Thelma

Scam, Bam,
Thank You Ma’am

Thelma
Directed by Josh Margolin
Switzerland/USA 2024

Not to be confused with the famous identically titled Nordic horror infused sci-fi movie from 2017 (reviewed here), Thelma is a movie starring 95 year old actress June Squibb as the 93 year old title character, Thelma Post. She’s actually based on the director’s grandmother, also Thelma Post, who is currently 103 and who is also seen in the movie in a mid-end credits scene. Thelma Post is the widow of Ted Post, the famous Hollywood director, who is in family photos in the movie. Which would make sense because the location used for Thelma’s apartment in the movie is actually the real Thelma’s actual apartment.

Joining the actress in the film are her character's grandson Daniel (played by Fred Hechinger) who she has a very good relationship with... and his parents played by the wonderful Clark Gregg and the always brilliant Parker Posey (is she still regarded as the queen of indie film-making these days?). One day, Thelma gets a phone call with someone pretending to be her grandson in jail, who puts her onto a ‘lawyer’, and she falls for the scam, posting ten thousand dollars of bail money to the PO box given. The rest of the family, apart from her brilliant grandson, think she should be put in a home but, while they are procrastinating on stuff like this, she makes up her mind to track down the scammers and get her money back... inspired by Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible films she watches with her grandson.

So she goes to collect an old friend, Ben, played by the late, great Richard Roundtree in his final film (he died a few months before the premiere and it has an ‘in loving memory’ tag to him at the end of the credits). He has a new, two seater scooter and the two go a long way to find the scammer, after collecting a loaded pistol from another of Thelma’s old friends.

The film also has a nice touch where the main scammer at the end of their quest is also an elderly guy and, in some ways, much worse off than they are. He’s played here pretty well by the fantastic Malcolm McDowell (wow... Roundtree and McDowell, two 1970s cinematic icons in the same movie).

And it’s a nice, gentle comedy which explores what it means to be very old and the differences between people and the way they accept ageing, or don’t. Ben, for example, is perfectly happy in his elderly residence, where he is playing Daddy Warbucks in a version of Annie they’re putting on for the other residents... but, since the death of her husband two years prior, Thelma is more of a loner. In one scene, which I thought was a really nice touch, her grandson asks her what her plans for the day are... and we next see her sorting out all her pills for the next week and putting them into their respective compartments. Sadly, I am now at the age where I can totally sympathise and understand that... and not just from watching my folks do the same thing, alas.

Now, the film isn’t as pacey as I thought it would be but it is quite heartwarming and I think it also doesn’t make the kinds of turns I thought it would, so there’s a lot to keep things entertaining and surprising. The music by Nick Chuba is pretty good too... leaning into the action themes from the kind of movies which inspire Thelma but with a more modern take. Sadly, Schifrin’s Mission Impossible theme was, presumably, too rich for the budget but the score has a nice vibe to it and, at some point, I’m sure I heard one of my favourite musical instruments, the cimbalom, on one of the cues.

By the end of the film, everything seems to be maintaining the status quo of the central character (I thought it would go down a different route) and, my only real criticism is that Thelma, as old as she is, maybe doesn’t seem to learn too much from her experiences in the movie (or at least not unless certain things were left on the cutting room floor). But it’s a nice enough ending and, as I said, the real life Thelma pops up halfway through the end credits. This one is nothing spectacular but it is a heart warming and fun time at the movies so, yeah, definitely worth a watch.

The Jetty

Dragons In Ember

The Jetty
4 Episodes
Airdate: July 15th 2024
BBC

I can’t remember what it was that I was reading, a couple of months ago, about Jenna Coleman’s new BBC mini series The Jetty. But it had Coleman promoting it big time and I really liked her both in Doctor Who (although I thought her character arc in her last season was a bit ropey) and in The Sandman (reviewed here). And I wanted to see her in something else and... yeah... The Jetty is not bad.

It features Jenna Coleman as Ember Manning (a detective in the Lancashire police force), Ruby Stokes as her teenage daughter Hannah, Archie Renaux as her police partner Hitch, Amelia Bullmore as her mother Sylvia and Tom Glynn-Carney as her husband Mack... who has been dead for just under a year when the series starts. Ember is working a case where a place from her past is burned down but, it soon intersects with a ‘missing believed dead’ case of a young girl from years before, which a pod caster played by Weruche Opia is investigating.

And it’s quite good but also has some week spots, I reckon. Some of the episode cliffhangers are pretty great... such as when you think they have found the body of someone they are looking for in a lake but it then turns out to be one of the other regular characters you didn't realise was dead. But the writing seems kinda... I dunno... like it’s shifting. I think it may have been recut from the original order of the edit too, probably for reasons of pacing, because it occasionally suffers from that thing where one character is in on something they shouldn’t have known about yet and then, at other times, covering old ground about something they have already been seen to be knowing about.

Let’s cover the good stuff first. The performances are great. Jenna Coleman is, as always, totally brilliant in the role and, also, a big shout out to Ruby Stokes who does really well as her daughter, struggling with big emotions and getting herself into more trouble. And the chemistry between them is also really cool... a second series of this would be nice, although it may not be in the pipeline.

And it looks good too, with some nice sweeping landscapes and some nice rich colours in the night sequences. The music, which I think is composed by someone called Tim Morrish (although I’m not sure... the IMDB is being pretty bashful around that subject) is quite nice and minimalistic, reminding me a little of Hans Zimmer in places. Alas, there’s no commercial release of the score that I can see.

The one annoying thing is the old giallo trope about there being too many suspects. As Ember realises there are more and more connections to her own past, I was pretty sure there was going to be an end twist but, because there are so many characters and I had about four suspects in it, the solution became a bit hit and miss. I suspect this is the case of the writers throwing as many people into the mix as possible to try and hide the truth.

As it happens... and without giving anything away... there’s a double ending with not one but, two killers involved and, I have to say, the two people were both two of my possible suspects. So I was kinda disappointed that it went down those routes, to be honest. And, believe me, it’s really not as much of a twist ending as people are making out... most people will get there way before, I think. But that’s my only real issue with it... well, that and the question of... why is there suddenly a common thread in both this and films I’ve bought in the last year that features women ‘jacking off’ horses? Is this some kind of trending theme? And on the BBC no less.

But yeah, the show was absolutely riveting, for the most part and, I ploughed through the four episodes quicker than I thought I would. Jenna Coleman is also one of the show’s producers and I think she helped develop the role and the story (the original ending would have had someone not on my list of suspects doing the first murder)... so she’s obviously put a lot of work in on this and, certainly, she does carry the show considerably, playing a much more ‘world weary’ character than I’ve personally seen her pull off before (and when I say pull off... no, she’s not the one pulling off the horse in this). I have to say that I’ve got even more respect for her as an actress than I used to... so hopefully that’s the reaction many people will be having. I certainly think this was a good role for her and hope she continues to do some more genre work in future. The Jetty is a pretty good watch and certainly one I’d recommend.

Deadpool & Wolverine

Penny Deadpool

Deadpool & Wolverine
Directed by Shawn Levy
USA/Canada/Australia/
New Zealand 2024
Marvel
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Some very slight spoilers.

Well, Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t terrible.

Sadly, that’s one of the most complimentary things I can say about it. Discounting the appearance of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (reviewed by me here), for me this new one if the weakest of the Deadpool films. It has its problems but, it moves so fast that a lot of people probably won’t notice and I’d be surprised if this wasn’t one of the biggest box office openings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films (yeah, I’m sure this one will be quite popular with people).

Okay, positive things first because, as much as there are negatives there are good things to say too. So Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the title characters have great chemistry and the film is filled with great actors and also some interesting cameo appearances from past Marvel characters (not all of them from the MCU versions of the movies). And there are some funny one liners dotted around which Reynolds delivers in his usual Bug Bunnyish manner and it’s all good fun, to a point.

It’s got a very strong opening... and a very strong first half hour it has to be said, including a title sequence battle royale where, after digging up Wolverine’s rotting corpse from the grave left after his death in Logan (reviewed here) and finding he hasn’t regenerated, he gets into a fight with a weird time agency (I think the same one from the Loki TV show) and kills many of them in very gory ways using various bones from the skeleton of Logan as weapons.

