Dr. Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs

Bomb Voyage

Dr. Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs 
aka Le Spie Vengono Dal Semifreddo
Italy/USA 1966
Directed by Mario Bava
American International Pictures
DVD Region 1

Okay, so I watched the first film in this sequence of two, Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine, very recently and reviewed it here. I didn’t think a heck of a lot of it, to be fair, even though it’s just the kind of oddity of a movie I usually relish. However, I was really looking forward to this sequel because Mario Bava is one of those amazing directors who can make even the blandest of subjects look interesting and inject it with some inspiring photography, imbibing it a vitality all his own. So I couldn’t wait to see what he did with subject matter like Dr. Goldfoot and his ridiculous schemes for world domination. Well... hmmm... to say I was underwhelmed would be a little harsh but, it has to be said, it’s a terrible movie and I was really surprised that Bava had ended up directing it

The history of the movie is somewhat strange in that it turns out that it started off life as a sequel to a film I mentioned, completely by coincidence, in my review of Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine, namely the Goldfinger spoof Due Mafiosi Contro Goldginger, which starred a very famous duo of Italian comedians called Franco & Ciccio and this second Goldfoot film, also, features them quite heavily. However, to help secure funding, the producers got the help of American International Pictures and AIP would only come on board with the backing money if the film was a sequel to their own spy spoof, the aforementioned Doctor Goldfoot. So the plan was to have two completely different cuts of the film, one which would feature more of  Franco & Ciccio (as the Italian cut apparently does... although they’re all over this cut of the movie too) and one version which is a Dr. Goldfoot film... except in the UK where it apparently had to be released as Dr. G And The Girl bombs because a real Doctor named Goldfoot threatened legal action.

The other thing I learned, and I’m sure I knew all this before because I read Tim Lucas’ excellent Mario Bava bible, All The Colours Of The Dark, many years ago... is that Bava really didn’t want to be involved with this movie in any capacity and, frankly, it shows. He was, however, under contract so he... well... he did his best with it I guess.

The film opens up with a bizarre reminder of the first movie as the credits play out with footage from the previous installment with a voice over by Vincent Price, narrating what happened and bringing the audience up to speed. Except, it’s really weird because Price as Dr. Goldfoot is the only actor/character carried over from the first film and so footage of Franco, Ciccio and “singing sensation” Fabian from this movie is also inserted in the recap, to somehow try and fool the audience into thinking their characters were in the first movie too. Um... moving swiftly along...

Franco and Ciccio don’t dominate the movie as they apparently do in the Italian version but, it has to be said, they don’t seem to jell well with a lot of the surrounding story. I can kinda see the appeal of them actually and would love to see them in other stuff but, seriously, I suspect this movie is not a good vehicle for them. Their comedy is very broad, often slapstick in places, and with maybe a dash of the anarchic humour of the Marx Brothers thrown in... served up with a generous helping of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedy violence at the drop of a hat. They even throw in a version of the Harpo/Groucho mirror scene from Duck Soup, only performed with Vincent Price and one of these two in this one. So they really should have fit into this movie pretty well in theory... but the reality is it’s a clunker of a film they’re in and, sad to say, that if you think Frankie Avalon’s comedy performance in Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine was particularly bad (I know I did), well, lets just say that Fabian makes Frankie Avalon look like the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.

Price himself is enjoyable enough but, honestly, the tone of his performance in this one is at odds with what he did with the character in the first. He really hams it up even more and spends most of the film actually talking to the audience. He’s kind of brilliant but, honestly, he doesn’t just break the fourth wall, he torches it and then dances on its ashes. I think he probably spends as much time mugging at the audience and filling them in on what’s going on than he does interacting with the other characters, in all honesty. There’s some funny stuff here but, when you pitch it against the plot, it seems kind of out of place and unnecessary. He still has lady robots clad in gold bikinis, who explode when kissing their victims this time around but, they seem to lack even the intelligence of the gals in the first movie and somehow seem to be a bit unsteady on their feet, it seemed to me.

There’s some terrible Bondian references again... such as one of Goldfoot’s personal assistants being called Hard-Job, after Goldfinger’s Odd Job. There’s also an homage to the periscope spy scene in From Russia With Love but... with a ridiculous comedy periscope that extends wherever he wants it to go and follows people around, stretching around corners etc, without anyone seeming to notice it. Honestly awful. Maybe he should have just stuck to using the “magically seeing anywhere he wants to” cam he seemed to have invented in the first film, perhaps?

The film has not much of an excuse for a plot and, if you thought the overlong comedy chase at the end of the first movie was dull and monotonous... well you should try sitting through this one which, pretty much, lasts the entire last third of the movie and which is equally less than entertaining, devolving into a fight with fire extinguishers on an airplane.

Ultimately, I was expecting to see a lot of Mario Bava’s perfectly framed photography and trademark bright colours but, while there certainly is some in this movie at some points, I found myself wondering if Bava was even on the set half the time because... some of it looked like it had been directed by somebody else. I feel sorry for Bava having to direct this rubbish under contract and, looking at other reviews of this movie, I think it’s generally agreed that this is the worst film he ever put his hand to... something I didn’t know when I started watching this monstrosity.

There’s not much more to say about this. Lallo Gorri scored the Italian version of this film and I would certainly like to see that version and definitely hear his score. This American version of the film is scored, once again, by Les Baxter and I have to say that I liked this score a lot more than the one he did for the first movie. It’s a lot jazzier and bolder than that one, I think, and it reminded me a lot more of what other American composers were doing in spoof spy films at the time... which is honestly not a bad way to go with it.

One last thing. There’s an uncredited actor in this called George Wang who plays one of Goldfoot’s assistants. All the way through this I recognised him but couldn’t quite put a finger on where I’d seen him before. Turns out he’s the Chinese guy who gets killed by Ursula Andress with her bullet shooting bikini at the start of The 10th Victim (reviewed here) and he’s got quite a distinctive face. I also found out he died just a couple of weeks before I saw this film... which is kinda sad since he’s only just properly appeared on my radar. Apparently he used to turn up in a lot of spaghetti westerns also... so I’ll look forward to a bit of Wang spotting now as I watch more movies.

Dr. Goldfoot And The Girls Bombs is the weaker of two very bad movies. There’s a lot of potential entertainment value, I feel, in movies with villains who have ridiculous names and even more ridiculous plots for taking over the world but, alas, and much to my surprise, neither of the Dr. Goldfoot movies live up to that promise. I am, however, happy to have seen them because that particular box tick was a long time coming. If you are a fan of Vincent Price then it’s probably worth a watch. If, though, like me, you’re partial to a bit of Mario Bava, well... you might not like what you find here.

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Subterranean Apesick Blues

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes
USA 1970
Directed by Ted Post
20th Century Fox 
Blu Ray Region B

Warning: I need to talk about the ending of this 
movie so consider yourself warned for spoilers.

So two years after the awesome Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here) we got the first of the sequels which was, I have to say, somewhat less awesome. Of the five original Apes movies, I’ve always thought they made three really great ones and two clunkers. My least favourite of the bunch being the final of the five, Battle For The Planet Of The Apes, and this one running it a close second for worst Apes film ever, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes.

