said, Faulker was smart enough to realize how brilliant Chandler's original novel was, and he doesn't monkey around with it too much (the story goes that Hawks was given $50,000 to get the rights to The Big Sleep. He managed to get them for $5,000 and then pocketed the remainder). There are minor differences here and there, but the only major change is to the ending. The identity of a killer is changed, certain guilty characters are made less guilty, and instead of Marlowe heading off alone into the sunset, he gets a sunnier finale. It is Hollywood, after all, and although the era and private eye aspect of the movie means it's inevitably tagged as film noir, it's not really nihilistic enough to really deserve the moniker (Chandler's books, for that matter, are also generally more comical and his protagonists nicer and more heroic than you'd get in "true" noir fiction). Faulkner's alteration of the ending, while obviously parting substantially from the book, isn't bad. I didn't see anything wrong with the original ending, but I guess if you have to have a happier wrap-up, this one is pretty good.

Movies like this are why I keep watching movies. OK, yeah. Movies like this and Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead. It's rare that you have so many brilliant players hitting on all cylinders -- too many geniuses often results in an unholy mess, and while The Big Sleep certainly flirts with confusion, it's never incoherent. You just have to work at the plot a little. It's just about as close to perfection as a film can come.

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Monday, November 07, 2005

Bang Rajan

2000, Thailand. Starring Jaran Ngamdee, Winai Kraibutr, Theerayut Pratyabamrung, Bin Bunluerit, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Chumphorn Thepphithak, Suntharee Maila-or, Phisate Sangsuwan, Theeranit Damrongwinijchai. Directed by Tanit Jitnukul. Written by Tanit Jitnukul, Kongkiat Khomsiri, Patikarn Phejmunee, Buinthin Thuaykaew. Purchase from Amazon.com

After concentrating October on reviewing Spanish horror films -- which was actually more fun than the poor reviews for many of the films may suggest -- I've found myself with a big stack of other stuff I'd watched throughout the month that needs mention. So forgive me if some of these comments are shorter than usual.

It had been my intention to catch the Thai epic Bang Rajan when it was playing in extremely limited (as in, one theater) release in New York, but as with most things I plan, it didn't pan out that way. I was getting worried that no DVD release seemed forthcoming, which I thought was strange. So I rented the UK edition from Niche Flix, only to get it and discover that it was cracked and unplayable. I was just destined not to see this movie it seemed.

Then all of a sudden, there it was on Netflix -- and only Netflix, in some sort of exclusive distribution deal with Oliver North's production company or something, which was in charge of bringing it to the United States, presumably to make up for how awful Alexander turned out to be. So at last, I was able to sit down for a night and watch hot Thai guys with big walrus moustaches beat the crap out of each other.

Thai movies have been getting a lot of exposure in the past couple years. While not nearly as popular as Hong Kong, Japanese, Korea, or Bollywood films, Thai cinema has eeked out a substantial cult following in the West, thanks primarily to the sort of low-fi approach many of the films have. As films from most of Asia attempt to out-tech and out-glitz Hollywood (though to date, only the Koreans have really succeeded at this), Thai films are throwbacks to an era of cruder but more interesting special effects, CGI-free fight scenes, and a more down-to-earth approach to making films that, while often rough around the edges, are refreshing precisely because they are rough around the edges. They feel like movies actual people made, instead of being mass market researched products that seem to have been assembled by a machine.

Hot on the heels of the international success of Ong Bak, which reminded people of how much fun it was to watch Jackie Chan and others during the 1980s before they got all old and broken down and reliant upon computers and gimmicks, Bang Rajan hit some screens around the United States. Like many recent Thai films, it concentrates on the period of war between the disparate fiefdoms of Thailand and the Burmese empire to the north -- a conflict which eventually led to the formation of the Siamese nation, and the last time Thailand was ever controlled or occupied by a foreign power (unless you count Japanese businessmen drunk on Heineken and looking for a cheap handjob). While some films have concentrated ont he complex political maneuvering that took place during the war, and others on the personality of the great Thai queen who eventually lent part of her name to the nation, Bang Rajan chooses to concentrate on lean, muscular guys in loin cloths beating the shit out of each other.

The story of the village of Bang Rajan is one of the most famous in Thai history, and while it's easy to say the film Bang Rajan was inspired by films like The Seven Samurai, it's also easy to guess that The Seven Samurai might have found some kernel of inspiration in the true story of Bang Rajan. It was a tiny rural village which, despite being grossly outmatched by Burmese forces possessed of far superior technology, numbers, and training, managed to hold out against onslaught after onslaught, costing the Burmese dearly, not to mention delivering a major blow to Burmese morale before the town finally fell. Bang Rajan the movie takes this story and treats it with an epic feel, though there's very little truly original in the film and every hoary old chestnut of this type of war movie is served up. What makes Bang Rajan fun, however, is how gung-ho it is with its elements. I'd compare it to Shiri -- a completely by-the-numbers police thriller from Korea which, despite conforming to every single genre expectation, does it so well that it becomes tremendously fun to watch the old formula again.