We then get embroiled in a story where Deadpool is tasked with helping to kill off his dwindling timeline (which is decaying because of the death of Logan, who is apparently that timeline’s ‘anchor being’ )... but instead he grabs a Wolverine from another timeline to save is own universe and friends while trying to fight off the film’s two villains... played for laughs by Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Paradox and played startlingly seriously, by the scene stealing Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova.

Right from the outset the film is loaded with constant swear words and lots and lots of Marvel and non-Marvel pop culture references... and sometimes these hit really well and other times they don’t. But here’s the thing... while the film starts off as charming and it certainly has its heart in the right place, all the endless allusions to other movies and the constant fighting seem to be there to distract from the simplicity of the story and... well... it all felt like padding, to be honest. The first three quarters of an hour or so of this kind of thing is great but, yeah, after that initial set up it just gets, um, kind of dull. And while there are a lot of characters from the previous two films (along side some other notable appearances), my favourite character from the second movie, Domino, is curiously absent.

So, spectacular for sure and there’s certainly a lot of CGI blood spilled... yeah, I prefer practical effects myself but with a film with this much gory action, the alternative would have taken far too long and really hurt the budget (is my guess)... but, no.

Also, there are a lot of needle drop songs in this (and also melodic references to scores like Silvestri’s one for The Avengers) but it would have helped me personally if I’d have recognised more than just a couple of them, I think. I mean, I recognised Jimmy Durante and I think one of them maybe Madonna. That's kinda it on the song references for me.

And, truth be told, although I certainly liked the film, I did find myself checking my watch long before the end. Now, the film didn’t turn out to be the big ‘MCU reset button’ I was expecting it to be and part of me is glad and part of me isn’t. I mean, okay, we now have a variation of Wolverine that can be recalled when the big tentpole Marvel features start coming again (which is not necessary now we have the concept of a multiverse carried into the movies anyway) but ultimately, despite lots of rumblings that this would change the shape of the MCU, it really does seem to be a movie with no real stakes or consequences. This coupled with the fact that Deadpool’s regenerative powers seem to work in an entirely different manner to how they worked in the last two movies really left me cold, if not a little confused.

The trailer campaign didn’t help it much either. When I was watching it I felt like I’d already seen most of the scenes referenced in the last few months. So there were some surprises but... not so many of them. Where the trailers really let it down, though, is in the big, climactic scene where two of the lead characters (look, I’m trying to skirt around the danger zone with this in terms of spoilers, okay) appear to have met their matter/anti-matter end and died. However, in the trailer there are scenes where they appear together in it which haven’t turned up yet so you know... you kinda do know... that these two are going to make it out alive and kicking. So they kinda killed that one themselves.

And, yeah, that’s me done with this one, I think. Deadpool & Wolverine is going to hit big and will make a lot of people happy. Sadly, I didn’t get on with it nearly as much as I thought I would but, there’s always a chance that it might grow on me at some point in the future, for sure (I might find it easier to process the second time around). So, yeah, I’ll try it again when it comes out on Blu Ray (and goes into the sales), I think.

The Vigil

Viy-gil and
Sado Mazzik-ism

The Vigil
USA 2019
Directed by Keith Thomas
Vertigo Releasing

The Vigil is another one of those great feature debuts, this one by director Keith Thomas. It’s based around the Jewish faith and features a character who is less religious and no longer serious about that aspect of his life. That is to say, Yakov, the film’s main protagonist played by Dave Davis, is somewhat lapsed due to an incident in his recent past when he was unable to prevent the death of his little brother while he was in his care.

The film starts with flashbacks of another character in the second World War, where a young boy is forced by the Nazis to shoot one of his friends or family members, in a muted, blue dominated colour palette. We then meet young Yakov, who is attending a regular discussion group for, I think, Jewish people who have either stepped aside from their faith or had tragic events impact their lives... it’s never really made clear. Yakov is struggling to make ends meet and he makes the point that some weeks he has to choose between buying food and his medication (for a psychological condition which causes hallucinations and is probably related to his recent trauma, I would guess).

On his way out of his weekly meeting, he is approached by a deeply Religious member of the Jewish community who hires him, due to his past experience, to be a shomer for the night. A shomer is somebody who holds a vigil over a recently deceased person to stay up with him/her all night, recite prayers and generally protect the corpse from evil spirits. So he gets to the house of the dead gentleman, who was obviously the boy from World War Two at the start of the movie... and starts to watch over the body. The only other inhabitant in the house is the old man’s widow, Mrs. Litvak, played by Lynn Cohen. She goes upstairs to sleep and the guy who recruited Yakov tells her she suffers from senility (she doesn’t but, it’s easy to see why people think that because of elements of the story which become apparent) and that she’ll probably sleep through the night.

And then the story begins proper as Yakov is left alone with the corpse and, as you would expect, starts hearing and seeing things which lead to psychological attacks by The Mazzik. A demon spirit who has kept the reclusive Litvaks more or less confined to the house for decades and who now decides it wants the ‘broken man’ Yakov as his next permanent ‘haunt’. The attacks come in many forms and often incorporate modern technology like a cine projector or Yakov’s new smart phone... which gives the film a particularly creepy moment at a couple of points in the narrative. And, of course, it takes Yakov a while to realise that he’s not actually having his normal hallucinations and is, instead, experiencing a genuine, supernatural terror. The very kind of terror that he, as a shomer, should be concerned about. Things get even more serious when he finds he can’t leave the house and get more than half a block before cramping up completely and getting somewhat damaged... The Mazzik won’t let him.

And it’s really nicely put together, is genuinely unsettling in places (always good for a horror movie) and the story, such as it is, never really goes into the most expected territory I thought it would. The ending of the film, for example, took a completely different direction to where I assumed it would go.

The acting is great by the two leads (Yakov and Mrs. Litvak) as they find their place in the Mazzik narrative and the way the film is shot is wonderful. The house is lit by muted pastel colours which are a kind of off-brown orange for most of the rooms with the various dark areas pitched in a green hue which instantly gives a kind of neutral or unsafe feel to anyone when they are in those darker areas.

The director and cinematographer use this kind of juxtaposition of darks and colour to their full advantage here as well. It obviously pushes the depth visually but it also helps with the shot composition having this kind of two tone dominance to the rest of the colours. For instance, there are some lovely shots where we see the body from another room looking into it. So we have the dark greens of the walls coming in slightly to the left and right and the room behind with the corpse, in oranges but, because of the little projections of walls coming in from either side of the opening, it gives a kind of 4:3 aspect ratio pitched into the middle of the shot, which Yakov then sits in... facing camera, just slightly off centre. It’s a really simple but startling composition. 

And the director will similarly push the contrast of the rooms, often putting the camera at various junction points within the house so that you can see three or four areas of the house at the same time... so, for example, the front room on the left, the hallway on the right with the kitchen behind the hallway and the stairs leading up to the landing on the left. And, of course, with a horror film, that can be used to the director’s advantage by showing the audience things happening in one part of the screen, in a different room, which another character will be unaware of. So, yeah, there are a lot of shots where they kind of section off the space on screen to delineate different things they want to highlight.

The other big star of the movie is Michael Yezerski, who provides a truly great modern horror score (sadly unavailable as a proper CD release, so I guess I won’t get to hear it as a stand alone) which is absolutely stunning and really helps the tone of the movie. I first noticed it in an early conversation between two characters and it started building behind them, almost but not quite to the point where it felt either over scored or mixed in too much to the forefront. But, it never quite crosses the line and it’s not just a ‘modern horror atonal’ style score, although it does occasionally have elements of that. It genuinely comes in to signal things are about to get very spooky, for example, even when you’d have no clue that something was wrong just from the beautiful imagery. And although a fair amount of the scary atmosphere comes from the brilliant sound design as various noises come in and out of the soundtrack, the score is never overwhelmed by this as it might be in some films and it even takes an unconventional route, in one of the big scare scenes, where it gets really loud and becomes almost a ‘techno horror’ style track... almost like a modern ‘beats’ version of what Argento was trying to achieve with his Goblin scores but still anchored into punctuating the scares of the film rather than just playing through. It’s quite an achievement and I think this composer is definitely someone that some of the big companies, like Marvel, should maybe have a listen to. The score becomes an amazing, positive addition to this movie and I’m going to have to listen out for this guy’s name again.