I didn’t know this the first time I ever saw this movie but there are some good reasons why this one is but a pale shadow of the former installment. For starters, the previous movie’s star, Charlton Heston, reportedly did not want to be in this one and so cut a deal where he was promised that he’d be working for only two weeks on the film... which is why he is not the lead character in this, instead appearing only at the start of the movie and then returning for his “final solution” of an ending to the story. He donated his paycheck on this one to a charity.

Another factor in this film’s lack of oomph must also be to do with the fact that, because of severe financial problems 20th Century Fox were suffering through at the time due to the box office failure of big projects like Hello, Dolly and Tora! Tora! Tora!, the budget was reportedly slashed late in the day from five million dollars to two and a half million dollars. That can’t have helped morale and I believe the decision to get Ted Post in as the director on this one was largely due to his experience in shooting a lot of television and dealing with low budgets. This kinda makes sense but one wonders, in hindsight, if the company would have been so quick to slash the funding if they’d have known the longevity of the franchise which, as you probably know, is still running to this day.

The main factor for me though, and I don’t know who made this decision, is that it’s not had any input from one of the key developers of the first movie, Rod Serling, who gave us that marvellous twist ending (just like he would have written for one of his Twilight Zone episodes) and who was a meticulous writer with a good attention to detail, in my opinion.* I think this film in particular suffers from not having him on board but... I can’t just blame that either because, as far as I remember, he wasn’t involved in any of the other sequels either... and some of those were great.

The film actually starts, pre-credits and then throughout the opening of the movie, with a cut down version of the last few scenes of the original film, ending with a slightly censored version of Taylor’s final outburst before moving onto the apes and then the new lead. Interestingly, of the three main apes who feature in the flashback scenes at the start of the film - Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans - only Evans and Hunter reprised their roles as Zira and Dr. Zaius for this second movie. Roddy McDowell was busy directing a film in Scotland at the time and so the role of Cornelius this time around, asides from those opening revisited scenes, is played by David Watson, finding himself in the unfortunate position of having to... um... ape McDowell’s mannerisms.

So, instead of our main man Charlton in the lead role as Taylor, we have Heston look-alike James Franciscus, taking over as crashed astronaut Brent, sent to rescue Heston and his buddies. We don’t see the crash, or at least an expressive camera movement like in the first movie, presumably due to the budgetary restraints. Instead we have a broken up ship on desert land... which makes you wonder how Brent survives the crash, to be honest. In Planet Of The Apes, Taylor and company crash land on water but the debris in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes shows a cracked open spaceship. After burying his fellow crew members, Brent stumbles across Linda Harrison reprising her role as Taylor’s love interest, the silent Nova. After spying Taylor’s dog tags around her neck, something which wasn’t established at all in the first movie, we get more of Taylor’s story in the mind of Nova as Brent tries to establish communication. We see Heston and Harrison surviving weird walls of fire and then... Taylor falls through a solid mountain in a special effect worthy of something with even more of it’s budget slashed than this movie apparently was. Seriously people... lets not go there. It would be an understatement to say that most of the effects in this film are... just not that special.

Nova takes Brent to meet Cornelius and Zira in a sequence which has none of the punch of Taylor’s first meeting with the titular apes and after that we get a load of scenes involving hiding Brent away from prying eyes in Cornelius and Zira’s pantry, and lots of humourous dialogue and action which is a little bit over the top and more appropriate for a bedroom farce in some places. While this kind of writing and performance works well in the next film in the series, if memory serves, it really undermines the gravitas of the situations the main protagonist finds himself in here, it has to be said. There’s also lots of captured, escaped, captured, escaped to-ing and fro-ing which seems to me, to be honest, to just be padding to keep the budget of the film down.

It seems the writers have also toned down Maurice Evans’ Zaius character substantially from the first film. Zira and Cornelius should either be dead or in jail but, instead, they are married now... even though the film can only have taken place a week or so at most since the first movie (must have been a hasty criminal trial followed by a quick wedding). Interestingly enough, when Heston reacts to Zaius at the end of the movie, calling him a “bloody bastard”, it grates in a way that it wouldn’t have in the first film. It’s like the character has changed but Taylor is still acting towards him like he would have in the first movie... I believe there were a lot of script rewrites on this one.

Technically the film is not very good and seems to want to solve everything with dodgy short cuts. I’ve already mentioned the not so special effects (don’t even get me started on those crude lightning forks) but you also have stuff like, for instance, the sauna scenes. Dr. Zaius and other apes are seen talking in a sauna and there is a small amount of steam in the room. Now I know those ape costumes were hot but, I’m pretty sure that whenever they cut to a close up of the apes talking, the steam has just been superimposed on over the shot. It just doesn’t look right. I’m guessing they used steam for the master shots but, when it came time to shoot the close ups, they just turned the steam off because it was playing havoc with the actors and the make up. That’s what I think, anyway, and there seems to be an air of cheapness about the whole production, it has to be said. Which is a shame.

Where the film really loses it for me, however, is when Brent and Nova stumble upon the buried remains of our civilisation in an underground cavern. Underground to this future time period, obviously, and not as it would be seen today (which puts paid to one of the so called “goofs” reported on the IMDB). After a revelation which is a little less stunning than the original movie’s Statue Of Liberty ending, due to the timing of it mostly, we have this place populated by deformed mutants who tend talk telepathically until Brent shows up so they start using their voices (even when they don’t have to at later stages of the film... since Brent isn’t in the same room with them), worship an atomic bomb and wear masks that make them appear more human. Even though they live in isolation and have absolutely no reason for wearing these ‘human masks’ within their society.

It’s here that Brent finally catches up with Taylor and, after the mutants interrogate him telepathically and force him via mind control to try and kill Nova, they then make Brent and Taylor fight with the sheer power of just one controlling mind... and it’s all nonsense. It also seems a little at odds with the society so cleverly worked out for the first movie. Certainly it’s more appropriate to an old Star Trek episode (which I think the idea might have even been partially inspired by) and trying to shoehorn this plot into a movie with enough of a high profile concept in it as it is... and it’s such a brilliant evolutionary idea that the apes films start off from... just seems very clumsy, ham fisted and generally superfluous to anything in the rest of the story. I don’t know at what point this script had this tribe of half rejects from The Omega Man (reviewed here) grafted onto it but I know it was worked on quite a few times before this version was made (I believe even James Franciscus himself worked on one draft of the screenplay) and the introduction of these mutants is a bold but totally awful idea. It doesn’t fit the tone of the series and sticks out like a sore thumb... just awful.

Rosenman’s score is quite good and he sticks with percussion propelled orchestration and somewhat atonal writing set up by the film’s previous composer as a kind of musical syntax for the apes. It’s not nearly as special or experimental, nor as memorable, as Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the first movie but... at least it fits the film okay. Honestly, though, those bloody tone pyramids he does really do get on my nerves (see my review of The Car here for further clarification).

The one good thing that this film has to offer is... its last five minutes. My understanding is that Heston favoured the ending as it was shot and, since he’d hoped there would be no more sequels made (from what I understand), the ending of this one is pretty final in its conclusion with all three human protagonists being shot dead, caught in the battle between the apes and the mutant humans - first Nova, then Brent and then, finally Taylor - and then, with his “bloody bastards” line, Heston’s dying character activates the doomsday bomb and the whole planet is wiped out. It’s a particularly good ending to a film that started off okayish, got very weak and then somehow managed to get us to a final solution that at least still packs a punch. So there’s that.

