Dressed To Kill

No Chime To Die

Dressed To Kill
USA 1946
Directed by Roy William Neill
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Dressed To Kill is the third of five movies that I know of, to bear the exact same title as each other. However, for our purposes here, it’s the fourteenth and final of the Sherlock Holmes films made by first 20th Century Fox and then Universal, starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as the faithful Dr. Watson (I’ll get into why it was the last a little further down the page). It also, once again, features Mary Gordon as Holmes housekeeper/landlady Mrs. Hudson, although the interior room of 2212B Baker Street seems to have grown considerably in size again for this one. Inspector Lestrade as played by the incomparable Dennis Hoey does not make any appearance here, he already had his series swansong on the previous film, Terror By Night (reviewed here) but he is mentioned in it at least. Actually, I’m guessing he must have already been engaged in shooting another movie because this one is firmly set in London and features a large police presence.

The plot is similar in some ways to The Pearl Of Death (reviewed here), which was loosely based on The Adventure Of The Six Napoleons. In this one it’s three music boxes made by a prisoner and sold off at auction which are the things everyone is looking for. Holmes has a photographic memory for the tune that’s played on one of the three when an old friend of Watson, a music box collector who has bought one of them, is showing off his collection. It’s a good job Holmes can remember it note for note because he’s suddenly also trying to track down the music boxes when Watson’s friend is murdered by a henchman of lady antagonist Hilda Courtney (played by Patricia Morison), the super-villainess of the story who needs the boxes because they contain the key to the whereabouts of some forged Bank of London plates for five pound notes (the proper, big old five pound notes of yesteryear, I might add).

Holmes figures out, from his music box and a remembrance of the other, that a few notes have been changed on each rendition of the tune, Once A Jolly Swagman... so he consults with a criminal who he cleared of murder by proving he was cracking a safe somewhere else, who he knows is an expert on music. Eventually he figures out the coded messages in the tune variations and it’s one of those films where the villains are racing to get there first and murdering people as they go. Holmes himself eludes a deathtrap just in time while Watson is being duped by the lady in question. It’s been a while since Rathbone’s character went in disguise in the movies and, he doesn’t on this occasion either, but Patricia Morison does to steal one music box right from under the noses of Holmes and Watson.

And, yeah, it’s another entertaining, Holmesian romp with the added extra, if it’s your thing, of Nigel Bruce doing a Donal Duck impression. It doesn’t go down well with the young girl he’s trying to cheer up, for sure. It’s interesting to see the racially targeted humour of the day has stood the test of time and continued over the years too, nicely preserved here. For example, when Holmes is querying the price each music box sold for with the owner of the auction house, he asks why such a low price was paid for the third. Was there something wrong with it. The answer was, of course, that Mr. Kilgore, the man who bought it so cheaply, was a Scotsman. Yeah, alright then. if you say so.

Another point of interest, although it’s been mentioned in the films before, is Watson’s role as Holmes’ sensationalist biographer. In the short stories, originally published serially for many years in The Strand Magazine, it’s known to Holmes that Watson publishes lurid accounts of their adventures in that very magazine. In this film... and much more than a passing reference this time, much is made of Watson’s stories published in The Strand which, was just about still going when this film was made and set contemporary to its time... the magazine was going from late 1890 (with a January 1891 cover date) until it ceased publication in March of 1950 with Issue 711. Much is also made of the famous, ‘The Woman’ from the Arthur Conan Doyle story A Scandal In Bohemia, aka Holmes’ female nemesis Miss Irene Adler (who, although only actually appearing in one of Conan Doyle’s stories, has been used in various forms by many writers and in many films since).

As usual, Rathbone and Bruce are absolutely brilliant and everyone does very well. Indeed Miss Morison was so convincing in her disguise as a lowly housekeeper that, when she went to eat lunch in the studio canteen still in costume, she was told to get out and eat with the rest of the extras as she wasn’t supposed to go near the stars. She must have been delighted that her disguise on this day’s shoot was so good it even fooled the canteen staff.

But things were troubled with Rathbone and he decided to quit the role, both in the films and on the radio (although he would occasionally play Holmes on stage and was, in other ways, dogged by the role throughout his career). He felt that, since his first film for Fox, The Hound Of The Baskervilles (reviewed here), the role had been like a cookie cutter template producing repetitive impressions. I’d myself argue that Rathbone was so good in the role in every one of his fourteen Holmes films (all made between 1939 and 1946 with a two year break in between the Fox and Universal periods... so they were really knocking these things out quickly, to be fair) that it was criminal to leave a role which was evidently so popular with cinema goers internationally and, to this day, I’d argue that, despite the obvious intentional differences to the original stories, he was the one, definitive Holmes. On the radio, they recast Tom Conway in the Holmes role opposite Nigel Bruce’s Watson for a while... and having seen him in a fair number of Falcon movies and a few other things... that might not have been a bad choice. They also considered recasting the films with him in them and continuing the series but... well, I don’t know why that didn’t happen but, perhaps it possibly had something to do with the fact that the producer/director of the majority of the series, Roy William Neill, dropped dead of a heart attack seven months after the release of this film. I don’t know.

All I do know for sure is that Dressed To Kill is another high point in the series and that Rathbone and Bruce certainly went out on a good one. Heavily recommended and a fitting, if early end, to one of the greatest film sequences in cinematic history. And that's me finished with the Rathbone Holmes reviews but, fear not, more Sherlock Holmes reviews will be coming to this very blog in the not too distant future.

Nightsleeper

Carry On Up
The Cyber

Nightsleeper
UK BBC September 2024
6 episodes

You know, I barely watch many British TV shows outside of, well, Doctor Who, these days because I’m not that enamoured of them. Heck, I don’t watch many TV shows period, truth be told. But there have been a couple over the last year and this one, Nightsleeper, is something I caught about a minute or two of when my parents were watching it. It looked pretty well put together and so I thought I’d try the first episode and, frankly, I was hooked right away. This is a truly high quality thriller from the BBC and I was so impressed with it. Even though, yeah okay, it’s not that original and it feels a little like half the plot of The Cassandra Crossing and The Taking Of Pelham 123 mixed in with Bird Of Prey (which is a TV show I’ve not seen since the 1970s or early 80s… wish they’d repeat that one again).

So, a cybercrimes worker called Abby, played startlingly believably by Alexandra Roach, in the Victoria Station area of London, is called back from her holiday (she was about to get underway) because a train has been hijacked… hack-jacked, in fact. The sleeper train going from, initially, Glasgow to Euston (the route is changed over many plot twists) is sabotaged with a computer device plugged into it’s workings and it’s on a direct collision course for London, unless an anonymous terrorist group are paid so many gazillions in bitcoin. With the cybercrime chief of staff away on holidays, Abby is the one trusted to try and stop this calamity. So it’s up to her and her, somewhat dodgy (who can she trust?) team and an ex-copper on the run (due to crimes he may or may not have committed) on the train, Joe, played by Joe Roan, to try and stop the train before it takes out the London terminus.

And it’s a great little cracker of a show, for sure. It’s fast paced and, you’d wonder how a cybercrime show about stopping a train could run for six 45 minute episodes but, it does go at a fair lick with a high number of twists and mini revelations which means, well, it never gets dull. I watched the whole show in two sittings and I could have easily watched another six right after.

Now, all this being said, in terms of writing… it’s a game of two halves. On the one hand the characterisation and dialogue is phenomenally well written… everyone seems fleshed out in their shorthand kind of way and you will be caring a lot about most of the characters. On the other hand… it does run every cliché and set up in the book but, even while you can predict what is going to happen a lot of the time (including the reveal of the identity of the main antagonist, so to speak, in the last episode), it doesn’t really matter because it’s all put together so beautifully (the editing is fantastic too) and it whizzes along in quite an addictive fashion.