Bang Rajan has everything you'd expect in a movie where sassy villagers repel superior forces: the cool and calculating leader, the young hot shot, the drunken lout who will rise Toshiro Mifune style to the heights of glory and honor in battle -- nothing you haven't seen dozens of times before. But that familiarity didn't much matter to me, because Bang Rajan is full of energy and zest, not to mention solid acting, incredible cinematography, and some truly monumental moustaches. The battles are gory, informed obviously by Braveheart, but very effective, and for much of their running time, the director (Tanit Jitnukul, who helmed the similar historical battle epics Khunsuk and Khun Pan: Legend of the Warlord) manages to refrain from employing "in the thick of it" shaky cam, which I loathe so much these days.

The leading cast of men continue the modern Thai tradition of loading their films with hot guys who can actually act. Jaran Ngamdee sports a moustache that would make Rollie Fingers fall down and weep at his feet. I guess it was a fake, but the fact that Thai men ever sported moustaches this fabulous is just one example of the undying flame that enabled them to defy the Burmese army for nearly half a year. Like the other characters, he is exactly what you expect of his character, but all of them are likeable, which is more than you can say in many other Seven Samurai-inspired movies. As the drunken, axe-wielding Nai Thongmen, Bin Bunluerit became the crowd favorite and took home a best acting award for that year. He proves that the Toshiro Mifune model can still be fun, exciting, and poignant even if you already know what to expect.

The fact that the film invests real time in developing characters and familiarizing you with them, even within he confines of their cliches, makes the finale clash, when you know pretty much everyone has to die, all the more effective. And the scene of Jaran Ngamdee slashing his way across a lush green field littered with corpses, his majestic moustache flowing around him -- man, it's straight out of "dramatic war cinema 101," but it's still extremely effective. The film also sports some fine female supporting stars, but I'm just not familiar enough with hem to have much to say except that I really dig the Thai dress and hairstyle from the 1760s.

I also enjoy comparing this to similar battles from generally the same time -- say, oh, I don't know, the American Revolution. Though I'd studied plenty about that in school, I never once had any idea what might have been happening in Thailand at the same time. I wouldn't exactly call Bang Rajan a solid historical lesson, but history and folk tales underline everything that goes into the story -- and in fact, that it is so similar to Seven Samurai and countless other war and siege films is a testament to how certain folk tales permeate all cultures, and certain traits and scenarios affect populations across varied cultures and geographies.

My only real gripe about Bang Rajan are a few ill-advised forays into CGI explosions. Placed as they are amid actual actors and sword fighting and stampeding elephants, these clumsily-executed computer effects stick out like a sore thumb. But there are only a couple of them, and that's easy to overlook in the greater scheme of thing. Bang Rajan end sup being one of my favorite things: well-executed, energetic genre formula. You know what you're going to get, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still taste delicious.

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Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Werewolf Shadow

There comes a time in a man's life when he simply can't stand the thought of sitting through another Spanish devil-worshiper movie from the 1970s. For me, that time came a mere two films into my exploration of Spanish devil worshiper movies from the 1970s. I admit, I am weak. I thought I could take it, but after Black Candles confronted me with woman-goat bestial sex and still managed to be hum-drum and boring, I felt it best if I let sleeping demons lie, at least for a few days, and move on to something different. My original intent had been to review the Paul Naschy devil worship movie Exorcismo, since any survey of Spanish horror, no matter how half-assed, shouldn't be done without devoting some time to Naschy. Luckily, my ambivalence toward sitting through a third such film didn't preclude me paying "homage" to Naschy, since the man actually built most of his reputation through his dozen or so werewolf movies.

Naschy is also known by his original Spanish name, Jacinto Molina. I prefer to call him Paul Naschy, because that's the name he gave himself, and calling him otherwise would, in my eyes, be a grave insult, like when people call pro wrestlers by their real names instead of just calling them Ultimate Warrior or Nature Boy Ric Flair. Molina decided to call himself Paul Naschy in hopes that having a less ethnic-sounding name would foster some degree of cinematic success in America. It didn't really work, though he did land a few small parts here and there before returning to Spain and beginning in earnest to build his legacy as one of the pillars of the Spanish horror industry, the other pillar being Blind Dead director Amando de Ossorio. Part of the problem was probably that, as far as de-enthnitized names go, Naschy was fairly unwieldy, though it did open up all sorts of avenues for use of his name in not-too-clever puns based on the fact that most people assume "Naschy" is pronounced "na-shee" or "nat-chee." For instance, a young man trying to convince his girlfriend they should watch a horror film together can confront her with a copy of, say, Beyond the Living Dead, and charm her with the line, "Hey baby, wanna get Nachy?" And who can forget the day Janet Jackson addressed the Spanish horror icon directly by imploring him to call her, "Ms. Jackson, if you're Naschy."