And that’s me pretty much done with The Vigil. It’s not the scariest horror movie ever, obviously... but it’s genuinely got some great horror vibes, unsettling atmosphere and it definitely has its moments... a kind of Jewish ‘tooling up’ sequence had me smiling too. All in all, I think most horror enthusiasts will have a good time with this one and I definitely recommend it as one to watch.  It obviously shares elements of Viy (reviewed here) but more like a compressed version for a modern age and though the initial timidness of the central character shares some commonality with various iterations of the central protagonist in adaptations of Gogol’s Viy, he doesn’t bring any of this down on himself and it’s really not the same kind of story, mostly. Give this one a go.

Republic Horrors - The Serial Studio’s Chillers

Eagle Eyed Horror

Republic Horrors -
The Serial Studio’s Chillers
By Brian McFadden
Kohner, Madison & Danforth
ISBN: 9780615920986

Just a very quick shout out of a review for Brian McFadden’s quite valuable little tome Republic Horrors - The Serial Studio’s Chillers. Now Republic weren’t exactly known for their horror output, most people would, I’m sure, mostly associate them with serial chapter plays and westerns. My running joke with my father, every time we sit down to watch a serial made by Republic, is that as soon as a good guy and bad guy enter an interior set, most anything not nailed down is going to get tossed at each other in a brawl... which is pretty much correct. I don’t think I’ve seen a Republic horror but I’m aiming to fix that at some point. Judging from this book though, there weren’t that many of them made.

The book highlights what, according to the author, are the ten Republic horror films... a subject he became interested in because he was trying to chase down a memory of a scene from one which had haunted him since childhood and then the subject became something of an obsession, as he went through studio by studio trying to find the film... until, to paraphrase Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous sleuth, whatever studio remained, no matter how improbable, must be the truth... the film in question was a Republic movie (which I believe he’s written about in another book which I need to track down, as it was a mystery movie).

Now, I have to say my definition of what makes a horror film differs from what the writer thinks... so there are a few mystery films tinged with the cinematic vernacular of a horror film rather than being the genuine article, as far as I can see... but some of these definitely are. The ten movies covered here are London Blackout Murders (1943), The Lady And The Monster (1944), The Girl Who Dared (1944), The Vampire’s Ghost (1945), The Phantom Speaks (1944), The Fatal Witness (1945), The Woman Who Came Back (1945), The Madonna’s Secret (1946), The Catman of Paris (1946) and Valley of the Zombies (1946). Of those ten there’s also at least one mystery... The Woman Who Came Back, where the explanation as to the scientific reasons behind the manifestations are so badly thought out and unconvincing in light of the shenanigans afoot, that it probably does turn out to be a horror movie after all.

Each chapter has a summary of one film which includes little, useful asides about key actors and character actors in the film. And then a behind the scenes section with more of the same and notes about sets and special effects (the Lydecker Brothers are obviously mentioned a fair bit and, with good reason... I remember their melting cave sequence from King Of The Rocketmen when I was a kid and I’m still amazed when I watch it these days). So there’s lots of interesting shout outs to stars like the original screen Superman, Kirk Alyn or, say, future Perry White (opposite George Reeves’ version of the man of steel) John Hamilton. And also Republic’s sometime failure to really cash in on an actor to the degree they might have done, such as Universal horror regular Evelyn Ankers.

There’s lots of stuff I didn’t know here too... such as actress Peggy Stewart, who became so tied in to Republic Westerns that she had a deliberate career change for a few years as a casting agent to shake the image with the plan to then restart her acting career when she wasn’t so typecast. Then, when she went back into acting on TV in the 1950s, well... anyone who knows American TV in the 1950s knows that most of her opportunities would have been westerns, which were pretty much the main staple of the tube at that time.

I also didn’t know that Maxine Whitney, wife of serial director William Whitney who helmed some of the studio’s best serials, went into acting for the studio to keep the paychecks coming in while her husband was serving his country in the war. Or the real downfall of Republic studios being largely due to the studio head insisting on casting his girlfriend, ice skater Vera Hruba (later Vera Ralston) as a leading actress in films... she was not a great actor, was mostly in flops and the shareholders had had enough, it turns out. I never knew that story until now.

Another thing the book is useful for is confirming various street sets and interiors reused and redressed for other productions... and what stock footage was re-used and so on... which is something my father and I are always on the lookout for too, whenever we watch one of these Republic serials. So a Spanish and Cantina street set location redressed as an African village for The Vampire’s Ghost etc. And even the way Western stuntmen would turn a Western bar brawl choreography into a brawl in a Paris pub or a Western stage coach chase into a big city carriage chase... using the skills they had on the former for the less westerny assignments.

All in all, I’d have to say that Republic Horrors - The Serial Studio’s Chillers was a delight to read and I got a lot out of it. That being said, the book was written a while ago now. That’s a double edged sword it turns out because, for example, if I want to grab the book on the Lydecker Brothers the writer recommends, well... it’s out of print and fetches three figure sums now. So no chance of that. On the other hand, just recently, these films have started to get restored and reissued so, I’m probably going to try and nab that new Blu Ray set of Republic horrors at some point, I think. So there you have it, a valuable tome and a guide to what were then some hard to find movies. Definitely worth your time if you are a lover of Republic, for sure.

Dirty Ho

Fine Art Prince

Dirty Ho
aka Lan tou He
Hong Kong 1979
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Dirty Ho starts off with an opening credits sequence depicting the two main protagonists, Wang Tsun Hsin played by Gordon Liu and ‘Dirty’ Ho played by Yue Wong, fighting an abstract battle against many people against a white studio background, as the two fight side by side and protect themselves from hordes of combatants who mean them harm... serving as a metaphor for various action sequences much later in the movie. Unfortunately, it’s also scored with some excruciatingly inappropriate De Wolf library needle drop which, yeah, kind of put me off a little, it has to be said.

Then we get dropped into the story, as black market jewel trader Ho and upmarket, generally honest but ‘cunning and hiding something very important’ Wang, come into rivalry on a pleasure boat, as they each try to one up the other with the number of girls they can retain at their tables with various high value bribes. When it all ends badly for Ho and he is cheated out of his own ill gotten gains, he tracks down Wang but always seems to come a cropper of bad luck. Whether it’s a big fight with ‘The Handicapped Four’, all who turn out to be quite able bodied after all, in a parody sequence poking fun at Crippled Avengers (reviewed here) or one of many spectacular set pieces where Wang pretends he’s hired one of the escorts, Crimson, as his body guard, manipulating her arms and legs (and lute) as he pretends she is fighting Ho, coming out on top when s/he splits his forehead with a venom filled sword cut... it’s all quite fun stuff.

When Ho can’t find a cure for the big, ugly thing brewing on his head as a result of that fight, he eventually ends up becoming Wang’s disciple/slave so he receives a daily antidote which will eventually cure his condition. However, after a number of reveals, Ho slowly falls in with what’s going on and realises Wang is the eleventh of fourteen princes who is supposed to return to the palace at some point so the emperor can announce who will inherit his throne. The princes are trying to stop each other from being there, especially Wang, who does need to be there but is only really interested in living a life outside with fine art, good wine and the pursuit of martial arts. Ho falls in with him and, when Wang is wounded in one leg, allows Wang to train him and develop his kung fu skills so he can be a better bodyguard and help him return to the palace at the required time.

And it’s a fun film filled with elaborate set pieces. There are a couple of scenes where various people try to kill Wang in social situations without Wang or his opponent letting on that they know. What are best described as battles of social manners when, for instance, the tasting of eleven fine wines becomes a low key but no less spectacular acrobatic affair where wines are served and tasted by each as they dodge each other’s killing hands and feet, keeping up the pretence of a social situation. Similarly, there’s more of the same where the study of some fine art prints and scrolls turns into a battle against people wearing ‘Rosa Klebb’ style shoes with retracting blades (note to a regular reader... not blades retracting from George Lucas' butt though, okay?).

There’s also a great scene where, with Wang being wheeled through the land by Ho on a pushcart, the two manage to survive an attack by a battalion (including many archers) in a long action scene not unlike the kind you would get in the Lone Wolf And Cub movies (which I need to revisit again on Blu Ray real soon, I think). There’s also the inevitable training sequence with a ‘revert to type’ set of scenes where Ho is taught how to improve his kung fu skills by kicking targets while balancing little candles in small bowls on his shoulders, burning himself with wax whenever he gets something wrong to train his body. So yeah, while the film does kinda poke fun, tongue-in-cheek style, at some of the conventions of the genre up until this point, it also uses those very conventions and genre tropes to do it... which I guess would make sense.