Still... with Heston and co thinking “End of world equals end of franchise” kind of sentiments... it’s at this point that I remind you that three more sequels were made and, despite the absolute leap of faith required for the reasoning behind the plausibility of the story in the next entry... I have to say that the third one, which also sees the return of Jerry Goldsmith as the main composer (Goldsmith and Rosenman each scored two of the Planet Of The Apes movies each with another composer being brought in for the fourth of the five movies), is a much better sequel and also manages to shift the story of the first one into a topsy turvy comic reversal of fortune plot, high on laughs, before delivering the final, strong, sucker punch of an ending in that one. More of that when I come to rewatch and review... Escape From The Planet Of The Apes. 

* It has come to light since I wrote this review that Serling did not come up with the idea for the famous Statue Of Liberty reveal. Click on my review link below of the book Simians and Serialism for more details.

Planet Of The Apes at NUTS4R2

Planet Of The Apes 

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

Planet Of The Apes TV Show (live action) - to be reviewed

Time Of The Apes - to be reviewed

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes  

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

War Of The Planet Of The Apes

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

Simians And Serialism - A History and Analysis of 

Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes 

Avengers - Age Of Ultron

Stark They Were 
And Golden Eyed

Avengers - Age Of Ultron
2015  USA
Directed by Joss Whedon
UK cinema release print

Warning: Really quite huge spoilers implied in the text here... 
don’t read before watching if you really don’t want to know.

Okay. Where to start on this big beast of a movie?

There’s been a lot of pre-hype to this next Avengers movie, as can be expected. Clips started being released maybe a year ago? I think in the case of this movie that was maybe a bit of a mistake because, honestly, the clips released are probably some of the best parts of the film and I could have done with, especially the Hulk-Buster armour, being a bit more of a surprise. Maybe I would have responded to the film a little better if it had been.

Now, I have to say that this is certainly not a bad film and neither, despite first impressions, is it a mess of a movie. It’s actually quite a good, solid little entertainment. However, it’s also not a great movie and, if I totted up some kind of personal ranking for the Marvel Phase 1 and Phase 2 movies, I guess, for me, it would come about halfway down the list.

Just so you know where I’m coming from, I actually gave the original Avengers movie a not so hot review (read it here) and I have to say I was kinda disappointed with that one at the time. However, I rewatched it on Blu Ray about a year later and, it has to be said, it grew on me quite a bit and I really enjoyed it a lot more the second time around. This new film isn’t half as good, in my opinion, and it’s certainly not up to the standards of, say, more recent Marvel movies like Iron Man 3 (reviewed here) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (reviewed here)... although I liked it a hell of a lot more than the Marvel Universe Phase 2 movie that preceded it (and you can read that review here).

But, like I’ve said before, this particular set of Marvel universe films have been put together by producers who have an uncanny knack of both getting perfect casting (there’s not a bad or inappropriate performance in this film) and picking just the right directors for the job. Following up on this we have writer/director Joss Whedon, who directed the first Avengers movie and was presumably chosen, at least partially, because of his proven ability to work wonders with films and TV shows which require a strong, unifying story arc involving interaction with a large ensemble of characters... such as Firefly, Serenity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once again he manages to skillfully wield this army of ever increasing characters that the producers are throwing at him to get something that, while not always gold, is at least very serviceable and satisfying in parts.

The movie once again features Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner (Hulk), Chris Evans as Steve Rogers (Captain America), Chris Hemsworth as Thor (you know... The Mighty), Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow), Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton (Hawkeye) and an impressive roster of other regular characters from the Phase Marvel Universe popping up in places where you’d like to see them... the only noticeable absences being Downey Jr’s and Chris Hemsworth’s leading ladies from their stand alone films. Added to this cast are four new characters including the titular character Ultron, a bad guy voiced and motion captured by James Spader. We also have the Iron Man series regular Paul Bettany back as both his usual “voice of Jarvis” and the first live action movie incarnation of “The Vision”, although this character’s origins are terribly messed around with. One good thing about that, though, is the fact that the actor having also voiced Jarvis is absolutely accounted for in the course of the story at an almost metatextual level.

Two other new characters on board are “the twins” Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, aka Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch as played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olson respectively. Now this is an interesting thing because, as I mentioned in my review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pietro is also in 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise now, played by a different actor and with different origins. In the original comics he was a mutant (as he presumably is in X-Men: Days Of Future Past - reviewed here) and both he and The Scarlet Witch started out as villains in the 1960s, part of Magneto’s mutant army, before switching sides and joining The Avengers. In Avengers: Age Of Ultron they are, instead, genetically enhanced humans who have been modified by agents of H.Y.D.R.A. So it will be interesting to see if audiences get confused with Quicksilver’s inclusion, in two completely different guises, in both franchises.

Asides from the company politics which allowed for stuff like this to happen, however, I’m happy to report that Spader, Bettany, Taylor-Johnson and Olson all do a great job and more than hold their own against the regular cast members in this movie... which can’t be an easy task when there’s so much talent in the room, so to speak.

So there’s bad things and there’s good with this movie.

For starters, while Banner/Hulk is more integrated into the plot in this one, not to mention a romantic sub-plot with one of the other characters, he also has less impact. In the first movie, they held back on Hulk a little and when he did get a couple of moments, they really counted and were extremely funny. The humour of all the characters is still in here but, especially with Hulk, its quite toned down.

Another problem for me is the structure. This kind of tent peg movie usually builds to a spectacular climax and, though it certainly has a lot of money up there on the screen and has an epic feel to the way it’s been shot and edited... it still feels like there’s a heck of a lot less going on than in the previous collective outing. I think one of the reasons for that is that there’s no real surprise in terms of opposition at the end. In the first film, Loki was the bad guy and it wasn’t until the last hour that he brought on thousands of aliens and even some bigger alien flying slug thingies... the stakes kept getting bigger, at least on a visual level. In this one, although the stakes get bigger in terms of what’s actually going on, on an eye candy level with the antagonist it’s just... more of the same. We have loads of multiple variants of Ultron and he’s everywhere at once. When he’s killed or seems near defeat he brings on... more Ultrons. Yeah, okay, we’ve seen that trick more than once throughout the movie... we didn’t really need to see it again. Now my regular readers know I’m not one for going with a standard, cause and effect, build to a big finale structure and usually revel in films which are brave enough to take a less obvious approach... but in the case of this film I think it does kinda hurt the picture a little, if I’m being honest. I also don’t think it’s anyones fault because, until you get this stuff in an editing room, you’re kind of rolling the dice as to how what you’ve captured and created digitally comes across and so... I think it’s just one of those things. Saying that, I think most people will be more than satisfied with the structure and spectacle in this one... so I’m probably in a minority on this point.

There are some truly nice moments in this too, though.

For instance, there’s an extended version of the pre-release clip Hammer scene, where The Avengers are having a party and everybody, or almost everybody, tries to lift Thor’s hammer off the table. It’s quite fun but... Joss Whedon’s genius doesn’t stop there... it’s actually a really nice set up for a punch line which comes into play for the last act of the movie. So if you do get fed up with this early sequence, remember that it’s all an elaborate set up for a great and humorous moment later on in the movie which also, I should add, tells you everything you need to know about the calibre of one of the new characters and is pretty great movie shorthand for getting a feeling of trust and bonding with the core group of Avengers going. It’s a really nice moment when it happens and, judging from the gasps of glee from the audience I was with... you’ll probably know just what I’m talking about if you’ve seen this film.