Naschy built his reputation primarily through the sheer force of volume. He appears as the cursed Waldamer Daninsky no fewer than a dozen times, aside from paying homage to Dracula and other creatures of the night. But his heart was always with the werewolf, even when his werewolf movies were retitled things like, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. My first exposure to Naschy came years and years ago, when as a wee sprout I caught an afternoon airing of Dracula's Great Love, which apparently was referred to by someone, somewhere as Cemetery Tramps, which is about the greatest name ever. I hope a group of girls somewhere starts a ghoulish garage rock band by that name, if they haven't already. All I really recalled about the movie later in life was that there was a long, drawn-out finale wherein Dracula engaged in a weepy inner monologue and woe and the sadness in his soul before staking himself through the heart. I remember that and the fact that I hated it. Even now, years later and despite recommendations, I still avoid the movie. Perhaps I am doing Naschy and Dracula a great disservice. But then, perhaps Naschy and Dracula were doing me a great disservice by making Dracula into such an emo crybaby. Next up is a movie where Dracula wears ratty oversized sweaters and writes acoustic guitar ballads about how vampirism makes him sad. Geez, I thought vampire lore could get no worse than the goth-industrial interpretation ruining it these days, but I think I just came up with something even more foul.

A few years ago, I saw Naschy in his signature role of Waldemar -- which I can't help but constantly bark out in an admonishing British nanny voice (sad that I have such a voice filed away for use) -- in the film Werewolf Versus the Vampire Women, which is another great title. Werewolves have never been my favorite monsters, but they do lend themselves to some great concepts -- like menacing a girl's dormitory, fighting lesbian vampires, or forming wild motorcycle gangs. Still, they also lend themselves to self-pity, and say what you will about a gill-man; at least they can't write bad angst poetry.

The problem with Werewolf Versus the Vampire Women was the usual problem with Euro-horror imported into America. It had been recut, redubbed, and rendered largely incomprehensible in many ways -- not that Euro-horror in its original uncut form is ever all that comprehensible to begin with. I decided to reserve judgment on the film until I'd seen the full and original version of the movie, which I have now done. The movie is still meandering and rather dull, with the usual gaping plot holes and a collection of characters that don't act anything remotely like real people would act in similar situations. Hey -- I said Naschy was a pillar of Spanish horror. I never said he was a particularly solid pillar.

In its original version, Werewolf Versus the Vampire Women is known as La Noche de Walpurgis, or Werewolf Shadow if you prefer. It is the third film in Naschy's Waldemar saga -- for what else can you call a series that is over a dozen films long -- but viewing of the previous two films isn't required, because you can get up to speed quickly. We open with two men arriving at a morgue where lies the corpse of Waldemar Daninsky (Naschy, who looks kind of like John Belushi if Belushi had been into weight lifting), who we assume was dispatched with silver bullets at the end of the last film. One of the men rambles on about how Waldemar is a werewolf, pointing out the man's pentagram-shamed mark as evidence. The other man, however, is a Man of Science™, and as a Man of Science it is his duty to scoff at and mock such superstitions. To disprove his own point, he extracts the silver bullet from Waldemar's chest, thus allowing the former corpse to once again spring to life and engage in some wooly bloodletting (it being a full moon night, he instantly transforms into a werewolf). Oh, Man of Science! Will you ever learn?

This being a European film, it would be unheard of not to have some gratuitous breast shots before the credits roll, so Waldemar the Werewolf immediately rushes out to feast 'pon the blood of a buxom young woman -- young women being prone to wandering alone in the middle of the night through the woods near a morgue.

So far, so good, right? Three werewolf killings and some gratuitous nudity before the credits? These are the elements I've come to expect based on the high standards set by other continental horror pictures, and Paul Naschy doesn't disappoint. Unfortunately, the film takes a long break after this promising beginning as we are transported to gay Paris (we know we're in Paris thanks to stock footage of the Arc de Triumph) where we meet Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and her gal-pal Genevieve (Barbara Capell). They are about to head off into the countryside to do some work on their graduate thesis (that hoary old chestnut again!), which seems to have something to do with tracking the history of the dreaded Countess Wandessa, rumored to be a vampiric hellspawn who fed on the blood of nubile virgins.