Once again, just like in Heroes Of The East (reviewed here) and a few others, the director allows the moving camera to get right into the action with the cast, making for a dynamic series of combat sequences (not to mention lengthy ones), which pull you into the centre of things and, well, it’s an alternate way of doing it and I guess it does allow you to cheat a little in terms of breaking the fight down into shorter sequences rather than pull back and do longer takes from a static shot set up, but the technique works well and the skill and expertise of the performers... all of whom perhaps belong in a circus, as is the nature of the characters in these films... is such that you certainly don’t think any less of the brilliant fight choreography and the enthusiasm with which it is brought to life.

And that’s me done with both Dirty Ho, another of these movies I would gladly recommend but, also, with Arrow’s ShawScope Volume 1 Blu Ray set, of which this is the twelfth and final movie in the box, followed by two CD compilations of the soundtracks from six of them, all of them needle drop tracks from the De Wolff music library. However, if you are liking some of my Shaw Brothers movie reviews, fear not, I still have a few stand alone titles to watch and there’s also a second Shaw Scope volume being released* of these fairly soon (and which will surely have been released by the time this review makes it onto this blog so, yeah, more to come soon, I would say).

*Actually, since writing the first draft of this review a year or more ago, I have the second Shawscope set and four additional Shout Factory Shaw Brothers Classics box sets to watch and review too (so somewhere around 60 moives) plus, as of a couple of weeks ago, the announcement of ShawScope Vol 3 on the horizon. So, yeah, although there may not be as many Shaw Brothers reviews on here in the next month or so, there will be a fair few Golden Harvest reviews coming too (if you like early MIchelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock movies, keep an eye out) and, you can rest assured, the Shaw Brothers will certainly be returning to this blog at some point in the near future... at least that's the plan.

Pursuit To Algiers

Clues On Cruise

Pursuit To Algiers
Directed by Roy William Neill
USA 1945
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Just two of the regular characters are in this, the 12th of the ongoing Sherlock Holmes series, those of Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson although, saying that, a lot of the recurring actors who have been popping up in several different roles as part of the repertory company which populates these movies are still on hand. No Mary Gordon though, since none of the action takes place near Baker Street. Nor indeed is Dennis Hoey on hand to have Lestrade give any of his dubious but entertaining assistance.

Pursuit To Algiers starts off with Holmes and Watson being recruited by a foreign government to escort the son of an assassinated king back to his homeland in a bizarrely convoluted manner, in which Holmes has to solve clues both in the street and in a local fish and chip shop in order to piece together the information that he is wanted at a certain address at a certain time. It’s all good secret agent style stuff and lots of fun although, in the context used here, it very much seems like unnecessary overkill, to be honest.

Once they are on the case, Holmes takes Nikolas, the heir to an empire (if Holmes can get him to said empire unscathed) with him on a three manned plane while Watson is sent to their destination in Algiers by cruise ship, to act as a decoy. Alas, after only a short while Watson is faced with the knowledge that the plane Holmes and his client were on was shot down above treacherous mountains by unscrupulous villains. It’s not long, however, before Holmes and Nikolas are found waiting for Watson in the adjoining cabin, as Watson had been used as more than a dupe than he thought, in order that the two could take a safer but slower way of travel and avoid the plane tragedy that Holmes expected to happen all along.

After that it’s a joyous affair, as the three stay on the cruise ship for the remainder of the film and try to ward off various assassination attempts while Holmes indulges in verbal jousting with his would be assassins... in a strictly gentlemanly way, of course, since everybody knows he knows but, they don’t want to say it out loud.

Well I say gentlemanly but, when Holmes figures out that one of the assassins is recruited from a circus act where he uses his skills at throwing knives, he not only avoids being a pin cushion himself but manages to break the gentleman’s hand as it comes through the cabin porthole to make the kill. Which is unusual for Holmes but it’s good stuff and certainly Holmes character doesn’t lose any of his credibility pursuing such quick justice in a certain scene.

This is what I call a comfy film. For some reason I feel relaxed when watching movies that take place on a cruise ship and this one follows the old Agatha Christie method of populating the cast of characters with a number of possible suspects who all look like they’ve got something on their minds and could be a possible threat to the main protagonists. This proves to be the film’s undoing on a certain twist near the end (which I won’t spoil here) as one of the more twitchy fellows in this, one of the stewards, is acting too suspiciously to be a neutral member of the cast and, since the director almost goes out of his way to make you assume he’s a villain, he’s obviously not and, by a certain point in the film, you realise that there’s only one person who this person could now be revealed as. There’s more than one dupe on the ship, for sure.

One of the characters in this is a singer who seems to be in a state of distress whenever she is near Holmes but who makes friends with Dr. Watson. What this means practically is that, for the first time since the second film in the series by 20th Century Fox, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes (reviewed by me here), there are a fair few musical numbers but producer/director Neill doesn’t allow them to slow the film down and often concentrates on the histrionic tension of some of the characters watching and listening, as he allows the audience to wonder who is friend or foe. It also means we get a chance to hear Watson sing. Now, the dub as he warbles Loch Lomond is so intensely different in terms of the background ambience and clarity of the sound, I was convinced this was a comical overdub from a professional singer but, according to a couple of sources, this was Bruce singing himself. Now, I’m not so sure of that but can’t disprove it either so... hmm.

Bruce’s Watson is the usual tip top comic performance that mixes the characters less smarter aspects with alert caution... caution enough to save the life of one character, in fact, when he spots something wrong with a person’s coffee. He throws salt over his left shoulder as he should when some salt is spilled and, since this necessary custom to ward off bad luck has, I suspect, fallen by the wayside in recent years, one wonders what the younger section of modern audiences might make of this moment in the film.

And talking of things which have fallen by the wayside, one thing which I loved is that Watson reminded me of a phrase I’d not heard in a long time... ‘to sleep like a top.’ However, when I looked up the derivation of the word, first known to be introduced in a Shakespeare play, the deduction that a spinning top appears completely still when it’s spinning seems to me to be somewhat stretched as an explanation. I suspect that there was once a more satisfactory explanation for the phrase but, alas, that it’s been lost in the mists of time.

And that’s me done on Pursuit to Algiers... not based on an Arthur Conan Doyle story and stretching the characters to a point where, I believe, Rathbone was now getting very tired of playing the role (the role, of course, for which he will probably always be best remembered). I think this is just another wonderful film in the series and, although the restoration of the print doesn’t seem to be as brilliant as most of the others in this set, it’s still better than it’s been in the past and another worthy addition to the series. Two more left to go.

Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters

Portal Poppers

Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters
10 Episodes
Airdate: November 2023 - January 2024
Toho/Apple

Warning: A legacy of spoilers.

Well, I have to admit I wasn’t really expecting much from Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters but I certainly got into this and am now looking forward to a second series. You’ll perhaps remember that Monarch is the mysterious organisation, mostly friendly, who monitors and tries to predict and limit damage done by the so called ‘Titans’ in the US branded Godzilla/King Kong movies... aka The Monsterverse.

Now, to just lower your expectations a little, yes, you do see them make cameos in the series, along with a few other monsters but, the actual monster scenes in these episodes are pretty fleeting. You get maybe one sighting (sometimes two) an episode for a minute or two but, that’s okay, because the story is so interestingly written and pretty brilliantly performed that you don’t need the monsters to make for an engaging show. Maybe they could have shortened the title of the show by three words though, so as not to get too many people’s expectations up.

Okay, so this is one of those shows that flip flops back in time so you have the three founding characters who started Monarch in the 1940s/50s played by the absolutely brilliant Mari Yamamoto as Keiko, Anders Holm as Bill Randa (playing the character that John Goodman played in Kong - Skull Island but as he was in the 1950s... and, yes, Goodman also turns up at the opening of the first episode) and last but by no means least, Wyatt Russell, son of actor Kurt Russell, playing a character called Lee Shaw... also played by his father in the modern sections of the show.

But you also have the modern day story with a sister played by Ana Sawai and a brother played by Ren Watabe, who find out about each other in different corners of the globe after their dad (who is the son of Keiko and Bill) is missing, presumed dead. And then they find out that he’s been living two lives of two secret and simultaneous marriages but, also, was once working for Monarch. And there are a whole bunch of other characters who are equally important but if I start listing them all this would be one long  blog entry.