Another great thing here is that none of the new characters are skimped on. Sure we get less coverage than maybe most of the regulars do but, the new characters aren’t just treated like add ons here... they have a sense of history and identity, even The Vision, and because of this there’s a great moment towards the end of the film where... oh wait... that really would be a spoiler too far but... well... lets just say, I didn’t see that coming. So that was kinda unexpected which, with modern movies, can only be a good thing.

Another great moment is where we realise that, as much as we think we know these characters from the previous films, there’s always something new up their sleeve. Take Hawkeye, for example. Not only does he very quickly and efficiently, temporarily take care of a character who has pretty much knocked out the entire team at one point, but when the chips are down he fleas with his team to his safe house where we, and most of the team (only Natasha Romanoff knows this fact about Hawkeye which, given their history, is no surprise), get to meet Hawkeye's best kept secret... his wife and kids. So this is all good stuff and it’s in moments like this that we see Joss Whedon’s beating heart breathing life into these four colour creations and bringing the humanity, along with his cast and crew, to these famous creations.

And then there’s the music...

I’ve commented before on the dire lack of musical continuity within the Marvel Phase One and Two movies and have tried to justify it to myself by comparing it to a comic drawn by the same artist but with different inkers each issue. However, this film has two music credits which, surprisingly, come up separately... Music by Brian Tyler and Music by Danny Elfman. The credits don’t share the same screen and, with an album release towards the end of next month which seems to have different cues by each of the two artists, I’m guessing this was not a collaboration. So what happened here? Was Brian Tyler busy because his time on the project over ran and Elfman was called in to score the rest? Or did the producers just reject part of Tyler’s score and instead of having Elfman replace it all, just had him rewrite the bits they didn’t like. I’m sure it’ll be a while before the truth of that situation is revealed to enquiring minds but, it has to be said, the real surprise here is how well this patchwork approach works in the final movie. Both composers seem to have made themselves subservient to certain films in the history of some of the characters and are happily quoting from various themes throughout the series. This gives it a nice musical continuity which really, and puzzlingly, seems to be quite successful...although it has to be said that it’s a noisy movie and a lot still gets lost in the sound design.

So there’s that.

There’s only a mid credits end scene in this one and, if truth be told, it really feels like a retread of an end credits scene from one of the previous movies. However, the film leaves the movie in a spot where it’s quite clear where the characters can go from here and this thing seems to be leading directly into the next Thor and Captain America/Iron Man movies. It’s also getting clearer how the second Guardians Of The Galaxy movie, when it gets made, will jigsaw nicely into proceedings when it comes time for the big two part Avengers Infinity War movies which will signal the end of Phase Three... as this one signals the end of what the Marvel people call Phase Two. Meanwhile, we’ve got the first Phase Three movie, Ant Man, being released in a few months and, since that character and his many later incarnations also has such a strong history with The Avengers in the 1960s and 1970s comics, it will be interesting to see just how many characters they can try and cram into Infinity Wars when it finally hits our screens a few years from now.

But for now we have this film, Avengers: Age Of Ultron and, though I was a little disappointed in places, it’s really not a bad movie and I reckon if I take another look at it at some point soon, I might enjoy it better. My experience with films of a certain type is that sometimes my brain doesn't enjoy the movie too much the first go around because it’s too busy processing all the information some directors like to cram in. So there’s no need for me to recommend this one... if you are into superhero movies which, in the mightly Marvel manner, are pretty much modern morality plays dealing with broad stroke issues then this one’s right up your street. Like I said at the start of the review, it’s certainly not a mess and it’s worth taking a look.

Death Fallls Lightly

Giallo Go Lightly

Death Falls Lightly (La Morte Scende Leggera)
Italy 1972 
Directed by Leopoldo Savona
Westminster Films DVD Region 0

I’m told that Death Falls Lightly is quite a rare giallo to get hold of but it’s one I especially wanted to take a look at because, as regular readers of this blog might have already guessed, I absolutely love Lallo Gori’s score to this movie and I really wanted to see how the music fit the picture in this one.

The films starts with a longish, guitar dominant song which is a particular favourite of mine, accompanying a point of view camera shot of someone as they stand in the hallway of a house and look around. There’s a fair bit of moving camera in this one. We are then, via the camera eye, taken into a bedroom and there is the shape of a person under a pillow...

Cut to our unsympathetic protagonist Giorgio Darika, played by Stelio Candelli, an actor I’ve apparently seen in quite a few things such as Planet Of The Vampires, Nude For Satan and Demons... although I didn’t actually recognise him, I have to say. He leaves the house, jumps in his car and we continue with the theme of the camera eye looking through the windscreen of his car as we drive the streets with him... while the rest of that gorgeous opening song and the credits sequence play out.

He visits his ‘judge friend’ and tells him that he has found his own wife dead with her throat slashed open in his house. He has absolutely no alibi or witnesses as to where he has been apart from the fact that all his friends in high places, like the judge, know he’s been on a trip running drugs to fund their political careers. So it’s up to his high powered friends to help him lay low and find a way out for him while the police are "making their enquiries". After a brief stop to pick up his lover (played by Patrizia Viotti, and not to be confused with his wife, obviously), the district attorney drives him to a deserted hotel... although how such a big place is completely devoid of customers is beyond me... and the two are left there to wait out the manhunt until something can be done.

Now, it’s not a bad giallo at heart. The director manages to make the most of his location and it feels quite claustrophobic at times. When the two in the hotel realise that, actually, they are not totally alone there after all, things get going with a lot of wordless sequences where Darika is wandering around the hotel uncomprehending as he meets various “inhabitants” like the owner of the establishment who he sees has murdered his own wife in the exact same way that Darika’s wife was killed. After he helps the owner bury the body, things start to get a little bit more off kilter as various little incidents accumulate to gradually wear down Darika’s mental health and place a strain on his grasp of reality.

What’s really interesting, though, and something I applaud, is the fact that there are loads of little things in this that seem completely superfluous to the plot and which are never followed up on. For instance, on the way to the hotel, Darika and co come across a road accident with two men who have been thrown from their car and who lay bleeding on the street. I guess it’s maybe there to show that Darika, who has to be persuaded to not go and help, isn’t completely heartless but, if that’s the case, it certainly doesn’t work... at least not for me. He’s certainly not a hero figure that I could recognise as such. Another little throw away scene has the detectives working Darika’s case, searching around his house and not being able to get into a locked room which they decide needs to be opened. We never once come back to the detectives or the house again in the movie, as far as I can see. Now, it may be these are hangovers of a script which changed after those scenes were shot, perhaps, and I know that some people would be put off by the insertion of story elements that don’t go anywhere but, honestly, I prefer this kind of inclusion of material over the standard Hollywood cause and effect approach any day, although that can also work very well for certain kinds of films.

Now there’s a trick ending to this movie which I have to say, I did see coming. I also, it has to be said, guessed the identity of the killer in this movie from very early on in the running time but, being as it’s a giallo and they always defy logic and throw in every kind of red herring in the book, I wasn’t too upset by my easy identification of what the writers and director were trying to hide. What bothers me more is the sheer loopyness of the way everything is revealed. The killer, for example, and there’s no way I’m going to spoil it for you here and tell you who it is, could have gotten away with things scott free if they hadn’t made the mistake of blindly lashing out at someone with a razor blade for no apparent reason at the end of the movie. Not only does it defy credibility when that single swipe leaves three... yes, three... deep gashes in a victim’s throat and face... it also makes no sense whatsoever. I knew it was this person behind the original killing in the movie but why the heck give yourself away like that? It makes no sense. I dunno. The mind of a killer, eh?