So, yeah, you have the resigned top cybercrime guy brought in to help out (played here by David Threlfall), the opening bag snatcher chase used as a diversion to plant the device, the miscommunications and the rival unit who end up making the situation worse than it already is, the ex-rail guy who you just know is going to have a heart attack before the end of the show (played brilliantly by the always watchable James Cosmo), the top hierarchy making decisions about sacrificing the lives on the train and not telling their operatives (as in Abby and the majority of her team), the person inside the train who knows more than they’re letting on, the one working satellite phone (everything else blocked by phone jammers), the passenger who isn’t supposed to be on the train… all that stuff and more. But I didn’t mind it one bit because it was all done in such a way that all the clichés seemed like the best logical choices for the situation.

Also... some nice camera work and, as I said, the editing is all top notch. For instance, there’s a lovely moment when the camera zooms into the black and white CCTV screen which then turns into colour and becomes the next shot. And, yes, I know we’ve all seen that done before but it was done here with such throwaway panache that you can’t help but marvel at it. Another nice thing is the first episode opened with a shot of the piano at a station in Scotland being played by a passenger and the diegetic musical notes become the non-diegetic score of the scene.

So it’s six episodes of cat and mouse with an unknown antagonist and the few deaths in it are handled in such a way that the audience really feels them (there’s no body count element at work here) and a nice finale where Abby herself is in clear and present danger from the train which is hurtling towards her at increasing speeds. I can’t see a sequel to Nightsleeper being easy to market (although I’d absolutely love to see the continuing adventures of Abby, for sure) but as a stand alone mini-series this one was pretty great. A thorough recommendation from me.

Message From Space

Prince Hans, No Solo

Message From Space
aka Uchu kara no messeji
Japan 1978 Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Toei/Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Small spoilers about the final outcome of the movie... as if there was any doubt.

I’d not seen Message From Space before but I believe I do have a bootleg of this tucked away somewhere with the title Japanese Star Wars and, to be fair, that’s actually a more accurate title, in some ways, than its real one and, again in some ways, that does also sum up the movie too. And I don’t mean that to detract from what is, in actual fact, a quite entertaining and historically contextually impressive film.

Kinji Fukasaku, who some of my readers may remember from classic films like Battle Royale and the, perhaps, not quite so classic The Green Slime, directed this for release in 1978. It was a year after George Lucas’ magnum opus first hit cinemas in the US (and eventually, right at the end of the same year, in the UK) and the eyes of the world were eyeing up that box office take. Just as in America, many countries rushed to release their own, half rip off Star Wars* bandwagon films... some of which hadn’t been able to get a green light until the Lucas film had every producer on the planet scrambling to develop whatever science fiction properties they could get their hands on. And Japan was no exception although, while I’m sure many studio heads and film industry people had been able to see Star Wars in 1977, it actually didn’t get a release in Japan until a couple of months after this movie was already in cinemas (there’s a certain irony there, I guess).

Okay, so yes, despite the staunch defence of the movie against comparisons in the booklet included in the Eureka Blu Ray, this film certainly does have a lot of Star Wars injected straight into its DNA. I mean, if you want ot watch it on a surface level, you can’t help but laugh and be entertained by some of the ‘bend over backwards’ attempts to shoe horn as many resemblances as possible into the story and a fair few other production elements, it has to be said. However, there’s also a lot of other impressive stuff here which, perhaps, went on to inspire some of those Hollywood bandwagon movies in much the same way... I suspect.

A brief rundown of the plot set up is that Princess Emeralida, played by Etsuko Shihomi of the Sister Streetfighter films (reviews coming as soon as I get around to watching them) is charged with a mission by her father, the elder of the rag tag band of space hippies who are the lone survivors of the planet Jillucia. The war shredded planet has been occupied by the inhabitants of the evil, silver skinned Gavanas Empire, who have set up their main fortress there. So the tribal elder sends the eight magic Liaba seeds (snicker... Liaba minora perhaps... but they look just like Walnut shells to me) out into space to seek the eight brave warriors who are prophesised to save them. Emeralida and her humble bodyguard must follow them and find the eight worthy warriors, scattered in various places in the galaxy... and raise them to come to their aid. These include General Garuda played by Vic Morrow, his R2D2/C3PO half bleeping/half talking, dome headed android Beba Two, Kamikazi Mei (played wonderfully by a severely underused actress called Peggy Lee Brennan) and even the legendry Sonny Chiba as Prince Hans. They and some of the other ‘heroes’ are all pretty good in this and help carry what is a far more entertaining film than we should expect of the story. There’s even an appearance by the president of Earth, played by Tetsurô Tanba, who played in stuff like Three Outlaw Samurai (review will eventually be coming) and You Only Live Twice (reviewed by me here).

Okay, enough of the plot. The film has lots of key notes from Star Wars that it hits. The space ship flying overhead shot mimicking the Star Destroyer at the start of the Lucas film, the laser beams shot from pistols and dogfighting space ships (often making sounds more reminiscent of automatic pistols) plus many other familiar elements, such as the final attack run on the Gavanas fortress which looks suspiciously like the final attack on the Death Star, except in this case, instead of trying to hit a thermal exhaust port 3 metres in diameter, our brave and fearless heroes are trying to hit a reactor core 10 metres in diameter. Of course, in order to save the people of the planet, they also have to end up destroying said planet but, hey, at least they won, right? Right?

Certainly, one of the biggest influences felt from Star Wars here is the ‘golden age Hollywood score’ by composer Ken'ichirô Morioka. It’s like he studied John Williams seminal score to the ‘n’th detail and there are many call backs to some of the musical passages in the American film. Not least of which is the theme in the leitmotif for the Liaba seeds, which bears a striking resemblance (perhaps a couple of notes changed or missing) to the Obi Wan/Force theme from Williams’ Star Wars scores.

All this aside though, there are also some elements which Hollywood movies, including future Star Wars movies, might also have been taking notice of in this one. The lightning style forks of laser power emitted by the spaceships of the bad guys foreshadows the similar VGer effects used in Star Trek The Motion Picture of the following year (and I’m pretty sure one of the Gamera movies used it even before this... you’ll find it mentioned, I’m sure, in one of my Gamera reviews)... although, I guess it’s kind of an expansion of the same kind of visual effect used when R2D2 gets zapped by the Jawas, in some measure. Also, the interior sets of the Gavanas fortress, while tipping the head to the interiors of the Death Star in some ways, also has windows and decor which wasn’t seen in the Star Wars franchise until the second film, The Empire Strikes Back, was released in cinemas two years later than this. So, yeah, a kind of post modern Ouroboros kind of cannibalism between this and the Star Wars films, perhaps.

Ultimately, no matter how much of it is pure rip off (and there is a lot of that in this) and how much of it is original to this film (but probably also eclectically borrowed, perhaps), glowing space whips aside, Message From Space is a very entertaining piece of cinema starring some Japanese screen legends and I’m really glad that Eureka have decided to put out a fantastic looking Blu Ray disc of it. A definite recommendation from me, for sure. Maybe they’ll issue the TV series continuation next?

* And don’t forget, the Star Wars films themselves ransacked many different story elements from various sources (some, of course, from Japanese cinema) and so one can understand a lack of reluctance to copy the film by other people... it’s all fair game and Star Wars certainly wears its influences on its sleeve.

Delicatessen

Butcher Self
In My Position

Delicatessen
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
and Marc Caro
France 1991
Studio Canal
Blu Ray Zone B

I remember when Delicatessen got released in the UK... it was early January 1992 and one of two absolutely amazing French movies released within a week of each other over here. It was around the time of my 24th birthday so both these movies, the other being Bertrand Blier’s astonishing Merci La Vie, were films I went to see in celebration of said birthday, being as I was a student in London at the time. The mid 1980s to the mid 1990s were an absolutely golden era for foreign language films at the cinema in the UK and three places I could regularly keep up with these wonderful, first run foreign language releases were the magnificent Lumiere cinema on St. Martin’s Lane, the Metro on Rupert Street and, as a last resort because their screens were much smaller but, they always had the films on at the tail end of the run in case you missed any, the Swiss Centre just off Leicester Square. None of these three cinemas are still in existence, in case you are wondering. I think I first saw Delicatessen at the Metro but both this one and Merci La Vie were seen by me a few times at different cinemas. Unfortunately an English subtitled Blu Ray of Blier’s film is not yet forthcoming... bit annoyed about that as the DVD release wasn’t as good an English translation on the subtitles as the cinema prints and VHS tape.