Now normally I try to avoid relying on plot summary, but I bring this up in greater detail than usual so I can make a few pointless asides. First, and I've mentioned this before, what the hell college to these people go to where a thesis like this gets approved? I guess it's no worse than those people who do a doctoral thesis on punk rock or Punky Brewster, but all that does is further compound the problem with higher education: that being, that most of it is utter hogwash. Theses like these are why we liberal arts majors are laughed at by people who write theses like "A New Precision Measurement of the Anomalous Magnetic Moment of the Positive Muon."

Secondly, have you ever noticed how often female vampires have to be lesbian vampires? I'm not complaining or anything. I'm just sayin'...

Anyway, Genevieve and Elvira head off into the countryside and soon become lost and run out of gas. Luckily, Waldemar happens to be lurking nearby, and he invites them up to his spooky mansion as guests until their car gets fixed (I didn't realize getting gas required such technical prowess). He is delighted to learn that they are searching for the tomb of the countess, because he, too, is searching for the tomb...for his research, of course. Everyone's got their research. In reality, Waldemar is pursuing the legend that the countess was killed with a silver crucifix, and it's his hope that plunging the crucifix into his own burly chest will finally put an end to his miserable cursed existence. I don't know why he's going through this much trouble; the silver bullet seemed to have done the trick last time, and there's less chanc eof that coming out than a crucifix dagger (meddling Men of Science not withstanding).

While Waldemar is overjoyed to discover their common quest, the ladies are less than thrilled to discover he has a raving mad sister with a tendency to grab other women's breasts. When Genevieve discovers bloody shackles in a shed, you would think that'd pretty much be the end of that, but Elvira trusts Waldemar for no particular reason, and before too long, they've tracked down the body of Countess Wandessa. Waldemar explains that legend has it if you pull the crucifix out, Wandessa will return from the dead to wreak unholy vengeance on the living. Then he pulls the crucifix out of her chest, which seems really irresponsible. I mean, if he was a Man of Science, it would be one thing, because then he wouldn't believe those peasant superstitions. But he's a werewolf, for crying out loud. You'd think he'd put more stock in ancient curses.

Before Wandessa can return to haunt the living, Elvira has a run-in with a completely gratuitous zombie monk. No one seems especially phased by the existence of this zombie monk. As far as zombie monks go, he's pretty creepy looking. Once we're done with him, we can move on with the rest of the movie, which of course, involves Wandessa coming back from the grave to laugh hauntingly and flit about in slow motion. She vampirizes Genevieve, and then it's up to Waldemar and Elvira to stop her ghastly reign of terror, which as far as reigns of terror go, is pretty small-time. Eventually, Waldemar goes werewolf and we get the big showdown between him and Wandessa, which is about as satisfying as that big Universal Pictures showdown between Frankenstein and the Wolfman, which involved thirty seconds of the monster going "Arrr! and knocking lad equipment over while the Wolf Man jumped around on top of stuff.

It's obvious that Naschy is a fan of horror, particularly the old Universal films (and one assumes Hammer films). He tries hard to recreate an old-school feel, albeit one with boobs, and sometimes he succeeds. Direction and cinematography are solid, if not completely spectacular. The slow motion effect on Wandessa's movements is simple but highly effective in creating that ever-present continental horror "dreamlike quality." And although his performance as the human Waldemar is listless in any language, Naschy throws himself into his lycanthropic alter-ego with unbridled gusto. Even half-assing it as Waldemar, Naschy still possesses a certain charisma. Maybe not the kind that would make a woman fall instantly in love with him and put up with the fact that he's a werewolf, but whatever.

The rest of the cast is as they always are in Euro horror films, so it's really pointless to comment except to say that there are at least likeable characters, or at least characters you don't utterly despise. Euro horror usually seems to try and create th emost wretchedly irritating characters possible, presumably so you can delight in seeing them killed in various wacky ways. But that delight rarely makes up for suffering through the ponderous scenes that come before the jackasses get killed. At least Naschy seems to think the characters in his movie shouldn't be instantly reviled by all who behold them.

So that's what's right with the movie. What's wrong, unfortunately, is everything else. The pacing is deliberate, and by deliberate, I mean I am trying to say it's slow and laregyl boring, but I don't want to sound that mean. Lack of logic in European horror films is almost always dismissed by fans as being part of the "otherworldly, dreamlike state" for which these films often strive. But since Werewolf's Shadow is otherwise grounded in the real world, and in a world where there's been no attempt to express the notion that reality is strange or inapplicable (aside from, you know, the thing about werewolves and vampire women and gratuitous zombie monks), so when characters do dumb things, it just seems dumb.