At the end of the day, the music was still the best thing about this movie, although it seemed a little overscored for the imagery in a few places, I felt. Sequences best left unscored had exciting music thrown over the top of them and vice versa but, honestly, this may not have been the composer’s decision and these things happen a lot more after the score has been recorded than you might hope. It contains a lot of Jews Harp in the latter half f the score which fans might expect to be more appropriate for one of Gori’s spaghetti western scores than in a giallo but it seems to work out okay and it’s not as out of place as some of the other stuff in this film.

Death Falls Lightly is not the best giallo I’ve seen, for sure, but it does have a nice atmosphere all its own and fans of the genre who are already familiar with classic works in the form by directors such as Mario Bava, Dario Argento. Sergio Martino etc may do well to take a look at this one sometime. It may not be one of the greats but it certainly isn’t one of the worst and, despite its deeply implausible plot mechanics, there are a lot more nonsensical films than this on the market. One to watch, then, if you are a fan of the genre, rather than to use as an entry point into this kind of movie making.

Planet Of The Apes

Heston, Blooming Tall

Planet Of The Apes
USA 1968 
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A,B,C

Warning: There’s the obvious spoiler in here so, if you really don’t already know the famous trick ending of this film, then steer clear of this review until you’ve had a chance to watch it for yourself.

I’ve been a fan of Planet Of The Apes for almost as long as I can remember. One of my early cinema memories (although by no means the earliest) was of seeing Battle For The Planet Of The Apes as a five year old in 1973, as part of a double bill with an obscure underwater adventure movie called The Neptune Factor* (I think I slept through a lot of the other movie). The one thing which I remember from that film was... oh, no, wait... I’ll save that memory for when I come to rewatch and review that fifth installment.

I remember it wasn't just the movies I loved as a kid. I also used to watch the live action TV series, the cartoon series, had the novelisations, had some of the comics (not many, some of the British black and white Marvels carrying reprints), had a few of the TV show bubble gum cards (again, not many but at least I still have them), got the Mego action figures and also had a Planet Of The Apes board game. A game in which, if you were caught, your cardboard human had to stand on a cardboard cage while you had to twiddle and then press a button and, if you were unlucky, you would be plunged to the depths of the cage. That was a pretty cool game, actually.

Years later, in the 1980s sometime, I read the original source novel, Monkey Planet, by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote the original novel The Bridge on the River Kwai) and loved it, although I was amazed by how different the novel was to the way the movie turned out. The ape society in the novel, for instance, is much more technologically advanced than the one depicted in the movie version, if memory serves, and it’s far less aggressive to the central astronaut protagonist. Also, in the novel, the central character really does land on a different planet and the ending to the story, while the same outcome in principal, is actually reaching the same kind of point by a different means.

In fact, I remember when reading the novel, thinking how much it was like reading one of Edgar Rice Burroughs original John Carter novels in the way it explored the aspects of the central culture at the story’s heart. I also loved the explanation, not apparent in the film, of the reason for the length of the journey taking hundreds of years and necessitating putting the crew into suspended animation for the majority of the time... the trick to it was that the actual main part of the journey, gazillions of light years, actually only took a few seconds. However, the engines running themselves and the ship through space to reach the speed to enable that main part of the journey took many years... which I thought was kinda clever.

The movie starts with a prologue monologue of Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, as he is about to go into suspended animation. As he puts himself under we go into the opening titles and Jerry Goldsmith’s incredible score, which won him an oscar nomination and should certainly have snagged him the prize, but didn’t. He lost out to John Barry’s, admittedly, fantastic score to The Lion In Winter but, I think in this case the Apes should have probably taken it. It’s such a unique and influential score.

After this we have my favourite part of the movie... the first half hour. No apes and just three astronauts trying to survive in the harsh terrain of what they think is an alien planet. We have philosophical discussions and frightening scarecrows and a bunch of mute, human savages who our heroes encounter after a much needed swim when they find water (I don’t know why they are so pleased to find water at this point because, after all, they already crash-landed in a body of water at the start of the movie). And we have Jerry Goldsmith’s score, wonderfully spotted as certain scenes are wisely left without music to heighten the dramatic effect in specific sections.... although he did actually write some music for the spaceship crash landing which was left out of the finished film.

It’s a beautiful score and many people assume, when hearing it for the first time, that it employs a lot of electronics. It doesn’t. It’s got some great orchestration as Goldsmith gets his musicians to play their instruments in unusual ways that they weren’t designed for, some of the time. He even, at one point, grabbed the big steel mixing bowls from the studio canteen and used these for percussion effects in some of the earlier scenes. And then we have The Hunt. A piece of music which is an action cue when we finally, after a half an hour, see the apes... it’s all fantastic scoring and I was privileged to, at least twice in different years, see Goldsmith reconstruct the 15 minutes or so of music leading into and including the hunt music live in a couple of the concerts I went to see him conduct when he was alive (must have seen him about six or seven times throughout my life, I reckon). It was absolutely incredible. He also uses horns and rhythms to emulate the grunting of the apes as a musical effect in the score too. Outstanding stuff.

As an aside to the music, I see that on the IMDB it says that Planet Of The Apes is the first fully atonal score to grace a movie. Well, in my opinion that’s pretty wrong on a couple of counts. One, because it’s not, in any way, totally atonal... it’s full of rhythm and melody and it’s very hummable, believe me. Secondly because, as far as I know, the first atonal, indeed the first twelve tone serial score, was Leonard Rosenman’s music for the 1955 Vincent Minelli movie The Cobweb... so I don’t know why there are so many incorrect “facts” to be found on the IMDB. It simply isn’t true. Planet Of The Apes is the second, I think, of a long collaboration Goldsmith had with director Franklin J. Schaffner and, like most of the others, it garnered a brilliant musical response from the composer.

Back to the movie, though. Schaffner employs a lot of Dutch angles to keep everything off kilter in these early sequences, to echo the disorientation of the astronauts and incite that kind of empathy in the audience. When the apes finally make their appearance, things are less angled but there are still some striking compositions and designs found throughout the movie and I think, although it’s now back to being a strong and healthy franchise, this first movie is still a little underrated by some. It’s a brilliant film with some unique visuals to match the groundbreaking musical identity, with deft little visual flourishes like the, improvised on the day, “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” pose that the orangutans in the courtroom scene mimic. There are a lot of these kinds of things occurring, both scripted and improvised, throughout the movie and it adds to an already rich, visual and aural feast. It’s no wonder that the movie spawned four sequels, TV shows and two reboots.

And when you think about the story mechanics involved in the first 35 or so minutes... it’s pretty impressive. The writers have to find a way of leaving the astronauts without their clothes and Taylor without a voice to speak (for a while) and Schaffner and the actors have to sell it without alerting the audience as to why it’s necessary to have to do that... otherwise the next half hour or so just won’t work. The way the cast and crew pull this off is... quite astonishing when one considers it. Not to mention the amazing make up which is another major feat and without which the movie might not have been green lit. Without the screen tests involving Edward G. Robinson (who was sadly not up to filming his role as the original choice for Dr. Zaius) then we may not have the franchise we have today.