Delicatessen was a surprise, sleeper smash (more prints were quickly struck for the UK market) and was filmed by a duo of film makers billed as Jeunet and Caro. The former would, of course, continue to make cinematic history, especially with his other big smash hit ten years later, Amélie (aka Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain review coming soon).

And it’s a bizarre, surreal film which plays like a black comedy involving some kind of post-war event where a small delicatessen and the people who live in the flats which are part of it, are struggling to survive. It could easily be the 1940s because the visual aesthetic of the film (and various audio and visual references) certainly fit in with that period... or it could be the far future. The time setting is deliberately left vague but there’s definitely a post-war vibe to the whole thing.

The film follows the arrival of a new handyman at the flats, Louison, played by the always watchable Dominique Pinon. He is an ex-circus performer trying to make ends meet after his partner, Livingstone the monkey, was eaten by hungry survivors of... whatever has happened. He falls in love with the butcher’s daughter Julie, played by Marie-Laure Dougnac, who tries to warn him, unsuccessfully until he’s being attacked with a meat cleaver, that her father... played in a wonderfully comic book style by Jean-Claude Dreyfus... murders newcomers in the night so the tenants of the flats, played by a wonderful and diverse cast of actors giving laugh out loud funny and surreal performances, can eat the new tenants who come their way, rather than sacrifice one of their own. Everything is payed for in corn and lentils, the currency of this struggling world.

It’s a film which plays like a kind of Heath Robinson contraption of comical moments and vignettes edited together into unlikely sequences... which, I think it would be fair to say of pretty much most of this writer/director’s filmography and it is, it has to be said, an absolute joy to watch. Who can forget the sight of Julie playing her cello with Louison accompanying her on his musical saw. Or the lovemaking scene where the sound of the straining springs on a bed set the rhythm for a raucous sexual metaphor of a montage of various tenants accompanying them with comical antics of increasing pace. Or the comical and elabourate suicide attempts of one of the neighbours, who keeps getting accidentally saved by her own incompetence. Or the wonderful dance with bubbles which Louison performs for the kids on the stairway landing. Or the faction of vegetarian ‘troglodytes’, waging war against those who live above the surface. Or even... well let’s just call him ‘the frog man’ and leave it at that.

The films is witty, enchanting and has a style which absolutely draws you in to this magical world the directors have created. That this was a debut feature is remarkable... the film is so risky and confident... with its ‘dark fairytale’ vibe, where everything is played for comedy value but with a warm, beating heart at its centre.

The colours, too, are absolutely amazing. Hard to describe but like pastel tones which have been given extra colour saturation to achieve a warm, rich look. My one gripe being that I’m not totally sure I trust this new Blu Ray master by Studio Canal (a company who I dislike these days more than I used to... the 1990s was a time when I welcomed their logo at the start of a film). In the blurb at the front of the Blu Ray, one of the restoration features it lists is that they’ve ‘harmonised the grain’. I dunno, maybe that’s why, on Blu Ray, the exterior location looks like what I now realise was just a big, internal set. I mean, the ersatz is always a problem on Blu Ray restorations anyway but this sounds like something which maybe could be taking things a little too far... I need to find out what this is all about, for sure.

Either way though, Delicatessen is one of the greats of French cinema, that much is certain. It’s an absolute treat for anybody who appreciates the cinematic arts and, frankly, an essential film in my book. If you’ve not seen this you might want to run, rather than walk, to your earliest opportunity to get some eyeball time with this wonderful movie. I saw it multiple times when it came out at the cinema and, if it weren’t for the fact that I have to keep watching different things to keep this blog going, I would be watching it multiple times on Blu Ray still. This is, after all, the third format on which I’ve owned this film... anybody remember the superb Electric Picture VHS box set back in the 1990s? Still got mine!

Never Let Go

Rope Burns

Never Let Go
Directed by Alexandre Aja
USA 2024
Lionsgate (thought they’d
pulled out of UK distribution)
UK Cinema Release Print.

I was going to say I have a bit of a hit and miss relationship with the films of Alexandre Aja but, then I refamiliarised myself with his filmography and it would be fair to say, I think, that it’s more of a miss and miss track record. I have this idea in my head that he starts off each film really well, setting things up for an intense ride which tends to peter out around halfway through and, yeah, that’s kind of what he does here but... I’ll get back to that in a little while.

Never Let Go does have a great idea behind it. Surviving, it’s implied, some apocalyptic influx of evil into the world, a mother played by Halle Berry and her two young boys, played absolutely gob-smackingly amazingly by Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins live in a remote cabin in the woods. They cannot leave the house, however, because it has magical religious properties protecting them from evil. So they have to wear these long ropes around their waste when they go out of the house scavenging for grubs and squirrels to eat. However, as these kids, who are maybe just pre-teen or early teen aged, start to question their mother’s wisdom about the evil that only her and the audience can see... things start to go pear shaped.

And yeah, that’s a nice set up for the plot and it’s mostly all I’m saying about the story here. Other than... not all the three main protagonists survive until two thirds of the way into the movie... so the tension does keep ratcheting up.

What I will say is that the performances by all three of those actors are absolutely amazing and that they manage to carry the film quite nicely. Added to this, the make-up job and CGI work on the ‘evil’ snake tongued people is excellent. And, of course, since it’s the main hook, a good deal of the tension and drama of the story comes from... you know... letting go of the rope.

However, once again the director fails to land a good, solid ending for this film. There’s a set up revolving around what is possibly ‘the last polaroid camera on Earth’ with one shot left in it which, when used towards the conclusion, really contributes to making no sense of just what has been going on by the end of the movie. I mean, it’s like, without giving away anything, it’s an ‘is it or isn’t it?’ kind of deal with the mechanics of the story and how it plays out and, by the end, the director maybe didn’t want to commit to either one of them... instead favouring the idea of having his cake and eating it at the same time. Which, for me, negates and drains all the tension and good work he’s been consistently running with up until around the last ten minutes. I was left there sitting in the mostly empty cinema (it was a Sunday evening) thinking... this makes absolutely no sense.

So, yeah, whether the fact that he managed to keep the tension and be really scary up until that point counts as a good time at the cinema or not is something I can’t really judge. It just feels like Never Let Go really fumbles the ball at the end and takes the ‘lazy story writers’ way out (there’s even one of the actors promoting it in interviews as a strong point, I think, where the audience brings their own baggage as to the ending, so to speak). Nope. This movie clearly doesn’t work for me and it’s a shame because it is quite intense, atmospheric and has some great photography. But, no, I won’t be recommending this one to anybody when all is said and done so... yeah... still waiting to see that great Alexandre Aja movie, I reckon. It’s got to be coming one day. This one just seems like Aja trying to channel M. Night Shyamalan with, sadly, similar results.

Joker - Folie à Deux

Great Fleckspectations

Joker - Folie à Deux
Directed by Todd Phillips
Canada USA 2024
DC/Warner Brothers
UK Cinema Release Print.

Well this was an unexpected, surprisingly brilliant movie. I admit I was going in with pretty low expectations but Joker - Folie à Deux, the sequel to the same director’s Joker (reviewed here) is a pretty marvellous film and far superior to the flawed and derivative first movie. Now, that being said, I had one big problem with this movie and it’s the exact same one as I had with the prior film. But also having said that, it really is the only problem I have with this one because, it’s one of those rare, damn near perfect concoctions that Hollywood manages to pitch up every now and again.