For instance, not only does Waldemar go through all the trouble to recover the dagger-crucifix; once he has it, he doesn't use it. If he's so tortured and miserable, you'd think he'd pluck it out of Wandessa and immediately insert it into himself. But I guess love makes ya do crazy things, like not end your miserable werewolf existance.

And then there's the big finale. The less said about that, the better, Naschy was a fit guy, but that doesn't really translate into adeptness at fight choreography. It's abysmal to the point of being laughable, which I suppose is something.

Naschy has the pieces, and he has some great ideas and some moments when things work, but the entirety never really comes together, and sloppy scripting ultimately undermines the film. If you're a seasoned pro at Euro horror, you're probably going to walk away think ing, like me, that despite it's flaws, Werewolf Shadow wasn't that bad, and it was even kind of fun. However, it's not going to do much to win converts to the cause, and people to whom Euro style horror films do not appeal are going to find the movie to be one more example of what they don't like. I thought it was OK, and while technically the strengths don't outweigh the weaknesses, I have a soft spot for any movie, however, crude, where a werewolf dukes it out with a lesbian vampire. Yeah, OK, Naschy. You're no genius, but you're better than many in your genre, and I'll sign up for a tour of another Waldemar the Werewolf movie.

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Tuesday, November 23, 2004

HOTS

1979, United States. Starring Susan Kiger, Lisa London, Pamela Jean Bryant, Kimberly Carson, Mary Steelsmith, Angela Aames, Marjorie Andrade, Cece Bullard, Karen Smith, Robyn Martin, Lindsay Bloom, K.C. Winkler, Sandy Johnson, Marilyn Rubin. Directed by Gerald Seth Sindell. Available on DVD from Amazon

So I think we have this and Pom-Pom Girls, and then we're pretty much finished with the whole cheerleader exploitation thing and can move on to more important genres like sexy stewardess sexploitation and naughty nurse sexploitation. You may recall in my review of the first of these films I watched for this site, The Swinging Cheerleaders, I stated that I wasn't all that interested in cheerleader movies. Well obviously, since this is the fourth one I've reviewed so far, that initial assertion hasn't proven to be entirely accurate. What I should have said is that I don't care for cheerleader movies that are like H.O.T.S.

H.O.T.S. was one of those perennial late-night cable favorites that would entice young boys to find a way to stay up late and get a glimpse of the many forbidden fruits put on display. For me, this usually meant going over to my friend Rob's house since there was no cable television where we lived, but his dad had installed one of those gigantic old satellite TV systems that could pick up everything. Although our favorites were Sword and the Sorcerer, Revenge of the Ninja, and that first Emanuelle film with Sylvia Kristel, we'd pretty much watch anything that was on so long as it promised us bloodshed or nudity, or preferable, some tantalizing combination of both. While the commercials for H.O.T.S. didn't seem to promote much in the way of bloodshed, they did trumpet the idea that there would be naked boobs galore. And so we planned our schedules and assumed that we'd have another classic piece of entertainment to add to our list.

It's pretty clear to me now that the reason I thought I didn't like cheerleader sexploitation was because the only one I'd ever seen was H.O.T.S., and even as a young lad desperate for anything with a hint of nudity, I recognized that H.O.T.S. stunk and stunk bad. I seem to even recall that halfway through we simply gave up and decided to watch something else - and given the broadcast schedule for cable TV at the time, there's a 90% chance we ended up watching Beastmaster for the umpteenth time. Now, I have nothing but fondness for Beastmaster, but it really says something about your nudie cheerleader movie when a couple of kids would rather watch Beastmaster yet again than finish the sexploitation.

H.O.T.S., for all its promise, turned out to be idiotic, tedious, and surprisingly timid. Now idiotic I can take in a nudie film. I wouldn't be one to claim that filth like The Cheerleaders and Revenge of the Cheerleaders was anything but idiotic. And perhaps even a bit tedious. But at least they weren't timid. When they decided to bare it all, they bared it all. H.O.T.S., coming as it does at the very tail end of the cheerleader exploitation arc, suffers from increasing limitations on what could be gotten away with in a film. Thus this movie has a distinct lack of the full nudity we've come to love and expect from movies of the 1970s. Unable to be as brash and flat-out twisted as previous films, this final whimper (or first murmur of the 1980s teen sex comedy) attempts to make up for its lack of guts by stealing the plot from Animal House and putting more boobs on parade since it can't show anything else.

The thing movies this wretched never seem to understand is that when you steal the plot of a film that is much better than yours, all it's going to do is remind people that they could be watching Animal House instead. H.O.T.S. has more in common with that movie than with any of the 1970s cheerleader films, and in fact, it's not so much that it has anything in common with Animal House as much as it has everything in common with all those God awful 1980s teen sex comedies that flooded the world in the wake of Animal House. If you're around my age, you know the ones. A team of misfits, probably possessed of an unquenchable thirst for sex and beer, must devise a plan to let them beat the snotty rich kids in the big ski race/raft race/football game/what have you. Along the way, a lot of twenty-something starlets will show their boobs, and probably at least one guy will fall off a ladder.