It’s the ending though, that really gets everybody when they first see the film and, although it’s different from the book, it’s obvious from the strength and twistiness of it, I think, that one of the major writers on this was Rod Serling. It should come as no surprise to anybody that the notorious, half buried Statue Of Liberty reveal at the end of the movie is from the creator and chief writer of the television series The Twilight Zone (first season reviewed by me here) when it’s an ending worthy of the best of those episodes. It certainly puts his stamp on this movie and the ending to Tim Burton’s later, 2001 reboot of the movie, while being a little closer to the novel in essence (if not in tone), is a bit of a let down in a way, in terms of the strength of this original ending.**

Any way you look at it though, this film is superbly directed and edited (some of those shots really shouldn’t work together as well as they do but... Schaffner manages to pull it off pretty well), has brilliant performances from the actors (not least from the likes of Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans, who had to act behind all that make-up) and a classic Jerry Goldsmith score which pulls you in and doesn’t let go. One of the great movie treasures that any cineaste (or even one of us more common and garden variety of movie lovers) should definitely take a look at. Outstanding.

*With thanks to Twitter friend Andrew Elias for correctly identifying the movie I saw on a double bill with Battle For The Planet Of The Apes back in 1973 as The Neptune Factor.

** It has come to light since I wrote this review that Serling did not come up with the idea for the famous Statue Of Liberty reveal. Click on my review link below of the book Simians and Serialism for more details.

Planet Of The Apes at NUTS4R2

Planet Of The Apes 

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes

Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

Planet Of The Apes TV Show (live action) - to be reviewed

Time Of The Apes - to be reviewed

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes  

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

War Of The Planet Of The Apes

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

Simians And Serialism - A History and Analysis of 

Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Planet Of The Apes 

Mad Max

Far From The Mad “In Crowd”

Mad Max
Australia 1979
Directed by George Miller
MGM Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Some Mad plot spoilers in this.

Up until this week, this is the only one of the Mad Max franchise that I’d ever seen and, truth be told, the other time I saw this, in the very early 1980s, I really didn’t think much of it. But I should add here that, in those days, the odds were stacked against anyone into films really responding too much in terms of video releases because you probably weren’t going to be getting any idea of what the film was actually like from the home video version anyway. I remember renting this, at the time, from the Off Licence situated the next road along from me... the Off Licence is still doing a roaring trade to this day, in fact, but I think he ditched the video rental part of the business sometime in the early 1990s.

I must have been about 14 or 15 when I first saw this but I was already familiar with the adverts for the vinyl soundtrack album to this one on the back of old Starlog magazine covers... so I was quite looking forward to it but, like I said, the odds were stacked against me. Quite apart from being a typical, low quality video picture, the film had been dubbed into American English, I believe, and so I’m guessing the UK home video version was probably the one with the bizarre, alternate Amercian sound to it rather than the original Australian English language version.

Worse than even that though, and this is something that a generation of movie watchers below me may not realise, the majority of home video releases back in those days were pan and scanned from the original ratio and dumped into, what was then, a standard 4:3 aspect ratio. This causes havoc to the way you perceive films because, quite apart from the obvious problem, you also have the presence of shots where a camera is moving over either a static or already moving shot, changing the way you perceive the image and the speed at which you are supposed to be “reading” that image. You also have single shots cut into two or more shots, if the person doctoring the video to fit the standard 4:3 television sets of the day decided that the information on both sides of the screen was worthy of inclusion. This also, obviously, completely messes up the way your brain receives the film in question. I hate to sound like an old fogey but, seriously, kids these days with their widescreen TVs and perfect transfers don’t know how good they have it. That being said, certain companies like Warners, I’m told, have started chopping the tops and bottoms off of old TV shows in order to make them fit perfectly on widescreen TVs so... seriously people? Have they learned nothing?

Anyway, I wanted to check out the Mad Max films for a couple of reasons, even though I avoided the sequels back in the day due to my first, less than ideal, home viewing of this one. Reason number one is that a fourth installment in the series is coming to our cinema screens in less than a month and people have been getting quite excited about it, for some reason. I have to say that, when I watched a trailer for this in a cinema the other day, in front of John Wick (reviewed here), I thought I was watching an advert for a cartoon or animated feature for the first 30 seconds or so... the CGI was, well, less than realistic looking. To these eyes anyway. Still, it would be nice to take a look at it and if I’m going to do that then... I have watch the original trilogy.

The other reason I thought I should finally give these films another chance was that, for many decades, people have been asking me to check out the sequel, The Road Warrior. People have always told me it’s a much better movie and some folk even say that it’s inspired by a Judge Dredd story I read and loved, week by week, in the late 1970s: The Cursed Earth... which in itself is a good reason to give the second film a go (although The Cursed Earth was obviously inspired by the Roger Zelazny novel Damnation Alley... which was itself made into a movie).

So I guess all this meant giving the films a proper go at some point before the new one comes out and so, arming myself with a cheap boxed set of the trilogy in a nice Blu Ray transfer, this is exactly what I’ve done.

I have to say, now I am able to properly appreciate the way the film is photographed and edited without the whole 4:3 thing getting in the way, that it’s a much more interesting film than I’d originally given it credit for when I saw it back in the early 1980s. There’s certainly a raw, low budget edge to the look of the shots and, considering the subject matter of a group of motor bike riding thugs causing mayhem in a rundown landscape, it doesn’t detract from the movie in any way and it all feels about right for it.

Future star Mel Gibson’s Mad Max character is set up with a very long and spectacular, in terms of stunts, car chase with several police vehicles pursuing a gang member who has stolen a car with his lady friend. During the various hijinks of this opening chase, we get glimpses of Max monitoring the progress of the chase on his police waveband as he takes care of his well oiled machine (his car, okay?) and instead, we get shots of his boots, his coat and sun glasses from behind. Character details like that start to gradually build as he begins to “tool up” but we never see his face... the information of what he actually looks like (which to be fair, is nothing special) is withheld to give the audience a suspenseful introduction to the character so that when we finally get to the moment of being able to look him in the eye, it’s coupled with a heroic and violent resolution to the criminal problem, thus subconsciously identifying him as a hero figure in the collective, audience mind through release of tension. When Max makes that first kill he whips off the glasses and the music finally kicks in and swells up to further enhance the psychological manipulation. Simple and effective.

Now the film is a revenge movie but it takes until, literally, the last 20 minutes or so to prepare us for this character’s vector. Although his friend Goose is killed off viciously about two thirds of the way through, it’s not until right near the end that the real motivator of his sudden, vigilante (if you read it that way) crusade is put into place. After that initial chase, the director starts hitting the emotion pedal by showing us an idyllic lifestyle when Max is not on duty. A simple man at peace with his girlfriend and young son. It’s revisited again after Max tries to quit the force following the death of Goose but, instead, is given some time off to think it over. It’s at the end of this last part where things go really wrong and the gang in question wait for Max to leave before visiting their own twisted revenge on him (for the events that take place in that opening chase sequence, right at the start of the movie) and run over his girlfriend and kid. When it comes time to switch the life support off on his dead family... Max goes on his rampage.

However, unless I missed something or it wasn’t made clear enough, he never actually gets the villain of the piece, just one of the guys responsible for the vendetta against Goose... so it’s kind of a strange movie in that the thing doesn’t actually get resolved*. I know there’s The Road Warrior up next, and I haven’t watched that one as yet, but I’m guessing, from checking the cast list of that one, that this revenge spree is left curiously unresolved in the scheme of things. So I did find that kinda strange, to be honest.