So that particular problem... and it is admittedly a huge one... is this: What the heck does this character and movie have to do with the DC character The Joker? Answer, like the first one, almost absolutely nothing. The Joker personae is very different, shares no similarity to the character’s background in the comics and doesn’t even have the tenuous connection to Bruce Wayne that the first film has (indeed, the Wayne family don’t even appear in this one except as a blink and you’ll miss it presence on a billboard). And frankly, name checking Harley Quinn and Harvey Dent as main characters and then having a set prop pushing the idea of Arkham Asylum... that does not a Joker movie make. So to say this is in the same universe as the characters which it exploits to get people into cinemas is a little cynical and misleading, at best, I would say. To their credit, DC are labelling this as an Elseworlds movie (in line with their very bold comic book strand of the same name) but they could have easily have called these two movies something else entirely and not had the links to the comic book universe clumsily used as a marketing proposition at all.

All that being said... I don’t really care because this film is an absolutely magical time at the cinema and is easily, at this point in the year, one of 2024s best movies. Not the best, certainly but, it’s on that list.

This one, once again, top lines Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck (aka The Joker) and he’s joined in this one by Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn) who also, it has to be said, has very tenuous links to her comic book alter ego. They are also joined by such luminaries as Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener and, briefly, Steve Coogan too. And if you’re expecting more of the same of the first film I’m delighted to be able to say, you may be disappointed. I’m not the biggest fan of Phoenix but I’ve warmed to him in roles like this the last few years and his tender portrait of Arthur once again makes this a memorable movie. And, honestly, Lady Gaga is right there matching him with an equally solid performance all the way. Their respective characters’ love holds the movie together and, alas, I can’t comment on that too much for fear of spoilers but, it’s an interesting dynamic, for sure.

And, as I said, it’s not like the first movie... especially in terms of story. This just covers Arthur’s lead in to and eventual appearance at his trial for five of the six murders he committed in the last movie. But this is also an example of what has come to be known, over the last decade or so, as a Jukebox Musical. There are loads of songs, some of which even I could sing along too (mostly from the 1960s) and some of these transpire in what are the naturalistic settings of the movie and, others of them take place inside Arthur Fleck’s head, where the colours are wild and the glamour comes to the fore. And it’s good stuff. I loved Lady Gaga’s rendition of If They Could See Me Now from Sweet Charity (the Gwen Verdon stage show flagged, as opposed to the Shirley MacLaine movie version of Fosse’s remake of Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria, both of which I talk about here) and, well, all I will say is, even if it’s just a clip from The Bandwagon, seeing Oscar Levant on the big screen again is awesome. That’s certainly entertainment, if you catch my drift.

Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score once again keeps the visual images and the musical interludes effectively threaded together and the cinematography is all levels of gorgeous, especially when utilising the MGMified colours of the 1950s and 60s musical palette. Plus, the brand new Joker themed Looney Toons short which starts off the movie is a wonderful piece of work too, it has to be said. So, yeah, that’s me pretty much done on Joker - Folie à Deux other than to say, I was genuinely impressed and riveted by the whole film as it slowly played out and I can’t wait to grab this one on Blu Ray when it gets a release. Definitely see this one on a big screen if you can.

Hellboy - The Crooked Man

A Witch Before Dying

Hellboy - The Crooked Man
Directed by Brian Taylor
USA/UK/Germany/Bulgaria 2024
Dark Horse Comics/Icon
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Very slight content spoilers for two scenes.

This must be one of the least publicised movies out there and I’ve no idea why, now I’ve seen it, because it’s great. I told a few of my friends who are Hellboy fans that I was going to see the new one, Hellboy - The Crooked Man and, some of them didn’t even know a fourth film in the franchise had been made. I know this is like a low budget, poor cousin to the other three but, really? They didn’t have a proper advertising budget?

Anyhooo!. Okay, so let me be straight about this… I love Guillermo del Toro as a director and think he makes some great movies. And I liked his Hellboy movies, especially the second one but, I have to say I preferred Neil Marshall’s stab at the character in the third film and, I think this new one runs that one a close second too. One of my favourite reviewers commented on Twitter that this film is the closest of them all to a an almost verbatim adaptation of the comic book run it’s based on and, although I’ve never read any of them (as yet), I can see how that might be the case. Especially since, for once, we have the original comic creator Mike Mignola writing the screenplay for his character here.

Okay… brief rundown of the plot. It’s the late 1950s (so I guess that makes this one a prequel) and Hellboy (played here by Jack Kesey) is on a freight train in the deep countryside with special agent Bobbie Jo Song (played wonderfully by Adeline Rudolph) and another agent. They are baby sitting their cargo to get back to their headquarters… said cargo being an imprisoned spider housing a demonic soul inside it. Well, as they go through a specific, witchy part of the country, the spider grows to giant size, gets loose, kills an agent and escapes, crashing the train carriage (but not the rest of the train somehow… I think the low budget has something to do with this because we don’t see the carriage again) and allowing it to escape. Hellboy and Bobby start exploring the area and come across someone suffering from a witch’s curse and also they bump into a guy called Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), a basically good guy with a lucky bone and who is trying hard not to be the witch he somehow has become. All three of them head off to find his friend and then find the dark forces unleashed in the surrounding forest, so the two agents can try and locate their hellish cargo. And that’s as much as I’m saying about that.

So if you’re familiar with the Hellboy franchise then, maybe just leave your expectations at the door for this one. Although ‘Big Red’ has the similar, cynical and humorous attitude to the world (although he seems less world weary and specialised, which makes sense if it's set in the 50s), the script really strips the comedy element down to pretty much nothing here. Instead, what we have is a straight up, in your face, relatively small scale horror movie which should surely please fans of the genre. It’s not exactly scary… it’s still a horror action movie with the emphasis on the darker elements of the plot… but it is suspenseful and, I have to say, budgetary constraints aside, a really well made movie. Which is what I’d expect from someone who directed the brilliant Crank pictures and the second, superior Ghost Rider movie.

Even the opening and closing title card is absolutely designed to get under your skin. Perhaps taking a cue from the early Insidious movies, it’s an uncompromising card which enters suddenly and then just leaves, dropping you into the middle of the action. While this movie is set in the fifties, it could almost be set anytime because the whole of the film is pretty much confined to the forest, the nearby landscape and its inhabitants... whether human, demonic and, in one scene where a church is under siege, the freshly risen undead.

Now, the film is not as gory as the glorious third film in the franchise (reviewed here) but it does have its moments and there’s a nice sequence where Tom goes to find a witch friend and, when they get there, she’s just a naked skin on the bed, uninhabited. Very much looking like a prop from the wonderful 1966 British horror movie Island Of Terror (reviewed here). And then, when the witch returns in the form of an animal (I can’t remember which, maybe a racoon), the animal enters the skin through the mouth and suddenly the body begins filling back up with bone and internal organs as it spasms on the bed. So not so much gory but satisfyingly gloopy in certain scenes, for sure.

The film is fast paced and is entertaining as hell. And it’s got a nice complimentary score by someone called Sven Falconer which I’m guessing we’re not going to see on CD anytime soon, more’s the pity. It works really well for the small scale nature of the majority of the film though and it helps keep this frenetic pacing making sense when, in later scenes, the editor keeps crosscutting between three to four protagonists as each encounter their own problems.

And I think that’s me done with this one. I really had an unexpectedly good time with Hellboy - The Crooked Man and if you’re a fan of the franchise or, especially, horror movies in general, then this one is definitely worth seeing on a big screen, I would say. Loved it.

Megalopolis

On The Fritz

Megalopolis
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
USA 2024
American Zoetrope
UK cinema release print

“Head and hands need a mediator.
The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.”
Metropolis, 1927

So the day before I saw Megalopolis, I watched a review by one of my favourite movie critics. 