H.O.T.S. fulfills all the requirements of the genre and then some by taking it a step further and making the plot even more similar to Animal House. Our heroic girls are part of the H.O.T.S. anti-sorority, the hottest and sassiest group of girls on campus. Hijinks, often of a sexual nature, are the order of the day when the H.O.T.S. ladies (Heather, O'Hare, Teri, and Sam) decide that in order to get back at the evil sorority, they'll steal every man on campus and thus deprive the snobby girls of their daily lovin'…at least until the antics of the H.O.T.S. girls steams the uptight dean and he threatens to close down their house. Naturally, the day can only be saved by engaging in some sort of sporting activity against the rival rich girl sorority, and the sport they chose is strip football.

So yeah, dumb enough, right? But it's not so dumb that the movie couldn't be good for at least something so long as it appealed to the sordid side of what people might desire in their late-night sleazy movies. And while H.O.T.S. does feature a large number of bountiful bouncing breasts and waste no time in getting to them, it turns out they're not enough to make up for the film's horrendous acting, painful attempts at comedy, and shockingly boring script. It turns out, contrary to what you may believe, that yes, a movie can be so bad that not even a lot of boobs can save it. I thought that maybe I'd overestimated how bad the film was when I was young, but secretly I knew that wasn't the case. I was just making excuses for renting it again so Teleport City could be something like, "The number one online authority on sleazy cheerleader movies." I mean hell, if the movie couldn't past muster when I was eleven, it sure as hell wasn't going to get any better with age. And it turns out that it got even worse. I wouldn't call it the worst 1980s teen sex comedy ever made, but it's certainly up there in the running. Once again, despite my best efforts, I couldn't finish the movie. I ended up watching the last forty minutes on so on fast forward just so I could say that at least I made it to the end. Even that was a chore. There is probably an actual matehematical way to graph the point at which boob shots no longer compensate for the abysmalness of the movie in which they appear. Whatever that graph may look like, H.O.T.S. definitely appears ont he negative end of the bouncing bell curve.

The comedy is on the level of things like the college being F.U. Heh heh. Get it? And the evil sorority? Pi! You know, like, as in…you know. Also, there's a fat chick because comedy demands a fat chick. Man, this movie makes Revenge of the Cheerleaders seem inspired for casting David Hasselhoff as a guy named Boner. About the best you get here is Danny Bonaduce in bed with a seal. Even if the comedy had been funny, the delivery would have killed it since pretty much no one could act -- though that didn't stop several of the girls from going on to lucrative careers in awful direct-to-video sci-fi and horror films and, one assumes, appearing regularly at the Chiller Theatre convention. Kim Carson, who plays H.O.T.S. founder Sam, probably had the most prolific post-H.O.T.S. career. She has some ninety-five films to her credit, many with titles like Talk Dirty to Me IV, New Wave Hookers, Rockin' Erotica, and the much-acclaimed Cumshot Revue II, which personally I felt suffered from trying to be bigger and more expensive than the original while forgetting what made part one such a classic. I'm willing to bet all of those films actually have better scripts and acting than this one.

You know what? I really hate this movie. I hate it a lot. And when I hate a movie this much, it's not even any fun to write about it - and I haven't even gotten to the scene with the robot. I wouldn't recommend H.O.T.S. even if you are hard up for boobs. You might as well just go ahead and rent one of the older cheerleader movies from the 1970s. Not only do they show a lot more, they somehow manage to be a lot less irksome than this "dawn of the 80s sex comedy" film. At least they go all out with their nudity and had the good sense not to dally too long in between sex scenes. H.O.T.S. has stretches of gut-wrenchingly unfunny comedy that seem to go on for a truly epic amount of time, and nothing slows time down more effectively than bad, unfunny comedy. And this isn't the sort of bad comedy that is so bad it actually becomes funny. No, this is just bad comedy that is so bad that it's boring, and then they make it last for a long time. As a kid, I simply turned to a different channel. As a grown man who really should be ashamed of himself for even thinking of watching H.O.T.S., I was pondering gouging out my eyes before I decided to simply get the film over with and never think about it again.