What I will say is that it’s absolutely brilliant and intriguing and is set mostly in the 1950s and 2015 (after the first Monsterverse Godzilla movie) but also in the 1960s and 1980s for little snippets. And, if you’re like me and doing the maths, yes, that should mean that older Russell, Kurt, should be in his nineties by the time of the show’s setting if younger Russell, Wyatt, is playing the same character in the early 1950s. And you’d be right but, here’s the thing... that ageing difference is also built into the plot and teased very early on in the series until, in the final two episodes, everything begins to make a bit more sense. All I’m saying is it has something to do with those portals into other worlds as they were in the time of these films... the 2021 movie Godzilla VS Kong (reviewed by me here) brings more clarification to the package, if you think about it... but that’s another story.

And while there’s not an awful lot of expensive monster mayhem in the show... it’s definitely a fast paced and very globe hopping experience, with more than enough questions, intrigue and drama to keep you on your toes. The odd appearance by a monster is just icing on the cake a lot of the time... plus, of course, the main reason for having an organisation like Monarch in the first place.

The music is kinda okay too although, I have to say, I would have liked to have heard the old Akira Ifukube Godzilla themes at least once in this... it’s a shame they didn’t put in an appearance, for sure. Still, I guess you can’t have everything and, by the time the last episode of season one ends, the present day has shifted to 2017. So I’m assuming, if this runs for another few seasons, it might even catch right up to the year of broadcast.

I hope we get these and, without getting any spoilers into the mix, if one of the above actors is to return (and I hope he does) then it makes sense that some years go by for some of the other characters if they embark on a rescue mission, of sorts. Anyway, I’m not going to say too much more about this one other than I enjoyed Monarch - Legacy Of Monsters way more than I thought I would and I’m glad it’s been renewed for another series at some point.

Longlegs

 

Hell, Oh Doll Lee

Longlegs
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Canada/USA 2024
Black Bear
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Some slight spoilers.

Set in 1995, Longlegs is the latest film written and directed by Oz Perkins, who is the son of Anthony Perkins (yeah, that’s right, he’s Norman Bates son... a role he played on film too as young Norman in Psycho II). And I think this is only the second film I’ve seen by him. I saw February (aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter) a couple of years ago and wrote a review at the time, which still hasn’t seen the light of day on this blog but it is coming, honest. This is what happens when you write faster than you can publish... I have over 240 written reviews waiting in the wings, as it were, at this point (score a big plus to the paranoia of the ‘what if I’m ill one week... need to write a few to keep in hand’ mentality).

Now this one I didn’t know he was connected to until a few days after I saw the trailer. All I know is, the trailer was a rare and completely unsettling two and a bit minutes and, I have to say, most of the film is exactly like this. I do have a problem with this film’s third act but I’ll get to it in a minute.

The Longlegs of the title is a kind of deranged/supernatural serial killer of sorts (although he doesn’t actually do the killing himself... I’ll get to that) played by Nicolas Cage and, honestly, the make-up he’s in for the film is so good, if I didn’t know it was Cage then I wouldn’t have guessed. And the main protagonist of the movie is  FBI Special Agent Lee Harker, as played by Maika Monroe, who was so good in movies like The Guest (reviewed here) and It Follows (reviewed here).

Now it’s set up early on that Harker has special, pretty much psychic powers which give a certain insight as to the suspects she is after. And so she’s handed the case of a series of killings which have been going on since the late 1960s, where the fathers of each family have killed all of them and then taken their own lives. But strange notes and symbols are left by a person at the scene of each one, tying these seemingly unrelated blood baths together.

And it’s a quite good movie. The intensity and chaos of the movie is, pretty much, as it plays in the trailer. It’s also fairly inventive and I think could have also been sustained as a mini series in terms of the amount of intrigue and plot twists it offers up as things unfold. Especially in regards to Harper’s own connection to the case, which I’m guessing the audience will realise a lot quicker than her character does. There is a genuine sense of creeping dread pervading the film and, Cage’s deranged performance as the rarely seen Longlegs is just the cherry on top.  

But the person who really carries this movie is Maika Monroe. She plays the character as a very muffled, reclusive type, almost like she’s got a high level of autism to her make up... and she does it very well. And the reason she is like this throughout the film is explained towards the end and makes perfect sense... and when I say explained, I mean shown to us via a gunshot to a doll’s head, which ushers in unconsciousness for a while... but that’s all I’m saying about that.

For me though, the third act where everything pulls together and the story elements are explained, seemed a bit of a cop out. The identity of a certain other individual that Harper is also looking for is pretty obvious by about halfway through the film (or it seemed like it to me, anyway) and it all just felt a bit overly complicated and overwrought in terms of the supernatural element involved (yeah, this isn’t a serial killer thriller... it’s a proper horror film for sure). So... I have to say that, for me, all the incredible build up went down with a bit of a damp squib of a last 20 minutes or so. That being said, though, the explanations for everything that does go down at least seem to make a certain logical sense and, yeah, to me the writing of this element felt very much like the kind of straight-to-video-rental movies of the 1980s in terms of building up something which, if enough people rented it, could be expanded into a franchise. So it does at least live up to it’s own premise... I can’t fault it for that.

And yeah, at the end of the day and despite the end reel, I must say I really enjoyed Longlegs. It is predictable in places but it’s also incredibly chilling and suspenseful and so, yeah, if you’re a horror movie fan, I’d say this one is definitely worth taking a look at. And I’d even advise checking out the trailer to this one to get a full flavour of it before you go. Despite my reaction to the denouement, I think a lot of people are going to like this one and, perhaps, at least half the audience might not see the end reveals coming. So catch it at some point, is what I say.

Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F

A Piece Of The Axel

Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F
aka Beverly Hills Cop 4
Directed by Mark Molloy
USA 2024

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Axel Foley is back... finally. Played once more by Eddie Murphy, this movie completely ignores the pilot film for the proposed TV show and puts Axel F back on the streets as opposed to running the station, his TV son now swapped out for an estranged movie daughter (which, aside from the huge continuity errors made by conflicting events in the pilot movie, also screws up the third movie, where he had no children but the daughter is therefore a couple of years older than she should be here... if audiences can spot these things, why can’t the actual writers?).

The plot set up on Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F is simple but good fun. Billy Rosewood, played again by Judge Reinhold, is out on a case which will clear a suspect in jail from being a cop killer. But he gets too close and is kidnapped and held by ‘the bad guys’ to try and get the evidence they know he has on them. But not before he has engaged Axel’s daughter, played by Taylour Paige, to clear the suspect of the charges (she is a lawyer) and also not before he calls in Axel, because he’s worried for her safety after she is almost killed and threatened to drop the case (something he knows she won’t do).

Other series regulars include Paul Reiser who has now taken over from the former chief back in Axel’s regular stomping ground, John Ashton as Taggart, Billy’s ex-partner who is now running the precinct in Beverly Hills and a, not exactly surprising but welcome return of Serge in a scene, played once again by Bronson Pinchot. Also new to the cast, asides from Taylour Paige, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt as another cop in Billy’s precinct (who also has a dating history with Axel’s daughter), Luis Guzmán  as a criminal kingpin and Kevin Bacon as an FBI man who, you just know is going to turn out to be the villain of the piece as soon as his first scene hits.

And it’s a great little movie, it has to be said... harkening right back to the origins of the character (as released, not the Stallone version) with Eddie Murphy playing it relatively straight (asides from his usual wise cracks) and with an equal emphasis on action, rather than just comedy (just like in the original, when you actually cared about the characters somewhat.... which follows through here). It might seem a little slow at times to a younger audience expecting just endless carnage but it’s a nice little homage to the original and it pretty much hits all the right beats. You also get a snow plough chase and a helicopter chase thrown in for good measure.

One of the nicest things for me, though, was the music. Not just the brilliant score but also the use of songs. At least three of the songs were used front and centre in the first movie and, here, they’re used in a similar fashion. In fact, the first song of the movie is Glenn Frey doing The Heat Is On and it really brought back memories of me sitting in a cinema in the early 1980s with a dear, now departed friend. 

Similarly, the underscore is absolutely spot on. This time around they’ve got a modern composer who I quite like, Lorne Balfe... but he uses all of the old Harold Faltermeyer themes (such as Axel F, Shoot Out etc) and he orchestrates the synthesiser work, to my ears at least, exactly as Faltermeyer did in the first two movies. It’s absolutely brilliant.