Now this is quite a gritty film, dealing with adult issues and done so in the grubby syntax of the period it’s shot... which seems to my mind to possibly be a little post apocalyptic, which would explain the lack of police helicopters and dilapidated, unkempt look of the police headquarters in this film. That being said, my cousin now lives in Australia and he said the place where they filmed this movie... always looks like that. So not really sure whether it’s supposed to be post-apocalyptic or not but... my guess is yes.

I also find it quite interesting that, for such a grimy film, the director shies away most of the time from actually showing the audience anything too graphic. I think we see the burnt hand of Goose but we never see his burnt face, for example, just Gibson’s reaction to it. And this kind of modus operandi is employed throughout the duration of the film. When a man is terrorised and his woman raped, for instance, we cut away from them being dragged away from their car to some nice, artistic shots of a crow flapping its wings etc. Instead of showing Max’s girlfriend and young son killed, we are just shown the aftermath of a shoe and a ball as a metaphor for what just happened. Now while it’s good that the director realised that a lot of the really horrible stuff would be made even worse if it was left to the imagination, it means that the actual graphic content of the film is surprisingly small and I do find that this particular visual cocktail film comes up a little short in a couple of places where showing just a little bit more (definitely not the whole hog, so to speak) would maybe have been a little more effective.

That being said... what do I know? It’s obviously an influential film, especially in terms of the spate of American and Italian post apocalyptic, gangs of thugs movies which came after it. I was thinking about this while I watched it and, honestly, I think even the villainous characters in a movie like Paul Veerhoven’s Robocop would be hard to imagine if Mad Max hadn’t come along first. They all seem to be very close cousins. And obviously, Neil Marshall’s own tribute to those films, Doomsday, also owes a tremendous debt to this film and, probably, The Road Warrior too (I’ll know soon enough, I guess).

Of course, Mad Max also has its own share of influences and with its motorbike drag scenes and Django-like scene towards the end, where Max has one of his hands run over and broken just like Franco Nero had decades before. It all points to the director being a fan of Westerns, if I’m not much mistaken. Mad Max and all those later derivatives seem to be about cowboys fending off against the marauding Indians... with the cowboys being the forces of law and order and the Indian tribes being renegade bike gangs soaring across their own desert land... their four legged friends replaced by two wheels and a big engine.

All in all, the film is a lot better than I was expecting and it has some nice photography to boot. Brian May’s score is a little bit overdone in places, I think, but overall it’s of its time and, although I can’t imagine a score like this being written for that kind of picture today, it gets away with it here I think. Not a great film but probably, in some insane B-movie parlour sense, a bona fide classic and, hopefully, the best is yet to come. Check back here soon for my review of... The Road Warrior.

*Since publishing this review, Grindhouse Dave has made clear to me that the villain of the piece does, indeed, get his come uppance... although before Max sorts out the guy who kills Goose. I've watched the clip and realised that it wasn't obvious, to me, that this death scene was indeed supposed to depict Toe Cutter, the gang leader, and personally I don't think it's very clearly presented but, it does seem to be in there. So thanks to the Twitter realm for clearing that up for me.

Mad Max @ NUTS4R2

Mad Max

Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Saint's Double Trouble

Templar Nights

The Saint's Double Trouble
USA 1940
Directed by Jack Hively
RKO DVD1 Region 1

So, finally, I am continuing with my catch up on the series of The Saint movies I started rewatching and reviewing a couple of years ago, after an unscheduled break. The Saint’s Double Trouble is the fourth in the series, and the third with George Sanders in the title role. Although this one, for some strange reason not known to me, is not directly based on any of the original Leslie Charteris novels, he apparently did have a hand in developing this one for the screen... which is a shame in some ways, due to the gimmicky nature of the plot. You’ll see what I mean in a minute, if the title doesn’t already give it all away to you.

The film starts off with a coffin being taken to a postal service in Cairo, being mailed, allegedly, by Simon Templar to his old Egyptologist friend Professor Bitts in the US (played here by Thomas W. Ross). And who do you think would walk into a post office with a coffin in his arms? Yep, here we have what can only be called a “guest role” for the original “authorised” screen Dracula, Bela Lugosi. After this scene, he drops out of the film until somewhere about two thirds of the way through the picture and it’s a shame that his inability to learn the English language, and having to learn his scripts phonetically, had already reduced him to these kinds of minor roles. In this film he plays a character called “The Partner”, who is really just a human clue for Simon Templar to pick up on in his fight against the real villain of the piece.

Now, after having watched this for 15 minutes, I started getting confused. By this time, you see, I had forgotten what the title of the movie was and when Simon Templar went back to his hideout to consult with his gang of criminals... um. What? Yeah, it’s the old doubles plot. These days it’s one of the sure signs that a movie or TV show has gotten to the point where it’s “jumped the shark”, in modern parlance... and that’s one of the reasons why I was surprised Charteris was involved in this one. Even in those days it was getting to be a bit of a cliché, I suspect, and certainly a sign that the scriptwriters were running out of ideas. As it happens, though, it did manage to fool me... so it was either done incredibly subtly or... I didn’t anticipate the complete lack of realism in the way the characters were pitched.

By that last comment I mean to say that, although George Sanders is obviously playing both roles, his voice and characterisation of the “double” are exactly the same as each other. Seriously people? They’d even have the same voice? Furthermore... how the heck does the double know enough about Simon Templar’s personal life to be able to frame him for a string of murders? Anyone could fake up a Saint calling card, sure... but they wouldn’t, for instance, have a knowledge of the history between Simon Templar and Professor Bitts or, as it turns out, Professor Bitt’s daughter, played by Helene Whitney. So there’s that.

Still, it doesn’t really matter because the cast are all pretty good, although the locations being used all seem to be limited to the same three or four settings, with characters going back and forth between the specific areas laid out in the first 20 minutes of the movie... with the exception of a jail scene near the end of the film (and that’s giving away nothing in terms of plotting, by the way). Jonathan Hale is back on hand as Inspector Fernack, the Inspector Teale equivalent of The Saint’s American set adventures... and I’m happy to say he’s playing the character a little smarter than he did in the last entry. Still not as sharp as he was in the original Louis Hayward opener, The Saint In New York (reviewed here), but certainly no longer a completely helpless buffoon, at least.

The pacing is not as speedy as the blistering third film in the series (reviewed here) and, in all honesty, the dialogue is not as sharp or as singing as it was in that one either. However, the characters are all fairly charming (even the villains) and it whiles away its short running time fairly pleasantly. Sanders impressed me a little by actually being quite ruthless and tough when it came to risking the lives of the people who are playing against him... and still manages to come out of it as less of a thug and more of a righteous person who is, nevertheless, also a Robin Hood style criminal. I was also pleased that the writers were not afraid of killing off one of the more likeable, good guy characters in the film... and stuff like that is always a bonus to add a touch of weight to the drama and ensure that to Simon Templar in this one, just like a 1980s action hero... this time it’s personal!