H.O.T.S. It's a teen sex comedy that can't even capture the attention of a teenager. If you think to defend the film by saying that it's pointless to criticize the acting or story in a film like this, then all I can say then is, first of all, it shouldn't have had so much acting and story if it couldn't do those things. And secondly, even as brainless sleazy sexploitation, H.O.T.S. fails utterly despite some nice breasts on display. There is absolutely no reason to watch the movie, unless you need something to demonstrate to you the merits of The Cheerleaders and Revenge of the Cheerleaders, which are the movies you should probably be watching instead of H.O.T.S.. You know, this movie has put in a bad mood, now, which makes it even worse. What kind of wacky sex romp puts you in a bad mood? I'm going to have to go watch Bruce Lee pull out Chuck Norris' chest hair just to make myself feel better.

The best way to sum up the whole experience goes thusly: when I was in college, my good friend Eric was working as an usher at a movie theater when showgirls hit the screens. I myself worked as an usher a few years prior, but that was when Home Alone came out. Anyway, it being a high-profile NC-17 sleazefest, theaters knew that every underage kid worth their weight in salt was going to be devising complicated schemes for sneaking in to see the film. So one of Eric's jobs was to stand guard over the doorway and recheck ticket stubs for anyone entering the forbidden auditorium of unearthly delights presented in the form of the chick from Saved by the Bell giving a lap dance to the guy from Twin Peaks. During one of the showings, perhaps an hour into the movie, a guy walks out of the theater, turns to Eric, and says, "Tits and ass aren't worth a movie that bad."

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Saturday, October 09, 2004

Horror Express

1973, Spain/UK. Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, Silvia Tortosa, Julio Peña, Georges Rigaud, Ángel del Pozo, Víctor Israel, Helga Liné, Alice Reinheart, Juan Olaguivel. Directed by Eugenio Martín. Available on DVD from Amazon

It didn't take long for the genres of horror and science fiction to start mingling. It's a natural marriage, after all, and the two often blend seamlessly, the best and among the earliest example likely being the first two Universal "Frankenstein" movies. Throughout the 1950s, horror and science fiction were frequent bedfellows as atomic terrors ran amok across assorted landscapes. Increasingly, however, it was the science fiction element of the films that was in the forefront, with the horror placed in the background unless one was genuinely terrified of superimposed grasshoppers. By the middle of the 1950s, science fiction was still enjoying the occasional big budget celebration a la This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956) while horror films were becoming increasingly cheap, b-movie quickie affairs. Not that that means there weren't plenty of gems in the mix, but compared to science fiction, horror was lagging.

It was in this setting, however, that England's Hammer Studio decided to mix the two together once again in what they hoped to be a high-class concoction, first as a television series and then as the film The Quatermass Experiment. Although horror was often regarded as a dying genre, Hammer proved that handled properly and with respect, fans were still ready to turn out for a good horror-scifi half-breed. Two more Quatermass films were made, the latest being 1967's superb Quatermass and the Pit, which sees the good doctor and investigator of all things extraterrestrial and paranormal grappling with an alien carcass discovered beneath London and possessed, seemingly, of a Satanic nature as well.

Which brings us nicely, if rather half-assedly, to Horror Express, a film that seems to draw from both the feel of a Hammer film as well as that of a ripping HG Wells story without actually being from either source. The idea of gods, angels, and devils as space aliens is no longer especially new and novel, though few serious (or even comical) studies of the notion exist in film. It's a favorite of conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists, however, with the best-known proponents of the idea being those who believe that "ancient astronauts" visited Earth thousands of years ago and helped with everything from the erection of the Egyptian pyramids to the construction of Incan, Mayan, and Aztec pyramids to the carving and raising of the ominous heads on Easter Island. Apart from the notion that aliens were jetting through the cosmos showing off their masonry and stone-carving skills is the theory that so-called holy beings, your Jesus and your various angels and maybe even a Greek god or two, were beings from another planet whose miraculous powers were rather run-of-the-mill back home but really something here on Earth where we didn't have the ability to turn water into wine. Thus these creatures would be perceived as gods and angels, and the naughty ones as demons and devils, by us backward shepherds here on planet Earth.

It's not a completely daft idea, as far as such theories go, at least no more so than Jesus being the son of a supreme being who created everything out of nothing and, with the entire universe at his disposal, whiled away the centuries picking on Job and pulling stunts like, "Abraham, sacrifice your son! No just joking! Dude, I can't believe you were really going to sacrifice your son." The idea that these angels, that perhaps even Jesus himself were aliens isn't entirely insane, especially when you take into consideration the power of Jesus to appear as a blond-haired, glowing white guy despite his Jewish-Arabic origins.