Now, I find Francis Ford Coppola a bit hit and miss but he’s always very interesting and, one of the reasons I wanted to see this one was because he’d been trying to get this film made since he was talking about it on the set of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s. After many cast changes and false starts he finally raised the $120 million dollar budget out of his own pocket (to ensure the lack of studio interference), selling one of his own vineyards in the process. However, when I watched this one review of the film by the critic I have a lot of time for, it was a ten minute rant about how it’s possibly the worst movie he’s ever seen (someone’s clearly not seen Harlem Nights then!), for various reasons. So I kinda regretted that I'd bought the ticket to see it at Leicester Square but, I was in London to attend a book signing anyway and so I went through with it and, you know what... it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

The film is a fable set in the late 21st Century where Adam Driver’s character Cesar Catilina, who has the power to freeze time whenever he wants, is one of the chief architects and power players in the royalty that is New Rome, taken over from New York (so SPQR USA, I guess). He’s also invented a new and magical building material called Megalon (not the same Megalon who is an enemy of Godzilla in a 1973 movie, reviewed here). And the whole film is a power struggle between the various members of the extended family who play Gods to this new Roman Empire... there’s Nathalie Emmanuel as latest love interest to Cesar, Julia Cicero. And there’s Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Cicero), Shia LaBeouf (troublemaker Clodio Pulcher), Aubrey Plaza (as ambitious, backstabbing TV presenter Wow Platinum), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (as Cesar’s driver and wing man Fundi Romaine) and even Dustin Hoffman as a behind-the-scenes fix it man.

And I think the reason the film has been said to have no story is probably due to the fact that it’s such a fairly simple story that everyone is expecting more from it, perhaps. But there is one. And it’s been called unwatchable by many, it would seem... but no it isn’t. Unlike the reviewer I saw, I didn’t find it incredibly dull and it didn’t really feel longer than its two hours and eighteen minutes (although, it kinda felt like there may have been some cuts which could have expended certain scenes, like the final fate of Clodio).

And, yes, pretty much all the actors are giving absolutely scenery chewing, over the top performances which some may later come to regret and which seem stagey and contrived but... I’ve been thinking about this... I suspect a lot of this may have been exactly what Coppola was going for here.

To explain, the one review I saw didn’t mention a very specific film which, it turns out, lots of other people have mentioned in connection to this film... I just didn’t know about it. So I was about two thirds of the way through Megalopolis before I realised that this is a film very much informed by the 1927 Fritz Lang silent movie, Metropolis (reviewed here). And I wish I’d figured that out sooner because, yes, the dialogue is extremely bad and so much nonsense in this film, for the most part but, if you scratch that off the surface and look at it as a silent movie, treating the dialogue as unnecessary chatter, then you do have a film which starts to resemble those lofty heights that Lang committed to celluloid at the end of the silent era.

Yes, it’s a somewhat bloated corpse of a movie but, perhaps that’s how the younger generation may perceive Metropolis as being if they were presented with it as a brand new film nowadays. And, look, I’m not denying that there are a lot of problems and unfortunate artistic dead end choices in this movie but, I think it’s not something you should dismiss so lightly either... I think it’s definitely worth a look and my gut instinct is telling me that 30 to 50 years from now, if Coppola is still remembered, then this film may come under a certain re-appraisal and people might start taking it a little more seriously than, well, than it’s even possible to do right now.

Given that the film is quite all over the place tonally in some sequences, I have to also give a round of applause to composer Osvaldo Golijov, who manages to shift his musical palette through a number of different styles and really does help bring together the movie as a whole, I think.

One last thing about Megalopolis, before I move on and forget about this one for a while... the reviewer who I watched before I saw the film brought up the movie Caligula (reviewed by me here) and said that it’s a much more interesting way of doing things than what Coppola has done here. I don’t think Coppola was necessarily influenced by that film but, I think it was a good call to invoke it because there were many stretches of the movie, especially at the start, which do call to mind that particular film (actually, if Megalopolis had more female nudity, I would have thought a lot more of it, I suspect). 

It is then, as far as I'm concerned, a never dull but perhaps less substantial take on a kind of melding between the sensibilities of Metropolis and Caligula (another film people are citing in relation is The Fountainhead but, I’ve never seen it so can’t comment either way). And although it is not going to make many people who see it happy, I’m really glad I did take the opportunity to go to the screening and could certainly be tempted back to see it again in ten years or so. It’s not the aesthetic disaster that many reviews may lead you to believe but, similarly, I think this will fail abysmally at the box office and I kinda feel for Coppola (who recently lost his wife during post production). I hope this noble dinosaur of cinema can remain untouched by the possible public lambasting this film may well receive. An interesting failure then but, one which may well be considered a success by many in later years, I feel.

The Well

Went the day…

The Well
Directed by Federico Zampaglione
2023 Italy
Uncork’d Entertainment

I got fed up with waiting for The Well to get any kind of cinema release here in the UK. It’s now looking unlikely and, to further inflate the crimes against filmanity this movie is a victim of, it’s apparently due to be released in the near future on UK DVD, but not in a proper Blu Ray transfer... which a film which looks as exquisite as this one so obviously needs here. Why is this country becoming a bunch of philistines when we should be, like the French, a bunch of cineastes? 

So okay, yeah, I decided to watch a free, HD, pre-streaming version of the film, if you catch my drift. I mean, I want to buy a cinema ticket and a Blu Ray of this but, it’s like the company don’t want me to spend money on their movie. Absolutely crazy stuff. I can only hope that one of the proper boutique labels like Severin or Arrow or Vinegar Syndrome pick this one up in due course and give it the proper treatment it deserves.

Okay, so this film is, to all extents and purposes, made by someone who is definitely trying to make it look like a late 1970s/80s Italian horror film (even though it almost all takes place in 1993) and, frankly, succeeding in almost every way possible. Even the plot details have a very similar feel to lots of horror films and even gialli made in that period in Italy so, if you are a fan of that particular golden age, then you really do need to see this one.

The film stars Lauren LaVera as Lisa, sent by her father (who owns a company who restore artworks to their former glory), to a chateau in Italy, in order to restore a painting belonging to a woman called Emma (played by the great Claudia Gerini, who younger, modern audiences might best remember for her turns in the first off the new Diabolik movies, reviewed here and John Wick Chapter 2 reviewed here) and her freakish daughter. On the way there, she meets up with three Americans studying the flora and fauna of a nearby forest and they agree to meet up later that week… that meeting never really happens for reasons I won’t reveal.

When Lisa arrives at her destination, she discovers the huge painting is completely smoke black due to a recent fire… but she has to uncover what lies beneath in two weeks, due to reasons made very clear at the end of the story. However, as each day goes by and more of the demonic (because, of course) painting is brought to light, Lisa begins to encounter nightmarish visions along the way. Is the painting hiding a deeper, sinister secret? Well, yeah, absolutely.

That’s as much as I’m saying about the plot but, as you would expect from a film trying to emulate the Italian horror films of the 70s/80s, it looks absolutely beautiful and the camera moves through the shots in a very controlled and slow way. There’s a lovely shot, for example, where the camera slowly moves left past a birdcage in the foreground of the shot, removing the bars from the screen as the verticals exit on the right... then the rest of the scene plays out and then the camera exits the scene with the precise opposite movement, bringing the bars back into the front of the screen. Another great shot has Emma’s daughter constantly circling around Lisa and camera moving in a circle with her. And there’s a wonderful sequence where a room so neutral and colourless it looks like it’s in monotone, is suddenly contrasted with an orange/brown room which, when Lisa enters it, is pitched against the mono room which can be seen in the huge doorway she just came through. So, yeah, the film is lovingly crafted and absolutely has the feel of those cinematic delights it’s trying to emulate.

Not to mention the level of goriness in the movie… let’s just say that this one has the same kind of eye gouging, limb lopping, gut munching, face peeling violence that would have made this an instant video nasty target if it were released in the period it’s succeeding so well at copying. Not to mention, there’s even the ‘person bends down to reveal to the audience that someone else is standing behind them’ shot which was popular for a time in films such as Argento’s Tenebrae (reviewed here) and De Palma’s Raising Cain. There are even a couple of scenes, one right at the start and one in the middle, where Lisa’s eye make up makes her look a little like Jessica Harper in Suspiria (reviewed here).