Now, to be fair, there were gaping plot holes in this and not too much done in terms of actual detecting and problem solving as Simon Templar tries to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s very much late 1970s Roger Moore as James Bond territory when it comes to any actual investigative techniques being used. That being said, the lack of logic and realism in terms of the plot mechanics in no way detract from this being a pretty entertaining experience and Sanders is surprisingly capable in a role which has him leaping undetected onto the running boards of cars or being tied up in a sinking row boat... this is all good stuff.

Once again, the trademark tune which Sanders whistles and which is claimed by Charteris himself as his invention (although my money is still on musical director Roy Webb, who continues duties on this entry) is heard and, certainly, it’s something that fans of later incarnations of The Saint in film and television, especially Ian Ogilvy’s turn as Templar in the TV show Return Of The Saint, will be very familiar with. So it’s good that at least some films were going for a certain amount of musical continuity... much more than the powers that be in Hollywood seem to be attempting these days, at any rate.

The ending is a short and sweet affair. I’m pretty sure these shorter movies would have been made to be the supporting feature to larger budgeted productions in most cases, but it certainly ensures that the film doesn’t outstay it’s welcome and I have to say, despite my objections to Sanders in the role in comparison to Louis Hayward, who I think played the character perfectly to the version in the books, I am still having a blast with this series of films and am enjoying these just as much as I did in my early teens, in the 1980s. So you can be sure there’ll be another Saint review on here soon and I need to get my skates on in that respect so I can start catching up to The Falcon films again. Watch this space.

John Wick

Wicked Game

John Wick
2014  USA
Directed by Chad Stahelski & David Leitch (uncredited) 
UK cinema release print.

Okay. So I find it kinda strange and irritating that a relatively high profile action movie like John Wick has had such a delayed release in this country, especially when the language it’s been shot in is a derivative of the language we speak here in the UK. My cousin lives in Australia and I remember him recommending this film to me when we had a Skype conversation in early November. Why did we have to wait so long for it in this country? Especially since, as is my understanding, there were no censorship issues with it. Note to studios: If I really had wanted to see this film badly enough, I would have just legally bought the US DVD or Blu Ray edition which came out a little while ago over there and had it shipped... pretty much anyone who is a lover of film in the UK has to have at least one multi-region player of some kind laying around because there is so much trouble with censorship and availability in the UK. People less scrupulous than I would, and I’m sure many did, just download it illegally from the internet... personally I don’t do that, for a variety of reasons, but many people do. So you are really hurting your box office take by not releasing these movies more or less simultaneously.

John Wick is a pretty good, broad stroke revenge movie, fuelled very much by comic book style attitude towards the action and violence but shot with a certain amount of care and detail to the point that it is like the close kin of another movie I saw at the cinema recently, the Liam Neeson action flick Run All Night (reviewed by me here). Of course, in every other country, John Wick was the first horse to bolt out of the stable door but, obviously, I’ve had to wait until after the Neeson flick had already been playing for a while before I had an opportunity to see this one.

The similarities between both are quite marked.

Both films start off by showing a central protagonist in a very bad way and then flashback to how he got into this state for the majority of the running time. They are both films which involve an anti-hero ex-killer (Wick’s nickname is Baba Yaga in this) who has a history with the villain of the piece. Wick, by the way, is played by the highly competent actor Keanu Reeves and his ex-villainous connection is played by Michael Nyqvist, who most UK audiences will recognise best from his role as Mikael Blomkvist in the original adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its subsequent sequels, collectively known as The Millennium Trilogy. Both John Wick and Run All Night have a central protagonist who is forced to go on a rampage of some kind due to the misguided exploits of the young, hot-head son of the film’s principal antagonist and, in each case, that antagonist is only going after the protagonist, very reluctantly, because he has been backed into a corner due to the consequences of those actions of his offspring.

Both films also feature very long action and chase sequences but the way both films go about trying to achieve their adrenalin fuelled, emotional goals are very different. The two have nicely composed and designed shots but, where Run All Night has a kind of modus operandi to the sequences which keeps them cut like an MTV pop generation video on acid - extremely short shots making up all the scenes - Wick uses much longer, fluid shots with a lot of moving camera to capture the more flamboyant scenes of violence. Both films have their pros and cons and are trying to be gritty but with Run All Night, the speed of the shots slightly detracts somewhat. John Wick, on the other hand, is a little more light in tone when it comes to the raw edge of the character and, as I said, much more comic book in its treatment of the choreography of the action sequences. It prefers to use moving master shots to keep you pulled in and focused.

Neither film is wrong in their approach but I find the idea of two films with similar themes being the flip side of the coin to each other, when it comes to the technique used to illustrate those themes, extremely interesting. The fight choreography in John Wick is certainly impressive and it does look like Keanu Reeves is doing a lot of his own “rough n’ tumble” in this one... quite convincingly, I might add. In terms of comparing the two films... I’d consider watching John Wick again because the action sequences seem to be a lot more entertaining, it has to be said.

The main difference to this movie is that John Wick is very much a revenge thriller and it takes a fair bit of the early screen time pulling very hard at the audience’s emotions to establish the connection between Wick and his new puppy dog, sent from his recently deceased wife to bond with Wick after her death. Everyone loves a puppy and so the inevitable scene where John is beaten up, his dog killed* (which is in the trailer, so I’m not spoiling anything here, people) and car stolen, is very calculated but, obviously, it works pretty well and you'll get quite fuelled up to see Keanu Reeves’ character leap into action and punish the bad guys. Strangely though, and this is where the art of film comes into play, the amount of time between John Wick losing his wife, gaining a puppy and then having it killed, forcing him out of his self-imposed “kill them all” retirement, can actually be only a week in terms of the events in the character’s chronology. However, the director is skilled, or at least tricksy enough, to give those elements a sense of gravitas even though they take up a pretty insignificantly small amount of time in the principal character’s life. And, of course, Keanu Reeves’ on screen performance is sturdy and assured enough to convince the audience that his personal stake in this is enough motivation for his actions throughout the rest of the film. So, as usual, good work from him.

He’s ably supported by some great actors and actresses in this too, with some good little turns from Willem Dafoe, John Leguizamo, Ian McShane, Adrianne Palicki and Bridget Moynahan (although, seriously people, 8 seconds of screen time is really not enough for this wonderful actress). He’s also well supported by some striking shots, cool lighting changes (there’s a scene where he goes from neutral whites and beiges to a “full on Bava” of greens and reds at one point), neat editing and... a nice enough score by Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard. Although regarding this last element it seems, on first listen in the context of the movie, to be a killer baseline missing a central theme which might have given the film a little more lift in places, I felt. Great action coupled with a strong sense of a, kind of, moral heart for the character (despite killing 77 people on screen, most of whom are innocent of any crime against him other than trying to stop him from killing someone else) round out a movie which is actually quite entertaining.

Talk of good box office and a sequel is something which surprises me in the case of John Wick, given that it took so long to get the film out over here. However, it deserves a shot at a franchise, I think... although I’m not sure where they can go with the character after this since the motivation for his misadventures seems to be all used up by the time he’s done with his rampage in this one. Time will tell I guess but, in the meantime, if you like well oiled action movies with lots of loud noise and all the usual punching, shooting and chasing in them, then John Wick should probably satisfy your appetite for destruction for a while. Locked, loaded and ready for traction.

*Just a thought but, if you’re going to take a car ride with your dog and then spin the car around in some death defying, high speed spins and such like, your dog will seriously be looking half dead, at the very least, way before the villains of the piece come into play. That sequence is not very plausible.