Horror Express is not a Hammer film, it could easily pass for one thanks to its quick pace, period setting, and the presence of Hammer's two biggest stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and while it doesn't present us with the scenario of our deities being space travelers, it does rely heavily on the notion that beings from other worlds have visited this planet long before the presence of mankind in our current form, and that if said beings were perhaps trapped in the body of a monkey for two million years only to find themselves awakened on a train going through Siberia, they'd be annoyed. Lee stars as Professor Saxton, an intrepid scientist-adventurer the likes of which we simply do not see enough of these days. On an expedition to the far north of china, his team uncovers the remarkably well-preserved mummy of an humanlike ape Saxton assumes to be the missing link, not to mention being one of the greatest anthropological or archaeological discoveries of all time. Hey, consider that some people think of a particularly nice chunk of pot shard to be one of the greatest discoveries of all time, and you can understand why Saxton is so excited about his Peking Man.

Sexton immediately returns to the city with his find and books passage to Europe on board the Trans-Siberian Express, only to discover that much to his chagrin his number one scientific and one-liner rival, Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing), is also along for the trip and keeps bugging Saxton about seeing what's in that padlocked box. A Chinese thief at the station doesn't see fit to badger Saxton and, assuming the crate is full of jewels or fine women's lingerie, goes about taking a peek. When the police find him, he's dropped dead with blood pouring from his sockets and his eyes turned completely white. Saxton, being a fine, condescending British scientist, doesn't think much of the incident. The guy was a thief, after all. A mad Russian monk with wild unkempt hair and beard (is there any other kind of Russian monk), however, sees the entire affair as a sign that whatever is contained within the crate must surely be the work of Satan. To prove his point, he attempts to draw a cross on the box, only to discover that being the wooden container of all things Luicferian, the cross will not show up. Whether or not something less holy, like perhaps, "Springsteen 4 Ever!" would have showed up is one of the mysteries that shall remain forever unanswered.

Although the cross incident impresses the locals, Saxton dismisses it as a simple parlor trick, and points out that the guy is bugging his eyes out and ranting and raving about Satan. So all aboard the horror express, including Saxton, Wells, the crazy monk Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza, who acted in Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin and One on Top of the Other, among many European cult films), a suspicious Russian police inspector named Mirov (Euro-cult veteran Julio Pena, who also starred in films like Horror Rises from the Tomb, Werewolf Versus the Vampire Women, A Pistol for a Hundred Coffins and Sergio Corbucci's The Mercenary), a mysterious female spy, two Russian nobles, and a whole host of other people whose only job is to fill up the dining cart. In other words, it's a regular Agatha Christie gathering, the kind you always get on these old trains but rarely, if ever, on modern trains. See, therein lies the problem with modern rail travel: not nearly enough intrigue. Used to be that for the price of a ticket, you'd get spies menacing one another with stilettos, upper-class society types embroiled in murder mysteries, and alien-possessed monkey-men throwing things at Peter Cushing. No more. Maybe instead of offering the usual "first class, second class, et cetera" nonsense they should offer something like, "first class, second class, and turn-of-the-century intrigue class."

Needless to say, it isn't long before the ape-man claims another victim, this time a porter whom Wells had bribed to take a peek into the box and report back to him. Then the ape-man picks the lock and disappears, much to Saxton's annoyance. Faced with no other reasonable possibility, Inspector Mirov and the two British scientists are forced to assume that a two-million year old ape man has somehow been revived, learned to pick modern locks, and is currently at large and turning people's eyes white. An autopsy on the baggage handler also reveals that the brain is as smooth as a baby's bottom, disregarding then the obvious statistically rare and dismissible occurrence of an ugly, pockmarked baby bottom. It's clear that this is no ordinary two-million year-old missing link. As the list of victims grows, Wells, Saxton, and Mirov join forces to uncover the mystery at the heart of the creature's rampage. Things only get harder when they realize that the creature itself is not the ape-man, but an entity inside the ape-man which is able to leap from one body to another when the need arises. This revelation prompts the best line in the entire movie, in which Mirov turns accusingly to Saxton and Wells and proclaims, "Even one of you could be the monster!" to which Cushing's Wells replies indignantly, "Impossible! We're British, man!"

Eventually, it is discovered that the entity is a space alien, marooned on the planet millions of years ago and really keen on getting the hell out of here. The creature's trump card in attempting to get Wells and Saxton not to kill it is that it's seen millions of years of earthly history prior to being frozen and can provide them with knowledge immeasurable. It's a tempting Faustian deal, but one the stolid British researchers resist, though the crazed monk, fearing that this beast is Satan himself, decides to cast his lot with the side whose physical manifestation is running amok on the train. AN impromptu stop at a remote Siberian outpost allows Cossack soldier Telly Savalas to board the train with his troops and either get to the bottom of things in a quick and efficient manner or provide more corpse fodder for the creature, who also reveals an ability to revive the bodies of its victims and send them, zombie-like, shambling through the claustrophobic train cars in a final horrific onslaught against the living. You guess which eventuality comes to pass.

Horror Express is a ripping go