Another thing is the score by Oran Loyfer, which sounds very much like something Goblin or Bruno Nicolai or Keith Emerson or even Libra would have provided, by the time it gets to the end of the picture. It totally goes there and even features a cheesy song with lyrics pertaining to the story for the end credits. End credits which, I should add, contain a long thanks section near the finish which includes Lamberto Bava and Alan Jones among the people listed.  

So yeah, that’s me done on The Well. If this somehow gets a Blu Ray release at some point I will definitely be snapping this one up… it’s the kind of thing you might want to watch on a double bill with something like The Church, I reckon and, as I said, fans of those kinds of movies would do well to acquaint themselves with this one, for sure. All it needed was a bit of nudity and it would have been absolutely pitch perfect but, what we do get (apart from a terrible twist about the owner of the pub across from the castle, which was telegraphed pretty much from the start of the movie when you meet him) is pretty close. I loved this one.

Afraid

 

AIA Eye

AfrAId
UK/USA 2024
Directed by Chris Weitz
Columbia/Blumhouse

Warning: Yep, some AI spoilers in here for sure.

Don’t get me started on AI. I think it’s soulless and somewhat evil and is going to be destroying as many lives as it could potentially help. I am annoyed that certain laws have not been made around the use and development of AI but, what can you do? It looks like Hollywood is also jumping on the bandwagon and using movies (at the moment) to look into this and try and hold a mirror up to society to see if anyone’s looking (while another part of Hollywood are already embracing this artificial treachery in the most disgusting manner... this needs to be stopped). And this new film, AfrAId is just one in a long legacy of movies to look at the idea of AI being a bad back alley to walk down. From films like 2001 - A Space Odyssey (which is referenced a number of times here, sometimes rather blatantly and clumsily and, sometimes not... such as a young character being named Calvin, or Cal for short... I guess we were lucky he wasn’t called Halvin, then), Westworld, Demon Seed through to more modern movies concerning themselves with the same thing, such as M3GAN (reviewed here) and Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning (reviewed here).

This new one, AfrAId was something I wanted to see, not because it was looking like it was doing anything much different to the history of AI gone wrong on screen before but mainly because it features two actors I like a lot, though I’ve not seen them in a great deal, playing the parts of the mother, Meredith and father, Curtis who make up a family unit with their teenage daughter and two younger sons. Namely Katherine Waterston and John Cho.

The plot is simple... after a set up which deliberately gets your back up, as a family decides to turn their AI helper off and are then punished for it by the very AI they are trying to shut down (and when I say punished, I mean they’re probably killed), the film follows Curtis as he has to make a new pitch for his boss to potential clients (played by Keith Carradine) in his advertising company, to market this new AI helper which is like Alexa dialled up to 11 in terms of intelligence and what seems to be self cognisance. Three representatives show up, including one played by David Dastmalchian (so you just know something bad is bound to happen) and Curtis gets the deal, as the company gets paid an obscene amount of money. But in order to figure out what he’s selling, he’s compelled (well forced really) to take the new AI system, called AIA, into his family home. And of course, at first it seems to be making the lives of the family members better even though, right off the bat, it’s doing some pretty scary things with the kids. And then, of course, things get out of control... but I don’t want to say how because there are some nice ideas within the film. So in terms of the story itself I’ll leave that there.

Now, I mentioned M3GAN earlier and, in some ways the film is a little like the last quarter of an hour of that but with a little extra going on, added into the mix. And, here’s the thing... the film is both smart and clumsy all at the same time. Which makes for a tonally uneven piece of art. 

For example, I can understand the film makers must have wanted to draw people in by giving them a scare sequence at the start of the film before going into the story proper. But, that in itself seems a little redundant considering the next ten minutes or so show the benefits of the digital world, where AIA harkens from, being slowly eroded as the film tries to make the point that technology is a pervasive and not altogether benign presence in our lives. And that would be my big criticism of the film in general... every time something subtle or clever happens, there’s usually something else coming up just before or after that’s way dumber than you might expect. It’s almost like a committee of film studio executives looked at a more palatable cut at some point and started sending notes on what they thought the lowest common denominator audiences would be better off being spoon fed with. So that’s somewhat annoying, it has to be said.

But, to counter that, the film is well acted and the concept is pushed a little further than you might expect... which is to its advantage. Granted, there are no real surprises on this one but... and this is where the spoiler comes in folks... it does have a surprisingly downbeat ending to it. And I don’t mean some little coda or something small that comes in post-credits (there are none here), I’m talking about the resolution to the story, such as it is, before the credits role. This is not exactly a feel good movie people... which is something the sci-fi thriller can get away with more bluntly than movies in other genres, for sure.

Okay, I think I’ve said all I wanted to on AfrAId... it was an entertaining slice of sci-fi/thriller cum horror and, while it sometimes feels like a retread of the aforementioned M3GAN, it certainly does do it’s own thing at crucial points and I had a really good time with it. One to watch, I think... although the threat to us all from AI is never going to be quite the same as depicted in this feature (but it will be worse and possibly quite soon), that’s for sure. Worth checking out though.

Elric Of Melniboné - The Elric Saga Volume 1

Rune Messiah

Elric Of Melniboné
The Elric Saga Volume 1
by Michael Moorcock
Saga Press
ISBN: 9781534445680

And so I revisit one of my teenage writing heroes, the incomparable Michael Moorcock, in a series of hefty tomes published by Saga Press which, while not claiming to cover absolutely every story that Moorcock has included his Elric character in (that way lies madness), does its best to assemble, in chronological order, the bulk of the stories, revised at various points by Moorcock to get a greater continuity, since the first of the short stories, The Dreaming City was published in Science Fantasy Issue 47 in 1961. Now there’s a reader’s guide to the series in the back of the book which goes over the difficulty of attempting such a task, where the stories were written haphazardly and revisited, starting in this one with the prequel novel from which this first collection takes its title (which would, I concur, definitely be the place to start).

So, and keeping in mind some of these collected ‘novels’ are made from different short stories originally published in a different order and retitled, this collection collects together Elric Of Melniboné, The Fortress And The Pearl, The Sailor On The Seas Of Fate and The Weird Of The White Wolf.

Now Elric was one of my favourite of Moorcock’s characters (along with Jerry Cornelius and Dorian Hawkmoon) but, of course (and this is where it gets extra complicated), Moorcock created a whole multiverse out of his stories and many, perhaps even all, of his characters are manifestations of each other in their specific plane of existence. So for example Elric, Erekosé, Dorian Hawkmoon and Corum Jhaelen Irsei are all manifestations, in different ‘phase shifts’, of Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion... but if they are then, so too are Jerry Cornelius, Jherek Carnelian and a whole bunch of others. Although nearly all of these characters are, puzzlingly, mostly out of print in this country for some reason or another at time of writing... which is a poor showing for one of the country’s greatest sci-fi and fantasy writers.

All this kind of makes it hard to recommend this series of Elric collections as a jumping on point but, I do have to really because I’ve never found myself able to find a true reading order through this author’s works. Let’s just say then, that the more of Moorcock’s characters you are familiar with, the more rich will be your appreciation of the novels when little overlaps or references to other realms of existence are made manifest in each heroes saga (as they do here). For example, one might want to make oneself familiar with the first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme (my review of the excellent movie adaptation of the same name can be found here) before reading The Singing Citadel, which is collected here in the final book in this collection, as the first story in The Weird Of The White Wolf. Or maybe not... since each is as much a different reflection of the other, it has to be said.

Anyway, forget all that and just enjoy a great hero written as a counterpart (and possibly antidote) to the much loved Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. Elric is an albino king of the dreaming city known as Imryyr, who questions the cruelty of his people and, due to some personal tragedy (and a really stupid decision on his part when he takes back the throne from his evil cousin), wanders the world seeking out the ways of the rest of the cultures which make up The Young Kingdoms (forged of chaos, as we find in what is slotted in as a kind of opening flashback in The Weird Of The White Wolf, in this particular tome).