So, yeah, a short review and my only problem with the movie is that it was funded by an evil ‘cinema killing’ company who have hogged it for their own channel rather than get the cinema release it deserves. I’m guessing this means I won’t be able to buy a copy on Blu Ray either, which is a problem for me (not an ‘official’ Blu Ray but there may be other options). At least a CD soundtrack is coming though, I believe (although I’d also like a CD for the third movie too, please). So, yeah, I’d almost rather the movie never got made than be financed and distributed by said evil corporation but, as it is, Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F is an absolutely wonderful and entertaining sequel and doesn’t let the original movies down in any way. Worth checking out, if only to remind yourself that Eddie Murphy can do some pretty good acting when he puts his mind to it. Just waiting to see if they do a Yet Another 48 Hours next.

Killer Mermaid

The Long
Fish Goodnight

Killer Mermaid
aka Mamula
aka Killer Mermaids
aka Nymph
Directed by Milan Todorovic
Serbia/Montenegro/Poland 2014
DVD Region 2

Warning: Some light spoilerage ensues.

Mamula or Killer Mermaid as it’s more commonly known (also Killer Mermaids in the UK, together with a wonderful DVD cover painting which totally misrepresents the film in almost every way) first came to my attention back in 2016. I was at the FrighFest they did that year in a shopping centre cinema somewhere near Shepherd’s Bush, sitting looking bored and lonely (as I probably usually am), either waiting for a friend to turn up or killing time before my next screening, when this curious guy sat down next to me and started up a conversation. Seeing as I’m inordinately English in my outlook, I was immediately suspicious of this intrusion into my personal space but he seemed like a nice chap and so I responded in kind. I told him about this blog and he told me about his new film he’d written, showing at that moment in one of the screens.,, called Downhill (I should probably check that one out at some point). And then he told me about his real ‘baby’ he’d wrote and presented a couple of years before, Mamula which had been rebranded Killer Mermaid.

So he was obviously Barry Keating, I think. And he told me the former film didn’t do as well as he’d liked/hoped. I promised I would keep a look out and review it for my blog at some point. And then we went our separate ways. But you know how time rushes by when you get past a certain age... I bought the DVD of the film the very next day but, yeah, it’s taken me 8 years to get around to watching it... sorry Barry.

But, heck, it was worth the wait. For me, anyway.

The film opens strongly with a cheesy song playing over home movie style footage credits of a young couple holidaying. Then, we join the two as the man is lured to the water by a siren song while the woman is brutally killed by someone with an anchor. As cold openings go, it’s not bad.

The set up to the film involves two American tourists, Kelly played by Kristina Klebe and Lucy played by Natalie Burn. Lucy was once seeing a college friend years before and so the girls go to meet him for a Mediterranean holiday in Montenegro. The guy also has his new fiancé in tow, which doesn’t go down well with Lucy but the four, and then five when a friend of the fiancé turns up, decide to go for a look at an abandoned, derelict prison island that Kelly spotted.

A local guy called Niko, looking for his lost daughter (who turns out to be the girl from the opening), warns them about going to the island, which was used for nazi concentration camp style experiments during the war. And Niko is played wonderfully well by the great Franco Nero. Anyway, when the kids get to the island, their boat is destroyed and it turns out both the killer mermaid of the title (well, half siren, half mermaid... there’s definitely some artistic licence here) and the anchor killer are there, hunting them... since the anchor killer wants to chop them up for food for his beloved mermaid.

If that sounds like a B movie horror plot set up to you then... okay, it is... but it’s an incredibly well made one, I have to say. The acting by pretty much all the cast is superb, with standout work from Klebe and, of course, Nero looking wonderfully intimidating and capable.  But it’s not just that... the film looks a gazillion bucks, so to speak. I’m assuming it’s a fairly low budget movie but what the cinematographer manages to get on screen is fantastic. Beautiful framing and wonderful colours (especially in some of the underwater shots)... it just makes everything look amazing. Even when stuff is borrowed from other films... such as when ‘anchor guy’ is slowly decapitating one of the main characters and the camera follows the motion of his axe as he chops away at the neck, presumably in homage to the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson chops through the door... it’s done in a very different way and doesn’t pop you out of the picture like it might have.

Now, my one slight gripe (because I had to have one, right?) is the slight telegraphing involved with the identity of the anchor killer guy. The film almost goes out of its way to imply it’s a certain person early on when, in fact, it turns out to be someone unknown to the cast of characters. I just thought the hints were a bit heavy handed and so I was pretty sure it wouldn’t turn out to be the character the film obviously wanted me to think it was. However, this was more than paid back when what I thought would be a very obvious, if somewhat laboured, twist towards the end of the movie... didn’t happen. Thank goodness... credibility would possibly have been out the window if what I was expecting to happen actually did occur.

So, honestly, I really enjoyed this movie and would love to upgrade this one to Blu Ray sometime if I get the opportunity... it looks pretty good. Killer Mermaid is a particularly fun horror movie and I’d recommend this one to most fans of the ‘monster movie’ genre, for sure. I mean... good acting, beautiful cinematography, nudity, gore and Franco Nero. What could possibly go wrong?

Wild Cards - Sleeper Straddle

Croyd And Seek

Wild Cards
Sleeper Straddle
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Bantam Books
ISBN 9780593357835

This one’s all about Croyd.

Wild Cards - Sleeper Straddle is the 32nd of the Wild Card mosaic novels that began releasing onto an unsuspecting public in 1987. That’s when I started reading them and I’ve managed to keep up to date over the years. After a few long slumps in publication, not to mention a few different publishing houses, the series seems to be going stronger than it ever has, with a new novel published almost every year for the last decade or more.

The basic set up from the first volume is about the Wild Cards virus from the planet Takis, which fell into the wrong hands and was detonated over New York in the 1940s... when local hero Jet Boy failed to stop an evil villain’s plot involving the stolen, alien virus. What happened next is that the world was instantly affected. Many turned ‘the Black Queen’ and died, many became Jokers (hideous and varied mutations) and a few became Aces, receiving various superhero powers. And there were also Deuces... a kind of cross between and Joker and an Ace... although even Jokers have some kind of minor power, usually related to the nature of their mutation (like waking up from a coma in the body of a centaur).

And the human gene pool was forever tainted by the virus, so when you grow up and reach puberty (or sometimes later) your ‘card will turn’ and you’ll either stay a Nat (a natural, unaffected person) or you’ll as likely become a Joker or possibly an Ace or, if you’re unlucky (or lucky, depending on your point of view) you’ll just die.

And the series goes from the 1940s and brings us right up to the modern day, telling tales of a large range of characters throughout the history of the Wild Cards universe... mostly these days contemporary to the year the novel is released but sometimes they’ll still look back (as this latest tome does). And so we get generations of different characters represented with, since it’s an 80 year old history by now, various deaths and new characters cropping up all the time. As you might imagine, the world building in these novels is fantastic.

Also special about these is that they’re rarely a single novel written by one writer (although that has happened at least once). They are collections of stories focusing on different characters by different writers, which almost always link together to give an overreaching story arc to a particular book and also, mini-series of events in a chain of books. So there are trilogies and more of specific themes involving different ‘threats’ to the world, for example. Of course, the writers also die after a while too.

Now this latest volume, Sleeper Straddle, follows the exploits of one of the original, old school characters introduced in the very first book in 1987... Croyd Crenson, aka The Sleeper. And Croyd is well over 80 but doesn’t really age at all... the way the virus affected him back in the 1940s, when he was in school as the virus was released, is quite unique. Basically, whenever Croyd goes to sleep, he goes into a period of hibernation for a number of weeks and wakes up as something totally different... sometimes an Ace, sometimes a Joker, sometimes something in between and with the shadow hanging over him that, one day, he’ll probably draw the Black Queen and die. So Croyd is a... freelancer... a career criminal but on the side of good. When he reaches the end of his cycle of being awake he gets really frantic, keeping himself awake with pills for as long as he can and getting way too paranoid for anyone to cope with. He’s also one of the greatest loved heroes in the Wild Cards universe, from the point of view of the readership and he usually gets at least a mention in any of the novels... mostly just a passing reference or a guest cameo for a part of the story... often called ‘Croyd sightings’ by the readers.