When he is king of his land and being one of the last few beings who is a master of the sorcerous arts, he keeps his strength up through a regular intake of herbs but, due to the rocky path towards his ultimate destiny, he has now at his side, the black rune sword Stormbringer (brother of similar sword Mournblade), a weapon forged in chaos and which steals the souls of all it slays and feeds the energy back into the wielder, in this case Elric. However, the blade seems to have it’s own consciousness and, singing its way through battle, will also guide and control Elric’s hand, sometimes deliberately slaying people that Elric does not intend to kill... such as a very important character in Elric’s life (just as Jerry Cornelius similarly, accidentally killed, with his needle gun, the multidimensional manifestation of that character, his own sister, in The Final Programme... Catherine Cornelius, as played by Sarah Douglas in the movie version).

As all Moorcock’s fantasy fiction, the book is full of colourful scenarios, steeped in surrealism and laced with a bleak and ironic melancholy which are the chief traits of the doom laden Elric himself. In the final tome collected here, he meets his more regular companion Moonglum, after he abandons another friend and ally after he has more or less wiped Imrryr and its inhabitant from the face of the Earth, when the dregs of the survivors wake their dragons and slaughter the crews of the ships of his allies.

And Moorcock’s often quotable prose is irresistible and quite often addictive as you read through Elric’s adventures, with such marvellous lines as, “And there are times, Prince Elric, I’ll admit, when a decent piece of steel has a certain advantage over a neatly turned phrase!” And, of course, full of interesting ideas... Elric’s cruel race has a choir of slaves surgically altered so that each can sing only one note perfectly, for example.

Plus the odd surprise such as, when attacked by a hideous demon thing, it’s one sorrowful utterance of “Frank.”, which means nothing to Elric, is a signal to readers that this was a multiversal manifestation of Jerry Cornelius’ brother Frank, in this plane. Another welcome surprise being in the first story in the collected tome, The Sailor On The Seas Of Fate, when Elric, Erekosë, Hawkmoon and Corum team up (quite literally in one sequence, where their bodies metamorphosise into a combined, black demonic entity) to stop the multiverse from ending. And of course, the wrangling of that encounter... since this is the second time Elric and Corum have met from Corum’s point of view but, not from Elric’s, who counts this as his first meeting (not that he can remember this adventure when it’s done, anyway)... is as deftly handled as it could be.

So for all it’s complexities and references, I would still heartily recommend the Saga Press edition of Elric Of Melniboné - The Elric Saga Volume 1 as a great place to start off and familiarise yourself with Moorcock’s mercurial multiverse, for sure. I now have four books of their ‘trilogy’ by Saga Press (see how complicated it’s become again already, four out of three, due to Moorcock releasing a new Elric tome just last year) and so I will report back on those when I get back to them.

The Substance

A Woman Of...

The Substance
Directed by Coralie Fargeat
UK/France 2024
MUBI
UK cinema release print

Warning: Yeah, it’s almost impossible to talk about this one without some significant spoilerage so... I’m not even going to try.

The Substance is the second feature length film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, following on from her tremendous first feature, Revenge (reviewed by me here). Now, if it comes down to it, I’d have to say I preferred her first movie to this one but, there’s no doubt that this is an outstanding piece.

Put it this way, there’s body horror cinema done right, such as when written and directed by the Cronenbergs (David and his son Brandon) and there’s body horror which, just seems a bit tame and unrelentingly pretentious... such as those directed by people like Brian Yuzna or Clark Baker. So I can’t be down on The Substance because this one definitely falls into the former camp and I certainly had a good time with it. Also, it seems like a lot of the special effects are practically done so... yeah, can’t complain, for sure.

The film follows Demi Moore in a truly outstanding performance as main protagonist(s) Elisabeth Sparkle, a former Hollywood oscar winner and fitness queen of TV ratings who is fired by her boss, played by Dennis Quaid, for being ‘past it’. However, after she survives a gnarly car accident, she is given a heads up and enters into the world of The Substance. This... well... substance, basically births a younger version of the person out of the spinal column of the first... in this case called Sue and played with equal relish by Margaret Qualley. Once the thing is birthed, she has to look after the comatose, older one by feeding her certain nutrients for seven days and then switching back to the old ‘matrix’ version for seven days, who will be doing the same for the new gal in town. Both are the same person and seem to share the same memories but.... both have different perspectives on their respective life, obviously. 

Anyway, Sue gets Elisabeth’s old TV job and takes the ratings higher than they’ve ever gone (going home to look after her ‘sick mother’ every other week is the excuse she uses for her use and eventual abuse of the titular concoction) and, as the two continue their stuttered co-existence... jealousy and rejection of each other’s lifestyle choices turn them into enemies. But, as they both find to their detriment, there are consequences for breaking the rules of use of The Substance.

Okay, that’s the set up in a nutshell and, I have to say, for the first three quarters of the movie I was loving it. It starts off with a demo of the substance on an egg yolk which then sets up the next shot which ends up bookending, somewhat, the intervening movie. And it’s a wonderful opening. A close up shot of the construction of Elisabeth Sparkle’s Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star followed by how it gets cracked and aged over the years... which is the first of, a fair few quite blatant metaphors the film uses to talk about the central issue... why are people, especially the female of the species, so enchanted with youth and so afraid of ageing?

Okay, now before I go any further, I just want to remind you that I thought the film was great... and it’s certainly one I will be buying when it gets a Blu Ray release, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Now, there’s been a lot of talk that the film is a remake of various films over the years. Sure, it certainly leans into various literary concepts and their collective cinematic legacy over the years but, nope, this is clearly it’s own film in that, if anything, it’s a mish mash of various ideas. Ideas such as The Picture Of Dorian Gray... not to mention various films where antagonists have deliberately stolen the life force of others to keep themselves going such as The Night Strangler (reviewed here)... I might even mention the body swap genre to a degree and it certainly has stylistic surface borrowings from things such as The Elephant Man and, I dunno if this was a deliberate thing or not but, certain things which start to happen in the final act reminded me just a little of the ending of the movie adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme (reviewed here). So to blatantly call it an unofficial remake of something else is to do the director and her art an injustice, I think.

My only problems stem from the final half an hour or so of the film. Some of them are credibility things which, bearing in mind the fantasy nature of the film, seem a little puzzling within the built world of the film... such as a certain character being let back stage for her all important New Year’s Eve live broadcast when, in real life, she would have been kicked off the lot. Also, since when did they have topless dancers on prime time New Years shows in the US? Is that a thing now? But my main issue with the movie is that I thought the denouement of the story, no matter how well done... and it is stylishly rendered, for sure... seemed a little unsatisfying. I was waiting for Demi Moore’s version of the character to start doing something which was being done to her by her alter ego at some point but, alas, the narrative didn’t touch that idea, which is kind of a shame.

However, it really doesn’t matter because, even in the final segment of the film, it had me smiling. There are a fair few mirror scenes in this movie, since it’s basically dealing with the idea of female beauty and there’s one near the end which is scored by a piece of Bernard Herrmann’s music from Vertigo (one of my favourite films) and, if you remember the scene it was originally written for, well... it’s a wonderful musical joke that really perked me up in my seat.

Other than that, I think the other thing I wanted to say was, I thought Fargeat’s Revenge was a really solid, feminist, girl power movie so I am surprised to be reporting back that, this film seems to be as much about the ‘male gaze’ as it is about the improbable standards of beauty that self-same gaze spawns as a shared expectation of society. Which astonished me but, yeah, this is full of lingering close ups on the female body... in various fitness costumes that don’t leave much to the imagination and certainly in the lengthy, numerous sequences of the two lead actresses being completely naked. So... yeah, not so much disappointed by Fargeat’s seeming slant to this (I may have misunderstood something, I reckon) as much as finding myself being caught unawares, so to speak.

But, all that aside, I have to say I still really liked The Substance, even though it has lots of scenes which would have been completely cut out by the BFFC even twenty years ago (which is always puzzling to me but I’m glad they didn’t mutilate this one and said institution should be put down like a rabid animal anyway). This is a nicely put together, charming variant on the body horror narrative and fans of that sub-genre should embrace the film with open arms and legs. Certainly it’s a good example of modern cinematic spectacle, for sure... it’s just annoying that the striking score by Raffertie is not available on a proper CD... I would have liked to have given that one a listen.