But like I said, this one’s all about Croyd and he was originally created and written about for the series by the late, great, old school science fiction writer Roger Zelazny (who died back in 1995). This volume starts off with a dedication to him and it’s kinda nice the way various writers have kept his Croyd Crenson character alive over the years.

This one comprises seven stand alone stories about various incarnations of Croyd over various years, linked by a binding story which bookends it and also provides long story links from each chapter. That story, Swimmer, Flier, Felon, Spy is by Christopher Rowe and presents a unique challenge for Croyd Crenson. Crenson hires a powerful, fastidious and very secretive, ex-CIA trained Deuce called Tesla (who also has two horns on his head from which he can emit arcs of electricity) to help find himself. In that, when Croyd awoke from his latest sleep, he had split into six different Aces, most of whom think the others are imposters (and want to kill them) and all who are slightly diminished without the other five. So it’s Tesla’s task to locate the various new Croyd’s in the city and try to get them all to meet one night before they start going to sleep again, in an effort to get them all to recombine somehow then they lose consciousness.

Hence, as Tesla plays detective and starts interviewing various people, we get the stories of various incarnations of Croyd and the people he’s encountered, via the person who Tesla is interviewing (or variations of, at any rate). The stories are Days Go By by Carrie Vaughn (set in 1961 in Greenwich Village), The Hit Parade by Cherie Priest (set in 1983), Yin-Yang Split by William F. Wu (set in 1990), Semiotics of the Strong Man by Walter Jon Williams (set in 1999), Party Like It’s 1999 by Stephen Leigh (also set in 1999), The Bloody Eagle by Mary Anne Mohanraj (set in 2003) and The Boy Who Would Be Croyd by Max Gladstone (set in 2019).

And once again it’s a fantastic set of stories and, like the majority of these mosaic novels, there’s not a bad one in the bunch. My personal favourites in this volume were Days Go By, which tells the story of a young joker photographer as she gets out from her abusive relationship (helped by Croyd, who spends a good month or two asleep on her couch after a party) and gets recognition for her own art... and the brilliant Semiotics of the Strong Man. This latter features another old school Ace who never ages from the original first novel, Jack Braun aka Golden Boy. He was an actor in the 50s and from then on but also sold out all his friends in the McCarthy communist witch hunt in the 50s so... yeah, not everybody likes him. It’s a great tale in this one where he meets Croyd in the audience of a film festival in Rome where he is a guest and more shenanigans follow, revolving around an exhibit in a suite of rooms in the same hotel from which the head of an old robot superhero from the early books, Modular Man, is stolen.

But readers will encounter a few old characters. Such as a younger version of Jokertown Police Detective Leo Storgman from the relatively recent Fort Freak trilogy of Wild Cards novels and another story featuring The Oddity... who was originally a woman and two men engaged in a threesome in bed one morning when their cards turned and they became a painful, ever shifting, combined mutation of all three in one body. There are even quick references to people like Thomas Tudbury, aka The Great And Powerful Turtle and, cameos from much loved characters who have also since died in the series, such as Father Squid.

Perhaps my favourite moment was early on in the novel and, like all the Wild Cards stories which... like all good science fiction... comment on, satirise and hold a mirror up to our society, reflects the times we live in. In this case, a biting criticism on ‘wokeness’, it seemed to me, when Croyd refers to Tesla as a Joker and then corrects himself, commenting that these days he’s probably supposed to call Jokers ‘Jacks’.

And, honestly, there’s not much else to say. Like all the Wild Cards mosaic novels, this one is insanely good and presents a plethora of ideas and observations in the most entertaining way possible. Long term readers of the series will almost certainly love Sleeper Straddle but, even people who just want to sample one of the books for the first time might find this one more of a stand alone experience, as most of the characters who are not making their debut here are fairly well explained to new readers. A wonderful book and, as usual, I can’t wait for the next one (which will be out this year apparently... wow, two Wild Card novels in the same year, I don’t think that’s happened since the 1980s).

MaXXXine

XXX Factor

MaXXXine
Directed by Ti West
USA/UK/New Zealand 2024
A24
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Slight spoilers.

MaXXXine is the third and presumably final part of Ti West and Mia Goth’s successful X Trilogy, which started with the incredible X, reviewed here (where Goth took on the role of both Maxine Minx and Pearl) and continued with the prequel, Pearl, reviewed here (where she just played the title character). Once again, Goth (also on board as a producer, although she’s not one of the credited writers this time around) plays the part of Maxine and this is set some years after X, during the 1980s, with Maxine Minx now a hugely successful porn star, looking to make the crossover to acting in real, Hollywood movies.

After some footage of Maxine as a kid, which is purely there to establish something during the third act denouement, we start this film once again with a big door being opened... but this time it’s not the barn door from Pearl’s farm but a similar looking door on a studio set in Hollywood, where we see Maxine auditioning for a role in a sequel to a low budget horror movie, The Puritan, to be directed by the same director of the first, Elizabeth Bender (played by Elizabeth Debicki). However, although she’s successful in getting the part and, hopefully, cracking Hollywood, it looks like her past, as the final girl survivor and self defence murderer from the events depicted in X, is also about to catch up with her, in the form of someone who certainly wants to grab her attention and who does so through murdering her friends and securing the services of sleazy, private detective John Labat, played by Kevin Bacon.

Yeah, that’s a thing here, by the way... while the first two films felt like independent movies (which they kind of were, in a way), MaXXXine feels like it has a lot of famous actors in it, not least of all the two, central cops portrayed by the always watchable Bobby Cannavale and the equally brilliant, as she always is, Michelle Monaghan. Honestly, as good as Mia Goth is here (and, she really is, as you’d expect), the two cops are the reals stars of the film as far as I’m concerned. They don’t get too much screen time but I would like to have seen more of their characters, it has to be said.

Anyway, the first main question that comes up is, does this all have something to do with the real life serial killer known as The Night Stalker who was terrorising Hollywoodland at the time... or is someone using those murders as cover for their own. Either way, Maxine needs to find out so she can concentrate on being the standout star of The Puritan 2... and she does so in her own, ruthless manner.

Now there’s a lot of good stuff here, not least of which is the use of sets and references from other films, such as the old Universal Bates Motel and house from Psycho. In fact, there’s a moment in the film where Kevin Bacon’s character has chased Maxine into the Bates house and, for a minute there, I thought we were going to get a blow by blow replay of Arbogast’s death scene in the original Psycho (as it happens, Kevin Bacon’s death, when it comes, is far nastier).

So, all the actors are fine, the direction, shot design and editing is... all good. That being said, I’d have to say that this is the least satisfying of the X Trilogy. It just doesn’t seem as clever, maybe wastes an opportunity about exploring the title character’s lineage (because I may have misunderstood the point of the dual role in the first movie, as it turns out) and, though I was kind of expecting it to have a double ending at one point, it didn’t do it in the way I was expecting it to and, while that’s normally a positive experience for me (I want a movie to surprise me), I kinda thought the ending we did get just felt a bit off and, well, a bit hum drum. It also felt like the dual ending could have been a ‘flip a coin’ decision, in terms of where it leaves the characters for the last sequence.

The other big sin the film commits is that it doesn’t really make good on the XXX factor in the title. X was about a bunch of people going to shoot a porn movie (and just hiring the wrong location) and the boldness of the nudity and positive sexuality represented throughout the film was a breath of fresh air for modern movie making. Pearl skipped a lot of that but made up for it by the way it was shot and the call backs to old movies (although, it kinda felt the technical  call backs were an anachronism to a later time than being represented in that one). This one has pretty much no sex and the nudity is poorly lit or just not on screen. And yes, I was disappointed by that missing element. If a film is called Star Wars, for example, I want to see people having battles among the stars. If it’s a title referencing a term for hardcore, pornographic films, as this one is, then I’d expect to see some of that better represented here... especially when the character of the main protagonist is a world famous porn star.

All said and done though, I still quite liked MaXXXine and, while it wasn’t the ending of the trilogy I’d hoped for... it at least, kinda wraps things up and so, I can forgive it if the hyperbole of the marketing machine is selling the product as something it’s not, to be honest. My least favourite of the series but I’m still hoping they release a nice, X Trilogy box set on Blu Ray at some point soon (I deliberately didn’t buy the first two because I’m assuming/hoping a box set will be released in the near future).