Hundreds Of Beavers

Beaver Pitch

Hundreds Of Beavers
USA 2022
Directed by Mike Cheslik
FilmHub

Warning: The whole format and brilliance of the movie is a spoiler in itself... just watch the damned movie and then maybe head on back here after you’ve seen it.

Although it’s got a 2022 copyright date on it, Hundreds Of Beavers has been playing and wowing the festival circuit for a couple of years now and so it didn’t get a proper cinema release in this or other countries until earlier this year (which, hooray, means I can include it in my ‘last year’s best movies list’ in January 2025). It was on my radar and I wanted to see it, even though I’m not the biggest fan of slapstick humour... but it played hardly any cinemas over here at all and practically nobody over here in the UK has even heard of it. Which is a shame since it’s absolutely an amazing and almost unique cinematic experience.

Okay, so the film stars Ryland Brickson Cole Tews as Jean Kayak, aka Apple Jack in the pre-credits sequence. Well, I say pre-credits sequence but they don’t start rolling until just over half an hour into the movie and the title of the film itself doesn’t hit the screen until two thirds of the way in. Anyway, after accidentally destroying his thriving cider trade, partially to do with some beavers eating things they shouldn’t and partially to do with him being quite drunk... he’s left in the wilderness with just himself in the snow trying to survive. And also trying to catch something to eat like a rabbit or, you know, a beaver.

It’s at this point that I should probably add that the film is a blend of live action and animation, in stonking black and white, has barely any dialogue in it at all and that all the animal parts are either puppets or, for the most part, men dressed up in rabbit, beaver, wolf and horse costumes. So hold onto that thought for a minute...

The film immediately turns into a brilliant parody of old roadrunner cartoons, with the beavers/rabbits etc as the roadrunner and Jean as Wiley Coyote. And while there are a few steals from silent comedy and many Looney Toons cartoons, I’d have to say that a lot of the ‘familiar’ gags are new or at least done in different ways. Either way... the film is incredibly inventive and witty and, even though the central character is killing as many beavers as possible... he will totally have your sympathy and you will want him to succeed in his mission.

So, I’d have to say if someone told me I’d have to sit through almost two hours of silent cartoon homage, I’d be pretty put out by the prospect. But, amazingly, this film never gets dull and the story manages to keep finding new ways to develop and hold the interest. I never once got bored in this one, for sure. For instance, when he comes across a beaver fur trader and his beautiful daughter (played wonderfully by Olivia Graves) in a cabin in the wilderness, Jean has to try to keep bringing back beavers with various coins which can be converted into goods as rewards, as he works up to what the proprietor’s price is for the hand of his daughter in marriage... which is, of course, Hundreds Of Beavers. So yeah, Jean becomes a trapper.

As the film goes along we get more and more inventive traps (quite often that’s also all the more to backfire on the trapper), we get a whole host of ideas thrown at the audience in more and more hilarious ways such as... a giant fortress constructed by the beavers from which to mount their ‘special project’, Holmes and Watson beavers, a giant man made up of many beavers walking along in formation and... well, as the saying goes... much, much more.

And, honestly, I can’t recommend this one enough. The music in this is great too, some of it original songs and some of it an old friend I’ve not heard from of late in modern movies... the old De Wolf Music Library... I had no idea these people were still supplying modern movie makers with needle drop scores for their projects!

Anyway, that’s me about done on Hundreds Of Beavers, not because I haven’t got anything else to say but because to say much more than this would be to spoil it somewhat. What I will say further, though, is that at some point about half way through the movie, I began to question what the heck I was watching... I did so with a big grin on my face (well, as near as a grin as I get) and I’m still questioning it now. But in a good way, for sure.

Running Scared - Insider Tales From The House Of Hammer

Running ‘til
They’re Hammered

Running Scared -
Insider Tales From
The House Of Hammer
by Phil Campbell with Brian Reynolds
Peveril Publishing
No visible ISBN

Subtitled Insider Tales From The House Of Hammer, Philip Campbell and Brian Reynolds’ tome Running Scared is a lovely, short but refreshing read about a time period roughly between 1969 and 1972, where these two both worked as runners for the illustrious British film company Hammer.... both in their Wardour Street office in London (I always look for the preserved Hammer House fronting when I am up there to this day) and in the various studios and on location, where they were sometimes assisting in production to one degree or another. Before I dig in though, an apology is in order, on the odd chance either of the writers ever stumble on this review...

I bought this 2015 book from the two writers in that same year, from a stall run by them at the Camden Film Fair. I remember chatting with them for a bit and telling them about this blog, dropping them a card and telling them to wait a few months and then, after that, they should find a review of this book on here. Well, what can I say? There’s always a shinier, newer book around the corner and, although this book didn’t stray too far from the top of the pile, a seven year wait for me to read and review was not my intention (nor a two year blog publication date after that, for that matter). So my apologies to Phil and Brian for not getting my act together quicker. It’s only me working this blog and I’m doing my best, honest.

Okay, that out of the way... I bought this book knowing nothing about it other than when I discovered the writers on a stall at the fair. But I had a hunch that, if anyone was going to turn up the stories you don’t officially get on various accounts of the Hammer films in various authorised editions, then it’s going to be the non-star ‘little people’ who were hovering in the background. It’s always the same in any company... it always seems to be the average man in the office who is fully aware of what’s really going on and what to do about things, while management go about creating their own problems for themselves and it seems it’s true of film companies too. In fact, I’ve noticed over the past couple of years that this is also true of the people running the country... the people in power demonstrate a lack of common sense and an unbelievable lack of awareness of things going on and, yeah, the people in the street are the ones having to deal with their folly. So it is, in some ways, although certainly only very politely touched upon here, in various film studios too.

The book is breezily written by Phil, who is the main focus although several of Brian’s accounts of his experiences with various personnel and iconic stars also find thier way into the tome. Phil writes with a lot of humour and, as I’d suspected, it’s packed with information that you won’t necessarily find in other, more high profile accounts of the days of Hammer. Basically, as runners, the guys would do a variety of jobs which could be considered a bit ‘run of the mill’ (while also being quite essential to the smooth running of a production, actually) including things like buying biscuits, transporting film cans, photocopying various documents and call sheets and distributing them, running errands for cast and crew... stuff like that. So, as you can probably guess, people like these two can certainly have some stories to tell.

And what stories! If you want to find out about many things such as giving Ingrid Pitt a piggy back ride to keep her costume out of the mud and being asked to deposit her weekly pay down her ample cleavage because her hands were full, then you’ve got the right book. Or that time Jenny Hanley got a fly in her eye and nearly killed herself and Phil because she was giving him a lift in her car and they nearly ran a red light. Or some interesting times with my favourite Lady Of Hammer, the lovely Caroline Munro, who Phil saw in action on both her Hammer movies, Dracula AD 1972 (reviewed here) and Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter.

There are also his observations about the times when tragedy struck... for example, during the making of one of my favourite Hammer Horrors, Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (reviewed by me here), he tells of how Peter Cushing had to leave on his first and last day of filming one of the main roles when his wife died, how his replacement Andrew Keir managed to damage his leg and had to go to hospital on his first day and how the director died half way through filming.

And, yeah, it’s all in here. Encounters with the likes of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Ingrid Pitt, Kate O’ Mara and a whole host of others too numerous to mention here, not to mention actors from neighbouring sets such as Vincent Price when he was filming his second Dr. Phibes movie.

I won’t go on as this is only a quickie but I would like to conclude by heartily recommending Running Scared - Insider Tales From The House Of Hammer, not because it by any means replaces any of the more exhaustive or academic works on the studio but, more because it’s got stories and photos (many of them) which are quite unique to this book and the memories of Phil Campbell and Brian Reynolds... you won’t see too many of these anywhere else folks. Also, of course, because it’s entertainingly written and I had an absolute blast with it. A quirky, fun and very informative book, for sure.