Pleasantville

Another Pleasant
Valley Fun Day

Pleasantville
USA 1998 Directed by Gary Ross
New Line Cinema Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Spoilers Rave On.

Wow.

Where to begin with such a complex and brilliant film?

I saw Pleasantville when it first hit cinemas back in 1998 and was instantly bowled over by it. Then, it was a major movie for me at the dawn of the DVD era and a very early purchase for me on that format. It was a ‘go to’ film for me for a fair few years... I watched it often at the tail end of the 1990s and very early 2000s. Then I just kind of forgot about it until very recently when an expanded re-release of the amazing score to the film came out. So I imported a Blu Ray copy over form the US (Why the heck is an important film like this not on UK Blu Ray?) because, well, with the way colour and monochrome are treated in this film... it made it an easy, no brainer of a candidate for an upgrade. Although, well, I hadn’t seen it in at least two decades so I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t have one of those experiences where a much loved film of yesteryear went on to disappoint me when I revisited. I needn’t have worried... Pleasantville is as much of an all time classic now as when it was first released and I find it amazing that this film has such a low key reputation these days. It deserves to be rediscovered and reappraised as the sheer masterpiece it is... and soon.

Okay, there’s lots going on in the film but the basic premise is this... teenager David, played by Tobey Maguire, is a fan of an old black and white TV sitcom called Pleasantville, to the point he is going to go in for the cash prize quiz during the TV Pleasantville Marathon at the weekend. Meanwhile, his sister Jennifer, played by Reese Witherspoon, has invited her dream date over to watch a concert at the same time the marathon starts on TV. Brother and sister fight over control of the remote, which smashes. But, as if by magic (and accompanied by peels of sinister thunder), Don Knotts arrives playing a TV repairman who, after quizzing David about his knowledge of Pleasantville, leaves them a brand new, strange looking remote with ‘a little more oomph’.

The Pleasantville Marathon begins and while the son and daughter of the perfect 1950s sitcom family, Bud and Mary Sue, are fighting over a radio set, David and Jennifer are once again struggling with the remote in the same way, parallelling the action on the TV screen. And then the wrong... or right... button is pressed and, hey presto, they are both transported into the world of Pleasantville in 1958, replacing Bud and Mary Sue, wondering what the heck they are doing there and with Jennifer bemoaning the fact that she is now in ‘pasty’ black and white.

Their sit-com mother and father are played by Anne Archer and William H. Macy and the guy who runs the local diner is played by Jeff Daniels.  And as they live out their life in this perfect TV 1950s world... where the Geography teacher teaches classes about the only geography the residents know (consisting of two roads), everybody on the school team scores a basket at basketball (no matter where they throw it, it will always wind up in the hoop), the fire brigade knows only how to deal with cats in trees and wives stay home dutifully and prepare dinner for their working husbands... they, subtly at first, begin to inadvertently (at first) change and challenge the values of the inhabitants of the town, which slowly transforms objects and then people into full-on technicolour, in contrast to and amidst the monochromatic existence of the other residents.

So sex is introduced to the teenagers. Jeff Daniels’ character goes from not being able to make a cheeseburger himself because of the order of the routine changing when Bud is late at his part-time job at the diner, to becoming a painter (with real colours) while falling in love and having an affair with Ann Archer (who accidentally causes a tree to burst into flames as an instance of the world of Pleasantville reacting physically to her sexual discovery when she masturbates in the bath tub for the first time) and so on and so forth.

So its a film about social change and sexual revolution and the way a society deals with that. There’s an apple in Eden metaphor and a point where the black and white characters start rioting, burning books (which always used ot be blank until the pages started filling in by themselves) in an allegory of the Nazi regime and putting up signs in windows like ‘No Coloureds’... which means in the context of the film, no people who arent in black and white but is obviously a call back to the real signs put up in places in the USA in the fifties as a racial barrier (and I suspect some states in America probably still use them). 

When the owner of the diner paints a portrait of Joan Allen naked in the window and then later he creates, with ‘Bud’, a mural depicting the changes in society in Pleasantville, the two of them are put on trial. A trial which concludes with... oh heck, I’m not going to tell you everything because it’s a film which needs to be seen. A pure classic of 90’s cinema and one of the best films (if not the best) of that decade.

The acting in this is absolutely superb from everybody. You have brilliant performances from Maguire and Witherspoon who do some amazing things with just facial expressions and reactions to carry a lot of the weight of the changes going on around them. Meanwhile, you have William H. Macey having to limit his performance throughout a lot of the film to the way a character in a 1950s sitcom would behave... and coming a cropper (like Daniels) when his routine/scripted life has a spanner thrown into it. “Where’s my dinner?” he constantly asks of the void.

And then again you’ve got characters like those played by Daniels and Archer, who go through changes and transform from those same 50s sit-com ciphers to people learning to question and change their expectations of life and grow from it. It’s a real tightrope of performances brought together and, somehow, it all works. And a special shout out is required, I think, for Tobey Maguire’s love interest, played by Marley Shelton, who is absolutely glowing in this.

And the film itself is put together in an equally clever way too. Two things which stick in my mind are as follows...

One, as the town and people in it start to change, the music (asides from Randy Newman’s absolutely pitch perfect and beautiful score) begins to echo the kinds of changes they are gong through. Starting with the kids beginning to break out with rock n’ roll and then progressing into jazz. This is no better presented as when the local teenagers are consulting with Bud (who has somehow become their inadvertent figure head) about the world ‘outside’ the parameters of Pleasantville, which is all set to Dave Brubeck’s great jazz piece Take Five. I’m guessing the director chose this because it’s written in a less simplistic 5/4 rhythm. It’s a superb scene though, with the percussion beats echoing the volatile questions Bud is being asked, like little gut punches musically expressed.  

And the other thing is the opening scene which establishes Maguire’s character. In a film about the way change is wrought and perceived (and reacted against), the director experiments, following a montage sequence advertising the ‘Pleasantville Marathon’ on TV, with the semiotics of cinema. Now, visual language is generally something that most people don’t consciously realise they have quite a sophisticated command of. Pioneered, consciously or otherwise, by people like Georges Méliès, The Lumiere Brothers and D. W. Griffith at the dawn of cinema, a visual cinematic language soon evolved and this is something that any person, as soon as they start watching TV in their infancy, teaches themself how to decode... often without even realising it. And the director uses that same visual language here to quickly pull the rug from the audience and upend what they thought they were watching.

So let me just talk about two basic concepts... the establishing shot and the one/two/one/two sequence making up a conversation. So an establishing shot is usually a single shot or series of shots of a location so you can establish in your mind where the following scene is playing out. In a seventies TV show, for example, you might see a shot of a building in a street and then you might see another shot of a close up of a window on the building (or it might just dolly in or zoom to that window within the same shot) to establish that the next scene you see is taking place inside the room where that window is.

And the other sequence of shots I mentioned, a conversation between two people, is very quickly rendered by a close up or medium shot of one person speaking a line facing a camera, then a shot of another person either speaking to camera or reacting to those words, then back to the first person for the next line or reaction, then back to the other person etc... and the viewer instinctively, through early experiences with the visual language of film, immediately puts this together in their head as two sides of a conversation.

Where Ross is brilliant here is in the school yard where we first have a shot of Tobey Maguire talking to a girl he obviously has a crush on and is trying to ask out. He says something, then we cut to her reacting, then we cut back to him saying the next line, then back to her reacting... and so on for 30 seconds to a minute. And then, when you’ve got the message that it’s two sides of a conversation, the director cuts to an overview, establishing shot revealing that Maguire is standing in another part of the yard completely, talking to the air in an imaginary conversation with her, while her reaction shots were directed to a boy she was talking to just across from where he stands, alone... and it totally changes what you thought you were watching, disorienting the viewer for a second and setting up the mission statement, if you like, that this is a film which plays with metatextual ideas but not just in terms of what the characters in the film are perceiving.... but also in regards to the audience. The final shot of the film also does a similar kind of thing but in a different way.

And that’s me done, I think, with my thoughts on Pleasantville. It’s one of the true masterpieces of American cinema as far as I’m concerned and I’m amazed that more people haven’t cottoned onto it over the years. An intelligent film with an agenda of promoting self awareness, individuality and progression through change. As represented by sexuality, literature, music and art. If you are a friend of cinema and you’ve not seen this classic then you might want to do yourself a favour and rectify that real quick. One of the all time greats.